It was around four ‘o clock in the afternoon that my grandfather used to come home from the courts. We would eagerly await his arrival since he always brought home fresh sweets from the Bengali hunchback’s shop. As he approached the wooden gate of the house he would clear his throat, and this was a signal of sorts. His daughter- in- law would quickly cover her head; my grandmother would go to the kitchen and put water on for tea; we, his grandchildren, knew that it was the last round of dice in our afternoon game of Pachisi before the scores were tallied. This family routine persisted right through the 1940s.
My grandfather had other uses for his harsh, grating cry . When he cleared his throat in his office, his client knew that the interview was over, not unlike the government officer who signals the end of a meeting by noisily pushing back his chair. Occasionally, my grandfather would strike terror in the witness’s heart with the same piercing sound in the middle of an interrogation.
As we settled down to tea, my grandfather would ask, ‘So, what’s happening?’
‘Nothing much’, my uncle would reply nonchalantly, ‘Gandhi and Nehru were arrested again today ’.
My grandfather would grunt and the conversation would move on. We were a professional, middle-class family, not particularly given to patriotic enthusiasms. We were more interested in the latest scandal in our neighbourhood that had been uncovered by my uncle. Men like my grandfather were typical of a new professional middle class that had emerged in the late 19th century in the Punjab with the introduction of western education. It consisted of lawyers, post masters, railway engineers, medical and forest officers, and of course, bureaucrats and clerks.--all the new professions that were needed to run a province. Since passing an exam was the only barrier to entry, its members came from various castes and backgrounds. Although opportunities were open to all, the upper castes were the first to seize them. Once you learned English, cleared an exam, rewards and prestige were showered upon you. You became the new westernized urban elite whose rise matched the decline of the landed gentry.
My father was a civil engineer with the Punjab government and he spent his days building irrigation canals and bringing water to the parched land. I shuttled as a baby on the lap of my mother between canal colonies and my maternal grandfather’s sprawling home in Lyallpur. Most of Punjab was arid, but over three generations, the vision and toil of engineers like my father had created a network of canals that irrigated the land and turned it into a granary. The lower Chenab canal was one of the first to be built in the last quarter of the 19th century. With it came the orderly and planned town of Lyallpur, named after Sir James Lyall, the Lt. Governor of the Punjab. My grandfather proudly moved there in the early part of the twentieth century to start a law practice. And it was where I was born soon after Mahatma Gandhi challenged the British to ‘Quit India’ in 1942.
In the middle of Lyallpur was a brick clock tower from where eight roads emanated and a town spread out in concentric circles. Our house was off one of these roads called Kacheri Bazaar and the district courts were located there. Our road connected the tower with the sumptuous gardens of the Company Bagh which sprawled over forty acres. Since it was hot in the summers and cold in the winters, our daily life varied considerably with the seasons. We spent most of the day in our open courtyard where most of the business of the house was transacted. In the summers, we moved from the courtyard to the covered veranda before the sun rose too high. By midday, it was very hot and we went deeper into the cooler rooms inside. The bamboo shades came down after lunch as the house prepared for sleep. We returned to the courtyard in the early evening after the mashkiya had sprinkled cool water on it from his bag of goatskin. We even slept in the courtyard on hot summer nights and watched the brilliant stars high above. In the winters, this process was reversed. We slept inside and came out gradually with the morning sun. We spent most of the day in its luxurious warmth, shifting our chairs and charpais according to the sun’s path, and only returned inside at sunset.
Grandfather’s house was one of the first to come up in Kacheri Bazaar. He had been young and ambitious in the early years of the century with all the confidence of a man on the way up. He was filled with hope, thinking that the British were doing some good in India. Their railways had bridged the country and their canals had made a huge difference to the economy of the Punjab. But their best contribution, he felt, was the rule of law. As a lawyer he had experienced English justice first hand, and he reminded us more than once that English magistrates were mostly fair and decent.
As we sat drinking tea in the courtyard, grandfather would tell us of his latest case in court. My uncle would sometimes interrupt with an appreciative remark about the quality of the hunchback’s sweets. Conversation was the great pastime in our house. If two persons were together they would not read or work, they would sit down with a cup of tea and talk. And they could talk for hours about people they had never met. One day to our dismay, grandfather did not back bring sweets. He brought fruit instead. The house immediately rose up in revolt. Grandfather explained patiently that sweets were bad for us, and in the end he had to pull out all his lawyer’s tricks in order to persuade us. So, we switched reluctantly to eating fruit, and the air began to smell of mangoes and leechies in the summer and oranges and maltas in the winter. But for months we talked nostalgically of the hunchback’s sweets.
Grandfather valued routine, and at five o’clock his friends would arrive to play bridge. Some of them smoked the hookah while they played. Soon afterwards the family barber appeared and he gave give each bridge-player a shave, and would even oblige with a haircut if needed. After playing a few rubbers, grandfather would get up, ask for his cane and leave with his friends for the Company Bagh. As they walked, they talked about the politics of Lyallpur and of India, and in particular the growing distance between Hindus and Muslims.
In the gardens, grandfather was drawn to the odours exhaled by the exotic plants. Although his friends preferred the colourful beds of English flowers neatly laid out during our brief spring season, he was pulled by the fleshy, erotic scents of the magnolias, the jasmine and other decadent vegetation. He told us one day how he had been filled with nausea on learning that they had found the corpse of a Hindu boy in the carnation beds. The innocent boy had been stabbed by a Muslim youth and had come here to die all alone amidst the fragrance of the magnolias. They had found him face downwards, his face covered in vomit, his nails clinging to the soil. They had turned him over and he had covered the handsome face with his white handkerchief.
‘What did he die for, this poor boy?’ grandfather exclaimed when he returned home.
There were increasing incidents of violence between Hindus and Muslims throughout my childhood. One day when I was four my aunt had pulled me away from the window, and closed the shutters because a Muslim mob had begun to throw stones at our Hindu neighbour’s house. Grandfather talked about the madness of Hindus and Muslims killing each other ever since Jinnah had brought the possibility of a homeland for Punjab’s Muslims. Who would have thought, he said, that this would be the consequence of India’s struggle for freedom from colonial rule? His bridge friends reassured him that Hindus and Muslims had lived together for hundreds of years and they would continue to do so for hundreds more. It was merely a temporary insanity. After all, they were the same people--Indian Muslims were mostly converted Hindus. But we feared the worst.
After returning from the Company Bagh, grandfather would sit in his cane chair and watch the fading summer light in the courtyard. I sometimes joined him. We would watch my grandmother lead the women to the roof of the house in order to perform the sandhya. With lighted earthen lamps the women would chant Sanskrit verses in praise of the evening and the setting sun. Listening to them from below, grandfather had once observed with a smile that not a single one of them understood what she was saying.
My grandfather’s status had risen gradually over the previous decade as he had gradually married off his daughters, one by one, to Class I officials of the colonial bureaucracy. The eldest had married an official in the Indian Railways, who had impressed us with his luxurious salon-on-wheels in which he once came to visit us in Lyallpur. The second girl had married a professor of English in the prestigious government college at Lahore. He was an accomplished tennis and bridge player and this gave him an entry into a social world denied to the rest of the family. When he came to visit us in Lyallpur, he did not fail to drop important names casually in his conversation. The third, my mother, married a civil engineer in the Punjab government’s department of irrigation; and the fourth an officer in the Indian army. By marrying his daughters shrewdly to high-ranking professionals rather than to landlords, who were in fact wealthier than these officials, my grandfather bought social status and security for his family. And so we rose from the middle to the upper middle class within a generation.
As he rose in the world, grandfather became more finicky about his clothes. I would watch him change before he went out in the mornings. The servant would bring him polished shoes and helped him to put them on. Then he assisted him with his coat. Finally, it was time for the turban, an important moment, when all conversation was suspended. He wore his turban in a particular fashion, which he had learned from a stylish lawyer who had recently returned from Lahore, the capital of fashion. He made one, two, and then three turns around his head with the starched white cloth, and it was done. The servant offered him a silk handkerchief and his gold watch. He saw himself in the mirror and twirled his moustache. He looked a man of substance as he opened the gate and strutted off to his chambers.
After he left, my grandmother would get ready to do her social rounds in Lyallpur. She would be dressed in a starched white sari and she would often ask me to join her. We would set off at ten or eleven in the morning in our horse-drawn carriage, sometimes to mourn a death and other times to celebrate a birth or even an engagement. On the way we had to sometimes go through Civil Lines where the small British community and westernized Indians lived. The avenues would become broader and the bungalows more spacious. We passed the imposing Government House where the District Collector lived. It was a dazzling white building surrounded by colonnaded verandas set amidst acres of green lawn. Against the boundary wall there was an occasional splash of red or white bougainvillaea. The overall effect befitted the dignity of the district’s highest official. Next to it was the equally imposing government college surrounded by playing fields.
As our carriage went along the geometrically laid out roads and past the curving gravel driveways of the lesser officials of the Raj, my grandmother observed that the smells in this part of the town were different from ours. I once asked her why we could not live like this, in a stately house with green lawns amidst these splendid avenues shaded by trees. She replied that she would feel lonely here. She liked the bustle of the town, and she had got used to the high walls of her courtyard. My grandmother felt sure that she would feel naked in these ‘inside-out’ houses where the verandas and gardens faced the outside. It was not natural to live like this, she added
It was unnatural in another respect as well, and I understood this many years later. Civil Lines certainly had an unmistakeably different atmosphere from the chaotic part of the town where we lived, but it was not English either. Years later I visited England when I was grown up. I searched for our Civil Lines there but I did not find it. Our sun is too strong, our land is too flat, and these buildings were too imposing. Our alien rulers may have tried to create a bit of England, but they had not succeeded. Civil Lines was an imperial, intrusive, and antiseptic imposition and it was alien to both races.
During our journeys about town my grandmother would sometimes tell me a story from the Mahabharata. I would listen in fear and pity to her account of the epic’s great heroes. She had no doubt that the events actually happened. They had taken place before our degraded age. In those days, gods used to mingle with men, and human beings were more inclined to adhere to the highest ethics of dharma. Grandmother had a sense of cosmic time and she believed that the epic was a true account of the deeds of her righteous ancestors in the Punjab, who with the aid of the God, Sri Krishna, defeated unrighteous foes. For her the Mahabharata was not merely an epic—it was a divine work.
*******
I was born a Hindu and had a Hindu upbringing. My grandfather belonged to the Arya Samaj, a reformist sect that had come up in the nineteenth century. Our ancestors did not have a living memory of their own political heritage and this must have been difficult. We had lived under Muslim rulers since the 13th century and had regarded political life as something filled with deprivation and fear. After the Muslims, we saw the rise of the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, and with its collapse around 1850 came the powerful British with Christian missionaries in tow. Thus, three powerful, professedly egalitarian and proselytizing religions surrounded us--Islam, Sikhism and Christianity. And so I can understand why my ancestors were eager to receive the Gujarati reformer, Dayananda Saraswati, who established the Arya Samaj in the Punjab in the second half of the nineteenth century. He advocated a return to the Vedas, a diminished role for Brahmins and vigorous social reform. He ‘modernized’ our Hinduism.
‘Arya’ in Sanskrit means ‘noble’ among other things. European scholars in the nineteenth century took this ancient word from the Vedic texts to propagate a racial theory of ‘Aryan’ origins of Hindu culture and society based on a common Indo-European language system. We embraced this idea enthusiastically for it related us racially to European Aryans. Arya Samaj had the positive impact of helping to create a nationalist sentiment among the new Punjabi middle classes for freedom and independence from Britain. The invention of an Aryan race in nineteenth century Europe had tragic consequences for Europe, culminating in the ideology of Nazi Germany. Half a century after the Second World War, the word ‘Aryan’ evokes repulsive memories of Nazism and is thoroughly discredited in the West. In India, however, it has been revived, curiously enough, with the rise of Hindu nationalism and the ascent of the Bhartiya Janata Party.
The Arya Samaj started many schools in the Punjab and my father went to one of these, the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (D.A.V) School, in Lahore. After completing it, he passed the entrance examination to the coveted Roorkee Engineering College, which had been set up by the British in the mid-nineteenth century to train civil engineers who were to build the growing network of irrigation canals and roads in the Punjab and the United Provinces. By the time my father went to Roorkee in 1931, there was a growing Punjabi middle class. Roorkee was a fine place. It not only gave my father an excellent technical education, it also fostered intellectual curiosity and introduced him to modern ways. He learned to ride, to play tennis and to think for himself. Oddly enough, it also made him deeply curious about the spiritual life.
Two years later, my father came home triumphantly waving a coveted degree. This was in 1933 in the middle of the Great Depression when the Punjab government had stopped hiring irrigation engineers. But he was patient. He bided his time, and eventually he got into the government the following year. During the year of waiting, he embarked on a spiritual quest. He found a mystically-inclined Guru who had an ashram on the banks of the Beas River; through him, he developed a lasting passion for the spiritual life. The Guru was a sant of the Radhasoami sect, descended intellectually from medieval bhakti and sufi traditions that gave him about the possibility of direct union with God through devotion and meditation. His modern mind appealed to my father’s rational, engineer’s temper. So, my father turned away from the Arya Samaj.
My maternal grandmother in Lyallpur remained a traditional Hindu when everyone was rushing to join the Arya Samaj. Her dressing room was filled with the images of her many gods, prominent among them Krishna and Rama, and she would say in the same breath that there are millions of gods but only one God. Her eclecticism did not stop there. She would visit the Sikh gurdwara on Mondays and Wednesdays, a Hindu temple on Tuesdays and Thursdays and she saved Saturdays and Sundays for discourses by holy men, including Muslim pirs, who were forever visiting our town. In between, she made time for Arya Samaj ceremonies when anyone was born, married, or died. My grandfather used to jest that she had taken out lots of insurances—at least someone up there might listen to her. My father’s mysticism, my grandfather’s Arya Samaj and my grandmother’s traditional Hinduism seem to have coexisted in a chaotic sort of way without causing disharmony in my mind. Amidst this religious pluralism, I have grown up with a liberal attitude and temper that is a mixture of scepticism and sympathy for the Hindu way of life.
Our family in Lyallpur had a hypocritical attitude towards money. Officially, we did not accord it a high place, but, in fact, we loved it. Although we professed a low opinion of the bania commercial castes, grandfather was not above money-lending. Belonging to the Arora sub-caste, we thought we had descended from ruling families from mythical times. Aroras and Khatris were the dominant castes of urban Punjab, although Khatris thought they had a higher status. Both of us, however, engaged in commerce and were also functionaries at princely courts. When the British came in the mid- nineteenth century, both were among the first to embrace western learning and the modern professions. Although Brahmins were superior to us in caste hierarchy, they lost their social position because they were slow to learn English and confined themselves to studying Sanskrit and to religious duties.
I remember my grandmother used to admonish our bania grocer for manipulating his weighing scale. It was the same with the family jeweller, but she treated him with more finesse. She would also scold her son for wasting his pocket money on “adulterated” ice cream. Each commercial transaction, it seems, was a challenge in our lives. It was always a case of us—educated, honest, middle- class citizens—versus them—tax dodging, street-smart banias. We may have looked down on banias, but we loved the bazaar. The most famous bazaar in the Punjab was Lahore’s Anarkali, and to shop in it was the fondest wish of every Punjabi. People came from all over the Northwest to taste its fun, gaiety, and laughter. All of Anarkali’s women, they used to say, were beautiful, and all its men handsome. And if something could not be had in Anarkali it was probably not worth having. For this and other reasons, they called it ‘paradise on earth.’
*************
The great event of the year was our annual visit to the orchards of my great aunts who lived in Gujranwala district. It took weeks of planning and co-ordinating and there was much excitement and bustle in our Lyallpur house before we left. The entire family went by train from Lyallpur to Gujranwala, and along the way, at different stops, other relatives would join our train, and by the time we arrived, we had become a great big clan party. At the railway station at Gujranwala, we piled onto sad-looking tongas, and amidst much merry making, we headed for the prosperous orchards of our country cousins.
Their prosperity as landlords was recent. It had come with the canal. With water available in plenty, they began to grow fruit that was transported by agents to far away places like Lahore. There was a sharp divide in attitudes between our cousins and us. We were from the town and we considered ourselves superior even though they were wealthier. They owned lands but we were better educated. We felt squeamish about their bathroom and lavatory arrangements but they were more generous and their big-heartedness always won us over. My grandfather once observed that more than anything else it was the English language that divided us from our Gujranwala family. They had the money but we held the status. When Punjab was partitioned in 1947, they suffered far more than we did. All of us became refugees--both Gujranwala and Lyallpur went to Pakistan. But they lost their lands, and they became poor. We were educated and we could get jobs and get going.
My stay in Lyallpur with my grandparents came to an end when my father found a house in a canal colony in the Hisar district of East Punjab. We went by train and stopped en route at his Guru’s ashram. My father wanted to receive the Guru’s darshan, which he believed held the power to protect us and give us spiritual moorings. My father’s mother had also accompanied us to the ashram and she impulsively placed me at the Guru’s feet and asked him to give me a name. She suspected that my mother had given me my name, Ashok Kumar, because she thought my mother was secretly in love with the movie star of the same name. His film Achhut Kanya, produced by Bombay Talkies, had been a big hit in the cinemas of Lahore, Lyallpur, and in the rest of Punjab.
