The Hindu Business Line : We the people...

“Our cities are getting paralysed because the urban infrastructure is collapsing. Bangalore is a perfect example of how not to manage an urban conglomerate. And people from North ask what are you complaining about?"

Picture by Anand Tiwari

Mr Jayaprakash Narayan

Rasheeda Bhagat

I am like the little boy who appears at the end of the superb speech that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was not allowed to make in the Lok Sabha before the trust vote… the village kid who studied under a kerosene lamp; only I didn’t have to walk miles to school. I had a school in my village in coastal Andhra Pradesh.”

This is how Jayaprakash Narayan, President of Lok Satta, which was initially launched as a “people’s movement” but became a political party in October 2006, describes his childhood. (Dr Singh had said: “The first ten years of my life were spent in a village with no drinking water supply, no electricity, no hospital, no roads and nothing that we today associate with modern living. I had to walk miles to school, I had to study in the dim light of a kerosene oil lamp. This nation gave me the opportunity to ensure that such would not be the life of our children in the foreseeable future.”)

With his father in the Indian Railways, the child lived with his aunt and went to a Telugu medium school. What angers him is that several decades later the education our children get is awful. “I had fabulous education. Despite all these obstacles my generation had excellent education.”

As many students did in those days, after school he joined the Andhra Loyola College and then a medical college. He “sailed through” and qualified as a doctor in 1978. But his medical college days also coincided with the Emergency; “I remember literally every minute of June 12 of 1975 (Indira Gandhi’s election declared invalid), the midnight of June 25-26 (when Emergency was declared) and March 21, 1977 (when it ended). The BBC was my staple; it changed everything. The anger we felt at the Emergency, the incarceration and muzzling of the press, the sense of injustice and then the collapse of the Janata government. There was this angst… a tremendous void, the misery we felt was unbelievable.”

So Narayan couldn’t do what most doctors from Andhra did in those days, “take the next flight to the US. Somebody suggested why not join the IAS, and I wrote the exam and walked in.”

This was in 1980; he was trained in Karimnagar district and after the usual round of posts as sub-collector, collector and so on, he was posted as special officer at the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant in 1984. “This was when my socialist scales fell. It was then India’s biggest public sector enterprise with an investment of Rs 8,000 crore; peanuts today but a lot of money in those days. Until then, like many youngsters I believed public sector was good and moral by definition, and private sector was probably bad. But here I realised that the public sector in India is the private sector of those in office.”

After seeing “the privilege, the patronage, the petty tyranny and the horror” that prevailed there, he became a passionate champion of people’s empowerment and decentralisation in local governments, and “freedom and choice in economic activity but with proper regulation. I also realised that government should not be the one to do business. I’ve built all my life in government, and out of it, around these principles.”

So did he leave government service in 1996 because of disenchantment?

“No, that’s not the right word. Personally I had a very fulfilling career and a wonderful time.”

So was it frustration that he couldn’t make a difference?

“Of course you can always make a difference but relative to what should happen, even the best of us, leave alone a piddling government servant… an IAS officer… I dare say even a minister, a chief minister or a prime minister, can do little. Given the systemic constraints and the horrid conditions we are in, your ability to deliver is no more than 20 on a scale of 100. That is something I understood very clearly. Some of us who delivered 20 were lionised because most of us delivered only 5! And we think we are kings or god’s gift to this country. But I never had that illusion.”

Prized postings

Narayan says he was a “very privileged person, highly respected and given some of the most prized postings… as the Collector of the southern districts, SO of the Steel Plant, MD of the infrastructure corporation. I also wielded a lot of authority, and was respected by both Congress and the TDP (Telugu Desam Party). Unlike in Tamil Nadu, where habitually the next government arrests officers, I was treated with great respect by both parties. And I fought with every CM on issues and they respected me. So I was a very lucky and spoilt fellow unlike most civil servants in India!”

But he also realised that a larger systemic reform was required. “A government job gives you an enormous opportunity to learn even though you may not be able to do much.”

