Dummies at play

Ramchandra Guha laments the ‘absence of vigorous, credible, state-level leaders’ at the Congress party:

"Things were once otherwise. In Jawaharlal Nehru’s time, the Congress had strong, capable, and focused CMs — among them S Nijalingappa in Karnataka (then known as Mysore), K Kamaraj in Tamil Nadu (then Madras), BC Roy in West Bengal, and YB Chavan in Maharashtra. They successfully won elections and ran governments.

Now, in states like Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh, there is no one, identifiable, Congress leader. Five or six senior men jostle for position, their precedence varying from month to month depending on the winks and nods of the high command. In other states the situation is even more dire."

It is one of the ever-lasting ironies of Indian politics that the Congress party, run in an autocratic and presidential manner at the center, prevents strong leaders at the state level. This was one of Indira Gandhi’s Big Ideas: to plant mediocre dummies at the state level. The idea was a runaway success. The senior  Mrs. Gandhi started her career pitted against formidable leaders at the union and the state level. At her demise, no one in the party dared oppose her or her son.

Mrs. Sonia Gandhi’s Big Idea has been to copy her mother-in-law and at the center as well: not even Dr. Singh’s greatest admirers can charge him of being strong-willed (except during the passage of the Nuclear deal) . Aso, Mrs. Gandhi seems intent packing the union government with ordinary, pedestrian journeymen like Vilasrao Deshmukh, Sushil Kumar Shinde, CP Joshi and MS Gill. Mr. Guha’s comment thus applies at the center as well.

PS: Prem Shankar Jha argues that we must judge Dr. Singh ‘not by what he has been saying but by what he has done’. Unfortunately he builds his case by citing token actions, like the arrest of A Raja, and a questioning of the junior Ambani. With the Supreme Court’s action yesterday striking down the appointment of the CVC, the PM’s position has further weakened. Tokenism won’t help here.

(Ramchandra Guha article link via Churmuri).

Constituencies as family heirloom

I am eagerly waiting for Patrick French’s new book on post-Independence India (and the early reviews are encouraging). From an excerpt in Outlook magazine, it appears that one important theme in the book is the hereditary nature of Indian politics. We’ve seen countless examples in the recent past about how Indian politicians promote their offspring, but this report, compiled by Mr. French and his associates, shows how deep the malaise goes. Some highlights:

•          68% of Indian MPs under the age of forty come from political families
•           28% of Indian MPs come from political families
•           100% of Indian MPs below the age of thirty are from political families
•           70% of women MPs come from political families

It’s worse when it comes to start-ups founded by regional satraps. The Nationalist Congress party, backed by allegedly India’s biggest venture capitalist Sharad Pawar, has seven (out of nice) MPs that have entered politics through family connections. All five MPs of the RLD, promoted by politician-comedian Lalu Prasad, come from political families.

Mr. French and his associates have also provided the dataset that lists every Indian MP (from the Lok Sabha), details like his/her age, sex, political background and notes. The dataset is worth reading and analyzing in its entirety, and we hope to bring you more details/comments in the coming weeks.

Mr. French also had this to say when asked whether Indian politics would become completely hereditary:

“I was quite surprised by the results when I did that survey of the Lok Sabha. I did not expect the data to be so overwhelming—the  fact that, for example, every MP under the age of 30 is hereditary. I don’t think it’s a bad thing having political families in any democracy. The problem really is the scale of what is happening. For instance, the quite inspiring grassroots leaders who came up in the past—certainly in the Congress—would have no chance of winning a ticket for a Lok Sabha seat now. You have this ironic situation where democracy is deeply entrenched and yet, at the same time, for the top reaches of certain parties, you have to be the son or daughter of an existing leader in order to get anywhere.”

Personally, though I am amused by the extent of the rot, I am not shocked. The lines of mafia, business and politics have blurred in the past two decades, and the first two professions run deeply in families, so it’s no surprise that our politicians would emulate the ‘best practices’ from these. A vast majority of Indian politicians have interests in real-estate, which necessitates some allegiance to organized crime.  Most of our successful politicians also run business empires, and it is natural that to protect the interests of the family, the heirlooms like parliamentary constituencies are passed on: it’s part of the family business, and our politicians are at least being good fathers. (For instance, who can fault Karunanidhi for being a bad father? Mr. Karunanidhi has fathered several children from three wives, and has settled for nothing but the best for them: one he made a Union Fertilizers minister, another a deputy CM, yet one another a Rajya Sabha MP. Even distant relatives like grand-nephews get to become cabinet ministers and run large TV networks.)

