Anticipating India - Shekhar Gupta

ANTICIPATING INDIA THE B EST O F NATI ONAL INTEREST

Shekhar Gupta

For Viveck Goenka, nineteen years, 900 columns and not one call to ask ‘why’. If you find more newspaper owners like him, please do exchange notes with me. & Mandakini, Rudraneil, Abhimanyu and Swati, the four points of my compass.

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION

PART 1: NDA DAYS WISE MEN TALKING WHAT INGRATITUDE, MY GOD SCREAMING, SILENTLY ASSAM’S LOST DECADE AH, THE SWEET SMELL OF POVERTY! UTTAR PRADESH AS INQUESTION THE UGLY PICTURE BACKFIRE’S BURNING POT’S BLACKER THAN THE KETTLE THE BREACH CANDY DILEMMA THE MODI MAGNIFIER THE HMT ADVANTAGE POLITICS IN PAST TENSE THE JAMES-JUSTICE TEST NEW DELHI, NEW VOTER THE RESULTS ARE IN

PART 2: CONGRESS SPRINGS A SURPRISE MR VAJPAYEE’S HIGH GROUND, MRS GANDHI’S ROAD AHEAD BEST BAKERY VERSUS UPPER CRUST IT’S MANMOHANOMICS, MANMOHAN IT’S THE BROKER AND THE FARMER PURUSH VERSUS PARIVAR MAXIMUM CITY, MINIMUM PROGRAMME CRIPPLING THE DOCTOR LIBERATE OUR CITIES OUR POOR LITTLE RICH OLD POLITICS VERSUS NEW ECONOMY GENERATION EX WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BULLDOZER? EVEN LOHIAITES ARE LEARNING MY SEAT, MAI-BAAP WILL THE BULLY NOW DO WHAT BULLIES USUALLY DO WHEN THEIR BLUFF IS CALLED? IF MODI WINS ON SUNDAY NORTHEAST IS INDIA AND THEN THERE WERE NINE THE RURBAN MIND IT’S NOT ABOUT 272 YES, WE CAN’T THE CHATTERANTI THE GLORIOUS CERTAINTIES COCKTAIL PARTY OF INDIA HINDU RATE OF BJP GROWTH HANDS DOWN

PART 3: THE RETURN OF THE UPA HIS NEXT CLASS ACT BABUJI DHEERE CHALNA THE MAKING OF THE FLAW PURUSH DROUGHT-PROOFING INDIA TEARING DOWN NARASIMHA RAO SECONDERABAD NO SILENCE, PLEASE THE BUCK STARTS HERE WITH ALL DUE RESPECT THE POWER OF ONE IS ANYBODY THERE? LEFTOVER AT THE CENTRE

PART 4: THE UPA IN DECLINE UNITED REGRESSIVE ALLIANCE GO, OR GET GOING SO NEHRU KILLED GANDHI! THAT FUNNY BOFORS FEELING DIRTY BUSINESS UPA’S METEORIC FALL THERE ARE TWO CONGRESSES IS ANYBODY OUT THERE? LOK SABHA, 2014 THE GREAT LETDOWN THE SUMMER FREEZE MUMBYE DECIDE ON THE DOCTOR THE OFFICER RAJ NO NOOSE IS GOOD NOOSE THAT SINKING FEELING BLUNDER JANATA PARTY THE STATES STRIKE BACK ANYBODY OUT THERE? CRUDE POLITICS MEENA KUMARI POLITICS FIXERPRENEURSHIP FIRST FAMILY, SECOND NATURE NAGPUR, WE HAVE A PROBLEM A RETREAT TO REFORM EARS WIDE SHUT THEM VERSUS THEM PROUD TO PAY ONE DYNASTY DIMMING STILL MANDAL, STILL MANDIR LAWLIPOP POLITICS OUR POOR LITTLE SANJU NOT ENOUGH, BOSS CRONY, CRAWLY CAPITALISM THE BLEEDING HEARTLESS

PART 5: THE RISE OF NARENDRA MODI

MODI VERSUS HIS PARTY THE CHIEF IN CHIEF MINISTER BODY POLITICS LOSE-LOSE THE DEFORMISTS MODI-HIT SCARED WITLESS CURRENT ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT THE CONGRESS’S MODI AKHILESH, YOUNG AND LISTLESS I’VE GOT THE VETO POWER HIS MORAL HIGHNESS THE ACCUSED MY SARDAR VERSUS YOURS OR ELSE, MODI

PART 6: FROM ANNA TO AAM AADMI AAM AADMI VERSUS SAB CHOR THANK GOD FOR POLITICS WE, THE THIEVING PEOPLE JANTAR, CHHU MANTAR THE GREAT INDIAN HIJACK OUT WITH OUR RAGE OUR SINGAPORE FANTASY THE AAM ANNA AADMI ANNATIONALISM HOLIER THAN COW THE CASTE OF CORRUPTION FOOTNOTES INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book would never have happened if I had not met Surendra Pratap Singh (SP), a brilliant Hindi editor who made his mark across genres, the dailyNav Bharat Times, weekly Ravivar and then as my editorial adviser for the Hindi edition ofIndia Today , and finally as a key founder of Aaj Tak. He mentored an entire army of political journalists in English and Hindi. I am happy to be counted among them. SP and I met and became friends a bit late in my working life. I had built a track record of sorts for covering troubles within India and around the world. But SP told me emphatically that I would remain a fair-weather, parachute journalist living from story to story unless I graduated to writing about politics. Over the following years, therefore, he became my teacher in Indian politics, particularly in the complexities of caste and class in the heartland, and helped me understand what lay beneath what many saw as the excesses of the Mandal Commission. It didn’t stop there. It was at his urging that I gathered the nerve to leave my very secure and comfortable perchIndia at Today to move in as the editor of theIndian Express , our most political paper by far. And yet, again, even hen interrupted by calls from the Aaj Tak newsroom on the mobile phone that mystified him (1995– 96, when the first mobiles came to India), he nagged me to start a weekly column if I wanted to be taken seriously as an editor. The world of journalism and a family lost SP too early, to a stroke. I have missed him all these years and owe not just the column, but also my evolution as a political riter to him. This book is dedicated to Viveck Goenka, publisher of the Express Group, and that must sound unusual. Because sure enough, there was competition, not just from immediate family but, as those ho know my wife and me, children and children-in-law well, from the so many dogs and cats who enrich our lives. My choice of Viveck is very well thought out. I dedicate this collection to him because through nearly nineteen years as editor of the Indian Express, one of our greatest institutions, and through the publication of more than 900 National Interest articles that rubbed people across the political, bureaucratic and corporate spectrum the wrong way, I never, ever, got a phone call from him even to ask why. Even when people called him to complain, he usually responded with the equivalent of switchingoff his phone. No editor can ask for a better gift from his publisher. It’s such a pity that so few today are cast in this mould. We spent several frustrating days thinking of a name for the column. Many were tossed around but ere not convincing—also because I wanted the freedom to write on anything, from politics to defence, security and foreign policy to cricket. The answer came from S. Prasannarajan, he of the quaintly complex and charming prose and intriguingly refreshing turn of phrase. Call it National Interest, he said, and you can write on cricket, Bollywood, anything. So, thank you Prasanna, for giving me such intellectual space and licence. Raj Kamal Jha and Unni Rajen Shanker, currently editor and managing editor, respectively, at the ndian Express have been my friends, colleagues and partners in much for more than twenty years. I have rarely felt sure of the drift without brainstorming with them before starting to write every

stressful Friday afternoon. In much of Indian journalism you have never seen anybody who can write a headline as Raj can. National Interest has benefited greatly from his brilliant headlines, as I from picking his phenomenal bank of knowledge and ideas even when he was on long sabbaticals in totally hopeless time zones. Unni has the finest sense of political nuance, as also of what is non-kosher even for a writer as reckless as me. Raj brings a refreshingly globalised intellectual view to all issues, helps you cut through the clutter as no other. To him, I also owe a lesson every journalist should engrave on his sleeve: never switch off your bullshit detector. Raj and Unni lead a formidable reporting team at the Indian Express whose brilliant work served as primary research for my pieces. Investigations Editor Ritu Sarin, Delhi Editor Rakesh Sinha and Express News Service Editor Pranab Dhal Samanta, thank you for doing that fact-check a minute before deadline. Swapan Dasgupta headed our editorial page when the column began. From him on to A.J. Philip, Pamela Philipose, Saubhik Chakrabarti, Mini Kapoor and Vandita Mishra, truly wonderful editors headed the Indian Express opinion pages with a small, stellar and uncomplaining team of talented young women and men. I thank them all, and apologise to them for holding them up late Friday evenings when they deserved to go home or party. Amulya Gopalakrishnan, Sudeep Paul, Ipsita Chakravarty, Yamini Lohia and Parth Mehrotra in the current team, and many talented ones who have now grown so wonderfully well in the profession—National Interest belongs to you as much as to me. One of them, however, deserves a very, very special mention. Mini Kapoor has selected these columns and spent months editing, fact-checking, putting in references and citations. It is only her perseverance and patience that has made this book a reality. Thank you Mini, friend and colleague. And remember, we aren’t done yet. Usha Uppal, without whom, I sincerely believe, not even a word would have been written. She makes the impossible so easy, she runs my back-office blending art with magic I have still not figured out. Many of these columns were written on scraps of paper faxed from hotel counters, my handwriting legible only to her; sometimes in chunks of garbled paras texted from my BlackBerry. Only Usha could translate all this—which she did with a smile. And another ally who can teach you to deal with any calamity—including a self-perpetuating one like me—with a smile. If you need a can-do tutorial, call Ambreen Khan. Another unusual thank-you note to two extraordinary friends and comrades. Libel, contempt o court and some laws nastier than these are hazards journalists live with. I have spent half a lifetime squabbling with overly cautious lawyers who threaten you with nothing less than the possibility o ail if you dare to step out of the line they, of course, draw for you. In Vaidehi Thakar and Poorvi Kamani, the Indian Express has much more than a brilliant legal team. It could not have asked for a finer set of guardians of its unmatched and uncontested editorial freedoms. It does no harm that both also happen to be my most regular readers, fair if unforgiving critics, and never forget to chide me on the odd Friday that I get too lazy to write. But if anything ever brings legal trouble, they are wonderful allies, particularly along with Nachiket Joshi, quicksilver in the courtroom. And, of course, the guru of them all: so thank you also Goolam Vahanvati. Can I ever forget and be not grateful to you for being such a calm lifesaver in Chandigarh's high court in 1996 for what was indeed a criminal lack o

udgement on my very first day as editor of the Express —baptism by fire, as you told the furious bench—even if it was not direct but vicarious. Lawyers who love to fight the good fight are the greatest editorial force multipliers. Krishan Chopra is the most patient publisher you will find. And a perfectionist. His persistence has made this first publication with HarperCollins possible. Once again, let me say what I just said to Mini, we aren’t done yet!

INTRODUCTION National Interest, my (mostly) Saturday column, is now in its eighteenth year. Our politics and political economy are its most visited themes. Anticipating India is a selection from the columns on these themes. It is by no means a definitive work of contemporary history. Nor does it pretend to be so. It isn’t entirely chronological either. That would be too predictable. Indian politics, like a hardfought cricket Test match that fluctuates session to session, follows a stop/go, lean-back/leap-forward pattern. That’s why the Congress can get defeated in 1989, and the BJP and Left both support a largely leftof-centre V.P. Singh government, apparently to keep the corrupt dynastic rule out. But in 1996, the Congress and the Left are to join hands to install a United Front (Gowda and Gujral) government in power, now to keep the evil communal forces out. In the same year, and then in 1999, the Congress and the Left vote together to defeat the BJP-led NDA twice in the Lok Sabha. The Left again supposedly gulps the chalice of poison and enables the Congress-led UPA to take power in 2004 only to keep the now even more communal ‘Modi-fied’ BJP out of power. Just four years later, in 2008, it is as if the Left and the BJP have had a dip in the Ganga together. This time to keep dirty American hands off India’s foreign policy, symbolised by the nuclear deal. How do you explain all this? And frankly, you can go on. Gowda and Gujral, who got the country’s top job (1996–98), did so only so that the BJP could be kept out of power. Soon afterwards, both embraced the BJP as a senior partner. Gowda’s party aligned with the BJP to share power in Karnataka. Gujral’s son Naresh is now a Rajya Sabha member and spokesperson of the Shiromani Akali Dal, the BJP’s most durable ally in Punjab and India’s most anti-Congress party of all. ‘Can you please, please explain your country to me?’ asked my late afternoon caller in 1998. This as a totally befuddled Frank Wisner, US ambassador to India. How could Sitaram Kesri pull down such a stable-looking and generally efficient (at least on the economy) government on a mere pique? Truth to tell, I was then as confused as he, and have no answers even now for how things change in Indian politics and why. So please do not expect this selection of writings to settle such arguments. The Congress, under SoniaGandhi’s diktat, also brought down the second UF government under Gujral, because the DMK was in the coalition and somehow ‘compliant’ in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, as claimed somewhat dodgily by the Justice Jain commission of inquiry. The report as leaked by Arjun Singh, who wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to upstage Kesri and draw Sonia directly into politics. He said the Congress couldn’t keep in power a government of ‘Rajivji’s killers’. Six years later, the DMK became the same Congress party’s most loyal ally, the assassination forgiven if not forgotten. You want more surprises? The two-year Gowda–Gujral arrangement was our most left-of-centre to date. It even had two key cabinet members from the CPI (Indrajit Gupta, home, and Chaturanan Mishra, agriculture). Yet it carried out some of the most path-breaking reforms. Chidambaram’s dream budget of 1997, the Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme and then setting up of the

Disinvestment Commission under G.V. Ramakrishna. That flurry of change is outdone in its improbability by the stalling of all reform under UPA 2 now. Even though it had a healthier majority, a much stronger reform dream team led by Dr Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram, and a buoyant, near-surplus economy. Once again, therefore, how do you explain this India? You only watch, observe, converse, reflect. And enjoy. It is not as if there is no logic to Indian politics. It is just that it is complex, with many variables, shifting loyalties, alliances, flexible ideologies, shuffling priorities and unshakeable vested interests. You get wisdom more likely from conversation than from reading books on political theory or history. And often from unlikely interlocutors. One of my favourites is a conversation with H.D. Kumaraswamy, Gowda’s son. ‘How do you justify your father joining hands with the BJP to make you chief minister of Karnataka when he had himself become prime minister only to keep that supposedly evil party out?’ I asked him on NDTV’sWalk the Talk . ‘Sir, my father actually made a big mistake by becoming prime minister of India,’ he answered so promptly as if he had anticipated my question. ‘Why do you say so?’ I asked. ‘Because by becoming prime minister for a few months, sir, my father lost hold over his own party and his own state. So our power was permanently damaged.’ Since I looked unconvinced, he clarified: ‘We have to learn from the DMK and AIADMK, sir. You hold power in your own state, and then trade it for a share in the central government, whoever may lead it.’ A still young and inexperienced inheritor of a single-state kulak legacy had taught me an essential political fact. That in any Lok Sabha election now, anything from 60 to 100 seats will be on by parties whose ideologies are totally fungible with power. That is why 200 is the new 272 in our politics. A completely different message was to be read in the Aam Aadmi Party’s successful debut in Delhi and the Congress party’s outside support to its government. Included in this selection is a column that stated that the Anna–Kejriwal movement’s essential impulse was anti-Congress. That still hasn’t changed even if the AAP’s brief alliance with the Congress has left many of its original BJP or pro-BJP backers stunned. All this proves is that we Indians learn politics quickly. Even when we started out being basically anti-political. This state election has left the Congress a marginal party in Delhi. It is also by far the weaker party going into national elections. So the risks of aligning with it for power in Delhi, howsoever corrupt you may have called it, are much less than going with the BJP, and you have a better negotiating position as well. I did not start out as a political reporter. I only strayed into that most vaunted—and fun—part of our profession. Once in a while when the senior political dadas were not available for some reason. Or when, as a cub reporter usually left to cover crime in a city so benign it averaged only six murders a year (Chandigarh) or dealing with what was called, in typically vicious newsroom language, trayand-fire (the clip-tray with press releases like some ‘Lions Club’ celebrating Diwali with ‘pump and show’, and the routine call to the fire department before going home), you were told to go to the usually empty state assemblies late afternoon when real business was over and members’ private

motions were discussed. My own debut in political reporting was the equivalent of the golden duck. I returned breathless from my first afternoon in the Punjab assembly, not even twenty-one yet, and started explaining all the fascinating private members’ bills that were discussed. ‘You just be a good Pandu (old Mumbai-speak for a cop) and focus on accidents and robberies,’ said Balan, our much loved chief sub-editor. ‘Leave politics to senior people, and please take all private motions to your home. This is my newsroom.’ But there were still learnings, and early learnings are the most useful. One of the first was never ignore politicians when they are out of power. That is when they have the most time and patience for you. They are also likely to remember this with some warmth, if not gratitude, when they return to power, as they almost always do. I sat sometimes to get some political gyan from, who else, but Giani Zail Singh when, as leader of a decimated Congress after 1977, he sat on dharna in Chandigarh’s Sector 22, with a motley group of protesters that nobody paid any attention to. He taught me patiently about caste and class in Punjab, of how it was nearly impossible for a non-Jat Sikh like him (he was a Ramgarhia, traditional carpenter) to become chief minister in that state and how remarkable it was for Indira Gandhi to have elevated him to that. Zail Singh lost power in 1977. Since then Punjab has had seven chief ministers. All of them have been Jat Sikhs. And it seems unlikely to change soon. Years later, when Indira Gandhi made him the first Sikh president of India, he never forgot the k‘ hapachhi’ (scrawny) reporter on a red motorbike and found time for me even though Rashtrapati Bhavan was way beyond my station yet. And you always learnt politics from him. At the peak of the Punjab terror, when my friend and mentor Arun Shourie was really angry with the bungling Indira government, I sought time for him and myself with Gianiji. He hosted us for tea on the lawns of Rashtrapati Bhavan and tried calming Arun by playing down, even trivialising, the threat. ‘Munde ne tey goondey ne’ (They are urchins and goondas), he said. ‘What else is the problem? All you need to deal with them is intelligence.’ ‘Intelligence? What do you mean, Gianiji?’ Arun asked. Zail Singh told us a rather colourfully involved story of how, when he was chief minister of Punjab, he had made sure his DIG (CID) reported to him directly and not to his home minister, unlike the rest of the police. At the same time, he had a mole of his own in the Akali Dal working committee. His DIG (CID) was forever irritated that his chief minister seemed to get the inside dope even before him. One day, Zail Singh said, the DIG stormed into his room, excited. ‘I have discovered your source, sir,’ he said. It was a woman member of the senior Akali organisation. Gianiji smiled in acknowledgement. ‘But sir, she is a woman of poor character. What kind of woman are you in touch with, Chief Minister Saab?’ the DIG asked. ‘Oye DIG Saab,’ Gianji said. ‘Aisa kaam bure character ki auratein hi karengi na, achche character ki nahin. Yeh intelligence ka kaam hai’ (You think women of good character will be your moles? You need a woman of poor character here. This is the intelligence business), he told the sheepish DIG. This is perhaps why he wasn’t such a successful spook. But on that late sunny winter afternoon on his west-facing lawns, both Arun and I had learnt a brilliant lesson in politics and governance. And this, from a man with almost no formal education.

And such uncluttered views as expressed in his speech at the World Congress on Anthropology which he inaugurated at the Panjab University campus as chief minister and where I helped as a journalism student volunteer. ‘I do not understand you scientists,’ he said. ‘If man descended from monkey, tey tota kithhon aaya?’ (Then where did the parrot come from?) It’s an aside, but he rewarded me even more generously subsequently by insisting on presenting the INLAKS Young Journalist of the Year Award for 1985 to me in spite of bureaucratic opposition to the Rashtrapati presenting a foreign, private foundation’s award. He spoke with warmth and then turned to my parents to say how gratifying it was to see your child inherit good sanskar and do well. But what was one to do with more famous offspring when they seem to act contrary to their parents’ ays? This was widely seen as the first expression of his impatience with Rajiv Gandhi, which ultimately led to a clash where Zail Singh, who had infamously offered to sweep the floor if Indira asked him to do so, emerged as an unlikely challenger. Lesson: there were no permanent pygmies or titans in our politics. Three more national leaders who gave generous tutorials to me, as I got more involved in politics after covering conflict for years—possibly also because, post-1993, the internal and external security situation had started to improve—were Atal Bihari Vajpayee, P.V. Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri, particularly when each one was out of power. I met Vajpayee for the first time on the steps of the state guest house on the outskirts of Guwahati in 1982. The Assam agitation was at its peak, government authority was non-existent and there seemed to be no solution in sight. Vajpayee was already our most respected opposition leader and almost thirty-five years older than me. But he did not lecture me. I was struck by his curiosity and humility, his keenness to listen and understand, and his repeated ‘confession’ that ‘all of us in Delhi know so little about the Northeast’. You would have known then that he would emerge as one of India’s most loved prime ministers in the course of time. This was in complete contrast with my first meeting with K.S. Sudarshan, then ‘ baudhik pramukh’ (intellectual chief) of the RSS. He sat me down to a stern lecture on how Assam was a target of organised Muslim invasion and the only solution was to arm tribals to drive them out. Parts of this conversation found mention in my 1984 book, Assam: A Valley Divided . I am not sure if anybody followed his advice. But within months, ethnic massacres, unmatched in severity even by Delhi 1984 and Gujarat 2002, broke out in Assam, topped by Nellie where Lalung tribals, armed with no more than swords, daos (machetes) and crude spears, killed nearly 3,500 Muslims within hours before any police could arrive. Twenty-one years later, Sudarshan was to pop up in my life again. He spoke to me on NDTV’sWalk the Talk and surprised me by launching a wild attack on Vajpayee, his foster son-in-law and Brajesh Mishra and by talking of Uma Bharati in contemptuously casteist language. I cannot say for sure if Sudarshanji had any role in giving me my biggest worldwide news break ever, the Nellie massacre. But he certainly gave me my biggest political scoop ever as the BJP, which had ust lost power, never really recovered from that jolt. These conversations also teach us the difference between democratic statesmen and merely ideological bullies. The second time I had a real conversation—or rather several—was when I got my first big national election to cover, and which I called entirely wrong. In December 1984, Vajpayee was fielded against Madhavrao Scindia in Gwalior. The contest, predictably, was called araja aur rank

(prince versus pauper) contest. Scindia was endearing, charming, solid. But we so loved Vajpayee. There was something stirring about going to see him in his very modest old family home with its hand-pump and dung-coatedkuchcha courtyard, particularly after seeing Scindia in his palace. A maharaja against a commoner who could go to a college only because he got a scholarship from his father. And didn’t he make us laugh. He had fractured his foot while campaigning in Mehsana, in Gujarat, and stuck out his foot, plaster and all, in fake, self-deprecatory bravado while pretending to ince and smile mischievously: ‘Unka panja aur mera toota pair ’ (My broken foot versus the Congress’s hand). I called that election wrong because I loved one of the two contestants too much. And I wasn’t the only one. Almost everyone did so. With one exception. Tavleen Singh, who then orked for theTelegraph and later grew into India’s most provocative and durable political columnist. So the lesson again, learn to keep your distance, in politics even more than in armed conflict. Because love and hate cloud journalistic judgement. Since all my work is in print and available for verification, I’d also like to say that I did not call an election wrong after that. If Vajpayee taught us the power of charm and big-hearted generosity, the man he often called his guru, or ‘guru ghantal’ , Narasimha Rao could teach anybody hard politics. He was the first prime minister I got to know personally while he was in office. But he really opened up much later. You had to learn from him how to keep a secret. Once, in 1993—it is an incident I subsequently reported with his permission—Afghanistan’s dictator Najibullah, in the course of a routine interview in Kabul, asked me if I could take a message to my prime minister that he wanted something like a hundred million dollars to buy arms for his troops. Why me, I asked, I am just a reporter. But Najib, formerly a feared head of Afghan secret service KHAD, obviously had the wrong intelligence on me. He believed I had the ear of my prime minister even more than our ambassador did. The truth was, I had never met Rao one on one. On my return I mentioned this conversation as a joke at a cocktail party to M.J. Akbar, who had till recently been a Congress MP. The very next day I was summoned to see Rao. He sat, or sort of stretched out, on his sofa, an apron round his neck, half sipping and half dripping his porridge. After I had told him of the conversation, I pleaded with him never to tell anybody I had, inadvertently, become a messenger as I was better off just being a journalist. This was the only time he smiled, or in fact showed any expression. He pointed a finger to his ear, then down towards his belly, slapped it, and crossed his arms. In simple English, this goes from my ear to my stomach and stays there forever. After he lost power and sort of disappeared into political wilderness, shunned by his party, I went to see him often. He had endless time and wisdom. And some smart and mischievous lines. Why didn’t he leave the Congress if it treated him badly, I asked. Arre ‘ bhai , I am not Yashwant Sinha to shift parties for an election ticket.’ Or, when he was facing several corruption cases:Koyi ‘ kehta hai maine murgi churayi, koyi kehta hai murgi ke ande, kintu sab kehte hain ki main chor hoon ’ (Some say I stole the hen, others say I stole its eggs. But everybody agrees that I am a thief). One afternoon, during the course of the Kargil conflict, I dropped by his place just in case he could offer a new spin on the crisis. I got, on the other hand, a three-hour discourse on Narasimha Rao and the art of crisis management, from Charar-e-Sharief * to the siege at Hazratbal** to Ayodhya. To a

political journalist it was a bit like getting wisdom from old Bhishma Pitamah himself. I have to admit he indulged me with time and trust. But I never could find that one moment of weakness, or geriatric distraction, when he would share with me the one secret I wanted from him: what exactly happened in the winter of 1995 when American satellites picked up suspicious activity in Pokhran and believed that only their immediate pressure dissuaded him from testing a new nuclear device. My suspicion, by now, was that he had sold the Americans a dummy. His scientists were not yet ready, American pressure was increasing and he bought time for them by faking a test, and then cancelling, as if submitting to pressure, to make Washington complacent hereon. His answer was always the same: two slaps on his belly, arms crossed and the line to me in aWalk the Talk, a rarest of rare, detailed Rao interview where he simply said: ‘Arre bhai, kuchch to mere saath chita mein jaane do’ (At least let something go with me to my funeral pyre). Of course, I was able to confirm much later that my suspicion was correct and that became one more reason I see Rao, and in fact the entire political class, in a different light, even a contrarian one in these hate-politician times. Whatever their other flaws, deep down most Indian politicians are patriotic. And how exactly I found out the truth of that winter of 1995 is a story I can’t tell yet. It has to wait a certain tragic date of embargo. Sitaram Kesri was in an entirely different class: never a mass leader, always a pundit of old-style politics, the man who personified the quintessential Indian politician: dhoti, Gandhi topi, potbelly, darbars on white mattresses, spittoon, leaning againstgol takiyas (the barrel-shaped pillows old Congressmen so loved) and so on. But there were other sides to him, some so incredibly endearing for a dog-lover like me, and my friend and teacher in political journalism, the late S.P. Singh (legendary editor of Ravivar, Nav Bharat Times and founder of Aaj Tak). The most charming thing about Kesri was how he loved his three Pomeranians. Come evening, Kesri held court reclining on his mattress, teaching caste politics to some of us journalists, controlling the Congress party and running conspiracies and subterfuges over cups of thick, sugary tea, which he slurped from a saucer ith frayed edges. But all his share of biscuits was fed to the Pomeranians. And just after sunset, he ould call his attendant and driver and ask for the dogs to be taken for their ice cream in his official hite Ambassador to where else but India Gate, where middle-class Delhi takes its children for the same pleasure. Kesri lived next door on Purana Qila Road. Besides much else that S.P. Singh did for me in our relatively short period of friendship, introducing me to Kesri and his evening discourses was a great favour. If you got over your stereotypes and prejudices, you couldn’t find a better teacher in heartland politics. He was a socialist, a Mandalite and a political fund collector, none of which made him popular in New Delhi those days. His reputation as the Congress party’s treasurer was legendary. He never kept any account books: ‘ Na khata, na bahi, jo kahe Kesri, wohi sahi’ (No ledger, no account books, whatever Kesri says must be correct) was a claim that nobody in his party ever questioned. He said to me equally proudly once that he had now got even banias like ‘ hum aur aap’ (me and you) as a backward caste in Bihar. I told him I would tell my father that but wasn’t sure he’d be flattered. He said, bring him to me for a session. He asked me once, in 1997, who, in my view, were his party’s prime ministerial candidates for the future (Sonia was still out of politics). I said, Rajesh Pilot and Madhavrao Scindia. ‘I know you like

them both. But neither of them has it in him to become prime minister,’ he said. Then he explained. He said when ‘your dearest friend’ Pilot was offered the key position of minister of state for internal security by Narasimha Rao, he came to see me in great excitement. Punjab, Kashmir and several other crises were on. Rajesh said his profile would really go up. ‘I said, do no such thing,’ said Kesri. He told Pilot it was a thankless job. Home Minister S.B. Chavan was a ‘headmaster’ and a control freak. Besides, he would take the credit for all that worked well and blame all security failures and terror attacks on Pilot. ‘I told Rajesh, stay with the communication ministry. You are a bright, backward caste [Gujjar] leader with a future. Use your ministry to collect IOUs on all sides by generously giving phone connections to friend and foe.’ But, he said, Rajesh didn’t listen. Which made him conclude he did not have the instinct for bigger things. Similarly, Scindia failed the Kesri leadership test just when the veteran had thought he had shown a rare spark. Scindia resigned as civil aviation minister after an Uzbek TU-154 plane, wet-leased to counter an Indian Airlines strike, landed on top of another in foggy weather at Palam. ‘I thought this as the first time since Shastriji [Lal Bahadur] resigned as railway minister following a train crash that another minister had done so. This showed Scindia was a real prospect.’ The next day, he kept looking for Scindia’s press conference, media interviews, but there was complete silence. ‘Then I called his home and checked,’ he said. He was told Scindia had gone to the hills for a week’s vacation. ‘Now here is somebody who resigns after an accident. Greatness is his only if he would grab it now. But he goes on a vacation. You think he can ever become prime minister?’ Sadly, accidents cut both promising lives short, so neither Pilot, nor Scindia lived long enough for Kesri’s thesis to be tested. But the biggest learning from this old fox was how pragmatic the Indian politician could be. And how witty. Kesri led a parliamentary delegation to China. When he came back, I asked him, ‘Chacha [uncle, as everybody addressed him], what is it that you found most striking about them?’ ‘These Chinese communists,’ he said. ‘Why, Chacha?’ I asked. ‘What’s so different about them and other communists?’ ‘These Chinese communists are like drivers of DTC [Delhi Transport Corporation] buses,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand what you are saying, Chacha,’ I said. ‘Bhai dekho. They signal left but turn right. Is that not like DTC drivers?’ Kesri also gave me a line I have used all these years to explain the happy post-reforms phenomenon of old Indian socialists embracing private capital and free enterprise. Without this change, even the Rao–Manmohan Singh reforms post-1991 would not have led to the aspirational upsurge that’s been gathering momentum in India for two decades now. This theme runs through several of the writings in this collection. From grievance to aspiration, in fact, would have been the default title for this volume if dramatic power shifts of the last three years had not made a big change such a strong possibility. On another note, it was the impact of these changes that also led to the rise of the state and much greater federalisation of the Indian system, a trend National Interest picked up early and stayed with. The arrival of Sonia Gandhi saved the Congress from what looked like certain destruction in the

late 1990s and ultimately brought it back to power for a full ten years. There are those who believe that it wasn’t the best thing to happen to the party. It merely postponed the inevitable and prevented hat could have been creative destruction and then, probably, rebirth. Much as the BJP’s under L.K. Advani after descending to just two Lok Sabha seats in 1984. The mystique of Sonia features often in these writings. Let me first talk about what is admirable about her. Her courage and inner strength and, the biggest surprise of all, her talent as a conciliator. UPA 1 was a much more unnatural alliance than the NDA, and with a much weaker core. But she held it together. The affection and respect between her and Manmohan Singh is real, and mutual. She carries the weight of her legacy with élan, but, as I discovered in the course of W a alk the Talk at the old Nehru family home, Anand Bhawan, in Allahabad (a venue chosen by her), is not afraid to break from the past. It was the first time she expressed regret for the Emergency and even revealed that Indira Gandhi also later felt she had gone too far. I am still intrigued by what made her change her approach in UPA 2. Did the Congress’s Rajya Sabha-ist sycophants finally get to her? Did she get insecure about Manmohan Singh’s rising stature? Or did she simply fall for the mythologies peddled by New Delhi’s Left intellectual clique (and always Congress fellow travellers) that Manmohan Singh’s idea of growth was anti-poor, that 9 per cent growth entailed 91 per cent destruction and that she had to reach out directly to the poor. This started the destruction of her own government. But more important was the institutional damage it caused. National Interest was the first to attack her idea of an NAC (National Advisory Council) expanding its influence as unconstitutional and destabilising. This had created a tiny cabal of ‘sarkari’ intellectuals with no accountability but full power to attack her own government under her full protection. A key theme in many columns was how this institutionalising of a parallel power centre ould end up wrecking the prime minister’s office and stature, and it did. She tried to make amends by cutting the NAC to size later, but the damage was already done. Her choice of Manmohan Singh as prime minister was brilliant, and as long as she gave him space, it worked. But the moment she showed doubts, he simply collapsed and lapsed into a self-pitying, defeatist state of mind. It can be nobody’s case that Singh is not a bold risk-taker. He showed this with the reform of 1991, the nuclear deal of 2008 and the distance he covered with Musharraf in searching for permanent peace. But the moment his party turned on him, he decided not to fight back. As somebody ho has admired him for decades, I consider his diminution a great national tragedy. Much before the UPA came to power, I had two conversations with him that I cherish. One when he so generously asked me home for lunch because I wanted to understand from him what exactly happened in the first reform phase. And two, on an Indian Airlines flight to Bombay, where he fretted that the Indian economy had no hope until our political class could convince our people to start paying the right prices for goods and services (like fuel, power, railways, education, water) they expected the government to provide. He himself achieved some of this subsequently, but now watches in resignation as the rise of the AAP on the slogan of free water and cheap power is turning the clock back on his boldest idea. There is one thing he shares with Rahul Gandhi that I have never been able to understand. Both are

excellent communicators one on one. But both are hesitant to speak in public. You want evidence, atch myWalk the Talk with Manmohan Singh at the Delhi School of Economics, in 2004, just as the run-up to the general election had begun. Several of these columns rued this inability of the top UPA leaders to communicate through the media, Parliament or even public speeches. I can also say that National Interest was right in saying that this could only lead to disaster. As it was in arguing that Rahul’s Bharat versus India electoral theme was tired and outdated and would be rejected by an aspirational people. It was peddled by NAC types and some other hangers-on in the Congress who have never taken the trouble of fighting an election. Rahul has nuanced that line now, but too late. In detailing my education in Indian politics, I mentioned Zail Singh, Vajpayee, Rao and Kesri in some detail mainly because they were such long-distance runners. This is by no means a memoir yet, so my apologies to dozens of others whom I leave out. Indian public life has always been peopled by characters who are by no means perfect. Many are crooks and thieves, a few are brilliant and sincere and the rest a bit of all of the above. All are tough, cynical, take-no-prisoners people and so thickskinned they could shame a rhino. But together, they provide this unlikely republic its cohesion and stability. In my book, there isn’t a greater patriot I have known than old Parkash Singh Badal. A little known and appreciated factoid about him: he has spent more time in jail as a political prisoner than any contemporary after Nelson Mandela. Always in the Congress party’s prison. But when the Bhindranwale tsunami was rattling India, one Akali giant stood tall and unwavering, at the risk of death. From him you learnt the niceties of old-fashioned politics, decency and social grace. He is close to ninety now, but will visit the family of friend or foe for a wedding or a funeral and never speak a rude word. For a Walk the Talk (that I so cherish) I suggested as a location the Chandigarh War Memorial (built with funds raised by Indian Express readers). In a stunningly brilliant design by two women architecture students, the memorial has a wavy wall of granite plates, with names o Indian soldiers from the northern states engraved chronologically. Inevitably there are slabs honouring those who died during Operation Blue Star in the Golden Temple, 1984. In a spirit of full disclosure, I reminded Badal we would be walking past, even pausing in front of, these slabs.Unka ‘ kya kasur tha, betaji ?’ (What was their fault, son?) he said. ‘They were disciplined soldiers following their orders. It was Indira Gandhi’s order that was atrocious.’ Now find me another definition of a patriot. And he never, never forgets to check if your driver has been fed a proper meal by his staff or not. Karunanidhi and Bal Thackeray formed with Badal a trinity of regional long-marchers. From Karunanidhi you learn how liberal democracy turns a secessionist into a nationalist. I asked him how he felt when he was described as a separatist. ‘I wasn’t just described as one, I was a separatist,’ he said with an honesty you didn’t find among any of his central ministers. Then what changed him? He said the wars of 1962, 1965 and 1971 convinced him that there could be no sovereignty for any smaller nationality outside a united Indian republic. Remember, he made no more than token noises hen the Sri Lankan army was carrying out a brutal annihilation of the LTTE during our national election campaign of 2009. Balasaheb and I became acquaintances on the phone first. One Saturday evening, while dining with my family at Baan Thai (which later shut down, regrettably) in the basement of Delhi’s Oberoi, I got a

call saying Balasaheb wanted to speak with me. I remembered at once I had called him a mafioso and orse in that morning’s National Interest. So I braced myself for a diatribe. But Thackeray was not so predictable. ‘Of all the journalists who abuse me,’ he said, ‘Shekharji, you write the most delightfully.’ ‘Then what are you doing for me, Balasaheb?’ I asked cheekily. ‘Come to my home for dinner,’ he said, ‘and I hope you eat meat and drink wine in spite of being a Gupta.’ We met several times afterwards, and on the picture wall in my office there is one showing him and me drinking white wine, the poster of a roaring tiger and a framed picture of his friend and idol Michael Jackson in the background. Of course, it did not change any of the Indian Express group publications’ critical view of him. It also didn’t deter his thugs from attacking the home of my colleague, the respected and then editor ofLoksatta (Marathi only), Kumar Ketkar. The generational shift in Indian politics, outside of the dynasties, has been spearheaded by relatively younger women. I have gratefully accepted the compliment whenever Mayawati or Mamata Banerjee has addressed me as an older brother, not needing to remind either that she is just a bit older than me in fact. Sonia Gandhi’s transformation into an Indian (I say that seriously) is as much a miracle as the rise of Mamata and Mayawati or the durability and resilience of Jayalalithaa. A definitive history of contemporary Indian politics is best left to so many of our wonderful scholars. One of whom, Yogendra Yadav, is now in public life as a key mover in the Aam Aadmi Party. This collection is more like a real-time view from the spectators’ gallery, and while there may be the pretence of archival research here and there, mostly thanks to much younger, uncomplaining colleagues, the only other wisdom these writings reflect is a diehard reporter’s selective professional memory and hindsight. A theme you would find recurring often is how politics is frozen in our country, failing to keep pace with the voter and something’s gotta give at some point soon. Precisely that has happened now and the three Indians who personify the shift that is generational as well as political and philosophical are Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal and Rahul Gandhi. I have argued with all three. Not just argued, but even fought, as many of Modi’s supporters, masked or not, say. Reporters of the ndian Express have also broken several of the 2002 riot stories that Modi has still not been able to put out of his way. Yet, Modi and I never broke civilised conversation. Which is much more a credit to him than to me. Because I am, after all, a shameless, old-style reporter type. I never stop talking to anybody my writings may have torn into, or not answer phone calls from anybody whomsoever. Generally, Indian politicians have that quality as well. God knows I had done enough to make Arjun Singh furious over the years. He even called me early one morning with a dire warning that if the man in whose name we ran theIndian Express (its redoubtable founder Ramnath Goenka) had been alive, I wouldn’t have lasted one more day in my job. But he always returned my call, found time whenever I asked, and then engaged. I know the great secular manipulator’s followers would chafe. But Narendra Modi, even at the other end of the ideological spectrum, is equally an old-fashioned politician, always with a ready smile and hug. He called me just once to complain about a story that Muslims were being denied

NREGA benefits in Gujarat (and it turns out that he was right on that one). He said, ‘You abuse me all the time for Hindutva, which is your right. I also can’t complain because I do believe in Hindutva. But you cannot call me so cheap ghatiya [ ] as to deny a hundred rupees a day to my Muslims.’ Later as we got to talk more often, he said I was the one critic he fully engaged with because while I cursed him for what I disapproved about him, I was also willing to give him credit when he did something right, as with his economy and infrastructure, particularly power. It was in aWalk the Talk with me in 2004 that Modi came closest to expressing remorse for 2002. Modi, therefore, also has that one essential asset in Indian politics: the armour of a thick skin. I am not sure you can say that about the two others in this upcoming race between the three. Both Rahul Gandhi and Kejriwal are still wary of those who disagree with them, though in their own different ways. Unlike Rahul, Kejriwal is an enthusiastic communicator in public, whether campaigning door to door or on the big stage. I have argued with him and the Anna movement often and several of those writings are included in this collection. He asked me, in a conversation, if I had checked with my marketing people how the line the paper had taken on the Anna movement was orking with our audiences. I said I wasn’t producing an entertainment channel or a Bollywood film and audience preferences should never be the main determinant of news value. On reflection later, however, I had to concede that Kejriwal had figured out the modern news media’s greatest weakness: eyeballs. And his success in exploiting that (entirely legitimately) has contributed greatly to his brilliant success. As he grows in stature as an elected member of the establishment now, and fights on a much higher stage, it is a matter of time before he also imbibes that essential lesson of our politics: that you must continue to engage with all, particularly those who argue with you. The rise of Modi and Kejriwal, and the stalling of Rahul, has also underlined to us again the value of decisiveness and risk-taking in Indian politics. By fighting to become a candidate for prime minister, Modi has risked even losing his safe perch in Gujarat. Kejriwal has been an even bigger risk-taker, challenging Sheila Dikshit in her once impregnable fortress and not even covering himself by fighting in a safer constituency as well. We Indians love giant-killers. And while I have sometimes compared Kejriwal’s defeat of Sheila with Raj Narain beating Indira Gandhi at Rae Bareli in 1977, the comparison is inapt, because Kejriwal is no comedian or maverick like Raj Narain. He is a challenger of substance in the long run, one you would describe as alambi race ka ghoda. All three will change and evolve in the months to come. Modi towards moderation, Kejriwal towards a little establishmentarian calm, and Rahul may shed some public diffidence and risk avoidance. Together, the trio will lead a brilliant cast of political characters who never leave you short of an idea when you sit down to writing another National Interest on a weary Friday afternoon.

NDA DAYS

WISE MEN TALKING 26 November 1997 My dear Kesriji,* I write this to you with a sense of anguish. You’d recall how reluctant I had been to take up this ob earlier this summer. I knew it wasn’t going to work. But you counselled me to think positively, that with your instinct and my intellect we would survive at least until Independence Day in 1998. ** You would also recall that you were good enough to make that solemn commitment in public. Mercifully, however, I trusted my instinct and not yours and never gave my Maharani Bagh house away on rent despite such great demand in the diplomatic circuit. I trust that you also took care to retain the DDA flat you had declared among your modest assets. There will be a problem if you have a difficult tenant. Earlier I would have recommended that you use Comrade Surjeet to mediate. But as you and I well know, even that old man seems to be losing his touch now. Never mind. In this difficult and traumatic hour I do not wish to shame you. I know exactly how you feel. Because I feel about the same way myself—irrelevant, ineffectual, bitter and betrayed. That is why this letter is more a reflection on the politics of our times and also on our brief tryst with real power. I write to you also with a special empathy, knowing that in 1990, when the Mandal fire was burning our cities, you were the only Congress MP supporting V.P. Singh on the principle of social ustice. It must by now be a familiar situation for you. Because you again seem to be the only one in your party to be supporting me. My friend Jaipal Reddy is so right in descri bing you as the only social ustice-wala in the Congress, as someone who has married one person but is carrying on with somebody else. Why it had to be me in this case is what I am complaining about. Kesriji, newspaper columnists and IIC types can go on arguing why you and I are like chalk and cheese. But the fact remains that politically we share more than our belief in social justice. We also come from a similar sort of background. Except that I was the wise counsel within Indiraji’s cabinet, hile you were an equally trusted bagman. I also entirely understand your predicament now, because I too had to go when I couldn’t handle her younger son . Now you have problems with her senior bahu. I know some people will remark uncharitably that it is the inevitable fate of family retainers but I had expected the times would have changed. At least from the way Narasimha Rao handled her for five years, all of us could see some hope. But either we didn’t have his skills or you were a bit complacent. I cannot remember if Ghalib had said something to explain this situation. I am sure he did, the genius that he was in the ways of cruel Dilli. But it is a pity I cannot check with his official biographer Pavan Varma who, as you know, is also the spokesman of the Ministry of External Affairs and is currently preoccupied with explaining away all the cancelled visits (mine as well as our foreign guests’) in view of this political uncertainty. I am not complaining that I wasn’t able to go to Malaysia or Bangladesh, but please do understand our national embarrassment when even friend

Yasser hit the headlines once again, talking about Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. I must say, however, that the Americans persisted with their new-found maturity. Ms Albright made it clear at the very outset she had no intention of raising the Jain Commission issue at the talks. But why am I digressing? Time and again at all the steering committee and core committee (you know, some of us even call it theshor committee) meetings, my United Front colleagues have pointed out to me that our agenda should be domestic rather than international. That is how I intend to keep it in this brief letter and do a stocktaking of what we, two wise old men, had set out to achieve in this oint venture of ours. Strengthening the secular forces was the centrepiece of our agenda. I know you were furious that I lost you control over the rump that remained of your party in Uttar Pradesh. But see what I gave you in return. I gave you Mulayam. Possibly even the BSP. You remember how keen the BJP was to go for mid-term elections when you brought down Gowda in your Third Miracle. Now they are running scared at the very prospect of a poll. Unfortunately, we do not have much else to write home about. It is time, therefore, that we began to think about what we will do once all this is over. Of course, I have my IIC and you your Lodi Garden. But maybe I can still go to Jalandhar and give it a shot at the mid-term polls. The Akalis have been friendly and the ‘first Punjabi prime minister’ sentiment might just work there. I do, therefore, feel sorry for you. I wonder whether there will ever be any place for you in the Congress under the new dispensation. Can I, therefore, make a suggestion entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times when we joined the freedom movementprabhat pheris in our youth? Remember, you’ve been the treasurer of the Congress party for decades, the guardian of its family silver (no pun intended) and keeper of its darkest secrets. If the humiliation and betrayals of the past weeks can prod you into telling after decades of kissing, all I would say is, go ahead. With your memory and instinct, and my intellect and contacts in the media, we should certainly be able to teach these shifty bu —– rs in your party a thing or two. Yours sincerely, Old man not in such a hurry

From Kesri (as told to Pranab Mukherjee): My dear Gujralji, I just received your letter and must say I do not appreciate its tone, which is impolite, if not downright impertinent. All I would reiterate at this moment is that I am a loyal soldier of the Congress party which is back on the trail of glory with Soniaji having accepted my long-standing insistence that she take it over. Thanks for the gift of Mulayam. I am still talking to Kanshi Ramji. With so much to do before the polls, can’t say very much more right now. But hopefully we will meet soon again, possibly when I come campaigning for my party in Jalandhar. Until then, I remain,

Still the old man in a hurry

WHAT INGRATITUDE, MY GOD* 22 January 1998 I spent the whole day waiting for the call from Sitaram Kesri. No, not for the Berhampur ticket. I understand his impotence as he understands mine. But since I believe he spends all his time playing cards these days, I thought he would probably send me an invite as well. Who can understand better the agony of a president of the mighty Congress sidelined by the dynasty? Kesri’s predicament I understand. But what have I done so wrong that the partymen whom I kept in power for a full five years now avoid me like a rabid dog with mange? I trudge to dingy courtrooms all by myself, lonely and abandoned. What I would like to ask these ungrateful opportunists is, what is the charge against me? That I collected and gave bribes so they could stay in power? Or that I helped run that dirty little intrigue in St Kitts for the sake of Rajiv Gandhi? So unfair, but having been in this party for over half a century, I shouldn’t be surprised. Actually, I am just contemptuous. After all, I held power for longer than all non-dynasty prime ministers put together. I did a better job in my five years than Rajiv, whose widow’s pallu my partymen are grabbing so fondly now. What a mess Rajiv made of a majority of 413 in a House of 545! He became a lame duck in his last two years, complicated Punjab, Kashmir and Sri Lanka, and left his party and the family permanently blighted by Bofors, losing half his seats in 1989. It is a cruel thing to say and it would make Mani Shankar Aiyar angrier, but if Rajiv had not been assassinated midway through the 1991 campaign, the party’s final tally would not have been much better than what I bagged in 1996. What is the point of now reminding my fellow Congressmen that I gave them a stable five years even though, unlike Rajiv, I inherited a minority government held together with treachery and intrigue. I started economic reforms, shielded Manmohan Singh from the securities scam and generally left the economy in much better health than Rajiv did. Yet, if none of my partymen wished to make reform an election issue, main kya karta ? I know the media and even my partymen have often claim ed that my worst enemy is my silence. They made fun of my pout. How can I ever expect them to ponder if they did better under me, or that big-mouth Rajiv? The time, however, has come for me to dump modesty and assess my own years in power dispassionately. Indira, in her first avatar, I can’t say. But could Rajiv ever have steered India with half as much skill through the end of the Cold War? All right, I bungled with the odd hasty statement like the one during the failed Soviet coup.* But by and large, I figured out the new Russia, contained Robin Raphel and that other upstart, Benazir Bhutto, settled Punjab and even controlled Kashmir. That Abdul Kalam is such a quiet, discreet fellow . . . I am not sure he will ever open his mouth on this. But somebody please ask him if all his achievements and now Bharat Ratna would have been possible if I had not manipulated both Moscow and Washington to buy him time.

God, emotion indeed is the mother of indiscretion. How can I, a wily old fox, be so careless as to talk of secrets that should remain in my belly forever? And don’t at least my senior cabinet colleagues know what I am talking about? Just why is it that they never give me the credit for anything? Or, can’t I also rightfully ask why is it that they never hold the dynasty responsible for bringing the party to such a pass today? Nothing amuses me more than talk that the party suffered because I ran the dirtiest government in India’s history. First of all, such claims are unfair to people like my socialist friend from Ballia. * Second, who made money after all? Look at the more celebrated cases: Sheila Kaul is Rajiv’s aunt. Satish Sharma, his bosom pal, until not so long ago the guardian of the family silver. Jagdish Tytler, Ghani Khan Choudhury . . . whose loyalists were they? And Buta Singh, I did not even have him in my cabinet. Yes, I did not particularly bother about my cabinet colleagues who built fortunes but I also did not expect that they themselves would make corruption an election issue against me, their own leader. Look at my plight:Koi kehta hai murgi churai, koi kehta hai murgi ke ande (somebody says I stole the hen, somebody says I stole its eggs). Either way, I was called a thief. Now if even Sonia also fails, they will probably start blaming me for Bofors as well. Allegations of thievery do not hurt me as much as the canard that I was a closet saffronite, the khaki-chaddi-under-the-dhoti campaign. Would the man who says this most loudly, Rangarajan Kumaramangalam, now check under his own trousers? I did miscalculate in trusting the BJP on Ayodhya, but wasn’t it Rajiv who allowed theshilanyas and launched the 1989 campaign from there ith a call for Ram Rajya? Who will give me credit for the way I isolated, and at least for two years marginalised, the BJP after Ayodhya? My friends ask me why I am whining now on being sidelined by Sonia when I spent half a century happily serving the dynasty. There is some truth in that. But those days were different. Just as a party like the Congress needs its Chandraguptas, it also needs its Chanakyas. But today if Sonia will not see the value in my famed Kautilyan skills, it is because of the one crucial mistake I made. That was in presuming, in 1991, that the days of the dynasty were over and that I was rebuilding the party for the post-Gandhi era. I did take my position as prime minister far too seriously. I saw through the Jain Commission tamasha and tried to block it. I thought it didn’t look good if an elected prime minister gets daily instructions from the darbar of the dowager queen. I failed to see how two decades of sycophancy had emasculated my partymen, who would see someone like me as no more than a forgettable blip in the history of the dynasty. I can now see why the Congress party’s official historians will give me less space than even Gulzari Lal Nanda.

SCREAMI NG, SILENTLY If Ruchika were your daughter.

2 Dece mber 2000 On 12 August 1990, Ruchika Girhotra, just 14, went to play at the Haryana Lawn Tennis Association (HLTA) courts at Panchkula, near Chandigarh. She complained to her father that S.P.S. Rathore, a senior police officer and president of the HLTA, felt her up. After some deliberation, he and her friend’s parents made a formal complaint to the then Haryana chief minister, Hukam Singh. He asked the then director-general of police (DGP), R.R. Singh, to investigate. Singh concluded after enquiries that an FIR should be filed against Rathore. The very next day, on 4 September 1990, the state financial commissioner accepted the DGP’s report and asked for a case to be registered under Sections 342 and 354 of the IPC. For one and a hal years nothing happened. Nothing. Until 13 June 1992, when the state law department woke up again and recommended that an FIR be registered against Rathore. This is when the real action began. By this time Ruchika’s brother Ashu had turned fourteen and, boy, wasn’t he going to be made to pay for his sister’s ‘sins’. Between 6 September 1992 and 30 August 1993, Haryana Police, instead of moving against Rathore for molesting Ruchika, registered six FIRs against her brother for auto thefts. All cases went to court. In each, he was fully acquitted. But the harassment, the humiliation, the expense of litigation claimed their victim. Four months after the sixth FIR was filed against her brother, Ruchika, now 17, committed suicide. In early 1994, the Haryana chief secretary again recommended action against Rathore. Again, nothing happened. Ruchika’s family went to pieces, even into hiding. In July 1997, Ruchika’s friends’ parents gathered the courage to file a PIL in the Punjab and Haryana High Court asking for a CBI probe. On 17 November 2000, the CBI filed a chargesheet—chargesheet , not merely an FIR— accusing Rathore of molesting Ruchika. If the story doesn’t sicken you already, if it doesn’t ma ke you bristle with anger—and fright in case you happen to be the parent of a teenager—read on. Ruchika’s father, who had been in hiding fearing police harassment, asked how it was that Rathore was charged only with molestation, but not for driving his daughter to suicide? The brother’s life, after the humiliation, the torture and the litigation at such a young age, is a mess. And Mr Rathore? He is now the DGP of Haryana and continues to be in that job despite the chargesheet. Here, Advaniji, is a first in your long and distinguished political career—someone charged in a court with molesting a fourteen-year-old child, yet commanding the police force next door to Delhi. Surely, Sardar Patel wouldn’t have approved of this. Had Ruchika survived the trauma, had she been stronger, born with a thicker skin, she would have been a woman of twenty-four. She would, by now, have voted in three elections, may have even

raised a family of her own. But she chose to complain when she was harassed as a child, and paid for it. What lesson does her fate hold out for other young women in our schools and colleges, orkplaces, playgrounds? Shut up and suffer silently if some old uncleji feels you up? Particularly i he happens to be powerful, even more so if he happens to be a cop? And mind you, this did not happen in some unreachable political jungle of western Bihar. This happened in an upper-middleclass suburb, the kind of place people like us inhabit. Quite frankly, Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala’s reasoning for not removing or suspending Rathore is so ludicrous there is no point wasting time countering it. The CBI, he says, is famous for framing people with fictional chargesheets—he should know, he says, having been a ‘victim’.* But the point at this stage, Mr Chautala, is not whether Rathore is guilty or not. The point is, in which civilised society would you appoint as your DGP a man accused of molesting a fourteenyear-old, whose brother’s life was devastated with trumped-up cases, whose father went into hiding and who, eventually, committed suicide? Which parent, and which child, will feel safe in that state any more? What view will that state’s police sub-inspectors, station house officers take of all the reforms the courts and activists have brought about in the police’s treatment of women? As such, it is not a state known to possess the most polite policemen in the country. Now, when they see their government toss aside the National Human Rights Commission’s strong suggestions to remove the DGP—based on a series of reports in theIndian Express —or the Central Vigilance Commission’s advice to do so, they will draw the obvious conclusion. Who is to tell Chautala any of this? The BJP, which supports his government in the state, has demanded Rathore’s removal, but he couldn’t care less. As for Rathore, it’s life as usual. The case, he says, is a frame-up: ‘I am under no moral obligation to resign.’ This isn’t merely one more case of police high-handedness and political protectionism. It raises some very serious questions. First of all, why isn’t there, in the media and Parliament, the kind o outrage that would have erupted had Rathore been a politician instead of a senior IPS officer? The Supreme Court and Narasimha Rao had made almost half his cabinet resign because they had been chargesheeted in the hawala case which was like a bicycle theft compared to child molestation. Only a fortnight ago, the BJP forced two of its own ministers from Gujarat to resign because they had been chargesheeted in a rioting case. Why should the same principle not apply to senior civil servants? Innocent until proven guilty, but step aside from authority or a position where you could influence the case. The opposition’s lack of concern we can understand. There is special delight and gain in attacking rival politicians for their misdemeanours. Civil servants are less interesting targets. But why should e see the same relative indifference at the popular level? Why are we so much in awe of the civil servant? Because he falls in the PLU (people like us) category? Would the response of the media in general have been the same had Rathore been the home minister of Haryana rather than its DGP? The second question is an even nastier one but more relevant in the context of Chandigarh. This case has dragged on for a decade now. Why has this not evoked a hundredth of the kind of protest that the Rupan Deol Bajaj–K.P.S. Gill case did? It is nobody’s case that one kind of sexual harassment is different, or lesser or greater, in its severity than any other. But Rupan was a senior IAS officer and

more capable of defending herself against a DGP than a fourteen-year-old child on the tennis courts at Panchkula. Where are all the women’s organisations, civil libertarians, legal luminaries who hit the streets on the Rupan case? The impetus in that case had come from members of the civil service in Chandigarh, so outraged at so blatant a case of sexual harassment. Where were they for four years hile the file on Rathore’s prosecution was put in deep freeze, while Ruchika’s kid brother was being tortured and buried under false cases? If they had shown even a fraction of the dogged outrage they did in the Rupan case, Ruchika would probably have been alive today. Maybe even the almighty bureaucratic protests in the Rupan case were more about protecting the honour of a fellow IAS officer rather than just another victimised woman? Class camaraderie more than moral indignation? And the feminists and civil libertarians and so on? Would it be too unkind to suggest that, as in the case of politicians, cynicism gets the better of them as well? Maybe the protest and anger in the Gill case were not so much about gender equality or civil liberties as about the political opportunity to destroy a tough, brutal cop whose guts and methods you hated? This argument can go on and on. But for people like Vajpayee and Advani, honourable, middleclass people with sound family values, great personal integrity, the facts are clear enough. They need to only look at the chronology of events. If, after that, they do not find enough reason to force Chautala to move his DGP aside, it could only mean that, as politicians, they are no different from the others. They could, then, go and see, along with their families, Mahesh Manjrekar’sKurukshetra , which is all about a chief minister fighting to save his rapist son, killing his victim in the hospital, destroying her family. Bollywood is not particularly known for political understatement but when you go home and review the facts of the Panchkula story, you would wonder how fast real life is catching up with dark cinema. It will shame you.

Postscript: On 16 November 2000, the CBI filed a chargesheet against Rathore. In December 2009, a CBI court found him guilty of molesting Ruchika and pronounced a six-month imprisonment, which as increased by the sessions court to eighteen months. The police filed closure reports in cases involving both a cover-up in Ruchika’s suicide and the false cases against her brother—these were accepted by a special CBI judge on 1 June 2012. At the time of going to press, a petition filed by Ruchika’s friend’s father against this, claiming that her father’s and brother’s consent was taken under duress, is still in court.

ASSAM’S LOST DECADE A ‘people’s movement’ that became a cruel joke.

5 Ma y 2001 Every journalist pays his dues somewhere in the course of a long career. I believe I paid mine as a reporter for the Indian E xpress covering internal strife in the troubled early 1980s in the Northeast. The Northeast, particularly Assam, was then a unique story, perhaps the only one in independent India when the national media’s sympathy—even admiration—was with the agitators. Most of us on the beat, barring the Calcutta media, never even called them troublemakers. In print, we called them the Assam movement leaders. In conversation, they were just ‘boys’. We were so forgiving, so much in love with the ‘boys’. They had rejected (then home minister) Zail Singh’s ‘suitcases’, defied (then IG, law and order) K.P.S. Gill’s lathis, braved the scorn of the Bengali media. They lived in modest hostel rooms in Guwahati University’s rundown campus, where they sometimes did not have five rupees to buy youbhaat at the mess but at whose call the entire population of Guwahati would come out on the streets, turning Governor L.P. Singh’s curfew into a joke. This was the early 1980s. It is such a pity there was no television to record those heady times. Prafulla Mahanta and Bhrigu Phukan led a people’s movement that fired the imagination of not only gullible young reporters but also old Gandhians and JP-ites who were quick to compare it with satyagrahas of the past. People came out in lakhs, blockaded refineries, oil pipelines, roads, railway lines. For more than three years the writ of the government did not run. If the government imposed a curfew, people would fill the streets and defy the CRPF to thrash them. Then, to rub it in, on a national day like 15 August, the student leaders would declare a ‘people’s curfew’ and you couldn’t stir out unless you had a ‘curfew pass’ from them. And just so they wouldn’t be misunderstood as being anti-national, Mahanta and Phukan would hold their own Independence Day celebration a day earlier or later. If during some period of quiet the movement seemed to be flagging, they would announce a ‘martial sounds day’. All of the Brahmaputr a valley would come out on the streets at a fixed hour, clanging anything they could find in their kitchens, thalis, buckets, pots and pans, anything that would make a racket. Then they would declare a ‘people’s blackout’ and all of the valley would look as if the Chinese were again probing what was left of the perimeter defences of Tezpur. The ‘boys’ were then gods. They could do nothing wrong. They could never be bought, fooled scared, enticed. They were so perfect, so sincere to not only the Assamese but also to the national cause, so indivisible, so incorruptible and so brilliant they even topped all their examinations in spite of spending all their time on the streets. The past decade has, however, shown how wrong we all were and that is not only because we figured much later that doting professors and deans sometimes sat and answered the question papers for their favourite ‘boys’. The coming election will further prove how touchingly stupid people like

us were in not being our usual, sceptical, questioning selves. * Ever since Rajiv Gandhi enticed them into the mainstream political process after the peace accord of 1985, everything the former agitation leaders have done has underlined just one point. That deep down, they were as cynical, selfish, divisible and greedy as other politicians. Mahanta and Phukan started out like Vajpayee and Advani, chief minister and home minister, and were often called Ram and Lakshman by their followers. Today they are the most bitter of enemies. Mahanta’s direct electoral rival is Atul Bora, the former general secretary of the All Asom Gana Sangram Parishad, the ubiquitous bearded presence in so many group photographs at negotiations with the Centre. Mahanta has run a government twice as corrupt as any the Congress gave Assam in the past and about a tenth as effective as the late Hiteswar Saikia’s. Ask any IAS/IPS officer of the Assam cadre and he will talk so nostalgically of Saikia. The subcontinent specialises in producing a particular breed of demagogue, one who voices a minority’s grievances, real and imagined, so well as to build a mass persecution complex. I have made much of my living as a reporter dealing with the type. Bhindranwale, Prabhakaran, Subash Ghising, Pakistan’s Mohajir leader Altaf Hussain are all masters of the same craft. But there was no one better at that than Mahanta and Phukan. Their real masterstroke was giving their very regional movement a nationalist colour—they were, after all, only fighting Bangladeshi infiltrators. But at a ‘people’s’ Independence Day rally they wouldn’t forget to ask how it was that the national anthem (written by a Bengali) made no mention of the hills and valleys of Assam. They also built this elaborate secular façade . . . they were not singling out Muslim infiltrators, they wanted the Bangladeshi Hindus out equally. Those of us who witnessed the massacres during the February 1983 elections at Nellie and elsewhere were often confused by the even-handedness with hich both Hindu and Muslim Bengali settlers were slaughtered. We were confused because we instinctively looked at riots through a communal prism. So we missed the point that this was, pure and simple, ethnic cleansing. If you spoke Bengali, you were an ‘infiltrator’ and, therefore, in trouble. But hat Mahanta, Phukan and others also proved subsequently was that ethnic hatred was negotiable as long as they had political power. They forgot the foreigners’ issue and deported even fewer infiltrators than the Congress governments had done in the past. Mahanta has run the most unimaginative and worthless government in Assam. His own voters are now going to make him pay for it. The very Assamese caste Hindu who treated him and the other student leaders like gods is now set to boot out each one of them. The Asom Gana Parishad will now finish whatever remained of its old romance, ideology, regional commitment. Let me also suggest that nothing could be better for Assam. The demise of the AGP, and thereby the final burial of the nostalgia over the old movement, is as welcome a change as the growth of the BJP in Assam. For many of the loyal Assamese caste Hindu supporters of the AGP, it will be a logical homecoming to the BJP. With its bitter and bloody divisions of ethnicity and language, Assam, more than Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu, will benefit if its politics is run and contested from a more national standpoint, something the rise of the BJP as the main challenger to the Congress would now do. Funny that we should so happily anticipate the death of a regional party in this era of coalitions.

But Mahanta, Phukan, Bora, Bharat Narah, Nagen Saikia, Arun Sarma, all the legendary leaders of that great movement proved so incompetent at converting a people’s movement into a credible political force. Assam, as a consequence, has lost a decade. The only good this has done is drive more and more talented Assamese outside the region in search of jobs and opportunities, something they were unwilling to do in the past. Besides this, a decade of rule by alleged people’s power has done nothing for Assam. It is such a pity so many of us, this writer included, were fooled into believing these ‘boys’ would actually change the face not only of Assam, but also that of national politics. But then we too were young, idealistic and gullible.

AH, THE SWEET SMELL OF POVERTY! Forget what Dil Chahta Hai, we’re wired to rubbish the rich.

1 September 2001 Why does Dil Chahta Hai mark such a seminal turn in Bollywood history? Certainly not because it has a great storyline—its plot is thinner than Bangaru Laxman and Jaya Jaitly’s defence. And certainly not because it does not rely on a star cast—it has three of the hottest male stars chasing three of the hottest women, even leaving the odd top model or VJ jilted on the sidelines. It also certainly doesn’t spread any social message. But when was the last time you saw a Hindi film that celebrated riches, the high life, luxury so unapologetically? In the usual formula, one of the three friends (Aamir Khan, Akshaye Khanna and Saif Ali Khan) would have hailed from a poor family, brought up by a widowed mother. His would have been the one home with happiness and his mother’s the shoulder his friends cried on, for she ould have been the fount of all wisdom, generosity, and hers a genuinely contented life. The poor guy’s girl, then, would have had to be the richest, with evil, unhappy parents. And she would have redeemed herself by renouncing her riches for love, and moving into his chawl. Not in this case. Here all of them are rich. They (including the women) drink champagne. They coolly ditch old boy/girlfriends and hitch on to new ones. They flaunt the symbols of affluence: cellphones, resort holidays in Goa, 51-inch flat-screen televisions. They ride a Merc now and a Lexus then, yet use seat belts. Can we name another Hindi film that was so relaxed, so nonudgemental, so merrily in your face about being rich? If popular cinema mirrors the mind of our society, are we seeing the first stirrings of a post-reform urban India that is not embarrassed about being wealthy? Where the rich are not wretched by implication and the poor, similarly, spiritually so well endowed? Too early to jump to that conclusion perhaps. But no harm in imagining that because, unless that change comes about in the traditional Indian view of wealth and its creators, we have no realfuture except to become a colony of China. The famous and equally outrageous American writer P.J. O’Rourke raises this very important question in his latest book,Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics: Why Do Some Places Prosper and Thrive while the Others Just Suck? (Atlantic Monthly Press, New York.) It can’t be the brains, he says, because ‘no part of the world is dumber than Beverly Hills and the residents are wading in gravy. In Russia, meanwhile, where chess is a spectator sport, they are boiling stones for soup.’ He similarly dismisses the other likely factors. Education is ruled out, because how could America then be so rich when its class four school students ‘know what a condom is but aren’t sure what is 9x7’. I culture made the difference, America would have been a basket case. And if civilisation made people rich, the Chinese would have been ruling us all for ages. Even if the key was natural resources, Africa

ould have been richer than Scandinavia. His conclusion, after travelling and studying economic systems around the world, is that places that respect wealth, its creators, enterprise and the free markets which enable them to do so become rich. We do very poorly, actually, because as Dhirubhai Ambani pointed out so bluntly in his acceptance speech at ‘The Economic Times Businessman of the Year’ award night two weeks ago, not only do we not respect creators of wealth, we hold them in suspicion and contempt. Whatever controversies the Ambanis may have featured in, they have built real wealth, and our system cannot stomach that. It has worked, therefore, over a decade, to find what they have done wrong, what laws they have twisted, which levers they have turned to build these world-class assets. How has a firstgeneration Indian enterprise come so far without its owners going to jail even once? The problem ith our country, unfortunately, is not that it has Dhirubhai Ambani. The real tragedy is, even the decade of reform has failed to produce a couple more Dhirubhais. If that had happened, not only ould we have become a better economy, even this Dhirubhai would have been kept on a leash, and on his toes, by real competition. The ugly rich, the thieving capitalist, the ostentatious pig are our stereotypes that precede the fake Nehru–Gandhi socialism when the only abuse worse than that was to be called a stooge of the Birlas– Tatas (read capitalists). This suspicion of enterprise and repudiation of competition, enterprise, individual quest for riches go far back in our past. Was the caste system, then, Manu’s idea of a kind of licence-quota raj? Nehru’s socialism said, thou shall only produce this many cars of this engine capacity and make and no more of this, or nothing else. Manu said, you were born with these skills, with these genes and whatever your forefathers left you, so thou shall endeavour to do no more, at least not differently. So the rich, hether financially or intellectually, would remain so through generations while those with skills ould remain poor. The net effect was an institutionalised barrier between skills, intellect, enterprise and aspiration for all time to come. With the rich now guaranteed their status forever, without threat or competition, it was so cynically convenient to glorify the poor asdaridranarayan , the humble image of god. This may be pop sociology but don’t forget the way the upper crust glorifies and celebrates poverty. There is a very Indian Kautilya Marg–Carmichael Road poverty chic in which they may live the lifestyle of the dudes ofDil Chahta Hai but constantly rail at the free market threat to the poor. They love poverty, the poor are so sexy, and a guilt trip packs such sadistic delight. Its principle is straightforward: poverty is my birthright, but you shall have it. There has to be something so terribly wrong with a society which, even when it celebrates its finest wealth creators, is more proud of their spartan lifestyle than their riches. What else do endless newspaper articles, television programmes extolling Narayana Murthy’s middle-class lifestyle tell you? How he eats with his staff, travels economy, hires taxis in Mumbai, cleans his own toilet, gives himself a small salary, and so on. We celebrate his asceticism and not his entrepreneurship. If he gets his fame through such self-denial, why did he build such a marvellous enterprise and wealth? How ould his lifestyle inspire your children or mine to slog and become entrepreneurs? A Bill Gates

ith his mansions and jets might. But Narayana Murthy? I’d rather cram up the scriptures and become a new-age guru or a tele-evangelist on some Aastha kind of channel instead. Time magazine this week carried a hair-raising cover story on how China’s new companies will drive those of other Asian nations bankrupt. Chances are they will start with India, and it won’t help even if we pulled out of the WTO—the Chinese are not even in it yet. This is the price we would inevitably pay for our poverty obsession, for our masochistic Hindu view of wealth: the rich are ugly and unhappy, the poor are content and virtuous. But Dil Chahta Hai shows you that at least our cinema could now be kicking this hypocrisy. If Bollywood truly holds a mirror to our society, that change could begin to reflect there as well.

UTTAR PRADESH AS IN THE UGLY PICTURE Why our failing Hindi heartland needs an emergency bypass.

16 February 2002 It’s time now to be realistic about Uttar Pradesh. Do not waste time putting together what caste and religion have divided so completely. Just slash, cut, break the state up until it ceases to resemble the srcinal. The Americans say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Turn this logic around for a state that is not called Ulta Pradesh for no reason: if it ain’t fixable, break it up further. In this election, for example, the three rival appeals are all negative. Mulayam tells Muslims, vote for me or the BJP will thrash you. The BJP tells Hindus (mainly upper castes), vote for us or lowcaste rabble will lord over you. Mayawati tells fellow Dalits, give me my 90 seats so you and I can deny power to both Mulayam and the BJP and settle scores for 5,000 years of Manuwadi injustice. So fiercely have these three etched their party lines that nothing can cut across them. Listen to the speeches this poll season in UP. There’s no talk of better governance, development, investment, enterprise. Make such promises here and you’d be laughed at. Each of the three sections is voting not so much for better governance but to deny power to the other two. The state’s last single-party government that completed a full term was under the Congress in 1985–89. Then V.P. Singh, first through Bofors and then Mandal, destroyed the Congress vote bank. Kanshi Ram and his BSP also made their first real appearance in V.P. Singh’s ‘needle’ by-election in Allahabad in 1988 after breaking away from Rajiv Gandhi. What was once hailed as the first stirrings of empowerment of the underclass has now disembowelled the state. The tragic triangle was completed with the BJP coming up with Mandir. The last decade has seen UP slide lower than Bihar in several areas. The state could be the sixth largest nation in the world—it has a much larger population than Pakistan’s. What is more telling, its population growth rate is even higher than Pakistan’s. The last five years have seen all three claimants (Mayawati, Mulayam and the BJP) in power by turn—the BJP has even given us three chief ministers of its own in this mêlée. But deep down it is merely a brutal tripartite blood feud. The previous government’s programmes have been unked, statues of its leaders uprooted and officers posted by one transferred immediately by the other. No surprise then that civil servants have created a little safety zone of their own in Noida, here they are building their permanent residences. No surprise also that this part of the state is relatively well governed. In effect, the elites, particularly the bureaucracy, have already seceded from the state. There will be many arguments against the state’s break up. Funnily, even a religious argument against the division of Uttar Pradesh once came from a Congressman. Govind Ballabh Pant, who was piloting the States Reorganisation Bill in December 1955 as the then Union home minister (he was also a former chief minister of UP), rejected demands from many southern MPs that the state be

divided into more manageable entities. The argument that won him the day was: how can you divide the land of Ram (Ayodhya, in the east) and Krishna (Mathura, in the west)? History, however, has a cruel way of getting even with those who dared to stand in its way. Pant’s own region has now been carved out of UP into Uttaranchal * and his very talented son (K.C. Pant) cannot even win an election from there despite having defected to the BJP. Ironies apart, the reason the senior Pant and the Congress were so adamant on keeping the behemoth together was purely political. Its top leadership came from the state, where it completely dominated the politics. Who would want to cut up a pocket borough with eighty-five Lok Sabha seats? It believed voters in smaller states might find issues more complex than a straightforward vote for Nehru (and later the Gandhis). Today the Congress might be the party most amenable to the idea of this division. There will be other, more practical arguments. The state doesn’t have many other ethnically/politically/geographically distinct regions. But these do not matter when slicing up this state should be the national priority number one. India deserves better than to suffer this atrocity of a state which overwhelms national politics through the sheer weight of its pauperising, exploding population and its eighty Lok Sabha seats. This UP contributes nothing to the national kitty except crises, embarrassment and shame. And this, when it has great Indian landmarks, ancient and modern: Varanasi, Mathura, the Taj Mahal, Ayodhya, two IITs, one IIM. It once also had some of India’s best urban centres. Now it flaunts its most embarrassing clichés: caste politics, communal tension, rotting cities and dead institutions. Its size distorts our federalism, its politics diminishes our pride. We must agree to cut it up. How, in how many pieces, on what basis are questions we should now be talking about. The experiment of creating smaller states from Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and out of the hills of UP has worked. What is good for the late Govind Ballabh Pant’s homeland, then, must be good for the rest of UP. So now that we have Uttaranchal, why not carve the state up into Purvanchal, Rohilkhand, Bundelkhand and Awadh? Call the leftover bit Unnat Pradesh—that sounds more upbeat, it also helps us keep the UP acronym alive. In any case, anything will be better than the hopelessness of India’s undeservedly and unnecessarily largest state, underlined by this depressing election campaign.

BACKFIRE’S BURNING QUESTION How can frenzied February un do Delhi’s success post-13 December?

2 March 2002 Let’s simplify things by first accepting the conspiracy theory on Godhra. That the burning of the train as a premeditated act by a well-armed Muslim mob. That somebody was expecting the arrival o this train and had laid an ambush. So what could be the motive of whoever plotted this? Corollary: hy shouldn’t he be smiling now? If Godhra was a premeditated terrorist act, its perpetrators have achieved their objective by now. Nothing has irritated the jihadi mafia more than three facts: that communal peace in India has held out so splendidly, that Muslims should be so rapidly integrating in the Indian political mainstream with a leader of their own (even if it is Mulayam) and that mainland Indian Muslims have never sympathised ith the Kashmiri insurgency. Absence of Hindu–Muslim riots since the Babri demolition has given India its first near decade of communal peace. It’s been a period of such remarkable quiet that even the Union home ministry doesn’t consider it necessary to include statistics on communal riots in its annual report. If these will be back in that book again, you can see why the mass murderers of Godhra should be smiling. Whether or not the jihadis and/or the ISI were behind Godhra, the fact is that this one act has compensated them for so many failures. Since the ISI initiated the strategy of using sectarian terrorism two decades ago to bleed India, it has aimed at one objective: getting people of a minority community and Hindus to fight one another. The selective killings of Hindus by Khalistanis in Punjab, the ejection of Pandits from Kashmir, even the attack on Parliament on 13 December were all part of the same strategy. As was their most significant terrorist success so far, the serial blasts in Bombay on 12 March 1993. The best thing about bachelorhood is that you are not likelyo thave grandchildren who embarrass you with questions like, ‘Pitashri, what did you do when Gujarat was burning in 2002?’ Narendra Modi will be saved that embarrassment. But at 51, he is still young by the Bhishma Pitamah standards of our politics. And the press conference of 28 February 2002 will haunt him through what should still be a very long political career. His ‘I am absolutely satisfied with how the police and government handled the backlash . . . I am happy that violence has largely been contained’ statement of 28 February will rank in our history on a par with Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘when a tree falls, the earth shakes . . .’ after his mother’s assassination that provided instant moral justification to the Sikhlynching mobs. It is unlikely that Modi, or others who so crudely suggest that Muslims deserved some retribution, would see the self-defeating short-sightedness of this logic. Sadly, this has undone so much of the really remarkable work the same party’s government has

accomplished at the Centre following 13 December. That was a much greater provocation than Godhra. The impulse for military retribution was stronger and cut across party lines. But the Vajpayee government astutely eschewed that temptation in the national interest and yet flexed its military muscle in a way not even Indira Gandhi had done. The gains of that policy are historic. The Centre’s post-13 December strategy has achieved far too much to be undone by one Narendra Modi and his non-existent (at least for 48 bloody hours) government. But if at a time when the world as sniggering at such an unstable Pakistan and its mullah-dominated television images, the Daniel Pearl kidnapping and killing, it has to now find mirror images of sorts from India—sadhus with trishuls, arson, burning bodies, religious hatred—somebody has to look back on the follies of this February with remorse. The image of George Fernandes exhorting the mobs in Ahmedabad to return home or their own army would shoot them is a far cry from him rallying his troops on the Line o Control. The tables have been turned. Shouldn’t we at least be asking who else is to blame besides, indeed, the diabolical mastermind of Godhra?

POT’S BLACKER THAN THE KETTLE In 1984 there was shame, there was d ecency. In 2002, there’s Modi.

6 April 2002 In their defence of the indefensible, some BJP spokesmen have used one last argument: the Congress had no business complaining about Gujarat given its own role in the killings of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984. This shuts up the Congress loudmouths. But if you were around as a reporter to cover the 1984 riots, you wouldn’t accept this as the complete truth. On Gujarat, I have to rely upon the accounts of the formidable team Indian of Express reporters there. But when 1984 happened, I was there, along with so many other reporters, witnessing a pillage and massacre of the type none of us had seen yet. In Nellie, earlier, more people died in a single day (3,300) than in any riot after Partition. But the police did not help along the murderers. It happened in a distant, hidden patch of a dry Brahmaputra floodplain in a dark corner of Assam. And while the police and the state government were guilty of ignoring early warnings, they did not participate in the killings and loot. I reached Nellie when killings were still on and the wounded were crying, crawling, carrying their dismembered limbs, trying to push back entrails hanging out of stab wounds in their children’s bellies. There was just half a platoon of the CRPF there, led by a very honourable head constable called H.B.N. Appa, who was crying bitterly that he did not have the firepower to stop the killings. He was by no means egging the killers on. He had still saved a few thousand lives. He resurfaced in my reporting life a year later, in Amritsar during Operation Blue Star, at the head of a CRPF patrol, his lonely heroism at Nellie having earned him the reward of the single pip of a subinspector which he flaunted at me and asked: ‘So what did you get for reaching there ahead of the others?’ And even then he talked about how many lives he could have saved if only he had had a full platoon. One of my abiding memories of Nellie is the bitterly dejected, forlorn face a day after the massacre of the then DIG of Nowgong district, under whose charge the village fell. ‘If only we were here a few hours earlier . . . if only we were here a few hours earlier,’ he kept on mumbling. That pain returns to his face even today when I sometimes cruelly pull his leg by reminding him I beat him and his police to Nellie. You can check with the gentleman if I am speaking the truth. He is P.C. Sharma, the current director of the CBI. * Or you can check with his then boss, K.P.S. Gill, who had to answer so many difficult questions when Indira Gandhi flew in, ashen-faced, the following morning. The killings following Mrs Gandhi’s assassination were a tragedy of an entirely different dimension. Columns of smoke rose all over Delhi, mobs—actually just bands of thugs—moved from one locality to another looking for Sikhs, looting and killing. It was then that the tactic of burning people to death was first used so clinically. This was no mass upsurge. There never was a Hindu

versus Sikh confrontation. Just bands of lumpen goons with knives, swords, sticks in their hands, greed, hate and sadistic joy in their eyes. It was on the second day that the complicity of the police became clear. At Trilokpuri (where the largest massacres took place) a police patrol egged the mobs on: ‘Here, here, three sardars were fleeing in that street . . . catch the . . . b —– s.’ Or a straightforward taunt: ‘What are you doing there ith these useless weapons? Go get some real swords . . . these won’t kill abakra.’ That these killings were not mass riots but orchestrated reprisals is borne out by the fact that the moment the army appeared on the streets, the riots died. The first armoured personnel carriers arrived in Trilokpuri, and thereafter not one Sikh was harmed. The army did not even have to fire one shot. The police, obviously, were back in the barracks. Sulking. So what’s the point, you might ask. The point is the difference between Delhi of 1984 and Gujarat of now. First of all, the ordinary Hindu in Delhi never got involved in the riots—many of us put on crash helmets, picked up hockey sticks and cricket bats, wickets, anything at night to run vigils in our streets so no ‘outsiders’ could harm our Sikh neighbours. Heard any such stories from Gujarat? Second, once the government got its act together (within 72 hours) all rioting stopped, as if someone had blown the whistle and called off a game. Third, and this is the most important distinction, there as shame, embarrassment, contrition, even fear on the faces of top civil servants, police officers, Congressmen. They knew something terrible had happened. Rajiv Gandhi may have made his insensitive ‘when a tree falls, the earth shakes . . .’ statement to explain the killings, but damage control started immediately. Sikhs would still complain, and I would too, that so many among the big fish have not yet been punished. But even as the riots were dying out on 3 November (Mrs Gandhi had been assassinated on 31 October) Delhi’s lieutenant governor, P.G. Gavai, was fired. The responsibility went to the then serving Union home secretary, M.M.K. Wali. The SHO of Trilokpuri was removed on 2 November. The police commissioner, Subhash Tandon, was replaced on 12 November. So were the DCP (east), under whose jurisdiction Trilokpuri fell, additional police commissioner (range) and DCP (south). Within a month or so they were all facing departmental inquiries. Contrast this with what happened in Gujarat. No policeman was removed or punished for non-performance or complicity. Narendra Modi, on the other hand, moved out mainly those who had been effective, true and loyal to the uniform. So the SP of Kutch got removed after three weeks of peace. Murder visited Anjar shortly thereafter. The Congressmen whose names surfaced or were even popularly mentioned in connection with the 1984 killings all paid a price. The political careers of H.K.L. Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar never recovered from the taint of 1984. Two others (Lalit Maken and Arjun Dass) were assassinated Sikh militants. Even the the Congress slowlyofdistanced from thetalking taintedofleaders. Isn’t it a bitbydifferent now when leading lights the BJPitself go around ‘Hindu consolidation’, of Modi having become a ‘Hindutva hero’ or of the likely electoral dividend of the killings? Atal Bihari Vajpayee was both a witness and a victim of that unusual winter of 1984. I, too, was itness to his sad and entirely undeserved defeat at the hands of Madhavrao Scindia two months later in Gwalior in what all of us promptly called a r‘ aja aur rank ’ (prince and pauper) election. We

heard stories of how he, a very poor but brilliant schoolboy, had been educated on a scholarship given by Madhavrao’s father. We visited his very modest house and in that contest we all knew which side we were on, even if it ended up losing. It happened because the Congress exploited the antiKhalistani mood, the sympathy for Rajiv and very little else. Don’t forget that slogan, ‘ Gandhi Rajiv ka ailan, nahin banega Khalistan ’ (Rajiv Gandhi’s proclamation, there will be no Khalistan). Vajpayee is too seasoned a politician to not know that nothing of that sort will come his party’s ay after Godhra and the revenge of the Gujarati. He knows exploiting mass murder for political gain is not rajdharma. He also knows, then, what hisrajdharma enjoins him to do. How promptly and decisively he does that would determine the future of his own, now very imperilled, political legacy.

THE BREACH CANDY DILEMMA Why Delhi’s power and Mumbai’s wealth cannot level with each other.

