AN UNHOLY TRINITY: A potent and combustible mix of politicians, corporates and bureaucrats is eating into the vitals of governance. Will Narendra Modi stem the tide?

New Delhi
28 November 2014

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n Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, now retired, received a peculiar instruction from a minister when he returned to his state cadre after a deputation at the Centre. The minister wanted the official to substitute the income certificate submitted by a student, who wanted to appear for an entrance examination, with another one so that the boy could claim the benefit of a quota for backward minorities and easily secure admission in a medical college. “Only you and I would know,” the minister told the officer, reassuring the latter that their secret would be safe with him. The officer, who had by then earned a reputation for not being a doormat for the politician, refused; needless to say, he was promptly transferred out.

Even though many years may have passed since the incident, Alphons Kannanthanam vividly recalls a sense of affront that apparently the minister felt and how his transfer order was issued the very next day.

In an earlier avatar as the commissioner of the Delhi Development Authority, Alphons demolished more than 14,000 illegal structures that had been built by certain politicians and high-net-worth individuals, reclaiming in the process acres of prime property that were then valued at several thousands of crores of rupees. Then, as later, he was shunted out at the behest of certain politicians and their associates.

Incidentally, his relocation to Delhi in 1992 had come about in similar circumstances; he was transferred out of Kerala after he wrote a dissenting note in the infamous palmolein oil import scam that had rocked the state. Alphons has since taken to politics; he contested and won as an independent candidate from the Kanjirapally Assembly seat in Kerala. He joined the BJP in 2011.

Cut to 2012 and another IAS officer, Ashok Khemka, would be transferred out for the nth time for taking on the powers that be. His fault? He detected certain irregularities in land transactions, particularly one allegedly involving a high-profile politician’s son-in-law and a public limited company. Khemka has been unceremoniously transferred more number of times than the total number of years of service he has put in so far. Today, he serves as the transport commissioner of Haryana.

When reports began to appear in the media about the extent of this VIP’s involvement in the alleged scam and when a civil society movement called India Against Corruption began to pose uncomfortable questions to the erstwhile Manmohan Singh government and the Congress party alike, this VIP had derisively remarked, “mango people in a banana republic”; in Hindi, mango people means “aam aadmi”, an unmistakable reference to the anti-corruption movement, some of whose members subsequently floated the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

Some politicians and political parties have wondered why a “private citizen”, like the VIP in question, should be hounded in the manner he has been. But, as the TEHELKA investigation reveals, he hardly fits the description of a private person. For, how many private citizens can claim to curry favours from a corporate (Jet Airways, in this case), and with relative ease at that? Or, as a BJP leader wondered aloud, which private citizen would be exempted from security checks, greeted with a meet-and-assist service every time he flies or accorded security at taxpayers’ expense?

The downside of corruption

India may have copied the British model of governance, but the similarity ends there. In the United Kingdom, a certain minister had to resign for even as much as asking the person concerned to fast track the issue of a visa application of the nanny of his former lover. India, in contrast, seems to exhibit a far greater tolerance of misdemeanours. (However, one of the earliest recorded exceptions to this general trend was in 1951 when Jawaharlal Nehru made an example of HG Mudgal, who, incidentally, was also from the Congress party, for accepting a bribe.)

There is no gainsaying that the intersection of political, corporate and bureaucratic classes in India presents a combustible mix and their interplay has a direct bearing on governance.

In 1993, the government constituted a committee headed by the then home secretary NN Vohra (today he is serving as the governor of Jammu and Kashmir) to look into the nexus between crime syndicates, bureaucrats and politicians. Twelve years later, in 2005, the Second Administrative Reforms Commission was set up under the chairmanship of Veerappa Moily for revamping the administrative machinery. Certainly, the two reports leave a lot to be desired.

A conservative estimate by an industry chamber puts the financial cost of certain recent cases of corruption at 36,400 crore. Also, India has slid down Transparency International’s corruption perception index rating; from being ranked 72 in 2007, it dropped to 87 in 2010 and 94 in 2013, below some countries such as China.

In Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer 2013, politicians, corporates and bureaucrats in India had the dubious distinction of being perceived as more corrupt than others. More than 80 percent of the people surveyed felt that the political parties and their leaders were corrupt; 65 percent felt the same way about lawmakers and bureaucrats; and 50 percent said that businesses were guilty of indulging in corrupt practices.

Corruption dates back decades

While he headed the Second ­Administrative Reforms Commission, which, among other things, examined the politician-corporate-bureaucrat nexus, Moily had said that corruption has been with us for several centuries. Even at the time Kautilya wrote Arthashastra, he had said that just as fish moving inside water cannot be known when drinking water, even so officers appointed for carrying out works cannot be known when appropriating money. Modern India isn’t any better. A perusal of the history of independent India would suggest that it is replete with scams. The earliest recorded scandal dates back to 1948 when a foreign firm was contracted for supply of jeeps to the Indian Army. Although the firm received monies, it failed to deliver the promised number of vehicles.

Nehru was not personally accused of corruption, but the same could not be said of his government. As a sitting Congress mp from Thiruvananthapuram, Shashi Tharoor, writes in his book Nehru: The Invention of India, “Jawaharlal [could not] prevent the growth of the corruption which his own statist policies facilitated. The image of the self-sacrificing Congressmen in homespun gave way to that of the professional politicians the educated middle classes came to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in khadi who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing uncountable (and unaccountable) riches by manipulating governmental favours. With licences for quotas for every business activity, petty politicians grew rich by profiting from the power to permit.

“The stench of corruption reached Jawaharlal’s own circles three times in the later years of his rule: When his finance minister TT Krishnamachari was obliged to resign in 1958 over improprieties in a life insurance scam (it was Feroze Gandhi’s muckraking that brought about Krishnamachari’s downfall); when his friend Jayanti Dharma Teja, whom Nehru had helped set up a major shipping line, defaulted on loans and skipped the country; and when Jawaharlal’s own private secretary since 1946, MO Mathai, who was accused both of spying for the CIA and of accumulating an ill-gotten fortune, was forced to resign in 1959. In none of these cases was there the slightest suggestion that Jawaharlal had profited personally in any way from the actions of his associates, but they again confirmed that Nehru’s loyalty exceeded his judgement.”

History was to repeat itself, again, during the tenure of the erstwhile upa government. A series of scams, including, but not limited to, the allocation of 2G spectrum and coal blocks and the hosting of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, eventually led to the downfall of the government that was headed by a prime minister with a Teflon image.

According to former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai, if the then prime minister Manmohan Singh had wanted, he could have prevented the 2G scam. Also, recently, the Supreme Court told CBI director Ranjit Sinha to recuse himself from the 2G probe. According to TSR Subramaniam, a former cabinet secretary, that the CBI was a “hand maiden” of the government of the day was well-known but he thought it was extraordinary that no action has yet been taken against Sinha.

Will Modi make good his promise?

Candidate Narendra Modi raised the bar by saying that neither does he himself indulge in corruption nor would he allow others to do it (“na khaata hoon, na khaane doonga”.) At the same time, he qualified his remarks in an interview he gave to a private television channel by saying that the problem of corrupt practices could not be solved to everyone’s satisfaction, but that certain preventive measures could surely make it difficult to indulge in corruption. The jury is still out on whether and how well Prime Minister Modi is able to stem the tide of corruption, which, as he said in August at an election rally at Kaithal in Haryana, is a disease worse than cancer.

His government set the tone as early as June this year when it used President Pranab Mukherjee’s speech to a joint session of Parliament to underscore that the government “is determined to rid the country of the scourge of corruption and the menace of black money”. In the same speech, it was said that “the institution of Lokpal is important to curb corruption and my government will endeavour to formulate rules in conformity with the Act”. (The government hopes to push for the Lokpal and Lokayuktas (Amendment) Bill, 2014, in the ongoing winter session of Parliament.)

Subramaniam insists that it is too early to judge the Modi government; he points out that Modi has made a beginning by making it known to anyone who would care to listen to him that he intends to bring about a visible difference in the way India is governed. Already, the message seems to have had the desired impact on corporates. Recently, The Economic Times quoted Godrej group chairman Adi Godrej as saying that “there is a definite realisation among Indian firms that even in government, there is a major movement underway against corruption”.

Hypocrisy to the fore

Yet, to the discerning, it is obvious that the debate about corruption in India smacks of hypocrisy and double standards. According to a recent Transparency International report, 54 percent of Indians surveyed say they paid a bribe in the past year; that is one in every two Indians who participated in the survey.

