Pain without gain

Pain without gain

No Government of a billion plus people can withstand the tens of thousands of crores of subsidy bill that fuel and gas subsidies entail. Not with the demand curve, and indeed the cost of imported petroleum crude, in ever rising mode. This move, controversial as it seems, may therefore be seen as pragmatic in a sea of “political” steps.

Political initiatives such as a rising list of massive welfare schemes and attempts to institute quotas for underprivileged sections. But this, without figuring out how to pay for them, or, in the case of the “Quota Raj”, how to address the blows it delivers to meritocracy.

The stock market, more or less moribund lately, jumped upwards. It likes any attempt to balance the budget because that is just “arithmetic”, as former US President Clinton said at the recently concluded Democratic Party Convention.

But another reason for its good mood may well be the US reiteration of policy commitment to an extremely low interest regime for the near to middle term. Mr. Bernanke, Governor of the US Federal Reserve, said the low interest regime will continue even as the US economy continues to recover. What a far cry this is to our own bias against economic growth!

Because, without taking care of both sides of the ledger, a fate, not a good one, awaits us. India’s erstwhile role model, the USSR, now  inhabits the pages of history for trying to put the theory of Communist egalitarianism into ham-handed and repressive practice. Little children call such a game “beggar thy neighbour” without realising they are talking about Communism in practice.

And ironically it was glasnost meaning “openness”, and perestroika meaning “restructuring”, that did it in because it was too little that came too late. The same fate could overtake the UPA II Government when it goes to the polls.

After all, ordinary people hate being told that they need to suffer the pain for a corrupt regime’s incompetence. But with The UPA’s very likely departure in 2014 or earlier, the successor Government can perhaps start setting things to rights.

The public outrage, and that of the Opposition, and even a number of the UPA Government allies, is thoroughly justified. Inflation, the very altar at which the Government has sacrificed growth since 2008 by raising interest rates and controlling both credit and money supply is going to soar as a consequence of this action.

The Government planning and economic systems have let it down in disastrous fashion. There is a great deal of concentration on the expenditure side of the ledger particularly directed at populism, rather than badly needed infrastructure for example, with a cavalier attitude to the income side.

The culprit appears to be the perennial Socialist hangover this Government seems to suffer from. It is influenced by the nearly Communist NAC, several staunch Leftists amongst the Congress Party seniors, other theorists and thinkers, who are all not keen on encouraging business and industry.

This even as the Government, probably a section of it, has announced a slew of FDI

(Foreign Direct Investment) encouraging measures to try and distract the public outrage and deflect some of its hostility.

But all the moves, such as FDI in retail and FDI in the airline business may have come too late in the day to show results before 2014. Besides, the domestic airline industry is awash in red ink and probably too sick to revive in a hurry. And FDI in retail may yet see a roll back due to all kinds of motivated opposition. A weak Government, forever dithering from pillar to post, is hardly capable of convincing anyone about its resolve to see things through.

An embedded hostility to the allegedly fraudulent “India shining” scenario is palpable in policy actions taken by the Government and its regulatory agencies; and consequently business and industry is either at a standstill or in recession.

Even the ever brash and hopeful housing and building sector, a haven for the investment of black money, is looking increasingly beleaguered. Demand has fallen. Inventories have risen. Transactions, as the broking community are fond of saying have become “less”.

Some observers are expecting a crash in the so called property “bubble”. If that happens, because of the Government strangling all growth and confidence, and with the monumental debt incurred by big builders, let alone the little ones, several major banks will also go belly up.

But the Indian Government, typically, does not worry about this kind of thing. Instead it has been busy collecting money hand over fist in a procession of scams one overtaking the other in heft and hue to fill its war chests. All the while promoting scheme after sponsored scheme to give away money to the poor and impoverished with a view to getting re-elected so that the party may continue.

It is true that a Government can always borrow and spend and that is exactly what ours is doing. It can also print more and more money. But since that is the road to bankruptcy there are occasional knee jerk reactions such as sharp increases in the price of diesel and cooking gas that will hit the middle class as well as business and industry. The diesel pump using farmer will be affected too, but he is being looked after by all the give-aways.

Every Government spokesperson piously claims the price hikes are a difficult step taken in the broader national interest. And of course, the most vocal apologists for the Government are reportedly about to be made ministers! But while they are still at it, what they are saying about the outrageous increase in diesel and gas prices, taken in isolation, may well be true.

But the attitude demonstrated is akin to someone eating a five star meal at an expensive eatery and confessing he has no money to pay thereafter. Our coffers are empty because we did not make due cause to fill them. The public cannot be blamed. It is the job of the Government made up of elected representatives to think of such consequences in advance and provide for them.

If over the next few days and months, the rising costs of living are actually assuaged with bold new initiatives in long pending reform, then the economy could become stimulated to grow again.

This, and this alone, will cover the multitude of our sins. Otherwise, in good Communist tradition, most of us, except the functionaries, party bosses, politicos, and the most manipulative amongst us, will have to become a great deal poorer and share in the misery imposed on us by a Government’s lack of vision.

(1,103 words)

15^th September 2012

Gautam Mukherjee

Blasphemy and Dogma

Blasphemy and Dogma

“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” 
― John F. Kennedy

“Heresy," by the way, simply means "choice." It came to mean "thoughtcrime," implying it was blasphemy to presume to choose your own belief instead of swallowing what the bishops spoonfed you.” 
― Robert M. Price

In former times of apartheid and segregation, it was conveniently believed that the lesser party to the “separate development” was better off for being confined to interact with his own kind. That he had to do so in infrastructure starved of funds was seen as appropriate to his essential “inferiority”.

India gave its own twist to such thinking with its concept of  “untouchability” derived from being entrusted with the cleaning of “night soil”, in order to justify its convenient barbarism. High caste Hindus piously spoke of karmic destiny to explain the great caste divide.

Colonialism and Imperialism similarly justified the subjugation and humiliation of the “natives” by thinking of them as less than fully capable “children” that needed a paternal hand to care for them. That the colonial brand of care, despite Kiplingesque or Churchillian  talk of the “White man’s burden” was anything but even-handed, is indeed the hypocrisy at the heart of that exploitative system.

In the horrific Spanish Inquisition of yore, or in the Taliban dominated bad-lands today, “heresy” or even common or garden “deviance” was, and is, punished by a righteous, retributive and savage death; by fire, beheading, bombing or bullet.

Our Sovereign Democratic Republican Socialist and Secular Government’s understanding of “Secularism” and “Communalism” also suffers from such twisted and selective logic.

Assam, and in a spill-over context, indeed the whole of the North East, suffers from a euphemistically put “ law and order problem”, despite millions of illegal Bangladeshi migrants asserting themselves with mysteriously held arms and ammunition. This is compounded by various secessionist movements, tribal struggles, and foreign fomented terrorism in the region. Be that as it may, the ethnic threat to the local populations cannot be minimised.

That these migrants have been let into the country with the active connivance of our Government over the years in order to use them for convenient vote banks is curiously not emphasised. That this has now reached alarming levels where the interloper now seeks to take over, is again not emphasised.

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a girl punk group called Pussy Riot has been jailed and is waiting to be tried, possibly for blasphemy. Their crime: they shouted anti- Putin slogans inside a cathedral Church in Moscow.

It is ironic that Russia, the originator of the Godless Communist Revolution of 1917, suppressor of the Russian Orthodox Church and all other religions as the “opium” of the people, should now be thinking of invoking blasphemy!

Blasphemy, after all, is a near medieval term, beloved today of only the most rigid mullahs of Islam. The Russian leadership seeks to prosecute the rebellious girl band, with solemn attitudes befitting the punishing of some intractable insurgency. But these are three young women eliciting solidarity from the likes of pop diva Madonna. That Pussy Riot in jail refuses to apologise deserves our salute.

The media frenzy over the recent sentencing of the perpetrators of the Naroda-Patiya riots in Gujarat also seems to lack balance. It is nobody’s case that the convicted are not guilty, but even they should be allowed the benefit of their appeals and petitions all the way to the Supreme Court. This particularly if “justice” is the main point of the exercise as opposed to “vengeance”.

Meanwhile, the strenuous attempt to link culpability all the way up to Chief Minister Narendra Modi, of whom the Government at the centre seems to be in mortal fear, should by the same logic hold the Government in Assam and its Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi  squarely responsible. There too we have current unrest, murder, arson, carnage, communal violence, and displaced people in camps, playing out daily on our TV screens.

And, if we are to hark back to the Gujarat riots of 2002 with such fervour, we surely need to reopen the book on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi and actually hold our own version of the Nuremberg Trials in that regard too.

It is remarkable that despite nearly 4,000 Sikhs being openly lynched on the streets of New Delhi, and displacement of over 50,000 others, not a single instigator or perpetrator has so far been convicted according to the Human Rights Watch report of 2011.

Also in 2011 Wikileaks Cable Leaks has revealed the US Government assessed the 1984 riots were orchestrated and directed by the Indian National Congress. Even Mr. Rajiv Gandhi’s laconic comment on the Delhi riots was: “when a big tree falls, the earth shakes”.

While democracy entails the cut, thrust, and parry of accusations and counter accusations from the Government and what is gleefully referred to as the “fragmented” Opposition; it cannot be allowed to  result in mayhem and paralysis. But in order to achieve parliamentary dialogue instead of obstructionism, the Government needs to show some good faith.

Endlessly defending its myriad wrongs and the monumental corruption under its supervision is not going to wash in parliament. And, if recent opinion polls are to be believed, nor will it do so at the next general elections. That the Opposition is unable to fully benefit from the woes of the Government calls for some changes in its own gap between rhetoric and reality too.

Indeed all of India’s elected representatives need to update the tired old arguments and shed some of the cant that hovers around the great definitions of Secularism and Communalism. We cannot keep applying different yardsticks to our opponents without affecting the entire credibility of the debate.

Besides, as long as our politicians refuse to treat our national problems as just that, fringe elements do and will continue to exploit the loopholes with impunity. The instigators of sedition, subversion and violence are operating from the shadows, safe in the knowledge that the political discourse will trot out justifications on their behalf. The net loser in all this are the people, who are living in an environment growing steadily less savoury and more unstable.

Both the concepts of dogma and blasphemy imply impatience with, and intolerance of,  alternate points of view. Too many countries have slipped on this banana peel throughout history. An essentially tolerant country like India needs to get back to its roots. But, we won’t do it with increasingly polarised politics that defends the indefensible, and that seeks to bamboozle the people with its own version of the untruth.

(1,098 words)

3^rd September 2012

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader on Edit Page of The Pioneer on 6th September 2012 as "In frenetic discourse, leave space for truth". Also published online at www.dailypioneer.com