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A 'must read' article. Prof. Rajeev Srinivasan is the Director of a Business school at TVM and was on the faculty of IIM Bangalore, earlier.
the following was published at http://www.rediff.com/news/
The Great Indian Rope Trick, the Potemkin State and other illusions of progress
Rajeev Srinivasan on how Indians are satisfied with illusions, not reality
Indians live in a state of illusion: they believe there is progress, there is a democracy, and that the state is a benign mai-baap nanny
state. It turns out that they are wrong on all counts, but apparently
this political and economic theater is quite enough as anodyne for the
long-suffering Ordinary Indian.
I was impelled to write this after reading “The Great Indian Rupee Trick” by Krishnara athttp://ramanujapuram.
I also happened to leaf through an old issue of National Geographicfrom
1988 with a story on Kerala, and it mentioned that $1 = Rs. 12 at that
time. Thus, the rupee has, in about 25 years, lost 80% of its value, and
quite a bit of that in the last few years (mostly coinciding with UPA
2). In simple terms, the fall of the Indian rupee reflects the lack of
competitiveness of the Indian economy.
The
dramatic increase in the Current Account Deficit suggests the same
thing: that there is little India makes that foreigners want; whereas
Indians want to import a lot of things others make. It was blithely
predicted by India’s mandarins that the rupee’s fall would lead to a
surge in its exports, but on the contrary, India’s exports have actually
shrunk by 4.6 % year to year.
We
don’t need to go far to understand why this has happened: it is because
of pure economic mismanagement. The immense potential of the country and
its people has been wasted – a colossal crime against the people and
indeed against humanity, which has prevented half a billion people from
clawing their way out of poverty.
Why
have Indians allowed a clutch of clever political entrepreneurs to do
this to them? It must be because Indians are satisfied with delusion (is
that why Bollywood is so big?). They are happy with the illusion of
progress; they are happy to have the illusion of a democratic republic;
they are happy to have the illusion that our wretched are being looked
after. In fact none of these is true, but they happily suspend their
disbelief. They live in a make-believe world.
The
fact is that India is falling further and further behind the rest of the
world. Half the world’s poor, half the world’s blind, half the world’s
sick and malnourished, are in India. Things are not getting better; they
are getting worse by the day. India is regressing rapidly.
Remember
how India was compared to China (much to the Hans’ disgust) and other
developing nations, courtesy Goldman Sachs and the convenient BRIC
epithet. But have you noticed that these days India is increasingly
bracketed with Africa – and sometimes contrasted negatively with
sub-Saharan Africa, for instance in malnourishment – as the last
reservoir of the world’s miseries? China appears to have decisively
trounced India in the race for growth and prosperity.
There
is, some argue, the effect of democracy, as though there were a
Democracy Penalty. But this is absurd, because India is not a democracy.
It is a hereditary feudal monarchy with a large set of court jesters
and other hangers-on. Parliament is a chimera, or at best a smokescreen.
There are what look like elections, what looks like an assertion of the
people’s will. But this is a hugely expensive, elaborate charade like
the Potemkin villages of Tsarist Russia.
In
fact, the Parliament is merely a place to park the hereditary scions of
the ruling castes. Patrick French’s 2011 research (“The Princely State
of India”, in Outlook magazine, Jan 17, 2011http://www.outlookindia.
Furthermore,
Parliament is just a rubber stamp. There is the gigantic Food Security
Bill, which will add many billion dollars to the nation’s budget
deficit. It was enacted not after Parliamentary debate, but as an
Ordinance, or executive order. Similarly, a few years ago, the ‘Nuclear
Deal’ with the US was signed by the executive without ever informing the
Parliament about how much was being given up in national security in
return for virtually nothing.
Therefore,
the Indian Parliament is merely ornamental, and a playground for the
children of political bigwigs. But Indians are under the comfortable
illusion that they live in a Parliamentary democracy. Yes, that and ten
rupees will get them a cup of coffee.
Then
there is the fantasy that the Indian State is benign. And that it looks
after its poorest and worst-off. Which is the alleged reason that the
unelected National Advisory Council (a truly motley crew) has rammed
through various hare-brained schemes such as NREGA, RTE, and the latest
turkey, FSB. And what is the reality with all this spending – which
amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars? The Indian State is actually
a Predatory State, the direct descendant of the colonial construct
intended to loot and pillage.
In a March 23, 2011, article titled “India can’t fumble its ‘food right’ plan”, the Wall Street Journal noted
that, according to the Global Hunger Index, India is in the category of
‘alarming’ along with Haiti, Bangladesh, Sudan, Cambodia and Nepal.
This is worse than war-ravaged Afghanistan and Iraq. The only countries
were hunger is worse than India are: war-torn Congo, Haiti and
Bangladesh. This is how the UPA has helped the Common Man?
Even worse, reporting on a study in the British medical journalLancet, the Economist
A more recent update is even more damning. Quoting the Asian Development Bank, the Economist of
Jul 6, 2013 (“Widefare”) points out that of all the welfare states in
Asia, India’s is the worst-performing: it has neither depth nor breadth.
That is, neither is the alleged welfare net reaching a large
proportion of the people, nor is the per-person welfare amount high. Even Pakistan manages to give its welfare recipients more.
I will
close with a final illusion: that of toilets in trains. Even in
higher-class compartments, if you use the stinking toilets, you will
notice that there is no way you can clean your bottom with dignity.
There is a chained mug and a faucet, thus giving you the idea that you
can wash yourself. Much of the time, there is no water. The rest of the
time, you are frustrated because the chain is just slightly too short –
there is no way you can wash yourself without twisting yourself into
contortions, or without spilling soiled water all over the toilet floor.
The
bureaucrat who specified the length of that chain – just three inches
too short – is a perfect metaphor for India’s ruling classes. They
have no interest in your welfare, only in giving you the frustrating
impression that you can actually accomplish something, which of course
you cannot.