Category Archives: Transhuman News

On many development metrics, Bangladesh's performance and achievements have been justly recognised and feted at home and around the world. However, while the 50-year transformation scenario has indeed been robust, near-term trends have exposed systemic weaknesses, making the medium-term outlook decidedly shaky. While the immediate sense of macroeconomic breakdown has been tempered, the micro realities of poor and middle-class households struggling against a relentless cost-of-living crisis, and the meso realities of enterprise-level heightened uncertainty in growth outlook in critical subsectors, signal the entrenched presence of "bad days" for a majority of the population.

In May 2022, the fifth round of the PPRC-BIGD panel survey estimated the proportion of new poor to be 18.5 percent. Last week, the government's statistical agency at last acknowledged that the poverty rate had indeed gone up and now stood at 29.5 percent, compared to the pre-Covid level of 20 percent. But this rise in poverty numbers and the economic despair of an escalating number of the middle classes is only the visible tip of the crisis iceberg. The real worry is in the political economy of the policy landscape impacting both crisis management in the short term and growth management in the medium term.

Bangladesh has a vibrant public discourse on the state of the economy. However, what is frequently missing is a political economy lens and connecting the necessary dots.

Is corruption only a moral failure or does it flourish due to how rule-making, incentives, and sanctions are being politically constructed? Is the reluctance towards reforms only a question of inefficiency or is it dictated by the compulsion of protecting vested interests? Are implementation weaknesses a lack of capacity or are they due to how merit is systematically sidelined to the benefit of sycophancy? What indeed is the reality of economic governance?

We have always had deficits in our economic governance. But over the last decade, the political economy of the policy landscape has morphed into something more structural. Alouha tribhuj, or an iron triangle, of three tendencies has come to define and limit the policy landscape.

The first part of thelouha tribhujis a one-sided vision of development. Infrastructure has become the "be all and end all" of development, with social development pushed to the sidelines. This is not to say that "social" is out of budgetary attention. But even in "social," all the attention is on the hardware, with software out of sight. School-building has become more important than the quality of education. Hospital-building has become more important than the quality of healthcare. Standalone infrastructures without attention to integration with other parts of the infrastructure network is leading to plummeting liveability and productivity of urban centres. Focus is on the concrete only, without commensurate attention to user protocols, maintenance and infrastructure governance.

The consequences of this one-sided focus are all too familiar: shocking lack of road safety and unpredictability of travel; drop in the quality of educational experience; healthcare becoming a reality of galloping costs without results.

The second part of the iron triangle is the rampant spread of conflict-of-interest-driven policy-making. Boundaries of public and private interests are constantly transgressed in the policy landscape in favour of private interests closely aligned with ruling groups. Flouting of rules and, in some cases, rules specifically designed for narrow private interests have shockingly become the norm in critical and remunerative sectors such as finance, banking, energy, transportation, ICT, and infrastructure. Such collusive "contact and contracts" have become brazen and become a structural property of today's economic governance.

Some sectoral examples make the above abundantly clear. Quick rental electricity plants were adopted as a short-run option to address load-shedding. But why has it continued far beyond the initial timeline, with a relentless expansion of installed capacity without required investment in distribution infrastructure and primary energy supplies? Why was gas exploration deliberately sidelined for a disastrous overdependence on expensive LNG import? Why has the state agency Bapex been systematically sidelined in favour of a foreign firm in Bhola gas fields, as a glaring example? No wonder capacity charges have emerged as the brazen face of planned inefficiency and corrupt collusion, dictated not by economics but by political economy.

A similar story holds sway in the most catalytic of economic sectors namely transportation. Primacy of narrow politically-connected private interests have become a structural barrier not only to road governance, but also to the economics of transportation impacting travel time, onerous formal and informal costs of travel, and rampant failures in road safety. The BRTC has been rendered a perennially sick state-owned enterprise, route permit allocation is dominated by a transport owners' oligopoly standing in the way of both road safety and sector efficiency, and the BRTA is nowhere near rising up to its stewardship role. Rule-flouting private interests are effectively being given the immunity to continue the misgovernance stalemate.

Turning a blind eye to glaring conflicts of interest nay, positively supporting corrupt and collusive rule-making has also come to cast the darkest shadow over the banking and financial institutions sector. The pillars of finance sector governance are either over-eager to pander to selected private interests, or conspicuously inactive in their regulatory and supervisory responsibilities that has led to astounding levels of fraud and corruption. The case of PK Halder has perhaps become emblematic of such entrenched institutional culpable misgovernance.

The consequence of such corrupt and collusive rule-making is neither vague nor inconsequential with the most serious impact on competitiveness of the economy. Our exports-to-GDP ratio one measure of competitiveness has halved over 2012-22, from 20 percent to 10.6 percent. The continued stagnation in the private investment-to-GDP ratio is another cause for worry. Most recently, collusive regulatory moves appear to have unnerved external investors in the stock market. In such an amoral world, the "good entrepreneur" is effectively left adrift with a herculean uphill task.

The grip of the "iron triangle" works differently, but no less negatively in the case of development projects, particularly infrastructure projects. E-tender was supposed to have brought in transparency and efficiency to the whole process of awarding contracts, but reality speaks otherwise. Corrupt, inefficient and collusive practices work here through informal barriers to competitive bids, inflated costs, post-approval cost escalations, and project delays.

The third part of thelouha tribhujis theobicharer orthoniti the economics of injustice rooted in policy marginalisation of all those lacking political voice, including workers, farmers, small entrepreneurs, and now even the middle classes. Not one member of the common masses sits idle, relentless in their effort and labour for whatever opportunities come their way, but the benefits of policy attention is disproportionately faced away from them towards a small number of favoured groups. Public transport, prices of essentials, utility costs, affordable housing, access to quality healthcare and education, access to green spaces each of these pillars of quality living, central to the welfare of the common people, lacks the level of policy attention that would make a difference. It is as if the common masses have to shoulder the burden of resilience while fruits of growth flow disproportionately to favoured groups.

