Dear Dr Manmohan Singhji
Indecisions, wrong decisions, weird decisions, shocking decisions, reversed decisions, Raja decisions, Sonia decisions, Rahul decisions. Gursharan decisions. Destiny has laid them all at your doorstep.
When you choose to live where the buck stops, you have to get used to frequent knocks. So far you have taken the knocks in your stride; they don’t seem to bother you at all. Some of us often wish you would scream and shout out your innocence but you deny us even that pleasure.
Your detractors say yours is a conspiracy of silence which gave a tacit sanction to corruption and irregularities. Your letter wanting to be kept at an arm’s length in the 2G case suggests this could actually be true. Coalition dharma notwithstanding, if true, that would be sad.
Personally, I am quite willing to accept that you are a quiet sort of person who hates public speaking. I have met such people and have no difficulty in understanding the mindset. Unfortunately while such people may make great economists, poets and philosophers, they have severe limitations as Prime Ministers. You should have thought it through before signing on the dotted line. But having accepted the position you owed it to yourself, your party and the people of India to have worked to bridge that weakness.
You had several options. You could have appointed a trusted Deputy PM to do most of your talking. Or at least had a smarter communicator than V. Narayanasamy in the PMO for regular briefing much as they do in the White House. You could have expressed your opinions and points of view through your writings and through social media. Or simply had many more informal meetings with the media.
Either way, remaining incommunicado was not an option. Remember the unfortunate Delhi rape? The incident had little to do with you except in a general sense. All that the youngsters at India Gate wanted was a shoulder to cry on. But you were absent. What could have been a super-charged moment of your personal reconciliation with the youth was converted into yet another low-point of your tenure.
But why belabor the subject? This is obviously a cross you have decided to bear and so be it. There are enough other issues to discuss.
Though everything may appear dark and dismal today, in a comparative sense you haven’t done too badly. Apart from Panditji and Indira Gandhi, you are the only PM to have served two terms. The last time that happened was in 1973 when India was yet not a true multi-party democracy.
History will credit you as the first PM to give India a 7.5% growth over 10 relatively peaceful years. That is no mean achievement as it came at a testing time for the world economy. And you did so while heading a coalition government in the era of aggressive mass and social media.
Only time can tell how well you will be regarded in the long-term. It will also depend on how your successors perform. However, in the success stakes till now, if we were to keep Panditji out of this equation, you are likely to feature in a cluster with Vajpayee, Rajiv and Rao. Considering that you have never actually been elected to the Lok Sabha that is not bad at all.
But equally, you are leaving behind a negative trend. Since the glory days of 10% plus growth in 2010, it has been consistently been downhill.
The descent has been steeper on the softer issues. The paralysis of the last two years has been unprecedented. You have allowed the drift to such an extent that strategic choices which your government had the right to make are now being termed scams. And so low is the credibility of your government that many, perhaps a majority, believe that they are indeed scams.
Allowing Raja to get away with the last-minute changes he made in the tendering process was your moment of reckoning and you allowed yourself to blink first. Had you stood your ground, the message would have gone around that you cannot be trifled with and the long chain of embarrassments would never have happened.
On the coal issue, you were clearly outwitted.
Your initial instinct to auction the mines was right. But you had not reckoned with the depth of the vested interests in mining. Once the states began protesting you had no option but to retract; even a fool could see that the auction route would result in delays and disruption in power generation and supply. For holier-than-thou civil servants, insisting on auctions was easy; they did not have to bother about the impact on power generation. You had to.
They knew you had no option. The system collaborated to hang you. At least a part of the blame must go to the bureaucrats in the PMO whose job it is to prevent the Prime Minister from entering such a minefield.
But allegations and scams are all in a day’s work in democracies. Despite all this, to use the immortal words of Jim Hacker ‘you have done OK’. Not bad at all for someone who really was a round peg in a square hole from Day One.
You were the dream of the middle-class. A highly educated technocrat with sound global credentials and yet a humble self-made man who owned a Maruti 800 and had actually studied under the street lamp as a child. That a person like you could occupy the highest office in the country was a fairy tale we wanted to believe.
