A Winner All The Way

The Great Reformer has won the day - and lives to fight another day. Despite his all too obvious lack of leadership qualities, Manmohan Singh has been a winner all the way: first as a techno-bureaucrat, then as Finance minister and now as the Prime Minister of the country. As Finance Minister in the minority PV Narasimha Rao government in the early nineties, the good doctor administered the tottering Indian economy perhaps its bitterest ever shock therapy by ushering in the most sweeping reforms imaginable and – wonder of wonders – not only got away with it but has actually been feted for it ever since. While there was never any doubt about the fact that the former Governor of Reserve Bank knew his economics, he was certainly a political greenhorn when Rao pulled him out of nowhere to make him the Finance minister of the country. But Manmohan was nothing if not a quick learner – even in a field which had never been his domain. And he put the lessons in realpolitik that he learnt under the tutelage of perhaps the most underrated Prime Minister of the country to good effect when he became Prime Minister himself. Having seen from close quarters how the wily Rao weathered the very real threat to his minority government in 1993 by scripting the infamous JMM bribery case, Manmohan did a Rao in August 2008 to save his crippled government which had just lost its crutch in the shape of the Left. More than four years after the event, I still remember every single detail of the dramatic happenings on that eventful day. In my mind’s eye, I can still see him coming out of Parliament, V Narayansami and others in tow, beaming from ear to ear and flashing the ‘V’ sign from various angles for the benefit of the camerapersons in attendance. [The visual has actually become a bit of a signature tune for MMS given the zillion times that it has been aired on television as a ‘File Shot’ ever since. If you are a little attentive, you can watch it on TV even now, generally with the headlines.] Television channels, on their part, kept beaming the bearded winner all day long with the contemporary hit ‘Singhh is Kingg’ playing loudly on the background. It was the day Singh won his first real political battle. But it was also the day he lost his innocence. Asked by an enterprising reporter about allegations of crores of rupees changing hands to save his government, the just anointed Kingg asked a counter-question by way of an answer, “But where is the proof?”, knowing fully well that no power on earth can unearth the ‘proof’ now that he had weathered the challenge to his Prime Ministership. How true he was!! He has a Teflon-like quality that no other politician living or dead has/had. Nothing sticks to him. He may preside over the most brazen act of bribery to save his government, but nobody has so much as pointed a finger at him. It has all been duly blamed on the dirty-tricks department of the Congress. He may acquiesce in the massive loot of the exchequer in the form of the spectacular spectrum scam, but nobody is ready to believe that he facilitated it knowingly. Even now when it has been proved beyond any shade of doubt that the systematic selling (it was not even selling, but pure and simple gifting away) of the family silver, nay coal, happened right under his watch as the Coal minister, the commentariat is busy singing homilies to his ‘personal integrity’. Pray, what use is it if the man with this precious attribute has no compunction whatsoever in putting up with people utterly devoid of this precious attribute all around him. Years ago, when the Harshad Mehta scam blew on the face of an unsuspecting nation still recovering from the after effects of Dr Singh’s shock therapy, Manmohan had said he was ‘not going to lose any sleep over it.’ May be we should have paid greater attention to the import of what he had said back in 1993. May be we should have known that the good doctor could sail through the longest-ever procession of the most brazen scandals without losing any sleep over it. The only thing over which Manmohan loses sleep, it would appear, is when the natives do not understand the ‘economics’ behind the hike in fuel prices/cap on the number of subsidized LPG cylinders, when the courts tell the government to distribute rice rotting in the open due to lack of storage space free to the hungry or when the’ The Washington Post’ dubs him a ‘tragic figure’. For all his benign visage, Manmohan Singh has a vicious side to him which bursts through the carefully cultivated exterior every now and then. Odias who watched his televised address to the nation on Friday could not have missed a phrase that he used during his address: ‘Paisa ped par nahin ugta.’ [‘Money does not grow on trees’]. It was a phrase he was using publicly for the second time. The first time was when MPs from Odisha had gone to request him to for a special package for the state. When the PM’s insensitive and below-the-belt comment became a raging controversy in the state, he clarified that he was ‘just joking’. I wonder which one is more offensive; the original comment or the ‘joke’ part!! Just as Narasimha Rao needs to be complimented for spotting the man for the moment at a time of great economic crisis, the Empress of Congress needs to be given 10 out of 10 for spotting the politician in Manmohan. Just as his mentor kept Sonia Gandhi at bay for as long as he was at the helm of the party and the government, Manmohan has kept the perennial crown-prince waiting in the wings for as long as he is at the helm. Bravo Manmohan! [This column was first published in The Political and Business Daily.]

