| 18 May 2004 | Tuesday | 27 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
What brought the BJP down
Two sides of a coin
In my last article, I had identified four areas that needed government's immediate attention to ensure that the rates of economic growth achieved over the last two years are sustained - and, if possible - increased well into the future.
I suggested that one way of accomplishing this would be to draw a series of plans to increase the amount of national income that gets saved, improve in significant ways the quality of human resource, rapidly develop the country's physical infrastructure, and improve upon the quality of governance.
Last week I touched upon the first two of these contributors to sustained growth. Today I will take up the other two. In discussing the need for developing physical infrastructure we should perhaps go back to the British era - the period of hundred or so years during which Britain governed Indo-Pakistan subcontinent.
Indian nationalists while they were campaigning for independence from British rule used to argue that all colonial powers were essentially predators. Britain, they claimed, was no exception. It adopted policies and established programmes that transferred enormous amounts of resources from India to Britain.
The demise of the small scale Indian textile industry was usually held out as an example of how Britain had exploited the subcontinent. It turned India from a significant producer and exporter of textiles to one that became a net importer.
Most of India's textile imports came from the mills established in Lancashire. India exported raw cotton to these mills; the mills spun cotton into yarn, wove the yarn into fabrics, and exported the fabrics back to India. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost in India while the mill towns in Britain prospered.
Some revisionist modern-day historians have begun to argue that Britain's colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent did more good than harm. If the costs and benefits to India of rule by Britain are measured in a dispassionate way, the scale tilts in favour of benefits they claim.
The most vigorous exponent of this point of view is the British historian Niall Ferguson, the author of a highly influential book titled "Empire". I have provided this long preamble to suggest that if we draw up a balance sheet for the rule by the British over the areas that make up today's Pakistan, benefits will far outweigh the costs.
This may be one reason why the leaders of Punjab, the North West Frontier Province and Sindh were not active participants in the Indian independence movement.
They were also, at best, lukewarm supporters of the "idea of Pakistan." They supported Britain's rule over India long after it was being challenged elsewhere, primarily for the reason that British gave a great deal of attention to these provinces. London was interested in this part of its Indian empire for three reasons.
First, it wanted to recruit soldiers from this area for their army. They had convinced the people of these provinces that they belonged to what the British had begun to call the "martial races."
Volunteers from these martial races were needed to protect Britain's Indian empire from encroachment by other imperial powers. London was already engaged in the "Great Game" to keep Imperial Russia from controlling the several Muslim kingdoms of Central Asia.
Many influential British policymakers were convinced that this was a necessary game to play in order to keep the Russians from advancing towards India, the "jewel" in the British Crown.
Second, the British administration in India became very concerned as the country's capacity to produce food was overtaken by the increase in its population. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a number of provinces of British India were rocked by famines that took a heavy human toll.
The increase in population was itself a consequence of the rule over India by Britain. "Pax Britannia" had replaced wars and insecurity that had been the norm in India for more than a thousand years. Freed from these concerns, people could turn their attention towards increasing the size of their families.
Looking for a strategy to deal with the growing food problem, the British began to focus their attention on bringing under cultivation the vast empty tracts of land in Punjab and Sindh.
There was plenty of water available in the Indus River system to irrigate this empty space. The British administrations in Punjab and Sindh went to work to lay the foundations of what was to become one of the largest irrigation systems in the world.
A series of barrages were constructed to empound enough water in the six rivers of the region - the Indus and its five large tributaries - to feed the feeder canals that began to spread out over the area.
Generous offers of land grants were made to induce people who knew agriculture to settle in the "colonies" that sprung up all over the region. Within a few decades Punjab and Sindh had become the granaries of British India.
Third, in order to provide troops for the Great Game and to supply surplus food grains from Punjab and Sindh to the rest of India, the British built a network of roads and railways. There were few areas in Sindh, Punjab and the Frontier Province that this communication network did not reach.
In sum, if we look only at what the British government gave to this part of their Indian empire, it is not too difficult to agree with the argument advanced by Ferguson. Having inherited this impressive irrigation and communication network, Pakistan began to "decapitalize" it.
The various administrations that were in office in the half century between 1947 and 1999 did little to save this system from deterioration, let alone augment it. In fact, this was one reason why with a relatively low level of investment Pakistan was able to produce relatively high rates of GDP growth in the 1960s.
