Do a FRBM on subsidies, Mr FM, put a cap on the subsidy bill

http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/budget/budget-2014-mr-jaitley-do-a-yashwant-sinha-on-subsidy-enact-a-law-to-cut-it-progressively-89938.html

President Pranab Mukherjee, once the finance minister, has often been blamed for the mess the economy itself is in. Why, even his successor from his own former party, P. Chidambaram, has often hinted that the economy may have been in better shape if the fiscal easing that Mukherjee had done in the wake of the global meltdown had been reversed a year earlier than it ultimately was.
But one has to give credit to Mukherjee for one initiative in his last budget in March 2012, which has not got the attention it deserved. Dealing with the vexed issue of subsidies, Mukherji had said he would try to restrict the subsidy bill of the Centre to under 2 per cent of GDP in 2012-13 and bring it down to 1.75 per cent of GDP over the next three years.
It is another matter that the subsidy bill in 2012-13 actually shot up to 2.54 per cent of GDP, up from 2.41 per cent in 2011-12. Mukherjee could perhaps disown responsibility, using the excuse that he had moved to Rashtrapati Bhavan within a few months of that landmark statement.
But it is a pity – and a surprise - that Chidambaram did not take this ball and run with it. After all, he had, in his first stint in North Block in the United Front government backed by the communist parties, made bold to commission a discussion paper on government subsidies. He got an update done in 2004 soon after assuming charge during his second shift. In both his stints – and in between – he had constantly stressed the need to trim this bill.
Capping the subsidy bill is a sound idea and one that Arun Jaitley needs to push. It imposes a measure of discipline on the government, saying this is all the cloth you have, now cut it in a manner as to make the most of it. Decide which subsidies are more important, give more to those, less to the others but all within this limit.
Mukherjee took the initial step; Jaitley needs to take the next one and get legislative backing for this, something similar to the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) law. Once the cap is set – to be achieved in a phased manner over a period of time like Mukherjee suggested - any move to spend more than the cap will have to be get parliamentary approval. How will this help?
Right now the subsidy burden is a problem of only the government in power. When it attempts any trimming exercise, the rest of the political class comes together to force it to roll back subsidy cuts. Getting legislative backing for a subsidy cap will force Parliament to debate on an appropriate ceiling. Hopefully, it will be one that will not threaten macroeconomic fundamentals. Indeed, the very process of debating the need and level of the cap will reinforce the logic of reining in subsidies, highlight wasteful and unjustified ones, bring out hidden ones, strengthen the case for the necessary ones and focus attention on effective delivery. Importantly, the ownership of that cap will be that of Parliament as a whole.
Since breaching this cap will also require parliamentary approval – an exercise that will involve going through the legislative rigmarole – governments will not be so cavalier in infringing it. This might force more serious efforts at ensuring that only the really deserving get subsidies.
And even if a government does go back to Parliament, once again the entire debating process will again highlight its own inefficiencies and put a black mark on its fiscal performance. So it will try to come back on track soon.
This does sound too easy and good to be true. After all, Parliament did legislate the FRBM Act. And Parliament itself allowed it to be breached. But no party is denying the legitimacy of the milestones set in the FRBM Act and the fact that the UPA government breached it is something that it is constantly pilloried for. The whole process of legislating the FRBM Act – from the time the idea was floated to actual enactment – took a few years and intense debate. Thanks to this, Parliament is serious about it; there is no talk of raising the deficit caps or postponing implementation or even scrapping it.
In taking the initiative to legislate a cap on subsidies, Jaitley can show his party as a fiscally responsible one. It was Yashwant Sinha, during the NDA regime, who initiated the FRBM legislation. It just so happened that the Act got passed toward the end of the government’s tenure and the UPA government notified the rules, allowing it to take credit. But the sheen was taken away from that credit by the fact that first Chidambaram asked for a pause in its implementation (in 2005) and then Mukherjee amended it to relax the deadlines.
Jaitley can now do for subsidies what Sinha did for overall fiscal consolidation.  It will be a feather in the BJP’s cap both economically and politically.

