GHATOTKACHSERIES II

Straws in the Wind

2012-02-01T22:48:00.001-08:00

Straws in the Wind

In a “those were the days” kind of way, time passing can seduce us to think of a perfection encountered long ago. This is, of course what myth is made of, with every inconvenient inconsistency air-brushed out of memory.

But certain things are dug too deep to evaporate in the mists of time. The inequities and savage barbarisms of racism, for example, or the blood soaked wounds of religious feud. But even such fore-knowledge and genetic memory can be, and often is, suppressed on the altar of expediency. The question, in evolutionary terms however is, does an old trick work in perpetuity?

The covering up of elephant statues in Uttar Pradesh while turning a blind eye to the numerous schemes and themes named after Jawaharlal Nehru and his stick-to-power family of successors, is one such straw in the wind.

Income Tax raids on the UP Chief Minister’s crony capitalists, not in the routine course of a work-a-day week, but pretty much during state elections, is another. The barring of controversy’s child Salman Rushdie’s visit to a literary festival at the instance of a hard-line Deoband is yet another.

But not all our straws in the wind portend the pessimistic. The once unassailable bastions of Western prescription, the venerable Time magazine and Newsweek too, now routinely feature Indian, Asian, even Iranian lead-writers, even on their covers, using their non-Caucasian by-lines. No more are such people confined to the footnotes and acknowledged for “inputs”.

Newsweek’s international edition even boasts an Indian-American Muslim Editor, though nothing can apparently save it from going the way of all print in the West.

The poignancy in such “establishment” publications turning fair-handed and liberal at the point of death may not be lost on all. What are they expecting now--Asian White Knights or perhaps resurrection in Hindi and Mandarin? Why not, after all, it is happening all over in business and industry. Not only are Indians and Chinese snapping up Western businesses but even the once Western glamour-struck Arabs are beginning to invest in India, having lost billions down the plughole in Europe and the US.

But, all in all, the belated fairness does rankle, and makes for hard-hearted negotiations. One should pause before blaming the Chinese for this, and perhaps take a cue from them instead. Or have we already begun to do so?

The new “make-nice” is a departure from arch imperialist Rudyard Kipling’s back-handed compliment to Gunga Din, the selfless water-bearer of his famous poem. Gunga Din’s day is decidedly done. He is seen to be as anachronistic as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom. Sweet as the tales may have seemed once, they are slurs and swear-words now.

American Actor Will Smith says he is a Star because of the success of the Civil Rights Movement. President Barack Obama acknowledges as much too. There were, of course, early White sympathisers, but history shows us that morality turns into reality when economic compulsions force the conversion. The American Civil War and the abolition of slavery is a case in point.

This was also the reality during Mahatma Gandhi’s struggles too, both here and in South Africa before that. And how women got the vote in the West, and later, man-size jobs, battered and depleted as men-folk were by the ravages of two world wars.

Interestingly, even though as a nation we hesitate to overtly express hard power, having been born in the crucible of non-violence which encompasses, at least in concept, thought word and deed; we sometimes do manage to make our intentions plain.

Acquiring a nuclear sub at last on lease from Russia, albeit for the second time, but this one in the context of our own nuclear weapons carrying indigenously built nuclear submarine Arihant about to be inducted, some say, before 2015, is a clear message to China which has six such subs in its navy already.

Our buying some USD 20 billion worth of the French Dassault Rafale state-of-the-art Fighters is a departure from our default position of buying Russian. Though we will continue to hang on to that line of military supply for other items, including Sukhoi -35 aircraft and that much delayed and awaited aircraft carrier.

We can’t, and won’t, win an all-out war with China today or any time soon, but we are not going to be a pushover as we were in 1962. And that is why we are raising another mountain regiment for Arunachal Pradesh and getting on with roads, bridges, helipads and air strips there. Also, why we are talking to others in the Pacific maritime region which China wants to convert to a Pax of the Dragon pond.

The British and the Americans might be sorry to lose to the French, but we may have done something, for ourselves, based on merit, of both the aircraft and the accompanying commercial deals. We may be giving shape and fuel to our long-term ambition to actually make our own Fighters, not by just bolting them together, but inclusive of the technology development.

France needed us to buy its Rafale aircraft, unable as they have been to find international buyers so far. We needed a good aircraft to see us through today’s challenges and twenty years ahead and the possibility of developing indigenous fifth generation Fighters one day. China is already doing all this, but this decision says, after five pondering years, that we are not giving up the ghost either.

There are other hopeful straws in the wind. The FII gush of funds into India in January 2012 may portend the revival of the Indian stock markets after all. Our markets do represent viability and long term potential in a world that has largely let itself down.

The FIIs can apparently see their way beyond the current softening in growth rates and seem encouraged by the successful curbing of food inflation. The RBI and Ministry of Finance too have started injecting financial liquidity into the system and this is definitely good news.

Politically, we continue to appear chaotic, but a consolidation of public opinion in favour of good governance and the candidacy of Mr. Narendra Modi for Prime Minister per a recent opinion poll is a good sign for the next general elections.

Mr. Anna Hazare may have been eclipsed for the moment, but his anti-corruption crusade has certainly touched a chord with the public. Besides China, the West and the Arabs may decide to curry favour with a deceptively mild-mannered India now, instead of perennially trying to show us our place. And Pakistan too won’t be in a position to exploit the difference.

(1,098 words)

February 2^nd, 2012

Gautam Mukherjee

NewsLaundry - Can You Take It? Barkha Dutt? - 1

2012-01-31T07:31:00.000-08:00

Serge

2012-01-14T05:37:00.001-08:00

Serge

Serge is blanket-like woven wool - thick, heavy, warm. It is itchy, hairy, usually gray or black. Nobody would dare dye it pink. Not even for a feminist prank or World Aids Day. Serge has come back, with double-breasted lapels, a profusion of plastic buttons reminiscent of the old bone or tortoiseshell ones, or over-the top shiny disco ones, and epaulets. Serge, bold as brass, is impossibly retro in 2012.

So what prompted its use in the minds of so many designers both mass market and exclusive? Could it be the yearning for a time before a modicum of too-clever-by-half human “efficiency” painted us into a dehumanised corner?

And that’s not all, the Serge we see is contrived into three-quarter length trench coats, ready for sleep-outs or is it pass-outs, designed to make you feel snug as the proverbial bug in the rug (with rug-like bulkiness thrown in for free), even if you’d probably have a time of it steering your car with it on.

Or, sitting in an economy class airline seat for that matter, trying to eat off those little trays designed for contortionists. Now you’d know, with your Serge jacket on, what it must feel like to be fat, that loss of mobility that being too wide brings on, unless of course it is your job to walk along the watchtowers on the Great Wall, clapping your leather mittens together, stamping your boots on the cobbles, and rarely sitting down at all.

This despite the Red Guards highlights on the coats with occasional Darth Vader sartorial exuberances. But it’s Serge you see, and not some muscled, moulded, indescribable new-age fabric. It’s age-old, woven centuries ago by those persecuted peeved Huguenots; and it’s disconcerting to see it hung there afresh in mall show windows.

You haven’t really seen these coats outside teak heirloom wardrobes. If they don’t exist any longer in fact, it’s because those man-size wardrobes have vanished too. Now it’s all in your mind’s eye, huge carved-wood wardrobes and Serge suits both, probably untroubled since Central Heating came in.

But now there they are again, Serge double-breasts, three-quarter length, in every place selling branded clothes. Serge is back, done up in shoulder-padded imitations of Jinnah’s Saville Row suits from the forties, but mercifully there are no fur hats in accompaniment, not even the Red Guard style ones or the Quaid-e-Azam ones from Astrakhan.

The other item from the thirties and forties adorning many of the same mannequins are Fedora hats. Lots of them suddenly, smart snappy things, disappearing as fast as they are put out on display, though you still can’t see many people wearing them outside nightclubs, out on the streets, in broad daylight. Except the ones worn by visiting Hollywood actors with the necessary chutzpah, doing Agra and Rajasthan, and several photo-ops.

Note how they are indeed in Fedoras, and not Indiana Jones outfits in khaki complete with battered bush hats. Hollywood actors have figured out that here we call them Sahib, John Masters style, and not Bwana. So the Indiana Jones and the Swahili patter is best saved up for Nairobi. Ah so, a shrinking world makes us all politically correct to a lesser or greater extent.

But the photos are really very intriguing; just T shirts in the Delhi cold, some kind of sports body warmers thrown over ever so casually, designer stubble or a little more perhaps, sound-byte comments on peace, spirituality, friendly Indians and Gandhi, a little amazement, and Fedoras for visuals.

2012 is kicked off, maybe with a new season in fashion, and the world seems to be Frank Sinatra smart, with or without the accompanying loss of hair. There may even be a Rat Pack in the making, but none of the Serge or snappy hats with the trim rims in the shops are necessarily aimed at women.

Frankly, nostalgia apart, Serge wouldn’t make it outside of minus twenty and the stereotypical heavy-body USSR matron queuing up in the cold for a loaf. You won’t catch a Dubai-tripping Babushka or Uzbek showing the blindest bit of interest and rightly so. Vanity demands you ignore it.

So cover up in Serge at your peril if you’re young, curvy and restless. And forget ever leaving the ice rink. Imagine doing slow circles around it for eternity like a portly Marlon Brando in Serge three-quarters. Except you’re a fox from Russia remember, and not a hamburger eclipsed icon cum once a “contender” but now a ruin.

But with so much thick wool in the shops, it probably means they are donning it in colder climes and not just selling us a surplus of carpet underlay. That’s how it percolates down to us here, in Delhi, via the brands we can’t get enough of.

But this 2011 winter, segueing into winter still in 2012, has us potentially making a meal of thick cloth. Though, once again, I don’t see Serge on people that much, just the mannequins, and in my head.

The wry thought is bound to come to someone who has watched a black and white James Cagney “take that you dirty rat” film, that many who are contemplating the Serge and donning the Fedoras have no idea that this is not brand new fashion seen for the first time.

And the new, light, created fabrics and their brand masters must be scratching their heads. Here is this chunky apparatchik from the Russian Revolution of 1917, who actually stood up in a full overcoat made of the stuff, rather than this bulky driving jacket meets double-breasted Chicago mobster in Fedora. But here in North India, we are playing at winter, and hardly letting it shape our character.

What is this Serge then? Recession putz? Something to embrace your upper half in a wrap as enveloping as a confidence-building buddy? Pessimism in your heart and optimism in your head?

Why does a young circa 2011-12 designer fall in love with this fabric? It doesn’t exactly drape well, and has a texture only a mother could love, so it must be the warmth. This is a blanket that you walk away in on your pins. Any goat-herd can tell you about its efficacy.

But in fashion philosophy terms, its arrival could represent the return of amorphousness, vagueness, shapelessness- the non-committal, uncertainty. It is de-glamorised, girded, epaulleyed, but hardly splendid.

Serge is the Russian soldier trudging through the snow without his boots. But at least there’s Serge on his back and sides. And a Fedora on his head to remind him of all the fun he isn’t having just yet but still could be before long.

(1,102 words)

13^th January, 2012, Lohri

Gautam Mukherjee

He who pays the Piper

2012-01-12T01:24:00.001-08:00

He who pays the Piper

Have you ever heard of a Piper satisfied with pretend payment? The famous one, the Pied-Piper of Hamelin, saw to it that the village that cheated him after he divested it of its rats, lost all its children too.

Deficit financing is a little like pretend payment because it attacks the value of the money itself, degenerates the strength and vitality of the economy, and is, in reality, a waterfall of paper promises against the future, a future, in part actively subverted and pauperised by wanton deficit-financed spending in the present.

It is a Devil take the hindmost kind of economic thinking fuelled by the cynical thought that the perpetrators of the outrage won’t be there when their successors discover the hollowness of their fiscal predicament.

The irony is in the fact that deficit financing has nevertheless become the norm on how to run an economy all over the world. The mellifluous justification from certain economists is that policy initiatives cannot wait for the money to come into the till before it is spent. That kind of timid fiscal behaviour may be alright for the housewife running the kitchen from money stashed in her biscuit tin, but is hardly worthy of finance ministers and planning commissions invested with the lofty business of running the finances of a country.

In the powerful countries of the West, imitated alas, also by the emerging economies, the long-held conviction was that their mountain of debt accumulated with ever increasing audacity would never actually come crashing down upon them. They had good reasons that included the buoyancy of their economies, the prowess of their technological innovation, the sophistication of their financial systems, the strength of their military and the skill of their diplomacy etc.

But it all fell apart and is testimony to the truism that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Yet, let us remember that as recently as in the Clinton presidency, notable for being free of any major military conflict, the US economy, after his eight years in office, was handed over with a surplus in the coffers and near nil unemployment.

This may well have been partially due to the cyclical dividend of the Reagan-Thatcher years that preceded it. The duo spurred private enterprise on both sides of the Atlantic, combated militant unionism, dismantled the USSR and the Berlin Wall and reduced the sway of big government. Clinton benefited from all this during his watch, but certainly did nothing adverse to stymie the cumulative economic dividend.

Bill Clinton’s performance is all the more remarkable because the Democratic Party is well known for its huge public welfare spending. But of course, he was prevented from executing major reforms in the American Healthcare System by the powerful pharmaceutical/hospital/insurance lobbies. Had he succeeded in this, as President Obama has to a certain extent in a much worse economic environment; it might have shot up Government spending and queered the pitch of his glowing economic report card.

In India, blessed as it is with abundant natural resources, a vast domestic market and a plentiful, young and skilled work force, it probably takes monumental incompetence to have so many million people in the ranks of the backward and poor. This is also the welfarism/ “conscience” argument from the Socialist and Left-leaning thinkers in the Government, Opposition, coalition partners, the NIA and elsewhere; unimpressed as they are by mere growth in the GDP.

This, even as all the GDP baiters rarely acknowledge that it is this very increase in the macro performance that has enabled us to raise our expectations, and amongst the middle class and above, our standard of living. Socialism, our old soul-mate, has given us very little back for all the love lavished upon it.

But indubitably, if one sees the predicament of our teeming millions of poor people deprived of all civilised life opportunities such as decent health, housing and educational/employment opportunity, the argument to do something substantial for them is most compelling. We have to uplift the masses to remove the dangerous inequality that plagues us. Still the question remains, and is no nearer a solution after 65 years of independence; how do we pay for it?

In the past, the Government of India rarely thought it necessary to worry about economic viability, harping instead on various Socialist shibboleths of inclusiveness. We are in danger of doing it again but we cannot sustain a combination of deficit financing and inefficient welfare delivery mechanisms riddled with corruption, without visiting ruin upon all our heads.

Our huge number of poor, cheated at every turn by people who make money in their name, evince false sympathy, exploit and manipulate, are not being helped by the Government bankrupting itself and future generations in their name.

The way to uplift the poor is by helping the rest of the economy to make the money to pay for their betterment. And this money is in foreign hands, Western, Middle Eastern, Japanese, Far-Eastern, even Chinese, and very keen to invest in India in most fields given the right laws, business incentives and reduction in our infamous red-tape.

But Indian policy seems forever split between the past and the present without taking into account that there are vast values waiting to be unlocked and brought into the fray. The fear and insecurity of the political establishment forces it to avoid bold policy steps. The consequent focus on electoral considerations at all times unfortunately runs riot over issues of governance. But, even the politicos need to realise there is no way out, unless we want to collapse into the predicted balkanisation and chaos.

Besides, it isn’t just the plight of the poor pushing us in the direction of bold reforms, but also the demands of an infrastructure completely inadequate for the needs of our massive population. Our armed forces are poorly armed and menaced by a militarily superior China. Our agricultural economy suffers from age old glut and shortage, without the modernisation it is crying out for. Our private sector is starved of bank finance. We need money for every one of these purposes and myriad others but seem to be doing nothing about it.

We are not in this position because we have no choice. We are not a small country like Greece or Iceland with limited options. We are not growing in double digits right now because we won’t exercise the choices, very many good ones, that we do have.

Perhaps, early in 2012 as it is, we need to take a cool hard look at our assumptions and commit ourselves to growth as the engine and ladder to achieving the aspirations of all Indians.

(1,109 words)

12^th January 2012

Gautam Mukherjee

Safe House Wellness Retreat - The Facility

2011-12-28T23:43:00.000-08:00

Insouciance

2011-12-27T11:49:00.000-08:00

Insouciance

Insouciance is a kind of uncaring nonchalance born of smugness. There is a suggestion of wilful idleness about it, a sense of entitlement, and an assumption that one can get away with not delivering on one’s promises.

And even some twisted thinking that suggests that doing what one says dangerously raises expectations. And should these be met, it only fuels even higher, unreasonable and unwarranted aspirations amongst essentially undeserving, ignorant people, best not encouraged above their station.

And therefore, it is implicitly better to drown such ambition at birth using ruthless subversion. Of course, you will never catch a politician or factotum saying any of this out loud. On the contrary, the average neta or bureaucratic burra sahib will feign horrified protest against such calumny being heaped on his ilk.

This is all the more remarkable because in a democracy which presumes to promote equality of opportunity, it is a patrician/feudal attitude, papered over with egalitarian and pro-people rhetoric. This is all the more ironic because in recent times, many elected representatives do not exactly come from a background of privilege.

But fact is, our common or garden politician and “steel frame” bureaucrat fits the bill for both insouciance writ large, and nonchalance too, though the latter term has a Dev Anandish charm about it, found, in this context, to be missing in action.

The lesser accompaniments to these exalted personages, including all manner of secretaries, clerks, “officers” and agents at large, are not so humble that they are incapable of aping their masters.

So, for the supplicating public to be nearly squashed under this mountain of hubris is a very natural thing. That it makes them somewhat angry and full of the malice of schadenfreude, that peculiar but oh so real German notion of deriving pleasure at another’s misfortune, is therefore not surprising.

Particularly since now, you have this former army driver in a Gandhi cap and whites, in possession of a very effective wagging finger, that has lit a fire under all this insulation from reality.

Here was the standard issue politician, state, central, in meaner municipal/local government, or even quango setting, comfortable in the belief that he had to only think about his voter near about an election, and not at all otherwise, sanctimoniousness apart.

And suddenly, the former driver and social activist from Ralegan Siddhi, an obscure backwater in usually placid rural Maharashtra, is jumping all over one’s mind space. Mr. Anna Hazare is not only able to capture the media attention, but quite a bit of the popular imagination as well with his relentless Government bashing. People love an underdog going to war and understand one that talks in comfortable sound bytes.

That Mr. Hazare is simplistic is the true delight of the masses, if truth be told. People are sick of being bamboozled and patronised by insincere men and women, some elected to public office, some in unsackable Government jobs, and yet others in political parties and committees, who wield enormous power without being accountable to very many, let alone the public.

And this challenge to the comfortable politician and bureaucrat has been mounted at a time when the ruling classes are seen to have mismanaged both the economy and the political landscape. And brought it down to the point where not only is there policy formulation and implementation paralysis, but also a rapidly developing dire straits in terms of its rapidly depleting coffers.

The Government has choked the economy in the pursuit of lower inflation to the point where it is almost broke itself. Both direct and indirect taxes have fallen, and the need to borrow to bridge ever widening deficits has grown. Though you wouldn’t necessarily realise it if you looked at the ever expanding subsidy raj we cannot afford being thrust upon mute future generations.

Of course, the Indian Government routinely tends to see the light only when it reaches the end of its dark dank tunnel. It is always a rock bottom moment that brings substantive change to us, in a paradoxical, Through the Looking Glass manner. So expect a cut in interest rates and stimulation of growth afresh in 2012. Looking back to 1991, Mr. Narasimha Rao was able to jettison Nehruvian Socialism once and for all only because we had come perilously close to bankruptcy. And most “reform” of our system since has also been with a gun to our heads. We cannot arrive at a political consensus on any improvement without this coercive aspect, and perhaps it won’t be long before future governance learns how to stage a crisis for the purpose!

But as long as the taps of cheaper credit are turned back on, the reportedly Rs. 150,000 crores worth of Non-Performing-Assets (NPAs), consisting of loans to stalled power sector companies and moribund infrastructure builders, can all be revived. And quick to forgive Indian industry can put the folly of monetary Stalinism behind itself.

And, once again, the politico and bureaucrat will be saved from the consequences of their sins. If you’re a mere member of the public, all you have to do is wait for it, and survive long enough to see the worm turn.

And yet with a report card hovering between failed grades and the bottom most rungs of scraping through, there is no real mea culpa. Instead, there is a pointing of fingers at civil society abrogating to itself the proper functions of our elected representatives. As if it is being done without provocation or cause by a group of misguided and subversive individuals naïve about the functioning and needs of governance.

Let’s face it, there might have been no JP Narayan in his time, launching the political careers of the many towards the bottom of the pyramid then, or Anna Hazare now, gaining traction with the Twitter and Facebook generation many decades his junior, without some due cause.

Of course, as the Lokpal debate proceeds, it becomes more and more difficult to fathom how the wondrous creature is going to function, and be effective, even if, and after, a “strong” bill is enacted into law. A polity free of corruption in the Indian context sounds truly fabulous and unreal.

Of course, a desire to make such a thing come about is laudable. And like the activism of civil society amplified by media coverage, is likely to tone up the functioning of not only Government but the Opposition too, and this not just at the Centre but also in the States.

As for the economy, even bad cooks cannot totally wreck the effect of good ingredients, despite a chronic laparwai insouciance.

(1,099 words)

27^th December 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published in The Pioneer on Edit Page as Leader Edit on 29th December 2011 entitled "Wait for the worm to turn". Also online at www.dailypioneer.com and in The Pioneer ePaper. Also archived under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

Navel Gazing Discontent

2011-12-15T03:11:00.001-08:00

Lovely Poonam Kaur

Navel-Gazing Discontent

The current official navel-gazing assessment of our economic situation is stymied by its own in-built limitations. It is now evident that an economy of our modest proportions does not possess the resources to right itself, dependent as it is on investment from the driver economies of the West to do so. This, particularly in the management of our current account deficits, despite our foreign exchange reserves of some $ 300 billion.

We should have realised this before embarking arrogantly on a strict monetarist path, smug in the belief that our growth story was going to survive the abuse to its roots. Instead FDI has dried up, would-be investors domestic and foreign are dismayed, and FII money is leaving in floods, driving the rupee and the stock market down in its wake.

With appalling swiftness, we have gone from an admired BRIC nation that survived the 2008 downturn with finesse, to one in which we have managed to embarrass ourselves to the point of becoming a global disappointment in 2011.

And since some 56% of our economy now consists of the services sector, inclusive of the growth engines of IT; and America happens to consume, or did, some 90% of our IT exports, we are naturally hard hit in that department. Of course, a lot of this service sector also attends to the domestic market, but the home market has been garrotted in the cause of containing inflation too.

Europe and America are grappling with an avalanche of debt without growth, even negative growth in some places, that has led it to technical, if undeclared, bankruptcy. They are only staving it off from naked admission by constantly printing more and more notes marked figuratively with an IOU from the future. And of course, the West does have a substantial technological and military dominance and the heft of sheer size that will help it pull through in the end. In past centuries this would have been a good time for them to go to war in order to seize the resources they needed, and some say the military activity in some of the oil and mineral rich regions is precisely that.

Back in our shanty, besides IT, our other brilliant spot consists of small diamonds duly imported, cut and polished, mainly in Surat, before being sent out again. And diamonds, the small and tiny ones which are processed in India, have also been hit hard by the recession in the West.

Other areas, such as commodities, garments and engineering goods, not our strong suit in any case, are caught in the pincers of very low margins and sluggish demand. But the good thing is that the exports area accounts for only about 12% of the total Indian economy. So the implication is - fix the domestic economy and we’ll be alright. However, this seems easier said than done, as attempts to reform it have demonstrated.

This mainly because, despite the grave economic situation, occasionally given frank voice to by our Finance Minister Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, the powers that be are more interested in controlling inflation which affects the voting poor the hardest, rather than managing growth, which is an amorphous reality not easily understood by the illiterate.

So growth be damned has been the mantra of our Government, let’s control food inflation instead. The good news is that food inflation is at last falling noticeably, partly because it is a seasonal demand-supply thing for farm produce, and partly because of the sharp constriction in money supply engendered by over a dozen interest rate hikes imposed by the RBI.

In addition, even as Business and Industry have been battered by way of collateral damage by the actions of an unsympathetic and unsupportive Government, observers, at least those that don’t subscribe to endless handouts, are dismayed by the Government’s exploration of more populist measures. These encompass further reckless welfarism aimed at the aam aadmi, such as the pending Food Bill, likely to have very deleterious effects on the finances of the Government.

With indifference writ large on the part of the Government, Indian companies will have to wait to make their own way once the investment climate and confidence improves in the West. We will then stop being buffeted by waves of imported pessimism aggravated by unhelpful domestic policies and circumstances. These include tight money, the Government’s ever growing fiscal deficits, weakening currency values, slowing growth rates, governance paralysis on reforms, chronic political cacophony and weakness and a most disconcerting lack of purpose.

The great hope is in the revival of the much vaunted domestic economy that the whole world also wants a slice of. Hopefully, what is done is done, and there will be change before we reach the point of no return. In trying to drive out inflationary liquidity over the last 13 months or so, we have lost economic momentum, while succeeding only very slightly in curbing inflation, because a lot of it is automatically imported, via our vast petroleum needs.

So what can we expect next? We do have the wherewithal to ride out this period of distress, as long as we once again pump-prime the domestic economy, reversing the present tight money policies, in an echo of what we did in the aftermath of the Wall Street debacles of 2008. It would have been great to encourage FDI also, but judging from the furore over FDI in multi-brand retail, it may prove to be politically too difficult at present.

But we cannot afford to kill the golden goose entirely. Most analysts of the European and American economic scenario are also casting doubt on their ability to return to prosperity via the rocky road of prolonged austerity. What that would do is assassinate the spirit of all enterprise, and no government can substitute for it, or insinuate anything else to serve in its precious place.

On our part too we need to course correct fast. Perhaps the greater folly has not been the delusion of grandeur occasioned by the navel-gazing. Nor in the inward looking regard that we were safe as the second fastest growing economy in the world. It is in not recognising our imperatives on how to keep it that way. We have presumed that the “India story” that we have got used to dining out on, could never slip away. Now that it is, we must freely admit that our revised self-image of several years now cannot stomach or tolerate being sent back to the third world of basket cases. Let us therefore hope that it is not the covert policy of the Government in a variation of the Communist deification of poverty and privation.

(1,108 words)

15^th December 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit in The Pioneer as "Ahead lies disaster" on December 15th, 2011. Also online at www.dailypioneer.com where it is archived under Columnists and in the ePaper of the day.

Control and Carpe Diem

2011-12-03T19:58:00.001-08:00

Control and Carpe Diem

Control the message and you end up controlling the medium, seems to be the update on Marshall McLuhan’s vision. And this is being practised in a see-saw motion by both the Government and the Opposition.