The Sky Is The Limit

Aseem Trivedi’s take on the all pervasive corruption in the country is no great shakes as a cartoon. It lacks the understated humour of a RK Laxman or the subtlety of a Sudhir Dar. It is anything but imaginative in the depiction of the celebrated lions in the national symbol of Ashoka Stambha in the shape of wolves, the substitution of the Ashoka Chakra with the danger symbol of a skull and bones and the pun on the slogan ‘Satyameva Jayate’. It is almost child-like in the simplicity of its message and in the unpretentiousness of its expression. In fact, it appears more like the work of a student venting out his anger against a particularly stern teacher in the form of a badly drawn caricature of the teacher on the blackboard than the outpouring of a mature artiste pontificating on the alarming proportions that the epidemic called corruption has assumed in the country. But sedition??? The charge is laughable and needs to be dismissed with the contempt that it richly deserves. The Indian State, the Constitution and our National symbols must be on very shaky foundations if they are threatened by the work of a mediocre activist cartoonist. Our national symbol can’t possibly be so fragile as to break at the anguished cry of a young man disturbed by corruption all round him. But then what better can one expect in a country where the Prime Minister’s Office (not the Prime Minister, we are told) gets worked up over an article published in a foreign journal describing the presiding deity of that office as a ‘tragic figure’? While on the subject of sedition, I am reminded of the Laxman Choudhury case some two years back in which the Mohana-based journalist was booked under this relic of the British era and put behind bars for full 79 days for nothing more sinister than the fact that a packet containing some Maoist literature had been sent to him. He was not even caught in possession of the leaflets which had only been addressed to him. But that did not stop the police from booking him for sedition, among other charges, the lower courts from upholding the charge and the Chief Minister from refusing to do anything about it despite a delegation of senior journalists meeting him twice and urging him to intervene. [I remember wondering at the time whether, with the abundance of Maoist correspondence at my residence and the intermittent Maoist calls on my cell phone, I too was not a fit case to be charged with sedition!] For those who do not know, Laxman Choudhury was no closet Maoist or even a Maoist sympathizer. He had been pounced upon by the officer-in-charge of the local police station for his temerity in doing a story for his newspaper on the alleged nexus of the local police with ganja traders. It might be of interest to the readers of this column (I hope there are some) that, in a case of divine justice, the same officer was caught red-handed by vigilance personnel while accepting a bribe of Rs 10, 000 from a ganja trader!! But let us return to Aseem Trivedi and his cartoon. To those arguing that everything, including freedom of expression, has its limits, I would like to pose two questions. First, what use is the freedom of expression, supposedly a fundamental right guaranteed to every citizen of the country by the Constitution, if can’t even allow the innocent, albeit crude, expression of anguish over a phenomenon that is tormenting millions of Indians? Second, who fixes the ‘limits’? Those whose heckles are raised at the mere mention of the Gandhi family? Or those who howl at the Prime Minister being called a tragic hero? On second thoughts, why blame just the Congress variety of politicians? Our entire political class put on televised display a palpable ignorance of the concept called freedom of expression, a brazen disregard for a contrarian point of view and an unhealthy level of intolerance during the debate in Parliament over a cartoon in NCERT school books. Babasaheb and Panditji, the dramatis personae in the cartoon, must be turning violently in their graves!! The danger with keeping the bar low in the matter of such a precious thing as freedom of expression (not for nothing did Indira Gandhi feel the need to abrogate this fundamental right during the Emergency) is that it would keep coming progressively down till it reaches a point where any utterance that casts even a minor aspersion on a politician could land somebody in jail. It would be the freedom of expression of the mute. The litmus test for curbs, if any, on the freedom of expression of an individual or an organization has to be whether it incites violence, communal or otherwise. But curiously, no government has mustered the courage to put restrictions on the ‘freedom of expression’ of the Bal Thackerays and the Badruddin Ahmeds in the country even as the ‘long arms of law’ homes in on the Aseem Trivedis, the Binayak Sens and the Laxman Choudhurys. Nearer home, a Jagdish Tytler can get away with instigating a crowd of boisterous Congress supporters to go berserk and launch a murderous attack on a police woman. But all governments would move heaven and earth when someone lampoons their ‘honourable’ leaders as the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal showed a few months back. If such intolerant curbs on the freedom of speech are condoned, the day is not far off when the government machinery, with all the powers and gadgets at its disposal, would eavesdrop even on roadside, drawing room or office gossip (some of which could invite calls for death sentence, given the level of intolerance of our politicians) and haul up both the speakers and the listeners on the charge of ‘sedition’ or ‘waging war against the State.’ The sooner the sedition charge is banished from the IPC, the better it would be for Indian democracy. As for that most precious gift called ‘freedom of expression’ given by the Constitution of India to every citizen, THE SKY IS THE LIMIT.

