Statues will not assure Mayawati immortality

It is difficult to take issue with Mayawati for her monuments, never mind their huge cost. She is only following in the footsteps of past rulers and leaders. At least she built her own National Dalit Memorial and Green Park. Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter simply appropriated the prime minister’s official residence, a Lutyens-era building, converting it into a monument for the first prime minister of the country. The same happened with Indira Gandhi, and the families of Lal Bahadur Shastri and Jagjivan Ram followed suit, beginning a trend that could well convert Lutyens Delhi into a necropolis.
Mayawati is merely a mortal and no doubt she expects that her great Dalit Memorial Park will memorialise her life  for centuries, if not millennia. But the Park, she also seemed to suggest in her inaugural speech, was her beachhead for the invasion of Delhi.
She repeatedly emphasised that the Dalit Memorial on the east bank of the Yamuna stood, as if in counterpoint, to the Nehru-Gandhi memorials on the west. In other words, they signified the arrival of Dalit power at the very gates of the capital. False modesty has never been one of Mayawati’s faults, and she has made it known more than once that the Dalit ki beti intends to become the Prime Minister of India.
 
Imprint
There is nothing wrong in her seeking to make a political point, or to establish a symbol of Dalit power through statues and monuments. This has a history going back to the Pharaohs and Caesars. Megalomania, or a search for immortality, can result in memorials aimed at leaving an imprint for thousands of years. But history is quite impartial on the matter. China’s first emperor Chin Shi Huang (259-210 BCE) built an enormous
monument in Xian which has been located —though, yet to be opened, its attendant terracotta army has made the site famous.
In contrast, however, there is someone whose impact is even greater, Genghis Khan (1162?-1227CE), whose descendants ensured that his tomb would remain hidden forever. The great Khan clearly needed no monuments and has imprinted himself on historical memory through his great conquests and, apparently, his sex life. Recent research claims that 8 per cent of the men living in the region that formed part of the Mongol Empire carry Y-chromosomes identical to Genghis which amounts to a staggering 0.5 per cent of the population of the world today.
Yet statues and monuments can be destroyed, obliterating history. UP’s second most important political formation, the Samajwadi Party, has declared that it will pull down Mayawati’s monuments if it came to power. Fearing guerrilla attacks on the parks, Mayawati has set up a special force to guard them.
There is a precedent in history there as well. The successors of the monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten (1300 BCE)  destroyed his temples as thoroughly as they could. But they did not reckon with researchers of the twentieth century with computers who matched every piece of a destroyed frieze and told us the story of the great king of ancient Egypt, husband to the beauteous Nefertiti and father of Tutankhamen.
It would be futile to tell Mayawati that a bigger imprint on history has been left by people who have no monuments at all, at least not historically identifiable ones—Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. What they have left is a legacy of words and ideas which are far more pervasive than the awe any monument inspires. In that sense, actually, Bhimrao Ambedkar does not need a statue to honour him; he has the words of the Indian Constitution to memorialise him.
 
Politics
So the lessons of history, insofar as monuments are concerned, are somewhat chequered. Great buildings get re-labeled, like the great Hagia Sophia (360 CE) in Constantinople which was converted into a mosque and then a museum. As for statues, they are much easier to deal with. With some luck they are merely carted away, as in the case of the imperial statues that litter the Coronation park in Kingsway Camp in New Delhi. If you are unlucky like Stalin, Lenin and Saddam, the statues are pulled down and destroyed. Or, of course, if the culture changes, as in Egypt, a statue, like that of the Pharaohs, is shorn of any claim to divinity and remains merely as a museum piece.
Somehow, I think that it is not the eternal that bothers this arch practitioner of realpolitik right now, but the immediate and the limited. And that happens to be the coming elections to the Uttar Pradesh state assembly. Having failed to make a dent in other states, it is clear that Mayawati cannot permit any erosion of her party’s dominant position in the state. In that sense the speech at the inaugural of the park was actually the beginning of her 2012 state assembly election campaign.
The enemies have been clearly identified. The Samajwadi Party would have the first claim to be her principal rival. But it was scarcely mentioned in her speech. Instead, all her ire was focused on the Congress. The reason for that is not far to seek.
The Congress came up with a surprise performance in the 2009 General Elections winning one more seat in the Lok Sabha than the BSP. More important, it became clear that Rahul Gandhi’s campaigning had made an impact and managed to erode a bit of Mayawati’s non-Jatav Dalit vote. This is the party whose leader Rahul Gandhi has made guerrilla raids into the state, picking up issues that show up Mayawati’s government as being insensitive not only to the poor and weak, but the Dalits as well.
 
