Archive for the ‘political economy’ Category

28 Oct

The American Nightmare

Posted by vramani in elections, government, political economy. Tagged: , , .

This presidential hopeful called Trump

Into politics has made a big jump

His speeches loquacious

Are truly audacious

And may lead to an American slump

The American Dream has seduced millions across the world, ever since the docking of the Mayflower in Provincetown Harbor in 1620 and the establishment of the first settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts. In recent years, the dream started souring with the 2008 meltdown and a gridlocked Congress which could never agree on legislation. The aftermath of 9/11 also saw the growth of a xenophobic distrust of certain categories of human beings, typified by humiliating airport searches and surveillance of those who did not fit into the neat, comfortable definition of “us”. But never in their wildest dreams would most Americans have ever visualised that a rank pretender to the post of the President of America would not only secure the Republican Party nomination but also be in serious contention for the top job come the eighth of November. Like a master bridge player, Donald has Trumped his Republican opponents and virtually rewritten the rules of political debate. The American Dream is giving way to the American Nightmare, with likely precipitous consequences not only for that nation but for the rest of the world as well.

The bruising election campaign is symptomatic of the strains America has gone through in the first fifteen years of the twenty first century. The nearly two century old Monroe Doctrine has been tested in North America only twice, the first time when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. The second attack of 9/11 was the first assault on mainland America, with the emphasis moving from state to non-state actors. Since that fateful day, America has seen a gradual, creeping erosion of her preeminent political and economic status, which seemed to have been secured after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have ended in bloody stalemates and laid the foundations for even more bitter conflicts across the Middle East. Syrian refugees pour into Europe, straining the social fabric of the countries on that continent. The Arab Spring has turned into winter. The Islamic State is still to be comprehensively subdued. And terrorism has truly become a decentralised, cottage industry, when any person with a warped ideological mindset can lay his (and increasingly her) hands on weapons of mass destruction to wreak havoc on unsuspecting (but increasingly fearful) populations.

But it would be naive to believe that the rise and rise of Donald Trump is reflective of only recent trends in the popular mood. In her seminal work “The Authoritarian Dynamic”, Australian academic Karen Stenner has underlined the importance of the prevalence of an “authoritarian predisposition” among segments of a population that extends beyond animosity to just one group, ideology or evolving social value. This predisposition is latent in the individual when economic and social conditions seem stable but is activated when a normative threat is perceived. It then manifests itself in three forms of intolerance — racial (fuelled by ethnic or religious diversity), political (against dissent, as expressed by divergent views) and moral (opposed to deviance in sexuality-related or other issues pertaining to morality). The authoritarian individual’s threat perception is particularly activated by the lack of consensus in society (as reflected in widely varying views on political, social and economic issues) and a loss of faith in the ability of politicians and the prevailing political system and institutions to manage and minimise these differences. This “American authoritarian prototype” (white-male-Protestant-heterosexual) constitutes the core of Trump supporters and its genesis predates Trump’s entry into the political arena.

Since the end of the Second World War, America has been a participant in theatres of armed conflict in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. The less than successful interventions in the new millennium in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East have punctured the myth of American armed invincibility. The Iraq invasion exposed the duplicity and lying of the American political elite as they capitalised on the fear psychosis created by 9/11 to promote narrow partisan interests. The “open society” was riven by suspicion and mistrust, even as accounts of use of extrajudicial measures and human rights violations against prisoners of war created disquiet amongst thinking, sensitive sections of the US public.

It took almost one hundred years after the end of a civil war waged to abolish black slavery to formalise the equal status of blacks in the USA through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While this legislation has been followed in letter (if not always in spirit), the American authoritarian prototype has never really reconciled to the loss of his erstwhile superior, separate status. The growing presence of blacks in the government and private sectors, including at increasingly higher levels, has raised the hackles of especially those of their white brethren who have lost out in the education and employment sweepstakes. The ascension to the top job in 2008 of a black man only served to reinforce this bitterness and brought to the top the latent anti-black prejudice, as witnessed by the cheap slander of the incumbent President’s personal life and consistent efforts to derail his policies.

The icing on the cake came with the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008. Virtually overnight, working class families were plunged in debt with severe erosion in asset values. The credibility of politicians hit a new low with the common perception that Wall Street got away with murder, thanks to a sympathetic government in Washington, DC. Add to this the fear of loss of jobs to Chinese, Indians and those from a host of emerging economies and you have a situation tailor-made for the appearance of a demagogue: Trump stepped into the breach, virtually hijacking the Republican nomination. Americans have now reached a position where voting for either candidate is seen as a choice between “the devil and the deep blue sea.” Neither is seen as having the ability to heal the growing fissures and discontent in American society, Trump because of his extreme positions on minorities, the economy and foreign policy, and Clinton, because of her perceived links to a tainted political and financial establishment.

Many commentators see the implications of this “authoritarian predisposition” extending well beyond just the current election. If Trump wins, it is extremely doubtful if he will be able to walk his talk, but the continued use of a divisive and demagogic approach to issues will cause irreparable damage to the social fabric of the world’s longest-existing democracy. If Clinton wins, but her Democratic Party fails to gain control of the two Houses of Congress, the US will go through another phase of paralysis in policy-making at a time when it faces global challenges on various fronts. Even if her Presidency is accompanied by Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress, civil strife could still be a grim reality, given the rising assertiveness of the black minority, the reality of joblessness for the less-educated white population and the evolution of unipolar challenges to America’s dominance on the world economic and political stage.

Just over a hundred years ago, on the eve of the First World War, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey presciently observed “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”. Europe is going through the throes of an existential crisis today with the very idea of a liberal democratic system, founded on pluralism, free speech and diversity, being questioned: the Brexit saga was just one of its manifestations. The virus is spreading across continental Europe, exacerbated by the Syrian refugee crisis. Its existence in the New World across the Atlantic shows the resilience of this strain, with the credulous belief that a “strong man” can solve all the problems confronting citizens today. Karen Stenner reaches a rather sobering conclusion in her book “If there are inherent predispositions to intolerance of difference…and if those predispositions are actually activated by the experience of living in a vibrant democracy, then freedom feeds fear that undermines personal freedom, and democracy is its own undoing”.  Even the political scientist Francis Fukuyama who, in his book “The End of History and the Last Man”, had been optimistic, in the heady years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, of the prospects for the universal spread of liberal democracy has qualified his optimism by expressing doubts as to whether, having reached the liberal democratic destination, citizens might not again look for new political arrangements. The USA, in 1776, acted as a beacon on the democratic road taken by other countries: we can only hope that 2016 does not set humankind on an altogether different, destructive path.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 Jul

The Brexit fallout – a return to atavism?

Posted by vramani in government, political economy. Tagged: , .

No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

 (John Donne: No Man Is An Island)

…it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to.

(Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth)

 

If 2015 was the year of Greece’s struggle to resolve its relationship with the European Union (EU), 2016 saw a far more dramatic battle as the United Kingdom agonised over its tempestuous relationship with the EU. The die has finally been cast with Old Blighty deciding to sever her over four decade old association with the European Union. In the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, “It is not an amicable divorce, but it was also not an intimate love affair.” It is time now to dispassionately analyse the political and social forces at work behind the Great Drama of 2016 and what these imply for the directions that societies around the world seem to be taking.

Cynical politics underlay the UK referendum move from 2013 onwards, when the British PM announced it as a poll promise. Once he returned to power, his (and the Conservative Party’s) trousers were firmly nailed to the mast. The opposition Labour Party was in a win-win situation: if Britain voted to quit the EU, early elections were a possibility, given the internal dissensions over the issue in the Conservative Party, and, if the vote favoured remaining in the EU, the Labour Party was still on the winning side. The far-right, xenophobic UK Independence Party saw this as an opportunity to whip up domestic passions on immigration and increase its support base ahead of the next elections.

Meaningless debates took place on the implications of Brexit for the British economy in terms of the impact on trade, employment and growth. Any undergraduate student of economics would be aware of the hazards of an assessment of its probable effects, given that ceteris paribus (other things being equal) is a textbook concept that has almost no relevance to the real world. How human actions will play out over time and what effect they will have on economic parameters can be predicted neither by astrologers nor by economists.

As support veered from one side to the other, it became increasingly clear that the impact of factors like migration on employment opportunities and the composition of social classes were the major issues exercising the minds of the lay public. There was also the question of national sovereignty, of the extent to which the UK was comfortable with an agenda ostensibly set in Brussels. The UK was always a reluctant European partner, as evidenced by her non-participation in the Monetary Union and the Schengen Agreement. Even so, questions were raised in the UK over the abridgement of national sovereignty by the diktats of the European Parliament.  There were increasing fears in the UK over what were perceived as European attempts to impose greater integration, with moves towards fuller economic, political and social union.

