Ajay Maken

In defence of Smriti Irani: Why Madhu and Maken are wrong

 smriti-irani

Vivek Kaul

So Smriti Irani cannot make for a good human resources development minister because she is not a graduate.
Or so we have been told by the likes of Madhu Kishwar and Ajay Maken.
In short, people who have degrees make for better politicians is the conclusion being drawn. But is that really the case?
Let’s take the case of a certain Lalu Prasad Yadav, who was the defacto Chief Minister of Bihar for more than 15 years. Lalu has a Bachelor of Laws and a Master in Political Science. How did his degrees make any difference?
During his rule Bihar went from bad to worse. In fact, when Lalu was questioned about the lack of development in the state, he was very open about admitting that development did not lead to votes.
Such was Lalu’s lack of belief in development that even money allocated to the state government by the Central government remained unspent. As Santhosh Mathew and Mick Moore write in a research paper titled State Incapacity by Design: Understanding the Bihar Story, “Despite the poverty of the state, the governments led by Lalu Prasad signally failed to spend the money actually available to them: ‘…Bihar has the country’s lowest utilisation rate for centrally funded programs, and it is estimated that the state forfeited one-fifth of central plan assistance during 1997–2000.’”
Interestingly, between 1997 and 2005, Rs 9,600 crore was allocated by the Ministry of Rural Development to Bihar. Around Rs 2,200 crore was not drawn. Of the amount that was drawn only 64% was spent.
During Lalu’s rule Bihar went from bad to worse and a whole generation lost out on progress. But yes, Lalu had two degrees.
Let’s take an even better example of former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh, a PhD from the University of Oxford. Now compare his degree to the mess that we have ended up with under him. Interestingly, most of our politicians who have a degree, tend to have a degree in law. How does that help in anything other than running the law ministry or the ministry of corporate affairs or other similar ministries? And that is assuming that having studied law, the politician understands its intricacies (not every lawyer has the same command on the subject like Arun Jaitley does).
If we take this argument further, what it means is that to become a minister an individual should be an expert in that particular area. So, a finance minister should either be an economist or a finance professional. Arun Jaitley is neither. A defence minister should have experience in the area of defence. So, doesn’t that make General V K Singh an excellent choice for being the defence minister?
Further, in order to get an individual with the right experience or a degree to head a ministry, one would be looking at technocrats all the time. So, then why bother about electing MPs at all?
This would mean moving onto a more American form of government where the President is elected by the people and is allowed to choose his team, a lot of whom are technocrats who have the required experience.
Given this, insisting that a minister have a degree, doesn’t make much sense in the present system of government that we have.
That’s the general part of the argument. Then there is also the specific part regarding Smriti Irani and Congress’ criticism of her lack of a degree. To her credit Irani is a successful professional, who has risen on her own, in a very competitive television industry.
Also, what one needs as a minister is the ability to administer. Whether she has that or not, we will come to know in the time to come.
The Congress party is in no position to criticize her. One of their foremost leaders Rajiv Gandhi, never completed any degree after leaving the Doon School. He was the prime minister of the country. His mother Indira, never completed her degree at Oxford. Their current leader Sonia Gandhi’s educational qualifications are also nothing to write home about. So, they really are not in a position to criticise Irani. It’s like the pot calling the kettle black.
To make a totally different comparison, all the Ivy League MBAs, PhDs in Maths and Physics who worked on the Wall Street, created a major part of the financial crises that the world is currently going through.
To conclude, there is not much of a link between having a degree and having the ability to govern. Look at the mess Kapil Sibal, who held the human resources development ministry between May 2009 and October 2012, made in the education sector. He had got his LLM degree from the Harvard Law School.

 The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 28, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