It did not have to invest large amounts of resources in building the physical infrastructure that was required. The British had left one behind.
The only significant investment made in the irrigation system was done in the context of the Indus Basin Replacement Works. As the programme's name suggests, these works did not add much to the system. Their primary purpose was to replace the water that was allocated to India.
The network of communications was similarly neglected. In the fifty year period between 1947 and 1997, Pakistan added only a couple of hundred kilometres of new railway track to the vast network left behind by the British.
The road building record was better but the major investment in this period was the construction of the Lahore-Islamabad motorway that remains underused half a dozen years after it was opened to traffic.
Pakistan did not invest much in power and telecommunications, either. The country was briefly surplus in electric power after a score of generation units were built in the 1990s under the independent power producers programme.
The programme was expensive in the sense it obliged WAPDA to purchase power from the private producers at a price higher than its average cost of production. This meant that WAPDA ended up subsidizing the independent generators, weakening its own financial situation.
Although Pakistan had invested a significant amount of public money in developing the telecommunication network, it was done in a haphazard way. The country was also slow to reform the Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation which performed inefficiently, not unlike most public sector enterprises.
If Pakistan is to take advantage of the benefits that are available to populous countries with good knowledge of English, it will have to improve the telecommunications network and power supply. Both are critical inputs into the building of a knowledge based economy.
Pakistan will have to build fast the infrastructure it needs to support a growing economy. It also needs to repair equally fast the infrastructure that already exists. The latter - the work of repair - needs to be undertaken in particular to restore the efficiency of the large irrigation network.
To do all this will need a well thought out action plan that will carefully examine the demands of a growing economy and then find resources for funding it. It is fortunate for Pakistan that the World Bank has decided to concentrate once again on infrastructure development as a high priority at the time Pakistan's resource needs for investment in this area are very large.
Some of what we have said about the rich inheritance from the British in terms of physical infrastructure also applies to matters concerning governance. At the time of independence, Pakistan had a functioning bureaucratic system, a legal system that worked reasonably well, an administrative system that maintained law and order with a fair amount of efficiency in most parts of the country, and a system of local government that looked after the needs of most of the population.
Most of these institutions were allowed to wither away or were deliberately abolished by a series of administrations that governed Pakistan over the last half century. Little new was created in their place.
Poor quality of governance was one painful consequence of this neglect of institutions. It is not surprising that in the 1990s Pakistan came to be identified as one of the most corrupt places on earth.
The rebuilding of the instruments of governance is needed since good governance is an important determinant of economic growth. The Musharraf government has taken two important steps in this area.
It has established - or, more accurately, reconfigured - a system of accountability that applies to all segments of the society. It has also introduced a far-reaching change in the system of local government that has transferred a significant amount of authority to elected people at the local level.
The Nazims, elected by the people, are much closer to the citizenry than any other official chosen by the people with a wide array of authority ever was in the country's history.
While these are moves in the right direction, there are some problems with both initiatives. These need to be corrected. The law that governs the accountability system does not provide the types of safeguards all citizens need when they are deemed to have done some wrong.
The basic tenet of all well functioning legal systems is that the accused are treated as innocent unless proven to be guilty. The current accountability law makes the opposite assumption.
Those placed in charge of the system of accountability must also be accountable, preferably to the legislature in which, ultimately, all power must rest. In so far as the Nazim-based system of local government is concerned, it has run into some teething problems.
Elected members of the provincial and national legislatures resent the power wielded by the local elected officials. That is wrong and unfortunate. Those who represent people in the legislative assemblies are not supposed to exercise executive authority. The Nazims do.
During the period of transition from a system of administration in which the office of the Deputy Commissioner also controlled the magistracy and the police force, it was clear where the responsibility for maintaining law and order actually resided. Under the new system, there is some confusion as to who is responsible in this area.
In conclusion, it would be fair to assert that the Musharraf government has some distance to go before it can be sure that it has placed the economy on the trajectory of high growth.
It has introduced a number of important structural reforms that would ensure that the revival of the economy is not based on the largess of a few foreign friends. It must now introduce some structural reforms not seriously addressed by any of the past administrations.
What brought the BJP down
Two facts stand out in an extraordinary Indian election. There was a disconnect between the elite and the bulk of voters. Second, the plurality of the electorate imposed its own dynamics over the high-tech campaign of the ruling party.
The surprise in the defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance stemmed from the inability of politicians and analysts alike to decipher these phenomena.
