SIZE DOES MATTER !

   I don't get invited to many dinners these days, primarily because 80% of the chaps I know are convinced that Mr. Modi is the best thing that has happened to mankind since the discovery of penicillin. They are what somebody has termed "educated clapper boys" of the Supreme Inaugurator. I stopped clapping shortly after committing the original sin of voting for Him in 2014, and have ever since regretted not having read that wonderful short story THE MONKEY'S PAW by W.W. Jacobs before casting my vote. Do read it, folks, for it is a warning against wishing for something without being aware of its consequences. I'm paying for this gap in my education nowadays by dining alone with my Indie pooch while the good wife too, like Mr. Parakala Prabhakar's wife, is also away at some mandali singing paeans to He Who Cannot Be Named.

  On the rare occasion that I do manage to sidle past someone's front door the first thing I look out for is my host's TV, and then his bookcase, and compare their sizes. Let me explain. My Dad, who was a man of few words and neither accepted, nor proffered, any advice, once made an exception to this general rule and gave me this sage counsel: Never argue with a person whose TV is bigger than his bookshelf. He went on to then floor me by giving me a second piece of advice! A country's progress (he said) is not determined by by the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of its general population but by the TFR of its idiots (TFRI)-its progress is in inverse proportion to its TFRI.

  Papa passed away in 2017, without seeing his words being vindicated every single day in New India. The televisionjeevi have taken over the country and no longer even bother with a bookcase in their sitting room, having replaced it with a replica of the new Ram mandir or a model of a bulldozer. The TFRI has exploded, its spermatozoa occupying high positions in government, universities, media, defence forces, bureaucracy, the world of celluloid and the arts, even the RWAs and Whatsapp groups.

  Just pause and consider what we are up against. Even as Manipur is burning, soldiers dying in Kashmir and Olympians being denied justice at Janta Mantar for the last month, our Prime Minister is forum shopping for accolades in the south Pacific, to the accompaniment of quawali type clapping by anchors on prime time TV. On the evening of 21st May NDTV devoted one entire segment to a discussion on the Papua New Guinea Prime Minister touching our PM's feet ! They even had a panel of political analysts and diplomats to convince the viewer that this was the final endorsement of our Vishwaguru status. Never mind that PNG's population is less than that of Kolkata or that even Sambit Patra doesn't know where it is located. A joke by President Biden (asking for Mr. Modi's autograph) was converted into a major policy initiative by the USA, even as the European Union is contemplating action against India for undermining sanctions against Russia, and we have been accused for the fourth year in a row of suppressing religious freedom by the same USA. Anchors in the throes of sacerdotal passion swoon when informing us that the Australian P.M says that Mr. Modi is "the Boss", but fail to mention that the BBC's The Modi Question is being screened in the Australian Parliament the very next day. How does one even begin to argue with such people?

  We are by now accustomed to our Ministers spouting nonsense like Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park spouts steam, but even by these Mariana Trench standards the Tripura Chief Minister has hit a new low when last week he claimed that Hindus had invented the Internet 9000 years ago and that it was then known as Indra Neta. He, of course, did not bother to explain who supplied the electricity to power the Indra Neta; presumably that information shall be supplied by Mr. Piush Goyal, our Commerce Minister and an acknowledged authority on gravity, the theory of relativity and the trade deficit. Not to be outdone in the loyalty sweepstakes, the Chairman of ISRO has just announced that scientific concepts relating to time, metallurgy, the structure of the universe, aviation etc. were first found in the Vedas. They found their way to the west much later, via the Arabs. So why doesn't he publish them and assure a Nobel Prize for himself, instead of the Padma Shri which is now in the bag?

