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8 ISSUES AND INSIGHTS
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MUMBAI | 19 NOVEMBER 2016
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ince 1992, there has been a Project Unigauge and its desirability is unquestioningly accepted. There was gauge conversion earlier too, but it became more formal from 1992. The 1992-93 Railway Budget speech stated, “The question of uni-gauge sysBIBEK DEBROY tem has been agitating parliamentarians, economists, entrepreneurs and even the public at large. Metre gauge route kilometres of 23,419, representing 38 per cent of the total route kilometres, are considered a drag on the system. From the macro-economic point of view, it stands to reason that gauge conversion should be speeded up especially when the emphasis is now on energy conservation, and some of the ills of the metre gauge system need to be remedied urgently... Minimizing of transport bottlenecks and transhipment hazards would thus not only enhance Railways’ capacity and capability but also inspire confidence in investors in opening up new growth centres and boost economic activity for removal of regional disparities.” Hence, Uni-gauge, ruling out some heritage lines. Historically, IR (Indian Railways) had four gauges — broad (1,676 mm), metre (1,000 mm) and two narrow gauges of 762 mm and 610 mm. Metre and narrow gauges were constructed because they were cheaper and traffic wasn’t expected to be significant. Railway old-timers will correct me if I am wrong. I think there was someone from IRTS (Indian Railway Traffic Service) who retired as GM. (His name was Hariram.) He is the one who prepared the base-paper for Project Uni-gauge. Arguments were standard ones. Passenger and freight services suffered on metre and narrow gauge. Speeds were low. There were transshipment costs. These are valid arguments, but it is also true that metre gauge got short shrift. There were under-investments in metre gauge. What is the axle load on a railway wagon? You might say more than 20 tonnes, aspiring to go up to 25 or even 32.5. But let’s go hack several decades, at a time when even 20 tonnes was tough. Though it is difficult to believe, in those days, metre gauge wagons carried more weight (per length of track) than broad gauge. hen containers that could be used on both broad and metre gauge wagons developed and non-container loads declined in importance, transshipment costs became less important. In 1977, in Tambaram, there was a farewell for the last metre gauge train and one of the spectators said in an interview, “We used to wait on the Guindy bridge to watch the metre gauge Vaigai Express in those days running at a speed of 100 km per hour.” That’s a decent speed. I am not suggesting we should have stayed on with metre gauge. All I am flagging is that there was no attempt to increase speeds and axle loads for metre gauge, or develop better couplers. A neglected metre gauge was unfavourably compared with a preferred broad gauge. I have found references to a report, but have been unable to lay my hands on it. It was by Sanderson and Porter Company and was dated 1957. For US, this evidently recommended that one should first invest in metre gauge before upgrading to higher gauges. Thanks to Project Uni-gauge, there has been gauge conversion. Other than rails, bridges, tunnels and platforms have been redone. In some instances, with a new broad gauge line, distances have declined. We are moving towards uniformity with that broad gauge of 1,676 mm. I asked someone from IR a stupid question. Can’t one have rolling stock that runs on both metre and broad gauge? I remember the Maharani Saloon in Mysore Railway Museum. This goes back to 1899 and can run on both gauges. Apparently, technology to enable rolling stock to run on multiple gauges has been developed. But it is still very expensive. Therefore, no option other than to tinker with rails. However, who uses this broad gauge of 1,676 km? India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, a bit of Bangladesh, and bits of Argentina and Chile. China and several countries in East Asia use standard gauge of 1,435 mm. Much of South East Asia uses metre gauge. Iran uses standard gauge too. Unigauge may have standardised within the country, but from a cross-country angle, we might have been better off without gauge conversion and with metre gauge. That’s the reason Bangladesh wants the new rail links with India to be mixed gauge, that is, dual gauge. Even if there is multilateral funding, why should Bangladesh switch to 1,676 km? We used to have some dual and mixed gauge sections, but they are now neglected. Think of the nightmare of the Trans-Asian Railway network — 1,435 mm, 1,520 mm, 1,524 mm, 1,676 mm and 1,000 mm. Without dual/mixed gauge, passengers/freight will have to be transshipped. I suspect integration gains with neighbouring countries are primarily for freight, not passenger traffic. In that event, for Bangladesh, Nepal and South-East Asia, we would have been better off had we retained metre gauge in north-east India and invested more in improving its efficiency. There is an apocryphal account of how Lord Mayo (Viceroy from 1869 to 1872) made three Indian males sit next to each other, measured the distance and thus decided the metre gauge width. That was a good reason for retaining metre gauge.
Can Mamata Banerjee unite the opposition? That she is a popular people’s leader cannot be disputed. But equally indisputable is her brand of whimsical politics — one reason everyone is a little wary of coming together under a banner led by Banerjee.
