Beyond gonorrhoea and cholera

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn


COMPARISONS have been made between Donald Trump and Narendra Modi. They may have several facets of personality and politics in common but their routes to power were entirely different.

Modi’s road to becoming prime minister was enabled by bloodshed and a state that is swamped by a rapacious variant of capitalist ideology that profits from Hindutva. The phlegmatic Manmohan Singh was its misleading poster boy. Trump’s rise to power was strongly resisted, on the other hand, by a subtler corporate system driven by the deep state. Genial Obama was the veneer.

Manmohan Singh, for all his mild manners, classified the country’s most impoverished tribespeople as the biggest security challenge. On behalf of usurious capitalism, he unleashed a military campaign against the forest dwellers in which women continue to be raped and homes uprooted. Some women abused and tortured by the police in Chhattisgarh were in Delhi to share their ordeal on Sunday. Singh unleashed state terror on anti-nuclear villagers who opposed controversial Russian-built nuclear reactors near their southern hamlets, which they fear are potentially worse than Fukushima’s.

Singh prophesied that Modi, if he won, would be a disaster for India. But Modi has only added narrow nationalism and its bloodier prescriptions to the quiver he inherited from Singh. Business tycoons that supported Singh are sworn allies of Modi.

Obama, like his predecessors, dropped bombs at will over Afghanistan, and contrived, in harness with Hillary Clinton, the depredation of a secular Syria and a secular Libya. Trump, albeit from a white supremacist plank, has asked inconvenient questions about the decimation of secular Arab satraps who had successfully kept the lid on a fanatical religious genie. Modi has uncorked the evil spirit of Hindutva, not learning from the tragedy that befell the neighbours when Ziaul Haq let loose Islamic revivalism as a tool of governance.

As Singh thought of Modi, Obama too cautioned that Trump would be disastrous for America. Singh and Obama were prophetic about their successors; of that there should be no doubt. But they were both accomplices in their rise. That too is indisputable.

There is a preponderance of embedded journalism in both chest-thumping democracies, embedded meaning lying in bed with the state. As his American cousins had done in Iraq, a BBC journalist, unbelievably, rode astride a tank to liberate Kabul. His Indian counterparts brought the Kargil war into Indian drawing rooms with their helmets on. Images of the bloody war on colour TV, replete with an American-style trail of body bags of fallen soldiers all the way to their usefully filmed funeral scenes helped enliven a genre of nationalism that was barely dormant.

Nationalism thus fanned mutated soon enough to become a scourge for many helmet-embracing journalists, but the penny still doesn’t seem to have dropped. One of them says she loves Kashmir and the Indian army in the same breath but fails to notice the inherent contrariness of her loves. And she also loves capitalism, the Indian TV anchor who left her job recently would say. There is nothing in any of her three loves — Kashmir, army, and capitalism — that reveals a less than robust nationalist bone.

A burgeoning mass of Indians is similarly failing to see the umbilical ties between militarism and communalism, between nationalism and fascism of which India’s rapacious genre of capitalism is an energising force. Adam Smith would have cringed.

Trump’s luck with the media was opposite of Modi’s. CNN and the New York Times have emerged as his most implacable critics in the American media. He struggled for a while even with arch-right-wing Fox News. All were complicit in the tragic unravelling of the secular Iraqi state and earlier in the sacking of Afghanistan. The media sold unverified tales of hidden weapons of mass destruction. Remember?

Trump has said many things that are downright gut-wrenching to any liberal sensibility, but one belief he has held on to would make even his Israeli allies hate him. That’s his criticism of Iraq’s invasion by America.

Trump’s visa restrictions on Muslims, however, are a copyright infringement. Modi excluded Muslim asylum seekers first. Trump is soft on Syria’s Christian refugees to placate a domestic constituency; Modi is wooing Hindu Bangladeshis.

In a world where old problems, new headaches and daily mood swings are all delivered through television, there is a distinct possibility for the masses to be swayed by an absence of reason.

