Opinion Parivartan, Vikas: PM Modi won’t have much to list in his August 15 address

These were things that needed to be talked of from as important a pulpit as the Red Fort. Sadly, that is almost all we have done since then, talk about these things. On the ground, action has been pitifully inadequate. If the Prime Minister orders an inquiry into this dire absence of ‘parivartan’, he could find that as usual, Indian officialdom has got in the way. He may also find that had he trusted his chief ministers more, we may at least have seen dramatic change in states ruled by the BJP. He chose to trust high officials instead, holding regular video conferences with chief secretaries. And nothing happened. He misjudged the extraordinary skills Indian bureaucrats have to stymie change.

In his first address from the Red Fort, the Prime Minister made the grand gesture of abolishing the Planning Commission. Commentators, like your columnist, who believe that India will only prosper when we shake off the last vestiges of Soviet-style planning, cheered from the sidelines. I imagined, like others did, that with central planning tossed in history’s garbage bin, the government would get out of the business of doing business. I expected that at least in the service sector where officials have repeatedly shown that they are completely hopeless, there would by now be signs of privatisation. But Modi’s government continues to run the Ashoka Hotel and Air India at huge losses to the Indian taxpayer. Why? Is it because the same officials who manned the old Planning Commission continue to keep their jobs? Is it because clever officials told him that dramatic change was a bad idea? I do not know, but it is time that the Prime Minister found out.

Unsurprisingly, by the time it came to making his second speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort, his most ardent supporters had begun to feel disappointed. They saw that too little had changed and it had taken too long for these little changes to show results. The Prime Minister seemed not to notice, and again it could be because nobody is better at fooling our political leaders into a sense of false security than the mighty mandarins of Raisina Hill.

So India under Modi has trundled along much as it did before without showing any of the historic changes we had hoped for. The ordinary Indian’s interface with the State remains as ugly as ever, whether it is with law enforcement officials, tax inspectors or those officials supposedly charged with providing public services.

Meanwhile, officialdom has prospered. The Seventh Pay Commission will raise the salaries of one crore central government employees in spectacular fashion and their very generous perks will continue untouched. Why do we still have Pay Commissions? Why are the salaries of bureaucrats not raised on the basis of performance? Why are they not penalised when instead of cutting red tape they increase it by, for instance, giving themselves more powers to harass citizens? The new rules that force NGOs receiving foreign funds to declare intricate details about their assets are a fine example of this. As are constant cries to go out and find ‘black money’.

This column has pointed out before that tax evasion does not amount to changing the colour of money from white to black, what does is when people suddenly become very rich without doing any work. The only people in India who do this are politicians and bureaucrats. The only people who need huge stashes of ‘black money’ to fuel their electoral machines are politicians. If only the Prime Minister had noticed this already.

As things stand, the Prime Minister will not have much to list by way of ‘parivartan’ and ‘vikas’ in his August 15 address. If nobody has told him this yet, it is because officialdom has built an impregnable wall around him.