Planning Commission should go, but its expertise should be used

This piece was published in quartz.com. That heading doesn't capture what I am saying- that it should go forever but giving the link anyway.

 http://qz.com/224804

 So, for the first time since 1950, the country does not have a Planning Commission. The fact that the rooms of Yojana Bhavan, the building that houses this ode to a socialist economy, are still populated does not mean anything.
Technically, the Planning Commission is the deputy secretary and the various members. The denizens of Yojana Bhavan are merely the secretariat to the Commission. Technically, they are all jobless, as of now.
The Narendra Modi government may not have formally rescinded the March 1950 cabinet resolution setting up the Planning Commission, but by not naming a new commission, even a month after taking over, it has indicated that it has little use for the body that dominated the management of the economy for 64 years. Already one of its central functions – Plan allocations in the budget -- is being handled directly by the finance ministry. It was rather ridiculous for one body to sit and determine how much funds ministries and states should get and what they should spend it on.
This rather dismissive approach is not new. It was expressed in far more contemptuous terms by Rajiv Gandhi, who ridiculed the Commission as a bunch of jokers. But he stopped short of dismantling it. None of the post-1991 governments too questioned the Commission’s relevance. The closest anyone came to it was Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which, in its manifesto of 1998, said `the Planning Commission will be reformed and reorganized in light of the changing developmental needs of our country’. However, the revamp plan drawn up by Jaswant Singh, the deputy chairman during its 13-month first tenure, only attempted to expand the Commission’s empire. Subsequent BJP manifestos remained silent on this matter.
But the idea that the Commission needs to be recast in a different mould stayed. Singh’s immediate successor, K. C. Pant (in the National Democratic Alliance government of 1999), roped in private consulting firms to suggest what the Commission’s role should be. In the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) second stint, Manmohan Singh tasked member Arun Maira to suggest how to overhaul the Planning Commission as a Systems Reform Commission. We never got to know what this meant, though Maira has been vocal in complaining that nothing got done. Nevertheless, the proposed name change itself was a major gain; it showed growing acceptance of the irrelevance of the Planning Commission in a liberalised era.
So, the Modi government’s failure to name a new Commission is welcome. In fact, it is high time the cabinet passes a resolution quashing the 1950 one.
But should all the economist-bureaucrats in Yojana Bhavan be given a golden handshake and the piece of prime real estate be turned into a money-spinning office complex? (Incidentally, this was a suggestion given in the late nineties by a Congress ideologue before he took a  ideological left turn.)
Perhaps not. Over the six decades of economic management, the Planning Commission has built up some expertise and resources which could be put to good use. What could these be? Here are four possibilities:
* It will be silly to assume that economic policy making will be done in a vacuum, without any forecasts and projections on macro-economic indicators. Sure, there’s a chief economic advisor and a planning unit in the finance ministry but that need not preclude an independent think tank kind of body that will monitor economic developments, assess their impact on India and provide intellectual inputs for economic policy. During Pant’s stint as deputy chairman, a Delhi-based consulting firm ACOR had suggested something on these lines, comprised of experts on contractual appointments. It had said this could be called the Planning Commission Policy Research Institute or the Strategy Research Institute of the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission nomenclature will have to be dropped, though.
*  Why not, as former minister, Arun Shourie, suggested in a recent newspaper interview, replace the Planning Commission with a Reforms Commission? There is a slew of second generation reforms that are needed; there could be many more that are not evident right now. A Reforms Commission can suggest how to sequence reforms, how to implement them and also help in the political management of reforms. It could be something similar to the Productivity Commission of Australia which its website describes as the `government's principal advisory body on all aspects of microeconomic reform’. Its recommendations, which cover both private and public sector, are based on extensive research and public enquiries.
* Another option could be to have something like the Congressional Budget Office of the United States. The CBO, though it is part of the Congress system, provides independent assessment and analyses of the economic and other costs of every legislation. Its recommendations are taken with utmost seriousness. This is something that is completely missing in India. There is hardly any impact analysis of laws and the result is that the government is ill-prepared for the costs – economic and non-economic - that surface at the time of implementation. India sorely needs a  body that assesses the impact of our multiple regulations and laws both before they are passed and periodically when they are implemented.
* We have seen enough examples of inter-ministerial wrangles making for messy policy, policy paralysis and implementation problems. The Prime Minister’s Office is supposed to sort these issues out but sometimes it may need some expert inputs to work out a compromise. For years, the Planning Commission has played a coordinating role between ministries as well as between the Centre and the states. Why not institutionalise this in a new organization?
A body that replaces the Planning Commission can do any one of these or a combination of these. The basic idea should be that the idea of central planning is anachronistic and contradicts the spirit of a liberal economic order. It’s time to make a clean break from the past.

