The splintered social contract

I wrote this piece in 2007. Thought I'd re-circulate it because to me it still seems relevant. I've edited it.

In September 1897, an eight-year-old girl in New York City, Virginia O’Hanlon, wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Sun. She wanted to know if there was a Santa Claus.

The letter drew a response from Francis Church, a lead editorial writer for the paper.

Church’s editorial, Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus, is widely regarded by students of journalism as perhaps the most famous edit ever written in America; it was the subject of a film starring Charles Bronson as Church.

Writing about the “skepticism of skeptical age”, Church reassured his interlocutor that Santa Claus did exist: “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy...”

As a graduate student specialising in editorial writing, I can remember virtually memorising Church’s words and hoping that some day mine would have such meaning. With Christmas upon us, the edit came to mind.

What happened to wide-eyed innocence? The question is relevant in India today, where cynicism and guile have hardened hearts all across the nation.

Humanism and compassion are stored on the highest, most inaccessible shelves of values.

Hard-bitten people have emerged as leaders in business, politics, education, entertainment and media. They hold sway over the national discourse.

Intent on getting ahead, they push and shove, scream and shout, lie and cheat. It’s about accumulation of power and wealth: the worst form of capitalism, without the moral anchor that the European Enlightenment provided in the West.

In 21st century India, while the economy booms, the social contract is splintered by divisive caste and communal agendas raised by power-hungry politicians and money-grubbing bureaucrats, not to mention hard-boiled industrialists.

Such Dickensian characters as the Artful Dodger, the scoundrel who dodges responsibility for the consequences of his actions, and Ebenezer Scrooge, the killjoy who has come to symbolise a lack of charity, are emulated; gentleness, guilelessness and similar values of what the editorial writer Church called “eternal light” are discounted, even scorned.

It is almost as if existence is a zero-sum game in which victory is never sweeter unless it’s at the cost of someone else.

This mindset has a deep and lasting influence on public affairs. The individual, corporate and political values that flow from such thinking eschew the larger cause, the public good, the common weal.

Conflict is the central theme and the media seem to wallow in it. Celebrities, bureaucrats, companies and political parties are featured like gladiators of ancient Rome, while bloodthirsty citizens watch from the coliseum stands.

In this sport, only these groups count: the players and the media..

Beyond that there is filth, disease, poverty and ignorance that provide compelling evidence of the failure of governance.

Given such lopsided public priorities, there are garish malls, office buildings and apartment houses rising from the middle of a rubble strewn landscape.

Everywhere there is confusion: badly designed roads, unmanageable traffic, overburdened public transport, ill-equipped public hospitals and stressed out citizens who contract the diseases of wealth such as coronary heart disease and diabetes without the requisite bank balances to pay for their treatment; never mind those poor people who die of easily treatable diseases like malaria and diarrhea.

As the twelwth year of the millennium recedes into history, it is clear that that a Las Vegas bonanza style seems to have overtaken the practice of public affairs.

Public policy must be rescued from the roulette tables and the slot machines of zero-sum thinking.

Winning and losing; all manner of one-upmanship and conflict, true, are  major drivers of history, to be sure.  Without a social contract, India is a victim of the Las Vegas approach that promotes short-term thinking when what is sorely needed is a long term vision to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor; to give some hope to the mess of villages, towns and cities that are hellholes.

Let me hasten to add that I am not advocating a return to the days of central planning when deadly serious bureaucrats focused on the long term objective of peace on earth even as the neighbourhood fell apart.

This article appeared on DNA website on December 18, 2007

The splintered social contract

The rise of righteous reaction

Mahatmas with a small m

Through my pre-teen and teenage years, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather. He was a medical doctor, a theosophist, a Congress party activist and a compassionate human being. He was my ideal.

One summer when my siblings and I were visiting his home in Surat, someone told him I had eaten meat. Grandfather wasn’t incensed or censorious; he simply said “We don’t eat meat.” I was in awe of this man who attracted eminences like Rabindranath Tagore, Annie Besant, George Arundale, among others to his home. When he said something, I listened, deferentially.

However on this occasion his comment rankled. Grandfather seemed to be suggesting that because of caste and religious strictures, our family was vegetarian. Having eaten a mutton samosa at a friend’s house, I thought to myself that his reaction was over the top. I knew he was tolerant and liberal; his extensive library included books by Bertrand Russell and other free thinkers.  Thanks to him, we were spared worst traditions of caste and religion.