For some reason, when you became a Prime Minister, you ceased to be a friend or a brother or a father. Sadly you forgot that the Prime Minister cannot just be another nameless civil servant. He or she leads the nation. When he smiles, the nation smiles, when he is sad, it shows on every face and when he is angry, so is the nation. Perhaps it was the way you defined your role or just an extension of your natural diffidence. Either way, it was a disappointment.
What was your dream, Dr Singh? Putting aside limitations imposed by convention, party or parliament, what would you have wanted to achieve for India? How would you have wanted to be remembered? You never revealed it.
By not doing so, you forced us to make our own assumptions. Tom saw you as a reformer, Dick thought you were an agent of growth and Harry believed you would globalize India. Tom, Dick and Harry were all disappointed.
Tempering expectations and managing hope is a part of the responsibilities of the head of government. Much of today’s frustration emanates from the simplest of truths we were never told. That the country’s journey into a free market does not only mean more money and opportunity, it also means more accountability for our actions. It was the business of your government to have alerted us and held our hand through the changeover.
Your humility was the stuff of legends. Some of the stories may have been exaggerated but a lot were true. I personally remember you seated with the rest of us in the plane as a Finance Minister circa 1994 and on alighting, walk to the bus, briefcase in hand like the rest of us.
You are among the last of the generation that could have imposed moral authority. If there was someone who could have taken a stand against the ‘lal batti’ culture, it was you. You could have demolished these obnoxious symbols of everything that is wrong with us and brought back simplicity and accessibility in to the political space.
Instead you allowed power and money to become the only currencies that work. Years later when you look back, I have no doubt this will prove to be your single biggest disappointment.
The obscenity of a 27 floor residence on an acre of the country’s most expensive real estate in a city that houses over a crore in slums. Or the donation of crores to temples by one of the country’s wealthiest even as his employees await salaries. Or the mega-bucks spent on flying planeloads across the world for weddings even while the minimum subsistence amount is pitched at Rs 35 per head. That we have reached a level at which these have ceased to be moral or ethical choices is something for which you as the Prime Minister must share some responsibility.
But that is not all. After a point, the lack of moral authority has started impinging more directly on the governing process. The impunity with which institutions treat the central government is shocking. States run by the opposition ignore it. The CAG, the Courts, the CBI and even the Archaeological Survey of India all seem to believe that the government does not exist. Within the government, ministries often take different stands. And you take no stand at all.
Soon after taking over, you had stated that you would prioritize administrative reforms. That would have been an excellent idea. We have created a vast bureaucracy which probably works at a fraction of its capacity. This was not a reform that needed more investment, it required only commitment and focus.
Had you even taken the first few elementary steps, long after the scandals are dismissed or forgotten your contribution to administrative reforms would have endured. It was something you could have done even without a strong political clout.
Instead you ran one of the most profligate governments ever. As per World Bank data, between 2007 and 2012, while our economy grew by less than 40%, our cost of governance grew by over 60%. But despite the extra input into governance, the quality of governance dipped across most parameters tracked by the World Bank. Today we are one of the few countries in the world which have a significantly higher per capita cost on governance than per capita income.
All this investment would be worth the trouble if we had improved significantly on the Human Development Index scale. After all governments exist to improve the quality of life of the people. Sadly that has also not happened. Our HDI index has still not caught up even with rest of South Asia.
I am no economist but can understand that for a country that imports two-thirds of its oil, deficit and value of the rupee are inter-linked. If you can hike up the value of the rupee, the deficit will reduce. What is it that the government wants? A weak rupee in order to make exports more competitive and give an impetus to manufacturing which can generate jobs? Or a higher valuation of the rupee to reduce your deficit? These are strategic options. I know more about the currency policy of China than India. Should you not share your strategy with the country?
It is true that much of the government’s paralysis in the last two years was caused by the BJP’s obstructions in Parliament. I do not wish to go into the merit of their decisions but certainly would like to know where was your counter-offensive? Where were the human-interest stories telling us how the blockade of Parliament was affecting the aam aadmi? Where were the ads that would have explained to me that even 1% knocked off from the growth rate could mean loss of jobs? Where was your activism? Where was your fighting spirit?
In the end you allowed the BJP to get away with it.
