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Nuclear in the Year of Modi

14 Thu May 2015

Posted by in India, Nuclear, South Asia

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It has been a year now since Narendra Modi took office as prime minister of India and by all accounts, it has been a good year. In many ways, Modi’s victory is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency of the United States in 2008 – after eight years of what many saw as a misguided war in the Middle East and Central Asia, a significant number of Americans wanted change. Similarly, after ten years of anaemic Congress rule, Modi represented the hopes – perhaps unrealistically high – of millions of Indians.

For a candidate who had spoken at length about solar power during the election campaign, it was surprising to see Modi talk up nuclear energy once in office. In July 2014, Modi visited the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and was full of praise for India’s nuclear community. Declaring that nuclear power would be an essential part of India’s energy security, he assured the Department of Atomic Energy of his full support in the implementation of their expansion plans. To be sure, it will take a brave prime minister to belittle the nuclear programme – India takes much pride in its high-tech endeavours such as spacefaring and nuclear technology, especially given the prejudicial international environment in which it was developed. Yet such pride has not necessarily translated into support in the past – some projects are decades overdue and there was never a concerted push towards nuclear power in India.

A few important developments in the nuclear arena have taken place during Modi’s first year in office, some of them entirely of his making and others not so much. For example, India signed agreements with Australia and Canada for the supply of uranium for its safeguarded reactors. These negotiations had been ongoing since the previous regime and would have been concluded no matter who resided at Race Course Road. Similarly, work on Kudankulam, Kalpakkam, and general nuclear research would have likely continued under bureaucratic inertia.

Modi’s leadership has expedited other nuclear developments, principally the civil liability for nuclear suppliers. However clumsy the solution to the train wreck that is India’s nuclear civil liability law may be, a suppliers’ insurance pool removed a major obstacle before nuclear vendors – foreign and domestic – investing in the Indian nuclear market. Another project that saw some movement in the past year due to Modi’s involvement was Jaitapur. The Indian prime minister raised the issue of Jaitapur with Areva during his visit to Paris in April 2015 and saw the French nuclear concern sign a pre-engineering agreement (PEA) with Larsen & Toubro. The agreement is significant, perhaps more so than one realises, because it involves the transfer of forging technology to L&T to enable it to manufacture reactor vessels for the French EPR reactor in India. Not only will this obviate the need for European and American nuclear vendors to depend upon Japanese companies to provide crucial reactor components, but it will also allow India to support its indigenous nuclear industry and eventually enter the export market.

As remarkable as these two achievements are, the shortcomings of Modi Sarkar are equally baffling. Despite a close relationship with Shinzo Abe since his days as the chief minister of Gujarat, Modi was not able to nudge an Indo-Japanese civil nuclear cooperation agreement closer to the finish line. This was a disappointing setback as both Tokyo and Delhi try to surreptitiously bolster defence and strategic cooperation. Similarly, India failed to capitalise on the Russian offer made during Vladimir Putin’s visit in December 2014 to build 20 reactors in the country. Part of the problem was perhaps that the Indian nuclear establishment was not ready to absorb such an investment and had no sites or plans ready to deploy so many reactors. Furthermore, domestic opposition to nuclear power would make quick movement on new sites difficult.

As always, there have been rumblings about Hitachi and Toshiba setting up nuclear power complexes at Srikakulam and Mithi Virdi but there has been little movement on the ground despite the persistence of such rumours for almost a decade. Similarly, Rosatom’s project at Haripur has been stalled for years without any conclusion in sight. The foundation stone to Gorakhpur, an indigenous nuclear project, was laid by then prime minister Manmohan Singh in January 2014 but the project had been planned since 1984 and there is little news of it since the foundation ceremony either. Such chronic delays need to be addressed if India is to ever pursue nuclear power seriously – in an era where financing is the largest component of the cost of a nuclear power plant, delays can mean the death knell for nuclear energy.

