Is Lalu’s feudalism rubbing off on Nitish?

Written by
N.R.Mohanty

Last Saturday(sept.22,The Indian Express(New delhi edition) carried a photograph which tells us something about the feudal character of our politics and politicians.The photograph was nothing exceptional: it just showed a Railway Protection Force constable in uniform kneeling down and adjusting the shoes of Railway Minister Lalu Yadav.

Many will ask: what is the big deal about it? Isn’t that a routine sight?

That only suggests how much the feudal culture is a part of our public life. The kings used to rule over the subjects as a ‘divine right’. They treated the state officials as their vassals. Now, the kings are gone; elected representatives rule over us, but they behave as if they are the modern-day kings. For them, the state employees, high or low, are nothing but just but personal attendants.

Lalu Yadav symbolizes this feudal culture. He revels in it. He would not find anything wrong with what was shown in the Express photograph. You ask him about it and it is most likely that you will get a tart reply: “If you want, I can make the RPF DG (Director General) to tie my shoe-laces for a photo-opportunity”.

 

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If you think it is an exaggeration, then you should go through a news item in the Indian Express (Delhi Edition) three weeks ago (Sept. 3, to be precise).Lalu Yadav, while making fun of Nitish Kumar who shifted a DM for not recognizing his voice on phone, told the journalists in the corridors of the Parliament: ” Hum jab CM the to chief secretary se hum khaini chunwate the (when I was the CM, I made the chief secretary prepare tobacco). Aur yahan, Nitish Kumar ko DM poochta hai ki kaun CM!”Can there be a starker manifestation of a feudal mindset?

As a matter of fact, Lalu Yadav’s feudal mannerism is much restrained in the cosmopolitan Delhi where he is presiding over the biggest estate of all, the Railways. When he ruled Magadh (Bihar) with his capital in Pataliputra (Patna), the entire ambience that he created was a virtual throwback to the medieval times.

When I went to Patna as a journalist for the first time in early 1990s, Lalu Yadav had become the toast of the media –as the messiah of social justice. Like all journalists coming to Patna, my first port of call was 1, Anne Marg, the chief minister’s official residence.

I was there at about 10 in the morning. There was a huge crowd waiting there. But the CM was nowhere to be seen. I was told that he was still upstairs, sleeping. Time ticked by, it was 11, then 12, but no sight of him. Finally, he appeared, yawning as hordes of hangers-on rushed to touch his feet.

He settled down in his designated sofa and plonked his feet on a table kept in front of him. Then cups of tea were served; he exchanged pleasantries and shared jokes with the small coterie that surrounded him, while others, the ordinary mortals, looked at the spectacle from a distance.

It went on for more than an hour and then the chief minister went back upstairs for his morning chores. When he would go to office, I asked. Everyone smiled. A journalist friend told me that he attended office rarely, except when some work or meeting could not be held at home for reasons of protocol. The chief minister of a state did not attend office! Did he work from home?

Well, every time I went to the CM’s residence, I found him sitting in his ‘durbar’, with hordes of loyalists surrounding him.

I saw secretaries to the government, senior IAS officers, waiting on the sidelines for their turn to speak to him on official matters.

It was a typical sight where personal and official became indistinguishable. The feudal arrangement ensured that the lord handed over the baton to his homemaker wife Rabri Devi when the CBI arrested him for his involvement in the multi-crore-fodder scam.

There was more to the feudal display — if the wife was the malkin (the owner of the estate), then by extension, the estate belonged to the husband as well. It was hardly surprising that the change of regime (from the husband as CM to the wife as CM) did little difference to the status of the husband. After all, the state of Bihar was a family estate; and everyone who had anything to do with the state had to bow before the mukhiya of the family – Lalu Yadav.

I once saw R K Singh, an efficient and upright IAS officer, who was the home secretary then, come up to Lalu Yadav with the then DGP in tow. He requested a private audience with Lalu saying that there was something important to discuss. Lalu asked him to wait and got back to his durbaris (hangers-on) sharing chutkulas (jokes) with them. There were no vacant chairs and the home secretary and the DGP were virtually left twiddling their thumbs in a corner.

