A Cocksure Government Slowly Loses the Plot

by Swapan Dasgupta

Indian general elections have the uncanny knack of injecting wisdom in hindsight. When the tally from the Electronic Voting Machines is revealed on May 16, there will be a torrent of cliches coupled with belated discoveries of undercurrents. The winners will shower praise on the innate maturity of a discerning electorate; the losers will harp on the failure of communications; and analysts will detect a hitherto invisible mood for either change or continuity. If there is no discernible outcome, there will be a frenzy to unearth a lofty ideological principle behind a lowest common denominator — ‘secularism’ is the favourite. There will be one set of politics till the morning of May 16 and another from the afternoon.

It is precisely the anticipation of a mismatch between the voices at the hustings and the post-facto writing of history that prompted the pioneers of the Nuffield College studies of British elections to stress the virtues of reading an ‘‘election in flight’’. The halfway stage may be an opportune moment to reflect on the flight path of the 2009 poll.

A striking feature of the 2009 campaign is the astonishing degree to which it has combined a parliamentary election and an American-style primary. If the dog-fights between the Congress, NCP, RJD and Samajwadi Party (all ostensibly in the UPA) are any indication, it would seem that the battle is not between an incumbent government and its opponents but a delegate selected for a grand UPA plus Left convention to be convened after the counting. Last Thursday morning, even as voting was still underway, both Sharad Pawar and Lalu Yadav were pontificating on how the PM was to be chosen. This wasn’t just arrogant bravado. For the UPA, a civil war is being fought simultaneously with the war against the BJP-led NDA.

A corollary of this self-absorbed smugness is the Congress desire to keep its first family firmly in focus. Sonia Gandhi and Rahul may be doing all the travelling and delivering their lines but it is Priyanka who has been tailoring the campaign to the imperatives of a family melodrama. The Congress has deliberately scripted speculation of Priyanka’s future political role — with the frisking-exempt Robert Vadra chipping in — and her sisterly views on Rahul’s own post-poll alignments. Even her nose has become the subject of analogy and flattery. For the 124-year-old party, politics, it would seem, is just a dynastic saga.

The Congress campaign is disproportionately centred on the need to skirt a debate on the past five years. L K Advani may have fired the first salvo in the majboot versus weak debate that has left the editorial classes drooling for more. Yet, since it is an accepted rule of politics to avoid a battle on terms set by the opponent, why did the Congress choose to respond? And that too by resurrecting a 17-year-old demolition and a nine-year-old hijack?

A possible answer is that a positive campaign based on the PM’s incredible claim of 80% strike rate in the past five years had to be offset with a negative campaign that galvanised the committed. Indira Gandhi was adept in this game and Narendra Modi repeated this trick in Gujarat 2007. The flip side of this cleverness is that in proclaiming his combativeness, Manmohan Singh undermined his claim to be above the hurly-burly of partisan politics. In short, he reinvented himself into something which he is definitely not. Will the unlikely appearance of a pugnacious Manmohan bolster the Congress appeal among the middle classes? Or, will it add to the existing cynicism of the non-voting classes?

The extent to which Manmohan has ducked his area of core competence is staggering. At a time when even consumer advertisements are devoted to coping with the bad times, the economist PM has wilfully abandoned Keynes for Kandahar. Where the Congress was expected to reassure people that the economy is safe in the hands of a technocrat, the PM’s intervention has been confined to strange remarks about the inevitability of 8% growth — the reality being a dismal 4% or less. Never mind admitting the grim reality of a sharp downturn, the PM hasn’t deigned to utter even a word of sympathy for the 15 million victims of closures, redundancies and economic mismanagement. What is even more astonishing is that the Opposition hasn’t taunted Manmohan with having a head but not a heart. They haven’t even detected the cruel irony of the Josh Congress has invoked.

At the midway stage of the flight, Verdict ’09 appears less about an Opposition winning but a cocksure government gradually losing the plot.

(This article was first published in The Times of India on April 26, 2009.)

April 27, 2009 | Filed Under Swapan Dasgupta | 4 Comments 

End of Maai-Baap Raj

by Sudipto Das

There’s a very bad news for most of the political parties in India because the Maai-Baap Raj is coming to an end.