Achievement
Election outcome analyses have shown that Mayawati’s Brahmin-Bahujan strategy is no longer working. The National Election Study 2009 revealed an erosion of the Brahmin support with a large proportion of upper caste votes going back to the Congress, and a smaller to the BJP. Additionally the Congress gained Muslim and non-Jatav Dalit votes, though not at the expense of the BSP.
Not surprisingly, all talk of the “sarvajan” samaj seems to have stopped and
Ms Mayawati is focused on preserving her Dalit fortress. But, at the end of the day, given the fractured electorate, rock-solid Dalit support alone will not be enough to enable the BSP to form a government again. 
Enormous will power and organisation skills have brought Ms Mayawati where she is. But whether it is the elections, or her own achievements, they are yet only engraved in stone. The world outside the Dalit Memorial Park remains harsh, especially so in Ms Mayawati’s UP. She cannot pass on the blame to past governments alone. Indeed, till the 1980s, UP was badly off, but not as badly off as it is today relative to the other states of the Union.
So, when the next assembly election comes around, Ms Mayawati will not have to address history, but the people of her state who are only partly Dalit. They will decide whether she has, as she claimed in her speech, fought against criminalisation and corruption. More important, they are bound to raise queries about development  issues. 
She has had four terms as Chief Minister, though in fairness only the current one will run the full term. Even so, Nitish Kumar has shown in neighbouring Bihar that real change can be brought about, even in seemingly hopeless states within years, should the leader have the right qualities.
Mail Today October 18, 2011

We need a better policy of openness

Recently, Law Minister Salman Khurshid moaned that the Right to Information Act (RTI) was creating problems for “institutional efficiency and efficacy” of the government. He went on to add that the government had “no regrets” in having brought the Act. “But then too much of RTI work is hitting the working of government departments” and the time had come to see how “we can make it more effective and hassle-free.”
Unfortunately for him, the statement came in the aftermath of the “letter bomb” in the form of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) releasing the controversial finance ministry note which said that the 2G spectrum could have been auctioned at  better price, had the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram insisted.

Legislation
But Khurshid and others who are alarmed at the workings of the RTI have a point. It is true that information is power and that the laudable aim of the legislation was to empower the citizen. This is something the bureaucracy understood very well and was not very happy about  sharing information. So it is fighting the RTI tooth and nail. But, as the Hazare experience has shown, an excess of anything, even democratic rights, can be bad.
The RTI was one of the path-breaking pieces of legislation mooted during the United Progressive Alliance’s first stint in government. It is a pity that in its second spell, the UPA is reeling from the consequences of the RTI, or scheming with the babus to somehow kill it.
The most devastating recent use of the RTI till now, has been the 2G papers obtained by BJP activist Vivek Garg.  Whether he was tipped off about the existence of the papers is one thing; what is clear is that it had the effect of shaking the government of the day. But one result of the controversy is that it has paralysed the government with officials refusing to put down their views on paper which could, through the RTI, find its way into the public domain.
There was nothing unique in itself in the RTI. Other democratic societies have also felt the need to come up with a freedom of information legislation to make the workings of government more transparent. But, given the government of India’s colonial DNA, it was nevertheless remarkable that such a legislation did actually come about. A great deal of credit for its efficacy in its key growing years rests with Wajahat Habibullah, the first Chief Information Commissioner, a soft-voiced and polite bureaucrat with impeccable Nehru-Gandhi credentials, and rock-solid integrity. It were his rulings that cut through the yards of red-tape that the babudom unleashed in a bid to stifle it. At another level the powerful have unleashed their goons on RTI activists, killing as many as 13 persons across the country in the past two years.
Not surprisingly, the big users of RTI have turned out to be people with a vested interest—someone overlooked for  promotion, a businessman seeking information on a rival’s government contract, a political activist seeking to embarrass the government.
But it is also a tool that enables an outraged citizen get information on why his roads are in a state of disrepair. An NGO query in Bhopal revealed that ten persons had died in the Bhopal Memorial Hospital due to unethical and possibly illegal drug trials. There have been other such far-reaching revelations that have helped improve the overall climate of governance.
The RTI commissioners are aware of the problems with RTI. In a recent decision they said that the minutes of meetings for the IIT Joint Entrance Examination could not be provided as it would lead to a “breakdown” of the examination system. But there are places where the decisions teeter between the right of privacy of public servants and the legislation. In February, for example the CIC said that the service details of a government servant were not confidential. This was in keeping with its previous decisions of taking property details and income tax returns of public servants out of the confidentiality list, a decision that has been challenged in the high court. The previous chief justice K G Balakrishnan had raised the issue of RTI and pending judgments of the court. It’s important that in the process of upholding the right to information, the RTI does not make governance difficult.