‘Since you have placed him at my feet, let us call him ‘Guru Charan Das’, he said with a smile. Thus, I was transformed overnight from the ‘prince of happiness’ to the humble ‘servant of the guru’s feet’. The Guru must have known that this child needed to be reminded about the virtue of humility every day. The first two parts of my name became gradually condensed into one, but it did nothing to make me humble or spiritual.
My mother was visibly unhappy in the canal colony. She felt lonely and the vast, unbroken horizon on the dusty, treeless plains of Hisar added to her sense of isolation. She missed her family, her friends and the comforts of Lyallpur. She was also anxious because I got diarrhoea soon after we arrived. Her only comfort was the continuing monotonous sound of the running canal behind our house. My father was a quiet and shy man and at first his silence also troubled her, but she got used to doing all the talking. As a sub-divisional officer, he was the most important official of the Raj for miles. His job was to maintain his portion of the canal, making sure that the water flowed efficiently through smaller distribution channels to the farmers’ fields. This was difficult at times because some farmer would invariably divert his neighbour’s water, and this led to a quarrel - and even murder. In such a situation, he became the judge.
The few buildings in the canal colony were of brick. They had flat roofs with wide verandas, all white washed inside as dictated by the Public Works Department. My mother tried to make friends with the wives of the overseers but she found them uneducated and could not resist a feeling of superiority. She liked being the wife of an important official. The farmers overwhelmed her with gifts of grains and vegetables from the fields, but my father invariably returned them. They were a bribe and he knew that the price he would have to pay, and it would be to look the other way when the farmer illegally widened the water channel to his field.
After eighteen months in Hisar my father was transferred to a desk job in the government’s irrigation department in Lahore. After the canal post, my mother was thrilled to be in the capital city of Punjab where she had been to college and had many friends. My father got a modest house in a middle-class area, not too far from the sprawling Lawrence Gardens, presided over by a statue of John Lawrence, the ‘Lord Sahib of India’. It was our first real home and my mother furnished it with pride and care - but within my father’s limited means. She was overjoyed to be young and alive and living in Lahore. She was under the spell of its enchanted streets, its vivacious bazaars and its beautiful women.
**********
Our idyllic life in Lahore was short-lived. In the late afternoon of 20 August 1946, there were urgent steps outside. My mother was sitting at the dressing table. She held a bottle of coconut oil in her hand and she was combing her hair. I was watching her in the mirror when my father burst in and announced that Lord Louis Mountbatten had been appointed Viceroy and he had declared that the British would finally leave India. My mother dropped the bottle.
‘Look what you did!’ she exclaimed accusingly.
Eight months later, Mountbatten announced that Punjab would have to be partitioned to make room for the Muslim state of Pakistan. Our happiness over our country’s approaching independence turned to fear and uncertainty, and a pall of gloom settled over the Hindus of Lahore. We wondered if Lahore would go to India or to Pakistan. In those months before the boundary line was drawn, everyone was in a panic. We no longer felt safe. Large-scale violence broke out in early August 1947. While the Muslims were in a majority in Lahore, the Hindus owned eighty percent of the property. When our neighbour's house was burned in early August, we realised that we might be trapped on the wrong side of the new border. The next day a Muslim mob came and threatened to burn us alive if we did not leave. We escaped that night to the home of a Muslim friend of my father's who hid us in his storeroom. On August 8 we fled. My younger aunt's husband, a major in the army, brought us to safety in a military truck, and deposited us at the Guru’s ashram at Beas. On August 9, 1947 occurred the ‘Great Killing of Lahore’ in which 10,000 Hindus were slaughtered.
At midnight on August 14th the British Raj came to an end. On the same day Pakistan was born, carved out of Punjab and Bengal. Sir Cyril Radcliffe did the actual carving in five weeks and the demarcation on the map came to be known as the Radcliffe Boundary Award. The Guru gave asylum to thousands of refugees like us. He set up tents and make-shift kitchens. To our good fortune, according to the boundary line drawn by Mr. Radcliffe, the ashram found itself forty miles inside the Indian border. My mother cried continuously for she had heard no news from Lyallpur and she was afraid that her family was trapped. In his last letter, my grandfather was reported to be stubbornly insisting on staying on even if Lyallpur went to Pakistan. My father had been to Jullunder, the nearest town, to enquire after their whereabouts, but he had not succeeded. On the historic night of the 14th, dozens of people were huddled in our ill-lit tent glued to the radio. Despite the suffering and the uncertainty about the future, the refugees were filled with emotion as Nehru began his historic speech at midnight. For the first time we heard the new nation’s anthem but few recognised it. Someone stood up. Then, one by one the others also got up until everyone in the dark tent was standing up, and many had tears in their eyes. When the reference came to ‘Punjab’ in the anthem, the refugees looked at each other, helplessness in their eyes.
In the end, my grandfather had no choice. On August 9, a train filled with half-dead Muslim refugees arrived in Lyallpur. They told a harrowing tale of murder, arson and rape on the other side of the border. The Muslims of Lyallpur vowed revenge. On the morning of the 10th, the Muslim clergy called a meeting in Lyallpur’s main mosque and called upon God fearing Muslims to kill non-Muslims. Sikhs were singled out to pay for the crimes in Amritsar, Jullunder and Ludhiana. On hearing this, Sikhs began to cut off their hair and shave their beards. The barbers of Lyallpur were unusually busy that day. But it did not help. Two thousand Hindus and the Sikhs were killed on the 10th. Grandfather’s family escaped miraculously. My uncle, the major, showed up at their door without warning on the same afternoon with a military van. He gave them an hour to pack. As they piled in, my grandmother said, ‘O wait! I forgot to lock the front door’. My grandfather shook his head, ‘she’s locking the Muslims out’.
A week later, my father learned that he had been transferred to Simla, which had now become the temporary capital of the new, truncated state of Punjab after the loss of Lahore to Pakistan. We left the ashram the following day but found only chaos at Jullunder’s railway station. No one knew to what schedule the trains were running. On both sides of the railway platform, crowds of refugees were huddled together, believing that they would be safer in groups. As soon as a train approached, the refugees would get up. Pushing and shouting, they would rush for the train. But the last four trains had not stopped.
We did finally manage to get onto a train which was going east. But it did not move, and seemed to stand still for hours. My father went to check with the station master. From the window of our compartment, I watched him go past and I saw a tall Muslim police officer standing erect on the platform. Suddenly, there was movement. A train was coming from the opposite direction—from Delhi going to Lahore. Activity increased on the platform, but the policeman seemed unaffected, and continued to stare straight ahead. Then two very young Sikh boys emerged from nowhere. They could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen. They came from behind and thrust a dagger into the policeman. He did not cry. He just fell and died. My mother pulled me back and tried to shut the window, but it would not close.
We heard screams as the incoming train slowed down. There were sounds of bullets. My mother pushed me down. We lay on the floor of the carriage. They were shooting at the incoming train. There were more shots followed by more shouts. The train full of half-dead bodies did not stop. Minutes later an old Sikh forced his way into our compartment. Full of fear my mother screamed. ‘We are Hindus, don’t kill us!’ Then she saw her husband come in after the stranger. My father had found him at the ticket window when the shooting began and the old man grabbed hold of my father’s shirt. Both had hidden in the toilet of the First Class Retiring Room. Eventually we began to move. We reached Ambala, where we changed for Kalka, and from there got on the hill train for Simla.
*******
The view from the tiny window of the miniature hill train was enough to refresh the most exhausted emotions. On each bend of the winding route, we saw green slopes with tiers of neatly cultivated terraces, which looked like gardens hanging in the air. Belts of pine, fir and deodar punctuated the terraces. Masses of rhododendrons clothed the slopes. Towards the south, we could see the receding Ambala plains far below. Sabathu and the Kasauli hills were in the foreground. Northwards rose the confused Himalayan chains, range after snowy range of the world’s highest mountains. The stench of death was left behind at Jullunder station.
The train stopped at Barog where a white car on rails went speeding by. ‘The rail car’, the Anglo-Indian ticket collector explained, ‘carries the rich and the busy who don't have luggage and who want to reach Simla in a hurry. Until a week ago it was the only white sahibs rode in it, but now it seems everyone is doing it. Amazing, how quickly the brown sahibs have slid into the shoes of their departing masters!’
At Shogi, we glimpsed the first wondrous vision of Simla. From afar, it looked like a mythical green garden dotted with red-roofed houses. Our excitement mounted. We passed Jutogh, crossed Summer Hill, turned into tunnel number 103, and finally reached Simla's Victorian railway station. The town of Simla occupied a spur of the lower Himalaya and ran in an east-west direction for six miles. We settled in a little cottage which was situated in an unfashionable part of town known as Chhota Simla, at the southeast end, sloping directly south towards Jakhoo hill. The government provided us a house that was tiny and icy cold at night. But we loved our little house. It was situated in a handsome grove of deodars and from our veranda we had a spectacular view of the next ridge and many ridges beyond. From the narrow veranda, we stepped onto a little lawn; from the lawn, there was nothing to step onto except fresh air for the ground suddenly dropped beneath our feet.
My earliest memory of Simla is of waking up suddenly on a frosty morning. It was just after dawn and I was only half awake. It had been raining and along with the wet there was a rawness in the air. I could hear the wind blow. I ran to my mother’s bed. She stretched her arm and I nestled by her side. With her warm hands she felt my body and pressed me closer to her.
‘Did you have a bad dream?’ she asked.
I did not answer. I was content to feel her warmth. In her big bed with her soft arms around me, I felt protected. I cuddled against her and in a moment I was blissfully asleep.
I was put into St Edward’s school soon after we arrived. I cried on the first day when I was taken by the headmaster to the first grade. I stood shyly behind the door, not daring to go in. I was shorter than the other boys and my hair was cut square and parted in the middle like a peasant’s. I was ill at ease in a new shirt which pinched me under my arms. My new shorts braced up tightly. I sat down at a desk at the back, not daring to cross my legs. When the bell rang in the afternoon I did not get up. I would have kept sitting there had the teacher not returned to the class to pick up her bag. The daily two mile walk to school along Cart Road framed my new life. In the mornings I would be rushed and nervous, my hair wet, as I hurried to school, In the afternoons I would dawdle back home, usually with other boys. I would linger, eat wild berries along the way, and arrive kicking a pine cone with my new Bata shoes.
In the evenings, everyone in Simla went to the Mall no matter what the season. Between five and seven o'clock the thing to do was to get dressed and take a stroll from the Ridge to the end of the lower Mall in order 'to eat the air’. It was a wide, winding stretch of about a mile along a gentle slope with glamorous shops and smart cafes. One went there to be seen and to see others, and every evening you found a veritable fashion parade where men, women and children vied with each other in the elegance of their clothes.
We had never seen anything quite like Simla: the Tudor belfry of Christ Church cathedral with its massive brass bells; the elegant Victorian villas with their gardens bursting with dahlias and pansies; the imposing architecture of Viceregal Lodge. Simla had been, after all, a grand bouquet to the Englishmen's fondest imperial dream. For five months of the year, from mid-April to mid-September, it used to be the imperial capital from where the British Viceroy ruled the Indian Empire (extending, administratively speaking, from Burma to the Red Sea). Every English man and woman in India used to yearn to be in Simla for 'the season', when it was one of the gayest places on the earth. The refugees from West Punjab were so happy to be alive that they embraced Simla with reckless abandon and tried to make a new life; this helped them to forget the one they had lost in Pakistan.
My father earned a modest salary, and my mother ran the house on a tight budget. Her biggest expenses were on school fees, uniforms, and milk for her growing children. She worked hard to get us into an English-medium school although it cost more than she could afford. It had a long waiting list because of the recent influx of refugees and she had to apply “influence” to get us in. She made sure that we worked hard at studies, got good marks, especially in English and Mathematics. At the end of the month there was little money left for anything else.
A shy mid-level government official, my father was a man content with his own company. But my mother had a great and unrequited desire to be a part of Simla’s fashionable society. She wanted ‘to see and to be seen’; she wanted to mix with the elite; she wanted to be a ‘somebody’--and she lived in fear that her own world was insignificant compared to the grand world beyond us. The natural solution was to join ‘the club’, the ADC. Although it had begun as an Amateur Dramatics Club, a sort of extension to the Gaiety Theatre during the British days, it was now mainly a social club and, more importantly, the meeting place of the fashionable in Simla. Unfortunately, we could not afford it.
She must have transmitted her anxieties to me for I grew up with an acute concern for status. I compared myself to those who had things that I did not possess; to boys who were more attractive to girls than I was; and especially to those who made it to the school cricket team. I must have been twelve when a bachelor friend of our family’s saw me hovering outside the ADC one day. He put an arm around me. ‘Come, my boy, let’s go into the Green Room for a cup of tea,’ he said.
We were greeted by the hall porter and we walked past smoke-filled card rooms to another room full of young people and laughter. I looked around me with awe. Bearers in starched white uniforms with green cummerbunds and sashes and tassels were gliding between the tables. ‘So, this is where the smart people of Simla meet’, I thought. As my host hailed a group of young people to join us, I was intoxicated by my first encounter with an inaccessible and forbidden world--the glamour, the clothes, the sophistication of language and manners. I imagined these people dwelling in big houses, with tall hedges and high gates, leading a life quite unlike my own.
Among them I recognized a girl who was a few years older. She looked utterly beautiful. I kept looking at her, hoping she would recognize me. But she looked through me. Even when I smiled at her she ignored me. My head was spinning when I returned home. I was excited by my first encounter with a forbidden world. I tried to recall her thin face. I could visualize her shining brown eyes, her long dark hair, and the unusual way she tilted her head. The more I thought about her, the more inaccessible she seemed to become. I would lie awake for weeks thinking of her.
My discovery after a few days that I knew where she lived left me breathless. I had recognized her because I used to pass her house daily on my way to school. I had seen when I had accidentally peered through their hibiscus hedge. What had been an impersonal landmark on my daily trudge to school now seemed to acquire a special character. Even before the bell rang in the afternoon announcing the end of school, I would begin to think of her. I would hurriedly gather my books and run out before any of my schoolmates decided to tag along. A red, round post-box—a proud symbol of the British days—stood a hundred yards from her home and it announced the pleasure that awaited me. When I reached her gate, I would slow down my galloping pace, take a deep breath, and walk with measured steps.
My heart beat would quicken as I looked thorough the latticed gate, which gave a view of the side of the house along with the winding path leading up to it. From this angle I could tell if they had company. I could observe the servants moving back and forth to the lawn with the tea service. As I walked along the road I could see the front of the house. I was grateful for the hibiscus hedge that was cut low for I could see the lawn but I had to be careful not to be seen. I became skilled at hiding behind a giant deodar tree that was on a slightly higher level. The house itself had a long gabled front of red brick but years of Simla’s weather had mellowed it.
They always seemed to have company and on my ‘lucky days’ I would be able to spot her. She would sometimes be talking to her friends. At other times she would be playing badminton towards the side of the house. I saw her one day up close. She was in light blue and sitting on the lawn a few yards away from the hedge. She was speaking with two boys and a man of indeterminate age. Her head was unmistakeably tilted as she listened to the man. Suddenly she looked up and she saw me. Her lively eyes seemed to mock me. A shiver ran through my body and I quickly moved away. A few minutes later I heard a voice. It was the same man who called out to me from the hedge. He told me that it was not polite to stare at people. I was mortified and I walked away quickly. When I reached home I was depressed by the contrast of my drab life with the brilliance of her world.
Some years later, I met the object of my dreams properly and discovered that she was a snob, and like all snobs she had an enormous capacity for inflicting pain.
----
Glossary
bhakti : love or devotion for a personal form of God
charpai : a bed with a wooden frame, interwoven with rope
darshan : seeing, beholding, vision of the divine; to see with reverence
dharma : duty, law, virtue, doing the right thing
mashkiya : a person who pours water from a goatskin bag
pir : a Sufi teacher, spiritual leader
sant : saint, guru
Sufi : inner, mystical dimension of Islam
tonga : light horse drawn carriage
---
This account forms a chapter in Remembered Childhood, Oxford University Press, Nov 2009. Some of the incidents have appeared earlier in a different forms in my autobiographical novel, A Fine Family and my non-fiction narrative, India Unbound.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Scenes from a Punjabi Childhood
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Like honeybees collecting nectar, (Outlook, July 20, 2009)
Ever since 1991 we have come to expect a vision of the economy’s future in the Budget speech of the Finance Minister. This did not happen on July 6, 2009. The day before, the Economic Survey had raised the hopes of real reform. Those hopes were dashed. Pranab Mukherjee spoke like an accountant, not a statesman, and the stock market fell by almost a thousand points. The new government lost an opportunity to spell out its program and win over domestic and foreign investors.
Ultimately, the nation needs private investment to pull us out of this economic downturn. Because of the failure to articulate the long term, investors worry that the big spending stimulus of this government is here to stay and it will crowd out private investment. A large deficit is understandable in these recessionary times, but we needed a commitment to return to fiscal responsibility once normal times return. Deficit spending on this scale risks a re-rating of the country, which would mean a higher cost of money, higher inflation, and bad consequences for the Indian rupee.