Witness how Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Ms.Mayawati, has thrown down the gauntlet to the UPA, of which her BSP is also a restive part, by proposing that her state be split into four. UP has long been a grand prize for any political dispensation in its present form, along with Bihar, even after being divested of Jharkhand. UP is vast, ungainly, populous, lawless, backward, communally sensitive, yes, but sends cohorts of MPs to both houses of Parliament.

But broken up into four states, the political imperatives as well as the arithmetic will change, perhaps unpredictably. For the implied manageability, it is nevertheless a good idea chasing its time. Meanwhile, the proposal, and the timing of its propagation, has managed to set the cat among the pigeons. At a minimum, the resolution, passed swiftly by the UP Assembly, has put paid to the pressure being applied on Ms. Mayawati by the higher reaches of the Congress Party.

The UPA, caught on the back foot, has countered with a stirring of the quota politics cauldron. The new mischief is in terms of an 8% reservation for Muslims within the 27% OBC quota. Not to be outdone, the SP has dusted off its old proposal asking for an additional Muslim quota over and above the OBC 27% . The upper castes and Hindus are no doubt being asked to pay for the sins of their forefathers, a kind of karmic pitri dosh.

But all this is essentially political posturing. As the numbers in UPA 2 are constituted, to get anything passed at the Centre, the UPA needs both the SP and BSP for its numbers, not to mention the DMK and the TMC as well. Likewise, the BSP with its split-the-state-into-four proposal. And provided Parliament is allowed to function long enough!

Some of these trial balloons will be adjudged as too complicated to grab the voter’s imagination, and other ideas will peak too soon. A case in point is the rage about the Land Acquisition norms, wherein what Mr. Rahul Gandhi proposed, post his visits to Bhatta-Parsaul, has been defused by quick political and administrative action as well as by the Allahabad High Court giving out a number of sagacious decisions on the matter.

This land acquisition topic did indeed help Ms. Mamta Bannerjee ride to power in Paschim Banga. But now she’s grappling (ironically) with her former pals, the Maoists, and out-retrograding the Communists by stoutly opposing FDI in retail. For Ms. Bannerjee now, it is a battle for credibility with the much pampered if nearly destitute grass-root voter, whatever the illogic.

Ms. Jayalalithaa, Chief Minister from Tamil Nadu, joins her in the chorus against FDI in retail from Chennai, for good measure probably, and to avoid any labels of elitism from the watchful and active DMK, smarting from being thrown out of power in the state.

Chief Minister of Delhi, Madame Dikshit’s attempt to control the messaging is less effective. Her big idea is to try and tame the BJP dominated MCD by trifurcating it. The BJP, taken aback at first, has now waded into the fray armed with codicils and amendments. Mrs. Dikshit is carrying on regardless, but with consensus likely to elude her, she has moved on to testing the waters for full statehood for Delhi.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, besieged on all sides by corruption scandals, stubborn inflation, persistent terrorism from Maoists/Islamists, bullying from China, artful dodging from Pakistan, a slowing economy, governance paralysis, indiscipline, populism, a clamouring Opposition, global economic meltdown, high commodity prices, etc., has also had his eureka moment. Dr. Singh does tend to get one big idea per term of office that he tenaciously adheres to- remember the civil nuclear power deal from UPA 1?

This time, it has come in the form of a redemptive Cabinet decision to push through majority or wholly-owned FDI in multi-brand and single-brand retail with little or no restrictions, including the kind of babu-bred detailing that makes even a good idea a non-starter.

Suddenly, the 2G scam is old hat, the Opposition stands out-manoeuvred on black money and inflation, and anti-corruption Tsar Anna Hazare is scrambling to get his share of media space. Mr. Hazare may be growing desperate at being upstaged, if his ever more bizarre pronouncements about flogging alcoholics, slapping Mr. Pawar, more fasting, and a resurrected East India Company, is anything to go by.

The fact is, liberalising the retail space is going to benefit millions of farmers to get more for their produce. It already has in Punjab and Haryana, as pointed out by the farmers’ lobby, where the efforts of the desi retailers such as Reliance Fresh have delivered. It will also open up a lot of jobs and other supply opportunities all along the delivery chain and make for a degree of first world sophistication, instead of the waste, unhygienic conditions, sloppy management and general inefficiency that dogs our present efforts.

The Opposition, and various Luddites in the ruling party, are essentially defending, and that too with unnecessary paranoia, an outdated set of ideas. The consumer will also benefit from better prices and a surfeit of choice, as in much else since 1991. Not one Kirana store need necessarily shut down if it wants to work for a living in competition with the big chains. It is competition that has put India on the economic map since liberalisation began, and not protection and barriers to global free trade.

In 1991, Mr. Rahul Bajaj was a leading light of the “Bombay Club” lobbying relentlessly to prevent foreign competition with talk of an “even playing field”. Now the same Mr. Bajaj suggested Kingfisher Airlines should be allowed to die if it could not compete. And India, flagging in its growth story and lagging in its Reforms Programme, can certainly do with the dollar billions in FDI investment and the modernisation it will bring.

A similar defensiveness was evident when Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, first started to put computers in to improve the workings of the Government, Nationalised Banks and PSUs in the Eighties. Then too, there were a firestorm of flag-waving and slogan-shouting morchas, all hysterically yelling fear and saying the machines would end up taking those secure Government jobs.

But remembering that silliness today makes one fairly confident that FDI in single and multi-brand retail cannot be stymied after all, despite the no-holds barred kabbadi match going on at present.

(1,102 words)

4^th December 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

The Phantom Strikes

2011-11-24T08:03:00.001-08:00

The Phantom strikes

It isn’t just the Rolls Royce that has made much of its quietness in motion. Much, as in its monikers of Phantom and Ghost and its famous David Ogilvy created advertisement.

The legendary headline to the 1958 print ad said: At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock. The Subhead line read: What makes Rolls-Royce the best car in the world? “There is really no magic about it – it is merely patient attention to detail,” says an eminent Rolls-Royce engineer.

Of course, the Lee Falk “Ghost who walks” inspired imagery in the Rolls Royce model names, the somewhat horse and carriage reminiscent rounded lines, and the advert that talked of tick-tocking clocks and miles per hour, all belong to a bygone era. One in which the “Roller”, under British ownership, exuded occasional, if nostalgic, whiffs of Empire, despite the dwindling number of its anachronistic takers.

Significantly, this iconic British marque built at Crewe in the Midlands, associated with royalty and the “toff” for so long it seems like forever; still makes aircraft engines on its own. The auto manufacturing however has been hived off to BMW, the German car maker from Bavaria, which also once made aircraft engines but now only has the blue and white propeller on its much admired logo.

But BMW too, while extensively reengineering and restyling the Roller into tank-like toughness and Teutonic performance, has daintily retained the ethereal model names and the je ne sais quoi Greek mythology classicism of the “Spirit of Ecstasy” hood badge, now retractable to elude souvenir hunters, vandals and the gritty cynicism of modern times.

With this combination of old world class and Butch new, improved, performance, the Phantom can outgun several serious sports cars, despite weighing in at over two tons without any armour plating. Likewise, the slightly smaller new Ghost for those who want to drive themselves.

Which brings me to the reclusive billionaire with built-in state-of-the-art stealth features undetectable on most radars, known as “The Phantom of Bombay House”. I write of Mr. Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry and his long road journey to the takeover of the iconic Tata Group. He too oozes stateliness and good manners while being a proven quantity over decades at or near the top of Indian business and industry.

Mr.S.P. Mistry has been closely associated with all the major construction emanating from the Tata Group for decades. He has been an inner circle intimate of JRD Tata and an avuncular and consistent presence for his successor Ratan, not to mention all the other Tata satraps. Mr. Mistry has quietly sat on the boards, or in the Chairman’s office, of several Tata companies at the same time, for decades together, in addition to having his own name plate formally and informally at the board table at Tata Sons for just as long. But despite his biggest single private shareholding at some 18.5% in the Tata Sons holding company, Pallon, as his friends call him, has been careful to eschew petty ambition while diligently minding the store.

Even now, at around 80 years of age, in technical retirement certainly, the elder Mistry is still a major force at Bombay House, despite his innate humility, warmth, human touch and signature low-key style. But underneath this silk and velvet, is a clear cut and long term strategist that has at last executed a plan of action begun in 1930, when his father, the heir apparent Cyrus Mistry’s grandfather, acquired 12.5% of Tata Sons by buying out the then Tata lawyer’s holding.

In the 1930s it was a very different kind of Phantom and Ghost, that rolled around in the heat and dust of princely India, besides featuring anthromorphically in hit films like “The Yellow Rolls Royce”. But undeniably, the Rolls Royce motor car’s survival to date owes much to a nimble evolution from its walnut and burl dashboards and picnic hampers that has cast many of its contemporaries into the outer darkness of museums sighing with times past.

The naming of the 43 year old Cyrus Mistry to the top job at Tatas’ is significant for its signal of an astute and hard-nosed makeover not unlike the one made to the Roller by BMW, signalling both modernisation and continuity, and recognising, as Ratan has done throughout his tenure, coinciding with the beginning of India’s liberalisation, that competition, not protection, is here to stay.

The Tata Group, grown out of the pre-independence ethos, consolidated throughout the Socialist era and brought into its own since 1991, has a long way to go in its transformation into a global behemoth. And this particularly as the balance of power is beginning to shift to Asia in terms of China and India and also to the other BRICS countries. What is certain is that America and the West will have to share a lot of power and pelf in the future.

Cyrus Mistry will have the time, over 30 years per the terms of tenure at Tata, God willing, and given the determination and vision demonstrated by outgoing Chairman Ratan Tata, like JRD before him, he will take it to the heights of achievement and excellence befitting the refreshed TATA logo.

Cyrus Mistry has already taken the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, albeit in conjunction with his father and elder brother, into very impressive multi-billion dollar growth, branching out into a conglomerate on its own, embracing manufacturing, services and engineering, from its roots in A grade civil construction going back to his grandfather’s days.

The time has come to continue the kind of dynamism and courage that has marked the latter half of Ratan Tata’s tenure, when he came into his own after successfully subduing considerable internal challenges to his leadership. Cyrus Mistry is lucky to be inheriting this legacy of consolidation. All he has to do now is leverage the considerable strengths of the Tata Group in an era where India itself is destined to become a leading nation and economy.

There are great opportunities in areas that are yet to be thrown open to the private or collaborative joint sectors, particularly in the Defence Industry, but they are coming because of irresistible geopolitical pressures and threats that need urgent action. Such private-public-international collaboration, inclusive of both organic and inorganic growth, as demonstrated in the Corus and Jaguar/Landrover acquisitions, has the potential to catapult more and more companies in the Tata Group into the upper reaches of the Fortune 500.

All Mr. Mistry needs is a hunger and stomach for visionary growth and he has certainly demonstrated this characteristic already, if on a smaller canvas.

(1,100 words)

24^th November 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit on the Edit Page of The Pioneer as "With sleeves rolled up" on November 29th, 2011. Also online at www.dailypioneer.com

Modi as in Deng

2011-11-13T01:47:00.001-08:00

Modi as in Deng

Reform is China's second revolution.
Deng Xiaoping

In power terms, political correctness is a reasonably modern phenomenon. In history, the blood and gore of conquest was usually cast in terms of valour, vision and the capacity to rule. It was understood statecraft was not a province for wimps. But another demeanour, far less militaristic, that works nowadays, is that of the doer with a modicum of style.

Chief Minister Narendra Modi recently went to Beijing with a large entourage of Gujarat’s finest business leaders. He went in response to an ongoing Chinese initiative from the Central Committee of the CCP. Another possible Opposition prime ministerial candidate, Mr. Nitish Kumar of Bihar, has also recently been to Beijing on the same invitation format, as have several others, including Haryana’s Mr. Hooda.

Modi however is the only Indian CM who can boast of Chinese rates of growth. Gujarat has an overall figure of 12%, per annum, with even the usually moribund agricultural sector turning in a record-breaking 10% last year. The urban population of Gujarat, at 40% of the total, more closely resembles the demographic in China. Our near inviolate shibboleth is that “India lives in its villages”. That profundity was pronounced by the Mahatma, Gujarat’s greatest gift to the nation and the world, over a half century ago. Unsung as he undoubtedly is, Sardar Patel also from the womb of Gujarat, with a great deal more realpolitik to him if not the greatness, makes up a close second to MAK Gandhi.

Modi, also cast in decidedly heroic hue, is seen by the Chinese as an Indian Deng Xiaoping, himself long on the periphery of national power, but once installed centre stage, the one who took China on its spectacular trajectory to make it the fastest growing economy in the world. Our NaMo, impressed as he is with Chinese achievements, is not content however, to slavishly ape Chinese growth methods.

He sees the business opportunity more as a Chinese one, and asked his hosts to desist from egging Pakistan on to make trouble for India, inclusive of the Chinese presence in POK. He also referred to the brandishing of Chinese maps that include large tracts of Indian territory such as Arunachal Pradesh and Akshai Chin on the Chinese side of the fence.

Modi does not think such essentially hostile attitudes are going to help Chinese companies get lucrative Indian contracts in infrastructure, telecom, and energy, amongst other things. Hardly the talk of a supplicant, and to give credit to his hosts, they took such pointed remarks on board without demur.

But even if China sees Modi as a possible future prime minister of India, they don’t have to fight through the thicket of rivals and detractors that NaMO has to tackle. Of course the matter that most stands in Modi’s way towards power at the centre, is the perception that he either caused, or colluded, with mob fury, during and in the aftermath of the Godhra riots that took some 3,500 lives. While technically and legally it may be very difficult to lay any such blame at his door, the damage has already been done.

The irony of this situation is that this country itself was born in the grip of communal violence, with perhaps a half million lives lost in the process. But it did next to no damage to the subsequent political careers of the principal beneficiaries, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Mr. Jinnah of course coughed his last soon after, but you could hardly blame his tuberculosis on his politics. The third beneficiary in glory, if not in pelf and power, was the beribboned Lord Mountbatten of Burma, but when he was finally blown up in a fishing skiff many years later, it was the IRA that did it, and not any part of the Hindu-Muslim diaspora.

In recent history, there was Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s invasion of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, that bizarre use of tanks through narrow lanes, and that of the regular army.

There were about a thousand casualties around the lanes, rooms, pools and terraces of the temple. The net effect was one of desecration and sacrilege. The martyrdom of Bhindranwale, when a judicially sanctioned noose would have been infinitely better was a corollary, and deeply wounded Sikh pride, a consequence. And then, there was the whispering from the shadows, echoing with the ghosts of Jallianwala Baug, located just a few alleyways away, in the same city.

Later came the Shakespearean aftermath, that of Mrs. Gandhi’s murder at her wicket gate, and the 4,800 Sikhs butchered in the Capital in swift retaliation. The

carnage organised, it is maintained to this day, by prominent members of the Congress Party, over four days of barbarity.

And yet it is Godhra, where the first provocation involved the deliberate burning alive of scores of Hindu pilgrims inside locked railway carriages, and Ayodhya, wherein nobody was killed during the demolition of Babar’s mosque; which are held out as prime examples of communal intolerance in this country.

Having the bountiful money tap of Government advertising is a good way to control the flow of news and analysis, even allegedly third-rate analysis, as certain judges with extra-curricular views have it. It is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, if one only casts a glance at the state of our judiciary and the functioning of our legal system. But casting stones at others is the sub-continental idea of free speech. Though we have never been much good at taking what we love to dish out.

Coming back to Mr. Modi and the great neo-liberal cant about his unsuitability for the top job because of his communal credentials, and coming, as he does, from that “communal party”, is so much talk that can harm our national progress.

The importance of NaMO is that there is practically no one from any party with his development record. And as for his communalism, even if it is taken on face value, it cannot be seen to be any worse than that of any other politician, including Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, who justified the Sikh killings in Delhi circa 1984, in philosophical and arboreal similes.

Deng the doppelganger was purged twice by Mao, but managed to upstage Mao’s designated successor Hua Guofeng. He then took control of the second generation reform that has catapulted China to its present prominence.

Modi has similar potential, albeit in a different political context and discourse, and this has not been lost on the Chinese. As for NaMo himself, he prepared for his visit carefully and made his presentation on Gujarat in correct Mandarin.

(1,105 words)

13^th November 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit on the Edit Page of The Pioneer as "Modi could be India's Deng" on 15th November 2011. Also online at www.dailypioneer where it is also archived under Columnists.

People will say all sorts of things

2011-10-21T09:44:00.000-07:00

People will say all sorts of things

Ernest Hemingway said all American literature began with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. But then L Frank Baum, coming later, shouldn’t have had the hassle he did in trying to sell his wonderful Wizard of Oz. Publishers said to him, full of omniscience, that there wasn’t and couldn’t be, any such thing as an American fairytale.

And all because the prescription was for importing such magic and fairy-dust from Europe, where the culture was considered old and deep. The Judeo-Christian and Anglo-Saxon world never paid much mind to the other “exotic” cultures such as ours, or that of the Chinese for that matter.

L Frank Baum wrote over a score of books, besides the magical Kansas tale about Dorothy and Toto and the Kansas wind; but nothing else really mattered. But he was spot on about Oz with the lion who was a coward, and the yellow brick road, and the tin man worried about rust, the scarecrow with no brain, and of course, the wizard who knew the way home.

On the converse side of this argument, maybe that’s why so many American writers, and not a few of the painters, went to imbibe the spirit of France. Of course, help from the French, during their war with Britain, also created a subliminal kinship. It’s symbolised by France’s present of the Statue of Liberty, standing to this day in the New York harbour, opposite the fabled old immigration point of Ellis Island.

John Lennon, avant garde Liverpudlian and world citizen, art-schooled and acerbic, was very good at saying things, including something about the Beatles and Jesus. He also said if you want to call rock n roll by another name, it’s Chuck Berry. He plugged the early Elvis by saying he had actually died the day he went into the US Army, (and not after starting a merchandising empire wearing his bejewelled jumpsuits and demonstrating his karate moves on stage in Las Vegas; and certainly not when he was, by his own description, “fat and forty”). Lennon said a few things about Nixon too, and they probably got him killed.

Rewinding a little, the commissioning executives at Decca and at EMI (the latter now ironically, but not surprisingly, defunct), said that there was no future for four young men with guitars (The Beatles), while turning down the opportunity to sign them up after listening to an audition. It’s fortuitous that the Beatles had Brian Epstein to do their Col. Parker parallel for them, because he did get them in on Parlophone, an EMI subsidiary, later with the help of legendary producer George Martin.

Across the Atlantic, Bob Dylan said to the Beatles, who were fans of his, shortly after their famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. This was right at the beginning of their US invasion, in 1964. What’s this about holding hands, said Dylan allegedly, here smoke this.

People, it appears, will say all sorts of things.

Some of the most inconsistent things being said locally are ironically coming out of the mouths of our would be reformers in team Anna.

What need was there for Mr. Shanti Bhushan to fly that dangerous kite about Kashmir? Especially now, when all India has to do is wait for the disintegration of Pakistan, because of its extremely unviable internal contradictions, having run with the hares and hunted with the hounds to the point of terminal exhaustion. It is a little like these buildings that collapse in the inner-city every monsoon.

Particularly, when the vandals keep stealing the supporting pillars of US diplomatic protection along with the accompanying dollars, and expect Pakistan to leverage the other yellow pillar, or is it peril, of China, to do the work of both.

And more importantly, pay for the privilege, presumably in Renminbi and Yuan. Yuan apart, every red-blooded scotch drinking elite member of the ruling classes in Pakistan would rather take a George Washington faced dollar and go and bamboozle the Yanks as opposed to the Chinks, “all weather friend” and “deep as the Arabian sea and high as the Himalayas” notwithstanding. But these guys may be surrounded these days.

After all, Pakistan’s terrorist breeding programme is so successful that they are rapidly outnumbering and swamping all other local species including the despised “mohajirs” imported from India. These hapless exiles actually thought they would be better treated in Pakistan amongst their co-religionists than in Allahabad or Lucknow or Hyderabad or Junagadh for that matter. And they’ve been reeling from the shock for every one of these 64 years, even though they are loathe to admit it. And that includes Mohajir former president Pervez Musharraf.

Plebiscites too, much as Bhushan may advocate them, are a page straight out of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s ghost’s book. The one in which he wants the thing in Kashmir where the skewer of demographics is expected to give him the kind of democratic verdict he was fond of. That is when Zulfie wasn’t drinking the “infidel’s scotch” or profaning the atmosphere canoodling with kafir women.

Plebiscites have had their failed day, and have actually never worked anywhere. They were nevertheless favoured by excellent Roman Emperors such as Nero and Caligula, with death as a reward for ticking the wrong box.

Mr. Bhushan also recently argued his own case seeking Income Tax exemption for his heart-bypass surgery, because he considers it an occupational hazard as a lawyer. He may have something there. Still, Anna Hazare obviously knows how to pick them, but it is a relief to see he knows how to discard them as well!

I wonder what Anna’s going to do with his expense fudging frontrunner for Jan Lokpal? Or his master’s voice, who hasn’t paid quite a lot of taxes and spent a quantity of time moonlighting from his government job. Or Mr. Bhushan senior blithely garnering himself a farm property “allotted” to him by Chief Minister of UP Kum. Mayawati’s largesse.

What makes it particularly disappointing is the lame excuses they have handed out when it comes to their own integrity and probity. And this, at a time when the race is far from run.

To be fair, it is indeed a very difficult game to stay a jump or two ahead in the honesty stakes, particularly with your supporters immolating themselves on the fervour of their own combustibles (also known as vanity).

And as for dictators and other infallibles, they have a strange habit of coming to ultimate grief in the vicinity of drains and underground crevasses. Who knows what Saddam and Gaddafi called safety, but it certainly didn’t work for them.

(1,097 words)

October 21^st, 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader on Edit Page of The Pioneer as "Shake it like Elvis" on 2nd November 2011
and online at www.dailypioneer.com/ as well as in The Pioneer ePaper.

Please Sir, may I have some more?

2011-10-10T04:32:00.000-07:00

Please Sir, may I have some more?

Charles Dickens, said to have been reincarnated as JK Rowling, the author of the phenomenally successful Harry Potter series, never got over the trauma of being sent to the Poor House with his entire family, on account of his father’s bankruptcy.

The brilliantly conceived Harry Potter, though an ace wizard, is an orphan, maltreated by his remaining family. Could it be the same Dickensian soul in JK Rowling carrying on with the expiation?

Dickens mined the trauma of that poor house experience of some two years in book after book including Oliver Twist , David Copperfield and A Christmas Carrol. He, even after he became rich and famous, also demonstrated several colourful mundane and profane quirks in his personal life as well.

In Oliver Twist, the protagonist famously has the temerity to ask for more porridge in the orphanage and brings down the wrath of the establishment on his hapless if innocent head.

Dickens’ thematics of deprivation, hunger and brutal repression brings to mind the strange ongoing discourse about the so-called Poverty Line, with a blue-turbaned Mr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia of the Planning Commission trying to calm the troubled waters in his considerably pucca accent while wearing his air of inviolability.

But showing surprise at the media focus on his Rs. 32/- per person per day Laxman Rekha, when it used to be only Rs. 24/- is somehow missing the point. Nobody seems to realise that having such a thing in itself shouts about the failure of our remedies and nostrums in this regard after more than sixty under-achieving years!

It is shocking the amount of newsprint and broadcast media time that has been devoted to this obscenity. Noted columnist Mr. Swaminathan.A. Aiyar added to the surrealism in a recent article by opining that since poor families tended to have more members and had say five or six mouths to feed; a rate of Rs. 32 per day times 6 would work out to a not totally shameful Rs. 6,000/- or so per month! And that the middle class were not morally qualified to ask for more for the poor because they cribbed about paying this kind of wage to drivers and servants. What happened to the logic of 6,000/- times 6 here, presumably for a family of domestics all cleaning and swabbing in unison in neighbouring homes, or drivers of either gender, from ages 10 to 79 doing likewise? Then, the poor would be veritably middle-class, and we could move the Poverty Line to say, waist-high!

The fact is that Socialism over 40 years has done us no favours. We became a nation of lofty, lecturing, hectoring, arrogance-laden theorists, our reach nevertheless always exceeding our grasp. Then Liberalisation came, with an ultimatum from the World Bank in 1991, and changed the rate of growth, slowly, and then very fast, considering it was climbing from a paltry little third-world base.

And gradually the middle-classes swelled, till now we talk of some 300 million people, with the poor being twice as numerous, and a couple of hundred million people in the rich category, differentiated between those who have cash and assets worth crores of rupees, and yet others with so much that they could never properly tell you just what they were worth.

Besides the number of Indian US dollar billionaires is swelling respectably, not just in the domestic but the Asian context, and millionaires are plentiful enough to hardly elicit comment.

This singular fact of growth in the economy near the double-digits year-on-year has led to whatever change and transformation we see around us. If the poor are going to get anywhere at all, then they are going to benefit from the effects of this sustained growth and transformation in their possibilities.

But there is indeed another problem that hasn’t quite hit the comfortably pontificating middle-classes here in India as yet, but might, when rising wages drive low-end jobs overseas to poorer countries.

Remember, once the developed world busy exporting jobs, spoke of cheap Japanese and Taiwanese imported goods of dubious quality. Even China with its formidable manufacturing strength and current export competitiveness is going to have to move up the value-chain and hopefully be saved from the fate of many others. They, like us, have a potentially massive domestic market to run to.

Similarly, as India climbs up the same globalised economic tree in hot pursuit, the middle classes will have to keep expanding to fuel more and more domestic demand.

But if we export low-end jobs, our economy, as in the West, will turn from being investment driven and manufacturing/service industry/infrastructure based, to a consumerist/trading one.

This tends to favour the rich with the resources to corner trading opportunities, and the economy tends to get polarised between the rich and the poor, relatively speaking of course.

America is seeing the shrinking of its middle-class now, grown strong in the post WWII years with its massive job creation programmes, and, if we tread the same developmental path we could see the same thing happen here.

Of course, we have a long way to go before the worm turns, particularly with our birth rate persisting and prolific, and the years in between are assuredly good ones.

But decades from now perhaps, we will have to face not the problem of monetary scarcity, but one of plenty without that many jobs. And that is provided the rich who control the finance haven’t bet it all on the wrong horse like Lehman and Goldman and all those happy Jewish people in Wall Street, now being occupied by a bunch of irate “smelly hippies”.

But even if the famous Indian conservatism and rectitude keep us on the straight and narrow, it might still be a feeling amongst those of us who are not rich and probably not poor. A feeling of being all dressed up with nowhere to go unless we plunge into the world of the self-employed. This more so with no Laxman Rekha drawn up to tell us our place in the scheme of things.

