The audacity of scope

Big dreams need better planning than this

(Published on November 19, 2016 in Business Standard)

It’s always fun to read about putrescent extravagances like the rumoured Rs 550 crore wedding that Karnataka mining tycoon and political crony Gali Janardhan Reddy just organised for his daughter. This one featured a Rs 17-crore bridal sari, Rs 5 crore invitations, and 50,000 guests including Karnataka BJP president BS Yeddyurappa, who is to financial propriety what kryptonite is to Superman. It’s superfun to read about it while standing in a five-hour-long queue for the ninth straight day to exchange Rs 2,000 suddenly worthless rupees for the day. It’s the kind of thing that brings a smile to one’s face in these dark times, even if it is kind of a psycho killer smile.

The Indian government commendably wants to honour one of its campaign promises by sucking out black money and corruption. But in the hyperbolic style of the Modi government, it is trying to do it with that most powerful of economic tools: metaphor. It’s a mahayagya, said Modi, a ‘festival of honesty’. It’s disgraceful to sell state policy through religion, but if you’re going to, remember that like all festivals, this one is a temporary respite until we get back to routine; and like all festivals, it’s going to make you feel good rather than actually change your life.

Targeting black money is a fine idea, and props to Prime Minister Modi for wanting to address the problem. Forget, for a minute, the critique that demonetisation is a high-impact, low-yield exercise that will do nothing to stop corruption. Give the government the benefit of doubt. Even then, when you decide to inconvenience 1.2 billion people, you’d better have thought your plan through, because intelligent planning is the difference between dreams and nightmares. The government has shown unforgivable irresponsibility in not foreseeing or planning for most the basic of problems. We now have new currency that ATMs are not configured to dispense, not enough lower denomination currency in the market to make change for Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes, and people are being tagged with indelible ink used for elections. Nobody is prepared for the crippling cash lockdown in 95% of the economy. And it is killing people.

As a relatively hale, time-rich, urban banking customer with four ATMs at five minutes’ walking distance, I can get by thanks to the plastic in my wallet, and standing in line endangers only my mood, not my livelihood. But 55 people (and counting) have died as a result of demonitisation, and many more have gone hungry. You would think that the only time state-directed action kills its citizens is as collateral damage in times of war, or when citizens have been handed a death sentence by a judicial process. Here, people are dying because creditable ambition is backed by incredible incompetence, because an exercise that needs years of planning has been unleashed in six months. What is this unseemly haste about, if not elections? The government’s argument that secrecy was necessary to avoid giving hoarders a heads up has been debunked by reports that many of the right people knew, including allegedly Messieurs Ambani and Adani.

The really striking feature of this demonetisation exercise is India’s tolerance for shabby governance. The more empowered you are, the less you’re willing to put up with stupid or inefficient policy. The less empowered you are, the higher your pain threshold, by necessity—and the more business and politics will take advantage of you. It speaks to the extent to which ordinary people despise the corrupt rich that so many are willing to put up with their present hardships to support the government. Good governance would value that spirit, and would plan as hard as possible to minimise that pain, instead of making a self-interested and frankly legally dodgy splash; floundering; and being reduced to making it up as it goes along.

“No honest tax-payer will lose a single rupee,” said power minister Piyush Goyal. That’s not true; hundreds of millions of honest tax-payers who legitimately pay zero tax, will be losing the money they might have made instead of standing in line.

There is no doubt that black money and corruption have screwed this country hard. There is no doubt that it has to be addressed. I would love to see this exercise succeed. But not at the cost of lives. The days of Pathankot, of JNU anti-nationalism, of beef murders—those were the good old days of calm, controlled, beautifully executed cock-ups—compared to the giant cowpat we now find ourselves in. Modi’s demonitisation isn’t upsetting the economic applecart—it is blowing it up, and screwing the shards into our eyes. Here’s hoping that it will get sorted sooner rather than later, with no more loss of life.

