K Natwar Singh: Living in a blunder land
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-W B Yeats (The Second Coming)
The second United Progressive Alliance (UPA-II) government is not an inspiration. And by no stretch of the imagination can it be called a model. The adamantine fact is that UPA-II is now a national liability. From M J Akbar to Shobhaa De, from The Hindu to Times Now, from one cartoonist to another, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is under siege. Ridicule has replaced respect. A trust deficit has been added to the budget deficit. And the worthy doctor is now derisively labelled as Manmohan-II, who is unable to rein in the supercilious or defend the serious in his government. One pays a heavy price when one holds high office. The trappings of power, a cloistered existence, the isolation and the security shield make leaders lose touch with ground realities. When did the PM last enter a shop? When did he go to a village to have a chat with farmers à la Rahul Gandhi? And when he does condescend to meet five prominent press heavyweights, he falls into a blunder land.
- Consider his atrocious remarks on Bangladesh. His office made things worse by stating that the remarks were off the record. What then were they doing on the website?
- Mani Shankar Aiyar “wrote to me on purely ideological grounds,” the PM said. Mr Aiyar says he had pointed out what was going wrong in the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee.
- The PM questioned the mandate of the Comptroller and Auditor General to hold a press conference on its 2G scam report. Will someone in the Prime Minister’s Office read the comments that serious newspapers carried about this blunder?
- The PM said the home minister was not informed about the “sweeping” of the finance minister’s office. That puts the home minister in his place, who took refuge in the NDTV studio.
- Take the PM’s observations on the functioning of his loquacious environment minister. Were they necessary?
To shoot oneself in the foot once or twice is bad enough but to do that five times stretches credibility beyond measure. In recent months, he has displayed a genius for misgovernance.
Dr Manmohan Singh is an untarnished man whose image has been irreparably tarnished — “the dawn was golden, the noon silver, the evening lead.” Even his admirers have begun to ask, “Why is he taking all this flak? Why doesn’t he quit?” What does one say to such a decent man? Auf wiedersehen or au revoir or goodbye and good riddance? He deserves better but the bells have begun to toll.
A close friend of long standing dropped by the other day. He is endowed with a ready wit and exceptional mastery of linguistic irreverence. He said Dr Singh was walking a tightrope over the cesspool of corruption. According to my friend three types of corruption exist today: petty, retail and wholesale. Petty corruption involves a homeowner being harassed by a New Delhi Municipal Council inspector for extending the kitchen by a foot. Only a going rate of Rs 3 lakh can satisfy the inspector. In retail corruption, the income tax commissioner will reduce the penalty for non-payment of tax by a corporate house in return for Rs 5 crore. In wholesale corruption one eats a helicopter for breakfast, a Boeing 747 for lunch and an aircraft carrier for dinner.
Is globalisation causing disenchantment? Are its discontents gaining the upper hand? One is familiar with the vast range of globalisation. Apart from finance, communications, TV and IT, we now have sartorial, culinary and sports globalisation. Regrettably, one never hears of the globalisation of truth, morality, ethics, virtue or values. It is time we did, considering that we are living in a spiritual wilderness.
The current obsession is the market. In this context, the great Mexican poet and admirer of India Octavio Paz said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “For example, the triumph of the market economy (a triumph due to the adversary’s default) cannot be simply a cause for joy. As a mechanism the market is efficient, but like all mechanisms it lacks both conscience and compassion.”
TAILPIECE
I recently finished reading Civilisation by an energetic and engaging historian, Niall Ferguson. A footnote reads, “The Authorised Version (as the King James Bible of 1611 came to be known) stands alongside the plays of William Shakespeare among the greatest works of English literature. The term of forty seven scholars who produced it were [sic] let down by the royal printers only once. The 1631 edition – known as the ‘Wicked Bible’– omitted the word ‘not’ from The commandment, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’.”