Old Politics vs New Economy

Old Politics vs New Economy
That’s the Gowda-Murthy fight. And it’s pretty much clear to everyone whose side the new India is on
SHEKHAR GUPTA
The Indian Express

Shekhar Gupta It is easy to be disgusted with the way the H.D. Deve Gowda tirade against N.R. Narayana Murthy, his Infosys, and the entire IT industry has grown. At two of my recent meetings with Deve Gowda, he had asserted repeatedly that he could never, ever, be seen to be destroying what he had helped create. Many of the decisions that finally built Bangalore into a global IT powerhouse, he claimed with good justification, were either taken, or implemented under him as the state’s chief minister. So what has gone wrong since then?

Is it just the frustration with his own dismal politics at the moment? Having become a former prime minister at an age too young to retire from politics and at a juncture where he is forced to be the supporting actor even in his own state? Is it just his resentment at the IT industry’s ability to stand up to political bullying and question his cynical blocking of so many infrastructure plans in Bangalore just to show Congress and its chief minister, Dharam Singh, who is the boss? Or is it straightforward politics, that he believes there will be a fresh election soon, he

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is punch-drunk having lost his deputy Siddharamaiah and has decided on a rural versus urban, humble farmer versus rich techie agenda to shore up his dying politics?

What is more significant than all this, however, is that the victim of his ire, Narayana Murthy, has not buckled down. He has not only resigned as chairman of Bangalore International Airport Ltd but also, in a pithy letter to the chief minister, asked him some searching questions. Alright, Mr Deve Gowda attacked me because he may be like that only... but what about you, and the Congress party? Why have you remained so quiet? If Murthy too had given in, gone down on his knees in contrition, as you would normally expect an Indian industrialist to do, there would have been no story. That he has not, and has chosen to kick the system back in the shins instead, is the story. It marks a change in our political and social evolution that we must cherish, and build upon.

This is no clash of personalities or egos. In a reforming Indian economy, this is our first experience of an inevitable clash, between old politics and new economy. Our traditional old politician was at peace with the old economy, where the businessman depended on him for licences, quotas, permissions and clearances and then, to protect him from the extortionist inspector raj and finally, to keep the taxman and other likely raiders off his back. The new economy businesses need none of that.

The IT ministry came up before our political class thought of even setting up an IT ministry. The political class has never quite accepted this. Given half a chance, it would have tried to “rectify” this, by bringing the regulation and restrictions into the sector so that it could somehow acquire discretionary powers. That it can do no such thing, given the iconic status the new economy has acquired, its capacity to generate wealth — and jobs — and the international recognition it has achieved, must be galling for the practitioner of old politics. This is just the sentiment Gowda is reflecting. The mutually comfortable arrangement of the old economy was underlined so profoundly by the late Dhirubhai Ambani in an interview to T.N. Ninan (then at India Today) with his immortal “I will salaam anybody” quote. So dramatically has the situation changed today that both his sons would tell you they no longer need to call on anybody in Delhi for anything. And even when they were having their bare-knuckles fight over what was, after all, an industrial empire representing four per cent of India’s GDP, no politician, under two successive governments either dared, or saw the need, to meddle.

That is not the equation politicians of Gowda’s generation relish. They are loathe to cede the power space to the entrepreneur like this. They still see the businessman as the archetypal “sethji”, or “lala”, who has to wait outside their door and pay their personal and political bills. The new economy has demolished that paradigm. It needs almost nothing from the government, except decent infrastructure wherever they are based, and some land which, in our country, is still either controlled by the government, or must be acquired by it. This is the one power old politics still has and this is what Gowda has seized upon. Hence the attack on Murthy is to do with real estate — his motivation is to grab real estate and make profits in it (“at the cost of the poor farmers”) rather than expand an enterprise that will create more jobs, wealth, taxes and prestige.

But I would reckon Gowda is too shrewd not to know this won’t work in the long run, that nobody, even the most destitute farmer whose behalf he pretends to speak on, will buy any of this. Fifteen years of reform may not have drawn out all of the socialist venom in our systems but they have brought about enough change so that it is no longer so easy to paint a Murthy, a Tata, a Premji or an Ambani as mere capitalist usurpers and to turn the jobless millions on them. The new India loves and cherishes its entrepreneurs (capitalists?) more than it trusts its politicians.

I cannot conclude this without sharing a story from the brief period of Gowda’s prime ministership. Pravin Jain, the Indian Express picture editor in Delhi and his team had figured early on that the greatest photo-op in that period was the prime minister found asleep in his public appearances. They would catch him sleeping at functions, felicitations, in cabinet meetings, even while meeting foreign dignitaries and, sure enough, the front page was theirs for the asking. So one day, inevitably, I got invited for tea by C.M. Ibrahim, then information and broadcasting minister, and Gowda’s closest confidant and hatchet-man (though now they are estranged).

“Arrey bhai, Shekharji,” he said, “aap apne photographer ko bolo na kyon us bechare ke peechey pade hain (why won’t you ask your photographers why they are stalking that poor fellow)?” What can I do, I asked. If the prime minister is found sleeping in his public appearances, it is front page news. Why don’t you reason with the prime minster instead to be more alert, I added. Ibrahim’s answer was as hapless as it was — it now turns out — prescient. “Arrey bhai, yeh aadmi saara din prime minister nahin hai (this man is not a full-time prime minister),” he said. “From nine am to seven pm, he is prime minister of India, from seven pm to midnight he is chief minister of Karnataka, from midnight to two am, he is district magistrate of Hasan, then at 4.30 am he has to get up for puja, then breakfast, and then back to being prime minister of India. So when can he sleep?”

From being the lord of all of Bharatvarsha, from Hastinapur to Hasan, Gowda is now wallowing in his own isolation and irrelevance and taking his frustration out in a totally lost cause (for himself and the old politics he personifies) on the one man the rich and the poor all adore and the one industry the right and the left of our politics both love, and woo desperately. So here is my final argument and prediction: another hall-mark of our old politics was the cynical realism of its practitioners. It’s a matter of time before this truth dawns on our youngest former prime minister as well and you’d see him cutting his losses and back-tracking, if only the Congress would stay firm.

Postscript: At the height of the Murli Manohar Joshi versus IIM battle, which in many ways was part of a similar old politics versus new economy phenomenon, I had written a National Interest (‘Wireless Wimps’, IE, February 21, 2004) accusing our new economy leaders of not standing up to him, of protesting in decaffeinated English. It’s time I took that back now as far as Narayana Murthy is concerned.

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