Caution, Chowkidar is asleep

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

CAUTION, CHOWKIDAR IS ASLEEP

So, with the Nirav Modi (NiMo) and Mehul Choksi scam hitting Rs 11,400, and still counting, the country seems to have doggedly refused to stray from its path of letting the financial systems open 24X7 for plunder. It might have begun with the Nagarwala case in the high noon of the early Indira Gandhi era. It could have evolved into the Harshad Mehta (early 1990’s) and Ketan Parekh (early 2000’s) saga, in which the two worthies in effect looted banks to fuel stock prices to dizzy heights. And, with the financial system being the platform on which the corporate system rests, the systemic destruction was in public view in 2009, with the brazen fiddling by B. Ramalinga Raju and associates of profit and loss figures of the erstwhile Satyam Computers, in cahoots with PriceWater house Coopers, the world famous auditors.

In fact that was a major reason why voters thought they’d had enough of it, gave an almighty shove to the Congress-led government,and welcomed a regime led by one who proudly promised : na khaunga na khane dunga(“neither will I steal nor will let others steal”) and will be your Chowkidar (Guard) for 24X7.

However, the two diamond traders’ recent escapades, in obvious collusion with a gaggle of officials of Punjab National Bank and their unknown patrons, has turned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-quoted pre-2014 assurance into a bizarre mockery. And the dimension of the theft too is poised to leapfrog over time, as more claims accumulate with PNB due to the fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoU) issued to banks abroad in favour of the ‘diamond duo’. Till last year, the duo could easily float below radar as they had a key ‘friend’, Gokul nath Shetty, PNB's Deputy Manager, who had enabled them to “roll over” the credits after the termination of the statutory 90-day period. The trick of the trade lay in circulating the LoU over SWIFT, the secure telecom network that connects banks the world over, without informing the bank’s own Core Banking Solutions (CBS). It is like your partner withdrawing cash from a joint account without informing you.

Or something even more serious! Because the rogue partner can cheat you only to the extent of your own net worth. But a PSU bank is owned by none other than the President of India. No government so far has agreed to bring its stake down to below 50 per cent. So it remains a ‘sovereign risk’ which, if left unchecked, has the potential to recoil on the exchequer. 

The question is: why did a government wedded to the promise of “na khane dunga” look the other way when NiMo’s companies were splurging on unexplained and undeclared bank credit for over seven years? How did Shetty continue in the forex department of PNB despite a Central Vigilance Commission rule that the incumbent in sensitive post should be transferred after three years? Why Shetty's three transfer orders were canceled? What were the bank’s army of external auditors doing? And where were RBI’s team of hundreds of inspectors who have the powers to inspect any branch, anytime and any account ? Why was the Modi administration so oblivious of  daylight robbery in its own banks?

Well, it can be attributed to the typical Indian lethargy to fight corruption. But there is yet another explanation why Nirav Modi's shenanigans went unnoticed under the NDA for almost four years. How will the ‘bigger Modi’ assuage his critics who point at his group photo with the ‘little M’ at the WEF conclave in Davos, taken days after the CBI had filed an FIR against the businessman? Besides, Nirav Modi is the brother of Nishal, who is son-in-law of the Salgaokar family of Goa, closely related to the Ambanis, the country’s richest clan. The CFO of Nirav’s holding company being grilled by CBI is nephew of the late Dhirubhai Ambani, the Reliance founder.

In the past, the likes of Harshad Mehta and Ketan Parekh defrauded the  nationalised banks and played havoc in the share market because of systemic inadequacies. Some of these flaws were indeed fixed, which is why the capital market today is fully screen-based, with adequate disclosure norms in place. The corruption-prone badla system was replaced by a mature derivatives market. But the banking sector remained largely untouched, except that Raghuram Rajan, as RBI Governor, initiated the diagnostic steps. These showed how deep the rot had gone. The bad loans of public sector banks were 4.4 per cent in March 2014 against 2.09 per cent in 2008-09. After the change in government, as Rajan was forcing the banks to own up their losses and today the figure of NPA is over 14%. Rajan didn't have a cordial relationship with the Modi government is too well known. He went, and even the disclosures stopped. Choking under bad loans, the PSU banks began putting squeeze on total advances last year, for the first time in two decades. The banking sector’s bad loans, together with loans being rolled over and under restructuring, have hit a dizzying Rs 10 lakh crore, which is 3X the country’s tax revenues. If one looks at only PNB, its NPA has shot up three times between 2014 and 2016, from Rs 18,800 crore to Rs 55,818 crore. And roll overs are tubmling out of the closet of one bank after the other.

It is clear that somewhere someone is involved and guilty of connivance, ignorance or humungous lapse. Narendra Modi handles all appointments, transfers, postings in government & banks. He reads every complaint and mail sent to him and responds as well. His Man Ki Baat is a testimony to his actions. He gave a dressing down to the jewelers at a huge conference in 2015 and imposed taxes on them which no PM could dare in the past. But did he measure up to the job of chowkidar (sentry) when it came to guarding banks' coffers ? Pollsters say his ratings remain high. But as another election draws near, the chinks in Modi's armory are clearly showing.

(The author is National Editor, Lokmat group)

Didi may challenge Modi in 2019

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Since Narendra Modi bulldozed the parliament in May 2014, and repeated the feat three years later in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state, the opposition is overwrought with frustration. With the chances of its electoral recovery rather distant, it is unable to paper over the lengthening, and deepening, lines of its internal fissures. Like Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s exit from its camp; his JD(U) facing an existential crisis; or the CPI(M), which is convulsing with internal dissensions so deep that its general secretary Sitaram Yechury fails to get his party’s nod for returning to the Rajya Sabha with Congress support.

The opposition is hamstrung for other reasons too. Faced with BJP, RSS and their ideological challenge, the traditional ‘secular’ politician seems to have lost the plot. His response to incidents of serious cultural onslaught is feeble, at best. For example, no opposition party has worked out a coherent strategy to combat the Hindutva groups nursing their private militia in the name of cow vigilantes. They attack cow vigilantism as though it were the handiwork of extreme bigots sheltered by the Hindutva groups. But they have failed to present it as an integral part of an agenda to turn the religious minorities into second class citizens. Their bankruptcy surfaced when Congress workers attacked a BJP leader in Chhattisgarh responsible for cows death. On the rare occasions that Congress president Sonia Gandhi, or Rahul Gandhi, the vice president, comment on contemporary issues, they fail to strike a chord. While Rahul shoots and scoots, his mother has limited grasp of India’s social and civilizational issues. BSP supremo Mayawati, always shy to venture beyond Dalit issues has become even more tongue-tied. Down south in Tamil Nadu, ruling AIADMK and two other factions are getting sucked into the BJP rather than trying to redefine themselves in India’s political landscape after the end of multi-party rule. In Maharashtra, so total is the hold of BJP that Shiv Sena, its ideological sibling and local rival for power, outshines other opposition parties. In the states where the Congress is ensconced, such as Karnataka, there is not much certainty about its continuance.

In such bleak scenario for the opposition, two things are missing—leadership and strategy. Some of the opposition parties assumed that, in fighting BJP, the best strategy would be to forget past differences with the Congress and tie up with it. In Uttar Pradesh, former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav tried it, and paid heavily for that mistake. In West Bengal, the CPI(M), by fighting the 2016 assembly election jointly with the Congress, fell into the same trap.

With the passing of years, if there is a single opposition leader to cobble up a strategy against BJP’s divisive politics, she is Mamata Banerjee. The West Bengal chief minister is a master player of the caste and sub-caste cards. In 2011, she succeeded in putting the 34-year-old CPI(M) rule to an end my mobilising the subalterns against a party which, though highly regimented, had only higher castes in its upper echelons.

Her Bengal is in BJP’s crosshairs for a long time. During CPI(M) rule, there was no entry for the Hindutva politics as the state’s poor were entirely identified with the hammer-and-sickle. BJP thought that, following the Marxists’ exit, it may be able to polarize votes.

But the BJP’s strategy against Mamata Banerjee has not succeeded so far. It brought limited dividend in 2014 with BJP getting 16 per cent votes (only two seats). But the BJP share came down to 10 per cent in the assembly elections two years later. Banerjee ruled the roost as her deft ‘salami slicing’ of the state’s huge OBC and dalit population did not allow the BJP to herd all non-Hindus under the saffron shamiana. It is a strategy that has worked.

In India, with ‘forward caste’ population estimated to be around 25 per cent (that leaves three-quarters of the population comprising the entire panoply of OBC and dalit, plus minorities), it is tough for BJP, to win elections without support from a large section of non-caste Hindus. That explains why Modi, and party president Amit Shah, have been reaching out to those on the lower rungs of the caste ladder, with a Dalit being made the President of India. Ram Vilas Paswan, a Dalit, heads the LJSP, an important partner in the ruling NDA. During his tours aimed at the 2019 general election, Shah makes it a point to have lunch (well publicised) one day in a dalit home.

