Last year I was on the jury of the McKinsey Award for the best article in the Harvard Business Review, a monthly journal for managers. This wasn’t easy work because I was forced to read every single article in the magazine in 2005 when I would much rather have been reading a novel. Besides, I have always believed that business is more about doing and less about reflecting. I was amused to find so many of the best articles had Indian names attached to them, and I thought with a smile, India is not only producing spiritual gurus but also “business gurus”. But I am sceptical of this latter ‘guru’, and sometimes wonder if the acronym stands for someone “Good at Understanding, but Relatively Useless”.
In the December issue I came across an article called “Hiring for Smarts”, which argues that the old fashioned IQ test is still the best predictor of success at the workplace. I liked the piece, not only for its clarity and confidence but for its impressive data base. In the end I decided not to nominate it because it was counter-factual. I know too many bright people with very high IQs who have failed as managers. The reason is that they lacked the ability to implement, a far more important skill in the world of action, and more difficult to acquire than thinking ability. I have known too many companies with excellent ideas and strategies who failed because their employees did not have executional abilities.
Of course, one needs to apply intelligence in executing a plan--in priorizing tasks, for example. But I find that determination and persistence are more important in getting results. These qualities reside on the right side of the brain, whereas analytical abilities lie on the left side. Jim Collins’ study of outstanding CEOs (From Good to Great) has arrived at the same conclusion. When I was younger and went recruiting at the IIMs, I always sought persons who had willpower and resolve rather than those with sheer mind power. The irony is that our education system teaches us to think but not to get things done. You’d expect that business schools would correct this bias, but they don’t teach one to implement either.
Our brahminical bias in favour of knowledge in India creates an even bigger gap between thought and action. Many of our leaders who run the world of affairs—profit and non-profit organisations, colleges, cricket teams, hospitals—lack the same ability to deliver results. Millions of our government employees are smart, having entered via competitive exams. Yet they persistently fail to repair roads, provide drinking water in villages, get teachers to show up at primary schools, action an FIR at a police station. Perhaps, the IAS exam should also check out a bias for action.
We tend to blame ideology or democracy or our system, but the dirty secret is that Indians value ideas over accomplishment. Exceptions like Shreedharan at Delhi’s Metro or Kurien at Amul did deliver, after all, from within the system. Even Nehruvian socialism could have delivered more—it didn’t have to degenerate into “Licence Raj”. The “golden quadrilateral’ highway project made great strides when B.C. Khanduri set clear, measurable goals, monitored day to day progress, and persistently removed obstacles. He thus motivated NHAI employees, but also made them accountable. These are some of the implementation qualities of the right brain, which make ordinary people do extraordinary things.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
A LEARNING CURVE, NEWSWEEK, MARCH 6, 2006
Two weeks ago I got a call from the board member of one of the world’s largest consulting companies, who invited me to come and speak to them about why so many Indians were making it in the global knowledge economy. My distinguished caller spoke about innovations emerging from General Electric and Microsoft’s R&D centers in Bangalore; advanced avionics installed by India’s Air Force on Russian fighter aircraft that had caught the U.S. defense establishment’s attention; sophisticated research on global capital markets outsourced by Wall Street to India; finally, he rattled off a dozen Indian leaders’ names in global multinational corporations.
I was skeptical. ‘Perhaps, it’s our large population?’ I suggested. He countered with half a dozen large countries that are invisible in the knowledge economy. ‘Or maybe it’s simply knowing English?’ I said. He asked if there was something in India’s education system that might help explain India’s recent economic success.
Although India does a miserable job of educating its masses, the best in India do get a decent education. Aside from the famed Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, there are around twenty other centers of excellence in science, engineering, medicine, and even the liberal arts. Their success lies mostly in the high quality of their students, not teachers. The real victory may be with parents and their middle class insecurities. Indian parents, night after night, insist on overseeing their kids’ homework--it’s a rare mother who accepts a dinner invitation during exam season. By age 15, the young are packed off to coaching classes to prepare them for entry into the competitive colleges. Once they get in, of course, their future is made--they will be picked up by one of dozens of India’s emerging globally competitive firms, such as Reliance, Jet Airways, Infosys, Wipro, Ranbaxy, Bharat Forge, Tata Steel, Bharti, HDFC Bank and others.
The Indian middle class sends its children to private schools because government schools have failed. A national study by Harvard University faculty shows that one out of four teachers in government primary schools are absent and of those present one out of two is not teaching. As a result, even the poor have begun to pull their kids out of government schools and enrol them in indifferent private schools, which charge $1 to $3 a month in fees and are spreading rapidly in slums and villages across India. NIEPA, an official education think tank, confirms that two-thirds of the children in urban Maharashtra, U.P. and Tamil Nadu, three of India’s largest states, are now in private schools. The economist, Jean Dreze, predicts that government schools in Indian cities will soon be history.
Although teacher salaries are a third in private schools, Prof. James Tooley of the University of Newcastle found that even unrecognized schools delivered 22% points higher mean score in mathematics in his study of 918 schools in Hyderabad’s slums. A national study led by the NGO, Pratham, confirmed last month that even in villages 16% of the kids are now in private primary schools and they achieved 10% points higher scores in verbal and math. This upsets the Left establishment, which trashes these ‘mushrooming private schools’ and wants to close them down. The lower bureaucracy takes advantage of this prejudice and extracts bribes in exchange for licences, which typically average 5% of the private school’s running cost.
Private schools in India range from expensive boarding schools for the elite with large campuses to low end teaching shops in the bazaar. NIIT, a private sector company with 4000 ‘learning centres’, trained 4 million students and helped fuel India’s IT revolution in the 1990’s, and yet was not accorded recognition by the government. Ironically, even the children of government school teachers go to private schools. Members of Parliament finally recognized the state’s failure to deliver education when they pushed through parliament a legislative act a few months which would make it mandatory for private schools to reserve seats for backward castes.
Thus, Indians are solving their problems in the old fashioned way by depending on themselves and not waiting for the state. The media research firm TAM reports that educational institutions were the single largest advertiser category in print media in 2004 (up from sixth position in 2003). National Sample Surveys also confirm the rising spend on education. In 1983, only 1.2 percent of per capita expenditure went to education; this rose to 2.4% in 1993, to 2.8% in 1999 to 4.4% in 2003. In urban areas it has risen even faster, from 2.1% in 1983 to 6.3% in 2003.
As with so much about India's success story, Indians are thus finding solutions to their problems without waiting for the government. If China's success is due to its amazing (and state-funded) infrastructure, India's is largely the result of individual initiative that has given birth to globally competitive companies. If this initiative can successfully broaden access and quality to education, India could be even better positioned for the knowledge economy than its behemoth neighbor. And it’s success might be a more durable.
Gurcharan Das is the author of India Unbound (Knopf) and other books. He was earlier CEO of Procter and Gamble India.
I was skeptical. ‘Perhaps, it’s our large population?’ I suggested. He countered with half a dozen large countries that are invisible in the knowledge economy. ‘Or maybe it’s simply knowing English?’ I said. He asked if there was something in India’s education system that might help explain India’s recent economic success.
Although India does a miserable job of educating its masses, the best in India do get a decent education. Aside from the famed Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, there are around twenty other centers of excellence in science, engineering, medicine, and even the liberal arts. Their success lies mostly in the high quality of their students, not teachers. The real victory may be with parents and their middle class insecurities. Indian parents, night after night, insist on overseeing their kids’ homework--it’s a rare mother who accepts a dinner invitation during exam season. By age 15, the young are packed off to coaching classes to prepare them for entry into the competitive colleges. Once they get in, of course, their future is made--they will be picked up by one of dozens of India’s emerging globally competitive firms, such as Reliance, Jet Airways, Infosys, Wipro, Ranbaxy, Bharat Forge, Tata Steel, Bharti, HDFC Bank and others.
The Indian middle class sends its children to private schools because government schools have failed. A national study by Harvard University faculty shows that one out of four teachers in government primary schools are absent and of those present one out of two is not teaching. As a result, even the poor have begun to pull their kids out of government schools and enrol them in indifferent private schools, which charge $1 to $3 a month in fees and are spreading rapidly in slums and villages across India. NIEPA, an official education think tank, confirms that two-thirds of the children in urban Maharashtra, U.P. and Tamil Nadu, three of India’s largest states, are now in private schools. The economist, Jean Dreze, predicts that government schools in Indian cities will soon be history.
Although teacher salaries are a third in private schools, Prof. James Tooley of the University of Newcastle found that even unrecognized schools delivered 22% points higher mean score in mathematics in his study of 918 schools in Hyderabad’s slums. A national study led by the NGO, Pratham, confirmed last month that even in villages 16% of the kids are now in private primary schools and they achieved 10% points higher scores in verbal and math. This upsets the Left establishment, which trashes these ‘mushrooming private schools’ and wants to close them down. The lower bureaucracy takes advantage of this prejudice and extracts bribes in exchange for licences, which typically average 5% of the private school’s running cost.
Private schools in India range from expensive boarding schools for the elite with large campuses to low end teaching shops in the bazaar. NIIT, a private sector company with 4000 ‘learning centres’, trained 4 million students and helped fuel India’s IT revolution in the 1990’s, and yet was not accorded recognition by the government. Ironically, even the children of government school teachers go to private schools. Members of Parliament finally recognized the state’s failure to deliver education when they pushed through parliament a legislative act a few months which would make it mandatory for private schools to reserve seats for backward castes.
Thus, Indians are solving their problems in the old fashioned way by depending on themselves and not waiting for the state. The media research firm TAM reports that educational institutions were the single largest advertiser category in print media in 2004 (up from sixth position in 2003). National Sample Surveys also confirm the rising spend on education. In 1983, only 1.2 percent of per capita expenditure went to education; this rose to 2.4% in 1993, to 2.8% in 1999 to 4.4% in 2003. In urban areas it has risen even faster, from 2.1% in 1983 to 6.3% in 2003.
As with so much about India's success story, Indians are thus finding solutions to their problems without waiting for the government. If China's success is due to its amazing (and state-funded) infrastructure, India's is largely the result of individual initiative that has given birth to globally competitive companies. If this initiative can successfully broaden access and quality to education, India could be even better positioned for the knowledge economy than its behemoth neighbor. And it’s success might be a more durable.
Gurcharan Das is the author of India Unbound (Knopf) and other books. He was earlier CEO of Procter and Gamble India.
Deeper into India’s soul March 12, 2006
How is it that so many Indians are making it in the global economy?’ This was a common refrain during President Bush’s recent visit. I looked for answers in India’s education system for a recent essay for an American magazine, and concluded that success belonged to students rather than teachers, and the real victory might lie with parents and their middle class insecurities—it’s a rare Indian mother who will step out of the house in the evening during exam season.
But education is only half the answer. The other half lies in history. ‘Western iron has probably entered deeper into India’s soul’ noted Arnold Toynbee fifty years ago. He felt India’s experience of the West was more intimate, more profound, and more painful than China, Russia, Japan, or Ottoman Turkey. His historian’s view of British colonialism was of a leisurely intermingling of two great civilizations over two centuries, which has eased India’s passage to modernity. Modern institutions thus found a comfortable home in India, and more significantly liberal thinking become a part of the Indian mind, unlike the Middle East, which also experienced colonial rule. This might explain in part why Indians move about comfortably in today’s global economy.
The British needed educated Indians to collect revenue, man the railways, guard forests, and generally run the country. The price of a ticket to these jobs was the English language. So, Indians learned English, passed exams and entered the modern Indian middle class. We became Macaulay’s bastard children, otherwise called “brown sahibs”. We berate Macaulay for cutting us off from our roots and ancient culture, but we don’t give him enough credit for creating a meritocratic middle class society. Happily, the pain of political slavery is gone, but our obsession with English and excelling at exams has stayed.
The colonial exam system merely reinforced the old Indian reverence for knowledge. This goes back three thousand years to the earliest speculations in the Rig Veda, which blossomed in the systematic reflections of the Upanishads. These experiments of the mind led to six systematic schools of philosophy and the rebellious paths of the Buddha, Mahavira, and Ajivikas. The diverse paths were an invitation to any creative spiritual entrepreneur that he could start a new yoga sect as long as he had a new idea and a talent for organization. Hence, we have a bewildering array of diverse paths to the truth. Not only does this diminish the temptation for theological narcissism—that only my religion has the answer--it also creates a bias for innovation. As there is no hierarchical church, each brahmin in his temple across India’s half a million villages thinks he is the Pope, while each self-sufficient village jealously guards its autonomy. It makes things chaotic but it also fosters an independent, enquiring mind which is so essential to success in the global knowledge economy.