  But let's not be too harsh on our Ministers, they are just a sign of the times we live in. Our bureaucracy is no less inventive. No doubt inspired by our aspirational Net Zero goal, Madhya Pradesh has decided that it would achieve this all by itself: the govt. has banned the use of "tandoors" in all major cities because they generate a lot of CO2. Now we know why it's going to take us 50 years to reach the Net Zero target. This astounding decision is almost in the same league as the RBI Governor explaining that the Rs.2000 note is being demonetized because it has completed its life cycle. Surely that is even more true of all other denomination notes, which have been around for much longer- is he going to withdraw them too and take us back to the age of barter? (There is a strong rumour that in future all notes shall come with an expiry date embossed on them, so that the RBI does not have to do a press conference every seven years). And does Mr. Das realise that he is revealing his non-economics background when he says that the notes have to be returned by 30th September 2023, while at the same time  maintaining that they will continue to be legal tender after that date? Come on, sir, make up your mind; as the hooker told the guy: "You can't have it both ways, dearie."

  The TFRI among the RWA and Whatsapp groups, however, is the real cause of concern for me. Their members (or most of them) reside in a cuckoo land where God handed out bile instead of brains. After years of committing all manner of sins they have suddenly discovered God and find that HE can only be a Hindu. After growing up on Mughlai food, listening to gazals and quawallis, conversing in a language that has as many Urdu words as Hindustani, swooning over Dilip Kumar, Madhubala and Waheeda Rehman, saying "Wah!Wah!" to the poems of Ghalib and Gulzar, they have now concluded that these are evil influences, they threaten our Hindu sanskars and girls, and the whole lot must be banished from this cuckoo land.

  The Supreme Leader is the new God and he can do no wrong, he is pure as the driven snow notwithstanding Adani, Rafale, the windfall private profits of cheap Russian oil; the Gandhis, Nehru and Mamata Banerjee are responsible for all the ills of this country, in that order; the Congress won in Karnataka only because of appeasement of Muslims; the women wrestlers at Jantar Mantar are being funded by the Opposition; Uttar Pradesh is a model of law and order even though according to the NCRB data for 2022 it has the highest crime rate per capita (7.4) of all Indian states; we have taught China a lesson, even though it is sitting on thousands of sq.kms of our land in Ladakh; Kashmir is a land of peace and prosperity even though it is one of the most militarised regions in the world; India is a world champion in the fight against climate change even though we are the 8th most polluted country in the world and 39 out of the 50 most polluted cities are in India (Quality of Air Report 2022), and we have just cleared a proposal to fell 800,000 trees over 160 sq. kms of virgin rain forest in the Andamans so that the usual suspect cronies can make a few more billions.

  This list of delusions goes on and on but our big TV types believe this is the gospel truth. Their minds are as open to reasoning as a govt. office on a weekend, and any persistence on my part always carries the risk of collateral violence. So I don't argue any more, I quickly size up the comparative sizes of the TV and the bookcase and beat a hasty retreat to the safety of my flat and the pooch who has more intelligence than all the members of my RWA put together. I've pinned my hopes now on the algorithms of AI and Deep Learning. I learn on good authority that soon we shall have a TV which will automatically change channels or switch off the moment the likes of Arnab Goswami, Rahul Shivshankar, Navika Kumar or Sambit Patra appear on the screen. So cheer up, folks,  artificial intelligence may yet save us from natural stupidity and usher in the real Acche Din. 

THE REVERSE CONTINENTAL DRIFT.

   Now that the Karnataka elections are done and dusted (at least until Mr. Amit Shah launches the 2023 version of Operation Kamala), the media and social media are going bananas debating the impact of Bharat Jodo Yatra on it, the contributions of EVMs and ATMs to the final vote tally, whether Kumaraswamy will now shift permanently to Singapore, and if resort owners should be given a one time tax waiver to compensate for the loss of income as no horse trading was needed to form the government. But there are a couple of other issues of import that bother me.

  About 50 million years ago, the Indian plate, drifting across the Tethys sea from south of Australia, crashed into the Eurasian plate to create the present day Indian sub-continent. Mr. Modi and his merry band, as ignorant of geology as they are of history, may have triggered a second continental drift-but this in time in reverse, with the peninsular part of the sub-continent (comprising the five southern states) drifting away from the mainland.