The other reason is India’s rapid journey towards retracing its roots, such as Feudalism. But more on that later.

Look who has spoken

After weeks of silence on the 2G scam, during which he once again let the policy go adrift and kept the country in the dark, the Prime Minister has spoken:

“I wish to state categorically that I have nothing to hide from the public at large and as a proof of my bona fides, I intend to write to chairman of the PAC that I shall be happy to appear before the PAC if it chooses to ask me to do so. I sincerely believe that like Caesar’s wife, the Prime Minister should be above suspicion.”

Obviously Dr. Singh had to invoke Caesar’s wife and not Rama’s wife Sita, as Lord Ram belongs to staunch-rivals, the BJP. Far from being a masterstroke (as the Congress inner circle believes), the statement further confirms the public’s long-confirmed suspicion that the thugs behind the scam will be free:

a) By focusing the attention on himself, the PM appears to deflect the spotlight from A Raja and the DMK

b) By categorically denying the opposition’s demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee, the PM has paved the way for a further deadlock of the parliament.

The second bullet point worries me. The parliament’s next session in the budget session, and it would be interesting if the Government can get the finance bill through. The CAG report on the CWG fiasco is also expected by then, and the opposition is sure to step up the pressure for the JPC. Something has to give in – the Prime Minister might simply snap and resign, and the country must brace itself for a shock mid-term poll.

As an aside, it is interesting to see how participants of a social institution work in tandem to destroy its credibility. The repeated stalling of the business of the house serves no one’s interest, save the parliamentarians: the allowances and the goodies keep on coming, without any accountability. The only parallel I could think of was sportspeople fixing matches and breaking apart the sanctity of the sport – if you are a Pakistani cricketer, there’s a fat chance you’d be prosecuted for your crimes.

Vilasrao's latest scandal

Quiz: A distressed farmer in Vidarbha approaches a loan shark for a loan. The shark loans the amount to the farmer at the monthly interest rate of 10 per cent. Later, the loan shark and his goons harass the farmer for loan repayment. Two other farmers who’ve taken loans from this shark commit suicide. So does the a daughter of another farmer, unable to bear the consequences when her father could not pay the loan. When the said farmer files an FIR against the loan shark, against whom FIRs are already registered, what do you expect? (Here’s a hint you don’t need: the loan shark’s son is an MLA at the Maharashtra state assembly).

Obviously you expect the police to go easy on the loan shark, perhaps harass the farmers for filing the complaints. This is exactly what happened, with the blessings of Vilasrao Deshmukh, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. When the farmer approached the High Court, the court slapped a INR 25,000 fine on the state government. As the Maharashtra state government’s primary duty is towards land-grabbers, builders and loan-sharks, it challenged the fine. Overturning the fine and slapping a INR ten lakh fine on the government, the Supreme Court said:

“The camouflage of sophistry used by Vilasrao Deshmukh in the instructions given by him and the affidavit filed in this court is clearly misleading. The message to the authorities was loud and clear i.e. they were not to take the complaints against the Sananda family seriously and not to proceed against them.

…

Cases involving pervasive misuse of public office for private gains, which have come to light in the last few decades, tend to shake people’s confidence and one is constrained to think that India has freed itself from British colonialism only to come in the grip of a new class which tries to rule by the same colonial principles.”

How would you expect Mr. Deshmukh to react? The last time he was compelled to react to a public event was after the 26/11 attack on Mumbai, when Mr. Deshmukh was the serving Chief Minister. His reaction then was memorable: as a tour-guide, he accompanied the film-maker Ramgopal Verma to one of the disaster sites, to explain the workings of the attack. No such tours are expected (dying farmers are less cinematographic then terrorist attacks). So Mr. Deshmukh has stuck to the usual: he has dismissed calls for his resignation, terming “These are political things.”

PS: The joker even asked the corporate sector to understand the need for ‘adherence to good corporate governance practices and increased sensitivity to social obligations.’