(1,004 words)

10^th October 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit on Edit Page of The Pioneer on 14th October 2011 as "May I have some more?". Also published online at www.dailypioneer.com and in The Pioneer ePaper. Archived under Guest Columnists online at www.dailypioneer.com

A suitable metaphor

2011-10-06T23:39:00.000-07:00

A suitable metaphor

What is a suitable metaphor for our life and times in India today? Was it encapsulated in the picaresque 1993 novel Suitable Boy by author and poet Vikram Seth?

The book chronicled the emerging new nation of the 1950’s busy abolishing the Zamindari system, working on women’s emancipation etc. in the backdrop of an idealistic, if ineffectual, Socialist India that only succeeded in increasing poverty even as the population exploded.

Or is it the shifting of gears in big-time geopolitics in the South Asian theatre and the Indian Ocean region as well?

America has sold war planes to Taiwan and entertained the Dalai Lama. It is not very happy about the growing Chinese involvement in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, Baluchistan, Gilgit and POK, and China’s evident policy of pushing India around in Arunachal Pradesh and other places.

It is uncomfortable with China’s nuclear submarine programme and the launch of its aircraft carrier with more being built. It is cross about its nuclear proliferation using North Korea and Pakistan as proxies. And then there is the relentless infrastructure upgrading and talk of a new Silk Route, alongside of the revival of the old Stillwell Road one. And also its muted belligerence in the South China Sea and China’s laying claim to its oil, gas and other resources, the needling of Japan, etc etc.

With regard to Pakistan, China’s side-kick desperate to dominate Afghan politics and power play, President Obama recently said: “We’re not going to feel comfortable with a long term strategic relationship if we don’t think that they’re mindful of our interests as well.”

There is an evident shift in stance both from the frequency and the more than usually candid nature of the statements from not only the President, but also Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (wild animals being reared in the Pakistani backyards), outgoing Joint Chief of Staff Mike Mullen (ISI supports the Haqqani network), and Vice President Joe Biden (unreliable ally), Defense Secretary Leon Panetta (retaliation)...

And this new exasperation with Pakistan, frank criticism of its ways, threats of discontinuing the massive military and non-military aid, is being publicised worldwide by a global media, slowly but surely hardening its own stance.

It seems clear from all this that America is getting ready to do something more effective than finger-wagging, and has moved on to strategising about exactly how to restore the balance of power in its own favour. The scurrying around of Pakistan’s military top brass also echoes this perception.

But the back story is indeed long and fascinating. Probably much too much of both for proper analysis in this short piece. Still, it all began with America’s historic and infamous tilt towards Pakistan in the Nixon-Kissinger years, aided and abetted by its concurrent overtures to open up to China. The rise of China into the world’s fastest growing economy is a direct consequence of that tilt, and so is its growing posturing and militancy.

Pakistan, in the interim, has gone through its “good terrorists” era under President Zia Ul Haq helping America free Afghanistan from the Soviets, alongside comprehensive Islamisation of the Pakistani polity domestically. Then came the corruption and loot of the Benazir Bhutto years, followed by the artful dodging of commando President Musharraf.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden at Abbotabad recently however has torn the veil right off the mutual denial and deception.

And now it is time for another tilt away from the toxicity of the situation. Don’t be too surprised if we wake up one morning soon to a frontal American attack within Pakistani territory launched from the Arabian Gulf and Afghanistan. This could take place, starting with a crippling of Pakistan’s nuclear assets, as soon as the Americans work out their quid pro quos with China.

India will, of course, benefit from the change, and began to do so under former President George W Bush. But, is our defining metaphor then some kind of big brother largesse or happy coincidence of geopolitics?

Or does the question resonate better with revered journalist Mr. Sunanda Datta-Ray’s recent article that invokes Kipling’s 1901 India novel Kim; saying much of the description in it still strikes a “contemporary chord”. Mr. Datta-Ray also quotes Paul Scott, the author of the Raj Quartet, set in the 1940’s, just as India was making its transition towards independence.

A character in the novel Division of the Spoils, Sargeant Guy Perron, an upper-middle class gentleman who prefers to be a non-commissioned officer, says, “I have never been in a country where the sense of the present is so strong.” Point taken, but I dare say we may not be particularly respectful of our hoary history, but it is still embedded in our DNA.

Perhaps a more apt metaphor is the new film by Mr. Tigmanshu Dhulia, who has adapted the themes of Guru Dutt’s baroque Zamindari tale Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam into a stylish if somewhat sly Sahib Bibi aur Gangster, with no apologies to the iconic period piece based on Bimal Mitra’s novel.

Dhulia interprets, but it is not a retelling at all. It is more of a comment on what we have to do to get ahead, or even just by, in a resurgent, if somewhat morally decayed contemporary India. So the metaphor is not just about peeling paint and backless cholis that provoke hot, if inappropriate, sex. It is also about the notion that one may not always get what one wants, but with a little effort, it is possible to get what one needs - to paraphrase a very catchy Rolling Stones number.

If contemporary India is a wheeler-dealer haven then, does it mean it is time to give the straight-up and honest a hasty mass burial in a shallow grave?

No, but you might get run over by wheeler-dealer traffic going down both sides of the road. Which may amount to the same thing if you have the temerity of wanting to cross the road.

Casting aside the cloak of metaphor, one has to be struck by the sheer death of incompetence though. It is no good being a bad crook today. Ditto goes for a neer-do-well do-gooder. This is the era of delivering the goods for a price.

You would be spiritually bankrupt if you didn’t want to move on. But the fact is Indians are in a hurry to catch up with, and perhaps surpass, the developed world. We no longer consider such ambition a pipe dream. And that means we are not only focussed on the future but innately aware of our glory days of the past.

(1,099 words)

7^th October 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit on the Edit Page of The Pioneer as "In search of a metaphor" on 19th October 2011. Also published simultaneously online at www.dailypioneer and in the facsimilie edition ePaper.

Collaboration Sutra

2011-09-19T01:55:00.001-07:00

From Modern Mughal miniatures by the Singh Twins

Collaboration Sutra

Renowned columnist Maureen Dowd who writes for the New York Times compared the poor academic credentials of the Republican Party front-runner Rick Perry with that of the Harvard educated and almost professorial President Obama, with not, let it be understood, anything approximating approval for Perry. She ends her piece with: “The occupational hazard of democracy is know-nothing voters. It shouldn’t be know-nothing candidates.”

In India, confronted by a host of portentous issues including terrorism, national security, corruption, inflation, economic slow-down and drift in governance, all of which have become onerous, the truth and applicability of Ms. Dowd’s comment, though made in the American context, is indeed perplexing.

It is probably true that neither the people of India, nor our rulers and administrators, quite know how to tackle our problems. But even though the urban or rural public may not understand the issues or possible solutions very well themselves, they are not willing to passively endure the non-doings of an incompetent sarkar any more.

One such portentous issue, on which the Government has actually taken some action, is the matter of land acquisition. The snatching of land from its original owners for a pittance without recourse has been carried out with Stalinist insouciance ever since the flag of independent India fluttered first in 1947. Then and throughout since, land acquisition has been carried out with spectacular brutality, instead of being conducted in a manner befitting a republic aspiring to ostensible equality for its citizens and one boasting universal franchise.

So now, even as the Union Cabinet has already passed a forward looking Land Acquisition Bill for further consideration and enactment by Parliament, the various interested parties and their lobbies are hard at work.

The agricultural land-owners are pleased with the provisions that henceforth acquisition of land by developers and industry will require the promoters to pay four times the highest registered sale price in the preceding three years for land sold and bought in the contiguous rural area. For land bordering urban municipalities, where rates are higher, the applicable formula is double the highest registered price of the last three years for a given area. In addition, 70% of the targeted land-owners have to agree to the proposal in order for it to go through, leaving the door open for further negotiation and upward mobility of the buying/selling price per acre.

The Government, in the interests of equity, fair return to its largest voting constituency, and natural justice to boot, will not interfere in this process. It will henceforth confine itself to land acquisitions strictly for the common weal, as in roads and freight corridors with widespread benefits for the general public.

Consequently, the builders and industry looking at green-field projects are a worried lot, because they think this Bill, when enacted into law, will sharply increase the costs of their projects. In fact, land prices have begun to rise already in anticipation, now that the threat of compulsory acquisition by the Government has been set aside.

These constituents also have a point, though urban builders can, of course, pass on the increases in land cost to the ultimate customers of their flats and villas, and they, in turn, can look forward to sharper appreciation in their real-estate values in short order. The so called low-cost or budget housing is a misnomer and non-starter in the NCR or around any of the metro cities anyway, because even a modestly priced and small flat is priced at over Rs. 30 lakhs. To get these at affordable prices, one has to move to Panwel near Mumbai or Bhiwadi or Kundli near the NCR for example. And given good connectivity, this need not be impractical either, as has been demonstrated in many places abroad.

Industry has also been directed in the Bill to share their potential profits by allocating some 15 to 17 % of the developed land to the original land-owners free of charge so that they can participate and partner in the development of their area.

Most of the complaints of the developers and industrialists are essentially retrograde because they are comparing what is fair to all with what was to their exclusive benefit till lately. So, it won’t surprise anybody when they do all they can to argue for a dilution of various provisions of the Bill before it becomes law.

The land-owners, including illiterate tribals from some of our mineral and resource rich states, are naturally strongly in favour of the new Bill, which seeks, after all, to redress the inequities of the colonial 1894 land acquisition law in force at present.

But even as the discussion gathers traction and momentum, there is another, perfectly workable methodology that has been in use for many years now- that of an equitable collaboration. In this formula, the land owners retain title to their land themselves and the developer or industrialist puts in all the money and expertise to develop it.

Collaboration agreements typically run on a 40% to one third share in favour of the landlord, inclusive of a negotiated advance of monies to seal the deal. This is a fair basis for a mutual sharing of the future appreciation in property values, or handsome profits on sale at any point in the development phase as well.

Similarly, in the case of industry developed in collaboration, the land owners get to participate as shareholders on an ongoing basis, with options to sell part or whole of their holdings as the time goes on, at freely negotiated or market rates.

This form of shared enterprise has the most important virtue of rendering most of the increase in land prices redundant, and normally draws voluntary and enthusiastic cooperation from land-owners. But of course, this kind of transaction may not suit the developers and industrialists who have long been used to a less equitable outright purchase of land at low prices, and the unfettered freedom to work on the development at their own pace and in the manner they see fit.

In terms of redevelopment of residential and commercial premises and plots in our metros, as well as a number of projects in the surrounding areas, collaboration is a tried and tested method which has proved most successful. There is no reason, given a shift in attitude on the part of business and industry, that it won’t work equally well in rural areas too.

But to underpin and ensure the good intent of the developer or industrialist, the Land Acquisition Bill, with a minimum of modification, needs to be passed into law as soon as possible.

(1,100 words)

19^th September 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Published by The Pioneer as Leader Edit on the Edit Page on 22nd September 2011 as "Look beyond new land Bill". Also published online at www.dailypioneer and in The Pioneer ePaper simultaneously.

Tiger! Tiger! Burning Bright

2011-09-14T22:46:00.000-07:00

Tiger! Tiger! Burning Bright

This country’s tectonic plates are shifting, and not just under Sonepat. It is a phenomenon occurring deep down in its unexplored innards. But on the surface too, there is much sensed excitement, like monkeys chattering in the forest to herald the approach of a tiger.

The old formulae, such as the much abused fig leaf of “secularism”, used to dupe the largest minority, and fear-monger amongst the smaller ones, have not totally lost their relevance, but they no longer command blind faith.

The perception of the people has become much more sophisticated as a consequence of greater prosperity and exposure to the world via satellite TV. The left-liberalism of the ruling party has undeniably yielded some benefits over decades of being in power, most of them continuously, but now this success at lifting the lowest common denominator, has come of age with its concomitant changes in aspiration.

This change, in aspiration and sophistication, is evident also in the reception given to the new wave commercial cinema coming from younger directors, and even the success of original music men such as AR Rahman.

Some of these new movies do not have the de rigeur songs; others lack the elaborate masala-mix of melodrama; others still, dare to explore elephant-in-the-room topics. As for AR Rahman, it is a me-and-my-studio-effects phenomenon the old school would not consider seriously. But it is AR Rahman with the international recognition and the Oscar and not any doyen of the old school.

This may all be a middle class and multiplex phenomenon, a metaphor stretched too far, but even then the size, spending power, education, exposure and clout of this segment cannot be denied. This has turned it from a passive “petit bourgeois” mindset, fearful of losing its hold on precarious “respectability”, into a more assertive and expressive one.

The change in the air is also evident in the realm of public affairs in the way the people are proving resistant to the old explanations, the mealy-mouthed platitudes, the lip-service, the sloth, inefficiency, waste and hypocrisy, accompanied by the routine passing of the buck. The inaction and ineffectiveness is resulting in an audible, if not yet loud ticking of the clock, even in the silence of this quartz-batteried and digital age.

The usual nostrums and broad spectrum stock explanations are not working. Nobody believes the cant being handed out. Truth be told, they never did, but added to the existent disbelief is a certain impatience and unwillingness to put up with it anymore. Even the tele-evangelising apologists for the ruling dispensation are having trouble mustering enthusiasm for the lines they are required to mouth.

As for the sycophancy towards the ruling family at the apex of the Congress Party, and indeed most of its allies, similarly topped by can-do-no-wrong satraps, it all has a tinge of desperation. And no minister of Government or party big-wheel wants to be less sycophantic than the competition, lest it costs one much more than one is willing to lose.

Out on the street meanwhile, the trouble is that the institutions and mechanisms of redressal are themselves dressed in cobwebs and rust. So there is nothing to do but mobilise on the streets, hopefully under the gaze of the force multiplying media.

We may not be part of the Arab and North African “Jasmine” revolution, mostly against dictators and absolute rulers backed by military juntas, but there too, dangerous as it is, it is the street that is the forum.

We in India are ostensibly democratic, but our functioning has always been decidedly feudal, autocratic, even colonial, with brown men replacing white ones. This malaise of obtuse arrogance affects all who get elected to office or occupy those inordinately powerful and unsackable posts in the Government.

The agitation over corruption that has caught the popular imagination is actually a symptom of deeper causes. It is probably the thin edge of a wedge that will open up Indian society to review and reform all that is antiquated and redundant in our country.

And stimulated by these yearnings for renewal, catalysed by this banner of obsolescence, it is difficult to point at even a single area of our daily experience not in need of overhaul. The frightening thing is that the framework and human resources available to bring about such comprehensive change is simply not available in-house to the Government.

Nor can our grasping politicians in faux people-friendly mode and fancy dress to match, cope effectively within their ponderous parliamentary procedures and the moribund Soviet style checks and balances. These are now seen by the public to be redundant mechanisms and excuses for doing nothing. What we have is a legion of yesterday men and women baffled by the demands of tomorrow, clueless, floundering, ageing, rigid, impotent and unresponsive.

And in the midst of all this, there is the spectre of a tiger approaching, with all the “fearful symmetry” of the four-legged one from William Blake’s evocative poem. Czar Nicholas must have felt like this when a determined Lenin took him and his centuries old monarchy head on.

Mr. Narendra Modi can unite the country under the truth of equal rights and opportunities for all communities, as opposed to the ruling dispensation’s time-worn strategy of playing Peter against Paul and living off the difference.

The Congressional Research Service of the United States has recently acknowledged Mr. Modi’s possibilities as a future prime minister, even before he and his party have enunciated their own positions.

This comes on top of an abstruse Supreme Court ruling, best understood by competent lawyers in its entirety, but which, the man on the street may be forgiven for construing as a “clean chit”.

In plainspeak, Modi is not Himmler, let alone Hitler, despite strenuous smear campaign efforts to that effect. He is undeniably a most efficient Chief Minister with a mission to deliver what he promises. And he can definitely do likewise at the national level given the chance. And this for Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Tribals and every other minority and community alike. Mr. Modi on his part, reacting to the propaganda against him, is working hard on refurbishing his image.

Therefore it is understandable that when the ruling dispensation puts the rise and rise of Narendra Modi in their smoking pipes, they can’t help but gag on the acridity. More so because the way things are going, the people of India could well see Mr. Modi, with his proven experience and effectiveness, as a better alternative to Mr. Rahul Gandhi for the prime ministership of India in 2014.

(1, 089 words)

15^th September 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as the Leader Edit on the Edit Page of The Pioneer on Dussehra 7th October 2011 as "Time to slay our demons". Simultaneously published online at www.dailypioneer where it is archived under Guest Columnists and in The Pioneer ePaper.

Forbearance and Virtue

2011-08-25T23:39:00.001-07:00

Forbearance and Virtue

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Edmund Burke, British statesman and philosopher from the 18^th century, said “Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist,” and, “the greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse,” in an echo of Lord Acton’s famous aphorism on the corruptibility of power.

In context therefore, it is somewhat amusing to witness parliamentary procedure being used as a shield to hide behind, by the very people who have outraged the public long enough with routine and boorish flouting of parliamentary norms. So much so that, both spontaneously, and as a consequence of political mobilisation, large numbers of citizens have finally take to the streets in protest, not just in Delhi but all over the country, led by an erstwhile army driver inspired by the Mahatma and his methods.

In the midst of the extensive and most commendable media coverage, one can almost see the manthan, the churning of the political discourse, with the possibility of a distinct shifting of gears. This is what happened economically, and irrevocably, in 1991 and may be happening, in the political context, today. And since the political classes are under attack, they are scrambling to find consensus and common ground amongst themselves.

Mr. Varun Gandhi, strangely, the only MP to visit the Ramlila Grounds to see what was going on for himself, described it, in pointedly dulcet tones, as a milestone and turning point that will be in the political history books 25 years from now.

This young man of 31, educated briefly at the London School of Economics, who may have come of age at last, may also have realised something profound, in the very midst of the cacophony and multiple versions of the Lokpal Bill jostling for political space. He too looks at this protest not so much as an anti-government matter but as one that goes well beyond what is being talked about right now, to what this popular movement actually stands for. It stands for change in the way things must be done by politicians in future.

It was equally, if not more of a pleasure, to listen to Mr. Arun Jaitley’s broad spectrum speech on the multifarious ways and means of nearly institutionalised corruption on the part of the system. He spoke in the Rajya Sabha on the 24^th of August 2011, broadcast live on most of our English news channels.

Mr. Jaitley is probably the most articulate, modern and cerebral amongst the top leadership of the BJP, particularly in English. His passionate delivery and well reasoned arguments are made with the finesse of a top-notch legal luminary that he is, and this brings great lustre to his role as the Leader of the Opposition in the upper house.

There is something of Obama at the hustings about his style, that suggests he could do very well as the international face of the BJP at the next general elections, rather than confining himself to back-room strategies as an in-charge of the election campaigns in various states.

Along with Mr. Narendra Modi, the great “NaMo”, with his tremendous governance skills and overwhelming grass-roots support in his home state of Gujarat, you’ve probably got the new avatar of the erstwhile Vajpayee-Advani team that took the BJP from two seats in parliament, namely their own, to power for a full-term, and thereafter on to being the principal Opposition and ruling alliance in several significant states around the country.

Certainly this duo has relative youth and vigour on its side, and both are also seasoned players at the forefront of their party administration. The third member of what could be a winning team, with a view to carrying along the NDA allies, while drawing others into the fold, should probably be Mr. Nitish Kumar, a proven success in his home state of Bihar.

Ironically, he too is in the NaMo mould when it comes to governance, but without the taint of alleged communal bias in his image. Bihar, of course, has a large and eligible minority voting population, and it has been important for Mr. Kumar to pass muster with this sizable constituency. In addition, as Mr. Kumar is a leading light of the JDU and indeed the NDA, and not the BJP, he can be very useful in the Opposition bid for power in 2014.

As for the ruling UPA, much of their aam aadmi plank has been eroded, both by inflation, and the humungous parade of corruption scandals following each other like floats in a Brazilian carnival. Besides, there is a generational shift afoot in the ruling family but the burden of experience still lies with seasoned cabinet ministers and party satraps decades older than the heir apparent and his junior ministering contemporaries.

It is going to be interesting to see how the Congress Party manages its contradictions in this regard, and its effective transition to team Rahul Gandhi. Courtiers can’t hack it at the polls, and stalwarts will not do so at the expense of their self-respect and power.

We have seen the grand old party languishing for many years in the wilderness after the passing of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi till Mrs. Sonia Gandhi came to head the Congress Party apparatus. And this is still the salutary writing on the wall.

In the paralysis of governance and political confusion at present, it is also becoming increasingly obscure as to what the priorities of UPA II are. It is no longer the aam aadmi, because nothing is being done for his benefit, so what is it?

As for a possible UPA III, like a sequel to a sequel of a badly scripted franchise, there is some real doubt now on whether it can attract large audiences to the box office/ballot box.

The larger point however is to do with the Burkian concept of forbearance or patient self-control when it comes to the oppression of the people’s aspirations, however inchoate. Law and order cannot descend into a Stalinist pogrom time and again and certainly not in our main cities while showing the face of ahimsa to Maoists, seditionists and separatists! Our Home Ministry has a quixotic idea of firmness if it wants to negotiate with savage and murderous Maoists and stamp on peaceful protestors under the full gaze of our national media.

As for the Burkian notion of Virtue, it is the public that is trying to teach the political classes the meaning of the word afresh. They truly think the politicos have forgotten its meaning, and so they can ignore this only at their own peril.

(1,098 words)

26^th August, 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published in The Pioneer Edit Page Leader Edit on September 2, 2011 as "The game has changed" and online at www.dailypioneer.com simultaneously.

The joys of the forward-looking statement

2011-08-01T07:34:00.001-07:00

The joys of the forward-looking statement

One of the joys of writing pieces for the Edit and Op-ed Pages of a national daily broadsheet, is the facility and licence to make “forward looking statements”.

During my decades in corporate life, it was something of a taboo to do so with regard to the affairs of public limited companies. The fear was that it would cause sharp-hearing punters and heavier-duty investors to trade on the listed stock of the company based on such pronouncements, which could provide a straws-in-the-wind reckoning on which way it was likely to lean in the future, and what profits could be made by speculating on such inclination.

In America and the West, and lately in India, the procedure, hallowed and admired once in financial market circles for the derring-do initiative it showed, is now anathema, and labelled a criminal offence. “Insider trading” attracts the punishment of instant dismissal and criminal prosecution. If convicted, it will tend to get one fairly long jail sentences too.

Plus, there were the hierarchical requirements which specified who was or wasn’t an “authorised spokesman”, and just what he or she was authorised to speak or issue written statements on. Even top brass were not immune to such restrictions, on the principle one always has to serve somebody. Of course, they could also feign ignorance of lowly operational matters when it suited them, but that is quite another matter.

Then again, all the information and persuasive pitching, was an attempt at opinion formation, which is also the objective of senior journalists and their not so distant cousins, the politicos. The urgent messaging seeks to influence and convert, via the medium of the well-written or well-spoken word, timed well too, and accompanied wherever possible, by relevant images.

Otherwise, it would just be so much reportage, and though it is eminently possible to slant reports to suit one’s world view, editorial writing and appearing on TV talk-shows provides a rather freer format to hold forth according to one’s persuasion. And long has it been known that fancy oratory can certainly give birth to the occasional good idea too.

Politics, with its proximity to power via the EVM (electronic voting machine), has the inside track on this declamatory process in theory, necessary for the all-important gathering of votes, along with a liberal use of monetary and other inducements.

But, it is seen that too much of the political messaging in India lately is about feint and parry, essentially defensive manoeuvre, minimalistic in scope, and very little by way of the expected thrust of leadership and the grand sweep of vision. Our Prime Minister, for example, seems reluctant to voice his opinions altogether, as if expecting to be ridiculed in the midst of his chaotic governance. When he comes out to speak to the public or the media, he gives the clear impression that he is doing so under pressure from his party.

In this prevailing climate of drift, most committed commentators sound like apologists of the UPA or the Opposition as the case may be, or indeed the Left, who uniquely manage to appear opposed to whatever is going on, whether they are in formal support of the Government, any issue, or not.

But with all this caginess as the prevailing order, it makes for a dreary narrative that rarely takes the India story or plot-line forward for the hopeful. That we are going through tough economic times both at home and globally does not help either.

Civil Society comes across, alas, as mostly naïve, with a great deal of fury and thunder that still isn’t tantamount to effective intervention, though Mr. Anna Hazare may prove this perception wrong yet. At least it is trying to do something to clean up the mess, and for that intention and effort it deserves appreciation from those who do much less.

And to carry the corporate analogy forward, politics does not actually destabilise the polity with its manifestoes, however radical, even though most are rarely implemented. Election promises too are largely forgotten once in power. But the fact remains, a great deal of governance is about policy making and its implementation, and has to be both continuous and viewed from a long term perspective.

In a democracy, to find a Government that seems to say nothing at all about its future direction is both disappointing and distressing. Nothing that is, apart from occasional probing comments pronounced by the more quixotic amongst its spokespersons, aimed at shoring up its perceived vote banks. And then, there is the tactic of routine and boring denial in counterpoint to the criticisms of the populace, the media, and the judiciary and, of course, the Opposition.

Combined with a dysfunctional parliamentary session or two, even as it will be interesting to see how the political classes handle the current Monsoon session, the picture of rudderless drift and insouciant unresponsiveness is more or less complete. Not to mention the huge legislative backlog suffering from unforgivable neglect! Juxtaposed with a politician’s natural urge to be a little economical with the truth, it makes for disinformation in place of transparency.

Which brings us to the central point of the deteriorated quality of our democratic discourse. We have parliamentarians and state legislators, who do not uphold the grand traditions of parliamentary democracy, but instead trash them under the full public gaze and the media spotlight, like so many loutish schoolboys. We have institutions, set up by our founding fathers to be vigilant against subversion of the workings of Government, ruthlessly compromised by political interference, to the extent that they are more or less beholden to the Government of the day. A bureaucracy that is disconnected and suffering from the same malaise as the institutions. And we have a judiciary, also corrupt in parts, and wholly overburdened to the extent that it can barely dispense justice.

So where do we go from here? Is it the abyss of failure to implement the vision of our founding fathers, or are we on the verge of a renewal and modernisation in our functioning that will give us new hope and determination to succeed?

It could go either way of course, but the balance of power seems in favour of an electorate growing more sophisticated in its needs and wants. Much of the dissonance being experienced today springs from a society and nation in the throes of growing up. The elected representatives in our young republic will have to respond to this new and more demanding reality therefore, or be replaced by others, more attuned to the present day, and willing to do so.

