Government cold to CAG's quest for new powers

For the past two years, the CAG has been pushing the Finance Ministry — its nodal ministry — for crucial changes in the 1971 Audit Act. To no avail ...

24 June 2011
The Hindu

Government cold to CAG's quest for new powers

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The United Progressive Alliance government may have shown a willingness to draft a new Lokpal Bill, but it is dragging its feet on a proposal to strengthen the public institution that has done so much to expose wrongdoings in public life: the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG).

For the past two years, the CAG has been pushing the Finance Ministry — its nodal ministry — for crucial changes in the 1971 Audit Act. The accounting watchdog's concern is that its mandate to summon files and examine the way public monies are spent has not kept pace with new modes of governance that have emerged, especially since liberalisation.

Weekly reminders

In 2010, the CAG sent concrete proposals for amendments to three broad areas, but the government is still mulling over its response. This, despite getting formal reminders on an almost weekly basis.

The official silence is not surprising given that audit reports have become something of a political hot potato. The capital was rife with reports of corruption in the telecom sector, for example, but it was only when the CAG report on the 2G spectrum allocation confirmed the scam that the government was forced to act. The latest audit report to set off a political firestorm is on oil and gas production sharing contracts, with the CAG's leaked draft saying Reliance Industries was shown “undue favours” in its KG basin operations.

The KG report is still being finalised, but its long-gestation period — work began in 2006 — and tentative conclusions reflect the weakness of the audit mandate. The Petroleum Ministry dragged its feet in giving documents (despite having asked for the audit in the first place) and private companies refused to share relevant information. The CAG now wants this situation rectified.

The first amendment it is seeking relates to the speed with which government departments respond to audit requests. Crucial audits get delayed because ministries aren't obliged to respond within a specified time frame. Just as the Right to Information Act gives ordinary citizens the right to get an answer to their questions within 30 days, the CAG wants a similar deadline for official responses to its queries.

The second change pertains to the mandatory disclosure of finalised audit reports. Governments delay the tabling of reports which are politically inconvenient. The CAG's audit of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation was not tabled in Parliament for a year. And the Maharashtra government held on to a report for 18 months because it contained adverse comments on Vilasrao Deshmukh, tabling it only when the CAG threatened to have it released through the Governor.

With these examples fresh in its mind, the CAG wants the law to specify that governments must immediately table reports submitted while the legislature is in session, or within the first week of the next session, if submitted in between.

Finally, the CAG wants the 1971 Act to clarify its powers to audit new forms of government economic activity such as public-private partnerships and joint ventures, and new conduits of expenditure not envisaged when the law was first framed — such as the routing of money for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the National Rural Health Mission and the MNREGA through panchayati raj institutions and non-governmental organisations.

By some estimates, more than Rs. 80,000 crore is spent this way every year, beyond the reach of the CAG's regular audits. Because the CAG doesn't audit this expenditure, Parliament too does not get to review how well this money is being utilised.

A weakness born of bad intent

The UPA government's unwillingness to act against the abuse of political and corporate power has created a vacuum which others are rushing to fill...






7 June 2011
The Hindu

A weakness born of bad intent

Siddharth Varadarajan

Like millions of others across India, I have spent the past week repelled by the spectacle of a weak government entering into improbable contortions over the naive and somewhat bizarre demands of Baba Ramdev. And when the “toughness” followed in the early hours of Sunday, it came in a typically cowardly fashion — with police action in the dead of the night against unarmed supporters who did not pose an immediate or even potential threat to law and order in Delhi. Kapil Sibal, the government's chief negotiator, said permission to assemble at the Ram Lila grounds had been granted for yoga exercises and not politics. But people in India have the right to assemble peacefully and to put forward political demands if they so wish. If tomorrow, the organisers of a classical music concert in Nehru Park put up a banner demanding a strong Lokpal Bill, will it be OK for the police to wade in?

The fact that the Manmohan Singh government swung from abject capitulation to unnecessary confrontation in less than 48 hours does not surprise me. Its credibility on the issue of corruption is at an all time low. The pressure it is under has blunted its political instincts. However, sending four senior ministers to the airport to welcome the yoga instructor-turned-upstart politician and then hundreds of policemen to extern him were both acts of gutlessness which the Congress party will find hard to live down. Particularly when the Baba was not even serious about the issue of black money.

Everybody with any sense agrees that corruption is a serious issue and that all efforts must be made to end the curse of black money. But it is meaningless and even nonsensical to demand the framing of a new law to confiscate black money when we do not know where this money is, how much it consists of and who it belongs to. If the authorities had this information, they would be legally empowered to seize the funds and place their owners behind bars. But the passage of a new law will not make the gathering of this information any easier. Either the Baba is not a very serious person or he has allowed emotion and his broader political ambitions to cloud his judgment. Which is surely not a good thing for someone well versed in yoga.

The problem of corruption is not simply one of law but of will. The hold of black money over the economic and political system of India cannot be ended so long as the government lacks the political will to actually crack down on the printing press which generates it: corruption. Defined broadly as the abuse of political and corporate power for personal gain, corruption is the glue which binds this country's political and economic elite at every level of governance from the block and district up to the Union. Corruption is not an abstraction. Every crore that a politician or bureaucrat may have secreted away as “black money” in Switzerland or elsewhere is organically linked to the tens of crores of rupees in both “black” and “white” money outside and inside India that businessmen generate by getting favourable treatment. Corruption was an integral part of the “license-permit raj” of Nehruvian socialism. But it has grown to frightening proportions in our liberalised free market economy. Politics and business have come so close together today that it is sometimes hard to tell the two apart.

Any serious campaign against corruption by civil society or politicians, Babas or babalog must zero in on the system which generates illegal gains for those with power, influence and money. Such a campaign must demand that action be taken against those individuals who have abused their authority or sought to subvert laws and procedures for personal gain. But Ramdev's campaign was not about this at all. Which was why the government was also quite happy to engage with him in what it knew would be a meaningless exercise.

While there is always room for legislative clarity in the definition of offences, the implementation of any new law will remain a prisoner to this lack of political will unless it allows for independent investigation and prosecution. A strong Lokpal Bill may help remedy the situation somewhat but only if the ability of the government to interfere with the investigation or punishment of well-connected individuals is ended. Here, it is instructive to see what happened in a recent case decided by the Lokayukta for the Delhi government, Justice Manmohan Sarin.

In the same week that the UPA government agreed to discuss the entire system of taxation, finance, administration and education in the country with Baba Ramdev, its stiffness of resolve in protecting a junior politician accused by the Lokayukta of abusing his authority seems to have passed almost unnoticed.

The case concerned a Delhi minister, Raj Kumar Chauhan, who sought to interfere with the tax inspectors even as they were conducting a raid at the premises of a private establishment. A complaint against the minister was filed by a senior IAS officer, Jalaj Shrivastava, who was a tax commissioner at the time. After conducting an inquiry, which included collecting testimony on oath from the officers concerned, Justice Sarin found that the minister had indeed abused his authority on behalf of a private party. But his recommendation that Mr. Chauhan be sacked and proceeded against was rejected by the President of India on the advice of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. Evidently, the MHA found Mr. Chauhan's explanation — that the telephone call he placed during the raid was nothing other than the routine expression of concern for a constituent — to be more credible than the exertions of the Lokayukta or of the upright bureaucrats who put their future career prospects on the line by becoming whistle-blowers.

The protection afforded to the Delhi minister, who is fairly low down in the Congress party's food chain, shows the extent to which the “system” is programmed to circle its wagons at the first sign of trouble. Even if one dismisses this example because the Lokayukta is still a young institution, what explains the continuation of Vilasrao Deshmukh in the Union Cabinet despite the Supreme Court holding him guilty of abusing his authority when he was Chief Minister of Maharashtra? Mr. Deshmukh had intervened on behalf of a usurious moneylender against whom some peasants wished to file a police complaint. Instructions to go easy were phoned in to the police station concerned, which diligently made a record of the call in its daily log book. A system that is keen to stamp out the abuse of authority — which lies at the root of all corruption — would ask Mr. Deshmukh to leave the Cabinet now that his culpability has been confirmed by the highest court. But, alas, the UPA does not run such a system. Mr. Deshmukh got promoted to a more powerful ministry. And instructions have been sent out to all police stations in Maharashtra that they should no longer make a record of every phone call they receive from ministers.

