It's time to get down to business

Manmohan Singh's second term has seen huge scams but also action against crony capitalism of a kind India has never experienced. Which trend will finally prevail?





19 February 2011
The Hindu

It's time to get down to business

Siddharth Varadarajan

Anyone trying to predict the outcome of our polity's life and death struggle with crony capitalism will have to make sense of two contradictory sets of images.

On the one hand is the obfuscation and prevarication that senior Ministers have served up when confronted with the reality of the 2G spectrum scam and other unprecedented instances of corporate and political robbery. The most recent display of this was by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself, who needlessly played down the scale and significance of the revenue loss that the 2G scam had caused. But, on the other, are the pace and scope of the current investigation, which has also been unrivalled by anything India has witnessed so far. The same Prime Minister whose silence and ambivalence on 2G was seen by the Opposition and the public at large as weakness and even complicity has pushed the Central Bureau of Investigation into summoning and questioning top industrialists like Anil Ambani, raiding Kalaingar TV, the business arm of a key political ally, the DMK, and sending A. Raja, who was Telecom Minister till some time ago, to the unwholesome confines of Tihar Jail.

These are extraordinary developments by any yardstick and government managers have let it be known that there is further excitement in the offing. In the days and weeks ahead, more iconic businessmen are likely to be questioned for their involvement in the spectrum allocation scam. Nor will Shahid Balva be the only high net worth individual to be packed off to judicial remand.

When the leaked Radia tapes exposed a small part of the inner workings of the India establishment, our crony capitalists banded together to plead privacy and complain loudly about a “witch hunt.” Top corporate figures and even some politicians spoke about the danger of India becoming a “banana republic” and issued dark warnings in serial interviews about how the investment climate in the country was being adversely affected by the absurd suggestion that respectable businessmen might actually be involved in scams. The purpose of that fully scripted campaign was to ensure that the media, the investigating agencies and the courts all back off. Fortunately for our body politic, that has not happened. Public disaffection is so high that none of the estates of our system can afford to be seen as slackening. And that includes the executive too, notwithstanding the ‘zero loss' logic it foolishly put out. In his testimony to the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, the CBI director was at pains to distance himself from that arithmetic of denial. Though the agency was painfully slow in getting off the block, nobody can really fault its current approach. And the credit for that must be shared equally by the media, the courts but also, ironically, Dr. Singh.

Yes, the Supreme Court is monitoring the functioning of the CBI but there are scores of cases where similar monitoring has produced nothing even remotely so dramatic. The Mulayam Singh disproportionate assets case, for one. When you are in government service, individual acts of bravery without the requisite air cover can be risky. As the police officers who raided the offices of Reliance Industries in New Delhi 13 years ago when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was Prime Minister discovered, taking on the biggest captains of industry is not exactly a career advancing move. If today, the younger Ambani is answering questions about his role in Swan Telecom, there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that the agency has received pretty direct encouragement from the highest levels of the government.

The question, of course, is whether or not the CBI will persist in its endeavours. Are we being treated to an elaborate dog-and-pony show? Or does the agency's current activism represent a fundamental course correction for a system which has tolerated and thrived on corruption? If yes, does the Prime Minister have the political clout to see things through?

Rent seeking and money making have been fellow travellers of the Indian political system for more than four decades but this is arguably the first time that a Minister has been run out of office and sent to jail as part of a criminal investigation. Never before has the role of big business come under the scanner like this either. When the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power at the Centre in 1998, it promised clean governance. What the country got instead was sweetheart deals in the form of privatisation of hotels and other public sector assets, the petrol pump scam, the coffin scam and other crooked ventures. As the Justice Shivraj Patil report has catalogued, the rot in telecom policy and spectrum allocation also started then. But nothing was ever probed.

The United Progressive Alliance inherited this corrupt system and presided over its unprecedented expansion. Thanks to whistleblowers, upright auditors, a vigilant media and a fair bit of corporate rivalry, however, the truth about 2G, the Commonwealth Games and other money-making enterprises has slowly come trickling out. There are, of course, scores of other fishy deals that need probing too, especially those involving land grants and mining concessions.

