An Unholy Trinity

This article was first published by Tehelka (www.tehelka.com) on 28 November 2014 under the headline An Unholy Trinity.

Mission impossible? The jury is still out on whether and how well Narendra Modi is able to stem the tide of corruption. Photo courtesy: PIB

A potent and combustible mix of politicians, corporates and bureaucrats is eating into the vitals of governance. Will Narendra Modi stem the tide?

A

n Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, now retired, received a peculiar instruction from a minister when he returned to his state cadre after a deputation at the Centre. The minister wanted the official to substitute the income certificate submitted by a student, who wanted to appear for an entrance examination, with another one so that the boy could claim the benefit of a quota for backward minorities and easily secure admission in a medical college. “Only you and I would know,” the minister told the officer, reassuring the latter that their secret would be safe with him. The officer, who had by then earned a reputation for not being a doormat for the politician, refused; needless to say, he was promptly transferred out.

Even though many years may have passed since the incident, Alphons Kannanthanam vividly recalls a sense of affront that apparently the minister felt and how his transfer order was issued the very next day.

In an earlier avatar as the commissioner of the Delhi Development Authority, Alphons demolished more than 14,000 illegal structures that had been built by certain politicians and high-net-worth individuals, reclaiming in the process acres of prime property that were then valued at several thousands of crores of rupees. Then, as later, he was shunted out at the behest of certain politicians and their associates.

Incidentally, his relocation to Delhi in 1992 had come about in similar circumstances; he was transferred out of Kerala after he wrote a dissenting note in the infamous palmolein oil import scam that had rocked the state. Alphons has since taken to politics; he contested and won as an independent candidate from the Kanjirapally Assembly seat in Kerala. He joined the BJP in 2011.

Cut to 2012 and another IAS officer, Ashok Khemka, would be transferred out for the nth time for taking on the powers that be. His fault? He detected certain irregularities in land transactions, particularly one allegedly involving a high-profile politician’s son-in-law and a public limited company. Khemka has been unceremoniously transferred more number of times than the total number of years of service he has put in so far. Today, he serves as the transport commissioner of Haryana.

When reports began to appear in the media about the extent of this VIP’s involvement in the alleged scam and when a civil society movement called India Against Corruption began to pose uncomfortable questions to the erstwhile Manmohan Singh government and the Congress party alike, this VIP had derisively remarked, “mango people in a banana republic”; in Hindi, mango people means “aam aadmi”, an unmistakable reference to the anti-corruption movement, some of whose members subsequently floated the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

Some politicians and political parties have wondered why a “private citizen”, like the VIP in question, should be hounded in the manner he has been. But, as the TEHELKA investigation reveals, he hardly fits the description of a private person. For, how many private citizens can claim to curry favours from a corporate (Jet Airways, in this case), and with relative ease at that? Or, as a BJP leader wondered aloud, which private citizen would be exempted from security checks, greeted with a meet-and-assist service every time he flies or accorded security at taxpayers’ expense?

The downside of corruption

India may have copied the British model of governance, but the similarity ends there. In the United Kingdom, a certain minister had to resign for even as much as asking the person concerned to fast track the issue of a visa application of the nanny of his former lover. India, in contrast, seems to exhibit a far greater tolerance of misdemeanours. (However, one of the earliest recorded exceptions to this general trend was in 1951 when Jawaharlal Nehru made an example of HG Mudgal, who, incidentally, was also from the Congress party, for accepting a bribe.)

There is no gainsaying that the intersection of political, corporate and bureaucratic classes in India presents a combustible mix and their interplay has a direct bearing on governance.

In 1993, the government constituted a committee headed by the then home secretary NN Vohra (today he is serving as the governor of Jammu and Kashmir) to look into the nexus between crime syndicates, bureaucrats and politicians. Twelve years later, in 2005, the Second Administrative Reforms Commission was set up under the chairmanship of Veerappa Moily for revamping the administrative machinery. Certainly, the two reports leave a lot to be desired.

A conservative estimate by an industry chamber puts the financial cost of certain recent cases of corruption at 36,400 crore. Also, India has slid down Transparency International’s corruption perception index rating; from being ranked 72 in 2007, it dropped to 87 in 2010 and 94 in 2013, below some countries such as China.

In Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer 2013, politicians, corporates and bureaucrats in India had the dubious distinction of being perceived as more corrupt than others. More than 80 percent of the people surveyed felt that the political parties and their leaders were corrupt; 65 percent felt the same way about lawmakers and bureaucrats; and 50 percent said that businesses were guilty of indulging in corrupt practices.

Corruption dates back decades

While he headed the Second ­Administrative Reforms Commission, which, among other things, examined the politician-corporate-bureaucrat nexus, Moily had said that corruption has been with us for several centuries. Even at the time Kautilya wrote Arthashastra, he had said that just as fish moving inside water cannot be known when drinking water, even so officers appointed for carrying out works cannot be known when appropriating money. Modern India isn’t any better. A perusal of the history of independent India would suggest that it is replete with scams. The earliest recorded scandal dates back to 1948 when a foreign firm was contracted for supply of jeeps to the Indian Army. Although the firm received monies, it failed to deliver the promised number of vehicles.

Nehru was not personally accused of corruption, but the same could not be said of his government. As a sitting Congress mp from Thiruvananthapuram, Shashi Tharoor, writes in his book Nehru: The Invention of India, “Jawaharlal [could not] prevent the growth of the corruption which his own statist policies facilitated. The image of the self-sacrificing Congressmen in homespun gave way to that of the professional politicians the educated middle classes came to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in khadi who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing uncountable (and unaccountable) riches by manipulating governmental favours. With licences for quotas for every business activity, petty politicians grew rich by profiting from the power to permit.

“The stench of corruption reached Jawaharlal’s own circles three times in the later years of his rule: When his finance minister TT Krishnamachari was obliged to resign in 1958 over improprieties in a life insurance scam (it was Feroze Gandhi’s muckraking that brought about Krishnamachari’s downfall); when his friend Jayanti Dharma Teja, whom Nehru had helped set up a major shipping line, defaulted on loans and skipped the country; and when Jawaharlal’s own private secretary since 1946, MO Mathai, who was accused both of spying for the CIA and of accumulating an ill-gotten fortune, was forced to resign in 1959. In none of these cases was there the slightest suggestion that Jawaharlal had profited personally in any way from the actions of his associates, but they again confirmed that Nehru’s loyalty exceeded his judgement.”

History was to repeat itself, again, during the tenure of the erstwhile upa government. A series of scams, including, but not limited to, the allocation of 2G spectrum and coal blocks and the hosting of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, eventually led to the downfall of the government that was headed by a prime minister with a Teflon image.

According to former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai, if the then prime minister Manmohan Singh had wanted, he could have prevented the 2G scam. Also, recently, the Supreme Court told CBI director Ranjit Sinha to recuse himself from the 2G probe. According to TSR Subramaniam, a former cabinet secretary, that the CBI was a “hand maiden” of the government of the day was well-known but he thought it was extraordinary that no action has yet been taken against Sinha.

Will Modi make good his promise?

Candidate Narendra Modi raised the bar by saying that neither does he himself indulge in corruption nor would he allow others to do it (“na khaata hoon, na khaane doonga”.) At the same time, he qualified his remarks in an interview he gave to a private television channel by saying that the problem of corrupt practices could not be solved to everyone’s satisfaction, but that certain preventive measures could surely make it difficult to indulge in corruption. The jury is still out on whether and how well Prime Minister Modi is able to stem the tide of corruption, which, as he said in August at an election rally at Kaithal in Haryana, is a disease worse than cancer.

His government set the tone as early as June this year when it used President Pranab Mukherjee’s speech to a joint session of Parliament to underscore that the government “is determined to rid the country of the scourge of corruption and the menace of black money”. In the same speech, it was said that “the institution of Lokpal is important to curb corruption and my government will endeavour to formulate rules in conformity with the Act”. (The government hopes to push for the Lokpal and Lokayuktas (Amendment) Bill, 2014, in the ongoing winter session of Parliament.)

Subramaniam insists that it is too early to judge the Modi government; he points out that Modi has made a beginning by making it known to anyone who would care to listen to him that he intends to bring about a visible difference in the way India is governed. Already, the message seems to have had the desired impact on corporates. Recently, The Economic Times quoted Godrej group chairman Adi Godrej as saying that “there is a definite realisation among Indian firms that even in government, there is a major movement underway against corruption”.

