Essays and Op-Eds

Celebrating Pratibha Patil

This is the 23rd installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

If you are an Indian, your heart should swell up with nationalistic pride today – and perhaps even explode. India elects a president as you read this, and it is likely to be Pratibha Patil. There has been much talk in the media about how she is unfit for that post, an opinion I have also expressed. But now I have seen the light. I was wrong.

Competence and intellect are optional attributes for a post that only has ceremonial value. Our president represents India to the world, and should be someone who people can take one look at and say, “Ah, so India is like that!” For various reasons, Pratibha Tai embodies much of India in her slender frame.

Consider, first, her spirituality. We are a spiritual nation, and Pratibha Tai actually converses with spirits. When she was nominated for the presidency, she revealed that she had been told by an enlightened soul that she was destined for bigger things.

“I had a pleasant experience,” she told an audience at Mt. Abu, where she had gone to meet a lady named Hridaymohini aka Dadiji, who runs a “World Spiritual University”. She had chatted with a gentleman named Dada Lekhraj, who died in 1969 but has presumably hung around since. “Dadiji ke shareer mein baba aye,” she told the audience. (“Baba came in Dadiji’s body.”) This, you will notice with pride, also has a touch of the erotic about it, which is quite appropriate in the land of Khajuraho and the Kama Sutra.

There are many advantages of having a president who can speak to spirits. She can chat with Gandhiji (Mahatma, not Sonia) over breakfast, and let us know his views on the world and Lage Raho Munnabhai. If George W Bush comes visiting, she can impress him by chatting with Saddam Hussein and asking him where those WMDs are. (“Dadiji je shareer mein Saddam aye.”) And so on. Lucky Dadiji.

Pratibha Tai will also not let India’s traditional sciences wither away just because they are nonsense. (What kind of silly reason is that anyway?) Consider astrology: Just last year, while launching an astrology website that she surely knew would succeed, she said, “Astrology is a serious and deep subject which has a great influence on our society. The growing expectations of the people from this subject requires application of science and technology.”

Under Pratibha Tai’s influence, astrology might even be introduced in the IITs. Her encouraging words could spark off an outsourcing revolution in astrology, as the rest of the world dials Indian call centers to find out what Aquarians should have for breakfast.

A president should have a vision for the nation, and Pratibha Tai fits the bill. During the emergency she had announced, “We are … thinking of forcible sterilization for people with anuvaunshik ajar (hereditary diseases).” This is laudable, because it is in sync with the oppressive policies of our great leaders Shri Nehru and Shrimati Gandhi (Indira, not Sonia), whose governments repeatedly denied us personal and economic freedoms – for our own good, of course.

Just see the impact of such a measure. All of us have genetic predispositions to some disease or the other. If we’re all sterilized, only government servants will have kids. (Babus will, of course, be exempt from all laws.) Thus, our mai-baap government will have the only mai-baaps around, and our population problem will be solved at one blow.

Pratibha Tai displayed a similar subtlety when she spoke out against the purdah system, claiming that it originated as a protection for women against Mughal invaders. The fact that she said this with her head covered spoke volumes about her feelings about the world today. Is it not be awesome to have a president capable of such nuance?

Many allegations have recently been made against Pratibha Tai, but are more like features than bugs. She allegedly protected her brother from murder charges, and mismanaged a cooperative bank she controlled by cancelling loans taken by her relatives. Is Indian tradition not all about taking care of your family? Also, using a cooperative bank to defraud people is an honourable political tradition in Maharashtra, and that state has reason to be proud of her as well.

It must be admitted that Pratibha Tai’s opponent Bhairon Singh Shekhawat also cares for his family – he reportedly helped his son-in-law get out of a CBI case. He might also be an unheralded pioneer of the great Indian art of corruption – he was allegedly suspended in August 1947 for taking bribes, as soon as India gained independence. But he can’t speak to spirits.

My heart is filled with delight by that old political adage that we get the leaders we deserve. Today, Pratibha Patil will almost certainly be elected president of India. Aren’t you proud?

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives.

Previous posts on Pratibha Patil: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Licensed to toast

This is the 22nd installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

“You may now need licence to own toaster,” read the headline of a news report this Tuesday in the Hindustan Times. The article began: “You do not use the Toast Authority of India’s toasting services, but may soon have to pay a one-time licence fee for the toaster you own and an additional tax on any new toaster you buy in the future. Why? To support the Toast Authority of India and its employees.”

“Wait a minute,” you tell me, “you’re pulling a fast one on us. This is way too absurd to believe. Our gentle, compassionate government would never do something like that.”

Right. Well, I did make some of that up. The headline actually said, “You may now need license to own TV.” And in the para I quoted, replace “TAI’s toasting services” with Doordarshan, “toaster” with “TV” and “TAI” with “Prasar Bharati”, and there you have it.

Now tell me, is that any less absurd?

This gives me a bad sense of déjà vu. A few weeks ago I read Doordarshan Days, Bhaskar Ghose’s memoir of his days as director general of Doordarshan in the 1980s. In that, he bemoaned the scrapping of a similar license fee.