Democracy in the 20th century has boosted the Indian’s irreverent temper, and after 1991 the young Indian mind is finally decolonised and unbound. Turn to any of our hundred TV channels—it’s a chattering India of Amartya Sen’s ‘argumentative Indians’. Contemporary India is filled with spiritual innovators, software princes, Dalit activists, brown sahibs and more—it’s a noisy, raucuous party, full of fun to which a billion Indians are invited, as long as you have an opinion and are aware that both spiritual space and cyber space are invisible. All of this enters into the explanation of India’s recent economic rise.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
But education is only half the answer. The other half lies in history. ‘Western iron has probably entered deeper into India’s soul’ noted Arnold Toynbee fifty years ago. He felt India’s experience of the West was more intimate, more profound, and more painful than China, Russia, Japan, or Ottoman Turkey. His historian’s view of British colonialism was of a leisurely intermingling of two great civilizations over two centuries, which has eased India’s passage to modernity. Modern institutions thus found a comfortable home in India, and more significantly liberal thinking become a part of the Indian mind, unlike the Middle East, which also experienced colonial rule. This might explain in part why Indians move about comfortably in today’s global economy.
The British needed educated Indians to collect revenue, man the railways, guard forests, and generally run the country. The price of a ticket to these jobs was the English language. So, Indians learned English, passed exams and entered the modern Indian middle class. We became Macaulay’s bastard children, otherwise called “brown sahibs”. We berate Macaulay for cutting us off from our roots and ancient culture, but we don’t give him enough credit for creating a meritocratic middle class society. Happily, the pain of political slavery is gone, but our obsession with English and excelling at exams has stayed.
The colonial exam system merely reinforced the old Indian reverence for knowledge. This goes back three thousand years to the earliest speculations in the Rig Veda, which blossomed in the systematic reflections of the Upanishads. These experiments of the mind led to six systematic schools of philosophy and the rebellious paths of the Buddha, Mahavira, and Ajivikas. The diverse paths were an invitation to any creative spiritual entrepreneur that he could start a new yoga sect as long as he had a new idea and a talent for organization. Hence, we have a bewildering array of diverse paths to the truth. Not only does this diminish the temptation for theological narcissism—that only my religion has the answer--it also creates a bias for innovation. As there is no hierarchical church, each brahmin in his temple across India’s half a million villages thinks he is the Pope, while each self-sufficient village jealously guards its autonomy. It makes things chaotic but it also fosters an independent, enquiring mind which is so essential to success in the global knowledge economy.
Democracy in the 20th century has boosted the Indian’s irreverent temper, and after 1991 the young Indian mind is finally decolonised and unbound. Turn to any of our hundred TV channels—it’s a chattering India of Amartya Sen’s ‘argumentative Indians’. Contemporary India is filled with spiritual innovators, software princes, Dalit activists, brown sahibs and more—it’s a noisy, raucuous party, full of fun to which a billion Indians are invited, as long as you have an opinion and are aware that both spiritual space and cyber space are invisible. All of this enters into the explanation of India’s recent economic rise.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Thursday, March 02, 2006
A great nation 26 February 2006
For a country that was widely regarded as 20th century’s great disappointment, it must feel good that the 21st has begun rather nicely. India is today one of the world’s fastest growing economies, and there is even talk of it becoming a great power. No doubt Mr Bush will also remind us of it this week. I must confess, however, that such talk leaves me cold.
I ask myself what is “great” about a “great power”. I learn more about India’s greatness when an old friend in New Jersey tells me that she has decided to return home to Tanjore because she cannot live without Carnatic music. Or my bania’s son says he is leaving for America because he couldn’t get admission into a good college here. He adds, “There are opportunities here for the best and for the corrupt, but anyone can make it in America.”
George Perkovich says that military might is not sufficient for greatness. America was a great power in the 1970s; yet it lost to a very poor Vietnam. Soviet Union, another great power then, stumbled against an even poorer Afghanistan. Neither are nuclear weapons essential. For then Pakistan would also be great. Hyphenating India and Pakistan diminishes us, but nuclear weapons, alas, are great equalizers. Nor is a permanent seat on the UN Security Council a measure of greatness. It would be healthier to lower its value in our self-perception because we are unlikely to get it soon.
My bania’s son is right--America is great because it is a land of opportunity. Sweden’s greatness lies in its welfare system that protects one from the cradle to the grave. Holland’s eminence lies in civil liberties. France is distinguished for its public support of culture. Norway is great because of its income distribution. Until recently, Japan’s excellence lay in job security. And England is remarkable for its sense of fairness.
I think India’s greatness lies in its self reliant and resilient people. We are able to pull ourselves up by our chappals and survive, nay, even flourish, when the state fails us at every turn. When teachers and doctors don’t show up in government primary schools and health centres, we don’t complain. We just open up cheap private schools and clinics in our slums, and get on with it. This makes us a tough and independent people. Fortunately, we are a young nation and the young Indian’s mind is now decolonised and liberated. You only had to look into Dhoni’s fearless eyes in Karachi last Sunday. But there also exists the fearful, old mindset, often among petty bureaucrats, who only know how to say “no”. Happily, they are doomed--you can tell by the way they sneeze or pare their nails.
Our democracy has released our spirits and brought us intimations of future greatness. Our economic success is more remarkable because it has been democratically produced. Our political freedoms are, of course, valuable in their own right, but they will also help sustain our coming prosperity. The shocking state of our governance, however, tells us how far we are from being a truly great nation. Moreover, we will only be able to call ourselves great when every Indian has access to a good school and a good health clinic. When our government realises that it doesn’t have to run these schools and clinics, but only to provide for them, will we achieve the Indian way to greatness.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
I ask myself what is “great” about a “great power”. I learn more about India’s greatness when an old friend in New Jersey tells me that she has decided to return home to Tanjore because she cannot live without Carnatic music. Or my bania’s son says he is leaving for America because he couldn’t get admission into a good college here. He adds, “There are opportunities here for the best and for the corrupt, but anyone can make it in America.”
George Perkovich says that military might is not sufficient for greatness. America was a great power in the 1970s; yet it lost to a very poor Vietnam. Soviet Union, another great power then, stumbled against an even poorer Afghanistan. Neither are nuclear weapons essential. For then Pakistan would also be great. Hyphenating India and Pakistan diminishes us, but nuclear weapons, alas, are great equalizers. Nor is a permanent seat on the UN Security Council a measure of greatness. It would be healthier to lower its value in our self-perception because we are unlikely to get it soon.
My bania’s son is right--America is great because it is a land of opportunity. Sweden’s greatness lies in its welfare system that protects one from the cradle to the grave. Holland’s eminence lies in civil liberties. France is distinguished for its public support of culture. Norway is great because of its income distribution. Until recently, Japan’s excellence lay in job security. And England is remarkable for its sense of fairness.
I think India’s greatness lies in its self reliant and resilient people. We are able to pull ourselves up by our chappals and survive, nay, even flourish, when the state fails us at every turn. When teachers and doctors don’t show up in government primary schools and health centres, we don’t complain. We just open up cheap private schools and clinics in our slums, and get on with it. This makes us a tough and independent people. Fortunately, we are a young nation and the young Indian’s mind is now decolonised and liberated. You only had to look into Dhoni’s fearless eyes in Karachi last Sunday. But there also exists the fearful, old mindset, often among petty bureaucrats, who only know how to say “no”. Happily, they are doomed--you can tell by the way they sneeze or pare their nails.
Our democracy has released our spirits and brought us intimations of future greatness. Our economic success is more remarkable because it has been democratically produced. Our political freedoms are, of course, valuable in their own right, but they will also help sustain our coming prosperity. The shocking state of our governance, however, tells us how far we are from being a truly great nation. Moreover, we will only be able to call ourselves great when every Indian has access to a good school and a good health clinic. When our government realises that it doesn’t have to run these schools and clinics, but only to provide for them, will we achieve the Indian way to greatness.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Nasadiya Temper 12 February, 2006
The recent controversy over Islamic cartoons in Europe is once again testing the boundaries of religious tolerance. Most Hindus, of course, believe that they are tolerant and trace their broadmindedness to their many gods. Some even ask: how did our tolerant pluralism turn into the intolerance of Hindutva?
Hindu pluralism is grounded in the Rig Veda, Wendy Doniger, the Sanskrit scholar, tells us in a wonderful essay, “Many Gods, Many Paths”. It may well have originated in the charming humility of the Nasadiya verse (10.129): “[In the beginning] there was neither being nor non-being … [but] who really knows? … [for] the gods came afterwards.” This questioning attitude, adds Doniger, might also have led to the invention of a god whose name was the interrogative pronoun, ka. For the creator once asked Indra, “Who am I?” Indra replied, “Just what you said: Who.” And this is how the creator got the name, Ka or Who.
The pluralism of the Rig Veda, however, did have a monistic hue for the very substance of the universe was divine. Each god had a secondary or illusory status compared to the divine substance, yet was a powerful symbol of and a guide to the divine. Hence, many gods co-exist comfortably in a non-hierarchic pantheon. And the devotee of many, non-hierarchical gods is more likely to see the many sides of truth, and thus be more tolerant.
By the time that this unassuming outlook is enshrined in the famous “Neti, neti” (“Not this, not that”) attitude of the Upanishads, the seeds of monistic certainty have been firmly planted. It is charming the way open-minded kings in the Upanishads invite holy men of various schools to debate religious issues. But the modest openness of neti becomes a “submerged form of intellectual imperialism” when we come to Shankara. A belief in the unity of brahman and atman may lead to a belief in the unity of all persons but it does not necessarily lead to a respect for all viewpoints, as the argumentative followers of Shankara and Ramanuja will testify.
Thus, social pluralism doesn’t always follow from intellectual pluralism. The problem is that when I speak with certainty about my beliefs, I cannot help but suggest that what I believe in is superior. I secretly want you to renounce your opposing view and accept mine. Hence, all such statements are attempts at conversion. Here lies the leap from tolerance to intolerance. What stops one from trying to convert others is good manners. Fundamentalists lack these and take the further leap and threaten death.
The source of Hindutva’s intolerance, or for that matter any fundamentalist’s, is a political one and it is futile to seek answers in belief. All fundamentalists are insecure, and seem to take an excessive interest in others. They would do well to see Walt Disney’s 1942 film, Bambi. In it is a rabbit named Thumper, whose mother asks him, “Thumper, what did your father say?” Thumper replies, “If you can’t say something good about a person, don’t say anything at all.” Islamic, Hindu and Christian fundamentalists ought to consider joining Thumper’s School of Social Harmony. They might also consider following Albert Camus’ sensible advice: “To be happy one must not be too concerned with others.” The ordinary Hindu on the street, or any person anywhere, I am convinced, is tolerant in belief. She has the unassuming Nasadiya temper of the open-minded seeker in the Rig Veda, and all fundamentalists could learn something from it.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Hindu pluralism is grounded in the Rig Veda, Wendy Doniger, the Sanskrit scholar, tells us in a wonderful essay, “Many Gods, Many Paths”. It may well have originated in the charming humility of the Nasadiya verse (10.129): “[In the beginning] there was neither being nor non-being … [but] who really knows? … [for] the gods came afterwards.” This questioning attitude, adds Doniger, might also have led to the invention of a god whose name was the interrogative pronoun, ka. For the creator once asked Indra, “Who am I?” Indra replied, “Just what you said: Who.” And this is how the creator got the name, Ka or Who.
The pluralism of the Rig Veda, however, did have a monistic hue for the very substance of the universe was divine. Each god had a secondary or illusory status compared to the divine substance, yet was a powerful symbol of and a guide to the divine. Hence, many gods co-exist comfortably in a non-hierarchic pantheon. And the devotee of many, non-hierarchical gods is more likely to see the many sides of truth, and thus be more tolerant.
By the time that this unassuming outlook is enshrined in the famous “Neti, neti” (“Not this, not that”) attitude of the Upanishads, the seeds of monistic certainty have been firmly planted. It is charming the way open-minded kings in the Upanishads invite holy men of various schools to debate religious issues. But the modest openness of neti becomes a “submerged form of intellectual imperialism” when we come to Shankara. A belief in the unity of brahman and atman may lead to a belief in the unity of all persons but it does not necessarily lead to a respect for all viewpoints, as the argumentative followers of Shankara and Ramanuja will testify.
Thus, social pluralism doesn’t always follow from intellectual pluralism. The problem is that when I speak with certainty about my beliefs, I cannot help but suggest that what I believe in is superior. I secretly want you to renounce your opposing view and accept mine. Hence, all such statements are attempts at conversion. Here lies the leap from tolerance to intolerance. What stops one from trying to convert others is good manners. Fundamentalists lack these and take the further leap and threaten death.