Congress along with many other parties has thrived on the security of the millions of helpless destitute people who treat the political class with reverence as their Maai-Baap. These poor helpless people are given the false impression that their politicians are their only hope for survival. But the sad part is that, despite being fooled for more than half a century, these poor illiterate people haven’t yet come to understand this deceit in totality. The very politicians whom they consider their Maai-Baap did almost nothing to improve their conditions. In fact all attempts were made to keep them destitute and illiterate as long as possible because only then they would be helpless and nurture the hope of getting help from the political class. The moment they find out that they have been cheated for so long that will be the end for many parties. The moment they see development they will get rid of their false hope and dependence on the political class.

Let’s see what happened in West Bengal over the past thirty years. CPM came to power as the messiah of the land less and poor and destitute people of Bengal. Already the socio economic conditions in Bengal were shattering since independence due to the huge influx of migrants from Bangladesh. After the Bangladeshi independence in 1971 there was the second round of migration into West Bengal. Unlike Punjab, which was also affected by the partition of India, majority of the people who moved into India from Bangladesh were very poor. Despite serious and honest efforts by the first CM of Bengal, Dr. B C Roy, the conditions of millions of people, especially the refugees, in Bengal didn’t improve much even till the seventies - when finally the CPM came with the hope of change. CPM is credited with pioneering land reforms in India. Yes, they did snatch away lands from the landlords, often brutally and illegally, but they took very little care in formally distributing the land among the people. Once the landlords were driven out the people hailed CPM as their messiah. Under the surveillance of the party dadas millions of people, many of them from Bangladesh, got lands to farm and thus got means for survival. But that was the end. No one understood that during the same period of time the farmers in Punjab became so prosperous but they remained always poor - depending on the local party dadas for almost everything. Nothing was available to them without the intervention of the party. They remained destitute and poor forever and kept on considering CPM their Maai-Baap till finally the events at Singur and Nandigram happened in Bengal. One fine day they lost their land. As they never owned the lands and were just allowed to farm illegally some thirty years back by the local CPM dada, they were not entitled to get the compensation for the loss of land. So finally the entire village went against the same dadas whom they used to consider their Maai-Baap. So came the end of the Maai-Baap Raj in several parts of Bengal and in the subsequent Panchayat election Mamta Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress made a killing in those places. Presently many such Nandigrams and Singurs are in the making in Bengal.

Same is true elsewhere also. People are finally awakening with the rude shock that they have been cheated for decades.

During my recent vacation in Uttarakhand I happened to interact with a number of local people in Delhi, UP and Uttarakhand. Most of these people are drivers or daily wage workers. I was really surprised to find that one of the drivers understands the necessity of good education above everything else. He knows that in order to raise his social status he has to see development and that can come only with good education. He even knows of civil services, NDA and many other exams that are the gateways to prosperity. He didn’t bother to bribe a clerk of a public school in Delhi to get his kids admitted.  His views and ideas are not isolated instances. I heard similar things from across the spectrum of people who are at the base of the pyramid. So it’s clear that this huge chunk of population is gradually drifting apart from just attending rallies of political parties and waiting in despair hopelessly for their Maai-Baap politicians to do something. They know that they have to progress in lives.  The moment they appreciate education they will become more and more aware and enlightened. And that’s really bad news for most of the political parties who have survived on the lack of awareness and illiteracy of the people.

But that is good news for parties, like BJP, that stand only for development. Secularism, social justice and everything else will fall in place if there is development.

April 27, 2009 | Filed Under Sudipto Das | 7 Comments 

Where is the Secularism?

by Sudipto Das

We all know that Seyed Salahuddin, the supreme leader of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, the largest Kashmiri militant group and the militant wing of Jamat-e-Islaami, has the blessings of ISI and many sympathizers in Pakistan. ISI has grown out to be a Frankenstein, often out of control of the politicians in Pakistan.  India has learnt to accept the role of ISI in many Pakistan sponsored acts of the terrorism. But India does expect that the political class would be sensitive to India’s sentiments and attitude towards such acts of terrorism. Though lethargically, but still Pakistan did start taking actions against people allegedly involved in planning the 26/11 Bombay terror attack in November 2008. How did we all feel when Imran Khan went on record saying that Jamat-e-Islaami is not a terrorist organization but an organization involved in social service? It’s really appreciable that other than him, we didn’t hear any other prominent political leader in Pakistan defending Hizb-ul-Mujahdideen or its leaders at that point of time though we expected more cooperation from them.  We are quite vocal against Pakistan’s providing a safe haven to many of the international terrorists. We all know that people there are sympathetic to these terrorists and that itself is a major concern to us.