29 June 2002 The problem with writing anything about the Ambanis is, you are immediately expected to declare your interest. Which side are you on? For or against? You ‘can’t’ be neutral. Further, if you are for them, they must have done something for you. If you are against them, they must have hurt you. This is probably why so little is written and discussed about them in the media except their immediately newsy business activities, social appearances and, sometimes, controversies. Could this also be the reason why, while literally the who’s who of Indian business and high society have visited Dhirubhai Ambani in the hospital,* only one Union cabinet minister has done so? Not even the finance minister has been there. The old man fighting for his life after his second stroke is after all the founder of India’s first private sector Fortune 500 company! Or the oil and petroleum minister. Dhirubhai built by far the biggest petrochemicals empire in the country. Unlike some of his predecessors, Ram Naik has also never been accused of being an ‘Ambani man’. Then why is even he so shy? Is it because of the same fear of having his motives questioned? What will people say,log kya kahengey ? In some ways it is a logical corollary to the old phenomenon of Delhi not being able to level with Mumbai, and vice versa. The two cities are instinctively and attitudinally so far apart that it seems they need to establish diplomatic relations so they can even hope to understand each other. The official currency of Delhi is power. Power produces money and so Delhi thinks that is how it must be elsewhere, and why should Mumbai be an exception? Mumbai, on the other hand, produces money through enterprise and believes that money buys power. So it must wonder why any other place should be an exc eption, notably Delhi. You may dismiss this as pop sociology, but there has to be a reason why Delhi so compulsively ignores all entrepreneurial successes, and Mumbai is so much in awe of Delhi’s power. How many people in Delhi are today conscious that some of the fastest growing stars of corporate India are from their city? For example, Ranbaxy,* one of the sharpest pharmaceutical companies internationally, and the Munjal/Hero group, which is not only the world’s largest bicycle manufacturer but has left Bajaj behind as India’s largest two-wheeler manufacturer. These are the new stars. But even the srcinals, the DCM family, have traditionally been acknowledged more as philanthropists, patrons of the arts, culture and education than as entrepreneurs. That pursuit we Dilliwalas have ceded to Mumbai. Similarly, Mumbai believes political power belongs in Delhi. Its politicians have made very little

impact in Delhi and even if a Morarji Desai became prime minister, he failed to make any mark on politics, power structure or history. The Ambanis confuse this simple equation. They have not only real money produced from real enterprise in Mumbai, but power in Delhi that would be the envy of so many of the older, third- or fourth-generation, business houses that have also been rich and successful and distinguished members of the establishment, who may have participated in the freedom movement and can cadge Rajya Sabha memberships from national parties. But they somehow have never acquired the same unique—‘money in Mumbai, power in Delhi’— profile, one that immediately pops the question at the politician, bureaucrat or journalist: which side are you on? We have now become so fearful of that question that we are quite happy to leave the Ambanis to their own devices: nobody wants to be seen as being friendly with them, and very few covet their enmity. But if you hold shares in their companies, you hope they have enough clout and networking to have their interests (and yours) looked after. And if you don’t like them, and have the power of the establishment, you satisfy yourselves by delivering pinpricks, like activating an Official Secrets Act * case in the week preceding the sale of a PSU for which they bid aggressively. Which other country would have acted in this manner towards its largest corporate house days after it became its first private company to make it to Fortune 500? Who else would have denied any national honour to Dhirubhai while bestowing the Padma Bhushan on Henning Holck-Larsen, the 93year-old Danish chairman emeritus of the Larsen & Toubro group, not so much for setting up that company in India some six decades ago, but for having come out of the woodwork to campaign against the Ambanis’ bid to acquire it. We in Delhi can’t yet figure out Mumbai, and now there is also a Bangalore complication. The older business houses, like the Tatas, Birlas and Bajajs, were seen to be a respectable part of the establishment and benefited a great deal from that. The Ambanis controlled and dominated it, but gave a lot more back to their shareholders. Now we have Narayana Murthy and Premji who have built enormous wealth by completely ignoring and side-stepping the Delhi establishment. Their businesses required no real help from the government nor were they so susceptible to its intrigues. Since their basic product, software, had so many tax exemptions and because exports were income tax-free, they didn’t have to pay much attention to the inspectors either. They didn’t need licences and quotas. Nor did they need friendly ministers and joint secretaries to keep the CBI and Enforcement Directorate off their backs. We (in Delhi) see them today as more pristine simplydarbar’s becausedeference they had sotowards little tothem do with us. mirror image of India’s current anti-politician The Delhi is the mood. One reason there is such popular support for Kalam as president is because he is not a politician. He never had to play the game or rub shoulders with other players, so he is more deserving of one of its supreme trophies. Similarly, Narayana Murthy and Premji must be cleaner, more respectable than the old economy-walas, simply because they haven’t had that much to do with the politicians and babus in Delhi.

So, we have this new classification of successful Indian businessmen. The Birlas and the Tatas, creators of wealth but in step with a doting establishment. The Narayana Murthys and the Premjis ho did so while bypassing Delhi altogether. And, in a category entirely of their own, the Ambanis, ho built enterprise and profits before and after reform, charming and dazzling the establishment and hen that didn’t work, arm-twisting it. Is that why we in Delhi’s establishment are so shy of levelling with them even as their patriarch fights for his life at Breach Candy?

THE MODI MAGNIFIER If he wins, if it’s Sonia versus Modi in 2004, Vajpayee and Advani will know who to bl ame.

16 November 2002 The question in Gujarat is not who will win, or by how much. * The first has been a foregone conclusion ever since the massacres. The second doesn’t matter. As long as Narendra Modi wins, hich he most likely will, this election will mark a decisive turn in our politics. It will have many interesting firsts. It will be the first election in our history where governance will not at all be an issue. Modi, if anything, is telling people that such things do not matter. What matters, on the other hand, is that somehow he and the collective pride of the Gujarati Hindu have been challenged by Mian Musharraf. So you figure out whose side you are on. If he’s been brazen, the Congress is equally befuddled. Its appeal for votes on the old slogan of secular equality and so on sounds like so much blah, particularly as it has a former RSS man in the lead (Shankersinh Vaghela). Modi is seeking a vote against Musharraf, Muslims and the Italian church, in that order. It is working in Gujarat. What is to stop him and his supporters within the BJP as well as its scattered ideological members from believing it should work elsewhere as well? This is one reason why this will be such a defining moment in our politics, more significant than thedestruction of the Babri Masjid and more farreaching and lasting than any rathyatra in the past. Whatever its impact nationally, it would change the politics of the BJP forever. It will be the first election in the party’s history to be won not by Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s personal popularity or oratory, nor by Lal Krishna Advani’s skills at political management or mastery at alliance arithmetic. It will be a victory for Modi’s personal popularity in a state where he had not even won a panchayat election before this. Also a victory for the entirely new kind of politics he has brought forth. He has dropped all pretence of decency and constitutional centrism that has marked our mainstream politics so far. Until Modi happened, mavericks who broke these rules belonged to fringe or, at best, one-state parties. Language and tactics of this kind were only employed by a Thackeray, a Lalu, a Mulayam, or any one of Haryana’s trinity of Lals. Leaders of mainstream parties (including the BJP) spoke a measured, mainstream language even in election campaigns. In fact, the one time an impetuous Rajiv Gandhi dared to break that rule by calling his opponents limpets, he had to apologise at once. More recently, even Sonia Gandhi was made to quickly backtrack from her description of the Vajpayee government as nikamma (inept) and the charge that the PM had lost his mansik santulan (mental balance). Modi, in comparison, has got away with abuse that ould make Lalu blush, and has emerged as a Hindu middle-class (at least Gujarati) hero for it.

This is bound to have a lasting impact on how politics will be conducted hereon. Within the BJP, all the senior leaders, including Vajpayee, Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, have used clean language in election campaigns, besides being scrupulously careful to never project an anti-minority image. Modi’s ‘Hum paanch, hamare pachees ’ slogan derogating Muslims stands in stark contrast ith all that. Until now, the BJP got votes because Vajpayee’s charm combined so effectively with Advani’s guile. This election is likely to be won by a megaphone that won’t need either. In fact, Modi would be quite okay if Vajpayee and Advani do not even come to campaign in Gujarat. How would this play on the already complicated equation within the Sangh Parivar? There is already no love lost between the leaders of the VHP and the prime minister. If anything, they abuse him even more than they abuse ‘secularists’. In the past few days we have heard the first whimpers o criticism from them for Advani as well. While Vajpayee openly expresses disapproval of the VHP’s methods, its leaders are given pride of place by Modi in his Gujarat campaign.* How will they respond after they win? Particularly when they know better than anybody else that this victory would come because of them, because somebody followed the line they had been espousing unsuccessfully for such a long time. If it works, it will be said that the Modi line worked. Nobody, then, would look back at a lost opportunity more ruefully than the PM. If only he had removed Modi when his heart and mind and constitutional morality dictated that he do so. He would then have ended this innings a statesman, with his reputation and stature enhanced. His party would have still won this Gujarat election, but he ould have ended his political career on a higher note than being forced to applaud from the sidelines, reluctantly and in humiliation, a victorious Modi. The younger, impatient elements in his party who held him back in Goa will now not wait to thank him for that act of political ‘foresight’. Chances are they will go with the rising sun. If somebody had said in April this year (when Vajpayee visited Gujarat, delivered a brief, stirring speech that brought tears even to the eyes of the riot victims, reminded Modi of hisrajdharma but stopped just short o living up to his own) that the 2004 general election could be a contest between Narendra Modi and Sonia Gandhi, he would have been banished to a mental asylum. Today, can you dismiss that prospect out of hand? This question will dominate post-12 December politics much more than the margin of any Modi victory.

THE HM T ADVANTAGE From Kapil to Kalpana, Karnal to Cape Canaveral: Hail the rise of midd le India.

15 February 2003 While so many state governments rush to add chapters in their school textbooks on her heroic life and the Shiv Sena threatens to rename Valentine’s Day after her, does anybody know just who Kalpana Chawla was? Where she came from and, finally, where she belonged: among people like us, or people like them? You at least know the school she went to, Tagore Bal Niketan in Karnal, cradled in Haryana’s basmati heartland. Even the town she came from is as nondescript as her school. Twenty-five miles to the north, along he t Grand Trunk Road, is the smaller but better known Kurukshetra of the Mahabharata. Twenty miles to the south, along the same highway, lies Panipat, another famous battleground. Until the rise and then the heroic demise of Kalpana, * who knew if Karnal existed twenty or so miles adrift of Kurukshetra and Panipat? Who, indeed, also realised that a modern, successful, creative India was surging beyond the charmed circle of its exclusive institutions, distinguished families, power elites? In so many ways Kalpana, Karnal and her Tagore Bal Niketan represent the new, once-nowhere India that is now striding on to the centre stage. The medium of instruction in Tagore Bal Niketan is probably English. But having been brought up in those parts in schools not very different from this, I can safely suggest it won’t qualify to be an elitist school of the kind you’d flaunt on your CV. The rise of Kalpana, therefore, is one more example of the arrival of this new, small-town, modestly brought up but ambitious, hard-as-nails Indian to the forefront. For want of another label, let’s call this Indian the Hindi Medium Type (HMT, in short). The label is not to be taken literally. It doesn’t necessarily mean that this Indian should have gone only to a Hindi-medium school. It is also synonymous with small-town India, the dehati , local or desi, anybody who would have been considered an outsider in the upper-crust power structure till the other day. Not people like us. Kalpana counts not only because she was so exceptional in her talent and courage but also because as a middle Indian in our headlines she is no longer an exception. Our cricket team has already been taken over by HMTs. How many of your younger cricketers can answer a Tony Greig question in English the way a Ganguly or Dravid would, or a Pataudi or Gavaskar would have? Virender Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh, Mohammad Kaif and Dinesh Mongia are not people with engineering degrees or MBAs, nor do they have blue blood or connections with the elite schools, at

least of cricket. Not even a Shardashram of Mumbai. They are tough, ambitious, talented boys from middle India, the ‘rurbanised’ Bharat, who are happy to fight for their place in the post-reform sun. And most remarkably, the system is letting them succeed. Kapil Dev was our first HMT star of what was always an English-medium game. When he arrived a quarter of a century ago, there were endless jokes about his English diction, grammar and syntax. But you couldn’t question his ability to unleash the outswinger at will. Or his track record as captain of our first World Cup winning team, though we often doubted his ability to get his over counts right towards the end of an innings. Now, see how many members of this team actually sound worse than Kapil when they speak English. And if you look at the next ten probables, you would know in which language they’d be comfortable answering questions in years to come. What’s true of Kalpana and cricket is also beginning to work in that last bastion of elitism, the corporate world. The two most prominent stars of Indian business, the Ambani brothers, started out at a modest, HMT school near the chawl where their parents lived. So ordinary was the school that it has since ceased to exist. Similarly, Google the educational details on Silicon Valley stars and if you notice that the first elite institution most of them list on their CVs is an IIT, you would know where they are from. The Ambanis and the Narayana Murthys have risen where scions of so many former A-list families of corporate India are supporting their lifestyles merely by scavenging on the properties left behind by their parents, partying and collecting Versaces, their businesses all in a shambles, the shareholders, employees and bankers vacuum-cleaned. And if you want to see who is powering Indian manufacturing along with the Ambanis in energy and the Narayana Murthys in technology, check where the Munjals, who created the Hero Group, came from. Little Ludhiana in Punjab’s doab that produced grain, hosiery and may have only boasted of a few tiny foundries by way of industry. Pawan Munjal is a graduate of Regional Engineering College, Kurukshetra, next door to Kalpana’s Karnal. Sunil Mittal, now battling the Ambanis in the telecom marketplace, is a product not of St Stephen’s but of New High School and Arya College, Ludhiana. Even the world of politics is at a unique turning point. Not one senior political leader in any party (including the Congress whose chief is more Italian than elite) now boasts privileged or even English-medium schooling except, perhaps, L.K. Advani and Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, ho must be the only Dosco among the power elites today. In any case, thedressers only Dosco to politics have made news is Raja Bhaiyya’s father, Uday Even the nattiest in our today arelately HMTs. Contrast this even with the Pratap days ofSingh. the freedom struggle when so many of the key leaders were from privileged families and educated abroad. Nowhere is the change more visible than in the armed forces. If you’ve been to an army mess two decades back, do so again now. Or just go to the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun and see how many officers now come from middle and rural India.

They are the sons of former jawans and JCOs, lower-rung bureaucracy, even the medium-sized, post-green revolution farmers, the very heartbeat of middle India, very modest, very HMT, salt of the earth. Any group photo of a Doon School or Lawrence old boys reunion will include a bunch of former generals and air marshals. But check the pedigree of your Kargil heroes and you will not trace more than the odd soldier to Doon or a school of that kind. The closest that some of the young officers who fought in Kargil came to an elite upbringing was Delhi’s Army Public School. The reversal of fortunes in the media has been even more spectacular. Though it’s best to avoid naming names now. You can’t be judgemental about people hailing from one class or another. Reverse snobbery is no answer to the tyranny of upper crust, Doon–St Stephen’s–Mayo–Sanawar–Lovedale–Loyola domination. Also, please do not celebrate the rise of the HMTs in a fit of boulder-on-the-shoulder liberal piety or as a revenge of the Bharatiya underclass on Macaulay. Celebrate it for the larger message it brings, that the system of upper-class patronage that the British built, and institutions left behind by them, is now unravelling under this assault of middle India. Further, it is being broken not by legislation, executive order, ideological Indianisation, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi’s end-of-history textbooks or any constitutional amendments. It is happening because of forces beyond our control. Forces of free market, globalisation of our minds, worldwide competition and worldwide opportunity, access to the finest universities, the best employers in the world who do not care about hich school you went to or your English diction, as long as your SAT scores were better than that of the others. Nor who your father or your uncle was. It is not a perfectly fair situation yet—it never is, even in the most free economies. But the process is natural, inevitable, has a momentum of its own and is very much part of the larger medley of change: decentralisation of power, rise of the new rich, urbanisation and access to opportunity far beyond the charmed circle somebody’s parents gifted him. In her deeds and her death, Kalpana personalised this remarkable transformation powered by the market, new ideas, growth of the media, globalisation of our minds. Her middle India will power our future now, underlining how stupid it was to believe that we could become a first-class nation merely by dipping into a talent pool that excluded 99 per cent of our population. The rise of this former underclass will create the impetus to further expand this pool, which in turn ill create popular pressure for better educational infrastructure across the country. Whyand do GREs? our children—even withare so-called monthscompetitive on their SAT scores It is the beliefthose that you dealingelite withschooling—slog a system that is for viciously but equally fair, where your ability matters more than how well your parents may have done in life. And here performance takes precedence over pedigree. Just as well that the key to that future now lies in the hands of us HMTs.

POLITICS IN PAST TENSE A democracy would pay dearly for the rear-view-mirror politics of unfinished agenda.

1 March 2003 These weeks mark what could be a turning point in global history. A new war is about to break out in Iraq. There is a never-ending global downturn. This is also the week of the budget, and so much cricketing action.* Meanwhile our parliamentarians, whousually struggle to get a quorum together to pass crucial bills, are fighting over whether or not Savarkar deserves to get his portrait installed in the precincts of Parliament. It is a tribute to the Congress party’s own ideological bankruptcy and tactical confusion that it oke up this late to raise a protest. What makes it funnier is that two of its own luminaries, as also o the Left, had at an earlier meeting absent-mindedly said yes to the Savarkar portrait. It is only now, punch-drunk from Gujarat on the one hand and from the charges of indulging in soft Hindutva on the other, that the Congress decided this was an issue worthy of high attention. The same Congress that goes along so meekly with the VHP’s anti-cow slaughter drive and whose leaders happily collect commercial and personal favours from ministers of the NDA government, the same Congress that presents the people of Gujarat the ‘soft’ secular option of a Vaghela to counter the appeal of the selfstyled Chhota Sardar is now going all blue in the face because the president is unveiling the portrait of a freedom fighter, howsoever controversial, on whom a commemorative postage stamp was issued by none else than its own former prime minister who banned the RSS.* Who will take such a Congress seriously as a political party? How does the BJP look in comparison? We Indians are in any case unique in our obsession with the hollowest of all symbols, renaming cities, streets, anti-poverty schemes, schools and colleges, trains. But the BJP and its ideological siblings take the cake—or maybe kalakand made of pure cow milk—in this obsession. They do have a genuine comp laint, what else can they do when almost everything in the country has already been named after the Nehrus and Gandhis? But is this the only ay for the saffron Right to leave its mark in history? By naming and renaming streets and railway stations or installing the statues of the heroes of its own partisan past? This fixation with statues and portraits is dangerous because it fits so neatly, and so conveniently, into our pattern of irresponsible competitive politics. When I am in power I install statues and name streets after my heroes. Of course, when you return to power you can rectify this historical wrong. Uttar Pradesh, which faces a real danger of being renamed Ambedkaristan one of these days, has already shown the way. You can sell hollow emotion to your voters and hope they will never read your manifesto. There are dangers in this very Indian idea of taking a partisan view of all our past, from the

prehistoric to the freedom movement, of dividing it between yours and mine. Certainly the Congress and the Left played this game in the past. The BJP has come to the party now. It sets the debate at an extremely crude level that embarrasses the nation, undermines our true heroes and their memory. Other democracies have handled this more maturely. My colleague Raj Kamal Jha, who is currently teaching a semester at Berkeley, points out how in the US the portraits installed on Capitol Hill are specially commissioned paintings to mark the great milestones of history. The statues are mainly of presidents but each state can contribute one, chosen through a resolution by lawmakers. The last four statues installed, between 1985 and 2000, were so apolitical you could almost hear your own politicians gasping: an Apollo 13 astronaut, a native American leader who championed his community’s welfare, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives and Philo Farnsworth, the electrical engineer whose inventions helped develop television, the baby incubator and the electron microscope. Howsoever contentious your politics, you couldn’t quibble with these. Why does our politics remain so rooted in the past? Our leaders must suffer from a dangerous inferiority complex or they would not invoke the past, its heroes and villains all the time instead o talking of now and hereafter. So the Congress wants your votes for its role in the freedom movement, a reward for the immortal greatness of Nehru and Gandhi. The BJP, instead, woos you for the greater glory of Lord Ram and Krishna, to ‘correct’ the injustices of eight centuries of Muslim subjugation. Then Mayawati wants to rule you in Ambedkar’s name, Mulayam Singh in Lohia’s, Jayalalithaa swears by MGR, and so on. If you are so obsessed with the past, you cannot really leave it behind. How can you progress hen everything is an unfinished agenda, a never-ending blood feud? A democracy would pay dearly for such rear-view-mirror politics. It may have something to do with the age of our leaders—the front benches of most parties in Parliament look like cardiac ICUs, though without the tubes. Many o today’s leaders were born around the time Savarkar wrote his treatise on Hindutva. They can be pardoned for being short of ideas for the future. But what about the rest, the new generation that will, inevitably, begin to replace them in 2004? If politics is a competitive business, it must compete for our children’s futures rather than be allowed to settle scores over the past. Those who fight over the past forget that India is undergoing a generational change. Nearly five crore first-time voters in 2004, for example, would have been born after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. If somebody had the courage and the imagination to offer them a real promise for a better future, he would end up making history rather than waste his lifetime quarrelling over it.

THE JAMES-JUSTICE TEST Will the government pas s it? Or will it b end for Modi to u ndermine the two institutions that have given it so much stature?

2 August 2003 How would the Best Bakery picture now look from Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s exalted perch? With smoke still rising in rioting Gujarat, he had openly, and emotionally, reminded Narendra Modi on his rajdharma. L.K. Advani has said often that what happened in Gujarat—Godhra and after—was a national shame and also that if the opposition and the media had not responded by attacking his party and Modi so viciously, even his responses would have been more nuanced. Now, what will their advice to Modi be? Will they, for example, pit the government in a bare-knuckles fight against its own National Human Rights Commission (NHRC)? Will they let Narendra Modi do so?* Hire the best lawyers and take on Justice Anand? And meanwhile, Venkaiah Naidufiles a defamation case against him for bringing Gujarat into disrepute? Is that why they created an institution like the NHRC? This is a tricky one. The next time the Pakistanis, a Scandinavian NGO, Amnesty International or even some US congressional committee raises the issue of human rights violations in Kashmir, the same government and its spokespersons will respond by holding forth on the independence and firmness of the same NHRC. As long as we have our own watchdogs like the NHRC and the free media, what business do you have to lecture us? Yet, meanwhile, the ruling party’s president would continue accusing the same NHRC of joining the conspiracy to defame the only state where his party has won a clear election victory in the past five years. It simply won’t work. Resolving the contradiction between realpolitik andrajdharma is the true test of statesmanship. Or you walk into trouble. For example, around this time last year, Narendra Modi was mocking ‘James Michael’ Lyngdoh as some kind of Christian devil messing up Gujarat’s Ram Rajya. Now his party has to congratulate him on winning the Magsaysay Aw ard. Since October last year, Modi’s own bosses have been extolling Lyngdoh and his Election Commission for their firmness, independence and courage, as they bask in the glory of the election he held in Kashmir. It has been acknowledged to be so internationally. Vajpayee, Advani, George Fernandes, even K.S. Sudarshan and Modi would ask you to celebrate this. Would it have been possible without one ‘James Michael’ and his Election Commission? Would this election have had the same legitimacy if he had not, just a month earlier, stood up to Modi and his abuses so nonchalantly? Would so many Kashmiris have braved the terrorist threat to vote if the election had been conducted by a lesser man and a lesser institution? How the government now responds to the NHRC’s intervention may yet give a good indication of its own tolerance of watchdog institutions. Modi apart, this government has been far more tolerant o

institutions than the Congress. Barring the Minorities Commission, where the srcinal crime is the choice of a lightweight chairman, and the Cattle Commission, which has mercifully been wound up, e have lately seen institutions of checks and balances acquire greater stature and power. The Sena– BJP government in Maharashtra may have repudiated Justice Srikrishna’s report on the Bombay riots but that hasn’t stopped his march to the Supreme Court bench. This president* is making Rashtrapati Bhavan unprecedentedly activist. Even his predecessor** successfully blocked the use of Article 356 to dissolve the Bihar assembly. It is perhaps a part of the same growing institutional and constitutional maturity that Article 356 has not been used to settle political scores even once since Narasimha Rao dismissed the four BJP-run governments in the aftermath of the Babri demolition. And occasional abuse apart, this government has put up quite nicely with an increasingly nosey press, including 24-hour television news. Even this newspaper has got away entirely unscathed with so many embarrassing exposés, from the petrol pump scam to the Best Bakery cover-up, without, I must add in all fairness, a single threatening call or one piece of vindictive action. You would not have expected the senior Mrs Gandhi to have put up with such an interventionist Supreme Court, such a troublesome Election Commission and certainly not the media. At Express the , e are still dealing with cases filed against us by her and Rajiv Gandhi. She would have packed the courts with stooges and loyalists—as she did during the Emergency. Rajiv, too, had a low threshold of tolerance with such ‘interference’. One of the lowest points in his prime ministership was his undermining of the same Election Commission for the ‘crime’ of holding five by-elections with electronic voting machines. The Congress happened to lose all five and Rajiv successfully hauled the commission to court on the ridiculous plea that the law until then defined a ballot as a piece of paper. The Congress will probably say that my whole argument is flawed. That the NDA’s greater tolerance of institutions is no more than the limitations of a smaller majority. I would, however, like to believe that it is more because the NDA is led by people like Vajpayee and Advani whose politics matured during the Emergency in Mrs Gandhi’s jails, just as that of Nehru and his generation did in British prisons, and who want to be remembered as democrats. This week’s events—the honour for Lyngdoh and the NHRC intervention in the Best Bakery case—will test that commitment. Will they now advise Modi to submit to the NHRC’s will, most humbly and on bended knee, and not politicise them further by fighting it in the Supreme Court? And will they then also remember one ‘James Michael’ Lyngdoh when they finalise the Republic Day honours next year just before he demits office?

NEW DELHI, NEW VOTER In Raipur, they throw free schoolbags at you; in the capital, lower SPM levels.

8 November 2003 You ask anybody from the Congress or the BJP what will happen in the coming assembly elections and the answer is similar: 3-1.* Of course, each side thinks it will get three of the four major states. You delve a little deeper and you discover another peculiar thing. Congressmen rarely include Madhya Pradesh among the three they think they are going to win, BJP loyalists never include Delhi among their three. The Congress’s Madhya Pradesh predicament is different. In times when it is hard enough for an incumbent to get elected after one term, it would be a miracle for one to get re-elected twice, even i the challenger was wrapped in saffron. But Delhi is a different matter altogether. The incumbent Sheila Dikshit is poised to win a vote entirely because people believe that she has made a positive difference to Delhi in five years. If she wins, it would be against the run of play. You hold a Parliament election and chances are the BJP will once again win all the seven seats in Delhi. You pit Sheila Dikshit against Madan Lal Khurana in a Lok Sabha election in Delhi and she will struggle. But in an assembly election, where she has performance to talk about, she will walk all over him. And she will do this in spite of the goodies, concessions and bribes the BJP has been offering voters, rewriting of the by-laws, reversal of the Rent Act and so on. She will also win in spite of all the sniping, sabotage, bitching and back-biting that goes on in the Congress party. She will do so right in the heart of the deeply anti-Congress north. Does the 2003 election in Delhi mark the arrival of the new Indian voter? The reason our Hindi heartland finds itself in a hole today is that the voter has stopped expecting or demanding performance from her leaders. In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, voting patterns have now become ossified. When the logic is that all of them are thugs, so better to have my th ug in power than yours, politicians lose all interest in governance or performance. If voters accept their misery as a given, their leaders are happy to take them for granted. That is why we need to especially savour the mood in Delhi. The majority of the city’s population comes from the same caste-ridden states: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, besides Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs who have traditionally been the BJP’s voters. And yet, while their friends and families vote along caste lines back home, they will be assessing their government here predominantly on performance. Why this variance? What is the sociology of this change? Could it be that as voters become more prosperous, acquire a greater stake in their lives and become more aware, they are able to rise above petty concerns, hatreds, prejudice? Or bribes. Nobody, for example, would even attempt to tempt voters in Delhi with free schoolbags with his

pictures on them, like Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh. The BJP in Delhi has failed to understand this change. For a couple of years now, in its desperation to win power back in what always used to be its pocket borough, it has followed the ‘free schoolbag’ strategy in one form or another. The same outdated politics was played on the eve of the municipal corporation elections. Jagmohan was removed as urban affairs minister because he was cleaning up the city, removing encroachments and thereby ‘angering’ the BJP’s voters. What the BJP failed to realise was that he was also pleasing so many others, honest citizens of Delhi who too have votes. The party got wiped out in the MCD elections but learnt nothing. Lately, we in Delhi have watched with disgust the BJP and its leaders block almost every reform in the city. It also so happens that Khurana has been at the forefront of all these campaigns. He has blocked every environment-friendly policy in the capital and here the main reason Sheila Dikshit gets re-elected will be the improvement in the quality of the air our children breathe. He has blocked the shifting of polluting industry, campaigned for a wild zoning policy under which you are free to convert any part of Delhi into a concretised slum and has paraded himself, along with his peers, carrying swords, maces and even riding a horse in anaswamedha yagna of sorts. He seems to have opposed almost anything that sounded like a three-letter word: introduction of CNG, the implementation of the Delhi Rent Act (DRA), value added tax (VAT), Conditional Access System (CAS) and so on. What if he got elected and discovered sex was a three-letter word as well? You shudder. Seriously, though, this Delhi election can be a watershed in our voting behaviour. It should give you and me the confidence to believe that as people become more prosperous, successful, upwardly mobile, aspirational and with a stake in tomorrow, they are more likely to vote for a better future than to take revenge on somebody for the past. That will be the most significant message of the coming mini-general election.

THE RESULTS ARE IN Doesn’t matter who you voted for. Four verdicts so far, and together, they mean: the voter’s smarter than the politician.

8 Ma y 2004 One remarkable feature of this election is how punditry has been entirely hijacked by pollsters, psephologists and statisticians. No quibble with that, particularly when nobody seems to be missing the old-fashioned, heavy-hitting but simplistic caste-based jargon like AJGAR, MAJGAR, KHAM and so on. But you also can’t let the entire electoral phenomenon get reduced to mere—if intelligent —guesswork on numbers. So here is my take on the four results, or rather lessons, this election will produce. These will not determine which coalition rules us a week from now. But these will define our politics for many years to come. The arrival of the smart voter: If the results throw up a Parliament not particularly different from the last one, it would be tempting to say nothing has changed, that people have continued to vote along old fault lines of caste, region and religion. But that is not the truth. While the overall numbers may look similar, these will be made up of results from the states that will be radically different from the past, particularly in the case of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab and Haryana. In each one of these states the voter will be punishing her incumbent chief minister. So this voter does not allow herself to be swayed by either charisma (in this case Vajpayee’s) or hype (over India Shining). The BJP and its formidable army of intellectuals will analyse these results and perhaps conclude that positive slogans do not work and, therefore, it might be better to fall back on bitter negativisms o the past. But that will be a mistake. The lesson is, no matter how much media you buy, how well you misuse the media you own and how much noise you make, this voter will not vote on the idea of ‘feelgood’ unless she is really feeling better than before. This is where the NDA went wrong in confusing the malls of Gurgaon, the software parks of Bangalore and Hyderabad, cheaper housing loans and easy gas and phone connections for some huge trickle-down effect of a decade of reform that might translate into a high index of voter satisfaction. It forgot that for an overwhelmingly large number o Indians these things are a mere fantasy, their lives are still untouched by the comforting winds of reform. That kind of a deep, and wide, feel-good wave would require five years of robust reform in economy and governance, not just one year of 8 per cent growth. * This election marks the rise of this smarter voter who checks out your claims and she will redefine our politics. The decline of negative politics: This campaign will mark the decline of several negative issues that have dominated our electoral politics for nearly a decade and a half: Bofors, Ram Mandir, reservations, national security, a leader’s foreign srcin and even the old leftist notions of pristine

secularism. Actually, except Sonia Gandhi’s Italian srcin, none of these issues has even been raised seriously by any side in this campaign. Even there, the BJP’s seniormost leaders were careful in keeping away from the foreign srcin issue and concentrating on their own track record instead. In fact, when the NDA campaigners, particularly some BJP loud-mouths, strayed and the first exit polls indicated a swing away from them, a sharp course correction was applied. The prime minister himself never took up these issues and you can only see these declining further into insignificance by 2009. No significant party promised fresh job reservations—the prime minister actually dared to ask his voters to stop waiting for government jobs and create local enterprise instead. If you read all the manifestos carefully, they all prescribe more or less the same solution for Ayodhya. An election is not exactly a dip in the Ganga, so it cannot cleanse you of all your sins. But this one decisively marks the decline of negative issues that have blighted our politics since 1989. One consequence of the politics defined by these issues was the absurdity of the third front, negative notion of keeping either the Congress (1989) or the BJP (1996) out of power. The 2004 election is setting us firmly on the road to a durable bijli–sadak–paani agenda. One hopes as we become more intelligent, less cynical and thereby more demanding, we will add education and health to this. Mixing foreign policy with domestic politics backfires: One opportunity the BJP has totally failed to exploit in this election is peace with Pakistan. Nothing else would have created greater optimism and comfort. It was even believed, quite simplistically, that this mood combined with the exploits of our cricket team would create an irresistible feel-good swing.* But two weeks into the campaign most o its campaigners were not even mentioning peace with Pakistan. Why did they so quickly give up the one creative idea—and part-achievement—that even the Congress or the Left could not have questioned? The BJP blundered by using this simplistically to seek the Muslim vote. Its initial idea, that better relations with Pakistan were essential for better Hindu–Muslim relations here, is not fallacious. But it as wrong to say this in the elections. It angered Muslims. Was the party making peace with Pakistan to make them happy? It confused many Hindus. Was the BJP making concessions to Pakistan to get Muslim votes? Either way, the BJP squandered a great opportunity. The lesson is, do not enmesh issues of foreign policy and larger national interest in partisan, or worse, divisive, domestic politics. Muslims have still not voted for the BJP because the questions they raise, security, equity, justice (all heightened by Gujarat), have nothing to do with what you are doing along the LoC. The business of electioneering has changed: The era of the massive election rally has been long over. People now have work to do. This election was fought more in the media than on the streets. Television is now the new electoral battleground and, as with more developed democracies, will increasingly replace public meetings and door-to-door campaigns as the mode of campaigning. A recent India Today opinion poll had clearly shown that a large majority of voters now make up their minds on political issues on the basis of what they learn from the media. So, much as they detest us, our politicians will have to learn to live with that reality. This voter is becoming more literate, smart

and questioning.

CONGRESS SPRINGS A SURPRISE

MR VAJPAYEE’S HIGH GROUND, M RS GANDHI’S ROAD AHEAD The lessons of Verdict 2004.

14 May 2004 It’s always so easy to tell the loser what he did wrong. But you can’t do that to Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He packs just too much charm, old-world decency and dignity, as also personal popularity and magisterial control over public opinion, for you to raise questions like these. His party and his strategists have so cruelly denied him the great trysts with destiny he had scripted for another term— peace with Pakistan, settlements with China and our own Nagas, even the National Highways Development Project. That he brought us so far down this road in such testing circumstances is by itself a compliment to one of our tallest leaders. Admiration for him, as young Rahul Gandhi so generously underlined in his post-victory chat with the media on Thursday, cuts across the political divide. It is rare to have a man approaching 80, after six decades in public life, with so many friends and so few enemies. So let’s not speak of him in the past tense. Vajpayee has to contribute even in this Parliament, as the leading voice of the opposition as well as its most distinguished senior citizen. The wise man will have his own take on how a leader with such sweeping personal ratings could get his party—and coalition—defeated so comprehensively. Rent-a-quote analysts and pseudosocialists call it the revenge of Bharat on India, the message from the poor to the feel-good classes, and so on. The import of this election is more complex than just that. If it were so simple, how come the greatest beneficiaries of feel-good economics, in south Bombay and New Delhi, the mall– multiplex crowd in Gurgaon, have voted exactly the same way as the debt-strangled farmer in Vijayawada, the jobless graduate in Hazaribagh or the petrified Muslim in Mehsana? This dramatic verdict is as much about anti-incumbency as about theising r expectations of our voter. As reform pulls more Indians above the poverty line, they areraising the bar of their expectations. From roti, kapda aur makaan to bijli, sadak, paani and then education, health, social dignity and security, all quality-of-life issues. This voter is more unforgiving, demanding, tougher to fool. It would then require something extraordinary to blunt her almost compulsive rejection of an incumbent. Vajpayee had it in him to do so. There were times when he rose above his party in the national interest. A pity the party failed to rise with him and when it went out seeking votes in his name, there was a disconnect. As if he did not belong to them, or they did not deserve him. Vajpayee would, therefore, rue the few occasions he allowed pressures from the same party to hold him back from what he knew to be morally correct and politically prudent. He stopped short o sacking Narendra Modi and was then forced into that suicidal alliance with Jayalalithaa. * His instinct said one thing, he let his party force him to do the opposite.

This, however, is in the past. The reality of today and tomorrow is Sonia and her coalition. Even in this heady moment, she would know the meaning of carrying the faith—and future—of a billion people. She wasn’t born among them. But she has adopted them as so many of them have accepted her. It’s a formidable challenge, morally, politically and intellectually. While she may do well to learn from Vajpayee the art of managing a rainbow coalition, she also has to understand what denied him a place in history that should have been his for the asking. In the national interest, it is not good enough merely to rise above your own party’s interest occasionally, or often. You have to do it all the time. And when you blink, people will be brutal. The legacy of the family and the party she inherits is both mixed and complex. Her test lies in deciding how much of it to build on, how much to revamp and how much to bury. The agenda is already formidable, from comforting the markets and writing the budget to picking up the thread with Pakistan and China, figuring out America, a complex world and India’s place in it. There is no time to lose. For, if there’s one thing Verdict 2004 tells us, it’s this: the voter wants to see a better future, not tomorrow or the day after, but today.

BEST BAKERY VERSUS UPPER CRUST Why is the Left burying the mandate’s message against Hin dutva and using the poor to peddle its election fiction?

29 May 2004 During the election campaign, we were told it was all about communalism and Modi. And at least that is the reason—to keep the BJP and its Hindutva parivar out of power—that these allies, particularly the Left, have joined hands with the Congress. But how often in the course of the past fortnight have you heard them mention Modi’s name? If you listen to them, instead, you’d think that this whole election was about Arun Shourie and his disinvestment ministry and the reason the Left has so willingly backed this coalition is to keep him and his ‘ideology’ out, not Modi or his hordes. Modi’s name actually surfaces again in our discourse not by the leading lights of a coalition put together in the name of secularism, but by the members of the outgoing coalition. One after the other, the allies of the BJP, all of whom (except the Akalis and Biju Janata Dal) have been wiped out in this election, are now blaming Modi and the Gujarat riots. The first to say so, quite stunningly, was the Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray. Then came Mamata Banerjee, Digvijaya Singh of JD(U), now even that token Muslim of the BJP, former textiles minister Shahnawaz Khan. Senior members of Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party have begun to speak out as well. At their two-day stocktaking, one of the central themes was the loss of the minority vote because of Gujarat, and Babu’s silence after initial demands to remove Modi. Finally now, so evident has the liability of having Modi in their midst become, it has even emboldened more than 60 of his own legislators to demand his head. How come the only people who have still not taken notice of this are the partners in the UPA and, most notably, the Left? Could it be that while Modi and the obvious threat of Hindu communalism were a useful ustification for backing the Congress-led alliance, its value interms of ideology and post-2004 politics was limited? So the Left and the entire ‘equal distribution of poverty’ mafia quickly changed tack and redefined both the electoral verdict and the post-election politics as a rejection of economic reform. The attack on Shourie, his privatisation, the markets and reform began within twelve hours o the election results, and nobody, I repeat nobody, remembered to send even a thank-you card to the minorities who had come out in large numbers all over the country to vote with one single objective, to defeat the BJP. And why were they doing so if it were not to punish them for what Modi had done and, in the case of Christians, what some of the others were trying to do by enacting completely arbitrary anti-conversion laws? But over a fortnight, nobody, particularly from the Left, has cared to say so. The discourse, on the other hand, is about how the poor have spoken, have created political space for poverty, how this is a verdict against policies inspired by the World Bank, IMF and WTO.

It’s even been said that the BJP has been wiped out in urban centres because of joblessness caused by privatisation—in spite of the fact that not one PSU based in or around Delhi or Mumbai has been sold. You’ve also been told that it’s a revolt of the farmer, the downtrodden, the marginal Indian who has asserted his will after watching this ‘so-called’ reform in silent anger. These are stirring thoughts. But you run into problems once you start looking at the facts. For example: — If this is a case of the poor of India speaking out against the NDA and its economics, how come the poorest of all Indians, the Oriyas, have voted back the BJP and its most loyal ally, the Biju Janata Dal, so emphatically? — If it is an expression of the poor, drought-hit rural Indian’s revolt against the NDA’s elitist, city-centric reform as ‘reflected’ in the Andhra verdict, how come in neighbouring, and drier, Karnataka, the BJP has done so well? — If it is the anger of the farmer against an MNC and FDI-centric economic reform that has ‘pauperised’ him further, you can quite understand his rejection of the Congress in Punjab. But how do you then explain his equally emphatic endorsement of the same party in Haryana? — If this verdict is the poor and downtrodden speaking out against lousy governance, insensitive politics, the deteriorating quality of their lives, the lack ofbijli, sadak aur paani , how come they have continued to vote back Lalu and Mulayam who, besides anarchy, have also given them the worst economic development or social indicators for any part of India? — And if all or many of the above are actually true, how come the voters in two of the poorest Bimaru states, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, have given the BJP such a clean sweep? You can go on and on but the simple fact is that this verdict is more multilayered than any other in our history. Vajpayee had said repeatedly during the campaign that this looked like a most issue-less election. Now an election campaign abhors a vacuum even more than day-to-day, routine politics. So every region or state chose an issue of its own and voted accordingly. This election, therefore, became a series of twenty state elections and finally what settled the issue was the total rejection o the BJP’s allies in four states (Andhra, Tamil Nadu, Bihar and West Bengal) and the losses it suffered in Uttar Pradesh (around twenty) and the two biggest metros (twelve). The one common factor wherever the BJP or its allies have lost ground is the presence of the minority (Muslim and Christian) vote. Where it wasn’t the case, they did better (MP, Rajasthan, Punjab). Seething in anger over Gujarat, Muslims probably voted to take revenge the democratic way instead of resorting to terrorism or rioting. Similarly, the smaller Christian population waited to punish the BJP for its anti-conversion mania which had affected even some of its allies, like Jayalalithaa. The BJP’s allies have understood this. So, I suspect, have the ‘secular’ forces, the Left and its allies and the poverty club. It is therefore so utterly cynical on their part to paint this verdict as one against reform rather than against communalism and bigotry. The tragedy is, they have—hopefully

temporarily—managed to confuse the Congress as well. What is worse, they are undermining the bravery, patience and wisdom of the minorities, as also the rejection of the BJP-type Hindutva by a growing population of secular Hindus. This brainwashing will not succeed in the long run.

IT’S MANMOHANOMICS, MANMOHAN To keep NDA reforms going, it’s the lowest of low-hanging fruit Dr Singh will pluck. Can he reach higher than in 1991 for another place in history?

5 June 2004

An essay in the latest Economist (29 May–4 June) that raises the question ‘Who put the shine into India?’ should be essential reading for our new MPs. It traces India’s break out from the ‘Hindu’ rate of growth and asks who made it possible, Dr Manmohan Singh and Narasimha Rao in 1991, Rajiv Gandhi in 1985–89 or his mother in 1980–84, after her post-Emergency exile when she returned unencumbered by the collective intellectual weight of her old pseudo-socialist cabal? The answer is a complex one. Indira Gandhi, in her second avatar, had realised the perils of mere vote-catching populism. She slowly began unshackling domestic enterprise from quota raj, also slipping in the first visible FDI in our history in the form of the Suzuki–Maruti collaboration. Rajiv followed with further relaxations and then, after what was mercifully only two years in the doldrums under V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar, we were back to reforming again, under Rao and Manmohan Singh. This phase, though, was more radical and created the foundation for sustainable, long-term growth. What Indira and Rajiv did, argues theEconomist , was to pluck the lowest of the low-hanging fruit in the 1980s. Does it then follow that what the BJP-led NDA government did in its six years was to pluck more low-hanging fruit in the second crop from the same reform tree? Possibly, but its record is a mixed one. It opened up in many areas, rationalised taxes further, freed up imports and foreign exchange, actually sold some profit-making companies—which have all done better subsequently. But, most important of all, it began the process of big spending on infrastructure. It is a pity though that it moved slowly in so many areas, from power to FDI sectoral acps and even civil aviation. Each one of these is now becoming a battle for its successor. But that is the basic nature of reform in India. If you actually believe (as I do) that reform began ith Indira Gandhi in 1980, you would now be looking back at a quarter-century of reform-led growth. It is also an important fact that while we took the first forty years after Independence to double our GDP, we doubled it again in the subsequent fifteen, and could do it even faster now if the Common Minimum Programme’s promise of 7–8 per cent growth is realised. The reform process, therefore, has been a continuous one and I would dare argue that it has had bipartisan support. With every change in government, the incumbent has handed over the baton to the successor with unfinished agendas. The change has continued. In a quarter-century now, we haven’t seen a rollback except during the brief Janata Dal interregnum when its finance minister, Madhu Dandavate, once astounded

the Western diplomatic corps by telling them that while he did not mind FDI, ‘I will not go looking for it’. Since then leaders of every party from the BJP to the Left in West Bengal, Lalu to Chautala, Mulayam, Mayawati and Jayalalithaa have wooed FDI. The other continuing thread in this quarter-century has been that opposition to the reformer has almost entirely come from within. Indira Gandhi could override it partly with the force of her personality and partly because what she was doing was still so unobtrusive, mostly stealthy. She packaged the arrival of Suzuki in complex agreements that befuddled even the most vigilant xenophobes around her. But I believe that her most significant contribution was at a different, and most vitally fundamental, level. Our access to recent history is extremely limited, so we do not know hether she had foreseen the end of the Cold War and Soviet decline. But even as she tacitly backed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, she acted proactively to end the freeze with the US. Her meeting ith Ronald Reagan in October 1981 started a fundamental shift, not merely in our foreign policy, but in our entire worldview. In 1981, nobody (except, who knows, the Iron Lady herself) would have figured this. But could a democracy as emotionally complex as India have gone ahead with sweeping reforms, integrating with global markets and capital flows, if the US and the West were still seen as permanent adversaries? The ‘reform’ of India’s foreign policy, and thereby our popular worldview, has gone on simultaneously with economic reform. Changing age-old views, prejudices, suspicions and even commitments in India is a very complex process. It is not like a Lee Kuan Yew or Mahathir waking up one morning and issuing a diktat. The complexity is underlined by the way each set of reformers has been hobbled from within. Rajiv, as he hit the Bofors crisis midway through his tenure, was persuaded to not merely halt reform, but hark back on the old mantra of US-bashing with that stunning ‘naani yaad dila denge ’ speech. Rao and Manmohan Singh were consistently opposed not merely by Arjun Singh—who opposed everything in that cabinet anyway—but also by the likes of Rangarajan Kumaramangalam (who later became a reformer of sorts after joining the BJP), Vayalar Ravi and even A.K. Antony, who produced a report blaming his party’s 1996 defeat on economic reforms. Just for the record, it is now his turn to battle the Left in his state to defend his own ADB-funded reforms. The BJP–NDA years were no different. Through their six years there was no real opposition to any reformist policies from the real opposition. The Left did not matter. The Congress was extremely constructive in voting for so many reformist legislations that many of the NDA constituents opposed. Almost all the opposition to reform came entirely from within. At one end of the spectrum, there were the RSS and Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, with their unreconstructed economic revanchism and retroGandhian fixation. At the other were so many cabinet members who saw a security threat in all kinds of things, from increasing the FDI cap in telecom (while so many of them used Hutch cellphones) to privatising what were merely refining and retailing petroleum companies like HPCL and BPCL. When Vajpayee looks back on what he started but left unfinished in his six years, he would regret deeply not putting his foot down on the five or six occasions when policy decisions—already widely debated and accepted—were blocked from within. Manmohan Singh, therefore, should have a pretty good idea of what he should expect. One of the most cruelly ironical aspects of the history of our reform has been opposition from within. It comes

partly from unevolved intellect, partly through inter-corporate lobbying and sometimes out of a sheer clash of political ambitions. The kind of opposition he may face from the Left, actually, will be more predictable and principled. He and Chidambaram will argue with the Left on a different plane, take some ground and concede some. The real trouble will come, as always, from within. Yet, when both reflect on 1991, the difference should only encourage them. As both have acknowledged, the NDA has handed over an economy that is sounder at a macro level than ever before in our history. Inflation and interest rates are low, reserves plentiful, exports booming and, hat is more important, several infrastructure projects, notably highway building and port/airport/power sector modernisation, are already under way. Keeping these going is merely the ‘lowest of the low-hanging fruit’ Singh can pluck. His challenge would be to convince people deeper in the countryside that reform is even more important for them than for their richer cousins in the cities, find the money for some populism and yet prepare the ground for the next generation of reforms that history, one hopes, would see as being even more significant than what he did with Rao in 1991.

IT’S THE BROKER AND THE FARMER The NDA acted as if the two were mutually exclusive. For the UPA, the challenge is to change the discourse, to convince the farmer that reform is the only plank to bridge the great divide. And the broker that the best news for the market is shrinking poverty.

11 July 2004 In the scorchingly volatile evolution of the post-election politico-economic debate, a fascinating new question has emerged, particularly after the market reaction to the budget. Who should matter more, the broker or the farmer? Farmers have the votes and brought the UPA to power. Brokers drive the markets and could not save the NDA. The NDA ignored the farmer and paid for it. It is, therefore, fine for the UPA to focus on the farmer and the market be damned, or at least, it better appreciate what has changed. Or put it another way. If the markets don’t like the odd thing in the budget and decide to tank, should the government bother about the other Sensex-watching classes, or should it be satisfied because the farmer is happy? Other questions naturally follow. If the majority is—or should be—happy, why bother with the small elite that is involved in the markets? Or, can you focus only on one constituency at a time? Does it have to be the broker OR the farmer? Are the interests of one naturally contrary to the other’s? For an insight, let’s turn to Amartya Sen who, speaking to this newspaper just after the election results, said: ‘The markets can be used by all fruitfully, rather than by a few selectively, if basic education is widespread, if general health care is good, if land reforms have occurred, if microcredit is widely available and if initiative is encouraged even when coming from the underdogs of society.’ Would it be too wrong if the message one reads in this profoun d argument is that for an economy and a society to really grow and prosper, the equation has to be not the broker OR the farmer. It should be the broker AND the farmer. The NDA’s big failure was wooing the broker and ignoring the farmer. In the euphoria of one year of growth, it had stopped talking to, even talking of, the poor. It forgot that reform was good not only because it gave you a charging Sensex, declining interest rates and goodies on the shop shelves o your mall, but also because it was the only way to bring more growth, create more jobs, make more farmers richer and capable of being included in this growing class of Indians for whom a better lifestyle was now becoming a reality. Also, that it was the best way to give succour to the very poor. The NDA forgot to even try to convince the poor and the vast majority of rural Indians that reform as the best thing for them, it was the only way to bridge the gap between them and the shopping

mall-going (Sensex-watching) classes. The UPA now must not make the similar mistake of not trying to convince the markets that nothing would work better for them than happier, richer farmers and that nothing would secure their comfortable lifestyles more than eradication of poverty, the narrowing of the great divide. The fact is, even more than the NDA, this government has people in key positions ho understand this. Could it be that, until now, even they have been caught in this great intellectual confusion afflicting all of us with a good, middle-class, bleeding-heart conscience, and yet with commitment to reform? The solution is to change the nature of the discourse. The fact is, if you read the budget carefully, it actually seeks to bridge that divide. Amartya Sen said in the same interview that India ‘needs reform, and has needed it for a long time’. But he added that ‘reform is needed for equity-based reasons, as ell as for economic efficiency’ and that his ‘main complaint’ with the reformist agenda ‘has been its lack of radicalness’. You can take your time absorbing that. But one area where our reform lacked radicalness was the ay it focused only on industry, external trade, financial markets and larger regulation. It never tried to bring the economies of the big factories, the buying classes and the services of the big cities, the financial markets and the rural economy closer together. Chidambaram has, indeed taken a ‘radical’ step in this budget to do so by bringing commodities trading to the bourses as well. A pity such a significantly positive step has been lost in the commotion over securities transaction tax. If there is one thing this election has ensured, it is that you cannot carry out economic reforms by stealth. The economy is now the central point of our political debate. You cannot carry on like the Chinese communists, who, as the late Sitaram Kesri, after a visit to Beijing, described to me to be like the drivers of the Delhi Transport Corporation buses: they signal left, and turn right. Because economics is now politics, reformers now need to be upfront. It is good, therefore, that there is a CMP (common minimum programme), and an evolving thought ith the president’s and the prime minister’s addresses, now this budget and Manmohan Singh’s Independence Day address five weeks from now. The reformists in this government have some unique advantages and some old handicaps. The advantage is that the Left is now on board, the debate is out in the open and more about how much, how, and when, and no longer over whether, why or what if. The handicap is the backdrop of the last election, the vicious ideological divide with the BJP and the nagging question of whether reform or farmer-centric populism gets you votes. Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram and their fellow reformers are smart enough to figure this out. But even a good thing, i overly politicised, can become a curse. India Shining has now become a political liability and so much an object of ridicule that for the other side (UPA) it is sometimes even becoming inconvenient to admit that overall things have got better for India and that we are on a growth curve that we never dreamed of in our history. The danger is, the very idea of a shining, resurgent, growing, assertive India could become a liability and an idea to be shunned rather than promoted just because it got overly politicised. It has happened with us in the past. The Emergency and subsequent electoral politics made the very vital idea of family planning such a political liability that the programme hasn’t fully recovered yet. It is, therefore, necessary for the reformers in this government to nuance the discourse now so we not only

keep reforming, as this budget promises, but so that we also keep bridging the divide and convince those at both ends of it that nothing will bring them closer than reform and growth.

PURUSH VERSUS PARIVAR By robbing Vajpayee of his place in history, the RSS ends up jeopardisin g its own future.

16 April 2005 Atal Bihari Vajpayee has admirers across our political spectrum. So you can understand his agony. In his first public appearance after RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan’s attack on him in an NDTV Walk the Talk interview with me* brought him close to tears. He said he feared calumny more than death. Another significant thing that Sudarshan said must not be forgotten. When asked if by ‘failing to deliver’—as he thinks he did—Vajpayee denied himself his rightful place in history, Sudarshan said, hat can I say, I am a contemporary samkaleen ( ), it will be for historians to judge. And then he went on to suggest that dispassionate history is generally written thirty years later. But as a samkaleen, there was no doubt that he did not think Vajpayee deserved that place. There is no credit, in particular, for economic reform—in spite of opposition from the RSS and its affiliates, usually manipulated by corporate lobbyists. There is no mention of the peace process he initiated, o the national highway project, of doubling India’s economic growth. His big ‘failure’ is ‘not making any progress on the Ram temple’ and not being able to take his ideological uncles along. Look at it this way. In this worldview, what Vajpayee achieved for India, through governance, is secondary to what he did not do for the ideology. It is not so important that future generations would thank him for giant economic strides, for breaking our fear of thinking big on infrastructure, for deftly leading India in a very complex foreign policy environment. The truth is, when India’s history is ritten thirty years hence, and one hopes we will be evolved enough by then to have genuine historians write it instead of members of either a Murli Manohar Joshi or an Arjun Singh cabal, Vajpayee’s six years will be seen in pretty good light. Maybe his picture will not adorn the offices of the RSS. But future generations of Indians by and large will remember him fondly. Vajpayee’s record, however, was not unblemished. Non-partisan historians will, for example, have an issue with him on his handling of Modi. I am sure some of them will also say that Vajpayee denied himself a much greater place in history by failing to fire Modi when he could have done so, how those hours of indecision and lack of conviction during his party conclave in Goa cost him true greatness. Chances are, those historians will also note that he was under extreme pressure by the same RSS which saw in Modi a truer reflection of its own philosophical beliefs. This will, however, be no alibi for Vajpayee. When histories of great men are written, authors do not footnote their failures with alibis. Historians are clinical, cruel people. But they are less unfair than contemporaries. And jealous resentment of the contemporary is not confined to the guardians of ideology. The Sangh Parivar’s anger with Vajpayee is not so different from the way the Congress has tried to bury Narasimha Rao.

He was ignored in his post-power years, and most party leaders were afraid even to be seen with him. He was denied honour in death. A Congress government is in power now. But if there is a proposal to name a road, an airport, a train after him, or to issue a postage stamp in his memory, we know nothing about it. This is in spite of the fact that the man who helped him change the course o India’s history in the midst of a terrible economic crisis, Manmohan Singh, is now prime minister. The bitter truth is, the Congress would want to deny Rao his rightful place in history exactly for the same reason that the Sangh Parivar would prevent Vajpayee from claiming his. If one is to be repudiated for defying his political ideology, the other must be made to pay for not bowing before his party’s first family. In effect, it means the same thing. The Family is to the Congress what Hindutva is to the RSS. It is the abiding legacy that you defy at your own risk. Both the Congress devotion to the idea of the first family and the Sangh Parivar’s to its ideology are camels in their respective tents even today. In denying these two leaders what should be their due, both ultimately undermine themselves.

MAXIMUM CITY, MINIMUM PROGRAMM E From Mumbai to Gurgaon, Delhi to B angalore, the Congress h as the keys to our urban engines. Look how it’s switching them off, one by one.

30 April 2005

In themiddle of the ongoing commotion in Parliament, Sonia Gandhi may have noted the diminishing of two of her more important chief ministers. Vilasrao Deshmukh, chief minister of India’s second largest and second richest state, has to present himself in Delhi to explain to her his policy over such an ‘important’ issue as a ban on Mumbai’s dance bars. This, when his state is facing its starkest power crisis in a decade, with public protests, if not power riots yet, in a dozen cities. To be fair to Deshmukh, however, he is also a victim of his coalition partners. The Talibanesque morality campaign is the obsession of his NCP home minister, R.R. Patil. Deshmukh’s fault, if anything, is pusillanimity of a kind that is alarmingly becoming the hallmark of Congress chie ministers. The other Congress chief minister cannot be described as pusillanimous by any stretch of the imagination. Sheila Dikshit is also the Congress party’s most popular chief minister. But, just as Deshmukh has had to pay for his spinelessness, Sheila is being punished for daring to have an identity of her own. And punished by whom? By complete nonentities like Jagdish Tytler, who can barely hang on to that most pitiable wooden spoon, the ministry of NRI affairs, and by one Ram Babu Sharma.* Now who’s that? The political message in this is that the party has learnt nothing from experience. Whenever it has humiliated or removed an incumbent chief minister, it has paid heavily. But of more immediate concern is what it means for Delhi and Mumbai, the two engines that drive India and which the Congress party controls. The Congress needs chief ministers in Mahar ashtra and Delhi who can cut red tape, canvass for resources and drive change. What they have got, instead, is one who is short o ideas and focus, and is a political cipher. And the other who is simply furious. Now turn your attention to Bangalore. Dharam Singh, the chief minister of the Congress-led coalition there, has been a lame duck from day one, not taken seriously by his own partymen and pushed around by H.D. Deve Gowda. He now leads the most fragile state government in the country. It would be a real surprise if it doesn’t fall within this year, leading to fresh elections in Karnataka. ** Sheila Dikshit still has the spine and the savvy to recover. Maharashtra can see the return of some sanity if Sonia Gandhi and Sharad Pawar both focus on it. But Karnataka looks like a lost cause altogether. The overall effect, however, is that there is now a shadow on the future of India’s three most

important urban centres, its political capital and financial capitals and its IT showpiece. If our major urban centres rot and decay, so will the rest of the country. Like all rapidly developing countries, India is urbanising at a fast pace. Some of its more developed states—Kerala, Gujarat—are already ‘rurbanised’. Big cities are both cradles and magnets for enterprise and creativity. India cannot grow if its major urban centres are allowed to decay and die. The Congress has a special responsibility. It rules not just Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, but also other upcoming modern urban centres, from Hyderabad to Pune, Chandigarh to Gurgaon. India cannot grow if these urban centres are trapped in power cuts (Pune), political indiscipline (Delhi), infrastructure freeze (Bangalore), water shortage (Gurgaon) and that most ridiculous man-made calamity of all, Talibanesque conservatism in Mumbai, the lure of which cuts across party lines, with one side working full-time to fight that menace to national security and family values called bar girls, and the other telling women that if they wear low-rise jeans they should expect to be raped. The future, for our cities, seems downhill.

CRIPPLING THE DOCTOR India never voted for a 24-page pamphlet called CMP. Left keeps waving it to make the PM looklike our most honest lame duck.

16 July 2005

One of the most remarkable turns in our politics is the claim that after Left leaders met the prime minister earlier this week he had agreed to keep his forthcoming discussions with George Bush within the parameters of the Common Minimum Programme (CMP). I do not think even the teeniest banana republic ever trivialised its engagement with the world like this, or demeaned its legitimate chie executive in this way. If all the functions of this government, from economics to foreign policy, are to be run by a 24-page, half-coherent pamphlet, where is the need to have a prime minister? We can be run by a permanent caretaker government, helped along by a decent cabinet secretary who recites the key covenants of the CMP along with theHanuman Chalisa , or whatever prayers he prefers, at the start of an onerous day at work. Frankly, Manmohan Singh’s problem is not what the CMP confines him to. The law it lays down on his engagement with the US is a masterfully vague example of bureaucratese. I can quote all of it (para 3, page 23 of the Holy CMP) here: ‘Even as it pursues closer engagement and relations with the USA, the UPA government will maintain the independence of India’s foreign policy position on all regional and global issues.’ This is ALL it says. Or, for the sake of absolute clarity, I can also quote the preamble which may be relevant: ‘The UPA government will pursue an independent foreign policy keeping in mind its past traditions. The policy will seek to promote multi-polarity in world relations and oppose all attempts at unilateralism.’ All it adds up to is one and a half platitudes. But the CMP is being used—quite deliberately and systematically—to paint this government as captive to the CMP and the L eft. You can see a game plan unfolding. The Left, the Congress party’s adversary in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, would keep on rubbing its nose into the ground. Then, once it is safely settled in power after elections in Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram next year, the Left would pull down the UPA government at the ‘right’ moment, on some high populist issue, and then put together a third front-type coalition after another election. It is improbable, but it is not impossible. * Some of this logic fell in place in the course of a conversation with former Prime Minister Gowda in Bangalore earlier this week. How was it that the Left now wanted to even reverse reforms it was directly party to in his third front (United Front) government? He proudly pointed out to me that two of the most significant reforms, the dismantling of the administered pricing mechanism (APM) for petroleum products and setting up of the Disinvestment Commission, were both done by his cabinet

that included CPI stalwarts like Indrajit Gupta and Chaturanan Mishra. There was never any problem, he said, and while he had his disagreements first with Kesri and then with 10 Janpath over the Jain Commission, interference from the Left was minimal. The Left parties, in fact, were model allies. Then you could dismantle the APM; today you have to ask Abani Roy before adding 50 paise to the price of petrol. So the same Left, which went along happily with more radical reforms in Gowda’s brief tenure, including Chidambaram’s 1997 ‘dream’ budget, today wants a decision as inconsequential as the sale of 10 per cent BHEL equity withdrawn, even though it did not object to a similar sale in another navratna, NTPC, just the other day. The Left is only playing to its own priorities, the most important of which is to make the Congress look bad. That’s why their protests are muted when reformist steps are taken by non-Congress ministers. Lalu slipped in private players in the railway container business and there wasn’t a whimper. If a Congress minister had done it, the comrades would have forced the prime minister and the UPA chairperson to issue a public apology followed by a day-long chanting of the CMP as prayaschit. Today Sonia’s government is in a situation where bills moved by it may not pass because its own allies would oppose them. At the same time she cannot ask the BJP for parliamentary support (just like the BJP did with the insurance and electricity bills when in power) because it might anger the Left. She is forced to treat the BJP as untouchable by the same Left that had no problems joining hands ith the Sangh Parivar to keep V.P. Singh in power—then, ostensibly, to ward off dynastic rule by keeping out her husband who had 197 seats. With just over 10 per cent strength in this Lok Sabha, the Left can pretty much run this government ith no accountability. They may wince at my use of a brutal expression from the world of corporate high finance, but isn’t it the exact political equivalent of a leveraged buyout? How else can you describe a situation where you have taken over a whole government on the strength of sixty MPs? The central fact is, the people of India never voted for the CMP. The majority of their votes went to the Congress and the BJP whose manifestos made very different promises. The CMP has been put together by adversaries who came together after the polls only to keep the BJP out. Like the Treaty of Versailles, it was always doomed to sink. It will, soon enough.

LIBERATE OUR CITIES Almost no major US city is the seat of government. What if you made Satara Maharashtra’s capital?

6 August 2005 Why have some cities done better over the past decade while others declined? Why has Delhi improved so dramatically while Mumbai has rolled downhill? Why have Gurgaon and Noida blossomed as new high-tech BPO destinations, while Bangalore is so choked? Why has Chandigarh survived while, less than 150 km north of it, Shimla has become a multi-storey slum and a looming seismic disaster? Here is a hypothesis: cities controlled by those whose voters belong there boom. Cities ruled by those whose voters live elsewhere are bled to death. Delhi works because its chief minister has to only get votes in the city to get re-elected. Even with limited statehood,* where the elected government has no control over land, law and order and what is known as the NDMC zone (mainly Lutyens’s Delhi), the focus does not shift. Politicians are driven by votes, and by prospects of making money. In a set-up like Delhi, both opportunities are within the city. Imagine, for example, if Delhi was a part of Uttar Pradesh or Haryana. The state government, then, ould have collected the majority of its votes in the countryside where factors other than Delhi’s traffic, pollution, power or water supply would play out. Its stake in the city would have been limited. But not now. Even in an east Delhi slum, a migrant day-wager from eastern Uttar Pradesh now generally votes on the basis of whether his quality of life has improved or worsened in Delhi, rather than follow caste in the manner that his family back in the village may. Chandigarh is a different case study. While old-timers may rue the arrival of some DDA-type apartment blocks and violation of the very exacting—and dreary—architectural norms inherited from Le Corbusier, by and large the city has grown and pr ospered. What if it had been given over to Punjab or Haryana? It is the city’s Union Territory status, along with the institution of local-level democracy, an elected municipal corporation, that has saved it from the ravages of state-level politics. Shimla has no such luck. It is the colony of Himachal Pradesh. Mumbai and Bangalore are prime examples of cities getting reduced to no more than colonies o the states to which they belong. Whatever the size of these cities, the number of MLAs they send to the assembly is a fraction of the majority. So a Deve Gowda, Dharam Singh, Sushilkumar Shinde or Vilasrao Deshmukh is not heartbroken if the city rots. The resources that the city generates, particularly taxes, sale of real estate and bribes are happily moved to the countryside because that is here the votes are. In our post-May 2004 Rural versus Urban discourse, this has become even more convenient. You ask Gowda or Dharam Singh why Bangalore is languishing and the instinctive

answer is a question: but what about the poor in the villages? Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister R.R. Patil personifies this. Through the peak of the Mumbai crisis* he has been missing in action. Could he have ignored his constituency similarly? His only ‘contribution’ to Mumbai has been the closure of dance bars so he can probably impress his voters back home because he stopped at least one ‘immoral’ activity in that big, bad city of the rich.** If some focus has now returned on Bangalore, it is because of the collective pressure from the captains of its tech industry, media and the Congress high command. In Mumbai, just the magnitude of the calamity, the humiliation of having to air-drop food packets in India’s largest, richest metro, will force some change. For how long, nobody can say. Already the state’s politicians are complaining about the flooded interiors getting ignored because of the focus on Mumbai. Many of Mumbai’s angry opinion leaders have been asking for drastic action. Free the city from the clutches of the state’s politicians, make it autonomous, give it a mayor with the powers of a Giuliani or Bloomberg. Or, that it should simply refuse to pay taxes. None of this is going to happen. In no state will political interests allow their crown jewels to go away. Forget Maharashtra and Karnataka, do you even imagine Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu letting Hyderabad or Chennai become Union Territories?† You have to find a solution. Politicians will neither invest time, money or emotion in their cities, nor allow them to break free of their control. But can you at least take them and their governments away from them? In the US, for example, almost no major city is the seat of the government of the state to which it belongs. The capital of New York state is quiet Albany and California’s is not Los Angeles or San Francisco but nondescript Sacramento. Chicago is not the capital of Illinois, it is Springfield. What if you shifted the capital of Maharashtra to, say, Satara or Sangli and Karnataka’s to Hubli or even Mysore. It would decongest Mumbai and Bangalore, save them from some VIP culture and also result in the building of more cities. An added, but significant, bonus will be the opportunity for politicians to make lots more money in real estate as land is acquired and prices boom around the new capitals. This is one reason Gurgaon and Noida have been allowed to bloom so nicely by politicians in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. This could also address independent India’s one big failing, its inability to build new cities as the Chinese have done.

OUR POOR LITTLE RICH A republic where everything comes free, or dirt cheap, for the rich —power, water, gas, college education.

8 October 2005 If you were one among a quarter of a billion Indians living below the poverty line, or one among nearly half of rural Indians who have never had a light bulb in their homes, what would you have thought of the recent pictures of the tony rich of south Delhi holding candlelight marches against a 10 per cent increase in power tariffs? In that entire protest, the one people missing were Delhi’s poor. But the well-to-do, even celebrities, were out in strength, painting the media radar screens as if the farmers of Kalahandi had besieged the capital. All this over a 10 per cent increase after so many years. Having tasted success, the socialists of south Delhi are now asking for more. Several resident elfare associations (RWAs) are threatening to stop paying their water bills unless the Delhi government junks water reform. For the most privileged and prosperous section of Delhi’s elite to refuse to pay their water bills is sheer anarchy and can be put down in 24 hours; just one night spent under a rickety fan in the police lock-up would do. But will the government do it? It perhaps won’t, because of the fear that reform is still seen as ‘anti-poor’. So the rich might win again, and mind you, it is not just the World Bank-aided water scheme that they are protesting against. Their anger is also caused by another perfectly reasonable idea—of charging a tax on private bore-wells that most of us have dug in our houses in all of south Delhi, drawing unlimited underground water for free, unmindful of drying aquifers. We do it because Jal Board water is so scarce. It is scarce because we pay so little for it and because our water distribution has been awaiting reform for decades. But why should e care? We’ve got our free bore-wells for which we use electricity now subsidised to the tune of Rs 182 crore a year by our government. And for drinking water, we get our 20-litre bottles of Bisleri home-delivered. The rich exploiting subsidies in the name of the poor is not really new. That they would hit the streets in protest if these were to be taken away from them, or would refuse to pay their power and ater bills, is new. This greed has grown over decades of pampering of the rich and the middle classes, where the state (or the political system) doles out subsidies in the name of the poor but which benefit only the well-to-do. On Delhi’s power and water, somebody should check the homes of those protesting: how many of them have their own private (and untaxed) gensets running on diesel (subsidised for the poor farmer); how many of them own bore-wells. And you will know how the most privileged members of our society have successfully fattened themselves by hanging on to the mammaries of the socialist state, hile the poor have been marginalised further.

The next example is LPG. If, after almost two decades, the expression ‘scarcity’ has hit our front pages, it is because of the price and market distortion that has gone on in the name of the poor, but to the benefit of the rich. The government wants to subsidise LPG for the aam aadmi, but would hope to sell it at a much higher price to the dhaba around the street corner. The obvious result is a black market, and now the oil ministry threatens to unleash armies of inspectors to prevent ‘diversion’. Market distortion, black market, inspector raj and corruption, these are all the most logical links in the same ridiculous chain of misdirected subsidies. Ask leaders of the Left, who go apoplectic at the very suggestion of an LPG price hike, whether the poor they speak for can afford a gas connection to begin with? To have LPG, you need a home, a kitchen you can lock, a gas stove, a deposit for the connection. Do the real poor have any of these? And will a small increase really hit the middle, or even lower-middle, classes so badly? An LPG cylinder today costs less than the price of hiring a pirated DVD, or buying Coke and popcorn at a multiplex. And yet the same people will start stoning buses over a twenty-rupee increase in LPG prices. Look at it another way. Most lower-middle-class families today have a cable TV connection, and it costs nearly twice as much as an LPG cylinder. Do they ask for a subsidy on it? Do they protest hen cable operators announce annual increases, or pass on the service tax burden to them? They are illing to pay for their entertainment. But they have been brought up to believe that their essential needs—energy, water, education and so on—must be provided by the state free, or at a subsidy. Talking of education, what happens to your household budget the year your child passes out of school and goes into college? Your expenses go down immediately. That is because private schools charge remunerative fees. Our college fees have not been raised for fifty years. Colleges have to live on UGC subsidies at the cost of the taxpayer. This is actually the finest illustration of Indian socialism, where the rich and the middle classes (or bourgeoisie, if you so prefer these days) get the state to allocate subsidies in the name of the poor and then give them all to themselves. The poor obviously do not have the money to send their children to good (private) schools, or to pay for private tuition. So their children, unless exceptional, do not get the 90 per cent needed to get into a halfdecent college. So the school-level subsidy becomes their curse, and the college-level subsidy is out of their reach. What is the better answer? To put private schools also under a UGC-type monstrosity? Or to let colleges charge realistic fees, and use the surpluses to increase their seats as also to subsidise the genuinely poor and the deserving, rather than your child or mine? The other current pseudo-socialist obsession, Provident Fund interest rates, is part of the same phenomenon. Eighty-five per cent of EPFO members have deposits below Rs 20,000. So how much benefit can they derive from a nearly 1.5 per cent annual subsidy on interest? At the most, Rs 300 per year, or Rs in 25the a most month. But the economies better-paid around salariedtheclass has beenenvy: giftedana8.5–9.5 privilege counterparts prosperous world would per their cent interest, completely tax-free, and with sovereign guarantees. While 85 per cent or more of the genuine orking classes only applaud a subsidy paid in their name, the real benefit goes to PLUs once again. They are the ones who should be sending thank-you cards to Gurudas Dasgupta.

OLD POLITICS VERSUS NEW ECONOM Y That’s the Gowda–Murthy fight. And it’s pretty much clear to everyone whose side the new India is on.

22 October 2005 It is easy to be disgusted with H.D. Deve Gowda’s tirade against N.R. Narayana Murthy, his Infosys, and the entire IT industry. Is it just the frustration with his own dismal politics at the moment, having become a former prime minister at an age too young to retire from politics and at a juncture where he is forced to be the supporting actor even in his own state? Is it just his resentment at the IT industry’s ability to stand up to his political bullying? Or could it just be that he is punch-drunk having lost his deputy Siddaramaiah* and has jumped in panic on the stale, old rural versus urban, humble farmer versus rich techie agenda? What is more significant, Narayana Murthy has not backed down. He has resigned as chairman o Bangalore International Airport Ltd. In a pithy letter to the chief minister (Dharam Singh), he has also asked him somesearching questions. All right, Mr Deve Gowda attacked me because he may be like that only . . . but what about you, and the Congress party? If Murthy too had gone down on his knees, as you would normally expect an Indian industrialist to do, there would have been no story. That he has not is the story. It marks a change in our political and social evolution that we must cherish. In a reforming Indian economy, this is our first experience of an inevitable clash, between old politics and new economy. Our traditional politician was at peace with the old economy, where the businessman depended on him for licences, quotas, permissions and clearances, to protect him from Inspector Raj and finally to keep the taxman off his back. The new economy businesses need none o that. The IT sector came up before our political class thought of even setting up a ministry for IT. Our political class has never accepted this. Given half a chance, it would have tried to ‘rectify’ it by bringing the regulation and restrictions into the sector to give itself d iscretionary powers. That it can do no such thing, given the iconic status the new economy has acquired, is galling for old politicians. Gowda exemplifies this. The mutually comfortable arrangement of the old economy was underlined so profoundly by the late Dhirubhai Ambani in an interview to T.N. Ninan (thenIndia at Today ) with his ‘I will salaam anybody’ quote. So dramatically has the situation changed today that both his sons ould tell you they no longer need to call on anybody in Delhi for anything. And even when they were having their bare-knuckles fight over what was, after all, an industrial empire representing 4 per cent of India’s GDP, no politician, under two successive governments, saw the scope or the need to meddle. That is not an equation politicians of Gowda’s generation relish. They hate to cede power to the entrepreneur like this. They still see the businessman as the archetypalsethji or lala who has to wait

outside their door, pay their personal and political bills, and say thank you. The new economy has demolished that paradigm. It needs almost nothing from the government, except decent infrastructure and some land which, in our country, is still either controlled by the government or must be acquired by it. This is the one power old politics still has. And this is what Gowda is flaunting. Hence the attack on Murthy is to do with real estate—he wants to grab land and make profit on it (‘at the cost o the poor farmers’).* But I would reckon Gowda is too shrewd not to know this won’t work in the long run. Fifteen years of reform may not have drawn out all of the pseudo-socialist venom in our system, but it is no longer easy to paint a Murthy, a Tata, a Premji or an Ambani as a mere capitalist usurper and to turn the jobless millions on him. New India values its entrepreneurs more than it trusts its politicians. I cannot conclude this without sharing a story from the brief period of Gowda’s prime ministership. Praveen Jain, theIndian Express photo editor in Delhi, and his team had figured early on that the greatest serial photo-op at the time was the prime minister caught asleep at his public appearances. They would catch him sleeping at functions, felicitations, in cabinet meetings, even hile meeting foreign dignitaries. And, sure enough, the front page was theirs for the asking. So one day, inevitably, I got invited for tea by C.M. Ibrahim, then information and broadcasting minister and Gowda’s closest confidant and hatchet-man (though now they are estranged). ‘Arrey bhai , Shekharji ,’ he said, ‘aap apne photographer ko bolo na kyon us bechare ke eechey pade hain ?’ (Why don’t you ask your photographer why he is stalking that poor fellow?) ‘What can I do, Ibrahimji,’ I replied. ‘If the prime minister is found sleeping in public, it is frontpage news. Why don’t you reason with the prime minister instead to be more alert?’ Ibrahim’s answer was as honest as it was—it now turns out—prescient. Arrey ‘ bhai, yeh aadmi

saara din prime minister nahin hai’ (This man is not a full-time prime minister), he said. ‘From 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., he is prime minister of India, from 7 p.m. to midnight he is chief minister of Karnataka, from midnight to 2 a.m., he is district magistrate of Hasan, then at 4.30 a.m. he has to get up for puja, then breakfast, and then back to being prime minister of India. So when can he sleep?’ From being the lord of all of Bharatvarsha, from Hastinapur to Hasan, Gowda is now wallowing in his own isolation and irrelevance and taking his frustration out in a totally lost cause on the one industry the Right and the Left of our politics woo desperately. Postscript: At the height of the Murli Manohar Joshi versus IIM battle, which in many ways was part of a similar old politics versus new economy phenomenon, I had written a National Interest (‘Wireless Wimps’, IE, 21 February 2004) accusing our new economy leaders of not standing up to him, of protesting in decaffeinated English. It’s time I took that back now as far as Narayana Murthy is concerned.

GENERATION EX Geriatrics are becoming history Left and Right. What are they doin g in the Congress, at the expense of young talent?

10 Dece mber 2005

Everybody around the world, except perhaps in India, accepts that politics is now a younger person’s profession. We have today a world where Bill Clinton retires at 54 as a two-term president, Koizumi and Schroeder keep falling in love, Blair is producing babies, Musharraf plays a hard game of squash and Bush boasts a Bjorn Borg-esque pulse rate of 48. The Chinese have brought about a generational shift. And all of Europe, including, surprise of surprises, France, is going through similar change. Politics in India has never been a profession of the young. It’s society where experience is confused for ability and age for wisdom. This has to change now. Today’s politics and governance are more demanding. They demand better, more modern skills, a spontaneous connection with technology and understanding of the markets and a stake in the future. Around the world now public figures are younger, fitter, more active. In contrast, ours look outdated. In this cabinet, what are people like Arjun Singh (75, human resource development), Sis Ram Ola (78, mines)* and Mahabir Prasad (66, small-scale, agro and rural industries) doing with three of the key portfolios on whose performance this government will be judged in 2009? In any case, will the party be able to take these same faces to the people in 2009 as it seeks a fresh term? In 2009, the people of India—their incomes nearly doubled from 2004 if even 8 per cent growth continues—will look at the claimants not just for experience but also for energy and talent. If there is one thing the older generation of our politicians knows well, it is how to squash the young. The late Madhavrao Scindia once complained to me, rather philosophically, of how people in his party kept telling himhe needed some more experience. ‘I tell them,’ he said, ‘I am well above 50, and a grandfather. How much more experience do I need?’ I personally was witness to one of these most skilled golden oldies cut a young ‘pretender’ to size. As I had lunch with the late Sikander Bakht (industry minister in the NDA government), his young deputy, Sukhbir Singh Badal, walked in, talking of some public sector reform. ‘Yes, barkhurdar (son), very good idea. Study this a bit more. I will tell some experienced officers to brief you . . . Yes, yes, I am all for reform but learn patience from me . . . I am all for youthful exuberance but in politics you need a lot more experience.’ And so on. By the end of a half-hour conversation I saw young Badal quietly retreat, chastened and without having one idea of his accepted even for further discussion. In today’s Congress, the argument for keeping younger talent on wait is: if you give them government positions, who will do the party work? This is cynical and, frankly, stupid.

Whatever its compulsions, the Congress has to look at the generational change taking place around it. A change in the BJP’s top leadership is near and inevitable. Its general secretaries, Pramod Mahajan,** Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Sanjay Joshi, and its key chief ministers, Narendra Modi, Shivraj Chouhan, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Raman Singh, are all in their 40s and 50s. Even the CPM, the srcinal hangout of the long marchers, has brought about a spectacular generational shift. Its most visible and powerful faces are now Prakash and Brinda Karat, Sitaram Yechury, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Mohammed Salim, Nilotpal Basu, Dipankar Mukherjee, * and so on. The ministers from the southern allies, Dayanidhi Maran, A. Raja, Anbumani Ramadoss and even Chandrashekhar Rao, are among the youngest members of this cabinet. So, whether it looks right or left, or at the centre, the Congress can ignore this change at its own peril.

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BULLDO ZER? Our poli ticians are brazen in their defence of illegal land use. They are scared of losing money, not votes.

24 Dece mber 2005 So now we know what exactly it takes for our politicians to sink their differences, prejudices, competitive instinct, everything. Even more than cricket or war, it is real estate. In our two biggest cities, Mumbai and Delhi, the entire political class is now getting together to confront the judiciary on the issue of unauthorised constructions. The Maharashtra assembly has been discussing ways to amend the law to let encroachers in the predominantly Sindhi refugee suburb of Ulhasnagar carry on living in their unauthorised properties, overturning a high court verdict that these be demolished forthwith. The political effort to block these demolitions comes despite the fact that one of the government’s own committees (headed by Nand Lal, widely acknowledged to be an upright officer) has documented in detail how local land mafias, in cahoots with municipal officials, have built an almost entirely illegal colony. Never mind also that the leading light of this unholy alliance was strongman Pappu Kalani. But even this is tiny compared to what is going on in Delhi. For almost a week, as municipal bulldozers and hammers went about gingerly demolishing a few unauthorised buildings, mostly on encroached government land, under high court orders, legislators of the Congress and the BJP got together to press for a new law to give amnesty for all illegal buildings, and for amendments to the new master plan. So desperate has the political class in Delhi become, it even passed a resolution (unanimously, of course) in the assembly, asking the municipal corporation to stop demolitions. And hen it didn’t, they served a privilege notice on the municipal commissioner. The politicians are not fighting for the poor, or for principles. They are doing all this to bestow on the capital’s well-to-do the power to break every building and zoning law in the book. The truth is, this is not about votes. After all, buildings on the demolition list now are just around 18,000 and even if you count, say, five votes on an average for each affected family, it is no more than a lakh of votes in an electorate of nearly 90 lakh. They are fighting, instead, to protect their own, very special privilege to break property laws at ill. They need that privilege because property, and its misuse, has now become one of their main sources of income. Not only do they break these laws merrily for their own properties, but also because so many of them are involved with real estate mafias. Why does reform in some areas of our infrastructure proceed much faster than in others? Anything that does not involve real estate moves much faster. Telecom is a good example. Anything that involves land takes much longer. One of the biggest roadblocks to the national highway project is land acquisition. The Mumbai airport modernisation has run into the challenge of clearing its own

land of encroachments. Work in Delhi’s Commonwealth Games Village has not begun yet because the Uttar Pradesh government, which owns a small part of the land to be acquired on Delhi’s side of the Yamuna, does not want to part with it. You go around the country listing delayed or blocked infrastructure projects, and you will find one common thread: land. In a reforming economy, licences, quotas, FDI clearances, phone connections, power and rail wagon allocations have all moved out o the politicians’ discretionary powers. Their clout is entirely intact in only two areas, property and policing. And they will not let it diminish. That is why the two most difficult reforms in India are to do with policing and property. One of the very few powers a politician can use unabashedly and ithout any accountability is his police. He can jail his opponent, get journalists thrashed and make sure his loyalists go scot-free even for major crimes. The second is property. This is why Gowda hated the IT industry so much; IT firms did not have to go to politicians like him for anything. Then he figured there was one thing they had to come to him for: land. That is when he hit back at Narayana Murthy. Now you know why our politicians will not reform our property laws, modernise land records, cut stamp duties and do other simple things to bring real estate out of the grip of the black economy. Now you know why even a pro-reform Congress–NCP government in Maharashtra would not abolish the urban land ceiling law, which most other major states have done. * It won’t, because politicians are desperate to hang on to the few discretionary powers that remain. These powers are their ticket to personal fortunes, in cash and property. I cannot conclude this without telling you my favourite real-estate-and-politics story. Nawaz Shari once insisted I travel from Islamabad to Lahore on the eight-lane motorway he had built and was so proud of. He even sent me his newest Mercedes so I could really enjoy the ride. The motorway was onderful, but it was also empty. So I asked the driver, from the prime minister’s staff, the reason hy nobody seemed to be using the highway. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘it is nearly a hundred kilometres longer than the Grand Trunk Road built by Sher Shah Suri more than five centuries ago.’ He explained hy. The moment Mian Saab (Sharif) announced the plans to build his dream highway, all his key partymen from Punjab made sure it passed their villages. Meanwhile, they bought large parcels o land en route. These then had to be acquired at exaggerated prices, fixed by themselves, and so what should have been a brilliant idea actually became a white elephant.

