Vivek Kaul
Rahul Gandhi is angry again. Yesterday, he barged into a press conference being addressed by Congress general secretary Ajay Maken and announced that the ordinance passed by the Union Cabinet to protect convicted legislators from complete disqualification as “complete nonsense”.
The Supreme Court had ruled on July 10, that an MP or an MLA, if convicted by a court in a criminal offence with a jail sentence of two years or more, would be immediately disqualified. On September 24, the Union Cabinet cleared the the Representation of the People (Amendment and Validation) Ordinance, 2013 to negate the Supreme Court ruling.
This ordinance allows convicted MPs and MLAs to continue in office to the condition that their appeal is admitted by a higher court within a period of 90 days and their conviction is stayed.
Rahul Gandhi felt that this was incorrect and said “I’ll tell you what my opinion on the ordinance is. It’s complete nonsense. It should be torn up and thrown away. That is my personal opinion.”
“I am interested in what the Congress is doing and what our government is doing. That is why what our government has done as far as this ordinance is concerned is wrong,” he went on to add, embarrassing the Prime Minister and his cabinet of ministers, which had cleared the ordinance only a few days back, in the process.
A lot of analysis has happened since yesterday afternoon, when the Gandhi family scion said what he did. Some people have suggested that “Rahul has his heart in the right place”. Some others have said “what is wrong with calling rubbish, rubbish”. A television anchor known for his loud and aggressive ways called it the “victory of the people”. And still some others have asked the obvious question “how could the government have cleared the ordinance without the consent of Rahul or his mother Sonia Gandhi?”
On the whole, Rahul’s decision to call the ordinance “nonsense” and something that should be “torn and thrown away” is being projected as a surprise. While nobody could have predicted what Rahul Gandhi did yesterday, at the same time this can’t be termed as a surprise.
Rahul Gandhi over the last few years has made a habit of raking up issues to embarrass the government and his party, by saying something controversial and then disappearing. In July 2008, Rahul visited the house of Kalavati Bandurkar, in the village Jalka in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. Her husband had committed suicide in December 2005, hit by crop failure and debt. He left her with a debt of Rs 1 lakh. After visiting her, Rahul highlighted her plight in Parliament and then quickly forgot about her. It was an embarrassment for the Congress Party given that it ruled the state of Maharashtra. Since bringing her into the limelight, Kalavati’s daughter and a son in law have also committed suicide.
In October 2008, while addressing girl students at a resort near Jim Corbett National Park, Rahul Gandhi referred to “politics” as a closed system in India. “If I had not come from my family, I wouldn’t be here. You can enter the system either through family or friends or money. Without family, friends or money, you cannot enter the system. My father was in politics. My grandmother and great grandfather were in politics. So, it was easy for me to enter politics. This is a problem. I am a symptom of this problem. I want to change it.,” he said. Where is the change? When was the last time the Congress party had an election for the post of its president? If the top post of the party is not democratic, how can the party be expected to be democratic?
On February 5, 2010, Rahul came to Mumbai and travelled in a local train both on the western line (From Andheri to Dadar) and the central line (from Dadar to Ghatkopar). A lot of song and dance was made about him defying the Shiv Sena, but nothing constructive came out of it. The local trains continue to burst to the seems.
On May 11, 2011, Rahul riding pillion on a bike managed to enter the Bhatta-Parsaul villages in Uttar Pradesh, giving the district administration a slip, and challenging the might of Mayawati, the then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.
The villagers in Bhatta-Parsaul were protesting against the acquisition of land by the state government and the protests had turned violent. A few days later Rahul went to meet the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to appraise him of the situation.
After coming out of the meeting he told reporters “The issue here is a more fundamental one with regard to these villages in particular and a large number of villages in UP down the Agra highway, where state repression is being used, where people are being murdered…quite severe atrocities are taking place there….There is a set of 74 (mounds of) ashes there with dead bodies inside. Everybody in the village knows it. We can give you pictures. Women have been raped, people have been thrashed. Houses have been destroyed.” These were serious allegations, but nothing ever came out of them.
On August 26, 2011, Rahul gave a speech in favour of Lok Pal in the Lok Sabha, where he said “why not elevate the debate and fortify the Lok Pal by making it a Constitutional body accountable to Parliament like the Election Commission of India?” That was the last we heard of Lok Pal. Meanwhile, Anna Hazare, continues to threaten to go on another hunger strike if the bill is not passed by the Parliament soon.
More recently, on April 4, 2013, Rahul addressed the Confederation of Indian Industries. It was a 75 minute speech, and one of the things he recounted about was about a journey he made a few years back on the Lokmanya Tilak express from Gorakhpur to Mumbai (Lokmanya Tilak is a station in Mumbai at which many long distance trains coming from the Eastern part of the country terminate). “I spent a large part of the Thirty Six hour journey moving across the train and talking to travellers – youngsters, weary families, and migrants moving from the dust of Gorakhpur to the glitter of Mumbai. Took us Thirty Six hours. It is called an Express!”