Some bad days are needed for good times to roll

This was published in Nai Dunia, 17 June 2014. 
http://naiduniaepaper.jagran.com/Details.aspx?id=686267&boxid=13104
Giving below the English draft that I sent.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks in Goa on Saturday that tough economic measures will have to be taken to put the economy back on track have invited predictable jokes about achche din and bure din. Perhaps the BJP brought these jokes upon itself by overdoing the achche din aane vaale hain message during the elections, but this is neither the time nor the subject for jokes.
Because the simple truth is that the economy is in a bad state and government finances are in even worse shape. It is true that the UPA government was not fiscally responsible. Former finance minister P. Chidambaram may have kept the fiscal deficit at 4.6% of GDP, but this has been done by postponing some expenditure (which the new government will have to bear) and getting some revenue in advance. So the Modi government’s first economic step will have to be to restore some order to government finances. Sound government finances are the foundation of a robust economy.
The other major problem facing the government is that of inflation, which is still not in the comfort zone. The Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan has moderated his hawkish stand on interest rates to give the new government time to address the structural issues that are fuelling inflation. The government needs to get cracking on these to create an environment where he can bring down interest rates. 
So what are the tough measures that Modi is planning? It is clear by now that the only person who knows Modi’s mind is Modi himself, but if he is really serious about doing what he has indicated, these are some of the steps he could – and should - take.
One, on the revenue side, increase in tax exemption limits may not happen (though media reports say this is expected). The inflation monster has not been tamed yet and giving people more money to spend without addressing supply shortages and bottlenecks will not be a wise step. The economy certainly needs a demand push, but this has to be calibrated. Besides, an increase in the exemption limit to Rs 3 lakh is expected to cost the exchequer Rs 60,000 crore a year, according to the finance ministry. This is certainly not the time for such giveaways. The corporate sector, too, will have to reconcile itself to having some excise cuts given by the previous government taken away.
Two, on the expenditure side, there will be a drastic overhaul of the subsidy regime. The President’s address and Modi’s own statements during the elections show a welcome emphasis on infrastructure. This will mean that the bias towards revenue expenditure – which is 86% of total expenditure – will be corrected and capital expenditure will get the focus it sorely needs.
But revenue expenditure has one item that is committed expenditure – interest payments, which absorb over 40% of tax revenues. Defence and salaries too cannot be touched. That leaves subsidies, which eat up 25% of tax revenues. Interest payments do not affect people’s budgets directly, so it can be safe to assume that when Modi speaks of tough measures, he intends to cut the subsidy burden significantly. This is something the economy has been crying out for.
Subsidy reform will not mean withdrawing all subsidies or drastically cutting allocations across the board. What it will mean is better targeting, which means only the genuinely needy will get subsidies and a lot or undeserving people will not.
If Modi is really serious about subsidy reform, then the cap on subsidised LPG cylinders should go back to nine. That will not only result in a saving of nearly Rs 4000 crore, but it will still cover 89% of the population.
His government should also allow decontrol of diesel prices or at least allow price hikes. This will have an immediate inflationary effect, but that will fade out in time. Importantly, it will also moderate wasteful consumption and bring enormous savings to the government.
A far more tricky issue will be tackling the food subsidy, the biggest subsidy item at nearly 40% of the total bill. The BJP backed the National Food Security Act (NFSA) which could lead to the food subsidy bill ballooning. But this problem will have to be tackled. One way to bring down the food subsidy bill would be to bring down the cost of procuring foodgrains. This could mean not allowing huge increases in the minimum support price. There are other ways to reduce this cost – reforming the procurement mechanism and eliminating inefficiencies but that will be a long-drawn out process. The farmers will be up in arms, but the government will have to remain firm. 
There are a whole lot of other tough measures that the economy needs but these are the ones that will bite the people. That is why governments are generally loath to take them. The fact that Modi seems to be preparing the climate for these unpopular measures is a good sign. It shows two things. One, that he is not going to let politics prevail over good economics. Two, he has realised the necessity of explaining things to the people, something all reforming prime ministers and finance ministers from 1991 onwards have ignored.
People are not unwise. They know the need for belt tightening and cutting wasteful expenditure – they do it all the time with their household budgets. Surely, they will realise that if they want achche din forever, they will have to put up with bure din for some time.