This incident haunted me over the years. Since I admired him, I dismissed the episode as a one-off occurrence. Nevertheless, it came back to haunt me in the mid-1970s, when I was living in the US.  Our high-profile India Forum group in Chicago became a magnet for NGOs and activists of all types, looking at times for financial support but mostly to spread the gospel of the jholewala alternative.  I termed it “the rise of righteous reaction.”

The ascent of the righteous activist posing alternative, mostly woolly and impractical models, was like a riptide generated by the Navnirman wave.  Led by Jayaprakash Narayan, a Congress party dissenter, the movement was against the perceived corruption and, in a phrase cherished and propagated by the jholewala, ‘anti-people’ development policies of the Indira Gandhi government of the time.

Training his guns on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Narayan called for “Total Revolution,” a Maoist-style leap backward into anarchy which prompted the imposition of the Emergency in June 1975. Condemned worldwide as a dictatorial regression, the Emergency destroyed the government’s credibility. The Congress Party was defeated in the general election of 1977.

However, even before the first non-Congress government assumed office in Delhi, things had begun to go awry. During what he thought was a revolutionary war; Narayan had called on the armed forces to revolt against the government. That’s when the steady erosion of his vastly inflated stature began, helped in no small measure by the subsequent fumbling and ineptitude of the Janata government which came to power in 1977.

Narayan’s movement had its roots in the margins of the Gandhian movement. The Mahatma’s success with the independence struggle allowed him to exhume and propagate an anti-Western, anti-modernity ideology drawn from his 1909 tract Hind Swaraj. Mohandas Gandhi challenged Jawaharlal Nehru’s modernization agenda, recommending simplistic notions like village republics, self-sufficiency, nature cure and vegetarianism as national alternatives.

Like many students who studied in the US after him, Narayan became a Karl Marx admirer. However, when he returned to India he found his position pre-empted by Nehruvian economic policies that emphasized central planning and nationalization of core industries. For him and his acolytes, it was a short step to the vituperative and impractical edicts of Hind Swaraj.

The Navnirman movement was confused at birth. It combined the anti-Western, anti-modern strains of Gandhian utopianism and the anti-market, anti-constitutional Marxist dogma. This weird and unsustainable campaign fell apart as casually as it was formed.

After the failure of Narayan’s movement, the role of righteous reaction became marginal. The protest against the Narmada Dam project led by a global coalition of NGOs gave it a second wind. Through the 1980s, the Indian jholewala brigade became involved with relatively benign campaigns against child labor, deforestation, and for employment generation, education, healthcare, among others.  

In 2004, the newly-elected UPA government, recognizing their contribution to social welfare and poverty alleviation, sought to co-opt the jholewala brigade into the National Advisory Council (NAC). The NAC’s deliberations focused on welfare and (Citizen’s) rights rather than the legitimacy of the government and the political system. But a more virulent strain of Jholewala activism surfaced with the appearance on the national stage of Anna Hazare and his disciples.

The Hazare protest went further than Narayan in challenging the legitimacy of the Constitution and the credibility of the political system. Sophisticated in the use of propaganda, the rural chieftain and his jholewala acolytes cleverly projected their protest as being against corruption when actually it is a political assault on the UPA government and its leading party, the Congress. Like Narayan, Hazare over-reached and today, his protest has degenerated into a media relations effort.

Is the tradition of smug righteousness so deeply ingrained in the Indian psyche that it can only be contained, never eradicated? Who will be the next mahatma (with a small m)?

This Article appeared in the Education World magazine in August 2012 issue.

www.educationworldonline.net

Paid Media Lacks Credibility

In an exclusive interview with Image Management, Rajiv Desai, Chairman and Chief Executive of Comma Consulting, discusses how the PR industry can grow in India, and how it needs to change.

Q. Some industry experts suggest that over 80% of the PR business is split between Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. How can the industry fuel pan India growth?

To fuel the PR industry’s pan- India growth, we need more business. The next big markets are away from the metros. For example, with Bharti, we worked in teeny- tiny rural areas, because that was their rural push. The next big thrust has actually been in telecom; there are now telecom related businesses in hinterland area. When you have businesses, then you have jobs, and the growth of business fuels the need for PR.  I think that is what can really help – more expansive businesses as opposed to centralized ones. It s not that  India didn’t have a very enlightened policy  because even during the Nehruvian era we had these public sectors mines, steel plants and chemical plants  in remote areas like Chattisgarh. That was enlightenment, but also a sort of forced migration into the hinterland. And without the appropriate the connectivity’s, they became white elephants.

