T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Politics and national security

LINE & LENGTH

Our history shows that bad governance is also a threat to national security.

A new national security advisor has just been appointed. But it would be surprising if he realises, like most other well-meaning Indians, where the threat to India's long-term security really comes from.

I say "long-term" advisedly because that is what the National Security Council is supposed to deal with, leaving the immediate threats to the Joint Intelligence Committee.

So here is something Mr M K Narayanan should be worrying about. In the last 1,500 years, no less, central governments in India have always failed because of the nature of Indian politics and never because of an invasion. Even the East India Company, which crawled into India, spread itself with the help of weaknesses in Indian politics.

The stories of the various kingdoms since the 12th century, and later the Mughal empire, are well-known. But thanks to the re-writing of history by Left historians, who have their own agenda, the helplessness of the central government, even as some provincial satrap gnawed away at its roots, is never told properly.

My own eye-opener came from the late Penderel Moon's two-volume history of the British empire in India. As a former ICS officer and a well-wisher of India on a par with C F Andrews, his book is free of any kind of taint or toxin.

It shows how Mir Jafar was only the final straw. And even he, if I may humbly suggest, would never have had the incentive to make a deal with the British if the earlier nawabs had not completely eroded the Emperor's authority.

If you look at it from this perspective, I would say that a very big long-term threat emanates from the UPA's willingness not just to tolerate but also cooperate with wayward parties.

Such parties and their leaders have been defying, with breathtaking impunity, the liberal, even if not the national, consensus on how India should be governed. And they have gone unpunished.

But, then, does the central government not have an even larger mandate to ensure that India is not weakened in the manner it is being weakened by the goings-on in, say, Bihar? After all, monkey see-monkey do, so how much longer before the same things start elsewhere too?

The short point is this: the UPA has entered into a contract with the entire country to rule in a decent and reasonable way, which the BJP did not do.

A state-level party's mandate cannot nullify or over-ride the essence of that larger contract. I have a stake, too, and it must be respected, never mind if the state leader withdraws support to the central government.

It would help if Mr Narayanan commissioned someone from within the civil service (I can tell him who) to write a briefing paper entitled "Provincial Actions and the Erosion of Central Authority (AD 500"�2005)".

He will find that whenever the Centre has failed to preserve the core ideas around which the empire was built, the results have been disastrous.

And even those who don't admire Indira Gandhi would say this for her: she understood this instinctively. Not all her dismissals of state governments were unjustified. Her daughter-in-law, who cannot possibly have the same sense of Indian history, is severely handicapped in this respect. There is nothing for the inner voice to delve into.

It therefore falls to the Prime Minister to educate his boss. And the task of alerting the Prime Minister of the dangers that lie ahead falls to Mr Narayanan. It is not for him to wonder about the future of the UPA government; he must think about India's future.

Some months ago many security experts in Delhi heard him speak at a conference organised by the IISS and the Delhi Study Group. He spoke for almost an hour on the threat from our neighbours. He was very convincing.

But, as a former head of the Intelligence Bureau (he headed it twice), he must also be aware of the threat from the politics of our country, which is increasingly dominated by all the wrong sorts of fellows.

If he commissions the paper, he will find three common strands across the eras: corruption, lawlessness, and, when the two were tolerated, the tendency of satraps to dictate terms to the central government. In short, the threat may well come from the way we are allowing ourselves to be governed. Bad governance is also a threat to national security.

Mr Narayanan could also ask for a study on the meaning of corruption as understood in India. Thanks to the British, it has acquired a particular meaning which includes what used to be called mamul or customary payments to public officials by the public. This, by the way, was the essence of Clive's self-defence when he was hauled up by the British parliament.

He said he was only taking what was customarily and willingly given, so why make a fuss? Indeed, the East India's Company's problem was not with what Clive took, but what it was cheated of when the other employees took what belonged to it.

Even in the Mughal empire, the right to mamul never meant the right to cheat the exchequer by not collecting the taxes in full. What was Caesar's was always rendered unto him. This has stopped happening in India.

The answer is not higher taxes or eliminating exemptions or the Laffer Curve. Those are band-aids. The answer is the toughest possible action against taxmen who cheat the exchequer while enriching themselves. As a former finance minister, the Prime Minister knows what goes on.

He appears to admire China, but in China, though the local officials collect their mamul, there are strong dis-incentives to cheat the local or provincial or central governments. The reason: there is no Article 311 and therefore no job protection. On the other hand, if you cheat the government, you run huge risks.

In India, cheating the government, especially by its own employees, is a completely risk-free enterprise. It also yields enormous returns.

As for lawlessness, which is not merely the thriving of crime but the much larger defiance by sub-national power centres, there can be no better description than the one in Percival Spear's Twilight of the Mughals.

The key message in his book is that the decay was slow and barely imperceptible and it was therefore possible to pretend nothing was wrong. Then Nadir Shah came. I have two copies of the book and would be happy to lend Mr Narayanan one.

Postscript: While Europe is busy celebrating a non-anniversary, 60 years of the liberation of Auschwitz, we have typically forgotten a diamond jubilee. In the famous "Poorna Swaraj" session at Lahore in December 1929, the Indian National Congress declared January 26, 1930, to be the first Independence Day.