Early experiments showed we could be persuaded to choose a brand of cigarettes by flashing wild stallions, unrelated to the topic, in the backdrop of Marlboro country. Ford cars would leap between rugged hills to woo customers who had to otherwise pass a rigid set of driving tests to get a licence to precisely not try the tricks. Cigarettes cause cancer just as climbing vertical cliffs, if at all possible, would wreck the car if not also kill the driver. But that realisation is a rare and usually delayed intuition. The ‘informed’ choice TV boasts is, more often than not, pure bad advice.

You can’t have a debate with a TV ad. It’s a monologue. Trump and Modi have this in common. They hate to face questions. They avoid news conferences. They both tweet. They give exclusive and by implication friendly interviews. Modi speaks routinely on the radio, which has remained the most compelling means of collaring the masses since the Third Reich.

I am sure Trump will soon be discovering the miracles of the radio. Orwell’s 1984 is selling feverishly across America. The fractious opposition that helped Trump’s rise is now standing up to him. That possibility looks distant in a nuclear-tipped India where the opposition seems more troubled by the rise of Arvind Kejriwal, a democrat, than by Modi, a potential fascist. Julian Assange described Clinton and Trump as a choice between gonorrhoea and cholera. With Europe in right-wing ferment and India in free fall, Assange may soon find it difficult to tell the difference.

How reforms killed Indian manufacturing

Ashok Parthasarathi in The Hindu

As the government pushes for ‘Make in India’, it could begin by unmaking the damage the post-1991 reforms inflicted on domestic industry.

This year marks 25 years since the so-called “economic reforms” were launched in July 1991. By now, broad contours of the policies and practices that characterised such reforms are well known, viz. radical deregulation, marketisation and privatisation of the industrial, technological and financial sectors, and an across-the-board induction of foreign direct investment and foreign institutional investment, and so on.

Basing himself on the erroneous views of India’s IT software and service sector behemoths, the “advice” of Western governments, large foreign companies and the trinity of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, Manmohan Singh, then Finance Minister, concluded around mid-1992 that we could be globally competitive only in IT software and services and not in hardware. Thus he reduced import duties on all IT hardware purportedly to “facilitate” software promotion and growth on a globally competitive basis using imported hardware. Result: by 1994 our fledgling civilian IT hardware industry folded up.

No one seems to have told Dr. Singh that IT hardware far more technologically sophisticated than the commercial hardware being imported by our software companies was being manufactured by Indian defence, atomic energy and space agencies and even exported to other developing countries such as Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Death by policy

The “reforms” also dealt a body blow to the indigenous optic fibre telecommunication systems industry, a project begun by the Department of Electronics (DoE) in 1986 with the setting up of the public sector utility, Optel. Based on a global tender, technology-transfer agreements were concluded with two companies, Fujitsu and Furukawa, in 1987 and a blueprint for the Optel plant prepared. It indicated a project cost of Rs.45 crore and a construction period of 30 months; when completed, the actual numbers were Rs.46 crore and 32 months.

All this was possible because I got one of our top technocrat-managers, Bhagwan Khurana, to leave his job as CEO of Punjab Wireless Ltd. (Punwire) and become CEO of Optel. A top-class cluster of three plants was operational by end March 1989. In its very first year of commercial operations Optel’s turnover was Rs.64 crore with a profit of Rs.11 crore. In 1990-91 the turnover zoomed to Rs.298 crore with Rs.35 crore profit.

Around this time, Sterlite, a metallurgical company, and Finolex, a packaging material producer, entered the field. They would import fibres and merely sheath them into cables. Even the sheathing material was imported — the cables had merely 10-15 per cent domestic content. This, however, ran into a roadblock in the form of the graduated customs duties then applicable, which promoted local production. They started lobbying with the government to reduce the import duty on fibre — a manufactured component — from 40 per cent to 10 per cent, which was the duty on raw materials. I was then Secretary of the Electronic Commission and Additional Secretary in the DoE. Despite the DoE’s stout opposition to both the character of the companies’ “projects” and the drastic and irrational reduction of duties, they got their way. Within six months, large quantities of optic fibre began to be imported. Optel had to close down its optic fibre plant and import low-grade fibre from China to be able to compete in our own market with the likes of Sterlite and Finolex!