With these modern businesses like telecom, and to some extent insurance and banking, they first built the linkages and then they locate. Whereas, in the earlier one’s you were sort of pushed into it because of the policy decision. That’s the kind of thing that will help. If for example if they stop hindering retail FDI and actually let it happen – this will create a huge rural pan-India growth.

Q. What is the biggest challenge facing the Indian PR industry?

Q. Do you see paid media as a tool or threat to the PR Industry?

If you think that the be-all –and-end- all of PR is to be in the media, then you might find this to be a factor. But it’s not for us. We are in the media because it serves a different purpose. Not just to have someone’s mug in there and make them feel great. So, if the be all and end of your PR campaign is media coverage, we get more coverage. We are a small company but no one generates the kind of coverage we do.

If it doesn’t serve the client’s purpose, then media coverage may not be the thing. If it doesn’t serve the media’s purpose, then you influence the media. Any paid media lacks creditability.

Q. How does Comma Consulting set themselves apart from the other PR agencies in India?

This article appeared on Image Management India Website on July 24, 2012.

Rajiv Desai, Comma Consulting: Paid Media Lacks Credibility

When Rajesh Khanna Dabbled in Politics

“For the last few weeks, the crowd puller on the streets of New Delhi’s official and diplomatic quarter has been Rajesh Khanna, a former film star in a country wild about movies and a Congress candidate for Parliament in nationwide elections that begin Monday,” Barbara Crossette wrote in The New York Times in May of 1991.


Mr. Khanna was pulled in to counter the star power of the “sobersided, meticulously articulate, scrupulously courtly” Lal Krishna Advani, leader of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, she wrote, who was giving Rajiv Gandhi stiff competition.


“Mr. Khanna is equally renowned for once having been married to an Indian Marilyn Monroe called Dimple Kapadia. When she agreed to show up on the hustings for old times’ sake, the crowds were ecstatic,” she wrote.


Not all of them, though. 

Khushwant Singh, a columnist, author and former newspaper editor, says that the appearance on the Congress Party ticket of Mr. Khanna, whom he describes as “some kind of buffoon,” has made him decide to boycott the election, the first time he has done so since he began voting.

Rajiv Desai, who runs a public affairs consultancy in New Delhi and occasionally writes on politics and the evolution of political campaigning in India, thinks the celebrity candidate is a sign of political maturity.

In an interview, he said that the attraction to politics of public figures of any kind is a sign that the base of the candidate pool is widening and campaigns are becoming more sophisticated. In South Asia — certainly in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh — opposing parties have tended to regard each other as ideological if not mortal enemies, and have found it hard to work together after elections.

“These celebrity politicians don’t treat politics as deathly serious,” Mr. Desai said. “They can look at the other parties as rivals, not enemies.”

“In this election, although Congress is likely to get the largest number of seats, there is a chance that it may have to work in coalition with other parties. It will have to tread warily.

This article appeared on The New York Times on July 18, 2012.


When Rajesh Khanna Dabbled in Politics

Asleep at The Wheel?

He drank heavily in his prime and still enjoys a nightly whiskey or two at 74. India's leader takes painkillers for his knees (which were replaced due to arthritis) and has trouble with his bladder, liver and his one remaining kidney. A taste for fried food and fatty sweets plays havoc with his cholesterol. He takes a three-hour snooze every afternoon on doctor's orders and is given to interminable silences, indecipherable ramblings and, not infrequently, falling asleep in meetings.

Atal Behari Vajpayee, then, would be an unusual candidate to control a nuclear arsenal. But for four years the Indian Prime Minister's grandfatherly hands have held the subcontinent back from tumbling into war. Despite the fact that he heads the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a constituency stuffed with extremists, Vajpayee has ambitiously pursued peace with neighbor and rival Pakistan, even traveling to the Pakistani cultural capital of Lahore in 1999, vainly hoping to bury the bloody animus of the past and start an era of good feelings.

