Macavity

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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.