Thanks 2010

Then the irresistible, enterprising Indian femme fatale, who irresponsibly exposed a few holy cows, besides doing the craft of lobbying considerable harm.

And since 1991 did not merely mark the beginning of India’s modern growth story, but also the final burial of old-style socialism, you can be forgiven for hoping that Sonia’s restoration of Narasimha Rao in the Congress pantheon might mark the first stirrings of a welcome rethink.

In 1985, some six years before the introduction of far-reaching economic reforms, looking out from the highest rooftop in Hong Kong, the area surveyed exported more than three times as much than all of India’s $12 billion. We excused our miserable performance by alleging that Hong Kong was a city state; China in the same year exported $30 billion, but it was a communist state, and so on. Twenty-five years later, the Jalan report makes the same wrong assertion that India is unique. the Jalan report is left with no legs, no arms, and most importantly, no soul.

Eventually, I decided to hear some of the tapes. I found bits of fairly serious stuff interspersed in mountains of trivia, gross unprofessionalism and a tragedy. First the trivia. A columnist writing a piece exactly the way that one of Radia’s client’s would have liked, and giving her a précis before it was put to bed. An über-rich spouse being irked by a write-up on her, and having someone ask Radia to fix it. The connected husband of an adopted daughter and Radia sharing well-known juice about the near-death bankruptcy of a major Delhi-based property developer-qua-nascent mobile player, whose bounced cheques were manifest missiles of the past. Some wickedly perspicacious comments by a retired IAS honcho, now a Rajya Sabha member, involving Shivji ki baraat (various creatures in the Union cabinet); the apparent demotion of the erstwhile commerce minister from glories of the WTO to fixing the nation’s potholes; and the unexpected rise of Anand Sharma and Jairam Ramesh in the post-2009 election dispensation. And conversations with Ratan Tata — including one where Radia spews nineteen to the dozen, while Tata says, “Yeah”, “Uh, huh” and “Um, hmm” 33 times.

Actually, all this is only done for the poor in India. For example, when telecom operators got the 2G spectrum at throwaway prices from the government and then traded them away to foreign partners at ten times the price, the non-poor 2G experts never asked for such foreign sales to be banned. It is true that the government acted like the irrational onion farmer who forgot to ask for a higher price but then our government is not poor. After all, how many poor can suffer the losses made during the Commonwealth Games! And, unlike onions, the poor do not buy 2G spectrum and so none of our millennium development goals is affected by 2G traders buying cheap from the government and selling high to users of such spectrum.

And finally read who read which books in 2010 among.

Natwar Singh’s My Books of the Year

At present I am reading the much awaited (at least to me) book of this year- Makers of Modern India by Guha.

I fully share the same feeling that Natwar has on the “The exclusion of Vallabhai Patel ” in the book.

Natwar writes:

• Makers of Modern India by Ramachandra Guha provides the excitement of history. His selection of the “Makers” will not be universally accepted but neither can it be lightly dismissed. The exclusion of Vallabhai Patel is bewildering, as is the inclusion of Hamid Dalawi. He gives his reasons for doing so, but these are not entirely convincing. In his prologue, he states what India means to him — “the most interesting country in the world”. 

K Natwar Singh’s Tailpiece

He writes in BS:

• "A word about Article 370 of our Constitution. The BJP, when out of office, invokes this Article in connection with Jammu and Kashmir. It does not do so while in government. How did Article 370 find a place in the Constitution? On page 55 of Volume 3 of Letters to Chief Ministers, Pandit Nehru wrote, “This matter came up before us when the Constitution of India was being finalised about November 1949. Sardar Patel dealt with it then and he gave a special, though transitional, place to the Jammu and Kashmir state in our Constitution.”

• The transitional bit was jettisoned soon thereafter. Now, it is unlikely to be dropped or even modified. Life was much less complicated in 1949."

In nature there exists no democracy, nor equality

Mr.Natwar Singh’s mourning thoughts:

• Even today, 36 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women cannot read or write. Yet, almost all of them know their Ramayan and Mahabharat well. A couplet from Tulsidas clinches an argument.

• A striking linguistic feature of our national language Hindi is its undemocratic underpinning. Hindi-speakers address one set of people as aap, another group is demoted to tum, and finally there is the ubiquitous tu. No reform will change this linguistic Hindi uniqueness.

• In nature there exists no democracy, nor equality. Who have suffered the most in the floods in China and Pakistan? The poor. Who have been at the fiery end in Russia? The poor. Against nature’s arbitrariness and fury, we human beings have no armour or shelter. Nature holds all the aces. What about Surya Dev (the Sun)? Surely He or It shines over every one. Yes, but its divine rays produce a Sahara, a Greenland and the ever-dark forests of the Amazon. The conclusion is inescapable, nature triumphs. This is not fatalism. This is reality. We are at the mercy of nature.

Bits and piece of the I Day

Neither India nor the world is an orderly place

What cannot be cured must be endured

K Natwar Singh says:

Indian democracy is now on auto-pilot. There is no danger of a democratic crash. Flawed, our democracy may be, survive it will. Its critics are mostly armchair-wallahs. Where one meets all the people one has been trying to avoid.

All must wear bikinis

K Natwar Singh Love on the IPL saga:

"In a lighter vein, I have been mulling over a tantalising possibility. What a superb Bollywood film the IPL-Modi saga would make.

Producer and director: Lalit Modi; script writer: Shashi Tharoor; dialogue by Sardar “Sherry” Siddhu; lady stars: Madams Zinta, Shetty and S Pushkar; advisers: Sunil Gavaskar, Rudy Kirsten, Shane Warne and K Pollard; music by A Raheman; photography by Anil Kumble; umpires: former prime ministers of the UK and Australia, Messrs John Major and John Howard, both cricket buffs; commentators: three heavyweight India politicians. Authentic hero Shah Rukh Khan to play the role of Lalit Modi. Finally, the female cheerleaders. These are to be selected by the producer-director. All must wear bikinis. The IPL I, II and III girls were over-dressed!!"

Needs a moral upheaval

A piece of mind from K Natwar Singh:

“The fact is that progress is not inherent in history. Progress is not a law of nature (I am excluding scientific progress).

The 19th century was passionately devoted to the gospel of progress. The 20th century mocked the 19th century. Two world wars, the invention and use of nuclear weapons are not signs of progress. The 20th century began on a high note — growth in human consciousness and the scientific revolution lit the horizon. But, “Darkness at Noon” soon put an end to that hope. The 21st century has so far had a very bumpy ride. 9/11 is now a melancholy part of the English language. Next, George W. Bush, whom the “people of India deeply loved”, invaded and destroyed Iraq.

“The record of the human species up to this time suggests a grave deficiency in social intelligence… The problem is, therefore, primarily genetic and only secondarily institutional.”

“On the economic plane, traditional confusion between the standard of living and the quality of life needs to be dispelled. People are not necessarily happier because their per capita income is higher. The gross national product is not an index of gross national contentedness.”