Right Angle

The age of intolerance

2012-01-28T22:08:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

There are many in the Government who are absolutely chuffed at the ease with which Operation Stop Rushdie was played out. First, the Rajasthan Police (or was it the Central authorities?) informed the organizers of the Jaipur Literature Festival that sundry assassins financed by the Mumbai underworld were on the prowl. That ensured Salman Rushdie didn't check-in for his flight to India. Secondly, once it was known that the organizers would use technology to circumvent the unofficial Congress ban on Rushdie, the local hotelier and the organizers were deftly arm-twisted into cancelling the video linkup for fear of violence and police indifference.

Yes, there were voices of liberal outrage at the subversion of democratic freedom. However, since the indignation was confined to a class that rarely bothers to vote, has no worthwhile electoral influence and, if the chairman of the Press Council is to believed, still harbours a colonial mindset, it could be safely ignored in favour of the satisfaction among those who, apart from being more authentic, also control powerful Muslim vote-banks.

What was witnessed last week was cynicism perfected into a fine art by a government that has excelled in the art of subterfuge. Where the regime wants to offset protests against free speech, it does so unapologetically. In Punjab, crowds at a public meeting to be addressed by Rahul Gandhi were compelled to leave their shoes and any black apparel outside the venue for fear that these could become either missiles or black flags. In Jaipur, however, the authorities chose to be cowed down by the threat of small groups of demonstrators. The champions of intolerance won in Jaipur because their victory was facilitated by the might of the state.

Yet, many apologists argue that the events of last week don't necessarily imply any waning commitment to democratic freedoms. Rushdie, it is said, was the exception because his mere mention sends many Muslims into an apoplectic tizzy. And, say the apologists, the timing of the celebrated author's visit was all wrong. If there had been no elections in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress regimes at the Centre and in Rajasthan may well have been more inclined to showcase India as a place where the bar of intolerance is generously high.

Recent trends suggest otherwise. It is becoming increasingly clear that the kerfuffle over Rushdie was no unfortunate aberration but part of a bid to replace an argumentative society with a regulated democracy where freedom is circumscribed by constant reminders of the limits to freedom.

The attempts to muzzle free speech in the social media and the cyber world can no longer be wished away as obsessive concerns of individual ministers with particularly thin skins. Since September 5 last year, the department of information technology has held five meetings with organizations such as Facebook, Google, Blogspot and Yahoo to force a code of conduct governing their content. It is not that the government is concerned with lewd pictures and pornography. It has demanded that the social media sites "scan and screen/filter the content hosted on their websites for objectionable content about Constitutional authorities, council of ministers in Centre/states, political leadership, public authorities and disable them on their own or as and when brought to their knowledge in writing by an authorized representative of such authorities." A public interest litigation protesting the "damage (to) the secular fabric of India" is also before the Delhi High Court.

In plain language, the government is demanding the right of pre-censorship of all potentially "objectionable content" relating to public life and politics--a demand that has striking resemblance to the censorship practiced by the authorities in China.

It is, of course, possible to dismiss these moves as trivial concerns that will affect a minority of internet loonies who are unaware of the niceties of parliamentary decorum. The only problem is that when the right to determine what is objectionable is given to people who are unaffected by the charms of pluralism, the consequences can be very dangerous. The Rushdie affair last week has vividly demonstrated that for a section of the political class, the right to offend does not count as a permissible freedom. India is being forced into a mental straitjacket.

Sunday Times of India, January 27, 2012

Will BJP project Modi as PM?

2012-01-28T21:53:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Opinion polls in India rarely tend to be definite: They are at best indicative of political trends. Even so, the latest round of the bi-annual Mood of the Nation poll sponsored by India Today must bring a measure of joy to the BJP and particularly those in the organisation who feel that the future belongs to a dispensation led by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

The findings are no doubt much more encouraging to the BJP than to the Congress. In the event of a snap general election, the BJP is expected to win some 140 Lok Sabha seats, which is significantly more than the 110 seats the poll gives to the Congress. In the individual popularity stakes, it would seem that Modi has nearly doubled his claim to be considered as a future Prime Minister. Whereas he was the prime ministerial choice of only 12 per cent six months ago, his current acceptability is 24 per cent. More important, Modi is well ahead of Rahul Gandhi who is the choice of 17 per cent, a fall of four per cent from mid-2011.

However, before the BJP goes gaga celebrating its good showing in an opinion poll, it would be instructive to read the fine print which paints a potentially disturbing picture for the future stability of the country. The poll shows that the NDA (as it is presently constituted) would be only a whisker ahead of the UPA. Together, the two main alliances would account for two-thirds of the Lok Sabha seats. In other words, the Lok Sabha would be divided into three near-equal parts: The NDA, the UPA and members of the Left and regional parties who will hold the balance of power.

The next Government, in short, will be formed by the formation that is least unacceptable to the regional players. It will be the Naveen Patnaiks, the Jayalalithaas and the Chandrababu Naidus who will determine not only the composition of the Government but also the Prime Minister.

For the moment, that is not entirely good news for Modi. His candidature is likely to invite opposition from a section of the NDA and those outside the alliance that regard him as a polarising agent. This may exclude Jayalalithaa and, at a pinch, Patnaik, but will definitely include Nitish Kumar and Naidu.

There is another imponderable. The poll indicates that the BJP can get to 140 seats if it fights as a part of the NDA and without any clarity over its leadership. Will this tally improve or shrink if Modi is the candidate?

Conventional wisdom deems that elevating Modi to a prime ministerial candidate is fraught with risks. Modi is without doubt the most popular BJP leader in the country. His mere presence energises the committed and there is little doubt that he will be able to generate euphoria around himself. In a Modi-Rahul battle, the Gujarat Chief Minister will gain from the infectious enthusiasm of his youthful followers all over the country.

Yet, there is big question mark. Just as Modi will certainly galvanise any BJP campaign and attract an incremental vote from people who are looking forward to purposeful, no-nonsense governance, he will also help consolidate that section which sees Modi as an ogre and a personification of evil. The fact that this includes the dominant section of the media — miffed because Modi has no time for it — and the liberal intelligentsia will ensure that the attack on Modi will be shrill, alarmist and pitiless. Intellectual luminaries will be lined up to tell the country that a Modi administration will be a replica of Hitler’s Germany, with Muslims reduced to the status of non-citizens.

The purpose behind this shrill campaign will be to turn a general election into a referendum on Modi and divert attention from the pathetic quality of governance under the UPA. The Congress believes that with Modi as the BJP’s face, the entire non-BJP vote will rally behind it. Indeed, it has been suggested that the situation would resemble Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater was the darling of his party faithful but Johnson was more acceptable to the electorate.

It is impossible to know whether or not history will repeat itself but what is clear is that Project Modi has a greater chance of success if the enthusiasm for the undeniable leadership qualities of the man can be extended into a platform that brings a multitude of non-Congress parties under one roof. I don’t think any appeal based on highlighting Modi’s Hindu credentials can do the trick. Modi is already too much of a Hindu icon for this point to be emphasised and re-emphasised, especially by people who may end up making minorities and moderate Hindus jittery.

For the BJP, the future lies in fine-tuning and internalising the plank of federalism. Rolling back the frontiers of centralisation is the only plank that will unite the maximum number of regional parties. However, it would appear that many BJP leaders have not cottoned on to its potential appeal. To be fair, Modi has long acknowledged its potential. Now he needs to make many more strategic interventions on the same lines and complement his Sadbhavana Mission with a more tangible message for the rest of India.

Fielding Modi as the prime ministerial candidate constitutes an audacious step. The BJP has to calculate whether it wants the plodding approach or is willing to take risks.

Sunday Pioneer, January 29, 2012

Inhumanity in Norway

2012-01-28T21:48:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

The establishment of an all-embracing “nanny state” has been a cause of concern to many sensible, right-thinking citizens of the European Union (EU).

In Britain, to cite just one example, there is anger and exasperation over the way apprehended illegal immigrants have been able to avert deportation by falling back on the EU’s human rights legislation. The so-called right to family life has been successfully used by those who have broken the law to prevent constituent nations from acting against them.

So absurd is the situation that illegal immigrants were even able to cite the ownership of a cat and membership of a local cricket team to earn for themselves the right to stay in a country where they had overstayed their welcome.

It is against this bizarre backdrop of an over-regulated state, replete with gratuitous codification of daily life, that we must view the strange case of Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya, Indian citizens resident in the Norwegian town of Stavenger.

In May 2011, the child welfare department of the town took the couple’s two children, a son aged two and a daughter then barely five months old into custodial care. The Bhattacharyas were accused of dereliction of parental responsibilities.

What were the faults of the Bhattacharyas, a normal middle-class couple with the husband working as a geo-scientist with Halliburton, a well-known US company? In the courts where the case was heard, the account of parental negligence was provided. These included the absence of separate rooms for the children, the lack of appropriate toys, the absence of a separate diaper changing table and the fact that the son slept in the same bed as the parents and was fed by hand — which allegedly amounted to “force feeding”. The mother was also guilty of breast feeding the daughter in an unsuitable way.

According to a report in an Indian newspaper, filed from Oslo, the authorities argued in court “that when the mother breast-fed the infant, she put her on her lap without holding her, holding the head against the breast but not close to her body”.

Taken together with the fact that the mother had admitted to once slapping her son — a prohibited act under Norwegian law — the Child Welfare Service concluded that the mother failed to look after the children’s emotional needs. The larger interests of the children, it felt, were better served by placing them in foster homes.

The city court of Stavanger agreed with the Child Welfare Service and sent the children to foster homes. As an act of generosity, it allowed the parents to see their children — one of whom was still being breast-fed — twice each year for two hours. In a further revision by the Country Board of the Child Welfare Service it has now been stated that the children must remain in foster homes till they are 18 years of age but would be allowed to spend three hours each year with their parents in three separate visits of an hour each.

The sheer inhumanity of the Norwegian state defies belief. What happened to the Bhattacharyas is not merely the result of the perverted thinking of authorities that believe they know better than the natural parents of children.

It is also an outcome of insular Europeans not knowing and not bothering to appreciate the fact there is no prescribed way of bringing up children. That a child does not have a separate room and the fact that diapers were changed on the bed rather than on a table of a prescribed size are niggling issues. These have more to do with their parents’ financial priorities than a bid to wilfully scar the children emotionally.

Indian children routinely share a bed with their parents or grandparents. This is often a function of space or gestures of affection and they haven’t resulted in India becoming a nation of the emotionally traumatised.

Equally, if feeding a child by hand constitutes an inhuman act of force-feeding, more than 95 per cent of Indian parents would be found guilty of cruelty. Norway cannot dictate how an Indian family chooses to eat. By this absurd logic, Westerners in India should be advised that toilet paper is unhygienic and environmentally unsound!

Like many prosperous but insular countries, the authorities in Norway possess an infuriating sense of sanctimoniousness, believing that their habits, customs and worldviews are the only routes to well-being. There is no common sense view of right and wrong.

In the matter of bringing up children, what the Norwegian authorities are demanding is not emotional sustenance but homogenisation. These are the hallmarks of a totalitarian system that believes children belong primarily to the state. Norway is not a totalitarian state but its social codes resonate with checklists of uniformity.

It is heartening that the Government of India has responded to the sense of outrage at home by summoning the Norwegian ambassador to South Block. It is said that a solution may be worked out with the grandparents of the children giving a helping hand to the Bhattacharya couple.

In other words, Norway will be given a face-saving way out that stops short of its authorities admitting that what happened to the Bhattacharyas was a gross violation of their human rights, particularly their right to a family life and their right to pursue cultural practices. India has a moral duty to rescue two of its children who have become victims of judicial abduction.

Deccan Chronicle/Asian Age, January 27, 2012

A victory for intolerance

2012-01-23T22:49:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Those writers who indulged in a bout of needless grandstanding by reading out passages from Salman Rushdie’s contentious The Satanic Verses at the Jaipur Literature Festival last Friday did the cause they were ostensibly espousing very little good.

On the contrary, their symbolic defiance of the 1988 ban on the book merely served to confirm in the eyes of those baying for Rushdie’s blood that the main purpose behind the invitation to the British-Indian author was to resurrect a controversy that, mercifully, has passed its sell by date. The sundry clerics and ghetto politicians who clamoured for Rushdie’s permanent exclusion from India can now feel vindicated that they managed to contain a sinister assault on the fundamental tenets of Islam.

However, if there is one thing that is clear about last fortnight’s kerfuffle, it is that the fuss was only tangentially connected to the Satanic Verses — a book that is not openly sold in India. Since he re-established his right to visit India in 1998, courtesy the NDA Government, and then wisely procured a PIO card that assures him visa-less travel for life, Rushdie has been in India on more than six occasions and maybe more. He has delivered lectures, graced literary festivals and celebrity parties and even reclaimed his grandfather’s house in Solan. On each occasion some fringe group or other has issued statements opposing the visit and on each occasion the Government chose to ignore them. On his part, Rushdie has done nothing to either resurrect the Satanic Verses issue in India or trigger any new controversy. His behaviour in India has been careful and restrained. After all, he, more than anyone else, is aware of the huge personal costs of living undercover for at least a decade after Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his death sentence through a fatwa.

So, what was so different this time? The difference lies not so much in the fact that the Deoband seminary asked for his visa to be cancelled and that some shadowy organisation promised to reward anyone who threw a slipper at Rushdie with a prize of Rs 1 lakh. There are some bodies that exist to take sectarian positions on matters and routinely proclaim that Islam is in danger. They do it when a US President comes visiting, when Indo-Israeli ties improve, when Taslima Nasreen asks for the right of residence in India and they do it at the whiff of Rushdie. The best way for the Government to have reacted was by ignoring them. Indeed, it seemed that was precisely what was going to happen until Rushdie tweeted and the Rajasthan Government stepped into the fray.

It is difficult to accept the Rajasthan Government’s plea that it would have a hard time guaranteeing Rushdie’s safety. Equally, it is impossible to respond to the Centre’s plea that either the outlawed SIMI or a section of the Mumbai underworld was plotting to send an assassin to accomplish what Ayatollah Khomeini had desired 24 years earlier, with a straight face. What gave the game away was the fact that no one in the Government and the Congress (with the honourable exception of Manish Tewari) deemed it necessary to express a single word of condemnation for those who wanted the ban on Satanic Verses to be coupled with a ban on Rushdie the person. Notables in India are fond of tirelessly repeating that “we will not be cowed down by terrorism”. But isn’t that what precisely happened in the case of Rushdie?

The forces of intolerance scored a famous victory last week. They won because the match was fixed in their favour by the UPA Government and the Congress. And the outcome was pre-determined because with the Uttar Pradesh election round the corner, the Congress wanted to show a gesture of goodwill towards those who claim to influence the vote-banks. Rushdie lost out because the Congress was loath to have any influential Muslim body point an accusing finger at it. Those who felt offended and let down by Rushdie’s absence from Jaipur were regarded as inconsequential members of the non-voting classes. Their protests could safely be disregarded.

The monotonous regularity with which the bar of artistic freedom is being lowered should alarm all Indians. Yet, under the guise of secularism and the principle of equal respect for all religions, it has become possible for all groups with an imaginary grievance to exercise a veto power. This is a travesty but what compounds the offence is the fact that retrograde decisions are being routinely taken by people who know better, are not personally narrow-minded and pay lip service to India as an argumentative society.

The argument that compromises with democracy have to be made for the larger interests of democracy is specious. Over the years, intolerance is fast turning into the new normal with every group and religious denomination jumping into the fray. From a historical work on Shivaji, the title of a film and the morality of women to theological disputations, the agenda is being set by those resourceful enough to command a mob.

The ‘sab chalta hai’ attitude is no answer. Nor does it do to shower the barbarians with disdain and feign a sense of superiority. What is required is for a plural culture and mindset to take deep roots in society. Moral relativism has become an excuse to relegate decency to the backburner. As a state, India has eschewed dharma.

Sunday Pioneer, January 22, 2012

REIGN OF TERROR - Mamata Banerjee as Bengal’s new ogre

2012-01-19T22:49:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Ever since the time a CPImembership or connection was the best passport for entry into journalism, theIndian media has been excessively charitable to the Left. A looselyLeft-liberal set of assumptions including anti-Americanism, a distaste for theprivate sector and a loathing of ritualised religion were hallmarks of theEnglish-language media—at least until aggressive TV news channels with sharplydivergent value systems re-established balance.

The most importantconsequence of this slanted politics was that the Communist parties (and theirfellow-travellers) were able to punch much above their weight. In its 34 yearsof government, the Left Front in West Bengal benefitted considerably from thegoodwill and generosity showered on it by a national media enamoured of itsprogressive credentials. Copious tears, for example, were shed when the CPI(M)Politburo turned down the United Front’s invitation to Jyoti Basu to becomePrime Minister of India in 1998. However, very few column inches were devotedto examining the realities behind Basu’s reputation as a capable administrator.For an influential section of the editorial classes that had once foughtbattles on behalf of Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, the Communist partieswere the holy cows and West Bengal their sacred pasture.

Mamata Banerjee by contrastwas always an object of intense suspicion. Ever since she emerged to occupy themain anti-Left space in West Bengal she was portrayed as a maverick, anincorrigible populist and an utterly irresponsible individual. This recklessimage persisted through the 2009 general election when it was lamented thatPrakash Karat had facilitated his own party’s downfall by his decision towithdraw support to the Manmohan Singh Government over the Indo-US nuclearagreement. Indeed, a section of the fourth estate clung on to the belief thather Lok Sabha success was a fluke and that she would be stopped at the gates ofWriters’ Buildings by a determined Left. Even as late as a month before the May2011 Assembly poll, the media watering holes in Delhi were full of tales of howthere was a ‘late swing’ to the Left resulting from a popular realisation thatMamata would be too costly a burden for West Bengal. The results told anotherstory.

The Congress which hadentered into a grudging ‘mahajot’ with the Trinamool Congress after the Leftwithdrew support to the UPA Government was both a producer and a willingconsumer of the negative perceptions of West Bengal’s most famous Didi. SoniaGandhi and the Prime Minister were no doubt grateful to Mamata for teachingKarat a lesson he wouldn’t forget in a hurry, but this was coupled with concernover the consequences of the gentlemanly Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee being replacedby an unguided missile. In 2011, the Congress wanted the Left Front to lose butit hoped that the TMC would fall short of an outright majority and enable it toplay a balancing role—a euphemism for insisting Mamata dance to its tune forthe next five years.

These calculations wereupset by last summer’s resounding and categorical endorsement of Mamata by theWest Bengal electorate. Mamata was now her own boss with very clear ideas ofhow she would manage relations with her national ally.

At the local level she movedfast. First, she gave inconsequential portfolios to the Congress ministers sheinducted into her ministry. Second, she sought to undercut the remainingCongress bases in North Bengal.

The Congress High Commanddidn’t respond to these provocations too adversely. Traditionally, the Congresshas always viewed its local units as subordinate to the national party. As longas Mamata played ball in the Centre, the Congress was willing to turn a blindeye to her local transgressions.

Unfortunately for theCongress, Mamata had her own ideas. Angry at being fobbed off with merelollipops instead of the grand Bengal package she had banked on, she did whatmost non-Congress chief ministers from Jayalalithaa and Narendra Modi to NitishKumar have done: elevate the battle to a principled tussle over federalrelations. It is federalism that has governed Mamata’s prickliness over mattersas diverse as the Teesta Waters Treaty with Bangladesh, the Communal ViolenceBill, the Lokpal Bill and the Food Security Bill. In addition, she used herrepresentation in the Cabinet to raise awkward questions on fuel price hikesand the decontrol of retail trade. More to the point, she used her numbers inParliament to join hands with the Opposition and embarrass the Government.

The CPI(M) had a positionsimilar to Mamata’s in the four years it provided ‘outside support’ to the UPAbetween 2004 and 2008. It used its strategic clout far more discerningly and incharacteristic Communist style: to support the ‘progressive’ initiatives bySonia Gandhi and oppose the ‘neo-liberal’ policy moves of the Prime Minister.In addition, it used it good offices to secure the appointments of‘progressives’ in positions of influence and authority, particularly in therealms of higher education. The CPI(M) more or less replicated the approach ofthe CPI between 1969 and 1977 when it upheld the ‘progressive’ regime of IndiraGandhi, particularly in her fight against the ‘reactionary’ Syndicate.

Mamata, on her part, has notbeen so calibrated in her approach as the Comrades. She has been principledinsofar as she has focussed on the big questions and not bothered at all withtrivial issues of appointments to governorships and quangos—something the Congressis innately more comfortable with. The result is that Mamata does not havebackers among either those who look to 10 Janpath or those with one eye to thewisdom emanating from Race Course Road. After she embarrassed the government inthe Rajya Sabha over the Lokpal Bill, the exasperation of the Congress with herscaled new heights—to the point where senior ministers are now singing praisesof the sweet reasonableness of the Left. As of today, Mamata is regarded as thejoker in the UPA pack and the Congress is itching to be rid of her.