PLAIN POLITICS ADITI PHADNIS o is Mamata Banerjee the heroine of demonetisation? She was the first to unambiguously criticise the move, she followed it up with a fervent effort to unite the opposition around the issue of inconvenience to ordinary people, and when no one came, then with Arvind Kejriwal’s party on one side and the National Conference on the other, marched to Rashtrapati Bhavan and the Reserve Bank of India to slam the move, doing what she is best at: street protest. Obligingly, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to know of it and there was a stand-off: and it was led by Mamata. To be honest, there are not many like her around any more: totally un-self-conscious about rabble-rousing and with a completely
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transparent eye to the main chance. It brings the old days back. November 25, 1992: Mamata Banerjee, then president of the West Bengal unit of the Youth Congress, organised a rally at Kolkata’s Brigade Parade Ground to launch a movement against the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s long rule in the state. The crowd that attended was impressive and it cheered her enthusiastically as she proceeded to sound the symbolic “death knell” of the state government from the dais. This support moved her so much that she announced, then and there, that she would quit her post as junior minister in the Narasimha Rao government (she was in charge of youth affairs and sport) and devote her energies fulltime to building an anti-Left Front movement. Rao was, naturally, livid that a junior minister had put him in such an embarrassing position by making a public announcement before informing him. Banerjee couldn’t be bothered. The dramatic public announcement came to nothing; she did not resign from the Rao ministry. Nor was it the first time she displayed such selective amnesia. Earlier the same year she had said she would resign her ministership when she was defeated by colleague Somen Mitra in elections for the post of president of West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee. She forgot to follow up on this too. Her current leadership spell draws on three
KEYA SARKAR couple of months ago we had some friends over for breakfast and I happened to mention to them that there was an opportunity to view Tagore’s paintings in the original at an exhibition organised in Santiniketan. Considering how rare it is to see Tagore’s works in his own museums, my friends went straight from breakfast. After about an hour one of them called, beside herself in anger. Apparently the paintings were cordoned off from visitors not by rope as is normal but by orange traffic cones. Knowing Tagore’s dedication to the highest of aesthetics, she was truly enraged. I had strangely the same feeling when I went to visit a new gallery which opened recently (only four years late) to commemorate 100 years of the publication of Tagore’s “song offerings”, popularly known as the English Gitanjali, in the year
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to evolve. The election to the President of India is due end of June/beginning of July next year. By then several state assembly elections including Uttar Pradesh will have been completed. Will there be an election? It seems unavoidable at this point, given the fractious relationship between the Congress and the BJP. Will other opposition parties — including Mamata Banerjee — accept a common opposition candidate and work towards respectable numbers for him/her? In a presidential election, MLAs and MPs are voters, an electoral grouping which comprises 4,896 members. Of this, 776 are MPs and 4,120 MLAs from states. According to the BJP, the National Democratic Alliance has around two per cent more votes than a majority. The party feels this percentage will increase after the election in the five states. The value of votes for a UP MLA is more than the value of MLAs from any other state — to be precise, the value of one UP MLA vote is 208 and the total value of the state’s votes is 83,824. At present, there are only 41 BJP MLAs in the UP Assembly. Unless this number goes up, the BJP could be in perilous waters. All this is speculative at this point. Union governments in power have a huge capacity to dole out patronage, win friends and influence people in an election of this nature. But Mamata Banerjee is setting the stage. The question is: what will she get out of it?
> TIM DAVIE, CEO, BBC WORLDWIDE, & DIRECTOR, GLOBAL, BBC
The BBC’s worldwide man The BBC’s long-term perspective on content is what makes it a hub of world-class drama, formats and news programming, Davie tells Vanita Kohli-Khandekar or Tim Davie, now 49, moving from a fast-paced American working environment at Pepsi to UK’s public service broadcaster BBC in 2005 was a culture shock. “The subjectivity of creative work is not an easy choice, but one has to go with the flow. I stepped in (to the BBC) at a time when I wanted change,” says he. A big reason was his need to bring up his three boys back home in the UK. Davie started as director of BBC's marketing, communication and audiences division before becoming head of radio 2008. He is now CEO, BBC Worldwide, and director, global. “The public dimension to the BBC can create pressures,” says he. Like when he was asked to step in as acting director-general of the corporation following George Entwistle’s resignation in 2012. This was a time marred with accusations of a cover up of the abuse by star presenter Jimmy Savile among other things. Davie’s steadying of fraught nerves within and outside the BBC at the time marked him as a star within the system. Now, besides heading Worldwide he oversees editorial strategy and brand for BBC’s international news operation. Davie, who was part of UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s delegation to India earlier this month, has just got out of a panel discussion at the India-UK Tech summit when we meet at the ITC Maurya in Delhi. He is full of beans and energetic, just like he was at our meeting in Liverpool last year. He talks of his eight-day holiday with his family in Rajasthan earlier this year as we walk to the executive club. A pleasant November afternoon is marred by the pollution-induced haze visible through the glass doors on our left. It is the sort of afternoon to discuss fiction, natural history and the state of the world. We order our cappuccinos and begin. “At the end of the day you need to step back and put things in perspective. It was a tough time when I came in. But eventually what the organisation stands for and its values are important. BBC is a force for good. It lives and dies by public support and we have to earn that support everyday,” says Davie. In a survey across the UK earlier this year more
