The flabby Indian state surrenders to terrorists once again

The philosopher George Santayana once said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  He was probably talking about Indians, even though he did not quite say it. The Orissa government’s decision to concede all fourteen demands of the Maoists, in exchange for its collector R. Vineel Krishna and junior engineer Pabitra Majhi, marks yet another surrender by an Indian state to the armed might of a militant group. Clearly we have learnt nothing from the fiasco of the IC 814 hijack of 1999 or the release of Rubaiya Sayeed in 1989. 
In part, the problem seems to be in our muddled response to Maoism. Because they claim to speak on behalf of the people and have organised poor tribals to fight what they say are the depredations of the state, there is an assumption that they are some kind of Gandhians who use guns only when compelled to do so.  That is simply not true and let us not fool ourselves: The Maoists have obtained their ends by threatening to execute the two officials. Looked at any way, this is an act of terrorism.
 
Price
There will be people who will say that the Maoist demands were largely reasonable. That is true, but the masters of public relations that they are, they have taken care to camouflage their real demands—the release of imprisoned senior cadre—with the ones which  show them as friends of the poor and the exploited. So, it is true that some good ends will be served by the episode—justice may be nudged a bit on behalf of tribals who lost their land because of a NALCO project, the Orissa government will harden its existing opposition to the Polavaram dam project in Andhra Pradesh, trumped up cases will be withdrawn against some tribal activists, and so on, so forth. But, all these have been obtained with the real threat of death hanging over two people.
The consequences of this surrender are bound to be negative. The next time the Maoists want to spring a colleague from jail, they will kidnap another functionary of the state, perhaps some lowly policeman and threaten to kill him. If the official is relatively junior, the state may not even react and the hapless person could  be executed.
I wonder whether the alacrity with which the Orissa government acted had something to do with the fact that the officer in question is from the Indian Administrative Service, and that the officials advising the Chief Minister on the issue are also members of the same prestigious service which is known to look after its own to the exclusion of everyone else.

Another consequence of the state kneeling before the Maoists will be in the conduct of the anti-Maoist operations. Already, as one of the pre-conditions for the release, the government has suspended anti-Maoist operations in the jungles of Malkangiri. If Maoist cadre, presumably arrested after a great deal of effort by the police, can get away like this, why should the police personnel waste their time and effort, and risk their lives, in actively pursuing them ?
 The penalty for the Orissa surrender could be long lasting. Even today the country is dealing with the consequences of releasing five Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front militants for the kidnapped daughter, Rubaiya, of the then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed. This disastrous decision gave the still fledgling Kashmiri militancy its greatest boost in December  1989. For the first time, the Kashmiri militants felt, they had actually bested the Indian state. The result was that tens of thousands of young Kashmiris went across the Line of Control to receive arms training from the waiting Pakistani handlers.
Ironically, the militants had been on the verge of releasing Rubaiya anyway. The public opinion may have been heavily influenced by the JKLF’s azadi propaganda, but the outfit itself came under a great deal of social pressure for the dastardly act of holding a young woman hostage.
 
Folly
Yes, Kashmir was still in its age of innocence. Farooq Abdullah, then Chief Minister of the state was aware of this and he refused to release the jailed JKLF leaders, Hamid Sheikh, Sher Khan, Javed Ahmed Zargar, Noor Mohammed Kalwal and Mohammed Altaf Butt.  However, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s ministerial colleagues in Delhi— Arun Nehru, I.K. Gujral  and Arif Mohammed Khan—recommended to Prime Minister V.P. Singh that he be overruled and the JKLF militants were released.
The next historical lesson came from the IC 814 hijack. A passenger aircraft with 176 passengers aboard was returning from Kathmandu to Delhi when it was hijacked on December 24, 1999 by some Pakistani Harkat jihad-e- Islami terrorists. The authorities bungled in not being able to stop the aircraft when it landed in Amritsar, and so it went to Lahore, then Dubai and finally landed in Kandahar, then under the control of the Taliban. Twenty-seven passengers, including one Rupin Katyal— who had been stabbed several times and who later died— were released in Dubai.
On the ground, the aircraft was surrounded by Taliban personnel who claimed they were there to protect the aircraft and its passengers, but in reality had been deployed to prevent any Indian military action. After several days of negotiations, the hijackers obtained the release of Masood Azhar, a top terrorist leader who had been in jail since 1993, Ahmad Sayeed Omar Sheikh, a British-Pakistani terrorist who was in jail for kidnapping several foreigners in New Delhi in 1994, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, a Kashmiri militant leader under arrest since 1992.
 
