Narayanan's firing is a good time to ring in change

He was not the victim of a palace coup, or, as he believes, a target of Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s vindictive gaze. M. K. Narayanan was fired because he failed to do his job and hopefully his exit will set some standards of accountability in the second UPA government. His was a classic example of the Peter Principle; a man who rose to the level of his incompetence. He was no doubt a competent Intelligence Bureau officer, but as intelligence czar he was a failure, as indeed he was as the Indian special representative to negotiate the settlement of the Sino-Indian border dispute. His success in coordinating the Indo-US nuclear deal owed much to the fact that he followed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s agenda faithfully, rather than opposing it, as he did in several other instances.
Narayanan’s rise and his fall personifies the challenges India’s apex security management faces, and the failures that have marked the effort to do something about it. Ever since the wimpish governments of the 1990s gave way to the muscular NDA, India has made enormous efforts to work out an effective national security policy and mechanism to implement it.


This effort has been impelled in great measure by the events of the past decade—the nuclear tests of 1998, the Kargil embarrassment of 1999, the ignominy of the IC814 hijack, and a series of terrorist incidents culminating in the Mumbai carnage of 2008. But a little over a decade after the National Security Council was constituted and a National Security Adviser appointed, the country is still groping for an effective management system.
Narayanan was brought in at a peripheral level as a part-time adviser on internal security in 2004. However the sudden death of J.N.(Mani) Dixit propelled him into the centre-stage as the National Security Adviser. Out of the shadows, Narayanan began to enjoy the limelight—the foreign trips alone or accompanying the PM, the high-level meetings with foreign counterparts, the lengthy TV interviews and the fawning bureaucrats.

Failures
Only, it did not leave him enough time to do his day job. The nature of the job would have been a challenge for a harder working man, but in Narayanan’s case, it overwhelmed him. In part the problem was that he did not energise the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) which had subsumed the Joint Intelligence Committee. He began dealing individually with the heads of the various security departments and instead of working along the lines of the National Democratic Alliance Cabinet-approved reform proposals, he instituted his own changes and constituted his own task forces outside the NSCS.
He did not allow the Multi-Agency Centre to coordinate intelligence on terrorism to come up and the National Technical Research Office set up to consolidate high-tech intelligence was treated like a step-child. Neither did he clean up the ailing Research & Analysis Wing nor restructure and refocus the IB. The major consequence of this was that either he, or his office, missed out a vital clue on the eve of the Mumbai attack, information that could have prevented the carnage.
The failure was manifest, too, in the question of China. He assumed the mantle of the Special Representative at a key time. This was the vehicle that should have delivered the border settlement in quick time. This was evident from the fact that in the period 2003-2006, the SRs had an average of three meetings a year and produced the far-reaching agreement on “the political parameters and agreed guidelines for a border settlement between India and China” that virtually spelt out the contours of a border settlement on the basis of a mutual exchange of claims. But the following year, 2007, there was only one round, only one in 2008 as well on the sidelines of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Beijing in January that year, and the thirteenth round in August 2009. Significantly after this round, the two sides issued a press note which said that the two sides agreed that henceforth they would discuss “the entire gamut of bilateral relations and regional and international issues of mutual interest.”
In other words, a specific process for solving the border issue has for some unknown reason now been broadened to discuss the wider aspects of Sino-Indian relations. This was the round Narayanan claimed “was the best that I have had in the nine rounds that I have held with him.” This was a burden he should not have been given. Even his most ardent admirers will concede that Narayanan’s forte is not diplomacy, leave alone the complex arcana of the Sino-Indian border dispute.
So the country is back at the juncture where it needs to rethink its ideas on national security management at the apex level. As has been pointed out by commentators, the NSA’s position was skewed by the unique role played by the first incumbent of the office, Brajesh Mishra, who played a role as the top governmental aide to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as well as the NSA. Narayanan’s penchant for playing top spook, rather than intelligence czar or policy adviser created more distortions in the office. It took Mumbai and the failure with China to bring this out.

Need
So, in trying to pick up the pieces, Home Minister Chidambaram, who got the defunct Multi-Agency Centre going, is proposing a National Counter-Terrorism Centre which will play the role of the key body that deals with the most important security challenge of our era. It would be wrong to see this as some kind of a bureaucratic power grab. Because he is talking principally about the internal dimension of the threat, the impression going around is that he wants to take charge of all of the intelligence infrastructure.
That is neither possible, nor desirable. To counter terrorism, inputs are certainly needed from agencies like the R&AW, IB, NTRO, Department of Revenue Intelligence, the Narcotics Control Bureau and so on. But these would be better off under a Director National Intelligence and have a dotted line link to the NCTC for the simple reason that these agencies also have to service other subsets of the security paradigm—the country’s political leadership, the armed forces and the finance and commerce ministries. The government would do well to take the opportunity presented to appoint a DNI at the same time that it creates the NCTC.