The source of Hindutva’s intolerance, or for that matter any fundamentalist’s, is a political one and it is futile to seek answers in belief. All fundamentalists are insecure, and seem to take an excessive interest in others. They would do well to see Walt Disney’s 1942 film, Bambi. In it is a rabbit named Thumper, whose mother asks him, “Thumper, what did your father say?” Thumper replies, “If you can’t say something good about a person, don’t say anything at all.” Islamic, Hindu and Christian fundamentalists ought to consider joining Thumper’s School of Social Harmony. They might also consider following Albert Camus’ sensible advice: “To be happy one must not be too concerned with others.” The ordinary Hindu on the street, or any person anywhere, I am convinced, is tolerant in belief. She has the unassuming Nasadiya temper of the open-minded seeker in the Rig Veda, and all fundamentalists could learn something from it.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Why Rani can’t read? January 29, 2006
We are not a cooperative people, and some even accuse us of a crab’s mentality—we’d rather bring down the next guy than see the team win. So, when 20,000 volunteers from 700 institutions collaborate to test 332,971 village children in 484 districts at a breakneck pace, within a month that is a victory of sorts. It also says something about our voluntary movement. Where civil society begins to flourish democracy has taken hold, says de Tocqueville, and this is worth celebrating on this 57th birthday of our Republic.
This team effort was led by the impressive NGO, Pratham, and the result is a citizens’ report card called Annual Status of Education Report 2005. It is the first ever snapshot in our nation’s history about children’s ability to read and do arithmetic. The good news is that the old bogey about children not attending school is gone. 93.4% of village children are in school. You could argue that 1.3 crore children are not in school, which is terrible, but I prefer to celebrate the achievement. The gender gap is also happily narrowing. In 2001, 65% of the kids-out-of-school were girls; this has come down to 55%.
The bad news is that 35% of India’s rural children between ages 7 and14 cannot read a simple paragraph, something they should have learned to do in the first school year. 52% cannot read a simple story, which they should have learned by grade 2. 41% cannot either do two digit subtractions with borrowing or divide three digits by one digit. Given the atrocious state of government schools, these are not surprising results. The optimist might even argue that at least two out of three kids can read a paragraph and one in two can read a story; and 1 in 4 can subtract and 1 in 3 can divide. Children in private rural schools, who constituted 16% in the sample survey, scored 10 percentage points higher.
There are some surprises in the data on states, but overall rural India is behind by 2-3 years. This is deeply disappointing for a nation that aspires to heights. Also, we won’t know how badly off we are unless Pratham benchmarks these results with those of other countries. Curiously, the very act of testing brought the whole village together. Children wanted to be tested. Mothers wanted to know, “can my child read?” One village patriarch cynically told Pratham volunteers that they were wasting their time. But when he discovered that none of his three children could read, he practically fell off his khatiya. It was a shock to many parents and communities that that their children had been left behind.
Why Rani cannot read is because we don’t focus on outcomes. Official policy forbids primary schools to test kids as it might hurt their self-esteem. Children are automatically promoted till class 5. It does make sense not to want to create excessive anxiety of an annual external exam in the very young. However, parents, children and even teachers, do need feedback. Unless you test the child, how do you help the child to improve? How do you know if the teacher is doing her job? If the child knows when he is bowled out on the cricket pitch, why not tell him when he is bowled out in class? Instead of stopping IIM-B from going to Singapore, the Minister ought to be thinking about these questions—and why 3 out of 4 children cannot subtract.
This team effort was led by the impressive NGO, Pratham, and the result is a citizens’ report card called Annual Status of Education Report 2005. It is the first ever snapshot in our nation’s history about children’s ability to read and do arithmetic. The good news is that the old bogey about children not attending school is gone. 93.4% of village children are in school. You could argue that 1.3 crore children are not in school, which is terrible, but I prefer to celebrate the achievement. The gender gap is also happily narrowing. In 2001, 65% of the kids-out-of-school were girls; this has come down to 55%.
The bad news is that 35% of India’s rural children between ages 7 and14 cannot read a simple paragraph, something they should have learned to do in the first school year. 52% cannot read a simple story, which they should have learned by grade 2. 41% cannot either do two digit subtractions with borrowing or divide three digits by one digit. Given the atrocious state of government schools, these are not surprising results. The optimist might even argue that at least two out of three kids can read a paragraph and one in two can read a story; and 1 in 4 can subtract and 1 in 3 can divide. Children in private rural schools, who constituted 16% in the sample survey, scored 10 percentage points higher.
There are some surprises in the data on states, but overall rural India is behind by 2-3 years. This is deeply disappointing for a nation that aspires to heights. Also, we won’t know how badly off we are unless Pratham benchmarks these results with those of other countries. Curiously, the very act of testing brought the whole village together. Children wanted to be tested. Mothers wanted to know, “can my child read?” One village patriarch cynically told Pratham volunteers that they were wasting their time. But when he discovered that none of his three children could read, he practically fell off his khatiya. It was a shock to many parents and communities that that their children had been left behind.
Why Rani cannot read is because we don’t focus on outcomes. Official policy forbids primary schools to test kids as it might hurt their self-esteem. Children are automatically promoted till class 5. It does make sense not to want to create excessive anxiety of an annual external exam in the very young. However, parents, children and even teachers, do need feedback. Unless you test the child, how do you help the child to improve? How do you know if the teacher is doing her job? If the child knows when he is bowled out on the cricket pitch, why not tell him when he is bowled out in class? Instead of stopping IIM-B from going to Singapore, the Minister ought to be thinking about these questions—and why 3 out of 4 children cannot subtract.
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Religious narcissism January 15, 2006
Last month I visited the ‘post-secular world’. I found myself sitting next to a group of white Americans on a train from Washington to New York, who told me blandly that I would go to hell because I believed in abortion and evolution. I had heard that Bush’s America had turned religious, but I could not imagine how much till that morning. I was their captive for three hours, and they decided to do their good deed and try to convert me to their faith.
Jurgen Habermas, one of the most influential thinkers in the West, explains religion’s return, especially in America, in Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity. He says that people have traditionally found solace in religion when threatened, and the emergence of ‘post-secular societies’ is a reaction to terrorism after 9/11. The religious values of love, community, and godliness also help to offset the global dominance of an ethic of competitiveness and acquisitiveness in the capitalist workplace. In post-reform India too, I have noticed that the young are increasingly overwhelmed by the demands of work and material success, and have begun to seek refuge in various sects of bhakti.
This fundamentalist post-secular America is so different from the one in which I grew up. During my college days in the sixties I read the great modern thinkers and I learned that reason was superior to belief (Hegel); that God diminished man’s sublimity (Feuerbach); that religion was an ‘opiate of the masses’ (Marx); and there was no ‘future of an illusion’ (Freud) because ‘God was dead’(Nietzsche). I returned to India expecting the world to gradually turn secular with the spread of modernity. But the India that I came back to was, arguably, the world’s most religious place. I worried that religion made Indians passive and accepting, and turned them away from the pressing problems of society when we needed an active and engaged citizenry in democracy to fight society’s injustices. So, I turned for inspiration to the third goal of classical Indian life, to dharma or right conduct, rather than the transcendent goal of moksha. Dharma was secular while moksha was religious.
Over time I have discovered, however, that a secular life based on the noble end of dharma cannot substitute the mesmerising power of moksha. Secularism is a noble but limited ethic—I don’t think it can replace religion. In a similar vein, Habermas explains that many of our modern ideals, such as the intrinsic worth of all human beings that underlies human rights, stem from the religious idea of the equality of all men in the eyes of God. Religious idealism and biblical justice, he reminds us, also infused the civil rights movement in America in the 1960s. Were these invaluable religious sources of morality and justice to atrophy, he is doubtful whether modern societies would be able to sustain these ideals on their own. Religion's return, however, does present an undeniable danger and risk in a post-secular world. Hence, in a recent lecture, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, Habermas spoke about the commendable idea of toleration, which is the foundation of modern democratic culture. He called it a two-way street. Not only must believers tolerate each others' beliefs, but also the atheism of nonbelievers. Disbelieving secularists, similarly, must value the convictions of religious citizens. Only those religions who can suspend the temptation of theological narcissism--the conviction that my religion alone provides the path to salvation--are welcome in our rapidly changing, post-secular world. gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Jurgen Habermas, one of the most influential thinkers in the West, explains religion’s return, especially in America, in Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity. He says that people have traditionally found solace in religion when threatened, and the emergence of ‘post-secular societies’ is a reaction to terrorism after 9/11. The religious values of love, community, and godliness also help to offset the global dominance of an ethic of competitiveness and acquisitiveness in the capitalist workplace. In post-reform India too, I have noticed that the young are increasingly overwhelmed by the demands of work and material success, and have begun to seek refuge in various sects of bhakti.
This fundamentalist post-secular America is so different from the one in which I grew up. During my college days in the sixties I read the great modern thinkers and I learned that reason was superior to belief (Hegel); that God diminished man’s sublimity (Feuerbach); that religion was an ‘opiate of the masses’ (Marx); and there was no ‘future of an illusion’ (Freud) because ‘God was dead’(Nietzsche). I returned to India expecting the world to gradually turn secular with the spread of modernity. But the India that I came back to was, arguably, the world’s most religious place. I worried that religion made Indians passive and accepting, and turned them away from the pressing problems of society when we needed an active and engaged citizenry in democracy to fight society’s injustices. So, I turned for inspiration to the third goal of classical Indian life, to dharma or right conduct, rather than the transcendent goal of moksha. Dharma was secular while moksha was religious.
Over time I have discovered, however, that a secular life based on the noble end of dharma cannot substitute the mesmerising power of moksha. Secularism is a noble but limited ethic—I don’t think it can replace religion. In a similar vein, Habermas explains that many of our modern ideals, such as the intrinsic worth of all human beings that underlies human rights, stem from the religious idea of the equality of all men in the eyes of God. Religious idealism and biblical justice, he reminds us, also infused the civil rights movement in America in the 1960s. Were these invaluable religious sources of morality and justice to atrophy, he is doubtful whether modern societies would be able to sustain these ideals on their own. Religion's return, however, does present an undeniable danger and risk in a post-secular world. Hence, in a recent lecture, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, Habermas spoke about the commendable idea of toleration, which is the foundation of modern democratic culture. He called it a two-way street. Not only must believers tolerate each others' beliefs, but also the atheism of nonbelievers. Disbelieving secularists, similarly, must value the convictions of religious citizens. Only those religions who can suspend the temptation of theological narcissism--the conviction that my religion alone provides the path to salvation--are welcome in our rapidly changing, post-secular world. gurcharandas@vsnl.com
A guide to clear thinking, January 1, 2006
We live in unusual times. Who would have imagined in 1991, when communism died and our reforms began, that fourteen years later the Indian republic would become hostage to the extraordinary influence of the Left? For almost two years now, it has been instructive to observe the mind of the Indian Left. And if one compares it to the Chinese communist mind, the result is a guide to clear thinking.
Both Chinese and Indian communists claim to be compassionate, but the Chinese version of compassion is tough while the Indian is tender. The Chinese invest in roads; thus they create opportunities for private investment, which in turn generates productive and enduring jobs. India’s communists create jobs through the Employment Guarantee Act, which they claim will also create roads. If the Indian strategy is implemented brilliantly—an unhealthy assumption, but let it pass--it will put money in the pockets of the jobless, but the roads will get washed away in one monsoon. China’s strategy will give their people world class roads but not money. Both strategies are based on good intentions--Indian communists give fish to the hungry; Chinese communists teach them to fish. The tender impulse gives quick relief to the suffering; the tough impulse cures the disease.
Indian communists prefer to protect the jobs and perquisites of the lucky few (about 8 % of Indians) in the organised, unionised sector. Chinese communists care about the unlucky many who don’t have decent jobs. Indian communists stall labour reforms, defend an unviable public sector, and advocate high interest on pensions. Chinese communists work hard to build exports and create an investment friendly climate. This means, for example, that Chinese entrepreneurs can lay off workers when demand falls. Indian entrepreneurs cannot do so, and thus prefer to invest in machines rather than be saddled with workers with lifetime employment. Therefore, the Chinese are creating millions of productive, new jobs, while Indians are protecting thousands of unproductive old jobs. Chinese compassion is tough while Indian compassion is tender.
Chinese communists select potential gold medal winners for their Olympic team. India’s communists fight for Ganguly’s inclusion in our cricket team. More to the point, India’s Leftists sacrifice merit in advocating reservations in education and jobs. Hence, China will not only win gold medals at the Olympics, but it will create a society based on merit and excellence.
