Remember

Ever since 1991 we have come to expect a vision of the economy’s future in the Budget speech of the Finance Minister. This did not happen on July 6, 2009. The day before, the Economic Survey had raised the hopes of real reform. Those hopes were dashed. Pranab Mukherjee spoke like an accountant, not a statesman, and the stock market fell by almost a thousand points. The new government lost an opportunity to spell out its program and win over domestic and foreign investors. Ultimately, the nation needs private investment to pull us out of this economic downturn. Because of the failure to articulate the long term, investors worry that the big spending stimulus of this government is here to stay and it will crowd out private investment. A large deficit is understandable in these recessionary times, but we needed a commitment to return to fiscal responsibility once normal times return. Deficit spending on this scale risks a re-rating of the country, which would mean a higher cost of money...

Our idyllic life in Lahore was short-lived. In the late afternoon of 20 August 1946, there were urgent steps outside. My mother was sitting at the dressing table. She held a bottle of coconut oil in her hand and she was combing her hair. I was watching her in the mirror when my father burst in and announced that Lord Louis Mountbatten had been appointed Viceroy and he had declared that the British would finally leave India. My mother dropped the bottle. ‘Look what you did!’ she exclaimed accusingly. Eight months later, Mountbatten announced that Punjab would have to be partitioned to make room for the Muslim state of Pakistan. Our happiness over our country’s approaching independence turned to fear and uncertainty, and a pall of gloom settled over the Hindus of Lahore. We wondered if Lahore would go to India or to Pakistan. In those months before the boundary line was drawn, everyone was in a panic. We no longer felt safe. Large-scale violence broke out in early August 1947. While t...

The great event of the year was our annual visit to the orchards of my great aunts who lived in Gujranwala district. It took weeks of planning and co-ordinating and there was much excitement and bustle in our Lyallpur house before we left. The entire family went by train from Lyallpur to Gujranwala, and along the way, at different stops, other relatives would join our train, and by the time we arrived, we had become a great big clan party. At the railway station at Gujranwala, we piled onto sad-looking tongas, and amidst much merry making, we headed for the prosperous orchards of our country cousins. Their prosperity as landlords was recent. It had come with the canal. With water available in plenty, they began to grow fruit that was transported by agents to far away places like Lahore. There was a sharp divide in attitudes between our cousins and us. We were from the town and we considered ourselves superior even though they were wealthier. They owned lands but we were better educat...

As our carriage went along the geometrically laid out roads and past the curving gravel driveways of the lesser officials of the Raj, my grandmother observed that the smells in this part of the town were different from ours. I once asked her why we could not live like this, in a stately house with green lawns amidst these splendid avenues shaded by trees. She replied that she would feel lonely here. She liked the bustle of the town, and she had got used to the high walls of her courtyard. My grandmother felt sure that she would feel naked in these ‘inside-out’ houses where the verandas and gardens faced the outside. It was not natural to live like this, she added It was unnatural in another respect as well, and I understood this many years later. Civil Lines certainly had an unmistakeably different atmosphere from the chaotic part of the town where we lived, but it was not English either. Years later I visited England when I was grown up. I searched for our Civil Lines there but I di...

It was around four ‘o clock in the afternoon that my grandfather used to come home from the courts. We would eagerly await his arrival since he always brought home fresh sweets from the Bengali hunchback’s shop. As he approached the wooden gate of the house he would clear his throat, and this was a signal of sorts. His daughter- in- law would quickly cover her head; my grandmother would go to the kitchen and put water on for tea; we, his grandchildren, knew that it was the last round of dice in our afternoon game of Pachisi before the scores were tallied. This family routine persisted right through the 1940s. My grandfather had other uses for his harsh, grating cry . When he cleared his throat in his office, his client knew that the interview was over, not unlike the government officer who signals the end of a meeting by noisily pushing back his chair. Occasionally, my grandfather would strike terror in the witness’s heart with the same piercing sound in the middle of an interrogatio...