For the Congress, the wayout of West Bengal lies in Uttar Pradesh. For the past month, relevant circlesin Lutyens’ Delhi have been abuzz with talk of ‘secret’ negotiations betweenthe Congress and Samajwadi Party. According to those who make it their businessto fish in troubled waters, the ‘deal’ involves a post-poll coalition betweenthe Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Congress in UP and the SPjoining the UPA at the Centre in return for Cabinet berths. The Congress, itwould seem, has made up its mind to swap the TMC with the SP. This may explainwhy Mamata has sharpened the intensity of her attacks on the Congress.

There is still oneimponderable. The Congress needs both the TMC and either the SP or the BahujanSamaj Party to get its candidate into Rashtrapati Bhavan later in the year. Itwould be in difficulty if a discarded Mamata decides to back a unitedopposition candidate. The possible way out, which is being explored courtesy aPolitburo member of the CPI(M) is for the Left to bail the Congress out inreturn for an agreement on the candidature of the present Vice President.

The Left has been playing aquiet role in accentuating the differences between the Congress and Mamata.Having been severely battered in the Assembly election, its only hope of arecovery lies in Mamata self-destructing and a split in the anti-Left votes inWest Bengal.

No wonder the stageis being set to portray Mamata as Bengal’s new ogre.

The Telegraph, January 20, 2012

Meddling with nationhood

2012-01-14T22:04:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

The extent to which the discourse on the vexed issue of reservations has changed over the years is quite remarkable. When the Constitution was being framed, the remnants of the Muslim League argued that independent India should persist with the reservation of seats in legislatures for Muslims and other religious minorities. Predictably, in the aftermath of a Partition that many attributed to the system of separate electorates and the notorious Communal Award, the demand drew a sharp response from the Congress benches.

Intervening in the debate on August 28, 1947, the then home minister Sardar Patel had some harsh words for the proponents of minority reservation: "I once more appeal to you to forget the past…You have got what you wanted. You have got a separate state and, remember, you are the people who were responsible for it, and not those who remain in Pakistan…What is it that you want now? In the majority Hindu provinces you, the minorities, you led the agitation…Now again you tell me and ask me to say for the purpose of securing the affection of the younger brother I must agree to the same thing again, to divide the country again in the divided part. For God's sake understand that we have also got some sense..."

Had a politician of standing delivered a similar speech today, it is certain that the liberal media and the assembled army of secularists would have construed it as a textbook example of ahate speech. Over the years, thanks to changing political fashion, the sharpness of political discourse which was a feature of the national movement, has been blunted and replaced by squeamish angst. This is particularly evident in the debate over the proposal of the Congress to introduce a 4.5% quota-to be raised to 9% if the party wins Uttar Pradesh-for religious minorities in government jobs and higher education.

In line with the recommendations of the Rajinder Sachar committee report, the issue has been presented as an aspect of India's quest for social justice. Since many Muslim communities are understood to be even worse placed than dalits in their socio-economic status, the imperatives of social justice, it is argued, demand they be given a helping hand to help them enjoy the full benefits of citizenship. If the politically consequential Other Backward Classes can enjoy the benefits of reservations, or so the argument goes, it is against natural justice to deny similar benefits to people just because they follow a different faith.

It is a compelling argument and one which has moved the liberal elite. Against this is the letter and spirit of a Constitution that is quite clear that special privileges for minorities must be limited to their absolute right to manage their own religious, cultural and educational institutions-a privilege denied to non-minorities. The Constitution is also categorical that religionbased reservations in government jobs and political representation constitute a big No. Small wonder there is subterfuge involved in concealing the real motives behind the proposal.

For the Constitution-makers, the status of minorities posed a dilemma. There was a consensus on postponing a common civil code to help Muslims get over their post-Partition disorientation. Yet, the Constituent Assembly was not at ease with the principle of differentiated citizenship. In a landmark intervention, B R Ambedkar, for example, confessed that "I personally do not understand why religion should be given this vast expansive jurisdiction so as to cover the whole of life and to prevent the legislature from encroaching upon that field."

The extension of job reservation to Muslims threatens to add a new dimension to differentiated citizenship. From separate personal laws and full cultural and educational autonomy, minority rights are sought to be extended to other arenas including the handling of sectarian conflict. The road is being readied for political reservations at a future date.

There may be strong electoral compulsions governing the move to institutionalise a separate Muslim identity. But before jumping headlong into legislation, the political class must enter into wider public consultations. The issue is not who is 'secular' and who is 'communal'. The stakes are higher: the very character of the Constitution and the meaning of nationhood.

Sunday Times of India, January 15, 2012

EC is democracy's dull censor board

2012-01-13T00:27:00.001-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

A recent assertion by Union law minister Salman Khurshid at an election meeting in his parliamentary constituency that the Congress was intent on enhancing the reserved quota for backward Muslims from 4.5 per cent to nine per cent has, quite predictably, created a stir.

The BJP has been vocal in its opposition, arguing, quite legitimately, that the Muslim quota is at the cost of the Other Backward Classes who have hitherto been the principal beneficiaries of the post-Mandal extension of reservations all over India. Others have seen it as an overdue measure to correct the implicit discrimination against Muslims (and, for that matter, Christians) in the matter of reservations.

The debate on Muslim reservations has just about begun and the coming months will witness rival groups mustering public support for their respective positions. This is exactly as it should be in a democracy — policy announcements being deliberated with passion at different levels, particularly during elections. That is why it comes as a surprise to learn that the Election Commission has issued Mr Khurshid a showcause notice for his promise to enhance the Muslim quota.

By making this announcement about what the Congress intends to do in the unlikely event of it being voted to power in Uttar Pradesh, Mr Khurshid, it is being suggested, violated the model code of conduct for candidates and parties.

Regardless of our personal views on the Congress’ attempts to play the minority card with gusto, the EC’s action against Mr Khurshid is somewhat ridiculous and smacks of needless over-zealousness. An election is a festival of democracy, an occasion when the ordinary citizen gets an opportunity to elect both a government and representatives to law-making institutions of the state.

Like in most festivals there is both seriousness and frivolity in elections, and the process is governed by a drill. The EC exists to ensure two things. First, it is responsible for ensuring a degree of fairness which is possible if there is a semblance of a level playing field. And, secondly, it assumes overall responsibility to guarantee that the festival is orderly and does not degenerate into a drunken brawl where unruliness and muscle power prevail.

Over the years the EC has demonstrated its ability to be counted as one of the institutions that works. Beginning with the imperious T.N. Seshan, successive Chief Election Commissioners have maintained and upheld the independence of the body and freed it from political interference. In the process they have ironed out many of the creases from the electoral process.

Although no system can be regarded as perfect, the EC has done its bit to ensure that election expenditure by candidates and parties are not extravagant, that voting is peaceful and orderly, and that the counting of votes is accurate. There have been occasional lapses but these owe mainly to the laxity of individual election officers.

It is precisely because the EC is an exemplary institution that occasional criticisms of its operations deserve to be taken seriously and viewed as exercises in democratic improvement.

The foremost criticism of the EC is that it often seems preoccupied with a draconian implementation of the rules at the cost of the spirit of democracy. The showcause against Mr Khurshid is a classic example of bureaucratic over-interpretation.

The Congress is well within its rights to propose a nine per cent Muslim quota in government jobs and educational institutions. It is also within its rights to propagate this ridiculous scheme, just as Mulayam Singh Yadav is fully within his rights to promise free water and power to farmers. Both sets of assurances are populist and calculated to create social and economic distortions in the polity. But that is not the point. Democracy cannot be artificially sanitised or confined to an ideological straitjacket.

Parties are at liberty to advocate national suicide in the garb of national salvation. Other parties are at liberty to denounce their opponents. As long as no one advocates violence or makes a hate speech, the EC need not concern itself as an ideological ombudsman. Like the norms governing free speech, the idea is to give a campaigner wide latitude.

Unfortunately there are occasions when an attitude of disdain towards rumbustious democracy is manifested in the conduct of election officers. In the Karnataka Assembly election of 2008, the script of Sushma Swaraj’s TV broadcast was censored because it contained a sharp attack on the government for its failure to control prices of foodstuff. Otherwise, too, election officers in their role of censors have disallowed parody, interpreting humour as being tantamount to personal attacks.

The election authorities have also adopted an excessively rigid distaste for the public display of posters, cut-outs and flags. This has prevented political parties from publicising their candidates and has been a deterrent to political information, a perquisite of informed choice.

These are not major complaints but they are needless babu-inspired hurdles to the proper celebration of democracy. The EC is quite right to keep a strict eye on the conduct of political parties and the candidates. However, it would also be well advised to give all its election officers lessons in the spirit of democracy.

The application of rules in a thoughtless manner by officials who may be out to get their own back on arrogant politicians doesn’t enhance the quality of India’s democracy. Having established some order in the conduct of elections, it’s important the EC doesn’t err on the side of arbitrariness.

Outrage will not influence UP polls

2012-01-07T23:02:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Having been at the receiving end of metropolitan derision for more than a year, the Congress has reason to believe the tide is finally turning. If its Christmas celebrations were not entirely joyous thanks to the “fleedom at midnight” saga in the Rajya Sabha over the Lokpal Bill, 2012 has begun on a happier note for three reasons.

First, the party’s bush telegraph has successfully disseminated the impression that it is on a spectacular comeback trail in Uttar Pradesh. Whereas it was earlier expected to come fourth in a four-cornered contest in India’s largest State, optimists now reckon it is in second place after Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and much ahead of both Mayawati and the BJP. To what extent this perception is real or simply based on irrational exuberance is something which will be known on March 4. But there is no doubt there is an extra bounce in the step of the average Congress activist.

Second, the tension between the Congress and Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal hasn’t renewed speculation about an imminent collapse of the UPA Government at the Centre. Instead, it has been an occasion to demonstrate that India’s oldest political party remains wonderfully nimble-footed for its age. There is talk that there will be a swap in coalition partners, with the Samajwadi Party replacing the Trinamool Congress. If the grapevine is to be believed, it has already been decided that the next Railway Minister will be either Mulayam Singh Yadav or his son Akhilesh. The associated presumption is that there will be a SP Government in UP propped up by the Congress, either in coalition or through outside support.

Finally, Congress publicists, aided by an obliging media desperate to prove its even-handedness, have made much of the BJP’s hypocrisy in crusading against corruption and simultaneously embracing the tainted BSP discard Babu Singh Kushwaha in UP. Ideally the BJP should either have spurned Kushwaha or been brazen about his induction. Instead, it got the worst of both worlds by first welcoming Kushwaha and then allowing internal democracy to become public democracy. What was essentially a one-day headline has dominated the news space for three days because Kushwaha became the fig leaf for different factions of the party to play out their rivalries over the distribution of tickets. True, there were individuals who were guided by ethical imperatives. In the main, however, the respective positions on Kushwaha were guided by factional (and, by implication, caste) considerations. The sub-text of the turbulence was a tug-of-war between the upper caste and OBC lobbies of the party.

For the Congress, the Kushwaha affair has been a godsend. It has allowed it to establish the principle of moral equivalence. This is important for the Congress. As a practitioner of the most cynical form of statecraft, the Congress has tended to be expedient and flexible on the issue of corruption. The BJP, unfortunately for it, is a party whose ethos is governed by middle-class values. Thanks to its RSS pedigree, it has traditionally cherished uprightness more fanatically than the party which claims descent from Mahatma Gandhi. In electoral terms this implies that the Congress can live with a YS Rajasekhara Reddy more easily than the BJP can digest a BS Yeddyurappa. For the Congress, doling out patronage is a part of normal politics; for the BJP, innocence is still cherished. The Congress will play the caste game with vigour and yet pretend it is above casteism; the BJP will play the caste game surreptitiously because it always has one eye on a homogenised nationalism.

There is another big difference. Last month, the Congress effortlessly accommodated Ajit Singh and his Rashtriya Lok Dal in the UPA. This was despite the fact that the RLD contested the 2009 general election as an ally of the BJP. There were Congressmen who didn’t like the arrangement. But they kept quiet because the party operates on the principle that the High Command — a euphemism for the first family — has the last word. The BJP, on the other hand, is relatively more democratic. The alacrity with which Yogi Adityanath, Maneka Gandhi and others expressed their opposition to Kushwaha’s entry is in sharp contrast to the silence which greets controversial decisions by the Congress High Command.

The question is: Which of the two approaches is preferable? Middle-class opinion is remarkably schizoid on this point. On the one hand, the lack of internal democracy inside the Congress is lamented. Simultaneously, the middle-class (which is also reflected in the media) shows a great deal of impatience with inner-party strife which is equated with indiscipline. An argumentative democracy is celebrated with the same enthusiasm as regimented democracy.

It is quite apparent that this middle-class sentiment doesn’t always percolate down to the grassroots. Mayawati’s grand birthday celebrations and her majestic monuments to Kanshi Ram are mocked by the middle-classes. Yet, it is quite apparent that Mayawati’s ostentatious flamboyance carries a large measure of approval of ordinary, poor Dalits who view her wealth and success as symbols of community pride. Flashiness, in other words, isn’t universally loathed. Its perceptions are socially determined. This may explain why politicians tend to be far more accommodative towards cutting corners than do the supporters of Anna Hazare. This may also explain why the outburst of moral indignation against the BJP on Kushwaha may not be a determining factor in the UP election.

Sunday Pioneer, January 8, 2012

SINGLE SIZE DOESN’T FIT ALL - To be united is not necessarily to be homogeneous

2012-01-06T06:04:00.000-08:00

Swapan Dasgupta

Many decades ago, during a Test match commentary on radio, I heard one broadcaster ask another a seemingly innocuous question: why does Bombay produce more Test cricketers than Calcutta? One of the proffered answers was quirky. The higher standard of cricket in western India was attributed to the Indian standard time.

The reasoning was faultless. In the winter months, when cricket is normally played, darkness comes to Calcutta far earlier than it does to Bombay. Consequently, young cricketers in Bombay have opportunities for longer game practice in the afternoons than they do in Calcutta where, ideally, the clocks should be one hour ahead of IST.

That a huge country like India should have multiple time zones may seem a no-brainer. After all, the sun rises two hours earlier in the Northeast than it does in parts of Gujarat. Yet, in the aftermath of Independence, when there was an understandable preoccupation with ‘national unity’, a political decision was taken to collapse the longitudinal variations in a unified time zone centred on Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh. The decision was reiterated in 2004 when Kapil Sibal, who was then minister of science and technology, told Parliament that the IST should persist because “the expanse of the Indian State was not large”.

That a breadth of more than 2,000 km covering 28 degrees of longitude should be regarded as “not large” by a minister may appear astonishing. But like the so-called ‘national dress’, which emerged out of Jawaharlal Nehru’s own sartorial preferences, the IST is a relic of the early post-Independence years when ‘national unity’ was often equated with homogenization.

The thrust towards homogenization didn’t stop at symbolism. The 1950 Constitution was nominally federal in character. In reality, however, the antipathy to regionalism and the fear of secessionism made the Congress leadership retain the paramountcy clauses of the 1935 Government of India Act. Coupled with the establishment of the Planning Commission (a body that is outside the Constitution), which became the instrument of centralization, the political system was weighed heavily against the states. The Centre had the powers to dismiss state governments, thwart state legislations and possessed overriding powers in subjects under the concurrent list. And although the distribution of Central revenues was decided by the Finance Commission, the principle of a redistributive Centre meant that New Delhi retained enormous discretionary powers to either favour or discriminate against a state.

The over-centralized system proved functionally adequate as long as the Congress was the dominant party and held power in both the Centre and the states. Differences, when they arose, were resolved across the table through informal discussions between party colleagues. Yet, grievances persisted. Eastern India, for example, was miffed by the freight equalization of coal and steel — a decision that negated the locational advantages of Jharkhand and West Bengal. In addition, the licence-permit-quota rajenabled powerful politicians and influential lobbies to defy the logic of the market.

Things have no doubt changed with the end of the Congress’s monopoly of power and the dismantling of an overbearing regulatory regime after 1991. After a long and bitter political struggle that spanned some 25 years and some helpful interventions by the judiciary, the powers of the Centre to dismiss state governments have been regulated and codified. We are unlikely to see whimsical interventions that, for example, marked the dismissal of state governments in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. At the same time, the Centre remains an irritant in allowing political considerations to decide what state legislation to approve and which ones to keep in abeyance. In recent months, environment has emerged as a point of friction with the Centre choosing to become the final arbiter for clearances.

Liberalization of the economy, too, has helped the economic growth of the states. Before 1991, it would have been inconceivable for Ratan Tata to make a snap decision and shift the manufacturing unit for his low-price car from Singur in West Bengal to Gujarat. Indeed, the rapid development of Gujarat as a manufacturing centre under Narendra Modi would have been out of the question had the politicized licence-permit-quota rajbeen in place — a hostile Centre would never have given the necessary clearances. That foreign direct investment has taken place mainly in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat (and not in Rae Bareli and Amethi) owes everything to the fact that decisions are being taken by corporates and not the Planning Commission.

India, it would seem, has blundered from over-centralization to a position where states are accorded greater respect. However, this emerging equilibrium is in danger of being disturbed by trends within the Congress. In today’s India, with most state governments in the control of non-Congress parties, the Centre has found itself somewhat reduced in stature. To compensate for this loss of clout, the United Progressive Alliance government has chosen to undertake Delhi-designed mega welfare schemes embodied in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the proposed food security bill. Inspired by European welfarism, the schemes are premised on the one-size-fits-all philosophy, a trademark of the earlier Planning Commission.

Traditionally, critiques of Sonia Gandhi’s Lady Bountiful schemes have centred on their likely impact on the precarious fiscal deficit. There are also concerns that large sums of money may be diverted away from the real beneficiaries, thanks to an incompetent and venal State machinery. However, beyond fiscal and delivery concerns, a larger issue needs to be addressed. Is it appropriate that the Centre should apportion to itself the role of principal welfare agency?

The answer should be in the negative. State governments have a greater connection with localities and a greater accountability to the people than babus in the ministry of rural welfare in Delhi. Why should the labour market in Punjab be distorted by a scheme that only serves to drive up agricultural prices? Why shouldn’t Gujarat be permitted to have welfare schemes for the poorer tribal districts, instead of having one imposed on the whole state? If Orissa and Chhattisgarh already have effective distribution of subsidized rice to poor families, why should a Food Security Act be imposed on it?

Mamata Banerjee raised some of these larger questions when she questioned the right of the Centre to design a lokayukta scheme for the states. She had earlier raised similar questions over the imperious manner in which the Centre proceeded with the Teesta waters treaty with Bangladesh, which affected West Bengal directly. For raising the federal issue, Mamata was dubbed petulant and difficult. But who was being difficult? Mamata for upholding the rights of states? Or a Centre that proceeded on the assumption that a ‘big democracy’ has the divine right to guide ‘little democracies’?

In six decades, India has travelled a long way. The concerns over ‘national unity’ that seemed all too real in 1947 are no longer valid. Today, the feeling of Indian-ness is deep-rooted and complemented by a vibrant metropolitan culture. Secessionism doesn’t have the same emotional appeal it had in the past, except perhaps in the Kashmir Valley located in a state that, ironically, accords the greatest measure of autonomy to its people. What does have an appeal is the desire for economic growth and personal betterment. It is in this context that excessive centralization and its associated inefficiencies become an impediment.

The debate on federalism is circumscribed by the uncritical acceptance of many of the national symbols of power. There is a need for greater scepticism and intellectual audacity. We could start by asking whether the IST needlessly leads to the cricketing potential of eastern India remaining unfulfilled.

The Telegraph, January 6, 2012

Lollipops won't pacify Mamata

2011-12-31T23:43:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

The failure of theCongress-led UPA Government to negotiate the passage of the Lokpal Bill in theRajya Sabha has been blamed on an obstructive BJP. Such an assessment isneedlessly flattering to the BJP which found itself out of sorts in the LokSabha but managed to recover its composure in the Upper House. The questiontherefore arises: what did the BJP do right in the Rajya Sabha what it didn’tdo in the Lower House?

The difference does notmerely lie in the behaviour of the SP and BSP which obliged the Government inthe Lok Sabha but demonstrated greater independence in the Rajya Sabha. TheGovernment was far more bothered by the obstreperous conduct of its allyTrinamool Congress that wanted to press its amendments in the Rajya Sabha. TheTMC managed to secure endorsements from all the Opposition parties. And thismeant that the Government was bound to lose on the floor of the House had thevote actually been taken.

This was the third time inrapid succession that the TMC had scuttled the Government’s initiatives. Itnegated the Teesta Waters Treaty that Manmohan Singh wanted to sign during hisvisit to Bangladesh. The TMC chief Mamata Banerjee put her foot down on theground that she had not been properly consulted. This embarrassment wasfollowed by Mamata’s unbudging veto of the decision to allow foreign directinvestment in multi-brand retailing. The TMC was concerned about the impactforeign investment would have on the millions of petty retailers who have fewother means of sustainable livelihood in the state. And now there is Mamata’sunrelenting opposition to the Lokayukta proposals that have a direct bearing onhow the state government fights corruption.

Mamata has been painted bythe Government as a difficult customer and an incorrigible populist who isunmindful of larger national concerns. It is being whispered that intra-Bengalirivalries have prevented Mamata from obliging the otherwise obliging PranabMukherjee who has a reputation of being a crafty consensus builder.