Grandstand
As we have noted anything taken to an excess can be harmful. And so is the case with the RTI. There is genuine danger of the government being swamped by RTI queries. According to a response, ironically to an RTI query to the effect, the PMO revealed that queries to it had increased from 48 applications in 2005 to over 3,000 queries in 2010 alone. I can imagine that this could rise manifold in years to come.
Equally important is the issue of the confidentiality of the workings of the government. If everything is open to RTI, officials and ministers will act like MPs in Parliament. Ever since the proceedings of  Parliament began to be televised, MPs have been using the floor of the House to grandstand on issues, rather than deliberate on them. So, there is danger that officials will take decisions, not without fear or favour, but with an eye on the public opinion.

Secrets
The vagueness over what is secret begins from the Official Secrets Act (OSA) of 1923 which was essentially aimed at military threats against India. It sought punishment for those who communicated information—maps, codes, passwords, sketches etc— that could adversely affect the sovereignty and integrity of the country and punished all those who illegally possessed documents relating to national security.
All agencies involved in security—the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and so on—have a system of ascending scale of classification—confidential, secret and top secret—by section officers, under secretaries and deputy secretaries. But while the OSA provides a legal definition, howsoever obsolete, about what is secret—maps, sketches, codes, passwords, note or document relating to the sovereignty and integrity of India— we have no clarity about the sanctity of the documents of the other departments of government, including the Cabinet and the PMO. 
The result is that decisions on just what is secret and what is not, are being defined on a case by case basis by the Information Commissioners. Given the volume of queries, this is not a particularly good way of going about this. 
What the government needs is an ordered policy of transparency. By now we have a body of decisions by the RTI commissioners which indicate the kind of information that should be in the public domain. So why doesn’t the government place such information in the public domain and ensure that you do not have to use the RTI to obtain the information? 
Second, the government should, with the Information Commissioners, work out a regime through which certain documents will retain confidentiality for a particular time span—say 10 years, 20 years and 30 years. So, certain sensitive decisions will be declassified automatically after a particular time span. It is a well known fact that there are no secrets with an infinite time span.
Third, the government needs to revisit the OSA. This colonial era statute has outlived its utility by several decades. There is need to redefine secrecy in relation to national security in light of modern technology where sub-metre satellite imagery is available to the public and hackers are able to penetrate the computers of the PMO and the National Security Council Secretariat. Note that no significant OSA conviction has taken place since the mid-1980s when the Larkins brothers were convicted.
Does that mean that there are no spies and traitors operating in India? Don’t count the pathetic “spies” who are frequently caught by the police with alleged sketches and diaries detailing their activities on behalf of the ISI.
Mail Today October 13, 2011

Everybody loves an entitlement in India

So, our politically correct activists have forced Planning Commission Chairman, Montek Singh Ahluwalia to eat crow. They have got him to accept that a statistical device through which poverty is measured in India will not be the means of determining who is provided entitlements. Actually it was never intended to be so and it is good that Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has clarified that the government will take into account other elements of deprivation before considering specific entitlements for  rural households. 
The statistical constructs to define poverty are something that economists have debated for years, but it has spilt over into the public domain for a variety of reasons. First, the Rs 32/26 construct  had all the usual suspects, Harsh Mander, Aruna Roy and their ilk foaming at the mouth.
Then even politicians as diverse as  Mayawati and Murli Manohar Joshi jumped into the issue. The reason was not difficult to find. Poverty lines in India have been a means of giving entitlements, and in turn the grant of entitlements is a means of harvesting votes. And right now, the government is in the midst of preparing an Act that will provide subsidised food for half the population of the country.
 