Now let’s change positions. Let’s replace Hizbul with LTTE, Seyed Salahuddin with Prabhakaran, Pakistan with India and India with Sri Lanka. What do we see? We see that a major ally of the ruling UPA going on record saying that Prabhakaran is his personal friend and not a terrorist. The same leader also wrote a poem in praise of a slain LTTE commander last year.  It’s a matter of speculation how exactly this leader would react if some day Sri Lanka captures Prabhakaran, alive or dead.  Just for the information of everyone LTTE is also an internationally banned terrorist organization and the only one with army, naval and air wings and Prabhakaran is acknowledged as a dreaded terrorist internationally. Now doesn’t this whole incident put India and Pakistan in the same stand with regards to attitude towards terrorism?

In Pakistan the sympathy is for terrorists fighting for Muslims and in India the sympathy is for the terrorists fighting for Tamils, both in foreign lands. Karunanidhi’s interview in NDTV in praise of Prabhakaran has been aired so many number of times. Doesn’t this fall into the category of provocative speech?

The response of Congress was just that these are his personal views and not that of Congress. But strangely did we see any official action being initiated against Karunanidhi? Neither did we see Congress alienating them from Karunanidhi. If that’s the case then why do they expect BJP to alienate from Varun Gandhi, who also did a similar crime of making a provocative speech? When we all at Friends of BJP condemn Varun Gandhi’s speech and we expect that he won’t indulge into similar things in future, I also take similar offence against Karunanidhi’s open support in favour of a terrorist organization and its leader who is no lesser a criminal than any of his counterparts in Pakistan.

Where is the secularism when Varun is put into jail for his speech and Karunanidhi is going free?

Where is the secularism when Lalu Prasad wants to crush Varun Gandhi under a road roller and there’s absolutely no response from any of the UPA allies, nor Congress, for the other provocative speech?

Anyone who came in support of the people allegedly involved in the Malegaon blast was branded communal. Yes, we do appreciate that and are in favour of alienating ourselves from anyone who is allegedly involved in any form of terrorism (even though it’s not correct to brand someone a criminal till the final court verdict is out). But then why the response or attitude towards Karunanidhi would be different?

The idea of secularism gets a severe beating whenever there’s such a blatant act of hypocrisy. Secularism stands on the idea of same reaction, response and attitude towards all sects and communities. I just don’t understand what secularism all these self claimed secular non-BJP parties speak of. I just heard Mr. Sharad Pawar saying that he is ready to team with anyone who doesn’t side with BJP. I hear similar things from Prakash Karat, Lalu Prasad and many others. All of these people vouch by secularism and brand BJP as the harbinger of communal riots and non-secularism. They want to give an impression to all that they are fighting to ensure that we have a secular-India. But then where is the secularism in their action? What secularism do they speak? Had Prabhakaran been a Hindu terrorist in Pakistan or Bangladesh fighting for the liberation of Hindus there, could we see the similar sympathy for him? Why don’t then we treat all the Naxalites as our friends and try to defend them. After all they are also fighting for social justice? Any act of terrorism starts from some sort of social injustice.  But that doesn’t give any sort of legitimacy to the heinous acts of terrorism.

A secular country should be always dead against any form of terrorism irrespective of the motive or the group of people it’s associated with. The security of the country is not a matter of negotiation and under no circumstance should be compromised. This case of going easy on Karunanidhi is again another instance of appeasement politics - the very thing that’s killing our country!!

