Clearer and Farther

Clearer and Farther

Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.

V.I.Lenin in his pamphlet “What Is To Be Done?” (1901)

Vladimir Illyich Lenin brought about the epoch-altering 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, more or less by dint and force of his own character. He led from the front, and his party men followed as he finally turned out, not just the Tsar, but his moderate Menshevik colleagues too, and seized power. This,  despite being personally irascible and unpleasantly blunt. Still, the reason why the Bolsheviks stood fast behind Lenin was because he saw the issues in a clearer perspective, and thought much further forward, than anyone else around him- including the altogether more persuasive Trotsky.

                                                                                                                     

Today, as India stands presumptive on the threshold of its transformational renaissance, the political leadership lacks an overarching and strong vision to tackle the tremendous and widening disparity between the haves and the have-nots. This is all the more urgent as India’s economy grows at near double digits, and cannot but be seen as a callous and glaring failure of policy.

                                                                                       

But all we can witness towards addressing this great shame is lip-service and lousy implementation of some desultory and wasteful poverty alleviation programmes. Nobody seems willing to set about solving the problem as one of our two greatest priorities by throwing massive intellectual and monetary resources at it. We need productive and sustainable rural prosperity for sixty percent of our people. Indeed, if we confined our planning process to this one objective, we would probably be using those fine economists in the Commission far better.

The other looming and lurking 800 pound gorilla receiving little enough attention is the crying need for comprehensive modernisation and infrastructure creation. What’s being done, and it is not as if nothing is happening, is woefully inadequate and hardly on par with the best global standards.

Let us enumerate a few of our inadequacies: We have perhaps one quarter the electrical power we need with little hope of catching up at the pace we have adopted; our roads and highways are better than before, but hardly world standard; our railways are still in the 19^th century with electric and diesel locomotives tacked on in place of steam engines. Our overall systems and processes are obtusely labyrinthine and medieval. Our government to people interaction is feudal and colonial in tone and tenor. Our legal system is ponderous and its backlogs gargantuan. Our water is unfit to drink. Our food is sub-standard in quality and neither stored nor processed properly. Our municipalities are totally swamped, chaotic, ignorant of civic standards, and garbage is piled high everywhere.  The listing of our weaknesses is nearly endless. Nothing works in a manner befitting a developed country, not even in the show-piece capital of New Delhi, aspire as we might; and the end is nowhere in sight.

We manage to be self-satisfied nevertheless, consoling ourselves that things are better today than they were yesterday. But the fact is, in a rapidly globalising and technologically driven world, we cannot afford to move at our quaint and antiquated pace any longer. We are not only left far behind the now near-bankrupt developed world; but practically all the other emerging nations of every political persuasion, including the much cited BRIC or ASEAN or the GCC, the G-20, even most of the nations in the UN General Assembly!

And yet we want, and will probably get, for a variety of favourable geopolitical reasons, a permanent seat in the UNSC. We will be the most under-developed UNSC member of them all, with little hope of catching up, and hard-pressed to meet our consequent obligations on the world stage.

 

This gradualism, the hallmark of our policy-making in all matters, may be wise enough to contain political paradoxes but here could yet be the blight that wrecks the promise of a better future. Perhaps it isn’t this realisation that matters, otherwise it wouldn’t be ignored. But if more states vote to reward development as they have in Bihar recently, and in Gujarat before that, then the broader political classes will have to move out of their extended stupor for their own survival.

We cannot afford to be slow. And yet, each successive Railway Budget for instance, does not attempt to upgrade our railway system into something appropriate to the 21^st century, like France’s exemplary TGV system. Instead we tinker with old-hat populism as if we were still in the socialist dawn of 1950 and the informed commentary is relieved because train fares are not raised! 

The Union Budget 2011, as usual, will also focus on a plethora of micro issues, provide miniscule reliefs and tweak existing provisions, in a masterful balancing act signifying very little and showing the way forward not at all.

There will be no bold strokes, no Maoist attempt at a “great leap forward” with its exciting possibilities and ambition. This even as the term Maoist itself has changed meaning completely from the policies and homilies written down by the partly forgotten Chairman in that once fashionable Little Red Book. Today a Maoist refers to   tribal and agent provocateur terrorists in India’s jungle tracts trained, supported and sustained covertly however, by China.

Revolutions don’t often produce the results the people may want, as is borne out by the rear-guard and vainglorious action Colonel Muammar Gadhafi is fighting before his imminent ouster after 42 years of iron-fisted tyranny. But he too has ruled so long in the name of the people. He too wrote his telephone-directory sized Green Book in lieu of the institutions he destroyed.

But asking for policies that promote rural prosperity and widespread creation of new state-of-the-art infrastructure is not ideologically revolutionary. China and Brazil and Russia have adopted this path to their lasting benefit despite some excesses and redundancies. But at least they have left the era of chronic shortages of essential enablers behind and can concentrate on refining their governance.

India needs to do something urgently. Now, when both credibility and resources mobilisation are far less of a constraint than they have ever been in our 62 year republican history, there is no excuse to keep going slow. The Leninesque bit will however be in throwing out gradualism in favour of a dramatic makeover.

(1,066 words)

26^th February 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published at Leader on the Edit Page of The Pioneer with the same title on March 12, 2011 and also online at www.dailypioneer.com and in the pioneer epaper. Also archived undr Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

Macavity

Cat -Pablo Picasso

Macavity

He always has an alibi and one or two to spare
Whatever time the deed took place, Macavity wasn't there!

The Mystery Cat-TS Eliot



The Prime Minister’s bravura, brazen, evidently much rehearsed performance, at the interaction with the senior broadcast media recently, was reminiscent of poet TS Eliot’s poem about an elusive mystery cat he called Macavity.

As spectator sports go, one finds the packaging of a position between a rock and a hard place particularly fascinating. But still, the nation waited and waited for a gritty, integrity-laden truth out of the whole thing. Instead, we were treated to a series of anodyne and self-serving statements. But perhaps, to read the tea leaves properly, our wait will have to be extended. Because the only clear-cut thing Dr. Singh said is that he wasn’t quitting, and that he intended to do some restructuring of the cabinet after the Budget session.

But verily, he has matured and ripened as a politician. Dr. Singh now uses his natural gifts of modesty, personal honesty, erudition, the familiar white bearded and sky blue turbanned persona, to not just give an appealing and sympathetic account of himself but attempt an audacious suspension of disbelief worthy of a master cinema director.

Many senior media persons and Opposition politicians have already marvelled at how the PM has positioned the precarious state of governance with corruption and bad news pouring out of every orifice, as a matter he is just about to tidy up, having recently located his misplaced broom.

The transmogrification, over the years, of the once decidedly Leftist professor and economist turned World Bank inspired reformer, liberator of the Indian economy in 1991; eliding, kaleidoscopically, imperceptibly, into the blasé politician of today, is impressive.

The Dr. Singh of 2011 must have been reminding himself, as he fielded questions with a practiced ease, that he was exactly where he wanted to be. He was informing us that he was determined to go down in history as the first non “family” Congress PM to stay for two full back-to-back terms.

And, by implication, he underlined that there was no one in the UPA or the Opposition who could unseat him. And increasingly, this very durability and tenacity of tenure may turn out to be his lasting testament. This, and the knack he displays to see his pet projects through. In this, he has quite a lot in common with former US President George W Bush who was also not thwarted from his essential purposes by mere criticism.

Besides, even if we cast Dr. Singh into the Faustian mould of having struck his particular bargain, to share power with the Congress party head, we can’t fail to note his emphasis on the satisfactory performance of the GDP growth under his helmsmanship. And based on this success alone, Dr. Singh seeks to minimise the impact of all the corruption on his watch.

Besides Faustian pacts aside, a sharing of prime ministerial power is hardly unprecedented. Our first PM Jawaharlal Nehru had to do so with both the Mahatma and Home Minister Patel, while they lived. More recently, the charismatic Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee shared his primus inter pares powers with his friend and comrade in arms, Mr. LK Advani. Besides, it has taken Dr. Singh off the hook on matters connected with the electoral success of the Congress Party.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the binary of power, all does not seem well. Electorally there have been hardly any state assembly or by-poll successes. Equally, we can’t help but note the shambles in the poverty alleviation and rural employment programmes for the aam aadmi.

Dr. Singh could therefore be consciously benefitting from the weaknesses in his own Party. He also seems determined to reach out to the Opposition to rescue the Budget session from the fate that befell the Winter Session, even if it means finding a way through to appearing before the much demanded JPC. And, in this, he is likely to be met more than half way by the Opposition.

Dr. Singh, the politician, is also adept at breaking logjams. He did it in UPA 1 to get the Left off his back by deftly utilising Mr. Mulayam Singh’s numbers in the Lok Sabha. The Left has been floundering both politically and electorally ever since.

To assess Dr. Singh as politically naïve or weak may be a classic misjudgement. He knows how to play the hand he has been dealt adroitly. He also knows age and health dictates that this is his last dance in active politics. And while minding the store and sweeping out the Augean stables of domestic politics interests him, it is not by any means his passion. The economy qualifies in this regard, as does foreign policy.

Dr. Manmohan Singh will see to it that that India tilts decisively towards the United States by way of our defence purchases before he leaves high office. This will reduce the strategic disadvantage we have always found ourselves in with regard to neighbouring bugbears China and Pakistan.

Both these countries are occasionally strident in their relationship with the US but know which side their bread is buttered. They have consequently benefitted enormously from being perceived as allies.

By way of contrast, India has long been in the Soviet camp while pretending to be non-aligned. The Russians today may also be selling us military equipment on more or less favourable terms, though the Admiral Gorshkov affair and the faulty Sukhois sent to India lately seems to give the lie to this.

An economically pressured America and Europe now won’t be that far behind in pricing and technology transfers too. To hark back to the nuclear fuel stoppages after our covert nuclear weaponisation as American/ Canadian/ European unreliability ignores the Civil Nuclear Deal which couldn’t have come off without their concerted support. Besides, Russia stopped supplying us the cryogenic engines too.

Fact is, we have to trust in our own usefulness, not so much in the old way of the world divided into blocks, but the emerging new world order of functioning democracies and/or economic clout. China, in the contest of the permanent UNSC seat for India, is beginning to see India in these terms, despite itself. After all, in a changed world, the future may need India and China to jointly pick up the pieces that used to be Pakistan.

(1,063 words)

20th February 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit on Edit Page of The Pioneer as "Macavity of our times" on Saturday 26th February 2011. Also online at www.dailypioneer.com where it is archived under Guest Columnists. Also published in The facsimilie edition on 26th February 2011 of The Pioneer ePaper. 

Denial

Denial

The campaign in the media about the hoarded billions in Swiss banks that allegedly belong to hawala-patronising and black-money generating Indians, is hotting up. But this blithely ignores some vital components of the very structuring of political and commercial life in India.

We keep totting up the sums, estimated to be a mouth-watering Rs. 500 billion per a BJP report ($1.4 trillion), and talk of liberating substantial development funds should these sums be repatriated.

But even as we entertain such fantasies, we must realise that these vast sums stashed abroad are a symptom of the pervasive disease and not just the collective act of deviants from the honest norm.  So, to get at these monies now or in the future would call for a sea-change in the way we run things in India.

Unless, of course, the intent is no more than to deliver some eyewash. If a few diamond merchants are somehow brought to book and their tax-evading monies repatriated, some good will no doubt come of it, but it would certainly not cure the malaise! To sort out this great fiscal anaconda will take much more.

Consider that no electioneering or constituency “management” or indeed the expenses associated with the day-to-day running of political party machineries can take place without enormous sums in cash being employed. Sums of cash much beyond the scope of the official “party fund” charged in miniscule amounts from members. Sums in cash much larger than constituency allowances. Much larger than the sums stated in ridiculously out-of-date guidelines on how much a man or woman may spend in order to get elected in the first place!  

The sums called for run into tens of thousands of crores, much of it extorted from business and industry for the party coffers in cash. These sums are quite legitimately required; both to cater for the inevitable costs of patronage based loyalty amongst cadres and grass-roots political organisers/workers, and the inflated costs of development in the rural areas which compose most constituencies.

Also think of the per diem costs of chartered private planes and helicopters now routinely used by politicians for their constituency visits plus the large fleets of vehicles required to ferry them and their staff around on the ground.

On the other side of the fence, no business development can take place without substantial bribes being paid to a gargantuan officialdom, a circumstance, to be fair, in place from Mughal times, with a suitably hoary, even sophisticated tradition of graft and patronage.

Today, post the British overlays: its monopolies, duties, cesses, taxes, its permissions, warrants, licences, exclusions, inclusions, requisitions, over and above the old Mughal ones; we have tens of millions of  un-sackable officials empowered with myriad levels of sanctioning authority and oversight.

