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Our ability to change India in a globalised world |
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Looking beyond the Jan Lokpal Bill
On the record
PROFILE
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Our ability to change India in a globalised world
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the fifties Nehru was accused of having too grand a vision of India's role and place in the world. Nehru's towering personality obscured the passion, logic and depth of that debate, particularly in the fifties. It was a debate about the very idea of non-alignment. It was a debate about whether values have a role in foreign policy. It was a debate about the economic autarchy we should seek and about the very nature of our industrialisation. It was a debate about nuclear disarmament. On most of these Nehru's choices have been vindicated by history. In hindsight, we might be accused of a misplaced faith in the multilateral approach and international organisations where we expended so much effort. We even took Pakistan's aggression in J&K to the UN, thinking the UN would come to a quick and proper decision. But the first act of the Security Council was to change the subject on the agenda from the "Kashmir Question" to "India-Pakistan question"! We had underestimated the protean forms of power politics. There is no question that in Nehru's time we were punching above our weight, measured strictly in realist balance of power terms. This was possible because of the strategic space that the Cold War opened up for us and because of the eminent good sense and reasonableness of what Nehru was doing and advocating. During the fifties, India stood higher in the world's (and her own) estimation than her strength warranted. During the sixties the reverse was the case. After 1971 there has been a greater correlation between India's strength and prestige and this seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Our priority Our primary task now and for the foreseeable future is to transform and improve the life of the unacceptably large number of our compatriots who live in poverty, with disease, hunger and illiteracy as their companions in life. This is our overriding priority, and must be the goal of our internal and external security policies. Our quest is the transformation of India, nothing less and nothing more. If we have consistently sought to avoid external entanglements or outside restraints on our freedom of choice and action, it is because we have been acutely conscious of this overriding priority and wanted nothing else to come in the way of its pursuit. This was and remains the essence of the policy of non-alignment. If we have sought the strategic autonomy that nuclear weapons bestow upon us, it is to be able to pursue this goal without distraction or external entanglement. This is the touchstone against which policy should be measured both for desirability and effect. We have not done badly, when judged by the pace and nature of the development of India's society and economy. Only one other country, China, can be said to have drawn more people out of poverty largely as a result of her own efforts. Consider the statistics. In 1947 the average Indian lived for 26 years, only about 14% of us were literate, and we were one of the poorest countries on earth with well over 3/4ths of our population in poverty. Famine was common, as was disease. Today our average life expectancy is over 65 years, 2/3rds of our population is literate, and (using similar relative yardsticks) around 1/5th of our population is poor. We feed ourselves and know how to control disease. But the same statistics show that there is still a long way to go before we can say that all our people enjoy a satisfactory standard of living or are in a position to enjoy and exercise their rights and realise their full potential. Hence India's primary responsibility is and will remain improving the lives of its own people for the foreseeable future. In other words, India would only be a responsible power if our choices bettered the lot of our people.
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We, therefore, need to work for a peaceful periphery. We have an interest in the peace and prosperity of our neighbours, removing extremism and threats from their soil, as we are doing successfully with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Bhutan. This is more than the negative interest in avoiding sources of terrorism, extremism and insurgency from cross border ethnicities or others. l
As a country lacking some of the essential resources for our continued development (such as oil, high grade coal, fertilisers, high technology and non-ferrous metals), it is essential that we work to ensure our continued access to them and build up our strategic stockpiles and alternatives. This requires a sustained cooperative engagement with the world, of the type that we are attempting in Africa and South East Asia and already have with West Asia. When we have physical access, Central Asia too becomes important to us for this reason. l
We have an interest in helping to create an enabling international environment. We have an interest in global public goods like a peaceful order, freedom of the seas and open sea lanes. Over 20% of our GDP is now accounted for by our exports and our growth and survival depend on our imports of fertilizer, energy and capital goods. l
We have a responsibility to build infrastructure in India and our neighbourhood that enables us to pursue these goals. In this sense, roads in the border areas, air, rail and sea connectivity with our neighbours and economic integration in our extended neighbourhood all become strategic goals. l