Once upon a time there was an ambitious young man named Mukesh Ambani who invested Rs 38,000 crores to look for gas, deep on the ocean’s floor off the turbulent coast of Andhra Pradesh. Some called him mad. If ONGC, the government exploration company, did not find anything after wasting thousands of crores of taxpayer’s money for decades, how could he risk his and his shareholder’s money in this reckless manner? What if nothing was found? They did not know that Mukesh is one of life’s winners. Not only did he find the gas but the amount was beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. It was the biggest energy discovery in the world at the time. More impressive still, he has brought it into comercial production in half the normal time, thus creating another world record. No wonder he is a hero to millions. His breakthrough will reduce significantly the nation’s energy bill for importing oil and it reinforces our faith in private exploration. And there is still much more gas under the ocean floor,...

In January this year, President Sarkozy of France, former Prime Minister Tony Blair of England, and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, kicked off a debate in Paris on the nature and the future of capitalism. It was in response to the global economic crisis. This article--my inaugural column for the Times on Saturday--is a contribution to this debate. The idea that an ancient Indian epic might offer insight into capitalism’s nature, on the face of it, appears bizarre. The truth is that the Mahabharata’s world of moral haziness is far closer to our experience as ordinary human beings than the narrow and rigid positions that define debate in these fundamentalist times. Capitalism is also about ordinary persons--buying and selling goods in the market place. The Mahabharata believes that human beings are flawed and these flaws make our world ‘uneven’, vishama--making us vulnerable to nasty surprises. Duryodhana is one of the chief causes of ‘uneveness’ in the epic. Others too have th...

With the rise in religious fundamentalism around the world, it is increasingly difficult to talk about one’s deepest beliefs, says Gurcharan Das I was born a Hindu, in a normal middle-class home. I went to an English-medium school where I got a modern education. Both my grandfathers belonged to the Arya Samaj, a reformist sect of Hinduism. My father, however, took a different path. While studying to be an engineer, he was drawn to a kindly guru who inspired him with the possibility of direct union with God through meditation. The guru was a Radhasoami saint, who quoted vigorously from Kabir, Nanak, Mirabai, Bulleh Shah and others from the bhakti and sufi traditions. Growing up Hindu was a chaotically tolerant experience. My grandmother visited the Sikh gurudwara on Mondays and Wednesdays and a Hindu temple on Tuesdays and Thursdays; she saved Saturdays and Sundays for discourses by holy men, including Muslim pirs, who were forever visiting our town. In between, she made time for Ar...

Anyone travelling in India by air must have got a sinking feeling last week when the Congress leader, Sanjay Nirupam, demanded that Jet Airways be nationalized. He raised the spectre of the ugly days when Indian Airlines had a monopoly of the skies before 1991. This would have effectively turned Jet Airlines from one of the world’s best airlines to one of the worst. Naresh Goyal, Jet’s founder, on the other hand, was scared of his pilots forming a union because of his memory of the 1974 Air India pilots’ strike which started the decline and fall of Air India. The trouble in Jet Airways began when some of its pilots wanted to form a union. The management said 'no', and sacked two of the leaders. In response, the other pilots went on ‘mass sick leave’, which left tens of thousands of passengers stranded, wondering who to blame for their undeserved suffering. This comes at a time when the aviation industry is going through very tough times and Jet Airways has reported a loss of ...

The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan are meeting today in New York to carry forward the peace dialogue begun at Sharm-el-Sheikh. India’s decision to meet has been prompted by Pakistan’s arrest of Hafiz Saeed, the mastermind of the Mumbai terror attacks. Many Indians feel cynical, however, about today’s meeting, especially after the disappointment at Sharm-el-Sheikh. Negotiating with a nation whose secret service might be plotting the next terrorist attack on you seems bizarre, but is there an alternative to the slow, maddening grind towards peace with our neighbour? All of us dream of waking up one day to discover that the border between India and Pakistan had become as peaceful as the one between Canada and United States. It seems hopelessly romantic, but this is precisely what happened to France and Germany who were in perpetual conflict for 75 years. Now one cannot imagine these two European enemies ever going to war. If India and Pakistan could pull this off, we might even...

Corporate Affairs minister, Salman Khurshid, created quite a stir recently when he warned companies to refrain from paying “vulgar salaries” or face the music. Mukesh Ambani took his advice and cut his salary by 65%. Flaunting wealth is distasteful; it is also imprudent when market capitalism is still trying to find a comfortable home in India. However, the minister was profoundly wrong. The trouble with judging other people’s lifestyle is that soon you are tempted to control other things, and this is a short step to the command economy. Not to live ostentatiously is a call of dharma, not a legal duty. The distinguished minister, who is a sensible lawyer, quickly realized his error and pulled back the next day. “Only the company’s shareholders can decide salaries…It cannot be mandated, but should be self-exercised,” he said. Yes, this is the right position—only shareholders have the right to fix salaries in a democracy, not the government. The significance of the minister’s two posit...

