A gift of maturity

A gift of maturity

There comes a time when a modern nation succeeds in lifting the veil on its potentialities. A time, when what it says and does can be measured against objective yardsticks that place it among the emerging winners. That it should also coincide with the end of the fastest- paced century in history is indeed a most favourable augury. Year 2000 for India, apart from notching up 53 years of nationhood with its corpus intact, ends up telling us we haven’t done half badly.

Let us take food first- in a nation of a billion plus souls that might have fallen victim to a Malthusian spectre long ago, we seem to have enough surplus wheat to trade it for bruisingly expensive oil. Issues of clothing and shelter, the other two pillars of basic survival, have also been much alleviated. This despite the fact that we have grown up with a notoriously inefficient “command and control” economy for at least 44 of our 53 years. But still, roti, kapda aur makaan are no longer breast-beaters in the exclusive realm of political rhetoric and Bollywood melodrama. They need to be seen as issues being addressed and objectives attainable by most, if not all, our people in 2000.

We still can’t claim satisfaction in several other essentials like electricity, water, transportation, communications, medical care, education, environment and so on. But the fact is, there are new and relatively innovative moves being made in all these areas. We also have had respectable growth rates in year 2000, and the CII projects even better figures for next year. We are, in addition, sitting on the largest foreign currency reserves ever. So, even though the first private insurers are beginning to stir with all the purpose of pensioners, and DTH’s too-little-too-late advent seems as star-crossed as the expensive electricity from Enron’s Dabhol project-modernisation and globalisation are definitely here to stay.

They have become an aspirational thing, which, as every yuppie on the cocktail circuit will tell you, is worth twice as much as mere gold. Did we really expect cellphone toting sarpanches this soon, or cyclists hurtling away in their first Maruti 800s, or porter-carried refrigerators in the satellite dish speckled hinterland of Himachal? And what about the savvy we are displaying at international beauty pageants?

But how does this maturing nation of ours define itself now? Could it be that Dewang Mehta of Nasscom is right? He has been credited with floating the attractive notion that what oil has been to the Arabs, IT will be to India. And then there are other suitors in the wings. Think of the emerging Indian stories in bio-technology, genome tweaking, cheaper Viagra, multifarious medical research and virtuoso surgical techniques for a start. The fact is, in 2000, all of it somehow breathes with a new confidence. This is because, for the first time, India has high-tech things to sell at a price that the whole of the developed world unequivocally wants. We have skills that have come of age to propel us closer to the head table of that all powerful Group of 8. The bomb, no doubt, also had something to do with it, as did the masterful control displayed at Kargil, but these I cannot take into the accomplishments of the year 2000. Still, since greatness is often preceded by signs and portents, they merit mention as significant milestones.

We ourselves, may not even remark on the breathtaking rescue of our peacekeepers in Sierra Leone, nor on the trend of NRIs and Western expatriates coming to live and work in India, or on Indian managers being exported or even on MNCs salivating at the size of our markets. And again we may not even notice that the foreign coverage on India has become distinctly less disparaging. But we must admit to noticing a US President, one of the most charismatic ever, albeit in his last year in office, spending nearly a week, wooing, as opposed to condescending to us this year.

And talking past the platitudes on democracy, we should be proud of some of the liveliest debates in the world splashed across newsprint and screen daily. We should also take pride in our election process that counts 600 million votes, mostly by hand, with unerring accuracy and impressive speed. Ironically, our virtues are sometimes brought into prominence by the misfortunes of others.

And talking of misfortunes, we have, at length and with all due ponderousness, finally stripped bare the shenanigans of cherished cricketing heroes. In the process, more in sorrow than anger, we have also learned to distinguish between our love of the game and a few of its flawed practitioners. It may be a fine point to some, but this too we have discovered about ourselves this year.

And most recently, we have seen a prime minister who heads a large and unwieldy coalition giving voice to the explosive view that a particular mandir should be built where a certain mosque used to be. And this simultaneously with taking the boldest peace initiatives seen so far to resolve the festering crisis in Kashmir. He has done both these things with courage, and got the NDA to keep him on his horse, despite many among them only agreeing to disagree. This then is the acid test of maturity because since when has power been comfortable with principle?

The fact is, we are no longer afraid to look at things that contradict each other. And having admitted them to ourselves, we are prepared to press on as best as we can. This is surely a gift of maturity. A most valuable gift that has come us this year in accumulation to those gone by. And I have no doubt that it is this gift of maturity above all which will animate our progress into the bold new century to come.

( 978 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
First published in The Pioneer www.dailypioneer.com on Sunday, December 24th 2004 in the Dialogue column

India cannot modernise without international help

India cannot modernise without international help


Time was when all we knew was frozen in time. We implemented Laskian socialism and gave every commanding height of the economy to the public sector. Typically, we did not throttle the private sector but put a strict watch on it instead. All around us we had either/or choices and life was as simple as the Fiat and the Ambassador. A man knew where he stood.

Time came when the citadel developed not just cracks but structural faults, serious enough to threaten the entire edifice. We were forced to change economic policies which had driven us nearly bankrupt, and that is when the confusion began.

Bureaucrats used to intoning shibboleths on “maximum employment” and “social objectives” underwent a culture shock when confronted with “return on investment” and “viability”. Manufacturers of goods made with pre-world war technology, when technology itself was young, scurried to modernise.