On the issue of criminals in Parliament. Why the Ordinance? Even lay observers like me knew that the President would not sign it. Why did you allow yourself to be made such a fool of? Whichever way one looks, one cannot help but wonder how you walked into a minefield and suffered from the worst loss of face in your 9 years.
Lastly the Pakistan issue.
By trying, you did the right thing. Pakistan is a neighbor and by no means a push-over. Both sides have hurt each other in the past and if we are to make a new start, we will have to start with a new slate. You did well to ignore the people who criticized you. They were only demonstrating their natural prejudice.
However, you neither have the time nor the authority to sign a new solution with Pakistan in the next few months. I would urge you to change your strategy.
Try an alternative. Come on TV. Make a formal announcement that India will consider every intrusion into our territory as an act of war and treat it as such. And that beginning now, India will follow the 10x strategy. What is 10x? Simply that in any exchange provoked by Pakistan, we will use 10 times the force in retaliation whenever there is any violation of the cease-fire.
You have 6 months now. Apart from the BJP no one is ready for early elections. This is real freedom time. A lot can be achieved in 6 months. For long you have followed Guru Nanak. In the next six months, try Guru Gobind Singh’s advice:
Deh siva bar mohe eh-hey subh karman te kabhu na taro.
Na daro arr seo jab jaye laro nischey kar apni jeet karo.
Arr sikh ho apne he mann ko, eh laalach hou gun tau ucharo.
Jab aav ki audh nidan bane att he rann me tabh joojh maro.
देह शिवा बर मोहे ईहे, शुभ कर्मन ते कभुं न टरूं न डरौं अरि सौं जब जाय लड़ौं,
निश्चय कर अपनी जीत करौं,
अरु सिख हों आपने ही मन कौ इह लालच हउ गुन तउ उचरों,
जब आव की अउध निदान बनै अति ही रन मै तब जूझ मरों .
O Lord grant me the boon, that I may never deviate from doing a good deed.
That I shall not fear when I go into combat. And with determination I will be victorious.
That I may teach myself this greed alone, to learn only Thy praises.
And when the last days of my life come, I may die in the might of the battlefield.
My case rests.
Yours
Preet K S Bedi
When you choose to live where the buck stops, you have to get used to frequent knocks. So far you have taken the knocks in your stride; they don’t seem to bother you at all. Some of us often wish you would scream and shout out your innocence but you deny us even that pleasure.
Your detractors say yours is a conspiracy of silence which gave a tacit sanction to corruption and irregularities. Your letter wanting to be kept at an arm’s length in the 2G case suggests this could actually be true. Coalition dharma notwithstanding, if true, that would be sad.
Personally, I am quite willing to accept that you are a quiet sort of person who hates public speaking. I have met such people and have no difficulty in understanding the mindset. Unfortunately while such people may make great economists, poets and philosophers, they have severe limitations as Prime Ministers. You should have thought it through before signing on the dotted line. But having accepted the position you owed it to yourself, your party and the people of India to have worked to bridge that weakness.
You had several options. You could have appointed a trusted Deputy PM to do most of your talking. Or at least had a smarter communicator than V. Narayanasamy in the PMO for regular briefing much as they do in the White House. You could have expressed your opinions and points of view through your writings and through social media. Or simply had many more informal meetings with the media.
Either way, remaining incommunicado was not an option. Remember the unfortunate Delhi rape? The incident had little to do with you except in a general sense. All that the youngsters at India Gate wanted was a shoulder to cry on. But you were absent. What could have been a super-charged moment of your personal reconciliation with the youth was converted into yet another low-point of your tenure.
But why belabor the subject? This is obviously a cross you have decided to bear and so be it. There are enough other issues to discuss.
Though everything may appear dark and dismal today, in a comparative sense you haven’t done too badly. Apart from Panditji and Indira Gandhi, you are the only PM to have served two terms. The last time that happened was in 1973 when India was yet not a true multi-party democracy.
History will credit you as the first PM to give India a 7.5% growth over 10 relatively peaceful years. That is no mean achievement as it came at a testing time for the world economy. And you did so while heading a coalition government in the era of aggressive mass and social media.