What explains the schizophrenic attitude of the United Progressive Alliance government towards the 2G scam? Why does the Prime Minister peddle the fiction that companies like Swan or Unitech did not resell their spectrum (for a profit) but only expanded their equity base, when the sale of equity for a company which has no assets other than spectrum amounts to the same thing? Why does he persist in comparing the loot of public money via the sale of cheap spectrum to the cost of providing food subsidies for the poor — even as the CBI is pounding on the doors of the companies that benefited from the 2G allocation?

As an economist and a man of unquestionable integrity, Dr. Singh knew full well the revenue consequences of forgoing an auction for the allocation of 2G spectrum and recorded his unhappiness with the decision. Even if he is right in saying that he could not have been expected to get into the minutiae of decisions in all Ministries, this can at best explain why he allowed the January 2008 spectrum allocation to take place. What it does not explain is the delay of 20 months in the registration of the first FIR by the CBI. In the intervening period, there was ample material in the press for the Prime Minister to realise something wrong had happened. His argument that the compulsions of coalition came in the way doesn't cut much ice. For one, the DMK, with which the Congress has an alliance in the Tamil Nadu Assembly, would have been bound by the same compulsions and would have been hard placed to rock the boat at the national level. For another, why wasn't safeguarding the public exchequer considered as good a reason for putting the fate of the government on the line as the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal? Finally, ‘coalition dharma' cannot explain the persistence of Congress politicians with questionable credentials in the Union Cabinet, men such as Vilasrao Deshmukh, for example, against whom the Supreme Court has passed embarrassing strictures.

If the Prime Minister were anyone other than Dr. Singh, one might be justified in treating his belated intervention in the 2G matter as an indication of his own involvement. In reality, the delay was the product of both his individual political weakness and his party's failure to understand the political implications of the scam. Today, it is obvious that vigorously pursuing the case is in the best interest of the government, the ruling party and the coalition. Such is the level of public disenchantment that if the Congress fails to punish the officials, politicians and businessmen involved, it will take a beating at the next elections. But there is also a wider, systemic opportunity the 2G investigation provides for the Indian polity. Capitalism needs rules. In mature capitalist economies, those rules are designed to allow businessmen to make “normal” profit and to use (or loot) the resources of the state as a collective. The growth of monopoly power, and thus supernormal profit, is also a “natural” part of the process of accumulation. When individual corporate houses attempt a short-cut, however, they invariably corrupt the wider political edifice. Corrupt politicians come and go. But unless the crony capitalists who use them are punished, Indian democracy will continue to corrode.

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India-Pakistan talks: Two years and still counting

Further delays in the resumption of dialogue with Pakistan will not make it easier to get satisfaction on the terror front....








5 February 2011
The Hindu

Two years and still counting

Siddharth Varadarajan

An entire year has passed since the Manmohan Singh government decided it was time to find a way to break the dialogue deadlock and kickstart the process of engagement with Pakistan.

During this period, Dr. Singh has met his Pakistani counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, once, Foreign Secretaries from both sides have met twice, and the two Foreign Ministers sat together once, in Islamabad in July 2010. That encounter ended inconclusively, even disastrously, with the Pakistani host compounding the visible lack of progress made in their talks with the impropriety of a public diatribe against his visitor. When the opportunity for a second ministerial meeting arose at the United Nations where both Ministers spent a week in the fall, cussedness ensured a suitable date could never be found.

At the root of the Islamabad fiasco was the fact that neither side was willing to risk upsetting political equations at home by appearing to concede too much ground to the other. Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi wanted to be able to tell the stakeholders who matter in his country — the military — that he had got India to agree to a calendar for the resumption of dialogue on Kashmir and Siachen. But India's External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna was not prepared to go that far. He wanted to calibrate any timetable for the resumption of talks on politically sensitive issues like Siachen to visible progress in the investigation and prosecution of those involved in the Mumbai terrorist attack of November 2008. What resulted, thus, was a stalemate.

On February 6, the two Foreign Secretaries will make a fresh attempt to press the reset button on the frozen process in Thimphu on the sidelines of a Saarc event. Unfortunately, they will meet under circumstances that are seemingly less propitious for a breakthrough with both leaderships under siege. In India, Prime Minister Singh is battling charges of dragging his feet in high-profile corruption cases and the Opposition's hostility towards him and his government has never been greater. In Pakistan, the killing of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and the open sympathy his assassin attracted from religious clerics and sections of civil society have vitiated the atmosphere and put the liberals and the entire secular political class — which forms a natural constituency for cooperation with India — on the backfoot.

On paper, the government of Yusuf Raza Gilani is likely to find a second helping of whatever fare India served last July as unpalatable as the first. India, too, may feel it has no option but to spurn the Pakistani demand for a clear timeline for the resumption of dialogue in the absence of headway in the 26/11 case. And yet, a deeper look at the dynamics within Pakistan and at the core interests of India ought to give both governments cause to re-examine their attitude.

In a speech to the Research & Analysis Wing on January 21, the Prime Minister's Special Envoy for Pakistan, Satinder Lambah, spelt out the government's policy dilemma. “Engagement,” he said, “does not always assure us of a desired response, nor does it guarantee success. However, rejecting the process of engagement will not enable us to achieve our long-term goals.”

In relation to Pakistan, India's principal goal today is the permanent neutralisation of terrorist organisations which operate with differing levels of support from the establishment of that country and launch attacks on Indian targets. The second key long-term goal is the establishment of normal relations with Pakistan. In his speech, Mr. Lambah made the only public reference the Government of India has cared to make in all these years to the back-channel negotiations which took place with Islamabad from 2004 to 2007. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's measures to improve relations with Pakistan were based on the principle that “borders cannot be redrawn but we can work towards making them irrelevant,'' Mr. Lambah said, adding that a lot of progress had been made. “The ball is in Pakistan's court. We will be willing to pick up the threads.”

In my opinion, Mr. Lambah's words point the way towards the possibility of forward movement but only if both governments have the courage to acknowledge the illogicality of their current official positions.

Three paradoxes

India knows “rejecting the process of engagement” will not enable it to achieve its goals on the terror front and yet it is unwilling to talk until it sees satisfactory progress in the Mumbai attack case. A second policy paradox it must overcome is that it is reluctant to resume the harmless ‘front channel' talks on Kashmir even as it is “willing to pick up the threads” on the far more substantive back channel if Pakistan agrees. Finally, Pakistan, which has spent the better part of the past six decades demanding substantive progress on the Kashmir issue must explain why it is obsessed with the immediate resumption of the formal process (even though it knows this will lead nowhere) but is reluctant officially to embrace the back channel process and formula which offer the best chance for a speedy, win-win outcome.

For the past two years, I have been part of a Track-II India-Pakistan dialogue process that the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in Delhi and the Jinnah Institute in Islamabad have been conducting. The meetings take place in Bangkok because neither government is willing to guarantee it will issue visas for all the participants coming from across the border, but that is the subject of another article! Besides strategic analysts and journalists, the ‘Chaophraya Dialogues' have brought together senior retired military, intelligence and foreign service officers, many of whom spent their entire careers planning and executing moves against the other side. Even in the tense atmosphere which prevailed following 26/11, these dialogues always produced a broad consensus in favour of engagement. But this tended to stop short of a fulsome endorsement of the composite dialogue process and the back-channel. Indeed, several Pakistani interlocutors — whether from military or political backgrounds — seemed reluctant to endorse the back channel. The military men said the venture was General Pervez Musharraf's ‘solo flight,' the politicians felt the process was tainted by its association with a dictator.