In India’s social fabric of mixed hue, it is not possible to win elections on the support of one or two castes. Mayawati, for example, won elections in Uttar Pradesh whenever she could broaden her appeal beyond the jatav community of dalits to which she belongs. But Mamata Banerjee’s appeal is subtler. It works on the ‘class animosity’ among castes, thus posing a challenge to the BJP strategy of appealing to an all-embracing Hindu identity. Last year, as there were minor skirmishes between Hindus and Muslims at Dhulagarh in Howrah district, BJP bent over backwards to give it a communal tinge but the Trinamool leader used a mix of her understanding of subaltern politics, and executive power, to deny BJP any leeway.

The answer to religious identity politics is the politics of subaltern identity. Nitish Kumar realised it as he introduced the mahadalit concept and re-embraced Lalu Yadav. But he has hung up his boots in opposition politics. In today’s scenario, if Modi’s BJP can face a serious contender in 2019, it has to be from Mamata Banerjee.

Whom to Trust and When

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Restraint surely has a “bottom line”, as the Chinese government spokesman reminded India. And that too after seven weeks of persistent effort by India to end, through negotiations, the standoff with the Chinese military in the Doklam plateau, a stone’s throw from the point where the boundaries of Sikkim, Tibet and Bhutan meet. India sent National Security Advisor Ajit Doval to Beijing to talk the matter over, but he came back empty-handed as China would not relent until hell freezes over.

China’s is typical bully’s logic. It questions India’s right to send troops, through a third country, Bhutan, into Doklam. But the ownership of the area is contested between Bhutan and China; it is anything but trespass by India to China’s territory. Further, the Indian action was in response to China constructing metal road that could bring artillery and tanks close to the thin land mass, the ‘chicken’s neck’, that connects the Indian plains with the eight north-eastern states. In 1962, when China and India went to war, the Chinese targeted that very spot as it moved its troops across Nathu La in Sikkim. Imagine how will China respond if India builds a string of missile bases that threaten the security of Tibet, or beyond?

While China says India must move back “with no strings”, and raises the pitch of its megaphone diplomacy, India’s policy-makers are in a double bind. On one hand, China is a goliath with GDP (in PPP terms) nearly three times that of India, and four times the southern neighbour’s military budget. On the other hand, India is saddled with a rather chaotic democracy in which the opposition turns even a foreign aggression into an opportunity to find fault with the government. China’s one-party rule doesn’t entertain the liability of gaining public support for its war efforts. In China, such leader’s accountability, if at all, may lie behind the closed doors at the forthcoming national congress of the communist party of China. There, President Xi Jinping’s return as chief of the party for another term is taken as given.  

The Indian opposition criticism of the Modi administration’s handling of the Doklam standoff has three layers, all of which have supposedly originated from the Congress. At one level, it cribs about Modi’s public displeasure with Beijing about President Xi’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) policy by not attending a widely attended meeting of the OBOR invitees earlier this year (Bhutan, India’s friend, was the other absentee). At another level, the opposition brushes aside the government version of the standoff. Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi dramatized his personal spite for Modi when he stayed away from an External Affairs Ministry briefing of the opposition leaders but had a well-publicised meeting with the Chinese envoy in India, as though he were hearing the truth from the horse’s mouth. Moreover, the opposition would put down the Modi government’s foreign policy per se and present the imbroglio in the north-east Himalayas as part of a general policy dislocation.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, in a robust speech in the Rajya Sabha last week, addressed most of these issues with clarity. She rightly expressed her dismay at some opposition politicians in India—a Congress member in this case—questioning India abstaining from the OBOR summit. “The OBOR link to Gwadar port in Baluchistan goes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK), which India considers as an integral part of our country. How does an Indian political party expect us to attend the OBOR summit?” Swaraj crafted a credible defence of Modi’s foreign policy—“for most of its terms, India under the Congress had Russia as ally and the US as enemy but, under Modi, both Russia and the US are friends”—and went all out against Rahul for his offensive gesture.

However, the opposition efforts to pin down Modi on the China issue can lead to a self-goal as public opinion generally turns red hot on patriotism during military confrontations with foreign countries, as it was evident in the 1962 war with China, the 1971 Bangladesh war with Pakistan or the 1999 Kargil war. Unless India gets a bloody nose in a decisive war with China, there is little chance of Modi’s popularity hurtling down (it happened to Jawaharlal Nehru after the 1962 defeat but there was plenty of public support during the war). Besides, much water has flown down the Brahmaputra between 1962 and 2017; there may still be a huge mismatch between the military prowess of the two countries but both have increased their power to wreak havoc on each other. That has minimised the chances of a full-scale war.

Still, there is little chance of India being able to clinch a deal with China anytime soon for peaceful resolution of the existing, and future, problems. Future, because China is known for shifting goal posts to cause unexpected problems. Like it is doing in South China Sea by rewriting history to lay claims on newer islands dotting it, or in twisting past agreements along the 4,000-km border with India and Bhutan. Beijing does not accept the McMahon line as it was an “imperialist legacy” but now swears by the 1890 Calcutta treaty between British India and China under the Quing government because it allows the country’s present rulers to move troops close to the Indian border.

China is in a hurry to establish its hegemony across Asia and fill up as much of the power vacuum caused by the US lowering its global profile. For India, it is a long-term diplomatic challenge. It is not a diplomatic chin wag for aspiring political amateurs to pompously show off their legacy connections.

Conscience vote goes abegging

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

In this space last week, I doubted if the secret ballot system in the presidential and vice-presidential elections could be entirely to the advantage of the BJP-led NDA. The opposition looked like having an ace up its sleeve as its candidate for Presidency, Meira Kumar, was bubbling over for what she thought could be “vote according to conscience”.

It wasn’t. Cross-voting had benefited not Kumar but Ram Nath Kovind, BJP’s victorious candidate. In Gujarat, as a prelude, perhaps, to former chief minister Shankar Sinh Baghela quitting the Congress, at least 11 Congress MLAs ditched Kumar to vote Kovind. In West Bengal, Kovind bagged the votes of 11 MLAs though BJP and its allies could have openly garnered only six MLAs. But its largely some dissidence in Congress & the Left that may have gone in favour of Kovind. Mamata devised a mechanism through which she ensured that there is no cross voting in her party except one MP who is suspended. In Maharashtra, Meira Kumar’s tally was 77, which fell short of her calculation by at least ten. In Uttar Pradesh, eight MLAs had violated their party instructions by voting Kovind; they could be ‘renegades’ from the Akhilesh Singh Yadav-faction of the Samajwadi Party. The numbers in the tiny north-eastern state of Tripura are baffling; in a state with no BJP legislator, Kovind found seven silent supporters. There were opposition reversals in Punjab too, as two of the Aam Aadmi Party’s four MPs are suspected to have for the BJP candidate.

There was a reverse trend as well. In Rajasthan, Meira Kumar was supported by ten more MLAs than her expected tally, a feat which is not possible without some BJP MLAs having been driven by the ‘call of conscience’. But volume-wise, the trend of cross-voting was overwhelmingly dominated by the BJP. Like Kumar, Gopal Gandhi, Opposition’s Vice Presidential candidate,  too has pinned his hope on the electors’ “conscience”.

The failure of the appeal to ‘good sense’ is not a recent phenomenon. In the years between Independence and promulgation of the Constitution in 1950, the so-called idea of India got delineated in the very preamble of the Constitution. It was made on behalf of the “people of India”, which is, by itself, an assertion that the country would make no discrimination on the ground of caste, creed, gender or religion. The preamble defined the Constitution’s four pillars: justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. B. R. Ambedkar, the acknowledged architect of the Constitution, said on the last day’s session of the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949: “Political democracy cannot last unless there is at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognises liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life”. Ambedkar had also said that these three principles of liberty, equality and fraternity were “not to be treated as separate items in a trinity” because (a) equality without liberty would kill individual initiative, (b) without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many, and (c) without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things…it would require a constable to enforce them”.

I have cited this long passage from one of the most sparkling discourses in Indian politics because it provides, in a sense, the essence of the “conscience” or “good sense” that UPA, the loser, has vainly tried to invoke. Such ideal is embedded in the Constitution and is made explicit in Ambedkar’s radiant prose. As the first to form government, it was the Congress’ turn to follow the principles laid down in the Constitution. But it failed and failed the people of India.

It was during the Congress rule that equality got divorced from liberty by a bizarre quality of government and its myriad rules and regulations. It snuffed out “individual initiative”, exactly as Ambedkar had predicted. Again, it was in the Congress rule that equality of opportunity was denied to the poor while the rich had the liberty to influence policy and get richer. Another Ambedkar prophesy that came true.

However, the absence of fraternity has a long history. The communal holocaust and partition in 1947 itself is a testimony to the dismal fact that the Indian society was revelling in fratricide instead of being fraternal. Nor was the Congress any less divisive than what it accuses Modi of, in its handling of caste and communal issues. From the 1980’s, when infusion of militancy turned Islam into a security threat, successive Congress or Congress-led governments had, instead of promoting fraternity, tried to put the communities into their separate silos. In the Shah Bano case, by refusing to reform the obsolete Muslim marital system, Congress PM Rajiv Gandhi pushed the community back into its medieval isolation. A fraternal approach would have been to help the community to reform itself. On the other hand, the Rajiv administration, by allowing a Hindu group to perform worship of Ram in the Babri mosque, virtually ignited the communal fire which is still blazing. Equality and fraternity became victims of decades of vote-bank politics.