Institution
As for the NSA, it is clear that in the past his task has been dependent on what the Prime Minister wants, rather than an institutionalised requirement. In the Indian system of governance, executive responsibility is clearly devolved with ministers responsible to parliament, assisted by a bureaucracy. In that sense, any NSA with executive powers is bound to rub the system the wrong way. It would be a good idea, too, to replace the NSA in the Executive Council of the Nuclear Command Authority by a five-star Chief of Defence Staff.
The NSC’s function, as originally envisaged, was to think about medium to long-range options for the country in areas like military, economic, energy, health, food or water security through the agency of the NSCS, the Strategic Policy Group and the National Security Advisory Board. It also had various other support structures like the National Information Board (to look at IT related issues) and so on which have gone defunct in the recent years.
A new NSA will have more than his hands full if he sticks to the original remit laid down for his office, and the country’s decision-making processes will benefit from his ability to provide thoroughly considered advice to the executive system. Today, as any senior official will tell you, Cabinet members, secretaries and the like have hardly any time to apply their minds to a problem since they are
almost always overwhelmed by the immediate.
In the first decade of its existence, the office of the NSA has been dominated by personalities. The time has come now to build up the institution, rather than promote a personality.
This appeared in Mail Today January 21, 2010

Zero tolerance needed to stem Army rot

The day after tomorrow, on January 15, the Indian Army will commemorate the 52nd Army Day, the anniversary of the first Indian to take command of the army of independent India, General, later Field Marshal K.C. Cariappa. As days go, there is nothing unusual about it. There will be the traditional parade in the cantonment and the reception at the chief’s house later in the evening. But this Army Day, it will be difficult to avoid a dark sense of foreboding caused, not by the weather, but certain developments related to the discipline and good order of the force.
On Monday, the Army chief General Deepak Kapoor ordered the issuance of show cause notices to four of its senior generals. This would have been seen as an act of condign disciplinary action, were it not for the fact that the general has been visibly reluctant to act on the issue which involves his Military Secretary Lt Gen Avdesh Prakash, one-time Deputy Chief of Army Staff designate, Lt Gen P.K. Rath, Lt Gen Ramesh Halgali and Maj Gen P. Sen.
The four generals named above have been found to have crossed the red lines by a court of inquiry which has recommended that Prakash be dismissed, Rath and Sen tried by a court martial and administrative action be taken against Halgali.


This recommendation, relating to actions they took in relation to some land in Sukhna cantonment, has been upheld by the vigilance wing of the army headquarters. Such a recommendation is unprecedented in the annals of the army. As Military Secretary, Prakash heads all the promotion boards of the army and handles the postings of all officers above the rank of colonel and decides on the foreign postings of officers. The lack of an ethical compass in an officer at that level may have inflicted longer term damage.

Turpitude
Unfortunately, the scandal is only the latest in a line of revelations that have besmirched the image of the Indian Army. Last year, the army dismissed Major General A.K. Lal found guilty of molesting a woman officer. Responding to a question in the Lok Sabha in early 2007, Defence Minister A.K. Antony gave a list of 25 senior armed forces officers facing charges of corruption and financial irregularities. Among them were several general-level officers as well as people like ex-Maj Gen P.S.K. Choudhry and ex-Brigadier Iqbal Singh who were caught taking bribes in the Tehelka episode.
In the past and in a sense even now, it is not uncommon to have officers in the Army Supply Corps or the Army Ordnance Corps to be found with their hand in the till. However the recent trend, more alarming because of it, is that officers in the combat arms are being found guilty of moral turpitude and corruption. There was the 2004 case where an ex-major general, G.I. Singh Multani, was found to be selling military liquor by the truckload in the civil market.
Since British times, the Indian Army has owed its operational efficiency to the fact that it is deliberately separated from society at large. The military live in special cantonments, have their own canteens to buy things, their own schools to educate their children and so on. This ensures that the many divisions and tensions of Indian society are not reflected in military units which have long been rightly advertised as the best example of India’s secular nationalism.

