Manish Tewari

Vinod Rai has had the last laugh on Coalgate. Here’s why

Inclusive Governance: Enabling Capability, Disabling Resistance

Vivek Kaul

In an interview with the Business Standard in September 2013, Jairam Ramesh was asked why the Congress party was losing ground so badly in urban India. “Because of the bhumihar from Ghazipur,” Ramesh replied. He was referring to the former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, Vinod Rai, who had retired from his post in May 2013. The CAG in a series of reports had exposed the wrongdoings of the government.
As Rai writes in Not Just an Accountant—The Diary of the Nation’s Conscience Keeper “Jairam Ramesh was a regular visitor to the CAG headquarters for discussions on the audit of the national rural employment guarantee programme. His discussions did indeed lend value. In one of the conversations with me, he asked why N.K.Singh, the Rajya Sabha MP representing the Janata Dal(United), used to refer to me not only as a bhumihar but as a ‘bhumihar from Ghazipur’. I told him I did know what it meant.” Rai further writes that even his caste was brought into prominence, “and this after sixty-seven years of independence.”
Ramesh’s quip against Rai was a part of a series of statements made by leaders of the Congress party to discredit him. This after, the CAG had meticulously gone about exposing wrongdoings of the government in the telecom, coal, sports and aviation sectors.
Manish Tewari, the Congress leader who can speak on just about anything, said that the “R-virus has infected the Indian growth story. The R-virus stands for a phenomenon were responsible individuals decide to become loose cannons.” On another occasion Tewari said “When individuals decide to go rogue, institutions suffer. That possibly has the most detrimental effect on the India growth story.” Sharad Pawar, who is a part of the UPA, and was the food and agriculture minister in the UPA government said “CAG has taken certain decisions that have created a different atmosphere in the country… I haven’t seen anything like this in the forty-five years of my career as a politician.” Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, went on to claim that “untrained staff [is] auditing CAG reports.” The business lobby ASSOCHAM even went to the extent of releasing advertisements which said that CAG reports were sending wrong messages. The advertisement went on to state “The CAG’s conclusions over the 57 coal block allotment appear to have been arrived at without taking all facts into consideration. Only one of the 57 blocks has gone into production.”
The then finance minister P Chidambaram even went to the extent of saying that the government had faced no loss from giving away coal blocks free to private and public sector companies. “If coal is not mined, where is the loss? The loss will only occur if coal is sold at a certain price or undervalued,”Chidambaram had said.
In order to understand this statement we need to go back to the early 1990s. The government at that point of time realized that enough coal was not being produced. The Coal Mines(Nationalisation) Act was amended with effect from June 9, 1993. This was done largely on account of the inability of Coal India Ltd (CIL), which produces most of India’s coal, to produce enough coal.
The coal production in 1993-94 was 246.04 million tonnes, up by 3.3% from the previous year. This rate was not going to increase any time soon as newer projects had been hit by delays and cost over-runs, as still often happens in India. As the Economic Survey of 1994-95 pointed out “As on December 31, 1994, out of 71 projects under implementation in the coal sector, 22 projects are bedevilled by time and cost over-runs. On an average, the time over-run per project is about 38 months. There is urgent need to improve project implementation in the coal sector.”
The idea, as the Economic Survey of 1994-1995 pointed out, was to “encourage private sector investment in the coal sector, the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act, 1973, was amended with effect from June 9, 1993, for operation of captive coal mines by companies engaged in the production of iron and steel, power generation and washing of coal in the private sector.”
The amendment to the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act 1973 allowed companies which were in the business of producing power and iron and steel, to own coal mines for their captive use. Hence, the coal that these companies produced in these mines was to be used to feed into the production of power and iron and steel. Any excess coal was to be handed over to the local subsidiary of the Coal India Ltd.
Between 1993 and 2011, 195 coal blocks were given away for free to public and private sector companies for captive use. Most of these free coal blocks were given away between 2004 and 2011. Nevertheless even by 2011-2012, these coal blocks produced only 36.9 million tonnes of coal. This amounted to around 6.8% of the total production of 539.94 million tonnes during the course of that year.
And because very little coal was being produced in these captive mines, this led Chidambaram and the industry lobby Assocham to put forward the argument that since coal was not being mined how did the government face any losses? This was a really stupid argument to make. The government handed over a natural asset free to private and public sector players. They, in turn, were not able to mine coal from it quickly enough. How does that mean that the government did not face any losses? It does not change the fact that coal blocks were essentially handed over for free.
As Rai puts it in his book: “I thought any prudent and concerned industry body would have questioned the urgency to allot when the allottees had not even commenced mining. But then, since every person who wanted to display his loyalty to the government was hastening to take potshots at the CAG, why not an industry body?”