A 2013 document titled ‘Bribery and corruption: Ground reality in India’ prepared by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and Ernst and Young, a multinational professional services firm headquartered in London, quotes an unnamed foreign multinational company as saying, “These days, bribery is in many cases regarded as a norm rather than an evil.”

Yet, even if, for a moment, one were to accept and concede that corruption is endemic and few can claim to be untouched by it, that an ordinary Indian citizen is as culpable or guilty as, say, a VIP, the latter will still find it difficult to wriggle out because public interest is involved; and, therefore, to that extent, politicians, corporates and bureaucrats would be held to a different yardstick than the common man.

Corporates don’t fare any better, either. The FICCI document explains that “more than half of the respondents agreed that it is the lack of will of corporate enterprises to obtain licences and approvals the ‘right way’ which encourages bribery and corruption”.

Furthermore, while cash continues to be the most preferred mode of paying bribes (89 percent of the respondents selected it from the long list of possible modes), 77 percent chose “gifts and kind” as a likely quid pro quo, which, possibly, explains the behaviour of some of the dramatis personae in the TEHELKA investigation.

This, when the Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules, 1964, stipulate that government officials are not to accept or permit members of their families (or other persons acting on their behalf) to accept gifts.

According to the FICCI document, the expression “gift” includes free transport, boarding, lodging or other services, or any other pecuniary advantage provided by any person other than a near relative or personal friend with no official dealings with the civil servant.

As the Second Administrative Reforms Commission said, “The standard should be one of not only the conduct of Caesar’s wife but of Caesar himself.” And that holds true for the political, corporate and bureaucratic classes today. And tomorrow, too.

India-Pakistan peace: So Near And Yet So Far

This article was first published by Tehelka (www.tehelka.com) on 21 November 2014 under the headline So Near And Yet So Far.

Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri (Pix courtesy: Vijay Pandey)

Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri thought “Interrupted Symphony” should be a good title for his forthcoming book about India-Pakistan relations, but settled for Neither Hawk Nor Dove on the advice of his publisher.

The former Pakistani foreign minister, who has since joined Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, would not reveal whether he was inspired in part by how he found in a relative hawk like Brajesh Mishra, the late national security adviser to former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a reliable and honest interlocutor. “My book sends a hard message to Pakistan but delivered softly to India,” is all he would venture to say.

Kasuri, 73, recalls with great fondness and detail that the two nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours had come “very near” to an agreed framework on the Kashmir issue when Manmohan Singh and Pervez Musharraf were in power. Kasuri would know for he served as Pakistan’s foreign minister between 2002 and 2007; he was among a handful of persons on either side who have seen the contours of the back-channel talks between India and Pakistan start and evolve, only to be put in a deep freeze as, like most things in the subcontinent, the political climate changed without notice.

“Sir Creek was a signature away,” he says at a luncheon hosted by his dear friend Mani Shankar Aiyar in New Delhi, with a tinge of sadness mixed with exasperation at the glacial pace at which this roller-coaster of a peace process has meandered from the time both sides sat down for meetings, including in third countries, in order to gain an appreciation of each other’s bottom line. (Sir Creek is an estuary of about 100 km in the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, which forms a maritime boundary with Pakistan’s Sindh province.)

The paradox is unmistakable: India and Pakistan had come very close to a resolution of the Kashmir issue at a time when their bilateral ties were at their frostiest, following the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament and the 1999 Kargil conflict before that. Alluding to former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s remark about “balanced dissatisfaction” as a possible means to resolving the Ukraine crisis, Kasuri insists that the personalities involved in the India-Pakistan back-channel talks could claim with a degree of pride and satisfaction to have achieved “better than balanced dissatisfaction” and arrived at a template that could easily be sold to various stakeholders in both countries, including, but not limited to, the peoples and legislatures. “Hundred percent (agreement) was never possible,” he says, adding on a note of caution that a minuscule “religious right” in Pakistan might not relent.

A strong votary of Congress parliamentarian Aiyar’s push for an “uninterrupted and uninterruptible” dialogue between India and Pakistan, Kasuri says it behoves of the prime ministers of both countries to renew political and diplomatic contacts when they grace the 18th SAARC summit to be hosted by Nepal on 26 November, which, incidentally, will mark the sixth anniversary of the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks.

This year’s summit will be held after a three-year gap; the last summit was hosted by Maldives in 2011. While some South Asian diplomats cite this anomaly to question the efficacy of SAARC as a regional grouping, some others believe that the eight-member bloc could be meeting too frequently (annually, in the case of SAARC, where the member-states host it in the alphabetical order) for its own good.

Sheel Kant Sharma, a former Indian diplomat and a former secretary-general of SAARC, feels that the annual summits attended by the heads of state or government leave their respective bureaucracies with little or no time to act upon or follow up on the declaration adopted towards the end of a summit.

Gowher Rizvi, the international affairs adviser to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, suspects the SAARC has been “designed not to succeed” given how underfunded it is and how more attention could be paid to strengthening its secretariat. Rizvi, who was recently in New Delhi, said at an event organised by a privately-run think-tank that the SAARC secretary-general’s post should be elevated to a ministerial rank in order to allow greater access to the political leaderships of the member-states. Shyam Saran, the chairman of the National Security Advisory Board and a former foreign secretary, in turn, feels that India should take the lead to make SAARC work.

The first SAARC summit was held in Dhaka in 1985. At the time, it had Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as its members. Since then, it has grown to include Afghanistan as a full member and many more countries and multilateral organisations as its observers.

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INTERVIEW

‘Modi and Sharif must develop personal chemistry for peace to succeed’

For someone who was privy to the delicate details of the protracted India-Pakistan back-channel talks that straddled two governments in India, that of former prime ministers Manmohan Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri would rather hide than reveal and understandably so. Given the sensitivities, neither country would want the painstaking effort that went into the talks to become a casualty of negative public perceptions without first preparing the ground for a grand reconciliation. However, the former Pakistani foreign minister wants the broad contours of the talks to be put on record and debated in the interest of a lasting peace on the Indian subcontinent. “I hope the current BJP government will give some thought to why Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee had concluded that talks should be the way forward,” he tells Ramesh Ramachandran in an exclusive interview.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

Your visit to India comes before a likely meeting between the leaders of India and Pakistan on the margins of the SAARC summit in Kathmandu. Also the anniversary of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks is coming up. Given that backdrop, how do you see the bilateral discourse or engagement evolving?

As somebody who has dealt with these issues for a very long time, I hope and pray that the two prime ministers meet and this despite the fact that I do not belong to Mr Nawaz Sharif’s party. I talk as a Pakistani. It is in our interest that the talks take place and I think Mr Vajpayee, the wise man of BJP, had gone through a lot of political journey before he reached the conclusion that he did. Nobody could be a better patriot than Mr Vajpayee. Nobody could doubt his wisdom. Nobody could doubt his loyalty to the BJP. So, he must have gone through a lot of experience, a lot of thought process, for him to reach the conclusion that he did. And that’s why he started the process and that’s why history will always accord that to him. We are lucky that Dr Manmohan Singh’s government followed it through. Previously, by the way, we were not certain that it would happen. So, when the BJP lost, we were very uncertain about the fate of the process that was begun by him would be. So, all I will say is that I hope the current BJP government will perhaps give some thought to why Mr Vajpayee had reached the conclusion that he did. Secondly, we have tried everything… war… near wars… nuclearisation; everything has been tried. I mean are we going to live like this? I think if you talk to a sane Indian privately, he is very angry with what Pakistan is perceived to have done. But when he is in a cooler moment, he says, after all, as Vajpayee rightly said, you can’t change your neighbours and we can’t change ours. There were people, by the way, not just in India, who said that they did not want to have anything to do with Pakistan; a lot of people in Pakistan said they did not want to have anything to do with India; that Pakistan is in the Muslim world… they were thrilled when the Americans came forward with the idea of an extended Middle East and included Pakistan in it. Now they can continue to extend the Middle East as much as they want but geography will not change. So, any Pakistani in his right mind will understand that he can be a part of the Muslim world or whatever he wants to be… he can be part of the Ummah but he can’t escape geography. And I go further as a positivist. I believe it is good for Pakistan. And I’m sure that there are a lot of good Indians who think it is good for India; that India, despite being a much bigger country than Pakistan, can achieve its potential truly when there is peace in the neighbourhood. And this is something that the Indians have said… Indian leaders are saying… I am not putting words in their mouth… they said it themselves. So, I think, keeping that in mind, let’s hope that the two prime ministers meet.