In the final analysis, the Brexit vote is more a reflection of the hardening attitudes of the traditionally white populations of the UK and Western Europe towards the adverse effects of globalisation, notably loss of jobs and fears of loss of social benefits. The “unwashed millions” from Asia and Africa could be denied entry by stringent immigration controls, which are of no use in an EU dispensation that allows the free movement of EU nationals seeking employment anywhere in the EU. As EU membership spread in an easterly direction, the UK has seen the influx of migrants from more recent EU entrants like Poland, Albania and Romania. Technology has promoted the offshoring of jobs, leading to growing fears in the UK and elsewhere in Europe (as also in the USA) of being “Bangalored”. Imposition of austerity measures also stokes fears of a loss of social security benefits.

What is a cause for more immediate concern is the likely domino effect of Brexit. Far right, Eurosceptic, nationalist movements in France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands already pose serious challenges to the established political order. An exit from the EU of more members could place the future of European unity in serious jeopardy, raising fears of a reversion to a pre-1914 scenario, at the very juncture when the social fabric of Europe is coming under increasing strain. In a rapidly changing international scenario with the rise of huge Asian markets and new centres of production of goods and services, smaller European nations, operating in isolation with a limited resource base and technological skills, could find economic survival an increasingly difficult task.

“Third World” countries have adequate reason to smile wryly at the predicament of the UK and her European neighbours. Pax Britannica, followed by the Cold War era and then Pax Americana, has seen the interests of large segments of the world’s poorer population being at the mercy of the economic and political interests of the world’s powerful nations, essentially from the Western Hemisphere. Apart from overt military intervention (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria being only the prominent recent examples), Western powers have sought to use regional and international platforms (NATO, the UN, IMF, WTO) to promote their narrow economic and political interests, be it the suppression of inconvenient regimes or the negotiation of one-sided treaties on trade, intellectual property rights or the environment. Free movement of goods, services and capital from the West has been promoted, while movement of labour to the West and use of intellectual knowledge in critical areas like generic drug manufacture (which can save innumerable lives) have been sought to be restricted.

Unfortunately, the statements that are emanating from the victorious British politicians on the “Leave” side of the Brexit debate only serve as ominous warnings of their narrow, parochial approach to economic, political and social issues. Trump-etings from the USA in this crucial election year are no better: a campaign against an entire religion, xenophobia against the Hispanic population in the USA and promises to tinker with immigration and trade policies to secure jobs for the local populace. It would seem that influential opinion makers of the Western world are reverting to a tribal, insular worldview, in negation of the plural values that are supposed to have been the basis of Western civilization over the past century and more.

It does not need Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” to remind us of the ferment in many cultures around the globe and their efforts to resist the domination of Western influence and the Western way of life. China is well placed to supplant the USA as the world’s leading economy in the decades to come. India and a host of nations from Asia, Africa and Latin America are looking to find their place in the sun. Brexit will have had a salutary impact if it pushes political leaders in the UK, USA and other European nations to work towards promoting a more equitable and just world economic and political order in consultation with their counterparts from other nations around the globe, as well as striving to achieve greater integration of diverse ethnic and religious groups in their respective countries. The West’s failure to see the writing on the wall will only hasten its eventual decline. The lights may be going out all over Europe once again, with consequences one cannot even begin to imagine!

 

 

 

15 May

Water, water, everywhere…

Posted by vramani in government, political economy, public policy. Tagged: , , , .

Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink

(The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

The Ancient Mariner and his shipmates suffered the consequences of his shooting an albatross; becalmed on the wide ocean, they had no access to drinking water, leading to the death of all the sailors except the Ancient Mariner. An act as wanton as that of the Ancient Mariner today threatens the health (and lives) of millions across the parched plains of peninsular and northern India. The blame for the present predicament lies squarely on man’s nature rather than on Mother Nature. Man has squandered the available sources of surface water and, over the past four decades, has drilled deep into the bowels of the earth to extract every possible drop of water. The present summer represents one of the worst years of water availability for the Marathwada region of Maharashtra. Much publicity has been given to the efforts of many organisations, such as the Indian Railways, to supply water over long distances to Latur city. While all such initiatives are laudable and deserve to be appreciated (even though it appears that the local administration is going to be billed for the supply by the railways), the bitter truth needs to be recognised that these are temporary palliatives for a far more deep rooted crisis, one that threatens man’s very existence. Since I have spent many years of my public life in the Marathwada region in different capacities, it may be appropriate for me to add my two bits to the ongoing debate on the causes for this huge human-ecological crisis that is affecting nearly 20 million people in this region.

Drought has been a recurring pattern in interior Maharashtra in most areas of the rocky Deccan Plateau for centuries. Falling as they do in the rain shadow area between the two monsoons, these areas rely almost entirely on the bounty of the south-west monsoon to meet the food and water needs of their populations. But even Maharashtra’s worst drought in the early 1970s was agriculture rather than water related. The picture changed over the last quarter of the twentieth century with the rapid urbanisation of Maharashtra and the indiscriminate application of water (both surface and ground) for agricultural, especially cash crop, production. The large storage capacities of the Jayakwadi dam at Paithan in Aurangabad district and its sister dam at Majalgaon in Beed district whetted the appetites of the rural elite of Marathwada. Taking a leaf from their confreres in prosperous Western Maharashtra, the landed elite used water as the means to enhance their economic and political power. Sugarcane factories (often badly managed) sprang up in the region, putting strain on both surface and groundwater resources. Water storage in the Jayakwadi reservoir was (and is) crucially dependent on the drinking water and irrigation demands of the politically influential upper riparian districts of Nashik and Ahmednagar. While there are treaties and agreements governing the distribution of river water flows between countries like India and Pakistan and between the different states of India, there are no specified norms dictating the distribution of water between different regions of a state; political compulsions and administrative decisions generally decide the allocation of waters.

Recurrent water scarcity has also created rural-urban tensions in Marathwada. Farmers who are denied water for agricultural purposes resent the diversion of water for industrial and urban needs. When the Jayakwadi irrigation project was commissioned in the 1970s, no one foresaw the extent of demand for water that would emanate from the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of the sleepy town of Aurangabad. Today, a variety of industries, ranging from consumer goods and beer production to automotive and chemicals, are critically dependent on water from the Jayakwadi dam for their survival. Rationing of water supply to industry in lean years (as the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court has sought to do this season by limiting water supply to the beer production units) runs the risk of affecting industry and industrial employment prospects, more so if water scarcity becomes a recurrent phenomenon. The issue is complicated by the misuse of purified water for non-drinking purposes, including watering gardens and flushing toilets. Aurangabad Municipal Corporation has no rules to restrict the use of costly, purified water for only drinking purposes, with users being mandatorily required to use groundwater or recycled water for other purposes. Shrinking groundwater levels pose their own problems; Beed town, the district headquarters of the politically powerful Beed district, with a population of 1.5 lakhs, was historically famous for its dug wells (Bir, as the district and town were earlier referred to, probably derives its name from vihir, the Marathi word for well). With urbanisation and the supply of piped water, these wells have fallen into disuse, rendering the once water-abundant town vulnerable to surface water availability in the water reservoirs servicing the town. Growing contamination of surface and groundwater by industries and sugar factories, not surprising considering the extremely lax implementation of pollution norms, has further reduced the access to safe groundwater.

As always, human greed and indifference lies at the heart of the problem. Deforestation in the upper reaches of the Godavari River (in the name of development) has led to the accumulation of massive quantities of silt in the major reservoirs. The lure of new capital investments in irrigation facilities (in the contractor-driven raj of modern India) as opposed to investments in reservoir and canal maintenance has reduced the life of these assets and led to the runoff of rainwater that could otherwise have been stored. Most importantly, the “small is beautiful” slogan of Eric Schumacher lies buried under the focus on large irrigation projects. River water projects that were considered technically and financially infeasible in the 1970s and 1980s were taken up in different regions of Maharashtra after the mid-1990s. These projects are yet to see the light of day, given poor planning, inefficient execution and massive corruption. Resources that could have gone into soil and water conservation measures were squandered. Successive governments have dutifully paid lip service to soil/water conservation projects with fanciful names; piecemeal planning and lack of an overall picture for recharging the watersheds in the state mean that there is unlikely to be any meaningful resolution of the water crisis in the foreseeable future.

Is there no solution in sight to this crisis which threatens future generations? There can be, provided the political and administrative will exists to look for imaginative solutions which do not pander to the interests of contractors and their political backers, with the concomitant allocation of adequate financial and human resources. After a continuous three year water crisis in Marathwada from 2001 to 2003, the Marathwada administration, in collaboration with NGOs working in the soil/water conservation sector proposed to the state government a massive plan for systematic watershed planning and implementation of a slew of soil conservation measures, including afforestation, contour bunding, check dams and field ponds, that would involve local communities in the programme. Given the scale of the task, it was obvious that relying on rural employment programmes like the MGNREGA would not do, given that the skilled component in terms of machine-intensive jobs would require relaxation of the specified norms for percentage expenditure on labour. It was, therefore, proposed that rural employment funds could be tapped for the components that could be largely implemented using local labour, with the government budgeting for capital-intensive investments in machinery and skilled operations. This proposal never took off and, for all I know, is still lying in the dusty archives of the Government of Maharashtra. Such initiatives are desperately needed to look for long-term solutions to the mess we have landed ourselves in.