As we begin a new year we are fortunate to have at the helm three admirable reformers to guide our nation. They have a solid track record of economic reform grounded in tough compassion. They know, for example, that all Indians will only benefit from reforms if India creates an industrial revolution based on the export of labour intensive, low tech manufactures like toys, shoes and garments. It is the only way to broad scale prosperity. In order to achieve this goal, however, we need at the minimum labour and power reforms. But our tender hearted populists oppose these stridently. On this first day of 2006 it is the nation’s fervent hope that our reformers will find the courage to resist the opportunism of our political class which masquerades as tender compassion. So, the next time communists try to hijack a reform, our reformers should ask them, would they rather be a tender-minded, compassionate father who presents his son with a bike on his birthday or his tough-minded compassionate neighbour, who insists on the long-term kindness of teaching his son the work ethic and makes him earn the bike?
Both Chinese and Indian communists claim to be compassionate, but the Chinese version of compassion is tough while the Indian is tender. The Chinese invest in roads; thus they create opportunities for private investment, which in turn generates productive and enduring jobs. India’s communists create jobs through the Employment Guarantee Act, which they claim will also create roads. If the Indian strategy is implemented brilliantly—an unhealthy assumption, but let it pass--it will put money in the pockets of the jobless, but the roads will get washed away in one monsoon. China’s strategy will give their people world class roads but not money. Both strategies are based on good intentions--Indian communists give fish to the hungry; Chinese communists teach them to fish. The tender impulse gives quick relief to the suffering; the tough impulse cures the disease.
Indian communists prefer to protect the jobs and perquisites of the lucky few (about 8 % of Indians) in the organised, unionised sector. Chinese communists care about the unlucky many who don’t have decent jobs. Indian communists stall labour reforms, defend an unviable public sector, and advocate high interest on pensions. Chinese communists work hard to build exports and create an investment friendly climate. This means, for example, that Chinese entrepreneurs can lay off workers when demand falls. Indian entrepreneurs cannot do so, and thus prefer to invest in machines rather than be saddled with workers with lifetime employment. Therefore, the Chinese are creating millions of productive, new jobs, while Indians are protecting thousands of unproductive old jobs. Chinese compassion is tough while Indian compassion is tender.
Chinese communists select potential gold medal winners for their Olympic team. India’s communists fight for Ganguly’s inclusion in our cricket team. More to the point, India’s Leftists sacrifice merit in advocating reservations in education and jobs. Hence, China will not only win gold medals at the Olympics, but it will create a society based on merit and excellence.
As we begin a new year we are fortunate to have at the helm three admirable reformers to guide our nation. They have a solid track record of economic reform grounded in tough compassion. They know, for example, that all Indians will only benefit from reforms if India creates an industrial revolution based on the export of labour intensive, low tech manufactures like toys, shoes and garments. It is the only way to broad scale prosperity. In order to achieve this goal, however, we need at the minimum labour and power reforms. But our tender hearted populists oppose these stridently. On this first day of 2006 it is the nation’s fervent hope that our reformers will find the courage to resist the opportunism of our political class which masquerades as tender compassion. So, the next time communists try to hijack a reform, our reformers should ask them, would they rather be a tender-minded, compassionate father who presents his son with a bike on his birthday or his tough-minded compassionate neighbour, who insists on the long-term kindness of teaching his son the work ethic and makes him earn the bike?
The discreet charm of the Metro, Dec. 18, 2005
Sheila Dixit may be one of our best chief ministers, but Elattuvalapil Sreedharan will do more to knit the vast and disparate people of Delhi into one wholesome community. I rode in his Metro the other day and I came away convinced that we are about to create a new public culture in the nation’s capital. The Metro was clean, quiet, and efficient, as I had expected, but I also felt a sudden bond with strangers. For twenty-two minutes, as I rode in the comfort which the Mughal Emperor would have envied, I observed people recover some of the grace and friendliness that they normally reserve for relatives and friends. I felt connected to every person on the train. It was the same feeling I had as a child when I first rode on Mumbai’s suburban train in the 1950s.
As I came out on the street, however, my old fears returned. So did my revulsion for the filth around me. I felt separate instead of connected. The child inside the Metro had become an adult who felt the old status anxiety that I feel when I ride in my car, when I am more aware of differences with others than similarities. I wanted to stand away from the crowd than be a part of it. When public spaces are not kindly, you seek escape behind the barricade of your car or your gated home. When ordinary life lacks dignity, you run in search of physical and psychological cover. When you ride in a DTU bus you want to distance yourself and to feel superior to others.
Nothing could be nobler, more human than to feel deep inside that we are all one in every way that really matters. To feel this, however, you need to share unthreatening public spaces. Since we are not a culture of public squares and piazzas of say, the Mediterranean countries, we need to create other opportunities for rubbing shoulders with fellow citizens, and build empathy and respect for them. I sometimes get this nice feeling in a small town bazaar, but I usually feel this connectedness on Sunday afternoons when I am surrounded by picnickers in Lodhi Gardens. Sometimes when I am watching cricket on TV, I want to rush into the street and accost the first stranger to tell him about Pathan’s bowling. Music is also a great leveller, and I remember the same feeling at a Spic Macay concert years ago, listening to Malikarjun Mansur surrounded by hundreds of students.
Delhi’s Metro offers a great chance to change the city’s public culture. The best way to return the compliment to Sreedharan would be to encourage the new culture to spill out from below to above the ground. The challenge for Delhi’s government and its citizens is to make public spaces around the Metro clean and pleasant as well. Particularly old Connaught Place, where I used go as a boy to “eat the air” as we say in India. It will need more than the Metro, however, to create the new culture, Vyom Akhil, my friend in Orissa, reminds me. It will need educating boys not to urinate on the road, nor to halt their scooter in the middle of traffic in order to answer your mobile phone. But a new mode of transport is a powerful way to bring about a civic and democratic revolution in what has always been an unkind city. After all, Mumbai’s superior public culture originated, in part, in its better transport system.
As I came out on the street, however, my old fears returned. So did my revulsion for the filth around me. I felt separate instead of connected. The child inside the Metro had become an adult who felt the old status anxiety that I feel when I ride in my car, when I am more aware of differences with others than similarities. I wanted to stand away from the crowd than be a part of it. When public spaces are not kindly, you seek escape behind the barricade of your car or your gated home. When ordinary life lacks dignity, you run in search of physical and psychological cover. When you ride in a DTU bus you want to distance yourself and to feel superior to others.
Nothing could be nobler, more human than to feel deep inside that we are all one in every way that really matters. To feel this, however, you need to share unthreatening public spaces. Since we are not a culture of public squares and piazzas of say, the Mediterranean countries, we need to create other opportunities for rubbing shoulders with fellow citizens, and build empathy and respect for them. I sometimes get this nice feeling in a small town bazaar, but I usually feel this connectedness on Sunday afternoons when I am surrounded by picnickers in Lodhi Gardens. Sometimes when I am watching cricket on TV, I want to rush into the street and accost the first stranger to tell him about Pathan’s bowling. Music is also a great leveller, and I remember the same feeling at a Spic Macay concert years ago, listening to Malikarjun Mansur surrounded by hundreds of students.
Delhi’s Metro offers a great chance to change the city’s public culture. The best way to return the compliment to Sreedharan would be to encourage the new culture to spill out from below to above the ground. The challenge for Delhi’s government and its citizens is to make public spaces around the Metro clean and pleasant as well. Particularly old Connaught Place, where I used go as a boy to “eat the air” as we say in India. It will need more than the Metro, however, to create the new culture, Vyom Akhil, my friend in Orissa, reminds me. It will need educating boys not to urinate on the road, nor to halt their scooter in the middle of traffic in order to answer your mobile phone. But a new mode of transport is a powerful way to bring about a civic and democratic revolution in what has always been an unkind city. After all, Mumbai’s superior public culture originated, in part, in its better transport system.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Ghastly coalitions, away Times of India Dec. 4, 2005
Nitish Kumar’s victory in Bihar reminds us what a young country we are. The young look to the future, not the past, and Laloo’s appeal to caste had to fail ultimately because it sought to undo the wrongs of the past. The young want to make something of their life, and they look to the government to enable them to do so. Congress learned this lesson painfully in the winter of 2003 in the west central states. The difference is that to bijlee, sadak, pani, the young Bihar voter has added padhai and naukari.
It is now BJP’s turn to learn this lesson. The Bihar election gives moderates in the BJP an opportunity to stand up to the RSS and prove that a backward looking appeal to Hindutva will eventually fail in a young country. Vajpayee understood this, but people called it a mask. Advani too had begun to grasp this. Their speech writer, Sudheendra Kulkarni, kept reminding them relentlessly to look to the future, to shed Hindutva, and become a moderate, inclusive, secular party of the right.
As things stand, voters don’t trust either of our two main parties, which is why neither is able to win a majority, and we have to suffer through this era of ghastly coalitions that paralyze decision making. Voters don’t trust the BJP because they fear its sectarian extremists; they don’t trust the Congress because of socialist extremists, who believe in state control. India’s democracy will only be effective once we have two strong centrist parties, which shun identity and ideology, and yet offer genuine choice to the voter. Democracies around the world have learned that extremist parties fail and centrist parties succeed. This is because ordinary voters care about things that affect their daily life. They are pragmatic and fear extreme, ideological solutions. Hence, socialists in the Congress and Hindu fanatics in the BJP are liabilities. Neither mandal, mandir, nor socialism are viable strategies long term.
Since Congress occupies the space left of centre, the BJP ought to seize the empty space right of centre. Since Congress has always appealed to the poor with populist handouts, the BJP ought to embrace the exploding new middle class, which desperately wants reforms. This might seem a losing strategy as there are more poor people than middle class, but remember that every poor person wants to be middle class. Middle class is not only defined by income, but it is a self-reliant state of mind, which looks to the future, invests in its children and pulls itself up by its bootstraps. In contrast, the mindset of the poor waits for handouts and subsidies. NCAER projects that large parts of India are already turning middle class and soon half of India will be so.
Once India has two viable national secular parties, there will be pressure on both to perform, and attention will shift to governance and reforms, and away from caste and religion. If voters of Bihar are discovering this, the voters of UP will not be far behind. They watch television and see how far the rest of India is leaving them behind. They see that the simple goods of life are plentiful and cheaper in their neighbouring states, and they will wonder why Mulayam Singh refuses to enact VAT. So, it is time for both our national parties to wake up. As for the BJP, its best compliment to Nitish Kumar would be to support him to clean up Bihar and never utter the word, Hindutva there.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
It is now BJP’s turn to learn this lesson. The Bihar election gives moderates in the BJP an opportunity to stand up to the RSS and prove that a backward looking appeal to Hindutva will eventually fail in a young country. Vajpayee understood this, but people called it a mask. Advani too had begun to grasp this. Their speech writer, Sudheendra Kulkarni, kept reminding them relentlessly to look to the future, to shed Hindutva, and become a moderate, inclusive, secular party of the right.
As things stand, voters don’t trust either of our two main parties, which is why neither is able to win a majority, and we have to suffer through this era of ghastly coalitions that paralyze decision making. Voters don’t trust the BJP because they fear its sectarian extremists; they don’t trust the Congress because of socialist extremists, who believe in state control. India’s democracy will only be effective once we have two strong centrist parties, which shun identity and ideology, and yet offer genuine choice to the voter. Democracies around the world have learned that extremist parties fail and centrist parties succeed. This is because ordinary voters care about things that affect their daily life. They are pragmatic and fear extreme, ideological solutions. Hence, socialists in the Congress and Hindu fanatics in the BJP are liabilities. Neither mandal, mandir, nor socialism are viable strategies long term.
Since Congress occupies the space left of centre, the BJP ought to seize the empty space right of centre. Since Congress has always appealed to the poor with populist handouts, the BJP ought to embrace the exploding new middle class, which desperately wants reforms. This might seem a losing strategy as there are more poor people than middle class, but remember that every poor person wants to be middle class. Middle class is not only defined by income, but it is a self-reliant state of mind, which looks to the future, invests in its children and pulls itself up by its bootstraps. In contrast, the mindset of the poor waits for handouts and subsidies. NCAER projects that large parts of India are already turning middle class and soon half of India will be so.
Once India has two viable national secular parties, there will be pressure on both to perform, and attention will shift to governance and reforms, and away from caste and religion. If voters of Bihar are discovering this, the voters of UP will not be far behind. They watch television and see how far the rest of India is leaving them behind. They see that the simple goods of life are plentiful and cheaper in their neighbouring states, and they will wonder why Mulayam Singh refuses to enact VAT. So, it is time for both our national parties to wake up. As for the BJP, its best compliment to Nitish Kumar would be to support him to clean up Bihar and never utter the word, Hindutva there.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
A New Social Contract, Times of India, Nov. 20, 2005
I was deeply embarrassed last week before a distinguished audience of sophisticated investors abroad—they virtually called me a liar. A year ago I had reassured them that our stellar reformers–Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram and Montek–would not only ensure that our economic reforms would continue but they might even accelerate. A year later, the reforms are stuck and they were angry. I could not pretend that the reformers had become victims of coalition politics, for insiders tell me that the problem is with the Congress Party itself, which has lost the will to reform.
