From The Times of India, September 16, 2008

LEADER ARTICLE: Please Grow Up 16 Sep 2008, 0000 hrs IST, RAJIV DESAI

Print EMail Discuss New Bookmark/Share Save Write to Editor

As Delhi recovers from the shock of the terrorist bombings, it is apparent that India is under sustained attack. Weak governance, an intelligence failure and police bungling are the reasons the chatterati ascribes to the incident. It is almost as though they are inured to the random loss of life on the capital's mean streets. The real failure lies in the divisiveness of the political class. From Bangalore, where the BJP is holding a convention, saffron grandees have pitched in with vicious criticism of the government. Nobody has come to grips with the real issue: a political consensus is vital in a modern nation state. Certain issues of national interest are beyond partisan politics. The civilian nuclear deal with the United States was one such issue. The political bickering over it showed very clearly the lack of maturity in the political class. On September 6, 2008, the Vienna-based Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), a consortium of 45 countries that seeks to control international trade in nuclear materials, technology and equipment, issued a "clean waiver" that exempted India from its own denial regime. The effort was spearheaded by the US government and supported by most of the original seven members of the NSG. Where the global community rose to admirable heights to transcend its domestic political concerns, in India, the saffron and red opponents of the deal plumbed new depths of chicanery. Instead of closing ranks with the government, they dug in their heels and refused to acknowledge the importance of the NSG waiver and the potential it offers to transform India's standing in the world. The intemperate response from the two opposition parties betrayed a poor understanding of the nature of democracy. The government won a confidence vote in Parliament, signalling it had majority political support for the deal. It went on to get its safeguards plan approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency and then finally won the confidence of the NSG with its assertion that it was against proliferation and a nuclear arms race. Having tried every trick in the book to stall the deal, the opposition simply failed. They could have acknowledged that government won both domestic and international political support and as opponents do in a democracy, lined up behind the government to present a united face to the world. Never mind what happens in specific sectors, the Indo-US deal is a strategic move that will help transform the Indian economy. We will engage as a mature power with the big boys and therefore learn that we must take ourselves seriously. We cannot say one thing and do something else. In that sense, the Indo-US agreement takes Manmohan Singh's economic reforms of 1991 to a new level. We will have to play by the rules and not hide behind political barriers as we have done at the WTO. As it turns out, the business sector is already at it. For all the companies they have bought overseas and for all the foreign investment they have attracted, business leaders have understood the seriousness of contracts, intellectual property rights and the need for professional management. The Indo-US deal simply ensures that government will follow with accountability and transparency. Concomitant with the rise in India's global status, its political class needs to come together on key issues such as the NSG waiver and terrorism. The opposition parties could play a constructive role in achieving this. Clearly, nobody expects the Left to sign up. The formation is an ideological dinosaur that opposes the deal because of its irrational anti-American mindset. As is now clear, it is China's cat's paw. But the BJP could definitely play a bridging role. Its over-the-top response to the nuclear deal was based on the fear that the government has given up our right to test nuclear weapons. But the NSG waiver was to allow India the opportunity to do civilian nuclear commerce with the world. There is nothing in the agreement that talks about weapons testing. The waiver in Vienna is an overt acknowledgement by the world that India is a responsible nuclear power. Remember, the NSG was formed in the aftermath of the Indian nuclear test in 1974 and was strengthened after the 1998 tests. Against this backdrop, the NSG waiver takes on historic and dramatic dimensions. It is a magnanimous gesture by the very countries that led the hostile reaction to India's tests. It is sad that the BJP, whose support is crucial to achieve a national consensus on vital issues, continues to behave like a street-fighting unit. It must play the role of an opposition. But there is something called a loyal opposition, loyal to the Indian state. The BJP has every right to challenge the government. But it could temper the role it plays to be mindful of national interest. The BJP's response to the nuclear deal and now to the terror attacks in Delhi underlines the inability of our political class to present a united national front on vital issues. In stark contrast stands the situation in the US in which presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain put aside their differences on September 11 to make a joint appearance at the World Trade Center in New York.

Scaling Heights, Plumbing Depths

A Disturbed Weekend in Kasauli

Our friends Yuri and Rupa have a place just outside Kasauli, a civilized mountain oasis on the way to Simla. I call their retreat “Misty Heights.” We got there late on Thursday evening with Gautam and Rita, our other friends with whom we share the experience of living in America. When we arrived late in the evening, I thought of the Eric Clapton song, and said to myself that the place, shrouded in mist, looked wonderful that night.