Ad nauseam, we are told that it is better to teach a man to fish rather than giving him a fish to eat, since the former course of action is a lifelong investment. Similarly, it is far better to recharge the earth’s water reserves rather than rely on nature alone to make up for acts of human commission and omission. Marathwada’s districts get, on an average, between 600 and 950 millimetres of rainfall annually. I still remember India’s waterman Rajendra Singh expressing his astonishment that, with so much rainfall, Marathwada could not solve its water problem, when areas in Rajasthan were able to manage with an annual precipitation of barely 300 millimetres. Countries like Israel, with regions like the Negev Desert which receive about 30 millimetres of annual rainfall, have invested in water-saving drip irrigation and desalination technology to meet the needs of their people. Maharashtra, and India, can certainly take inspiration from such examples: time and tide wait for no man.

 

 

15 Apr

Secession of the urban Indian

Posted by vramani in government, Innovation, political economy, public affairs, public policy. Tagged: , , .

Amidst all the recent furore over “seditious” behaviour on one of India’s premier university campuses, my mind went to the steady secession of sections of Indian society from the larger populace around them. Now, secession is no laughing matter; any talk of it in the context of a region seeking to separate itself from the republic constitutes a serious crime. And yet, through its actions (or rather inaction), the Indian state itself has been guilty of creating a secessionist mindset in certain groups residing within its frontiers. Before I am hauled up before the guardians of law (one never knows in these hyper-excitable times), let me expand on my theme to set all apprehensions at rest.

I still remember a childhood when those of us living in cities like Delhi, Bombay and Madras received, and enjoyed, the benefits of public services. Electricity came from the local power undertaking and water from the local water board. Those living in Bombay and Madras were fortunate to enjoy good public transport (local train and bus) facilities. We Delhiwallahs were not so lucky; a six kilometre journey from school to home could take anywhere up to two hours, earning the Delhi Transport Undertaking (DTU) the sobriquet Don’t Trust Us. Public health facilities were extensively used: the Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) for minor illnesses and (in Delhi) public hospitals like Safdarjung and Willingdon (later christened Ram Manohar Lohia) for major ones. The doctors were reputed and trusted by their patients, the nursing staff was dedicated and competent and many of our friends went there for minor and major surgeries. While I don’t even remember seeing a uniformed policeman in our government colony, the friendly Gurkha watchman on his nightly vigil made us feel secure. The seeds of secession were already then being sown in primary and secondary education, though not in higher education: many of us went to private (euphemistically termed public) and missionary schools (with parental confidence in municipal and government schools at a fairly low level) but subsequently to publicly funded universities.

The last quarter of the twentieth century marked the watershed for the transition to a dual society. As the pressure of population grew, with large migrations to urban areas, shortfalls in public services and the unwillingness of better-off sections of the citizenry to live with these infrastructural deficiencies led to the Great Secession. The success of the Indian diaspora and their affluence created envy in their humble country cousins, who had to look forward to the casually tossed out gift on the annual pilgrimage home of the non-resident Indian. 1991 was the first window of opportunity for the great Indian middle class. Easier and cheaper imports, the opening up of the consumer sector to private investment and the information technology boom saw an explosion in the availability of hitherto forbidden fruit, which the Indian consumer was only too eager to acquire and consume. Money is the medium for the transfer of goods and services from the hitherto totally public domain to private enclaves of wealth and prosperity. As living standards improve for a growing middle class with aspirations to the “good life”, it would be instructive to examine how this stratification has worked in different sectors of services and how it has had its impact not just on the wealthier classes but also on the common woman/man living in urban settings in India.

Electric power supply has always been the country’s Achilles heel. Rural areas, especially in the more backward northern and eastern regions of the country, have long been inured to the absence of electricity. But urban areas, inhabited by industries and by the relatively wealthier segments of society, would not accept such a scenario. Industries went in for diesel generator sets and, where possible, captive power generation. Households followed suit very soon; as disposable incomes went up, generator sets made their appearance in private residences and housing societies. Even after the initiation of power sector reforms in the early 2000s, the scenario is yet to change, with problems persisting in all the three sectors of electricity generation, transmission and distribution. A nuclear deal was concluded, but power from nuclear plants still seems a distant dream. Oh, of course, there has been a lot of talk but, as yet, only limited progress on the renewable energy front, the inspiring example of countries like Germany notwithstanding. Bengaluru, India’s IT capital, sees its citizens stoically settling down to power cuts of three to five hours daily, while its energy policy makers scramble for excuses like low water supply positions in reservoirs.

Drinking water supply poses a major issue everywhere, and not just in years of scanty rainfall. Politicians and bureaucrats have failed to anticipate the demand for this crucial, life-giving resource, not just in rapidly growing urban centres, but also in rural areas, where water supply is fast depleting. There are a variety of reasons for this critical situation, best summed up as “the triumph of private greed over public need.” What is glaringly evident is the absence of any long-term planning for urban water management. No efforts have been made to recycle wastewater for use for non-drinking purposes, nor is there any coherent policy in place to desalinate seawater, on the lines of countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States. The only ones laughing all the way to the bank are the bottled water companies, which are the major drinking water supply source to populations in cities like Chennai and Bengaluru. With a steadily worsening groundwater scenario, water tankers are the order of the day in every metropolitan area. The urban poor have to make do with the trickle that comes from their public taps or fight for access to the tankers that service their areas.

The steady deterioration of public health services has, over the years, put an enormous financial burden on the aam aurat/aadmi. Money is again the feature that distinguishes the quality of services for the rich and the poor. Corporate, multi-specialty hospitals with state of the art technology are available to those who can pay, while the poor flock to already overloaded public hospitals. The average citizen has come to distrust the medical attention she can expect to get in public health institutions, forcing her to get into debt to meet the costs of private medical care. A moribund public health care system functions (??) under the benign gaze of governments (both central and state) and a controversial Medical Council of India.

Public transport, almost the only commuting option a couple of generations ago, is probably the most striking example of the widening chasm between the rich and the poor. City transport systems have come under immense strain, even as private car registration figures shoot up. Mumbai’s famed local trains are groaning under the sheer weight of numbers and even the Mumbai bus system (BEST) is not quite what it used to be. Indian city roads have, of course, proved to be somewhat of a social leveler — the potholes on the roads are no respecter of private or public transport modes and congested thoroughfares allow for no distinctions in time spent on travel, regardless of whether you are in a BMW or on a city bus. The Delhi Metro has been the only bright spot in an otherwise abysmal tale of stalled public rail transport and Bus Rapid Transit systems in nearly all Indian cities.

Most unfortunate has been the privatisation of security systems as inadequate police forces battle with multiple responsibilities in the diverse areas of criminal investigation, law and order maintenance and VIP security. It is bad enough when housing becomes segregated (although the coexistence of prosperity and squalor serve as reminders that “no man is an island”). It is worse when these residential islands also shut off the rest of humanity (including visitors’ vehicles) and seek protection behind high walls and iron gates. As the perception of individual insecurity grows, those who are well-off but not fortunate enough to be provided taxpayer-funded security go in for their private armies of security guards. The aam aurat is left to manage on her own against antisocial elements, with no beat patrolling by constables in even crowded localities.

The final act in this secession drama is the scramble for job opportunities overseas. The earlier flight to the Gulf at least saw many of the migrants return home to better living standards in states like Kerala. The subsequent exodus to the West, especially the United Kingdom and the United States, and other areas in South-East Asia and Australia, has been rather more one-way traffic. While there is the feeling in expatriates of a homeland lost, there is also the realistic recognition that India still cannot offer the same opportunities for innovative thinking and risk taking that many other countries both to the east and west of us offer. If you don’t believe me, ask a budding research scholar in any university or an entrepreneur starting a new venture. It should occasion no surprise that India’s only Nobel award in the basic sciences came during British rule (C. V. Raman, 1930). Indians have since won Nobel awards in the basic sciences, but their research has been conducted in foreign institutions.

Ultimately, the issue boils down to the pursuit of excellence. Islands of excellence in the country still float in a sea of mediocrity, a consequence of unimaginative education systems, blatant patronage based on ethnic and other considerations and an acceptance of sloppy, disinterested performance. Perhaps we should heed the prescient words of John Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the Lyndon Johnson administration “The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 Apr

Boys will be boys

Posted by vramani in government, irony, political economy, public affairs. Tagged: , , .