Not another pollution column

Yes, another pollution column

(Published on November 5, 2016 in Business Standard)

A friend hoped I wasn’t going to write on pollution this week, because he’s seen about 793 pieces on the subject in the last four days. Well, here’s no. 794.

Delhi’s pollution problem is encased in what author Douglas Adams called a Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field—a device that can run for 100 years on a single torchlight battery because it is powered by people’s total refusal to see what they don’t expect or want to see. Ours is a huge and life-threatening problem, but it requires so much patient, consistent, incremental, consensus-building work to fix, that it is too crazy boring to think about. So we haven’t. 

It’s been like that for years. At the turn of the century the Supreme Court prodded the Delhi government into making one huge leap to CNG, dissipating the ominous black cloud that hung over the capital; but over the years, that progress has been rapidly overwhelmed by more people, more vehicles, more construction, more dust, and crop burning in surrounding states. Today, despite CNG and a popular and growing metro system, the air problem is just getting bigger, worsening every winter. Yet we just go about our lives buying more diesel cars, shopping harder, building more things without tamping down dust, and burning leaves and wood, as if it simply isn’t true that we’re at risk of debilitating disease, or death, just by virtue of breathing. And it’s not like you can opt out of breathing.

Nobody wanted to think about it. It’s as simple as that.

But nothing focuses the public’s attention like wretched health. Everyone’s SEP field is failing. Today, every Facebook and Twitter timeline is filled with screenshots of air quality monitoring device readings, maxed out on the post-Diwali airborne sludge that we have no choice but to breathe. People are exchanging information on where to get face masks, how this air purifier compares with that one, and how long they’ve been coughing and sneezing. People are gasping their way to the doctor only to be told, purifiers-schmurifiers—the only way back to health is to leave Delhi and live somewhere else.

Just pause here for a minute. The air is so toxic that doctors advise people with vulnerable health conditions to simply leave Delhi. There’s no way to say this gently: you have to be a complete moron to believe that development at this price is any development at all. It’s a source of enduring amazement to me that when Delhiites speak of quality of life, mobile phones and cars come up; domestic help and groceries delivered to the door come up; but almost nobody will mention clean air and clean water. What will come up is the ability to holiday in a place with clean air and water.

People without kids can rant and rave, wear face masks and agitate for clean air; or go barefaced into the yellow miasma without caring when or where we drop dead. But for those of us who reproduced, and are responsible for someone little and vulnerable, and for all of us who have ageing parents, we really don’t have an option.

Would you be okay with locking your kids into a smoke-filled room? Would you agree to force them to smoke several packets of cigarettes a day? Would you be okay with putting a hand over their mouths so that they have to struggle for breath? Because that’s what you’re effectively doing by putting up an SEP field around Delhi air. If your answer to those questions is no, you have a duty to stand up and demand that everyone—government and citizens—work together to find a solution.

This is a long-standing public health emergency in the capital of India. That is, at best, embarrassing—but we no longer have the luxury of focusing on the best. When the AAP came to power, I had hoped that it would make cleaning up Delhi air its top priority. This season, as PM 2.5 levels in Delhi rocket off the charts, the health minister tweeted something to the effect that he would set up a committee to form other committees to look into it—I’d suspect him of gallows humour if governments had a sense of humour. The AAP’s failure to take serious anti-pollution steps ranks as its biggest, most damning failure.

Delhi can recognise and demand a minimum quality of life; or we can decide that we don’t mind living in an unliveable cesspit as long as we have shiny new malls and great cars and money—that, like cockroaches, we can thrive in filthy conditions.

But if we don’t get real now, we won’t have a choice. We’re completely out of time.  

The god-awful state of secularism

When it’s the thought that counts, but not in a good way

(Published on October 22, 2016 in Business Standard)

What’s left of our rationality took another tooth-loosening blow in Mathura the other day. One morning, according to newspaper reports, several dozen Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, and other Hindutva activists showed up at the Bindu Seva Sansthan Ashram, and made round eyes and scary teeth at its leader, Swami Balendu, because the Swami had organised a meeting of—wait for it—atheists. The activists felt that the godless have no business meeting in their extremely goddy town.

