Soon after Narendra Modi became prime minister, like many others I also offered him some gratuitous advice. Sirjee, I wrote in this paper, if you want to get re-elected in 2019 you must curb two things: inflation and the babus because both make everyone's life miserable.
Controlling inflation was easy. He had inherited Raghuram Rajan at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and that was enough. Mr Rajan has done an admirable job of bringing it down from over 13 per cent in 2014 to less than seven per cent now.
He has done so with the only means at his disposal, the interest rate, which he kept high. Any other governor, even Subramnian Swamy, would have done the same.
It's called demand management while you wait for the government to embark on supply management. It is, if you will, a beta blocker while the surgeon gives you a date for a multiple bypass in 2018, if then.
But if inflation control was left to the RBI, babu control was directly up to the prime minister. And whereas Mr Rajan succeeded marvellously, the PM has failed, oh, spectacularly.
Poor man, he thinks he is the boss. Alas, he is not. This is because babudom, as an institution, still calls all the shots.
Mr Modi - note that I am not saying the government - makes policy; then Parliament, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi permitting, make the laws to give effect to those policies.
But it is babudom which makes the rules to implement these policies and laws. And there lies the rub.
A culture thing
When my father passed away several years ago, my brother and I had to perform the 13-day obsequies. Being younger, I had only observer status. So I observed what the vadyar (pandit or purohit) was making my brother do. As a bureaucrat he was getting a taste of arbitrariness.
He had to stand up, sit down, wear the darbham - a grass ring worn on the fingers during all religious ceremonies - take it off, sprinkle ghee on the rice and water on the til, add ghee to the fire, and of course, put Rs 100 on the platter. This last was almost metronomic.
I tried to see if I could guess what was coming next but it was all highly stochastic, which means "having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analysed statistically but may not be predicted precisely."
It all seemed a bit over the top to me, so on the second evening I took out my father's volumes of the Dharamashastras to see what the vadyar was up to. And it was then that I had my epiphany.
If the Dharamashastras laid down policy, it was the vadyars, like the babus of today, who made the rules which were opaque, random, self-serving and designed to tax the yajaman (client or citizen). And, by God, you could not ask questions without attracting severe ire.
But what struck me most forcefully was the resigned acceptance by everyone that this is how it was, better to bear it and get your work done than to question it.
It brought to mind the old Confucian saying about enjoying it.
'For us, by us and of us'
It would be futile to give examples of how the bureaucracy operates on the 'for us, by us and of us' principle. Like countless others, I too had thought Mr Modi the Magnificent would come down heavily on it.
Like everyone else I was mistaken. Mr Modi has done nothing to reduce the waywardness of the bureaucracy. It continues to grind us into the dust.
It cannot be that Mr Modi doesn't know this. But does he care? Or is he so worried about not annoying it that he prefers to divide the electorate instead of getting the bureaucracy to serve it?
Mr Modi thinks digitisation will tame the bureaucracy. But as Swaminthan Aiyar wrote in 1990 - the State Bank of India chairman had solemnly pronounced that India didn't need ATMs - haha, hahahahaha!
Computers, Sirjee, can implement the rules but who makes the rules for what needs to be done online? If every ministry makes its own rules, which do not take into account the rules made by the other ministries, what does the citizen do when he is caught in the crossfire?
Why, to give just one small example, are the rules for obtaining a PIO/OCI card in the US different and more difficult, from what they are in other parts of the world? Inconsistency of this sort is pervasive. Everyone has experienced it.
So here, after two disappointing years, is some more gratuitous advice for Mr Modi: conquer the enemy within if you want to lose no more than a 100 seats in 2019.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