Despite some good progress on the nuclear front during Modi’s first year as prime minister, some fundamental reforms of huge import remain to be accomplished. One is in the arena of transparency. Pace the claims by the nuclear conclave, reliable and consistent information about the nuclear programme is elusive. The introduction of the Right To Information Act has shifted the onus of uncovering data onto activists rather than keep it on the department in question. Furthermore, national security or the public interest is used as an excuse to cloak even the quotidian operations of the Department of Atomic Energy. For example, in November 2014, the Minister of State for Department of Atomic Energy, Jitendra Singh, informed the Lok Sabha that “it is not in the public interest to disclose the quantity of production of uranium” in response to a question on the average annual production from uranium mines and the quality of the ore!

Another reform that should be considered over the next four years is to transfer the control over nuclear energy to the Ministry of Power. This would allow the minister responsible to take a comprehensive view of the power requirements of the country and the options available before deciding on India’s energy mix. Though secrecy may have been important to India’s nuclear programme in its dual-use incarnation, the separation of civilian and military nuclear facilities as stipulated by the Indo-US nuclear deal has obviated the need for such levels of confidentiality. Defence reactors would obviously be retained by the PMO or perhaps transferred to the Ministry of Defence, but those facilities involved in non-military activities can be put under the purview of the minister of power.

What Modi and the Indian nuclear programme sorely needs is a visionary. When Homi Bhabha envisioned a three-stage nuclear programme for India in November 1954, there was not a single commercially operating nuclear reactor in the world; India did not yet have an operational reactor of any type. The world’s first commercial power reactor went critical in December 1957 in Shippingport, United States, and India’s first reactor, Apsara, came online in August 1956 for research purposes; India’s first commercial reactor, Tarapur Unit I, went critical only in October 1969. Bhabha’s ability to think decades ahead was a boon for India’s nuclear programme but it came at a point when the commercial uranium reactors were still a theory and thorium reactors were a distant dream. Bhabha himself was a competent scientist but by no means technically brilliant. However, his audacious dream transformed India .

It is difficult to predict what a visionary might advocate but a few things that might receive consideration are new technologies such as Molten Salt Reactors, Integral Fast Reactors, and thorium reactors such as the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor. A second consideration would be a ramp up in the number of reactors by an order of magnitude – if we want clean air, plentiful energy, and growth simultaneously, perhaps it is time someone talked about a thousand reactors over the next half century rather than twenty, fifty, or even a hundred. Modi has shown himself to be an able administrator so far but now he needs a domain expert with chutzpah. As the good Book teaches us, where there is no vision, the people perish (Míshlê 29:18).

This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on May 18, 2015.

India’s Allodoxaphobia

29 Tue Jan 2013

Posted by in India, South Asia

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If there is anything that India fears, then the top slot on that list must go to freedom of information. For a democratic republic, and not one of those only fashionably named so such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, India’s surplus of laws that seek to limit the dissemination of information and opinion is staggering. Though I’d love to rail about the First Amendment to the Indian constitution, the notorious Section 66A, and a plethora of other totalitarian provisions that make the framework of the Indian republic, this post is about an often forgotten or ignored topic that is related but clearly not as glamorous as another much-to-be-criticised law, the Right To Information Act (2005) – the declassification of government documents and the (meaningful) opening of the National Archives.

Out of all the concerns India is saddled with, why is a relatively academic issue of such importance? After all, the RTI has, however imperfectly, given citizens the legal right to demand information that was heretofore difficult or impossible to access. Archives interest primarily a minuscule constituency of researchers who would largely write for peer-reviewed journals and other academics. None of this is false, yet to categorise the opening of archives as an issue only a few professors might be interested in misses the forest for the trees.

There are many benefits to adopting German or British archival policies. One is that the creation and professional maintenance of millions of documents will keep not only our history alive but also create jobs for students not smitten by the PCM bug. A National Records service would, in effect, create a new industry, providing employment to thousands, and hopefully dissuading those of only middling scientific talent from applying to engineering or medical colleges. India’s libraries – only by the grace of semantic generosity – are in utter disrepair; the National Archives are unhelpful and unfriendly, and the various state archives makes one prefer Delhi!