So far, it’s your garden variety, lunatic fringe problem. What really matters is that the police officials who accompanied the activists backed them up, saying that the Swami and his godless guests were on their own in case of a law and order problem. It is not clear, from the reports, whether or not there followed a moment of silence during which everyone looked at their feet and wondered what, then, the police is for, exactly. Going with the flow, the Mathura administration withdrew the permission they had previously granted for the meeting. Atheists were harassed and warned not to write about all this on social media. Needless to say, the meeting was cancelled.

That marks a new low in the tedious god-bothering that is spreading like a nasty fungus across the land. Zealous religion has always made a nuisance of itself—people shutting down art exhibitions, burning books, breaking things, roughing up other people, rioting and so on—but now we’re manufacturing stupidity at a dizzying rate. Back in the good old days, it took paintings of nude gods to enrage the sanctimonious. Now, disavowing religion is enough. Rationality is enough.

That’s because if there isn’t a god to dictate your life to you via a priest/prophet/rabbi/some other amanuensis, you might actually start using your brain and coming up with thoughts of your own, thereby disempowering those who like to control your politics.

And this is political—it has nothing to do with spirituality, that private, individual thing that requires no external validation or agreement. When administrative mechanisms—like the police—align with a majoritarian religious agenda, facilitating social veto and citing law and order problems as a reason to not maintain law and order, we are well on the way to losing our collective marbles. And to being a horribly pious, violent, fearful, brainless, boring country.

The Samajwadi Party’s pathetic law and order track record in Uttar Pradesh is a fabulous self goal, since it allows thuggish elements—including, but not limited to, the Sangh Parivar—to take swift advantage of the power and developmental vacuum, currently with an eye on the 2017 polls. But then, the attack on rationality is not limited to one state’s poor law enforcement. It’s coming directly from the Centre.

Religion has always been treated with kid gloves in India, thanks to the Congress’s weakness for its vote-gathering potential. But it is being weaponised by the Sangh, and loaded on to the super-efficient delivery mechanisms of nationalism, education, and government dictat. The Sangh doesn’t understand the first thing about freedom—the freedom to question, to express yourself, to worship or not, to ridicule, to debate. It hates independent rational thought, because its very specific vision of India is one in which everyone is emotionally blackmailed into remaining cooperatively in their ordained place in the power pyramid, in return for having more money in their wallets.

Street muscle and mixed messaging is therefore very efficiently ripping secularism out of the Constitution. Some things, we are being told, are beyond question—including the list of such things. Hinduism. Nationalism. The armed forces. Power. Rich people. Money. The national interest. Development. The national honour. All of these newly sacralised things were vigorously questioned by the same people, when they were not in power.

So it’s wildly funny to watch the Sangh invoke the Constitution to demand a uniform civil code on the grounds of equality. I happen to agree with the idea of a UCC, but only as long as it rips religion out of politics. Keep the state out of the house of worship, the bedroom, the hospital, the funeral, the wedding, and the family, except to ensure individual rights and law and order; let people opt in to religion or nationalism or the family structure if they wish to, and ensure that the state backs up their guaranteed individual rights if they wish not to. Lift the inviolability of ‘family’ law and expose it to the scrutiny of the Constitution. Strike down triple talaq as well as the laws on cow slaughter; abolish Muslim polygamy as well as tax breaks to the Hindu joint family. Uphold the right to worship anything, and the right not to worship anything. Be truly equal.

But that’s as fanciful as the idea of god, because in Sanghese, equal means ‘some more than others’.

Patriot games

In which cynicism preys on sentiment, and everyone loses.