Modi’s government may be small; the state continues to be big

Narendra Modi’s 45-ministry government has attracted a lot of attention. It is also being hailed as the first step in what could be his signature style of governance – minimum government, maximum governance.
Sorry, but it isn’t.
Modi’s government is certainly a lean government, but it isn’t a minimum government. Let’s not confuse the two concepts. A lean government is about size and numbers. A minimal government is about a philosophy, a certain view of the role of the state.
A minimal state, as defined in the classical liberalism lexicon, is about the state confining itself to just a few areas. There is consensus on two – defence of external boundaries and enforcing law and order as well as upholding the rule of law. There are departures from this point on details. Some liberal streams include the provision of public goods as a responsibility of the state and there are differences on the definition of public goods as well. But the broad point is this: the state should not get into too many areas and most definitely not in areas where people are able to manage their own affairs through their own individual enterprise.  
India is not familiar with the idea of a minimal government. Before 1947, it was used to a colonial-feudal set up and post 1947 that got converted into a mai-baap sarkar. The state kept assuming more and more responsibilities till it was present in practically every aspect of the lives of individual and enterprises, riding roughshod over personal and economic freedoms. And yet the size of the government remained relatively small. Indira Gandhi, remember, ran lean governments. The unwieldy size of ministries is a post-seventies phenomenon. Remember also that gargantuan cabinets continued even after 1991 even as the command-and-control economy structure got steadily dismantled. 
It was only the Swatantra Party that came close to articulating the idea of a minimal state. The second of the 21 principles of the party stated: `. . . The party stands for the principle of maximum freedom for the individual and minimum interference by the state consistent with the obligation to prevent and punish anti-social activities, to protect the weaker elements of society and to create the conditions in which individual initiative will thrive and be fruitful. . .’ It is unfortunate that the party did not get much traction.
Modi’s government doesn’t quite pass this test.
It will if his government decides that the state should not be running hotels, airlines and providing telecom services and gets rid of the public sector in these areas. Instead, Modi talks about strengthening public sector undertakings. It is not clear if the government will pursue an aggressive disinvestment agenda.
It will pass with flying colours if the information and broadcasting ministry, steel ministry, culture ministry and the Planning Commission were disbanded. These are clearly, clearly relics of the socialist era. There are a host of other ministries that could make it to the axing list, but changing their role instead into a more of facilitating/regulatory role can be a subject of debate. Closing down these four is a complete no-brainer; no debate is needed.
There are some who argue that since the increase in the role of the state led to the unwieldy size of the government, limiting the size of the government will automatically result in a reduced role for the state, since administration will be a challenge otherwise. This argument is flawed. One, as already noted, Indira Gandhi ran a tight ship but one which was omnipresent and omniscient. Two, reducing the number of ministries and departments will not lead to shedding of work. On the other hand, technology can make it easier for the state to have its tentacles everywhere – far, far more easier than in the seventies.
Though Modi’s minimum government maximum governance idea does talk about the government moving from an interventionist to a facilitating role, the focus is more about using technology to speed up processes, clearances and permissions and make them transparent. It does not question the need for the myriad procedures that any interface with the government involves. It does not question the number of points of interface with the government. It is about making the government efficient in its current role, not about questioning its role.
Maybe that will come. Maybe Modi will realise that the problem with governance in India is that the state/government has taken on far more responsibilities beyond what should be its core responsibility of defence, law and order, upholding the rule of law and provision of public goods. Maybe he will realise the need for the state to focus on just these and do its job well.
Modi must be persuaded into making the 45-ministry government the first step of an ideological leap of faith. A small government must also mean a small, but effective, state.