The India-Pakistan talks have a start-stop pattern to them. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s invitation to Nawaz Sharif for his swearing-in ceremony was followed by the cancellation of foreign secretary-level talks and, more recently, ceasefire violations across the Line of Control and the international border in Jammu and Kashmir. Is the atmosphere any more conducive for talks?

Let me put a counter question to those who put a question like this. When the peace process was serious, was ever a gun fired in the 2003-04 period? Not a single bullet was fired. So, I mean, the two things are linked. I agree entirely with Mani Shankar Aiyar when he talks about uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue… that’s, in fact, the reason why I support (a dialogue) because that is the nature of our relationship. And, of course, the famous Vietnamese bombing… the meeting in a Paris hotel between the Vietnamese negotiator and Henry Kissinger was not interrupted in spite of the bombing that was inflicted on the Vietnamese people, including phosphorous bomb, and you have seen the horrid photograph of the child burning… it is etched in my memory. So, when you talk of the state of the Pakistan-India relationship, it cannot be worse than that because no Pakistani or Indian government has in any war tried to burn people alive. I mean, to my knowledge, we have never used phosphorus. Both (India and Pakistan) have fought against each other and treated each other’s prisoners humanely. So, let’s look at the way we are different from a lot of other countries, luckily. Let’s build on it and my own feeling is that this is a temporary setback. I think Prime Minister Modi’s basic purpose is to develop India. This is what his winning slogan was and the people of India bought into it. He will have to deliver on it if he has to win the next election. In fact, in order to keep their aspirations, expectations and hopes alive, that they are not dashed, he will have to deliver and I don’t want to say anything more than what I am going to say to you. For that to be achieved to its full potential, there has to be peace in the neighbourhood. I have not seen any country develop, unless you are the United States of America, and have the capacity to literally do whatever you want to do with any other country and get away with it, but even they have paid a price. America has not got away with it. It has paid a major price for what it did to Iran and Afghanistan. Today, China has either overtaken or will overtake the American economy. Why? Because of these very distractions. So, it remains true that you need peace around if you want to develop.

There was a lot of talk about a ‘Four-Point Formula’ when Manmohan Singh and Gen Pervez Musharraf were in power. It envisioned cross-LoC movement of people, phased withdrawal of armed forces, a new model of governance and a joint mechanism for carrying the process forward. In your estimation, is that a template that governments in India and Pakistan can and must work upon?

You see, there are a lot of thoughts that I am going to say in my book. Why did we arrive at that (formula)? It’s easy to write in four lines about a four-point formula but there was a good reason: The Kashmiris didn’t wish to be divided. So, we wanted a joint mechanism where Kashmir won’t be divided. For the first time, it gave some experience to the Pakistani and the Indian leadership to interact with each other in a conducive and a productive manner, instead of trying one-upmanship in the United Nations fora. I know, I used to be thrilled when I used to be leading the Pakistani delegation because I saw young Pakistani foreign service officers work extra hard to get one paragraph brought into a NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) statement, about which I mention in my book. After keeping awake the whole night, they would tell me, ‘We have won a great victory, Sir.’ I’m sure the Indians were trying their best to ensure that the paragraph should not be included… (which talked about) a distinction between ‘terrorism’ and ‘war of independence’. What difference did it make? I used to then ask our young boys about the effort that they had made because ground reality does not change. You have to deal with India; it is your neighbour, a much bigger neighbour. What were we aiming at? A just peace. By the way, in the absence of a just peace, as I remarked to other people, even if one side wins, nothing can happen. The other won’t accept it; it will wait for a better day. That’s what happened to Germany and the result was Adolf Hitler. So, therefore, I think what we started, and I have staunchly believe and I have never changed my mind on that just as Mani Shankar Aiyar doesn’t change his mind, what’s more important for the current government is the journey — intellectual and mental journey — that Mr Vajpayee went through.

Like it or not, a lot more depends on personalities than systems or processes in the Indian subcontinent. Do you think personal chemistry matters, too? How important is it or will be for a dialogue among political leaders such as a Modi in India and a Sharif in Pakistan? Is there a critical mass on both sides to take the peace process forward?

You will be surprised that I devote an ­entire chapter in my book to personal relationships and Mani also figures in it. I strongly believe in it. It matters but is it a Berlin Wall that you cannot overcome? Not at all. My way of dealing with the Indians was first to accept that they are as human as I am. Their instincts are the same as mine. I was able to ­convince them… at least three foreign ministers of India I dealt with… that they could take me at my word, that I would do my best. I was not a dictator of Pakistan, but they knew if I made a commitment I will try my best. Human relationships matter, but it doesn’t mean human relationships are always among people of similar backgrounds. People who are entrusted vast responsibilities by their nations are ­under extraordinary compulsions to ­actually break the Berlin Wall and try and develop that empathy, because in the absence of that empathy I agree with you it’s very difficult to do any constructive work. If perpetually you are thinking the other ­fellow is out to do you in, then it won’t work. So I think Prime Ministers Modi and Sharif or whoever comes to power in Pakistan, they must develop that chemistry. But that is not going to happen overnight. Sometimes you (know some people)… Mani Shankar Aiyar and I knew each other but it doesn’t mean that I knew every interlocutor of mine. I didn’t know Natwar Singh or Pranab Mukherjee but I developed very good chemistry with them. They knew they wanted to serve India’s cause, I wanted to serve Pakistan’s cause. We have to first convince that our cause was not so completely in conflict. What was the common factor? The 600 million people living below the poverty line while the Chinese have lifted 600 million above the poverty line. The ­Chinese were behind Pakistan and India in 1949; this is something that we should try and emulate.

If I were to now talk about the domestic politics in Pakistan, we see your party and its leader Imran Khan agitating and mobilising public opinion against the Sharif government. Where do you think the domestic political discourse in Pakistan lies vis-à-vis India?

Here’s the good news. Nobody can contradict me. And I put it in my book. I have quoted him (Imran Khan), so when he comes to power, all those speeches of him will be quoted back to him. I have said in the book the areas where I disagree with Imran Khan but the area where I entirely agree with him is on India. And there are many statements that I have quoted and hopefully Imran means what he says and I have no doubt that he means what he says. I have seen a lot of goodwill for him in India, by the way. Although some people may not agree with his current politics, they have goodwill for him as a person. So, my own feeling is that Imran wants peace with India. He wants a just peace, as I do. And then I did something clever. I actually briefed him before he was going to Mirpur to deliver a speech. He went on record that I have briefed him and he supports that. I’m interested in making sure that it comes in my book. So, that means that the next government after Nawaz Sharif’s will be our government.

So, am I correct in presuming that you remain an incorrigible optimist about the India-Pakistan peace process?

As I said, I have no option; the other is a disaster I am not prepared to confront. And for the Pakistan-India relationship with the history that it has, you have to be an optimist. But it’s not that I am a foolish optimist. I am an optimist based on what I saw at close hand. I could see people regarded as hawks like Brajesh Mishra (the late national security adviser) meeting me in Munich; we interacted as human beings. We have had hawks on the Pakistani side. Hawk or whatever, everybody is human on the inside. The point is to touch the right chord and everybody should know, Indians and Pakistanis, that beyond a certain point the other side cannot be pushed. If you realise that, no mountain is insurmountable.

So, the moment that came some few years ago is not entirely lost. Peace is eminently possible and doable?

Whenever there are statesmen in power, hopefully soon; if unfortunately not soon, whenever; they will have a blueprint before them. They will know this is the bottom line for both the governments. Beyond that neither government will relent. So, the good thing is that the work that has been done is on record. There’s no poker anymore. You can’t pretend to ask for the moon because the other side already knows what you have agreed and this is institutional memory by the way. Regardless of posturing, it remains in institutional memory. I can’t believe that Dr Manmohan Singh was not consulting the Indian Army and somebody in the (Indian) foreign office must have been in his confidence.

In hindsight, do you think Manmohan Singh erred in not seizing the moment and travelling to Pakistan in 2006?

It was just bad luck. You had elections in Uttar Pradesh and some other states. I wish he had come (to Pakistan)… hindsight, they say, is 20/20. If I think Dr Manmohan knew what was going to happen in March 2007, he would have strained extra hard despite the elections. So, I give him benefit of the doubt. I didn’t know what was going to happen in March (the protests by lawyers after Musharraf suspended the chief justice of Pakistan’s supreme court), so why should Manmohan Singh have known? I thought we were there for the next five years. That’s the next thing I have learnt in politics. Never make that mistake. When for the first time my name was mentioned as foreign minister, I accompanied Asghar Khan to Tehran and they thought he would be the prime minister and I would be foreign minister… this was several decades ago. And we were with the Shah of Iran and I say in the book how he was holding forth on Mozambique to Angola but didn’t know a thing that was happening in Tehran. And five months after we met, he was out. And he was at the height of his power. With all the American might behind him, the Americans didn’t provide him (Shah of Iran) with land for a grave. He had to go to Egypt to be buried. So, things change dramatically.

