Usual Suspects

In these troubled times for the global economy, it may be worth narrating a story about the mentality of Indian politicians.

When the Congress returned to power in the summer of 1991 after the Janata Dal interregnum, the cabinet of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was presented a note by the ministry of finance advocating dramatic reforms that included the deregulation of the economy. The note was greeted with predictable scepticism, if not outright hostility by the cabinet.

Looking for a way out of the logjam, Rao despatched a young aide to one of Indira Gandhi’s trusted confidants for advice. The hard-nosed veteran read the finance ministry note and then offered his suggestion. Wouldn’t it be more advisable, he asked, to preface the document with appropriate passages from Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi? It would, he suggested, definitely enhance the comfort level of the cabinet to know that the proposed measures were in conformity with the scriptures.

The wily Rao didn’t hesitate to accept the sage advice. A reworked cabinet note was circulated and this time, the opposition melted away, giving the prime minister the mandate to pursue liberalization as the highest stage of Nehru and Indira’s socialism.

This delightful story may well be true, partially true or plain apocryphal. What is remarkable, however, is not the revelation that the Congress party is made up of dinosaurs, but the extent to which orthodoxy takes hold of the political imagination to resist change. This is, of course, true of India but it is also a global phenomenon.

In her autobiography, The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher spelt out the insidious hold of the post-War consensus on the British political imagination: “By 1964 British society had entered a sick phase of liberal conformism passing as individual self-expression. Only progressive ideas and people were worthy of respect by an increasingly self-conscious and self-confident media class.” Thatcher may well have been talking of India.

Nominally, India may have travelled a long way from the days when inefficiency and sloth were regarded as economic virtues and when personal rates of taxation for the highest slab touched 97 per cent. What is significant, however, about the massive economic shifts that were first brought in by Manmohan Singh’s 1991 budget is the remarkable extent to which change has been ushered without fanfare and, more often than not, by stealth.

It required the 1991 balance of payments crisis and the emotional trauma of the physical mortgaging of some of India’s gold reserves to begin the assault on the licence-permit-quota raj. Likewise, it required the Western sanctions against India in the aftermath of the 1998 Pokhran-II blasts to lift many of the curbs on foreign capital and rid Atal Bihari Vajpayee of his party’s accumulated swadeshi baggage.

As 2011 draws to a close, India is at a similar crossroads. The economic downturn in the United States of America and the Eurozone crisis has left no economy untouched. Complemented by what is called the ‘governance deficit’, India’s economic indicators have moved southwards. The gross domestic product projections are down from nine per cent to seven per cent; the already-large fiscal deficit is expected to breach the budgeted five per cent level and touch more than six per cent of the GDP; inflation has been hovering around 10 per cent for nearly a year and shows little sign of coming down despite 13 interest rate hikes since March 2009; the sensex has lost 22 per cent since January and foreign direct investment inflows have virtually ceased after touching a record $29 billion in 2010; in the preceding quarter, the profitability of Indian companies fell by an average of 30 per cent; and the Indian rupee, now blessed with a distinctive symbol, has lost some 15 per cent of its value in barely three months, thereby making imports prohibitive and adding to the inflationary spiral.

Middle India’s overall comfort level with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rested on two beliefs: first, that he was a man of integrity and innate decency and, second, that he had the requisite skills to manage the economy. On both these counts, Singh’s reputation is in tatters. No one accuses the prime minister of being personally dishonest, but the sheer scale of the corruption charges before the courts have put question marks on his ability and willingness to tame his roguish colleagues. Worse still, there is complete consternation at the prime minister’s inability to ‘fix’ the economy. That he doesn’t possess the proverbial ‘magic wand’ is conceded by all reasonable Indians. What strikes them as odd is that the senses of urgency and purpose that should have accompanied the economic slide are missing. The government appears to have simply given up. Particularly disturbing is the extent to which a beleaguered political class seems ready to fall back on the ideological shibboleths that many imagined had been steadily discarded since 1991. The approach to the fiscal deficit is a classic example of a government that seems unconcerned.

