The Failure of the Political Class

The political class is like the public sector, which seeks to run a modern enterprise in a bureaucratic fashion that died abruptly with the Soviet Union. Likewise, politicians and bureaucrats and their cohorts in the academy try to operate a modern nation-state with command and control techniques more suited to the colonial era.

This contradiction was outlined in stark relief by the terrorist strikes in Bombay. Not even the most modern nation-state could have anticipated the strikes; however, the key is the response. Right or wrong, governments in the United States and Western Europe responded swiftly. Certainly in the US there has been not even a minor incident of terror since 9/11. Now compare that to the dithering, uncoordinated response of the Indian authorities. A cogent approach might, at the very least, have contained the number of casualties.

It took nearly ten hours for commandos to show up. Plus the police proved once again unable to do the simplest job of sanitizing the area. Instead, you had crowds of curious onlookers and the inevitable television crews and reporters. What’s more, television reporters, in their eagerness for “Breaking News,” were oblivious of the impact that their coverage could have, especially in keeping the terrorists informed about the commandos’ tactics.

Plus various spokesmen fed the media with information about police plans, government strategy and commando tactics in a random manner. It was clear that no one was in charge: not the union home minister, not the state chief minister, not the state home minister, not the NSG chief, not the police commissioner, not the state and central information ministries…it was a comprehensive failure of governance.

The question arises: could politicians and bureaucrats done any better? Of course, they could have. So why didn’t they? Why did it take the state chief minister so long to grasp the true nature of the attacks? Why did his deputy, who also serves as home minister, downplay the magnitude of the problem? Why did the center take so long to wake up: what was the national security adviser doing? What was the home minister doing? A National Disaster Management Authority office was established recently. Was this not a disaster included in its terms of reference?

Nevertheless, let’s not play the blame game; instead let us analyze why things went so terribly awry. My 27 years of intimate acquaintance with the political process leads to the following answers to questions raised above:

1. The position of a politician in any party is vicarious. Except for the supreme leader, no one is secure. This puts a premium on sycophancy that cascades through the ranks and explains why politicians wear rings, undergo elaborate religious rituals and are deeply superstitious. Their survival is not on the basis of performance or leadership; if he or she should in some way displease the leadership, it’s curtains. Neither chief minister Vilas Deshmukh nor any of the Patils (central and state home ministers) was capable of getting anything done except ceremonial posturing that in their minds would please their overlords. In such a culture, politics becomes process rather than goal oriented. Meaningless gestures and flatulent rhetoric are all you get. Hence Deshmukh’s “terror tourism” trip to the Taj with Bollywood celebrities or Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s gift of money to the family of a slain security officer. Compare that to 9/11, when the New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani took charge and directed the response.

2. National priorities are much lower in the politician’s hierarchy of values. Every situation he faces is judged on the basis of whether it strengthens or weakens his position. In addition to sycophancy, the political culture celebrates opportunism. This explains why the chief minister of a neighboring state rushed to Bombay and the Oberoi, where he swaggered before the assembled media, charging the government with failure and calling for new laws and what have you. If ever Modi was stripped of his recent image building sheen, this was it. He was shown up for what he is: a small-time opportunist with an agenda that is clearly too large for him. Meanwhile opposition leader L K Advani, with his refusal to support the government, wrote his obituary as a possible prime minister. Contrast that to solidarity shown by American and European politicians in the face of similar terror attacks.

3. Innovation and ideology are an intrinsic part of modern political cultures. Barack Obama steamrollered his way to the presidency of the United States with a high-tech campaign and a message of change. In India, Mayawati is feted for her ability to rabble rouse among the impoverished and oppressed Dalit castes, wearing diamond rings and disclosing mind-boggling assets. The BJP, with its pursuit of a communal ant-Muslim agenda, offers no real message other than hate and deceit. The failure of the party to emerge as a center right alternative is unforgivable and speaks to a lack of vision. On the other hand, the Congress is hopelessly paralyzed by various competing factions including a socialist left that seeks to return to the days of Indira Gandhi; feudal groups based on caste and religious affiliation; and a ruling progressive section that is held in the check by the various factions. The result is reform by stealth, a hesitant foreign policy and mindless populism.