So he thought things through and the “same reasons which compelled me to join also compelled me to leave. If the constitutional system is malfunctioning, or functioning sub-optimally, then you have a duty to set that right. But you have that mandate not as a government servant, but as a citizen to mobilise public opinion and work with the political system to change it.”

So he quit government service in 1996 and Lok Satta was started. After rejecting the option to become a political party for 10 years, it did make the leap in 2006 and till now it has contested four by-elections.

Did it win any seats?

“Of course not! India is not at that stage yet. We are the only party committed to not giving a single rupee for vote or distributing a single drop of liquor. I challenge any party in Andhra, Karnataka or Tamil Nadu to say we’ll do that and win a seat. But we got 12 per cent vote, and are regarded as the largest of the small parties in the State. But we are still a small party.”

So will he make it some day?

“Someday, yes, but not today. Because it will take time; but we have enormous public support and credibility. We are probably known to about 70 per cent of the people and have a membership of half a million.”

Narayan maintains that today honesty is incompatible with survival in politics and is amazed that political parties were incredulous at the corruption involved in winning the recent trust vote in Parliament. He believes the system must be changed to ensure that political parties are allotted seats on the basis of their total vote share. If this doesn’t happen, the two national parties – Congress and the BJP – will continue to “be elbowed out” from more and more States by regional parties.

Politics and corruption

A new system, he says, can bring more educated and decent people into politics. He argues that when the share of the major parties falls below a certain percentage in the States, “people sense this party is over. So even if I wish to vote for that party, I won’t because I don’t want to waste my vote.”

Apart from hatred and anger resulting in tactical voting, the “other drawback of our electoral system is that you can win only by doing two things. Either you pander to the lowest common denominator like caste, or give Rs 2 a kg rice or free colour TVs, legitimate but improper. The other thing is illegitimate and dangerous — liquor and money.”

Maintaining that in Andhra Pradesh an MLA has to spend Rs 5-10 crore to win a seat by bribing voters with money or liquor, he says: “That is why when people are horrified at a crore of rupees exchanging hands in Delhi (as displayed by the BJP MPs in Parliament) I think it is hypocritical.”

With such corruption inherent in the system, only a “certain class of politicians with money and muscle power are coming in. A consequence of this is that they are not only elbowing out decent, clean and middle classes from politics, evoking revulsion in people, but public policy also suffers. Because you have in the government people who have no understanding of policy issues and all they do are transfers, postings, contracts and tenders and interfere in crime investigations.”

All this, he reasons, should induce us to move towards some form of proportionality-based system but with a sufficiently high threshold; “once you reach this, your vote share is changed into seat share. So you don’t have to resort to such measures to win. And don’t expect morality out of morality; create a system where morality actually gives political dividend. This will motivate decent people to enter politics and the conduct of politicians will change; I see a win-win for everybody.”

In the same manner, he wants the dismal quality of education in our country to be uplifted by allowing private investment of the right kind; not from “paanwallahs and liquor barons but from decent people.” Making a pitch for the sacking of regulatory bodies such as the Medical Council of India, the AICTE, the UGC etc, he points to the problems faced by Amrita Patel (NDDB Chairperson) when she started a medical college in H.M. Patel’s name; “the problems she encountered from Day 1 were horrendous; both from the MCI and the State government. She said I won’t take capitation fees, but need to charge a fee of Rs 1.4-1.5 lakh, and they said you can’t do that; instead you too can charge capitation fees! In Andhra Pradesh the capitation fee for a medical undergraduate seat is around Rs 40-50 lakh. She said I won’t do it; everything here is transparent. Now this is the level of discourse when genuine people want to get into higher education and it is disgusting. So, I think we have to remove this monopoly and this vice-like grip of the UGC and other bodies which is completely destroying the system.”

Quota and creamy layer

On quotas in education, he has an interesting take; extend the creamy layer criteria to all segments that get reservation. Don’t allow any Collector’s son or a minister’s daughter to get reservation, and, much more important, move towards weightage from quotas and blocs, as that is ultimately a zero sum gate. He suggests a weightage of 10-12 per cent for marks in competitive examinations in higher education as well as employment on grounds of rural background and poverty — urban or rural. “But don’t have a quota. This will cut across all castes and religions. A Muslim gets it, a Hindu — upper or lower caste — or a Christian gets it too. So the heartburn is no longer there. And there is an aspiration; unless you reach a certain level you won’t get the benefit.”