Law
In common with the military forces of many countries, the Indian Army is governed by a special statute, the Army Act of 1950 whose aim is to ensure swift and drastic action for any infringement of discipline and good order. To civilian eyes, military justice is too swift to be fair. That is not the case, but it is certainly draconian, something seen as desirable if the military is to be able to function at its best.
Military law and the summary powers, which are often devolved to unit commanders, emerged from the compulsions of organising armies and ensuring that they were able to be battle-ready at all times. For this reason, even in democratic societies, military law has a distinct draconian touch. But this is what has provided the army its unique ethos which evokes considerable respect from all sections of society in the country.
In earlier times, officers could be court-martialed and punished for “conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman” which could be anything from indecency and dishonesty to cruelty. In 2000, a Lieutenant General in charge of the Leh Corps was asked to put in his papers for being involved with another officer’s wife.
There may be a view that such matters are private and what happens between consenting adults is no one’s concern. But, and this should not surprise, people hold their leaders to a higher level of accountability than they would themselves. This is what accounts for the righteous indignation over the conduct of, say, erstwhile Governor of Andhra Pradesh, N.D. Tiwari.
Therefore, the government needs to do everything to ensure that the military leadership does not back away from the task of maintaining discipline and good order in its ranks. The government has created an armed forces tribunal to act as a civil court while adjudicating service matters and a criminal court when looking at appeals against courts martial.
But there is something more that can and needs to be done. The sense of honour is an important component of the ethos and esprit de corps of the military. That is why G.I. Singh Multani of the booze scandal and P.S.K. Chaudhry of the Tehelka fame were stripped of their rank as major-general. The government must now follow it up with stripping officers convicted of serious crime and moral turpitude of their decorations and distinguished service awards.
This has been done in the case of former DGP S.P.S. Rathore of the Ruchika molestation case almost as an afterthought. Public outrage pushed the Union Home Ministry to act swiftly on the matter. There is no reason why military officers convicted of various crimes and misdemeanours are also not stripped of their honours and medals.

Honour
To the civilian, a medal is a piece of metal with a bright ribbon. But it means a great deal to the person who wears it on his chest. The disgrace of being stripped of rank and decorations will add some teeth to the failing deterrent of military justice. Indeed, in the early 1990s, the then Defence Secretary not only ensured that a corrupt general was forced to leave the army, but his decorations were withdrawn. However, the sympathy of his brother officers led to their restitution later. Unfortunately, the response of many senior army officers to the Sukhna scam is that the Army can only be as good as the society it springs from.
The problem with the military of today is that instead of maintaining a tradition of zero tolerance, there is misplaced solidarity with brother officers. This is what has enabled Rathore to escape justice for so long, and this is what seems to have persuaded Kapoor to drag his feet in the Sukhna case.
What has happened in the police forces could well happen to the army if its officers start believing that they must stick together through the thick and the thin as a corporate entity. This attitude will hollow out the army’s discipline, good order and ethos, and eventually the whole country would pay the price.
The army has a great reputation as a national institution and instead of allowing it to “catch up” with civilian institutions in its failings, an effort should be made to show it as an exemplar of ethical conduct.
This appeared in Mail Today January 13, 2010

The PM must fix our science and technology problem

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is right: “If India has to re-emerge as a knowledge power in the 21st Century, then it can only be through developing a strong capability in science and technology.” But his prescription for attaining the capabilities was something of a cop-out. The Prime Minister has usually held the Cabinet portfolio for science and technology and Dr Singh claims that under the United Progressive Alliance, the government has invested heavily in expanding and upgrading the S&T and innovation system in the country; indeed, as he put it, “we have worked hard to do what is good for science.”
Unfortunately, that good is not good enough. As the PM himself opined, Indian science is riddled with bureaucratism, favouritism and a “know it all” attitude. It has been impervious to government efforts to reform its system. A major example of the failure of Indian science has been its inability to support Indian agriculture effectively, despite the huge investments and extensive system of laboratories and institutions that were created for the purpose. This failure is costing the country dear, and will cost it more as the country finds itself unable to boost productivity, or cope with the challenges arising out of the vagaries of climate change.

The PM and his worthies at the annual science jamboree

The Prime Minister’s speech listed out a host of initiatives: the new solar mission to boost solar generation capacity to 20,000 MW by 2020, the technology mission for “winning, augmentation and renovation (war)” of our water resources, the Geo-spatial Technology Applications Mission to promote crop planning and monitoring as well as flood management and so on. In keeping with its proclivity for slogans, the government has declared 2010-2020 as the Decade of Innovations with a view of obtaining “out of the box” solutions for Indian problems in the area of economic growth, as well as healthcare, energy, urban infrastructure, water management and so on.

