Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai

I've been pretty pissed off about the political climate in India of late, and the kinds of things going on, especially on Facebook. My apologies for the misuse of the title.

If you're not aware of what's going on in India these days, it's the circus that comes along every few years. The Lok Sabha elections, which eventually elects the Prime Minister of India. The two, or should I say three leading candidates are all deeply flawed. There's yet a group which is angry about this very fact, that we're looking directly at PM candidates, cause India isn't a presidential democracy. I'll get to why I'm pissed with that group a little later.

First, the candidates, the Congress finally has it's scion Rahul Gandhi up and running, the BJP has Narendra Modi of Gujarat fame, and somehow, almost in a delusional fashion, we have Arvind Kejriwal. Lets look at them in order, Mr. Gandhi, who's now better known as a meme after his all too infamous interview, cannot honestly hope to win. After answering questions from probably a parallel universe, no sane or well educated person would want to vote for him. This is fairly shameful, as he comes from a long line of very successful politicians, all of whom were intelligent enough to hold their own in the political arena. Intelligence seems to have its roots in genes, and Sonia Gandhi has proven her intelligence time and again, let alone the rest of the Gandhi clan. So how he was so much at loss in a scheduled interview is beyond me. After that, how can anyone want to hand over the reins of a country to him.

Mr. Modi owes his fortunes and misfortunes to Gujarat. To some it seems like I support him, but quite frankly that isn't the case. My knowledge of economics isn't that deep that I can comment on the development that has happened in Gujarat and how much that's his doing. But, having been to parts of it, I can say that the people of the state have a bigger claim to that than any leader. It may be a stereotype, but they really do have business sense. I've never seen a state in India that is cleaner, more organized, and safe for women. Now since I haven't seen Gujarat pre-Modi, I don't know how much of that is thanks to his leadership, but I doubt anyone can attribute human nature to a leader. As for the infamous riots, the plot is a little more complicated. The courts exonerated him, but the specter of those riots have never left him. I can't comment on his guilt, that's for courts and people wiser than me to decide. What I can say though, is that they happened on his watch, and I've seen people resign for less. If he is guilty, then sure I can go along with the moral argument of why he should not be PM. More so however, people in politics are built on perception, and I do buy that argument that whenever he does go abroad to represent India, the defining factor won't be his successes in development, it'll always be those riots.

This may be abrupt, but let me turn to Mr. Kejriwal, cause he's the one who annoys me the most. Why, you may ask. Well, quite simply, all he's doing is throwing a spanner in the works. He, and his party for most part, seem to love a revolution, they're just not sure what they're going to do if they succeed. Yes, that line is supposed to remind you of the Joker's line from the Dark Knight, where he says "I'm like a dog chasing card, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qE6v0khR9U). Because some of you are probably foaming at the mouth by now, let me explain why. The two main points that AAP wants to bring about that I've understood are, rooting out corruption and decentralizing the power of the government. Honorable intentions at heart, but very half baked executions. Their model of corruption removal seems to think that corrupt people are somehow separated from regular people. That the aam aadmi is somehow not corrupt. No offense, I've met very few such aam aadmis in a country of more than a billion people. Extrapolating statistically, I don't think we can find enough such people to run the country. And furthermore, simply being honest doesn't make you qualified to run anything. Stupidly, let me borrow a line from the West Wing, where a Nobel prize winning president says that fixing any problem requires a combination of efforts, not going all out in a particular direction. Anyone who has any experience with natural systems will be able to tell you that the way mother nature does it is pretty much the same. Redundancy is the name of the game. If you want to remove corruption, remove the things that lead to corruption. But first, rid yourself of the naive notion that any system can be completely corruption free. Corruption is a natural implication of a system with insufficient resources for the number of people -- everyone will want to steal cause there isn't enough for everyone. It's a part of human nature, all that we can do, is make it an option with a high opportunity cost. Not just by prosecuting corruption, but also weeding it out from our day-to-day behavior. Don't slip a 50 to the cop who stopped you, go pay that ticket. Don't misuse that company car for personal things. Don't cut the line or jostle, follow order. Because those more visible forms of corruption arise from them. Reducing power tariffs and giving people freebies is just populist politics, something that other parties have been doing for ages.