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than three-fourths of Britons said that the corporation should remain independent of the government, regulator or any other body. Its independence and ability to invest in good quality journalism, thanks to the £3.7 billion licence fees that TV owning British homes pay, has made the BBC a trusted news brand globally. Does its presence in the UK keep private broadcasters in line? It is a question that many Indians, worried about the fast declining news TV market in India, wonder about. “The quality standard (for news and creative) in the UK is very high in general. The BBC is an important component of it. There is no doubt that the impartiality of its news output sets a standard. But that is not solely at the BBC’s doorstep. It is part of a unique broadcasting ecosystem and explains why we have been able to generate so much business for BBC Worldwide,” says he biting into a cookie. BBC Worldwide, the BBC’s commercial arm, supports the licence fee by monetising the content created for the UK market, outside. Sherlock, Top Gear and Doctor Who among other shows and its natural history programming are bought by hundreds of broadcasters and OTT platforms across the world. In 2015 it generated over a billion pounds in revenues, returning £222 million to the corporation. How on earth do shows that are quintessentially British, from location to the cultural referencing, work outside? Doctor Who, a long running sci-fi series about a nameless 2,000 year old alien with two hearts is a hit in over 200 countries, some of which have no former connection with the UK, like India or the other commonwealth nations. At a Doctor Who event for 4,000 people in South Korea last year, 100,000 turned up. Within 24 hours of its release Sherlock’s season three was watched by 80 million people on YouKu, the Chinese equivalent of YouTube. Britain’s Got Talent, British Idol (both Fremantle) or Strictly Come Dancing (BBC Worldwide), which Indians know as India’s Got Talent, Indian Idol and Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa are among the dozens of formats that UK’s independent production firms create and export, making it the largest
When an MP “developed” Tagore
PEOPLE LIKE THEM
premises: elections to five state assemblies will be held in the next few months and could shift the tide of public opinion away from the BJP, seeking an option in the opposition; there is currently a vacancy for the leadership of the aforementioned opposition; and the rest of the opposition is a bunch of lily-livered cowards. There is only one problem: the mover of the resolution is Mamata Banerjee. That she is a popular people’s leader cannot be disputed. But equally indisputable is her brand of whimsical politics. After she became chief minister of West Bengal, Banerjee’s hold on her party is such that leaders know they must indulge her every whim, or face a fall from grace. This leads to unforeseen consequences, as several leaders who thought they had a brilliant political future discovered after they were dumped by Banerjee — for not listening to Rabindra Sangeet with the right degree of concentration (Banerjee was singing) or for not taking medicines she had prescribed (she fancies herself as a doctor), for example. And so, while bitter rivals Congress and CPIM could sink their differences and come together, everyone is a little wary of coming together under a banner that is led by Mamata Banerjee. But then you could argue that an all-in opposition unity as a banding together of all antiBJP political parties is a proposition that will be put to test only next year, so the idea still has time
1912. This in fact had got Tagore the Nobel, first for an Asian. My heart sank the moment I entered. This looked like a jewellery showroom. The floor was marble and granite, the wall paper was antique gold and bronze and the lighting fit for a Titan showroom in any mall. My stomach churned as I tried to imagine what Tagore, known for his simplicity, would have thought of this commemoration. There was also rangoli or alpona on the floor in some strange wriggly design reminiscent of the plastic paste-on rangolis. And this, in Santiniketan — where the stalwarts of the Bengal art movement had made alpona into an ornamentation which made any other unnecessary. Reconciled to the décor (done apparently by some interior design firm from Kolkata) I decided to focus on the curation. In the three rooms dedicated to this English edition of the Gitanjali there were only a lot of handwritten manuscripts pasted on the walls (much of it in Bengali). They stretched almost up to the ceiling which made reading, even for the very interested, quite a task. The curation was in a style similar to that of a student who didn’t know the relevant answer in an examination and so puts down all he knows on the subject in the hope that the examiner will find the relevant lines somewhere. There was no story, no anecdotes —
just a lot of written matter on the walls and a few glass cases with objects whose relationship with the Gitanjali was completely unexplained. There were also some busts of Tagore by various eminent artists. But there was also one by a currently serving peon with the museum, who dabbled in sculpting. The signage on a door which said “exit” actually led me to one room with a mirror covering one wall, quite like a cheap motel. I thought maybe because of the mirror I was not able to locate the exit door but the security man explained that was not the exit. “So why the signage?” I asked. “Everybody knows it’s the other way,” he explained. The décor, the curation, the signage — all that makes up a good museum had me intrigued. I climbed up one floor to meet an official if I could. Found one and asked him why, when Tagore’s whole life had been exhibited in just two rooms of the museum, a decision had been taken to devote so much space to only one publication — the Gitanjali in English. The gentleman said it was because an ex-Member of Parliament had made a donation from his LAD (local area development) fund to the museum and he had suggested this theme. So poor Tagore got “developed” and the MP got his pound’s worth — a large two feet by two feet plaque at the entrance which paid homage to his generosity.
