<b>Rahul Jacob:</b> Good Governance Day?

Even by the dysfunctional standards of India's politics, the past few weeks have been depressing. But, set aside that the country's finance minister is suing Delhi's chief minister for defamation and that the winter session of Parliament, like the session before it, ended yesterday having accomplished little - except for shouting and the energetic charging towards the speaker's podium that is used as a form of aerobics since exercising outdoors in New Delhi is harmful to one's health.

Instead, consider these three news items from the past few weeks.

• On December 1, city officials in Chennai took the extreme step of releasing waters from the city reservoir into the Adyar river because the reservoir was at risk of overflowing - with a warning of a few sentences to the media just an hour before. Residents were caught unaware; lives were lost and homes flooded. The city's catalogue of urban planning missteps includes placing the airport's second runway in the path of the Adyar and allowing housing and commercial developments where there used to be lakes, a pattern repeated in every major metropolis in the country.
   
• Just weeks after the prime minister's assurances to a UK-India business council meeting that retrospective taxation was "a thing of the past," Cairn Energy has appealed to the PM that the issue of its Rs 10,427 crore retrospective tax dispute be resolved. The dispute, about a tax demand that arrived years after a company reorganisation, has dragged on since January 2014, even as the company's officials have repeatedly met with the sympathetic finance minister and senior bureaucrats. The high-falutin' rhetoric of reform from this government presumably delayed the company's decision to seek arbitration. The government then took six months to announce an arbitrator. Read Cairn UK Holdings' restrained letter to the Kafkaesque sounding "Secretariat of Dispute Resolution Panel" and one can't help feel that an early believer in India's liberalisation process and New Exploration Licensing Policy since the mid-1990s, and one which has contributed towards making India less dependent on energy imports, is being subjected to death by a thousand cuts.
   
• Last week, the Hollywood star Orlando Bloom's electronic visa was found to have, what I understand from having spoken to a government official, "technical deficiencies." As a result, he was summarily deported at 3 am. One explanation from the government is that the type on the print-out of Mr Bloom's visa approval was "faded"; another that the actor had travelled without a confirmation that the visa had been approved. Mr Bloom, not unreasonably, requested that instead of being deported immediately, he be detained at Delhi airport till 10 am so as to allow his hosts to resolve the situation. Instead, he was shouted at by immigration officials and British Airways was told that their flight returning to London would not take off unless Mr Bloom was on it. It required the energetic intervention of Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj for a visa to be arranged for the Lord of the Rings star after he was deported to London. Little wonder that our tourist arrivals of 7.7 million (mostly ethnic Indians on foreign passports, I would wager) are dwarfed by those of Malaysia with 27 million.

In each of these instances, one sees not the Incredible India of tourism ads, but Intransigent Indicus, an autoimmune affliction of national bureaucratic incompetence and pigheadedness. "My experience here has led me to the conclusion that (the) present machinery is to some extent archaic, and is certainly not conducive to rapid and efficient handling of matters. There is a great deal of lack of coordination and red tape and unnecessary noting." This passage is not taken from a letter from Simon Thomson, chief executive officer of Cairns. Nor is it a travelogue written by the articulate and engaging Mr Bloom, whose mother was born in Calcutta when his grandfather worked as a doctor there. It is, in fact, a letter from Jawaharlal Nehru to the country's chief ministers, dated May 5, 1948. It continues, "We are rather apt to grow self-complacent and imagine that all is well in this best of all possible worlds."

Common sense would suggest that if this government really wanted to make a break with what the prime minister and finance minister have repeatedly derided as the "tax terrorism" of the previous government, they would have resolved the Cairn issue in a few weeks by herding the bureaucrats into a room and ordering them to do so. How much effort would it have taken for the gratuitously obnoxious immigration official and the supervisor who deported Mr Bloom to Google him? There are easily accessible pictures of the actor's films and visits as a UNICEF Goodwill ambassador to Liberia and to refugee camps in Macedonia and Serbia for Syrians and others.

But, for India's bureaucracy, doing what is logical and right is almost completely beside the point. Governance in India remains stuck in a realm of referring to precedent and the exercise of arbitrary power. In a column this week, the Financial Times' Victor Mallet reports that a young bureaucrat confessed that it had taken 18 months to "reach a decision on whether to provide a cheap mug for toilet ablutions in second class sleeper carriages... All this at a time when the ministry wants to spend $137 bn in the next five years on upgrading the rail network." It is almost obligatory, as the FT did, to compare our bureaucrats to Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister, but that merely highlights that the makers of the TV serial were not imaginative enough.

As the writer Jan Morris reported in the 1970s after picking up a tourist brochure: "'This map,' says one Delhi tourist publication severely, 'is published for tourists as a master guide and not as legal tender' and there, in its mixture of the interfering, the pedantic, the unnecessary and the absurd speaks the true voice of Indian officialdom."

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Twitter: @RahulJJacob