(Published on October 8, 2016 in Business Standard)

On a recent television debate, actor Om Puri stuck up for Pakistani actors working in Bollywood, and said that nobody forces soldiers to sign up to the Army. The ensuing tide of vitriol caused him to apologise for those remarks:

“‘I am guilty and I deserve a punishment. I want to be tried by the army, I should be court-martialled. I want a constructive punishment,’ Puri said. ‘The army should teach me how to use weapons and send me on the same site where that brave man was [sic] sacrificed himself for the country. I don’t want to be forgiven. I am pleading to the nation I want to be punished.’”

It’s so over the top that it sounds like a satirical comment on the idiocy of having to apologise at all. Like: “I’ve been a bad, bad elf. Please allow me to stand in the corner in a dustbin, banging my head repeatedly against the wall, while our demigods in uniform punch me in the kidneys. Broadcast it live. Hey, do you have rusty nails, burning coals, broken glass, anything? I’d really like to crawl through that.”

But maybe Mr Puri was being genuine. Either way, the takeaway is that the most pressing national issue is to figure out whether something can be read as an insult to the nation, and then, depending on the answer, read it as an insult to the nation anyway, and throw an eye-watering tantrum until people coddle you just to shut you up—or, more malignantly, because otherwise you will blacklist, beat, or kill them. You don’t want that, because we are also a country in which law-abiding citizens are told that the police will not be held responsible if criminals do them harm.

That’s what happened to actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who had a role in a Ramleela in Uttar Pradesh. The Shiv Sena said a Muslim can’t act in a Hindu story, and the police said they couldn’t do anything about any consequent trouble, so the organisers asked him to pull out. Law is ceding ground to de facto power: social behaviour is increasingly being regulated by social threat or violence. The Sena must be thrilled to be spreading its communal poison beyond Maharashtra, but the BJP can take credit for softening up the territory.

After all, it’s UP—ground zero for the cow/beef vigilantism sparked by Mohammed Akhlaq’s murder last year. In Dadri this week, a man jailed in that case died of illness. His body is laid out in public, wrapped in the Indian flag. Is the message that he served the nation by murdering a Muslim—whose son serves in the Air Force? It’s a grotesque, criminal fudging of issues, cynicism preying on sentiment.

What of the people whose job it is to play watchdog, to separate truth from the smoke and mirrors? In India today, if you’ll pardon the expression, too many news anchors have abandoned that role to function like the government’s PR department. When Arnab Goswami says that questioning military action indicts one’s patriotism—that there should be no room for nuance in this black-and-white issue—he is no longer a journalist. But then news anchors have long jostled for patriotic cred, when they should have been reminding India that patriotism is not a requirement for citizenship, nor is playing along with calls for unity—however patriotism and unity are defined in that moment. And in this moment, patriotism and unity are being defined as unquestioning worship of the armed forces. Self-styled patriot anchors are leading witch hunts when they should be pointing out that the armed forces are as fallible and open to question as anyone else, and that questions are not the same as insults. Instead, they have helped popularise the term ‘martyr’ for a soldier killed in action, apparently innocent of the religious connotations of the word. A dead jihadi is a martyr. A dead Indian soldier is a professional who served the state and is publicly mourned.

That’s the stunning achievement of two and a half years of this government—a political bait-and-switch, selling a promise of economic development, and delivering a triumphalist machine that sacralises country, nationalism, majoritarianism and tradition, to achieve Hindutva goals. Secular institutions and ideas are being given non-negotiable religious weight. Religion has handcuffed rationality and put a gun to its head, and individual rights are being socially delegitimised.

When insecurity makes sweet, sweet love to mindless team spirit and overblown regard for power, the child of that union is hyper-nationalism, and it’s a spoiled brat whose parents rush to fulfil its every wish. This emotional pap is very handy at election time—you have only to look at the posters coming up in Uttar Pradesh, of the Prime Minister pictured as a warrior.

But there’s another way to fight for your country: You can just refuse to give up your brain.