Deindustrialisation

In 1990-91, there were at least a dozen electronics corporations producing a range of high-tech radio communication equipment, industrial electronics and control and instrumentation equipment worth annually around Rs.6,000 crore. However, the reduction in customs duties from 60 per cent to 30 per cent overall, which led to a glut of imports, forced many of these corporations to halt production and become import agents, a phenomenon repeated in the key solar photovoltaic industry.

“Reforms” also led to large-scale import of cell-phone handsets that could have been easily produced here had a policy of phased manufacture been adopted. Result? The entire market for such handsets was met by unnecessary imports from Day One in 2005-06. In 2013-14 cell-phone imports totalled Rs.35,000 crore.

By 2000, foreign brands grabbed 80 per cent of the television sets market, from a situation where 10 local companies catered almost fully to the demand. Six of the 10 indigenous television makers have folded up, with a ripple effect on the electronic components sector.

My final example is our heavy electrical equipment industry led by Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL). Up until 1998-1999 this industry was doing very well. However from the next year onwards, four Chinese power plant equipment manufacturers began to seriously erode BHEL’s market. This erosion was despite the quality and technical reliability of the Chinese equipment being considerably inferior to BHEL’s products. The United States, home to General Electric and Westinghouse, imposed penal anti-dumping duties on Chinese power plant equipment. Yet, the Indian government merely watched as BHEL lost 30 per cent market share by 2014.

These examples indicate that in sector after sector, the “reforms” have led to deindustrialisation. Products that we were manufacturing in the 1990s are being imported now. The negative impact this deindustrialisation has had on employment and on our economy is gigantic. The government must act immediately to halt the destruction of domestic industry on such a massive scale instead of merely tom-tomming its “Make in India” policy.

(Ashok Parthasarathi was the Science and Technology Adviser to the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.)

Fables of Modi’s first year in power

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

Some left-wing activists these days are worriedly discussing post-16th May India. According to them Narendra Modi’s consummate victory on this day last year marked a paradigm shift in the nation’s politics — for the worse, they assert. Others who shared the traumatic perspective changed their view earlier this year after Arvind Kejriwal emerged as Modi’s unlikely foil and bête noir.

Before we continue with Kejriwal’s near mythological role in stalling the rightist juggernaut led by Modi, let us briefly look at the prime minister’s Achilles heel, which, ironically, happens to be the clear majority he won exactly a year ago. In other words, a majority in parliament in the Indian system is no assurance of stability, a weakness that was best illustrated by Rajiv Gandhi’s turbulent tenure.

Gandhi’s four-fifths majority in the Lok Sabha remains unmatched to this day. Ideally, it should have given him five years of solid, stable government between 1985 and 1990. Instead, what he got was a crippling defence procurement scandal that haunted him till his death. His own party acolytes deserted him and some even conspired to topple the young prime minister.

Amitabh Bachchan, Arun Singh, Arun Nehru were among the younger lot who had come close to the prime minister after his mother’s assassination. They left him before his term was over. Others from the Gandhi Camelot moved over to the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). His trusted aide Vishwanath Pratap Singh subsequently became prime minister in 1990. The BJP and the communists supported him.

Look at the contrast. Indira Gandhi who split her party to be able to become prime minister at the head of a minority government in 1966, ruled with far greater confidence with support from communists and other assorted liberals.

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Worried leftists should unequivocally thank Kejriwal for relieving them of their trauma over the Indian PM.

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Her legacy still energises Indian politics, its economy and culture too. The banks that were nationalised by her remain state-owned. The two words she added to the preamble of the constitution — secular and socialist — have resisted periodic assaults from the right. The liberal arts and the scientific spirit she gave the academia with no impressive majority in parliament is planted as firmly as a sturdy molar that can only be uprooted by a painful surgery.

Easily the best example of someone without a majority who completed three full terms, first as finance minister and two as prime minister, is Manmohan Singh. He introduced sweeping economic reforms though his government had to bribe a few tribal MPs to stay in majority. He got support from the communists in his first tenure as prime minister and earned enough brownie points to win a second term. He faltered after he evicted the left, not because he did not have a majority in parliament.