If ever there was generational bonding, this was it. Yuri, now a growing Bollywood star, is a former IAF fighter pilot, who was chosen to be a part of India’s space program. Rupa is a whiz kid; she is a partner in a global business that deals with American and European buyers of quality apparel.

Gautam is India’s senior-most editor, who is the genius behind the success of the Bombay-based DNA newspaper and who now serves as editorial adviser to The Times of India. He is the most sensible and erudite person in Indian journalism today. Rita is a teacher in Washington DC area; she is the fount of wisdom on education. What we discovered over the weekend is that she is also the greatest authority on films, Hollywood and Bollywood.

When you put this accomplished lot together in the hills, walking in the clouds and wearing sweaters and shawls in July, you have the makings of an enjoyable weekend, dripped in nostalgia. Especially because Gautam and Yuri are also rock stars, who, like the cult band of the 1960s, Traffic, can “sing a song, play guitar, make it snappy.” So we sat in the bar of “Misty Heights” and laughed away the hours, talking about the great things that we could do that weekend.

Even as we enjoyed conversations and music, we learned over the weekend about the bomb blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad. Many of us had family and friends in the two cities. We tried to reach them but all phone lines were jammed. So we sat on edge, worrying about them, hoping for the best, fearing the worst. We did eventually reach them and were gratified to learn they were okay.

Nevertheless, it cast a pall over the gathering. We wondered what could possibly motivate people to rain death and mayhem on innocent people? I can understand driven psychos like Prabhakaran’s LTTE in Sri Lanka, who sent a suicide bomber to kill Rajiv Gandhi. Given the levels of corruption and police state governance in the island country, there is modicum of logic in the LTTE’s extremism.

What is clearly beyond reason is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in India. There are 150 million Moslems in India and they are within their rights to be concerned about the BJP and its Nazi views. On the other hand, they are a pampered lot, with every political party vying for their support. The classic example of this mollycoddling is that the avowedly secular government of India pays for Moslems to make their pilgrimage to Mecca.

Politics apart, these terrorist blasts have outlined in stark relief the sheer incompetence of the government. It is not about the BJP or the Congress; the central and state government agencies are simply inept and stupid, what a good banker friend of mine calls IAS. These agencies, whether RAW or IB or CBI, have been unable to bring anyone to book, starting with the bombings in Bombay in 1993.

“The world has decided we should be a global player,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once told me. But the world simply has no idea that the Indian government is in held in thrall by corrupt politicians and wily bureaucrats.

So we have the unseemly spectacle of L K Advani, in the midst of this terrorist mayhem, asking the Speaker of Parliament to release a clandestine video that ostensibly shows a cash for votes transaction. No one, including the Speaker, bought the BJP’s wild allegation. In fact, the Speaker is reported to have read Advani the riot act, expressing grave displeasure at the flagrant violation of parliamentary norms.

Advani was referring to an alleged monetary offer made by the government’s supporters to induce legislators to vote for the UPA in the confidence vote in Parliament. What’s even worse, despite enjoying the exalted status of opposition leader, Advani allowed, nay encouraged, these dubious players to enact the cash drama in Parliament.

My personal view is that Advani is the most corrosive politician in India today. He stands criminally accused for his role in the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992 and for his recklessly provocative rath yatra two years before. He is so blinded by his ambition to become prime minister that he has lost all sense of balance.

How can Advani focus on the so-called sting operation that members of his party conducted during the vote of confidence? More than 50 people have died in the terrorist attack in Gujarat (which Advani represents in the Lok Sabha) and Karnataka, both states run by the BJP. Shouldn’t he be asking questions of the BJP chief ministers there as to how this happened? He clearly has come unhinged by the government's convincing win on the floor of the house.

Where he should stand shoulder to shoulder with the central government, urging his party chief ministers to move quickly to arrest the perpetrators, Advani has shown he has the mentality of a municipal councilman. As such, he will continue in his cynically graceless manner to yell and scream from the margins to which he has relegated his party. Under the burden of his ambition, the BJP, which could be a useful right of center alternative in the political mainstream, has been reduced to a rump of naysayers and whiners.