Nevertheless, there are many positives in this Budget. In our bad old socialist days, Finance Ministers would have raised tax rates to cover fiscal deficits. This time the FM actually decreased tax rates for individuals (from 34% to 31%) while holding them for companies. This was courageous and it is strongest indicator that Pranab Mukherjee has changed and believes in growth. Many countries suffering from the global recession have increased tax rates. This FM also showed guts in scrapping the irritating and ugly Fringe Benefit Tax. The major negative was the raising of the Minimum Alternative Tax for companies from 10% to 15%, and this will hurt our fastest growing companies and those in infrastructure.
The best thing the in the Budget is a re-commitment to a dual Goods and Services Tax (GST) from April 2010. This is a wonderful idea which has been championed for years by Vijay Kelkar. India is not a common market where goods and services move smoothly. Anyone who sells a product lives through a nightmare of excise, state and central sales taxes; entry, turnover, and service taxes; and the terrible octroi which keeps trucks waiting for hours at check points. GST will integrate all these indirect taxes into one flat tax, which is IT intensive, offering frictionless interface between taxpayer and collector. Like the VAT, it taxes only the added value at each stage, lowering the overall tax burden. Those who persist in selling without a bill will lose credit on taxes already paid, it will force them into the tax net. It will improve compliance and make us a more honest nation. A lot of work needs to be done to make GST happen but the Finance Minister’s re-commitment to GST will now galvanize the centre and states to work hard and move to the most important tax reform in India’s history.
Another positive feature of Pranab Mukherjee ‘s speech was his commitment to changing the attitude of tax collectors. P. Chidambaram, in his well-intentioned zeal for taxes, had let loose the tax departments on the taxpayers and this had created fear, bad blood, and the loss of some of the goodwill created during Jaswant Singh’s time. Mukherjee wants tax collectors to be “honeybees collecting nectar from the flowers without disturbing them, but spreading their pollen so that all flowers can thrive and bear fruit.” This is the right attitude. Despite many honest and hard working officers in income tax, customs and excise, these departments continue to give India a bad name. In successive surveys, foreign investors cite them as the reason why India is not a good place to do business.
The Congress Party was re-elected in May on the promise of economic populism. On July 6 the government delivered on that promise. This is bad news for India because populism is a temporary palliative and does not lead to long term prosperity of the poor; it is also something that our country cannot afford. The nation waited to hear about the reforms that would create precisely those enabling conditions for the poor to pull themselves up. India’s tax payers are not against a safety net for the poorest, but they want the benefits to reach the poor. When the FM announced handouts in the thousands of crores, it was his duty to reassure us that the money would not be lost once again in corruption. We waited in vain to hear what government was doing to improve delivery. Without the overhang of the Left, there is no excuse for the UPA taking the country backward. If it persists in this it will lose the goodwill of so many who voted for it.
---
Gurcharan Das is the author of The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma (Penguin 2009), which interrogates the Mahabharata in order to find the answer to ‘why be good?’
Ultimately, the nation needs private investment to pull us out of this economic downturn. Because of the failure to articulate the long term, investors worry that the big spending stimulus of this government is here to stay and it will crowd out private investment. A large deficit is understandable in these recessionary times, but we needed a commitment to return to fiscal responsibility once normal times return. Deficit spending on this scale risks a re-rating of the country, which would mean a higher cost of money, higher inflation, and bad consequences for the Indian rupee.
Nevertheless, there are many positives in this Budget. In our bad old socialist days, Finance Ministers would have raised tax rates to cover fiscal deficits. This time the FM actually decreased tax rates for individuals (from 34% to 31%) while holding them for companies. This was courageous and it is strongest indicator that Pranab Mukherjee has changed and believes in growth. Many countries suffering from the global recession have increased tax rates. This FM also showed guts in scrapping the irritating and ugly Fringe Benefit Tax. The major negative was the raising of the Minimum Alternative Tax for companies from 10% to 15%, and this will hurt our fastest growing companies and those in infrastructure.
The best thing the in the Budget is a re-commitment to a dual Goods and Services Tax (GST) from April 2010. This is a wonderful idea which has been championed for years by Vijay Kelkar. India is not a common market where goods and services move smoothly. Anyone who sells a product lives through a nightmare of excise, state and central sales taxes; entry, turnover, and service taxes; and the terrible octroi which keeps trucks waiting for hours at check points. GST will integrate all these indirect taxes into one flat tax, which is IT intensive, offering frictionless interface between taxpayer and collector. Like the VAT, it taxes only the added value at each stage, lowering the overall tax burden. Those who persist in selling without a bill will lose credit on taxes already paid, it will force them into the tax net. It will improve compliance and make us a more honest nation. A lot of work needs to be done to make GST happen but the Finance Minister’s re-commitment to GST will now galvanize the centre and states to work hard and move to the most important tax reform in India’s history.
Another positive feature of Pranab Mukherjee ‘s speech was his commitment to changing the attitude of tax collectors. P. Chidambaram, in his well-intentioned zeal for taxes, had let loose the tax departments on the taxpayers and this had created fear, bad blood, and the loss of some of the goodwill created during Jaswant Singh’s time. Mukherjee wants tax collectors to be “honeybees collecting nectar from the flowers without disturbing them, but spreading their pollen so that all flowers can thrive and bear fruit.” This is the right attitude. Despite many honest and hard working officers in income tax, customs and excise, these departments continue to give India a bad name. In successive surveys, foreign investors cite them as the reason why India is not a good place to do business.
The Congress Party was re-elected in May on the promise of economic populism. On July 6 the government delivered on that promise. This is bad news for India because populism is a temporary palliative and does not lead to long term prosperity of the poor; it is also something that our country cannot afford. The nation waited to hear about the reforms that would create precisely those enabling conditions for the poor to pull themselves up. India’s tax payers are not against a safety net for the poorest, but they want the benefits to reach the poor. When the FM announced handouts in the thousands of crores, it was his duty to reassure us that the money would not be lost once again in corruption. We waited in vain to hear what government was doing to improve delivery. Without the overhang of the Left, there is no excuse for the UPA taking the country backward. If it persists in this it will lose the goodwill of so many who voted for it.
---
Gurcharan Das is the author of The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma (Penguin 2009), which interrogates the Mahabharata in order to find the answer to ‘why be good?’
Saturday, June 27, 2009
To thine own self be true
When Polonius said in Hamlet, ‘to thine own self be true’, he was not thinking of Part I of the UPA government’s forthcoming Budget. Polonius was saying that integrity and success lie in being true to oneself. This Budget is expected to announce a massive give-away of rice and wheat at Rs 3/- per kilo, and the scheme is likely to fail because it fails Polonius’ test. Eighteen years of slow, incremental economic reforms have fashioned a certain kind of nation which was captured brilliantly in the film, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. If the movie caught the character of the nation’s poor, the Indian Premier League (IPL) of cricket mirrors it for the middle class. The character quite simply is of a vibrant and energetic private sector that is hemmed in by an arid eco-system of weak governance. As if to underline this, our bureaucracy has recently been rated the worst in Asia in a survey of twelve countries.
While we deeply admire the UPA’s commitment to the poor, we are repelled by its inability to understand our state’s limitations. As it is, there is huge corruption in the public food distribution system and it would be far better to make cash transfers to the poor via smart cards. It will not harm the poor farmer either, as selling grains at Rs 3, which will inevitably end up in the black market. Smart cards are being successfully used in the national health insurance scheme (RSBY).
Millions of Indians are stuck between the factory and the farm but they do not sit around and complain. Each morning they pull themselves up and go out and create a livelihood in the informal sector. Our regulations, alas, do not make it easy—hence India is rated 128th in the ease of doing business. In a massive new study, Moving out of Poverty, people claim that they have risen out of poverty through their own initiative, and not through hand-outs. The poor prefer an enabling environment that lets them work with dignity. Our advantage over China is that we respect property titles and Karnataka and Andhra are showing that when secure titles are on-line, the poor capitalize on them to start businesses in the informal economy.
Unlike the statists behind the Rs 3/- scheme, many UPA ministers are refreshing in seeking to create enabling conditions for the poor. The new minister of HRD, Kapil Sibal, understands that teacher absenteeism is forcing even the poor to desert state schools and he is focused on better delivery through public-private partnerships. The energetic Kamal Nath has begun to cut red tape and remove bottlenecks in pursuit of an ambitious target to build roads, putting greater onus on the private sector. M M Kharge plans to spend Rs 30,000 crores to develop skills, and knows that the only way to impart vocational education is with the involvement of companies. Sivaprakash Jaiswal has announced the end of state monopoly in the corrupt coal mining sector, and it raises the hope of finally bringing efficiency to a sector that accounts for 55% of India’s energy basket. Veerappan Moily has promised ‘sweeping, holistic judicial reform’ that will tackle the backlog of 30 million pending court cases among other reforms. All these five ministers are following Polonius’s advice.
In the past year both China and India held a sports event. The magnificent Beijing Olympics were a tribute to the efficiency of the Chinese state. The Indian Premier League (IPL) is a testimonial to our private sector. When the timing of the IPL clashed with the elections this year the IPL did not give up. It played off the English and South African boards to get the best deal and the result was an amazing sight--Delhi playing Hyderabad in Cape Town and Mumbai playing Chennai in Johannesburg. With bold ambition, quick thinking, meticulous planning and brilliant execution—all the skills that are making Indian companies successful on the world stage—the IPL filled stadiums, shuttled ten of thousands of Indians to South Africa, and enticed millions to their TVs back home. It took a hundred years for Major League Baseball in America to hold its first game outside the US and fifty for the American Football League to play outside. The Indian Premier League has gone global in its second year.
The two sports events are metaphors for two models of development. The Chinese state can deliver rice and wheat at Rs 3 to the poor. But India’s cannot. The UPA government would do well to remember Polonius advice and be true to our nation’s character.
While we deeply admire the UPA’s commitment to the poor, we are repelled by its inability to understand our state’s limitations. As it is, there is huge corruption in the public food distribution system and it would be far better to make cash transfers to the poor via smart cards. It will not harm the poor farmer either, as selling grains at Rs 3, which will inevitably end up in the black market. Smart cards are being successfully used in the national health insurance scheme (RSBY).
Millions of Indians are stuck between the factory and the farm but they do not sit around and complain. Each morning they pull themselves up and go out and create a livelihood in the informal sector. Our regulations, alas, do not make it easy—hence India is rated 128th in the ease of doing business. In a massive new study, Moving out of Poverty, people claim that they have risen out of poverty through their own initiative, and not through hand-outs. The poor prefer an enabling environment that lets them work with dignity. Our advantage over China is that we respect property titles and Karnataka and Andhra are showing that when secure titles are on-line, the poor capitalize on them to start businesses in the informal economy.
Unlike the statists behind the Rs 3/- scheme, many UPA ministers are refreshing in seeking to create enabling conditions for the poor. The new minister of HRD, Kapil Sibal, understands that teacher absenteeism is forcing even the poor to desert state schools and he is focused on better delivery through public-private partnerships. The energetic Kamal Nath has begun to cut red tape and remove bottlenecks in pursuit of an ambitious target to build roads, putting greater onus on the private sector. M M Kharge plans to spend Rs 30,000 crores to develop skills, and knows that the only way to impart vocational education is with the involvement of companies. Sivaprakash Jaiswal has announced the end of state monopoly in the corrupt coal mining sector, and it raises the hope of finally bringing efficiency to a sector that accounts for 55% of India’s energy basket. Veerappan Moily has promised ‘sweeping, holistic judicial reform’ that will tackle the backlog of 30 million pending court cases among other reforms. All these five ministers are following Polonius’s advice.
In the past year both China and India held a sports event. The magnificent Beijing Olympics were a tribute to the efficiency of the Chinese state. The Indian Premier League (IPL) is a testimonial to our private sector. When the timing of the IPL clashed with the elections this year the IPL did not give up. It played off the English and South African boards to get the best deal and the result was an amazing sight--Delhi playing Hyderabad in Cape Town and Mumbai playing Chennai in Johannesburg. With bold ambition, quick thinking, meticulous planning and brilliant execution—all the skills that are making Indian companies successful on the world stage—the IPL filled stadiums, shuttled ten of thousands of Indians to South Africa, and enticed millions to their TVs back home. It took a hundred years for Major League Baseball in America to hold its first game outside the US and fifty for the American Football League to play outside. The Indian Premier League has gone global in its second year.
The two sports events are metaphors for two models of development. The Chinese state can deliver rice and wheat at Rs 3 to the poor. But India’s cannot. The UPA government would do well to remember Polonius advice and be true to our nation’s character.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Why the future belongs to India
In preparing for a much publicised debate in London on the motion ‘The future belongs to India, not China’, I was reminded of a conversation with my mother. She had asked, what is the difference between China growing at a rate of 10% and India at 8%? I replied that the difference was, indeed, very significant. If we were to grow at 10% we could save twenty years. This is almost a generation. We could lift a whole generation into the middle class twenty years sooner. She thought for a while and then said gently, 'we have waited 3000 years for this moment. Why don't we wait another twenty and do it the Indian way?'
She had understood that the cost of democracy is the price the poor pay in the delay of their entry into the middle class. She did not elaborate the 'Indian way' but it must include taking a holiday on half a dozen New Years Days! It is easy to get mesmerized by China's amazing progress and feel frustrated by India's chaotic democracy, but I think she had expressed the sentiments of most Indians who will not trade off democracy for two per cent higher growth.
In referring to the 'Indian way', my mother meant that a nation must be true to itself. Democracy comes easily to us because India has historically 'accumulated' its diverse groups who retain their distinctiveness while identifying themselves as Indian. China has 'assimilated' its people into a common, homogeneous Confucian society. China is a melting pot in which differences disappear while India is a salad bowl in which the constituents retain their identity. Hence, China has always been governed by a hierarchical, centralized state-a tradition that has carried into the present era of reform communism. China resembles a business corporation today. Each mayor and party secretary has objectives relating to investment, output and growth, which are aligned to national goals. Those who exceed their goals rise quickly. The main problem in running a country as a business is that many people get left out.
India, on the other hand, can only manage itself by accommodating vocal and varied interest groups in its salad bowl. This leads to a million negotiations daily and we call this system 'democracy'. It slows us down--we take five years to build a highway versus one in China. Those who are disgruntled go to court. But our politicians are forced to worry about abuses of human rights, whereas my search on Google on 'human rights abuses in China' yielded 47.8 million entries in 13 seconds! Democracies have a safety valve-it allows the disgruntled to let off steam before slowly co-opting them.
Both India and China have accepted the capitalist road to prosperity. But capitalism is more comfortable in a democracy, which fosters entrepreneurs naturally. A state enterprise can never be as innovative or nimble and this is why the Chinese envy some of our private companies. Democracy respects property rights. As both nations urbanize, peasants in India are able to sell or borrow against their land, but the Chinese peasants are at the mercy of local party bosses. Because India has the rule of law, entrepreneurs can enforce contracts. If someone takes away your property in China, you have no recourse. Hence, it is the party bosses who are accumulating wealth in China. The rule of law slows us down but it also protects us (and our environment, as the NGOs have discovered).
We take freedom for granted in India but it was not always so. When General Reginald Dyer opened fire in 1919 in Jallianwala Bagh killing 379 people, Indians realised they could only have dignity when they were free from British rule. The massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, where 300 students were killed, was China's Jallianwala Bagh. China today may have become richer than India but the poorest Chinese yearns for the same freedom.
Because the Indian state is inefficient, millions of entrepreneurs have stepped into the vacuum. When government schools fail, people start private schools in the slums, and the result is millions of 'slumdog millionaires'. You cannot do this in China. Our free society forces us to solve our own problems, making us self-reliant. Hence, the Indian way is likely to be more enduring because the people have scripted India’s success while China’s state has crafted its success. This worries China’s leaders who ask, if India can become the world’s second fastest economy despite the state, what will happen when the Indian state begins to perform? India's path may be slower but it is surer, and the Indian way of life is also more likely to survive. This is why when I am reborn I would prefer it to be in India.
----The writer is speaking in a debate in London on 12 May 2009 in support of the motion ' The future belongs to India, not China'-----
She had understood that the cost of democracy is the price the poor pay in the delay of their entry into the middle class. She did not elaborate the 'Indian way' but it must include taking a holiday on half a dozen New Years Days! It is easy to get mesmerized by China's amazing progress and feel frustrated by India's chaotic democracy, but I think she had expressed the sentiments of most Indians who will not trade off democracy for two per cent higher growth.
In referring to the 'Indian way', my mother meant that a nation must be true to itself. Democracy comes easily to us because India has historically 'accumulated' its diverse groups who retain their distinctiveness while identifying themselves as Indian. China has 'assimilated' its people into a common, homogeneous Confucian society. China is a melting pot in which differences disappear while India is a salad bowl in which the constituents retain their identity. Hence, China has always been governed by a hierarchical, centralized state-a tradition that has carried into the present era of reform communism. China resembles a business corporation today. Each mayor and party secretary has objectives relating to investment, output and growth, which are aligned to national goals. Those who exceed their goals rise quickly. The main problem in running a country as a business is that many people get left out.