Girish Karnad essayed the role of a young, idealistic dairy technologist in Manthan, an inspiring movie on the politics of starting a dairy cooperative in Gujarat. The local overlord, played by Amrish Puri, attempts to win over Karnad by offering him choice liquor, which our young man firmly refuses. Puri then, with a sarcastic laugh, states that he is very fond of idealists, since they are bound to lose their idealism one day. I don’t know how many of the actors on the prosecution side of la affaire JNU, our recent box office hit on television, have seen this movie. Even if they haven’t, they would probably have done well to have taken a leaf from Puri’s book and treat the entire JNU episode as another case of boyish spirits which merited at most a mild rap on the knuckles and a word of reproof, with a knowing nod of the head, that “boys will be boys”. By throwing one of the more draconian sections of the Indian Penal Code at the students of the University, the government of the day unwittingly conferred a distinction on these students and willy nilly dragged itself into a controversy that led to international condemnation as well as a suspicion in the public mind that there was a political agenda behind the entire imbroglio.

My generation passed through the portals of higher education during the days of the Emergency of 1975-77. Even prior to that, there was considerable ferment in idealistic sections of the student population. The exploits of Che Guevara in Latin America, the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war protests in the USA and the distant rumbling of the Naxalite uprising in Bengal were all beacons of hope for sections of youth that had come face to face with the unravelling of the post-independence Nehruvian consensus. Scores of students from the neoliberal environment of Delhi University left their studies to pursue their dreams of a classless society. Severe state repression and the vortex of violence the movement spawned led to a fairly early disillusionment with the Naxalite movement and the homecoming of the chastened prodigals. Their future careers in academia or the civil services (almost the only two job openings at that time) would have been severely jeopardised had the then Government of India not had the sagacity to overlook their youthful enthusiasm and withdraw possible prosecutions against them. Many of these potential “revolutionaries” went on to outstanding tenures in the civil services and the academic world, especially as teachers in the university that is at the centre of the present controversy (some have moved from Trotsky to the Temple, but that is another story). There was (and is) a deep humanism and liberalism informing the approach of many of them to social, political and economic issues. The Emergency represented the darkest phase of Indian democracy, but it also had one redeeming feature: it sensitised the youth of my generation to democratic values of freedom and human dignity and developed in many of us distaste for authoritarianism of all hues. Freedom to us meant freedom of thought, speech, association, profession of any religion (or no religion) and culinary choice, to name the prominent ones. Colleagues of mine in the Indian Administrative and Police Services stood up to excesses of different political formations when they attempted to trample on the constitutional rights of ordinary citizens in the name of religion, caste, ideology, ethnicity or region.

I stress this cherishing of fundamental human values, because I am aware of the educative role of the university in developing the thinking individual in each of us. It is made all the more poignant in view of the recent calls by many highly qualified persons to students to concentrate on their studies and not on politics during their stay in the university. Proponents of this school of thought seem to view the role of institutions of higher learning as producing technology zombies of the sort popularised in the Dilbert comic strip, rather than alert, aware citizens who will participate actively in the ongoing process of social transformation. Unfortunately, this betrays a highly technological view of the roles of discussion and dissent in public discourse. Any discussion on issues relating to the human condition and efforts to better it are inevitably political in nature. It would appear that significant sections of the intelligentsia still view the development of the critical faculty in individuals from an authoritarian perspective. Probably, this has its roots in the parental and social (including educational) environments which stress conformity rather than curiosity. From personal experience, I can certainly aver that independent modes of thinking and functioning evolved only when I entered college. Nor can I claim that my true education came from the classroom: rather, it was the product of hours of discussion after class on diverse issues ranging from politics to social issues and values.

V.S. Naipaul characterized India as a land of a million mutinies over forty years ago, easing somewhat the resentment of Indians over his earlier reference to the country as an area of darkness. If Naipaul was right then, we would have to term this as the land of a billion mutinies now. Assertions of identities by disadvantaged castes and communities, not to mention the struggles of the female half for their rightful place in the Indian sun and the refusal to be denied their economic opportunities, have led large sections of the population to question the traditional, patriarchal social structures. The university has served as an avenue for upward mobility and for questioning the existing power structure. Any political party which seeks to assert the monopoly of its ideology and restricted worldview over institutions of higher learning, through manipulation of teaching processes and educational curricula, is pursuing a chimera. As Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan affirmed in a recent speech at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai “The first essential is to foster competition in the marketplace for ideas…This then leads to a second essential: Protection, not of specific ideas and traditions, but the right to question and challenge…it is by encouraging the challenge of innovative rebels that society develops.” Governments learn this lesson far too late – the Congress government in 1977 reaped the consequences of the denial of free expression to the student population in higher education institutions for twenty months.

Ultimately, the Argumentative Indian will have his say. Having had his say, he will then move on to the basic business of earning his livelihood. Governments in a democracy need to provide a pressure valve to a population, many of whose members still suffer from myriad economic and social deficiencies. Ignoring this reality can prove fatal for a government when it next goes to the hustings. The first requirement for a successful, popular politician is a keen sense of irony laced with good-humoured forbearance, a quality sadly lacking in most of the political class in India today. The first generation of Indian political leaders was jailed by the British; the second generation of political leaders was jailed by the Congress. It would be truly ironic if the third generation of leaders of independent India were to emerge from those currently being jailed by the present government. Who can tell, every cloud may have a silver lining!

 

15 Mar

Centralization – The bane of governance in India

Posted by vramani in political economy, public affairs, public policy. Tagged: , .

Any newly born nation nurses a sense of insecurity, more so since the nation state is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. There are also enough doomsayers hovering around with their dire prophecies. The Indian nation-state has had more than its fair share of such pessimistic prophets in the early decades after independence. It also had to contend with the aftermath of the Partition and the amalgamation into the Indian Union of over five hundred princely states, not all of them exactly ecstatic about the prospect. There was, therefore, an overwhelming opinion in the then leaders of the Indian government that, given the daunting challenges faced by the nascent Indian state on the economic, social and political fronts, a strong centre was a prerequisite for not just the development of, but even the survival of India as an independent nation. Not surprisingly, the Indian republic came to be categorised as “a unitary state with federal features.”

Interesting though it is as a subject, this article is not focusing on the political aspects of centralisation but rather on the impact on governance of such centralisation of powers. It needs to be made clear that concentration of powers is a vice that affects every political formation, indeed every organisation that operates in the public and private spheres in India. It is also an accepted axiom that each level of government is in favour of devolution of administrative and financial authority only upto its own level. Thus, while state governments, especially of different political persuasions from the government at the central level, have harped, right from Tamil Nadu in the late 1960s, on greater devolution of powers to them, they have been conspicuously silent when it comes to devolving powers to local governments. The three experiments in democratic decentralization in the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka have been aborted over time to protect the economic and political interests of state-level politicians. The implications for governance, especially at the level of the aam aurat/aadmi, have not been exactly salubrious.

There are both charitable and uncharitable explanations for the propensity to centralize economic and political powers. The “charitable” ones include:

  • the colonial mindset, prevalent to this day, that the natives are not fit to govern themselves. Politicians and bureaucrats, at central and state levels, never tire of relating horror stories about the misdemeanours of local governments;
  • the mistaken assumption that centralisation of financial powers and procurement decisions lead to savings;
  • the continuing faith in the efficacy of a Soviet-era centralized planning system, where the know-it-all bureaucrat sitting in a cubby hole in Mumbai/Delhi hands out schemes and money to the public.

There are also some “uncharitable” reasons for this love for centralisation:

  • the realisation of the state-level politician that his continued existence depends on justifying his utility to the system. This politician is aware that the emergence of powerful grass root leaders is a threat to his future in politics. This phenomenon, observed in the Indian National Congress since the 1970s, has since percolated to every political party. Devolution of powers to local governments would also obviate the need for top-heavy governments at the central and state levels, thus rendering many politicians jobless;
  • the bureaucracy being seen as a vehicle for guaranteed, lifelong employment, without any accountability for performance. There is the rather patronising belief that bureaucratic interventions can solve all problems, hence the operation of Parkinson’s Law with a vengeance in the Indian government system: staff expands to create more work, with, in fact, a diminution in efficiency. Increasingly, public service has also become a self-service system and a foolproof mechanism for rent-seeking, the stress being on kimbalam (illegal gratification) rather than sambalam (salary), to use Tamil terminology.