Luckily, I was bailed out by the Indian economy, which continues to grow robustly, and has been doing so for two decades, contemptuously ignoring our governments. The only way to explain this contradiction is that politics and economics are increasingly getting divorced in India, and we may have become like Italy, where they used to say, the economy grows at night when the government is asleep. Stephen Roach, the chief economist of Morgan Stanley, who exercises considerable influence on investor minds, explains: “India is on the cusp of something big. After my third trip there in 18 months, I am as enthusiastic about India as I was about China in the late 1990s. What excites me is the potential for an increasingly powerful internal consumption dynamic - the missing link in most development models.”
Roach points out that India’s consumption share of GDP is 64%–higher than that of Europe (58%), Japan (55%), and China (42%). The world economy needs another major consumption-led growth nation other than America. Thus, “India’s consumption-led approach to growth may be better balanced than the resource-mobilization model of China”. That consumption is a virtue is an idea that Lord Keynes made popular, and serious economists still believe it, but Indians with their streak of asceticism are less confident. Roach suggests that this government’s populist programs, which go under the code name “inclusion”, such as the Employment Guarantee Act, might even generate a consumption dividend in the hands of the poor. I would agree with him if I had any hope that its benefits would actually reach the poor.
Vijay Kelkar reminded us recently in his Gadgil Memorial lecture that India ought not to take its “golden age of growth” for granted. The window of opportunity for “a grand demographic dividend” will be a limited to the next two decades, and if our leaders do not reform aggressively, and if they continue down “the slippery path of state capitalism and populism”, we will lose the opportunity, become economically stagnant as we did before.
So, how do we get our government off its “slippery path of state capitalism”? The political scientist, Bhanu Pratap Mehta offers an answer. “In this situation, any imaginative party would propose a new social contract. It would expand the social security functions of the state in areas such as health, education and employment. But it would also argue that reforms elsewhere - creating an integrated goods and services tax, furthering disinvestment, committing to genuine special export zones and fiscal prudence - are not incompatible with, but might actually further, social objectives.”
Our entire political class must buy this new social contract with urgency, and especially the Congress Party. The great failure of reformers in all parties is that they did not convince the rank and file that the reforms would not lose them votes. Will our stellar reformers do it now or must we resign to snatch defeat from our golden age of growth? gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Luckily, I was bailed out by the Indian economy, which continues to grow robustly, and has been doing so for two decades, contemptuously ignoring our governments. The only way to explain this contradiction is that politics and economics are increasingly getting divorced in India, and we may have become like Italy, where they used to say, the economy grows at night when the government is asleep. Stephen Roach, the chief economist of Morgan Stanley, who exercises considerable influence on investor minds, explains: “India is on the cusp of something big. After my third trip there in 18 months, I am as enthusiastic about India as I was about China in the late 1990s. What excites me is the potential for an increasingly powerful internal consumption dynamic - the missing link in most development models.”
Roach points out that India’s consumption share of GDP is 64%–higher than that of Europe (58%), Japan (55%), and China (42%). The world economy needs another major consumption-led growth nation other than America. Thus, “India’s consumption-led approach to growth may be better balanced than the resource-mobilization model of China”. That consumption is a virtue is an idea that Lord Keynes made popular, and serious economists still believe it, but Indians with their streak of asceticism are less confident. Roach suggests that this government’s populist programs, which go under the code name “inclusion”, such as the Employment Guarantee Act, might even generate a consumption dividend in the hands of the poor. I would agree with him if I had any hope that its benefits would actually reach the poor.
Vijay Kelkar reminded us recently in his Gadgil Memorial lecture that India ought not to take its “golden age of growth” for granted. The window of opportunity for “a grand demographic dividend” will be a limited to the next two decades, and if our leaders do not reform aggressively, and if they continue down “the slippery path of state capitalism and populism”, we will lose the opportunity, become economically stagnant as we did before.
So, how do we get our government off its “slippery path of state capitalism”? The political scientist, Bhanu Pratap Mehta offers an answer. “In this situation, any imaginative party would propose a new social contract. It would expand the social security functions of the state in areas such as health, education and employment. But it would also argue that reforms elsewhere - creating an integrated goods and services tax, furthering disinvestment, committing to genuine special export zones and fiscal prudence - are not incompatible with, but might actually further, social objectives.”
Our entire political class must buy this new social contract with urgency, and especially the Congress Party. The great failure of reformers in all parties is that they did not convince the rank and file that the reforms would not lose them votes. Will our stellar reformers do it now or must we resign to snatch defeat from our golden age of growth? gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Everyone needs an address November 6, 2005
When I was growing up in post-Independence India in the 1950s and 1960s, the word ‘conservative’ was an abuse in the vocabulary of Indian intellectuals. We passionately wanted change and likened Nehru’s ‘Tryst with destiny’ speech to Wordsworth’s famous lines on the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”. To be conservative in Nehru’s India was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, and spontaneity against life.
Now, more that fifty years later, the wheel has come a full circle. It is the old Nehruvian progressives who are ‘old’, who hark nostalgically for a socialist utopia. They oppose reforms and still believe in statism when it has been discredited everywhere. It is the young who believe in the reforms today based on the conservative idea of the market. Alas, there is no political home for a secular conservative in today’s India, someone who wants vigorous reform and believes in good but small government. I had hoped that the BJP might shed its sectarian agenda and become a secular, conservative party. But this has not happened.
In my column last month, “I’m a Hindu, but”, I described the dilemma of a sensitive principal over teaching the Mahabharata in her school. My fear that secularism might undermine tradition may seem exaggerated. Certainly in the villages, our epics are well and alive. But India’s future will be written in its cities, where we must worry about preserving continuity with the past, especially before the relentless onslaught of a powerful global culture. Like Edmund Burke, who founded Conservatism, I think society is not merely a collection of loosely related individuals, but a living organism. I feel reverence for the past not as a political doctrine but a habit of mind, as a way of living and feeling. Hence, I raised the question that if Italian children can read Dante’s Divine Comedy or English children can read Milton in school, why should “secularist” Indians be ambivalent about teaching the Mahabharata?
It’s true that the Mahabharata has lots of gods, and in particular the elusive Krishna. But so do Dante and Milton deal with God. As a secular Indian, I appreciate the “wall” that our founding fathers built between religion and education. I admire France and Turkey who have the strongest “walls”. But what does one do when our literary classics are "semi-religious"? At the same time, if our kids don’t read Sanskrit classics in a secular environment they will grow up impoverished. Something has gone terribly wrong in the way our schools churn out deracinated products, who know little about their own culture but a great deal about the West. Some people would teach all the religions, and with this they hope to engender what Emperor Ashoka called a “respect for all creeds”. This too is a dangerous path, for how do you teach religion without worrying about some teacher somewhere who might hurt the sensitivities of some follower. Before you know it, you have a riot on your hands. So, I do sympathize with the school principal’s dilemma.
“Every writer needs an address”, wrote the Yiddish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer. That is a fine way of saying that all human beings need local roots, an identity, and a link with a unique identifiable past. A writer needs it even more because he aspires to speak universally about life. Clearly, we need to ponder over this idea in India, and ask if its time has come. Is this the time to revive the Swatantra Party?
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Now, more that fifty years later, the wheel has come a full circle. It is the old Nehruvian progressives who are ‘old’, who hark nostalgically for a socialist utopia. They oppose reforms and still believe in statism when it has been discredited everywhere. It is the young who believe in the reforms today based on the conservative idea of the market. Alas, there is no political home for a secular conservative in today’s India, someone who wants vigorous reform and believes in good but small government. I had hoped that the BJP might shed its sectarian agenda and become a secular, conservative party. But this has not happened.
In my column last month, “I’m a Hindu, but”, I described the dilemma of a sensitive principal over teaching the Mahabharata in her school. My fear that secularism might undermine tradition may seem exaggerated. Certainly in the villages, our epics are well and alive. But India’s future will be written in its cities, where we must worry about preserving continuity with the past, especially before the relentless onslaught of a powerful global culture. Like Edmund Burke, who founded Conservatism, I think society is not merely a collection of loosely related individuals, but a living organism. I feel reverence for the past not as a political doctrine but a habit of mind, as a way of living and feeling. Hence, I raised the question that if Italian children can read Dante’s Divine Comedy or English children can read Milton in school, why should “secularist” Indians be ambivalent about teaching the Mahabharata?
It’s true that the Mahabharata has lots of gods, and in particular the elusive Krishna. But so do Dante and Milton deal with God. As a secular Indian, I appreciate the “wall” that our founding fathers built between religion and education. I admire France and Turkey who have the strongest “walls”. But what does one do when our literary classics are "semi-religious"? At the same time, if our kids don’t read Sanskrit classics in a secular environment they will grow up impoverished. Something has gone terribly wrong in the way our schools churn out deracinated products, who know little about their own culture but a great deal about the West. Some people would teach all the religions, and with this they hope to engender what Emperor Ashoka called a “respect for all creeds”. This too is a dangerous path, for how do you teach religion without worrying about some teacher somewhere who might hurt the sensitivities of some follower. Before you know it, you have a riot on your hands. So, I do sympathize with the school principal’s dilemma.
“Every writer needs an address”, wrote the Yiddish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer. That is a fine way of saying that all human beings need local roots, an identity, and a link with a unique identifiable past. A writer needs it even more because he aspires to speak universally about life. Clearly, we need to ponder over this idea in India, and ask if its time has come. Is this the time to revive the Swatantra Party?
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Amoral familism October 23, 2005
Nothing quite captures the imagination as these two facts: whereas three out of four members of China’s politburo are technocrats, one out of four members of India’s parliament has a criminal record. This explains a lot–our depressing governance, stalled reforms, creaking infrastructure, and the absence of reasoned debate in parliament. Ironically, as our economy becomes stronger, our polity seems to grow weaker. Just when our companies are breaking out of the shackles of family control, our politics is going the other way. When our best companies are building depth of management and becoming professional, our political parties are creating family dynasties.
The satisfactory end to the Ambani saga, especially in the way Reliance assets were divided, represented a victory of professionalism over familism. In contrast, our political parties are beginning to resemble the old family run companies: from Bihar to J&K and from Tamil Nadu to U.P. our political leaders are busy building family dynasties. The original inspiration, of course, came from our oldest party, the Congress, but even the newer ones, like the Shiv Sena, appear to be following in its footsteps.
Our political parties are embracing the heredity principle when our best companies have succeeded in separating their family’s and their company’s interests. None of our political parties is managed by professionals. Not one has depth in organization, nor a clear command structure down to the grass roots. This weakness explains in part why some of our best performing governments fall so easily, such as the last one in Karnataka, and why in the heart of Bangalore, Congress party managed to lose the by-election in May 2005 from a constituency occupied till the other day by the fine reformer, SM Krishna. That his successors have only played petty politics and obstructed the development of infrastructure in India’s premier city is another matter.
Many shrug their shoulders and ask, what is wrong if a politician’s son enters politics? Isn’t it like a doctor’s child wanting to be a doctor? No, there is a difference. Politics is a matter of public interest, and citizens want the best person to lead them. It is possible that a politician’s son might turn out to be a great leader, but the odds are against it. This is not how nature distributes talent. In 1950 we chose not to become a monarchy but a republic. So, how can we just shrug at this return of bloodlines in our political life? Remember also, the principle of heredity is one step away from the loathsome caste system.
Tom Paine wrote in The Rights of Man (1791), “I smile when I contemplate the ridiculous depths to which literature and science would sink were they to become hereditary.” The idea of hereditary ruler is as ridiculous and more offensive than a hereditary author. When family interests prevail, political parties become weak, and governments don’t perform. The end result is that the things don’t get done– reforms slow down, roads don’t get built, and the house goes dark when your child sits down to study. The mentality in a family run polity is feudal. I don’t do what is right, but what serves the family. Loyalty matters more than performance. The best person doesn’t get the job but the one who is manipulative. Edward Banfield called it “amoral familism” in describing why southern Italy keeps failing and northern Italy succeeds. So, dear reader, it is time to shake off your complacency, and the next time around, don’t vote for “hereditary asses, imbeciles, and this curse of the nation,” as Napoleon put it.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
The satisfactory end to the Ambani saga, especially in the way Reliance assets were divided, represented a victory of professionalism over familism. In contrast, our political parties are beginning to resemble the old family run companies: from Bihar to J&K and from Tamil Nadu to U.P. our political leaders are busy building family dynasties. The original inspiration, of course, came from our oldest party, the Congress, but even the newer ones, like the Shiv Sena, appear to be following in its footsteps.