Sapped by such a cancerous culture, the political class was simply incapable of responding to the terrorist assault on Bombay.

an edited version of this column appeared in the times of india, december 4, 2008

Eyewitness to Terror

BATTLE GROUND : St Xavier’s College approx 9.40 p.m. onwards

"There's been some firing at V.T. station," he said. It didn’t sound too serious. But within minutes, the scenario changed - and how! TV channels blared the news of a possible gangland gun battle at Leopold's Cafe, in Colaba. By 10.15 pm, frenzied reporters on all channels screamed, "we have a terrorist attack…shooting at the CST station reported….and they have entered the Taj Hotel in Colaba."

Suddenly, unexpectedly, all hell broke loose around St. Xavier's College. Machine guns fired (sounds very different from the ' rat-a-tat ' that we hear in movies) and grenades blasted around us. We listened in hushed, frightened silence to the deadly news that the 'atankvadis’ – terrorists- were in the neighboring Cama Hospital premises. Some of us huddled in the recreation room before the TV; some, standing on the long third floor terrace, watched disbelievingly at rifle-toting commandos enacting battle-like scenes before our eyes; and, some slept!

Standing in the corridor facing the Azad Maidan, Paul Vaz was visibly shaken. He saw a man shot in cold blood, just in front of our college driveway on Mahapalika Marg. Proof, that the ‘terrorists’ had scrambled past our main gates!

Peering over the railing of the terrace facing St. Xavier's School, Joe Velinkar and Arun watched in disbelief. Just a few feet from the College side-gate (the one facing Rang Bhavan), two men were crouched behind a white car with a spinning red light atop it. Then, with guns firing in the air, they "coolly," according to Velinkar, walked past the Rang Bhavan, and entered the G.T.Hospital complex.

Sometime between these two happenings, in this same area, brave policemen met their deaths in front of the Corporation Bank, which is situated at the extreme end of the college building. Bullets whizzed - dented the door of the bank and the red, steel electric sub-station. This is the spot where ACP Ashok Kamte (an alumnus of St. Xavier's College), Hemant Karkare, the ATS Chief (his daughter had completed her studies last year at Xavier’s) and Vijay Salaskar met their end.

Presumably, the young terrorists escaped in these officers’ Qualis van - the same Qualis that fired indiscriminately, killing two youth living in houses behind our college. And then later, on bystanders at the Metro junction a few meters away. But, within our college stone walls, surrounded by hours of bloody violence, someone surely was watching over us and our hostelites. That same someone is now prodding us to work harder - in and through our Institutions - to bring about change; to make a difference - in our beloved India.

If you prayed for us…THANK you

Lawrence Ferrao SJ

Fr Lawrie, principal of Bombay's prestigious Xavier Institute of Communications, was the celebrant at our daughter Pia's wedding in Goa, November 24, 2008. He sent me this eyewitness account.

Opportunities in Meltdown Crisis

It is the yearning of most middle class Indians to send their sons and daughters to go to Harvard Business School. That’s not surprising, given the Indian obsession for job-oriented training rather than a liberal arts education. When your children get into elite business schools, you feel you’ve fulfilled your dharma. After that, they get lucrative jobs in Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and what have you. There they work with men and women from around the world whose Arjun-like focus is to make piles of money: an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a spectacular beach house in the Hamptons, a skiing holiday in the Alps, a summer place in the south of France, a villa in Tuscany, an apartment in Paris or a great hotel in London.

Well, just as American assumptions about finance have been upturned by the dismal reality of economics, your idea of dharma is about to take a beating. The chickens have come home to roost. Twenty-eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unlamented demise of Soviet communism, we are witnessing a massive assault on the skewed capitalism unleashed by global finance. When a bunch of ambitious yuppies is given the run of the markets, you should expect immature behavior. A thousand points up, a few thousand points down: the masters of the universe thought they were invincible.

We’ve seen this in India in the first four decades of Independence. Young people with means and connections attended elite schools like Oxford and Cambridge and returned to high positions from where they pushed the intellectual ideas of the day. The result was Fabian socialism that created and favored the elite. The Leftish intellectuals who ran the country advanced distorted notions about egalitarian growth from positions of privilege. They pushed weird ideas: a ‘commanding heights’ public sector; restrictions on private enterprise; outright nationalization of ‘core’ sectors deemed vital to the country; ‘development’ banking, subsidy populism.

