Monday, March 31, 2014

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. 

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