If Baba Ramdev were really serious about fighting corruption, he would have hit the UPA hard at the places it was most vulnerable instead of trying to build his own political constituency through shadow boxing against imaginary foes like the Cayman Islands and the 1000 rupee note. As for the Bharatiya Janata Party and RSS, which have tried to fire from the Baba's shoulder, the less said the better. Why is it that L.K. Advani, who was the second most powerful man in India for six years from 1998 to 2004, woke up to the problem of black money only after his government was voted out of power? If there is a lesson from the farce that has been enacted in Delhi this past week, it is this: there is no room for abstraction. Instead of demanding the “return of black money,” let us ask the government why it has not signed an agreement with Switzerland of the kind the European Union has for the repatriation of taxes that the Swiss levy on interest earned by foreign account holders. Instead of the death penalty for the “corrupt,” let us ask why the Prime Minister is so slow to act against ministers who abuse their authority. Let us push for a strong and empowered Lokpal whose recommendations cannot be thrown into the dustbin.

Bribery charge must now be investigated

The Embassy cable suggests a serious crime was committed on Indian soil to which U.S. diplomats were privy. The Prime Minister cannot cite lame arguments to justify inaction...





19 March 2011
The Hindu

Bribery charge must now be investigated

Siddharth Varadarajan

Since politics is a distraction, consider the following retelling of the WikiLeaks tale. An activist dies in a traffic accident. CCTV footage from a bank nearby suggests he might have been murdered but the case is never investigated properly. Three years later, a newspaper publishes what it says is an American Embassy cable sent a few days before that suspicious accident. In the cable, a U.S. diplomat quotes a multinational company executive talking loosely about how he paid money to some criminals to convince the activist to get out of his way.

How would a civilised country which values the rule of law react to such a disclosure? Would the government cite technicalities about the “unverified and unverifiable” nature of the “purported” cable and the executive's protestation of innocence and not even bother to ask the police to look into the matter? Or would it reassure the nation that even though the information is unverified, it will do its best to find out the truth?

In the face of the political firestorm that The Hindu's publication of a secret U.S. Embassy cable about payoffs to MPs has generated, all that the people of India needed was an assurance from the UPA government that the serious crime of bribery, if established by a proper investigation, would not go unpunished. What they got instead was cynical obfuscation.

Speaking in Parliament on the subject, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have mounted a ‘technical' and wholly ineffective defence of the government.

The July 17, 2008 cable sent by U.S. Charge d'Affaires Steven White stated that a Congress politician named Nachiketa Kapur — described as a “political aide” to Captain Satish Sharma, M.P. — showed an Embassy staff member “two chests containing cash and said that around Rupees 50crore-60 crore (about $25 million) was lying around the house for use as pay-offs” to MPs to ensure that the Manmohan Singh government won the confidence vote that was set for July 22. The cable, which was accessed by The Hindu from WikiLeaks, also quotes Mr. Kapur saying Ajit Singh's Rashtriya Lok Dal was paid Rs.10 crore for each of its MPs.

That the RLD was actively being wooed can be seen from the Union Cabinet's July 17, 2008 decision to rename Lucknow airport ‘Chaudhry Charan Singh Airport' after Mr. Ajit Singh's father. Other inducements were also on offer but in the end, the RLD voted against the government. Here Nachiketa Kapur turned out to have been remarkably prescient. After claiming the RLD MPs had been paid off, the Embassy cable notes: “Kapur mentioned that money was not an issue at all, but the crucial thing was to ensure that those who took the money would vote for the government.”

In the face of this damaging information which is contained in a secret cable that was never meant to be publicly circulated (that too in a redacted form) till at least 2018, Mr. Mukherjee and Dr. Singh made five lame points.

First, the Finance Minister told Parliament on Thursday that since the allegation of bribery applies to the 14th Lok Sabha which has since been dissolved, the 15th Lok Sabha had no locus standi to discuss the issue.

Second, he said the cable was a sovereign communication between different branches of the U.S. government, was covered by diplomatic immunity and that the information it contained could neither be confirmed nor denied by India. Despite the U.S. State Department saying publicly last year that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had spoken to External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna to warn him of the impending publication of confidential cables by WikiLeaks, Dr. Singh told Parliament: “The Government of India cannot confirm the veracity, contents or even the existence of such communications.”

Third, the Finance Minister said the information about bribery in the cable would not be considered admissible evidence in any court of law. The Prime Minister added that “many of the persons referred to in those reports have stoutly denied the veracity of the contents,” as if the country ought to be satisfied by mere protestations of innocence by the accused.

The government's fourth argument was that a Parliamentary committee had probed the matter and concluded that there was “insufficient evidence.” Finally, the Prime Minister took refuge behind the “court of the people,” declaring that since the Congress got re-elected in 2009 the charge of bribery had been “rejected by the people.” By this logic, the Congress has no right to accuse Narendra Modi of complicity in the 2002 massacres since this allegation has been “rejected by the people” not once but twice.

Instead of hiding behind technicalities and dubious political arguments, government managers could have defused the crisis by promising that the information contained in the cable would be probed. It is nobody's claim that the contents of a U.S. Embassy cable should be treated as gospel truth. Of course, the reason the cable struck a wider chord is because there is corroborating evidence of bribery having taken place in the run-up to the confidence vote. There are video recordings from a sting operation conducted by CNN-IBN and a Parliamentary committee tasked with probing the matter in 2008 felt there was enough material for the appropriate investigative agencies to conduct a probe. That said, the Embassy cable's contents still need to be verified.

Captain Satish Sharma, Nachiketa Kapur and Ajit Singh have all said the allegations against them are false. Captain Sharma has denied Mr. Kapur was ever his political aide and the latter has said he had only passing contact with the Congress MP and with U.S. Embassy officials. Are they lying? Or was the U.S. Embassy staff member being economical with the truth when he told the Charge d'Affaires he had been shown the cash?

A proper police investigation conducted by an agency like the CBI under the supervision of the Supreme Court can certainly make a fair attempt to establish where the burden of truth lies.

Mr. Mukherjee is right that the cable is sovereign diplomatic communication but India can surely request its “strategic partner” to help probe an allegation that has diminished the country's democratic institutions in the eyes of its people and the world. For starters, the U.S. can be asked to identify the unnamed Embassy staff member. If he was an Indian employee or an American without diplomatic status, there would be absolutely no problem in the CBI recording his statement and asking him to join a criminal investigation. He could tell us, for example, where his conversation with Mr. Kapur took place. The staffer reported back to Mr. White that he was told Rs.50 crore or Rs.60 crore was “lying around the house.” Which house was he referring to? Even if the Embassy “staff member” was a diplomat — one theory is that it was the Political Counsellor himself who dropped his descriptor because he had inadvertently become party to a criminal act — diplomatic immunity would not come in the way of him informally helping the police in their investigation. India can also ask the U.S. to waive his immunity. Moreover, the call records of Captain Sharma and Mr. Kapur can be examined to fix their physical locations and ascertain the nature of their relationship, especially on the day the meetings mentioned in the cable took place. This can then be triangulated with the telephone number of the U.S. Political Counsellor, whose number is known to the Indian authorities. These are the minimum steps that any self-respecting democracy would want to take in the face of such a serious charge.

On the eve of the July 22, 2008 vote of confidence, I wrote an op-ed in The Hindu where I said: “Even if the government wins the trust vote on Tuesday, the Prime Minister and the Congress will not be able to live down the taint of impropriety surrounding their victory.” The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the listlessness, drift and corruption that so many commentators have indicted the Manmohan Singh government for in its second innings have their origins in the manner in which that trust vote was won. The UPA lost its moral centre that day, and with it, its political bearings.

In a hideous coincidence, the taint of bribery has come back to haunt the government at a time when the nuclear dream which was supposed to make it all worth it is slowly evaporating in plumes of deadly radioactive steam above Japan. “If implemented in the way it is promised, [the nuclear deal] would increase the country's energy options in the long-run,” I wrote in the same op-ed. “But no deal is so good that it merits the short-circuiting of democratic propriety through horse-trading or worse.”

The Opposition is wrong to insist that the Prime Minister must resign because of the leaked cable. But he has a moral obligation to ensure the cable's contents are investigated properly. Refusing to do so would be an act of immense political folly, especially in the light of all the scam allegations that have buffeted his government.

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.

The fabric of belonging

Had the national flag which the BJP wants to unfurl in Srinagar also been dipped by them to honour the memory of the hundred young Indians who were shot dead in the valley last year, Kashmir would be a very different place ...








