Serious, sincere, helpless

The Prime Minister came across after today’s TV-only press conference as the Great Stoic.

Clearly aimed at damage control and expectation management, his answers were sincere and candid, especially about the compromises that have to be made to keep a coalition together. His most startling analogy was to ask rhetorically if food, fertilizer and kerosene subsidies for the poor could be construed as revenue losses. “What is your starting point?” he asked in the context of the 2G spectrum being allocated at sub-market rates. One TV editor asked him if he was implying that 2G, too, was a subsidy. He side-stepped this one.

He should have been asked: “Are you comparing subsidies that help India’s poor with subsidised wireless spectrum that made the rich richer?”

Other answers: “This is coalition dharma…things are not entirely the way I would like them to be”; [on corruption] “I have to tolerate a lot … otherwise every six months we would have new elections.” “We shall overcome, we shall prevail, we will provide our country with a functioning government”; “As of that moment [May 2009] I had no reason to believe that anything seriously wrong had been done”; this despite the fact that “complaints were coming in [against Raja], complaints were from all sides”; “These irregularities shouldn’t have happened .. I am not very happy about these developments.”

There has been an amazing amount of public talk by government leaders ahead of the Budget session. Clearly, the prime minister sees, as he told the BBC, that a poor international image “saps our self-confidence”. He referred to self-confidence several times during the news conference, from his opening remarks onward. But on the lack of any reforms by UPA-II, and other signs of dithering, he had villains galore – state governments, the BJP, the coalition system. He did talk about “harsh punishment” for the corrupt and said “wrongdoers won’t escape this time”. And he made clear he would not throw in the towel – all this was a learning experience and he “relished” it, and likened himself to a CEO – if seven of ten decisions were good, “shareholders will say ‘job well done’”.

The prime minister also made a few key allusions to points that this Budget may address – the dire need to create a viable corporate-debt market, the need to mobilize funds from overseas in a Infrastructure Development Fund, and a push for the PPP (public-private partnership) model in infrastructure development. There are also clear signs that Pranab Mukherjee will start the process of curbing or axing ministers’ discretionary powers, widely seen as a font of corruption.

Overall, Manmohan Singh came across as sincere, serious, and a bit helpless. “I have a job to do. We have a lot of unfinished business. I will stay the course,” he said, stoically.

[This post also appeared on the Business Today website at http://bit.ly/primeminister]

Sharm el-Sheikh and appeasement: a lesson in history

O tempora! O mores! Were that Cicero were alive today to witness the depths India is plumbing in self-deception, we might hear the opening words of his famous oration.

Leader after leader of the world’s biggest democracy is standing up to be counted with words that can only be described as desperation wrapped in dementia inside dyslexia.

“We have nothing to hide”; “We are an open book”. And, the day after Manmohan Singh delivered a courageous defence of the joint statement that has brought him so much vexation, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee made a speech in parliament that excoriated all the doubters.

And then Mukherjee said something that would make students of history blanch:

“Everybody knew that before the Second World War when Chamberlain entered into the Munich Pact, that it is not going to succeed, but it was considered necessary because they thought that the last effort should be made to save the world from the impending Second World War. This is the lesson of diplomacy, which we should not forget. Pakistan is going to exist and our relationship with Pakistan has not been cordial from the very beginning. But keeping the communication channel open does not mean it is conceding or surrendering on any particular point. Foreign policy is the extension of the national interest in the context of the external situation and atmosphere.”

Dear, dear Pranabda. He was barely three years old when Neville Chamberlain gifted Hitler the Sudetenland, the border area in Czechoslovakia where Germans were in a majority.

Chamberlain told his people he had averted war. He was proud of his appeasement and believed he had given Hitler what seemed to be his “reasonable” demand. After all, the same year (1938) Time magazine voted Hitler the Man of the Year.

Mukherjee can be forgiven for not remembering Chamberlain’s words: “However much we may sympathise with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbour … If we have to fight, it must be on larger issues than that. I am myself a man of peace to the depths of my soul; armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me... War is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake.” (emphasis mine)

Ringing words. And ringing words were what Prime Minister Singh delivered in parliament on July 29. “I say with strength and conviction that dialogue and engagement is the best way forward,” he said. And later, “Let me say that in the affairs of two neighbours we should recall what President Reagan once said – trust but verify. There is no other way unless we go to war.”

Let us refresh our memories on what the Sharm el-Sheikh joint statement said. "Action on terrorism should not be linked to the Composite Dialogue process and these should not be bracketed. Prime Minister Singh said that India was ready to discuss all issues with Pakistan, including all outstanding issues," the communique said. Bracketed? All issues ... including all outstanding issues?

That bit of “bad drafting”, as Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon so helpfully put it, was followed by a wan ruling party damning the prime minister with ten days of silence and then a pallid statement earlier this week that left it to him to hoist himself out of trouble.

The opposition outcry was led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, and what a glorious example they set! Atal Behari Vajpayee's peace-making bus trip to Lahore in early 1999 was followed by the Kargil war, which Pervez Musharraf now proudly says forced India to discuss Kashmir (ergo, "all outstanding issues" above).

I well remember the ignominy of shepherd boys noticing that all the commanding heights along the Srinagar-Leh highway had been quietly occupied by heavily-armed Pakistani "irregulars". (Ten years ago the Pakistanis had not learnt phrases like "non-state actors"). And Musharraf, who gave India a bloody nose, is today gleefully owning up to the Northern Light Infantry, battalions of which had been set up specifically to stage the Kargil attack. In fact, Musharraf’s smug boasts drowned out whatever few efforts were made to track down the families of the Indian soldiers who died in the Kargil war.

Anybody reporting on Kargil in 1999 knows that the Pakistanis agreed to end their "aggressive patrolling" -- another piece of doublespeak from Musharraf -- only after U.S. President Bill Clinton twisted Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's arm in Washington.

The sub-text in 1999 was the West’s fear that India and Pakistan would unleash their newly-acquired nuclear weapons on one another. The spectre of a subcontinental Armageddon has only grown over the past decade. “There are uncertainties on the horizon, and I cannot predict the future in dealing with neighbours, two nuclear powers,” Manmohan Singh told parliament, referring to Pakistan and China.

Five months after Kargil, Pakistan-nurtured “freedom fighters” again put India’s broken nose into splints with the hijack of Indian Airlines Flight 814 to Kandahar. We watched the humiliating spectacle of our foreign minister escorting terrorist leaders to the Afghan city to be swapped with the Indian hostages.

Nothing daunted, Vajpayee invited Musharraf to the Agra summit in July 2001 – an event that the Pakistanis turned to their own advantage with what can only be described as “muscular diplomacy”. Five months later, terrorists staged the attack on India’s parliament.

Again and again, Pakistan has extended its fist to India’s palm. And Musharraf, the man who taught his Indian interlocutors the fencer’s art of feint and thrust and parry and lunge, is now feted and wooed by Indian talk-show hosts and conference organisers who proclaim him the only man who cracked down on terrorism and wished for peace with his “big and powerful neighbour” (see Chamberlain above).

The travesty is that Musharraf did underwrite secret talks between his emissaries and Indian envoys that brought the neighbours within sight of a tantalising Kashmir solution, a formula that would render the 740-kilometre Line of Control redundant. But Musharraf’s own overweening ego brought about his downfall, and the secret talks now hang like a chimera over the blood and smoke of the Mumbai attacks.

Manmohan Singh made an admirable speech on Wednesday. It was a good speech from a man of peace. But the genteel negotiators of Delhi’s South Block must contend with the stomp and swagger of the denizens of Rawalpindi’s Army HQ. And the ever-hopeful Indians need to remember what Canada’s Lester Pearson said a long time ago: “Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way.” Not the other way round.

(This column appeared in Khaleej Times on August 1, 2009)

How to apologise without saying sorry

Apologising is never easy. Barack Obama knows this now. He made a non-apology apology last week to a Massachusetts police sergeant two days after saying the officer “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr because he was trying to break into his own house.

Obama’s decision to wade into a local issue involving an African-American friend triggered a worldwide debate on race and the U.S. criminal justice system. The Cambridge Police Department dropped a charge of disorderly conduct against Gates and said the incident was “regrettable and unfortunate”, but demanded that Obama himself apologise and in an unusually direct rebuke said the president had used the right words but at the wrong party.

It was ironic that Gates should be involved in a racial row. When football star O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the charge of killing his estranged wife Nicole and her friend in 1995, Gates published a brilliant and critical analysis, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” in The New Yorker. “Many blacks as well as whites saw the trial’s outcome as a grim enactment of Richard Pryor’s comic rejoinder ‘Who are you going to believe — me, or your lying eyes?’” Gates wrote.

Not forgetting that Rupert Murdoch had to apologise to the victims’ families for planning to publish O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.

But Obama, who shot into national consciousness with his carefully choreographed “colourless” campaign and was hailed as ushering in a new, post-racial United States, had to interrupt a White House press briefing on Friday to offer the kind of mea culpa that his wordmeisters must have sweated bucketfuls over.

Obama said he could have “calibrated those words differently”. Then he said:

“My sense is you've got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way that it should have been resolved and the way they would have liked it to be resolved.”

It sounded like Obama had studied the same primer as Rita Bahuguna Joshi, who said after sledging Mayawati: “"I regret what I said in a fit of anger. If it is being misconstrued, if it's being misinterpreted, it is being taken out of context, then I regret it.”

Apparently Obama decided to “apologise” to Sergeant Jim Crowley after talking the matter over with his wife Michelle. The president has quite a few other things to mull over. His honeymoon is definitely over. A Zogby poll last week put Obama’s approval rating at 48%; 51% of those polled felt the U.S. was “on the wrong track”. This, pollster John Zogby noted, was about where George W. Bush was with voters just before the 9/11 attacks. A CBS News Poll put Obama’s approval rating at 57% -- down from 68% in April. The good news is that another CBS poll said more blacks in the U.S. – 59% felt that race relations have improved, up sharply from 29% in July 2008.

The bad news is that 43% of blacks believe they are stopped by police because of their race. DBW – Driving While Black – is not a nice place to be, even if you are driving an expensive BMW.

So on a range of issues – healthcare reform, the way the huge stimulus package is being spent, the backtracking on Guantanamo, the growing “surge” in Afghanistan – Obama is not coming through as a blazing reformer with a flaming sword.

Actually he is having a fairly easy time of apologising. His predecessor spent his first few months in the White House feeling regretful.

Very early in his first term, Bush had to apologise personally to the Japanese prime minister after a U.S. nuclear submarine smashed into a Japanese fishing vessel carrying schoolchildren off Hawaii, killing nine of them.

A few weeks later, a U.S spy plane with 24 crew members force-landed on China’s Hainan island after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. The Americans sent a repatriation team to bring back the crew after an 11-day standoff, and said they were “very sorry” that the Chinese pilot had died in the collision.

You would think that after Vietnam, Cambodia and Watergate, Americans had had a lot of practice in deniability.

Ten years ago NATO planes bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. China’s People’s Daily commented scornfully this May that the incident had been shrugged off by the U.S. as a “mistaken bombing”. “Taking into account that this event is a page already turned in history, the alertness and latent hostility that the U.S. holds towards China seems not to have vanished.”

Six years into its occupation of Iraq, we are only just beginning to hear a little less about the collateral damage of teenaged U.S. soldiers shooting dead civilians who did not slow down near checkpoints. We don’t hear apologies either about the civilian deaths caused along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border by unmanned drone bombings. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in April that 546,000 people have registered as refugees, forced to flee their homes by the relentless bombing.

Back to the art of apology. The Japanese used to have it down pat. Their language is peppered with apologetic phrases. Every time somebody brushed against me in an impossibly crowded Tokyo subway train both of us would mutter gomen nasai – forgive me. And Indians did not invent anticipatory bail – the Japanese routinely say shitsurei shimasu, “excuse me for what I am about to do”. But the coinage has got a little debased recently.

Much was made last year when Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony, did not apologise personally for a series of mishaps in which Sony’s lithium-ion batteries caused laptops to burst into flames.

Observers noted that a lower-ranking Sony official bowed from a sitting position while apologising for the overheating batteries, of which Sony eventually had to recall 9.6 million.

In contrast, Citigroup’s former CEO Chuck Prince, apologising for problems that led to the closure of the banking giant’s Japanese private banking licence, stood up and bowed for a full seven seconds. Leslie Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist for Weber Shandwick, writes in Corporate Reputation: 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation that CEOs need to follow three important steps when apologising: take responsibility, act quickly, and communicate sincerity.

Japan’s Prime Minister Taro Aso was tearful last week when he announced early elections and the dissolution of the Lower House. "My wavering remarks caused anxiety and distrust in the public and led to a fall in the party support rate," Aso was quoted by Kyodo as saying at the start of his speech. "I'm deeply repentant."

Apparently Aso had planned to apologise in the middle of his speech but his Chief Cabinet Secretary advised him to start off with an apology. In May, Ichiro Ozawa resigned in tears as president of the main opposition party over a political funding scandal.

Maybe Obama’s wordsmiths need to get together with Manmohan Singh’s to craft a non-apology apology for the Sharm el-Sheikh joint statement. Or maybe our diplomats and ministers just need to tear up a bit.

(This piece appeared in the Business Standard of July 31, 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)

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)