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]

Tapeworm

The din ricocheting around the Niira Radia tapes reminds me of the way we drive on our roads. All the honking, tail-gating, lane straddling, near-misses and mayhem only delay our journey to our destination and leave us tired, irritable and stressed out. So also the titillation over the Radia phone calls. What is the real point of all the noise?


The scandal has gone viral on the internet, but not many seem to recall the suspense and cynicism that surrounded last year’s government formation and the drama around the DMK’s men in Delhi. (For a refresher, read my June 6, 2009 post "Writhing On The Wall"). The coalition nearly fell apart over just one ministry – telecoms – that the DMK wanted so desperately. Everybody is so fixated on Delhi and its muck that few are asking why the DMK wanted to keep that gold mine for itself. For that answer, you have to look at Muthuvel Karunanidhi’s sons and nephews and the insurance policy his third wife and her daughter needed to take out, their premium an upstart politician called A. Raja.


Exactly how did the journalists on the tapes influence the prime minister’s allocation of portfolios in his cabinet after last year’s general election? Is there a smoking gun? Were the journalists plied with wine and money and worse? So far there is a lot of speculation and much discomfiture but not much of incriminating evidence. How many more conversations would the authorities have to tape to trace every sticky strand in this huge web of false friendliness, deception, and influence peddling?


Journalists as a class are narcissistic. In India they believe they are so powerful that many are delusional. They are delusional because they have moved around for far too long in a psychedelic whirl of tip-offs and “off the record” conversations to recognise that they have gone beyond observing and reporting to being players themselves in the power game. It is a dark and dank world where PR agencies erupt like toadstools and younger journalists quickly learn that you do not need to be a specialist in any subject to report on it because somebody is going to spoon-feed you with the story and the script. All you have to do is ingratiate and regurgitate.


At a broader level, very few Indians seem to worry, or care, about the implications of the Radia tapes for privacy and the government’s over-arching power to burrow silently and deeply into your life without your knowledge or say-so. A senior official in the intelligence community told me that the government can intercept and tap up to 6,000 phone conversations a day. The Home Secretary or the Chief Secretary has to authorise wire-tapping in the interests of national security. Earlier this year Parliament was briefly agitated about allegations of interception of opposition politicians’ phone calls, but the row quickly blew over. The Radia wire-taps were apparently triggered by complaints of income-tax and foreign-exchange violations. The selective leaking of the tapes and the feeding frenzy it has triggered should worry any Indian who cares about individual liberty.


Watching the endlessly talking heads on television, I was reminded that the use of lobbyists, the courting of senior journalists and the recognition of television as a powerful medium first emerged as a legitimate tool during John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, so we are only honing a half-century of use and abuse. And for those of us who despair of the bad news that sprawls across our screens and newspapers, it is worth recalling media guru Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of the rise of advertising and the cheering good news that it throws relentlessly at you. “Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news. In order to balance off the effect and to sell good news, it is necessary to have a lot of bad news,” McLuhan wrote, adding at another place: “Real news is bad news – bad news about somebody, or bad news for somebody.” Most certainly for Niira Radia.