A little later, someone from the personal staff rushed to Lalu saying that the passengers were getting restless as the flight to Delhi was already delayed more than half an hour to enable him to board the plane. Lalu got into the waiting car and left for the airport, leaving the home secretary and the DGP crestfallen.

Mind you, this was when Lalu Yadav was not the chief minister, but the chief minister’s husband. The feudal set-up in Bihar did not need even the token presence of the de jure head of the government when the state officials spoke to the de facto ruler.

In the 15 years that the family held sway over Bihar, (Lalu as CM for six years and Rabri for nine years), Lalu Yadav treated the state officials with such contempt that all self-respecting officers tried to flee the state.

With the change of regime, one hoped, the feudal era would come to an end. As Nitish Kumar is more of a hands-on administrator and handles official task in an impersonal manner, one expected him to make a clean break with the feudal culture that preceded him. But the manner in which he snubbed a district magistrate who did not recognize his voice on the mobile phone — that it was enough ground for his suspension — was unbecoming of him; in fact, it gave a flash of that feudal arrogance which his predecessor invariably

It does not stand to reason that a promoted IAS officer, in his senses, can afford to ignore the call from the chief minister. It was possible there was some disturbance in the network (as it is, the DM was in an interior district where network problems were bound to be there), or it was even possible that there was a lot of noise that drowned the voice on the other side.

It would not have dented the CM’s image had he waited for the DM’s explanation; rather it would have shown him in better light, as a mature administrator. But the manner in which the district magistrate was summarily shifted did not do well to the image of a post-feudal Bihar under Nitish Kumar.

Bandh Violators should be sent to jail

Written by
N.R.Mohanty The Supreme Court was right in its decision to declare the bandh call given by the ruling DMK and its allies illegal. But the apex court was wrong in suggestingthat it had the right to recommend the removal of theTamil Nadu government for violating its order.

What the Supreme Court ought to have done was to haul up the leader of the ruling party, M.K Karunanidhi, on contempt charges and send him to jail for daring to defy its express order. The Court should have acted on the principle that the buck stops at the top.

It was imperative that the Supreme Court acted decisively so that the smaller players of Indian politics, like T R Balu, Priya Ranjan Das Munshi and sundry Left leaders, who have been hailing Karunanidhi as the role model, were put in place and some sanity prevailed in our democratic set-up.

When the Supreme Court banned the bandhs in 1998, it acted on behalf of the millions of the people of this country who had no other option but to suffer the political hooliganism silently.

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All of us have faced the situations when criminals masquerading as politicians swamp the streets to enforce bandhs. As a student in Berhampur town in Orissa, I was witness to the depredations of the left parties, which had a strong base in the district. Quite often the student and youth wings of these parties would paralyse the entire township to demand the reinstatement of their leaders suspended for adopting unfair means in the examinations.

And what did they want to prove? They wanted to tell the college authorities that the entire town showed
solidarity with the suspended students. But the fact was that an overwhelming majority of students of the college itself wanted the suspended students to be expelled. But they could not say it openly, for that
would have meant inviting the wrath of the muscle men.

Criminalization of the protest methods has not been a prerogative of the left parties alone. Almost all
political parties have taken to it, provided they had enough strength to flex their muscles. Left parties, for example, are incapable of calling a bandh in major cities of Bihar, as they simply don’t have the cadre to enforce it. But they do it with aplomb in their strongholds.

The BJP is now making a virtue of the Supreme Court decision on bandh to take on its political rivals, but the fact is that it has not hesitated to paralyse normal life for partisan ends. Didn’t we see it resorting to Chakka Jam all over the country a few days ago on the Ram Setu issue, subjecting hundreds of thousands of people to inconvenience, rather torture?

The Congress, which has been largely responsible for the degeneration of the democratic culture in the last three decades, has also contributed in no small measure to this criminalization process. The regional parties are no less guilty. The smaller parties which revolve around individual leaders — be it Mamata Banerjee, Jayalalitha, Sharad Pawar, Bal Thackaray, Lalu Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan or the like – have found it expedient to mobilize their supporters by calling for bandhs periodically.

