W’end Links: Sh Lalu Yadav, Women Empowerment and Bravery Awards

Start the weekend with this write-up on Hon. Rly Minister Sh. Lalu Prasad Yadav in The American (Hat Tip: Ajay)

…move on to a thought-provoking article on Pubs and Women Empowerment by Anil Chawla

and finally, read General Vijay Oberoi’s thoughts on Death, Valour and Awards (email excerpts below)

Excerpts from all these article are below, as always.

*** Excerpts from “The Indian Railway King” by Graeme Wood ***

…Lalu is a happy man: happy to have risen to become rich, beloved, and reviled all over India; happy that a grateful nation credits him with whipping its beleaguered rail system into profitability; and happy that he’s managed to do all this and somehow stay out of jail. Under his leadership, Indian Railways has gone from bankruptcy to billions in just a few years. When Lalu presented his latest budget to Parliament on February 13, he bragged, “Hathi ko cheetah bana diya” (“I have turned an elephant into a cheetah”). What’s his secret?

…In his home state of Bihar, where he first rose to power, the common touch served him well. Bihar is India’s poorest and most backward state. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lalu knitted together a coalition of poor Biharis that elected him chief minister. The Lalu years wrecked Bihar further. When corruption allegations surfaced, critics demanded that Lalu resign on moral grounds. The scandal that brought him down, known as the “Fodder Scam,” effectively amounted to a government-wide ruse under which taxpayers paid for nonexistent hay. But Lalu held on for a long time. “I have heard of football grounds and cricket grounds, but not moral grounds,” he said. When the pressure became too great for him to stay in office, he responded with a nepotistic masterstroke, bold even by his standards, and appointed his wife, Rabri Devi, to rule in his place. (“Who do you want me to appoint?” Lalu asked. “Your wife?”)

…The rest of India chuckled at Lalu, and more often with him. But Bihar remained the most lawless state in the country. “He never tried to do serious business in Bihar regarding development,” says Sushil Kumar Modi, Bihar’s current deputy chief minister, and a Lalu acquaintance for nearly 40 years. “Lalu Yadav is not a serious man. Not a single state-sponsored scheme happened under his rule. He thought, ‘If I can rig the elections, there is no need to do any work.’” Thakur is more damning: “He arrived promising to dismantle the Establishment, an anti-hero out to snatch power from Patna’s bungalows and deliver it to the people, but he ended up a creature of the Establishment himself.” By the time Rabri—a semiliterate buffalo herder who did Lalu’s bidding, and whose name, incidentally, means “Custard Goddess”—left office in 2005, everyone in India knew Lalu, and his name was a byword for incompetence, cronyism, and the abject failure of government.

Even then, Lalu commanded enough of a following among his coalition of “extremely backward castes” (or, in the wonderful semiofficial abbreviation, “EBCs”) and desperately poor Muslims to secure a role for himself in India’s 2004 Congress Party government. He wanted the interior ministry, but the new government wasn’t ready to have a rube in charge of such a powerful portfolio. They gave him the railways ministry, and many expected the same pitiful misrule that had characterized his time in Bihar.

Indian Railways was in trouble: in 2001, a report by the BJP—a government dominated by the Brahmins who are Lalu’s permanent foes—predicted it would hemorrhage cash at a rate of $12 billion annually by 2015. (The whole budget of the Indian government, by comparison, is $128 billion.) Indian Railways was barely managing to cover its daily operating costs, to say nothing of paying for the new equipment and strengthening bridges. The report concluded: “It is very likely that Indian Railways would be a heavily-loss-making entity—in fact one well on the path toward bankruptcy, if it were not state owned.” Outsiders whispered the word “privatization” but were hushed: Indian Railways has been a source of national pride since before independence, and statist sentimentalists could never let it fail.

Lalu’s term as railways minister has been shockingly successful. Instead of turning India’s most prized national institution into a basketcase and a ruin, Lalu has led one of most spectacular economic turnarounds in a country bursting with economic miracles. Indian Railways began raking in cash and posting surpluses in the billions. And the intelligentsia and technocracy, at first shocked and dismayed that a shameless populist had seized a fragile and unwieldy national institution, have largely come around to acknowledging that India Railways has been transformed into a respected institution—and so, possibly, has Lalu.

…Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways. The statistics beggar belief: every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China. (The third-largest employer is the British National Health Service.)

…The world has few centrally managed organizations as large as Indian Railways, and surely none maintains the same level of performance.Indian Railways is a government enterprise, and it has the dead weight characteristic of state organs. Employees live in housing provided by the Railways, send their kids to Railways schools, and visit Railways doctors when sick. Nearly a million are pensioners, and therefore provide no value to the ministry at all. