The Importance of the Drummer Boy

The Importance of the Drummer Boy

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.
Adam Smith

Senior economic affairs journalist Gautam Chikermane has coined a slogan “Mera Bharat, Ameer Bharat”, in easy to understand convent-educated Hindi. He wants the political classes to consider embracing it in the run up to general elections slated for 2014. The thrust of the accompanying article is inspiringly positive. Mr. Chikermane writes, “To mess with this generation because of a political focus or policies that belong to the past is foolhardiness”.

Mr. Chikermane suggests that refusing to improve the economic lot of our young citizens, given our demographics, will result in more and more industrial and civil unrest, and give further teeth and traction to the subversive and extremist movements plaguing this country.

The curious use of Bharat for India or vice versa is usually loaded to distinguish between urban and rural realities. But Chikermane’s slogan seems to have taken inspiration from, innocently enough, the much lauded “Mera Bharat Mahaan” campaign of a few years ago, developed by some of the finest advertising professionals in this country.

Another remarkable article has been published by young Mr. Prayag Akbar. Prayag questions the insertion of “Secular” and “Socialist” into the Preamble to the Indian Constitution by Mrs. Indira Gandhi during the Emergency.

Akbar suggests that the first term has been wrongly used, over the subsequent years, to tar the BJP, Shiv Sena and other political parties which profess a Hindutva focus with the unfair taint of Communalism. This is because “Secular” has been twisted to mean an exaggerated bias towards the minorities.

Much of the liberal-Hindu world view and large sections of the media are embarrassed to profess majoritarian views. This does not trouble Anglican England or Catholic France but we seem to be hoisted on our own petard.

Even liberal and educated Muslims belonging to the upper strata of Indian Society, says Akbar, are similarly put under pressure to defend any inclusive or universal views they may wish to uphold. To paraphrase the gist of Akbar’s argument here, he writes that by oft repetition, like the Goebbelsian lie, Secularism has been subverted to take on a narrow prism meaning rather than its original purpose- to seek a separation of Church and State.

That the policy twist to our desi version of Secularism is now coming home to roost is evident in Congress ruled Assam and in the increasing polarisation of caste, sub-caste, religious and regional interests. It is doubly aggravated, of course, by illegal migration from Bangladesh which is visible not only in Assam but all over the country.  That Pakistan and its trouble fomenting affiliates in India and Bangladesh should exploit this situation seems entirely logical from their point of view.

Pakistan was, after all, set up as an Islamic State on the premise and presumption that the Muslim was not going to be treated fairly in Hindustan. Consequently, it has never bothered with the niceties of “Secularism” in any format whatsoever, even when their quasi-secularist and founder Mr. M.A. Jinnah was alive. It is currently busy fighting its own Islamic extremists and driving out the smidgens of minority populations left over there. But the real aggravation to the Pakistani psyche must come from the realisation that not only is India much more of a nation, despite its slack ways and stupendous ethnic and religious diversity, but it is also a happy home and hearth to many more Muslims than exist in the whole of Pakistan!

We may not be an ideal country for any of our people, but we are not deliberately living a lie and compounding it every day by our actions. But many across the border must be wondering what it is that their nation stands for after all. Has it become a no holds barred rogue state on its way to self-destruction? Or is Pakistan going to be subsumed by its own extremist elements to wage perpetual war on the rest of the world including against Muslims that don’t conform to its dictates?

As for the bestial urge towards ethnic cleansing, it does seem to go with the extremist ethos, by no means confined to the Islamic terrorist.  Still, Indian Kashmir, without ostensible provocation from Pakistan held Kashmir or Pakistan, also did not hesitate to kick out the Pandits and take over their property in an act of brutal majoritarianism.

India/Bharat/Hindustan as a State did nothing to defend their Pandits. This despite the first Prime Minister of India and national icon Jawaharlal Nehru being a Kashmiri Pandit himself.

Perhaps the Pandits do not belong to the right kind of minority for our “secularists”. Nor can such secularists countenance punishing the “real” minorities for their sins against the majority community, even if it happens to be a persecuted minority in Kashmir.

And “Socialist”, as a fused guiding light inserted into the Indian Constitution seems, to Mr. Akbar, as it does to many others, to be a subversion of the original intent of the Constituent Assembly. All it wanted was for the new nation to be a “Sovereign Democratic Republic”, without any other political prescription to act as a constraint or straightjacket.

Mr. Chikermane’s call to pursue riches, in order to, as President John Fitzgerald Kennedy put it once, “to lift all boats”; runs up on the shoals of our self-imposed “Socialism”.

It is this out-dated political ideology that is still being clung to by the current powers that be for its supposed electoral dividends. The latest inspiration to emanate from such quarters was a bizarre idea to provide millions of poor people free mobile telephones. Unfortunately for the intended beneficiaries, the Finance Ministry has indicated its inability to fund the enterprise.

In the full frontal assaults of 18^th century warfare, there were conch shell blowers, buglers, fife players, bagpipers, and drummers to sound preparatory alerts and execution signals to infantry going into battle. These brave worthies played on during the battle to boost troop morale and consequently carried no weapons.

Perhaps we need to salute the contribution of all those who issue such clarion calls and refuse to take the current state of affairs as our manifest and immutable destiny.

Drummers, in a sense, who are eager to change things using, not the power of office, but the inspiration of their ideas. If we must remember Karl Marx ad nauseam therefore, let us also reflect on the ideas of  Wealth of Nations writer Adam Smith to guide our future.

(1,103 words)

August 21^st, 2012

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader on Edit Page of The Pioneer on 23rd August 2012  as "The drummer boy keeps us aroused". Also online at www.dailypioneer.com

Sarkarispeak from the Ramparts

Sarkarispeak from the Ramparts

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh can walk quite fast without swinging his arms. There is a little movement at the wrists, that is all. He holds himself erect, head held high, wearing his characteristic sky blue turban and exuding a sense of accomplishment. And well he might. This is the 8^th time he’s taken the lift to the ramparts of Red Fort.

Watching him walk the red carpet briskly as he arrived to address the nation on the occasion of Independence Day 15August 2012, one has to admire his inscrutability under the lenses of all those satellite channels.

This confident if opaque body language extends to his message to the nation, where he spent the bulk of his speech delivered in a near monotone, to extol the accomplishments of his Government’s years in power.

The people of India may find themselves a little underwhelmed by his longish laundry list of incremental gains, garnished with generous doses of statistical spin. On the ground things may not seem to have moved very much, but, the mood is distinctly self-congratulatory.

As for the future, Dr. Singh would have us believe, never mind the grid collapses of recent times, that “our next target is to provide electricity to each and every household in our country in the next 5 years and to also improve the supply of electricity”. The first part refers to being connected universally, improbable as that might be. The second part however is a near impossibility, wisely left as a vague promise.

The big new idea is the vocational sounding National Skill Development Council. This entity plans to develop the skills of “8 crore people” who “will be trained in the next five years”. We will have to wait and see.

Prime Minister Singh also brazened his way through the lack of momentum in infrastructure development. He said, “We have taken new measures”, and referred to “Ambitious targets”.  Apparently, the Prime Minister is not daunted by non-performance. 

He goes on, despite the howling protests from foreign investors and Governments at the UPA Government’s unfriendly taxation and retrospective scrutiny moves that: “we will have to create confidence at the international level that there are no barriers to investment in India”.

 The Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, the antithesis in style to our Prime Minister, shouts “Off with his head” frequently. Dr. Manmohan Singh delivers regular commentary on his Government’s failed economic grades with contrasting sang froid.

(406 words)

August 15, 2012
Gautam Mukherjee

Published in NITI CENTRAL www.niticentral.com, as a news item on 16th August 2012.

The Economics of Independence:Then and Now

The Economics of Independence: Then and Now

Rich in essence, poor in reality- great potential, sorry performance; with large doses of terrifying chaos in the Kumbh Mela of a masala mix. India conforms to the “riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” formulation originally applied to Russia by Winston Churchill. But this has indeed been the story of our economic journey since 15^th August 1947.

At first, the poverty was nearly overwhelming, leavened only by the dignity the Mahatma could bring to it. And this dignity, symbolised by wearing of homespun Khadi, in protest against colonial dominance via the mills of Lancashire; carried over in the first flush.

Now, the whole business of Khadi seems as quaint as the Boston Tea Party. Netas on constituency visits or the election trail today are more partial to mulmul under waistcoats that may or may not be bullet-proof.

Besides, they are usually inside air-conditioned helicopters, freezing rest houses, or high end SUVs, unless it is absolutely essential to brave the elements. There is also the upmarket donning of Linen, as far away from Khadi and its symbolism, as chalk is to cheese.