“Given that today there are at least 8 crore television sets in the country and at least 15 crore radio sets,” Ghose bombasted, “an annual fee of, say, Rs 1000 for a television set and Rs 100 for a radio set would have brought in Rs 4000 crore. Even after paying for the cost of collection and for an inevitable shortfall in collection, the amount left over would meet a truly professional public broadcasting network’s operational expenses, costs of upgrading equipment and expansion plans.”

Leave aside the questionable math and the small matter of why “a truly professional” network would need to look beyond its revenues to manage its costs. Ghose’s statement is revelatory because it reveals the sheer arrogance of power that the government displays, the assumption it makes that it is our lord and master, and can charge us whatever it wants for the facilities it kindly allows us to enjoy. It is as if we owe our existence to the government, and exist at its mercy. Should it not be the other way around?

I assumed while reading Ghose’s book that such thinking was a remnant of the past. Well, silly me. That HT news report states that there might be a levy of between 5-10% on every TV set we buy. (At the time of writing, on Wednesday morning, the meetings to decide these are a few hours away.) Another proposal being considered is to make TV channels pay a “public broadcast fee” of 5% of gross revenue to Prasar Bharati. Along with this fee, they will have to send an Archie’s card to the government saying, “Thank you for letting us exist, my honourable mai-baap. Slobber slobber.”

Other publicly funded broadcasters exist around the world, but that is no justification for such blatant theft. It takes remarkable ineptness for Doordarshan, with its large reach and low quality of programming, to remain unprofitable. This is not surprising: If its existence depends on subsidies, there are no incentives for it to respond to competition and raise its standards. Spending other people’s money when there is no accountability is hardly likely to lead to responsible behaviour.

Consider one thing, though: it is easy to feel outraged at the prospect of this licence fee because we know exactly what’s happening to that money, and can see the waste. But I would argue that most of our taxes are similarly wasted. Most of our ministries should not exist. Ditto most public sector companies. Ditto most of what the government does. This wastage would be more apparent if the government gave us a neatly itemized report of where exactly our money goes. But our taxes, so inevitable that we do not question them, go into this vast hellhole called government – who among us has the time or energy to bother about what happens after that?

Note that the amount of taxation on us goes beyond the taxes that we pay. Anything that interferes with market processes imposes costs on us, and has the same impact as a tax. Protectionist tariffs raise prices to beyond what we would pay in a competitive market. So do regulations and licences, either by imposing higher costs on companies or by deterring them from entering markets, thus reducing competition. In the 1980s, when there was a government monopoly on telecom, people had to wait up to five years to get a telephone – that time, and all that you could have done with a phone, was effectively a tax.

And yes, you pay taxes on your toaster, not just when you buy it but for every use, for bread and electricity don’t come free of taxes. And where do they go? Mostly towards uses quite as absurd as the Toast Authority of India.

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives. My thanks to Gautam, Sumeet and Sruthijith for their inputs for this piece.

Also read: “Your Maid Funds Unani.” “A Beast Called Government.”

Arpita and the Bombay Plan

This is the 21st installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Much amusement came yesterday when I read of Arpita Mukherjee ranting against singing shows on television. Arpita, in case you haven’t heard of her, is a singer who came to national attention by taking part in singing reality shows like Sa Re Ga Ma Pa and Fame Gurukul. She has an album out now called Yeh Hai Chand, and in the course of a recent interview she said, “Reality shows create unnecessary hype.”

She went on to disparage the voting mechanisms of such shows, and said, “most of the competitors who are not talented win music talent hunt reality shows.” Critics of such shows would no doubt be pleased at Arpita’s outburst – she is a beneficiary of the shows she lambasts, which seems to make her criticism credible. Fans of those shows would rail at her hypocrisy and ingratitude. Actually, her comments are entirely rational and predictable. In fact, she reminds me of JRD Tata and GD Birla.

In 1944, with India on the verge of independence, a group of industrialists that included Tata, Birla and other notables like Purushottamdas Thakurdas, AD Shroff and Kasturbhai Lalbhai came up with a document called “A Brief Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India” – also known, famously, as the Bombay Plan. In this, instead of arguing for free markets, they made a case for massive state involvement in the economy. Fans of big government held it up as a sign of validation – India’s biggest businessmen were putting their faith in central planning instead of free markets. In his wonderful book, India After Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha writes, “One wonders what free-market pundits would make of it now.”

Well, I find Arpita’s and the industrialists’ actions to be analogous, and not remotely befuddling. The shows Arpita criticises enabled her entry into the music business, but now that she has got her break, they are a threat to her. They provide an assembly line of singing talent to the music industry, acting as a filter for talent, and are the biggest source of competition for Arpita. Who likes competition?

Similarly, state controls on the Indian economy shut out competition, and helped entrenched players like Tata and Birla. It is a different matter that the controls and license raj went too far and hurt even the industrialists who had been in their favour, but they did prevent competitive markets, which was in their interests.

It would be presumptuous to conclude that either Arpita or the Bombay Plan authors consciously intended to shut out competition, but their incentives were certainly aligned that way. And while Arpita’s comments will have no impact on the viewership of reality shows, businessmen who fear competition have harmed this country immeasurably.