Karnataka has decisively shut the southern gate for the BJP. Whatever slim chances it had of making in-roads into Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in 2024 have disappeared like the triumphant smile on Mr. Modi's visage. Consequently, we now effectively have two Indias, with little in common, and certainly no trust, between them. One can almost call it a second partition- of the mind, that is- and this may yet turn out to be the BJP's lasting legacy for the country.

  The gap between the southern states and the rest of India has been growing over the years (since before 2014) and is now taking the shape of an unbridgeable chasm. In all indicators which determine the health of a nation or society- economic, demographic, developmental, governance- the southern states are beginning to look like they are on a different continent from the rest of India. Take that most basic of indicators, Per Capita Income, of the five southern states and compare it with the five "Hindu heartland" states of the north. The table below gives the position for 2020-21, at current prices:

STATE                 PER CAPITA INCOME (in Rs.)   RANK

Karnataka            236451                                             5

Telengaga            231103                                             7

Tamil Nadu         212174                                             9

Kerala                 205067                                             11

Andhra P            192360                                             16

Rajasthan           115933                                              25

Madhya P           104894                                             28

Jharkhand           71071                                               31

U.P.                    61666                                                32

Bihar                  43605                                               33

India Av.             74567

(It can be noticed that all the southern states are far above the national average, whereas 3 of the northern states are well below it).

   The same pattern repeats itself for other indicators like literacy rates, Total Fertility Rates, infant mortality, poverty ratios, unemployment etc. I could give the comparative figures but it would take up too much space: those interested could google them on government web sites. But here is another significant statistic: 30% of the national GDP is contributed by the southern states, even though they constitute only 18.2% of the country's population. And yet, when it comes to central FC (Finance Commission) devolutions, they receive far less than the Hindi heartland states, thanks to TORs (Terms of Reference) that reward inefficient tax collections, bad governance, poverty ratios and population increase. As per the 15th F.C. recommendations the Union Budget 2023-24 provides Rs. 1,83,237 crores to U.P., more than the amount provided to all the five southern states put together ( Rs.1,61,386 crores). The five northern states mentioned in the table above have cumulatively received Rs.4,66,488 crores, almost three times their southern counterparts.

  The south sees this as discrimination which, to be fair, has been happening since before 2014 but has been made worse now by changing the TORs of the F.C. But what has further exacerbated this simmering discontent is the politics of the BJP since coming to power. It continues to push Hindi down southern throats by fiddling with educational syllabi, renaming campaigns where only Hindi is the preferred choice (the latest being the proposed amendment to change the Forest Conservation Act to Van Sanrakshan evam Samvardhan Adhiniyam), the systematic confrontation of Governors with elected governments, the latest instance being the Tamil Nadu Governor's suggestion that the name of the state should be changed! There is little consideration for feelings, emotions, sensitivities or even history south of the Vindhyas.

  But what may now be bringing the kettle to a boil is the BJP's attempt to impose its anti-Muslim, hyper nationalistic, Hindutva ideology on the southern states. It fails to realise, with its ignorance of history, that the South wants no part of this bigotry and religious hatred of minorities. For one, its Hinduism is as deep rooted as that of its northern cousins with an equally long, if not longer, history and traditions. Two, the Hinduism of the south does not suffer from the paranoia and insecurity of the north because the Mughals came to the south very late in their reign, when the fervour for demolishing temples had waned considerably and had been replaced by a more mature politics of trade and cooperation. Three, the south was far removed, geographically, from the horrors of Partition, and therefore its two major communities have no reason to fear or hate each other. Four, it has lived in harmony with the other sizeable minority, the Christians, for centuries, ever since Saint Francis Xavier landed on the shores of Goa in May,1542.

  Notwithstanding the above, the BJP has been trying for years to stir the religious cauldron in the south, and had made Karnataka its southern laboratory in the run-up to these elections. With the help of a hijacked government it tried everything- hijab, halal, Tipu Sultan, removal of quota for Muslims, Bajrangbali- but failed miserably. In the process, however, it has widened the north-south divide and made the latter even more suspicious of not only the BJP but all political parties north of the Vindhyas.

