Last week I called up a friend. She was on the train from Bangalore to Chennai. I was surprised. She is not the kind of person who travels by train. I asked her how long the train journey takes. Four and a half hours, she replied. So why are you taking a train when you are so busy and time is so important, I asked. Simple, she said. “It takes an hour and a half from my office to Bangalore airport. Then there is check-in, security checks, a delayed take-off because the plane arrived late, more time on the tarmac while waiting for clearance from Air Traffic Control, and then a 45-minute flight. I found it quicker to take a train. There is less stress, minimal turbulence, and I can read a book!”
This is really the story of India, and of countless surveys and papers in which Elephant India is compared with Tiger China. I have travelled to nearly every country in Asia and their airports always made me cringe in shame at the memory of Delhi or Mumbai. Changi, Chep Lak Kok, Incheon, Bangkok, Narita, Kansai, Beijing, Shanghai, Jakarta, Lahore – even Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh – all made me wish I could return to Delhi and not have to descend dark stairs, get into a jerky bus, and enter a terminal building with a smelly entranceway to wait for baggage that is brought in on clanking trailers and thrown roughly on a creaky old belt by tired men.
Just before the elections, as my plane circled Delhi, I was struck by how similar our politics and our state-owned airline are. "We know you have a choice of other airlines (parties) but we appreciate your custom (votes)". Ageing aircraft (infrastructure) crewed by ageing staff (politicians). Endlessly stacked-up planes waiting for permission to land ... don't they conjure up a picture of endless project delays? "Don't blame us, blame the weather/air traffic control/technical faults/late arrival of our own plane" sound so much like "Don't blame us, blame our coalition partners/the opposition/the global economy/the ISI/late arrival of the monsoon".
It costs more to fly from Delhi to Kerala than to Singapore, but that's not our fault -- look at how our nasty trade partners are trying to get us to lower our tariffs and taxes so they can fill our skies with their planes. Lost baggage (promises)? Not our fault again -- it's our alliance partners. Please continue to give us your business (votes) -- we promise things will get better once we have that extra runway (a few more parliament seats). Coming off my plane, exhausted and wrung-out, I saw signs that promised a better airport by next year. Where would we be if we had not offered to host the Commonwealth Games?
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has referred constantly to the need for more infrastructure to lift India out of the seven to eight percent growth rut. If India does not grow at a steady double-digit rate over the next decade, the elephant will stumble, and fall to its knees. Last week President Pratibha Patil referred to infrastructure as one of the key goals of the new government: “(Attention to recession-affected sectors) must be accompanied by measures to achieve a countercyclical expansion in public investment in infrastructure sectors including public-private partnerships in these sectors. Financing the investment will be a critical constraint and my Government is determined to ensure that innovative steps are taken in this area, consistent with a medium-term strategy of prudent fiscal management.”
Back in February, India’s interim budget said 50 new infrastructure projects worth Rs 67,700 crore ($14.5 billion) had been approved, and the India Infrastructure Finance Company, which will finance 60 percent of commercial loans in critical public-private partnerships, plans to raise Rs 30,000 crore ($6.8 billion) during the current fiscal year ending March 2010.
It helps if you are a Congress government with a clutch of Nehru-Gandhi names to christen every new populist spending plan. We have the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, which has spent over Rs 50,000 crore ($10.6 billion) over the past four years on the “urban poor”. Under the Indira Awas Yojana, the government has built more than six million homes for rural poor. And now, President Patil has announced the Rajiv Awas Yojana, which aims to build a “slum free” India for the 62 million people living in shanties in the nation’s cities.
All these schemes come at a steep price. There was a huge surge in what can only be described as election-year fiscal profligacy in 2008/9. The government’s revenue deficit shot up to 4.4 percent of GDP against an estimated 1.0 percent – a four-fold increase. The fiscal deficit has alarmingly rocketed to Rs 326,515 crore ($69.5 billion) or 6 percent of GDP from the original estimate of 2.5 percent. In ordinary language, the Indian government was printing money – literally. And Reserve Bank of India figures bear this out. In the week ended May 29, currency in circulation totalled Rs 709,364 crore ($150.9 billion), a rise of Rs 96,699 crore ($20.6 billion) over a year earlier.
But what about the poor in India, the target of all this largesse? Are the country’s 1.2 billion people truly moving towards economic equity? In its Global Economic Prospects 2009 report last December, the World Bank noted that rising food prices were hitting the poor hardest. In urban areas in South Asia, it warned, poverty levels had gone up by as much as 4.4 percentage points – the highest in the developing world.
Already, 32.3 percent of the urban population and 43.3 percent of the rural population in South Asia is poor, that is, living at or below the “poverty benchmark” of 1.25 U.S. dollars (less than 60 rupees) a day. This is only slightly better than Sub-Saharan Africa. “Capital inflows have diminished, contributing to falloff in investment growth, particularly in India,” the World Bank said in a March 2009 update. “Fiscal support for slowing economies may face constraints in already quite high budget deficits.”
In her speech to Parliament last week, President Patil said new targets will soon be set for rural electrification by the new government. That will be of some consolation to Ramakanta Sethi, a Dalit boy from the fishing village of Kendrapara in Orissa. Ramakanta, who herded cattle during the day, did exceedingly well in his high school examination, studying at night with only a kerosene lantern for light. When Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, re-elected last month with a landslide majority on a good-performance ticket, congratulated Ramakanta on his success, embarrassed officials promised to make amends for the darkness in Kendrapara. Electrifying news indeed.
(This appeared in the Khaleej Times on June 9, 2009)
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Above 262 Seats, There is No Morality (31 May 2009)
If you wrapped your head in a piece of cloth to ward off the baking heat, and you closed your eyes and shut your ears to the news as it broke, you could feel yourself spinning around in a time machine last week.
There they were, the cavalcades of satraps and tributaries, bearing incense and myrrh and marigolds and shopping lists, descending on the Congress’s “war room” and 7 Race Course Road – how appropriate an address for horse-trading! – to wheedle and whinge and while away the long hours while the royals decided who would be seated in their durbar. Was this any different from the Prince of Wales’s visit just over a century ago when India’s princelings flocked to Delhi to pay tribute to their future emperor? How deliciously feudal we are, how supremely inured to the trappings of royalty or dynasty. Whether it is the house of Bolangir, or the scion of Gwalior, or the royal house of Srinagar’s Gupkar Road – papa and son Abdullah and son-in-law Sachin Pilot, himself from the Gurjjars’ post-Emergency ruling clan, all huggle-muggle in a “Kodak moment” – today’s Congress Party, which bills itself as the world’s largest democratic party, is a long, long way from getting there. You don’t need to stand for any election to make it to a top party post. And you know the long roll-call of famous progeny who will grace the Treasury benches. There are quite a few in the Opposition ranks, too, but don’t for a moment assume that this means we have a young Lok Sabha. Although there are 79 MPs under the age of 40, the average age of this Lower House is 53.03 years – this is older than the 14th Lok Sabha and much older than our very first parliament in 1952 where the average age was 46.5 years.
But what about the Aam Admi, the bemused hero of Laxman’s cartoons, the speck in the ocean of 417 million Indians who actually voted this time? First of all, the media, who (again) got it wrong in their opinion and exit polls and exhibited their immaturity and illiteracy, actually have not managed to analyse why voters behaved the way they did. At a very broad level, the average voter in large swathes of our nation still reacts in a visceral manner to what she hears. That message may be wrapped in a wad of currency, or address basic fears about a livelihood, food to eat, clean water, or decent roads. Why, most of the newly-minted MPs would have been hard put to even spell the names of their constituencies before this election. Ajay Maken boasted that he had visited his New Delhi constituency – where he lives – 200 times since 2007. Most of us ordinary citizens visit our constituencies, where we live, at least twice every day.
Second, the Common Man is tired of blatant and primitive appeals to caste and religion. That is why the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Bahujan Samaj Party, and yes, even the Bharatiya Janata Party have been administered a very big punch in the solar plexus. Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar, Orissa, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi prove that just trying to run a half-good government that is not nakedly corrupt can reap big rewards.
And finally, contrary to early euphoria about the return of the national parties and the decimation of regional fiefdoms, the numbers tell a different story. The combined vote share of the Congress and the BJP actually fell from the 2004 election, and the vote share of the regional parties stayed nearly the same at about 30 percent. Yes, the BSP, the RJD, and others of their ilk have been forced to offer “unconditional outside support” (see satrap above) but for the UPA, it is like going to sleep every night with your head resting on a basket of cobras.
A hung parliament it was not, but creating a new government took quite a while. It is fascinating, even for us politics-obsessed Indians, to watch the process. After all, Manmohan Singh’s cabinet has 78 ministers, ministers of state with independent charge, and junior ministers of state, which means every third member of the UPA in the Lok Sabha is a minister. Not very long odds. The portfolios were also largely unsurprising. None of the top posts went to newcomers. There were a few stabs at imagination: Kamal Nath got road transport and highways, Veerappa Moily got law, and the irrepressible Farooq Abdullah got new and renewable energy. But did it set off a frisson up the nation’s spine? You tell me.
And down south, while Andhra Pradesh sulked at not getting more ministerial posts despite giving the Congress its single largest chunk of 33 MPs from any one state, dynasty-building was going in apace in neighbouring Tamil Nadu. One day after his older son Azhagiri was named a minister in Delhi, Tamil Nadu chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi named his second son his deputy and heir apparent. You’ve got to expect some drama in a state that has politicians with names like Stalin, Napoleon and Tagore.
Way off in the Sunderbans, Cyclone Aila caused death, destruction and destitution. People had no water or food for days. But it was point-scoring time again, and Mamata Banerjee and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee wanted to be sure we knew it was a national calamity.
In 1996, as a few Indian climbers lay dying on the upper reaches of Everest, they were ignored by a group of Japanese summiteers. There was a huge uproar about why the stricken men had not been offered oxygen and a lifeline. In India’s politics, getting to exercise power is getting to the top of the world, and it takes everything you have. “Above 8,000 metres there is no morality,” one Everest climber said. So brutal, and yet so true.
(This piece appeared in Khaleej Times on June 3, 2009)
There they were, the cavalcades of satraps and tributaries, bearing incense and myrrh and marigolds and shopping lists, descending on the Congress’s “war room” and 7 Race Course Road – how appropriate an address for horse-trading! – to wheedle and whinge and while away the long hours while the royals decided who would be seated in their durbar. Was this any different from the Prince of Wales’s visit just over a century ago when India’s princelings flocked to Delhi to pay tribute to their future emperor? How deliciously feudal we are, how supremely inured to the trappings of royalty or dynasty. Whether it is the house of Bolangir, or the scion of Gwalior, or the royal house of Srinagar’s Gupkar Road – papa and son Abdullah and son-in-law Sachin Pilot, himself from the Gurjjars’ post-Emergency ruling clan, all huggle-muggle in a “Kodak moment” – today’s Congress Party, which bills itself as the world’s largest democratic party, is a long, long way from getting there. You don’t need to stand for any election to make it to a top party post. And you know the long roll-call of famous progeny who will grace the Treasury benches. There are quite a few in the Opposition ranks, too, but don’t for a moment assume that this means we have a young Lok Sabha. Although there are 79 MPs under the age of 40, the average age of this Lower House is 53.03 years – this is older than the 14th Lok Sabha and much older than our very first parliament in 1952 where the average age was 46.5 years.
But what about the Aam Admi, the bemused hero of Laxman’s cartoons, the speck in the ocean of 417 million Indians who actually voted this time? First of all, the media, who (again) got it wrong in their opinion and exit polls and exhibited their immaturity and illiteracy, actually have not managed to analyse why voters behaved the way they did. At a very broad level, the average voter in large swathes of our nation still reacts in a visceral manner to what she hears. That message may be wrapped in a wad of currency, or address basic fears about a livelihood, food to eat, clean water, or decent roads. Why, most of the newly-minted MPs would have been hard put to even spell the names of their constituencies before this election. Ajay Maken boasted that he had visited his New Delhi constituency – where he lives – 200 times since 2007. Most of us ordinary citizens visit our constituencies, where we live, at least twice every day.
Second, the Common Man is tired of blatant and primitive appeals to caste and religion. That is why the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Bahujan Samaj Party, and yes, even the Bharatiya Janata Party have been administered a very big punch in the solar plexus. Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar, Orissa, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi prove that just trying to run a half-good government that is not nakedly corrupt can reap big rewards.
And finally, contrary to early euphoria about the return of the national parties and the decimation of regional fiefdoms, the numbers tell a different story. The combined vote share of the Congress and the BJP actually fell from the 2004 election, and the vote share of the regional parties stayed nearly the same at about 30 percent. Yes, the BSP, the RJD, and others of their ilk have been forced to offer “unconditional outside support” (see satrap above) but for the UPA, it is like going to sleep every night with your head resting on a basket of cobras.
A hung parliament it was not, but creating a new government took quite a while. It is fascinating, even for us politics-obsessed Indians, to watch the process. After all, Manmohan Singh’s cabinet has 78 ministers, ministers of state with independent charge, and junior ministers of state, which means every third member of the UPA in the Lok Sabha is a minister. Not very long odds. The portfolios were also largely unsurprising. None of the top posts went to newcomers. There were a few stabs at imagination: Kamal Nath got road transport and highways, Veerappa Moily got law, and the irrepressible Farooq Abdullah got new and renewable energy. But did it set off a frisson up the nation’s spine? You tell me.
And down south, while Andhra Pradesh sulked at not getting more ministerial posts despite giving the Congress its single largest chunk of 33 MPs from any one state, dynasty-building was going in apace in neighbouring Tamil Nadu. One day after his older son Azhagiri was named a minister in Delhi, Tamil Nadu chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi named his second son his deputy and heir apparent. You’ve got to expect some drama in a state that has politicians with names like Stalin, Napoleon and Tagore.
Way off in the Sunderbans, Cyclone Aila caused death, destruction and destitution. People had no water or food for days. But it was point-scoring time again, and Mamata Banerjee and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee wanted to be sure we knew it was a national calamity.
In 1996, as a few Indian climbers lay dying on the upper reaches of Everest, they were ignored by a group of Japanese summiteers. There was a huge uproar about why the stricken men had not been offered oxygen and a lifeline. In India’s politics, getting to exercise power is getting to the top of the world, and it takes everything you have. “Above 8,000 metres there is no morality,” one Everest climber said. So brutal, and yet so true.
(This piece appeared in Khaleej Times on June 3, 2009)
Writhing on The Wall (24 May 2009)
It felt very strange indeed, as if all the gawkers at the zoo were inside the cages, looking expectantly at the monkeys prancing outside. It did not take very long for the chemical rush to the brains of millions of Indian voters after the election results came in on the 16th to subside. Yes, the Congress party had won its best victory since 1991, and yes, it could finally cock a snook at the likes of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav. And yes, it really rubbed the Communists’ noses in the dust kicked up by the nuclear deal with the U.S.
How edifying it was to watch endless footage of India’s first truly Breaking News government’s birth pangs. What prolonged agony – you almost felt like planting a foot on the table, plunging in your forceps, and yanking out the creature -- deformities be damned. Despite those impressive numbers, Congress still needed the tripod of Mamata Banerjee, Sharad Pawar and Muthuvel Karunanidhi to get it to the magic majority figure. How interesting, that both the forever feisty Banerjee, who quit the Congress in 1997 to form Trinamool Congress, and Pawar, who quit the Congress in 1999 because of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin, should now happily sup at the same table as the Gandhis because they want more than anything else to keep the red and saffron hordes at bay.
Mamata has been implacable in her crusade against the Communists, who have fallen to a humiliating 24 nationally, and a crushing 16 in West Bengal from 35 in 2004; in Kerala, of course, the Communists have been wiped out. But is the CPI(M) fazed? Is there going to be a politburo purge? “Those anti-Communist quarters who have been rejoicing at the setbacks suffered by the Left and have written the epitaph of the CPI (M) will be proved completely wrong,” writes Prakash Karat. Indeed, so long as India continues to be home to one-third of our planet’s poor, Karat and his comrades will always see a glow on the horizon.
It will be interesting to watch how Banerjee and her motley crew of 18 MPs rub shoulders with the Treasury benches as economic reform is debated. She has already served notice that – railway minister or not – she will spend a lot of time in West Bengal targeting the Communists. She has said she wants rules for Special Economic Zones reviewed. And Tata Motors, which is fighting with its back to the wall on its ill-advised acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover, will certainly remember Mamatadi fondly for driving its Nano dreams out of Singur.
But to return to the zoo allegory, it is Karunanidhi’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam that did some wonderfully torturous wall-sitting after the election results. Last week in Chennai, the average Tamilian watched, subdued and disembodied, while television screens broadcast numbing and repeated shots of what was purported to be Velupillai Prabhakaran’s corpse on display, and numbing and repeated shots of Karunanidhi and his confidants haggling. It can’t be easy being the paterfamilias if you have three wives, numerous offspring, numerous grand-nephews, and numerous favourites of sundry wives jostling for a piece of the pie in a state that is the same size as Greece. Yes, sometimes you wonder why the Athenians invented democracy.
It was political drama at its most garish and vulgar, complete with endless marigold garlands, sirens, stormy entries and exits, early-morning flights – everything that Chennai’s cardboard cutout culture can teach Delhi.
Here are some facts:
- The DMK and Congress have together won 26 seats, exactly the same number in 2009 as in 2004
- Despite the final battle between the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam raging right through the Indian election, and despite Jayalalithaa playing a last-minute and desperate Eelam card, voters decisively turned their backs on Eelam as an issue. The Pattali Makkal Katchi, in particular, was obliterated.
- Driven by a political machine built over four decades by Kalaignar Karunanidhi, the DMK has put down very deep roots across Tamil Nadu’s countryside, something both the Congress and the AIADMK cannot match.
- Observers noted that the voting percentage shot up dramatically in the final hour of polling, when no-shows will very likely not show up at all. They also noted that the DMK was the only party to set up tables at every polling station to monitor voters. Why is this significant? The DMK knows which buttons to press (see above).
- Everybody – including Comrade Karat – agrees that the money spent on the elections this time was exponential, and unimaginable. Particularly in Tamil Nadu, a very observant foreign diplomat told me, it was a question of the DMK out-spending the AIADMK.
- Why is there such a to-do over the DMK bagging the Communications, IT and Surface Transport portfolios? Why was Manmohan Singh very reluctant at first to re-induct T.R. Baalu and A. Raja? Think mobile phones, think 3G licences, and think the Ram Sethu project where there are mammoth dredging contracts to be loaved and fished. Hopefully you will get your arithmetic right.
By now most of us know that Congress’s huge jump in seats occurred because of a very small two-percentage-point jump in its vote share. If it had not been for Uttar Pradesh, where the party made its most impressive new gains, or Rajasthan, where the Congress flipped the Bharatiya Janata Party on its back, or Andhra Pradesh, where its 33 seats trumped the 29 it won in 2004, there would have been a hung parliament. The BJP has also built on its grassroots success in Karnataka, rising to 19. The Congress numbers in Kerala could be put down to growing rage against the long-incumbent Left parties. It has a job on its hands in rebuilding credibility in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
Indeed, Congress would have continued to be eclipsed even in the Hindi heartland -- it did very poorly in Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh, winning only 4 of 64 seats, and struggled to win 12 in Madhya Pradesh – if it had not been for Uttar Pradesh.
This is no consolation for poor Mulayam and Amar Singh, who barely got seats at the oath-taking ceremony at the presidential palace on the 22nd. The best thing that Mulayam, the Main Man from Mainpuri can do at this point is to be nice to the dozens of senior civil servants, police officers and other factotums who have been very rudely turfed out because Mayawati’s grandeur became truly delusional.
(This piece appeared in Covert magazine of June 1-14, 2009)
How edifying it was to watch endless footage of India’s first truly Breaking News government’s birth pangs. What prolonged agony – you almost felt like planting a foot on the table, plunging in your forceps, and yanking out the creature -- deformities be damned. Despite those impressive numbers, Congress still needed the tripod of Mamata Banerjee, Sharad Pawar and Muthuvel Karunanidhi to get it to the magic majority figure. How interesting, that both the forever feisty Banerjee, who quit the Congress in 1997 to form Trinamool Congress, and Pawar, who quit the Congress in 1999 because of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin, should now happily sup at the same table as the Gandhis because they want more than anything else to keep the red and saffron hordes at bay.
Mamata has been implacable in her crusade against the Communists, who have fallen to a humiliating 24 nationally, and a crushing 16 in West Bengal from 35 in 2004; in Kerala, of course, the Communists have been wiped out. But is the CPI(M) fazed? Is there going to be a politburo purge? “Those anti-Communist quarters who have been rejoicing at the setbacks suffered by the Left and have written the epitaph of the CPI (M) will be proved completely wrong,” writes Prakash Karat. Indeed, so long as India continues to be home to one-third of our planet’s poor, Karat and his comrades will always see a glow on the horizon.
It will be interesting to watch how Banerjee and her motley crew of 18 MPs rub shoulders with the Treasury benches as economic reform is debated. She has already served notice that – railway minister or not – she will spend a lot of time in West Bengal targeting the Communists. She has said she wants rules for Special Economic Zones reviewed. And Tata Motors, which is fighting with its back to the wall on its ill-advised acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover, will certainly remember Mamatadi fondly for driving its Nano dreams out of Singur.
But to return to the zoo allegory, it is Karunanidhi’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam that did some wonderfully torturous wall-sitting after the election results. Last week in Chennai, the average Tamilian watched, subdued and disembodied, while television screens broadcast numbing and repeated shots of what was purported to be Velupillai Prabhakaran’s corpse on display, and numbing and repeated shots of Karunanidhi and his confidants haggling. It can’t be easy being the paterfamilias if you have three wives, numerous offspring, numerous grand-nephews, and numerous favourites of sundry wives jostling for a piece of the pie in a state that is the same size as Greece. Yes, sometimes you wonder why the Athenians invented democracy.
It was political drama at its most garish and vulgar, complete with endless marigold garlands, sirens, stormy entries and exits, early-morning flights – everything that Chennai’s cardboard cutout culture can teach Delhi.
Here are some facts:
- The DMK and Congress have together won 26 seats, exactly the same number in 2009 as in 2004
- Despite the final battle between the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam raging right through the Indian election, and despite Jayalalithaa playing a last-minute and desperate Eelam card, voters decisively turned their backs on Eelam as an issue. The Pattali Makkal Katchi, in particular, was obliterated.
- Driven by a political machine built over four decades by Kalaignar Karunanidhi, the DMK has put down very deep roots across Tamil Nadu’s countryside, something both the Congress and the AIADMK cannot match.
- Observers noted that the voting percentage shot up dramatically in the final hour of polling, when no-shows will very likely not show up at all. They also noted that the DMK was the only party to set up tables at every polling station to monitor voters. Why is this significant? The DMK knows which buttons to press (see above).
- Everybody – including Comrade Karat – agrees that the money spent on the elections this time was exponential, and unimaginable. Particularly in Tamil Nadu, a very observant foreign diplomat told me, it was a question of the DMK out-spending the AIADMK.
- Why is there such a to-do over the DMK bagging the Communications, IT and Surface Transport portfolios? Why was Manmohan Singh very reluctant at first to re-induct T.R. Baalu and A. Raja? Think mobile phones, think 3G licences, and think the Ram Sethu project where there are mammoth dredging contracts to be loaved and fished. Hopefully you will get your arithmetic right.
By now most of us know that Congress’s huge jump in seats occurred because of a very small two-percentage-point jump in its vote share. If it had not been for Uttar Pradesh, where the party made its most impressive new gains, or Rajasthan, where the Congress flipped the Bharatiya Janata Party on its back, or Andhra Pradesh, where its 33 seats trumped the 29 it won in 2004, there would have been a hung parliament. The BJP has also built on its grassroots success in Karnataka, rising to 19. The Congress numbers in Kerala could be put down to growing rage against the long-incumbent Left parties. It has a job on its hands in rebuilding credibility in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
Indeed, Congress would have continued to be eclipsed even in the Hindi heartland -- it did very poorly in Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh, winning only 4 of 64 seats, and struggled to win 12 in Madhya Pradesh – if it had not been for Uttar Pradesh.
This is no consolation for poor Mulayam and Amar Singh, who barely got seats at the oath-taking ceremony at the presidential palace on the 22nd. The best thing that Mulayam, the Main Man from Mainpuri can do at this point is to be nice to the dozens of senior civil servants, police officers and other factotums who have been very rudely turfed out because Mayawati’s grandeur became truly delusional.
(This piece appeared in Covert magazine of June 1-14, 2009)
Putting It All Together Again (17 May 2009)
“India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator,” Winston Churchill said in 1931. At times during this election campaign that description seemed apt.
The surge of collective outrage after the November attacks in Mumbai quickly dissipated in a high-decibel assault of television and radio advertisements, voice and text messages and everything from YouTube to podcasts that painted every politician in the most garishly evil of hues. What else do you expect when you have to woo 714 million voters, many of whom would not even have heard the names of the 1,000 – yes, exactly that number – “registered unrecognised parties” in the field.
And yet, after a long, long time India’s voters have spoken in a clear voice. It is easy to forget, in the tumult and velocity that besiege us, that we teeter on the edge of the first decade of the 21st century. India has just decided to endorse a gentleman prime minister after one of the crudest campaigns in the past 62 years. Kandahar, Kandhamal, Godhra were thrown around in a frenzy of finger-pointing, but the reality is that a huge number of young Indians, 18 to 21, voted for the first time this year and that begins to explain the seismic shift that has occurred.
A few weeks ago, Manmohan Singh listed Naxalism, regionalism, terrorism and communalism as major dangers facing India. He failed to list negativism. Much is being made of the fact that Singh is only the second prime minister since Independence to sail into a second full term in office. Here is a 76-year-old man who speaks in a near-whisper, his heart patched together by much bypass surgery, and yet an electorate that grows younger by the day decides to give him more time to work for a better, more prosperous – and more optimistic – nation. Indians are weary of bad news.
It is no accident that Nitish Kumar in Bihar, Naveen Patnaik in Orissa, and Sheila Dikshit in Delhi have triumphed so spectacularly on a performance-based scorecard. The huge mini-nation of the National Capital Region is crawling with young Biharis who work in a myriad of service jobs – plumbers, electricians, watchmen, drivers. They are all exiles from a failed state, from a region that Lalu Prasad Yadav, feted by business schools for introducing clay tea cups on Indian trains, plunged into near-total darkness. The young man from Champaran who came calling on Saturday saw Nitish’s victory in simple terms. “Bihar had fourteen sugar mills in the past,” he said. “Now there are two. But things are beginning to work. There is light again.” A small irony – Lalu’s election symbol is a “hurricane lamp”. So it is performance that has been rewarded – nowhere more so than in Delhi, where Dikshit now not only is a third-term chief minister but has a 100% sweep of parliamentary seats to burnish her image. And in Orissa, where communal violence appeared to have held Patnaik in a pincer grip last year, the Bharatiya Janata Party has been decisively routed and Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal has won a majority in both the Assembly and parliament elections.
So the only pattern you can see in the election is of hope -- that the global recession will not bite too deep in India, that there will be jobs and income for more people, that universal healthcare and education will begin to glimmer a little brighter on the horizon, that India will take its place as a “soft power” – a concept that Shashi Tharoor is pushing.
The former UN diplomat donned veshthi and angavastram to ride to a decisive victory as a Congress candidate in Thiruvananthapuram. Although he is not, age-wise, a true “digital native”, Tharoor has been adept at using the newest tools of communication. He has regularly transmitted campaign updates from his “TwitterBerry”. “Still sinking in – a majority of over 100,000 votes!” he relayed on Saturday. So Tharoor, and Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, Milind Deora, Sachin Pilot, Priya Dutt, and Deepender Hooda form the storm-troopers of the revitalised Congress.
Indeed, in picking its younger candidates the Congress moved decisively to jettison some of its older war-horses who carried way too much baggage – the likes of Arjun Singh and A.R. Antulay. Here it differed from the BJP, whose leadership looked too old and set in its ways. The voters firmly hammered down the overweening arrogance that much of the old political class displayed – across party lines. And they gave some the fright of their lives – P. Chidambaram won by an embarrassing 3,354 votes in Sivaganga.
In the end, people seemed to want to see a return to modesty, even a bit of humility, as they recoiled from the brazen declarations of assets that candidates made when they got their tickets – humble servants of the people whose wealth multiplied by long strings of zeros from one election to the next.
So here you now have a woman whose marble likenesses rear up like poison mushrooms, and a Communist power couple who have never stood for election, or the wily caste-based politician from a Gangetic state who once made it to the Guinness Book, and a chain-gang of murderers, rapists and gangster chieftains who either manipulated the criminal justice system or put their wives or other proxies up – and they have all been humbled in one way or another.
“The trouble is that there are too many old leaders who will not let us do anything,” Manmohan Singh told me quietly in a 2006 conversation. It was a long flight from Delhi, at the mid-point of what was to be his first term as prime minister. “There is so much to do.”
This election has answered Manmohan Singh’s prayers, but there is indeed a lot to do. The Congress manifesto listed several action points – a growth budget within 45 days of taking power, Right to Food legislation, expanded education spending, and an ambitious plan to link every village in the country to a broadband network within three years.
“Rapid growth is an essential condition for getting rid of poverty,” Singh told a group of editors just before the campaign started. He noted that the economy had grown an average of 8.6% over the past five years and population growth had slowed to 1.6%. “If we can sustain that pace, in ten years we will double national income.” In the end, that is what counts for one-sixth of humanity.
(This piece appeared in Khaleej Times on May 20, 2009)
The surge of collective outrage after the November attacks in Mumbai quickly dissipated in a high-decibel assault of television and radio advertisements, voice and text messages and everything from YouTube to podcasts that painted every politician in the most garishly evil of hues. What else do you expect when you have to woo 714 million voters, many of whom would not even have heard the names of the 1,000 – yes, exactly that number – “registered unrecognised parties” in the field.
And yet, after a long, long time India’s voters have spoken in a clear voice. It is easy to forget, in the tumult and velocity that besiege us, that we teeter on the edge of the first decade of the 21st century. India has just decided to endorse a gentleman prime minister after one of the crudest campaigns in the past 62 years. Kandahar, Kandhamal, Godhra were thrown around in a frenzy of finger-pointing, but the reality is that a huge number of young Indians, 18 to 21, voted for the first time this year and that begins to explain the seismic shift that has occurred.
A few weeks ago, Manmohan Singh listed Naxalism, regionalism, terrorism and communalism as major dangers facing India. He failed to list negativism. Much is being made of the fact that Singh is only the second prime minister since Independence to sail into a second full term in office. Here is a 76-year-old man who speaks in a near-whisper, his heart patched together by much bypass surgery, and yet an electorate that grows younger by the day decides to give him more time to work for a better, more prosperous – and more optimistic – nation. Indians are weary of bad news.
It is no accident that Nitish Kumar in Bihar, Naveen Patnaik in Orissa, and Sheila Dikshit in Delhi have triumphed so spectacularly on a performance-based scorecard. The huge mini-nation of the National Capital Region is crawling with young Biharis who work in a myriad of service jobs – plumbers, electricians, watchmen, drivers. They are all exiles from a failed state, from a region that Lalu Prasad Yadav, feted by business schools for introducing clay tea cups on Indian trains, plunged into near-total darkness. The young man from Champaran who came calling on Saturday saw Nitish’s victory in simple terms. “Bihar had fourteen sugar mills in the past,” he said. “Now there are two. But things are beginning to work. There is light again.” A small irony – Lalu’s election symbol is a “hurricane lamp”. So it is performance that has been rewarded – nowhere more so than in Delhi, where Dikshit now not only is a third-term chief minister but has a 100% sweep of parliamentary seats to burnish her image. And in Orissa, where communal violence appeared to have held Patnaik in a pincer grip last year, the Bharatiya Janata Party has been decisively routed and Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal has won a majority in both the Assembly and parliament elections.
So the only pattern you can see in the election is of hope -- that the global recession will not bite too deep in India, that there will be jobs and income for more people, that universal healthcare and education will begin to glimmer a little brighter on the horizon, that India will take its place as a “soft power” – a concept that Shashi Tharoor is pushing.
The former UN diplomat donned veshthi and angavastram to ride to a decisive victory as a Congress candidate in Thiruvananthapuram. Although he is not, age-wise, a true “digital native”, Tharoor has been adept at using the newest tools of communication. He has regularly transmitted campaign updates from his “TwitterBerry”. “Still sinking in – a majority of over 100,000 votes!” he relayed on Saturday. So Tharoor, and Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, Milind Deora, Sachin Pilot, Priya Dutt, and Deepender Hooda form the storm-troopers of the revitalised Congress.
Indeed, in picking its younger candidates the Congress moved decisively to jettison some of its older war-horses who carried way too much baggage – the likes of Arjun Singh and A.R. Antulay. Here it differed from the BJP, whose leadership looked too old and set in its ways. The voters firmly hammered down the overweening arrogance that much of the old political class displayed – across party lines. And they gave some the fright of their lives – P. Chidambaram won by an embarrassing 3,354 votes in Sivaganga.
In the end, people seemed to want to see a return to modesty, even a bit of humility, as they recoiled from the brazen declarations of assets that candidates made when they got their tickets – humble servants of the people whose wealth multiplied by long strings of zeros from one election to the next.
So here you now have a woman whose marble likenesses rear up like poison mushrooms, and a Communist power couple who have never stood for election, or the wily caste-based politician from a Gangetic state who once made it to the Guinness Book, and a chain-gang of murderers, rapists and gangster chieftains who either manipulated the criminal justice system or put their wives or other proxies up – and they have all been humbled in one way or another.
“The trouble is that there are too many old leaders who will not let us do anything,” Manmohan Singh told me quietly in a 2006 conversation. It was a long flight from Delhi, at the mid-point of what was to be his first term as prime minister. “There is so much to do.”
This election has answered Manmohan Singh’s prayers, but there is indeed a lot to do. The Congress manifesto listed several action points – a growth budget within 45 days of taking power, Right to Food legislation, expanded education spending, and an ambitious plan to link every village in the country to a broadband network within three years.
“Rapid growth is an essential condition for getting rid of poverty,” Singh told a group of editors just before the campaign started. He noted that the economy had grown an average of 8.6% over the past five years and population growth had slowed to 1.6%. “If we can sustain that pace, in ten years we will double national income.” In the end, that is what counts for one-sixth of humanity.
(This piece appeared in Khaleej Times on May 20, 2009)
The Centre Cannot Hold (30 November 2008)
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
(W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming)
“The siege of Mumbai” – how counter-intuitive can we get! We had hundreds of soldiers and policemen laying siege to three hostage sites, and we had hundreds of ravening TV journalists laying siege to the terrorists, the hostages, the commandos, the policemen, and the nation. Our television reporters are taught to speak with no pause, shouting breathlessly, breaking news bite by shrill bite. So many times during those endless hours viewers felt we were giving away too much to the terrorists – down to how many commandos had been flown in and which sides of the hotels they were probing. And we had the sickening sight of wild celebrations when Nariman House was “liberated” – only to have officials say it was not over, and in the end of course everybody, hostages and terrorists, were dead many long hours after the commandos were helicoptered to its rooftop.
Many of us are coming off a slow boil after watching far more television news over the past 72 hours than we did for several years, and the overwhelming feeling is of rage and helplessness – and many questions. How did the terrorists get into Mumbai, and then into the five locations they hit with such impunity? Why did the National Security Guard take so long to get to the hostage sites? Why did it take the NSG so long to finish off their job? How come there were no survivors at Nariman House after prolonged commando operations? Why have we focused so much on foreign hostages, and not on the ordinary Indians who were mowed down at the train terminus?