Foreigners streamed into our city hotels clutching shiny plastic credit cards, purveying all manner of enabling know-how, designs to revolutionise our infrastructure and multiply our options. Media folk coined images of springing tigers and lumbering elephants to depict an economy awakening. Think tank gurus extolled the virtues of the largest working democracy in the world, replete with an independent judiciary, a free Press and the “steel framework” of an extensive bureaucracy. Opportunity stared us in the face as we emerged from the socialist shadows, blinking in a market driven sunlight.

Now we are four years down the high road towards an open economy. Treasury coffers look genteel, far from over-flowing yet, but bound to grow, nudged by an annual GDP doubled since liberalisation began. Throughout our socialist years the gross domestic product managed to “grow” at no more than two per cent. A statistic dubbed the “Hindu rate of growth” by international sceptics, ironically contrasting India’s population explosion with her economic performance.

Even our present pace is not much faster than the proverbial pilgrim’s when compared to Pacific Rim economies posting annual growth in double digits. We could catch up if we wanted to. The bulls are indeed snorting behind the arras of cyberspace but the bears are still squatting in the arena. Four years down the road of our boldness we have developed cold feet wondering when we saw the last milestone and what was written on the gantry signs overhead.

Nostalgia hits us for that time past when it stood still. A time when all our deficiencies could be jettisoned at the altar of socialist ideology. When we comforted ourselves that after all, “social justice” did not come cheap.

Meanwhile the car we are in keeps rolling inexorably on towards the free market. It is no longer the familiar hold-all Ambassador, nor the constant Padding but a new fangled Maruti mutating into a Peugeot, a Cielo, an Opel Astra, even a Mercedes as the kilometres flow by. We look with distaste at this apology for a high road impervious to the high tech machinery straddling it. There is so much to update now that the citadel is breached!

Where do we begin? Fact is we already have-four years ago, but now we are not so sure. That is why there are3 anarchic winds blowing around and opinions like blades of grass sweeping left, right, and standing straight up, buffeted from all sides.

Change is scary, there, I have admitted it, but we can either make room for it or collapse under our cumulative burdens like our erstwhile friends, the USSR. Every civic and infrastructural facility we have today is an anachronism: roads, airports, stations, ‘phones, schools, colleges, hospitals, insurance, law courts like bedlam, gardens like garbage dumps, garbage dumps like mountains, adulterated food, contaminated water, sub-standard and expensive housing, inadequate and temperamental electricity- the list is so long we have grown apathetic to its ravages.

We cannot solve our problems fiddling like Nero as India gets mired deeper in the morass. Harking back to a mythical golden age in the long ago cannot wipe out the stench of a present decay-a symptom of a dying civilisation is to refuse to look upon the face of reality.

Ladies could not stop the industrial revolution. Hydra –headed fundamentalism will also, in time, be ironed out of the history pages, just as a wrinkle is smoothed away. Discarded, not because of its ideological debilities alone, but overtaken by independent compulsions to modernise everything, produce competitive goods and services, carve a niche for India, in order to survive in the global village.

We cannot modernise unless we take the international help that is being offered. We fed our hunger with the Green Revolution. As consequences we have growing surpluses after feeding a population doubled in the interim. We beat back drought with canals, irrigation, dams and wasteland reclamation. We did not do these things alone. The benefits are so profound that the word “famine” has been obliterated from the Indian lexicon. There were so many starvation deaths in the 19th century that it makes the losses of the holocaust look like a bus accident.

Reinventing the wheel will take too long. We have to take charge and pay attention to the terms on which we induct technology. Our intelligence must be harnessed to getting ourselves the best catapult to make up for the inward looking years.

Today we might consider ourselves desirable because of a huge, potentially lucrative domestic market. We should be careful not to sit too long admiring ourselves. Suitors get tired of uncooperative damsels and settle for the charms of more pliable ones.

We should all get this clear-that a country of the size and importance of India has no choice but to clamber to its new tryst with destiny inside shiny buildings o0f chrome and glass at the free market. There is no mileage in looking wistfully at quaint mud huts rushing by the car windows because they, and their ilk, cannot meet our burgeoning needs, and if truth be told, never have! We cannot cling to a tattered dogma on the threshold of the second millennium.

Our very own Swedish Camelot is waiting for us on the round table of global cooperation now, not among the crumbling ruins of our socialist citadel. We have to learn to enjoy the new found choices given us by the gods of technology. Techno Gods who have abstracted the gold and jewels from sovereign crowns and replaced them with invasive inter-networked information beamed from the heavens.

If we go out and meet this brave new world head on we will not be intimidated by the glare. If we resist the inevitable, the tottering citadel will collapse upon us.

That would be the epitaph fit for a dinosaur – a country grown too tired to adapt, an ancient civilisation preferring to climb into permanent slumber on the pages of history encircled with encomiums and laurels.

( 1, 142 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
First published in The Pioneer www.dailypioneer.com on Monday 26th February, 1996 on the Edit Page in the main Opinion slot

Sorry vessels for change

Sorry vessels for change

“When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
There I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again…”

From Helter Skelter, The Beatles, in The White Album

There’s this déjà vu quality to progression that mocks the entire effort. Why, your philosophical self asks your prosaic side, do you bother to strive if all you really want is more of the same? In other words, if you are poor, you want to be poorer. No, not quite. You want to be the opposite. If you are weak, you want to be strong. If you are ugly, you want to be beautiful.