The entire edifice came crashing down in 1991 when the government went bankrupt. Slowly and painfully, a new structure arose in its place: a tentative reform regime frequently held hostage to mindless moffusil politics practiced by con men and goons, bigots and activists who fill party offices. One thing is obvious; the old elite have had to make way for ambitious interlopers, whether in politics or business. Their next generation largely opted out of public service and made their homes largely in the global financial community: in New York, London, Hong Kong and Singapore.

This is where the story becomes intriguing: at the intersection of the next generations of the Indian elite and the world of global finance. Once a secure and lucrative place, it is now the center of the meltdown. If the recovery is long in coming, these young men and women will most likely head home. As they pour in looking for elite perches, they will encounter the crass interlopers who now occupy such positions. It could make for an interesting political turn. In alliance with modern-minded politicians found in the Congress and in some regional parties, they could power a new equation in the country’s politics.

The global financial bust could actually re-invigorate politics. The moffusil mafia that now holds the Indian state to ransom could face a challenge. Chances of overcoming the current anarchy could improve dramatically. As things stand today, civil society (not the jholewallahs but the real thing: a middle class with civic values) is under assault. All manner of low life, including criminals, assembles under a ‘leader’ and wreaks chaos and mayhem in cities, towns and villages, without let or hindrance. You have Hindu bigots killing tribal Christians in Orissa and Karnataka; street hoods enforcing a chauvinist agenda in Bombay; Mamata Banerjee forcing the Tata Nano venture from Bengal; a regional party playing to its ethnic base by seeking to influence Indian policy in Sri Lanka; the Left playing ideological games to strap a government they were in alliance with; a BJP that is desperate for power and will go to absurd lengths as it did with displaying wads of cash during the vote of confidence in Parliament; a Congress that cannot shake off its nostalgia for Indira Gandhi and therefore remains unconvinced about economic reforms.

These distressful events are taking place at a time when the economy is notching up record growth. The minuscule middle class has grown to a critical mass and can irreversibly transform the country into a stable, modern democracy. Sadly, no political party speaks for this emergent group. Virtually all political parties are preoccupied with caste, religion and populism. It is a measure of the narrow worldview of the political leadership that no one has been able to grasp the significance of this demographic event. The closest any leader came to recognizing the growing middle class is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. This much was clear from his relentless advocacy of the Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement. He fought the odds and emerged triumphant and the middle class applauded. Can he persuade his reluctant party to solicit the support of this vital new constituency?

Meanwhile, at ground zero in the global financial markets, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy have demonstrated their leadership by pursuing an intelligent response to the crisis. The much maligned British premier, in particular, has won plaudits in his own country and around the world. In the US, a fading George W Bush failed to rally his own party around a flawed bailout package put forward by his lightweight Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson.

Interesting possibilities lie ahead. For instance, the crisis has steered the debate in the presidential campaign to focus on crisis management capabilities of the candidates. As such, this has favored the unflappable and analytical Barack Obama, with his cool temperament and level head, over the more mercurial John McCain. In the next few weeks, US voters will have the chance to send a powerful signal by selecting their President. A President Obama has a better chance of restoring sanity in fearful and avaricious global financial system.

an edited version of this column appeared in education world, november 2008

Corporate Social Responsibility?

The Nano Goes to Modi’s Gujarat

The decision by the Tata group to re-locate the Nano plant in Sanand is of concern to liberal Gujaratis. The logic of business is to be competitive and profitable; as such, Tata’s move makes sense. The company was right to choose the business-friendly state and get down to the task of making the revolutionary Nano car, which promises to put India on the global map of the auto industry.

Nevertheless, it just does not sit comfortably with liberal sensibilities in the communally-polarized state. What’s more, the triumphal note that Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi sounded at the media event to announce the pact appeared to be a new form of propaganda. He followed it up with a series of television interviews, resplendent in new sartorial style. In these interviews, Modi positioned himself as a spokesman for the new India.