I think I lost track there, went on a bit of a rant, so let me come back to the second point, decentralization. The core tenet of the idea of swaraj is very appealing, to return the power to the disenfranchised masses and let them decide how to spend that money. Let me ask you this simple question, in such a model, how can you get the IITs which educated Mr. Kejriwal, how can you get the Bhakra Nangal Dam, the Indian space program, the amazing railway network and roads that India has? Distributed decision making makes sense for certain projects, but not as a general rule. Economies of scale are important for growth. As for decentralization, there have been projects for a long time in that direction, which have slowly divested some power to local councils and gram sabhas. Being impatient with that just because the current system doesn't correspond to an ideal is again naive. No system is perfect, so when you advocate revolutionary transition from a model that somewhat works, you better be sure that your alternative will work better. Cause anything else leads to anarchy, and ironically, more corruption. As I've said numerous times before, this is governance, not kindergarten, learning on the job isn't an option at this scale.

So there you have it, three candidates, all of whom are deeply flawed in their own different ways. I wouldn't want to vote for either of them. If you twisted my arm, and flew me back to India to vote, I'd probably be in favor of Modi, cause at least he has an established track record for governing.

As for the people who're unhappy that we're getting closer to an American model where leading candidates are making themselves known, and crying themselves hoarse about how India's democracy was designed differently and a Presidential model has serious pitfalls, take a moment. No one is transitioning India to a Presidential model just yet. Moreover, just because we understand two models of democracy doesn't mean a new better model can't evolve. Because the people who designed these two models did it to the best of their knowledge at that time. People seem to forget that times change, and given different conditions, those very same smart people might have made different decisions -- that's what made them intelligent to begin with. So using the argument that someone decades or centuries ago did something and following that by rote is something I don't understand. Instead I advocate trying to understand why they made the decisions they made and how those were driven by the prevailing conditions, so that we can understand if any of those have changed, and if we may need to rethink their ideas. Cause it's not like we don't make intelligent people anymore, we probably just don't elect them to office as much, and don't give them the freedom to make lasting change. 

Divergent

I've been reading the Divergent series of books these past few days. Yes they're  probably written for teenage girls, and probably have major elements lifted from others, but it's a nice story, and I'd recommend reading it. There are a few things in there I'll probably write about in a while. But, In the meantime I found a nice excerpt from the end of the third book Allegiant, that I felt was worth sharing:

“There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater.

But sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life.

That is the sort of bravery I must have now.”

A skeptical aam aadmi

I am what most people might call a skeptic (with the grand exception of technology, where I seem to be an early adopter of most things), but I like to keep an open mind for new things, provided they give a good argument in their favor. Quite simply because doing anything new is hard, so some leeway should be granted. It's illustrative to think of this as the hump:

Yep this one, no pun intended

I was lucky enough to find a pic that illustrates the phases too! I maintain the most interesting things happen in phase 2, cause honeymoons are fun and easy (or so I've heard...). Humps are hard, because going up slopes is hard. That may sound like an obvious fact, but that's the reason trails take a long route up, mountain roads have bends, and you have to take a few degrees to get to active research. And quite simply, there is no easy way across the hump and anyone who promises you such a way is most likely a liar (think diet pills and their no-exercise-weight-loss promises). This is an accepted fact in sciences, barring quantum tunneling. Lets leave that out for the time being, cause I won't be talking about quantum things here. The jump I'm claiming here is that most real world challenges also fall somewhere along this curve. People spend years making slow, creeping progress towards a solution, building momentum. And when you hit the peak, you know that the trend has reversed and you'll see a sudden flood of progress. I'd postulate that gay rights in USA are approaching that peak. Why? Cause simply put, it's a battle for minds, as soon as you have a critical mass of people believing in your solution, you have the majority and the majority can convert others much more quickly.