Retrieve
After their release, Masood Azhar split with the Harkat jihad-e-Islami and set up the Jaish-e-Mohammed which was involved in the attack on the Parliament House in New Delhi in December 2001 and other terrorist acts. Sheikh’s career has been even more notorious. He was reportedly involved in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, as well as in the assassination plots against President Pervez Musharraf. He is currently in a Pakistani jail. Both Azhar and Zargar remain free.
The result of the IC814 hijack and the 9/11 incident in the United States in 2001 compelled New Delhi to adopt a tough anti-hijack policy. India would not negotiate with hijackers, authorities had pre-authorisation to immobilise aircraft on the ground, the air force would, under certain circumstances, shoot down an aircraft under the control of hijackers.
But the whole can only be the sum of the parts. The Union government can only do so much, the states need to do their bit, especially in the case of the Maoist movement which confronts the state with a complex problem. It feeds on  poverty and deprivation and the systemic injustice and exploitation in many parts of the country. But it is also a fact that the leadership cadre of the Maoists are a bunch of cold blooded killers who ruthlessly run an empire of extortion and exploitation of their own.
There is little point in lamenting over what has happened. The Union and the Orissa state governments must now focus their efforts in retrieving the situation  to the extent they can. Instead of going easy on the Maoists, they should press on with the anti-Maoist campaign. 
This does not mean a relentless military effort, but a sophisticated strategy which separates the Maoist fish from the waters in which they are swimming through effective political engagement with the locals, more development work, better security for government officials, and an overall resolve to press the campaign into a fight to the finish.
Mail Today February 24, 2011

Don't write the PM off just yet

It should have been said of him that he came, he saw and he conquered. But the Prime Minister’s modest goal in his carefully managed “interaction” with the TV media on Wednesday,  was not to emulate Caesar, but his wife, whose aim  was merely to remain above suspicion. Dr Manmohan Singh’s decision was not a matter of choice, but the need of the hour, since he sits besieged by the rising tide of public anger relating to corruption in his United Progressive Alliance government.
The Prime Minister may have had an immediate goal in organising the “interaction” — to break the downward spiral his government seems to have entered. But there seems to be a larger goal—to transform the political danger confronting his coalition into an opportunity to best the Opposition.


This may seem counter-intuitive at present when his government is beleaguered, and even the conduct of the coming Budget session of Parliament is in doubt. But Dr Singh has not reached where he is by linear thinking. His chosen martial art is judo.

Judo
He has in the past, too, used his seeming weakness to come out on top. He did it in 2004 with regard to his rivals in the Congress party to gain Sonia Gandhi’s affections, and he repeated it in 2008, and lined up his reluctant party to push his Indo-US nuclear agenda through parliament, by hook and by crook. Mr Advani and the Bharatiya Janata Party grandees who are salivating at the prospect of returning to government be warned.
If there was one unambiguous message in today’s interaction, it was that the PM was not about to put in his papers out of disgust or frustration, or the barracking tactics of the Opposition.  “I have a lot of unfinished business,” he said and “I intend to stay the course.”
If the PM appears all alone right now, it is also, perhaps, that he chooses to be so. The subtext of the press meet was to absolve Manmohan Singh from any blame in the scandals that have hit the UPA government.  The PM seems to have subtly islanded himself  from not just his own government, but also his party.
After the TRAI, Telecom Commission and the Finance Ministry had approved of A Raja’s decision not to auction the spectrum, “ I was in no position to insist that an auction took place,” he noted at one point. At another he declared, “ I have not met anybody myself,” in reference to a charge that the PMO was in the know on the Antrix-Devas deal. And, most importantly, he declared  “ I am not afraid of appearing before any committee, including the JPC.” He doesn’t have to belabour the point, but the emphatic “I” says it all.
There is an artfulness in his defensive tone. He  acknowledged, for example, that he could make mistakes, but, he pointed out, he was not as bad as he was being depicted, presumably by the media. Yet, his message was clear—he intended to stay the course. “We shall overcome, we shall prevail,” were  the brave, if somewhat hopeful closing lines of his prepared statement.
No one has, even now, questioned the Prime Minister’s sincerity or his honesty. He provided reasonably convincing explanations for why he, personally, cannot be blamed for either the 2G sale or the Antrix-Devas deal, you can even accept his point on the importance of giving space in the coalition to the partners to determine their own nominees. But surely, there is an element of naiveté in not understanding as to why the DMK was so insistent in getting the telecom portfolio. It wasn’t to serve the public.
The real issue remains the need for the PM to pull out of the downward spiral his government is caught in. And the question in everyone’s mind is whether Wednesday’s  effort can give some breathing space to what looks like a dying government.  The jury is clearly out on that. 