In essence, India was not shining for too many voters for the BJP's comfort. Outside the high-tech capitals and corporate boardrooms, the voters' concerns were different. They concerned employment, farm prices and such seemingly mundane issues as of power, water and the price of necessities.
Andhra Pradesh's Chandrababu Naidu, for instance, failed to pick up the signal that while he was being feted by Bill Gates and others as the computer guru, scores of farmers were committing suicide in his bailiwick in sheer desperation.
The other concern the BJP belatedly sought to address by wooing Muslims and although it acquired some high-profile Muslims and the endorsement of some clerics, this crucial constituency remained unconvinced about the party's credentials.
The BJP's theme of friendship with Pakistan was welcomed, not merely by Muslims but large sections of people belonging to Hindu and other faiths. A sense of anticipation was heightened by the highly successful and often nail-biting cricket series.
While the development plank of the BJP rang a bell with voters, there was not much to show for it. The poor voter could not relate to grand infrastructural schemes while the connecting roads to his village were neglected. And in the end, the India Shining theme proved counter-productive because there were many dark corners in the country.
In a sense, the BJP made only half a change in its outlook and there remained the suspicion that even this change was more tactical than substantive. The BJP can also be faulted for overdoing the foreign origin theme of Sonia Gandhi.
Pramod Mahajan, the main party strategist, even suggested at one point that Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi were ineligible for high office because their mother was foreign-born - a more racist line of reasoning is hard to envisage.
It is true that large sections of the middle class were inimical to seeing Sonia in the prime minister's chair because of her foreign birth. But in her indefatigable crisscrossing of the country during the staggered election campaign, she proved she could connect with the people.
Unlike the middle class, the peasant and the poor had no prejudice against her because of her provenance. In the end, she picked up sympathy votes from even sections of the middle class because all the vitriol poured on her cast her in the role of the victim who must be protected.
No one, including perhaps the Congress, expected the party to emerge as the single largest. Several factors were responsible for the surprising outcome. The Congress, specifically Mrs Gandhi, gave up the party's traditional high and mighty attitude to woo regional and small formations, even swallowing the humiliation of receiving only four Lok Sabha seats in Laloo Prasad Yadav's Bihar.
She sought the help of both the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh and Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party in the key state of Uttar Pradesh, only to be rebuffed.
Perhaps the most crucial decision was to swallow the Tamil Nadu DMK's previous approach towards the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka linked to Rajiv Gandhi's assassination to team up with it. The Congress was handsomely rewarded. Similarly in neighbouring Andhra, the alliance with the Telengana entity paid rich dividends.
While the process of coalition-building will take a little time to gel, with the communists emerging as the most important ally, most attention is focused on the impact of the new government on the country's economic and foreign policies.
The Bombay stock market has already registered its nervousness. While there will be changes in the pace and scope of disinvestment, the reform process should continue after a few hiccups.
Past coalition governments have ruled with minimum programmes and a new or revised version will, in all likelihood, do duty for the emerging dispensation. Given India's salience in information technology, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, no government can ignore these areas or hobble them.
There is understandably much interest in the foreign policy implications of the change in government. In view of Atal Behari Vajpayee's high-profile approaches to Pakistan, capped with the landmark Islamabad summit last January, the obvious question is whether a change of guard will make a difference.
Perceptions are often as important as substance and there is a sense of unease in Pakistan over the setback the nascent peace process might suffer with Vajpayee's departure.
It is true that President Pervez Musharraf and Vajpayee had been able to build a rhythm - if not some trust - in the prelude to further talks. Besides, there is no gainsaying the fact that as the leader of a reputed hard-line party in relation to Pakistan, Vajpayee would have been in a better position to sell a compromise deal to the Indian public.
That said, the substance of Indian policy towards Pakistan will remain unchanged. Vajpayee's approach to Pakistan, in particular his "hand of friendship" offer, has the approval of the Indian elite cutting across party lines. There are hotheads and extremists on both sides and they can be expected to make noises.
Nor is there the prospect of any dramatic change in the important Indo-US relationship. The new government will probably not repeat the extravagant effusiveness of Jaswant Singh in welcoming the American missile defence shield proposal, but New Delhi will remain interested in furthering the Indo-US strategic relationship.
Even on the vexed question of the American role in Iraq, India's stance will not change much, except at the margins and in rhetoric. There is, in a measure, greater sympathy in the new dispensation for the plight of Palestinians, but the military component in the Indo-Israeli relationship is too important to be sacrificed.