Meanwhile back in Kasauli, we agreed that politicians like Advani would naturally draw an extreme response from Islamist formations like the “Indian Mujaheedin,” who have claimed responsibility for the blasts. Advani bashes on relentlessly: sponsoring foolish resolutions to oppose the government's plans to speed up reforms; egging on the egregious Sushma Swaraj in her wild allegations about the blasts; forgetting his own dismal record as home minister. It's time for him to adopt a vow of silence and maintain it for the remainder of this government's term.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

The Defeat of Evil

The Advani Karat Pact

Paritranaya sadhunam vinashaya cha dushkritam
Dharma sansthapanarthaya sambahvami yuge yuge

(Gita 4:8)

(For the upliftment of the good and virtuous
For the destruction of evil
For the re-establishment of natural law
I will come in every age)

So the BJP and the Left and the casteist Mayawati have been defeated conclusively; time to take stock of why they did what they did. A bit of history will help understand what happened.

On August 23, 1939, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin entered into a secret agreement with Germany’s Adolf Hitler. It was the ultimate act of appeasement because Stalin felt that would focus Hitler's attention on Western Europe. On July 8 2008, Prakash Karat made a not-so-secret pact with L K Advani, whose naked ambition is to become India’s Prime Minister.

Karat is a diehard Stalinist, who is enjoying his place under India's democratic sun. Most people believe he gets his marching orders from the mandarins in Beijing. Because the Left is what it is, he remained unchallenged until the Speaker of the House, Somnath Chatterjee, called his bluff with support from the more flexible members of the CPM. He defied Karat and stayed on as Speaker and was quick to call "The Ayes have it" on the voice vote after the debate, rudely disrupted by BJP thugs, over the confidence vote called by the Prime Minister.

Then there’s Advani, who for all the years he’s been in politics, comes off as an amateur actor seeking a role in the major play of governance. For many years he served as the home minister and forced his way into being the deputy prime minister of the clueless Atal Vajpayee. For all the darts, deserved or not, hurled at the current home minister, Shivraj Patil, Advani was clearly the most incompetent incumbent.

On his watch as home minister and deputy prime minister, terrorists were freed and flown by external affairs minister Jaswant Singh in an abject surrender to the world’s worst thugs, the Taliban of Afghanistan. Under his watch also, Islamic terrorists attacked Parliament House with a view to taking Indian lawmakers hostage. And on and on the story goes. There were so many terrorist incidents, including the attack on the Akshardham temple in Gujarat, under his dispensation that when he gets up in Parliament to attack this government for being soft on terrorism, he comes off sounding like a hypocrite.

Remember, this man is so desperate that he has become discombobulated. He went to his native province of Sindh in Pakistan and was so "moved" that he lost all sense of bearing; he ended up calling Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, a secular leader. He forgot that Jinnah led the Muslim League and asked for a Pakistan as a home for the Muslims of British India. Jinnah's intractable stand caused the Partition and a loss of millions of lives and the largest transfer of populations the world has ever known to this day.

Sadly, Advani and his family were among the victims of Jinnah’s communal calculations. But then Jinnah was personally suave and secular and used the communal divide just to grab power. Advani understands that; he took out his rath yatra in the 1980s that left thousands dead in it‘s wake. Like Jinnah, Advani has cynically manipulated communal divisions in India in his no-holds-barred pursuit of power.

Between the ideologue Karat and the incompetent Advani, our country is being held hostage today. They have come together to try and topple India’s most liberal and reformist government. This is not the first time that India’s Hindu nationalists and communists have come together. They colluded in 1977 to support the Janata Party government of Morarji Desai and then in 1980 to support V P Singh, the feudal thakur who managed through sheer deviousness to become the prime minister for a few months.

Both experiments ended in disaster. Who can forget Madhu Dandavate, the finance minister in V P Singh’s ill-starred government? A man of great integrity, Dandavate was nevertheless an inexperienced person with no sense of the importance of his position. His first comment on assuming office in 1989, “The coffers are empty,” set the stage for the rapid decline of India into bankruptcy. The man who presided over the mortgage of India’s gold reserves to the Bank of England was Yashwant Sinha, an equally incompetent bureaucrat who served as finance minister after Dandavate. Sinha is today a leading light of the BJP, partly because he is among the few articulate people in the saffron combine.