What India's New Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar Needs To Do

New Delhi
14 November 2014

I

f Manohar Parrikar wants unvarnished advice, he need not look beyond the late Brajesh Mishra, who served as the national security adviser to former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Or he could remind himself of what George Fernandes, who was defence minister in the Vajpayee Cabinet, used to think aloud about bureaucratic inertia and its impact on defence preparedness. For, what they said then remains valid today.

In the winter of 2009, Brajesh Mishra sought to impress upon an audience comprising some of the best minds in the Indian strategic community that a disproportionate emphasis on economic growth could blindside New Delhi to the threat posed to it by the possibility of a two-front war with China and Pakistan. The government-of-the-day’s single-minded focus on achieving and maintaining a near double-digit annual growth would be rendered meaningless if it is not able to defend itself from external aggression on two fronts, was his blunt advice to decision-makers.

Mishra looked at defence preparedness against China, for instance, in conjunction with acquisition of military hardware and capabilities. In his estimation, if the gap continued to widen, militarily and economically, between India and China and it got reflected in Chinese adventurism or belligerence along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that separates the two countries, then it behoved of India to take pre-emptive measures. The recent skirmishes along the LAC only seem to reinforce some of Mishra’s concerns.

Another of Mishra’s worries was a perceived lack of defence preparedness, which he attributed in no small measure to the ghost of the Bofors scam, which discouraged successive governments from making timely military purchases. “(Decades) after Bofors, the burden is still on the shoulder of politicians (and they are) afraid to take decisions,” this writer recalled Mishra as saying — a view that has been endorsed by some of those who were privy to the shortage of military hardware during the 1999 Kargil conflict with Pakistan.

Mishra’s remarks echoed George Fernandes’, who famously said that the fear of attracting allegations of corruption was to be blamed for the delays in procurement of military hardware. A Tehelka report (Defenders of the indefensible, 25 September) quoted Fernandes as saying in 2003, “There is hardly any official in the ministry who would like to put his signature for anything that has to be purchased. He would like to postpone it. He would like to put it off. He would like to do whatever he has to do because he thinks that is the best way for him to survive.” He amplified the political class’ anxieties by saying that “the court is not going to listen to that and if a political activist or minister does it, then the man who is his rival or opponent is not going to accept that. It is a terrible world”.

Former army chief Gen (retd) VK Singh, who is now the minister of state with independent charge of the statistics and programme implementation ministry in addition to being the minister of state in the ministries of external affairs and overseas Indian affairs, had presented a grim picture of India’s defence preparedness and cautioned the UPA government to act without delay.

Parrikar’s predecessor Arun Jaitley had sounded a note of caution, too. He warned the defence ministry apparatus against being “very defensive” and asked it to shed its conservatism in the acquisition of weapons. Jaitley sought to make amends for the erstwhile UPA government’s questionable track record on defence acquisitions by okaying certain key projects worth several tens of thousands of crores, such as the indigenous development of six submarines at a cost of Rs 50,000 crore, a Rs 3,200 crore deal for the purchase of Israeli anti-tank guided missiles, procuring surveillance aircraft from the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and inviting the Indian private sector to participate in the production of transport aircraft. In the Union Budget, Jaitley had raised the cap for foreign direct investment (FDI) in defence from 26 percent to 49 percent in order to give a boost to the indigenous defence-industrial manufacturing base. Jaitley had hoped that not only would the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) turn into a manufacturing hub but regular meetings of the Defence Acquisition Council could go a long way towards speeding up the purchases, besides giving a fillip to Modi’s “Make in India” slogan.

For his part, Parrikar has said that it would be his endeavour to fast-track defence purchases. Top on his list could be to take the multi-billion dollar medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) project to its logical conclusion by okaying the purchase of 126 French Rafale jets for the Indian Air Force. “I have realised that if someone properly heads the defence ministry, then we need not worry about Pakistan and China. We are strong enough… we have to build our capability over the next two-three years,” he said upon his return to Goa after assuming the office of defence minister.

Parrikar attributed the delays in some acquisitions to vested interests or corruption. For the metallurgist from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, restoring the delicate civil-military balance would be an important task, too.

Whatever it takes: Modi plays musical chairs

New Delhi
14 November 2014

A

 week is a long time in politics and for the BJP four days were more than sufficient for the script to play itself out. After installing his protégé Amit Shah as BJP president in July, Prime Minister Narendra Modi waited for the afterglow of the BJP’s spectacular win in Maharashtra and Haryana to set in before expanding his council of ministers. Over the past weekend, he rewarded political turncoats from the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal with ministerial berths, shuffled his pack of ministers by inducting new faces and put underperformers on notice all at once so that he achieved the following:

• get the political (read caste) arithmetic right before more states in the Hindi heartland go to polls;

• suitably reward the states that have stood by him and the BJP;

• swing the balance of power on Raisina Hill, which houses the North and South Blocks and, by extension, the Cabinet Committee on Security, decisively in his favour; and

• keep his detractors within the party and in the RSS, the BJP’s ideological mentor, in good humour.

Come Wednesday and the Modi-Shah duo carried forward the unscrupulous ease and clinical precision with which they executed the expansion of the Union Cabinet, to Mumbai, where they coerced the Shiv Sena into submission and co-opted the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) for ensuring that Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis easily won the trust vote in the Assembly. Incidentally, this was the same ncp that Modi had described as a “Naturally Corrupt Party” during the Maharashtra election campaign. No matter that in dumping its idea of being a party with a difference for realpolitik, the BJP lent itself to the charge of rank opportunism. In between expanding his Cabinet and marshalling his resources in Maharashtra, Modi hosted former Kashmiri separatist leader Sajjad Lone while Shah, for his part, welcomed Congress leader Karan Singh’s younger son Ajatshatru Singh into the BJP fold as Modi and Shah plotted their “Mission 44” by triggering a realignment of forces in the run-up to the Assembly election in Jammu and Kashmir.

For the discerning, the events of those four days showcased the best and worst sides of a party riding high on a winning streak. From airlifting a Manohar Parrikar from Goa to head the defence ministry and resurrecting a Suresh Prabhu from political oblivion by giving him the plum portfolio of the railway ministry to (correctly) calling the Shiv Sena’s bluff of severing all ties with the BJP, Modi and Shah worked in perfect unison to outwit friends and foes alike. It was a hark back to 2005 when Modi expanded his council of ministers in Gujarat after winning the 2002 Assembly election. Then, as now, he relented and agreed to induct more ministers only after fortifying his position by getting a man of his choice (Vajubhai Vala) installed as BJP president in Gujarat. Then, as now, he gave ministerial berths to some who were not necessarily seen as being his camp followers in a bid to disarm his detractors within the party. And then, as now, he effected an expansion of his council of ministers only out of compulsion. If, then, it was BJP patriarch LK Advani who nudged Modi to induct more ministers into his Cabinet, it was an appreciation of Shah’s political compulsions ahead of key Assembly elections (Bihar in 2015, West Bengal in 2016 and Uttar Pradesh and Punjab in 2017, among others) coupled with his own desire to salvage what remains of his ambitious agenda of rationalising ministries in order to give to the people “minimum government, maximum governance” that forced Modi to undertake the exercise now.

Spot the difference

Modi took care to allot or reallocate portfolios in keeping with an administrative logic that aims to reduce bureaucratic inertia and put economic reforms on the fast track. The induction of an IIT-alumnus Parrikar as the defence minister, a chartered accountant Prabhu as the railway minister or a Harvard-educated former investment banker Jayant Sinha as the minister of state for finance bears him out. However, for a prime minister who advised Maharashtra Chief Minister Fadnavis to worry about how to serve the people rather than how to save his government, some of Modi’s own decisions smacked of double standards and tantamounted to putting survival over principle. This, when not so long ago, addressing the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Modi had held forth on his agenda for an aspirational India. “Earlier there was a habit in our country to keep small groups happy. Divide in small groups and keep your vote bank intact. This has changed now. The thinking of the young generation of India has changed. The young generation of the country does not want to live in parts. The change has come due to the youth,” he said, explaining how he wanted to transcend caste and community considerations to create opportunities for a neo-middle class.

