Managing Dhanraj

You will find an answer behind the gloss and strength of the new India. Look closely. The major kink in its foundation is a culture where problem solving swings between the extremes: do nothing, or sweep it all away.

We’d rather ignore a situation and hope it will sort itself out. If we are forced into a decision, we’d rather get rid of the problem than deal with it. India is littered with untackled problems, continuing situations. It is a land of the indefinite, the eternal ellipse. You could perhaps put it down to our ancient philosophy of live and let live. You would recognise it today as our chalta hai attitude.

Let’s first get a perspective on all that’s going right. It’s now quite clear that the foundation of a new tomorrow has acquired some strong building blocks. One of the most important is the vision thing. You may ridicule the phrase and point to everything that isn’t shining (and really, what isn’t could fill canyons, what is could merely fill cracks), but Atal Bihari Vajpayee is the first leader in modern India who’s given us a vision. The once smirky responses to President Abdul Kalam’s India 2020 vision have changed to pop-star like adulation because his vision makes sense to those who can see themselves becoming a part of it (his latest bestseller: an audio book, narrated by actor Girish Karnad). Visions are powerful things. A B-grade American movie actor is remembered as a hugely successful American president not because of his famous and generous tax cuts but because of a speech where he spoke of “a thousand points of light”. That was how Ronald Reagan saw the American education system. That is how millions remember him. With vision has come the dismantling of licence raj, the attention to infrastructure, a flowering of entrepreneurship — you know the spiel.

So, much has matured in new millennium India. But we must now turn our attention to that weakness in the foundation. Our approach to solving our problems puts us firmly in the old world, in the age of despots and incompetents. It is marked by an immaturity that belies our ambitions. That is why India is witness to so much petulance, so much childlike attrition, such displays of extreme behaviour when issues can’t get solved.

So too K.P.S. Gill. His fiefdom approach to Indian hockey has worked only to a point. That’s why his system cannot handle someone like Pillay. That’s why we see former hockey Olympian Joaquim Carvalho — Pillay’s mentor in his formative years — contacting team coach and the star’s bete noir Rajinder Singh. Since Carvalho was Singh’s old team mate, he was using those old links to put in a word for Dhanraj. Surely, at a time when India’s hockey is stuttering badly in its quest to join the cricket team on the road to glory, there must be more to solving the Dhanraj problem than old-boy approaches?The world outside hockey is of course littered with chaotic approaches to problem solving. A lot of it seems to stem from a disconnect between traditional thinking and modern requirements.

Murli Manohar Joshi is a classic example of an otherwise mature mind plagued with the inability to transcend personal feelings and beliefs. It shows in his refusal to accept a system that he doesn’t agree with, in his inability to solve a problem by listening to accomplished minds other than his own. India’s history books will tell you how the person was always more important than the system, how a ruler’s beliefs indeed became the system. Aurangzeb, Hyder Ali, the list is endless. People like puratchi thalaivi (great leader) J. Jayalalithaa are cast in the same mould. This is where the tigers of the east have left us behind. Their democracies may be shakier than ours, but their systems are strong, their problem solving abilities mature and largely independent of personal whimsy. That is why their citizens have so much faith in their system despite often eccentric heads of government. In India, the system needs to become paramount if we are to solve problems. If it does, faith follows. The Supreme Court is one such system. You might occasionally disagree with some judgements, but no one seriously questions the system that guides its operations. Yet, that is not the case with the executive — and that’s because erratic and unreliable politicians and bureaucrats have overwhelmed its systemic underpinnings.

There are exceptions. The National Highway Authority of India — despite a Satyendra Dubey — has matured into a system that’s working like it should. The impetus to do that undoubtedly came from its minister and the prime minister, but it can now — hopefully — work as well without them. The Indian cricket team is another example of a system that has been freed from personal whimsy — of the selectors and players — and allowed to mature into a successful, self-propagating entity, receding gradually from the dangers posed by typically Indian loose cannons. If India learns to not just solve problems like highways and cricket but understands how they were done, the next stage in our national evolution might be around the next mountainside. But first, let’s get Dhanraj back on the team.