Atal Behari Vajpayee was invited to form a bizarre minority government in 1996. It lasted all of 13 days. How could the president invite anyone who did not have the remotest proximity to finding a majority? Indian presidents have not always been transparent. Anyway it was a two-week government that signed the damaging Enron electricity deal, majority or no majority.

My worried leftist friends should unequivocally thank Kejriwal for relieving them of their trauma over Modi. The Aam Aadmi Party he heads has single-handedly changed the contours of possibilities for India’s political cobblers. When I see former BJP minister Arun Shourie laying into Modi on the eve of his completing his first year in office, the criticism reminds me of Rajiv Gandhi’s disloyal friends. However, Shourie could only speak because of Kejriwal’s amazing victory, which took the wind out of the prime minister’s sails.

If Mufti Mohammed Sayeed in Indian Jammu and Kashmir got the BJP MLAs to swear by the Kashmiri constitution they were loath to, he had his way because AAP’s victory in Delhi had emboldened him. Sonia Gandhi, ever so reclusive since the drubbing of her party by Modi, suddenly found spring in her walk. She led the entire opposition, including communist leader Sitaram Yechury, to the presidential palace to protest Modi’s land acquisition bill. Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and the backward caste satraps in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have benefited from Kejriwal’s humbling of Modi. Even Modi’s ally the Shiv Sena is now growling thanks to AAP.

Modi’s choreographers, which include the bulk of the media, are projecting his foreign policy in glowing terms not the least to mask his reneging on most domestic promises — rural, urban, rich, poor. With his claims of head transplants in ancient India, the prime minister has also become a caricature of the tough cookie he was thought to be. His gag measures against certain NGOs have boomeranged, inviting an earful from foreign governments.

He might have felt close enough to President Obama to call him by his first name, but it was more gracious for India that Obama called Manmohan Singh his learned guru.

Examples are galore of leaders being spurred by domestic difficulties to make foreign policy choices, and visits. Rajiv Gandhi was laying into Pakistan with Operation Brass Tacks before the Bofors scandal broke. When the scam raged he found himself signing a major agreement with Benazir Bhutto for nuclear safety with Pakistan.

Modi can wear any headgear in China, but he can’t approach the simple handshake between Deng Xiaoping and Rajiv Gandhi nor Narasimha Rao’s game-changing 1993 agreement with premier Li Peng for “peace and tranquillity on the borders”. In Mongolia, as I write, Modi is having a great time. Who showed him the way?

Indira Gandhi got Mongolia to second the resolution for the recognition of Bangladesh at the UN in 1972. The job done, she invited the Mongolian prime minister to Delhi, took him out for a quiet chat under a tree at Teen Murti House. When she offered him a cigarette, the guest hesitated. She lit one herself, helping her friend to pick one from the pack.

Hazare ke Khwaishen aisi ki har Khwaish ho-hum nikale// Bahut nikale unke demands phir bhi kam nikale

Corruption And Its Discontents

By Niranjan Ramakrishnan

26 August, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Hazare ke Khwaishen aisi ki har Khwaish ho-hum nikale
Bahut nikale unke demands phir bhi kam nikale

(with apologies to Mirza Ghalib)

Judging from the New York Times and the Washington Post, urban India is abuzz with the idea of banishing corruption. Photographs of peaceful marchers filling a giant overpass have made front-page news. Anna Hazare, whose arrest and fast have ignited the stir in cities all across India and amongst Indian groups abroad, is now a well-known figure. The fast, meetings, and protests are being billed as nothing less than a second Freedom Movement.

That last accreditation is in perfect pitch with an intelligentsia cut adrift from any sense of proportion, as befitting one that till only the other day was capable of considering Manmohan Singh a more significant reformer than Mahatma Gandhi.

Amid all the din it is easy to forget the lofty purpose of the Second Freedom Movement. It is for the appointment of an ombudsman and a subsidiary bureaucracy to oversee allegations of corruption amongst government officials. One may just as soon label a demand for Web access to one's income tax records as the second Declaration of Independence.