Interestingly, Manmohan Singh explained the inability of the private coal producers to start producing coal quickly enough by saying “it is true that the private parties that were allocated captive coal blocks could not achieve their production targets. This could be partly due to the cumbersome processes involved in getting statutory clearances.”
This Rai says is a defeatist argument. As he writes “This does appear to be a defeatist argument; if the government is aware that the processes are cumbersome and accords the process urgency, it is incumbent on the government to take steps to ensure speedy clearances.”
The CAG came in for heavy criticism for coming up with a loss figure of Rs 1,86,000 crore for these coal blocks being given away free by the government. In his book, Rai explains with great clarity how this number was arrived at. The CAG worked with most conservative estimates while coming up with this number. While calculating the loss the CAG did not take into account the coal blocks given to the public sector companies. Only blocks given to private sector companies were taken into account.
The total geological reserves of the coal blocks given away for free amounted to around 44.8 billion tonnes. The total amount of coal in a block is referred to as geological reserve. But not all of it can be extracted. Open cast mining of coal typically goes to a depth of around 250 metres below the ground whereas underground mining goes to a depth of around 600-700 metres. Beyond this, it is difficult to extract coal.
The portion of the geological reserves that can be extracted are referred to as extractable reserves. The CAG worked with fairly conservative estimates on this front as well. Typically extractable reserves are around 80-95% of geological reserves. As Rai writes “Audit based its computation on [the] conservative estimate of 73 million tonnes for every 100 million tonnes given in the GR [geological reserve]…Can audit be faulted if its computation was based on a conservative estimate of 73 per cent?…The extractable reserves…based on the aforementioned method, was found by the CAG to be 6282.5 million tonnes, which is mentioned in the report.”
So only 6282.5 million tonnes of the 44.8 billion tonnes of geological reserves was assumed as extractable reserves while calculating the losses of the government due to giving away coal blocks for free.
After establishing the extractable reserves the CAG needed to establish the price at which this coal could be sold as well as the cost of production of this coal. For establishing the price at which the coal cold be cold, the CAG considered three possible options.
“The first was by imports. The average import price of non-coking coal sourced from Indonesia during 2010-2011 was Rs 3,678 per tonne (Indonesia supplied most of our non-coking coal imports). The second source was the coal sold in e-auction by Northern Coalfields Limited, a subsidiary of CIL [Coal India Ltd] based in Singrauli. The third and major source of coal supply in the country was that which was mined and supplied by CIL. Audit utilized the only creditable data available in the public domain—that of CIL. CIL is regularly audited by the CAG, so its accounts and other details can be taken as authentic. From the audited accounts of 2010-2011, the average sales price of all grades of coal sold by CIL was taken as Rs 1,028 per tonne. This was the most conservative price too,” writes Rai.
After this, the cost of production of coal needed to be established. For this, the CAG again went back to CIL, which produces most of the coal in the country. As Rai writes “The average cost of coal mined by CIL was found to be Rs 583 per tonne. The MoC has indicated, after due verification, that the financing cost ranged from Rs 100 to Rs 150 per tonne. To be on the safe and conservative side, audit assumed it to be at Rs 150. Thus, while the average sale price was Rs 1,028, the average cost was Rs 583 plus Rs 150, namely Rs 733,” writes Rai.
Manmohan Singh later criticized this calculation by saying “the cost of production of coal varies significantly from mine to mine even for CIL due to varying geo-mining conditions, method of extraction, surface features, number of settlements, availability of infrastructure etc.”
By taking the average cost of production these are exactly the factors that CAG was taking into account. And this left Rs 295 per tonne (Rs 1028 minus Rs 733) as the financial benefit. So Rs 295 of financial benefit per tonne was multiplied with 6282.5 million tonnes of extractable reserves and a loss figure of close to Rs 1,86,000 crore was arrived at.
As you can clearly see the most conservative estimates had been used to arrive at a loss number. If the CAG had not used these conservative estimates it could have easily put out a much bigger number for these losses.
Another criticism that the CAG came in for was that the loss calculation did not take the concept of net present value(NPV) into account. “Even if discounting had been done to arrive at the NPV, we would have possibly projected an annual increase of 10 per cent in cost/sale price, and we would then have discounted, at, say, a discount factor of 10 per cent. We would have got to an NPV of financial gain of Rs 2.40 lakh crore, at 11 per cent of Rs 1.86 lakh crore and at 12 per cent of Rs 1.49 lakh crore. There is no substantial difference. Hence, why all the ire?”
In the end, Vinod Rai has had the last laugh. The Supreme Court in a recent decision deemed the allocation of coal blocks to be illegal. And for those who are still not convinced about the way Rai operated as the CAG, it is time they read his book.