The problem with Congress’ recent and vociferous appeal to people’s conscience is that most people—the new generation, in particular—do not think of BJP’s adversaries as repositories of conscience. Instead, they are seen by the younger Indians as a picture of ineptitude and corruption. Its the loss of credibility on policy and conduct.  It is not that the Congress doesn’t understand it, but it has few options. If it must keep its own conscience clear, it has to snap ties with Lalu Yadav. With that vanishes its toehold on power in Hindi-speaking India.

Kung-Fu master's Indian friends

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

The US civil society is riled no end by the alleged Russian intervention in last year’s presidential election, with an eye on seeing Hillary Clinton defeated. The fact that she lost the election, and Donald Trump won, is read by a good section of the American media and public as the outcome of machinations by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

If true, it is unprecedented for the world’s biggest power to have its internal affairs remote-controlled by another country. However, for India, an even larger democracy than America, the “foreign hand” nudging domestic policy is an old chestnut. India under the late Indira Gandhi was regarded as ‘client state’ of the former USSR, with the government orchestrating its domestic and foreign policy in step with Moscow’s diktat. Similarly, there were tell-tale signs of American intervention in several key events in the nation’s life that shaped its destiny, like the allegedly CIA-sponsored air crash leading to the death of Homi J. Bhabha, father of India’s nuclear programme. If he were alive, India would possibly have achieved its present nuclear capabilities several decades earlier, with cheap power triggering Asia’s industrial revolution not on the eastern coast of China but on Indian soil.

And now, it seems to be China’s turn to do its bit. In this space last week, I described China as  India’s “dangerous” neighbour. Dangerous, because it poses serious security risk. It is building roads that can bring its artillery right up to the border of the Indian state of Sikkim, with its bulldozers that were at work in the territory of Bhutan, a tiny mountainous country that depends on India for its foreign relations and external security. In China’s perception, India is a weakling, a perception born out of its 1962 experience, yet India cuts a profile high enough for a hit on it to reverberate across the world as a demonstration of the Dragon’s might. 

However, China, like America and Russia in the past, has also emerged as a player on the chequerboard of India’s internal politics. Apparently, it is rattled by the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the global stage, as a decisive leader of India’s 130 million people who carries no ideological baggage that hamstrung the country’s previous rulers. And, like the USSR in the past, it has kept a close watch not just on Modi but the entire political spectrum, and must have observed the extent of antipathy towards him that some of the opposition leaders, notably the top leaders of the Congress party, harbour against him. There are reasons for China to be soft towards the Congress as, under its leadership, India resolutely desisted from crossing the red line in response to various urgings from America to be a party to the mission to contain China.

But India under Modi has shown more spunk than what makes Beijing’s tolerance limit. It has joined in strategic partnership with Japan, Australia, Vietnam and the US—countries that are worried by China’s flexing of naval muscle on the maritime rights of all over South China Sea. In 2008, the US gave India the legal right to build on its civilian nuclear capabilities despite being a nuclear nation and a non-signatory to NPT. But it was an ineffective largesse as India was not a member of the exclusive Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG); without its nod, it is not possible to obtain either nuclear fuel or technology. For over two years now, China, as an NSG member, has made it its mission to stall India’s entry into the all-important nuclear marketplace.

Differences arose even on issues related to terror as China, as member of the 15-strong UNSC, flatly refused to ban Masood Azhar, head of terror group Jaish-e-Muhammad, which had attacked Indian parliament in 2001 and the Air Force base at Pathankot in 2016. It was China’s gift to Pakistan in exchange of the latter’s help in mobilising members of the Organisation of Islamic Nations (OIC) in support of China. And of course for gleefully offering China land to build rail and road communication from Kashgar, the oasis city in Xinjiang, to Gwadar port in Pakistan’s Baluchistan. Interestingly, the more Modi sought to befriend the US, the more China began putting pressure on him. It multiplied as Modi’s global image got enlarged, the latest being his historic red-carpet reception in Israel as the first Indian PM in that country. The irritation of his critics at home rose in direct proportion to China’s hostility. It was as if some of them were enjoying India’s humiliation. This is enigmatic, because Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Congress PM, was a victim of China's deliberate betrayal: he had taken China as friend, but was betrayed by an aggression of unmatched ferocity. Unable to bear the shock, he died within two years. However, in what remains of his family, there are elements making money by exporting handicraft and other objects to China against unrealistically high invoice, and some party leaders close to the family have strong Chinese links.

It is likely that the recent Chinese hostility north of Sikkim had a bearing on the Congress-led move to unite the opposition parties in India against Modi. And, as the opposition unity effort tends to fizzle out, it is a Chinese gambit that looks like having gone for a toss. The stand off in the Doklam area, therefore, may end sooner than expected. No wonder Modi and Chinese president X Jinping, in their meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg last Friday, held a brief talk on the side line, disproving Beijing’s hawkish bureaucrats who’d discounted the chance of a meeting. But everyone was happy as they shook hands. The only unhappy soul was Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi who snarled: “Why is Modi silent on China?”

You down jack, I down jack

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Analysing the upcoming election (July 17) of the President of India may be like replaying the tape of an old cricket match. Because there is not much surprise left in the contest between Ram Nath Kovind, a career politician and the ruling NDA’s official candidate, and Meira Kumar, UPA’s, or rather the Congress’, official candidate, daughter of former deputy prime minister Jagjivan Ram, diplomat, former Lok Sabha Speaker, and an amateur rifle shooter. Kovind is way out front in the race, which generally follows party lines. And, in the arithmetic of voting strength, the NDA starts from a winning score of 63 per cent; it may go up, not down, in the weeks ahead.

But it is still an interesting election. For the BJP, the choice of candidate holds a major surprise for the assorted scaremongers who had begun counting the Doomsday by the annulment of the Constitution’s secular commitments, and expected Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah and the RSS to rummage through the nether world and pick up a Hindutva-warrior as the Presidential candidate. The political know-alls in the stretch between Raisina Hill and the gossip-filled bar and cafe of the India International Center were convinced that the apparent rejection by Team Modi of BJP bigwigs like L. K. Advani, M. M. Joshi and Sushma Swaraj for the prestigious (and powerless) job of the President had an ominous hidden meaning—that of eventually ‘Hinduising’ the Constitution with the help of a like-minded President. As if, given an encouraging pat in the back, any of the above persons would be shy to prove their Hindutva ! Apparently, it did not occur to the ‘cognoscenti’ that if the Constitution were to be twisted and mangled right down to its “basic structure”, its operation room could be the Parliament, and not the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The President is a cipher after all.

The fact that Ramnath Kobind is anything but a Swayamsewak—his only link with the RSS being that he had gifted to it his (none too pricey) ancestral home at Derapur in Uttar Pradesh—tells nothing much. If Modi is really harbouring some radical plans about governance, he can carry it through regardless of who is the President. Just as he did not say a word to President Pranab Mukherjee before ordering the scrapping of 86 per cent of the money in circulation. However, while the choice of Kovind is an obvious pointer to the BJP’s 2019 strategy of leaving no dalit sect unturned, it has a sub-text, which is that the dalit face the BJP under Modi and Shah is looking for is the quiet and sober type, not Mayawati’s kind of a restless soul who’d put caste at the centre of every discourse. Both Mayawati and Kovind are law graduates but the latter had practised law for years and, unlike Mayawati, joined a political party which is anything but someone’s personal property. On the other hand, to Mayawati, politics is a weapon of self-aggrandizement.

Just as Kovind’s choice underlines certain aspects of Modi’s mind, the selection of Meira Kumar by the Congress—which is the short-hand for Sonia Gandhi—is also indicative of its priorities. Kumar is dalit only by name but is a prominent member of the capital’s elite club that has all along set the rules of the game of politics. In her young days, she grew up a Lutyens’ Delhi girl and never left it at her present age of 72, having been elected five times to the Lok Sabha and then nominated as Speaker of the Lok Sabha. And, like all clever denizens of Lutyens’ city, she used her influence to get her father’s 6, Krishna Menon Marg residence allotted to herself for 25 years. Her selection as the Congress’ presidential candidate speaks volumes for the elitist bias that has crippled the grand old party, with choice of leadership at every stage being determined by pedigree and rank in society. Meira Kumar may not go down as badly as Lakshmi Sahgal in 2002, who bagged merely 107,366 votes against winner A. P. J. Kalam’s 922,884. The UPA’s performance could be a lot better if Sonia Gandhi showed a bit of imagination and started the ‘trick’ herself, forcing Modi to be the ‘taker’. Instead, the Congress allowed Modi to deal first, as in a game of bridge, and the latter played Dalit, his strongest hand. As successive elections in Uttar Pradesh are showing, economic and demographic changes are making the backwards dump their traditional guardians, Congress and BSP, with a big chunk of them tasting BJP’s hospitality. If Sonia Gandhi had a better sense of the game, she could in fact accept CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechuri’s advice and put up Gopal Krishna Gandhi as UPA candidate. That would have left Modi with no option to tapping the dark and thick seam of bigotry, and hatred of Mahatma Gandhi, in BJP’s sub-soil. Besides, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, who is supporting Kovid as he’s too eager to get his uneasy alliance partner Laloo Yadav off his back, by keeping Modi pleased, if necessary, would have thought many times over if he had to oppose a scion of the Mahatma and stay on the side of his abusers. That has a cost, of expulsion from the respectable class. But there is a silver lining in the Congress game-plan; it may finally bring SP-BSP-RLD-Congress on the poll table during 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Modi should have a reason to worry.