Another immediate and obvious advantage of a clear process of declassification of documents and archival maintenance is the creation of area experts outside the government. The colonial mindset of the Indian government which demands that subjects be controlled, not citizens empowered, may fear this. Declassified documents will attract hundreds of scholars from across not just India but the world to study Indian policies on security, agriculture, industry, foreign affairs, water management, and a host of other issues. This is assuming, of course, that the reports on which the government documents are based are also declassified. Indian decisions of the past will receive a thorough scrutiny.

Declassification also helps in making existing “think tanks” meaningful entities. Presently, researchers use their exclusive or privileged access to people in the corridors of  power to analyse Indian policy. This is an unhealthy relationship as the scope of research and intensity of critique can be set by the establishment. Such power disequilibrium leads to either the marginalisation or the co-optation of a scholar by the state machinery – in exchange for functioning within a permitted range, analysts will be given access and some even made into court historians. The lack of independently verifiable sources available to all lowers the value of the output of Indian think tanks, and the paucity of sources and information means that the entire sector sounds like a gaggle of geese, repeating the few crumbs of information thrown to them by self-important babus and/or politicians.

Beyond the pitiable condition of India’s libraries and archives is the general disregard for them. For example, the Lok Sabha library carries 1.27 million books, periodicals, gazettes, and reports for use by India’s elected officials. The National Library in Calcutta (the largest in India) holds 2.2 million tomes. In contrast, the US Library of Congress (LoC) contains nearly 34 million books, the Boston Public Library 23.6 million, and Harvard University over 16 million books. Similarly, the British Library holds over 14 million books. These massive libraries are open to the public as well as researchers, though the LoC does not keep its stacks open.

In contrast to this is the experience of researchers in other countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, or Germany. Clear procedures for declassification exist as do avenues for requesting that classified information be considered for declassification (Freedom of Information Act). The National Archives in London have their catalogue online for patrons to see if there is relevant information on their topic before planning a trip to Kew. In Germany, the Bundesarchiv and the Politisches Archiv of the Auswärtiges Amt show similar friendly cooperation – when I visited in 2009, they had run multiple searches for me and pulled all the necessary files, microfilms, and microfiches and had them ready at a desk reserved for me when I arrived. Archives and major libraries that serve as state depositories are all staffed by qualified personnel in various fields of the humanities or information management to assist researchers. It is also easier to interview politicians and bureaucrats in these countries than it is in India, for mystique seems to be a key ingredient of worth in the subcontinent.

In India, the blanket reason of national security is often cited. This is, in a word – hogwash. These reasons exist in all countries, but advanced democracies have learned that an open approach to information is far more beneficial to the health of their republics than a quasi police state that suppresses free expression and information. India’s experience with secrecy has clearly shown that it is an unhealthy practice; the country severely lacks experts on a host of issues and it shows in the country’s comical daily administration. It is not an impossible task to appoint committees of experts and security professionals who have been through a thorough background check on a two-year basis to review documents for declassification. Various systems already exist around the world that can be studied and implemented in India.

Given the costs of setting up a national system of records maintenance, some will undoubtedly attack it as an elitist project since its most immediate beneficiaries are few compared to other items on the development agenda such as public transportation or education. If numbers of beneficiaries were the only criteria for implementing a project, however, one might question the astronomical costs of providing security to some of India’s elected officials as well as the travel habits of token heads of state. A national records service may not be cheap, but the cost of not having one is significantly higher.

