M D Nalapat
The Congress Party is following the tradition first adopted by Nehru and Patel of placing the (colonial model) Civil Service above India’s Civil Society.
Some days ago, an unnamed worthy called and referred to the
Karkardooma courts while informing this columnist that he would soon
face prosecution and worse. What was the crime? Being tardy by a few
days in clearing a bill of Rs 1,100 of Tata Indicom, a company that has
gone out of business. It is sobering to read Arun Shourie’s book, Anita
Gets Bail (and that too in the daytime and not late at night, the way it
was granted to our fabled business and political leader, Karti
Chidambaram). Bail ought certainly to be a routine right of any citizen
not yet found guilty of a crime, but often is not. Given that the
British-era (and centuries-old) laws of our democracy give a terrifying
number of agencies the power to deprive a citizen of his or her liberty
even for a sum as trifling as a rupee, the agent’s threat once more
revealed the contempt of the post-1947 political class towards the
rights of the ordinary citizen in “post-colonial” India. Elected
politicians share with officials an attachment to British-era laws, for
these give them immense power over citizens not well connected. That a
company (or those acting as its agents) is emboldened enough to threaten
to deprive a citizen of his or her liberty on a matter that would rank
as a petty—and civil—dispute in any other democracy indicates why daily
life in India remains a hazardous enterprise. Not leaping to attention
when the National Anthem gets sung in the theatre, accidentally brushing
against a member of the fair sex while walking, sending off a tweet
that offends any of our 1.27 billion citizens. These are a few of the
thousands of ways in which a citizen can find himself thrown into the
quicksand that the legal system is in a country, where cases drag on for
decades. And yet there is an entire army of individuals who thus far
have almost totally escaped the clutches of the law, and these are the
“unknown” but easily identifiable individuals in the banking system who
have cost taxpayers more than Rs 600,000 crore of current value during
the past decade and counting, by gifting loans to those who had zero
intention of repaying the same.
Not all NPAs are caused by an intention to cheat the financial
system. Some have their origin in business conditions gone bad as a
consequence of factors beyond the borrower’s control. And there are
those individuals who have refused to scurry away to London or
Singapore, but who have worked hard at repaying their creditors, and
succeeded. Such individuals need to be named, recognised and honoured by
government rather than ignored the way they have been. Instead, it is
often those who have—in effect—stolen huge sums who adorn VVIP anterooms
and the society pages of newspapers. The Indian Express (which, let it
be admitted, is the first newspaper this columnist picks up in the
morning) has mentioned in its 15 June issue that a record Rs 1.44 lakh
crore of “bad loans” were written off by India’s commercial banking
system. While private banks wrote off Rs 79,940 crore during the past
ten years, the State Bank of India alone accounted for Rs 123,137 crore
of bad loans written off during the same period this year alone. Who
were the sanctioning authorities during this period? Does anybody know
or care? Some within a stock exchange have been reported to have given
unfair access to select brokers, resulting in an “insider” windfall to a
few HNIs. More than a few of those who were associated with this still
enjoy positions of power and patronage, and have been appointed to their
posts either by the government or with its blessings. This columnist
has long said that an exhaustive inventory of current lifestyles of the
top 500 public officials during the past decade may be instructive and
easy to accomplish.
An administration needs to be judged by the median income of the
inhabitants of the country in which it is operating, and by such a
metric, India’s is among the worst in Asia. Despite this, there is a
collective howl of protest when even the most minimal of administrative
reforms gets carried out. The Congress Party, during its decade in
office under Manmohan Singh, ignored the numerous very useful
suggestions of the Veerappa Moily committee. Earlier, Arjun Singh and
N.D. Tiwari had attacked Prime Minister Narasimha Rao when he carried
out a few reforms during 1992-93, affecting his confidence so badly that
the reform process visibly slowed in the final three years of his term.
Now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts at broad-basing—to a very
limited extent—the pool of recruitment into the IAS is being met with
fierce opposition from a party led by a relatively youthful leader who
ought to be leading the charge towards altering the British-era system
of the present in a manner that better meets the needs of the 21st
century. By demanding a rollback of even a baby step towards reform, the
Congress Party is following the tradition first adopted by Nehru and
Patel of placing the (colonial model) Civil Service above India’s Civil
Society. Rahul Gandhi in his earlier avatar of general secretary of his
party correctly demanded the end of laws that criminalise defamation or
send gay men to prison. It is not expected of a party under his
leadership that it opposes even a wholly inadequate lateral entry of
domain experts from Civil Society into the Civil Service.
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