Breakfast at terrorist-decorated Taj, with Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani on either side -- what triumphant symbolism to crown Hillary Clinton’s public relations tour de force in India. But did it work? It did make possible one impossibility; uniting the BJP and the Communists in a common cause. They were equally agitated, as indeed were some ruling party MPs, over the “hidden details” of the agreements the American lady finalised with our Government.
What offended them, and a lot of others, was the way America insists on American laws overriding the laws of other sovereign nations. They want our business – billions of dollars worth military equipment. But when we buy them, we must also buy the superiority of American laws which demand the right of inspection by American officials of our equipment and their deployment. Even the Indian Prime Minister’s special aircraft is subject to American inspection/approval from time to time because a US company supplied it.
The problem here is an attitude of mind. Remember the saying, “What is good for General Motors is good for the world”. Well, it now stands proved that it was not even good for General Motors which has collapsed. But the attitude of mind has not changed. What the US Congress resolves for America is binding on the world.
There is a further problem. The high-falutin attitude works only with orderly countries that have their own functioning parliamentary and legal systems. It never worked with Pakistan, for example. Massive quantities of American arms were supplied to Pakistan to strengthen its democratic forces. But most of the weaponry was used against India. America did not or could not take action under its end-user laws. Pakistan is smart enough to know that America recognises only West-ward looking terrorists. So they mounted a serious campaign against the Swat Talibans and won applause from the likes of Hillary. Which left Pakistan free to carry on merrily with east-ward looking terrorists. (V.K.Krishna Menon used to scorn Americans for assuming that their guns supplied to Pakistan could only fire in one direction).
Why is it that India appears unable to call this kind of bluff? Is it just a matter of Manmohan Singh’s avowed admiration for America? Or is there, additionally, a lingering colonial mentality in our bowing to the West as a matter of habit?
Our history since independence is studded with events that suggest such a predilection on our part. We internationalised the Kashmir issue (when there was no need to do so) because Nehru was easily influenced by the Mountbattens. Imagine China taking the Tibet issue to the UN. In 1994 in the wake of the Bhopal gas tragedy, we allowed Union Carbide boss Anderson to walk free. Indian law was rendered toothless. In 1995 after a foreign aircraft dropped arms in the remote area of Purulia, five Latvian and one British crew were finally sentenced. But all of them were given executive pardon and allowed to go home. Will the American system allow any such leniency to jailed fashion designer Anand Jon who is widely believed to have been framed by business rivals in Los Angeles?
Six decades after independence, we are still to learn how to stand up for our dignity. Imagine how dramatically equations will change if we do a few things the American way. Give our business, for example, to European suppliers of weapons and nuclear plants who do not have humiliating end-user specifications. And ensure that a departing American dignitary or two are body-searched at our airport. That’s a language that will be instantly understood.
Showing posts with label Nehru. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nehru. Show all posts
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
How we smashed a jewel
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What a pathetic plight Air-India has reached. It’s become the first government-owned company that is unable to pay salaries. The unions blame the Government and insist on their privileges. Which means the irresistible force of business economics is in head-on collision with the immovable object of employee resistance. Disaster beckons.
Public sympathy is unlikely to be with Air-India. For one thing, it has been unpopular with passengers for many years. The reasons range from unreliable timings to on-board discrimination against Indians. In the Gulf sector, where it maintained a lucrative monopoly for as long as it could, its ill-treatment of passengers on delayed flights had become a scandal.
For another, the villains in the Air-India tragedy are the bureaucrats and the unions – a combination that has been the undoing of many public sector undertakings. Because of the glamour and perks associated with the airline business, Air-India became a magnet for IAS top brass. Those who were good at lubricating politicians – a tribe that loves lubrication – managed to appropriate the company for themselves. Thus non-specialists took charge of a highly specialised enterprise. The unions, as usual, put rights before responsibility.
True to public sector morality, Air-India today has the world’s highest staff strength for an airline: 31,000. Their salary bill is Rs 350 crore a month. The norm in the airline business is to have 75-80 employees per aircraft. Air-India has about 230 per aircraft. It is currently running at a loss of Rs 15 crore A DAY.
Those who have brought the company to such a pass deserve punishment, not a bail-out package. They had inherited a jewel of a company before they ruined it. Tata Airlines, established one year before independence, had become, one year after independence, Air-India International. In 1953 it was nationalised but, on the invitation of Jawaharlal Nehru, J.R.D. Tata continued as Chairman. In 1978 Tata was summarily dismissed by Prime Minister Morarji Desai. After that there was no stopping the IAS-politician nexus.