He recalls a year in Andhra Pradesh medical admission test, where “an announcement was made on the public address system asking all scheduled caste candidates to go home; they were all selected as there were more seats than candidates!”

Narayan says the anger against reservations is on the manner in which it is done. Recalling the violent anti-quota stir that Gujarat witnessed in 1979, he says it was triggered by a physically-challenged student, a State topper, who wrote the PG entrance and “topped in every branch. And yet he could not get a specialisation of his choice, as they had only x number of seats in Gujarat in that specialisation and all of them were reserved for various communities!” Last year a similar thing happened in Andhra Pradesh; the topper wanted Radiology and Imaging, but couldn’t get it for the same reason, but there was no violence.

“The ugly, non-transparent and bureaucratic way in which quotas are decided makes people get mad. So I’m saying change the system and bring in weightages based on economic criteria as well as merit.”

India’s future

Even though he is appalled at the fiscal profligacy adopted by the UPA government (the recent agri loan waiver) and the rush of promises by political parties such as free rice, colour TVs, unemployment dole, etc, Narayan is gung ho about India’s future, despite several problems.

“The economy will slow down — even the FM is now talking of 7 to 8 per cent growth rate; it may even slow down to 6 per cent, which might be a shocker for us after so many good years.” The more frightening problem is of “cities getting paralysed because our urban infrastructure is collapsing, though we pretend it doesn’t matter. Bangalore is a perfect example of how not to manage an urban conglomerate; Chennai is one of the better cities. And, people who come from the North — Patna or Lucknow — say, ‘what are you complaining about?’!

Apart from an enormous effort to improve infrastructure, if we also don’t make conscious and serious attempts to build hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small towns, we’ll be in big trouble.”

But the growing numbers of educated middle-class— “which could become the single biggest constraint to India’s economic growth and the whole demographic dividend will be a nightmare if we don’t improve the quality of our education” — and improvement in some aspects of governance such as public healthcare in States like Kerala, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Maharasthra, and the hope that “our leaders will realise that on certain aspects of development we’ll have to work together” makes him optimistic about India’s future. “You have to be an optimist; what else can you do? Blow your brains out or become a naxalite!”

Satta-speak

Communal divide: Am I worried? Yes and no. Deeply worried because politics is always in favour of communal divide — whether religion or caste. And no, because it won’t go beyond a point. Not because we are a greatly wise people but we are a practical people and realise that we have to coexist and society doesn’t allow us to go beyond a line. Even in Gujarat (2002 pogrom) it was ultimately the society that put a stop to it. True, it was willing to go beyond what you and I would accept, but not beyond a certain limit.

Music: One of my great regrets in life is that I wasn’t born a Tamilian to learn classical music. I enjoy music without knowing much about it; Indian light music and old film songs.

Reading: Biographies, history, political economy and of course humour; I love P.G. Wodehouse and have probably read all his books several times.

Favourite book: Difficult to name one. In recent years Guns Germs and Steel by Jaret Diamond... a marvellous book. Another book, not a classic and a little less elegant but a marvellous book nevertheless, is A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. Also Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics.

Relaxation: I love humour — in films, in books. All this dialogue is intellectual… in my heart I’m still the village kid in Dr Manmohan Singh’s speech.

Favourite movie: Come September is my all-time favourite.

Food: Simple vegetarian food, though I do eat non-vegetarian, but that is rare.

Naxalism: My stand has been consistent; they haven’t grown suddenly and can’t be contained suddenly. The manner in which the State functions, the lack of opportunity and dignity, and such injustice and corruption makes people angry. Take Andhra Pradesh or Karnataka, for example; where is the political process except on the day of elections when you offer money and liquor and all kinds of goodies like free rice, colour TVs, etc? To me the surprise is that only a small number of people have become naxalites.

Dream for India: If we can fulfil the potential of every child irrespective of birth — today there is grave injustice on that front — I’ll die a happy man.

Picture by Anand Tiwari

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in