This article appeared in the Indian Express, written by veteran journalist Kanchan Gupta.
India needs reforms, not a super babu
August 20, 2011 10:22:52 PM
Kanchan Gupta
We were at Checkpoint Charlie. There it was, in real life no more than an unimpressive white prefabricated cabin with a grey slanting roof straddling the famous crossing in the Berlin Wall that had come to symbolise the Cold War. This is where spies were swapped on smoky, rain-washed evenings; a gap in the Iron Curtain immortalised by writers of brooding yet brilliant fiction like John le Carre. Just in case those crossing Checkpoint Charlie from West Berlin into East Berlin were unaware of their passage from ‘freedom’ into ‘servitude’, a large board had been put up for their benefit: “You are leaving the American sector.” These six words were repeated in Russian and French. In brief, you had been warned. It was a bright summer day when the bus in which I was travelling crossed into East Berlin after a brief halt at Checkpoint Charlie. A rather well-built East German woman with a stern, unsmiling face, muscles straining at the fabric of her severely cut dark brown Army jacket, had boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, and sold each one of us a ticket, a rectangular piece of cardboard printed with undecipherable details. Her job done, the bus began to inch its way through the narrow opening; within seconds we had made our passage from West into East. A short distance later, the bus stopped again. An official boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, checked our tickets, made elaborate notes in a leather-bound logbook, and disembarked, without so much as saying guten morgen or danke — he was clearly not paid for that. A kilometre or so away, the bus was flagged down at a barricade. A third official, jowly and scowling, boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, checked our tickets, and made further elaborate notes in his logbook, also leather-bound. That, however, was not the end of the passport-ticket story. When we disembarked from the bus, we were made to pass through a turnstile which would turn only after we handed over our passports and tickets to a woman who bore remarkable similarity to Herta Bothe of Bergen-Belsen fame and she pressed a switch behind the counter where she stood, her face passive and her gaze steely. The passport was returned, the ticket was retained as it was ‘state property’. I later learned that the multiple checks were to ensure that the previous official had done his or her job and meticulously followed all rules. Each one of them would file a report to his or her boss, who would then file a report to higher officials, who would then compare and match the reports and file yet another report recording their satisfaction or pointing out lapses. Those reports would then be put in a file and the file would be filed in a high-security Stasi building somewhere for future reference. As for the tickets, they would be recycled till the cardboard crumbled; the remains would then be sent to a recycling plant to produce fresh tickets. A very elaborate system, and foolproof too, just that it did not prevent the edifice from collapsing after the first brick in the Berlin Wall was dislodged in the winter of 1989, leading to the fall of the sprawling Soviet Empire. Memories of that summer day’s experience at Checkpoint Charlie and beyond came flooding back last Friday as I heard Ms Kiran Bedi addressing the crowd at Ramlila Maidan, or Midan-e-Ramlila if we must borrow metaphors since Anna Hazare’s do-or-die crusade against corruption which has captured the popular imagination is being compared with Egypt’s Midan-e-Tahrir, or Tahrir Square, ‘revolution’ by easily excitable though appallingly ill-informed ‘revolutionaries’ waving the National Tricolour and chanting “Azadi”, demanding that the Jan Lok Pal Bill, which they of course haven’t even read, be adopted and implemented without a comma or full stop being changed. There was Ms Bedi on the dais, waving at the crowds and swaying to their sloganeering. “You don’t need to know what is there in the Jan Lok Pal Bill we have drafted,” she assured the cheering masses, “All you need to know is that we (and she emphasised the ‘we’ with a great degree of emphasis) will get you 101. Do you know what is 101? Let me tell you what is 101. If someone asks you for a bribe, no matter where you are, whether in a city or in a village, you will have to just dial 101 and immediately Jan Lok Pal inspectors will rush to the place with cameras and recorders.” Here she took a pause as the masses went into a frenzy of cheering, assured that a solution to the gargantuan problem of corruption was just three digits away. “And… listen to me… and, if 101 doesn’t do its job, you can dial 102. Other Jan Lok Pal inspectors will rush to your help and take the first lot of inspectors to task,” Ms Bedi was in full flow now, “You will ask me, what if 102 doesn’t work? Don’t worry, you can then dial 103…” I didn’t bother to listen any further, but possibly she went on to explain how 104 would monitor 103, and 105 would keep a watch on 104, and so on. In other words, what we are being promised is a Soviet-style parallel bureaucracy with Soviet-style inspectors to enforce a Soviet-style law in a Gestapo state which will rule not on the strength of respect for the law but fear of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Big Brother. What is being demanded are not measures to remove the primary reason for corruption, a bloated Government with a humongous bureaucracy, but a law that will make Government even bigger — a return to the days of Inspector Raj which we had to cope with for the privilege of living in a joyless socialist India wrapped with endless red tape. Everybody knows that the route to a corruption-free India lies through radical reforms that will ensure minimum government, maximum governance. But that’s a tedious process which will also mark the end of entitlements. So, what we are being asked to adopt instead is a second version of the hugely wasteful NREGA which has bred further corruption and thievery at all levels of our administration. The new job-generating scheme shall be called JLPEGA — it will create sufficient employment to keep retiredbabus, busybodies and self-appointed monitors of rectitude in clover at the taxpayers’ expense. Sadly, our political class, denuded of credibility, has so compromised itself that it lacks the guts to take on those who claim to represent all of India but have nothing to show, apart from a well-choreographed made-for-television protest, to substantiate that claim. Strait is the gate and narrow the path to redemption. If legislation and the creation of bureaucratic institutions could alone redeem us as a nation, we wouldn’t find ourselves in such a sorry mess. Populism has brought us to where we are today; populism of the kind being witnessed at Midan-e-Ramlila (and before that at Tihar Square) will only leave us stuck deeper in the mire of hopelessness. Anna Hazare is right up to a point. India does need a second freedom movement, but not to recreate the Inspector Raj of our socialist past. We need a second freedom movement to secure economic freedom and freedom from a system that intrudes into every aspect of our lives. That’s how democracies have dealt with the menace of corruption elsewhere in the world.
India needs reforms, not a super babu
August 20, 2011 10:22:52 PM
Kanchan Gupta
We were at Checkpoint Charlie. There it was, in real life no more than an unimpressive white prefabricated cabin with a grey slanting roof straddling the famous crossing in the Berlin Wall that had come to symbolise the Cold War. This is where spies were swapped on smoky, rain-washed evenings; a gap in the Iron Curtain immortalised by writers of brooding yet brilliant fiction like John le Carre. Just in case those crossing Checkpoint Charlie from West Berlin into East Berlin were unaware of their passage from ‘freedom’ into ‘servitude’, a large board had been put up for their benefit: “You are leaving the American sector.” These six words were repeated in Russian and French. In brief, you had been warned. It was a bright summer day when the bus in which I was travelling crossed into East Berlin after a brief halt at Checkpoint Charlie. A rather well-built East German woman with a stern, unsmiling face, muscles straining at the fabric of her severely cut dark brown Army jacket, had boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, and sold each one of us a ticket, a rectangular piece of cardboard printed with undecipherable details. Her job done, the bus began to inch its way through the narrow opening; within seconds we had made our passage from West into East. A short distance later, the bus stopped again. An official boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, checked our tickets, made elaborate notes in a leather-bound logbook, and disembarked, without so much as saying guten morgen or danke — he was clearly not paid for that. A kilometre or so away, the bus was flagged down at a barricade. A third official, jowly and scowling, boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, checked our tickets, and made further elaborate notes in his logbook, also leather-bound. That, however, was not the end of the passport-ticket story. When we disembarked from the bus, we were made to pass through a turnstile which would turn only after we handed over our passports and tickets to a woman who bore remarkable similarity to Herta Bothe of Bergen-Belsen fame and she pressed a switch behind the counter where she stood, her face passive and her gaze steely. The passport was returned, the ticket was retained as it was ‘state property’. I later learned that the multiple checks were to ensure that the previous official had done