By Col (Retd) Anil
Athale
It is good that the verdict of the 2014 general elections is clear and
not a fractured one like in 1996 or 1998. The new BJP Prime Minister
will find an economy that is on the slide, unemployment on the rise, and
security threats worsening due to the emergence of a new cold war,
among other things. On top of it all are the heightened expectations of a
young and restless population.
But the first challenge before the new
PM is to restore the power and prestige of the office of the Prime
Minister. The erosion in the authority of this office that took place
over the last 10 years is unprecedented – something not seen even during
the tenures of Deve Gowda and IK Gujral, who ran shaky minority
governments.
This erosion happened because the PM chose to play second fiddle to the
UPA chairperson. As any administrator knows, power comes from the
ability to reward or punish. In the case of the outgoing government, the
power of rewards was in the hands of Sonia Gandhi, who controlled even
minor appointments in the central government and its offshoots.
These
appointees owed their personal loyalties to the ‘family’ and not the PM.
Is it any wonder that the PM was unable to implement almost any policy?
In the days of monarchy, the sceptre represented the power of the king.
Even in its democratic ‘avatar’, the speaker of Parliament sits in the
shadow of a ‘mace’, or sceptre.
The outgoing government was guilty of
letting the sceptre fall into the hands of an unconstitutional
authority, thus destroying the cohesion of the executive.
Politics, by its very nature, abhors a vacuum. The power vacuum in UPA-2
was filled by the judiciary, the media and some NGOs. It is easy to
blame the judiciary for usurping the policy-making functions of the
executive, but it saw the crown lying in the dirt and used the mechanism
of the PIL to pick it up. The media, especially 24-hour television, and
foreign- funded NGOs, were not far behind. A new PM will have to first
wrest back the power of decision-making from these arms of the state and
none-state actors. The battle is going to be hard and dirty, so much so
that the new PM may find that the just concluded election campaign was a
picnic compared to what lies ahead! The problem is that the
institutions that acquired this power (the judiciary or the media) got
it without corresponding responsibility. So they will fight
tooth-and-nail to retain their power.
But while the new government fights these battles and begins to
implement much-needed changes and economic reforms, there are three
doable, non-controversial policy decisions that can easily yield
double-digit economic growth. An economic institute has estimated that
each one point rise in GDP propels six million families out of poverty.
The three non-economic measures suggested here are capable of minimally
raising GDP growth by one percentage point each! The trinity of measures
are:
* Focus economic and foreign policy on the east. The west can wait.
* Re-orient defence policy and reorganise the vast defence machine.
* Prioritise ‘soft power’ export as a major foreign exchange earner and
employment generator.
Sanjaya Baru’s book, The Accidental Prime Minister: The making and
unmaking of Manmohan Singh, has one intriguing revelation. It says that
the outgoing PM’s initiative on open trade with south-east Asia was
stalled by Sonia Gandhi and her National Advisory Council (NAC). As
someone who has been studying the north-east insurgencies for the last
25 years (including the last few years as the Chhattrapati Shivaji
Fellow of the USI), one can say without contradiction that trade with
Asean via the land borders of the north-east will save millions of
taxpayer rupees by reducing subsidies, generating employment and
ushering peace that in turn will reduce defence expenditure.
The first obvious step in this Look East policy is to look at our own
North-East first. For instance, the Kaladan river project to connect
Sittawe port in Myanmar with Mizoram has been in limbo for the last 30
years! The border connectivity at Moreh in Manipur is primitive with
only headloads permitted to be carried across the border!
Contrast this with the fanfare and attention given to our trade with
Pakistan via the Wagah border or via Uri and Chiken Di Bagh in Kashmir.
At the risk of sounding harsh, one can say that Indian foreign policy in
the last decade was reduced to a Pakistan policy. Unfortunately for us,
the fundamentals of the Pakistani ideology are such that any progress
will be a mirage for a few generations.