The second face of the economics of injustice is equally concerning. All our discussions are around macroeconomic imbalances and the ensuing crisis. Yet, we also need to keep in focus our medium-term goal of achieving the SDGs. In at least three areas, there is a real danger of reversal with Bangladesh becoming off track in SDGs: nutritional deficits (with nutritious items disappearing from the household diet due to lack of affordability), rise in secondary dropout level, and rise of youth unemployment (particularly, educated youth unemployment).

Bangladesh may be at an inflexion point in its development journey. Plenty of other initially successful countries fell into the "middle-income trap" because warning signals were not heeded and reform needs were pushed under the carpet. Will Bangladesh be able to recognise thelouha tribhujfor what it is a vicious triangle of mutually reinforcing policy tendencies that has morphed into a structural barrier straddling Bangladesh's inclusive and sustainable development aspirations? This cannot be overcome or dislodged merely by technical recommendations and feel-good talk. The need of the hour is a dismantling of thelouha tribhujthrough a qualitative change in political realisation, political approach and political will, and an urgent big push on reforms.

Hossain Zillur Rahman,an economist and political sociologist, is the executive chairman of Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC).

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Louha tribhuj and the political economy of development - The Daily Star

William Boyd is not slowing down. Here I am, the 70-year-old novelist tells me over Zoom, 40 years on from my first novel, and Im actually busier than ever. And I think my imagination is actually cranking up better than ever. I seem to be slightly speeding up as I get older!

Theres certainly an abundance of imagination on show in Boyds new novel, The Romantic, which is the fourth of his whole-life novels, covering a colourful character from birth to grave.

But then Boyd has always been busy, as the author of 17 novels, five collections of stories and numerous screenplays. He is, by any measure, one of Britains most successful writers; he is speaking to me from his home in affluent Chelsea (between the Kings Road and the river).

I almost wrote one of Englands most successful writers but the blended nature of Boyds upbringing is a key element of his identity. He was born in Ghana, raised there and in Nigeria, then educated in Scotland, France and Oxford. Now he divides his time, as his book blurbs put it, between London and southwest France. He has a well-spoken accent with just a tincture of Scots remaining.

This mixed-up national identity is reflected in the hero of The Romantic. Cashel Greville Ross is raised initially in Ireland, and his lifespans the 19th century just as Boyds earlier whole-life novels The New Confessions (1987), Any Human Heart (2002) and Sweet Caress (2015) spanned the 20th.

Most of the 19th century was a period of turbulent change, says Boyd. Almost like the 20th to 21st century in a way. I had to factor in the way technology began to influence peoples lives, from chamber pots to flushing toilets, or from coach and horses to speeding trains. So its a very rich world to explore.

Cashels life moves from Ireland to Oxford, and from there the surprises never stop. The rambunctious romp of his story takes Cashel to India (fighting in the third Kandyan War), Italy (meeting Byron and Shelley), Africa (discovering Lake Victoria a year before Speke and Burton) and the United States. The book has been likened to a less politically incorrect version of the Flashman stories.

But it also deals in issues that have preoccupied Boyd throughout his career, specifically identity and the influence of chance on our lives. Cashels confusion about his identity in one sense it is the story of a man who never knows quite who he is runs deep. I dont know if you spotted this, laughs Boyd, but at different stages in the book hes called an English c**t, a Scottish c**t and an Irish c**t!

Boyd is also concerned with the sleight of hand involved in telling a fictional story as though it were fact. He opens the novel with a preface about its source material and adds little details of verisimilitude footnotes, sketches throughout. Im trying to show how powerful fiction is, and how it can deal with the human condition better than anything else can.

That aspect of being impulsive, of being driven by your heart not your head, I think Im a bit like that myself. I have a romantic nature

And even in Boyds shorter novels take Armadillo (1998) or The Blue Afternoon (1993) hes always interested in the aspects of a life we dont often see in fiction, like the workplace.

Im a realistic novelist, unapologetically, and so the world youve created, and the characters youve created, have to be three-dimensional, textured and real. For a long time I resisted writing about a writer, so lots of my protagonists have proper jobs: loss adjuster, primatologist. Its an attempt to give a granular feel to the fiction.

In The Romantic even the most minor of characters are rich in detail. Bad writing or bad novels are easy to spot, Boyd says, because they only trade in stereotypes. And if youre a serious novelist, you must always strive to avoid falling into that trap, of going to central casting with the chatty barman or whatever. Youve got to make the character step off the page in a distinctive way.

Another trick of the trade is how you name your characters dont just call them John Smith or Sally Watts. Come up with something a little bit individual, and immediately the character starts to live. Something like Cashel Greville Ross, or Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, or Salvador Carriscant.

The novel is called The Romantic because Cashel is a romantic not just in the obvious sense though he is popular with women, and falls for one painfully for life but also in his spirited interest in everything. To what extent, I ask Boyd the least obviously autobiographical of novelists when you write about this restless, ambitious character, are you writing about yourself?

In response he says he was partly inspired by reading Stendhals autobiography The Life of Henry Brulard. In it, he identifies himself as a romantic but he sees it as a kind of curse on his life. He kept falling in love with women, making a fool of himself and having to leave town. And that aspect of being impulsive, of being driven by your heart not your head, I think Im a bit like that myself. I have a romantic nature. I recognise from Stendhals account of his life and his errors, things that chime with my own! And its from these sorts of collisions that your novels grow.

Boyd referred to himself earlier as an unapologetically realistic novelist. But there is, surely, a lot of playfulness in his work, and particularly his short stories?

I see so many of my contemporaries not being published, or their books going out of print. Im very conscious of how a reputation that seems to be thoroughly established can suddenly fizzle out

I think thats absolutely true. I use my short stories as a way of flexing muscles I wouldnt flex in my novels. I use the alphabet, an A to Z, theres one story which is an attempt to write a story in the form of a nouvelle vague film. And you wouldnt want to spend two years writing a novel to see if that worked, but you can do it over a few days with a short story.

[But in the novels] I do do that slightly meta literary stuff. Brazzaville Beach is written in the first person and third person. Any Human Heart is a 500-page novel written as a journal. People sometimes disparagingly describe me as a traditional novelist. But tell me other traditional novelists whove fractured their narrative in this way, and changed pronouns, or used 77 photographs, and so on.