24 January 2011
The Hindu

The fabric of belonging

Siddharth Varadarajan

Jammu and Kashmir is a part of India but the people of Kashmir can be forgiven for believing their country has forsaken them.

Throughout the summer of their most recent discontent, when a hundred young men and women lost their lives in police firing, leaders from the ruling and opposition parties acted as if nothing untoward had happened. Six months earlier, the mere threat of violence in Hyderabad led the Union Home Minister to declare the government had agreed to the formation of a separate state for Telangana. In Rajasthan, the blockade of national highways by agitating Gujjars produced an instant offer of dialogue and negotiation. But in Kashmir, the corpses kept piling up while the government, the Opposition (with some honourable exceptions) and civil society in the rest of India reacted with the kind of detachment reserved for death and destruction in faraway lands like Darfur and Iraq.

The fact that the public mood in the valley began to soften slightly only after an all-party delegation visited Srinagar and condoled with some of the victims' families underlined something quite unpleasant about ourselves. That the indifference of mainland India to the suffering of the ordinary Kashmiri is as much a factor in the alienation of the State as the politics of separatism and the violence of extremist groups operating with the tacit and sometimes overt backing of the Pakistani military. With characteristic indecisiveness, however, the Manmohan Singh government failed swiftly to capitalise on that initiative. When a group of interlocutors was finally appointed with a fairly open-ended mandate to listen, talk and report back, the mood in Kashmir had once again begun to harden. The fact that Dileep Padgaonkar, Radha Kumar and M.M. Ansari have still managed to make some headway in their interactions is more a result of their own personal commitment to changing the terms of New Delhi's engagement with the valley than with the attitude of the Centre and of Political India, which continue to send mixed signals.

One day, the Union Home Secretary tells reporters the government is prepared to pare down the presence of the security forces in Kashmir, the next day this statement is bluntly contradicted by the Defence Minister. The Prime Minister and Union Home Minister speak of amending the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act while the Army Chief announces publicly that he will never accept this. In the Machchil fake encounter case, the same general declares that his soldiers — who are accused of kidnapping and killing three young Kashmiri men — can never get justice in Kashmir, as if the State is not a part of India. Only the Army, he said, will be allowed to investigate the matter. Of course, in the Pathribal fake encounter of 2000 — where the Army has taken the Central Bureau of Investigation all the way to the Supreme Court to prevent its officers from standing trial for murder — the Army has not seen fit to even proceed against them under its own authority. Surely such a cavalier attitude to justice ought not to be tolerated in an integral part of India?

The Government of India rightly protested when Beijing began treating Kashmir-born or Kashmir-domiciled Indians differently from the rest while issuing visas for travel to China. But the same government does not mind treating Kashmiri Indians differently when it comes to issuing passports for them to travel. A Srinagar-born colleague of mine whose family left Kashmir to live in Delhi as part of the forced migration of Pandits from the valley in the 1990s was recently told by the Passport Office that she had to provide additional documentation that other Indians are not required to do in order to obtain a passport. As for Kashmiris applying for Indian passports in Srinagar, a recent documentary film by Ashvin Kumar, Inshallah Football, documents the heartbreaking experience they have to endure before the country which so emotionally claims them as its own will allow them to travel abroad.

Hoisting the flag

As the Centre's three interlocutors plough a lonely furrow through the infertile and even hostile soil of distrust and alienation, patiently listening to and cataloguing popular grievances, the Bharatiya Janata Party wants to rekindle a sense of estrangement by staging a provocative and high profile yatra to Srinagar in order to hoist the Indian flag at Lal Chowk in the heart of the city's commercial centre on January 26.

There is nothing patriotic or noble about the BJP's plans and intentions. Instead of a voyage of solidarity and empathy aimed at reassuring the people of the State that the party will fight for the sacred values of truth, justice and inclusiveness which the flag embodies, the party is planning an expedition based on the flawed belief that meaningless symbolism is all that is required to win hearts and minds and cement Kashmir's status as a part of India.

If a sense of national belonging can be instilled and solidified by the mere hoisting of a flag, 60 years of official ceremonies in Srinagar ought to have ended the sense of alienation that is writ large over the valley. Even if the BJP goes ahead with their mindless yatra, it will not alter the realities on the ground one bit and would actually make the situation worse. Whatever we may say or do or wish, surely Kashmir will be an integral part of India in a meaningful sense only when the residents of Srinagar themselves throng to Lal Chowk and hoist the tri-colour themselves. The challenge for the Indian polity is to create the conditions for that to happen one day, however difficult that may seem today. But the BJP's proposed flaghoisting is not just an exercise in naivette or cynicism. It is the product of a mindset that considers Kashmir to be terra nullius, an empty landscape to be coveted and possessed rather than a land with a people and soul who acceded to India in 1947 on the basis of a covenant which must be respected in full measure and who have as much right to a life with dignity as those elsewhere in the country do.

A politician can drape himself in the national flag but it is the texture of his politics which will determine whether he truly cares for the nation and its peoples or not. Today, the Congress politician and businessman Naveen Jindal is known not for fighting a landmark case over the right of ordinary citizens to fly the flag but for his endorsement of the obscurantist tradition of khap panchayats. Ministers and officials will preside over flag hoisting ceremonies on Republic Day throughout India even as their policies and actions in the preceding year have bled the hallowed earth on which they stand dry. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel and the people of India know this only too well. If the BJP really wants to do something for the country, let them take their yatra to Karnataka. There is a large plot of land in that State which the party's chief minister signed over to his relatives. Let the process of safeguarding this country from those who are undermining its foundations begin by planting the national flag there.

Musical chairs on a drifting ship

More than a reshuffle, the UPA government needs a new deck of cards and, much more urgently, a new game...






20 January 2011
The Hindu

Musical chairs on a drifting ship

Siddharth Varadarajan

Any ministerial rearrangement which leaves the big four portfolios of Home, Defence, External Affairs and Finance untouched is bound to disappoint headline writers but so underwhelming is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's latest reshuffle that it is hard to understand the motivation or logic behind the entire exercise.

Three weaknesses

The United Progressive Alliance is suffering from three major weaknesses. The first is the public's perception — notwithstanding the ouster of Ashok Chavan from Maharashtra and A. Raja's resignation from the Union Cabinet last year — that Dr. Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi are unwilling to act firmly against corruption. The second is that cronyism and personal loyalties are seen as bigger virtues than efficiency. The third is that the Prime Minister himself is unwilling to lead from the front and stare down individual ministers who think they have the individual power to veto collective decisions.

So long in the making was Wednesday's reshuffle that it seemed as if Dr. Singh and Ms Gandhi might actually be willing to make the “course correction” the Prime Minister promised in his New Year's message. While the compulsions of coalition politics limit his options when it comes to the non-Congress ministers, he should have used the prevailing mood in the country to sweep aside Congress ministers who have either failed to make a positive mark or actually done damage. He could have also struck a blow for probity by ousting Vilasrao Deshmukh — indicted recently by the Supreme Court for abusing his authority when he was Chief Minister of Maharashtra — and asking Virbhadra Singh to step aside till he clears himself of charges that the High Court in Himachal Pradesh has already taken congnisance of. Had he done just that much, the Prime Minister could have overcome some of the negative atmospherics generated by the fiasco over 2G spectrum and the controversy over Central Vigilance Commissioner P.J. Thomas.

Unfortunately, none of this happened. Like old card players who never die — they just shuffle away — the non-performers in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's cabinet have simply reshuffled their way to new ministries. And Mr. Deshmukh, whose illegal intervention in a police case in favour of a usurious moneylender ultimately cost the Maharashtra government a Rs.10 lakh fine, actually ended up getting a promotion. He has been moved from Heavy Industries to the much more crucial Rural Development portfolio, which is responsible for the rural employment guarantee programme of the government.

Sources in the Prime Minister's Office told The Hindu the reshuffle was intended to send a “perform or perish” message to ministers holding economic portfolios. Thus, Murli Deora, Kamal Nath, Virbhadra Singh and a few others who have not exactly set the Yamuna on fire with their performance were ‘demoted' to less grand ministries. Though Youth Affairs and Sports is not an economic ministry, his handling of the multi-crore Commonwealth Games too cost Mr. M.S. Gill that portfolio. One wonders, however, why these ministers weren't simply thanked for services rendered and their places given to others in the party who might do a better job all round?