India abounds with businessmen who form strong interests groups with deep pockets to lobby governments for protection against competition. Rahul Bajaj’s infamous Bombay Club is one such group, which couches its protectionist beliefs in the rhetoric of ‘supporting’ Indian companies. We have seen protectionist policies in virtually every sector of our economy, from steel to petrochemicals to the media. Indeed, some newspapers that publish editorials railing against protectionism also then lobby against foreign investment.

These tendencies go beyond the world of business. Arvind Kala wrote in this paper on Tuesday of how Punjab’s Akali leaders were against the Dera Sacha Sauda mainly because they represented a threat to the monopoly they aspire to retain on Sikhism. The communists support harmful labour laws that protect the interests of the unions that support them, even though they harm many more workers than they help. And so on: I’m sure you can think of dozens of examples just by looking around you.

Big businesses can often be the biggest enemies of free markets, and we must stop taking the actions and words of industrialists like Bajaj as representative of those who believe in economic freedom. The real beneficiaries of free markets are the billion-plus people in this country. Competition raises the quality of goods and services that they get, and lowers prices. Foreign investment leads to economic growth, and increases employment and productivity.

Businesses whose interests are aligned differently will inevitably be strong forces against freeing up markets even more, and they can only be countered if all of us raise a stink about it. We need free markets, for only they can provide prosperity to the millions in our country below the poverty line. We need Sa Re Ga Ma Pa and Indian Idol a little less, but without them we’d have fewer alternatives to Himesh Reshammiya. There is no better argument for competition than that.

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You can read all my earlier columns for Mint here.

Arpita was my favourite contestant from her season of Fame Gurukul, and you can see one of her performances on that show here—I wish whoever uploaded the song hadn’t referred to it as Rat Ka Nasha. It has all the template drama of a reality show, as well as celeb judge John Abraham responding to anchor Mandira Bedi’s query of why he likes Bengali women by saying, “I think they’re a race in themselves.” Other races, it would seem, are part of other races.

Also, here are the rushes of a recent interview of Arpita, with the cheesiest notes ever on the right panel. Next week I’ll link to JRD Tata’s music videos.

A Liberal Complaint

This is the 20th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Erudita, the Goddess of Words, was snoozing up in heaven when she was woken up by a sudden noise. Deep down in the Vocabulosphere, there was turmoil. “I should go and investigate,” she thought.

She zoomed down. There, bang in the middle of the political spectrum, the word Liberal was pacing to and fro. Left to right. Right to left. Left to right.

“What’s the matter, Liberal?” She asked. “You seem agitated. Is everything okay?”

“Everything okay, everything okay?” mocked Liberal. “Everything is not okay. I want to quit.”

“Quit?” said Erudita. “You can’t quit. As long as humans need you, you have a job to do. Just do it quietly, and all shall be well.”

“Humans,” said Liberal, “are the problem here. A century ago I was happy and peaceful, sure of my identity. I knew what I meant. But in the last few decades, I have been brutalized. My original meaning has been wrung out of me, and now I stand for different things to different people. I have become a label, and a cuss word, and a badge to people who don’t even know what I stand for. Aaargh!”

“Whoa, hold on there,” said Erudita. “I thought you were one of the most important words in modern history, for everything that you embodied. What’s gone wrong? Start at the beginning.”

Liberal took a deep breath. “You see, my mum, Liber, meant ‘free’ in Latin. Bless her soul. And when I was born in English in the late 18th century, and started becoming popular, I stood for freedom just like she had. In fact, because of ideas that had been shaped for a few decades before me, I embodied a rich system of beliefs in individual liberties.

“I was everywhere! In spirit, I was shaped by John Locke in England, and soon the ideas that I was to stand for were taken up and developed by the likes of David Hume and Adam Smith in Scotland, Baron de Montesquieu, Jean Baptiste Say and Frederic Bastiat in France, Immanuel Kant in Germany, and most satisfyingly, by Thomas Paine and America’s early founders.

“Oh, those were the days. When people invoked me in a political context, I stood for something clear and unambiguous. To be ‘liberal’ in that age meant to support individual freedom in all its senses: social, cultural, economic, political. To a liberal person, the government’s chief purpose was to defend and enable these individual freedoms, our rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ as Thomas Jefferson put so well.”

“Yes, those were eventful times,” said Erudita. “And you were one of the most important words in the political domain. And you’re still a word that inspires a lot of passion. So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that I was abducted by the Left! Now I mean completely different things to people across the world, and some of it is the opposite of what I once meant. In the US today, deeply illiberal people call themselves liberal. They support freedom only in a social and cultural sense. When it comes to economic freedom, they want none of it. They believe that two consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they want with each other – unless they’re trading!

“They want a big government that constantly interferes with personal freedom. It takes your money and redistributes it like a big, bumbling Robin Hood. Most dangerously, it put barriers in the way of private enterprise, not realising that people enrich themselves by trading with each other to mutual benefit, and not by depending on charity from above. Indeed, that’s the secret of America’s prosperity.

“It’s worse in India. Free enterprise has long been distrusted there because of the baggage of India’s history – Imperialism marched in with the East India Company, and capitalism is often mistakenly associated with it. True liberals have always been marginal there, and feel wary of calling themselves liberal.