Is Mamata as bad as she ismade out to be by the Government’s spin doctors? That she is mercurial,pugnacious and prone to flying off the handle are well known. In fact, it isprecisely these attributes that were well appreciated by the people of Bengal.You had to be something a little out of the ordinary to persevere for threedecades—through many ups and downs—in the fight against a well-entrenched andruthless Left Front.

Yet, I think the Congresshas grievously miscalculated by imagining that Mamata is merely a spoilt childwho can best be placated by doling out lollipops in the form of Central grantsto her. Yes, Mamata does like the lollipops and is not averse to acceptingfreebies and sops. But, at the same time, like the mercurial J. Jayalalithaa ofTamil Nadu, her tantrums are not born out of impulsiveness alone. There is agreat deal of calculation behind each of Mamata’s moves. It is thesecalculations that the Government has failed to understand when they view her asa petulant child.

The most important ofMamata’s objectives is her quest to establish a regional space for herself andher party. The TMC was born out of Mamata’s revolt against the High Commandculture of the Congress. She could not countenance the fact that despite beingthe united Congress’ main mass leader in West Bengal she was being constantlystymied by rivals whose only claim to fame is that they had better connectionsin Delhi. Having established herself as the main anti-Left party in West Bengaland having overshadowed the Congress, her main thrust now is to transform aregional party into a party that epitomises West Bengal. Despite operatingunder the discipline of the Politburo, Jyoti Basu succeeded in positioninghimself as the great Bengal consensus. Now Mamata wants to fill the void by takingup some of those issues.

Till the United FrontGovernments of H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral gave the CPI(M) a stake at theCentre, the Reds in West Bengal had fought long and hard to rectify theimbalances in Centre-State relations. Fulminations against a discriminatoryCentre formed an important part and parcel of the Left’s armoury.

Mamata’s battles should berightly seen as an aspect of the battle to rectify federal distortions in thepolity. In the past few years, Narendra Modi had fought these battles. But Modiwas thwarted by both a political and image problem. Being in the BJP he did nothave the requisite strategic clout to influence decision-making in the UPA—aproblem that has plagued Nitish Kumar and Naveen Patnaik as well. In addition, thebaggage of the 2002 riots made Modi a contentious figure and the UPA exploitedthis cynically.

With a total of 23 MPs inboth Houses and representation in the Cabinet, Mamata has taken the battleinside the government where it is heard loud and clear. She has consciouslyabjured all patronage—she has not claimed a governership, any ambassadorshipsor quango jobs for her favourites—to focus single-mindedly on the principlethat West Bengal must be consulted and its opinions taken on board on all mattersthat touch West Bengal, including foreign policy. She has contested the notionof an exclusive Central prerogative.

Mamata has initiateda principled battle for federalism. Other Chief Ministers could do well toemulate her.

Sunday Pioneer, January 1, 2012

Hope back in Calcutta

2011-12-31T23:36:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

There was a time, somewhere in my distant childhood, when the 'season', beginning with Christmas and culminating in the New Year, was centred, not on Goa, but on Calcutta. It was 'burra din', the time when Park Street (now renamed Mother Teresa Sarani) was lit up to resemble Oxford Street in the only other city the elite of Calcutta identified with. It was the time of the Test match at Eden Gardens and the races on New Year’s Day. And it was the time of roasts and plum puddings laced with a dollop of brandy butter.

Alas, that was before the Reds stepped in and turned Kolkata into a city of gloom. By the time the Left Front was removed last year, the spirit had been squeezed out of the second city of the Empire. Instead, Kolkata became a city with a glorious past and an uncertain future. The reality was symbolized by the imposing buildings in varying stages of dereliction.

Returning to the city for the ‘season’ this year after more than 15 years, what was striking was the revival of hope. The Tourism Department of the state government had organized a Christmas festival on Park Street which was brightly lit and the restaurants were crowded and buzzing with activity. There was a gaiety that had earlier been missing. On Christmas Day, the temperature was a degree below London. And while the sahibs took out their tweeds and ties, the wags were quick to comment that ‘Didi’ Mamata Banerjee had done one better than the city that she holds as the ideal for Kolkata.

What came as a bigger eye-opener was how little the conversations in the clubs or ‘athome’ drinks parties focused on either Anna Hazare’s show in Mumbai or the Lokpal debates in Parliament. It is not that West Bengal doesn’t have its share of graft and bureaucratic sloth. It is just that a city that had got back a glimmer of hope was too busy celebrating the likelihood of a better future.

From the perspective of the metros, the elements of hope may be woefully modest and even flaunting in Kolkata is sober by the exacting standards of Delhi and Mumbai. But the point to note is that Kolkata didn’t feel the political acrimony and the gloom-and-doom story that has overwhelmed much of India.

The young Indian Civil Service recruits were taught in Haileybury that “whatever is true of India the opposite is equally true.” The lesson was worth remembering. Only too often , generalizations are made about India on the strength of a partial reality in Delhi. If Delhi shivers, the rest of India is also thought to be in the midst of a cold wave.

The more we gauge the Indian reality, the more we realize that the ‘idea of India’ — a phrase so favoured by over-concerned TV anchors — is just another of those expedient myths we love to bandy about. There is undoubtedly an India that exists during war and cricket matches, but the idea varies from place to place and from city to city. This diversity is something that neither the Planning Commission nor the architects of mega welfare schemes have been inclined to accept.

For the Delhi-based pan-Indian elite, political power emanates from the national capital and filters downwards. The reality, however, is that the country is made up of clusters of regional elites whose aspirations and priorities are very different, and why not?

A simple Christmas celebration in Kolkata , Navratra in Ahmedabad and Ganesh chaturthi in Mumbai tells us more about the different Indias than all the proceedings of the Delhi-centric National Advisory Council. It tells us that a dysfunctional India doesn’t become a reality when the Centre loses its way. It happens when a paralysed Centre prevents the regions from achieving their true potential by concentrating too much power in Delhi.

These days the talk is about democratization and accountability. These lofty goals become far more meaningful when Indian federalism becomes what it was intended to be: a Union of states. When Kolkata smiles and Delhi is gloomy, not least because some Bengali politicians are flexing their muscles, you instinctively know that something right is happening, somewhere.Street (now renamed Mother Teresa Sarani) was lit up to resemble Oxford Street in the only other city the elite of Calcutta identified with. It was the time of the Test match at Eden Gardens and the races on New Year’s Day. And it was the time of roasts and plum puddings laced with a dollop of brandy butter.

Sunday Times of India, January 1, 2012

A game of thrones

2011-12-30T22:09:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

The first thing that strikes me about the Lokpal Bill debates in Parliament this month and the discourses on the subject earlier this year is that the Congress has successfully managed to claw back some of its lost political ground. This may not be too apparent to social media enthusiasts or those who have unequivocally put their faith in Anna Hazare’s movement. However, if you contrast the inchoate and contrived smugness of the likes of communications minister Kapil Sibal during the Ramlila Ground fast with the fact that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh actually delivered a rare election speech in the Lok Sabha during the Lokpal debate, it will be possible to appreciate the atmospheric change.

What has contributed to this change isn’t some bright light shining in the horizon. Far from it. Between Independence Day and the year-end, the Indian economy has taken a colossal nosedive, as the experts predicted it would. The GDP growth has slipped below seven per cent, the deficit has crossed all budgetary calculations, the rupee went into free fall in the international currency markets, the statistics of manufacturing were dismal and Indian corporates were making a beeline to invest in anywhere but India. True, there has been a global truncation of the economy but India has fared worse than most emerging economies. The only little ray of hope is that food inflation is coming down and there is even a possibility that interest rates may come down.

The question, therefore, arises: Is politics in India completely unrelated to economics? Why, with such pathetic economic management, do opinion polls show upward signs for the Congress in Uttar Pradesh? Why did the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress together do so well in the municipal polls in Maharashtra? And why does it exude confidence in Uttarakhand and Punjab?

Congress loyalists would undoubtedly attribute the feeling of recovery —and sentiment is a big factor in election time — to the return of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the re-activation of Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi after a longish sabbatical. The perception is unverifiable and relevant only to those who are party activists. For the rest, the impression of Congress recovery has to do with other factors.

The most important of these is the fact that the Congress has done something right by deciding to play the game on the strength of its own agenda. In other words, the party consciously eschewed the battle lines that were sought to be drawn by Team Anna or for that matter the media. The Congress always knew that it would come out second-best or worse if it played the Lokpal game on Team Anna’s agenda. Consequently, it took a deep breath and chose to focus attention on other themes. The Lokpal Bill was crafted in a way that ensured extraneous issues such as religious reservation would get equal attention; the thwarted proposal to secure FDI investment in multi-brand retail bolstered its reformist credentials among a section that had basically written the UPA government off; and the Food Security Bill was packaged as the next biggest garibi hatao initiative after the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The implications of each of these initiatives for the country are serious and sometimes grave. The Food Security Bill in particular is calculated to make an almighty mess of public finances and could have serious consequences for the fiscal deficit. The religion quota in the Lokpal may well reignite sectarian tensions in the country.

It is also possible that both these proposals may meet the same fate as the move to introduce foreign investment in retail. My guess is that the Congress strategists have factored in possible setbacks and aim to turn adversity to advantage in the same way as Indira Gandhi turned the defeat of the Privy Purses Abolition Bill in the Rajya Sabha to her advantage in the 1971 poll. The point to note is that the Congress has secured important talking points with which to enthuse its traditional constituency of the poor and minorities. Three months ago the Congress appeared rudderless. Today, it has issues that can position the party effectively in the battle for votes.

Secondly, the Congress has practised what it has traditionally excelled in: subterfuge. The kerfuffle over Kiran Bedi’s travel expenses, Mr Hazare’s alleged RSS links and the so-called activist orientation of the media may seem trivial. However, they have succeeded in injecting question marks before Mr Hazare’s movement. The media in particular has quietened down considerably since the government floated a trial balloon over regulation and control of the social media.

Finally, the BJP dissipated much of its energies and organisational resources in bolstering L.K. Advani’s well-meaning but purposeless Jan Chetna Yatra. The unending focus on the party’s succession battles may well be contrived and premature. But it has served to highlight the fact that the party has not been able to mount any effective agitational programme that galvanises its core constituency. Indeed, by overplaying its opposition to reforms in the retail sector the BJP made itself suspect in the eyes of the urban middle classes who are its natural supporters. The Congress has always gone into battle with an eye on its core support base; the BJP on the other hand has been far too reactive and inclined to fight battles away from its home turf. As of now the party looks like under-performing in Uttar Pradesh because it has no clear focus or a credible leadership. The Congress appears better placed than it actually is.

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, December 30, 2011

A divisive agenda in guise of Lokpal

2011-12-24T22:04:00.000-08:00

Author: Swapan Dasgupta

If the Congress had chosen to emulate the Samajwadi Party, the RJD and the Shiv Sena and declared itself against the very idea of an all-powerful Lokpal, it would have earned the grudging respect of many Indians.

That the heart and soul of the Congress is not with a truly draconian Lokpal Bill as favoured by Anna Hazare and his sanctimonious claque is an open secret. It is also understandable that the Congress doesn’t want to take any effective steps that would make its use of discretionary powers answerable to some empowered ombudsman. Having exercised power for too long, the Congress genuinely believes that it is the natural party of Government. It is wary of curbs to its authority and, worse, an injection of the principle of accountability.

Subterfuge has been the Congress’ signature tune in dealing with the unexpected euphoria around Anna Hazare and his Jan Lokpal proposals. From trying to intimidate Anna, to launching its dirty tricks campaign, the Congress did its utmost to see that the movement against corruption didn’t become a prairie fire. In this endeavour it was partially successful: Thanks to unending prevarication and foot-dragging, the Lokpal issue became somewhat of a bore.

The Congress’ manoeuvres against the Lokpal proposals were a part and parcel of politics. People may or may not have liked it but few could deny that it was part of a normal political game — and the reason why politics is regarded as ethically suspect. Last Thursday, however, the Congress went a step too far. In seeking to divert attention from the inadequacies of the Lokpal Bill introduced in Parliament, the party proffered the mother of all distractions: A quota-based Lokpal.

Those familiar with history will recall that VP Singh announced the implementation of the Mandal Commission report in 1990 because he wanted to puncture a mammoth kisan rally that Devi Lal had convened in Delhi. A momentous decision with far-reaching consequences was taken for the flimsiest of reasons. This time too, the founding fathers’ abhorrence of organising public life on religious lines — they had just experienced the devastation of Partition — was casually discarded because the Congress wants to come in third place in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election.

The results of springing the quota rabbit from the top hat were exactly as the Congress intended. The focus shifted from corruption and the ways to fight it to identity politics, particularly the issue of religion-based reservation for minorities. The BJP went ballistic over the minority quota whereas Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav forgot their objections to Lokpal and embraced the return of the Communal Award. Read with the introduction of the 4.5 per cent quota for minorities from the 27 per cent OBC share of reserved jobs and college admissions, last Thursday was a landmark in contemporary history. It was the day the political assumptions of the 1950 Constitution were thrown overboard by a cynical political class.

It is possible that the formal introduction of religious quotas may take a while. There is certain to be a judicial challenge to the Cabinet decision and this in turn will have a bearing on the final shape of the Lokpal Bill. The Mandal Commission too took many years before the implementation got under way and the Muslim quota (let’s face it, it’s really about a Muslim quota) will probably be the subject of prolonged litigation and, maybe, even a Constitution amendment.

The passage of the proposal will be protracted but what is not in any serious doubt is that a clear majority of MPs favour minority reservations and will be reluctant to oppose it in public. In short, the ideological and political battle over religion-based quotas has been lost even before the battle has begun.

The reasons are well known. For the past decade at least politicians in the Muslim community have mounted a spirited campaign for Muslim reservations on the grounds of natural justice. Regardless of the merits or otherwise of the proposal, what is extremely clear is that those who favour it are better organised to leverage their numbers during elections. Tactical voting has given the Muslim community a clout disproportionate to their numbers.

On the other hand, there is nothing that can actually be called a countervailing Hindu vote. Although the Ayodhya years were an exception, Hindus by and large are disinclined to vote as Hindus — they vote along class, caste and other lines but not on the basis of their Hindu identity. This naturally means that canny politicians don’t have to really bother about any reaction to minority appeasement strategies. The Muslim vote is far more purposeful.

Unless nationalist India awakens from its slumber, the country is faced with a potentially divisive agenda. If the religious quota secures judicial and political approval, it will only be a matter of time before there are demands for religious quotas in the judiciary, the UPSC, Comptroller and Auditor-General’s office and even university departments. To talk of the balkanisation of India is woefully premature but it would be safe to assume that the emotional balkanisation process is in an advanced state. There is an Indian identity that still holds its own, but it is only a matter of time before particularist identities overwhelm it.

I hope I am horribly wrong, but for India, the Lokpal Bill may turn out to be a costly misadventure.

Sunday Pioneer, December 24, 2011

KITH AND KIM - Why does the buffoonish regime continue in North Korea?

2011-12-22T22:43:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

One of the enduring memories of life in an English university in the late-1970s was the collective enjoyment in leafing through and, occasionally, reading aloud the pamphlets helpfully left behind in the common room by functionaries of the North Korean state. Wonderfully printed on glossy paper, much like the ones sold for a song by the propaganda houses of Moscow and Beijing, these offerings from Pyongyang were a class apart.

Devoted mainly to the heroic achievements of their beloved leader Kim Il-sung, the booklets were the alternatives to the (still unborn) cartoon channels on television. We learnt how grandfather Kim — now the “President for eternity” in the world’s necrocracy — swam across seas and lakes to singlehandedly take on the fascist, militarist Japanese invaders. And, over purposeless pints of beer, we imbibed the profundities of the ‘Juche’ ideology which, The Times this week helpfully described as a “quasi-mystical farrago of turbid platitude and ferocious xenophobia”, but which we mistook for a Monty Python skit.

Of course, as happens with all disorganized readings of what the comrades still insist on describing as “scientific socialism”, we often missed out on the best bits of the popular culture associated with the doctrine. For example, my Maoist friend, also a great friend of North Korea, but blessed with a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humour —next to the Red Book he loved P.G. Wodehouse — never secured for me either the recording or the sub-titled version of the song, “Oh how I love to carry manure up the mountain while singing praises of Chairman Mao and denouncing the Gang of Four”.

Also, since we had gone our different ways by 1980, many of us missed out on the remarkable story of the birth of Kim Jong-il, the “Dear Leader” who was anointed successor to the “Beloved Leader” Kim Il-sung in 1980. While the wicked imperialist version is that he was born in some remote corner of the Soviet Union in 1943, the authentic North Korean version is far more compelling. The “Dear Leader”, it would seem, was born near the peak of Mount Paektu — the mythical birthplace of the Korean people — in 1941. As he entered the world, a swallow descended from heaven to proclaim the coming to earth of “a prodigious general who will rule all the world.”

As a ‘progressive’ alternative to the Christmas tale, this story is worth a look.

We also missed out on some of the childhood tales of the man who ascended to the other world earlier this week, having helpfully passed on the baton to the “Great Successor”, the 29-year-old Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-il, it is said, was destined for greatness since childhood. George Washington merely cut down a cherry tree and spun a moral tale but the wrath of Kim-II knew no bounds. As a three-year-old, he daubed a map of Japan with black ink and, lo and behold, that traditional enemy of Korea was rocked by gales and typhoons of astonishing ferocity.

It is worth considering if it was the hand of Kim that was responsible for last year’s tsunami that decimated Japan.

The fairy tale rendering of North Korea’s recent history may have provided mirth and amusement to some bored students, but it wasn’t all that funny for the estimated two million people who died from a man-made famine in the mid-1990s. So horrific was the suffering that there were credible reports emanating from that closed society of cannibalism.

Not that the suffering of his own people bothered Kim-II, who became famous in the luxury trade as the world’s single-largest purchaser of Paradis cognac produced by Hennessey. Kim-II loved the good life and, like all communist tyrants, indulged himself without restraint. A film buff whose personal collection of Hollywood and Hong Kong films was awesome — it is said that James Bond and Daffy Duck were among his favourites — he secured the abduction of the South Korean film director, Shin Sang-ok, and his wife to coerce them into making films for North Korea. There was, it seems, something of Dr No and Goldfinger that rubbed off on Kim-II.

More ominously, he was so captivated by the glamour he witnessed in Hollywood films that he maintained a troupe of 2,000 dancing girls, recruited from poor peasant families across the land. The girls were further classified into three groups. At the lowest end was the “dancing and singing team”, which entertained; this was followed by the “happiness team”, which specialized in massages for the privileged few in the party hierarchy; and finally there was the “satisfaction team” that existed to give pleasures of the flesh to Kim-II.

Presumably, the “Dear Leader” saw these as creative endeavours. If the official biography is any guide, he devoted the time spent as a culture czar in the politburo composing six operas. These works, it was modestly suggested by the Juche chroniclers, were “better than any mankind had created.”

To regard North Korea as a rogue regime controlled by a family of megalomaniacs out to prove the prescience of George Orwell’s 1984 is stating the obvious. The 20th and 21st centuries have had their share of evil, beginning from Hitler and Stalin and extending to Idi Amin, ‘Emperor’ Bokassa, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein. But few have managed to withstand the winds of change as successfully as the Kim dynasty, which has endured for more than six decades — nearly as long as the Soviet Union.

Does the answer lie in what the North Korean propagandists suggest: that “The Korean people are too pure-blooded and therefore too virtuous to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader”? Or is it that extreme tyranny coupled with extreme deprivation snuffs out imagination and aspiration from the oppressed, making them impervious to normal human responses?

Whatever the reason, North Korea is not a primitive society. The Kim regime spends nearly one-third of its gross domestic product on defence, making it the most militarized country in the world. Yet, the level of its military preparedness is awesome. The country demonstrated its nuclear potential in 2006 and 2009, and its missile technology that it sells on a regular basis to Pakistan is sophisticated and dangerous. They suggest that far from being a society of supine bumpkins living under the military jackboot, Pyongyang actually boasts a critical mass of extremely efficient scientific talent. Such people can be tamed for a period of time but to keep them in a state of permanent docility requires superhuman control.

Perhaps that is what the Kim dynasty perfected as their response to, first, de-Stalinization in the 1960s and, subsequently, the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union.

Today, China is finding it impossible to combine its extreme nationalism with rigid control of society. There are uprisings all over challenging state authority and regimentation, such as the ongoing one in Wukan. Why hasn’t North Korea, a far smaller country, experienced a similar churning? It can hardly be the case that Koreans are temperamentally docile and more so if the rhetoric of the State is couched in extreme nationalism — a case of another Burma. South Korea, for all its remarkable economic progress, remains politically very volatile.

Kim Jong-il, the obituaries in the West were unanimous, “was among history’s most monstrous tyrants” who left his people “impoverished, incarcerated and broken.” That’s obvious. What is not so obvious is why such a buffoonish regime continues in the 21st century. Is it because any relaxation of tyranny presages the end of an unhappy chapter?

Telegraph, December 23, 2011

Maharani's durbar and a blinkered view of history

2011-12-17T22:05:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Apart from newspapers thatcommemorated the event and an agreeable party on the lawns of Ambassador Hotelwhere the cultural elite drank to the occasion, the centenary of the transferof the Capital and the foundation of New Delhi was largely unobserved. ‘Official’India which otherwise loves to organise tacky commemorations by producingunappealing postage stamps gave this event a wide berth. And, while no one wasforthcoming about the reason, the rationale was inescapable: the 1911 Durbarwas a ‘colonial’ event and, therefore, only worthy of sneer.