The plus side

On the plus side, the biggest positive to emerge from the reshuffle is the transfer of Jaipal Reddy to Petroleum and Natural Gas, a strategic ministry that has never fully recovered from the exit in 2006 of Mani Shankar Aiyar. The pruning of Sharad Pawar's portfolio is another plus, as is the handing over of a crucial ministry like water resources to Salman Khurshid. Minority Affairs, however, will be an unnecessary encumbrance and one hopes the government will have the good sense to think out of the box and give that charge not to a minority politician but to a dynamic, secular non-minority leader with a genuine commitment to the welfare of the minorities. Taking tourism away from Kumari Selja makes no sense given the fair job she was doing; one can only hope the additional charge of Culture given to her is meant for the long-haul. As far as other changes — full cabinet rank for Salman Khurshid, Shriprakash Jaiswal and the induction of Beni Prasad Verma from Uttar Pradesh, for example — tactical considerations seem to have been uppermost in the Congress high command's mind with assembly elections in the crucial state less than a year away. Also, the ‘asset stripped' civil aviation portfolio — temporarily handed over to Vayalar Ravi — is being kept in reserve for allocation to the DMK if the political situation following the Tamil Nadu assembly elections warrants it.

Tactics, however, will take you only so far. Whatever end he hoped the reshuffle would serve, the Prime Minister is likely to find himself confronting the same political challenge tomorrow as he did yesterday: how to restore public confidence in his ability to lead a clean and efficient government. This was not the challenge the Congress faced when it got re-elected to power in 2009 and the party needs to introspect over how it has lost its way. The cabinet reshuffle indicates it is still not ready to do so. The official obfuscation over revenue losses caused by the arbitrary sale of spectrum and the confrontationist stand the Centre is taking over both the CVC and Joint Parliamentary Committee issues suggest the stalemate in Parliament is likely to continue into the Budget session. That this will be bad for Indian democracy is clear. But it is also likely to irreparably harm the political fortunes of the ruling coalition.

Sorry people, we're hanging up on you

The Manmohan Singh government is digging an even bigger hole for itself by claiming there was no loss of revenue from the sweetheart sale of 2G spectrum to favoured corporate houses...





12 January 2011
The Hindu

Sorry people, we're hanging up on you

Siddharth Varadarajan

“Milord,” cunning lawyers have argued in countless Hindi movies, “how can there have been a murder when there is no dead body?” I was reminded of this line when I heard Kapil Sibal — who has been performing as an understudy at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology ever since A. Raja was ousted on corruption charges — bravely defending the legacy of his predecessor at a press conference. By attacking the Comptroller and Auditor General's 2G spectrum scam report and claiming the government lost no revenue despite the fact that “procedural irregularities in the implementation of the first-come first-served policy” may have occurred, Mr. Sibal has done the political equivalent of removing the “dead body” from the crime scene and then declaring his clients innocent. For if the government lost no money through the sale of spectrum in 2008, it stands to reason that the politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen who are today being investigated could not have made any money either. Illegitimate profits cannot be conjured out of thin air — which is what spectrum essentially is. There is no dead body milord.

Sadly for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who no doubt prepped Mr. Sibal to make his ill-advised arguments, the CAG report is full of incriminating corpses. And their ghosts are likely to stick around long enough to haunt the ruling party at the time of the next general election.

The central thrust of Mr. Sibal's argument is that the PAC used flawed logic to arrive at the conclusion that the sale of Universal Access Service licenses by the Department of Telecom in 2008 led to a revenue loss of Rs.1,76,000 crore. But here's what he chose not to say. The CAG itself acknowledged in its concluding chapter that the amount of loss could be debated but “the fact that there has been loss to the national exchequer in the allocation of 2G spectrum cannot be denied.”

Indeed, the CAG made separate calculations based on four different methodologies in order to demonstrate the flawed nature of the licensing system the DoT ran. The figure cited by Mr. Sibal came from using the 3G spectrum auction proceeds as a guide to the revenue the government gave up by not auctioning 2G spectrum. Other methods used were looking at the sale of equity by shell-company licensees Swan Telecom and Unitech. Both of these companies sold a chunk of their otherwise worthless equity to established operators, thereby providing a helpful indication of what the licenses they had bought for a song were truly worth. Extrapolating from those sales figures, the CAG estimated that the government short-changed itself by anywhere from Rs.57,666 crore to Rs.69,626 crore.

The CAG report methodically establishes how the great spectrum robbery of 2008 was essentially a scam within a scam. The original scam was designed to benefit the universe of existing and potential telecom operators by selling them a scarce resource — spectrum — on a first come, first served (FCFS) basis at a seven-year-old price that had no bearing on current market conditions. Given the exponential increase in teledensity between 2001 and 2008 — by some estimates, the number of mobile subscribers had already risen from four million to 300 million and was expected to continue to grow at a rapid clip — the failure to use an efficient price discovery mechanism meant the government was prepared to forsake an enormous amount of revenue in order to benefit operators fortunate enough to get hold of new spectrum.

But having scripted super profits for the lucky telecom companies in the spectrum allocation process, it was inevitable that the politicians and bureaucrats running the show would take the next step. The only way to accumulate rent from companies benefiting from a giveaway that is available to all as a matter of policy is to use one's allocative power to favour some over others. This was the genesis of the second scam in which a handful of applicants — many of whom were completely unqualified to be applying for telecom licenses at all — were cherry-picked by the DoT in an arbitrary subversion of the first come, first served process. The CAG report demonstrates how Swan, in which the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group had a key stake, and Unitech were among the beneficiaries of this. Bank drafts and guarantees were prepared in advance by some companies who were unofficially tipped off so that their completed applications for spectrum could be submitted literally within minutes and hours of the official call going out.

Mr. Sibal, who tore into the CAG, was sporting enough to admit there may have been some wrongdoing in the manner in which the FCFS policy was implemented. At the same time, he insisted the policy of charging 2001 prices was correct and that a 2G spectrum auction would have led to an increase in the price of telecom services. What he ignores is the fact that the cost of telecom services emerging from the 2G allocation will be a function not of the absurdly low price at which the government sold spectrum but of the prevailing tariff rate in the market and also the higher resale price at which this precious commodity finally enters the system. To paraphrase an argument first made by Sunil Jain in the Financial Express last year, there was indeed an auction for 2G spectrum whether Mr. Sibal approves of auctioning or not. But this auction was conducted not by the government, as it should have been, but by the companies who benefited from the arbitrary manner in which spectrum ended up getting allocated. They simply turned around and resold what they had received to the highest bidder.

Mr. Sibal also sought to argue that the government policy on spectrum allocation — of underpricing it or even giving it away free — was justified in the name of keeping the cost of basic telephony down. He compared the Rs.17 a minute cost of a mobile phone call a decade back with the 30 paise per minute rate today to prove his point but this is a flawed argument. Most technology-driven consumer goods and services experience a declining price curve over time. I paid $1,000 as a graduate student in New York for my first laptop computer in 1990. It was a no-brand, 386 chip, 40MB hard drive heavyweight monster whose battery lasted about an hour if I was lucky. Today, $1,000 will buy you a powerful notebook and decent variants can be bought for as little as $300. It also cost me $2 a minute to call my parents back home (which is why I rarely did so). The last time I was in the U.S., I could call India for eight cents a minute. The drop in call rates has nothing to do with subsidised spectrum as Mr. Sibal would have us believe, but with competition, increases in productivity and the global ebb and flow of technological change and obsolescence which allowed Indian companies to buy 2G network equipment at a relatively inexpensive cost. In any case, even at the supposedly low call rates in India, telecom operators are making serious money. The last thing they need is a free handout in the form of an FCFS spectrum allocation policy, that too one which is rigged.

The government's argument about keeping mobile call rates low may have had some credibility if the logic was applied consistently. But everything in India is contingent on whose asset is being sold to whom. When a public asset like spectrum is to be sold to a private company like Anil Ambani's Swan Telecom, or to Tata or others, we are told the price must be kept low even if there is a revenue loss. When a public asset like food grain is to be sold to the poor under the proposed Right to Food Act, the same people say prices cannot be kept low because this would lead to a revenue loss. When a public resource like Krishna-Godavari (KG) gas comes into the hands of an industrialist like Mukesh Ambani, the price must be kept high even if this means consumers end up paying a higher price for electricity and fertilizers. From 2G to KG to CWG the system's logic and rules will always be designed to allow maximum profits for those with real connections.