“So-called Indian liberals are even worse than their American counterparts. They oppose the economic freedom that the country desperately needs. Their commitment to freedom is incomplete and hypocritical and, even in the social domain, conditional – consider how they defended the free speech of MF Hussain or Chandramohan against those Hindutva fanatics, but not of the Danish cartoonists or the publisher who was jailed for publishing Sikh jokebook. They are driven by politics, not principle, and it’s no wonder that I have become a cuss-word in India. It’s driving me nuts.”

Erudita went over and put her hand on Liberal’s shoulder. “There there,” she said, “calm down now. It could be much worse. At least some people still care about what you once meant. I can’t say the same for that friend of yours who was once so merry, but no longer is. Remember Gay?”

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As regular readers would know, I identify myself most with classical liberalism, which is more or less the same as modern libertarianism. But those terms are misleading in that they end with ‘-ism’, automatically implying that they are ideologies with their own set of dogmas. That is not how I view them.

My worldview begins with and flows from the simple principle of individual freedom. I believe, to quote from Wikipedia, that “all persons are the absolute owners of their own lives, and should be free to do whatever they wish with their persons or property, provided they allow others the same liberty.” This simple principle acted as the lodestar of the great liberals of the 18th and 19th century, though the term ‘liberal’ holds other connotations today. Whichever way one uses it, there is scope for misunderstanding. And, sadly, there is no political party in India that supports the true liberals. Alas.

How voters fail democracy

My review below of The Myth of the Rational Voter, by Bryan Caplan, appears in today’s Mint.

Oh, how we bemoan politicians in India. We call them corrupt, undereducated, sometimes criminal, occasionally senile, and we complain about how they do nothing for the country. And then, again and again, we vote in the very people we rant about. Is this a failure of democracy? If so, what causes it?

The traditional answer economists would give you, from public choice theory, is “rational ignorance”. The costs of casting an informed vote outweigh the potential benefits. Our vote, let’s face it, would count only in the immensely unlikely event of a tie. To gather and evaluate all the information required in terms of the policies that a government should follow are too time-consuming for us. Thus, it is rational to remain relatively ignorant. And because of this rational ignorance, bad governments come to power, and are in the sway of special interests, for whom the benefits outweigh the costs of influence.

This is not just an elegant theory, but also politically correct. Voters aren’t stupid, it tells us, merely rational. Well, along comes Bryan Caplan, who teaches at the George Mason University in Virginia and is a popular economics blogger, to tell us that democracy fails not because voters are rationally ignorant, but because they are irrational. In the introduction to The Myth of the Rational Voter, he writes: “In the naïve public-interest view, democracy works because it does what voters want. In the view of most democracy sceptics, it fails because it does not do what voters want. In my view, democracy fails because it does what voters want.”

Caplan’s book is written in an American context, and is yet profoundly relevant to India, and will evoke jolts of recognition from readers here. For a significant part of the book, he outlines the different biases that people tend to have, in the face of all evidence. There is the anti-market bias, people’s inability to “understand the ‘invisible hand’ of the market”. There’s the anti-foreign bias, a distrust of foreigners and an underestimation of the benefits of trading with them. There’s the make-work bias, which causes people to “equate prosperity not with production, but with employment”. And there’s the pessimistic bias, which makes people “overly prone to think that economic conditions are bad and getting worse”.

Caplan doesn’t merely allege that these biases exist, but proves it by presenting a fair amount of data on what the American public thinks. It follows, then, that in the political marketplace, politicians will pander to these biases to get elected. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that so many disastrous policies have not only survived decades of evidence that they are counterproductive, but enjoy popular support. Thus, protectionism thrives, businesses continue to be over-regulated, and counterproductive price controls such as the minimum wage remain popular. Worse, they will remain that way, not because voters don’t want to invest the time in evaluating their results, but because voters choose, irrationally, to believe in them regardless of their efficacy.

Now, why would they do that? Caplan ascribes it to what economists call “preferences over beliefs”. We all tend to subscribe to one belief system or another, for it gives us comfort in a complicated and scary world. When it is a religion, we cling on to it irrationally, with our faith refusing to accept any reasoning that could contradict our worldview. Political ideology is no different. Caplan quotes Gaetano Mosca:

The Christian must be enabled to think with complacency that everybody not of Christian faith will be damned. The Brahman must be given grounds for rejoicing that he alone is descended from the head of Brahma and has the exalted honor of reading the holy books. […] The Mohammedan must recall with satisfaction that he alone is a true believer, and that all others are infidel dogs in this life and tormented dogs in the next. The radical socialist must be convinced that all who do not think as he does are either selfish, money-spoiled bourgeois or ignorant and servile simpletons.

Caplan sums it up beautifully: “Worldviews are more a mental security blanket than a serious effort to understand the world.” Now, while the exact examples he comes up with may not be so relevant to India—though we do have our share of deluded socialists—the phenomenon is commonplace. Indian elections are determined largely by identity politics, by worldviews that ignore issues of governance and economics.

The religious nationalism that we see in Gujarat, for example, is a classic example of a worldview acting as a crutch, perhaps exacerbated by the insecurity that globalization brings. If you look back on state and national elections over the last few decades, you will be certain to find many where the results are mystifying. Caplan’s wonderful book explains why. It may not fill you with hope, but perhaps hope would be, as Caplan may put it, rationally irrational.