ILLUSTRATION: BINAY SINHA
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seller of formats globally. “The things that have worked for us (globally) are the ones that have first worked in the UK. Many of our shows — Sherlock, Doctor Who or the natural history programming
come from a public service mindset. They need five-six years of investment,” says he. There were just three episodes of 90 minutes each in the first three seasons of Sherlock, a brilliantly done contemporary take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic. But the show is now one of Worldwide’s biggest hits taking drama’s contribution to about half of its topline. In the process of supporting the licence fee BBC Worldwide has created a studio that is second only to Hollywood’s top few. How does it manage the quality of creative output at this scale. By creating hubs within the UK production business and giving them lots of headroom, says Davie. BBC Worldwide has minority stakes in several independent producers in return for rights to distribute their content. “They keep their creative magic while benefitting from the distribution scale we offer,” says Davie. That incidentally is a model that has worked in kids’ programming in India which is otherwise dominated by broadcasters who usually use production houses as low-cost vendors. Chhota Bheem, one of the biggest kids’ characters was born out of a co-production between the struggling Green Gold Animation and Turner International in 2008. Worldwide also has co-production deals with Netflix, Amazon and others in its bid to grow digitally. Online gets Davie talking about what could overcome the limitation of pay TV in India. “In India the mobile unlocks potential (for content),” says he. In the year ending March 2016 Worldwide’s Indian arm had produced 270 hours of content and syndicated approximately 1,000 hours, all for the India market. Last year BBC Worldwide identified ten countries it wants to specially focus on. These include India, China, Mexico and Indonesia among others The coffee is over. Davie talks of the second part of David Attenborough’s Planet Earth that has just been released. “Like many Brits I have grown up with an incredible natural history education because of the BBC. It is a big thing that I work with David Attenborough,” says he. From a cola marketer to a full-blooded public broadcasting man; the transformation is complete.
Where am I going?
PEOPLE LIKE US KISHORE SINGH f it’s Saturday, it must be — “Pune” suggested my wife as I struggled groggily to remember in which city her call had woken me up. “That’s next week, unless this week is already next week,” I informed her. “I’m in” – peering at the hotel stationery that mentioned the name of the hotel but not its city — “Hyderabad, though it might be Chennai.” It turned out to be neither, which I discovered not during the course of the day but the following morning, at the airport, when I showed my ticket to the person manning the security, who prompted booted me back to the tail-end of the queue with a chastising lecture that if I intended to board a flight from Bengaluru, I needed to show him a ticket from Bengaluru, and not Mumbai, or
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Chennai, as I was apparently doing. Pushing a punishing itinerary across several cities on a promotional tour, it felt surreal to arrive at a destination and not know where I was. Over the last years, all airports have developed a sameness that is alarming; all hotels resemble each other; and even the FM stations that cab drivers seem partial to, sound the same. If the gobbledygook I had been assaulted with for several days seemed any indication, I was being subjected to south Indian babble though my north Indian ears failed to distinguish the nuances of Malayalam from Telugu or Tamil. “Kannada,” my colleague corrected me, reminding me yet again I was in Bengaluru — now, if only I could find my ticket. Did I say all hotels look the same? Let me correct that to mean they look similar — but try finding where to charge your phone and you’ll soon realise that if one will require you to crawl under the bed to find a socket, another will need you to disconnect the uplighter. Nor are these the only disingenuous ways to distinguish one from the other. In one, the bedside switches control everything but the lamp, which, mysteriously, can be switched off only from the corridor outside the bathroom. As for showers and faucets, it is impossible to tell the show-
er from the tap, or to get warm water and not a scalding cascade, or an icecold pour. Are pillows meant to smother you with their softness, or cause a crick because they are unyielding? Where their services celebrate diversity, hotel coffee shops can only be described as monotonous. From stale fruit platters and soggy scrambled eggs to gosht for dinner and salad for lunch, buffets are ennuingly analogous. Time was when you could tell a city from its cuisine, but with everyone demanding pizza or pasta instead of Chettinad or Syrian-Christian, all food now looks and tastes the same. When I had biryani packed from Chennai instead of Hyderabad, and failed to get brownies from Theo’s in Mumbai, there was hell to pay at home, but when I decided on chocolates from Fabelle in Bangalore, I was flayed because “How many times do I have to say that nobody eats truffles at home?” my wife castigated me. I’m on a flight as I write this, but I’m not sure where it’s headed. Presumably I’ll know when we get there. If it’s New Delhi, the chauffeur will be waiting to pick me up; if it’s elsewhere, I might ask the Uber driver where I am at the risk of being considered mad. Or I’ll try and make sense of the drivel on FM — provided it’s in a language I can understand.