EVEN LOHIAITES ARE LEARNING And you thought B udd ha was the only one to let reforms sweep his ideological cobwebs away: look at the latest converts.

7 January 2006 If, like this writer, you too are a believer in economic reform and are dismayed at the roadblocks and rollbacks in Delhi, go to some of our states for some good news. The cause for this cheer comes from a category of politicians you would least expect it from. The Lohiaites, over the decades, have been the most retrograde of all socialists, serving a destructive cocktail of hyper socialism and hyper nationalism. But today, the leading lights of that uniquely Hindi heartland faith are breaking away from that past. The Lohiaites have been one of the main causes, and also the biggest beneficiaries, of the Congress party’s decline, particularly in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. So far they had resisted the winds of change even more stubbornly than the Left. But they are changing now, and changing for the better. I have maintained for a long time that among the last sectors to be reformed in India will be the railways, police and real estate. That is because of the great political vested interest in discretionary powers and, consequently, the scope for money-making they provide. That is why Lalu Prasad’s stint in the rail ministry has been such a pleasant surprise. Do not be blinded for one moment by his obstinate refusal (so far) to increase passenger tariffs, or inconsequential populism like promoting milk, lassi and earthen kulhads on his trains. One look at the railways’ financial performance, even in two years of rising fuel prices and increased competition from truckers on rapidly improving highways, and you know there is an interesting story in the making. Ask any senior member of the cabinet and he will tell you Lalu has been such a good minister, particularly on economic issues. He has almost never blocked any reformist decision and has supported new ideas like public–private partnerships, special purpose vehicles, even outsourcing o services, all things that Rail Bhavan bureaucrats would normally abhor. That is why my most cheerful headline in a long time is Lalu opening up the railways container business to the private sector. Sure enough, he had promised this in the last rail budget. But so did Chidambaram promise 49 per cent foreign equity in insurance in his 2004 budget and now nobody is even talking about it.* Similarly, his fellow Lohiaite (though now political adversary) Nitish Kumar has started his innings as chief minister on a reformist note so unfamiliar and unexpected in Bihar. One of his first actions has been to unbundle his bankrupt electricity board (which loses Rs 3.5 crore per day) into four zonal corporations. As is to be expected, his unions have threatened to go on strike. My third cheering story of the week did not even make front-page headlines. I found it buried on one of the commodity pages ofBusiness Standard this Thursday and, from my reading at least, it

seemed as if the reporter had missed the point a bit. The story complained that government-owned sugar mills were struggling to get steady cane supplies because private companies in Uttar Pradesh ere offering prices higher than the state-mandated minimum support price of Rs 113 per quintal. Some private companies, the report said, were offering up to Rs 15 more than that. Some were even ‘luring’ the farmer with freebies like tins of desi ghee and sacks of DAP fertiliser. Now this is in a state that was notorious for starving sugarcane farmers, by sugar mills delaying payment for years together. In fact, it was in response to this that Rahul Gandhi had made his maiden intervention in the Lok Sabha to get the cane farmers’ ‘arrears’ released. If in that very state farmers are now being not merely paid on time, but paid more than the minimum support price and also ooed with freebies by private companies, isn’t that a story of reform? Whatever else you may say about the Mulayam Singh Yadav–Amar Singh Samajwadi Party government, their basic approach to the sugar business has been reformist. Private sugar mills have blossomed and instead of begging, pleading, agitating, blocking roads and burning buses to get his own dues, the farmer is now being pampered as a supplier crucial to the sugar business. Isn’t it reform in agriculture? There will be crony capitalism as long as there are politicians and businessmen. No politician in India can claim sainthood on that. But the test also is, what does that cronyism yield? Even under the darkest-sounding Lohiaites, Uttar Pradesh has persisted with power reform, defying the unions (and, of course, you do not expect Left leaders to go protesting when this happens in non-Congress, nonBJP states, just as they embrace reform so wholeheartedly in West Bengal). Mulayam is trying to build modern townships, and while allegations of mone-ymaking will be there whenever a politician touches real estate, at least he is not as muddled in his head as the Congress has been in Mumbai and Delhi on urban renewal. What these three Lohiaites are telling you is that, just like Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, they have discovered that they cannot get re-elected by plain, socialist rhetoric alone. The key to survival in politics is now performance on issues that matter: bijli, sadak, paani, padhai, naukri . It is not possible to do any of that without reforming. Ideology be damned. And politics now is economics. When even the Lohiaites buy that mantra, you know India is on to a good thing.

MY SEAT, MAI-BAAP Higher education is the last relic of the quota raj. Can the PM do for our child ren what he did for us in 1991?

27 May 2006 Most people of my generation got their first exposure to the complexities of national politics through the dark phase of the Emergency. And as it lifted, peer pressure in the hostel messes was intense to go and work for Janata Party candidates taking on the Emergency gang. At the Panjab University campus in Chandigarh we also had a good candidate, former Congress Young Turk and rebel (and later vicepresident of India) Krishan Kant. Hundreds of students bunked classes to go paint the town with his posters and anti-Emergency slogans. Now what is the relevance of this three-decade-old story to the raging issue of OBC reservation in institutions of higher learning? Well, let’s go back to 1977. Elections swept, Krishan Kant found a few moments in that heady aftermath to thank his student volunteers. Of course, he delivered a small speech condemning the Emergency and extolling Jayaprakash Narayan and his brand of socialism. Then he added, in sheer gratitude, ‘I thank you for what you have done for me and for democracy. Please come to me if you need any help. And whenever each one of you gets married, please see me. I will give you a coupon for an LPG connection out of my MP’s quota.’ So, remember that much longer dark phase in our history from our own lifetime. When a gas connection, Bajaj scooter, telephone connection were all part of the largesse the political class could dispense, to our eternal gratitude. Or, we had the option of waiting in line for fifteen years. Fifteen years of reform have changed all that. In fact, our children today would find these stories o man-made, self-inflicted scarcities entirely unbelievable. As incredible as, hopefully, their children would find stories of today’s even more cruel, selfinflicted atrocities. A total of 4,000 seats in all our IITs, just around 1,500 in all our IIMs, a mere 50 MBBS seats per year in AIIMS, a ridiculous total of 235 for graduate diploma and postgraduates put together at the National Institute of Design, only 480 students at the National Law School, and so on. That is why today’s spectacle of a mere 2–3 per cent of all eligible applicants making it to these institutions, of 90-percenters failing to find decent courses in Delhi University colleges is today’s equivalent of the pre-1991, fifteen-year wait for scooters, gas connections, telephones. The anger you see on the streets of your cities, the bitterness that motivates normally pampered and sheltered medical students to endure hunger strikes to rival Medha Patkar’s, comes out of this frustration. And here is my central point. If the economic crisis, the near-default of 1991, gave Finance Minister Manmohan Singh the opportunity to turn that fifteen-year wait for basic necessities of transport, household fuel and communication into a situation of unlimited plenty, his own colleagues’ crude

push for OBC reservations brings an opportunity to similarly rejuvenate higher education.* Why do people like Arjun Singh (and the Mandalite chieftains who still reap the harvest of votes at the expense of the Congress) think an OBC quota is such a potent weapon? Why should a step that ill, at best, get 2,000–3,000 OBCs into these institutions bring them so much political gain? Because this handful of seats in these institutions is today’s equivalent of Krishan Kant’s LPG coupons. Here is something the politician denied you in the first place. And here is something he can give you: his largesse if you give him your eternal gratitude and, of course, your vote. Would it have been the same way in 1977 if LPG had been available off the shelf? Would it be the case now if India had, instead of 5,000, some 50,000 IIT seats? Or 10,000 in the IIMs, 500 at AIIMSlike institutions, another 200,000 in medical colleges elsewhere instead of 18,000? This artificial scarcity is the mother of today’s frustration and a festering national crisis. Since higher education seemed to concern so few, it was on nobody’s political radar screen. Even the most ideologically proactive HRD ministers like Murli Manohar Joshi and Arjun Singh would never have seen any need to focus on it. But this self-destructive quota crisis which Arjun Singh has walked his party into changes all that. Higher education is now on the political centre stage. Government control over higher education has produced a scandalous state of man-made scarcity. We believe our advantage in the global marketplace comes from our superiority in technology, mathematics, sciences. Can we do that on the back of 4,000 IIT graduates per year? It might be sobering to look at some global comparisons. MIT alone takes as many undergraduates per year (4,000) as all of our IITs. Harvard Business School alone takes 900 students every year and Harvard Law takes 1,800, almost 400 per cent of our NLSUI of Bangalore. Is that how a modernising, growing India, its economy driven by the engine o services and manufacturing, is going to compete in this globalising world? But how can you compare our situation with America’s? We have a per capita income of $700, they have $22,000 per year, so the argument will predictably go. Similar arguments were used to keep gas connections, scooters, cars and telephones in short supply for more than four decades after Independence. And what happened when you opened up? The taxpayer did not have to spend a paisa more. And today we are acknowledged to be a rising global power in car manufacturing, the second fastest growing telecom market, and coupon books for MPs’ LPG quota went out of print years ago. But there are areas where they still remain. An MP can still give you a coupon or a letter for admitting your child to a Kendriya Vidyalaya. Please go and stand outside the HRD minister’s house next month, and you will find hordes of people waiting for help in getting their children some reasonable education, unmindful of the signboard that firmly tells those seeking Kendriya Vidyalaya admissions not the to crowd thenow entrance. Why would minister use a part of his hoard (particularly after the education cess) to build a couple of hundred more Kendriya and Navodaya Vidyalayas, and to expand and build new IITs and IIMs? He won’t because he will then lose the power of the coupon and the quota. And his bureaucrats on’t allow it because this is by far the most important area of our economy they can still fully control. The power of keeping an IIM director waiting for weeks for his joint secretary’s clearance to attend a prestigious foreign conference is heady. More institutions, more seats, private investments all

diminish that power. This is the last—but perhaps the most destructive—relic of the licence-quota raj. The quota crisis, and the fortuitous arrival of higher education on the political centre stage, is in many ways similar to the other crisis that led to India mortgaging its gold to escape payment defaults. As finance minister, Manmohan Singh managed to convert that crisis into an opportunity that changed our lives. Can he use today’s crisis in higher education to do the same for our children? *

WILL THE BULLY NOW DO WHAT BULLIES USUALLY DO WHEN THEIR BLUFF IS C ALLED? For three years, the Congress doormat let the comrades walk all over it. The Left delud ed itself, help ed b y the capital’s rent-a-quote liberals, into believing the worm will never turn. Well, it has.

12 August 2007 Just when the Left leaders were savouring the completion of their conquest of both Houses o Parliament, the prime minister has spoilt their party by defying them to do whatever they want because he won’t concede any more space on the nuclear (read, larger foreign and strategic policy) issue. This is the all-conquering comrades’ moment of truth. For more than three years now, they became used to the Congress shivering in submission the moment they opened their mouths. Not only that, they became some kind of authority on advance rulings. On most issues of foreign and economic policy, it seemed as if Congress ministers had to seek the Left’s clearance before opening their mouths. Legislation supported by a wide majority in this Parliament has been in deep freeze just because the Left, with the leveraged power of 60-plus, would veto the wish of 360. A.B. Bardhan and Gurudas Dasgupta, whose party, the CPI, can barely get in the double figures, have been holding out threats of withdrawing support to the government once a week. Karan Thapar, in fact, can conjure up national headlines at will—all he has to do is invite a Left leader to the studio. The next day’s front pages are guaranteed with one more threat to pull down this government. There as never one word of protest from the Congress. Its leaders felt throttled by the CMP (Common Minimum Programme), that self-inflicted Treaty of Versailles. But because the Left leadership still thinks its politics through more cl everly, Congressmen were also brainwashed into believing many myths. One, that the bully hated hem t so much, and was so reckless, he was going to pull the plug any day. Two, they believed a most cleverly spread canard— supported by the capital’s sizeable Left-liberal, rent-a-quote intellectual elite—that there was a vast schism between the prime minister and 10 Janpath. That this distance was not just of detail and style, but of ideology. Maybe the new generation of Left leaders also embraced that delusion. They went to Sonia routinely to complain about this prime minister and style and probably mistook her silences and noncommittal nods for agreement. Then, at least four of the more senior members of this cabinet prostrated themselves before the commissars with job applications for president and vice-president. Egos got even more bloated as the Left rejected one candidate after another, stating in public their reasons more explicitly than any BCCI selection committee chairman does while dropping a player.

One was too old and unfit for the job, they said, another was a devotee of Sai Baba, a third wore his faith on his sleeve—literally, an ‘Om’-engraved bracelet. The Congress took all this insult and public humiliation. It even kept quiet when the Left’s hand-picked vice-president attacked its foreign policy. The Left believed the worm would never turn. But a deadly combination of political inexperience, ideological rigidity and personal hubris has brought them to this interesting turning point. Now, just before they set out for the southern coast to stop the waves as the Indian Navy exercises with four other ‘friendly’ ones, from the US, Singapore, Australia and Japan—so much to the irritation of the First Friend, China—they have to take a more serious call. The prime minister has thrown a challenge: learn your part of the coalition dharma or go to hell. To leave no doubt, he has even chosen a paper in Kolkata to send out that message. Will the bully now do what bullies usually do in such situations: shut up and look for a face-saver? Or will they finally bite instead of just barking? If today’s Left leaders find this dilemma too painful, they would do well to seek sage advice from the one comrade who knew the art of political negotiation and flexibility, the one man who knew power politics is different from a JNU debate. His name is Harkishan Singh Surjeet and sure enough, if he was still in control, he would never have let the Left paint itself into such a tight corner.

IF MO DI WINS ON SUNDAY Stage set for ultimate Sonia versus Modi battle. If he loses, the RSS he defied will get back. Either way, wait for the rise of a new politics.

22 Dece mber 2007

On the eve of the 2002 Gujarat elections, I had stuck my neck out to predict, somewhat audaciously, that if Narendra Modi wins, it would alter the character of national politics and that the next general election could be a Sonia versus Modi contest. There were some curious murmurs from the usual suspects of the Congress who called that Saturday morning. But, surprise of surprises, the angriest protest came from Pramod Mahajan. He called early that morning and, for once, was not his usual sugar-coated self. ‘What’s this, boss, hat kind of nonsense are you writing?’ he said. Why should it have upset Pramod if I was predicting his party’s victory in Gujarat? That foxed me and, in any case, six-thirty in the morning is not exactly when I am at my brightest. Pramod apologised for calling early and we agreed to meet for lunch that afternoon. Mahajan startled the steward at the Oberoi’s very proper Belvedere by asking for a whole, large onion. ‘Don’t peel it,’ he specified. I thought for a moment that Mahajan, always a great showman, anted to use the onion to make a political point about the BJP. He, instead, plonked it on the table, crushed it under his ample palm and plucked out the flesh for himself and me to munch with our lunch. Even in a seven-star environment, the BJP’s most flamboyant star was his rustic self. Then he came to the point. ‘What do you mean by saying “Sonia versus Modi” in the next general election? Do the rest of us ear bangles? You think we have spent decades in politics to now hand it all over to somebody who alks in through he t back door?’ I tell this story because while the 2004 poll distorted the emerging political scenario then, it is incredible how it is promising to play out exactly the same way now. If Modi wins on Sunday, * the stage will be set for an ultimate Modi versus Sonia battle, even if Advani continues to be the BJP’s shadow prime minister. Modi will then be the key campaigner. His kind of politics, his style of mobilisation, his cryptographic saffronism and even his short-sleeved kurtas will then define the BJP campaigns in subsequent general elections. In the long run, too, he will emerge as Rahul Gandhi’s main challenger. He will unite against himself the parties that need the Muslim votes, thereby strengthening any Congress-led coalition. He will put under great strain the members of any BJP-led coalition, particularly those that still value Muslim votes. Nitish Kumar is a key example. Even his orst critics won’t deny that if he wins on Sunday, he will pretty much define the agenda for national

politics in the future. This is also why his re-election will worry many of his party’s leaders exactly the same way his rise had irritated Mahajan in 2002. It is not just because he will then make an immediate bid for the national leadership. On the contrary, chances are that he will let Advani be the prime ministerial candidate in 2009. But his style and persona will cast a larger-than-life shadow not just on the BJP, but on the entire saffron politics. Two important factors that have marked the BJP’s national politics will then change. One is that hatever their commitment to RSS ideology, most senior leaders of the BJP have risen from the parliamentary system of the 1950s and 1960s. They have, therefore, conducted their politics within the broader parameters of constitutionalism and parliamentary sobriety. Vajpayee has smilingly sparred with Nehru, and Advani was on talking terms with Indira Gandhi and Rajiv, even after she ailed him and his entire party leadership during the Emergency. Also, whatever their private views, you have never heard any senior BJP leader say nasty things about Muslims in public. The second factor to have defined the BJP’s politics, so far, is its leaders’ servility to Nagpur. So strong has that hold been that even at the peak of Vajpayee’s power, most key decisions, even privatisation of PSUs, had to be cleared with the RSS. If Modi wins tomorrow, both will change. He may not call Muslims names in public, but he leaves very little to chance. Not for him the Lucknavi niceties of old-fashioned BJP leaders. He will never entertain a suggestion to reach out to Muslims especially, as he does not believe in ‘appeasement’. He is not shy of using the expression ‘Aalia, Malia, Kamalia’ to refer to goondas on the streets of Gujarat. And when asked if he isn’t actually suggesting—in code language—that the bad guys are all Muslim, asks with a straight face: ‘So what would you have said in English, Tom, Dick and Harry . . . ould that have made the bad guys all Christian?’ Modi’s rise will completely change the form, style, substance and essence of the BJP’s politics. In the 1990s at Ayodhya, Advani had given his party a certain direction. Modi’s rise will now mean that the use-by date on that politics is over. Most interestingly, he will change the second factor too. He may be an icon of aggressive Hindutva, but Modi has emerged as the first BJP leader ever to defy the RSS. He has not deferred to them. He has, in fact, defied them. He has even denied RSS boys and sympathisers the power of making money on the side, something they consider their entitlement in BJP states. The RSS and VHP are now returning the compliment by boycotting his campaign. If Modi ins, he will also be the first BJP leader ever to win in defiance of, and despite, the VHP and RSS. So come Sunday, you will see the rise of a new politics, one way or the other.

Postscript: I have a sneaking feeling that this time, too, my phone will ring (I hope, not at 6.30 a.m.) and someone from the BJP will say, ‘What nonsense are you writing?’

NORTHEAST IS INDIA The prime minister’s visit is a reminder that we have to face up to the realities of the region.

16 February 2008 Our prime ministers, in fact most of our most important leaders, rarely visit the Northeast. And even hen they do, it is usually a most non-newsy event. The politics of that region does not count for very much where we live, with all of the seven states contributing just about twenty MPs to the Lok Sabha. And insurgency, which used to make headlines a quarter-century ago, is now more or less dormant, barring the odd ULFA strike here and there. So who, in New Delhi or Mumbai, Bangalore or Chennai, bothers about the Northeast? Even the spasmodic twists and turns in peace talks between the Centre and Muivah and his NSCN insurgents rarely make page one. So wonderfully out of sight, out of mind the seven states—actually eight now, since we also include Sikkim in that diverse grouping— have been that if you took a poll even in one of your smartest colleges in our big cities, many students ould not be able to tell you the capitals of Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. Or be aware of the fact that the state of Arunachal Pradesh, with just about 20 lakh people, has more territory than almost half the states of India. Of course, there is now greater awareness of the fact that the Chinese lay claim to this entire territory. And that is the reason the prime minister’s recent visit to that distant outpost made news.* You cannot quibble with most things the prime minister said, or did, on that very significant visit —unless, of course, you are Chinese. But you have to now face up to the realities of the Northeast, as he seems to be doing. Some of these are new, most of these are old, but almost all of these are uncomfortable. Sixty years after Independence, and a clear forty-five years after we fought a bitter ar with the Chinese over Arunachal Pradesh, it now takes our prime minister to personally visit the region and promise roads, power, schools, air services and so on. What’s so special about this, you might ask. Isn’t thi s exactly what prime ministers would promise any part of the country they visit? What is special here is just the lag between the north-eastern states and even the rest of the Indian ‘mainland’. The region, particularly Arunachal Pradesh, has been left at least two decades behind the rest of the country in basic development. And the saddest thing is, it is only partly by cynical neglect. It is mostly by design, and on the basis of a policy formulated by our most well-intentioned political leaders and civil servants. The Northeast, particularly Arunachal Pradesh, was mostly discovered by independent India in the mid-1950s, exactly a half-century ago in the first flush of separatist demands and insurgency in Naga Hills (what was to later become Nagaland) and then the Chinese claims on Arunachal Pradesh. Nehru, to his credit, saw the need to reach out to the region. But his first experience was not encouraging. He personally visited Nagaland in 1953 hoping to win over popular opinion, but was

stung by the kind of rejection he confronted. In fact, the moment he had finished speaking at the large public meeting in Kohima which was expected to have turned Naga opinion away from the separatists, the entire crowd turned their backs and started to beat their backsides, the native gesture of protest and rejection. Nehru had far too much sensitivity not to understand that he was dealing with a more serious problem than what was imagined in New Delhi. So he looked for solutions, allies and ideas. It was during this phase that an itinerant adventurer-cum-anthropologist called Verrier Elwin entered the scene. Elwin was fascinated by India’s tribes and felt as passionately for their well-being as Nehru. He wrote seminal work on many of India’s tribal communities, particularly the Nagas, and anybody who understands Nehru even a little bit would appreciate why Nehru was so easily fascinated by him. So from the moment they came together, Elwin became Nehru’s intellectual inspiration, a one-man think-tank on the tribal Northeast. They were absolutely right in believing that the region was different from the rest of India and needed some kind of specialist handling. So both orked together on building and orienting an all-India service they set up specially for the Northeast, the Indian Frontier Administrative Service, which produced some great titans in the history of our bureaucracy, as also some great storytellers. One of them was Nari Rustomji, and I had the privilege of getting to know him well during the two and a half years for which I was based in the Northeast as this newspaper’s correspondent (1981– 83). Now retired and on a visit to meet friends, he called me because he was intrigued by the review I had written of his then latest book,Verrier Elwin and India’s Northeastern Borderlands , in the paper’s Sunday edition. Intrigued, as he told me over tea at my tiny Shillong cottage, because ‘it seemed not only that this guy had actually read the book, but that he even seemed to know something about the region’. Rustomji was a frontiersman in speech and style and would have made a terrible diplomat. So he wasn’t one to suck up to journalists for publicity or be in awe of them. But we became friends, even though more than five decades adrift in age. And it was during the many fascinating sittings with him that the story of the Elwin–Nehru romance with the Northeast unfolded. Elwin was an amateur anthropologist, having read English literature at Oxford, but also a romantic. He loved the tribes so much he made a home wherever his current research interests were and became a member of the community. But the prospect that his gullible, vulnerable tribals may have to deal with the big bad world outside worried him greatly. So he devised a policy of firmly calibrated change, which he described as ‘hastening slowly’. Nehru, in all honesty, idealism and innocence, bought this idea. This meant resisting change, shielding the tribal regions from the mainstream/mainland, preserving and protecting them. It resulted in a policy that effectively quarantined the tribes the Northeast. tribal regions, which became statesano Nagaland, Mizoram and of Arunachal, were soMost completely sealed off that alater fellow Indianthe needed inner-line permit to visit. Fortunately for the Mizos and the Nagas, Christian missionaries had already struck roots there, so they became the bringers of change, of modern education and ideas. But Arunachal was late, and was more fully ‘protected’. It was under the influence of Elwin, who ironically had come to India as a missionary, that the Centre even banned Christian missionaries from entering the state. This ultimately resulted in the enactment of a law by the local assembly banning

conversion. The result was a quarantine, which only became tighter following the 1962 military debacle as the fortress psychology of a defeated army harmonised so totally with the siege mentality of an ethnic protectionist. This resulted in a policy where roads, airports and power generation capacity were not built, lest the Chinese should come and grab it all from us. The lack of roads was actually seen as a good tactical ploy to deter the Chinese armies from venturing too deep into our territory and thereby stretching their supply lines. Very few schools and colleges were set up, and with missionaries kept out, there was no alternative either. In fact, in 1983 I travelled along the Assam–Arunachal border for a story on the then growing phenomenon of Christian missionaries setting up schools right next to the border so Arunachali tribal children could come and study there. But they were too few to make a difference. That is why the young tribals you now see working in airlines, restaurants, banks and other service industries—bright, efficient and so confident—are mostly from Mizoram, Nagaland and Manipur, where the missionaries resisted the quarantine, and almost never from Arunachal. This is what Manmohan Singh is now trying to change. And this is why when he talks of massive road building, introduction of air services, electrifying villages, it amounts to turning the clock back on that Elwin–Nehru philosophy which, though so well intentioned, ultimately proved so disastrous. If you lived in Arunachal now, particularly if you lived close to the border, you would know how much better off the population in Chinese-controlled territory is. They have 24-hour power, roads, schools, shops full of goodies. And here, you have been protected, or rather preserved, as a museum piece. Frankly, if the disparity continues for too long, the Chinese do not have to fight any war over territory. We risk seeing many of what we regard as our own people walking across. After all if the sons of rich farmers in Jalandhar would sell their family silver to get a visa to the West, why ouldn’t a poor tribal of Arunachal exercise the same choice towards the east? This does sound grim, but this is the reality today. The only good news is that this prime minister obviously has the intellect to understand this. And also to leave the past behind to build a new future, much as he did with our economy in 1991.

AND THEN THERE WERE NINE That’s the number of states which hold the key to who will rule the Centre. So, farewell national leaders, welcome regional winners.

24 May 2008 With the decline in the might of pan-national parties and vote banks, even a national election has now become just a net result of many state elections. The process began in 1989 when V.P. Singh emerged as a kind of regional leader of Uttar Pradesh and used that leverage to run a coalition government. Over the following two decades, with no great national leader emerging, this trend only strengthened. Vajpayee was the one, but limited, exception to this. His appeal did cut across geography, ethnicity and language, but not so strongly that he could fill the old Nehru–Gandhi space. But with his wider acceptability, he was able to swing that small but crucial number of fence-sitters in various political geographies towards his coalition partners. His absence has now removed all resistance to ‘regionalisation’ of national politics. Even Congress leaders acknowledge privately that it was this change that brought them to power in 2004. The UPA came to power because four things happened. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy demolished Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra, Karunanidhi trounced Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu and, even more importantly, the NDA was reduced to just 10 seats in Uttar Pradesh and 11 in Bihar. Even if the BJP had won anything close to the 29 seats it had in Uttar Pradesh in 1999, it would have had the critical mass to keep the NDA in power. Together, these four states accounted for a swing of nearly 120 seats and brought the UPA to power. One factor that wasn’t common to these states was the Congress. In Uttar Pradesh, it was Mulayam Singh’s surprising resurgence that destroyed the BJP. In Bihar, Lalu’s caste coalition swept the NDA aside. In Tamil Nadu, it was a straight fight between two regional leaders and their respective allies. So in all three of these decisive states, the battle was won by a regional leader. And what about Andhra? Yes, the Congress swept it. But wasn’t Andhra, besides Haryana, the only state where the Congress had allowed the emergence, and projection, of a state leader, unchallenged by local rivals and unmolested by its Rajya Sabha-ist general secretaries? Rajasekhara Reddy had campaigned for the chief minister’s job for five full years and earned such a brilliant victory for his party. In fact, even today, he and Bhupinder Singh Hooda are the only two Congress leaders who are allowed to function as regional chieftains. The lesson, therefore, is self-evident. National elections are now no longer ‘national’ in the conventional sense but a net result of elections in different states. In a rapidly fragmenting vote base, a national election can now be more aptly compared to a bestof-nine-sets tennis match. The coalition that wins five of these nine will take the match, and gaddi the of Dilli. These nine ‘sets’ are: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh,

Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Kerala. Together, these nine states (or sets in our mythical tennis match) represent 351 seats in a House of 543. And while there are other large states, like West Bengal, Gujarat and Orissa, we are not considering them because there radical change is unlikely. The nine on our list are states that can, and usually do, go one way or the other decisively. The national party or coalition that can win five of these nine can be nearly sure of bagging power for its coalition, since this by itself will give it a tally of nearly 200 overall. In fact, if one of the coalitions wins a clear victory in five of these nine, it will be almost unassailable. And how will this be ensured, and by whom? Each of these will be a local battle between an incumbent and his challenger. So the party, or coalition, which has the best regional leader in each state will win. This is where the Congress is in trouble. Barring Andhra Pradesh * and Haryana, it does not have any state under a leader who could even be sure of winning his own seat. Where it has leaders, as notably S.M. Krishna in Karnataka, they have been humiliated and squashed into pulp by its Rajya Sabha-ist high command, whose leading lights you see preening on TV news channels every evening. The most striking victim is Vilasrao Deshmukh in Maharashtra, whose fate is worse than that of a daily-wage employee. No leader in Karnataka, one in Maharashtra dead in the water, nobody in Uttar Pradesh, the ally still reeling in Bihar, and if you were a Congressman, you would think four of the nine states are written off already. This is the party’s crisis of regional leadership.

THE RURBAN MIND The village and the city are increasingly thin king alike. The Congress, trapped in th e old, ign ores this idea of a new Indi a.

31 May 2008 Ever since its Karnataka defeat to the BJP, the Congress party’s closet-coterie Rajya Sabha warriors ho control the CWC have been inventing new excuses. They would like you to believe that one reason they lost out was that after delimitation, urban constituencies have increased. And the cities, e all know, prefer the BJP. Of all the alibis, this may even have some justification. Yet, such is the level of organisational lethargy in the Congress today that they have grabbed the wrong end of that logic. Delimitation is not some conspiracy against them. It is an acknowledgement of the new demographic reality in a rapidly urbanising India. It is now entirely up to a political party to decide whether it embraces it as an opportunity or rubbishes it as a curse. But urbanisation, the movement of populations from villages to cities, as well as the social, economic and infrastructural upgrade of villages, is an irresistible force. A national party that does not embrace this reality is headed for disaster. But for some reason Congress geriatrics are shy of accepting this. That is why their politics and rhetoric are still so rural centric, as if cities do not matter. Or rather that cities are somehow bad, immoral, rolling in cash and essentially anti-secular, and therefore deservingly ceded to the BJP. This was also the Congress argument during last year’s Gujarat campaign: don’t get dazzled by Narendra Modi; his impact is confined to the cities, and villages will reject him. In fact, even a politician as experienced as Sharad Pawar had fallen in that trap, as he told me in Gondal, one of the few seats his NCP was contesting in Gujarat: ‘Modi will lose. Cities will vote for him, but villages are fed up.’ Any analysis of that election shows that Modi’s support was uniformly spread across cities and villages in each political geography of Gujarat. So what will the Congress Kautilyas say now? Gujarat is a unique case not only because its mind is ‘Modi-fied’ but also because it is the most urbanised of our larger states. For nearly a decade and a half, the state has built roads, power and education infrastructure, upgraded its irrigation and agriculture and thereby narrowed the gap between its many, and booming, cities and villages. Gujarat, for all practical purposes, is now a state that can be more aptly described as ‘rurban’. Which is why the old Congress belief of ‘villages are ith us and so are the numbers’ is now a fantasy there. The trend has been further confirmed in Punjab where for decades the Congress had the cities and Akalis the villages. In the latest elections (2007), the Akalis swept the cities. And, last heard, even the veteran comrades of the West Bengal CPM, whose rural support has been the stuff of legend, were trying to figure out why villages gave them such a beating in this month’s panchayat polls.

Increasingly now, numbers as well as political clout are moving from villages to cities. In any case, being more exposed to the media and other elements of change, cities are influencing the political agenda in villages as well. Karnataka was no different. The BJP has done well in cities as ell as in villages. And if it has won such an unexpectedly large number of Scheduled Caste and Tribe seats, it is because more and more villages are now thinking like cities. Or, more accurately, this is because cities and villages are increasingly thinking alike, because India’s political landscape is also being ‘rurbanised’. The national party that acknowledges this least of all is the Congress. It has a deep anti-urban bias. You can understand the alienation leaders like Lalu or Mulayam feel with cities as urban areas breed anonymity of caste, language and ethnicity, currency of their politics. Cities are by definition much too diverse to support their kind of narrow vote-bank politics. But why the Congress? Almost all its leaders attributed their 2004 victory to Declining Bharat’s revolt against BJP’s Shining India. One look at the figures would trash that. The BJP, in fact, retained the majority of its rural seats, but was wiped out in the cities. Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad ere all swept by the Congress or the allies. In hard figures, Yogendra Yadav points out (‘The elusive mandate of 2004’, Economic and Political Weekly , 18 December 2004) that while the NDA’s urban seats fell from 51 in 1999 to a mere 21, the UPA’s went up from 16 to 35. This is what made the difference in May 2004, a revolt of the cities against the NDA, not villages, as the Congress persuaded itself to believe. Because of this confusion, instead of sending thank-you cards to the cities, the Congress started to punish them. In its desperation to find favour for its rural schemes, it has strangled the urban voter ith new taxes and cesses on goods, services, salaries, even stock options. Then, to contain headline inflation, it has brutally increased interest rates. Most ordinary people in cities are now paying up to 500 basis points more even on small loans for two-wheelers and essential hite goods and for their children’s education. They curse the UPA every month as they pay their increased EMI. It is only a party that refuses to understand this new sociology of Indian politics that overlooks the killer impact of EMI inflation on its voters. This raises two more important points. One, if the argument is that the Congress has punished the urban voter while pretending to favour the villages, how come it has not been rewarded in the countryside? The answer is simple. In this rapidly developing (read, urbanising) India, the rural–urban divide is blurring, even in voting behaviour. Two, why did cities vote then the way they did? For example, why did they vote UPA so overwhelmingly if you thought—and rightly so in the past—that the BJP had its support in cities? The cities probably so sanctification fed up of the Murli Manohar Joshi kind ofin meddling with education that they value were so much and the of state-sponsored violence Modi’s Gujarat that they turned against the BJP.

IT’S NOT ABOUT 272 Don’t let the numbers game distract you. It’s a rare moment when India’s place in the world will be debated.

19 July 2008 While we watch in disgust the deal-making and horse-trading in our politics, let us not overlook the profound issues that got us here.* All the murkiness and trivialities apart, this crisis has been caused by three differing worldviews, of how India looks at the post-Cold War world, its own position and stature there and what it needs to do to further its interests. It is the first time in our history that foreign and strategic policies have become such an issue. So far, these policies had more or less been run on the basis of a consensus, Nehruvian for most of the first twenty-five years after Independence, and then only pushed further in the same direction by Indira Gandhi. There was no debate on India’s prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement which tilted distinctly towards the Soviet Union, the underdog in the Cold War. This larger formulation was not challenged even when India took proSoviet positions on the pulverisation of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and then Afghanistan, over almost three decades. Barring the hiccup of the 1962 defeat when the Nehruvian foreign policy paradigm as questioned, there wasn’t much doubt even on our policy on our borders, neighbours and nuclear eapons. That is why, when the Janata came to power in 1977, Prime Minister Morarji Desai and his external affairs minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, made no major departure even from Indira Gandhi’s Emergency past, except, perhaps, that they hosted Jimmy Carter, the first American president to visit India in a very, very long time. On our border disputes, that consensus is contained in two unanimous resolutions of Parliament, hich, if followed in letter and spirit, would require us to raise humongous armies to recover all captured territories from China and Pakistan. On the nuclear issue too, when Indira Gandhi conducted Pokhran I, the opposition mostly applauded. Similarly, on Pokhran II, Kargil and then Operation Parakram, the Congress more or less played along as a loyal and ‘consensual’ opposition. All this changed with the nuclear deal. The old Holy National Consensus on foreign policy ended and an entirely new debate emerged. Further, it was a debate among three distinct views, not just two. Let me try to describe these very briefly. 1. The first is the Congress–UPA worldview led by Manmohan Singh’s intellectual vision. The Cold War ended, and there is no doubt as to which side won. But this new, post-Cold War world is still figuring out its power balance and strategic architecture. This offers India enormous opportunities to leverage its geographic location, strategic muscle, economic strength and liberal, democratic, secular polity. India needs to be an equal member in multilateral negotiations and processes, have access to

high technology denied under various sanctions and, most importantly, settle its border disputes with Pakistan and China. All this, of course, requires friendly relations with America. Particularly when the US establishment seems so favourably inclined towards us. This is where the nuclear deal came in. More than a deal for energy a decade from now, it was seen as signalling one great break from the America-phobic past. But, given the Congress party’s own Nehruvian non-aligned legacy, its political minds’ doubts about Muslim voters, this policy lacked conviction in its implementation, and even in its articulation. That is why this government found it so difficult to be upfront with the voters on the basis, wisdom and implications of this policy. 2. The BJP–NDA view is fundamentally not dissimilar to that of the Congress. But it is not encumbered by any nostalgia, emotion or the risk of losing Muslim votes. It sees the US as a strategic ally, and happily says so. In fact, chances are that statement will be made in its election manifesto. It sees no problem, morally, strategically and even electorally, in being a partner of the US, holding military exercises, sharing information and strategising together. It follows that it is also not at all shy of an explicit and deep engagement with Israel, which is something the Congress handles very carefully. If the NDA comes to power, chances are that one of its senior cabinet ministers’ first foreign visits will be to Israel. The UPA has avoided that for a full four and a half years. This is why, hile they may not disagree with the foreign policy paradigm shift that Manmohan Singh is trying to bring about, they do not necessarily see the nuclear deal as its touchstone. If they come to power, they ill be able to make other, even more radical moves in the same direction. So why not wait for a few more months? On the borders, they do want to settle with Pakistan and China. But they see China as a strong, permanent strategic is whyNational they would preferDefence. a larger All nuclear in a proper, old-fashioned triad challenge. and even, That ultimately, Missile this,arsenal, they believe, is only possible in a tight, unambiguous and unabashed strategic alliance with the US. Manmohan Singh’s nuclear deal then looks like a small thing, and a bit of hypocrisy too. 3. The Left has always had a clear and distinct foreign policy view. While on many larger and conceptual issues they accepted the Nehruvian non-alignment, pro-Arab, pro-Soviet, wary-of-theWest formulations, they have always been against nuclear weapons or any strategic relationship with the US. But we did not hear too much of it in the past because the Left was not in the power structure. Now, and going ahead, particularly if another UPA government is installed with their support, or if their own third front succeeds this regime, you need to understand their view as well. As they look at the world, they acknowledge that the Cold War has ended and one side, possibly not the best side, has won. A single, dominant superpower creates a power imbalance and an unfair orld. This must be addressed. The two powers in this transitional world that can challenge and contain the rise of one, dominant global bully are China and Islamic nationalism. One has already challenged Bush’s America, and the other, China, is getting ready. As and when China acquires that status, there will be a new balance of power, even if not a new cold war. In that situation the NonAligned Movement will again find a raison d’être. And when it does, India should be its natural

leader. That will not only be sufficient to give India the stature it deserves in the new power architecture, it will also be more morally correct. Of course, this new Non-Aligned Movement, like the last one, will be inclined more towards the underdog, which now will be China. They see the nuclear deal, therefore, as closing that option for India by linking it into a strategic relationship with America. And that they will not allow on their own watch. Behind all the shenanigans and midnight deal-making, therefore, lies an entirely new debate in our domestic politics over foreign policy. It involves issues that will greatly influence the lives of our future generations, and hopefully the two-day debate next week will see each side argue its case before the nation. If this confidence vote becomes a seminal debate on India’s foreign policy, just as the 1999 debate (when Vajpayee’s government fell) became a landmark one on secularism, some good would have come out of this crisis.

YES, WE CAN’T We are resigned to watching an d ap plaud ing change from the sidelines.

8 November 2008 Much stirring prose has already been written by much better writers on Barack Obama’s victory speech at Chicago, so I had better focus on a couple of the more substantive aspects of the change in the US. America has had many charismatic presidents in the past. But even in times when it was a much more pre-eminent power, nobody tugged at the heartstrings of non-Americans around the world like he does. Why? Is it just because of his race? Yes, the victory of the underdog in so fiercely competitive and unforgiving a society is something that fires your imagination. But there is more behind this global elation than merely the colour of Obama’s skin. Here is an American leader who’s so positive, so forthcoming and so lovable. Not angry or bitter and always seeking revenge, as George Bush had sounded after 9/11. Obama has still to prove himself as president, but he has already comforted us all with his choice of words. He has never come across as being soft on terrorism, or even on his country’s engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan. In fact, even in his victory speech he mentioned both in a manner which, substantively, was not pacifist. But his phraseology is inoffensive, in contrast with George Bush’s. We will smoke ’em out, either you are with us or with the terrorists, the axis of evil, history begins now—these were all Bush’s lines, arrogant, crude, in-your-face lines that embarrassed his allies, scared those who could only afford to be neutral, and gave added moral and ideological justification to his enemies. Obama knows he has to continue in earnest with the war Bush started, but without offending the world like he did. Even the sole superpower cannot win its battles by making the whole orld hate its guts. He knows his ethnicity, his upbringing and, most of all, his middle name will help draw out some of that venom. But he also knows that the American people will be watching him closely, that they haven’t x e actly voted a bleedingheart, softie apologist to the presidency. For so many of us, in the non-white world, there is a special feeling of joy that an AfricanAmerican has risen to the US presidency. But he has not done so because of some affirmative action, or because of some political deal-making of the kind that elevates a Gowda (or, tomorrow, Mayawati) to India’s prime ministership. Obama has fought a series of open political battles to first in his own party’s nomination, and then 52 per cent of the popular vote. And while his being African-American is a factor, most Americans have voted for him not because they wanted a change of ‘colour’. They have voted for him because they want fundamental change in the way their countr is governed, and in the way they are viewed in the world. All of the world sympathised with America after 9/11. But Bush blew it within weeks, using the language of the street-side goonda. He ran a foreign policy that was exclusionist, bitter and angry. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

as the first to point out the damage he was causing when she, in a brilliant article in Foreign ffairs, accused him of running the most ideological foreign policy in America’s history. His references to the Crusades and the language of a crusader further weakened his nervous allies in the Islamic world. Obama has to change all that; and yet he has to continue fighting the same enemy with as much intensity, if not more. His voters are by no means giving up the fight against terror, but they would rather do it without becoming the most hated country in the world. So they have chosen a man who they think could heal, lead, fight and deliver. Obama ran a brilliant campaign and spoke so well, he could have won the presidency of the world. But his real success lay in choosing the moment when America wanted change, and then presenting himself as the one man who could promise that better than any other, particularly Hillary Clinton (to their own party) who was seen more as a continuation of the Democratic past. But Americans took such a leap of faith because their political and intellectual system did not allow the national debate to degenerate into race or religion. It stayed at a level that was relevant to today’s voters, and vital to their children’s future. And once the question was presented like that, the choice between Obama and McCain was a no-brainer. This turn in American politics, unfortunately, also underlines for us the way ours has degenerated over the past few years. India’s economy has boomed; our tech entrepreneurs are the envy of the orld; our new, self-confident and skilled manpower gives us exaggerated respect around the world. But has our politics kept pace with it? The response of our political class to the global downturn would make you feel it was something confined to foreign lands. A short session of Parliament was held at the peak of this crisis, but our MPs seemed more concerned about communal or caste vote bank issues. Nobody moved an adjournment motion or demanded a statement by the prime minister on the economic crisis—but there ere adjournments over Raj Thackeray’s statements. Only the BJP issued a statement that even the media ignored, because their focus too was petty,tu-tu-main-main politics. The Left claimed their blocking of reform in the financial sector had saved India. Before you debate that claim, you have to first ask them if and how they are so sure India has already been ‘saved’. What would be the consequences, for example, if growth were to actually fall to 6 per cent or below next year, as the IMF predicts? In America, a contraction of 0.5 per cent over two quarters is considered recession. But that is when you calculate backwards from average growth rates of 2–3 per cent. In India, if you go back from 9.5 to 6 per cent, you lose the same 3.5 percentage points of growth and it will feel like a recession as well, particularly when it comes to job creation. Is that the centre point of our national political debate today? Our politics is now falling dangerously behind the curve. A chief minister with a two-thirds majority lost his showpiece industrial project, the stock market lost 60 per cent of its value, industrial growth is faltering, exports are losing steam and the rupee value. And yet, what is the most fiery political debate consuming our national financial capital? It is whether or not its Bihari settlers can celebrate the Chhat festival safely. In Mumbai, a gang of Hindus has been caught, allegedly for carrying out bombings directed at Muslims. The gang, it seems, also involves former army officers—

and yet the BJP, the party that goes blue in the face demanding an Israel-like tough response to terrorism, calls them ‘cultural nationalists’. Surely, India needs change, and India too needs a leader like Obama, who would give us new hope, strike chords that resonate with us and deliver us from the pettiness of our political discourse. But given the state of our politics and the intellectual bankruptcy that cuts across party lines, change of that kind seems an impossibility. We, therefore, seem condemned to watching change come about elsewhere, and applauding from the sidelines.

THE CHATTERANTI Why their SMS passion and talk-show fury find no echo. And thank heavens for that.

6 Dece mber 2008 You’d be surprised how it is more likely you would get away with saying something entirely facetious and silly, but get into trouble when you try making a serious, sincere point. That, at least, has been the story of my life. At a series of public functions in Pakistan several years ago, * I said Pakistan was in many ways as imperfect a dictatorship as India was an imperfect democracy, the central argument being that just as India had not been able to accord all its citizens all the freedoms that a democracy of this quality should have, Pakistan had not quite been able to deny its people all the freedoms that a classic dictatorship should have. That is why a reasonably free media functioned even under Musharraf, an Indian editor was able to say rude things at the launch of a newspaper (by now the widely respected Daily Times ) and there was a reasonably independent judiciary; not the kind of things you would see in Saddam’s Iraq, Ahmadinejad’s Iran, or even China and Saudi Arabia. It instantly got me in trouble. The NDA was in power then and the attack came from saffron blogs and pro-BJP columnists on well-known websites. It was as if this Indian editor had gone to Pakistan and given his country a bad name by finding faults with its democracy and merits in Pakistan’s dictatorship. What is happening right now after the 26/11 terror attacks, particularly in Mumbai and among our upper classes, can be seen in that context. Pakistanis, over the past year, have braved bullets, assassinations and dictatorial persecution to throw out a general and give themselves at least half a democracy. Whatever happens on Pakistan’s estern flank and in its fundamentalist underbelly, the basic instinct of its elites, intellectual and social, its media and professional classes is to strengthen their very fragile democracy, and to seek more of it. God knows, they have reasons to hate their politicians. But they have also tested the generals for four decades and, wiser for that experience, have no intention of returning to their embrace. And exactly at the same time, the same classes in India have turned themselves into a lynch mob against the political class and, by implication, our democracy. The one institution Pakistani elites are suspicious of is their military. The one institution Indian elites respect and adore today is their military. You’d wonder just what is going on. Since TV chat shows, SMSs and chain emails have become the main forum of domestic debate and political discourse among our upper crust, it is safe to go by the evidence of what you see and read there. Any number of illiterate emails and SMSs now float around, not merely cursing politicians, but spreading utter falsehoods about the Constitution and laws. There is one, for example, that says that our Constitution (Article 49-O, it specifically says) entitles us to go to a polling booth and say we do not want to vote for anyone, and if the number of such votes is higher than votes polled by the leading

candidate, the election will be set aside and nobody will be elected. So that is the way to fix the political class which, realising that, has kept that ‘article’ under wraps. Now most of us passed our class X Civics a long time ago, and god alone knows how, so let’s not question anybody’s knowledge of our Constitution. But none of the thousands of very well-educated, rich, successful, respectable people through whom this silly mail has passed and been forwarded have bothered to check that venerable document. For, if they did, at least one myth would have been set at rest: Article 49 deals ith something very important, and it is not the right of negative vote, but the protection of our monuments. Similar stupid, flippant and dangerous mythologies continue to be built: that we spend more on the SPG than on the NSG, the implication being that we value the lives of our prime minister and president more than those of ordinary citizens. Nobody checked the facts, probably because i they turn out different, they may demolish the entire hypothesis. Why let facts come in the way of holy indignation? So the same leading lights of Mumbai’s genteel classes, who never shed a tear when nearly 600 Mumbaikars lost their lives in several terrorist attacks, now walk around with candles because the threat has moved beyond local trains to rocking coffee shops and bars. Incidentally, they still do not bother to light a candle in front of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus station where more lives were lost than at both the hotels put together. More than the hypocrisy, however, it is the message they send out to their countrymen that is significant: that the political class has failed us, so please do not vote (‘those who come in through our vote are more dangerous than those who come through the boat’), or exercise that mythical right of negative vote. The virus of Mumbai’s elites seems to have been caught even by the creative set; the latest Amul hoarding exhorts the ‘real’ terrorist to show up, and has a neta surrounded by black cats. We have had several leading film and creative personalities demand that Pakistan, or at least its terror camps, be carpet-bombed. And on Thursday night Kabir Bedi declared on NDTV in his grave baritone that ‘we’ have ‘incontrovertible’ evidence of ‘ISI, Lashkar and Jaish’ involvement and should start attacking them inside Pakistan. After all, he said, that is what the Americans are doing in Waziristan, etc., and what can the Pakistanis do except protest feebly? Further, he suggested that we learn from Mossad and carry out ‘targeted assassinations’ of the bad guys in Pakistan. How much peace that strategy bought Israel over the decades is not a question that this intellectual of the 1960s would ponder over much. In fact, the only really sexy idea to come out o all this rage is that we should stop paying taxes. Great idea, but must it be confined to Mumbaikars alone? Don’t the rest of us also have issues with our government? To be fair, we need to see where this rage is coming from. These attacks have brought terror to the doorstep of the classes which had long divorced and insulated themselves from our very system o politics and governance. Over the years, as our governance declined, or failed toWe keep pace with our society or economy, all of us learnt to become individual, sovereign republics. send our children to private schools, get treatment only in private hospitals, have our own security in gated communities, never need to use public transport, even own our own diesel gensets to produce power, and in many parts of the country arrange our own water supply, either through our own bore-wells or tankers. Then we suddenly get hit in one area—physical safety, law and order—which is still entirely in the hands of the government. Knowing how thick-skinned our politicians are, and exaggerating all

the most horrible stereotypes about them, we see no possibility of changing them. So we now look for desperate measures: compulsory military training, conscription, NSG for every city. The armed forces, we say, are the only institution that can bring about this change. Pakistan has been owned by its army since its creation and see how much worse its law and order is, how the country suffers from daily terror attacks by its own, and how large swathes of its territory are nothing but extension campuses of its most notable contribution to the modern world: a university of jihad. Yes, our governance sucks. But the solution for the upper crust now is not to secede from it. Law and order is not public health, government schooling or power supply. The whites in South Africa under apartheid tried doing that and it did not work. The racist governments of the past liberally gave them automatic weapons and some of the richest homes around Johannesburg used to carry signs that said trespassers would be shot. But it did not buy them more security. Their homes just became bunkers, or high-security prisons in which they locked themselves up. The solution lies in returning to the ‘system’, challenging and changing it from within. Just as the poorer and the middle classes do around the country. As a story by Vandita Mishra in this paper’s Friday edition showed, even in these times of anger and cynicism, more and more Indians are coming out to vote. They do not love their politicians, they usually vote them out. But they do it by using the power of the vote, not by disowning it. Or, look at it another way: we, in our little charmed circle, can vent our rage on chat shows and in cyberspace. But the children of our farmers and working classes will always be there, to vote out lousy governments on polling day, and to get into uniforms— khaki, olive-green or black—and risk their lives fighting terrorists for our sake.

THE GLORIOUS CERTAINTIES Fou r things you can be certain of in an election that will be too uncertain to call.

18 April 2009 In a muddled general election where the bravest psephologist won’t predict anything more than a hole range of uncertainties, let me stick my neck out and underline some certainties. The first certainty is that this election will confirm a trend that began five years ago in our politics: that performance pays. In these past five years, anti-incumbency has gone down from almost 70 per cent to 46 per cent. And nothing about this voter behaviour is irrational. No government that performed has been voted out due to sheer voter contempt or arrogance. On the contrary, those that performed have been re-elected. Similarly, no non-performing government has been re-elected just because of its communal, caste or ideological appeal. This election will reaffirm this as a welcome new trend for the coming years. What this means is that leaders who have delivered governance will bring the numbers in the next Lok Sabha. Nitish Kumar in Bihar, Narendra Modi in Gujarat, Bhupinder Singh Hooda in Haryana, Sheila Dikshit in Delhi, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Raman Singh in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, respectively, will be nearly unassailable, whatever the coalitions or forces arrayed against them. Even Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, who faces an unprecedented TDP–TRS–Left alliance in a three-way contest with Chiranjeevi as spoiler, will avert the disaster that you would normally have predicted, just because his government is seen to have delivered in cities as well as villages—and also in the war against Naxalites. Similarly, the Left will be punished severely in both Kerala and West Bengal. In one, they have a chief minister who is an anachronism in the twenty-first century; in the other, their own ideological contradictions have mortally damaged one of India’s best chief ministers. In neither of the two states are they campaigning on their own performance. In Kerala, the irs is a muddled ideological appeal. In West Bengal, they seek a vote to keep Mamata Banerjee out. This is not an election for negative campaigns, as even the Akalis will learn in Punjab. They have run a lazy, outdated government and bankrupted the state. Even the revival of the anger of 1984 will not do the trick for them. The state that needs watching is Maharashtra. By all accounts, the Congress– NCP government’s performance there has been dismal. But the BJP–Shiv Sena challenge is not yet convincing enough to harvest this voter mood fully. So, another near certainty is that Maharashtra ould buck this performance test. The related certainty, however, is that the larger outcome of this election would depend on whether my prediction on India’s second largest state (in terms of Parliament seats) turns out correct or not.* The next thing you can say for sure is that the nature of this next coalition will be determined not so

much by who can go with whom, as by who will not, or cannot, go with whom. Let’s simplify this. Whichever opinion poll may be correct, the BJP and its ‘like-minded’ NDA will get, including Shiv Sena and the Akalis, at least 150 seats or thereabouts. These can never join a Congress-led or a third front-type ‘secular’ coalition. Similarly, the Congress, and third- and fourth-front constituents (Left, SP, RJD, Muslim League), who need the Muslim vote or have an aggressive secular core, will never go with the NDA. So this takes another 250 or so MPs out of the equation. The endgame therefore ill be played among the remaining 150. And how does that cookie crumble? At least fifty or thereabouts of these will have limited flexibility. Sharad Pawar’s NCP, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool and Naidu’s TDP will see a future downside in aligning with the BJP, but at a pinch they could do so. It will be slightly more complicated for Naveen Patnaik’s BJD and TDP to go ith the UPA as the Congress is their main rival in their power bases. This will further restrict the overall mobility within this decisive group of 150. The key, therefore, will be the 100 or so who could move either way—and that is where the real complications will come. If the Left decides to support a Congress coalition, for example, the numbers they bring will be netted off against Mamata Banerjee, since she will most certainly move out. Similarly, even if the third front does brilliantly, there will be no way they could get the numbers from other ‘secular’ parties like the SP, DMK and Trinamool, as they cannot coexist with the BSP, AIADMK and the Left, respectively their mortal enemies. So any coalition will get only one of each of these sets of rivals. This will diminish the net numerical power of all these parties. Now we come to our final set of certainties. First, whichever coalition comes to power, Ramadoss, Paswan, Kumaraswamy (junior Gowda) and Ajit Singh could be in its cabinet. These fortunate men represent the phenomenon of total ideological fungibility, as they will share power with any of the three possible combinations. They will also pretty much have their pick of what can only be described as ATM ministries. Each of these will have just a few seats, but total political mobility. And finally, without the benefit of any opinion poll, you can most confidently predict the fate of all the smart, new upper-crust ‘party-less’ stars of this election. For convenience, let’s describe them as candidates of the Cocktail Party of India. It is one thing to rabble-rouse at politician-bashing chat shows, but it will take more to turn the tables on the political class than chief executives of failed banks or airlines. So the TV chat show class of independents forfeiting their deposits is the final certainty.

COCKTAIL PARTY OF INDIA The new crop of independents mean well. But they don’t und erstand or respect our politics.

2 Ma y 2009 This election has witnessed a new aspirant: the well-meaning, earnest corporate professional and civil society activist. Captain G.R. Gopinath, who founded Air Deccan, and Mira Sanyal, on electoral sabbatical from ABN Amro where she is the country head for India, are contesting as independents in Bangalore and Mumbai, respectively. Similarly, Jayaprakash Narayan, who runs a wonderful NGO called Loksatta which has been very effective in areas of governance, and Mallika Sarabhai are in the contest as well. I know some of these brilliantly talented people well and some casually or indirectly —I have even had the good fortune of sometimes basking in the reflected glory of one, Captain Gopinath. In so many places, in airport terminals, hotel lobbies and simply on the street, particularly in the south, young people, mostly management students, have walked up to me to ask for autographs. And by now I know I need not flatter myself; they come to me because they mistake me for Captain Gopinath, their maverick genius who pioneered low-cost aviation in India. These new election candidates are all perfectly well-intentioned, smart, patriotic Indians whose motives you cannot but applaud, who want to raise the level of our mainstream politics. But unfortunately, it won’t work. At least not this way. Here’s why. You may call it the cynicism of an old-fashioned political journalist, a ‘Dilliwala’, and I have already got more than my share of flak for suggesting that all the candidates of what I described, halffacetiously as usual, as the Cocktail Party of India will lose their deposits. But do hear me out. The reason why such wise and sincere people will draw a blank in their maiden political adventure is not because our system is by now so corrupt and ridden by caste and communalism that it has no place for decent people. They will do badly because even in their enthusiasm to take the democratic route to change, they betray not merely an ignorance of our democrac y but also disrespect for the voter. Here, in brief, is the argument of this New Independent: if after electing fourteen Parliaments the majority of our people are still so poor, suffer so much injustice and corruption, and if our vast security machinery cannot protect us from 26/11, something has to change. The tricky part, however, is: how do you bring about that change? By joining and reforming the (democratic) system from ithin, or by challenging and wrecking it from outside, and then building a new one? Their current sentiment is to go with the latter. So party politics is evil. It promotes vote-bank politics, casteism and communalism, personality cult, feudal succession and sycophancy, and keeps the really talented people out. So the same smart individuals can now enter the contest as independents and rock the ‘politician’s’ boat, probably by riding the anti-politician mood so visible on Barkha Dutt’sWe the People every Sunday. This argument won’t go much further than Malabar Hill living rooms, and not

merely because most of these angry ‘we the people’ were not seen among the 40-odd per cent who turned out to vote in south Bombay, preferring to escape to Alibaug, Madh Island, Lonavla or Goa: ho wastes a four-day weekend for a mere vote? It will not work because, fundamentally, the notion that you can invent a new politics where independents displace parties is not only silly, it is also undemocratic. The essence of parliamentary democracy is the party system. All democracies are built around competing parties, ideologies, mass leaders, manifestos. Imagine a Lok Sabha of 543 individuals, or where even 10 per cent of the members have no party affiliation. Imagine the incoherence, the sheer anarchy. Such a thing has only been tried in the past by military dictators. Three times in Pakistan, once each by Ayub Khan (guided democracy in the 1960s), Zia (in the party-less election that elected Junejo as prime minister in the mid-1980s) and then Musharraf after he had sent the top leadership of all major parties into exile. (Though even the latter two were not fully party-less, and had the king’s party in the fray.) We all know how ‘successful’ these attempts have been. The other fallacious notion is that the world of politics is filled with stupid, uneducated, lazy and corrupt criminals. That comes from an unquestioning acceptance of the Bollywood caricature of the neta. It is certainly a great idea for professionals, entrepreneurs and activists to enter politics. But for that they have to first understand and respect politics, embrace the heat and dust, hard work, take-noprisoners competition that goes with it. As the track record of our prime ministerial aspirants (Manmohan Singh and Advani) shows you, politics certainly has place for honest people. But it needs charisma, ambition, diligence, wisdom and experience of a very high order before you can make your mark, even save your deposit. Because people who come out and vote, defying the heat and cynicism, poverty, frustration, hunger and even the lure of a four-day weekend, understand what is good for them better than many of us in our ivory towers. Partisan politics sounds awful on 24-hour TV, but it keeps us together as a nation, giving different sections of our society, the minorities, Dalits, tribals, even corporates and journalists, a voice. If more than 90 per cent of distant tribal Nagaland’s people come out to vote when less than half as many do in south Bombay, it shows how parts of the country here real democracy was denied for long are so much more enthusiastic about it. Party politics is the most meritocratic profession of all in democracies. It is only politics that enables an Obama to defeat a Hillary Clinton for the nomination of the Democratic Party and then appoint her as his secretary of state, or enables a Mayawati to build a party and rise from nowhere to give crores of Dalits a sense of inclusion and empowerment. Party politics does not prohibit the educated upper crust, but you cannot take it for granted and demand a lateral entry at the top by right ust because you are better educated or better ‘bred’. Most of our politicians have been at it for years, learning their ropes inby college, panchayatgroup or labour union politics. Mosttell ofyou, them, one very look well at the latest book published this newspaper ( ) would areasalso India’s Elected educated, contrary to theOmkara stereotype. These new entrants will fail because they seem driven by a divine right to come and clean up our politics and governance, sullied for sixty years by illiterate, venal politicians and stupid voters. In a small way, they will remind you of the Swatantra Party of erstwhile princes. They were swept away by their own former subjects. And whether their governance of their feudal kingdoms was much better than corporations run by our new independents

is a question we shall pass for the moment.

HINDU RATE OF BJP GROWTH It’s become a low-150s party. And will stay this way until it moves from Hindu Right to centre-right.

9 Ma y 2009 If we continue seeking parallels in military science (because electoral politics is war by another name, only more vicious), our politics for exactly two decades now has been a kind of stalemated, stationary trench warfare. The unlocking of the Babri Masjid and theshilanyas of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple in the last months of Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership made secularism the centre point of our national politics, particularly in the Hindi heartland; combined with a Mandalignited OBC surge, it led to the destruction of the Congress in the Gangetic plain—even today, it can barely hope to touch twenty seats in India’s most politicised zone, from Uttarakhand to West Bengal, out of a total of 167. The BJP was able to harvest this for some time, as the Ram temple fervour overwhelmed caste. But it declined thereafter, as the promise of building a grand new temple for Lord Ram did not quite have the oomph that the idea of destroying an old mosque did. As history, ever since man discovered god, shows, destroying has always held much greater sex appeal than building. So the Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri site has remained frozen in time since 1992, and so has our politics. This new polarisation is loosely defined as secular versus communal, or who can afford to oin hands with the BJP and who cannot. Its corollary is that it enables parties with total ideological, philosophical and even political conflicts to come together on the principle of secularism or antiBJP-ism. The BJP would call this analysis simplistic. They will say the secular–communal discourse is just a camouflage for many political parties handing out to Muslim voters a veto on who can rule India. Any party that needs (and has a realistic chance of getting) the Muslim vote will ‘blindly’ oppose the BJP, they say. That is why, according to them, the BJP and the NDA have to build their politics in a field with a maximum of 325 out of a House of 543, since atleast five parties—the Congress, Left, SP, RJD and NCP—can have nothing to do with them. That is the line of untouchability in our politics. Or perhaps the line that separates the rival trenches, and political mobility therefore is confined to hopping from one trench to another on the same side—barring some small serial defectors like Gowda, Paswan, Ramadoss and Ajit Singh, the entirely mobile operators whose ideology is totally fungible with power. You can feel sorry for them, but this is a problem for the BJP to fix. No political party can grow, even survive, by only feeling sorry for itself. Beginning in 1989, polarisation had helped the BJP. By 1998, it had peaked. It was for the party’s vastly experienced leadership to read the writing on the all. It never showed the conviction, the fibre to lead a change, an evolution that would have repositioned the BJP as a party of the centre-right rather than of the Hindu Right.

Vajpayee, the BJP leader most respected by the minorities, tried, but lost his nerve at the most decisive moment, a moment that, if seized, would have placed him among India’s great statesmen, in fact our first real statesman of the Right, or maybe the second if you place Sardar Patel somewhere there. This moment was the killings of Gujarat in 2002—on the flight to Goa, for the party national executive meeting, when he had to decide on sacking Modi after his rajdharma speech. But he blinked. In the process, he diminished himself and his party and presented its opponents Narendra Modi as their second rallying point after Ayodhya. That Advani tried to address the same ideological isolation subsequently with his statement on Jinnah underlines the fact that, deep down, political wisdom does exist while the will is lacking. He has tried to reposition his party closer to the centre in a slightly more complex but interesting manner. The alliance with the Akalis in Punjab and with Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, he thought, had helped move his party to the centre; and while Muslims may still not vote for it, if he could simply persuade them not to treat the BJP as their permanent enemy—one that needed to be defeated by voting tactically against it all over the country—he could change its fortunes fundamentally. But neither had he prepared his party and its ideological mentors, nor had he the audacity to bash on regardless. So this breakout from the trenches remained short, half-hearted and a failure. And yet again, Advani and his BJP blew an opportunity presented by Varun Gandhi’s speeches. Imagine if instead of rushing to his defence and demanding a forensic examination of the DVDs, Advani stated unequivocally that he abhorred such language and politics? In one stroke it would have brought his party closer to the centre, given it wider acceptability. Indian democracy is not unique in having to deal with such a divisive issue of history and legacy. Race and segregation was a divide that determined American politics for a long time. But the Republicans cut their losses in the course of time and so it ceased to be the central issue. Many more blacks still vote for the Democrats but the Republicans totally dumped the race issue, giving America its most prominent black public figures in Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and the Supreme Court ustice, Clarence Thomas. And while the larger majority of voters of colour were still on the ‘other’ side, and there was no foreseeable prospect of those ‘vote banks’ shifting, remember how even George Bush (Jr) dealt with Trent Lott, the Senate Republican leader who, in a 2002 fund-raiser to celebrate Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, made remarks that appeared to raise the race issue again. (He said ‘problems’ could have been avoided had Thurmond’s 1948 presidential bid succeeded; Thurmond had based that campaign on a racial segregation platform.) Bush immediately dumped Lott, ho lost his job two weeks later. The wonderful thing about democratic politics is that such opportunities do arise every now and then. leadersand seize them. Vajpayee had hisIndian big moment withpaying Modi; the Advani his twice,Smart with Jinnah Varun. * But the BJP and politicsonce, are now pricehas for had those long marchers having wasted all three. And that is why their politics, and India’s, remains frozen.

HANDS DOWN From grievance to aspiration.

17 May 2009 There are winners and there are losers in any election. But this is one election India can feel particularly good about. Not only because it has been one of our smoothest ever but also because it confirms the positive trends that some of us incorrigible optimists have been highlighting for a while. This newspaper has argued that the politics of grievance, rooted in our complex past, is giving way to the politics of aspiration. Or, as Thomas Friedman would put it, the weight of dreams is turning out to be heavier than that of memories. This election, powered by 60 crore voters, shows our democracy is now on the virtuous curve. Anybody who built a campaign on negativism, prejudice, victimhood and vengeance has been demolished. The voter has, in fact, been even less forgiving with victims of hubris, with those who loftily announce themselves as ‘next’ prime ministers without being sure of reaching double figures; those who build their own statues; and those who with a fraction of seats in Parliament try to control the nation’s foreign and economic policies without, of course, being accountable for anything. The Indian voter has always rejected arrogance and pomposity but has sometimes been forgiving of those ith whom she might have found affinity of caste, religion or ethnicity. By jettisoning even that, the voter has shown new maturity. This didn’t happen overnight. Over the past five years, we saw the voter increasingly reject the spoilers, the rent-seekers. This election reaffirms that trend—and vindicates the voter’s faith in those who deliver. There are other shifts, some stunning, some subtle. This will be India’s first post-1991 secular government elected without any help from the Left and in spite of its bitter opposition. So the voter has also junked the idea that Indian secularism needs certificates from the Left. Or that, somehow, you had to be godless to be secular. Such a ringing endorsement of incumbency laso busts the myth that an angry voter throws out everybody. A mature, aspirational voter thinks calmly and rewards good performance. You see that across states: the Congress scripts a brilliant revival in Uttar Pradesh but has its poorest score in next-door Bihar where Nitish Kumar runs its first decent government in three decades. Similarly, nobody is swayed by abuse and innuendo any longer, particularly when directed at a leader seen as decent, honest, modest and well meaning. The BJP erred grievously in making a man like Dr Manmohan Singh the main target of its attack, for being ‘weak and ineffectual’, because it was contrafactual—and the voter had the equanimity to judge that. On the contrary, in this environment of insecurity, with terror attacks and job losses, India has shown that it finds greater comfort with a leader who is mature and understated. Having risked his head twice, on economic reforms in 1991 and the nuclear deal in 2008, Dr Singh will now feel the burden of high expectations. This mandate is

such it leaves you no excuses. A final word about L.K. Advani, who once again finds himself on the wrong side of history. He has shown admirable grace in defeat and can have the satisfaction that he played a key role in bringing to Indian politics something it needed so badly—a centre of gravity which, as this newspaper has argued, can only be found if the Congress and the BJP together have at least 325–350 seats in the Lok Sabha.* That this figure has almost been achieved, that the Centre will now hold, is another reason why Verdict 2009 deserves applause.

THE RETURN OF THE UPA

HIS NEXT CLASS ACT A radical revamp of higher education is the only way to do justice to the politics of aspiration.

30 May 2009 In his first innings as a politician, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh liberated our economy. In his second, as prime minister, he brought about a paradigm shift in our foreign policy. In each case, he persisted with change at great risk to his neck, and reputation. So what will he change in his third stint in public office? Or, rather, what should he? Our guess, and wish, is that he now does to our higher education what he did to our economy and foreign policy in 1991 and 2008, respectively. It is fashionable now to talk of our demographic dividend. By 2020, we will be the youngest big nation in the world, with an average age of 29. Our dependency ratio, the number of healthy breadwinners for each dependent—someone ‘too old’ (above 65) or ‘too young’ (below 15) to earn—is already near a healthy 1.8. By 2030, at 2.1, it will be nearly the highest in the world. (China’s will have declined steeply to about 1.7 by then.) Unless our totally moribund system of higher, technical and vocational education is revolutionised, this dividend will become a curse. India would then end up having the largest population of angry, unemployable young lumpens in the history of mankind. Even India will not have the resilience to survive that calamity. On the other hand, if he can now reform our education, the same young India ill be a qualified, productive, creative and joyful pride of the global community. If 1991 unleashed Indian entrepreneurship and 2008 liberated us from a six-decade fear of Westoxification, this is a real opportunity to end discrimination, deprivation, inequality and even caste and communalism. Just as the licence-quota raj created self-inflicted scarcities of telephones, scooters and cooking gas, our utterly authoritarian, cynical and intellectually bankrupt higher education policy has created humongous shortages. We all know the odds for a candidate to qualify for premier engineering, management and medical colleges. Those with means now pay their way to colleges in Australia, Singapore, Qatar, besides the traditional ‘exporters’ of education to India, the US and the UK. Various estimates put just the cost on Indian parents of educating their children abroad at between $6 billion and $8 billion per year. This is an entirely one-way trade, as very few foreign students come to study in India, and some of those who wish to, like researchers, even Fulbright scholars, are given hell by our Orwellian (or you could coin an Indian equivalent, Arjunian, Murlimanoharian) HRD establishment. Where does it leave the poor who can’t afford to buy their children seats overseas? Where does it leave Indian enterprise and industry—even the government, its armed forces, hospitals, PSUs—which can’t find enough skilled manpower and therefore have to pay exaggerated wages, distorting all economics?

Yet, do advertise for a security guard onnaukri.com and see how many applications you get from MAs, M.Sc.s, even Ph.D.s. These are young Indians who have invested the most valuable years o their lives collecting degrees but no knowledge, education but no skills. Unless this disaster is stemmed now, these numbers will multiply faster than you can imagine, and they will be angrier than you wish to imagine. But if you can fix it, the dividend will be not merely demographic, but even economic and political. While our army of the unemployable increases, we suffer from crippling shortages of not just engineers, doctors and managers, but also of nurses, welders, electricians, plumbers, masons, carpenters, teachers and, of course, social scientists. Engineering, management and medicine at least have their IITs, IIMs and AIIMS. What brand name can the social sciences and liberal arts boast of? They, in fact, have a bigger problem than lack of resources: lack of intellectual freedom, diversity of thought and opinion. The few social science centres that we have, therefore, produce clones. Usually these are clones of professors steeped in the heady ideologies of the 1970s incapable or unwilling to notice that the ‘revolution’ has passed them by. JNU is a perfect example. It is known that education liberates. But it also follows that better education, particularly greater access to higher education, creates a virtuous cycle of improved collective self-esteem, equality, ambition and satisfaction that dovetails so nicely in this new resurgent India that is choosing politics of aspiration over politics of grievance, and which will continue to get only younger for another twenty-five years. It is only because of increased opportunity that a paanwala’s son can now get to IIT, or one modest coaching centre run by one motivated individual in Patna can send so many Bihar kids to our topmost engineering colleges. And this opportunity has arisen when our IIT-JEE system now provides only 8,000 seats. This looks like a lot now, compared to just 2,000-plus in 1988. But given the needs of our young people, and of our economy and industry, it is way too little. Compare this to UCLA (25,000 undergrad and 11,000 postgrad), MIT (4,172 undergrad, 6,048 PG), Harvard (6,714 undergrad and 12,442 PG) and a total student strength of 11,250 at Yale. In comparison, our venerable JNU has 5,000 and it is the only one of its kind in all of India, while there are ten UCs (Universities of California). This shortage, this criminal undersupply of quality education, is the most cruel atrocity on a society blessed with so much intellect, and such respect and longing for education. Dr Devi Shetty o Bangalore’s Narayana Hrudayalaya tells me that given the diabetes epidemic, India is now the kidney disease capital of the world. Yet, do you know how many nephrologists our medical colleges produce in a year? Only 70. Neurology does worse, with 63, cardiology a little better with 88 and oncology, the specialisation to treat cancers, only 15. And we hope to earn foreign exchange from medical In each of these aspecialisations, absorb, and needs, at least ten times as many pertourism! year. Can you imagine country of 110India crorecould producing just 7,332 MDs per year? America produces 16,000 and little UK 4,200. This undersupply of quality education at all levels is entirely self-inflicted, and unnecessary. Every year we see a scramble for private and even central school admissions, court cases, madness of 90-percenters failing to get into even economics and English honours in our better colleges (actually just about ten of them exist all over India). And the definition of ‘better’ college here is

here at least classes are held regularly since the UGC, a three-letter word from hell or Kim IlSung’s North Korea, won’t even let a college charge its pupils more if they are willing to pay, or give its teachers more than the salaries it mandates. The result then is the phenomenon you see on your T screen all day. The advertisement telling you that India’s largest private university is Lovely Professional University in Punjab, of course with UGC certification. Now, why pick on a name, you might ask? The Americans have business schools named after Kellogg and, who knows, even Mickey Mouse. But comparisons should stop about here. This is what Manmohan Singh now has the opportunity, time and political space to change. The choice of Kapil Sibal, our first ‘modern’ HRD minister in two decades, is a good beginning. This is an issue Rahul Gandhi feels strongly about. There is no opposition from the BJP, which should be as embarrassed of the record of its Murli Manohar Joshi in HRD as the Congress should be of Arjun Singh’s. So if 1991’s near-bankruptcy created the space for economic reforms, and a new intellectual-philosophical urge fuelled the nuclear deal and thereby a generational foreign policy shift, the new demographic opportunity and politics of aspiration have both created the mood for a revolution in education. On this one now, there are no excuses. No Dr Joshi, no Arjun Singh, no fake ideology, no Left.

BABUJI DHEERE CHALNA That’s our national theme song. That’s why we don’t like Sreedharan forcing the pace or Sibal thinking bold.

18 July 2009 Two things over the past two weeks underline for us a serious chronic ailment of the modern Indian mind: a fear of speed and of scale. The prime minister talked of a 100-day agenda for his new government and Kapil Sibal was the first off the blocks. Almost nobody substantively disagrees with the broad thrust of his reform in education. But the reaction that cut across both the political and intellectual classes was the same, giddy nervousness: Kapil is going too fast, in India things move slowly. Kapil, of course, is unfazed and responded, in an interview with me on NDTV’sWalk the Talk (13 July 2009, indianexpress.com), by asserting that he was, in fact, eighteen years too late already. And that education reforms should have begun simultaneously with those in the economy in 1991. But as he goes along, he will have to fight the same doubts even among the believers. Because that is how we Indians have become, not merely over centuries of deprivation and calamities, but also through six decades of licence-quota-limit-everything socialist toxification. The second evidence of the same widespread mental illness came in reactions to the Metro accident in south Delhi that claimed six lives. From newspaper columnists to TV channel talking heads to anchors who panicked as if another 26/11 had struck us, the ‘doubt’ was the same: Sreedharan is brilliant, but is he going too fast? Is the Metro team under too much pressure to finish the project before the Commonwealth Games? Why was the man not showing some ‘humility’ and slowing down? Must he continue to risk the lives of workers? This in a system that is so forgiving o railways that move slowly, completing every project in double the scheduled time if not more (look at the Jammu–Srinagar rail link, for example *), while still consuming hundreds of lives every year in completely ridiculous and avoidable accidents. Or, in fact, our view could be, thank god, our trains run so slowly, or so many more would die! This also in a system where a tiny sea bridge (Bandra– Worli sea link in Mumbai) that took twice the scheduled time and three times the initial cost to be half-complete can still draw the entire political class to inaugurate it and celebrate it as a marvel o Indian engineering. In a more normal society, you would have honoured Sreedharan with a Bharat Ratna. Here, instead, we are worrying about how and why he has apparently not set up a succession. Earnest and young Mr Lovely, Delhi’s transport minister, wants to start looking at Metro safety while his own ministry makes light of killing the odd guy even on his half-done-forever BRT corridor which, in engineering terms, is nothing but the laying of a few clumsy barriers and pavements. The history of building a new, independent India, unfortunately, is a history of delays, cost overruns, inefficiency, corruption and obstructionism, whether it comes to roads, bridges, railways,

airports, schools and colleges, hospitals, whatever. Over the decades, we have collectively convinced ourselves that schedules are just for the heck of it, naam ‘ ke vaaste’, because the realities of life will make it impossible to stick to them. Because nobody wants to believe the system can be changed, we have also acquired a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, feeling smug and secure in being held hostage by it. Go to the National Highways Authority website and check the list of projects delayed by more than a year. An even nastier sibling of our fear of speed is our repudiation of scale. Through the decades, our entire politico-bureaucratic-intellectual system has worked to ‘control’ scale going ‘out of control’. This is what provided the intellectual basis of the licence-quota raj: because every resource, particularly capital, was ‘scarce’, it was imperative that we ‘controlled’ how anybody invested/expended it. The 1991 crisis liberated industry from that curse and see how wonderfully and gloriously it has responded and prospered. But much else is still bedevilled by the same thinking. So e will first build a two-lane road because we are afraid a six-lane one will be ‘too much’, given ‘traffic projections’. Then, it will be completed three years late, and be chock-a-block on the day o its inauguration. Six months later, you will start thinking of four-laning it, and by the time that is completed, and it is overloaded, you will plan two more lanes. As a result, we remain in a constant spiral of construction and underdelivery. The same applies to our railways, airports, schools and colleges. We always plan for yesterday, deliver day after tomorrow, and are condemned to live with permanent shortages. In both practical and philosophical terms, this is comparable with our selfinflicted shortages of scooters, telephones and LPG connections in the past. The fear of scale, at least until the recent past, was exemplified by many leading lights in the Planning Commission who invested so much emotion, energy and time in scaling back plans and projects that it should have been renamed ‘Underplanning’ Commission. Admitted, we can’t always hope to match the Chinese in scale and speed, and the belief in the principle of ‘if you build it, they (users) will come’. But we have embraced the idea of ‘hastening slowly’ as a core national belief, possibly drawing inspiration from our romantic poetry, even film songs that always counsel patience over speed: Babuji ‘ zara dheere chalo ’ ( Dum), ‘Haule-haule ho aayega pyar’ ( Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi ) and that evergreen favourite of three generations, Geeta Dutt’s ‘Babuji dheere chalna ’ from the 1950s’ Aar Paar. You just tweak the next line a bit replacing ‘pyaar ’ with ‘sarkar ’ and you get the most fitting anthem for our system: Babuji dheere chalna, sarkar mein zara sambhalna. Because if you move slowly, you take no risks at all. There are enough excuses in India for you to justify delays and, in any case, excuse-mongering is our most prized national tribute. It is only if you break that rule, try to finish things on schedule, or dream big, that you run the risk of going wrong.

THE M AKING OF THE FLAW PURUSH Advani’s spin doctors painted him as Patel, airbrushed his ‘soft’ spots, which led to a series of blun ders.

30 August 2009 It can be nobody’s case that L.K. Advani lacks political intellect, guile or commitment. For three and a half decades since he arrived on the national centre stage with his arrest, and then appointment as information and broadcasting minister in the first non-Congress (Janata Party) government in 1977, he has been one of the most prominent success stories of our politics. He has been one of the few truly self-made leaders to have attained such a high position, which is particularly remarkable because unlike many others, Morarji Desai, Chandra Shekhar, V.P. Singh and even Mamata Banerjee, he did not ever use the Congress fast track. In so many ways, he is truly an srcinal. Nobody who could resurrect a party from the train-wreck of the Janata in 1980 and then lift it from two seats in 1984 to nearly 200 in 1999 and to national power for six years can be written off by history. Yet, you’d wonder why we are using the expression ‘has been’ so many times even as we list his many positive attributes and successes. Even the finest political minds do not get their instinct right every time. This is particularly so when it comes to choosing a time to call it a day. Advani missed his moment to bow out honourably when the 2009 election results came. He offered to quit but then allowed those around him, the same cynical coterie that he should hold responsible for so brutally damaging his image and political legacy, to ‘persuade’ him to hang on. Hang on to, and for, what, they didn’t tell him and, it seems, he did not bother to ask. The bid for prime ministership finally over, it as entirely up to him to earn a well-deserved farewell in dignity. His CV for a half-century in political life would have still been formidable. But he did not, and has brought himself to this pass now, when he is accused of lying by one of his closest associates, of having his memory fail him and of being weak by many partymen. This must hurt. One unusual thing about Advani the politicians ithat unlike the cynical thick skin that decades in public life help you grow, he is, actually, quite a sensitive person. Unlike many in his business who would laugh a crisis of this sort away, Advani would brood, because he also weighs himself on an exacting scale of stature, respect and legacy. If his own colleagues now question his integrity, memory, strength and conviction, it must hurt like hell. His minders told him they were packaging him as a tough, decisive leader in this election. That as fine. But he allowed them to go too far, in suggesting that he was tough when compared not merely to Manmohan Singh, but also to Vajpayee. It was for that reason that it was ‘necessary’ to distance him from anything ‘soft’ that was done by the NDA while giving him the full credit for anything tough or decisive. The Kandahar hijack was seen as one ‘soft’ spot on the NDA’s record. A little nuance, his minders told him, would do no harm if it could convince people that at least he was

not aware that Jaswant Singh was going on that plane with the terrorists. That image, the memory o that humiliation, was indefensible and Advani had to be protected. He erred gravely in letting his people build this fiction. It is at moments like these that a leader is tested. He should have said that his shoulders are broad enough to take responsibility for whatever happened. Also, while nobody can run his politics like Raja Harishchandra these days, there is something morally and tactically wrong ith a prevarication so cynical it camouflages your own responsibility and passes it on to your own colleagues. As long as there was the promise of a return to power, those colleagues were willing to take the rap. Why should they now continue to do so? Defeat, as we all know, is an orphan. And orphans of defeat also have only one game left to play, every man for himself. Advani and Vajpayee have had a remarkable relationship of love, and respect. I had once described them as an old couple who argue forever but one would never do anything the other doesn’t ant. Maybe a better way to describe their relationship is that of siblings who love each other but also harbour strong rivalry. Many in the BJP, and particularly those around Advani, were quick to draw historical parallels with Nehru and Patel, both diehard Congressmen, but one ‘soft’, the other ‘hard’, one a believer in agnostic secularism and the other not shy of his Hindu identity. It is a great irony that while they occupy opposite ideological poles, the BJP leadership still draws inspiration, even personal comparisons with Congress leaders of the past. Advani’s spin-doctors tried to paint him as the new Sardar Patel and it led to a series of blunders. Advani erred in letting them take over not merely his politics, but his life in general. Some of the same lot would hang around him even when he was in government, merrily dropping his name to feather their own nests, rent-seeking or power-broking. They would call businessmen, party leaders (particularly chief ministers) and even senior journalists from his office and home phone numbers and preface the conversation, usually, with ‘I am calling from Advaniji’s home’ or ‘Advaniji was saying . . .’ Many of the same people clung on to him because, even after the power was lost at the Centre, the party still controlled eight states. These low-level operators, using his name, made him no friends and lost him many. If Advani had chosen better company, he would not have gone against his grain on the nuclear deal, and then, because one bad judgement is usually followed by many more, joined hands ith his most vicious ideological adversaries, the Left and the BSP, in trying to bring down the government. If Advani had not suspended his own formidable political judgement, he would have known this was a lose-lose game for him. If the government had fallen, Mayawati would have emerged the giant-killer and a likely prime minister in a rampaging third front led by the Left. If the government survived, he and the NDA would go to the polls as recent losers. But he went ahead, even allowing that totally stupid cash-for-votes operation, and is now paying for it. You have heard often of somebody snatching defeat fromWhat the jaws of victory. Thisa was a remarkable case front of somebody snatching someone else’s defeat. should have been Left–Mayawati–third debacle actually became Advani’s and the BJP’s, mainly because they put so much capital behind that idiotic sting. Mani Shankar Aiyar upbraided me in a TV discussion earlier this week for having said that I have not known Advani to either tell lies, or to have a weak or convenient memory. How can anybody say that when Advani’s own colleagues are questioning both, he asked. Let me now venture to say one

more thing. That deep down Advani is a sensitive and introspective man. And some day soon, when political stakes are lower, he will reflect on how and why his script went wrong, and give us honest answers. Probably in the next edition of his autobiography.