And this bribe money, in small instalments, for the humble, must be traceless.  If however more substantial sums are warranted for the powerful and exalted, they must be routed through labyrinthine benami courses, with a great deal of it being paid in kind in the form of property transferred, bought and paid for.

And for the abundant overflow of liquid funds; to further secure the loot, it must be broken up into many separate transactions and be sent abroad through those ubiquitous unofficial banking channels. This must be done from time-tested and foolproof multiple points of exit to multiple destinations. And there be secreted in dozens of bank accounts in as many benami “front” names. In front, that is, of “secret and anonymous” numbered accounts.  Try unravelling this whole ball of twine in terms of judicial proof and it could keep several generations in employment!

The Swiss have built a nation on this secrecy. They hold tens of billions of dollars in accounts set up not only over the centuries of Europe’s turbulent past but also between the two world wars with no apparent claimants. The money trail has gone cold, that too for many years now. Many were Jews, others were Nazis, Indian princes, deposed dictators and so on.  This unclaimed money makes for a significant chunk of the Swiss economy.

Such is the Swiss success and sophistication at the shadowy and secretive management of no-questions-asked banking that copycat tax havens have been established all over the world, and now are springing up every day to cater to new destinations such as a resurgent Africa. Collectively, they provide much comfort to those in need of their services.

But there is another side to the story. The beleaguered President Hosni Mubarak is said to have stashed over $ 70 billion for the rainy day that seems to be now upon him. But, as in many such cases, he will be allowed to leave with his money for minimising the turmoil and bloodshed, and his nation will be happy to be free of him at last.

Besides, Egypt allows for 20% local participation in all joint ventures with foreign entities and many other Arabian locations insist on 51% local “sponsorship”. So powerful people are legitimate beneficiaries of their enterprise, notwithstanding that it is a concept different from the Western idea, grafted onto India,  that you cannot, or certainly should not, benefit from your position in the Government. But, because of local laws in Arabia, it is not illegitimate either.

India is probably no more corrupt than the next nation, but it is burdened with untenable laws that most of the powers-that-be have seen fit to circumvent. The British were past masters at disguising their plunder: sometimes via the East India Company and often through a procession of princely stooges. They played at Victorian rectitude, much like their putting pantaloons on the legs of their pianos, while entertaining themselves to unbridled licentiousness.

We need perhaps to look again at our outdated laws if we are to tackle the scourge of the black economy. Partly, it exists because the Government and its constituent party machineries cannot do without it. And partly, because neither can business and industry in the present dispensation.

There is also the matter of a profligate and inefficient use of tax revenues with a huge Government living high that makes for a very understandable desire to dodge taxes on the part of a long suffering public.

Barking in general is recognised as a substitute, a harmless one at that, to the bite. But barking up the wrong tree as a deliberate decoy, is perhaps an insult to the intelligence of the Indian people.  

(1,070 words)

7^th February, 2011

 Gautam Mukherjee


Published by The Pioneer as Leader on Edit Page on 10th February 2011 entitled: Disease called black money. Also published online at www.dailypioneer and in the facsimilie edition of the newspaper. The article is archived under Guest Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

Prompters

Prompters

Autocratic Islamic governments are being challenged on their city streets and squares. But unfortunately, the protests are underpinned by religion, the only vehicle of mass mobilisation that even Islamic dictators, their armies and secret police can’t stamp out.

President Hosni Mubarak’s final moment of reckoning could come after any week’s Friday prayers now; or perhaps on a week day as soon as the US brokers his departure on terms acceptable to itself. He won’t lose his life in the bargain only if he retreats to his billions abroad like his son and heir who has preceded him.

There is little hope nevertheless that regime change in compact Tunisia, followed perhaps by Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine; even Saudi Arabia, will lead to anything other than interim governments very much like the ones they replace. Eventually, after further public discontent,  there will be Mullah-led or inspired radical Islamic regimes like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Regimes with harsh, repressive, anti-modern ways;  particularly towards women. These will be overtly puritanical, extreme governments, long on rhetoric, short on civilised law and order, based, first and last, on the anachronistic Sharia’h laws.

Depressingly, it makes little difference whether the revolutions take place in Shia or Sunni majority countries, in under-populated or populous ones, or indeed in this decade, or the last, or even the one before that. It is hard to deal with an all-embracing secular and temporal religious system stuck in another time zone. Democracy, as we know it, the Grecian spawned ideal, is not for Arabia, because it has no ideological place or appeal in the Arab psyche. This despite the fond hopes entertained to this effect in the West.

