There is self-congratulation all round about the surgical strikes against Pakistan last week, which seems to reflect a military and diplomatic departure from the past. However, once the jubilation has subsided we need to ask when can we make surgical strikes against poverty? After all, if our ecstasy over a one-off military operation has to last, India needs to emerge as an economic superpower. For this, we need to draw one lesson from the recent operation and ignore another obvious one.
According to an article by Manu Pubby in The Economic Times, "Lt Gen Ranbir Singh, the man who announced two Indian surgical strikes - one in Myanmar, last year, and the latest strike on terror launch pads in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir - to the world, has been specially chosen for the task of planning operations due to his military acumen. He also has a direct stake in ensuring that the attacks on the Army are avenged." In both the attacks - June 2015 in Chandel, Manipur, and September 18 in Uri - "the Army units that came under attack were the Dogras - a regiment to which Lt Gen Ranbir is the Colonel Commandant, the senior-most officer belonging to the Dogras in charge of troops welfare."
This is an important piece of information. Whether it is a one-time operation or a lasting change, we need highly-skilled and motivated leaders with a direct incentive in the task given to them. The incentive may or may not be economic (in military, it is honour and duty, which Mr Singh was responding to). But there is no doubt that we cannot clean up decades of systemic mess through people who are not motivated enough.
Mr Singh of the 9 Dogra battalion has developed special planning acumen and military expertise, writes Mr Pubby. To utilise him, the army has broken tradition to ensure that he remains Director-General of Military Operations, despite being approved to command a corps-level formation, a decision that was cleared by the top Indian leadership, he says. His importance can be judged from the fact that on Thursday, the officer was part of the meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security. What can people like this do in the economic field? I will come to that later, but are people like Mr Singh visible in all areas of the economy, starting with government-owned banks and other enterprises? They have rarely been identified, nurtured and retained.
The second lesson from the strike could be that government can get things done. And, we could extrapolate this success to other fields and keep the faith. India has a lot of cleaning up to do, which this government will do because it is willing to make a departure from the past and be result-oriented. But this would be a wrong lesson to draw. Governments can also fix economic logjam as a one-time effort. But continued deep involvement in the economy usually costs a lot of money and time and achieves little. To initiate rapid change through a democratic set up, motivation would have to be purely economic, whether we like it or not. Even in a non-democratic set up, China achieved its economic progress by allowing incentives for financial success, made famous by Deng Xio Ping's comment: It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.
A committed government will surely achieve more than the than those who have only a superficial interest in changing things. It will always have CEOs who turns around a government company. But that will be an exception to the rule. It is not a formula that can be replicated and that too on a long-term basis. We need a change in the drivers of economic growth: From the sclerotic, large and wasteful government that causes inflation and affects the poor, to a rule-based free enterprise system, which creates competition, lowers costs, raises productivity and excellence. Who has more economic incentives: The businessmen, who are responsible for creating jobs, repaying their debt, paying taxes and having to stay competitive, or a bunch of salaried people who keep going up the ladder no matter what happens to the businesses they run?
This is where we need top-flight talent like Mr Singh in the economic and financial fields, whose job would be to move us from the existing system to a new one in the next few years. This needs an overarching vision, which fortunately has been supplied by Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself: "The government has no business to be in business", and "minimum government, maximum governance". Can he now start living up to these slogans by making a surgical strike at the root of poverty with the help of some top-class managers?
The writer is the editor of www.moneylife.in
editor@moneylife.in
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