By the way, have you ever thought from this angle that any regional party is, by its very own existence, a communal one? In dictionary, being communal means to be associated with any particular commune or community. Like, any Bengali Association in any part of India outside West Bengal is communal. Any Indian Association outside India is a communal. A part which derives its existence from any particular community like Dravidians or Dalits can be branded as communal. Even a party that propagates communism is also a communal one very much like Muslim League. When Mayawati speaks more of the Dalit she is being communal. When Prakash Karat speaks of Marxism as the only solution he is being communal. When Karunanidhi speaks only for the Tamil people he is being communal.  As a matter of fact almost all parties in India are communal by construction. Any regional party ought to be communal in nature. Only the national parties like BJP or Congress are not communal at least by construction.  So I’d like to stress on the point that we should make sure that our country is ruled by a national party because only that can give us the secularism that we all aspire of.

April 26, 2009 | Filed Under Sudipto Das | 10 Comments 

BJP - True Essence

by Tarun Malaviya

BJP represents an idea and while an individual can fail or fall short, an idea, especially a Living one cannot. The idea of Sanatan Dharam, on which the BJP is based, is being continuously rediscovered, refined, adapted and taken forward by the Gurus and teachers. In its essence, it is an open, dynamic, powerful living set of ideas.

That’s why BJP represents the future of politics in India. The truth is that the BJP is only a manifestation of a much larger movement of the revival of the Sanatan Dharma (or Hindutva / Hinduism) and would therefore benefit from it.

Chances are that these ideas will have a cleansing effect on the party and enable it to revitalize and re-invent itself every time it loses its way.

Chances are that the idea will continue to exert a pull on a lot of very capable people and therefore the BJP will continue to have a greater chance of self renewal. (We are already seeing such an evolution happening in the BJP).

The only way that the BJP can be beaten is by a team / leader that can better embody these ideas or by an idea that is even more advanced or a combination of both.

April 26, 2009 | Filed Under Contributions | 7 Comments 

Phase 1 and 2 Trends

Phase 1 and Phase 2 trends from Swapan Dasgupta. “Phase 2 has been very good for the BJP and its allies, good for BSP, not so good for the Congress and somewhat disastrous for the so-called Fourth Front…The big question after Phase 2: can Congress retain its status as the largest party in the Lok Sabha? I would prefer to not speculate and leave it to the final results. But the bush telegraph has started buzzing in Delhi.”

April 25, 2009 | Filed Under Swapan Dasgupta | 5 Comments 

The Curious Case of Dr. Manmohan Singh

by Neelima Choahan

IT is ironical that the very personal traits that enabled Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to ascend India’s highest post have also brought him so much angst.

Much has been said about the apparent weakness or strengths of Singh as a leader in the last few weeks.

Often referred to as the ‘accidental Prime Minister,’ the 76-year-old has been quoted in the past as having never wanted to aspire to the top job.

Indeed, the quiet and unassuming Sikh is above all a consummate bureaucrat. And a bureaucrat’s strength lies in his or her ability to serve the political masters.

In fact, a successful bureaucrat is not that much different from a faithful family retainer.

Unquestioning in its loyalty, the retainer guards its owner’s property. In return for its devotion, the favourite is entrusted with the full control over its master’s hearth.

The family faithful gives unconditional love to its owners, not caring whether they are a bunch of criminals, liars or murderers.

Likewise, a civil servant is known for protecting the best interests of his political masters whether they are wrong or right.

And why not, the bureaucrat’s success depends upon the ability to ruffle as few feathers as possible.

A Gandhi loyalist, Singh has also endeavoured to always please the high command. In return he has been trusted with the family’s most prized possession - the royal throne - i.e., the post of India’s Prime Minister.

This move is a master stroke by the once reluctant but now-turned-savvy politician Sonia Gandhi.

Gandhi fully understands the perils of power and its ability to corrupt. So, she shies away from promoting any leader who may secretly harbour ambitions beyond that of crowning the “rightful” heir to the PM’s post.

The self-effacing Singh is therefore the perfect candidate for the job. His gentle persona and inability to take strong actions helps him maintain the current political status quo.

Smarting at the “weak leader” charge and afraid the label might stick the Gandhi troika of Sonia, Priyanka and Rahul have scrambled to defend Singh’s record.

Speaking at a rally recently, Gandhi said it was up to the people to decide who is strong and who is weak.

But having proven himself to the “family” the Prime Minister shows no desire to prove himself to the people.