However, Presidential election cannot gauge public opinion as its electors comprise those already elected. Still, it is an occasion to get a sense of the kind of people running the majority group among the country’s lawmakers, big and small; their values and the respect they have for the illustrious countrymen whom majority of the people respect. In this sense, the Congress’ role is disappointing. For Modi’s Dalit, all it could offer was its own Dalit. And one like them, to be sure.  

A TOUGH ACT TO FOLLOW

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

In Britain, the law to register a joint stock company, instead of waiting for a Royal charter, was enacted in 1844. The same year saw the Joint Stock Companies Winding-up Act that could bring a company to an end and liquidate the assets. 

India inherited so much of its financial processes from its colonial masters yet it remained a laggard in the handling of failed businesses, thus crippling the banks’ resolve to find new borrowers. Sadly, having an economist prime minister trained in Britain didn’t help much. In 2014, India’s toxic loans stood at Rs 13 lakh crore ($195 billion), or a good $20 billion more than the GDP of New Zealand. The government of Dr Manmohan Singh collapsed under a cloud of controversy about sweetheart deals in licences for natural resources, and the consequent ruining of banks. 

This is the background to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s daring Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016 (IBC) which ought to have come a couple of decades earlier—but better late than never. It is the first step in clearing the mess in which the economy is stuck, in which 240 of the top 500 borrowers belong to the stressed or Elevated Risk of Refinance (ERR) categories. These 240 entities, in their turn, hold about 42 per cent of the total outstanding debt of Rs 28.1 lakh crore. Rather than criticising the Prime Minister for “going slow” on reform, it is time his critics asked if the economy could be back in motion without unclogging the money pipes to and from the banks. 

However, the IBC architecture is complex. It requires armies of Insolvency Professionals (IP) National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) and the regulator, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI). These professionals will be directed to takeover a troubled company and run its affairs with as much authority as its CEO. And they will of course remain in consultation with a Committee of Creditors. But it is the IP who has to decide the way forward—with either a saving formula (“resolution”), or liquidation. It is different from the existing (and ineffective) business rescue or winding-up procedures, like BIFR and SICA. What is lacking in them is the speed element, which puts IBC in a different league. After being assigned by IBBI, the Insolvency Professional must send his report within 180 days, with an extension of 90 days if the creditors have no objection. But that must lead to the final solution. Its novelty is charmingly spectacular in a city like Mumbai where the pre-Independence textile mills, all falling irretrievably sick in the Sixties, took almost half-a-century to let their creditors sell off the land for residential buildings, offices and shopping malls. 

Led from the front by the Prime Minister, his administration’s urgency to clean up the credit market is evident from the beginning. Last week itself, the Reserve Bank of India, with prodding from PMO, sent a list of 12 stressed accounts to bankers for urgent resolution through IBC. The holders of these ‘dirty dozen’ accounts, with names as familiar as Jyoti Structures, Monnet Ispat, Bhushan Steel and Essar Steel, account for 25 per cent of the current gross Non-Performing Assets (NPA). In India, as in Britain, the process of insolvency resolution has historically been biased on rescue. But, with a rigid time line for resolution or liquidation, IBC leaves no room for dodgy promoters to keep dawdling over airy-fairy rescue plans. In a way, it wouldn’t have allowed liquor baron Vijay Mallya to spend years in India on the excuse of trying to ‘save’ his bankrupt KingFisher airline, and then flee to England. 

The IBC is superior to anything similar in existence in the past. It exhibits a clear understanding of the real-life situations prevailing for asset quality to deteriorate in stages, from doubtful to outright bad. The PSU banks, host to most of the stressed assets, are manned by a crop of cautious bankers who’d give the difficult borrower one more chance before reporting his account to RBI as an NPA. Such extreme step also involves a personal risk. Sniffing a banker-client corrupt linkage, the CBI may knock at the very banker’s door one day. Under the new IBC, however, criminal proceedings are not permitted to interfere with the resolution of the existential problems of an insolvent company. This should give bankers the spirit to report a loan that doesn’t seem right before it gets rotting. 

Still, what is not clear yet is the government’s readiness with the IBC architecture. While IBBI, the regulator, may develop the required personnel and skill sets with time, the NCLT will have a tough time. Its mandate is to hear cases earlier dealt with by the Company Law Board (CLB), in addition to the new IBC cases. In March 2015, the CLB had 4,200 pending cases. All this will now go to NCLT, plus 4,000 IBC cases annually. The latter number may multiply with old BIFR and Debt Recovery Tribunal (DRT) being channeled to NCLT. This may raise workload on the NCLT benches quite sharply, with its solution being large scale fresh recruitment of NCLT judges, many of whom are required to be technically knowledgeable. 

The Indian business professionals—executives, shareholders, lawyers, finance experts—have a mindset coloured by the past culture of being reckless with bank loans. It led to the joke of a borrower visiting his banker in a rickety Maruti 800 to negotiate a loan, but, after defaulting, returning to the bank to restructure the debt, but in a Mercedes this time. One hopes Modi’s IBC will restore parity between the size of the debt and the length of the defaulter’s car.

The loan waiver gambit

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a way of making juicy promises studded with numbers that he emits with great certitude. Some time it works, sometime it doesn’t. When it fails to work, it blowbacks on his government with unfailing accuracy. Just as it’s happening for over a month now. A rosy promise he made in 2014 is now chasing him. During his general election campaign, Modi assured the farming communities that, if he could wield power, they’d get a 50 per cent return on their investment in agriculture. Such return on investment in the medium term is many times over that in oil, gas, or even information technology in its heydays.

But the fact is that Return on Investment (RoI) in agriculture is moving southward, not the other way round. I am not sure if the government has the vision to see light at the end of the tunnel in which agriculture in India has gotten itself imprisoned over decades. Had successive governments implemented some innovative schemes in the agriculture sector, farmers would not have suffered as they did during the several decades. Modi knew the plight of the farmers as he was at the helms in Gujrat as Chief Minister.  In 2014, Modi offered moon to the farmers and that’s Modi’s present unenviable situation. With farmer unrest setting off as Jat farmers’ pandemonium in Haryana and Delhi, it has now engulfed Maharashtra, parts of Uttar Pradesh, even distant Tamil Nadu. In Madhya Pradesh, where an insensitive state government failed to curb police brutality at Mandsaur, bordering Maharashtra, six farmers were killed in firing. Adding insult to injury, Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh, whose calling demanded of him to rush to the spot, remained unperturbed as he appeared on a television program the same day by the side of a yoga tycoon, and bending his torso in the same asana as the latter’s. Meanwhile, the next day at Mandsaur, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi was grabbing headlines as police of the BJP-ruled state of Madhya Pradesh prevented his entry and arrested him.

Agriculture accounts for only 17.32 per cent of India’s GDP yet 58 per cent of the rural households depend on it as the principal means of livelihood. Common sense dictates that a sector being so overcrowded, its stakeholders would insist on multiple reforms, like educating and re-skilling themselves for alternative vocations, forcing the state to invest heavily on agricultural infrastructure, help diversify produces and design ‘smart’ subsidies. In all these tests, if the Congress-led UPA were an utter failure, the BJP-led NDA is under performer.

However, the Modi administration was quick at promising reform. Irrigation is an example. Only 47 per cent the country’s farms are irrigated, though it generally means pumping up groundwater with bore wells and dry up the underground aquifers. It is sheer waste of water. However, the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY), with a Rs 54,000-crore allocation (in five years), is floundering because it has little interest in minor irrigation that brings water directly to the farmer—the budget for such schemes has been cut 30 per cent this year. The explanation was that higher allocations have been made to the states. The government’s focus is on large projects, 92 of them, most of which are under various stages of completion. The problem is such long term projects do not help the farmer facing consecutive droughts in short term.  

Irrigating India being too challenging a task, the Modi administration has gone for the easy option, which is loan waiver. For this, however, the copyright goes to Congress which waived farm loans countrywide in 2007. Its futility is best shown by agricultural economist Ashok Gulati in a chart that shows the state-wise tepid and unequal growth of agricultural output between 2007-09 and 2014-15. In 2004-05 prices, the annual growth rate of agriculture in India was only 3.2 per cent. Punjab, once the granary of India, witnessed its declining growth trend dropping even faster to 1.3 per cent.