The CAG in its report has demonstrated how “the entire process of allocation of UAS licenses lacked transparency and was undertaken in an arbitrary, unfair and inequitable manner … which gave unfair advantage to certain companies over others.” It was this “unfair advantage” which allowed “certain companies” to earn revenue that rightly belonged to the government. So compelling is the charge of corruption on a massive scale in the spectrum licensing matter that the Supreme Court has said it will monitor the progress of investigations by the CBI.

Public disenchantment with the corrupt ways of our political and business establishment is running so high that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was forced to promise in his New Year greetings a “course correction” that would “cleanse governance” in India. If Mr. Sibal's arguments are any indication, however, Dr. Singh's New Year resolutions have not lasted very long at all. If the UPA government continues to remain in denial, it will pay a heavy political price. At the time of the next general election, when Congress managers scratch their heads and wonder where on earth the seats to form the next government are going to come from, Mr. Sibal's arithmetic will be remembered as the point where the game which was not going the party's way anyway finally slipped out of its hands.

Welcome to the Matrix of the Indian state

The Radia tapes reveal the networks and routers, the source codes and malware that bind the corporate and political establishments in India.







29 November 2010
The Hindu

Welcome to the Matrix of the Indian state

Siddharth Varadarajan

As squeamish schoolchildren know only too well, dissection is a messy business. Some instinctively turn away, others become nauseous or scared. Not everyone can stomach first hand the inner workings of an organic system. Ten days ago, a scalpel — in the form of a set of 104 intercepted telephone conversations — cut through the tiniest cross-section of a rotting cadaver known as the Indian Establishment. What got exposed is so unpleasant that several major newspapers and television channels that normally scramble to bring “breaking” and “exclusive” stories have chosen to look the other way. Their silence, though understandable, is unfortunate. Even unforgivable.

After all, the tape recordings of Niira Radia's phone conversations have come to light against the backdrop of the recent Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) report on the allocation of 2G spectrum, which demonstrated how the rules were arbitrarily bent by the then Telecom Minister, A. Raja, in order to favour a handful of private companies at government expense. Among the beneficiaries of Mr. Raja's raj were Anil Ambani. And also Ratan Tata. In one of the tapes, an unidentified interlocutor asks Ms Radia, whose clients include both Mr. Tata and Mukesh Ambani, why “you people [i.e. the Mukesh Ambani group] are supporting [Raja] like anything ... when the younger brother [Anil Ambani] is the biggest beneficiary of the so called spectrum allocation”. “Issue bahut complex hai,” Ms Radia replies. “Mere client Tatas bhi beneficiary rahein hain (my client, the Tatas, have also been a beneficiary).”

Apart from telecom, the tapes also provide valuable insight into the gas dispute between the two Ambani brothers. This was a dispute in which Mukesh Ambani made skillful use of the “gas is a national resource” argument with a pliant media even as he used his influence with individual MPs to try and orchestrate a massive tax concession for his company from the same national resource, Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin natural gas.

In an interview to NDTV and the Indian Express on Saturday — two media houses that have so far avoided covering the tapes — Ratan Tata has called the recordings a “smokescreen” designed to hide the real truth. He is wrong. Utterly wrong. No doubt we know very little about who leaked the recordings and why these were cherry-picked from a wider set of 5,000 recordings the Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax authorities made as part of their surveillance of Ms Radia. But even if the story they tell is partial and designed to expose only a fraction of the corporate lobbying which has been going on, we would be naive to ignore the contents of the tapes or be dismissive about their significance.

In the science fiction film, The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo, “You're here because you know there's something wrong with the world.” The Matrix, he says, is the world that has been pulled over everyone's eyes to blind them from the truth that they are slaves. He offers Neo the choice of a blue or red pill. “You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill ... and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

The Niira Radia audio archive loaded on to the Internet by Open and Outlook magazines last week is the red pill of our time. It reveals the source codes, networks, routers, viruses and malware that make up the matrix of the Indian State. The transmission of information, also known as “news”, between different nodes is vital for the system to work efficiently. The news is also the medium for reconciling conflicts between different sectors of the establishment. If you hear the recordings, you begin to understand the truth about the Wonderland that is India. No wonder there are many amongst us who would rather swallow the blue pill. For once you go in, the only way out is to keep digging. And yes, the rabbit-hole runs deep.

So deep, for example, that we hear a Member of Parliament, N.K. Singh, who is meant to represent the people and the state who voted for him, brazenly batting for a single-man corporate constituency, Mukesh Ambani.

In one recording, Mr. Singh tells Ms Radia of the firefighting he is doing on behalf of Mr. Ambani to ensure a tax concession the finance minister had announced in the 2009 budget for gas production is made applicable retrospectively. Ms Radia says she has killed news stories about the Rs.81,000 crore super profit Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) would make were that to happen but Mr. Singh is more concerned about what happens in Parliament during the debate on the Finance Bill. His fear is that if Opposition MPs make a noise about a largesse being given to one company, the finance minister would be on the defensive and the prospect of extending the concession retrospectively would not even arise. Mr. Singh accuses BJP leader Arun Shourie of being on Anil Ambani's side and reveals how he has managed to get Mr. Shourie replaced as the BJP's lead speaker by Venkaiah Naidu. How well does Mukesh know Venkaiah, asks Mr. Singh, who is a Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar on a Janata Dal (United) – JD(U) ticket. Ms Radia replies that a senior RIL executive, P.M.S. Prasad, knows Mr. Naidu well. “Then I am going to get him flown in today to talk to Venkaiah,” Mr. Singh says, “because if he is the first speaker, and he already takes a party line, then it will be very difficult for Shourie in his second intervention, to take a different line. Then we have to orchestrate who will speak, you know, this is the immediate problem right now. Because, frankly, if this doesn't go through, this tax thing, then it's a major initiative taken that then fails to materialise.”

We don't know if Mr. Prasad flew down and met Mr. Naidu as N.K. Singh wanted him to do. But the BJP leader's speech in Parliament two days later has this telltale suggestion: “The Bay of Bengal has become the new North Sea of India. Government departments should not be seen quarrelling whether mineral oil is a natural gas or not. Whatever concessions [are] needed for infrastructure, exploration ... are connected with the energy security of the country.” This was a veiled reference to the Petroleum Ministry's letter to the Finance Ministry asking for natural gas to be given the same tax concessions available to oil retrospectively and not just from the New Exploration Licensing Round (NELP) VIII round which would exclude RIL's KG basin output. A request the revenue secretary had turned down.

In other recordings, we see journalists and editors, who are meant to report and analyse what is going on objectively, offering to become couriers and stenographers and foot soldiers in the war one set of corporate fat cats is waging against another. We also see a political fixer, Ranjan Bhattacharya, whose USP once was his familial proximity to the Bharatiya Janata Party, seamlessly open a line to the Congress and go about his business as if election results don't matter. He boasts about his proximity to Ghulam Nabi Azad and his ability to send a message to “SG, boss”, a reference to the Congress president. He then quotes Mukesh Ambani telling him the Congress party is now “apni dukan”. Mr. Bhattacharya may have been lying about his influence but then the formidable Ms Radia is anything but a dupe.

We also hear in the tapes an iconic businessman, Ratan Tata, who today makes sanctimonious statements about crony capitalism and the danger of India becoming a banana republic, lobbying through his PR agent, Ms Radia, for A. Raja to be given the Telecom portfolio.

If the allocation of spectrum by the Manmohan Singh government in 2008 and 2009 is one of the biggest scams in independent India, then the involvement of businessmen like Ratan Tata, Sunil Mittal and Mukesh Ambani in lobbying for their choice of telecom minister when the UPA government returned to power in May 2009 is surely a very important part of the back-story. But it is a story none of the journalists who liaised with Ms Radia during this time chose to report. More than the squabble within the Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (DMK) or between the DMK and the Congress, the involvement of India's biggest companies in the process of cabinet formation was the story that should have been headlined. Ms Radia talks of Sunil Mittal and AT&T using Times Now to push out stories about Dayanidhi Maran being the frontrunner for telecom and Mr. Raja being in disfavour. Her own strategy appears to have been to use her relationship with Barkha Dutt and Shankar Aiyar to get the opposite message out onto news channels like NDTV and Headlines Today.

Instead of using Ms Radia as a “source” for covering the DMK, her role, and the role of her principal clients, in trying to push for a minister who was seen even then as tainted ought to have been exposed. But then Delhi is a hothouse of power, and proximity to power deadens one's reflexes and weakens one's nerves. What Indian journalism needs more than anything else today is distance. From both politicians and industrialists. It is never too late to swallow that red pill.