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Bryan Caplan runs the wonderful blog, EconLog, with Arnold Kling. If this subject interests you, just browse through their recent archives, there’s plenty more there on the topic.

The politics of division

This is the 19th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Politics in India sometimes seems like a card game. A few days ago, when Pratibha Patil’s candidature for president of India was announced, the newspapers were full of how the UPA was playing the “gender card.” Her record in politics was not at the heart of her nomination – Patil is a woman, and because of that alone, politicians were expected to support her.

Vir Sanghvi wrote last Sunday of how Prakash Karat vetoed every name the Congress threw at him till he was outwitted by the choice of Patil. “If Karat had objected to Mrs Patil,” wrote Sanghvi, “he would have seemed anti-woman and so, he finally gave in.” A news report told us of how the Congress “attacked the BJP for not supporting Patil for the post of the President of India and accused the saffron party of being ‘blatantly’ against the cause of women.” (It can be presumed that had the UPA’s candidate been male, the BJP would have been “against the cause of men.”)

While the BJP did not succumb to this dubious logic, they were certainly worried. Their assumed ally, the Shiv Sena, had reacted to Patil’s candidature by applauding the fact that she was from Maharashtra. The Maharashtra card! (At the time of writing, the Sena is yet to make a final choice – they haven’t yet put all their cards on the table.)

Cards, cards, cards. Ten years ago KR Narayanan won support across the political spectrum because of the “Dalit card”. Five years ago APJ Abdul Kalam benefited from the “Muslim card”. Both men have their fans, and I even know one person who likes Kalam’s poetry, but the political support they got derived from their Dalitness and Muslimness respectively. Parties that could not afford to be seen as anti-Dalit or anti-Muslim found it hard to oppose them.

The office of president is largely ceremonial in India, and it doesn’t bother me if we choose our figurehead according to caste or religion or gender. But the very fact that these factors count underlines the grip of identity politics in this country. The primary factor in Indian elections is not governance but identity, not what you do but who you are.

Consider Bihar. Lalu Prasad Yadav was in power there, either directly or through his wife Rabri Devi, for 15 years, in which time the state strengthened its position as the most backward in the country. And yet he kept getting voted to power. His government’s performance did not matter – He had positioned himself successfully as the representative of the Yadavs and the Muslims, and they wanted their man at the helm of things.

Mayawati, who has ‘the Dalit vote’ all wrapped up, came to power in the recent UP elections by cannily wooing the Brahmins with the help of Brahmin politician Satish Chandra Misra. The BJP, playing identity politics of a different kind, lost out because in much of the country, caste matters more than religion. And both matter more than governance.

There is a vicious circle at play here. I believe that social divisions such as caste get diluted by prosperity – if there is more to go around, you resent others less, and inspire less envy. In the melting pots of our big cities, for example, caste is not as big a factor in how people view each other as it is in the villages. (I am speaking in relative terms, of course – there is plenty of caste discrimination in our cities as well.) As people get more and more prosperous, they become less and less insecure, and crutches of identity become less relevant. I grew up in a relatively privileged household, for example, and don’t even know exactly what my own caste is. What’s yours?

Now, given that identity politics is the oxygen of our politicians, consider their incentives: Are they likely to do anything that will remove the divisions on which they thrive? Would it have been in Lalu’s interests to take Bihar on the road to development? Can true ‘social justice’ – when caste and religion don’t matter – be the rational aim of any political party?

Reservations, whether intended that way or not, are a political masterstroke. Under the guise of ‘social justice’, they create a politics of entitlement which increases social divisions, instead of removing them. College kids who may not otherwise have given a damn about caste grow into adulthood resenting whole categories of people. Indeed, just consider how ill-will between the Gujjars and Meenas has grown recently because of such politics.

I’m not saying that politicians actually sit down and make Machiavellian plans on how to increase the divisions that they depend upon. But see how their incentives are aligned. Their getting elected does not depend on governance or sound economic policy, but on catering to and keeping intact the divisions between us. Are we going to let those divisions define us, or can we break free?

Previous posts on this subject: 1, 2. And here’s an essay I wrote on a similar theme: “Don’t Think in Categories.”

The comfort of a worldview

This is the 18th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

The other day I was at a party with some highly intelligent people with strong views on the world. We talked about politics, economics, movies, and, as you’d expect from Indian men, cricket. Among the subjects that stirred up heated arguments were global warming, farmer suicides and the existence of God.

You might think that of all these worthy subjects, debating the existence of God is pointless. It is a matter of faith, and lies beyond reason. I agree. But I’d point out that for all practical purposes, the other subjects we argued about aren’t too different.

Everyone present there had strong views on global warming, but none of them completely understood the science behind it, or could explain the difference between a climate model and a ramp model. All of them vociferously offered conflicting solutions for our agricultural crisis, but their belief was rooted in intentions, without a historical perspective of what had actually gone wrong, and how markets and prices work. As the hours slipped by and the pegs piled up, we conducted opinionated drawing-room discussions on complex subjects whose intricacies none of us had mastered.

Now, this is not a condemnation. The world is terribly complicated, and it isn’t rational for each of us to try and master every subject around us. If that was a prerequisite to having opinions, we wouldn’t have any, and would wander around baffled by everything. It is natural and sensible for us to seek cognitive shortcuts to understanding the world. Such shortcuts often result in neat little packages known as worldviews.