There is a stalemate in the US over the failure of the White House and the Republican-controlled senate to agree on measures to reduce a trillion dollar deficit, and in both Britain and the Eurozone, the deficit is at the root of a political and diplomatic stand-off. Yet in India, fiscal consolidation has been deleted from the vocabulary of the ruling party and its allies. The hugely expensive and inefficient Centre-sponsored welfare schemes are not merely regarded as holy cows but there are moves to expand the net. So whimsical is the sop culture that last week the commerce ministry announced a Rs 3,844 crore ‘package’ for weavers in eastern Uttar Pradesh because Rahul Gandhi demanded it. No wonder Mamata Banerjee believes that handouts are her birthright too. In Europe, it is said that ‘austerity is the new normal’. In an economically fragile India, fiscal profligacy is the norm — the preferred Rahul alternative to beggary. India is living beyond its means but no one seems to care.

In most of the countries gripped by the downturn, the trend is towards removing as many obstacles to growth as possible. In Britain, for example, stringent planning norms have been relaxed to facilitate a growth in housing. In Italy, the new ‘technocrat’ prime minister has announced a series of measures that include fiscal prudence, welfare cuts and the dismantling of restrictive practices. In India on the other hand, there are moves to add a statutory premium on land acquisition for housing, industry and public utilities. Additionally, limited progress has been made in enlarging the scope of foreign investment in insurance and retail because of the government’s failure to secure agreement within the ruling coalition.

India, it would seem, is sleepwalking its way into an economic disaster zone. Yet, there are two remarkable features of this death march. First, there is no widespread realization that the troubles aren’t confined to inflation and price rise but affect the nerve centres of economic growth. Second, there is the presumption that statist intervention and a more rigid regulatory regime (that deters private sector corruption) is the way out.

Nehru, it must be said, did a remarkably good job in turning progressivism into common sense. Even two decades after liberalization transformed India and heralded far wider levels of prosperity, India has not yet turned its back on the belief structures of the bad old days. Economic reforms, it would seem, become meaningful only when accompanied by an intellectual revolution.

The Telegraph, November 25, 2011

Since clever one-liners are as much a part of a journalist’s stock-in-trade as hard information or penetrating insights, I have often described myself as a lapsed historian. This self-description has served two functions: first, to explain why the past invariably intrudes into my writings on the present and, second, to allay fears of being a crashing bore.

This may seem needlessly harsh on India’s historians — a community that is forever involved in public brawls over one thing or another. In most ‘free’ countries, by which I don’t include China and countries with a Ba’athist-inspired dispensation, historians are among the most exciting people to have as intellectual decorations. They tend to be witty, irreverent, erudite and, most important, quirky. A historian who can discuss corruption in India with a passing reference to Gibbon’s account of the ‘sale’ of the Roman Empire to Didius Julianus by the venal Praetorian Guard is the sort of person we’d love to fly with. In the old days, a savage book review by A.J.P. Taylor was an occasion that we all looked forward to.

Historians were very clever but they could also be rather nasty people, especially when bitching about fellow historians. I recall the casually devastating observation of the Cambridge historian, Eric Stokes, that someone must have thrust a copy of a Rajani Palme Dutt pamphlet in the hands of an ageing Sarvepalli Gopal. It was a not-very-subtle way of suggesting that Gopal’s biography of Jawaharlal Nehru was riddled with dogmatic certitudes and, perhaps, was characteristic of the university he inhabited in old age.

Even ideological convergence didn’t automatically promote conviviality. I particularly recall Eric Hobsbawm’s carping observation in Interesting Times that E.P. Thompson was “a man showered by the fairies at birth with all possible gifts but two. Nature had omitted to provide him with an in-built sub-editor and an in-built compass”.

Maybe it was Hobsbawm getting his own back on Thompson for his disavowal of the Communist Party after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the so-called ‘revolt of the intellectuals’. However, I detected a conflict of temperaments. Despite a commonality brought about by a shared vision of proletarian power, these were two different individuals. Hobsbawm was an austere, refined patrician, strangely reminiscent of the pre-war European man of letters. Thompson, by contrast, was emotional and excitable and very English. Hearing him declaim passionately about subjects as diverse as nuclear disarmament and the Luddites, he often reminded me of a radical vicar, always at odds with Lambeth Palace but yet accepted in the Church of England.