Hypocrisy to the fore

Yet, to the discerning, it is obvious that the debate about corruption in India smacks of hypocrisy and double standards. According to a recent Transparency International report, 54 percent of Indians surveyed say they paid a bribe in the past year; that is one in every two Indians who participated in the survey.

A 2013 document titled ‘Bribery and corruption: Ground reality in India’ prepared by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and Ernst and Young, a multinational professional services firm headquartered in London, quotes an unnamed foreign multinational company as saying, “These days, bribery is in many cases regarded as a norm rather than an evil.”

Yet, even if, for a moment, one were to accept and concede that corruption is endemic and few can claim to be untouched by it, that an ordinary Indian citizen is as culpable or guilty as, say, a VIP, the latter will still find it difficult to wriggle out because public interest is involved; and, therefore, to that extent, politicians, corporates and bureaucrats would be held to a different yardstick than the common man.

Corporates don’t fare any better, either. The FICCI document explains that “more than half of the respondents agreed that it is the lack of will of corporate enterprises to obtain licences and approvals the ‘right way’ which encourages bribery and corruption”.

Furthermore, while cash continues to be the most preferred mode of paying bribes (89 percent of the respondents selected it from the long list of possible modes), 77 percent chose “gifts and kind” as a likely quid pro quo, which, possibly, explains the behaviour of some of the dramatis personae in the TEHELKA investigation.

This, when the Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules, 1964, stipulate that government officials are not to accept or permit members of their families (or other persons acting on their behalf) to accept gifts.

According to the FICCI document, the expression “gift” includes free transport, boarding, lodging or other services, or any other pecuniary advantage provided by any person other than a near relative or personal friend with no official dealings with the civil servant.

As the Second Administrative Reforms Commission said, “The standard should be one of not only the conduct of Caesar’s wife but of Caesar himself.” And that holds true for the political, corporate and bureaucratic classes today. And tomorrow, too.

NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT: Go beyond making pro forma noises

The first International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons will be observed on 26 September 2014. Will the Bhagavad Gita, which Robert Oppenheimer cited to explain his philosophy of life before and after the Trinity nuclear test of 1945, inspire Modi, Obama and their contemporaries in the comity of nations to do their duty by reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in international affairs?

New Delhi
25 September 2014

The redrawing of the boundaries of Ukraine may have come at an inopportune moment in the contemporary discourse on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. Ukraine’s dismemberment at the hands of Russia, coming as it did after it renounced what was the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world at the time of disintegration of the erstwhile Soviet Union, could impel certain nuclear holdouts to retain and refine their nuclear arsenals or spur some nuclear threshold states to cross the Rubicon and seek to insure themselves against potential violation of their sovereignties. It didn’t help that Russia also signalled its intention to finesse its security strategy by further developing its nuclear capabilities, which, in turn, has forced the US and NATO to revisit some of the underlying assumptions of their extant policies in eastern Europe. At the same time, those developments have once again brought to the fore and highlighted the perils of indiscriminate nuclear sabre-rattling and the human and humanitarian costs of atomic pursuits. Already, there are in excess of 16 thousand nuclear weapons worldwide today. According to a latest data published by an American magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the largest concentrations of nuclear weapons are residing in Russia and the US, which together possess 93 per cent of the total global inventory; while Pakistan is reported to be quantitatively and qualitatively increasing its arsenal and deploying its weapons at more sites. Also, the failure of the nuclear-haves to break free from the vice-like grip of “Pehle Aap” (Hindi for you first or after you) culture, which pervades their thinking insofar as delegitimising the use of nuclear weapons and reducing their salience in international affairs are concerned, stands exposed. The entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), for instance, is held up on account of the inability of eight countries – the US, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea – to sign and/or ratify it. The US has signed but not ratified the treaty, which China cites to defend itself; Pakistan, in turn, finds in India’s reluctance to even sign the treaty, let alone ratify it, a convenient escape clause for itself. Possibly, an early US ratification could have a domino effect on the remaining seven countries.