The article appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on Sep 16, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is the author of Easy Money. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

Why Manish Tewari's zero loss theory doesn't hold much ground

Manish-Tewari
Vivek Kaul 
If you keep repeating something people might finally start believing you, one day, someday.
Or so seems to go the logic in the Congress Party.
The Party has gone on and on about how the loss numbers regarding the various scams put out by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India are largely fictional.
This effort has been led by P Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal and Digvijay Singh upto this point. They have questioned the Rs 1.76 lakh crore loss estimated in the 2G scam and the Rs 1.86 lakh crore estimated in the coalgate scam. They have tried to tell the nation that there has been no loss. And the numbers put out by CAG are largely fictional.
Digvijay Singh, the senior most General Secretary of the Party has even alleged that Vinod Rai, the outgoing CAG, has political ambitions and that’s why he been trying to shame the government.
The latest missive in this direction has come from Manish Tewari, the information and broadcasting minister, and one of the chief trouble shooters of the Congress Party. He has remarked that “We’ve seen this great debate around certain hugely exaggerated and mythical numbers which have been thrown in public debate by certain very responsible institutions and functionaries… I think when institutions start indulging in fiction writing that is the greatest disservice that can possibly be done to an issue.”
What caused this outburst was an interview that the outgoing CAG Rai gave to The Times of India. In this interview he was asked “what was his reaction when Kapil Sibal came with the zero loss theory?” “I felt sorry for them. I have never said this before, but I actually felt sorry for them,” said Rai. In the same interview Rai denied having any political ambitions whatsoever. “Whenever this question has been put to me, I have neither said ‘yes’ nor ‘no’. If I say I will not join, you will not believe me. If I say I will join, you will say “bola tha na“. But I am making it clear today. I have been apolitical all my life. Now, in the 65-years plus age why should I change?” said Rai.
It is important to clarify here that estimates made CAG on the losses are not mythical at all, as Tewari and others of his ilk would like us to believe. Lets try and understand this in case of what is now known as the Coalgate scam, by starting at the very beginning.
The Coal Mines(Nationalisation) Act was amended with effect from June 9, 1993. This allowed the government to give away coal blocks for free both to private sector as well as public sector companies. This was done largely on account of the inability of Coal India Ltd (CIL), which produces most of India’s coal, to produce enough coal.
The coal production in 1993-94 was 246.04 million tonnes, up by 3.3% from the previous year. This rate was not going to increase anytime soon as newer projects had been hit by delays and cost over-runs, as still often happens in India. As the Economic Survey of 1994-95 pointed out “As on December 31, 1994, out of 71 projects under implementation in the coal sector, 22 projects are bedevilled by time and cost over-runs. On an average, the time over-run per project is about 38 months. There is urgent need to improve project implementation in the coal sector.”
Hence, to encourage more production of coal, the Coal Mines Act was amended with the view of helping at least those companies which used coal as a raw material. As the Economic Survey pointed out “In order to encourage private sector investment in the coal sector, the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act, 1973, was amended with effect from June 9, 1993, for operation of captive coal mines by companies engaged in the production of iron and steel, power generation and washing of coal in the private sector.” Using this change in policy the government of India gave away 195 coal blocks for free between 1993 and 2011. What is interesting nonetheless is that prior to 2004,only 39 coal blocks were given away free to public sectors as well as private sector companies. The remaining blocks have been given away since 2004. The Congress led UPA government has been in power since May 22, 2004.
So this shows clearly that around 80% of the coal blocks were given away for free only after the Congress Party led government came to power. What queers the pitch further is the fact that most of these blocks were given away during the period between 2006 and 2009 when the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, also happened to the coal minister.
When we measure the coal blocks given away for free in terms of their geological reserves, the results get skewed further. The total geological reserves given away for free between 1993 and 2011 was 44,802.9 million tonnes. Of this nearly 41,235.9 million tonnes was given away between 2004 and 2011. As pointed out earlier, for most of this period (except for a period of around 5 months in 2004) the Congress led UPA government has been in power. During the period 1993-96, when the Congress government led by PV Narsimha Rao was in power, nine coal blocks with geological reserves of 917.7 million tonnes were given away for free. Hence, the Congress Party was directly involved in giving away 42,153.6 million tonnes of coal, or around 94% of the total geological reserves.
So Coalgate has largely been a Congress scam. The CAG in its report tried to put a number to the losses on account of the government giving away these blocks for free. There were a number of assumptions made while calculating these losses. First and foremost blocks given to government companies for free were not taken into consideration. And secondly, only open cast mines were taken into account while calculating losses, underground mines were ignored. If these mines were taken into account the loss number would have been greater than Rs 1.86 lakh crore.