A call to arms: Time to get the classical liberal agenda going

What does the stupendous victory of the Narendra Modi-led BJP in the recent elections mean for India’s liberals - the genuine liberals, not the left-of-centre variety?
But first, let’s get definitions out of the way. The word `liberal’ has been appropriated by far too many pretenders and it’s time for the real liberals to reclaim the tag. The genuine liberals are those who believe in the supremacy of the individual, a small but strong state and no overbearing state intervention in the economy. Not for this section a paternalistic state, one that encourages a dependency syndrome in the garb of empowering people. Not for this section any compromise with personal, intellectual, cultural and economic freedoms. And with the rule of law.
This section was starved of a political voice after the Swatantra Party disappeared from the scene in the mid-1970s, though it has been making itself heard, especially after 1991, through other forums. It cheered the initiation of the economic liberalisation process but despaired at the continued overhang of the socialist era, in the form of the paternalistic-cum-nanny state. Contrary to the lampooning of it by the leftist brigade as `neo-liberals’ pushing the agenda of big business, this section has been warning against the economic reforms process being more pro-business than pro-market and pressing for a correction of this skew.
This group (barring a section that is firmly with the Congress) has, undoubtedly, aligned itself with Modi, decisively rejecting the fear-mongering by the leftists and the Congress. His articulation of the minimum-government-maximum-governance idea, spot-on linking of corruption with lack of transparency in governance and promise to address that, disinclination for sop-driven welfare-ism, clear focus on infrastructure and an enabling business environment has resonated with them. Other post-1991 governments had opened up the economy, but no Prime Minister (not even Atal Behari Vajpayee) had articulated a cogent view of the role of the state the way Modi has.
The liberals have quibbles with Modi’s silence on privatisation and his opposition to foreign multi-brand retailers, but see these as minor details that don’t detract from the fact of a directional shift in economic policy and the role of the state.
This, the liberals seemed to have realised, is the closest they could get to the old Swatantra model. For them the decisive mandate that Modi has got is an affirmation of their belief fact that people – even if they don’t understand ideological labels – are instinctively against dole-centric policies (it isn’t as clear as that but let’s leave that for now).
This group will obviously want Modi to deliver on completely dismantling the socialist edifice that had been built up in the pre-1991 era. They know it can’t be done overnight – the stroke-of-pen reforms got over in the early 1990s. It will be a long-drawn out process, with roadblocks aplenty and even some rollbacks. But they will give him time so long as his focus is clear and he reins in the swadeshi economics brigade in the BJP and the sangh parivar which gave the Vajpayee government a hard time. Some leading lights of this group could get closely involved with a Modi government. 
But there are concerns.
One, what if Modi’s promise of a new economic paradigm isn’t what it seems? What if, as Vivek Dehejia asks in this article, `Modi’s instincts are certainly pro-business, but are they pro-free market’? Wouldn’t this run the same risk of encouraging the kind of cronyism that became rampant in the past decade? Two, will he decisively junk the dole-centric welfare model, which the BJP is not entirely averse to (after all it merrily went around supporting the rights-based entitlement legislations)?
Three, and this is a larger concern, what about the role of the RSS in the personal, cultural and intellectual space? The fact that Modi will not allow the RSS to dictate the economic agenda is clear; that he will do so in other areas as well is not. He hasn’t revealed his mind on the issue of non-economic freedoms, the upholding of which is just as important to the liberals as the ensuring of economic freedoms. He has, till now, remained silent on this. There has been no reaction to the Supreme Court order on Section 377. He has also never come out and expressly condemned attacks on intellectual and cultural freedoms as well as provocative statements against Muslims by the rabid right-wingers.
Also, though they don’t buy the mass-murderer imagery that the so-called `secularists’ propagate, they are critical of Modi’s failure to check the 2002 riots. Upholding the rule of law and protecting life and property is an essential part of the classical liberal agenda.
So there is a dilemma.
Should the liberals remain silent on the social issues, and concentrate their energies on getting the economic agenda going, ensuring particularly that this agenda is a pro-market one and not a pro-big business or worse pro-business house one? After all, the entire left-of-centre brigade will be extra-vigilant on the non-economic freedoms, looking for the first chance to trip Modi up. Should the liberals focus on redefining the role of the state in a way that it doesn’t get into the personal and intellectual space and on strengthening institutions so that they can never become compromised regardless of the regime in power? But what if the doomsday predictions of the `secularists’ come true and gangs of sanghis go around attacking minorities,  young couple indulging in PDA and getting books and art shows banned? Should they remain silent spectators because the economic issues are getting addressed?
Would criticising Modi strengthen both the fringe elements in the sangh parivar, who want to push their exclusivist and conservative social agenda, as well as the leftists/Congress supporters, who are just waiting for any opportunity to discredit and pull down India’s first avowedly right-of-centre government?
These are questions the liberals have to wrestle with in the coming days.
The problem they will face is that if they criticise the government, they will be at the receiving end of the ire of the online and offline Modi fanatics as well as the we-told-you-so jeers of leftists and Congress supporters. If they remain silent, the latter will label them fascist sympathisers waiting for suitable rewards. 
But is this twin attack new to them? Haven’t the liberals always been criticised and labelled by extremists on both sides, as well as Congress sympathisers masquerading as neutral intellectuals? Should the fear of such name-calling come in the way of making the most of the first opportunity they have got to expand the genuinely liberal space in India?
Certainly not.
The Swatantra had limited success because the intellectual climate in the sixties and seventies was overwhelmingly leftist. That is no longer the case.
So why can’t the liberals work with the Modi government, flooding it with new ideas and creating an environment for greater receptivity to economic reforms, something that has been sorely missing till now? At the same time, any attempts to subvert institutions, impose an artificial intellectual consensus or a conservative social agenda and snuff out dissenting voices (including left-of-centre voices) should also be opposed. The two approaches need not be contradictory.
History will not forgive India’s real liberals if they pass up this opportunity.