The problems of creating an open society are not insurmountable, though India’s leaders seem to lack the desire to solve them. Between the infamous First Amendment and Section 66A, if anything, India seems to suffer from a severe case of allodoxaphobia – a fear of opinions. Yet it is time to develop a thicker skin and get over infantile sentiments; as India’s shadow grows in international affairs, it will need better informed ministers and scholars. No amount of economic growth, infrastructural development, or military strength can course correct for ignorance and stupidity. By the way, perhaps as a non sequitur, I am also fully aware that were such a declassification project to be undertaken, it will continually demolish the shibboleths of Nehruvian socialism until 2028.

This post appeared on Tehelka Blogs on January 30, 2013.

Nation-building and the Myth of Homo Auctoritas

18 Sun Mar 2012

Posted by in India, South Asia, Theory & Philosophy

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In its fullest sense, nation-building refers to the process of creating a national identity – administrative as well as cultural – such that a new state is politically stable and viable. However, more commonly, it refers to the efforts of newly independent states (India, African states) or states that have undergone radical transformation (Germany, Japan, Eastern Europe, former Soviet republics). This is primarily because, while all states need to be built, it is only these new ones which have the task remaining. Nation-building is a long and arduous task, with many difficult decisions to be made – the nature of government, the function of government, lines of authority, civil liberties, limitation of powers, a machinery for self-correction, infrastructure, and so on. These are not decisions that can be entered into with passion or prejudice, but with a rational and logistical head.

Prerequisites for nation building

India, gaining independence in 1947, set about ordering her political space with gusto. Despite some of the finest minds in the country being appointed to the Constituent Assembly, the final product –  the Constitution of India, and indeed, the country itself – has the markings of a lethargic has-been than a dynamic new state looking forward and ready to face down its challengers. To be fair, India was severely handicapped in her (ongoing) process of nation-building. Most successful nation-states – Denmark, the United States, Canada, France, to name a few – evolved slowly over centuries and had time to build up the necessary prerequisites to statehood. The general trajectory of these states has been an evolution from authoritarian systems to liberal democracies. During their authoritarian days, Western Europe and its derivatives (Australia, Canada, the United States) had to answer the same questions of statehood and address the same problems – illiteracy, religious identity, linguistic cohesion, credibility of institutions. Motivated by revolutions when subjects were dissatisfied (Magna Carta, English Civil War, French Revolution, 1848), monarchs shaped their nations without too much interference from a self-interested public. As a result, when Europe turned to democracy, states already had a high degree of literacy (France had approximately 95% literacy in 1881). Furthermore, as European states had remained independent and not been colonised, development of infrastructure and institutions had steadily been taking place. India, however, inherited a literacy rate of 12% and an economy that had been, in real terms, stagnant for 190 years with little to no development of infrastructure (if one doesn’t count the railroads from the mines to the shipyards).

India’s compromises with nation-building

The compromises India made in the Constituent Assembly for the sake of a united nation today threatens that very nation. In the early years of the republic, Jawaharlal Nehru set a bad precedent by cowing down to bad policy recommendations backed by the coercive force of populist politics. The failure to implement a uniform civil code has divided communities in India; the introduction of reservations based on caste has solidified caste lines rather than eliminate them, and has given birth to vote banks and minority politics; the flippancy with which the constitution is amended has made the document a foil to be wielded by any half-skilled operator. What shred of dignity was left was torn away by Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, in her declaration of the Emergency and the systematic decimation of institutions, from the judiciary and presidency to her own party. Once the Congress Party let the genie out of the bottle, the propensity to reuse those same methods did not go away and in fact expanded.

It is little wonder, then, that many Indians are frustrated and cynical of politics. It is not uncommon to hear in India that the country needs a strong leader to cut through the frivolous politics and bureaucratic inefficiencies and propel the nation to greatness. As an outsider to the Indian experience, this has always struck me as odd and, frankly, ass-backwards – while most peoples yearn for freedom and liberty, Indians seem to desire authority and control. However, as most psychologists would tell us, it is an instinctual human reaction to lean to the Right in times of crisis – Adolf Hitler in Weimar Germany, Winston Churchill after the outbreak of World War II, or Menachem Begin after the Yom Kippur War, the massacre of the Israeli Olympic team, and the Entebbe hijacking. Similarly, watching India free fall into chaos at all levels – economic, social, and political – has created an upsurge of authoritarian yearning, an admiration if not outright desire for Homo Auctoritas.