Change
It wasn’t surprising that the events in West Asia—the overthrow of tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt — was also brought into the meet by a questioner. The PM’s answer was correct, if predictable. India is a democracy, at least in terms of providing periodic opportunities for the people to change their government.
Alarmingly, what we are witnessing in India is the slow erosion of the solid political edifice that has largely kept social and political peace in India. It is being brought on by a careless political class that seems determined to live on past political capital.
Where in Egypt we see the possible beginning of a process of the construction of a democracy, in India we are witnessing  an unthinking effort to destroy it. Sadly, the very people designated to  lead the democratic system— the politicians— are in the forefront of the effort.
The Prime Minister has said that he is dead serious about getting to the bottom of the scams that have undermined his government and not sparing anyone.  The big question is: Has the PM bought enough time from an angry public to ensure that he can push through the Union Budget for the coming year, and then carry out his promised exercise of deep restructuring and reshuffle of his Cabinet?   

Choices
The key is in the choices the PM makes in the coming three months. Will he, for example, bring a bill that will create an  empowered Lok Pal to check corruption? Can he truly rid his Cabinet of the corrupt  notwithstanding what he quaintly calls “coalition dharma”? Will the lumbering legal process make a visible impact in the Commonwealth Games, Adarsh Society, 2G and Devas-Antrix scams? Can enough be done in this short period to deter our venal babus and politicians?  
Even so, you must give Dr Singh full marks for trying. He may have come across as being  nervous and defensive, but to write him off would be a serious mistake.  The press meet was a carefully considered act, aimed at communicating with the middle class which plays a key role in shaping opinion in the country.
With his humility and genuine sincerity, the prime minister, offering himself to  interrogation by a JPC,  would have gone across well with the  tens of millions who  witnessed the media interaction. They may even agree with the PM that it is the media which is sapping national confidence, not the corrupt netas and babus.
Dr Manmohan Singh will have achieved his short-term goal if he has bought a couple of months he says he needs to show that he means business with regard to UPA-II and its agenda. But the longer term goal of restoring his own reputation and that of his government could be more elusive.
A rotten edifice that came up over decades cannot be dismantled and rebuilt in a short space of half a term of a government, that, too, one that has been so seriously implicated in all manner of wrongdoing.
Mail Today February 17, 2011

Authoritarian rule is usually brittle

The events in Tunisia and Egypt have brought out starkly the difference between an autocracy and a democracy. You can never predict the way things will unfold in an autocracy. Democracies are quite predictable. Take India. You may not be able to predict which party will be leading the government in 2020, or who the prime minister will be, but you can be sure that things will be, more or less, a variation of what they are today. Doesn’t sound very exciting, but that’s the way it is.
Things work differently with authoritarian states. Seemingly unshakeable regimes suddenly find the ground beneath their feet shifting. The events in Egypt and Tunisia are actually a pale replay of what happened in Iran in 1979 or in Eastern Europe and Russia a decade later.
 
Faultlines
Usually empires, kingdoms and governments come apart following a defeat in a war, a financial crisis or a military coup. But in modern autocracies, with their well-developed systems of secret police, press censorship and repression, the faultlines develop and extend themselves silently. The collapse is usually swift and often triggered by a trivial set of events. Many explanations have been offered for the collapse of the Shah of Iran, or the Soviet Union. But only in hindsight. Prospectively no one predicted the events.