And so we have a situation where the Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy refuses to test his political mettle in the rough and tumble of an election campaign.

Because a true leader is a visionary who often inspires, sometime offends but never fails to leave a mark on the psyche of the nation.

A sycophant, however, is none of these things.

Much though Singh would like to deny it, the past five years show that though he is a mazboot sycophant he is certainly not a mazboot neta.

April 25, 2009 | Filed Under Neelima Choahan | 10 Comments 

On the Importance of Public Policy

by Rajeev Mantri

As the title of this piece clarifies, I am writing about public policy. I should make it clear the outset that I will not touch upon dynasty, sycophancy, communalism or secularism, because those are political issues. This article will focus on the policy stance taken by the two national parties, the Congress and the BJP, in domains of specific relevance to the startup and venture ecosystem. These domains are education and the economy.

Sound policy-making in education, which falls under the purview of the Human Resource Development Ministry currently headed by Mr. Arjun Singh, ensures that India keeps churning out not just talented employees for enterprises and businesses of all sizes, but also tomorrow’s entrepreneurs and business leaders - the Sunil Mittals and NR Narayana Murthys who have created world-class companies from scratch.

The Finance Ministry and Commerce Ministry take crucial policy decisions in the financial and economic sphere on matters such as taxation, capital markets, international trade, industrial development and formulating the Union Budget. Policies in these areas affect business and companies of all sizes.

In the Congress-UPA regime, we’ve seen an increase in reservations in the nation’s premier institutions of higher learning and creation of news IITs and IIMs. Mr. Arjun Singh has gone to the extent of calling for enforcement of caste-based reservations for faculty at IITs and IIMs. The overnight creation of new IITs has come in for severe criticism from an authority no less than Dr. CNR Rao, eminent scientist, educationist and chairman of the Prime Minister’s Scientific Advisory Council. The HRD Ministry has been doling out IITs and IIMs like toffees to schoolkids.

The BJP-NDA HRD Minister Murali Manohar Joshi has an ordinary record. Mr. Joshi wanted to make Astrology a course in colleges, and also spent part of his tenure trying to rewrite history books used by schoolkids. Mr. Joshi also drastically cut the fees charged by the IIMs, meddling needlessly in the affairs of the country’s top business schools. These policies are, however, far less destructive than calling for student and faculty quotas and diluting the brand and standard of IITs and IIMs by creating them overnight.

Neither party focused with the same vigour and enthusiasm on primary and secondary education.

For the current election, BJP’s stated policy on higher education is one of reforms and capacity creation. As a Wall Street Journal article noted recently, there is a serious and silent crisis brewing in higher education, and there is an urgent need for reforms. The BJP is the only major party calling for liberalizing the education sector and allowing private companies and philanthropic foundations to operate universities under newly-formulated rules and regulations.

Private philanthropy has delivered the goods in other fields - Abhinav Bindra, India’s first-ever individual Gold Medal winner at the Olympics, and boxing Olympic Bronze Medal winner Vijender Kumar, both received financial support from LN Mittal-backed Mittal Champions Trust. Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Foundation has initiated the Satya Bharti School program to reach out to rural India, providing access to pre-primary and primary education for children. Why not encourage philanthropists to build world-class universities?

The dearth of world-class universities has resulted in large numbers of Indians going abroad for higher studies, sometimes never to return - but not all Indians can afford the high fees charged by universities abroad. Even IIT and IIM graduates tend to stay abroad on going there for higher education or professional employment, in what has been dubbed a “brain drain”.

On the other hand, we have Samajwadi Party’s Mulayam Singh Yadav, former Chief Minister of UP and former Union Defence Minister, calling for a ban on English language use in schools and on the use of computers and agricultural machinery. It was this same Samajwadi Party which the Congress-UPA government turned to to survive the trust vote in July last year.

Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav’s argument is that computers and machinery take away employment from farmers. By that line of reasoning, we should all go to back to doing everything manually so that we can “employ” as many people as possible - so much for productivity gains, the raison d’être for every new product and venture! Clearly, Mulayam and his friends want to take us back to the Stone Age. The scary thing is there is a good chance that he could be a Union Cabinet Minister in the new government.