India, on the other hand, can only manage itself by accommodating vocal and varied interest groups in its salad bowl. This leads to a million negotiations daily and we call this system 'democracy'. It slows us down--we take five years to build a highway versus one in China. Those who are disgruntled go to court. But our politicians are forced to worry about abuses of human rights, whereas my search on Google on 'human rights abuses in China' yielded 47.8 million entries in 13 seconds! Democracies have a safety valve-it allows the disgruntled to let off steam before slowly co-opting them.
Both India and China have accepted the capitalist road to prosperity. But capitalism is more comfortable in a democracy, which fosters entrepreneurs naturally. A state enterprise can never be as innovative or nimble and this is why the Chinese envy some of our private companies. Democracy respects property rights. As both nations urbanize, peasants in India are able to sell or borrow against their land, but the Chinese peasants are at the mercy of local party bosses. Because India has the rule of law, entrepreneurs can enforce contracts. If someone takes away your property in China, you have no recourse. Hence, it is the party bosses who are accumulating wealth in China. The rule of law slows us down but it also protects us (and our environment, as the NGOs have discovered).
We take freedom for granted in India but it was not always so. When General Reginald Dyer opened fire in 1919 in Jallianwala Bagh killing 379 people, Indians realised they could only have dignity when they were free from British rule. The massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, where 300 students were killed, was China's Jallianwala Bagh. China today may have become richer than India but the poorest Chinese yearns for the same freedom.
Because the Indian state is inefficient, millions of entrepreneurs have stepped into the vacuum. When government schools fail, people start private schools in the slums, and the result is millions of 'slumdog millionaires'. You cannot do this in China. Our free society forces us to solve our own problems, making us self-reliant. Hence, the Indian way is likely to be more enduring because the people have scripted India’s success while China’s state has crafted its success. This worries China’s leaders who ask, if India can become the world’s second fastest economy despite the state, what will happen when the Indian state begins to perform? India's path may be slower but it is surer, and the Indian way of life is also more likely to survive. This is why when I am reborn I would prefer it to be in India.
----The writer is speaking in a debate in London on 12 May 2009 in support of the motion ' The future belongs to India, not China'-----
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
The Dharma of Capitalisam, Wall Street Journal
The most damaging fallout from this economic crisis may well be a loss of trust in the democratic capitalist system, especially if those who are unemployed and suffering begin to believe that "anything goes" in an unfair world. In the rush to rewrite the rules of the game, policy makers might consider the message of dharma from Indian philosophy and literature, which offers a more nuanced answer to moral failure and the ethics of capitalism.
Dharma can mean virtue, duty or law, but is mainly concerned with doing the right thing. It is the moral law that gives order and balance to each human being and the cosmos. The concept is uniquely suited to guiding us through our present economic and regulatory quagmires because it is concerned with the achievable rather than the ideal. It recognizes that happiness comes from upholding a certain balance, by living according to a system of beliefs that restrains and gives coherence to our desires. Dharma does not seek moral perfection as Christianity or Islam does. Hence, pragmatic Indian statesmen throughout history have turned to it to address issues of public policy.
Dharma is probably best exemplified by the story of Queen Draupadi in the 2,000-year-old Indian epic, the "Mahabharata." In it, the queen asks her husband, Yudhishthira, about unmerited suffering: "When everything was going so well for us, why was our kingdom stolen in a rigged game of dice?" she complains. She exhorts her husband, who gambled away the kingdom, to raise an army and get their possessions back. But he reminds her that he has given his word to his enemies to remain in exile for 13 years as punishment for losing the game.
"What is the point of being good?" she persists. "Isn't it better to be powerful and rich than to be good in an unfair world where those who steal and cheat sleep on sheets of silk and pillows of down while those who are good have to settle for the hard earth? Why be good?" To this he replies in the only way that he knows: "I act because I must."
The King's answer represents the uncompromising, compelling voice of dharma. For him, good acts produce good karma, and these acts eventually change the balance of dharma in the universe. If people did not keep their commitments, the social order and the rule of law would collapse. Dharma is needed by everyone to live a happy, flourishing life.
There were many dharma failures in the run-up to today's economic crisis, in which all actors seemed to behave rationally. When U.S. house prices were rising and interest rates were low, even the poor got a chance to get a mortgage and a home. Banks securitized these mortgages and sold these complex financial products to other financial institutions, who also gained through better returns. When the housing market turned down, these financial products turned toxic. Whom do you fault?
Dharma draws a fine line between rational self-interest and selfishness. It would judge all actors in today's crisis guilty for tipping the balance of dharma in the wrong way. The undeserving recipient of the loan may have misjudged his or her ability to repay. The banker, motivated by short-term reward, pushed subprime mortgages to shaky borrowers without doing sufficient due diligence. Rating agencies underestimated the riskiness of the assets. The institution that bought the risky financial products failed to protect its shareholders. Regulators were captured by interests -- and when they acted, it was from domestic compulsions, forgetting the global consequences.
President Barack Obama's reaction to the crisis, among other things, was to seek to claw back bank bonuses. Congressional Democrats suggested an extortionate tax on bonus recipients at banks that received federal bailout money. To want to punish someone in this crisis is understandable but it is a dangerous path. What the world needs instead is the calm and principled voice of King Yudhishthira. He would have appealed for a voluntary return of bonuses while explaining to the public that Wall Street had been bailed out to save Main Street's pain. Furthermore, honoring bonus contracts is necessary to support the rule of law.
If envy is the sin of socialism, greed is the sin of capitalism. As capitalist nations grow, the resulting wealth creates enervating influences. Generations of savers are replaced by spenders. Ferocious competition is a feature of the free market and it can be corrosive. But it is also an economic stimulant that promotes human welfare. The subtle art of dharma tries to strike the right balance between healthy and unhealthy competition.
The choice for policy makers today is not between free markets and central planning but in getting the mix of regulation right. No one wants state ownership of production where the absence of competition corrodes the character even more. Dharma's approach is not to seek moral perfection, which leads inevitably to theocracy or dictatorship. It recognizes that it is in man's nature to want more and it seeks to give coherence to our desires by containing them within the discipline of an ordered existence.
only catches crooks but also rewards dharma-like behavior and nobility of character.
Mr. Das is the author of the forthcoming book, "The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma" (Penguin).
Dharma can mean virtue, duty or law, but is mainly concerned with doing the right thing. It is the moral law that gives order and balance to each human being and the cosmos. The concept is uniquely suited to guiding us through our present economic and regulatory quagmires because it is concerned with the achievable rather than the ideal. It recognizes that happiness comes from upholding a certain balance, by living according to a system of beliefs that restrains and gives coherence to our desires. Dharma does not seek moral perfection as Christianity or Islam does. Hence, pragmatic Indian statesmen throughout history have turned to it to address issues of public policy.
Dharma is probably best exemplified by the story of Queen Draupadi in the 2,000-year-old Indian epic, the "Mahabharata." In it, the queen asks her husband, Yudhishthira, about unmerited suffering: "When everything was going so well for us, why was our kingdom stolen in a rigged game of dice?" she complains. She exhorts her husband, who gambled away the kingdom, to raise an army and get their possessions back. But he reminds her that he has given his word to his enemies to remain in exile for 13 years as punishment for losing the game.
"What is the point of being good?" she persists. "Isn't it better to be powerful and rich than to be good in an unfair world where those who steal and cheat sleep on sheets of silk and pillows of down while those who are good have to settle for the hard earth? Why be good?" To this he replies in the only way that he knows: "I act because I must."
The King's answer represents the uncompromising, compelling voice of dharma. For him, good acts produce good karma, and these acts eventually change the balance of dharma in the universe. If people did not keep their commitments, the social order and the rule of law would collapse. Dharma is needed by everyone to live a happy, flourishing life.
There were many dharma failures in the run-up to today's economic crisis, in which all actors seemed to behave rationally. When U.S. house prices were rising and interest rates were low, even the poor got a chance to get a mortgage and a home. Banks securitized these mortgages and sold these complex financial products to other financial institutions, who also gained through better returns. When the housing market turned down, these financial products turned toxic. Whom do you fault?
Dharma draws a fine line between rational self-interest and selfishness. It would judge all actors in today's crisis guilty for tipping the balance of dharma in the wrong way. The undeserving recipient of the loan may have misjudged his or her ability to repay. The banker, motivated by short-term reward, pushed subprime mortgages to shaky borrowers without doing sufficient due diligence. Rating agencies underestimated the riskiness of the assets. The institution that bought the risky financial products failed to protect its shareholders. Regulators were captured by interests -- and when they acted, it was from domestic compulsions, forgetting the global consequences.
President Barack Obama's reaction to the crisis, among other things, was to seek to claw back bank bonuses. Congressional Democrats suggested an extortionate tax on bonus recipients at banks that received federal bailout money. To want to punish someone in this crisis is understandable but it is a dangerous path. What the world needs instead is the calm and principled voice of King Yudhishthira. He would have appealed for a voluntary return of bonuses while explaining to the public that Wall Street had been bailed out to save Main Street's pain. Furthermore, honoring bonus contracts is necessary to support the rule of law.
If envy is the sin of socialism, greed is the sin of capitalism. As capitalist nations grow, the resulting wealth creates enervating influences. Generations of savers are replaced by spenders. Ferocious competition is a feature of the free market and it can be corrosive. But it is also an economic stimulant that promotes human welfare. The subtle art of dharma tries to strike the right balance between healthy and unhealthy competition.
The choice for policy makers today is not between free markets and central planning but in getting the mix of regulation right. No one wants state ownership of production where the absence of competition corrodes the character even more. Dharma's approach is not to seek moral perfection, which leads inevitably to theocracy or dictatorship. It recognizes that it is in man's nature to want more and it seeks to give coherence to our desires by containing them within the discipline of an ordered existence.
only catches crooks but also rewards dharma-like behavior and nobility of character.
Mr. Das is the author of the forthcoming book, "The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma" (Penguin).
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Young India, old politicians
Not a single politician has explained to us during this election campaign why India has risen to become the world’s second fastest growing economy. It did not happen because our leaders gave cheap rice, reservations, employment guarantee schemes, loan waivers, or anything else on the mind of our political class. Hence, a suspicion has grown that our country may be rising despite its politicians and the economy grows at night when the government is asleep. The best that our leaders have done since 1991 is to gradually get out of the people’s way.
If one did manage to find a stray neta who understood the reasons behind India’s success, it would probably be a younger one. For it is young, self-assured Indians, whose minds are decolonized, and who are confidently scripting India’s success story via the private sector. This is unlike China, whose success is being orchestrated by a purposeful state. This too makes sense for three fourths of China’s politburo consists of young technocrats. In comparison, almost one fourth of India’s greying legislators have a criminal record.
If India can rise despite the state, it would seem to matter less and less who wins this election and which coalition comes to power. The ability of politicians to do real harm (as they could during the ‘licence raj’) has diminished. What is remarkable about India’s history is not what happened in 1991, but that every government after that has continued to reform, albeit in a slow, halting manner. Even slow reforms have added up to make India a high growth economy. That it has happened in a chaotic democracy in which Mayawati aspires to be PM is the real triumph.
The political reason for our success is that every government had a few young reformers, who understood that a nation prospers not by giving people fish but by teaching them to fish. In 1997, Chidambaram delivered a ‘dream budget’ when no one was looking; Arun Shourie had the determination to push through the privatization of loss making state companies against opposition within his coalition; BC Khanduri had the will and the skill to push forward an ambitious highways program; Lalu Prasad had the good sense to leave it to young Sudhir Kumar to stage the greatest turnaround in the Indian Railways; Suresh Prabhu did wonders in electric power until his envious, ageing boss cut him down. These were young men in a hurry. Compare them to the sad, elderly Arjun Singh, who fell asleep during meetings and cussedly refused to reform our education system.
The Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, is unique in engaging with the world of politics and it has a lesson for our rulers--learn to behave your age. The classical Indian life is lived in stages. The first is brahmacharya—the period of adolescence when one is a celibate student; in the worldly second stage, grihasthya, the householder produces, procreates, provides security for the family and enjoys the world. At the third, vanaprasthya stage, one begins to disengage from worldly pursuits to have time for rest and reflection; and in the final stage, sanyasa, one renounces the world in quest of spiritual release from human bondage. This is how to live a flourishing and balanced life. The Mahabharata reminds us that the second stage is the indispensable material basis of civilization, and this is the time for politicians to become statesmen. Our weary, old politicians have got it all wrong—they are trying to hold on to power at the wrong stage of life. The epic would approve of Rahul Gandhi’s efforts to bring the young into our political life.
Because of high growth, prosperity will now spread in India but happiness will not unless we fix governance. Every political party has promised cheap rice, more schools, more hospitals and more everything in its manifesto. But 80% of the rice will not reach the poor, 25% of the teachers will be absent from schools and 40% of the doctors will not show up at primary health centres. A few, younger MPs have understood the Indian voter’s deep despair over corruption in the delivery of public services. Hence, they have rightly concluded that our first priority must now be not economic reform but governance reform.
The Mahabharata also had a problem with the self-destructive, kshatriya institutions of its time, and it had to wage a war to cleanse them. We too, I fear, will have to wage a Kurukshetra-like battle against our corrupt government institutions in order to bring accountability into public life. Like Yudhishthira in the epic, we shall have to struggle in order to recover dharma and a meaningful ideal of civic virtue. Fortunately, a few younger netas understand this and it is they who will write our future and not the tired old men who are trying desperately to hold on to power while pretending to rule us.
----
The writer’s forthcoming book, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma, interrogates the Mahabharata in order to answer the question ‘why be good?’
If one did manage to find a stray neta who understood the reasons behind India’s success, it would probably be a younger one. For it is young, self-assured Indians, whose minds are decolonized, and who are confidently scripting India’s success story via the private sector. This is unlike China, whose success is being orchestrated by a purposeful state. This too makes sense for three fourths of China’s politburo consists of young technocrats. In comparison, almost one fourth of India’s greying legislators have a criminal record.
If India can rise despite the state, it would seem to matter less and less who wins this election and which coalition comes to power. The ability of politicians to do real harm (as they could during the ‘licence raj’) has diminished. What is remarkable about India’s history is not what happened in 1991, but that every government after that has continued to reform, albeit in a slow, halting manner. Even slow reforms have added up to make India a high growth economy. That it has happened in a chaotic democracy in which Mayawati aspires to be PM is the real triumph.
The political reason for our success is that every government had a few young reformers, who understood that a nation prospers not by giving people fish but by teaching them to fish. In 1997, Chidambaram delivered a ‘dream budget’ when no one was looking; Arun Shourie had the determination to push through the privatization of loss making state companies against opposition within his coalition; BC Khanduri had the will and the skill to push forward an ambitious highways program; Lalu Prasad had the good sense to leave it to young Sudhir Kumar to stage the greatest turnaround in the Indian Railways; Suresh Prabhu did wonders in electric power until his envious, ageing boss cut him down. These were young men in a hurry. Compare them to the sad, elderly Arjun Singh, who fell asleep during meetings and cussedly refused to reform our education system.
The Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, is unique in engaging with the world of politics and it has a lesson for our rulers--learn to behave your age. The classical Indian life is lived in stages. The first is brahmacharya—the period of adolescence when one is a celibate student; in the worldly second stage, grihasthya, the householder produces, procreates, provides security for the family and enjoys the world. At the third, vanaprasthya stage, one begins to disengage from worldly pursuits to have time for rest and reflection; and in the final stage, sanyasa, one renounces the world in quest of spiritual release from human bondage. This is how to live a flourishing and balanced life. The Mahabharata reminds us that the second stage is the indispensable material basis of civilization, and this is the time for politicians to become statesmen. Our weary, old politicians have got it all wrong—they are trying to hold on to power at the wrong stage of life. The epic would approve of Rahul Gandhi’s efforts to bring the young into our political life.
Because of high growth, prosperity will now spread in India but happiness will not unless we fix governance. Every political party has promised cheap rice, more schools, more hospitals and more everything in its manifesto. But 80% of the rice will not reach the poor, 25% of the teachers will be absent from schools and 40% of the doctors will not show up at primary health centres. A few, younger MPs have understood the Indian voter’s deep despair over corruption in the delivery of public services. Hence, they have rightly concluded that our first priority must now be not economic reform but governance reform.
The Mahabharata also had a problem with the self-destructive, kshatriya institutions of its time, and it had to wage a war to cleanse them. We too, I fear, will have to wage a Kurukshetra-like battle against our corrupt government institutions in order to bring accountability into public life. Like Yudhishthira in the epic, we shall have to struggle in order to recover dharma and a meaningful ideal of civic virtue. Fortunately, a few younger netas understand this and it is they who will write our future and not the tired old men who are trying desperately to hold on to power while pretending to rule us.
----
The writer’s forthcoming book, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma, interrogates the Mahabharata in order to answer the question ‘why be good?’
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Dharma fails on Wall Street
‘Oh, so you are one of them!’ is how someone greeted my nephew, who is embarrassed to tell people that he is an investment banker. ‘I’d rather say that I run a brothel,’ he says. ‘At least, that’s a business people understand.’ Bankers, having brought the world economy to its knees, have become pariahs overnight and a target of people’s rage. International Labour Organization warns that global unemployment could hit a staggering 50 million. A typical knee jerk reaction is call it ‘greed’ but that is not helpful. We have always known that if envy is a sin of socialism, greed is a failing of capitalism. Much has been written of this crisis but not enough about its moral quality. Do free markets inherently corrode character?