Worldviews make us feel that we have it all figured out, with little room for doubt. A worldview could be a religion—the devout often find an answer to everything in God. Or it could be an ideology that claims to have answers to all the ills that plague our world. Worldviews are deliciously comforting—in his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan nails it by referring to them as “a mental security blanket.”

While worldviews bring comfort, they also lead to intellectual laziness. Lured by the certitudes of received wisdom, we often stop examining difficult questions, satisfied that we know it all. This can be dangerous if our worldview is fundamentally flawed, especially if it is widely shared, and can actually impact the lives of millions of people.

Take socialism. It is dreadfully beguiling, and I must confess that when I was in college many eons ago, I thought Karl was a cooler Marx than Groucho. Firstly, socialism makes you feel good about yourself, for the compassion that fills your heart. Secondly, it has—and therefore you have—an answer for everything—usually government intervention. Thirdly, since your coolest peers—and the hottest girls on campus—are likely to be Leftist, it helps you fit in, and gives you a sense of purpose. It is an enduring fashion.

Now, socialism—which I use here as a shorthand for Leftist thinking—runs counter to one of the basic truths of economics, one that is dreadfully unituitive: that central planning cannot distribute resources and build prosperity remotely as well as spontaneous order can.

The invisible hand of markets working together to satisfy people’s needs is hard to visualise, and easy to distrust. It is easier, as we so often do in India, to invoke the power of government much as devout people take the name of God. To every problem, we cite government as a solution, even though government intervention and regulation, when they subvert free markets, are usually the problem to begin with.

There is historical evidence of this: the degree of development in a country, and the efficacy with which it eliminates poverty, is almost directly proportional to the extent of economic freedom it has allowed its people. A look at the two Germanys before the Berlin Wall was broken or the two Koreas should illustrate this. Hell, India should illustrate this, hobbled for decades by policies with wonderful intent and disastrous outcomes.

It isn’t just the socialist Left that has a dangerous worldview: the beliefs of the religious Right are quite as pernicious. It views everything through the prism of identity, and boasts of an intolerance at odds with the cultural traditions of the religion it claims to represent. It is an anachronism in a modern India, and a threat to our diversity and progress.

I am not saying that worldviews are a bad thing—as regular readers of this column would have noticed, I have one as well. Socialists and Hindutva boys would no doubt find my belief in individual freedom to be quite as dangerous as anything they get up to. But being aware of these trends in our thinking can help us be more open to new ideas, and to examining our holy cows. It is always better to pause for thought than to stop thinking. No?

An earlier piece on a similar theme: “Reason vs Rationalisation.”

Mobs are above the law

This is the 17th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

I felt an intense desire yesterday to go out and burn a bus. There was no specific reason for this – it was like a craving for ice-cream – and I also figured that I would throw stones at shop windows afterwards. Being in a social mood, I called up a couple of friends to ask if they would like to join me. They politely declined. Oddly, they also asked if I was okay. “I’m just fine,” I told them. “You go have latte and feel sophisticated.”

But I understand their apprehension. Had a couple of us gone out and burnt a bus, we would have been arrested instantly, and later thrashed in the lock-up. On the other hand, had a couple hundred of us gone, nothing would have happened. We would have been allowed to burn buses and throw stones, and even hurt or kill a few people as long as they weren’t anyone influential. All we’d need was a banner or two, or even just some slogans to shout. “We want justice,” we could proclaim, while figuring out whether you set fire to the tyre before or after it’s around the hapless passerby. It takes skill.

In India, mobs are above the law. The events in Rajasthan in the last few days are an illustration of this. The losses to business because of the protests by the Gujjars and their clashes with the Meenas are estimated to run in the hundreds of crores, and I think you’d agree with me that a lot of it was avoidable. Most mob violence in India is.

Now, mobs are a problem across the world. Sports-related mob violence takes place in most of the developed countries, and earlier this week around 1000 people were injured at protests at the G8 summit at Rostock. But mostly, police struggle to stop such violence because of logistical issues. Countries across the world recruit police keeping relatively normal times in mind, and find themselves over-stretched when riots take place.

In India, our police is certainly below par, but it isn’t all about logistics. Mob violence is often not controlled even when it can be, which is not something you’ll see in the UK or the US. How often have police in India been known to stand by and watch as rioters damage property and/or people? They do this mostly because they know that the violence they are witnessing is not a mere law-and-order issue, but a political one. It is outside their domain.

Politics in India has been sanctified, and you’ll never find a cop arresting a politician, unless he is being used as a tool by an even more powerful politician. Any mob activity that has political sanction has, by default, the implicit support of the law-and-order machinery. This applies to bandhs, to morchas, to strikes and even to riots, as we saw in Delhi in 1984 and Gujarat in 2002. And because the polity is so fractured and votebank politics is commonplace, many relatively small groups – such as the Gujjars – can disrupt normal life and get away with it.

While the police is biased towards the powerful, the legal system is also dysfunctional. Even if someone gets arrested for rioting – it has been known to happen, though always at the bottom of the food chain – do you seriously expect him to be brought to justice? The fellow will get bail, the case will drag on for years, the cops will be too incompetent to file a proper chargesheet and witnesses will change their tune. In the end, justice will not be done.

