Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy by Mihir S. Sharma

Author:Mihir S. Sharma [Sharma, Mihir S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9788184006797
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2015-01-15T08:00:00+00:00

ALL THE LITTLE LEE KUAN YEWS

China and India—like several other Asian countries—are indeed consumed with anger about corruption. But not everything that we believe is corruption is indeed corruption.

Even so, the judgements of the past years have been clear and unyielding: that the Indian economy and its government operate without any morality, and need correction and control. People Like Us need to swoop in and save it.

This has led to the frankly terrifying increase in power in India of the strange many-headed beast that calls itself Civil Society. We may not know all its heads, all the NGOs and activists and so on that think they are the only check on the power of a constitutionally elected government. Yes, we can never know all the heads of this Hydra, for two more sprout whenever you look, but we can be reasonably certain all the heads speak English nicely.

That bit is important. It helps to understand that the Hydra is trusted where politicians aren’t because the Hydra can explain things in nice, uncomplicated English.

Indeed, even bureaucrats and policemen are trusted more than politicians at this odd stage in our history, mainly because the police and the civil services are full of nice English-speaking men. Ah, we murmur to ourselves, if only these nice smart unelected men weren’t forced to answer to those dreadful vote-bank-seeking vernacular-speaking elected men, they would fix things before you could say ‘class bias’. Thus we rejoice every time an elected government is put on the backfoot by an unelected bureaucrat, some recently anonymous exam-passing form-filling procedure-fetishizing time-server. We rejoice—for We, the People, were granted a victory against those elected by, well, Other People.

Thus the saviour of our democracy—well, of the worthy salaried middle class of our democracy—is that democratic hero famed in song and story: the unelected state functionary. The bureaucrat, or the judge, or the copper, or the army chief—anyone, really, as long as you wouldn’t mind your daughter marrying his son.

We believe that these bureaucrats will save us, if they are just given the power to do so. Perhaps they need to be ‘empowered’, as Narendra Modi told his seniormost secretaries; perhaps they need to be made ‘independent’, as the Supreme Court tells the Central Bureau of Investigation.

But wait—this is confusing. For the ‘independent’ CBI seems a whole lot like an ‘unaccountable’ CBI. Perhaps we should stop worrying about that, though. No way could the CBI be home to some corrupt megalomaniac. Not like J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI; Old J. Edgar would never have passed the UPSC exam. Or the interview—for in that, estimable moral character is unerringly sussed out, and it is ensured that only good, honest, humble boys get through.

Worst of all, perhaps, an ‘independent’ CBI isn’t exactly working to ‘empower’ other bureaucrats. In fact, free of any restraints, the CBI is happily accusing retired bureaucrats of being corrupt, and producing as ‘evidence’ a bunch of perfectly straightforward and defensible decisions they’ve taken. And, unsurprisingly, those bureaucrats’ currently serving successors are scared sign-less.

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