Open letter to Gandhi scion as India enters 'Rahul Kaalam'

Dear Rahul,

I hope congratulations are due. In what is the country’s worst-kept secret, we all know you are the Congress’s heir-apparent and that you will become the next prime minister if the UPA comes back to power in 2014 – or even earlier. In the run-up to the big job, you are expected to play the role of party head – possibly by being anointed working president.

Most newspapers on Wednesday quoted your party general secretary Janardhan Dwivedi about your future role. Here’s what The Indian Express said, quoting him: “There is no suspense about it. He has a role, which is increasing constantly. In natural course, his role will go on increasing. This is what Congressmen want and this is what in their opinion is natural. There is no doubt about it that Congressmen want his role to increase.”

It would be good if you actually take charge, for the country needs someone to be in charge – we cannot afford to have a hand-wringing PM who takes no responsibility for anything. But permit me to be critical: you yourself have shown no great inclination to take charge so far, as you have been dashing off to political trouble-spots for photo-ops but have proffered no concrete solution to any of the critical issues facing the country – barring one, which is poverty.

However, you should also know that you can’t eradicate poverty with pre-election giveaways. Poverty can only be eradicated if there is a growing economy generating enough jobs and wealth for you to redistribute. In the first four years of the UPA, the economy was at least generating lots of tax revenues, but now it is not. The growth rate is slowing, revenues are slowing, and inflation is roaring. This means, your anti-poverty programmes cannot be funded without giving serious thought to economic issues.

You may not be a believer in astrology. But many Indians believe that you should not start important things when the time is inauspicious — in rahu kalam. The economy is entering one such inauspicious period thanks to UPA-1’s karma of overspending. You should not be starting anything important in UPA-2 till the bad phase passes.

The Indian political-economy is entering a bad period. Your government has been caught with its pants down on corruption. Your ministers are doing questionable things (Read this , and this, and this) . Even your PM is no saint. Almost nothing on the economic front is going right, and your mother, and her bad advisors on the National Advisory Council, are planning more deadbeat schemes to ruin things. You should tell her to hold off for a while.

Here are the top five things you need to address as soon as you become the party’s working president – or whatever.

Reform one should be electoral reform. You have been talking about giving the Lokpal constitutional status, saying that would be a “game-changer.” But the real game-changer would be electoral funding reform. Black money is generated primarily by the political need to spend so much on electoral reforms – this means corruption is rooted in electoral politics. If you don’t agree — ask Andimuthu Raja and his political benefactor M Karunanidhi, whose daughter is in jail for trying to raise funny money to run his TV channel.

If you can scrap the nonsensical (and much misused) MP Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS) , you will find enough funds – Rs 4,000 crore every year — to finance all candidates’ election funding without seeking additional money from the exchequer. If you are not afraid of your own MPs, this is the sensible thing to do.

Reform two concerns energy policy. The fiscal situation is sinking primarily because your government is unable to reform the one thing we need in plenty: energy. India is grossly underpricing energy – whether it is petroleum products or coal or power. Only the poor should get energy subsidies, but currently everyone enjoys it. The rich buy diesel cars, and rich farmers use subsidised diesel pumps and cheap agricultural power. The less rich middle-class Indians drive two-wheelers that use costly petrol. Mamata Banerjee is fighting the wrong cause.

Indian coal is priced at one-third the international price – which is why we are going to become huge coal importers over the next few years. Look at the idiocy of this policy. We will make our own coal unviable, but we will import costly coal to fuel our power plants. We will not raise power tariffs, and our state electricity boards are becoming sick.

The PM’s biggest achievement was the nuclear deal, which was sold to us as important for our energy future, but in the name of people’s movements — and you have been talking up their cause — both Jaitapur and Kudankulam are in trouble. Do you see the mess our energy sector is in? We need an integrated energy policy – and this calls for pricing reforms.

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Reform three is budget reform. For too long politicians in this country – and your party is a prime example of it – have treated the exchequer and taxpayer revenues as personal loot that can be used to fund re-election campaigns. The NDA left you an economy with rising revenues. But after seven years of UPA, we are running a huge fiscal deficit that will cross 5 percent of GDP for sure this year, and will get worse next year – unless you do something about it.

Overborrowing by the government is making money costly for everybody, and raising interest rates. Businessmen are not investing any more. Ask the RBI. In the name of helping the poor, your government has made housing unaffordable for everybody but the super-rich. Clearly, you need to rein in irresponsible spending. A simple rule will help: if every new spending idea is accompanied by a special tax to fund it, it will serve as an automatic check on fiscal irresponsibility.

Reform four is to reduce the social initiative overload. We know you heart bleeds for the poor, but the poor would be better off if we also use our heads. Your government has tried to solve all the evils of the past in a few years – usually before elections – and has legislated the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (or NREGA), the Right to Education, the Right to Information, and now the Food Security Bill. One is told that your government is also planning a Universal Health Insurance legislation. You also want to help farmers by raising minimum support prices just before the elections.

Of these initiatives, only the RTI and NREGA make enormous sense. This is not to say that food security is not needed. We do need it. But your scheme is a disaster waiting to happen. If you want to know why, read this . It is best to use NREGA as your flagship, keep improving and extending it, and then think about food security. Just think about it: if people have money (which is NREGA’s basic intention), they can buy food without your Food Security Bill.

But the more important point is this: legislating something is not the same as implementing it well. Peter Drucker said that any organisation that tries to achieve more than one or two important objectives will probably fail. Given the sheer inefficiencies inbuilt into government, how do you expect it to deliver on so many schemes with such large outlays and with such potential impact?

I can guarantee you, most of the money will go down the drain. The country would respect you more if you tried to do one thing really well for which you will be remembered. The Left Front did one thing well – land reforms – and ruled for more than three decades. Your government will fail if it tries a hundred different things and implements all of it poorly.

Reform five is most important – and only you can do it. Once you become working president, you should give yourself a specific term – say five years – and announce that after five years you will do only social work in a personal capacity. It does nobody any good to have a permanent dynasty to rule India. You yourself would have noticed, your party has only sycophants and time-servers because the Gandhi family places a glass ceiling for promising politicians.  No worthwhile politician can hope to rise to the top as long as you are there.

The best thing you can do is announce the end of dynastic politics. I am not sure you will like this advice, but remember, the political economy is entering rahu kalam. It’s going to be a crown of thorns even for you.

There is only one letter difference between rahu kalam and Rahul kalam.

Your Sincerely

A Critic of Dynasty Politics Who Will Only Tell You the Truth