In our most recent round, however, both sides made some progress. “The absence of a formal and sustained engagement on the full range of issues confronting India and Pakistan is unhealthy, counterproductive and dangerous,” the Indian and Pakistani participants declared in a joint resolution. “We welcome the forthcoming meeting of foreign secretaries in Thimphu and hope that the two sides will be able to prepare the ground for the resumption of a comprehensive and sustained dialogue.” More significantly, the principle which Mr. Lambah spoke of — and which Khurshid Ahmed Kasuri, who was Foreign Minister in the Musharraf years, has also spoken of — found joint support: “We agree with the broad vision of India-Pakistan relations in which borders cannot change but can indeed be made irrelevant. We resolve that a dialogue between the two countries should include discussions on Jammu and Kashmir. The formal bilateral dialogue should be complemented by back-channel contacts. The people of J&K should be appropriately consulted in this process”.

Terrorism, the resolution noted, is of deep concern to both India and Pakistan. “Indian concerns about the Mumbai attacks in 2008 have seriously affected the dialogue process. The perpetrators of the attack should be brought to justice at the earliest. Pakistan has deep concerns about the tragic loss of lives in the Samjhauta Express attack. India has to expeditiously prosecute those involved and keep Pakistan informed.”

Taken together with the views of Prime Minister Singh's envoy, this resolution, which leading members of the strategic community in India and Pakistan approved, indicates a possible way forward. What is required is a process that can build on the Indian enthusiasm for the back channel with the Pakistani insistence on resumption of the front channel. One way to do this is to examine whether, after a suitable period of time, the two channels can be merged. After all, once the back channel reaches an understanding on broad concepts, translating it into actionable parameters will involve painstaking negotiation. It is significant that Mr. Kasuri made well-rehearsed statements during his recent visit to India to the effect that the Pakistani military brass, including Gen. Parvez Kayani, who was head of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate at the time, were kept fully briefed after each back-channel meeting with the Indian side. No one in GHQ, Rawalpindi, has refuted what he said.

On terror, the aftermath of the assassination of Salman Taseer has brought home to most Indians the degree to which the Pakistani state is caught in a vortex. A system which cannot ensure justice when a high constitutional functionary is killed is unlikely to be able to offer India much relief on 26/11. This is not to say India should stop insisting on progress. But tying the future course of our bilateral engagement to this futile pursuit is unhelpful and counterproductive. Liberal Pakistanis say the resumption of dialogue with India will strengthen them in their struggle against the jihadis and the ‘establishment'. They may well be exaggerating their own influence and our own. In the worst case scenario, dialogue will turn out to be a placebo that will not help them or us. But India has nothing to lose by following their prescription.

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K. Subrahmanyam, strategic thinker par excellence, 1929-2011

Much more than a mere advocate of Indian nuclearisation, K. Subrahmanyam was instrumental in shaping the country's foreign and security policies in the post-Cold War world...






3 February 2010
The Hindu

Strategic thinker par excellence

Siddharth Varadarajan

Intellectual progenitor of the Indian nuclear weapons programme and by far the most influential strategic thinker of his own and subsequent generations, K. Subrahmanyam's enduring contribution was the coherent intellectual framework he helped provide for the country's foreign and security policies in a world buffeted by uncertainty and changing power equations.

He died in New Delhi on Wednesday after a courageous battle against cancer. He was 82.

In a long and distinguished career that began with his entry into the Indian Administrative Service in 1951, Subrahmanyam straddled the fields of administration, defence policy, academic research and journalism with an unparalleled felicity. His prolific writings — contained in thousands of newspaper articles (including in The Hindu), book chapters and speeches over four decades — touched upon a broad range of global and regional strategic issues and invariably generated fierce debate in India and abroad. But it was his early — and even controversial — advocacy of India exercising the option to produce nuclear weapons that made governments and scholars around the world sit up and take notice of his views.

Subrahmanyam's first formal involvement with the Indian nuclear establishment began in 1966 when, as a relatively junior bureaucrat in the Defence Ministry, he was asked to join an informal committee tasked by the Prime Minister's Office with studying the strategic, technical and financial implications of a nuclear weapons programme. Soon thereafter, he was made director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), a post he held from 1968 to 1975. He was one of the first analysts to sense a strategic opportunity for India in the emerging crisis in East Pakistan and his public articulation of this well before the 1971 war led Pakistani officials to see him eventually as a Chanakya-like figure who managed to contrive their country's dismemberment.