Modi had aroused expectations of ushering in a change in the way India would be governed but some of those hopes seem to have been belied by his succumbing to tokenism, caste considerations or the ubiquitous identity or vote-bank politics. Consequently, electoral considerations more than merit seem to have been at play here. Again, in trying to project that he has given a fair representation to Dalits and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in his council of ministers, Modi inducted certain persons with criminal cases, including that of attempted murder, registered against them. For instance, Ram Shankar Katheria has a case of attempted murder, among others, against him. Also, Modi perpetuated a stereotype that a Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi was only fit for the portfolio of minority affairs. Having said that, Modi has yet managed to keep dynasts (such as Varun Gandhi, Anurag Thakur or Dushyant Singh) away from his Cabinet, but one would still be forgiven to ask, “So what’s the difference between him and others before him?” or “Can the BJP still claim to be a party with a difference?”

The induction of certain ministers such as Vijay Sampla from Punjab and Katheria from Uttar Pradesh, both Dalits, or Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, also from Uttar Pradesh, who hails from the most backward Nishad caste, indicated a BJP strategy to woo and to broaden its appeal among the Dalits, the backward classes and the intermediate castes. Clearly, the BJP has trained its guns on the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in Punjab by projecting Sampla as its Dalit face in the state. Sampla is the mp from Hoshiarpur, which falls in the Doaba region where the BSP claims to have a base. Sampla’s elevation should also be seen as an indication of the BJP’s desire to branch out on its own in Punjab. The BJP has already appointed Katheria, the minister of state in the human resource development ministry, as the party in-charge for Punjab.

Birender Singh, a Jat and a former Congressman from Haryana, was inducted in the Cabinet so that the Jat community did not feel alienated, especially after the BJP’s win in the recent Haryana Assembly election on account of the consolidation of the non-Jat vote. Sanwar Lal Jat, who belongs to the Jat community from Rajasthan, found a place in the Cabinet, too.

 Again, by giving ministerial berths to Giriraj Singh, a Bhumihar, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, a Rajput who is considered close to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Ram Kripal Yadav, a Yadav, all hailing from Bihar, the BJP intended to convey the message that it valued their contributions and hopes to ride on the back of their support when elections are held in the state. Similarly, Babul Supriyo’s induction as the minister of state for urban development indicated the BJP’s plans to make a foray into West Bengal.

With the expansion of the council of ministers, now there are 66 ministers with 26 ministers of Cabinet rank (excluding Prime Minister Modi), 13 ministers of state (independent charge) and 26 ministers of state. The average age of the ministers is 59. (Earlier, there were 46 ministers in Modi’s Cabinet. The number dropped by one, to 45, after Gopinath Munde’s death.) Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have pride of place in the council of ministers with 13 and eight ministers, respectively, followed by Maharashtra (six); Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh (five each); Karnataka (four); Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan (three each); Goa, Jharkhand and Punjab (two each); and Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Telangana and Delhi (one each.) The states that went unrepresented were Kerala, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya. If it should be of any consolation to the northeastern states, the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (or doner) has been placed under the independent charge of Jitendra Singh, who is a minister of state in the Prime Minister’s Office. Although one more woman (Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti) was inducted into the council of ministers with a minister of state rank, the percentage of women as a whole in the Cabinet dropped from 26 percent to 22 percent and in the entire council of ministers from 15 percent to 12 percent.

An essay in comprehension

Unwittingly, Modi’s penchant for the unconventional failed to live up to its billing, at least insofar as the “historic change” that he had sought to introduce “in the formation of ministries” as a step towards “smart governance” was concerned. Before he was sworn in as prime minister on 26 May, a press release issued on his behalf had said, “For the first time, he adopted guiding principle of ‘minimum government and maximum governance’ and also rationalisation with a commitment to bring a change in the work  culture and style of governance. It is a good beginning in transforming entity of assembled ministries to organic ministries. It will bring more coordination between different departments, will be more effective and bring a speed in process. The focus is on convergence in the activities of various ministries where one Cabinet minister will be heading a cluster of ministries who are working in complimentary sectors. Mr Modi is eventually aiming at smart governance where the top layers of government will be downsized and there would be expansion at the grassroot level” (sic).

Accordingly, one saw certain key ministries bring grouped together and placed under select ministers but it was dictated more by personalities than processes. Consequently, Arun Jaitley was given the twin (and disparate) portfolios of finance and defence, Ravi Shankar Prasad got law and telecommunications and Prakash Javadekar came to head the ministries of environment and information and broadcasting. To use an analogy, a chess player would find it difficult to advance in a game if his repertoire of openings did not evolve as the game progressed; similarly, Modi, much to his dismay, found himself saddled with a Cabinet that did not quite shape up, or performed, the way he would have liked, leaving him with little choice but to either make the necessary corrections or go back to the drawing board.

Another innovative idea, that of bifurcating the Ministry of External Affairs in order to have a dedicated department dealing with foreign trade and commerce, which Modi himself had flagged in 2013, seems to have fallen by the wayside. Among some of his other ideas that have not seen the light of day are deputing officers from the states to Indian missions abroad and designating a partner country for every state of the Indian Union depending on geographical contiguity or economic linkages.

* * * * * * *

Will Prabhu bring railways on track?

S

adananda Gowda’s loss was Suresh Prabhu’s gain. Gowda was one of two prominent casualties of the Cabinet expansion, the other being Dr Harsh Vardhan. While Gowda was eased out from the railway ministry and moved to the law ministry, Vardhan, who saw his health portfolio being taken away from him and given to JP Nadda, was put in charge of the science and technology ministry.

Prabhu (above) has the unenviable task of ushering in much-needed reforms in the railway ministry. His challenge will be to succeed where Gowda failed, namely, implement Modi’s reforms agenda by drawing up a roadmap for attracting FDI in this sector and make the railways operationally efficient.

Safety and customer service are Prabhu’s other immediate priorities. “The prime minister has decided that the condition of railways has to change. Our two focus areas will be customer service and railway safety as passenger safety is increasingly becoming an area of concern,” he said soon after taking charge of the ministry. The railways was an integrating factor for the economy and “if we work in this direction, we can propel economic growth”, he added for good measure.

The 61-year-old’s induction into the Cabinet was as dramatic as it could get. Shunned by his own party, the Shiv Sena, over the past decade, Prabhu was appointed by the Modi government as the head of an advisory group constituted for integrated development of power, coal and renewable energy. He is also the prime minister’s sherpa for the Group of 20 (G20) summit. On the morning of 9 November, he quit the Shiv Sena to take up the membership of the BJP and was subsequently sworn in as a Cabinet minister.

SAFFRON PARI-WAR!

New Delhi
10 November 2014

Written in collaboration with Prateek Goyal
Although a government headed by the 44-year-old Devendra Fadnavis has taken oath of the office in Maharashtra, the political tug-of-war between two estranged allies, the BJP and the Shiv Sena, is far from over. Fadnavis and Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray spent the past few days visiting temples and seeking divine blessings, while their trusted aides remained tight-lipped in a bid to narrow their differences.

Fadnavis returned home to a hero’s welcome in Nagpur and offered prayers at the Ganesh Tekdi temple before beginning a new political innings as the chief minister of the richest state in the country. Thackeray, meanwhile, held a show of strength with all 63 of his MLAs at the Ekvira Devi temple in Lonavala near Pune. His father, the late Bal Thackeray, had paid a similar visit to the temple after the Sena-BJP coalition formed its first government in the state in 1995.

Whether Uddhav’s visit was a precursor to his party eventually joining the Fadnavis government was hotly contested but his cryptic message on the occasion left some political commentators mystified. “Today,” Thackeray said, “I have come to Ekvira Devi’s shrine with 63 MLAs but very soon I will come here with more than 180 MLAs.”

At the time of going to the press, Fadnavis was confident of winning a trust vote on the floor of the Assembly, scheduled most likely on 12 November. However, he left open the possibility of expanding his Council of Ministers to include the Shiv Sena’s nominees following the trust vote. For its part, the Sena kept up the pressure on the BJP and was looking to extract maximum concessions from the latter. Given their ideological affinities, and a 25-year-long history of partnership, a coalition of compulsion between the BJP and the Shiv Sena is eminently plausible but neither party wants the compulsions of running a coalition to cramp its space.

Clearly, the rules of engagement are being rewritten as the BJP, under its president Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, charts a radically different course from the yesteryears. Fadnavis has made it amply clear that Modi wants him (Fadnavis) to pursue a development-oriented ageNDA and not worry about saving his government.

