I will shoot the next person who says Jokepal

The day Lalu Prasad Yadav is the voice of reason is the day democracy needs to take a long shower.

On Thursday, in his inimitable style, Lalu asked Parliament not to rush ahead with passing the Lokpal Bill, saying that the country cannot be ruled by a bureaucrat, a former police officer, two lawyers and a social activist. He called for reasoned debate and for the views of every member of India's Parliament to be taken into account. This radical position caused the nation's media to bestow upon him the honour of newsmaker of the day, with interviews and shouting matches (‘moderated’, of course, by news media's resident backpfeifengesicht, Arnab Goswami) on his and other speeches in the Lok Sabha. I am willing to wager my moustache that at least one major newspaper on Friday will contain a list of zingers that “left Parliament in splits.”

The problem, however, was that each of these mentions did not care so much for the fact that a veteran MP asked for greater debate on a marquee legislation that is currently scheduled to be passed by both houses in 48 hours, but that he was in favour of reservations for minorities – minorities, mind you, not Muslims – or that he was scared of a Lokpal or that he had said bad things about Annaji and Annaji would campaign against him in future elections. People called him irrelevant and non-serious and a buffoon, drinking the Kool-Aid (or the RSS equivalent, Gau-Mutra) of meritocracy and sab-neta-chor-hain that Team Anna and whoever is riding that bandwagon this week are feeding them.

At the centre of the media’s – and by extension, the people’s – ire was the fact that Lalu is pissed at the fact that the Lokpal will not have a quota within a quota for backward minorities, despite the fact that other bodies like the Supreme Court and the Election Commission have no reservations (with, of course, the condescending mentions of SY Quraishi and JM Lyngdoh, who overcame their racial handicaps and St Stephen’s educations to become perfectly good chief election commissioners).

Amazingly, the anger – and there was considerable – at the R-Word coming anywhere close to the hallowed office of Lokpal was matched if not exceeded by the fact that it was coming in the way of smooth passage of the bill. Charges were made that the whole thing was just a stunt before the UP elections, which is probably true, but that is another matter. The very fact that such a thing could be even mentioned, let alone debated, was alternately called sacrilege or Machiavellian or plain ol’ dumb.

The fact remains, however, that the issue is worth at least some debate. All parties have agreed to reservations for backward classes in the Lokpal, and Muslims in particular have some legitimate concerns about Dalit converts not getting the same affirmative action they would have enjoyed had they stayed Hindus. It's a murky, complicated issue that is being debated at various fora. The Lokpal Bill, though not central to this debate, is by no means beyond the bounds of that debate. It is a quota within an existing quota, after all. In fact, I would be intrigued to watch Parliament debate the very existence of a quota in the Lokpal. My point is that there are a gazillion issues to be considered before passing the Lokpal, and two days of debate is not nearly enough time to do so. And railroading this bill through Parliament is not going to do anybody any favours. Pranab Mukherjee says that this bill has been discussed over most of the year, and thus MPs are in a good enough position to vote on it. But the special sitting of Parliament next week – Kerala and north-eastern MPs be damned – is going to be the first time this version of the bill is going to be debated in Parliament.

Then again, why this hurry? Because otherwise Annaji will protest. But Annaji is going to protest anyway, as long as he doesn’t get his bill. It makes sense to actually talk this out in Parliament, work out a bill that is at least what all of Parliament wants. You know, so that you can actually back up all that rhetoric about the supremacy of Parliament. More than just a photo-op of Parliament working while Anna protests, robust debate on the current draft should yield a number of amendments that would address many concerns and – hopefully – significantly improve the bill. History has shown that Parliament can be surprisingly coherent when it wants to. Next week, it has its entire raison d’être on the line: if Parliament succumbs to the stereotype perpetuated by Team Anna and discards nuanced debate for grandstanding and cynical ploys, not only will the reputation of the legislature be irreparably tarnished, but its very existence will be that much harder to justify. No pressure.

Maybe one of Lalu’s suggestions should be taken just this once: let all the parties release their members from their whips and let them vote according to their conscience.

Nothingness as policy in a hungry nation

(One of my favourite things in the internship at Tehelka was being asked to review books on a regular basis. Thanks to the quality of books published in the summer of 2011, this allowed me, a lowly college student, to rip into famous authors and their latest offerings. One book that escaped my wrath was Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, a remarkable book on poverty that promises to change the way we look at development. On the penultimate day of my internship, I attended a session with the two authors and two of my personal favourite articulators of public policy: Nandan Nilekani and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. The following is a piece I wrote in the aftermath of such awesomeness.)

On being asked for three policies that could help India tackle poverty, MIT economist Abhijit Banerjee, co-author with Esther Duflo of the seminal book on development Poor Economics, had a perplexing answer. “I have only one suggestion: don’t do anything,” he said. We do not know enough about the methods, he said, adding that they could do more harm than good. “We have a moral responsibility to deliver, but not to deliver a lie.”

Banerjee and Duflo have long advocated the use of empirical evidence before adopting anti-poverty measures, most of which are prescribed by the West for the entire developing world and might not be applicable in India. These ‘silver bullets’, as Nandan Nilekani calls them, are often gross simplifications of complex economic theory, distilled to fit a 22-minute news programme. As Duflo puts it, it is important to find shoes that fit the poor, and not the poor that fit the shoes.

But for a development economist like Banerjee to ask a nation that is talking about ending hunger, corruption and illiteracy to do nothing is a bit jarring. Largely due to the efforts of a proactive National Advisory Council (NAC), we are talking about expanding entitlement programmes to cover a number of aspects of development. Bills on these, however, receive nowhere close to the public scrutiny they should. Ask a random sample of Indian citizens how many of them support the Right to Education Act, and you are likely to get a large majority in favour of the legislation. Ask the same sample what the law contains, and barring a few stock answers, very few know, or care.

The National Food Security Bill, touted to be the biggest legislation in the UPA2 government’s tenure, has recently had many of its substantive clauses removed by the agriculture ministry, without much hue and cry. The constitutional guarantee to food, child nutrition, maternity benefits and emergency food relief have all been removed from the NAC draft, which now resembles a standard food subsidy.

All over the world, the public holds its government accountable for the laws it makes. In the US, the healthcare debate – albeit not nearly the best when it comes to quality – involved public participation unheard of in India. Everybody had an opinion on the issue. In fact, for better or for worse, public policy is debated minutely, with every major amendment being analysed on the hundreds of news channels. We last discussed a law in such detail when the India-US nuclear deal almost brought the government down. Why do we not dissect the current batch of laws with similar interest?

Government is accountable for the laws it makes. In the US, the healthcare debate – albeit not nearly the best when it comes to quality – involved public participation unheard of in India. Everybody had an opinion on the issue. In fact, for better or for worse, public policy is debated minutely, with every major amendment being analysed on the hundreds of news channels. We last discussed a law in such detail when the India-US nuclear deal almost brought the government down. Why do we not dissect the current batch of laws with similar interest?

In his landmark study of electoral strategy, Clientelism and voting behaviour, Leonard Wantchekon performed a unique field experiment to quantify the impact of campaigning on a platform of national policy on election results. He got four parties in the first round of the 2001 presidential election in Benin to canvass on the strength of their policies in one village, and on strictly localised propaganda in another village where their initial support is roughly the same. A team of one party worker and a research assistant would go to the first village and talk about ending corruption and how it would eradicate poverty, and rant to the second village how their region had fallen behind and promise to provide pork barrel spending and hiring sons of the soil. The results confirmed what political parties in India have long known: parochial positions improved the party’s performance, while policy positions actually hurt it.

We have a polity which does not extend beyond our caste, class and region. Politicians have exploited that for decades. The conversation for poverty alleviation is restricted to a general sense of affirmation at the need to do so, but with few original ideas beyond throwing money at the problem. Thankfully, there are fora, such as the NAC, where these ideas are discussed in depth, but like the hatchet job on the food security act shows us, its suggestions can easily be ignored without fear of backlash.

In a country where 42 per cent of the population falls behind the international poverty line, we cannot afford for our government to fall prey to the temptation of symbolic legislation that has not been subjected to field tests first. In the meantime, it would make more sense, as Banerjee says, to fix our development mechanism.