The extractable reserves from the coal blocks considered for the calculation came to be at 6282.5million tonnes. The total amount of coal in a block is referred to as geological reserve. But not all of it can be extracted. Open cast mining of coal typically goes to a depth of around 250 metres below the ground whereas underground mining goes to a depth of around 600-700 metres. Beyond this, it is difficult to extract coal.
So 6282.5 million tonnes was the amount of coal that was given away for free. This coal could have been sold at a certain price. Using the prices at which CIL, which produces most of India’s coal, sold coal, CAG arrived at an average price of Rs 1,028.42 per tonne of coal.
There is a certain cost in producing this coal. The average cost of production was calculated to be at Rs 583.01 per tonne using CIL data. Over and above this there was a financing cost of Rs 150 per tonne that was assumed. This meant a profit of Rs Rs 295.41 per tonne of coal (Rs 1,028.42 – Rs 583.01 – Rs 150) had been let go off. Hence the government had lost Rs 295.41 for every tonne of coal that it gave away for free. The total losses were thus estimated to be at Rs 1,85,591.33 crore (Rs 295.41 x 6,282.5 million tonnes).
This loss figure comes with a disclaimer from CAG. “A part of this financial gain could have been tapped by the government by taking timely decision on competitive bidding for allocation of coal blocks,” the CAG report points out.
One criticism of this calculation has been that CAG did not take time value of money into account. All the extractable reserves of the mines considered couldn’t have been mined at once. They would be mined over a period of time. So that should have been taken into account and a present value of the losses should have been calculated. This point is raised by the CAG in its report as well. As the report points out “total extractable reserve of a coal block could be extracted over the lifetime of a block as per its mining plan. In the absence of future year wise quantity of coal extracted, sale price, cost price, financing cost etc pertaining to a coal block over its lifetime, audit has taken the currently available audited figures of CIL as reference values.”
But there are other points which clearly prove that CAG has been conservative in its calculations, like any good auditor would. While calculating losses on account of giving away coal blocks for free the CAG took into account the price at which CIL sells coal directly to companies it has an agreement with. This is the lowest price in the market. The price that CIL auctions through the e-auction route is higher. As the CAG points out in its report on an ultra mega power projects, the average price of coal sold by CIL through e-auctions in 2010-2011 was Rs 1,782 per tonne. If CAG had taken this price instead of the CIL price, then profit per tonne of coal would have stood at Rs 1,050 (Rs 1,782-Rs 583.01- Rs 150). The losses would have then stood at Rs 6.6 lakh crore.
If the price of imported coal would have been taken into account, losses would have been even higher. The average price of imported coal in November 2009 was Rs 2,874 per tonne (calculated by the CAG based on NTPC data).
If CAG had taken this price, the profit per tonne would have been Rs 2,142 (Rs 2,874 – Rs 583.01 – Rs 150) and the losses would have been Rs 13.5 lakh crore. The CAG did not take into account these prices. It took into account the lowest price of Rs 1,028.42 per tonne, which was the average Coal India price, like a conservative auditor would.
So here is my humble request to Congress leaders like Manish Tewari who have been saying that the various CAG reports have been “indulging in fiction”. Please read these reports. They are documents which have been written with great care and thorough research. The Congress Party may not be agree with the losses for obvious reasons but it cannot dismiss them totally. They can also question the methodology and the quantum of the loss as well. But saying that there has been no loss, makes them look a tad stupid in the eyes of urban Indians, who are the ones majorly concerned with such issues.
In fact Vinod Rai in the interview summarised the situation very well when he said “in my report I have said that there has been loss and that cannot be denied. The quantum of loss can be debated. I told them your own agency, CBI, has said there was a loss of Rs 30,000 crore.”
Now only if Manish Tewari wasn’t so much in love with his voice…
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 25,2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

Why Congress has learned the wrong lessons from India Shining

Manish-Tewari
Vivek Kaul
Human beings love a good story. And a good story is complete. If something has happened then there is needs to be a ready explanation available for it. Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about this in Fooled by Randomness. Taleb recounts watching Bloomberg TV, sometime in December 2003 around the time Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq.
At this point, American government bond prices (commonly referred to as treasury bills) had gone up, and the caption on television explained that this was “due to the capture of Saddam Hussein”. Some thirty minutes later, the price of the American treasury bills went down, and the television caption still said that this was “due to the capture of Saddam Hussein”.
The question is how could the capture of Saddam Hussein lead to have two exactly opposite things? That is simply not possible. But there is a broader point here. If something happens, the human mind needs a reason, an explanation or a cause for it. Without it, the loop is not complete. Hence, the human mind actively seeks causes for events that have happened, whether those causes are the real reasons for the event happening is another issue all together.