DROUGHT-PROOFING INDIA States that invested in irrigation are weathering the worst drought in years. It is a chance for Pawar to redeem himself.

15 August 2009 If the drought, certainly one of the worst in a century, has left you depressed, listen to me this Independence Day weekend. Just drive out of Delhi and go as far as you want up north. Go to Shimla, Chandigarh or as far as Amritsar, but drive, don’t fly. Because an incredible—and happy—surprise awaits you. Totally lush, bounteous fields of paddy stretch endlessly on both sides of the highway. So here is the drought? Where are the caked, cracked and dried mudflats with withered saplings? And mind you, Punjab and Haryana are among the worst-hit states this year, notching up a rainfall deficit of 50 to 70 per cent in most places. What’s gone wrong, or right, here, you might ask. You speak to the governments of the two states, and they tell you how severe the drought actually is, how stressed their reservoirs are, how little rain has fallen this year. But then they also tell you ith surprising confidence, even smugness, that ‘one drought we can manage, at a pinch even two in a row’. This drought, one of the severest ever for this region, will damage farm economics to an extent, making the farmer spend more on diesel and power, but the yields—even in the water-guzzling paddy flats—are going to be more or less protected. In fact, Manpreet Badal, Punjab’s very modern and talented finance minister and himself a farmer of no mean size, tells me the Punjabi farmer has been quick to recover from initial setbacks as the monsoon deteriorated unexpectedly. (This year’s monsoon forecasting has been probably the worst ever in our recent history, but that is a different story.) Because of poor forecasting, which kept on promising a monsoon recovery, many farmers missed the early paddy-sowing window. But they more than made up for it by quickly switching to basmati, which can be planted a little later. This will in fact mean more money for them, but a smaller contribution to the national paddy reserve. The reason Punjab and Haryana, and to an extent wes tern Uttar Pradesh across the Yamuna, parallel to Haryana’s grain bowl, can grin and bear at least one terrible drought is the foresight of regional leaders and some central governments that made investments in irrigation in the 1950s and 1960s. That, even more than any improved seed varieties or pesticides, is what made this the green revolution zone. The division of the Indus system rivers almost to the last litre between India and Pakistan also provided an impetus to plans to trap as much surplus water as possible in so many reservoirs which, in turn, constantly help underground aquifers with constant recharge. Of course, it helped that most of this was done in decades when the most retrograde environmental and jholawala movements in the history of mankind had not yet arrived on the Indian scene. The 1960s also saw the rise of farmer (or Jat) politics in the region, producing a string of farmer leaders, Kairon, Badal, Charan Singh, Devi Lal, Ajit Singh and now Bhupinder Singh Hooda. While

Left ideologues and sundry poverty ‘specialists’ dismissed these as mere kulak leaders, together they ensured that states continued to invest in irrigation and power. At least every farmer, of any size, in this region has the one thing that will save his life in a drought: a pump set, whether running on power or diesel. The result is this endless expanse of paddy greens when most other parts of the country, ith much less rain shortfall than Punjab–Haryana, have seen their crops wither away entirely. This includes most of the remaining plains of north-western and eastern India, Rajasthan, Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and most of Madhya Pradesh. All these, barring parts of southern Bihar, have had more rain than Punjab and Haryana. Also, quite ironically, many of these, particularly Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and some parts of Madhya Pradesh, have vast underground aquifers sitting much closer to the surface than those up north. They don’t have pump sets, though—which, to think of it, do not cost that much— or the energy to run them. The answer to why one region can deal with a terrible drought and another can’t lies in their politics—because in a democracy votes and voter awareness decide where the state invests. Another remarkable success story is Gujarat, where, again, the empowerment of Patels led to the building of a robust irrigation system. It was also because of the astuteness with which the same political class (irrespective of party affiliations) sold the idea of the Narmada dam to fellow Gujaratis that our most ell-organised, publicised and globally supported anti-dam movement failed to block it. The dam got built because Gujaratis won’t brook any obstruction to it. Today, Gujarat is another state capable of eathering a drought year, even two. The reason I did not use that example already is simply that it seems to have received reasonable rainfall this year. Maharashtra is a limited success story. Parts of it, particularly those under Sharad Pawar’s influence, have secured irrigation. But parts, like Vidarbha, struggle without the rains. Yet another state to have sorted out its politics, at least on the farm front, is Andhra Pradesh. Rajasekhara Reddy is making huge investments in irrigation, and because some of these are in really ambitious plans, they will still take some time securing the south’s agri-powerhouse fully against a drought. But he is getting there. Today you can either fret over the poor state of politics and decades of lousy governance in Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and, to some extent, Madhya Pradesh, or use this drought as an opportunity to fix this problem. As the old line goes, you should never waste a crisis. Because we have been passing through what weathermen would call a good monsoon epoch for nearly two decades, we have been able to put the irrigation challenge on the backburner. There was a touching, sweeping line in the CMP that simply said: all pending irrigation projects will be completed. But nobody, even in the Left, ever reminded UPA 1 of that pledge. Over these ‘easier’ monsoon decades, all our governments have treated the water resources ministry as the most inconsequential. I have, for years, stumped my colleagues in the newsroom with one question: is India’sand water minister? a trick question because that portfolio usually goeswho to a nobody, onlyresources by default. Do youThat knowiswho has that portfolio in this cabinet? If this is an opportunity to restore the focus to irrigation, on the larger management of our water resources (what happened to the grand plan of linking at least intra-basin rivers?), it is also a chance for Sharad Pawar to redeem himself as agriculture minister. A man most eminently suited for the job has made nothing of it so far, distracted by inflated ambition on the one hand, and cricket on the other,

and reduced, unfortunately, to some kind of an agri-commodities minister. He has to get out on the (agricultural, not cricketing) fields now, and use this, resurgent India’s first real drought, to launch new green revolutions. A country our size, after five years of 8 per cent growth, can do better than having just two and a half green revolution states in a federation of twenty-eight.

TEARING DOWN NARASIMHA RAO B laming h im for Bab ri, the Congress lost the heartland vote it now wants back.

28 November 2009 Justice Liberhan has delivered only two real surprises in his report. * It is also entirely understandable why only one has been taken note of in political debate. That, indeed, is his repeated and gratuitous censure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. But the other real surprise has gone unnoticed—and that is entirely understandable too. In fact, the Liberhan Commission’s total exoneration of Narasimha Rao has left the BJP cold, the Left-secular intelligentsia stunned and the Congress confused. You can understand why the BJP does not care. You can also understand the indifference of the Left-secular intelligentsia, because they always called Rao a closet Jan Sanghi. Pull down his dhoti, and you will find a pair of khaki shorts, they would say. But why is the Congress silent and unwilling to claim vindication? That’s because the commission destroys the canard they themselves have sustained against their own party. They did it not because they really believed Rao was complicit in the destruction. Most of them saw it as a great excuse to pressure the then hands-off Sonia Gandhi to bless an insiders’ coup and replace Rao with Arjun Singh. Rao survived many internal coup attempts, but he never recovered from this damage. In 1998, Sitaram Kesri even denied him a Lok Sabha ticket. Those who knew Rao well, including, I dare say, PrimeMinister Manmohan Singh, would never doubt his secular commitment. That he was a believer, visited temples, participated in rituals is also ell known, but he was no bigot. It is much easier for a non-believer to be secular. He was also cast in the old mould of Indian politics. So he would keep open communication and relationships with all sides, including the BJP. In fact, he had a particularly warm relationship with Vajpayee—remember that exchange at a political function where he described Vajpayee as a ‘guru’ in politics and Vajpayee said Rao, instead, was the guru of gurus, guru ‘ ghantaal ’? But if anybody says that he celebrated secretly when the Babri Masjid fell, he does this complex and fascinating politician injustice. But for a long time there were so many stories floating around about his ‘complicity’ and these ere mostly believed. Why did he take the BJP leaders’ word that Babri would not be harmed? Why did he not go over the state government’s head to order central forces to open fire? Why did he not at once dismiss Kalyan Singh’s government and take control of Uttar Pradesh? The conclusion, therefore, was that deep down he was complicit. Politicians become much nicer beings when out of power, particularly if you are willing to go spend time with them in their years in the wilderness. I did that a few times with Rao, particularly during some periods of great crisis, notably the war in Kargil. I would land up at his Motilal Nehru Marg home and ask him: so how would Narasimha Rao have handled this crisis? He was out o politics, so I did not feel the pressure to be judgemental about him. He was a wise man with six

decades of experience and a remarkable memory, and as a student of political history you always learnt something. He was facing so many court cases, from corruption to bribery (he was eventually acquitted in all) and was left to fend for himself. Lonely, in a mostly empty home with some books, newspapers, an old treadmill and just a few pieces of creaky furniture and a computer as his only possessions, he was usually happy to see me. He enjoyed telling stories like a lonely grandfather. Sometimes he laughed at his own fate. His most memorable line to me, talking about the many cases he was facing, was: ‘Koyi kehta hai maine murgi churayee, koyi kehta hai murgi ke ande, par sab kehte hain ke hoon to chor ’ (Some say I stole the hen, some say I stole the eggs, but they all agree I am a thief anyway). And he would then laugh, almost giggle, for just about fifteen seconds. He knew I was always pumping him for information, and sometimes asked if I went home and noted it down some place. With time he dropped some reserve and spoke more freely about a lot that happened in the past, a political historian’s delight. But on two issues he would go absolutely quiet: on what happened in the winter of 1995 when the New York Times said he had prepared to test at Pokhran but pulled back under American pressure, and on how exactly he lost control in Ayodhya. On Ayodhya, he simply said, he would tell the commission whatever he had to say. On Pokhran, he ould just say, ‘Arre bhai, kuchch to mere saath chita mein jaane do ’ (Leave something to take to my pyre). But one afternoon, when I had dropped by in the middle of the Kargil war, he opened up on Ayodhya and gave his answers to the questions listed earlier in this article. Why did he not ask the central forces to open fire? What were the mobs attacking the mosque shouting, he asked, ‘Ram, Ram’? What would the soldiers opening fire at them have been chanting to themselves while following my orders to kill maybe hundreds, ‘Ram, Ram’? Reading the confusion on my face, he said, hat if some of the troops turned around and joined the mobs instead? It could have sparked a fire to consume all of India. Then: why did he not dismiss Kalyan Singh? Mere dismissal, he said, does not mean you can take control. It takes a day or so to appoint advisers, send them to Lucknow, take control of the state. Meanwhile, what had to happen would have happened and there would have been no Kalyan Singh to blame either. And why did he trust BJP leaders? ‘It was Advani,’ he said. ‘And he will be made to pay for it.’ This was obviously a reference to how he had trapped a totally innocent Advani in the Jain hawala case. One thing you wouldn’t associate with Rao was forgiveness. He surely failed as prime minister to prevent the tragedy at Ayodhya. But his rivals in the Congress did their own party such disservice by spreading the canard that his government was responsible for that crime. This, more than anything else, lost them the Muslim vote in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and gifted Mulayam Singh Yadav the ‘M’ for his M-Y (Muslim–Yadav) vote bank. It is this lost vote bank that Rahul Gandhi hasthat tried desperately to win back. any dispassionate reading recent political history will tell you this is a self-inflicted injury.But The Congress has itself builtoa mythology whereby the Muslims have come to hold the party as responsible for Babri as the BJP. And since they vote against the BJP anyway, now they could only punish the Congress. If you take Justice Liberhan’s indictment of so many in the BJP seriously, you cannot at the same time dismiss his exoneration of Rao, and the government and the Congress party under him. You cannot put the clock back on so much injustice done to him, like not even allowing his body to be

taken inside the AICC building. But the least you can do now is to give him a memorial spot too along the Yamuna as one of our more significant (and secular) prime ministers who led us creditably through five difficult years, crafted our post-Cold War diplomacy, launched economic reform and, most significantly, discovered the political talent and promise of a quiet economist called Manmohan Singh.

SECONDERABAD In return for Hyderabad, Andhra gets a chance to build a new city by the sea.

12 Dece mber 2009 Big cities have been the object of political greed and envy through the history of mankind. In older times, cities attracted conquering, pillaging hordes. Now, in democracies, the political class knows that while the votes lie in the countryside, the real money sits in the cities and their real estate. For ordinary people too, big cities become objects of status and pride. That is why most of the argument following the Centre’s sudden decision to allow the creation of Telangana has been confined to the status of Hyderabad. Most Andhraites, it seems, won’t mind the loss of the other Telangana districts —but Hyderabad? Similarly, most of those who belong to Telangana are not even willing to accept sharing Hyderabad as their capital with Andhra as, probably, a Union Territory. Chances are, some ‘temporary’ solution like that will be worked out for Hyderabad. After all, you can’t suddenly create a new capital for either of the two states. Then, as often happens in India, that ‘temporary’ status will continue to be extended indefinitely, through spasmodic agitations, crises, loss of workdays and life. This, in fact, will be the only immediate option. But in the long run, it will make both states, Andhra and Telangana, unhappy—and Hyderabad a crowded, run-down political orphan, hosting two governments, but getting very little in return. Could we, then, think of the unthinkable now? Let Hyderabad go to Telangana and help Andhra Pradesh build a brand-new capital city. Of course, their government will have its transit accommodation in Hyderabad until that happens. It is the peculiarity of the division in Andhra Pradesh that makes the job of a commentator so difficult. How does one describe the two sides? Both are Telugu, both have the same caste mix, same ethnicity, culture and so on. The clamour for a separate Telangana is a regional aspiration, or a case of the ‘inland’ districts wanting their own political space in a state where power is dominated by their ethnic brethren from the richer, coastal districts, or from the eastern grain bowl between the two great rivers, Krishna and Godavari. Telangana’s districts are drier, poorer, have had only very limited benefits from the large hydel projects, and they see Hyderabad as their only real asset. The more entrepreneurial, energetic and richer coastal districts, on the other hand, believe that the buzzy new Hyderabad is both their creation and their reward. But it also distorts their perspective. Andhra is essentially a coastal state, but the presence of Hyderabad on its western inland flank has forced its people, particularly its entrepreneurs, politicians and intellectuals, to look inward, rather than outward to the sea and beyond, where the real opportunity and riches lie. Given the economic growth in its coastal districts, booming agriculture, and nearly $35 billion worth of underconstruction irrigation projects, new ports and power plants, the natural inclination of Andhraites should be in that direction. But Hyderabad makes them look inward. This, at a time when the second

largest hydrocarbon discovery in the world after the Gulf of Mexico has been made along their own coastline. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy knew this, and was therefore focusing on power and fertiliser plants in the coastal districts. Maybe the loss of Hyderabad will now persuade coastal Andhraites to look at this zone of incredible promise. India has always had an East-of-Kanpur problem. Generally, as you go eastward from Delhi, economy, quality of life and governance decline. But the fall is precipitous as you cross Kanpur. Maybe it is because of poor politics, or just poor luck or, who knows, bad Vaastu! But the fact is that the entire eastern seaboard is struggling while the west coast has become India’s engine of growth and prosperity. Barring Kerala, all its states are investment friendly and a very large proportion of all new investment in India is being made there. It may be just a coincidence, but all the new, modern and grand private airports being built in the country are in cities that are generally closer to the western coast. The east, on the other hand, is inhabited by some truly moribund states: West Bengal and Orissa, or relatively status quo-ist ones, like Tamil Nadu. Andhra, under YSR, had been emerging as the east’s one rising state. Some of us bemoaned the fact that his death killed that new energy as well. This division, ironically, may help prevent that. If the new Andhra can get over the loss of Hyderabad, use what it gets in compensation and its own enterprise to build a new capital city—one hopes, closer to the coast—it has the opportunity to create both an asset to be proud of and a magnet of opportunity that looks outward, across the Bay o Bengal, rather than inward, as with Hyderabad. Besides, its politicians will figure soon enough that the moneymaking opportunity a new city offers is much greater than an old metro nearing saturation. Like conquerors of the past, India’s politicians love to rule and plunder cities. But unlike the Mughals, they rarely build new ones. We only build a new city when it becomes necessary to provide a new state a capital. That is how Chandigarh and Gandhinagar came up and New Raipur will eventually be built. India needs great new cities, and Andhra entrepreneurship—not for nothing are India’s builder-contractors usually called ‘Andhrapreneurs’—can now build one for India, and themselves. And how desperately India—if it has to fix its East-of-Kanpur problem and its interregional growth imbalance—needs a booming state on its eastern coast which, like all growing economies, is focused seaward and beyond, rather than inward.

NO SILENCE, PLEASE If this government seems to be stalling, it’s because of its reluctance to talk, to proactively create pub lic opi nion.

9 January 2010 To be honest, we do not have a pressing reason or provocation to assess the performance of UPA 2 exactly at this point of time. No first hundred days, no first anniversary, no first budget and so on. In other words, there is nothing that we journalists would call the ‘news peg’. Yet there is something that tells you it is about time we evaluated where UPA 2 is headed. Or rather, if it is moving, or stalling. Answers to these questions are never simple or easy, and they have rarely been except, say, in Rajiv Gandhi’s first year when things were galloping, and in V.P. Singh’s first (and mercifully only) year when we were rapidly sliding backwards. But on balance now you have to admit that large sections of this government give you the impression of stalling. As you dig deeper, you also find that it is stalling not particularly because it encountered any headwinds, but because the doldrums it is in are its very own creation. Why? It could be complacence: an easily won second term, an economy pretty much reviving by itself, a year of respite from terror. It could be laziness and fatigue: there are still several members in this cabinet who know this is their last real job and if their party still wins in 2014, the best they could hope for is a Raj Bhavan. And not many fancy having the audacity or the hormones to have as much fun there as N.D. Tiwari apparently did. It could also be deliberate: a donothing strategy, Mamata Banerjee thinks, can work well for her till 2011, and Sharad Pawar, who has turned out to be such a stunningly clueless agriculture minister, does not know what we can or should do anyway. It is also likely that this is, as we columnists usually love to say, a combination of all three. But there is also a fourth problem that bedevils this government. It is its very surprising inability, even lack of inclination, to talk to the people, either to explain its actions or to create public opinion to back its policy. The second decade of the twenty-first century can’t be compared with 1991 when economic reform could be carried out pretty much by stealth, without any debate in public. There is very little low-hanging fruit left when it comes to economic and policy reform. No, UPA 2 now has to deliver on big, game-changing reform. Revitalising and massively expanding India’s creaky and inadequate infrastructure is just the start. Taking on Naxalites needs a similarly big effort. Reworking how industry acquires rural land will need us to alter attitudes that we’ve had since Independence. Without sweeping change in higher education, and fast, another generation will be left out of the India growth story. All of these require a robust national conversation. The likely scapegoat of 1991 is now the leader—and yet, if things were to really go to pieces, he is still his party’s chosen scapegoat. So there is very little gain in his not talking to his people and

explaining and commending his own policies to them. All this strange diffidence is sending large sections of his government into a shell, some in confusion, some in lazy celebration and some, a very small but significant section of the usual suspects, even plotting a mid-term ‘change’. It is a most curious situation where a prime minister with such high personal credibility is shy o creating public opinion in support of his own ideas. We have complained in the past about the silence of the reformer in our political system, both in the NDA and UPA. But we now face an entirely silent leadership. It is not as if people are not talking. Only, those who should be keeping quiet are talking. At least two of the ministers in the MEA can’t say no to the camera, no matter what the question is, even if it is about what some nutcase blogger said in China. Nearly a half-dozen secretaries in this government are on their way to becoming media stars, filling in the space left vacant by their ministers. But did the prime minister deliver to us simple folk one speech explaining what he was trying to do in Sharm el-Sheikh and why? Did he, or even Sonia or Rahul Gandhi, make even half a statement before that meeting to prepare public opinion for some change or shift? Remember the way Vajpayee, and in the past even Indira and Nehru, used Parliament and other public forums to give the people just the cue they needed. The stepping back over Sharm el-Sheikh was this government’s first false step. The cricketing equivalent would be a team losing its first wicket. The little quibble over drafting apart, it was entirely self-inflicted because nobody had prepared the people for this change. The failure to get any of the old reform bills—pensions, banking, insurance—passed in two sessions of this Parliament is entirely because of that same diffidence. If leaders of this UPA, unburdened of the Left, had been using some of the TV talk time to open up these issues, the benefits these reforms would bring to us, in public debate, the BJP would have struggled to keep blocking Rajya Sabha for bills that were first ritten by its own government. But none of that has been done. It’s not as if nobody is talking. Some are, and getting results. Chidambaram is turning out to be one of our most transparent, and open, home ministers ever, even thinking aloud on structural changes in his ministry and throwing into public debate an idea that could indeed have been pushed through in secrecy. He has similarly communicated with people at large on Naxalism and terrorism and this government has been rewarded with widespread popular support for its policies on these key issues. Kapil Sibal* is talking about his ideas way ahead of implementation and while old-timers initially accused him of being impatient and immature, they should now applaud, because not only is there so little opposition to his ideas of change, but there is a great deal of support. Jairam Ramesh ** has done a good job of explaining his shifts, and has not been shy of joining a very robust debate on climate change, with rewards. Kamal Nath† inherited a ministry in suspended animation but one reason he has been ablepublic to shake it up, Then and win many internal battles, is that he agriculture is talking and building his own opinion. think of all thosebureaucratic who are silent: the food and minister tops the list. Somebody has to explain to the people why food prices are rising and what is being done about it. The last time we heard him talk in public was about the terrible cricket pitch at Kotla. In 2010, when people are wise and impatient, this is not going to work. Around the world, incumbents are getting elected now because people have both access to facts and the wisdom to analyse them. That is why the UPA won a second term with a greater majority. Its complacent silence

is not doing it any good.

THE BUCK STARTS HERE The message from Dantewada is old and familiar: we face a new monster, and need skill, p atience and guts.*

10 April 2010 On the Republic Day of 1995, terrorists set off an IED right next to the podium where General K.V. Krishna Rao (one of our finest army chiefs) stood to take the salute as the governor of Jammu and Kashmir. He survived, miraculously, but many others did not. This was still early days for the Kashmir insurgency. This was seen as a great failure of security. Since the state was under Governor’s Rule, there were immediate demands for his resignation. General Rao asked me over for a drink at New Delhi’s J&K Bhavan a week or so after the incident. ‘This,’ he said, ‘was a terrible failure, and of course the buck must stop with me.’ He said he had told the government, ‘If you want me to resign, I will happily do so. But what will you do hen such a thing happens again?’ He continued, however, in a mood of reflection, to provide a reality check: ‘We also have to see the consequences of a governor resigning each time such failure happens. Because such incidents will happen. Kashmir is a long haul.’ A nation and a people, he said, ‘had to have it in their guts’ to deal with a challenge like Kashmir, as you ‘will never keep Kashmir if you quit after each setback’. The message from Dantewada for India, therefore, is an old and familiar one: you are facing a new monster, and you have to have the skill, patience and, above all, that something that General Rao said a nation ‘must have in its guts’ to deal with it. Nobody has to quit, nobody has to indulge in namecalling and nobody has to either exaggerate the threat or trivialise it. The key to winning this complex ar is to deprive it, right now, of the oxygen of partisan politics. Over the past six decades India has acquired the unique skills, the experience and the resilience to deal with such insurgencies, and the good news is this one is more likely than, say, Kashmir to follow the classic patternof the other Indian rebellions so far, particularly in the tribal Northeast. Unfortunately, that similarity also includes the fact that in the course of each such earlier insurgency the nation wakes up and commits its full resources only after a big shock. There have been many in Kashmir, besides that Republic Day, topped undoubtedly by Kargil, and each time India has responded with greater resoluteness. We still have a problem in Kashmir. But our gains are substantive too: two successive elections, internationally acknowledged as clean, have given the state two successive legitimate democratic governments—which is not something Pakistan has ever had— and now we have global acknowledgement of the sanctity of the Line of Control. See this against the background of the many moments in the past fifteen years when you would have thought Kashmir was a lost cause, one of those as recent as during the Amarnath land allotment agitation. A serious nation does not react to events, no matter how shattering. It assesses a challenge, and devises a policy.

India also has the unfortunate, but invaluable, privilege of long institutional memory in handling remote-area insurgencies, absorbing the setbacks in that process. In fact, for each insurgency I can name a day that looked as bad, if not worse, than Dantewada. In Mizoram, on 13 January 1975, a band of Mizo rebels infiltrated the police headquarters and killed the entire brass: IGP Arya, his DIG Sewa and SP (special branch) Panchapakesan who were then holding a meeting. And how did Indira Gandhi respond? She sent in a tough army brigadier, G.S. Randhawa, to replace the IGP. Randhawa then led the successful hunt for the assassins and, more importantly, built the first units of the Mizoram Armed Police, consisting mainly of native tribals. That, in fact, marked the beginning of the end of the Mizo insurgency. In Assam, much later, a similar setback came with the assassination of E.S. Parthasarathy, the tough commissioner of Upper Assam division, in Jorhat on 6 April 1981, by a grenade planted in his office chair. The senior Mrs Gandhi again responded by unleashing Hiteswar Saikia on Assam, even if through an election that was mostly illegitimate. In his politics and his ethics, Hiteswar was no angel. But he was one of the toughest politicians you ever met, and a nationalist. He survived on transplanted kidneys in the early 1980s, when that aspect of medicine was not so advanced, brushed aside near-thing assassination attempts, but cleaned up the incipient armed underground. In both cases, a setback ultimately led to a situation where India’s political leadership—by a fitting coincidence under Indira’s son, Rajiv—found people on the ‘other’ side willing to sign a peace deal that has endured. The history of the Naga insurgency is far too long for me to make detailed references in a mere newspaper article. It delivered sizeable blows in each decade: the wiping out of an army patrol (29 soldiers) in 1957; the shooting down—and that is so relevant in today’s context—of an IAF Dakota on 26 August 1960 and its pilots being taken prisoner; the wiping out of a 22-strong Sikh Regiment patrol on 14 February 1982, at Namthilok, near Ukhrul, Muivah’s hometown. But each time, India took it on the chin and came back with even greater resolve. The Shillong Peace Accord of 1975 brought most of the major tribes overground, and into the political mainstream. Peace with the ones that remain, mainly under Muivah—significantly those that were more ideologically inclined to the Left under Chinese influence—is a work in progress. The massive, massive setbacks on the way to eventual peace in Punjab are too recent to need repetition. Insurgencies in India, therefore, follow a pattern pretty much like a bell curve. That is the wisdom from our institutional memory. The graph of violence rises in the initial period, producing more and more casualties on both sides. But at some stage the rebels come to the realisation that this state and its people are too strong and resolute to be defeated in a long war, no matter what the score in a particular battle. That thefollow point ofthat inflection when rebels see reason. There is notwo reason whythey the Maoistday’s insurgency will isnot same pattern eventually. But remember things: ill only do it once you convince them of the futility of war for them, and you will only get a durable peace when you offer it from a position of strength. Two more things. When the time for peacemaking comes, the Indian state has been among the most generous and flexible, and that wonderful attribute defies our awful party politics. Nobody, for example, has ever questioned the subclause inserted in the Constitution, under the very contentious

Article 370, answering some of the Nagas’ anxieties about their natural resources. Another subclause may eventually be confected to settle with Muivah’s men. In Assam, Mizoram and Nagaland peace accords have brought the former rebels to power, and in Punjab the Akalis, though through a more complex political process. So when the time comes, India will need to be generous with amnesties, governance reforms and forgiveness. But you have to fight hard now to earn that moment. Second, in a war, your tactics change every day, sometimes by the hour. You do not discuss or debate tactics in the media. You do not rule out the use of this instrument of state power or that. The constitutional and historically established principle is that the state must use the ‘minimum’ power required to deal with a law and order challenge. What that ‘minimum’ power is, is to be left to the leaders of the day to decide. So please ask all your responsible people to stop debating tactical options, from air power to army in public. This country needs soldiers, not TV stars. Today’s leaders have to be taught to avoid what the BBC’s Nik Gowing describes as the ‘tyranny of real time’. By the way, in 1960 Nehru figured out that ‘minimum’ power included his air force, against the Nagas; Mrs Gandhi sent airplanes to bomb Aizawl when Mizo rebels had raised their flag on the treasury, and were about to sack the Assam Rifles battalion headquarters, which housed not just troops but also their families. The pilots on those bombing runs included two names we all got to know subsequently: Rajesh Pilot and Suresh Kalmadi. Again, in Operation Blue Star, she used tanks, APCs and Howitzers in the Golden Temple. You want to dig deeper, and you will find more diabolical innovations. Sardar Patel sent the army to subdue the Nizam in Hyderabad in 1948 and called it ‘police action’. Nehru, in 1961, did even better. He sent the army, navy and air force to liberate Goa—and still called it police action. So do not close your option of defining the ‘minimum’ required in a particular situation. And do settle down for the long haul, with that ‘something in your guts’.

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT The halo around the higher judiciary is dimming—and this is dangerous.

10 July 2010 Four recent developments add up to a very disturbing picture: of our higher judiciary being under siege, or on the defensive, or becoming an unwitting victim to a wider conspiracy, or falling to a eakness it does not accept. But any which way you see it, the picture that emerges is worrying. Here are the four instances I pick. They are entirely unconnected but, when seen together, should make us all sit up in some alarm. — Just last week, at a short and dignified function in a central Delhi auditorium, Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily’s book on the Ramayana was released. No problem with that. It was released by Justice S.H. Kapadia, who recently took over as the thirty-eighth Chie Justice of India. No problem with that also, or maybe. In his very short speech, Justice Kapadia complimented the law minister not just for his scholarship, but also for the fact that he takes all his decisions based on ‘honesty and integrity’. Of course, he went on to clarify that he did not mean that other ministers did not do so too. It is just that he knew more about this one. Any problem with that? Maybe none for now. Except that such public praise can come back to haunt you given the history of healthy, and sometimes not quite healthy, tension between the two institutions, judiciary and executive. — Another week prior to that, Moily himself had launched a remarkably sharp attack on one of Kapadia’s predecessors, Justice Ahmadi, accusing him of diluting the case against Union Carbide and thereby letting Warren Anderson get away. To some of us, it seemed odd that a serving law minister should be attacking a former Chief Justice of India on a judgement delivered by him as the head of a Supreme Court bench. Even more so when the Bhopal case had been deliberated upon by two benches that included, among their distinguished members, four judges who eventually served as Chief Justices of India—Ranganath Misra, M.N. Venkatachaliah, K.N. Singh and A.H. Ahmadi. Moily was sharply criticised by this newspaper editorially for what some of usis saw as an attack on the highest in an Emergency-like tone (even though Moily not exactly the H.R. Gokhale of judiciary the Emergency). But, of course, no one in the large community of eminent jurists rose to Ahmadi’s or the Supreme Court’s defence. In fact, since then, it has become common for NGOs and the media to unhesitatingly describe Bhopal as an outcome of ‘collusion between politicians, bureaucracy and the judiciary’. In an unconnected, but very relevant development earlier, the government, in response to an RTI application, had stated that Justice Y.K. Sabharwal could

not be appointed as National Human Rights Commission chairman (who has to be a former Chief Justice of India) because of adverse media reports against him, even if that meant keeping it vacant for a year and a half. Except during the Emergency and the unstable but dictatorial period leading up to it, have the executive and the thinking classes ever made a habit of ridiculing the Supreme Court like this? — The Supreme Court still does not seem to know what to do with Justice Shylendra Kumar o the Karnataka High Court, who has emerged as a whistle-blower of sorts. * Internal democracy being one thing, how seriously would the executive take an institution which can neither protect itself from its own nor satisfy the dissenting voices from within? Could it just be that the Supreme Court’s own flip-flops over Dinakaran, Shylendra Kumar’s Chief Justice in Bangalore, have so weakened it morally as not to be able to keep dissent within itself? Further, can it be confident of always keeping its powers, particularly of appointing judges and managing the entire judiciary, within itself and unchallenged by the executive? — The fourth point is where, in some ways, it all—decline of moral authority, if I may push my freedom of speech and also luck—began. This was the weak, unconvincing and ill-advised manner in which the Supreme Court responded to the demand of making judges’ assets public. Having themselves forced the political class to declare their assets, the judges needed to find more convincing arguments to counter the growing public opinion that they were shy of subjecting themselves to what they mandated for others. This was further complicated by the way they handled the issue of whether the Chief Justice’s office should come under the ambit of RTI. Read together, these instances underline a disturbing phenomenon: where the higher judiciary could be losing, or at least begin to be seen to be losing, some moral authority and, more importantly, popular adulation and support. These instances have all created an impression that the top judiciary today is either too weak to defend itself, or cannot, because it is no different from other institutions, particularly the executive. This is dangerous. I had argued in National Interest (‘The noose media’, IE, 3 April 2010) that the media had to be careful now as it was running the risk of breaking the social contract which emerged post-Emergency and which guaranteed its freedoms that were not clearly codified either in the Constitution or any legislation. It would be doubly distressing if the judiciary were to also head that way. The truth, however, is that judicial autonomy and the deep-seated national belief that nobody should be allowed to mess with it have also been earned through decades of democratic debate and evolution, and has been steeled through challenges and crises, particularly before and during the Emergency. Smarting under the rebuff of the Kesavananda Bharati judgement, Indira Gandhi had floated the idea o ‘committed judiciary’ which rose during the Emergency, but did not survive it. Just like the media, therefore, the judiciary woke up to a new dawn of moral authority, respect and freedom with the lifting of the Emergency. It has not looked back, at least not yet, and the people of India have only applauded it, at least so far. And if the judiciary’s highest stature among all our institutions is again a reward of that post-Emergency social contract—as a guarantee against majoritarian excess—most o

its autonomy has been scripted by itself. The judges’ appointment procedure, for example, is entirely self-created, and so far the executive has not challenged it. Judges, publicopinion would say, may not be perfect and may make mistakes, but the executive can never be trusted. So stay with the judges. That notion is now under challenge. Indian democracy is now more mature, and therefore also more questioning. Issues of judicial accountability can no longer remain within, like family secrets. Surely none of our eminent jurists would like the higher judiciary to be seen as some kind of an exalted khap panchayat which takes all decisions about itself and about its own within the closed confines of its own hallowedbiradari . The judges’ conduct, whether professional or personal, cannot remain away from public scrutiny. And public opinion is now cleverer and less forgiving. You can no longer, for example, get away with the argument that while the judiciary may be rotten at lower levels, it gives a glowing account of itself at the top. People now know that the judiciary is a selfmanaged and self-governed institution, that higher courts have administrative responsibility over the lower ones and cannot escape accountability for the rot there. And as popular doubts and dissonance grow, people begin to ask, is the judiciary as bad as the others? Like bureaucrats, politicians, even the media? That is the danger. Because the political class is watching this, and sharpening the knives.

THE POWER OF ONE That’s all it takes to transform an institution—just one person with no p ast and n o greed for the future.

31 July 2010 Last Saturday, I found myself at an unusual sort of book release. This was the launch, at India Habitat Centre, of The Cobra Dancer by veteran Andhra journalist Devipriya. It is the somewhat curiously titled biography of former and legendary Central Election Commission observer K.J. Rao, who will always be remembered for giving us the cleanest elections in Lalu’s Bihar. * Of course, Rao has also become a very familiar face to us in the capital, as a member of the Supreme Court-appointed team o commissioners to oversee the demolition and sealing of encroachments and illegal constructions in the capital. This event was different not only because it was so unlike the usual Page 3-type book release with celebs, cheese and wine. The audience were mostly Rao’s current and former colleagues, many senior citizens and some activists. There was almost no media. The only cameras I spotted were from some Telugu TV channels. But there was some wisdom dispensed in that IHC hall that morning, and a reassuring takeaway as the speakers (with the exception of this writer) were all people who have on fame and admiration in not just leading our greatest institutions, but also developing them into the brands we feel so proud of: former Chief Justice of India J.S. Verma, former Chief Election Commissioner J.M. Lyngdoh and S.Y. Quraishi, who now moves into the top job at Nirvachan Sadan. But it was something that Justice Verma said, while explaining the challenge of institution-building, that should get us all thinking. An institution can rise to its true strength, and truly play the role the founding fathers mandated for it, only if it is led by a person ‘who has no past, and no expectation (o any reward) from anybody in the future’. Someone who has no past and no greed for anything in the future? Simple enough, you might think. But it isn’t as simple as that. It is tough enough to find many people with nothing to hide in their past, so they are not prone to blackmail, or pressured by IOUs conceded. People who can judge a case, run an election, prosecute a criminal politician, investigate a corrupt bureaucrat effectively and fairly. But where do you find someone who, in addition to this, would be willing to retire quietly into obscurity? Our system is much too brutal and clever to let such rare people rise to the top. That is hy it is only providentially, rather than by choice, that one such is put in charge of an institution. And then the institution changes, and rises to its true power. How many of our institutions do we really feel proud of today? That we trust fully to protect our constitutional rights and liberty? Your count will not go beyond two, the Supreme Court and the Election Commission. In both cases, we were fortunate that just a couple of remarkable people came to lead them at some crucial junctures of our history. Justice Verma himself picked up the thread from

the great judges of the 1970s, a remarkable handful led by late Justice H.R. Khanna in a cruel and crucial decade for our democracy, to raise the Supreme Court to its true constitutional power, respect and glory. Verma then also took the weight of the same moral authority to the National Human Rights Commission. T.N. Seshan showed the country—and the Election Commission itself—the power that the Constitution had intended to grant it but that his predecessors had never used, in the mistaken belief that they were merely another department of the government. The commission was fortunate again to get an even more formidable—and not a fraction as idiosyncratic—chief in J.M. Lyngdoh, ho took its reputation even higher, burying a tradition of state-sponsored rigging and terror threats in Kashmir and defying Narendra Modi’s loaded ‘James Michael Lyngdoh’ chants to hold another election in Gujarat on his own terms.* Seshan himself failed to pass the second part of Justice Verma’s test, with his delusional quest for Rashtrapati Bhavan.** But by then the image of the commission had risen so high that the only stature his hubris damaged was his own. The commission even survived many controversies and shenanigans, and at least one CEC who completely flunked the Verma test. Forget going into retired obscurity, he cadged a Rajya Sabha membership on a party ticket and then a ministry so insignificant that the only reason he is noticed is because of his unseemly tur ars with Suresh Kalmadi and a fellow Gill, of the Indian Hockey Federation. Today nobody dares to mess with either the Election Commission or the Supreme Court. One can still countermand an election in Bihar or Kashmir and the other can set the CBI on the Sohrabuddin encounter case. Both have survived sabotage, subterfuge, allurements and vilification. All because a few, just a few, good men came to lead these at some providential moments of time. Imagine how much stronger we would have felt as a nation if just two other institutions, the CBI and the CVC, had also been similarly fortunate. The sad fact is that the Supreme Court has repeatedly enhanced the powers and autonomy for both these institutions and the law places the CBI under the CVC’s superintendence, to give one autonomy and the other investigative muscle. But neither has yet been blessed with a leader willing to monetise this freedom into institutional capital. Instead, an entire succession of our CBI directors has only made news through rotten controversies, and spent their tenures ‘fixing’ cases politically, one way or the other. As for our CVCs, do you remember the names of any? They have been so ineffectual, such nonentities and so inadequate for the job that their office has mostly been reduced to a post office where claimants for public sector jobs and their lobbyists or rivals write endless complaints against each other and ensure that these are duly leaked. A clean-up of the CBI is probably too much to ask for in today’s political climate. But, with some luck, if only we could get a strong and wise CVC. And as that gathering last Saturday morning showed, city(which still has whowas will riskwhen theirhe lives and future for as little Rs 12,000 a this month is many all thatpeople K.J. Rao paid cleaned up theinterests Bihar election) and as leave a brilliant legacy behind. The challenge is to find and empower them. Just a few of them. You cannot make a better investment than that for India’s sake.

IS ANYBODY THERE? Hard to make out, between a silent PM and his cross-talking party.

14 August 2010 Let me ask you a trick question. How would you describe the UPA 2 government, as one that talks too little, or one that talks too much? Stumped? Don’t blame yourself. It is indeed a bit of both. Except that the parts of it that should be talking are so exasperatingly quiet, and the parts that should keep their mouths shut cannot stop blabbering. The result is a government that looks one of the most chaotic and internally divided in our history. First, the parts of UPA 2 that are not talking. Certainly, the prime minister isn’t. In Pranab Mukherjee and Chidambaram,* he has able lieutenants to speak on his behalf. But is that a reason why he should not? India’s prime minister is not some kind of technocratic head of administration. Whatever the nature and background of the person occupying the job, it is essentially a deeply political one and is never insulated from public opinion, and vice versa. Just as no political arrangement, whatever its peculiarities, should ever undermine or weaken the position of its prime minister, no prime minister can afford to go into such a long phase of silence. It is not as if Dr Singh was giving out weekly televised speeches in UPA 1, but there were three differences then. One, expectations from that government, and the prime minister, were much lower. Two, even if the prime minister did not, Sonia Gandhi was still displaying a connect with people. Three, and probably the most significant, dissensions within the Congress were not so pronounced. This Parliament session has underlined the downside of this approach, particularly as the prime minister’s and Sonia Gandhi’s somewhat detached silence is only matched by the noise made by others. There is widespread confusion about all the issues on which the government has been under pressure: prices, Commonwealth Games, Bhopal, Kashmir. An impression has grown that this is a deeply divided government with no centre of gravity. S ince New Delhi is also the capital of political conspiracy theorists, nobody ever believes any public expression of dissent—particularly in the Congress—is merely somebody’s recently awakened conscience talking. So when we see Digvijaya Singh taking on his own government in Azamgarh over Batla House, or calling its home minister and his own ‘friend’ intellectually arrogant and then taking a different tack on the Maoists, it fits with the usual theories on the usual suspects. But when he raises doubts about who gave Warren Anderson his boarding pass, you wonder what is going on—remember, it was he who told NDTV from the US that it couldn’t be the state government’s fault, that instructions had come from Delhi (Rajiv was PM then) and that there may have been American pressure. Is there any theory to explain Congress people raising questions about a late Gandhi (other than Sanjay, of course)? That exposed a vulnerable new flank for the opposition. And even before the Congress could cover it, another of its veterans, and

Madhya Pradesh chief minister during the Bhopal disaster, Arjun Singh, reignited that fire again with his too-clever-by-half statement passing the buck on to the Centre—but blaming Narasimha Rao instead. Then, there is Mani Shankar Aiyar wishing the Commonwealth Games failure. With comrades like these, who needs an opposition? This remarkable conspiracy of silence and noise has created problems for many of the key issues today. Does the government have a policy on Maoists, or does Chidambaram have one, with others holding different views? Does this government have a bad conscience on Bhopal, and if so, why? Does it have a coherent plan on Kashmir besides systematic waffling? Has it dumped the Commonwealth Games and distanced itself from Kalmadi, or does it have a plan to save them? Who speaks to whom to bring back some coherence when the foreign minister gives the home secretary a ticking off in serial interviews on TV?* What conclusion do you draw when so many cabinet members indulge in the game of Honey, I Shrank Montek (read, Manmohan)? We know the troubles the BJP is facing. We also know that the Left is headed for a new abyss in West Bengal and Kerala. The Yadavs of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are self-destructing. But the troubles that UPA 2 is now facing are also serious, and mostly self-inflicted or a result of friendly fire. It’s been fifteen years since you’ve seen such a chaotic, noisy yet silent Congress leadership. Fifteen years back was when the party lost power under Narasimha Rao, its favourite demon. You have to concede that it is much less insecure now, but it is certainly much more complacent.

LEFTOVER AT THE CENTRE Whenever the political Left declines, its ideologues acqui re greater power.

28 August 2010 My favourite on our wall displaying theIndian Express front pages, recording the major turning points in this newspaper ’s 85-year history, is the one from 21 January 1957, and not because that is the year I was born, but because it tells how things can endure even as they change over fifty-three years. The turning point that earns that front page a place on that wall is when Nehru inaugurated our first nuclear reactor in Trombay, and promised that ‘India will not misuse the atom’. This is also the day his government announced strict limits on steel use and tougher foreign exchange controls, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld pleaded with the Israelis to vacate Gaza and, reported in a single column, Eisenhower and Nixon took over in Washington. But the most fascinating is the main lead. Because there were no Election Commission restrictions in those innocent days, Nehru also used his visit to address a ‘three-lakh’-strong election rally in Chowpatty with what the headline-writer calls a ‘stunning attack on Communists’. The report describes Nehru’s condemnation of the Communists as an ‘impassioned challenge’ of their ‘tall-talk of proletarian revolution’. Now, what are we missing here? A stunning attack by Nehru on the Communists? Just when his own party had taken its most ‘stunning’ turn to the left, with the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956? This, the mid-1950s, was actually the most ‘Communist’ phase of Nehru’s own politics, as the purge of the Congress ‘Right’ was more or less completed and its ‘Left’, from Krishna Menon to K.D. Malaviya, rose. A look at the following decades tells you why it is not such an intriguing contradiction. It is a continuing phenomenon that recent months’ politics has only confirmed: that there is an inverse relationship in India between the decline of the political Left and the rise of the intellectual Left. In the sixties (1969) and the seventies (the Emergency, 1975–77), Indira Gandhi’s policy change was led by Left intellectuals and the CPI (then pro-Moscow) became her tail-wagging supplicant. The political Left could only rise again with her decline, and the banishing of the intellectual Left. The Congress, in short, has perfected the strategy of destroying the Left’s political ambitions by renting and co-opting its ideologues who, unlike the politicians, have no patience for life out of ‘power’. If you follow the developments over the past two years, topped by this remarkable Parliament session, you see the strategy works even in this decade. You go back two years, because that is when the Left’s political power was at its highest point since Independence. Somnath Chatterjee was not telling us a secret when he said that a Politburo member told him that they could ask the prime minister to sit or stand up and he would. This is when OB vans stalked CPM and even CPI leaders,

many of whom had become overnight TV stars; and polls, and reputed publications, were listing Prakash Karat among the top three in their power lists (after Sonia and Manmohan Singh, though some argued that he actually belonged at number two). Where do he, his party, his politics and, most interestingly, his ideology stand now? The nuclear deal, which he had made the very bedrock of his politics and the test of his party’s new power, is signed, sealed and now cemented by the Nuclear Liability Bill. And how has that come about? The Congress got Parliament to sanctify the nuclear deal by stealing the Left’s most loyal, largest and in fact its only Hindi heartland ally, the Samajwadi Party. It has now succeeded in getting the Nuclear Liability Bill passed by winning over the BJP, the Left’s biggest ideological enemy. So ithin two disastrous years the Left has lost both its closest political ally and its philosophical adversary to the Congress, while its parliamentary strength has halved, and it finds itself on the wrong side of the only certainty in our electoral politics: the loss of West Bengal and Kerala next year. And where are its ideological fellow travellers meanwhile? One by one they are jumping again on the Congress bandwagon, cornering the finest jobs in showpiece cultural institutions, universities, even the National Advisory Council. Arundhati Roy has been praising Sonia and Rahul, while the bhadralok revolutionaries of Bengal, from Mahasweta Devi to Aparna Sen, see Congress ally Mamata as a saviour from the CPM’s ‘contractorocracy’. And just when the ideological Left is rising, hailing Rahul’s speech at Niyamgiri and the ‘interventions’ of Digvijaya Singh, Mani Shankar Aiyar and Jairam Ramesh as the Congress party’s return to its socialist, anti-corporate ‘roots’, the fate of their occasional political leaders was underlined just on Friday morning in the Lok Sabha discussion on amendments to the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act. Nishikant Dubey, BJP MP from Jharkhand, held forth in ‘clear support’ of the bill, which he hoped would also prevent conversions of ‘entire villages’ by Christians in his state and the rise of mosques and madrasas all over the country ‘with foreign money’. Nobody interrupted or protested. The Left is too isolated, demoralised, punchdrunk or maybe just nuked out, and, since he was after all speaking in support of the bill, why would the secular Congress protest? The Congress can therefore celebrate one more destruction of their Left challengers. But it has to remember that each such phase has led its very illustrious leaders ultimately to decline—because they allowed Left ideologues to take over their party’s politics and their government’s policies. There is enough documented history to leave us with no doubt that Krishna Menon was the one individual more responsible than any other for the debacle of 1962 and the decline of Nehru as a broken, defeated man robbed of his global moral stature. To underline just one fact, the man who fought to keep American domination away from the entire non-aligned world left behind an American military mission (to help us defend ourselves theinrampaging Chinese he had once a twostar general in New Delhi, the onlyfrom time our independent history thatsoweloved) have led hadbysubstantive foreign ‘military presence’. In his death, thus, Nehru was denied the farewell he deserved. Krishna Menon, meanwhile, has an important New Delhi road named after him. Similarly, the first time Mrs Gandhi took a Left turn, she ended up with tax rates of 97 per cent and inflation of 31 per cent. The second time, the result was the Emergency which, though hailed by her Left drumbeaters, would blight her legacy forever. And as she lost power in 1977, the ideologues

disappeared, where else but to the little revolutionary enclaves they had gifted themselves in Shanti Niketan, Anand Niketan, West End, Sundar Nagar, Vasant Vihar, Jor Bagh, the sexiest New Delhi colonies, while leaving us of the working class to the mercy of the Delhi Destruction Authority (as the DDA should be more aptly called). This is what the Congress and the Gandhis now leading it have to remember. This is not a case of history repeating itself. It is a case of history continuing an unbroken trend. The key question in postnuclear deal and post-Niyamgiri politics, therefore, is whether today’s Gandhis will prove wiser than their ancestors, or again succumb to the same rented pinko charm that ultimately consumed Nehru and Indira.

THE UPA IN DECLINE

UNITED REGRESSIVE ALLIANCE Why this government, in its second year, looks like a lame duck waiting for elections.

4 September 2010 It is always challenging to be an observer of politics and government in this city. It is also never boring. You have the ruling party looking more confident, even cockier, than at any other time in two decades. At the same time, you have its government looking so hobbled, not even halfway into its second year, you would think it was a lame duck serving out its last few months in power. Then, depending on who you run into on the street corner, you can be told by somebody in a position of authority that either of the two could be true, that this is a strong government led by a strengthening party, or that it is indeed a government for a few more months, because you cannot see an increasingly impatient ‘party’ putting up with it for much longer. Now here is your challenge as an analyst: in straightforward political wisdom, there is no reason hy the government should be weak or its party leadership should be getting so impatient with it as to be planning a shift or change. That, by the way, is my view too. Yet, I am mindful of the risks to reputation involved in stating that so clearly in a city where it is always considered prudent to ride on a few ifs and buts and disclaimers. Because if you look at the many pointers on the ground, they defy all reasonable analysis. Some confusion has begun to show in the performance of the government. The Kashmir Valley is drifting out of control. Nobody seems to know what the party line on the Naxals is. After nearly five years of respite, our security environment, externally as well as internally, has deteriorated. Between Kashmir, Maoism, Telangana and the build-up to next year’s elections that promises months of violent uncertainty in West Bengal, India is back to a state of siege. And the argument that evokes the greatest passion in the ruling establishment is whether the use of the description saffron for Hindu right-wing terror is appropriate or not. The world must be laughing at us. In fact, it is. That is why the external security environment has deteriorated alarmingly. In the kind of neighbourhood we live in, nothing is noted more promptly than a phase of weakness and waffling descending on India. Even if you leave Pakistan aside as the usual suspect, we would be living in denial if we do not read the message from China. They have now checked us out over a year and felt bold enough to escalate gradually to a level where they can deny a visa to one of our three-star generals in a much celebrated, ongoing process of military-to-military contact because he serves in Kashmir. They put nearly a division strength of their troops in what India considers its own, or at least disputed, Kashmiri territory. The Chinese are not about to invade. But by reducing us to this impotent, silent rage they are only reminding us of the hollowness of our claims to any big power status. They are underlining to us, in their typically blunt yet convoluted way, that we are merely a

subcontinental power which has issues, Pakistan and Kashmir, to handle within our own neighbourhood. And we, meanwhile, cannot decide to buy an artillery gun for our army in twentythree years, have critical defence acquisitions blocked because the director of the CBI produced a list of charges against certain suppliers and has not yet backed it even with an FIR. And do you want to know how scandalous this is? The omnipotent CBI chief, modern-day Indian equivalent of Stalin’s infamous hatchet-man Beria (show me the man, I will give you the crime), gave these charges not even on his agency’s letterhead but on a plain piece of paper and, most breathtaking of all, did not even sign it. And yet, the government, even the mighty Cabinet Committee on Security, has not been able to toss this aside. When issues of vital national security get such short shrift, you can imagine what happens to economics. Over the past six months, a resurgent India’s growth environment has been replaced by the dark povertarianism of the 1960s. We must, in fact, be the only nation in the world today where the ruling elites and establishment intellectuals are all competing to prove whose count of people below the poverty line is higher because in this new mood, the higher this count, the more virtuous. Digvijaya Singh carries on fighting his personal battle with Chidambaram—and Mani Shankar Aiyar ith the whole government, though much more entertainingly. Meanwhile, corporate India watches in amazement how a minister of state can routinely walk all over the prime minister. This anarchy has spread deeper still. The health ministry bureaucracy carries out a witch-hunt of Indian scientists involved in a reputed international scientific study * in a manner reminiscent of the licence-permitquota–foreign-hand raj of the mid-1970s. This, when the prime minister is setting up more universities of science and centres of research. We have seen before governments in India lose their way early in their tenures. But those were governments like the Janata in 1977 and the daily-wage arrangements of V.P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar, Gowda and Gujral. That one as politically strong as UPA 2 should be so adrift is a new, and unfamiliar, political phenomenon. Maybe, just maybe, the problem arises from the political mood and situation of the Congress party. Half its leaders, beginning with Rahul Gandhi, are already in campaign mode for 2014, and the other half presume that the election has already been won and are therefore positioning themselves for their share of the power the next election will bring. This has twin consequences. First, you lose interest in the current government, because it is a mere interregnum, a minor halt en route to the real thing. Second, how do you ensure the jobs and positions you think you deserve in 2014, unless you discredit the ones holding the same now? These are the riddles that make our current politics so much more fun—only if you are watching from outside.

GO, OR GET GOING Three questions for the Congress, and five essential things for this government to fix.

11 September 2010 Here is a three-question quiz for the top leadership of the Congress party. One, do you want Rahul Gandhi to become prime minister replacing Manmohan Singh during the term of this Lok Sabha? Two, if not, do you still want a new prime minister to run the government until 2014? Three, do you want to dissolve this Lok Sabha sometime soon? If the answer is ‘yes’ to any of these three, then you have no time to lose. But if the answer, as I believe, is ‘none of the above’, then you have to do a few new things, and also make a course correction. You have to speak to your prime minister to focus back on governance, to rebalance the cabinet, and you have to help him do so. Because the risk you do not want to take going into 2014 is of facing an election with the longest lasting lame duck in India’s history. And here are five things that you specifically need to fix: 1. First of all, the cabinet. Over the past year we have seen the government evolve in an unprecedented manner where, it seems, ministers (particularly some senior ones) have begun to function like bureaucrats. All responsibility is avoided and decisions are put in orbit with the excuse of ‘party–government disconnect’. That bluff has to be called. The way to do it is to drop the nonperformers. At least five senior ministers in this cabinet have been hopeless non-performing assets. They must go in the next reshuffle. That will, by itself, bring in the additional benefit of fixing the average age of the cabinet. Look for those who are there not because they bring any special skills, value or experience but only to balance the politics of some state, or faction. Those that consider their tenure in the cabinet as ‘time-pass’ while they plan and plot their return to the state. You can count five like that in one minute, so please do not ask me for names.* A Union cabinet cannot be a sinecure, or a cushy exile for those you do not want making mischief some place else. 2. Both the party and government need a Kamraj Plan. There are senior ministers of the cabinet who you would rather have out there, managing your politics, tying up alliances, making deals. At least three of them need to go out and they will serve the party better than they do in their current, distracted non-performer status in the cabinet. Similarly, some from the party should be inducted into the cabinet, particularly one of the general secretaries who has not held a government position for a long time now and has age, energy and resourcefulness still on his side to deliver on specific responsibilities in key areas.** Think of him for one of the key positions in the Cabinet Committee on Security, some of whose current members are duds.

3. The prime minister has to fix his office. We know that he is a believer in ‘correctness’, but over the decades the engine of any government is the PMO. He needs more, fresh people there and he needs to empower those he trusts. The PMO cannot be a forwarding office. It has to make sure the prime minister’s and the government’s agenda is implemented, its wishes are carried out and bottlenecks are quickly removed. Vajpayee’s PMO is a good example. That was a coalition government too and Vajpayee’s mandate was hobbled by internal power struggles of the BJP even more than Manmohan Singh’s because of his party’s sniping. But Vajpayee’s PMO packed real power, and delivered what he wanted. And honestly, Vajpayee worked no more than six full hours a day and never missed his long siesta, while Manmohan Singh works eighteen and, from all accounts, takes his worries to bed. He needs more people in his office delivering, getting ministers and ministries to talk and sort out their differences and getting decisions implemented. 4. Revisit the idea of GoMs and EGoMs. This Manmohan Singh innovation is going past its use-by date. This was a useful instrument to get consensus decisions on contentious and complex issues. But it has lost much value in UPA 2. Most GoMs have failed to arrive at a coherent conclusion and where they have, they have run into resistance, in some cases at the almighty NAC. The PM, therefore, has to first do a performance appraisal of the currently functioning GoMs and then take back what is stalled and push it top-down from the PMO. 5. The prime minister has to reach out to Sonia Gandhi and find a way of institutionalising his government’s interaction with the party and, now inevitably, with the NAC. There is no point in the government announcing a decision or policy and then stalling in the face of criticism from a ‘party’ critic or opposition of even one member of the NAC. When a newspaper article or even stray criticism by an NAC member can chill the government into rethinking or inaction, the only way to function is to institutionalise that interaction. How that is best done, the prime minister and Sonia have to figure out. And while the prime minister and the government do some of this, the party will need to do some cleaning up at its end as well. A crucial aspect of this will have to be a fresh look at its chief ministers and the states it is running. Its chief ministers in Maharashtra and Andhra (which send eighty-seven members to the Lok Sabha) look powerless and ineffective. Its other states, from Kashmir to Goa, are disasters. If fortunes in today’s national elections are a net result of several key state elections, the Congress will need to empower and build its chief ministers as its poster boys.

SO NEHRU KILLED GANDHI! That’s the bizarre plot Sudarshan tried to sell me when we last met. This perverted RSS mindset hobbles the BJP.

13 November 2010 The return of the RSS and, more importantly, its former sarsanghchalak , K.S. Sudarshan, to the headlines* gives me just the right excuse to recount the untold story of my one-on-one dinner with him at Nagpur, my Sudarshan moment. This was the evening before I recorded a long, tell-all interview ith him for NDTV’sWalk the Talk (April 2005) which set off tremors in the BJP that never really settled.** He cursed Vajpayee and all those who mattered to him, politically and personally, ascribed Uma Bharti’s unpredictability to her social (caste) status and ‘indifferent’ early upbringing, and generally held forth in the manner of the great, reckless headline hunters. But the fact is, I missed the much bigger story. Maybe because I had poor news judgement, certainly by the screaming standards of some of today’s news television. Maybe I was just being a fuddy-duddy. Or maybe, just maybe, because I was wise not to make myself look like a fool. As we were being wired for the recording, he asked me if I wanted to talk in detail about the points he had mentioned ‘last night’. No, Sudarshanji, I said with some alarm. Having learnt my ournalism in more conservative times, I did not particularly want to ‘ruin’ an entire interview listening to him hold forth on Sonia’s rise in India as a ‘Roman Catholic’ conspiracy ‘controlled from Italy’ (whose province he thought the Vatican was), or his incredible take on Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. But now that he has already gone ‘public’ with his conspiracy theories on Sonia, it is better for me to share with you his even more imaginative take on who killed Gandhi and how, which he shared with me over a very spartansubzi-dal-sukhi-roti meal sitting on the floor at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur. Better for me to write about this now before he decides to say it all in public the next time he appears in front of an audience. The key to understanding India’s plight, he said, right elbow resting thoughtfully on his raised knee, is to understand the Nehru parivar, how they have ‘conspired’ to take control of this country and to systematically destroy all that should have been dear to all ‘Hindustanis’. He started the story o this ‘conspiracy’ from Gandhi’s assassination for which the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha were ‘unfairly blamed’. This was the usual RSS lament, I thought, until he asked me, as if with genuine disbelief: ‘So, do you also believe that Godse killed Gandhi?’ ‘Is there any doubt?’ I asked. ‘The courts convicted him.’ ‘You people are so gullible,’ he said. ‘You do not even look at the facts.’ Then he started to explain the ‘facts’. See that picture of Godse with folded hands in front o

Gandhi. ‘If he had actually shot him, the bullet would have entered from a higher point in his body and exited from a lower point,’ he said. He asked me, further, if I knew the difference between someone being shot with a revolver and a pistol. ‘I am not sure I do,’ I said. ‘But how is that important?’ ‘Because the entry wound of a pistol shot is smaller than the exit wound and, in Gandhi’s case, it as the other way round. Yet they claimed Godse shot him with a pistol.’ ‘And how is that important?’ I asked, now worried that our dinner, where we were supposed to discuss areas that our interview would explore the next morning, was going into some kind of jadoo territory. ‘Because, from all evidence, Godse did not kill Gandhi. And you know what,’ he continued, ‘Nehru made sure no postmortem was conducted on Gandhi’s body. Because he did not want the truth to come out.’ ‘So then, Sudarshanji, who killed Gandhi?’ I asked. ‘Why ask me?’ he said, with a smile that was as conspiratorial as QED. ‘You can see who stood to benefit from Gandhi’s assassination. Everybody knows Gandhi was going to make Patel prime minister.’ ‘But, Sudarshanji, somebody did shoot Gandhi in front of hundreds of people,’ I asked. ‘Yes, somebody did. But notsaamne se, kintu peechhe se,’ he explained. ‘It was a do dhaari ki talwar’ (two-edged sword), a conspiracy to give the Nehru parivar unfettered power and to blame the Hindus for killing Gandhi. ‘And how do you know this, Sudarshanji?’ I asked. ‘There was this book written by a former police officer in Andhra Pradesh. I believe he exposed all these facts,’ he said. Of course, he said he had not read the book himself, did not remember its title or the name of its author and closed the argument with the finality of death, literally, by saying that the supposed cop-writer, whose name nobody could recall, had also obviously been dead for some time. Now that Sudarshan has returned to prime time from the wilderness, I wonder if I had missed an opportunity by not taking his cue to resume ‘discussions from last night’. But, really, if you take yourself seriously as a journalist, or even as a reasonably literate citizen, do you give time to such illiterate rubbish? The truth is, many in the BJP would also like to say that. But none would have the courage to raise such a question. After that Sudarshan interview rocked the party, many in the BJP and RSS told me, but Sudarshanji is like that only. That is why, they said, we keep him away from the media. But in this case, Sudarshan had himself reached out to me through his staff and set up that interview, so they ere notisable tohim, hideashim. But Sudarshan is just an individual. Does the BJP leadership debate if the problem with an individual, or with the RSS and its peculiar worldview? It is this blind, unquestioning devotion to an organisation and a philosophy which was born obsolete, if not sick, that has limited the BJP’s rise. Indian politics has space for an ideology a little to the right of centre, but not for the minority-bashing, xenophobic, neurotic nationalism and desighee-and-cow-urine economics that the RSS represents. Unless the BJP can dump that curse, it will continue to decline.

Postscript: How, then, does the rise of the BJP to power in 1998–2004 square with your theory, you might ask. The difference then was Vajpayee, who protected both his party and government from its ideological ‘uncles’ whose hatred for him, in turn, came out so sensationally in that Sudarshan interview. Vajpayee, actually, was cross with me over that interview. He did not speak to me for some time, and when he did, his first question was, ‘So, you were so happy when Sudarshanji was abusing me? You never stopped him.’ ‘But how could I? He is thesarsanghchalak ,’ I said cheekily. ‘Theek hai, humko gaali dena to unka banta hai, hum bhi kab unki nahin sunte hain? ’ he said, and we made up again. It is only because of his wisdom and liberal stature that the BJP was able to build a real coalition and rule India for six years. To get anywhere near power again, it will have to either invent another Vajpayee, or make a clean break from its ideological mentors. Neither looks like a real prospect now, when the new, young party president (Nitin Gadkari) draws his ‘power’ from the idea that he is a ‘Sangh’ appointee.

THAT FUNNY BOFORS FEELING If Parliament doesn’t begin work, the UPA could s lide i nto a paralysis lon ger than what gripped Rajiv 1987 onwards.

27 November 2010 It now looks like it’s been a very, very long time since the three heady days of the Obama visit. We had been generous enough to convene the winter session a little bit ahead of time to accommodate his visit. And since then, the same Parliament has not met for even one hour of legislative business. Do you also remember the first Indian to welcome Obama as he alighted from Air Force One in Mumbai? It was Ashok Chavan. He was fired (as Maharashtra chief minister) on charges of corruption and nepotism within eleven minutes of Obama’s departure from India. And the man he praised so much through his three days, for his wisdom, integrity, foresight and intellect, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is now being projected by his own partymen as super-honest ‘but’ too soft to handle the charges that are being hurled at him and his government. No prime minister of India needs Section 144 to protect him from his opposition MPs, and certainly this one does not need anticipatory bail from any scrutiny, including that of a JPC. For that is the lazy excuse being used by Congress people in whispers: if we concede the JPC* and it summons him, the poor fellow won’t be able to take it and ill quit. We all know that a fortnight is a long time in politics, but even for a society as adept at selfdestruction as ours, this one has been remarkable. All of a sudden, far from being a risen power (as Obama described us), we are beginning to look like one that is drifting without an anchor. There is no prospect yet of the logjam in Parliament being broken. The scandal that is the cause of this parliamentary crisis has receded in the background, as the talk now is centred on political and corporate intrigues, phone taps, leaked transcripts that throw not a sliver of light on the scam but ruin many reputations. Instead of getting any closer to catching the guilty in the telecom scam, then, we have so brilliantly succeeded in declaring ourselves a nationwhere all professions, from politics to bureaucracy, to business and now the judiciary and the media, are peopled by crooks. How does one describe this situation?Sab chor hain , but I do not know, nor have the patience to find out who the realchor is. We have seen this wave at least three times in the past decades. First, ith Mrs Gandhi in the mid-1970s, when widespread allegations of corruption led to Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement, sent our politics on a downward spiral and culminated in the Emergency. Second, with Bofors in 1987, and then with the Jain hawala case in 1995. Each of these nourished the same widespread belief that everybody was corrupt—so nobody trusted anybody to catch the real crooks, and ultimately nobody got caught. But each one ruined the tenure of a government. Bofors, that broke in 1987, is in fact a more striking example. Parliament stopped, all communication between the government and the opposition was reduced gaalis to , a JPC was set up

and turned out to be an eyewash, the cabinet split as dissidents led by V.P. Singh used the opportunity to break away and build a political challenge that ultimately defeated Rajiv Gandhi. Even more importantly, Bofors onward, his government became as ineffectual as it had seemed purposefully effective till then. India lost nearly half the tenure of a very stable, powerful government. You talk to the seniormost leaders of the UPA now, and they admit they are in a Bofors-like trap too early in this term. There are still three and a half years to go and if this is allowed to get more bitter, it could unleash a period of non-functionality even longer than Rajiv’s after 1987. This is exactly what’s going to happen if this session does not resume functioning. The BJP’s insistence on a JPC is silly because it would only serve to obfuscate the issue and save the guilty, as JPCs have done in the past. But is a JPC such a mortal threat to the UPA that they will not concede it, whatever the cost? Can the Congress afford to be so arrogant as to not accommodate the opposition on anything? No government can shut down its Parliament and join battle with the opposition on the streets eighteen months into power. And what about the opposition, particularly the BJP? Is a permanent parliamentary paralysis what they want? Since when has the total blocking of Parliament forever become a legitimate tactic for getting a demand met, howsoever important? They will tell you, smugly, that people will not accuse them of negative politics because they are so angry about telecom corruption. The good thing with the BJP is that, unlike the Congress, it has some internal democracy. But, unlike the Congress, it has no central authority. The seniors have been sidelined, and the younger lot think they have the Congress on the ropes and must not relent. But most of them are, by now, secondor third-term parliamentarians. Do they realise what a dangerous example they are setting for our politics? What if the parties in opposition in our state capitals also take the cue from them and start using the stalling of their respective assemblies as blackmail to get their demands? The result will be anarchy. And the BJP will share the blame for that equally with the Congress.

DIRTY BUSINESS That’s what the political class accuses India Inc. of while it cosies up to the crony capitalists.

11 Dece mber 2010 What does the Radia tapes–Raja saga tell you about the power of corporate India? You can take your cue from Deng Xiaoping (‘learn truth from facts’) or N.R. Narayana Murthy (‘look at the data first’), and the picture that emerges challenges the popular post-Radia view of rampaging corporate czars holding India to ransom. It may indeed be that corporate India is now at its weakest post-1991. Until a few months ago, Ratan Tata was chairman of the Investment Commission set up by UPA 1. Reporting directly to the prime minister, and including other eminent captains of Indian business, HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh and former Hindustan Lever chairman (and Gandhi family confidant) Ashok Ganguly, the commission was expected to attract big FDI. It was not only to sell the India story to foreign investors, but also to help them cut red tape and secure fast-track clearances. Today, if Ratan Tata says that he needed to hire Niira Radia as he did not have ‘permanent connections’ in Delhi to secure a level playing field for his business, what does it tell you about his power? Or that o corporate India? Normally you would have expected a group like the Tatas to hit all the right buttons and move on. But not in this phase in our post-reform political economy where corporate India has seen its power collapse exactly when there is talk of rampant crony capitalism. Just what is going on? The fact is, today you find the conventional private sector losing not just political clout, but even access, often seeing itself denied the social niceties and respect it had come to take for granted. Those running the three main chambers—CII, FICCI and ASSOCHAM—would never admit it, but their power is now at its lowest point since 1991. The prime minister rarely, if ever, talks to corporate India. Government representation at the CII–World Economic Forum annual showpiece, the India Economic Summit, has rapidly declined over the UPA’s six years. In fact, the edition last month was the poorest of all. The prime minister, of course, gave it a pass; Pranab Mukherjee made a brief visit to speak in his stead, and then most of the top ministers stayed away. This year’s summit had probably the poorest levels of interest ever, sometimes presenting empty halls to serious panels. Similarly, under the UPA, official Indian representation at Davos has steadily declined. At the January 2011 Davos meet, India is again the theme, for a rare second time in five years; and yet the CII and the World Economic Forum are struggling to get senior ministers to come. It is a strange paradox: the UPA enjoys the 9 per cent growth which funds its populist yojanas , but is shy of being seen with those who have made it possible, our entrepreneurs. How is one to explain this contradiction where corporate India is so orphaned that even a Ratan Tata has to hire a lobbyist from hell and Mukesh Ambani needs to pay for a share of her time as well?

(Once upon a time, a strategic phone call would have been enough.) Or when Sunil Bharti Mittal, one of India’s most successful self-made post-reform entrepreneurs, is driven up the political wall by a good-for-nothing minister like Raja? Or how come the redoubtable Anil Ambani has his coal linkages all tangled up while sundry nobodies with political linkages squat on millions of tonnes of reserves? This when almost everyone, from Raghuram Rajan to the Economist to Newsweek, ranks crony capitalism as the biggest threat to the India story. This paradox is rooted in economics as well as politics. Economics, because our political class has suddenly discovered an entirely new way of making money from—and with—the private sector, but not from the Tatas, Birlas, Ambanis and so on. In fact, it is a waste of time going to them collecting a few crores by cheque or a little bit here and there, as most of their companies are listed, ith foreign investments and auditors, and thus don’t quite have the flexibility to produce hundreds o crores in cash. Today’s political class needs money on a different scale altogether. And that can only be had from entrepreneurs of yet another ‘new’ economy built around land and natural resources. Spectrum falls in that category. After losing licences and quotas in 1991, the political class has now discovered a way of making much more through discretionary powers to allot, allocate, authorise the use of state-owned resources, or allowing the change of land use. Around most of our cities, the value of agricultural land can jump a hundred times if you change its use to residential or commercial. The politician today is happy with even a small percentage of this humongous arbitrage. He has to break no law, not even acquire that land. The builder buys, the neta changes its use. The same applies to mining leases, big infrastructure contracts where a percentage o cash or even benami equity is now built into the bid by many major contractors. That is why Raghuram Rajan is right in his latest book, Fault Lines , when he says that most of India’s new billionaires come not from conventional manufacturing, IT or finance businesses, but from infrastructure, real estate and mining, where the state—and politicians—still hold arbitrary powers and, therefore, arbitrage. One land deal can produce more money than a dozen top members of India Inc., so why bother about them any more? This is the economic reason why corporate India feels so lost now. The political reason is simple. It is rooted in the Congress party’s faulty reading of the 2004 verdict as being against the BJP’s India Shining, and therefore against anything and anybody that represents that ‘fraudulent’ idea. The logic being: poor farmers vote us to power, not fund managers. The question we need to ask is: what goodies can you take to the poor farmer, what rights to food, obs, education, loan waivers, if corporate India is not giving you growth, taxes, fiscal space, millions of new jobs? Congress cannot take growth for granted. Particularly not when, disillusioned with policy blockages of a new backlash are from New Delhi’s dreaded and now rejuvenated Bhavans, the biggest and and fearful finest Indian entrepreneurs now moving their investments overseas. Tata now has nearly 60 per cent of his turnover overseas; almost all of Mukesh Ambani’s big investments over the next decade ($12 billion) are committed to America. Aditya Birla, Anand Mahindra, Essar, Bharti are all looking outward. Traditional corporates are voting with their feet while the new billionaires of crony capitalism of land–natural resources–politics get entrenched, hand in glove with the many Rajas of our scary new politics.

UPA’S METEORIC FALL Can Congress arrest it with shrinking CMs, warring ministers and outside support from the Family?

18 Dece mber 2010 Just a year back, everything looked as if it was playing out to script for the UPA. Now it seems to have all gone wrong, much like the dramatic turn in a romantic couple’s fortunes after the interval in a 1960s Hindi movie. Except, just about eighteen months into a five-year term, it isn’t quite interval time yet for the UPA. And,unlike a Hindi movie of the 1960s or at any other time, in politics a happy ending cannot be presumed. The challenge UPA 1 had to tackle now feels like a breeze compared to the open war among members of the cabinet now—more precisely, Congress members of the cabinet. The seniormost ones are tired and disillusioned. The ‘young’ lot, as politicians in their late fifties and mid-sixties are described in India (factoid: Wen Jiabao is happy to be addressed as grandpa by schoolchildren, hile Prithviraj Chavan, the young, new Maharashtra chief minister, is exactly his age), are fighting, bickering, bitching and leaking against each other. It is a widely known fact, and easy to substantiate, that UPA 2 has emerged as the most internally fractious Indian cabinet since Morarji Desai’s Janata in 1977. On the eve of the AICC session, * the party’s leadership cannot even look at the states for succour and optimism. The Congress today has the most ineffectual chief ministers in the country. Its failure to stabilise Andhra after YSR’s sudden death and to build a new leader is only matched by its incompetence in messing up Maharashtra. The party has now ruled the state for eleven unbroken years under five chief ministers (Deshmukh served twice). The only other politically significant state the party controls, Rajasthan, presents an indifferent picture. The chief minister,** always a lightweight, is further weakened as the political centre o gravity of his state unit now resides in Delhi, in the formof PCC chief C.P. Joshi. The debacle in this eek’s by-elections and recent civic polls tells a story. Other Congress states, Jammu and Kashmir, Haryana, Assam, Goa and Pondicherry, are insignificant. Very few Congressmen dispute these facts. But, this does not make them rethink their politics. In fact, even if they tear their colleagues to shreds, or make patronising, even ridiculing remarks about the prime minister, the swagger is still all there. And it comes from the question all of them throw at you: but where is the opposition? Look at the situation within the BJP. But, post-Bihar, there are some stirrings. Nobody in the Congress would ever dare question the leadership, but for the first time in the history of UPA coalitions, some Congressmen have begun to doubt if their party’s future has indeed been pre-settled. In the three days preceding the Bihar results, I happened to run into at least six senior Congress

ministers and two general secretaries. The most pessimistic estimate of Congress seats was twenty. The most optimistic was sixty, and the person who made it would be most embarrassed if I mentioned his name now. But just four? Congressmen now wonder—once again, only in whispers—if something indeed has gone, or is going, wrong. They do not have to look far. Many, in fact most, of the Congress party’s current problems lie in the fact that they misread the verdict of 2009 to believe that the opposition had been vanquished forever. Since May 2009 Congressmen have been celebrating the ‘victory’ of 2014 and posturing, preparing, and, of course, poisoning their likely 2014 rivals’ lunch already. Jockeying for positions in a 2014 (Rahul Gandhi) government from May 2009 is about as illogical as a cricket team, however formidable and all-conquering, wanting to play the second innings first. This is where the party has blundered. All the problems that bedevil it today, squabbling or insolent ministers (particularly those that claim 10 Janpath’s blessings), restive allies, impatient and insecure general secretaries and apparatchiks and, worst of all, a frighteningly weakened prime minister and, more specifically, PMO, are rooted in this. You will see the Congress party’s formidable talent and experience on display at the AICC session. But all their collective wisdom and cleverness will not reverse the downslide unless they start to look within rather than draw comfort from the BJP’s situation. And if they wake up, they will also see two new realities in the national political balance of power. One, the post-2004 party–government compact where the party, or more precisely the Gandhi family, totally derisked itself by distancing itself from its government’s major decisions so it could later claim the credit for successes and disown its setbacks, like Sharm el-Sheikh, will no longer ork. People simply won’t accept it. And the party cannot go to polls in 2014 seeking an antiincumbency vote against its own government. So, from economics to environment, from diplomacy to terrorism, the party and the government have to work firmly on a sink-or-swim-together basis. Two, the party has to accept that the days when pan-national leaders could swing entire elections are over. Political and electoral power has now moved to the states. Look at the Indian election now like a best-of-nine-sets tennis match. The nine ‘sets’ are UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, MP, AP, Kerala, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Together these send 351 MPs to the Lok Sabha. Any coalition that wins five of these will automatically get close to 200 seats and the rest will then fall in place. How well placed is the UPA of December 2010 in this nine-set match of electoral tennis? An honest answer to that would be a sobering and useful theme to the AICC session, rather than the usual swagger and loud declarations of loyalty and sycophancy.

THERE ARE TWO CONGRESSES And on e Family will d ecide which one prevails. The deluded, nostalgic majority or a brave minority.

25 Dece mber 2010 That what should have normally been the silly season turned out to be such a politically charged fortnight was probably to be expected, with a much-delayed AICC plenary and the BJP’s big rally in the capital.* But the surprise of surprises is evidence of the first stirrings of some real introspection in the Congress. This change is probably led by none else than the Family. Sonia Gandhi’s belated and fond remembrance of Narasimha Rao is remarkable. ** The Congress has spent nearly a decade and a half disowning and condemning Rao, and generally holding him responsible for whatever may have led to the downturn in the party’s fortunes. The Babri Masjid was demolished on his watch and the Congress moved to soft Hindutva, leading, it was concluded, to the loss of the Muslim vote. So he was responsible for both calamities: decline of the Congress, and the rise of the Hindu Right. He was so reviled that the truck bearing his body was not allowed even symbolic entry into AICC headquarters. You could, indeed, dismiss this hint of Rao’s rehabilitation as a response to the challenge in Andhra. But I will be more optimistic in guessing that this is a signal for some subtle, and significant, course correction by Sonia Gandhi herself. The larger argument, however, is not about the political resurrection of a long-demised individual. It is about what and whose achievements the Congress party of today and, more significantly, of 2014 goes to the voter with. If it has seen the need to remember Rao after fifteen years, for how long could it afford to overlook the real legacy of the UPA’s ten years? This is an important question because in this new, and uncharacteristic, churning in the Congress today lies a fascinating interplay of two views. The dominant one, of course, is that the party needs no more than the name of the Gandhis and a return to the pre-Rao ideological positioning: hard socialism, hard secularism and harder antiAmericanism. This, it is argued, would bring back the old vote banks, Muslims, adivasis, Dalits and the poor in general. The challenger view, held by a very small, brave minority, is that slogans that got you votes until 1980 no longer work, nor can the mere name of the Family, particularly when more than half the population in 2014 would have been born after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. But this view will have a short half-life unless the Gandhis themselves embrace it. The Congress party’s instinctive old view was fully articulated by Digvijaya Singh at the AICC meet and if you read it with what he has been saying on Naxalism and tribals, the pattern becomes clear. His idea, and his is by no means an insignificant support base in the party, is to return to hard secularism (even more than socialism) and thereby first scaring Muslims about the RSS and then impressing them by fighting it. The only problem is, Muslims need no further persuasion to fear the

RSS. Even where they have abandoned the Congress, they have voted tactically to defeat the BJP. Except, they are no longer willing to be taken for granted. In each state they look for the party or candidate most likely to defeat the BJP and vote with that one purpose. So if the Congress does not have the ability (the Urdu word,auqaat , might be more apt) to defeat the BJP in, say, UP, they would not waste their vote out of some old affection and will vote for the SP or BSP instead. Where the Congress is a credible opposition to the BJP, as in Maharashtra, Andhra, Karnataka or even Gujarat, they vote for it. So this entire new strategic turn to hard RSS-bashing is so much hot air. The same would apply to the Congress Old Guard’s nostalgia for hard socialism. You talk sadly o the poor all the time, of two Indias, of the hapless aam aadmi who suffers for lack of connections, and the voter turns around and asks, so what have your party’s governments been doing for fifty years out of sixty-three since 1947? Some in the party now acknowledge the laziness of this approach. Because if it impressed, the party would not have lost its deposit in 221 of the 243 seats in Bihar. I have been saying that some of the lingering distortions in the Congress worldview are rooted in a faulty analysis on the 2004 verdict as being some kind of a permanent condemnation of the idea of a shining India. These distortions have also been compounded by a faulty reading of the 2009 verdict. You ask a Congressman, and he will tell you they won because of NREGA and farm loan waivers. Almost nobody would credit the re-election to five full years of 8 per cent growth. It is the NACdriven largesse, they say, that brought the poor back to the Congress. What does the data say? In Bihar, Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, where the largest percentage of the population is below the poverty line, the Congress got just 10 seats out of 86. Even if you add the other Bimaru states, MP and UP (but not Rajasthan which has moved on), the party’s tally was just 48 out of 208. So the poor and the tribals really did not return to the UPA in spite of NREGA, loan waiver and the Forest Rights Act. In fact, in 47 Scheduled Tribes seats countrywide, it won only 19. The ones who voted for it, on the other hand, were cities and upwardly mobile, urbanising, aspirational states. The Congress or its allies swept every major city (except Bangalore and Ahmedabad) and urbanising states. Out of the 204 seats in Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra and even Gujarat, it collected 134 seats, exactly two-thirds. You could argue, therefore, that what got the UPA re-elected was growth rather than povertarian largesse. Looking ahead to 2014, you could either believe that another five years of 9 per cent growth ould bring you even better results than 2009, and mould your slogans and political agenda accordingly, or make a hard reverse to 1980. But since 1991 did not merely mark the beginning of India’s modern growth story, but also the burial of old-style socialism, you can be forgiven for hoping that Sonia’s restoration of Narasimha Rao might mark the first stirrings of a welcome rethink.

IS ANYBODY OUT THERE? Mumbai’s most powerful frantically dial the Dilli darbar; why nobod y’s taking the call.

22 January 2011 Speaking at a memorial meeting at Birla Matushri Sabhagriha on 13 July 2002, a week after Dhirubhai Ambani’s death, I had made a semi-facetious comment on why he attracted so much awe and envy, respect as well as hostility. I said: to understand the phenomenon of Dhirubhai, you have to see Mumbai and Delhi as two different and distant sovereign republics that are yet to establish diplomatic relations with each other. In Delhi, you acquire power through politics and use that to collect wealth. In Mumbai, you acquire money through enterprise and use that to get, or buy, power in Delhi. Dhirubhai was a unique Indian entrepreneur: he spanned the two ‘republics’ as no one else has done before him and after. He had power in Mumbai and had the key to Delhi. That’s the reason he was such a larger-than-life figure. But this week’s argument is not about Dhirubhai. It is about the loss of clout of the republic of Mumbai and, by implication, corporate India. This is also about how New Delhi has again acquired pre-eminence over Mumbai in matters of business for the first time since the reforms began in 1991. Many of the capital’s Bhavans have been restored to their old power and glory; the Congress party’s discourse has become suspicious of, and hostile to, corporate India; and some individual ministers have arrogated to themselves discretionary and arbitrary powers that you last saw only during V.P. Singh’s mercifully short raid raj. It is, in fact, in this light that you have to read the ‘open letter’ * written by some of India’s most loved corporates, accompanied by some of our most respected former judges and regulators. Far from being able to influence policy, these conscience-keepers of corporate India are now reduced to making desperateappeals to New Delhi’s good sense. And how much clout they now have is evident in how little response their letter has evoked. Nobody in the UPA government has responded. Or in the BJP. Nobody has even made a token statement sharing their concern. Nobody has invited them for a conversation to ask why they are so sullen when the economy is growing at 8.5-plus, and just a week before Indian entrepreneurs’ beauty parade in Davos. Today’s UPA isn’t sure how it should be conversing with business; and those of its leaders, including the prime minister, who still speak for free economy, are generally sniped at by the Great (and rapidly growing) Congress Whisper Factory as being anti-poor and not ‘in sync’ with the party, or with 10 Janpath. Of course you could fault the signatories of this open letter for being too cautious. That is why their letter is so unspecific in what it is complaining about, or the actions they want taken in redress.