Bureaucratism
But there is one problem. These schemes have to be implemented. And, the instrumentalities the country has for the purpose are blunt. Dr Singh did say that he had taken note of Nobel laureate, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan’s comment about “the need for greater ‘autonomy from red tape and local politics’ for Indian scientists.”
But merely taking note is not enough. Nor will it do any good, as Dr Singh suggested, “to have our scientific institutions introspect” on the issue of autonomy and propose solutions. The government is virtually the monopoly investor in S&T in this country. It is the task of the government to come up with solutions.
Rarely are institutions capable of self-reform, and Indian science which has been ossified for several decades now, will not even be able to introspect, leave alone implement schemes for reform. For one thing, most of those who are being asked to introspect will deny that there is any problem at all.
Actually reform is probably the wrong word. A structure as inflexible and unproductive as Indian science and technology is incapable of being reformed. It needs to be built from ground upwards, all over again. The process must be led by the topmost leadership and its first goal must be to get the government out of the business of managing science and technology.
The government must, of course, continue to fund science strongly. It must audit the funds thus spent, but this role should keep the government servants away from deciding on scientific-technical issues. What is needed is an entirely new framework of relationship between the government and science to achieve what Dr Ramakrishnan wants—freedom from red tape and local politics.

Solutions
The idea may seem outlandish, but the way to do this is to give science and technology back to where it should have remained in the first place—our universities and institutions of higher learning. One of the big failures of Indian science has been the extent to which it has vanished from teaching institutions. As is well known, S&T flourishes best in an atmosphere of openness and intellectual ferment. This can only happen in places where teaching and research go hand in hand. This is not to decry the need for specialised laboratories and institutions, but only to state that there is need to reset the balance in favour of the universities.
A good example of what the government can do can be had from China. In 1986, according to a recent article in The New Yorker, four of China’s top weapons scientists wrote to supreme leader Deng Xiaoping that China’s over-emphasis on military research had atrophied the civilian science set up. As a result of this appeal, Deng set up what is called Project 863 (The letter was dated 3-3-1986) which in the ensuing years poured billions of dollars into labs, universities and enterprises in a range of products “ranging from cloning to underwater robots.” In 2001, China added energy technology to the list of projects to be supported by 863.
The burden of the article is the advances that China has made in a host of clean energy technologies, but you can see the impact of the programme in a host of areas ranging from the new Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed rail network, to the ambitious electric car project. The Chinese learnt their lessons from the US where the Pentagon and the National Institutes of Health create panels of experts who look into competitive proposals and award contracts.
The process has not been without its problems. The most celebrated was the case of Chen Jin, a researcher who got more than $ 10 million grants to make a chip to rival Intel’s, but it turned out that he had faked his results. But that has not deterred the Chinese who have incorporated the lessons of the Chen episode into their procedures. Chinese S&T probably still suffers from cronyism and fraud, but it has also come up with substantial achievements.
The key to what has happened in China is to get the bureaucracy out of the business of managing science and technology and debureaucratising the process of funding worthwhile projects. A similar process would do very well in India. More so than China, India has a tradition of entrepreneurship—commercial, scientific and technological. Indians like Laxmi Mittal and Swaraj Paul have shown their worth abroad, as have scientists like S Chandrashekhar, Hargobind Khurana and Ramakrishnan. As the case of Information Technology, reveals, Indians like Narayan Murthy and Azim Premji did great things within India, but that is because the government did not control or regulate the sector till it had already taken off.

Demilitarise
Indian science and technology, too, has had an inordinate military orientation. For decades, the nuclear sector gobbled up an unconscionable proportion of R&D resources. They may have given us the bomb (though the thermonuclear device failed), but they have failed to deliver on the power front. The emphasis on the military has prevented the emergence of an aeronautics industry in the country. Because the focus has been on military products via the Ministry of Defence-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, India has not been able to establish a worthwhile civilian aeronautics industry, and is fated to import generations of passenger aircraft.
Ironically, despite huge investments, defence S&T has also been a monumental failure. The Rama Rao Committee is reported to have given some proposals to reform the DRDO to the Defence Minister A.K. Antony. But the proposals will not amount to much since Rama Rao, a former DRDO hand, is a “safe” scientist and was appointed to provide anodyne solutions. Nothing short of a drastic remaking of the DRDO, and indeed the structure of official science in India, will enable India to meet the ambitious goals that the Prime Minister outlined at the Indian Science Congress last Sunday.
This article appeared in Mail Today January 6, 2010