We Indians are really “full of it”. We have an answer for everything, but we are also easily paralysed by the tiniest smidgeon of poisonous crisis. We are secretive, scheming and slippery. We believe we are one of the greatest powers on earth, but we treat our individual citizens with scant respect. Individual freedom, and information, and the kind of secure contentment that breeds innovation, creativity and civility are rare concepts If you have bucketed along Delhi’s dug-up roads for the past few years, waiting for this great sporting event or that flyover or this magical new Metro line or that better tomorrow while missing a bad smash-up, or even death, by centimeters, then watching those symbols of Mumbai’s Belle Epoque burst into flame while “well dressed” diners and dreamers were being massacred, room by banquet hall, brought home the kind of psychotropic sensation that makes you light-headed and in denial of the worm-hole you are hurtling down. (I was struck by how many reports referred to “well dressed” guests at two of India’s most expensive hotels. Almost as incongruous as a rag-picker’s torn singlet in the slums of Dharavi, I guess).
All this happened just as voters in the national capital were getting ready to elect – or eject – a Congress government, and the BJP in particular excelled at bad-taste advertising. It took out large front-page ads about tackling terrorism by electing a BJP government. There has been too much of effete hand-wringing by the UPA government at the centre, but how quickly we have forgotten the humiliation of Kandahar, when our foreign minister personally escorted top terrorists to freedom.
Thin-skinned as always, we are also quick to claim the dubious honour of having suffered terrorist attacks going back nearly 30 years. We boast some of the best strategic brains in the world. But have we come up with a national consensus on how to tackle terror? We have one NSG in the nation’s capital and the only way to transport the commandos is in a Russian plane parked in Chandigarh. It took our home minister – he of the natty suits – nearly 96 hours to resign. Our dear president, of course, couldn’t even be bothered to interrupt a trip to Vietnam and Indonesia and rush back to her beleaguered nation. Indeed, if you discount the fact that schools and the stock exchange in Mumbai were closed on Thursday – in a cruel twist, Thanksgiving Day – life hummed along just fine just miles away in Dadar, where Raj Thackeray kept a very low profile, and in Mahim, Bandra, and the vast hinterland of old and Navi Mumbai.
So we get blown off our feet by the latest terrorist outrage, and we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and carry on as if nothing had happened. We have a huge law and order apparatus and a criminal and penal jurisprudence that is fattening day after day with case law built on the backs of a quarter-million undertrials in our prisons. Law and order is in any case a “state” subject, and the Centre can conveniently blame regionalism for things that go wrong – unless the state is ruled by the central ruling party or coalition. In which case you have a phalanx of lynx-eyed, designer-khadi clad politicians leading the mourners at a top cop’s funeral after offering the customary cash compensation.
Amidst the bedlam, it was interesting that few television channels dared to field politicians. Do our politicians not notice that Bollywood very rarely makes a movie where a politician is a good person? Was it so hard to notice that there were crowds of citizens cheering and thanking the NSG commandos and jeering politicians?
There are so many follow-ups to do, it takes one’s breath away. What sort of counter-terrorism training do our seniormost counter-terrorism policemen get? Did it make the slightest operational sense for Hemant Karkare, Ashok Kamte and Vijay Salaskar to drive off in the same vehicle – only Kamte armed with an automatic rifle, the other two only with revolvers – right into a terrorist ambush? With blueprints of both hotels available, why could one section after another of the Oberoi, or the Taj, not have been sealed by the commandos and the terrorists squeezed into a corner, instead of the obviously free-ranging “battle” that just three men waged up, down and across the huge warren of the Taj?
There was a lot of poor TV reportage, and some of it was downright crude and Goebbelsian. Now that is a word too far, you will say. Well, how else do you react to more than one channel implying that Amar Singh Tandel, the skipper of the trawler apparently hijacked by the ten terrorists, had aided and abetted them? Was his beheaded body, hands tied behind his back, a reward for treachery?
The rage and the helplessness are underlined by a rare piece of good television I stumbled on on Sunday – one channel did a re-run of a nearly three-year-old investigation where two journalists transported fake contraband, wooden crates that could easily have contained hundreds of kilograms of explosives, from the high seas past derelict Customs posts, bringing them ashore and driving through Mumbai all the way to the Gateway of India. It was a shocking story, and it speaks of criminal neglect of both our coastline as well as strategic targets like the Bombay High oil rigs. There has been no follow-up, and I’m sure the authorities did not even notice the report. It’s true, folks – we have a cartoon Coast Guard struggling with self-righteous little men who have the power to paralyse our defences.
So where do we start? We need a national security apparatus with highly-trained counter-terrorism troops armed to their teeth with 21st-century arsenals stationed in every Indian state and answerable to our version of a Homeland Security administration. We need intelligent men and women capable of piecing together the thousands of bits of intelligence that can be gathered by more feet on the street. We need to be less impatient with security measures. We do not need nastier laws that confer huge power – with scant accountability – on an ill-equipped police force. We have enough laws to tackle terror. But security demands a fixity of purpose, and a determination to out-think the terrorist. It is easy to shrug off the fact that there has been no terrorist attack on the soil of the United States after September 2001, or complain about the fingerprinting and overt security you see there; but safety carries a price tag. That has not happened without huge expenditure, and a sophisticated vigilance apparatus.
And I am waiting for the follow-ups – the hundreds of suppliers and small merchants whose livelihoods depended on the two devastated hotels, on the brave announcers at CST who warned commuters to flee when they spotted the gunmen, on the hotel staff who hid terrified guests in safe areas, on the bloggers who had so much information, and so many opinions. Every act of terror triggers many acts of courage. We must celebrate them, quickly.
(This piece appeared in Khaleej Times on December 3, 2008)
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
(W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming)
“The siege of Mumbai” – how counter-intuitive can we get! We had hundreds of soldiers and policemen laying siege to three hostage sites, and we had hundreds of ravening TV journalists laying siege to the terrorists, the hostages, the commandos, the policemen, and the nation. Our television reporters are taught to speak with no pause, shouting breathlessly, breaking news bite by shrill bite. So many times during those endless hours viewers felt we were giving away too much to the terrorists – down to how many commandos had been flown in and which sides of the hotels they were probing. And we had the sickening sight of wild celebrations when Nariman House was “liberated” – only to have officials say it was not over, and in the end of course everybody, hostages and terrorists, were dead many long hours after the commandos were helicoptered to its rooftop.