  A perception and feeling is growing in the southern states that the north is acting as a drag on their development and progress, cornering all national resources for their own benefit. Even worse, there is now also a fear, ever since the BJP assumed power in Delhi, that they are being politically marginalised. The apparition that haunts them is the impending delimitation of Parliamentary constituencies on the basis of revised population figures, which is due in 2026. So far the exercise has been kept in suspended animation since 1971. It is a contentious issue since the southern states are likely to lose out: they have done much better than the cow belt states in controlling population growth, and will therefore lose many seats once current population figures or projections are taken into account for allocating seats in Parliament.

  If the 2011 census is made the basis for the delimitation then four northern states ( U.P., Bihar, MP and Rajasthan) shall gain 22 seats while the four southern states (AP, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telengana) are set to lose 17 seats. (Their position gets progressively worse with each succeeding census). What this means for them is that delimitation will only push them further into the political margins, if population figures do not continue to remain frozen. Doing that, however, may require a constitutional amendment, and the south has every reason to suspect that the BJP would not be inclined to bring in such an amendment. Its main support base is the cow-belt states, it is irrelevant in the south, and it would be happy to gain seats in the northern states to consolidate its power. And it may already be working in that direction with its usual foresight and thoroughness: the new Parliament building is reported to have space for 884 members of the Lok Sabha, against the current strength of 543- something which the southern states have not missed noticing.

  To put it in pure geological terms, the peninsular plates are currently under a lot of tension and tectonic pressure. A victory for the BJP in 2024 could result in their beginning to shift, a continental drift we could do without and should all be worried about. This, perhaps, is one context in which we should be looking at the BJP's loss in Karnataka.

              

OF ABUSES AND ABUSERS

    These days my reading consists mainly of books with titles like TEN SECRETS OF LIVING TO BE A HUNDRED or SEVEN THINGS YOU MUST DO BEFORE YOU DIE. There was a time, however, when one read more exciting stuff, most of which have now faded into the mists of forgetfulness. But I do remember one book in which a lady tells her lover: "You don't make love TO a woman, you make love AT her." Pause, dear reader, and consider the import of these words, and the difference a single preposition can make to a sentiment. TO implies conversation, affection, concern, a sharing of experience. AT, on the other hand, denotes a one-way communication, a selfishness, a lack of concern for the other. But, you may well ask: why mention this now?

  Because I am reminded of this every time I hear our venerable Prime Minister speak, whether it is at a choreographed public rally or in the sanitised environs of a Man ki Baat, or in the incense-burning portals of a TV studio where he is treated like the presiding deity and the high priest, both. His exhortations are always about what HE thinks, what He feels, what HE wants, what HE considers is good for the nation, and so on. The public- that is, you and me and ours-never ever features in his sermons, for  we don't even exist for him, his total involvement is with the lights, cameras and tele-prompters ( when they work, that is).

  But some good can come of even this rodomontade: the Prime Minister's lament at a rally in Karnataka last week that he has been abused precisely 91 times by other parties has cleared up one big mystery for me, one that had been dogging my waking hours and haunting the sleeping ones. I now finally know the reason why the government has no data on Covid deaths, migrant deaths during the great exodus from cities, farmers' deaths during their agitation, how much area the Chinese are occupying in Ladakh, contributors to the electoral bonds and PM CARES, how many MSMEs had to shut down post demonetisation and GST, and other important matters. Until the Prime Minister spoke AT the conscripted crowds in Bangalore, I had thought that the govt. was simply trying to conceal this information. But now I know better.