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OPINION 9 >
Volume IV Number 16
ILLUSTRATION BY BINAY SINHA
MUMBAI | 19 NOVEMBER 2016
WEEKEND RUMINATIONS T N NINAN
Our post-truths
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idway through his prime ministership, Narendra Modi has made his first blunder, the botched exchange of high-value currency notes for new. But the remarkable point to note, politically, is that so many people have said (at least in the initial days) they are willing to live with the inconvenience and dislocation, since it is in a good cause: Attacking the black economy. This is one more example of Mr Modi’s ability to get the country to accept the narrative that he spins out. Weeks earlier, much of the country had bought another Modi narrative, as he successfully diverted attention from the extreme alienation, violent unrest and prolonged curfew in the Kashmir valley, by posing tests of nationalism that rode on the back of an army operation (don’t question the army, don’t question the government—or you are an anti-national). Economists can argue till they are blue in the face that the scrapping of un-surrendered currency notes deals only with the existing stock of black money, not the flow of black economy transactions — which will continue. Reporters will draw attention to the thousands of crores that the BJP (and Congress, among others) has received in the past from unnamed sources — underlining the underlying hypocrisy. Analysts will point out that all economies have black economies that range from a low of nine per cent of GDP to 30 per cent and more in even the advanced countries — no higher or lower than in India. What is worse, the black component of economies has generally been growing faster than GDP. The scrapping of old high-value currency notes, therefore, may cause unrecorded transactions to stop for a while, but they will resume. Undaunted, an emotional Mr Modi has stuck to his script and vows to take even more drastic steps. This must be our version of what Oxford Dictionaries has declared to be the word of the year: Post-truth. Mr Modi is a master in evoking the emotional reasoning that is the essence of post-truth — as indeed is Donald Trump. Don’t confuse me with the facts, what I feel is the reality. For decades, commercial advertisers have sought to exploit this limbic level of reasoning and consumer response by mixing up images of consumer products with, say, movie stardom, or success with the opposite sex. Mr Modi needs no such props. He is the messenger and the message. The second point to note, midway through the life of this government, is how much a cadre-based party of many leaders has morphed in such a short space of time into having just one leader whom no one in the system will dare question. The party could not name a chief ministerial candidate in the Bihar elections last year, and is unable to name one for Uttar Pradesh now. To many observers, this is Indira Gandhi re-born. She had her post-truths too: Three decades after her death, millions of poor voters continue to believe that she stood for the poor, though her record during 16 years of prime ministership shows that poverty barely declined. But like Mrs Gandhi, Mr Modi has become a populist. It is also uncanny that her advisors told her that, with bank nationalisation, it may be possible to abolish the income tax because the government would have access to so much money. Today, the Pune-based Arthakranti Pratishthan that says it met Mr Modi and advocated the currency note expropriation also argues that the income tax should be scrapped! And so India has slipped into the category of countries with strongman leaders, democratically elected. Russia’s Putin and Turkey’s Erdogan are the contemporary examples usually cited for this category, but there is a slew of East Asian leaders before them who are seen to have delivered for their people. For Mr Modi at this point, it is easier to get marks for effort than for results; but that is only in the world of unemotional facts and numbers. For the future, we have to wait on events to see whether the strongman narrative plays out differently from other countries.
My little black diary
AL FRESCO SUNIL SETHI he morning of November 10, when the demonetisation demon actually hit us, will go down in the country’s history as Black Thursday. It left no Indian unscathed. Here are jottings from my black diary of the week: Thursday, Nov 10: After a quick count my wife and I discover we have about ~800 worth of usable notes in the kitty. Our two long-standing staff — scrupulous, loyal and diligent — have ~600 plus loose change. Thursday is grocery-shopping day; with other expenses it’s not going to take us far. By afternoon,
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armed with cheque books, I’m at my neighbourhood bank. The queues are unbeatable. My efficient banker designated “relationship manager” is no longer taking calls. Defeated by late evening I find phones in meltdown mode — friends, family and colleagues are in similar straits. Friday, Nov 11: Up early, I’m ready for battle at 9 am. Of the four banks on our main street in south Delhi, I have accounts in two. One is a government bank up a twisted dark staircase with slovenly, tea-slurping staff and a fat slouching guard with an ancient double-barrel gun. The other is posh and private — all plate glass, comfy chairs and steaming cappuccinos. Even the guard is lean and alert with a superior weapon. My banker lets me in on senior citizen grounds and I finish my business in an hour. A retired army officer who lives nearby is dripping vitriol: “Aa gaye na acche din…Aur do Modi ko vote! (Have Modi’s promise of good days come? Go vote for him
The WhatsApp governance After sharp shifts on strategic policies, demonetisation without data, debate, de-risking or war gaming marks Mr Modi’s governing style n ordinary human brain is divided in two distinct halves, each performing a different set of functions. If it’s a politician, the halves can be conveniently divided as politics and governance. How does this work with Prime Minister Narendra Modi? Particularly after his most striking policy move so far, whether you call it demonetisation or a mere currency exchange. His political half, we know better already. He is the most political of SHEKHAR GUPTA our leaders in decades, with a seventh sense of public opinion almost like that of an accomplished naadi-vaidya (traditional ayurvedists who diagnose a patient by feeling the pulse). We have seen his language change between 2002 to 2007, to 2012 and finally on the national stage in 2014, hitting just the most sensitive and productive buttons with the voter. To that extent, he is winning this round as well. At least so far. His political (read electoral) proposition is straightforward: Do you believe there is a lot of ill-gotten black money, or not? The answer has to be yes. More questions follow. If so, can India progress, or achieve its destined status as a global power unless you can bring these trillions back in the system? No again. Next: Haven’t we tried our best already to bring it back from tax havens and then through an amnesty scheme? You might get a mixed response on that, with the fans saying yes, critics saying no but a very large number uncertain. The latest question, therefore, shifts the emphasis from that tricky question: If all other efforts have failed, why not the last option, so what if it is the nuclear one and leaves much collateral damage as its fallout. I know it is a risky, tough decision. But isn’t that why you elected me? Would you rather have Manmohan Singh, an indecisive, uncommunicative, do-nothing?