But all the parties, big or small, have justified bandhs on democratic premises. The CPM leader Prakash Karat said the other day that the court could not take away their democratic right to protest. Yes, Mr. Karat, a bandh would certainly be a democratic mode of protest, if it were voluntary. But it is rarely so.

Even when an opposition party gives a call for bandh and the state government is determined to prevent it by deployment of security forces, the scope for coercion remains, because there can never be enough security to give protection to all those who need it in every part of the territory. If your vehicle is damaged or the goons enforcing the bandh vandalises your business outlet, then you may spend a lifetime running around for compensation. So people prefer to keep indoors. And the political parties claim that it is all voluntary!

The CPM, in fact, made the democratic logic stand on its head when it called for bandhs in West Bengal where it was the party in power. When the security forces withdrew and let the party cadre dictate on the streets, the complete success of the bandh was a foregone conclusion. But every time the CPM called it a ‘democratic victory’. Many ruling parties, DMK being the latest, have emulated the CPM’s example all over the country. The DMK’s case is indeed the most absurd. After all, it is the ruling party in the state; it is also part of the union government. Then whom was it protesting against?

What is most disconcerting is that even after the Supreme Court’s explicit order declaring the bandh call illegal, Karunanidhi & Co. resorted to the subterfuge of a hunger strike while the vandals unleashed themselves over the hapless people.

This must come to an end. People of this country have for long suffered at the hands of the self-centric
politicians. Our institutional mechanism does not allow the people to take them to task, except during the elections. In the intervening period between two elections, the political class has a free run. Even in the elections, the people have very limited choice, as most of these politicians are birds of the same feather. The people of Tamil Nadu had thrown a corrupt Karunanidhi out and brought Jayalalitha in. But they found Jayalalitha equally corrupt and showed her the door. But then again Karunanidhi re-entered the scene as the people were left with the Hobson’s choice.

When the political system is so hobbled and the democratic choice before the people is so limited, one
expects the Supreme Court to stand firm to come to the rescue of the people. The court’s decision on bandh has brought solace to millions of silent people of this country. The apex court must not be cowed down by the ranting of the political parties. It will win the support of the silent majority of the country if it sends the political bigwigs to jail for criminalising the democratic process.

An open letter to Sonia Gandhi

Written by
N.R.Mohanty The immediate provocation for writing this letter to you is your ‘enemies of development’ speech at Jhajjar in Haryana last Sunday. After your statesman-like address to a gathering in New York where you referred to the debate on the Indo-US nuclear deal in India as democratic churning, you brought yourself down to the level of run-of-the mill politicians, like Kapil Sibal, who consider themselves as the last word as to what constitutes our national interest.

You, in fact, went a step further. Your minions laid down the fault lines of India’s nuclear roadmap. Even
Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, who has all through his tenure acted like a mouse, roared like a tiger when he dared the Left to topple his government over the deal. It could not have been without your consent or promptings. Like an Empress, you gave the final battle cry: ‘Those who are not with us are against us. Those who are against us are against development’.

Will you tell us Soniaji, what is your vision of development? Or, do you have a ‘vision thing’, like the semi-educated US president George Bush once said? When you refused to accept the office of the Prime Minister in 2004 and told the stunned world that you would instead work for the development of the country, many of us had felt that you would be the one who would carry forward the glorious legacy of your grandfather-in-law, Jawaharlal Nehru.

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There was a feeling that you carry a special burden – that of not being an Indian by birth, in fact, you became an Indian citizen years after your marriage to Rajiv Gandhi – and, therefore, you will rise to the occasion to fulfill the expectations of a people and a system that catapulted you to the pre-eminent position in the country, which is perhaps unthinkable anywhere else in the world.

You showed signs of that special ‘burden’ to prove yourself. You brought together some of the finest people, in terms of their knowledge and activism, in an advisory council and took some exemplary steps like enactment of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the Right to Information Act. With all their anomalies and shortcomings, they were a revolutionary step forward.

