Posted by: John Elliott | April 10, 2009

Another shoe thrown – another Indian politician a target

Congress buckles under flying shoe

One of George W. Bush’s most significant positive legacies (there aren’t many) is that the Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at him last year opened up a new way for the desperate to express their abhorrence of politicians.

Naveen Jindal

Naveen Jindal

I was writing this post, with the headline “Congress buckles under flying shoe”, when the tv reported that a shoe has been thrown today at another politician – this time it was at Naveen Jindal, a Congress MP and industrialist and a popular figure on Delhi’s party and polo circuits, who was the target of an angry retired (reportedly drunk) school teacher in Rajasthan.

This looks like becoming a feature of India’s current general election campaign and is surely to be welcomed, providing no shoe lands too painfully on its target, and the throwers are not roughed up by the police and goons who guard the politicians.

I say this because many politicians and political parties deserve to be publicly humiliated for the appalling, self-seeking, and often corrupt way that they have run the country for years.

Jarnail Singh

Jarnail Singh

When Jarnail Singh, a 36-year old Sikh journalist, threw a shoe on April 7 towards Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s home minister, he could never have thought he would hit his target so successfully. He says he aimed to miss Chidambaram – which he did – because the minister was only an intermediary target  for Sikh anger.

The real target were Congress Party leaders who had named two politicians, Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, as general election candidates. These two men  both have cases against them stemming from violence that led to the deaths of 3,000 Sikhs after prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh security guard in 1984. Added to this, it looked as if a court case against Tytler was about to be dismissed.

Yesterday Congress amazingly buckled and cancelled the two men’s candidatures. The party, headed by Sonia Gandhi, was reacting to protests that spread across the Sikhs’ home state of Punjab in support of Jarnail Singh’s shoe-throwing.

So who has come well out of the shoe throwing so far?

– Certainly Jarnail Singh, a usually quiet 40-year old journalist, who became a national hero yesterday, and who then reacted well, almost apologising for what he did and saying “impulse got the better of me”.

– Also Chidambaram, who said he understood Singh’s motivations and asked for no more action to be taken. He also admitted that Congress governments had not done enough to charge those responsible for the 1984 killings – a specially significant statement coming from a home minister.

– But surely not the Congress leadership which, even though it took the right decision in dropping the two men, should not have chosen them in the first place – and now looks weak and indecisive by cancelling their candidatures when they suddenly became a general election liability.

There is much that is wrong with the way that India’s government’s political parties, government and legal systems work. The Sikh protests have led to extensive television and newspaper discussion of these problems – not only of the way that those accused in the 1984 killings have gone free, but also of how people have rarely been charged successfully for other outrages such as the Gujarat 2002 massacre.

That is surely good.

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Posted in India, India general election | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | April 8, 2009

Religious intolerance surfaces in Indian election

See also https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/another-shoe-is-thrown-another-indian-politician-a-target/  _______________________________________________________________________

It’s curious how the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is having unintended and totally unexpected impacts on India’s general election campaign which officially begins on April 16.

Varun Gandhi, grandson of former prime minister Indira Gandhi, has refocused the Bharatiya Janata Party’s fundamentalist electoral platform over the past three weeks, and now the memory of the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 has focussed attention on a less-than-savoury side of the Congress Party.

Both events, coincidentally, are highlighting extreme Hindu views regarding Muslims and Sikhs.

Shoe thrown at Chidambaram

Shoe thrown at Chidambaram

The dynasty has been hoping that the election focus would be on Rahul Gandhi, prime-minister-in-the-making, and on his mother, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Congress Party and the current coalition government, so that they would together get the credit for leading Congress to victory in a new coalition government. But these other events have now burst onto the stage.

Dealing with the second event first, a Sikh journalist threw a shoe during a press conference yesterday at Palaniappan Chidambaram, the home minister, because the Congress has allowed Jagdish Tytler, a controversial politician, to stand as a candidate in the election. [On April 9, two days after the shoe throwing, the Congress Party withdrew Tytler and another candidate from the general election in response to growing criticism].

Tytler has been accused for the past 25 years of being one of the instigators of vicious riots staged by Hindus against Sikhs after a Sikh security guard shot Indira Gandhi. The specific Tytler allegation relates to a Sikh temple being set on fire, causing the death of three people.

I was in Delhi at the time and saw how Sikhs feared for their lives as 3,000 were killed and the riots spread – riots that were undoubtedly encouraged by Congress politicians and not quelled for several days by the party’s leadership that included Rajiv Gandhi, who became prime minister (and was assassinated in 1991).

Jagdish Tytler

Jagdish Tytler

Sikh anger over those events has been reawakened by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) last week asking a Delhi court to clear Tytler of charges against him and to close the case that has been running through the courts for years. The court will give its verdict on April 9  [deferred till April 28] but, whatever it says, many Sikhs are convinced that the CBI was working under the instructions of the Gandhi-led government that wanted to clear Tytler so he could stand as a candidate.

If those suspicious are correct, the government’s plan has misfired, as became quickly evident today when protests against Tytler spread across the Sikh’s home state of Punjab, disrupting traffic and blocking railtracks.

Leading Sikhs defended the journalist. The SGPC, known as the Sikhs’ parliament, offered him a job and legal expenses, and the Shiromani Akali Dal,  a Sikh political party, offered him a two lakhs of rupees ($4,000) reward and offered to make him a parliamentary candidate.

Reports suggest that Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister and a Sikh, is far from happy about the candidature of Tytler, who seems to have some hold over the party’s leadership. The government has today reacted to the protests by reconsidering his role.

The fact that Congress has not dealt with prosecutions stemming from the 1984 riots while it has been in power over the past 25 years seems to show an appalling bias. This strengthens the feeling of hurt and estrangement that fed the Sikhs’ call for Khalistan (a form of independence or autonomy for Punjab) through the 1980s.

Varun Gandhi filmed on a video

Varun Gandhi filmed on a video

The Varun Gandhi episode involves the 29-year-old son of an estranged member of the Gandhi dynasty who has become a prominent and cherished member of the BJP. Seen till now as a mild, soft-spoken young man who wrote poetry, he has suddenly become the poster boy of the BJP’s extreme nationalist wing since he was filmed allegedly verbally attacking Muslims  and Sikhs (even though he is mother is a Sikh). He claims videotapes were doctored.

It is not clear whether his attack was planned with BJP leaders. Initially it was seen as detrimental to the BJP’s cause at a time when the party is trying to play down its nationalist Hindutva doctrine and make broad economic and developmental appeals to the electorate.

But the BJP has now decided to ally itself with Varun, and some leaders have visited him in jail, where he is being held for his inflammatory speeches. This is because, like it or not, Gandhi is playing to many BJP supporters’ deeply held anti-Muslim views, and he has rallied them to the BJP‘s cause – leaving other politicians to tut tut on the sidelines and regret that Gandhi had been quite so outspoken.

All this shows how nothing is ever simple in India. While Varun Gandhi’s mother is a Sikh, his late father Sanjay (Rajiv’s brother) was half Parsi and half Hindu. And Jagdish Tytler, born to a Hindu father and Sikh mother in what is now Pakistan, was brought up after his parents died by a prominent Christian educationalist.

You’d think that such diverse backgrounds would breed tolerance!

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This post is also on the FT India page – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5bb5a80e-243e-11de-9a01-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a6dfcf08-9c79-11da-8762-0000779e2340.html

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Posted in dynasty, India, India general election, Manmohan Singh, Punjab, Rahul Gandhi | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | April 4, 2009

India’s electoral system does work

 

It’s amazing that Indian democracy works. I am not talking about the staggering figures of 714m eligible voters in 543 constituencies with 828,000 polling stations and 1.36m electronic voting machines, administered and protected by six million officials and security forces – statistics that are trotted out in awe by foreign correspondents every election to grab the attention of their newsdesks.

My point is how surprising it is that the vast mass of India’s electorate tolerates this exercise, and accepts the result,  even though it will do them little good. Every five years, and sometimes more frequently, around 60% of those eligible troop into polling booths and vote for aspirant parliamentarians and politicians who are most unlikely to have any interest in improving their lot.

Many will not know or have heard of the candidates because constituency MPs rarely exist here in the way that they do in the UK, where most local MPs tend their local area, hold “surgeries” to help answer people’s questions and meet their needs, and generally become a local figure.

There are only a few such MPs in India – Mani Shankar Aiyar for example in Tamil Nadu. Usually, party power brokers allocate seats at the last minute. The successful candidates then blast their way noisily round their constituencies, making speeches full of empty promises, laced with gifts (when the Election Commission is not looking), and then get elected, or do not.

Parties’ policies seem to matter little, despite detailed manifestos. There is of course a sharp divide over the BJP’s Hindu-nationalism and the Left Front’s soft communism, even though both of these are at least partly curbed in coalitions.

The decline in economic growth and rising prices in the shops, plus terrorist attacks, may count against Congress; but there seems little to choose between the parties on these subjects. Both the BJP and Congress for example have strong liberalisation policies, with the BJP perhaps carrying a little more conviction because both Sonia Gandhi and prime minister Manmohan Singh have reservations. And both parties would be tough on terrorism and security.

The first election I reported was in 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress Party won on a huge sympathy wave after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The elections of 1989 and 1996 produced unclear results as the dominance of Congress declined. Congress won again in 1991 on another sympathy wave after Rajiv was assassinated.

Then the Bharatiya Janata Party, under Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s skilful leadership, came back firmly in 1999 at a time when Sonia Gandhi had yet to pull the Congress Party back together. In 2004, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance won a totally unexpected victory because voters had tired of the over-confident BJP and its leading regional allies.

But while the system works, and is some ways getting stronger, it risks being devalued. On the positive side, the expansion of the urban middle class means that more people are able to decide for themselves how to vote without being herded or bullied by caste groups or gang bosses. On the other hand, the system is slipping into hands of political dynasties and regional party leaders, whose personal agendas often mean they care less for democracy or India than past MPs, and politicians with criminal links.

The Public Interest Foundation’s www.nocriminals.org website shows that one in five MPs elected in 2004 had pending criminal cases against them, either awaiting trial or on appeal after conviction – about half the for murder, violent robbery or rape.

They included 40% of Maharashtra’s MPs, 35% of Bihar’s, and 28% in Uttar Pradesh (UP). Among them were five out of nine MPs in Sharad Pawar’s Maharashtra-based Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), and eight out of 19 in Mayawati’s UP-based Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). It is well known that criminals use politics to help run their gangs and fix government decisions and contracts.

Dynasties generally have a negative impact on politics because they block a party’s development and prevent new leadership emerging at the top. This is not to under-value the contribution made by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, not to ignore the potential of young dynastic MPs such as Omar Abdullah (now chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir), Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot, Manvendra Singh, Milind Deora, as well as Rahul Gandhi. These men seem to have positive agendas for improving the lot of the poor and how India is run, though they have yet to prove themselves as able politicians and leaders – and their existence means that outsiders have been denied positions.

There are also numerous sons, daughters and other relations being brought into politics by politicians who do not have such high ideals and seem to be there mainly to sustain a family’s prestige and patronage – and, I suspect, to ensure that illicit assets and money accumulated by their fathers or uncles is kept in the family. It would be good if disillusionment with such patronage led to them losing in elections.

The growth of regional-based parties like Mayawati’s BSP is more worrying because few of them are interested in national policies. They line up with whatever national government suits them (though some do shun the BJP), and this time are working as a (not very stable) third front that could try to step in if neither Congress nor the BJP has enough seats to lead a coalition.

They habitually seek cabinet posts for ministries that are most lucrative in terms of kickbacks – defence, telecoms, highways, aviation and power for example – and seek influential ministers of state posts such as in the finance ministry. National parties also, of course, covet these jobs and there have been Congress Party defence and power ministers in the current government, but these politicians have had a national focus.

Yet, despite all the lack of focus and sincerity – and the corruption, caste-influenced voting, and occasional violence – the system works. That is shown when swings happen and poor-performing MPs lose their seats, and governments are ousted, or elected by unexpectedly large majorities. But the downsides make the system vulnerable. The main thing India needs strong leadership to develop the economy and resist terrorism. For that, it needs a stable government – the risk is that it might not get it. 

this is an article that appeared in the weekend Lounge section of Mint, an Indian daily business newspaper – see http://www.livemint.com/2009/04/03200858/The-system-does-work.html?h=A3  including a Radio Podcast of the script.

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Posted by: John Elliott | April 1, 2009

Manmohan Singh marks the limits of liberalisation

There is a revealing line hidden away in the text of a Financial Times’ interview with Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, that is published today. Asked about “the future of capitalism, especially in India”, he replies: “We are a mixed economy. We will remain a mixed economy. The public and private sector will continue to play a very important role”.

This is significant because it underlines his continuing belief in India’s public sector and his long-held reservations about wholesale privatisation.

Manmohan Singh during the interview

Manmohan Singh during the interview

The prime minister preceded that line with the phrase “capitalism with a human face”, which  he has used several times (sometimes saying “reforms with a human face”) over the past 15 or so years. (I first heard it in 1995 as the title of a book by Sam Brittan, the FT’s veteran economic commentator).

This underlines the fact that the prime minister has never been the arch liberaliser that the international media likes to make him. He was not the architect of the 1991 economic reforms – the basic plans were drawn up between the end of Rajiv Gandhi’s 1984-1989 Congress government and 1991. But he did become an enthusiastic – and caring – implementer.

Narasimha Rao, prime minister of the Congress government elected in 1991 in the midst of a dire financial crisis, picked him as finance minister because, it is said, he reckoned that if the reforms succeeded, he (Rao) would get the credit, but if they failed he could blame ex-bureaucrat-Singh. As it turned out, Mr Rao’s calculation was wrong because the reforms were a success and Mr Singh got the credit – despite the government’s loss of nerve in 1994-95 after unfavourable regional election results.

On privatisation, Mr Singh’s Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has been held back for most of the past five years primarily by the Left Front that supported the coalition till the end of last year.

But Mr Singh was content to live with some of the Left’s approach because he does not believe in privatising profitable public sector businesses (PSUs, as they are known in India – U stands for undertakings). The corollary is that he believes in privatising loss-making PSUs, which of course is unreal because they rarely find a buyer.

He does favour selling – “divesting” in PSU jargon – minority stakes, and on that he was held back by the Left. But, along with the Left, he has not seemed keen on allowing in strategic investors – which usually means a specialist private sector company that aims eventually to acquire a majority stake.

He did not seem very disappointed when, just after the current government’s Common Minimum Programme was put together in 2004, he said that no profit-making PSU would “normally” be privatised. To underline the change of policy from the former Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, the Disinvestment Ministry was scrapped and merged into the Ministry of Finance.

It is refreshing to find an economic reformer who does not charge blindly up every liberalising alley, but instead analyses what is good and practical for the country. Too often governments around the world have privatised everything they can, without analysing the pros and cons.

A senior British Treasury official once told me that it was essential to have a constant stream of privatisation candidates so as to “maintain the momentum” of the policy. If that momentum was lost, he said, it could be difficult to restart it.

In India, of course, there is no momentum to be maintained. A few companies were privatised under the 1999-2004 BJP-led government, but since 2004 there has only been minimal restructuring, some by a specialist reconstruction board (the BRPSE).

It is surely good that the prime minister takes his stand on a literally mixed economy. It does mean of course that PSUs remain over-manned and often poorly managed, but at least there is something of a debate on the issue.

Too often India’s industrial policy, as I have written before, is developed by enthusiastic ministers working with equally enthusiastic private sector interests – for example on foreign direct investment rules, special economic zones, and airport privatisation (where Indian private sector companies are primarily interested in low-cost land acquisition and property development, not running top class airports).

There now needs to be a debate on where India is going on privatisation, maybe with the prime minister setting out how far he would like to go, and in which industries.

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this post is also on the FT website – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0c43f820-1eb2-11de-b244-00144feabdc0.html

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Posted in India, India economic reforms, India economy, India FDI, India industrial policy, India Left, India politics, Manmohan Singh | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | March 23, 2009

Tata’s “One-Lakh” Nano – let’s cool the hype

I’m travelling out of India so hadn’t intended to blog on the launch today of Tata’s tiny Nano car, but am doing so because, surely, the hype has gone too far.

On the FT website there’s a piece by Suhel Seth, a well known figure in India’s social, media, and business circles, excitedly titled “Why India Needs a Nano”.

the Nano

the Nano

Arguably it’s something of an insult to India because it suggests that the country needs this small car because “in these troubled times, India needs a symbol of hope; a symbol of the possible”.  It will not just be the launch of a car – “instead it will be the launch of a million possibilities”. This is sheer hype from my friend Suhel, who I believe advises Ratan Tata.

I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but what is all the fuss about?

There have been many small cars before around the world – a little Fiat 600 and a even smaller front-opening BMW Isetta 300cc three-wheeler “bubble car” (below)  were for example familiar sights on  Europe’s roads 40 or so years ago

OK, so the Nano’s basic ex-factory price will be one lakh rupees – that’s Rs100,000 – roughly $2,000 at current exchange rates.

And this means that Ratan Tata, who heads the Tata group and has direct managerial responsibility for Tata Motors, is personally honouring his promise to produce a car for that price.

bmw-isetta

But every buyer will have to pay more than one lakh rupees even for the basic model – probably nearer $2,500, though that is of course still less than India’s next cheapest car, Maruti’s 25-year old 800cc model which retails for about Rs190,000 upwards.

More significantly however, not many of this basic model will be built, simply because it will  not be profitable. The economics of the exercise dictate that Tata Motors must focus more on higher priced models that can fetch higher prices, which it will do immediately.

And, unless Ratan Tata announces it later today, we do not know how these cost savings add up, nor the surely considerable contribution made to the low costs by the extremely favourable investment incentives that it was first offered for its blighted West Bengal factory at Singur and now has in Gujarat where the car will be made later.

These incentives on land price and tax and other concessions are of course available in other states for new factories, but would presumably not have been offered for Tata Motor’s main plant in Pune. (I will return to these figures later when I am back in India)

Nano interior

Nano interior

So let’s be realistic. Sure, Tata is today unveiling an exciting new small car – smaller than anything else on the India market. Other manufacturers – including India’s Bajaj Auto with Renault – are working on a similar size car, so Tata does seem to be heading where there will be a big demand.

That’s great, but the One Lakh  Ratan Tata promise has become a branding gimmick and is well below the on-the-road price of most 0f the Nanos that will be produced.

And a proportion of the savings has come not from brilliant engineering or innovation but from state government subsidies, which will cost the tax payers of Gujarat in lost government revenue.

Secondly, if Ratan Tata really wants to do something for India, wouldn’t he have done better to develop a tiny car with serious fuel emission and fuel economy innovations, instead of simply a low cost brand that will further clog India’s already crowded roads?

So, on balance, is Tata really doing India many favours today?

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This post is also on the FT.com website – see http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2b47c97e-178f-11de-8c9d-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=a6dfcf08-9c79-11da-8762-0000779e2340.html

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Posted in India, India transport, Tata, Tata Motors | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | March 15, 2009

Campaign aims at “no criminals” in Indian politics

At last some leading public personalities are attempting to clean up India’s crime-ridden political system.  For years people have metaphorically wrung their hands in horror and frustration as criminals have tightened their grip on politics, especially in the poorest and roughest states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

These criminals enter parliament and state assemblies and work closely with other corrupt politicians, the police, judiciary and bureaucracy who all help them run their gangs and fix government decisions and contracts.

This trend is now being attacked by a campaign called the Forum for Clean Politics, which is being run by the Public Interest Foundation, which in turn is headed by Bimal Jalan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and a top finance ministry bureaucrat, who is now a member of the Rajya Sabha (upper house of parliament).

Bimal Jalan

Bimal Jalan

Figures on the forum’s www.nocriminals.org website show that one in five Members of Parliament elected in India’s 2004 general election had pending criminal cases against them, either awaiting trial or on appeal after conviction.  About half the cases are for murder, violent robbery or rape.

Those involved include 19 (40%) of 48 Maharashtra’s MPs, 13 (35%) of Bihar’s 37, and 23 of UP’s 80. Bihar’s list includes Lalu Prasad Yadav, the railways minister, who was the state’s chief minister till he had to resign over corruption charges.

Even more surprising and shocking is that  five out of nine MPs (56%) in the Maharashtra-based Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which is headed by agriculture minister Sharad Pawar and aviation minister Praful Patel, have criminal cases. 

Similarly, 42% – eight out of 19 – from the UP-based Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which is run by Mayawati, UP’s chief minister, are in the list.

Mayawati and Pawar are among the country’s most important politicians and they are both possible candidates to be prime minister, if neither the Congress Party nor the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win enough seats in the coming general election to lead a coalition.

I spoke to Jalan yesterday and he made the point that, bad though it was, a few criminals in politics did not matter so much when India’s parliament was dominated by the major parties. Now however, with the growth of coalition governments at both national and state level, small parties and their MPs exercise considerable influence.

“Governments have a lot of power over things that criminals want such as land rights and allocation of land, property rights, mining rights and environmental decision,” he says.

The figures show that MPs and candidates with criminal records are more common in regional parties like the NCP and BSP than in Congress and the BJP, where the percentages drop to around 20%. Analysts say that this is because regional party leaders and criminals are mutually useful to each other – criminals provide party finance and muscle power, and receive favourable decisions in return.

The statistics are based on returns that election candidates have to file with information of cases pending for more than two years. They are allowed to stand and be elected when they have either not been convicted, or are on appeal, because they can claim that they are innocent – though in many of the cases their guilt is beyond question. In India’s often corrupt judicial system, it is easy to delay and even fix cases so as to avoid a final decision.

Jalan is not sure how much impact the campaign will have, but he is sure that “parties will be much more reluctant to nominate people with criminal records”. Other foundation members include Naresh Chandra, former cabinet secretary and ambassador to the US, Tarun Das of the Confederation of Indian Industry, and Suresh Neotia, chairman of Ambuja Cement whose Neotia Foundation has provided the finance.

The campaign is being supported by some newspaper groups, including the Times of India, and other organisations. It is using mobile phone text messages to encourage voters to ask questions about candidates’ past histories, plus  You Tube (two films click here and here), and has gathered 4,000 members on its Facebook entry for No Criminals in Politics. There is also an advertisement campaigns on tv and in newspapers encouraging people to vote with slogans like “keep religion out of politics and politics out of religion”.

Other public figures including Ratan Tata, head of the Tata group, and E, Sreedharan, who runs the highly successful Delhi Metro, last year launched the Foundation for Restoration of National Values. This is reported to be taking legal action over the vast numbers of government advertisements that appeared two weeks ago just before the general election was announced.

All this may not have much effect on the coming election, but it is a beginning. India’s greatest strength is its democracy and it is time it was wrenched free of criminals and their political friends.

“ENOUGH – CLEAN UP PARLIAMENT” – in Italy – a current campaign to oust Italian MPs who have criminal convictions – see an Italian blog (in English)  http://www.beppegrillo.it/eng/condannati_parlamento.php

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this post is also on the FT India page – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7fb849ce-1227-11de-b816-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=a6dfcf08-9c79-11da-8762-0000779e2340.html

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Posted in India, India corruption, India elections, India general election, India land, India police, India politicians, India politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | March 8, 2009

Musharraf walks a Delhi tightrope – in a time warp

030809123617_mg_1174_editedIt was like being in a time warp when Pakistan’s former president, General Pervez Musharraf, spoke at an India Today conference in Delhi last night (March 7).

His focus was on past peace efforts between India and Pakistan, and why they had failed – and what he had done as president to try to make them work. His theme was that a peace deal on the two countries’ disputed Jammu & Kashmir border was essential, and that India needed to change more than Pakistan to make that possible.

But he said virtually nothing on major events of the past year or so – from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, to the terrorist attack on Mumbai  that killed 170 people last November and last Tuesday’s attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore – nor the worrying Sharia law agreement reached by Pakistan with Taliban extremists in Swat, just 100 miles north of Islamabad.

It was almost as if these events hadn’t happened, and the Taliban crisis hadn’t escalated in Pakistan, which Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s home minister, described last week as “not a failed state but……threatening to become one”.

Surprisingly, Musharraf also made scarcely any mention of semi-formal “back channel” negotiations between India and Pakistan during his time in power. Good progress on ways to soften the disputed Jammu & Kashmir border, and solve some specific border issues such as the disputed Siachen Glacier, were being made but the initiative died when Musharraf’s power declined and he lost the presidency.

Musharraf salutes as he arrives in Delhi from Pakistan

Musharraf salutes as he arrives in Delhi from Pakistan

As he arrived last night and walked through the crowd outside the banqueting hall, Musharraf looked less substantial and confident than when he was Pakistan’s military ruler. But he soon smartened up on stage, saluted the audience several times, and then settled down to the mixture of battle readiness and ardent peacenik that we grew used to during his presidency.

He was on the stage for well over two hours, till around 11pm, making his speech and answering questions – some far from friendly – from the audience as well as from Arun Poorie, founder and head of the India Today media group.

His biggest admission was that India and Pakistan had done “a lot of meddling” in each other’s internal affairs. “Your RAW does exactly what the ISI does, and the ISI does exactly what RAW does,” he said, referring to both countries’ secret services, which encourage unrest – and, allegedly, terrorist attacks – on each other’s territory.

“Let us tell RAW and ISI to stop their confrontations,” he said teasingly, adding later: “The past has been dirty….the past has been bad, but don’t put the blame on Pakistan…You correct your house so that terrorism in Pakistan decreases”.

In people’s minds as he made these remarks was India’s belief, shared by the US, UK and other countries, that the terrorists who carried out the Mumbai  attack came from Pakistan. There have also been amazing allegations from Pakistan that India’s RAW was behind the Lahore cricket attack. But Musharraf steered clear of specific cases.

His biggest departure from the truth was that “the ISI and [Pakistan] Army is totally on board with bringing peace with India….totally on board with my talks with Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh”. That drew sighs of disbelief verging on jeers from the audience.

His biggest accusation against India was: “Terrorists in Afghanistan visit here [Delhi] and I’ve seen pictures of them…..I know of [name unclear] terrorist sitting in Kabul who comes here and is welcomed by your organisations……I will give you a list of people who come here [from Kabul]”.

Though occasionally rattled, he showed throughout that he has lost none of his skills as a public performer on a political and diplomatic tightrope. He said nothing that would upset the government in Pakistan, which he depends on for his freedom, and made enough constructive remarks to satisfy his hosts.

At the end, he got a standing ovation – for effort if not for content.

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Posted by: John Elliott | March 7, 2009

Mallya saves Gandhi memorabilia for India but seeks buyer for his family silver

 Gandhi ji advocated Prohibition, but we needed a liquor Baron to bring back his things to India! JAI HO for the craziest place on earth – says a text message doing the rounds in Delhi this morning.

the auction items

the auction items

What a lovely diversion it’s been for Vijay Mallya, chairman of the ailing UB liquor group and Kingfisher Airlines, to be able to buy Mahatma Gandhi’s memorabilia for a vastly inflated $1.8m in a New York auction yesterday, instead of worrying about from the miseries of his businesses.

UB group and Kingfisher are so broke that Mallya is considering selling stakes of 15% upwards to international liquor companies such as Diageo – who presumably would not agree to have less than 26% because they would want to have some control under India’s company law. Mallya is also trying to persuade the Indian government to allow foreign airlines to invest in Indian carriers so he can sell 26% of Kingfisher abroad

These sales really would be parting with the family silver! Should someone organise an auction to save UB and Kingfisher for India?

Vijay Mallya

Vijay Mallya

Mint newspaper dealt with the Mallya purchase rather neatly in a front page editorial this morning: 

“There is rich irony in the fact that a liquor baron, who is described as the king of good times, has bought the sandals, glasses and other personal belongings of Mahatma Gandhi, a frugal and abstemious soul.

“Vijay Mallya paid $1.8 million (Rs9.27 crore) for Mahatma memorabilia—and has been swamped by affectionate praise from ordinary Indians. What Mallya does with his money is really nobody’s business, but we cannot but help wonder whether he overpaid for no fault of his.

”India’s cultural affairs minister Ambika Soni said she had been instructed by prime minister Manmohan Singh to do ‘whatever possible’ to ensure that the Gandhi items were brought back to India. There was enough national debate to tell the outside world that India was desperate to win the bid.

“Was that sensible strategy? The reserve price of the items was $20,000-30,000, far less than the final sale price. You do not need a game theorist to know that India sent the wrong signals and helped push up the final price. A collective poker face would have helped.”

The Indian Express says in an editorial headed Buying and selling eyeglasses sans perspective:

“The auction of Gandhi-related memorabilia in New York brought out the most delightfully hubristic side of everyone concerned………..the Indian government seems to have decided that anything that Bapu ever touched was the Patrimony of the Nation, and having it in the possession of icky, capitalistic foreigners (imagine, selling a used pair of glasses for a profit!) would mean trampling, unacceptably, on Indian sovereignty. Then there is the Delhi High Court, which, given the universality of Justice, issued a stay order on the auction of things physically outside India by an auction house outside India on behalf of a seller outside India……..

“And how did all this end? In properly Indian manner, with competitive chaos: Tushar Gandhi using Dilip Doshi to bid against Vijay Mallya, who may or may not have been the state’s representative. If anyone thinks that the spectacle of a liquor baron bidding for the used crockery of a man who was not the world’s biggest alcohol fan was blasphemous, they’re clearly moralistic killjoys that don’t understand Gandhism.

