Leadership and vision

KC Singh

As 2016 heads toward its end, the bell tolls for four crucial anniversaries having contemporary relevance. November 1 is the golden anniversary of Punjab, formed in 1966 after a protracted agitation since the 1956 reorganisation of states on a linguistic basis. It also is 25 years since the Soviet Union’s collapse, which Harvard's Francis Fukuyama dubbed, as his book's title reads, “The End of History”. Twenty years ago P. V. Narasimha Rao ended his prime ministership, having adjusted the Indian economy and foreign policy to the post-Cold War world. September 11 was the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attack by Al Qaeda on the US. The consequences of the US fight against radical Islam persist.  

Punjab over fifty years became the granary of India but also the cradle of militancy; the sword hand of India but also the perennial rebel against Union highhandedness. The Akali Dal thrived on sectarian appeal, freebies to farmers, P.S. Badal's easy accessibility and non-confrontational politics. The Badal government's current term (2012-17) saw his family overlay the old system with nepotism, brazen conflicts of interest, appointment of halqa chiefs, like in the Soviet Union, to oversee administration in designated areas. The triumvirate that once ran the Akali Dal i.e. G.S.Tohra heading the SGPC or the religious wing, Talwandi controlling the party and P.S. Badal the government has been superseded by the Badal family or surrogates controlling all three. The grand old party built on sacrifices of millions, first to create Punjab and then during the Emergency to resist repression, is today a mere instrument to advance power and pelf of the Badals.  

The Congress provided historically the non-sectarian and Delhi-influenced counterpoint to the Akali Dal. It overcame Sikh ire over Bluestar by projecting Capt Amarinder Singh, who had resigned his Parliament seat over that attack on the Golden Temple, first as the state party chief then as the chief ministerial candidate, reaping also his image as presumptively honest being born a prince, in the 1997 election. He is still the Congress' face, employing social media, coffee chats, and interaction with youth etc for electioneering. He has experience but a reputation for inaccessibility, laid-back governance and overdependence on courtiers. 

The debutant AAP has turned the next election into a three-way contest. People want change, accountability, and honesty of purpose to eliminate the drug mafia, create jobs, clean up cities and improve health, education and other public services. AAP brings that hope but without experience, whereas the Akali Dal and the Congress bring experience without hope. 

Globally the trend favours new political entities that address people's aspirations and problems more imaginatively, even if they are maverick parties or idiosyncratic individuals like Donald Trump. Italy's Five Star Movement or M5S was founded by Beppe Grillo, a comedian, actor and activist who is populist and Utopian, abhors corruption, neither right nor left ideologically, and seeks replacing elected representative democracy by direct, Athenian-type people's rule. While they control some cities, national power may be close if the constitutional amendments proposed in a December 4 referendum are passed. They choose candidates online, rejecting anyone who has served before. 

Punjab urgently needs good governance and a visionary remodelling of its economy-- agricultural and industrial. After two drought years, Punjab from 1966 set off the Green Revolution, providing 62% of India's wheat and 8% of rice. But the wheat-rice rotation that then commenced has wrought ecological havoc with water table depletion and fertiliser leaching. From 1985-86 to 2000-01 the area under wheat rose from 32 to 34 lakh hectares but under rice from 17 to 26 lakh hectares. Meanwhile Punjab has urbanised and de-industrialised. It needs non-polluting high-technology industry on the California model. To make that transition Punjab needs to upgrade its infrastructure, education and health systems and improve urban quality of life.

Contrariwise, all parties are peddling subsidies, protectionism for non-competitive units, hackneyed schemes etc instead of a vision for non-polluting, low carbon, high-technology industrial Punjab and a new white and green revolution to tap into the supply chains of food for the aspirational middle class in India and the Gulf.

Russia, twenty-five years after the Soviet collapse, is being assertively repositioned by President Vladimir Putin to regain global influence and strategic space. However, if Hillary Clinton is elected President, convinced as her campaign is that Russians hacked the Democratic Party's computer and are leaking emails to harm its candidate, a new Cold War may commence. Germany and France are already threatening sanctions against Russia over Syria. The worsening Russia-US relations will be a challenge for India as it balances the two. With budgetary pressure due to low oil and gas prices, Russia is developing "hybrid" capability to wage war by non-military means. The US and its allies are bound to react, if Trump does not win. A concomitant rise of China and its growing convergence with Russia bury the Fukuyama thesis about history ending. In Asia it seems to be rebooting. 

Two books are out on P.V.Narasimha Rao. "Half Lion" by Vinay Sitapati traces his evolution as a politician. Rao, he explains, slipped reform past the Congress' Neanderthals by claiming continuity with the past. Deng Xiaoping in China did likewise by chanting Maoism while unravelling it. Ashis Nandy says Indian tradition is "to alter the dominant culture from within by showing dissent to be part of orthodoxy." Ironically reformist PM Manmohan Singh was stymied by the Congress; Narendra Modi wrestles similarly with the RSS' nativist instincts to thwart reform. Rao's reset is still incomplete. 

The year and President Barack Obama's presidency end with a military operation under way to eject ISIS from Mosul and compel them to retreat to Syria. The US is also more forthrightly confronting Pakistani duplicity in both fighting and nurturing terror groups. The entire Islamic region to India's west is in turmoil. Al Qaeda has replanted itself in Syria, implementing sharia less harshly than ISIS, hoping to take its place as it declines. The conflagration across West Asia has been worsened by Shia-Sunni contestation and Turkey's Kurdish nightmare and desire to extend control to the Aleppo-Kirkuk axis. The war the US began in 2001 is today wider, more complex and assuming a neo-Cold War dimension with the Russia-Iran axis solidifying. 

Each anniversary reminds that leadership and vision are the prerequisites for stability and growth, whether in a province or a nation or a region. Deep cogitation over human destiny, and not Diwali firework, is in order.  

— The writer is a former Secretary, MEA