In the economic policy sphere, the Congress party has historically been socialist. Mrs. Indira Gandhi went to the extent of including the words “socialist” and “secular” in the Preamble of the Constitution of India during the Emergency imposed by her in 1975, a time when civil and political liberties and freedoms were suspended. Mrs. Gandhi invoked extraordinary powers and altered the very Constitution of our nation. Most people reading this article probably weren’t even born at the time.

Today, every political party must profess to be socialist to be able to register with the Election Commission of India and contest elections, as this article from the Wall Street Journal notes. It is not that the socialism of Congress was unchallenged from the start - Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (Rajaji), a close confidante of Mahatma Gandhi alongside Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru, broke from Nehru, his colleague of four decades, on the issue of License Raj, a term also coined by Rajaji.

Most readers of this article probably cannot relate to an India where there were just two car manufacturers and barely half a dozen models to choose from, or an India where it took months and years to get a telephone connection and where Indian Airlines was the one and only domestic airline. If Rajaji had had his way, the first four decades after Independence would have seen businessmen other than Tatas and Birlas, whose companies enjoyed government-granted monopolies.

The man who dared to challenge the system and came out trumps was one Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani, and his story is well-documented.

What’s wrong with socialism, one might ask? Isn’t socialism good for the poor and needy? Socialists work for the poorest of the poor, the aam aadmi, and without socialism this impoverished lot would really struggle to survive.

These are seductive arguments put forth by the Communist and Socialist establishment. Policies should be judged by their results, not their intentions.

The record of history tells us that it is precisely the socialist and communist nations which are also the poorest. In India, we have seen the magic of free markets and capitalism at work in sectors like telecom and civil aviation. Mobile phones and air travel were once the preserve of the wealthy, but competition has enabled even autorickshaw drivers to own cellphones and low-income groups to afford air travel. The DNA newspaper recently carried an article on how a group of debt-stricken farmers in Vidarbha declined government help, took charge and escaped the debt trap.

It never helps to pay people to remain poor and tax them heavily when they do productive work.

Moreover, companies like Bharti Airtel, Pantaloon Retail and Deccan Aviation are case studies in entrepreneurship. They were all founded by first-generation entrepreneurs who entered sunrise industries and built their companies from scratch. The result has been such that everyone is better off - the company founders, investors, employees and above all the consumers and citizens of India.

On August 15, 1947 India attained political freedom, but not economic freedom. Economic freedom did not come until the summer of 1992, when near-bankruptcy fructified the otherwise poltically-impossible decision of liberalizing the economy and began the process of the dismantling of License-Quota-Permit Raj. It should also be remembered that reforms were conducted not by choice, but necessitated by circumstances. The credit for taking the politically-tough decision goes to PV Narasimha Rao, under whose watch Dr. Manmohan Singh got a free hand to liberate the Indian economy.

Given the baggage of history it carries, the Congress party continues to believe in high taxes, sarkari welfare schemes and a regime of excessive regulation and control. The Congress-UPA insists on schemes such as the NREGS, even when their effectiveness is highly questionable.

The Congress-UPA has conducted zero market reforms in the last 5 years. It has initiated new taxes such as Fringe Benefit Tax and Securities Transaction Tax. When the banking and finance world was in the depths of the crisis last year, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi invoked the “wisdom” of Indira Gandhi’s bank nationalizations of 1969.

As an old saying goes, even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.

The BJP-NDA’s record on economic reforms is far better. Indeed, the BJP is the only major political party which supports economic reforms, free markets and entrepreneurship, and has expressly called for low taxes in its manifesto. Under the Vajpayee-led government, the government privatized inefficient, government-operated public-sector enterprises, which were burdens on the taxpayer.

The business of business is not the business of government. Former secretary of the Disinvesment Ministry and chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Pradip Baijal, has given his account and made the case for privatization in the book, Disinvestment In India: I Lose, You Win.

Mr. Baijal explains how loosening government control and privatization results in efficiently-run companies and lower prices for consumers, not to mention the amount of money raised through divestment, which can be invested in more critical areas such as primary education, national security and basic healthcare.

When the Congress-led UPA came to power, it promptly disbanded the Disinvestment Ministry and folded it into the Finance Ministry as the Department of Disinvestment.