An excellent illustration of police bias and legal incompetence is the difference in the handling of the Bombay riots of 1992-93 and the blasts of 1993. Around 900 people died in the former, 250 in the latter, and yet, those who were behind the riots, as part of mobs that had political support, have yet to be punished. Justice has been done in the latter case, but were the riots any less criminal than the bomb blasts?

In case all this makes you so distraught that you are tempted to turn to prayer, don’t. God is part of the problem here, not the solution. Nothing insulates mob violence in India such as the excuse of religion. Forget religious riots—have you ever tried walking the streets of Mumbai during Ganpati, when drunk young men clog the streets, dancing and throwing colour with abandon? Anything that is done in India under the guise of religion is immune to the law.

Festivals in India enable mob misbehaviour, and the way they are celebrated in modern times virtually gives social sanction for hooliganism. This applies even to a relatively non-religious festival like Holi, which is no longer a wholesome celebration of spring but an excuse to harass women (and even men, sometimes) whom one doesn’t know.

Anyway, I have written enough, and I will go now to indulge a craving. No, you won’t find me burning any buses today. Instead, I’ll go get some ice cream. But if a few hundred of you ever desire to go out and set the town on fire, get in touch with me. I have contacts, and we’ll have a blast.

(Note: Some earlier posts on this and related subjects: 1, 2, 3. And thanks to Gaurav and Sumeet for their inputs.)

How to predict the next Indian Idol

This piece of mine has been published in today’s Lounge, the Saturday edition of Mint.

We’re the world’s largest democracy, but let’s face it, politics is boring. Who to vote for? Why can’t we vote by SMS instead of having to trot to a voting booth? Why don’t our politicians perform? Pah!

That’s why Indian Idol is such a perfect show for us. It gives us the power, it gives us the ease, and it even gives us something to choose from. We’ve given up on governance – let’s vote on entertainment.

And wouldn’t it also be nice is if you could forecast the winner long before the rest of the country knew who it was? Oh, how your friends would admire you then! You would be the Indian Idol Pundit!

Well, Lounge is here to help you pick the Indian Idol winner this year. Large quantities of telephone polling are not required. Public choice theory need not be studied. All wisdom will now be revealed in seven points in the next few paragraphs. Read carefully.

One: The winner will be the boy next door.

Indian Idol is not a singing competition but a likability contest. The winner is likely to be not the best singer, but a good singer with a pleasing personality. In the first season, Rahul Saxena, Rahul Vaidya, Amit Sana, Aditi Paul and Prajakta Shukre were all better singers than the eventual winner, Abhijeet Sawant. In the second season, NC Karunya was streets ahead of Sandeep Acharya. And yet, Abhijeet and Sandeep, besides being competent singers, also had boy-next-door charm. The girls found them cute – the boys didn’t feel threatened by them. Killer combo.

Two: The winner will be an early favourite.

Keep a close eye on who wins the early piano rounds. Both Abhijeet and Sandeep won their piano round in their season of Indian Idol. Most viewers tend to decide early on who they like. The rest of the season, they ignore that person’s failings – unless they are too glaring – and find reasons to reinforce their choice.

This is also why Ravinder Ravi, who won a piano round with a powerful performance in the first season, survived until the final five despite a series of monstrously besura performances: those who had chosen him as their winner overlooked his failings, and kept finding reasons to validate their early choice. This brings us to our next point…

Three: Don’t worry about the besuras

It really is no fun unless a lousy singer goes really far in the competition, despite the jury’s criticism. This happened to Ravinder Ravi in Season One, and it happened recently to Sanjaya Malakar in American Idol. Both times, immense worries were expressed that they would win. But that could never happen.

No matter how much support they get, and for whatever reasons, bad singers will always have more people against them than for. Now, when there are seven or eight contestants left, those votes against are diffused among many people. When there are four or five left, the supporters of good singers who are eliminated switch allegiance to good singers still in the show. It then becomes harder for the besuras to survive. This also works against polarising personalities who are otherwise good singers, such as the arrogant Rahul Vaidya in Season One: the ‘against’ votes count for more as the field narrows down.

But criticism can also help the besura singers, as the next point illustrates.

Four: Criticism helps

Let us say you have your allegiances mapped out, and are planning to send one SMS each for your favourite three singers. Suddenly, one of them has a bad day, and Anu Malik goes ballistic. Seeing a singer you support in trouble, you send three SMSs instead of one. And so on.

A bad performance in a particular episode, or finishing in the last three of a results episode, can actually help contestants by motivating their supporters to vote more. And this can also work the other way.

Five: Complacency kills

The big upset of Season One came when Rahul Saxena got voted out in the last nine stage. A similar huge upset happened in the fifth season of American Idol, when Chris Daughtry got voted out in the last four stage. In Daughtry’s case, a commonly accepted theory is that his supporters became complacent, and assumed that he was so darned good that he would get through without their vote. I’d surmise the same happened in Saxena’s case, and also resulted in Melinda Dolittle’s ouster in this season of American idol. If a really good singer is coasting in the early stages of the competition, watch out.