Scams
The 32/26 construct has its roots in food consumption. It was set in the 1970s from the monthly consumption expenditure of a family whose members consumed 2,400 calories of food in rural areas and 2,100 in urban. This has since been monetised and indexed to give us the 32/26 value of today. The calorie consumption index has had a chequered history. They emerged from pre-World War II studies in Germany of the physiology of work of European loggers. How they relate to Indian physiques and conditions is a mystery.
No one can deny the state’s responsibility in providing food for its destitute citizens. In line with this, the state has two approaches before it. First, to buy vast quantities of food grain, store it and arrange for its distribution. The second approach is to provide cash directly to the beneficiaries.
The first approach is marked by massive leakages. First, the FCI’s acquisition process is riddled with corruption—poor quality grain purchased and passed off as good. Second, it is stored in such awful conditions that a good amount of it
simply rots. Third, on its way to the
fair price shops, as well as in those shops, it is diverted.
Last year, under the pressure of the courts and following investigation by an SIT, the CBI was asked to probe the diversion of food grains meant for the poor in Uttar Pradesh which was being shipped out by the trainloads straight from their storage areas to Bangladesh and Nepal.
 
Schemes
The value of the foodgrains ran into tens of thousands of crore rupees over several years. The food was meant for a slew of entitlement programmes that activists swear by—Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana, a food for work scheme; Antodaya Anna Yojana, meant to provide food security for the poorest families; the Midday Meal Scheme to give children a nutritious meal on all working days.
Yet, there seemed to be little outrage of the kind that accompanied the 2G scam, perhaps because the villains were the cogs of the system—district officials, FCI managers and railway personnel. There were no well-known political faces in the cross-hairs of the media.
Faced with diversion, many specialists have been suggesting a variety of alternate measures—food coupons, direct cash subsidies which will go into the bank account of the recipient through a smart-card. But this looks like a bit of day-dreaming. There are unlikely to be banks and even post offices in the poorest areas  in India. Those who reach Delhi or Mumbai, even in the most menial of jobs, are not poor compared to the many, mainly women, children and the aged, who live in the contiguous villages of Orissa, Bihar, Chattisgarh, West Bengal border, or in Bundelkhand.
When middle-men can gouge the middle-class in Delhi, who will guarantee that the poor in the remote rural areas are given food grain at actual market prices and not at sharply marked up ones? As for coupons, not only can they be forged, but you can be sure, unscrupulous traders will trade these for half their value for cash with the indigent.
The UPA government is set to make food into an entitlement. Estimates vary, but you could have some half of the country’s population lining up for subsidised food grains. Given the quality of governance in the country, this huge exercise is likely to lead to massive fraud and you can be sure that the really poor and needy will somehow slip through the net.
 The other issue is the question of allocating valuable resources. Despite the growth of its economy, India’s fiscal situation is not all that good. Taking on the burden of a massive food entitlement programme could mean depriving vital areas—education, health, infrastructure— of much needed investment.
These are areas which could yield dividends in terms of higher productivity, both in the city and the country-side. Indeed, these are vital if the country wants to ensure that the 500 million or so people it thinks in need of entitlements are to be shifted from farming marginal land into gainful employment where their incomes will be much more than the dismal 32/26 we are stuck with for now.
 
Fix
 Indian academics, people like Amartya Sen, Jean Dreze and Utsa Patnaik, have been debating the issue for years. Yet we have no clarity on what it is to be poor. In trying to include food to its list of entitlements, the government seems to be going the wrong way. Figures show that there is widespread malnutrition in India, not only among the poor, but the richer people as well. The issue is not so much the quantity of food they eat, but its quality.
What is needed is an enhancement of proteins in the diet through inclusion of eggs, fish, meat and milk. Getting all that into the entitlement list would be impossible. What can be done, instead, is to make programmes like the Mid-day Meal Scheme effective.
Actually, probably the most important fix that will improve health and nutrition would be access to safe drinking water. Much of the poor health of children and adults is on account of water borne diseases. Fix that and a large part of the poor health and nutrition problem will be fixed. To do that you need some determination and less hypocrisy about poverty. 
But most political parties find it useful to use a promise of entitlement to garner votes. This has been carried to ridiculous limits in states like Tamil Nadu where the poor are being gifted colour TVs and mixers.The politicians need to pause and think about these policies which could easily lead to the emergence of a class of people who find it more convenient to remain allegedly poor. This is what the current crisis in Europe is all about.
While it is true that there can be no comparison between poverty levels in Europe and India, it is also true that human responses to a particular situation, in this case, the convenience of living in an entitlement culture, are similar.
There is a need, therefore, of targeting  the helpless poor— the children, old folk, mothers and the sick— for entitlements, while the able-bodied need to be helped to get on the track of better education and gainful employment.
Mail Today October 5, 2011