As Ed Smith former English cricketer wrote in a recent column “The point, of course, is that causes are being manipulated to fit outcomes. They weren’t causes at all, merely things that happened before the defeat. The ancient Romans had an ironic phrase for this terrible logic – post hoc, ergo proper hoc, “after this, therefore because of this”.”
An excellent example of this phenomenon in an Indian context is the defeat of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the 2004 Lok Sabha election. Of the explanations that followed the one that gained most credibility and is still holding on strong, is the India Shining Campaign.
Since the results of the 2004 Lok Sabha elections came in, it has been widely held that BJP lost the elections because of the “insensitive” urban centric India Shining advertising campaign, which ignored the aam aadmi. The irony is that even the BJP came to believe this.
As Arati R Jerath points out in a recent column in The Times of India “Significantly, L K Advani was to acknowledge later that the India Shining slogan was “inappropriate” for an election campaign. In hindsight, many in the BJP realized that the tone and tenor were arrogant and insensitive and that it glossed over prevailing social and economic inequities that the NDA government had failed to address.”
This logic doesn’t hold true against some basic number crunching. The difference in vote share between the Congress led UPA and the BJP led NDA was a little over 2%. The NDA got 33.3% of the vote whereas the UPA won 35.4% of the vote. As economist Vivek Dehejia, the co-auhtor of Indianomix – Making Sense of Modern India, said in an interview to Firstpost “That 2% difference in vote share can equally be attributed to a number of other explanations, such as bad luck, as it is to anything else. Or let me put in another way; if you look at those results, basically it came down to a coin toss. A third of the voters voted for the NDA, another third voted for the UPA and a third voted for somebody else.”
Hence, if the NDA had got 1% more vote and UPA had got 1% less vote, the situation would have been totally different. And maybe in that situation, people would have been talking about how the India Shining campaign really worked. Given this, it is not always possible to figure out why something happened. The broader point is that India is too diverse with too many issues at play to attribute the win or a loss in Lok Sabha elections to one cause, which in this case happened to be the India Shining campaign.
But such has been the strength of this explanation that it continues to prevail. In fact, the Congress party has gone at length to explain why there recently launched Bharat Nirman campaign is totally different from the India Shining campaign of 2004. “India Shining was hype, hoopla and spin. Our campaign is different. Bharat Nirman is not a poll campaign, it tells the India story of the past nine years,” the information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari was recently quoted as saying.
In fact, the India Shining campaign had put too much emphasis on India, people came to believe, and missed out on Bharat. So the Congress has taken great care that the Bharat Nirman campaign caters to Bharat.
That difference notwithstanding prima facie there doesn’t seem to be much difference between India Shining and Bharat Nirman. Both are campaigns launched to highlight the achievements of the incumbent government. India Shining was launched well before the Lok Sabha elections and at that point of time, the BJP leaders maintained that the campaign was meant to attract international investment and beyond that nothing more should be read into it. The Congress seems to be doing the same. As Tewari said “Elections will be held on time. There is no need for speculation.”
Eventually, the BJP got caught into its marketing blitzkrieg and advanced elections by six months. The extent to which Congress wallahs have gone to deny the link between Bharat Nirman and the Lok Sabha elections being advanced, leads this writer to believe that most likely elections will be advanced. As the line from the great British political satire Yes Minister goes “The first rule of politics: Never believe anything until it’s been official denied”. The Congress, like BJP, is in the danger of getting caught in its own spin.
India Shining cost the taxpayer around Rs 150 crore. Bharat Nirman has already spent around Rs 200 crore of the taxpayer money. As an article in the Brand Equity supplement of The Economic Times points out “Sources close to the campaign say that close to Rs 200 crore has been spent on this campaign under various heads. So large is the campaign that in recent months the government has been the single largest consumer of air time and media space on many of the major channels in volume terms.”
What hurts is the fact that the revenue stream of the government at this point of time is stretched. The Ministry of Finance has even gone to the extent of running an amnesty scheme for service tax defaulters. A defaulter can declare and pay his taxes and thereby avoid any fines or even other penal proceedings. If finances are so stretched, why is money being wasted on an advertisement campaign like Bharat Nirman?
More than anything else this government has lost so much credibility that any advertisement campaign cannot help. As Jerath puts it “The campaign is a pathetic attempt to sweep the controversies of the past three years under the carpet. A slick film and a lyrical jingle cannot erase the stench from various corruption scandals or make up for non-performance as food prices rise and the economy slows down.”
The lesson drawn from India Shining should have been that feel good advertisement campaigns run by the government and paid for by the taxpayer, do not really matter in an electoral democracy as diverse as India. Instead the government, which is seen tom-tomming its own achievement, comes across as arrogant. But the parties in power love it. As the Brand Equity points out “The temptation has been too great and a campaign of similar proportions has been released. Perhaps the only difference is that ‘India’ has been replaced by ‘Bharat’ and ‘Shining’ by ‘Nirman’. While the Congress insists that this is not a political campaign (just as the BJP insisted with India Shining), the timing and the quantum of spends seem to belie that.”
