Will Manmohan-Chidambaram duo play the magic flute?

By Sisir Basu

So very often the ubiquitous comrades remind the United Progressive Alliance government to function within the Common Minimum Programme parameters. One constant refrain is the understanding and efficacy of the programme. An ensemble of disparate dispensations has vowed to rule and reform "with a human face". The much-avowed human face is perforce of the destitute, depressed and downtrodden. It is a face Gandhiji advocated to be the talisman, the end-all and be-all, of governance. Plans and manifestos, prime ministers and chief ministers and their parties as a rule promise the moon; they achieve but a fraction of it. Their cadres grow; size of ministers grows; the bureaucracy burgeons. The poor become poorer.

India is home to a third of the world’s absolute poor: Some 130 million have no access to basic healthcare; 200 million do not get safe drinking water; 70 per cent of the country lacks basic sanitation. The Directive Principles of state Policy provide for universal education, yet one-third of the populace is unlettered. The Constitution provides for the education to be a birth right of a child; yet the number of children not in school is over 50 million. Article 301 of the Constitution provides for freedom of trade and commerce throughout the Indian territory, yet octroi and sales tax constitute great barriers.

Amidst apprehensions as much as aspirations, the CMP unfolds a roadmap the UPA contemplates to pursue for economic growth and poverty alleviation. The bottomline is that the CMP must demonstrate there is a government that governs, is also effective and will deliver. Aside from the rhetoric and platitudes for high growth and social justice, there is this categorical imperative of retrieving the soul of the nation. The country bemoans its loss, the loss of its gentleness, its values, its idealism.

The air is thick with despair and disenchantment. Buffeted and with little real choice, the electorate conveys its disgust by voting out the incumbent, most candidates having regularly betrayed their confidence, and belied their promises. The dance of democracy extracts a heavy toll: Its very concept and values are questioned; an ever new breed of political upstarts descends on the scene with the trappings and a halo of power abrogated to them. A scramble is routinely witnessed for loaves and fishes of office. Many of the netas turned ministers play the Santa Claus, and distribute largesse though at a huge cost to the exchequer.

Disparities really grow not only of incomes, of living conditions, but of behaviour, conduct, and concern. The gentle and the modest steadily dwindle, becoming verily an endangered species. Not that the country does not have a large number of men, women and children, wonderful human-beings.

The system is in a shambles. Behind the thin veneer of white apparel lurks dark deep layers of greed and graft. The criminals are no longer condemned by the collective consciousness.

With impunity, cartels of exploitation grow and prosper. Corruption is the byword, corroding the socio-economic fabric of society. Inferior material is used in critical utilities which endanger lives; collusion of engineers and supervisors with builders and contractors extracts its heavy price; urban agglomerations steadily turn into a pigsty; even hallowed heritage sites are exploited and encroached; the ubiquity of decaying cities signifies a sinful abdication of basic responsibilities; public property is mulcted, encroachments and illegal constructions are regularised to eke votes. Terrorists do not come from out of the blue, that fidayeens live right amongst us under the garb of public servants and political leaders in municipal offices, in collectorates, in hospitals and health centres, among police and municipal offices, in Customs, excise, Central and state tax establishments, in all spheres of public activity, wreaking harassment to hapless citizens.

Free India’s first Premier and stately stalwarts such as Sardar Patel had enunciated clear canons of conduct by ministers, legislators and civil servants. Today, these golden guidelines have been swept aside, in fact, derided. Administrative steel-frame has become pliant, servile, and manipulative. Misuse of public office and public resources is rampant.

Austerity and probity is denounced and scoffed at. Let there be a concerted campaign to restore and implement the edicts of Nehru and Patel, to avoid waste, shun misuse of public funds, eschew ostentation and extravagance – as much as interference in routine administration. Austerity needs to be pursued by those in power and position, to establish their identity with the common folk.

Let the Council of Ministers and senior-most echelons in bureaucracy set an example and scrupulously shun any five-star hospitality. The "VIP" culture that has spread like a virus needs to be exorcised. None other than the President, the Vice-President and the prime minister be allowed to jump the queue at airports, for example, or avoid immigration/emigration and security drill. Let there be an affidavit filed at the end of the year by each PSU’s CEO that it has not expended on hospitality, renovation, transport and other artifacts for the administrative ministry, ministers, bureaucrats and/or their families.

The need is to emphasise three Ds: Delayering, downsizing and devolution. If anything, this will help engender accountability and efficiency. Important recommendations of the Fifth Pay Commission about reduction in strength, in wasteful expenditure, in holidays were mysteriously set aside, while implementing the other facile suggestions. The commission suggested the complete abolition of the provision of extension in the service rules. Let this be followed, with no post-retirement jobs offered to civil servants.