Six: The winner will be non-South Indian

Viewers tend to support contestants they identify with or feel some empathy for, and they are far likelier to feel that way for people who are from their region. Sure, it’s politically incorrect, but region-specific voting certainly does take place, even if voters often don’t do this consciously, and can rationalize it in various ways. Now, Sony’s viewership is far less in the South than in the rest of India, which makes the going rather difficult for a South Indian contestant. Sure, Karunya got as far as the final two in Season Two, but he did not win despite being overwhelmingly the best singer.

Seven: The winner will be male

That’s why we said “boy next door” in our first guideline. This is bewildering, but Indian Idol doesn’t work like American Idol, and women simply seem to attract less votes, regardless of singing ability: none have made it to the final three in either season. There can be various reasons for this: Maybe voters opt to support someone of their own gender, and guys are more likely to waste SMSs. Maybe the guys vote more for guys, while the girls vote for both sexes. Whatever the reasons, expect a male winner.

Phew, well, there you are. Sure, some of these guidelines may conflict with each other in certain situations, but that’s when your innate sagacity kicks in, right? Also, remember that what makes for gripping television doesn’t always impact the voting: Viewers react more to personality than to back story, and the crying auntie in the audience or the two-minute segment on a contestant’s village won’t affect the voting too much.

Hey, why don’t you challenge Bejan Daruwalla to an Indian Idol prediction contest? Armed with our advice, you’ll surely win! Coming to think of it, if they had an Astrologer’s Idol…

(Some of the analysis here elaborates on these earlier posts of mine: 1, 2, 3. Recent posts on Indian Idol: 1, 2.)

Keep the ‘Free’ in ‘Free Speech’

A version of this piece was published today as the 16th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

I should be grateful that you are reading this column. I have often written about how free speech is threatened in India, but we are nowhere near as bad as some other countries, such as China or Iran or North Korea. There you’d probably read me one week, and then I’d vanish. Here the press is somewhat freer.

Nevertheless, I think you’d agree that things could be better. In India, films are routinely censored, books are often banned, and artists have been roughed up and put behind bars. Often, the constitution allows this and our laws support it, and there seems to be a common consensus that there should be limits to free speech.

A famous case for such limits was made by Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr in 1919 in a US Supreme Court case, Schenck v. United States. The defendant, Charles Schenck, had been indicted for distributing leaflets to people likely to be drafted for military service. The leaflets asked the men to “assert opposition to the draft” on the grounds that it went counter to the provisions against “involuntary servitude” in America’s 13th Amendment.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Schenck, and the judgement written by Holmes said, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” Since then, this hypothetical example, of a man falsely shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater, has been brought up by people who argue for the imposition of limits on free speech. Naturally, having cited this example, they often tend to propose their own limits.

Well, my view is this: I don’t think that there is any need for limits to be imposed on the right to free speech that are not already implicit in the way they are defined. Shouting “fire” falsely in a crowded theater would be wrong even without any restrictions placed on free speech simply because the right to free speech is fundamentally a property right, and does not extend to other people’s property. Let me explain.

All rights, I believe, emerge out of the one that we are born with: The right to self-ownership. At the most basic level, this is a property right. We own ourselves, and have the right to do whatever we wish with our body and mind. To make anything of this right, we must also respect others’ right to self-ownership.

From this arise other human rights. The rights to life, to thought, to action are all implied in the right of self-ownership – and so is the right to free speech. All these rights are constrained only by the corresponding rights of others. As Murray Rothbard, the libertarian economist, once wrote, “Not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard.”

Let’s go back to the crowded theater, and shouting “fire” falsely. If the owner does it, he is clearly cheating his customers. If a customer does it, he is infringing on the rights of the owner, and endangering the safety of other customers. And if anyone is hurt by this, the fire-shouter can be prosecuted for the harm caused, and that harm will be defined by rights that originate from the right to self-ownership. Thus, if property rights are strictly enforced, there is no need to add any restrictions on free speech apart from the ones that those imply.

If we all looked at free speech through this prism, whereby it is part of a body of rights that originates from the right to self-ownership, and contains no others, I suspect that many modern controversies would not exist. Cartoonists and painters would be allowed to depict whatever they wanted as long as they infringed on nobody’s rights. Books and films would not be censored or banned. While everyone would have the right to protest all such free expression, they would have no business doing so violently. And offending people’s sentiments would not be a crime, for sentiments hardly count as tangible ‘property’.

I often rail against the Indian Penal Code because it contains laws that place restrictions on free speech that have nothing to do with property rights, such as “outraging … religious feelings”. I also bemoan the fact that after paying lip service to freedom of speech in Section 19 (1) (a), the writers of our constitution added limits to it in 19 (2) such as “decency or morality”, which are unjustifiable, and are interpreted arbitrarily. 

And what of America, you ask, where Charles Schenck spent six months in jail after Justice Holmes’s bizarre decision, which did not uphold Schenck’s right to free speech? Well, the Supreme Court overturned that ruling in 1969, thus strengthening their protection of free speech. And no one, even there, can shout “fire” falsely in a crowded theater and get away with it.

This piece is an elaboration of the thoughts I expressed in my post, “Shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater”, and in the comments here. My thanks to Sumeet, Yazad, Gaurav and Shruti for their inputs.)