But after the initial burst of enthusiasm waned, you seem to be caught up in the worst shenanigans of the realpolitik, which has been the bane of India’s politics. But perhaps you couldn’t help it, as it runs in the ruling family of India of which you are the inheritor. Indira Gandhi had begun well as the messiah of the poor (remember her slogan of ‘Garibi Hatao’), but she got derailed when she got busy in installing her son Sanjay as her successor.

After Sanjay’s untimely death, your husband was groomed to step into her shoes. And he did when Indira fell to the bullets of her Sikh bodyguards. He made a disastrous start by justifying the retaliatory attack on the Sikhs with his notorious remark: When a big tree falls, smaller ones are likely to take a toll.

But soon he began to invest his energy for political, economic and technological reforms that India desperately needed. When he took the nation by storm with his myriad initiatives, there came a bolt from the blue – the Bofors scandal that destroyed all the credibility that he had garnered as the Prime Minister.

When you took over the reins of the Congress party, many of us expected that you would have learned from your husband’s mistakes and start on a clean slate for a new development agenda for the country.

Left may be wrong, but not irresponsible, certainly better than DMK

Written by
N.R.Mohanty In his weekly column last Sunday, Vir Sanghvi, a former Editor of Hindustan Times, defended the Prime Minister in the following words: “The recent media caricature of Manmohan Singh as a poorly-advised, single-issue Prime Minister is not accurate. When it comes to the crunch, the PM has shown that he can look at the big picture, pull back and demonstrate the flexibility that you need to lead a coalition.”

A day later, on Monday, Gautam Adhikari, a former Editor of The Times of India, berated Prakash Karat: and the Left: “Consider for a moment what (Prakash) Karat has achieved. To start with, he managed to keep the Left suspended happily in a political yamalaya by being a part of neither the UPA government nor the parliamentary opposition. From his perch, he smartly calculated, he could have his cake and eat it too. Exercising power without responsibility was what the Left established, with remarkable success, as its style of doing its best for India. It first used a piece of paper called the ‘common minimum programme’ as a sacred text to virtually halt all attempts at implementing progressive economic reforms. And now it has stopped the government from pursuing an independent foreign policy.”

I think, while Mr. Sanghvi erred in being more charitable to the Prime Minister than he deserves, Mr. Adhikari has a problem in reverse; he is rather uncharitable to the Left leader.

Mr. Sanghvi finds fault with the media for doing a caricature of Manmohan Singh as a single-issue Prime Minister. But he should blame the PM for earning this epithet for himself. After all, the sparring game between the Left and the government he heads had been going on for more than three years, but it never reached a flashpoint. That was due to mutual accommodation. The government was keen to fast track various economic reforms, the Left leaders used to express its reservations but on many occasions, they were persuaded by the lavish attention bestowed upon them by Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh, not to speak of the lesser mortals in the government. On occasions, when they were not persuaded, they made feeble protests and threatened to carry the matter to the people’s court and forgot all about it.

The Indo-US nuclear deal was going through the motions in a similar fashion until the Prime Minister suddenly wanted to up the ante. After all, his ‘Do-or-Die’ remark on the nuclear deal in the interview to the Telegraph was not delivered because of any immediate provocation. In fact, Manmohan Singh had specifically asked for an interview with the English daily from the communist heartland, West Bengal, to throw the gauntlet at the Left – either you accept the deal or I go to the people for a fresh mandate.

Perhaps the Prime Minister had thought that the Left leaders, who had got so used to be in the centre of action for over three years, would baulk at the thought of getting back to the margins of the political theatre. He had hoped that they would accept the deal as a fait accompli, as they had done about the SEZs and the FDI in several sectors, while making the usual noises. Opinion polls suggesting that a fresh election would boost the prospects of the Congress and spell the doom for the Left were part of a design to coerce the Left to sign on the dotted line.

But the Left decided to call the Prime Minister’s bluff. Prakash Karat, the leader of the Left, was categorical in his response: We will withdraw support if you went ahead with the deal. This led to an eyeball-to-an-eyeball confrontation. The question was whether one party would blink first to prevent the disaster or one would follow the other into the quagmire. In either case, the first strike had to be with the government.

