Sunday, 01 June 2014 | Swapan Dasgupta | in Usual Suspects
Those who attended the swearing-in ceremony of the government in the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan on an extremely hot evening may have been dissatisfied with the lack of drinking water for the seated guests (except those in the VVIP enclosure). The reason was strange: some nervous security personnel were concerned that the small plastic bottles of water would be turned into missiles by a partisan crowd and aimed at the stalwarts of the outgoing UPA Government. In the end, these fears turned out to be entirely imaginary. The large numbers of BJP workers who attended Narendra Modi’s installation as Prime Minister turned out to be extremely well-behaved and even generously bipartisan in their applause.
The anxieties of some officials of the barbarians storming Rashtrapati Bhavan to celebrate the great Hindu moment may well have been a case of political paranoia over the unfamiliar but this has been replicated all over babudom in the past week. The attributes of a strong, austere and no-nonsense leader that made Modi so attractive to an electorate seeking real change, has been the source of nervous panic in the citadels of bureaucratic lethargy.
To a large extent some of these suspicions have turned out to be very real. The Cabinet that was sworn-in last Monday may have been a hotch-potch of the politically important, the regionally influential and the socially representative but the belief that the easy-going style of Atal Bihari Vajpayee would be mirrored by Modi has turned out to be completely unfounded.
It is not merely that Modi moved into Race Course Road with only a suitcase and without requisitioning the services of the best interior decorator that will define the style of this government. Austere personal lifestyle is something that Indians love to deify. However, discarding opulence and the imperial trappings of authority are not ends in themselves. They become politically meaningful when coupled with effective governance.
What has triggered alarm about Modi is not that a relatively inexperienced Minister of State Jitendra Singh got into a controversy over Article 370 or that — horror of horrors — a non-graduate has been asked to preside over the Human Resources Development Ministry. These are two-day stories that are quickly forgotten, even by the TV pundits who appear to be so agitated at the time of ‘Breaking News’. The status quoists don’t mind Modi faltering and foe-turned-bosom buddy editors telling the errant Ministers to shut up, but they would rather he stumbled seriously. That would provide them the best chance to form a protective shield around him, cut him off from the realities of the political world, blunt his reformist impulses and merrily await his inevitable downfall.
If Modi had begun his innings announcing a slew of policies, some overturning existing ones and others aimed at shaking the system, his undercover detractors would not have been unhappy. The advantage of impulsiveness is that a lot of wrong numbers are dialled. These wrong connections in turn erode the credibility of the Government and dampen the desire to tinker with what many regard is a slow moving but time-tested culture of governance by inertia.
Whether past experience or good counsel has alerted Modi to the minefields in the path of change, is a matter of detail. What is relevant is that the Prime Minister has directed his ministerial colleagues to first concentrate on modest and achievable 100-day targets and leave the grand vision for a time when they have acquired greater information of what is possible and what is not.
The measures announced in the first week of government don’t aim to radically alter the system. Their principal focus is to introduce a measure of efficiency and purposefulness. The objective is far more modest: to change the work culture of the government.
In actual terms it is an enormously lofty objective. If the babus focus more on clearing their files on time and without trying to second-guess the political authority, if their minds are more on a honest day’s work than an honest morning’s golf with the local fixer, and if their limited interface with the general public and those who need to interact with the ministry are couched in helpfulness rather than imperious cussedness, Modi would probably have done more good in 100-days than the UPA did in 10 years.
What is interesting is that there is no coercion that accompanies this efficiency drive. In his 10-point programme, Modi has promised to empower the bureaucracy and give it a generous measure of functional autonomy. In plain language, the babu is being assured that he will not have a political apparatchik breathing down his neck. Instead, he is being assured policy stability and an unstated fixity of tenure in return for dedication and commitment.
Yes, the Ministers have to constantly worry about their performance and their success or failure in meeting commitments. Their future depends entirely on how well they can keep pace with Modi — a reason why it was felt that the course was too physically challenging for the 75+ veterans. But for the babus, their performance is being judged by less exacting standards: their ability to take the right decisions, fast.
If this experiment succeeds, it will mark a huge leap forward.
Source: http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/usual-suspects/modi-has-shaken-up-babudom.html
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