It is full of platitudes and, frankly, in places reads like the usual rant, though more gently worded, you hear from the anchors of two-and-a-half muck-raking TV news channels these days—of course much more elegantly and gently worded. That, also, is why the letter loses much of its impact. You need to pick up an oversized magnifying glass and search between the lines. Then, maybe, you will find what it is all about: the use of arbitrary powers by many ministers; the return of widespread rent-seeking, political arrogance, bureaucratic negativism, of environmental obstructionism that harms the poor; poor communication between the Centre and the states; even the BJP has been chided for confusing ‘dissent’ with ‘disruption’. People of such eminence have written all this in such subtle language— almost like the Urdu of old Lucknow—that the meaning is lost. Nobody in today’s Mumbai wants to take panga with UPA 2’s Delhi any more. Look at the stature of the people who have to raise their voice. Two of them, Ashok Ganguly and Deepak Parekh, were members of the prime minister’s Investment Commission. (The third, Ratan Tata, is of course in the Supreme Court asking who leaked his private phone conversations even if he as wire-tapped legally.) Bimal Jalan and M. Narasimham are former RBI governors. Sam Variava and B.N. Srikrishna are two of our most respected former Supreme Court judges, and Azim Premji is not only one of our greatest IT czars, but also our most pre-eminent Muslim entrepreneur and the largest philanthropist. These are not odd-ball busybodies, or retired, marginal people fulminating. Many are UPA favourites. Anu Aga is on Sonia Gandhi’s NAC, a body today more powerful than the cabinet, which it routinely attacks. Justice Srikrishna’s report on Telangana has just been accepted by the government. Deepak Parekh’s wisdom is routinely sought by government, even during a hopeless crisis like Satyam. And Ashok Ganguly is not just a Rajya Sabha member nominated by this government, but also has the ear of Sonia Gandhi. You wonder, therefore, just what is going on. India’s growth is robust in spite of stalled governance, widespread negativity and ‘noise’, and it is fuelled almost entirely by its private enterprise—and yet its most respected leaders feel so left out and vulnerable. The government is led by several business-friendly people, including the prime minister. Yet there is a disconnect between corporate and political India, between the Congress and business, between Mumbai and Delhi. One of the two ‘sovereign republics’ has recovered the ground it had lost to the other because of reforms, but the two still haven’t established diplomatic relations. That job cannot be done by Murli Deora, the new corporate affairs minister, even though Somnath Chatterjee once described him as the MP from Nariman Point. The prime minister will need to start talking. The drop in FDI figures lately has been precipitous; and if more Indian entrepreneurs, demoralised by the Congress’s pinko newspeak and corruption, take their investments overseas, growth will stall goodbye. 2012 on.* Besides the great India growth story, you can then also kiss the NAC freebie fantasies

LOK SABHA, 201 4 That election is now wide open. The winner will be the party which makes the boldest move away from Old India Politics.

26 February 2011 The first week of a functioning Parliament in nearly six months has made one thing dramatically clear: that the election of 2014 is no longer a done deal. Opening exchanges showed a new energy in the opposition, particularly the BJP. In a debate that must rank among the classics of our recent parliamentary history, Sushma Swaraj notably worsted veteran Pranab Mukherjee, point by point, and then gave us one of those moments you cherish in parliamentary politics, by giving a smiling Pranabda a friendly hug at the end of the day. It’s been a long time since we saw a moment like this in our Parliament. The BJP’s mood is easier to explain. At this time last year, it was staring at a hopeless future. Its top leaders engaged in a Mahabharata of sorts, no happy turning point in sight. Across the ideological fence, Congressmen were sharpening the knives as well, to stab their own in the back as they ockeyed for the spoils of an election already ‘won’ in 2014. And, in the process, brutally undermining their own government much like a body afflicted with some autoimmune disease that begins attacking itself. Both sides would acknowledge that an upset of sorts has now been caused. Not that the tables have turned but the next election has been thrown open in a way nobody had anticipated. Five things have made it happen, three of which are rooted in our major states, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Tamil Nadu. The UPA can’t repeat its near-sweep of 2004 and 2009 in Andhra and Tamil Nadu. And the disaster of Bihar stunned the Congress. Even more than its tally of four seats, the shocker was the fact that its candidates lost their deposits in 221 out of the 243 seats it contested. For the NDA, on the other hand, the success of Bihar showed what kind of political gains were available in the new India if you were willing to dump old, exclusionist, negative agendas. Bihar has, therefore, emerged as that fortuitous turning point that an opposition in the dumps prays for. The two factors outside of these states are the obvious ones: the withering damage the UPA has suffered because of corruption charges and the discordant, disruptive noises that began emerging from within the Congress exposing its disastrous complex of ideological laziness, conflicting ambitions and political imprudence. To understand this shift, National Interest has to revisit its long-held theory that an Indian national election is now like a best-of-nine-sets tennis match—whoever wins five of these will take the trophy. These nine ‘sets’ are our large states where electoral fortunes can change: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Andhra, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka. Together, these account for 351 seats in the Lok Sabha, so whichever coalition wins five of these is

likely to cross the 200 mark anyway. That 200 is the new 272 in our Lok Sabha now, as you would presume that the same coalition would collect some more seats out of the remaining 192, and if it is still short, some small parties with ideologies totally fungible with power would join it. If you were a Congress strategist, that equation would look far from reassuring today. And you would be a fool not to acknowledge, at least to yourself, that this will be a much closer election than you had expected it to be. And how does the BJP pass this ‘best-of-nine-sets’ test? It would err in hoping to ride Bihar’s euphoria to victory in the Lok Sabha, because it does not exist in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra, and has been decimated in Uttar Pradesh. So where do the UPA and NDA—or, more accurately, the Congress and BJP—go from here? The lesson for each is somewhat similar. The next election is its to win or lose depending on whether it can dump some of its awful, outdated and politically suicidal habits or not. Take the Congress first. Its entire politics is built around loyalty to one family. It also implies that the party will build no other strong leaders, particularly regional chieftains like YSR, Hooda and Sheila Dikshit. The party has none such in these nine key states? To expect Rahul to go out and win all these states by himself will be a tough call in 2014, when so many of India’s voters would have been born after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. So the Congress will have to build a new set of genuinely empowered state leaders. The BJP, similarly, should know from its Bihar experience that its srcinal Muslim-hating, narrow Hindutva is now outdated. In a state with a sizeable Muslim vote, the BJP has won 91 of the 102 seats it contested, possibly the highest strike rate (90 per cent) for any party ever in our history. Would it have done as well if Modi, Mandir, Hindutva had been floating in the Bihar air? Only if it takes that logical lesson forward, apologises to Chandrababu Naidu, Naveen Patnaik and Jayalalithaa, can it put together a coalition that will once again begin to look like a winner. Remember the nine-set match. The first week of this budget session has confirmed to us that the election of 2014 is now open. The winner would be the party that makes that bold, final and convincing move from its outdated politics of grievance to India’s wonderful new politics of aspiration.

THE GREAT LETDOWN UPA 2 got a mandate from an aspirational, impatient India. How its lack of conviction is frittering this away.

30 April 2011 There are parallels in the mandates that Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress won in December 1984 and Sonia Gandhi’s UPA in May 2009. In both cases an aspirational electorate brought back an incumbent to power on a promise of change. A fortnight from the second anniversary of UPA 2, you can also begin to see parallels in the pace with which the Congress of 1984 squandered its mandate, and the UPA now. Rajiv Gandhi was undone by his party’s old guard, who he had taken on frontally too soon. He had not yet prepared his party or public opinion for the break from the past that he articulated so bravely in his speech at the Bombay AICC session (in 1985). When the formidable immune system of entrenched old interests struck back, he did not have the skills to fight back. The move downhill began just as his government entered its third year. UPA 2 began its decline even before it was two. For one, it had brought along its Bofors from UPA 1, the telecom scam. But to hold the telecom scam primarily responsible for UPA 2’s predicament would be to oversimplify the case. Rajiv Gandhi’s politics started going downhill with his pandering to the Muslim Right on the Shah Bano judgement that alienated moderate Muslims within his own party, liberals among his voters and gave the Hindu Right a cause. From then to Bofors and the shilanyas at Ayodhya, to please the devout Hindus instead, it was one long series of political blunders with no redemption or recovery. UPA 2’s blunders are of a different nature, a direct result of fundamentally flawed politics. This government was voted back to power by a resurgent India making a bold move from the politics of grievance to the politics of aspiration, something this newspaper also underlined on the day after the results in a front-page editorial (‘Hands down’, IE, 17 May 2009). But it would seem that once elected, it forgot all about that aspirational young India and slipped back into its own old, povertarian, everything-is-wrong-where-are-we-headed discourse. Not a step was taken on economic reforms, if anything, some were reversed as so many central ministers, now full of the arrogance o re-election, were back to the old Congress instinct of extortion and rent-seeking. From day one, UPA 2 seemed like it was embarrassed by the very factors that had given its voters such aspirational belief. It was shy of talking growth, employment generation, modernisation, even national pride. It was shy of sending a thank-you card of some kind to those who had voted it back to power. In 2009, the UPA won almost every single city in a rapidly urbanising India. Yet, rather than reform urban governance, it sat silently as one urban agency after the other became more corrupt, more whimsical and more cruelly authoritarian, and mostly in cities under its own governments. Ask

anybody in Delhi who has to take an MCD permit to build something or get a certificate from the DDA. Can you even get a birth certificate, a driving licence, a passport in time without paying somebody? You are first not told what you can build, and after you build, the same guys come to demolish it. In Mumbai, no apartment buyer knows how much square-footage he is paying for and hat he will get. All cities are short of school and college seats, and a child is doomed unless her uncle is a big shot who can swing her into a decent school. The UPA should have begun to address these issues from day one in their second innings. They did nothing of the sort, and the result is the mainly well-heeled, but angry and humiliated, city folk who are walking around with candles,Mera ‘ neta chor hai ’ tattoos and demanding that their MPs be fed to vultures or dogs, or both. An aspirational society is an impatient society. Even more so when it is so young, and getting younger. Nobody in the Congress or the UPA has been talking to this India, whether in cities or villages. This has been the quietest, the most shy government in India’s history. If the mood at Jantar Mantar is anti-politician or for an apolitical system, this has been an incredibly apolitical government, which is a tragedy. Because in a democracy, politicians must speak with the people, to sell their ideas, plans, explain their mistakes, promise redress, and so on. But here, Sonia and Rahul rarely, if ever, speak in public. They almost never speak to the media or make an intervention in Parliament and, rarer still, on behalf of the government. The party behaves as if this government has been outsourced to bureaucrats. The prime minister too speaks rarely and his minders seem to not only draw great comfort from it, but also take pride in it, as if they have a prime minister they need to protect and hide from public interaction and gaze. If you do not speak to the voters for two full years, they will turn to somebody, to the courts, to high-decibel TV anchors, to Anna Hazare. Petrified Congressmen are today coming out in defence of politics and democracy. But their own party treated this government as if politics was India’s curse and only what was apolitical was virtuous. The National Advisory Council (NAC) was formed with a statutorily mandated position, and Sonia Gandhi related to it (in public perception) much more strongly than to her government. In the name of civil society, the NAC was given the powers to not only draft legislation but also to attack the government and its policies relentlessly. That is why the Congress now sounds so hollow hen it questions the demand that ‘civil society’ draft the new Lokpal legislation. If Sonia’s civil society can do it, why not Anna’s? And please stop giving us sanctimonious lectures on Parliament’s sovereignty over law-making. These, the depoliticisation of its own political approach and a clinical but systematic distancing o the party and its top leadership from its government, are UPA 2’s equivalent of Rajiv Gandhi’s premature assault on the old guard and the Shah Bano bill. Telecom and other scams have filled the moral spaceSingh thus vacated to importantly, become today’s andtotoreverse symbolise popular If Sonia, Manmohan and, most RahulBofors, still want the slide and anger. not write off 2014 as well, they will have to totally reboot their politics.

THE SUMM ER FREEZE The government in lockdown, Congress in disarray, its leadership silent—has the end game begun?

18 June 2011 Finally, there is unanimity on one thing in New Delhi: that this has become our most dysfunctional real government in three decades. Real, to distinguish it from the obviously temporary arrangements like Chandra Shekhar’s, Gowda’s and Gujral’s, described by the late Vithal Gadgil in his immortal phrase as ‘ten-day wonders’. It passes the buck to GoMs and EGoMs, which in turn only make news for postponing their meetings. The government is too scared to raise petroleum prices, treating the three-figure Nymex and Brent quotes with suspension of disbelief. Indecision over coal mining is blighting power generation, and waffling over the Cairn–Vedanta and Reliance–BP deals is being atched with dismay by foreign investors. Appointments of heads of the most important PSU giants like ONGC and UTI, of our most vital infrastructure organisation, NHAI, even the CVC are stuck. There is no progress on the ambitiously high-sounding National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC), though the president promised it in her address to Parliament. Our higher defence organisation is a mess, with chiefs speaking out of turn and an unedifying controversy over the army chief’s birth certificate which is not being set at rest one way or the other, thereby dividing the brass. Such is the state of paralysis that even members of this cabinet, senior leaders of the ‘party’ and definitely its furious coalition partners all acknowledge it with a shrug of helplessness. We have seen how devastating a government which is non-functional despite a majority can be in West Bengal in the two years under Buddhadeb since May 2009. Now to have a government like that at the Centre, and that too for three more years? It is a frightening prospect. Businessmen are fleeing, taking their new investments overseas. The markets are usually the first to sense policy paralysis. The markets, languishing in the third position among the world’s worst performers in the past twelvemonths, have brushed aside Egypt to become the second worst. Given the mood of dismay in Dalal Street, Russians should be feeling threatened at the bottom. The paralysis in the government is matched by the confusion in the Congress party. Its carefully scripted strategy of distancing itself from all government decisions except the most obviously populist ones has now unravelled and backfired. While the government finally responded to this by suspending all decision-making on anything even remotely controversial, it is the party that is now getting the rap for all the scams, some real, some exaggerated and some (as a most eminent and honest scientistentrepreneur, Kiran Karnik, explained in an interview with me, IE, 8 March 2011) mostly imaginary like ISRO/Devas. Over the past three weeks I have been stopped by ordinary people at airports, in shopping malls, at a petrol pump, in a spiritual ashram, at the national athletic games in Bangalore

and so on with a question that seems to have become a clamour: why are you in the media so scared of the Gandhis? Why is no one exposing their humongous stash overseas? It is all bunkum, of course, and in any case the beauty of Swiss accounts is that nobody needs to go to Switzerland to do anything with them. But the Congress defends itself very poorly when it merely responds by calling those making such allegations deranged or RSS whisperers, as if the RSS is the new ISI. People of India are not stupid. They know who to trust and who to laugh at. But the Congress party steps on its own toes by treating even its top leaders’ travels as some kind of a national secret. So far, the Congress has got away with treating its top leaders as some kind of an endearing, mysterious, aloof royalty. The use-by date on that self-imposed mystique is now over. Ditto for the Gandhi family. The strategy of controlling politics and government from a distance ithout directly speaking to the people has contributed to the current paralysis. The Congress is not the Communist Party of China, where you had to face-read Mao or Deng to figure out what the party line was. In this increasingly young, aspirational India of 2011, leaders have to talk not just to their partymen but also to their people. Because if they don’t, the so-called civil society, hyperactive udges and a hyperventilating media will grab that space. If you see this peculiar party–government arrangement, it is a bit like you send out a nightwatchman* to play out the difficult half-hour at the end of the day, so your main batsman, some Sachin Tendulkar, can come and shine the next morning. That is the way the party looked at UPA 2, presuming it had already won 2014. But it forgot that five years of governance were not the difficult last hour in a day’s play, but an entire innings. The main batsmen (in this case, Rahul) can no longer be hidden in the safety of the pavilion. He has to step out and speak up. So must Sonia. This has been a remarkably unique period in our political history, where the three seniormost leaders of the establishment have not been speaking to us, the people, as a matter of policy and strategy. It is not working. The victory they had taken for granted in 2014 is now most certainly a fantasy.

MUMBYE How the city of dreams is becoming the global metaphor for an urban nightmare—and all that’s wrong with India.*

16 July 2011 Here is a question and a proposition rolled into one: is Mumbai the new Calcutta? And the choice of the new name for one and the old one for the other is deliberate. There was a time when Calcutta was the globally celebrated metaphor for all that was wrong with India. In depictions like Dominique Lapierre’s City of Joy , the poverty, the dysfunctionality of that city, was the benchmark for all that could go wrong with Third World urban sprawl. Rajiv Gandhi brought the decline of the city to national consciousness by proclaiming that the city was dead. Now, not only has Mumbai become the new Calcutta, it also does not have the comfort of having Mother Teresa’s touch. Check out the signals from popular culture. Four of the most prominent recent books centred on Mumbai (Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra,Shantaram by Gregory Roberts, Suketu Mehta’s aximum City and most recently Aravind Adiga’sLast Man in Tower ) have each drawn from the seamier underbelly of India’s clichéd city of dreams. Two of the most celebrated India-themed foreign films,Slumdog Millionaire and Salaam Bombay, have followed the same pattern. Not to be left behind, Bollywood is also back to its old pessimistic view of its own city, as the success of Once

Upon a Time in Mumbai (with a sequel in the works) shows. In fact, today almost all that is optimistic in popular culture is north/Delhi-based, fromBand Baaja Baaraat to Rab Ne Bana Di odi . Even the new bestselling chicklit is based in Delhi, Anuja Chauhan’sZoya Factor and Advaita Kala’s Almost Single . And this, in a city with a well-earned notoriety for being wildly unkind to young women. Repeated terrorist attacks and bombings are only the most visible symptoms of Mumbai’s decline. The boast of developing it into Asia’s new financial centre, a new Shanghai, is now an insult to India’s fastest diminishing city.Its policing is a disaster, the underworld is making a comeback. It has lost nearly 400 lives to terror attacks in five years. And the answer to the question ‘Why Mumbai?’ may lie in the fact that here more than anywhere else do terror modules find refuge in the underworld. A flourishing underworld and sprawling slums provide Mumbai a unique sanctuary for terror. And hat do we have to fight them? A most politicised and faction-ridden police leadership. And a police rank and file which, if it is fortunate, finds shelter in one of the city’s rotting chawls. I invite you to visit any of these. How can a man living such a poor quality of life with his family have a sense o pride in his city, or his uniform? It is still a marvel it manages to produce heroes like Tukaram Omble (who died clutching Kasab’s AK-47). This is further compounded by the fact that the police reports to R.R. Patil, Maharashtra’s home minister, whose first holy objective is to fix Mumbai’s ‘rotting’ morality. So he would shut down

dance bars while the larger underworld and terror modules flourish and his police force gets more divided and demoralised. Such is the paralysis that most of the purchases planned after 26/11 have not been made. You cannot build a global financial centre in a city whose law and order is so uncertain. Nor can you do so in a city which is adding no new and modern schooling and higher education facilities. Deepak Parekh, one of the most respected residents of Mumbai, speaks with great pain that he has so few seats in the reputed Bombay Scottish, which he presides over, that he has to deny admissions in its Powai branch to the children of professors from the neighbouring IIT. There are too few college seats, too few engineering and medical colleges of quality and repute. No surprise then that some o the most important figures in the financial and corporate world are now relocating to Delhi. Just over the past year, two of the shiniest stars of global banking have moved to Delhi, harassed by the nightmare of traffic, infrastructure and possibly a sense of insecurity. Most of Mumbai’s infrastructure decisions are lost in some kind of a dreaded politico-bureaucratic orbit. The city took a decade to build a tiny sea link at a time when the Chinese build one fourteen times its size in four years and make no song and dance about it. What kind of a commercial capital can it be if it does not even offer its residents one air-conditioned train seat for their daily commute? (Delhi now has 2.5 million, and Calcutta, 600,000.) Can a city with just one north–south artery be Asia’s financial centre? Not when ust one strategically parked and booby-trapped truck can slice it neatly into two, snapping all contact between its only airport and downtown. For a long time every decision taken by the Maharashtra government was presumed to carry the stink of corruption. Now we have a chief minister* whose personal honesty nobody questions, but ho does not take any major decisions. Preventing corruption by not taking any decisions is a bit like banishing AIDS by banning sex. There is, however, an essential difference between the declining Calcutta of old and the Mumbai of now. Unlike Calcutta, whose residents always maintained their love and loyalty to the city and resented any criticism of it, Mumbai’s residents are now among the angriest Indians. A desperate sullenness has replaced what used to be eternal optimism once upon a time in Mumbai. These bombings will surely hasten some decisions. But that will not be a solution if Mumbai has to survive as a self-respecting modern city and not degenerate into a Third World equivalent of what New York was before Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned it up. The new Shanghai is a dream that never ill be. It can, however, be redeemed only in one way: if we can free Mumbai, and other major cities (like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta), from being colonies of their state-level politicians. Can we at least get the two-dozen-odd infrastructure decisions fast-forwarded in Mumbai, some decongestion and the police force cleaned up?

DECIDE ON THE DOCTOR And h ere’s one possibl e prescription for the ailing rest.

1 October 2011 Here are the three most popular political questions these days: is UPA 2 dead, or not quite dead yet but gasping for breath, and is it possible to revive it? There isn’t a fourth possibility in this equation. Let’s try to simplify this in Test cricket terms. In May 2009, the UPA’s second term could be seen as the beginning of a new Test match as favourites. But the script has gone wrong. So today, it is like it came out to bat and was 82 all out. It has been asked to follow on, chasing a big deficit. It seems headed for the political equivalent of a stunning innings defeat on the third day of this political ‘Test’ match, or 2012, the third year of this Lok Sabha. So the basic reading is: not dead, or nearly dead, but down on its knees, following on, and hopeless. Some of the most stirring fightbacks in cricket history have come after follow-ons. But team managements and captains have to do something bravely different to make that happen. Like, for example, changing the batting order. Or threatening some irresponsible batsmen with the sack. Is the UPA (or rather the Congress) capable of doing that? First of all, the Congress has to decide whether it wants to continue with Manmohan Singh as its prime minister. If it doesn’t, it should end his agony now. And if it wants him to stay, which I presume is the case, it should say so to its utterly unruly Congress contingent in the Union cabinet, so selfdestructively unruly that the only comparison you would find appropriate is the Pakistani cricket team. The party leadership has to then ask all its Shoaib Akhtars to fall in line, or be dropped. No scuttling of cabinet proposals backed by the prime minister, and the political equivalent of capital punishment if anybody is seen undermining his authority (‘my conscience would not have allowed it but I was under pressure from the PMO’ kind of stuff). You either make sure your prime minister’s rit runs, or people will find another prime minister. People now have choices and no patience. And they do not always share your contempt for your opposition. If this first, prime ministerial question is settled, you can move on. Identify islands of impatience ithin your top brass. Tell Pranab Mukherjee that he will be nominated for Rashtrapati Bhavan next July. Your usual way would be to make him—and all other aspirants—wait till the last day, until their nails have all been chewed into their bellies. Now that luxury is not available. You need your most important—but lately faltering—cabinet member at peace with himself. Not angry, impatient, frustrated. Next, tell Chidambaram, who has been keen to get back to finance from home, to wait just a bit, that he will cross the North Block aisle as Pranab moves to Rashtrapati Bhavan. That will settle the issue with—and between—these big two. Who will then replace Chidambaram in home? Start now, by bringing Sheila Dikshit into the

cabinet. S.M. Krishna, one of the nicest, most gracious people you’d meet in politics, has to be most respectfully offered a Raj Bhavan.* Dikshit’s induction will achieve several things. One, you will bring an experienced, true-blue Uttar Pradesh politician, with experience and a thick skin, into the cabinet. See how skilfully she handled the CAG report on the Commonwealth Games compared to other blundering Congressmen. She will be the first woman in the Cabinet Committee on Security since the passing away of Indira Gandhi, and she would also be the first member from the Hindi heartland in this most powerful body in UPA 2. Of course, the second benefit would be the end of bloodletting between her and Ajay Maken, provided he is appointed Delhi chief minister. The Congress’s challenge of winning Delhi for the fourth time in 2013 will keep him busy and quiet. The next steps will be the toughest because they will challenge the party’s own entrenched immune system. Consider this fact: six of the seven fourth-term members in this Rajya Sabha are from the Congress. (The seventh is the BJP’s S.S. Ahluwalia, and guess what? His first two terms were courtesy the Congress!) Of the third-term members, the score is 13 out of 20. In fact, only 26 out o the 153 first-time Rajya Sabha members now are from the Congress. In the twenty-member Congress Working Committee, only five—including Sonia and Rahul—are members of the Lok Sabha. What does this tell us? That the party has been overwhelmed by political squatters who bring no votes or seats but are so very hot at gossip, intrigue and parlour games. They have no base, and little real talent but sycophancy. So here is what to do. Ask every two-term Rajya Sabha MP who has been rewarded with a cabinet position, or a place in the party hierarchy, to choose a constituency now. He should nurse this constituency and must contest for the Lok Sabha next time round. That one step, the prospect of facing an election and that too probably earlier than 2014, would cool all fratricidal ardour and bring discipline back in this cabinet. It is not insignificant that most of the infighting in this cabinet takes place amongst these permanent Rajya Sabha-ists with nothing to lose. They are also the most prolific and brazen at challenging the prime minister’s authority and gratuitously dropping the Gandhis’ name. Carry on from here. Ask the seniormost amongst these to go and win back their states for the party. Assign Digvijaya Singh to bring back Madhya Pradesh which he lost in 2003. Veerappa Moily, helped by an able Jairam Ramesh, should win back Karnataka, and Ahmed Patel should focus fulltime on defeating Modi in Gujarat. All three states are run by the BJP, bring eighty-three seats to the Lok Sabha and will hold the key to power in 2014. These stalwarts, with their skills and experience, are needed to defeat the BJP in its strongholds, rather than to be permanent intriguers and self-styled histleblowers against their own government. It is a lot of ask, you might say, using a cricketing phrase. But it is the only way out. Otherwise, an innings defeat is guaranteed. And I am happy to stick my neck out and predict that, irrespective of hat my voting preference might be.

THE OFFICER RAJ As UPA 2 drifts, bureaucrats, former and serving, move in for the kill.

15 October 2011 On the last working day of September, the Nandan Nilekani-led UID Authority received a rather clinical-sounding communication from the CAG informing him that he was sending in a team to conduct a performance audit of UPA 2’s flagship programme. Now, the UID was not due for audit this year, so this was some kind of special initiative. And sudden too. Because on the morning of the very next working day, 3 October, Monday, the CAG team was sitting in the UID offices. It was almost like a tax or CBI raid.* Now, you could argue either way on the constitutionality or justification behind such a sudden move, particularly when there hasn’t been even a whiff of any financial wrongdoing on the part of the UID. Even in terms of performance, it may be much too premature for audit evaluation. But the UID has been draggedinto a bureaucratic turf battle with some sections of the Planning Commission, and it is no secret on Raisina Hill that the opposition to the project (and relative financial autonomy given to it) is led by Sudha Pillai, a redoubtable IAS officer now serving as secretary to the Planning Commission. To be fair, she has been open in questioning certain aspects of the way the project is being run. And it is probably only a coincidence that the current CAG, Vinod Rai, not only happens to be her 1972 batchmate, but also shares with her their parent cadre of Kerala. We have no evidence at all of the two working in concert in any way, and so let us simply presume that each one has been acting on his/her own, driven by bona fide doubts about the project. But what is evident is that each of them is at least individually challenging a programme so precious not only to this government, but also to the Gandhis. Let’s not take a position on whether this is a good or a bad thing. Let us simply say that such things are nearly unprecedented in New Delhi. If you’ve been observing our politico-bureaucratic complex closely over the past few months, you ill find many such things that were hitherto extremely rare. Some examples: — On 29 July, Ashwani Kumar, the minister of state for science and technology, threw a dinner party in honour of the new andoften CVChave to which senior political leaders and top ambassadors werecabinet invited.secretary Now, how you other seen ministers holding parties to welcome new bureaucratic appointees? In the British system we follow, in fact, the cabinet secretary is the clerk of the cabinet. — Just a fortnight back, the Indian Coast Guard took out advertisements (including in this paper) announcing the launch of two new ships. One of these was launched by the wife of the secretary, defence production, and the other by the wife of the joint secretary. So far, you

thought these ceremonial, publicised launches were the privilege of the political class. With the politicians hiding in bunkers now, came the bureaucrats. And now their spouses have joined the party. — Almost every day now you see civil servants, particularly those from economic ministries, on your TV screens. From finance to power to coal to oil and gas, almost all key economic ministries have seen their top civil servants emerge as their most visible spokespersons. On top of this bureaucratic star cast was, of course, our former home secretary, G.K. Pillai. In fact, the only truly invisible civil servant is the seniormost of them all, the cabinet secretary, who, such a nice, self-effacing man, will most likely tell you that that is the way it is meant to be. — This government is under a legal assault of sorts from more retired civil servants than any in India’s history. At least three former chief election commissioners, one former cabinet secretary, seventeen former central government secretaries or equivalent and four former DGPs are in court, mostly with PILs, against this government. This list also includes a real surprise, a former air chief, Air Chief Marshal S. Krishnaswamy, who has joined a PIL questioning the appointment of directors to SEBI. And as this is being written, a group of former high-ranking government officials, led by former Union cabinet secretary T.S.R. Subramanian, and including former CEC N. Gopalaswami among others, have filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010. As they would say in bureaucratese, this list is by no means conclusive, or even exhaustive. But it does give you the picture. That with the weakening of the political authority, its ministers hiding in fright, our civil services are enjoying a golden era of unfettered, unquestioned power. They are controlling their ministries, with the political bosses afraid of questioning any bureaucratic input as it ould later be seen as a scam by a regulator or a watchdog (CAG, CVC, CBI), all totally manned by brethren from the same civil service. The result is an unprecedented civil service coup. You may also want to add to it the fact that most of the civil society groups—on all sides—are led by former bureaucrats (N.C. Saxena, Aruna Roy and Harsh Mander of Sonia Gandhi’s NAC; Kiran Bedi and Arvind Kejriwal of Anna’s team; and E.A.S. Sarma, B.D. Sharma and others of the anti-big project opposition loosely built around Medha Patkar). From all formulations it now also seems that the new Lokpal, whatever the nature of the final bill, would also be mostly manned by former bureaucrats selected by a committee with a preponderance of their own former colleagues. Can you blame the bureaucracy for this? They are simply walking into a vacuum created by a political leadership which is not willing to stand up for its beliefs or even bona fide decisions. It’s been ceding ground to all other claimants: the judiciary, civil society, RTI activists and now its own civil servants. The net result is this creeping acquisition of state power by the civil service. The state of this government is best captured by that brutal, if sexist, old saying from the Hindi heartland: garib ki joru, sab ki bhaujai (a weak man’s wife is everybody’s sister-in-law). Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Many, in fact most, of these civil servants are probably honest, ell-meaning Indians—so what is wrong if they displace our bumbling politicians?

I am reminded of a story that former US Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill says he would tell routinely to his students at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. Bureaucrats, he said, were like doctors and nurses in the emergency ward of a hospital. When a patient was wheeled in, their job was to follow standard operating procedures (SOPs) and wait for the specialists (the political leaders) to arrive the next morning. The politicians would then decide what to do with the ‘patient’, and the bureaucrats would, in turn, implement those instructions. But you can imagine what would happen i people trained to follow SOPs took over the job of specialists in a country as complex as India. The result would be a government in deep freeze, incapable of taking decisions, running on mere SOPs. In brief, a government in the emergency ward, which is as good a way as any to describe UPA 2 today.

NO NOOSE IS GOOD NOOSE We need to look within—b ut we also need to tell His L ordship Katju & Co. where to get off.

12 November 2011 Can one be so daft as to find something in common between the new Press Council chairman, Markandey Katju, and the Haryana strongman of yore, Bansi Lal? One a forthright judge, to praise hom Fali Nariman invoked Shakespeare, the other a ‘take-no-prisoners’ tyrant who completed the unholy trinity of the Emergency: remember the slogan,Emergency ‘ key teen dalal, Shukla, Sanjay, ansi Lal’. One a brahmin of brahmins, a Kashmiri from very liberal and genteel old Allahabad, the last a rough-and-tough Haryanvi Jat who founded a dynasty in his own political style and culture. But if you had heard Bansi Lal tell you what was wrong with us journalists and how it was damaging India, you would understand why I draw parallels. As a journalism student in 1975, I watched Bansi Lal address the Independence Day rally at Rohtak, the heart of Jatland, where he explained why press censorship had been imposed. Of course Indiraji believed in press freedom. But press people should know that freedom does not mean licence (khuli chhutti ). And then he dropped all pretence, even that of being the dean of the Haryana School of Journalism. ‘What is the value of these newspapers?’ he asked. ‘After eight in the morning, a few annas a kilo? And what use are they at that price? Only that when you buy pakodas or chaat, the shopkeeper wraps them in a scrap ofraddi . . . Never do it again,’ he exhorted the crowd, ‘because these newspapers are so full of poison, you may just die.’ Comparisons are cruelly unfair and this one probably even more so. But I do not believe we ournalists have been so forcefully attacked by anybody in the establishment ever since the Emergency, except now by the most venerable Justice Katju. There is also one big difference, and regrettably so for us journalists: during the Emergency all political abuse and excess brought forth ide popular anger against the establishment, and support nd a sympathy for the media. The opposite is happening now. Justice Katju called me last Friday to suggest that this paper hold a nationwide opinion poll on whether people think he is right in his criticism of the media. ‘If they think I am wrong I will apologise, otherwise TV journalists who are abusing me for my remarks should say sorry to me and mend their ways,’ he said, and underlined that an SMS poll running on one channel’s ticker had given him a 78 per cent heads-up. Press freedoms were written neither specifically in our Constitution, nor in any clear laws. Freedom of speech for all citizens (Article 19 of the Constitution) is a gift from the founding fathers, but the notion of a totally free press is rooted in the social contract that emerged from the Emergency hen the people of India, having tasted censorship, declared they would never allow anybody to steal that freedom from their journalists. It has subsequently been nourished and irrigated by a remarkably

libertarian and hugely respected judiciary. So, if today that holy social contract is fraying, and a liberal former judge of the Supreme Court getting popular applause for probing those fractures with a knife, it is time for soul-searching. As one of the senior citizens of the media, I had tried raising the flag on these disturbing developments in an article titled ‘The noose media’ (IE, 3 April 2010). I had said that never before in my life had I seen journalists lampooned and even abhorred in popular culture as halfwit gasbags, insensitive, dumb, even corrupt reprobates. And this was beforePeepli [Live] and much before the Munnabhai ringtone of Niira Radia’s phone had become such a rude wake-up call for us. We continue to live in denial if we think we have redeemed ourselves fully by our unquestioning rallying around the Anna Hazare movement or the anti-corruption campaign. In fact, every time we boast about this in public, we only reaffirm the one attribute the people of India detest the most, arrogance or selfcongratulatory hubris. Sadly, India today is the only democracy in the world where regulation of the media is even being debated. This, when the rest of the world is celebrating the Arab Spring and WikiLeaks. We have a udge taunting us, to wide applause, to submit to regulation, and if not, face the danda. And the government setting up a GoM on the media on the one hand, and suggesting self-regulation on the other. We journalists are batting on a very sticky wicket now, and frankly we are the ones who left it exposed to the nastiest elements. While the current attacks are confined to news television, nobody should be so delusional as to see this as an issue of one medium alone. We at theIndian Express, which was in the forefront of two big battles for press freedom, during the Emergency and when Bofors-struck Rajiv Gandhi tried to bring in his anti-defamation law, believe that the idea of press freedom can be neither nuanced nor segmentised. So the same freedoms that the Constitution, our great post-Emergency social contract and the many Supreme Court judgements bestow upon us must also be available to all other media: hether television, radio, web, or someone who runs anekla-chalo blog, within the same laws that apply to conventional media. Any effort to curtail or even ‘regulate’ these by anybody must be resisted, even by fasting at Jantar Mantar or marching in protest on Rajpath. This debate on the ‘role’ of the media and the ‘need’ for regulation is specious, dangerous, self-defeating and anachronistic in a mature democracy in 2011. That is why it is so distressing to see the many captains of news television themselves pleading for regulation and thereby walking into a trap of their own setting. What is worse, in this panic they could also end up dragging the other media with them. They are probably responding to the larger public criticism and the Peepli [Live] syndrome. But this self-flagellation is dangerous and drags us all on to a slippery During slope. the Emergency it was said that when asked to bend, most Indian journalists chose to crawl. Today there is no Emergency, no Indira Gandhi, no V.C. Shukla and no Bansi Lal, and 2011 is not 1975. So let us stop fearing our own shadow, and get our own house in order to repair the social contract with the people. It’s time to internally debate and set up professional institutions to ensure fairness in reporting and comment and, most important, ethical conduct. But it is also necessary to tell anybody in the establishment giving us unsolicited advice where to get off.

THAT SINKING FEELING The hoardings i n Mumbai are blank, the writing on the political wall spells disconnect—and despair.

10 Dece mber 2011 Economists call it recession when growth turns negative. But others have simpler criteria. Corporates see a recession when they do not feel like investing, adding capacities. That’s the way they have been for nearly a year already. For a mere journalist like me, even simpler, maybe simplistic, criteria ork: if you begin to see empty hoardings on the major road arteries of Mumbai, particularly on the 22-kilometre drive from Sahar airport to the city, you know there is trouble coming. These are India’s most-sought-after hoarding sites, commanding huge tariffs and usually pre-booked for months. When empty ones begin to stare at you, displaying nothing but the phone numbers you need to call to rent them, you know India’s economy is headed for trouble. This is not the first time that National Interest has employed this quaint criterion of an economic slowdown. We had noted a much more alarming situation (‘It’s the economy, genius!’, IE, 11 August 2001) when the majority of hoardings were empty, and a real recession was on. This week, the first arnings are visible on our financial capital’s walls, and skyline. Not a single corporate head you run into has anything to tell you except that he is moving investments overseas, in utter disgust with ‘Delhi’. We may have seen phases of economic growth slower than this in the two post-reform decades, but never has the entrepreneurial mood been so low. It is not fair to blame just the government for it. Both the Congress and its UPA allies see it as transient. In fact both, the allies and the Congress, mostly need this government as a siphon through hich they empty the fisc and the savings we salted away for our children. When the ruling party itself decides to get into election mode the moment it comes to power, throwing freebies and subsidies, what can you expect from the poor opposition? A stunning example of this competitive populism came from Uttar Pradesh last week. Mayawati responded to Rahul Gandhi’s campaign built around the UPA’s NREGA by promising to extend the scheme to 365 days a year instead of a mere 100. Not for decades has India seen such self-destructive politics. The BJP has now morphed into the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, whose sixteenth-century economics its very same leaders had countered so adroitly when they were in power. Maybe you could blame some of their drift on the absence of Vajpayee. The BJP now behaves like a party that no longer believes it could ever come to power again. How else do you describe its repeated demand for a parliamentary vote on executive decisions?* Doesn’t it know the Congress in opposition would hold it to the same principle should the BJP ever come to power? The biggest problem with UPA 2 is that from the moment it came to power, it has been caught in the self-created contradiction of being the government and the opposition at the same time. You

cannot fault Rahul Gandhi for his idea of winning back the states his party has lost over the years. But the route and the metaphor he has chosen for his politics are that of grievance, while his party was brought to power by an aspirational, resurgent India. Again, while it is one thing to attack Mayawati for corruption, the suggestion that anybody from UP who takes the train to Mumbai is going to beg in Maharashtra runs contrary to the aspirational idea that people move to big cities to chase their own Indian dream. It will not stand the scrutiny of facts. Over the past decade, the majority of the migration into Mumbai has been from districts of interior Maharashtra which compare with UP in economic decline, destitution and caste-based discrimination. While the party, under Rahul, goes from state to state bringing the mantra of grievance and lists nothing against the achievements column of its own UPA, the government sounds so much sillier making claims of growth and reform. This is the essential—and fatal—contradiction of the UPA. In addition, because of the ruling party being in this constant electoral and oppositionist mode, the central government too finds it impossible to show at least a minimum level of fairness to oppositionrun states. So even the prime minister sits silently when opposition-run states are savaged by his partisan ministers. The destruction of Orissa’s industrialisation plans is one such example. But the larger, net result is widespread negativity. Which is precisely what even Team Anna is riding. While nobody is investing, and manufacturing is at a standstill, indecision in the government and the resultant bureaucratic hijack have combined to create conditions which could take the Indian banking system to a catastrophe. Banks have an exposure of nearly Rs 5 lakh crore to the power sector, which is now threatened by the self-inflicted confusion over the availability of coal. Another Rs 1 lakh crore worth of loans to the steel sector are similarly jeopardised because of the serial mining ban in iron as well as coal. The telecom sector, with loans of nearly Rs 3 lakh crore, is again in a spin because of policy confusion. Add another Rs 20,000 crore in aviation and other assorted industries, and you have India’s banks looking at nearly Rs 10 lakh crore worth of loans threatened by bad government policy, indecision or the return of old-fashioned extortion. No wonder Indian banking stocks are declining twice as fast as those of other major companies. We started with a question. So let’s also conclude with one. What is the Hindu Rate of Growth two decades after reform? It certainly can’t be the 2–3 per cent of India’s Brezhnev decades. The new Hindu Rate of Growth is 6 per cent, and on all evidence, from macroeconomic data to the empty billboards of Mumbai, we are headed there next year.* This is not the forgiving India of the past. Two years of 6 per cent growth and joblessness will bring its angry millions out on the street—try sending them back to their villages with the promise of more NREGA days. In short, three years of lousy growth, with a fiscal bankruptcy to rival Greece’s, will totally rewrite the script for 2014.

BLUNDER JANATA PARTY The UPA is at its most discredited ever. Then how come the BJP is looking so b ankrupt of new ideas?

7 January 2012 There couldn’t have been a better time for the BJP than this to be smiling. The UPA government is non-functional. The Congress is reeling, targeted by Anna Hazare’s activists as the most villainous of the contemptible political class. The economy has been in disaster zone, the rupee in free fall and even inflation at levels that are electorally toxic. The mood of the Congress’s allies ranges from sullen (DMK) to angry (NCP) to contemptuously rebellious (TMC). * For a well-organised challenger, this is about as good as it gets. Yet, with three weeks to go to the first phase of polling in Uttar Pradesh, it is the BJP that looks on the defensive. Its self-goal with the induction of Kushwaha, already being investigated as the kingpin of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scandal in UP (a story broken byExpress Correspondent Surbhi Khyati), * has more than negated all its gains from the midnight Lokpal bill drama in Rajya Sabha. Live, 24-hour news TV is a hungry monster that also loves variety. Like a monster’s hunger, its outrage is insatiable, and it loves to find a different new cause to vent on. Kushwaha has, therefore, neatly replaced Rajya Sabha, which is, at best, last fortnight’s news rendered even less ‘relevant’ with Team Anna retired hurt, for the time being. Check out more news on the BJP. A party that boasts a modern, well-educated and relatively young leadership has meanwhile produced a legislation of its own: banning not just the trading but eating of beef in Madhya Pradesh, a state run by it for eight years now, and one with an average real growth rate lower than that of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal (according to CSO data from 2004–05 to 2010–11). Maybe the problem with Madhya Pradesh’s economy, its inability to attract investment and create jobs was that some fifth columnists ate beef under the cover of darkness in their power-starved towns and villages, thus inviting divine wrath. This, from a party that went to the polls in 2004 on a promise of reform and modernisation. Don’t dismiss it as just an odd thing confined to a unique state, inspired by a catchy line in that rather nicely done advertisement campaign by its tourism department:MP ‘ ajab hai, sabse gazab

hai’ (Madhya Pradesh is one of a kind, it is amazing). Rather than move a step forward postVajpayee, the party is taking two steps backward. The point that got lost in the fog of this warlike inter session was the self-inflicted isolation of the party on the inclusion of a solitary minority member in the proposed Lokpal panel. It even broke ranks with two of its most important allies, Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) and the Shiromani Akali Dal, on this. Rather than signal its return to old, hard Hindutva, the BJP was telling you what a total lack of imagination combined with an every-man-forhimself leadership can do to the country’s second largest party with a decent six-year record in

power. In the Uttar Pradesh campaign it displays all the weaknesses usually chronic to the Congress: lack of a chief ministerial candidate, infighting, absence of a grassroots organisation and a big idea. The Congress at least has its most powerful leader fronting its campaign. Who captains the BJP in the state? It tried to make up for this by playing caste equations and all it found was a lemon called Kushwaha. Rule by the Congress or a coalition led by it has historically been the default position in Indian politics. That is why even when the party weakens, faces popular disenchantment (as in 1967 and 1991) or enters an election as a rank underdog (2004), it benefits from both the tailwinds of legacy and inertia of history. To break these, the challenger needs new ideas, a new momentum. The BJP (and formerly Jan Sangh) has seen this work three times already: in 1977 as a part of Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement, 1989 onward riding Advani’s big political idea of Hindutva and Mandir, and then in 1998 Vajpayee’s very own promise of patriotic but gentle and inclusive nationalism and economic reform. The party has not produced one big idea since then and that is why it is in decline. Inclusivist nationalism has now been replaced with anti-beef obscurantism and minority-phobia, as i these are going to impress today’s aspirational urban Hindu voters, the party’s old but estranged loyalists. On economics, the party has spent seven years purging the reformist ideas of its own NDA: from opposing FDI in retail, which it promised in the first place and the pension bill which it had brought in through an ordinance. Everything else reformist is being opposed, from insurance FDI to GST to the committee filibuster of sorts even on the harmless Direct Taxes Code. The principle seems to be, if you do not have a big new idea of your own, block all those that come from elsewhere, even if they ere your own to begin with. Meanwhile, some of the best ideas in governance and reform are coming from the BJP’s own and its allies’ chief ministers. Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh is running a food subsidy scheme so good that even supposedly pro-Maoist activists (who otherwise hate him) applaud him. Narendra Modi is the most pro-growth chief minister in the country. You can say what you want about his hundred other delinquencies, but can you argue with 24-hour power to all Gujarat villages? Nitish has already successfully implemented direct cash transfers to the poorest, a first in India. But the BJP’s high command will not stitch together a vision, a national agenda, based on their own state leaders’ ideas. They are, in fact, away from Delhi. It is only in boredom caused by such smug, vacuous political thinking, where you believe the UPA would simply blunder into handing over power to you, that idiotic ideas arise, like recruiting a Kushwaha, criminalising the eating of beef, blocking retail FDI and pension reform. And you keep paying for them.

THE STATES STRIKE BACK And the Centre is clueless b ecause it fails to see and respect the power shift.

24 March 2012 The mood on the economy is lower today than at any point in the past ten years, barring perhaps during the crazy week of the 2004 election results when a victorious Comrade Bardhan made his ‘Bhaad mein jaye disinvestment’ statement and sent the stock market tanking by over 16 per cent in one trading session. Economy and market experts, whether Indian or global, are usually consistent in only one thing: being proved wrong. The current unanimity that utterly broken politics has destroyed the India story (see the latestEconomist cover) and that its unnerved reformers are on the run is scary. But there is equally unanimity on a note of encouragement. That much of this paralysis, even backward slide, is confined to the central government, and that things are moving in many states under smart, pragmatic chief ministers. That many states are growing way above their long-term averages and shoring up India’s headline economic indicators. There are two more significant facts. One, that none, not one, of these chief ministers is from the Congress or even the UPA (with the possible exception of Sheila Dikshit though Delhi is not a state). And second, that all, and I repeat all, of them are at odds with the Centre. You can argue with them. You cannot, however, overlook the fact that they fully believe that this central government is not just bumbling, incompetent and weak, it is politically partisan, unreasonable, arrogant, cussed. The result is, almost every new initiative of the Centre—from the Lokpal bill to GST to NCTC to a clutch o economic decisions ranging from FDI in retail to mining, land acquisition and food security—is running into a wall of opposition from these formidable chief ministers. They now have the numbers to block anything they want in New Delhi. And they are doing it consistently, predeterminedly and, in many cases, illogically and unreasonably. Example: the BJP’s chief ministers opposing FDI in retail, GST and NCTC, ideas from their own book. There is an alarming loss of trust between the Centre and the states at a time when federalism has more political ballast than ever before in our history. Worse, there is also a loss of respect. This has rarely happened in the past. On counterterror measures, for example, there was closer understanding —and trust—between the Left-run West Bengal and BJP’s New Delhi. In fact, it was much, much better than the relationship between the current UPA and its own coalition member Mamata Banerjee’s government in Kolkata. That is because A.B. Vajpayee reached out to other parties’ chief ministers with respect and warmth, and earned some of that in return as well. Today’s breakdown is genuinely widespread, and has spread to individual, almost personal hostility and distrust for many ministers in the central cabinet. This is just what India does not need at this dysfunctional juncture. Who is to blame? If federal politics is a game of give and take, the Centre would always need to

be more large-hearted. Particularly when the Congress by itself controls only two, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, of the ten states in India sending twenty-five or more MPs to the Lok Sabha, this no longer remains a mere nicety. It is a political compulsion. The failure of the Congress to do so has caused this current breakdown. It is easy to see why. The Congress returned to power in 2009 with 206 seats believing it had already won the election of 2014 as well. And with the BJP underlining its own decline and irrelevance with every misstep subsequently, the Congress concluded that the happy days of brute majorities were around the corner. This gave it the arrogance to treat not just chief ministers of the opposition (most of whom are ruling India’s key states) but even its own allies with disdain. Ask Sharad Pawar how the Congress has humiliated him over these two years. His word has been ignored, his policies overturned, his closest friends and interests attacked and now an upstart Congress minister is even encouraged to challenge his sway over the one thing he truly values: Indian cricket. You may believe the entire folklore on Pawar’s corruption, whispered allegations about him being the richest man in our politics, the ‘word’ on the ‘street’ that he has a finger in every corporate and real estate pie. You have the choice to not have him as your partner at the Centre as well as in India’s most gravy-laden state, Maharashtra. But you cannot have him on board and kick him around. You can see why he has spoken out in anger now and will look for an opportunity to get even in 2014. Further, if this is how an ally is treated, what can political and ideological adversaries expect? As a report on the front page of this paper on 29 February* told us, the UPA’s stooges in various Raj Bhavans have been sitting, in many cases for more than two years, on at least twenty bills passed by their state assemblies. They have no authority to do this without giving reasons. The states see the Centre as having displayed bad faith in not fully compensating them for their share of central sales tax, so how can you trust it on moving towards a national GST, and so on. Orissa is seething that its industrialisation drive has been destroyed. Uttar Pradesh has been denied clearance for landmark PPP projects, including expressways and an international airport. These chief ministers fight the Congress for power in their states and will challenge its comeback in 2014. And the government at the Centre does not have the confidence to rise above that politics. Is there a way out? Can Dr Singh convince his party bosses that his government cannot deliver ithout a working equation with these states? That if the Centre remains dysfunctional, they can pretty much write off the UPA’s prospects in 2014? I can tell you a story from Vajpayee’s times. I had gone to see him one lazy weekend afternoon. We had already overshot our time, which was easy considering the long silences he tended to lapse into and the delightful lines he spoke in between, as if during the ‘breaks’. He suddenly looked up and contorted his face in mock horror, asking me to buzz off as he had kept on wait somebody he really shouldn’t have. ‘Who is this very important person?’ I asked. ‘Woh hain, Congress ke, achche honhar [promising] neta hain ,’ he said, walking me out. ‘But who is this, Atalji, jis se aap itne ghabra rahe hain?’ I persisted. ‘Arre bhai wohi, dekhne mein bhi bahut achche hain ’ (the nice-looking one), he said, running his palms over his head as if to suggest a mane or something.

Finding me still intrigued, he gestured that I look left, into his PS’s room, as we waited for the ferry car. And I did spot the Congressman, who answered both his descriptions, promising and goodlooking. And, of course, the mane. Vajpayee said he was not playing politics or seeking a defection. He was reaching out to reformminded Congress people to call a meeting of all chief ministers, irrespective of their party affiliations. He was keen that it be hosted not by a BJP leader but by S.M. Krishna, who was then seen as a reformist chief minister of Karnataka. Only if chief ministers have a consensus can reform move forward, he said. That idea failed to find the Congress high command’s approval. The conclave never happened. But in a different scenario now, this prime minister could revive that idea. And if he wishes to get the chief ministers together, he can even call upon the services of the same ‘nice-looking’ Congressman ho has already lived up to his ‘promise’ by rising to a cabinet ministership under him.

ANYBODY OUT THERE? The government’s inaction down the line is only matched by the silence at its top.

19 May 2012 The flavour of this disastrous season seems to be distinctly Greek. Who is to blame for the rupee and the Indian stock market being the emerging markets’ worst performers? And as the brilliant and irrepressible Indian Express columnist Surjit Bhalla points out in today’s op-ed page,* for India’s industrial production growth being the lowest in the world outside Europe? Of course, it is the retched debt-defaulting Greeks. And who is responsible for this state of paralysis, a loss of political authority so severe that in one sector after the other, bureaucrats have taken over all power? Where the almighty Sarkar-e-Hind has to unleash the governance equivalent of a WMD by issuing a presidential directive to one of its own PSU monopolies to supply coal to stranded power producers. Where economic bills are being put in cold storage even when many have the BJP’s support. And where, two months from the installation of the new president of the Republic, the ruling party is still keeping all its hopefuls on wait. If they ere to be held responsible for this total paralysis of political governance in India, then those 11 million Greeks would have to be awfully hard-working people. Unless, of course, our famous CAG carried out their last census and counted, as it has often done lately, the 11 million as 110 crore: hat’s a few more zeros between friends. Take a closer look at this abdication by UPA 2. After the courts and civil society moved in to fill the governance space ceded by it, what was left has been taken over by the civil services. After the courts, now regulators, who are almost all retired civil servants, are determining basic policy while senior ministers wring their hands in amain-kya-karoon despair that has now been printed on the calling card of this cabinet. Take TRAI, for example. One year ago, we were all fighting to defend the political class and justifying its supremacy in a democr acy as the assault from Anna’s civil society raged. Today, we have entered a fascinating new phase in our democratic evolution where civil servants are so dominant, they are also cornering many of the sinecures the political class usually counted as its own. Note, for example, how retired IAS and IPS (in fact, more IPS than IAS) officers have governorships of more key states in the country than political veterans. Who do you blame for this political debacle? The Greeks? You have to look within. The old story of discord between the party and the government is rubbish. Sure, the government is neither deciding, nor implementing. But equally, the party either does not know what it wants or is not telling anybody. Unless you think it is being done through leaks, deep background briefings and whispers that are usually prefixed with ‘but 10 Janpath has a different view . . .’ Has anybody heard 10 Janpath’s point of view on any key policy issue? Or of 12 Tughlaq Lane

(Rahul Gandhi’s residence)? And let’s be fair, have you lately heard what 7 Race Course Road thinks on any of the issues assailing India today? A capital city like this, where no one speaks to anybody, in such a vast country may be fascinating for journalists and pundits. But it looks like a very, very foreign place to the rest of India. A very alien place, more distant than even Greece. More Pyongyang than Athens. We have today an incredible situation where the top three in the ruling establishment almost never speak to the people of India. Sonia, Rahul and the prime minister speak rarely in Parliament, almost never to the media and hardly ever directly to the people of India, except during election campaigns. Media, you can understand. Everybody seems to think that journalists are vermin. UPA 2 has also added Indian entrepreneurs to that category. Go back to some of the footage that shows Revenue Secretary R.S. Gujral admonishing the captains of corporate India at FICCI and CII forums. Nobody knows if he was mandated by the finance minister to do so. But entrepreneurial India has not been kicked around so rudely since the V.P. Singh–Bhure Lal raid raj. So you have today an establishment where nobody speaks with their people. Nobody explains any action, and certainly nobody tries to build any public opinion for any policy. You cannot help thinking sometimes that our establishment has lapsed into some old iron curtain style of governance. But at least then you could pore overPeople’s Daily, Pravda or some such and read between the lines and guess what was on the comrades’ mind. Not so in India today. The Congress does not even have an official daily. In fact, if you looked at government-owned television, particularly the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha channels, you would find the entire discourse so utterly in conflict with any idea o modern, reformist economic policies that you would see how the government’s own media does not speak for it. In any case, what is the government policy on key issues? On the economy, it seemed to follow calculated ambiguity until the new revenue secretary changed it to coercive diplomacy. On foreign policy, particularly on Pakistan, nothing has been done to sensitise public opinion on the historic opportunity that has emerged after an entire decade of peace on the LoC, while old establishment hawks (in India, not Pakistan) continue to fan disinformation. And on politics, the party is playing ith the cards so close to its chest even on its nominee for the president that every possible and impossible name is being speculated upon, the latest being Labour Minister Mallikarjun Kharge. This reminds me of a story from I.K. Gujral’s short-lived government. His principal secretary (now governor of Jammu and Kashmir), N.N. Vohra, exasperated by decision-freeze in the PMO, once told him, ‘Prime Minister sir, there is an allegation against us that ours is a government of Punjabis.’ Gujral lifted sort of Vohra, philosophically, ‘So whatlike canPunjabis?’ we do about it?’ ‘For once, sir,hisforhead justand twoasked, weeks,’ said ‘can we function I am not betraying any confidences because Vohra did not tell me this story. Gujral did, and he ill forgive me. But it is a conversation worth recalling in these unusual times.

CRUDE POLITICS UPA’s dismal political management turns a belated (and much needed) petrol price hike into an ‘event’.

26 May 2012 More than two months after the prime minister said we needed to bite the bullet, and a couple o eeks after the finance minister talked of hard decisions, we finally have one: the petrol price increase. Even more encouraging, there is no talk of a rollback yet. The question to ask, therefore, is: why have they not been doing that lately? Because if they were, this week’s approximately 10 per cent hike would not have become such a story, or rather, event. Before this, the last increase of Rs 1.80 per litre in petrol prices was carried out on 4 November 2011, followed by reductions of Rs 2.22 and 78 paise in the following two fortnights. And then the process stopped. Why? Because apparently the UPA was getting ready for the Uttar Pradesh elections. We suspended that fortnightly rhythm in search of votes. Then we waited even longer as nobody wanted to give the silly opposition a chance to scuttle the budget session of Parliament. At the same time, crude kept rising and the dollar falling, the deficit widened and inflation peaked, so voters all over the country got angrier anyway. How would a more political government have handled this? It is lazy now to say that Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA had an easy time because they had crude running at $12 a barrel. The fact is, Vajpayee carried out 33 (yes, 33) fuel price increases over his six years. Of course, the average increase was so tiny nobody seemed to notice—while there were token protests by the Congress and the Left. Yet, in the process, the price of kerosene, the most politically sensitive fuel, was taken from Rs 2.52 to Rs 9.01 per litre, an increase of more than 350 per cent. The second most sensitive, diesel, as more than doubled from Rs 10.25 a litre to Rs 21.74, and the equally troublesome LPG was nearly doubled, from Rs 136 to Rs 241.60. Petrol went up only by 50 per cent, from Rs 22.84 to Rs 33.71 and, in the process, the distortionary gap tha t is rapidly—and destructively—dieselising our economy and environment was narrowed to manageable levels. In comparison, in the eight years of the UPA, crude has risen nearly 170 per cent, the rupee has fallen more than 20 per cent, yet prices of kerosene and LPG have been increased by only 65 per cent and diesel and petrol by 88 per cent and 114 per cent, respectively. In the process, the fisc has been vacuum-cleaned, and yet, for its spasmodic but headline-making price increases, the UPA has got much more bad press. Diesel, meanwhile, is back to being the evil polluting king of all fuels. The indecisive style of this establishment is compounded by the fact that its administrative and political authority is so scattered—so scattered, in fact, that the buck has to make a dozen halts en route, like a DTC bus, before it finally stops with somebody. This results in even routine decisions dragging themselves out into public controversies and finally ending up as ‘events’. Thirty-three fuel

price hikes, one every two months or so on an average, can never be events—in fact, the frequency and the tiny size of the increases make them non-newsworthy. But that is not the style of the UPA. It dithers and meanders into making everything out to be a story, a controversy. The current plight of civil aviation is a pretty good case. Every day there is a speculative headline somewhere that FDI in private airlines will soon be allowed. Nobody reminds anybody that it is already allowed, to the extent of 49 per cent. So what is the story? It is just that this FDI policy was customised to the ‘needs’ or ‘demands’ of one private airline known for its legendary ‘persuasive’ powers in New Delhi then. So if you are a foreign chappal , apparel, automobile, candy manufacturer, in any business whatsoever, you can invest in an airline in India. But not if you are an airline. Now, ould you call that incredibly stupid? No, it is incredibly smart of an Indian capitalist who found the right cronies and had the law customised for him so that all competition was kept out. This incredibly unique restriction is not merely the most striking example of Indian crony capitalism, it makes us look like a banana republic. Changing this should have been a minor, routine editing correction. Yet, we have dithered over this for so long that it has been allowed to grow in the popular mind as some kind of a bailout for an Indian entrepreneur as ‘effete, decadent, wasteful and incompetent’ as Vijay Mallya. So when this FDI policy is indeed rationalised, it will be another event. Because the UPA takes so long with its deliberations, it has forgotten the virtue of political management by boring routine. In state after state now, electricity utilities have gone bankrupt (their combined losses top Rs 2 lakh crore and banks are bracing for another shock) while the regulators have either sucked up to their governments and not allowed tariff increases or because chief ministers have also caught the UPA virus. It has taken two really powerful chief ministers, Jayalalithaa and Mamata Banerjee, to make abrupt, sizeable tariff increases of 37 and 25 per cent, respectively, recently. Most of the others—except Rajasthan’s—are letting the monster grow. You do not have to be an economist to see how, with new capacity being added, India will be power surplus by 2015. Yet, by then, everybody involved in the electricity business, from producers to distributors to their banks, would have gone bankrupt. We will not address these tariffs and deficits as a matter of routine now, and one day everybody will need a giant bailout—maybe from the IMF. Now that will be some event, of the sort not witnessed since 1991.

MEENA KUMARI POLITICS The UPA must face it: the script has changed, tragedy is no longer queen. India is aspirational, impatient, unforgiving.

30 June 2012 The last two years’ electoral politics has made one thing clear: you no longer win elections in India by reminding people how awfully rotten their fate is. Particularly when you and your party have been governing them most of the time. This young, aware India is aspirational, impatient and unforgiving. This is no longer a country o Meena Kumaris. Those of my vintage will know what I mean. But for the younger readers, Meena Kumari was the tragedy queen of the 1960s and the entire theatre began sobbing the moment she appeared on the screen. Our mothers would tell us to take two handkerchiefs if we were going to atch a Meena Kumari film. But at some point at the turn of the century—I would even say, in the ake of the Kargil turnaround—the new generation of Indians dumped that negative, defeatist, selfpitying ‘kasam tumhari main ro padungi ’* attitude. This new mood was then fuelled by a decade o rising growth, increased respect for the Indian passport, a renaissance of sorts that touched everything from art, literature, cinema to sports and, most importantly, ushered in the EMI culture among the middle classes. Then, two years ago, the Congress decided to change the script, telling the people of India how badly off they were and how they had been betrayed by their rulers. So badly that two Indias had come into being, one shining and one declining. The strategy guaranteed not merely defeat in elections subsequently, but also destroyed from within a government that had achieved a feat not seen in nearly four decades, of an incumbent at the Centre winning back power after serving a full term. It broke the virtuous momentum that both the UPA and India had been riding. Suddenly, growth was a four-letter ord, entrepreneurs were crooks and crony capitalists, and all Indians, besides the rotten billionaires and millionaires, were starving, malnourished or, at best, migrant daily-wagers in the metros. In short, we were being told by the very people we had re-elected that we were back to our ‘reality’: a country of Meena Kumaris. That this self-destructive backward march has ensured the Congress party’s rout in most assembly elections lately is not the issue. This is a democracy, voters have choices, and someone or the other ill be elected to rule us. The damage it did was to India, its economy, its pride, to the national mood and self-esteem, or the India story. Every reformist move was blocked by opposition from within the party. Its top leaders stopped having any contact with modernising, entrepreneurial, job-creating India. They thought they did not need to. As in their new, post-2009 wisdom, India’s real job creators ere the district collectors distributing the miserable NREGA largesse. Because that is what the vast majority of Indians so desperately needed. And, if I may turn the knife, deserved.

An important and powerful Congress MP—a formidable three-term Lok Sabha winner, not one of those smug, never-retiring Rajya Sabha squatters—made a confession in an in-flight conversation last eek. He said the party made a suicidal blunder by brainwashing itself that the 2009 victory had come because of NREGA. When it had, in fact, come from growth. Never mind, he said, that the data never justified this mistake. In states where nearly 65 per cent of India’s BPL families live, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa, the Congress party’s strike rate was just about 20 per cent. The party, or its UPA allies, on the other hand, swept every major city (except Bangalore, which was split) and had a nearly 60 per cent strike rate in the richer states. It did enormously better, for example, even in Modi’s Gujarat than in Bihar, Orissa or, for that matter, Uttar Pradesh, which was seen as a Rahul success story. Aspirational Indians sent a thank-you card to the UPA. It responded, in turn, by kicking them in the shins, increasing taxes and EMIs, blocking manufacturing and mining, shutting down power plants, stopping ongoing projects and investments and generating massive job losses. That same once grateful and resurgent India is now downbeat and furious. And what about the very poor? Of course, they are grateful, even for NREGA, but to the non-Congress chief ministers who do a much better job of implementing central schemes. Congress people say two things now. They all say, one, that power will not return to them in 2014. And two, that the BJP also is in no better shape, so we will have a couple of years ofkhichdi and then a remorseful people will have no choice but to bring us back. This is how the Congress defines optimism now. At the same time, you sit with a map of India with one of them, and go over it state by state. In the past three months, I haven’t met any Congressman who reaches three figures. Caveat: I haven’t been doing much map-reading lately with professional Rajya Sabha-ists, the brilliance o hose back-room politicking is fully matched by their hopeless ignorance and self-righteous loathing of electoral politics. Wishful thinking is not a virus unique to the Congress. The BJP, which has a touching belief that Narendra Modi will lead them to power, is equally susceptible to it. But what happens with the Congress right now is more important because it will be in power at the Centre for nearly two more years still. The good thing is, the party is in deep panic. It has seen the writing on the wall for 2014. It says, SEE YOU LATER. The party, so consumed by the smugness of a second successive victory that it declared 2014 already won, never even debated the wisdom of its disastrous strategic shift from optimism and growth to povertarianbhookha-nanga -ism. It cheered from the sidelines, as its own undermined its government, leaked, whispered and planted vicious stories about the growing distance between the party and the prime minister, about how one was furious and the other sulking or the other way around, and how a change at the top would come any time now. From economic reform to foreign policythe (remember el-Sheikh?), from power to tax laws, equivalent from mining manufacturing, governmentSharm was undermined from within. This plants is a classic political of a to deadly autoimmune disease. A recent conversation with a distinguished member of the holy National Advisory Council deserves mention here. I asked this very well-meaning person, in fact one of the nicest, sincerest people you will meet anywhere, why the NAC was always undermining the government, raising impossible demands and then making it look insensitive and anti-poor.

‘What can we do when people are still dying of starvation and so much foodgrain is being wasted . . . we need that food bill,’ I was told. ‘But from where will the government fund it?’ I asked. ‘That the government has to find out,’ the NAC member said. ‘But then, why doesn’t the NAC also pass a resolution supporting FDI in retail as it would prevent astage of food, besides improving the farmers’ lives?’ I asked. ‘Oh, oh, that, you know, will not happen. You know that will not happen.’ And the conversation ended. My interlocutor was not a career politician. The good thing, therefore, is that at least the real politicians in the Congress are now frightened into seeing the light. That is why people who did the most to destroy UPA 2’s momentum, from infrastructure to mining to power to irrigation to manufacturing to scientific agriculture, are now writing pleas for FDI and hard reform. It may just give UPA 2 the space to carry out a proper spring-cleaning of the cabinet and restore some sanity and poise in its last two years in power.

FIXERPRENEURSHIP It thrives under UPA 2—and is p unis hed b y the market.

1 September 2012 Here are some tricky questions. Is UPA 2 the most entrepreneur-unfriendly government since the reform of 1991? Or is it the most crony capitalist regime in India’s history? Or could it be a bit of both? Let’s now turn these questions around. Do India’s businessmen detest UPA 2 more than any other government in three decades except V.P. Singh’s (mercifully) short raid raj in 1989–90? And then, have so many Indian businessmen fattened themselves more under any other regime in post-reform India than under this one, even while showing no particular entrepreneurial spark, betraying their bankers and vacuum-cleaning minority shareholders? Or, to repeat the earlier question, can both be true? The fact is, there is nothing incredible or contradictory about this. You don’t need a Ph.D. to understand how crony capitalism is the very death of genuine entrepreneurship. It snuffs out the virtuous animal spirits of enterprise. It also provides a permanent do-nothing excuse and an ATM for the political class. Worst of all, it ruins public opinion for businessmen as it confirms the worst old fears of all of them being carpet-bagging robbers. The reason reform prospered in India for two decades was that its success was widely visible and also available to be shared by a wide section o our people. Why has the picture then changed so dramatically? Could it be just a consequence of the global commodity boom fired by easy liquidity flooding the larger Western economies after the 2008 financial crisis? It has created windfall billionaires overnight all over the world, including in India: the Reddy brothers of Bellary are an example. Or, could it be something more complex? Let’s look at some examples of the new Indian entrepreneurial class before we turn on the usual suspect, the government. This decade of commodity and property price boom has seen the rise of a new generation of businessmen, or rather fixerpreneurs, with the unique talent and connections to ork on that most lucrative cusp of finance, politics and natural resources. Many of these quickly got listed on the stock markets in boom times, and kept leveraging their balance sheets as if the train ould never stop. But the underlying asset value was not that of their brands or products, but of land banks, political connections, mining leases and, in one specific case, telecom spectrum. That heady success story the markets have now sorted out, and brutally so. Most such ‘asset’ companies are now penny stocks and bankers are chasing after their promoters with auction notices, provided something remains to be auctioned. The big collateral losers in the process are some half-decent infrastructure companies, even those with a reasonable record of efficient delivery. The two companies building and running private airports in India, Delhi-Hyderabad and Mumbai-Bangalore, are valued at no more than Rs 2,500 crore and Rs 1,500 crore and carry a debt burden almost fifteen and forty times

that much, respectively. Whether they deserve this plight, endangering their bankers, shareholders and the vital projects they are implementing, is not the point. This is precisely what you expect when the market and its customers—investors and lenders—lose faith in governance, political as well as economic. To go back to our srcinal questions, the economy and markets have floundered not because UPA 2 is pro- or anti-business, but because it has been so hypocritical about the private sector. Because of the Congress’s internal political and ideological conflicts, UPA 2 decided to generally avoid even being seen in public with entrepreneurial India, while indeed working closely with them behind closed doors. It resulted in yet another fascinating contradiction: at an institutional and a policy level, Indian business has never been as uninfluential since 1991 as it is now. Yet, at ‘operative’ levels, many of them have been able to work with government and the political class. Think of a situation here, except in the odd instance, the prime minister and the leading lights of the UPA don’t go to formal CII–FICCI-type functions, or even an IIM convocation, when the prime minister has spoken only rarely with Indian business formally and in public in this term, and yet one group after another can troop into 7 RCR for meetings and problem-solving. Not just that, individual businessmen can visit the capital on fixed days of the week and meet who they want in the PMO and elsewhere. When the establishment makes such rich povertarian virtue of staying away from businessmen while it cultivates them fondly in dark corridors, people do wonder what is going on. Particularly when the value of their savings has been, meanwhile, dwindling. If you draw a simple chart of the large companies that have lost the most value on the stock markets over the past three years, you’d notice that almost all of these were doing business on the same cusp of politics, finance and natural resources. To that extent, the market has been the first to sense the rot and has applied a stunning self-correction. Many of those who called themselves masters of the universe until just the other day, flaunting Bentleys, private jets, yachts, Swiss chalets and more, are now hiding from their bankers and shareholders and blaming the ‘system’. Obviously, there can be no sympathy for them or for their bankers. The markets have responded to this multilayered crisis of governance. But what about the government? Let’s not call it anti-business. Let us just say that compulsions of the return of ideological nostalgia made it shy of being seen to be engaging with business. When it came under suspicion of big-ticket match-fixing, it even tried to separate the cronies and the capitalists here and there. But it is because it was such a weak government that a completely different quality of businessmen, or rather fixerpreneurs, moved into that space, in the company of some rampaging politicians carrying their own preferences or hit-lists. Transparency, fair regulation, clearly stated policies, open communication are the engines of a reformed economy. But underlying all of that has to be a strong, decisive and clear-headed government, which UPA 2 most certainly has not been. So you have seen the kind of cronyism visible in some mine and spectrum allocations as ell as the selective targeting of some of India’s largest, most substantive business houses, particularly in the field of minerals and oil and gas. A remarkable illustration of this destruction by crony capitalism in reverse is the loss of value of India’s three largest showpiece oil and gas exploring companies—RIL and Vedanta (Cairn Energy) in the private sector and ONGC in the public

sector. Manmohan Singh’s reform twenty years ago brought Indian entrepreneurship—and passports —global respect, and $300 billion of reserves. Today it’s all in a shambles. Or, the India story is gravely in danger of going the way of Russia. And of course, without any of its stupendous riches.

FIRST FAMILY, SECOND N ATURE Why the Congress loses its head to d efend Vadra.

13 October 2012 Just when you think the Congress party has lost its ability to think, it surprises you. As with the nuclear deal. That ruthless political craft was in evidence again as it isolated the BJP and humiliated Mamata Banerjee in getting the president of its choice elected. Yet again, in the manner it was able to shift the hawa with the sudden flurry of economic decisions. And then, all of a sudden, it was back in the trenches. All because charges were hurled at Robert Vadra, whom the party describes as yet another private individual. What is it about the party that the moment a member of the Gandhi family is attacked, it loses its political judgement? It ceases to respond like a political party. Its seniormost leaders and cabinet ministers, many with several decades in public life, instead of trying to leverage the qualities o experience and maturity that rivals like Team Kejriwal (mere ‘upstarts’, as the Congress would describe them) cannot match, start behaving like panicky hit men in some kind of political Gangs o Hastinapur. The capital’s political scuttlebutt now has it that word has come from the very top for the Congress people to shut up. But the more important question is, why was that stupid counterattack launched in the first place? If Vadra is a private individual, married to a member of the Gandhi family who, too, is apolitical and thereby a private person, why did the party jump to his defence? And even if they did, why with such colossal incompetence? Examine some of the things prominent Congressmen said. Salman Khurshid first swore to give his life for the Gandhi family (hoping they’d notice). Then he said something like, he knows, ‘for example, where Prashant (Bhushan) gets his cases from’. You first accuse Gang Kejriwal of not being political and hitting below the belt. Then the law minister of the Republic kicks a fellow lawyer in the one place a half-decent public figure usually wouldn’t. Howsoever Bhushan may ‘get’ his cases, does that answer the charges levelled against Vadra? The ‘two wrongs make a right’ argument only tars the one Khurshid is defending. Manish Tewari is the party’s spokesman. He has worked hard at raising his voice to be heard in the noise. But in days to come, if Kejriwal finds muck to throw at a senior BJP leader, he might have to hastily revisit his charge that they are merely the BJP’s B-team. Rajiv Shukla was quick to pronounce there is no quid pro quo (how does he know so soon?) and counter by ‘exposing’ the Bhushans’ land allotment in Himachal Pradesh. But Ambika Soni, the I&B minister? She said Kejriwal was levelling his allegations to boost his own image (is that a crime in politics?) and accused TV channels of ‘helping him by airing these allegations’. What are these TV channels supposed to do? Not to be left behind, Veerappa Moily piped up too, and lost his way a bit in history.

He accused Kejriwal of Goebbelsian lying and then added, hold your breath, that ‘India is not Germany and our democracy is well nurtured’. Which Germany was he talking about? It took him a couple of days, but inevitably, H.R. Bhardwaj dumped his constitutional reserve (he hasn’t shown much in the Bangalore Raj Bhavan anyway) and also rose to the defence of the Gandhi family, whom he had only ended up embarrassing permanently with the way he, as law minister, had supposedly helped Quattrocchi retrieve his hoard from a sealed bank account. And Jayanthi Natarajan? Just how angry did she get in a TV studio over the attack, which she called ‘shameless and shameful’, so effectively outraged that even Salman Khurshid quietly fled from the same discussion, afraid of being shown up as relatively moderate. If only she were to show the same passion to save the Gangetic dolphin. It was such a spontaneous avalanche that you thought for a moment that even A.K. Antony may decide to break his permanent silence. And just an aside too tempting to avoid: how come, while they talked of the land in Himachal, no Congressman raised questions over the Bhushans’ patently wrong farm-home land allotment by Mayawati in Noida? This was exposed by Ritu Sarin in theExpress on 20 April 2011, and carried a gem of a quote from Shanti Bhushan: ‘I agree there is no transparency in the scheme . . . But why should we challenge this? . . . There may be a case for a scheme like this to be cancelled.’ Could it be that some of the senior Congressmen also may have got allotments there, following the principle we ould describe in heartland politics as Ram naam ki loot hai? The only people who stayed out of it, surprisingly, were Jairam Ramesh and Digvijaya Singh, the usual suspects. Could it be that they were beaten at the blocks by others? Or could it be that they had heard something to the contrary from the bosses? Either way, this sudden Congress outrage was just hat you would expect from a party whose leitmotif, over the years, has been sycophancy. It was as i everybody wanted to mark his attendance in the royal court. And predictably, the angriest voices ere of the party’s Rajya Sabha-ite darbaris. Robert Vadra may indeed have a defence. In any case, he is entitled to it until proven guilty. But the defence should have been mounted by him, particularly if he is just another private citizen. And the defence had to be built around facts, answers and explanations, not counterabuse and outrage. Now even if he argues that he is not in public life and thus should be spared this limelight, public opinion will not buy it. The Congress party has stupidly pulled that cap on to his head, and theirs too. In any case, he had not exactly strengthened his ‘just another private citizen’ argument by refusing to insist that his name be taken off the list, displayed at airports, of people exempted from frisking. At this juncture, public opinion is utterly unforgiving of those seeking the false trappings of VVIPdom. Meanwhile, spare a thought for the only real Congressman, and an important chief minister at that, ho is charged with having delivered the quid pro quo, if at all—Bhupinder Singh Hooda. Sure enough, no Congressman has spoken in his defence. The larger point, however, is, the Congress needs to grow up. Kejriwal and Bhushan have broken a post-1980 political contract in India that children of political families were not to be attacked. The Vajpayee and Gandhi families treated each other with great deference during the NDA years and later. The opposition, by and large, has been kind to the Gandhi family, except Modi’s ‘ ’ gai-bachhra (cow and the calf) responding to ‘maut ka saudagar’ in 2007. The Left has never attacked them,

targeting only the evil duo of Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambaram. This has now changed. The Congress has to factor this into its politics.

NAGPUR, WE HAVE A PROBLEM Why are the BJP ’s talented l eaders so smug with ossified RSS as their default b oss?

27 October 2012 One of the walls in my office displays a selection of the most devastating works of E.P. Unny, India’s finest political cartoonist now, and a worthy successor of the late Abu Abraham on the pages of the ndian Express . Dated 12 December 2000, it has K.S. Sudarshan, the then RSS chie (sarsanghchalak ), as a schoolteacher. Vajpayee, in school uniform (don’t miss the shorts, although, since it is black and white, we can only guess the colour), is squatting on the floor, a slate in his hands. His question to the teacher: ‘Tell me, Sudarshanji, what happened when Godseji went to the prayer meeting to protect Gandhiji?’ That had appeared in a week when some of Sudarshanji’s statements had hit the funny headlines, particularly his conspiracy theory that the Babri Masjid had not been brought down by kar sevaks, but by a bomb planted by the Congress. I have to confess, though, at that point I thought the cartoon was a bit vicious, even by the standards of Unny’s acid-dipped pen. It took me nearly five years to realise it asn’t. I had gone to Nagpur to record aWalk the Talk for NDTV 24x7 (‘BJP shaken as RSS chief targets Vajpayee, family and aide Mishra’, IE, 12 April 2005) after a sudden invitation from the sarsanghchalak ’s office. Sudarshanji had thoughtfully called me for a preparatory chat over dinner the previous evening. The meal, sitting on the floor in his semi-lit, gadget-less kitchen, was basic. RSS leaders, in fact, are usually so spartan they would make the Maoists look like hedonists. And I don’t know how, but almost inevitably, the talk shifted to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Of course, Sudarshanji told me, it was an outrage to blame the RSS. But I wasn’t prepared for the story he told me in all earnestness. That Godse had only gone to greet Gandhi. That he had carried a pistol, but Gandhi was shotwith a revolver. That forensically, if Gandhi had been shot from the front, the entry wound would have been smaller, and the exit a gaping hole. But it was the other way around. Conclusion: he was shot from behind. Implication (his words, not my interpretation): the only person who stood to benefit from his death was Nehru. So, my child, he seemed to say, QED. How did he know this? A senior police officer ‘from Andhra’ wrote this in his book. Who is the officer and where is he? He died a long time ago. Where is the book? It went out of print a long time ago. Now, I had the option the next morning to build the interview around this theory and it would have made instant headlines too, but silly ones. So I preferred the relatively boring contemporary political theme. He made even bigger headlines, calling for the ‘now really old’ Vajpayee’s retirement, holding his foster son-in-law, Ranjan Bhattacharya, and Brajesh Mishra responsible for all of the

BJP’s problems, questioning Uma Bharti’s upbringing, etc., etc. And what was the response I got from senior BJP leaders who endlessly complained that I had talked poor Sudarshanji into saying all this incendiary stuff? He is a simple man: he is really a gullible old man. Well meaning, but too ‘bhola bhaala ’ for politics, etc. His successor, Mohan Bhagwat, is not any of that. He is smart, articulate and much younger. He is not a goof. Particularly in this leaderless BJP, where even his nod is the law. Read his customary Vijayadashami speech last week. His economics is of the 1950s, but that you’d expect. So are his thoughts on society, religion, the Ram temple and, most importantly, national security. He still wants to liberate PoK (Pakistan-occupied Kashmir), all right. But he also said that ‘because of the policies pursued by government during the last decade’, terrorism is on a comeback trail in Jammu and Kashmir. The truth is, terror has declined over the past years in Kashmir, and this year has been the best since, maybe, 1989. Ten months have passed (and I say this with trepidation), and our army has not lost even one life to hostile fire this year, but why confuse wise olddeshbhakts with facts? One thing the RSS doesn’t lack is consistency. On all these issues—economics to society to religion to women to Muslims and Kashmir—its view has been as unchanging as the scriptures. So how does one run a BJP government in this country if every single decision has to either conform to the Great Teacher’s views or have his concurrence? Vajpayee did this, mostly in defiance of the Sangh. His own stature and political skills enabled him to do so. He opened many areas to FDI, including insurance, in spite of RSS-fuelled swadeshis. He sanctified the Line of Control as a de facto border—and thereby did the Indian strategic cause the greatest service—again ignoring the RSS. And even when they wanted Brajesh Mishra’s head, he let the grand viziers of Nagpur know that if they so insisted, they could take his instead. No wonder Sudarshan hated him. The situation today is entirely different. The BJP has so many leaders, and yet no leader. So it suits everybody to generally embrace the idea that the party’s power resides with the RSS. Nagpur, therefore, is the party’s 10 Janpath. The BJP can now keep or dump Gadkari. * But nobody would say ho appointed him party president. Whenever the BJP mocks Manmohan Singh as a prime minister appointed by 10 Janpath, it needs to say how many of its presidents have been genuinely elected or chosen by consensus rather than ‘appointed’ by Nagpur. Jana Krishnamurthy, Kushabhau Thakre, Venkaiah Naidu, Nitin Gadkari and, not to forget, Bangaru Laxman. What did their CVs read like? They were all foisted by the party’s own 10 Janpath. And you can see the difference. The Congress is a family-owned concern. But at least its proprietors are in public life and fight elections. The RSS, on the other hand, only says it should not be dragged into the BJP’s politics. Its leaders are still private individuals. an Express Group ‘Idea Exchange’ (organised our sister publication on have 4 September), At Mohan Bhagwat touchingly said the RSS was notbythe HR manager of theLoksatta BJP. You to be reckless to question thesarsanghchalak . But do check that statement out against the procession of top BJP leaders—including Narendra Modi—who have been visiting Nagpur lately. This is the fundamental problem with the BJP today. Its pantheon of talented leaders will not choose their first among equals and would continue to use the RSS as their default boss. In the process, they have to silently accept its ideological view of politics, society, economics and, worst o

all, its old, paranoid, khatre-mein-desh worldview. Nobody in the BJP today has the stature or courage to challenge this fatal contradiction of India’s second largest party being controlled by a selfavowedly ‘apolitical’, and definitely extra-constitutional, centre of power.

Postscript: Much before Sudarshan, there was Balasaheb Deoras. At the peak of the terrorism in Punjab, he had famously asked why there should be a problem between Sikhs and Hindus. Sikhs, he said, were only keshdhari Hindus, after all. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was still alive and in control of the Golden Temple and I was present for his afternoon discourse on the day Balasaheb’s statement was published. So, if Deoras calls us keshdhari Hindus, he asked, what will he call Muslims?Sunnatdhari (circumcised) Hindus?

A RETREAT TO REFORM A Congress in deep pani c is preparing to shed its hyp ocrisy, recast the politics of its economics.