The only person Bharat Nirman benefits is the information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari (and the media houses which get paid for carrying these advertisements), who after taking over as the I&B Minister had to show that he was doing new things that could revitalise the image of the Congress party and he has done precisely that. But this benefit might be short lived because in the days to come if the Congress led UPA loses the next Lok Sabha elections (as it is likely to), then Bharat Nirman will be held responsible for it, like India Shining was.
And then Manish Tewari, might become the new Pramod Mahajan, the man behind the India Shining Campaign.
To conclude, what happens to the taxpayer who finances these expensive campaigns? Well all he can do is sing the old Mukesh song (sung in the style of KL Saigal) “dil jalta hai to jalne de. aansoo na baha, fariyad na kar”.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 20, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

Is Manish Tewari’s media diktat a sign of Cong returning to 1970s?

sanjay gandhi

Vivek Kaul

Manish Tewari, the minister of information and broadcasting, who probably spends more time in television studios defending the Congress party, than in his office, recently issued what his ministry called an ‘advisory’ on the way television channels have been covering the protests against the gang rape of a 23 year old women in a moving bus in Delhi.
A part of the advisory had this to say “It has been observed that some private satellite news TV channels in their 24X7 coverage have not been showing due responsibility and maturity in telecasting the events relating the said demonstration and such a telecast is likely to cause deterioration in the law & order situation, hindering the efforts of the law enforcing authorities.
Whereas Rule 6(1)(e) of the Cable Television Networks Rules, 1994, which contains the Programme Code to be strictly adhered to by all private satellite television channels, provides that no programme should be carried in the cable service which is likely to encourage or incite violence or contains anything against maintenance of law and order or which promotes anti-national attitude.”
After Tewari’s senior in the party as well as the government Sushil Kumar Shinde equated the protesters in Delhi to Maoisits, Tewari wants the nation to believe that the coverage of the protests in the heart of the capital could promote an anti-national attitude. What has the world come to?
I can’t help but compare this situation to the scenario in the mid 1970s when Indira Gandhi, as the Prime Minister had declared a state of internal emergency and the politicians of the day directed the newspapers to fall in line. (There were no television channels back then other than the state owned Doordarshan).
As Vinod Mehta writes in The Sanjay Story “The Chief Censor of India issued a dictat to the press…: ‘No criticism of the family planning programme. This includes letters to the editor.’”
Indira Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay had unleashed an ambitious male sterilization programme to control India’s burgeoning population. “The problem, of course, was that Sanjay did not have the time for gentle act and sustained persuasion. He wanted results, latest by day after tomorrow. A young man in a hurry he disastrously miscalculated the quantum of ‘motivation’ necessary to get people to the operating table,” writes Mehta.
Given this, Sanjay’s ambitious programme came in for a lot of criticism and one of the impacts of that was that the press was asked not to criticise it. The same thing albeit in a milder way is happening right now. Tewari’s veiled threat against covering the Delhi rape protests comes after his predecessor Ambika Soni ( a known Sanjay Gandhi crony) stopped government advertisements to the Daily News and Analysis (Read about it here) for a while late last year.
The state of internal emergency was declared in India with effect from the midnight of June 25, 1975. That morning most Delhi newspapers did not come out because the Congress government had ordered power supply to be cut in Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg where most newspaper offices are based in Delhi. As Tavleen Singh writes in Durbar “But with typical Indian ineptitude, the officials had forgotten that the Stateman and the Hindustan Times had their offices in Connaught Place.”
Soon Inder Kumar Gujral who was the information and broadcasting minister was dismissed given that he wasn’t deemed to be effective enough. “Sweet, mild Inder Gujral was replaced by Vidya Charan Shukla. The story of the minister’s sacking that drifted around newspaper offices was that Mr Gujral, an old friend of Mrs Gandhi, had objected to Sanjay ordering him around and Sanjay had responded by ordering his immediate dismissal. The unsmiling brutish Shukla warned us at the first press conference he held that any defiance of press censorship would be dealt with harshly. He was soon dictating which stories we should give ‘prominence’ to and these were usually related to an event attended by Sanjay Gandhi or an idea that had come from him,” writes Singh in Durbar. While it is difficult to see Manish Tewari morphing into another Vidya Charan Shukla, his recent dictat to television channels is a milder form of what Shukla did with the newspapers in the mid 1970s when emergency was in operation.