Centralisation can take the form of intervention in procurement contracts, discretionary distribution of scarce resources (land, public funds, primary schools, colleges, universities, etc.) and formulation of policies from above imposed on those whom schemes are intended to benefit, as well as the imposition of rigid guidelines which the “street-level bureaucracy” is expected to follow in letter and spirit. The damage resulting from such a system can be long-term, often resulting in serious misallocation of resources, with concomitant effects on economic development. Drawing on my three decades of experience in the civil services in India, I have identified six major consequences of centralized decision-making:

  • Corruption: Lord Acton rightly observed “…absolute power corrupts absolutely”. In the Indian context, we can safely say that absolute centralization corrupts absolutely. Primary education has been one major casualty; ministers deciding where and when schools are to be run, and by whom, have spawned a multi-million rupee black market in school education. The same pattern has been emulated in the case of higher education, with even more profitable results. Influential politicians and their backers run huge education empires today, often of extremely dubious quality. Maternal and child nutrition is another area where the Supreme Court Commissioners have documented a number of instances of state governments sidestepping the Supreme Court guidelines to award food supply contracts to monopoly contractors, ignoring local self-help groups. Recent actions of the central and most state governments indicate a tendency to favour individual contractors over local groups in food supply, ostensibly on the grounds of improved nutrition, although the evidence of years of centralized monopoly supply strongly indicate otherwise (as verified personally by yours truly at anganwadis (day care centres) in rural Maharashtra). It can always be argued that no corruption has been specifically established but then Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion: the antecedents of these contractors and their political connections leave ample room for suspicion.
  • Faulty policy design: Decisions in Delhi often do not work in the gallis (streets). The examples of three major policy initiatives of the previous government which continue under the present government show how top down policy making can stymie the best of intentions. Take the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee programme (MGNREGA). Designed to provide 100 days of employment to each member of the rural population who seeks work, the scheme drew on earlier examples such as the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) of Maharashtra, which was intended to provide on-demand work at times when there were no work opportunities in agriculture. The problem with the MGNREGA lies in its design. Unlike the EGS, the MGNREGA is implemented across all districts in a state regardless of whether the prevailing economic conditions warrant such a wage programme. Common sense would dictate that there would be few takers for such a programme in a district like Kolhapur in Maharashtra with its extensive irrigation facilities and well developed agriculture and ancillary activities. It takes me back to 1989 when a precursor central programme, the National Rural Employment Programme (NREP), was implemented across all districts of Maharashtra. We found it almost impossible to get labour for this programme in a district like Parbhani in Maharashtra, where rural employment was abundantly available in the irrigated agricultural areas. In such a scenario, the local bureaucracy ends up subcontracting the entire programme to local contractors, who then use machinery to carry out the work, defeating the very purpose of the programme. Food security and education are again two areas where the ambitious universal thrust of the programmes does not take into account the glaring deficiencies in the public distribution and education systems in most states. Nor does it appear that the budgetary provisions the Government of India is making and that state governments are likely to make will enable universalisation of these two programmes.
  • Inefficiency: In my days as an IAS probationer, it was drilled into us that, as District Magistrates, we should assume a proactive role in firmly tackling violence between or directed against communities. The recent judicial commission report on the Muzaffarnagar violence of 2013 has faulted the district administration and the local police for inaction in preventing and subsequently containing violence during the riots. My surmise would be that the District Magistrate and the Superintendent of Police were looking over their shoulders for directions from their higher-ups on how to deal with elements that obviously had powerful political backing, instead of moving swiftly to nip the trouble in the bud through preventive arrests and a show of force. Centralisation in times of crises deters prompt, effective action. Yet another example comes to mind from a sector I am familiar with. The Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) was set up to regulate petroleum exploration and production activities in India. Over the years, a paranoid mindset in government agencies and the “intelligentsia” has led the DGH to refer every investment decision involving private operators to the Petroleum Ministry for approval. Contractual timelines for approval of proposals were blithely ignored while the mandarins in government wrestled with the decision process. That golden mantra of centralisation, referral to a committee, ensured that natural gas prices took years to be finalised. The final solution has satisfied neither the companies nor the command economy socialists in the intelligentsia, while the chimera of market-determined gas pricing recedes further into the future.
  • Demotivated street bureaucracy: Centralized programmes lay down rigid guidelines with almost no scope for exercise of innovation by those actually responsible for ground-level implementation of these programmes. Accompanying this is the tendency to distrust the lower bureaucracy, doubt their commitment and make scapegoats of them for faulty policy design. Complex and arduous reporting requirements tie up field staff in paperwork, not giving them time to attend to their clientele. It is no wonder then that there appears to be little enthusiasm for meaningful programme implementation with a specific focus on outcomes. The sense of a larger purpose in their professional life and of engaging in a noble mission is never inculcated in grass root workers. We observe this in the large majority of teachers and health and nutrition workers. No encouragement is given to primary level workers to use their initiative to resolve local problems, nor are small amounts of money made available to them to meet their basic infrastructure requirements or to experiment with ideas that can contribute to the success of the programme.
  • Disempowered communities and individuals: Programmes handed down from above almost never draw on the problem solving abilities of local communities. It is evident in the very designation of the recipient of the scheme as a “beneficiary”, effectively ruling out her participation in the design and implementation of the scheme meant for her. An overburdened, often disinterested bureaucracy is largely concerned with delivering the inputs and completing its targets, with no emphasis on either the processes of implementation or the desired outcomes.
  • Damage to democracy: The process of centralized decision making is, in the final instance, detrimental to the development of an aware, active citizenry that can contribute to the democratic process. As passive recipients, people are deprived of the capacity to participate in decisions that significantly impact their lives. When programmes fail to deliver the desired results, the consequent disenchantment often drives the disempowered into the clutches of demagogues who promise them the earth and capitalise on their fears to undermine the democratic framework of society.

Recent trends in the pattern of budgetary transfers from the central government to the states give more cause for concern. Devolving more untied funds to states will place more unbridled discretion for patronage in the hands of unscrupulous politicians and bureaucrats. State governments have, in any case, never been enthusiastic promoters of democratic decentralization. With little accountability for the manner in which public money is spent (or rather, misspent) and with little fear of being brought to book for their misdeeds, it looks as though, in the words of the Harvard University economist Lant Pritchett, India’s “flailing” governments will continue to flail away.

 

1 Mar

Intolerance…for the rule of law

Posted by vramani in political economy, public affairs. Tagged: , .

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” (S.G. Tallentyre)

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines tolerance as “willingness to accept feelings, habits or beliefs that are different from your own.” A related definition is “the ability to accept, experience or survive something harmful or unpleasant.” Acceptance is the word common to both definitions: this implies accommodation by the individual of the acts or thoughts of another, even though they may conflict with his deepest convictions, indeed with his very way of life. The limits of such tolerance are set by the legal framework; the Constitution of India, while enunciating the inalienable freedoms available to every resident of India, has also circumscribed these to the extent necessary to protect the rights of other individuals and to preserve the essential social fabric of the country. All other laws are subordinate to the Constitution; over the past almost seven decades the superior courts have struck down a number of legislative enactments which were deemed to violate the basic structure of the Constitution. Implicit in this process is the recognition that a democracy is run by the rule of law and the final arbiter of any act, whether by word or deed, is the judiciary.

It is, therefore, with a sinking feeling that one observes the steadily growing tendency of different groups to ignore and often show their contempt for the rule of law. Indian society has, like any other society, displayed strains of intolerance towards socially disadvantaged sections, based on caste, religion and gender, to name just three categories. In recent times, the shabby treatment of the noted artist, M. F. Hussain, and the politically motivated attacks in Maharashtra on newspaper editors and academic institutions that were deemed to have insulted the memory of the warrior king Shivaji were instances of intolerance that made headlines. What is disturbing in India’s history over the past many decades is the resort to violence against helpless individuals and the perceived failure of the law and order machinery to protect them or bring the perpetrators of violence to book. Most recently, the mob violence in Muzaffarnagar in 2013 and the lynching of a man in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, in 2015 for allegedly consuming beef have been followed by the execrable act of lawyers indulging in violence against a student leader accused of the crime of sedition. What these three incidents starkly bring out is the brazen disregard for the operation of the rule of law. In all three cases, apologists belonging to the currently ruling dispensation have sought to ex post facto justify the perpetration of violence. More dangerous even than the display of intolerance towards fellow human beings is the utter contempt for the rule of law that these actions reveal.

Democracy is traditionally believed to rest on four pillars: the executive, legislature, judiciary and the press. With the spread of representative democracy and the growth of the internet, many commentators add a fifth pillar in the form of civil society. The 2011 Arab Spring is a vivid reminder of the power of public opinion and social media in shaping the course of events in a country. How has India fared in terms of the performance of these pillars and what are the lessons to be learnt if the tender plant of democracy is to take firm root in Indian soil?

Organs of the government, especially the police, have often displayed distressing levels of partisanship in handling conflicts between different communities and in protecting life and property. Indira Gandhi’s “committed bureaucracy” has been a spectator to, if not a participant in, India’s worst communal conflagrations — Delhi (1984), Mumbai (1993) and Gujarat (2002). The executive arm of the state is generally intolerant of criticism and the Indian executive is certainly no exception to this rule. But what marked out the latest incident in the public eye, the JNU case, is the extraordinary interest shown by the highest levels of the government in what were statements by youth in its usual phase of excited fervour. What could have been handled as a local incident and dealt with (if at all necessary) as a disciplinary matter by the University has been allowed to blow up into a controversy which has attracted national and international attention. Having committed one error of judgment, the executive compounded its problems by failing to act firmly against those who attempted to browbeat judicial institutions and interfered with the course of justice.