3 November 2012 Elsewhere in this newspaper this morning, Senior Assistant Editor D.K. Singh, one of India’s sharpest political journalists, underlines the import of the rally the Congress party has planned in the capital this Sunday (4 November) in support of FDI in retail. * Not only is this the first time the party is coming out to support a substantive economic reform, but it is also putting some emotion into it. And the impetus has come from the top. Most powerful Congressmen from around the country, including the party chief ministers and PCC chiefs, are being asked to come. So far, its economic discourse had floated within a zone that you may describe aptly, and with a straight face, as fifty shades of pink. Its reigning establishment purged and disowned Narasimha Rao and watched in some horror as Manmohan Singh, back as prime minister, did make a serious effort in UPA 1 to revisit the idea of 1991. Whenever the prime minister and a few other UPA reformers risked doing something enterprising, the ‘party’ looked the other way. It reminded me, often, of something the late Sitaram Kesri had said after he led a parliamentary delegation to China: ‘These Chinese communists are like drivers o Delhi’s buses . . . they signal left, and turn right.’ Except, in this case, it seemed like the driver ished to turn right, but the party high command, playing traffic cop, was signalling left. Or at least that pretence, however farcical, was being maintained. Further, until now, its economics and politics were not just Left but also generally xenophobic. In fact, it is difficult to remember if the party ever came out publicly in support of anything foreign, or a foreign engagement, barring the African National Congress or the Palestinians. Or when a Soviet or Cuban strongman came visiting. It is for all these reasons that this Sunday’s rally is significant. You have to take note of the fact that India’s largest political party has thrown off its carefully stitched cloak of hypocrisy. This is some change from a party whose leaders usually de-risked themselves from almost anything remotely free market or reformist by writing cautionary letters to the prime minister. Even on the nuclear deal, the party had thought long and hard before the PM had left them no choice. However, this ‘aberration’ as also ‘corrected’ almost immediately in UPA 2. The prime minister’s first foreign policy initiative in his second term, at Sharm el-Sheikh, was snubbed promptly, rudely and so dismissively that he was left too humiliated to take another step, except backwards. Now, it seems, he has discovered the nuclear deal moment again. If the nuclear deal, therefore, was about changing the paradigm on India’s larger foreign and strategic policy, this is an equally significant shift in the economic discourse.

What has brought about this intriguing change? First of all, it is a realisation that the party is left ith no other tricks. It cannot fight the next election on the issue of corruption, or, in other words, on its entire opposition’s (conventional and neo-activist) terms. It may be useful, therefore, to shift the discourse to economics. And for that, it needs an idea more distant and distinct than old socialism. That, in any case, has now become everybody else’s policy as well, though nobody has embraced it as enthusiastically as the latest set of challengers from unconventional politics, ranging from Arvind Kejriwal to Anna Hazare and their OB van lieutenants. This, in fact, has created an entirely new opportunity in Indian politics. With the entire collection of what may be called the TV Studio Party of India (until they formally announce a name) now positioning itself way to the left of Prakash Karat, some space has been created for both the Congress and the BJP to argue with each other in a more modern, aspirational, positive and reformist language. But let’s not digress for the moment. It’s a point made often in this column that the main reason for UPA 2’s continuing disaster is that the Congress party deliberately and cynically misread the mandate of 2009. Ignoring telling facts such as its sweep of almost all urban centres in India, its really poor performance in states where the vast majority of the poorest Indians live as against its relative success in more upwardly mobile regions, it asn’t willing to give credit to the five preceding years of robust growth. In finessing the achievement as that of the ‘government’ or the ‘party’, it made it sound as if people had voted it back in power—with a larger majority—in spite of growth and not because of it. That credit had to be given to NREGA, farm loan waiver, Pay Commission and stable prices of petroleum fuels. This contradiction created the political equivalent of a self-destructive autoimmune disease for the UPA’s second edition. The result was devastation of India’s manufacturing, mining, power, steel and infrastructure sectors and, quite frankly, also its environment, by making an entirely virtuous idea politically controversial and adversarial. It reduced a globally celebrated success to an object o derision and junk grade rating. Those responsible can, with justification, be charged with premeditated murder of the India story. Now, in deep panic, their party is making a belated, yet surprisingly well-organised, retreat. While we are on the issue of the ruling party’s economic about-turn, it is instructive to flag another interesting point. How come most of those pushing for reform even in these last five quarters (if at all) of this government, are Lok Sabha members? Many of them, including P. Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, M.M. Pallam Raju, Pawan Kumar Bansal, Salman Khurshid and even Manish Tewari, are also looking at a very, very challenging passage the next time around as the political ground in their old pocket boroughs has shifted meanwhile. Most of them, including Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot and C.P. Joshi, are veterans of many elections. Yet, if they are all willing to risk it on change, they must someA.K. electoral meritVayalar in reform and Ghulam modern economics. with those opposing the same see change: Antony, Ravi, Nabi Azad, Contrast Jayanthi this Natarajan, Jairam Ramesh and so on. They are all in the Rajya Sabha. They do not have to worry about losing their place in Parliament, howsoever disastrous 2014 may be for their party. They will snigger from the sidelines. More evidence will be needed to establish this. But this Sunday’s rally is a strong indication that the Congress leadership has now decided to go with the former, rather than the latter.

EARS WIDE SHUT The UPA still doesn’t get it; cities will stand up to ask for more, you can’t switch off.

29 Dece mber 2012 One problem with mass anger is that it makes us overlook what or who it is that we are angry about. Particularly when it happens to be a mere individual. So, as we scream, pull out the barricades at Rajpath and vent, from the streets to Facebook to the year-end party circuit, spare a thought for the lonely 23-year-old still hanging on in distant Singapore. * Most human beings would not have had the strength or will to survive a fraction of what she had to suffer. That she is still there, battling, surprising the most experienced doctors, and also inspiring them to not give up, is a part of the story that must not be forgotten. We have to think of her, pray for her and draw inspiration from her. Because this anger, ultimately, is about her first. All the rest of us, our fury and frustration, our slogans, our disgust for the police and the ‘system’, our concern for our children, come later. Hers is the story of a 23-year-old from a family of modest means who did not have dad’s car and driver to take her home at night, and whose eyes lit up when a bus stopped and offered her and her friend a ride home. This is about a public transport-using, ordinary, but aspirational and modern Indian, and not some ‘dented and painted’,* clubbing stereotype of an eighteenth-century mind. She is what this is about, first of all. And least of all about us in the media who, while congratulating ourselves for leading this anger, haven’t exactly been above the usual milking of the story, with much voyeurism: see a TV channel using the silhouette of a model in a flimsy black dress, head buried between her bare knees, covered with equally bare arms. Or some of the others Bollywoodising the story by assuming names for the victim, one even drawn from a Sunny Deol-starrer on the theme of rape. So take a break, once again, and pray for her as she fights the most formidable odds. But don’t forget the incompetent way this has been handled by your government and do not forgive them for it. Even during the Anna agitation, this government had displayed the outdatedness of its responses. It first did not know what hit it, and then went down on its knees, offering to draft a draconian new law jointly with Team Anna, an idea as insincere as it was unworkable. Last week showed us that it has still learnt nothing. For three days, as the fury of a relatively small but articulate crowd magnified by television raged, nobody came out to talk, to reason, to douse the fires. The government once again went into the trenches and outsourced the problem to people least suited to handle it: Delhi Police. Deservedly or not, the police were already the object of popular anger. Where were the seven Congress MPs from Delhi? Or the forty-one ruling party MLAs? Where was the home minister, his deputies, the Gandhis? The lieutenant governor may have been caught on the rong foot overseas, but where, for heaven’s sake, was Sheila Dikshit? This was not her police, we

know. But these were her people, the same Delhiites who have given her the privilege of being a thrice-elected chief minister, well ahead of one Narendra Modi. And if it is too much to expect today’s SUV-driving political class to deal with such messy distractions, where was the usual, boring civil administration? The chief secretary? The deputy commissioners? The entire magistracy? All burning up their unused casual leave at the end of the year? You leave angry crowds and an edgier police to deal with each other and you can only get the disaster of 23 December and an unnecessary loss of life.* For a government so endowed with modern, mostly foreign-educated offspring of old party stalwarts, it is phenomenally incompetent in dealing with these protests. You can no longer hide behind old arguments: these are small crowds compared to what we politicians can bring, these are upper-crust sahibs and memsahibs, Delhi-centric non-voting classes and so on, or that these are exaggerated by TV, how do you deal with immature media, etc. You can either wait for the rest of us to become more ‘mature’ or, meanwhile, learn to deal in real time with such challenges that will now continue to rise. You do not expect Manmohan Singh to do an Obama wiping his tears after the Connecticut school massacre. But didn’t the entire Congress have anybody, just one leader, to show some empathy? If Sonia Gandhi could join the crowds celebrating India’s World Cup victory, why couldn’t someone join these protesters too? To speak to cameras outside Safdarjung Hospital, to shed a tear, probably genuine, but is it anybody’s point that politicians cannot or should not fake it if necessary? They do it all the time for votes. So once again, was Sheila Dikshit also on casual leave? And why do these outbreaks happen only in Delhi? Because India’s most improved city is also necessarily India’s most aspirational. Also, the most impatient and unforgiving. And it is the home of the national media, particularly news television. Some of us have been arguing that in cynically finessing rural against urban, the UPA has dangerously alienated the cities in a rapidly urbanising India, in spite of the fact that most of them voted for it overwhelmingly, twice. Yet, if the UPA’s arrogant and delusional message has been, our voters live in distant villages, so you city folk go fend for yourselves, it is being made to pay for it. The cities, particularly Delhi, have found a new voice. Television and social media are their new megaphones and force multipliers. You can’t survive in denial of this new reality. Nor can you squash it. If you do not upgrade your cities, modernise your governance, scale up schooling, colleges, jobs, housing, public transport, policing, more and more of this will happen. Come May, for example, what if five thousand school-finishers with 85-plus per cent marks land up at Rajpath, protesting they have no college to go to? Or if two thousand sets of parents arrive with their four-year-olds, saying find school admissions for them? Will you tell them, go to municipal schools or third-rung colleges like your enormously more and tell lessyou privileged common citizens? Where youmade send you your children, mister, they willnumerous ask you, and to go to hell. If these few days have did already nervous, frankly, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

THEM VERSUS THEM Why there’s a deepening divid e between the two elites, rulin g and governing.

5 January 2013 The idea that there are two Indias is not new. For intellectual convenience, one is called India, the other Bharat. One is shining, the other declining. One lives in cities, the other in villages. One is upper-caste Hindu, the other scheduled or backward caste, tribal or Muslim. One is white collar, the other in agriculture. But our thinking has become so numbed by these established notions that we are missing another division in India, in fact, in Shining India. Or, the rise of two Shining Indias in conflict with each other on the streets, as we saw in the protests over the 16 December gangrape now and during the Anna mobilisation earlier. Let us call one the India of ruling elites, and the other of governing elites. Governing elites are the political and bureaucratic classes, the judiciary, the conventional (or rather institutional) intelligentsia and media, police and armed forces. The ruling elites, on the other hand, are the economically ‘arrived’ Indians outside of the sarkari system. The businessmen, new professionals, particularly from IT and banking, the EMI-powered, young, double-income community and, of course, the conventional old rich and offspring of earlier generations of governing elites, NRI returnees and modern, foreign foundation-fuelled activists. These ruling elites and our traditional governing elites now have so little in common, so little shared ground that they have begun to look like two sovereign and hostile republics. Except, they live within the same territorial frontiers. That is why one finds it natural to blame the other for whatever it thinks is going wrong. The governing class blames the ruling elite for insensitivity typical of the rich, inability to understand ‘real’ India and for making unreasonable upper-crust ‘give them cake’-type demands each time they come out protesting. The ruling elites, of course, have the deep belief that all of India’s rulers are corrupt, inefficient, unskilled, illiterate, insensitive, outdated and out of touch with the new aspirational India, undeserving of holding the jobs and exercising the powers that they do. And, therefore, the ‘system’ must change. We have looked at two related phenomena in the past. And these, in some ways, may have been precursors to the complex situation now. One was the way Mumbai and Delhi functioned like two entirely different, and distant politico-socio-economic entities. * You made money from enterprise in Mumbai—and bought power with it. You earned power through votes in Delhi—and acquired wealth ith it. So Mumbai and Delhi became metaphors for entrepreneurial and political India, respectively. The other phenomenon was of our biggest cities—Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and so on (with the exception of Delhi)—becoming ‘colonies’ of the states to which they belonged. ** Take Mumbai, for example. The political class that rules it does so by getting votes in the

Maharashtrian countryside. This phenomenon, get the votes in the villages and use that power to rule and plunder the cities, can be seen in all our big cities. This political marginalisation of metropolitan India was hastened by the rise in migration and slummification as the hinterland moved in as the same politicians’ vote banks, pushing the upwardly mobile India further to the political margins. These two disparate phenomena have now expanded to make the divide complete. Today the ruling classes have nothing to share with their governing counterparts except contempt and anger. Their children pass their plus-two at the best schools, which are now factories that massproduce fee-paying Indian students for foreign undergraduate colleges. That is one of the reasons presidents of American universities now routinely float around in India. They come looking for customers, not scholarship. Our government has created this market by assuring undersupply o quality college education. These children return from college more or less alien to their country and its ‘system’, and join their parents’ expanding world of non-governmental power elites. Their social and professional circles are mostly PLU, where almost every other Indian they come across, security guards, drivers, cooks and domestic servants, taxi-men, even policemen, are allbhaiyyas . I say policeman with particular emphasis as he is usually their first point of contact with governance: to get a driving licence, a passport renewal verification, a traffic ticket, or a breathalyser test on a night drive. And this bhaiyya is usually sorted out with some cash. As the rest of the government must be. Then they compare this rotten governance with what they experience overseas. The richer families now routinely employ a full-time fixer whose only job is to solve their ‘little’ problems with the government, represented mainly by the police, excise, income tax and the various municipal departments, all of which are equally ‘corrupt and purchasable’. Of course, nobody in these ruling classes, with the clout of cash and connections at the higher levels and the force of idealism and impatience among the professionals in the aspirational EMI stage of life, wants to venture across the divide. They do not compete for all-India services. Check the socio-economic profile of IAS officer recruits every year. The competition is too tough, too messy and, in any case, what do civil servants get paid, ‘unless they become corrupt’? These classes also shun politics. Particularly, again, because it is too dirty, but also because of the entry barriers. And the armed forces? Forget it. Who will lead that life, and that too for so little money? Better leave soldiering for the children of India’s kisans. Maybe Shastri had figured it out when he said Jai ‘ awan, Jai Kisan’ in 1965. The British royal family, which sends its boys to active military service, is no inspiration to these new royals of India. They want to have nothing to do with government. They only want to fight it. And what about the governing elites? They have internalised the belief that all their problems, all the ills they blamed for, are thenon-voting imagination of these greedy, unreasonable, illiberal, arrogant neware Indians, whom theynothing dismiss but as the class. But when these non-voters arrive at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar or Mumbai’s Azad Maidan, they don’t know how to deal with them. They are an unusually well-dressed people’s army that comes in tow with a marauding cavalry, of OB vans and camera cranes. You may say these are small crowds and that political crowds used to come in lakhs, but there is a qualitative difference. In the past, when lakhs of poorer Indians came protesting, you could gas, thrash and shoot them. The detained, injured and even killed were mere statistics on

day two. Not with these smaller, niftier, smarter crowds of protesters. When an 18-year-old college student in jeans climbs a pole on Rajpath carrying a placard, she gets millions more eyeballs than a dying patient abandoned in the compound of a Hazaribagh hospital—just as somebody on a 24-hour crash diet at Jantar Mantar would attract millions more eyeballs than Irom Sharmila in Imphal. Each of these protesters is more articulate than any police officer. India’s ruling elites are now media savvy and camera trained. Each TV anchor, in turn, is more articulate than any of your party spokespersons. And so many of our activists are smarter, cleverer and better communicators than all of these. This is a larger reality the governing classes cannot wish away. Whatever their judgemental view, they have to learn to live with it, find a modus vivendi. In fact, they need to embrace and co-opt this other Shining India. They have to take a leaf out o Indira Gandhi’s book and bring in some of the more talented professionals from the corporate world and liberal-global academia laterally into government. Professional India has to be given a better institutionalised role in governance. This will mean bringing in more of these successful professional classes into politics. Just one Nandan Nilekani is not enough. And yet you can see how he can solve problems, sell innovative new ideas and processes that conventional politicians and bureaucrats can’t. This applies to all major political parties. Even the bureaucracy and judiciary have to find ways to bring this ruling elite into the tent. Why do all the positions of regulators, from telecom to RBI, SEBI, insurance, competition and information commissions and so on, have to go only to retiring civil servants? * The National Security Council set-up? Why not fish in a larger pond? Over the past decade, the governing classes have built a fortress. The ruling elites, conscious o their new power now, are determined to smash its gates. It is for the former now to throw open the gates instead and accept the new reality. Or condemn itself to a permanent siege. As history will tell them, sieges usually end one way.

PROUD TO PAY Power to rail, LPG to IIT, why the pragmatic new India doesn’t want freebi es.

12 January 2013 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s critics and friends are unanimous that irrespective of how good or bad the times, he looks the same: worried. I can tell you, however, that one of his biggest worries has remained as it was fifteen years ago. Which is when I had a conversation with him on board a morning Indian Airlines flight from Delhi to Bombay. he T NDA had just come to power and was making some reformist promises. But Manmohan Singh, on that flight, was speaking both as an economist and a politician. He was worried, he said, because he feared that India’s growth, even economic stability, was under threat because of its people’s disinclination to pay the real price for goods and services provided by the government and, equally, the politicians’ lack of courage to persuade them to do so. He mentioned fuel, foodgrain, rail and bus fares, electricity and water. If we look back carefully at what has been accomplished over the past twelve months or so, he might wish to revisit that view now, and happily so. It is still a work in progress, but there is evidence now that our people are changing. And, as almost invariably happens in democracies, the political class has failed to foresee this welcome change, let alone embrace it. The increase in rail fares this week has gone through almost bloodlessly. * So bloodlessly, in fact, that you worry if this is some deceptive calm before all hell breaks loose. But it won’t. As it didn’t hen diesel prices were hiked substantially and a rude LPG cylinder cap introduced in September last year. Streets did not go up in fire, and the departure of Mamata Banerjee from the UPA was an inevitable moment of liberation. The threatened Bharat Bandh, in spite of the Left and the BJP coming together with Mulayam, Mamata and Karunanidhi, was a flop, like any other protest against fuel price hikes before this. The only places where it was visible were West Bengal and Kerala. But you can bring those states to a standstill even if you call for a bandh because Brazil did not win the World Cup. These states are ever so bandh-ready. I saw Kochi come to a pause as news came in that Saddam Hussein had been hanged, and several parties gave bandh calls. I was, at that precise moment, floating as a tourist in Mattancherry, the heritage quarter of Kochi harbour. And was witness to the fact that the first people to pull the shutters down and join the bandh were the shopkeepers on Jew Street. Consider some other recent user price increases. There have been heavy increases in bus fares in Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Karnataka and even Kerala. While all of us, particularly the pink papers, fret over the health of the power industry and state utilities, thirty-one states and Union Territories have hiked power tariffs in the past twelve months. The average increase is a robust 16 per cent. Tamil Nadu has instituted the highest increase (37 per cent), and it was the state’s first hike after nine years.

Even the formidable DMK was not able to exploit it to rebuild its broken politics, it could only secure a tiny rollback. Kerala followed with a 30 per cent hike, Mumbai 28 per cent, Delhi 20, UP 17.6, Maharashtra 16.5, and Punjab and Himachal 12. Two facts need to be underlined here. Delhi saw some protests, mostly not from the poor or the middle classes, but the Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) of pampered south Delhi colonies. No wonder Kejriwal’sbijli-jodo campaign ended so abruptly. There is no sympathy for power thieves any more, as there is none for corrupt netas. Second, Himachal, which announced one of the lowest increases, 12 per cent, rolled it back indirectly by announcing a subsidy cushion after some protests in its election year. But why is tiny Himachal so important? The government panicked and subsidised some of that increase, hoping it would make the voter happy. Just as, following the same stale, old-school politics, it presumed that the Centre’s LPG cap, ‘suicidal’ so close to the Himachal elections, would win it a second term. The BJP built a campaign around LPG and rising prices, and threw in an innovative freebie as well: free induction heaters. And hat was the result? It got thrashed. That is why tiny Himachal is important. Because it tells you Indian voters are moving on. And there are real economic and social reasons behind this welcome change. Himachal, for example, has a very high percentage of government employees, and now, with the rise of some industrial areas (Baddi in particular) in the plains and foothills, also a growing population employed in the organised sector. These can be described as VDA-Indians. VDA stands for Variable Dearness Allowance, which rises at quick, often quarterly, intervals with the price index, giving this growing population an inflation cushion. This increase in the number of Indians employed in the organised sector is the reason why these price hikes have been absorbed. Last week, the IITs increased their tuition fee by 80 per cent. No parents marched to Rajpath. Our airlines have fully established the principle of fuel surcharge, thereby protecting themselves from wild increases in crude prices. The only complaints you have seen were from some in the media. Planes are full. Welcome, then, to a pragmatic new India. Where some in the middle classes are VDA-hedged, and others have seen their incomes grow so fast they can pay more for better services rather than insist on freebies. Of course, the poor are in a different category altogether. But the sad truth is, most of the poor do not benefit from these subsidised prices. Our subsidies mainly go to the middle classes and the rich. For the poor, the basics, foodgrain, fuel and even power tariffs, are protected at the low levels of consumption they can afford. The only people protesting, in the cocktail circuit and on T channels, are the rich. For them, subsidies are an entitlement and a status symbol, not a necessity. Go to the petroleum ministry website that now has a truly sensational list naming each individual subscriber how many subsidised LPG cylinders sheA-lists. has been using far. Look the voluntary centurions: they are alland members of your political and financial There hassonever beenatany movement, any offer or mobilisation, on the part of the really rich or powerful, like our ministers, MPs, even judges of higher courts, to say they willingly give up even the *six cheap LPG cylinders as an undeserved subsidy. But what do you expect from elites who will be outraged if you just removed that obscenity of a signboard at every highway toll plaza listing those exempted from paying a paltry toll? How you wish that one day a Chief Justice of India will take the lead and voluntarily give up at

least that one privilege. He wouldn’t even need a PIL to pronounce on that. But we are digressing. The basic point is, the Indian voter is changing for the better. She wants better services and goods and with greater dignity, and won’t mind paying more for them. It is for the leaders to understand this welcome change and build a new politics around it, fuelled by aspiration, growth and performance, not mere freebies as in the past.

ONE DYNASTY DIMM ING The Gandhi family can’t swing India—and can’t challenge rising regional families.

23 February 2013 You can frame this question in one of many ways. What has changed fundamentally in politics over the past decade, or what hasn’t? Or, what is it that has changed radically and dramatically, and yet looks like the continuation of an old, familiar pattern? The short answer to this muddled question: dynastic politics. The muddle goes on. Dynastic politics is now on the decline, yet has acquired deeper roots. Dynastic hold on India’s politics has weakened and strengthened at the same time. These conflicting cross-currents have brought about a fundamental shift in our politics. They have hurt the Congress most of all. Ask any Congress leaders who contest elections (unlike its star cast of privileged Rajya Sabha-ists) and they will admit to you, albeit in whispers and fearfully glancing left and right, that the days when the Gandhi family could win them their seats are over. Only those who nurse their constituencies or have local, caste-based or family vote banks win their seats. Of course, it helps i the Gandhis visit to campaign because that endorses them within the party. Otherwise, their ability to in seats beyond the Amethi–Rae Bareli enclave has diminished to insignificance. I asked a senior (and always elected) Congress leader, then why is the Gandhi family still so important? He said they cannot help anybody win elections, but they keep the party together. Their ord is law and the party needs that discipline. Illustration: the moment Sonia or Rahul says something, everybody nods and falls in line. If Narasimha Rao or Sitaram Kesri said something, everybody broke out in rebellion and rashes. You have to assess Rahul Gandhi’s recent Jaipur speech against this background. * It tugged immediately at fellow partymen’s heartstrings, but made little impact beyond. So here is the answer to the first half of ourquestion: the dynasty has become evenstronger within the Congress, with not even a whiff of discontent of the kind Nehru (occasionally), Indira (twice and substantively so) and Rajiv (most significant of all) faced. The dynasty owns the party as never before. But its pan-national votecatching appeal is history. At least for now. The Gandhi family has suffered because several new dynasties—at least fifteen of them politically significant—have risen in key electoral zones. Each one of these now has a strong, proprietary vote bank, and total ownership of its party. A pan-national dynasty no longer has the ability to breach these fortresses. From the Abdullahs in Kashmir, Badals in Punjab, Mulayam Singh in Uttar Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu and Jaganmohan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh, Karunanidhi in Tamil Nadu, Gowdas in Karnataka, Thackerays and Pawars in Maharashtra, Lalu in Bihar to Naveen Patnaik in Orissa and Sangmas in distant Meghalaya, all represent dynasties that may be limited by geography but cannot be

challenged by a national party. So a Lalu may be thrashed by a Nitish, but his vote share will still remain ahead of the Congress’s—or even the BJP’s, particularly if the party were to be out of its alliance with the JD(U). Inability to counter the rise of these dynasties is the Congress party’s biggest failure. This is the greatest game-changer in our politics. Each one of these dynasties is represented by a strong local leader who has tasted and exercised elected power. Each one has learnt the art of leveraging his regional power to grab a share of the national pie. Each has also learnt that real clout and money are now in the states. This was explained to me most candidly by H.D. Kumaraswamy, Deve Gowda’s son, when he was briefly chief minister of Karnataka. ‘My father,’ he said, ‘committed a great mistake in becoming prime minister of India.’ In return for that job for a few months, he said, his father lost control over the state of Karnataka. ‘We all have to learn from the DMK,’ he said. ‘Keep your hold in your own state, and then negotiate with whoever leads the coalition in Delhi for a share of national power.’ The Gandhis haven’t found an answer to this. Nor can they complain about it. Because they were the ones who established the principle of a political party as a closely held family concern. In fact, so lazy has the Congress leadership been with its politics that while its own vote base has been taken away by these satrap families, a number of mini or sub-dynasties have risen within the party. Partly because that’s where the leadership’s comfort level is: isn’t it so much easier to deal ith familiar faces, to be among your ‘own’, generation to generation? And partly because the party had no other mechanism to produce new crops of leaders from student, trade union or even tribal or farmers’ movements, the traditional nurseries of Indian political talent. So the party now has Amarinder Singh, wife and son, etc. in Punjab, the Hoodas in Haryana, where Kiran Chaudhary represents the Bansi Lal lineage as well, Sheila Dikshit and son in Delhi, Virbhadra Singh in Himachal, Sachin Pilot, Jitin Prasada, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Milind Deora, all of whom represent subdynasties and are mostly capable of winning just their own seats. You can go on counting, from Narayan Rane in Maharashtra to even Pranab Mukherjee and son in West Bengal. The Congress owns them all, but its central leadership is no longer capable of challenging them. It tried to defy one such, in fact the most prominent of these, and ended up with its political disaster called Andhra Pradesh. This is the central problem with the party: its top leadership can no longer win national elections. Its efforts to rekindle the Gandhi–Nehru family nostalgia cannot go beyond the party faithful. And it has no local leaders to counter these fifteen-odd regional dynasts. Its own group of political scions is like a chamber of princes. They have failed to extend their influence beyond their own constituencies. The party’s politics is now trapped in this rut. And you cannot pull it out simply by invoking the name of the family, even five generations of it. This just won’t do in 2014, three decades after Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

STILL M ANDAL, STILL M ANDIR Behind our frozen politics: both Congress, BJP cold to any Big New Idea.

2 March 2013

If you don’t believe that the politics of a democracy the size and diversity of India has remained frozen for two decades, a close look at the chart accompanying this article will tell you that vote shares of major players have remained more or less constant since the Congress lost its domination in 1996. They may have sometimes moved in a narrow band of mostly 2–3 per cent. But changes o government have taken place more as a result of decisive local or regional turnarounds: the decimation of the BJP by the Samajwadi Party (not a constituent of the UPA) in Uttar Pradesh, the near-clean-sweep by the DMK in Tamil Nadu and the Left’s best ever performance in West Bengal and Kerala in 2004 brought the Congress-led UPA to power. The difference in the Congress and BJP’s vote share was just over 4 per cent. Power changed hands mainly because of several statelevel sideshows.

What lost the NDA power was also the loss of its own allies: Naveen Patnaik’s BJD, Mamata Banerjee’s TMC and Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP, all driven out by the Gujarat killings and aggressive Hindutva. These factors, more than any aam aadmi revulsion over India Shining, brought the UPA to power. In fact, the Modi factor, which consolidated the minorities against the BJP and drove out any ally with some hope of getting minority votes (Mamata, TDP, and eventually BJD) produced a Lok Sabha with such peculiar arithmetic that an anti-BJP, Congress-led coalition was the only possibility. There were changes in 2009, particularly in the cities where some votes shifted from the BJP to the Congress, partly because of five years of growth and the rise of Manmohan Singh as a middleclass favourite. But essential divisions in national politics remained largely unchanged. This status quo has prevailed since 1996, though three different coalitions (UF, NDA and UPA) have ruled India. In each election, with such a small gap between the big players, the final power equation has been decided by two kinds of regional players: those who can ideologically or electorally go only with one side (as in the SP and Left with the Congress) and those with ideologies totally fungible with power (DMK/AIADMK), who will go with any frontrunner. Who is responsible for this frozen politics? Indecisive voters or lazy politicians? The answer is, predictably, the latter. In the two decades since 1992, no party, coalition or leader has produced a decisive new idea that could influence voters across at least a few electorally important states. We take the 1989–92 period as a watershed because this was the last time a new idea—in fact, two—checked out the voter’s mind in the Hindi heartland. The BJP launched the Mandir movement in 1989 and V.P. Singh led Mandalite forces on the slogan of social justice. Both ideas were divisive. But they ensured Rajiv Gandhi’s defeat in 1989 and destroyed, almost permanently, the Congress party’s vote banks. Mandir and Mandal were, therefore, the last big ideas that altered our national power equations. Since then, nobody has been able to catch India’s imagination. Even today, our politics is essentially determined by these two factors. Mandalites rule Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and across most of the country it is a battle between pro-Hindutva and anti-Hindutva (more conveniently described as secular and communal) forces. To that extent, the politics that L.K. Advani and V.P. Singh crafted in 1989–92 still prevails. Sure, specific events (the rise of Vajpayee as an inclusive leader, NDA’s sudden parliamentary defeat just before the war in Kargil, Gujarat riots, the nuclear deal) cause small, 2–3 per cent, fluctuations, decisive in a sharply divided polity. But there has been no big change since 1992. Democracies and voters respond to big ideas, even during phases in history when elections look like a one-horse race. Indira Gandhi’s aggressive socialism andGaribi Hatao was a big new idea and brought a landslide in 1971, even after she had divided her party and her opposition had consolidated. In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi won thethe Congress its biggest majority ever on his If own ideathe of youthful resurgence. It is lazy to dismiss 1984 verdict as a mere sympathy vote. thatbig were case, Rajiv would not have found the kind of popular adulation he did in at least his first two years. He was the last leader in India’s history to present us with an optimistic, aspirational and can-do agenda, and was rewarded. He was followed by Advani and V.P. Singh with their Mandir and Mandal. Since then, our politics has drifted. Both the Congress and BJP have lacked the courage or the foresight to seize subsequent

opportunities. A Congress government (though not under a Gandhi) ushered in economic reform in 1991. But the party has never gone to the voters with that as a big idea. So deep is its socialist indoctrination that in 1996, even Narasimha Rao did not sell reform. I travelled with him on his campaign to Jammu and was astounded when, instead of claiming credit and seeking votes for reform, he told a small, confused audience the story of how he had resisted pressure to privatise his PSUs or allow FDI in insurance. ‘Maine bol diya,’ he said, ‘main apna LIC kabhi kamzor nahin hone doonga’ (I told them, I will never allow my LIC to be weakened). Until the pro-FDI rally in Delhi in November, the Congress never even talked of economic reform as a good idea. The BJP’s inability to learn from Vajpayee’s success represents a comparable lack of political imagination. Vajpayee showed his party the benefits in moving closer to the ideological centre, of more inclusive politics, which persuaded even a Farooq Abdullah to stay in the tent. He thought, and isely so, that a new, genteel, non-threatening right-of-centre politics could be built around idespread anti-Congressism in the states. But he was defeated when the party and its ideological controllers held back his hand during the Gujarat riots. This not only lost the BJP its secular allies, it also led to a very slow but consistent decline in its vote share: nearly 7 per cent from its 1998 peak. The chart that shows the BJP and Congress vote-share graphs like stunning mirror images of each other tells you that in the first post-Ayodhya election in 1996, the Congress’s vote share was 28.8 per cent and in 2009 it was 28.55, even though the first time it lost power and the second time it was acknowledged to have won an impressive victory. In exactly the same period (1996–2009), the BJP’s vote share moved from 20.29 to 18.8 per cent, an insignificant decline of just over 1 per cent. Do we need more evidence that our politics has remained essentially frozen for two decades? It also follows that this may just present a perfect opportunity for somebody with the political intellect and courage to break the stalemate.

LAWLIPOP POLITICS From corruption to rape, the UPA’s basic i nstinct is susp ect: better legislate than d eliver.

16 March 2013 The rise of Anna Hazare panicked the UPA into embracing the idea of drafting serious laws at the point of a gun. Sometimes it is given deadlines by others, notably Anna Hazare, and now it set a deadline for itself, over the Criminal Law Amendment Bill.* Shocked and awed and, most importantly, embarrassed over its own incompetence in dealing with the aftermath of the Delhi gangrape, it first set up a committee under Justice J.S. Verma to suggest a new draft law in thirty days. And when he did submit that draft, in fact, a day ahead of the deadline, it promulgated an ordinance after making some arbitrary, hurried changes. We know human beings can do the stupidest things in fright. But you would have expected that a government consisting of so many thick-skinned political veterans would have at least used the submission of the Verma report to buy some time, to circulate it for wider discussion—a bit wider than in that weekend’s TV talk shows—and waited for the Parliament session less than a month away. With the ordinance, it set a deadline for itself: it either passes the law in Parliament now, or the ordinance lapses, and brings back the combined wrath of news TV and activists. Hence, pass this law now, howsoever imperfect, hasty and un-debated, howsoever strong the disagreements on it within your own cabinet (a welcome rarity in a cabinet where two-thirds mostly yawn and doze through their routine Thursday meetings). But why the hurry, nobody asked. Who promulgates ordinances overnight like this on what is, after all, a new criminal law? It is not as if a ar was on and you needed to amend Defence of India Rules to plug some dangerous loophole. In any case, a new law would not have applied to a crime that had already taken place. And really, and I know it is risky to raise such questions in these times, do you really think the horrible nutcases who brutalised that young woman on the night of 16 Decem ber would have had second thoughts if such a law had existed? Maybe the government was taken by surprise yet again. It may not have expected Justice Verma to break rank with so many of his fellow retired judges heading commissions, inquiries and committees, ho have about as much respect for deadlines as the Indian railways do for arrival and departure timings. Once he delivered the report, somebody said, oh, so what next? Justice Verma, who had given us that brilliant sexual harassment verdict, had not threatened to go on hunger strike if the draft did not become law by Holi. Today, the government is talking of splicing and splitting that law, leaving out some contentious clauses, calling an all-party meeting and so on. Wasn’t the time to do all this when the draft was submitted? Shouldn’t a far-reaching law like this be examined by a parliamentary committee?

This is a very serious law. And it is littered with issues that remain gravely contentious: age of consent, quantum of punishment, burden of evidence, very delicate definitions on voyeurism, stalking, harassment. All these are very important issues and must be addressed, of course. But these must be debated over time, rather than be legislated on the run and left for future generations to cleanse. It is idely acknowledged that a hard case makes for a bad law. Which is exactly what is happening now. This legislation is several issues, laws, laments and, frankly, prejudices and ideologies, rolled into one. And it is now going to be passed with a deadline imposed by that SOS ordinance. Offering a legislation in place of a political response to a challenge is the classic symptom o eak governance. We are expected now to buy the argument that just the passing of this complex and hastily drafted law will make India a better place for women, while it will still be implemented by a system so lousy it cannot even prevent one of the key accused in a case that has the world riveted, and hich is the raison d’être of this new law, from committing suicide in jail. Try selling us something else. In the absence of police and judicial reform, and the fine-tuning of its clauses after a wider, patient, open-ended debate (some in the ordinance read like a crudely written page from an anatomy textbook), this law will have the effect of setting up thousands of ‘ATMs’ across the country: at least one in each police station. It may or may not protect vulnerable women, but it will surely empower and enrich corrupt policemen. But don’t tell the UPA this. Wait for Pranab Mukherjee’s memoirs and he may, he just may, decide to share with you the fury and frustration he controlled while dealing with Anna Hazare and his committee of wise and impatient men as they sat down to draft the Lokpal bill against a deadline. In one of the earliest meetings, he firmly told Team Anna that a law resembling their draft would need India’s Constitution to be rewritten. And when a member of Team Anna * replied that that indeed was the idea, Pranab simply said he did not quite have the mandate to do so, and if Team Anna wanted it, they would have to go to the people and get it. But a ridiculous, hurried and impractical draft of some sort was created. It is still floating in the legislative system, and has fortunately been prevented from becoming a law. The political class around the world knows the art of throwing lollipops to fool and calm down people furious with their inability to govern. In the UPA’s dictionary, you can spell lollipop as ‘lawlipop’. It cannot address rural distress, so you have a law for employment guarantee. It cannot provide food for the hungry while the granaries are full, so you will be given a right to food law. Go eat that law if the corrupt political–bureaucratic–contractor nexus steals your grain. Now there will be a homestead law, and then maybe a right to better nourishment act, and why stop there? A right to iron and folic acid law and, surely, a right to Vitamin D since, as an eminent nominated member has already informed the Rajya Indians genetically the Parliament sunshine vitamin. You may find this facetious, butSabha, if youwe look at thearerecord of the deficient UPA andin our in general, ridiculous, unimplementable or sheer bad laws like these pass without debate. Nobody wants to be on the ‘other’ side of a populist bad law. Civilised, mature democracies demand, and deserve, better governance. They do not enact bad laws in a hurry. It is easy to enact them, but it takes generations to rectify them. Remember, some of our lousiest economic laws that still bedevil our reform process, from killer amendments to labour

laws to urban land ceiling, were enacted by Indira Gandhi’s utterly illegal and unconstitutional Emergency Parliament in its sixth year (a six-year Parliament, the only time such a monstrosity has been inflicted on this Republic). It has taken three willing Parliaments to repeal urban land ceiling, but several states still hang on to it. Politicians love bad laws that bring discretion and rent. And only bad parliaments pass laws unthinkingly. Note one fact: the record for the largest number of laws passed in a year, 118, is with the same sixth-year banana republic Parliament of 1976, when the entire opposition was in jail. Even the words ‘secular’ and ‘socialist’ were inserted in the preamble of our Constitution by the same illegitimate Parliament, and it is unlikely that even the next generation ill be able to restore the founding fathers’ srcinal preamble. It is a digression, but maybe it isn’t, to recall the Constituent Assembly debates on precisely this issue. And then Ambedkar’s brilliant explanation for dismissing these demands. The economic and social policies of the state, he said, ‘must be decided by people themselves according to time and circumstances’. He added: ‘It cannot be laid down in the Constitution itself, because that is destroying democracy altogether . . . you are [then] taking away the liberty of the people [in future] to decide hat should be the social organisation in which they wish to live.’ He said while at that point a majority believed in socialism, in times to come ‘it is perfectly possible’ that they might ‘devise a [better system] than the socialist organisation of today or tomorrow’. This tells you how brilliantly liberal and politically prescient the founding fathers were. They established and gifted us a tradition of patient and thoughtful law-making. We are now reducing it to a cynical, save-my-skin joke on future generations.

OUR POO R LITTLE SANJU He isn’t a faceless Muslim, let’s throw away the court verdict, cry our elite tears.

23 March 2013 Honestly, I hardly know Sanjay Dutt well enough to form an opinion on him. I won’t be able to say hether he was an innocent, gullible but decent and truly unfortunate boy with a heart of gold, or a flawed and pampered superstar who routinely played with his own life and the law and mostly got away, thanks to his and his parents’ fame and connections, and has now run out of luck. I am not even particularly qualified to speak of him as an actor. My personal and professional acquaintance with him is limited to a one-hour conversation for aWalk the Talk interview on NDTV 24x7 on 20 May 2007. I had found him gentle, even vulnerable, surprisingly honest and humble in talking about his past, his mistakes, even his tryst with drugs and his fightback. What had obviously helped was a phone call I made to his sister Priya on the way to their Pali Hill home. You could see how his younger sisters mothered and protected him. Priya had called to counsel him to be kind and open with me, and Namrata was in attendance on the sidelines along with her most adorable poodle. So this is what we have: talented, vulnerable, gentle, well-behaved, blessed with comic timing, a sometimes obedient older brother to two doting sisters, and now we have it on good authority, even on Justice Markandey Katju’s, a good husband and father to three children. But here is the question that matters: does all that absolve him of the charges on which he was convicted in a verdict now confirmed by the Supreme Court? The answer, regrettably, is no. Because justice is about laws and evidence. It is not about what a nice guy you have been. Or how kind, wonderful and successful your parents and siblings are. The clamour of support for Sanjay on these lines has come from Hindi heartland politicians (mainly of the Samajwadi Party, for which he campaigned sometimes) and all kinds of cinema personalities, ranging from Madhuri Dixit to Rani Mukherj i, Kunal Kohli to Mahesh Bhatt. And never to be left behind, Justice Katju also jumps on the bandwagon. Not one of them says that he was innocent and framed, that the judicial verdict is flawed, that the evidence against him was dodgy. Kohli, a talented young filmmaker and one of the handful of acquaintances I have in Hindi cinema, asks what is the point of these convictions while the main perpetrators are safe in Pakistan. Now how does that logic work? And if it does, then why are so many others to spend much of the rest of their lives in jail or Yakub Memon to hang, while his more malevolent brother Tiger and ‘mentor-in-chief’ Dawood Ibrahim live happily in Pakistan? Should we then suspend all these sentences until the government is able to get Pakistan to deliver these bada bhais? Of course not. These people are guilty. They wrecked Bombay. They were players in one of the most diabolical terror plots ever to destroy India—frankly, more dangerous in its

ambition and possibilities, if clumsier in execution, than 26/11 a decade and a half later—they must be punished. And you will add, most likely, why has the Supreme Court been so generous in reducing the death sentence earlier given to ten of them to life? How can you be so kind to such bad guys? This is, therefore, not an argument for liberalism, nor for sparing the foot soldiers while the generals live in ISI-funded comfort in Pakistan. It is an argument about having two kinds of law, one for people like them who look, feel and sound so guilty. The other for a nice guy like us, who was merely a victim of circumstances, insecure, being half-Muslim and thus brainwashed into arming himself for selfdefence, so what if it was with an AK-56 assault rifle. Mind you, this was relatively innocent 1993. And AKs were not weapons you almost ever saw outside some militant districts in Punjab and Kashmir. Two decades make a story a generation old. So it is also necessary to remember what these bombings were all about. They came within two months of the post-Babri riots in Bombay, when somebody in Pakistan saw a new possibility. The plotters thought bombings like these in sensitive places would most certainly invite reprisals from Hindus, particularly Shiv Sainiks, helped along by a police that was criminally one-sided in the riots two months earlier. That is why hand grenades and AK series assault rifles were given to Muslims in ‘sensitive’ localities. When Hindu reprisal squads ‘inevitably’ came, they were to be counterattacked with weapons of lethality unknown in India yet. And once a few thousand Sainiks and policemen were killed, there would be no saving Bombay, or even India. You might still say that your favourite star was innocent of all this. He was just a silly, scared, dumb and stupid young fellow, what did he know about all this? Two questions, then, follow. One, how do you know, or certainly, how do you know better than the courts? And two, if so, why is the same test not applied to all the others convicted, or to many more who rotted for more than a decade in jails as undertrials? That so many of them were later declared innocent and acquitted only compounds the injustice done to them. The prime of their lives taken away, their families devastated and their children reduced to a furious talent pool for groups like the Indian Mujahideen. Why did these influential voices not speak out for them? Why don’t they do so now? Only because these are poor, ordinary Muslims? They are not just guilty because they have been pronounced so by the courts, but they also ‘look and sound’ guilty, and expendable. That’s the way bad guys look, that’s where they come from. And that’s how they must go. But from where we come, given what we look like, how we dress, who we have for our friends and family, we can only be nice guys. And if one of us gets into the occasional mess, you must show a little more understanding. No one cried for Kersi Adjania, now eighty-three, who served a two-year jail term for allowing his foundry to be used to destroy Dutt’s gun. All the mitigating circumstances being quoted for Sanjay Dutt, sadly, are gifts of our elite privilege. Who else amongst the other convicts would have had the wherewithal to collect brownie points by working for AIDS charities, even getting on the board of some? Who else would have a father with so much love and goodwill among crores of Indians and across the political spectrum, one ho could charm equally Indian soldiers on the borders and Balasaheb Thackeray, to whom he took a successful mercy mission? Let’s flag, in particular, one of Justice Katju’s arguments in defence of

Sanjay: that he has, through his films, revived the memory of Mahatma Gandhi. It is a bit rich coming from somebody who is always mocking popular culture, films as well as cricket that we so adore ‘while farmers are committing suicide’. But then, since all are supposed to be equal before the law, ere the other convicts given the same opportunity to revive the legacy of the Mahatma, or maybe a founding father of their choice? Justice Katju should have, on the other hand, chided the media, his supposed charge, for not having the courage to ask the most obvious question: why was the CBI so kind to Dutt as to not appeal against the special court verdict relieving him of charges under TADA? A usual filmi-type dude talking the them-and-us type of language is understandable; after all, many of the same people who sought sympathy for Shiney Ahuja also demanded instant public lynching of the Delhi gangrape accused. Their alleged crimes may have been similar, but one looked and sounded like us, an innocent, even an unwitting victim, and the others so utterly guilty. And finally, and I am conscious this is about an old friend whose political and secular commitment I have admired, without necessarily agreeing with him always. Mahesh Bhatt can afford to talk with such passion in defence of Sanjay, or of the system being unfair to him. He should, instead, be grateful to the same blessed system and the media for how lightly his own son, Rahul, got away over the evenings he spent with one David Coleman Headley. If he hadn’t been his son, or frankly, if he too had been from what we so contemptuously dismiss as the great unwashed, or if only he had a Muslim name, the same Bombay police would have got him to do a bit more explaining. And if I may add, much less politely.

NOT ENOUGH, BOSS Rahul’s u nlearning from his mistakes—but i s it a b it slow, a bi t late?

6 April 2013 Whatever your view on Rahul Gandhi’s first substantive public appearance on Thursday, * you would say that he displayed a charmingly self-deprecatory side of his personality. So, if he is capable of having a little laugh at himself, if he is also willing to reassess his politics so far, as he completes ten years as an MP, he might see some of the mistakes he has made. Or issues he might wish to revisit. Since we do not have an insight into his mind yet, here is our list of what could possibly be called the three mistakes of his political life (apologies to Chetan Bhagat). Let’s talk about two first, and leave the third for later. First, he went campaigning in the 2010 assembly elections to Bihar with a straightforward message, which I am paraphrasing: two different Indias had come into being, one shining, the other declining, and it was time now to rectify that. That the message did not work is evident in the fact that the Congress lost its deposit in 221 out of 243 seats, winning only four. As to why it failed so badly, listen to the words of a very poor—but politically articulate, as they usually come in Bihar—farmer at one of his rallies. ‘Woh kehte hain do Bharat ban gaye’ (He says two Indias havecome into being), said the farmer, half-squatting and leaning on a lathi. ‘And what do you think about this?’ we asked him. ‘Hum kahat, sahib [We say, sir], that of the 60-odd years of Independence, for 53 years you have ruled us and created two Indias.’ Then, with a defiantly mischievous twinkle that you see in the eyes of the poorest Indians only during an election, he added, ‘And we say, sahib, that if we give you five more years, how can we trust you not to divide us into three Indias now.’ This was followed by the next mistake, of failing to understand the meaning of aspiration and ambition as he launched a less pessimistic campaign in Uttar Pradesh, 2012. He said it was so awful that people from that state had to go to big cities like Mumbai and Delhi to look for ordinary jobs. He illustrated this with the story of an Uttar Pradesh migrant working on the Delhi Metro, leading a tough life alone, because there was no opportunity at home. His solution was that an expanded NREGA and a better rural economy would enable the same people to stay at home, in their villages. Cut to a member of his audience again. ‘We get Rs 300–400 a day as labourers on the Delhi Metro. You can live on Rs 150 and send the rest home so your children can go to a decent school. We’d rather go to Delhi and Mumbai and work. Ask the Congress people to take NREGA 365 days a year and stay in our village, we are going to big cities,’ was the answer. That view was later affirmed in the election result.

We never know enough to make sense of political history in India, and definitely not so soon. But it could just be that the disaster of Uttar Pradesh led to an honest and realistic reappraisal within the Congress party. Only that could have shaken it to support FDI in retail at a public meeting, the first time it had done so for anything free market or foreign (other than the Soviet Bloc in the non-aligned past). It definitely created the space for the prime minister to focus back on the economy. And while e do not yet know if it is too late already to redeem the wreck, the important fact is, a new future course of the Congress party’s econo-politics is now being set. And it has been bleached of some of its deep pink. Did we see some flashes of that welcome change in Rahul’s 70 minutes with the CII as ell? He had erred in the Hindi heartland—youcan’t just get away by blaming your speech writers when you are a leader of total power in your party and, self-admittedly, a product of such a deeply political DNA. He had erred in not reading, first, the aspirational upsurge and then its meaning and implications. Even in the apparently hopeless heartland, aspiration is no longer three square meals, or a hundred rupees a day. It is electricity, schools, jobs, dignity, material goods, mobile phones, even cable TV. For one living in a parched Bundelkhand village with no economy, migration to a big city even for a day-labourer’s or security guard’s job is aspirational. It is not humiliation. In growing India, even the perspirational classes are entitled to aspiration. That’s the intellectual moat he seems to have crossed now. While the inclusive metaphor and tribute to a rights-based minimum guarantees programme were present, he mainly talked aspiration, empowerment and entrepreneurship. He also spoke one of his most significant, welcome and hopefully enduring lines so far, when he talked of a job being the bridge between aspiration and empowerment, and how only entrepreneurial India could produce those jobs. This is progress. When Rahul Gandhi says in April 2013 that a rising tide may lift all boats but somebody, including industry, has to give the poorest Indian a boat to at least have that opportunity, it is a far cry from the awful oldspeak of shining versus declining, aspirational versus perspirational India. When he speaks of professors at IITs not even knowing the worth of their intellect and the need to link them to the markets, when he taunts India’s corporates and asks if they have any say in decision-making besides, probably, being good friends with Montek, and suggests an institutional way for them to have a say in governance, it is progress. But is this enough? Doubts arise because he is still hesitant to talk about the future, about his own and his party’s politics and policies. The most important missing point was something suffixed with ‘if we return to power . . .’ Isn’t that what you expect from a political leader heading into an election year, when his party is seeking a third successive term? You can’t then get away merely with describing how things are. You as also havefathoms to say the how they will be,within how his youown, would themand to his be. party’s Could politics, it also be because, Rahul contradictions his want dynasty’s his understanding and appreciation of what it means to be in public life is also still a work in progress? Which brings us, finally, to his third mistake. In his speech at Jaipur that stirred the party faithful, he talked of ‘this power’ that ‘everybody seeks’ being ‘poison’. It might be a good idea for him to reflect on this as well. In a democracy, power is a wonderful gift, an honour and a cherished

privilege that voters give you. Good leaders embrace it with joy, gratitude and humility. They must treat political office—and power—as public trust and try coming up to their people’s expectations. ‘Power as poison’ is, regrettably, a feudal formulation, not a democratic one. Power, public office, the faith of the voter, even vote banks can be looked at in one of two ways: a scripted-in-DNA bequest, or a humbling responsibility. Also, if you see this ‘power ’ as poison, how do you persuade decent people to join politics? Maybe that dilemma still needs settling. You can see this country any which way: an elephant, tiger, beehive or hornet’s nest. But it changes faster than any other we know. See, for example, the incredible empowerment and rise of the backward castes in the past two decades. The ranks o Mulayam and Akhilesh, Lalu, Nitish and Mayawati are now joined by Narendra Modi, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, even Vasundhara Raje, the new stars of a party as brahminical as the BJP. You talk of finding political talent deep down, at the panchayat level, remember that is how it was until your own party turned into an oligarchy of many minor dynasties, a chamber of princes. Remember where even Ahmed Patel came from: he was a taluka panchayat president. This is a tribute to the same democratic politics and it is essential that the most significant national leaders recognise and respond to this. Because, awful poison or humble privilege, power will no longer follow DNA and dynasties. It will need policies and programmes. Understanding the aspirational upsurge, therefore, is progress. But, in the absence of a convincing agenda on how you promise to live up to it, it is tempting to borrow a Rahul-ism and turn it on him to say that yes, we have seen progress, but there is a long way to go yet, boss.

CRONY, CRAWLY CAPITALISM The tragi-comic spectacle of India Inc. on bended knee before Rahul and Modi.

13 April 2013 The corporate circuit is abuzz with a story that is as delightful as it is chastening. It seems that when our business leaders attended Narendra Modi’s Vibrant Gujarat Summit in January and sang his praises, an activist central minister sent several of them a sarcastic text message. It was one thing to promise to invest in Gujarat, but did you have to prostrate yourselves in front of Modi, he asked. Or something to that effect, maybe in more colourful prose. Earlier this month, some of these corporates thought they had turned the tables when some texted the same minister asking, if he was so outraged at the way they behaved in front of Modi, what did he now think of their performance when Rahul Gandhi came to CII? The minister simply replied that he found it equally despicable. The minister surely had the last word on this. And quite honestly, on this point, you’d have to agree with him. For three years now, corporate India has been complaining about the UPA messing up the economy. This has forced them to move their investments overseas. They have also been complaining that the PM, Sonia and Rahul avoid even communicating with them formally. Then, when Rahul Gandhi finally comes by, what do they do? Do they raise any of their grievances, or tell him whatever they think has ruined the India story? The two questions that actually get asked are about how to improve Centre–state relations and contamination in one state’s water with uranium and another’s ith arsenic. Okay, Rahul is not the finance minister of India, so why drag him into deficits, interest rates and retrospective taxation. But nobody asked him the simplest, the most obvious question that ould have followed from the very preamble of his own speech. Something like: ‘Rahulji, thanks for paying us such high compliments and calling us the cutting edge of the India story. But do you know how low our morale is, and why? And how will you address that? Thank you.’ Nothing of the sort happened. All that the leaders of our business had on the top of their minds on a day of such rare opportunity were unctuous platitudes and inanities. What else would you expect from a crowd that was so flattered and, equally, so desperate to flatter? Go back and read the fawning reactions: brilliant, thought-provoking, forward-looking, visionary, youthful and inspirational, I have hope, and finally, now I have hope. In fact, you may have found a familiar ring to the superlatives used to describe Rahul’s speech. So play with Google a bit and you’d know why: similar or even more breathless descriptions were used to describe Modi—his policies, approach and business-friendliness—by the same businessmen at Vibrant Gujarat. And more of the same was in evidence again this week as Modi came to speak at the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Kolkata. There was generous, sycophantic laughter even before Modi had finished his by now familiar andghisa-pita one-liners and jokes. It reminded

you of how people begin to laugh or applaud halfway through a funny or smart piece of dialogue when they go to watch a favourite movie for the fourth time. And the questions afterwards? They were a mirror image in seriousness and relevance to what Rahul had been asked at CII. Just as he had been spared any relevant or even remotely challenging questions, so was Modi. Nobody asked him, for example, if there wasn’t a hint of cronyism in the way his government relates to industrialists in Gujarat (so many businessmen would whisper to you all the time about the special status of a certain conglomerate with the name beginning with ‘A’, and it is not Ambani). And nobody asked him what his vision of a fair and inclusive India is, and how he will put the apprehensions of its vast and diverse minorities to rest and thereby provide a harmonious and peaceful environment for business, now that he is bidding for the prime ministership. To be fair to Modi and Rahul, they probably had answers to the questions that nobody dared to ask them. When political leaders come calling, corporate India only asks for favours in return for some form of sashtaang pranam. They do not ask questions. Or seek answers. Businessmen will have their reasons: we have to deal with the sarkar all the time, you have no idea how vindictive they could become. Or, if I open my mouth too wide, they’ll set the taxman upon me. You know what happened to so and so! But the larger question they need to answer is, where do they see their own place in Indian society? If Indians with such power and riches will have no courage to speak their minds and, on the other hand, will simply play sycophants and court jesters, who do they expect to do the complaining, ask the hard questions? The media, which they are now so indulgently buying up, or the Anna–Kejriwal types, whose praises they sang when they seemed to be winning while the battle was fought in the T studios, only to dump them later as such nuisance? The Express strongly agrees with one thing both Rahul and Modi say, even though their idiom is different: that India’s future is tied to its economic growth and the cutting edge, in that quest, will come from the private sector. But has Indian capitalism risen to justify such high respect and expectations? The answer is a regretful no. Two decades of reform, one decade of 8 per cent growth, have not yet built an Indian capitalism that has the confidence, poise and, frankly, even the conscience to stand on its own feet, to look the political or bureaucratic bosses in the eye and to ask the questions most relevant, even if not to all citizens, at least to their respective shareholders. We had seen some evidence of that in the recent past, particularly with some business leaders (including Azim Premji, Ashok Ganguly, Deepak Parekh and Keshub Mahindra) writing open letters to the prime minister, raising such necessary questions. And they deserve high praise and gratitude, because it was their activism that jerked the government back on to the rails. Surely, nobody has dared to set any taxman upon them. lookand at the full picture now, about. and thatThe wasprime a rareminister’s exception.last speech to CII (before 3 Here is aBut story, something to think April 2013) was on 24 May 2007. He then chided corporate India for its lavish lifestyle, euphoric excess and high salaries. Sunil Bharti Mittal was the president of CII that year. He responded by saying that the PM’s views were not misplaced, and donated Rs 4 crore, or a large percentage of his salary then, towards the education of underprivileged children. At a dinner at the then chief election commissioner Navin Chawla’s home a day or so later, I

oined an editor of genuine eminence and enormously greater experience in remonstrating with Mittal. Our point was simple: as the head of CII, and thereby the captain of entrepreneurial India, he should have responded by telling the prime minister that while his point was arguable, it was none of the government’s business. Businessmen’s job was to create wealth ethically and distribute it fairly to their shareholders and pay their taxes honestly. It was for the government then to use that money udiciously and address our common concerns on socio-economic equity. By offering, instead, to give away his salary, he had been unnecessarily defensive. And nobody was going to send him a thank-you card for it anyway. You want to know what the government has sent him instead? They have now hit him and his globally admired company with the most ridiculously vindictive criminal litigation for something that is alleged to have happened fifteen years ago. And nobody among his corporate peers is willing to speak up for him in public. Now you know what we mean when we say Indian capitalism has not yet come of age. This is what you expect in a world of the super-rich, where the only ideology is everyman-for-himself, and the sarkar is still the eternalmai-baap.

THE BLEEDING HEARTLESS On Maoists, the UPA’s headless chickens are coming home to roost.

1 June 2013 While launching the war on terror, George Bush asked that infamous question, you are either with us or against us. The UPA would confuse even George Bush. Because, so far, for all of these nine ridiculous years, it has not even been able to decide whether it is with itself, or against itself, on Maoist insurgency in India’s east-central heartlands. Every few months, usually at some high-level security conference, the prime minister describes it as the greatest threat to India. Then a Chidambaram takes the cue and builds a more robust response. And both are cut down by a Digvijaya Singh and some ‘root causes’ theory. Operation Green Hunt may still be a mythical codename, but the home ministry did launch an audacious campaign to move into the socalled ‘liberated zones’ (frankly, the most brutal obscenity that this nation has been gifted in this decade of waffling). The forces made some progress, and also suffered some reverses—the seventysix killed in Dantewada on 6 April 2010 is by far the highest single-day loss for India’s security forces in counter-insurgency* after the first night of Operation Blue Star (149). The third highest of a day has also been in this confused war (38, when a police boat was attacked on 29 June 2008 in Orissa). You need to put these figures in perspective. India’s armed forces rarely suffer such high single-battle or single-operation casualties in counter-insurgency. They did not lose so many lives in a single day of fighting even in Kargil, even on the nights Tololing and Tiger Hill were taken. And how has the UPA responded? It has kept mum as its embedded ‘liberals’ have popped up routinely ith conspiracy theories and more ‘root causes’. And equally so when successive chiefs of the army and the IAF have made unsolicited statements that their forces can’t be used in fighting the Naxals (if I may add with some trepidation because I know what militaristic fury this could unleash) with poorly concealed delight that the paramilitary forces were getting their ‘comeuppance’. No chief has been questioned, countered or counselled to also stay out of the debate as much as they want to stay away from action. This is why we say that on the Naxal issue, the UPA’s response would confuse George Bush himself. How would his simple, maybe simplistic, and uncluttered mind deal with a situation where a government is against an enemy, but also with it? Or, forget poor Bush. How would your mind deal ith it? For nine years now, the UPA and its various spokespersons, ranging from the prime minister to those considered close to Sonia and speaking for her, from home ministers (I use the plural deliberately, because even the three who have held that job, Shivraj Patil, Chidambaram and Shinde, spoke in different voices, with the first being a pure root-causes man) to NAC members spoke at cross-purposes. One set called them a grave threat, a bunch of bandits and so on, while the other

romanticised them as merely misguided, well-meaning people fighting for the tribal victims o ‘extractive’ industries. For a full nine years, the leadership of the Congress accepted this unquestioningly. It allowed, even welcomed, the embedding of the Maoist middle ground and sympathisers within its establishment, notably the NAC and the Planning Commission. Remember that one of those eight Maoists released in exchange for the abducted Malkangiri collector Vineel Krishna as A. Padma, wife of top Maoist Akkiraju Haragopal alias Ramakrishna. And she managed Aman Vedika, an orphanage run by activist and then NAC member Harsh Mander. * Many of us—including this newspaper—sympathised with Dr Binayak Sen for being charged and convicted under the archaic sedition law. He is also a very likeable, soft-spoken, sincere paediatrician. But must you appoint him in a key Planning Commission committee (steering committee on health, drafting their Twelfth Five Year Plan)? Gentle children’s doctor, yes. But he is a convicted Maoist sympathiser. Bringing him inside the tent like this, what message are you sending out to the security forces, to the police and intelligence agencies and people of India? Or, to twist the knife and twist a popular Hindi heartland slogan as well, ‘ Sainikon tum sangharsh karo, hamein pata nahin hum kiske saath hain ’ (Fight on, soldiers, just that we are not sure whose side we are on). And finally, what message are you sending out to the Maoists? They only let you know last week how contemptuously they read your confused minds, by wiping out the entire state leadership of your party.** This is not the first government to be confused while dealing with an internal security challenge. The one comparable example is V.P. Singh sending Jagmohan as governor to throttle the then incipient Kashmiri insurgency and, at the same time, designating George Fernandes as Kashmir affairs minister to apply the healing touch. The two worked at cross-purposes, clashed and confused everybody, from the armed forces to the people of Kashmir, even the separatists. We are all still paying the price of that schizophrenia. The UPA’s nine years have given us more of this. It was reassuring earlier this week to see the rural development minister speak out on TV channels, finally using the correct and fitting description for the Maoists. But the same minister was saying smugly until the other day that Maoism only prospered in states not governed by the Congress. Sadly, politicians are not the only guilty party here. Your heads and hearts should burn with fury every time an armed forces chief says he won’t send his forces to fight the Maoists, because his troops ‘can’t be seen fighting their own countrymen’. Own countrymen, did you say? Then who are the Kashmiris you’ve been fighting with pride, and to subdue whom you have built the largest and most powerful military command in India’s history? So large that the Northern Army Commander has more than 50 two- and three-star generals reporting to him. So you think Kashmiris are not your countrymen as much as the heartland tribals are? Isn’t that exactly what the Kashmiri separatists are saying? Or what about the Naga, Manipuri and other tribal insurrectionists of the Northeast, to fight hom, sort of permanently, you have set up an entire counter-insurgency corps in Dimapur? Do you think they aren’t Indians as much as the tribals of Dandakaranya? If so, isn’t that exactly what the north-eastern separatists are also saying? The fact is, the leadership of the armed forces has merely aywalked into the policy vacuum left by the UPA. At one point, it had got so frustrating that this newspaper even carried a half-serious editorial asking why the admiral (‘Soldierly silence’, IE, 12

April 2010) was letting his navy down by also not coming out to say that under no circumstances ould he allow his warships and submarines to be used against the Maoists. That was after the army and air chiefs had spoken out. Since we have been jolted into saying and listening to rude things this week, here is another. How are we to explain this utter indifference to the loss of police and paramilitary life? Do we put a different value to the life of an Indian soldier depending on the colour of his uniform? How many OB vans follow the coffins of CRPF men who die fighting what our prime minister describes as our gravest security threat? Which ministers visit their families? Because the netas go where OB vans are. Why does the air chief get away with his contemptuous dismissal of the perfectly valid demand that there be a proper inquiry into how his crew fled from their downed helicopter, leaving an injured comrade in it? That chap was from the police, you see. I have made my living as a reporter covering wars and strife all over the country and elsewhere, notably Sri Lanka when the IPKF was there. I have said often that the only time I struggled and failed to keep my clinical, reporter’s impartial reserve was when I saw the body of an Indian soldier. My recurrent nightmare even now, almost three decades later, is the bodies of jawans on stretcher bunks, three on each side, in an army truck leaving the Golden Temple on the morning of 7 June 1984, after the long night of Blue Star. The one on the top stretcher on the right side, a boy barely 20, still had beads of perspiration on his face, indicating he must have just died. Would it have mattered if he ore khaki, instead of olive green? Wouldn’t you rather be colour-blind than accept the cynical finessing that seems to be the norm these days?

THE RISE OF NARENDRA MODI

MO DI VERSUS HIS PARTY That’s the first battle—given h ow far the BJP has d rifted sin ce Vajpayee’s exit, the 2004 election loss.

15 June 2013 The noise over Narendra Modi’s elevation* has drowned out some important questions. What does the BJP stand for now? How do its ideology, policy and politics compare with the Vajpayee–Advani years? How much distance has it travelled since then, and in which direction: left, right, forward or backward? Or maybe, instead of the judgemental backward or forward, let’s just call them the shifts since 2004, when the BJP lost power and, equally importantly, Vajpayee lost his voice politically and also, sadly, physically. We have to see the consequences of Vajpayee’s fading. Advani’s grand strategy brought the NDA to power. But from then on, he decided to go along with the new, more inclusive paradigm that Vajpayee set, making the party depart from its old view on all four crucial areas of governance and politics: economics, society, foreign policy in general and Pakistan specifically. On all of these, the BJP became softer, more modern and inclusive. So inclusive, in fact, that even Farooq Abdullah could join the NDA. But the loss of power, an angry inability to accept it and the sudden absence of Vajpayee, followed by the penance forced on Advani after his statement on Jinnah, changed much of this. The first shift was on Pakistan. A party that led such a muscular peace process, resulting in the Lahore and Islamabad Declarations and a durable LoC ceasefire, made a quick about-turn. The near political execution of Advani by the RSS for the ‘crime’ of saying a few nice things about Jinnah has to be contrasted with Vajpayee going to Lahore’s Minar-e-Pakistan in February 1999 and stating that a stable and prosperous Pakistan was in India’s interest. Nobody in the RSS dared to attack him. Only their Pakistani counterparts, the Islamic clergy, organised a ‘cleansing’ of the steps Vajpayee had climbed at the monument to Pakistan’s founding. In India, voters only rewarded the BJP with an even bigger mandate in an election that followed later that year, in spite of the betrayal of Kargil in the short interregnum. But this was the first successful policy the BJP reversed as soon as it lost power. In the heyday of power, Advani got away with stating in public a remarkable new idea, that for his party to become more acceptable to India’s Muslims, it had to somehow change the notion of Pakistan being a permanent enemy. That is why he supported all the peace initiatives, leading, in fact, the move to invite Pervez Musharraf to Agra. Nobody punished him then, least of all the voters. The party’s turnaround on another one of its old, central foreign policy beliefs, that America was a natural strategic ally, was even more spectacular. It was highlighted by the opposition to the nuclear deal. It totally confused its urban voters and devastated its candidates in all the major cities. On economics, the party of reform and free markets lapsed into default Left. It has stalled the

raising of insurance FDI from 26 to 49 per cent when it had itself opened the sector up to FDI, persuading the Congress to pass the srcinal amendment. It has also blocked (through last-minute nitpicking) the pension bill it had itself brought in as an ordinance in its last months. It now threatens to reverse FDI in retail, after having promised it in its manifesto in 2004. Its chairmen in parliamentary committees block anything even vaguely reformist. One of its state finance ministers (Madhya Pradesh) has been allowed to stall the GST.* In so many areas, the party’s economics harks back to the Congress of Indira Gandhi. The only exception is the state of Gujarat. But we will come to that later. Even socially, the party lost no time in ridding itself of the relative liberalism of its six years in power. And tactically it became a one-trick pony: just block Parliament and then thrash the comedians the Congress party sends to the TV studios in the evening. Politically, the most significant post-2004 change is the return of the RSS to centre stage. Many of the shifts we talk about here are because the srcinal ideological master is back in control. For six years, Vajpayee had kept it at bay and Advani had quietly acquiesced—or there is no way the NDA ould have been able to sell so many PSUs. Now, it is back, its firing of Advani (after his Jinnah speech) being its first victory shot. Today, having had its candidates as two successive party presidents, it is shaping decisions, causing disputes, and then settling them. Given where the BJP had reached by 2004, this is a big, big shift. Narendra Modi arrives at the top in this setting. His elevation itself marks a change in the BJP’s style. For a party that eschewed the personality cult, and where the seniormost leaders were seen as generous, benevolent old men and addressed as poojniya ‘ ’ (venerable), a mere state leader such as Modi’s projection as a chakravarti -in-waiting is remarkable. Next, his economics is the opposite o hat the Nagpur Gurukul of Swadeshi, Xenophobia and Frugalism preaches. In the BJP today, he is the only leader willing to say anything modern or entrepreneurial: less government and more governance is now his slogan, and refreshing. But you will see the mismatch soon enough as his party quietly goes along to pass the food security bill, which will work totally contrary to this idea. * Modi’s first challenge, once the old-guard challenge is out of the way, would be to find some common ground there. A lot of urban middle-class and entrepreneurial India adores him because of his Gujarat model of economics. That hasn’t been his party’s view lately. His political challenge is not simple either. His rise has charged up the faithful, but whatever your passion, in a real-life election you can have only one vote, unlike Twitter, where you can have a hundred accounts, each even with a display picture in the name of our many gods. He has to reach out to fence-sitters and doubters while keeping the faithful in check. Modi is too smart not to see the degree of difficulty has to deal with this.his personality creates: his rise has divided his friends and united his enemies. He To move forward, he will need to take both his party and himself back to where Vajpayee had left them. Before it becomes Modi versus Rahul, therefore, the battles of Modi versus BJP and Modi versus Modi will need to be won.

THE CHIEF IN CHIEF M INISTER Nitish may just have redefined 2014 as a contest between two types of CMs, two systems of governance.

22 June 2013 Is Nitish nuts, a genius, or too clever by half?* None of the above. He is, simply, a 100 per cent postMandal, heartland politician. He knows his equations of caste, vote banks and ideologies. He is also a risk-taker, and reads the political winds better than most others. Among all the former Lohiaites ho emerged from Mandal’s creative destruction of the heartland’s old vote banks, he was the only one who embraced the BJP. The other two, Lalu and Mulayam, placed themselves squarely against it, as leaders of the hard secular side, knowing that a minimalistic approach of getting the Muslims together with the Yadavs would be good enough to keep them in business in a fragmented politics. Nitish was crowded out of that space by Lalu. But he had the political audacity and foresight to go the ‘other’ way, thereby becoming the first secular Lohiaite (with George Fernandes and Sharad Yadav as his partners) to do so. His most remarkable success lies in the way he has embraced the BJP and its upper-caste voters, yet comforted the Muslims, and in the process devastated Lalu Prasad. One of the most significant findings of our travels through elections in Bihar, particularly in 2010, was how he had got Bihar’s Muslims to admire him, even callhim sher ka bachcha (the description became the headline for that instalment of my Writings on the Wall, ‘When lonely Lalu misses “gentleman” Sonia, and a Muslim calls Nitish sher ka bachcha’).* He achieved that while being in the BJP’s tight embrace for two reasons. One, he had given Bihar a genuinely secular and peaceful five years. And two, he had kept Narendra Modi out of the campaign. This finessing of alliance politics between the BJP and Modi was both brilliant and unsustainable. Last week, he retreated from this not only in time, and in an orderly manner, but also looking composed. In the process, he turned Bihar’s politics upside down. If the Congress joins him, it will be the end of Lalu. After almost three decades, therefore, the state will have genuinely bipolar politics, with the BJP on one side and the Congress on the other, even if as a very junior partner. You can disagree with everything Nitish says, but he has raised some interesting points to justify his move. The first is that an alliance today has to be inclusive and led by softer, big-hearted leadership. The second, that there can be more than one model of good governance and development, and that you cannot blindly apply what works in one state to another. And the third, that his responsibility and interests lie first and foremost within his own state. His model, if anything, is the exact opposite of Modi’s, so how could he be in alliance with a party now led by him? This phenomenon, the rise of the chief minister, has now matured to such an extent that you have two different categories of successful chief ministers. One, the softer, touchy-feely, politically

correct, cautious—even indecisive—humble and personally honest populist. Nitish, Mamata, Naveen Patnaik, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and even Bhupinder Singh Hooda will fall in this category. The other, aggressive, tough, hard-talking, decisive, take-no-prisoners risk-taker. Modi leads this category. Sukhbir Badal (as de facto CM), Raman Singh and Jayalalithaa will be the other three. Both categories have ushered in high growth rates. Both have kept the peace (okay, post-2002 for Gujarat). Both have enjoyed repeated electoral success. Of course, there are other things in common between them. All of them are dictators within their states and their parties. And—I know it sounds cruel to the BJP—it is true that barring Hooda, all of them are or have been part of the NDA. In fact, Nitish, Naveen and Mamata were ministers in the Vajpayee cabinet. One political translation of what Nitish is saying is, okay, so you elevate Modi because he is a very successful chief minister, but so am I, and so are many others. And none of us needs to borrow the face mask of any of the others. With Nitish there, you can be pretty sure that elections will only take place on schedule now. You also know by now that the next election will be won or lost by the chief ministers. The new thing you can now say is that it will be a contest between these two different models of chief ministership. Where does that leave the Congress party? Only one of its chief ministers features in either of our two lists, and its rebels are constantly harassing him. Sheila Dikshit may have featured in the softer group, but then Delhi is only half a state, * with the chief minister not having a say in land or law and order, the two pillars of governance and political power in India. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, would have definitely belonged in the other group, even ahead of Modi, but he is not there any more. So what is the Congress left with? A Tarun Gogoi who is being eakened by his own even in his third term. An Oommen Chandy who doesn’t know whether he is coming or going. And a Prithviraj Chavan who leads the second largest state in the country (in terms of members in the Lok Sabha), but is taken so much for granted that he has to beg for months even to get an audience with the environment minister and is then dismissed out of hand, to return to ridicule in Maharashtra. And mind you, we haven’t even mentioned Ashok Gehlot as yet. Because he doesn’t count for enough to deserve a mention in dispatches. So the Congress, indeed, has chief ministers who fall in neither of these two categories. You can call theirs a model of their own, where a chief minister doesn’t really count for anything except as a party supplicant. Nitish’s move has opened a small window for them. But more importantly, it has opened up national politics and redefined it as nothing has since Mandir and Mandal, as a contest between these two systems of governance. We have often fretted about a new big idea not having surfaced in our politics in a long time. Modi and Nitish may just have produced one now.

BODY POLITICS Ishrat isn’t the first, she won’t be the last. We need stronger checks and balances, not petty point-scoring.

6 July 2013 There are some things you can say with certainty on the Ishrat Jahan case. That there is enough smoke to suggest that at least three members of the group were involved with really bad guys. Second, that there is no evidence at all—at least not yet—that they were coming to assassinate Narendra Modi. Third, they were most likely killed in a fake encounter. And finally, there is little reason to doubt that this was a joint operation between Gujarat Police and the Intelligence Bureau, and both parties knew exactly where they, and their captives, were headed. What we do not know is whether it was an operation that the intelligence agencies would sometimes describe as a ‘controlled killing’, where you use moles and plants to lure your targets into a trap and then put them away, or if it was a rogue operation, either driven by a combination of paranoia and arrogance or to please the bosses. No matter which side of this tricky debate you are on, you would have to admit that a fake encounter ould always be illegal. Which is where we start to get into problems. If these were indeed terrorists lured through an undercover operation and then subjected to ‘controlled killing’ carried out in good faith, should it be treated differently from any other fake encounter? Can the antecedents of the victims and the intentions of the spooks be mitigating factors? The legally and morally correct answer, without any doubt whatsoever, is no. A fake encounter is a fake encounter and no law allows anybody in India to take someone else’s life—even a Pakistani citizen’s. So what is left to debate? The problem is that it isn’t so simple. Because it is not the first time ‘controlled killings’ or ‘black operations’ have been carried out by our intelligence agencies and police. They have done so on a much larger scale in several parts of the country, and have been applauded and rewarded for these. So much so that even when innocents have been targeted and killed, these have been overlooked as genuine errors or collateral damage. It gets further complicated because much of this has not only taken place under the watch of the Congress and several other secular parties, but that many of the same organisations and personnel have been involved. So how do the encounter killings of hundreds of suspected/alleged Sikh terrorists in Punjab become justified, but some half-dozen in Gujarat evoke such outrage? If the court has assigned the CBI to probe what it suspected was a fake encounter, and the agency has now filed a chargesheet, it would be a straightforward case. It is the gloating by the Congress that has politicised and, I am afraid, also communalised the issue. It is feeding straight into the narrative of every-encounter-is-fake, and total Muslim victimhood. This, when the majority o such encounters (including Batla House) have taken place under the watch of Congress/UPA governments, in Delhi, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and, indeed, Kashmir.

There are many reasons why this should have been the fittest case for the Congress to not politicise. Because if the CBI has good evidence, it will do its job anyway. But this gloating and politicisation now threatens to open our entire security underbelly. And not everything that spills out ill look or smell nice. For example, when this particular encounter took place (15 June 2004), the UPA was already in power in Delhi and M.K. Narayanan, our sharpest and most powerful spymaster after B.N. Mullick and R.N. Kao, was special adviser to the prime minister for internal security and controlled all intelligence agencies, particularly his alma mater, the Intelligence Bureau, which he had led (1987– 89 and 1991–92) and most of whose officers had served as his subalterns. It is clear that the UPA’s security establishment knew exactly what had happened and had accepted it. Until the courts brought in the CBI. The head of the IB when this encounter took place was K.P. Singh, and he too will need to be asked what he knew. So would Ajit Kumar Doval, who succeeded him just the following month (July 2004). I may have some intellectual argument with him, off and on, but I have known Doval well, as our respective careers in the field ran in parallel in Aizawl and Gangtok in challenging times, then to Islamabad and troubled Punjab of the early 1990s. I can say that he is one of the most intrepid and committed ‘operational’ spooks in our history. If somebody was able to pen the real story of how terrorism folded in Punjab within a few bloody months in 1993, Doval’s name will appear as many times as K.P.S. Gill’s. Because they so conclusively demolished the ISI’s most ambitious operation ever outside of Kashmir, they were seen as national heroes. But nobody asked how many suspected terrorists they put through ‘due process’. And when questions were raised about fake encounters or killing of innocents, the entire government system colluded in never letting the truth out, even when the Supreme Court had wanted it. I am not writing a definitive history of that period now, but they fought fire with fire, even kidnap with kidnap. When Gurbachan Singh Manochahal, a top-ranked militant, abducted the father of a police superintendent, the police abducted his son and a peaceful exchange was carried out. That, then, was ‘due process’. In fact, Gill used to say that militancy would end the day its leaders were convinced that the moment one of them had moved to the police’s ‘A’ category, he had no more than six months to live. The state police did the shooting, but identification, cornering and luring of ‘militants’ were mostly done by the IB’s unarmed operatives riding in a Maruti van. And they were funded directly—mostly in cash by the suitcase—by Subodh Kant Sahay, minister of state for home in the V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar governments (1990–91), and Rajesh Pilot, minister for internal security in Narasimha Rao’s. More recent examples are even more striking. For instance, many of the top Maoists killed, including Kishenji and Azad. What happened there? Controlled killing?these Blackquestions, operation?you Duewill process? If you start raising need two commissions of inquiry. The first immediately to look into who all were in the know in New Delhi under the UPA on the Ishrat Jahan encounter and why they had accepted it so far. The second, and a more interesting one, on what our intelligence agencies have been up to in the past, and with what kind of oversight. I, for example, ould also love to see answers for some mysteries that have dogged reporters of my generation: how did tribal insurgents of the Tripura National Volunteers (TNV) suddenly kill ninety-one Bengalis

(who form a wide majority in the state) on the eve of the 1988 elections there? Rajiv Gandhi immediately enforced the Disturbed Areas Act (just seven days before elections), charged the Left Front government with colluding with the tribals, and this was a rare occasion when the Congress on Tripura. Shortly afterwards, the TNV came overground and its notorious leader, Bijoy Hrangkhawl, was rehabilitated happily. Or, was there something behind a rash of attacks in the Punjab countryside in 1991, targeting the families of Punjab policemen? It is then that the state police turned against militants and the tide turned. More recent examples are even more striking. You can safely say that our intelligence past hasn’t exactly been either ineffective or incompetent, nor would it pass the legal/moral scrutiny of the Ishrat Jahan case. The larger argument therefore is, if they did so in Gujarat, it is not the first time the IB and state police forces have collaborated to kill. So while it is one thing to investigate this case as a crime, be careful of what you will unravel if you do not ensure a ‘controlled fallout’. Fighting terrorism in any democracy is tough enough. But if you also unleash Congress versus BJP, agency versus agency and Hindu versus Muslim factors in it, you are asking for trouble. We can’t have a weak government set free one agency as a caged parrot and kick the other into a hangdog. This needs to be handled very, very carefully. Our intelligence agencies must now be put under greater oversight. But no country today, particularly one with our neighbourhood, can weaken its intelligence agencies. Time has come, therefore, to debate, rewrite and refine the charter of our intelligence agencies, put them under real oversight, but also empower them legally and constitutionally to carry out field operations. In his brilliant recent book, The Way of the Knife , Mark Mazzetti, the Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times correspondent, documents how the CIA morphed into a killing machine against AlQaeda/Taliban from a mere intelligence agency. His account is chilling and disturbing. But it also tells you how a constitutional state even creates a legal mechanism to kill without due process, but assigns accountability. In Washington now, the president himself sanctions each killing—even that of an American citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki, the cleric in Yemen), after a team of lawyers has examined intelligence evidence and advises him to do so. Sounds rough? But there is responsibility formally assigned at the highest level for taking a life, and for the mistakes that will inevitably be made—the CIA also killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old innocent son in a case of ‘mistaken identity’. A system will be better than some buccaneers getting together and bumping off some usual suspects. Or the higher establishment simply wringing its hands and dumping it all on ‘dirty cops’. In this case, the Centre has dumped its IB boys just as Modi abandoned his encounter cops—each in the hope that the trail doesn’t lead up to them. Whatever its legality or justification, or the lack of either, the Ishrat Jahan encounter was not the first of its kind. Nor will it be the last. You need to create a proper legal framework that will discipline your intelligence agencies, but also make them stronger and more dashing, rather than weaker and bureaucratic.

LOSE-LOSE Down and almost out, the Congress lays out a ‘secular’ trap—and the BJP is walking right in.

13 July 2013 Precisely at a time when it had promised a decision-making flourish, the UPA seems missing in action. Some things have moved, but many others have got stalled. The prime minister hasn’t spoken for any of his policies for weeks, and nobody knows for sure where Rahul Gandhi is. There is too little coherence to convince you that the UPA is improving its governance report card. Yet, if I said that in the build-up to the 2014 campaign, the UPA, or rather the Congress, has been the first off the block, will you, to steal the favourite line of our columnist Surjit Bhalla, tell me I am mad? But the fact is, the Congress has made the first moves in this campaign. It has unveiled a minimalistic strategy. It knows it cannot repeat its 2009 performance. It simply does not have a track record. So what do you do if you know you cannot win? You deny the other side victory. Simply put, I may not be able to win, but I can ensure that neither will you. Then it will be down to post-election arithmetic, a kind of who-cannot-go-with-whom Duckworth-Lewis. Armies call this the strategy of terrain denial. When you know you cannot win, you block your rival’s progress and then salvage something from the attrition and stalemate. The Congress knows that if it allows this election to be fought on governance, it would be laughed out. And if it lets the opposition set it up on corruption, it would be wiped out. So the Congress has gone right back to trying to convert this into a single-point contest: not to bring itself back, but to keep Modi out. In simple, political English, what this means is, if I can set up this campaign on the single point, who the Muslims should fear and who they shouldn’t, I may be able to deny the NDA, or rather Narendra Modi, power. Talk to the seniormost people in the Congress, and the number they mention, with a gleam in their eyes, is 135-40. If they can get to that and somehow keep the BJP (with its essential allies, the Shiv Sena and Shiromani Akali Dal) within 165, they will be much better placed to form a coalition eventually. Because the number of those who cannot go with Modi will always be higher than those who can. In fact, Modi’s presence in front may even give some of the regional and Left parties a high moral excuse to bury their differences with arch enemies, just to keep him out. There is another key number: to somehow keep the BJP below twenty-five in Uttar Pradesh. India’s electoral history tells you that for an anti-Congress combination to come to power, it has to sweep the Hindi heartland (1977, 1989, 1998–99). That is because the largest of these parties, the BJP and the Lohiaite–Mandalite groups, are not even in the contest in the south and most of the east. With Nitish Kumar in the bag, the Congress believes this minimalistic approach is working. They think they have denied Bihar to Modi. Now if only they could hold him back in Uttar Pradesh. He can then sweep Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and the big urban centres. It will not be

enough. The departure of Nitish has also encouraged them to believe that many of the other unhitched players, Naveen Patnaik and Jaganmohan Reddy in particular, too may find it tough to support the NDA. And if the campaign does get fought on identity, you may even achieve an impossibility, like both Mamata and the Left supporting a secular combination from outside just to keep Modi away. Modi’s arrival, therefore, has redefined the Congress strategy much before it has reflected in his own party’s. The Congress has now set a trap for the BJP. The heavy campaign on the Ishrat Jahan case, at the supremely cynical price of unravelling the Intelligence Bureau, is only the most visible example o this. The BJP, for now, has walked straight into the trap. Its first false move was not the elevation of Modi: that was supposed to work differently, as he has been repositioning himself for three years now as a much-reformed nationalist champion of economic growth. Then, he and his party sent Amit Shah to Uttar Pradesh. Just what were they smoking, drinking, eating, thinking when they did so? Everybody has seen this move as the BJP pursuing a strategy of polarisation. And Amit Shah, too much of a faithful to suppress his basic instinct, walked right to the deepest end of that trap with his initial statements in Lucknow, and then the visit to Ayodhya. Now, his party president can say a million times that the Ram temple is not an election issue. But the damage is done. Or, as they’d say in the heartland,samajhne waale samajh gaye . . . When you talk to Modi and his seniormost BJP supporters, they say they know that mere polarisation will not work for them. That the Modi they want to project in 2014 should look and sound nothing like the Modi of 2002. But politics is about faces and masks, chehras and mukhautas . So if the Modi of 2014 is represented by Amit Shah, you do not leave much to debate on who is the face and who the mask. This is precisely what the Congress had been waiting for. An election fought on performance, growth, governance and corruption would simply devastate them. A polarised campaign gives them hope. Building a temple, in any case, does not have the same oomph as destroying a mosque. It’s for Modi and the BJP to now make a course correction and ensure no more Amit Shahs poke their fingers in the eye of middle India. Otherwise, you can safely predict our most negative election campaign ever. An election fought on identity will be so unfair to Muslims, so contemptuous of Hindus and so insulting to such a resurgent, young and aspirational India. It will also give the Congress a chance.