Manmohan's dinner diplomacy a hit with Obama

In which the Obamas get to find out who's who in Delhi ...







8 November 2010
The Hindu

Manmohan's dinner diplomacy a hit with Obama

Siddharth Varadarajan

Any doubts Barack Obama might have had about the political pecking order in India is likely to have been settled by the seating arrangement at the private dinner Prime Minister Manmohan Singh threw for the visiting U.S. President at his residence on Race Course Road on Sunday night.

The 50 Indian and 20 American invitees were sprinkled across 10 tables arranged under a high-domed, open tent on the lawns just outside the bungalow once known as “7 RCR” that serves as the Prime Minister's residential camp office.

Among the high-profile invitees were Ministers, politicians, film stars, captains of industry, bureaucrats and the odd academic, environmentalist and even journalist. And at the head table, alongside the two principals and their spouses, pride of place was given to three politicians whose importance for the current and future state of the government is just a notch below that of Dr. Singh: Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and the member of Parliament from Amethi, Rahul Gandhi.

If Ms. Gandhi's place at the high table needs no explanation or comment, Mr. Mukherjee's presence there — especially when his American counterpart, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, was seated elsewhere — sent a clear message about his status as the primus inter pares of senior Ministers, several of whom (S.M. Krishna, A.K. Antony, P. Chidambaram) were also present at the dinner . As for Mr. Gandhi's slot on the high table, Mr. Obama could be forgiven for thinking this was part of some sort of grooming exercise. If I win a second term as U.S. President, he must surely have asked himself, is this the man I might be dealing with in India in 2014?

Whatever the future portends, however, Mr. Obama knows Dr. Singh is the man who calls the shots on the bilateral front for now. The two leaders spent nearly an hour closeted together in a meeting without aides or note-takers, giving the assembled guests a chance to freely mingle over endless glasses of pomegranate and mousambi juice. What they discussed is not known. Shortly after 8 p.m., everyone was asked to get into a U-shaped line by the SPG chief, B.V. Wanchoo. The Prime Minister and the U.S. President then walked in with their spouses. Mr. and Mrs. Obama proceeded to shake hands and exchange a few words with each of those present.

No one from the Left parties appears to have been invited. But the Prime Minister did invite Arun Jaitley and L.K. Advani from the Bharatiya Janata Party, as well as the former National Security Adviser, Brajesh Mishra. The other Ministers present were Sharad Pawar, Kapil Sibal, Salman Khursheed, Anand Sharma and Prithviraj Chavan.

The tables at which guests were seated were named after prominent Indian-Americans or American individuals with a strong India link like Dalip Singh Saund (the first and only Indian to be elected to the U.S. Congress) and Norman Borlaug of the Green Revolution. Live entertainment was provided by the Navy band and the BSF's camel band.

Apart from Mr. Gandhi, the Prime Minister invited several young MPs to the dinner including Meenakshi Natarajan, Priya Dutt, Harsimrat Kaur and Kanimozhi. The Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, suggested Mr. Obama take the time to visit his State, an invitation the U.S. President said he would take up when he was able to find time to travel a bit more in the region. Among the film personalities present were Aamir Khan and Shabana Azmi. Chess wizard Viswanathan Anand was also there, as were atomic energy stalwarts Anil Kakodkar and Srikumar Banerjee. The industrialists present included Anu Agha of Thermax, Ratan Tata, Azim Premji, Swati Piramal and N.R. Narayana Murthy. Top bureaucrats included National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon, Principal Secretary to Prime Minister T.K.A. Nair, Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, Media Adviser to Prime Minister Harish Khare and Culture Secretary Jawhar Sircar.

Force of faith trumps law and reason in Ayodhya case

Legal, social and political repercussions likely to be damaging ...








1 October 2010
The Hindu


NEWS ANALYSIS

Force of faith trumps law and reason in Ayodhya case
Legal, social and political repercussions likely to be damaging

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court has made judicial history by deciding a long pending legal dispute over a piece of property in Ayodhya on the basis of an unverified and unsubstantiated reference to the “faith and belief of Hindus”.

The irony is that in doing so, the court has inadvertently provided a shot in the arm to a political movement that cited the very same “faith” and “belief” to justify its open defiance of the law and the Indian Constitution. That defiance reached its apogee in 1992, when a 500-year old mosque which stood at the disputed site was destroyed. The legal and political system in India stood silent witness to that crime of trespass, vandalism and expropriation. Eighteen years later, the country has compounded that sin by legitimising the “faith” and “belief” of those who took the law into their own hands.

The three learned judges of the Allahabad High Court may have rendered separate judgments on the title suit in the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi case but Justices Sudhir Agarwal, S.U. Khan and Dharam Veer Sharma all seem to agree on one central point: that the Hindu plaintiffs in the case have a claim to the disputed site because “as per [the] faith and belief of the Hindus” the place under the central dome of the Babri Masjid where the idols of Ram Lalla were placed surreptitiously in 1949 is indeed the “birthplace” of Lord Ram.

For every Hindu who believes the spot under the central dome of the Babri Masjid is the precise spot where Lord Ram was born there is another who believes something else. But leaving aside the question of who “the Hindus” referred to by the court really are and how their actual faith and belief was ascertained and measured, it is odd that a court of law should give such weight to theological considerations and constructs rather than legal reasoning and facts. Tulsidas wrote his Ramcharitmanas in 16th century Ayodhya but made no reference to the birthplace of Lord Rama that the court has now identified with such exacting precision five centuries later.

The “faith and belief” that the court speaks about today acquired salience only after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bharatiya Janata Party launched a political campaign in the 1980s to “liberate” the “janmasthan”.

Collectives in India have faith in all sorts of things but “faith” cannot become the arbiter for what is right and wrong in law. Nor can the righting of supposed historical wrongs become the basis for dispensing justice today. In 1993, the Supreme Court wisely refused to answer a Presidential Reference made to it by the Narasimha Rao government seeking its opinion on whether a Hindu temple once existed at the Babri Masjid site. Yet, the High Court saw fit to frame a number of questions that ought to have had absolutely no bearing on the title suit which was before it.

One of the questions the court framed was “whether the building has been constructed on the site of an alleged Hindu temple after demolishing the same”. Pursuant to this question, it asked the Archaeological Survey of India to conduct a dig at the site. This was done in 2003, during the time when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government was in power at the Centre. Not surprisingly, the ASI concluded that there was a “massive Hindu religious structure” below, a finding that was disputed by many archaeologists and historians.

The territory of India – as of many countries with a settled civilisation as old as ours – is full of buildings that were constructed after pre-existing structures were demolished to make for them. Buddhist shrines made way for Hindu temples. Temples have made way for mosques. Mosques have made way for temples. So even if a temple was demolished in the 16th century to make way for the Babri Masjid, what legal relevance can that have in the 21st century? And if such demolition is to serve as the basis for settling property disputes today, where do we draw the line? On the walls of the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi can be seen the remnants of a Hindu temple, perhaps even of the original Vishwanath mandir. Certainly many “Hindus” believe the mosque is built on land that is especially sacred to them. The denouement of the Babri case from agitation and demolition to possession might easily serve as a precedent for politicians looking to come to power on the basis of heightening religious tensions.

Even assuming the tainted ASI report is correct in its assessment that a Hindu temple lay below the ruins of Babri Masjid, neither the ASI nor any other expert has any scientific basis for claiming the architects of the mosque were the ones who did the demolishing. And yet two of the three High Court judges have concluded that the mosque was built after a temple was demolished.

From at least the 19th century if not earlier, we know that both Hindus and Muslims worshipped within the 2.77 acre site, the latter within the Babri Masjid building and the former at the Ram Chhabutra built within the mosque compound. This practice came to an end in 1949 when politically motivated individuals broke into the mosque and placed idols of Ram Lalla within. After 1949, both communities were denied access though Hindus have been allowed to offer darshan since 1986. In suggesting a three way partition of the site, the High Court has taken a small step towards the restoration of the religious status quo ante which prevailed before politicians got into the act. But its reasoning is flawed and even dangerous. If left unamended by the Supreme Court, the legal, social and political repercussions of the judgment are likely to be extremely damaging.

Caution pays, but leadership is also about taking a stand

Political parties cannot serve as vehicles for enlightened decision-making, for raising the level of society's consciousness, if their leaders are going to shy away from taking a stand...