Loan waiver, therefore, is not linked to agricultural productivity. Instead, it is a fallout of rural indebtedness which has become, over centuries perhaps, a signature of India’s village life. From Nehru to Modi, no regime could combat it. Up to 57 per cent of farm families in Maharashtra are indebted. For India, the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) measured it as 52 per cent in 2013. The anxiety of loan default sits on the mind of India’s rural people like dead weight, accounting for most farmers’ suicides (in Maharashtra, 4,291 in 2015). Politicians try to cash in on this anxiety, like Yogi Adityanath who, after taking charge of Uttar Pradesh, promised a loan waiver of Rs 30,792 crore.

And that blew the fuse on the farming front. Across Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana, farmers are demanding full waiver of all outstanding loans. Maharashtra has already buckled under farmers’ pressure, and others too may not have much option. But, with total agricultural loan standing at Rs 12.6 lakh crore, it can be fully written off at the peril of “severe systemic consequences”, as minister of state for agriculture Parshottam Rupala said in Parliament. The other anodyne in the government’s chest of medicines is the Minimum Support Price (MSP) mechanism. As subsidy, MSP has gone a long way in curbing India’s crop diversity, by keeping it primarily a wheat-and-rice country. But, with rising income levels, popular food choice is changing, and, according to a study by Credit Suisse, per capita consumption of cereal is dropping 1 per cent annually over the last 30 years. That explains bursting cereal warehouses.

What is destroying agriculture? Can it survive with so many people jostling for a sector of so little value? How can farming be modernized when the holdings are pocket handkerchief-sized? Modi rightly abolished presentation of a  Railway Budget. But its high time that a separate Krishi Budget be introduced. This will force the bureaucracy completely insensitive to plight of the farmers and rural economy and lame-duck ministers to help in changing the face of the farmer. My humble advice is Modi’s yoga-loving ministers and chief ministers can apply their mind to these issues, rather than assuring fictional profit in agriculture, or busting the exchequer to write off bad loans.

Opposition needs French lesson

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

The routing of the opposition in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections by the BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a stunning effect which will not subside anytime soon.

The initiative that Congress president Sonia Gandhi began since April to meet individual opposition leaders—from Sharad Pawar to CPM’s Sitaram Yechuri, both Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav of Bihar, or West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee—is a direct fallout of the defeat in Uttar Pradesh.

However, it is the seemingly irresistible rise of BJP, and the anxiety that it may after all change the rules of the game of politics set in the past decades, that has spread across the length and breadth of the country. In Chennai, the possibility of matinee idol Rajanikanth carrying the flag of BJP into peninsular India has made the Opposition worried. It lent  to the birthday of nonagenarian leader K. Karunanidhi, into a matter of national urgency, on the scale of Udyog Parvin the Mahabharata. In Uttar Pradesh, Samajwadi Party leader and former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has resumed calling BSP supremo and his sworn enemy Mayawati “bua” and they are talking again directly now. Besides, unfazed by the new anti-corruption inquiries he is facing, Lalu Yadav is holding a joint rally of opposition parties in Patna on August 27, its battle cry being “BJP hatao, desh bachao”.

Nevertheless, achieving opposition unity is easier said than done. It’s because it was hopelessly disunited to begin with, so much so that the BJP could manage to come to power in 2014 due to, inter alia, its disunity. The vote share of NDA was 38 per cent yet it bagged 336 (61.87%) of the 543 Lok Sabha seats.

And now, after the UPA parties’ misfortune, their internal problems have compounded. Mayawati is no longer the monarch of her Jatav community as the Dalit youths of Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, have taken their destiny in their own hands instead of leaving it to BSP. They were oppressed by the rich and armed and politically influential Rajputs. Now they have formed Bhim Sena which promises to become the community’s new platform. Within SP, the Yadav family tussle involving  Akhilesh and Mulayam Singh Yadav, his father and the party’s founder, is far from being resolved. Also doubtful is the Congress’ ability to project itself any longer as the ‘natural cradle’ of potential prime ministers. Sonia Gandhi’s ‘unity luncheon’ (for selecting opposition candidate for President election), coinciding with the NDA government’s third anniversary, skipped by Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, was an impressive photo-op, and just about that.

In fact, Nitish rubbed it in by abstaining from Sonia’s conclave yet meeting the Prime Minister over lunch the very next day. Pawar was present at the lunch but he’d earlier turned down Sonia’s call-in to be UPA’s presidential candidate. “The job comes with a great house but I enjoy talking to you”, he later told journalists. Obviously, the job he’s aspiring to is to lead the next government from Parliament, not Rashtrapati Bhavan. Nitish Kumar, too, has got his sight set on the prime minister’s job. In his earlier meeting with Sonia, he’d recommended a second term for Pranab Mukherjee, the outgoing President. However, he said little about the nature and leadership of a future opposition alliance. The Congress is desperately looking for an alliance with H D Deve Gowda in Karnataka. But Gowda is deeply hurt as the Congress government had put his son H D Kumaraswamy in jail. He did attend Sonia’s lunch after persuaded by Sharad Yadav and Sitaram Yechuri. But no further political deal in Karnataka.

The opposition turf has no shortage of vaulting ambition, inflated ego, or pulses racing doe to Modi’s taxmen and cops closing in on piles of allegedly ill-gotten cash. But that doesn’t a leader make. The big change that has hit the electoral process in democracies worldwide is that it has become almost entirely personality oriented, like in the presidential system, with little room for the opposition except that of “also ran”. Most recently, it has happened in France, with centrist and globalist Emmanuel Macron getting  66 per cent votes while Marine Le Pen, the right-wing populist being left with only 34 per cent. What’s noteworthy is that Macron, who had been the finance minister in the previous socialist government of Francoise Hollande (something comparable in its ineptitude and venality to the Manmohan Singh-led UPA-2), quit it, formed his fledgling party En Marche, and targeted and grabbed his bull’s-eye—the huge middle ground that’d shiver to support Hollande’s  party yet would have voted for Le Pen if there was no option.

Incidentally, Britain is heading for a similar situation as it goes to poll on Thursday, June 8. In this mid-term poll, the British voter will be caught between prime minister Theresa May’s pro-Brexit Conservative Party and the Labour under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, a rather loopy communist who worships Venezuelan ex-president the late Hugo Chavez and says if elected PM he’d nationalize mail, rail and energy firms. That’s a bit too much in a nation that still respects Margaret Thatcher, the ‘iron lady’ of privatization, and the country reshaped by her. The country became the bedrock on which two ‘new Labour’ PMs, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, could thrive. Corbyn is a hater of their ‘neo-liberalism’ while May is clearly devoid of political ideas. Therefore, it is likely that, come June 8, voters will move one way in large herds but none will be there to represent the sensible middle ground. Significantly, Macron polled 84 per cent of the top 20 per cent highest educated voters.

India did not (and does not) have a Macron-type leader primarily because it lacks enlightened voters. But that is no excuse for leaders being so bereft of ideas about the direction that India may follow. When called upon to govern states, their ideas are limited to banning alcohol, or denying land to industry. It’s not Modi’s opposition, India is waiting for his challenger.

Steak and Dhokla

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Defying gravity, when Donald Trump made his way to the White House last year, it was generally seen as a mostly local catastrophe whereas the US foreign policy, it was hoped, is too big to fail, resting on the long pillow of seemingly unshakable global business and defence ties. But Trump is a new persona amidst foreigners in Washington.

Till recently, in the French presidential election this month, he seemed championing populist right-wing leader Marine Le Pen as “strongest on borders, and she’s the strongest on what’s been going on in France”. After rolethe liberal pro-EU candidate Emmanuel Macron soundly beat her, Trump did a somersault as he told Macron: “You are my guy.” With other European leaders, he was downright caddish. In his recent trip across the pond, he called Germans “bad” because they sell “just too many cars” in America. At a NATO meet photo-op, he shoved the leader of Montenegro, a small Balkan nation, who happened to be at the centre, to occupy his place.

Before flying into Europe, Trump was in Riyadh where he became a picture of cordiality, starting his interactions with a traditional all-male swordplay, and promising a bonanza of aid for arms to fend against “radical Islamist terrorism”. What he forgot was that it was his host that was the engine powering jihadism based on the tenets of Wahhabism, and Saudi nationals constituted most of the fighters of both Al Qaeda and Islamic State. In the process, attention got deflected from the significant fact that the Saudi priority being to mount attacks on all non-Sunni nations, notably Iran, Trump’s promised aid has the potential to derail Teheran from the path of non-nuclearization. Tehran had earlier agreed to tread after patient persuasions from the Western powers. However, Trump, in stark contrast to his inexplicable show of magnanimity in Riyadh, was all petulance in Europe as he reminded his NATO colleagues that what mattered most (to him) was the regularity of their payments into the alliance’s coffers. NATO was born in the early years of the Cold War as a bulwark of the Western democracies against the communist USSR under its totalitarian leader Stalin. It is obvious that Trump, with hitherto unstated Russian affinity that he and his family members reportedly cherish, is finding NATO’s very idea to be flawed from his perspective from the beginning.