A good deal of the credit for the early shunning of princely ostentation also goes to the simple, jail-bred personal habits of Pandit Nehru. And, his understandable, for the times, passion for Socialism, accompanied by its horrid hand-maiden, the “planned” economy.

This tentacular Planning Commission led development, turned us into a doctrinaire nation, while pointlessly fighting the demonstrated genius Indians naturally have for innovation, jugaad and entrepreneurship.  

This bias towards sarkari oversight soon spread to most of the Government ministries concerned with development such as Commerce, Heavy Industry, Finance etc. till the dreaded “Licence-Permit Raj” of the Nehru/Indira Gandhi years dominated all legitimate economic activity.

Unfortunately, despite the sea-change in circumstances since 1991, it always threatens to come back, in new forms, such as the punitive GAAR, the corruption-ridden “Change of Land Use” (CLU) norms, “Regularisations” and its opposite, the threat of “sealings”, demolitions, acquisitions and so on. Overall there is just too much Government!

Perhaps the State as bully and extortionist is embedded into our DNA from ancient times, before Socialism, before the Mughals. It may even be regarded as a kind of entrepreneurship of the powerful as old as the toll barrier and torture.

It is therefore neither a secret nor a surprise why so much of the true vitality of our economic reality exists outside the margins of the official economy. Even officialdom privately admits happiness about this “unofficial economy”. It is a safety valve and an enabler against the stultification of the policy line.

The major official reason for always imposing an economic bridle on entrepreneurship is to uplift the poor, bracketed always in the context of “limited resources”, without however the will to unshackle the means to produce more. But shouldn’t the rate of growth argument hold good here too, if this evergreen polarity is not to perpetuate itself?

Yet, most of the political classes refuse to directly link the prosperity of business endeavour with the much talked about “trickle-down” effect. The anti, largely Socialist argument, is that the rich get richer but the poor get poorer in a free market economy.

This despite the shortcomings of Socialism and its inability to deliver the desired, not to mention the promised, results. Still, many of its adherents, including Mr. Nehru and Mrs. Indira Gandhi, not to mention the Lohiaites, the Communists and sundry others, seem to stubbornly prefer the promises of the Socialist dream over the reality of sloth, fudging, shoddiness, under-performance and chronic shortages.

Wasting time, resources and opportunity for most of our independent years has resulted in India being pushed to the back of the class in most matters. Our lofty sanctimony and unsolicited advice to others may have reduced, but our wilful under-achieving ways persist to this day.

The way forward promises incremental growth at best, if the past is any barometer. If however, a political dispensation ever arrives that views the rich and poor as yoked together, rather than residing on different planets, we might then see what we have only seen in fits and starts so far.

India has no real excuse for being only a $ 1 trillion economy or double that if one counts the “black” economy. It could be multiples larger, quite easily, but for that to happen, we have to shed the doctrinaire and still over-regulated present dispensation. The Government has to change, essentially from jailer to facilitator. It is such policy shifting that can become the golden key to the future.    

(758 words)

11 August 2012

Gautam Mukherjee

Hand that Wags on the Tail's Instructions

Hand that Wags on the Tail’s Instructions

Mr. Lal Krishna Advani has set a cat among the pigeons with his unambiguous blog.  The only question is, what is the BJP veteran and strategist hoping to precipitate as a result of his observations? 

Let us frame the cause in the context of a man who may be an elder statesman now, but nevertheless one who is very active as the working Chairperson of the NDA. And one, who along with Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, took the BJP all the way from two seats in the Lok Sabha to a full term and a few days in power at the Centre. Managing at the same time  a large and complicated NDA then.

As for effects: the leaders of both the UPA and the NDA are squirming. Both regard their chances at the hustings warily in 2014. Mr. Advani even wrote that the Congress Party can’t expect their own seat tally to exceed double digits. He has written what insiders in the UPA are thinking privately, and he even referred to discussions with some unnamed Union Ministers. All of it implies a leadership vacuum. Only then can the tail be considered as more substantial than the dog.

That he tarred his own NDA formation with the same brush has got quite a few of the notable pigeons in his own rafters flapping their wings. Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha and Advani protégé Mr. Jaitley has given his logic, most persuasive as usual, and NDA convenor Mr. Sharad Yadav has made bold to contradict Mr. Advani. They may both be a tad defensive but it is better to evolve a consensus now rather than rue the day tomorrow.

