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Continued from Part 1... If you are Montek Singh Ahluwalia, even “mere advice” can provoke some of the country’s most vociferous policy debates. In September 2011, while the food security debate was at fever pitch, in an affidavit to the Supreme Court, the Planning Commission submitted that its expert committee headed by Suresh Tendulkar had defined a person above poverty line as anyone consuming more than Rs. 32 a day in an urban area. Shocked by this definition, activists challenged Montek Singh to prove he could live on Rs. 32 a day, failing which he should resign. He was abroad when the controversy took wild turns with new participants entering the arena every day. Rural Development minister Jairam Ramesh wrote him a stern letter saying the formula for the poverty line was flawed. Planning Commission member Abhijit Sen also wrote him a more light-hearted email whose subject was ‘Successor to Anna’, referring to the media frenzy Montek had provoked. Congress wannabe leader Rahul Gandhi [a man whose only qualification to date is that he is Sonia Gandhi's son] asked Montek to do “a rethink” on the Commission’s definition of poverty. As soon as he returned to India, a harried Montek Singh rushed to meet PM Manmohan Singh and then Jairam Ramesh. He held a press conference soon after, trying to explain himself and promising that the Rs. 32 poverty line would not be a determinant for the food policy. However, in March 2012 again, he said the number of poor in India had reduced. This was almost political suicide but Montek doggedly stuck to his line on almost every television channel, stating the unsayable. “People don’t like to hear that poverty has fallen even though Amartya Sen has said it has,” says Montek Singh. Ironically, endorsing his position, even a development economist staunchly opposed to him admits that gross poverty figures have been going down in India. He refused to be quoted, however, saying this was a historic inevitability and did not take away from his opposition to Montek’s policies. Calling from a work trip to China a few months after I met him, Montek told me he had been recently pondering on why these black-and-white positions on poverty had become the norm. Later that day, he said, “Many who are ideologically opposed to our economic policies are obviously unwilling to accept that the growth produced by these policies is also inclusive. They could say it is not inclusive enough and I’d agree. We should certainly do better. Some people feel the Tendulkar Poverty Line was too low. We are appointing a new committee to go into the issue, but no matter where you draw the line, it is absurd to deny the fall in poverty.” After a long pause, he added, “Maybe we didn’t explain our position as well as we should have.” He didn’t. In fact, all of Montek's friends wince when the Rs 32 debate is brought up. “I felt so bad, seeing him flounder for words for perhaps the first time in his life,” says Rajiv Kumar, director of FICCI and a close friend. “Why didn’t he defend himself better?” asks economist Bibek Debroy. It was a PR disaster, an embarrassment for the government. It came as a shock to those who believed - and for good reason - that he was unflappable. He has recently lost aficionados in industry circles too. Corporate leaders feel he is losing the battle to populism and want more from him. “He’s still regarded very highly because of his genius, but in recent years, I believe he’s lost the sheen,” says FICCI’s Kumar. When Montek took up cudgels on behalf of the energy sector in late 2010, questioning the concept of ‘go, no-go’ areas for coal mining devised by Jairam Ramesh, the then Minister for Environment and Forests, the energy industry was agog with the stunning return of Montek as they knew him. But that single-minded assertion - so applauded by corporates - was short-lived. The contrapuntal forces tugging at India’s economy began their tug again and he was forced to buckle down some. “Many of us have no strong emotions about Montek’s stint,” says Rajeev Chandrasekhar, industrialist and Rajya Sabha member. “No anger or disgust. Just an overwhelming disappointment in him.” Chandrashkhar wrote newspaper editorials and a letter to the PM calling Montek’s defence of the government in the 2G spectrum scam “smooth talking and articulate spin”. Chandrasekhar says he expected to see refreshing ideas, transparency and a radical change in the way business is done when Montek was appointed. “Not more of the same legacy governance. He may have taken a lot of correct positions before, but when his character was tested in the past eight years, he took all the wrong positions. Everything remains undone. There is not one radical innovation.” A major energy company honcho - one of the few who agreed to be interviewed, but only after issuing a preamble of confidentiality (“If you mention my name, I will deny everything,” he said) - says emphatically that Montek must be disheartened, collecting the medals of his imminent defeats. “There is too much politics that fuels government decisions, too much voter-appeasement an economist like him must hate,” he says. On the contrary, Montek once had unabashed political ambitions. He is said to have had a serious interest in the finance minister’s post when the UPA came to power in 2004. Rumours of this were confirmed when former bureaucrat NK Singh was heard telling lobbyist Niira Radia in a tapped phone line that Montek “tried much earlier, you know, during the transition ... and didn’t cut ice. And this time pitted against Pranab (Mukherjee), there was no chance.” Ministerial berth or not, Montek Singh remains deeply clued into the government’s internal workings through the PM, his mentor and frequent visitor to Montek's Panchsheel Enclave home. Within the Congress party, this friendship has fuelled apocryphal stories of the economist duo taking and reversing decisions over the dinner table, and announcing it to standing committees the next morning. “He has the PM’s ear,” said every single source, without exception. Many of them added, “It makes him untouchable.” Assiduously private, Montek is loath to discuss this friendship. When I first requested an interview, he said, “Are you going to ask me about how I know the PM?” All he eventually said was that he met Manmohan Singh for the first time when the latter visited young Indian economists working at the World Bank in the eighties, but friends suggest the duo have been in touch since Montek graduated from Oxford University. Their wives are close, and perform gurdwara service together. And despite being a decade younger, Montek is one of very few who call the PM by his first name. This sort of shield acts as a survival kit in a political environment where Montek is constantly fighting internal battles, but many feel he might have squandered this advantage. |
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| Gulati narrates an incident that illustrates how bullish Montek can be when he believes in something. As one of the economic advisors during the BJP-led NDA government, Montek urged PM AB Vajpayee to disinvest government stake from the automobile sector. “Why is the government manufacturing scooters and cars?” he said. “Why are we making dams and airports?” He explained how disinvestment would allay the fiscal deficit problem and also root out corruption, recounts Gulati, as Vajpayee looked on flummoxed. The next day, he wrote Vajpayee a long letter explaining his position again and followed this up with phone calls. After the weekend, the Vajpayee announced the divestment.
