A system that is top heavy, and for which ordinary people don't matter, eventually loses out, says Meghnad Desai
The tragedy of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk is not that the hundred plus sailors died. That is bad enough. But the system let them die. It is the old story of totalitarian cultures. They are secretive. Officials never admit to making mistakes, never apologise. And the worst is that in the desire to control everything they think that people just get in the way. Thus people are expendable; the system is everything. For me the real sign was that Vladimir Putin could not be even bothered to come to Moscow for the crisis. I agree that his going to Murmansk would not have helped. But no leader of a democratic country would survive being away on a holiday, within reachable distance and fail to show concern. At times like these the political head acquires symbolic importance; he has to tend a grieving nation. Bill Clinton did this after the Oklahoma bombing, Tony Blair after the death of Princess Diana. Putin apologised too late and too coldly. You could see that he did not really mean it. The old system has not died. Stalinism lives; people do not matter. When I was growing up during the fifties in Bombay, we were brought up to admire the Soviet Union as it then was. Stalinism was not a dirty word. India, despite being a democracy, had fallen head over heels in love with a totalitarian dictatorship. Of course, we all knew that the real villain was the West and Imperialism, that the Soviet Union was real democracy and real communism. Artists and intellectuals and political leaders supported the Soviet Union. Some of them were really sincere. There was a strong surge of sympathy for the poor and the exploited. There was also a time long past by then when communism was a friend of the poor. But by the fifties it had become a sham and even in an open society that India was, we were fed lies. India's fascination with Russia continues. Some of it may be for geopolitical rather than ideological reasons. But the habits of thought encouraged in those halcyon days of early Nehruism die hard. There is still the same desire for official control for ignoring and stifling initiatives which come from outside the political system. The lessons of 1991 and the disastrous course of the economy before then have not been learnt. Ten years later, the Reserve Bank still can't let the rupee find its own level and messes up the lives of exporters with silly rules about dollar receipts. This fails to stabilise the rupee and inconveniences the people who are trying to move India ahead. I would have thought that in this day and age the RBI would do the stabilisation if it was at all desirable (which I doubt) by going with the grain of the market and offering the dollar earners incentives to bring the dollars back. Thus, for example, it could issue zero coupon dollar bonds. Anyone worried about the depreciation of the rupee and therefore holding the dollars abroad could be reassured that they would get the same dollar amount back if they wanted when the bonds matured. These bonds could be traded and that would indicate the view that markets take of the likely future depreciation. Such a new instrument would make sense. But the old dirigiste habits die hard so we will have a mess instead. The reasons for the slide are the usual ones. The economy is growing well but the fiscal laxity of the government shows no sign of being addressed. The government is half-hearted in its economic reformism. It starts to do good things as with insurance and telecom. But at the first whiff of opposition, often from within the coalition (such as from "progressive, cyber" protectionist Chandrababu Naidu), it withdraws and concedes defeat. Its conduct of privatisation or disinvestment to give it the hypocritical name has been flawed. Now with a change of ministers it will be slower still. The death of P R Kumaramangalam is a tragedy for more than the obvious reasons. It exposes the hauteur of the medical profession which also believes in never admitting error. But it also deprives India of a young and powerful advocate of change. Like the death of Rajesh Pilot, it is a loss of another person from a generation that should have come to power long ago. There also goes the hope of tackling the electricity sector with any speed. The state electricity boards are engaged in robbing the state i.e., the poorer people who bear the brunt of taxes in the socialist republic of India. They should be punished not pandered to. But what can you expect from a polity that surrenders to Veerappan and fails to bring the perpetrators of the 1993 Bombay riots to book. By contrast, the IT industry of Bangalore is playing host to the Japanese, whose nation was the advance guard in Asia when it came to computer technology. Japan is now a busted flush because the old policy of letting the MITI bureaucrats run everything has failed, and in the meantime the cronyism of the political system with the banks has caused a meltdown. Here again is a system that shows contempt for the ordinary people. The politicians of the Liberal Democratic Party, the bureaucrats and the top commercial and industrial cartel bosses have carved up the country in their own interests. It worked for a while. Even the USSR did after all. But eventually a system that is top heavy loses out. As the cliché goes, people are the real wealth of a nation. All the people, not just the top dogs, not just the new Brahmins. They have initiatives which should be encouraged. The forces that stifle them, the control freaks in the public sector should be removed. India has incredible human resources. It only needs a real culture of democracy which will harness those resources and not thwart them.