Only time can tell how well you will be regarded in the long-term. It will also depend on how your successors perform. However, in the success stakes till now, if we were to keep Panditji out of this equation, you are likely to feature in a cluster with Vajpayee, Rajiv and Rao. Considering that you have never actually been elected to the Lok Sabha that is not bad at all.
But equally, you are leaving behind a negative trend. Since the glory days of 10% plus growth in 2010, it has been consistently been downhill.
The descent has been steeper on the softer issues. The paralysis of the last two years has been unprecedented. You have allowed the drift to such an extent that strategic choices which your government had the right to make are now being termed scams. And so low is the credibility of your government that many, perhaps a majority, believe that they are indeed scams.
Allowing Raja to get away with the last-minute changes he made in the tendering process was your moment of reckoning and you allowed yourself to blink first. Had you stood your ground, the message would have gone around that you cannot be trifled with and the long chain of embarrassments would never have happened.
On the coal issue, you were clearly outwitted.
Your initial instinct to auction the mines was right. But you had not reckoned with the depth of the vested interests in mining. Once the states began protesting you had no option but to retract; even a fool could see that the auction route would result in delays and disruption in power generation and supply. For holier-than-thou civil servants, insisting on auctions was easy; they did not have to bother about the impact on power generation. You had to.
They knew you had no option. The system collaborated to hang you. At least a part of the blame must go to the bureaucrats in the PMO whose job it is to prevent the Prime Minister from entering such a minefield.
But allegations and scams are all in a day’s work in democracies. Despite all this, to use the immortal words of Jim Hacker ‘you have done OK’. Not bad at all for someone who really was a round peg in a square hole from Day One.
You were the dream of the middle-class. A highly educated technocrat with sound global credentials and yet a humble self-made man who owned a Maruti 800 and had actually studied under the street lamp as a child. That a person like you could occupy the highest office in the country was a fairy tale we wanted to believe.
For some reason, when you became a Prime Minister, you ceased to be a friend or a brother or a father. Sadly you forgot that the Prime Minister cannot just be another nameless civil servant. He or she leads the nation. When he smiles, the nation smiles, when he is sad, it shows on every face and when he is angry, so is the nation. Perhaps it was the way you defined your role or just an extension of your natural diffidence. Either way, it was a disappointment.
What was your dream, Dr Singh? Putting aside limitations imposed by convention, party or parliament, what would you have wanted to achieve for India? How would you have wanted to be remembered? You never revealed it.
By not doing so, you forced us to make our own assumptions. Tom saw you as a reformer, Dick thought you were an agent of growth and Harry believed you would globalize India. Tom, Dick and Harry were all disappointed.
Tempering expectations and managing hope is a part of the responsibilities of the head of government. Much of today’s frustration emanates from the simplest of truths we were never told. That the country’s journey into a free market does not only mean more money and opportunity, it also means more accountability for our actions. It was the business of your government to have alerted us and held our hand through the changeover.
Your humility was the stuff of legends. Some of the stories may have been exaggerated but a lot were true. I personally remember you seated with the rest of us in the plane as a Finance Minister circa 1994 and on alighting, walk to the bus, briefcase in hand like the rest of us.
You are among the last of the generation that could have imposed moral authority. If there was someone who could have taken a stand against the ‘lal batti’ culture, it was you. You could have demolished these obnoxious symbols of everything that is wrong with us and brought back simplicity and accessibility in to the political space.
Instead you allowed power and money to become the only currencies that work. Years later when you look back, I have no doubt this will prove to be your single biggest disappointment.
The obscenity of a 27 floor residence on an acre of the country’s most expensive real estate in a city that houses over a crore in slums. Or the donation of crores to temples by one of the country’s wealthiest even as his employees await salaries. Or the mega-bucks spent on flying planeloads across the world for weddings even while the minimum subsistence amount is pitched at Rs 35 per head. That we have reached a level at which these have ceased to be moral or ethical choices is something for which you as the Prime Minister must share some responsibility.
But that is not all. After a point, the lack of moral authority has started impinging more directly on the governing process. The impunity with which institutions treat the central government is shocking. States run by the opposition ignore it. The CAG, the Courts, the CBI and even the Archaeological Survey of India all seem to believe that the government does not exist. Within the government, ministries often take different stands. And you take no stand at all.