Some time later in the speech he said: “I am a pilot. I learnt to fly in the United States, I came back. I wanted to convert my license. So I went to the DGCA and I asked what do I have to do. They gave me the curriculum, I opened the book. A large section in the book talks about how to drop mail from aero-planes. How many of you are getting your mail dropped from airplanes in the sky?…And it’s not only in pilot training, it’s everywhere. Look at our text books, open them out. Most of the stuff is not really relevant to what they are going to do.”
The things that Rahul said were not only an embarrassment for the current government. The fact that Indian Railways takes so much time or our education system is not up to the mark, has not happened overnight. The degeneration has happened over a period of time, meaning Rahul’s great-grandfather(Jawahar Lal Nehru), his grandmother (Indira Gandhi), his uncle (Sanjay Gandhi), his father(Rajiv Gandhi) and his mother(Sonia Gandhi), who have been de-facto heads of government at various points of time since India’s independence, are responsible for it.
But then we all know that? How does just pointing out the obvious help anybody? Where are the solutions? As The Economist wrote after Rahul’s CII speech “Gandhi could have spelled out two or three specific measures, ideally in some detail, that he would support—for example, getting an Indian-wide goods-and-services tax accepted; promoting investment in retail or other industries; or devising a means by which infrastructure could be built much quicker. If he were really brave, he might have set out thoughts on ending bureaucratic uncertainty over corruption, or on land reform.”
But all Rahul seems to do is hit and run. He says something on an issue, embarrasses his party, his government or his ancestors and moves on. Rahul Gandhi is not a serious politician. He is in politics because he cannot do anything else or is expected to continue the family tradition and keep the flag flying.
One can only speculate on the reasons for his lack of interest, given his reclusive nature. From his father and grandmother being assassinated to the fact that the future generations are no longer interested in what their forefathers built, be it business or politics.
I am more tempted to go with the latter reason. Rasheed Kidwai, makes this point in the new edition of his book 24 Akbar Road. As he writes “It is said that the conqueror Taimur the ‘Lame’ once spoke to the famous historian and sociologist Ibn Khuldun about the fate of dynasties. Khuldun said that the glory of a dynasty seldom lasted beyond four generations. The first generation inclined towards conquest; the second towards administration; the third, freed of the necessity to conquer or administer, was left with the pleasurable task of spending the wealth of its ancestors on cultural pursuits. Consequently, by the fourth generation, a dynasty had usually spent its wealth as well as human energy. Hence, the downfall of each dynasty is embedded in the very process of its rise. According to Khuldun, it was a natural phenomenon and could not be avoided.”
Hence, evolution is at work. As historian and author Ramachandra Guha told me in an interview I did for Firstpost in December 2012 “I think this dynasty is now on its last legs. Its charisma is fading with every generation. And Rahul Gandhi is completely mediocre.”
That to a large extent explains Rahul’s hit and run mentality and his reluctance to take a more active role in government. After his yesterday’s statement, the least that Rahul Gandhi can do is take on more responsibility either by advancing the Lok Sabha elections or becoming a part of the government in some form.
But neither of these things is going to happen because Rahul Gandhi has said what he wanted to and disappeared again. His attitude is best reflected in an interview he gave to the Tehalka magazine in September 2005, in which he is supposed to have remarked “I could have been prime minister at the age of twenty-five if I wanted to.”
The statement created an uproar. The Congress party immediately jumped to the defence of its princling. Abhishek Manu Singhvi, specifically mentioned that Rahul had not said ‘I could have been prime minister at the age of twenty-five if I wanted to’.
(Tehakla initially stood by its story but backed down later. “This seems to be a clear case of misunderstanding. Mr Gandhi thought he was having a casual chat whereas our reporter took it to be a proper interview,” the weekly said in a statement(The ‘edited’ casual chatcan still be read on Tehelka’s website)).
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on September 28, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Rahul Gandhi
Advani versus Modi: The shishya who wanted to be guru
Vivek Kaul
The patriarch of the Bhartiya Janata Party, India’s main opposition party, used the nuclear option today.
Or as the old Hindi film dialogue goes “hum to doobenge sanam, par tumko bhi le doobenge.”
Lal Krishna Advani, a former film critic, who built the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) right from scratch, today quit from the three main fora of the party, the National Executive, the Parliamentary Board and the Election Committee.
In his resignation letter Advani said that for sometime he had been finding it difficult to reconcile with the current functioning of the party as well as the direction in which it was going. “I no longer have the feeling that this is the same idealistic party created by Dr (Shyama Prasad)Mookerji, Pandit Deendayalji (Sharma), Nanaji (Deshmukh) and (Atal Bihari) Vajpayeeji, whose sole concern was the country, and its people. Most leaders of ours are now concerned just with their personal agenda,” he write.
