Sanjaya Baru: Scoundrel times
Revitalising government and regaining people's trust are critical to restoring faith in institutions
Never have these words of William Yeats rung more true than in these scoundrel times:
Turning and turning in the
widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
—Yeats: The Second Coming
Last week, the committee to select next year’s Padma award winners met in New Delhi. It remains to be seen how many businessmen will make it to that list this coming year. Two decades after J R D Tata became the first and the only businessman so far to be conferred a Bharat Ratna, India’s business leaders have come under a cloud. An atmosphere of suspicion and despair has gripped India Inc. This was best exemplified by the words of HDFC chairman Deepak Parikh who said in a TV interview over the weekend, “Everything that was going so well a few months ago seems to have suddenly snapped.”
He described the prevailing political and business environment in India as “tough times”. He may well have used that famous phrase of Lillian Hellman, describing another era of despair, rumour-mongering, back-stabbing, mutual suspicion, fear and cynicism — the McCarthy era in American politics — “scoundrel times”. Truth, wrote Hellman, “made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels”. (Scoundrel Time, 1976.)
But, this is no time for despair. In crisis, there is an opportunity. Once the wasted winter session of Parliament comes to an end, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh can still retrieve the situation and reclaim the ground fast slipping from under his feet.
The falconer must regain his voice. The blood-dimmed tide must turn. The innocent must resurface. The best must regain conviction. The passion of the worst exposed. Things need not fall apart, if the Centre can hold.
In days to come, a three-track approach will have to be followed for the current state of drift to end. First, the processes of justice and administrative action already set in motion will have to move forward and come to their logical conclusion. Many issues are now in front of the judiciary, the Supreme Court, and these will have to be addressed and judgements delivered. The sooner this is done the better. Delayed justice can harm the body politic.
It has been a long time since the politics of the country has been shaped by the judiciary. The verdicts the courts give can alter the medium-term course of Indian politics. The highest court of the land must demonstrate wisdom and maturity in arriving, as soon as it can, at its view on an assortment of issues relating to government policy which can impact on the nation’s political stability.
Second, there are a series of administrative decisions waiting to be taken which can have the effect of either re-affirming public trust in government or further weakening it. Various institutions of governance have come under intense and almost coordinated attack. Public faith in these institutions has to be re-secured. Who becomes the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), what happens to the “tainted” heads of the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) and Prasar Bharati will be closely watched. If news reports that incumbent Sebi chief C B Bhave will be given another two-year term, fulfilling the aim of giving a five-year term to such offices (since Mr Bhave has completed only three years), that CVC P J Thomas and Prasar Bharati CEO B S Lalli will voluntarily step down are indeed true, then public faith in three important institutions will be restored.
Going forward, the government must inject a greater degree of transparency into the appointment of such functionaries, and regulators, rewarding competence more than loyalty. The central government and the Prime Minister’s Office are in desperate need of revitalisation.
This is an administrative agenda that can be immediately acted upon and would have a huge positive impact on public sentiment, altering for the better the prevailing environment of deep cynicism, especially in the media.
Finally, the Manmohan Singh ministry needs a major reshuffle. Rarely in a democracy do ministers remain in the same job for such long periods of time as has been the case with the United Progressive Alliance government.
That a reshuffle has direct relevance to the agenda of good governance is now amply demonstrated by l’affaire Raja-Radia. The sum and substance of the Radia telephone tapes of May 2009 is that there was both an attempt to retain Mr Raja in the same ministry and a simultaneous attempt to prevent Mr Dayanidhi Maran from returning to that ministry. The best thing that Prime Minister Singh could have done in that fateful week of May 2009 would have been to name someone with impeccable credentials, a young, fresh face, a politician with a clean record, say someone like Sachin Pilot, for the job!
Constant reshuffle of ministers, with stability of tenure at the level of secretaries to the department, chosen on the basis of their record and competence, can easily reduce the scope for subversion of government by vested interests.
A radical reshuffle of the Union Council of Ministers, moving all those who have been in one ministry for more than a period of two years, dropping those who have acquired a reputation for repeated wrongdoing or sheer incompetence, even as realpolitik considerations are not entirely ignored (for they have to be considered to ensure the stability and durability of a coalition) would make a huge difference to how UPA-II is perceived.