The second arm, the legislature, exemplified by Parliament at the national level, has, in recent years, often generated more heat than light. It has also dragged its feet on crucial legislation over the past decade, with parliamentarians more interested in winning battles of lung power than contributing to legislation that will promote economic growth and development. Over the years, legislations on a unified indirect tax system for the entire country, rationalization of archaic land laws and establishment of anti-corruption watchdogs have languished. A colonial era sedition provision, introduced in India after the 1857 mutiny, is still extant, although the mother country, the United Kingdom, dispensed with this statute over five years ago. Although no less a person than Jawaharlal Nehru espoused the sentiment (as far back as 1950) that this obnoxious provision should vanish from the statute books, independent India still retains this pernicious law that is freely available for abuse by insecure governments. To my knowledge, no honourable Member of Parliament has made any attempt to get this section in the Indian Penal Code repealed.

The one bright spot in the firmament of democratic institutions has been the legal system, though there is, obviously, the issue of the interminable judicial delays which frustrate the delivery of justice and tend to make the ordinary citizen cynical about the rule of law. This has to be qualified by the caveat that, while the judiciary, especially the higher judiciary, has been the one beacon of hope for the common man, the fraternity of lawyers has sometimes conducted itself with an appalling lack of dignity. Jokes about lawyers’ habits are commonplace in all democracies but the legal fraternity in India has, in recent years, besmirched its reputation with behaviour that is more suited to a beer hall than to a bar association, as witnessed in recent incidents on court precincts in Chennai and Delhi. In the recent case involving the production of the student leader arrested for sedition in the magistrate’s court, the nation and the world were witness to ugly scenes of alleged assault by “lawyers” on the student leader (a matter which is still under investigation), with the police apparently standing by as mute witnesses. Surely, lawyers, if the assailants were indeed lawyers, ought to be aware that the law must take its course.

The fourth pillar, the press, has been an increasing cause of concern in recent times. The print media, under threat from the electronic media and now social media, has generally tended to focus on avenues like advertising revenue, with lesser concern for factual reporting and issues of social concern. The electronic media, with almost no exceptions, is engrossed with sensationalism and “breaking news.” Even more disturbing is the tendency for news channels to act as adjudicators of legal issues, especially cases currently under investigation by the law enforcement authorities. Judgments have virtually been passed on most news channels in the high profile case involving Indrani Mukerjea. In the JNU student leader case, unverified audiovisual evidence has been casually bandied about by certain news channels. Value judgments on the patriotism of individuals and their actions have been passed without leaving the matter to be decided by the appropriate judicial forum. If the press was felt to be compliant during the Emergency years of 1975-77, there is now reason to worry whether it is complicit today with certain segments of society that seek to impose their narrow sectarian, nationalistic view on the country.

The biggest hope for a healthy, flourishing democracy lies in a questioning, independent civil society that accommodates a diversity of views and encourages discussion and dissent. No less a person than Raghuram Rajan, the present Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) observed in a lecture in October 2015 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai that societal self-interest lies in the protection of the right to question and challenge, for only through encouraging the challenge of innovative rebels does society develop.  The growing partisan shrillness of discourse and the recourse to vituperative, often libellous language in the social media is a sad reflection on the deteriorating standards of public debate in a country that has produced outstanding thinkers like Ambedkar, Nehru and Rajaji. It should occasion no surprise when we have commentators in recent days opining that students should go to universities to study, forgetting the important role of universities and other institutions of higher learning in fostering the spirit of questioning in individuals and equipping them to contribute to political and social development in their future lives. While it has been heartening to see the large number of those who have taken a stand against the attempts to straitjacket thinking and debate, there is no denying the growing numbers who refuse to use hard facts to bolster their viewpoint, relying instead on emotion and unverified information to push their worldview as the only acceptable one. When they lose out in the battle of words, as is bound to happen when reason does not inform argument, they descend to the use of swords.

Democracy in India, like the nation state, is a concept that has been put together since 1947 and has (despite various gloomy prognostications) lasted over nearly seventy years, in contrast to most other countries that achieved independence around the middle of the twentieth century. The people of India have chosen their governments at the national level sixteen times since independence and have ushered out the incumbents on eight of these occasions. But the right to bloodlessly change governments (Karl Popper’s fundamental classification of a democracy) is hardly the only characteristic of a democracy. It is the rule of law which guides the functioning of a democracy in the interregnum between elections. Seen from this viewpoint, the “five pillars” of Indian democracy can be said to have secured barely passing grades. Nor, regretfully, do most Indians show tolerance for the words and actions of their fellow humans, whether from India or outside. The rule of law apparently applies only when one is wronged, not when one wrongs one’s fellow human. Two examples will suffice: progressive writers in Bengaluru choosing to boycott the Literature Festival because one of the organisers had differing views on the Award Wapsi controversy and the intolerance shown by Left parties to political dissent in Bengal over their 34-year rule. Respect for the individual’s right to freedom of expression, consumption and decision (three freedoms which are being questioned at various levels today) is still to be ingrained in the Indian democratic psyche. Till this tolerance becomes a matter of habit, we cannot claim that our country functions on the principle of the rule of law.

 

 

 

 

1 Nov

Killing Mockingbirds – A Twenty First Century Syndrome

Posted by vramani in political economy, public affairs. Tagged: , , .

It is not often that a writer hits the bestseller list with her first novel. Harper Lee achieved that with her masterpiece “To Kill A Mockingbird”, which describes the racism and social inequality prevalent in the 1930s in the American South. A black man, Tom Robinson, is falsely accused of raping a white woman from one of the most wretched white communities on the fringes of society. The prevailing animosity of whites towards blacks, seventy years after slavery was formally abolished, manifests itself in efforts of some members of the white community to lynch the accused. In the ensuing trial by an all-white jury, Tom is sentenced to death, despite a brilliant defence put up by his white lawyer, Atticus Finch. Atticus is able to discredit the evidence of the rape complainant very comprehensively, although this does not lead to a verdict of acquittal. Despairing of getting justice in a system weighted against his community, Tom is killed while trying to escape from jail. The father of the complainant, a down and out reject of society, seeks to avenge his humiliation at the trial by attempting to kill Atticus’ children, losing his own life in the process. What the novel highlights is the number of innocents who are caught in the web of this bigotry and hatred. The author likens these to mockingbirds, which cause no trouble to humans and give pleasure through their singing. Hence the injunction of Atticus Finch to his children never to hunt mockingbirds. Tom Robinson, like many others in the novel, is the mockingbird caught in a vortex not of his making but of which he has to reap the grim consequences.

Twenty first century India is in some ways (and unfortunately increasingly so) reminiscent of the American South of an earlier generation. In recent times, women, children, householders, truckers, scholars, writers and journalists have been at the receiving end of lynch mobs for just trying to live their lives as they deemed best, without in any way interfering in the lives of others. The provocation (as so termed by vigilante groups) can be linked to a certain worldview about “culture”, which gives no space to diversity of individual behaviour, intellectual thought and even dietary practices. Women in Mangaluru (and elsewhere) have been targeted for expressing their individuality in ways which in no sense constituted any violation of the law of the land but “offended” patriarchal mindsets of some groups. Violence against women has been a longstanding feature of Indian society (protestations of its veneration of women notwithstanding) – what is disturbing in recent years has been the concentration of violence against women seen as bucking traditional mores and behaviours expected of women – whether it is association with the opposite sex, visiting places (e.g. pubs) seen as male prerogatives or even establishing their financial independence through gainful employment. Freedom of expression (enshrined in Article 19 of the Constitution of India) has been sought to be curbed extra-legally ever since the forcible exile of M. F. Husain two decades ago. Then we had the unedifying spectacle of hooligans from the Nationalist Congress Party (in power in Maharashtra at the time) vandalizing the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune  and destroying priceless manuscripts to protest the research support it is supposed to have given to a “controversial” book on the Maratha ruler, Shivaji. More recently, writers like Perumal Murugan in Tamil Nadu have been pressurized to disown their writings which some social groups objected to, apart from the as yet unsolved murders of three rationalist scholars over the past two years. The last straw on the camel’s back has been the recent incidents of mob violence against members of minority denominations by socially dominant groups enjoying political patronage, ostensibly on the grounds of offending religious sensitivities related to alleged beef consumption.

There are two disturbing aspects to these developments that make all right-thinking, sober Indians reflect on (and despair of) the direction that Indian society seems to have taken. The first refers to what the political theorist Hannah Arendt has termed as “tribal nationalism” in her book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. As she puts it “(Tribal nationalism) can be easily recognized by the tremendous arrogance, inherent in its self-concentration, which dares to measure a people, its past and present, by the yardstick of exalted inner qualities and inevitably rejects its visible existence, tradition, institutions and culture…tribal nationalism always insists its own people is surrounded by “a world of enemies”, “one against all”, that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind…”. The concept of an Indian nation is barely seventy years old. National pride was sought to be rekindled during the two hundred years of British rule by hearkening back to a pre-Muslim conquest glorious past, as though to deny the existence of history after 1192 CE (the Battle of Tarain), which marks the start of Muslim political ascendancy in India. It is unfortunate that, today, history is sought to be rewritten on the same basis, ignoring six centuries of social and political evolution which influenced the mosaic that is present-day India. It is even more unfortunate that this ersatz history has had its impact on certain sections of society, especially those exposed to a limited worldview founded on prejudice and a marked sense of inferiority, leading to a conviction that the majority community must assume its “rightful” place in the country. The “other” then becomes a convenient scapegoat for all one’s shortcomings and no effort is spared to impose a majoritarian worldview on all other communities.