The myth of Homo Auctoritas in Indian garb

Howbeit, nothing is simple in India, and neither is the Indian’s taste for a strong leader. While scholars of dictatorial rule have studied systems in the West as well as East and agreed that totalitarianism is different from authoritarianism in that the former is more statist while the latter represents merely a high concentration of authority, India presents a unique case. The Indian conception of ‘strong’ rule is better classified as Bose-ism (alas, the credit for coining the term must go to Krishnalal Shridharini, writing for the Milwaukee Sentinel in April 1944). But what is Boseism? Ideologically, Subhas Chandra Bose advocated a fusion between socialism and fascism, what he called Samyavada.1 In his own words,

I would say we have here in this policy and program a synthesis of what modern Europe calls Socialism and Fascism. We have here the justice, the equality, the love, which is the basis of Socialism, and combined with that we have the efficiency and the discipline of Fascism as it stands in Europe today.

The concept emphasises a charismatic leader who is more functional than individualistic, rejecting personality cults and positioning the leader as merely the head of the party in pursuit of a greater cause. Because the accrual of power is not for personal gain, there would be less corruption. Contrary to Nazism, Boseism was not at all racist and Bose himself had a falling out with Nazi officials in the mid-1930s over their treatment of Jews and description of Indians and Slavs in Mein Kampf. Boseism, informed by a Hindu ethic, was, oddly for a totalitarian system, remarkably pluralistic. Programmatically, Bose wrote,

  1. The party will stand for the interests of the masses, that is, of the peasants, workers, etc., and not for the vested interests, that is, the landlords, capitalists and money-lending classes.
  2. It will stand for the complete political and economic liberation of the Indian people.
  3. It will stand for a Federal Government for India as the ultimate goal, but will believe in a strong Central Government with dictatorial powers for some years to come, in order to put India on her feet.
  4. It will believe in a sound system of state-planning for the reorganization of the agricultural and industrial life of the country.
  5. It will seek to build up a new social structure on the basis of the village communities of the past, that were ruled by the village “Panch” and will strive to break down the existing social barriers like caste.
  6. It will seek to establish a new monetary and credit system in the light of the theories and the experiments that have been and are current in the modern world.
  7. It will seek to abolish landlordism and introduce a uniform land-tenure system for the whole of India.
  8. It will not stand for a democracy in the mid-Victorian sense of the term, but will believe in government by a strong party bound together by military discipline, as the only means of holding India together and preventing a chaos, when Indians are free and are thrown entirely on their own resources.
  9. It will not restrict itself to a campaign inside India but will resort to international propaganda also, in order to strengthen India’s case for liberty, and will attempt to utilise the existing international organizations.
  10. It will endeavour to unite all the radical organizations under a national executive so that whenever any action is taken, there will be simultaneous activity on many fronts.2

Two things stand out in Bose’s agenda – the first is, as Bose promised, that it truly does sound like a fusion of socialism and fascism, the language a mix of ‘workers’ and ‘military discipline’. But then, there is no hiding that Bose was a Leftist throughout his life. The second, and perhaps the most unacknowledged thing, is that Boseism was meant to be temporary (point 3). This feature is essential in understanding the Indian approach to authoritarian rule; it is not an insane desire to lose liberty, nor is it a drive towards thanatos (as Sigmund Freud may have commented). It is a cry for doing the job right.

But here is the kicker – it cannot be done. As much as it may be demanded, successful Boseism is the next thing to impossible. The time in which India could have been readied for democracy is long by, spent creating an independent nation-state that resembles fairly well the boundaries that an idea of India held. Had Mohandas Gandhi or Vallabhbhai Patel agreed with Bose and implemented his system, it may have been accepted…for a while. Nonetheless, today, there is a deficit of trust between India’s citizens and her leaders. Memories of the Emergency, the last time an Indian leader tried to impose authoritarian rule upon India, are still fresh. Multitudes opposed Indira Gandhi then, and the same will be the case today. But more important than the fact that it cannot be done, there are important reasons why dictatorships are not worth the glitter.