Revealed: The sordid and ugly face of India

2009 is ending for the country with with a sad, gut-wrenching feeling. No, it’s not the economy, the stability of the government, or the failure of the monsoon. It is an inner tumult brought on by the haunting image of Ruchika Girhotra, being played and replayed on TV and newspapers. The 14- year old molested by a senior police officer and then pushed to suicide by the systematic and brutal persecution of her family.


To add to the bitter taste of the rising bile is the other image being repeated — the smirking face of the man who perpetrated the act, S.P.S. Rathore, formerly of the Indian Police Service. There are other faces, too, some as yet not in focus, which reveal, to use Hannah Arendt’s term, the banal collection of people — policemen, school teachers and politicians — who were accessory to the terrible act and its cover-up. The policemen participated in the false arrest and torture of her brother, the school expelled her for little cause, other policemen watered down the charges against Rathore, bureaucrats who passed the buck on the case, and, above all, the politicians, who protected him in the knowledge that he would be in their power and do their bidding.
The entire system was thus involved in the evil act of destroying the Girhotra family. This was the system created by Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar and Gandhi, our upright and just founding fathers. Their heirs have become anything but that. Some like Lalu Yadav, Mayawati, O.P. Chautala have at least been charged with wrong-doing, but there are others, like Narendra Modi and Bal Thackeray who have gotten away with incitement to murder, and many, many more in the top rung of our political system who are corrupt and violent, but manage to escape the rigour of the law in much the same manner that Rathore did for 19 years—by suborning the system and through the assistance of friendly colleagues and babus.

System
The one thing that emerges from the case as it has unfolded, is the unstinted support that Rathore got from the political class. This was important since the political class is our master-class. Successive Chief Ministers in Haryana refused to take heed of reports of Rathore’s wrong-doing and actually promoted him.
Their cynical logic was simple. A compromised cop like Rathore was ideal for their own purposes, which in many instances, too, went beyond the bounds of the legal. For a politician, a crooked and morally compromised policeman is worth his weight in gold. He is able to use him as currency to get a lot of things done—intimidate enemies, fix elections and overawe rivals.
Is it any surprise that senior police officer R.K. Sharma, convicted for journalist Shivani Bhatnagar’s murder, was dismissed from service seven years after his name came up in the case? That another police officer in Rajasthan is absconding, allegedly for the past 13 years after raping his orderly’s wife, a simple village woman. And the son of another policeman, convicted of rape in the same state, has jumped parole and vanished. A senior Punjab police officer, Sumedh Singh Saini has been charged for the wrongful confinement and disappearance of two individuals and their driver. The list is extensive, and no doubt, just the tip of the iceberg.
If unchecked, it is this moral degeneration, where the custodians become the criminals, that will define the India of tomorrow, not our growing economy, scientific and technical prowess, and the like. There will be little point in attaining material success if we lose our soul — not in a religious sense — but as Plato and Aristotle saw it, the essence of our being, or that which makes us human. In almost every culture, this is defined by compassion, love and an unambiguous understanding of what is right and what is wrong. It has been marked through history by the ending of slavery, advances in gender justice, the outlawing of torture and an end to what used to be “cruel and unusual punishment.”
It is the inbuilt moral compass that has guided human civilisation to the present, that which persuades people to fight oppression and defy persecution. Morality is not, or should not, be a peripheral issue. For Gandhi, of course, it was always central. But even for hard-headed realists like Ambedkar it was the key. It was not for nothing that Babasaheb pointed out that minus constitutional morality, the structure of governance created by the constitution would not work. This is the morality that was undermined systematically by Indira Gandhi, to begin with, and has since suffered all-round damage.