The Scalping of Daljeet Kohli: A Silly and Wasted Effort

http://www.firstpost.com/politics/the-scalping-of-daljeet-kohli-a-silly-and-wasted-effort-1498385.html

In December 1997, this writer had gone to interview Pranab Mukherjee, then an ordinary MP of the Congress Party. The news of a Congressman, Rangarajan Kumaramangalam, joining the Bharatiya Janata Party had broken just an hour earlier. When I mentioned this to Mukherjee, he burst out with an incredulous look on his face: `Mohan-da’s son joining the BJP? How is that possible?’ 
For those who don’t know, Rangarajan (popularly known as Ranga) was the son of Mohan Kumaramangalam, a leading light of the Communist Party of India who joined the Congress in 1967 and became an integral part of Indira Gandhi’s leftist band. He had died in 1973 and so was spared headlines similar to those playing out a day after Manmohan Singh’s half-brother joined the BJP.
Mukherjee’s reaction to Ranga jumping parties and the current buzz over Singh’s brother shows one thing will never change in this country – the typical Indian refusal to see an individual and his or her choices outside of the family context.
Mukherjee’s reaction was not to a Congressman switching sides, but to a left-wing Mohan-da’s son joining a right-wing party. Daljeet Singh Kohli was just another businessman, whose decision to join a party would have been a `non-event’, as finance minister P. Chidambaram quite rightly put it. The only reason the BJP made his entry into its ranks a huge spectacle was his relationship with Manmohan Singh.
Modi’s reported statement on the occasion – `Dr Manmohan Singh’s brother has joined the BJP and this will add to our strength’ – reflects poorly, not on Singh and the Congress, but on himself. Is the BJP in such a bad shape that it requires the entry of a little-known brother of a man whom its leaders have never ceased to mock as the weakest-ever Prime Minister to give it strength? Does a party which is supposedly riding to victory on a Modi wave have to resort to such gimmickry?
Even as a political strategy – to show that everyone from the party to the family is abandoning Singh – it doesn’t make sense. It would have, if Singh was standing for elections and was prime ministerial candidate. He is not; he will retire from active politics and perhaps go into oblivion after his Rajya Sabha term is over. So what is to be achieved by `embarrassing’ him? It will only give a Congress which has already abandoned him a chance to say in private – see, we were right to junk him.
By the way, the Congress too has not shied away from splitting families on political lines, the most famous example being of the Scindia family, where Madhavrao was wooed into the Congress fold, deeply hurting his mother, Vijayaraje Scindia. So let the party not take a moral high ground on the Kohli affair.
The way the media has reported this is also a comment on its intellectual bankruptcy. Why should Kohli joining the BJP be an `embarrassment’ for Singh? Why is one brother said to have `deserted’ another?  Why is this a `psychological boost’ for the BJP? Didn’t the person writing this – and the editors clearing the copy – stop for a moment and think of the inherent contradiction between stories of a BJP on a high and requiring Kohli, of all people, as a psychological boost? Perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of this is Chidambaram being asked about it at a press conference where he was rubbishing Gujarat’s economic model. Shouldn’t the questions have focused on pinning him down on the UPA’s shaky economic performance, instead?