(1, 096 words)

1^st August 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Updated version of this post published as "India's road to redemption" as the leader edit on the Edit Page of The Pioneer on 20th August, 2011. Also published online at www.dailypioneer.com and featured in the ePaper and is archived under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

Goodbye Consumer Growth, Hello Infrastructure

2011-07-28T02:05:00.000-07:00

Colours in motion- Georgia O'Keeffe

Goodbye Consumer Growth, Hello Infrastructure

As India approaches its 64th Independence Day, we could look at the present economic situation both as an opportunity and a threat. Only a lack of imagination, which we are, alas, quite capable of demonstrating, will make it six of one and half a dozen of the other. Meanwhile, the world media has been reviewing 20 years of Indian reforms, and wondering when the stream of progress disappeared underground like the legendary Saraswati.

Consumer growth, and in this, one needs to include, despite the stretch, private sector investment in capacity expansion/modernisation; is bound to be impacted by the RBI’s rate hiking spree, with the Finance Minister saying there may be more to come. Ditto for the equity markets and job market, though short-term debt funds are doing well in this high interest scenario.

On the street, this will mean fewer new cars and less frequenting of bars. It will mean less home buying and more renting. People will pre-pay loans and pay off credit card balances, even as new loans will grow scarce, particular, and pricey.

All this fiscal discomfort is upon us in the cause of taming inflation, particularly food prices, and also because it is now hovering at just under double digits, making short work of any earning increases one might garner.

But as usual, there is a silver lining to this cloud when it is realised that one need not quarrel with the stringent Government action to control inflation, because it can be done without sacrificing GDP growth too.

Except that the growth, like in China over several years of double digit postings, has to come from Government and public sector investment in long gestation period infrastructure, making up for shortfalls in resources by contracting foreign credit, development funds, and supplier/partner equity.

This will entail getting away from the paranoid dogma of post-colonialism and third world Socialism that imagines that every foreign trading partner is an avatar of The East India Company. Internationals have long shaken their heads in disbelief at some of our tender conditions. It is as if we are not only holier-than-thou but distrustful and precious as well.

Instead of this inferiority complex ridden outlook, we must attract Government-to-Government funding and expertise, like the Japanese funding of the Delhi Metro and its largely French know-how. Also, consortia, made up of public and private enterprises, nominally from home with its slim pocket-book, and substantially from abroad, instead of the other way around.

And all these players in it together, in order to make an equitable buck for each, while moving India’s developmental ambitions along.

This is the kind of investment both in financial quantum, and years, of input, before one can hope to see an output, that the private sector in India cannot properly handle. It is actually much too small. The public sector, unlisted in the most part, monopolistic in strategic areas too, is several times larger, as a recent report pointed out, but even they are not up to the task, both financially and managerially.

Fortunately, the Government is thinking along these lines already. Recently, it has moved to sweeten the terms of FII investment in infrastructure bonds with a shorter lock-in period, chastened by a luke-warm response to a three year sticker.

They also think it is time to permit substantial foreign investment in multi-brand retailing, not just in consumer durables and apparel etc. but food, and lift restrictive conditions on foreign entities, confined so far, tied to minority stakes, and wholesaling.

This is excellent news because, if implemented, it will prevent rot and wastage in our agricultural produce to market dynamics, create refrigerated cold chains, modernise procurement practices and raise value-addition and food processing standards, and raise the remuneration of farmers and other producers. But, setting all this in motion and thereby delivering new, qualitatively better options to the consumer at more competitive prices will, of course, take time.

Similarly, as consumers everywhere are bracing for higher electricity tariffs, it is a good time to put in those state-of-the art nuclear power plants from France, the US, Russia, Canada, Japan, that were fought for so hard by UPA 1.

Nuclear power plants have a considerable gestation period, before they get to turning out stable, long-term, and relatively cheap power. A nuclear power plant from France’s Areva, for example, has a life-span of around 60 years.

They need to be sited, because of threat of terrorist or enemy attack, not on the beach, like protest-ridden Jaitapur, Maharashtra, but in concrete secure installations underground, or inside hill-sides as if they were military targets. After all, they could well be, in the somewhat charged South Asian theatre.

But dozens of nuclear power plants, supplied in due course with domestic uranium, since we have now found very large deposits, plus one of the largest global availabilities of Thorium, makes this form of power generation the logical choice of the future. Moreso, since we have to import over 70 % of our petroleum products, and demand is growing all the time. Petroleum prices are indeed one of our most critical cost-push factors towards inflation.

There are other projects in the defence realm, the building of our own aircraft carriers and other large warships, nuclear submarines, the building of military aircraft, satellites, missiles and their delivery systems, protective and defensive clothing and so on, that can be developed in the interim. We can substantially help the economies of the West at this critical juncture, even as we help ourselves in these strategic areas to reduce our dependence on imports.

Then there is the building of strategically important all-weather tunnels in the North West and North East.

And even if we accomplished only a small proportion of some of the things outlined here, along with other infrastructure work also underway, the building and retention of a 10% or more growth rate would be assured for several years to come, and this, with proper long-term contracts signed, without spiking inflation.

It would also, thanks to the new infrastructure to come, as the former Indian kings built palaces in times of famine, and President Hoover built the Hoover Dam during the Great Depression, set the stage for a prolonged consumer-led boom in the future.

The alternative to this growth by other means could well be not just a slow-down but recession. And while that will certainly stop inflation in its tracks, it will sorely damage, if not put an end to, the India growth story. Surely we don’t want that to happen. Instead we want to reboot, at 64, the next leg of the Reforms process, led this time by the infrastructure sector.

(1,104 words)

28^th July 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as leader on Edit Page of The Pioneer as "Reboot and reform" on August 10, 2011. Also published simultaneously online at www.dailypioneer.com and archived there under Columnists. In addition, it appears in the day's ePaper as well.

Kick the Tyres, Light the Fires

2011-07-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

Kick the Tyres, Light the Fires

We need to get ready. Ready to make the most of a scenario where the West is having a very tough time managing its colossal debt burden. It’s not just the European Union with country after country going belly-up. Currently it’s Greece, Spain and now Italy, the 3^rd largest economy in the EU, groaning under the twin scourges of massive debt and recession.

Meanwhile President Obama, across the Atlantic, is trying to get the US Congress to permit the raising of the American sovereign debt ceiling, because otherwise the US will run out of money in a matter of days. This in turn could set off a global debt crisis of unprecedented proportions with cascading defaults and runaway interest rates, while causing a crisis of confidence in international trade and a tsunami of damage in the real economies around the globe.

But, as in India, there’s party politics afoot, rather than the urgent bipartisan cooperation required. The Republicans don’t want higher taxes if they agree to raise the debt limit. And the Democrats, want to do something about reducing deficits already at stratospheric heights, before they permit their President to raise the debt ceiling.

President Obama, skilful politician that he is, is trying to give both sides a little of what they want, playing off short-term considerations in favour of the Republican position, while bargaining for long-term strategies to bring down the national deficit to please his own side. Being a President who has been managing one crisis after another, mostly of an economic or military nature, from the first day that he stepped into the Oval Office, I have no doubt that he will succeed in the immediate sense.

But afterwards, the US and Europe will have to make more substantive changes to the way they deal with the global order, because the very engines of growth have shifted.

India has debt too, and much of it born of inefficiency and the taking of policy soft options for populist reasons; and yet it’s nothing like what they have in the West. This is partly because we have simply not been able to borrow as much internationally, or on the terms that the Western nations have been able to give themselves. And partly because of an innate conservativeness of approach.

But now, the West doesn’t have growth either, because they’ve already completed that economic cycle through the post WWII era for several prosperous decades; and now, there is too much and duplicated capacity in largely out-of-date manufacturing facilities, and not enough customers for their “rust-belt” goods.

Of course, things are fine in pockets of excellence, such as defence production, sophisticated engineering and aviation, and in those higher reaches of software and IT, even entertainment, where America still holds the commanding heights, along with the likes of Russia, Israel, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and yes, China.

India is many leagues behind the big powers in this and most other regards. Ours is still an economy of want and obscene disparities, with bottled-up and unmet needs from years of lag. At fewer than two trillion dollars in GDP, we also lack any real size as yet.

India needs more of almost everything- more electricity, more roads, more dams, more schools, more hospitals, more education- it’s a seemingly endless list of considerable magnitude. We don’t have enough of any of these things, neither by way of quantity nor quality, probably because of lazy governance and lack of resources.

India does have domestic demand though, almost endless demand for at least twenty or thirty years of development at an accelerated pace; and probably a half century of it, if we keep trundling on as we are.

We need to pick up speed and go faster than a no doubt creditable 7 to 9 per cent pace of growth currently. Because even this has us falling behind on every planning parameter, with massive cost overruns to boot. And yet, compared to negative growth or a weak percent or two in the West, our growth rates are phenomenal.

Still, given the scale of our requirements relative to the size of our economy, almost every macro-economist agrees that we need to sustain double digit growth in GDP if we are to abolish poverty amongst 400 million of our poorest. But double-digit growth can only come if we take the bold decisions necessary to attract the foreign capital we will need.

Some say, perhaps in apology, that our pace of growth is better assimilated and sustainable precisely because it is not ahead of demand. This, of course, is a self- serving justification. China swiftly and deliberately creates vast and modern infrastructure much ahead of its demand curve.

And yet, use the Indian model or Chinese, it is the destiny of these two Asian nations to take up most of the slack in the 21^st century, along with Brazil, Russia, and some think South Africa. The situation in America and Europe will not ameliorate anytime soon without huge structural and policy changes. Their Governments need to engineer a true partnership with the emerging BRICS and other lesser economies, not only in the sharing of opportunity, expertise and natural resources, but political power too. Therefore many international prescriptions will have to be rewritten, many treaties scrapped.

Besides, the very globalisation process that began with the export of low-end manufacturing and service industry jobs, mainly to the cheap labour areas of Asia decades ago, will now have to perforce migrate up the value chain, with greater and greater technology transfer, even-handed cooperation and reciprocity.

Without this, except for those areas where BRICS, and beyond them, the rest of the world, have too large an expertise gap to bridge, Western commerce with the globe will grind down further.

In order to start growing again, as it must, the developed West must jettison its traditional closed-shop style of international bargaining. Just throwing money at its moribund economies won’t work because most of it tends to migrate abroad where the opportunity for profit in commodities and other trades is greater.

It will have to bridge the traditional North-South Divides substantively and proactively, in ways that have never been tried. And yet the exigencies of survival will certainly prompt the change sooner rather than later.

But the truth is, India and China and the other BRICS also need Western expertise, organisational finesse and technology, just as much as they need our markets. They need to be ready to trade the one for the other, but the chances of striking good bargains have only risen sharply of late.

(1,092 words)

21^st July 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit in The Pioneer on 28th July 2011 as: "Time for India to surge ahead". Also online at www.dailypioneer.com and in The Pioneer ePaper. Archived under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

Land of Hope

2011-07-12T00:16:00.000-07:00

Georgia O' Keeffe

Book Review: INDIA Land of a billion entrepreneurs

Author: Upendra Kachru
Published by: Pearson. 2011.
258 pages. Rs. 399/-

Land of Hope

Mr. Kachru’s new book makes for a stimulating, free-flowing read, and since its tone and thrust is both optimistic and grounded, it is also inspirational. A management thinker that waves the Indian flag with logic and pride is refreshing, particularly when he not only recognises how far we have come since liberalisation of our economy began in 1991, but has a fair estimate of how far we are going. There is therefore much to recommend, by way of educational input and original analysis in Mr. Kachru’s latest offering to the lexicon of management theory.

One exciting idea is the highlighting of 55% of our population, rural and urban, being self-employed. To a cynic this may seem like a euphemism for “unemployed” or “under-employed”, but common sense dictates that survival from the grass-roots upwards proves, and to be a valid statistic, it has to do that much, that these people are necessarily entrepreneurial, albeit to a lesser or greater extent, and with varying degrees of success.

Of course, in counter-point, we can see that the modestly-paid over-employment in Government departments, and the resulting inefficiency and corruption therein, does not exactly recommend employment as a panacea in itself. But the moot point is that today there are many opportunities that were not there in our Socialist and Public sector emphasising years, and this book gently urges us to see the possibilities in this.

This percentage figure of the self-employed, when applied to a population cresting towards 1.25 billion people, is indeed gargantuan, and possibly holds the key towards the ultimate, if somewhat utopian goal of full employment.

Another compelling proposition, has the author suggesting that India has deployed its educated middle class into the breach of the global knowledge economy, particularly in the IT realm, very successfully at that, because it was the right thing to do while it plays catch-up on infrastructure, technology induction etc.

While it is doubtful if it was as prescient and deliberate as all that, it certainly seems like a brilliant idea in hindsight, given the numbers of high quality graduates from our IITs and IIMs, thanks to the originally Nehruvian policy of putting substantial resources into higher education.

Besides, our current Home Minister and formerly several terms Finance Minister, Mr. P.Chidambaram, likes pointing out that the private sector cannot do very much on its own without Government backing. Since Information Technology (IT), is more or less a private sector phenomenon, it is arguable that Government support by way of tax breaks and patronage may very well have played its part in its success.

However, on the global stage, we have remained largely body-shoppers obsessed with H1B Visas to the US, even after two decades of emergence, rather than people who have climbed up the value chain with branded and copyrighted complete software solutions.

Still since one must do what one can, it is good to remember that this has not stopped the Chinese from reaching a very influential position in global commerce, with dominance in the manufacturing of all manner of low-end products from dolls and surgical steel ear-ring hooks and eyes, to the world’s one stop-shop for computer hardware, largely for export.

Simultaneously, China manufactures high-end defence equipment including missiles, aircraft, nuclear submarines, even aircraft-carriers, and the Chinese have state-of-the-art infrastructure for dams, bridges, tunnels, high-speed trains, highways, and pipeline building capabilities for domestic use. So doing what we do in IT should not hinder India either. After all, there is little percentage in challenging your buyer’s survival on his own home turf!

IT does contribute nicely to our relatively new-found “service economy”, which now accounts for nearly 60% of our GDP, risen from well under a half billion in US dollars at the end of the Madame Indira Gandhi era, to nearly $2 trillion now.

Meanwhile, as Mr. Kachru says, other areas of public and private endeavour, such as manufacturing, agriculture, processes, systems and technology upgradation, are gradually addressing the demands of the second decade of the 21^st century.

That this is not going as well as it might is fair indictment of our governance and innate timidity of policy-making. A Socialist era hangover in the form of left-liberal economics still holds considerable sway in India and so gradualism is the best we can hope for, despite consequent huge cost overruns and scandalously slow project implementation. Not for us, possibly ever, the Chinese pace of getting things done!

However, this book prefers to look at the glass as half full rather than half empty, as it rightly should.

The avoidance of jargon and a minimum of graphs and charts to bolster arguments and an engaging anecdotal style, is also appealing in this book. Particularly because so many management theorists affect the use of a rather dry and stastistics/reference heavy approach, that tends to obscure more than it reveals, except perhaps to the most in-the-know of academicians. But for the general reader, this book is both clear and interesting.

The author illustrates his points on the many facets of entrepreneurship with many first-hand interviews and studies of well-known and successful Indian companies in diverse fields, including Rahejas in construction and real-estate, data-storage success Moser-Baer, and the home and abroad luggage maker, VIP Industries.

And being a professor himself, after being a company executive too, Mr. Kachru stresses the importance of skill upgradation. This is what turns a small business into a bigger one, fuelled by the confidence that the newly acquired knowledge can bring.

(929 words)

12^th July 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Meat and Potatoes

2011-07-10T05:04:00.001-07:00

Meat and Potatoes

Sunday Times of London Style Magazine food critic AA Gill, a Scotsman with a Sikh name that he does not explain: perhaps it was originally McGill, but he dropped the Mc because of its less than haute cuisine association with the branded hamburgers. McBurgers, that have been sold so plentifully, that if they were laid end-to-end, they would go to the moon and back several times over.

Mr. Gill, who might be a Sikh after all, also has initials in place of his first names, and wrote, somewhat enigmatically, in a recent restaurant review, that “meat is all eugenics and fascism”.

AA Gill is a mysterious sort, often favours dark glasses and eschews alcohol, despite being a food critic. He goes on the strength of his intelligence, taste, language and stylistic skills, even if he doesn’t ever say so himself. All this, without once imbibing the wine.

As for Gill’s typically elliptic comment: did he mean by the former moniker, the genetic engineering and up-breeding involved to produce superior meat? And the fascism is presumably the uncompromising attitude necessary to make it happen.

This applies to beef and pork, because they are the serious meats of choice in the Western world. Fowl, Turkey, Duck, however formidable, are also-rans, decided poor cousins, to whom the same principle may well apply, but without the same degree of exactitude and accountability.

Though it is at once true, that huge, essentially tasteless in themselves turkeys, like triple distilled Vodka, have been known to feed mini-van fulls, of family and friends, while still yielding left-overs.

This even as one turkey is pardoned every year. A reprieve granted by no less that the President of the US for Thanksgiving, that peculiarly Puritanical Pilgrim Fathers celebration at the heart of American prudery.

Besides, one wouldn’t know how to classify snake-meat, not to mention, kangaroo, horse, seal, elk, moose.

Where that leaves the eponymous potatoes that proverbially accompany the meat, is anybody’s guess. And this in all meat-eating countries, including Ireland, though there, they allegedly prefer to live and die by the potato.

My personal guess would liken them, the humble potatoes, to the excellent back-up singers without whom no singing stars of heft would properly shine. However, ask them, and the back-up singers, like stage-lights, will profess contentment with their good jobs to do; no more, no less.

Another report, not written by Mr. Gill at all, on European, U.S., South-American, Australian, and Japanese milk, certainly; and others who follow their Dairy-farming practices, indicates that it contains all manner of additives fed to the cows that gave it up. And that drinking quantities of milk production enhancing boosters meant for the cow, but inescapable if one imbibes its milk, may not be all that good for humans.

European and American dairy-produced milk, has large draughts of cow hormone boosters, and cow vitamins and cow tranquilisers too. But clearly, what may be divine for the bovine is not so for old “two legs”. Also, milk from the free-on-the-range variety, spending their days in bucolic grazing, like the Swiss Chocolate mothers, perhaps don’t poison as they sweeten.

Fortunately, milk and meat are two different things. Though the cow hopped-up on boosters is also capable, no doubt, of contributing wonderful tenderloin. So delicious as it may be, to drink from, taste, eat; is eugenics, let alone fascism, working out to be a hero or a villain?

And so, at last, to the question, drawing upon the ready analogy, of whether India has, you know, meat; or is merely aggregated from the potato patch, bless its soul.

The moot point in this: it all begins with land. There’s land for grass and land for things in concrete and other bits for the macadam and rail. But first, there is indeed the land. Now in India, land is the best way to get-rich-quick if one has the power to change its use parameters- the hallowed Governmental stroke-of-the-pen CLU (change in land use), a kind of open-sesame planning permission, transforms the potato patch into very powerful, and enriching meat instantly.

The farmer/land-owner sells, or is compelled to sell via acquisition notices from the Government, using an 1894 law that permits daylight robbery, because the unilaterally set acquisition rates have no bearing on prevailing market prices at all.

But it isn’t as if the Government is not aware of the profit potential of the agricultural land thus acquired. But in its original “use” state, one can only grow food or graze livestock on it. But after the Government turns the self-same land, notwithstanding whether it is arable or waste-land, into “commercial” or “residential” or “institutional”, hey presto, by just changing its classification, it turns into a gold mine. And there are many takers, willing to pay many multiples of what the Government paid the farmer to usurp his land just a few pen strokes ago.

This is what is at the heart of the meat and potatoes conundrum, because quite apart from normal co-existence, in this context, said meat and said potatoes are actually interchangeable, and never mind the incipient eugenics or fascism involved!

This inherent unfairness to the original land-owner goes a long way to explain the political fortune boosting propensities of both Singur and Parsa-Bhataul.

And for once, Mr. Rahul Gandhi has latched onto a genuinely worthwhile cause. His suggestion that there should be two land acquisition laws, one applicable for roads, bridges, railway lines etc. and another for SEZs, institutional, residential/commercial development etc. has substantial merit.

Government might be justified in commandeering land cheaply if it truly puts it to a “public purpose” like said road, port, rail etc., whereas all the other uses, just various forms of property development, benefit limited numbers of people at best, including the pen-wielders involved in conjuring up that all important CLU, but to the decidedly unfair exclusion of the original land-owners.

A colonial administration, which is what obtained in 1894, was of course not interested in serving any interests other than its own, but, as in much else that involves the independent Government of India to date, it has seen little reason to change its ways, or its laws, to actually serve the people it, in effect, lives off.

Still, at present, new land acquisition laws may indeed come to be passed in parliament and not just the state assemblies, because they are of interest to Mr. Gandhi and ergo, to a Central Government. A Central Government moreover run by a Party intent on embarrassing the state government of Uttar Pradesh in the lead up to the forthcoming assembly elections there in 2012.

(1,099 words)

10th July 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Ram Rajya

2011-06-26T00:41:00.001-07:00

Ram Rajya

TIME magazine reports, in a snippet, that 47% of Americans can’t raise $2,000, in US dollars, in 30 days, without selling an asset. I dare say most of the middle classes in India, including the lower echelons of the descriptor, can find, or borrow, one solitary lakh of rupees in one month without liquidating any asset.

Of course, our poor, some 500 million souls, and almost the same percentage of our 1.25 billion population, can’t.

However, the comparison is between the richest country in the world, albeit going through a rough economic patch, and the second fastest growing emerging nation, going through its own political turbulence and governance deficits.

But then America is largely made up of wage-earners. These range from the mind boggling compensation of the business leaders to the millions of humbler folk living on weekly pay-slips. This is because some 3% of the American population actually own everything there, and in most other areas of American influence across the world. Capitalism has its advantages, but they are rarely spread evenly.

Another major difference between America and India is the sheer extent of national debt. India, with an economy hovering short of 2 trillion dollars has a large current account deficit, but it is still in single digit percentages. India also has a sizeable chunk of national debt, measured against GDP, and this is definitely in double digit percentages. Our off-book liabilities, such as those of various poorly run state power corporations, ad hoc “non-plan” expenditure and the like, are considerable. We probably owe at least one third to 40% of our GDP, when all of it is accurately admitted to.

This could have been higher, but partly because our infrastructure bottlenecks in electrical power, roads, trains, ports, airports, automation, health, education, methodology, etc. they collectively act to dampen confidence in our economy, and slow it down. Besides, we are growing at anywhere between 7% to 9% per annum nevertheless.

But America, the world’s sole super power is hardly growing now, but continues to do its borrowing in many multiples, not percentages, of its $13 to $ 15 trillion economy. Its national debt is reported at 64% of GDP, but add in all the off-balance sheet liabilities and it is more like 500% according to FORTUNE magazine.

Bob Rodriguez, CEO of a $16 billion money management firm First Pacific Advisors thinks there will be a debt crisis in the American economy within two to five years and that it will shake the global financial systems much harder than the financial crises of 2008. Rodriguez expects US Government borrowing to hit a wall of international under-confidence, sending global interest costs spiralling out of control.

America is the greatest debtor in the world, and China, alongside most of the other leading countries, including India, is its greatest lender. And the US dollar is the main currency of global trade.

So, if America, as a nation, goes through a debt burden crisis, it will be many magnitudes bigger than the 2008 one. It will hit most national economies, in a horrific domino effect. The answer, Rodriguez says, is fiscal belt-tightening now, not more and more borrow-and-spend policies to promote growth. But, many do not agree with this, citing the Great Depression of the 1930s when precisely this was done.

India, of course, goes too much the other way, ever ready to strangulate growth, citing inflation, but never really looking for efficiencies and modernisation as substitute strategies. So, we become World Bank/IMF/ Davos Summit heroes by default. But it is interesting to note that no other country wants to follow the Indian way nevertheless, lacking perhaps our sizeable domestic demand.

That we routinely sacrifice our destiny on the altar of fiscal prudence is cold comfort to those of us who want this country to first, for once, achieve its true potential, because that could heave us into a different shore and paradigm going forward.

Slowdowns hit the poorest hardest, and this is true of people and nations. But a recent book by Management Professor Upendra Kachru: India Land of a billion entrepreneurs, meditates entertainingly on how we have the largest number of shops and mobile hawkers, in urban and rural India alike, relative to our population, in the world. The book also comments that: “The way entrepreneurs operate, whether their strategy is attack or defence, differentiates them”. Indian fiscal policy, on the whole, is defensive.

This prudent stance may well be built into the national DNA. Traditional Indian business always emphasises the balancing of the daily cash books, with a bias towards income over expenditure. Our middle class can come up with a lakh because we’ve got it secreted away, in public sector bank savings accounts, in post-office savings, in ubiquitous PPF accounts, in life insurance policies, and even in the relatively new-fangled mutual funds with their open-plan formats and any working day deposits and withdrawals.

Welfarism, including the NAC variety, is largely, if not wholly, directed at the poor and the destitute, even as it infamously enriches the gravy train that leads towards them. Perhaps the Americans, long used to being on top, are habituated to spending every cent they have; but we cannot afford to, in any event. There will be no bail-outs for us because we at least have food on the table and a roof above our heads.

When the middle class in India has no money to fall back upon, given the less than dire nature of our needs, we are on our own, because the poor are much worse off, and even they have totted up over 25 lakh farmer suicides and counting!

Perhaps this lack of bold carpe diem, is a civilisational deficit, in a nation that boasts of 5,000 year plus traditions. Because, erring always on the side of caution, we don’t seem to have the guts to realise our full potential, not only just now, but at any time during our long story of survival.

Of course, this virtue of making sure we have a financial cushion, is partly due to our innate conservatism, our trust in gold and silver over currency, and the saving habit, that has only strengthened with greater prosperity after 20 years of the reforms process. The savings rate has actually gone up by over 10 % to about 32% of household earnings, instead of the other way around.

Another country that saves like us is China, and they’ve also been around for centuries through ups, like today, and not a few downs too. But just because they save, the Chinese don’t skimp on infrastructure, national security, or growth like us.

(1,102 words)

26th June 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader,Edit Page on June 30th, 2011, entitled "China's boon,India's bane" and online at www.dailypioneer.com. Also in The Pioneer ePaper. Archived under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

Obliquity

2011-06-20T09:15:00.001-07:00

Obliquity

What is truth?
Pontius Pilate

The one major thing in Indian governance that is not substantially tainted yet, despite routine shrill allegations, usually from the losing side, is the conduct of elections under the Election Commission of India. And the actual, rather swift, counting of votes from the hard-to-rig EVMs (electronic voting machines).

We are somewhat ahead of the world in the use of EVMs, despite unproven allegations of electronic ways to make them favour one side or the other. They are, curiously, not yet used in the West - remember the “pregnant chads” controversy from a punching of cards system in the Florida primaries, in the closely fought George W Bush Vs Al Gore presidential election?

Well, our voters from the proverbial Kashmir to Kanyakumari, in the largest voting exercise on earth, don’t have a problem with them. And, as a consequence, our elections are much less susceptible to the traditional “stuffing” of ballot boxes. But alas, we tend not to have wildly popular winners with over 99% of the votes cast, such as former President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan or President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe!