Arundhati Roy writes seductively. Recently I picked up her new book, Listening to Grasshoppers, and I was mesmerized by her luminous prose but I disagreed profoundly with her conclusions. I was revolted, in particular, by her support for violence. She regards Naxalism as armed resistance against a sham democracy. I call it terrorism. Roy thinks that India pretends to be a democracy in order to impress the world. I think our democracy is as real as my grandson’s thumb. Yes, it has many flaws but it is legitimate. We need to reform the police; speed up justice; make babus accountable; stop criminals from entering politics; etc.. Yet, this democracy has done a colossal amount of good. It has raised the prospects and self esteem of the lowest in our society and protected us from the great genocides of the 20th century. Gujarat, to its disgrace, may have killed 2000 people but Mao’s China killed more than 50 million, according to the Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm. One may be justified ...

If only we would pause and look beyond the horizon of day to day events, we would see a trend of great significance. More people on the earth have risen out of poverty in the past 25 years than at any other time in human history, and this has happened primarily because of sustained high economic growth in  India  and  China . Unlike  China  which has embraced growth enthusiastically,  India has a vast industry of ‘poverty-wallas’, who incessantly raise doubts if our growth is pro-poor. These ‘growth skeptics’ tend to make our reformers defensive, which slows reforms and the nation loses the potential for even higher growth. Earlier they argued that post-reform growth was ‘jobless’ until recent data has proved them wrong. Nowadays, they usually say, ‘growth but…’ While the type of growth does matter, the truth is that growth in itself is virtuous, and we should celebrate that  India  is experiencing this miracle. Now, two experts on poverty have c...

The conviction this week of Ajeet Singh Katiyar in Delhi in the notorious Dhaula Kuan gang rape case of a university student from Mizoram is good news. More important than the conviction is the 71 page judgement of the court which admonished the defence for maligning the victim and maintained that the private life of the victim is irrelevant. ‘A lady who has lost her virginity is not unreliable’ said the judge, whose verdict was primarily based on the victim’s consistent testimony. We seem to have come a long way from the 1979 case of 16 year old Mathura, who was raped by two policemen within a police compound when the court acquitted the policemen on the grounds that Mathura had eloped with her boyfriend and ‘was habituated to sexual intercourse’. This case ultimately went to the Supreme Court, which sadly upheld the verdict. It became a landmark case, which went on to energise the women’s movement in India. There were echoes in this week’s judgement of another historic case--that...

At a smart luncheon party in South Delhi this week something very peculiar happened. Someone blurted out, ‘These high and mighty guests are friends of Madhu Koda!’ This did not go well with our celebrity hostess, to whose discomfort the conversation soon went downhill as people sought the latest ‘juice’ on the Koda scandal. To my surprise, a consensus seemed to emerge that liberalization was at the root cause of corruption. The link between corruption and economic reforms was also echoed in a cover story in one of our national magazines this week. In an opinion poll conducted by MDRA and the magazine, 83.4% of the people in eight major Indian cities believed that corruption had gone up after the liberalization process. It confirmed to me that people, who are otherwise sensible, still do not get it. They do not understand that corruption persists in India because reforms are incomplete and scams occur in sectors like mining which have not been reformed. Madhu Koda’s is a rags to ric...

James Tooley, The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves, Penguin; 302 pages; Rs 499 I first met James Tooley on a cold morning in Delhi. I was drawn to him by his sincerity, his passion, and most of all by his infectious smile, which made everyone in the room smile back at him. As I watched him I thought of Tagore’s observation in the Stray Birds about how much the world loves a man when he smiles. Tooley’s remarkable book, The Beautiful Tree, is a tale of heroism. In it, he discovers that in the slums of India, in remote mountain villages of China, and in shantytowns in Africa, the world’s poorest people are creating their own schools to give their children a better future. In an extraordinary journey which began in the slums of Hyderabad, Professor Tooley finds out how committed entrepreneurs and engaged teachers in poor communities have started private schools with very low fees (Rs 70-170 per month) in two rooms or entire...