Going by the numbers

If success were based on human development and quality of life, there are no dictatorships that could match liberal democracies. In a 2011 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) report, the first country that even resembles an authoritarian state is Russia at 39th rank. Jordan, a constitutional monarchy, is at 61st rank, and genuine totalitarian regimes fare far more poorly. Even counting among the recently (post 1945) decolonised states, Cyprus, Jamaica, and Sri Lanka – all democracies – take top spots at 27, 53, and 58 respectively. According to the Economist’s Intelligence Unit, a 2005 Quality of Life Index (QLI) put the first non-democracy at number 18 – which was Hong Kong, part of China that enjoys significantly more civil liberties than the mainland. The first proper dictatorship was Qatar, at 41. And like the IHDI report, even recently decolonised democracies rank fairly high, Cyprus (23) and Barbados (33) coming in ahead of the oil-rich kingdom of Qatar.

However, if success were based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth alone, it is obvious that totalitarian regimes do quite well too. It would be silly to deny that a dictatorship can boast sound economic results – any political system, free or unfree, that removes obstacles to entrepreneurship, investment and trade, and makes a credible commitment to safeguard property rights to a certain extent will trigger a virtuous economic cycle. Spain’s Francisco Franco and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew discovered that in the 1960s, as did China’s Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s, and many others at various times. Explosive GDP growth is of particular relevance to the Indian case, as Boseism is meant to be a short-term phenomenon anyway. The argument would be that two decades of Boseism would propel the economy at rapid rates, after which a return to democracy could be made. Leaving aside the structural problems with such a theory for the moment, let us look closer at the two indicators – GDP Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) per capita and GDP rate of growth.

It would stand to reason that developed countries would grow slower than developing countries; after all, the former have already put in place much of their physical infrastructure and a percentage increase for them would be much larger and harder while spare capacity and unrealized potential tend to allow developing nations to grow faster than developed nations. The fastest growing GDPs in 2011 that are not based on mineral wealth exports belong to Lebanon (19%), Jordan (10.9%), China (9.1%), Argentina (9.1%), Estonia (8.4%), Turkey (8.3%), and Sri Lanka (8.2%). Among these, the only complete dictatorship is China with a Democracy Index ranking of 141. While Lebanon and Jordan are at 94 and 114, the remaining are all democracies, with Estonia ranked the highest at 34. In terms of GDP per capita too, Estonia is the highest among the fastest growing economies, ranked at 47.

Since her economic liberalisation in 1991, India has been living in China’s shadow and the two states have been compared again, as they were in the early years of the Cold War. For the outside world, the India – China rivalry represent a most fascinating experiment, an opportunity to compare democratic growth and totalitarian growth. Given China’s breathtaking economic performance, it has been suggested that the real advantage the authoritarian state has over its democratic neighbour in the southwest is the nature of its regime. Clear and short lines of authority and fear are supposed to have facilitated quick decision-making and bypassed vested local interests. Although this reasoning is seductive, it does not entirely bear scrutiny. Governance is a difficult quality to measure, but the World Bank has decided upon six basic characteristics to measure governance – voice & accountability, political stability and lack of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. For a better picture, things get extremely complicated: there are too many variables within each indicator that are peculiar to a region, criteria between surveys are arbitrary, ‘good governance’ is difficult to define universally, or there may be biases in the sampling. To be sure, there exists much criticism. However, the individual country data reports for Indian and China released by the World Bank, according to their World Governance Indicators (WGI) index, tell an unexpected tale. Not surprisingly, India ranks higher than China in voice & accountability every year (the report gives percentile data from 1996 to 2010). China ranks higher than India in political stability but the two are fairly even in government effectiveness. India is ahead of China again in regulatory quality and rule of law but the two are about the same in control of corruption. So despite the common perception, China’s totalitarianism gives it no advantage over democracies. It needs to be pointed out that because of its totalitarian nature, much of what happens in China is censored to the outside world, and official Chinese economic statistics have often been rumoured to be fake. Tourists, journalists, and diplomats are carefully kept on the rosy path, forbidden to travel to the interiors of the country.