Under J.R.D. Tata’s leadership, Air-India had become one of the world’s great airlines, admired for on-time performance, excellence of service, cleanliness and good food, not to mention the “exotic hostesses” at a time when the saree was not all that familiar in foreign cities. All this became possible because J.R.D. was an aviator himself and he put together a team of internationally respected professionals. As author Anthony Samson noticed in his book “Empires of the Skies”, J.R.D insulated his airline from favouritism in appointments – the exact opposite of our bureaucratic culture.
That contrast is also the clearest pointer to what needs to be done. Politicians and babus must stop pretending that they are Vijay Mallyas and Naresh Goyals. Business is not their business. They should do what Margaret Thatcher did to British Airways. When she became Prime Minister in 1979, she announced she would return BA to profit-making. It was an elaborate process. By 1987 it was completed and British Airways became a private company. Of course it has been caught in the present business downturn, but that is a factor of business, not of mismanagement by babus and exploitation by unions.
Thatcher took one procedural move, which too is worth emulating. She appointed Lord King, her “favourite businessman”, to work out the modalities of privatisation. Perhaps Manmohan Singh can entrust the task to the Coimbatore Paramount Airways owner for a compelling reason: He has worked out the only business model that seems to be bucking the economic downturn syndrome. Besides, M. Thiagarajan is a pilot, like J.R.D.Tata.
Public sympathy is unlikely to be with Air-India. For one thing, it has been unpopular with passengers for many years. The reasons range from unreliable timings to on-board discrimination against Indians. In the Gulf sector, where it maintained a lucrative monopoly for as long as it could, its ill-treatment of passengers on delayed flights had become a scandal.
For another, the villains in the Air-India tragedy are the bureaucrats and the unions – a combination that has been the undoing of many public sector undertakings. Because of the glamour and perks associated with the airline business, Air-India became a magnet for IAS top brass. Those who were good at lubricating politicians – a tribe that loves lubrication – managed to appropriate the company for themselves. Thus non-specialists took charge of a highly specialised enterprise. The unions, as usual, put rights before responsibility.
True to public sector morality, Air-India today has the world’s highest staff strength for an airline: 31,000. Their salary bill is Rs 350 crore a month. The norm in the airline business is to have 75-80 employees per aircraft. Air-India has about 230 per aircraft. It is currently running at a loss of Rs 15 crore A DAY.
Those who have brought the company to such a pass deserve punishment, not a bail-out package. They had inherited a jewel of a company before they ruined it. Tata Airlines, established one year before independence, had become, one year after independence, Air-India International. In 1953 it was nationalised but, on the invitation of Jawaharlal Nehru, J.R.D. Tata continued as Chairman. In 1978 Tata was summarily dismissed by Prime Minister Morarji Desai. After that there was no stopping the IAS-politician nexus.
Under J.R.D. Tata’s leadership, Air-India had become one of the world’s great airlines, admired for on-time performance, excellence of service, cleanliness and good food, not to mention the “exotic hostesses” at a time when the saree was not all that familiar in foreign cities. All this became possible because J.R.D. was an aviator himself and he put together a team of internationally respected professionals. As author Anthony Samson noticed in his book “Empires of the Skies”, J.R.D insulated his airline from favouritism in appointments – the exact opposite of our bureaucratic culture.
That contrast is also the clearest pointer to what needs to be done. Politicians and babus must stop pretending that they are Vijay Mallyas and Naresh Goyals. Business is not their business. They should do what Margaret Thatcher did to British Airways. When she became Prime Minister in 1979, she announced she would return BA to profit-making. It was an elaborate process. By 1987 it was completed and British Airways became a private company. Of course it has been caught in the present business downturn, but that is a factor of business, not of mismanagement by babus and exploitation by unions.
Thatcher took one procedural move, which too is worth emulating. She appointed Lord King, her “favourite businessman”, to work out the modalities of privatisation. Perhaps Manmohan Singh can entrust the task to the Coimbatore Paramount Airways owner for a compelling reason: He has worked out the only business model that seems to be bucking the economic downturn syndrome. Besides, M. Thiagarajan is a pilot, like J.R.D.Tata.
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Sunday, May 31, 2009
Our poverty + their wealth = India
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Sometimes it takes a foreign eye to see India in perspective. Known statistics, for example, have been humanised by The Economist to paint a telling picture of the Indian reality in its post-election glow. The juxtaposition of facts goes thus:
“About 27 million Indians will be born this year. Unless things improve, almost 2 million of them will die before the next general election. Of the children who survive, more than 40 percent will be physically stunted by malnutrition. Most will enroll in a school, but they cannot count on their teachers showing up. After five years of classes, less than 60 percent will be able to read a short story and more than 60 percent will be stumped by simple arithmetic”.
This is by no means a damn-India editorial. Far from it. The cover story is headlined “Good news from India”. True, The Economist often adopts a know-all attitude and gives lectures to all and sundry. This is no reason why we should shy away from facts that are known to us, too, as facts.