This came from a man under whose leadership the BJP went from two seats in the 1984 Lok Sabha election to 182 seats in the 1998 and 1999 Lok Sabha elections. Though when it came to leading the government Advani had to make way for the more acceptable and the softer face of the party, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Nearly 15 years later, in 2013, Advani thought that finally his time had come. His time to lead the country. Something he had always wanted to do, but never gotten around to. It was the last throw of the dice for him. A nice farewell into the sunset. But that was not to be.
He was upstaged by a man who was once very close to him. Someone who Advani taught a lot about politics. And someone whom he promoted as well as protected on different occasions. The man they call Narendra Damodardas Modi.
A son of a tea shop owner from Vadnagar in Gujarat, who rose first through the ranks of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS) and later the BJP, and grew so tall, that he finally managed to upstage his guru Advani as well. And this is something that Advani could not digest, which in turn led to the nuclear option, which now threatens to create huge problems for the BJP.
Narendra Modi started working for the RSS at a young age of six. He joined the RSS formally as a pracharak at the age of 21, in 1971. He was the second pracharak to be deputed by the RSS to BJP, its political affiliate. This happened sometime in 1987-88, during the days when Modi used to go around Ahemdabad in an ash coloured Bajaj Chetak.
This was also the time when Advani was looking to rebuild the BJP, after its disastrous performance in the 1984 Lok Sabha election, where the party had won just two seats. Among other things Advani decided to revive the post of the organising secretary in the state units of BJP. In the erstwhile Jana Sangh (BJP’s earlier avatar before it merged with other parties to form the Janata Party in 1977) the post was held by RSS pracharaks. Modi was made the organising secretary of the Gujarat unit of the BJP.
As Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay writes in Narendra Modi – The Man. The Times “From the beginning it was evident that Modi was Advani’s personal choice and he was keen to strengthen the unit in Gujarat because the state was identified as a potential citadel in the future.”
Advani also mentored Modi during his early days in politics. “It was Advani who mentored Modi when he virtually handpicked him into his team of state apparatchiks after recommendations from a few trusted peers in the late 1980s. Advani also gave Modi early lessons in how to convert the mosque-temple dispute into one of national identity and political blackmail,” writes Mukhopadhyay.
Modi would soon rise to national prominence when he would play a part in organising Advani’s famed rath yatra which yielded huge political dividends for the BJP. As Mukhopadhyay points out “Modi came into the national spotlight for the first time when he helped organise Advani’s Rath Yatra in September-October 1990…Modi coordinated the arrangements during the Gujarat leg and travelled up to Mumbai and it was a huge success in Gujarat – both in terms of seamless arrangements and public support.”
After the Rath Yatra he also helped organise Murli Manohar Joshi’s Ekta Yatra. Given the finesse with which he organised these yatras, for a while he was referred to as the poor man’s Pramod Mahajan. The late Pramod Mahajan was the man BJP turned to when it had organise big events.
In 1991, when it was getting risky for Advani to contest from the New Delhi Lok Sabha constituency given the low turn out that it had in elections, it was Modi who suggested that Advani move to the safe seat of Gandhinagar in Gujarat. A seat that Advani has represented since then except in 1996 when he had to resign due to the allegations of money laundering made against him in the hawala scam.
In the years to come the relationship between Modi and Advani went from strength to strength, with Modi emerging as the super Chief Minister of the first BJP government in Gujarat in the mid 1990s.
As Advani’s fondness for Modi grew, so did Modi’s stature within the BJP. “Throughout the 1990s and even after Modi became chief minister, Advani’s special fondness for Modi has been well known by both party insiders and observers… Advani had played a crucial role in the making of Modi as chief minister (of Gujarat) replacing Keshubhai Patel in October 2001.”
Within months of becoming the chief minister of Gujarat, Modi had a big problem on his hand. The bogey number S6 of the Sabarmati Express caught fire on February 27,2002, on the outskirts of the Godhra railway station. Fifty eight people died in the fire. The bogey had kar sevaks returning from a yagna n Ayodhya.
As Ramachandra Guha points out in India After Gandhi “On their way back home by train , these kar sevaks got into a fight with Muslim vendors at the Godhra railway station…Words of the altercation spread; young men from the Muslim neighbourhood outside the station joined in. The kar sevaks clambered back into the train, which started moving as stones were being thrown. However, the train stopped on the outskirts of the station, when a fire broke out in one of its coaches. Fifty eight people perished in the conflagration…Word that a group of kar sevaks had been burnt to death at Godhra quickly spread through Gujarat. A wave of retributory violence followed.”