The Hindu sense of historyhas at the best of times been rather feeble. However, when it comes to the 190years of British rule, the disdain for a recorded past is coupled with aspurious political correctness and hypocrisy. Even after six decades ofIndependence and flamboyant assertions of national sovereignty, India has yetto develop the necessary self-confidence to view history as history. Instead,the past has been sought to be tailor-made to view the prevailing politicalfashions of the present.

It is not that the ignominyof being ruled by a ‘foreigner’ has weighed heavily on the nationalconsciousness. In the past thousand years or so, predators from the west haverepeatedly overwhelmed indigenous kingdoms, particularly in northern andeastern India, and combined ruthless vandalism with innovations. Turks,Mongols, Persians and Afghans made India their happy hunting ground, and ruledwith a mixture of raw coercion and cultural co-option. The conquerors alwaystook care to maintain a discreet distance from the conquered peoples withoutcreating a closed system based on ethnicity and religion. Of course, post-Akbarmany of these barriers broke down but never sufficiently for the hapless DaraShukoh to become a trendsetter. Not enough of the conquerors went ‘native’although enough of the conquered peoples appropriated facets of the Persian andTurkish ways of life.

Many of these changesstemming from conquest and subordination were also dutifully played out in thetwo centuries of colonial rule. The British steadfastly maintained their socialdistance from the ‘natives’, particularly after the uprising of 1857 and theinflux of the memsahibs into the Civil Lines and cantonments. The Indians weresocially wary of the British but there were enough ‘collaborators’ (as inMoghul times) who sought to bridge the cultural and emotional gulf between theWest and the East.

More to the point, therewere enough Indians that genuinely believed (particularly after the demise ofthe East India Company in 1858) that British rule constituted a significantadvance on anything the country had hitherto experienced. At one level the 1911Durbar was a spectacular show of imperial might—as evident from the grovellinggenuflection of the Indian princes (barring Baroda and Udaipur) to theKing-Emperor. But it would be imprudent to forget that until Mahatma Gandhicaptivated the nation with his simple message of swaraj, the common Indian wasgenuinely enamoured of the “Queen’s peace”. The choreography of the 1911 Durbarwas thrown out of gear when the Indian crowds broke the cordon to kiss theground on which the King and Queen had walked. Were they victims of ‘falseconsciousness’?

“Maharani” Victoria wasn’tIndian and nor did she ever visit India. Yet, this diminutive frump became asmuch a part of India as any distant Moghul. In 1911, when the New Delhi projectwas inaugurated by George V on December 15, the British Empire was the mostworld’s most decisive power; by 1931, when New Delhi was finally ready tofunction as the seat of government, the imperial sunset was approaching.

This is not revisionisthistory. It is the history that was itself cynically revised as part of thenation-building project of India’s post-imperial rulers. But history isn’trewritten by removing the George V statue from its canopied pedestal opposite IndiaGate or by renaming Connaught Place as Rajiv Chowk. Unless India is overcome byperversity, there will be a Lutyens’ Delhi distinct from a DDA Delhi, aKingsway called Rajpath, the North and South Blocks and a Parliament Housebuilt for an India where democracy was conceived of as the future.

The British Rajwasn’t quite the dark ages the sloganeers make it out to be.

Sunday Times of India, December 18, 2011

Middle class fed up with coalitions

2011-12-17T21:57:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

As 2011 draws to a close, this may well turn out to be the year the Indian Establishment lost faith in itself. The unwavering optimism of the past decade and particularly the self-confidence that marked India’s upward economic trajectory has yielded way to a sense of dejection and nervousness. The reasons are more than the worrying GDP statistics, the boo-boos of the Reserve Bank of India and the UPA Government’s political drift.

There is a growing feeling, echoed in all the drawing rooms during the festive season, that India has shot itself in the foot once again — aiming, a high Government functionary put it to me so evocatively, not merely at the feet but at each individual toe. There is a growing feeling, echoed in all the drawing rooms during the festive season, that India has shot itself in the foot once again — aiming, a high Government functionary put it to me so evocatively, not merely at the feet but at each individual toe.

In moments such as this there is the irresistible temptation to explore the roots of the growing dysfunctionality. In the US, there is a raging debate about the need to make the fat cats pay a larger share of their wealth in taxes; in Europe there is concern that a centralised Eurozone will squeeze out the last vestiges of national sovereignty from the member states; and, in China, the lessons of the ongoing Wukan uprising may well be an indication of the things to come. In India, apart from a growing sense of disgust with politicians, some old chestnuts are being drawn from the fire in the form of a revival of the debate on a presidential system of Government.

The features of the debate are still hazy. But underlying the disgust with coalition politics is the desire of a section of the metropolitan elite to usher a regime dominated by a no-nonsense strongman (or woman) that can take decisions in the national interest and inject purposefulness into governance. It is felt that the disproportionate influence of regional satraps such as Mamata Banerjee has to be curbed and the smaller parties shown their place in the larger India. No one wants to formally attack democracy because that is politically unacceptable. Yet, the chaotic underbelly of one billion arguments is sought to be tempered by identifying minimum standards of responsibility.

The demand for a presidential system to replace the parliamentary shambles is not anti-democratic per se. But in today’s context it assumes that too much democracy is bad for the country and an impediment to India fulfilling its Great Power destiny.

A presidential system can also be said to contain a measure of exasperation with India’s political federalism. Why, it is asked, should Mamata Banerjee with 20 Lok Sabha MPs be in a position to veto decisions that have a bearing on the entire economy? The assumption is that she should confine her interest to West Bengal and the Railways and not threaten the Government’s survival with her opposition to foreign investment in multi-brand retail.

The discomfiture with Luddite politics may well be warranted. There is, after all, a similar sense of foreboding with the smaller coalition partners in the United Kingdom and Australia. The question is: Why would Mamata, or for that matter the DMK, relinquish its strategic clout at the Centre voluntarily? What does it get by way of compensation?

The answers are awkward. A State Government in India has limited powers and, more important, a limited revenue base. Even these limited powers to govern and tax are constantly under threat from a Government whose political signature is best seen in gigantic, one-size-fits-all Centrally-dictated schemes such as the MNREGA and the proposed Food Security Bill. Even in the relatively non-contentious area of national highways construction, States ruled by the non-UPA parties complain that they are discriminated against by a vengeful Centre. In the sphere of environment, there is a new clearance raj that has been put in place by the Centre and used selectively to target projects — as happened in Lavasa.

During Indira Gandhi’s time, non-Congress State Governments used to complain against the misuse of the overriding political powers of the Centre, notably its power to unilaterally dismiss unfriendly regimes in the States. Today, almost all the non-Congress Governments in the States complain bitterly about the lack of powers and financial shortfalls — at a time when the Centre is flush with funds.

These are complaints that are insufficiently heard and appreciated in New Delhi. Unlike the Centre where a majority Government has been tottering since the Commonwealth Games scandal erupted in August 2010, most State Governments are relatively stable. Indian democracy is not dysfunctional at the State level. And yet, ironically, the States are unable to reach to their full potential because the constitutional division of powers is heavily weighted in favour of the Centre.

This is an anomaly that is yearning to be redressed. There should have been no earthly reason why a State should have to take the Centre’s approval to undertake a policy on, say, roads, retail and environment. These are areas which are best resolved locally and keeping in mind local interests.

The excessive centralisation of India was a product of socialist planning — an idea that no longer finds favour. Why, in that case, should the principle of a redistributive Centre be allowed to remain as an instrument of political discretion? If Gujarat has the potential of growing at above 10 per cent per annum, should it be thwarted for the sake of priorities dictated by the nominated National Advisory Council?

India is better served as a Union of States, a federation with a common market and a common currency.

Sunday Pioneer, December 18, 2011

United we vote, divided let's shop

2011-12-16T22:19:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

In one of the few meaningful interventions on the state of the economy in this disrupted Winter Session of Parliament, Leader of Opposition (Rajya Sabha) Arun Jaitley imagined he put Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a spot by referring to his expressed opposition to foreign direct investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail in 2002, when the Atal Behari Vajpayee government was in power.

In stressing that Dr Singh is as governed by expediency as any lesser being, Mr Jaitley was undoubtedly making a powerful debating point. Yet, in his speech he deftly avoided a more obvious question: Why do politicians across the board behave one way in government and the opposite way in Opposition?

The question is relevant in the context of both the Congress and the BJP. The idea of opening up India’s protected retail sector to some form of foreign competition was an idea that was first mooted by the DMK’s Murasoli Maran when he was minister of commerce in the NDA government.

It wasn’t an idea that found enthusiastic support from everyone: the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh led by the uncompromising RSS leader Dattopant Thengdi was vocal in its public opposition, as were politicians belonging to the “swadeshi” camp in the BJP.

But the idea was sufficiently attractive to be included in the 2004 election manifesto of the NDA — although not in the BJP’s vision document. If it was the coalitional imperative that scuttled the scheme this month, it was coalitional enthusiasm that put the scheme in the NDA manifesto.

The inconsistencies don’t stop here. Mamata Banerjee was viscerally opposed to FDI in retail and was even willing to vote against the government in Parliament if it came to the crunch. The Congress in Kerala was similarly discomforted by the government’s initiative.

At the same time, the Shiromani Akali Dal, which has experienced the benefit to farmers from organised retail, was enthusiastic in its support. So apparently was Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi who, however, bowed to the party line and put his preferences on hold.

It also seems that many BJP MPs were dismayed by the party’s unequivocal opposition and preferred a more nuanced position. They were struck by the absence of any discussion within the parliamentary party before the BJP firmed up its position. Congress MPs would doubtless have the same complaint about its government’s unilateralism.

The point I am emphasising has, however, less to do with the lamentable secrecy and lack of consultations that surround most executive decisions — the retail liberalisation may well have gone through had it not happened in the midst of a Parliament session.

What I find interesting is that, political considerations apart, the government’s decision had supporters and opponents cutting across the political divide. More significant, the broad support for corporatising retail trade appears to have come from states which are either relatively better placed in the GDP — states such as Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Gujarat and Maharashtra — or smelt gains from an efficient cold chain — as, say, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh.

For West Bengal, Ms Banerjee’s unrelenting opposition was quite understandable. Having lost its manufacturing base during the 34 years of Left Front rule, the unorganised retail sector is one of the largest sources of livelihood for a large range of people from the very lowest strata of the middle class to the rural poor.

The relative lack of other opportunities has made retailing the only possible source of livelihood for many people. A shrewd politician, Ms Banerjee would not meekly have handed over such a large and vocal community to the Left. For her, opposition to organised big retail made a lot of economic and political sense.

The real problem that the government faced was a conceptual one. There was just no way in which a momentous decision over retail trade would have a uniform effect throughout India. In certain states the benefits to both farmers and consumers would far outweigh the threats to the local kirana shop or middlemen. In other states, however, there would be disruption of local communities which had the potential of triggering social unrest.

The question that needs to be asked is: should, say, Gujarat or Punjab be denied the opportunity of becoming more integrated with the world market for the sake of West Bengal and eastern Uttar Pradesh? The concentration of power in the Centre makes this inevitable and forces absolutely local considerations to become pan-Indian impediments. Logically speaking, it seems absurd that the decision to allow a Tesco to operate a chain of supermarkets in Delhi should invite a veto from a Tamil Nadu-based regional party.

But that is how India has organised its politics and separation of powers. In a genuinely federal state, such decisions should be taken at the state level and be governed by mundane considerations such as municipal planning permission. Instead, it became a test of the Union government’s credibility.

The simple truth is that the idea of a redistributive Centre which was at the heart of the socialist planning process has run its course. In today’s India, it is the centralisation of power on crucial issues such as labour, power, infrastructure and environment that constitute obstacles to growth.

Uneven development is a fact of life that cannot be controlled by bureaucrats and politicians. There is often talk of a twin-track Europe. In India, we need to acknowledge the necessity of a multi-track, federal India.

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, December 16, 2011

History is ignored

2011-12-11T23:29:00.001-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

The British Empire was above all a celebration of protocol and pageantry-what the historian David Cannadine has called “ornamentalism”. This would explain the somewhat perfunctory treatment meted out by King George V and Queen Mary to the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, when he stepped on board the Medina in Bombay to welcome the only visit of a reigning King-Emperor to India on December 2, 1911. According to convention, the Viceroy of India was the direct representative of the Crown in India: he governed in the name of the King-Emperor. With the monarch now physically present in the Empire’s prize possession, the Viceroy was automatically relegated to the status of a mere Governor-General.

Bruised vanity wasn’t the only hiccup governing the visit. The British Cabinet, in the throes of a vicious encounter between the House of Commons and House of Lords over a high-tax Budget, was most reluctant to have the monarch away from Britain for such a long time — there was just no precedent. The King overruled the elected government peremptorily. “It was”, he said, “entirely my own idea”.

Queen Victoria, the original maharani, would have loved her grandson for the defiance. To her, India was the Jewel in the Crown. The government wasn’t pleased and flatly refused to pay for the costs of a new, bejewelled crown that would symbolise the King’s symbolic anointment as King-Emperor on Indian soil. There was a scheme to make the Indian princes pay but ultimately the bill for the £60,000 crown from Garrard, the Crown Jeweller on Regent Street, was footed by an ever-obliging government of India.

It wasn’t the Asquith government alone that was not amused. The Archbishop of Canterbury threw a minor tantrum when it was suggested that the crown be placed on his head by three princes — one Hindu, one Muslim and one Sikh. As Kenneth Rose noted in his biography of George V, “he argued that coronation implied consecration, and that in a land of Moslems and Hindus, any such act of Christian worship would be misplaced. It was therefore agreed that the King should arrive at the Durbar with the crown already on his head.”

So it was that at noon on December 12, 1911, that the King-Emperor and the Queen-Empress rode in state to the grand domed tent, flanked by Sir Pertap Singh, the Diwan of Jodhpur, and by reputation the wisest guardian of princely India. His carriage was preceded by a contingent of the 10th Hussars that trotted in to the venue where the band played the robust notes of “See, the conquering hero comes.”

Actually, it was an unlikely “conquering hero”. Two days before, there was a spectacular state entry of the King into Delhi and the 25 square mile tented township complete with ornate princely pavilions, metalled roads, railway lines, electricity and post offices that had been put into place in record. Based on the diaries of the 23-year-old Lilah Wingfield, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who travelled to India to experience the Empire in all its glory, writer Jessica Douglas-Home has provided an unflattering description of the first impressions of the King: “Curzon’s (1903 durbar) had been a show fit for the representative of the greatest sovereign on earth. But now, the first time a reigning British monarch had arrived in person on Indian soil, the Emperor of Emperors appeared as an insignificant, virtually invisible, figure, seated uneasily on a small bay horse surrounded by taller, more imposing and better mounted military men.”

“As the lonely figure of the King rode anonymously down the processional route into the mile-long Chandni Chauk, the crowds looked at the Queen in all her glory and came to the conclusion that she must have left His Imperial Majesty behind in England.”

Unfortunately for Hardinge, possessed by a fanatical desire to demonstrate that Lord Curzon’s 1903 Durbar wasn’t the last word in awesome pageantry, there was another boo-boo in the offing. In the ceremonial genuflection of 475 Indian princes before their King-Emperor, Gaekwad of Baroda deviated from the script. Minutes before he was to appear, he took off his ceremonial jewels and dressed as a Maratha gentleman, walked up to throne, bowed and then — horror of horrors — instead of taking the mandatory seven steps backward, turned his back and walked away, “nonchalantly twirling a gold-topped walking stick”. There was, wrote Douglas-Home, “a murmur of dismay” from the crowd.

An equal gasp of surprise greeted the King’s announcement, kept a fiercely guarded secret, that the capital would be transferred to Delhi from Calcutta. “The Times correspondent visited 10 of the camps and informed his readers that the announcement of the new capital was being received without enthusiasm. Some blamed the Calcutta monsoon, others suggested that it was a reflection of a British intention to remain permanently in India. It was believed by some that Calcutta had been chosen as the seat of power because it would be easy to leave by sea in case of an uprising.”

An uprising, however, was the last thing on anyone’s mind. The only show of people’s power occurred when, after the King had departed to his tent “rather tired after wearing the crown for three hours” and a 101-gun salute. A huge crowd of Indians broke the cordon, rushed to the durbar tent and were seen kissing the ground on which their raja and rani had walked. A Tibetan Lilah Wingfield encountered said he had travelled four months to be in Delhi to get a glimpse of the King!

The next day the foundation stone of New Delhi was lowered into a plinth by the King in front of a small audience of 500. “To loud applause the Maharaja of Gwalior offered to give the plinth a statue of the King Emperor.” From faraway London, Lord Curzon decried the move to shift the capital to Delhi — “the graveyard of empires”.

The Durbar was the most important event in India a century ago. It was a great moment for a Raj that would not endure for more than 36 years and which would never really settle down to a New Delhi that was formally inaugurated in 1931. But it was also a moment in India’s history that will live on despite the contrived derision of the “post-colonial” mind. The Raj’s Delhi is as much a show of India as is Shahjehanabad, the creation of rulers who came from Central Asia.

The latter is celebrated; the former isn’t even commemorated. That’s why India has no sense of history, only an overdose of hateful politics.

Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, December 12, 2011

Stalling Parliament negates democracy

2011-12-11T22:26:00.001-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Michael Heseltine was a renowned British politician who, many say, should have been the leader of the Conservative Party after Margaret Thatcher was unceremoniously dumped. There are many reasons why Heseltine never made it to the top job — he was seen as too liberal, too flamboyant and too individualistic — but one thing that was always held against him was his moment of excitable indiscretion in 1976.

Provoked by a group of socialist louts singing the ‘Red Flag’ in the House of Commons, Heseltine picked up the ceremonial mace and twirled it menacingly. No harm was done and Heseltine was duly reprimanded by the Speaker (he may even have been suspended for a few days). However, this incident, for which he was instantly dubbed ‘Tarzan’ by the media, continued to haunt Heseltine for the rest of his days in active politics. His momentary lapse into indecorous behaviour became a permanent blot on his character.

It would have been so refreshing if the Indian political class and the electorate applied the same exacting standards of parliamentary conduct on our MPs. Far from it. Once upon a time, the disruption of Parliament by the likes of Raj Narain (who was often bodily lifted out of the Rajya Sabha by marshals) was a novelty and viewed as an individual deviation. During the first 10 days of the winter session, both Houses of Parliament did not function. For reasons as varied as price rise, Telangana and FDI in retail, groups of MPs that included both the Opposition and members of the ruling coalition felt that disruption was the best way to register protest. Even after normal functioning resumed last week, Question Hour was disrupted by BJP MPs for flimsy reasons: The demands for the resignation of Home Minister P Chidambaram and External Affairs Minister SM Krishna.

Of late, there has been a sense of public revulsion against the frequent disruption of Parliament but this does not appear to have made too much of an impact. Instead of using Zero Hour effectively, there are some members of the Opposition who have got it into their heads that disruption is always preferable to arguments. Since it takes barely 15 MPs to throw a House into confusion, this extra-parliamentary approach is used with increasing frequency inside Parliament, with the same devastation. In the final years of Rajiv Gandhi’s five-year stint in Government, Parliament witnessed the creation of a “shouting brigade” of Congress MPs who used lung power against a tiny Opposition. In hindsight, Rajiv set an unfortunate precedent. Today, the same shouting brigade has entered the bloodstream of the Opposition and has contributed immeasurably in lowering Parliament to the level of a fish market.

What is important to note is that the debasement of Parliament hasn’t happened because a few MPs have no respect for institutions. It has occurred because those with a full awareness of their actions have encouraged the disruptionists. In other words, it is not ignorance or cultural inadequacy that has led to the assault on parliamentary functioning, but deep cynicism. Rajiv Gandhi knew the consequences of unleashing his shouting brigade; and LK Advani was aware that the reason for disrupting the first substantive session of the UPA Government in 2004 wasn’t any substantive grievance but astrological advice — some Babaji had apparently forecast that the UPA would be tottering before Diwali 2004.

Today, it is the same story of wilful culpability. Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, the two Leaders of Opposition in Parliament, have distinguished themselves in parliamentary debates. They have the ability to take on arguments with arguments, eloquence, sarcasm and wit. Yet, they have been mute spectators to their less accomplished colleagues running riot. Unless we see evidence of Swaraj and Jaitley actively opposing this mindless culture of disruption, it will be presumed they are co-conspirators in this game.

Of course, the blame should not be directed solely at the Opposition. The Government, whose parliamentary majority rests on maverick and demanding allies, is always anxious to prevent any discussion that involves voting. As the BJD member Jai Panda has written on various occasions, negating all voting resolutions is tantamount to short-changing the electorate. Parliament, apart from being a talking shop, is primarily all about the numbers game. If a formal division is limited to law-making, it leaves out of its purview the entire process of governance. Had the Government agreed to a voting resolution on FDI in retail, there would have been no logic to the disruption of Parliament. Instead, we had the bizarre situation of the Government taking a major initiative, its coalition partners and the Opposition opposing it bitterly and it finally doing a U-turn, without the matter reaching Parliament at all.