There were many dharma failures in this drama. When U.S. house prices were rising and interest rates were low, even the poor got a chance to get a mortgage and a home. Who could oppose that! Banks combined these mortgages into a collateral debt obligation (CDO), got it rated, and sold it to institutions, who also gained through better returns. When the housing market turned down the CDOs became toxic. Who do you blame? In a sense all are guilty. There is a fine line between self-interest and selfishness and the balance of dharma tipped the wrong way. The undeserving recipient of the loan lied about his ability to repay; the banker, moved by short term reward, promoted the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage; the rating agency was dishonest in colluding with the bank; the institution who bought the risky CDO failed in its duty to protect its shareholders.
The calamity might have been contained if Lehman Brothers had been bailed out on September 14, 2008. The old rivalry between Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, and Hank Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs may have come in the way. The blue bloods at Goldman Sachs had long harboured a deep prejudice against the upstarts at Lehman. Fuld was arrogant and always managed to steal the limelight. But Paulson, as U.S. Treasury Secretary, possibly unconsciously, allowed personal prejudice to distort his thinking when he refused to save Lehman. When Lehman collapsed, so did confidence and bank liquidity, and this was the tipping point of the global collapse.
It is extraordinary that there is no remorse. Investment bankers who tipped the global economy into a recession, still expected bonuses, as though they had a God given right to earn more than ordinary human beings, much like the aristocracy just before the French Revolution. Particularly embarrassing was the disclosure about John Thain, chairman of Merrill Lynch, who spent $1.2 million to do up his office, which included a $1400 waste paper basket and $35,000 commode in the bathroom. He paid $4 billion in bonuses to his executives when Merrill Lynch had declared a loss of $15 billion in Q4. When he said that bonuses were needed ‘to retain the best people’, someone quipped, ‘What best people? They just lost you $15 billion!’
It is a lesson for the millions in India who have just risen into the middle class. Successes of capitalism produce over time enervating influences when a generation committed to saving is replaced by one devoted to spending. Ferocious competition is a feature of the free market and it can be corrosive. But competition is also an economic stimulant that promotes human welfare. The choice is not between the free market and central planning but in getting the right mix of regulation. No one wants state ownership of production where the absence of competition corrodes the character even more. The answer is not to seek moral perfection which inevitably leads to theocracy and dictatorship. Since it is in man’s nature to want more, let’s learn to live with human imperfection, and seek regulation that not only tames crooks in the market but also rewards dharma-like behaviour.
A person who lost her job because of troubles on Wall Street, insistently asks, ‘Why me? What did I do to deserve this?’ Draupadi asked the same question in the Mahabharata. ‘When everything was going well for us, why was our kingdom stolen in a rigged game of dice?’ She wants her husband to raise an army, and win it back. But Yudhishthira says that he has given his word. ‘But what is the point of being good?’ she asks. To which he replies, ‘I act because I must’. It is the uncompromising, compelling voice of dharma. This is an answer that the investment bankers might ponder.
------
There were many dharma failures in this drama. When U.S. house prices were rising and interest rates were low, even the poor got a chance to get a mortgage and a home. Who could oppose that! Banks combined these mortgages into a collateral debt obligation (CDO), got it rated, and sold it to institutions, who also gained through better returns. When the housing market turned down the CDOs became toxic. Who do you blame? In a sense all are guilty. There is a fine line between self-interest and selfishness and the balance of dharma tipped the wrong way. The undeserving recipient of the loan lied about his ability to repay; the banker, moved by short term reward, promoted the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage; the rating agency was dishonest in colluding with the bank; the institution who bought the risky CDO failed in its duty to protect its shareholders.
The calamity might have been contained if Lehman Brothers had been bailed out on September 14, 2008. The old rivalry between Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, and Hank Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs may have come in the way. The blue bloods at Goldman Sachs had long harboured a deep prejudice against the upstarts at Lehman. Fuld was arrogant and always managed to steal the limelight. But Paulson, as U.S. Treasury Secretary, possibly unconsciously, allowed personal prejudice to distort his thinking when he refused to save Lehman. When Lehman collapsed, so did confidence and bank liquidity, and this was the tipping point of the global collapse.
It is extraordinary that there is no remorse. Investment bankers who tipped the global economy into a recession, still expected bonuses, as though they had a God given right to earn more than ordinary human beings, much like the aristocracy just before the French Revolution. Particularly embarrassing was the disclosure about John Thain, chairman of Merrill Lynch, who spent $1.2 million to do up his office, which included a $1400 waste paper basket and $35,000 commode in the bathroom. He paid $4 billion in bonuses to his executives when Merrill Lynch had declared a loss of $15 billion in Q4. When he said that bonuses were needed ‘to retain the best people’, someone quipped, ‘What best people? They just lost you $15 billion!’
It is a lesson for the millions in India who have just risen into the middle class. Successes of capitalism produce over time enervating influences when a generation committed to saving is replaced by one devoted to spending. Ferocious competition is a feature of the free market and it can be corrosive. But competition is also an economic stimulant that promotes human welfare. The choice is not between the free market and central planning but in getting the right mix of regulation. No one wants state ownership of production where the absence of competition corrodes the character even more. The answer is not to seek moral perfection which inevitably leads to theocracy and dictatorship. Since it is in man’s nature to want more, let’s learn to live with human imperfection, and seek regulation that not only tames crooks in the market but also rewards dharma-like behaviour.
A person who lost her job because of troubles on Wall Street, insistently asks, ‘Why me? What did I do to deserve this?’ Draupadi asked the same question in the Mahabharata. ‘When everything was going well for us, why was our kingdom stolen in a rigged game of dice?’ She wants her husband to raise an army, and win it back. But Yudhishthira says that he has given his word. ‘But what is the point of being good?’ she asks. To which he replies, ‘I act because I must’. It is the uncompromising, compelling voice of dharma. This is an answer that the investment bankers might ponder.
------
Sunday, January 25, 2009
On the difficulty of being good
B. Ramalingam Raju has been much on the minds of the citizens of our Republic, whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow. It is thus a good time to reflect on Satyam’s moral significance for our post-liberalization era. Although the story is still unfolding, there are intimations of sadness and tragedy about a man who has committed the greatest fraud in Indian corporate history. The swindle was worth Rs. 7136 crores, and the deceit went on for seven years. As a result, the public—both Indian and foreign investors—have lost around Rs 23,000 crores in the value of their shares, and over 40,000 employees face an uncertain future.
Raju built through skill, talent and dedication a great company. Ten years ago, I looked him in the eye and I saw sincerity, competence, and great purpose. I saw ambition, not greed. Soon after that I ran into one of his customers in the U.S. and she spoke glowingly about Satyam’s dedication to quality, reliability, and integrity. There is no tribute greater than a satisfied, passionate customer, and it explained to my foggy mind, at least in part, why India had become the world’s second fastest growing economy.
Why should a person of such palpable achievement turn to crime? Was it just greed or was it because his stake in Satyam had dwindled to 8.6 %, and the company was in danger of slipping out of the family’s control? Raju had two sons and possibly a sense of filial duty drove him to create companies in real estate and infrastructure, two sectors of our economy that are only half liberalized, where politicians insist on bribes up-front for favours delivered. Since revenues from the new companies were far away, Raju dipped into Satyam to pay the politicians. It might have worked but no one counted on a downturn and a liquidity crisis. Desperately, he tried to restore the stolen assets back to Satyam by merging it with his son’s companies but that didn’t work.
When Raju crossed the line from his cheerful and familiar world of open and competitive capitalism into the dark nether regions of crony capitalism, he was no longer in control. He had walked from the transparent world of reformed India into the shadowy underworld of unreformed India, whose rules are set by crooked politicians. Why did he do it? Greed is too easy an answer. It might have been hubris, like Duryodhana’s in the Mahabharata, who thought he was master of the universe and could get away with anything. It is easy to believe your infallibility when everyone in Hyderabad tells you so.
The better comparison, I believe, is with the father. Raju was ruined by his Dhritarashtra-like weakness for his sons. We should nurture our children, but we don’t need to leave them a company each, certainly not by crossing the line of dharma. It takes moral courage to resist the sentiment of partiality to one’s family. This is why the Mahabharata challenges the old sva-dharma of family and caste, preferring instead the newer, universal sadharana-dharma, which teaches us to with behave impartially with everyone.
Satyam is a case of fraud and criminality. So, let us also stop wringing our hands, looking for regulatory answers. It is not a governance failure. Internal and external auditors, and independent directors are guilty only of negligence. This was such an ingenious crime that that no still understands it. Remember, there are crooks in every society, and they will get around the most fool-proof systems. So, don’t try to reform the system—it will only create more red tape and kill the animal spirits of capitalism. The important thing is to quickly get to the truth, and put the guilty behind bars. Ideally, make the crooks sing and book their political protectors as well. Don’t blame liberalization either--the answer is more reform, not less, in order to break the nexus between politicians and business in the unreformed sectors of our economy.
Raju’s story causes us discomfort because it challenges our unexamined conception of success. Surely, there is a better way to live, we ask. Yudhishthira also challenged the kshatriya concept of success in the Mahabharata. When he insisted on taking a stray dog into heaven, he performed an act of dharma, showing that goodness is one of the few things of genuine worth in this world that might take away some of the familiar pain of being alive and being human in these post-liberalization times.
----
Raju built through skill, talent and dedication a great company. Ten years ago, I looked him in the eye and I saw sincerity, competence, and great purpose. I saw ambition, not greed. Soon after that I ran into one of his customers in the U.S. and she spoke glowingly about Satyam’s dedication to quality, reliability, and integrity. There is no tribute greater than a satisfied, passionate customer, and it explained to my foggy mind, at least in part, why India had become the world’s second fastest growing economy.
Why should a person of such palpable achievement turn to crime? Was it just greed or was it because his stake in Satyam had dwindled to 8.6 %, and the company was in danger of slipping out of the family’s control? Raju had two sons and possibly a sense of filial duty drove him to create companies in real estate and infrastructure, two sectors of our economy that are only half liberalized, where politicians insist on bribes up-front for favours delivered. Since revenues from the new companies were far away, Raju dipped into Satyam to pay the politicians. It might have worked but no one counted on a downturn and a liquidity crisis. Desperately, he tried to restore the stolen assets back to Satyam by merging it with his son’s companies but that didn’t work.
When Raju crossed the line from his cheerful and familiar world of open and competitive capitalism into the dark nether regions of crony capitalism, he was no longer in control. He had walked from the transparent world of reformed India into the shadowy underworld of unreformed India, whose rules are set by crooked politicians. Why did he do it? Greed is too easy an answer. It might have been hubris, like Duryodhana’s in the Mahabharata, who thought he was master of the universe and could get away with anything. It is easy to believe your infallibility when everyone in Hyderabad tells you so.
The better comparison, I believe, is with the father. Raju was ruined by his Dhritarashtra-like weakness for his sons. We should nurture our children, but we don’t need to leave them a company each, certainly not by crossing the line of dharma. It takes moral courage to resist the sentiment of partiality to one’s family. This is why the Mahabharata challenges the old sva-dharma of family and caste, preferring instead the newer, universal sadharana-dharma, which teaches us to with behave impartially with everyone.
Satyam is a case of fraud and criminality. So, let us also stop wringing our hands, looking for regulatory answers. It is not a governance failure. Internal and external auditors, and independent directors are guilty only of negligence. This was such an ingenious crime that that no still understands it. Remember, there are crooks in every society, and they will get around the most fool-proof systems. So, don’t try to reform the system—it will only create more red tape and kill the animal spirits of capitalism. The important thing is to quickly get to the truth, and put the guilty behind bars. Ideally, make the crooks sing and book their political protectors as well. Don’t blame liberalization either--the answer is more reform, not less, in order to break the nexus between politicians and business in the unreformed sectors of our economy.
Raju’s story causes us discomfort because it challenges our unexamined conception of success. Surely, there is a better way to live, we ask. Yudhishthira also challenged the kshatriya concept of success in the Mahabharata. When he insisted on taking a stray dog into heaven, he performed an act of dharma, showing that goodness is one of the few things of genuine worth in this world that might take away some of the familiar pain of being alive and being human in these post-liberalization times.
----
Friday, January 02, 2009
The Next World Order, New York Times
CHINA and India are in a struggle for a top rung on the ladder of world power, but their approaches to the state and to power could not be more different.
Two days after last month’s terrorist attack on Mumbai, I met with a Chinese friend who was visiting India on business. He was shocked as much by the transparent and competitive minute-by-minute reporting of the attack by India’s dozens of news channels as by the ineffectual response of the government. He had seen a middle-class housewife on national television tell a reporter that the Indian commandos delayed in engaging the terrorists because they were too busy guarding political big shots. He asked how the woman could get away with such a statement.
I explained sarcasm resonates in a nation that is angry and disappointed with its politicians. My friend switched the subject to the poor condition of India’s roads, its dilapidated cities and the constant blackouts. Suddenly, he stopped and asked: “With all this, how did you become the second-fastest growing economy in the world? China’s leaders fear the day when India’s government will get its act together.”
The answer to his question may lie in a common saying among Indians that “our economy grows at night when the government is asleep.” As if to illustrate this, the Mumbai stock market rose in the period after the terrorist attacks. Two weeks later, in several state elections, incumbents were ousted over economic issues, not security.
All this baffled my Chinese friend, and undoubtedly many of his countrymen, whose own success story has been scripted by an efficient state. They are uneasy because their chief ally, Pakistan, is consistently linked to terrorism while across the border India’s economy keeps rising disdainfully. It puzzles them that the anger in India over the Mumbai attacks is directed against Indian politicians rather than Muslims or Pakistan.
The global financial crisis has definitely affected India’s growth, and it will be down to perhaps 7 percent this year from 8.7 percent in 2007. According to my friend, China is hurting even more. What really perplexes the Chinese, he said, is that scores of nations have engaged in the same sorts of economic reforms as India, so why is it that it’s the Indian economy that has become the developing world’s second best? The speed with which India is creating world-class companies is also a shock to the Chinese, whose corporate structure is based on state-owned and foreign companies.
I have no satisfactory explanation for all this, but I think it may have something to do with India’s much-reviled caste system. Vaishyas, members of the merchant caste, who have learned over generations how to accumulate capital, give the nation a competitive advantage. Classical liberals may be right in thinking that commerce is a natural trait, but it helps if there is a devoted group of risk-taking entrepreneurs around to take advantage of the opportunity. Not surprisingly, Vaishyas still dominate the Forbes list of Indian billionaires.
In a much-discussed magazine article last year, Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, raised an important question: Why does the rest of the world view China’s rise as a threat but India’s as a wonderful success story? The answer is that India is a vast, unwieldy, open democracy ruled by a coalition of 20 parties. It is evolving through a daily flow of ideas among the conservative forces of caste and religion, the liberals who dominate intellectual life, and the new forces of global capitalism.
The idea of becoming a military power in the 21st century embarrasses many Indians. This ambivalence goes beyond Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle for India’s freedom, or even the Buddha’s message of peace. The skeptical Indian temper goes back to the 3,500-year-old “Nasadiya” verse of the Rig Veda, which meditates on the creation of the universe: “Who knows and who can say, whence it was born and whence came this creation? The gods are later than this world’s creation. Who knows then whence it first came into being?” When you have millions of gods, you cannot afford to be theologically narcissistic. It also makes you suspect power.
Both the Chinese and the Indians are convinced that their prosperity will only increase in the 21st century. In China it will be induced by the state; in India’s case, it may well happen despite the state. Indians expect to continue their relentless march toward a modern, democratic, market-based future. In this, terrorist attacks are a noisy, tragic, but ultimately futile sideshow.
However, Indians are painfully aware that they must reform their government bureaucracy, police and judiciary — institutions, paradoxically, they were so proud of a generation ago. When that happens, India may become formidable, a thought that undoubtedly worries China’s leaders.
---Gurcharan Das is the author of “India Unbound.”
Two days after last month’s terrorist attack on Mumbai, I met with a Chinese friend who was visiting India on business. He was shocked as much by the transparent and competitive minute-by-minute reporting of the attack by India’s dozens of news channels as by the ineffectual response of the government. He had seen a middle-class housewife on national television tell a reporter that the Indian commandos delayed in engaging the terrorists because they were too busy guarding political big shots. He asked how the woman could get away with such a statement.
I explained sarcasm resonates in a nation that is angry and disappointed with its politicians. My friend switched the subject to the poor condition of India’s roads, its dilapidated cities and the constant blackouts. Suddenly, he stopped and asked: “With all this, how did you become the second-fastest growing economy in the world? China’s leaders fear the day when India’s government will get its act together.”
The answer to his question may lie in a common saying among Indians that “our economy grows at night when the government is asleep.” As if to illustrate this, the Mumbai stock market rose in the period after the terrorist attacks. Two weeks later, in several state elections, incumbents were ousted over economic issues, not security.
All this baffled my Chinese friend, and undoubtedly many of his countrymen, whose own success story has been scripted by an efficient state. They are uneasy because their chief ally, Pakistan, is consistently linked to terrorism while across the border India’s economy keeps rising disdainfully. It puzzles them that the anger in India over the Mumbai attacks is directed against Indian politicians rather than Muslims or Pakistan.