After the riots there was immense pressure on Modi to resign. When prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee came to Gujarat after the riots, he suggested the same. As Mukhopadhyay writes “Vajpayee visited the state capital (of Gujarat) on 4 April 2002 and was apologetic – among other issues – for not paying a visit earlier. He called the events a blot on India and made no secret of his displeasure at the Modi government’s handling of the situation. The denouement came at the end of the day-long visit when he advised Modi to follow the Raj Dharma when the prime minister was specifically queried if he had any message for Modi.”
Modi continued to be the chief minister of Gujarat and that was primarily because of the blessings of Advani. Even though Vajpayee was the prime minister, the party was still run by Advani. As Mukhopadhyay points out “Once again in 2002, it was Advani who acted as a buffer between Modi and a section of the party which was baying for his blood as a symbolic atonement for the 2002 riots.”
Modi continued to live to fight another day and continued to rise within the BJP, applying the tricks of the trade that he had learnt from Advani.
On a visit to Pakistan in June 2005, tried to become the statesman that Vajpayee was by saying nice things about Mohammed Ali Jinnah. As Advani wrote in the Visitors’ Book at the Jinnah Mausoleum: “There are many people who leave an inerasable stamp on history…But there are very few who actually create history. Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah was one such rare individual.”
With this statement, Advani probably wanted to get rid of the tag of the original posterboy of Hindutva. But that did not work. And saying nice things about Jinnah did not go down well with RSS, which still believes in the idea of Akhand Bharat. Advani had to quit as the president of the BJP as a result of this faux pas.
The relations between Advani and Modi started turning sour after this. Advani obviously was trying to get rid of his tag of being the posterboy of Hindutva. But saying nice things about Jinnah went against the entire idea of Akhand Bharat which the RSS believes in. Around this time, Modi started to distance himself from his mentor. Advani had to pay for this statement and had to quit as the BJP party president in late 2005.
And this created space for Modi for a bigger role. As Mukhopadhyay writes “The original poster boy of Hindutva ceased to be and yielded space to the much younger Modi as the mascot of the aggressive Hindu face. At times it appeared that the guru-shishya relationship of yore had been replaced by intense rivalry.”
In the time that has followed the rivalry only grown. The final nail in the coffin came yesterday when the BJP decided to appoint Modi as the Chairman of the of the campaign committee of the BJP for the 2014 Lok Sabha election. This was essentially a signal that Modi was the tallest leader in the party and not Advani.
The shishya had finally arrived.
The son of a tea shop owner had risen through the ranks and been chosen the leader among the leaders of the BJP.
This was very unlike the Congress which chose it leader on June 19, 1970, the day Rahul Gandhi was born.
The only problem was that the guru still wanted to be the guru.
His last ambition still hadn’t been fulfilled.
And given this, how could the shishya takeover?
And if the shishya had decided to takeover, what would the guru do in the party anyway.
But for a man who has fought his fights as well as Advani has, how could he go down into the textbooks of history without one last fight.
The masterstroke by Advani has caught everybody off guard. The boxer in him is still alive. Advani ‘Rocky’ Balboa may not be as quick as once he was, but when he hits them, they hurt.
What will the shishya do now?
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on June 10, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Indian politics and its Lalu Prasad Yadav syndrome
Vivek Kaul
During his heydays in the 1990s and the early 2000s, Lalu Prasad Yadav never organised political rallies.
He organised Railas.
These were very big political rallies held at the Gandhi maidan in Patna. And they were deemed to be so big by Lalu that the feminine sounding word ‘rally’ proved inadequate to describe them.
Hence a new word Raila was coined.
But time passed and the world went around, and in the end the old adage ‘you can’t fool all the people all the time’, came true in case of Lalu as well.
These days Lalu is a minor player both at the state and the central level. Given this, every few months you can hear him saying nice things about Sonia Gandhi, whenever the opposition parties choose to attack her.
A couple of days earlier Lalu went back to his favourite method of political engagement. He organised a parivartan (change) rally in Patna (and not a Raila). News reports suggest that Lalu hired thirteen trains to ferry his supporters to Patna for the rally.
This is a huge change from the usual. In the Bihar, that this writer grew up in, a rally would mean an open invitation to the supporters of Lalu to board any train that they wanted to.
Also like any good father would, Lalu used the occasion of the parivartan rally to soft launch his sons Tej Pratap and Tejashwi into big-time politics. Tej Pratap is a BA drop out and Tejashwi was a budding cricketer who played one Ranji trophy match for Jharkhand in November 2009. He was also a part of the Delhi Daredevils IPL team, warming his bum on the bench for a few seasons.
It is interesting if we compare this launch with that of Lalu’s own launch into serious politics which happened in the early 1970s. Lalu had quit student politics in 1970, after he lost the election for the post of the President of the Patna University Students Union (PUSU) to a Congress candidate. Before losing this election, Lalu had been a general secretary of the PUSU for three years.