Fault lines are already emerging: The Shiv Sena favours a united Maharashtra, whereas the BJP is not opposed to carving out a new state of Vidarbha from Maharashtra. (Incidentally, Fadnavis hails from Nagpur in the Vidarbha region.) The Sena criticised Fadnavis for making a statement about Vidarbha during his grand welcome at Nagpur. The party’s mouthpiece Saamana suggested that carving out Vidarbha from Maharashtra is like separating a son from the mother. Another sticking point is the allocation of portfolios in the new state Cabinet.

For the record, Anant Geete, Shiv Sena’s lone nominee in Prime Minister Modi’s council of ministers, continues to retain his portfolio of the Union Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises. It is an indicator that the Sena-BJP ties have not reached breaking point. Another sign of the shape of things to come was the possibility of an expansion of the Union Cabinet to accommodate new ministers, not only from the BJP but also from the Shiv Sena. Suresh Prabhu, a senior Shiv Sena leader who held the portfolios of power, environment and industries in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, is being seen as an likely addition. Prabhu is currently serving as the Prime Minister’s Sherpa for the G-20 Summit. The Cabinet expansion was expected to take place before the Maharashtra Assembly met on 10 November.

Bridging the gap

The first signs of a thaw became visible when Uddhav attended Fadnavis’ swearing in ceremony at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium on 31 October. In the days leading up to the ceremony, the Sena had dropped hints that it might skip the function, miffed as it was at the BJP’s attitude towards it. It was only after Amit Shah and a clutch of other BJP leaders personally spoke to Thackeray over the telephone that the latter relented. In spite of the NCP’s offer of unconditional support to the Fadnavis government, sources in the BJP insist that they want the Sena onboard. Turning to the NCP could raise uncomfortable questions for the BJP at a time when some NCP leaders are facing charges of corruption. Former deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar, NCP state president Sunil Tatkare and former PWD minister Chhagan Bhujbal have cases of corruption registered against them. In fact, the Maharashtra Anti-Corruption Bureau has proposed an open inquiry against the three (Pawar and Tatkare with regard to an irrigation scam and Bhujbal in the ‘Maharashtra Sadan’ controversy).

Talks between the two allies are said to revolve around a formula where the new government could comprise 32 ministerial berths out of which 20 would remain with the BJP, 10 would go to the Shiv Sena and the remainder could be devolved to alliance partners, from among the Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana, Rashtriya Samaj Paksh, Shiv Sangram and the Republican Party of India (Athawale faction). For its part, the Sena is also eyeing the posts of the deputy chief minister and the Speaker of the Maharashtra Assembly.

BJP spokesperson Madhav Bhandari says, “Nothing has been decided about sharing of ministerial berths yet. We will make it public once it is decided. We are still to decide on alliance partners. The core committee of the Maharashtra BJP and the central parliamentary board will take a decision in this regard together.” Bhandari amplified it by saying that while the Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana, Rashtriya Samaj Paksh, Shiv Sangram and the Republican Party of India (A) were a “part and parcel” of the BJP alliance in the state, a decision on adding “new friends” was pending.

If the BJP and the Shiv Sena chose to be circumspect, the RSS was optimistic of the Sena joining the government in the state. “The two parties are natural partners and will definitely come together to form a government. Who is elder and who is younger doesn’t matter. What matters is that both are brothers, and in coming days, everything will be sorted out,” says Madhav Govind Vaidya, a senior RSS ideologue. He adds, “There is nothing wrong in [the Sena’s] demand,” citing the 1995 precedent, when the Sena kept the chief minister’s post and the BJP got the deputy CM’s post, to suggest that today when the BJP occupies the CM’s post, the deputy CM’s post could go to the Sena.

An uneasy coalition

While the BJP’s wins in the Maharashtra and the Haryana Assembly polls have come as a shot in the arm for the Modi-Shah duo, the manner in which those ­victories were achieved have come in for scrutiny by the RSS.

The blurring of lines between the party, represented by Shah, and the government, headed by Modi, has caused concern among some in the RSS. While the dissonance has come in handy for some of Modi’s detractors within the party and the government, who feel suffocated by his autocratic style of functioning, a ­section of the RSS fears that the BJP’s ­ideological moorings could get diluted, or worse, compromised, if the current ­leadership continues to enjoy ­runaway freedoms or if the delicate balance of power between the party and government on the one hand, and the government and the RSS, on the other hand is upset.This has implications for regional parties in general and the BJP’s allies in the NDA in particular. There is already a view that riding on the Modi wave, the BJP could ride roughshod over smaller regional parties in states that will go to polls in the next few years. Rumblings of discontent are being heard from a section of the BJP cadres in Punjab, where Assembly elections will be held in 2017.

Just as the BJP and the Shiv Sena traded accusations during the Maharashtra election, in Haryana, the BJP trained its guns on the alliance between the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD). The BJP’s overtures to the Sirsa-based Dera Sacha Sauda led by Gurmeet Ram Rahim before the Haryana elections could potentially change the dynamic of the ruling BJP-SAD alliance in Punjab.

However, the sad has been quick to correct the perception of a drift in its relationship with the BJP. A SAD leader said that there were “no issues” between the two parties and that the Badals were in regular touch with Amit Shah and others in the BJP. He asserted that unlike an “unreasonable” Shiv Sena, the SAD was a “reasonable partner”. “We will be fighting the Delhi Assembly election jointly,” he added.

* * * * * * *

From Dharampeth to Malabar Hill

By Prateek Goyal

Forty-four year-old Devendra Fadnavis is the new poster boy of the BJP in Maharashtra. This is the first time since its inception in April 1980, in Mumbai, that the party has laid claim to the chief minister’s chair. With Amit Shah at the helm of the party’s affairs and Fadnavis as its president in Maharashtra, the BJP bagged more than 100 seats — a feat never achieved by a single party since 1995. Fadnavis is the second youngest chief minister of the state after ncp chief Sharad Pawar, who was 38 when he became the chief minister in 1978. His father Gangadhar Rao Fadnavis was a Jan Sangh leader and a BJP mlc from Nagpur.

Fadnavis started his political career as a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in 1989 and strengthened his political base by attending RSS shakhas in Nagpur. Fadnavis got his first public position at the age of 22 when he was elected as a corporator in the Nagpur Municipal Corporation. After his re-election, he became the youngest mayor of the corporation at the age of 27. There has been no looking back for the boy from Dharampeth after that. He won his first Assembly election in 1999 from the Nagpur (West) constituency and has contested and won on three occasions from the Nagpur (South West) constituency before making his way to Varsha — the chief minister’s official residence at the Malabar Hill in Mumbai.

Fadnavis is a law graduate from the Nagpur University and is a known orator. He is known to have a clean image and an understanding of government and budgetary processes. Though soft-spoken, he is known for his fiery interventions in the Assembly. He had taken on the former Congress-NCP coalition government for various scams (Adarsh, irrigation, etc). He rose to prominence after he was made the state BJP president in 2013. He was close to the late BJP leader Gopinath Munde.

Yadu Joshi, the president of the Maharashtra Union of Working Journalists and a childhood friend of Fadnavis, recalls him as a firebrand leader, who would organise protests in support of the underprivileged. “I remember one protest Devendra had organised for demanding land rights for slum dwellers of Kamgar Nagar and Tukdoji Nagar in Nagpur. He raised the issue in the Assembly, too, and eventually succeeded in getting those people their rights,” Joshi says. “He was instrumental in getting scholarships for obc students. He has followers across all sections of society and has friends across party lines.”

Pravin Datke, the mayor of Nagpur, worked with Fadnavis during their time in the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha in Nagpur. Datke says, “He is a humble man. He is where he is today because of his hard work. He has exposed various scams. Some people may think that there is a rift between Nitin Gadkari and him but he has always considered Gadkari as his leader.”

At an election rally in Nagpur, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was thankful to the people of Nagpur for giving Maharashtra a brilliant and committed leader like Devendra Fadnavis.