Looked at through this prism, two countries of great importance to India stand out—Pakistan and China. On paper, Pakistan is a democracy, but just on paper. It has its elections, change of governments, a somewhat free media. But then there is the Army, whose role as a guardian of the nation goes beyond what is expected in a democratic polity. The edifice of formal government in Pakistan, too, is a shaky one.
The ground rules keep shifting somewhat dramatically year on year. It was just last year that the Prime Minister regained his primacy as the head of government. His powers had been usurped by the military dictator Pervez Musharraf and his civilian successor, Asif Ali Zardari was not too keen to shed them and they had to be reluctantly pried from his hands by a united Pakistani political establishment, aided by the Army.
The case of China is more straightforward. The Communist Party of China makes no bones about running an authoritarian system, so effective that it has even been able to police the usually ungovernable world wide web. So remarkable have been the economic achievements of the country, that people talk of the Beijing Consensus where an authoritarian government with a market economy is being spoken of as a model for third world countries. Rather than go the route of Russia which became a democracy prior to restructuring its economy, the CPC has adjusted itself to provide the booming market-based Chinese economy an effective system of authoritarian political stewardship. This system is based on a vast bureaucracy which has evolved a system of internal rules which ensure that the excesses of the Maoist period are contained. It limits the term of party and government leaders, much in the same way as many democracies do, but the key decisions on who will be the leaders is decided on in an opaque manner. Deng Xiaoping, who was himself the core of the second generation leadership set in place a system that has seen the third generation—Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, Zhu Rongji— successfully take the nation to great heights and hand over command to the fourth generation—Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao in 2002-3.
We are now on the eve of another leadership shift in China, as the fifth generation comes to the fore. It’s now clear that in 2012, Xi Jinping will succeed Hu as the General Secretary of the party and the President of China. Li Keqiang’s attendance at the World Economic Forum meet in Davos last week seems to have cemented his candidature for the prime ministership in succession to Wen Jiabao. 
This is where the uncertainties begin. The stability of the Chinese leadership has been a function of the enormous expansion of the Chinese economy, the great skill of the politicians in command, and the consensus within the CPC on the need to play by the internal rules, whatever they are. But, the Chinese economy cannot grow at this blistering pace for the next decade as well.
As it is, faultlines are becoming visible between the town and countryside, and the east and the west. A measure of the fragility of the Chinese system is evident from the haste with which Hu abandoned the G-8 Summit in Italy and returned home in the wake of the disturbances in Xinjiang in July 2009.   
 
Earthquakes
While China’s great economic progress is a tribute to its astute leaders and hardworking and hugely gifted people, the order and control that you see in modern China is based on an authoritarian system. Its cities do not feel the kind of pressure their Indian counterparts are subjected to because you need a special passport to live and work there. The population has been kept in check by methods that would never work in India, as became evident during the Emergency of 1975-1977. The legal system in China is virtually non-existent. Land is sequestered at will and uprisings crushed ruthlessly.
Unlike India where instances of social and political disorder are often limited by ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries, in China such movements grow to dangerous levels, sometimes developing an all-China character, resulting in regime change. In the mid-19th century, the Taiping rebellion spread across southern China and led to the loss of millions of lives.
The Wuchang uprising that preceded the 1911 Revolution that overthrew the Qing empire, is another case in point. Though it was initiated by the central authority, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s also falls into the pattern of civil disturbances that begin in one part of China, spreading quickly to its length and breadth. The Tienanmen uprising of 1989 occurred because the authorities refused to permit the people to mourn the passing of the reformist Hu Yaobang. It shook the Communist rule as nothing else has done in recent times.
In the ensuing years, the potential for a cataclysmic all-China uprising has grown. For one, Mandarin has effectively established itself as the dominant Chinese dialect. For another, the internet has provided the people a limited mode of self-expression which was hitherto prohibited.
 