This is where I'll pivot to the point I want to discuss. The AAP (Aam Aadmi Party for the uninitiated), is offering a panacea to the problem of corrupt governance. Their manifesto has a definite socialist tilt, but they claim to have solution that works. So yay, we're at the peak of the hump. A lot of their supporters say this is why they must be given more leeway than other parties. I'm willing to accept that to a limit, but there seems to be a general misunderstanding of what it means to be near a peak. To get near this peak, a large number of people have devoted their lives and effort. In this case, quite literally lives have been lost to highlight corruption and try to steer the country away from it. So when someone claims to be capable of crossing the hump, they carry the wishes and dreams of a lot of people past and present. Secondly - and this is the part I see gross ignorance of - they're near the peak, not past it. A mistake here has the potential to start an avalanche of momentum away from the desired outcome. Why, you might ask, cause future governments can point to their failure to shoot down progress. If you want examples, just look at the current problems the Obama administration is facing from mistakes in the healthcare rollout.

The two arguments that might detract from me having any say in this are that I'm technically not an aam aadmi, and that I'm not even in Delhi right now. Yes, I've used a good combination of luck and hard work to get where I am, so I might not be like most of the middle class AAP represents, but I'm still there, and I've lived through the spectrum, through my experiences and my family's. As to the fact I'm not in Delhi right now, well, that gives me some objectivity simply from being outside the problem I'm supposed to be looking at (I spent a whole post discussing that, so look it up :) )

So finally, here is the primary thing I'm skeptical about: Why dole out the results you expect to come down the line? I'm inclined to believe there is corruption in power and water distribution, but why not let those inquiries complete with actual facts. I don't care where you studied, IIT included, because most IITians themselves will say it's dangerous to assume that your predictions will always be correct. Even experts fail periodically, and you're still new to this game. This is where that danger of rolling backwards comes into play. A mistake here will reverse the momentum in the blink of an eye. The same parties AAP accuses of favoritism and corruption will come back and point fingers, destroying their hard-earned credibility. Because, unlike some who feel this is a victory, I think this is just the beginning of the test, one in which they have to ace every question to be successful. Doing that requires slow prudence and maturity, not rushed populism.

Even now, negative articles are propping up about Kejriwal and his perceived heavy-handedness in matters. How raising questions and pointing out possible flaws seems to be anathema. There's only so long (that honeymoon period), that AAP can hide behind the label of being new. After a point they'll have to start answering questions, biggest of which is how they intend to pay for what they've already given away. Because no matter how corrupt the previous government was, in the decade or so Sheila Dikshit was CM, I saw the power situation improve, pollution go down, and transportation improve by leaps and bounds. When I was a kid, the word "blueline" warranted terror similar to Gabbar Singh. People knew what "folding cots" were, cause we slept on them a lot of times thanks to there being no power. Pollution was so bad that smog was a daily occurrence. Thanks to, in spite of, or independent of, the Congress government, power cuts went down, buses became better and safer, a metro was finally built, and pollution is going down thanks to CNG. Those are achievements, big ones at that. Delhi still has problems, and almost all of them can be traced back to the massive influx of people it sees everyday. I once sat through a lecture (by an expert on the topic, mind you) on how you can't possibly plan for such an influx because there aren't enough resources. And now AAP, which doesn't have so many experts, is claiming it can. I'm not inclined to believe them unless they offer hard proof. And they seem to be on their way to delivering that, with audits of power companies etc. Instead of fast-tracking these audits, they went on a promise making spree. Temporary as these promises might be, taking something away is always exponentially harder. Remember when reservations were only meant to last for a few years?

If it was unclear from the last para, what I'm trying to say is that governance is built on hard-won victories, not shoot-from-the-hip promises which play to the masses. AAP had the potential to do the former, and still does, but they seem to be going for the latter, which is what disturbs me. Because while you're focused on this particular hump, don't forget the other hump, the one of dictatorship. If you're confused, read about Herr Hitler's rise to power.

ps: I know some of you are going to lose it about the last line, so let me clarify that I don't think AAP is going to become the next National Socialist German Workers Party, only that small missteps have the potential to have big repercussions. Because the steps from National Socialist to Nazi aren't that many if we follow anything like mindless drones without asking questions to the contrary.