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NATIONAL INTEREST
r Modi is winning this argument. What is more remarkable, he is winning it on the strength of those most harassed, inconvenienced, and impoverished — if temporarily — by
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now!)” Thinking my troubles are temporarily over, little do I know of the strife ahead. Saturday, Nov 12: Our two family faithfuls deliver ominous tidings: They have more than ~2 lakh squirrelled away in trunks, kitchen drawers and elsewhere. It’s not only fat cats who stash crores in basements and under car seats. Imbued with a deepseated distrust of corrupt governments that long ago abandoned them, this is how 85 per cent of the population prefers to save. It’s their hard-earned income, not ill-gotten wealth. I rush them to the government bank where I helped start their accounts back in the 1980s. The filthy staircase with lines stretching far down the street is now a war zone — a mayhem of shouting, kicking and shoving. The metal entrance gate is chained and padlocked. Nasty louts, old men, housewives with babies beat against it like storming a jail. Once inside, there’s more bad news. One of my retainers’ accounts has gone dormant from disuse, the other has lost her PAN card. But they manage to exchange ~4,000 each and I am fortunate with my ~10,000 withdrawal. The ordeal
The audacity of scope
INTER ALIA MITALI SARAN t’s always fun to read about putrescent extravagances such as the rumoured ~550-crore wedding that Karnataka mining tycoon and political crony Gali Janardhan Reddy just organised for his daughter. This one featured a ~17-crore bridal sari, ~5-crore invitations, and 50,000 guests including Karnataka BJP President B S Yeddyurappa, who is to financial propriety what kryptonite is to Superman. It’s superfun to read about it while standing in a fivehour-long queue for the ninth straight day to exchange ~2,000 suddenly worthless rupees for the
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day. It’s the kind of thing that brings a smile to one’s face in these dark times, even if it is kind of a psycho killer smile. The Indian government commendably wants to honour one of its campaign promises by sucking out black money and corruption. But in the hyperbolic style of the Modi government, it is trying to do it with that most powerful of economic tools: Metaphor. It’s a mahayagya, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a “festival of honesty”. It’s disgraceful to sell state policy through religion, but if you’re going to, remember that like all festivals, this one is a temporary respite until we get back to routine; and like all festivals, it’s going to make you feel good rather than actually change your life. Targeting black money is a fine idea, and props to Prime Minister Modi for wanting to address the problem. Forget, for a minute, the critique that demonetisation is a high-impact, low-yield exercise that will do nothing to stop corruption. Give the government the benefit of
this greatest-ever currency destruction in human history. Give me these 50 days, just 50 days, he says, and I will give you a brilliant India and a perfect world. And a majority of the non-black money owning multitudes are inspired. Just like the women’s hockey team were by their coach, played by Shah Rukh Khan, when he beseeched the fictional players in Chak De! India to give him “just 70 minutes”. Unlike a hockey coach, however, whose exhortation will be checked against cold numbers within 70 minutes, a politician has more time. At the end of 50 days only the current inconvenience may be over. What exact benefits it brings, or devastation it causes, we wont know for months, if not for a couple of years. You can’t accuse this government and its economic team of not having gamed the consequences thoroughly. How can you game something never done before in human history, where no data or precedents are available. All you have is the contempt of old, establishment economists who love the status quo. In any case, in politics, the important thing is to find a product, an idea, a promise or slogan that sells. No electorally brilliant leader makes a promise necessarily driven by the belief he will fulfil it. Since the three-example rule is the oldest one in journalism, here is our list, one old, and two very recent. In 1969 Indira Gandhi, having split the Congress, nationalised banks, abolished privy purses and thereby fired the imagination of the (many still starving then) poor by causing the rich pain, and invented the slogan of Garibi Hatao (eradicate poverty). The entire opposition united against the mythology she was peddling, Frank Moraes, the great editor of The Indian Express, even wrote a daily front page column “Myth and Reality” to lambast her. But she swept the elections. Her posters, banners, all had that immortal line: They say, remove Indira. Indiraji says, remove poverty. Now you decide. Most certainly Indira Gandhi had no real plan or scheme, most likely not even the intention to eradi-
doubt. Even then, when you decide to inconvenience 1.2 billion people, you’d better have thought your plan through, because intelligent planning is the difference between dreams and nightmares. The government has shown unforgivable irresponsibility in not foreseeing or planning for the most basic of problems. We now have new currency that ATMs are not configured to dispense, not enough lower denomination currency in the market to make change for ~500 and ~2,000 notes, and people are being tagged with indelible ink used for elections. Nobody is prepared for the crippling cash lockdown in 95 per cent of the economy. And it is killing people. As a relatively hale, time-rich, urban banking customer with four ATMs at five minutes’ walking distance, I can get by thanks to the plastic in my wallet, and standing in line endangers only my mood, not my livelihood. But 55 people (and counting) have died as a result of demonetisation, and many more have gone
has taken five hours. Sunday, Nov 13: Our cleaning lady is a born complainer — her poisoned barbs normally aimed at neighbours, employers and Arvind Kejriwal. Today, slumped over mop and pail, she’s hysterically abusing the government. “Maar diya Modi ney…hum sab ko bhikari banaa diya. (Modi has killed us…he’s turned us all into beggars).” Her husband is asthmatic and can’t queue; her children work; she has no money for her bus fare, milk or medicines. I press some money to placate her. But she’s not the only one penniless. My sister-in-law, back in town, is also cash-strapped. Our daughter calls urgently from the US to say a visiting American colleague is stranded with ~2,000 notes with few takers. Like mobile ATMs we’re ferrying money all over the place. Monday, Nov 14: With my cache of new currency running low I’m back at the bank to beg for rapidly-vanishing small notes. Defence Colony market on Sunday evenings is usually throbbing, with barely standing room on pavements, but yesterday it looked desolate. The wellheeled woman ahead of me at
the stationer’s was buying a pack of rubber bands. She plucked out her Amex gold card to pay for the ~35 purchase. I was awestruck: Was this a paragon of the cashless economy? Or are the rich so mean they get poorer faster than everyone else? Tuesday, Nov 15: My brother, who lives in Goa, reports that the tourist season is collapsing. Thousands of marooned holidaymakers are at the mercy of extortionist racketeers. The PM says the poor will sleep peacefully after November 8. In fact, precisely the opposite is happening. Thursday, Nov 17: Our two doughty faithfuls leave the house at first light and return at odd hours — queuing at post offices (no money there yet) or at banks (where the exchange is down to ~2,000 altogether). The news from their villages is grim: Long treks to empty banks, rotting crops, dead trades, voracious moneylenders. All Indian lives are interlinked in a safety net to compensate for the failures of the nation-state but demonetisation’s overall harm is incalculable. It will take 500, not 50, days to alleviate this pain.