Why are economic reforms and market-friendly policies important for entrepreneurs and venture investors? Because our energies are better spent in building and launching new products and services, rather than dealing with government agencies at every step of the way and paying taxes which are used to fund wasteful schemes such as the NREGS.

To all the entrepreneurs in the Internet, mobile VAS, retail and other growth sectors, I ask - would your ventures be possible without the promotion of free markets? We should think of the possibilities that reforms can open up in industrial sectors given the advent of materials-science driven innovation in clean technology and nanotechnology.

We must not take our economic freedom for granted.

Market reforms open up a world of opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators, who generate both jobs and wealth, not to speak of the productivity gain and its multiplier effect. As economist Joseph Schumpeter and Nobel Prize-winner Milton Friedman have pointed out, entrepreneurs are the growth drivers of an economy. Any government policy must promote and sustain entrepreneurship and competition.

If the Indian economy is to grow at double-digit rates, economic reforms are a must. On this criterion, the choice between the Congress-led UPA and BJP-led NDA is clear and unequivocal. Our country needs more entrepreneurs, and as NR Narayana Murthy has said recently, entrepreneurship is the best solution for poverty.

(Rajeev’s blog is at http://rajneeti.blogspot.com/)

April 24, 2009 | Filed Under Contributions | 10 Comments 

Elections 2009: A Unique Experience — Part 5: Optmism Ahead

Over the past couple months, I have got an opportunity to interact with many senior leaders in the BJP. Few have fitted into the classical, negative impressions that we have had drilled down about politicians in India. Maybe, I was just lucky. But I do believe that India has hope - and the worst of our governance nightmares are behind us. Politicians work under a wide array of conflicting expectations. There are many who are out there to do genuine good, and who have dedicated a lifetime to being in politics.Maybe, the bad of the breed still out number the good, but I do think the tide is shifting. And that is a good sign of India. Good Governance and Development is rapidly replacing caste and votebank arithmetic as the way to success in elections. In that sense, accountability is already coming in. Just like employees who fear being fired, politicians in power cannot do without it - so they are quickly realising that delivering on promises and improving the lot of people is the only way to get re-elected. And if Bihar can do it, so can any state in India.

We still have a long way to go. And this is where we in Middle India have to rise to the occasion. We need to be ready to devote 1-2 hours a week to engage with the political system. What is needed is a framework to make that happen at the local level across the country. We have to participate in nation-building because India cannot lose more time. And this is what I have been brainstorming with my colleagues in “Friends of BJP.”

April 24, 2009 | Filed Under Rajesh Jain | 3 Comments 

The Prime Minister’s Ersatz Bravado

by Sudheendra Kulkarni

For a conscientious politician, honour is a greater adornment than power. He values honour more than the office he holds. However, it can be said of some politicians that they lose their honour before they lose power. Dr Manmohan Singh, an essentially honourable man (I say this on the basis of my interaction with him before he became Prime Minister), has allowed his personal integrity suffer a serious dent by, among other things, the reckless manner in which he has attacked L.K. Advani, the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP and the NDA. An objective assessment of what Advani said about Dr Singh, and how the latter hit back at the BJP leader, would reveal that the PM put his personal honour at stake and emerged a loser.

The harshest word that Advani has used in describing

Dr Singh’s performance is that he is a “weak” Prime Minister. He has only articulated what most Indians know—that the PM has allowed his high office to be “devalued” by making 7 Race Course Road subservient to 10 Janpath. There was no personal prejudice or animus in this description. It was in the nature of legitimate political criticism coming from an opposition leader. Advani is incapable of harbouring personal hostility towards anyone. On the contrary, he has on many occasions discarded constraints of political correctness to publicly shower praises on his political opponents.

Recall how he publicly eulogised P.V. Narasimha Rao, in the first year of his premiership, as India’s “best prime minister after Lal Bahadur Shastri”. Recall how both Atal Bihari Vajpayee and he supported several economic reforms initiatives of Dr Manmohan Singh when he was the finance minister in the Rao government. Recall how, when Advani represented the Vajpayee government at the funeral of E.M.S. Namboodiripad in 1998, he lauded the “idealism” of the CPI(M) leader. Recall also how, during his chance encounter with Rahul Gandhi at the airport lounge in Delhi in 2007, he told the young Congress leader that he did not consider the Congress an “enemy” of the BJP but only a “political adversary”, implying that the two national parties can, and should, cooperate on major national issues.