In fact, the Trump presidency has got deeply mired in the Russian muddle. FBI, America’s top investigative agency, which was given the task of investigating possible links between Trump’s campaign team and entities in Russia, has now got its chief fired by the President. Yet there is no sign of the agency closing the investigation. On the other hand, it has zeroed in on Trump’s son-in-law and White House senior advisor Jared Kushner, apparently to investigate the extent and nature of his alleged interactions with Russians. It has been reported that, a month after Trump’s election, Kushner discussed with some Russians a project to set up a secret line of communication with Moscow.

Also under the scanner are the extensive business dealings that officials close to Trump had with Russian proxies in Ukraine. It is the Russian military intervention in Ukraine that brought a new urgency into NATO. After all, Ukraine is the most pro-West of the ex-Soviet satellite nations which former US President Barack Obama fully appreciated. It was Trump’s predecessors who made his country share the concern of Europe and the cost of containing Russian president Putin’s fury. In his election campaign, Trump turned it into his ammunition as he presented the European powers as parasites that were leeching on America for their security. On the other hand, he presented Russia as a victim. Strangely, this fanciful narrative not only went unchallenged in the American public space but created a lot of interest in within the Putin administration to install  “our man” in White House. This is an idea that might make the remains of Stalin turn in its grave. Trump’s deeply troubled five months’ presidency, and the continuance of governmental and congressional probes into his affairs, have got Washington shrouded in an uncertainty not seen till the end of the Nixon years.

All this is bad news for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has visited 57 countries since assuming office, but whose foreign policy turns on the pivot of America. A Modi visit to the US towards the end of next month is on the anvil. But the problem is, India is not prominently placed in Trump’s attention span and priorities. In his recent speech in Riyadh, he mentioned India, among others, as a victim of terrorism. But, unlike his predecessor, he lacks a world view, not to speak of a civilizational compass. India in his mind may be lost in a landmass which seem to be distant.

It is not that Trump’s mind-space is limited to the Trump Towers in America. He has a dealmaker’s shrewd understanding of who’re the ones that matter, and is careful to set the chocolate cake moment with Chinese president Xi Jinping at his Florida club Mar-a-Lago, or play golf with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, and beam at his Saudi hosts when served his favourite all-American fare, well-done steak and ketchup.

He is a Conservative elite and will remain so, impeachment or no impeachment. Personality wise, he is so far removed the liberal Obama that Modi must rewrite his manual of self-projection—the “my friend Bahrahak” types—with care. And food is an issue; committed steak-lovers may hold dhokla-eaters as the ET.

The real problem is, Trump’s dealings with people are purely transactional. If India is jointly pounded by Pakistan and China, he is unlikely to promptly act, at least that’s the impression one gets. Secondly, Trump in unpredictable. And that’s why the coming US visit is Modi’s litmus test.

Never say die !

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

With the collapse of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), first in Punjab & Goa, and now in the recently held Municipal polls in Delhi, the last “hope” of the Opposition politics is heading towards self destruction. No doubt, the opponents too are working over-time to inflict a body blow to the four-year born baby. But most of the AAP’s wounds are self-inflicted. If the party is heading towards the funeral pyre, its no one’s fault. Its none else than Arvind Kejriwal himself.  

Gone are the days when he was the darling of the media, the down-trodden and the middle-class. It was Kejriwal who had stunned the nation by trouncing the  BJP in its citadel by winning 67 out of the 70 Assembly seats. The rout of the Congress which ruled the Union Territory for 15 years under Shiela Dikshit, was of no consequence. It was expected due to variety of reasons. But it was he who single-handedly halted the victory march of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It was a severe blow to the BJP and sent its leaders into a shell.  The “alternative politics” became the narrative. It was not as if the country was not aware of Kejriwal’s national ambitions. After all, he had contested 500-odd Lok Sabha seats in May 2014 and came a cropper. Yet AAP winning four Lok Sabha seats in Punjab raised eye-brows. But it was his win in Delhi that aroused a new kind of  “Hope”.The “secular forces” needed a horse to ride and Kejri was right there. He was the man of the moment.

The timing of his rise in 2013 was most opportune and he never looked back until the big shock in Punjab & Goa and then in Delhi which was his citadel. The Congress had lost the plot in May 2014 and could never recover from the shock tally of 44 Lok Sabha MPs. And this was not all. The party started losing one state after the other and with the BJP scouting for “talent” in every state, the Congress suffered one set back after the other. So much so that veterans like S M Krishna opted to “dump the sinking ship.” A prominent Madhya Pradesh Congress leader had almost clinched his re-entry into the BJP. It was nixed at the last minute by one of the Trioka members (Modi-Shah-Jaitley). 

The Congress’ two sitting Chief Ministers will face their litmus test this year end in Himachal Pradesh & Karnataka. It is also an irony in the era of Congress bashing that its victory in Punjab is not attributed to the  Gandhis. The credit for Capt. Amrinder Singh’s win is attributed to his leadership and to the BJP which did everything possible to ensure AAP’s rout. Secondly, AAP’s one blunder after the other in Punjab helped the Congress to dislodge the Akalis after ten years. Why the Congress leadership can’t be credited with Punjab win ? Look at the MCD poll results in Delhi ! Rahul Gandhi’s hand-picked Ajay Maken ensured that the party secures the third position. Therefore, the most worrying aspect is that the Congress leadership failed to create “hope” amongst its rank and file and Rahul Gandhi’s inability to enthuse the voter is widely accepted. The Left parties who commandeered Central governments from outside, have now been reduced to single digit in Parliament. It is now confined to Tripura and even here, BJP chief Amit Shah is determined to snatch the Left’s last Bastion. The Indian Left is facing a leadership crisis and it is desperately searching for a Kanhaiya to save it from virtual extinction.

The less said the better of another prominent national political party, the BSP which has nearly 20% votes fixed votes in over 100 Lok Sabha constituencies. But she is fast losing the plot and surfacing of her recent audio-tapes could be a turning point in Dalit politics. Her image is already sullied and the BSP is virtually on the verge of extinction in both houses of Parliament. The Lalus, Mulayams, Mamatas have destroyed their own image as one scam after the other hits them and their parties. This has brought Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar who is considered a clean politician at a crossroad. If he dumps Lalu, his government goes. Alternatively, he can re-join the NDA. The BJP also badly needs Nitish Kumar as it wants Bihar’s 40 Lok Sabha seats in its kitty. The BJP is aware that it will be difficult to sweep Lok Sabha polls in Bihar if it contests alone and Nitish-Lalu-Congress stay together. In either case, his dream of emerging as a consensus candidate for the Prime Ministerial post from the Opposition benches is in jeopardy.

Therefore, its a pitiable situation for the Opposition, at least for the moment. For the very survival of democracy a strong Opposition is needed. But one cannot expect the Modi-Shah to create the Opposition. The leaders on the Opposition benches will have to re-invent themselves. The Opposition will have to find a leader who is capable enough to take other parties along. Arvind Kejriwal had showed the charisma and there was a moment when the Left parties were willing to do business with him. But he lost the plot due to his self-destructive over-ambitious politics. Rahul Gandhi had ample opportunities to lead the party from the front and provide the leadership. But he too missed the bus. May be he will have to re-orient and re-invent.

If BJP can re-invent after 14 years of struggle after being routed in 1984, why shall the Opposition be in a hurry. Modi’s honey-moon is not over yet and the Opposition parties do not have 24X7 politicians like Modi and Amit Shah. But political parties don’t die, only their corrupt and incompetent leaders fade away with time. The parties bounce back.

BJP Norwester

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

What area elections? In fact what is representation politics all about? What important is the outcome of an election to the destiny of parties concerned? 

For those of us who grew up in the profession in the ‘Mandal’ era of politics, with so many caste and community groups, elections were always a hair-trigger experience as no one would know which group would have a change of mind at the last moment. So it was a bit like betting big-time in the so-called Z-category shares, though recent SBI reforms have somewhat reduced their deadly volatility.

BJP and its unrelenting efforts to stabilise India’s electoral outcomes have produced stupendous results. If there is an election in the mainline Hindi-speaking states (39% of population) there is no percentage in guessing who has the ace. Off-mainland, the non-BJP states are still nestling with their traditional protectors, like Bengal with the Trinamool Congress, Odisha under the wings of the Biju Janata Dal of Naveen Patnaik Tamil Nadu under the twin Dravidian parties by rotation or Andhra Pradesh under regional satrap Chandrababu Naidu and a couple of more smaller states.  The Congress is struggling to retain its last bastion in Karnataka. Elsewhere things are running riots.

In Uttarakhand, twice from Congress, former judge Vijay Bahuguna made it to the success pole in his state, yet fell short chief ministership in Dehra dun, a post that gracefully went to Trivendra Singh Rawat, an RSS old-timer. If at all, it proved that the parry’s ‘kremlin’, the troika of Amit Shah-Narendra Modi-RSS, would not deviate from their ideological fealty if possible. However, for Bahuguna, it was not unrelieved gloom as his sister, Rita Bahugna, once a determined spokesperson of the Congress is now minister in Yogi Adityanath ministry.  

Despite this strict choice of class and caste, BJP kept its window remarkably open way back the days of Nitin Gadkari’s presidentship. Courtesy Gadkari and later Rajnath Singh with the blessings of the RSS, nearly 100 of the 282 Lok Sabha MPs (in 2014) did not belong to the BJP, or for that matter, had little o do with the party and its ‘lotus’ culture. Birendra Singh and Rao Inderjit  Singh, both powerful ministers are iron men transported from Congress; one before the Lok Sabha polls and the other on the eve of Haryana Assembly elections. The BJP was always like a second fiddle to Devi Lal & Chautala and could hardly grew in the state. Therefore, the troika took a conscious decision to import talent lock, stock & barrel and give them ministerial berths too. Entry of Suresh Prabhu from Shiv Sena, a party that had little respect for his talent after his founder’s demise, and being inducted straightaway into the Railway Ministry. S.S. Ahluwalia, a ‘man for all seasons’, represent an elite induction hardly seen ever. The computer wiz kid of Rajiv Gandhi fell out with the Gandhis after he joined P V Narasimha Rao. He was the first major catch of the BJP as he knew inside out of the Congress and helped Atal-Advani team to nail the then ruling Congress. To a very large extent, it gave a party of Jai Shree Ram-chanting a degree of administrative gravitas it had toward the very end Vajpyee’s regime. 

And the elite flow is unchecked. In Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma was a prize catch that not only brought the party to win in Assam, a first for a saffron flag to unfurl on the Brahmaputra bank. The Biswa Sarma effect has paralysed the Congress in the entire north eastern region. It was the Congress which won most seats in Manipur yet it failed to get the support of just three MLAs to form government. The BJP proved its skill once again in garnering support from six Congress MLAs who have joined the party. The resigning MLAs must resign from the assembly and say they are happy to seek reselection under the BJP. But their confidence is not an issue.  Biswa Sarma is like a Simon Bolivar. He has announced that he’d soon grab the two states of Tripura and Meghalaya, one a surviving citadel of the CPI(M) and the other an old liege of the Congress when Purno Sangma was the liege lord. No one can tell what will happen in Tripura, but, those who have visited the state say northwester winds are blowing. It is very difficult to imagine the state’s ‘comrades’ not to wake up the roaring call of Amit Shah’s change. 

Goa’s is a classic example where Congress lost power because the leadership was unable to decide within the first 12 hours of results as to who should be its chief ministerial candidate. Digvijay Singh is being flogged for all the wrong reasons.

The country is in a state of political stupor, with old ideas and action calls becoming thoroughly ineffective and the people have shown little interest in more of the old stuff. The old fear about the BJP, that its a party of too much polarization, is somehow getting sublimated in a new fusion of acceptance. Something that Gadkari said is the ‘genius’ of his party that turned Ratnakar, the dacoit into the poet of poets. He said in Pune when confronted how could his party go on admitting all & sundry including criminals of the Congress, SP, BSP into the BJP, “If criminals enter the party, we lessen their faults and increase their merits…In our party, criminals change for good, in the same way in which Valya, a robber, turned into Valmiki…” The hunt for talent has not ended. The new troika of Modi-Shah-RSS is on hunt of hidden talent across the country. The BJP have taken 180 degree turn.

But there is definitely a point about hardcore public life changing people’s behaviour, something that is hard to find in a like Congress with total control clamped on independent thinking. 

Udyog Parv and a Dalit president

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

The job of the President of India surely glows with gravitas, complete with a bespoke palace on Raisina Hill that could make the White House in Washington look modest. The words in the Constitution defining the position of its occupant in the Indian republic are also grand. Article 53(1) says that the executive power of the Union shall be vested in the President.

But these are just words as the issue of the President’s power was settled way back in the 1940’s, with B. R. Ambedkar, draftsman of the Constitution, favouring a truly powerful chief executive, and the Gandhi-Nehru clique, on the other hand, being all out for powerful legislature. The latter won. No wonder the same article goes on to underline that (19-3): “Nothing in this article shall…prevent Parliament from conferring by law functions on authorities other than the President”.  The fact that the Indian President is merely a titular head is known to school students, so his election should hardly attract either politicians’ get-up-and-go or even common man’s interest. Yet, politicians have always given the Presidential election—with its cumbersome calculation of votes—more weightage than it rightfully deserves.

In the Sixties, Indira Gandhi, in her early years as prime minister, wanted her protégé V. V. Giri to become President but her right-wing ‘syndicate’ in the party had Neelam Sanjiva Reddy as its candidate. Giri won, but not until the differences escalated and led to split in the Congress. In the Nineties, K. R. Narayanan easily glided through the election when the electoral college was badly splintered, thanks to the Mandal-era politics then prevalent, and everybody thought the former student of London School of Economics would be too scholarly to be assertive in India’s cutthroat political environment. Yet, it is this short and unassuming Dalit who surprised all when he refused to dismiss two state governments, of Kalyan Singh and Rabri Devi, despite being pushed by I. K. Gujral and A. B. Vajpayee respectively. But the Rashtrapati Bhavan can truly prove to be a gilded cage for over-ambitious politicians, as it happened with present President Pranab Mukherjee, who had aspired to the prime minister’s post occupied by  Manmohan Singh and had gone some way in gathering support of UPA partners until Sonia Gandhi got him summarily despatched to the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Mukherjee’s term is due to end on 25 July, before which his replacement must be elected. Except Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India, no other president had a second term, nor is it likely that Mukherjee, a dyed-in-the-wool Congressman, will have too many helping hands stretching out from a predominantly pro-BJP electoral college. The total voting strength of the 776 MPs and 4,120 MLAs translates into 10,98,882 votes (each MLA has a voting strength multiplied by a factor of his state’s population), the halfway mark being 549,442. The ruling NDA is already ahead of it and is adding on to the lead after every election. There is little doubt, therefore, that the new occupant of the best address in Delhi will be a man (or woman ?) approved by the ‘saffron brotherhood’, if not being one of it.

Earlier, in 2002, BJP under Vajpayee as prime minister boldly supported ‘missile man’ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. Given a chance, the party could produce a hard-core saffronite from its RSS stable. But it did nothing of that sort. Kalam, in his turn, made the BJP proud. Being a Muslim president, he still supported the Uniform Civil Code, an issue close to the BJP’s heart for decades. Moreover, he was not given to pussy-footing on dismissal of state governments headed by leaders mired in corruption charges. In 2005, he dismissed the Bihar government headed by Rabri Devi, a task that his predecessor, Narayanan, had refused to carry out. It is a fact that Kalam did not oblige hard-core nationalists as he prolonged the mercy petition of Afzal Guru, the mastermind of the plan to attack the Indian Parliament. But Kalam’s choice brought to the Vajpayee set-up a rare respectability in both domestic and international spheres as this aeronautics scientist was held in high esteem. In the Vajpayee years, the BJP ruled only through a coalition and its grip on national politics was still unsure. A pacifist and multiculturist at the Rashtrapati Bhavan was an asset then.

In 2017, things have undergone a sea-change. Apart from holding more than half the Lok Sabha seats on its own, the BJP, singly or through allies, is in power from the hills and the plains to the seas. Modi has succeeded in doing what Vajpayee couldn’t, winning states after states.  It is no time for an ideologically driven leader like Prime Minister Narendra Modi, or his fellow-thinkers like party president Amit Shah and RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagawat, to shelter behind a façade of goody goody liberalism and be content with the party’s elders from the pre-Modi era. Example: L. K. Advani, Murali Manohar Joshi, Kariya Munda and half a dozen more. The new names that are surfacing are hard-boiled RSS men who are also Dalit: like 73-year-old cabinet minister Thawar Chand Gehlot, a Dalit. Also in the running is Satyanarayan Jatia, a jatav (Mayawati’s caste). Though he was denied Lok Sabha ticket, the party rewarded him with a Rajya Sabha seat. There may be an unknown, unsung RSS Dalit hero for the post. The presidential poll is like Udyog Parv in the Mahabharata.  The previous assembly elections are a testimony to abiding upper caste support to BJP. Modi himself claimed that he is an OBC and garnering non-Yadavs in big numbers. He is now eyeing the Dalits who were never part of saffron dispensation. Modi, ever since his arrival at 7 Race Course Road (Lok Nayak Marg), has done everything possible to embrace the legacy of Dr Ambedkar. A Dalit commitment completes the circle. Political pundits are unnecessarily misplacing their bets on yesteryears’ horses.

Opposition deserves Modi's thanks

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetization drive in November last year, he was being written off by most opposition leaders, and their buddies in the media. Even Saamna, the Shiv Sena magazine, called demonetization an “atom bomb” and Uddhav Thackeray said “(after note-bandi) it was BJP-bandi as well”. But in the ensuing municipal elections in Maharashtra, the BJP won eight out of ten councils and increased its tally in Mumbai by 264%  to 82 seats. It shocked all by its performance in Odisha, Gujrat and elsewhere. That established the basic truth that demonetization, however painful to the common man, was actually appreciated for some reason that has not been analysed; be it for being seen as just deserts for the bribe-taking rich.