The period of emergency also saw the power in the Congress party pass onto the next generation i.e. from Indira Gandhi to Sanjay Gandhi. As Mehta writes “Around November ’76 Mrs Gandhi was finally sold on dynastic succession not only on the ground of filial devotion but because she thought that the country’s destiny safe in her son’s hands…No coincidence then that in December ’76 the Censors issued a written directive to the press asking it to refrain from using the prefix ‘youth leader’ in connection with Mr Sanjay Gandhi.” Sanjay Gandhi became the real leader ‘overnight’ and gradually took over the running of the government of the day from his mother Indira, despite never being a part of it.
Along similar lines Rahul Gandhi, the proverbial prince in waiting, will lead the Congress party in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it was recently revealed. What remains to be seen is whether Rahul gradually takes over the running of the government from his mother Sonia as well, like his uncle did from his mother nearly 36 years back. Sonia Gandhi despite never being a part of the government wields tremendous control on it.
The emergency was a blot on the Indian democracy. But it didn’t really impact the man on the street, the average Indian, the man who actually goes out and votes, and who we now know as the aam aadmi, in any major way. “In February ’76 a Bombay monthly, now undeservedly extinct, sent a reporter to the interior of Maharashtra to determine what impact the Emergency had had at the grassroots level. The reporter returned with the not unexpected news that most villagers didn’t even know there was an emergency in the country,” writes Mehta.
Until of course Sanjay Gandhi caught onto the idea of male sterilization to control the Indian population. But he was a man in a hurry and soon forced sterilizations were being carried out through out North India and states like Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Quotas were set for different chief ministers. Navin Chawla, another known Sanjay crony, who rose to become the Chief Election Commissioner of India, and who was one of the bureaucrats helping Sanjay Gandhi implement his hair-brained scheme, said “One had to prevent poor people living like animals and breeding more poor people.”(As Vinod Mehta quotes him in The Sanjay Story).
Soon forced sterilizations were happening all over the place. Even the beggars around the Taj Mahal in Agra were rounded up and forced to undergo nasbandi. And this finally made people realise that an emergency was on in the country. As Mehta writes “Before June ’76 the Emergency was a peripheral phenomenon in rural India. The constitutional changes, detention of opposition leaders, curtailment of fundamental freedoms, censorship of the press, were hardly likely to affect life of the Indian peasant….This ignorance was rudely shattered with the launching of the sterilization programme. And it was this which took Emergency to the heart of India, to its hamlets and small towns.”
When elections finally happened in 1977 this turned out to be a major issue and the Congress party was booted out of power the first time since independence. The entire frustration of the emergency came to be consolidated largely around one issue and that was nasbandi. Mehta quotes author Sasti Brata as saying “The elections have not proved that democracy flourishes in India, the elections have only proved that men don’t like to lay on tables and have their things cut off.”
Is something similar happening in an India, which is clearly more urban now than it was in the 1970s, right now? Has the frustration of being under nearly eight and a half years of misrule of the Congress party led UPA, all getting consolidated under the issue of a 23 year old women being raped in Delhi? The nation has forgotten the 2G scam. The commonwealth games scam. The nexus between Robert Vadra and DLF. The coalgate scam. We have adjusted to the price of almost everything going up at a very fast pace and the fact that our salaries are not going anywhere. We don’t seem to mind the high EMIs.
But will we forget the fact that a 23 year old women who had her whole life in front of her and who was getting back home from watching a movie on a late cold Delhi evening, happened to board the wrong bus, only to be raped and almost killed by a set of goons?
That time will tell!
The article was originally published on www.firstpost.com on December 27, 2012.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

What Manish Tewari is trying to do is confuse us – like Sibal


Vivek Kaul
The urdu poet Bashir Badr once wrote “dil ki duniya purani dilli hai, job hi guzra hai usne loota hai.” (Loosely translated which means that the heart’s world is like Old Delhi, whoever has passed through has looted it).
The politicians who run the current United Progressive Alliance (UPA) operate out of New Delhi, and like the chieftains of the yore who robbed Old Delhi, they continue to rob New Delhi and in the process India.
One such robber politician is A Raja who sold 122 telecom licenses at Rs 9,200 crore in 2008, a price which was significantly lower than the price the government could have got if it had auctioned the licenses. The Comptroller and Auditor General(CAG) made four estimates of the losses on account of this. These losses worked out to Rs 57,666 crore, Rs 67,364 crore, Rs 69,626 crore and Rs 1,76,645 crore.
As is wont in such cases the media ran with the highest figure and put the losses on account of shenanigans of Raja at Rs 1,76,000 crore. But even a loss of Rs 57,666 crore was no small number.
The Supreme Court canceled these licenses. The government recently tried to auction these licenses again.  Its aim was to raise Rs 40,000 crore from these auctions. It managed to raise only Rs 9,407 crore.
This prompted Manish Tewari the newly appointed minister for Information and Broadcasting to ask “Mr CAG, where is the Rs 1.76 lakh crore?”
