From Business World of 1 September 2004.
Choose your battleground
Choose your battleground
It took the Prime Minister a hundred days to address
industrialists; he did so at ASSOCHAM’s JRD centenary memorial meeting last
week. A legendary reformer like him would have been forgiven the delay, but for
the fact that the Common Minimum Programme that drives his tenure had some
pretty scary threats to industry, such as reservations in the private sector.
He was himself a bit embarrassed by his tardiness, and excused himself by
saying that the daily turmoil in Parliament prevented him from meeting people.
It was a telling admission, especially since he has mentioned the mayhem in
Parliament often before. It shows that he expects others, such as politicians,
to behave decently. A fat hope, as he should have known by now. When he first
became finance minister and showed anguish at the opposition’s attacks, Atal
Bihari Vajpayee, then leader of the opposition, had advised him to developed a
thicker skin. He still has to take that advice.
There were other ways in which
the Prime Minister’s speech could have been improved. Being his first major
address to industrialists, it should have been delivered at 9:30 PM, not 9:30
AM. That would have given him a hundred times larger television audience.
ASSOCHAM would have gladly accommodated him; he is Prime Minister now. The
speech showed his scholarship. That JRD stood for Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy
must have been news to quite a few in his audience; the reference to the 1944
Bombay Plan and the quotation from Professor R K Hazari’s book from the 1960s
was a testimony to his early readings and his phenomenal memory. But his tribute to JRD need not have been
mediated through a book on concentration, ownership and control; and it need
not have been shared with nods to other industrialists of JRD’s time.
Occasions like the ASSOCHAM
meeting should be used to give a powerful message. If there was one in the
Prime Minister’s speech, it was that he is going to take infrastructure
seriously – chair a committee on it himself. A laudable objective – and one he,
incidentally, inherited from his predecessor. But the difference in approach
was palpable. Vajpayee did not let himself be bothered by nitty gritty. Coming
out of a poetic cloud one afternoon, he just said, “Let there be roads from
Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Porbandar to wherebunder.” He called Major
General Khanduri, and told him to start on the roads forthwith. He called
Yashwant Sinha and asked him to find the money somehow. And they both did; by
the time of the general elections, four years later, national highways were
festooned with portraits of Vajpayee.
Mamnohan Singh would have been
shocked by the very idea of such nonchalance. Such extravagance would have
repelled him. And as for the sycophancy – he would rather it was all showered
on Sonia Gandhi. So what he chose to announce to the industrialists was that
they would soon get better regulators for infrastructure industries, after a
design to be perfected in the Planning Commission. An excellent idea; as
TDSAT’s latest verdict (denying TRAI the power to regulate telephone
interconnexion) shows, some of our regulators are models of imperfection.
Still, the industrialists must have been left a bit befuddled; can this really
be the Prime Minister’s diagnosis of what is wrong with India’s infrastructure?
If the promise to design better
regulation was too profound for the ever practical industrialists, the promise
to undo the inspector raj was too shallow. All know that most of the 30-odd
inspectors the Prime Minister refers to are employees of the state governments;
and who would believe that a Prime Minister who cannot even prevent Amarinder
Singh from playing mischief with water and YSR Reddy with power can stop visits
of inspectors? And then, how are laws going to be enforced if the government
cannot find out that they are being followed? Inspection is a vital part of
government. What industrialists wish – hope forlornly for – is that inspectors
would not be corrupt. And on how to wean them of sweet lollypops – the Prime
Minister will seek the advice of industrialists – those whom he soon plans to
appoint to his Industrial Advisory Council. Shuffle, shuffle, file disposed.
Everyone knows that the Prime
Minister is a man of good education, high intelligence and utmost integrity.
That is why he faces such high expectations. He is human; he cannot fulfil them
all. But he is Prime Minister; he can choose where he wants to make a
difference. And he can ignore the rest – leave Mani Shankar Aiyar to irk the
opposition in Parliament, go back to the PMO and work on the few things he
cares for. And he can drive the nation towards his goals. That is what he
should have done with the industrialists.