To pamper NAC, tax the people

By Swapan Dasgupta

There is a curious ritual that is faithfully enacted each Budget day. The Finance Minister makes a rambling speech, concluding with a verse from the Greats, which leaves most MPs (and, for that matter, TV audiences) completely weary. However, a ripple of excitement is felt in the Treasury benches the moment the FM announces that the allotment for a welfare scheme, invariably named after one or the other member of the Nehru-Gandhi family, has been increased by a few hundred crores. The message is received by an enthusiastic thumping of desks and much happiness.

There is little doubt that later this month, when Pranab Mukherjee presents his Budget, the scene is certain to be replayed. The worry beads won’t be out when it is realised that the GDP figures for the past four quarters show a sharp and worrying dip, that manufacturing is growing at less than one per cent and that the fiscal deficit, projected by last year’s Budget to be some 4.6 per cent of the GDP, is set to touch six per cent. But come the announcement of some grandiose mega-scheme, the MPs (cutting across party lines) will be joyous.

It is politically incorrect to contest the unstated consensus that each Budget should see more and more money being pumped into welfare schemes. Since Sonia Gandhi institutionalised the participation of unelected representatives of NGOs into the decision-making process, the belief that India’s first priority is to craft a socialist-style welfare state has taken deep roots. It has become the new common sense to insist that the burgeoning revenues from economic activity must be channelled into a new regime of doles and subsidies. At every opportunity, the brigade of articulate, middle-class do-gooders guilt trip successive FMs into apportioning more and more money into more and more schemes designed by the poverty brokers.

This year, when India is witnessing a discernible economic slowdown, economic activity is being hit by exorbitant interest rates caused by an inflation that itself was the result of the government’s fiscal profligacy, and inflation has made a dent in the middle class standards of living, there is a new demand that is echoing through the corridors of power: tax more. The tax rates in India, it is being argued, is too low and is needlessly generous to the fat cats who must be squeezed till the pips squeak. In the 1950s, the socialists in the Congress and their Communist friends used to rail against the monopolists; today, they declaim at the obscenity of Indians who enrich themselves in India but make fresh investments overseas.

As is to be expected, the new demand reflects the emerging anti-business attitudes of the liberal elites on both sides of the Atlantic. President Barak Obama has made class conflict the basis of his re-election plank against Republicans who seem too preoccupied with faith and morality. In Britain, the coalition government is having a tough time contesting the emerging wisdom high earners must be taxed over and above the 50 per cent rate of income tax. In France, the socialist challenger to President Sarkozy wants a 75 per cent tax on millionaires.

This growing anti-business and anti-entrepreneurial mood isn’t visible in China, Singapore, Indonesia and other Asian countries that have witnessed rapid growth. However, since the West dictates intellectual fashions of the Indian elite and supplies a translated version of the ‘eat the rich’ dogma, the assumptions of defensive societies have become the mantra in some circles of India. It is so reminiscent of the ease with which the systematic suppression of the private sector under Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi was backed by volumes of economists’ wisdom.

This time too there is the backing of the same tribe of quack doctors for raising all taxes. The logic is simple: if the economy as a whole is on a downturn, squeeze those who have nurtured growth since 1991.

This self-destructive bloody-mindedness that draws sustenance from a culture of envy is the inevitable result of not wanting to address the root of the problem: the quality of the ever-growing government expenditure. When, some five years ago, I had described the then fledgling Employment Guarantee Scheme as the Corruption Guarantee Scheme, I was dubbed a despicable, right-wing cretin. Today, as was evident during the UP election, political parties now compete with each other to allege the embezzlement of state funds.  

As The Pioneer reported last Thursday, the Rs 1,00,452 crore spent on the MNREG programme in the past six years has yielded diminishing returns. The days of work provided for households, far from reaching the stipulated 100 days, actually fell from 54 in 2009-10 to 47 in 2010-11 and 32 in the nine months of 2011. Even economists who are naturally inclined to endorse mega schemes have begun to issue warning signals. In an article to Hindustan Times, Abhijit Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan and others wrote: “how these progressive policies have actually worked in practice has left this claim (of being a pro-poor government) in tatters.”

The time may perhaps have come to begin questioning the quantum and quality of public expenditure on the ego schemes of Sonia Gandhi. During the UP campaign, both Rahul and Priyanka boasted of how much money “we” gave to UP. It’s not they who gave the money, it was taxpayers both rich and poor who have paid for political profligacy. 


Sunday Pioneer, March 4, 2012

Inhumanity in Norway

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