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 Almost as many as his white kurta- pajama and the ironically out-of-date Gandhi cap, that the Mahatma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 21st 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 2nd
2012
Gautam Mukherjee
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