THE DEFORMISTS The UPA hammers down a holy consensus: poverty is my birthright and I will ensu re you have it.

20 July 2013 Our discourse was always predominantly socialist and welfarist, but under the UPA it has now become entirely so. There is no voice offering an alternative, except some who might lean even more to the left of the NAC-stricken UPA. The consensus on political economy is now more total than it has ever been on foreign policy. This is scary. And the Congress is not the only one to blame. It started with the repudiation of the vanilla growth-is-good idea. As it came to power in the summer of 2004, the Congress did not reject growth and reform out of hand. It merely qualified both terms. So one became inclusive growth, and the other reform with a human face. These changes were much more than merely editorial or ornamental. They were politically loaded. The implication being that growth, by itself, is iniquitous, and reform is brutal and inhuman. Nobody tried to explain how it as so. Sadly, nobody even questioned this. That is why the BJP is to blame as well. With the decline of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, there was nobody left to speak for his economics. Arun Shourie, ho carried out the NDA’s most audacious reform as minister for disinvestment, was soon sidelined. The BJP reflexively echoed the Congress party’s rhetoric. For a full nine years, therefore, India’s economic reform had no champions in national politics and only a handful within the commentariat. The Congress party’s rented intellectuals, led by the NAC, took over the discourse and nobody dared question them, although some fretted behind the scenes. Inevitably, even some usual suspects, who had been celebrated as reformers in the past, took the cue and changed sides. This was a risk-free bandwagon. Never in India’s history has the economic discourse been so one-sided. In the past, there was at least the unabashedly contrarian Forum of Free Enterprise of Nani Palkhivala, A.D. Shroff and M.R. Pai. Now we have all the venerable chambers, CII, FICCI and ASSOCHAM, holding grovelling conferences on ‘inclusive growth’. Even in the red-hot 1960s, there was the Swatantra Party, which may not have counted for too much in terms of numbers and was easily reviled as a chamber o decrepit princes, but was represented by formidable stalwarts like Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, K.M. Munshi, V.P. Menon, Minoo Masani, Piloo Mody, N.G. Ranga and Gayatri Devi. Their moral and intellectual authority enabled them to weigh in on the debate even in a decade dominated by great socialists like Nehru, Krishna Menon and Indira Gandhi. In today’s Parliament there is no one. There isn’t a single member, from any party, not even among any of the intellectuals and creative people nominated to the Rajya Sabha, who would question the establishment view. Povertarianism (I claim copyright on that term), therefore, became a part of our holy national consensus. Reminder: povertarianism is a unique philosophy concocted by the Congress and three generations of intellectual

fellow travellers. Its central postulate is, poverty is my birthright and I shall do anything possible to make sure you have it. With apologies to Tilak:Garibi hamara janmasiddha adhikar hai, aur hum ise aapko dilakar hee dum lenge . And what about professional economists? Sonia Gandhi was at least uncluttered. From day one, she leaned on Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz (who was just emerging and, in the words of his academic critic Jagdish Bhagwati, using his Nobel Prize as a weapon of mass destruction). She did not need to check out any contrary view. She shared their fundamental worldview, or one’s scepticism of trickle-down and the other’s discontent with globalisation. But what about all the others? There were many who disagreed, but nobody was willing to come out in the open to take on the Sen–Drèze doctrine read with Stiglitz. For Indian economists, whatever their beliefs, the ultimate prize is the embrace of the establishment. The only two reckless enough to be anti-establishment were Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. Read their latest,India’s Tryst with Destiny (Collins Business). Where was the BJP, meanwhile? Okay, Arun Shourie was out, but what about the party’s reformist finance and commerce ministers of the past, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha? How would you read their acquiescence? As meek surrender? Intellectual laziness? Lack of political spine? The party allowed fake old pinkos inherited from the detritus of old socialist parties and the desi-ghee-cow’sdung-and-urine crowd from Nagpur to hijack its economic thought. The message was, anything the Congress could do to harm growth and the economy, we could do worse. All the bad laws, from NREGA to right to education to increased reservations in institutions of higher education, went like knife through butter, and so will the right to food, in spite of Mulayam Singh Yadav’s opposition. Read the debates on all of these. It would be a travesty to call them debates, in fact, as everybody agrees on the basics. The only difference the BJP usually has is, how it could make these laws even orse. Privately, they would all tell you what blunders were being made, how we were bartering our children’s future away for a few votes, and yet why nobody could afford to question these. While the Congress subverted and then overwhelmed our political economy, the BJP’s intellectually bankrupt response would raise serious questions on its credentials as our second largest party. Unable to come up with one new idea, one alternative agenda, it grabbed any slogan that came its way as long as it embarrassed the Congress. The right to food was to be contested not because the idea was nutty, but because the BJP ‘was already doing it better in Chhattisgarh’. In the process, it unthinkingly played along with the UPA’s repudiation of Vajpayee’s reform years. In nine years, nobody from the BJP has mentioned privatisation. This is a disowning of the economic achievements of the NDA. It’s been so vacuous as to even jump on to Baba Ramdev’s mythical campaign to bring back of dollars in they blackput money, so thatagainst he would a cheque of Rs povertarianism? 2.5 crore to each trillions Indian. So what did up assoanmuch argument the send Sen–Drèze–Stiglitz Ramdev’s Babanomics. That is why they have looked so lost and isolated in the economic debate, or sounded like the UPA’s B-team. It is also significant (for the BJP) that they now have to deal with a leader who is illing to speak a different idiom, and question their own establishment view. Narendra Modi’s mocking of the UPA’s rights-based legislations, using the analogy of an unarmed person attacked by a

tiger in a jungle trying to scare the beast away by showing him his gun licence instead, is a first. It is also disruptive: for the BJP more than for the Congress.

MODI-HIT Just yesterday, Nitish, Akhilesh were riding a wave. Why do they sudd enly seem adrift?

3 August 2013 Advertising and brand guru Alyque Padamsee has a time-tested line: I do not believe in repositioning my brand, I merely force my rival to reposition his. Alyque may find it particularly revolting that I borrow his wisdom to underline the impact of Narendra Modi, against whom he has campaigned with such dedication. So my apologies to him. But the fact is that Modi’s appearance on centre stage, and the polarisation it promises, has sent some of the BJP’s old rivals scurrying for a share of the Muslim vote. As if there is nothing else left to fight for in 2014. It’s got the Congress making silly statements on issues like the Batla House encounter (doesn’t matter if it took place on its own watch). But even more specifically, he has forced Nitish Kumar and Akhilesh Yadav to reset their politics. As a consequence, the chief ministers of India’s most populous states, who only recently won handsome victories and looked smug, are both looking stranded. It is still too early to say how big a difference it will make in terms of Lok Sabha seats. But the gainer from this, to whatever extent, will be their enemy, the BJP. No surprise that they are now beginning to make mistakes, a bit like a punch-drunk boxer swaying aimlessly and getting even more battered in the process. What do we mean by Modi psyching them into repositioning their own brands? Both Nitish and Akhilesh won famous majorities on the slogan of better governance and development. Nitish was encashing his success with law and order, road building and free bicycles, besides, indeed, the fact that he had forced the BJP to keep Modi out of Bihar. A dominant local leader laying down the law for a national party was a heady ‘sher ka bachcha’* act for the Muslims of Bihar, and many broke ranks with old friend Lalu. Nitish was clean, modern, governance oriented and secular, while being a senior partner of the BJP. Tha t made for a brand that swept the market, or in more modern terms, a killer app. Similarly, Akhilesh was young, sincere, accessible and humble, promising jobs, public–private partnerships and, most importantly, computers and English education, thus breaking from his party’s outdated Lohiaite fixation. That election campaign was remarkable in how little his party focused on making a direct appeal to Muslims’ insecurities. Funnily, it was the SP’s most secular campaign ever. And led by such a young, convincing leader, this too made for a killer brand or app in a market peopled by India’s most frustrated voters. Let’s do a brand health-check on both now. Nitish broke with the BJP over Modi with a flourish and enjoyed his 48 hours of fame. Whatever his explanation, he saw an opportunity to wean his state’s sizeable Muslim population away from Lalu. He overnight became the darling of the Congress

and secular intellectuals, whose adulation can be heady but counts for little in elections. The Congress in Bihar is aptly called the Nano Party (since its four assembly members can fit into that one tiny car) and, in any case, has zero transferable vote should Nitish align with it. Will the Muslims now shift wholesale to Nitish, and thereby make up for the loss of the upper-caste vote the BJP alliance brought him? Unlike the Congress, the BJP had a transferable vote in the state. His calculation simply is, this loss of the upper-caste vote will be more than compensated by the shift o Muslims to him from Lalu, his main rival, bringing him double benefit. But Lalu is not such a pushover. He has an argument, and he knows how to communicate. So all he has to do is remind his Muslims that besides the Akali Dal and Shiv Sena, Nitish was the most loyal ally of the BJP and did not even squirm or whimper when Gujarat burned, unlike other ‘secular’ leaders in the NDA, notably Mamata Banerjee, Naveen Patnaik and even, to a lesser extent, Chandrababu Naidu. So all Lalu has to say is, Nau sau choohe kha ke billi Haj ko chali . Or some even more colourful variant of that. In the process, Nitish has taken his eye off what brought him such a historic mandate in his second term: good governance. His response to the midday meal tragedy, I regret to say—since I’ve been such a fan of his—is juvenile. Good, confident and experienced leaders with national ambitions do not respond to a setback by hurling illiterate conspiracy theories. Losers do that. But Nitish is now not talking about governance or development. It is all about minorityism and vote-bank populism. His loosening grip is evident in the rise of Naxal attacks in his state and you have to say, regrettably again, that the live-and-let-live deal that his government and police seemed to have struck with the Maoists is also now fraying. The departure of the BJP has lost him his most competent ministers, particularly Finance Minister Sushil Kumar Modi. He had won such a remarkable second mandate on a wave of aspiration and optimism. Today, his politics and economics have both returned to old minority victimhood and freebie-fuelled populism. So much so that it has forced even my old friend N.K. Singh, one of India’s most committed and successful economic reformers, to begin sounding like a povertarian. No wonder all three recent opinion polls show Nitish suffering significant attrition. Akhilesh’s situation is more complicated. He came to power on his youthful charm. But he gave in too easily to constant meddling by his father and an entire cricket team of ‘uncles’. The only promise he seems to have lived up to is distribution of free computers, development and job creation be damned. And unlike Nitish, who wisely gave money to girls to buy their own bicycles, Akhilesh has had his notorious government procurement system buy his computers. It is a matter of time before scandals erupt around them. He failed to persuade his father from publicly running him down. At an Indian Express Idea Exchange recently, * Omar Abdullah made a telling comment when he said that if his own father (Farooq) was making similar statements about him, he would have been very resentful of him. The quality of governance, law and order, even communal harmony in his state has so deteriorated that people are already nostalgic about the Mayawati years. And Akhilesh’s latest would even make his bureaucracy long for her return: she only transferred them every now and then on a whim. But this one has suspended, and is threatening to chargesheet, one of his state’s youngest woman IAS officers and has unleashed a wolf-pack of abusive Samajwadi Party uncles on her. The youngest ever chief minister of India’s largest state taking on his most vulnerable, rookie woman IAS officer: the move is

so idiotic, it has lose-lose written all over it. And why is he doing it? Apparently to appeal to his Muslim loyalists. Because he worries that the fear of Modi may drive them to the Congress. So, here I am, young Akhilesh, so mercilessly squashing an even younger woman officer because she dared to touch an unauthorised construction, see how much I love my Muslims. This is by no means an isolated example. He tried to withdraw cases against all Muslim terror suspects. In that case, he was thwarted by the courts. In this case (Durga Shakti Nagpal), he will be defeated by public opinion. And both are examples of him abandoning his youthful, sincere, humble and modern governance card, and a return to minorityism that used to work once, but then failed. Both these powerful icons of better governance and development have stepped back in time and politics to the rotting trenches of the past, abandoning what won them mandates just recently. Now how else would you describe this, if not as a case of both Nitish and Akhilesh doing an Alyque Padamsee on themselves?

SCARED WITLESS That’s what the government is—in the face of OB vans, studio warriors and B JP hawks.

10 August 2013 The UPA government looks increasingly like a band of nervous submariners sailing through hostile aters. They dive underwater at the first sensing of danger and then watch the world through the periscope. Except, the periscope in this case is news television. You can list countless examples of this peculiar behaviour by UPA 2. But let us confine ourselves right now to three. First of all, I must send out an apology to real submariners, who are among the toughest, coolest and the most courageous sailors—I use the term submariner here purely as a convenient political metaphor. The first example of this panicky submariner’s approach to governance came just this eek, with the UPA at the very highest levels mostly in hiding, or responding to whatever the ‘periscope’ revealed. E.P. Unny, India’s finest political cartoonist by far and theIndian Express newsroom’s crown jewel, got it so brutally and brilliantly right with his caricature of Defence Minister A.K. Antony, wrapped in a toga, described as ‘Mark-II Antony speech’. You’ve had other ministers go back and forth with their statements on sundry other issues. But a defence minister on an incident on the LoC? He now says he first spoke only from ‘available’ information and now that he knew better, terrorists dressed in army fatigues became not just Pakistani regulars, but troops from their special forces. And how did he find that out? Because the army chief himself visited the spot and brought back the facts. Where did he get them from? How does it square with his own unit registering an FIR blaming terrorists? Forget all that. You’ve now ducked under water, danger lurks, so do hatever you can to save yourself. Further, because the media and the BJP are screaming, you also give us an incredible innovation in governance at the top: the defence minister laying out the terms for a resumption of dialogue with Pakistan. Where is the external affairs minister? Where is the prime minister? Hiding underwater? The other two examples also tell you how only a weak and perennially nervous government lets mere incidents and 48 hours of talking-head-outrage panic it into policy disasters. The beheading o an Indian soldier on the LoC in January, and later the killing of Sarabjit Singh in a Lahore jail, followed by the usual procession of OB vans to their respective villages and the arrival o superannuated warmongers on studio debates, even had the prime minister breaking his silence and saying it could no longer be business as usual with Pakistan. In one weak moment, he had abandoned the policy of engagement in which he had invested over so many years. You threw out Pakistani players from the Indian Hockey League, blocked their cricketers from the IPL, cancelled a couple o academic seminars. If revenge and punishment were what you were after, was this tit for tat for the loss of two Indian soldiers’ lives? It wasn’t. It was self-defeatingly silly. Pakistani artistes, players

coming to perform in India is an exercise of India’s soft power that Pakistani extremists and militarists resent. We now played right into their hands, our stupidity compounded by the fact that while we kept the players out, several Pakistani umpires and coaches continued to appear in these tournaments— including one Asad Rauf, suspected of excelling in such mainstream Indian activities as match-fixing. We suspended trade, blocked the train and bus to Pakistan (which a mob, now of the Congress, again did at Amritsar this Friday), and, at least in the case of Sarabjit Singh, got even in somewhat greater —if medieval—style, by orchestrating a frenzy that led to the killing of a hapless Pakistani in a Jammu jail. Of course, the OB vans, studio warriors and BJP hawks have all moved on. Nobody has returned to check on either Sarabjit Singh’s or the beheaded soldier’s grieving families. That was merely a story, a flavour of those 48 heady hours. But the policy damage endures. Only weak leadership allows mere incidents to shape its policy. Leaders have to have the nerve, foresight, patience, thick skin and skill to navigate through periods of noise to protect their big ideas. India has never had a leader, nor is it likely to have one (even if the next one has a name beginning ith ‘M’) who would say something as stupid as he will never talk to Pakistan unless it becomes a faithful friend. Engaging with Pakistan, through phases good and bad, has been a policy with every prime minister of India, including Vajpayee. Now even the Congress, starting with Sonia Gandhi, is flogging its own government. Which brings us to another significant point. We have never, never had a government in India hose foreign policy was set from outside. But UPA 2 is a sad exception. Historians could argue that its decline began with the Congress party openly upbraiding the prime minister for the Sharm elSheikh statement and forcing him to resile in humiliation. The government has not recovered since, as many others—within the cabinet and outside—took the cue that it was open season on the prime minister. His writ weakened. Soon enough, and inevitably, his government had lost that one attribute ithout which nobody can govern, described in that untranslatable Urdu word,iqbal (‘The Great Indian Hijack’, National Interest, IE, 4 June 2011). Of course the prime minister cannot escape the blame for giving in too easily. But the UPA’s most damaging contribution in its ten years will be the undermining of the office of the prime minister, and thereby the disturbing of the centre of gravity of India’s governance.

CURRENT ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT Behind the plunging rupee is the story of how the UPA–Congress leadership killed mining, exploration, industry.

24 August 2013

Last Saturday (17 August), at a dignified little ceremony at 7 Race Course Road, the prime minister released the fourth volume of the history of the Reserve Bank of India. There was, however, a certain apologetic mournfulness in that select gathering of no more than thirty of India’s topmost economic and monetary policymakers. It looked so much like a chamber of van quished generals. It had to, given the state of India’s economy and considering that the group included almost all economic leaders of UPA 2, except Finance Minister P. Chidambaram who was away in his constituency. RBI Governor D. Subbarao’s speech was more explicitly in the nature of anticipatory bail: you have to give history time to assess the wisdom of some of the central bank’s key actions. But history has little patience, and a long, unforgiving memory. So it is unlikely that it will easily overlook or forget how the India growth story collapsed under the leadership assembled in the room. Anticipatory bail, therefore, will not work. What may be more useful is to search for others to blame. And if you were not so panicked, and not so spineless to question any policy that reaches the very top of the Congress, you could find at least one party more guilty than all of you. That guilt has to lie with the political leadership of this government and the Congress party, whose second reign will

go down in India’s history as one that devastated its mining and manufacturing, destroyed its balance of payments, debilitated its industry and deprived lakhs and lakhs of the poorest Indians, mostly tribal, of basic employment and livelihood. The graphic accompanying this article by itself tells this story. From the first year of UPA 2, when it grew at a remarkable 7.9 per cent, overall mining collapsed year after year, to reach minus 2.3 per cent in 2011–12. In fact, of the 24 months ending June this year, mining logged negative growth for 21. And even for the three months that it was in positive territory, it was barely ever to the left of the decimal. No wonder the mining growth rate of the past three financial years, from 2010–11, has been 5.2, minus 2.1 and minus 2.3 per cent, respectively. And while under the new regime it is considered so amoral to feel sorry for Indian industry and entrepreneurs, you need to note how it has stressed our factories and stolen our jobs. Take steel. India’s iron ore production, 218 million tonnes in 2009–10, is now just over half of that. Steel mills are starved of ore and many, in UPA’s believe-it-or-not, are surviving on imported scrap. You want more striking figures? In 2009–10, we exported 117.37 million tonnes of iron ore. Last year, it was down about 87 per cent of that figure and today we import 5 million tonnes of iron ore. Even that does not tell the full story because of the amount of scrap we import. In the last financial year, our imports of ores and scrap were at $14.99 billion, almost twice the 2010 figure of 7.7. Now you know where your CAD (current account deficit) is coming from? Our iron ore production is now less than a fourth of Brazil’s or Australia’s even though we have matching reserves. We know that many object to raw materials like ore being exported. So have we helped the situation by blocking almost all steel capacity expansion on some ground or the other? Our current steel production is 80 million tonnes compared to China’s 780 million, even if some of this was built around ore imported from the US. Now, we do not sell the ore. And to twist (sadly) that old Tata Steel line, we also do not make steel. What about coal, which we have such an abundance of? We always imported coal of some grades. But once again, under UPA 2, strangled by Coal India and policy freeze, imports have nearly doubled to $16 billion. Another $20 billion is locked up because of the UPA’s nine-year logjam in petroleum (gas and crude) exploration policies. I know that it is brave to say this these days, but Reliance and Cairn are both victims of this, sitting on proven reserves and unable to drill or move. The oil ministry has refused to recognise or clear two of Reliance’s gas-fields (NEC-25 and R series, adding up to 30 mmscmd*), and blocked Cairn’s Rs 13,000-crore investment that can produce another 100,000 barrels of oil a day. Now how much is that worth at today’s price of a hundred dollars per barrel? And this, when under the production sharing agreements, the exchequer will get 80–85 per cent of this gas and crude. So you add the self-inflicted net deficit on steel (15), coal (16) and petroleum (20) and you get to 51 billion of the current year CAD estimate of $70 billion. The same incredible story continues with other minerals. At 3.5 billion tonnes, India has the third largest bauxite reserves in the world. India is now likely to become a bauxite importer to feed its refineries that produce a bare 1.5 million tonnes of aluminium while China, with no bauxite, produces 20 million tonnes. We have become so judgemental about mining and minerals that today even basic construction materials like sand, stones and ordinary soil to bake into bricks have become scarce. All of India’s activists have now become defenders of its sand. Never mind that national highway

contractors have landed in courts pleading that they cannot build with the non-availability of these basic materials and when the price of an ordinary brick has touched Rs 15. If you think mining is so immoral, do ban it by all means. But then accept the dollar at a hundred rupees. Or get Greenpeace and Bianca Jagger* to fund your CAD. Sure, some of this stall and decline is because of judicial intervention. This applies particularly to iron ore. But did the government make a good enough case to continue production even while those guilty of illegalities were punished? In Karnataka and Goa, it was blinded by the prospect of targeting BJP governments. Vedanta’s aluminium plant in Orissa has been laid waste with denial of bauxite after nearly Rs 30,000 crore had been invested there; POSCO has been delayed endlessly. After more than a decade-long legal battle, the Supreme Court has finally permitted the Centre to auction India’s oldest (and long-defunct) gold mines, Kolar and Hutti, to the private sector, but there hasn’t been a stirring of action from the government yet. You can go on. We do have a mining minister. But he is so inconsequential, and so incompetent, I bet most of you cannot even tell me his name. If you ever heard Dinsha Patel say or do anything of interest about mining, I will buy you lunch. See his track record, and you can understand two things: the health o Indian mining and of the Congress in his home state of Gujarat. And he is not the only minister atching over Indian mining. There are also ministers for oil, coal and most notably, steel, Beni Prasad Verma, the chief joker in the pack. But why just blame the Mr Nobody Dinshabhai and others. In fairness, you have to record that somehow, as it entered its second year, the leadership of UPA 2 concluded that mining was immoral, unethical and unnecessary. That it was responsible for all the ills of east-central tribal India, from environmental degradation to tribal destitution and Maoism. So stop mining, shut down this wretched extractive industry, and these problems will disappear. Or, as they would say in the Hindi heartland: na rahega baans, na bajegi baansuri (who will play the flute when there is no bamboo left). And what have we achieved? This humongous CAD, precipitous manufacturing decline and fiscal deficit. Our environment has deteriorated. Lakhs of tribals have lost their livelihood—at least 50,000 of them in and around Kalahandi, Bolangir and Koraput (the notorious KBK, India’s poorest tribal districts) where the Vedanta plant has been shut. And chances are many of them will land up in our cities and on our highways, hammering and rolling stones and sand into our roads and construction sites. That is, provided you can get soil, stones and sand in the first place. And Maoism? Has it declined or risen under UPA 2? I can rest my case.

Postscript: Here is a conversation of not long ago with a well-informed global tycoon. What is the difference between doing business in India and China, I asked. In China, he said, once they decide to do something, they do it, no second thoughts, no retreats. Deng, he said, said thirty years ago, that within twenty-five years China should control 90 per cent o the world’s rare metals and minerals (gadolinite, cerium, plus scandium and yttrium, etc.) without hich no modern electronic or telecom gadget can be produced. By now, they control at least 80 per cent of these. And when the Japanese ‘misbehaved’, the Chinese squeezed these supplies and all of them, from Panasonic to Sony, went down on their knees.

‘And you know what,’ he said. ‘Of the remaining 20 per cent in the entire world, India has more than half. Now if you cannot access most of it, because of people you call Maoists or Naxalites or their intellectual backers, and you think the Chinese have nothing to do with it, you know where you live. On cloud cuckooland.’

THE CONGRESS’S MODI They are using him as their mascot because he scares minorities, worries the middle ground.

7 September 2013 Nobody doubts that Narendra Modi will be the NDA’s candidate for prime minister for 2014. The only question left is the timing of that announcement. * The remaining question, therefore, is: who will be the UPA’s, or rather the Congress party’s, candidate? It seems extremely unlikely that it will be Rahul Gandhi. Only in the event—howsoever unlikely—of the Congress crossing the 200 mark again will Rahul swallow that ‘poison’ called ‘power’. You can speculate on a half-dozen other names. But you can be dead sure that no one will be chosen before the election results. So what if I said I know who the Congress candidate for 2014 is? And what if I said it is Narendra Modi? Do I need to get my head examined then? I perhaps do for many reasons, but not this. And here is why. The BJP has chosen Modi as its candidate because of his widening and deepening personal appeal in its traditional catchment areas, his growth-oriented governance, campaigning ability and relative youth by the standards of Indian politics . But in choosing a figure as divisive and polarising as Modi, it has also made him the Congress party’s candidate. So just as the BJP (NDA) goes to the polls seeking a vote for Modi, the Congress is going out canvassing for a vote against him. That is why we say that Modi is as much a candidate of the Congress as the BJP. This is not unprecedented. In the 1971 national election, following the Congress split of 1969, the Congress (R) went to the polls seeking a fresh mandate for Indira Gandhi on the slogan Garibi of ‘ atao’. The mostly united (non-Communist) opposition, or the grand alliance incapable of projecting a prime ministerial candidate, only sought a vote against Indira Gandhi. It walked into a strategic minefield. The Congress (R) came up with a simple formulation: Woh kehte hain Indira hatao, ndiraji kehti hain garibi hatao. It won her her first landslide. Today, thechappal is on the other foot. If the BJP is smart, all it has to do is draw a lesson from the defeat of its parent Jan Sangh, hich was part of the grand alliance, and now return with something like,Woh kehte hain Modi ko

harao, Narendrabhai kehte hain desh ko pragati ki di sha mein wapas lao . But we haven’t seen much evidence as yet that the BJP is likely to be as smart as this. It is, on the other hand, playing into its adversaries’ hands by letting this become a vote on Modi’s more distant past, a past he has often, though not yet convincingly, tried to leave behind. Limited success, because he is neither willing to make amends for it, nor express real contrition. He has only tried to distance himself from it, with some success, you’d admit, by focusing on his record of industrialisation and development. But one tactical blunder, like the elevation of Amit Shah in the party, and then putting

him in charge of Uttar Pradesh, puts paid to even that. Just what is the BJP trying to achieve by assigning Shah to Uttar Pradesh? It enables the Congress, SP and other traditional ‘secular’ parties to set the clock back by a decade and return the focus to Modi 2002–04. The BJP spokespersons’ claim that Shah is just a low-key but hard-driving apparatchik, who has been sent to Uttar Pradesh because of some incredible knowledge of electoral equations and processes and because of his psephological genius, is a joke. Because if such things were to win you elections, then the Aam Aadmi Party should sweep the Hindi heartland, if not all of India, because nobody ‘understands’ it electorally or psephologically as much as Yogendra Yadav does. The appointment of Amit Shah to Uttar Pradesh, therefore, is the BJP’s (or rather Modi’s) first big blunder, and that too so early in this campaign. At best, Shah, with his track record as a political hatchet-man (I repeat, political, anything else the courts will rule on in the course of time), can further organise the faithful, draw more of them out on polling day and bring whatever incremental change the engineering of the campaign process can do. His very presence will scare the minorities further, but that, as we know, the BJP does not worry about for now. But will it attract any additional voters? That is where Modi and the BJP are getting it wrong, carried away by the noisy cheers of the faithful, and among the Internet’s mostly non-voting classes. That cannot win them a national election. In a polarised election, they and the Congress can be sure of three things. One, that none of the BJP’s old voters is going to cross the trenches and vote against it. Two, that minorities, Muslims and even Christians now, will consolidate more strongly and strategically to defeat Modi. And three, that the fate of this election will be decided by members of the majority community sitting on the fence or, possibly, a larger catchment, the vast middle ground: voters who do not fear or dislike Muslims and other minorities and are uncomfortable with traditional Hindutva politics, but at the same time are also tired of the Congress. If Modi wants to win, he needs a large number of these to swing to him. He cannot achieve that by putting Shah in front. Because that will not merely scare the minorities, it will even convince this Hindu middle ground that nothing has changed with him. There is a vote waiting to be won for positive change, growth and a radical shift in the larger national discourse in 2014. But that vote will not be for beating up any community. That is precisely how the Congress would like to set this election up. It is today confident of only one thing: that it will emerge as the second largest party. So its first priority is to keep the gap between the BJP and itself to less than fifty seats. It can only achieve that by what we had earlier described as the political equivalent of the military strategy of terrain denial (‘Lose-Lose’, National Interest, IE, 13 July). It is working on the proven belief that in a diverse democracy, the sum of all insecure minorities is always greater than a divided majority. That’s why the Congress thinks that Modi is their mascot, because he frightens the minorities andasworries the for middle hy we say Modi is the Congress party’s candidate as much the BJP’s 2014.ground. And that is

AKHILESH, YOUNG AND LISTLESS He’s turned the clock back to the Babri days: from aspiration to fear.

14 September 2013 Your view on Akhilesh Yadav today would vary with how you relate to him. If you are his Muslim voter, you’d be furious. If you are his father, you’d be disappointed. If you are one of his political uncles, you’d be so thrilled and even grateful to him, for proving you right and Mulayam wrong, in overlooking your advice that he was too immature for such a big job. If you are his—and his father’s —political rival, like the BJP or BSP, you would be gloating in joy and relief. Relief, because where ould it have left your politics if Akhilesh had really lived up to his promise and risen as a younger Nitish Kumar of Uttar Pradesh? He had exactly the same opportunity, but he has blown it faster than even Rajiv Gandhi lost his 1984 mandate. And unlike Rajiv, who left computer- and IT-driven growth as his lasting legacy, all Akhilesh might end up leaving behind are millions of broken laptops. And what if you were a mere political journalist and commentator, and a confirmed ‘pseudosecularist’ or ‘sickularist’, which the Internet Hindus prefer, like this columnist? How would you be feeling about Akhilesh right now, having so unabashedly celebrated his aspirational rise just last year? The answer, regrettably, is: stupid. This isn’t only about the last several days of riots in Muzaffarnagar. Although the fact that the army has had to be called out in Uttar Pradesh to control communal riots after more than twenty years (the Babri demolition, 1992) is a shame for a secular government. This isn’t even about the earlier, so incredibly idiotic suspension of a still rookie IAS officer for the ‘crime’ of demolishing a wall at an unauthorised place of prayer in the month of Ramzan. Nor is it about continuing electricity shortage, lack of infrastructure, the spectacular rehabilitation of the same old liquor-and-real estate empire even after its master and commander Ponty Chadha’s death. So what are we complaining about? It is the change in our biggest state’s political discourse. Tak ing it back by twenty-one years is a bigger calamity than the return of the army to control riots in as many years. Earlier this week, Samajwadi Party leaders mocked Akhilesh’s government by saying, don’t give us laptops, give us security. Do we understand the significance of this shift backwards in time, from laptop to skullcap? Read this along with Akhilesh’s mindless act of turning out in a Muslim skullcap at the peak of the riots. It was politically and symbolically even worse than Narendra Modi refusing to wear one presented by a Muslim clergyman. Let me explain why. First of all, when riots are raging, involving two communities, you can’t make a public display o hich side you are on. That would be as violative ofrajdharma as Modi’s performance during 2002. Second, this indicates a kind of frivolous, trivialising, OB-van approach to your first big political and administrative challenge. Third, in any communal riot, no matter what the score (and surely Muslims

have suffered much more in Muzaffarnagar), there are innocent victims on both sides. If a ruler tries to finesse this, between them and us, mine and theirs, he needs to get his head, and heart, examined. Modi has a defence that he doesn’t believe in ‘hollow’ symbolism, that he detests minorityism, etc., etc. He, at least, has that argument, though I would contest it. In a diverse democracy, symbolism is also important, and you have to reach out to the minorities, to reassure them that you won’t allow any majoritarian excess. This is not appeasement politics. Or Vajpayee would not have been holding iftars. But we are complaining about something even more serious. The changing of Uttar Pradesh’s Muslims’ political discourse from the laptop to the skullcap. From aspiration back to fear and grievance. That is a big step back in time and history. It negates India’s greatest secular success of the past two decades. This has come just at a time when more and more Muslims were feeling reassured enough to ask their leaders for more than mere physical survival. In Uttar Pradesh in particular, Mayawati had given them five perfectly peaceful years. The state’s Muslims, among the poorest Indians anywhere, were moving towards the social and economic mainstream. This applies particularly to western Uttar Pradesh, where Muslims have, by and large, seen themselves as equal to fellow Jats and have enjoyed an excellent relationship with them through the centuries. They have been serving in the army and rivalling the Jats in agricultural yields. They happily and confidently drive their motorcycles into neighbouring Delhi, nonchalant in their traditional loose pyjamas, seeing no need to ‘merge’. Over the past few years, in fact, you have seen a new phenomenon: of young Muslims, mostly riding motorcycles, in raucous—and peaceful—groups, burning the rubber on Delhi’s main avenues late at night to celebrate Shab-e-Barat. They wear skullcaps for sure, but they are aspiring for the laptopcarrying middle-class status. Akhilesh has now reversed some of this mood. Are we being too tough on young Akhilesh? After all, his father has never given him any space. His uncles, both by DNA as well as politics, have mocked and sabotaged him. It’s a bit like if Rahul Gandhi became prime minister tomorrow and Sonia headed another NAC to keep him on ‘the straight and narrow’, and if his cabinet committee on political affairs included five of his similar uncles. There is some merit in these. But these can’t be mitigating factors when you have been elected— and not just by your traditional voters—to govern. This is not just the fastest decline in an elected leader’s fortunes, it also threatens the very basis of any liberal, genuinely secular politics in the runup to 2014. That is why analysts like me, who saw so much hope in Akhilesh and his new Samajwadi Party, should be feeling stupid.

I’VE GOT THE VETO POWER That’s the chorus of this government, from minister to babu, police to regulator.

21 September 2013 At our usual gossip sessions in Mumbai over coffee earlier this week with a particularly cerebral star of corporate India (who had better go unnamed for his own good), the talk shifted to the current obsession in his universe: our governance paralysis. Where government has no leader whose writ runs, and where everybody seems to have the power to veto and block anything. Our country, he said, had become like Poland of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Apparently, in that period, Poland had a system whereby each member of its parliament had a veto. So, any member of parliament could block any decision. Everything, as a result, came to a standstill. I did a quick search later on the Internet and found references and explanations for this phenomenon of liberum veto (Latin for ‘free veto’), which was prevalent in that period in the Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some detail needs mentioning. In the Sejm (as that parliament was called), any member could shout Nie ‘ Pozwalam’ (Polish for ‘I do not permit’) to not just block a legislation from being passed, but also bring about an immediate adjournment and repeal any laws already passed. There must have been some oomph in this for it to survive almost two centuries. India has taken its time getting there. But now that we have done so, we are out Pole-ing the Poles. We have seen all and sundry—even four Andhra Pradesh MPs from the TDP on the Telangana issue—block our Parliament. Two AGP MPs blocked a vital constitutional amendment to sanctify a strategic agreement with Bangladesh by snatching the draft from the hands of External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid, and so on. The virus has proliferated beyond our Parliament. It afflicts the entire cabinet, our regulators and the bureaucracy. So we now have the entire establishment staffed by omnipotent ‘no-men’. Whether admirable or abominable depends on which side ofthat particular debate you are on. The Polish parallel is excitingly apt. Let’s take a few key examples. The most striking, of course, is our Ministry of Commerce and Industry (or rather, the Department of Industrial Promotion and Policy). The veto there has trickled down to the joint secretary level. One of them can routinely produce truly exotic objections to any new reform, particularly if it involves a three-letter abomination called FDI. From FDI in retail to relaxation of foreign investment in aviation, and now to hat is described as ‘brownfield pharma’, the ministry’s mid-level bureaucracy has done everything possible to block investment while its remit is to promote it. And it isn’t the only one. At every meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure, an innovation created to save the economy from this strangulating maze of vetoes, one case after another pops up with similar issues. Environment, the usual suspect, cleared a major power plant in May

2012, but hasn’t as yet issued a simple letter to the entrepreneur saying so. The coal ministry—which complains most of all that everybody else, from environment, railways and power to tribal affairs, is blocking its plans—is a quiet champion by itself in slaying others’ projects. Railways are the worst. Ask anybody, including its niftier offspring, the Delhi Metro, what an impossible challenge it is to merely get right of way to build a flyover across a rail line. This ‘I’ve got the veto power’ madness bedevils more than the economy and infrastructure. Take human resource development. Almost all reform and modernisation has come to a standstill ever since arguably its weakest minister in fifteen years took over. Decisions already taken, even Indian private universities already sanctioned, are not moving because the minister has given the Left a veto. Why so, when the Left has just 38 MPs in a Parliament with an existing strength of 787? Because, through propaganda and persuasion, it dominates the parliamentary committee on HRD and it says no to all reforms. Of course, this is by no means binding on the government. But the minister is too pusillanimous to overrule it. That utterly unconstitutional veto becomes a lazy, do-nothing government’s most convenient excuse. When nobody at the top has the spine to kick an obstructionist in the butt, this veto power travels downwards. In the capital, for example, the new airport was contracted out through open, public bids that involved the construction of a certain number of hotels of a given height. It is only after the hotels ere built that somebody in Delhi Police woke up to the ‘opportunity’ that was being lost. So security threat became their ‘Nie Pozwalam!’ Construction was stopped, the airport owners (which includes the sarkari Airports Authority of India) and their lender banks were all left stranded for months. Now they are spending enormous amounts of money on blocking all windows with bulletproof glass and raising the modern equivalent of a Great Wall of China, or at least the Tihar fencing, around the Aerocity (besides some tributes here and there), so nobody can take a potshot at planes on the runway. Nobody is to ask how somebody would smuggle in long-range guns through hotel security. Of course, nobody is also to ask why there are no such concerns at Mumbai airport, where slums extend deep into the perimeter and where one could happily park oneself with a well-sited bazooka or a heavy machine gun. These arbitrary, unconstitutional and obstructionist veto powers go unchallenged because of weak governance, where every decision or idea has to pass the test of the last man’s NOC. This creates unchecked and monetisable power centres. One has to be reckless to say this, but since somebody has to be thick-skinned enough to say so, what the hell. Whenever you see a story about the navy objecting to another tall building in Mumbai on security grounds—after it’s been built—the word that comes to your mind is ATM. If the only threat facing our navy’s assets in its largest safe harbour is spies hanging out of And the windows and balconies civilianblue buildings, it should start by shutting downofthe Taj in Colaba. if that would save thisofaspiring water navy the awful embarrassment losing genuine capital assets in peacetime—the latest, submarine INSSindhurakshak , in the same harbour, in fact—we can shift all the tall buildings out of south Mumbai, in the national interest. The truth is, the navy has a veto on construction in India’s most expensive island. And it’s done nothing for the navy’s reputation and preparedness. When one skyscraper is allowed to rise and the other, next to it, is locked up, all that comes to your mind is Adarsh. There is no starker

example of a monetisable veto than that scandalous building, the likes of which run into scores in Mumbai. India as seventeenth-century Poland may sound like a quaint idea, but people are now getting fed up. In fact, this indecision and uncertainty is feeding the clamour for a more decisive leadership, aka Narendra Modi. It is the UPA’s most grievous, self-inflicted wound, and an election-season gift to the BJP. The pity is, two generations of Indians will pay for it, in more ways than one.

HIS MORAL HIGHNESS After hitting the prime minister’s office, Rahul cannot afford to run.

28 September 2013 What does 27 September 2013* have in common with 20 January 1987? And why should we call it a most stunning example of history repeating itself? Except, while it triggered the decline of the father in spite of his unprecedented majority, it has pretty much finished whatever remained of the prestige and authority of what the son described as ‘my government’ in this afternoon’s remarkable political turning point, designed for televised flourish. Rahul Gandhi, in short, had discovered his A.P. Venkateswaran moment. That pre-Internet, prenews television moment needs some recalling for a nation so innocent, nearly half a billion of its people are younger than Google. At a press conference at Vigyan Bhavan, a Pakistani journalist said to Rajiv Gandhi that there was some contradiction in his statement and that of his foreign secretary (Venkateswaran) about when he was likely to visit Islamabad. Rajiv Gandhi said, quite nonchalantly in fact, ‘Soon, you will be talking to a new foreign secretary.’ Venkat, widely respected and utterly a proper establishment man, was taken by surprise. Unwilling to take that public humiliation, he resigned the same afternoon. He did this even though he was only 56, had been in the top job for just about nine months and ad h plenty of service left. This Friday afternoon’s drama played out at the Press Club of India, just about a kilometre up the same Lutyens avenue, in pretty much the same manner. The only difference being, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had fired his foreign secretary, which he had every right to do, particularly when there ere differences between them. This was a firing several ranks downwards and there was no likelihood of the then External Affairs Minister N.D. Tiwari (he of the more recent sex tapes and paternity test fame) or his MoS, K. Natwar Singh, complaining that they had been passed over in the decision. The only questionable thing was that he did th is in public, at a press conference and, not to miss the foreign hand, in answer to a Pakistani journalist. Rahul Gandhi, as the party’s vice-president, has delivered a similar blow (we are not calling it a sacking as yet as we do not know what next week has in store) several ranks upward, at least in the constitutional scheme of things, to his own party’s prime minister. It is up to the prime minister now to decide whether he wants to close this loop of history by following Venkat’s brave example. Or stoop to carry on as a ‘loyal soldier’, thereby furthering the sycophantic tradition of his party. His admirers would wish that he chooses the former. Even if, given where he is right now—in Washington, meeting Obama on Friday and Nawaz Sharif on Sunday—he is denied the freedom that Venkat had of exiting the same afternoon, he should do so immediately on his return. It would be heartbreaking for all those who admire him for his dignity, integrity and intellect—whatever the

criticism of his lack of articulation or decisiveness—if he chose to simply carry on. He is not even a Gowda, or Gujral or Chandra Shekhar (although, having known him well, I doubt if the last named ould have put up with this). What is more important, if he carries on, he would not merely demean himself personally, but also destroy whatever respect and authority still survives with the office of the prime minister. The prime minister’s oath of office also has an implicit responsibility to protect the pre-eminent decision-making authority and dignity of that office. And it is so difficult to see how Manmohan Singh would be persuaded to go down in history as somebody who so damaged it. He also knows better than the rest of us that what happened now was no isolated incident. This process of pitting his government against the party, of undermining him and his office, began just as UPA 2 was sworn in. His first foreign policy initiative, the Sharm el-Sheikh joint statement with his Pakistani counterpart, was vetoed in public by his own party. He resiled in his first public humiliation by his own party (filling in quite nicely the role the Left played in UPA 1). Several party ‘loyalists’ in his cabinet took the cue immediately and blocked projects and decisions in areas ranging from environment, agricultural research, mining, tribal affairs, industry and so on, ruining his stellar record on economic reform and growth. All this led to the current economic and monetary crisis, while the man supposedly in charge, and the one Angela Merkel often describes as the only leader who really understands the global economic crisis, watched helplessly from the sidelines. It’s time now he said to all of them, enough. You win. Find yourselves another prime minister, or advance the polls. And what about Rahul Gandhi? The best thing is that he has finally spoken out, taken a stand on something. So far, he has promised to be tribalka sipahi on one day, and kisan’s or commuter’s or migratory labourer’s or Dalits’ on other days at random, leading to unkind comments like, if he is indeed a soldier, he must be a soldier of the parachute regiment. He is also right in principle on this one. The way this law was being pushed through the ordinance route was immoral, unconstitutional and unsustainable. So it was necessary to cut your losses. But was this the right way of doing so? This bill—even ordinance—has been under discussion at several cabinet and party and multiparty forums, and in Parliament, for quite some time now. Rahul had every opportunity through these months to intervene forcefully. It is difficult to imagine how his ‘dissent’ would not have prevailed. But even if he was resisted, or vetoed, he had every right to go out and upbraid ‘my government’ in public. But the time to do that was not now. Not when the cabinet has cleared the ordinance, senior ministers and your personal loyalists are defending it in public and, most importantly, when the prime minister is overseas and set for two key mini-summits. And politically, to do this 48 hours before Narendra Modi’s public meeting in Delhi? Was it meant to be some kind of a belated birthday gift to your rival? The die is now cast. And for once, Rahul has chosen to do so. So it is, in a manner of speaking, progress. He should now follow this by taking over responsibility. He should either move into the prime minister’s chair for the remaining months of this term, or get this government dissolved and advance general elections to November, along with the five state assemblies. A leader at his level cannot do a hit-and-run. And in any case, the rules of engagement have now been redefined. If his coalition were to win, and another lesser mortal appointed prime minister, he and the rest of us

citizens will also have to be mindful of the precedent already set: that he and his cabinet could be similarly flogged in public by a higher power within the party, the Constitution notwithstanding. India cannot survive another term under a Prime Minister Lite. So it is imperative that Rahul now unequivocally declare himself as the party’s candidate for prime minister in the next election, and give the voters a clear choice. Or, who knows, this will end up as another likely Congress story, with one side expressing qualified regrets and the other, unqualified gratitude, so status quo prevails, even if the status of each is greatly diminished.

THE ACCUSED How India Inc. may have played a supporting role in its own persecution.

26 October 2013 You have seen the government rise to defend the allocation of the Talabira coal block to Hindalco only because there is an implied threat here to the prime minister’s office. This is unusual, welcome, yet really late. Under UPA 2, by now, the redefining of India’s corporate class as the ‘chorporate’ class is complete. The Anil Ambani, Sunil Mittal and Ruia groups were already under criminal investigation of some kind or the other. This month, with the Supreme Court asking the CBI to investigate the Radia tapes, we have seen two of India’s ‘most respected’ (Industry Minister Anand Sharma’s words, not mine) join that mournful procession. Meanwhile, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has been canvassing for investment across international financial centres, and his handpicked RBI governor, Raghuram Rajan (probably the UPA’s first wise appointment to a key autonomous position), is working to stabilise the rupee. It’s not going to be easy. Not when all of India’s top entrepreneurs are spending more time with experts in criminal law than on mergers and acquisitions. You can look at it two ways. One, that twenty-two years after Manmohan Singh launched his reform, two-thirds of its biggest stars find themselves at the door of the CBI. Two, that it is just over six months after Rahul Gandhi had his first public conversation with entrepreneurial India, at the CII (4 April 2013). He hailed them as ‘cutting edge’ and pleasantly surprised both his admirers and critics with that smart line about a job being the difference between aspiration and empowerment. He also invoked John F. Kennedy to say that while a rising tide lifted all boats, you needed to build new boats for those who didn’t have any and were, therefore, left out. The same ‘cutting-edge’ businessmen who were to build that boat are now in the doghouse. And his own rhetoric has changed radically. It is back to the 1960s, povertarian, rich versus poor idea of India, where the fate of Bharat as sealed by a handful sitting in ‘air-conditioned offices’. ACs moved from being an elitist luxury to one of our aspirational white goods a long time ago. You are also tempted to ask if the NAC, which drafted such virtuous handouts for the poor, functioned under an old ceiling fan, or a neem or peepal tree. But let’s not get distracted. The prime minister’s defence, in spite of its unusual clarity, will not make much difference now. The latest turn in the coal allocations case provoked him to finally speak up. But it should also make him introspect. Shouldn’t he have been defending his own policies, from telecom to coal, from the very beginning, instead of falling back on the panicky ‘the guilty will be punished’ and ‘the PM has done nothing wrong’ line? It convinced nobody. It only confirmed the impression that his was a much eaker PMO in UPA 2. Nobody would have ever insinuated that this prime minister did something

for money or other personal benefit. The charge against him, always, was that he was weak. Unwilling to shoo away encroachers on his authority and shy of defending his own policies. On 2G as ell as coal, he would have been better off saying that he and his office devised innovative policies aimed at quick growth and employment, plentiful connectivity and energy, rather than revenue maximisation. Let the voters take a call on whether these were wise or not. And within these, if somebody had broken the rules in exchange for favours, he would be punished. Raja, for example, is under trial not for following the first come, first served policy but for ‘violating’ it, allegedly for financial benefit. Coal allocation, actually, was a more innovative policy. India was horribly short of coal. The 1973 coal nationalisation (under Indira Gandhi) gave Coal India Ltd monopoly over India’s most abundant mineral. And there is nothing worse or more incompetent than a PSU monopoly. Because it asn’t possible to undo that nationalisation in this Parliament, the PM and his advisers tried to get around it. The ‘solution’ was offering captive mines to ‘genuine’ users on a non-commercial basis. This had ‘For Rent’ written all over it, and his office and authority were too weak to prevent its misuse. See, for example, the choice of coal ministers through nine years of the UPA. Until now, however, he did not defend his policies. He and his spokespersons only said either that he had done nothing wrong (coal), or that he did not know (2G). It is such a cruel story to tell at this point, but since the prime minister went to school in old Punjab, he might remember the old story about the senior education officer on an inspection of a village school checking the students’ GK by asking who had broken thedhanush in Sita’s swayamvar in the Ramayana. Sure enough, the nervy teacher asked apparently the brightest student in the class to answer. ‘I don’t know who broke the dhanush,’ said the prodigy, ‘but I can assure you that I didn’t.’ The latest shock, with the CBI knocking at the PMO’s door, has forced the prime minister to change that script. But too much damage has already been done to his image and to that of corporate India, with whom he shared such an affectionate relationship since 1991. And his party really doesn’t care. It is not as if corporate India has helped its own cause, meanwhile. Economic reform changed much, multiplied its size, profits and riches. But its leaders failed to keep up with this in terms o popular stature and respect. India’s businessmen are India’s worst, the saddest sycophants, gushing over a Rahul speech one day and over some Modi one-liner for the rest of the week. Every budget (including Pranab Mukherjee’s, with the Vodafone retrospective taxation) gets eight or nine out of ten from them on TV while they whine and curse off camera. Then they expect the media to fight their battles. In the post-Radia tapes India, where people started to believe, by and large, that all powerful people, from businessmen to politicians to lawyers and judges and, of course, journalists, were complicit in reducing our governance a multilayered corporate did not talk of self-correction or any repair to to their image. Eachelite was conspiracy, quietly celebrating theleaders misfortune o someone else until now, when it seems nobody is left. There are so few exceptions to this, particularly outside the relatively staid universe of the IT industry. Corporate India also needs to reflect on the way it latched on to the Anna bandwagon in the touching belief that people thought only their netas were chors . So, pass that Stalinist Jan Lokpal bill, let the CBI become an autonomous monster, cut the legal processes and send these thugs to jail. Until

the politicians turned the tables. Can it be anybody’s case that the cop is the most honest, the most professionally competent and fairest of all Indians? You campaigned for a police state in the belief that only your political leaders were thieves. Now, the cops are rewriting the rules of Indian business.

MY SARDAR VERSUS YOURS And why is the Congress complaining? When the only icons it cares about are all in one family.

2 November 2013 In this season of competitive absurdity it is tough to say which one is more ridiculous. The Congress claim that the legacy of Sardar Patel is too holy to be exploited for electoral purposes, or the BJP’s literal giganticism in building a statue of the Iron Man in, what else, iron, and almost two and a hal times the size of the Statue of Liberty. One thing, however, is common between them. Both have locked horns on the legacies of the past instead of a promise of the future, even as the 2014 campaign is just beginning. In the Congress, they are pastmasters at exploiting the residual trust, affection and nostalgia that vast numbers of Indians have for the past generations of their leaders. If anything, under Sonia Gandhi they had done a bit of a course correction. They talked of the present and the future and won two elections. But Sonia has now yielded the leadership to Rahul. He is bringing the party back to the basics. It is invoking memories of and loyalties to the leaders of its earlier generations. But with one important qualification: the only leaders they invoke are direct members of the Dynasty—mother, father, grandmother, great-grandfather, even great-great-grandfather (Motilal Nehru). This leads to three obvious questions. One, how wise is it to hark back to a distant past when you have been the incumbent for a decade? How prudent is it to leap backwards in time almost two decades (the last time the Dynasty directly on power was in December 1984, under Rajiv)? This is a digression, but even here, it is significant how little you hear of Rajiv Gandhi in this campaign. The backward leap, therefore, is almost a quarter-century. The party has a real brains trust, in its in-house Kautilyas as well as in its highpowered computers. So it must have thought this strategy through carefully. But for a simple analyst—and also ultimately a voter—like this writer, it is difficult to understand the party going around the country reminding people of how awful their fate is, when the same party has ruled them, directly or indirectly, for fifty-four years out of sixty-seven. To return to our basic argument, here is question number two: it may be useful to take your voters back to your party’s great leaders of the past. But why confine yourself only to the members of one family? And third, if you dump all the others, including Patel, how can you object to another party invoking his name instead? Giants of history can’t be trademarked. Why is this some kind of partisan political exploitation of a great leader of the past, but using Nehru and Indira’s name is fine? Over the past two decades, the Congress has worked systematically to rewrite history as if the only leaders who mattered in its own, and India’s, past were the Nehru–Gandhis. Nothing would have embarrassed Nehru more. Whatever his differences with his contemporaries, Patel, Netaji and even,

at a stretch, Ambedkar, he had kept it within entirely democratic and liberal parameters, giving them all space and respect. In the post-1980s India, this has changed. Almost no new landmark has been named by a Congress government after a leader other than from the Dynasty. Hyderabad’s new cricket stadium and Mumbai’s new sea link have both been named after Rajiv Gandhi, missing an opportunity to honour some greats from these states. We know nobody in the Congress would name anything after Narasimha Rao. But why not honour the memory of another figure from Andhra Pradesh, your own Channa Reddy or even NTR—after all, even his daughter (Purandeswari) is a member of your coalition and a central minister. This, when both the airports in Hyderabad, old and new, are named after Rajiv Gandhi as well (only the domestic part of the old airport was named after NTR under the NDA, when Chandrababu Naidu was chief minister). And in Mumbai, why miss the chance of underlining the ‘fact’ that Sardar Patel was yours too and naming the sea link after him instead? Or even Ambedkar who, like NTR, was not from the Congress, but has a legacy everybody competes for. Or Y.B. Chavan, arguably the greatest Maratha leader on the national stage ever. Babu Jagjivan Ram was the Congress party’s last great Dalit leader. We know that he had a bitter parting after the Emergency, but the party hasn’t had a Dalit leader of that stature before or after. His daughter is the Lok Sabha speaker and is sometimes even mentioned among possible prime ministerial nominees in the capital’s frequent whispers. But you will never hear a Congress leader today remembering Babuji, forget seeking votes in his name. So can you complain tomorrow if the BJP does so? The BJP’s problem is simpler, and more genuine. It has an insufficiently long past and an inadequate political history to find leaders from its own pantheon. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Deendayal Upadhyaya were very important leaders but very few outside the small circle of the saffron faithful know anything about them. And its two most important—and if you may be forgiven for using that expression, iconic—leaders, Vajpayee and Advani, are still around. The party, therefore, has a real problem. It is fine if it goes into the really distant past. Then it has Lord Ram, Krishna, Shiva and then, relatively more recent, Rana Pratap and Chhatrapati Shivaji. The Congress doesn’t even complain, but the voters want some more contemporary names. That is why the BJP has no choice but to borrow and steal from the Congress. It could argue, however, that history, and its greats, cannot be divided on a partisan basis. Also, that it is not borrowing or stealing but only honouring those the Congress has forgotten. Sardar Patel as only the first Congress great to be adopted by the RSS and Jan Sangh, which had built an entire conspiratorial demonology around Nehru. As his principled rival in his party and government, Patel as chosen as a natural, posthumous ‘defector’ by Sangh ideologues. Lal Bahadur Shastri was the second. paid rich compliments thesent RSSnoduring the 1965 was immediately hailed a favouredHe nationalist, while Nehru to was thank-you cardwar for and doing even more during theas1962 ar. Go to YouTube and watch the speeches of Baba Ramdev, Anna Hazare and then footage of RSS rallies and exhibitions. Shastri has pride of place there, in voice and posters. Will you also now accuse the BJP of exploiting a truly great Indian like Shastri for partisan politics? Particularly when you had dumped him long ago? The Sangh Parivar has indeed been unabashed in stealing some of its rival’s legacy. The hailing of

Indira Gandhi as Durga was clever and I have sometimes thought that I may just live long enough to see her also installed in the RSS iconography. If our politics follows the same pattern, with the Congress purging all but the Dynasty from its memory and the BJP happy to borrow, you might even see a similar ‘floor-crossing’ for Manmohan Singh in decades to come. And why not Narasimha Rao as well? Although the Congress would then say, we always told you so.

OR ELSE, MODI Why sp ooking the voter canno t be his opp onents’ only strategy.

16 November 2013 The first person to call me that September morning in 2002 was a friend who had been present at a political (NDA) dinner the previous night and said I was under attack there from many BJP ministers. Apparently, the only ones to rise to my defence instinctively were Sushma Swaraj and Arun Shourie, also members of the Vajpayee cabinet. The first, my friend since 1977 and a distinguished senior on the Panjab University campus but an exact contemporary professionally: she won her first election to the Haryana assembly and became a junior minister almost the same month that I joined this paper as a cub reporter in the same city, Chandigarh. The second, much more than just a friend, philosopher and guide, a teacher through life and to whom I owe, among many good turns, the most wonderful o them all, my tour of duty in the Northeast between 1981 and 1983 for this paper. The conversation at that dinner was about something I was supposed to have said in a speech in Pakistan. And it wasn’t nice. L.K. Advani had complained, in particular, that I had boasted that I, and this newspaper, would ‘sort out’ Narendra Modi, so nobody need worry about him. Also, that George Fernandes (then defence minister) had brought it up in the cabinet earlier that week, even passing around some printouts that showed I had described him in Pakistan as a ‘buddhu rakshas’ (stupid monster). The speech was delivered in the course of a series of public events in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi to mark the launching of theDaily Times, edited by Najam and Jugnu Sethi, among the bravest and most liberal journalists you’d find anywhere, and owned by Salman Taseer (later assassinated by religious thugs). I was only the third and the least significant or eminent of the three speakers invited from India, N. Ram ofThe Hindu and Arundhati Roy being the other two. Since Advani is one of our most accessible leaders ever, I called him to check what had caused this. He said that besides whatever else I may have said, two things stood out as objectionable in particular. One, ‘George was really upset’ with my description of him, and that I had boasted I, this newspaper and the Indian media would fix Modi. And then Advani said he wouldn’t have been so disappointed if Arundhati or Ram had said such things.Kintu, ‘ Shekharji, aap se aisi apeksha nahin thhi ,’ (But we didn’t expect this from you). It was all very polite and dignified and he added that I should also call George. Which I did at once, and asked George thatbuddhu ‘ ’ was all right, but would anybody in Pakistan ever understand the meaning of rakshas ‘ ’, so why would I describe him as such? He said I had a point, but this is what he had read in an article posted on Rediff.com by Varsha Bhosle (Asha Bhosle’s right-wing daughter who died, sadly, in October 2012, allegedly having committed suicide). Here are the facts of that story. The first offence, the insult to George Fernandes, was all fiction. Somebody in the audience had asked Ram what he thought of his defence minister’s idea of a ‘limited

ar’ with Pakistan. Remember, this was mid-August 2002 and, following the Parliament attack, our forces were massed on the border with live ammunition under Operation Parakram. Ram said it was a ‘stupid’ and ‘monstrous’ idea. There is no way he would have usedbuddhu or rakshas , given that his Hindi is no better than my Tamil. He never used that description for George, and certainly I hadn’t even spoken on this. But the second charge, I stood ‘guilty’ of. At least prima facie. And this was also in response to an audience question. ‘You keep praising India’s democracy all the time,’ asked this concerned woman, ‘but what will happen to your democracy if Modi comes to power? Shouldn’t we Pakistanis and your Muslims orry?’ ‘Don’t worry about our democracy and Modi, ma’am,’ I said. ‘We have institutions to deal with Modi if he threatens our democracy and its values of liberal secularism . . . we have the judiciary, Parliament, Election Commission, and also us, the free media. You can trust India’s institutions to deal with any such challenges now.’ And then I added, in some exasperation, as that question was being asked often on that visit (just months after the Gujarat riots), ‘You don’t worry about Modi. Please leave him to us Indians and our institutions.’ That is all there was to that ‘offensive’ statement, and I am quite happy to repeat it even today. Except, I now have to address campaigners of the Congress party who are building their entire 2014 election campaign on a Modi paranoia. That he will come to power and ruin our democracy, break up our country and sully every liberal value the founding fathers built this Republic on. It is not for me to take a call on who the people of India should choose to lead them next year. But the fact is, whoever it is will have to work within the parameters of the Constitution and uphold its core values, whether he likes them or not. Because a democracy is neither made nor destroyed by individuals. It is built around institutions that sustain and nurture it, and protect it in case of an assault by any monsters, hether buddhu or wise. Tested by dictatorial individuals and forces, as India was during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, these institutions emerged even stronger, thereby making our democracy even more unassailable. Howsoever formidable Modi may be, he cannot be like the Indira Gandhi of 1975 ith a brute majority. And she also failed. It is because the voters know this well that the Congress party’s current, single-point campaign, built on the Gabbar-isation of Modi, is not working. After ruling India for ten years uninterrupted, you cannot merely scare India into voting for you. Those that fear Modi, notably the Muslims, will vote to defeat him anyway. They do not need a reminder, and Modi is unlikely to be able to calm them unless he finds a way of seeking some sort of closure to 2002, which until now he has shown no inclination to do. But the Congress cannot win a third term just by scaring us all of Modi. Because 2014 is a far cry from 1984. And because we are not scared of Modi, even those who won’t vote for him. And surely, we will deal with him, or anybody else, from any party, Congress, BJP, Third Front, who threatens to become a monster. To win power in 2014, you need a much wider, affirmative agenda. I had taken a few months off on a sabbatical between 1993 and 1994 to write a monograph for the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (Adelphi Paper 293, ‘India Redefines Its Role’, OUP, January 1995). This is when the BJP was a rising power post-Ayodhya. I had analysed this in detail and recklessly stuck my neck out to say that while the BJP would come to power, you

need have no larger worries as India would make the party change a lot more when it’s in power than it would be able to change India. Second, that the BJP was riding a peculiar surge, whereby it looked as if India’s large majority of Hindus had acquired a minority complex. Vajpayee flattered me by referring to this argument from the monograph (with due credit and citation) in his brilliant defence o the first BJP government that fell in thirteen days and held forth in some detail on why the majority had acquired this minority complex. He talked about how it was important now to challenge this division of the Indian mind between majority and minorities. In his prime ministership, he genuinely anted to deliver on this promise. But Gujarat 2002 blotted his report card. And he never forgave Modi. Or even himself, for his inability to ensure adherence torajdharma after talking about it in Ahmedabad. I would repeat both these points once again now. The more the anti-Modi forces work towards polarisation, the more they bring back the majority’s minority complex. It helps their adversary rather than harming him. At the same time, if at all he were to be voted to power next year, India and its institutions would change Modi (and even his BJP) rather than him being able to change India. That’s hy fear can’t be the key to the voters’ mind in 2014. It will be a positive, considered choice from the options on offer.

FROM ANNA TO AAM AADMI

AAM AADMI VERSUS SAB CHOR That cannot be ou r national mood. In 100 d ays, the PM needs to act: bring clean regulators, dismantle government ATMs.

20 November 2010 Make a roll call of the key members of this UPA cabinet and you wouldn’t think they preside over the most corrupt government in India’s history. The prime minister is sometimes attacked by the opposition for being weak, and once, famously, he was even called nikamma ‘ ’, or rather some milder English equivalent (inept). But not even his worst enemy would ever call him corrupt. You could say pretty much the same for the finance, home and defence ministers (Pranab Mukherjee, P. Chidambaram, A.K. Antony). So the four most important members of the cabinet are clean. And yet, if you held an opinion poll, a vast majority would say corruption is India’s biggest challenge today. So how can a government with such clean, efficient and experienced people at the top land itself in such a mess? At a time when the economy is booming, the internal situation is stable and the external environment so promising, the last thing India needs is this bitter mood of sab‘ chor hain’. How accurate the generalisation is, we can debate in better times. But as they say in business, never fight ith the customer or the market. In a democracy, the people, the voters, are your customers. And if they are so furious, and so readily inclined to believe that everybody is a thief, that every deal is a scam, you cannot dismiss it as some seasonal virus. Three things are clear. One, that while the top leaders of this cabinet are individually clean, they have failed to exercise adequate control. Two, that for too long have they erred—and gravely so—in casually and lazily personalising the issue of corruption. So blame telecom on Raja (and use the alibi of that horrible expression, coalition dharma), the Commonwealth Games on Kalmadi and Adarsh building scam on Chavan. Three, and this is the most serious, that they have failed to keep pace with changes in a reform-charged economy. Because of this, politics, governance and regulation have fallen way behind business and the markets, resulting in therise of an entirely new generation o kleptocracy which has its roots in politics, bureaucracy and private enterprise. The scams of today are fundamentally different from those of the past in that almost all have something to do with the government–private sector interface. In the past, scandals were all about government purchases and contracts and, as economic reform began, the stock market. Government purchases became less of a story because of reform. Even key PSUs became listed companies and therefore more transparent. The reason we have run one of the cleanest stock markets in the world for a decade now is simply the correctives that followed the two earlier scams (Harshad Mehta, Ketan Parekh). But the failure of the same reformers to prepare the system for challenges that would have inevitably followed is intellectual as well as moral. Over the past few years, almost all scandals have involved misuse, or allegations of misuse, o

discretionary powers by the government, either for old-fashioned rent-seeking or its new child, crony capitalism. Telecom is only the most brazen example of both. It has given India a bad name globally, particularly because this is such a sunrise industry and one of the greatest post-reform success stories of India, along with IT, followed by automobiles and aviation. Whatever happens domestically, damage to India’s international reputation will be humongous as the scandal now takes some of the largest global telecom players in its sweep. Meanwhile, under the same dispensation, the government’s own telecom companies have been systematically destroyed. One of these (BSNL) has been denied public listing on the most idiotic arguments but understandably on the most obvious of motives (to keep the ministry’s grip over its contracts and largesse). Public listing brings transparency and diminishes discretion. So those are the last things you want when you so crave cronyism and rent. Let’s look beyond telecom. Every major scandal the UPA has faced has stemmed from misuse of discretionary powers by its ministers. From petroleum to mining leases and coal linkages, almost all the major scandals that create today’s ‘sab chor hain’ mood have resulted from the fact that autonomous and modern regulation has failed to keep pace with the reform and growth of our economy. Free markets cannot survive without equally free and wise regulators. That is where the UPA’s record has been so shoddy. Raja is not the only one to have undermined his (telecom) regulators. The petroleum ministry has systematically decimated its own. Civil aviation has only talked of a regulator for six years now without a step taken in that direction. For how long can higher education, which is becoming big business now, be left to be ‘regulated’ by the UGC and AICTE and MCI? There is so much discretion left with the environment ministry that in the past it was widely known that some of its incumbents pretty much had tariff cards for clearances. That, mercifully, is not the situation now. But this kind of discretionary power leaves scope for enormous whimsicality as ell as corruption. And where is the real estate regulator without which there is no protection of the rights of the emerging new middle class? You know why all politicians, particularly at the state level, love discretionary powers over land so much. So was the case with industrial licensing, and Manmohan Singh dismantled that. Why has he not been able to do so with property now? These scandals could ruin this government and, most unfortunately, the prime minister’s name. But he has been in that place before and knows what needs to be done. He needs a new 100-day project now to institutionalise these regulators and take away his key economic and resource ministries’ discretionary powers. They will protest, particularly those manning what can be aptly described as ATM ministries: you shove the card, cash starts dropping out of the slot. He also needs to abolish ministries which are built as pure ATMs, like steel and coal, as these are also anachronisms in a reformed economy. It won’t be easy, but itIfwon’t be as tough thethe nuclear public support for a clean-up is guaranteed. he doesn’t, he willassee clock deal, firmlyparticularly set back onwhen his own reform, under his own charge. Surely, that’s not the Manmohan Singh legacy that Manmohan Singh would like to leave.

THANK GOD FOR POLITICS Why contempt for politicians d oesn’t go beyond the bu bbl e of sullen drawing rooms.

19 February 2011 Just a 90-minute interaction between the prime minister and the captains of electronic media in the country turned our entire upper crust into TV reviewers. * And, of course, in their near-unanimous udgement the prime minister came off poorly: he sounded too defensive, he was getting too much into minutiae, he did not sound assertive enough. How does it measure up to a quick reality check? It won’t if you remember that the key to understanding Dr Manmohan Singh is: the man you see is the man you get. He is never one to sound assertive or aggressive, never one to make broad-brush statements. His style is like that of a professor caught in the complex detail of a problem rather than that of an expansive Atal Bihari Vajpayee. And his method and moods? I have often said that even at the best of times Dr Singh comes across as Rahul Dravid batting at 39 for 3. He is not given to flourishes. Go back to his public statements after the first flush of reform in 1991. He had the same lonely, almost melancholy countenance when his first crisis, the (Harshad Mehta) stock market scam, hit him and when he spoke a line as honest—and politically naïve, you might say—as his ‘depends on hat is your starting point’ explanation forhow to calculate presumptive loss on account of Raja’s 2G spectrum allocation. He said in Parliament then, famously or infamously, on the stock market crash, that he ‘wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it’. Of course it got the rich, old and new, by far the greatest immediate beneficiaries of his policies then, furious: we are losing money, and he is so indifferent! Lack of gratitude is the hallmark of the upper crust the world over. But in our country, lately, it has also got wrapped in a fascinating elite contempt for the political class. For the well-heeled Indian now, our politician (neta, as pejorative, is the preferred expression) represents all that is wrong with our society. Someof it is probably driven by some evangelical ‘don’t confuse me with facts’ sections of news TV, where anchors with clenched teeth and bared fangs hold forth calling every scam massive, unprecedented, bigger than ever before and then blaming it on politicians. ‘Safely’ because whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, ultimately it is only our politicians ho end up facing accountability, and they are also the least likely to go after you. Take the telecom scam. A cabinet minister of the ruling coalition, who also happens to be the leading Dalit face of a key ally in a state going to the polls this year, has been locked up in jail. If he and his alleged coconspirators were bribed, it was done by some corporates. Have any of these ‘intrepid’ TV anchors dared to call one of them, or even his spokesman or CEO, to his studio for a debate, or called for their arrest if not hanging? Would one of them ever dare to call one of these corporates ‘a congenital scamster’? You have to ask that question because that is exactly how one of these anchors has been

routinely describing Suresh Kalmadi. Now, for sure, Kalmadi has more than a few serious questions to answer for the Commonwealth Games. But how do you know his forefathers were scamsters? Would you ever dare talk like that about anybody but a politician? The more interesting thing, however, is that it is the rich who are applauding this lynch mob. Exactly the class which wanted to hire private commandos in Mumbai after 26/11, to stop paying taxes, and keeps routinely calling for election boycotts. You ask them who they would prefer as their rulers if not our ‘netas’, and they waffle: the Congress has nobody worthwhile, the BJP has imploded, the third front is dead, and Mayawati,arre baap re baap . . . There was a time when the same class as fascinated with Musharraf: so smart, so with it, so confident, what swagger, so articulate, so much ‘like’ us. More important, so unlike our smelly, potbellied, crotch-scratching politicians who mostly do not know how to speak English. You know where Musharraf ended up as millions of brave Pakistanis took to the streets to protect their democratic rights? And while the charmed circle mourns the end of the idea of India because of political corruption and incompetence, it is exactly our politics that is transforming India in a most remarkable manner now. The politics we curse has given us a truly federal polity where over half of the states are governed by non-UPA parties. And where, while power to make big money (from land, minerals and liquor licensing) has shifted to the states, we have at least ten chief ministers with impeccable reputations. That hasn’t been seen since Nehru’s first decade. What is even more important, the most efficient and effective among our chief ministers—Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik, Sheila Dikshit, Narendra Modi, Raman Singh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Bhupinder Singh Hooda—have all defied antiincumbency. So it is evident that their voters not only acknowledge and reward these qualities, they also celebrate and value their democracy and the politicians that make it possible. Behind this sullen, big-city drawing room mood, the reality is that India is democratising in a manner that is unprecedented yet logical. Voting percentages are going up, good leaders are being reelected with larger majorities and others are mending their ways. Even the Congress has been forced to send to Maharashtra, its traditional milch cow, a chief minister in Prithviraj Chavan, whom his orst enemies would never accuse of making a dishonest rupee. Likewise, can you deny that Dr Manmohan Singh is honest, capable, well intentioned, wise and, most importantly, re-electable? So what if you do not exactly find him to be a rock star in front of the camera. That was never even promised to you. But one thing you can be sure of. Whatever his countenance and style, like the dour but indispensable cricketer we compared him with, he is at his best at 39 for 3, which is what the scoreline looks for UPA 2 right now. You can trust him when he says he isn’t going anywhere midway through this innings. So forget all talk of a change midway, likely successors and so changes on through this Lok a Sabha. a fresh push for reforms, administrative and political and, hopefully, changingAnd of theexpect headlines.

WE, THE THIEVING PEOPLE Give us a chosen few of ‘unimpeachable’ integrity, arm them with the most undemocratic law made outside Parliament.

23 April 2011 Some questions can have only one answer. For example, is corruption a bloody awful thing? Are you sickened and outraged by recent scandals? Shouldn’t the perpetrators of all these be thrown into jail? Is the process of catching such thieves in high positions too slow, too compromised and, actually, a oke? Does India need to set up a new, effective mechanism to strike terror in the hearts of the thieves? If the Jan Lokpal bill, drafted by well-meaning, sincere members of civil society, provides that legal framework, should it be passed forthwith? The answer to all these will be a resounding, unanimous ‘YES’. No question. No argument. Now, let’s pose another question: have you read the text of the proposed bill? The honest answer is that most of you have not. Nor had I until late last week. So here are some follow-up questions. In that fight against corruption, are you willing to reshuffle the great constitutional arrangement of checks and balances, separation of powers within our institutions, Parliament, executive and the judiciary? Will you create a new institution that’s a cop-cum-prosecutor-cum-inquisitor-cum-judge at the same time, in a ‘na appeal, na vakil, na daleel ’ (the expression made famous during the Emergency) arrangement? Do you want an institution that will override the judiciary and Parliament, have the magisterial powers of search and seizure and, as time passes, will pretty much appoint its own successors and be answerable to none, particularly as even the judges of the Supreme Court will quake in their robes before they hear complaints against the Lokpal as it would also have the powers to investigate complaints against them? (There is a concession, however: such investigations will not be carried out on behalf of the Lokpal by a police officer below the rank of a superintendent o police.) Finally, are you willing to appoint a General Musharraf in mufti to sort out all that bedevils India today? I can presume the answer to all these will begenerally no, though there will be some quibbles over the interpretation of this and that. But please do read the text of the bill as we go on. The Musharraf reference is brought in with great care. He tried to create a ‘perfect’ system with a ‘democracy’ that was ‘guided’ by him and his corps commanders, obviously men of ‘unimpeachable integrity’ (a term you will read often in the Lokpal bill draft) and certainly unquestionable patriotism. It worked well for eight years, until he got caught in putting his control over his judiciary to the test o public opinion, and Pakistan, even under military rule, revolted. It is tough to see how India, old or new, would ever accept so dictatorial an arrangement. The Musharraf reference is also tempting because the standard answer from this group of civil society leaders to the question whether their bill violates the basic spirit of the Constitution is, so what, the Constitution is amended all the time. But the kind and number of constitutional amendments this draft will require will need a Musharraf.

Remember how he unveiled his new constitution at a press conference and carried out thirty-six amendments on the spot, on the suggestions of journalists who, I presume, fitted his definition o members of civil society. Read this draft along with me. First of all, the composition of the ten-member Lokpal and its chief. Four will have to be former senior lawyers or judges, with no more than two former civil servants. Where will the rest come from? All of these will have to be people of ‘unimpeachable integrity’, who also ‘should have demonstrated their resolve to fight corruption in the past’. From where will you find these people, particularly as you are working on the presumption that a large number of judges o the Supreme Court and high courts do not pass that test of unimpeachable integrity? And who will choose them? A committee headed by the prime minister who, in turn, will be under the jurisdiction of the Lokpal he chooses. But wait, it gets more complicated. This committee shall include the two youngest judges of our high courts and Supreme Court, respectively, the presumption being that the young are cleaner (Clause 6, 5c and d). But if a Lokpal has to be fired for misdemeanour, the case ill be heard by a bench consisting of the five seniormost judges of the Supreme Court. Confused? Why are the youngest virtuous while hiring, and the senior-most equally so while firing? This selection committee will first set up a search committee of ten, of which five shall be former CAGs and CECs, but only if there has never been a ‘substantive’ allegation of corruption against them and if they do not have any ‘strong’ political affiliations. Who is to sit in judgement with such subjective criteria? But wait. This committee of five will then choose five members from civil society. How civil society is defined we do not know, but in fairness, you should presume we ournalists will not be among them. If this is not sounding impossible already, this search committee has to recommend at least ‘three times the names as there are vacancies’ (Clause 6, 10f). So if you thought it was hard enough to find so many perfect men and women, you now know that you have to find three times as many. And, of course, when the selection committee’s choice is finally forwarded to the president, she ‘shall’ sign it within a month. This would make the Congress party in particular blush, as the last time the president of the Republic was treated so peremptorily was during the Emergency. If the bill tells the president what she ‘shall’ do, it similarly directs the Supreme Court, five seniormost of whose judges will hear any complaints against the Lokpal and ‘shall not dismiss such petitions in limine’. And of course, should they decide that the Lokpal is guilty, they will write to the president, who ‘shall’ fire him within a month. If the idea of this bill is to take away all discretion and strike terror in the hearts of the bad guys, it does that very effectively. Except, so many of the rest, generally innocent Indians, may live in that terror as well. bill, recovered, for example, entitles the Lokpal collectfrom 10 per cent of allinthe collected, stolenThe wealth or even national wealthto‘saved’ being stolen, its fines own corpus for its own use, thereby creating an extortionist incentive: the more you value, the more you collect. Read on. If you report on another citizen and he is caught and convicted, you would similarly earn as your reward 10 per cent of the money recovered and/or the money saved from being swindled. We will, therefore, be incentivised by law to become a nation of cops and spies, sneaking on neighbours and family for pecuniary gain. Such things only happen in North Korea. Of course, this

may put so many Indians in jail that real estate companies, maybe even DB Realty and Unitech, may find it profitable to diversify into building new prisons all over the country. Further, almost all Lokpal proceedings, from selection committee meetings to trials, will be video-recorded and copies ill be available for a fee. This will be a great stimulus for the video industry and if you have any spare cash, you had better buy some Moser Baer stock. The bill plays nicely on the current ‘sab chor hain’ mood. So if a company is found to benefit from a corrupt practice, five times the loss it is supposed to have caused the public (it could have been 5 x 1.76 lakh crore in the case of the telecom scam) will be recovered by auctioning not just its assets, but also the personal assets of its directors. You can go on: Lokpal members will be deemed police officers, have the powers of search and seizure without going to a magistrate—precisely the question with the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act—have protection of contempt of court law, ill function as civil courts, be investigators and prosecutors, throwing out the very principle o separation of powers, checks and balances (Clauses 8–19, 21, 24, 25, 27, 32). As we saw in the first five questions raised, and answered in the affirmative in this article, there is no doubt that all Indians are now furious over corruption. But is the way to fight it to totally subvert our constitutional arrangement? Or install a Kim Il-Sung with his politburo? This bill, in this form, is designed to match the dictum of ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’. It also presumes all Indians are thieves unless proven otherwise and can only be governed in a police state. Further, that a society of a billion-plus thieves can be cleansed by barely a dozen individuals armed with the most undemocratic law drafted in a democracy, and outside its Parliament. That is why this needs greater, more sober discussion. That is what we are trying to initiate in this newspaper. This draft bill, unfortunately, is like losing your way before starting that journey.

JANTAR, CHHU MANTAR Will we, the Eminent People, now send an apology to the Poor Voter?

14 May 2011 As you savour this election verdict,* remember the line that the Jantar Mantar candlelight vigilantes so loved to paint on their Gandhi (Anna) caps:Mera neta chor hai. It was spoken with such vehemence, and so adored by PLUs, that you had to be suicidal to question it. Defending the politicians? Have you had your head examined lately? Your best friends would chide you: ‘You defending the system? What’s wrong with you, you were such a nice guy? This mood is not against democracy. This is against bloody politicians.’ ‘Apolitical’ and ‘people’s’ democracy were the buzzwords of that heady fortnight. It was a matter of time—actually very little time—before the clamour ofmera neta chor hai brought to us its inevitable echo, or the other side of the same philosophical coin: Mera voter chor hai . That was always the sentiment underlying the Armani–Jimmy Choo ‘Revolution’ of Jantar Mantar: that our democracy only installed illiterate, crude, crooked, good-for-nothings in power hile the really virtuous, self-styled EPs (‘Eminent People’), leaders of the self-defined Civil Society, who mostly spoke with each other, activists and busybodies, the really smart and honest Indians, were excluded. And the one responsible for this atrocity was the usual suspect, the Indian voter, who answered exactly the same description as the neta: stupid, illiterate, crude, ignorant and, most importantly, corrupt. If you had dared to question this when the jasmine-scented smoke of candles was floating in our TV studios, you would have been instantly convicted and sentenced for being pro-corrupt and anti-democracy. You had to be reckless to raise these questions in that phase of Prime Time McCarthyism. The really bright, intelligent and, most importantly, ‘h onest’ Indians were now bringing you your Tahrir Square to liberate you from tyranny. And tyranny of what else but this curse called India’s electoral democracy. And you were complaining? Whose side were you on? As perfectly intelligent and creative an actor as Anupam Kher was exhorting us to throw our Constitution out of the window. Neha Dhupia, who cut such a fetching and convincing figure in Phas Gaye Re Obama as the S&M, man-hating don-madam of Uttar Pradesh’s kidnapping mafia, tweeted that when she landed in Delhi a day after Anna’s fast, the air already felt less corrupt. All this nonsense, even if from such talented people, was given wide currency by many of us in the media as if this was our moment of deliverance —from our rotten democracy. Yet, it took the simple honesty of the venerable Anna Hazare himself to say clearly what was being insinuated in whispers or read between the lines. That the one responsible for the destruction of our democracy was our silly voter. To borrow an expression from Barack

Obama, Anna Hazare spiked his own movement’s football by explaining why if he contested elections he would lose his deposit, because our voter, the corrupt, drunken idiot, would merely trade her vote for cash, a sari, a bottle of liquor. All of us who applauded that now need to write a big, grovelling apology to the voter. She has defied all these temptations to deliver a wise and decisive verdict. More specifically, an even humbler note of apology is due to the people of Tamil Nadu, painted as the most corrupt of all with awful, awful stereotypes thrown at them: they only vote for saris, liquor and 500-rupee notes (two ‘Gandhis’ before polling, and two after the results if the ‘right candidate’ wins). Gandhi, if you haven’t figured already, is the code for a 500-rupee note because it carries the Mahatma’s portrait. The proposition was that because the DMK had bribed them, it would win again in spite of Raja and 2G. How could you trust ‘such’ voters with electing your rulers? And what could you expect when your voters sold out for bribes and elected bribe-givers who, in turn, would recover their ‘investment’ many times over and so on. After today’s verdict, will you still dare to say this? The very same voter has come out in numbers unprecedented in electoral history (when voting percentages are declining around the world) and thrown rotten eggs on all our faces. All of us, upper crust, upper caste, well-heeled PLU, EP, howsoever flattering the acronyms we fabricate to describe ourselves, should collectively apologise to the wise people of Tamil Nadu. Can you imagine how lousy (even if cynically vindicated) we would have felt if they had elected the same corrupt DMK again? So bow to them, in your newly painted Gandhi (Anna) cap, and say a sincere sorry. Just when the most protected and privileged classes are demonising the ‘system’, those allegedly at its most brutally unjust receiving end have stood up to protect it. Even in Assam, which is so smugly and lazily described as ‘insurgency-ridden’ in civil society and media discourse despite it having been peaceful for so long, the voter turnout was 75 per cent. And in West Bengal, allegedly reeling under a million mutinies, 84 per cent. Did all these voters brave the May heat in India’s most humid zones to vote because somebody bribed them or fed them hooch? How smugly contemptuous can we, the well heeled, be of our poorest, most vulnerable and most exploited brethren who not only protect our freedoms but also give us the gift of their collective wisdom by electing or rejecting our governments on merit, and help build our institutions. All this while we march the streets of south Bombay and Lutyens’s Delhi threatening to not pay taxes, to throw out the ‘system’. And how do we vote? Compare south Bombay’s 43.3 and south Delhi’s 47 (our two most PLU/EP constituencies) to 85 per cent in the Maoist heartland of Jhargram in tribal West Bengal. And who won Jhargram, the most romantically celebrated ‘liberated’ zone? Mamata’s candidate Sukumar Hansda; the candidate of the very pro-Maoist ‘civil society’, the PCAPA’s Chhatradhar Mahato, lost his deposit. A revolution, you said?Indian, We have seen one poorest, most honest our voter, for today, that. but not the one we had been promised! And thank the This is a free country, so you have the right to question and attack the ‘system’. But the problem is, our civil society, media, intellectual discourse are all still thin and shallow. They do not match the depth and maturity of our voting classes. They make a destructive lynch mob with an unquestioning, don’t-confuse-me-with-facts media. They can severely undermine the very institutions that protect our freedoms, rights and entrepreneurship. Of course, the ‘system’ develops aberrations but correctives

must come from within it, not from outside with hastily, self-servingly and ultimately selfdestructively invented constructs like ‘civil society’, Eminent People, Empowered Committees, court-appointed ‘Eminent’ outsiders and so on. Many of us, in frustration, have resorted to these shortcuts. In fact, this amounts to demanding almost a ‘civil society’ coup d’état by depoliticising democracy and governance. We must introspect. So, indeed, must our higher courts which, I should argue with humility, have unwittingly played along and are now, to use a cliché judges love to use in their judgements, hoist ith their own petard: the political class is hitting back so artfully by manoeuvring to get panels o EPs to select judges, hoping to throw out the Supreme Court’s hallowed collegium and, if they have their way, expose all judiciary to the deprecatory gaze of thena appeal, na vakil, na daleel Lokpal, selected, generally, by the same EPs who would be elected by nobody, but selected, in turn, by fellow EPs. Why? Because the voter is ‘too stupid’ to give you a system that can get it right from within. If you still believe that dangerous nonsense, read today’s verdict again.

