Author: M.D. Nalapat
Publication: Sans Serif
Date: April 29, 2011
URL: https://wearethebest.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/
While some NGOs are run by sincere individuals
interested not in personal but in social gain, many of the organisations active
in India act as milch cows for those controlling them. For example, a top
journalist got formed an NGO headed by his son,and then used his contacts
in foreign embassies to ensure a huge flow of grants to the organisation,
enough to ensure that Junior could leave India and live in Europe. Several
senior officials set up NGOs and "Think-tanks" after retirement
that are creative only in the ways in which they collect funds. Many times,
the so-called "independent" NGO acts as a mouthpiece for foreign
donors, expressing their point of view as "Indian opinon", an example
being a well-funded NGO run by a former naval officer who joins many others
in faithfully parroting any line that is fed to him by US or EU agencies during
the many occasions when he gets invited there to nod approvingly at the grotesque
policy prescriptions that they adopt for India. Across the world, the debris
of states that have failed because of following such advice is ubiquitious,
yet because of the fact that the only way to get funding and fellowships from
the US or the EU is to toe their general line, the big cities are filled with
"analysts" and "experts" who fill newspaper columns and
television space retailing what their benefactors in Washington, Paris and
London (the three "saviours of the Libyan people") want them to
say.
The first priority in India - and other countries
in the vicinity - is to take care of family and friends. An example is the
so-called National Security Advisory Board. Members of this august body come
at least once a month to the national capital, where they are put up in 5-star
hotels in exchange for giving their views on subjects as diverse as Fiji and
Moratua. Not that any of these opinions gets taken seriously, much less gets
integrated into policy. The purpose of the NSAB is to accomodate old friends
in a comfortable sinecure and make them understand how much they are appreciated.
Most of the distinguished members are regular guests of the nominating authority.
During his time as National Security Advisor
(1998-2004), Brajesh Mishra ensured at almost every individual who treated
him to lunch or dinner at the India International Centre (otherwise known
as Jurassic Park, not because of the advanced age of most members, but for
the fact that most remain firm admirers of the Nehru era, and are therefore
clearly delighted at the dawn of Nehru Era II in 2004 under the charming leadership
of Sonia Gandhi, the present head of the family. One of his successors, the
brilliant, acerbic M K Narayanan (who ensured that the Intelligence Bureau
was given a much greater priority in the security system than agencies such
as RAW) followed Mishra in filling the NSAB with his buddies, a practice that
gained him immense popularity in the small circle of retired admirals, generals
and officials who collectively form the Brains Trust for the conference circuit.
The Patron Saint of the NGO community is Sonia
Gandhi, who has sought to make an NGO headed by her - the National Advisory
Council - a super-government, able to inflict its views on a government where
prominent ministers such as Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Home Minister
Palaniappan Chidambaram are openly subservient to her dictates. In departments
across the system, including in the crucial field of Education, the influence
of the NGOs ( many of whom get foreign funding and have foreign staff) is
all-pervasive, which is why so many ministers come up with ideas that are
designed to wreck what little excellence remains within the system. One of
the ministers close to Sonia Gandhi is Education Minister Kapil Sibal, ordinarlily
a first-class intellect. However, recently he has been coming up with policy
prescriptions clearly cooked in some NGO pot in London or in Luxembourg, that
would have the effect of destroying quality school education in the country.
India would then join the many other poor countries where the only way to
get a halfway useful education would be to go abroad. The NGO-inspired suggestions
of the minister in the field of education have horrified parents across the
country and unified them against his government, but in the Congress Party,
there is only one vote that counts, and that is Sonia Gandhi's, so Sibal is
safe. More so as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has entrusted the preparation
of a road map for educating a country where more than 40% of the population
is under 40 to a close friend, the 79-year old Professor Yash Pal. One of
the benefits of being in government is the easy way in which friends and relatives
can be obliged, some with deals, others through sinecures, and Manmohan Singh
is no different from other politicians who look only within the circle of
their friends to fill jobs that require real skills and commitment.