Trolling Terror

(This is a piece I wrote after the Mumbai terror attacks on 13 July. My first opinion piece, it was put up - to my amazement and glee - on the Tehelka website)

I dread terror attacks. Not only because a number of innocent people die, but also because they bring out the worst in the Indian psyche. It makes the common man resemble the grandfather who makes the entire family uncomfortable at reunions with his racist diatribes and unconscionable solutions for all the world's ills. It leaves the Indian soul, which at the best of times is open and accommodating, a thoroughly parochial and violent beast.
On Wednesday, attributed by some news channels as 26/11 perpetrator Ajmal Kasab's birthday, 21 were killed and more than 100 injured in a series of blasts in Mumbai. Within minutes, social media - used by 8 million Indians and counting - erupted with what has now become par for the course on the middle class's response to terrorism: hang Kasab/Afzal Guru in public, bomb Pakistan back to the stone age, get rid of all our inept politicians. Internet trolls poured hate on whoever they considered responsible. One user even asked for Kasab’s castration at the Gateway of India. When calmer heads suggested a more rational approach to the attack, they were silenced by long, emotional diatribes full of moral righteousness calling them unpatriotic, pseudo-secularists and cowards.
Sadly, this is about average for any discussion on Indian politics in cyberspace. There is a disproportionate number of loud fundamentalists on the internet at the best of times, who regularly attack moderate voices with long, hateful posts (with a nationalistic disregard for the grammar of the language of our erstwhile colonial masters), which are interested more in painting the author as anti-national more than debating the issues at hand. In the worst of times, average, decent people take the comfort of the crowd and join in the mud-slinging, elbowing for more room on the moral high ground.
Now, one could argue that 8 million is a tiny majority, but you do not need to be a weatherman to know that these opinions qualify as mainstream in this country. Even if these are the opinions of the minority, it is a very vocal minority.
These knee-jerk reactions conveniently ignore ground realities, possible consequences and even simple morality. There is no evidence that links Pakistan to this particular attack. In fact, the lack of any intelligence seems to suggest a local group was responsible. Even if it was responsible, we cannot bomb a nuclear Pakistan without dire consequences. Similarly, we cannot deny Kasab due process without compromising the principles this country was founded on.
Terrorism is born through instigation of the minority community by playing on its insecurities. It is no accident that the bulk of the members of Indian Mujahideen were radicalised during either the Babri Masjid demolition or the Gujarat pogroms. It needs to be fought by actively engaging with Pakistan on dismantling its terror apparatus, and by building a truly secular state to remove the insecurities of Indian Muslims. These are solutions, however, that are too gradual for a country with as short an attention span as ours.
To a rational human being, these facts should be apparent. Unfortunately, rationality is the first sacrifice we make in trying to come to grips with terrorism. Perhaps it is wrong to expect rationality in a situation such as this. These reactions are, after all, a primal urge for revenge at the people who kill our fellow citizens with impunity. It is very difficult to look at the US going into Abbottabad and assassinating Osama bin Laden, and then be told that there is nothing other than diplomacy that our country can do to stop terrorism. When people look at Kandahar and Entebbe, they naturally assume India is a soft state.
People need to vent, after all. Sure, one would like the public to hold some civil liberties and human rights as inalienable, but on an emotive issue like terrorism, that seems too much to ask for.
It is when this xenophobic rage passes for public consensus on terrorism that it gets dangerous. There are political forces which play on this paranoia for narrow political gains. Thankfully, the BJP desisted from the more extreme measures during their stint in power, but it did pass the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (Pota).
So far, Indian governments from all sides of the political spectrum have shown great maturity in dealing with Pakistan on terrorism. Yes, there have been mistakes and they have sometimes erred on the side of caution, but India is generally perceived as handling the situation as an adult. There is still a lot more to be done on terrorism, but there is no place for simple solutions for such a complex problem. What we as a society need to do is not stick to moral absolutes when talking about terrorism, but acknowledge that there are serious limitations our country faces in the war against terror.

:Sheepish grin:

One of the most revered traditions of college life is procrastination. Doth not now, what thou canst doth tomorrowth, and all that. Though I haven't posted anything on this 'ere blog of mine since April, I have done a fair amount of writing, most of it during my time at The Financial World, a nascent newspaper run by Tehelka. I meant to put some of the better specimens on the blog, but a combination of laziness and protozoic Internet thwarted my plans. Finally, it took the release of another rant for me to get around to putting them up. I'm publishing only the two opinion pieces that can be called political. Most of the people who are ever going to visit this blog have already read them. If you haven't, well Bob's your uncle.