Owing perhaps to his experiences as a lawyer, Gandhi did not view some new law as the panacea to every social, economic or political problem. He pinned a lot more importance on the renewal of the human being. Gandhi believed that the quality of any country ultimately depends on the quality of its people. His abhorrence of legal cleverness as a means to fixing human problems is best illustrated by EF Schumacher in his classic, Small Is Beautiful,

" Gandhi used to talk disparagingly of 'dreaming of systems so perfect that no-one will need to be good'. "

That corruption is the scourge of daily existence in India as in few other countries may be entirely true. Ordinary people in everyday life have to pay bribes all the way from getting a driver's license to obtaining a housing permit. Certainly many of these are paid to government officials, big and small. The same government officials have to bribe others in their capacity as applicants. Corruption is many things to many people.

What Anna Hazare and his acolytes seem to forget is that corruption is not limited to the government. They also appear to believe that the appointment of eminent Indians to some overseeing council would somehow ensure moral chastity. If credentials alone, or even a personal reputation for incorruptibility, were such strong safeguards, the administration of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should be a showcase for civics textbooks on model governance. Instead, it is considered the fount of malpractice and graft on a gargantuan scale, with many reckoning it presides over the most corrupt dispensation in independent India's history.

Neither the protesters nor the government want to address the issue of corruption in India in its deeper essence. Is it an obscenity only when a government official receives a bribe? What about corruption of the conscience? For instance, is it corruption when someone can build a 60 story skyscraper for a personal residence in a country where millions of children go to bed malnourished? Gandhi again,

"Every palace that one sees in India is a demonstration, not of her riches, but of the insolence of power that riches give to the few, who owe them to the miserably requited labours of the millions of the paupers of India."

Even though there seems to be a palpable correlation between the size and scope of scams in India and Manmohan Singh's neoliberal initiatives starting in the early 90s, Anna Hazare and his wise counselors don’t seem to want to see it. And amidst all his ineptitude in dealing with this latest crisis, practically the first words out of the Prime Minister’s mouth were to caution that it would be wrong to connect corruption with economic liberalization.

As veteran journalist Alexander Cockburn is fond of saying, "never believe anything until it is officially denied".

In 1991, Manmohan Singh, finance Minister in a minority government, kicked off a 'liberalization' program laying the foundation for a two decade neoliberal spree. It has turned some 250 million Indian citizens into celebrated ‘consumers’, but distorted any measure of what Professor Amartya Sen would call ‘social choice'. In this new order, what is good for consumerism and high living is alone good for India, whatever its cost by way of farmer suicides, uprooting of entire villages, pollution of the water table, or handing over of India's agricultural future to the GMO boys at Monsanto and elsewhere. The lone measure of success in this Eastern Wild-West is something called growth rate; the ethos it has spawned would both amaze and gratify Gordon "Greed Is Good" Gecko.

Gandhi's diagnosis and cure for India's corruption epidemic would probably involve a lot more pain and sacrifice than a few marches. He might point out that in a milieu where leaders openly promote moneymaking as the most important virtue, and an elite esteems itself by the extent of its ostentation, corruption would only find a conducive habitat. He would reject recourse to some bill, not for some technical shortcomings, but perhaps saying that reliance on such measures would "diminish the moral height" of Indians, just as his khadi movement urged Indians to boycott foreign cloth and adopt the rougher and costlier homespun, instead of a fast outside the Viceroy’s palace pleading for a ban on English mill imports.

The fervid and often uncivil jousting between "civil society" on the one side and the gentleman Prime Minister’s cabinet on the other, poring over fine points of an anticorruption bill while taking care never to mention the 800 pound gorilla parked in the middle of the room, reminded me of something I had read long ago.

“One of the greatest of the Bengali novelists of the 20th century, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, has summed up the underlying principle of Hindu behavior in a neat, if cynical, epigram. He makes a woman who had a low-caste paramour boast that although she lived 20 years with him she had not for a single day allowed him to enter her kitchen.”