  The real reason is that the entire PMO was occupied in collating data on the abuses hurled at the PM . And that's not an easy job, you know; one has to keep tabs on every abuse on print and digital media, social media and public rallies, the New York Times and Washington Post, by Kunal Kamra and Satya Pal Malik. Then one has to consult the Oxford dictionary, Shehjad Poonawalla and Sambit Patra (both acknowledged authorities in this genre of communication) to grade the gravity of the invective, trace the progenitor of the said abuse and dispatch the Income Tax or ED guys to disabuse him of the idea of thinking that he can make it a habit. And finally, the tele-prompter has to be fed the inputs correctly for the next Prime Ministerial rally- we cannot have the TP suggesting "bugger" when what was intended  was "burglar", can we? Though both can be termed as abuses.

  It's a big operation, this, and so there must be either a working group or a Joint Secretary in the PMO working exclusively on this important assignment. If the former, then my vast experience in govt. tells me that it would probably be called Abusers (Hard) Working Group. Such avantgarde units are not easy to name, as we discovered in Shimla in the 80's. At that time the monkeys (the real, Rhesus variety, not the ones affiliated to a certain organisation) had practically taken over the HP govt. secretariat: they had a free run of the place, disposed of more files than all the Secretaries put together, and had even started attending Cabinet meetings. This last bit was a speculation, of course, but based on the clear simian imprints on some of the Cabinet decisions taken at that time.

  Finally, when the monkeys attempted to unfurl the national flag on the Secretariat roof, it was decided to set up a committee of senior Secretaries to examine the matter and give recommendations to put an end to the menace. The committee was notified by the Section Officer (GAD), but it was some time before we noticed that it was called Committee of Monkeys, instead of Committee on Monkeys. The same preposition problem, you will notice. All the members resigned, of course, lest this honour make its way into their curriculum vitae and blight their future chances of promotion. The Section Officer was suspended, of course, for his Monkey Baat.

  But it's possible that the PMO doesn't have a committee devoted to abuses but a Joint Secretary to handle it. If so, he would probably be designated Joint Secretary (Abuses), and that brings to mind another designative double entendre concerning President Abraham Lincoln.

  One day a Kentucky farmer, accompanied by his wife and teenage son, called on Lincoln. On being admitted to the President's presence he pompously introduced himself thus: "Good morning, Mister President. I am Mister Bates, this here is my wife Missis Bates, and my son Master Bates."

" Now, does he?", asked Lincoln, "have you shown him to a doctor? It's not a good habit, you know".

See the complexities in finding suitable appellations and designations? For if the Joint Secretary (Abuses) I shudder to imagine what the Secretary does.

HAS THE CIVIL SERVICE CITADEL BEEN BREACHED ? .

    

   I was privy last week to an extended Whatsapp chat between a serving senior IAS officer (let's call him K) and a venerable retired colleague about the extra-legal execution of the gangster-politician Atiq Ahmed. K, who otherwise plays the victim card more often than the Prime Minister does, was vehement in his support of the lynching, maintaining that when the system fails people are justified in taking the law into their own hands. His unequivocal view is that since the IAS and IPS have failed, it is "only Yogi's gang and their guns" which can ensure security for the common man. These are the views of an officer whose job it is to uphold the law, who has sworn an oath to protect the Constitution. Today he is advocating cold blooded murder, and no amount of reasoning by the retired veteran would make him change his mind. In fact, he flaunted his opinion by putting it up on a Whatsapp group and then defending it abrasively.

   The second disconcerting example is provided by a recent article by another senior serving IAS officer, this time the Director of the premier Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, the alma mater of  All India Service officers. This gentleman (who predictably belongs to the Gujarat cadre of the IAS) offers the view that the IAS did not have a national ethos (whatever that means) till 2014, that governments before Modi were unable to rid the service of its "colonial mindset" or "craft a civil service rooted in the national ethos", that "this task of defining an Indian ethos for the civil service began in the 75th year of India's independence, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address where he spelt out the country's vision......"