'BJP under Modi is vulnerable to the emergence of several Dev Kant Barooahs... (will become like Congress under Indira)'

New Delhi
9 November 2014

KN Govindacharya is not given to making statements merely for effect. Expect plain-speaking from the 71-year-old former RSS pracharak and former BJP ideologue, especially when the issues at hand are something he feels strongly about — the rise and rise of Amit Shah, the pitfalls of being a Narendra Modi or the degeneration of the BJP into an electoral machine. In an interview to RAMESH RAMACHANDRAN, he also says that the prime minister must be seen to act on black money and that the next Union Budget will be the best indicator yet of the thought process of the NDA government. Edited excerpts from an interview :

"Quote Unquote"

'BJP under Modi is vulnerable to the emergence of several Dev Kant Barooahs'

*******

'Indiscipline will become the order of the day in the BJP. If the party gets degenerated into just an electoral machine and the party, instead of being a party of workers with a mission, gets degenerated into a party of candidates for power — and instead of holistic growth, electoral gains become their parameters — then all this is bound to happen'

*******

'The next Budget will definitely be the indicator of the thought process of the BJP'

*******

'The Modi government has to present itself as pro-Bharat and pro-poor. There is a widespread perception that on certain issues the government is pro-Bharat, but it has to be translated at the policy level'

*******

'The Modi government needs to be much more forthcoming as far as actions are concerned. Just fond wishes won’t do. Just exclamations won’t suffice'

*******

'Mukesh Ambani patting Prime Minister Modi does not go down well with the cadres. The self-respect of the cadres is hurt'

It is nearly six months since Narendra Modi was sworn in as prime minister. How do you view his performance?

After Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, Narendra Modi has proved himself to be the most hardworking prime minister. He is also the most proactive. He has exhibited these two qualities. However, he has yet to learn the ropes of governance at the Centre. Now he is facing the arduous task of taming and then steering the bureaucracy because the whole structure, in spirit, is status-quoist, inert, corrupt and insensitive. Right from the peons to the secretary-level officials, passing-the-buck has been the greatest surviving strength of government employees. So, indecisiveness is another characteristic of the bureaucracy. As far as out-of-the-box thinking or breakthrough thinking is concerned, it is a far, far dream. So, now, Modi is facing this aspect of governance. It will be interesting to see how he fares in this context.

Similarly, you cannot differentiate between the two personalities of Modi and Amit Shah (BJP president) or, for that matter, between the party and the government. All rolled into one is the present picture. And it will continue to be so because Shah will not be seen as having any separate identity of his own. He will be just a shadow. He is yet to make a mark. So, with these things, naturally, there is always a liability or vulnerability of the emergence of several Dev Kant Barooahs. (Barooah was a former Congress president who famously said, “India is Indira. Indira is India.”) Only one was sufficient to damage the reputation. Here, that will become the way of working or the order of the day. So, it will be interesting to see how all these aspects are tackled.

What do you make of Prime Minister Modi’s pro-business image and some of the recent pronouncements by his government, particularly on issues such as black money?

Without imputing motives, I feel that the government needs to be much more forthcoming as far as actions are concerned. Just fond wishes won’t do. Just exclamations won’t suffice, but they have to be in unison with the action also. As Murli Manohar Joshi has also recently said (about politics and corporates), and I agree with him, a (Reliance Industries chairman) Mukesh Ambani patting Prime Minister Modi does not go down well with the cadres. The self-respect of the cadres is hurt. Because in this party, Nanaji Deshmukh (a founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh) used to have the best of relations with the industrialists but none of them could get into so much proximity and they were not given even the primary membership anywhere. But in the past 20 years, corporate houses have won Rajya Sabha seats also for some of their officials or ex-officials. So this nexus of political power and money power will definitely influence the formulation of policies also. It will be difficult for the political parties to strike a different line or mode that will be injurious or harmful to the interests of the corporates. So the people running the government must be aware of it and they should take precautions about it. That is why Modi was categorical that black money (“ek ek pai”; Hindi for every penny) will be brought back because that is the money of the poor. But, you see, this cannot match with his hobnobbing with the corporate sector.

Some view Modi as being autocratic. How would you describe his style of governance?

Modi has been working very smartly, so to say; he is an extraordinary performer when it comes to image, message, signals and politics. Nobody can match (him) and for that (to happen), a structure, technology and resources are needed. He has those things because of the party and the Sangh Parivar structures. Therefore, he is able to synchronise those three ­factors and that is his genius. One has to admit that, but that has to be translated into achievements at the ground level and it is in this context that I mentioned about the bureaucracy.

The Congress party is in disarray. A section of the media does not quite seem to have an appetite for being critical of the government. The judiciary is in need of reforms. In this situation, who do you think can effectively play the role of an Opposition?

The Opposition political parties have failed in their duties and they are not able to put their house in order. They are not able to digest their defeat or accept the reality that they have to rebuild the party; but how, they don’t know. They are also not clear about what should be their future strategy or planks of politics. On that count, the Opposition is nowhere to be seen. The media, for its part, has been rational enough to give time to this government before judging it or criticising it. They are acting fair enough, that is what I feel. As for the judiciary, it has come out openly with strong comments on black money and with regard to many other things; it has been vocal enough, assertive enough in its role. So I think that the media and the judiciary are indeed playing their roles, but the same cannot be said for the Opposition.

Can the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) be more effective as an Opposition than as a government?

They have to acquire more skills for wielding power to protect and promote the interests of the people. So I think it was because of the distress and despair in the minds of the voters against the erstwhile ruling establishment that AAP was successful more than what they also might have expected. They have yet to build themselves into a political instrument. Their movement may have been helpful but consolidation was not there. So go-slow would have been the better strategy but they are the best people to judge for themselves.

Could the BJP-Shiv Sena split have been avoided before the Maharashtra Assembly election?

I think Modi is playing his game of politics in an assertive manner, given the numbers he has. And he has not trampled upon the toes of other political forces per se. Instead, for example, in Amritsar (Navjot Singh) Sidhu was sidelined; by whom? It was totally unfair and the BJP had to gulp it at that moment. About the Shiv Sena, that has not been the case but definitely, because of the split, realities have changed as far as Shiv Sena is concerned and, on the BJP’s side, they have not been unfair in demanding more seats. That was not good politics played by the Shiv Sena. So it is their fault. That fault can’t be heaped upon the BJP.

So where do the BJP and the Shiv Sena go from here?

They (Shiv Sena) also will learn lessons, which it is due for them. Efforts are always there but many a time efforts may not yield desired results. But I don’t think the BJP does not want allies or that it has become arrogant. That will be unfair to say. It depends on both partners; unilaterally, it is not possible. They should also be sensible enough to understand the change in the ground realities and the texture of politics. And it is not the end of the day; they should understand that it is a continuing process. What I am apprehensive about is how politics is turning power-centric and not people-centric, leadership-centric or personality-centric and not issue-centric. Politics is not merely about government or governance. It is about the direction in which the whole nation is to be steered by the State apparatus. It all depends on how you view the role of the State. Just winning elections or numbers is not the end of the road. The State is supposed to protect those who can’t protect themselves. So I see that in this respect, more sensitivity is required by all parties, including the ruling party.The issues of the poor and the deprived have to get more attention in this era of marketism and the State should be weighing itself in favour of the poor and the deprived rather than creating a perception that it is closer to the corporates.

Certain instances of indiscipline reported from Maharashtra have embarrassed the BJP…

It will become the order of the day. If the party gets degenerated into just an electoral machine and the party, instead of being a party of workers with a mission, gets degenerated into a party of candidates for power — and instead of holistic growth, electoral gains become their parameters — then all this is bound to happen.

The government has taken certain measures on the economic front but there is a view that more reforms are needed and quickly at that.

The situation will become clear in the next Budget because the last Budget was an extension of the previous government’s interim Budget. There was no original concept in it. The next Budget will definitely be the indicator of the thought process of the BJP. Till then, we have to wait as far as economic issues are concerned. Having said that, there is the issue of amendments to the Land Acquisition Bill, which the government is expected to bring in the winter session of Parliament. Then there are some cases on fast track against certain politicians… all of which is getting delayed. So I think one should not test the people’s patience beyond a limit. Six months is neither too early nor too late but the government has to present itself as pro-Bharat and pro-poor. There is a widespread perception that on certain issues the government is pro-Bharat, but it has to be translated at the policy level. For example, the ban on cow slaughter is not only an emotional issue; it is as well linked to economic and environmental aspects and also the direction of the development model. Breeding centres are needed. A couple of centuries ago, the cattle-to-man ratio was 7 to 1. At the time of Independence, it became 1 to 1 and now it is the reverse; today, the cattle-to-man ratio is 1 to 7. This is an alarming situation. It will definitely affect the health of the country, lead to malnutrition among children and the socio-psycho atmosphere will be hurt if this ratio further declines. The government can take certain steps such as ensuring that the export of beef and fodder is banned altogether. These seemingly innocuous steps can go a long way in addressing some of the problems. I intend to submit a memo to the government on the issue of cattle, specifically cows and their progeny.

The ‘trickle-down’ development model is a proven failure, so a departure is needed. Whether this government indeed does some out-of-the-box thinking remains to be seen. It will be interesting to see what is there in the Budget.

The government may be emotionally inclined towards being pro-Bharat but I think a lot needs to be done for the government to adopt a pro-poor approach. This aspect has to be geared for not merely lip service but a genuine commitment is needed. Eco-centric development is the need of the hour. fdi (foreign direct investment) and trickle-down theory won’t work and they will be detrimental to those people who are dependent on natural resources. Their livelihood will be threatened. Therefore, sensitivity and continuous exposure to that section of the people is needed, not investor summits.

Instead of practising the failed dictum of trickle-down theory, they should proceed towards eco-centric development and not merely anthropocentric development. An overdependence on the trickle-down theory can be counterproductive as it could encourage disparities and inequalities. Inclusive development and empowerment are needed, not through doles and charities but by the active participation of those sections of society and opening up avenues for that is the task of the government. There is a lot of talk about smart cities but hundreds of villages could vanish or be affected by the development of smart cities. Should smart cities then be a priority?

BJP veterans such as LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi have been sidelined. Could they have been treated differently?

If electoral politics is the approach, then whatever has been done is correct; but if politics is to be viewed holistically, then some more options could have been there. But, then again, there is no use discussing all those options. Gatham Gathaha… what has happened, has happened. One has to move on.

Concerns have been expressed in some quarters over the future of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and the Unique Identification (Aadhaar) Number — two schemes that had been launched by the erstwhile UPA government. Where do you stand on this issue?

Continuity and change are to be blended together. As it is said, old is gold but everything new may not be the best, so change and continuity should go hand in hand. Many alterations to MGNREGA are needed but more changes are needed in the legislation on land acquisition so that agricultural land is saved and the land that protects the interests of animals, birds and other living beings is protected. The interests of jal (water), jameen (land), jungle and jaanvar (animals) should be at least as important as that of humans. So I feel if the approach is altered from an anthropocentric development to eco-centric development, it will do more good.

What are your impressions about the government’s foreign policy?

I think the government is in a learning mode and needs more time to understand the ropes of foreign policy. It could definitely have better diplomatic and economic relations with Russia because they have been natural allies, geopolitically, in the past. China can be a competitor, if not a rival, but we will have to see how far this competition can be healthy.

The challenge before Rahul Gandhi

New Delhi
8 November 2014

Will the Gandhi scion be able to overcome the prevailing sentiment against the politics of dynasty? asks Ramesh Ramachandran

DK Shivakumar’s mandate may be confined to Karnataka by virtue of his being a minister there but his sentiments seem to transcend the state’s borders and find resonance with a section of the Congress party’s central leaders. That is not to say that no one in the party’s central leadership had thought on those lines before or aired similar sentiments in the past.

In fact, first off the blocks was Kamal Nath, who, soon after the Congress debacle in the recent Lok Sabha election, sought to suggest that the party organisation was in dire need of an overhaul. He articulated as much in an interview to NDTV, in which he spoke about holding of elections to the Congress Working Committee. Perhaps, he added for good measure, it was time to put an end to the prevailing culture of patronage, too. Most recently, P Chidambaram told the same television channel that an individual from outside the Gandhi family could “someday” take over the reins of the party.

Not being exceptionally media-savvy or not having a Twitter account should be the least of Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s worries today. (Not that having a presence on social media is a bad idea.) For one who claims to have spent the better part of the past seven years reorganising the Youth Congress, he does not have much to show by way of outcomes. A straw poll would indicate that there is still a deep-seated resentment among a section of the Youth Congress activists at the manner in which the Gandhi scion has gone about ushering in purported reforms, which have been implemented more in the breach.

When Rahul came to head the Youth Congress in 2007, he spoke about democratising the organisation by regularly holding elections, but a common refrain even today is that family connections matter more than merit in the party and its various organs.

One sentiment that clearly emerges from interacting with some of the workers is that the Congress party seems to be woefully out of sync with the prevailing sentiment, inside and outside the party and in India’s hinterland, against the politics of dynasty and entitlement.

The asymmetry between the two principal political parties in the country today becomes even more pronounced when one considers who the Gandhis — Sonia and Rahul — are pitted against: Narendra Modi, who rose from being a chaiwallah in his childhood to occupy the highest office in the land, and Amit Shah, who rose from within the ranks to head the BJP. In such a situation, to rope in another dynast from the same family — Priyanka Gandhi Vadra — in the hope that she would pull the party out of the morass it finds itself in, is hardly going to be a solution. (The irony is unmistakable: The same Congress worker who rails against nepotism sees Priyanka as a saviour who will wave the proverbial magic wand and, voila!, make it all look good again. For her part, she has indicated time and again that she is not ready and willing yet to play a more active role in the party’s affairs.)

It should not come as a surprise that the Congress rank and file feels a sense of despair, made even more acute by the perceived absence of Rahul from the party’s affairs post the Maharashtra and Haryana Assembly elections. Incidentally, Rahul is a key part of a 12-member Congress committee constituted to “look into future challenges” but the nature and contours of the deliberations undertaken by this panel remain a mystery.

Similarly, the conclusions or recommendations by a committee set up under the chairmanship of AK Antony to examine the reasons for the party’s debacle in the Lok Sabha election did not help matters by absolving the party office-bearers of all responsibility. Instead, the committee’s report sought to ascribe the party’s loss to unspecified organisational handicaps and, oddly, manipulation of the media by its rival. Admittedly, winning isn’t everything but then again, you don’t win silver, you lose gold!

For a party that practically invented the art of election engineering, to commit the same mistake that its rivals did some decades ago is unforgivable. (In a sense, it speaks to the bankruptcy of the Congress’ present-day leaders.) The late Indira Gandhi won a landslide in 1971 on the back of a simple yet effective slogan of “Woh kehte hain Indira hatao, main kehti hoon garibi hatao (They are saying remove Indira, I’m saying remove poverty.)” The more her rivals (who had banded together in a grand alliance) conducted a personalised campaign against her, the more she gained. Cut to 2014, and the same Congress party targeted Modi at the expense of everything else, and ended up handing him an unprecedented victory at the hustings.

The Congress strategists seem to have forgotten that there is something called a law of diminishing returns and the effectiveness of a unidimensional campaign begins to wear off after a certain period of time. And this stratagem of the Congress to selectively target Modi will continue to bother the party if, as is being anticipated, it gangs up with some of its ‘secular’ allies against a resurgent bjp and trains its guns on Modi in the states where elections are due. The Congress needs to change tack to counter the Modi phenomenon.

If Rahul is missing in action, so are certain erstwhile Congress ministers who seem to have gone into hibernation after the Lok Sabha election. The alacrity with which some of them have resumed their professional careers sends out the wrong signal that they are abandoning the party when it needs their services the most. Consequently, the task of articulating the party’s views has been outsourced ad hoc to individuals who lack the requisite skills or the stature to make forceful interventions.

For the Congress party and its brains trust, now is not the time for window dressing; now is the time for a dressing down. Cosmetic surgery won’t do anymore. Rahul will have to lead from the front and ensure that his interventions are consistent, not sporadic. His cameos such as the ordinance-is-complete-nonsense-it- should-be-torn-up-and-thrown-away or his aggressive speech at the All India Congress Committee session in January this year have proved inadequate, sometimes counter-productive. On 28 October, Rahul met with his colleagues in what was only his first formal interaction with them after the recent round of Assembly elections. On the occasion, he touched upon the issue of holding organisational elections that would be transparent and fair. It remains to be seen how effective those elections prove to be in infusing new vigour into the party.

A reluctant politician Rahul might be but there is a thin line that divides being reluctant from being (or coming across as being) disinterested. This was brought out starkly earlier this year in Rahul’s interview to Times Now television channel. He was asked: “Had you not been a Gandhi, would you have been in politics at all?” His reply was neither categorical nor in the affirmative. The import of that silence (reticence?) was not lost on a discerning audience, some of whom wondered why the tenets of equal opportunity and internal democracy should not extend to his job.

As the party introspects and contemplates its future course of action, it could begin with rightsizing its top-heavy organisation, rejigging its team of officebearers at the national and state levels and spotting new talent within and outside the party, instead of paying a lefthanded compliment to the bjp by iterating that the latter marketed itself better in the Lok Sabha polls. As Chidambaram warned, the morale is low and the party’s leadership must respond urgently.

The question before the Gandhis is: would they rather perpetuate themselves than see the party revive and reinvent itself in keeping with the times we live in?

If the party survives, so will the Gandhis.