Oddly, Montek has had fewer wins with the Congress. Even though he was handpicked by the PM and is known to be strongly loyal to the party’s secular nationalist ideology, Montek comes off repeatedly as the heretic. A senior party leader from a southern state admits there was always speculation about Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s intolerance for Montek and his “ungrounded politics”, but party members reasoned that she was perhaps balancing her - and Rahul’s - overtly populist agenda with the growth agenda. “We kept our silence,” he says. The stark differences between the Planning Commission and the Sonia-chaired NAC however have swum repeatedly to the surface over the past eight years. Harsh Mander, an NAC member, says the government and planning commission would never have allowed any welfare schemes, “The reason we’re heard is because [Sonia] Gandhi supports our proposals.” But while these policy makers debate, the politicians have fast been making up their mind in the past year. The southern Congress member says “the old lefty partymen (sic) are more empowered now because the reformist agenda is not reaping electoral dividends. The abysmal performance of the Congress in the UP elections and the recent scams are blamed on the PM’s ineffectiveness,” he says. “And when the PM is in danger, the more aggressive Montek is no doubt in danger too.” These fissures in the party had been carpeted over until the United States Embassy cable leak in mid-2011. The cable mentioned that party members have advised Sonia to “jettison” the PM and put a more saleable political face at the head of the government. It also talked of the ‘reform cadre’ of PM Mamnmohan Singh, Montek Singh and P Chidambaram being threatened by the more socialist party old guard. As the Congress party caves in, with chaotic ideologies, electoral debacles, and declining leadership, a change of guard does seem eternally imminent.Montek says he understands that politics is the art of the possible. “But ultimately, good politics has to be rooted in good economics which will strengthen us in the long term,” he says. “My politician friends tell me it’s not that we don’t know what to do. It’s that we don’t know how to get reelected if we do it!” IN HIS office in Yojana Bhawan, Montek Singh Ahluwalia defines what he sees as his own failure. “When I came to planning commission, I was horrified at how little it had managed to do despite having all the expertise,” he says. “I wanted to restructure it.” As an administrator, he was expected to spearhead the long overdue structural overhaul of the Planning Commission. “It is a moribund, dead organisation,” says NC Saxena, who was a member in the nineties. “It is filled with IAS officers not selected for their merit or interest in planning work. To them, it is a parking lot, a place to wait till a more important secretary post opens up.” The planning commission’s mandate in the seventies has been to chiefly decide spending on central government undertakings and public sector companies. Today, therefore, the proportion of staff that has an expertise in the social sector - in education, poverty - is limited. Ahluwalia, himself a successful example of lateral entry into government service, argued for more flexibility in staffing expert committees, and suggested bringing intellect from outside the IAS pool. This, however, was seen by members of the civil services as an attempt to “outsource state work” and met with a roar of disapproval. The restructuring did not take off as planned. In his eighth year as plan panel head, this is probably the harshest failure to stomach. Montek’s passion for economics melds easily into an undying belief in the role of precise thinking in social and political issues. So why isn't he trying harder, ask those who cannot fathom why a streamlining enthusiast with the political backing of the PM would not use the opportunity to cleanse the system. The only grudging concession he is allowed is that Montek's political elbow room is dependent on Manmohan Singh’s own latitude within the Congress. The restructuring may not be his job at all, falling in the realm of the need for civil services reform, but Montek was expected to do it. The planning commission need not have stirred up a hornet's nest explaining the poverty line in its affidavit to the Supreme Court, but he insisted on it. It is not his mandate to predict the rate of inflation or growth in the press and dodge bullets when he got it wrong, but the eternal economist places his head on the line. Time and again, Montek’s trysts with the political system have led him through battles that were never meant to be waged. But he persists - perhaps as an extension of the inclusiveness agenda he is spearheading in the 12th plan, or simply as an intelligent dissident unconcerned with political exigencies. The rage he ignites, the doubts he stirs, and the beliefs he espouses, stir debates no Planning Commission Deputy Chairman has ever triggered before. Inadvertently, he has exposed the dilemmas of a monochromatic vision, of trying to let economics solve issues of politics. Ensconced in Montek Singh and the charge he helms are India’s most bewildering contradictions. He may insist his comments are just margin notes in a large government memo. But as the crisis he presides over becomes more urgent, and the irreconcilable paradoxes in India’s vision take a greater toll, he becomes more beleaguered. More entangled in argument. CONCLUDED The author is a Special Correspondent with Tehelka. ---------------------------- Read Part I of this Article here: | ||