Warning
This is not to say that China will go the way of the Soviet Union or Egypt. The Chinese have a clever and competent leadership and they are undoubtedly aware of the structural time bomb they are sitting on. There are indications that the issue of more political freedom is the subject of intense debate within the Chinese Communist Party. Given China’s importance to the world economy, a cataclysmic change is highly undesireable. 
The Chinese have reacted to the Egyptian developments with prudence. They have, for one thing, gotten some of the portals to censor “Egypt”-related searches. The state controlled TV and newspapers have steered the discussion on events in Egypt carefully, highlighting the perils of disorder and chaos. A million men marching, demanding more personal liberties in Cairo may not threaten the rulers in Beijing right now, but there is always tomorrow.
The events in Egypt have given the lie to the belief that if your economy is doing well and governance tough, you don’t really need the constant renewals of the consent of the governed through free and fair elections. The events in the Arab world do sound like the tolling of the bell against  the so-called Beijing Consensus.
Mail Today  February 3, 2011

BJP's backward glance in Kashmir is retrograde

What kind of a Republic Day present did the Bharatiya Janata Party think it wanted to give to the nation? Even its main ally, the Janata Dal (U), has come out against its move to hoist the national flag at the Lal Chowk in Srinagar. Bihar chief minister, Nitish Kumar, has said that the Ekta Yatra organised by the BJP’s youth wing had little meaning “given the kind of tension prevailing in the Valley.” He is probably expressing the national sentiment.
The BJP, of course, sees it in a different way. Integrating Kashmir to the Indian Union has been one of its three “core” agendas, along with a uniform civil code and the construction of a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.
 
Mookerjee
There is a deeper background here. In its recounting, the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the precursor of the BJP, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee was martyred for that cause. Mookerjee died, of an illness complicated by his poor treatment in 1953, after he had been arrested by the then J&K government headed by Sheikh Abdullah— the grandfather of the present chief minister, Omar Abdullah— while entering Kashmir.

BJP youth wing on their Ekta Yatra at the Punjab border

Mookerjee differed fundamentally with the Nehruvian policy of accommodating Kashmiri aspirations for autonomy. For Mookerjee, the idea of not permitting outsiders to settle in the state, or the special privileges that the state had got, through negotiations with New Delhi, were an anathema.
Kashmir is an issue on which the BJP  calibrates itself— measures the extent to which it remains true to its ideology. Having been helped by a befuddled Congress to recover from its seven-year enervation, the party is pacing itself against its tried and tested causes to see how it functions as a political unit.
As of now its current second-tier duo— Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley— seem to have marshalled the ideology, and the troops, effectively. But the Kashmir agenda could once again blow up in its face. We need only recall the fiasco that was the Rashtriya Ekta Yatra led by Murli Manohar Joshi in 1991. Given the troubled times, it had to eventually carry out its flag-hoisting mission in Srinagar under the protection of a curfew and CRPF guns.

We are not suggesting a Mookerjee-like tragedy or Joshi like farce here. But what can happen is that the party may over-reach itself. The almost all-round condemnation of its proposed plan to hoist the tricolour in Srinagar is a pointer towards that and Nitish Kumar’s condemnation is almost a confirmation. Politics cannot be run through fetishes, and the Kashmir integration issue, which the BJP sees in simplistic terms, has become that.
All those who have seen the bloodbath in Kashmir in the last two decades know just how complicated the Kashmir problem is. This was not simply an outcome of the lack of integration of the state with the rest of the country. What has become evident in recent years is that while the armed militancy has been defeated, it has not been completely eradicated. There are still a substantial number of gunmen around to disrupt the peace of the state, should they choose to. Knowing that they have little chance against the Indian security apparatus, they bide their time and choose their strikes with great care. This was evident in the killing of separatists like Abdul Ghani Lone and the shooting of Fazal Haq Qureshi, both of whom were for a dialogue with the Union government.
 
Fear
While militancy may be down, separatist sentiment remains high in the Valley. It is carefully nurtured through strikes, hartals and the like and mobilisations —such as those relating to the alleged rape and murder of two sisters in Shopian, or the proposal to lease some forest department land to the Amarnath Yatra Shrine Board.
Last year the cause of the day was the killing of Tufail Ahmed Matoo. But what added extra fuel to the upsurge were the Machil killings of three persons, allegedly by army personnel who wanted to pass them off as militants. The emotional alienation of the Valley’s young is such that they are always a ready source of foot-soldiers. Earlier, they took to guns, but now they have begun using stones.
At the heart of the Amarnath agitation, which was, at first sight, a trivial issue, was the reservoir of fear into which those who planned the agitation tapped. This is the fear that the Valley Kashmiri Muslims have of being overwhelmed by the “Hindu” majority. Thus calls to integration—BJP style—which means the possibility of outsiders buying land and possibly displacing the locals, plays well into the Kashmiri Muslim psyche.
Actually, in today’s day and age, while it is easy to displace a couple of hundred thousand people, like the Kashmiri Pandits, it is simply not possible to see how you can change the religious and ethnic composition of a compact area of 15,000 sq kms, where 98 per cent of the nearly
6 million people who reside, are Muslim.
But you cannot argue against fear. Especially, since that is exactly what the more extreme members of the BJP would want to instill in the Valley. As a result the small, but perceptible shifts in the state pointing towards greater accommodation to the national mainstream and a distancing from the separatist agenda, are being jeopardised.
 
