Will Sonia trump Saint Antony? (Sunday Guardian)

M D Nalapat

t was Pramod Mahajan who came up with the concept of "India Shining". And in his case, such a claim was certainly true. From a lower-middle class background, the BJP's Mr Fix-it entered the higher rungs of the economic elite. Of course, because of the need to pretend that he was still penurious by the standards of his business friends, a lot of such wealth would have been distributed amongst various names. Some claim that the marital adventures of his only son was motivated more by a desire to husband the wealth left behind by Mahajan than by romance, although this is something that is difficult to prove, and may indeed be wrong. The lady in question was admittedly a charmer, as the Mahajan family well knew. Decades ago, during 1977-78, when Indira Gandhi was out of office and needing vast amounts of money for her political comeback, the oxygen for her return was provided by D. Devaraj Urs, the urbane Chief Minister of Karnataka. Urs took care of her needs almost as comprehensively as another Karnataka CM, Ramakrishna Hegde, ministered to V.P. Singh. After all, it needs to be remembered that just as it took a lot of money to keep M.K. Gandhi in poverty, it takes a lot of cash to run a noticeable anti-corruption campaign.

Still slaves, even after ‘Independence’ (Sunday Guardian)

By M. D. Nalapat

	Police officers beat a man during a protest in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra on 19 April: ‘If the notables close to Dus Number visit a police chowki in rural India or a government office in the exurbs as ordinary citizens, they will soon come to understand the martya Sen, Sunil Khilnani and the other notables close to Dus Number may not notice this, but India is hardly a democracy for the 99%-plus of the population sans access to money and its Siamese twin, power. Although the Congress party claimed to be opposed to the British Raj, they have retained each and every one of the accoutrements of the colonial authority, including the laws and the administrative structure. Not coincidentally, such an institutional framework sucks away rights and authority from citizens and places them in the hands of the — admittedly elected — political executive. Hopefully, some day Sen and Khilnani will wander away from the air-conditioned environs of British-built Delhi and visit a police chowki in rural India or a government office in the exurbs, not as favourites of Dus Number, but as ordinary citizens. If they escape arrest or worse, they will soon come to understand the reality of democracy, Nehru-style. During the Raj, any Indian needed the permission of the white masters to undertake most activities. Any that was seen as detrimental to the interests of the few hundred thousand British in India and their fellows at home was banned. Has anything changed since then? Circa 2011, the permission of one agency of the government or the other is mandatory for any activity, including those regarded as routine in genuine democracies. The home ministry and the HRD ministry, in particular, have worked in tandem to snuff out independence and initiative in thinking in our institutions of learning. If Jairam Ramesh is correct that the IITs and the IIMs are not of the standard that he is used to in his peregrinations abroad, the reason lies in his own government which has tasked a 76-year-old (Professor Yash Pal) to come up with a roadmap for a 21st century education system. Hopefully, the good professor will suggest policies that are internationally in sync with the values and needs of the 1960s, rather than the 1930s. Several hundred thousand officials in India have — individually — the power to take away liberty and assets of a citizen. Many of them exercise such discretion in a manner that is designed to quicken the flow of funds to unnamed accounts in tax havens. It is characteristic of Dus Number that it got set up a committee to examine how black money could be eliminated, that was staffed entirely by exactly the same team that has presided over the biggest accumulation of black money in the nation's history. Naturally, these worthies would like even more extreme punishments to those they finger as wrongdoers (for a consideration of course, or the lack of it). They know that each turn of the thumbnail screw will increase the bribes that need to be paid to them and to their political seniors to escape torture. A Baba Ramdev and an Anna Hazare, with their prattle about death sentences, suit their purposes perfectly. We have a Reserve Bank of India that cannot get beyond undergraduate textbooks in economics, and which ignores the fact that the single biggest cause of inflation in India is corruption; a defect that no increase in interest rates will touch. The RBI has allowed the same US and European financial entities responsible for cheating investors of more than $4 trillion to set up shop in India and fleece unwary investors. Today, India has become as much a haven for commodity speculators as is the US and the UK, including in foodgrains. Instead of seeking to bring such elements to book as international criminals, Dus Number gives them access to the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister.
	ust as the authoritarianism of the 1970s led to the 1977 reaction against Indira Gandhi, the reversal of the — far too slow and incomplete — liberalisation of 1992-2004 by the UPA has created a public backlash against the state and its instruments. The people of India are even more circumscribed by the state as they were pre-1947. The ersatz democracy created by politicians unwilling to shed colonial-era powers needs to get replaced by a structure of administrative governance that returns to the people the rights they would enjoy in a democracy. There is a contradiction between the Constitution of India and the colonial-era criminal and civil procedure code and between the rights given to the people under the Constitution and the British-era administrative structure of Nehruvian India. That the people of the country are finally realising that they are still slaves is the only harbinger of hope. http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/still-slaves-even-after-independence