Boyd certainly doesnt exhibit the lack of confidence that infects even many successful novelists. (Iris Murdoch said that every novel was the wreck of a perfect idea.) He says he spends twice as long planning each book as I do writing it. Ive never abandoned a novel, because Ive done all this preliminary work. And each novel in a way has turned out as I hoped it would, there are no runts of the litter as far as Im concerned.

He is not, however, complacent. For me the absolutely main ambition now is to keep the show on the road. All my books are in print in the USA, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and of course the UK. How do you keep that going? Because I see so many of my contemporaries not being published, or their books going out of print. Im very conscious of how a reputation that seems to be thoroughly established can suddenly fizzle out. And Im aware of my good fortune in that sense.

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William Boyd: '40 years on from my first novel, my imagination is cranking up better than ever' - The Irish Times

Part One of a series

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) took to the Twitter social media platform on Tuesday, September 27, to clarify allegations that it has included a 'casteist' text, in the Class 6 History textbook, which talks about the Varna system and went viral on social media. The Boards defense: CBSE, which acts as a board that sets exam and affiliation guidelines, is not a publisher of textbooks across the country and schools affiliated to them use NCERT curriculum, especially from class 9 to 12.

"The class 6 History textbook containing topics on Varnas has been wrongly attributed as published by CBSE. This is factually incorrect. It is clarified that CBSE does not publish History textbooks, thus the matter does not relate to CBSE. Team CBSE," said the tweet by the national level of board of education. which received backlash from netizens and political parties such as Actor and Politician Kamal Hassan's Makkal Needhi Maiam and Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, two prominent political parties in Tamil Nadu.

Who then published the errant text?

The Free PressJournal reported the controversy and the boards clarification. CBSE, which acts as a board that sets exam and affiliation guidelines, is not a publisher of textbooks across the country. The book, which has the viral image of the text, was published by XSEED Education which is a publishing house based out of Singapore. The issue of tenders, costs and profits over textbooks is one that has dogged government text book boards for decades.

How did the controversy erupt?

It was social media users shared a chapter's page about the Varna System that went viral. According to the lesson's text, the Brahmins were priests and instructors, the Kshatriyas were warriors, the Vaishyas were businesspeople, artisans, and landowners, and the Shudras were labourers who assisted the other three varnas, which created an uproar among netizens.

Caste in Indian textbooks has been a long standing issue, unresolved and unaddressed. In 2021, as reported byThe Telegraph,an Odisha-based study revealed a strong bias against the oppressed castes in school curricula. The findings corroborate, with evidence, what many have said: School curricula erase Dalit and non-elite caste histories and lived experiences.

Details of the study:

A research group consisting of ISI Bengaluru and IIT Hyderabad experts analysed ten literature and social sciences textbooks taught to classes IV to VIII in Odisha schools. It found that only three of ten books ever mention Dalits, or only five per cent of the total pages that present Indian social life. This stark finding underlines the near invisibility of Dalits in our school curricula.

Textbooks, especially for the social sciences, formally open up the world for learners. This is why inclusion is crucial to representation and participation and exclusion perpetuates exploitation. Put differently, it is shadows and silences in our textbooks that hold a mirror lesson for teachers, students, families and society.

Exclusion as denial

From the late 1990s to presently, firstCommunalism Combat, now Sabrangindia have tracked these shadows and silences.Vimal Thorat, Convenorof the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) and a former professor of Hindi at the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), speaks to co-editor, Teesta Setalvad of her decades long struggle to ensure that Dalit literature from seven Indian languages (translated into Hindi) is available to MA Part II students at the IGNOU.

There will be no social transformation without the consistent and creative propagation of the fundamental values of equity and non-discrimination, said Vimal Thorat. If we want a society where there is camaraderie, fraternity, a sense of justice and equality, then these issues need to be brought in, inculcated and taught from standard 1 onwards; but we dont have these basic constitutional values in our syllabus. Why?

Excerpts from the Interviews:

The first all girls school was set up by Savitribai Phule, a radical feminist in Pune in 1848; she challenged gender exclusion and the caste order and yet this narrative is absent from our textbooks.There was a resistance even in the NCERT to ensure the inclusion of Phule, Jyotiba, Savitribai Phule and Ambedkar earlier. The first NDA government removed references to these radical thinkers in 2002; we had to struggle to get them back in 2012 but we are not sure what this government, given its orientation, will do.

Due to the strong Dravidian movementin the South, due to the heritage of rationalism and resistance led by Periyar and Narayan Swamy against Brahmanical hegemony, there was a strong impact in the social sphere and even in the area of education; there is a need for a new awakening in the north.

The period in India, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, was also a period wherein atrocities against Dalits in Punjab and Haryana also sharply increasedThis reached a terrible climax in 2013, when 42 Dalit girls were raped in Haryana and the organisation that I represent, the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) raised the issue consistently through mass meetings and campaigns. The incidents were shocking; they shook the nation. I recall when we held the Haryana Dalit Mahila Samaan Rally so many other cases came up before us. These should be the issues for the mainstream Indian feminist movement.

The pain and exclusions experienced by Dalit feminist writers, expressed powerfully in their literature has not been foregrounded as Indian feminist writing.How many Indian children in schools, or students at universities know the work of Kumud Pawde a Dalit Feminist who made a powerful statement in her essay, The Story of My Sanskrit an extract from her a autobiography Antasphot?[The work traces the path of a Dalit woman in the public sphere of education and employment: bureaucratic apathy to in-egalitarianism and an absence of revulsion to untouchability]

The issue of the Feminism of Dalit, Adivasi and Minority women needs to be considered carefully. The life experiences of Dalit and Adivasi women are different; they are life and death issues rarely seen and articulated in the middle class urban feminist movement.Security is a key issue for Adivasi women as is becoming clear in the heart of the Adivasi areas. Dalit women face attacks almost every day and the issues faced by Muslim women are also specific. For the Indian feminist movement to be representative and meaningful, all these issues need to be represented. In 2013 in Haryana in the course of two months there were 42 gang rapes of Dalit girls and women.Dalit feminist writing like that of Kausalya Baisantry (Dohra Abhishaap, Twice Cursed) speaks of the combined curses of untouchability and patriarchy.Urmila Pawars autobiographyAaydan(2003) is seminal. She is also known for her short story writing in Marathi. She hails from the Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. Urmila Pawar, Daya Pawar, Baby Kamble and Shantabai Gokhale are among the other prominent voices of Dalit literature. Her memoir Aaydan speaks of the weaving of cane baskets. It was the main economic activity of the Mahar caste to whom, she belongs.The symbolism of 'Chani' in Dalit womens writing: 'Chani' is the name given to dried pieces of meat; handling of animals was an activity segregated to the untouchables and therefore the women among them would perform this difficult task. The symbol of Dalit women, in their autobiographies speaking of carrying basketfuls of meat taken from dead animals on their foreheads even as the blood from the animals flows down the bodies. Hunger is the most compelling motive and to quell this hunger women would subject themselves to this. Then they would dry and cure the meat.