But what about if you already are, in some measure, what you want to be? Then you definitely want more of the same, not the opposite. You want more power if you are already powerful, better cars, if you already have them and so on.

This is fine as it stands, because it is understandable that you want to get all the things you do not have under your belt in short order. It is equally valid that you should want to preserve and enhance all your privileges. Change is a double-edged sword of freedom that can cut through Gordian knots that oppress you while whispering simultaneously of the whirlwind that can consume you if you are not vigilant. So, this is about recognising change either as an opportunity or a threat, depending on who you are and where you are located in the pecking order.

Since most of our crystal balls are singularly foggy about how change will affect us, quite a lot of us stick to the devil we know as opposed to new fangled devils one has yet to figure out. Tradition draws upon the status quo and seduces its adherents by reassuring them with the weight of times past when the premise has acquitted itself honourably, enhancing the established order, keeping the ship of life on course and shielded from the upsets of the ocean deep.

For the have-nots who constitute the whole world in one season or the other, because we can all point at various items lacking in our lives, the preservationist model is not par for the course. So, the duality of wanting more while hanging on to what we already have makes us take the plunge. Of course the resultant waves rock the raft of our primacy on whatever it is we do possess!

This brings us to the non sequitur of the “free lunch” and we readily agree we must pay for our cravings. You have got to give in order to get and such other homilies flood the brain. We are persuaded to take the plunge and become accomplices to rocking our raft, the very one we are perched on.

The ride begins and we feel strangely liberated, as if, just for a little while, we have demonstrated worth, as if we have dared to live up to our potential. Then the storm of uncertainty overcomes us, stripping away security, mocking our established order, destroying sentimental things. We are not very sure this was worth the trouble. We have done this out of pride, so now we have to take the fall. Our minds are sorry vessels for change clinging to vestiges of familiar things, revising pride into abject denial, bolstering it with Dutch Courage that hopes it is all a dream that we will awaken from and find everything is as it was before.

The Changemeister asks if that is what you really want because I can freeze your request and put things back the way they were. But are you sure, because I do not want to waste my time. A twinge of pride creeps back amongst the rising panic and we find ourselves saying no, carry on, but tell me it won’t hurt too much.

And thus mankind makes progress as a process of overcoming fear of the little known. Brave processes that plump for loss of primacy as a distinct possibility. We can prove we are not beyond redemption if we try to change. We dimly realise what will happen if we stand still. So we move on and after enough time elapses all the progress we have made becomes history, even tradition. Is it any wonder that we get the feeling that we’ve somehow seen it all before?

(750 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
First published in The Pioneer www.dailypioneer.com on Monday, April 8th, 1996
on the OP-ED page in the Analysis section, Musings column

From a socialist dogma to a glimmer of hope

From a socialist dogma to a glimmer of hope

Significant beginnings are harbingers of the future. What “Rosebud” was to Citizen Kane, "The Meiji Restoration" to Japan, the “Long March” to China. “The whiff of grapeshot” to Napoleon, “Anand”, to the future of Amitabh Bachchan, the first five years of liberalisation will be, to the future of India.

In these five years, economics emerged as a political statement so powerful that the future will not be able to ignore the brief season when the reforms policy was introduced. The voter has spoken in several voices but the final tally consists of one part in favour of Hindu resurgence, one part in favour of modernisation, and a third, which is a fractured amalgamation of regional aspirations trying to meld itself into one entity.

The question before the country today is should secularism be upheld at great cost by an ostrich-like denial of the three pronged-popular mandate or should it be tempered by the compelling logic of blending all three verdicts of the voter? The United Front combined vote means that the States want more autonomy and they will have to be given it. Resources will have to be more equitably distributed. Decision-making will have to be decentralised.

The majority Hindu community will have to be given its demand for a pre-eminent position so that the insecurity bogey of becoming second-class-citizens in their own country is removed. Denied, this groundswell has taken the BJP from a negligible two seats to 195 along with its electoral allies. Denied some more, it will ensure the full manifestation of a saffron regime with a hard right agenda come the next election!

The country must continue on its path of modernisation initiated by the Narasimha Rao Government. Under his courageous leadership the Congress Party jettisoned the creaky socialism that might have garnered more votes but does nothing for the modernisation of the country or its hopes to play a significant role in the community of nations. It is not surprising that with the disturbance of the status quo brought about by the Rao administration, the other unresolved problems of over centralisation at New Delhi and the paranoia of the 82 per cent Hindu majority vis-à-vis the minorities, should also appear and demand to be addressed.

The apprehension that the century plus old Congress Party could disappear because of its departure from its original principles of socialism and swadeshi brings an example to mind. For the entire 19th century, the British parliament saw governments run by either the Whigs or the Tories. The 19th century was a time of remarkable economic stability with the economic index for the entire century pegged at four per cent! Then the new century produced the upheavals of the two World Wars, and after that, the world changed completely.

The old Whigs virtually disappeared to be replaced by the Labour Party. Since we have based our parliamentary democracy on the Westminister model, is there a case in point for us to expect elements of the BJP and Congress to merge into a party of the right while all the regional forces and other like minded entities coalesce into a party of the Left? It would certainly shrink the ballot paper from its bed-sheet like proportions and provide the electorate with clear cut alternatives hitherto denied.

Will this new formation which some people see emerging from the historic verdict of the people become the shape of things to come? It is interesting to note Mr. HD Deve Gowda’s outburst after being denied the opportunity to form a Government at the Centre on May 16th, 1996. He said, “I am leaving for Karnataka, we will not bother to vote against the BJP. After all, it is a Congress-BJP coalition.” Has he prophetically articulated the future? More importantly, is it after due consideration, the appropriate response to the verdict of the people for the 11th Lok Sabha?

On the matter of economics becoming a political statement, let us examine some recent history. After decades through which no Indian dared to visualise a strong resurgent economy on par with the best anywhere, today we are witnessing a growing band of industrialists asserting they will create transnational corporations, that they can modernise and compete internationally, that there is no need to hand over the country to wholly-owned subsidiaries of foreign companies. They might have an ulterior self-serving motive of course, but several of them mean what they say. It was not so long ago that many of the same worthies moaned endlessly about inferior manpower, inferior infrastructure, red-tapism, political interference, lack of commitment, constraints of growth owing to dogma, and ended up saying that India would therefore remain a Third World backwater for close to eternity. They implied then that they were thoroughbreds constrained and if their shackles were to be removed they could fly like the wind. Perhaps it is time to call their bluff and then we can see who is part of the wheat and who is only chaff.

The socialist years were like a long session of study and preparation for the day we would come out to claim our destiny. If we really could not stand the cant in that period we could join the bully-boy bureaucracy at home, or skip to foreign shores and become “clever Indians”. There was a virtue made out of mediocrity that coloured our thinking.

Internationally, we saw for ourselves the failure of systems that denied their citizens the goodies of life. They did not grow strong. In time, they were hard pressed to provide even the onions and potatoes of daily existence. The amazing thing is we saw ourselves as a variation on this theme of deprivation, thanking God for the fact that we had enough to eat, that we could at least buy inferior goods, that we could avail of indifferent education and health services. We gradually gave up on expecting anything more, thinking it would not ever come to pass.

Now all that is changed. We know now that there is no glass ceiling we cannot break through if we try. The country has taken out its notebook and pencil to make its wish lists. The bourses indicate a yearning for economic growth never before witnessed and pessimism about retrograde steps that could be taken in support of socialist dogmas.

The Indian polity has grown up. We now no longer ally ourselves with the post-colonial have-nots in celebration of non-alignment. We do not shrug and say we just do not have the money to improve things and so must lump it as it is, resigned to deterioration and decay in the name of principle. We have been talking seriously of an integration with the world economy, of a free floating currency, of untold billions pouring in, to give us a chance to catch up, and be second to none.

Why has this happened? Is it because the polity is reflecting a broad consensus on this bid for prosperity? Has the evidence already before us convinced the electorate that there is every chance of becoming a first rate nation after all? If this is so, we should be suffused with hope for the future, because once we have dared to believe in our destiny, we have destroyed the mental shackles of a Third World apology forever. All that remains is to build detailed consensus on issue after issue as they hurtle past us towards implementation.

( 1,241 words)

By Gautam Mukerji

First published in The Pioneer www.dailypioneer.com on Wednesday, June 5th, 1996 in the main OPINION slot on the Edit Page.

Indian culture has little to fear from chips and cola

Indian culture has little to fear from chips and cola


There is a reasonably popular school of thought that needs to apply a brush to its thinking. The thought runs like this: why does India need potato chips, fried chicken, thick crusted pizzas, fancy apparel, fancier shoes, designer do-dads, imported pulp fiction, manners and mores via satellite et al, when it has substantial needs in infrastructure and considerable culture of its own? Which misguided soul permitted all of those baubles to strew our shores when we have such huge deficits in basic infrastructure? How much longer should the righteous endure this aberration of policy before setting it back on the tried and tested rails of our national needs? Frivolity is okay but should the national policy cater to it?

The drift of the above diatribe misses out the history of our sovereign democratic republic. We came in on a burst of ahimsa peppered with dead nationalist heroes and the factory siren dominated rule of a British Labour Party, weary from the War, not willing to get any more of its constituency killed over imperial lucre on distant shores. We jettisoned the “small is beautiful” policies of the Mahatma with enormous despatch, remembering, and generally believing, that it costs a lot to keep a nation in poverty, to paraphrase and twist Mrs Naidu’s famous remark on the Mahatma’s predilections. We built a command economy and watered it down to take into account the plurality of our thinking. Had Trotsky survived the purge he would have understood Nehru’s reluctance to wield a big stick.

We believed in social equality and enshrined it in the preamble and directive principles to the Constitution, and administered the country with a thicket of laws for a full 44 years before liberalisation; administering this bias, but without attacking the rich or demeaning their enterprise. We knew our ancient culture was replete with kings and serfs and a sinuous bonding held them together. Sometimes, more out of spite than governance, we snatched away privileges given solemnly at the hour of our nation’s birth from the princes, stripping away their titles and purses, and again from the people themselves during the Emergency, but soon remorse overcame these excesses and our rulers stood contrite in front of the populace to take their punishment. The princes became ambassadors, politicians, industrialists, hoteliers.