Vajpayee
The BJP’s urge to calibrate itself against its foundational movement and the reactions of the Kashmiri Muslims, are coming in the way of efforts to resolve the long festering problem. Over the recent years some issues have become manifest. First, that Pakistan is willing to abandon its long-held positions relating to a plebiscite or self-determination in the Valley. Second, that  military commanders like Syed Salahuddin are also ready to work out a peace agreement. Third, that the separatists in the Valley, including Syed Ali Shah Geelani, are willing to work out a deal with the Union government.
The only “dissidents” here would be the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and some elements of the Pakistani security establishment, both of whom have an agenda which is not really related to Kashmir.
In this background, the attitude of the BJP is that of a spoiler. It has no workable proposal to make on J&K, but it wants to use the issue as an element in its national strategy to return to power at the Centre. That’s a pity. The key steps that have led to the present favourable situation in  the Valley, be it with Pakistan or domestic opinion, were both initiated by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. But the BJP of today seems to be harking back to an earlier phase of its political life.
Perhaps it is time for the leadership of the party to reflect on whether they would like to go back to the post-Mookerjee past which turned out to be sterile, or adopt the path of pragmatism and commonsense charted out by Vajpayee.
 Mail Today January 26, 2011

The Prime Minister needs one more reshuffle

The reshuffle of the Union Council of Ministers is unlikely to alter the perception that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s second government is simply not working. The key dysfunctionalities in the Cabinet remain unaddressed, as do the larger issues between 10 Janpath and 7 Race Course. There have been some important ministerial changes, but accountability, that key to performance, has been minimally enforced in Wednesday’s anodyne exercise.
 
Incompetence
Dr Singh will have to do more, much more to get his government back on track.  Perhaps there is need for a bureaucratic reshuffle as well. That many of his ministers let him down is no secret, but surely what should be more galling to him is the failure of his chosen top bureaucratic team comprising Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrashekhar and his Principal Secretary T.K.A. Nair. These are the people he chose and nurtured with the expectation that they would ensure that his government works smoothly, his agenda moves forward and his flanks are protected from the activities of wayward ministers. They have managed to do none of these things.
 Mr Nair as a retired civil servant serves at the will of the PM, but Chandrashekhar has received two unprecedented extensions in service after he retired. Within the system he is known as a decent, even cerebral man. But in hindsight, perhaps, it can be said that he has lacked the “can do” personality that a CabSec must have.
The CabSec is no ordinary bureaucrat. As the head of the civil service and the chair of the informal Committee of Secretaries, he effectively runs the day-to-day affairs of the government, supervises the country’s nuclear weapons programme and clears logjams across the governmental system. He is also the “coordinating secretary” in a number of areas— the civil servant charged with looking after a particular subject. The two important areas he looked after in the last couple of years are the Commonwealth Games and prices, both of which have formed the vortex that threatens to pull the government down.