2021 Odisha study of history texts

Though the 2021 study focuses on schools in the state Odisha, there are suggestions hat the situation in many other states is no different. The invisibility of Dalit characters distances the texts from reality. It may also teach students to adopt a hierarchical approach in social interactions. In Indias social life, which is based on exclusion, notions of purity and pollution get enforced with (overt and covert) violence against the less powerful. The study refers to school texts in Gujarat, which call the caste system benign. In Rajasthan, too, caste is described as a good system based on professional differences.

In 1999, a study of the Gujarat state textbooks conducted byKhoj Education for a Plural India programme, (and published inCommunalism Combat, October 1999)described the caste system as the ideal way to build society. Of course, their [lower castes] ignorance, illiteracy and blind faith are to be blamed for lack of progress because they still fail to realise the importance of education in life, the book noted.

Caste is a precious gift,1999 Social Science Texts

The caste system receives generous treatment in Indian textbooks, as analysed by theKhojstudy, be it the ICSE text books or the Gujarat board.

Even the section in the text book of the Gujarat state board that seeks to explain the constitutional policy of reservations makes remarks about the continued illiteracy of the scheduled castes and tribes.

So, for instance, the same textbook pays lip service to political correctness through a fleeting reference to the fact that the varna system later became hierarchical, but in the same chapter, a few paragraphs later, literally extols the virtues of the intent of the varna system itself.

There is also no attempt nor desire, either in this text or the ICSE texts to explain the inhuman concept of untouchability (based on the notion, so impure as to be untouchable) that Jyotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar made it their lifes mission to challenge, socially and politically. In understanding and teaching about caste, both this text and other ICSE texts display a marked reluctance to admit or link the ancient-day varna system to modern-day Indian social reality.

The Varna System: The Varna system was a precious gift of the Aryans to the mankind. It was a social and economic organisation of the society built on the basis of the principle of division of labour. Learning or education, defence, trade and agriculture and service of the community are inseparable organs of the social fabric. The Aryans divided the society into four classes or varnas. Those who were engaged in the pursuit of learning and imparted education were called Brahmins or Purohits (the priestly classes). Those who defended the country against the enemy were called the Kshastriyas or the warrior class. Those who were engaged in trade agriculture were called the Vaishyas. And those who acted as servants or slave of the other three classes were called the Shudras. In the beginning, there were no distinction of high and low. The varna or class of a person was decided not on the basis of birth but on the basis of his work or karma. Thus a person born of a Shudra father could become a Brahmin by acquiring learning or by joining the teaching professionIn course of time however, the varna system became corrupted and birth rather than vocation came to be accepted as the distinguishing feature of the varna system. Thus society was permanently divided into a hierarchy of classes. The Brahmins were regarded as the highest class while the Shudras were treated as the lowest. These distinctions have persisted in spite of the attempts made by reformers to remove them. Yet, the importance of the Varna system as an ideal system of building the social and economic structure of a society cannot be overlooked.(Emphasis added).(Social Studies text, Gujarat State Board, Std. IX)

The only reference in this standard IX text to the indignities of the caste system as it exists today is through an attempt to blame the plight of the untouchables on their own illiteracy and blind faith.

Problems of Schedule Castes and Scheduled Tribes: Of course, their ignorance, illiteracy and blind faith are to be blamed for lack of progress because they still fail to realise importance of education in life. Therefore, there is large-scale illiteracy among them and female illiteracy is a most striking fact. (Emphasis added). (Social Studies text, Gujarat State Board, Std. IX, 1999)

The ICSE texts are similarly non-critical and evasive.The New ICSE History and Civics, edited by Hart and Barrow, Part 1 has this to say.

The Caste System: The division of society into four varnas (classes) had its origin in the Rig Vedic period. Members of the priestly class were called brahmins; those of the warrior class, kshatriyas; agriculturists and traders, vaisyas; and the menials, sudras. It is said that the caste system in the Rig Vedic times was based on occupations of the people and not on birth. Change of caste was common. A Brahmin child could become a kshatriya or a vaisya according to his choice or ability

Varna in Sanskrit means the colour of skin and the caste system was probably used to distinguish the fair coloured Aryans from the dark coloured natives. The people of higher castes (brahmins, kshatriyas, and vaisyas) were Aryans. The dark skinned natives were the sudras, the lowest class in society, whose duty was to serve the high class.

2019 New India

In 2019, the NCERT issueda circular announcingthe culling of three chapters from its Class IX history textbook under a policy to rationalise courses. The topics were clothing and caste conflict, cricket history, and the impact of colonial capitalism on peasants. This would imply that the struggles of the Nadar women of Travancore in the early 19th century to wear upper body clothes to cover their breasts, or the discrimination against the talented cricketer Palwankar Baloo to lead the Indian cricket team as he was a Dalit, would not be spoken of in textbooks.

However, a 2019studyof how caste was communicated through textbooks for Class 6 and 10 students has found some improvements compared with twenty years ago. In 2005, NCERT textbooks tried to address caste in a more explanatory way. The author of the study, journalist Sumit Chaturvedi, credits the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 and the Draft Learning Outcomes for elementary education, a document prepared by the NCERT in 2017, which spoke of sensitising students towards caste. Yet, Chaturvedi also notes some problems. The books focus on vulnerable caste groups and their lived experience, whereas dominant caste identities or the logic of the caste system is not interrogated. The perception is also created that caste is an issue of the vulnerable only, which supposedly indemnifies the dominant castes. Third, he notes, the books still allow the youth to claim they are casteless.

However with the coming and consolidation of the NDA I and NDA II governments, the NCF 2005 has been abandoned, texts slashed of their content and the New Education Policy (NEP-2020) implemented.

Though caste re-formulates over time, it is often taught as a thing of the past that has no relation to or continuity with what happens today. It allows the dominant castes to distance themselves from recognising that caste-based exclusions and violence are an existing malady. It thus facilitates denial of thelived experiences of the Dalitsand perpetrates violence against those who experience caste discrimination and bias.

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Caste in CBSE Texts, Who is to Blame? - NewsClick

By Paul SperryReal Clear Wirehttps://www.realclearwire.com/

Since being named special counsel in October 2020, John Durham has investigated or indicted several unscrupulous anti-Trump informants. But he has spared the FBI agents who handled them, raising suspicions he's letting investigators off the hook in his waning investigation of misconduct in the Russiagate probe.

In recent court filings, Durham has portrayed the G-men as naive recipients of bad information, tricked into opening improper investigations targeting Donald Trump and obtaining invalid warrants to spy on one of his advisers.

But as the cases against the informants have gone to trial, defense lawyers have revealed evidence that cuts against that narrative. FBI investigators look less like guileless victims and more like willing partners in the fraudulent schemes Durham has brought to light.

Notwithstanding his reputation as a tough, intrepid prosecutor, Durham has made excuses for the misconduct of FBI agents, providing them a ready-made defense against any possible future prosecution, according to legal experts.

"Durham was supposed to clean up the FBI cesspool, but it doesn't look like he's going to be doing that," said Paul Kamenar, counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center, a Washington watchdog group. "He started with a bang and is ending with a whimper."

In the latest example, critics point to a flurry of pretrial motions in Durham's case against former FBI informant Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the false claims regarding Trump and Russia advanced by the opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign known as the Steele dossier.

Next month, Danchenko faces charges he lied to FBI investigators multiple times about the sourcing of the information in the dossier, which the bureau used to secure wiretap warrants to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser. Relying on Danchenko's reporting, the FBI claimed that the adviser, Carter Page, was a Russian agent at the center of "a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between Trump and the Kremlin to steal the 2016 presidential election.

"The defendant was providing them with false information" as part of "a concerted effort to deceive the FBI," Durham alleged in a recent filing with the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., where the trial is scheduled to be held Oct. 11.

Had agents known Danchenko made up the allegations, Durham asserted, they might have asked more questions about the dossier and not relied on it to swear out the ultra-invasive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to electronically monitor Page, a U.S. citizen who was never charged with a crime.

But Danchenko's legal team points out that he turned over an email to the FBI during a January 2017 meeting with agents and analysts that indicated a key dossier subsource may have been fictionalized.

Stuart Sears, one of Danchenko's attorneys, argued earlier this month in a motion to dismiss the charges that investigators "essentially ignored" any concerns they may have had about Danchenko's sourcing, because they continued to renew the FISA warrants based upon it. Therefore, he argued, any lies his client allegedly told them were inconsequential, making them un-prosecutable under federal statutes requiring such false statements to have a "material" impact on a federal proceeding.

While Durham did not dispute the FBI's apparent complicity in the fraud, he waved it aside as immaterial to the case at hand. "The fact that the FBI apparently did not identify or address these inconsistencies is of no moment," he said in his filing.

At the same time, Durham acknowledged agents allowed the fabrications to contaminate their wiretap warrants noting they were "an important part of the FISA applications targeting Carter Page." But he stopped short of blaming the FBI, even for incompetence. According to Durham, the nation's premiere law enforcement agency was misled by a serial liar and con man.

"He's painting it as though the FBI was duped when the FBI was more than willing to take the initiative and go after Trump," Kamenar said, adding that though Danchenko may have been a liar, he was a useful liar to FBI officials and others in the Justice Department who were pursuing Trump.

The special prosecutor's indifference to the FBI's role in the scandal is more remarkable in light of what Danchenko admitted in his January 2017 interviews with the FBI. He told investigators that much of what he reported to Steele was "word-of-mouth and hearsay," while some was cooked up from "conversation that [he] had with friends over beers," according to a declassified FBI summary of the interviews, which took place over three days. He confessed the most salacious allegations were made in "jest."

Still, the FBI continued to use Danchenko's claims of a "well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between Russia and Trump to convince the FISA court to allow investigators to continue to surveil Page, whom the FBI accused of masterminding the conspiracy based on Danchenko's bogus rumors. Agents even swore in FISA court documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations that Danchenko was "truthful and cooperative."

The combination of Danchenko reporting a "conspiracy" and the FBI vouching for his credibility persuaded the powerful FISA court to continue to authorize wiretapping Page as a suspected Russian agent for almost a year. In addition to collecting his emails and text messages in 2017, agents were able to sweep up all his prior communications with Trump officials from 2016.

If the FBI were skeptical of Danchenko, it didn't show it. The next month, the bureau put him on its payroll as a confidential human source, or CHS, making him part of the bureau's untouchable "sources and methods" sanctum and thereby protecting him and any documents referencing him from congressional and other outside scrutiny. It made him a paid informant in spite of knowing Danchenko was a potential Russian spy threat who could be feeding federal agents disinformation. The FBI had previously opened a counterespionage probe of Danchenko from 2009 to 2011, and as his lawyers pointed out in a recent court filing, agents who were part of the case probing Trump/Russia ties, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, "were well aware of the prior counterintelligence investigation" when they were supposedly conned by their informant.

"It stretches credibility to suggest that anything else would have caused the FBI to be more suspicious of Mr. Danchenko's statements and his potential role in spreading disinformation than the very fact that he was previously investigated for possibly engaging in espionage on behalf of Russia," Sears said. "Armed with that knowledge, however, the FBI nevertheless persisted" in using him as a source while never informing the FISA court of the prior investigation.

The FBI didn't terminate Danchenko until October 2020, the month after the Senate declassified documents revealing the FBI had investigated him as a Russian agent. It also happened to be the same month Durham was appointed special counsel.

On Oct. 19, 2020, then-Attorney General Bill Barr tapped Durham "to investigate whether any federal official, employee, or any other person or entity violated the law in connection with the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns, and individuals associated with the administration of President Donald J. Trump, including but not limited to Crossfire Hurricane and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III."

So far, Durham has focused on the "any other person" part of his mandate. Federal officials and employees appear to be getting a pass.

Though Durham prosecuted former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith in August 2020, when he was acting as a U.S. attorney, he did not initiate the case. Rather, it was referred to him by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who first exposed how Clinesmith had doctored exculpatory evidence in the Page warrant process. Even though Clinesmith admitted forging a CIA email to make it look like Page never helped the agency monitor Russia, when in fact he did and clearly wasn't acting as a Russian agent, Durham failed to put him behind bars. Clinesmith was sentenced to 12 months' probation and 400 hours of community service, which as RCI first reported, the registered Democrat satisfied by researching and editing articles for his favorite liberal weekly newspaper in Washington.

Kamenar said the Clinesmith case was a "bad omen" for how Durham would handle dirty FBI agents. He pointed out that the prosecutor could have charged Clinesmith with the more serious crime of altering a CIA document, but instead negotiated a deal letting him plead to the lesser offense of lying to a government agency, which Kamenar called "a garden variety process crime." And "now he's got his law license back."

Clinesmith worked closely on the case with FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten, who was singled out by Horowitz in a 2019 report for cutting a number of corners in the dossier verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into the FISA affidavits and mislead the court.

Auten met with Danchenko at the bureau's Washington field office and helped debrief him about the dossier in January 2017. And he wrote the official FBI summary of those meetings, which noted Danchenko "contradicted" himself several times. Auten learned firsthand that the information Danchenko passed to Steele was nothing more than bar gossip, and that his "network of subsources" was really just a circle of drinking buddies. Also at those meetings, the analyst received an Aug. 24, 2016, email revealing that Danchenko never actually communicated with Sergei Millian, the Belarusian-born American businessman whom he had identified as his main source of Trump/Russia connections the all-important, albeit apocryphal, "Source E" and "Source D" of the dossier. It turns out Danchenko attributed the critical "conspiracy of cooperation" allegation the FBI cited as probable cause for all four FISA warrants to this made-up source, meaning the cornerstone evidence of suspected Trump-Russia espionage was also made up.

What's more, Auten learned that though Danchenko was born in Russia, he was not based there and had no access to Kremlin insiders. On the contrary, he confirmed that Danchenko had been living in Washington and had previously worked for the Brookings Institution, a Democratic Party think tank whose president at the time was tied to Clinton.

Yet Auten and his Crossfire team led the FISA court to believe Danchenko was "Russian-based" and therefore presumably more credible. They used this same description in all four FISA affidavits, including the two renewals that followed the January 2017 meetings with Danchenko.

Internal FBI emails from two months later revealed that Auten knew that using the term "Russian-based" was deceptive. While tasked with helping review Crossfire documents requested by Congress, including FISA applications, he worried about the description and whether it should be corrected. He discussed the matter with Clinesmith. But the falsehood reappeared in subsequent FISA applications.

It was also in January 2017 that Danchenko revealed to Auten and his FBI handlers that one of his subsources was his childhood friend Olga Galkina, whom he said supplied him the rumor that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to Prague during the campaign to hatch a plot with Kremlin officials to hack Clinton campaign emails.

The FBI already knew from intelligence reports that Cohen had not, as the dossier claimed, traveled to Prague to conspire in the alleged Russian hacking of Democrats, or for any other reason.

On Jan. 12, 2017, Auten and his Crossfire teammates received a CIA report that warned the Cohen rumor was likely part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The agency had discovered no such Prague meeting took place after querying foreign intelligence services, shooting a major hole in the dossier. The CIA report should have led the Crossfire team to treat any allegations sourced to Galkina with caution. But on the same day, the FBI got its FISA wiretap on Page renewed based on another groundless claim by Galkina this one alleging the Trump aide secretly met with top Kremlin officials in Moscow to discuss removing U.S. sanctions. The falsehood showed up in two more FISA applications, which alleged "Russia's efforts to influence U.S. policy were likely being coordinated between the RIS [Russian Intelligence Services] and Page, and possibly others."

Galkina also had a relationship with Charles Dolan, a Clinton adviser who figures prominently in the Danchenko case Durham is prosecuting.

It turns out Dolan was one of the sources for the infamous "pee-tape" allegation about the Kremlin supposedly having blackmail evidence of Trump consorting with prostitutes at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow, which has been debunked as another dossier hoax. But according to Durham, Danchenko tried to conceal Dolan's role in the dossier from the FBI. The special prosecutor argued that the deception deprived FBI agents and analysts information that would have helped them evaluate "the credibility, reliability and veracity" of the dossier. He said if they had known Dolan was a source, they might have, among other things, sought emails Dolan and Danchenko exchanged exposing their Ritz-Carlton hoax.

"Had the defendant truthfully told the FBI that Dolan played a role in providing certain information for the Steele reports the FBI might well have interviewed and/or collected such emails from Dolan," Durham speculated.

In addition, the prosecutor said, investigators might have learned of Dolan's "involvement in Democratic politics" and "potential bias as a source for the Steele reports." Except that they already knew about Dolan and his politics as well as his involvement in the dossier. It's also likely they already had his emails.

In another interview with Danchenko about his dossier sources, which took place June 15, 2017, FBI agents asked Danchenko if he knew Dolan and whether he was "contributing" to the Steele reports. Though Danchenko acknowledged he knew Dolan, he denied he was a source. Agents didn't ask any follow-up questions. (They also never sought to charge him with making false statements to federal agents.)

How did the FBI know to ask about Dolan? Because he was well-known to the bureau's Russia counterintelligence agents as a businessman who frequently traveled to Moscow and met with Kremlin insiders. But more importantly, his friend Galkina was under FISA surveillance as a suspected Russian spy at the time, according to declassified records. The FBI was collecting not only Galkina's emails, but also those of Dolan and Danchenko, all of whom regularly communicated in 2016 which suggests that at the time the FBI asked Danchenko about Dolan, it had access to those emails and was reviewing them.

This may explain why, as defense lawyer Sears noted, "the FBI never asked Mr. Danchenko about emails or any other written communications with Dolan" and why it never interviewed Dolan.

While Durham acknowledged that the FBI knew about Dolan's troubling ties at the time and neglected to dig deeper, he said he's not bothered by the oversight. "The fact that the FBI was aware that Dolan maintained some of these relationships and failed to interview Dolan is of no moment," he maintained dismissively in a court filing. All that matters, he suggested, is that the FBI was lied to.

One of those emails was particularly alarming. In an Aug. 19, 2016, email to Dolan, Danchenko made it clear he was compiling dirt on Trump and his advisers and sought any rumor, no matter how baseless and scurrilous. He solicited Dolan, specifically, for "any thought, rumor, allegation" on former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Such emails called into question the veracity of the whole dossier and further tainted the credibility of Danchenko's "network of subsources." But on June 29, 2017 two weeks after the FBI asked about Dolan the FBI renewed the FISA wiretap on Trump adviser Page based on, once again, the dubious dossier.

From its wiretapping of Galkina, moreover, Auten and others at the FBI who sorted through such FISA collections would have seen communications showing her strong support for Hillary Clinton, and how Galkina was expecting political favors in exchange for spreading dirt on Trump. In an August 2016 email to a friend, Galkina expressed hopes that Dolan would help her score a State Department job if Clinton won election.

It was a major red flag. But like all the others, the FBI blew right past it. Agents continued to vouch for Danchenko as "truthful" and his subsources as reliable, and continued to cite Galkina's fabrications in FISA renewals.

Under FISA rules, the FBI had a duty to "immediately inform" the secret court of any misstatements or omissions, along with any "necessary corrections" of material facts sworn in affidavits for warrants. But the FBI failed to correct the record, even after it became obvious it had told the court falsehoods and hid exculpatory evidence. In August 2017, agents finally got around to interviewing Galkina, who confessed the dossier allegations attributed to her were "exaggerated," according to the Horowitz report.

Scammed by the Alfa Bank Scam?Last year, Durham also painted the FBI as a victim of the 2016 political machinations of two other anti-Trump informants Michael Sussmann and Rodney Joffe, who conveyed to investigators false rumors about Trump allegedly setting up a secret hotline with the Kremlin through Russia-based Alfa Bank.

Durham charged Sussmann, a Washington lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, with lying to the FBI's top lawyer James Baker when he told him he was coming in with the tip outlined in white papers and thumb drives all on his own and not on behalf of Democrats and Clinton, whom he was billing for the Trump-Alfa "confidential project."

"Sussmann's false statement misled the FBI general counsel and other FBI personnel concerning the political nature of his work and deprived the FBI of information that might have permitted it more fully to access and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis, including the identities and motivations of Sussmann's clients," Durham maintained in the indictment.

But evidence emerged at the trial of Sussmann, who was acquitted, that bureau officials already knew the "political nature" of the tip and where the data came from, but withheld the information from field agents so they would continue investigating Trump through the election.

For example, in a Sept. 22, 2016, email describing the "special project," an FBI official in Washington stated that "Counsel Baker provided [Supervisory Special Agent] Joe Pientka with 2 thumb drives and identified they were given to him by the DNC."

"Everybody at the FBI actually thought the data came from a political party," Sussmann lawyer Sean Berkowitz argued, according to the trial transcript. "The (case) file is littered with references to the DNC."

But Durham kept offering explanations for why FBI brass bit on the politically tainted tip, opening a full field investigation based on it.

"Had Sussmann truthfully disclosed that he was representing specific clients [the Clinton campaign], it might have prompted the FBI general counsel to ask Sussmann for the identity of such clients, which, in turn, might have prompted further questions," Durham argued.

"In addition, absent Sussmann's false statement, the FBI might have taken additional or more incremental steps before opening an investigation," he added. "The FBI also might have allocated its resources differently, or more efficiently, and uncovered more complete information about the reliability and provenance of the purported data at issue."

Headquarters, however, did know the identity of the clients. Problem was, they blinded agents in Chicago, where a cyber unit was assigned to the case, to the fact that the source for the information was Sussmann and Joffe a federal cyber-security contractor who was angling for a job in a Clinton administration. (A longtime FBI informant, Joffe was terminated last year after he was exposed as the ringleader of the Alfa Bank scam.)

"You were not allowed to speak to either the source of the information, the author of the white paper, or the person who provided the source of the information and the data?" Berkowitz asked Chicago-based FBI agent Curtis Heide during the trial, according to transcripts.

"Correct," Heide replied.

Another Chicago investigator was led to believe the tip came into the bureau as a referral from the "U.S. Department of Justice."

Still, field agents were able to debunk it within two weeks.

The FBI was not fooled by the hoax, yet nonetheless went along with it for the next four months. The case wasn't formally closed until Jan. 18, 2017, just two days before Trump was inaugurated. But then it was soon reopened after Clinton operatives again approached the FBI as well as the CIA with supposedly new evidence, which also proved false.

"Comey and crew kept the hoax alive," former FBI counterintelligence lawyer Mark Wauck said, referring to then-FBI Director James Comey. They welcomed any predication that allowed them to open investigations on Trump, he added.

Pientka testified that Comey was "fired up" about the tip, despite the fact nothing had been corroborated. Comey even held senior-level meetings on the Alfa investigation in his 7th floor office. (Pientka, who led the "close-hold" investigation from headquarters, also helped supervise the Crossfire Hurricane probe.)

Ironically, no one knew better that Sussmann was a Democratic operative with an agenda than Baker the official Durham claimed was the direct victim of the scam.

