Aadhaar, Adityanath

This is the 73rd installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.

DEADLINE EXTENSION

My wife said, “Stay away, no kisses.
First link your Aadhaar to your Missus.”
I said, “Love, give your cheek.
Your plea, so very bleak,
Is one the Supreme Court dismisses.

REVERSAL

Adityanath said, “I am the King.
In Gorakhpur, I am everything.”
Then he got his ass kicked.
The voters can be strict.
Could this be the start of a downswing?

The Nehru Defence

This is the 47th installment of Lighthouse, my monthly column for BLink, a supplement of the Hindu Business Line.

Narendra Modi seems to have one answer for every attack on him. But Jawaharlal has been dead for 54 years.

The Candidates tournament for the World Chess Championship is going on right now. Eight of the best chess players in the world are playing each other twice for 14 rounds of gruelling action. The winner will take on World Champion Magnus Carlsen for the title later this year. It is a close tournament and anyone can win, but I am a chess nostalgic with a fondness for symmetry, and I’m rooting for Vladimir Kramnik.

Kramnik first won the title at the turn of the century, beating Garry Kasparov at his peak. His masterstroke in that match was reviving an old opening for black called the Berlin Defence. Kasparov could not breach that wall, and the Berlin has since become an impregnable cliché in grandmaster circles.

This tournament is being held in Berlin, and I write this column after the third round, in which Kramnik played the Berlin against pre-tournament favourite Levon Aronian and won a spectacular game to go into the lead. It is as if the fates gathered around and decided, He revived the Berlin. Now Berlin will revive him.

Back in India, on the political chess board, Narendra Modi has found a similar defence for all seasons. It’s called the Nehru Defence. No matter what attack is unveiled against him, he counters it with the Nehru defence. Economy’s doing badly? Nehru started it. Problems in Kashmir? Nehru, doh. Modi hugs foreign leaders too much? Nehru hugged Edwina.

Well, not the last, but you get the drift. The obvious response to the Nehru Defence this is to point out that Nehru died in 1964. What he may or may not have done is irrelevant to Modi’s performance now. Modi may not like many of the policies that exist today because of Nehru, but hey, he got a mandate in 2014 to overturn them. Why hasn’t he?

There were a host of reforms Modi could have carried out in the last four years to make India more free. He hasn’t implemented any of them. Indeed, he has shown the same command-and-control mindset that was Nehru’s great failing. He has combined it with the authoritarianism of Nehru’s daughter, Indira, who he most resembles. If he hates them, then he hates them so much that he loves them. His actions indicate that he wants to be them.

What irritates me more than the irrationality and dishonesty of the Nehru Defence is how the discourse has been shaped by it. Everybody is thinking in binaries. One side thinks Nehru was a monster who ravaged India. The other side thinks Nehru was a great statesman who built everything that is good about this country. Both these narratives hold some truth, but you’re not allowed to acknowledge both. Either Nehru was evil or he was a God. You are either a patriot or an anti-national, depending on which simplistic fairy tale you believe.

These binaries apply to everything today, not just Nehru. This is a form of historical revisionism. Nothing can be grey any more. Everything must be black or white. You must take sides. Any attempt at nuance is considered a cop-out, and both sides could come after you. So it makes sense to either be unflinchingly partisan – or to stay shut altogether. And when those who care about nuance withdraw from the conversation, we are left with Republic TV.

Think about what this does to the discourse. Let’s continue the chess analogy. Aronian, Kramnik’s hapless victim and a cultured, thoughtful man, once said that a game of chess was like a conversation. One player asks a question; the other replies, and asks one herself; and so on, in the mutual quest for truth. I found this analogy moving – and also heartbreaking, because there is no space for such a respectful conversation in Indian politics.

If they play chess at all, the two sides in our politics – and there are two now, because of the forced binaries – are playing not against each other, but against imaginary opponents on adjacent chess boards. They are talking past each other, and each is convinced of possession of the truth. One side repeatedly plays the Nehru Defence. The other side, on the other board, plays I-don’t-even-know-what, it’s not coherent.

Maybe the game in question is not chess at all. Maybe it is mud-wrestling. And maybe in some parallel universe, a man in a pinstripe suit with a name on it wrestles a man in a sherwani. The man in the sherwani has been dead for 54 years, so he keeps getting flung to the ground. Finally, unable to take the gratuitous posthumous humiliation, he springs back to life and catches the man in the pinstripe suit, and then something strikes his eye. He realises that the name on the pinstripe suit of his opponent is not ‘Narendra Modi’ but ‘Jawaharlal Nehru’. What kind of man wears a suit like that?

Two Deaths

This is the 72nd installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.

TWO DEATHS

I know many movie fans who cried
When that great actress Sridevi died.
She brought us such magic.
It was also tragic
Watching the press commit suicide.

ORIGINS

Isaac Newton said, “I’m sanskaari.
I saw an apple drop from a tree
And thought of a mantra
From the Panchatantra
That gave the concept of gravity.”

Two Jokes

This is the 71st installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.

FLAKE

Justin Trudeau is handsome and woke.
He is a virtue-signalling bloke.
See his Khalistan mess.
He’s really that clueless.
Frankly the guy’s a bit of a joke.

GOVT. ADS

One tendency that all netas share
Is one that should put you in dispair.
They love to advertise,
And all their sordid lies
Are funded by YOU, so please beware.

Fraudsters

This is the 70th installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.

BAKRA

Nirav Modi told me, “This is nice.
Eleven thousand crores will suffice.
I love committing fraud.
I will now chill abroad
While taxpayers like you pay the price.”

WHATABOUT

Narendra Modi said, “This is great.
Why is always me you berate?
When will you understand?
All netas in this land
Are thieves looking to eat off your plate.”