Hypocrisy is not second nature to politcians
in India, it is the first. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has a constitiuency
known for drug and people smuggling, but interestingly, several of the worthies
active in these key national tasks are now busy seeking to elect his son as
a Member of the Legislative Assembly. The Central Board of Direct Taxes (
under an officer close to a lady in the Finance Ministry who seems to have
powers equal to the minister himself, for some unexplained reason) seems unaware
of the financial standing of Mukherjee Junior, although now that he is in
politics, such facts will begin to seep out, as they are in the case of other
high-profile siblings such as the son of Home Minister Chidambaram (and his
friend Sanjeev Hooda) or the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi herself, who has built
a fortune in a relatively short timespan purely - one would assume - owing
to his genius and insight and not because ministers ranging from the Home
Minister to the Chief Ministers of Delhi and Haryana dance attendance on Robert
Vadra, whose activities have become so blatant that even the tame Indian media
(which usually looks the other way at VVIP peccadillos) has begun to murmur.
Clearly, Robert Vadra or Karthik Chidambaram are young men in a hurry to join
the same pantheon inhabitated by Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, an understandable
objective for two such capable youngsters.
Because of the fear of getting harassed by
the Intelligence Bureau (which has reverted ti the Nehru era days by becoming
a house agency for the Ruling Family) or the Income-tax authorities, media
houses do not examine the activities of VVIPs the way it happens in civilized
countries such as the UK or the US. Indeed, the Supreme Court of India has
just decreed that the religion followed by Sonia Gandhi is not a matter that
the public should be aware of. Hopefully, the judges who gave this order will
enlighten an eager citizenry about just what facets of a public figure are
suitable for the public to know. This columnist believes that the public are
entitled to every scrap of information about those in whose hands the running
of the country vests, but this is clearly not the view of the Supreme Court
of India.
Given such a mindset, it is hardly surprising
that so little is known about the personal and financial details of VVIPs.
Indeed, the Election Commission of India actually censures those who make
"personal attacks" ( such as pointing to examples of corruption)
against other candidates. If the officials ( and the Election Commission in
democratic India is filled only with unelected officials who have never stood
for election even in the college union) running the EC have their way, any
attempt at giving negative information about a candidate would be outlawed,
the way exit polls have been. Of course, political VVIPs in India are delighted.
They can safely go about enriching themselves and selling the country short,
aware that the Election Commission will go to bat for them should there be
the threat of exposure during a campaign. Sadly for those pinning their faith
in this noble institution, the Supreme Court has now decreed that the public
do not have the right to know the same facts about their rulers as voters
in the US or the EU do. Hopefully the judges will reconsider.
The Nehru era has been marked by tight control
over citizens, depriving them of autonomy and forcing them to get government
approval for any action. Now three admirers of the Nehru family have demanded
that India should go the way of Pakistan, and impose a One Dish rule in weddings
and feasts. If Rajiv Shukla (who leaped from journalism to cricket with considerable
finesse twenty years ago, and from there to cricketing administration) and
his two fellow-members of Sonia Gandhi's National Advisory Council have their
way, there would be policemen at each wedding to ensure that not more than
one dish is being served. Shukla is likely to next suggest that permits be
mandatory before any wedding feast can be organized, and indeed before the
bride and groom disappear on their honeymoon. After she took over power in
2004 (not in law but in fact), Sonia Gandhi has made India an unpleasant place
for people to visit, getting imposed such absurd rules as refusing to allow
a person to come back to the country within six months of leaving it, or demanding
permission from the Home Ministry (which takes 25 years to process a request
during the period when it functions at high speed) before holding an international
conference. Slowly, the country is getting strangled by a web of regulations
that are each designed to squeeze bribes out of the very people who are today
at the cusp of going into the streets to protest a system that makes them
suffer so that a few can enrich themselves.
- The writer is Vice-Chair, Manipal Advanced
Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair & Professor of Geopolitics, Manipal
University, Haryana State, India.
