The joke’s on us

Subsequently, we became the first democracy to use aerial bombardment to subdue a domestic insurgency, by the Mizo National Front in Aizawl. And remember that was done in early 1966 when Mrs Gandhi, prime minister for barely a few months, was in Lohia’s famous gungu gudiya (dumb doll) phase. Later she broke up Pakistan, annexed Sikkim, conducted a nuclear test and got away with it all, besides signing the Shimla Agreement and thereby giving the 1948 UN Resolution a quick burial. If this seems like the record of a soft state, show me one in the developing world that has done better.

Nobody would call a democracy that sends tanks and howitzers to prise a separatist movement out of the Sikhs’ holiest shrine a soft state. And what would you call onethat sends 1,50,000 troops, tanks and assault helicopters to fight the LTTE in Sri Lanka, believing that it was only squashing a movement that could be a future threat to India?

From Hyderabad to Aizawl, from Pokharan to Kargil, ours is not the history of a soft state. Yet there is a worldwide impression of us being such hopeless softies. Where does that come from?

The trouble is, we are a hard state, but only on the outside. Rolled up inside this rock-hard exterior is a soft core that has a hundred per cent tolerance of corruption, inefficiency, bungling and callousness when it comes to our own people particularly the ruling classes, the political leadership and the bureaucracy.

To understand this peculiar phenomenon just list down some of our great failures and man-made disasters in recent times: the unseen invasion in Kargil, the Purulia arms drop, the Cha-rkhi Dadri mid-air collision, the Gaisal and Khanna rail crashes, the Uphaar fire tragedy in Delhi, the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and RajivGandhi, Sant Longowal, Beant Singh and so on. Then, in an opposite column, list out the men held responsible for each one of these, and punished. If you draw a bl-ank, you will understand what I mean by the soft core of our hard state.

We are quite tough and uncompromising with foreign powers and elem-ents that threaten our interest. We are in fact quite brutal in dealing with internal threats. But when it comes to a bure-aucracy that bungles, politicians that lo-ot, we are so touchingly reasonable. Which hard state, for example, would punish no one, absolutely no one of any consequ-ence, for an international embarrassment like the Purulia arms drop? In which other country wo- uld no one, I repeat no one, lose his job for security failures leading to so many assassinations?

We run the world’s most successful protection racket in the name of governance. So the moment an assassination ta-kes place, each intellige-nce agency plants leaks in the media showing how it had given advance warning while the othersfailed to react. The moment a rail accident takes place, the signal man, a minor station master or the driver, if he survives the crash, is suspended. Higher up, people only make inspection visits, make pious statements. The odd rail minister may resign only to return a few months later in a better job. But have you heard of anyone senior in the massive railway bureaucracy losing his job? An escalator can swallow a child at our capital’s international airport without anyone ever paying for it.

The protection racket is now so well established that it even has an entirely predictable pattern. First the competing leaks where each organisation blames the other as witnessed last week in the case of the Amritsar bungle. Then the announcement of an inquiry which will take weeks to be constituted. Then weeks again consumed looking for an office, staff and vehicles for the inquiry committee. By this time the story is more or less forgotten, that outrage replaced by another one, over yet another newer, nastierdisaster.

We must have been an utterly perfect country in the past 52 years so you can’t even recall a dozen cases of officers of the IAS, IPS and the other key services having been sacked for inefficiency, dishonesty, dereliction of duty. Even when the newspapers announce the “sack” of an official for an almighty bungle, all it means is a transfer or at worst sideways move into a cosy sinecure. What is dangerous, however, is that the government’s idea of a sinecure can often be dangerously misplaced. Like a place on the top echelons of the paramilitary organisations for the failed top-cops the IAS types merely move from one ministry to another. In recent years at least three Delhi Police Commissioners removed for under performance have been “punished” by being made directors-general of the so-called elite National Security Guards.

This, the soft core of an outwardly hard state, is what makes us such a joke internationally. If the BJP now wishes to build a genuinely hard state, it has to begin byenforcing the principle of genuine accountability at home. That will mean naming names to begin with in the Kargil and Kathmandu bungles and making an example out of them so the others would get the message.

If that is not done, if the Kargil inqu-iry turns out to be a farce blaming nobo-dy, except possibly the media for falsely accusing the government and the army for being complacent, if the IC-814 inqu-iry fails to punish at least somebody of co-nsequence, if no one loses his job for the child-eating escalator, all this talk of zero tolerance of this or that, of creating a ha-rd state and so on, would remain what it has so far been–a load of, well, nonsense.