Pakistan versus America

Looked at in any way, the situation is intriguing. Here is a country which is dependent on the United States and the world to the extent of an aid package of $4.4 billion in 2010 alone. It is besieged by jihadis from within. Yet, not only does it encourage jihadis to attack its neighbours, but its principal benefactor, the United States, as well. Indeed, now the US says that it is not merely encouragement, but Islamabad is providing direct support to the jihadis to not only attack American facilities in Afghanistan, but kill American soldiers. You would say that this behavior is crazy. Some would say that artful Pakistan is protecting its national interests, and  is merely as crazy as a fox. Others, however, would argue that Islamabad, is crazy, simply crazy.

Perfidy
There is an inevitable sense of schadenfreude in New Delhi as it watches the meltdown of United States’ relations with Pakistan. Since the mid-1950s, the gullible Americans have been part of Islamabad’s project of maintaining strategic parity with India. And now, as American officials directly accuse the Pakistan Army of being involved in attacks against their Embassy in Kabul, and their troops in Afghanistan, the chickens are truly coming home to roost.
An account in Tuesday’s New York Times describing how an American major was treacherously killed in 2007, as he was leaving a peace meeting with Pakistani officials, points to a pathological behaviour that goes well beyond a desire on Islamabad’s part to preserve its national interests in Afghanistan. Yet the Americans have been forbearing till now.




Analysts like Fred Kaplan claim that Admiral Mike Mullen only noted that the September 13 attack on the US Embassy and ISAF headquarters in Kabul was carried out “with ISI support.” That this did not mean that the ISI had foreknowledge of the attack.
However, Reuters put out an item citing Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst who has advised the Obama Administration on Afghanistan,  that the US had evidence that the attackers “were in telephone contact with people connected to Pakistan’s principal intelligence agency.” On Saturday, an unnamed Pentagon official told Washington Post that Admiral Mullen overstated his case about the Pakistani relationship with the Haqqanis.
There are three known attacks in Afghanistan where the US has traced the attackers’ links to the ISI: The  attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul in July 2008,  on Kabul Bank in  Jalalabad in February this year and the assault on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul in June. There have been other attacks, such as the one  on the Hamid Guest House in February 2010 in which 9 Indians were among the 16 killed, which have had all the hallmarks of a proxy ISI strike.
Targeting Indians and Afghans is one thing, hitting  the headquarters of your long-time ally and aid-giver quite another. No matter how it seeks to fudge it, playing both sides in a war is a dangerous game, especially when you target a country which is much stronger than you are and which is under great political and economic stress.
Till now the US has swallowed its bile and sought to keep peace. Given the fact that 60 per cent of the supplies for the ISAF and US forces go through Pakistan, makes it difficult to contemplate alternatives. To an extent, the US has opened up the northern route through Russia and the Central Asian Republics. But its hostility towards Iran has blocked off an important overland route that could have matched that of Pakistan.
Islamabad claims it wants peace, but it has gone out of its way to foil every attempt by the Taliban to negotiate with the Afghan national government headed by Hamid Karzai. The February 2010 arrest of Mullah Baradar and the recent assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani are just two of the instances that point to that policy. What Pakistan wants is a peace in which their proxy, the Haqqani network is the dominant actor.

Accountability
Pakistan has made a great play about how its responses have been the outcome of its national interests, particularly the threats to its sovereignty.  These are specious claims. In the post –United Nations environment, sovereignty is not absolute.
All those who have signed the UN Charter have ceded some of our sovereign rights and over time, we have ceded more through our commitments to various international agreements. Moreover as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, Islamabad is also subject to UN Resolution 1368 that was passed in the wake of 9/11,  which reaffirmed the right to collective self defence and called on all states to bring the perpetrators of the attacks to justice. It also stressed that “those responsible for aiding, supporting or harbouring the perpetrators, organisers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable.”
But there are limits to what the US will bear, even for keeping the supply routes open. As it is the convoys have suffered enormous loss from periodic attacks, many of them almost certainly initiated by the ISI. But the US is not likely to easily swallow direct attacks such as the ones we are witnessing in recent times. 
What would Pakistan do if the US gave it an ultimatum on the Haqqanis, saying that if Islamabad does not act, it would and very visibly begin building up forces for the purpose near North Waziristan? What if it got UN sanction to pursue that goal? Pakistan may think China will pull its chestnuts out of the fire, but given its past track record, and its generally ruthlessly pragmatic role, Beijing could well step aside and let Islamabad stew in its own juice.
 Pakistan is making a huge mistake if it thinks that all this is a matter of a year and the US will pull out and leave. That is unlikely under the present conditions. The US would not like to repeat a “departure from Saigon” moment with the Haqqanis firing AK-47s in celebration at departing helicopters from Bagram. Neither will it be sanguine about leaving Afghanistan to a motely crew who will allow terrorists to establish camps and train themselves for more missions against the US and the West.