The communists and the communalists joined forces in opposing the government over the nuclear deal. The communists’ objection is bigoted; they hate the US; the communalists’ opposition is purely opportunistic because they would rather have done the deal. Who can forget Jaswant Singh strutting around the place, dropping names: “My friend Strobe.” A senior British executive told me that he was struck by the number of times this obstreperous BJP minister dropped the name in a 15-minute conversation.

This is why, despite the desperate 11^th-hour drama of dubious BJP MPs smuggling currency into Parliament House, the Advani Karat pact was defeated convincingly on July 22. They are the forces of darkness and India has already awoken to that Tagorean heaven of freedom, “where the mind is without fear and the head held high.”

copyright rajiv desai 2008

Halfway Point for the UPA

The Way Things Are Going…

When the Congress Party came to power nearly three years ago, middle class hearts were gladdened. Having supported the Neanderthal Democratic Alliance led by the BJP, many were dismayed by the 1998 nuclear tests, following which India became a pariah of the international community. In 2004, the Congress-led UPA won a mandate. Tragically, the Congress think tank, which consisted largely of people who played the role of the palace guard for 10 Janpath, interpreted the result as a vote against the BJP’s “India Shining” campaign.

The Congress continues to believe that Indira Gandhi was their talisman with her garibi hatao and her 20-point program. They see in Sonia Gandhi glimpses of Indira, when really she represents a continuation of her husband Rajiv Gandhi’s vision of ushering India into the 21^st century. Many of us who worked closely with him remember when he met Jack Welch, the head of GE, who started the first BPO operation. The rest is history. Today, we are not just the world’s back office; we are solving complex business problems on the basis of our information technology expertise.

Yet the Congress rank-and-file believes that the socialist nostrum is the way forward. They now talk about “inclusive growth.” There can be no denying that the fruits of India’s screaming economic success, led by the BPO industry, should also include the poor and that the government must play an active role in ensuring that they are equally distributed. But that’s not why the BJP-led NDA coalition was defeated. The middle class that voted it into power in 1998 deserted them, frightened by the communal agenda and more so by their incompetence in governance.

The BJP sees things in black-and-white: they propagate that the Congress is an anti-Hindu party and seek votes by raising the basest communal passions that were tweaked by the Partition. The Congress also takes a similar zero-sum view and pits the rich against the poor, stoking the fires of class conflict. It is unable to shake the Soviet mindset of state control over all aspects of human endeavor.

Both parties tend to ignore the middle class. In the old days, the middle class was small and easily forgotten; today it is a substantial, creative force that chose to oust the communal die hards of the BJP. And this is the very group against which the Congress seems to have taken up cudgels, with its divisive agenda of class and caste differences. It has increased taxes, squeezed credit and supported irrational quotas based on caste.

Neither party has taken into account the aspirations of this fastest growing segment of the population. There is something abroad in the world; it’s called the India story. No political party seems to understand it. After Manmohan Singh, as finance minister, scrapped Soviet-style controls on private enterprise in 1991, the economy boomed. Unfortunately, the sacking of the Babri Mosque derailed the reforms the very next year. The economy began to drift and that saw the comprehensive defeat of the Congress in 1996 and the emergence of carpetbagger politicians, who slept in different political tents every night.

In 1996-1997, there were two weak Congress-backed governments under whose dispensation the bureaucracy was able to stall any further reforms. In 1997, when it was clear that the Gujral-Deve Gowda regime had run it course, the bureaucracy unleashed a series of demand management measures including a rise in interest rates that reined in the growing economy. The recession that followed lasted until 2003. In the interim, BJP-led coalitions came to power but proved unequal to task of reigning in the demand managers. It resorted to ad hoc measures such as the poorly designed national highway program. In the event, the BJP-led NDA crashed to defeat in the 2004 election.

For two years, the UPA government focused on setting things right. But the internal contradictions in the Congress and the nihilism of the Left saw its goodwill erode. The Congress is losing elections everywhere but its sycophantic leaders believe that Rahul Gandhi will deliver them from the morass of ignorance and intrigue that is sapping the party. Such complacency will cost them dearly.

from daily news and analysis april 18 2007

Incredible India

Going to Hell in a Hand Basket

Everywhere I turn, India is screaming and shouting. Mayawati has done this; Mulayam has done that; Karat is posturing as he may have done in his days at Jawaharlal Nehru University; the cricket guys are in a huge cacophony; and Bollywood is in your face. The business lot is putting out news releases about buying this or that company in the world. Gimme peace, already!