Deflection and Reflection

This is the 69th installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.

A DEFLECTION

Masterji said, sipping single malt,
“Bal Narendra’s committed assault.
He keeps using his force,
And he shows no remorse.
He says everything is Nehru’s fault.”

ON REFLECTION

In case the stock market makes you frown,
If you think Dear Leader is a clown,
Don’t panic. Think it through.
Just take the long-term view.
Everything that goes up must come down.

It is Daft to Worry About Inequality

This is the 46th installment of Lighthouse, my monthly column for BLink, a supplement of the Hindu Business Line.

Inequality and poverty are different problems, requiring different, even opposite, solutions. India’s problem is poverty.

Let me begin this column with a question, dear reader, which I urge you to read carefully and answer before reading on:

In which of these two countries would you rather be poor: the USA or Bangladesh?

Most people I ask this to go, Duh, of course I’d rather be poor in the US than in Bangladesh. Well, here’s something I’d like you to consider: the USA has far greater inequality than Bangladesh does. A measure called the Gini Index measures inequality across the world, and the USA, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom all have greater inequality than Bangladesh, Liberia, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. And yet, that second group of countries is by far poorer than the first group

It has become fashionable these days, especially in elite, privileged circles, to agitate about inequality. But as my question and the data above make clear, inequality and poverty are very different things. Some of the poorest countries in the world are among the most equal. (Some Communist countries of the last century came close to achieving equality in poverty.)

So here’s my contention, in three propositions:

One: India’s big problem is poverty.

Two: The more we reduce poverty, the more we are likely to increase inequality.

Three: It is perverse, therefore, to worry about inequality. We should only keep our eye on poverty, and not worry if inequality goes up.

There is a fundamental fallacy at the root of the obsession with inequality. We think of the world in zero-sum ways. That is, we behave as if there is a fixed pie, and the rich can only become richer if the poor become poorer. In this vision of the world, the more inequality increases, the more abject the suffering of the poor. Redistribution is the only solution.

And yet, this narrative is wrong. The world is not zero-sum but positive-sum. The size of the pie increases with every voluntary transaction. Every time I buy a cup of coffee from a café, both the café and I are better off – otherwise we would not have transacted to begin with. The amount of value in the world has gone up.

The more you allow and enable such voluntary exchange, the more people trade to mutual benefit, and we all become better off. And the larger these economic networks of voluntary exchange, the greater the scope for such mutual enrichment. That is why people migrate to cities from villages, and rarely the other way around.

In fact, within a country, cities are far more unequal than villages are. If inequality was such a bad thing, why would so many poor people vote with their feet by migrating to cities? They embrace this greater inequality because they want to escape poverty.

The reason India remained a poor country for so many decades after Independence is that, with the zero-sum vision of our leaders, we frowned upon free markets. While the rest of Asia shot ahead, we restrained the natural ingenuity and enterprise of our people with our mai-baap vision of politics. We did reform a bit in 1991, but too little and too late. Our poverty levels did go down a bit, though, even as we grew more unequal, illustrating the fact that there is no correlation at all between poverty and inequality.

I don’t want to talk only in terms of abstract ideas, so let me illustrate one way in which reducing poverty would raise inequality. There is consensus among economists today, even left-wing ones, that we have crippled our manufacturing sector for decades with a series of bad laws, such as our labour laws, which don’t allow small businesses to grow, and force much of our nation into the informal sector. These regulations stopped us from becoming a manufacturing superpower like China. What would happen if these restrictions were to magically disappear one day?

You would have growth in the manufacturing industry. There is no question that there would be far more employment generated, which would reduce poverty. You would also have some of these businesses achieving scale and becoming behemoths. Poverty would go down and our per-capita income would go up; but because of the winners at the top, inequality would also go up. Would this be a bad thing? I don’t think so.

The zero-sum instinct is ingrained in us: we evolved in prehistoric times when we lived in small tribes amid scarcity, and the positive-sum view of the world would have been unintuitive. It is also natural to resent the super-rich among us, especially when they behave in ostentatious, obnoxious ways, and game the system with their money, which happens a lot in our crony socialist state. Maybe a country that has eliminated poverty can have the luxury to think about Inequality. But not us.

It is a moral shame that seven decades after Independence, we still have millions of people living in poverty. We need to fight this. We should not be distracted by false metrics.

A Special Cess

This is the 68th installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.

BUDGET

My finances were in such a mess.
I said, “I demand an Amit cess.”
A gentleman named Shah
Said, “Arre bhaiyya, wah.
Super idea, I must confess.”

FIRST PRINCIPLE

Tom Friedman has defended Aadhaar.
He said, “Facebook has your data, yaar.”
Oh, what a clueless gent.
Facebook has our consent,
And consent must be our guiding star.

A Special Cess

This is the 68th installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.

BUDGET

My finances were in such a mess.
I said, “I demand an Amit cess.”
A gentleman named Shah
Said, “Arre bhaiyya, wah.
Super idea, I must confess.”

FIRST PRINCIPLE

Tom Friedman has defended Aadhaar.
He said, “Facebook has your data, yaar.”
Oh, what a clueless gent.
Facebook has our consent,
And consent must be our guiding star.

A Fuss Over Pakodas

This is the 67th installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India edit page.

BRAVERY

The Karni Sena kicked up a fuss.
Their boss said, “No one listens to us.
Our protests were a flop.
But now we cannot stop.
Let us go and attack a school bus.”

NO WORRIES

Jaitley told Modiji, with much dread,
“A massive jobs crisis lies ahead.
There’ll be no bread to eat.”
Modiji said, “That’s neat.
Just let them eat pakodas instead.”