hungry. You would think that the only time state-directed action kills its citizens is as collateral damage in times of war, or when citizens have been handed a death sentence by a judicial process. Here, people are dying because creditable ambition is backed by incredible incompetence, because an exercise that needs years of planning has been unleashed in six months. What is this unseemly haste about, if not elections? The government’s argument that secrecy was necessary to avoid giving hoarders a heads up has been debunked by reports that many of the right people knew, including allegedly Messieurs Ambani and Adani. The really striking feature of this demonetisation exercise is India’s tolerance for shabby governance. The more empowered you are, the less you’re willing to put up with stupid or inefficient policy. The less empowered you are, the higher your pain threshold, by necessity — and the more business and politics will take advantage of you. It speaks to the extent to which ordinary people despise the corrupt rich that so many are willing to put up with their present hardships to support the government. Good gov-
ernance would value that spirit, and would plan as hard as possible to minimise that pain, instead of making a self-interested and frankly legally dodgy splash; floundering; and being reduced to making it up as it goes along. “No honest taxpayer will lose a single rupee,” said Power Minister Piyush Goyal. That’s not true; hundreds of millions of honest taxpayers who legitimately pay zero tax, will be losing the money they might have made instead of standing in line. There is no doubt that black money and corruption have screwed this country hard. There is no doubt that it has to be addressed. I would love to see this exercise succeed. But not at the cost of lives. The days of Pathankot, of JNU antinationalism, of beef murders — those were the good old days of calm, controlled, beautifully executed cock-ups — compared to the giant cowpat we now find ourselves in. Mr Modi’s demonetisation isn’t upsetting the economic applecart — it is blowing it up, and screwing the shards into our eyes. Here’s hoping that it will get sorted sooner rather than later, with no more loss of life.
cate poverty. She had discovered a marketable promise, and importantly one on which she wouldn’t be tested too soon. The opposition did not have a bigger idea, a fancier promise, except to say, you trust her? Can she eradicate poverty, how can you believe her? We know who the voter believed. It was only much later, as she persisted with a series of povertarian blunders, peaking with wheat trading nationalisation in 1973, that pauperised a stressed, post-1971 war economy and inflation crossed 25 per cent that the poor realised they’d been fooled. The two more recent examples are Brexit and Donald Trump. Demagogues who led the campaign for Brexit, Nigel Farage to Boris Johnson have all, as Americans say, gotten off that kerb. Their promise was to reclaim Britain and make it great again. The job of winning the referendum, and thereby disrupting Europe, done they are not about to put their hands up and be tested on that promise. Mr Trump, similarly, promised to make America great again at a time when, as most sensible people tell you, it is probably as great as it’s ever been. How much greater he will make it, when and how, why bother asking? His election is done and the political craft, ultimately, is all about winning popular opinion. If it has to be done by engineering a collection suspension of disbelief, so be it. his is precisely where Mr Modi is winning the immediate battle and his combined adversaries are at a disadvantage. Like Indira Gandhi in the early Seventies trapping her enemies in the for-oragainst poverty eradication trap, Mr Modi is conjuring up a for-or-against black money binary. Real results of his campaign wont be assessed for months, and if putting up with some inconvenience is all he is requesting, the poorest will grant it. The rich, meanwhile, may be figuring out not only ways to launder what they have, but also ways to profit from the misery of the cheering, voting masses. We can conclude therefore, that the political half of the Modi government’s mind is working brilliantly. A less certain picture emerges when you look at the other half. Demonetisation is only the latest — if clearest — indication of Mr Modi’s approach to governance. It is instinctive, audacious, non-risk averse, even impetuous. We aren’t going so far yet to say reckless. But there is no missing a boredom with detail, analysis and war gaming. Forget avoiding the usual trap of bureaucratic analysis-paralysis, there even seems impatience with data. We do not authoritatively know the extent of black money, where it’s hidden and by whom, what are our optimal targets of recovery and clean-up. We have some totally non-peer reviewed, unofficial, theoretical “reports”. So the “solution” is to vacuum out the entire money, give back what can be justified as legitimate and the rest is your gain. For the seventh-largest economy in the world, shared by nearly 1.3 billion mostly poor people, this is a buccaneering approach to governance. It can work, by yanking in a lot of informal economic activity into the formal tent and thereby expanding the tax base. But who knows. Just as nobody quite knew or gamed the consequences of going public with the surgical strikes across the LoC, or of the defence minister reopening the global debate on the Indian nuclear doctrine by expressing his “personal views”. If you are a fan of this government, you can compare it with Virender Sehwag: See ball, hit ball. And if you aren’t, it’s the classical definition of governance by urban legends, WhatsApp forwards and early morning brainwaves. We won’t know the score for another few months.
