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.

In Flux: The Indian Narrative

A recently released Transparency International survey lists India as the fourth most corrupt country in the World. Confirming what we always suspected, the poll states that “In Afghanistan, Nigeria, Iraq and India more than 50% of people said they had paid a bribe in the past year”.

This, along with the second tranche of tapes containing the conversations from the lady who runs our banana republic, reminded me how much the Indian narrative has changed in the past twenty years. I can chart the following shifts in the Indian Narrative:

a) When Dr. Manmohan Singh and Narsimha Rao began first hesitant steps towards liberalization, the consensus was that India was fast degenerating, and perhaps would trace the steps of Russia and Argentina in being unable to manage its finances.

b) The political instability of 1996-1999, and the ostracization by the World community after the nuclear explosions of 1998, made many wonder whether India would veer back towards the ‘Hindu rate of growth’.

c) The ‘India Shining’ years of 2000-2004 and the near-double digit growth that occurred during the early years of UPA-1, made many believe that India was gradually reclaiming its true place in the World order, that of a superpower. The nuclear deal with the US cemented this belief, along with the global acquisitions done by the companies from the Tata group and the Mittals

.

Today, however, the narrative has rapidly changed again. India seems to be unraveling and slipping in a quagmire of corruption. Many of us today perceive India as a fundamentally flawed, corrupt society that is run by mostly incompetent and corrupt politicians to serve and protect the interests of crony and rent-seeking capitalists, a society that has forgotten that an overwhelming majority (~77% as per some estimates) survives on less than twenty rupees (~40 USD cents) per day, and a society that lives in the most dangerous parts of the World and continues to ignore deep-seated internal security problems.

Given the arrow of history, I am sure this narrative would change again – I only hope things don’t get worse from here.

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?

A Turing test for Sharad pawar

Computer programmers will be familiar with the Turing test, a device to test a machine’s intelligence. As per Wikipedia:

“A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.”

One can devise a similar test for Sharad Pawar, allegedly India’s agriculture and food minister. During his disastrous career as the agriculture and food minister, lakhs of farmers – mostly in his own home state of Maharashtra – have committed suicide; and food prices have repeatedly breached all-time highs. Yet, Mr. Pawar prefers to remain silent. P. Sainath, rural-affairs editor for ‘The Hindu’, says:

“Sharad Pawar has never once moved to see that the National Farmers Commission Reports are placed in parliament for discussion and for adoption as policy, nothing. Sharad Pawar has not visited one house hold where a farmer has committed suicide. He is the agriculture minister. But he has been to every IPL, final, semi final, IPL 1, IPL 2 , he went to Durban to attend but he has not been in his home state of Maharashtra ,he has not visited the house hold of a farmer who was committed suicide, these are the sort of people who run our country. “

Then what makes Mr. Pawar speak? How do we know that Mr. Pawar feels responsible for any topic? If a farmer dying every half an hour doesn’t compel him to act, what will? If prices of essential commodities double in three years coaxes a statement to the effect that ‘we expect prices to rise even more’, what will? Is there an issue that can make the Baramati Boss talk?

We now have an answer: Lavasa. Mr. Pawar’s malleable and ultra-sensitive heart bleeds for the scam-embattled project. Mr. Pawar has recently come out against the environment minister jairam Ramesh’s directive asking the Lavasa corporation to stop constuction work.

So we now have a Turing test for Sharad Pawar: our alleged agriculture minister might be slient on topics of national importance, and thus rsemble a mue automaton, but attack one of his myriad business intersts, and the NCP supremo will sing.

Perhaps the farmers of Vidarbha must immoalte themselves in Lavasa. During the fourth edition of IPL.

regards,

- Bhushan.

Two recent articles by Vinay Hardikar

My co-blogger, Vinay Hardikar, has been in fine form recently, turing out two excellent pieces for the Marathi weekly Sadhana. In the first article, he provides an incisive commentary on 'Hindu', a novel by Bhalchandra Nemade. This is the best review of 'Hindu' that I've read so far. (I'll link to the piece once Sadhana makes it available online).

Second, in the Diwali 2010 edition of Sadhana, he recounts his experiences with four famed Marathi socialist activists: Baba Amte, G P Pradhan, Vasant bapat and Yadunath Thatte. Read the piece here - the last article in the issue.