With 1 million soldiers facing each other at high alert on the India-Pakistan border, those days seem long ago. At the same dangerous time, Vajpayee's stewardship is looking less and less comforting. The frail bachelor seems shaky and lost, less an aging sage than an ordinary old man. He forgets names, even of longtime colleague and current Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, and during several recent meetings he appeared confused and inattentive. After a meeting with a Western Foreign Minister, his appearance was described by one attending diplomat as "half dead." At a rare press conference last month in Srinagar, the Prime Minister tottered to the podium. Indian TV crews are asked to film him from the waist up to avoid showing his shuffling gait to find he had trouble understanding questions, repeatedly relying on whispered prompts from Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani. Even then Vajpayee stumbled over his replies. "He is very alert when he is functional," says one BJP worker. "But there are very few hours like that." Adds one Western diplomat: "We have a lot of conversations about his health. Some of his mannerisms come down to his personal style. But some of it is definitely spacey stuff."

While no one questions that key decisions on national security and foreign policy are still made by Vajpayee, the focus is now turning to the two men behind the throne: Vajpayee's low-key National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, and Vajpayee's hard-line BJP colleague of 50 years, 72-year-old Advani. The consensus among observers and diplomats is that the hawkish Advani is preparing to succeed Vajpayee at the next national elections due by late 2004. "There is no doubt he is the Prime Minister in waiting," remarks a diplomat.

In the meantime, Vajpayee has undergone a sudden conversion from peacemaker to warmonger primarily in response to political pressures. This year's standoff on the border shows the dovish Prime Minister has accepted the argument that war or the threat of it works. In comments that set off alarm bells around the world, Vajpayee last month spoke twice of an impending "decisive battle" against India's "enemy." Although he has repeatedly said that he does not want war, the Prime Minister has sound strategic reasons for ratcheting up the rhetoric. Since Sept. 11, he has found the international community more sympathetic to the idea of India waging its own war on terror against jihadis in the contended state of Jammu and Kashmir, where many of them have been inserted by Pakistan. And it plays well for India to keep the pot boiling: New Delhi can claim a victim's solidarity with the U.S., avoid addressing the awkward issue of its heavy-handed rule in Muslim-dominated Kashmir and just possibly get Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to actually shut down the jihadi industry on his territory, ending what India calls a "proxy war."

Last week, Musharraf told visiting U.S Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that he was going to put a permanent end to terrorist incursions into India. Vajpayee's government promised in turn some de-escalation measures, though a withdrawal of troops from the border has been ruled out. The big risk, however, is that no matter what Musharraf does, there are enough jihadis already in Kashmir to keep hammering India with suicide bombs and death squads. Four people were killed by terrorists Friday night in Kashmir, even as heavy shelling continued at the frontier and an unmanned Indian spy plane was shot down by the Pakistani air force. Any small spark can still push Vajpayee to deploy his soldiers in some punitive counterattack on Pakistan, which can lead to full-scale war.

Meanwhile, Vajpayee's colleagues carp that he's still not being hawkish enough. "Any Prime Minister that takes action against Pakistan will sweep the elections, but Vajpayee is reluctant and that will definitely damage the BJP," complains BJP hard-liner B.P. Singhal. "As the Prime Minister, for him, national interest is above party interest."

Tellingly, Vajpayee was forced to give up his moderate stance and attend to his party in response to a domestic disaster, not an international crisis. On Feb. 27, a group of Muslims firebombed a train in the western state of Gujarat murdering 58 Hindus. The reprisals against Muslims in Gujarat were fierce, unpoliced, and went on for weeks, killing some 2,000 according to human rights groups. (The official death toll, widely disbelieved, is half this.) On April 4, Vajpayee reacted with revulsion, urging Hindu rioters to rediscover "a sense of unity and brotherhood." Asked the published poet: "Burning alive men, women and children? Are we human or not? Or has a demon taken over us?" His office briefed newspapers on the likely candidates to replace Gujarat state leader Narendra Modi, a member of the BJP who was accused of complicity in the violence, or at least, ineptness in containing it. But scarcely a week later, on April 12, Vajpayee changed his tune. Nothing more was said about sacking Modi. And speaking to an audience in Goa, Vajpayee shocked the country by declaring: "These days militancy in the name of Islam leaves no room for tolerance. Wherever such Muslims live, they tend not to live in coexistence ... they want to spread their faith by resorting to terror and threats."