Baker, a fellow Democrat, was a close friend of Sussmann, who had his own badge to get past security at the Hoover Building. Sussmann had Baker's personal cell number and Baker cleared his busy schedule to meet with him within hours of Sussmann calling to discuss his tip. Baker was well aware that Sussmann was representing the DNC, because Sussmann entered the building numerous times during the 2016 campaign to talk with top FBI officials about the alleged DNC hack by Russia. In fact, Sussmann had just visited headquarters with a delegation from the DNC on Aug. 12, 2016 several weeks before he approached Baker with the bogus Alfa tip. They were there to pressure the FBI into concluding Russian intelligence was behind the "hacking" of DNC emails.

"I understood he had been affiliated with the Democratic Party, but that he had come representing himself," Baker testified during the trial.

Why didn't he tell investigators about Sussmann? "I didn't want to share his name because I didn't want to color the investigation," he said. "I didn't want to color it with politics."

In his closing argument, Durham prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis told jurors the FBI's conduct was "not relevant."

"Ladies and gentlemen, you've seen that the FBI didn't necessarily do everything right here. They missed opportunities. They made mistakes. They even kept information from themselves," he said. "That is not relevant to your evaluation of the defendant's lie."

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton complained Durham and his team have been acting more like apologists for the FBI than potential prosecutors of the FBI.

"The FBI leadership knew full well the Clinton gang was behind the Alfa Bank-Russia smears of Trump," he said. "Durham tried to pretend (the) FBI was a victim (when) it was a co-conspirator."

Wauck agreed. "The FBI-as-victim narrative was a bit of a legal fiction that Durham deployed for the purposes of the trial," he said. "The reality that emerged is that the FBI's top management was complicit in the Russia hoax that Sussmann was purveying."

Folding Up His TentDurham was first tasked with looking into the origins of the Russiagate probe in May 2019, before his formal appointment as special counsel in 2020. Trump and Republicans have expressed disappointment that after a total of more than three years of investigation, he has not prosecuted any top former FBI officials, including Comey and Andrew McCabe, who signed some of the FISA affidavits, or Peter Strzok, the biased leader of the Crossfire Hurricane probe who assured McCabe's lawyer in an August 2016 text that "we'll stop" Trump from becoming president. None has received a target letter. In recent months, McCabe and Strzok have gone on CNN, where they work as paid contributors, and smugly bashed Durham for running a "partisan" investigation, while at the same time gloating he's held the FBI up to be more of a victim than a culprit.

"Comey and Strzok and McCabe have gotten a free ride out of all this," Kamenar said.

Also, Durham went easy on Baker, another top FBI official, even after he held back key evidence from the special prosecutor before the Sussmann trial, a blatant lack of cooperation that may have cost Durham a conviction in the case. Comey's general counsel has received "favorable treatment," Wauck observed.

Baker, who reviewed and OK'd the FISA applications, never told Durham about a damning text message he received from Sussmann on his cellphone. Durham had already indicted Sussmann for lying to Baker, and he could not use Sussmann's smoking-gun message "I'm coming on my own not on behalf of a client or company" during the trial to convince jurors he was guilty of lying about representing the Clinton campaign. Legal analysts said it was slam-dunk evidence that would have sealed his case.

Baker testified he didn't turn over the text to Durham because no one asked for it. He proved a reluctant witness on the stand against his old pal Sussmann.

"I'm not out to get Michael and this is not my investigation. This is your investigation," he told DeFilippis during questioning. DeFilippis has since stepped down to take a job in the private sector.

(Demonstrating the incestuous nature of the Beltway, Baker also happens to be an old friend of Bill Barr, who hired Durham. Barr hired Baker as his deputy when he ran Verizon's legal shop in 2008.)

In another sign Durham has not lived up to his billing as an aggressive prosecutor, FBI Director Christopher Wray suggested in recent Senate testimony that Durham's team has not interviewed all of the Crossfire members still employed at the bureau. In lieu of face-to-face interviews, he said Durham's investigators have reviewed transcripts of interviews of the agents previously conducted by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the FBI's in-house disciplinary arm.

Recent published reports say Durham is in the process of closing up shop and completing a final report on his findings by the end of the year. Republicans have promised to seize on the report if they win control of the House in November and take back the gavel to key oversight committees on the Hill, along with subpoena power.

Some former colleagues who have worked with Durham and are familiar with his inquiry blame COVID-19 for his relatively few prosecutions and lackluster record. They say pandemic-related shutdowns in 2020 and 2021 set back his investigation by limiting travel, interviews, and grand jury hearings. As a result, they say, the clock ran out on prosecuting a number of potential crimes. The last FISA warrant, which according to the court was illegally obtained, was approved June 29, 2017, which means the five-year federal statute of limitations for that crime expired months ago.

Though Durham hinted in the Sussmann case about investigating a broader "conspiracy" or "joint venture," there are few signs pointing to such a massive undertaking. Bringing a "conspiracy to defraud the government" charge, naming multiple defendants, would require Durham adding staff and office space and beefing up his budget by millions of dollars, the former colleagues said.

According to expenditure statements, Durham continues to operate on a shoestring budget with a skeletal staff compared with his predecessor Mueller's robust operation, which indicted 34 people. And one of the two grand juries Durham used to hear evidence has expired. It recently wrapped up work, apparently without handing down new indictments (though some could be under seal).

"If Durham were building toward an overarching indictment alleging a corrupt conspiracy between the Clinton campaign and the FBI to deceive the court, he would not be charging people with lying to the FBI," former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said.

If there are any investigations still open after Durham retires, they could be handled by U.S. attorneys, the sources said. At least one of Durham's prosecutors works as a trial lawyer in the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C.

According to a court exhibit, Joffe "remains a subject" in the Sussmann-related investigation into alleged attempts by federal contractors to defraud the government with false claims about Trump and Russia. Joffe invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify after receiving a grand jury subpoena and has not cooperated with requests for documents. His lawyer did not return phone calls and emails.

The Special Counsel's Office did not respond to requests for comment.

The FBI declined comment for this article, but issued a statement last year saying it "has cooperated fully with Special Counsel Durham's review."

Paul Sperry is an investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations. He is also a longtime media fellow at Stanfords Hoover Institution. Sperry was previously the Washington bureau chief for Investors Business Daily, and his work has appeared in the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Houston Chronicle, among other major publications.

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Durham prosecutes FBI informants, while protecting their handlers - The Highland County Press