Tewari went on to add that “I think it is time for some serious introspection. It’s time the CAG introspects on his processes and it is high time that the BJP and some of the other opposition parties, which had made this their holy-grail and swansong of politics over the last two years, should publicly apologise.”
The comment is along the lines of Kapil Sibal’s famous zero loss theory on the CAG’s estimates of the losses to the government on account of Raja’s shenanigans. “The logic underlying this estimate is completely flawed. Government policy is formulated with a view to maximising public welfare, and not merely to maximise Government revenues. The pricing of different natural resources is often done in a manner that meets this objective,” Sibal had said justifying the decision of the government to sell telecom licenses in 2008 at the same price as they had sold in 2001. “No loss at all. Zero is the loss…It (the calculation made by CAG) has embarrassed the government, it has embarrassed the nation.”” Sibal declared.
But how does the government explain the fact that Unitech, a company which got the license in 2008, went around and sold 60% of its stake to Telenor for Rs 6,120 crore even before it had constructed a single tower to launch a mobile phone service. It had paid only Rs 1651 crore for the telecom licenses. Shouldn’t this money have realistically flown into government coffers?
So what can safely be said was that Sibal was essentially trying to complicate the issue in order to confuse the nation. As a recent profile on Sibal in the The Carvan magazine puts it “There was a method to Sibal’s madness. This was his opening statement before the court of public opinion, and he had unquestionably taken the strongest possible line in his client’s defence. That few seemed to believe him was beside the point. His audacity had muddied the waters just enough to introduce doubts in what had looked like an open-and-shut case, demonstrating that a sufficiently strenuous and elaborate defence of the indefensible could perhaps make it defensible after all.”
Manish Tewari is working along similar lines and trying to complicate the issue or as The Caravan puts it in Sibal’s case “muddle the water just enough”.
We need to understand a few things here to basically look through Tewari’s statement. CAG used various methods to arrive at the loss estimates that it did. For the estimate of Rs 1,76,645 crore, CAG used the prices that companies paid when the 3G licenses were auctioned in 2010. The logic being that if the telecom licenses had been auctioned in 2008 and companies had paid the same prices that they did for 3G licenses in 2010, the government could have made Rs 1,76,645 crore more than it actually did.
Similarly other ways were used to arrive at other loss estimates. Another loss estimate of Rs 69,626 crore was based on the price at which Unitech sold 60% of the stake in its telecom business to Telenor immediately after getting the telecom license in 2008.
So, yes, there was a loss to the government and the nation when A Raja sold off 122 telecom licenses for Rs 9,200 crore. There is no beating that irrespective of what Tewari now and Sibal earlier had to say.
Let’s come back to the recent telecom auction and the inability of the government to raise much money from it, something that prompted Tewari to ask “Mr CAG, where is the Rs 1.76 lakh crore?”
Just because the government couldn’t raise as much as it was expecting to from this auction does not mean that the way the government went around selling telecom licenses in 2008 was correct. Second, much has changed between 2008 and 2012. The finances of the Indian government are in a mess. Inflation and interest rates are high. And economic growth is stagnating. Hence, telecom companies are no longer in the mood to pay the high prices that they did for 3G spectrum in 2010. Also, if the government raised the kind of money that it did with the 3G auction in 2010, imagine the kind of money it could have raised had it decided to auction telecom licenses in 2008 when the financial crisis had not yet broken out, instead of giving them away on a first come first serve basis.
But Tewari is working along expected lines. He is a lawyer by qualification who was expected to muddle up things as a spokesperson for the Congress party. And he is working along similar lines after taking over as the minister for information and broadcasting, a post from which he can hope to effectively control opinion.
As Noam Chomsky, the world’s foremost living intellectual, points out in How the World Works “Ultimately, the governors, the rulers, can only rule if they control opinion…This is true of the most despotic societies and the most free… If the general population won’t accept things, the rulers are finished.”
In this day and age of the internet where it is very difficult to totally control opinion that is going around, the best a ruler can do is muddle the opinion and that is what Tewari is trying to do in this case.
Also having been in the party for too long Tewari has now tasted real power and is trying to do a Sibal. The Caravan in its recent profle of Sibal wrote “Among the country’s chattering classes, his innumerable television appearances and indefatigable zeal for defending the indefensible have made him a favourite target for mockery and derision—in which he typically appears as a caricature combining the worst qualities of lawyers, politicians and out-of-touch elites. But Sibal is well aware that his prominence within the party depends on these over-the-top performances, and it could be argued that no other politician has taken better advantage of the present age of around-the-clock television shoutfests and exaggerated sound-bites.”
This could have easily been written for Tewari as well.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on November 19, 2012.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected])