Thinking it Through

Dear Navjot Sidhu and Hu Jintao

This is the 28th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Dear Navjot Sidhu

Recently on a television show, I am told, you criticised the Indian Cricket League (ICL), and the players signing up with it, on the grounds that “they are in it for the money.” You found this reprehensible, clearly feeling that the profit motive was a bad thing. I wish to congratulate you on your beliefs. They were once shared by no less than Jawaharlal Nehru, who described “profit” as “a dirty word.” Indeed, I have heard that when he got angry at someone, he would abuse him or her by shouting, “You, you… you Profit!” But that could be apocryphal.

Mr Sidhu, allow me to express how much I admire your values. Shunning profit, as you surely do if your actions mirror your words, takes immense fortitude. You are always smartly dressed, with your turban matching your tie, despite buying clothes only from people who manufacture and sell them as a social service. When you eat out with your better half, who is also named Navjot and is therefore the better Navjot, you only eat at restaurants that were not begun to make a profit, but to help needy diners like yourself. Indeed, you buy no goods or services manufactured with the profit motive, and I really must ask you sometime where you shop. You also clearly accept absolutely no money for the entertainment you provide us on television, which is very kind of you. Your magnanimity has moved me.

I also admire how, being a man of principle, you do not allow reality to distort your beliefs. The BCCI has just announced a massive raise for its players, as well as greater prize money in domestic tournaments. This is clearly because they have felt the heat of competition that the ICL provides. It is good for the players, who now have more options, and will earn more money no matter what they choose. It is also wonderful for us cricket viewers, who also have more choice. But you have seen through these narrow, selfish considerations, and have stuck to the principle of profit being a bad thing, regardless of its consequences. Wow. It takes great conviction to stick to one’s beliefs in the face of reality, and I applaud you for doing so.

That is all for now. To my great shame, I need to now write a column for profit, and am not capable of the renunciation you clearly practise. I look forward to seeing you again on television, it is always a profitable experience for me.

Oops.

Yours sincerely

Amit Varma

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Dear Hu Jintao

Hao du yu du? I write to you today both to congratulate you and to express a complaint. I shall begin with the complaint, which is, in a sense, a compliment, for it could be made about few totalitarian leaders. I sincerely hope you will not take it amiss, or I will be in trouble after I die.

Recently while surfing the evil capitalist website of the exploitative Reuters Newsweek, I came upon the news that your government has “banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission.” The report went on to state: “‘According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is ‘an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.’”

My complaint is this: I make my living as a writer, and one of the genres I like to try my hand at, no doubt with great ineptness, is satire. But with this move of yours, you have made satire redundant. What manner of satire can match this reality? What can I ever write again without looking at that news item and saying, “Aw, but I can’t be as good as Hu.” And you weren’t even trying!

My complaint is a minor quibble compared to the admiration that gushes out of me. For long, people have protested at the “fatal conceit” that the state can control the economy, and fulfil the needs of its citizens. History has shown that prosperity and freedom go hand in hand, a notion that was a threat to you – until now.

You have now made a magnificent conceptual leap that renders any opposition futile. The earthly domains may be hard to control directly, but by regulating the heavens, you have finished all resistance. Who will dare to fight against you when they know that it is not just their life at stake, but also their afterlife. As that popular Hindi song goes, “Bachke tu jaayegi kahaan.”

Indeed, I hope with all my earthly heart that the Indian government follows your example, and outlaws all unauthorized reincarnation, or even ascents to heaven in those religions that have them. I will apply for the job of the babu granting reincarnation licenses. People will pay anything for a suitable afterlife, and there is surely much money to be made there. That is a heavenly prospect.

Yours sincerely

Amit Varma

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You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives. I’d earlier blogged about the reincarnation story here.

A Business Proposal

This is the 27th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Hello dear! Myself Ram Chander Misra, politician from India, bringing business proposal for your kind perusal. I have been politician for more than 30 years now, and have worked in all major parties. I am currently holding important ministry portfolio, and handling many crores of funds for social welfare scheme. Indeed, many thousands of crores of rupees. Which comes to many BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, dear. And this is where I need your help.

First, dear, let me tell you something about Indian government. Government of India is existing on the basis that it will help poor people of India. This it can only do if there are poor people in India. Thus, it is important to keep people in India poor. This is for their own good, dear, for how can we help them otherwise?

Government of India does this with very ingenuous method that is tried and tested through centuries. First, it taxes them vigorously, both their earnings and spendings, promising to spend their money back on them. But for every 100 rupees that we take, only 15 are spent as they should. I will come back to what happens to the rest, dear, because it CONCERNS YOU.

Government of India also puts restrictions on free trade, so that people cannot get rich on their own easily. You see, dear, people think that government is their servant, but it is other way around. Individual exists only to enrich government, and has only freedoms that we grant. We ministers in government control everything.