There need to be a special emphasis on the effectiveness of public service delivery rather than the quantity of development funding. The system is in need not so much of additional resources, as better policies and sound delivery mechanisms. There is need for teachers to attend schools and doctors to attend health centres and provide health care, for subsidies and public distribution system to reach the needy and the poor, for municipalities to clean drains and refuse. Let there be no mockery of the high and mighty engaged in photo sessions with brooms in hand. Let there be no such frolicsom tamasha. Governance is an earnest business. There is a need to ensure all officers and supervisors move out where action is, inspect, to lead the teams to do their job thoroughly.

Delivery of services is indeed the most crucial aspect. Countless commissions and committees have diagnosed the disease and prescribed reliefs and redressals. How will yet another administrativere forms commission help?

A crusade needs to be launched to cultivate and sustain the work ethos. In their presentation to the council of ministers, McKinsey explained that growth is mostly about getting the people and machines which are already there to work harder and smarter, "to ensure that 1+1 equal 3". Much like the finance minister’s mantra for transforming the economy by dint of "good economics, good politics, and hard work", their premise has been that growth will be driven by productivity increases rather than capital investment. Let the broken pieces be fixed; let the good system be restored Human capital is the key for development, for quality of life, for progress. The country has unwittingly encouraged sloth, indolence, and indifference. A vast number has been fed on a doctrinaire paralysis of work culture thereby destroying the very basis of growth.

An important instrument of effective governance is good communications. In fact, it is required to be a two-way communication: Frequent personal interface with the people at the grassroots. Officers and supervisors, in addition to ministers, need to be accessible and explain the programmes and plans in the lingo and idiom which the people understand.

For any government, time is short; resources are limited. Revolution of rising expectations would demand concentrated attention on limited spheres of activity at a time. The poor and the disadvantaged need to be helped and steered on a correct path, by example. Thirty-four per cent of India’s population is less than 15 years old. There is this familiar impatience of youth for the fruits of development to be in their grasp. They will willingly and cheerfully march along, and even sacrifice, if they find the deeds of the leaders match their words.

Restraint in thought, word and deed, if practised by several scores of ministers sworn in by the President and the Governors, will raise them in public esteem and bring credit to government. They need to sincerely study the job on hand with all its complexities. Let them not fritter away their energy, and newly garnered goodwill, only finding faults and denigrating the predecessors, bargaining for bigger bungalows and portfolios, and exhausting their energy on trivial maters of popular interest. The tasks ahead are daunting, and challenges onerous. Tall promises have a knack of knocking people down. The day of reckoning will not be far.

India needs creativity, resolve, diligence and a vision. It needs to take guard afresh and get on with a new innings, to win, Rabindra Nath’s Tasher Desh has a ray of hope to offer, a message wherein citizens, who had lost vitality, and their capacity to respond to the rhythm of life, played a magic flute, whereupon their vitality flowed back. India needs some similar transformation. There is hope the Manmohan-Chidambaram duo will play the magic flute. INAV

India as the favourite whipping boy

By I S Chadha

India debated whether or not to send its cricket squad to Bangladesh as the Indian High Commission in Dhaka received a fax message from a terrorist group to "kill all players". Indian intelligence agencies monitoring movements of terrorist groups had briefed New Delhi that Bangladesh had become the hubs of south Asia’s Terror Inc had quietly moved eastwards from J&K, and had been given shelter by the Khaleda Zia government. For Northeast terrorists Dhaka is a safe sanctuary. Notwithstanding repeated requests by India the Zia government has not co-operated to throw out terrorists hiding in Bangladesh. Instead, Dhaka has launched maligning campaigning against India. Thus, there is a growing distrust between the two neighbours. The Bangladesh government always harps on the theory of conspiracy by India to wipe out a neighbour through "desertification" of the country or, before it can do so, to project it to the international community as a "failed state"? The image of India as the big neighbourhood bully has long been the stuff of political campaigns in Bangladesh and Nepal.

What are the charges? From a long and seemingly endless list, some stand out both for their ingenuity and for their appeal to a section of the political opinion in Bangladesh.

Let us look first into the ones that aim to mould public opinion in that country. On top of this list is the charge that India’s attempts to manage the waters from 54 rivers that flow into Bangladesh would reduce large parts of that country into a "desert’. Buffeted by the regular cyclones that rise in the Bay of West Bengal in the south and the India-made "deserts" in the north, the country would face a real threat to its very existence. India’s river-linking project would thus conspire with an unkind nature to make Bangladesh a geographical disaster waiting to happen.

It does not quite help to tell the Bangladeshi accusers that the project, conceived by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, has many critics in India or, more important, that it may take decades to implement it even partially.