This is not the first time the media has tried to put Singh in a spot over the political leanings of his family members. The fact that his youngest daughter was working for a human rights organization in the Untied States criticizing the government’s counter-terrorism drive after 9/11 was, we were told, certain to embarrass him and affect his equation with the Bush administration. Didn’t it occur to anyone that this would be a non-issue in a culture which celebrates individualism and will not hold family members accountable for each other’s opinions and ideological leanings?
But why this obsession with family at all?
Why is Karuna Shukla quitting the BJP not about a senior party leader being sidelined but about Atal Behari Vajpayee’s niece on being ignored? If she were not Vajpayee’s niece would it have been alright for her to be ignored? Kohli too brings in the family angle. He says he joined the BJP because he was unhappy with the way the Congress treated his brother. So there is no ideological affinity with the party. (The irony of joining a party which has repeatedly mocked his brother in rather insulting terms is probably lost on him.)
Individuals can make choices that are different from that of their families. They are doing that all the time. They break away from the traditional occupations of their families and pursue their own paths. Children rebel against parents. Siblings take different paths. Families break up permanently with a lot of bitterness. And family members may even have irreconcilable ideological differences.
What’s more, this is quite common in Indian politics. Mohan Kumaramangalam’s father, P Subbarayan, who was a Congress leader, was supposed to have cried when his son became a communist. Subbarayan’s daughter, Parvati Krishnan, was also a member of the CPI. Ranga’s sister is in the BJP while his son has joined the Congress.
There are examples galore of families with members in different parties (apart from the Gandhi bahus, of course). Anil Shastri, son of Lal Bahadur Shastri, is in the Congress, while another son, Sunil, was with the BJP for several years before returning to the Congress, and a third son’s widow, Neera, is still with the BJP. One grandson, Siddharth Nath Singh, is in the BJP and another, Adarsh Shastri, has joined the Aam Aadmi Party. Noted lawyer, the late L.M Singhvi was in the BJP and his son Abhishek Manu Singhvi is a leading light of the Congress and was so even when his father was alive. Digvijaya Singh’s brother, Lakshaman Singh, quit the Congress for the BJP where he remained for 10 years before returning after a vituperative personal comment about his brother by Nitin Gadkari.
The ordinary public is quite aware of these differences in political families and their only reaction is one of amusement or cynical taunts about these families having ensured that they will benefit regardless of which party is in power.
How will they view the BJP holding up Kohli as a kind of trophy? There will be a few more jokes about Singh (mostly from die-hard BJP and Gandhi family supporters), some more about Kohli, but many more about the BJP. Is Kohli all that they could get, people are already sniggering. But mostly people will shrug it off. Singh is not even on their radar. That’s why the scalping of Kohli makes no sense at all.

Why Left’s intellectual bullying won’t work any more

http://www.firstpost.com/blogs/navyana-controversy-why-lefts-intellectual-bullying-wont-work-now-1487389.html