This free and fair election system is probably India’s last bastion, because even the higher judiciary has not escaped corruption charges, with more than one Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in contention in recent times. And so, the supremacy of the people’s verdict holds out the greatest hope for the future; despite the inexcusable go slow and stonewalling tactics of the Government besieged by a sea of corruption charges and the huge civil discontent over them.

With every investigative institution, including the CBI, also allegedly serving the Government’s narrow objectives, the voting public has no recourse against the might of an experienced ruling party, except at election time. But fortunately for us, the Indian voter knows this full well from past experience.

So irrespective of the havoc being wreaked on the protests of “civil society” by multiple and ruthless government action, all is by no means lost. Matters may well be addressed, if not redressed, at the general elections in 2014, notwithstanding the several assembly elections before that, which will also indicate which way the wind is blowing.

The Indian voting public has already shown itself to be astute and well-informed in recent assembly elections in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu in particular, and there are many instances of how it has brought about dramatic and decisive change time and again throughout our 63 years as an independent nation.

The Government meanwhile is inexplicably unable, or perhaps unwilling, to stem the rot with any urgent measures, be they swiftly bringing those charged with corruption to book, or controlling inflation and runaway prices, or indeed reviving the long stalled reformation process amongst other things. So we find the economy is slowing, the stock markets declining, and governance in a tail-spin.

In such a situation, the UPA may be well served by changing tack. It could resort to the power of tangentiality, that is, approaching subject matters via the scenic route, obliquely, rather than directly. This method has long been the life blood of diplomacy, and some new age management theorists say, all successful change.

It leaves, owing to its strategic ambiguity and deliberate vagueness, its calibrated diplomatic code, its ability to save face, enough wiggle room to wriggle out of long held positions. Positions, that have perhaps outlived their usefulness.

Using obliqueness, not only people and ruling parties, but nations also, can stay engaged in almost all situations short of all-out hells-bells war. And even then, the secret back channels would keep buzzing, just as, in the old days, spies from every side and a half mingled and swarmed over neutral territories-- such as the storied and romantic Casablanca in Morocco, the more matter-of-fact Geneva in Switzerland, Lisbon, Portugal, or Vienna, Austria. And all that spying was also diplomacy, and not just an opportunity to meet, and mate, with Mata Hari.

The result of such negotiated change, includes the accommodations necessary on both sides and flanks, across parties at the parliamentary and assembly levels, bilaterally at the national one, and sometimes multilaterally too. It can actually move mountains, an example being the multilateralism that resulted in India’s recent and semi-official inclusion by the de-jure nuclear powers club.

Consensus building processes, arrived at obliquely, with some big brother support to boot, do not result in rupture and its inconvenient consequence of lack of continuity. And this, even amongst people and nations of considerably divergent viewpoint, or in common parlance, amongst sworn enemies, frothing at the mouth, with daggers drawn!

Obliqueness, or as one new management study calls it, obliquity, has the embedded virtue of effectiveness and positive yield, that swashbuckling, but usually tragic, duels of honour do not.

Our long-held notions of non-alignment are a case in point. They were betrayed from the start with our eagerly sought inclusion in the Soviet camp, necessary for our very survival. But it didn’t somehow stop us pounding the pulpit at international fora without ever noticing the ridiculousness of our situation.

Meaning, in a roundabout munimji to sarkar kind of way, that in order to succeed, leaving leg-room for contenders to adjust and shift positions, is probably better, and happens when issues are approached tangentially.

This way, we could not only arrive at consensus on the running of this country internally, but also work with both China and Pakistan, at a qualitatively better level, without in fact compromising any of our strategic concerns. We could however actively refurbish, renovate, remove and reincarnate a political trajectory.

Closer home, think of what a power of minority wooing could do to the prime ministerial prospects of a most efficient chief minister like Narendra Modi of Gujarat? And how it can result in forgiveness, much like the Delhi anti-sikh riots of 1984, which actually killed more Sikhs than the Godhra carnage killed Muslims, despite, or is it because of, the oft repeated mantra of secularism? Played right, the whole Godhra controversy can yet be released to the slipstream of history, duly defanged, denuded, dessicated and dropped.

Pablo Picasso, famous and successful from the age of 19, spoke of art as a lie that revealed the truth. But in this season of innumerable scams and political drift, public and media outrage, actual retribution still faces heavy headwinds.

Is this then the reactionary backlash against a head-on confrontationist approach essentially doomed to failure? Or is the sarkari repression mobilising and consolidating public opinion rather well, making it ready to counterattack and unravel the power structures of today at the next elections?

(1,100 words)

20th June 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

You can run but you can't hide

2011-06-07T06:14:00.001-07:00

You can run but you can’t hide

In the middle of India’s anti-corruption stir fuelled by civil society, one is reminded of the theory of information blitzing and opinion building that underwrites the practice. Much of politics, apart from media, marketing, advertising and public relations runs on these very tracks.

I have to invoke Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the famous Canadian professor, who made a considerable impact when he published “The Medium is the Massage: an Inventory of Effects (1967). This book was about the effect of different mediums on the human sensorium. Media, such as TV with its visual content in addition to audio, radio, music on vinyl, even “noise”, were not only “hot” and “cool” on the senses, said McLuhan, but were “extensions” of human personalities, their emotions and thoughts.

McLuhan not only anticipated the ability of the various mediums of communication to witness, record, influence, but actually chronicle the inevitability of change.

Through the 1970s, hip media types toted McLuhan’s books around because they were loaded with futuristic phrases such as “global village” and “surfing”, meaning the very same as what we do today with keyboard and mouse, and not what beach boys do in Malibu or Bondi Beach.

McLuhan, who died in 1980, also visualised the “world-wide-web”, still called “www” in his very own phrasing, even though the internet was not even invented till the 1990s.

Marshall McLuhan anticipated the freedom of information and action the web would bestow on the ordinary member of the public. Still, he didn’t foresee the ubiquitous cellphone in every pocket, and the apexing and convergence of various abilities on this platform of great portability.

In the relatively simple 1960s and 1970s, technologically if not culturally speaking, people were exploring sexual freedom with the advent of the contraceptive pill- minus the scourge of HIV and AIDS. They were also much troubled by the inequities of the Vietnam War, in a time when left-liberalism, even socialism in certain quarters was thought to be fashionable.

In this setting, McLuhan’s message seemed both avant garde and psychedelic, rather than dazzlingly prescient. But then, given the mindset of the times, a lot of pronouncements did, such as Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary’s exhortation to: “Turn on, tune in, drop out”.

This was not, we are now told, a call to use drugs, particularly LSD, and do nothing, as was popularly supposed; but a fairly cerebral call to look within. But then, till recently, we were still in the era of managing perception to reflect the reality we wanted to project.

Hence, in his 1983 autobiography Flashbacks, Leary explained, though some would accuse The LSD using professor of revisionism: "Turn on meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive... Tune in meant interact harmoniously with the world around you... Drop out meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change". This high-minded apologia could almost be a prescription for the awakened Civil Society of today, not willing to stomach the corruption meekly anymore, instead of a seemingly misinterpreted hippie battle cry from the seventies.

Leary even reworked his famous slogan for the personal computer era in the decade before he died in 1996. He now said, “turn on, boot up, jack in”, and presumably contribute to the cyberdelic counterculture that cannot be controlled by the state. Once a subversive, always a subversive, I suppose.

If indeed Leary was suggesting a cultural revolution via the net, isn’t it a little of what is happening in Indian Civil Society,both from the City (read Anna) and country (read Baba Ramdev), albeit vanguarded by conventional media, and so long as the Government does not send in the clowns. Murmurs about the “Emergency” have not surfaced without possibility.

But it isn’t just the freedom of the Internet and its denizens on Facebook and Twitter and the Blogosphere that is the McLuhan style massage here. In 2011, we have to accept that the nature of the domestic and global political discourse itself has changed irrevocably.

Traditional politics from the days of Julius Caesar involved the management of perception. JFK won his sliver thin presidential battle with Richard Nixon by suggesting the latter looked like an untrustworthy used car salesman, exploiting Nixon’s intense five ‘o clock shadow in his presidential bid advertisements. And the photogenic JFK handled the first televised presidential candidate debates very much better than the ill-at-ease Nixon. But then, Richard Nixon did manage to repackage himself expertly as described in “The Selling Of The President” by Joe McGinniss (1968), for his next, and successful bid for the high office.

But with the McLuhan Age no longer in the future, a new transparency, not intentional, not even voluntary, has come to stay, and will determine things going forward.

It is not just the brilliant simplicity of a virtual drop box in cyberspace that is at the heart of the Wikileaks phenomenon. It is the true, if inconvenient meaning of transparency, without the fear of consequences, for the anonymous “snitch”. Or even for the aggressive Tehelka brand of ambush journalism. It is the empowering technology being carried around in every pocket today on a cellphone; ubiquitous, but potent as a loaded gun.

And then there is streaming technology, used extensively and thus constantly improved by the purveyors of free pornography on the internet. It not only entertains millions, but also enables the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, the CIA Director and the military top brass of the US, sitting in Washington DC, to watch the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s lair in distant Abbotabad. And this, in real time.

Any place can be infiltrated, anything can be streamed and/or recorded with spy cameras, on cellphones, or be conveyed, as to what is decided, via text message or email, almost simultaneously, with reasonable anonymity.

It gives a new meaning to the notion of “live” reporting, because this kind does not need the services of a professional journalist, except perhaps to contextualise and distribute the information revealed. No Cabinet meeting, full of Union Ministers, notwithstanding their vows of secrecy and confidentiality, is safe anymore.

Besides, the 24x7 news channels have ample time and space to give blanket coverage to opposing view points, and the newspapers specialise in merciless analysis. Most importantly though, it is no longer a contest of political leanings packaged for the public like it was. Now the public can and does receive its news unvarnished. It is the political discourse that must adapt and mutate to suit.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan loved to cry that people knew nothing about his work. Well, perhaps now we do, when we recognise its effects all around us.

(1103 words)

7th June, 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit Page under same title on 16th June 2011.Also online at www.dailypioneer.com,in The Pioneer ePaper, and archived under Columnists online at www.dailypioneer.com

2011-06-01T23:06:00.001-07:00

Leapfrog or Hopscotch?

2011-06-01T11:55:00.001-07:00

Leapfrog or Hopscotch?

Leapfrog is a hurtling over hurdles game, using friendly neighbourhood lads obligingly bent over for the purpose. Hopscotch involves one-legged hopping, except for the relief spot half way up that allows for a jumping jack motion using both legs, if only for a moment, before the hopping resumes. And the way the terrain is laid out, when you get to the head square, you need to about turn around towards the starting square; in short, it goes both ways.

Hopscotch also involves throwing markers at squares, balancing on one leg to bend down and pick up said markers without mishap, turning about, and proceeding down the return leg, without doing any of it outside the delineated boundaries of the squares, or muscling into one occupied by a marker already.

Such calibrated exercise, is Hopscotch, that it makes for a good metaphor for economic planning and policy implementation in India. Leapfrog then would be the sports model equivalent metaphor, designed and built for economic growth above all other considerations. But we don’t play this game, certainly never officially.

So what is more important now--containing inflation by tightening the stays on liquidity, hopping awkwardly between attempts at price control and promoting growth? Or is it wiser to pour scorn on our present sea of troubles by leapfrogging over them? Shall we promote breakneck growth, exhilaratingly, recklessly, with a view that we only live once in this life, notwithstanding reincarnation?

Shall we cock a snook at the resultant inflation as just so much froth and lather that will be left behind in the wake of our resultant prosperity? There really are so many questions, especially if you are willing to daydream dangerously.

It is hard, and not a little thankless, to be prudent, as the RBI Governor Dr. Duvvuri Subbarao knows full well, as he bears the brunt of tacit disapproval from his political overlords for his frequent, if largely ineffectual, tightening of liquidity to try and contain inflation.

The RBI Governor would be better off executing this piece of classic macroeconomic theory, if inflation was indeed succumbing to his prescriptions. Instead, he’s having to watch food prices, industrial input prices, the cost of all kinds of services, being buffeted by record petroleum and commodity prices.

And these are spiralling ever skywards, fuelled not so much by shortages versus demand, as ample liquidity generated by the US and Western Europe, as they struggle to revive their economies. Their interest rates, along with Japan’s, are at near zero levels, and they raise them at 0.25% rests when they do, alongside huge stimulus packages running into billions of dollars.

And so, as a side effect of all this money sloshing about the world’s financial systems, Commodities, including Precious Metals, have been going up to unprecedented levels, chased by the monies being invested in them looking for a quick buck.

Dr. Subbarao, presiding over the central bank of a $1.6 trillion economy, is therefore up against these beyond his control realities. Those of a partially globalised economy that India has become.

Meanwhile, in the domestic sphere, the tightening of the fiscal screws are demoralising business and industry, making them reluctant to invest in fresh capacities or modernisation, and slowing economic growth at the same time.

This, in turn, is putting pressure on the political imperatives. Inflation is hurtful to the poor. Slower growth is damaging to the economy on the whole. Together, this double jeopardy could substantially harm the UPA Government’s 2014 re-election bid. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee cannot be happy about this, particularly on top of the Pork Barrel of rampant corruption and shocking drift in policy matters.

A case may therefore be made out in favour of the Leapfrog. One needs to say it even if no one is listening. India can, it was estimated by Mr. Motilal Oswal, Chairman of the leading Bombay Stock Exchange Brokers in 2007, be a $5 trillion economy by 2020.

In December 2010, Mr. Oswal revisited his firm’s original thesis, without any dilution, stating: “We published our first note on the concept of NTD (next trillion dollars of India's GDP) in 2007. The core NTD thesis is this: It took India about 60 years post independence to clock the first trillion dollars of GDP. With nominal GDP growth of 14-15%, at constant exchange rates, India's next trillion dollars (NTD) will come in just 5-7 years. We juxtapose the NTD idea with the GDP growth experience of China to arrive at India's GDP of almost US$5 trillion by 2020.”

And this, at our usual game of economic Hopscotch, not Leapfrog. Even though we are a little behind Mr. Oswal’s forecast today, having added $0.6 trillion since 2007, we are broadly on track. And the second part of Mr. Oswal’s forecast has us more than doubling it again in the next five to seven years! And yet, there are many financial analysts, both Indian and foreign, who agree most soberly with Mr. Oswal’s prognostications.

The momentum of a large economy on a roll cannot be underestimated, but then we cannot afford to get in the way of the juggernaut either. So the stalled Reforms need to be advanced despite the UPA Government inexplicably making heavy weather out of their near majority of a mandate. And obsessing about inflation is not the only way.

We could, for instance, carry the farming sector into the modern era, just as this year, with industrial growth choked off by the liquidity squeeze and high input prices; and both the services sector and exports under pressure because of sluggish growth and global softness in demand; agriculture will come to the rescue with a projected 6.6% growth rate, monsoons willing; to clock us in at an estimated 8.5% GDP figure overall.

Besides, we never have counted the informal sectoring black economy, which is, we all know, as big as the official one. And therefore when we reach two, we will actually be at four. So, in 2020 we would be at $10 trillion, if you counted everyone on the bus. Now, that is almost as big as the economy of the United States at around $13 trillion today.

So why do we focus on all sorts of trouble instead of going in for policies that promote growth above all else? Perhaps we are pessimistic in our calculations out of force of habit. Or perhaps it just does not suit our temperament to play at Leapfrog. We actually prefer Hopscotch. Perhaps they should enter Hopscotch as a category in the London Olympics next year, if not into the economic theory books at the World Bank and the IMF.

(1,102 words)

1st June 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Footnote:Hopscotch
Hopscotch began in ancient Britain during the early Roman Empire. The original hopscotch courts were over 100 feet long and used for military training exercises. Roman foot-soldiers ran the course in full armor and field packs to improve their footwork, much the same way modern football players run through rows of truck tires today.
Roman children drew their own smaller courts in imitation of the soldiers, added a scoring system and "Hopscotch" spread throughout Europe.

Published (without above footnote) as Leader Edit in The Pioneer with same title "Leapfrog or Hopscotch?", on 3rd June, 2011, and mirrored online at www.dailypioneer.com and The Pioneer ePaper. Archived under Guest Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

2011-05-30T22:54:00.001-07:00

What Now My Love - Frank Sinatra

2011-05-20T02:24:00.000-07:00

What now my love?

2011-05-20T01:47:00.001-07:00

What now my love?

What now my love,
Now that you’ve left me,
How can I live, through another day
Watching my dreams, turn into ashes
And all my hopes, into bits of clay
Once I could see, once I could feel,
Now I'm numb-
I’ve become unreal.

Gilbert Becaud- Carl Sigman

The much “covered” song, “What now my love,” was first written in French by Gilbert Becaud in 1961, not long before the Naxalites first appeared in rural Bengal, and was given its English lyrics by Carl Sigman. It mirrors, I think rather well, what the vanquished Left Front must be feeling today.

And this, despite the fig-leaf of having garnered 41% of the popular vote in the recent West Bengal Assembly elections. But since The Left have had an innings lasting 34 years, everyone, except possibly some of the more committed amongst that 41%, is quite dry-eyed to see the backs of their nice white bhadralok dhoties sitting in the Opposition.

The question, more importantly, now that Ms. Mamata Banerjee and her 44 strong team of ministers has just been sworn in; significantly featuring members manning the oars from both the TMC and Congress; is where does West Bengal go from here?

The loaded question is reminiscent of one posed by a very rich, very shallow, young lady in literary fiction. One can almost imagine the memsahib, in summer dress and straw hat, ice tinkling in her drink, segued onto a New Alipur verandah in May 2011; but asking the question that first appeared in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in 1925.

“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy Buchanan, in her priceless little rich girl voice; “and the day after that, and the next thirty years.”

The fact is, now that the citadel (Writer’s Building) is won, Ms. Banerjee is faced with the riddles and enigmas of governance; likely to be very different from the emotive and very successful poll cry of Ma, Mati, Manush that spearheaded her landslide victory.

“Didi” is saddled with empty, actually shockingly overdrawn, coffers; and a populace deluded and rendered toxic by their sense of entitlement nurtured over three decades of Communist propaganda. The people of West Bengal have become expert at the “cholbe na” brand of agitational politics, ruinous state sanctioned Bandhs, and blaming anyone but themselves for all their ills. They have entrapped themselves into a stagnant time warp, but are paradoxically consumed by a corrosive envy, thinly disguised under the revolutionary clap-trap of “class struggle”.

So much so, that it has been, in the run up to Ms. Banerjee’s spectacular victory, hard to distinguish between the Communist cadres going on their Stalinist pogroms in the rural hinterland, and the Maoist “struggle” in many of the very same places. But now, where will all this adrenaline go to ground?

Of course, Ms. Banerjee will be vastly aided, unlike the Left Front, post Mr. Prakash Karat’s divorce from the Congress Party during UPA I; by the fact that the Congress are her allies, and UPA II will, she must calculate, rule at the Centre till at least 2014.

But Didi is going to face a vast cultural problem. In fact, the mature contours of her own Ma Mati Manush philosophy is yet to unfold, and will be watched with great interest by all. It is likely to retain a number of populist features of course, but usually it is difficult to be both populist and successful at development.

On the plus side, much business and industry, the few in-state and those who have run away but want to come back, including MNCs, will be interested in a relatively low-cost-to-do-business state, with ample educated and intelligent manpower; given the prerequisites of peace and quiet to get on with their business.

But notwithstanding any sagacity Didi is able to manifest in this regard, the Leftist malaise that has set in over thirty plus years will not be banished overnight. Everyone in West Bengal has been made-over to a lesser or greater extent. And the unlearning could also take time, very much like our socialist politicians and bureaucrats, all over the country, post 1991, trying to adapt to the new liberal clarion call.

Didi herself may find it impossible to act for development if she senses that it may be politically inimical. It is obvious that she didn’t take 19 years to get to Writer’s Building only to vacate it in a hurry.

After all, over the last 34 years, every aspiration had to be couched in the anti-capitalist garb of essential dogma. So you find a rich Marwari or Punjabi, still the moneybags in Kolkata, as they were when it was a much fancier and glitzy Calcutta, averring most sincerely that whatever he thinks, speaks or does is with the sole objective of helping the poor.

But, in time, who knows? There is an essentially capitalist soul of “Calcutta” buried under the overlay of Stalinist Kolkata rudely stripped of its rich traditions. Perhaps it will re-emerge now and assert its joie de vivre much faster than one anticipates.

Pre-independence Bengal and its capital, till 1905, was the centre of Britain’s sub-continental empire stretching from Burma in the East to the Gulf in the West. It knew and forgot tricks that other places and people are yet to acquire!

The spirits of those storied merchants, zamindars, nawabs, maharajahs, courtesans, femme fatales, artistes, artisans, company factotums, beribonned military men et al still sigh in the decaying gullies of an evocative city that is over three centuries old; backed to the hilt, no doubt, by its knowing, slumbering, sensuous, countryside.

That once-upon-a-time Bengal, alive still in literature and film, divided ruthlessly by Curzon, did not give up either; not even through the two World Wars and Partition. And Calcutta was the city you had to call a city right up to the fifties.

And then came the blight of the Naxalites ; followed by the ultimately barren land redistribution of the Left Front; the flight of capital, of industry; then the grinding poverty, the soul destroying unemployment that gave the Communist dream its most poignant lie; and now here we are.

There must be great meaning in this most impressive revolution via the ballot box - in this demonstrated yearning for change. Could this then be the beginning of a Bengal Renaissance to rival all its previous incarnations?

We will have to listen hard to the essential spirit of Bengal, very much older than the mouldering paper heroes of the now lost dispensation; to divine this for sure.

(1,096 words)

20th May 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit on the Edit-Page of The Pioneer on Monday 23rd May 2011, in the epaper, and online at www.dailypioneer.com as "Road ahead for Bengal". Also archived under Guest Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

The Politics Of The Ultimate Stakeholder

2011-04-11T09:38:00.001-07:00

The Politics Of The Ultimate Stakeholder

Everyone is talking about “Anna” Hazare and his crusade against corruption. He has, by his own description, combined Gandhian ahimsa with Chatrapati Shivaji’s militancy, and this, projected via blanket media coverage, has produced spectacular results.

For his followers, he is the latest incarnation in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Loknayak Jayaprakash Narayan. India, or is it Bharatmata, seems to throw up such saviours spontaneously whenever the body politic is in dire need of cleansing.

But Mr. Hazare’s clarion call won’t amount to much in the long run, unless, like the Mahatma fighting the imperial yoke, and Mr. Narayan challenging Mrs. Gandhi the 1st, he manages to also galvanise the rural masses who actually do almost all the voting. But to them, weaned on the inequities of corruption and inequality for generations, the present movement may seem a trifle exotic. So, Anna Hazare may have to broaden his message to interest them too.

While conducting his fast unto death in textbook Gandhian fashion, Mr. Hazare spiced his comments with calculated insults flung at politicians in general, and the ruling Government in particular, inspired, he informs us, by Chattrapati Shivaji.

And now, having won round one, Anna intends to install an incorruptible Lokpal soon. While the contours of this Lokpal to be are not as yet clear, he or she might possibly be moulded in the Oliver Cromwell or Maxmillien Robespierre tradition of revolutionary probity.

The charter, after all, is massive, because the Lokpal will be tasked to keep watch on all the three branches of Government as well as its bureaucracy etc. Ms. Kiran Bedi, the erstwhile supercop and Magsaysay Award winner, is thought to be a good fit.

But what will the Lokpal do to make its writ stick? How will it dictate terms to an elected Government? Or will it just be the representative of the Union of “Ultimate Stakeholders” as the CAG put it, entitled to a seat at the high table for selective deliberations?

And it must be remembered, however reluctantly, that both Cromwell and Robespierre, who turned their respective monarchies on their heads, were in fact elected and executive authorities. And Robespierre too was guillotined in the end, while Cromwell died very disillusioned with the Puritanism he spearheaded.

Part of the problem, we see now, was the introduction of impossibly high moral standards. The other was that the advent of Cromwell and Robespierre did not succesfully create the new political order they envisaged, but instead put an end to the excesses of absolute monarchy. Still, both were men of historic destiny, and represent rousing notions of purity and reform. And more than a little of their idealism and egalitarianism rubbed off on the process of political evolution, and not just in Britain and France.

In India too, Hazare’s snowballing folksy movement has taken the holders of power by surprise, their tired alibis blown skywards by this sudden gust of populist wind. Windiness of the vaporous variety was also on display. Congenitally unresponsive political, bureaucratic, judicial and associated quasi-ruling classes found themselves sputtering about “blackmail” and wagging a frightened finger at Civil Society.

Likewise, dark prognostications about this movable feast against corruption being hijacked by vested interests has not cut much mustard. And why should it, when this possibility is weighed against the Government sitting paralysed atop an absolute termite’s nest of rot of its own creation?

And so, the Mumbai motormen, the CAG Mr. Vinod Rai, top industrialists, the more politically inclined Bollywood stars, writers, poets, artists, professors, sportsmen including the all conquering MS Dhoni, NGOs who do not fear being upstaged at their long-standing and lucrative game, as well as obscure ones with nothing to lose, men and women in saffron, Delhi Metro hero Mr. Sreedharan, a pervasive and responsive media presence; and politicians from every party, except the ruling combine - can’t all be labelled conspirators and extra-constitutional subversives!

This then is an attempt at cleansing the system from without, because very few within it seem the least bit interested. That Hazare calls the present Government “Kale Angrez” does, of course, suggest some interesting parallels but also illustrates just how far the UPA Government of 2011 has drifted away from its “ultimate stakeholders”.

A Government that thinks nothing of routinely robbing, cheating and hoodwinking its ultimate stakeholders, has only itself to blame for provoking this backlash. Nobody believes in its attempts at punishing the guilty from its own ranks, particularly because it has not happened even once so far.

A Satyam like situation that has ruined its erstwhile fraudster-owner Mr. Raju, or the fate that befell the “Big Bull” Harshad Mehta, could probably never happen to a Mr. A. Raja, no matter how heinous his corruption may prove to be.

Besides, the Government has experience on its side, and the concession made by it to Hazare’s opening salvo, may be only to gain time in order to subvert his movement, take the pressure off ongoing and forthcoming Assembly elections, and to let the ardour of Civil Society, well known for its dilettantism, dissipate in time.

If the elite from South Mumbai failed to vote even after 26/11, will they change their mind after the jamboree at Jantar Mantar? And as long as the urban middle classes do not vote to at least 75% of its eligible strength, they will not affect the temper, timbre and behaviour of the political establishment. Mr. Hazare realises this and has even advocated penal measures against those who fail to cast their vote.