What this picture really tells us is that stability and reliability are most important when it comes to economic prosperity over the long term. Spain, a success story until the Eurocrisis, has seen its wealth double since 1985 and yet at no point in the last quarter-century did the Spaniards achieve annual growth figures comparable to those of China. Similarly, the US economy has grown by a factor of fourteen since 1940, but never experienced “Asian” growth figures. When the environment in which the economy breathes depends on the commitment of an autocrat or a party and not on sound institutions, development cannot occur with any certitude. Furthermore, liberal democracies like Peru and India, albeit flawed, have maintained a 7% GDP growth rate over the past few years and kept up with totalitarian growth without its attendant disadvantages.

Sick India

The evidence therefore points to not less, but more (or better) democracy. Authoritarian states, thought they may have the potential for success, have not done so well overall – one look at Africa should clear all doubt. Better democracy can only come through better transparency, through which institutions can be built. Transparency streamlines processes and transactions as well as reduce the space in which corruption can occur because it puts procedure in the open. Yet the Indian government has barely paid lip service to this so far. The most recent example is the Union budget, released less than a week ago – despite many calls for transparency in terms of funds allocation to various schemes, the Finance Ministry has chosen to remain silent on the issue. The budget document has only a mention of the funds allocated to each department and 20-25% of the outlay will probably remain unspent in 2012-2013 as it did the previous fiscal year, creating a huge pool of money to be siphoned off. Another reason for resistance to wards transparency is that budget opacity allows the distribution of state monies by ministers to preferred districts and persons. This, in effect, creates a mechanism for punishment by officials of districts whose voting records were ‘less than exemplary.’

India’s laws are so complex and impenetrable that they are a breeding ground for corruption too. Shortage of qualified judges, suffocating bureaucracy, and interminable delays in the disposal of cases has raised a veil over the legal system that citizens can pierce only by offering inducement. At all levels, the judiciary is implicated in scams and other misconduct but the process of reform is, again, buried under suffocating bureaucracy.

In business, Ajay Piramal, an Indian billionaire, refused to invest in India citing corruption, bureaucratic red tape, unstable government policies, and a complete lack of transparency. There is no need to recite examples from the umpteen sectors of India’s institutions to demonstrate the abysmal state of affairs but to put it in numbers, approximately $18.5 billion are lost in corruption annually, or 1.3% of the GDP. According to an Economist article in 2008, the ‘democracy tax’ in India is quite high, with over 120 members of parliament having criminal charges pending against them. Admitted the article of the Congress regime, “A BJP-led government would offer India a better prospect of reform than the current arrangement.”

Quoi faire?

Unfortunately, the solution evaded much of India during Anna Hazare’s tantrum in 2011 in support of a Jan Lokpal bill. The answer to the country’s sickness is, it seems, is to create more laws, more bureaucracy, and consequently more corruption. But this has been already been tried and is why India is where she is today – the country has the longest constitution in the world and a hodgepodge of laws, some universal and others applying to different sections of the body public. Had Hazare instead put his energies into declassifying government documents as per the 30-year rule, pushed for the availability of public records online, a stronger Right To Information (RTI) Act, integrity pacts, and other such transparency-enhancing procedures, he might well have been a true Indian hero. The nature of these procedures is to put under the public eye much of what happens in government. If citizens had easy access to land records, police case progress reports, Indian Administrative Service (IAS) transfer history, information on their parliamentarians (the issue of Sonia Gandhi’s fabricated educational history comes to mind), it would at least shift the onus of good governance through informed voting more onto them.