Modi is a politician and, some might even argue, a cynical one. It doesn’t take rocket science to see through his new effort to buy respectability. Like Lady Macbeth, he is seeking desperately to wash the communal bloodstains off hands in order win national acceptability. He is positioning himself to emerge as a national leader in the BJP once L K Advani is gone.

We can explain away Modi’s posturing as the way of an ambitious and ruthless politician. What is more difficult to accept is Tata’s decision-making process. The Nano is Tata’s prestige project. It is plausible that the decision was made on the rebound after the embarrassment and the financial costs of the shenanigans at Singur in Bengal. Given the formidable reputation of Tata, did no one consider the possibility that the decision could sully that standing?

Tata has sizable commitments to corporate responsibility programs. They stem from the conviction of senior management that their methods of conducting business should be ethical; as such, they must take into account the interests of society. These laudable programs have won prestigious awards and wide recognition. The Nano project is also driven by the same larger vision: to provide affordable personal transport to the emergent middle class.

While some companies like The Body Shop and others are recognized for their socially conscious practices, others are disparaged and their efforts often dismissed as hollow public relations ploys to whitewash the ethical questions raised by their operations. For example, the tobacco and oil industries simply have been unable to deal with the core ethical questions.

For all the years that such companies have fretted about corporate social responsibility, their notion is largely a putative expense to divert attention from real and serious ethical issues surrounding their business. Milton Friedman made sense when he famously argued in an article written 38 years ago that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

Friedman’s piece stirred a major controversy at the time. Not just his idea of corporate responsibility but all his work on monetary theory was dismissed as a handmaiden of powerful multinationals. It was the time of Woodstock and Viet Nam; big business in the West was viewed with glaring hostility in the media, in the academy and in the liberal mainstream. In India, given the socialist mindsets in politics and the bureaucracy of the time, business was seen a milk cow: favors and cash in exchange for licenses and permits.

With the dawn of the Reagan-Thatcher era, governments ceded space to the private sector. That was when views about corporate social responsibility began to change. If the private sector has unfettered access to markets, land, labor and capital, many scholars and analysts argued, companies must consider the larger social entity in their decision making.

In a recent example, a major infrastructure firm with far-flung projects served by casual labor included AIDS awareness and disaster management as part of its social responsibility initiative. It serves both the larger community and the company interests. Companies need to seek out areas where their operations intersect with the larger good.

Seen in that light, the Tata decision to re-locate the Nano plant in Gujarat raises many questions. Modi is like a chameleon in his relentless pursuit of power. Starting out as a fiery Muslim basher, he went on to pose as the champion of Gujarati pride; now he pushes himself as a business friendly leader. How does Tata reconcile its pact with Modi whose seven years as chief minister have been marked by overt targeting of minority groups? How can a company that has been honored by the US India Business Council sign on with a controversial politician who has been and continues to be denied a visa to the United States.

Modi’s culpability in the communal mayhem that followed the Godhra incident was clearly established; his effort to gain absolution by setting up the kangaroo Nanavati commission was clumsy. It’s in the past; he has turned a new leaf: the cheerleaders say. But who can forget that Modi built his political career by fanning the flames of religious bigotry with references to the conquest of India by the Mughals in medieval times and more recently, the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan

In the end, there is a growing belief that Tata’s move, though legitimate, helped Modi in his whitewash campaign to emerge as a national leader. As a result, this highly respected company’s commitment to social responsibility appears somewhat weaker.

an edited version of this piece appeared in the times of india, october 21, 2008

Goa Unplugged

After All, It IS India

So here we are in Ucassaim, Goa again. The monsoon is at an end and now there’s bright sunshine; warm humid days, cool starry nights. And I think to myself what a wonderful world. There are high-pitched songbirds in the morning; an irritating rooster with five-o’clock-alarm regularity; peacocks romantically a-braying at the prospect of snakes. The bread guy, the egg man and every other vendor has this little rooty-tooty horn that starts blowing from five in the morning to midday.

Our little village is, as such, a bucolic place. After three days of rain and a day of sunny blue skies, you can sit in the verandah and still hear the water dripping from the trees at night. You get up from your armchair and look up at the million trillion stars in the sky to see if it’s clouded over again and it’s raining. And you realize with some impeccable insight that dripping water is the main event in Goa during the monsoon. Even after two days of sunny skies, despite the star-filled, moonlit nights, the drip-drop of the water from the trees never ceases. It is soothing, almost mesmerizing.