Our goal must be defence, not offense, unless offense is necessary for deterrence or to protect India's ability to continue its own transformation. We must develop the means to defend ourselves. To what extent we become a net provider of security in the Indian Ocean and our neighbourhood would depend on how it contributes to India's own transformation. As of now it is our appreciation that our nuclear deterrence is best maintained by a credible and assured retaliatory capacity, rather than a destabilising first strike doctrine. It could be argued that I have outlined a very selfish policy, and that if every country were to follow such a policy, avoiding external entanglements and only taking what suits it from the international community, the world would actually end up poorer and less secure than before. It is true that absolute security for one country means absolute insecurity for all others. That is why it is also necessary to look at the sort of world we are living in and at the reactions that our pursuits will provoke from others. The World Situation We live for the present in a globalised world, which is increasingly tending towards multi-polarity, where power is more evenly distributed between and among states. There is no question that the world of 2011 is no longer as supportive of our transformation as in the nineties. The world economy has deteriorated in the last few years since the global financial and economic crisis of 2008. Pakistan and some areas west of her have declined into what appears to be chronic instability. West Asia is in turmoil. Technology has empowered small groups of radicals, extremists, hackers, pirates and terrorists, shifting the balance of power within states too. Between states, the rise of China has been magnified by a matching loss of Western will and economic confidence. In my opinion, three issues are likely to most affect our future ability to transform India. l
The first is the rise of China and Asia. The facts are well known. What China achieved in the last thirty years is phenomenal. In thirty years China's economy has grown by a factor of very nearly ten. The IMF recently projected that it will be the largest economy in the world in just five years time. By 2035 China will use one fifth of all global energy. China, which used to be dependent on direct foreign investment, is now herself the investor with three trillion dollars of international reserves and a sovereign wealth fund with 200 billion dollars. She is about to overtake Germany in terms of new patents granted each year. The world worries whether the powerful China that is emerging so rapidly will be a hegemon, or whether she will be one of several powerful cooperative states in the international order. Will she reorder international structures to suit herself, as the US did after WWII, and as other states have done in history? Or will she continue to rely on existing security and other structures that have worked so well for her, enabling her rise so far? There are no agreed answers to these questions, in India or abroad. India's interest is clearly in an inclusive world order, with China as one of its cooperative members. That is clearly what we need to work towards, along with China itself. Bilaterally India-China relations today have elements of cooperation and competition at the same time. We have a boundary dispute and overlapping peripheries in our extended neighbourhood, which is also China's extended neighbourhood. So long as both of us continue to be primarily concerned with our internal transformations, cooperate in the international arena on our common interests and do not see the other affecting our core interests, we can expect the present relationship to continue as it is. But this will require much better communication between India and China and no misunderstanding of each other's actions and motives. This also requires that some of our media and commentators, whose unquestioned brilliance is regularly on display lambasting other countries for their politics and policies, learn the virtues of moderation. The Chinese cannot believe that these media and commentators do not speak authoritatively for the country, as does their controlled media and academia. We must recognise that other countries too could have similar imperatives as ours and their own reasons for what they do. And why create self-fulfilling prophesies of conflict with powerful neighbours like China? (For me that is one of the lessons of the fifties that some of us are in danger of forgetting.) l
The second is a clutch of energy and technology related issues. Energy security, climate change, renewable energy and so on. Most of these issues that will determine our success in transforming India are not amenable to just our actions. We need international partners, coalitions where possible, to deal with major economic or political issues. Consider inflation in India, which concerns each of us. Much of what we see today in India is caused by the massive injection of liquidity in the international economy by the USA, China and developed economies to promote their own recovery after the economic crisis of 2008 and the rise in oil and commodity prices that has followed. This effect has been compounded by events in the Middle East and the uncertainty that this has caused, particularly about future energy prices. l