Farcical
 The failure with prices has been more serious and was brought out most illustratively by an extraordinary document issued from the prime minister’s office. Though issued by his media adviser, it seemed to be a haphazardly thrown together list of things the entire government planned to counter the price rise.  The document, simultaneously a mea culpa and a cri de coeur is also an effort to pass the buck. In a peculiar way, it sums up all that has gone wrong with Dr Singh’s second government.
That it was a bureaucratic grab bag is apparent from the collection of proposals that went into the 3-page document. First, the blame — on late rains for the onions and, on the rising incomes and, curiously, “inclusiveness” programmes, for the increased prices of milk, fish, meat and eggs. Then were the usual empty threats against hoarders and the pathetic calls for awareness campaigns involving Resident Welfare Associations, as though all of India is some kind of a South Delhi suburb.
Along with the homilies on the need to enhance productivity and diversification of agriculture are two sound proposals on the need to review the Agricultural Produce Market Committee Acts, and the somewhat shaded hint of the need for FDI in organised retail chains. 
There was a touch of the farcical, too, in the declaration that NAFED and National Cooperative Consumers Federation (NCCF) would sell onions at Rs 35 a kilo at their retail outlets. To see what had been done I trawled the net and checked the websites of both organisations. And here’s the gem: A PTI report of Saturday 15th, two days after the PMO press note declared that “20 tempos loaded with a cumulative quantity of about 8000 kg of onions [had been sent out to] different localities in the national capital to sell the vegetable at Rs 35 a kg to the common people.” Since 2 kilos per family was the norm, a grand total of 4,000 Delhi households had presumably benefited. There is nothing in the website to suggest that such sales took place outside Delhi. It is not known how many kilos the NCCF sold, but its website lists a grand total of 14 retail outlets, all in New Delhi.
 
Accounting
Just as “security” really means the safety of Lutyens Delhi, where the babus and netas reside, price control, too, seems to have meant taking measures in Delhi. Maybe the foxy babus had another goal in mind—to ensure that the masses in Delhi remain quiescent and do not do a Tunisia here. Uprisings elsewhere can easily be suppressed, but food riots in Delhi are quite another thing. 
But this is to digress.
Tucked away at the end of the document were the two issues that are germane to our critique. The government, it said, had decided to set up an inter-ministerial group under the Chief Economic Adviser Kaushik Basu to review and monitor the situation.
For the past forty years or so, it is the Cabinet Secretary who has chaired a committee of concerned secretaries who monitor the food prices. The committee met monthly, but when the price pressure was high, it would meet more frequently. Its job was to take quick decisions—ban export, increase import, order raids, get the railways to move commodities fast and tweak  rules in ways that only the babus can to ease the pressure. Clearly, the committee had not done its work in recent times. Having failed on the job, the Cabinet Secretary and his colleagues, have retreated to the margins and pushed the Chief Economic Adviser to the centre stage knowing that he has great prestige, but little executive authority. This new inter-ministerial body is a needless layer in the mechanisms to fight rising prices. All it does is to lengthen the time taken for an effective executive response to a crisis and, perhaps more important, help spread the blame for
any failure wider. 
The shoddy document only serves to illustrate how ill served the PM has been by his bureaucratic team. Lacking dependable ministers, he invested a great deal of power and authority on them. But, as any fair accounting will reveal, he has got little in return.
Mail Today January 20,2011

The LCA is but a shallow achievement

The good news is that, though it has taken an unconscionable twenty six years, the Light Combat Aircraft has got its initial operational clearance. Hopefully by 2012, it will enter squadron service. We now have a platform that we have developed with considerable difficulty, and through which we have gained extensive new facilities located in the Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd and the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA). These can be exploited to further advance Indian military aviation industry.
The bad news is that both the HAL and ADA are the same old organisations that have given us what one expert has termed as a “stunted” design, not particularly well suited for further exploitation. As it is, the Indian Air Force probably does not know what to do with it. Air Chief Marshal P.V. Naik’s left handed compliment described it as “a Mig 21 plus plus”.
Considering that the Mig-21 joined service in the mid-1960s, that does not quite look like a resounding vote of confidence.
Image: Rahuldevnath


After all, for an Air Force that flies aircraft like the Sukhoi 30 MKI, is in the market for a medium multirole fighter aircraft (MMRCA) and dreams of soon acquiring a fifth generation fighter, the LCA is a poor relative that must be kept far from sight and “out of harm’s way.” So it will be based at Sulur, near Coimbatore. 
 