The ground situation in the Indian North-East is extremely favourable
for ending the insurgencies and unrest once and for all. There is a
great yearning to join the Indian mainstream and progress economically. A
bold initiative in the North-East and the opening up of trade with
ASEAN can work wonders for the region as well as the national economy.
India’s defence posture is one of the most inefficient and resource
wasting postures in the world. Fundamentally, the defence apparatus is
still stuck in the British model of ‘Garrison army and expeditionary
force ‘. Defence planning, currently left to the armed forces, has
become a collection of worst-case-scenarios and their aggregation.
Modernisation has come to mean junior officers in the War Establishment
directorate leafing through glossy defence magazines and forwarding
demands for the import of the latest weapon systems! The scenario is
completed with DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation)
becoming a giant state within a state with import substitution passing
for research and indigenisation of components masquerading as
development.
Illiterate durbaris in Delhi and many motivated Western commentators
have expressed alarm at any hint of India’s review of its nuclear
policy.
They forget that pre-emption, when an attack is imminent, is an
integral part of any ‘no-first use’ policy. The new government can take
its time in drawing up a comprehensive review of security policies.
This should follow in three steps.
* Short-term (five years) and long term (20 years) comprehensive reviews
of threats to India's security.
* Best mix of nuclear, conventional and sub-conventional forces to deal
with them – both in terms of forces and equipment.
* Reform and renewal of the forces and production of weapons at most
economical cost within the country.
Since the credibility of the threat of retaliation is a vital ingredient
of deterrence (minimum or otherwise), the election of a strong-willed
leader like Narendra Modi has already enhanced the credibility of our
deterrence. It’s like adding 10 missiles to our arsenal. It is
understood that military forces exist to achieve foreign policy goals
(guns are the last argument of kings), including security.
In the
Nehruvian era, he brilliantly turned it the other way round and used
foreign policy to achieve strategic goals. But the 1962 debacle brought
home the dangers of this approach. Such is the intellectual laziness of
our foreign policy elite that any reference to building strength is
‘denounced’ routinely as an overly ‘muscular’ or provocative approach!
Should one then rather have anaemic policies? The ‘Ai mere watan ke
logo’ lament on defeat needs to be banished to the dustbin of history.
When next the army asks for new toys, the defence minister must ask some
hard questions. Every time I have visited J&K (and that is several
score times in the last few years) I am struck by the vast parks of
vehicles and equipment parked in the open – and never used even once
since 1971, or thousands of T-72 tanks, now being pensioned off and
replaced by T-90s, that have never seen a shot fired.
A deep review of
the existing defence posture is long overdue. It should be a
‘comprehensive’ exercise and not a truncated one like the Gen Rao
committee (teeth-to-tail ratio), the Arun Singh expenditure committee or
the Kargil review. These were truncated exercises and episodic and
their recommendations were not implemented any way.
A total revamp of security will not only yield savings worth 1 percent
of GDP but also provide better security.
Samuel Huntington (“The Clash of Civilisations”) had mentioned that
India was the only country that seemed immune to American cultural
power.
He mentioned that Bollywood outpaces Hollywood in the number of
movies produced. The influence of Bollywood is all-pervasive in Asia. A
fillip to dubbing, etc, will make it even more so. Giving industry
status and making finance available will be of help. But even more
importantly it is necessary to break the nexus between the underworld
and the distribution of cultural products.
Buddhism is India’s greatest cultural export to the world. In the whole
of South East Asia, there exists a vast reservoir of Indian cultural
capital. To tap it and make India the favourite destination of the
world’s Buddhists is not rocket science. If only the Bihar CM, instead
of demanding a central package, had spruced up Bodh Gaya, he would be
rolling in tourist dollars.
All the three measures suggested are doable in the short term and will
put India firmly on the path of economic recovery.
This would also
silence the doubters about where Modi will find the resources for growth
and jobs.
(The author is Coordinator of Inpad, a Pune-based thinktank)
A band performs at last year’s Ziro Festival of Music.