Cong trying to do a Romney in Gujarat by attacking Modi


Vivek Kaul
The Congress campaign in Gujarat is getting desperate. Sample this.
“When it comes to GDP growth, Gujarat is lagging behind states like Bihar, Odhisa and Chhattishgarh,” the Union Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma said while addressing a public meeting in Gandhinagar. “Narendra Modi says Gujarat is most progressive, but if you have been to other states, Bihar, Odisha and Chattisgarh are much ahead,” he added.
When Indian politicians start using terms like Gross Domestic Product growth with voters you know that they don’t have much else to talk about.
Data from the planning commission shows that the state gross domestic product (GDP) at current prices (which does not adjust for inflation) of Bihar, Odisha and Chattisgarh grew at the rates of 20.4%, 16% and 15.3% in 2011-2012.
In comparison Gujarat grew at 15.8%. So the economic growth (which is what the state GDP measures) of Bihar and Odisha was faster than that of Gujarat. But Gujarat grew faster than Chattisgarh.
But as the old saying goes we should be comparing Apples with Apples and not Apples with Oranges. And to add to that as one of my teachers used to say “percentages should be used carefully lest we draw the wrong conclusions”.
Let me deviate a little and give an example to explain what I am basically trying to say.  Let us say you earn Rs 10,000 a month and your income jumps to Rs 20,000 a month, a gain of 100%. On the other hand let’s say you earn Rs 1 lakh a month and your income jumps to Rs 1.3 lakh a month, or a gain of 30%.
So even though the percentage gain in the first case is more, the absolute gain is more in the second case. Hence, when we are talking percentages it is important to keep the base number in mind. So Bihar did grow faster than Gujarat but it was because of what economists like to call the “base effect”.
Gujarat’s state GDP in 2010-2011 was Rs 5,13,173 crore. It went up by 15.8% to Rs 5,94,369 crore in 2011-2012. In comparison Bihar’s GDP for 2010-2011 was Rs 2,17,814 crore. And it grew by 20.4% to Rs 2,62,230 crore in 2011-2012.
The point being Bihar is growing on a lower base and that’s why the percentage growth is higher. The same argument holds for Odisha as well.
The other point that comes here is the population of the state. Bihar’s state GDP went up by Rs 44,416 crore to Rs 2,62,230 crore. This gain of Rs 44,416 crore was spread across a population of 10.38 crore people. This implies a gain of Rs 4,279 per individual who lived in Bihar.
Now let’s do the same calculation for the state of Gujarat. The GDP of the state went up by Rs 81,196 crore to Rs 5,94,369 crore. This gain of Rs 81,196 crore was spread across a population of Gujarat is 6.04 crore as per the 2011 census. Hence, this implies a gain Rs 13,447 per individual who lives in Gujarat.
This basically means that the growth in Gujarat at an individual level was three times that of Bihar in 2011-2012. Hence, Sharma’s argument that Bihar grew faster than Gujarat doesn’t really work.
And Sharma is not the only one attacking Modi. Ajay Maken, the youngest minister in the Union Cabinet alleged at a rally that the ruling BJP government was neck-deep in corruption in the name of development. Well that’s like the pot calling the kettle black. As has been proven time and over the last few years, India hasn’t seen a more corrupt government than the current UPA government ruling the country.
Mani Shankar Aiyer, a former minister in the UPA government, called Modi Ravana and asatya ka saudagar. He also called him a paani purush. Congress Rajya Sabha MP Hussain Dalwai, said “Modi is just a mouse before Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel”.
Bharat Solanki, Union Minister for Drinking Water and Sanitation, decided to beat all the abuses being hurled at Modi and termed him as “Nathuram Godse” and alleged that “under the BJP rule in Gandhi’s Gujarat not truth but lies carry more currency”.
Elections campaigns can get nasty. But the Congress doesn’t seem to have learned from its 2007 blunder when Sonia Gandhi called Modi a “maut ka saudagar”. While it might have sounded like a brilliant turn of phrase to the Congress speechwriter who wrote Sonia’s speech, it clearly backfired on the party.
The issue here is what does the Congress attack Narendra Modi with? Economic development as I showed above is healthy in Gujarat. It is one of the few states in the country which has a power surplus. The roads are ‘just’ fine and the cities are largely clean. Modi doesn’t really have any big corruption charges against him unlike the Congress government as well as the party.
So what do you do in a situation like this? You get personal and attack on Modi’s big blip, the 2002 riots in the state, and hope that it creates enough fear in the minds of the voter and he decides to vote for the Congress.
But does the issue really matter to the major portion of the voters in Gujarat? The answer is no. As Aakar Patel, a known Modi baiter, recently wrote in the Open magazine “Gujaratis like to think they are great national­ists. It doesn’t occur to them that India suffers every time they triumphantly keep memories of the massacre alive, by backing the man first unwilling or unable to stop it, now too incom­petent to prosecute its participants. They are voting Caesar(i.e. Modi) back to power.”
Hence, Congress’ negative campaign isn’t really going to work. In fact, it might work in  favour of Modi, who will continue to espouse the cause of Gujarati Asmita and portray himself as a lone gladiator taking on the Congress baddies.
Also negative campaigns do not really work. Take the case of the recent Presidential elections in the United States. Romney’s attacks on Obama got too personal towards the end of the campaign. Donald Trump, a Romney supporter, wanted to see the college records of Obama. The insinuation here was that Obama may got into college in America as a foreign exchange student from Indonesia.  Trump also wanted access to Obama’s passport. The insinuation here was that would allow him (i.e Trump) to prove something Muslim about Obama.
As marketing guru Al Ries told me in a recent interview on Firstpost “Mitt Romney spent most of his time attacking Barack Obama. That’s the wrong strategy. What a politician needs to do is to offer a positive concept first and then point out that his or her opponent lacks this concept.”
Some of the biggest state elections in India have seen winning parties run extremely positive campaigns. Akhilesh Yadav ran the umeed ki cycle campaign in Uttar Pradesh and Mamata Banerjee ran the poriborton campaign in West Bengal.  While they are busy making a mess of the states after coming to power, but then that is a different issue all together.
In comparison. the Congress party doesn’t really have any strategy in place when it comes to taking on Narendra Modi. And what it is doing clearly won’t work.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on November 12, 2012.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer.  He can be reached at [email protected])