As if the ecological conspiracy was not enough, India, you are told, is plotting to ruin Bangladesh’s economy by refusing to withdraw the tariff and non-tariff barriers on the latter’s exports.

Then there is the familiar complaint about India’s strongarm tactics to force Dhaka to agree to export its gas to India. All Indian complaints will be silenced, it is said, if Bangladesh submits to this Indian pressure. Since Dhaka has not obliged New Delhi by doing so, the latter has mounted a slander campaign.

But the darkest Indian conspiracy is to tell the world that Bangladesh is on the verge of becoming a failed state that harbours and breeds terrorists, both homegrown and the ones from India’s North-east. If the Far Eastern Economic Review ran a cover story two years ago, describing the country as a "Cocoon of Terror", the idea for it must have been scripted in New Delhi. If Time magazine carried a four-page article earlier this year, calling the country a "State of Disgrace", you know where the plot for the article was hatched. And, if the Time journalist was of Indian origin, the "dark suspicion", as one journalist recently put it, was that it had been written "at the behest of his paymasters in New Delhi".

So when Bangladesh’s foreign minister, M. Morshed Khan, made some stunning anti-India remarks at a conference in Dhaka in September – in the presence of the heads of several foreign missions, including India’s – he only gave voice to the prevailing mood, at least in the present ruling establishment. What surprised many, however, was the tone of Khan’s remarks that bordered on threatening India that Dhaka too would retaliate to India’s alleged tactics.

In fact, analysis in Dhaka suggest that there are two distinct reasons why the Khaleda Zia government has raised the pitch of India-baiting so high. First, it is indeed a retaliation to what Dhaka sees as Indian attempts to run down the country’s image in the international community. India’s complaints about the shelters and training camps of north-eastern militants inside Bangladesh, about infiltration of Bangladeshis into India and above all, the projection of Bangladesh as a new hub of Islamic terrorists, are all seen as part of the conspiracy to malign – and destabilize – the current regime in Dhaka. India does this, the argument goes, because the Zia government has persistently ignored India’s security concerns.

One also hears that the Indian propaganda is actually a response to Bangladesh’s domestic politics. Since the Awami League is believed to be India’s favourite, the present coalition government, led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, bears the brunt of the Indian propaganda against the country. This is an old argument which, however, does not fully explain the stiffening of stances between the two countries.

But both analysts and some sections of the common people talk of a second reason for the recent anti-India campaign in Bangladesh. It is argued that this is actually an attempt of the current regime to defend itself against sharpening criticism both at home and abroad. From this point of view, this rhetoric has more to do with the country’s internal situation than with anything that India does or does not.

The reasoning follows like this. The worsening law and order situation, the rise of religious fundamentalism and even attacks on – and persistent threats to – the media and religious minorities have increasingly made things difficult for the Zia government. The ruling alliance and the government are desperate to divert people’s attention from the domestic problems. Whipping up anti-India passions is an old ploy that the rulers are trying to use once again.

That there is some substance in this reasoning is borne our by the events following the August 21 grenade attack on Sheikh Hasina Wajed and other Awami League leaders at a rally in Dhaka. The tragic incident, which killed 20 people, including the veteran women’s leader, Ivy Rehman, and injured several hundred League supporters, shook the government badly.

Although there had been many deadly attacks on political personalities and parties even during the previous League regime, the August 21 tragedy had altogether different dimensions. For Bangladeshis themselves, this was the ultimate example of the mounting threats to political pluralism and democracy in the country.

For the international community, too, the incident came as incontrovertible proof of what it had been suspecting for quite some time – that the country was dangerously sliding into anarchy, and that the government is either un-willing or unable to check the slide or, worse still, is conniving with certain elements responsible for this situation.

Not just the international press but several high-profile international organizations have been sounding alarm bells for the past two years. Organizations like the Amnesty International, Reporters Sans Frontiers and the Committee to Protect Journalists have repeatedly complained against growing threats to the media and the civil society in Bangladesh. Foreign investments in the country too dropped dramatically over the past two years.

It is common to hear in Dhaka the argument that the government’s shrill protests are actually a nervous and even panicky reaction to a situation getting out of its control. Laying the blame for the mess at India’s door is thus a desperate refusal to own responsibility for it and make amends. Such is the atmosphere of mistrust that even the Tatas’ proposal to make an investment of $2 billion in Bangladesh – the biggest in the country’s history – has raised more suspicion than enthusiasm.

On balance, the argument of domestic politics seems stronger. For the average Bangladeshis, the so-called Indian conspiracy is the stuff of politics. It is the lengthening shadow of the criminal, the extortionist and religious bigot that they are scared of. And, they blame their government, not India, for it. INAV