   There is much more of this sacerdotal nonsense in the article, but essentially, once we extract the meaning from this oily sludge, what this Kangana Ranaut- Amitabh Kant clone is saying is that the IAS continued to be a colonial service till 2022, its members having no connect with the people, that it was only after  Modi's arrival that it acquired relevance and a patriotic ethos. One would have dismissed this garbage as just some more of the persiflage we read everyday nowadays, except for the fact that this acolyte heads the institute which trains all our senior civil servants, drafts the syllabus for their training, imparts to them the first impressions of what their service will be like, defines the parameters of their future responsibilities and expectations. With the continued patronage of the Godfather, his capacity for undermining the originally neutral, independent, secular and apolitical nature of the All India Services is unlimited.

   The danger which is now staring the bureaucracy in the face cannot be underestimated. It is much more foundational than merely transferring inconvenient officers and rewarding the loyal ones, which has been the template so far since 1950. The effort now is to indoctrinate and mould the officers right from their training days in the image of their maker so that they will become mere party apparatchiks. (This, quite clearly, was the subtle hint to them from the PM himself recently when he exhorted them to keep a vigil on the spending of funds by political parties (read: Opposition parties), something which is not part of their job). 

   What alarms me is not just the perverted psychology and utterances of these two gentlemen. It is this: these two officers have been recruited, trained and have served in an era of relative liberal democracy, when constitutional values were generally respected, even though they might not always have been upheld in the ideal manner they should have been. And yet, it has taken just a few years of this regime for them to have capitulated to, and embrace, the new majoritarian, intolerant and authoritarian narrative that is the lingua franca of governance today. What hope then is there for those who are joining the civil services today, trained, guided and mentored by the likes of K and the Director referred to ? Will these new entrants be able to retain the vision of a Sardar Patel when he insisted on retaining the All-India services as an apolitical, federal, independent agency free to speak its mind, or will they become mere foot soldiers of a hegemonic ruling party which has made no secret of its desire to change the Constitution to conform to its own ideology? Will these "compliant managers" (an apt term coined by Mr. M.G.Devashayam in an article in THE WIRE) go on to join the Agniveers of the defence forces as the new storm troopers of the BJP/RSS combine?

   My fear is that Patel's vision is receding into history and may soon be redacted altogether. I interact fairly extensively with colleagues, both serving and retired, individually and through a number of Whatsapp groups. And their conduct and indifference worries me: the vast majority prefer to remain mute, content to get their pensions and salaries on time, devoting themselves to asinine forwards, as if the changes taking place around them are of no consequence. Many more are closet bhakts, clearly sympathetic to the new narrative of a fake Amritkaal but lacking the courage to openly say so. But an increasingly growing number of them are vocal supporters of the brutalisation of society and government, the vigilante justice, the exclusionary intolerance, the predatory use of police and regulatoty agencies to stamp out any dissent, the curbing of basic freedoms that are the norm today. Try as I might, I can find no sensible reason to explain this deterioration in character, except to wonder whether Ambedkar was right after all in stating that democracy in India is only a top soil, a thin covering that can be easily washed away. Perhaps the monster that is gradually emerging through this top soil- a hatred for minorities and a death wish for authoritarianism- was always latent in our character, covered by a shallow layer given us by our founding fathers but now washed away by a Devil's wind.

   It's the civil services that have held this country together for 75 years, for all their faults and mistakes, through wars, riots, droughts, famines, changes of government, disasters, endemic corruption and worse. Stumbling at times and blundering at others, they have nonetheless preserved our nation as a functioning democracy. But now these same services are getting unraveled through the latent prejudices, short-sightedness and sycophancy of its own members, serving and retired. I wonder if it will help to remind them of the words of the great Sardar on why he insisted on retaining the steel frame of the IAS:

"There is no alternative to this administrative system...The Union will go, you will not have a united India if you do not have a good All India Service which has the independence to speak out its mind, which has the sense of security that you will standby your work....If you do not adopt this course, then do not follow the present Constitution..... Remove them and I see nothing but a picture of chaos all over the country."

  Sadly, the New India has no place for a Sardar Patel, only for "Karmayogis" following in the footsteps of a Pied Piper. The Sardar himself has been reduced to a mute statue.