With the GRACE OF GOD, few Indians have fought against this arrangement, and as a result, government has grown and grown. You may not believe the large sums of money at our disposal, so let me give you examples. My favourite example is the almost Rs12,000 crore that goes into Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. See irony: First we are preventing employment from coming up by strangling industry with licence and inspection raj, and labour laws, and by making sure 60% of country is stuck in agriculture, when the figure in developed countries is closer to 5%. Then we are taking money from them to give them jobs!

Our education sector is also a problem, and we ensure that it remains that way by making sure that most parents do not have choices. With licensing laws and requirements, dear, we make sure that private schools are difficult to start and expensive to maintain. Many private schools operate illegally and at low cost, and many parents, even in slums, prefer to pay for them than send their child to a free public school. But most Indians LOOK TO THE GOVERNMENT to provide education, and for that we are spending Rs10,000 crore in Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, and almost Rs9000 crore for Prarambhik Siksha Kosh.

I could go on, dear, through every sector of the economy, but you get the point. We are given almost Rs50,000 crore to spend on our eight flagship schemes, which amounts to more than 12 billion dollars. The total funds available to us amount to twice this amount, or 25 BILLION DOLLARS. This is lot of money, even for people used to squandering, and this is where I NEED YOUR HELP.

You see, dear, the amounts I have mentioned above are just for one year, and I have been a minister for many. Me and my esteemed colleagues have accumulated wealth amounting to HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, some of which still lies in government accounts, though for all practical purposes it is ours only.

I live beyond my means, with many houses and cars that that my minister’s salary could not have provided, but most Indians overlook such small riches. They think corruption is disease of system, not realising the corruption is OXYGEN of system. You give one group of individuals power over another group, what to expect? But even then, to suddenly withdraw billions of dollars of wealth will draw attention. The media, especially, might bother. (We are trying to throttle them with broadcasting bill, but that will take time.)

So, dear, here is what I propose. If you are willing to help me, we can withdraw these VAST RICHES, and prevent them from going waste. Or even, God forbid, from being spent on Indian people. All you have to do is form a company, and I will transfer 10 BILLION DOLLARS to your account under development project. We can later share the money, with 40% to you and 60% to me. I will take care of all paperwork, such as licenses, caste certificates to get you preferential treatment, and so on. Details of the nominal fees for this will be sent later. If all goes well, you shall become my REGULAR PARTNER in drawing out the money of the Indian people.

The blessings of God and the Indian people are with you, for this system has been DEMOCRATICALLY APPROVED. Please reply at earliest.

Yours in expectance of shared riches

Ram Chander Misra

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

What Indian Cricket Needs

This is the 26th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

The mandarins at the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) must be delighted. As the third Test between India and England gets under way today, India stand poised to win the series, already 1-0 up. This, the BCCI babus are surely telling themselves, will take the pressure off them.

After India’s early exit in the World Cup, immense scrutiny was directed at the cricket board. Such scrutiny is common—the Indian team often goes through crises—and the same solutions are advanced each time. “‘Corporatize’ BCCI,” say some, “hire a CEO.” “Do away with the regional system of selectors,” say others. Editorialists demand increased investment in domestic cricket, while some get micro and simply want to “punish the senior players and give youngsters a chance”.

All these sound splendid, but they treat the symptom, not the disease. The problem with BCCI lies not in its actions or omissions, but in its incentives. The tragedy of Indian cricket is that, at the moment, the incentives of BCCI office bearers are not aligned towards ensuring the good health of Indian cricket. Instead, they are aligned towards ensuring their own continuance in power. These two don’t often lead in the same direction.

How does a BCCI president come to power? What he has done or promises to do for the good of Indian cricket is irrelevant. He is voted to power by the many state and regional boards in BCCI, and to get their votes, he has to look after their interests. This could include, for example, promising one-day internationals to small centres, which ensures that touring teams, and the hapless journalists following them, criss-cross the country playing a seven-match one-day series that consists of more travel and less play.

That also explains the zonal system of selection. Every region wants its pound of flesh, and each zonal selector effectively represents an interest group. Whenever a squad of 15 players has to be picked, around 10 are often automatic inclusions, with the remaining selections subject to give-and-take. Note that a zonal selector does not lose his job if he does not select the best possible team, which is subjective anyway. But he is certainly out of his post if he doesn’t look after the interests of his zone.

Doing away with the zonal system of selectors changes nothing, for the same pressures will remain, even if they manifest differently. Similarly, having a CEO and a corporate set-up will also be a superficial change as long as the state boards continue to call the shots. So, what’s the solution?