Many of us are coming off a slow boil after watching far more television news over the past 72 hours than we did for several years, and the overwhelming feeling is of rage and helplessness – and many questions. How did the terrorists get into Mumbai, and then into the five locations they hit with such impunity? Why did the National Security Guard take so long to get to the hostage sites? Why did it take the NSG so long to finish off their job? How come there were no survivors at Nariman House after prolonged commando operations? Why have we focused so much on foreign hostages, and not on the ordinary Indians who were mowed down at the train terminus?
We Indians are really “full of it”. We have an answer for everything, but we are also easily paralysed by the tiniest smidgeon of poisonous crisis. We are secretive, scheming and slippery. We believe we are one of the greatest powers on earth, but we treat our individual citizens with scant respect. Individual freedom, and information, and the kind of secure contentment that breeds innovation, creativity and civility are rare concepts If you have bucketed along Delhi’s dug-up roads for the past few years, waiting for this great sporting event or that flyover or this magical new Metro line or that better tomorrow while missing a bad smash-up, or even death, by centimeters, then watching those symbols of Mumbai’s Belle Epoque burst into flame while “well dressed” diners and dreamers were being massacred, room by banquet hall, brought home the kind of psychotropic sensation that makes you light-headed and in denial of the worm-hole you are hurtling down. (I was struck by how many reports referred to “well dressed” guests at two of India’s most expensive hotels. Almost as incongruous as a rag-picker’s torn singlet in the slums of Dharavi, I guess).
All this happened just as voters in the national capital were getting ready to elect – or eject – a Congress government, and the BJP in particular excelled at bad-taste advertising. It took out large front-page ads about tackling terrorism by electing a BJP government. There has been too much of effete hand-wringing by the UPA government at the centre, but how quickly we have forgotten the humiliation of Kandahar, when our foreign minister personally escorted top terrorists to freedom.
Thin-skinned as always, we are also quick to claim the dubious honour of having suffered terrorist attacks going back nearly 30 years. We boast some of the best strategic brains in the world. But have we come up with a national consensus on how to tackle terror? We have one NSG in the nation’s capital and the only way to transport the commandos is in a Russian plane parked in Chandigarh. It took our home minister – he of the natty suits – nearly 96 hours to resign. Our dear president, of course, couldn’t even be bothered to interrupt a trip to Vietnam and Indonesia and rush back to her beleaguered nation. Indeed, if you discount the fact that schools and the stock exchange in Mumbai were closed on Thursday – in a cruel twist, Thanksgiving Day – life hummed along just fine just miles away in Dadar, where Raj Thackeray kept a very low profile, and in Mahim, Bandra, and the vast hinterland of old and Navi Mumbai.
So we get blown off our feet by the latest terrorist outrage, and we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and carry on as if nothing had happened. We have a huge law and order apparatus and a criminal and penal jurisprudence that is fattening day after day with case law built on the backs of a quarter-million undertrials in our prisons. Law and order is in any case a “state” subject, and the Centre can conveniently blame regionalism for things that go wrong – unless the state is ruled by the central ruling party or coalition. In which case you have a phalanx of lynx-eyed, designer-khadi clad politicians leading the mourners at a top cop’s funeral after offering the customary cash compensation.
Amidst the bedlam, it was interesting that few television channels dared to field politicians. Do our politicians not notice that Bollywood very rarely makes a movie where a politician is a good person? Was it so hard to notice that there were crowds of citizens cheering and thanking the NSG commandos and jeering politicians?
There are so many follow-ups to do, it takes one’s breath away. What sort of counter-terrorism training do our seniormost counter-terrorism policemen get? Did it make the slightest operational sense for Hemant Karkare, Ashok Kamte and Vijay Salaskar to drive off in the same vehicle – only Kamte armed with an automatic rifle, the other two only with revolvers – right into a terrorist ambush? With blueprints of both hotels available, why could one section after another of the Oberoi, or the Taj, not have been sealed by the commandos and the terrorists squeezed into a corner, instead of the obviously free-ranging “battle” that just three men waged up, down and across the huge warren of the Taj?
There was a lot of poor TV reportage, and some of it was downright crude and Goebbelsian. Now that is a word too far, you will say. Well, how else do you react to more than one channel implying that Amar Singh Tandel, the skipper of the trawler apparently hijacked by the ten terrorists, had aided and abetted them? Was his beheaded body, hands tied behind his back, a reward for treachery?
The rage and the helplessness are underlined by a rare piece of good television I stumbled on on Sunday – one channel did a re-run of a nearly three-year-old investigation where two journalists transported fake contraband, wooden crates that could easily have contained hundreds of kilograms of explosives, from the high seas past derelict Customs posts, bringing them ashore and driving through Mumbai all the way to the Gateway of India. It was a shocking story, and it speaks of criminal neglect of both our coastline as well as strategic targets like the Bombay High oil rigs. There has been no follow-up, and I’m sure the authorities did not even notice the report. It’s true, folks – we have a cartoon Coast Guard struggling with self-righteous little men who have the power to paralyse our defences.
So where do we start? We need a national security apparatus with highly-trained counter-terrorism troops armed to their teeth with 21st-century arsenals stationed in every Indian state and answerable to our version of a Homeland Security administration. We need intelligent men and women capable of piecing together the thousands of bits of intelligence that can be gathered by more feet on the street. We need to be less impatient with security measures. We do not need nastier laws that confer huge power – with scant accountability – on an ill-equipped police force. We have enough laws to tackle terror. But security demands a fixity of purpose, and a determination to out-think the terrorist. It is easy to shrug off the fact that there has been no terrorist attack on the soil of the United States after September 2001, or complain about the fingerprinting and overt security you see there; but safety carries a price tag. That has not happened without huge expenditure, and a sophisticated vigilance apparatus.
And I am waiting for the follow-ups – the hundreds of suppliers and small merchants whose livelihoods depended on the two devastated hotels, on the brave announcers at CST who warned commuters to flee when they spotted the gunmen, on the hotel staff who hid terrified guests in safe areas, on the bloggers who had so much information, and so many opinions. Every act of terror triggers many acts of courage. We must celebrate them, quickly.
(This piece appeared in Khaleej Times on December 3, 2008)
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