25 May 2010
The Hindu

Caution pays, but leadership is also about taking a stand

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: Six years as Prime Minister have not taken the conservatism of the central banker out of Manmohan Singh. His answers to most questions at Monday's press conference to mark the first anniversary of his second stint in the top job were overly cautious and controlled, one might even say ‘monitorist'. Like a prudential banker, he opted for the path of generating low interest, wary, perhaps, that an expansionary supply of words would only inflate the risk of being misunderstood.

Of course, Dr. Singh spoke passionately on issues closest to his heart or with which he was intimately familiar. These were his efforts to build peace with Pakistan, the complex relationship between himself and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, the functioning of his Cabinet and, of course, his own future. His words on all these subjects carried the hallmark of sincerity and conviction. There wasn't a trace of equivocation when he said he had no intention of “retiring” from the job of Prime Minister so long as the work he had started remained unfinished. He confidently brushed aside the idea of a disconnect between party and government and surprised many by seeing virtue in debate and disagreement between his ministerial colleagues, so long as the airing of differences was first done in the Cabinet.

Little or no information

But on virtually every other issue, he yielded little or no information and barely ventured to stake out a position. There were no less than 17 questions of the 55 he was asked to which he provided generic answers. Of the boilerplate — “When the time comes, we will take appropriate decisions in all these matters” or “Every possible effort is being made and will be made to find amicable solution to these problems” or “the law should be allowed to take its course” — variety.

So it was that he told the country affirmative action for Dalits and tribals in the private sector — a promise the Congress had made in 2004 — required the “right atmosphere” while progress on delinking black money from politics needed “consensus”. The Telangana question was now being examined by a committee so it would be “difficult for me to offer any meaningful comment.” On whether a caste census might be divisive or not, all he would say is that “the process of examining [the inclusion of caste] is on.” On illegal mining in Orissa, “if anything concrete comes to the attention of the government, we will take effective action,” he said. On the failure of his government to grant sanction to prosecute soldiers accused by the CBI of murdering villagers in Kashmir, “I will look into it.”

The Home Minister's controversial demand for an “expanded mandate” to deal with the Maoist insurgency was also stonewalled. “These are issues which are strategy issues which will be discussed in the appropriate forum of the Cabinet whenever the opportunity arises,” he said.

This refusal to take a position on a range of issues that have animated public discourse over the past few weeks and months and which concern the lives of millions means that as and when the Prime Minister and his government take decisions, these will end up becoming even more divisive. Governments can carry their public along on difficult policy matters only when some effort is made to convince them about the necessity for a particular course of action. Dr. Singh has not flinched from arguing in favour of engagement with Pakistan but today neither he nor Sonia Gandhi is willing or able to play that role on pressing domestic issues. If, for example, the government really believes the execution of Afzal Guru could generate a negative political dynamic in the Kashmir valley, it should have the courage to make that argument. If, as the Prime Minister once said, minorities and other marginalised sections ought to have first claims on government resources — a Gandhian principle that is perfectly in harmony with the requirements of true democracy — he ought to lead from the front in taking the argument to the wider public. If he believes the private sector needs to do more to provide opportunities to India's Dalits and tribals, he could have used the press conference to make that point, even if a government decision is still some way away.

Political parties cannot serve as vehicles for enlightened decision-making, for raising the level of society's consciousness, if their leaders are going to shy away from taking a stand.

A year of living indecisively

The inability of the Prime Minister and the Congress president to push official policies in the direction of meaningful social change leaves the public confused...





24 May 2010
The Hindu

A year of living indecisively

Siddharth Varadarajan

As Manmohan Singh completes the first year of his second term as Prime Minister, it has become something of a cliché to accuse him of weakness. His inability to take action against Ministers accused of corruption or sheer inefficiency is an obvious indicator of his lack of power within the government. The dissonance on various crucial policy matters is another. However, these symptoms are more a reflection of structural weaknesses in the current ruling system than of individual failing on Dr. Singh's part.

There are, in fact, two sources of weakness in the United Progressive Alliance arrangement. The first is induced by the compulsions of coalition government, the second by the nature of the ruling party itself. Though the Congress won many more seats in 2009 than it did in 2004, it is still dependent on smaller parties whose agendas are mercurial and unpredictable. But this is a derivative problem, something of mere arithmetic importance, because it begs the question of whether the current problems faced by the Prime Minister would evaporate if the Congress had a majority of its own. Would the examples of rent-seeking, influence peddling, patronage, inefficiency and insensitivity we see in the functioning of various Ministries and government departments disappear if they were run by Congress Ministers? Would the government have the ability to deliver on its promise of social and economic inclusiveness if it were staffed only by the Congress? Only the hopelessly naïve would believe that.

Of the two structural flaws that have weakened the Prime Minister and his government, then, it is the second which is the more decisive. The nature of the Congress is a serious, foundational weakness, a constitutive flaw standing in the way of policy changes that could allow it to transcend the current political constraints and deliver to the people of India the kind of governance they deserve.

Much as the Bharatiya Janata Party would like us to believe it, the existence of two power centres in the government is not unique to the UPA. It is true that as Prime Minister of the NDA government, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was also the undisputed leader of the BJP. But the dyarchy in that arrangement involved a split between the authority of the party and the sangh parivar, rather than between party and government, and Mr. Vajpayee was certainly not the head of that family. As Congress president, a Member of Parliament and head of the UPA, Sonia Gandhi has a legal and political mandate of the kind the RSS never had. But the problem is that she is not being decisive in the exercise of her mandate. Many of the problems the NDA regime ran into sprang from the sangh parivar's assertiveness. In contrast, the UPA's problems arise from Ms Gandhi's failure to lead from the front.

Within the Congress party today, there are at least three ideo-political trends competing for dominance and the divisions and differences between them are apparent on a number of issues. There is first the social democratic paternalism of the party machinery as represented by Ahmed Patel but also Pranab Mukherjee, A.K. Antony, Veerappa Moily and others. This school recognises the importance of inclusiveness not as an end in itself but as an instrument to put political space between the Congress and the BJP. It cannot move beyond the paradigm of tokenism, little alliances and reservation. Instead of boldly embracing the Sachar committee's comprehensive recommendations on ending Muslim marginalisation, for example, or pushing for a Communal Violence bill that has real teeth, or encouraging the emergence of dynamic Muslim leaders within the Congress, this group is more comfortable making a deal with a clerical section of the community. It is not a coincidence that this group is also the one making the demand for the inclusion of caste enumeration in the census as a short-sighted means of beating the OBC parties at their own game.

The second ideological trend within the Congress is that of technocratic populism, as represented primarily by Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Ministers like Kamal Nath and others. This section has a certain disdain for the ‘consensual,' accommodative politics of the old school but ends up being quite anti-political in its approach. Not surprisingly, their approach finds the widest resonance with the mass media and upper middle classes. The Telangana fiasco was the first disastrous product to emerge from the technocrats but there have been other bad ideas as well. Mr. Chidambaram rightly questioned the logistical difficulties involved in conducting a caste census but sees no problem in the state's ability to collect and keep confidential the iris scans and ten finger prints of 1.2 billion Indians. The Maoist insurgency is seen as something that can be ended through an “expanded mandate” to use military means, and healthy debate and disagreement are looked upon with suspicion. The technocratic populists are also impatient with environmental norms and public hearings if they come in the way of highways and roads and factories and mines.

There is a third trend, too, but this is currently the weakest, despite being led, in a manner of speaking, by Rahul Gandhi as he attempts to renovate the Congress from the bottom up. Though there is a strong modernising element in Mr. Gandhi's approach, his approach is inherently political and calls for greater attention to be paid to the voices and aspirations of those who have become disconnected from the socio-economic mainstream over the past two decades. This trend within the party, whose ranks include Digvijay Singh, Salman Khurshid, Mani Shankar Aiyar and also Jairam Ramesh, believes that the Congress can have a political future only if it reflects the concerns of the marginalised. It knows the limits of the paternalistic and technocratic approaches and is pitching for the emergence of the Congress as a modern political party that is democratic in its outlook and approach and its internal functioning — something which it is not today.

To be sure, the boundaries between these three groups are not neatly drawn. Depending on the specific issue, shifting coalitions get formed and Ms Gandhi often ends up mediating one way or another.

What makes this struggle within the Congress even more interesting is that it is happening against the backdrop of big money making greater and greater inroads into the corridors of power. As is clear from data on the rising net worth of MPs and MLAs, formal political structures may be getting atomised but the dominance of super-rich national and local elites is getting more and more consolidated.