India’s own attempts at pushing for an international consensus on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament date back to 1954 when Jawaharlal Nehru became the first statesman to call for a “stand still” agreement on nuclear testing after the US conducted a series of nuclear tests, including the detonation of a nuclear device that was equivalent to a thousand Hiroshimas, in the tiny Pacific Ocean archipelago of Marshall Islands. That was followed by Indira Gandhi’s joining five other heads of state and/or government in issuing the Appeal of May 1984 to draw world attention to nuclear disarmament and Rajiv Gandhi’s now eponymously-named “Action Plan to usher in a worId order free of nuclear weapons and rooted in non-violence” that was unveiled on 9 June 1988 at the United Nations General Assembly. However, by then India had decidedly begun to embrace a foreign- and security policy that was dictated by realpolitik; and the nuclear tests by India in 1998 validated it. The consequent decline in India’s moral stature and political will ensured that her voice on disarmament remained feeble. However, it was around the same time that Kazakhstan was making itself heard, first by renouncing its nuclear arsenal and subsequently by forging a Central Asia Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaty, which was signed by all five Central Asian states – Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. On 2 December 2009, the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly accepted Kazakhstan’s proposal for declaring 29 August as the International Day Against Nuclear Tests. On this occasion last month, the victims of nuclear tests such as a 46-year-old armless painter Karipbek Kuyukov and the Hibayushas (Japanese for survivors of an explosion) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came together to shake off the international community’s inertia and to urge them to expedite disarmament talks which are otherwise progressing at a glacial pace. Kazakhstan’s efforts towards a global test ban, leading to an eventual ban on nuclear weapons, needs to be admired in India and around the world.

The way forward

Kazakhstan, Japan or Marshall Islands are not alone in their endeavours. Joining them in a campaign to showcase the humanitarian costs of nuclear tests and nuclear weapons are Norway and Mexico, which hosted the first two editions of a global conference. Austria will host a third in December this year. Considering India’s own past efforts at campaigning for disarmament, it would do well to consider making common cause with like-minded countries such as Japan and Kazakhstan. The essential features of the four-fold Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan are similar to the four specific steps that Japan’s foreign minister Fumio Kishida articulated recently in an article published by Foreign Affairs, a leading American magazine on international relations. For his part, Prime Minister Narendra Modi could use his talks with world leaders and his intervention at the United Nations General Assembly this year to signal his government’s intent. Mr Modi has already said in an interaction with Japanese journalists on the eve of his just concluded visit to Tokyo that “there is no contradiction in our mind between being a nuclear weapon state and contributing actively to global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.” Incidentally, the first International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons will be observed on 26 September, on the eve of Prime Minister Modi’s address to the 69th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. According to the United Nations, “As of 2014, not one nuclear weapon has been physically destroyed pursuant to a treaty, bilateral or multilateral and no nuclear disarmament negotiations are underway.  Meanwhile, the doctrine of nuclear deterrence persists as an element in the security policies of all possessor states and their nuclear allies. This is so despite growing concerns worldwide over the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the use of even a single nuclear weapon, let alone a regional or global nuclear war.” In 2015, the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) Review Conference will take place; the year will also mark the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings. Also, the United Nations plans to convene no later than 2018 a high-level international conference on nuclear disarmament to review the progress made in this regard. All these occasions could be used by the international community to discuss nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. A push for a global no-first-use could be a good starting point of those talks, to begin with.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe

Although Mr Modi has iterated India’s commitment to a universal, non-discriminatory and global nuclear disarmament and a unilateral and voluntary moratorium on nuclear explosive testing, Japan’s special sensitivities continue to cause a delay in signing of a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with India. In such a situation, even a tentative first step in this direction would endear India to those sections of the Japanese society that remain sceptical of civil nuclear cooperation with a non-NPT and non-CTBT country such as India. Towards the end of his visit to Japan, Mr Modi had said that he had gifted copies of the Bhagavad Gita to his Japanese interlocutors, including the Emperor. He explained his actions thus: “I have nothing more valuable to give and the world has nothing more valuable to get.” Hopefully, going forward, the Bhagavad Gita would help resolve the moral dilemmas confronting many a world leader and stir their collective conscience to do their duty. As for Mr Modi himself, he maintains that he is an incorrigible optimist. “Some people say a glass is half empty; some people say a glass is half full. I say the glass is half filled with water and half filled with air,” he had told the BJP Parliamentary Party, by way of an explanation, soon after he led the party to a historic win in the May 2014 parliamentary elections. That personal philosophy of Mr Modi could come in handy for India as it negotiates a minefield that is the contemporary global discourse on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

Will the Bhagavad Gita do to the leaders of India and the United States what Lord Krishna did to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata? Will the Bhagavad Gita, which Robert Oppenheimer cited to explain his philosophy of life before and after the Trinity nuclear test of 1945, inspire Modi, Obama and their contemporaries in the comity of nations to do their duty by reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in international affairs?