The global financial crisis has definitely affected India’s growth, and it will be down to perhaps 7 percent this year from 8.7 percent in 2007. According to my friend, China is hurting even more. What really perplexes the Chinese, he said, is that scores of nations have engaged in the same sorts of economic reforms as India, so why is it that it’s the Indian economy that has become the developing world’s second best? The speed with which India is creating world-class companies is also a shock to the Chinese, whose corporate structure is based on state-owned and foreign companies.
I have no satisfactory explanation for all this, but I think it may have something to do with India’s much-reviled caste system. Vaishyas, members of the merchant caste, who have learned over generations how to accumulate capital, give the nation a competitive advantage. Classical liberals may be right in thinking that commerce is a natural trait, but it helps if there is a devoted group of risk-taking entrepreneurs around to take advantage of the opportunity. Not surprisingly, Vaishyas still dominate the Forbes list of Indian billionaires.
In a much-discussed magazine article last year, Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, raised an important question: Why does the rest of the world view China’s rise as a threat but India’s as a wonderful success story? The answer is that India is a vast, unwieldy, open democracy ruled by a coalition of 20 parties. It is evolving through a daily flow of ideas among the conservative forces of caste and religion, the liberals who dominate intellectual life, and the new forces of global capitalism.
The idea of becoming a military power in the 21st century embarrasses many Indians. This ambivalence goes beyond Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle for India’s freedom, or even the Buddha’s message of peace. The skeptical Indian temper goes back to the 3,500-year-old “Nasadiya” verse of the Rig Veda, which meditates on the creation of the universe: “Who knows and who can say, whence it was born and whence came this creation? The gods are later than this world’s creation. Who knows then whence it first came into being?” When you have millions of gods, you cannot afford to be theologically narcissistic. It also makes you suspect power.
Both the Chinese and the Indians are convinced that their prosperity will only increase in the 21st century. In China it will be induced by the state; in India’s case, it may well happen despite the state. Indians expect to continue their relentless march toward a modern, democratic, market-based future. In this, terrorist attacks are a noisy, tragic, but ultimately futile sideshow.
However, Indians are painfully aware that they must reform their government bureaucracy, police and judiciary — institutions, paradoxically, they were so proud of a generation ago. When that happens, India may become formidable, a thought that undoubtedly worries China’s leaders.
---Gurcharan Das is the author of “India Unbound.”
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Changing rules of dharma
Speaking of the global financial crisis, Sonia Gandhi recently applauded Indira Gandhi’s bank nationalization of 1969, saying that it had given India ‘stability and resilience’. Like the Bourbons of France our political class neither learns nor forgets anything. I don’t think Sonia Gandhi realizes quite what she was saying. India’s bank nationalization delivered neither growth nor equity. Any public sector bank manager will tell you how loans were diverted to friends of politicians rather than to commercially deserving farmers. Bad debts of banks rose alarmingly in the 1980s and moral hazards persist.
Indira Gandhi drew us further away from world trade, raised tariffs and taxes, and made us one of the world’s worst performing economies from 1966 to 1989. Industrial growth plunged to 4% a year vs. 7.7 % in 1951-1965. Manufacturing productivity declined half a per cent a year. Rakesh Mohan estimates that her mistakes cost the nation 1.3 per cent lower GDP per capita per year—meaning that our income would have been more than double today. I don’t blame Nehru for adopting the wrong economic model as socialism was the wisdom of his age; I blame Indira for not reversing course as sensible countries in East and Southeast Asia did. Even China changed in 1978, but we had to wait till 1991. She multiplied by zero and put us back by a generation.
But let’s not dwell on the past. India is in the midst of a dire crisis and we don’t seem to realize how much we are hurting. Panic has choked credit worldwide. Our economy is slowing pitifully. Exports are collapsing. Banks have stopped lending. Construction has come to a halt. Fear has taken over, and people are not buying (except mobile phones). As demand shrinks, so do revenues and profits of companies. Investment has stopped and lakhs in textiles and construction are out of work.
The Mahabharata points out that rules of dharma change in times of crisis when one is forced to observe apad-dharma. Paradoxically, defending capitalism requires state intervention. History teaches that decisive government action can stem the pain. If Lehman had been bailed out the world might not have gone over the cliff. But once normal times return governments must sell off the banks that they had bailed out and not leave them as cash cows for politicians, like our public sector banks.
The quickest way to restore confidence is to further cut interest rates, CRR and SLR, and recapitalize banks. Today’s rates are still too high. Since oil and commodity prices have plunged, the risk of inflation has receded. As property prices decline, and as old mortgage terms become available, people will begin to buy the homes they postponed when interest rates rose. When people buy houses, they give jobs to millions. The same goes for other sectors. Consumer spending will raise demand, restore production, and lead to investment. There is a currency risk in this strategy, of course, but the risk of deflation is greater.
Of course, we should spend massively in infrastructure, but the trouble is that even the current programs are not moving. World Bank has threatened to withdraw funding from highway projects. 234 out of 515 Central projects are delayed. Hence, public spending wont work when speed is of the essence. The saving grace is that we have been accidentally ‘pump priming’ via the rural employment guarantee scheme and loan waivers. What we must not do is to close borders no matter how much local industry clamours for protection. In the 1930s every country tried to protect its own industry. World trade declined 60% between 1929 and 1932 and this caused a worldwide depression. We must do everything to protect the fruits of globalization which has lifted millions out of absolute poverty over the past 20 years. No one can predict when the present crisis will be over. Things could get much worse, meanwhile, but capitalism will eventually correct itself.
Indira Gandhi drew us further away from world trade, raised tariffs and taxes, and made us one of the world’s worst performing economies from 1966 to 1989. Industrial growth plunged to 4% a year vs. 7.7 % in 1951-1965. Manufacturing productivity declined half a per cent a year. Rakesh Mohan estimates that her mistakes cost the nation 1.3 per cent lower GDP per capita per year—meaning that our income would have been more than double today. I don’t blame Nehru for adopting the wrong economic model as socialism was the wisdom of his age; I blame Indira for not reversing course as sensible countries in East and Southeast Asia did. Even China changed in 1978, but we had to wait till 1991. She multiplied by zero and put us back by a generation.
But let’s not dwell on the past. India is in the midst of a dire crisis and we don’t seem to realize how much we are hurting. Panic has choked credit worldwide. Our economy is slowing pitifully. Exports are collapsing. Banks have stopped lending. Construction has come to a halt. Fear has taken over, and people are not buying (except mobile phones). As demand shrinks, so do revenues and profits of companies. Investment has stopped and lakhs in textiles and construction are out of work.
The Mahabharata points out that rules of dharma change in times of crisis when one is forced to observe apad-dharma. Paradoxically, defending capitalism requires state intervention. History teaches that decisive government action can stem the pain. If Lehman had been bailed out the world might not have gone over the cliff. But once normal times return governments must sell off the banks that they had bailed out and not leave them as cash cows for politicians, like our public sector banks.
The quickest way to restore confidence is to further cut interest rates, CRR and SLR, and recapitalize banks. Today’s rates are still too high. Since oil and commodity prices have plunged, the risk of inflation has receded. As property prices decline, and as old mortgage terms become available, people will begin to buy the homes they postponed when interest rates rose. When people buy houses, they give jobs to millions. The same goes for other sectors. Consumer spending will raise demand, restore production, and lead to investment. There is a currency risk in this strategy, of course, but the risk of deflation is greater.
Of course, we should spend massively in infrastructure, but the trouble is that even the current programs are not moving. World Bank has threatened to withdraw funding from highway projects. 234 out of 515 Central projects are delayed. Hence, public spending wont work when speed is of the essence. The saving grace is that we have been accidentally ‘pump priming’ via the rural employment guarantee scheme and loan waivers. What we must not do is to close borders no matter how much local industry clamours for protection. In the 1930s every country tried to protect its own industry. World trade declined 60% between 1929 and 1932 and this caused a worldwide depression. We must do everything to protect the fruits of globalization which has lifted millions out of absolute poverty over the past 20 years. No one can predict when the present crisis will be over. Things could get much worse, meanwhile, but capitalism will eventually correct itself.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
What are you reading these days?
One of my earliest memories is of a visit to a lending library. We lived in Shimla and I had discovered a circulating library near our home. Since my mother would not let me borrow a comic, I picked up my first copy of Enid Blyton. When we got home, my overbearing uncle thundered: “How can you let the boy read this trash!” Blyton may not be Shakespeare but with her I began my love affair with reading. When my kids were of that age they too found a lending library at Kemps Corner in Mumbai. When our family meets nowadays, we don’t ask, ‘how are you feeling?’ We ask, ‘and what are you reading these days?’
Just as a great city must have a big public park along with lots of small neighbourhood parks, so it must have one big public library and many neighbourhood libraries. Ideally, public libraries should be free, paid by taxes, and managed by the municipality. But this is a distant dream in India where the state has failed to deliver even more basic services like schools and hospitals. So, what do Indians do? Well, we don’t sit around. We start lending libraries in the bazaar, which are a metaphor of India’s middle class as it pulls itself up by its bootstraps. When government schools fail we start private schools in the slums; when public health centres fail, we open cheap health clinics.
Generally lending libraries charge ten percent of the book’s price. Since a new paperback costs Rs 200, one can borrow it for Rs 20, which is cheaper than an ice-cream. Chennai boasts the most lending libraries—129—but Eloor, they say, is the best with 80,000 volumes in a digital catalogue. Now thriving in Bangalore, Kolkata, and Delhi, it started in Kerala, the legendary home of the Reading Room movement. Hundred years ago villagers could not afford a newspaper and so they shared it or read it aloud to others. Thus, reading rooms were born. They made people politically aware, and EMS describes how they helped abolish the princely states of Travancore, Cochin and Malabar and united Kerala. By 1947 every village in Kerala had its reading room from which the communists recruited their cadres.
When I was thirteen, I visited America, where I discovered the neighbourhood public library from where I could borrow books for free. I walked in one day, filled out a form, and I was a member. The library had got started through a philanthropic donation of Andrew Carnegie, the ‘robber baron’ who built America’s steel industry. Between 1900 and 1917, Carnegie founded 3000 neighbourhood public libraries, insisting that the local municipality had to guarantee tax support for running and maintaining them.
In India, we do have some grand public libraries—the National Library in Kolkata, the Royal Asiatic in Bombay, and the splendid Connemara in Chennai. But these are more for scholars. Our most inspired library effort in recent years has been Delnet. The brain child of Dr HK Kaul, Delnet has electronically linked 1350 public libraries in India and a member can access 75 lakh books via an inter-library loan within 2-3 days.
But a neighbourhood library has a social purpose as well. Like a tea or a paan shop it brings people together. Delhi Public Library has a few branches but it insists on your identity verified by an MP/MLA/Gazetted Officer before you can borrow a book. My library in America only wanted an envelope bearing my family’s home address—such as a phone bill—as proof. I was treated as a citizen, not as a subject. Despite television and on-line reading, people will continue to read books for pleasure. Perhaps, one day we too will spawn our Carnegie. Or, as we turn into a middle class nation, we will demand publicly funded libraries. Meanwhile, at least, we have our lending library in the bazaar.
Just as a great city must have a big public park along with lots of small neighbourhood parks, so it must have one big public library and many neighbourhood libraries. Ideally, public libraries should be free, paid by taxes, and managed by the municipality. But this is a distant dream in India where the state has failed to deliver even more basic services like schools and hospitals. So, what do Indians do? Well, we don’t sit around. We start lending libraries in the bazaar, which are a metaphor of India’s middle class as it pulls itself up by its bootstraps. When government schools fail we start private schools in the slums; when public health centres fail, we open cheap health clinics.
Generally lending libraries charge ten percent of the book’s price. Since a new paperback costs Rs 200, one can borrow it for Rs 20, which is cheaper than an ice-cream. Chennai boasts the most lending libraries—129—but Eloor, they say, is the best with 80,000 volumes in a digital catalogue. Now thriving in Bangalore, Kolkata, and Delhi, it started in Kerala, the legendary home of the Reading Room movement. Hundred years ago villagers could not afford a newspaper and so they shared it or read it aloud to others. Thus, reading rooms were born. They made people politically aware, and EMS describes how they helped abolish the princely states of Travancore, Cochin and Malabar and united Kerala. By 1947 every village in Kerala had its reading room from which the communists recruited their cadres.
When I was thirteen, I visited America, where I discovered the neighbourhood public library from where I could borrow books for free. I walked in one day, filled out a form, and I was a member. The library had got started through a philanthropic donation of Andrew Carnegie, the ‘robber baron’ who built America’s steel industry. Between 1900 and 1917, Carnegie founded 3000 neighbourhood public libraries, insisting that the local municipality had to guarantee tax support for running and maintaining them.
In India, we do have some grand public libraries—the National Library in Kolkata, the Royal Asiatic in Bombay, and the splendid Connemara in Chennai. But these are more for scholars. Our most inspired library effort in recent years has been Delnet. The brain child of Dr HK Kaul, Delnet has electronically linked 1350 public libraries in India and a member can access 75 lakh books via an inter-library loan within 2-3 days.
But a neighbourhood library has a social purpose as well. Like a tea or a paan shop it brings people together. Delhi Public Library has a few branches but it insists on your identity verified by an MP/MLA/Gazetted Officer before you can borrow a book. My library in America only wanted an envelope bearing my family’s home address—such as a phone bill—as proof. I was treated as a citizen, not as a subject. Despite television and on-line reading, people will continue to read books for pleasure. Perhaps, one day we too will spawn our Carnegie. Or, as we turn into a middle class nation, we will demand publicly funded libraries. Meanwhile, at least, we have our lending library in the bazaar.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Finally, a lifeline for India’s poor November 2, 2008
Nothing causes as much anxiety in a family as when someone falls sick. 65% of India’s poor get into debt and 1% fall below the poverty line each year because of illness, according to NSSO 2004. The answer, of course, is health insurance, but only 6% of India’s workers have it. Free public hospitals are not an option as two out of five doctors are absent, and there is a 50% chance of receiving the wrong treatment, according Jishnu Das and Jeffrey Hammer’s study. This tragic state of affairs is, however, set to change dramatically with Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), a visionary national health insurance scheme, which provides Rs 30,000 ‘in patient’ health benefits at a premium of Rs 600, which the government pays if you are poor.
A brain child of an IAS officer, Anil Swarup, this scheme will succeed when others have failed because of choice, competition and a magical ‘smart card’. A patient can choose from almost 1000 private or government hospitals. States can choose from 18 public or private insurance companies. Insurers have the incentive to recruit the poor as they earn premiums by doing so. Hospitals will not turn away the poor because they don’t want to lose the Rs 30,000 in potential revenue. The poor have a choice to exit a bad hospital, something that only the rich can do today. Competition between hospitals will improve the quality of health care and new hospitals will come up because there is now money in catering to the poor.
The insured carry a smart card with a photo, fingerprints of the family, and an official’s ‘key’ who is accountable. It makes transactions cashless and paperless for the 725 pre-agreed medical procedures. This card contains Rs 30,000 and it tracks expenses day to day in the hospital and the money is deducted automatically after each procedure. No need for pre-approval or reimbursement. Since the poor are migratory birds, the smart card empowers a Bihari to use a hospital in Gujarat. Smart cards are designed to prevent fraud because of 11 unique types of embedded software.
So far 500,000 cards have been issued in six months covering 2.5 million people. Most states have agreed to the scheme because the centre foots 75% of the premia. Haryana and Gujarat are the most enthusiastic. Uttarakhand and Orissa are dragging their feet. Kerala is offering it to everyone as long as the non-poor pay their own premia; thus, it has become a universal product of the insurance company. Only Madhya Pradesh and the North East states, to their disgrace, have not joined. If all goes according to plan 30 crore people or one third of India will be covered in five years at an annual cost of Rs 4500 crores--a tiny sum compared to the money wasted in dozens of other schemes. Previous state health insurance schemes failed because they insisted that people use public hospitals and public insurers—with predictable results. This one will succeed because insurance companies, hospitals, and patients all have ‘skin in the game’.
Smart cards can dramatically cut corruption in all our social programs. India spends 14% of GDP in subsidies for the poor, which is more than enough to wipe out poverty. But poverty persists because subsidies leak out through corruption. Smart cards can also carry data on payments for rations (PDS) or earnings from employment schemes (NREGS) and it can expose corruption very quickly. Despite the Left’s strident rhetoric, middle class Indians do not resent income transfers to the poor as long as the benefits reach the poor. Our problems in India are of the ‘how’ not of the ‘what’. The smart card addresses the ‘how’, and we know its powerful because corrupt officials and politicians are trying hard to kill it. For the nation, it is the best Diwali present amidst all the gloom in the marketplace.
A brain child of an IAS officer, Anil Swarup, this scheme will succeed when others have failed because of choice, competition and a magical ‘smart card’. A patient can choose from almost 1000 private or government hospitals. States can choose from 18 public or private insurance companies. Insurers have the incentive to recruit the poor as they earn premiums by doing so. Hospitals will not turn away the poor because they don’t want to lose the Rs 30,000 in potential revenue. The poor have a choice to exit a bad hospital, something that only the rich can do today. Competition between hospitals will improve the quality of health care and new hospitals will come up because there is now money in catering to the poor.
