All the president’s persons

If things are just left to proceed at will, the outcome may go either way: a dynamic economy and those forging it may be so hobbled by the worsening of governance that they may put enough pressure on the political class to mend its ways, to improve governance or let governance deteriorate to such an extent that Bihar and UP are generalised, and economic growth is once again pulled down.

Why is it that, to take the obvious contrast, in industry new leaders are emerging by the year, leaders who are doing better and more innovative things; but in public life second-raters are giving way to third-raters, politicians are giving way to politicians dependent on criminals, and the latter to criminals-who-have-become-politicians?

Why is it that while our entrepreneurs are venturing into newer and newer fields, that while they are registering conquests in more and more distant countries, that while they are thinking and planning farther into the future and transforming their operations today so that they may outdo the world in the distant future, why is it that while in one sphere we see these features, in the other sphere, our politicians are stoking ever narrower sections, why is their horizon becoming shorter and shorter?

This brief book is about features in the structure of the ‘parliamentary system’ — actually, that should be ‘in the structure of what we have made of the parliamentary system’ — which hurtle us into the kind of politics that we see today, which steer power into the hands of the sorts of politicians we see today. And about the structure that we may adopt as an alternative.

One structure will induce conduct of one kind; another structure will make some other type of conduct more profitable. Our tax system of the 1950s and 1960s, with its extortionate taxes, ensured neither higher revenues nor equality. It fanned the black economy. As the rates have been lowered, compliance has improved. Similarly, under the licence-quota raj, knowing the technology or the markets was not a fraction as important as knowing the minister for commerce and industries, and the civil servants in the DGTD and the Office of the Controller of Imports and Exports — yes, exports too; even to export something you had made and earn the foreign exchange the country so desperately needed, you needed permission which only these worthies could give. That structure induced one kind of effort, it brought one kind of entrepreneur to the top — the one whose core competence lay in his ability to manipulate the state apparatus. As that structure has been dismantled, we see an entirely different kind of conduct among our entrepreneurs, we see an entirely new type of entrepreneur rise to the top.

... contd.