The second aspect, and this is one that can be fatal to the very existence of a democracy, is the lack of respect for and observance of the rule of law. The police and security forces have, on a number of occasions, been swayed by partisan considerations in the maintenance of law and order and in the prosecution of criminal offences. Matters have not been helped by a creaking judicial system that takes decades to punish the guilty, if at all they are brought to trial. It is not surprising, therefore, that two tendencies manifest themselves: (a) using every loophole in criminal investigation and judicial procedures, those with money, influence and power delay, or thwart, the course of justice; (b) in frustration, those denied justice take the law into their own hands. A sense of impunity develops where the absence of the fear of deterrent punishment encourages vigilante groups and mobs to go on killing sprees; India’s experience is testimony to numerous such cases.

All sections of the state and society in India bear some of the blame for this sorry state of affairs. Political parties in India have always operated on the basis of expediency and short-term political gains. Right from Indian independence, the political class has used divisions of religion, caste and language to further its agenda of survival. With the cynicism (or should I say, realism) of thirty years in government, I would say the Indian political class amply justifies Goethe’s description of “estimable in the individual and wretched in the generality.” While there must be many politicians who are unhappy with the state of affairs today, it is rather optimistic to expect a statesmanlike response from them to promoting communal harmony and refraining from using sectarian propaganda to further their political prospects. The media has tried to highlight the various instances of intolerance and hatred; unfortunately, in the babble of voices and utterances in print, electronic and social media, no reasoned debate on issues based on factual evidence is possible, with battle lines already drawn in advance. There are only two silver linings in an otherwise rather dark thundercloud: the judiciary and independent citizens in different spheres of society. The courts have upheld a number of individual freedoms and have, especially at the highest levels, sought to jealously guard their independence from executive encroachment and ensure that the basic structure of the Constitution of India is not tampered with. Even more heartening has been the fearless response from people representing a wide spectrum of opinion, cutting across gender, community, religion and caste barriers.

Ultimately, the India that the framers of the Constitution dreamed of (and that every right-thinking Indian aspires for) will be realised only when two prerequisites are met. Firstly, reason has to guide actions, rather than blind emotions arising from intolerance, hatred and a sense of inadequacy. Every Indian has to put the past behind and focus on the path ahead. Today’s situation has to be taken as a given, to be improved on, rather than ventilating past grievances and manufacturing unrealistic future scenarios. Secondly, every individual and institution in the country has to abide by and promote the rule of law. At the individual level, this requires adherence to laws and regulations. At the institutional level (especially the executive and judicial arms), this requires the fair and impartial administration of these laws and prompt delivery of services to the aam aurat/aadmi to address common needs that are often the source of frustration and anger. Above all, at a time, when the world is wracked by violence and destruction linked to religious and ethnic differences, there is a special responsibility cast on the inhabitants of the world’s largest democracy to set an example of compassion, love and humanity for their brothers and sisters in India and across the globe. In this context, it is apposite to end with portions selected from the masterpiece of the immortal bard, Rabindranath Tagore:

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15 Oct

What goes around comes around

Posted by vramani in political economy, public affairs, public policy.

There was a young lady of Niger

Who went for a ride on a tiger

They returned from the ride

With the lady inside

And a smile on the face of the tiger.

This limerick came to mind almost immediately when Sudheendra Kulkarni, the organiser of the function to launch the book of former Pakistan foreign minister, Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, had his face blackened by miscreants, following the veto by Maharashtra’s “Tiger” party, the Shiv Sena, of any function in Mumbai involving a personality from India’s western neighbour. That he was a prominent figure, till some years ago, of a political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which runs the governments in Delhi and Mumbai, with the Shiv Sena as a junior partner, apparently cut no ice with the Sena, which more or less said “serves him right” after the unfortunate incident. But then, after having consorted with a party like the BJP, many of whose members have made a virtue of divisions in society, Kulkarni ought to have been aware of the consequences of associating with a perceived “enemy” whose country is anathema to the professed worldview of his ex-party and its like-minded partners. It would, therefore be apposite to remember the Biblical injunction “they have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind”. History is replete with instances of the consequences of one’s karmas (both of individuals and nations) visiting one in this rather than in a future life. The eternal wonder is that this unpleasant truth does not cause man to ponder over his actions. Events from the not so distant past down to the present day illustrate man’s continued myopic vision.

We can start with the two major totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, the Third Reich of Germany and the Communist Soviet Union. Touted to last a thousand years, the German Reich crawled to its miserable, ignominious end in just over twelve years. Riding to power on the wave of disenchantment of the German people with inflation and unemployment, the Nazi Party, with its openly anti-Semitic approach, capitalised on the weak-kneed approach of European powers to unleash aggression on many of Germany’s smaller neighbours climaxing in the conquest of France in 1940 and the assault on Great Britain. Along with the millions killed in actual combat, there was the horrific genocide involving over six million Jews. The Second World War ended with the devastation of Germany and its division into two countries for the next forty five years. The Soviet Union, founded on the promise of equality for all, witnessed some of the greatest purges of its citizens and the despatch of countless others to concentration camps. The contradictions of an inefficient economic system and an oppressive political system saw the uprooting of the entire Communist edifice in the Soviet Union and its satellite states before the dawn of the twenty first century.

The USA has been no exception to this karmic cycle. Its post-World War II attempts to keep communism at bay and secure the world for Western (read American) capital led to the standoff in Korea and the disastrous misadventures in Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos. Unchastened by this experience, the USA leapt into the fray through its proxies, the Mujahedin and Pakistan, to counter the takeover of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. These Mujahedin were to form the nucleus of the Al Qaeda which took the war into US territory sixty years after Pearl Harbor. Further American adventurism in Iraq destroyed the one regime (of Saddam Hussein) that might have checked the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. With the Arab spring, the path was open for fundamentalism to spread through a number of countries with tottering regimes in the Middle East. In effect, US policy since the Second World War has led it to shoot itself in the foot; the terrible consequences are unfortunately being borne today by the masses of refugees fleeing Syria and other war-torn countries.

Coming to India, we have the Grand Old Party, the Indian National Congress, suffering (and, collaterally, making the nation suffer for) the consequences of one historic blunder after another. The declaration of the Emergency in 1975 saw the suspension of civil liberties and the unchecked use of brute state power against the people, whether in the relocation of people in the name of city beautification or the forced sterilisation campaigns. Given a resounding slap by voters in the 1977 general elections, the Congress showed it had learnt no lessons when it came back to power in 1980. The tolerance of (and tacit support to) ethnic divisions for narrow electoral gains saw the horrific Nellie massacre of 1983 in Assam and Operation Blue Star in 1984. Dabbling in ethnic quarrels exposed India to domestic terrorism with the assassinations,within seven years, of a Prime Minister and a former Prime Minister. The encouragement by the Congress of the Shiv Sena in the 1960s to check the influence of the leftist trade union movement in Mumbai nourished the growing “Tiger”. So much so that the Shiv Sena and its allies have controlled the cash-rich Mumbai Municipal Corporation for most of the past forty years. The Congress gave yet another chance of grabbing power to the Shiv Sena and its allies when it mishandled the 1993 Mumbai riots; coupled with internecine warfare within the Congress, the Shiv Sena and its allies were able to capture power in Maharashtra in 1995. Just four years of this government and the voter was ready to give another chance to a squabbling Congress-Nationalist Congress Party alliance. Fifteen years further down the road, this alliance, with its inept governance, blew its chances yet again and handed a major state to its opponents on a platter.

All these events are warning signs for practitioners of political power today but they continue to blithely ignore the lessons of history. The BJP came to power in 2014 on the electoral plank of “Sabka saath, sabka vikas” (with the cooperation of all, for the development of all). Unfortunately, its 16-month tenure has been marked by growing tensions between religious communities and a deep sense of insecurity in minorities. The utterances and actions of members of the ruling dispensation have emboldened fringe groups to take the law into their own hands, whether it be the murder of rationalists, the lynching at Dadri or the recent shenanigans over Ghulam Ali and Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri in Mumbai. It will be argued that states ruled by different parties are responsible for the protection of their citizens. But when a government at the national level lends support to Orwellian thought-control processes for controlling at least three of the five senses (sight, hearing and taste) of its citizens, it is not surprising that impressionable sections of the majority community work out their perceived grievances and frustrations on those who are not seen as part of their fraternity. Irresponsible and incendiary statements at election time and at emotionally surcharged moments only add fuel to the fire.