Our political parties are embracing the heredity principle when our best companies have succeeded in separating their family’s and their company’s interests. None of our political parties is managed by professionals. Not one has depth in organization, nor a clear command structure down to the grass roots. This weakness explains in part why some of our best performing governments fall so easily, such as the last one in Karnataka, and why in the heart of Bangalore, Congress party managed to lose the by-election in May 2005 from a constituency occupied till the other day by the fine reformer, SM Krishna. That his successors have only played petty politics and obstructed the development of infrastructure in India’s premier city is another matter.
Many shrug their shoulders and ask, what is wrong if a politician’s son enters politics? Isn’t it like a doctor’s child wanting to be a doctor? No, there is a difference. Politics is a matter of public interest, and citizens want the best person to lead them. It is possible that a politician’s son might turn out to be a great leader, but the odds are against it. This is not how nature distributes talent. In 1950 we chose not to become a monarchy but a republic. So, how can we just shrug at this return of bloodlines in our political life? Remember also, the principle of heredity is one step away from the loathsome caste system.
Tom Paine wrote in The Rights of Man (1791), “I smile when I contemplate the ridiculous depths to which literature and science would sink were they to become hereditary.” The idea of hereditary ruler is as ridiculous and more offensive than a hereditary author. When family interests prevail, political parties become weak, and governments don’t perform. The end result is that the things don’t get done– reforms slow down, roads don’t get built, and the house goes dark when your child sits down to study. The mentality in a family run polity is feudal. I don’t do what is right, but what serves the family. Loyalty matters more than performance. The best person doesn’t get the job but the one who is manipulative. Edward Banfield called it “amoral familism” in describing why southern Italy keeps failing and northern Italy succeeds. So, dear reader, it is time to shake off your complacency, and the next time around, don’t vote for “hereditary asses, imbeciles, and this curse of the nation,” as Napoleon put it.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
I am a Hindu, but..... October 9, 2005
The confident, handsome friend of our son’s gave a telling reply to a visiting Englishwoman the other day in Khan Market. “I am a Hindu, but …”, and he went into a winding reply about his beliefs. He hastily added that he was an Indian first. It was a perfectly honest answer, and any other person might have made it about Islam or Christianity. But I sensed an unhappy defensiveness–the ‘but’ betrayed that he was ashamed of being Hindu.
This happened a few weeks after I got a call from one of Delhi’s best schools, asking me to speak to its students. “Oh good”, I said, “in that case, I shall speak about dharma and the moral dilemmas in the Mahabharata.” The principal’s horrified reaction was, “Oh don’t, please! There are important secularists on our governing board, and I don’t want controversy about teaching religion.” I protested ineffectually, “But surely the Mahabharata is a literary epic, and dharma is about right and wrong. Where does religion come in?”
As I think ought about these two incidents, I ask myself, why should these two successful young professionals be embarrassed of their heritage? Something has clearly gone wrong. With the rise in religious fundamentalism, it seems to me that it is difficult to talk about one’s deepest beliefs. Liberal Hindus are reluctant to admit being Hindu for fear they will be automatically linked to the RSS. I certainly blame Hindutva nationalists who have appropriated our culture and tradition into a political agenda. But I also blame our secularists who behave no better than fundamentalists in their antipathy to tradition.
One of the strengths of Western civilization is that in times of crisis it seeks sustenance and inspiration from the rational ideals of Greece and Rome, from Homer, Pericles and Virgil. My fear is that modern, liberal Indians may not have any use for their past, and they will abdicate our wonderful traditions to the narrow, closed minds of fanatical Hindu nationalists. If Italians are proud of the Divine Comedy, the Spanish of Don Quixote, and the Greeks of the Illiad, why should “secularist” Indians be ambivalent about the Mahabharata? Why should it become ‘untouchable’ for a sensitive, modern, school principal? In part this is due to ignorance. We do not read our ancient classics with a critical mind as secular works of literature and philosophy, as young Americans read the Western classics in their first year of college as a part of their “core curriculum”. So, we depend on our grandmothers or Amar Chitra Katha or second rate serials on Sunday morning television. Meanwhile, the Sangh Parivar steps into this vacuum with its shrunken, defensive, and inaccurate version of our history and happily appropriates this empty space. And the richness of tradition is lost to this generation.
No one reads Edmund Burke these days. He opposed the French Revolution because he feared that killing the church and aristocracy would cut off links with the past. I too value continuity in our “custom, community and natural feeling” in Burke’s language, which is so necessary to realize our full human potential. To respect tradition means that one must criticise it as our 19th century reformers did. But I fear that our secularism is unwittingly undermining tradition. The challenge before modern, decent Indians today, it seems to me, is essentially the same as the one Ram Mohan Roy faced in the early 19th century: how to grow up mentally healthy, integrated Indians? How do we combine our liberal modernity with our traditions in order to fully realise our potential?
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
This happened a few weeks after I got a call from one of Delhi’s best schools, asking me to speak to its students. “Oh good”, I said, “in that case, I shall speak about dharma and the moral dilemmas in the Mahabharata.” The principal’s horrified reaction was, “Oh don’t, please! There are important secularists on our governing board, and I don’t want controversy about teaching religion.” I protested ineffectually, “But surely the Mahabharata is a literary epic, and dharma is about right and wrong. Where does religion come in?”
As I think ought about these two incidents, I ask myself, why should these two successful young professionals be embarrassed of their heritage? Something has clearly gone wrong. With the rise in religious fundamentalism, it seems to me that it is difficult to talk about one’s deepest beliefs. Liberal Hindus are reluctant to admit being Hindu for fear they will be automatically linked to the RSS. I certainly blame Hindutva nationalists who have appropriated our culture and tradition into a political agenda. But I also blame our secularists who behave no better than fundamentalists in their antipathy to tradition.
One of the strengths of Western civilization is that in times of crisis it seeks sustenance and inspiration from the rational ideals of Greece and Rome, from Homer, Pericles and Virgil. My fear is that modern, liberal Indians may not have any use for their past, and they will abdicate our wonderful traditions to the narrow, closed minds of fanatical Hindu nationalists. If Italians are proud of the Divine Comedy, the Spanish of Don Quixote, and the Greeks of the Illiad, why should “secularist” Indians be ambivalent about the Mahabharata? Why should it become ‘untouchable’ for a sensitive, modern, school principal? In part this is due to ignorance. We do not read our ancient classics with a critical mind as secular works of literature and philosophy, as young Americans read the Western classics in their first year of college as a part of their “core curriculum”. So, we depend on our grandmothers or Amar Chitra Katha or second rate serials on Sunday morning television. Meanwhile, the Sangh Parivar steps into this vacuum with its shrunken, defensive, and inaccurate version of our history and happily appropriates this empty space. And the richness of tradition is lost to this generation.
No one reads Edmund Burke these days. He opposed the French Revolution because he feared that killing the church and aristocracy would cut off links with the past. I too value continuity in our “custom, community and natural feeling” in Burke’s language, which is so necessary to realize our full human potential. To respect tradition means that one must criticise it as our 19th century reformers did. But I fear that our secularism is unwittingly undermining tradition. The challenge before modern, decent Indians today, it seems to me, is essentially the same as the one Ram Mohan Roy faced in the early 19th century: how to grow up mentally healthy, integrated Indians? How do we combine our liberal modernity with our traditions in order to fully realise our potential?
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Missing in Action
Times of India, September 25, 2005
A couple of weeks ago I reported that one out of four teachers in our government primary schools is absent and of those present one out of two is not teaching. Not surprisingly, many readers were deeply upset by this devastating data, and one offered the desperate suggestion of dispatching teachers missing in action to hell. I looked for Dante’s Inferno, but in the end opted for a home grown variety, a vision of hell provided helpfully by Svargarohana Parvan near the Mahabharat’s end.
Meanwhile, there is more bad news. We have now learned that if 25 percent are absent from government primary schools, the figure for absentee doctors is an appalling 40 percent in primary health centres. It varies from 67% in Bihar to 30% in Gujarat, but the all India average of 40% is the worst in a five-nation U.N. study–worse than Bangladesh, Uganda, Peru and Indonesia. In my last column I had celebrated the triumph of the human spirit that delivered cheap private schools in slums to make up for the state’s failure. But we cannot just abandon government schools and health centres. So, what is to be done? The problem is with our incentive system. If you get a regular salary and are not supervised; if you cannot be fired, or your pay isn’t cut for being absent; if your
social status is higher and you have more political clout than parents or patients; and if there is
lucrative work outside, what
would you do? So perhaps, teachers and doctors do behave rationally (albeit disgracefully) when they don’t show up.
Ragav Pandey, the former chief secretary of Nagaland, realised this and changed the incentive system in 2002. In successful economies, he realised, sellers chase buyers, doctors chase patients, and schools chase students because ordinary people control money. It would be ideal to give parents and patients control over money (through vouchers or health insurance). But since he couldn’t do that, he did the next best thing. Through a ‘communitisation program’ based on ‘no work no pay’ Nagaland transferred salaries of teachers, doctors, and nurses to elected village education and health committees. You can imagine what happened! Teacher and doctor absenteeism declined dramatically, student attendance and patient satisfaction rose spectacularly. So, the answer is for primary schools and health centres to be accountable locally. Critics claim that they would then be subject to capture by the local elite, but we now have a mitigating safeguard in the Right to Information Act.
Digvijay Singh tried something similar in Madhya Pradesh. As a part of gram swaraj, he gave authority to shiksha samitis of the panchayats to deduct wages of absent teachers both in the new informal schools and in the formal ones. They did it only in a few cases, but the threat was enough to improve teachers’ behaviour. The story does not end there. A few months ago, Digvijay Singh told me that he lost his election partly because the powerful teachers union, upset with his reforms, gave a call to defeat him. Voting machines make cheating easier now, and teachers, who were invigilators at the election, merely had to press a button-- no need to stuff ballots anymore.
Plato wrote more than two thousand years ago that the reform of our schools is everyone’s work—the work of every man, woman and child. We cannot give up on our government schools, but until we can get teachers to show up and to teach, let us not waste resources. Let’s not raise government spending on education till then.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
A couple of weeks ago I reported that one out of four teachers in our government primary schools is absent and of those present one out of two is not teaching. Not surprisingly, many readers were deeply upset by this devastating data, and one offered the desperate suggestion of dispatching teachers missing in action to hell. I looked for Dante’s Inferno, but in the end opted for a home grown variety, a vision of hell provided helpfully by Svargarohana Parvan near the Mahabharat’s end.
Meanwhile, there is more bad news. We have now learned that if 25 percent are absent from government primary schools, the figure for absentee doctors is an appalling 40 percent in primary health centres. It varies from 67% in Bihar to 30% in Gujarat, but the all India average of 40% is the worst in a five-nation U.N. study–worse than Bangladesh, Uganda, Peru and Indonesia. In my last column I had celebrated the triumph of the human spirit that delivered cheap private schools in slums to make up for the state’s failure. But we cannot just abandon government schools and health centres. So, what is to be done? The problem is with our incentive system. If you get a regular salary and are not supervised; if you cannot be fired, or your pay isn’t cut for being absent; if your
social status is higher and you have more political clout than parents or patients; and if there is
lucrative work outside, what
would you do? So perhaps, teachers and doctors do behave rationally (albeit disgracefully) when they don’t show up.
Ragav Pandey, the former chief secretary of Nagaland, realised this and changed the incentive system in 2002. In successful economies, he realised, sellers chase buyers, doctors chase patients, and schools chase students because ordinary people control money. It would be ideal to give parents and patients control over money (through vouchers or health insurance). But since he couldn’t do that, he did the next best thing. Through a ‘communitisation program’ based on ‘no work no pay’ Nagaland transferred salaries of teachers, doctors, and nurses to elected village education and health committees. You can imagine what happened! Teacher and doctor absenteeism declined dramatically, student attendance and patient satisfaction rose spectacularly. So, the answer is for primary schools and health centres to be accountable locally. Critics claim that they would then be subject to capture by the local elite, but we now have a mitigating safeguard in the Right to Information Act.
Digvijay Singh tried something similar in Madhya Pradesh. As a part of gram swaraj, he gave authority to shiksha samitis of the panchayats to deduct wages of absent teachers both in the new informal schools and in the formal ones. They did it only in a few cases, but the threat was enough to improve teachers’ behaviour. The story does not end there. A few months ago, Digvijay Singh told me that he lost his election partly because the powerful teachers union, upset with his reforms, gave a call to defeat him. Voting machines make cheating easier now, and teachers, who were invigilators at the election, merely had to press a button-- no need to stuff ballots anymore.
