Reform at the precipice

Reform at the precipice

It is said that philosopher and wit Voltaire was asked to repent for his wicked ways and denounce the Devil at his deathbed. Denying the soul-seeking priest, Voltaire, thought otherwise. He said he didn’t think it was an opportune time to make fresh enemies.

The Indian politician is reluctant to make an enemy of the Socialism that has hidden a thousand sins for him. Almost as many as his white kurta- pajama and the ironically out-of-date Gandhi cap, that the Mahatma incidentally never wore. In the name of the poor, lofty pronouncements and sentiments have served to deflect criticism from massive inefficiency, mind-numbing delay, and rampant corruption.

The market economy, with its relentless logic and consequence, is far less forgiving. And the Indian neta knows it full well. Our master-of-paradox style Indian politician may routinely practice an arch Capitalism in his private affairs, but the fount of his power, pelf and influence, he knows, is his bleeding heart lip-service to the cause of the poor.

It is yet another travesty of the truth that the poor have been uplifted only at snail’s pace in the last 65 years; while the politician that is not in hundreds of crores today, is a very incompetent politician indeed. 

The perverse thing about progress itself in India is that it is never a priority. All progress, political, economic, social, comes to us when we are at crisis point. This applies to fundamentals such as power, water, education, health and so on as much as it applies to the quality of our democracy. And democracy in India also seems to evolve and mature only with a gun to its head.

That penny-ante nations have no problem dealing with basic civic necessities like roads, electricity, water and modernity commensurate with the second decade of the 21^st century does not worry our disgraceful obtuseness.

 Perhaps, because this is a deeply religious country and people, God comes mysteriously to the rescue, lifting us from the routine morass we build for ourselves. It is God that helps us transcend our multiple infirmities and denies the doomsayers their satisfaction. In a round about way, this is what the Bible meant when it said the meek shall inherit the earth. The faith of our poor, their acceptance of suffering, moves the Gods to protect them.

Because, our educated elite that largely run this country, are experts at sitting on their hands. It is only when we are between a rock and a hard place, that the political dispensation of the day is able to push through any beneficial reform. And that too, after eliciting a hue and cry for challenging the status quo. We do very little to anticipate future demand and supply dynamics, probably to avoid stirring a hornet’s nest. We are a country of man-made and artificial shortages, much ameliorated since 1991.

But in many things there has been inadequate change. A good example is higher education, that needs entrance marks in the high nineties, and objective observers do find the occurrence of such percentages both suspect and incredible.

In recent times, and it is necessary to restrict ourselves to recent times, because the pre 1991 India was a much sadder narrative of poverty, shortages, neediness, hubris, and obsolescence.

Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh were able to transform Indian possibilities as we knew it since 1947. But it was only at the point of looming bankruptcy. That most reforms then were dictated to us by the World Bank in return for a life saving rescue package of loans, is the telling point.

And here we are in 2012, twenty one years later, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh showing some of his reformist zeal again, but only, once again at the menacing threat of a crashing economy.

The dismaying thing is the disarray in the political landscape. The Opposition, at various times in favour of reform measures, are busy cheeseparing their own confusion. The Government’s allies are sniffing around desperately for a political foothold that they can make capital out of.

Almost all of the objecting discourse smells of sour grapes and Luddite fear. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is addressing his legacy at the home stretch of his tenure. The Congress Party, with its own generally useful fifth column of sharp Left protagonists, finds itself helpless to resist presently. Socialism is therefore stymied, if unconvinced, for the moment.

But when have we ever welcomed change? In Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s time, blessed with a record breaking majority in Parliament, he still had a deuce of a time introducing computers in Government offices and banks, despite being labelled “Computerji”.

And babus, in their classically anachronistic manner, promptly put their PA’s to operating the “infernal machine”, even as they carried on dictating letters and spending all day correcting “drafts”.

And today, every political party, including the Leftists within the Congress Party and many others in the UPA, want to scuttle all of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s belated attempts at reform.

There is a lot of cant and misinformation in the air about every one of the initiatives announced and contemplated. The strange thing is we seem to abhor efficiency and refuse to acknowledge that we have much to learn. This even as we know precious little about the intricacies involved in multi-brand retail.

By letting in the world’s best in such fields we could learn a lot, but do we really want to? No, instead we prefer to cry wolf about the small trader and the small farmer, steeped in orthodoxy, xenophobia, obscurantism and chronic backwardness.

Pension reform and foreign investment in the airline industry, already a decade or more late because of raucous vested interest, is still attracting controversy just as it did in the nineties.

We can only dream of a Japanese style consensus on reform in India, where every political party backs it, but there is only a nuanced difference in degree. Instead we have the politics of the bazaar, and it is anybody’s guess what kind of oxymoron will emerge from all the resultant compromise.

The objections, after all, are mostly designed to attack the Government wrong or right. But it is the country and the people who will suffer in this battle for votes at all costs using shibboleths long past their sell-by dates.

But there remains one certainty. And the Soviets, who are by no means experts, having gone so completely the way of all flesh, said it years ago. They thought, in the first flush of the Nehru era, that this country is indeed run by God, as otherwise it wouldn’t run at all.

(1,104 words)

October 2^nd 2012

Gautam Mukherjee