India
Many wonder what India stands to gain, or lose, from the course of events. We lose a lot from a Pakistani meltdown triggered by the actions of the US. Failing Pakistan is one thing, a failed one quite another. You can be sure that if Islamabad takes on the US, it will indeed fail.
India’s interest is best served by a stable Pakistan, but one that is not a rogue actor on the international stage. However, a great deal of responsibility for bringing Pakistan down in a soft landing from the artificial altitude it has occupied in the last fifty years, rests with the United States. Sadly, after decades of pandering to Pakistan’s fantasies, it is the US which is having to contemplate the hard landing.
India should wish the Americans well, but be wary of any joint schemes of bringing Islamabad to heel. The US is two continents and an ocean away. But Pakistan is our neighbour and so we must pursue a policy which will not lead to any self-defeating long-term bitterness. As it is, there seems to be little clarity in the direction the US wishes to take.
Our Pakistan policy must display firmness, and even toughness, when needed, but also seek to be fair and accommodating, if required. Call it flexible containment, or engagement, if you will. There is no automatic congruence of interests between us and the Americans, though there is considerable room for coordination and cooperation.
Mail Today September 29, 2011

A suicidal path on nuclear energy

There seems to be something contrived in the anti-nuclear agitations that have come to life in the country. This is the time when the India’s enormous fifty-year old investments in nuclear energy, as well as diplomacy related to nuclear energy, are about to pay off. It is true that the Fukushima disaster has shaken up not just Japan, but the entire world. But any fair analysis of the incident would show that it was the outcome of a sequence of events, rather than one incident, a combination that is unlikely to recur in the future.
Because of India’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the Indian nuclear programme became subject to a series of embargoes organised by the United States. This led to a stunting of the programme, since our scientific community was unable to overcome the challenge. Even so, with the sheer passage of time, and some help from countries like France and Russia, India constructed a valuable nuclear estate whose crown jewel has been a fast breeder reactor which is being constructed at Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu.
 
Motives
Parallel to this was the diplomacy undertaken by the NDA and UPA governments which eventually led to the United States calling off the international embargo against India and allowing India’s civil nuclear industry unhindered access to the world nuclear industry. This has enabled India to obtain scarce nuclear fuel from abroad, as well as reactor technology and the massive upfront investments that are needed for nuclear power plants.
There have always been people opposed to the use of nuclear energy in India. But their numbers could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Remarkably, the prominent nuclear abolitionists even today —Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik— date back three decades and more. But in recent times, there seems to be a resurgence of protest given the movements in Jaitapur in Maharashtra, Haripur in West Bengal and now Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu.





However, a closer look will reveal that the main cause for the protests is not so much nuclear energy, but other issues like the land acquisition process, dissatisfaction with development and unrelated political dynamics. Unlike, say, a coal-based thermal power plant, a nuclear plant requires much more land because of safety requirements. But in terms of risks, a big dam poses similar risk of killing thousands if it bursts.
But the protests against the nuclear plants have seen an unlikely coalition of forces ranging from the Left and Shiv Sena in the case of Jaitapur, to Vaiko and a clutch of church leaders in Kudankulam. By invoking safety and involving the traditional anti-nuclear groups, the movements have sought to seize the high moral ground.
A lot of the middle-class brain power is provided by broad based coalitions such as the National Alliance of People’s Movements which are against almost everything—multinational companies, big dams, the use of coal, land acquisition, big industry and World Trade Organisation and so on. Just where the money for many of their constituent NGOs comes from is not clear, but it is not a small sum. Increasingly associated with them are large public sector unions whose goal is to prevent a dismantling of their sector, regardless of economic developments or logic. Shiv Sena, Vaiko and many of the politicians have no reason to be associated in an anti-nuclear protest, other than to fish in troubled waters.
There is no doubt that the nuclear power industry in India has been inefficiently, even incompetently, run. This is in great measure due to the molly-coddling of the Department of Atomic Energy by the government. But for the last decade or so, when government became aware of the inability of the DAE to provide for the country’s nuclear power needs, things have changed and the nuclear deal was one outcome of this.
 