Consider who BCCI is accountable to. It is not a government body, so it is not accountable to the government and, by extension, to taxpayers. It is not a public limited company, and does not have to answer to some vast body of shareholders. Besides the regional boards that are its constituents, it is accountable to its customers, to you and me. BCCI provides a service, and we have the power to vote with our wallets if they mess up. Well, they are messing up. So, why haven’t we voted with our wallets so far? Because we don’t have enough choices.

BCCI has a monopoly on the Indian cricket team, and regional representative cricket, and if we devote eyeball-time to watching India play cricket, we are perforce filling the coffers of BCCI. If cricket as a sport faced competition from other sports or pastimes, that could force BCCI to get its act together, but years will pass before anything poses a credible threat to cricket in India, if at all. We are a captive audience.

That is why I look towards Subhash Chandra’s venture, the Indian Cricket League (ICL), with great hope. I am immensely skeptical about anything that the Zee Group does, and I do not think a league with just retired superstars and domestic wannabes is sustainable. But the ICL represents a threat to BCCI’s monopoly over Indian cricket-watching audiences, and that is a good thing.

BCCI will, of course, try to protect its turf with a combination of strong-arm tactics, legal measures and inducements to its players. But if it finds that it is having to split the cricket pie in India, it will have to reform itself. The impetus for change might well come from its regional constituents, who may find that the ODIs they cherish and battle for are no longer so lucrative.

In other countries and other sports, a particular sporting body might have a monopoly over the national team, but there are local league systems that offer alternative employment to players and quality sports programming for viewers. English soccer players, for example, earn much more playing in the Premier League than for their country. It would be wonderful for both cricketers and cricket lovers if such options were available in India. Even if the ICL doesn’t succeed, it is clear that BCCI feels threatened by it, and it shows the way to others. That is good for us—and good for cricket.

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

Mommy-Daddy, go away!

This is the 25th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

One of my favourite quotes about politics is this one from David Boaz: “Conservatives want to be your daddy, telling you what to do and what not to do. Liberals want to be your mommy, feeding you, tucking you in, and wiping your nose. Libertarians want to treat you as an adult.”

This was said in an American context, and the liberals referred to are the Leftist ‘liberals’ of America, not the classical liberals who believe in individual freedom. It would be tempting to apply this quote to India, and to point to the religious right, with their moral policing and disregard for free speech, as the Daddy among us, and the socialist left, with their belief in big government and fantasies of a welfare state, as the Mommy.

But the truth is more complex and much sadder. Our government, regardless of the political party in charge, has always tried to play the role of both Mommy and Daddy. Like infants, we acquiesce.

As a Daddy, the state tries to regulate our personal behaviour. It assumes that we aren’t old enough to make our decisions, and that Daddy must make them on our behalf. This is all for our own good, and Daddy knows best what’s good for us. We are not mature enough.

This applies to the entertainment we take in. Censorship is classic Daddygiri. Daddy assumes that all of us have impressionable minds, get easily influenced, and cannot weigh things for ourselves. Things like sex and violence will corrupt the nation of a billion people, where children are presumably mass-produced in stork factories. (Note that if actual children had to be ‘protected’ from adult films, certification would suffice, instead of outright censorship.)

The health ministry, led by uber-Papa Anbumani Ramadoss, even banned smoking scenes in films a couple of years ago. (Film-makers are allowed to depict murder, though, as that is presumably less injurious to health.)  Of course, censorship applies not just to sex and violence, but also to ideas, as Anand Patwardhan’s travails illustrate.

All moral policing is Daddygiri, for any responsible Daddy must ensure that you get up to no mischief in your bedroom. The Indian Penal Code is full of it, with the worst of its laws being Section 377, which bars “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” This effectively makes homosexuality illegal, and the law is routinely used by cops to harrass gay people, as if they are juvenile delinquents and not responsible adults trying to live their lives as they wish.

Most licenses, when they require government approval, are examples of Daddygiri. In their classic book, Law, Liberty and Livelihood, Parth Shah and Naveen Mandava pointed out: “Entrepreneurs can expect to go through 11 steps to launch a business over 89 days on average, at a cost equal to 49.5% of gross national income per capita.” It’s 89 days here, but two in Australia, and eight in Singapore. Besides the costs it imposes, this Daddygiri is also morally wrong – if people want to start a business satisfying the needs of other people, which is the only way a business can survive, why does the government have to come in the way?

Mommy, as it happens, is no better than Daddy. Mommy does not believe that its tiny tots can take care of themselves, and thus gets up to all kinds of strange behaviour. If she finds that Ram is better off than Shyam, she takes 20 rupees from Ram and gives three of those to Shyam. (Don’t ask about the other 17.) She also takes one rupee from Shyam. All our social welfare schemes, such as the ruinous National Employment Guarantee Bill, run in this manner. Rajiv Gandhi once said that only 15% of such spending reaches its intended recepient, but such wastage is not the only problem. Exorbitant taxes act as a disincentive to work and business, and harm the economy.