The western world has greeted the change in Congress fortunes as the return of the Gandhis. More significant, however, is the longer term impact of the revival of the grand old party of India's independence.
It is ironical that L.K. Advani spoke on one occasion in the election campaign of his regret were the Congress to disappear. Sonia Gandhi has shown that such pessimism was at best premature.
The Congress is alive and kicking in its new avatar, as the anchor of coalitions at the national and state levels. Of course, the new member of parliament from Amethi, Rahul Gandhi, is ready to pick up the baton.
Two sides of a coin
There was a photograph in a newspaper last week of a plainclothes policeman who had a PML-N activist in a stranglehold that is par for the course in the professional wrestling we see on television. The difference was that this was for real and not staged.
If truth to be told, I was not shocked by it. We have come to accept brutality and it goes with the territory. I don't think we make any serious attempt to deny that our law-enforcing agencies can get "physical" and that we practise torture as a matter of routine.
This, willy nilly, would be true of every country in the world in varying degrees. This is because, at the level of primary instincts, homo sapiens have not evolved and our responses are still the same as those of the cave man.
By way of mitigation we do not proclaim from some Olympus that we are imbued with special and unique values and blessed with a way of life constructed to divine specifications.
Nor have we arrogated to ourselves the role of moral leadership, healing all wounds and wiping every tear from every eye or claimed an exclusive ownership to the fountain of "liberty" and "freedom."
In the treatment of Iraqi prisoners, the United States is being judged by its own-trumpeted system of values and it has failed by those standards. To say that Saddam Hussain was guilty of worse crimes provides no justification. He was not nominated by some mystic force to be the agent of good against the forces of evil.
There is not the same worldwide horror at prisoner abuse by the British though there should be given that Tony Blair displays a moral arrogance and more than it is good for him, there is something of the white man's burden when he talks of the British army helping the Iraqi people, of Rudyard Kipling's "Go, bind your sons to exile/To serve your captives' need."
Britain was a colonial power and behind almost all the great international crimes of the past two centuries, there was a contribution, some hand in the events, some harlotry.
Britain's reasons for going to war in Iraq were based on a falsehood but who the hell cares now whether Saddam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction? Iraq has unravelled. Has Tony Blair any idea of what he has been an accessory to? What has been wrought in the name of liberation? Hundreds of thousands of Britishers, of all description, had taken to the streets in massive anti-war demonstrations. Why did he remain deaf to these voices of sanity?
What is happening in Iraq goes beyond prisoner abuse. To try to palm it off as an aberration or the work of a few "rotten apples" just does not wash. Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and prisons in the United States and Britain where suspects are detained with no recourse to due process and without any charges filed against them reveals a mindset.
Terrorists would be hunted down, as if they were animals, but no one was prepared to identify or define terrorism and people were picked up at random and spirited away to hell-holes.
Not a few, not "rotten apples" but men, women and children (yes! children) who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. No one made certain that they were not persecuting the wrong people. Some 300 prisoners of Abu Ghraib have been set free, just like that.
They had been detained for several months and held in captivity. They had committed no crime. Their release was not an act of justice but damage control. The release coincided with the visit of Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad so that he could take the credit for this largesse and his badly stained image could be cleaned up.
Over and over it is being protested in pious tones that the shameful humiliation of prisoners was carried out by just a few, a mere handful. There is mention of the high standards of the military and in its own typical, sanctimonious and self-congratulatory way it is being claimed that these standards are higher than those of the military of other countries.
All the more reason to determine without further delay how up the command did these order come from and who, besides the "rotten apples" knew what was going on at Abu Ghraib prison.
Seymour Hersh, the award-winning journalist, has charged in an investigative report in The New Yorker that Rumsfeld had approved "a highly secret operation" last year which "encouraged physical coercion and the sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.
"The very fact that interrogations methods have been revised is prima facie evidence that the techniques adopted at Abu Ghraib had some sort of official sanction, if not blessing.
War is hell. It is also a great leveller and what is bred in the bones comes out in the flesh. One starts by demonizing the enemy and then one becomes like one's enemy. "I was only carrying out orders."
We have heard this before, Graveyards are full of people who are there because someone was carrying out orders. Heads or tails, good and evil are two sides of a coin. No one knows which side will come up when the coin is tossed.