Declassify 1962 India-China war report, reappraise the civil – military relations

The release of a portion of the ‘top secret’ T.B. Henderson Brooks – Premindra Singh Bhagat inquiry report on the 1962 India-China war by an Australian journalist Neville Maxwell has come at a time when the civil – military relations are under the scanner all over again, due in no small part to the allegedly inappropriate conduct of a former Chief of Army Staff who dragged the government to court over his age row and how an otherwise routine movement of troops coinciding with the date of court hearing gave rise to fears in the government of a possible ‘coup’; the unseemly controversy surrounding the frequent crashes by Soviet-era MiG fighter jets; and most recently, a series of naval mishaps that eventually led to the resignation of the Navy chief Admiral DK Joshi.

Let us look at the substantive portions of the 126-page section of the report that was released online by Neville Maxwell, who was the Delhi correspondent of the Times of London during the war. For one, the report squarely attributes the debacle to an unsound military plan. It goes on to blame the then army leadership, the intelligence apparatus, the bureaucrats in the ministries of defence and external affairs, and the political class, not necessarily in that order, for the humiliating defeat at the hands of the Chinese. The army leadership, for overruling the field commanders; the intelligence chief, for assuming, erroneously, that the Chinese would not resort to use of force; and the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s leadership, for pushing for a ‘Forward Policy’ of establishing military outposts in areas claimed by China and launching aggressive patrols without the necessary army wherewithal.

The report notes, among other things, the following:

* The government who politically must have been keen to recover territory advocated a cautious policy whilst Army HQ dictated a policy that was clearly militarily unsound.

* The Chief of Army Staff did not present the correct military assessment to the political leadership on the forward policy in spite of the fact that the military intelligence believed that China would retaliate against any move by India to reclaim territory.

* A meeting was held in the Prime Minister’s Office on 2 November 1961 which was attended among others by the defence minister, the foreign secretary, the Chief of Army Staff and the director Intelligence Bureau (DIB). It appears that the DIB was of the opinion that the Chinese would not react to our establishing new posts and that they were not likely to use force against any of our posts even if they were in a position to do so.

The Ministry of Defence has sought to take refuge under the pretext that the inquiry committee report remains top secret because of the extremely sensitive nature of its contents “which are of current operational value.” Some scholars have debunked the government’s claim, saying that declassification of the report would not hinder or jeopardise in any manner the contemporary political and military attitudes and affairs. On the contrary, they have argued, it was necessary in the interest of generating an open and honest debate in the country about the circumstances leading up to the war so that the right lessons could be drawn. It has been pointed out that the government ought to take the nation into confidence and encourage a critical analysis of what went wrong and how to avoid a repetition in the future. As a newspaper editorial said, “There needs, instead, be a thorough reading of the report and the manner of its eventual public availability for a tutorial on India’s inexplicably ostrich-like approach to archival material. If today we are reacting to the report as if it were still 1963, given the lack of clarity on military assessment of operational details, it reflects the state’s reluctance to allow access to material essential for proper history writing, the kind of history without which there cannot be coherent and informed public debate.”

The release of a section of the report is a wake-up call of sorts for the Indian political and military leadership. To quote a former diplomat Hardeep S Puri, “The contents of the report point to three extremely disturbing trends that were in evidence in the 1960s. Some of these have continuing relevance even 52 years later. These merit a full national debate in order to prevent the recurrence of a 1962-type fiasco. They relate to a continuing civil-military disconnect, serious gaps in training and provisioning of equipment, inadequate or flawed intelligence which contributed to bizarre decision-making at the army headquarters and by the political leadership in the ministries of defence and external affairs, and at the PMO.”

India would do well to reappraise its civil – military relations unless, of course, it wants to go down the path that George Santayana so eloquently warned against: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”