Although there was nothing abusive in what Advani had said about Dr Singh, the latter deliberately misrepresented his criticism as “abuse” in order to gain public sympathy and attacked Advani with a fusillade of highly personalised barbs. That he was not acting on his own became clear when he was seen to have synchronised his show of aggressiveness with the equally intense personalised attack on Advani by Sonia Gandhi and her son. It was as if the Congress leadership was stung by the fact that the people of India were seeing the ongoing parliamentary poll partly as a battle between a “majboot neta” and a “weak and proxy PM”.

“What is Mr Advani’s contribution to national welfare?” asked Dr Singh, in a mocking style that smacked of arrogance. The answer can be found in a presentation titled ‘Educating Dr Manmohan Singh’ prepared by an online volunteer working with me in Advani’s campaign office (see www.lkadvani.in). It brings alive a traumatic period in independent India’s political history—the dictatorship imposed during the Emergency Rule (1975-77) by the then Congress government—and describes Advani’s significant role in the struggle for the restoration of democracy. Under the saintly leadership of Jayaprakash Narayan, Advani and other opposition leaders participated in what came to be described as India’s “Second Freedom Struggle”. Along with tens of thousands of pro-democracy activists, he spent 19 long months in jail during the Emergency. Dr Manmohan Singhji, is this not a “contribution to national welfare”? And will you please tell the countrymen what you said or did during the Emergency—and whether you ever showed the courage of criticising it after you entered public life?

In another dig at Advani, Dr Singh said, “When Mr Advani was the Home Minister, the government handed over terrorists to the Taliban in Kandahar.” The entire country knows the extraordinary circumstances in which the Vajpayee government took the painful, unpleasant but unavoidable decision of releasing three terrorists in order to secure the release of 155 passengers aboard the hijacked Indian Airlines plane in December 1999. The action was in consonance with the unanimous decision taken by an all-party meeting convened by the Prime Minister on 27 December, in which the Congress was also present. The meeting had authorised the Vajpayee government to take “whatever decision keeping in mind the interests and safety of the passengers who were on board the aircraft”.

Let us also scrutinise Dr Singh’s words of ersatz bravado: “My government does not release terrorists when attacked. My government responds with commandos.” The hijacked Indian Airlines plane, when it reached Kandahar airport, was ringed by the tanks of Pakistan-controlled Taliban army. Moreover, the terrorists had placed explosives in the aircraft itself. It was on the sound advice of the Indian Army and Air Force that Prime Minister Vajpayee decided not to risk a commando operation in Kandahar and endanger the lives of 155 passengers. It is, therefore, foolhardy on the part of Dr Singh, who proved himself incapable of sacking his own utterly incompetent home minister for four-and-a-half years because the latter had the protection of 10 Janpath, to now say that he would have sent commandos to battle the terrorists in Taliban territory.

Dr Singh’s bravado has been busted by the candid words of his own new Home Minister. In a recent interview to NDTV’s Barkha Dutt, this is what P. Chidambaram said: “I do not know how I would have reacted if 150 families came to my doorstep and pleaded that the lives of their loved ones in that aircraft must be saved. It is easy to criticise but if one is in that position, it is a very difficult decision to take.”

Undoubtedly, the most outrageous comment in the Congress vs Advani face-off was made by Sonia Gandhi. Indirectly referring to the BJP, (those who “put on masks of desh prem”), she said at an election rally in Khunti (Jharkhand) on April 11: “We are in greater danger from people inside our country than from foreign terrorists entering India.” Congressmen are distinctly uncomfortable when asked if they would defend their foreign-born president’s shocking statement. After all, no responsible politician belonging to any party in India would ever say of his adversaries that they pose a greater danger to our country than “foreign terrorists”. Be it Dr Singh or Sonia Gandhi, they must be held accountable for what they say.

(This article was first published in the Indian Express on April 19, 2009.)

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