The insured carry a smart card with a photo, fingerprints of the family, and an official’s ‘key’ who is accountable. It makes transactions cashless and paperless for the 725 pre-agreed medical procedures. This card contains Rs 30,000 and it tracks expenses day to day in the hospital and the money is deducted automatically after each procedure. No need for pre-approval or reimbursement. Since the poor are migratory birds, the smart card empowers a Bihari to use a hospital in Gujarat. Smart cards are designed to prevent fraud because of 11 unique types of embedded software.
So far 500,000 cards have been issued in six months covering 2.5 million people. Most states have agreed to the scheme because the centre foots 75% of the premia. Haryana and Gujarat are the most enthusiastic. Uttarakhand and Orissa are dragging their feet. Kerala is offering it to everyone as long as the non-poor pay their own premia; thus, it has become a universal product of the insurance company. Only Madhya Pradesh and the North East states, to their disgrace, have not joined. If all goes according to plan 30 crore people or one third of India will be covered in five years at an annual cost of Rs 4500 crores--a tiny sum compared to the money wasted in dozens of other schemes. Previous state health insurance schemes failed because they insisted that people use public hospitals and public insurers—with predictable results. This one will succeed because insurance companies, hospitals, and patients all have ‘skin in the game’.
Smart cards can dramatically cut corruption in all our social programs. India spends 14% of GDP in subsidies for the poor, which is more than enough to wipe out poverty. But poverty persists because subsidies leak out through corruption. Smart cards can also carry data on payments for rations (PDS) or earnings from employment schemes (NREGS) and it can expose corruption very quickly. Despite the Left’s strident rhetoric, middle class Indians do not resent income transfers to the poor as long as the benefits reach the poor. Our problems in India are of the ‘how’ not of the ‘what’. The smart card addresses the ‘how’, and we know its powerful because corrupt officials and politicians are trying hard to kill it. For the nation, it is the best Diwali present amidst all the gloom in the marketplace.
A passion for death or life? October 19, 2008
The persistent attacks of terror on Indian cities by Islamist fundamentalists and on Christians in Orissa by Hindu fundamentalists have spread fear, re-opened old wounds, and polarized us. India’s economic rise is threatened as much by religious fanatics as by the global financial meltdown. This raises an insistent question: Will our 21st century be the story of an India turning middle class or will it get derailed by religious wars?
I have always believed that India would relentlessly march towards a modern, capitalist and democratic future; and terrorist attacks are a noisy, tragic, but ultimately futile sideshow. Islamism and Hindu extremism are a barely disguised form of tyranny, which will eventually lose their appeal. Even fundamentalists will get absorbed in finding good jobs, decent homes, and good schools for their kids. Since the attractions of peace are greater than of war, commerce will replace conquest as the route to achievement. History is on my side. In the past two centuries, the combination of democracy and market capitalism has triumphed over feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, fascism and communism. Europe, the home of religious wars, is now tolerant, and irreligious. There are today 120 genuine democracies versus only 10 a hundred years ago.
Since 9/11, Americans have also been debating the future of capitalist democracy. Many believe that Islam is incompatible with modern democratic values. Samuel Huntington in his book, The Clash of Civilizations, argues that future conflicts will not be between nation states but religious civilisations, and he predicts that Islamism will form an alliance with China to bring down the West. Francis Fukuyama rebuts this in The End of History. After communism’s fall, he predicts most countries will become capitalist democracies and the world will be at peace. But people, he feels, need more than shopping malls to satisfy their thymos--the human need for spirited achievement, which religion and wars fulfilled in the past. This explains the amazing religious revival in America, which Philip Jenkins has documented in The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity. He describes a new, vigorous, missionary Christianity that is increasingly assertive. The question is whether aggressive conversions by this new Christianity is producing the current backlash from Hindu extremists, who are behaving no better than Islamist terrorists.
For all its seductiveness, I never did buy the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory. Radical Islam or jihadism is political rather than religious. Sayyid Qutb and Osama bin Laden employ dangerous ideas of violence that are not Islamic but resemble anarchist ideologies of Europe. They resonate with Arab and European Muslims because of their deeper alienation with the West. In India, we have reacted to terrorism more maturely than the U.S. Indians are more relaxed than paranoid Americans, and this must dishearten terrorists. Our security agencies have not shown the same competence, however. Our government has also failed to assert the primacy of the citizen over the group, and stop pandering to religious and caste identities. Religion is a double edged sword----while it gives meaning to our confused, uncertain private lives, it also creates an exclusive identity, and this asserts itself publicly before long. In a competitive democracy secular politics does not spring automatically. It took centuries in the West to persuade politicians to eradicate religion from political rhetoric. The Islamic world is still struggling with this problem.
It may seem odd to say this at a moment that capitalism has been humbled, but I still believe that secular, democratic, capitalist India will prevail in the end. Just as we have rejected socialism and central planning as the path to prosperity, so will our plural, secular democracy ultimately defeat political Islam and political Hinduism.
I have always believed that India would relentlessly march towards a modern, capitalist and democratic future; and terrorist attacks are a noisy, tragic, but ultimately futile sideshow. Islamism and Hindu extremism are a barely disguised form of tyranny, which will eventually lose their appeal. Even fundamentalists will get absorbed in finding good jobs, decent homes, and good schools for their kids. Since the attractions of peace are greater than of war, commerce will replace conquest as the route to achievement. History is on my side. In the past two centuries, the combination of democracy and market capitalism has triumphed over feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, fascism and communism. Europe, the home of religious wars, is now tolerant, and irreligious. There are today 120 genuine democracies versus only 10 a hundred years ago.
Since 9/11, Americans have also been debating the future of capitalist democracy. Many believe that Islam is incompatible with modern democratic values. Samuel Huntington in his book, The Clash of Civilizations, argues that future conflicts will not be between nation states but religious civilisations, and he predicts that Islamism will form an alliance with China to bring down the West. Francis Fukuyama rebuts this in The End of History. After communism’s fall, he predicts most countries will become capitalist democracies and the world will be at peace. But people, he feels, need more than shopping malls to satisfy their thymos--the human need for spirited achievement, which religion and wars fulfilled in the past. This explains the amazing religious revival in America, which Philip Jenkins has documented in The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity. He describes a new, vigorous, missionary Christianity that is increasingly assertive. The question is whether aggressive conversions by this new Christianity is producing the current backlash from Hindu extremists, who are behaving no better than Islamist terrorists.
For all its seductiveness, I never did buy the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory. Radical Islam or jihadism is political rather than religious. Sayyid Qutb and Osama bin Laden employ dangerous ideas of violence that are not Islamic but resemble anarchist ideologies of Europe. They resonate with Arab and European Muslims because of their deeper alienation with the West. In India, we have reacted to terrorism more maturely than the U.S. Indians are more relaxed than paranoid Americans, and this must dishearten terrorists. Our security agencies have not shown the same competence, however. Our government has also failed to assert the primacy of the citizen over the group, and stop pandering to religious and caste identities. Religion is a double edged sword----while it gives meaning to our confused, uncertain private lives, it also creates an exclusive identity, and this asserts itself publicly before long. In a competitive democracy secular politics does not spring automatically. It took centuries in the West to persuade politicians to eradicate religion from political rhetoric. The Islamic world is still struggling with this problem.
It may seem odd to say this at a moment that capitalism has been humbled, but I still believe that secular, democratic, capitalist India will prevail in the end. Just as we have rejected socialism and central planning as the path to prosperity, so will our plural, secular democracy ultimately defeat political Islam and political Hinduism.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
When everyone lost, October 5, 2008
When you teach people for two generations not to respect the property of others you are bound to have a tragedy. Singur is 50 km northwest of Kolkata where Ratan Tata made the surprising decision to set up a factory for the world’s cheapest car, the Nano. Bengal’s image may have improved but it still has a poor work culture. But its chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is a charming man. He sees himself as the Deng of India, and he persuaded Tatas with an attractive plot of 1000 acres.
Although the state offered farmers a higher than the market price, some refused to sell their land. When they protested, the ruling CPM party let the police loose and acquired their land forcibly. Mamata Banerjee, an opposition leader, sensing an opportunity for votes, arrived on the scene and insisted on the return of 300 acres. By now the factory was almost ready; Tatas claimed they needed the land to house component suppliers to keep costs down. Mamata’s agitation soon went out of control. Tatas fearing for their staff’s safety, decided on Friday to leave Singur.
Here is a tragedy in which everyone lost! CPM’s culture of violence has been exposed. Buddhadeb’s hopes for an industrial renaissance of Bengal are dashed. Tatas and their vendors face massive relocation costs which have jeopardised Nano’s magical price. Mamata will now only be remembered for destroying Bengal’s future. For the people of Singur the dream of a better life is over. And India’s image is unhappily tarnished.
So, who does one blame? Clearly, the state violated the farmers’ right to property when it forcibly acquired their land. We used to think that property rights concerned only the rich—especially when the targets were zamindars and big business, whose banks and insurance companies were nationalized without due compensation in the 1950s and 1960s. The judiciary, however, kept warning successive governments that the right to property was fundamental. But our socialists were impatient, and on one sad day in 1978, the Janata government removed ‘property’ from the list of fundamental rights in our Constitution. Today, thanks to Mamata, we have realized that the even a poor farmer has a right to his land.
Just as I have a right to my life, I also have the right to the shirt on my back or my home, so that I may live in peace. I can only give up this right when I voluntarily sell my property. If someone forcibly takes it away, the state has a duty to get it back. In societies where property rights are secure and legally enforced, citizens feel safe. They have the incentive to buy, sell, engage in business, and everyone's life improves. There are times, however, when the state has to acquire private land forcibly for a public purpose such as a road. But acquiring property from farmers for the sake of industry does not qualify as ‘public purpose’. To our democracy’s credit, our government has now realised its mistake. A new land acquisition bill is up for Parliament’s approval in the next session. In the future, industry will have to negotiate with farmers, and only if there is a deadlock and only if 70% of the farmers have agreed to sell, will the state step in.
The lesson from this Bengali tragedy is give the poor a clean title to their property—their huts and plots--so that they may take a loan against it. Also, put land records on the Internet so that corrupt revenue officials will not exploit the poor. Karnataka has done it—it has computerized 2 crore land records of 67 lakh farmers. This is one way out of poverty. The Bengalis are our Irish, who as Yeats said, have an abiding sense of tragedy. Their tragic sense lies in striving to be rational but recognising life’s underlying irrationality. One cannot avoid tragedy, but strengthening institutions like property rights can help to minimize it.
Although the state offered farmers a higher than the market price, some refused to sell their land. When they protested, the ruling CPM party let the police loose and acquired their land forcibly. Mamata Banerjee, an opposition leader, sensing an opportunity for votes, arrived on the scene and insisted on the return of 300 acres. By now the factory was almost ready; Tatas claimed they needed the land to house component suppliers to keep costs down. Mamata’s agitation soon went out of control. Tatas fearing for their staff’s safety, decided on Friday to leave Singur.
Here is a tragedy in which everyone lost! CPM’s culture of violence has been exposed. Buddhadeb’s hopes for an industrial renaissance of Bengal are dashed. Tatas and their vendors face massive relocation costs which have jeopardised Nano’s magical price. Mamata will now only be remembered for destroying Bengal’s future. For the people of Singur the dream of a better life is over. And India’s image is unhappily tarnished.
So, who does one blame? Clearly, the state violated the farmers’ right to property when it forcibly acquired their land. We used to think that property rights concerned only the rich—especially when the targets were zamindars and big business, whose banks and insurance companies were nationalized without due compensation in the 1950s and 1960s. The judiciary, however, kept warning successive governments that the right to property was fundamental. But our socialists were impatient, and on one sad day in 1978, the Janata government removed ‘property’ from the list of fundamental rights in our Constitution. Today, thanks to Mamata, we have realized that the even a poor farmer has a right to his land.
Just as I have a right to my life, I also have the right to the shirt on my back or my home, so that I may live in peace. I can only give up this right when I voluntarily sell my property. If someone forcibly takes it away, the state has a duty to get it back. In societies where property rights are secure and legally enforced, citizens feel safe. They have the incentive to buy, sell, engage in business, and everyone's life improves. There are times, however, when the state has to acquire private land forcibly for a public purpose such as a road. But acquiring property from farmers for the sake of industry does not qualify as ‘public purpose’. To our democracy’s credit, our government has now realised its mistake. A new land acquisition bill is up for Parliament’s approval in the next session. In the future, industry will have to negotiate with farmers, and only if there is a deadlock and only if 70% of the farmers have agreed to sell, will the state step in.
The lesson from this Bengali tragedy is give the poor a clean title to their property—their huts and plots--so that they may take a loan against it. Also, put land records on the Internet so that corrupt revenue officials will not exploit the poor. Karnataka has done it—it has computerized 2 crore land records of 67 lakh farmers. This is one way out of poverty. The Bengalis are our Irish, who as Yeats said, have an abiding sense of tragedy. Their tragic sense lies in striving to be rational but recognising life’s underlying irrationality. One cannot avoid tragedy, but strengthening institutions like property rights can help to minimize it.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Kashmiri choice, August 24, 2008
A Kashmiri Muslim student came to see me last week and it was not long before our conversation turned to the current azadi wave in the valley. He did not think that an independent Kashmir was viable, and its only choice was either to be with India or with Pakistan. After a pause he asked guilelessly, why was India a democracy and Pakistan an autocracy? This set me thinking. I told him that Pakistan was more the norm--third world countries do not generally become stable democracies. India is an exception.
India’s democracy and Pakistan’s autocracy have deep roots in history. India’s nationalist movement was older and more widespread. Millions of ordinary Indians were drawn in by Mahatma Gandhi. Muslim nationalism emerged later and did not become a mass movement--Jinnah was more comfortable in the drawing room rather than the ‘dusty road’. While Indians prepared for democracy over three generations, Pakistanis-to-be got the itch only a couple of years before independence. After Independence, Pakistan’s politicians performed abysmally. The Muslim League Party disintegrated; there were nine governments in ten years; and the army under Ayub Khan seized power in 1958.
Jinnah’s great error as to impose Urdu as the national language when only 8% of Pakistanis spoke Urdu and 55% spoke Bengali. Thus, he sowed the seeds of Bangladesh. Sri Lanka made the same tragic mistake. India did not succumb to this anti-democratic temptation by imposing Hindi. This is how India gave space for sub-identities to flourish, allowed the rise of peoples’ leaders from linguistic states, and deepened democracy.
Although his slogan in the 1945-46 elections in undivided India was ‘Islam is in danger’, Jinnah wanted to build a modern nation. Even though General Zia ul Haq reinforced theological priority, I do not believe Islam prevents Pakistan from being democratic. The rise of Islamism does tear the ordinary Pakistani’s loyalty between the brotherhood and the state, but the Maulvi is not Pakistan’s natural leader as in Iran. The chief obstacle to democracy is the army. Hence, I am relieved that Musharraf is gone. It does create a vacuum that might be filled by extremists, but longer term the best thing for India is to have a democratic Pakistan.
For a brief moment in the mid-1970s the two nations seemed to converge. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto began to steer Pakistan towards genuine democracy while Indira Gandhi took India on the path of dictatorship. The paths diverged after 1977 as Mrs Gandhi called an election, and Bhutto was executed by Zia in 1979. India returned to the path of democracy, whose binding glue is the liberal notion that all Indians are equal citizens before the law, owing loyalty to the Constitution. This is a British legacy. Before that we were a collection of communities and kingdoms. Although we still feel loyal to our caste or community, we are different from tragic Pakistanis whose land has been hijacked by the military. Once there is military rule you get a state within a state. You are powerless to stop your secret service from creating monsters like the Taliban, and before you know it your country has become the world’s top university for terrorists.
I then turned to my young Kashmiri friend. He wished more Kashmiris could come and see India’s vibrant democracy, its confident economy, and the rise of the low born. ‘There is a simple choice before all Kashmiris,’ he said: ‘If you want to be a citizen of a modern democracy with unparalleled opportunities, you will choose self-assured India. If you believe that Islam is in danger and you want the army’s protection, you will choose tragic Pakistan’.
India’s democracy and Pakistan’s autocracy have deep roots in history. India’s nationalist movement was older and more widespread. Millions of ordinary Indians were drawn in by Mahatma Gandhi. Muslim nationalism emerged later and did not become a mass movement--Jinnah was more comfortable in the drawing room rather than the ‘dusty road’. While Indians prepared for democracy over three generations, Pakistanis-to-be got the itch only a couple of years before independence. After Independence, Pakistan’s politicians performed abysmally. The Muslim League Party disintegrated; there were nine governments in ten years; and the army under Ayub Khan seized power in 1958.
Jinnah’s great error as to impose Urdu as the national language when only 8% of Pakistanis spoke Urdu and 55% spoke Bengali. Thus, he sowed the seeds of Bangladesh. Sri Lanka made the same tragic mistake. India did not succumb to this anti-democratic temptation by imposing Hindi. This is how India gave space for sub-identities to flourish, allowed the rise of peoples’ leaders from linguistic states, and deepened democracy.
Although his slogan in the 1945-46 elections in undivided India was ‘Islam is in danger’, Jinnah wanted to build a modern nation. Even though General Zia ul Haq reinforced theological priority, I do not believe Islam prevents Pakistan from being democratic. The rise of Islamism does tear the ordinary Pakistani’s loyalty between the brotherhood and the state, but the Maulvi is not Pakistan’s natural leader as in Iran. The chief obstacle to democracy is the army. Hence, I am relieved that Musharraf is gone. It does create a vacuum that might be filled by extremists, but longer term the best thing for India is to have a democratic Pakistan.