As Sankarshan Thakur writes in Subaltern Sahib: Bihar and the Making of Lalu Yadav, “On the eve of elections of Patna University Students Union (PUSU) in 1973 non-Congress student bodies had again come together, if only for their limited purpose of ousting the Congress. But they needed a credible and energetic backward candidate to head the union. Lalu Yadav was sent for.”
The trouble of course was that Lalu was no longer a student. He was an employee of the Patna Veterinary College by then. But then those were the seventies and the state was Bihar, so not being a student was a small problem that could be fixed.
As Thakur writes “Assured that the caste arithmetic was loaded against the Congress union, Lalu readily agreed to contest. He quietly buried his job at the Patna Veterinary College and got a backdated admission into the Patna Law College. He stood for elections and won. The non-Congress coalition in fact swept the polls.”
And this set up Lalu for the big league as the agitation launched by Jai Prakash Narayan, against Indira Gandhi, gathered speed. The next year i.e. 1974, the agitation against Indira Gandhi spread throughout the country. As Thakur writes, “An agitation committee was formed, the Bihar Chatra Sangharsh Samiti to co-ordinate the activities of various unions and Lalu Yadav as president of PUSU was chosen its chief.” These events catapulted Lalu Yadav into the big league from which he never looked back. He became a member of the Lok Sabha in 1977 at a very young age of 29. He became the Chief Minister of Bihar in 1990.
But the fact of the matter remains that he if he wasn’t asked to contest the 1973 PUSU elections, Lalu might have never returned to politics and probably retired by now from the Patna Veterinary College.
Lalu was lucky because he was at the right place at the right time. His sons are lucky because they are his sons. The next generation of politicians(even those who are not a part of electoral politics) is always luckier to that extent. They already have a base that has been built to work from.
But the question does the next generation respect this base because of which they get lucky? And they answer seems to be no, as a spate of recent examples show. Robert Vadra, with his land dealings in Haryana and Rajasthan, has been a huge embarrassment for Sonia Gandhi, her son Rahul and the Congress Party.
Sharad Pawar had to recently come to the rescue of his nephew Ajit, after he made insensitive comments in drought hit Maharashtra. Mamata Banerjee’s IIPM educated nephew Abhishek stands accused of running Ponzi schemes in West Bengal. News reports suggest that UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has been spending a lot of time trying to settle ‘who gets the government contract’ dispute between his step brother Prateek and his first cousins. Pawan Bansal, had to recently quit as the Union Railway Minister after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) caught his nephew Vijay Singla for running a jobs for bribes racket in the Indian Railways.
And there are examples from the past as well. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s spotless reputation as the Prime Minister of the country was marred by the dealings of his foster son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya. J Jayalalithaa’s weakness for her foster son V Sudhakaran tarred her reputation. The late Pramod Mahajan’s son Rahul was and continues to be an embarrassment.
The late Prime Minister PV Narsimha Rao’s son Prabhakar was accused of being involved in the urea scam in the 1990s. If we go back a little further, Moraji Desai, the fourth prime minister of India, had to deal with allegations of graft against his son Kanti Desai. Kanti Desai had allegedly collected Rs 80 lakh for party funds misusing his position as the PM’s son. Raj Narain a minister in Desai’s cabinet, even came up with the slogan “Hamse kya parda hai, Kantike haath mein garda hai (Why hide it from us, Kanti’s hands are muddied).”
Jagjivan Ram could have become the first dalit Prime Minister of independent India if he hadn’t been embarrassed by his son, Suresh Ram. Nude pictures of Suresh were published in a magazine called Surya, which was edited by Maneka Gandhi. The pictures showed him in a compromising position with a 21 year old student of Satyawati College, Delhi University, called Sushma Chaudhury, who he eventually married (On a slightly different note Suresh’s sister Meira Kumar is the speaker of the current Lok Sabha). “If the Kamasutra has 64 poses of making love, this one certainly had 10,” wrote Khuswant Singh in a later column, with regard to these pictures.
As veteran journalist and editor Inder Malhotra has been quoted as saying “In fact, in many ways Suresh Ram tried to emulate Sanjay Gandhi and received the same shelter from his father which Sanjay got from her mother. It was a game of one-upmanship.”
And Sanjay Gandhi, among all the sons, daughters and relatives of politicians, was the biggest embarrassment of them all. His dictatorial ways ensured that the Congress party was thrown out of power for the first time since independence in 1977 (For a detailed study on this Vinod Mehta’s The Sanjay Story is an excellent read). Indira Gandhi who was known to be very stern otherwise continued to be a mother when it came to Sanjay.
The broader point is that the politicians’ weakness and love for their progeny (or even other close relatives) puts them in embarrassing situations. At times, the progeny are acting as fronts for the shenanigans that the politicians indulge in and at times they are on their own. But in either condition there is a cost that is to be paid for.