All protectionist laws are Mommy behaviour. Tariffs and subsidies coddle favoured groups and act as a barrier to competition, thus reducing our choices while raising the price we pay. Mumbai’s rent control act, which reduces the supply of real estate and drives up rents, is Mommy behaviour. Our labour laws are Mommy behaviour. (Indeed, they’re Daddy behaviour as well, from another perspective.)

Not surprisingly, this mai-baap way of functioning has much popular support. Many of us like the idea of a benevolent Mommy, not noticing the manner in which this Mommygiri harms the family. Daddygiri also has much support because many of us disapprove of the behaviour of others, and would like such behaviour to be regulated. As far as I’m concerned, I think of myself as an adult, capable of making my own choices, responsible for my actions, and extending the same courtesy to others.

What about you?

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

Will cricket decline in India?

This is the 24th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

As the first Test between India and England moved towards a finish earlier this week, one of my friends announced that he was singing Raga Malhar. This is a legendary raga that is supposed to draw rain from the sky. And indeed, rain fell. If causation could be established, my friend would be a national hero, for millions wanted precipitation.

Like most Indian men, I’m crazy about cricket. Like unrequited love, this passion often seems futile and self-defeating. It’s also mysterious. Why do we invest so much time and energy into following this sport and no other? Why is it the only sport that Indians excel at (relative to others, of course)? In a globalized world, can cricket survive?

Cricket is unique among sports in the amount of time it demands from its followers. In no other sport is a match played over five days. Even one-day cricket requires up to six times the investment a game of football needs. Given the amount of cricket played these days, to follow India’s international matches could take up the productive hours of up to three months of your year. Over a lifetime, if you live till 88, that could be 22 years of watching 22 men run around in flannels or pajamas. Are we crazy?

Until a decade-and-a-half ago, Indians had the time. In the pre-liberalized years, what options did we have for entertaining ourselves? Cricket and Bollywood—whose films were longer than the Western norm, you will notice—were all that Indians had for entertainment. Television was state-run crap (note the tautology), the Internet didn’t exist, there were few malls to hang out at, and so on.

Two interesting trends began in the 1990s, when we began to globalize and satellite TV spread across the country. One, fewer people in the big cities played cricket seriously. Kids in Mumbai and Delhi had many more options for their time, and a young man in Thane now had better things to do than rush off to Shivaji Park at 6 am for nets. The decline of cricket in Mumbai was a natural consequence.

Two, kids in the small towns, who didn’t have so many ways of entertaining themselves, were exposed to the nuances of the game via satellite television, where the best commentators shared their gyan on matches across the world. Their opportunities expanded as these towns became more prosperous. The result of this is the deluge of talented players from the smaller towns over the last few years.

My guess is that viewership for cricket follows the same patterns. People in bigger cities have less free time and more to do in it, a phenomenon that is bound to spread to smaller centres. Eventually, as cricket has declined in Mumbai, it might decline in India as well.

But there is a counterpoint to this. Sport is more than pastime or entertainment—it is also a means of validating national pride. We will always follow a sport in which we excel. And although Indian cricket may seem to be in decline—I shudder to think what the team will look like after Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar retire —we will always do better at cricket than any other sport.

Why are we so good at cricket, to begin with? Part of why we took up the sport is historical circumstance, but leave that aside. The main reason why cricket is suited to Indians, and one that many will find politically incorrect, is genes. People across the world come from different genetic stocks, and are constrained by biology. This is reflected in sports. The odds will always be against a white or brown man winning the 100m sprint at the Olympics, and Africans will always do better than Asians in long-distance running.

Indians, I believe, are genetically disadvantaged when it comes to sports in which pure strength, speed or endurance play a decisive role. We tend to do well only in sports that place a premium on skill—cricket is a classic example. Even within cricket, we’ve been more famous for our batsmen than our bowlers, and for our spinners than our fast bowlers. Even our fast bowlers rely more on skill—swinging and seaming the ball—than on sheer pace, where fast-twitch muscles come into play. Of course, there are variations within the country, where many different genetic stocks exist.

Indeed, this is why Indians declined in hockey, as astroturf reduced the premium placed on pure skill. Ditto tennis, where the sublime skills of Ramesh Krishnan would be useless in this era of the power game. In cricket, even though the speed and fitness required at the highest level of the game has increased, it is unlikely to go beyond the natural capacity of Indians.

And thus, by biology and circumstance feeding on each other, we are bound to cricket. I don’t bemoan this —if Rahul Dravid can get his mojo back, and play as he did when he was last in England, it will all seem worthwhile again. And my friend won’t have to sing Raga Malhar.

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

Also check out an essay in which I’d touched on this subject, “Do We Really Love Cricket?”

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.

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.”