The third is our internal cohesion and coherence, namely, our success in meeting the formidable internal challenges that we face and will face in the foreseeable future. These include the social and other effects of rapid but uneven growth. Left Wing Extremism or Naxalism is one such challenge to our development strategy and to our state institutions. We cannot say that we know all the answers. What we do know is that neither the application of force alone nor a single-minded focus on development can solve the problem. Equally we now face new challenges of policing mega cities and a population of which over 50% will soon be urban, not rural. The defence of porous borders requires us to learn new rules for the use and combination of force, persuasion and deterrence, alongside other more benign means. Talk of strategic autonomy or of increasing degrees of independence has little meaning unless our defence production and innovation capabilities undergo a quantum improvement. A country that does not develop and produce its own major weapons platforms has a major strategic weakness and cannot claim true strategic autonomy. This is a real challenge for us all. As a nation state India has consistently shown tactical caution and strategic initiative, sometimes simultaneously.But equally, initiative and risk taking must be strategic, not tactical, if we are to avoid the fate of becoming a rentier state. What would this mean in practice? It means, for instance, that faced with piracy from Somalia, which threatens sea-lanes vital to our energy security, we would seek to build an international coalition to deal with the problem at its roots, working with others and dividing labour. Today the African Union has peacekeeping troops on the ground in Somalia. We could work with others to blockade the coast while the AU troops act against pirate sanctuaries on land, and the world through the Security Council would cut their financial lifelines, build the legal framework to punish pirates and their sponsors and develop Somalia to the point where piracy would not be the preferred career choice of young Somali males. This is just one example of what such a policy could mean in practice. Summing up With time, our positive interests will grow and our horizons expand, as a responsible member of the international community. As an old fashioned patriot I am confident that ultimately the Indian people, history and geography will prevail, as they always have. For a considerable time to come India will be a major power with several poor people. We must always therefore be conscious of the difference between weight, influence and power. Power is the ability to create and sustain outcomes. Weight we have, our influence is growing, but our power remains to grow and should first be used for our domestic transformation. History is replete with examples of rising powers who prematurely thought that their time had come, who mistook influence and weight for real power. Their rise, as that of Wilhelmine Germany or militarist Japan, was cut short prematurely. So at the risk of disappointing those who call on India to be a "responsible" power, (meaning that they want us to do what they wish), and at the risk of disappointing some of you who like to think of India as an old-fashioned superpower, I would only say, as Mrs Indira Gandhi once said: "India will be a different power" and will continue to walk her own path in the world. That is the only responsible way for us. Reproduced from the Prem Bhatia Memorial Lecture, 2011 delivered by the National Security Adviser on August 11 in New Delhi |
Looking beyond the Jan Lokpal Bill The shrillness surrounding the subject seems to be hijacking the real issue by pinning hopes on only one legislative measure. It appears that the Lokpal Bill is being made out to be the panacea for all the ills of our corruption ridden society. This would clearly be an intellectual myopia. I personally studied the Jan Lokpal Bill to understand it better. I believe it is a good start but still needs to be looked into further. We need to remember planning & drafting this Bill would just be the beginning. The core lesson from countries that have made progress is that success has been achieved when an integrated three-legged programme of enforcement, prevention and education has been applied. As stated earlier, at this stage our Jan Lokpal Bill consists only of enforcement. It is thus a one legged chair. We need a three legged chair to make any progress. Hong Kong, Indonesia, China The case of Hong Kong appears to have more similarities to contemporary India. Hong Kong's Commission was established in response to a crisis of public confidence. In the mid-70's Hong Kong saw an incident that shook the very roots of its law & order when a senior police officer, Peter Fitzroy Godber, amassed a wealth of more than 4.3 mn HK$ in overseas bank accounts and, on being discovered, managed to simply leave the country using his police passport and contacts. It wasn't as if Hong Kong did not have an Anti-corruption branch before it, but it was incapable structurally to lead the charge against the problem. A more recent case has been the emergence of Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission.The Commission has a powerful remit to investigate and prosecute. To date it has a 100% success rate in conviction which includes ministers, senior serving MPs, Governors of the Central Bank, members of the Election Commission, judges, police and senior prosecutors. Its only restriction is that they cannot prosecute military officers as they are governed by military courts. If we look at China, enforcement rates are very high and punishment includes death but there is only enforcement with minimal efforts at prevention or systematic efforts at public education. The result is that public perceptions of corruption, despite application of the death penalty for the guilty, remain unchanged year