-- Nirad Chaudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living in the United States. He can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com

Narasimha Rao - The Unsung hero of the India story

by S A Aiyar in Swaminomics

Twenty years ago, Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister and initiated economic reforms that transformed India. The Congress party doesn’t want to remember him: it is based entirely on loyalty to the Gandhi family, and Rao was not a family member. But the nation should remember Rao as the man who changed India, and the world too.




In June 1991, India was seen globally as a bottomless pit for foreign aid. It had exhausted an IMF loan taken six months earlier and so was desperate. Nobody imagined that, 20 years later, India would be called an emerging superpower, backed by the US to join the UN Security Council, and poised to overtake China as the world’s fastest growing economy.



For three decades after Independence, India followed inward looking socialist policies aiming at public sector dominance. The licence-permit raj mandated government clearance to produce, import or innovate. If you were productive enough to create something new or produce more from existing machinery, you faced imprisonment for the dreadful crime of exceeding licensed capacity.



Socialism reached its zenith in the garibi hatao phase of Indira Gandhi (1969-77), when several industries were nationalized and income tax went up to 97.75%. This produced neither fast growth nor social justice. GDP growth remained stuck at 3.5% per year, half the rate in Japan and the Asian tigers. India’s social indicators were dismal, often worse than in Africa. Poverty did not fall at all despite three decades of independence.



In the 1980s, creeping economic liberalization plus a government-spending spree saw GDP growth rise to 5.5%. But the spending spree was based on unsustainable foreign borrowing, and ended in tears in 1991.



When Rao assumed office, the once-admired Soviet model was collapsing. Meanwhile, Deng had transformed China through market-oriented reforms. Rao opted for market reforms too. He was no free market ideologue like Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher: he talked of the middle path. His model was Willy Brandt of Germany.



His master stroke was to appoint Manmohan Singh as finance minister. Rao wanted a non-political reformer at the centre of decision-making, who could be backed or dumped as required. He presented Singh as the spearhead of reform while he himself advocated a middle path. Yet, ultimately, it was his vision that Singh executed.



In his first month in office, the rupee was devalued. There followed the virtual abolition of industrial licensing and MRTP clearance. At one stroke, the biggest hurdles to industrial expansion disappeared. Who was the industry minister who initiated these revolutionary reforms? Narasimha Rao himself! He held the industry portfolio too.



Yet he did not want draw attention to himself. So he ingeniously made the delicensing announcement on the morning of the day Manmohan Singh was presenting his first Budget. The media clubbed the Budget and delicensing stories together as one composite reform story. In the public mind, Manmohan Singh was seen as the liberalizer, while Rao stayed in the background.



Singh initiated the gradual reduction of import duties, income tax and corporate tax. Foreign investment was gradually liberalized. Imports of technology were freed. Yet the overall government approach was anything but radically reformist. When bank staff threatened to go on strike, Rao assured them that there would be no bank privatization or staff reforms. When farmers threatened to take to the streets, Rao assured them there would be no opening up of Indian agriculture.



The IMF and World Bank believed that when a country went bust, that was the best time for painful reforms like labour reforms. However, Rao took the very opposite line. He focused on reforms that would produce the least mass losers (such as industrial delicensing) and yet produced 7.5% growth in the mid-1990s. These gave reforms a good name, and ensured their continuance even when Opposition parties later came to power.



In the 2000s, the cumulative effect of gradual reform finally made India an 8.5% miracle growth economy. Rao got no glory for this. He had lost the 1996 election amidst charges of buying the support of JMM legislators. This led to his exit as Congress chief. Although he was eventually exonerated by the courts, he died a political nobody.



How unjust! He deserves a high place in economic history for challenging the Bank-IMF approach on painful austerity, and focusing instead on a few key changes that produced fast growth with minimum pain. The World Bank itself later changed its policy and started targeting “binding constraints” (like industrial licensing)



Manmohan Singh said repeatedly that he could have achieved nothing without Rao’s backing. Today, 20 years after the start of India’s economic miracle, let us toast India’s most underrated Prime Minister — Narasimha Rao.