A major reason that Lalu Prasad Yadav finally lost in Bihar was because of the shenanigans that his saalas (brothers in law) Sadhu Yadav and Subhash Yadav, indulged in. They had the political patronage of Rabri Devi, who was the Chief Minister of Bihar. News reports coming out now suggest that Lalu’s two sons are also not the best of buddies. And this can’t be good news for Lalu Yadav whose political fortunes have taken a huge beating since 2005.
All the politicians who promote their progeny in politics and allied areas, need to thank Indira Gandhi. If it wasn’t for her, politics in India would have never become a family owned business. As historian Ramachandra Guha said in a lecture titled Verdicts on Nehru: The Rise and Fall of a Reputation (Second V. K. R. V. Rao Memorial Lecture, Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, 20 January 2005) “After Nehru the Congress chose Lal Bahadur Shastri to become Prime Minister, a post on which he quickly stamped his authority. Mrs (Indira) Gandhi herself may never have become Prime Minister had not Shastri died unexpectedly. She was chosen by the Congress bosses as a compromise candidate who (they thought) would do their bidding. But once in office Mrs Gandhi converted the Indian National Congress into a family business. She first brought in her son Sanjay and, after his death, his brother Rajiv. In each case, it was made clear that the son would succeed Mrs Gandhi as head of Congress and head of Government. Thus, the ‘Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’ should properly be known as the ‘(Indira) Gandhi’ dynasty.”
India is still paying the costs of this monstrous mistake as almost all politicians now want to pass on the baton to their progeny and other relatives close to them. Professor Pulin Garg of Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad used to say with regard to family owned businesses in India “Haweli ki umar saath saal ( a family owned business lasts for 60 years).” It will be interesting to see how long political hawelis last on an average? That will be a big determinant of which way India goes in the decades to come.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 17,2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Food Security Act is another opportunity for Rahul to say I don't want to be PM
Vivek Kaul
The Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is in a hurry to somehow introduce the right to food security during the course of this year. Media reports suggest that a special session of the Parliament may be convened to get the bill passed.
But there are several major questions that the Congress led UPA government hasn’t answered with regard to the right to food security. This has writer has discussed some of these questions in the past. (You can read them here, here, here and here).
Here are some more important questions that need to be answered before the right to food security can move from being just a Bill to an Act.
1. The current plan is to sell subsidised wheat and rice to nearly two thirds of India’s population through the public distribution system. This system comprises of around 5 lakh fair price shops. Estimates suggest that nearly 60% of the food that is supposed to be distributed through this system is either siphoned off or is simply wasted. Given that, the eventual plan is to move the right to food security to a cash transfer system.
In this those entitled to food subsidy will have to buy rice and wheat directly from the market, at the market price, and the subsidy will be directly paid into their bank accounts or will be given to them through business correspondents hired by banks.
So what happens to the public distribution system in this case? Will it be dismantled? And if that is done, imagine the kind of unemployment it will lead to. Are political parties (even those within the UPA) which are so opposed to foreign direct investment in retail, thinking about this? And these shops are largely located in rural areas.
2. If right to food security eventually does move to a cash transfer kind of system, where the subsidy is direct paid out to those entitled to it, what happens to the elaborate procurement system for rice and wheat that the government has put in place? Currently the government declares a minimum support price for wheat and rice. At this price the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and other state government agencies, operating on behalf of the government, buy wheat and rice from the farmer., which then stocked and distributed through the public distribution system. This system is expected to continue for implementing the right to food security as well.
But what happens once the right to food security moves onto the system of cash transfers? Those entitled to the right to food security will have to buy wheat and rice directly from the open market. And that being the case the government need not maintain the humongous stocks of food grains that it currently does. The government will have to just buy as much of rice and wheat as might be needed to maintain a buffer stock, which currently amounts to somewhere between 14 million tonnes to 22 million tonnes of rice and wheat.
In 2006-2007, 169.1 million tonnes of rice and wheat was produced in the country. Of this, 43.8 million tonnes or around 26% was procured by the government. In 2011-2012, 198.2 million tonnes of rice and wheat was produced. Of this 88.5 million tonnes or nearly 45% was procured by the government.
So procurement rice and wheat by the government directly from the farmers has gone up tremendously over the last few years. And this has happened primarily because of the fact that the minimum support price has been increased consistently over the years. Farmers have been encouraged to sell to the government. If right to food security moves onto a cash transfer based system, what happens to the farmers who have become now used to selling at a fixed price to the government,which they know off well in advance? How fair is it on them? Are these things even being thought about?
While the current system of procuring more and more rice and wheat directly from the farmer has led to severe distortions, but doing away with it suddenly, will have its own severe repercussions.
