Some of TKR's writings from The Tribune (from 1998-2002)

I. Politics and corruption: then and now
T. K. Ramasamy

Poor George Fernandes. Not any proven misdeed but a broad public perception condemned him as guilty and unacceptable. And this deep-rooted suspicion of every politician being corrupt lies just beneath the surface, so to speak. In the surcharged atmosphere of today, it takes just one misstep or a careless remark to attract adverse attention and lose the reputation built over the years. You are guilty until you prove yourself innocent.

This is today's conventional wisdom. It is the variation of the old Peter's Principle that if an accident can happen, it will happen. If a bureaucrat or a politician can rake in tainted money, he will. And all those in policy-making and implementation business are in a position to make money. So they will or can.

Ask any seasoned bureaucrat. He or she will tell you a few common facts that pass off as secrets. One, policy-making and administration have become extremely complicated as living itself. The demand on the daily life of a senior official or a junior politico is such that he needs extra support to just live. And the nazarana tradition comes alive. Divali in the north and New Year in the rest of the country is the time when lavish gifts come one's way. They are no more just a token affair but a quid pro quo, a kind of retainer, an advance payment to be reclaimed in future.

This is the most widely accepted form of using money to curry favour, a latter day version of Dale Carneige's how to win friends and influence people. And it works. An officer of the Punjab government received some 20 years ago nearly three dozen suit lengths as Divali gifts and asked a leading textile merchant to sell them and give him the cash. After a few days the honest trader gave him a few lakh of rupees with the remark that not one piece had been sold but the money was found in the folds of the suit lengths along with visiting cards.

Former Union Minister Abdul Ghafoor offers the other extreme. He once sought the advice of the then Prime Minister to meet a peculiar problem he faced. This desi sharab loving Bihar leader complained that he received at least 20 guests every day and as was the custom, had to provide them accommodation and food. His salary and allowances did not go far enough. What should he do? No one knows what Indira Gandhi did.

Umashankar Dixit once regaled a small group of young journalists with his deep insight into political fund raising and the changing lifestyle of shady politicians. As a long-time treasurer of the Congress, he stoutly defended raising money for party work but divided field workers into three groups - the honest, the tolerable and the greedy. In the first category fall those State-level leaders and ministers who collect crores of rupees in the name of the party, keep about 20 per cent with them and pass on the rest to the central leadership. They are the honest lot, the backbone of the party.

Wait a minute. If they collected just Rs 10 crore and retained 20 per cent, they were richer by Rs 2 crore and yet the veteran called them honest. How come? The job, he said, was a high cost one. The man had to live in style, attend and organise parties, offer gifts on birthdays and weddings and maintain an office and staff. All this needed money and hence the compulsion to carve out a huge commission. In his own style, Dixit added that there was no law to prohibit him from keeping a greater share!

In the middle group came those who split the funds evenly with the party. They normally raised moderate amounts of money and their half did help them to work their way to the top leadership at the state and central levels and swing a few deals in favour of their benefactors. They had to serve a large client base, and maintaining contact could cost a lot. They were then the flamboyant ones, posing much more important than they really were. You saw them at every Congress convention, nudging close to the top leadership and moving about briskly and importantly, doing nothing.

The last rung is occupied by those who too did raise money but so small that it merely went to support their families. They occasionally parted with a fifth of their collection but were the point man at the lowest level — shopkeepers, small factory owners, not-so-big lawyers and others. They were the living link, the janata's neta. They spring to life during elections.

In Dixit's days seeking money for a political party was a discreet affair and not a purificatory process, as many believe today. Pramod Mahajan once came close to saying this. Just before the BJP annual convention in Mumbai, he came under attack from the diehard RSS old guard for his lavish style of living, a plush car, a cellular phone and frequent visits to five-star hotels. He retorted that it was the only route to solicit and secure funds. Of course, it was black money but no beneficiary had asked him to dip the currency notes in Ganga jal to purify it. Since then nobody has accused him of any financial wrongdoing.

Two more case studies of sorts. The first is naturally from Dixit. The DMK came to power in Tamil Nadu in 1967 and within years several of its MLAs started flaunting their newfound thousands (not lakhs or crores). The venerable old man tut-tuted the style and explained how his own party men behaved. A new Congress MP would wear only starched ultra white clothes and change his clothes twice a day, would have coffee either in the Central Hall of Parliament or in five-star hotels, would travel only in taxis and pretend as though he could afford all this for all the time.

A year on and after he had established the right contacts, the second dress change would go He would be willing to be seen in a little less ostentatious place like Hotel Janpath and would occasionally hire a three-wheeler. Once he had settled down, he would transform himself into a humble worker, playing down the importance of clothes and asking friends for a ride. "You see, if you are high up in the league, there is no cause to reveal your real identity," he would add.

The DMK leaders reversed this process, raising the hackles of journalists and their own supporters. The first thousand saw them buying a gold plated watch with a golden strap. The second thousand added a few silk kurtas and angvastrams. The transformation would be both loud and swift and hence showy.

The second is from a seasoned income tax officer in Chennai (then Madras). He was transferred from Delhi a few months earlier and I had shifted to Delhi a year earlier. Thus it was a meeting between a neo-Madarasi and a fledgling Delhiite. The topic was naturally corruption and the officer was both knowledgeable and forthcoming. He compared two sets of imaginary siblings to make his point. First the Chennai brothers. The younger one make a few hundred rupees on the sly. This is what he is likely to do.

He and his wife will first go to a temple to offer puja and collect prasadam. Then buy some flowers for the bhabhi and hire a three-wheeler to call on his brother. After a cup of coffee and an hour of listless discussion, he leaves. His bhabhi, a keen observer of men and their methods as most women are, confides her fears in her husband. "This is the last week of the month and your brother has no special reason to do puja. Nor the extra cash to buy me flowers. Obviously he has accepted some bribe. If he is caught and jailed, the family's name will be in mud and we cannot get a suitable match for our daughter. Who will like to marry the niece of a jailbird? So, tomorrow you write an anonymous letter to his office alerting it of your brother's greed and guilt. You must stop him before his next bribe." The domestic vigilance commissioner is on duty.

Now shift the scene to Delhi and the starting scene is the same. Here the younger brother and his wife buy a sari for her and a shirt for him and some costly sweets for the brother's family. There is a remark about the husband's insistence on buying a sari and her insistence on buying a shirt and their collective insistence on buying sweets for the elder brother. After a cup of tea, the couple departs in the same taxi.

This is what the bhabhi tells her husband. "You know what I know. You are four years elder to him and also senior in service. See, he is prospering and buying his wife gifts and you are not. Learn a lesson and get serious. We cannot go on living on the measly salary you get."

From The Tribune, March 18, 2001

II. In the South, it’s Divali sans divas
By T.K. Ramasamy

To write about Divali in South India is to invite intense fire from saffron troops. For, Ram stands delinked from the festivities. Nor, for that matter, does Lakshmi figure in anything that goes on that day. What kind of a Divali is it then?

In much of North, Divali marks the day when Ram returned to Ayodhya after his hard-fought victory over Ravana. And in Gujarat and Rajasthan, in particular, it is new year day when the first auspicious deal is struck, the first credit entry is made in accounts books and the goddess of wealth is formally ensconced in the cash box area. In Nagpur, I have seen gold coins being used for the worship of Lakshmi and silver coins were the most commonly offered substitutes for flower.

The South has to be different for two reasons. One, Ayodhya is in the North and Ram returned there from the South. Obviously, the people in the South are loathe to "celebrate" the departure of ram! This explains why Ram’s name is missing from the list of principal reasons for the festival of lamps.

The second reason is more prosaic. The South never had a pronounced and well defined trading tradition or a community famed for that profession. Of course, there are the Chettiars of Tamil Nadu, but they have been shopkeepers and not big time traders. The Chettiars’ was a no-risk business; and it promised no windfall either. Hence the need to worship god or goddess and ensure that luck was on one’s side was not so pressing.

Also, Divali is not native to the South. The practice and the practitioners prove in a stark form that the idea is an import from the North, and over the years has acquired a hue startlingly different from the Ganga and Narmada basins.

The start with, Divali does not commemorate anything that Ram did, but commemorates something that Krishna did. The folk belief in the North is that Krishna was a brilliant strategist but a reluctant fighter. True, he destroyed Kalia (the snake) and Kamsa (his uncle) but that was before he ascended the throne in Dwarka.

In the belief pattern of the Tamils, however, Krishna defeated and killed a ferocious foe (of humanity) called Naraksura when night merged into day on Divali — a day prior to new moon day (amavasya). It is the well-deserved death of Narakasura that the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu — a mere 2 per cent of the population — celebrate with sweets and fireworks.

But before that they go through an oil bath as a mark of respect to the slain asura. It may appear like playing on both sides of the net, but actually, it is neutrality and fairplay most delicately balanced.

That is how the Brahmins observe the day. They also take a second bath in a river, firm in the belief that on Divali day, a ceremonial bath in any river is equivalent to a holy dip in the Ganga. You see, the Ganga water may never reach the South, but the true believer can always bring the water for a few blissful minutes, Bhagirath-like!

The use of the word Brahmins is deliberate. For, the vast majority of those who are not Brahmins in all the four southern states have no notion of the Krishna part in the day; nor do they go in for an early morning ritual bath. Even in the matter of sweets and the elaborate lunch, there are very sharp differences and as a Brahmin this writer is unabashedly, partisan to the goodies available in plenty in a Brahmin’s house!

Divali was a non-festival for non-Brahmins until the early forties. This was because Divali is still a non-festival in temples in the South. Two factors contributed to carrying the message of Divali to all homes, even if in a truncated or distorted form.

One, the early decades of this century saw a particularly vigorous phase of sanskritisation. It is how the academics describe the way Brahmin belief and practice supplanted those of others. Names changes; new rituals found adherents; horoscopes came to command wider acceptance; bridegroom price and marriage at the bride’s home became the norm, replacing the earlier practice of bride price and wedding at the boy’s place; the last thing was the elevation of Divali as a statewide festival.

Until the forties, Divali was important for non-religious reasons. Three of the widely circulated and respected Tamil weeklies — Ananda Vikatan, Kalki and Kalaimagal — brought out sumptuous special numbers called Divali Malar. Each one carried gorgeous colour pictures of temples, gods and goddesses, apart from short stories fit for the entire family and such stuff. To possess a Malar was to assert your cultural and literary status.

Then, it was on Divali that blockbusters were released. No youngster thought his life worth living unless he elbowed his way to the matinee — the premiere show of one of the new films. People used to travel by bus for an hour or so to reach the towns where they could have their tryst with a new release.

For the boys and girls who got married in a year, the first or thalai Divali held special attraction. There is no thalai Pongal, even though that is of the South the festival. Often the entire village would treat the thalai Divali boy as an honoured guest and, perhaps, that was what made the day special!

The legends and the concepts of Divali are as different as those of the Navaratri festival. In the South, the nine days are festival days only in temples where the goddess is done up in nine varying poses of penance that Parvati undertook to win over Shiva.

The all-important day is the ninth, devoted to Saraswati, the goddess of learning. On that day, it is also Ayudha puja, or the worship of implements, or the South’s version of Vishwakarma Day. Not only is Durga missing from the scheme of things; even Ram’s triumph over Ravana is not there. Ravana does not burn in the vast stretch of southern India.

Come to think of it, each region splashes a local flavour to each festival often delightfully different from other areas. So is the case with core religious beliefs. India is a cultural mosaic, a put-together of differing and divergent legacies and legends. Hinduism is a confederation of beliefs. To say this is to provoke the new-found Hindutva forces. But not to say it is to delude oneself into disbelief.

Look at it this way. Divali in the South is a festival without divas, or lamps. Firecrackers at the crack of dawn is the only source of light. But it is more than enough to dispel the darkness of the new moon day (amavasya). What about the other darkness that has come to envelop our society? The light from a hundred Divalis may not suffice; for, it is a man-made.

This is an article taken from the archives. It was originally published in 1993.

From The Tribune, 26 October, 2000

III Budget's grey areas
By T. K. Ramasamy

Union Finance Minister promised in the Economic Survey that he would introduce "second generation" reforms. He has come close to delivering it in the Budget, and that is no mean achievement, particularly when his present exercise is compared to what he did last year when he had to roll back many budgetary provisions. He has fixed the spotlight firmly on rationalising excise and customs duty rates, given a firm fillip to the housing sector, made investment in UTI and mutual funds more profitable, initiated steps to tackle bad bank debts and unfolded a grandiose plan for rural development. He has cleared the ground for corporate amalgamation and merger and settled the rules for buyback of shares. There is room to find fault with his vision, and even be sceptical about the viability of the plans. But as components of his vision for the future — he called it a plan to build the future of 500 years — there is a definite direction and it augurs well. True, he has left several grey areas. There is no definite plan to boost industrial growth and exports, two areas which call for immediate attention. But then the lifting of several bottlenecks should generate what one industrialist calls the feel-good factor. And a psychological prod is the right first aid at a time when the economy is in recession.

The proverbial man in the street is likely to feel irked at two Budget provisions. The first is the flat levy of Re 1 a litre of high-speed diesel, which is likely to translate itself into higher road transport cost and hence trigger a general rise in prices. The other is the 10 per cent surcharge on income tax which will affect virtually all tax payers but will not benefit the state governments which can lay claim to income tax but not surcharge. But then the Finance Minister faces a daunting task of raising revenue to meet the rising expenditure at a time when the industry is stagnating and the fiscal deficit is soaring. With deft handling of the figures and taking out the small savings collection from the Budget, he has managed to lower the fiscal deficit to less than 5 per cent for the next year. How far it truly reflects the ground reality will be known only after a thorough study of the Budget figures and, that has to wait.

Mr Sinha has promised the very heaven for the rural poor. He has rolled out plans for free and cheaper food, shelter, education (of the janata variety through part-time teachers) employment and primary health service, all to be managed by gram sabhas. The problem is that many states, barring just four, do not have functioning village-level institutions and given the upper caste domination, funds are not likely to reach the intended beneficiaries who are the Dalits and the most backward castes. This should not lead anyone to dismiss it as illusory; given the reawakening process, the deprived sections will learn to assert and political workers who stand to gain from them will help them to fight for their rights. Theoretically, Mr Sinha may not have changed the lives of the lowest of the low but has shown them what they can expect and what the government is committed to give them.

If the helpful changes in the rules governing companies work and if the tax concessions to investors and the free entry offered to foreign direct investment take effect and if the restructuring of the excise rates end evasion of tax payment and if the concessions to house builders result in a burst of construction activity, the ongoing recession should end within weeks and the second generation of reforms should prove fruitful. That is a big if and it is here that the feel-good factor comes into play.

From The Tribune, 28 August, 1999

IV Indian agenda for Agra summit
T. K. Ramasamy

In his deep throaty voice External Affairs and Defence Minister Jaswant Singh unveiled the contours of the Indian agenda for the Agra summit. Just the contours, leaving it to the nation and India-watchers in Pakistan to guess the real thing. New Delhi is ready and willing to discuss the Kashmir dispute and a possible solution to it. There is a rider, if seen from the Pakistan side. Kashmir may be the core issue for the visiting side but it is also the core issue of Indian nationhood.

It is not a piece of real estate but the corner stone of its secular polity — a Muslim majority region on the border of Pakistan which believes in religion-based nationalism, being part of this country. Sever Kashmir and India will be pushed to a Hindu theocratic state which no one but the fundamentalists want and which will injure the interests of crores of Muslim citizens.

Mr Jaswant Singh articulated this powerfully and unambiguously. He virtually ruled out a referendum in Kashmir, which is anyway a tired cliché totally irrelevant to the present reality. This is the Indian position and except for subtle shifts, will remain valid at Agra too. The other issues are peripheral even if Mr Jaswant Singh dislikes the term.

Scholarship for 100 students, easy visa for members of separated families, release of civilian prisoners and other confidence building measures are euphoria-centric and not designed to lead to a settlement of the basic problem.

A summit between India and Pakistan first evokes euphoria and then leads to popular depression. This is easy to explain. The bilateral relations have become very rusty and several thick layers of dust have settled on them. It would need dozens of powerful blowers to clear the dust and a huge supply of lubricants to get the machine cracking. That is the popular perception and hence the euphoria — the hope that this cleansing process is about to begin. At the same time the enormity of the task and the history of failures induce a sober but sad evaluation producing gloom.

The trick this time is to avoid this pitfall and prepare the people on both sides of the border to be reasonable in their expectations. And Mr Jaswant Singh has done his mighty bit in this regard. He has been helped by an unexpected source. After talking incessantly about the centrality of the Kashmir issue, as if a solution will be the only indicator of the summit success, General Pervez Musharraf has lowered his pitch to admit that a mere beginning to the process of a settlement would be alright with him.

A perceptive Pakistani journalist, Mr Najam Sethi, puts it in a clear perspective. Pakistan does not have the military might to detach Kashmir from India and so has to settle for the second best. It can only be to secure greater autonomy for the Kashmiris and that is the real test of diplomacy. India can accept this particularly under a BJP-led rule and should ideally suggest this. The thing is to make this appear like a Pakistan demand and an Indian concession. Is anyone listening? 

From The Tribune, 14 July, 2000

V.  A Nehru sheds his unwanted legacy

ARUN NEHRU is a heavyweight physically, and a featherweight politically. So his joining the BJP is not a loss to any party, nor a gain to any other. He will win his Rae Bareily seat if the BJP wins the state of UP. Conversely, he will lose if the BJP fumbles. His is one of those cases where the party symbol has to carry the candidate through, warts and blank service record and all.

Nehru must be one of the few BJP candidates who does not have much stake in the party’s future but everything in the party winning the midterm elections. From the publicity hype unleased by the Hindutva Parivar, it is clear that he will win a heavyweight ministerial post if he and the BJP successfully clear the electoral hurdle. Nehru merely lends his name to the BJP list of candidates and nothing else. In a state which has rejected the Congress, will the Nehru magic work? An interesting thought.

Initial newspaper reports make it appear as though Arun Nehru renounced his entrenched place in the Congress and hurtled though ideological space to land in the Sang Parivar camp. That is far from truth. The fact is that he was never a Congressman, only a Nehru clansman, occupying a political post offered by a generous aunt. His cousin was not happy and at the first available opportunity, the two parted company and he soon joined the principled opposition led by V.P. Singh. The Jan Morcha stint was all to brief and a marooned man went into involuntary exile. The hybernation ends with the BJP’s seat offer.

For the saffron party it is yet another addition to the marquee name of high profile defectors. Yet another proof that it is no more a political or ideological untouchable. Yet another proof that it is gaining in popularity and public confidence while its main rival is losing its. There is a bit of self-induced illusion in all this but it is what the doctor ordered on election-eve.

Arun Nehru suffers from a severe handicap. Only a few days, earlier, a whole party, rather a big chunk of a political party, applied for membership of the BJP-led holding company. It was an attempt to gain backdoor entry, but the tag “Janata parivar” and “socialists” made this devious attempt both normal and to be welcomed. If Sharad Yadav (of the “bal kati aurat” fame) and Ram Vilas Paswan, who in his earlier avatar as a Janata Dal leader swore to drive out the BJP from his state of Bihar, can seek refuge in the same BJP why not Nehru who is proud of his Jan Morcha days association with the BJP as the party supporting the V.P. Singh government from outside? Anyway he punched his party card a long time ago when as the junior Minister in the Home Ministry he got the gates of the Babri Masjid opened and thus set the fuse for the December 6, 1992, demolition. Talk of foresight!

Also Nehru was a paints salesman, rather a very senior executive in Jenson Nicholson before he responded to his aunt Indira Gandhi’s summons to be a Lok Sabha member. As a paintsman, he must have succeeded in persuading a million people to change colours (literally) so he could sell new colours. Now he is taking that advice seriously and daubing a different tint on his political face. As a company executive he was colourless in political terms, a deep amber as an apolitical Congressmen, a shade pinkish in the social justice-touting Jan Morcha, pale grey as a recluse and now a tentative saffron. Nehru has been a traveller across the rainbow.

Nehru is the second member form the Nehru-Gandhi household to walk out of the Congress and gravitate towards the Sangh Parivar. Maneka Gandhi has done it a decade earlier first to the Jan Morcha and since last year as an associate, non-voting member of the BJP. She seems to have taken electoral roots in Philibit, something that comes to her as naturally as talking incessantly about dogs.

But one party change that hit the solar plexus of all politically inclined individuals in the country is that of K.C. Pant. He answers to the description of a complete and lifelong Congressman. The son of a distinguished and highly respected Congressman, he was born in the party, grew up in it and entered the Lok Sabha and blossomed into a sensitive and diligent minister as a Congressman. Yet one day last year he went over to the BJP, saying he was merely following his wife Ila. Losing a man like Pant should have shaken up the party but it did not. That speaks more about the party and nothing at all about the heritage of men like Pant, the sum of which is the heritage of the party itself.

In case of Rangarajan Kumaramangalam is a less important version of Pant’s. His father and mother were both brilliant communists. Mohan Kumaramangalam joined Indira Gandhi’s government in 1971 but died two years later in a plane crash. His association with the Congress was not long enough or emotionally strong enough to create a lasting family tradition. His son joined the Youth Congress and soon secured a party ticket to the Lok Sabha. His defection to the BJP last year was thus a media event for a full day and nothing more.

Political migration has lost is surprise element yet an unexpected yatri does stir up memory and also many doubts about the moral health of the system

From The Tribune, 12 August, 1999

VI. A sob story to beat all sob stories
By T.K. Ramasamy

In India there is no agency to test the immediate reaction of television viewers to major political speeches. (In the USA President Clinton’s addresses and his videotaped testimony in the Monica Lewinsky case received the instant poll treatment.) So no one knows for sure how the people at large received Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s combative speech at the AICC meeting on Tuesday. The delegates, reports say, were deeply touched, but then they were openly partisan.

One thing is, however, sure. Nobody can be cold to it, at least to the Hindi version. One has to either sway to the mushy sentiments or reject the blatant attempt to what the BJP has dismissively called “emotional blackmail”. The Hindi edition was a string of evocative terms, organised in a morally appealing order and crafted in everyday language to have the maximum effect on the common man. Then there was the appropriate body-language, adding emphasis with a mere nod of the head.

In the final analysis, it was the saga of a woman belonging to an extraordinary family and fighting her way out of wicked slander by party rebels and party rivals. The message was: she would fight and fight with the support of the people and on the side of the people. This is a winning combination, the latter-day version of “khoob ladi mardani”.

This marks a dramatic departure from her earlier tentative style. The only time she was aggressive was when she complained last year that Vajpayeeji “jhoot bol rahen hai”, and that went badly with even her fans. In the popular mind her impassive face and hesitant use of Hindi do not go well with a fighting speech or high decibel emotionalism. But this time she has deliberately plumped for a belligerent stance, with inherent risk and all.

Obviously, Mrs Sonia Gandhi has drawn first blood. The BJP, which threatened to make her origin of birth the main election issue, changed gear within hours of the speech. Mr Arun Jaitley, an ultra sensitive political adviser, downgraded her nationality as one of the issues and said the party would pit her inexperience against Mr Vajpayee’s decades of political work. Which means that the BJP is ready to make the Prime Minister’s record of service an election issue. This is a bad bargain. Mrs Gandhi’s is a blank book, and Mr Vajpayee’s is a crowded one, and the past 14 months are not very distinguished.

Until she unveiled her sentiment-soaked sob story, the BJP was getting ready to solicit votes on the basis of its own sob story — the premature termination of its hold on power: the rhetoric of “Is admi ka kasur kya tha?” That looks pale against the symbolism-loaded “bahu, suhagin, maa, vidhva” cycle. Being a confirmed bachelor, this “bahu to vidhva” road is closed for Mr Vajpayee, and other leaders do not matter much.

Mrs Gandhi has one more advantage. She has herself chosen the battle cry and the weapons she would wield. And she must be pleased with the initial response. Mr Vajpayee has to wait for his policy handlers to decide these things for him and it is a handicap. Given to himself, he would have avoided her nationality issue, as he indeed hinted at more than once. In these things, the hawks carry the day and they do not think much.

In this respect Mrs Sonia Gandhi enjoys the crucial advantage which regional leaders enjoy: they are both the vote-getters and party strategists. They shape the policy that suits them the most. Mr Vajpayee is a vote-getter, an electoral “mukhota”, trying to garner support on policies his heart is not in.

From: The Tribune, 27 May, 1999

VII. He who walked away with peace bonanza
by T. K. Ramasamy

He is the real gainer from the West Asian peace accord. Why not? He took a big gamble in bringing the adamant and angry opponents together, tirelessly flew to the Wye River conference centre, spent over 60 hours cajoling, arguing, convincing and even armtwisting the crowd of negotiators, brought in the old warhorse King Hussein of Jordan to lend moral weight and at one point even unleashed his pet dog, Buddy, to charm everyone into subjugation. He had the biggest stake in the peace accord and worked real hard to clinch it.

In the next few days leading to November 3, he stands to gain the most. The reference is to President Clinton, the most interested and involved third party in the bilateral dispute. As one White House aide gushed, Clinton has never concentrated his thinking, time and energy so much as he did in pushing things in the desired direction at the Wye centre in Maryland.

Brokering peace comes instinctively to Clinton. He pulled off a similar feat in Dayton, Ohio, to finally stop the Serbia-Bosnia fighting. The same go-between Richard Holbrooke is back on the scene, this time to defuse the Kosovo crisis. He sent George Mitchel to Belfast to bring the warring Catholics and Protestants together and, finally hammer out the Good Friday pact in Northern Ireland. That won the Nobel Peace Prize for John Hume and David Trimble. Clinton should have been the third sharer of the prize but Monica Lewinsky willed otherwise.

Unlike in the past, Clinton was not a selfless do-gooder this time. He was very much a selfish good-seeker. He was desperate to cover himself with a thin coat of the peace-maker’s varnish to rub out some of the garish stains the Lewinsky affair had caused. He wanted one good deed before the November 3 midterm elections to push up his popularity rating. He wanted TV cameras to project him doing something other than personal (defending his Lewinsky act), and political (drumming up support for his Democratic colleagues). He wanted to do something presidential. Like bringing peace to trouble spots.

In Clinton’s scheme, the White House is a (super) power house with its prestige extending far beyond the American shores.(This is the contra point to Kenneth Starr’s charge that the White House is a pleasure palace, where the powerful President plays on the immature feelings of ambitious but wayward girls.) That is his self-appointed task and he has the charm and energy to seriously work it.

The Maryland peace accord fully answers his long-term concept and his short-term needs. It may be just the hour to start thinking in terms of a Clinton doctrine and it is certainly the hour when he wants the success of the Maryland accord to blot out the sins of the Lewinsky affair in the popular mind.

There is another thing he hopes to reap from the peace accord. He wants a swing of voter preference in favour of the Democrats on November 3 as a reward for the “feel-good” factor in the latest American diplomatic coup. A few thousand more votes for his party in each congressional precinct! That is what he deserves, or thinks he deserves. Even a marginal shift of voter preference will demoralise the Republicans and the threat of impeachment will fade away.

Clinton wanted Middle East peace and wanted it badly to fight off the ominous impeachment threat. He worked for it and has got it. In the process, he has to lend the services of the CIA. But that is a small price.

What about Yasser Arafat and Benjamin Netanyahu? They have signed the deal and now they face hostile reaction from fringe groups. For them it is just an interim accord, delayed by more than 19 months. The final accord is due in May next year.

But that is another day, as they say.

From The Tribune, 26 October, 1998

VIII. Economics at the service of man
By T.K. Ramasamy

NOT many Indian economists or their Third World associates ever believed that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences would ever anoint Prof Amartya Sen with the Nobel Prize. Of course Sen richly deserved the accolade but the Academy has been too much biased in favour of accumulation of wealth to look at a man who has laid total emphasis on the distributive aspect.

Yet in western academic circles his name has popped up every year as a possible winner; the leading lights did not subscribe to his theories and, in fact, most of them disliked him, but could not resist his creative brilliance or his dogged pursuit of what was once described as welfare economics. These economists of the neoclassical school must now be hoping that the glitter of the Nobel Prize will somehow diminish the lustre of his ideas and their compelling relevance to the present.

Loosely speaking, two sights and the surprise developments in a small southern state in India have powerfully influenced his theory of development. As a nine-year-old boy he saw emaciated men, women and children littering Calcutta streets and falling dead during the 1943 Bengal famine. The picture of these starving dying men from the rural work force stays singed in his mind. The result is his work on famine and the startling conclusion that famine deaths are not due to a shortage of foodgrains but due to the distortions in distribution inherent in the system. The traumatic teenage experience has propelled sensitive Sen throughout his adult life to think up changes in the system to empower ordinary man and give him his freedom of opportunities. This is what the Academy hails as the “ethical dimension” to economic theory.

The other shattering memory is communal killing in Calcutta during the Direct Action movement in 1946. He saw a man being killed in the name of religion and since then has been violently against exploiting religion to generate hatred or incite killing. Communal politics, as he sees it, divides the poor sections of society and to that extent weakens the drive for the empowerment of the poor. He thus locates communalism as an insidious instrument against the poor, and since the majority in this country are poor, it is also anti-people. His secularism is anchored to this humane perspective.

Kerala has been a dominant influence in his ceaseless search for a model of development, as against that of economic growth. During his long years of research in poverty and inequality, social statistics of Kerala have shone as an exception to the dreary figures from the Hindi-speaking states.

At that time he was also simultaneously working on China. He found that the progress in the social sectors in India as a whole is abysmal when compared to China as a whole; but Kerala has outstripped China’s national averages in all respects. It has a higher literacy rate, longer life span, lower mortality and a much lower birth rate. And Kerala is one of the poorer states in the country. Obviously, the per capita income in a state has nothing to do with the social development of the residents. The determining factor is the way the system functions or the policies the government follows. Development can precede economic growth, rather it should if the accretion of wealth were to be equitably shared.

As Sen reasons, education is the starting point of development and it widens an individual’s opportunities for jobs, and his wage offers him choices, including the crucial choice to order his consumption pattern. This way, Sen has placed man at the centre of developmental activities. The neoclassical school has generation of wealth at the centre with market bringing the investors and consumers together and ordering the priority of growth. In all poor countries, the common man is mostly outside the market and hence outside economic growth.

Sen’s contribution lies in shifting the focus from market to man, from economic growth to distributive justice. What he has succeeded in doing is to radically alter the perspective of economics, in a manner of speaking. Scholars will object, but economics as a discipline has all along been the hand-maiden of the capitalist model of development, reflecting its successes and failures. Capitalism has often been re-engineering itself mainly to overcome or head off crises which its very structure ignites. But it has unerringly emphasised generation and accumulation of wealth as its only goal.

This per force can benefit only a select few and the others are palmed off with comforting statistics like GDP and per capita income, which superficially induce a feeling of shared opportunity. Job losses are glossed over by unemployment benefits. To all this, Sen says a firm no, which is logically persuasive and morally forceful. He talks of development and projects a common man’s eye view of material progress and wellbeing.

In the case of Third World, his approach is as creative and innovative as Cambridge school’s subaltern history, history not as a chronicle of the deeds and wars of kings but the life and desires of a people. In the post-Sen Nobel Prize era, economics is no more about the plans and promises of Ambanis, Birlas and their tribe but the aspirations, achievements and opportunities of the common man. Or of just you and me.

Maybe economics will begin to wear a human face and boast of a Third World dimension to it. It is time too that western (read capitalist) stranglehold on economic theories yielded place to the Third World demand for a massive dose of distributive (social) justice. The Nobel Prize is a good enough starting point to press for this change.

Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize, public choice theory and primacy of man over massing of money, all this should turn the thought for a second to Mehbub-ul-Haq, again from this subcontinent (Pakistan), who too made the human development index the core criterion of development. He would have been the happiest man today that his college-mate, longtime friend and fellow-travellor of sorts has won the highest recognition. He died in July last. Let me toss a lazy coin in the wish well: a posthumous Nobel for Mehbub-ul-Haq who too tirelessly worked for bringing the common man within the ambit of economic development, to doubly legitimise Sen’s theory?

From The Tribune, 16 October, 1998

IX. A DIY manual on communal riots
by T. K. Ramasamy

JUSTICE Srikrishna has submitted his report on the communal conflagration in Mumbai in 1992-93. Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray has dubbed it biased. His Sancho Panza acting as Chief Minister has gone one step further and rubbished it as anti-Hindu and as the protector of the Hindus, he has predictably rejected it. The BJP, in Maharashtra and at the Centre, has endorsed the Thackeray thesis. The Sangh Parivar has said the final word.

The logic (?) of this line of thinking is that the carnage (of more than 800 persons), destruction (of more than a crore of rupees worth property of Muslims) and arson (torching hundreds of miserable shacks) are a one-time aberration and are unlikely to recur. A “shok sabha” is all that is called for. Om shanti, shanti, shantihi!

Another view is equally valid. Read the extracts of the report again and a bit more carefully and you realise that the Srikrishna Commission has not confined itself to writing out an autopsy report. It has gone into the pathology of a communal riot, the mechanics and dynamics of long-suffering slum-dwellers turning into predators. In this respect, the report is a veritable do-it-yourself (DIY) guide. And this is terrifying.

Mumbai city proper had not seen communal killing on this scale. The badlands had been Thane and Bhiwandi. (Even there the spark came from the fierce competition over operation of profitable powerlooms.) But these horrible slums, promising nothing more than subhuman and precarious existence, became the killing fields for more than 30 days spread over two months in 1992-1993.

The killings had a delayed after-effect: the explosions of March 12, 1993, promoting the metropolis into a target of terrorist depredation. This is a natural cycle of metamorphosis and we have seen it several times in other parts of the country. Young hotheads, giving to themselves the right to protect their community, step outside society and take to abominable means to settle scores. In Mumbai’s history, March 12, 1993, is a blood-coloured blot, only slightly more garishly red than the preceding ones.

Let us go back to the Srikrishna report. The commission’s limited task was to analyse the what, the why, the how, the what of and the who of the prolonged primitive killing. That it has done admirably. But Justice Srikrishna has also probed the deeper currents. In two respects he is unsparingly brilliant. In bringing out the setting of the stage for the pogrom. And in laying bare the skilful manipulation of the mind of the unsuspecting killers and their abettors. It was a complicated job, but competently executed and patiently exposed in the report.

The Shiv Sena has long ago emerged as the fire-spitting enemy of the Muslim community. A few years ago, Thackeray thundered at Pune that Muslims could live in India if they accepted the status of second class citizens. So inflammatory was his speech that the RSS oldguard, the authentic offspring of the Hindu ideology of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, denounced him.

Hatred as policy comes naturally to Thackeray. After all, he launched his quasi-political career by whipping up an anti-South Indian babu frenzy until he thoughtlessly provoked the Dharavi slum dwellers who turned out to be more than a match for the violent Shiv Sainiks.

Thackeray’s march to the “maha-rioting” started with “maha arti” with considerable help from the BJP. This “maha arti” was no religious affair. It was thought of to intimidate the Muslims. It went like this. On Fridays, the Sainiks would gather, mostly women and children, in a temple for “arti”. Since the small structure could not accommodate them all, a huge number would spill over to the narrow road and block traffic.

The trick was to select a temple that was close to a masjid and Fridays are the days of “juma ki namaz”. What made this combustible was the old habit of Muslims filling the road, unable to find a place inside pocket-sized masjids. These were built for a small population when the city indeed had a small population. The growth in numbers set the stage for a regular Friday friction. No wonder in the mind of the two communities the “other” assumed the role of a tormentor.

Then came the Babri demolition on December 6, 1992. Muslims poured into the streets to protest but were confronted by jeering neighbours and occasionally by celebrating Shiv Sainiks. Tempers were rising and the moderate leadership in both communities lost their voice.

Then two things happened to light the fuse. Three lowly “mathadi” workers (who carry heavy loads on their heads) were found murdered. Since they were Hindus and since the air was communally vitiated, the popular opinion held Muslims as the killers. Around that time, seven Hindus were burnt to death in a slum (Radhabai chawl) where they were trapped. The Shiv Sena and its supremo sounded the tocsin, issued a call to arms and a do-or-die mission. And the Sainiks promptly “did” and the blood that was shed colours the conscience even today.

Thackeray through his Saamna and men of his ilk through another newspaper Navakal egged on the revenge-seekers. Funny, a vast majority of the rioters circling on the defenceless Muslims, were those who disliked the members of the minority community but would in normal times not even use an expletive. But in the heat of the moment, fanned by skilful mind-benders, they turned arsonists and killers. So did the policemen. They joined the murderers to do their bit, so oppressively hate-inducing was the atmosphere.

This was the cause-and-effect sequence, a fail-proof chain of depressed slum-dwellers, angry with society, becoming angry with fellow slum-dwellers separated only by religion. It has happened before and it happened in Mumbai. The hundreds of thousands of people who fled their slums in those days came from both communities and shared the same sense of terror and confusion.

It is after analysing the riots within this frame that Justice Srikrishna has found Thackeray, Saamna, Manohar Joshi and others guilty of provocative acts amounting to incitement to murder and the police of taking sides and the then Congress government of abdicating its basic responsibility.

Go over the sequence again. This can unfold with the same tragic intensity in Mumbai and in a hundred other vulnerable spots where people of all castes, language groups and communities exist in animal-like conditions. Anything can ignite their intolerance and give it a murderous dimension. In this respect, the Srikrishna Commission report is a detailed warning signal.

From The Tribune, 10 August, 1998

X Jaya races with rupee in shedding value
by T. K. Ramasamy

Tamil Nadu’s “Iron Lady” has set a blistering pace in her race with the rupee. So far it is a neck-and-neck affair, both shedding value every few weeks. There are differences though between the two. The lady’s is purely a self-willed effort while the currency is a victim of outside manipulation. Two, the fortunes of the lady in question may not smile soon, but the rupee should get relief once the regional environment turns favourable.

For the AIADMK “strong man”, the latest fiasco is the most grievous. (It does not mean that she cannot cause herself a more serious wound.) Her action, rather over-reaction, had all the ingredients of a classic misjudgement. The Cauvery is the wrong issue. This is the wrong year. The timing was hopelessly wrong. The resort to a dire threat was self-destructive.

And, horror of horrors, she had no fall-back position. Retreating from the brink is the loudest proclamation of one’s self-doubt and surrender. In today’s world waverers don’t win and winners don’t waver. She has blinked first in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the BJP. The present ruling combine is not the toughest of rivals and to invite a humiliating defeat at its hands!

No doubt, Ms Jayalalitha has lost the nimble political touch she showed in putting together a winning alliance in February. Perhaps she is sure-footed in dealing with her own Dravidian fans and foes but fumbles with non-Tamilians. If this be the case, it speaks volumes of her immaturity.

Let us start with her selection of the Cauvery issue for hurling a blood pressure-inducing threat at the BJP-led ruling combine. It is what may loosely be called a secular issue, in that any leader or any political party can take it up with any degree of vehemence either sincerely or to get electoral mileage.

For this reason it is a double-edged weapon, subject to the law of “winner takes all”. By the same token, the loser loses all. Given this inherent risk, Ms Jayalalitha should not have underestimated the political sagacity of her arch rival Karunanidhi or overestimated her own capacity to armtwist the Prime Minister and his advisers. She grossly miscalculated and is, therefore, gasping for breath under the debris.

Two, this is the wrong year to invoke the Cauvery to take out an insurance against electoral loss. The weather god has been very generous and there is ample water to please the kisan in both Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The demand for irrigation water is an emotional issue and no one, not even the mighty Jayalalitha, can whip up mass emotion when there is no crisis. She should know.

In 1995, as Chief Minister, she went on a theatrical hunger strike demanding a greater share of water to the state’s farmers and emerged as the sole voice and sword arm of the farming community. But 1998 is not 1995, and any melodramatic gesture of a repeat fast is likely to be misconstrued as an attempt to get rid of the so many kilos of accumulated fat.

In what will go down as an unpardonable snafu, she challenged three men who were desperate to score a victory, any victory, at this time. The Prime Minister wanted to tell the countrymen that he can do more useful things than ordering the Pokhran blasts. In other words, he was keen to prove that he is also a doer, not merely a poet. The Cauvery issue presented him with an excellent opportunity.

Karnataka Chief Minister J.H. Patel is caught up in one of his periodic crises. And the Cauvery interim award has gone badly against his state. He wanted several amendments to the old award and was ready to bargain. Of the three key negotiators, he is the biggest winner. He has managed to remove restrictive clauses from the interim award like the ban on improving the existing canal system or expanding the area under irrigation (11 lakh hectares), while also wresting veto power.

Mr Karunanidhi has been equally successful in inching back to the centre-stage of state politics. And by the same token in marginalising our tough lady. The last lingering opposition to the interim award has been overcome. The monitoring committee cannot offer much benefit but the high-powered Cauvery River Authority cannot cause damage either (the state weilds a veto).

In the days to come, Ms Jayalalitha would rue her haste in sounding the bugle before charting a retreat route. All agitationist politicians respect a golden rule: it is not necessary that one should win all battles but it is absolutely essential that one does not lose face. Ms Jayalalitha would learn this lesson the hard way and benefit the second time, if there is a second time.

From The Tribune, 14 August, 1998

TKR: Remembrance

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