In the subcontinental context, that kind of statement is a license for the killings to continue. According to diplomatic sources, the burden of the crisis made Vajpayee unwell. Adds Vinod Mehta, editor-in-chief of the Indian weekly Outlook magazine, Advani and his supporters used the illness to gather the party's hard-line core and read him the riot act. "The party basically gave him no room to maneuver," says Mehta. "He knew he could have lost his job and he had neither the spirit nor the physical strength to fight back. So he just gave up his moderate stance and fell in line. Now he's just a party mascot, a puppet of the hard-liners."

With an enfeebled Vajpayee at the helm, the prospect of war with Pakistan becomes more real. "Advani would really like to finish this proxy war, and perhaps do a bit more," says one diplomat. India has none of the checks and balances designed during the cold war to prevent a nuclear launch in anger. (Although India's military is comfortingly professional, nonpolitical and obedient to civilian control. The country's nukes are controlled by government scientists, and deployment orders come from the Prime Minister's office alone.) For his part, Advani denies any undue influence, or even the tag of "hawk" although, characteristically, he describes communal violence under the BJP as "minimal," even after the shame of Gujarat. But asked about the possibility of attacking across the Line of Control in Kashmir, Advani answers that in his view India is already facing an "undeclared war" from the militants. His list of conditions that Musharraf must meet before peace talks can begin is lengthy. "As long as this undeclared war, this training, arming, financing of jihadis, and this infiltration and terrorism and sabotage continues," he says, "then any dialogue will be meaningless." And he hints that the international community has given tacit approval for action. "One major change in the last 10 days has been that the U.S., Britain and other coalition members have said publicly and forcefully that Pakistan should stop cross-border terrorism," he says. "Our Prime Minister took really radical initiatives in the past. There's no question of that now" in other words, of actively looking for peace. An Indian army source adds that unless India detects that promised shift in militant activity and capability in the next five weeks, the military expects an order to attack.

The body on the other end of the seesaw is Mishra, a 70-year-old career civil servant and diplomat, who functions as the equivalent of a White House chief of staff. The fact that Mishra has survived countless calls for his removal he's accused of wielding influence beyond his position is testament to his pivotal role, diplomats say. Mishra is considered to be the brains behind the peace overtures of the past. His influence with Vajpayee these days waxes when the two men get away from the capital and the rest of the BJP. At a regional security conference in the Kazakh capital of Almaty last week, the Prime Minister made a rare and unexpected conciliatory gesture when he proposed joint Indian-Pakistani patrols along the Line of Control to ensure an end to infiltration. All week Mishra was briefing India's national newspapers that the government had decided to tone down the rhetoric. And significantly, when Vajpayee returned to Delhi on Wednesday night, Mishra stayed behind for further talks. But, warns Outlook editor Mehta, Mishra is just an appointed government servant, however close he is to the boss. "Mishra's influence is directly proportional to Vajpayee's position. He has no party base. When Vajpayee goes down, Mishra goes with him."

Observers say that the BJP is hoping to use Vajpayee through the next general elections, but no further. The party currently rules in a coalition, with Vajpayee as the glue that holds it together. If it manages to win an absolute majority, it won't need him any longer. The Prime Minister has largely accepted this gradual decline. His great ambition on gaining office was to do for India-Pakistan relations what Nixon did for China and the U.S.: only a right-winger, went the argument, could take the country into a peace deal with the archenemy. And this Vajpayee wanted to do, to secure a place in the history books. Friends say this ambition is now dead. Much of the Prime Minister's energy is now devoted to the business of weight rather than weighty affairs of state. His staff coaxes the reluctant old man onto a treadmill for 10 minutes every day and encourages him to take short walks. His "family" longtime companion Rajkumari Kaul, who suffered a heart attack in March, and her daughter Namita ensures he is served only boiled vegetables and rice. But Vajpayee still insists on an evening drink or two. In the family cottage in the Himalayan foothills, says an aide, nothing can keep him away from deep-fried trout. "He promises to stick to his diet with doubled rigidity once he leaves," says an aide, "but the trout he must have." On a long flight abroad, Vajpayee compared his menu with other members of the government party. "He was terribly upset when he discovered he had been singled out for special treatment," says the aide, "and tried to browbeat the in-flight staff into serving him the general meal, which was spicier." Meanwhile, tension seems set to continue between India and Pakistan. But as Vajpayee's ability to steer a moderate course diminishes, he's spending the twilight of his political life where he wants to be out to lunch.

This article appeared at Time.com on June 10, 2002.
Asleep at The Wheel?