Responsibility
How does the system go about rectifying the current state of affairs? Certainly, the Union government that controls the all India services needs to be far more pro-active than it is. As of now, the tendency of the government is to protect, rather than prosecute wayward officers. Taking the excuse that honest officers would be harassed, the Union government has a rule that requires central sanction for their prosecution. This rule needs to be drastically modified to exclude people accused of murder, rape and other such heinous crimes.
But the real onus for changing things rests on those who will have to undertake this task — the political class. And here, the lead must be taken by the party that began the rot—the Indian National Congress. The Congress is the mother party of our political system. It took the country to great heights, but it also brought it to its nadir. In just about a decade after the death of the tallest Congressman, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi brought on the Emergency. The Emergency’s atrocities—forced sterilisations, illegal arrests and harassment—were relatively minor. What was more damaging was the lasting legacy that Indira left— her party’s democracy subverted, the judicial system undermined and the bureaucracy corrupted with power.

Imperative
The Congress party thus has a historical responsibility to regenerate the system. Some recent signs do suggest that the party seems to have become aware of this. The raids on Madhu Koda and the exposure of his misdeeds have been attributed to this rethinking. Another sign is the refusal of the party to touch Shibu Soren after the recent Jharkhand elections, and more recently the quick decision to axe Narain Dutt Tiwari as Governor of Andhra Pradesh. But all this is too subtle and indirect. There is need for the party to frontally confront the issue of political immorality and its spillover into the administration and police machinery. There is really just one approach that will work—zero tolerance of crime, especially on the part of those charged with upholding law and order.
But the people of the country cannot and must not depend on the goodwill of a political party alone. Civil society and its key arm—the media—needs to play a systematic role in exposing injustice and unjust persecution.
India has great pretensions of being a moral nation, no doubt a hangover from the fact that Mahatma Gandhi led the freedom movement and that the Buddha, Mahavir and Nanak had walked the land. But in the last thirty years we have shredded whatever was left of that legacy. The system has become, to put it bluntly, immoral, unjust and corrupt. Those who comprise it, and especially those who lead it, need to do something about it, and fast.
This article appeared in Mail Today December 31, 2009

In 2010 our decade of opportunity will begin

Next week the world enters a new decade, the second of this millennium. Because the years to come belong to the future, there is always an uncertainty as to how they will unfold. In the last decade, the one that will end on December 31, India has clinched three key issues. First, it has more or less eliminated all the constraints on the Indian economy. Second, the politics of caste that so debilitated the Indian polity since 1990, have reached their finite limit. And third, Indian foreign policy has come out of the restraints that had been placed on it by the United States and the developed world.
The decade beginning 2010 can be what the period after 1990 was for China. Having suppressed Tiananmen in 1989, China launched a blistering phase of political consolidation and economic growth that has yet to slow down. Beijing saw the opportunity and seized it with both hands. Can New Delhi do the same ? True, China has certain advantages, not in the least being the single-mindedness and focus of the Communist Party of China, and its principal pillar, the People’s Liberation Army. It also has a generous measure of pragmatism, discipline and foresight, special qualities of the Sinic civilisation.
India began the 2000s with the slow meltdown of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. The party met its Waterloo when it became clear, in the wake of the post-Godhra Muslim massacre in Gujarat in 2002, that it was not willing to change its medieval view of India. It was not just that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was undermined thereafter, but so was his effort to shift the party away from the thralldom of the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh, an exercise that has been marked by failure since.

Highlights
The poor performance of the great Yadav chieftains of the Gangetic plains—Mulayam Singh and Lalu Yadav—in the 2009 general elections indicates that the Mandal tide has at last turned. Ms Mayawati’s inability to break out of her Uttar Pradesh bastion, too, has signaled the limits, if not the dead-end that the politics of caste have reached in the departing decade. The UPA has skillfully reappropriated the mantle of being the party of the poor by coming up with important measures of social welfare such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act which is the closest to a social welfare net that the tens of millions of Indian poor can get.
As for the economy, it has been ticking along at a handsome pace of about 7 per cent growth in the decade gone by. In the last two years, the economy has also weathered one of the worst downturns that the world economy has seen, and yet the rates of growth dipped only to 6.7 per cent in 2008-2009 and hope to reach 8 per cent in the current fiscal. There is every indication that the Indian economy goes into the new decade with considerable optimism. Barring infrastructure, almost all constraints—savings, investment, policy—have gone.



In the area of foreign policy, the most successful outcome has been the Indo-US nuclear deal. The nuclear issue was the pill stuck in the Indian throat. We had to either wash it down or swallow it. The nuclear tests of 1998 set in motion a complex train of events that finally persuaded the US to come to terms with India. The result was a far-reaching agreement whose main achievement is to remove a splinter under India’s fingernail that gave great pain in our relations with the developed world. A major side-effect of the agreement is that we will be able to sharply ramp up our nuclear power capacity through import in the coming decade.
If India holds true to the trends of the decade past, the period beginning 2010 should see decisive developments in the country’s economy, its global standing and its fight against poverty and disease. Take the area of defence, for example. The induction of a number of big ticket items—aircraft carriers and nuclear propelled submarines will compel us to rethink our oceanic strategy in a qualitatively different fashion. There are important gaps, such as the modernisation of the army and filling dangerous gaps in the Air Force, but things will have moved ahead in the coming years.