Plato wrote more than two thousand years ago that the reform of our schools is everyone’s work—the work of every man, woman and child. We cannot give up on our government schools, but until we can get teachers to show up and to teach, let us not waste resources. Let’s not raise government spending on education till then.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Childhood Trials, Sept. 11, 2005
A recent study by respected members of Harvard University and others has shocked us. It shows that one out of four teachers in our government primary schools is absent and one out of two teachers who are present are not teaching. We had suspected this rotten state of affairs when the Probe team surveyed North Indian states ten years ago, but we thought this problem was confined to the Bimaru states. Then Pratichi Trust’s study confirmed this unhappy situation in 2002 in Bengal—it found that less than ten percent of 5th graders could write their name in Bangla.
Now this larger study proves that we have a national problem. Jharkhand (42%), Bihar (38%) and Punjab (34%) have the worst absence rates, while Maharashtra (15%), Gujarat (17%) and Madhya Pradesh (17%) are the best. But India’s aggregate teacher absence rate is worse than all Third World countries, except Uganda (27%) in an eight-country comparison for which comparable data is available. Bangladesh (16%), Indonesia (19%), Zambia 17% and Peru (11%) rank better than India. (The full study is available at http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/kremer/papers.html.)
How are poor Indian parents coping with this tragic state of affairs? With typical Indian ingenuity it seems, according to another study by Prof James Tooley of the University of Newcastle. They are pulling their kids out of government schools and enrolling them into cheap private schools that are mushrooming in slums and villages across India. Of 262,075 children in 918 schools in the slums of Hyderabad’s old city, only 24% of the children were in government schools, 11.4% were in private aided schools and 65% were in private unaided schools (half of which were unrecognised). Although teacher salaries were a third in private schools, parents (many of them rickshawallas) preferred to spend Rs 70 to Rs 103 in fees because they found children learned more in private schools.
Mean scores in mathematics were 22% points higher in unrecognised private schools than in government schools. Teacher-pupil ratio was double in private schools, and roughly half the pupils were girls. Toilets, drinking water, blackboards, desks, and fans were in better condition in unrecognised privates schools than in government schools. Against the common assumption that private schools are run by fly-by-night operators, those in Hyderabad had been in operation between 8-18 years. Moreover, 20% of the children in these private schools were on scholarships. Amazing, the poor are subsidising the poorest to get educated!
Official data assembled by NIEPA confirms that two-thirds of the children in urban Maharashtra, U.P. and Tami Nadu are now in private schools. Hence, Jean Dreze predicts that government schools in Indian cities will soon be history. All this contradicts the Left establishment view (expressed in the Oxfam Education Report and UNDP’s Human Development Report 2003) which trashes these ‘mushrooming private schools’ without any data. It would close them down, and destroy any little hope for the poor. The lower bureaucracy takes advantage of this prejudice and extracts bribes, which average 5% of the school’s running cost. So, it is we who must change our elitist mindset. The parents may be poor but they are not stupid--they will certainly not spend their hard earned money unless they get results.
If insolent teachers in government schools leave one depressed, the revolution in private slum schools is something to celebrate. It represents the triumph of the human spirit when the state makes it so difficult to survive. It also explains why India is succeeding against all odds. If China’s success is induced by the state, India’s is despite the state. Hence, it may well be more durable.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Now this larger study proves that we have a national problem. Jharkhand (42%), Bihar (38%) and Punjab (34%) have the worst absence rates, while Maharashtra (15%), Gujarat (17%) and Madhya Pradesh (17%) are the best. But India’s aggregate teacher absence rate is worse than all Third World countries, except Uganda (27%) in an eight-country comparison for which comparable data is available. Bangladesh (16%), Indonesia (19%), Zambia 17% and Peru (11%) rank better than India. (The full study is available at http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/kremer/papers.html.)
How are poor Indian parents coping with this tragic state of affairs? With typical Indian ingenuity it seems, according to another study by Prof James Tooley of the University of Newcastle. They are pulling their kids out of government schools and enrolling them into cheap private schools that are mushrooming in slums and villages across India. Of 262,075 children in 918 schools in the slums of Hyderabad’s old city, only 24% of the children were in government schools, 11.4% were in private aided schools and 65% were in private unaided schools (half of which were unrecognised). Although teacher salaries were a third in private schools, parents (many of them rickshawallas) preferred to spend Rs 70 to Rs 103 in fees because they found children learned more in private schools.
Mean scores in mathematics were 22% points higher in unrecognised private schools than in government schools. Teacher-pupil ratio was double in private schools, and roughly half the pupils were girls. Toilets, drinking water, blackboards, desks, and fans were in better condition in unrecognised privates schools than in government schools. Against the common assumption that private schools are run by fly-by-night operators, those in Hyderabad had been in operation between 8-18 years. Moreover, 20% of the children in these private schools were on scholarships. Amazing, the poor are subsidising the poorest to get educated!
Official data assembled by NIEPA confirms that two-thirds of the children in urban Maharashtra, U.P. and Tami Nadu are now in private schools. Hence, Jean Dreze predicts that government schools in Indian cities will soon be history. All this contradicts the Left establishment view (expressed in the Oxfam Education Report and UNDP’s Human Development Report 2003) which trashes these ‘mushrooming private schools’ without any data. It would close them down, and destroy any little hope for the poor. The lower bureaucracy takes advantage of this prejudice and extracts bribes, which average 5% of the school’s running cost. So, it is we who must change our elitist mindset. The parents may be poor but they are not stupid--they will certainly not spend their hard earned money unless they get results.
If insolent teachers in government schools leave one depressed, the revolution in private slum schools is something to celebrate. It represents the triumph of the human spirit when the state makes it so difficult to survive. It also explains why India is succeeding against all odds. If China’s success is induced by the state, India’s is despite the state. Hence, it may well be more durable.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Manmohan's tragic Dilemma, August 28, 2005
I wouldn’t want to be in Manmohan Singh’s shoes these days. His heart says, ‘yes’; his head says, ‘no’. His political boss has pushed through parliament a national employment guarantee act, which feels good to his heart–after all, what could be nicer than to know that all Indians are employed! But his conscience tells him that this will be the biggest ‘loot for work’ program in India’s history. Thus, he is in a tragic dilemma, a dharma sankat.
A Chinese expert on India who lives in Beijing sent me an email saying that the Chinese would never contemplate such a job-creating scheme. ‘It would bankrupt us’, he said. ‘We create jobs by building roads, for example. A road creates opportunities for productive, permanent jobs as villagers begin to move between villages and towns. We have learned that job-creating schemes don’t create roads even when they are supposed to. This is because they are not accountable for road quality but only for creating jobs–the road is washed away in the next rain.’
Manmohan Singh knows that the Chinese expert is right–the only way to prosperity is not by giving a man a fish but by teaching him to fish. Only by giving people skills, creating infrastructure, and encouraging private investment are productive jobs born. Manmohan is a fine economist and knows that another one percent of GDP borrowed from the banks to finance this program will crowd out private investment, push up interest rates, lower the economy’s growth rate–and saddest of all, will actually reduce jobs! It troubles him that this act will pay Rs 60 a day when economists have demonstrated that paying the minimum wage diverts people from productive to unproductive jobs. The answer to more jobs is to reform our labour laws so that employers are not scared to hire workers.
The entire political class, meanwhile, smells the opportunity for a big corruption feast. This is why no one spoke out in the Lok Sabha, but only proposed amendments that would make corruption easier. Even if Rajiv Gandhi was wrong in thinking that only 15 percent of the funds reach beneficiaries, studies over 25 years in the EPW show that the poor never received more than 30 percent. Jean Dreze, author of this bill and someone I deeply admire, confesses that muster rolls were either absent or fudged in five out of six states studied under the current food-for-work program. ‘Loot for work’ are his words! Ask Manisha Varma, Solapur’s collector, how it’s done–she has just uncovered a Rs 9.1 crore EGS fraud in her district. All this puts a man of conscience like Manmohan in a dilemma–how to support a bill when you know that perhaps Rs 28,000 out of Rs 40,000 of the hard earned savings of the Indian people will be stolen. The states know it too and are thus unwilling to contribute even 10 percent of its cost.
One day I fear I shall meet Manmohan Singh weeping in a corner of India’s history–a knowing accomplice in the worst robbery in free India since the Fifth Pay Commission Award. He’ll be thinking how did this statist virus affect us just when things were going so well for India? I shall sympathize with him and hope that one day we too will become a middle class nation, and then the politics of India will also change. We will elect different sort of leaders, who will encourage us to depend on ourselves, and who will invest in infrastructure and in better schools rather than in populist giveaways.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
A Chinese expert on India who lives in Beijing sent me an email saying that the Chinese would never contemplate such a job-creating scheme. ‘It would bankrupt us’, he said. ‘We create jobs by building roads, for example. A road creates opportunities for productive, permanent jobs as villagers begin to move between villages and towns. We have learned that job-creating schemes don’t create roads even when they are supposed to. This is because they are not accountable for road quality but only for creating jobs–the road is washed away in the next rain.’
Manmohan Singh knows that the Chinese expert is right–the only way to prosperity is not by giving a man a fish but by teaching him to fish. Only by giving people skills, creating infrastructure, and encouraging private investment are productive jobs born. Manmohan is a fine economist and knows that another one percent of GDP borrowed from the banks to finance this program will crowd out private investment, push up interest rates, lower the economy’s growth rate–and saddest of all, will actually reduce jobs! It troubles him that this act will pay Rs 60 a day when economists have demonstrated that paying the minimum wage diverts people from productive to unproductive jobs. The answer to more jobs is to reform our labour laws so that employers are not scared to hire workers.
The entire political class, meanwhile, smells the opportunity for a big corruption feast. This is why no one spoke out in the Lok Sabha, but only proposed amendments that would make corruption easier. Even if Rajiv Gandhi was wrong in thinking that only 15 percent of the funds reach beneficiaries, studies over 25 years in the EPW show that the poor never received more than 30 percent. Jean Dreze, author of this bill and someone I deeply admire, confesses that muster rolls were either absent or fudged in five out of six states studied under the current food-for-work program. ‘Loot for work’ are his words! Ask Manisha Varma, Solapur’s collector, how it’s done–she has just uncovered a Rs 9.1 crore EGS fraud in her district. All this puts a man of conscience like Manmohan in a dilemma–how to support a bill when you know that perhaps Rs 28,000 out of Rs 40,000 of the hard earned savings of the Indian people will be stolen. The states know it too and are thus unwilling to contribute even 10 percent of its cost.
One day I fear I shall meet Manmohan Singh weeping in a corner of India’s history–a knowing accomplice in the worst robbery in free India since the Fifth Pay Commission Award. He’ll be thinking how did this statist virus affect us just when things were going so well for India? I shall sympathize with him and hope that one day we too will become a middle class nation, and then the politics of India will also change. We will elect different sort of leaders, who will encourage us to depend on ourselves, and who will invest in infrastructure and in better schools rather than in populist giveaways.
gurcharandas@vsnl.com
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Unsentimental choices
Times of India, Aug 14, 2005
History has its winners and its losers, and in the 20th century there was no bigger loser than the Soviet Union. Born in 1917, it died in 1991. India, its ally in the Cold War, also ended on the losing side. I am not sure if it could have been otherwise, but let us not pretend that our diplomacy achieved anything but defeat. True, we led the non-aligned movement, but what is the point of being the leader of a failed movement? Call me naïve, but I think unworthy Pakistan did better. Not only did it end up on the winning side of the Cold War, but it also got the world to equate itself with India.
Those strident voices, particularly on the Left but also in the BJP, who have been critical of recent breakthroughs in our relationship with the United States, ought to ponder this before giving any further lessons in patriotism to Manmohan Singh. They have accused him variously of ‘selling-off India’, ‘tilting to America’, and ‘making us America’s junior partner’. The Left is of course immune to knowledge. It still sees the world through antique anti-imperial, anti-colonial lenses. But others should know better. They should be asking instead how do we avoid repeating our earlier mistakes and end up on history’s winning side the next time.
Seeing India emerge as the globe’s potential back office and a rising economic power, the world has now started to equate us with China rather than Pakistan. Thus, we are feeling better and more self-assured. But we shouldn’t allow this to go to our heads. The fact is we cannot go it alone in the world, and the smug, new autarchic rhetoric in parliament should be nipped. Everyone needs friends and allies. The world distrusts a nation that is everyone’s friend. Such a friend is unreliable.
I owe this lesson to Henry Kissinger, who taught the introductory course in international politics when I was an undergraduate at Harvard. This was during the spring of 1962, before he became famous. He taught the basic lesson of the Arthashastra, which is that there are no good or bad nations; there are only powerful and powerless ones. The leader’s duty is to relentlessly pursue his nation’s self interest. His own hero was Metternich, who sketched the map of 19th Europe at the Congress of Vienna and brought a “century of peace” to Europe. He said that when nations pursued their self-interest, it led to a balance of power, predictability and peace.
Because I couldn’t follow Kissinger’s heavy German accent, I used to sit in the front row of his class. To my dismay, he would look at me and hold up Nehru as an example of how not to conduct foreign policy. This distressed me for I passionately shared Nehru’s idealism. Kissinger felt it was dangerous to have dreamers in power, because they injected morality into foreign relations. Because of his own likes and dislikes, he thought Nehru might have compromised India’s national interest with regard to China. Although I dislike Kissinger, I think he may have been right.
To avoid repeating our failures of history we need to make choices. And we need an unsentimental awareness of our national self-interest in the 21st century. This is a talent scarce among argumentative and sentimental Indians. When the chips are down and there is a war, we may do worse than have America as an ally. If that is true, then we should not allow our personal dislike of Bush’s Iraq policy to compromise India’s growing friendship with the United States.
History has its winners and its losers, and in the 20th century there was no bigger loser than the Soviet Union. Born in 1917, it died in 1991. India, its ally in the Cold War, also ended on the losing side. I am not sure if it could have been otherwise, but let us not pretend that our diplomacy achieved anything but defeat. True, we led the non-aligned movement, but what is the point of being the leader of a failed movement? Call me naïve, but I think unworthy Pakistan did better. Not only did it end up on the winning side of the Cold War, but it also got the world to equate itself with India.
Those strident voices, particularly on the Left but also in the BJP, who have been critical of recent breakthroughs in our relationship with the United States, ought to ponder this before giving any further lessons in patriotism to Manmohan Singh. They have accused him variously of ‘selling-off India’, ‘tilting to America’, and ‘making us America’s junior partner’. The Left is of course immune to knowledge. It still sees the world through antique anti-imperial, anti-colonial lenses. But others should know better. They should be asking instead how do we avoid repeating our earlier mistakes and end up on history’s winning side the next time.
Seeing India emerge as the globe’s potential back office and a rising economic power, the world has now started to equate us with China rather than Pakistan. Thus, we are feeling better and more self-assured. But we shouldn’t allow this to go to our heads. The fact is we cannot go it alone in the world, and the smug, new autarchic rhetoric in parliament should be nipped. Everyone needs friends and allies. The world distrusts a nation that is everyone’s friend. Such a friend is unreliable.
I owe this lesson to Henry Kissinger, who taught the introductory course in international politics when I was an undergraduate at Harvard. This was during the spring of 1962, before he became famous. He taught the basic lesson of the Arthashastra, which is that there are no good or bad nations; there are only powerful and powerless ones. The leader’s duty is to relentlessly pursue his nation’s self interest. His own hero was Metternich, who sketched the map of 19th Europe at the Congress of Vienna and brought a “century of peace” to Europe. He said that when nations pursued their self-interest, it led to a balance of power, predictability and peace.
Because I couldn’t follow Kissinger’s heavy German accent, I used to sit in the front row of his class. To my dismay, he would look at me and hold up Nehru as an example of how not to conduct foreign policy. This distressed me for I passionately shared Nehru’s idealism. Kissinger felt it was dangerous to have dreamers in power, because they injected morality into foreign relations. Because of his own likes and dislikes, he thought Nehru might have compromised India’s national interest with regard to China. Although I dislike Kissinger, I think he may have been right.
To avoid repeating our failures of history we need to make choices. And we need an unsentimental awareness of our national self-interest in the 21st century. This is a talent scarce among argumentative and sentimental Indians. When the chips are down and there is a war, we may do worse than have America as an ally. If that is true, then we should not allow our personal dislike of Bush’s Iraq policy to compromise India’s growing friendship with the United States.
Sunday, July 31, 2005
Status Anxiety
Times of India, July 31, 2005
The only discordant note in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s otherwise triumphant trip to the US was his pleading for a permanent seat in the Security Council. I have never been comfortable with this unseemly campaign. Hankering after superpower status is a sign of our status anxiety and lack of self-confidence. Besides, a seat should never be a national goal. It is like a medal in a race; the goal is to win the race; the medal is only a by-product. So, let us focus on genuine achievements like building a prosperous and compassionate society. Let us reform vigorously, lift the poor, improve governance, and our status will change on its own.
Manmohan Singh's gracious speech at Oxford, on the other hand, showed self-assurance (reflecting the nation's growing confidence) as he gave Britain credit for bequeathing us wonderful liberal institutions. Hence, the carping of Left academics was astonishing. I have long admired Irfan Habib and Partha Chatterjee — their writings have meant so much to my education. I can only attribute their criticism to the Left's own status anxiety after Communism's fall, which was also on display in its extraordinary cheek to advise the PM not to sell out India to America. But then, good manners have never been the Left's strong suit.
Anxiety about one's status is understandable. Like nations, all human beings feel a secret and powerful need to be noticed. It hurts when we are ignored. If people praise us we feel important; when they avoid us we feel worthless. The attention of others matter because we are uncertain of our own worth. We fear that we might end up a 'nobody', and want desperately to be 'somebody'. "Our sense of identity is held hostage to the opinion of others", says Alain de Botton in a superb book, Status Anxiety. We may not admit it, but the truth is we all seek to be loved by the world.
When we are babies, we are loved whether we burp or scream or break our toys. But this idyllic state changes as we grow up, and are soon surrounded by snobs who have great capacity for inflicting pain. Snobs are social climbers, dedicated to flattering the influential and ignoring the humble. Very rarely have I come across someone who was immune to status blues. A notable exception was the noble and penniless Fanny Price, Jane Austen's heroine in Mansfield Park. Most of us are like Duryodhana in the Mahabharata, who suffers from extreme anxiety at Yudhishthira's grand celebration to confirm his suzerainty. He feels diminished by his cousin's rise in the world. He is envious by his host's magical palace. Without sycophants around him, suddenly he feels alone. Just one amongst many illustrious guests, he loses all confidence.
This is not how we would want our children to grow up as citizens of a confident, proud nation. Fanny Price rather than Duryodhana ought to be our model of behaviour. We should pursue our goals single-mindedly, with a quiet confidence, without worrying so much about what others think. My aunt used to say, "You'll waste a lot less time worrying about what others think of you if only you realised how seldom they do." Of course, we deserve a permanent seat on the Security Council, but at this stage of nation building, this should not be our priority. Let us first put our own house in order. Let us vigorously reform our economy, lift our economy's growth rate, raise the poor, and fix the depressing state of governance. This is what will eventually make us a superpower and worthy of the coveted seat.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Bunty and Babli’s fresh talk
Times of India, July 17, 2005
When VS Naipaul appealed earlier this year for a more contemporary discourse in India, he had obviously not seen Bunty aur Babli, Bollywood’s first film about liberalisation’s impact on small town India. Naipaul was referring to the stale quality of debate among Indian intellectuals whose minds are stuck in post-colonial rigidities at a time when young Indian minds are decolonised and India has moved on.
Despite this liberation I am still troubled by our moral discourse, which fails to distinguish between being ethical and religious. The frustrating word, dharma, adds to our confusion because it can mean both. Too many visit temples in the morning but commit perjury in the afternoon. Too many shrug at our massive governance failures with, “What can you do? We live in Kali Yuga”. True, every civilisation harks back to a Golden Age without moral flaws. It’s also true that Indians are deeply religious and God has always settled right and wrong. But I was deeply dismayed recently at my failed attempts to convince students at one of Delhi’s best colleges that dharma and moksha are separate projects and religion is often a distraction for morality. The students believed that truly spiritual persons had to be moral.
I gave the example of a god-fearing person who is about to betray someone’s trust. She might argue, “Well God won’t like it, but then he is forgiving, so I might still gain in the end.” All of us agreed that this is not how a moral person reasons. She simply says, “It is betrayal, so I wont do it.” A good person doesn’t do wrong because of fear of God but out of a sense of duty. Plato, in the Euthyphro, explains that religion gives mythical authority to a morality that is already there. Religion doesn’t create ethics but it captures moral ideas in a symbolic way that engages our imagination. Unhappily, religions have too often sanctioned bad moral ideas—the Hindu caste system, women’s inferiority among Muslims, or Catholic opposition to birth control. Thus, it is best to keep religious and moral spaces separate.
Our ancients did separate them when they said dharma is one of the four aims of life. “What counted was a person’s conduct not his belief”, Professor Radhakrishnan used to say. James Fitzgerald recently pointed out that the meaning of dharma changed during the writing of the Mahabharata. Earlier, it meant observing Vedic rituals and doing visible deeds endorsed by society. Gradually, it changed to mean a personal (and universal) sense of right and wrong in order to become a better and refined human being. This happened probably under pressure from the newer ethics of yoga and Buddhism. Much later did Dharma come to mean religion, as in sanatanadharma, in the 19th century, and this has caused the confusion.
The West too separated religion and morality only in the18th century Enlightenment. This led the Russian writer, Dostoyevsky, to ask, “If God is dead, isn’t everything permitted then?” Delhi University’s students also sensibly asked me, “If God doesn’t decide your duties, then who does?” My answer is that we have to learn to depend on ourselves, on our humanity, and our capacity for empathy. Neither do I despair like many Indians over declining moral standards because I see undeniable gains around me: in our increased sensitivity to the condition of women, the Dalits, and the environment. These have been hard fought victories, and we should feel proud of them. Like Bunty and Babli I don’t think it matters where you are born or your faith; what you make of your life is all that matters.
When VS Naipaul appealed earlier this year for a more contemporary discourse in India, he had obviously not seen Bunty aur Babli, Bollywood’s first film about liberalisation’s impact on small town India. Naipaul was referring to the stale quality of debate among Indian intellectuals whose minds are stuck in post-colonial rigidities at a time when young Indian minds are decolonised and India has moved on.
Despite this liberation I am still troubled by our moral discourse, which fails to distinguish between being ethical and religious. The frustrating word, dharma, adds to our confusion because it can mean both. Too many visit temples in the morning but commit perjury in the afternoon. Too many shrug at our massive governance failures with, “What can you do? We live in Kali Yuga”. True, every civilisation harks back to a Golden Age without moral flaws. It’s also true that Indians are deeply religious and God has always settled right and wrong. But I was deeply dismayed recently at my failed attempts to convince students at one of Delhi’s best colleges that dharma and moksha are separate projects and religion is often a distraction for morality. The students believed that truly spiritual persons had to be moral.
I gave the example of a god-fearing person who is about to betray someone’s trust. She might argue, “Well God won’t like it, but then he is forgiving, so I might still gain in the end.” All of us agreed that this is not how a moral person reasons. She simply says, “It is betrayal, so I wont do it.” A good person doesn’t do wrong because of fear of God but out of a sense of duty. Plato, in the Euthyphro, explains that religion gives mythical authority to a morality that is already there. Religion doesn’t create ethics but it captures moral ideas in a symbolic way that engages our imagination. Unhappily, religions have too often sanctioned bad moral ideas—the Hindu caste system, women’s inferiority among Muslims, or Catholic opposition to birth control. Thus, it is best to keep religious and moral spaces separate.
Our ancients did separate them when they said dharma is one of the four aims of life. “What counted was a person’s conduct not his belief”, Professor Radhakrishnan used to say. James Fitzgerald recently pointed out that the meaning of dharma changed during the writing of the Mahabharata. Earlier, it meant observing Vedic rituals and doing visible deeds endorsed by society. Gradually, it changed to mean a personal (and universal) sense of right and wrong in order to become a better and refined human being. This happened probably under pressure from the newer ethics of yoga and Buddhism. Much later did Dharma come to mean religion, as in sanatanadharma, in the 19th century, and this has caused the confusion.
The West too separated religion and morality only in the18th century Enlightenment. This led the Russian writer, Dostoyevsky, to ask, “If God is dead, isn’t everything permitted then?” Delhi University’s students also sensibly asked me, “If God doesn’t decide your duties, then who does?” My answer is that we have to learn to depend on ourselves, on our humanity, and our capacity for empathy. Neither do I despair like many Indians over declining moral standards because I see undeniable gains around me: in our increased sensitivity to the condition of women, the Dalits, and the environment. These have been hard fought victories, and we should feel proud of them. Like Bunty and Babli I don’t think it matters where you are born or your faith; what you make of your life is all that matters.
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