The underlying fact about India is that six decades after independence, it remains an extremely poor country. There is widespread poverty in China, but not of the pitiable levels of human degradation we see in the slums of India. Countries like Malaysia needed only two decades to virtually abolish poverty.
Why have the many governments of India allowed the poverty of India to continue as a humiliating spectacle? The main reason must be that our politicians were busy with other things. When they did talk of poverty, it was only for purposes of gimmickry. Indira Gandhi sold the slogan “Garibi hatao”, won elections – and that was that. In his otherwise insubstantial book After Nehru, Who?, American author Welles Hangen wrote in 1963 what is true to this day. “The tragedy of India”, he said, “is not poverty, but the mentality that accepts, even condones, poverty”.
That mentality persists. When a film depicting the horrors of Indian poverty wins Oscars in Hollywood, we protest against foreigners looking only at the negative side of India. We don’t do anything about eliminating the negative side. In fact, we, too, try to profit from it by starting “slum tourism” in Dharavi.
Today we have a new union cabinet of mostly capable men and women, headed by one of the world’s most respected economists. Predictably, we hear of 8 percent and 10 percent growth. Spectacular growth has taken place since Nehru’s Socialist days. A nouveau riche class has arisen. But more than half of Mumbai’s population lives in slums. The very poor remain very miserably poor.
There are vital problems that do not depend on growth rates for a solution. The highly influential ministers from Tamil Nadu, for example, will need only a fraction of their influence to put an end to the shameful two-glass system in the teashops of the deep south. The powerful ministers from Punjab and Haryana can take effective steps to stop the practice of female infanticide. The high-calibre ministers from Kerala can help save their state’s rivers from being killed by sand mafias.
Of course none of them will do any of this. Our politicians are primarily self-centred. We will see poverty and misery continuing while the wealth of the ruling class increases. Organisations like the National Election Watch have computed that the average assets of MPs increased from 2004 to 2009 by 103 percent for Congress, by 155 percent for the BJP, by 463 percent for the DMK and by a breath-taking 831 percent for the JDS.
Poverty? What poverty?
“About 27 million Indians will be born this year. Unless things improve, almost 2 million of them will die before the next general election. Of the children who survive, more than 40 percent will be physically stunted by malnutrition. Most will enroll in a school, but they cannot count on their teachers showing up. After five years of classes, less than 60 percent will be able to read a short story and more than 60 percent will be stumped by simple arithmetic”.
This is by no means a damn-India editorial. Far from it. The cover story is headlined “Good news from India”. True, The Economist often adopts a know-all attitude and gives lectures to all and sundry. This is no reason why we should shy away from facts that are known to us, too, as facts.
The underlying fact about India is that six decades after independence, it remains an extremely poor country. There is widespread poverty in China, but not of the pitiable levels of human degradation we see in the slums of India. Countries like Malaysia needed only two decades to virtually abolish poverty.
Why have the many governments of India allowed the poverty of India to continue as a humiliating spectacle? The main reason must be that our politicians were busy with other things. When they did talk of poverty, it was only for purposes of gimmickry. Indira Gandhi sold the slogan “Garibi hatao”, won elections – and that was that. In his otherwise insubstantial book After Nehru, Who?, American author Welles Hangen wrote in 1963 what is true to this day. “The tragedy of India”, he said, “is not poverty, but the mentality that accepts, even condones, poverty”.
That mentality persists. When a film depicting the horrors of Indian poverty wins Oscars in Hollywood, we protest against foreigners looking only at the negative side of India. We don’t do anything about eliminating the negative side. In fact, we, too, try to profit from it by starting “slum tourism” in Dharavi.
Today we have a new union cabinet of mostly capable men and women, headed by one of the world’s most respected economists. Predictably, we hear of 8 percent and 10 percent growth. Spectacular growth has taken place since Nehru’s Socialist days. A nouveau riche class has arisen. But more than half of Mumbai’s population lives in slums. The very poor remain very miserably poor.
There are vital problems that do not depend on growth rates for a solution. The highly influential ministers from Tamil Nadu, for example, will need only a fraction of their influence to put an end to the shameful two-glass system in the teashops of the deep south. The powerful ministers from Punjab and Haryana can take effective steps to stop the practice of female infanticide. The high-calibre ministers from Kerala can help save their state’s rivers from being killed by sand mafias.
Of course none of them will do any of this. Our politicians are primarily self-centred. We will see poverty and misery continuing while the wealth of the ruling class increases. Organisations like the National Election Watch have computed that the average assets of MPs increased from 2004 to 2009 by 103 percent for Congress, by 155 percent for the BJP, by 463 percent for the DMK and by a breath-taking 831 percent for the JDS.
Poverty? What poverty?
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