Failures
But there is nothing foreordained about what will happen in the future. While significant achievements in the economy, politics and foreign policy in the past ten years have opened a window of opportunity, it is for the country to collectively seize it.
As it is, there are certain major problems that the policies of the decade gone by have merely touched. The first relates to quality education in the country. While people tend to focus on top schools like the IITs and IIMs, the ability to address the opportunities of the coming decade rests vitally in a comprehensive overhaul of the government run primary and secondary school system, and the extensive network of universities across the country, some run by the Union government, the others by the states.
Their condition today is pitiable. There is not a single university of any value between, say, New Delhi and Kolkata. In an area peopled by hundreds of millions, universities are producing millions of unemployable young men and women who are nothing but cannon fodder for the Maoists—their paper qualifications are of little practical use, but their partial education makes them self-aware and angry about their plight.
The second major failure has been in the area of health. It is well known that private health systems account for an unconscionably large proportion of health expenditure of Indians. The state and union government run systems are, predictably, in a shambles and they do not even pretend to cover even a fraction of the population. A country which vies to be a world power of some standing cannot do so by having the highest rate of maternal and infant mortality in the world.
Everything will eventually rest on one key issue—leadership. China’s great success, beginning 1990, was the manner in which the CPC managed an orderly leadership transition and the high quality of leadership that the country received. India cannot replicate an authoritarian system, but it needs to do something about the increasingly dysfunctional political system of the country. Incoherence at the political level cannot but have the most serious consequence in the area of governance.

Congress
One of the major unfixed problems has been Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s inability to reform the civil service, something he promised early in the UPA’s first government. Some cosmetic changes have been put forward like external assessment and so on, but there is need for deep and fundamental reform of the civil services to ensure that they do not fail the country in the way they have in the last fifty years or so.
Perhaps the most significant development of the last decade has seen the resurgence of the Congress party and the decline of the BJP. As the decade wore on, the Congress has become stronger and has skillfully expanded its agenda to undertake what it says is “inclusive growth”—that is privileging market-led growth over sham socialism, even while taking serious steps to address urban and rural poverty.
The last decade has set the leadership lines of the Congress party as well. Rahul Gandhi, the leader in training, will have to take the helm at some point in the coming decade. He has shown himself to be sensitive, caring and unafraid to break the mould. But his and his generation of politicians’ real test is ahead. The consequences of success are obvious, but the price of failure would be unimaginable.
This article appeared in Mail Today December 25, 2009

Gross injustice thrives in this country as well

The newspapers and TV channels have been full of the story of Vikram Buddhi, an Indian student in the US who has been sentenced to five years in jail for posting hate messages for George W. Bush. The sentence does appear somewhat harsh, but even his parents do not deny the basic charge. (I have been given to understand that this is incorrect and that his parents and Buddhi contest the charge) His father B.K. Subbarao, who spent four years in jail on trumped up charges of spying in India, says that the behaviour of the jury and the judge made it a fit case for a mistrial.
Yet none in the media, especially our hyperactive TV channels, have bothered about a case of gross injustice, closer home, here in New Delhi. Three persons—two associated with the National Security Council Secretariat and one with the Research & Analysis Wing—have been in rotting in New Delhi’s Tihar jail for the past three and a half years on the charge of spying for the US. As of now they have been denied bail, and even copies of documents that they are alleged to have given to a US diplomat have not been given to their lawyers.
A year after their arrest, I had occasion to report on their plight. In the process, I looked at the case documents, talked to some of their lawyers, NSCS and US officials, as well as friends and colleagues, and came to the conclusion that the charges against them are bogus and that they are victims of monstrous injustice. Two years later, that wrong has not been righted.