There were two options before Manmohan Singh – either he carried out his threat to go ahead with the nuclear deal and risk his government or abandon the project and save his government. The Prime Minister ate his words and blinked first.

But what would have happened had the PM gone ahead with the negotiations with the IAEA? Would the Left have carried out its threat to dislodge the government or would it have accepted the inevitable and vowed to fight the battle another day, and gone on to enjoy the political centre-stage for another 18 months?

Some would say that the Left would have lost its credibility if it had reneged on its threat. Why should it be so? After all, the Prime Minister reneged on his threat and has not lost his credibility, with a commentator of the stature of Vir Sanghvi coming to his defence. To repeat his words:” When it comes to the crunch, the PM has shown that he
can look at the big picture, pull back and demonstrate the flexibility that you need to lead a coalition.”

There would have been no dearth of commentators on the side of the Left to make Sanghvi-like endorsements for Prakash Karat if he would have accepted the deal to save the government: that he did so keeping the big picture in mind – the immediate threat of communalism far outweighed the distant threat of American imperialism. After all, if China could keep the imperialists at bay while sucking up to them, why couldn’t India?

This brings me to the comment of the other celebrity journalist, Gautam Adhikari. He makes the standard charge against the Left that it exercises power without responsibility, that it can have its cake and eat it too. By this logic, the Left would have discharged its responsibility better if it had been part of the government.

But then does Mr. Adhikari find the DMK, for example, a more responsible party than the Left just because it is part of the government? Look at its supremo, Karunanidhi, going publicly against the decisions of the government of which it is a part, if the said decisions went against the vested interests of the party in the state. Here is a party, which is enjoying the perks and privileges of being part of the government and at the same time the autonomy to go against the government.

The Left, to its credit, prefers to keep its autonomy to speak its mind while forsaking the privileges of being part of a government. What the Left is doing is an act of sacrifice, rather than an act of irresponsibility. It is an irresponsible behaviour in a democracy to support a government mindlessly. Since most of the regional parties that are part of a coalition government do not have a mind of their own as far as many national issues are concerned, they are the meek followers of the dictates from the national party that leads the coalition. But the Left has a mind of its own and you cannot hold it against them, even if you disagree with them, that they are using it to make the policy critique.

To repeat Mr. Adhikari’s words: It (the Left) …used a piece of paper called the ‘common minimum programme’ as a sacred text to virtually halt all attempts at implementing progressive economic reforms. I am afraid, the common minimum programme is not just a piece of paper– it is the bedrock of governance for the UPA government, which had been agreed upon when the coalition came to power. Most of the parties would be tempted to deviate from the letter and spirit of such a programme for considerations of partisan and vested interests. If the Left is using it to remind the government of its commitments, then it is acting with great responsibility, not careless abandon.

Globalisation, Market and Media

Nilotpal Basu, the CPI(M) leader, raised some fundamental issues in his column on this platform
(‘The role of media in the nuclear debate needs to be reviewed‘) last week (October 19) when he ticked off the media for its dubious role in the Indo-US nuclear debate. Let me quote the relevant extracts to put his argument in perspective: “Is the attitude of the mainstream media, an one off development or is there something more fundamental? In a very well researched paper the Delhi based media watch group Centre for Media Studies(CMS) has come out with startling figures. The study has established that `today advertising and market research in many ways determine the scope of mass media, including journalistic trends’. It is also an interesting coincidence that hundred percent FDI has been permitted in these two fields in the last two years.

“The study also establishes that from the supplementary nature (25 to 30 per cent) the share of advertising in total revenue of media has gone up to 60 to 75 per cent now. In case of television channels this is even larger – 70 to 80 per cent. In case of some big newspapers, advertising revenue is 60 per cent of the total. The size of the advertising market is also huge – Rs. 12,000 crores of which three-fourths are consumed by the mass media. Again, overwhelming bulk of mass media advertisement is accounted for by big corporates both Indian and foreign. There is a major concentration as well with 15 advertisers accounting for three-fourths of such advertising revenue. The advertising agency business is also getting concentrated with top five advertising agencies having major holding from outside the
country. This is a development commensurate with growing entry of foreign brands and increase in the share of foreign corporates.