For a brief moment in the mid-1970s the two nations seemed to converge. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto began to steer Pakistan towards genuine democracy while Indira Gandhi took India on the path of dictatorship. The paths diverged after 1977 as Mrs Gandhi called an election, and Bhutto was executed by Zia in 1979. India returned to the path of democracy, whose binding glue is the liberal notion that all Indians are equal citizens before the law, owing loyalty to the Constitution. This is a British legacy. Before that we were a collection of communities and kingdoms. Although we still feel loyal to our caste or community, we are different from tragic Pakistanis whose land has been hijacked by the military. Once there is military rule you get a state within a state. You are powerless to stop your secret service from creating monsters like the Taliban, and before you know it your country has become the world’s top university for terrorists.
I then turned to my young Kashmiri friend. He wished more Kashmiris could come and see India’s vibrant democracy, its confident economy, and the rise of the low born. ‘There is a simple choice before all Kashmiris,’ he said: ‘If you want to be a citizen of a modern democracy with unparalleled opportunities, you will choose self-assured India. If you believe that Islam is in danger and you want the army’s protection, you will choose tragic Pakistan’.
In praise of grand gestures, August 10, 2008
On a soggy monsoon afternoon last week I found myself in the company of not just one but two finance ministers, P.Chidambaram and Jaswant Singh, at the launch of a book by the admirable Swaminathan Aiyar. An unfailing rule for spreading happiness in the political class is to flatter—there is no limit to how much one can boost the human ego. I chose, however, a less comfortable course and quizzed the worthy politicians about the painfully slow pace of reforms. When both BJP and Congress agree on the major reforms, why can’t we insulate them from the football of competitive politics?
With the Left finally off its back, the Congress’ dream team wants to redeem some honour after four years of non-performance. Chidambaram picked up the ball and recalled how it had taken over five years to pass the insurance bill when it should have taken five months. When it was finally done, the NDA capped the foreign equity at 26% even though it had earlier killed the same bill because it was opposed to 20%. Jaswant Singh, normally quite charming, seemed bewildered and defensive. Perhaps, it was Sushma Swaraj’s outrageous statement that had put him out of sorts. When she declared that the BJP would not help pass the pending reforms, she was actually saying that she did not care about the lives of ordinary Indians.
The Congress, of course, is no better when it is in the opposition. Both parties should memorize Arun Shourie’s precept—the Opposition should never oppose anything it would itself do in office. Later over tea, the irrepressible Mani Shankar Aiyar, with classic Doon School bluster, reproached me for harbouring undemocratic temptations. If he had listened, I would have told him that many democratic countries pursue bipartisan policies when national interest is at stake. In the UK, the Northern Ireland issue was always above politics and prime ministers always kept Opposition leaders informed. The unwieldy US Congress has an unwritten rule, ‘politics stops at the shore’. Thus, bipartisanship rapidly delivered the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe after the World War II; Homeland Security after the 9/11 attack; and the sub-prime mortgage bailout this year.
The Nuclear Deal was one such moment in India’s history. It was less about energy and more about national security. Both the BJP and the Congress agreed on its essentials. Yet it became hostage to tragic politics. Bipartisan institutions could have spared us the cash-for-votes scandal and saved the political class’ image. Democracy does not have to mean permanent conflict. The Opposition does not have to only oppose. Mamata Banerjee is a failure because voters think that she only knows how to oppose. Ultimately, cooperation reflects character.
The Prime Minister showed statesman this week in reaching out to the Opposition on the Amarnath issue. Emboldened by this, he should now prime-move a bipartisan summit with key Opposition leaders, seeking agreement on an economic reforms slate over 200 days. The BJP knows at heart that pensions, insurance, banking are as much about national interest as preventing terrorism. The secret is to take the competitive sting out of the process. With this agreement in hand, Manmohan Singh should repeat what he did in July 1991. He should institutionalize an implementation mechanism inside the PMO for monitoring weekly progress. I am thinking of the famous Thursday Meetings of the economic secretaries, which were coordinated by AN Varma, Narasimha Rao’s principal secretary—it was the crucial instrument for implementing reforms at an unprecedented pace in 1991. This is the way to answer our mini-9/11 terrorists. India’s destiny will not be stopped by anyone.
With the Left finally off its back, the Congress’ dream team wants to redeem some honour after four years of non-performance. Chidambaram picked up the ball and recalled how it had taken over five years to pass the insurance bill when it should have taken five months. When it was finally done, the NDA capped the foreign equity at 26% even though it had earlier killed the same bill because it was opposed to 20%. Jaswant Singh, normally quite charming, seemed bewildered and defensive. Perhaps, it was Sushma Swaraj’s outrageous statement that had put him out of sorts. When she declared that the BJP would not help pass the pending reforms, she was actually saying that she did not care about the lives of ordinary Indians.
The Congress, of course, is no better when it is in the opposition. Both parties should memorize Arun Shourie’s precept—the Opposition should never oppose anything it would itself do in office. Later over tea, the irrepressible Mani Shankar Aiyar, with classic Doon School bluster, reproached me for harbouring undemocratic temptations. If he had listened, I would have told him that many democratic countries pursue bipartisan policies when national interest is at stake. In the UK, the Northern Ireland issue was always above politics and prime ministers always kept Opposition leaders informed. The unwieldy US Congress has an unwritten rule, ‘politics stops at the shore’. Thus, bipartisanship rapidly delivered the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe after the World War II; Homeland Security after the 9/11 attack; and the sub-prime mortgage bailout this year.
The Nuclear Deal was one such moment in India’s history. It was less about energy and more about national security. Both the BJP and the Congress agreed on its essentials. Yet it became hostage to tragic politics. Bipartisan institutions could have spared us the cash-for-votes scandal and saved the political class’ image. Democracy does not have to mean permanent conflict. The Opposition does not have to only oppose. Mamata Banerjee is a failure because voters think that she only knows how to oppose. Ultimately, cooperation reflects character.
The Prime Minister showed statesman this week in reaching out to the Opposition on the Amarnath issue. Emboldened by this, he should now prime-move a bipartisan summit with key Opposition leaders, seeking agreement on an economic reforms slate over 200 days. The BJP knows at heart that pensions, insurance, banking are as much about national interest as preventing terrorism. The secret is to take the competitive sting out of the process. With this agreement in hand, Manmohan Singh should repeat what he did in July 1991. He should institutionalize an implementation mechanism inside the PMO for monitoring weekly progress. I am thinking of the famous Thursday Meetings of the economic secretaries, which were coordinated by AN Varma, Narasimha Rao’s principal secretary—it was the crucial instrument for implementing reforms at an unprecedented pace in 1991. This is the way to answer our mini-9/11 terrorists. India’s destiny will not be stopped by anyone.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Go beyond Left and Right, July 27, 2008
On July 22, the Congress led UPA won a vote of confidence in Parliament over the nuclear deal. Despite the murky moments I truly enjoyed the debate. I got a sense of how our MPs think, feel and view the world. There were great moments in the speeches of Lalu Prasad, Rahul Gandhi, Omar Abdullah and others. Suddenly, it was all eclipsed by the stomach turning sight of bundles of currency flying about.
The debate showed how much our political landscape has changed after 1991. Both the right and the left are exhausted. The left, which earlier stood for idealism and change, has lost all common sense. It defends the status quo in voices from Jurrasic Park, forgetting that it too is a victim of vested interests. The right, which in India means the Hindu nationalistic right, finds less and less takers for its Hindutva ideology. The Congress is in deep trouble, unable to shed its traditional attachment to statism. It fails to grasp that the Indian mind is now unbound, and the young want to take charge of their lives.
Ideology is also exhausted in the rest of the world, where left and right matters less and less. In the West the left tries to conserve the welfare state. The liberal, economic right wants to dismantle it. Beyond that, the distinctions are blurred. The right has accepted transfers to the poor but it wants them to be efficient. The left no longer wants government to run businesses. Few oppose the market--the debate is on how to regulate it wisely.
If people don’t care about ideology, how will politicians win elections? Human beings want the same things everywhere--a safe, place to live; good schools and hospitals; clean air and water; be able to ply one’s trade without having to bribe; a judge to resolve disputes speedily. The amazing thing is that our politicians will do everything but deliver these. When we throw them out after five years, they blame ‘anti-incumbency’. Some of us have heard of an obscure railway official named Erapalli Sreedharan, who is quietly building a world class Metro for Delhi. If he were candidate for the Prime Minister, we would vote for him. His ability to execute projects has nothing to do with capitalism, socialism or Hindutva. The Chinese politburo has this advantage over our cabinet—its leaders have Sreedharan’s abilities.
Indians have been raised on a steady diet of Mahabharata, and so we are pragmatic. The Yudhishthira, who made the reluctant decision to go to war, was following a practical, achievable dharma. He was aware that while ahimsa, non-violence, is the ideal way to act, violence is sometimes inevitable. In politics, protecting the state’s interest is the path to justice rather than seeking human perfection. When ideology becomes the driving force of politics, room for compromise disappears. The Congress Party has just learned this lesson in the most painful way from its Marxist allies. As a general rule, the ethic of perfection appeals more to those who are far removed from public office.
The history of the twentieth century is littered with the graves of ideologies, all of which had some great and benign aim. This was the faith of Lenin, of Mao, even of Hitler, and who knows, maybe even Pol Pot. In India, we escaped these tragedies, but our modest experiments with Fabian socialism led to statism, and we are still trying to shake off that yoke. Our politicians should learn from history—shed ideology, acquire implementation skills, and focus on the real needs of people. This is the way to beat ‘anti-incumbency’ and win the next election.
The debate showed how much our political landscape has changed after 1991. Both the right and the left are exhausted. The left, which earlier stood for idealism and change, has lost all common sense. It defends the status quo in voices from Jurrasic Park, forgetting that it too is a victim of vested interests. The right, which in India means the Hindu nationalistic right, finds less and less takers for its Hindutva ideology. The Congress is in deep trouble, unable to shed its traditional attachment to statism. It fails to grasp that the Indian mind is now unbound, and the young want to take charge of their lives.
Ideology is also exhausted in the rest of the world, where left and right matters less and less. In the West the left tries to conserve the welfare state. The liberal, economic right wants to dismantle it. Beyond that, the distinctions are blurred. The right has accepted transfers to the poor but it wants them to be efficient. The left no longer wants government to run businesses. Few oppose the market--the debate is on how to regulate it wisely.
If people don’t care about ideology, how will politicians win elections? Human beings want the same things everywhere--a safe, place to live; good schools and hospitals; clean air and water; be able to ply one’s trade without having to bribe; a judge to resolve disputes speedily. The amazing thing is that our politicians will do everything but deliver these. When we throw them out after five years, they blame ‘anti-incumbency’. Some of us have heard of an obscure railway official named Erapalli Sreedharan, who is quietly building a world class Metro for Delhi. If he were candidate for the Prime Minister, we would vote for him. His ability to execute projects has nothing to do with capitalism, socialism or Hindutva. The Chinese politburo has this advantage over our cabinet—its leaders have Sreedharan’s abilities.
Indians have been raised on a steady diet of Mahabharata, and so we are pragmatic. The Yudhishthira, who made the reluctant decision to go to war, was following a practical, achievable dharma. He was aware that while ahimsa, non-violence, is the ideal way to act, violence is sometimes inevitable. In politics, protecting the state’s interest is the path to justice rather than seeking human perfection. When ideology becomes the driving force of politics, room for compromise disappears. The Congress Party has just learned this lesson in the most painful way from its Marxist allies. As a general rule, the ethic of perfection appeals more to those who are far removed from public office.
The history of the twentieth century is littered with the graves of ideologies, all of which had some great and benign aim. This was the faith of Lenin, of Mao, even of Hitler, and who knows, maybe even Pol Pot. In India, we escaped these tragedies, but our modest experiments with Fabian socialism led to statism, and we are still trying to shake off that yoke. Our politicians should learn from history—shed ideology, acquire implementation skills, and focus on the real needs of people. This is the way to beat ‘anti-incumbency’ and win the next election.
One cheer for Mayawati, July 13, 2008
On July one, 86 lakh children in class one and two began to learn English in government schools of Uttar Pradesh. It fulfilled a long standing demand of parents who believe that they have lost two generations to Hindi chauvinists. They know that a child who learns English by age 10 has a natural advantage for the rest of its life. Shortage of English speakers is one reason why software companies, call centres, export oriented industry has been slow in coming to UP and the caricature of the ‘bhaiya’ persists.
Mayawati’s decision on English was hailed by Dalits, and for good reason. A study in Mumbai shows that among Dalit women, those who learn English rise economically and socially by marrying outside their caste. 31% of Dalit women who knew English had inter-caste marriages compared to 9% who did not know English. This makes sense. Knowing English gives a Dalit woman a chance to work in call centres and other modern jobs where there are fewer caste barriers. Is Mayawati finally realizing that there may be more votes in meeting people’s real needs than in erecting statues to Ambedkar? She has also ordered toilets for girls in 90,000 primary schools.
It must have taken some courage to challenge the teachers’ union and the Hindi establishment. So, why do I offer only a single cheer to Mayawati? I would give her three cheers had she attacked the basic disease of teacher absenteeism. The famous Kremer-Murlidharan report shows that one in four teachers is not present in school, and one in four present is not teaching. As a result, 53.1 % of UP’s children in Class 5 cannot read a Class 2 text, according to ASER surveys. 67.2 % of children in urban UP and 29.1 % in rural UP are now in private schools.
What is the answer? Quite simply, the government should fund students and not schools. When a child reaches age 5, the government should give parents a voucher (like a scholarship), which can only be exchanged for education at a school of the parent’s choice. Since all parents want a good school for their kids, vouchers will create competition among schools. As vouchers will be the only source of a school’s income, and as teachers will be paid salaries only from vouchers, teachers will show up and even teach with inspiration. Teachers will have an incentive to perform. Good teachers will be able to earn more thanks to higher voucher income earned by their school. Teacher morale will thus rise. They will be accountable to parents rather than remote officials in the state capital.
Competition for vouchers will improve both government and private schools. Bad schools will close down, good ones will flourish. The poorest parents will be able to send their child to a quality school. The ability to exit their children from a bad school is hugely empowering—it is like having “voice” in a democracy. The rich have it because of their money power. Vouchers will give them purchasing power and “voice”. A poor child will get the same opportunity as a rich one to rise in the world, and we will progress to our dream of equality of opportunity.
Mayawati used to be a teacher. So, she will appreciate this public-private partnership. Teachers unions will oppose her, of course. She will be scared of losing lakhs of teachers’ votes, but she must remember that she will gain crores of votes of grateful parents. I’m convinced that more and more sensible policies will come from Dalit/OBC leaders who have fewer vested interests to protect (like teachers’ unions).
Mayawati’s decision on English was hailed by Dalits, and for good reason. A study in Mumbai shows that among Dalit women, those who learn English rise economically and socially by marrying outside their caste. 31% of Dalit women who knew English had inter-caste marriages compared to 9% who did not know English. This makes sense. Knowing English gives a Dalit woman a chance to work in call centres and other modern jobs where there are fewer caste barriers. Is Mayawati finally realizing that there may be more votes in meeting people’s real needs than in erecting statues to Ambedkar? She has also ordered toilets for girls in 90,000 primary schools.
It must have taken some courage to challenge the teachers’ union and the Hindi establishment. So, why do I offer only a single cheer to Mayawati? I would give her three cheers had she attacked the basic disease of teacher absenteeism. The famous Kremer-Murlidharan report shows that one in four teachers is not present in school, and one in four present is not teaching. As a result, 53.1 % of UP’s children in Class 5 cannot read a Class 2 text, according to ASER surveys. 67.2 % of children in urban UP and 29.1 % in rural UP are now in private schools.
What is the answer? Quite simply, the government should fund students and not schools. When a child reaches age 5, the government should give parents a voucher (like a scholarship), which can only be exchanged for education at a school of the parent’s choice. Since all parents want a good school for their kids, vouchers will create competition among schools. As vouchers will be the only source of a school’s income, and as teachers will be paid salaries only from vouchers, teachers will show up and even teach with inspiration. Teachers will have an incentive to perform. Good teachers will be able to earn more thanks to higher voucher income earned by their school. Teacher morale will thus rise. They will be accountable to parents rather than remote officials in the state capital.
Competition for vouchers will improve both government and private schools. Bad schools will close down, good ones will flourish. The poorest parents will be able to send their child to a quality school. The ability to exit their children from a bad school is hugely empowering—it is like having “voice” in a democracy. The rich have it because of their money power. Vouchers will give them purchasing power and “voice”. A poor child will get the same opportunity as a rich one to rise in the world, and we will progress to our dream of equality of opportunity.
Mayawati used to be a teacher. So, she will appreciate this public-private partnership. Teachers unions will oppose her, of course. She will be scared of losing lakhs of teachers’ votes, but she must remember that she will gain crores of votes of grateful parents. I’m convinced that more and more sensible policies will come from Dalit/OBC leaders who have fewer vested interests to protect (like teachers’ unions).
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