And this without the proverbial cat, who could be a certain Mr. Narendra Modi, making an entrance as yet.

We shall have to wait for that till after the Gujarat Assembly elections are demonstrably fought and won. But, in the meantime, is Mr. Advani saying Mr. Rahul Gandhi and friends in the UPA can’t deliver? If he is, he is merely reiterating the obvious.

Meanwhile, all the prime ministerial aspirants in the NDA, enough of them to fill a bus, are probably not too amused. But they should reflect on their own vote-catching abilities nationally in order to temper their ambition.

On the other side of the aisle, certainly several of the supporting or constituent regional parties of the UPA, such as the Trinamool Congress are restive. TMC is paranoid about the CPM in Paschimbanga regaining lost ground, who knows, even in collusion with the Congress Party. It will pull out to suit itself, and join the formation that furthers its own cause post-elections. The Left however, because of its ideology, will stick to the Congress coat-tails.

And allying for a further two years with a Government adrift and helpless as the Manmohan Singh Government, is not doing very much for TMC’s own political stock. Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal is bankrupt, and the Centre is not delivering any rescue packages, not even a tiny little token one.

Similarly, the flirtation and the minutely calibrated luncheon diplomacy with the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party at the Centre notwithstanding, it is State political compulsions in Uttar Pradesh that are going to decide their course of action. Ditto for the DMK in Tamil Nadu, smarting from its drubbing at the hands of arch rival AIADMK, as well as bruised and battered by the 2G Scam. Who will go with whom post-elections remains to be seen, but AIADMK may have chosen already.

The NDA is also embarrassed by its Chairperson’s observations, not only because one of its tallest leaders is obliquely asking for some firm leadership before it is too late. But also because the plausibility of what he has blogged cuts quite close to the bone.

The formation in 2014 could indeed be with a smallish regional party satrap as PM. It could even be Mr. Rahul Gandhi’s buddy and fellow political inheritor J & K Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, miniscule as his National Conference Party’s national presence may be.

Besides, we cannot rule out bariatric surgery recovered National Party President of the BJP Mr. Nitin Gadkari as a dark horse. Albeit, he is politically untried at the Electronic Voting Machine and this could get in his way. Or a rustic strong man like Uttar Pradesh’s Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav, or Bihar’s Mr. Nitish Kumar, both of whom would like very much to be Prime Minister.

There could be an articulate sophisticate like Mr. Naveen Patnaik of Odisha or Ms. J Jayalalithaa from Tamil Nadu trading places with Manmohan Singh. This particularly with a view to charm foreign Governments and investors. Though that kind of thing never hampered Deng or Mao or Stalin. Or Nikita Khrushchev and his shoe, nor KGB- bred strongman Vladimir Putin.  

And minority Governments have been formed many times before. Remember Mr. Chandra Shekhar or Chaudhary Charan Singh? And, with variations on the theme, the IK Gujral or VP Singh Governments? Short lived these “outside supported” entities tend to be, but even a few months in the primus inter pares formation does wonders for the regional party coffers and assuages the thirst for power. The regionals may have reached Union Cabinet status now and then, and certainly the brass ring of State Government formation several times, but not yet, and possibly never, the PM’s gaddi.

They probably feel if “humble farmer” HD Deve Gowda from Karnataka could do it why not me, meaning the head of every regional party with some seats in the Lok Sabha. It could be a consensus of the weak. And that kind of thing rarely has the luxury of dotting all the I’s and crossing all the T’s.

But the key point of Mr. Advani’s initiative could well be to facilitate the entry of Mr. Narendra Modi at the head of the NDA as the strongest candidate with enough proven administrative ability and stature. Mr. Modi will secure all the votes that could come to the BJP, leaving the other constituents to pick up their own decks. This may well take its collective tally somewhat higher than it is today and prove to be decisive when it comes to Government formation after all.

As for the bogey of polarisation for Mr. Modi’s perceived anti-minority bias, just think of his recent interview in Nai Duniya with Editor Shahid Siddiqui, thrown out of SP for his audacity, and shun the idea of rule by rump or tail for your answer. India deserves some good governance and Mr. Modi can provide it.

(1,098 words)

August 7^th, 2012

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader on Edit Page of The Pioneer on 09 August 2012 as "If tail wags the dog, governance suffers". Also online at www.dailypioneer.com where it is also archived under "Columnists".