If, on the other hand, a totalitarian – Boseist – regime were established, these issues would never see the light of day. Bose held the curious belief that he was accountable to the public, but not necessarily answerable. For example, Bose proclaimed the formation of the Provisional Government of Azad Hind in October 1943. While retaining his post as Supreme Commander of the Indian National Army (INA), he announced that he was naming himself Head of State, Prime Minister, and Minister for War and Foreign Affairs.3 These appointments involved no democratic process or voting of any kind. Further, the authority he exercised in these posts was dictatorial and often very harsh. He demanded total obedience and loyalty from the Indians in south Asia, and any who opposed him, his army or government faced imprisonment, torture, or even execution.4 His INA troops were obliged to swear an oath of loyalty to both the Provisional Government and to him personally. He ordered the summary execution of all INA deserters, and also prepared (but was never able to implement) law codes for the entire population of India. These laws, which stipulated the death penalty for a range of offenses, were to come into force when the INA, together with the Japanese Army, entered India to fight against the British.5

Transparency is not a panacea to India’s woes. Institution-building takes trust – citizens must be able to trust that the institutions they go to for help, be it the police, the post office, or the municipal office. In a case that horrified the nation in 2002, a disabled girl was raped in a train compartment in full view of other passengers – not one raised a finger to save the girl. While we may castigate the passengers on that train, it must also be realised that the passengers probably did nothing because they feared the harassment of the police and the courts, or worried that the rapist had some underworld associations and afraid that the police would not protect them from the wrath of the rapist’s friends if they accosted the rapist. As much as we’d like to loathe the bystanders, consider this: in a very strange incident in 2008, a 22-year old youth committed suicide within five hours of scraping former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda’s SUV with his car.

The hollowing of institutions in India has been so thorough that it has affected even the moral fibre of her citizens. The restitution will take time and effort, and no totalitarian regime will prove a shortcut – even East Germany wasn’t. There is a story of a man who was searching for a key under a lamp post. When a passerby asked the man where he had lost the key, he replied that he had lost it some distance away from the lamp post. Astonished, the passerby asked, ‘Why are you searching under the lamp post?’ The man replied, ‘Because there is light under the lamp post.’ Indians are looking at the form of government, not because that’s where they have lost the key, but because there appears to be light there. To create a government that is accountable, a citizenry that is discriminating, imaginative and tolerant, institutions that effectively deliver public goods, and laws that are properly enforced and institutionalised, India requires transparency that can heal the rift between the rulers and the ruled; reinforcing it with an absolutist system will not help. The changes required are many, and the tired cliche that Rome wasn’t built in a day comes to mind. But Robert Frost also comes to mind:

“But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”

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1: Bose’s inaugural speech as mayor of Calcutta. Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: 1990), p. 234. [TOP]

2: S.C. Bose, The Indian Struggle 1920-1942, Compiled by the Netaji Research Bureau (Bombay and other centers: Asia Publishing House, 1964), p. 312-313. [TOP]

3: Hari Hara Das, Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Movement (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1983), p. 367-370. [TOP]

4: Hugh Toye, The Springing Tiger: A Study of a Revolutionary (London: Cassell, 1959), p. 112-115. [TOP]

5: Das, Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Movement, p. 371-376. “If any person fails to understand the intentions of the Provisional Government of Azad Hind and the Indian National Army, or of our Ally, the Nippon Army, and dares to commit such acts as are itemized hereunder which would hamper the sacred task of emancipating India, he shall be executed or severely punished in accordance with the Criminal Law of the Provisional Government of Azad Hind and the Indian National Army or with the Martial Law of the Nippon Army.” These punishable acts include such things as spreading rumors “disturbing and misleading the minds of the inhabitants,” spying, destroying material resources controlled by the Provisional Government, and all forms of rebellion against the Provisional Government or the Japanese Army.” [TOP]