But in counterpoint to this perception of widespread apathy, is the profoundly more disturbing idea that Civil Society may no longer be satisfied with co-option at all. The very people who don’t vote citing lack of viable choice, may wish however to truly upset the applecart. They may be questioning the relevance of the Indian Constitution which has been so thoroughly subverted by our elected representatives.

These people, and who knows how many there truly are, in places rural and urban, may want to nominate their rulers henceforth after all, and set the cat amongst the pigeons with regard to the notion of elected legitimacy. They may think it the best way to improve the quality of our governance. Mr. Hazare then may indeed have quite a few things in mind when he calls this the beginning of a long struggle.

(1,056 words)

11th April 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Reality check

2011-04-05T03:41:00.000-07:00

Reality check

Bertrand Russell, a towering Leftist philosopher himself, critiqued the Bolshevik Revolution, that too shortly after it took place, saying that the Communists did not live up to the theory of their creed.

The dictatorship of the proletariat was, said Russell, just a plain old dictatorship, presided over by Lenin and Trotsky, with Stalin still carrying the bags and bringing up the rear at the time. And the “proletariat” consisted of carefully vetted yes men of the goonish persuasion, busy ruthlessly gutting all dissent in the ranks.

That Mr. Russell was right has been borne out by the collapse of Communism and its offshoots of Fabian Socialism and even Scandinavian and French versions of Welfarism; albeit for a variety of reasons other than venality. But these reasons do not offer much comfort because they range from indictments such as rank naïveté to a revolutionary wooliness - as in Cuba, lost in a time warp, ignorant of the thrust and parry of human nature.

But such disintegration might be the fault of the original formulations of Karl Marx himself, writing away in the warm bowels of the British museum while Engels picked up his bills. All people alas are simply not created equal, except in their mother’s eyes and in the eyes of God, and that is all there is to it.

Indian democracy for all its impressive Election Commission supervised exercises, of largely free and fair elections, doesn’t work in a particularly democratic way. After the votes are counted, the netas prefer to take a page out of the colonial book and render themselves inviolate.

The voter that actually can be herded to the hustings, is only seen as important at election time, when he and she is wooed, flattered, bullied and threatened if necessary, and/or mildly bribed with cash, kind, and liquid refreshment for his vote.

This is because not a single institution with the possible exception of the RTI mechanism has been created since independence to actually empower the hapless voter. Nothing beyond anodyne grievance mechanisms that are designed to be better at stone-walling than actual redressal. And a judicial system that delivers at snail’s speed.

The urban voter, growing more numerous as progress sends more and more people into cities and towns, does not get much change out of his elected representatives. As for the rural voter, still constituting the backbone of the election process; his plight is best described in the numerous R.K. Laxman cartoons over the decades since independence.

All of them are variations of the same theme. They feature helicoptering visits of politicians in dazzling white malmal, solicitously enquiring about the welfare of their destitute voters, while the latter stare uncomprehendingly in their tattered loin cloths, their bellies distended with promises, painfully trying to make sense of the big man’s questions.

The great white hope out of this third world morass that mocks at our rapid GDP growth, is the dawning realisation amongst some politicians that development and growth in the hinterland, amongst the great unwashed, may be the way to obtaining and holding on to power. That is, without the constant flux and eddy that characterises the old politics of caste, creed, regionalism, dynastic and nepotistic succession, and so on.

Bihar and Gujarat, both run by determined men of humble origin, certainly demonstrate this possible new maxim. And both states have also succeeded in lowering the boom on corruption with Chief Ministers demonstrating a high level of personal integrity, and thereby leading their political and bureaucratic flock by example, if not by the nose or ear. And let it be remembered that neither state was exactly a paragon of probity in the past!

But apart from the evolution of our polity from an elected anarchy, that owes more to the bazaar than it does to the Westminster model: towards something more coherent; we may be forced to re-evaluate many assumptions about the virtues of elite leadership.

Many of this miniscule species, are now, it is seen, morally spent, and unlike their ilk in the decades before independence, do not have the will or desire to provide leadership to an emerging world power. Our elite, sustained quite largely by inherited privilege, may be too enfeebled by good living and cronyism to make any serious effort at anything as selfless as nation building. And many amongst this charmed circle have even forgotten how to be ashamed.

However, happily for the multitude, the people from the smaller towns and villages, identified both by management thinkers such as Ms. Rama Bijapurkar and business heads such as Mr. Ratan Tata, as the “treasure” at “the bottom of the pyramid”, both in terms of their collective buying power and their aggregated human resource, hold out hope for the future and may well come to the rescue.

If they do, turning exceptions into the rule of thumb, it will be a most welcome if unbidden phenomenon, that may however have its roots in the earlier democratisation of our elected representatives, with the higher caste politician being joined plentifully by others of much humbler antecedents.

This has had some raucous consequences, such as chairs and microphones hurtling through the air in state legislatures; and some falling away of notional airs and graces past their prime, including the villainy and lecherousness of the rural “Chowdhary” in film after Bollywood film of a certain vintage; and even an explosion in corruption like starving people with sudden access to the banquet table; but through all this turbulence has come a renewal of unseen but subliminal benefits.

The parallel, while drawn in the blood of millions, could be the emergence of the working classes after the debacle of the first World War in Europe. The old aristocracy was largely wiped out then, but not only because of the attrition of leadership involved. Folly, arrogance, insouciance and incompetence may have had a good deal to do with their demise, and the consequent changing of the world order.

Here in India, the small towns and villages are demonstrating a competence and leadership that comes with not being jaded. The small towner is not ashamed of his origins or his culture any more, and these days looking at the calibre of the city folks, he has little reason to doubt his relative competitiveness. The old manipulations and stratagems of the elite therefore may be no more than at a last gasp of history.

(1,064 words)

5th April 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Unseen blushes and desert air

2011-03-25T00:46:00.001-07:00

Unseen Blushes & Desert Air

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard brings back school-room memories for many of us, replete with the occasionally baffling rigours of poetry appreciation. The lines quoted above are not only a poignant ode to anonymity, evocative of the unsung and obscure life, but profound in its implication of a tragic waste.

Mr. Gray was lamenting the fate of the generic peasantry in a bucolic agrarian 18th century British setting, but times may not have changed that much when applied to a country like ours, bursting at the seams with a population growing towards a billion and a half mostly unsung souls.

Quantity we indubitably have, and the recent Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games after that demonstrated that our winners often come from small towns and villages; but as a rule, how much do we do to nurture quality?

And to enhance this quality is essential to our better tomorrows. We must have three basics to do so. One, we must have a full belly, and then we need robust health and a dynamic education system.

The Government is not, as yet, doing enough to modernise agriculture towards that full belly of nutrition. We are still reaping the harvest from the Green Revolution of the eighties with nothing substantial done to improve the agricultural, food processing and cold chain infrastructure since then. And this despite persistent food price inflation and the pressure of a huge and growing population.

Still, given as we are to foreign prompting, we might respond to celebrated billionaire philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates’ recent talks with the authorities in Bihar and yet others in Delhi, because they want to do something to modernise our agricultural practices.

But, lo and behold, the Union Government seems to be doing something worthwhile about the major lacunae in our Health and Education allocations at last. In the flurry of information packed densely in the Union Budget proposals 2011-12 there is a potential gem of great value, typically embedded in the detail. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has sought to boost the fortunes of both Education and Health by making a deft structural change in policy he is well known for.

“Henceforth”, intoned Mr. Mukherjee, “capital stock in educational institutions and hospitals will be treated as infrastructure sub-sectors,” replying to a discussion on Budget 2011-12 in the Lok Sabha. He went on to state that both would now qualify for capital subsidies through “viability gap funding”.

Now, what this jargon exactly means will have to be revealed in the unfolding of this policy shift, but it seems to suggest that the Government will pitch in with funds to meet budgetary shortfalls of new schools and colleges and technical training establishments and yes, for immunisation and public health awareness programmes as well as hospitals and clinics too!

Where the Government will find the considerable resources needed for this purpose to uplift these woebegone and chronically inadequate infrastructures is not known, but perhaps the miracles of deficit financing will come to the rescue yet again. But to be fair, in an economy growing at near double digits, the deficits will be bridged, as long as the Government is not too profligate, and the money will be well spent as long as the intended beneficiaries are actually delivered their benefits.

This important development could have very favourable consequences if implemented with will and imagination. Already Mrs. Sheila Dixit’s subsequent budget for Delhi does seem, most laudably, to echo this changed emphasis with its higher allocations to both Health and Education and the most welcome announcement of free healthcare for school going students.

But a major worry is the Government’s talent for ruining a good initiative by administering a policy thrust in their typically sarkari fashion. The private sector with its clear-cut profit and growth motives may be far more successful at maintaining standards, collaborating successfully with foreign educational and health entities, unleashing competition, economies of scale, and in short revolutionising our Health and Education landscape. They need to be incentivised and this may be a beginning in that direction.

Should this programme be privatised successfully, one will not hear of school buildings collapsing in the first season after they are built. Nor about rampant corruption that creates black holes into which as much as 90 per cent of the development funds disappear. We would not have to deal with the callous imperviousness engendered by the job from which one cannot be sacked. We would not be building classrooms without teachers, or clinics with a higher rodent population than humans. We wouldn’t be looking at the waste of unusable and ill-maintained medical equipment. We would not be paying the bill for inflated and manipulated tendering and an almost complete lack of accountability. In short, for such routine delights that come as a consequence of most governmental implementation and execution.

The Economist in a recent article entitled Bamboo Capitalism suggests that most of the double–digit Chinese GDP growth, an estimated 70 per cent of it, is “produced by enterprises that are not majority-owned by the state”. The magazine goes on to say that the notion that: “state directed capitalism and tight political control are the elixir of growth” is mistaken. “In fact China has surged forward mainly where the state has stood back” says the article.

This is not to say that the Indian Government’s role as facilitator is not important. Japan, China, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and others in our Asian region have all benefited from strong Government support of private enterprise that executes objectives the Government holds dear.

There is no reason why we cannot also do this, except perhaps the entrenched mindsets of much of our bureaucracy and political leadership was nurtured, not in the liberating winds of change post 1991, but in the preceding socialist and public-sector favouring decades prior to that dawn.

Therefore, it may be some time yet before we properly start implementing policies meant for a resurgent 21st century economy. Still, the Government needs to be congratulated for doing something good about a vital need at last.

(1,048 words)

25th March 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Updated version published as Leader on Edit Page of The Pioneer under title"Mindset that stifles hope" on April 5th, 2011 and simultaneously online at www.dailypioneer.com and in the Pioneer epaper. It is also archived under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

Clearer and Farther

2011-02-26T02:44:00.005-08:00

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

2011-02-20T05:14:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-07T01:00:00.001-08:00

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

2011-02-04T05:01:00.001-08:00

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

Opportunity in search of a supreme leader

2010-12-23T01:42:00.000-08:00

Opportunity in search of a supreme leader

With the unexpected unravelling and loss of authority of the UPA quite early into its second term in office, an opportunity for the Opposition led NDA exists in 2014, or possibly as early as next year, if the parliamentary logjam persists.

The UPA could be forced to throw in the towel and call for general elections in the face of its mounting inability to govern, particularly in the forthcoming budget session. It is not inconceivable today that there could well be a no-confidence vote from the combined Opposition aided by a sizeable breakaway faction of the ruling combine, as early as the first half of next year.

The Government, on its part, seems confused about how to resolve its problems and persists in trying to drive a wedge between members of the Opposition, while simultaneously exerting considerable pressure on certain of its nominal allies to keep them threatened, involuntarily subdued, and functionally cooperative.

Despite a steady clamour both from the media and the combined Opposition, the UPA Government has done little to clean up its proverbial Augean stables, bedevilled as it is with more scams and evidence of maladministration than has been seen all-at-once in the history of independent India.

Of course, the UPA’s situation is further complicated by the ironic fact that their own designated and dynastic heir apparent is unable to graduate from his long-winded apprenticeship in the political arena. Nor is the young champion of the idea of the aam aadmi able to garner the votes on the strength of his charisma. Or implement his strategies as chief rejuvenator of his party for that matter. And neither is the Government able to bring succour to that very ordinary citizen with spiralling food prices and inflation pressing down on him without respite.

But to mirror the UPA’s hobbled situation for other, pedestrian reasons of power politics in the NDA, is hardly a recipe for success! To be a proper and credible alternative, the Opposition must project a much greater strategic cohesiveness that it does at present, particularly within the upper echelons of the BJP and its ideological backdrop, the RSS.

A clear sticking point for the Opposition combine, even in its four-party residual strength today, is the lack of a clear prime-ministerial candidate from within the BJP or the NDA. And this, quite apart from the urgent need to beef itself up, to use an unorthodox simile, by bringing back lost and new allies into the fold, so that its electoral heft is sufficient to actually capture power.

The situation is so glaring that various spokespersons of the UPA continually smirk at this Opposition disarray and blatantly count on the NDA’s internal power struggles and lack of clear-cut leadership to perpetuate its own hold on power, however undeserved; not only for the rest of this beleaguered term, but beyond 2014 too.

In a country saddled with such horrific bad governance, the deep rot of corruption, and lack of accountability, the people may yet be presented with no more than a Hobson’s choice. The UPA are, not surprisingly, counting on this to weather every storm.

Meanwhile back in the NDA, there are several possible prime-ministerial contenders, theoretically speaking, from generation next, such as the electorally popular Mr.Nitish Kumar and Mr.Narendra Modi, who may however prefer to continue in their states where they are doing an excellent job. They may well prefer the certainties of experienced state administration with their comfortable majorities, rather than facing the head-winds of coalition government at the centre.

There are others, more “staff” men and women than “line”, as the distinction goes in management circles; such as the feisty Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Ms. Sushma Swaraj, the urbane and polished Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mr. Arun Jaitley, and leading light from the South Mr. Venkiah Naidu.

They are all well known nationally and used to projecting the overall concerns of the NDA. And then, of course, there is party elder and pater familias Mr.LK Advani and several others from his generation, most notably, Mr. Murli Manohar Joshi.

There are more accomplished state level satraps like Mr. Shivraj Singh Chauhan from Madhya Pradesh, and erudite and capable people of prime ministerial calibre, with perhaps lesser electoral or administrative credentials, including several who have occupied senior ministerial berths during Prime Minister AB Vajpayee’s terms in office as well as professional people associated with the NDA as MPs and advisers, in addition.

Having said all this, BJP Party President Mr, Nitin Gadkari, party elder Mr. LK Advani as well as RSS chief Mr. Mohan Bhagwat, must collectively acknowledge that the public deserves to have some idea of who will lead the NDA at the centre, should the opportunity arise. The public that votes for the leading Opposition combine, already significantly placed in the states, deserves to think there is a good chance of victory with everyone working together for such an objective rather than undermining the overall effort for byzantine reasons.

I say byzantine, because it has been difficult to pinpoint responsibility after the losses suffered by the NDA in the last general election, even as the general public was treated to the spectacle of disunity, veiled criticism and innuendo that is not exactly inspiring.

The other matter is the need to enunciate a more inclusive right-of-centre agenda for governance rather than the bare-faced championing of majoritarian positions in a crude and unsettling manner for people from other communities. Such people, as also those from the majority community with a more pronounced secular bias, who may not be enamoured of the UPA after all that has happened, but certainly do not want to associate with a combine branded “communal” without seeming to demur.

The existing constituents of the NDA including the crucial JDU from Bihar are discomfited by blatant majoritarian posturing bearing in mind the mixed electorate they have to deal with. And modifying the ideological stance will give the NDA much greater political acceptability amongst those who want to break away from the UPA.

The trouble is, all this has long been known, but just as the UPA can’t seem to control corruption or resist the temptation to cynically pander to the minorities, the NDA seems wedded to a certain rigidity of position on core issues that ends up being exclusive rather than welcoming.

(1,055 words)

23^rd December 2010

Gautam Mukherjee

Transition as Sissy Maid

2010-12-11T02:00:00.000-08:00

Roy Lictenstein

Transition as Sissy Maid

True democratisation of a polity gives pelf and power to the underclass. That is its self-evident litmus test however crudely performed. But the inheritors mostly lack the finesse of their predecessors, long used to their exalted status. The new hands at the controls are generally both nouveau and gauche as opposed to old, self-assured and discreet.

Of course, it becomes an unfair comparison: unequal, unlike, apples and oranges from very different orchards. And there can be no honourable contest between such disparate fruit, except in terms of vitality perhaps, till a few generations have gone by, and a number of grafts and hybrids have taken hold.

In Europe, this democratisation came about by default, in the early and middle part of the 20^th century, via the final destruction of monarchy, the agrarian economy, empire, and the near extermination of the land/title/privilege holding aristocracy, speared on the pike of their noblesse oblige.

This was most poignantly demonstrated by the trench warfare in WWI, when officers from the landed classes on both sides led charges with no more than their service revolvers held aloft. It reminds one of the destruction of the Kshatriya hold on power at the end of The Mahabharata, with both the warring sides finished off and sick-at-heart; as if, as “charioteer” Lord Krishna, born Yadava, implies, a little inscrutably, that it was both preordained and for the ultimate good. Were the noble/warring Kshatriyas evil then at the start of The Mahabharata, and more importantly, were they more evil than the other contenders for power? The answer to this, in epic fashion, is probably still playing itself out over the yugas and kalpas.

In colonised America, the British were overthrown first, but the class/racial divides were only sorted to an appreciable degree through the bloodletting of the Civil War and the ongoing Civil Rights Movement. And the Boston Brahmins or the East Coast patrician Establishment haven’t given up the ghost as yet.

In India, untroubled by such pyramid overturning upheaval, save, late in the day for the freedom struggle, also at the end of WWII, during the radical surgery of Partition. But while that ghastly amputation without anaesthetic divided our people on communal lines, it did nothing for the cause of democratisation as such.

Instead it raised the curtain on our independence at the expense of opening a festering, hateful wound, unhealed to this day either in India or Pakistan, not to mention the other bits of British India cast adrift to fend for themselves, such as Sri Lanka, Burma(Myanmar) and Afghanistan.

Mahatma Gandhi’s pre-independence focus on his beloved “Harijans”, condescendingly describe them as an idealised, defanged, docile quantity, a species of noble and downtrodden humanity, that should nevertheless reconcile itself to its fate in the caste hierarchy. Gandhi’s favourite Harijans were not erudite and assertive Ambedkars/Mayawatis, but mute, grateful and huddled chamars bowled over by upper class empathy and compassion.

Nevertheless, because of his enormous influence as the father of the nation and chief ahimsa/satyagraha architect of independence, the Mahatma did move the heavy boulders of neglect and oppression from the newly minted independent India’s policy vision. And considering 85% of our populace today are not from the upper castes; not a day too soon.

After the Mahatma, Pandit Nehru and Mrs. Indira Gandhi did their bits towards righting ancient wrongs by political affirmative action and reservation/quota administrations. Nehruvian Socialism and Indira Gandhi’s devastating attack on inherited privilege and the freedom of the private sector had their effect, as did the Congress’ collaborations with the various Communist parties extant. Today, we may not still be an equal society, amongst our SC/ST distinctions and our aam aadmi avowals, but the ladder of under privilege features the more obscure tribals, and not so much the dalits, on its lowest rungs.

But, unleashed, however imperfectly, the Indian hoi polloi, like the tradesmen oriented tinkers, tailors, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers et al of Europe, glaringly lack sophistication and demonstrate a reduced level of efficiency even when given a chance!

Over the years since the world wars, the Europeans have managed to narrow the gap by dint of exposure and education. The nouveau and gauche have acquired some class along the way. And the remaindered ranks of the originally classy have overlaid themselves with some street credentials for greater relevance. And sometimes, the underclassmen are so astonishingly posh that it is hard to believe where they were even twenty five years ago.

But in India we are still in a tiresome transitionary phase. And like cross-dressing transvestites, also known as “sissy maids”, we haven’t found our metier as yet. Nevertheless, it is as if all classes have plunged into the déclassé third-class unreserved category, also much beloved of Mahatma Gandhi, if the bulk of the media analysis is to be believed.

Without going into the petulance of such perceptions, it might be fair to say that there is too much educated noise about the doings of rapacious underclassmen. It is as if they have no right to be venal and hypocrites. And, there is also a converse soft-pedalling of upper class wrong-doing, as if it were somehow qualitatively better. We Indians, new and old alike, also seem to believe in being above the law in direct proportion to how much pelf and power we manage to accumulate.

In this transition, the formerly privileged are put-out and refuse to self-examine. They are insecure, shrill and sometimes illogical. The fact is, the underclasses have as much right to be corrupt, inefficient and self-serving as anyone else, and need to make up for lost time. They are, after all, late arrivals to the party.

In terms of corporate India, not only do we not see many of the top twenty players of the first three decades since independence in contention now, but there seems to be a perpetual churning taking place. Even the rulers of the latter three decades are being challenged by ever nouveau and gauche arrivestes.

This may not suit the well ensconced Tatas, Ambanis, Mittals and so on, but it is unlikely to make any difference to the eventual outcomes. Democracy must spread privilege, like fertililizer on a field, in open competition. And if it succeeds in doing so without blood-letting, we will have to put up with the stink and have much to congratulate ourselves for.

(1,054 words)

11^th December 2010

Gautam Mukherjee

Published in Leader Edit slot on Edit Page of The Pioneer on December 16th, 2010 as:Democracy as great leveler. Also appeared simultaneously online at www.dailypioneer.com, is archived there under Columnists, and was featured in the facsimilie version of the day's ePaper.

By George He's Got It!

2010-12-01T04:20:00.002-08:00

By George, He’s Got It!

The true geo-politics altering crusading spirit probably died out with the medieval Crusades, and good riddance to it too. It would be much too much Bushism for today’s multi-polar world.

Which is not to say it didn’t generate quite a contest between the Jews, Muslims, sundry Slavs, other inconveniences to the Pope on one side; and the Roman Catholic Christians from the 11^th 12^th and 13^th centuries, on the other. But though the Crusades lasted some two hundred years (1095-1291), they ended, for the most part, with inconclusive results that persist to this day.

The crusading term however entered the lexicon, and the hearts of most evangelists, reformers, would be do-gooders, activists, social workers, and populist politicians. But then, all politicians are required to be populist to a lesser or greater extent, depending on whether they need to conform to the democratic franchise-based model or are exempted from the vote, as in one party and nominated governments of the Left and Right, monarchies and dictatorships. But even those who don’t need to get elected still need a modicum of popular support; and the crusades, the Roman Catholic version of jihad, were designed to focus unified attention on the enemy after all.

So it is poignant that in recent memory, most crusaders, nationally and internationally, turn out to have proverbial feet of clay, sundry skeletons in cupboards, and other disappointing integrity issues. In an Indian polity that is presently outdoing itself with new, improved essays in audacious and ever-enlarged corruption, it is disconcerting to see the long somnolent and moribund Environment and Forest Ministry being so hyperactive. But in a manner that produces much thunder and lightning but precious little rain.

It owes its present headline grabbing dynamism to incumbent minister of state with independent charge, since May 2009, Mr. Jairam Ramesh. I am probably not the only one who might be thinking that Mr.Ramesh has been at this particular pulpit for what seems to be considerably longer. But that is not true. He has been a junior minister in Commerce and Industry and the Ministry of Power as well, all since becoming an MP in 2004.

He has also been a Congress Party and Planning Commission adviser, back-room factotum, journalist, author, TV pundit and World Bank economist. But now, Shri Ramesh from Andhra Pradesh has pumped himself up to legendary St. George proportions, out to slay an absolute slew of dragons.

These fire breathing and reptilian monsters Ramesh targets range considerably in variety. There’s the hugely threatened Adarsh Bulding Society in Colaba, Mumbai, in danger of having a beautifully built and almost complete 32 storey building; almost done, that is, with the collusion of large swathes of Mumbai’s power elite. Ramesh wants to cut it down to six storeys! Then there is the 25,000 acre Lavasa, the first private sector purpose-built hill-station near Pune. Promoter HCC ( Hindustan Construction Company) must be ruing the day it deviated from the usual large bridges, flyovers and roads it traditionally builds. The esoteric debate is all about whether Lavasa is or isn’t 1000 metres above sea level and thereby under the purview and tender mercies of Environment Ministry clearances.

And also the ubiquitous brinjal, threatened by its GM (genetically modified) counterpart into purgatorial limbo. The GM version that is, while the GM Cotton Boll has pipped passed the post before the advent of St. George Ramesh.

The SUV brigade is also in the gun-sights of our Environment Minster who has managed to suggest the German ones, surprisingly, are diesel-guzzling, mega pollution-making inefficiencies, while saying not a lot about the rest, produced by the Indians, the Japanese, the British etc. It is a mystifying critique, but then he wants all of them to pay the full price of subsidised diesel. Mr. Ramesh may have a particular bee in his bonnet on pollution, because he also wanted India to unilaterally accept all Western ideas of carbon emission cuts when he represented us at the talks for the purpose at Copenhagen in 2009.

Besides, these latest bizarre automobile musings are ripples in the diplomatic waters for the MEA to negotiate, and might induce a few strange sensations in the Petroleum Ministry too. The Environment Ministry under Ramesh apparently sees its role as a supra ombudsman, a kind of an overseer of purity perhaps, a little like JK Rowling’s inspired Ministry of Magic maybe?

Other targets include Union Roads Minister Mr. Kamal Nath’s highway building and modernising zeal, particularly when it wants to widen roads passing through reserve forests. It is another matter that most of our reserve forests teem with human beings living in large and numerous villages in the deep forest, not to mention cohorts of poachers killing and maiming the animals with reasonable to absolute immunity. And there is hardly a word from Ramesh about all the illegal mining that goes on, quite a lot of it in the South to boot.

And the obstructionist charade is particularly appalling because the activist and (apparently) people’s crusading Environment Ministry is never much interested in nipping anything in the bud. That would be quite unglamorous of course. So why do that when it is so much more attention-grabbing to bring down the temple walls, or at least attempt to do so, once the edifice is built, and about to be commissioned/consecrated? Notice Mr. Ramesh is also not taking any broadsides at the Railway Ministry for their engine drivers mowing down several elephants in similar reserve forest areas. I wonder why?

What is wholly unconvincing, even amongst Mr. Ramesh’s selective targeting, is the sheer scope of works the Environment & Forests Ministry has carved out unto itself, not alas with a desire to remedy matters in this much dirtied and sullied environment of ours, but in a reincarnation of licence-permitism designed to extract obeisance from all that the Ministry wishes to point its laser pointer at.

The purpose of this seeming activism is suspect. As much as that of some people who champion Maoists and Kashmiri separatists while snuggling up to reserve forests with houses on the edge of the wilderness. So what if it is found to be an encroachment? Don’t other Page 3 people do it? Don’t the tribals do it? Don’t the villagers do it? Doesn’t the Government and the private sector do it? And isn’t it a graphic way to demonstrate how environment friendly, plant, tree, animal/bird and nature loving one truly is?

Who will watch our watchers? Besides, even St. George, the 3^rd century soldier-saint, slayer of dragons, brought back as legend in the medieval crusades, has morphed into a somewhat feminist sexual position in colloquial parlance.

(1,105 words)

1^st December 2010

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader on the Edit Page of The Pioneer on December 2nd, 2010 entitled "Politician as activist". Also online at www.dailypioneer.com and is archived there under Columnists. It is also featured in the ePaper facsimilie edition of The Pioneer for the 2nd of December 2010.

The Knack

2010-11-16T03:37:00.001-08:00

The Knack

It is ironic that the big news on the commercial front from President Obama’s recent state visit was about Indian orders worth USD 10 billion for American goods. And that it translates into 50,000 new jobs in America. This, in a beleaguered US, with unemployment percentages running into double digits, was President Obama’s first message from Indian soil.

Irony is a largely Western concept with no equivalent in Sanskrit; even if its harbinger is a path-breaking African-American President of the US, till recently given to stoking the outsourcing controversy with “Buffalo versus Bangalore” rhetoric.

But then, the charismatic President Obama’s roots, as one of the most Liberal-Left US presidents in recent times, are in local and community politics. And the dire state of the US economy, which he inherited, and has largely rescued from certain ruin with huge government hand-outs and near nationalisation style moves; is certainly not his fault.

But not to miss a beat, our usually mild-mannered Prime Minister Manmohan Singh chimed in on cue by declaring that we Indians are not in the business of “stealing jobs” from anyone.

The fact is, a severe drubbing at the mid-term US Congressional elections held just before his India visit, set President Obama’s perspective to rights. He got little credit for battling to save the economy of the free world from collapse; but scads of brickbats for not putting the nation back to work. Duly chastised, Obama is no longer keen on raising the outsourcing “bogeyman”.

The Republicans, now in control of the US Congress, consider it Luddite folly to refuse to go wherever in the world something can be sourced more cheaply and efficiently. So India, particularly its thriving software industry, can breathe easier, both because President Obama is forced to course-correct now; and because as an economy, we are, in the President’s own estimate, already “emerged”.

In a globalised world, it is indeed seen as unwise, to try and set the clock back, either because of populist reasons; or even by dint of other vexing issues, such as bureaucracy, red-tape, corruption, even bad infrastructure; when the key need is for a thriving manufacturing base and export hub. This particularly when one has a limited, expensive, and ageing workforce, as is the case in most of Europe and Japan, if not also in the US. Even the Chinese workforce, though populous, is ageing, thanks to its one child policy.

Japan, previously sceptical about India despite its potential, tried to grow its economy with China at first. And China took in huge amounts of Japanese investment in the eighties, but to fuel its own will to power. The nationalist Communist Party there were happy to fan anti-Japanese sentiment left over from the war years after their purpose was served.

Japan’s eyes are now opened to India. Long the No.2 economy after the US, though languishing through a two decade-long recession; over a 100 Japanese firms are entering India every year now. They are creating jobs here, in their home country, and around the globe, by investing, without demur, into the Indo-Japanese corridor between Delhi and Mumbai amongst other places. A $ 90 billion commitment, the corridor will, when completed, give the Indo-Japanese collaboration state-of-the-art manufacturing abilities and an exporting base second to none. The Japanese government is also moving finally on other matters like a free-trade agreement, a bilateral defence framework, and even an Indo-Japanese civil nuclear deal.

America too is treading a similar path with India, with some strategic and geopolitical overlays. Ergo, its intended removal of restrictions on the Indian access to dual-use high technology, closer defence related cooperation, and of course the consummation of the civil nuclear deal.

There is a compelling need for many of the erstwhile dominant Western powers to forge closer ties with India, growing robustly by dint of its domestic demand, and refresh long-held negative attitudes that have outlived their usefulness. Some of them are moving towards the opportunities presented faster than others, but we can expect a cascade effect as the time goes on.

Pundit after financial pundit is proclaiming that the Sensex will be close to 50,000 by 2015, and double that figure by 2020; the figures based on an approximate compounded return of 18% on equity. And this for the next quarter of a century at least, albeit with swells and troughs thrown into the puissant ride.

India’s biggest foreign bank, Standard Chartered declares India will be the world’s fastest growing economy by 2012. In the next two decades India will become the third largest economy in GDP terms, only behind China and the US. Morgan Stanley, on its part, says India will become the fastest growing economy in the world by 2013-15.

At the root of all this happy talk, and even at its branches, is the belief that globalisation provides additional job opportunities at home and abroad in a win-win partnership between participants. It becomes a virtuous cycle of additional capital raising both productivity and know-how for all concerned. The elephant both inside and outside the room is India’s appetite for infrastructure development, which will not be assuaged for years to come.

There was, during the US presidential visit, a low-key announcement of an Indo-US Infrastructure Development Fund with an initial corpus of $ 10 billion. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh however said we need over one trillion dollars for infrastructure development in the next decade alone. There is therefore plenty of room for other comers.

And lastly, as Linnet Mushran, an Englishwoman married to an Indian from the landed classes; the owner and inspiration behind the delectable Bhuira Jams made to legendary Fortnum & Mason quality standards by largely illiterate Himachali women, said: Indian women are very good with pickles and English women with jams.

The observation is strikingly true. But the magic ingredient in either case is, of course, an indefinable, cultural/ethnic instinct and sensibility for the appropriate that makes for the excellence.

The analogy can be extended to many other things that contribute both to the good life and human progress: Scotch and the Scots, sauces /gravies and the French, automobiles and Germans, software development and Indians, mass-manufacturing and the Chinese, styling and Italians, scale and the Americans, and so on.

The point being that some people are innately, and by virtue of their knack at something, better at doing certain things than others. Also that an intelligent workforce can be taught to perform to high standards.

The Japanese are astounded that we win Alfred Denning prizes for quality manufacturing of auto-components amongst all our chaos. Fact is, they shouldn’t be.

(1,096 words)

16^th November 2010

Gautam Mukherjee

Published in The Pioneer as Leader on the Edit Page as :"Bailing out America" on 17th November 2010 (Eid Al Adha). Also appears online at www.dailypioneer.com, in The Pioneer ePaper facsimile also on the 17th of November 2010. The article is also archived under Guest Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com against the dated listings under Gautam Mukherjee.

Brand-Building & Infrastructure Redux

2010-10-15T04:30:00.001-07:00

Brand-Building and Infrastructure Redux

Tata Hall will be the name of a new academic and residential building to come up at Harvard Business School, following on from a $50 million bequest from the Tata Group.

This is the largest ever contribution received by the Harvard Business School from an international donor. The School currently also happens to boast of a Dean Nitin Nohria who is of Indian origin.

This endowment from the Tata Group follows on from $10 million gifted by the Mahindra Group earlier. And coming during one of the worst financial crises the US has faced, these payments are bound to earn both business groups and their country of origin, a great deal of goodwill. Remarkably, both Tata and Mahindra come from the private sector in an emerging economy grappling with its binary demands of poverty and progress.

It is fortuitous indeed therefore, that such a slot was still left open; what with the Saudis, Kuwaitis and other very well-heeled Arabs looking for diplomatically leverageable investments and causes to endow in America. And that is just as well for us Indians and the two chairmen of Tata and Mahindra who happen to have studied there in times past.

These grants underline that neither business groups are, any longer, merely Indian, with more and more of a global footprint as the time goes on. The Tata Group already generates more than 60% of its business outside India. And a good deal of it is from the high-end of the market, in fields as diverse as hotels, steel, automobiles and tea.

With this foray into the Harvard Business School establishment, it will now be far more difficult for the likes of the luxury Orient Express Hotels brand, to show reluctance regarding “fit”, the next time Tata seeks to buy more substantially into its properties. Of course, that infamous episode was before Tata acquired Corus and Jaguar/Landrover, but was nevertheless sometime after it bought Tetley. And Mahindra may not remain the lesser known new owner of Satyam for long.

Sadly, old post-colonial attitudes to India may have been revised somewhat in Britain, but America, in its pre-eminence, is definitely the more lucrative nut to crack. Doing so via the Ivy League is therefore a very good idea.

Visionary actions like this, by the Tata Chairman, just months before he is due to retire from the day-to-day helmsmanship, albeit to a powerful stewardship of the Tata Trusts, are therefore to be lauded, both for their correctness and boldness. Since the Tata Trusts own over 60% of the businesses overall, hopefully Ratan Tata’s voice will continue to be heard well beyond 2012. Meanwhile, this is a classic example of brand building that will prove, for generations to come, extremely cheap at the price.

But brand-building alone would not be cutting the mustard. The Tatas back their well -targeted philanthropy with massive skill and know-how, represented by the oft repeated “Salt to Software” array of products and services. They are not only at the forefront of our nation building efforts but are proud innovators, epitomised by the Nano motor-car being freely sold at under $3,000 a unit.

Another major Tata Sons shareholder, the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, coincidentally, built the new and improved Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Delhi complete with the biggest membrane roof in the world. It was the glittering, state-of-the art venue of both the opening and closing ceremonies at the recently concluded 19th Commonwealth Games. Other SP Group companies, such as AFCON, have been building a lot of Delhi’s new infrastructure as well.

But quite apart from matters pertaining to the CWG, it is poor infrastructure that defines our backward image and acts as a retardant to the desired double-digit growth. And our neglect of it over the years, in areas such as electricity, water, transport, roads, ports, and so on, has put us at a nagging competitive disadvantage.

Besides, if the CWG managed to redeem itself from the shameful morass it was bogged down in just days before the event began; the credit must go in equal measure to the athletes who bagged 101 medals in a wide range of sporting events, and the quality of the world-class infrastructure built by India for the occasion.

“Bread and Circuses” was the cynical Roman Empire formula for entertaining the Hoi Polloi designed to render them amenable. A present day equivalent is probably the development of infrastructure, as in all that went into the CWG.

The broader point is that infrastructure, created and revived, even at very high cost, is without doubt the very elixir of growth and aspiration. It also spurs performance in practically any given field of endeavour. It is the very aphrodisiac to progress. But it is not only the infrastructure, but also undeniably better training for our sportsmen and women that has resulted in overall success at this CWG. But this training too is a form of infrastructure, without which the physical facilities would have stayed under utilised.

The Indian performance, particularly in sports where we were unable to win medals in past competitions, makes one realise what is possible with the right inputs. And that as a country, our surprisingly merit-based selection of heroes and heroines from small towns and villages, by such an allegedly corrupt and venal sports administration, is also most heartening. It showed us that poor and middle class India is vitally alive and well. And that it is demonstrably patriotic and sincere. And that it is the unsullied spirit of such men and women that promises good things for our collective future- despite the sickening corruption, cynicism and jadedness displayed by some of our richer and more powerful compatriots.

As for the other physical infrastructure enhancements, Delhi/NCR will be savouring its benefits, that of the metro, the spanking new airport, the spruced up main railway station, the flyovers, over-bridges, underpasses, new hotels, a revived Connaught Place largely rescued from its tawdry and abused degradation, and sundry other improvements, for many years to come.

And we must recognise that infrastructure is our ticket to improved standards, competitiveness and further growth still, in matters well beyond sports. It is both ladder and virtuous circle. It is our release from the taint of backwardness and the only thing holding us back from the beckoning of a glorious and prolific destiny.

(1,049 words)

Mahaashtami, October 15^th, 2010

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit in The Pioneer on November 3rd, 2010 as "Home and abroad". Also published online at www.dailypioneer.com and The Pioneer ePaper. Archived under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

Flowing Water & The Very Indian Concept Of Upaya

2010-10-03T04:21:00.000-07:00

The River- Roy Lichtenstein

Flowing Water & The Very Indian Concept of Upaya

If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy floating by… Japanese Proverb

Image management professionals rely on, and media men know, the axiomatic truth that every headline, however elating or distressing, is the successor to yet another headline. There is a riverine quality about the flow of news, and patience, for that matter, that allows the aggrieved, anguished or outraged to hope for justice. Also, “with a little bit of luck”, as in Eliza Doolittle’s father’s roguish expectation in My Fair Lady; today’s imperative can well become tomorrow’s irrelevancy.

So, hang in there, you who may be squirming uncomfortably in the eye of the storm. Minimise the damage as best as you can, and be sure you will slip off that front page and TV screen, into that dark and comforting oblivion you long for, probably much sooner than you think. All things do pass, including glory and ignominy, to be replaced by further glory and ignominy, but not necessarily your own. This may be banal as an observation, but that doesn’t seem to affect its home-truth quotient.

Besides, there is that other matter of coincidental juxtaposition- of inevitable good news and bad following on, that also manages to cast its own moderating/eclipsing influence.

Thus, for example, you have the monumental corruption, incompetence and unhygienic squalor on display in the run up to the CWG, memorably bracketed within a OC meditation in excellent East is East fashion, under the full gaze of international TV, on “our standards and their standards,” with more than a grain or two of truth in it. But, after making suitable amends with a war-footing clean-up: of dirt, snakes, dogs and pestilential mosquitoes: and the posting of Langurs to deter Rhesus monkeys from venues; we find such typically colourful and exotic issues segueing seamlessly into the glamour and hoopla of the all-is-forgiven high-tech Opening Ceremony.

And juxtaposed with the natural pride we all feel in witnessing this razmatazzy extravaganza, complete with prince, president, players and pageant; and on to the actual competition and the glint of medals, is the other insistent news of the Sensex striking out towards all-time highs, even as the GDP growth rate competes ironically with the food inflation figures.

And then, if that wasn’t enough to grant the government: its politicians, functionaries and bureaucracy a reprieve from their bad publicity; you have a most sagacious three-judge bench verdict from the High Court of Uttar Pradesh on the highly symbolic Ayodhya imbroglio. A verdict, long decades in its coming; one representative of no less than the vitality and resilience of our social fabric as a country. And this verdict has been received, not with discontent and public protest, but in a spirit of statesmanship and communal harmony nationwide. There is profundity and pride in this outcome, given the fractious history of this matter, not easily matchable, now or in the future, by any other nation on earth, no matter how apparently integrated and homogenous.

Surely then, any future nasty shocks notwithstanding, two rights or is it two and a half depending on one’s perspective, of varying import and relative stature, eclipse the remaining half. A half that is undeniably rotten, as it may continue to seem to those, both here and abroad, who prefer to make freer with criticism than praise. But of course this assessment too depends on the scales one uses to measure the abstractions underlying such weighty news flow.

And willy-nilly, the people of India are thrust into a new position of maturity. We make a mess of the Commonwealth Games preparations and yet redeem our pride, yes, Monsoon Wedding fashion, as hazarded by our Sports Minister MS Gill.

Our standards, of much more than hygiene and maintenance, on the other hand, are, without a doubt, quite deplorable. And it may be years, mysterious as the causes may seem, before we are able to get a fix on this sub-standard mind-set. Meanwhile, we will have to endure international slurs and ridicule, and pay for our sloppiness and unreliability in lost business, cost overruns, missed deadlines, faulty execution, diminished diplomatic stature and credibility.

So, easy as it may be to blame OC Secretary General Lalit Bhanot for his embarrassing remarks on relativity and filth; he has not, some of us may recognise, said anything untrue. Our cavalier attitude to cleanliness can be demonstrated on any city street or village across our beloved country. We may know what clean is but that does not inspire us to make and keep clean, particularly in any civic sense.

Meanwhile, the FII’s have pumped in close to $ 6 billion in the month of September alone, with a strong likelihood of much more to come, in a belated acknowledgement, that India is one of the few places they stand to make money in the next couple of years. This even as our absolute numbers of people below the poverty line keeps growing in relentless fashion.

And if we do finally resolve the Ayodhya issue with the building of a longed for grand temple to Lord Rama at his exact birth-place, as well as that of a great mosque on the banks of the Saryu river; we would, as a nation, have definitely achieved a proud milestone in the history of independent India.

If the import of the somewhat inscrutable Japanese proverb to do with revenge and rivers and floating corpses was meant to be about our communally conflicted recent past, it will have turned instead to a last laugh on our ill-wishers and detractors with less than absolute faith in our native cohesiveness and good sense.

Besides, we have other ways and means. There is a very old, very wise, Indian concept of “upaya”, celebrated, amongst other places, in the brilliant and visionary treatise Lal Kitab which has Persian origins and was originally written in Urdu. Without going into the esoterics of its efficacy, it is clear that the central suggestion is that of remedy and relief affordable to apparently intractable issues of karma and destiny. In short, there is no problem that cannot be alleviated or even solved with some flowing water, the gathering of certain offerings to be made, and the performance of some prescribed rituals over the whole enterprise. It is, in the end, a most reassuring world-view.

(1,055 words)

October 3^rd, 2010

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader on Edit Page of print edition of The Pioneer as "We are like this only" on Wednesday 6th October, 2010. Also online at www.dailypioneer.com and is mirrored in the pioneer epaper.

Winston Naked

2010-09-13T04:18:00.000-07:00

Winston Naked

There is a new and largely critical book on Churchill written by Frankfurt based historical researcher Madhusree Mukherjee, called Churchill’s Secret War. It has, not surprisingly, been extensively reviewed in the Indian media.

It says, amongst other things that help to strip away some of the lustre from the great man, that Winston Churchill was deliberately and wilfully responsible for the last of the Bengal famines (1943), that killed at least three million people.

It was one of the diabolical ironies of the devout Anglican moorings of the British Raj, particularly during the Victorian era that saw it to its zenith, that we lost over 45 million souls to periodic (about seven years), man-made famines throughout 200 years of British rule. And these needless deaths were caused by imperial priorities of war, annexation and armies on the march, such as the Afghan War, or, as in Churchill’s time, WWII.

The Raj thought nothing of depriving the poorest “natives” of basic staples of food by creating artificial scarcities resulting in rampant inflation, in order to divert grain and victuals to the war or annexation effort of the day.

But when Churchill wrote, (had ghost written), his four volume A History of the English Speaking Peoples, he lionised himself and dwelt on aspects of his selective memory. There wasn’t, of course, a single word in it about the Bengal famine of 1943-44.

To an imperialist like Churchill, unwilling to preside over the loss of Empire, anything that could strike a blow on the back of Indian nationalism was fair means. This included opposing limited self-government in the 1930s, vilifying Mahatma Gandhi, promoting the policy of divide and rule, and despising Indians in general for their temerity in wanting to overthrow British rule. So, genocide via famine too was probably reckoned to be par for the course, betwixt the many “weak whiskies” and cognacs that he famously consumed throughout the day and night.

To the credit of the Mughals whom the British usurped power from in the first place, there was no such privation during over 400 years of their rule; though the Mughals were given to massacres and sackings of another kind, of course. But such blood-letting, brutal as it was, did not involve, comparatively, such large numbers.

And similar kudos must go to ourselves since independence, despite the abject appeals that resulted in the humiliating PL-480 handouts from America in the Sixties, before our own Green Revolution made us food self-sufficient in the following decades.

Alas, despite this, thousands of starvation related deaths still occur in the poorest parts of the country today, owing to our callous political and bureaucratic bungling of surplus food stocks, abysmal storage conditions, and appalling distribution inefficiencies. There is also the rank corruption in the rationale and timing behind questionable exports and imports of food.

For all his rediscovered faults, Churchill’s lasting contribution to history was his early recognition of the true intent of the Nazis. And that is why he was the right person to preside over the war years. But afterwards, the British people, in their wisdom, saw to it that he was voted out of office, and, to their credit, they never let him back in.

But deprived of parental warmth as he was in his childhood, Churchill developed a vicious streak that was never very far from the surface. And it is one of the truisms of life that a man may burnish his image as much as he likes, but people can somehow see right through him to his essential self.

And as for imperialism itself, not only did the baton pass to the Americans directly but is ready to be passed on to the Chinese sometime later in the 21^st century. Though, in fairness, it might be a few years yet. Besides, there could always be an unforeseen twist in the tale, resulting in the abortion of such naked ambition, seeking to work its inexorability, not through the dogs of war, but in peace time.

Yet another icon of our post war era, but more properly blossomed in the Sixties, Seventies and since; is the musician John Winston Lennon of The Beatles and subsequent solo career alongside the Japanese-American Yoko Ono. He has also had a new BBC documentary made on him. Called Lennon Naked, it dwells on his essential psyche.

The new film shows John’s deep insecurity, his excessive drug taking and resultant psychosis, his cruelty towards his near and dear, an eccentricity and arrogance bordering on something darker, and clearly indicates that he was responsible for the break-up of The Beatles out of a spiteful hubris.

Lennon’s working class soul was essentially troubled by an anguish of abandonment felt from early childhood; much like the aristocratic but very lonely Churchill, brought up by governesses and preparatory schools. One compensated with an ostensible crusade for Peace, however subversive; and the other, by ruthlessly prosecuting a war that he nearly didn’t win.

Lennon’s was the more lurid history. His mother Julia left his father to remarry when John was just six. His father went off to sea and disappeared for 17 years. John was brought up by his Aunt Mimi, while his own mother had three more children with her new husband, living just a few lanes away in his native Liverpool. And then she was tragically run over by a bus.

All this was, no doubt, grist to the mill for the flowering of that famous Lennon genius, but it was also the reason for his pain and anger. Likewise Churchill’s life- long leaning towards heroics, adventurism and brinkmanship was probably compensation for the hollowness and inadequacy he felt inside. It helped to keep the “black dog” on his back at bay, helped with liquor, long baths, the painting of passable water-colours, and those famous cigars.

Lennon’s middle name was Winston. And both gentlemen, for all their storied glory, were tortured souls, driven, in equal measure, towards greatness and self-destructiveness.

That Churchill was put out to lionised pasture, and lived for decades during which he saw the world he believed in slip into history, was perhaps fitting. And likewise that John Lennon was shot in the street by a crazed fan, stilling the childhood injury done to his soul with a bullet through his heart.

(1,046 words)

September 13^th, 2010

Gautam Mukherjee

Published in The Pioneer Op-Ed Leader on 15th September 2010 as "The war on Bengal" and also online at www.dailypioneer.com where it is archived also under Columnists.

Two Versions

2010-09-08T10:04:00.000-07:00

Two Versions

There is a distinct disconnect between the Government and the Governed in India. The former drifts, flounders, feathers its own nest; and the latter suffers patiently or not so patiently.

The Governed are decidedly victims of extremely poor Governance, even in the midst of high growth rates lately; in a phenomenon similar to that which prevails in neighbouring China. There too, the majority of the numerous people, on a per capita basis, are very poor, while the single Communist Party ruled Government and nation is certainly well off, and the fastest growing economy in the world to boot. But then, ours, almost equally populous, is also the second fastest growing economy.

Still, this complaint is not only about neglected and disenchanted tribals turned Maoist, disgruntled Islamists turned terrorist, emasculated middle classes turned into grumbling nonentities; or ever growing numbers of poor people robbed of every shred of their dignity!

After all, this, and more along these lines, has proved so intractable to our successive Governments as to almost seem old hat. And being in a ruling party near majority in UPA II seems paradoxically to have made the quality of Governance worse. And this has in turn bewildered and belied all the high hopes of the electorate that chose not to return a typically blackmailing, regionally focussed multi-party coalition to the Centre this time.

But things are undeniably worse than in UPA I, plagued as it was by its 60 seat wielding Communist allies. And worse also than when the Opposition many party NDA combine ruled, under the sage and popular Prime Minister AB Vajpayee. This then must be complacency; bred perhaps by a reduced threat perception about the possibility of being unseated. Otherwise, it is indicative of the cluelessness of two leaders, or is it three, at the top, all naïve at best, about the nuts and bolts of Governance.

This lament is also not just about corruption, though it has grown sufficiently brazen and all pervasive to put us in the leading ranks of corrupt nations worldwide. The Commonwealth Games coming up are in undeniable danger of turning into an expensive and embarrassing fiasco. And for sheer looting, shoddy workmanship and dangerous callousness, it has already plumbed heretofore unfathomed depths of depravity.

No, it is time to recognise that our political classes, the bureaucracy and other arms of Government have been left behind. They are simply unable to keep up with the demands of a resurgent India. And everything under their sway, which is altogether too much for them to cope with, is suffering. Vital matters such as Defence and Agriculture are in bad shape. So are the entire gamut of state administered Education, Health, Natural Resources, Law & Order and Basic Infrastructure.

It has always been so in independent India. But the state of affairs was less glaring when the Government used to shackle private enterprise so tightly that they could barely function. Then everything was at a near standstill anyway. But now, the private sector has pulled away since 1991, and is today responsible for all the bright spots on the national landscape. Practically all of the growth in annual GDP figures and most of the lucrative employment opportunities are in the private domain, particularly if the unorganised sector is included in the calculations.

Through it all, the mystery wrapped up in the enigma of Indian Governance today is an insidious myth of spurious aam aadmiism. This is ruthlessly promoted, looking however, not really for equity or justice or upliftment, but for a constituency of stable votes.

It is reminiscent of the failure of Communism not just in West Bengal and Kerala, but around the globe, including in the most durable Fidel Castro’s Cuba, starving at America’s doorstep, all in its ostensible championing of the poor.

It is also reminiscent of the riddles of revisionism that sometimes plague history and legend alike. For example, coming down to us from the 9^th century, there is a persistent and fascinating legend about the existence of a female Pope, remembered as Pope Joan, who successfully masqueraded as a man (John or Johannes), all the way from a mere provincial monk to the exalted Seat of St. Peter in Rome.

This, of course is denied absolutely by the Vatican as scurrilous untruth, particularly as the sex of the Papess was only outed when she went into a labour of childbirth while leading a Papal Procession. She was, predictably, torn to pieces by an outraged mob.

But the legend of Pope Joan is a compelling story, and two feature films have been made about it. The first, from 1972, was directed by Michael Anderson, and its screenplay was written by one John Briley, who also wrote one for Richard Attenborough’s multiple Oscar winning film on Mahatma Gandhi in the eighties.

The other version, also titled Pope Joan, is a multi-national and detailed production, from 2009. The older film, from 1972, is somewhat glamorised with the beauteous Liv Ullman in the title role, but the newer one is a serious attempt to capture the ignorance, superstition and brutality of the “Dark Ages” when Christianity, even Roman Catholicism, with its considerable orthodoxies, was not quite as settled into its groove.

Contextually, there are several titillations. Celibacy was by no means universally practiced by the clergy. Nor was the Church a neutral observer in matters worldly though the sword and guile was used in a manner different from the Papal diplomacy of today. Some might say, even in matters sexual, things haven’t changed very much.

Pope Joan features also on Tarot Cards, immortalised as “The Papess”. But then, Tarot Cards have always been a vehicle for a coded history imbued also with a number of fascinating Hindu (Kali), Hebrew/Kaballah and Romany Gypsy influences; woven in holistically to enhance the powerful mysticism of its fortune-telling propensities in the hands of a good reader.

But the most telling part of the narrative on Pope Joan is to do with what is permissible to history. And there, Pope Joan, like the incompetence of Indian Governance, is simply not officially acknowledged. Our politicians and bureaucrats, our judges, municipalities and policemen, likewise admit to nothing. And as long as they can get away with this kind of stone-walling and lack of accountability, nothing substantive can change for the majority of people in this country.

(1,055 words)

September 8^th, 2010

Gautam Mukherjee

Deja vu Jack, would you please pass me a slice of immortal soul?

2010-07-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

New Bride Photograph by Dayanita Singh

Déjà vu Jack, would you please pass me a slice of immortal soul?

On the brink of annihilation by reason of obsolescence, after the outright demise of Polaroid, comes the last-gasping, floundering pantheon roll-call of photographic greats such as Kodak, Pentax, Nikon, Hasselblad, Olympus, Leica and so on; some languishing blue, yet clinging poignantly to their still-film avatars, but with nowhere else to go.

Others in the distinguished line-up, have used their famous brand names to sell out to a digital world of miniaturised, finger–snapping fast memories. But before the strains of the last post fade from hearing quite, here comes a revival!

It’s a marked thing no mistaking, another turn in the sun for the 35 m.m. film-using still-camera, back with a thump with its honour restored.

And this new interest is arising, not out of corny nostalgia or demand from the retro-freaks, but purely on the grounds of superior aesthetics. Now what exactly can you call the phenomenon- would you call it moving with or back in time?

The revival of the arcana of negative-positive dark-room developments and chemicals-leaning thereby towards the many qualities and effects it can impart; the art in its handling, the mystery, depth, atmosphere, authenticity, truth of its inherent nature, quirks, camera tricks, of film speeds, shutters and light, the development effects of exposure, paper, screens, thickness; all this and more.

In contrast, that is, to the mere near-film quality, no flash induced red-eye, but distinctly robotic digital snapshot. The province of the click as many as you please digital pictures may be soulless, but have, like bottom–feeding carps, practically displaced all the grand marques of the colour & BW photo-clicking kind. Photo artistes may mutter, aficionados may stutter, but that may be just the modern day equivalent of the green devil absinthe talking.

Pour quoi the change of heart? Perhaps, it is a belated recognition of the virtues of old fashioned still photography. Besides, it is difficult to commit to pictures that can be snapped in their thousands stretching towards infinity, constrained only by the capacity of the storage devices attendant, and the upload, download, folder, attach and send universe they tend to inhabit. It’s also the slightest bit pornographic even without the mms spreading smut, with a new convenient invasiveness all of its own.

But coming back to this revivalist context, I read a recent wisecrack in a magazine that echoes Albert Einstein’s famous remark about God and Certainty and Dice, albeit in a smarmy, self-serving and commercial kind of way. This one presumed to say: God takes pictures with a Leica, the film-roll carrying analog kind if you please; the intelligence conveyed to us mere mortals with a wonderful omniscience that can sometimes, of course, be the province of a self-confident advertiser.

This new found, if revived fondness for negative and print is similar to a renewed interest, bordering on reverence, usually reserved for the real McCoy, applied to old vinyl long-playing records replete with their sleeves, labels, scratches, stumbles, halts, hiss, all seen, not as the Neanderthal annoyances of crude technology but as so much in-built, or is it built-in, “atmosphere”. So think of the kudos earned by those prescient aesthetes who still keep their record players in working order and their album collections in their regularly dusted sleeves? Besides, they’re starting to mix in this retro-atmosphere into the new digitised world of recording to get away from the synthetic perfection of today’s techniques.

Fact is, all these transitions are not without their traumas. Years ago, Rolls Royce put in a toy gear change for drivers to play with, even as their cars ran on the then new-fangled and axiomatically silent automatics. Sometimes, it was recognised, back in the sixties or thereabouts, already a half century ago, letting go is not the only option. There’s always pretence.

What’s going to be the next U Turn on the technology trail? Whatever it is, it is good to remember that this harking back in the spirit of revision is not, at least till now, a mass sentiment. The majority are content to move on with the times without a backward glance.

But a few tend to pine over losing something more than just the bathwater even as they hold the squalling baby in their arms. These coves search. They seek. They wonder. They worry. And after all these travails, they sometimes zero in on an issue that may have escaped the notice of the many in their stampede for the exits.

These omissions, like torn off buttons on a shirt come back from the wash, may or may not provide the answers to the missing link or ingredient in the future. But to these sorts, quests of such manner make for meaningful activity. Sometimes however, later, perhaps much later, others, far more obtuse about their surroundings, find reason to be grateful to them.

Predictably, we others do not understand what the fuss is about at the time. We never do, actually, not when we first encounter such a phenomenon in the past, not now as we live and breathe, and probably not later either. Progress does cut corners on this very premise. It even presumes to educate us in new ways which are not always an advantage on all parameters.

So it is thanks to the unusuals amongst us, and sometimes an ever-suspicious, lugubrious and ponderous watch-dog or regulatory authority with vague and all encompassing powers to harass and obstruct, that keep societies as a whole from degeneracy in the face of change. All you need to do is read a little Kafka for further elucidation.

But when we talk of the next retro-vision with mass as opposed to niche support, it is probably going to involve a measure of concern about the very modern issues of pollution, global warming and the environment. But since these are relatively new concerns that have cropped up ever since we have grown deadly efficient at plundering the natural resources of this planet, there are no old ways and means to go back to.

No, to incorporate this sentiment and awareness we must build anew, but tinge and tincture our efforts with the sensibilities of an earlier, less rapacious time.

There will have to be, therefore, a technological remake of the old ways before mankind mass produced their 16 lane high-speed highways to perdition. We may not have a scenic route to take back to less toxic times, but some of the inspiration must come from a simpler era anyhow. This particularly, as many of us may be wearying of things and processes that do get better and more efficient at all apparent levels but yet manage to feel utterly soulless in their processes and content.

To capture that fragile and precious butterfly-like anima, gone AWOL amongst all our progress, future designers, geneticists, architects, legislators, journeymen all, may have to build-in “feel”.

This is easier said than done because a simulation will not suffice. To intuit what is necessary, they will have to manifest, from their genetically engineered innards, a slice of soul to deposit, not just the heartfelt, but the immortal kind, as the price of their admittance.

For what it’s worth, it will certainly make a change from the proverbial depositing of death-dealing firearms at the door as an act of good intent; because, let’s face it, by then, guns would have lost most of their power to kill anyway. Besides, suffer away for now without interference, while you still can, because it's a matter of some speculation what the future will make of germane issues such as love, meaning and death. If you can modify the body with genetics, just what kind of muscularity will it introduce to the mind?

(1,274 words)

July 25^th, 2010

Guru Purnima

Gautam Mukherjee

Free Imports Zindabad, Licence-Permit Murdabad!

2010-06-27T02:01:00.000-07:00

Free Imports Zindabad, Licence-Permit Murdabad!

From a macro economist’s viewpoint, subsidies and price controls distort. So theoretically, the sharp fuel price rises, designed to do away with such things, is for the common good and worth the projected 1% inflation engendered by expected price rises. Notwithstanding protests from opposition parties and allies alike for its “anti-people” aspects.

Perhaps this is a good time to suggest the same market forces logic should also extend to other imports, particularly high-end finished goods, which face a wall of protectionism, even when we do not manufacture the items in India. We protect the inferior by taxing the superior in a classic bit of left-over Socialism.

Consider that the recent US launch of the 2010 Audi A-4, with a number of new bells and whistles, is priced at some $31,000 there, or a modest Rs. 15 lakhs. This is the kind of figure applied in India to the likes of the Skoda Laura and the Volkswagen Jetta, the C and B category marques respectively, from the same stable as the luxury class Audi. But in India, by the time the new A-4 is introduced, sometime in 2011, its price will be in an altogether more precious Rs. 30 or 35 lakh range.

An S Series Mercedes Benz limousine, or a seven series BMW, or the high-end Audi models, which currently sell in India for about 90 lakhs, would be hard pressed to cost a rupee more than Rs. 45 lakhs in Europe or the US. And if these top class cars, were assembled in India, you could probably shave off another Rs. 10 lakhs from their on- street price.

It could happen, spurred by ever higher sales numbers, as the Indian economy, particularly that of corporate India, grows. Call it affordable luxury, though at any reduced price, such items will still remain the province of a privileged few.

There is, however, a universally beneficial reason for letting in sophisticated engineering, including luxury cars, without prohibitive import duties. It tends to raise standards all around.

Consider that Volvo and Mercedes are going in for heavy investments in bus and truck manufacturing facilities in India. Can Ashok Leyland or Tata Motors afford to be left behind? Otherwise, why have they upgraded their design and manufacturing benchmarks with alacrity, including the acquisition of bus and truck plants in South Korea and elsewhere to facilitate the process? Before such competition was allowed, the same domestic companies, somnolent with Government protection, were quite content to sell shoddy vehicles using 1954 technology, well into the eighties and nineties!

On a pure merits basis, fearful protectionism translates into penalties applied to aspiration, and punishment to success. This hurts more in an interlinked world. But choosing such illogic, animated not by a forward-looking vision, works its post-imperial damage, as if we abused children of empire know nothing better than to repeat the brutalisation and injustice.

We have chosen to hobble our progress because of our piece-meal and ad hoc policy, putting us well behind other BRIC economies such as China, Brazil and Russia. We change only if we must, reluctantly, suspiciously, travelling along with our holdalls and tin trunks of yore, and the ubiquitous, if inappropriate kitchen sink also. In our Socialist decades of retardation, dismal economic policy was always swaddled in ideological hypocrisy and if it weren’t for the size of our domestic markets we would have been sunk long ago. Still, it is hard to forget such long used pathways.

Policies of exclusion and scarcity were practiced with a grim colonial mindset, to deliberately enrich cronies with nod and wink favouritism. We made a virtue of permitting duty free or quota regulated import of intermediate goods and technologies, required for the manufacture of products in India. So far so good, but there were invariably built-in licensing bonanzas so that the powers that be could eat their cakes and have them too. Such cynical policy sleight-of-hand led to unrelated diversifications, outright fraud and collusive corruption.

But while hobbling local enterprise, the same Government of India did not allow in fully-built units of anything manufactured abroad, without imposing punishing duties. Neither did it encourage foreign investment. These meant only low-end products were produced, or more truthfully, assembled and copied locally; while sophisticated things were invariably imported at considerable cost, and this applied to everything from defence purchases to chocolate.

Indian industry, unexposed to the intricacies of top class R&D or manufacture, even via the copycat route, languished in its second or third-rate morass. We developed little idea about quality and sophistication in goods or services, or even, let it be said, management or project implementation practices. It gives you some understanding as to why we are so poor at execution even today.

But maybe now, just maybe, for its liberating and self-affirming fallout, amongst other things, it is time to let in not just imported vehicles but a plethora of other items at their international price tags, like civilized and self-confident countries do.

Local industry that is inferior and under-funded will be impacted when this happens. But, whatever won’t excite market sentiment anymore in comparison with markedly better alternatives, will force innovation, to the overall betterment of core virtues, those very aspects which are worth keeping and preserving.

India is inching its way towards integration with the globe in various ways, ranging from satellites, missiles and space exploration, nuclear power and high-end technologies with “dual-use” potential, continuous modernisation of our military machine and our forecasting models for everything from the weather to the economy. Our new found concern about carbon credits, stock market practices, a logo for the rupee which could go convertible someday, and so on. And, of course, painfully bearing the brunt of prices, meaning by that the real prices, of petroleum products that we are forced to largely import.

But, we could gain at the swings what we lose at the roundabouts, with a reworking of our import policies, so that we welcome anything we cannot as yet produce here in India on an open and general basis. By doing this, we could spark off another paradigm shift in our journey to join the ranks of the brightest and the best. And it won’t be very long after that before we can manufacture and offer services that are value-added, technologically cutting-edge, competitively priced, yet second to none.

(1, 052 words)

June 27th, 2010
Gautam Mukherjee

Book Review: The Corruption Conundrum and Other Paradoxes and Dilemmas

2010-06-16T01:45:00.000-07:00

Tree in Black- Sourav Biswas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GusxltLA1vQ
Book Review

Title: The Corruption Conundrum and Other Paradoxes and Dilemmas
Author: V. Raghunathan
Published in 2010 by Penguin Portfolio.

Probability Is The Only Certainty

This little book might seem at first to be an elaborate paean to cynicism, but it is nothing of the sort, even if it refuses to flinch from stating home truths. It does explore why corruption is universally rampant asserting: “a society is as corrupt as the system allows it to be,” but the author advocates remedies, not celebration.

Mr. V. Raghunathan, writer of this brilliant addition to management theory, taught Finance at IIM Ahmedabad for nearly two decades. He then went on to ING Vyasa Bank as its President before becoming the CEO of GMR Varalakshmi Foundation.

Here, he plays a continuous series of mind games via examples of logic with its knickers in a twist. But he starts off with the positive and commonsensical assertion that success is probable if the odds are meticulously pre-planned and materially stacked in one’s favour.

Raghunathan believes weighing and measuring componentry to arrive at probability, for or against a desired outcome, is the only certainty. It is, in plainspeak, an as-you-sow-so-shall-you-reap credo, very close to the age-old Hindu belief in Karma and its phenomena in tandem, namely cause and effect- applied to business, management, governance and decision-making.

Raghunathan, erudite, affable, conceptually lucid, is something of a Renaissance man, with six management books to his credit, additional skills as a cartoonist for a national daily and a columnist for the pink papers. He also played chess at the all-India level. He likes old locks and has gathered an impressive collection of the contraptions to himself.

His intellectual references, for the purposes of this book and its deductive and inductive logic explorations, are to do with the ancient Greek philosophers and other Western science moderns such as Albert Einstein who’s famous remark about certainty: God does not play dice, Raghunathan, to his credit, contests.

The author emphasises that: “God not only plays dice but His other name is random variability. If we do the right things, God’s way of rewarding us is to increase the probability of success.” Accordingly, Raghunathan does not talk of faith, except for fleeting references to the Bhagvad Gita, again to affirm the value of right action. There is no acknowledgement of predestination or embedded tendencies deep in our DNA programmed to ensure future outcomes or towards his assessment of probability.

The writer tries not to take sides in the moral equation. He is silent on Graham Greene’s belief that it is important to choose a side in order to remain human. But Greene, the master of moral dilemmas and cold betrayal depicted in novel after novel never confuses humanity with ethics. In fact, one may well remark at the quality of Greene’s vision of humanity which seems to consist of failings and wonder at its moral price!

Raghunathan on his part also makes clear that paradoxes, dilemmas and conundrums have no easy intellectual certainties, no obvious right answer or solution to them. What they present are either/or choices and sometimes, multiple-options based on the available facts.

Time and again, the author points to the inductive choices, also known, ironically, as leaps of faith. He rearranges the same set of numbers or gets the protagonists to cast the dice over and over, as in voting. And we see very different implications present themselves with each alteration. Raghunathan jokes, finally, about the best democractic decision being dictatorial.

To navigate safely through such binary or multipolar matters, mankind has traditionally turned to belief in a higher power for guidance and inspiration. Divorced from this ethical lodestar, it is quite easy to treat expediency as the greatest good, and wisdom as no more than comment on the durability of such expedient means.

Besides, these three cousins-paradox, dilemma and conundrum, tend to thrive in chaos. Applied to the stock market, Raghunathan points out that, “the opportunities to earn disproportionate returns are negligible in an efficient market”.

The author, a mathematician, is captivated by Game Theory, made famous by the acclaimed film A Beautiful Mind on the life of John Nash, its inventor. Game Theory states one reaches “equilibrium” on the very first move, meaning, the first move made well, as in the proverb “Well begun is half done”. But, Nash goes at uncovering such axiomatic truths mathematically, as does Raghunathan.

He describes the power of compounding, an open secret of the successful corporation, bank or wealthy individual. But the writer shows how the concept tends to elude the grasp of ordinary people, because of what he calls “counter-intuitive” thinking.

Finally, why did Raghunathan write this instructive, cerebral book: “To me, paradoxes are important in their own right. Paradoxes improve our logical thinking as well as intuition,” he says. That it aids research in behavioural economics and helps to prove or disprove economic phenomena is nothing to sniff at either.

(800 words)

16th June 2010
Gautam Mukherjee

Shortened version of this review appeared with the same title in the Sunday Pioneer on 11th July 2010 in the Agenda Section on the BOOKS page and also online at http://www.dailypioneer.com/

Cast your fate to the wind

2010-06-05T02:31:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PddZZ83Be8E

Cast your fate to the wind

I set my sail as the tide comes in

And I just cast my fate to the wind

Vince Guaraldi

When a nation approaches a fresh apogee in its destiny, it must review its own narrative, however bitter. For growth, not just economic, but an overall enhancement of stature, which could lead to greatness, demands the shedding of inappropriate baggage.

But, almost axiomatically, there is the anxiety at the prospect of casting off from familiar shores. It calls for changes: for an end to navel-gazing and decisive action against enemies of the state; but also for letting bygones be bygones. It calls for the ruthless elimination of security threats and the relentless pursuit of national interest; but also for the forging of new ties and alliances, sometimes with unequal and powerful partners that have not always done the right thing by us.

India

is rapidly and inexorably approaching that hallowed threshold, that long desired entrance to the portal of resurgent leading nations, with the appropriateness of our candidature held beyond dispute, and is called upon to make ready to seize its moment.

Some of the reason for arriving at this juncture is attributable to our innate virtue. Our Hindu/Buddhist/Sufi/Jain influenced pacifism and philosophical moderation, and the capacity to absorb different strains and viewpoints into our body politic. In a troubled world perplexed by the mayhem harvested by more dichotomised ways in the Judeo-Christian tradition, our nuanced responses, our seeming paradoxical embrace of opposing viewpoints, seems wise after all, and no longer wily or effete - no more the object of derision and contempt.

And other reasons, such as the upheaval in a settled world order, caused humiliatingly by self-inflicted implosion, not external aggression or sabotage, is climactic. An order undisturbed since before the fall of the Berlin Wall; perhaps unchanged from the first Bretton Woods Conference after World War II.

The hard reality is that Europe and America, large as their economies are, will, evidently, not grow at more than one or two per cent per annum for years, if not decades. And this too is dependent on mercantile and political cooperation of the sizeable fast-growing nations such as India and China.

A mirror held to the changing world reflects news of China looking at buying Newsweek magazine put on the block by owners’ Washington Post; also struggling to survive as a US broad-sheet in the Internet Age. But what does China actually want with Time magazine’s feisty competitor? Could it be to get their world-view out more clearly to the target audience, and without inherent Western bias and prejudice?

India

, recent purchasers of halcyon British automotive marques Land Rover, Range Rover and Jaguar through the Tata Group, is now moving towards making their engines in India. This move would have been deemed sacrilege a few years ago; but now, it has been prompted, not by a jingoistic Indian manager, but by the European CEO of Tata Motors. So the erstwhile financially troubled brands will be transformed: becoming more profitable and affordable. The engine design team will still be from the British Tata-owned operation, but the luxury vehicle engines will henceforth be made in

India

Meanwhile, Press reports state Beijing and Mumbai are pleased at the windfall discounts available on their high-end Mercedes Benz, BMW and Audi car purchases, occasioned by the persistent weakness in the Euro. This is probably good in the long run also, because the buying demand these days is in these, and suchlike places.

The prompting to resize our ambitions is coming in from various sides, some positive some negative in their impetus. The intensifying of terrorism and internal insurgency is a measure, if backhanded, of both our democracy and our success. Nobody is whisked away at midnight in India for railing at the state however misguidedly. Treason is not a term used to gag dissent and make political opponents disappear. Nor is the Indian State put out at suggestions that it is the greatest terrorist of them all! This State, now seen as a contender, is subject to efforts from certain quarters to hinder its progress and sap its strength. Ergo, it is necessary for us to find the modern wherewithal to prevail, and thwart such designs.

But even left to itself,

India

’s economic growth is posing challenges to our somewhat bullock-cart and buffalo gazing political leadership. Besides, no politician or political party is able to hoodwink the population anymore. In the Internet Age the control over information is innately slippery. It is not just a matter of secrecy and leakages, but the transparency, including the hackery, engendered by the possibilities of technology available. It is this technology that is proving harder and harder to outwit. Every side of the fence is affected, the heroes and villains, and all those of us betwixt and bemused.

And the ideological narrative too has changed drastically. We are no longer Socialist. Perhaps neither is China. But ideology to them has become an internal matter for them to interpret as they see fit. Because China realised it’s priorities in the now seemingly distant eighties. And today, having paid its dues, is indeed in control of its metamorphosis.

So to do this thing we are now called upon to do, we too must ignore the scars of recent centuries, must let go the post-colonial angst, as well as more recent geo-political biases against us.

We need instead to focus and not be distracted by rear-viewing cacophony, narrow parochialism or phoney nationalism. There is no opportunism in recognition of ground reality. It is not wrong to jettison that which is spent.

Since independence, through forty years of a Socialist India, we worked obliquely to undermine the authority and power of the West. So it should come as no surprise that they did nothing to help us either!

But now all is different. We have a shot at reforming global trade talks and international institutional financing in our favour. We could be in the UNSC soon, not just as a temporary but permanent member. We could be taken off all the presently inaccessible high-technology lists. Our nuclear programmes could go forward unfettered. We could address our regional concerns with Pakistan and China with much greater confidence.

But first we have to drop the burdens of history and cast our fate to this favourable and prevailing wind.

(1,054 words)

5^th June 2010

Gautam Mukherjee

Published in Leader Edit slot in The Pioneer on June 16th 2010 as "We must seize the moment". Repeated online at www.dailypioneer.com and archived there under Columnists.

Push Me Pull You But Don't Stop Now!

2010-05-27T01:19:00.000-07:00

Push Me Pull You But Don’t Stop Now!

A Push-Me-Pull-You is a creature that goes both ways at once; rather like splurging on liquidity and demanding austerity at the same time. It is a strange mutant creature with two heads on opposite ends of its body; but don’t ask which is front and which posterior. It is supposedly a cross between the legendary Unicorn and a lithe Gazelle. And the world knows of it from literature’s Dr. Dolittle, capable of conversing with animals.

The pushmi-pullyu is a perfect metaphor for our complicated economic times. And the prescription from Europe and America is a full-on flow of money, printed by their mints and guaranteed by their governments, to keep the financial system working; while simultaneously getting reacquainted with austerity and thrift from another, older, neither-a-borrower-nor-a-lender-be era. It’s like applying the brakes slowly so as not to go into a death spin from all that reckless speed built up in the past.

It was mighty Sir Bailout again, that saved the US economy from collapse in 2008. Otherwise we might have been revisiting the Great Depression of the 1930s. Refusing to skid off the road was good strategy that prevented calamity.

In retrospect, it was a mean–spirited blunder to let Lehman Brothers go under in 2008 while saving all the rest. But perhaps Lehman was the victim of its own first-mover advantage. Keeping liquidity plentiful and intact is the open secret of ongoing economic recovery in Obama’s America. The same formula is, and must continue to be, applied in Europe.

The fact is, despite apocalyptic and hysterical prognostications, only 20 % of the Eurozone GDP is suffering from Sovereign Debt woes, made acute by negligible to negative growth figures practically everywhere in the developed world.

But for all the fuss, Greece accounts for just 1% of Eurozone GDP. The lack of confidence contagion could, of course, spread, but with sufficient access to institutional funds, is unlikely to do so. The Great Depression came about because first a hundred and then a thousand banks were allowed to fail. Today also, the others lurking on the insolvency bus are Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy. But together, jointly and severally, they still account for no more than 20% of the GDP that backs the beleaguered Euro.

This is not to take away from the fact that when entire countries go bankrupt because of profligate financial management, and not, say, due to catastrophe or war, it is a profoundly disturbing and destabilising phenomenon. Especially since they belong to the supposedly enlightened, democratic, developed, and “free” West.

But surely the 80% better-off in Eurozone can pull their delinquent brothers out of the mire? You’d think so commonsensically, but there are dire predictions from Left-leaning Nobel-laureate economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, who expect things to get a lot worse. They can’t visualise the bailout recipient states bucking up soon enough with their newly minted responsible ways; and hold out a high unemployment, hyper-inflation spectre, fuelled by all that freshly printed money. They don’t expect Eurozone to survive.

But the sad thing is, many centrists and right wingers around the globe are also sceptical about the West’s ability to pull it off. They see the countries already in trouble as harbingers of things to come. They think the other 80% are technically better off but not by that much.

Meanwhile, the Eurozone national parliaments are glumly voting to pony up their share of the US$ 1 trillion bailout package announced recently, and as long as this is distributed efficiently and swiftly, much of the pain and panic should indeed subside.

It’s another story that the Communist Labour Unions in Greece are acting up and don’t want to accept the austerity measures that are required as a quid pro quo by the lending agencies. They refuse to understand that without drastic reform, the first trillion dollars, already pledged, will disappear into the abyss and much more will have to be conjured up to feed the ravenous belly of the beast; and still not solve the problem.

Unfortunately for the bankrupt sections of the Eurozone, all they can hope to do is finally cut their coats according to their cloth. It is a humiliating business and is going to be painful after years of consumption led boom. This has been the American formula over the last two decades, and Europe has become no more than an American satellite in the interim. But the common man in every bankrupt country is uncomprehending and bewildered and feels betrayed by his leaders.

But they in turn are equally hoisted on their own petard. They thought the good times would go on, like Madden’s Ponzi scheme, from the US led boom through the William Jefferson Clinton years, carried on uninterrupted through the George W Bush ones and on and on, to Obamaland.

But then there was 9/11. And afterwards there was acute jingoism and war: waged half a world away in Afghanistan and Iraq and the NWFP areas of Pakistan, and even more frantic hyper growth just before the bubble burst, with housing being sold to anybody at all who cared to apply.

And the latest is that China, which has been stimulus spending its way out of its own impacted economy while propping up the West, has decided to take the warnings on a real-estate bubble developing on home turf seriously. Ergo it is cutting back on the easy money liquidity that tempted too many to chance their arm. But now the same Western analysts are saying China is sucking out the liquidity that the Europeans and Americans are putting into the global financial system!

So what’s next- currency revaluation? After all, that too is a Western demand. But if the Chinese strengthen their currency their own export led growth engines will slow and impact the already depressed Western economies yet again.

Bottom line: this is shaping up to become the Asian century despite the tremendous volatility on the global bourses at present. The growth is here in India and China and parts of ASEAN for many years to come.

And the way around our mutual problems as the MEA has been saying lately, both with regard to China and Pakistan, is not to let individual issues of disagreement or contention prevent cooperation on the rest.

(1,047 words)

27th May 2010, Buddha Purnima.
Gautam Mukherjee