So the unthinkable happened. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh finally
decided to speak to the nation. Good! I suppose shop keepers, farmers and
word-count specialists in the media have finally understood why the diesel
price hike and FDI in retail are good for this country. The men and women in
our MSM could hardly hide their delight and rushed to gloat over the PM’s
speech and how he defended his spectacular decisions and cut the Opposition to
their pygmy size. Mercifully, the media stopped at calling it the “Big Bang” reforms and didn’t venture to
call it the “Higgs-Boson” of reforms. But there are a few questions that our
ever probing media never asked. We will get to those questions in a while.
The best article on the FDI I have read so far is once again from the
online news media and not MSM. R. Jagannathan writes in FirstPost: “If these are reforms, I am Amitabh Bachchan”. He explains
well that the latest actions by the UPA are nothing more than desperate
measures. Of course, nobody has written with convincing data on whether FDI
will benefit the ‘Aam aadmi’ or not very conclusively. But there is no doubt in
my mind that the decision is not inspired by the urge to “big bang” but by a
lot of unfulfilled commitments to investors and lobbyists abroad.
In the meantime, here’s a small conversation between two ladies from
the MSM. This was on September 14. What is striking from P. Malini of The Hindu
is that she states: “IF the PM is ALLOWED….” The PM, as head of the govt, is
the most powerful man in the country. Does he need to be allowed to
follow his light or convictions? But her statement does make sense because it
indicates the PM hasn’t been making decisions based on the country’s needs or
situations but on what he’s allowed to do by Sonia Gandhi and her private club.
Cleverly, Sonia Gandhi’s club is divided in two parts as under:
Club-1: A coterie consisting
trusted darbaris who help her manage the difficult and troublesome political
aspects of running a govt through MMS. If good comes out, she gets the credit.
If the opposite happens, MMS or any minister takes a beating.
Club-2: This is an exclusive
group of people assembled under a kiosk called NAC. This kiosk is a vending machine for legislations of populist,
welfare schemes. Schemes like NREGA, Right to food, Right to this, Right to
that. Right to drain the economy!
The reward for MMS is that he gets to be the PM for all the beating
that he takes. If courage, light and convictions were to drive him, as the two
media ladies were negotiating, he would have resigned on the 7th day after the
first month of his job on getting his pay-check. I read somewhere that the most
common reason people quit their jobs is because their ‘boss’ is terrible. A real-life
Hari Sadoo! In contrast, there are bosses who are with their people most times.
In times of personal grief they comfort them. They help resolve work related
issues. They seem to know when to intervene and when to keep off. A nation
expects the same from its boss. It’s no big secret that MMS simply lacks leadership
skills and people skills. Where a warm hug is required he would typically
mostly do an “aerial survey” from a distance. I quoted Marcus Buckingham, a Gallup poll researcher, in one of my
earlier posts and repeat that quote:
"What a leader does for followers is turn anxiety into confidence.
They’ve always done that throughout time and in every different society and
situation. When leaders lead well, it’s because they’re able to rally people to
a better future and make people spirited when they were previously
anxious." Problem is, MMS, not having won a single public election, doesn’t
have any followers. He only has a lot of bosses. Which explains Malini’s “if allowed” tweet. And people, as they
become more and desperately thirsty, see the mirage and ‘drink the sand’ hoping
it would quench their thirst. Nothing does this better than this scene
from the movie ‘The American President’(0.36 secs):
Presidential aide Lewis Rothschild (Michael J. Fox): …People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine
leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want
leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a
mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.
The President (Michael Douglas): Lewis, we've had presidents
who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a
flashlight. People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the
sand because they don't know the difference.
That would seem right. A huge population in India isn’t drinking the
sand because it quenches their thirst; they seem to do so because they can’t
tell the difference. And when they want water what our boss offers is FDI in
retail. Drink that! And then he comes out of his slumber to speak to them on
TV. No, not because he owes them care and understanding but because the
Opposition is supposedly misleading them. If at all he wanted to attack the
Opposition he was neither forceful nor convincing. If he wanted to separate
people’s concerns from the political ones of his detractors he failed again. In
‘The American President’ the opponent, Bob Rumsen, is constantly attacking the
President’s personal life and the bills his girl-friend is championing. After a
long silence, like MMS, Michael Douglas chooses to address the issue (3.07 mins):
It’s just a movie. Yes it is. And the bills that the President mentions
in his speech mostly didn’t make it. But we have known leaders from time to
time to stand up and talk to people and assure them that their leadership is in
good hands. They stand up and talk to people and not offer defence for some policy
decisions. Did MMS manage to do that? Clearly not! From once being considered
an emerging super-power comparable to the league of US and China, a pathetic PM has
reduced India to being compared to Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. Sure, that
is going to bring a lot of comfort to people. What next, will we be comparing
ourselves with Somalia in the next speech? Ever heard the US compare itself
with Brazil or Sudan? So Indians can drink the sand in the comfort that they’re
better off than Pakistan and Bangladesh.
As for the political aspect of it, the media simply didn’t ask the
right questions. Hillary Clinton met Mamata Banerjee in May 2012 to persuade
her on FDI. That’s not me but a CNN-IBN
report that stated it. Oh yeah, the same CNN-IBN whose Chairman recently wrote
a book “Superpower”. Mamata’s
reaction to FDI last time was no different from now when the UPA brought it up during
a parliament session in November 2011. Did they expect her to revolt and even
walk out of UPA? Soaked in the dirtiest waters of politics the Congress would
have damn well expected it and planned for it. Isn’t that why the cabinet
approved the policy last week even when the TMC minister and some Kerala
ministers were absent? Did the media ask
them if they had spoken to SP and BSP prior to this latest cabinet decision?
They did not. And CNN-IBN did have the greatest economist we have as a panellist
to discuss the reforms and PM’s speech. Haha! If he sees the Bimboesque tweet
from the Social Genius he will be pleased, everything’s fine.
It would be foolish to even assume remotely that Congress would have not
taken the SP and BSP into confidence prior to introduction of the policy. All
the charade of Mulayam Singh “keeping out communal parties” is just more
sound-bites he feeds the stray dogs of the media whose editors then present it
as gospel to their audience. MMS did tell the cabinet "The time has come
for big bang reforms. If we have to go down, we have to go down fighting".
After his speech, let’s just be thankful. I don’t think anyone would really
want to see the spectacle of MMS fighting.