‘Evidence’
Unfortunately, since the tag “national security” has been cited by the prosecution, the justice system of the country has entirely failed the three. On Monday, the Supreme Court adjourned a bail petition of Commander (retd) Mukesh Saini (58), formerly of the NSCS, one of those in detention. That of another accused, Brigadier (retd) Ujjal Dasgupta(64) director (computers) at R&AW will come up only next month. The third, Shib Shankar Paul(38), a computer systems official at the NSCS, too has been denied bail.
All three — Paul, Dasgupta and Saini — had been arrested in June-July 2006, for being associated with, Rosanna Minchew, a US intelligence officer working under diplomatic cover. There was nothing unusual or illegal about this because they were all members of the Indo-US Cyber Security Forum, an offshoot of the Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, which had been formed to deal with cyber-terrorism and information security. In fact Saini and Minchew were joint coordinators of the group.

Capt B.K. Subbarao holds up the picture of his son Vikram Buddhi who has been sentenced to five years imprisonment in the US for threatening George W Bush

Of the three, Paul had no intelligence background. He was principally a computer technician. The charges against him, too, are vague. But his crime seems to be is that he allegedly developed an “intimate” and “close relationship” with Minchew — testified to probably by IB surveillance tapes of their allegedly mooning about in Lodhi Gardens and some South Delhi restaurants. Paul had access to no secrets and probably would not have recognised one if he saw it. He was a systems person you find in every office to service the system and take care of the glitches. However, he did have some old documents which he had got as samples from the NSCS to create an office intranet.
The charges against Saini are vague, one newspaper claimed that he passed information on the Indo-US nuclear deal and that the Delhi Police’s Special Cell had seized several documents “including the draft report of the Indian nuclear doctrine from his computer pen drive”. Even a university research scholar knows that the draft nuclear doctrine has been a public document from the very outset.
Incidentally, the other “sensitive document” that Saini had was on the implications for India of the Kra Canal linking the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Siam. This was actually Saini’s hobby horse and he was the author of the document which he passed on to friends and colleagues. And now he is being charged for possessing it.
Dasgupta is alleged to have copied documents from his office computer hard drive into a lap top and thereafter onto a pen drive. One of the documents relates to something called project Aveneshak which the R&AW itself accepts has nothing to do with the security of the country. From what I have learnt, the project was basically relating to data storage and transfer which was Dasgupta’s job.

Gain
What have these “spies” alleged to have gained? In Saini’s case, the police claim that he had prevailed on Minchew to get him a job in Microsoft, India, after taking voluntary retirement from his job at the NSCS. Now, it is well known that Saini was a first rate professional and was more than qualified for the job that he had arranged for himself before seeking voluntary retirement, a path that many other defence officers walk on regularly.
There seems to be no specific allegation of gain in Dasgupta’s case.
As for Paul, according to the senior NSCS source, the police first spoke of him getting Rs 25 lakh, then scaled it down to Rs 16 lakh and then to Rs 8 lakh, the identical sum he had used to buy a flat, only that it was taken against a loan notified, as per rules, to
his office.
Currently, both Saini and Dasgupta are awaiting the court’s ruling on obtaining copies of the documents that they are supposed to have given to Minchew. The government’s case is that these documents are so sensitive that they cannot be revealed.
But if they have already allegedly been given to the Americans and shared with the prosecution, why can’t they be made available to the defending counsels? “We need to know what is being used against my client,” says P.K. Dubey, Dasgupta’s lawyer.
Three and a half years in jail have broken Das gupta’s health. Here is a man who served the country for almost 40 years and now he is in a prison for no fault of his. I have lost track of Shib Shankar Paul’s lawyers. He is reportedly being assisted by the legal aid cell.
The prosecution will find it hard to convict the three of them of transmitting information because it did not take place. But the colonial-era Official Secrets Act’s Section 4 is unyielding. Even associating with a foreigner can be a crime. The principal charge they face is therefore possession of documents, which, of course, the prosecution is not willing to share with the defence.
If the documents against Saini are any guide, even this is not likely to work. Anyway, according to Dubey, even if convicted, the maximum sentence for this would be three years. And the three have already done three-and-a-half, without bail.

Cost
The case has already cost the country a great deal because all cooperation in the vital area of cyber security with the US has come to a stop. No Indian official is any longer willing to participate in the exercise for fear of similar persecution.
But the price paid by the three and their families is infinitely greater. Paul, Saini and Dasgupta have already gone through hell in the jail for no fault of theirs. Their families have been ruined and disgraced.
It is high time that the government stepped in and stopped this farcical persecution. Far from being a threat to national security, the case of the three has highlighted the extent to which the national security establishment has hijacked the democratic system of the country and undermined its judiciary.
This article appeared in Mail Today December 18, 2009