The IMF needs to outgrow Europe (Sunday Guardian)

Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Anand Sharma with French Minister for Economy, Finance and Industry Christine Lagarde at a meeting in Paris last week. PTI fter the obligatory disapproving coughs, Dr Manmohan Singh is likely to accept the replacement of one French managing director of the IMF with another. When Christine Lagarde comes to Delhi, she will enter a city teeming with Francophiles, a species that is particularly strong within the Ministry of Defence. She will converse in French with Sonia Gandhi, and perhaps even find time for a celebrated import from her own country, NAC member Jean Dreze. Given the lack of unanimity within The Rest, it is almost certain The West will once again lead the IMF, the way it does every "international" institution set up after the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. And since the demise of the USSR in 1992, the UN system too has come under western tutelage, as evidenced by UN Security Council resolutions that give colonial-era powers to "Coalitions of the Willing" in countries in Asia and Africa. Of course, perhaps by coincidence, such "coalitions" invariably comprise members of Nato, or are dominated by them. However, allowing the top job at the IMF to remain the monopoly of Europe is a bad idea, one that is likely to prove expensive for Asia, as it watches the money it saves getting diverted into the bottomless pit that passes for public finance in at least a third of EU members. What Lagarde and the rest of her backers seek is money from Asia, and lots of it, to reduce the burden on the EU taxpayer, as the effort continues to make Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece borrow their way out of fiscal collapse. Lagarde's top nine priorities out of a total of ten will be Europe, hardly the mindset expected in the head of an "international" bank. While the IMF may function as a lender to these four economies, this needs to be done on a cold-blooded estimate of what they need to do to avoid default. Thus far, in contrast with the bitter medicine that it has forced economies in South America, Asia and Africa to swallow, the IMF has been noticeably kinder towards Greece and the rest of the PIGS, a policy that needs to change. The reality is that the expansion of the EU on the terms decided upon by the earlier members has proved too expensive to afford. This ruinous policy was initiated by Helmut Kohl two decades back, when he broke every canon of modern economic theory to treat the East German currency as equal to that of West Germany. Had Kohl fixed a more realistic exchange value, the eastern part of a reunited Germany would have developed much faster than it has. And as for the other countries of East Europe, the massive EU effort to enable parity between their social and other infrastructure and that of western Europe placed the tribal loyalty of ethnicity well above reason. Rather than concentrating solely on East Europe, had West Europe given attention to emerging economies in Asia and elsewhere, its returns would have been far higher. East Europe needed to come out of its backwardness at a pace dictated not by emotion but by the logic of economic reality, a process that would have taken about two decades, or the same time as elapsed between the World War II destruction of Japan and Germany and the re-emergence of the two powers. The attempt to telescope this essential process of economic evolution has weakened the financial sinews of the western members of the alliance, and has reduced their relative presence across the world, something that Nato bombs and missiles rained down on the recalcitrant seems unlikely to reverse. What the IMF under Lagarde will attempt would be for the EU to use this so-called "international" umbrella as a means for channelling savings from Asia and other locations towards the EU's stricken members. But the problems of Europe are too big to be eliminated by savings from Asia, a continent that has already been cheated of more than $2 trillion in savings and investments as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, a disaster in the making of which it had no role. Rather than repeat the mistake made by West Europe since the 1990s, of pumping investment funds into East Europe rather than into locations that have today emerged as the engines of international growth, investors in Asia need to focus on themselves and on markets in Africa and South America. If the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have bankrupted the US in a way that the Vietnam War could not, the reason lies in the fact that Bush-Cheney sought to funnel all procurement into US entities, rather than make use of production platforms in Asia. Since the 1990s, the EU has made the same mistake as the Pentagon, only on an even bigger scale. By looking only inwards, the EU has reached a stage when several countries within it are certain to default, even while the only hope that it has for economic stability lies in an Asia that has been ignored for too long. Madame Lagarde at the IMF would be more of the same. More of the same policies that have brought the EU to the edge of financial meltdown. Prime Minister Singh needs to do more than politely cough. India needs to throw its weight behind an "emerging economy" candidate, for it is the move away from a Europe-centric approach that is the best policy for the IMF to follow.