The sheer versatility of the tribe, the ability to garnish academic rigour with individual eccentricities, have added value to the public standing of historians. Because the study of history is, by its very nature, riddled with tentativeness, historians have helped embellish the past with insights of human behaviour. Just as no two histories can be the same, no two historians should be or even aspire to be the same. There is nothing more unprepossessing than histories written by a committee or disputes involving the past being resolved through a show of hands.

Ironically, both these are routine occurrences in India. “Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec,” was the only advice that Winston Churchill, then prime minister, proffered his education secretary, Rab Butler, during the passage of the Education Act of 1944. How to tell the story of Empire was for teachers, historians and society to ponder: it was not something any government could speak for the nation. Yet, in India, history writing is a preoccupation of the State and the successful historians are the ones best able to translate political priorities into a committee version of history.

Where the stories of the past are, ideally, replete with question marks of uncertainty and tentativeness, the history-speak of India is over-stuffed with certitudes, the ‘correct’ views. Sometime in the early 1990s, the Indian History Congress decided to settle the question of whether a temple predated the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya through a show of hands. The display of professional democracy, unfortunately, told us more of the historians of India than it did about a dispute that divided India emotionally.

All this circumnavigation is in aid of an anecdote. Some three months ago, I was hugely excited after reading Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson, a book I hoped many more people would buy and read. It so happened that I bumped into one of the pillars of India’s historical establishment at a dinner around that time. I couldn’t resist telling her about the book and about Ferguson’s earlier works. “That’s not history,” was the icy retort.

Ferguson, by the way, is a professor of history at Harvard and was also a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Yes, he does a lot of television but his scholarly credentials are very kosher.

Since it is rude to press a disagreement at a social occasion — I’ve had whisky thrown at my face for informing an earnest sociologist in 1996 that Uma Bharti was a personal friend — I left it that. However, interactions with students of history at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University resulted in two surprising discoveries. First, that Niall Ferguson was indeed shunned by the academic pundits, maybe because his books, like Heineken, reached parts that others don’t, and second, that it was just not done to blend the scholarly with the popular, a euphemism for the non-professional historian.

The envy part of the story is understandable but the rejection of the non-tenured historian is baffling. Earlier this year saw the publication of Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng, a Briton of Ghanian origin who, apart from having a doctorate in history from Cambridge, is also the Conservative member of parliament for Spelthorne in Surrey. Kwarteng also wears an old Etonian tie which makes him triply suspect.

Kwarteng’s thesis is compelling: “The British Empire was nothing more than a series of improvisations conducted by men who shared a common culture, but who had very different ideas about government and administration. There is very little unifying ideology in this imperial story. It was grand and colourful but it was highly opportunistic, dominated by individualism and pragmatism.”

Expressed in another way, Kwarteng has argued that there was no grand imperial project that led to half the world being coloured in red by 1918: the Empire resulted from a series of local decisions, some well-considered and others, such as the annexation of Burma, a consequence of impulsiveness.

In an environment of post- colonial angst, Kwarteng is certain to be regarded as another ‘revisionist’. This may not be an incorrect description if it is assumed that academic orthodoxies, like fashion, keep changing ever so often. But the more relevant point is that a revisionist challenge can only be mounted if the history establishment opens its doors and windows to let the outside air in. If historians choose to live in airtight compartments, they can wallow in their own correctness but with the associated risk of obsolescence and fossilization.

Centres of learning often have their origins in religious seminaries, what in India are called the ‘mutts’. A feature of this tradition is that knowledge is pursued for its own sake. But the self-enforced monastic insularity can also trigger hideous intellectual distortions.

At the heart of the kerfuffle over the inclusion and exclusion in the Delhi University history syllabus of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on multiple Ramayanas is the closed shop. India’s historians believe that to stroll outside their cloistered habitat involves the danger of falling off the edge of the world. No wonder they count for so little in the arguments over India.

The Telegraph, October 28, 2011