The Government cannot pretend that lowering the public esteem of Parliament has been a one-sided contribution of a cussed Opposition. The Opposition has much to answer for but let us not forget that the atmosphere in which Parliament has lost its sheen has been the contribution of the Government. How will parliamentary institutions be strengthened if the Prime Minister, the UPA chairperson and the heir-designate are uncomfortable participating in the proceedings of Parliament? The symbols of electoral democracy, it would seem, have been reduced to tickets for generous housing in Lutyens’ Delhi. We have created a privileged class that has a sense of entitlement but little accountability.

Sunday Pioneer, December 11, 2011

At A Moment of Change: The UPA Government is remarkably out of sorts

2011-12-09T04:01:00.000-08:00

It is striking that economists have joined hands with politicians to practise sophistry. Earlier this week, a British Treasury official, Sir Stephen Nickell, expressed hope that this year’s so far exceptionally mild winter in his country turns out to be as severe as last year’s. Sir Stephen’s wish had a tangential connection with the High Street retailers who have been frustrated by the slow sales of winter wear this season. In the main, however, his calculations had more to do with statistical jugglery. A severe winter invariably leads to slowdown and disruption which tell on the quarterly results. However, the wintry bedlam also leads to a rapid catching-up process once the snow melts and the sleet is washed away. What Sir Stephen was thus really hoping for was that one dreadful month of depressed or even negative growth is followed by a much better performance the following month. As The Daily Telegraph helpfully explained, the Nickell logic was based on the jugglery that “[O]ne dreadful month and the next slightly positive don’t count cumulatively as a recession”.

The Indian economy, despite all its shortcomings, is nowhere as precariously poised as Britain’s. The awesome 8 per cent growth of the gross domestic product may have fallen to below 7 per cent, but we are far from uttering the dreaded R-word. At best, the effervescent deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, may have admitted to seriously miscalculating the persistence of high inflation, but hismea culpa was so discreetly buried in the inside pages that there was not even a token demand for his head to roll. Consequently, the need for economists and economic advisers to engage in statistical jugglery to show that they were right after all was less pressing.

In India, economists are rarely, if ever, charged with quackery; the fall guy for economic mismanagement is inevitably the politician. The commerce minister, Anand Sharma, who was looking terribly self-important last week and choosing his words with a great deal of thought, is a much deflated figure this week after the Bengali Brahmin duo comprising the finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, and the West Bengal chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, decided that foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail could wait a more favourable constellation of stars and planets. The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, emerged from the 10-day storm that exposed the vulnerabilities of his government with his maun vrat strictly intact.

India must be a novel democracy for a political crisis to come and go with the three key figures of the dispensation — the prime minister, the United Progressive Alliance chairperson, Sonia Gandhi, and the designated heir apparent, Rahul Gandhi — to emerge without saying a word on the subject.

Yet, lots of people said lots of things and the social media went viral with uncharitable remarks about the silent triumvirate that governs India silently. Was that the reason why the multi-portfolio minister, Kapil Sibal, entered the arena and, without any compelling reason, demanded that the anarchic social media be subject to political censorship?

To many economists the logic may have seemed flawless: if you can’t outdo China in the economic race, you can at least start emulating it politically. To the less intellectually endowed, however, the timing seemed characteristically Sibal-esque. During the brief storm over retail trade liberalization, the Congress (if not the UPA as a whole) appeared to be recovering its composure and getting over its state of rudderless inertia. There was evidence to show that a section of the alienated middle classes welcomed the move to liberate the consumer from the distributional inefficiencies that contributed to exceptionally high food prices. The media, unrelentingly hostile since the Commonwealth Games scandal broke in August 2011, also seemed in a mood to be charitable towards the reformist impulses of the government. Even the letter-writing Eminent Persons Group seemed inclined to be supportive. And, more important, the principal Opposition party which had backed retail reform in its 2004 manifesto appeared cussed and blindly obstructionist and too willing to obliterate the difference between itself and the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

In such a situation, in stepped Sibal with his dossier of grievances against netizens who are naturally irreverent and insolent. The result is that the Congress is back to exactly where it was before the cabinet met last month to approve FDI in retail with the added stigma of intolerance attached to it.

Not since Charan Singh waged civil war against Morarji Desai and brought the Janata Party edifice crashing down in 1979 has India witnessed a government that is so utterly out of sorts. The problem stems only partially from an Opposition that is hell-bent on disrupting Parliament for the most trivial of reasons. At the heart of the growing dysfunctionality is the fact that the Congress no longer seems entirely convinced that the system of dyarchy that saw the UPA through in its first term is working. There is still personal respect for the prime minister. But his clumsy political management and his deadpan style of communication have convinced many of the party faithful that the next election is as good as lost unless there is a shake-up.

By instinct the average Congress activist is wedded to the idea of dynastic succession. In 2004, when Sonia’s “inner voice” told her to refuse the prime minister’s post, the party accepted it grudgingly and with the realization that the ‘Regency’ would facilitate the political apprenticeship of Rahul, the chosen heir. Since Manmohan Singh had no political base and was disinclined to create one for himself, the interim arrangement was accepted.

What has changed? First, the economic situation is no longer conducive to the mega-welfare style of governance that came with 9 per cent growth. The resources to fund Sonia’s lady bountiful act no longer exist, and the cost of uninterrupted profligacy is a mounting fiscal deficit, a declining rupee and a possible balance of payments crisis. The Congress is in a limbo between a preferred recklessness and the countervailing pulls of responsible governance. Its instincts favour rolling back the reforms initiated between 1991 and 2004, yet it lacks the political will to pursue the path of counter-revolution in a country where the majority of the electorate will be below the age of 40.

Secondly, Sonia’s health problems — still a State secret — are a source of worry. This is a subject that is still not discussed openly but Congress leaders are aware that the issue of succession can no longer be put off indefinitely. Earlier it was imagined that a good showing in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections next summer — by which is meant the Congress’s ability to finish third in the four-cornered race — would be sufficient to catapult Rahul to the top job. Yet, as the election approaches, there is insufficient confidence in the Congress’s ability to break new ground in India’s largest state. A bad result will leave the Congress even more disoriented.

Finally — and this is the truth that dare not speak its name — Congress supporters are worried that there is nothing else going for Rahul apart from pedigree. His aloofness and unbroken banality has been masked by careful handling but doesn’t appear to be yielding the necessary electoral dividends —Bihar being a prime example. It is not that Rahul is without charm but he lacks charisma. His only hope in 2014 lies in the Bharatiya Janata Party scoring many self-goals and putting forward someone completely inappropriate as its prime ministerial candidate. Rahul can perhaps win but only by default. He is no longer the ‘youth icon’ as he is made out to be; he is merely the face of the dynasty.

The Telegraph, December 9, 2011

A matter of choice

2011-12-04T23:45:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

One thing that unites both the proponents of foreign investment in multi-brand retailing and their disparate opponents is the conviction that foreign capital will introduce a spectacular degree of efficiency in a largely chaotic sector. It is recognized, and has been recognized since the NDA was first excited by the idea, that bulk buying and a streamlined distribution channel will help lessen the huge 'farm to fork' differential. That a transformation of retail into a part of the modern, organized sector will have a multiplier effect is also not seriously disputed.

But that's where the convergence ends. For the past week, Parliament has been disrupted, the Lokpal Bill and Anna Hazare put on hold and the government confronted with the most serious internal challenge since the Left withdrew support over the nuclear deal in 2008. Most MPs and a majority of chief ministers have chosen to mount a robust defence of inefficiency and opposed the likelihood of discounted grocery bills for three reasons.

First, even after 150 years of its liquidation, India hasn't got over its mental fear of the East India Company. In the language of socialism-which we still carefully preserve in the preamble to the Constitution-all foreign trade is suspect and calculated to puncture our national sovereignty and independence. Last week, a senior BJP leader who was feted as a great champion of economic reforms in his time as minister, was actually heard cautioning about the "strategic" consequences of foreign players in the retail sector. It was reminiscent of the time India was warned that WTO membership would involve a ban on chewing neem twigs.

Second, when it comes to shopping at home, we would rather buy from a Haldiram rather than a Heineman. It is a different matter that no trip to London is complete without the mandatory shopping at TESCO-a great British company which, some people deem, must never travel to India. It is a bit like Jawaharlal Nehru who preached austere self-sufficiency at home but let it be discreetly known that he wasn't averse to a decent bottle of Burgundy, preferably Grands Echezeaux, during his European tours. Nehru had good taste, as did Indira Gandhi, but they were clear about one thing: what was good enough for the first family wasn't appropriate for the rest of us. That was the essence of India's socialism.

Finally, each side has its own reasons to explain where they stand. The Prime Minister is anxious to refurbish his reformist credentials and, if possible, ensure that the outflow of money from India is reversed. The swadeshi types smell a great opportunity to embarrass the government and, maybe, even engineer its fall. They claim to be speaking for both the middlemen and the petty retailers-groups genuinely apprehensive of the impact of supermarkets on their livelihood. But in all this high economics, low politics and appeasement of special interest groups, one group is missing from the debate: the consumer.

In an erudite article in Economic Times, opposition leader Arun Jaitley made a curious observation: "Domestic retailers source domestically. International retailers operate on the principle of buying internationally at the cheapest cost." The assertion is dubious since the city corner shop today stocks everything for the price-conscious consumer. These include Italian spaghetti, Chinese light bulbs and South African peaches. But that is beside the point. What Jaitley is fearful is that the consumer's buying decision will be dictated by her budget rather than the 'Made in India' label.

The consumer may well be charged with being innately unpatriotic. But, is nationalism, by definition, high cost? What does it say about Indian manufactures if shoes made in Vietnam turn out to be cheaper and more durable than one made in Aligarh? Should the consumer be compelled to buy an inferior, expensive item on swadeshi principles, as used to happen in the past?

International competition can have two possible reactions. It can either generate lethargy or it can spur India to take those measures needed to make the economy truly competitive. The retail reforms could make India shake off its complacency. Or, the nation could wallow in the sense of entitlement that high-cost inefficiency brings. At least we now have a choice.

Sunday Times of India, December 4, 2011

A house of mirrors

2011-12-02T23:50:00.000-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

An unintended consequence of the disruption of the first quarter of the Winter Session of Parliament over the decision to allow foreign direct investment in multi-brand retailing is the growing support among the middle classes for a presidential system of government. The monotonously routine scenes of disruption and adjournments appear to have bred a mood of disgust about the efficacy, not of democracy but of democratic institutions. With India clamouring for both purposeful governance and accountability, it is becoming increasingly clear that India’s MPs lack the wherewithal to uphold lofty ideals.

The Opposition has to shoulder the lion’s share of the blame. When proclaiming that Parliament would not function unless the government rescinded its executive order on retail trade reforms, the BJP was too engrossed in the momentum of the battle it has undertaken to worry too much about the public response to the disruption. Like trade unionists unmindful of how a strike is perceived in society, the Opposition was too gleeful about the likelihood of the government being seriously embarrassed to worry too much about how the country as a whole perceived the shenanigans in Parliament. The pitfalls of catering to a single interest group were not seriously deliberated before rushing into action.

For its entire life, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the precursor of the BJP, was handicapped by a perception that it was a Brahmin-Bania coalition, catering to the narrow interests of beleaguered elites and the trading classes. In the past decade this perception has eroded, not least because any party requires a much bigger social base to emerge as a mass party. By sticking up so ferociously for a trading class that perceives a long-term threat to its dominance, the BJP has reinforced stereotypes of itself. Most important, it has left the field wide open for the Congress to show its concerns for the two groups that have been ignored in this debate: farmers and consumers. Of course, given its present state of disarray, it is unlikely the Congress will be able to exploit these openings.

It is not that the UPA government comes out of the episode like an innocent victim of the Opposition’s cussedness. Far from it. There is an element of mystery as to why the government timed its announcement to coincide with the Winter Session of Parliament, unless it really believed that the move would be widely welcomed and leave its parliamentary majority unaffected. However, having rushed in with the notification, the government could hardly expect that the Opposition would not capitalise on the fact that there is near-complete unity in its own ranks and division among the coalition partners of the government.

Even if no one questions the legal right of the Cabinet to issue a notification amending the rules of the retail trade, no one also questions the right of Parliament to discuss the subject and, if necessary, vote on the subject.
The frequency with which the government is shying away from debates that involve voting — whether on price rise or the retail reforms — has brought into question its commitment to the institutions of democracy. Governance in a democracy doesn’t merely involve taking the right decisions; it necessitates blending decisions with the will of Parliament.

True, any successful adjournment motion against the recent retail trade reforms doesn’t imply a vote of no-confidence in the government. The Trinamul Congress and the DMK may well either vote with the Opposition against the reforms or stage an expedient walkout. However, it is unlikely they will vote to topple the UPA government and force an early general election, as many in the BJP seem to desire. Yet, any expression of parliamentary displeasure against the retail reforms will seriously embarrass the government, erode the standing of the Prime Minister and, maybe, even force his resignation.

If Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was unaware of the larger implications of an inevitable parliamentary scrutiny of his decision, he was displaying amazing political naiveté.

Yet, astonishing as it may seem from the eye of the storm, it is conceivable that both the decision and the timing were carefully pre-meditated. For the past 18 months or so, Dr Singh has allowed himself to look indecisive and pathetic. The Prime Minister has particularly disappointed all those who believed that the 2009 victory would open the floodgates of radical reform, thereby allowing India to live up to its potential. The retail reforms are the only meaningful steps the government has undertaken since it assumed office in June 2004. The Opposition’s robust response to these innocuous changes that present India with, at best, a post-dated cheque has willy-nilly brought reforms (rather, the lack of them) into the political centre-stage. Most important, it has taken the focus away from Anna Hazare and his Jan Lokpal obsession.

Was this carefully calculated by a Prime Minister who some say is a better politician than an economist? Unless the Congress has made up its mind to jettison Dr Singh for the Crown Prince or a stop-gap arrangement, it is likely that the party has to unite behind its Prime Minister. If Dr Singh shows determination in that fight, the message to the electorate will be largely positive — people love a doughty politician. As a bonus, he has already succeeded in winning over a hitherto critical media to his side. All that the Prime Minister has to do is to be seen to be fighting to satisfy India’s blind craving for decisiveness.

Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, December 2, 2011

BJP risks losing urban support

2011-11-26T22:55:00.001-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Economic reforms in Indiaare usually achieved at gunpoint. It was the horrible balance of paymentscrisis and the emotional effects of the mortgaging of the country’s goldreserves that facilitated the historic process of deregulation by the ManmohanSingh Government in 1991. Seven years later, it was the wave of globalsanctions after the Pokhran-II blasts that propelled the Atal Bihari VajpayeeGovernment into using reforms as a weapon to neutralise the West’s hostility toIndia.

The qualified opening up ofthe retail sector to foreign investment announced last Thursday is the onlystep in the direction of economic liberalisation that the UPA Government hastaken since it assumed power in 2004. It is being said that the retailinitiative will be the precursor of reforms in civil aviation and, perhaps,insurance.

For the Prime Minister, theretail initiative may have salvaged his jaded image in the outside world as areformer. But while this may have played some role in encouraging him tooverrule Cabinet and Opposition objections, it was not the clincher. Whattilted the scales in favour of a politically high-risk initiative was the rapiddepreciation of the Rupee, soaring inflation and the dismal state of publicfinances. In other words, the opening up of the retail sector wasn’t occasionedby a deep rooted conviction that the present protectionist regime wasinefficient and served neither the farmer nor the consumer. Had the realisation—as Commerce Minister Anand Sharmaput it—that under the present system “the famer bleeds and the consumer isfleeced” been widespread, the Indian politician would have rushed in withreforms much, much earlier. The Congress, after all, has very little supportbase in the wholesale and retail sectors. The Akali Dal is essentially a partyof Sikh farmers and its endorsement of the reforms is revealing. It suggeststhat the agricultural sector wants greater choice in determining who buys farmproduce.

The present system wasallowed to continue for 20 years after the liberalisation process was initiatedbecause successive governments chose the line of resistance and allowedthemselves to be intimidated by traders. The traders’ veto on reforms wouldhave continued had the government not been forced to make changes. The consumersshould thank the Eurozone crisis and the UPA’s profligate expenditure policythat the monthly grocery bills should register a decline in the medium and longterm.

In the short term however,the Government still has a problem on its hands. There are projections that theretail sector should see nearly Rs 1,75,000 crore additional investments (someRs 70,000 crore in foreign investments) in the next five years. Yet, it isgoing to be a slow process. For the moment, the UPA faces a situation whereby thepossible losers are incensed by the changes but the beneficiaries aren’tterribly excited—because the gains will take a long time to be felt.

In political terms, this isdangerous. It is estimated that nearly a lakh of people per Lok Sabhaconstituency will see themselves as an aggrieved community. The petty retailersand their families are almost certain to be receptive to the populist rhetoricagainst foreign companies and the demonology that is building up aroundWalmart. The doomsday scenario may well be terribly exaggerated since urbanclusters with populations below 10 lakhs will retain their protected status forthe foreseeable future. Yet, a grievance is a grievance and with this retailreform the Congress has replenished the numbers of the burgeoning anti-Congressvote bank.

They may, however, becompensatory advantages for the ruling party. Economic reforms havetraditionally won the support of the urban middle classes—a group that swung tothe Congress in sufficient numbers to decimate the BJP in urban seats in 2009.Despite being a natural supporter of deregulation and the free market, the BJPhas, since its defeat in 2004, adopted a cussed approach to economic reforms.This has led to a growing middle class indifference to a party it supportedquite enthusiastically in the 1990s. In fact, like the Reagan Democrats, the2009 election saw the emergence of the Manmohan BJP voters—people who brokeaway from traditional support to the BJP and endorsed a pro-reforms Congress.

In actively championing thecause of the vyapari mandals in the big cities, the BJP has to be careful oftwo things. First, it must convince its supporters that it is not a status-quoistparty wedded to serving particular lobbies. Secondly, it must be careful thatthe anti-foreign and, by implication, anti-West imagery of the protests itplans on December 1 and thereafter does not end up creating a cultural mismatchbetween the below-35 generation and the ageing leadership of the party.

One of the features ofcontemporary India is that the below-35s, who will soon make up nearly half thevoting population, combine fierce patriotic with an approval of westernisationand western lifestyles. In overdoing the anti-Walmart rhetoric, as Uma Bhartidid last Friday when she threatened arson against the multinational if it setup shop in India, the BJP risks imposing a new cultural barrier for itself.

In 2009, the BJPceded the modernity plank to the Congress with its hyper opposition to theIndo-US nuclear accord. It has to take care that in opposing the government, itdoesn’t paint itself as a party of the Flat Earth movement.

Sunday Pioneer, November 27, 2011

SLEEP WALKING - Economic reform is meaningless without intellectual revolution

2011-11-24T23:07:00.001-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

P.V. Narasimha Rao, 1992

In these troubled times for the global economy, it may be worth narrating a story about the mentality of Indian politicians.

When the Congress returned to power in the summer of 1991 after the Janata Dal interregnum, the cabinet of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was presented a note by the ministry of finance advocating dramatic reforms that included the deregulation of the economy. The note was greeted with predictable scepticism, if not outright hostility by the cabinet.

Looking for a way out of the logjam, Rao despatched a young aide to one of Indira Gandhi’s trusted confidants for advice. The hard-nosed veteran read the finance ministry note and then offered his suggestion. Wouldn’t it be more advisable, he asked, to preface the document with appropriate passages from Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi? It would, he suggested, definitely enhance the comfort level of the cabinet to know that the proposed measures were in conformity with the scriptures.

The wily Rao didn’t hesitate to accept the sage advice. A reworked cabinet note was circulated and this time, the opposition melted away, giving the prime minister the mandate to pursue liberalization as the highest stage of Nehru and Indira’s socialism.

This delightful story may well be true, partially true or plain apocryphal. What is remarkable, however, is not the revelation that the Congress party is made up of dinosaurs, but the extent to which orthodoxy takes hold of the political imagination to resist change. This is, of course, true of India but it is also a global phenomenon.

In her autobiography, The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher spelt out the insidious hold of the post-War consensus on the British political imagination: “By 1964 British society had entered a sick phase of liberal conformism passing as individual self-expression. Only progressive ideas and people were worthy of respect by an increasingly self-conscious and self-confident media class.” Thatcher may well have been talking of India.

Nominally, India may have travelled a long way from the days when inefficiency and sloth were regarded as economic virtues and when personal rates of taxation for the highest slab touched 97 per cent. What is significant, however, about the massive economic shifts that were first brought in by Manmohan Singh’s 1991 budget is the remarkable extent to which change has been ushered without fanfare and, more often than not, by stealth.

It required the 1991 balance of payments crisis and the emotional trauma of the physical mortgaging of some of India’s gold reserves to begin the assault on the licence-permit-quota raj. Likewise, it required the Western sanctions against India in the aftermath of the 1998 Pokhran-II blasts to lift many of the curbs on foreign capital and rid Atal Bihari Vajpayee of his party’s accumulated swadeshi baggage.