THE GREAT INDIAN HIJACK It began with the NAC—and now five characters in fancy dress have brought the government to bended knee.

4 June 2011 The way UPA 2 has lost authority, or what is better described in a wonderful Urdu word that defies fair translation, iqbal , can only be called dramatic. On its second anniversary now, UPA 2 looks more irreparably damaged than Rajiv Gandhi’s government was in its third. In a most incredible and frightening first in India’s constitutional history, an elected government has been hijacked by intellectual charlatans, former babu busybodies, has-beens and wannabes, even some assorted nutcases and loonies. Its ministers issue a panicky, precedent-setting notification to placate a man in hite and cede Parliament’s right to law-making in a surrender worse than the Treaty of Versailles. A month later, the same ministers go crawling to the airport to prostrate themselves before a man in saffron, setting up directorates and committees to bring back the ‘four hundred lakh crore’ of Indian black money from overseas. Just how ludicrous that figure is can be seen even by a class five child, once you remember that India’s current GDP is just Rs 59 lakh crore. But nobody is to question any of this. Or the fact that the same ‘wizard’ in saffron promises that if his prescription is followed, all black money will return and the exchange rate will be 50 dollars to a rupee. That is, nearly a 2,500 times increase. You can snigger, smirk, turn your face and laugh. But ultimately you surrender. Just as you had done when threatened by another maverick in white who believes drunks should be caned, and all voters are corrupt, and Narendra Modi personifies good governance. You can choose who you want to surrender to and how to live to fight another day. But that is a vain, wishful fantasy of the politically vanquished. Which is exactly how this government has been looking. Sure, we have seen past governments losing authority faster than this. Morarji’s Janata in its very first year (with Charan Singh’s and the RSS’s growing impatience) and Narasimha Rao’s in its second (with the Babri demolition). But never in India’s history has a government with a genuine majority and a strong political core surrendered the state’s sovereign constitutional authority as this one. What is even more dangerous, it has ceded this to just about five characters in fancy dress, in shades of white to saffron, representing Left, Right and the Centre. They all claim to have no political ambition, all love ‘democracy’, but just want to change the ‘system’. On whose mandate, nobody dares to ask, least of all the UPA, minus of course poor Digvijaya Singh, fighting a lonely battle in a lost cause, a forlorn, modern-day Jhansi ki Rani. These new ‘mass’ leaders in fancy dress fight and compete bitterly amongst themselves, but are unanimous only on one thing: they must not first prove their popularity at any election. And hello, did Mahatma Gandhi ever fight an election? So what do we have for our new leadership now? A new pantheon consisting of a self-styled Mahatma Gandhi, a Vivekananda, a Sri Aurobindo and, well, if our society ever produced another

neo-Maoist who draped himself in saffron,* please remind me. Otherwise, we might just have an srcinal here. And an elected powerful government has handed over the baton to them. Even god cannot save a country where such powers of blackmail have been ceded to sundry godmen. And when e have a ruling party behaving like the Indian army in retreat in 1962. We must junk all pretences and face the truth. The srcinal blunder of outsourcing law-making and governance is the Congress party’s. It invented the totally subversive and extra-constitutional idea of the NAC consisting of ‘civil society’ activists and functioning as a super cabinet. Just like the Anna Hazare group, this consists of people incapable of ever being elected. All we do not know is if Sonia’s civil society dudes are also as contemptuous of elections as Anna’s. But the principle was no different. You need men and women of integrity from ‘outside’ the system, not ‘tainted’ by dirty politics, to keep an eye on a government of wretched politicians, even if led by an honest man. You need the NAC to make sure power does not go to even his head, and also to keep him off balance by attacking his government and policies and continuing to throw one idiotic law after another in his court. Why blame Anna Hazare when it is the Congress party itself that outsourced law-making to its darbari jholawalas? This is a team not of modern-day Ambedkars, but mostly of IAS dropouts and retirees who approach lawmaking with the ‘wisdom’ of sincere undergrads. You have any doubts, take a look at the draft of the incredibly stupid Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011. A Modi or Togadia can see in a minute the wonderful opportunity it presents them. It is totally violative of the states’ rights, is subversive of the Constitution and will never pass parliamentary or judicial scrutiny. But it will polarise people on a communal basis just when they seem to be getting over that sad past. This bill will not pass. But if the UPA continues to push it, it is guaranteed to polarise the Hindu vote and give the BJP a shot at power that any appeals to Ram Lalla cannot in 2014. This may even become Sonia Gandhi’s Shah Bano moment. Laws apart, the idea of putting a non-governmental watch over your own government undermines the very idea of elected, constitutional democracy and the cue is being taken everywhere. By new Anna Hazares and Ramdevs, and by Congressmen all over the country. Surrender in fright is more infectious than chicken flu and the first to display fatal symptoms is Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan. Petrified of a fasting Medha Patkar, just last week he set up a committee to inquire into an established slum rehabilitation project and included some seniormost Medha activists in the committee. Sheila Dikshit, one of the two re-electable Congress chief ministers in the country (Gogoi being the other), is also under assault from jholawalas on her brave cash transfer scheme in lieu o PDS. Outsourcing governance to activists is an idea not many Congressmen are willing to resist. You canBychoose to delude but that won’t change the that UPA 2 is now going downhill. undermining itsyourself, own government, the Congress hasfact exposed its flanks, front and rapidly behind, in the hope that its darbari, establishment activists will fill that space. But this vacuum is far too big for them to fill, so the rest are trooping in too. The logic is simple: if your chosen activists can draft key laws without getting elected or any accountability, why can’t we? And so what if our leaders are five notables in fancy dress. Sonia’s options are now clear. If she doesn’t like her government, she can change its leadership.

Or she can dissolve her government and seek a fresh mandate. But if her objective is to win power again in 2014, she cannot carry on with a diminished, polarised, paralysed and demoralised government for three more years. She should, therefore, either dismantle the NAC or expand it into a much larger, purely advisory, think-tank-ish body like the National Integration Council or the National Security Advisory Board. Otherwise, just as NGOs moved into her government space through a silent coup, the BJP will grab her political space. She hasn’t got until 2014 to decide. Similarly, the prime minister has to choose from limited, but simple, options as well. He can take a leaf out of Vajpayee’s book. Faced with relentless attacks from the RSS, Vajpayee made it clear that he would have no more of it and tested the belief that they needed him more than he needed them. He was able to save his government, his own beliefs and principles. Now the prime minister has to assert unequivocally that India can never survive with a weakened prime minister. Most likely, he ill have his way. But if he doesn’t, it may be time for him to think of doing what he may have so far thought unthinkable.

OUT WITH OU R RAGE Corruption denies a level playing field, so basic to the idea of the new, aspi rational India.

11 June 2011 Here are the two questions you are most likely to be asked these days. One, did India ever look so rudderless and angry in the past? And two, do people of India bother about corruption? The answer to both lies in 1989–90, one of the most important years in our political history. Rajiv Gandhi lost power to V.P. Singh, mainly because of the Bofors stink which drew a popular outrage that devastated the Congress in the north. And then, soon enough, V.P. Singh was running for cover, ith his crude implementation of the Mandal Commission report unleashing an even angrier storm. In each case, India looked even more anarchic and furious than it does now. So that should answer the first question. The second question was asked a little differently in 1989. It was more like, would Indian voters understand Bofors? Would they care? Surely, V.P. Singh was himself asked this question all the time. And to those of us who followed him, on motorcycles in 48-degree heat in the 1988 by-election in Allahabad, what followed was a fascinating tutorial in political communication. In village after village, V.P. Singh would get down from his motorcycle and speak to small groups of people. ‘Your homes have been burgled,’ he would say. In fact he would use the more colloquial sendh lag gayi hai—sendh is the hole the burglar makes in the wall to break into your home. Then he ould pull out a matchbox from his kurta pocket and hold it up: when you buy a matchbox for 25 paise, five paise go to the government. It is your money, with which the government builds schools and hospitals for you, buys guns for your army. If somebody has stolen a part of this, isn’t that the same as your house having been burgled? The voter understood. And you have not seen him angrier since, except perhaps now. The difference is that this new surge has not even nee ded a V.P. Singh to articulate it so brilliantly. It is mostly the result of how India has changed. If our people have moved so firmly away from the politics of grievance to the politics of aspiration, they will also not accept day-to-day corruption as a normal, chalta hai part of life. Second, aspirational people have higher self-esteem, so they are also less willing to swallow the daily humiliations they face wherever there is an interface with the government, whether to get a driving licence, passport, income tax refund, admission in a central school, decent college for your children, hospital bed for your old parents and so on. One of the more profound statements Rahul Gandhi made some time ago (at the Congress’s Burari plenary in December) was the way he defined the aam aadmi: one who is left out of the system, who has neither the contacts to manoeuvre his way through it, nor the cash to pay his way out of it. It is a different matter that his own party’s government and its hallowed NAC have done nothing to ease the pain of

the same aam aadmi, squandering money, energy and political capital behind populist yojanas and laws instead. That aam aadmi is out on the street now, with the cry of ‘enough’. This aspirational new Indian will not be resigned to her fate just because she is ‘out’ of the system and incapable of paying her way through it either. There is an old Punjabi truism that all those who beat their breast at someone’s funeral are actually each crying for their own. That is true of this anti-corruption mood as well. Please do not miss a story in tomorrow’s edition of the Sunday Express where our reporters have spoken to a wide range o people attending the various protests, all at their own expense, sacrificing a day’s work or more. Each one has a story to tell. A story of having been made to pay a bribe for a petty service or a straightforward entitlement like a hospital bed, a property registration, a passport and, worst of all for the urban middle class, a simple income tax refund, a school admission. Or having been denied it just because he did not have the money or contacts. In today’s aspirational, competitive upsurge, he will not take this with that old stoicism. If your child does not make it to the IITs/IIMs through a competitive exam, you are disappointed, but not livid with the system, because that exam is a fair, level playing field. But what happens when you cannot get your child into a central school, but your neighbour can, just because his distant cousin is an MP with a quota slip or he has the money to buy it from an MP? That is why this rising anger has not even needed a V.P. Singh to explain to people what corruption and scams mean for them. They actually neither understand nor bother about 2G or CWG, nor is their anger going to be sated by the mere fact that those allegedly involved in these scandals are all getting locked up in jail. People of India are not looking for revenge. They are looking for justice and an equal playing field for themselves and their children. They want politics to respond to their aspirations. That is what widespread corruption, nepotism and ‘connection-ocracy’ denies them. The recent burst of scams, particularly 2G and CWG, is playing in 2011 the role V.P. Singh played in 1989, by confirming the aam aadmi’s suspicions. And if these scams are the new V.P. Singh, in a manner of speaking, the media is their new megaphone. Those coming out on the street in Delhi’s 44degree heat are not doing so because they have done any fine reading of Team Anna’s Lokpal bill, or because they believe it will eradicate all corruption, or that Baba Ramdev’s campaign will bring ‘400 lakh crore’ rupees of black money from foreign banks. They are coming out because they are angry, they are finding no redress, not even the hope or promise of reform. So they just want to kick butt. The answer to all this is neither any apologies or promises from the government or the party, nor ust locking up people in jail. You talk about hanging those involved in scams? The Chinese execute hundreds corruption International every year, ranks including ofustheir provinces. Has that ended corruption?for Transparency themgovernors higher than on its scale of corruption: so even here the Chinese are ahead of us! The answer is governance reform. India needs to launch a massive reform in every area where a citizen comes in contact with the sarkar, from getting ration cards to driving licences and passports, birth certificates, property registrations, municipal clearances, tax assessments and refunds and so on. Availability of quality schools and colleges, something the aspirational young Indian and her parents

value most of all, hospital beds have to be quadrupled in the next five years, and a credible programme needs to be launched now. Land records, registrations must be computerised, and a new system ensuring deadline-bound delivery of routine government services must be set up. This is the only way to bring back some of the constructive, if competitive, calm we were just getting used to in our society.

OUR SINGAPORE FANTASY If only we had a government of We, the People Like Us.

25 June 2011 The upper-crust impatience with our ‘messy’ democracy and the rising new, post-Jantar Mantar clamour for quick fixes bring to my mind an exchange at a recent institutional investors’ conference here I was speaking on Indian politics. Just a little bit disconcerted by how many questions were being asked on the ‘curse’ of caste-based reservations, I did something wicked. This was a crowd of nearly five hundred of the best-paid, globalised Indian finance whiz-kids, in hundred-dollar Hermes ties, with six-figure (in dollars) bonuses and fancy cars. ‘We have here, fellow Indians with the finest obs in the world, mostly with an IIT/IIM education. Both institutions have also had caste-based reservations forever. So how many of you here are tribal or Dalit?’ Not a single hand came up. Sensing a QED moment, I turned the knife. ‘Okay, please tell me how many of you at least count a Dalit or a tribal among your friends or acquaintances? Or how many of you have even shaken hands ith a tribal or a Dalit?’ Not a single hand came up again. That’s because the Dalits or tribals our class of PLU interacts with are not equals, I said. They are only our domestic servants, drivers, people who wipe our windscreens at gas stations, iron our clothes, polish our shoes. Even when one of them drives you for a weekend’s break at a hill station, he sits on a different table, or more likely in another dhaba, rather than eat with you. That’s why you need legal, constitutional and, howsoever you may hate it, political intermediation to bridge that divide. Or they will invade our gated communities, burn our cars, poison our pugs. And our security guards will join them. There was silence for a moment, but then protest. Why was I bringing ‘dirty’ politics into what as, after all, a simple question of merit? This week’s argument, however, is not about merit or caste. It is about this growing upper-crust disenchantment with the ‘soft’ management and ‘messy’ execution that democracy brings. There should, therefore, be a quick, managerial and, by implication, extra-parliamentary solution. And there should be preventive, even prophylactic, safeguards so things can’t go too wrong. Read once again the statements that some of our latest TV stars, members of Team Anna, have been making to support the argument that the prime minister be brought under their Lokpal. Shanti Bhushan said it first: ‘What if Madhu Koda or A. Raja becomes prime minister?’ Arvind Kejriwal elaborated, and asked what if indeed, because it was quite possible given ‘our coalition politics’. And a prime minister in India, he said, knows so much on issues of national security. So what will the Lokpal do then if he thinks that the man chosen prime minister does not look worthy of the job? Gag him? Give him a bad ACR? Tell

the cabinet secretary to keep secrets of state from him? But most importantly, how would this Lokpal then determine that a really bad, unworthy guy has become prime minister, presuming that nobody actually charged with serious corruption can get there even in the current system? If he is a tribal (Koda) or a Dalit (Raja), it would be a dead giveaway, you’d suppose. You expect social and intellectual elites to be, what else, but elite. But this is now treading dangerous territory. The arrogant upper crust now has no patience for the ‘dirty unwashed’, thebhookha-nangas ‘ ’ or the ‘jahil-ganwars ’ who man our politics or vote to elect them, for the price of a sari, 100 rupees or a bottle of liquor, to quote Anna’s immortal line. They do not particularly want a dictatorship, but a more controlled, less noisy, better managed and guided democracy. This is the new Indian elite’s Singapore fixation. The government will be elected, of course, but only from amongst People Like Us, and then we will get leaders as academically accomplished as Singapore’s. And yet, if they go astray, there should be a senior minister, a minister-mentor or whatever you call him, a Lee Kuan Yew of our own to keep them in check. The Indian elite’s concept of its own Lee Kuan Yew is this civil society version of the allpowerful Lokpal, answerable to none and ‘selected’ from amongst us PLUs, by who else, but PLUs. If you look at the Team Anna version, the Lokpal will be selected by upper-crust, well-educated people: predominantly IAS officers (former CECs and CAGs), Supreme Court judges, civil society representatives (nearly half of whom are also former civil servants), and the prime minister and the leader of the opposition to represent the elected classes as well as the corrupt, stupid voters. This Lokpal institution will be untouched and unsullied by politics. It will keep politicians in check. This is never going to fly because this is India with all its complexities, diversity, inequalities, problems and so on. This is not anodyne, disciplined Singapore (which I love to visit) because if it was, half o this government would have been locked up in jail already for chewing gum, and particularly for sticking it under the finance minister’s desk. * This impatience with the noise of democracy—the tendency to blame everything on politics and the search for managerial, shortcut, extra-democratic solutions by executive fiat of some sort, or the kind of T20 approach to law-making exemplified by the candles-at-Jantar Mantar crowd—is an even greater irony given that this year marks the twentieth year of reform. Today’s chattering classes owe their new globalised stature to this reform, which came out of our politics. We need better education for the voter, not contempt for the voting classes. It needs better, deeper, wider democracy, not less o it. What will never work are these quick, elitist and even escapist solutions imposed from ‘outside’ by a privileged few who seem to believe the TV studio is the new Lok Sabha and you don’t even have to be elected to get there.

THE AAM ANNA AADM I Why the middle class is furious and why the Congress has only itself to blame.

20 August 2011 At least, two things about Anna Hazare’s movement are indisputable: its dominant anti-Congress impulse and its distinctly middle-class character. It is evident that middle India has turned against the Congress. Of course, the Congress will say that it doesn’t matter. That middle classes do not vote governments in or out, the poor in villages do. Also, those voters in villages think differently. The Congress is wrong on both counts. Because it is a new India in a new, hyperconnected world. The size and the power of the middle class, after twenty years of reform, are enormously greater than oldschool Congress politicians (which is how, funnily, you would now describe most of today’s younger Congressmen) would imagine. In its seven years in power, the Congress has shunned the urban middle classes so much that it has even stopped being on talking terms with them. The party can be forgiven for reading the 2004 verdict rong, believing that the poorest Indians, irritated by the BJP’s ‘India Shining’ campaign, voted the NDA out. But its refusal to read the 2009 verdict for its aspirational impulse was worse than poor political judgement. It also resulted from a cynical and intellectually lazy thought process. Inevitably, it developed into an autoimmune syndrome where the party has been busy preying on its own government and its own new voters among India’s growing aspirational classes. For seven years now, the Congress has not bothered to send even a thank-you card to the middle classes that voted so overwhelmingly for it—in fact, in 2009, it voted for Manmohan Singh who was really the party’s first genuine middle-class icon. Its Rajya Sabha-ist Kautilyas continued to boast that its NREGA, loan waiver, increased OBC reservations, oil subsidies and other such populist policies had won it a second term in power. If it continued to reach out to the poorest Indians, an Indira Gandhi kind of sweep was guaranteed for Rahul in 2014. It, therefore, did nothing for the urban middle classes, its leaders never spoke to them and even indulged in rhetoric that made upwardly mobile, hard-working urban and semi-urban Indians think they were immoral or guilty. As if these aspirational Indians were criminals who vacuum-cleaned all the spoils of economic reform while the vast majority had been left behind. With Sonia and Rahul Gandhi not speaking to them, a sullen prime minister in a shell and the NAC and other darbari civil society stalwarts and Congressmen constantly maligning reform and the government, the middle class felt orphaned, alienated and rebuffed. Until it found its new leaders in Team Anna. The Congress does not want to be confused with facts. In 2009, nine of our states had BPL populations higher than the national average of 37.2 per cent. These nine states, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Orissa, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh, together

account for 247 seats in the Lok Sabha. Together, these have more than 80 per cent of India’s extreme poor. How many of these seats did the Congress win? Only 62, or just a quarter. Out of the rest, the less poor, and thereby more urbanised and aspirational states, it won its remaining 144, or almost hal the seats on offer (296). Look at the party’s performance in the poorest states of India (BPL percentages in parentheses): Orissa (57.2), 6 out of 21 seats; Bihar (54.4), 2 out of 40; Chhattisgarh (49.4), 1 out of 11; and Jharkhand (45.3), 1 out of 14. If NREGA, loan-waiver and nanny-state ojanas were winning the Congress votes, then it would seem the benefits of those schemes were going to richer, less deserving states. Even in Gujarat, in spite of Modi, the Congress’s strike rate as much better, at 11 out of 26. It is in keeping with the trend because Gujarat has been one of our fastest growing and urbanising states. Similarly, while the Congress clings to the delusion that rural India loves it, the fact is the party, or its allies, swept every major city in India with the exception of Bangalore. But its basic, outdated, socialist and povertarian instinct rendered it incapable o acknowledging, or even understanding, this massive churn in Indian society. So like a child who prepares for exams by rote and regurgitates the answers he has mugged up, hatever the question, the Congress also started to repeat the old, inherited explanations for its 2009 victory. Worse, it did not want to acknowledge that an Indian electorate which, buoyed by a new ave of aspiration, had left the politics of grievance behind was responsible for its success. Following 2009, the party’s political discourse started dipping more and more into socialist and rural-ist old-speak. Two general elections and so many state elections had shown that the one thing aspirational India cared about was education, and yet all reform in higher education stopped. Hear the voices now from Anna and his crowds. The complaint you hear most often is of bribery in school and college admissions. Our cities are rotting, power supply is a disaster, urban reform is at a standstill. Education, training, recreational facilities, all the things that enhance your quality of life and satisfy this new ambitious urban upsurge, are in extreme short supply. These make a huge flourishing market for rent-seeking and cronyism. Rahul and Sonia never did, but increasingly even a frustrated PM and his key cabinet ministers have stopped speaking to this rising new India. It is almost as if when the country is becoming so decidedly aspirational, and has blessed it already with two consecutive terms in power, the party is searching for grievances of the past. This is the classic definition of a political auto-immune disease. The times when you could rule India without its urban middle class are now over. Because the key pivots of democratic governance, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, civil society activists and, of course, the media, all come from it. Alienating them is a disaster the Congress and the UPA have brought upon themselves, and so early in their five-year tenure.

ANNATIONALISM It’s Sunny Deol hyper, in your face, it wraps itself in Tricolour—it will be tested b y the id ea of Indi a.

3 September 2011 Pratibha, daughter of L.K. Advani, has recently produced a very impressive documentary titled Tiranga, on the history of our national flag. She might need to update it a bit. Because never in its eight-decade history has the Tricolour been made to work as hard as lately, since it became the standard of the Anna movement. You have seen it waved from the windows of cars, from motorcycles that whizzed past you onyour city’s streets, you have seen it on protesters’ caps, shirts, foreheads and even on the cheeks of the two little girls who offered Anna nariyal-paani to break his fast. Never in India’s history, not even during the freedom movement or wartime, has such aggressively patriotic fervour been unleashed. Mahatma Gandhi never used portraits of a tiger-riding Bharat Mata, and Bhagat Singh’s battle cry was not Vande ‘ Mataram ’. In their own distinctive ways, the three major streams of our freedom movement, Gandhi, Netaji and Bhagat Singh, reflected the respective beliefs and competed in the philosophical space of nation-building. Democratic plurality, ideological diversity and argument were integral to our freedom movement. Which is the reason why not just independence, but also such a marvellous Constitution emerged from it. Read the debates of the Constituent Assembly. The founding fathers differed, disagreed and argued with each other, but nowhere did one pull out the flag and say to the other: if you are patriotic like me, you have to agree ith me. The use of patriotism in a political debate is no different from the use of religion or an invocation to god. Because that squashes all argument. So here is the quibble. Once you wave the national flag and Bharat Mata, all arguments cease. Because then, if you disagree with me, you are unpatriotic:Mere paas tiranga hai, Vande Mataram hai, aur Ma (Mother India) hai, tumhare paas kya hai? In effect, if you then disagree with me, you are unpatriotic and your arguments are immoral, pro-corrupt. A democratic movement has to give space for disagreement, argue with those who have a different point of view, not wave the national flag and shut them up. The use of the flag is just one of the more visible metaphors of Bollywood-style hypernationalism

Mataram ’, forever a gentle, polite salutation to Mother India, is employed by Team Anna. Vande ‘ now used in an almost martial fashion, like a rousing regimental war cry, even by Anna himself each time he spoke to the crowd. ‘Inqilab Zindabad’ , Bhagat Singh’s invocation to revolution, was also adopted fully. Bharat Mata’s portrait, which formed the backdrop at Jantar Mantar and attracted some adverse ‘secular’ notice, was replaced with Gandhi’s. But young schoolgirls dressed and painted as Bharat Mata were routinely paraded in the crowds and on the stage so the fervour was not lost. Baba Ramdev made an appearance on day nine, grabbed a microphone and, the rock star that he is, walked

up and down the stage singing a stirring ballad: ‘Utho jawan desh ke, vasundhara pukarati, desh hai ukarata, pukarati Ma Bharti’ (Rise, the youth of India, your motherland, Mother India is calling you to rise). Almost each day a new super-patriotic metaphor was rolled out. My favourites: Anna kissing a vessel containing soil from Jallianwala Bagh, and even more dramatic, Kiran Bedi, while being taken in the bus following her arrest on 16 August, waving both arms out of the window and shouting, Ab ‘ tumhare hawale watan saathiyon.’ Of course, I haven’t been able to check with her if her inspiration as the more recent Akshay Kumar–Sunny Deol starrer on the ‘rescue’ of Indian POWs in Pakistan. But given her vintage—and mine—I would suspect it was the srcinal Kaifi Azmi song in the gutrenching last moments of Chetan Anand’s Haqeeqat (1964) when the last Indian soldier fighting the Chinese on that Ladakh outpost—of course, Sunny Deol’s father Dharmendra—lies dying, still clutching his rifle. Now, the language and style of popular protest are driven by their own heady mix of hormones. But really, to borrow words from a dying Indian soldier in such an unequal war while merely courting ‘preventive’ arrest for a day is a sad joke. This movement is employing Sunny Deol-style ‘patriotism’ to rouse its supporters and to kill all disagreement. Go to YouTube to see what a vigorous shakedown the Tricolour has been given through this movement, not least of all by Kiran Bedi herself. She now has a large, slanted Tricolour behind her desk—like American courtrooms—even when she speaks to television channels. In comparison, the brick wall of Abhishek Manu Singhvi’s home provides such an inconsequential backdrop. The Tricolour has been used to impale the bad guys in our movies. The most dramatic use of a national symbol, of course, was Dilip Kumar drawing the map of India with bullets on the chest of the villain (oops, oops, it was none other than the most vocal Anna supporter from Bollywood now, Anupam Kher).* There was a bit of that in this movement as well, though incidents when policemen, and in one case a journalist, were thrashed with reversed flags, were only a few. And don’t forget Anna’s daily chants, also borrowed from the same film, Dil ‘ diya hai, jaan bhi denge, ai watan tere liye. ’ The civil society group around Anna is smart and committed. But in wrapping the movement in the Tricolour and images of Bharat Mata, they have scored a self-goal. The emergence of civil society as such a powerful pressure group is a genuine achievement of Indian democracy. Because along with the courts, the media and the Election Commission, civil society forms a counterbalance to the likely excesses of electoral majorities. But by packaging itself in majoritarian, exclusivist colours, Anna’s civil society has erred. Symbolism like having Dalit and Muslim girls to help Anna break his fast— on their cheeks—will as you fakeever as the Muslim of Advani’s asith hethe ledTricolour the Ram painted temple campaign. By the way,look have before seendriver a child described rath, as a Dalit from a public stage in Delhi? And we accuse our politicians of being casteist and cynical! In any case, how can you use the Tricolour to fight your own constitutionally elected Parliament? A constitutional democracy’s most hallowed concept of ‘we, the people . . .’ cannot be reduced to ‘we, the mob . . .’, no matter how many ‘votes’ we might have on email, SMS or Facebook, or how vigorously we wave and shake the national flag. Because I may choose to disagree with you even

more vigorously, and the flag and the anthem will remain as much mine as yours.

HOLIER THAN COW Those who moralise must meet the high standards they expect of everyone else.

22 October 2011 In Vishal Bhardwaj’s Ishqiya, the uncle–nephew pair of tramps (played brilliantly by Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi) is vying for the affections of Vidya Balan, apparently a widow whose eyelashes never cease to flutter. The ‘uncle’ catches Warsi and Balan in what police press handouts ould usually describe as a compromising position. Hurt and indignant, he accuses the nephew o indulging in cheap, lusty behaviour. There is a quick and devastating comeback from Arshad Warsi, ho says to uncle Naseer: ‘Tumhara ishq ishq, aur humara ishq sex!’ Devastating, indeed, as it questions a senior’s moralistic hypocrisy where you set one standard for yourself, and another for the rest. But why are we recalling that exchange today? Now go over what we have been hearing from several members of Team Anna as questions have been raised about their own past. One lot* has been found getting very, very sexy farmhouse properties at very, very, very lucrative prices from Mayawati’s government in a totally discretionary, and non-transparent, ‘allotment’. Remember, it is an ‘allotment’, not even a lottery, or first come, first served. Their defence: yes, indeed, it looks rather unusual, and if somebody goes to court questioning these allotments, he may have a good case. But that doesn’t mean we will be returning these, since we did no wrong. Now please allow me the licence to translate that into simpler English: Mayawati was distributing these plots on some unknown and undisclosed criteria which look legally dodgy, but if I benefited in the process, why should I complain? If you have a problem, you go to court. Now what if some of the beneficiaries in the Adarsh Housing Society scam had used the same argument? They wouldhave been called thieves and hypocrites, and charged with compounding their own srcinal crime. So what would be pristine, charming, innocent love from a lonely uncle would be straightforward lust from a randy nephew. Let’s explore this further. Another member * of Team Anna overstays his leave from his government job, flunks his employment bond and is asked to pay back what is due to the government as per the law and procedure; it is still only Rs 9 lakh or so. And what is the answer? It is not that the government’s claim is fake or even vindictive. It is just that, what do my former employers (the central government in this case) think I was doing? Was I whiling away my time? I was campaigning for the right to information, which is so important for India. So even if I was effectively AWOL, the government should have the good sense to waive all claims. Waive all claims? Use discretion? Didn’t you think this entire campaign was about curtailing discretion? And what if lakhs of absentee

teachers in our government schools, who the Jan Lokpal is expected to fix, find similar excuses? Which leads us nicely to the more current story, involving so far the most respected and certainly most dramatically visible face* of the Anna movement, who has been caught fudging her travel bills variously. Variously because she has travelled economy but claimed business, travelled for one host but asked two to pay for the same flight, travelled on deep-discount tickets and claimed full fare. And here is her defence, variously: none of this money came to me; it came to my NGO which does such onderful work. I only suffered the discomfort of economy-class travel to save money for my noble cause. It is sinful to even attribute any corruption to me. Some of the explanation, in fact, has been more colourful. What if somebody invited me home and offered non-veg and veg food and I ate only vegetarian? Let me explain how. The angry and desperate defence unleashed by Team Anna following the exposé by Assistant Editor Ajmer Singh in this newspaper** focuses entirely on the business– economy class issue. All that she did, the argument goes, was a non-violent, clever equivalent of Robin Hood. But what about the tickets bought at 75 per cent ‘gallantry award’ discount from Indian Airlines and Air India and billed to her hosts at full price? Every paisa of these discounts on these fully state-owned and near-bankrupt airlines is paid for by the taxpayer. So in this case you vacuumclean the tax rupees I, the honest taxpayer, offer you in gratitude for your gallantry, and you divert them to your own gain, even if it is your own non-profit charity. Playing Robin Hood with money coming straight out of the Consolidated Fund of India? Maybe we do need that Jan Lokpal after all. Would have been interesting to see how they would have dealt with something like this. And what if a political leader facing corruption charges tomorrow, like Rajiv Gandhi on Bofors or A. Raja on telecom, said, hey, there was no personal gain here, I was only giving it to the party. Or Kanimozhi asked why you are raising such ‘silly and sinful’ questions about money that has after all gone to her NGO, and whose accounts are audited. You will run into that same uncle–nephew, Arshad Warsi– Naseeruddin Shah, love-and-lust contradiction. Please note that at least we haven’t yet committed the ‘sin’ of calling somebody corrupt or even stupid. Because this argument is about arrogance and hypocrisy and not about greed or corruption. I ould, in fact, go so far as to say that even if somebody came to me and said that he saw with his own eyes any of these members of Team Anna taking a bribe, I would question his sanity. They are victims of their own, unthinking, I-am-a-legend-in-my-own-eyes arrogance. They set an impossible standard for others in the system, but fail to check if they have themselves fully lived up to it, because now they are exposed to the public gaze and will be fully, brutally tested against it. It is useful to recall former Supreme Court Chief Justice J.S. Verma’s brilliant line when I once asked him if it was possible for an individual to change theexpectations system, build an institution. ‘It is possible,’ he said, ‘but you must have no past, and you must have no in the future.’ Members of the now-disintegrating Team Anna ould do well to check if they pass this test. Enough evidence has now surfaced that this Team Anna is no Team Gandhi. The more outrage it shows in its defence, the more hollow it sounds. The price, indeed, for holier-than-cow arrogance, hypocrisy and hubris.

THE CASTE OF CORRUPTIO N So anti-politics are Team Anna that they cannot see reality: how the system is l oaded agains t the und erprivileged.

24 Dece mber 2011 Is there a caste or communal link to corruption and crime? Or more bluntly: do your chances o getting caught in corruption cases increase as you go down the caste ladder? Nobody in his right mind ould say yes to either of these questions. So before you unleash a storm of protest on social media for my ‘casteist’ views, examine some facts. These will tell you the shocking story of prejudice against the so-called lower castes and minority communities. There is a large preponderance of this underclass among those charged in corruption cases by the state and courts, or even targeted in media sting operations. Here is a roll call: A. Raja and Mayawati (Dalit), Madhu Koda and Shibu Soren (tribal), Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav (OBC) are all caught in corruption or disproportionate assets cases. Faggan Singh Kulaste, Ashok Argal and Mahavir Singh Bhagora, caught in the cash-for-votes sting, are all Dalit; all three BSP MPs in the cash-for-votes scam, Narendra Kushwaha, Lalchandra Kol and Raja Ram Pal, are Dalit too. O course, there are also some illustrious upper-caste representatives in the net as well: Sukh Ram, Jayalalithaa, Suresh Kalmadi. But they are far fewer. Could it be that the upper crust tends to be ‘cleaner’ as a rule, or is the system loaded against those in the bottom half of the social pyramid? Please note also the observation in the Sachar Committee report on the condition of Muslims, that the only place where Muslims have numbers disproportionately high in comparison to their population is in Indian jails. So, face the question once again: do Muslims tend to be more criminal than Hindus? Or is the system loaded against them? You want some more telling examples, look at the record of the BJP. Two of its senior leaders ere caught on camera accepting cash. One, Dilip Singh Judeo, was a mere MP, but of a high caste and was happily rehabilitated in the party, fielded in the election and is now an MP.* The other, Bangaru Laxman, was ranked much higher in the party; he was, in fact, its president. He has been banished and isolated and is fighting the charges in that Tehelka sting case by himself. ** I am sorry to use this expression, but the party treated him as an utter outcast even as it continued to defend Judeo. What is the difference between the two? Judeo is a Rajput of blue blood, and Laxman a Dalit. You ant to take this argument to the judiciary? It has been loosely insinuated by many prominent people, including by some notable members of Team Anna, that a large number of our former chief justices have been corrupt. But who is the only one targeted by name (even though most charges are frivolous and nothing has ever been established)? It is Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, currently chairman of the National Human Rights Commission and before that, more importantly, India’s first Dalit chief ustice.†

Brutal, you might call these questions, and you will be right. But these issues are never academic in a diverse democracy. These have become even more important now as the political class has responded to Team Anna’s Lokpal campaign by proposing 50 per cent reservation for lower castes and minorities. You can say this is a cynical ploy to counter what is, after all, an upper-class, uppercaste, urban movement so far. But facts are facts. The system is much too prejudiced, much too loaded against the underclass. To ask if reservations are the right way to address this injustice is to hide from the real question. How do you ensure equity in the system? How do you convince this vast majority o Indians below the very top of the social pyramid that the system will be fair to them? Or you can flip this very same question in the context of Team Anna. Why have this vast majority of socially and economically vulnerable Indians been so distant from their movement? Why are the leaders who represent them, from Lalu to Mulayam to Mayawati, so critical of the institution of Lokpal? Because the minorities and weaker sections are always afraid of mass movements, particularly when these are led by the dominant upper classes. In these movements they see the threat of majoritarian excesses. And that is exactly the apprehension that the political class, particularly the UPA, has now gotten hold of. The upper-caste upper crust of our country is the most prejudiced, but dominant, minority in any democracy in the world. That is why even the person representing Mayawati on funny-man Cyrus Broacha’s show on CNN-IBN always has a blackened face. (Dalits are supposed to be dark-skinned, no?) The caste card, howsoever cynical, has thrown Team Anna off balance. They are now paying for having built such an unrepresentative upper-crust leadership, deluded perhaps by the belief that this battle was theirs to win on television channels. They started to believe their own mythology of being apolitical and did not realise that politics in a democracy as diverse as ours needs two essential prerequisites: an ideology and inclusiveness. A campaign against corruption is no substitute for ideology. And you can say that there was an underlying philosophical impulse to this movement. Except that its ideology was anti-political, underlined by that slogan from the early, heady days:Mera neta chor hai . It was probably because of that ideological abhorrence of politics and the give-and-take, the unending deal-making it involves, that Anna never thought of setting up a truly diverse and representative ‘team’ to begin with. Representative inclusiveness, they probably believed, was part of our cynical electoral politics though that did not stop them from having Dalit and Muslim girls help Anna break his fast, making it the first time that a child was described as ‘Dalit’ on a public stage in a mass rally. of Team Anna now say that theirs indeed is a political movement, and they are right. But Leaders even if they assert that it is above electoral politics, they have erred gravely in not learning from the political class and building a truly representative leadership. It could have come from both their abhorrence and ignorance of politics, lack of understanding of how you need politics to create a sense of fairness, balance and empowerment. That is the difference between Anna on the one hand, and Gandhi and JP on the other. Both of the latter made inclusive politics the vehicle of their revolutions.

Team Anna tried to circumvent politics, and now finds itself right in the thick of it.

*In 1995, militants led by ‘Mast Gul’ occupied the shrine at Charar-e-Sharief in Kashmir, and the confrontation ended with it being set ablaze.

**In October 1993, following reports that militants had lodged themselves in Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine, the armed forces laid siege to it, leading to an extremely tense standoff that was in the end peacefully resolved.

*These letters are purely fictional and not the result of another leak. Any resemblance to originals that may subsequently surface is purely coincidental.

**The Jain Commission report on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination was submitted to the government in August 1997, and reports appeared in the media in November that it had criticised the DMK, which as in Gujral’s United Front government. The Congress withdrew outside support to the government on 28 November. Sitaram Kesri was then president of the Congress party.

*This piece is a figment of this writer’s imagination and does not purport to be an excerpt from Narasimha Rao’s forthcoming novel The Insider , which, after all, is merely a work of fiction.

*In August 1991, before Boris Yeltsin appeared on the streets of Moscow and stared down the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, Rao had reacted by saying that it could serve as a lesson for ‘overenthusiastic reformers’.

*A reference to Chandra Shekhar.

*In January 2013, Chautala was convicted of irregularities in the recruitment of teachers in Haryana in 1999–2000 and handed a ten-year sentence.

*The Congress won 70 seats in the 126-member House, the AGP 20.

*It has since been renamed Uttarakhand.

*He went on to become a member of the National Human Rights Commission.

*Dhirubhai Ambani was admitted to hospital on 24 June.

*In May 2013, Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to felony charges and committed to pay $500 million to settle charges of manufacture and distribution of adulterated drugs from its facilities in Paonta Sahib and Dewas.

*Reliance Industries Limited and some of its top executives were charged under the Official Secrets Act after the police said they had recovered government documents in a raid in 1998 at the company’s Delhi office.

*The BJP won 127 seats in the 182-member assembly, the Congress got 51.

*That bonhomie with the VHP evaporated soon enough, so that by the assembly polls in 2007, and definitely in 2012, it was joked that the VHP ran a more effective campaign against Modi’s BJP than did the Congress opposition.

*On 1 February 2003, Kalpana Chawla was killed when the space shuttleColumbia broke up.

*The American-led invasion of Iraq was by now a certainty; the cricket World Cup was taking place in South Africa.

*The stamp was issued in 1970, during the government of Indira Gandhi, who went on to ban the RSS during the Emergency.

*The NHRC had moved the Supreme Court challenging acquittals in the Best Bakery case by a trial court, and also seeking the transfer of trials of four other Gujarat riot cases outside the state.

*A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

**K.R. Narayanan.

*The result was 3-1. The Congress won in Delhi, the BJP in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan.

*As it happens, such a feel-good effect was reaped by the Congress in 2009.

*Vajpayee and Musharraf met in Islamabad in January 2004 on the sidelines of a SAARC meet and reached an agreement on beginning the peace process.

*On the eve of the 2004 general election, the BJP struck an electoral alliance with Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK, thereby spurning its NDA partner, the DMK. Her party did not manage to win even one seat. The BJP won 138 seats, while the Congress (with 145 seats) formed the UPA with pre- and post-poll partners, and got the outside support of the Left parties and others.

*‘BJP shaken as RSS chief targets Vajpayee, family and aide Mishra’, IE, 12 April 2005.

*Ram Babu Sharma was the then Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee president.

**Missed by a month! A big chunk of the Janata Dal(S) withdrew support to Dharam Singh in January 2006.

*The Left won the West Bengal and Kerala assembly elections in 2006, and two years later withdrew support to the UPA government on the Indo-US nuclear deal, but the UPA nonetheless survived a vote of confidence in the Lok Sabha in July 2008. In the run-up to the 2009 general election, the Left cobbled together a third front, with Mayawati seen to be its prime ministerial candidate.

*Delhi is a Union Territory—so while it has an elected assembly, key powers, like those over police and land, are exercised by the lieutenant governor.

*Maharashtra was hit by severe floods, with Mumbai paralysed by more than 900 mm of rainfall, on 26 July.

**In July 2013, the Supreme Court overturned the 2005 Maharashtra ban on dance bars.

†In fact, the status of Hyderabad has been a key point of contention in the division of Andhra Pradesh to carve out a separate Telangana state.

*Siddaramaiah became chief minister of Karnataka in May 2013.

*Gowda called me in protest after this column appeared. ‘Your friend Murthy,’ he said, ‘is only building a land bank.’

*He returned to the cabinet as labour minister in June 2013 at the age of 85. He passed away in December 2013.

**He died in May 2006.

*He passed away in June 2012.

*They did so subsequently for JNNURM (Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission) funds.

*The limit on foreign equity has still not been raised.

*In April 2006, Arjun Singh, then HRD minister, announced that a 27 per cent quota for Other Backward Classes would be implemented in higher education.

*The Veerappa Moily Oversight Committee, in its attempt to address popular anxiety about the impact of the 27 per cent quota in higher education for OBC students, recommended incrementally increasing seats over three years (by a total of 54 per cent), as well as forging public–private partnerships for new IIMs, IITs, and medical and agricultural colleges.

*The BJP won 117 seats in the 182-member Gujarat assembly.

*On 31 January, Manmohan Singh arrived in Arunachal Pradesh for a two-day visit, the first by a prime minister in a decade.

*Since Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy’s death in a helicopter crash on 2 September 2009, the Congress has struggled to retain its political dominance in Andhra Pradesh.

*On 22 July, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was to seek a vote of confidence in the Lok Sabha after the Left withdrew support to the UPA over the Indo-US nuclear deal.

*In August 2002.

*The Congress–NCP got 25 seats, the BJP–Shiv Sena 20.

*Varun Gandhi, of the BJP, had delivered a communally charged speech during the 2009 campaign.

*The final tally: Congress 206 (UPA 262), BJP 116 (NDA 159), CPM 16, CPI 4.

*The deadline is now 2017.

*The Justice Liberhan Commission inquiring into the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 submitted its report after more than sixteen years in June 2009. It was tabled in Parliament on 24 November.

*He was then the HRD minister.

**Then environment and forests minister.

†Then minister of road transport and highways.

*On 6 April 2010, seventy-six security personnel were killed in a Maoist ambush in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district.

*Among other calls for transparency, Justice Shylendra Kumar posted details of his assets online at a time when many in the higher judiciary were opposing demands that their assets information be made public and Justice Dinakaran was facing allegations of land grab.

*In October–November 2005.

*In 2002.

**In 1997.

*Then finance and home ministers, respectively.

*In July, S.M Krishna (then foreign minister) had criticised G.K. Pillai (then home secretary) for the timing, on the eve of India–Pakistan foreign minister talks, of his comments linking the ISI to 26/11.

*The study, on the appearance of a new superbug in India, was published in The Lancet.

*S.M. Krishna, Mallikarjun Kharge, C.P. Joshi, Vilasrao Deshmukh (he passed away in August 2012), Virbhadra Singh.

**Digvijaya Singh.

*Sudarshan had called Sonia Gandhi a CIA agent and said she had been involved in the killing of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi.

**‘BJP shaken as RSS chief targets Vajpayee, family and aide Mishra’, IE, 12 April 2005.

*On spectrum allocation.

*The plenary at Burari, Delhi, on 19–20 December marked the 125th anniversary of the Congress.

**Ashok Gehlot.

*On 22 December to press for a JPC on 2G spectrum allocation.

**At Burari, Sonia Gandhi made a reference to Rao and the ‘impetus’ he gave to ‘the process of economic reform’.

*The ‘open letter’ on the governance deficit and corruption was signed, on 17 January, by: Anu Aga, Ashok Ganguly, Jamshyd Godrej, Bimal Jalan, Keshub Mahindra, Yezdi Malegam, Nachiket Mor, M. Narasimham, Deepak Parekh, Azim Premji, B.N. Srikrishna, N. Vaghul, A. Vaidyanathan and Sam Variava.

*The growth rate for 2012–13 was 5 per cent. The fall has continued in the course of 2013–14.

*Almost two years later, in March 2013, Modi used the nightwatchman comparison to criticise the Gandhis and Manmohan Singh.

*Three blasts in the city on 13 July claimed twenty-six lives.

*Prithviraj Chavan.

*He finally relinquished the external affairs portfolio in October 2012.

*On the Monday following the publication of this column, the audit was called off.

*On multi-brand retail. In November the government had cleared 51 per cent FDI in multi-brand retail. Under pressure from the opposition and some UPA constituents, it backtracked. Later, in September 2012, it cleared the proposal with some caveats.

*It was 6. 2 per cent for 2011–12, and 5 per cent for 2012–13.

*The TMC left the UPA in September 2012 over reforms like FDI in retail and limiting the subsidy on cooking gas cylinders.

*Thousands of crores of rupees meant for rural health were diverted, and investigations include the murder of top health officers as well as some accused. Babu Singh Kushwaha resigned from his post as family welfare minister in Mayawati’s government in April 2011. He was subsequently expelled from the BSP.

*‘Blocking, UPA style: Governors, Centre stall over 20 Bills in BJP-ruled states’, IE, 29 February 2012.

*‘Who will answer? Don’t blame the world for what’s happening here—despite Greece, Europe’s industry contracted less than ours,’ IE, 19 May 2012.

*The iconic song, from the 1962 filmSahib Bibi aur Ghulam , is sung by Geeta Dutt and written by Shakeel Badayuni.

*Kejriwal’s India Against Corruption had levelled charges against Gadkari about land allotments by the Maharashtra government to his NGO.

*At the rally at Delhi’s Ramlila ground, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh highlighted the issue of fuel subsidies, besides endorsing the decision on FDI in multi-brand retail.

*The 16 December gangrape of a 23-year-old woman sparked protests in Delhi, most prominently on Rajpath and at Jantar Mantar, and thereafter around the country. She passed away on 29 December.

*Abhijit Mukherjee, Congress MP from West Bengal, used the phrase to mock the protesters.

*Constable Subhash Chand Tomar was injured while patrolling the protests and died two days later.

*‘Is anybody out there?’, IE, 22 January 2011.

**‘Mumbye’, IE, 16 July 2011, and ‘Liberate our cities’, IE, 6 August 2005.

*In September 2013 Raghuram Rajan took over as governor of RBI.

*On 9 January, the then rail minister, Pawan Kumar Bansal, announced an across-the-board hike in passenger fares, effective 21 January.

*Later increased to nine, and then to twelve.

*On 20 January, at the Jaipur AICC session, upon being appointed party vice-president, Rahul Gandhi spoke about his mother, Sonia Gandhi, crying as she understood that power was ‘poison’.

*The legislation was passed by the Lok Sabha on 19 March, and by the Rajya Sabha two days later.

*Shanti Bhushan.

*On 4 April, Rahul Gandhi addressed the Confederation of Indian Industry in New Delhi.

*The security personnel were killed in an ambush by the Maoists near Talmetla in Dantewada.

*‘At NAC member’s NGO, they wait for Padma, wife of top Maoist’, IE, 24 February 2011. After the publication of this column, Mander wrote to say that ‘Padma’ had given her name as Sirisha while at the orphanage, and that till her arrest they had no clue about her real identity. (‘I feel there is no such thing as altruistic violence’, IE, 7 June 2013).

**On 5 May, Maoists attacked a convoy of Congress leaders in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district, killing, among others, Mahendra Singh Karma and PCC chief Nand Kumar Patel. V.C. Shukla succumbed to injuries some days later.

*As chairperson of BJP’s election campaign committee.

*The Madhya Pradesh finance minister Raghavji’s insistence that GST would infringe upon states’ rights was in contrast to the openness of his BJP colleague Sushil Modi, then chairperson of the Empowered Committee of State Finance Ministers, in negotiating a consensus.

*In the Lok Sabha debate on the bill, before it was passed by a voice vote, on 26 August, the leader o the opposition, Sushma Swaraj, said the BJP would address the deficiencies in the legislation if the party came to power.

*On 16 June, Nitish Kumar snapped his JD(U)’s 17-year-old alliance with the BJP over Narendra Modi’s appointment as chief of the party’s election campaign committee.

*IE, 23 November 2010.

*Delhi is a Union Territory.

*‘When lonely Lalu misses “gentleman” Sonia, and a Muslim calls Nitish ‘sher ka bachcha ’, IE, 23 November 2010.

*‘Don’t expect 100 per cent Kashmiris to thump chest, say we’re Indian . . . that will never happen’, IE, 31 March 2013.

*million metric standard cubic metres per day.

*A leading anti-Niyamgiri activist.

*The announcement came on 13 September.

*On 27 September, Rahul Gandhi made a surprise appearance at a press briefing by a Congress colleague and said that the ordinance issued by the UPA government (negating the Supreme Court order on disqualification of convicted MPs and MLAs) deserved to be torn up. The Centre subsequently withdrew the ordinance and the bill to the same effect pending in Parliament.

*On 16 February, the prime minister had a structured interaction with television journalists.

*Votes for assembly elections in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Puducherry, West Bengal were counted on 13 May. The Congress-led UDF gained Kerala, the party retained power in Assam and along with its dominant alliance partner, the Trinamool Congress, ousted the Left Front in Bengal. The AIADMK swept to power in Tamil Nadu, and its alliance won Puducherry.

*The reference is to Swami Agnivesh.

*The report ‘Pranab reported “serious security breach” in his office, urged PM to order secret probe’ (IE, 21 June 2011) referred to suspicious adhesive found in the office of Pranab Mukherjee, then finance minister.

*Karma, 1986.

*Shanti and Prashant Bhushan’s family.

*Arvind Kejriwal.

*Kiran Bedi.

**‘Kiran Lokpal Bedi buys discount air tickets, gets hosts to pay full fare’, IE, 20 October 2011.

*He passed away in August 2013.

**In April 2012, a Delhi court sentenced him to four years in prison.

†In October 2013, the government informed the Supreme Court that an income tax inquiry had found no evidence to substantiate charges against him.

INDEX Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), alliance with the Congress.See also corruption; Hazare, Anna; Kejriwal, Arvind Aastha channel Abdullah, Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah, Sheikh Mohammad Abraham, Abu accountability, deficit Adarsh Housing Society scandal Adivasis. See Dalits Adjania, Kersi Administered Pricing Mechanism (APM) Advani, Lal Krishna and Gujarat riots (2002), idea of Hindutva and Mandir, politics, political management, positive attributes and successes, statement on Jinnah, stature, respect and legacy, was trapped in Jain hawala case and Vajpayee, relationship Advani, Pratibha Aga, Anu Agnivesh, Swami Ahluwalia, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, S.S. Ahmadi, A.H. Ahmadinejad Ahuja, Shiney Airports Authority of India (AAI) Aiyar, Mani Shankar AJGAR Akalis Akbar, M.J. Albright, Madeleine All India Anna Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) lmost Single Al-Qaeda Ambani, Anil Ambani, Dhirubhai Ambani, Mukesh Ambanis Ambedkar, B.R. American. See United States Amethi Amnesty International anachronism Anand, Chetan Anand, Justice Anderson, Warren Andhra Pradesh, Congress, division, irrigation, political disaster Anjar anti-incumbency factor Antony, A.K. Anwar al-Awlaki Appa, H.B.N. Argal, Ashok armed forces Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act

Arunachal Pradesh, Chinese intervention. See also Northeast Arya (IGP) Ashwani Kumar Asian Development Bank (ADB) Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) aspiration and empowerment Assam: Assamese caste Hindus, Congress rule, insurgency, people’s movement, riots. See also Northeast Assam Rifles ssam: A Valley Divided ASSOCHAM Aurobindo, Sri automobiles and aviation industry Ayodhya. See also Babri Masjid demolition; Ram Janmabhoomi movement Azad (a Maoist) Azad, Ghulam Nabi Azmi, Kaifi Babri Masjid demolition. See also Ram Janmabhoomi movement Badal, Manpreet Badal, Parkash Singh Badal, Sukhbir Singh Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) Bajajs Bakht, Sikander Balakrishnan, K.G. Balan, Vidya balance of payments (BoP) Band Baaja Baaraat Bandra-Worli sea link, Mumbai Banerjee, Mamata. See also Congress; Trinamool Congress Bangalore Bangalore International Airport Ltd. banking system Bansal, Pawan Kumar Bansi Lal Bardhan, A.B. Basu, Nilotpal Batla House encounter Bedi, Kabir Bedi, Kiran below poverty line (BPL). See also poverty Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Kolkata Best Bakery case Bhagat, Chetan Bhagat, H.K.L. Bhagora, Mahavir Singh Bhagwat, Mohan Bhagwati, Jagdish Bhajan Lal Bhalla, Surjit Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) Bharati, Kesavananda Bharati, Uma Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and Akalis in Punjab, alliance, in Assam, Babri Masjid demolition, corruption, decline and economic

reforms and Hindu vote polarization, ideology, ideological bankruptcy and illegal land use, internal power struggle, lost in Karnataka, Lok Sabha elections (1989), (2004), (2014) and Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, alliance and Nitish Kumar, obscurantism and minorityphobia, peace with Pakistan, settlement with China, peace with Nagas, National Highways Development Project, policy and politics, rivals and RSS, relations, Shiv Sena and UPA’s decline, vote share. See also Advani, Lal Krishna; Modi, Narendra; Vajpayee, Atal Bihari Bhardwaj, H.R. Bhardwaj, Vishal Bharti Airtel Bhatt, Mahesh Bhattacharjee, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Ranjan Bhindranwale, Sant Jarnail Singh. See also Blue Star Operation Bhopal disaster Bhosle, Varsha Bhure Lal Bhushan, Prashant Bhushan, Shanti Bhutto, Benazir Bihar, assembly elections (2005)—(2010) Congress decline, growth rate, irrigation, Lalu’s caste coalition, midday meal tragedy, politics, poverty, voting patterns Biju Janata Dal (BJD) Bimaru states Birla, Aditya Birlas black market black money Blackwill, Robert Blair, Tony Blue Star Operation Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) Bofors scandal Bolangir Bollywood Bora, Atul border disputes with Pakistan and China Bose, Subhas Chandra Brezhnev, Leonid Broacha, Cyrus BRT corridor Bundelkhand bureaucracy, negativism. See also politics Bush, George (Jr.) Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure (CCI) Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) Cairn-Vedanta deal Calcutta (Kolkata), decline capitalism Carter, Jimmy cash-for-votes caste politics (caste, region and religion) Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), investigation of 2G scam, investigation of Radia tapes case Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) Centre-state relations

Chadha, Ponty Chandigarh Chandra Shekhar Chandy, Oommen Charar-e-Sharief shrine Chatterjee, Somnath Chaudhary, Kiran Chauhan, Anuja Chautala, Om Prakash Chavan, Ashok Chavan, Prithviraj Chavan, S.B. Chavan, Y.B. Chawla, Kalpana Chawla, Navin Chennai Chhattisgarh, poverty Chidambaram, P. China, business, India war (1962) Chiranjeevi Chouhan, Shivraj Singh Choudhury, Ghani Khan Christian(s), missionaries in the Northeast cinema and society Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act (2010) civil society Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary CNG introduction coal: allocations, mining, indecision over, nationalization Coal India Ltd coalition governments coalition dharma, Cobra Dancer, The Cold War, postCommonwealth Games, corruption communal riots in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh (2013) communalism Communist Party of India (CPI) Communist Party (Marxwadi) (CPM) competition Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) Conditional Access System (CAS) Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Congress, and Anna Hazare’s movement, anti-Congress combination, in Assam and Babri Masjid demolition, in Bihar, versus BJP, chief ministers, coalition with regional parties, corruption, decline, in disarray, dynastic politics (devotion to the first family), economic recession and economic reforms, issue of FDI in retail, ideological bankruptcy and tactical confusion and illegal land use and Indo-US nuclear deal, internal political and ideological conflicts and Ishrat Jahan encounter case and the Left, Lok Sabha elections (1984), (1989), (2004), (2009), (2014), Muslim vote bank, misread the mandate (2009), Narendra Modi, challenge and NCP, alliance, organizational lethargy political discourse, Rahul Gandhi as PM candidate, rural-centric politics, shunned urban middle class, split (1969) and UPA allies and UPA 2 governance and Vadra land deal case, vote bank, vote share over the years, won in Karnataka, Working Committee (CWC) Congress (R) Constituent Assembly Constitution of India constitutional morality

constitutional rights and liberty constitutionalism conversions core committee corporate India and political India, disconnect, role in its own persecution corruption and bribery, caste and communal links. See also Aam Aadmi Party (AAP); Hazare, Anna;See also individual cases counter-insurgency Criminal Law Amendment Bill current account deficit (CAD) Czechoslovakia dalits and adivasis, corruption charges against, sense of inclusion and empowerment dance bars of Mumbai, closure Dandakaranya Dandavate, Madhu Dantewada Dasgupta, Gurudas Dass, Arjun DB Realty DCM group decentralization Defence of India Rules defence organisation Delhi: assembly elections (2003) Congress, power and water, Rent Act (DRA) Delhi Development Authority (DDA) Delhi Jal Board (DJB) Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) Delhi Police democracy, democratic politics demographic dividend Deng Xiaoping Deol, Rupan Bajaj Deora, Milind Deora, Murli Deoras, Balasaheb Desai, Morarji Deshmukh, Vilasrao Devas Devi Lal Devipriya Dhupia, Neha Dikshit, Sheila Dil Chahta Hai Dilip Kumar Dinakaran, Justice direct cash transfer Direct Taxes Code (DTC) discretionary powers, misuse by politicians DisinvestmentCommission disproportionate assets Disturbed Areas Act (1988) Dixit, Madhuri Doval, Ajit Kumar Dravid, Rahul Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (DMK), in Tamil Nadu

droughts Dubey, Nishikant Dutt, Barkha Dutt, Namrata Dutt, Priya Dutt, Sanjay dynastic politics economic: bills, development and growth, discourse and monetary crisis, recession, reforms (1991), stability economy and infrastructure and markets regulations failed to keep pace with Eisenhower, Dwight D. Election Commission electoral politics Elwin, Verrier Emergency (1975–77) EMI culture, inflation employment generation Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) Enforcement Directorate entrepreneurship Essar ethnicity and language exports, decline family values farmer(s), committing suicide, debt and economic reforms, and FDI in retail, of Kalahandi, minimum support price, politics, of Punjab, revolt against MNCs, subsidies for Farnsworth, Philo Fernandes, George feudal succession FICCI finance, politics and natural resources fiscal bankruptcy and deficit food security food subsidy scheme food, wastage Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail foreign equity in insurance foreign exchange controls foreign investments foreign policy and domestic politics, nuclear issue paradigm shift Forest Rights Act Fortune Forum of Free Enterprise free markets freedom movement freedom of speech Friedman, Thomas Gadgil, Vithal Gadkari, Nitin Gandhi, Indira, aggressive socialism and Garibi Hatao , assassination, coal nationalization, economic reforms, hailing as Durga and insurgency in Northeast and Left, lost from Rae Bareli (1977), Pokhran I test, vote-catching populism. See also Emergency Gandhi, M.K., assassination

Gandhi, Rahul, conversation at CII and corporate India, higher education issue, unlearning from his mistakes and UPA government (negating the Supreme Court order on disqualification on convicted MPs and MLAs), prime ministerial candidate for 2014 Gandhi, Rajiv, assassination, complicated Punjab, Kashmir and Sri Lanka issue Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, Sonia, versus Modi Gandhi, Varun Gandhinagar, Gujarat gangrape case (16.12.2012) Ganguly, Ashok Ganguly, Saurav Gates, Bill Gavai, P.G. Gavaskar, Sunil Gayatri Devi GDP Gehlot, Ashok Ghising, Subash Gill, K.P.S. Girhotra, Ashu Girhotra, Ruchika Giuliani, Rudy globalization Goa, Congress rule Godhra Godrej, Jamshyd Godse, Nathuram Goenka, Ramnath Gogoi, Tarun Gokhale, H.R. Golden Temple Goods and Services Gopalaswami, N. Tax (GST) Gopinath, G.R. governance, versus bureaucracy, crisis/deficit and development, politics and economy, reforms, two types, of UPA government policy on key issues government-owned sugar mills government–private sector interface Gowda, H.D. Deve Grand Trunk Road Green Hunt, Operation green revolution Greenpeace Greig, Tony Gujarat, assembly elections (2002) riots (2002), growth and urbanisation, irrigation, model of economics Police. See also Modi, Narendra Gujral, I.K. Gujral, Naresh Gujral, R.S. Gupta, Indrajit Gurgaon Hammarskjöld, Dag Hansda, Sukumar Haqeeqat Haragopal, Akkiraju Haryana, Congress, drought

Haryana Lawn Tennis Association (HLTA) Hazare, Anna and his anticorruption movement Hazratbal shrine Headley, David Coleman Hero group higher education and demographic dividend Hindu Mahasabha Hindu(s), had acquired a minority complex, Bangladeshis in Assam, BJP’s vote bank, blamed for killing Mahatma Gandhi, communalism, Gujarati, identity, Muslim relations, rate of growth, rightwing terror, secularism, versus Sikh, upper caste, vote polarization Hindustan Lever Hindutva politics, Hindutva, anti- Hindutva Holck-Larsen, Henning Hooda, Bhupinder Singh Hrangkhawl, Bijoy human resources development human rights violation in Kashmir Hussain, Altaf Hussein, Saddam Hyderabad and division of Andhra Pradesh, Nizam hyper-nationalism hyper-socialism hypocrisy Ibrahim, C.M. Ibrahim, Dawood ideological: contradictions diversity isolation illegal land use International Monetary Fund (IMF) inclusive growth inclusive politics India Economic Summit India mortgaging gold to escape payment defaults ‘India Shining’ campaign Indian Coast Guard (ICG) Indian Frontier Administrative Service Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), IIT-JEE system Indian Military Academy (IMA), Dehradun Indian Mujahideen (IM) Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Indo-US nuclear deal Indus system industrial growth, decline industrial licensing Industrial Policy Resolution Industrial Promotion and Policy, Department inflation information technology (IT) infrastructure, contracts, decisions, projects, delayed or blocked injustice inspector raj institution building insurgency, in Assam, in Naga hills intellectual bankruptcy and laziness

intellectual freedom Intelligence Bureau (IB) inter-regional growth imbalance Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Investment Commission iron ore irrigation system Ishqiya Ishrat Jahan encounter case. See also Modi, Narendra Islamabad Declaration Jagger, Bianca Jagjivan Ram, Babu Jagmohan Jain Commission on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination Jain hawala case. See also Advani, Lal Krishna Jain, Praveen Jaish-e-Mohammad Jaitly, Jaya Jalan, Bimal Jammu & Kashmir, Congress rule, insurgency Jammu-Srinagar rail link Jan Lokpal bill Jan Sangh Janata Dal (JD) Janata Dal (S) Janata Dal (United) {JD(U)} Janata Party (JP) Jats, Sikhs Jawaharlal Nehru University Jayalalithaa Jha, Raj Kamal Jharkhand, poverty ihad Jinnah, Mohammad Ali Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) Jogi, Ajit Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) Joshi, C.P. Joshi, Murli Manohar Joshi, Sanjay Judeo, Dilip Singh udiciary, autonomy, moral authority Junejo, Muhammad Khan Kaif, Mohammad Kairon, Partap Singh Kala, Advaita Kalahandi Kalam, A.P.J. Abdul Kalani, Pappu Kalmadi, Suresh.See also Commonwealth Games; corruption Kamal Nath Kamraj Plan Kandahar hijack

Kanimozhi Kant, Krishan Kao, R.N. Kapadia, S.H. Kapil Dev Karat, Brinda Karat, Prakash Kargil conflict.See also Pakistan; Jammu and Kashmir Karma, Mahendra Singh Karnataka, Congress Karnik, Kiran Karunanidhi, M. Kasab, Ajmal Kashmir. See Jammu and Kashmir Katju, Markandey Kaul, Sheila Kaur, Preneet Kejriwal, Arvind.See also corruption; Dikshit, Sheila; Hazare, Anna Kennedy, John F. Kerala, Congress Kesri, Sitaram Ketkar, Kumar KHAD (Afghan secret service) Khalistan. See also Punjab; Bhindranwale; terrorism KHAM Khan, Aamir Khan, Ayub Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Shahnawaz Khanna, Akshaye Khanna, H.R. Khap panchayat Kharge, Mallikarjun Kher, Anupam Khurana, Madan Lal Khurshid, Salman Khyati, Surbhi Kim Il-Sung Kishenji kleptocracy Koda, Madhu Kohli, Kunal Koizumi Kol, Lalchandra Kolar and Hutti gold mines, auction to the private sector Koraput Krishna, S.M. Krishna, Vineel Krishnamurthy, Jana Krishnaswamy, S. Kulaste, Faggan Singh Kumar, Shylendra Kumaramangalam, Rangarajan Kumaraswamy, H.D. Kuruk shetra

Kushwaha, Babu Singh Kushwaha, Narendra Lahore Declaration land: acquisition mafias.See also corruption; real-estate; rent-seeking landmarks, being names after Nehrus-Gandhis language and ethnicity, politics Lapierre, Dominique Larsen & Toubro (L&T) Lashkar-e-Taiba law-making and governance, outsourcing. See also National Advisory Council (NAC) Laxman, Bangaru Le Corbusier Lee Kuan Yew Left, Left Front, blocked reform, decline, destroying political ambitions, best ever performance in Kerala, in West Bengal, withdrew support from UPA over Indo-US nuclear deal liberalism Liberhan, Justice. See also Babri Masjid demolition licence-permit-quota raj Line of Control (LoC), ceasefire liquor licensing Lohia, Ram Manohar Lok Sabha elections, (1984), (1991) (2004), (2009), uncertainties (2014) Lokpal Bill Loksatta (NGO) Lok satta Lott, Trent Lovely Professional University (LPU) Lovely, Arvinder Singh LPG, subsidy Lyngdoh, James Michael Madhya Pradesh, beef eating ban, growth rate, irrigation, poverty Mahabharata Mahajan, Pramod Mahanta, Prafulla Maharashtra, Congress, irrigation, poverty, severe floods Mahasweta Devi Mahathir Mohammad Mahato, Chhatradhar Mahindra, Anand Mahindra, Keshub MAJGAR majoritarian excesses Maken, Ajay Maken, Lalit Malaviya, K.D. Malegam, Yezdi Mallya, Vijay Mandal Commission, Mandal movement, destruction of vote banks Mandela, Nelson Mander, Harsh Manipur. See also Northeast Manjrekar, Mahesh Manochahal, Gurbachan Singh

manufacturing, decline Mao Zedong Maoism, Maoist insurgency.See Naxalism Maran, Dayanidhi market distortion Masani, Minoo match-fixing Mathura Mayawati, land allotment in Noida. See also Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) McCain MCD elections media, regulation Mehsana, Gujarat Mehta, Harshad Memon, Tiger Memon, Yakub Menon, V.K. Krishna Menon, V.P. mergers and acquisitions Metro accident in south Delhi migration, rural to urban minimum guarantees programme minimum support price (MSP) mining and UPA-Congress leadership and environmental degradation, judicial intervention Minorities Commission minority communities (Dalits and tribals) and Lok Sabha polls of 2014, minorityism, victimhood, violence against Mishra, Brajesh Mishra, Chaturanan Mishra, Vandita Misra, Ranganath Mittal, Sunil Bharti Armed Police, insurgency Mizoram, Mizoram modernization Modi, Narendra, BJP’s prime ministerial candidate and chairman of election campaign committee, comments on Gandhi family and the corporate circuit, personifies good governance and Gujarat riots (2002), and Ishrat Jahan encounter case, Lok Sabha polls (2004), (2014), and Nitish Kumar, political challenge, pro-growth, rise of versus his party Modi, Sushil Kumar Mody, Piloo Moily, Veerappa Mongia, Dinesh Mookerjee, Syama Prasad Mor, Nachiket moral authority, decline Moser Baer Mossad Muivah Mukherjee, Abhijit Mukherjee, Dipankar Mukherjee, Pranab Mukherji, Rani Mullick, B.N. Mumbai, 26/11 terror attack, airport modernisation, decline, policing, riots, underworld and slums, an urban nightmare Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) Munjal, Pawan Munshi, K.M.

Murthy, N.R. Narayana Musharraf, Pervez Muslim(s), in Bihar and BJP and Narendra Modi, denied NREGA benefits in Gujarat, in Indian jails, infiltrators, insecurities and Lok Sabha polls (2014), subjugation, victimhood, vote bank, in Uttar Pradesh Muslim League Nagaland, insurgency Nagpal, Durga Shakti Naidu, Chandrababu Naidu, Venkaiah Naik, Ram Najibullah Nand Lal Nanda, Gulzari Lal Narah, Bharat Narasimham, M. Narayan, Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan, Jayaprakash (Loksatta) Narayanan, M.K. Nariman, Fali Narmada dam Natarajan, Jayanthi National Advisory Council (NAC) National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP) National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC) National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and economic reforms and the UPA government, ignored the farmers, on Indo-US nuclear deal issue Kandahar hijack, lost power National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) National Highways Development Project National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) National Institute of Design (NID) National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore National Missile Defence National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), scandal in Uttar Pradesh National Security Council (NSC) National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) National Thermal Power Corporation Ltd (NTPC) Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Naxals, Naxalism (Maoism) NDTV negative campaigns Nehru, Jawaharlal, foreign policy and the Northeast Nehru, Motilal Nellie massacre New Delhi Municipal Committee (NDMC) Nilekani, Nandan Ninan, T.N. Nitish Kumar. See also Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); Modi, Nixon, Richard M. Niyamgiri politics NOIDA Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Non-resident Indians (NRI) Northeast. See also individual states Nuclear Liability Bill

nuclear reactor, Trombay Nymex O’Rourke, P.J Obama, Barack obstructionism Official Secrets Act Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) Ola, Sis Ram Omble, Tukaram Once Upo n a Time in Mumbai opinion polls Orissa, industrialisation plans, destruction, poverty Other Backward Classes (OBCs) reservation in institutions of higher learning outsourcing of services Padamsee, Alyque Padma, A. Pai, M.R. Pakistan, dictatorship, peace process, resumption of dialogue with, sponsored terrorism, limited war with .wars (1965), (1971) Pal, Raja Ram Palkhivala, Nani Panagariya, Arvind Panchapakesan Panjab University Pant, Govind Ballabh Pant, K.C. Parakram Operation Parekh, Deepak Parekh, Ketan Parliament, right to lawmaking, terrorist attack Parthasarathy, E.S. Partition party-government disconnect Pataudi, Mansur Ali Khan Patel, Ahmed Patel, Dinsha Patel, Nand Kumar Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai, politics of legacy Patels Patil, R.R. Patil, Shivraj Patkar, Medha Patnaik, Biju Patnaik, Naveen Pawar, Sharad Pearl, Daniel Peepli [Live] pension reforms people’s inclination to pay per capita income personality cult petroleum (gas and crude) exploration policies Phas Gaye Re Obama Phukan, Bhrigu

Pillai, G.K. Pillai, Sudha Pilot, Rajesh Pilot, Sachin Planning Commission Pokhran II police policy, blockage, confusion, decisions, on Maoist, paralysis, public opinion, reforms, vacuum. See also foreign policy Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth political: arrogance, class, conflicts, connections, contract, corruption and incompetence, divide, economy, governance, greed and envy, rurbanised landscape, leadership, marginalisation of metropolitan India, power, protectionism spectrum, vested interest politicians: arbitrary powers, bureaucracy and the judiciary, collusion, discretionary powers, driven by votes politico-socio-economic entities politics, of appeasement, of aspiration, decline, of democracy, versus economy, failing to keep pace with the voter, finance and natural resources and governance and higher education, insensitive, negative, decline, of Northeast, parliamentary politics, partisan, party politics, performance on issues, of unfinished agenda Pondicherry populism POSCO poverty Powell, Colin power sector, crisis, power generation, reforms surplus, tariffs power structure, power produces money Prabhakaran Prasad, Mahabir Prasada, Jitin Pratap, Rana Premji, Azim press censorship press freedom Prevention Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill price rise, ofoffuel Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) private sector privatisation of PSUs Provident Fund interest rates public listing public opinion public sector, jobs, reforms public-private partnerships (PPP), for new IIMs, IITs, medical and agricultural colleges Punjab, Congress, drought, killings of Hindus by Khalistanis, Police, terrorism Purvanchal QED quality-of-life issues Quattrocchi quota crisis Quraishi, S.Y.

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi race and segregation Radia (Niira) tapes Rae Bareli Rai, Vinod railways

rainfall deficit Raj Narain Raja, A. Rajagopalachari, Chakravarti Rajan, Raghuram Rajasthan, irrigation, poverty rajdharma Raju, M.M. Pallam Ram Janmabhoomi movement Ram, Kanshi Ram, N. Ramachandran, M.G. Ramadoss, Anbumani Ramakrishna (Akkiraju Haragopal) Ramakrishna, G.V. Ramayana Ramdev, Baba Ramesh, Jairam Ranbaxy Randhawa, G.S. Rane, Narayan Ranga, N.G. Rao, Chandrashekhar Rao, K.J. Rao, Namboodiri Tarak Rama (NTR) Rao, P.V. Narasimha, dismissed BJP governments in four states after Babri demolition and Babri Masjid demolition, court cases for corruption and bribery Rao, V.K. Krishna Raphel, Robin Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and (RSS), and Advani, banned and BJP, iconography, ideology and Narendra Modi and Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and Muslims Vajpayee Rathore, S.P.S. Rauf, Ashraf Ravi, Vayalar Reagan, Ronald real-estate mafias and politics Reddy, Channa Reddy, G. Karunakara Reddy, G. Somashekara Reddy, Jaganmohan Reddy, Jaipal Reddy, Y.S. Rajasekhara (YSR) regionalization of national politics Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) religion renaming of institutions and buildings rent-seeking. See also corruption reservation in higher education. See also Mandal Commission Reserve Bank of India (RBI) resident welfare associations (RWAs) resourcefulness Rice, Condoleezza right to food Right to Information (RTI)

Rohilkhand Roy, Abani Roy, Aruna Roy, Arundhati Ruia group rural distress rural economy rural-urban divide Rustomji, Nari Sabharwal, Y.K. Sachar Committee report Sahay, Subodh Kant Saikia, Hiteswar Saikia, Nagen Sajjan Kumar Salaam Bombay Samajwadi Party (SP), and communal riots in Uttar Pradesh.See also Mayawati; Yadav, Akhilesh; Yadav, Mulayam Singh Sangh Parivar Sangma, Agatha Sangma, P.A. Sanyal, Mira Sarabhai, Mallika Sarin, Ritu Sarma, Arun Sarma, E.A.S. Satyam Savarkar, Veer Saxena, N.C. Schroeder Scindia, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Madhavrao Scindia, Vasundhara Raje SEBI secularism, versus communalism securities scam securities transaction tax Sehwag, Virender Sen, Amartya Sen, Aparna serial blasts in Bombay service tax Seshan, T.N. Sethi, Jugnu Sethi, Najam Sewa (DIG) Shah Bano judgement Shah, Amit Shah, Naseeruddin Sharif, Nawaz Sharma, Anand Sharma, B.D. Sharma, P.C. Sharma, Ram Babu Sharma, Satish

Sharmila, Irom Shastri, Lal Bahadur Shetty, Devi Shillong Peace Accord Shimla Shinde, Sushil Kumar Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD)/Akalis Shiv Sena Shivaji, Chhatrapati Shourie, Arun Shroff, A.D. Shukla, Rajiv Shukla, V.C. Sibal, Kapil Siddaramaiah See also Blue Star Operation; Bhindranwale Sikhs: anti-Sikh riots, Delhi (1984), and Hindus, relations, terrorism. Sikkim Sindhi refugee suburb of Ulhasnagar Singh, Ajit Singh, Amar Singh, Amarinder Singh, Buta Singh, Charan Singh, Dharam Singh, Digvijaya Singh, Digvijaya (JD-U) Singh, Giani Zail Singh, Harbhajan Singh, Hukam Singh, Jaswant Singh, K. Natwar Singh, K.N. Singh, K.P. Singh, Kalyan Singh, L.P. Singh, Manmohan, and economic reforms (1991), foreign policy as prime minister, visit to Northeast, personal credibility, speech at CII, weak governance Singh, N.K. Singh, R.R. Singh, Raman Singh, S.P. Singh, Sarabjit Singh, Tavleen Singh, Uday Pratap Singh, V.P. Singh, Virbhadra Singhvi, Abhishek Manu Sinha, Yashwant Slumdog M illionaire social contract social dignity and security social evolution social justice socialism socio-economic equity

software parks of Bangalore and Hyderabad Sohrabuddin encounter case Soni, Ambika Sony Soren, Shibu Soviet Union, decline invasion of Afghanistan special purpose vehicles (SPVs) Sreedharan, E. Srikrishna, Justice B.N., Justice, report on Telangana St Kitts States Reorganization Bill (1955) statues and portraits Steering Committee Stiglitz, Joseph stock markets, boom, scam Stockholm Syndrome Subbarao, D. Subramanian, T.S.R. subsidies, being exploited by rich in the name of poor, misdirected Sudarshan, K.S. Sukh Ram Supreme Court, issue of assets declaration of judges, and fake encounters and hawala case on demolition and sealing of encroachments permitted to auction goldmines to private sector Radia, tapes case, Sanjay Dutt case verdict on disqualification of convicted MPs and MLAs Surjeet, Harkishan Singh Suzuki-Maruti collaboration Swadeshi Jagran Manch Swaraj, Sushma Swatantra Party Taliban Tamil Nadu, Congress Tandon, Subhash Taseer, Salman Tata Steel Tata, Ratan Tatas Team Anna Tehelka sting case Telangana state telecom market telecom scam (2G spectrum allocations) television and social media Telugu Desam Party (TDP) Tendulkar, Sachin terrain denial, strategy terrorism, in Punjab Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) Tewari, Manish Thackeray, Balasaheb (Bal) Thackeray, Raj Thackeray, Uddhav Thakre, Kushabhau Thapar, Karan Third Front.See United Front

Thomas, Clarence Thurmond, Strom Tiranga Tiwari, N.D. Tomar, Subhash Chand Transparency International transparency tribal(s): destitution, loss of livelihood. See also Dalits Trilokpuri Trinamool Congress (TMC) Tripura Tripura National Volunteers (TNV) 2G spectrum allocations.See telecom scam Tytler, Jagdish unauthorized constructions unemployment Union budget Union Carbide Unitech United Democratic Front (UDF) United Front (UF) United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) United Progressive Alliance (UPA)-1 and 2, corruption, decline, dismal political management, divided government and economic recession, and economic reforms, entrepreneurunfriendly government, issue of FDI in retail issue, governance deficit, handling of gangrape case, handling of Maoist insurgency, indecisiveness and Ishrat Jahan’s encounter case, Mamata Banerjee, relationship and mining and exploration issues, messing up the economy right-based legislations, stalling, undermined the office of prime minister, weak governance, USA, relations United States: and Iraq war, politics satellites picked up suspicious activity in Pokhran, terrorist attack on twin towers of WTC (9/11) University Grants Commission (UGC) Unny, E.P. untouchability Upadhyaya, Deendayal urban constituencies and voters urban land ceiling law urbanisation Uttar Pradesh, assembly elections, BJP’s campaign for 2014 polls, Congress’s decline, electricity shortage, al ck of infrastructure, irrigation, political discourse, population growth poverty, power reforms, voting patterns Uttarakhand (Uttaranchal) Vadra, Robert Vaghela, Shankersinh Vaghul, N. Vaidyanathan, A. Vajpayee, Atal Bihari and Advani and Babri Masjid demolition and Gujarat riots, inclusive politics Lok Sabha polls (2004), and Narasimha Rao relations, policy decisions and RSS Value Added Tax (VAT) Variava, Sam Vedanta Vedika, Aman Venkatachaliah, M.N. Venkateswaran, A.P. Verma, Beni Prasad Verma, Justice J.S. Verma, Pawan

veto power Vidarbha Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), anti-cow slaughter drive and Narendra Modi Vivekananda, Swami Vohra, N.N. Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme (VDIS) vote-bank politics voters: behaviour, can be traded for cash, a sari, a bottle of liquor, literate, smart and questioning Wali, M.M.K. Warsi, Arshad water distribution water resources management Wen Jiabao West Bengal WikiLeaks Wisner, Frank World Bank, aided water scheme World Congress on Anthropology World Economic Forum World Trade Organisation (WTO) Yadav, Akhilesh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Sharad Yadav, Yogendra Yadavs of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh Yechury, Sitaram Yeltsin, Boris Zia-ul-Haq Zoya Factor

ABOUT THE AUTHOR With over three decades of seminal reporting from the political and social frontlines of a changing India, Shekhar Gupta's byline is today synonymous with unparalleled credibility, independence and influence. His work includes some of the most significant investigations in contemporary journalism in the region: from Indira Gandhi's Operation Blue Star to the disastrous Indian intervention in Sri Lanka, from tracking Pakistan's politics and military to the first Afghan jihad and its effect in Kashmir. A recipient of the Padma Bhushan in 2009, India's third highest civilian honour, Gupta is Editorin-Chief of TheIndian Express newspaper. Under his leadership, TheIndian Express has thrice won the Vienna-based International Press Institute’s Award for Excellence in Journalism. He joined the newspaper as a reporter in 1977 and then spent over a decade inIndia Today as a reporter and editor. A regular speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos and its India summits, Gupta is the author of Assam: A Valley Divided (1984) and a monograph, ‘India Redefines Its Role’ (1995), for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, where he is a member of the Council. He also anchors Walk the Talk, a weekly conversation on NDTV with newsmakers from across the world. A collection of these interviews will be published soon. A proud father of a pastry chef in Delhi and a mathematical economist in London, Gupta lives in New Delhi with his wife—and the company of an adorable family of dogs and cats whom you would call stray at your own peril.

First published in India in 2014 by HarperCollinsPublishers India Copyright © Shekhar Gupta 2014 ISBN: 978-93-5136-255-5 Epub Edition © April 2014 ISBN: 978-93-5136-256-2 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Shekhar Gupta asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollinsPublishers India. Cover design & photograph: Rohit Chawla www.harpercollins.co.in HarperCollins Publishers A-53, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB, United Kingdom Hazelton Lanes, 55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900, Toronto, Ontario M5R 3L2 and 1995 Markham Road, Scarborough, Ontario M1B 5M8, Canada 25 Ryde Road, Pymble, Sydney, NSW 2073, Australia 31 View Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand 10 East 53rd Street, New York NY 10022, USA