The principal achievements of UPA-I came because Ms Gandhi and the Congress party provided strong political backing to initiatives like the Right to Information and the National Rural Employment Guarantee. But in UPA-II, so far at least, that political backing appears absent. The fact that there is dissonance within the Congress and the government on diverse issues is a good sign, an indication that contestation is under way. But the inability of the Prime Minister and the Congress president to mould and shape this debate and push official policies in the direction of meaningful social change leaves the public confused. Initiatives are being proposed or taken, like the Women's Reservation Bill and the Food Security Bill, but there is a danger of these ending up as incomplete measures even as attempts are made to roll back the gains already made like the Right to Information.

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act remains unchanged despite promises. The land acquisition and rehabilitation policy of the government is in a mess, affecting the lives of millions of people. There is a danger that militarisation and securitisation will take the place of politics as a means of resolving internal conflicts. On the first anniversary of the UPA's second mandate, it is time Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh took urgent stock of their joint enterprise.

This war can’t be won by mines and bullets

It is not litigants who’ve gone to court seeking the rehabilitation of civilians or ‘civil society activists’ but the Maoists and the State who must answer for the deaths of innocents in Chhattisgarh...






20 May 2010
The Hindu

This war can’t be won by mines and bullets

It is not litigants who’ve gone to court seeking the rehabilitation of civilians or ‘civil society activists’ but the Maoists and the State who must answer for the deaths of innocents in Chhattisgarh

Siddharth Varadarajan

Whether Operation Green Hunt actually exists or is, as P. Chidambaram insists, a figment of the media’s imagination, Monday’s deadly Maoist attack on a bus in Dantewada suggests it is the hunted that are doing most of the hunting.

Over the past six weeks, the Maoists in Chhattisgarh have killed more than 90 policemen or jawans from the CRPF or local constabulary. The 76 men killed in Chintalnar in April represent, perhaps, the highest casualty figure sustained by state forces in a single incident in a war anywhere in the world in years. Apart from the six villagers executed on Sunday after a kangaroo ‘peoples court’ found them guilty of being “informers”, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) killed 15 civilians in their attack on the bus, injuring scores more.

In the latest incident, the primary target was probably the group of Special Police Officers (SPOs) who were travelling on the roof of the bus. But even so, the fact that the bus was full of civilian passengers would have been obvious to the Maoist commanders whose spotters were apparently tracking the SPOs. That they chose to go ahead and detonate the land mine or IED by remote control knowing a large number of non-combatants would die should be a lesson for anyone who harbours illusions about the Maoists and their project.

When I had the opportunity to put some questions in writing to Azad, spokesman of the Maoists, in March, I was keen to push him on whether or not his party believed it had an obligation to conform to international humanitarian law. This is the body of rules which regulates armed conflict. The targeting of civilians and the killing of captives, for example, is expressly forbidden. As a format, written questions and answers do not allow the interviewer to pose counter-questions. Given this limitation, I anticipated the answer Azad would give on the question of the laws of war – that his fighters were not obliged to follow them because the government itself wasn’t doing so – and suggested this was tantamount to admitting the Maoist party subscribes to the same political culture and moral universe as the state it condemns. This suggestion of mine was met with silence but the attack on the bus is answer enough. The Maoists are not Gandhians with guns.

The authorities can console themselves by saying the latest attack shows the “growing desperation” of the Maoists, or that the targeting of civilians by them will be their undoing. But the fact is that by any metric of warfare, they are the ones who seem to have the upper hand. And they have it not because Indian democracy is robust enough to allow for a debate on the rights and wrongs of official policy or for PILs to be filed in the Supreme Court but because the CRPF, local police and SPOs on whom the Chhattisgarh government and Centre rely lack training, discipline, equipment, mobility and motivation. Instead of squarely facing this problem, Mr. Chidambaram and his colleagues in the Home Ministry are busy pointing fingers at others or bemoaning the lack of a “mandate” to fight the Maoists.

More than “social activists”, it is the government that ought to be concerned about the fact that many of the “successes” notched up by the security forces in Chhattisgarh have turned out to be bogus. For example, most of the dozen odd naxals supposedly killed in a fierce encounter last fall near Gompad were innocent villagers, some of them elderly.

There is both a moral and a military issue at stake here. Killing innocent people is wrong but it is also militarily foolish. Passing off ordinary villagers as Maoist combatants and faking entries in official log books may help the security forces present an inflated account of their success but will make actual victory on the ground even more difficult. On Tuesday, the Home Minister reiterated the importance of the so-called “two-pronged strategy” to deal with naxalism: “One prong is police action, and the other prong is development”. Unfortunately, neither prong is being followed very effectively. Indeed, the fact that there is today in Chhattisgarh an inversion of the supposed hunt is precisely because the state and central governments have made a mess of both policing and development. Thanks to a disastrous counterinsurgency strategy, several hundred innocent villagers have been killed, thousands of dwellings destroyed and tens of thousands of adivasis displaced. In Gompad last year, the SPOs cut off the fingers of a two-year old boy, Suresh. The Hindu published his photograph on October 20, 2009. Not one word of condemnation or remorse was heard from Mr. Chidambaram or his ministry.

Far from weakening the Maoists as its supporters claimed it would, the Salwa Judum vigilante movement which both New Delhi and Raipur patronised for years has strengthened the insurgents. This is precisely what the petitioners who filed a PIL in the Supreme Court in 2007 against the vigilantes had warned would happen.

In a recent RAND Corporation monograph, How Insurgencies End: Key Indicators, Tipping Points, and Strategy, Ben Connable and Martin Libicki conclude their survey of 89 past and present insurgencies by noting that ‘anocracies’ are the one form of government least likely to prevail over an insurgent force. Democracies do best and dictatorships sometimes prevail through sheer repression but the anocracies do worst. An anocracy is a phony democracy, which is good at neither proper democratic methods nor full-fledged autocracy. Its institutions are weak and poorly developed, offering little possibility for the government to isolate an insurgency from the people in whose name the fight is being waged. But the need to preserve the façade of democracy also means the full panoply of repressive measures – air strikes, mass arrests, censorship – is not available either.

India may be an imperfect democracy but I do not believe it is an anocracy. And yet, one could argue that state practice in Dantewada and other parts of India is anocratic. Based on the RAND data, then, it is safe to assume the Maoists are not going to be defeated any time soon. The choice we face is to democratise or autocratise the state’s response and the wider machinery of governance. Those who want to autocratise favour a dramatic escalation of the war, the rapid deployment of large numbers of security personnel, the use of air strikes. They are also intolerant of dissent and are quick to label any criticism of official policy as ‘support for Maoism’.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi are coming under intense pressure from this faction but they know the problem will grow exponentially if the government goes autocratic. And yet, they lack the confidence to democratise. What would democratisation as a counter-insurgency strategy look like? First, this requires strict adherence to the laws of war. No one can question the state’s right to fight those who take up arms against it. But non-combatants must never be targeted, let alone allowed to get in harm’s way. This would also mean ending the practice of billeting jawans in school buildings and other civilian infrastructure or hitching rides on civilian transport. India may not have signed the Geneva Convention additional protocol on internal armed conflict but Common Article 3 of the four conventions to which India is a party – not to speak of the Indian Constitution – prohibits violence against those not taking active part in hostilities or against combatants who are in custody. The reason the laws of war are important is that they provide a measure of protection to both sides, not to speak of civilians.

Second, the Centre should support the plan, currently before the Supreme Court, for the comprehensive rehabilitation of all those displaced by the violence in Dantewada. Third, the government should seriously consider a mutual ceasefire so as to push the Maoists towards dialogue. The cessation of hostilities, if extended, would allow the Dantewada rehabilitation plan to be implemented under the overall supervision of the apex court. Fourth, every manifestation of autocratic behaviour – the farcical public hearings on land acquisition for mining and power projects, the filing of criminal cases against poor adivasis for minor violations of the Forest Act, has to stop.

As for the Maoists, they need to realise this is not a war they can win. The Indian state’s capacity to absorb punishment is far greater than the Maoists’ ability to inflict violence. Whatever else its lacks, India certainly doesn’t need more soldiers, guns and IEDs. What it could use is a strong political movement to give voice to the aspirations of ordinary workers, peasants, tribals, women and other marginalised sections. Mao may have said power flows out of the barrel of the gun. But he also said to put politics in command. Alas, in Chhatisgarh today, there is no politics.