As 2011 draws to a close, India is at a similar crossroads. The economic downturn in the United States of America and the Eurozone crisis has left no economy untouched. Complemented by what is called the ‘governance deficit’, India’s economic indicators have moved southwards. The gross domestic product projections are down from nine per cent to seven per cent; the already-large fiscal deficit is expected to breach the budgeted five per cent level and touch more than six per cent of the GDP; inflation has been hovering around 10 per cent for nearly a year and shows little sign of coming down despite 13 interest rate hikes since March 2009; the sensex has lost 22 per cent since January and foreign direct investment inflows have virtually ceased after touching a record $29 billion in 2010; in the preceding quarter, the profitability of Indian companies fell by an average of 30 per cent; and the Indian rupee, now blessed with a distinctive symbol, has lost some 15 per cent of its value in barely three months, thereby making imports prohibitive and adding to the inflationary spiral.

Middle India’s overall comfort level with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rested on two beliefs: first, that he was a man of integrity and innate decency and, second, that he had the requisite skills to manage the economy. On both these counts, Singh’s reputation is in tatters. No one accuses the prime minister of being personally dishonest, but the sheer scale of the corruption charges before the courts have put question marks on his ability and willingness to tame his roguish colleagues. Worse still, there is complete consternation at the prime minister’s inability to ‘fix’ the economy. That he doesn’t possess the proverbial ‘magic wand’ is conceded by all reasonable Indians. What strikes them as odd is that the senses of urgency and purpose that should have accompanied the economic slide are missing. The government appears to have simply given up. Particularly disturbing is the extent to which a beleaguered political class seems ready to fall back on the ideological shibboleths that many imagined had been steadily discarded since 1991. The approach to the fiscal deficit is a classic example of a government that seems unconcerned.

There is a stalemate in the US over the failure of the White House and the Republican-controlled senate to agree on measures to reduce a trillion dollar deficit, and in both Britain and the Eurozone, the deficit is at the root of a political and diplomatic stand-off. Yet in India, fiscal consolidation has been deleted from the vocabulary of the ruling party and its allies. The hugely expensive and inefficient Centre-sponsored welfare schemes are not merely regarded as holy cows but there are moves to expand the net. So whimsical is the sop culture that last week the commerce ministry announced a Rs 3,844 crore ‘package’ for weavers in eastern Uttar Pradesh because Rahul Gandhi demanded it. No wonder Mamata Banerjee believes that handouts are her birthright too. In Europe, it is said that ‘austerity is the new normal’. In an economically fragile India, fiscal profligacy is the norm — the preferred Rahul alternative to beggary. India is living beyond its means but no one seems to care.

In most of the countries gripped by the downturn, the trend is towards removing as many obstacles to growth as possible. In Britain, for example, stringent planning norms have been relaxed to facilitate a growth in housing. In Italy, the new ‘technocrat’ prime minister has announced a series of measures that include fiscal prudence, welfare cuts and the dismantling of restrictive practices. In India on the other hand, there are moves to add a statutory premium on land acquisition for housing, industry and public utilities. Additionally, limited progress has been made in enlarging the scope of foreign investment in insurance and retail because of the government’s failure to secure agreement within the ruling coalition.

India, it would seem, is sleepwalking its way into an economic disaster zone. Yet, there are two remarkable features of this death march. First, there is no widespread realization that the troubles aren’t confined to inflation and price rise but affect the nerve centres of economic growth. Second, there is the presumption that statist intervention and a more rigid regulatory regime (that deters private sector corruption) is the way out.

Nehru, it must be said, did a remarkably good job in turning progressivism into common sense. Even two decades after liberalization transformed India and heralded far wider levels of prosperity, India has not yet turned its back on the belief structures of the bad old days. Economic reforms, it would seem, become meaningful only when accompanied by an intellectual revolution.

The Telegraph, November 25, 2011

A Look at the Man Who Could Be India's King

2011-11-21T00:05:00.001-08:00

The Gandhi family scion may turn out to be an empty suit. Indians, now used to meritocracy, won't like that.

By SWAPAN DASGUPTA

In democracies, dynastic succession should be a deviation from the norm. In India, many political parties are anyway led by sons and daughters of former bosses, but nowhere is this more prevalent than in the ruling Congress party, which the Gandhi-Nehru family has dominated since independence. Another succession is now in the offing, assuming of course that Indians keep tolerating this deviation.

India's "first dynasty" has been the subject of much speculation in the past three months. Family matriarch and president of the Congress party Sonia Gandhi is reportedly suffering from an unspecified illness. Talk of succession is natural and there is a growing clamor for her son Rahul to assume what numerous party functionaries have dubbed "greater responsibilities." The current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was always thought to be preserving the throne for the young Mr. Gandhi to ascend to it one day.

That day may be arriving. The 41-year-old Mr. Gandhi may soon be appointed working president of the Congress, to take charge of his mother's day-to-day responsibilities. His public rally this month in Phulpur, Uttar Pradesh, was widely seen as a first step in that direction, since that constituency was once represented by Mr. Gandhi's great-grandfather and India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

But banking on the young Mr. Gandhi as a future prime minister is a shot in the dark. His words and actions so far hardly justify the aura surrounding him.

Enlarge Image

European Pressphoto Agency

Sonia Gandhi (left) confers with her son and the heir apparent, Rahul.

Naturally shy, he has hitherto confined himself to photo opportunities. The media has made much of the night Mr. Gandhi spent at a poor untouchable's home; the ride he took in Mumbai's crowded suburban train; or the motorcycle trip into a village protesting land acquisition—all these acts symbolizing that he is in touch with the downtrodden. At a time when the country is sick of the septuagenarian politicians running the country, his 41 years of age have made him a "youth icon."

For all these tributes lavished on him, Mr. Gandhi lacks substance however. His parliamentary interventions have been patchy and confined to prepared texts; he has sometimes been shouted down by older parliamentarians. WikiLeaks revelations show him as someone prone to making casual remarks about "Hindu terrorism" posing a greater danger than Islamist terror. Meanwhile, he is spearheading his party's campaign in state elections next year in Uttar Pradesh, one of the largest states in India. But Congress is poised at best to win third place, and Mr. Gandhi may be stuck with the tag of an under-achiever.

Most worrying, the future leader seems to stay away from the burning questions of the day. He also hasn't involved himself much in the party's crisis management in the last year. Such aloofness may have contributed to the mystique around him but it has also prompted questions about what he believes.

The few indications Mr. Gandhi has given about his political beliefs are not encouraging. Like his mother, he has positioned himself as a "sepoy" of the poor, untouchables and tribals, as he himself tells it. He has played down his commitment to economic modernization in favor of mega-welfare schemes run by the central government. In many ways, he seems inclined toward a controlled economy run by "pro-poor" politicians, a thrust that is at odds with India's restless entrepreneurship today.

The full contours of his political views, of course, are conjecture. Mr. Gandhi has been wary of unscripted interactions with the media. Despite being in the limelight for seven years since he became a member of parliament, he remains a distant and unfamiliar figure to both the political class and the media.

Perhaps Mr. Gandhi thinks this aloofness will help him, as it helped his mother. As a widow of Rajiv Gandhi, the former prime minister who became a martyr when Tamil Tigers assassinated him in 1991, Mrs. Gandhi was treated with feudal deference. Her son, though, is not going to be the beneficiary of that generosity.

Mr. Gandhi enters the political fray in an India that has unrecognizably changed in the past two decades. With wealth and social mobility, the country has grown more assertive—and perhaps even insolent to the authority earlier imposed by caste, family or dynasty. One part of the anti-corruption movement that has grabbed headlines this year is a pushback against the politics of privilege. Indians have enjoyed success in the economic arena out of meritocracy, and find the lack of it in politics outdated. They are not going to take kindly to an empty suit like Mr. Gandhi, whose only claim to fame is his name.

This social churning should make the Congress Party sit up and question the old ways of dynasty. Instead, the possibility of a new leader from the Gandhi family has the party cadre suddenly energized. Mr. Singh's government has hurtled from crisis to crisis and many are now doubling down on the idea of dynasty to rescue the party. That idea is soon going to be tested.

Wall Street Journal, Opinion, November 21, 2011

A continent divided over the Euro virus

2011-11-19T21:00:00.001-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

How many of us can honestlyadmit to not being envious of a passport holder of a European Union country?The charm of being able to ride the Eurostar to Paris on an impulse, thedelights of visa-less travel from Scotland to Sardinia, the luxury of being tolive and work in Dublin or even Gdansk, and the comforts of a singlecurrency—these were the ideas that captivated the world from the early-1990s.The EU was the archetypal cosmopolitan ideal that overwhelmed successivegenerations seeking antidotes to national boundaries and narrow nationalisms.

It was fashionable to becommitted to a EU that, in time, and despite the misgivings of LittleEnglanders, would herald a true fiscal and political union. The generously paidEurocrats in Brussels and Strasbourg were committed to the civilising missionof a Europe based on uniformity—the uniformity of a single currency, one marketand, above all, of progressive social legislation based on exaggerated notionsof human vulnerability. Having created a transnational utopia from the debrisof a war-ravaged continent, Europe imagined it had earned itself the right tobe preachy and sanctimonious to the lesser world.

Yet, few expected the bubblewould be so close to bursting. In the past two months, a sickness that hadfirst emerged in Ireland and the Iberian Peninsula is threatening to overwhelmGreece, Italy and, in time, even France. Coming in the wake of an Americancrisis, the epidemic is threatening to destroy the cosy assumptions of the past20 years. Unchecked, it may even trigger the “final crisis of capitalism”Marxists have been fantasising since 1914.

Prophets of doom have traditionallyjumped the gun. The latest Euro-zone crisis may yet lend itself to a patchworksolution that preserves the essence of the EU while ridding it of grandioseembellishments. However, for that to happen, the captains of the EU have to getoff their high horse and recognise basic realities.

The first is the belief thatnational sovereignty can coexist harmoniously with the stated purposes of theEU. It just can’t. Greece can’t pretend it can continue merrily with itsinefficient public sector and Italy can’t pretend that it can afford to persistwith its elaborate welfare state. To live in a monetary union involvesaccepting a rule-based fiscal system that rejects financial profligacy.

This is a difficult decisionand involves defining the limits of democracy. The removal of the elected primeministers of Greece and Italy by technocrats who have never even contestedmunicipal elections is ominous. As a stop-gap measure to tide over a crisisthis may well be unavoidable. But since the austerity measures are deeplyunpopular in both the countries—and, indeed, in the other countries affected bythe Euro virus—how long before political exasperation forces a return of cussednationalism?

For the moment, Germany andAngela Merkel have been portrayed as the villains of the game and anti-Germanfeeling is rampant all over Europe. German voters in turn are asking why theyshould be subsidising the spendthrift ways of their European cousins and, atthe same time, be ruthlessly vilified for doing so. Will the clash ofnationalism lead to the unravelling of the EU experiment?

This is not necessarily adoomsday scenario. Although the original European Economic Community wascreated at the initiative of France and the Scandinavian countries to keep the ambitionsof a divided Germany within the bounds of economics, the past decade has seenunited Germany outstrip its fellow Europeans. Without any doubt Germany hasemerged as the driving force of the European economy. In terms of creativityand entrepreneurship it has left the rest of Europe far behind. WithoutGermany, the EU is meaningless.

However, for the rest ofEurope to recognise the leadership of Germany is a very tall order. The burdenof history, particularly the 12-year aberration of the Third Reich, has atendency of intruding into the consciousness of the present.

Germany may haverepackaged itself as a benign first among equals but it is confronted by achallenge that economic good sense is powerless to confront: the irrationalself-esteem that nationalism breeds in the less successful.

Sunday Times of India, November 20, 2011

BJP in search of a message

2011-11-19T20:43:00.001-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Many decades ago adistinguished British parliamentarian remarked that Opposition was more aboutprinciples in a way that Government with its preoccupation with compromisesnever can. The gentleman, who spent most of his career in the backbenches as apolitical untouchable, was a rarity. In real life, the quest for the oppositionspace has also involved expedience, inconsistency and, even duplicity. Apartfrom moments of crisis such as war or an imminent national breakdown—as inGreece and Italy—the Opposition has been content to use parliamentary politicsas an arena of one-upmanship.

The underlying belief isthat in most general elections, the electorate votes out a government ratherthan vote in an opposition party to power. This is generally true as far asIndia is concerned although, in the post-liberalisation era, governments(particularly in the states) have shown an uncanny ability to secure repeatedre-election.

In the past 12 months, asthe UPA Government has staggered from crisis to crisis and progressively lostboth direction and moral authority, the largest Opposition grouping has actedon the assumption that victory awaits it whenever the electorate is given achance to express itself. Those who had a dejected, hang dog expression afterthe 2009 verdict have suddenly acquired an extra spring in their steps. Theyhave acquired new hangers-on and their gift haul this Diwali turned out to befull of rich pickings.

It is the illusion ofinevitability that may explain why the BJP has become so purposelessly activein recent months and why it has lost sight of one of the main functions ofpolitical existence—to deliver a message. Last week, as the UPA Governmentfinally woke up from its prolonged spell of helpless inactivity and announced areform-oriented legislative programme for the winter session of Parliament, theBJP reacted with astonishing incoherence.

The reason is not far toseek. Since the election defeat of 2004, the BJP has been in a state of denialand distraction. The process of denial, which contributed to the mostunproductive five years in opposition, ended after the election results of 2009and the removal of L.K. Advani from the post of Leader of Opposition. However,the process of distraction has persisted since the UPA-2 came to power and ithas been fuelled by an unresolved leadership tussle.

The net effect is thatissues have lost focus inside the BJP. The BJP no longer has any real idea ofwhat it believes and what sort of India it would like to build after replacingthe UPA with its own coalition government. The impulses that propel individualsand communities to favour the party over the Congress are very much there:nationalism, business-friendly economics, deregulation and oodles of culturalsymbolism. How this translates into the globalised world of the 21^stcentury is, however, left vague and unstated.

At one time the party lovedthe ideologues it inherited from the RSS; today, a crass philistinism rules theroost. Under Nitin Gadkari, an enormously successful, self-made businessmanfrom Nagpur, the BJP has junked its earlier obsession with austere living andsimple thinking. Today there is a belief that politics is about the timelydeployment of resources—and plenty of it. Gadkari himself typifies the beliefthat political messaging is an incidental add-on: money is the key to securing politicalinfluence. In Maharashtra, Gadkari opposed Pramod Mahajan but in Delhi he hasreplicated his adversary’s style.

The BJP, for example, musthave spent a staggering amount of money in the arrangements and mobilisation ofthe three yatras undertaken by three veteran leaders. Yet, there the politicalreturn on monetary investment is certain to be pitiful for the simple reasonthat there was a mismatch between the feeble message and the choreography.

The BJP is no longer sure ofwhat it believes in—not in foreign policy which appears to be decided byembassy liaisons and junkets, not in economics which appears to flow fromcorporate lobbying, and certainly not in the negotiable moral economy ofpolitics. The party has designated a working group to forge a Vision Documentof sorts to educate the party about its core beliefs—after all, DeendayalUpadhyaya died some 47 years ago. But in the true traditions of those who writebooks without reading them, the project has actually been ‘outsourced’ to aKarnataka-based entrepreneur.

This is fairly typical.Having grown from a modest-sized party to a challenger to the Congress in aremarkably short period of time, the BJP has been unable to put into placealternative systems of self-regulation. While abusing the Congress system ofpatronage and cronyism, it has allowed the same system to take hold of theparty’s nerve centres, with disastrous consequences. Karnataka is by far theworst example but recall that it was the opposition to cronyism that led toB.C.Khanduri’s removal as chief minister in 2009. Khanduri was restored once itbecame clear that his successor’s rampany cronyism was likely to be rejected byvoters.

What has beenhappening in the BJP constitutes a betrayal of all those who believed in thecreation of a wholesome non-Congress alternative. Fortunately, the rot is onlyskin deep and hasn’t affected the party’s vitality. But it is important thatsomething is done now, well before the 2014 elections, to restore decorum and integrity.There is a good second-tier leadership that is capable of undertaking a springcleaning.

Sunday Pioneer, November 20, 2011

A king's ransom

2011-11-18T00:09:00.001-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Prime Minister ManmohanSingh is an extremely cautious man—a reason why he has endured in thecut-throat world of public life for nearly three decades. Yet, for a briefmoment last week he, very uncharacteristically, almost let his guard down. Isay ‘almost’ because, like a good politician, Singh was careful enough to leavefor himself an exit route.

The issue was the kerfuffleover the Vijay Mallya-owned Kingfisher Airways which is in dire financialstraits, having defaulted on its payments of aviation fuel and having cancellednearly 50 flights on one day, much to the chagrin of fare-paying passengers. Onhis return flight from the SAARC summit in the Maldives, the Prime Minister wasasked about the issue in his customary on-flight interaction with the media. Hecautiously prefaced his remarks with the caveat that “I havenot applied my mind to Kingfisher’s problems”. But then he went on to add: “WhenI get back, I will talk to (Civil Aviation Minister) Vayalar Ravi and wewill explore ways and means in which the airlines can be helped.”

A few years ago, such a gesture by a PrimeMinister to help an ailing Indian company, public sector or private, would havebeen treated as pretty routine and, indeed, obligatory. Trade unionists wouldhave been up in arms against possible job losses and may have even called for anationwide airlines strike that in turn would have forced the government’shands; the Left would have declaimed about the pitfalls of deregulating a ‘strategic’sector and may well have called for the restoration of Air India’s monopolyover domestic air travel; and well-heeled industrialists and MPs would havediscreetly lobbied the Finance Minister asking him to instruct the publicsector banks to offer extra lines of credit to a company in difficulty.

This was how business was done in India in thebad old days, when the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy corresponded to theimperatives of the ‘socialistic’ pattern of society. It is a commentary on how muchIndia has changed in the 20 years of liberalisation that none of this happened.Instead, public opinion—howsoever imperfectly that is measured—appeared to veerround to the view that Mallya must be allowed to stew in his own juice and thatspecial accommodation to Kingfisher by the political class would be tantamountto crony capitalism. From CPI(M) MPs to the ever-voluble Rahul Bajaj, it wasagreed that it was bad form to nationalise losses and privatise profits.

So huge was the outcry against any proposedbailout or politically-inspired ‘restructuring’ of Kingfisher’s debts that boththe Civil Aviation minister and those claiming to speak for the Prime Ministerhad to beat a hasty retreat. Instead, stern-faced bankers made it clear thatthere was no question of pouring in more good money into a bottomless pit. Likethe much-despised International Monetary Fund, the banks demanded‘conditionalities’, most notably a fresh infusion of equity by the promoter, ifnecessary by the conversion of inter-corporate debt into equity.

It is not that there was no appreciation ofMallya’s assertion that the various social obligations of domesticcarriers—such as servicing the North-east—put unacceptable burdens on anairline. There was also a realisation that the restrictions on foreign directinvestment, the huge sales tax burden on aviation fuel and exorbitant airportcharges made it impossible for the aviation sector to grow. However, there wasalso the corresponding appreciation that while the sectoral grievances neededaddressing, these were issues that weren’t specific to Kingfisher. For example,it was noted that the low-cost airline IndiGo had returned profits, despiteoperating in a difficult environment, because it had a robust business model.If Kingfisher was to be ‘accommodated’ for its quirky management style, whyshouldn’t IndiGo be rewarded with lower interest rates as a prize forefficiency?

The manner in which the debate was conducted overthe past week is very revealing and has implications for the future of economicdecision-making.

First, it is clear that future bailouts of thelimping public sector Air India is going to be fiercely resisted on thestrength of the argument that there has to be a level playing field for allcompanies, including the public sector.

Secondly, it is clear that in the coming monthscosy bailout packages for profligate or inefficient private sector companiesthat have good political connections will be fiercely disputed in the politicalarena. Coupled with the 2-G scam and the public movement against cronycapitalism, the space for leveraging political clout in business has shrunk.Bankers will be wary of sticking their necks out and politicians will be loathto put in the proverbial good word to the government on behalf of thosecorporates that have made a virtue of adding to non-performing assets.

Finally,on a more reassuring note, there is a greater awareness today that the Indiancorporate sector is suffering from sustained anti-business policies of the governmentand the regulators. In the past, ‘socialist’ politicians preferred to use theirdiscretionary powers to favour individual businesses. The focus is now likelyto shift to creating a wholesome environment for sectors of the economy. Inother words, the nature of the business rather the ownership of the businesswill engage the attention of policy makers. Which is all for the general good.

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, November 18, 2010

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS - The West needs props to cling to its sense of entitlement

2011-11-11T05:56:00.001-08:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Meddlesome priests,especially those blessed with exaggerated self-righteousness, have always beenthe butt of jokes. In a society where the quest of the material has easilyoutstripped the spiritual void, the Church of England in particular hasstruggled to retain its relevance in an increasingly irreverent land. Once apillar of the Establishment, the Anglican Church has, like the monarchy and theConservative Party, suffered from the post-War remaking of England. Nominallyit has kept its toehold as the established national Church of England, with theQueen at the pinnacle, but its ability to epitomise the Christian consensus haseroded. Plagued by theologicalbickering, over issues that range from gay priests to women clergy, it hasyielded its Christian certitude to the Church of Rome and the newly-emergentevangelical churches. The slightly dotty, parish priest who used to be ascentral to local communities as the local squire and the Women’s Institute is almostfacing extinction in the 21^st century.