Born in Tiruchi on January 19, 1929, Subrahmanyam returned to his home state of Tamil Nadu to serve as Home Secretary during the period of the Emergency. An honest and upright administrator, he considered the Constitution and the liberties it embodied to be of higher value than the political directives of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Congress party. At a time when his counterparts elsewhere in the country became willing accomplices to the suspension of civil liberties, Subrahmanyam used his powers to shield those being targeted. Many years later, during the Gujarat carnage of 2002, he was one of the few members of the strategic community to write about how the country would pay a heavy price if it failed to uphold the rule of law and the right to life of all its citizens.

He returned to Delhi in the late 1970s and ended up working as Secretary, Defence Production during Indira Gandhi's second tenure as Prime Minister. Differing again with the government on an issue of principle, Subrahmanyam was eased out of the Ministry of Defence and returned to the IDSA as director. Though intended as a punishment posting, he took to his new assignment as a duck to water. Through his efforts, the institute emerged as India's premier think-tank with a large number of scholars, many on secondment from the armed forces, conducting research on defence and foreign policy issues.

Journalism

After retiring from the government in 1987, Subrahmanyam continued to write on security matters, eventually joining the Times of India as a consulting editor. Journalism was in many ways his true calling. Affectionately known by his colleagues as “Bomb Mama”, in reality Subrahmanyam was far from being a nuclear hawk. He wrote on a range of issues, including on spiritual and religious matters and loved nothing more than to discuss national and global issues with his younger colleagues.

He was in favour of India acquiring nuclear weapons and argued forcefully during the international negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty against India's accession. At a seminar in Washington at the time, he famously denounced American critics of India's stand as the ‘Ayatollahs of Nonproliferation on the Potomac'.

And yet, he did not believe it was absolutely essential for the country to conduct an actual weapons test. When Pokhran-II came finally in May 1998, Subrahmanyam was taken by surprise but accepted that the government's hand had been forced by the manner in which the United States had tried to foreclose the country's nuclear option. At the same time, he said that India should immediately announce that it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons, a position the Vajpayee government accepted.

After the Kargil war, he headed the Kargil Review Committee which was tasked with recommending an overhaul of the Indian national security and intelligence apparatus whose failings had allowed Pakistani soldiers to occupy high altitude posts in Jammu and Kashmir. Besides a host of systemic reforms, Subrahmanyam argued in favour of India establishing a National Security Council but was disappointed by the structure of the institution that the National Democratic Alliance regime created. He nevertheless agreed to head the first National Security Advisory Board and was also instrumental in the NSAB's formulation of India's Draft Nuclear Doctrine.

A realist in his strategic thinking, Subrahmanyam was one of the first to understand and discuss what the emergence of a multipolar world order – his preferred term was “polycentric” — meant for Indian foreign policy. He argued that India had the capacity to improve its relations with all global power centres. At the same time, he sought to leverage American interest in India's rise by pressing for the removal of restrictions on nuclear and high-tech commerce.

He also believed the emergence of an economically interdependent world meant the era of military conflict between the great powers was a thing of the past and that economic growth and internal strength would be far more important determinants of national power than mere military might.

For one who worked in government for many years, Subrahmanyam prized his independence which he saw as the key to his integrity. I have had three careers, he once said when asked why he had turned down the offer of a Padma Vibhushan — as a civil servant, a strategic analyst and a journalist. “The awards should be given by the concerned groups, not the Government. If there is an award for sports, it should be given by sportspersons, and if it's for an artist, by artists”. The state, he believed, was not qualified to judge different aspects of human endeavour.

Subrahmanyam, of course, excelled in all his endeavours. True to form, his most creative period as an analyst came after he was diagnosed with cancer. In his death, India has lost one of its most perceptive strategic minds. The void will be impossible to fill.

He is survived by his wife, Sulochana, his daughter Sudha and his three sons, Vijay Kumar, Jaishankar and Sanjay.

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