“What more agreeable spectacle than Vijay Mallya, the buyer of Tipu’s sword, now buying slightly less violent relics? (And wasn’t he complaining the other day Kingfisher had no money?) Or than the government, which first disdained then took credit for Slumdog, now trying to take credit for another Indian Victory Abroad?”

Is what the Express calls Indian hubris going to lead to frenetic campaigns to save every piece of Gandhi memorabilia?  And would it have happened if it hadn’t coincided with the coming general election, thus making such hubris almost a political necessity for the government?

As Sam Miller, a BBC journalist, points out in his excellent new book on Delhi, Adventures in a Megacity , there are already two Gandhi watches in different Delhi museums, both assumed to be the one he wore when he was killed. Looks like an expanding market.

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Posted by: John Elliott | March 3, 2009

India’s election juggernaut gets moving – destination unknown

India’s general election juggernaut is on the move with polling, announced yesterday, on five days from April 16 to May 13, and vote counting on Saturday May 16. So India should have a new government by the middle-end of May. It’s a massive task with 714m potential voters (far more than three times America’s 210m), 170m of them aged under 35, and nearly 830,000 polling centres.

No-one can sensibly forecast who will win. The result will probably be dictated more by regional parties, which join national coalitions, than by the two main national Parties – Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In 2004, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance was expected to win but lost, mainly because its regional allies were defeated, notably in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

The final shapes of the coalitions are not yet known because national and regional parties are negotiating how many seats each should allocated to contest in an alliance. For example, in Uttar Pradesh (UP), Congress is arguing with the local Samajwadi Party about how many seats each should have. In some cases, notably Tamil Nadu, who links with who could depend on how those seat negotiations turn out.

Women Politicians

They are often best avoided because they are wilful, unreliable and temperamental. That of course is a hugely inaccurate and horribly chauvinistic allegation, but it is entirely true about the three women regional politicians who matter most in this election:

MAYAWATI, the low caste Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief minister of UP, who wants to be prime minister one day. She continually proves herself an unstable and unreliable partner, and seems more interested in her extravagant personality cult than sustaining coalitions.

JAYALALITHA JAYARAM, a former flamboyant AIADMK chief minister of Tamil Nadu, who also has prime ministerial ambitions. She is most important because she could deliver a sizeable block of seats to whichever national coalition she joins.

MAMATA BANERJEE, whose tantrums as leader of the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal drove Tata Motors’ Nano plant out of the state last year and killed a chemicals’ industry special economic zone. While fighting those projects, she exposed the rough Stalinist tactics of the ruling Left Front, led by the CPI(M). The question now is whether her Tata and SEZ “victories” will lead people to desert her because she drove away jobs, or support her because they are tired of the Left Front.

Dynasties

They are also best avoided but it’s not possible to do so in modern India. There are far too many of them, with seemingly endless lists of sons and daughters being brought into politics, as successors, by their parents and other relatives.

Dynasties generally have a negative impact on politics because they block a party’s development. They did however produce some impressive young MPs in the 2004 election, such as Sachin Pilot, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Manvendra Singh, Omar Abdullah (now chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir), Milind Deora and, of course, Rahul Gandhi – so they are not all bad.

States to Watch

It is fashionable in Delhi, and in India’s national media, to say that the huge northern state of UP is the most important state to watch in a general election. That used to be true when Congress ruled alone, and its ups and downs against the BJP could be gauged in UP. Now the voting in this state is so splintered, with Mayawati’s and other regionally-based parties gaining strength, that it is not so significant as a litmus test of the final result.

Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, in southern India, have been much more decisive in the past two elections – especially Tamil Nadu where there are basically only two voting blocks led by the DMK (now ruling the state) and Jayalalitha’s AIADMK.

Prime Ministers – there are several candidates, led by:

Manmohan Singh, the current of Congress prime minister, assuming he recovers sufficiently from his recent heart surgery – he is 76. If Congress wins and he is not fit enough, Sonia Gandhi, the Congress president, would have to decide whether to become prime minister herself (which she declined to do in 2004), or put her heir-apparent son, 38-year old Rahul Gandhi, into the job, or (less likely) select a non-family politician whom she trusts not to stand in Rahul’s way later.

Lal Krishna Advani, 81, who leads the BJP now that former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has retired.

If neither party wins enough seats to lead a coalition, or if it has to give way to a coalition partner in order to win its support, the candidates include: Mayawati; Nitish Kumar, chief minister of Bihar and leader of the Janata Dal (U), he is a former railways minister; Lalu Prasad Yadav, a former Bihar chief minister and now railways minister; and Sharad Pawar, a powerful veteran politician and now the agriculture minister, he is a former defence minister and chief minister of Maharashtra, and leads  the regional-based Nationalist Congress Party.

Policies

It may seem odd to write this 900-word column without mentioning policies, but that is how it is with modern Indian politics.

There is of course the sharp divide between Congress and the BJP over the BJP’s arch Hindu-nationalism, which will dictate how tens of millions of people vote even though its nationalism would be restrained in a coalition.

The current poor state of the economy, and recent terrorist attacks, may count against Congress, but there seems little to choose between the parties on these subjects.

The main thing India needs is stability to open up the economy further and resist terrorism, so it needs a stable coalition government. The risk is that it might not get it.

This post is also on the FT website – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eeb43778-07de-11de-8a33-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=a6dfcf08-9c79-11da-8762-0000779e2340.html

FOR MORE POSTS ON INDIA’S GENERAL ELECTION TYPE General Election IN THE SEARCH BOX – OR CLICK General Election BELOW

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Posted by: John Elliott | March 1, 2009

India’s government goes on a “Pre-Poll Sop Spree”

img_3452_edited2It’s election time folks – the dates are about to be announced for India’s general election to be held next month and in May. How do we know? Because government ministers have been rushing round the country inaugurating projects and laying foundation stones for the past few days before the announcement stops such publicity.
 

Along with the visits, there has been a massive number of full and half-page advertisements that have appeared in Indian newspapers this weekend proclaiming the great successes of various ministers and their departments.

It might be reasonable to assume that modern India would have outgrown this third-world sort of behaviour, where politicians get kicks by inaugurating projects and seeing their photos in newspaper advertisements, but I suppose it is all part of general election politics.

Advertisements in this weekend’s newspapers have lauded the following visits by politicians:

– Sonia Gandhi, Haryana water supply project and women’s medical college,
– Pranab Mukherjee, foreign (and acting finance) minister, Tamil Nadu power project,
– Kapil Sibal, science and technology minister, National Science Day (yesterday),
– Lalu Prasad Yadav, railways minister, railway line on a Maharashtra pilgrim route,
– Praful Patel, foundation stone and a new building at Sikkim and Assam airports,
– Sharad Pawar, agricultural minister, food park in Pune,
– Oscar Fernandez, labour minister, a medical college in Kerala,
– Prem Chand Gupta, corporate affairs minister, Corporate Bhavan in Jaipur,
– Jaipal Reddy, urban development minister, a statue in Delhi
– Sheila Dixit, Delhi chief minister, a flyover in Delhi
– Even India’s President Pratibha Devisingh Patil – a health care workshop in Delhiimg_3453-brightened_edited3                                                                                                                                                  

The government’s most public relations-conscious politician, aviation minister Praful Patel, has scored highest on visits, launching modernisation projects and inaugurating airport buildings at ten cites since February 20, according to a Mail Today article yesterday (click here and go to page 14) headlined “Pre-poll sop spree”. I wonder how many of the projects where work has not yet started were included in a mind-boggling series of architects’ drawings and pictures of shiny new buildings, with which he mesmerised journalists at a press conference about four years ago.

Challenging him for effort, Ram Vilas Paswan, minister for chemicals, fertilisers and steel, laid foundation stones and launched ten projects including chemists’ shops.

The most unlikely of the advertisements was one from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs headlined “Building People” with a picture of two jockeys racing horses. Patel’s Aviation Ministry boasted that charter airlines catered for people where “every minute counts”, neatly forgetting that his term at the ministry is ending with a plethora of loss-making airlines, inadequate ground support, and regular flight delays of an hour or more.

Now the Hindustan Times this morning, under a headline, “Last Minute Largesse” says that the government will announce, before the election dates are proclaimed, the creation of six new Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and a $2bn integrated child development scheme. The newspaper reported that as many as 60 proposals are on the cabinet’s agenda.img_3448-full-pic-brightened_edited

Not to be outdone, Mayawati, the prime ministerially-ambitious chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, has her own page advertisements proclaiming achievements in UP, showing she knows how Delhi works even before she arrives.

I have tried to find out the point of all the government’s advertisements which, I discovered, are placed by the Information Ministry’s Department of Audio Visual Publicity. Signficantly the Ministry announced two days ago that it is raising the advertisement rates it pays, and waiving its 15% agency commission, till June 30

 Surely, Sonia Gandhi cannot be pleased to see her picture used on such blatant wastes of money. And surely they are not supposed to win votes because they often reveal what the government has failed to do in the past five years!

Newspaper readers I have met over the weekend are laughing rather than taking the messages seriously.

So maybe the main aim is simply to reward loyal newspapers by boosting their advertising incomes – and to keep them loyal with the increased rates and reduced commissions that apply till the election is over.

Unsurprisingly, the Times of India and Economic Times get most advertisements – there are 12 in the Times today, some repeating ones that appeared in the paper yesterday.

The most intriguing story of the weekend was on the rediff.com website. It suggested that Navin Chawla, one of three Election Commissioners who is widely accused of favouring Congress (which he denies), suddenly took two days’ leave last week. His aim, the report suggested, was to delay the three-man commission announcing the poll date and bringing down the curtains on all the travelling and advertisements. It’s probably not true but, in modern India, is entirely believable.

Sadly governments do not seem to like carrying out projects launched by their predecessors. That has been only too clear since 2004 with the current government’s appalling record on the Golden Quadrilateral and other national highways projects that were started and built so successfully by the previous government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. I wonder what will happen to those in the lists above if Congress does not get back!

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