after year. Prevention Prevention contains a couple of key aspects - repairing the system or correcting certain processes. The first requires a capacity to review systems and procedures through an integrity lens that can spot possible loopholes and apply corrective improvements to reduce potential for abuse. An understanding of the regulations, institutional weaknesses and wider social context in which regulations are applied is needed. I believe it is critical for any Anti-corruption commission to be as capable of working on preventive techniques as it is on enforcement. To build its preventive capacity, the Ombudsman or the commission should constantly be looking for patterns of corruption as they emerge. Patterns can be found from the complaints being received with an eye to see if the system is the problem (preventive measures) or whether the problem is with individuals (enforcement measures). Through my discussions with various anti-corruption agencies around the world, I present to you a case which might make this point even clearer. In Hong Kong, the ICAC received a complaint that a contractor had used second grade cement to construct a tall building. ICAC sent its engineers for inspection and found the complaint to be true. Orders were issued for the building to be immediately demolished. ICAC did not merely stop at this single case inspection. They took upon themselves the task to find why such a thing went un-noticed by the civil inspectors who gave approval at various stages of construction of the building. What they found was that there were very few building inspectors and given the amount of construction happening in Hong Kong, were obviously over-worked and hence, the lapse. The third key element of successful counter corruption strategies is education. Education involves understanding corruption - defining what comes under the purview of corruption and what does not. People need to know the rules and procedures, not just staff in an agency but also those people who use their services. They need to know they do not have to engage in corruption to get what they need and need to be made aware of their rights - both legal and social to be able to resist demands of corruption. Anonymous complaints Apart from these fulcrums of prevention and education, there is a specific aspect which if taken care of would go a long way in improving the efficacy of Jan Lokpal Bill. The Bill prepared by the civil society in various paragraphs at different places talks about publishing every month the list of cases with brief details on each case. I believe this would be very harmful not only to the officer being investigated and proves to be innocent later, but also dangerous for the complainant and the witnesses. Any anti-graft commission in any country receives numerous complaints each year, out of which only a small number are found to be true and are substantiated- making details of each case public would lead to public ridicule of innocent people, given that the court of public opinion is much harsher than legal courts. The reputation of the innocent must be protected. Also, giving details of the case could lead to the exposure of witnesses and thus be a deterrent to whistleblowers or anybody wanting to divulge any corrupt practice. On the same grounds, all such details should be out of purview of the Right to Information Act also. In addition it is important to affirm that to safeguard the common man and ensure the security of the smaller fry in any corrupt system, anonymous complaints should be accepted. One final lesson from success stories in other countries. The containment of corruption did not happen overnight. In most places,even in small societies like Hong Kong or Singapore, it took about a generation for the transformation to take place. Corruption, after all, is a complex socio economic cultural phenomenon. At the heart of it is the disparity of power amongst the people of a country. Indeed, it mirrors the skewed distribution of power in the society - power being a combination of education, money, social and legal rights vis-a-vis the aspiration and ambition of a people. This is not an argument for inaction, but rather a cautionary reminder that when we set down the path to fighting corruption, we should know at the outset it is for the long haul, and not to be distracted by short term partisan jockeying. It is also a struggle that all components of the nation must face together. (The Writer is a Congress Member of Parliament, representing Kurukshetra constituency of
Haryana)
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On the record She is the founder director of 'Translating Bharat' and is responsible for a series of conferences and literary events organised by the literary consultancy, Siyahi. She is also a director at Yatra Books, which publishes original and translated works in English, Hindi, Marathi and Urdu, in collaboration with Penguin India. Battling a critical disease she is still devoting all her time to organising 'Litfests' from Kashmir to Kathmandu and writing short stories in her spare time. From Paro to Priya, how do you assess your journey as a writer? My journey as a writer has had me travelling through many styles and genres, speaking through many voices. Each book has been a new journey. It was fun to return to some of the characters of my debut novel Paro, with my latest novel' Priya, In Incredible Indyaa'. I am writing short stories, when I find the time, nowadays. Will new technologies strike the death knell of the book, as we have known? The human race will never stop telling or listening to stories.....in a sense, we are each other's stories. So books are going