Power
The DAE has always hidden itself behind walls of secrecy. While this could be understood when it came to the nuclear weapons programme, there was no reason why the nuclear power programme could not have been as transparent as, say, the Indian space programme.
In great measure the problems that have arisen at the places where the country is seeking to build new power plants are a result of the inability of the country’s nuclear establishment to reach out to people and allay their fears. After Fukushima, this task has been even more compelling. Everyone who lives within 30 or 40 kilometres of a nuclear power plant should have real-time access to radiation data from there. The government has spoken of making the regulation of the Indian nuclear industry more effective and transparent, but till now nothing has happened.
Post-Fukushima there has been a lot of rethinking on nuclear power. But as of now only Germany has announced its withdrawal from the path of nuclear power. But it was on that track  well before Fukushima. The one reason for this is that countries realise that though there is some risk with nuclear power, there are also advantages. Principally they relate to the environment, since nuclear power is carbon free and it does not require a vast logistical chain of railway trains, tankers or pipelines to supply fuel to the power plant.
As a rich and technologically advanced country, Germany can have the luxury of doing without nuclear power. Even so, before it shut down 8 plants in March this year, nuclear power amounted to 23 per cent of its total requirement. Renewable energy already accounts for 17 per cent. In contrast, nuclear energy accounts for a measly 3 per cent of Indian electricity generation and renewable energy, 10.6 per cent.
Again, in contrast to Germany, or other advanced countries, the choice before India is not nuclear or renewable as the source, but power itself. Large parts of the country do not have electricity at all, and even those that have suffer from prolonged power cuts. Tamil Nadu whose assembly is set to pass a resolution against nuclear power has faced severe power shortages in the last two years bringing its booming industrial sector to a grinding halt.
 
Leadership
Industrial countries have been talking of a “nuclear renaissance” based on newer, much safer nuclear technology. As it is, they have already derived considerable benefits from nuclear power. Nearly 30 per cent of electricity in Japan still comes from nuclear energy, Switzerland 40 per cent, France 75 per cent, and the figures for the US are 20 per cent, even though no new nuclear reactor has been added in its system for decades.
India is on the threshold of its industrial era. But that is likely to be strangled if the alliance of anti-industrialisation and neo-Gandhian groups are able to ride on the people’s anger against land acquisition and underdevelopment to bring their utopian agenda to the fore. What we need is sober and hard-headed political leadership that is able to contain its populist impulses for a while to enable the country’s development agenda move ahead.
At the same time, we need to open ourselves up to viable alternatives, which could be in the area of nuclear energy, or any other form. There is, for example, the case of pebble bed reactors which are much safer and can use our abundant thorium resources.
Of course, this has to be within the paradigm of normal development, not a Gandhian regression of our society back to the villages, where life would once again be nasty, brutish and short.
Mail Today September 22, 2011

Where are the leaders when you need them ?

It is difficult to define what leadership is. Some may say it is the social influence you exercise to attain a particular goal, others say it is instinctive, exercised by the leader of a wolf pack or a silverback gorilla.
Others see it simply as a management skill, to be taught and learnt. Most people would put it down to influence, and throw in words like “charisma” for good measure. But they would also say that a leader has the ability to inspire others to do their best, or bring out the best in a people. It is not surprising that leadership often reveals itself in the midst of a crisis. This is the time you need that other great feature of a good leader— the ability to take risks and go beyond the seeming logic of events.
 