The opposition’s reading of the tea leaves of politics was again in gross error in Uttar Pradesh. Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and Samjawadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, both in their 40’s, swayed by a hi-flier election consultant, formed a pre-poll alliance even though Yadav’s SP had been born in the early 90’s as an offshoot of the Janata Dal, the rainbow coalition of caste and creed that swore to remove the Congress from power. Gandhi and Yadav were walking on air after the coalition. After the results were out, the SP and Congress polled 21 and 7 per cent votes respectively, and the BSP, which the duo thought was of no consequence, polled 22 per cent. But the BJP and its local allies grabbed 41 per cent votes and 312 of the 403 (77.41%) seats. The Gandhi-Yadav pair were gung-ho about their chances all along, thinking of Modi as being out on a limb after the demonetization ‘fiasco’. So another upset since David beat Goliath.  What is the problem with the opposition? Why is it repeatedly failing to read the message that the electorate is repeatedly giving out?

It is evident that the opposition is distinctly worried about its prospects in the 2019 general elections. The chances of Modi’s return has suddenly entered, from an equal-odds zone, into an area of fair possibility. If that happens, the entire opposition leadership will go through an existential dilemma, with decades-old, if not centurion, families that may be forced to bid adieu from the stage of power. What is more important, a 2019 defeat will compel the anti-BJP political groupings to hit on a new idea of India, something quite different from what Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar had foisted on the nation after Independence, and what BJP, given a chance, will inarguably replace by an idea of its own. And if it wins the 2019 general election, its second consecutive conquest, the following five years cannot but rewrite its markers as a nation. Many things may change beyond recognition. India may move faster towards becoming a Hindu nation, like Israel is Jewish. The BJP’s historic victory in UP and installation of Yogi Adityanath at the bidding of the RSS at an eleventh hour shows the speed with which the so-called “secular” slate will be re-written. The saffron-clad Yogi continues to make waves and TV channels have gone berserk painting him as new messiah on the horizon. The entire RSS-BJP machinery is ensuring that UP becomes the shining example of the success of its ideology so that 2019 can be repeated with ease.

Gone are the days of the appeasement of minorities; nursed by so-called secular parties since Independence in one form or the other. It was not without reason that the BJP there wasn’t a single Muslim BJP candidate in Uttar Pradesh. The Muslims population as high as 18 per cent made hardly any impact on the electoral outcome in the state. A clamour for beef ban in the entire country is already gaining ground and states after states are levying cow cess for their welfare. If the Muslims don’t yield on Ram Temple, there are other ways & means to make them see reason. The Beef ban, Triple Talaq, war against conversions etc has made the Muslims worried and they have been exerting pressure on the “secular” parties to come together before more damage is done. It is no wonder that Congress leaders with a sophisticated sense of history, like Shashi Tharoor, who has recently admitted that the traditional Indian definition of secularism has not “worked”, are back to the drawing board to work on the Idea of India 2.0.

Whatever it transpires to be, the BJP’s own “idea” will differ from it vastly on two grounds. First, its unceasing hostility to Muslims has given it an opportunity to cobble together an overarching alliance of victimhood of Hindus across all castes. Besides, the electoral consolidation it has achieved can be the bell ringer for all kinds of reforms that India, so far administered very loosely, must carry out if it wants to be counted even as a middling nation in a few decades. Modi obviously sees his goals clearly. A uniform indirect tax policy (GST), subsidy reduction, making the public distribution system leak-proof—all these are bold reforming steps towards achieving inclusiveness.

Modi’s present home run in elections, and its future course, is therefore the result of complex cross currents of history—of a creeping ‘Indianness’ overpowering regional pulls and pushes—and the opposition will act stupidly again if it bets too high on Modi’s “mistakes” without working out its own strategy. But, barring a few intellectuals, the opposition ranks are poor on ideas. Instead, they keep hoping for a better tomorrow without doing anything. As the name of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar began circulating as the possible face of the opposition in 2019, Laloo Prasad, his ‘frenemy’, was sullen; he said he’d go on a “tour” of the country first. And C. P. Joshi, Congress general secretary known to be his vice president’s eyes and ears, claimed that, by 2018, “under Rahul Gandhi”, “we pose formidable challenges” to Modi. If the opposition refuses to wake up, the Prime Minister may send them ‘thank you’ cards in advance. 

Aadhar: The fear psychosis

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

The current brouhaha in the parliament, the media and the court over Aadhar, India’s unique identification card for citizens is typical of a nation witnessing a regime change, and its accompanying about-face on policy. It was the previous Congress-led UPA regime, harassed as it was by mounting subsidies and their rampant misuse through corruption, commissioned the services of IT wizard Nandan Nilekani to set up Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Insiders say it was Dr Manmohan Singh who came up with the idea and the government authority was created to administer the nation-wide 12-digit Aadhar card. The number touched 50 crores mark when UPA demitted office and shot up to 1.12 billion already. But always wary of upsetting the UPA vote bank—be they PDS cheats and assorted rent seekers—UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and the cabal around her put roadblocks on its use in one form or the other. The Aadhar actually remained a number, nothing else. The NDA, on the other hand, is keen to use the Aadhar platform for not only incidental operations like distribution of subsidised LPG cylinders but to replace the entire creaking PDS with a Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) architecture that may include issuing of Food Stamps.

But a countrywide identification system has its downside. If put in the hands of a draconian regime, its most fearsome use may be as an instrument of mass surveillance, much as the Nazis reportedly used an IBM machine way back in the 1933 census to identify the Jews in Germany. But, food and petroleum subsidy alone costing Rs 240,000 crore in 2016-17, and over 40 per cent of grains and sugar distributed across the Fair Price Shops either rotting in transit or getting pilfered, the gain from Aadhar far outweighs its imagined cost and fears. And the ‘cost’ is being cynically exaggerated by a section of leftist intellectuals in the former National Advisory Council (NAC) of UPA; it was popularly known as Sonia Gandhi’s ‘kitchen cabinet’. Jean Drěze, its economist ex-member, is particularly vocal against the NDA government’s plans with Aadhar. He is campaigning that the Aadhar Bill now passed in the Lok Sabha as a Money Bill (so bypassing the Upper House where the BJP is not in majority), is being built “as an infrastructure of social control”.

Last week, after the Lok Sabha cleared the Aadhar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley reminded the House that it was the “culmination of seven years of discussion” over the Bill. It was a confession of sorts of the stiff resistance that the BJP gave to the passage of some features of the law when the latter was in the opposition. But Jaitley was unambiguous in its purpose. He said “it will empower the state to distribute resources to the deserving people and save the resources that undeserving people get”. It is obvious that the economy, plagued by tepid tax revenues and soaring costs of government wages and defence expenditure, is desperate to curb the pressure of subsidies on both economic and social services. Even after setting aside the ‘merit’ subsidies (i.e., the essential subsidies in primary education, health, sanitation and sewage, mid-day meal, etc.), the non-merit (or inessential state spend on the undeserving) subsidy works out to a hefty one-tenth of the GDP. It is anything but sustainable. And the intention to curtail it signifies the political shift from the left to the right that marks the 2014 regime change.

Before the bill’s passage in the Lower House, it went through the Upper House with a slew of amendments, all moved by Congress lawmaker Jairam Ramesh. His amendments sought to prevent disclosure of “biometric or demographic information” in the interest of “national security”. It was proposed that the clause be substituted instead by “public emergency” or “public safety”. There were a few other amendments that were all swept aside in the Lok Sabha, where Jaitley’s ‘money bill’ made short shrift of Ramesh’s suggestions, one of which was against the use of Aadhar number for any purpose not mentioned in the Bill (such as for filing of Income-Tax return).

However, a good question to ask Ramesh could be: why is he nettled by the term “national security”? It is evident that a fear is stalking the opposition benches that the Aadhar Bill, after it becomes a law, may be used by the government to throw open the dossier on every dissenter and everyone who refuses to toe the line, and get its finger on his location, correspondence history, tax details or personal life. In a world which is digitally vibrant, the twelve digits on the Aadhar card are like a screen to the secret police to every secret in one’s life. In South Africa under the apartheid regime, the 1950 population registration data was used to assign in the 13-digit national identification number, the penultimate (12th) digit, telling if its holder is ‘black’ or not. There is no doubt, therefore, that Aadhar can turn out to be a weapon in the hands of the government of the day fighting war on many fronts. Surely, individuals, groups, communities etc indulging in anti-social, anti-national activities may have a reason to be worried too. For students of recent history, the anti-Sikh massacre after the assassination of Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984 may be a haunting issue in this respect. The Nanavati Commission report cites a glaring succession of the lynch mobs identifying Sikh households in Delhi with unerring precision within 24 hours of the former Prime Minister’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. Therefore, when a conspiracy drives mobs, it is not essential for them to act on a public identification network. There was no Aadhar then.

What is more relevant is the fact that the world has changed, and so has technology; and claiming privacy to be a “fundamental right” may be legally debatable but technologically laughable. Assuming that Big Brother is watching one’s movements, it makes sense giving everyone a number rather than making his wheat, or rice, get gobbled up by someone else.