Chanakya's New Manifesto: To Resolve the Crisis Within India (2 page)

To invoke Chanakya is not to take refuge in India’s glorious past and hope that magically those days will return. On the contrary, it is to derive inspiration from the past, since the past tells us that India is capable of new and audacious thought. Nations, without being mesmerized by the past, can leverage it to derive the right lessons. A people, without merely parroting the past, can study it objectively, in order to forge a better future.

An objective study will reveal that Chanakya was not just a thinker, pragmatist and strategist for whom the end always justified the means. Uninformed representations paint him as some cynical precursor of Machiavelli, whose only aim was to ruthlessly perpetuate political power through any means. The truth is that far from being a practitioner of immoral or unethical politics, his first concern was the creation of a just state. He believed that a polity should draw its inspiration from dharma, or right conduct. But, equally, as a votary of practical statecraft, he did not believe in impractical idealism. And, in furthering the national interest, or countering threats to it, he genuinely believed that, in such matters, the ends did justify the means. India should internalize this sort of clear-cut thinking. We have had too much idealistic posturing (which we mostly neither believe in nor practice); this has unfortunately been at the cost of the national interest.

Obviously, the bulk of Chanakya’s administrative prescriptions were contextual to his times and don’t concern us. But his overarching philosophy does. As a civilization, India has shown a remarkable talent in reinventing itself. That is the secret of our survival through an incredible 5,000-year-long journey. We have been known as a civilization in which ‘moulik soch’ or the power of original thought was cultivated. This is a legacy that we can, and must, revive. This may sound difficult today, when in so many areas of our national life we have nurtured and rewarded mediocrity. We have become complacent prisoners of mechanical formulations, and have forgotten how to dream and think. But we need to remind ourselves that we are not a nation of intellectual pygmies. Ours is a civilization that has produced giants in an infinite number of fields, and as a nation we can create the stage for their successors to contribute once more.

We are fortunate that our founding fathers bequeathed to us the framework of a functioning democratic order through a farsighted constitution. We do not need to throw this aside, or to transplant, borrow or mimic what others have done. But what we do need to do is to make the system that was bequeathed to us work. For it is obvious to anyone except those who deliberately choose to be blind, that the current manner of functioning of our nation is unacceptable. Our future is at stake. The future of our youth and upcoming generations is at stake. There is no time to be lost.

Chanakya’s New Manifesto
has been written in response to this imperative. As a body of concrete solutions, it can and should be challenged by those who may have better and more effective solutions to offer. Not all the prescriptions that it puts forward may be infallible. It has been written with urgency, but also with humility. It tries to tell the truth without qualifications, because we have no time left for sterile sophistry. But
Chanakya’s New Manifesto
does not claim to have a monopoly on the truth. It is not written with an ulterior agenda, nor is it against any one individual. However, it is uncompromisingly
for
India. Beyond petty egoism, or intellectual one-upmanship, or partisan narrowness, its purpose is to initiate an urgent and intense nationwide debate on CHANGE.

India, in order to make its real tryst with destiny, must change. We have the potential to be a great power, and must find a way to achieve that goal. If this book takes us further in that direction, it would have more than fulfilled its purpose.

THE CRISIS

A 5,000-year-old civilization and a young republic are today at a crossroads. Between the hopes of 1947 and the challenges of the twenty-first century. Between stagnation and growth. Between a plateau of its own making and the final push towards a legitimate place at the high table of the world.

Why are we standing paralyzed on the threshold of destiny? Our civilization has the resilience to overcome. It is characterized by antiquity, continuity, diversity, assimilation and amazing peaks of refinement. In an unbroken journey that stretches from the dawn of time, we are at a new curve, that of a young democracy. Can we afford to betray the cumulative legacy of our past by failing to carry this project to its full potential? We cannot. But we are dangerously close to the brink. The rise and fall of nations is marked by precisely such turning points. The distance between success and failure is much smaller than we think. Sixty-five years to get our act right is more than enough. Neither the world, nor our people, can wait forever.

In order to tackle the current malaise, the trivial has to be sifted out of the substantive, the transient from the urgent. Given the subcontinental-size canvas of India, we have to be rigorously focused when it comes to deciding what needs our immediate attention. This is especially so since not everything that has happened thus far is bad or worthy of rejection. There are good stories which do us proud, and which we need a lot more of. Our approach, therefore, must be to take a balanced view, and then without bias, prejudice or exaggeration, outline a prioritized path of action.

After careful thought, I have shortlisted five areas which, in my view, are the principal cause of our current predicament. Entire books can be written on each of these areas, but that is not my intention here. For our purpose, what will suffice at this point is to briefly give an overview of the state of play in each of these areas so as to profile the grim crisis we are facing today, and then, subsequently, drill down to figure out what exactly needs to be done to correct the problem or problems.

1. GOVERNANCE: The people of a nation have a fundamental right—those whom they elect must govern. When they don’t, this fundamental right is criminally violated. However, in recent times, as a result of the perennial instability of coalitional politics, where all the energies of our leaders go towards political survival—a subject we shall discuss in greater detail later—governance has come to a near standstill. If some governance does happen, it is sporadic, a case of too little too late, and is motivated by the crisis at hand—it is not part of a coherent and sustained vision. This manner of functioning does not discredit democracy itself, but only the way in which it operates in India, especially when it relates to governance.

This is not to underestimate the size of the challenge before us. India has the largest number of the abjectly poor in the world. It also has the highest number of people who cannot read or write. There are more malnourished children in India than in all of sub-Saharan Africa. Our infant mortality rate is unacceptably high. Malaria still claims more lives in India than anywhere else on the planet. Our track record in dealing with these matters even after six decades of independence needs very serious introspection.

The paralysis of governance on other key issues is also manifestly evident. Economic reform is languishing. True, an adverse international economic environment prevails today, with economic growth in the US, Europe and Japan languishing; still, the ineffectual management of our economy is apparent to even the uninformed observer. India’s economic growth plunged to a nine year low in the January-March quarter of 2012, down to 5.3 per cent from the 6.1 per cent of the quarter before. Significantly, the trajectory of decline tells its own story: from 8 per cent in the first quarter to 6.7 per cent in the second, 6.1 per cent in the third, and 5.3 per cent in the fourth. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) have in fact predicted that overall growth will fall further—down to 4.9 per cent according to the IMF. Manufacturing output grew by a dismal 2.5 per cent; the mining sector actually turned negative at minus 0.9 per cent; and, agriculture was back to its usual growth rate of 2.8 per cent from a rare high of 7 per cent in 2010-2011. Soaring deficits, shrinking exports, a plummeting rupee, sluggish markets, falling investments, international ratings close to junk status, and slowing internal consumption define the economy, even though it is considerably insulated from external factors by a burgeoning middle class which continues to fuel demand.

Decisions on a host of urgent initiatives are pending. These relate to greater public sector autonomy; a uniform tax regimen; more initiatives for foreign investment, especially in the sectors of financial services, insurance and pension funds; laws for the land market; mining deregulation; disinvestment, and radical reforms to bring in regulatory and transparency mechanisms. Some steps—such as the decision to allow Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail, and the partial reduction in subsidy for diesel and LPG—after years of governance paralysis are simply not enough.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw more capital flee India for investment abroad than inflows: $29 billion left the country while only $23 billion came in as investment. In 2010, FDI fell by a dramatic 31 per cent, although global investors were still investing in emerging markets. As a management specialist noted, ‘There is a real cost of poor governance and India is most certainly paying the price for it.’
¹

A number of crucial bills in the field of education are also pending. Given the fact that India has among the youngest populations in the world, education and the advancement of skills of our youth needs to be tackled on a war footing. However, far from getting the priority attention of the government, we have not even had a full-time education minister for some time now.

Agriculture has been neglected for far too long. Much required fresh thinking on the issues of credit, inputs, irrigation, research, storage transport and distribution has just not happened. Instead, foodgrains can be seen rotting in the open while thousands of people go to sleep hungry, and farmers committing suicide has become routine news. Expanding the area under irrigation should have become a national priority too, but allocations for this vital sector have actually gone down in many critical states, such as Maharashtra (down by 6 per cent), where even the sums that have been allocated (
6,849 crore) are mired in a major corruption scam. Dozens upon dozens of irrigation projects remain pending. The target for irrigation set by the government is short by eleven million hectares. This is the state of affairs when it is known that a majority of Indians, including our poorest citizens, depend on agriculture for their livelihood, and that an agricultural growth rate hovering below 3 per cent is just not enough to ameliorate their lives.

Almost all infrastructure projects are lagging behind schedule, be it roads, ports, power generation, water supply, airports, urban amenities like sewage, drainage and waste disposal, or mass transit. The government’s principal agency for the development of roads—National Highways Authority of India (NHAI)—was allowed to go without a chief for almost a year. Corrupt state electricity boards alone siphon off illicit funds amounting to
70,000 crore annually. We have the world’s fourth largest resources of coal, but mismanagement has led to our dependence on imports, and even then this essential mineral is in perpetual short supply.

The railways too is on the brink of disaster, with an accident a month, even as the ministers in charge spend more time in their state capitals than in Rail Bhavan. According to
India Today
, Mukul Roy, the former railways minister, averaged only about four days a month in his office in nearly five months on the job. Inaction in one area impacts the performance of others. For instance, 70 per cent of infrastructure projects are delayed because we are still saddled with an antiquated Land Acquisition Act dating back to 1894, and haven’t been able to pass a much-needed new bill.

Meanwhile, inflation, which hits the common man the hardest, remains a perennial worry. While negative external factors like the rising price of oil surely matter, there is also the issue of management here. The discovery of fresh oil deposits, which needs to have been taken up with urgency considering the degree of our dependence on this commodity, is far below the optimum. The rise in food prices is directly linked to the government’s abject failure in tackling problems of procurement, storage, transport and distribution.