Are the American People obsolete?

In a provocative essay, Michael Lind wonders whether the American rich need, among other things, the American markets and American labor.

“Offshoring and immigration, then, are severing the link between the fate of most Americans and the fate of the American rich. A member of the elite can make money from factories in China that sell to consumers in India, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country. With a foreign workforce for the corporations policed by brutal autocracies and non-voting immigrant servants in the U.S., the only thing missing is a non-voting immigrant mercenary army, whose legions can be deployed in foreign wars without creating grieving parents, widows and children who vote in American elections.

If the American rich increasingly do not depend for their wealth on American workers and American consumers or for their safety on American soldiers or police officers, then it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people. The rich don't need the rest anymore.”

While some of Mr. Lind’s arguments feel like satire and some are simply too cynical to warrant a serious discussion, many make sense, especially the one on the lessening importance of American labor, though technology-led innovation is still where the American rich would need the American middle class. Nevertheless, the entire essay is worth reading.

I was wondering how many of these arguments would apply to India. Via gated communities, exclusive schools and foreign hospitals, the Indian rich have successfully insulated themselves from rest of India, but they still need ordinary Indians as protectors (army and the police), the market and a supply of labor. There’s an additional need: since most rich Indians are politicians, or owe their riches to the rent-seeking system our politicians favor, they also need ordinary Indians to vote them (the rich) to power.

One would expect that being elected by the poor would make the rich sensitive to the concerns of the poor, but as the experiences in the past two decades have shown, being elected to power (even to the position of a petty MLA) is a ticket to unimaginable wealth. The Indian democracy thus becomes a system where the poor elect the rich to protect and enhance the interests of the rich.

Do scamsters have it easier now?

The moral worth of a society can be deduced by how it bestows its wealth to its members. Some societies like to think themselves as meritocracies: intelligence, hard-work and ability can get a committed individual far in life. Some, like the tribal societies, are equally-opportunity deniers – no amount of hard work will guarantee a comfortable life, let alone wealth. The India of today fares abysmally on this count. A primary source of wealth in India is rent-seeking.

The Wikipedia entry for rent-seeking seems to have been written keeping India in mind:

“an individual, organization or firm seeks to earn income by capturing economic rent through manipulation or exploitation of the economic or political environment, rather than by earning profits through economic transactions and the production of added wealth.”

Consider the three recent high-profile scams: the CWG mess, the 2G scandal and the land scam in Karnataka. In each of the three cases, the state, or rather the Mafioso who adorn the ministries and the secretariats, controls the access to rare resources: there’s only one instance of the Commonwealth Games in decades; the spectrum is owned by the people of India and hence its elected government; the chief Minister has tremendous discretionary powers to allocate land. Each of the beneficiaries of these scams had it easy: once they made it to the position (to be fair, this involves lot of struggle and effort) that enabled them to arbitrate, they could go for the kill.

Contrasting these scams with the scams from the yesteryears fills me with nostalgia. Consider three examples from 1992-2002: the Fodder Scam, the Tehelka scandal and the Harshad Mehta securities scam. In each of these three illustrious, path-breaking scams, there was lot of hard-work for the scamsters to do. In the fodder scam, for instance, the mafia (the involved politicians and the administrators) had to create records of thousands of livestock and maintain elaborate records to divert the funds marked for the fodder and the medicines. The defense officers in the Tehelka scandal had to elaborately justify their proposed purchasing decisions. Harshad Mehta had stupendous knowledge of the stock market and was a maverick trader. Compared to these stalwarts, today’s Mafioso are novices. (I can picture Harshad Mehta, having his way out of hell into heaven, muttering at A. Raja: "all you could arrange was a mere 1.76 lakh crores?")

The quality of scamsters, much like moral universe India inhabits today, has deteriorated. Our Mafia need increasingly lesser skills to acquire wealth, and increasingly, winning a biological lottery in enough, as Jagadish, the son of the disgraced ex-Karnataka IT minister Katta Naidu demonstrates, if you are hatched from an egg that is fertilized by an Indian politician’s sperm, you have a much higher chance to be filthy rich. Why struggle with innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity when being a minister or an administrator can fetch you millions a year?