We are not quite fifty as an independent nation but have shown a remarkable maturity both from the point of view of the governing classes and the governed. Both have, in the ultimate analysis, forgiven the excesses of the other and learned to respect the flash points that matter to each. The populace threw out Mrs. Gandhi because of the Emergency but brought her back longing for her sincerity and ability when the poseurs and small-minded had had a go at trashing the portals of power. We threw out Mr. VP Singh for being opportunistic over Mandal but he will go down in history as the man who addressed the inequity of a system of democracy which carefully contrived to keep the backwards out of real power. Jagjivan Ram’s ashes must be giving birth to a sea of flowers at the thought. Had he been alive now in 1996, perhaps his ability would have counted for more than his caste. Ms Mayawati will heartily agree with him and so will Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav and Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav and many others.

The governing classes have their own story of noblesse oblige to tell. A home-loving pilot lost his life in the hurly-burly of a political legacy he was uncomfortable with. His mother refused to stop short of attacking the Golden Temple at Amritsar or paying for her sacrilege with her life in the security interests of her country. Her Army Chief, General Vaidya, died the unprotected death of a pensioner with a solitary guard who could not even unsheath his weapon to protect the great man. The BJP has never recovered from the ignominy of destroying the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. A well-known historical precedent for their logic was that of Auranzeb’s, and he did as much to destroy the Mughal legacy as Akbar did to build it. They both lived one solitary incarnation and made their owm historical statements for us to assess.

Less exalted men with good education and from comfortable backgrounds have donned the regulation terry-cotton pyjamas, updated from the nationalist khaddar pre-independence, to grapple with the shaping of a democratic ethos that is a far cry from the Churchillian sneer of us destroying ourselves in no time. I wonder if that was really a sneer or the lament of a lover who had been shown the door.

Bureaucrats and postal employees, workers and mill hands, farmers, engineers, doctors, computer experts, mechanics, sadhus, charlatans, clowns and tragedy queens, bus drivers and railwaymen, scooter wallahs, taxi drivers and ferrymen, fisherfolk and bootleggers, dacoits and saints, aesthetes and boors, we have all made up this fabric from Madna to Malgudi (Yes, I know, you have many more who need naming too).

In broader terms and reaching farther back into time, India has always shown a remarkable ability to take in the invader and his foreign influences and churn it up so mysteriously and well that the new one becomes an Indian too. We therefore should have little to fear from the pop culture and food coming into the country. It might not be long till peculiar Indian hybrids and adaptations rule the roost. It is difficult to dilute an ancient culture. It is much more likely that the new influence will get blended in with the rest.

Now to the moot point of infrastructural investment.Anybody knows that it takes years to build power plants, roads, railways, ports, bridges, drill for oil, establish telecommunication networks, and that masses of deadwood have to be shifted to make room. Our legal system may be very thorough but no one can accuse it of restlessness. So why should any investor in his right mind wish to get involved in such exercises with less than advantageous terms to compensate for the delayed gratification? And why should he not want to make a quick buck at some instant coffee sales at the same time? Going back to the FERA days will not help the process and did the electorate give their votes to the Bombay Club or to the politicians who stood before them?

From our own point of view, it is clear that we are in need of everything, even superior rubber bands, which our local industry on its own refuses to make without the prod of competition. Perhaps Indian industry can do many things just like Indian politicians or writers or film makers or bureaucrats can, but we can only do it if there is a perceived need to change something.

Today there is a need for the elected representatives to submerge their petty agendas in order to cobble together a stable government. The voter has spoken in many voices leaving it up to the representatives to interpret his wishes. The wish list implies a blending of the various aspirations of the populace. Can our elected representatives bear this in mind when they start their post-election negotiations?

Instead of demanding a selective and lopsided appreciation of our charms, why do we not plunge in wholesale, confident of our ancient legacy of survival and amalgamation of the best and the worst that anyone can bring to our shores?

(1,243 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
First published in THE PIONEER www.dailypioneer.com on Wednesday, June 19th, 1996 in the main OPINION slot on the Edit page

The Pinocchio profession

The Pinocchio profession

There’s this risqué joke about the little wooden doll, Pinocchio, only child to the childless dollmaker and his homely missus. Pinocchio went forth into the world to seek his fortune and because of his innate charm and cuteness was taken in buy a handsome widow who soon put him to work.

Pinocchio worked hard at his chores around the widow’s cottage but was puzzled by the bouts of demonstrated affection shown to him by the widow. She would snuggle him face down in her lap and sighingly implore him to tell another lie. Now we all know the little wooden boy’s nose grew perceptibly every time he told a lie, something his parents had warned him not to do or he’d have to carry around the evidence for all to see.

Thus a pleasant diversion for the widow poses a dilemma for the little wooden doll. He likes the widow and wants to do her bidding but does not want to tell lies, much less carry around the evidence on his face for all to see. It would not be much of a dilemma if it was agreed that lies which give pleasure are different from and not as bad as ones that cause pain. But Pinocchio’s parents had been unequivocal on the morality of lie-telling. There were no good lies and bad lies in their book. They wanted their child to be truthful, no more no less.

The profession of public relations is faced with the dilemma of Pinocchio. It is clear to all the dream merchants in creativity that the real task is to demonstrate a clear vision and state the relevant issue in a positive manner. Not one of the practitioners of any art wants to tell lies while they’re about it. The moral crisis arises when the facts are not so savoury and have to be packaged and air brushed. Is it legitimate to highlight myths and by inference enhance the stature of a deficient client? Probably not, but then again, in the real world, it might not be easy to decide these things in absolute terms. It might be necessary to position the salient facts in a becoming manner vis a vis the competition. This does not seem so bad and the action lets one skirt the moral issues that plague the little wooden doll.

The true relevance of the profession in present times is to shine light on the knots and gnarlies that block development. These snarl-ups are often a consequence of mindsets which have become outdated, part of ideological positions which have shifted not only stance but content, in short, when policies change but do not transmit.

In such circumstances, a new moral ground is discovered by the practitioners of the Pinocchio profession. They become modern day Galahads out to do justice. They purvey information, clearly, concisely, in balanced perspective, to clarify issues so that the audience can cut through the thorny brambles over the stone work battlements of a discarded ideology. In times of change, as in present day India, there is an immense need for a clear statement on the nature and content of that change. Not only is the concept to be understood widely but also the consequences, the meaning of everyday manifestations, of the new order.

Without this clear interpretation of the consequences of change, you get ironic situations where the architects of worthwhile progress become victimised for their authorship. It quickly becomes apparent that the forces of reaction do not sit idle when anything disturbs the status quo. The centrist approach has traditionally been to appropriate the moral high ground without batting an eyelid, and from this vantage point, try to bludgeon the progressives into retreat and denial.

Having assumed the mantle of righteousness, the reactionaries think nothing of distorting facts, creating convenient collages of selective myth and spuriously passing off the heady cocktail in terms of a defence of culture and character versus a new found and mindless decadence.

We are a nation of great diversity in every conceivable way. This is why it is important to build consensus towards change. Change which is inevitable in its very nature. The time has come to regard the profession of public affairs in its true perspective, not as fancy footwork and smooth talk, but as the method by which we can grasp the issues that affect our lives. If public affairs people can rise to this challenge so can readers of our newspapers.

The fact of the matter is the dollmaker and his missus were quite right. There is no such thing as a “good” lie.

(769 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
First published in THE PIONEER www.dailypioneer.com on Friday, March 22nd, 1996

Show more confidence...

Show more confidence in growth and efficiency

There are at least two ways to make up a deficit. One is to save, another is to earn more. The Government of India apparently prefers the feudal way, which was to tax the ryots! Now independent for 49 years, the Government has updated its list of victims. Today it is merit and achievement in industry and commerce it preys upon, in addition to the ubiquitous urban common man fixed in the popular imagination by the dhoti-clad and check-shirted Laxman character. Of course, the erstwhile ryot is now exempted from all tax as free India’s atonement for the yoke it has carried since Mughal times. Rich farmers are exempted too because the rural constituencies make up over 60 per cent of the substantial population. And which politician wants to look a voting horse in the mouth?

Foreign companies who flocked to India because of its potential are sitting here losing money because the thicket of different entry taxes is arcane and complicated despite steady reductions recently. Why can we not have a flat excise duty and a single customs slab? Would that not increase revenues from its great virtue of simplicity and do away with the arcane in import administration?

Waste and pilferage, on the other hand, is a constant in Go0vernment administration. Considering their track record, it is imperative they limit themselves to the true core provinces of the Government. Let us look at some examples. Electricity, already a rare commodity, is going up in price all the time to subsidise transmission and distribution losses which in some cases is as high as 50 per cent.

The sharp pre-budget petroleum products’ price hike was not just due to devaluation of our currency- which anyway is because of years of unbalanced budgets- but also due to tens of thousands of extra personnel that refine and distribute the stuff, working little and obstructing much. The pace of decision-making in the Government is so snail-like, that even a ruthless dictatorship of the Left, as in China, or the Right, as in Indonesia, with all their human-rights abuses, swarm ahead of us, at every turn becoming darlings of the international investor community in the process. Anything, it seems, is better than cobwebs growing on their files and mildew sprouting on their investment plans.

It comes down to this: No politician dares to address the issues on a holistic basis. Each one in turn makes his spot on the gaddi convenient and hurries away without a thought to tackling the problem root and branch. There is no denying that increasing taxes, provided compliance is enforced , is indeed a sure-fire methods to reduce Budget deficits, but reducing them to spur growth is a risk that could lead, after all to double jeopardy.

However, this cynical and short-sighted outlook has made a country the size and potential of India inferior to much smaller Asian countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, not to mention tiny places like Singapore and Hong Kong. Before the first Budget proposals of the 11th Lok Sabha are finally canned, it is necessary for the rulers to commit themselves to the modern world. When the Prime Minister calls it a pro-poor Budget, and the reality is that the social sector spending allocations are the lowest in four years. I wonder who he is kidding? Can image ever substitute for reality?

The last Budget exercise was entirely defensive, with inadequate sops to various concerns of nation-building, akin to an attempt to feed a nation of Olivers with everyone holding up his bowl for more! How can the biggest and most productive industries be penalised for investing their profit into growth while the shamefully deficient public sector continues to squander the nation’s assets on lazy personnel and shoddy goods? Who is the Finance Minister actually putting on the mat? I would say it is the nation, because he is subsidising inefficiency and abetting sloth.

The sheer bulk of Government and its involvement in many things which are not its for province needs to be addressed. The CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) has already suggested how the number of ministers can be reduced but is anybody listening? Is a limit to hikes that can be applied to administered prices because it spurs inflation. There is actually no way out of the radical surgery to come if we go bankrupt- expect to make a beginning now. Otherwise, despite FII (Foreign Institutional Investor) interest and 12 per cent industrial growth, we are headed the USSR way.

The Government must show a sweeping will to privatise that puts pressure on the “lifer” government servants to perform or face the consequences. In other words, take away security of tenure and reward merit and achievement. This cannot be done without a catalyst and the agent of change is surely the private sector aided and abetted by foreign money. Large chunks of activity need to be taken away from government administration and the remaining core areas need to work with one eye on India’s place in the community of nations with emphasis on Asia in particular.

In industry, which has perked up considerably after the Rao administration loosened controls, the real growth will only come when the Government sheds its iron grip on monopolies and carefully structured bottlenecks from which vantage point it can reduce the private sector into a gibbering mess at will. The stock markets have long been waiting for some succour. The Government seems to take a sadistic delight in refusing to help. The Depository Act has taken its own sweet time and it is probable that the babus at SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) will not lower their dignity by hurrying up to implement it. Still, it is very much welcome, even if it has taken too many years.

A fillip to investor sentiment could be given by removing double taxation on dividends. We should follow international practice in this regard and simply do away with this soft option of raising petty revenues. If this were done it would certainly attract a much bigger flow of funds into the bourses from domestic investors. The move to review MAT( Minimum Alternate Tax) is most timely as the reportage on 10 per cent of the PPF (Public Provident Fund) money being liberated from the clutches of Government approved securities for the bourses.

On the subject of exports our single biggest lacuna is a lack of quality. This is not necessarily a permanent indictment, but if we want to increase export earnings we have to offer quality goods and services. If the other much smaller “Asian Tigers” have done it, so can we. But we need the help of the Government to assist in a total modernisation programme. To paraphrase Professor Higgins, Oh! Why can’t the Indian Government be more like the Japanese Government?

Exporters are hampered by some of the highest indirect taxes and utility costs in the world. Imposition of MAT will not help them any more than the flat two per cent tax on all imports. Forty-nine years on, we remain an exporting nation of garment sweat-shops, diamond craftsmen, carpet sellers, software-supermarkets, commodity traders and handicraft vendors. The total hardly figures in the statistics of world trade. Nothing substantial is, as yet, exportable. Who on earth wants to buy Indian machinery?

So in the end, I have a conceptual formula to offer. One cut taxes to spur growth. Two, reduce the size of government and the public sector; and, three, emphasise quality in everything. Is anybody in the Government of India listening?

(1,260 words)

By Gautam Mukerji

First published in THE PIONEER www.dailypioneer.com on Friday, October 4th, 1996 in the main OPINION column on the Edit page

Postscript

Services now account for 56 per dent of the economy. Software turned into more than a “supermarket”. Manufacturing exports still suffer from quality issues but India Inc. armed with the Government’s over US $ 200 billion in reserves is addressing quality, technology and market share issues in developed countries by buying up companies all over the world.

The Government has, at last, substantially, if not in full measure, started assisting Business and Industry and is delivering consistent 8 to 9 per cent GDP growth.

Many of the Stock Market bottlenecks are gone and total FII investment in the decade gone by add up to over 52 billion dollars. If all goes well, this fiscal could see US $ 12 billion come in. FDI is expecting USD 38 billion in 2007. India has just crossed into the rarefied ranks of a trillion dollar economy…

Agriculture is languishing (2 per cent growth) and 60 per dent of India’s population dependent on agriculture have benefited only marginally from her inclusion as a fast-track BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) economy and all the reams of newsprint devoted to exploring the ways and means of India and China being the greatest economic growth opportunities of the 21st century...

There is still no Provident Fund money in the Indian Stock Market.

Only savagery...

Only savages destroy art and antiquity

When Alexander the Great marched through Persia, victorious over King Darius, his men destroyed the great palaces and library in Persepolis, in a drunken show of savagery. They staggered around torching quiet wisdom and sumptuous beauty in an orgy of potent bestiality. It could have only made sense through the exaggerated eyes of liquor maddened bloodlust.

Savagery can be noble only if it is unpremeditated. Hanumanji, the loyal, ascetic and celibate monkey god must be repulsed at the recent burning of 23 works of Hussain’s art in his name. This is the typical soft target attack of the cowardly fascist coming down through the drains and sewers of recorded history and certainly not the work of any friend of Bajrangbali.

The depiction of naked womanhood, exalted in a goddess, is a legitimate conception, neither helped nor hampered by clothing. This nudity can only be perceived as a threat in faint hearts, because to the rest of us it is an image worthy of exaltation. To those of us who respect the shakti of womanhood, in a land where the yoni is worshipped formally, there is nothing to do except draw strength from a goddess depicted in any form.

Goddesses are not sexual objects of flesh and blood that we can outrage our hypocrisy over. They are founts of divine energy that the human mind gropingly gives form and substance to. What dignity can an artist steal from godhead by disrobing it? Did Pope Julius II not come to terms with Michelangelo’s conception of a naked god on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

The Mussalmans, through the ages, have refined and extended the entire field of calligraphy, permissible inside mosques. In Islam, let alone inside mosques, images of Allah, or his Prophet, in fact, the human form, including the female shape, are anathema. But the urge of mankind to embellish and exalt divinity found outlets in mosque architecture including tremendous advances in geometric design, jail work etc…. Precious jewels were embedded in the walls on occasion to add majesty. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, from where Muhammad the Prophet ascended to heaven, has a golden dome.

In contrast to these aesthetic expressions, throughout history, arbitrary savagery has had to impose itself by force of arms. There is honour in a martial sense in that. But in India today, we are witnessing a flaccid fascism that resorts to prurient mockery of the calendar-art-and-logic variety. And this type of bully picks soft targets via the back door.

This is no triumph of the lotus over the muck it springs from. What is being offered to an unsuspecting public is a poisonous cousin that attempts to reduce everything to its bestial minimum. Destroying symbols of another’s accomplishment is an impotent deed that deserves nothing but condemnation.

What does the controversy over temples and mosques in Kashmir, Mathura, Varanasi and lesser known hot-spots have in common with Ayodhya? The commonality lies in the threat of destruction and the demeaning malice that accompanies that thought process. But what bahaduri can there possibly be in bullying ancient and often revered stones as proxy for the targeted minorities?

Is such bigoted thinking not on the same train with abominations like ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe or Iraq? Such provocative ideas ignore the potential for utter outrage that can result in riots and mayhem. Pushed far enough, even a mouse can, at last, learn to roar. Did the bomb blasts in Mumbai not follow on from the destruction of the Babri Masjid? Where were the pyjama clad agents of saffron righteousness then? Should Hindu militancy not worry ( very seriously) about its ghee-fed underbelly?

Is the respite in Punjab and Kashmir to be treated as a thing of no consequence? Do we learn nothing from the tribulations of neighbouring Sri Lanka being ripped asunder in a jihad between Hindu Tamils and Buddhist Sinhalese? Not satisfied with the miracle of Indian style coexistence, savage and unthinking agent provocateurs wantonly play at shattering the calm in our body politic along religious lines.

Reasonable as these thoughts might be, I am not advocating appeasement, merely good sense. Whatever is good for the goose is indeed likewise for the gander. Having said that, it is very important to realise where it is all headed when savagery is allowed to lead the way. Dulcet toned Goebellesian logic is palavering up the intellectual rearguard. The cart and horse of Hindu assertion is tangled and unjustifiable. One rule of law is a laudable objective but so is the right to personal choice. How can selective logic be trotted out like the random killings of Jews shown in the parade ground scene in Schlinder’s List?

If we, the public, don’t watch our rears with all due diligence, we may soon be ruled, not by Ram in any kind of Rajya but by Asuras wearing Ram masks and laughing up the points of their devilish little trishuls.

The bush fires sought to be lit by cynical agent provocateurs could tear asunder the fabric of our young nation by undermining its secular credentials. Nehru said he did not want to create a Hindu Pakistan and indeed, one has only to look at the state of play in Bangladesh or Pakistan to realise that religion outside one’s home or place of worship can be a dangerous thing. As state policy, it becomes the hand-maiden of power hungry philistines no more interested in right and wrong than they are in purity of purpose.

India has done a lot better than its neighbours in this business of nation building and will continue to do so if we stick to the course chosen by our founding fathers, which of course included Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.

But there are grave threats to the national eiderdown with boorish and uncouth savages attempting to trample on the dignity and grace of a well endowed and tolerant people. Before this gets any worse, let us demand a proper accounting of the motivations involved, so that we are not consumed like so many collaborating Jews in the furnaces of our own complicity.

(1,000 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
October 28, 1996
First published in THE PIONEER www.dailypioneer.com in November 1996

Post script

Then came the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas and 9/11 and 7/7 and Godhra and Afghanistan and Iraq... Also Varanasi, Sarojini Nagar and countless strikes in Kashmir

Maqbool Fida Hussain, now in his nineties, feels safer living in Dubai. Dalai Lama, now in his seventies, feels safer living in India...

Kashmir is still burning but most, if not all, the terrorism is coming in from across the border now and very few Kashmiris see any merit in becoming part of Pakistan.

We are not popular in Bangladesh, or in Sri Lanka for that matter, but are better liked than we used to be in Pakistan, and China, and the United States... surprise, surprise!

Samuel P Huntingdon and extracts from his essay “The Clash of Civilisations” (1993) has become familiar to most armchair intellectuals, specially those who see a 100 year war against terrorism ahead...

We have learned very little from the examples set by Aurangzeb. This either makes us slow learners or wiser than we look.

In seeking affirmative action and reservations for the poor and "caste challenged" we probaly have bigger fish to fry than minorityism even if most of our minorities are nation builders we need to be proud of. Our mussalmans, more populous than in almost any other country,prefer, on balance, to be Indians and live in India rather than anywhere else, particularly Pakistan...

Through all this, savagery continues to be alive and well in 2007 but the good news is it's not winning and the way things are going for it, it probably never will.