The Toughest Job in India

Guess who has the most difficult job in India today? No, it is not Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Nor is it UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi. It is not the editor of the venerable Old Lady of Boribunder or the captain of Team India either. Hard to believe though it is, it is the Congress’ man for all seasons, Manish Tiwari. True, he was banished into the sidelines and barred from the television studios by the party high command for a while after his intemperate outburst against Anna Hazare at the height of the Anna wave last year. But after the erudite Abhishek Manu Sanghvi shot himself in the foot with his indiscretions with a lady lawyer, the grand old party had no choice but to fall back on the tried and trusted MP from Ferozepur. Since his reinstatement, he has been holding fort at TV studios every evening virtually single-handedly, performing the seemingly hopeless task of defending the indefensible with aplomb. [The portly Renuka Choudhury, a poor second choice, is good for comic relief with her inane comments and weird mannerisms. But when it comes to defending the party or the government against some serious, credible allegations of corruption or impropriety with meticulously dug out facts and carefully thought-out arguments, she is not a patch on Tiwari.] Being a lawyer has certainly helped Tiwari. But what has helped even more is his rare facility with the spoken word: the choice of words and phrases, the diction, the pitch, the subtle sense of humour, the gift of repartee, the ability to put on an expression .. you name it. More importantly, he shares all these attributes – and more - in the two most relevant languages for the spokesperson of a national party: English and Hindi. It is indeed rare for a person to be so good in two completely different languages. Tiwari’s is unquestionably the most unenviable job in the country right now. After all, not many would relish the prospect of being pounced upon by an increasingly combative media on a daily basis. A horde of blood-thirsty television reporters at the daily afternoon briefing and a no-holds barred television anchor in the evening – all in a day at the office! What makes the task particularly difficult is the fact that scams and scandal have tumbled out of the cupboards of the UPA government and the Congress party with a frequency that is too hot to handle for even the most stoic person. When he is not is answering a question on a corruption allegation against a minister, he is defending a leader accused of sexual misdemeanours. But Manish is rarely, if ever, fazed by the shrill, virulent nature of the questioning. He may lack the intellectual air of a Abhishek Manu Sanghvi. But make no mistake. He would do the defending just as efficiently - and often more effectively - because of his ability to become aggressive and shrill when the occasion demands – something that the balding senior lawyer clearly lacks. Watching Tiwari defend Union Tourism minister Subodh Kant Sahai on an English news channel the other day, I was amazed at his ability to turn the tables on the accuser – in this case the redoubtable Arnab Goswami. “Arnab Goswami”, he told the man feared by the highest and the mightiest in the land in a matter-of-fact voice, “cannot sit in judgment over something that has already been judicially adjudicated and by no less than the honourable High Court.” He was referring to the fact the Delhi High Court had thrown out a PIL against Sahai charging him with much the same malfeasance that has now led to a full-throttled cry for his resignation. ‘Does Arnab Goswami have any respect for the High Court?” he continued the harangue. Poor Arnab! He did not know where to hide and resorted to the easy option of leaving the floor open for Ravishankar Prasad, the BJP national spokesperson, to step in. Given the facts that had come to light since the Delhi High Court judgment - that Sahai had written to the Prime Minister recommending SKS Ispat’s case for coal block allocation, that the minister’s brother was not only a director in the company but was also present at the screening committee meeting that took the decision to allocate coal blocks to his company, the fact that the Prime Minister, who was then also the Coal minister, was in indecent hurry to accede to Sahai’s request and so on (all of which ‘Your Channel’ trumpeted all day long as its exclusive) – Tiwari’s bid to hide behind it would have been, in the hands of lesser mortals, an act of clutching at straws. But the wily lawyer turned the straw into a veritable handle to beat the anchor with. There are times when he can get exasperating. He can test your patience and – at times – make you feel like bashing him up black and blue. I personally know many people who just cannot stand the very sight of him. I have myself found his shrillness occasionally off-putting. But when I imagine the enormity of his task and the general aplomb with which he has been doing his unenviable job day after day, month after month, year after year and scandal after scandal, I often feel like doffing my hat to him. If you do not agree, just imagine yourself for a moment in his position and think about how you would have defended the blatant disregard for all cannons of fair play, the flagrant violation of all rules and norms and the rampant corruption that have marked the allocation of coal blocks – besides several other things - in the UPA regime and you would immediately understand what I mean. It is not easy defending the indefensible, is it? Well done, Manish!