3. What happens in a drought like situation? In a situation where the production of rice and wheat will come down, how will the government procure the amount that will be needed to be distributed to those entitled to the right to food security? The easy answer is that rice and wheat will be imported. But as this writer has pointed out in the past “Rice is a very thinly traded commodity, with only about 7 per cent of world production being traded and five countries cornering three-fourths of the rice exports. The thinness and concentration of world rice markets imply that changes in production or consumption in major rice-trading countries have an amplified effect on world prices.” (Source: National Food Security Bill Challenges and Options, Ashok Gulati, Jyoti Gujral, T.Nandakumar, Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), Ministry of Agriculture)
What is interesting is that there is a Force Majeure clause in the Right to Food Security Bill using which the government can shirk any responsibility to provide rice and wheat at a subsidised rate.
The Bill provides for a Force Majeure clause (Clause 52) that “the Central Government, or the State Governments, shall not be liable for any claim by persons belonging to the priority households or general households or other groups entitled under this Act for loss/damage/compensation, arising out of failure of supply of foodgrains or meals when such failure of supply is due to conditions such as, war, flood, drought, fire, cyclone, earthquake or any act of God.”
But it is precisely at this point of time that the right to food security, if there has to be one, should be working. As CACP report points out “It is worthwhile to note that precisely in these conditions a failure of market forces, volatility in prices and resultant distress is expected and at times like this the poor and vulnerable would depend on government to ensure their food security.”
4. Also, what is the basic goal of selling rice and wheat at subsidised prices. Who is it supposed to help? As a recent article in the Mint points out “Apart from the extremely poor, who form a small fraction of the population, nearly everyone else can afford the rice and wheat they require, as Bouis points out. A February report of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) shows the proportion of people not getting two square meals a day dropped to about 1% in rural India and 0.4% in urban India in 2009-10. Interestingly, the average cereal consumption of families who reported that they went hungry in some months of the year (in the month preceding the survey) was roughly equal to the average cereal consumption of those who reported receiving adequate meals throughout the year.”
So the point is that government’s own data clearly points out that the number of those who cannot even afford to buy rice and wheat for their daily meals is less than 1% of the total population. Doesn’t it make sense to target this section properly than doling out subsidised rice and wheat to all and sundry? But then targeting just them really won’t help the Congress party led UPA to get the votes in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. And if that does not happen how will Rahul Gandhi, get another opportunity to say, I do not want to be Prime Minister?
5. One of the goals of the right to food security is to improve nutrition. How does selling rice and wheat at a subsidised price help improve nutrition? The NSSO data quoted above clearly shows that most Indians can afford the rice and wheat they need to buy. To improve nutrition more consumption of vitamins and minerals is required. Howarth Bouis , director of HarvestPlus, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), made a very interesting point in an interview to the Mint a few months back. “ Food prices have been going up over time but we have to make a careful distinction in the Indian case between cereal and milk prices on the one hand, and all other foods on the other hand. After the green revolution, yields of rice and wheat shot up, and prices actually came down. Maybe prices have risen in the past couple of years but over the past 40 years, prices have fallen. The story is similar for milk. But if you look at all the other food groups such as fruits, vegetables, lentils, and animal products other than milk, you will find a steady increase in prices over the past 40 years. So it has become more difficult for the poor to afford food that is dense in minerals and vitamins.”
This explains the real reason behind poor nutrition in India. And no amount of selling of rice and wheat at subsidised prices can cure that. If nutrition needs to be improved food inflation which has gone through the roof needs to be controlled.
There are other factors as well. As the CACP report points out “studies have shown that the challenge of improving absorption lies in linking nutrition with health, education and agriculture interventions. Access to sanitation facilities and women’s literacy in particular are found to be strong factors affecting malnutrition.”
These are some more questions regarding the right to food security which need to be answered. In its current form the Right to Food Security Bill is nothing but a vote gathering ploy for Rahul Gandhi and nothing else, the bleeding hearts of jholawalas notwithstanding.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 16, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
How regional parties make the Rahul versus Modi debate pointless
Vivek Kaul
Sitaram Yechury, the CPI(M) member of parliament, was asked in a recent interview in the Outlook magazine, whether the next Lok Sabha elections were going to be a direct contest between RaGa (Rahul Gandhi) and NaMo (Narendra Modi).
To this rhetorical question Yechury gave a brilliant answer: “There is a lovely saying in Telugu: Aalu ledu choolu ledu, koduku peru Somalingam, which means ‘I don’t have a home, I don’t have a wife but my son’s name is Somalingam’!”
The debate whether the next Lok Sabha elections in 2014 (or even earlier for that matter) are going to be a fight between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi is basically a pointless one right now and at least till the election results are out. And there is more than one reason for the same.
In states that elect a large number of MPs to the Lok Sabha, neither the Congress Party nor the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is expected to be the largest party and win substantial number of seats. In Uttar Pradesh, which elects 80 Lok Sabha MPs, the fight is between Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party. The BJP is expected to come third. In West Bengal, which elects 42 Lok Sabha MPs, the fight is between the CPI(M) and Trinamool Congress. Similary Andhra Pradesh, which elects 42 Lok Sabha MPs, the fight is between YSR Congress and the Telgu Desam Party. In Tamil Nadu, which elects 40 Lok Sabha MPs, the fight is between the DMK and the AIADMK. In Orissa, which elects 21 Lok Sabha MPs, Naveen ‘Pappu’ Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal is expected to do well.