his or her job and meticulously followed all rules. Each one of them would file a report to his or her boss, who would then file a report to higher officials, who would then compare and match the reports and file yet another report recording their satisfaction or pointing out lapses. Those reports would then be put in a file and the file would be filed in a high-security Stasi building somewhere for future reference. As for the tickets, they would be recycled till the cardboard crumbled; the remains would then be sent to a recycling plant to produce fresh tickets. A very elaborate system, and foolproof too, just that it did not prevent the edifice from collapsing after the first brick in the Berlin Wall was dislodged in the winter of 1989, leading to the fall of the sprawling Soviet Empire. Memories of that summer day’s experience at Checkpoint Charlie and beyond came flooding back last Friday as I heard Ms Kiran Bedi addressing the crowd at Ramlila Maidan, or Midan-e-Ramlila if we must borrow metaphors since Anna Hazare’s do-or-die crusade against corruption which has captured the popular imagination is being compared with Egypt’s Midan-e-Tahrir, or Tahrir Square, ‘revolution’ by easily excitable though appallingly ill-informed ‘revolutionaries’ waving the National Tricolour and chanting “Azadi”, demanding that the Jan Lok Pal Bill, which they of course haven’t even read, be adopted and implemented without a comma or full stop being changed. There was Ms Bedi on the dais, waving at the crowds and swaying to their sloganeering. “You don’t need to know what is there in the Jan Lok Pal Bill we have drafted,” she assured the cheering masses, “All you need to know is that we (and she emphasised the ‘we’ with a great degree of emphasis) will get you 101. Do you know what is 101? Let me tell you what is 101. If someone asks you for a bribe, no matter where you are, whether in a city or in a village, you will have to just dial 101 and immediately Jan Lok Pal inspectors will rush to the place with cameras and recorders.” Here she took a pause as the masses went into a frenzy of cheering, assured that a solution to the gargantuan problem of corruption was just three digits away. “And… listen to me… and, if 101 doesn’t do its job, you can dial 102. Other Jan Lok Pal inspectors will rush to your help and take the first lot of inspectors to task,” Ms Bedi was in full flow now, “You will ask me, what if 102 doesn’t work? Don’t worry, you can then dial 103…” I didn’t bother to listen any further, but possibly she went on to explain how 104 would monitor 103, and 105 would keep a watch on 104, and so on. In other words, what we are being promised is a Soviet-style parallel bureaucracy with Soviet-style inspectors to enforce a Soviet-style law in a Gestapo state which will rule not on the strength of respect for the law but fear of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Big Brother. What is being demanded are not measures to remove the primary reason for corruption, a bloated Government with a humongous bureaucracy, but a law that will make Government even bigger — a return to the days of Inspector Raj which we had to cope with for the privilege of living in a joyless socialist India wrapped with endless red tape. Everybody knows that the route to a corruption-free India lies through radical reforms that will ensure minimum government, maximum governance. But that’s a tedious process which will also mark the end of entitlements. So, what we are being asked to adopt instead is a second version of the hugely wasteful NREGA which has bred further corruption and thievery at all levels of our administration. The new job-generating scheme shall be called JLPEGA — it will create sufficient employment to keep retiredbabus, busybodies and self-appointed monitors of rectitude in clover at the taxpayers’ expense. Sadly, our political class, denuded of credibility, has so compromised itself that it lacks the guts to take on those who claim to represent all of India but have nothing to show, apart from a well-choreographed made-for-television protest, to substantiate that claim. Strait is the gate and narrow the path to redemption. If legislation and the creation of bureaucratic institutions could alone redeem us as a nation, we wouldn’t find ourselves in such a sorry mess. Populism has brought us to where we are today; populism of the kind being witnessed at Midan-e-Ramlila (and before that at Tihar Square) will only leave us stuck deeper in the mire of hopelessness. Anna Hazare is right up to a point. India does need a second freedom movement, but not to recreate the Inspector Raj of our socialist past. We need a second freedom movement to secure economic freedom and freedom from a system that intrudes into every aspect of our lives. That’s how democracies have dealt with the menace of corruption elsewhere in the world.
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