Last month, the Church ofEngland flickered back to life briefly, courtesy the Occupy the City movementthat arrived in Britain as a spin-off from the Occupy Wall Street movement inNew York. Originally conceived as an expression of revulsion against the unbridledgreed of fat cats in the financial world, the movement has so far left theproletariat unmoved. However, it did strike an emotional chord among those onthe fringes of ‘respectable’ society—those committed to ‘fair trade’, organicfood, justice for the Third World, anti-globalisation and environmentallysustainable living. Some saw in the Occupy Wall Street stir an answer to theTea Party movement but its self-image was never so overtly political.

The anti-greed protestsembraced three distinct types. There were the remnants of the hippie movementtempered by feminism—the type of protestors who made a lifestyle statement bycamping outside the US Air Force base in Greenham Common for nearly three yearsin the mid-1980s. Then there were the professional anti-globalisationprotestors that are drawn to every meeting of the G-20 leaders and World TradeOrganisation summits. And, finally, there were the professional Leftists,usually from fringe organisations that have made a virtue of their own irrelevance.In the 1980s, the satirical weekly Private Eye, dubbed them the ‘Sparts’, aftera slightly bizarre left-wing sect that bore the name of Rosa Luxemburg’s oldSparticist League. I am happy to see that the usage of the term has beenrevived.

The picketing of St Paul’sCathedral in London, arguably Anglican England’s most spectacular basilica, bythis rag-tag bunch should have ideally attracted modest attention. Protests ofthis sort are dime-a-dozen in democracies and the law enforcement agencies arewell equipped to get them to move on with a minimum of fuss and violence.Unfortunately, this is when the meddlesome priests stepped into the scene.

Unable to countenance the authorities clearingthe area to prevent the protesters being a public nuisance and posing a firehazard, Reverend Dr Giles Fraser, the Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, resignedfrom his post. He was so overwhelmed by the Christian piety of the protestorsthat he proclaimed “I could imagine Jesus being born in the camp.” He alsodeclared that it was fitting
that a tentedcommunity had sprung up around St Paul’s because the
Saint had been atentmaker in real life. In the index of woolly-headedness, Dr Fraser had fewequals.

Dr Fraser’s curious resignation and his depictionof the protestors as noble, pure souls whose voices had to be heard was thesignal for the most spectacular display of humbug since the Abdication of 1936.The Church of England went all weak in the knees and the Archbishop ofCanterbury declared that the “Church of England is a place where the unspokenanxieties of society can often find a voice, for good and ill.” In an articlein Financial Times, Dr Rowan Williams went on to endorse a “Robin Hood tax” of 0.05per cent on “share, bond and currency transactions and their derivatives, withthe resulting funds being designated for investment in the ‘real’ economy…” Thetax, which has the backing of the G-20 and the likes of George Soros, WarrenBuffett and Bill Gates, is expected to yield around $410 billion globally—maybeenough to bail out Greece and Italy.

On his part, Leader of the Opposition Ed Milibandchipped in with the discovery that there was “a gap between people’s values andthe way our country is run”—an observation that was endorsed, among others, bythe Army chief who spoke of a loss of the nation’s moral compass. At this rate,an endorsement of the Robin Hood tax by the Duchess of Cambridge or even WayneRooney wasn’t out of place.

The Church, as the representative of Christ onearth, is naturally expected to attend to the “anxieties” and concerns of itsflock, presuming, of course, that those who camped in the City were loyal anddevoted members of the congregation. If the congregation is agitated by thefiscal crisis that all responsible economists say is upon the West, ittherefore follows that the Church must intervene, just as it did during thewars of empire and subsequently.

However, in the process, the importantdistinction between rendering unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what isCaesar’s stands in danger of being blurred. The Church can ideally wish lesshardship on its flock but to actually endorse a fresh tax is about as relevantas advocating a tithe on the commercial corporations. For all its insights intothe spiritual life of the faithful, the clergy’s insights into economicremedies for the nation seem suspect. What is beyond the ken of Swami Ramdev inIndia can hardly be said to be among the Archbishop of Canterbury’s corecompetence.

Actually, the Church’s meddlesome ways mask itsdesperate desire to gloss over some hard choices that need to be exercised. Theadvanced capitalist societies in the West have hitherto enjoyed standards ofliving that are out of proportion to the actual generation of wealth in thesesocieties. The welfare state which was built on the ruins of a war-damagedEurope could sustain itself for five decades because the West controlled thelevers of the world economy. This, unfortunately, is no longer the case. TheWest is increasingly looking patchy in its performance. Against the innovativeefficiencies of a Germany, a Switzerland and even California and Texas, is thelaggardness of Italy, Portugal, Greece and even France—economies that arespending much more than they earn and living beyond their means. Today’s crisisis Europe and, indeed, in the US has been triggered by the reluctance of thepeople to adjust to a lesser standard of living. Capitalism was OK as long asthe West was top dog but it has to be humanised once it is apparent that thecentre of gravity has shifted eastwards. This is what the European Union(Germany apart) is resisting and the sense of entitlement has been conferred amoral halo by the modern Church.

Therewas a time, some centuries ago, when the Church attended to people’s miseriesand played the role of a palliative. Today, Christ in Europe is increasinglybeing made to play the role of a saviour of a community that wants to cling onto untenable privileges. At the risk of repeating a discredited Marxistformulation, it seems a case of spreading ‘false consciousness.’ The messagefrom the East to the Western churches should be unambiguous: get real.

The Telegraph, November 11, 2011

Rahul Gandhi: PDC on a failing bank?

2011-11-06T01:43:00.000-07:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

If, as is being increasingly reported in the media, Sonia Gandhi is indeed planning to pass the baton of the Congress to her son and heir-designate Rahul Gandhi, the reason can be only one thing: Her health. Even this reasoning is based on conjecture since the state of the Congress president’s health remains as — or more — preciously guarded as India’s nuclear secrets, a strange phenomenon in one of the world’s most open societies.

Yet, Sonia’s health seems to be the most likely explanation for any such contemplated change of guard in the Congress. As a devoted mother, fiercely protective of her children and the family inheritance, Sonia would ideally have chosen a less worse time to throw the evergreen 41-year-old Rahul into the deep end, more so when his interminable ‘Discovery of India’ remains woefully patchy and confined to choreographed sleep-outs. There is no persuasive evidence that has emerged so far to suggest that seven years of political life has led to his mastering his family vocation. Rahul was born great; he has achieved greatness. Even for Congress loyalists, Rahul epitomises what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci cryptically observed as “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. They bank on him possessing the “magic wand” that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh admitted to not having.

Of course, there could be a more base explanation. For the past two years, the Congress, buoyed by winning 21 Lok Sabha seats in 2009 from Uttar Pradesh — where it was down to zero in 1999 — had made next year’s Assembly election the litmus test of Rahul’s ability to revitalise the Congress. The Congress general secretary’s endeavour to create a new breed of wholesome politicians who would rise from the ranks of the Youth Congress was one aspect of Rahul’s agenda. Its impact can only be felt in the long run.

Equally important was his commando raids to bolster local movements against the Mayawati Government — a project that has resulted in Digvijay Singh and Jairam Ramesh running amok. Digvijay’s minority wooing may not yield too many dividends because the Muslim vote seems to be firming up behind the Samajwadi Party, particularly after Akhilesh Yadav’s impressive rath yatra. However, Ramesh — ever the courtier with brains — is certain to do more damage to the future of India’s economic growth story with his over-populist Land Acquisition Bill than he is likely to add to Congress’ pro-farmer image. In caste-dominated UP, it will be some time before the intermediate and backward castes shed their long-standing antipathy to the Congress. Beni Prasad Verma, the only OBC leader of consequence attached to the Congress, is, for example, doing his own thing independent of Rahul Gandhi. His future movements would warrant close scrutiny.

Overall, reports from the ground in UP don’t seem terribly encouraging for the Congress. The party talks in terms of targeting 100 seats where it will throw in all the resources at its command but in its heart of heart it is aware that its best hope lies in displacing the BJP from the third position. The Anna Hazare movement has dented Congress’ support among the urban voters and upper castes and this is the reason it is now wooing the nimble-footed Ajit Singh in a frenzied manner. If the Congress’ indifferent run in UP persists, the party may become desperate enough to seek alliances with fringe Muslim sectarian parties in eastern UP.

The larger point is significant. If the Congress performance in UP turns out to be pathetic, there will have to be a fall guy. Digvijay Singh may nobly offer to be the sacrificial lamb. But will that settle the question? Congress activists will not join in the taunts hurled at Rahul’s ability to be the party’s secret weapon of the future -- a hope that, in another age, kept German morale alive from 1943 to the end of 1944 when everything pointed to impending collapse. They will defend Rahul robustly as Salman Khurshid did in 2007 when he suggested that the party had proved itself unworthy of Rahul. But in their minds there will be all sorts of questions. These questions won’t disappear if Rahul has already been kicked upstairs but it will allow Congress workers to claim that the big guy can’t be blamed for reverses in regional elections. The coronation of Rahul prior to the UP election forestalls the possibility of disturbances in the durbar in the short term.

Today there will be no challengers, a delay could invite problems.

The Congress is faced with a series of unenviable problems. The UPA Government increasingly resembles a Divided Progressive Alliance with top Ministers taking pot shots and pointing accusing fingers at a duplicitous PMO. The allies have their own mounting sets of grievances and Mamata Banerjee was the latest one to echo hers in belligerent language. These problems are more than ego hassles. They are occurring in the backdrop of a discernible failure of governance, mounting economic woes, eroding international confidence and an impression of drift.

The ‘DPA’ is clearly unravelling but yet no one — neither the Treasury benches nor the Opposition (barring LK Advani) seeks an election. The Congress believes that the worst is over and the Opposition BJP wants more time to put its own house in order. Rahul, to use Mahatma Gandhi’s immortal words, may well come to be the proverbial “post-dated cheque” on a crashing bank.

Sunday Pioneer, November 6, 2011

West's collapse a warning to India

2011-10-30T04:42:00.000-07:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

When the main news of the day happens to be the unnecessary
cancellation of a pop concert in the National Capital Region and
speculation over the likelihood of Anna Hazare reshuffling the
so-called Team Anna, you can be assured that India is still recovering
from its annual Diwali celebrations. The momentary respite from the
over-hyped and occasionally contrived celebration of politics is well
and truly welcome. Indians too need to re-focus on facets of life that
are truly meaningful and move away from the purposelessness of
mid-season politics.

The weariness, fortunately, is not confined to India alone. In Europe,
the seemingly endless bickering over the future of the Euro is on the
verge of completing its present season—the drama will doubtless
reappear after Christmas and the New Year. In the US, the comical
facet of the presidential primaries is on show courtesy an
advertisement of Republican challenger Herman Cain that shows an
aide—yes, wait for it—smoking a cigarette! I wonder which is worse for
the morally vulnerable: a flamboyant dictator being dragged out of the
gutter and then getting his brains blown out by his own golden pistol,
or some unknown guy smoking a cigarette. Is hate more acceptable to
the legions of the politically correct than a self-indulgent smoke?

It is probably an ethical question which defies a single answer.
However, you know that things aren’t as bad as they seem when society
becomes agitated thinking about the number of angels that can be
accommodated on a pinhead.

The allusion is to a puerile movement called Occupy Wall Street that
began with thousands of angst-ridden trumpets blowing in the US and
now seem to be on its final stages—hardly surprising because camping
out is not terribly comfortable as autumn gradually gives way to
winter. In many places, the OWS has fizzled out, in other places a
gentle nudge by the authorities has been sufficient to clear public
spaces, and in some of the remoter outposts of capitalism the
protestors are still being egged on by subversive clergymen.

Actually, the London version of the OWS has proved to be the most
interesting since it has produced an exotic khichdi of economics and
Christian theology. Reverend Dr Giles Fraser, the Canon Chancellor of
St Paul’s Cathedral, resigned from his post because he could not
countenance the idea of using either force or the law to evict those
who earnestly believed that pitching their tents and blocking access
to the Cathedral would—as the banners demanded—“End Capitalism.”

Rev Fraser is a sanctimonious simpleton. He was so overwhelmed by the
Christian piety of the protestors that he proclaimed “I could imagine
Jesus being born in the camp.” He also declared that it was fitting
that a tented community had sprung up around St Paul’s because the
Saint had been a tentmaker in real life—a factoid that should answer
why the BJP feels it has St Paul’s on its side.

Most practicing Christians obviously disagree with Rev Fraser’s
misplaced benevolence. The OWS hasn’t captured the public imagination
in the same way as the anti-Vietnam protests did. In fact, even
compared to the Tea Party movement against high taxes and federal
intrusiveness, its impact appears to be minimal. The pious
proclamation of a Warren Buffet that he should be taxed more hasn’t
endeared him to those ordinary people who believe that bloated
governments, far from resolving problems, actually prevent individuals
and communities to empower themselves financially.

There is obvious concern in the West that the logic of capitalism is
displacing them from the top of the pile and shifting the centre of
gravity eastwards—to China, to India and even to Australia. But this
unease hasn’t been sufficient to create a revolutionary movement
against advanced, as Karl Marx hoped it would. The West has just too
much to lose by allowing an economic system that it helped nurture to
go out of control. This is why the focus in Europe is over how to
prevent countries with responsible government such as Germany from
being dragged down by the profligate spending habits of countries such
as Greece.

The tremors in the world’s financial and capital markets have precious
little to do with yearning for the true Christian spirit or nostalgia
for 1950s style socialism. There is an awkward truth that is
manifesting itself all over the world: societies can’t go on living
beyond their means indefinitely. Sooner or later the non-viability of
high debts begins to be felt.

The West is concerned that its economies are no longer generating the
wealth that is needed to sustain a standard of living it become
accustomed to. Some are trying to meet the challenge by upgrading
skills and by attracting capital with the assurance of rule-based
societies. Yet others are unwilling to tolerate even temporary
hardship and see their salvation in silly protests such as OWS that
simultaneously help people salvage their conscience.

India doesn’t have too many moral dilemmas. This Diwali saw a downturn
in consumer offtakes but didn’t dampen the overall celebrations.
That’s because the people have a long history of adjusting to
temporary hardships. They know that corruption isn’t a moral issue but
a practical one involving fiscal adjustment. The Government, however,
thinks differently. This is why it should open its eyes to what is
going on in the world before undertaking pre-election splurges with
yours and my money.

SUNDAY PIONEER, OCTOBER 30, 20111

An Airtight Compartment: India's historians prefer committee versions of history

2011-10-28T00:25:00.000-07:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Since clever one-liners are as much a part of a journalist’s stock-in-trade as hard information or penetrating insights, I have often described myself as a lapsed historian. This self-description has served two functions: first, to explain why the past invariably intrudes into my writings on the present and, second, to allay fears of being a crashing bore.

This may seem needlessly harsh on India’s historians — a community that is forever involved in public brawls over one thing or another. In most ‘free’ countries, by which I don’t include China and countries with a Ba’athist-inspired dispensation, historians are among the most exciting people to have as intellectual decorations. They tend to be witty, irreverent, erudite and, most important, quirky. A historian who can discuss corruption in India with a passing reference to Gibbon’s account of the ‘sale’ of the Roman Empire to Didius Julianus by the venal Praetorian Guard is the sort of person we’d love to fly with. In the old days, a savage book review by A.J.P. Taylor was an occasion that we all looked forward to.

Historians were very clever but they could also be rather nasty people, especially when bitching about fellow historians. I recall the casually devastating observation of the Cambridge historian, Eric Stokes, that someone must have thrust a copy of a Rajani Palme Dutt pamphlet in the hands of an ageing Sarvepalli Gopal. It was a not-very-subtle way of suggesting that Gopal’s biography of Jawaharlal Nehru was riddled with dogmatic certitudes and, perhaps, was characteristic of the university he inhabited in old age.

Even ideological convergence didn’t automatically promote conviviality. I particularly recall Eric Hobsbawm’s carping observation in Interesting Times that E.P. Thompson was “a man showered by the fairies at birth with all possible gifts but two. Nature had omitted to provide him with an in-built sub-editor and an in-built compass”.

Maybe it was Hobsbawm getting his own back on Thompson for his disavowal of the Communist Party after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the so-called ‘revolt of the intellectuals’. However, I detected a conflict of temperaments. Despite a commonality brought about by a shared vision of proletarian power, these were two different individuals. Hobsbawm was an austere, refined patrician, strangely reminiscent of the pre-war European man of letters. Thompson, by contrast, was emotional and excitable and very English. Hearing him declaim passionately about subjects as diverse as nuclear disarmament and the Luddites, he often reminded me of a radical vicar, always at odds with Lambeth Palace but yet accepted in the Church of England.

The sheer versatility of the tribe, the ability to garnish academic rigour with individual eccentricities, have added value to the public standing of historians. Because the study of history is, by its very nature, riddled with tentativeness, historians have helped embellish the past with insights of human behaviour. Just as no two histories can be the same, no two historians should be or even aspire to be the same. There is nothing more unprepossessing than histories written by a committee or disputes involving the past being resolved through a show of hands.

Ironically, both these are routine occurrences in India. “Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec,” was the only advice that Winston Churchill, then prime minister, proffered his education secretary, Rab Butler, during the passage of the Education Act of 1944. How to tell the story of Empire was for teachers, historians and society to ponder: it was not something any government could speak for the nation. Yet, in India, history writing is a preoccupation of the State and the successful historians are the ones best able to translate political priorities into a committee version of history.

Where the stories of the past are, ideally, replete with question marks of uncertainty and tentativeness, the history-speak of India is over-stuffed with certitudes, the ‘correct’ views. Sometime in the early 1990s, the Indian History Congress decided to settle the question of whether a temple predated the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya through a show of hands. The display of professional democracy, unfortunately, told us more of the historians of India than it did about a dispute that divided India emotionally.

All this circumnavigation is in aid of an anecdote. Some three months ago, I was hugely excited after reading Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson, a book I hoped many more people would buy and read. It so happened that I bumped into one of the pillars of India’s historical establishment at a dinner around that time. I couldn’t resist telling her about the book and about Ferguson’s earlier works. “That’s not history,” was the icy retort.

Ferguson, by the way, is a professor of history at Harvard and was also a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Yes, he does a lot of television but his scholarly credentials are very kosher.

Since it is rude to press a disagreement at a social occasion — I’ve had whisky thrown at my face for informing an earnest sociologist in 1996 that Uma Bharti was a personal friend — I left it that. However, interactions with students of history at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University resulted in two surprising discoveries. First, that Niall Ferguson was indeed shunned by the academic pundits, maybe because his books, like Heineken, reached parts that others don’t, and second, that it was just not done to blend the scholarly with the popular, a euphemism for the non-professional historian.

The envy part of the story is understandable but the rejection of the non-tenured historian is baffling. Earlier this year saw the publication of Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng, a Briton of Ghanian origin who, apart from having a doctorate in history from Cambridge, is also the Conservative member of parliament for Spelthorne in Surrey. Kwarteng also wears an old Etonian tie which makes him triply suspect.

Kwarteng’s thesis is compelling: “The British Empire was nothing more than a series of improvisations conducted by men who shared a common culture, but who had very different ideas about government and administration. There is very little unifying ideology in this imperial story. It was grand and colourful but it was highly opportunistic, dominated by individualism and pragmatism.”

Expressed in another way, Kwarteng has argued that there was no grand imperial project that led to half the world being coloured in red by 1918: the Empire resulted from a series of local decisions, some well-considered and others, such as the annexation of Burma, a consequence of impulsiveness.

In an environment of post- colonial angst, Kwarteng is certain to be regarded as another ‘revisionist’. This may not be an incorrect description if it is assumed that academic orthodoxies, like fashion, keep changing ever so often. But the more relevant point is that a revisionist challenge can only be mounted if the history establishment opens its doors and windows to let the outside air in. If historians choose to live in airtight compartments, they can wallow in their own correctness but with the associated risk of obsolescence and fossilization.

Centres of learning often have their origins in religious seminaries, what in India are called the ‘mutts’. A feature of this tradition is that knowledge is pursued for its own sake. But the self-enforced monastic insularity can also trigger hideous intellectual distortions.

At the heart of the kerfuffle over the inclusion and exclusion in the Delhi University history syllabus of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on multiple Ramayanas is the closed shop. India’s historians believe that to stroll outside their cloistered habitat involves the danger of falling off the edge of the world. No wonder they count for so little in the arguments over India.

Telegraph, October 28, 2011

Much ado about 'Three Hundred Ramayanas'

2011-10-22T23:33:00.000-07:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

There is nothing like a goodculture war to excite the intellectual imagination. The decade of the 1990s wasdominated by the slugfest over the shrine in Ayodhya. It became obligatory foranyone with any pretension of being a ‘public intellectual’ to take sides onthis controversy. Neutrality or, worse still, supreme indifference wasautomatically construed by the dominant intellectual group as tantamount to anendorsement of ‘fascism’.

Then came the kerfuffle overM.F. Hussain’s contentious depiction of Ram and Sita that had the defenders ofthe faith screaming ‘blasphemy’ and reaching for their trishuls. Here too,India’s cultural community were encouraged to link arms against the vandals.

