The citizenry of India is too patient and undemanding of its leaders. True, when they commit egregious crimes and brazen acts of impropriety, the public is not averse to voting them out of office. Yet everyday acts of omission and commission and particularly dereliction of the duty of accountability for revenue mobilised through taxation, and expended from the public exchequer, is easily forgotten and forgiven.
The validity of this observation was confirmed when Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee presented the third budget of the Congress-led UPA-II government to Parliament and the people on March 16. Although perhaps in no country is the annual budget exercise of the Central government marked by as much hype, and media coverage as in India, paradoxically none of the economic pundits who dominate television news channels and the print media on B-day understands the Union budget sufficiently to provide a coherent account of the taxation strategy and expenditure priorities of the Union government. At best the post-budget analyses of ace economists are akin to those of the seven blind men of Hindustan describing parts of an elephant by touch and surmising the full form and shape of the beast.
This confusion is the outcome of the archaic presentation style and format of the budget which leaves the public (including your editor who edited India’s first two business magazines) at best minimally wiser about the tax-and-spend priorities of the Union government. The fault is not in us but in the deliberate opacity and lack of accountability of the Union finance minister and bureaucrats of North Block, New Delhi. For instance, it’s well known that one of the biggest expenditure heads of the Central government is the annual wages, salaries and pensions of the estimated 4 million ministers, bureaucrats and staff on its payroll. Yet this massive annual expenditure estimated at Rs.150,000 crore is not disclosed separately in the Union budget.
Curiously, the opacity of the Union budget is in sharp contrast to the high degree of transparency demanded from business enterprises by the Companies Act, 1956 and the department of company law and affairs. In their annual reports, corporates are obliged by law to declare the company’s wage bill (including the names, educational qualifications, experience and designations of all employees earning more than Rs.24 lakh per year), details of physical output and value thereof, together with a plethora of other information. Likewise, the citizenry which is expected to contribute a massive Rs.1077,612 crore to the Central treasury by way of direct and indirect taxes in 2012-13, is entitled to an itemised account under all major heads detailing how the money was spent last year and to what effect in terms of outcomes and assets creation, and how it is proposed to be spent in the current year with predicted outcomes.
Meanwhile academic and media pundits would do well to admit that there’s a strong element of the emperor’s clothes hysteria about the annual Union budget presentation rite. It needs to be exposed as a massively fraudulent exercise in taxing and spending without accountability.
Beginning of the end of dynasty politics
Although it may not seem apparent on the face of it, the recently concluded assembly elections in the Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh (pop. 200 million) in the north and Tamil Nadu (pop. 74 million) in the south, signal the beginning of the end of dynasty politics which has bedeviled the nation for the past half-century and is the prime cause of its rock-bottom human development ranking in the global community of nations. The striking feature of these elections was the crushing rejection of Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty and heir-apparent of the Congress party which has ruled India for over half a century after the nation wrested independence from British rule in 1947. Despite Rahul barnstorming UP for over three months before the election, the Congress won only 28 of the 403 seats in the state assembly.
Down south as well, in the Tamil Nadu state legislative election held in April 2011, the electorate of this relatively prosperous and literate state dumped the ruling DMK party led by chief minister M.K. Karunanidhi and his three sons and daughter, all of whom are top office-bearers of the party, into the dustbin. Disgusted with flagrant corruption and nepotism of the DMK, the voters preferred to recall AIADMK’s J. Jayalalithaa even though she has a slew of corruption and disproportionate assets cases pending against her in the courts. Presumably, Jayalalithaa’s saving grace is that as a single, unmarried woman she doesn’t carry the baggage of family. In short, even if belatedly, the Indian electorate has wised up to the reality that dynasty politics under which unqualified and inexperienced baba log automatically assume the mantle of party leadership, is synonymous with misgovernance and chaos.
Ex facie, the appointment of Akhilesh Yadav, son of former UP chief minister and Samajwadi Party (SP) supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, following the party’s stunning victory (engineered by Akhilesh) in the state as chief minister, seems to contradict this argument. But already disillusionment with Akhilesh’s inexperience and under-qualification for the job is setting in as SP goons are running riot, and reckless pre-poll promises made by him are proving difficult to fulfill.
The primary cause of the conspicuous failure of dynasty politics is that the baba log generation parachuted into apex level positions, have no experience of even running a company or NGO, let alone a country. Unschooled in leadership and intelligent decision-making, they quickly become architects of chaos and confusion.
According to author Patrick French (India: A Portrait) all political parties are actually family enterprises, with every single Congress member of the Lok Sabha owing his election and office to family connections and networks. Most opposition BJP MPs too, owe their election to connections with powerful political chieftains at the Centre and in the states. That’s why the Indian economy in which the State dominates the commanding heights, is paralysed by faulty policies, poor project implementation, chronic delays and pervasive corruption. Therefore the failure of the baba log brigade in the recent assembly elections is a good augury.