That’s why I retreat to my place in Goa and sit out late at night on my upstairs verandah, contemplating the cathedral of giant coconut trees surrounded by a curia of chickoo and mango. There is a choir sounding softly in the night; a harmony of gentle sea breezes rustling through the palms, like a quiet drizzle of rain.

For the past 28 years, I have been intimately involved in the public affairs of our great country. I thought we could do things differently. Certainly, since I came here from the United States in the late 1980s, things have changed dramatically. People are buying and doing things they never did before: toiletries and cosmetics, refrigerators, air-conditioners, washing machines, cars, houses and, in the upper reaches, designer clothes, yachts and even airplanes; in the realm of doing is the explosion of public transport, telecommunications, vocational education and computers.

India is enjoying the benefits of globalization. There are more choices, more opportunities, more hope. As I sit, contemplating the silence of my house in Goa, away from the chaos and noise in the public space, I can’t help wondering if we are getting it all wrong again. We admired but never practiced socialism; we practiced but never admired capitalism. We mixed our socialist mindset with a very stiff dose of elitism. Our recipe had ingredients of privilege, prejudice and perfidy. The concoction tasted of feudalism and authoritarianism.

Growing up in the primeval India of the 1960s, I realized that connections ruled. A reasonably talented young person from the middle class could only do what I did: emigrate. We fled socialist India to seek our fortune elsewhere, especially America. Back home, the privilegentsia dragged the country down into the abyss of poverty and pity. It became a basket case, scorned by the world. In the end, in 1991, the government was reduced to sending secret shipments of gold to the Bank of England to demonstrate solvency.

I was back in India when the Narasimha Rao government was left with no choice. In a historic budget, then finance minister Manmohan Singh scrapped the industrial licensing system. Reforms served up in that budget faced several political challenges including the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the rise of Hindu nationalism. Most subsequent measures were undertaken by stealth. Such changes went against the very grain of the culture of bribery and corruption bred by controls. Nevertheless, slowly but surely, the options for the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats declined.

Even today, there are vocal and powerful opponents of reform. The BJP stance is puerile politics. The Left is a dupe of the mandarins in Beijing. Within the Congress there are still several lobbies that feel it has tarnished the party’s self-image as a “pro poor” formation. Then are there are the “others,’ who feed off the trough of government finances: they are insidious opponents of reform.

With such formidable opposition, the government’s initiatives have been stymied except in the most esoteric areas of capital markets. The Indo-US civilian nuclear deal could have major benefits aside from the obvious ones that will bring India out of its pariah status. Sadly, it is on hold because of the Left servitude to Beijing and the infantile opposition of the BJP. Within the Congress, various mindless forces have contrived to sabotage India’s growth story because, like the wily Arjun Singh, they believe in nothing, profess only sycophancy.

The government’s botched effort at handling growth indicates the old mindsets still rule. So if there’s inflation: too much money chasing too few goods, the Congress poobahs would rather opt for the failed solution of demand management when the obvious thing to do is to remove obstacles to the production of more goods and jobs.

But no! We can’t have retail bloom; we will curtail growth in telecoms by all manner of stupidity; we will shackle financial services; we will not remove the barriers to real estate growth and continue to sabotage the crucial education system with rules and regulations set out by the corrupt and inept All India Council on Technical Education (AICTE). We seem to be going back to the starved sixties in a leaky boat whose officers and crew have no clue how to navigate in the changed economic circumstances.

So now we have choice between the devil: the loud, crass nouveau riche India; and the deep blue sea: the old scheming one in which the privilegentsia reigned supreme. With growing prosperity, India’s privileged classes, who wield more power than their legitimate bank balances, won’t have the wherewithal to maintain legions of low-wage servants: maids, bearers, drivers, gardeners, guards and assorted flunkies, all paid for by the feudal government and the rapacious private sector.

At the rate things are going, the nexus of politicians, bureaucrats, activists and fixers will have our country on its knees again, hunting for nuts and berries on the margins of the global mainstream.

copyright rajiv desai 2008