Now comes a wonderfullycontrived dispute over a Delhi University decision to omit an essay on theRamayana from the prescribed readings for its undergraduate History course. Thedecision has particularly agitated those with a penchant for progressivepamphleteering: it has been denounced as “academic fascism”—a conceptuallyintriguing proposition.

The essay “Three HundredRamayanas” by Indologist A.K. Ramanujan was never intended as an iconoclasticexercise. It spelt out the interesting variations in the Ramayana story in Indiaand South-east Asia with a great measure of quiet reverence. In fact, Ramanujanconcluded his essay with a tale of the mental and social elevation of a villagedolt after he actually listened to a recitation of the Ramayana.

Yet, because somephilistines had objected to the essay being in the list of prescribed texts,the culture war was transformed into a political war. The ‘progressive’adherents of ‘scientific history’ felt obliged to celebrate the importance ofmythology and the folk tradition—which they otherwise debunk—while the otherside despaired of a text that injected potentially “blasphemous” and contrarianideas in impressionable minds.

That such a puerile debatehas come to dominate a discussion over the curriculum in a university may seemodd but not surprising. Over the years, the history wars have become a featureof the larger battle over national identity. A feature of this clash has beenthe tendency of the opposing sides to repose faith in something called the‘correct’ view of India’s past. With their dominance in the history faculties,the ‘progressives’ have tried to fashion the curriculum in a particular way,using prescribed texts as the instrument of their ideological hegemony. Insteadof being an open-ended inquiry into the past, the practice of history in Indiahas been reduced to regurgitating a set of certitudes.

A Delhi University history graduatewho won a scholarship to Oxford recently recounted the absurdities of theprocess. The medieval history readings, he told me, were replete withdenunciations of the so-called ‘revivalist’ historians of an earlier era. Whatstruck him as surprising was that none of these apparently flawed historiesfeatured in the prescribed reading lists—not Sir Jadunath Sarkar, not R.C.Majumdar, and not A.L. Shrivastava. Inother words, rather than encouraging students to savour divergent ways oflooking at the past, history became a set of acceptable truths and unacceptableuntruths—hardly an approach befitting an open and argumentative society.

The problem, it would seem,arises from the dubious practice of listing prescribed texts. In the past, ahistory curriculum would identify broad themes for study, leaving teachers theindependence to recommend readings for further study. A student would be testedin the examination for his ability to construct lucid arguments that wouldreveal their understanding of the subject. With ‘prescribed’ texts becoming thenorm, the student’s scope for demonstrating independence of mind and evenoriginality of thought are naturally at a discount. They are expected to imbibeand parrot prevailing orthodoxies—a process that can hardly be said to beconducive for the training of the mind.

What we arewitnessing in India is not an assault on free speech but something far worse,an attack on the spirit of free inquiry. There is something fundamentallyskewed with a system of higher education that posits two stark alternatives: acompulsory reading (and, by implication, acceptance) of a scholarly work or notreading it at all. The space for critical discernment is fast disappearing andwe are turning into a nation of slogan shouters.

Sunday Times of India, October 23, 2011

Economy on the cusp of crisis

2011-10-22T23:19:00.000-07:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

Last Friday, for a shortwhile and until the Reserve Bank of India intervened in the forex markets, theUS Dollar breached the Rs 50 mark. The steady decline of the Indian Rupee, evenat a time both the American and European economies are deeply unsettled, may begreeted with whoops of delight in circles that specialise in body shopping fromIndia. However, for those who have a stake in the well-being and prosperity ofthe Indian consumer, the decline of the Rupee is bad news. It means higher fuelprices, higher prices of imports (which, sooner rather than later, will alsocome to include foodstuff) and high inflation. Corporates who wisely availed ofthe low interest rates on Dollar borrowing may find that their budgetaryestimates are likely to go awry by the free fall of the Rupee.

There is a clear writing onthe wall that suggests the Indian economy is in for a choppy journey in thecoming months. The rating agencies have already downgraded the shares of StateBank of India because of a problem with equity infusion. But anyone who isattentive to the market will know that the warning is not directed at theminority shareholders of SBI but aimed at the majority stakeholder—theGovernment of India.

Prime MinisterManmohan Singh may well think that life is good this Diwali—and this assessmentis certainly true if you believe India is made up of babus and others withinflation-protected incomes. However, there are strong reasons to believe thatlike the US, India is on the cusp of a ratings downgrade which will damage itmore seriously than it did the US.

“We believeIndia’s policy mix is worsening with a much tighter-than-expected monetarypolicy and looser-than expected fiscal policy”, wrote the Asia economicsanalysts of Goldman Sachs in the October 21 bulletin. In less abstruse languageit means that those entrusted with managing India’s economy are making acomplete dog’s breakfast of their responsibilities.

The signs of themess are staring people in the face. The GDP growth has already been estimatedto fall below 8 per cent, and the question that should be in everyone’s mind iswhether the growth rate remains above 7 per cent for both this and the comingyear. Secondly, with both food inflation crossing 10 per cent and generalinflation also nearing double figures, it is clear that the RBI’s aggressivehiking of interest rates—yet another one is due as the RBI’s Diwali gift to abeleaguered India—will only serve to erode the competitiveness of Indianindustry more. Thirdly, the Government’s monetary profligacy is calculated toraise the fiscal deficit from the budgeted 4.6 per cent of GDP to around 5.8 perof GDP. The mismatch between the Budget proclamation and the grim realitysuggests that the Government had absolutely no intention of adhering toresponsible spending. Like the socialists in Greece, this Government toobelieves that in the event of a crisis someone is always there to take care ofthe sick patient.

It should beclear to anyone with an elementary awareness of household finances thatindividuals and institutions should not, by and large, spend more than theyearn. They should also know that borrowing from the market to meet currentexpenditure means incurring outstanding debts that have to be serviced. Ofcourse, these are basic rules governing individuals with common sense—theyaren’t the rules for economists who run and advise governments.

When normalpeople run short of money, either because they earned less or spent more, theydo the next best thing—they tighten their belts and reduce unnecessaryexpenditure. Confronted by a problem of a mismatch between revenue andexpenditure, what does the UPA Government do? Blessed with superior knowledgeof economics it proceeds to increase expenditure more and borrowing more fromthe market.

It isastonishing, for example, that the Government, aided and abetted by a slavishPlanning Commission, is unfazed by the fact that the ambitious Food SecurityBill will raise the outlay on food subsidies by 66 per cent from Rs 60,000crore to Rs 1,00,000 crore. Creating an ambitiously elaborate welfare net onthe lines of Europe may be warranted if the Government revenues arecontinuously swelling on account of increased economic activity. But, as theGoldman Sachs report warns, tax revenues are expected to grow by 14.8 per centthis fiscal year as opposed to the 18.5 per cent growth projected in theBudget. At the same time, expenditure growth is expected to grow by 9 per cent,compared with 3.4 per cent stated in the Budget.

The message isclear: India is living well beyond its means and the burden of this profligacyis going to haunt the country for the foreseeable future. What compoundsmatters further is that measures such as the Land Acquisition Bill (stipulatingpayment of four times the market value to rural land purchases) will cripplethe growth of manufacturing and benefit China. No wonder corporate houses areinvesting enthusiastically overseas than in India.

That India issleep-walking into an economic crisis is evident to most people who have astake in India’s future. But it is something that appears to leave thepolitical class unmoved. The message that “It’s the economy, stupid” has beenlost on a country that is wallowing in delusion.

Sunday Pioneer, October 23, 2011

Protests fail, politics win

2011-10-20T23:01:00.000-07:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

The only talking point theCongress had after its ignominious performance in the by-election to the Hissarparliamentary by-election was that the last minute campaign by Anna Hazare’sfollowers contributed little to the final outcome. For all its national impactduring Hazare’s fast last August, the India against Corruption’s ability toinfluence electoral politics still remains untested—the movement curiouslydesisted from directly intervening in the by-election to the KharakvaslaAssembly constituency in Maharashtra. Consequently, the only definiteconclusion that can be drawn from the Congress’ spate of by-election debaclesis that anti-incumbency has benefited the principal anti-Congress parties.

The ferocity ofanti-Congress feelings is something that should hearten the nationalopposition, particularly the BJP which sees itself as leading a futurenon-Congress dispensation. However, far from being encouraged by the trends,the BJP has given the impression of being exultant. So gung-ho is the mood in asection of the BJP that it is acting on the belief that the next generalelection has already been won and that the remaining fight is over who shouldoccupy the Prime Minister’s post.

This strikes me as a classiccase of irrational exuberance. If the political timetable remains unaltered,the next general election is due in May 2014, some 30 months away. In otherwords, there is still ample time for either the BJP to score self-goals andneutralise its present advantage or for the Congress to recover lost ground byproviding the country with purposeful governance. Using analogy borrowed fromthe United States, what we are witnessing at present is just a run-up to theprimaries, not even the primaries themselves.

Of course, the timetablecould well be redrawn in the event of an abrupt collapse of the UPA Government.L.K. Advani has been making noises to that effect and, last week, even Mayawatijoined in the public speculation over the longevity of a government that islurching directionless from crisis to crisis.

Unfortunately for theOpposition, the scenario of abrupt collapse appears to be a case of wishfulthinking. First, if the odds are heavily stacked against the ruling coalition,it is extremely unlikely that its MPs will be tempted to do anything rash. Secondly,and despite Sharad Pawar’s public criticism of the Government’s handling of the2-G scandal, there is no evidence that either the DMK or Mamata Banerjee’sTrinamool Congress (the two largest coalition partners) want to travel analternative route. The DMK would prefer to keep its toehold at the Centre afterthe drubbing in Tamil Nadu; and Mamata, while fiercely independent in allmatters concerning West Bengal, wouldn’t like to lose the considerablepatronage powers the Indian Railways offer. Finally, and this is true for allentities going through a bad patch, the Congress is permanently hopeful thattomorrow. “Just wait for the Uttarakhand and Punjab polls” is a line frequentlyheard in Congress circles.

Barring an accident, amid-term parliamentary election in 2012 looks extremely unlikely—and this isregardless of the outcome in next year’s state elections. By stressing thelikelihood of an abrupt collapse some BJP leaders are ending up lookingdesperate. The hunger for power is regarded as a positive attribute forpoliticians in the so-called advanced democracies. In India, however, thanks tothe distorting effects of Gandhian thought, the craving to be in government isperceived as something perverse and immoral. The anti-politician mood generatedby Anna Hazare’s movement, particularly in the youth, has only served toheighten the revulsion for ‘power-hungry’ netas.

Advani failed to read thisparticular graffiti on the wall before embarking on his Jan Chetna yatra—areason why the venture lacked punch. However, more important, by putting hisprime ministerial ambition on public view, he made the one mistake anopposition party must avoid: shifting the gaze from the government to itself. Unlessthere is a profound ideological point that is being made—as happened duringAdvani’s Ram rath yatra in 1990—it is prudent for any ‘centrist’ opposition tokeep the spotlight firmly on the government.

This may seem heretical tothose in the saffron ranks intent on creating a Hindu version of the Tea Partymovement by courting the outrageous. However, the sheer complexities of Indiaand the uneven presence of the national parties throughout India negate thevirtues of a conviction politician. Coalition politics is not necessarily a figleaf for venality—as has happened in the UPA—but it is a trigger for thepolitics of aggregation. The major shifts in policy orientation by governmentshave rarely happened as a result on a resounding electoral endorsement. Thepeople have been inclined to elect a government and then leave them alone toexercise the wisest policy option. Electoral politics, as opposed to theprocess of governance, has rarely been ideological.

At one time it seemed thatthe shortcoming of the BJP (and NDA) could lie in not projecting a leader tocounter Rahul Gandhi. Today, as the heir apparent too struggles to overcome theanti-incumbency against the Congress, the inability or unwillingness to makethe next election a presidential contest well turn out to be a significantadvantage. The lesson from Hissar is that the traditional mould of Indianpolitics is broadly intact, despite Anna Hazare and a shrill electronic media. Forthe opposition, the real challenge is to keep its nerve for the next 30 months.

Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, October 21, 2011

Age of the socialist elite

2011-10-20T22:52:00.000-07:00

Book Review

Of A Certain Age: Twenty Life Sketches by Gopalkrishna Gandhi (Penguin/Viking, 234 pages, Rs499)

As a grandson of MahatmaGandhi and C. Rajagopalachari, Gopal Gandhi could well have joined the ranks ofthose Indians who are famous for being famous. Pedigree, however, is the leastof his accomplishments. A distinguished public servant, diplomat and man ofletters, he brought to the various posts he held a great measure of old worldcharm, civility and erudition—commodities in woeful short supply in a countrythat measures achievement by the individual’s ability to be sharp-elbowed.

A professional life asinteresting as Gandhi’s merits a detailed narration—and I hope he takes thehint and starts work on his memoirs. For the moment, however, he has beencontent with a short book of pen portraits of 20 individuals he got to knowwell, both socially and professionally. Given his way with words, it is acompelling and easy read—highly recommended for a lazy Sunday or atrans-continental flight.

The life sketches wereinitially written for newspapers and, consequently, suffer from an excess ofbrevity. Just when the subject starts to enthral, the word limit forces a prematureconclusion leaving umpteen question marks in the mind of the reader. This isunfortunate because many of the fascinating lives encountered in the book arecompletely unknown to a generation that was born after the 1970s.

As a schoolboy in Calcutta,I grew up reading M.Krishnan’s fortnightly ‘Country Notebook’ in the pages ofthe Sunday Statesman. Subsequently,one of my earliest responsibilities as a journalist was to proof-read Krishnanbefore the galleys were sent to the press. Yet, how many people not ‘of a certain age’ will be able to grasp thecontribution of that unassuming nature lover in just 1,200 words or so? Withoutminimising the sheer pleasure this book has given me, Gandhi would have donewell to flesh out his sketches for the benefit of an uninitiated generation.

Of course, there are twodistinct ways to approach the book. It is possible to read the 20 pottedassessments in isolation—a sort of great-men-I-have-known exercise the author charminglydescribes as “that inchoate bonding which, like a slow log fire in a hillstation, warms those who are of a certain age.”

More rewarding, however, isto take the cue from the author and view the life sketches as a backdrop of anage—what Gandhi calls the ‘Gandhi-Nehru age’. I disagree profoundly, but onlyon a chronological detail. Apart from Mahatma Gandhi, Harilal Gandhi, AbdulGhaffar Khan and, to a lesser extent, Jayaprakash Narayan and Acharya J.B.Kriplani who straddled the ages, the other 15 defined another era: theNehru-Gandhi age. Except that this Gandhi was Indira Gandhi.

Gandhi’s collection oftruncated biographies is also a wonderful commentary on the conviviality thatbound the politico-bureaucratic and cultural elite from Independence till thedawn of coalition politics in 1989. Of course, Nehru was the symbol of thisassociation of shared assumptions but despite the rough edges of herconfrontational style, even Indira chipped in with her contribution.

The most striking feature ofthis consensus was an almost blind worship of a seemingly progressive stateand, by implication, progressive politics which separated the ‘enlightened’from the cretin. What bound the refined bhadralok sensibilities of a Jyoti Basuand Hiren Mukherjee (both cardholding Communists) with the Fabianism of K.R.Narayanan and the public service Brahminism of R.Venkatraman and J.N. Dixit wasthe common reverence for an activist state. This faith in an enlighteneddespotism, legitimised through the ballot box, was based on noble intentionsand a shared disdain of vulgarian capitalism, particularly of the Yankeevariety. This is where aesthetes such as Pupul Jayakar and KamaladeviChattopadhyay stepped in with their devotion to indigenous crafts andhandlooms. They ensured that India’s socialist elite weren’t infected by thegrim and grey realism of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

But, at the same time,‘progressive’ also meant being a committed friend of the Soviet Union which allthese worthies were. It meant that when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, apart of what they had lived for was lost. President Narayanan wasn’t beingchurlish when he gracefully questioned the unipolar world to a visitingPresident Clinton: he was echoing his own anguish.

What Gandhi’s book missesout is that this consensus produced its dissenters. The awkward elementsweren’t packed off to a Gulag, but they were ruthlessly ostracised from anEstablishment that drew its sustenance from the conviviality of thelike-minded. Kriplani, for example, was barely tolerated by the ‘progressives’and they barely protested when JP was dubbed a fascist.

The omission is strikingbecause one of the most prominent heretics of that age happened to be Rajaji,his maternal grandfather. I would have loved to have read Gandhi’s take on theman who questioned the fundamentals of Nehruvian existence—and was vindicatedby history.

I would have also loved toknow why Gandhi’s roll of honour didn’t include anyone in business or involvedin the generation of wealth. It might explain why this charming collectionoften reads like an elegy to an India that, hopefully, is history.

Business Standard, October 21, 2011

Who’s bigger? Message or Messenger?

2011-10-15T21:54:00.000-07:00

By Swapan Dasgupta

If the solitary purpose of the Jan Chetna Yatra being undertaken by LK Advani was to demonstrate that the India of 2011 is markedly different from the India of 1990, it could be described as an unqualified success. Whereas in 1990 the Somnath to Ayodhya yatra was cut off in full flow at Samastipur on the orders of the Bihar Chief Minister, Advani’s fifth yatra had the satisfaction of being flagged off from Bihar by a friendlier Bihar CM.

In an ideal world, major political undertakings — irrespective of the loftiness of the cause — should not be pursued casually. For the BJP, there were other, less exacting ways of demonstrating that Nitish Kumar has been extricated from the clutches of the evil Lalu Prasad, and that 21 years is a long time in politics.

Advani must have kept in mind the experience of the Rashtra Suraksha Yatra of 2006 which was a casualty of mass indifference. The yatra had been suggested as an angry response to the blasts in Dasashwamedh Ghat in Varanasi, an issue that agitated the public mind in 2006 just as corruption does today. Yet, the yatra was a monumental flop not least because it lacked focus. Its objectives were five-fold: to safeguard national security; to defend national unity; to rescue governance from corruption and criminalisation; to save parliamentary democracy; and to protect the aam aadmi, garib and kisans.

So generous was the embrace of the yatra that an adventurous soul may well have smuggled in the demand for a Bharat Ratna to Sachin Tendulkar. No one would have noticed it, and least of all party functionaries who approached the yatra with the same sense of foreboding as the soldier who rode in the charge of the Light Brigade. But at least, it would have resonated with the “youth”—a slippery commodity that refuses to be re-inducted into a party it deserted sometime between the capitulation in Kandahar and the images of Bangaru Laxman extending his hand towards a wad of currency notes.

On this anti-corruption yatra too, the organisers have tried to inject a youth quotient by recording a theme song that had the party leadership wanting to emulate Herman Goering and reach for their guns at the mention of the word ‘culture’. Even Advani was compelled to concede during his gush-gush interview with NDTV’s Barkha Dutt that the song was best kept away from the ears of rural India — an indication that the messaging was wrong yet again.

The BJP, it would seem, has not taken sufficient care with the larger messaging of the ongoing Jan Chetna yatra. There is no point complaining that the media has been wilfully mischievous and has highlighted the footnotes rather than the central theme. During the 1990 yatra that redefined the ideological agenda for the next 15 years, the media also tried its utmost to focus on trivia.

Those with memories may recall how the offer of a bowl of blood to Advani made news for a day or two. Others may recall the suggestion of erudite Left-wing columnists that Advani’s focus on Ayodhya, rather than Mathura and Kashi stemmed from caste prejudice: Ram was Kshatriya, whereas Krishna was a Yadav and Shiv was possibly a tribal.

None of these sneering asides made the slightest difference to the central thrust of that yatra against ‘pseudo-secularism’. The question therefore arises: why has the anti-corruption theme of this yatra been subsumed by trivial issues such as the bus getting stuck under a bridge and cash incentives paid to the media in Satna? Most important, why has the central question of the yatra been transformed into the likelihood of Advani becoming the NDA candidate for Prime Minister in 2014?

The answer lies in the undeniable fact that the yatra resulted from a unilateral initiative by Advani. It is no secret that there were many reservations over the yatra within the BJP and its larger ideological family. The party feared that the yatra would highlight the unresolved issue of leadership for 2012 and point to Advani’s determination to have another throw of the dice.

None of these fears appear to be unfounded. During his travels, Advani connects with a large number of people but the people who observe the yatra or attend the public meetings associated with it are still a small drop in the ocean of humanity in India. Most Indians derive their perception of the political programme from the media, and the message from the media is unequivocal: this is Advani’s comeback yatra, calculated to force a sceptical BJP into acknowledging his primacy. Worse still, Advani appears to have done very little to put an end to the speculation. His interviews are largely focussed on his career as a yatri and he has kept alive the speculation by refusing to rule himself out as a candidate for the top job. The impression therefore persists that the yatra is a facet of a vicious leadership battle in the BJP, not least because the focus is on Advani and not on the BJP as a brand. The public reaction, consequently, is one of amusement, if not wariness.

There was a time when the BJP earned a reputation as the master of spin and a party that is able to dictate its agenda to the media. Alas, the party has lost its sure-footedness. Its messaging for this yatra has been self-defeating.

Sunday Pioneer, October 16, 2011