In Karnatka, which sends in 28 Lok Sabha MPs, BS Yeddyurappa’s Karnatka Janata Paksha (KJP) is expected to play spoilsport for the BJP. In Bihar, which sends in 40 Lok Sabha MPs, if the Janata Dal(United) and BJP, do not enter into an alliance and fight elections on their own, it is likely to benefit Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal. And on top of all this factor in the impact Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party may have on the elections.
In fact, last year there were reports of even a fourth front with strong chief ministers like Nitish Kumar, J Jayalalitha, Mamata Banerjee and Naveen Patnaik, being its constituents. Arun Nehru, a former bossman at Jenson and Nicholson, a former MP and minister seemed to be leading the charge on this front. As a report in The Indian Express had pointed out “One man who says he is working to get them together is former MP and perennial seat-predictor Arun Nehru. He’s set the “fourth front” ball rolling among CMs Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee and Naveen Patnaik and TDP leader N Chandrababu Naidu. Sources confirmed that the Bihar CM had been in constant touch with Banerjee and Naidu, directly and through Nehru, to “keep exploring possibilities.””
Given this it is likely that parties other than the Congress and the BJP might get sufficient number of seats allowing them to form some sort of a Third/Fourth Front. This front can then form the government with the outside support of either the Congress or the BJP. As Naveen Patnaik, the chief of the Biju Janata Dal and the Chief Minister of Orissa recently said “I think the Third Front is a very healthy option. But it is still early days.” In this scenario neither Rahul Gandhi nor Narendra Modi, will come into the direct picture.
How the situation develops will depend on how the post poll alliances evolve. As Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of Narendra Modi – The Man. The Times, told me in an interview “ The next election will in all likelihood see post-poll alliances determining who will head the next government.”
Given that, the entire hungama about the race to the top between RaGa and NaMo doesn’t really hold. It is the regional satraps who hold the key to real power. And in a situation of a Third Front being formed, UPA allies like Sharad Pawar and his Nationalist Congress Party will be the first ones to jump the ship.
Hence, the next Lok Sabha elections will not be a presidential sort of race that it is being made out to be. In fact neither the Congress nor the BJP will take the risk of naming a PM candidate before the elections. It will depend on how post poll alliances evolve and who is acceptable to the ‘potential’ allies i.e. if they have enough number of seats to negotiate.
Narendra Modi in his own way recognises this. As Mukhopadhyay said “I had asked Modi about the number of dwindling allies. He argued that if the BJP’s winnability increased, allies would automatically come. He said they had more allies when they were on the winning curve but they started deserting when the ship began sinking. If it becomes afloat again, other would jump in. It is with grave risk that one should indulge in crystal ball gazing. But if the situation does not alter dramatically within BJP, and in other parties – including Congress – I see little chance of any party naming their prime ministerial candidates…Modi’s chances will depend on the number of seats the BJP wins.”
Hence, even Modi understands at some level that it will be a liability for the BJP to declare him as their PM candidate in advance. So the BJP is likely to be as vague as is possible for them to be on Modi. But at the same time enough signals will be given to the core cadre of the BJP to project Narendra Modi as the Prime Ministerial candidate.
When it comes to Rahul Gandhi he has clearly said that he is not in the race to become Prime Minister. The cynical interpretation of this is that all politicians say these kind of things. And that to a large extent this is true as well. The only people to whom this so called unwillingness of Rahul to be in the race, causes problems for, are the chamchas that the Congress party thrives on.
As Ian Jack writes in Mofussil Junction – Indian Encounters 1977-2012 “The Congress party became a machine largely bereft of ideology, with one purpose: to elect a prime minister called Gandhi…For without a Gandhi, even a Gandhi from Turin, the Congress fears it will be found out.”
While the chamchas in the Congress party may want Rahul to lead the charge, he clearly doesn’t see himself in the race. And here he may have picked up a thing or two from his mother, who after having refusing the PM’s post, was the defacto PM anyway. So if a Congress led coalition does come to power, and even if Rahul Gandhi chooses not to lead it, he would be leading it anyway. So it doesn’t matter if he is in the race or not. The Congress might choose even someone like a Pratibha Patil to be PM (like it chose Manmohan Singh), but the real power will remain with Rahul and his mother.
To conclude while, the social media might feel that this there is a direct fight on between NaMo and RaGa (or feku versus pappu) for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it hardly seems to be like that after some reflection. The sufi saint Nizamuddin Aulia once said Hunooz, Dehli Door Ast (Delhi is still far away) and that is as true for RaGa as it is for NaMo, at this point of time.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on April 17,2013.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)