Abroad
Anna Hazare put it this way in his TV marathon of Tuesday evening, “Jab sankat hota hai to bhagwan ek aadmi khara kar deta hai (Whenever there is crisis God gives us the man)”. With self deprecating modesty he did say he was not sure whether he was the chosen one. Messiahs are, of course, part of the religions of the Book, sent to rescue frail mankind in their hour of crisis. But  messiahs are for believers, usually giving short shrift to the unbelievers. In another category, alas too frequently in history, is the Man on the Horseback who promises so much and eventually brings great misery.
Today, most of the world is in a crisis of sorts. Economies have tanked, jobs are scarce, politics are adrift, worse, there are countries at war. The blood and iron of a war has thrown up great leaders in the West — Pitt the Younger, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Yet, strangely, the one thing that seems marked by its absence, is the lack of leadership everywhere—the US, India, Japan, Europe.
The 10-year old War against Terror seems to have had quite the opposite effect. It has shown up the leader of the Free World, George Bush, as a bumbler extraordinaire who single-handedly undermined the effort by veering off to fight a war against Iraq. So we have the quagmire in Afghanistan, and the new threats in Somalia and Yemen. If anyone’s leadership stands out in this period it is of the Amir ul Momineen, Mullah Omar.
For a while it appeared that Barack Obama, he of the soaring rhetoric, would seize the mantle of leadership. But sadly, he has been all talk. His team misread and mismanaged the US economic crisis and the result is another quagmire, this time at home. Of course, he has lacked that other thing that all good leaders must have: luck. With Europe also going into a tailspin and the Afghan war not making any headway, the Obama presidency seems doomed and can only be redeemed by the fact that his Republican challengers in the next elections are pygmies compared to even him.
The situation in Europe is no better. Leaders of UK, France or Germany seem to be helpless in the face of the slowly unfolding Eurozone crisis, layered upon the failure of their social policy defined by the word “multiculturalism”. David Cameron set out on his prime ministership with broad bold strokes, but the past six months seem to have reduced his swagger. He has lost the opportunity to reform the NHS, and the recent riots have put a question mark over his other social policies. Nicholas Sarkozy was mooted as a leadership icon when he was first elected but he has not worn his crown well. Polls suggest that resentment against Sarkozy’s leadership style and lack of results runs deep in his country.
Angela Merkel has never been the flashy leader of the Sarkozy variety. But her hesitation in dealing with the economic crisis has doomed her as well in the eyes of the electorate. The situation in Japan is too obvious to comment on. Here is a country that has had six prime ministers in the last five years.
 
India
You will not find great leadership elsewhere either. Vladimir Putin has belied the hopes that had accompanied his rise in Russia and the prospect of a renewed presidential term next year inspires little confidence in a country that seems to be drifting. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao have done well, but not so much as leaders in the class of Deng Xiaoping, being highly able bureaucratic caretakers who have taken China to great heights. The world still awaits a display of genuine leadership from China, whether on some difficult domestic issue, or the larger world where China has become so much more important.
In his first term, goaded perhaps by his Leftist “allies” the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh displayed considerable leadership qualities in, for example, taking the Indo-US nuclear deal and pushing it through his party and parliament, providing a stable riot-free polity after the trauma of Gujarat 2002. In the second term we only see drift. Perhaps it is a function of his peculiar situation of being a leader without a party, or maybe age has caught up with him. Clearly, he seems to have lost two vital leadership ingredients—a fire in his belly and the stomach to take risks.
In the Opposition there are people who have leadership qualities. Two of them stand out, Mayawati and Narendra Modi. But, their record reveals deep flaws which does not bode well for the future, were they to be thrust in a larger role. Self-centred Mayawati has given little to her state in terms of good governance, not even to the Dalits.
On the other hand, while Modi has provided good governance in his state, he has a deep moral flaw arising from his handling of the 2002 Gujarat massacres. The issue is less whether Modi, then new to his job, planned the violence, but
more about his cynical use of the killings to consolidate his own position and
his very public lack of remorse for what happened.
 
Requirement
India can therefore partake of schadenfreude from the awareness that we are not the only ones who are suffering from a lack of leadership. But that does not alter our predicament, just as it does not give comfort to the Americans, the Japanese and the Europeans. But the needs of a desperately poor country, confronted with the opportunity of an era, are much greater.
Our leadership cannot just run the system, as the Chinese leaders have been doing, or allow it to run down as the Americans and Europeans are doing. They need to do things. Someone has to fix our education system whose products are unemployable, or agriculture which has been underperforming for the past two decades. Or, provide a health care system that will prevent the poor from being beggared, or move 400 million people from marginal agriculture to the factory in short order.
No doubt many of the unfortunates we have discussed would bemoan the circumstances into which they have been thrown— Nine Eleven, the financial crisis of 2008, the Eurozone debt crisis of 2009 and so on. They are good men, thrust into conditions they are not able to control or alter. But it is only such circumstances in which we look to our leaders and in which their qualities are tested.
For the present we can only await that leader and hope that we do not get someone who has a direct line to god, or a fuehrer determined to take us to his version of a Ram Rajya.
Mail Today September 21, 2011