`We cannot so easily hand over a good writer to the Modi camp, not without a fight. . .’
Those are the words of S Anand, founder-publisher of Navayana, in an interview with Business Standard.  Navayana is the publishing house that withdrew an agreement to publish the translation of a novel by noted Tamil author Joe D’Cruz because he praised Narendra Modi.
So, the intellectual world’s worst-kept secret is out. Writers and artists belong to `camps’. They don’t inhabit the free, boundary-less world of ideas where, yes, there are rightist and leftist slants, but only to give an edge to debates. Those belonging to one ideologically-rigid camp will not tolerate one of their members being tolerant of, or agreeing with, the other. Anybody doing that will be found guilty of apostasy and be bullied back into the fold. So, contracts will be reneged on, books and articles will not be published, and opprobrium will be heaped on the renegade. And if that fails, they will be blackballed.
What else is Navayana’s action, and the words Anand has used in the interview, other than bullying? `We genuinely hope and believe Joe will eventually reconsider his views, which have drawn flak in Tamil literary and political spheres’. The implication is clear - the publication of the book (perhaps with another translator) will depend on D’Cruz revising his views on Modi, or at least publicly saying so.
Even when he is admitting that Navayana’s action may have been a bit haste, Anand cleverly shifts the blame on D’Cruz, accusing the latter of airing his support for Modi after signing the contract because he sensed the translator and Navayana would not have come on board otherwise. As writer Mukul Kesavan (who can by no stretch of imagination be called a Modi sympathiser), asks very aptly in this piece in The Telegraph, what if D’Cruz had aired his views after the book was published – `would Navayana have physically withdrawn the book and pulped it? Stacked the copies up and burnt them?’ He adds: `just to ask the question is to know the answer: of course not.’ Maybe he is right, but that scenario is not entirely beyond belief or possibility.
The D’Cruz affair has shattered another myth - the left-of-centre intellectual brigade’s sanctimonious pretence that it is the sole defender of intellectual freedom against the right-wing - specifically the Hindu right-wing – ravagers of this space.
The intellectual terrorism of the oxymoronic left-liberal brigade has actually been the elephant in the room for very long. Navayana’s immature action and rationalisation has only brought into the open what has always been done silently and in a very sophisticated manner. The rabid right-wing has very stupidly got books, plays and art exhibitions banned, physically attacked independent writers and artists and vandalised buildings and very rightly attracted public revulsion for itself and sympathy for the objects of its attack.
The left clique, in contrast, has for decades labelled people who hold positions diametrically opposite to it – American agents, World Bank-IMF stooges,  corporate apologists, pro-establishment, Hindutva types, and, lately, sanghis – and banished them to intellectual and academic Coventry, far  more effectively and without any taint of censorship being attached to it. 
Sometimes, it has not been silent. There have been occasions when an award or a official post being given to someone perceived to be a right-winger, or supported by a right-winger, or simply opposed by a left-winger or two on some selection committee has been openly and hysterically attacked. Let us not forget how, through the sixties and seventies and even part of the eighties, universities and academic institutions were systematically packed with left-leaning academics and right-leaning ones effectively sidelined.
If D’Cruz hadn’t gone public with what happened, his would have been yet another unnoticed case of successful gagging of non-left voices. Anand sounds peeved that the author `chose to speak to the media before he responded to my and Geetha’s [the translator of D’Cruz’s novel] emails or calls’. Is that a grouse that D’Cruz didn’t give them space for intellectual intimidation?
Can you imagine the outrage that would have ensued if a publisher with a right-of-centre ideological bent had dared do what Navayana did to an author who criticised Modi or wrote something that would have got khakhi knickers all a-twist? The muted criticism of Navayana is almost akin to deafening silence, in contrast.
Instead, there are too-clever-by-half attempts at sophistry, drawing distinctions between right wing and left wing intimidation.  What happened to Wendy Doniger’s book was censorship, we are told; this is only a publisher exercising his right to freedom to publish only certain kinds of authors. So, here is a publisher saying his decision to publish a book will be determined not by its contents but by the political views of its author. That’s not censorship? Anand is not a left-wing Dinanath Batra, the self-appointed guardian of Hindu history? Seriously?
For far too long had the right-of-centre band (the economic and social/cultural liberals as well as the conservatives) been edged out of the public discourse space by the left-of-centre cabal. But they are beginning to challenge this mafia and reclaim their place. They will not be intimidated any more by either whispered calumny or open taunts, by social or intellectual ostracism or by allegations that they have struck cosy deals with the New Establishment. Their resolve to fight back will not be weakened by broad hints that their freedom is short-lived and dependent on their not criticising the New Establishment. If and when they face attacks from this New Establishment, they will not go running into the arms of the self-appointed Sole Upholders of Liberal Values and beg to be forgiven for their transgressions and be taken back into a left-leaning world.
Joe D’Cruz has shown the way by standing up. The country needs more of his kind.