The wonder of this place is that is a feast of vision and sound but also of heavenly aromas of food: the overwhelming smell of feni, the pungent odor of Goa vinegar and the lustful noseful of seafood. Apart from the hedonistic cornucopia that is the very essence of the place, there are other, more mundane aspects: good roads, polite drivers, great bars, good restaurants. It is fun to wander through the towns, villages and beaches during the day and eat a simple dinner at home or find a buzzing place to dine in.

This time, however, the pleasures of Goa were tinged with a black penumbra. It turns out our bucolic little village is full of greedy and envious neighbors. We’ve tried to reach out to them but their world is so different. The amount of money we spend going back and forth from Goa in a year surpasses their annual earnings. If we were white foreigners, nobody would hassle us; if we were rich, we would have people to contain them. Being neither, we face the hostility of neighbors, who are nice to talk to; it is clear they have a hidden agenda. And they operate stealthily through the Panchayat.

In our case, they cannot complain in terms of religion or caste: my wife is a Goan Catholic; I am a Hindu Brahmin. Between Pereira (my wife’s maiden name) and Desai (also a Goan name), we easily blend in, especially because we live the local life. The problems our neighbors are causing us are petty but stressful. One neighbor is a policeman; he had a wicket gate leading into our garden from his yard and enjoyed a free run of our property. We sealed off the gate. Now he is extracting revenge. He has filed a complaint in the panchayat against the boundary wall we are seeking to repair. He even brought in his loutish fellow cops to threaten us. Another neighbor started an ambitious project to build an additional floor but ran out of money; a third has cattle in his living quarters and the family is always at war, using loud voices and sometimes even physical combat.

All these years, we’ve ignored them, valuing the physical allure of the village. We’ve weaved that attraction into a pastoral experience. I was hoping to write poetry like William Blake,; instead I am constrained to write a Marxist tract. Now that we are sprucing up the property for our daughter’s wedding in the next few months, we’ve had people coming out of the woodwork, objecting to walls; this, that and the other. All complaints go to the Panchayat; there are inspections, without any reference to the alleged transgressor.

In the past few weeks, we’ve had all manner of harassment from neighbors. They are of a completely negative frame of mind. One neighbor complained that we had encroached into his property; another complained, and he lives across the street, that the wall would block the breeze in his house. A third simply said we could not do it unless we built ten feet into our property, giving him the land for free.

We come to Goa to get away from it all. We stay at out second home, mind our own business and reach out to the locals. There is, however, such a simmering pot of envy that you can neither touch nor swallow for fear of burns. We have decided to fight it. Never mind religion or caste, the hostility has to do with socioeconomic differences. Though nowhere rich by global or even the new Indian standards, we nevertheless pay our caretaker more than the per capita income of the village…we probably spend more than that on dinner, when we go out.

That is the truth. But I see no reason why they would gang up on us, except because they believe they can wring a few thousand rupees out of us. Apart from the fact that I would not even part with a penny, I am shocked that these people have such a skewed view of the world: the idea you can gang up to extract money from your better-off neighbor.

As my daughter says, “Man, Dad, they picked the wrong guy.” And indeed they did. My wife is from Goa and I am Goan by choice. We have the resources to tie the Panchayat up in litigation for the next 10 years. Our taxes are 122 rupees a year because that’s really what residents can afford. I have no qualms in using my financial clout to fight harassment. On the other hand, despite the pathetic real estate taxes, the village is clean; everyone manages to dispose off their garbage and there are no smelly bins of the type you find in Delhi’s villages. We know because even in the capital we live surrounded by a village that is immensely wealthier and depressingly dirtier.

So there we have it. We live in this bucolic village; we spend more money in a day than the local residents do in a month. But we could become victims of the egregious envy of our neighbors, who are simply hoping to make a buck by slowing our renovation. I told members of the Panchayat, who came to visit us, that we will support the local orphanage (imagine: in this little impoverished community, there is one). But we have no time for envious and greedy neighbors. And we will move heaven and earth to insulate ourselves from the petty machinations of the neighbors. It is class warfare, plain and simple.