nowhere, they will only become more accessible and interactive in the digital age. Only the formats and technology will change. Can festivals address the pathetic publishing scene in regional literature? Publishing in the Indian languages is increasingly imaginative, and the print technology has also improved tremendously. The new wave of digital publishing also has had an exciting and important impact. Book fairs and festivals do create further opportunities for literary dialogue and for making books and content more visible. What is being done to ensure quality translations of our language literature? Cultural empathy has to be cultivated. The more book lovers encounter and respond to literature in different Indian languages, the greater the opportunities to promote quality translations. There are many talented and dedicated people working on the translation scene. They simply require more opportunities to do this. Why is a festival being planned for Kota, since Jaipur festival in Rajasthan is already such a great success? The Vice Chancellor of Kota Distance University was keen to have a literary event in Kota to provide inspiration and impetus to local audiences. As you know, Kota is an important educational hub and I felt that it would be valuable to reach out to the large student community there. Will the focus of the Kathmandu festival be Nepali literature or literature from all the mountain regions? Kathmandu is a very cosmopolitan city, and I expect the festival team there will present a unique mix of regional and global themes. To What do you attribute the success of the Jaipur Literature Festival? The success of the JLF comes from the dedicated work of very many people, and of course the writers who participate with such unstinting enthusiasm. But the real success lies in the quality of the audiences, and the amazing collective energies they generate. What prompted the decision to hold the Kashmir Literature Festival in view of the perpetual security concerns? There were suggestions and requests from several writers to hold a literary event in a free and creative format in Kashmir. We felt this was a good idea. The security concerns will be addressed by the venue sponsors who are supporting the event. |
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PROFILE
But even sibsidised kerosene is expensive. The poor, explains this year's recipient of the Ramon Magasaysay Award, pay a lot more for energy than the elite. So, why can't they afford solar energy ? Deemed to be Asia's Nobel Prize, the award was given for "his pragmatic efforts to put solar power technology in the hands of the poor, through his social enterprise-- Solar Electric Light Company (SELCO)." The IIT graduate's visit to the Dominican Republic , while he was still studying at Kharagpur, left an indelible impression and changed his life. There he saw the poor using solar energy and paying for it, which convinced him that it was possible to replicate the model in India. He went on to study Energy Engineering in Masachusettes and his passion for lighting the lives of the poor with sunshine prompted Solar Electric Light Fund ( SELF) of Neville Williams to trust Hande with the job of installing solar power in 100 rural households in Karnataka. There was no looking back and in 1995 he set up the Solar Electric Light Company (SELCO), because only a company, he felt, could offer and sustain after-sales service. Hande was convinced that the problem did not lie in installing photovoltaic cells. The problem, he diagnosed, was to ensure customised after-sales service. He worked relenetlessly to convince Grameen Banks to finance solar electrification. India, he points out, has one of the highest exposures to natural sunlight but not much of it is being tapped as yet. But since power generating cost of solar energy is more than four times higher than thermal power, it has not quite picked up in the country. Hande's pioneering company provides a photovoltaic cell mounted on rooftops and a lead, acid battery for storing power generated by the cell. A two-light home system costs around Rs 10,000 to install and can be used to operate radios, cassette players and ceiling fans as well and comes with a one-year warranty. Technicians visit the homes every three months to check. With around two hundred employees, the company operates mostly in Karnataka and Gujarat and has an annual revenue of Rs 13.5 crore. Describing himself, half in jest, as a "complete subsidy product", in a reference to his studies in the IIT and MIT funded by Indian and US taxpayers, Hande advocates renewable energy courses in Industrial Technical Institutes (ITIs) and polytechnics besides incentivising the rural enthrepreneur rather than subsidising the product. SELCO designs and installs solar technology applications based on each customer's specific needs, whether a two or four-light system for the home, head lamps for night workers like midwives and rose pickers, or for working effectively with sewing machines. To enable the poor to access the technology, SELCO has pioneered in linking the sale of solar technologies with credit institutions, like rural banks, cooperatives, even self-help groups. Taking service to "doorsteps", it trains customers for maintenance and provides prompt, personalised help through its wide network of service centres. Treating the poor as partners instead of mere consumers, SELCO builds their confidence as it assists them in accessing and using technology to better their lives. Poverty reduction is central to the goal as Hande says, " until the poor become asset creators, we are not empowering them."
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