HAL
 The LCA is likely to be a kind of discontinuity— just like the HF-24— in Indian aviation history. Meaning that it will soon wither on the vine. Yes, there is talk of an Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft to be taken up by the ADA with Rs 100 crores being advanced for preliminary work. But this should have begun ten years ago to effectively enter the cycle of design, development, production and obsolescence that all aircraft must go through.
For this, the DRDO and the Air Force are both to blame, as is the leadership of the ministry of defence which should provide  strategic guidance and directives to our R&D and production institutions and ensure that they are implemented.
The sad thing is that things  need not, and should not, have been this way. From the outset, the LCA project became more of an expression of bureaucratic power— in this case the DRDO—rather than a project that would enable the emergence of an Indian military aviation industry. The DRDO sought to do an end-run around the IAF which, in turn, disdained the project through its key first decade. Ideally, a senior IAF officer should have led the project carried out under DRDO auspices, much in the way the Advanced Technology Vessel programme.
The big problem the government faces is the poor quality of the defence public sector units (DPSU) and ordnance factories. In their work culture the producer is the king, not the consumer. Over the years the DPSUs have perfected the art of skimming the cream from defence contracts. They will compel the MoD to canalise orders through them, and then, instead of absorbing a particular technology, simply buy kits and assemble them and sell it to the armed forces at a higher cost than would be paid to import the same equipment.
Perhaps the worst offender in this category has been the HAL which has failed to absorb technology from projects such as the Mig-21, the Jaguar, the Advanced Light Helicopter, and the Sukhoi-30MKI. Because had it done so, we would not have had to go hat in hand to the Russians for an FGFA, or for that matter, buy an MMRCA. The latest example is the Sukhoi-30MKI which the HAL swears is being made from “raw materials” in India. The facts, as my colleagues in Bangalore tell me, are otherwise. Besides some localisation, the aircraft still comes in sub-assemblies  from Russia. In the case of the aircraft’s engines, there is not even a pretence of indigenisation, all of it— and it is 40 per cent by value of the aircraft— comes from abroad. Yet, the project was sold to the country as one which would give a massive boost to indigenisation of the Indian aviation industry, and the country paid for the transfer of technology.
Allowing HAL to remain a monopoly military aviation producer is bad for the IAF and the country. There is need to split it into two or three separate and, ideally, competing units, with their own design bureaus.
 
Privatisation
Aviation is not the only high-tech area that has been grossly mismanaged. The story is the same when it comes to the government shipyards. While the absorption of technology has been better, the costs and delivery schedules are simply unacceptable. The Navy’s acquisition programme has been hamstrung by the dog-in-the-manger attitude of the defence shipyards which lack the capacity and the quality consciousness to take up high-tech projects such as the construction of advanced warships and submarines.
The new defence procurement and production policy seeks to open up the defence industry to the private sector, but it does not go far enough. On paper there has been a policy of getting the private sector into defence production since 2001. But the realities are more complex. There is, the well known way in which ordnance factories are being kept on life-support by allowing them to obtain kits from Tata and Ashok Leyland for assembly into trucks that are passed off as their own product. Then there are genuine problems—private sector companies cannot afford the stop-go approach of the ministry of defence where orders come in piece-meal, depending on the budgetary commitments which are annually determined.
A private producer with a contract to make five ships, would like to buy the steel, cabling, and other components in bulk from the cheapest quality vendor. But in our system, he will be told, you make one of a class, and we will decide on follow on ships later. And later often never comes.
 
Corruption
Unlike the aviation sector, there are already a number of top quality shipyards in the private sector in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, some of them better equipped than their military counterparts. They would be happy to participate in the ship-building projects, provided the government displays some sensitivity to the manner in which businesses run, as compared to ordnance factories and PSUs, which take a cost, and an arbitrarily high “plus” method, to fix their prices.
It is no secret that many of the problems of defence procurement arise from good, old fashioned, corruption. The elimination of middle-men or agents has done little to check the underhand games that take place. In 2009, a retired head of the Ordnance Factory Board that supervises 39 factories across the country, was arrested along with three other persons for alleged bribery. The recent mysterious loss of a file relating to offsets in the MMRCA competition gives a hint at the processes that are at play when a big buy is undertaken. The 2010-2011 CAG’s report has brought out small instances where “shadow” companies work in tandem with ordnance factories in such a brazen manner that tenders purporting to be from different firms have the same telephone and fax numbers.
Few in the country would grudge spending money on defence of the country. But they would be astonished if they knew the full story of the bureaucratism, egos, incompetence and plain corruption that characterises the Indian defence R&D and production system. Defence Minister A.K. Antony is trying to change the system, but his efforts are too little and too late. The man who needs to wield a big broom to clean up the system, has only a flimsy feather duster in his hand.
Mail Today January 14, 2011