Mr. Basu, armed with the CMS study, has raised the larger debate – the inter-relationship between Globalisation, Market and the Media. We need to carry the debate forward. Let us first discuss the Globalisation. The simplest explanation of this term is increasing inter-dependence. Mr. Basu is, I suppose, not opposed to the very idea of Globalisation per se, because his basic ideology draws from the Marxist dictum: ‘Workers of the world unite!’

Whether one likes it or not, Globalisation is a reality today; even the so-called anti-globalisation groups admit as much. Their only concern is to make Globalisation inclusive, to make it fair and just so that every section of the society benefits from it.

Globalisation is a process that has deeply affected the market and the media– the two major players in the modern-day world. Mr. Basu must be happy that what Marx had predicted about the capitalist world in the 19th century is at least taking shape today. Marx had said that the inexorable laws of the capitalism would lead to the increasing concentration of the capital in a few hands, raising the spectre of the monopoly capital on the one hand and increasing im-miserisation of a vast majority on the other. That was the ideal setting for a communist revolution, he had said.

It is a different matter that the world history did not unfold according to the Marxist script. But what Marx had said then is largely coming true today, as can be corroborated even by the CMS study that Mr. Basu refers to. The Market today is witness to increasing takeovers and consolidation. If the current trend persists, there will be only a few mega players who will hold the centre-stage in the world market in the coming years.

This brings us to the last, but the most important, segment of the raging debate: the impact of Globalisation and Market on the Media.

In the rapidly changing technological interface that we are witnessing of late, even the definition of the Media is expanding everyday. We will keep it confined to what Marshal McLuhan, who first used the term to denote the institutions of mass communication, meant by it. Mr. Basu’s pejorative reference to the media is largely in this context.

The globalization of the media has an amazing effect – it makes information available everywhere and instantaneously. That 500 million people all over the world watched a second plane crashing into the second tower of the World Trade Centre live on television on 9\11, 2001 was a big testimony to the effects of globalization on the media.

The large corporatisation, which is the mainstay of the global market today, has its positive spin-offs for the media sector – economies of scale favour the consumer, in terms of price and quality of products. People get to read multi-section newspapers and watch multi-channel television at a very nominal price.

But the negative fall-out of the process is that media ‘products’ – like newspapers and news channels – are increasingly being subjected to market rules – the rules of supply and demand with the controlling stake of the advertiser over the media. Some of those who are in the media business would say that they find nothing wrong with it; after all, the saying goes that one who pays the piper calls the tune.

But then there is a fundamental difference between commercial products such as a detergent powder and toothpaste on the one hand and media products such as a newspaper and a news channel on the other. The former have a limited, peripheral role in our life; the latter leave a much deeper influence, as they affect our thought structure, our beliefs and our information base. So we cannot allow the market to take control of our lives.

Then who should control the media? Clearly, it should be the civil society. There are three kinds of mechanism in any given society – it works well if each is confined to its own boundaries. The government must keep a tab on the governing institutions. The private sector (the market) must engage in activities of trade and commerce. But the civil society must have the decisive say in the functioning of the social institutions, of which the media constitute the most crucial component.

Unfortunately, the media has become a commercial proposition, with profit maximization as the guiding spirit. That is why, the market (the private sector) in cahoots with the big guns of the governing institutions are having a controlling stake over it.

Those media players who have refused to play by the market rules, those who have refused to subscribe to the journalistic code devised by the big advertisers have fallen by the wayside. Their circulations and TRP ratings have dipped. So the buzz in the media circle today is – Good journalism does not make good business. If you want to survive, play by the market.

That is the soft option and most have gone for it. But there is a challenging option, which only the brave hearts could embrace – that we need to do good journalism (social journalism, not market journalism) in such an exciting way that it becomes popular and makes good business.

I think, we all need to take comfort from a film like Chak de India, which without the song, dance, romance and melodrama – the staple of formula Hindi cinema – went on to become a box-office hit.

It just needs courage of conviction and plenty of creativity to break the shackles of market-government nexus and bring the civil society to the centre-stage of our life.