Meanwhile, democratic we Indians may be, but as we grapple with our inequities against a backdrop of a betrayal of governance, we seem to fall, temperamentally speaking, into two alternative heaps. Akin to dirty laundry on the floor, both heaps await a cleansing and washing hand. A clean hand wielding ample soft-soap and a muscular mangle perhaps? But can the hand that symbolises our hoary, if lost to itself, Congress Party deliver this?

Some of us fantasise, with a saccharine sweetness about a caring, sharing world. Others want to invoke purifying, fiery, Shaivite forces.  Both temperaments however, are bewildered and beguiled at their lack of success. Alas, both may be missing the woods for the trees.

The sweetness and light ones tend to be liberal, left-leaning souls, out to see the positive on the part of those they favour, ever-ready to sympathise with the marginalised, refugee influxes, endangered species, threatened environments, and most lost causes. They have no idea about how to square a circle, but are nevertheless implacably suspicious of the State and its motives, and only a little less hostile to big business.

The other ones, who dramatically seek bolts of devastating lightning to obliterate their enemies are seemingly made of sterner stuff. They are right-wingers, often embarrassingly patriotic, with a devil-take-the-hindmost approach to social justice. They believe in results, more or less at any cost and think “action” is the answer.

But all of this has really been about the general public, the electorate, civil society, the peasantry, the urban masses and others, the broad hordes that constitute, as the late great jurist Nani Palkhivala liked to call it; We, the People.

The rulers of India, on their part, fancy themselves as realists. But what comes disconcertingly to mind are the oblivious Nawabi Chess Players in Shatranj Ke Khilari even as the Red Coats march right into the Kingdom of Awadh.

This kind of “realism” comes naturally to people ensconced in the power structure; politicians, but also captains of industry and commerce. This world-view tends to be totally amoral and cravenly opportunistic, though well disguised in platitudes of concern and responsibility. Such realists are not perturbed by chaos. They don’t mind pollution either for the wonderful smokescreen it provides. Such people love weak governance with its lack of accountability and excellent opportunities for intrigue, manipulation, subversion and corruption. 

But surely, at bottom, this degenerate cynicism is both short-sighted and self-destructive? And also sad, because the short-term rapaciousness will have to be paid for with economic, if not sovereign enslavement; the more ironic, because India is on the very cusp of becoming one of the two or three leading world economies.

It is as if a degenerate clique given to sharp manoeuvres, have taken for granted the juggernaut of near double-digit growth in GDP on auto-pilot. They are simply looting because they can. Looking on from the margins, the corruption and brazen disregard for integrity is a virus that some very important people are decidedly immune to, while the same blight sorely tests the rest of us.

This may however make for very fertile conditions for the forces of implosion. We cannot afford to be smug, thinking this is not Egypt. But when civil order breaks down due to the force of widespread public foment, then bullets in their plenitude have never proved to be sufficient.

In India, we might well be on the razor’s edge. Termites of disregard are chomping hard at the foundations, whittling away at our institutions and constitutional structures, devouring our strengths relentlessly. There are, in addition, many daggers pointed at the very heart of our 62 year-old republic.

Our larger neighbours, China and Pakistan, are actively involved in fanning the flames with money, including counterfeit money; arms; training; encouragement; and propaganda.  Our smaller neighbours too have been suborned into the process with  noxious conduitry leading in from Nepal and Sri Lanka. Countries in our geographic orbit too like Myanmar and those in the Indian Ocean have been compromised against us.

But, the worst part is that we are increasingly proving that we are more than capable of doing much worse to ourselves. We are unmindful of the dangers just like the erstwhile USSR, long our mentor, was. So even as the world order changes in favour of Asia, India is far from ready to tryst with its Nehruvian destiny. Its powers that be, clad sometimes in ironic white Gandhi caps, are focussed on plunder and depravity yoked to narrow, self-serving advantage.

The point is, at this rate, we may not have the ability to seize tomorrow when tomorrow eventually comes; being too debauched and debased, like Sarat Chandra’s Devdas, to reach out to our glorious inheritance.    

(1,058 words)

Friday, 4^th February, 2011

Gautam Mukherjee