Soon after taking over, you had stated that you would prioritize administrative reforms. That would have been an excellent idea. We have created a vast bureaucracy which probably works at a fraction of its capacity. This was not a reform that needed more investment, it required only commitment and focus.
Had you even taken the first few elementary steps, long after the scandals are dismissed or forgotten your contribution to administrative reforms would have endured. It was something you could have done even without a strong political clout.
Instead you ran one of the most profligate governments ever. As per World Bank data, between 2007 and 2012, while our economy grew by less than 40%, our cost of governance grew by over 60%. But despite the extra input into governance, the quality of governance dipped across most parameters tracked by the World Bank. Today we are one of the few countries in the world which have a significantly higher per capita cost on governance than per capita income.
All this investment would be worth the trouble if we had improved significantly on the Human Development Index scale. After all governments exist to improve the quality of life of the people. Sadly that has also not happened. Our HDI index has still not caught up even with rest of South Asia.
I am no economist but can understand that for a country that imports two-thirds of its oil, deficit and value of the rupee are inter-linked. If you can hike up the value of the rupee, the deficit will reduce. What is it that the government wants? A weak rupee in order to make exports more competitive and give an impetus to manufacturing which can generate jobs? Or a higher valuation of the rupee to reduce your deficit? These are strategic options. I know more about the currency policy of China than India. Should you not share your strategy with the country?
It is true that much of the government’s paralysis in the last two years was caused by the BJP’s obstructions in Parliament. I do not wish to go into the merit of their decisions but certainly would like to know where was your counter-offensive? Where were the human-interest stories telling us how the blockade of Parliament was affecting the aam aadmi? Where were the ads that would have explained to me that even 1% knocked off from the growth rate could mean loss of jobs? Where was your activism? Where was your fighting spirit?
In the end you allowed the BJP to get away with it.
On the issue of criminals in Parliament. Why the Ordinance? Even lay observers like me knew that the President would not sign it. Why did you allow yourself to be made such a fool of? Whichever way one looks, one cannot help but wonder how you walked into a minefield and suffered from the worst loss of face in your 9 years.
Lastly the Pakistan issue.
By trying, you did the right thing. Pakistan is a neighbor and by no means a push-over. Both sides have hurt each other in the past and if we are to make a new start, we will have to start with a new slate. You did well to ignore the people who criticized you. They were only demonstrating their natural prejudice.
However, you neither have the time nor the authority to sign a new solution with Pakistan in the next few months. I would urge you to change your strategy.
Try an alternative. Come on TV. Make a formal announcement that India will consider every intrusion into our territory as an act of war and treat it as such. And that beginning now, India will follow the 10x strategy. What is 10x? Simply that in any exchange provoked by Pakistan, we will use 10 times the force in retaliation whenever there is any violation of the cease-fire.
You have 6 months now. Apart from the BJP no one is ready for early elections. This is real freedom time. A lot can be achieved in 6 months. For long you have followed Guru Nanak. In the next six months, try Guru Gobind Singh’s advice:
Deh siva bar mohe eh-hey subh karman te kabhu na taro.
Na daro arr seo jab jaye laro nischey kar apni jeet karo.
Arr sikh ho apne he mann ko, eh laalach hou gun tau ucharo.
Jab aav ki audh nidan bane att he rann me tabh joojh maro.
देह शिवा बर मोहे ईहे, शुभ कर्मन ते कभुं न टरूं न डरौं अरि सौं जब जाय लड़ौं,
निश्चय कर अपनी जीत करौं,
अरु सिख हों आपने ही मन कौ इह लालच हउ गुन तउ उचरों,
जब आव की अउध निदान बनै अति ही रन मै तब जूझ मरों .
O Lord grant me the boon, that I may never deviate from doing a good deed.
That I shall not fear when I go into combat. And with determination I will be victorious.
That I may teach myself this greed alone, to learn only Thy praises.
And when the last days of my life come, I may die in the might of the battlefield.
My case rests.
Yours
Preet K S Bedi
No comments:
Post a Comment