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Twitter: @ShekharGupta
Reality or fiction? EYE CULTURE VIKRAM JOHRI n “San Junipero”, an episode of the currently running third season of Black Mirror on Netflix, a young woman wanders the titular American town that, going by the music played in its discos and the dresses worn by the patrons, seems directly plucked from the ‘80s. (It is not — the town “adopts” different decades.) To the viewer, this creates a cognitive dissonance because the series, an anthology of unconnected stories, is normally set in the future due to its remit: The scale to which technology has come to shape our lives. At the dance club, the hesitant Yorkie meets her spunky complement in Kelly, who, like Yorkie, is a “tourist” in San Junipero. The two immediately hit it off, but their romance has the Cinderella-like quality of rushing against time, as some unspoken of event, revealed much later, occurs at midnight and separates the two budding lovers. We subsequently learn that San Junipero is an immersive nostalgia experience where people on the verge of dying can relive their youth for a few hours every week. More, it is where people go after they “pass over” (a euphemism for dying) — a heaven right here on earth where those who sign up can upload their minds, and in effect their bodies and souls, to the cloud. Here, as with all of Black Mirror, technology provides the awe-inspiring foundation for an edifice of deeply human questions. “San Junipero” brilliantly situates the desire for immortality not in narcissism but in the longing to prolong the connections that make life worth living. With its sweetly happy ending, “San Junipero” is an outlier in a series that is more given to capturing the depredations of the rapid adoption of technology. “Nosedive” showcases a time — hardly fictional in our age of social media intrusion — where a person’s worth is directly proportional to the grade they earn on a five-point scale whose sole basis is likeability. Random interactions, such as riding a bus, offer opportunities for ratings by strangers. Special discounts and job opportunities are up for grabs, but only by those north of four. Inevitably, this state of affairs engenders a new kind of class hierarchy where the high-pointers lord over the scorechallenged. The story is distilled through the eyes of a woman who is eager to get into the top bracket and the lengths to which she will go to achieve her goal. It’s a cautionary tale that does not end well, yet there is an uplifting lesson in her final realisation that she is truly free only when she gives up the race to be stiffly proper.
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While Black Mirror is primarily focused on the social effects of technology, the show is also interested in its more immediately physical ramifications. In “Playtest”, a volunteer signs up for a virtual reality game that manipulates neural signals in the brain to create all-consuming 3D horror simulations. Trouble begins when the game is unable to distinguish between its own program and the memory manipulations it inflicts on the volunteer. Past traumas mix with shocking imagery to yield a potent, and ultimately fatal, mix. Beyond technology, the world of Black Mirror seems deeply familiar also because its ambience, while not entirely relatable, is not as outlandish as that of similar shows in the past. From 1959 to 1964, The Twilight Zone examined race, gender and scientific progress in episodes whose appeal lay in their convoluted storylines and inexplicable plot twists. In contrast, Black Mirror, with its souped-up internet romances and survival on the cloud, is positively cute. And yet, the show points to an era that may be as chaotic as any that scientific advancement has wrought. Already, leading lights such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have spoken of the dangers of artificial intelligence. Programs such as IBM’s Watson rely on humongous quantities of data to come up with solutions in medicine and industry that are far superior to anything dreamt up by humans. Mr Musk has even said that we might be living in a simulation run by a super-intelligent alien species. The chief contention of these naysayers is the unknowability of the point where a sophisticated program will harvest its own “intelligence” to turn anti-human. HBO’s new show Westworld is built on this premise — although it seeks to earn viewer’s sympathy for the humanoid robots who populate the theme park after which the show is named. Humans, mostly of the despicable kind, come to the park to do what they wish with these robots whose “memories” of the brutalities are erased at the end of each day. When the robots rise in unison against the injustices inflicted on them in the coming episodes, the viewer will cheer them on. Technology is great but when it comes into conflict with humanity (in both senses of the term), the latter must win. If Mr Musk’s simulation is indeed true, we may be no better off knowing about it. In “San Junipero”, two women build a life together after their earthly demise. Witnessing their happiness is akin to saying a prayer — an invocation to a master simulator all humans have felt keenly since the dawn of time. Every week, Eye Culture features writers with an entertaining critical take on art, music, dance, film and sport