This column is tired of reiterating that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it. Yet, the aspirations of the aam aurat/aadmi – jobs, houses, food – are lost sight of in the preoccupation with rewriting history and dictating moral codes to the population at large. India’s youth is far more concerned with a resplendent future than with a glorious past. Agitating emotive issues to win electoral support can take a political party only so far. As matters stand, the Dadri incident may well cost the BJP dear in the ongoing Bihar elections. If it does not recast its image as a right of centre party with a plural approach to diversity, it may find the going tough in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh elections. And come 2019, we may see the Indian voter, with her dreams of achche din (good days) not realised, trudging to the polling booth echoing the immortal words of Faiz Ahmed Faiz:

This stain-covered daybreak, this night-bitten dawn,

This is not that dawn of which there was expectation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 Oct

Land Acquisition – Much Ado About Nothing

Posted by vramani in political economy, public policy. Tagged: , , .

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but with a whimper.

(T. S. Eliot: The Hollow Men)

This famous poem, which ends with the above quoted lines, is linked to a number of overlapping themes. The entire drama covering the period from the introduction of the amendments in end 2014 to the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (LARR Act 2013) through an ordinance, to the “sound and fury” over its introduction in Parliament as a Bill in 2015 (LARR Bill 2015), down to its final quiet burial in the end of August 2015 reminded me of this piece of 20th century literature. What was touted to be a grand effort at reform in making land available for the nascent “Make in India” industries and the infrastructure to support rapid industrialisation came a cropper in the face of a politically motivated, generally ill-informed campaign to preserve the “pristine” nature of the LARR Act 2013 which the LARR Bill 2015 sought to amend. After the heat and dust of the battle settled, there was only one clear loser — the average Indian citizen who hoped for better amenities, job opportunities and an improved standard of living.

What was the LARR Bill 2015 trying to do that so aroused the ire of the supporters of the LARR Act 2013? The Amendment Bill sought to exempt certain categories of projects from the social impact assessment and public consent provisions, including public private partnership infrastructure projects on lands owned by the government, going beyond the exemption from public consent already available in the LARR Act 2013 to projects of the government, its public sector undertakings and other entities essentially in the public sphere. There was no dilution of any of the provisions relating to compensation or resettlement & rehabilitation. This makes the defensiveness of the government of the day about the LARR Bill 2015 all the more inexplicable; it dissimulated where it should have unequivocally come out with a confident statement about its commitment to improving the lot of India’s citizens. In any case, as has been pointed out by Sanjoy Chakravorty (A Lot of Scepticism and Some Hope: Economic & Political Weekly, 8 October 2011), about 90 percent of land acquisition and displacement of people has been occasioned by government projects, so it is rather strange that an impression has been created that the LARR Bill 2015 is intended to further private corporate interests. A lot of hullaballoo has been created around non-issues to score political points and the likely damage to India’s long-term growth prospects by a seriously flawed Act has not been analysed or debated.

The manner of calculation of compensation has major implications for the economic viability of projects requiring acquisition of land, apart from its implications for the distortion of already imperfect land markets. Land valuation at four times the market (or consented) price, for rural areas, and twice for urban areas has no rationale. This will sharply raise project costs and also create a piquant situation in peri-urban areas, with demands for compensation as in rural areas impacting the economics of urban and industrial development in the peripheral areas of cities. The requirement for the social impact assessment to be carried out before the preliminary notification of the land is incomprehensible; any administrator connected with land acquisition will tell you that this will immediately lead to land speculation in those areas. Bengaluru witnessed this phenomenon when land was to be acquired for the NICE corridor road on its fringes; the Vijayawada-Guntur belt is also experiencing sharp escalations in land prices with the forthcoming development of the capital city for the new state of Andhra Pradesh. Inordinately high land cost will act as a dampener for land acquisition and will also exert upward pressure on prices of land privately acquired.

Multiple layers of bureaucracy will have an adverse impact on prompt acquisition. A potential investor will have to run the gamut of a social impact assessment, getting public consent, fixation of land compensation and approval of the resettlement and rehabilitation package before getting possession of the land for actual construction. This is, of course, presuming that environmental clearances and approval of the District Collector for conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural use are forthcoming in a timely manner and that the proceedings do not get bogged down due to, firstly, lack of public consent and, secondly, demands for enhanced compensation and other contentious issues to be decided by the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Authority set up under Section 51 of the LARR Act 2013. Recourse to other legal procedures (e.g. writ petitions) by interested parties to secure higher compensation or to contest the need for acquisition can further delay matters. Even with an outmoded Act like the Land Acquisition Act 1894, with its anti-landowner bias, it took anywhere up to several years for land to actually come into the possession of the acquirer. The LARR Act 2013 is likely to further increase this period, leading to project cost escalations.

Historically, industrialisation has proceeded based on the conversion of land from agricultural to nonagricultural use and on the ability of the agricultural sector to feed a population increasingly dependent on off-farm employment. This process has not been without its share of conflict, as brought out by Richard Hofstadter in his seminal book “The Age of Reform (1955)” where he describes the agrarian revolt of the 1890s in the USA and the attempts to harness it for political purposes. Not only did these agrarian movements fail to take off, quite to the contrary, as Hofstadter puts it “…the prosperity of the commercial farmers was achieved not only in spite of but in good part because of the rise of American industry and the American city“. As urban demand for food grew, agricultural prices registered a significant upturn. Improved efficiency in and mechanisation of farming operations, coupled with finance and transportation arrangements, contributed to a rise in farm incomes. At the same time, the excess rural population found employment opportunities in the cities. State support and guidance on farm produce distribution issues and the rapid growth of farmers’ cooperatives (in the areas of credit, mutual insurance, public utilities, marketing and purchasing) reduced the exactions of middlemen and diverted more income into the pockets of farmers.

What is truly unfortunate about the entire land acquisition mess is the ill-conceived effort to create a hostile relationship between the agricultural sector and the industrial/infrastructure sectors. On the one hand, there has never been a holistic approach of government to tackling issues from the farm to the table, nor has there been any concerted effort by organised farm lobbies to get government to invest in measures designed to enhance agricultural productivity and incomes. The result, with a large population still dependent on agriculture for survival, has been increasing pressure on land and temporary or permanent migration to urban settlements. With greater access to education and growing aspirations, the younger generation seeks a shift from an unviable life in agriculture. The distressing occurrence of farmer suicides is testimony to the failure of government to address farm issues, be they irrigation, crop insurance, productivity or remunerative markets. Archaic labour laws and an entrepreneur-unfriendly business environment have limited job creation in industry and related ancillary services. When 3 million people, many of them graduates, apply for a few hundred jobs as peons in government, something is definitely horribly wrong. And yet, the present debate on land acquisition procedures has not sought to focus on what could be done to ease the availability of land for industrial growth while also protecting the interests of the agricultural community. One interesting suggestion from Maitreesh Ghatak and Parikshit Ghosh (The Land Acquisition Bill: A Critique and a Proposal, Economic and Political Weekly, 8 October 2011) is to allow the land transfer price to be determined through an auction process rather than rely on bureaucratic determination through generally flawed sales statistics. Displaced farmers would be given the option to receive compensation either in cash or in the form of land. The government would buy more land than needed for the project to enable offer of land outside the area acquired for the project to those farmers who want land in return for land surrendered. This approach has the advantage of allowing the farmer to quote his consent price, which will probably reduce subsequent litigation for enhanced compensation. I am not advocating this or any other specific measure; what I seek to highlight is that there has been no informed debate on possible solutions that meet the needs of industry for land while also giving farmers a fair deal.

In fact, the entire brouhaha is reminiscent of the lines of another famous poet, W. B. Yeats “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity“. A law which was passed in a spirit of misguided sympathy for the farmer but is likely to severely impede economic development did not come up for a sorely needed review. The government of the day sought cosmetic changes in the law but, faced with an obstructive opposition in Parliament, meekly capitulated, consoling itself with the reflection that, since land acquisition is a concurrent subject under the Constitution of India, state governments can pass their own laws to simplify and speed up the land acquisition process. In that case, no purpose is served by Section 107 in the LARR Act 2013 which only permits such legislation by state governments as provides more favourable terms in respect of compensation and rehabilitation and resettlement provisions; it is anyhow unlikely that any state government will enact legislation that is seen as more onerous than the Central law, since this gives its opponents a ready political handle to beat it with.

We are, therefore, in a situation where a neo-Luddite combination of professional politicians and city-bred intellectuals, both without exposure to the realities of the farming sector, are effectively sealing opportunities for a large agricultural population to benefit from industrialisation. Adding to land market rigidities, while also stumbling on labour market reforms and doing little to improve the ease of doing business (best exemplified by the flip-flops on the Goods and Services Tax legislation), are hardly the best recipes to enthuse private Indian and foreign investors. The brunt of this economic obtuseness and political opportunism will, as always, be borne by the long suffering masses of India.

 

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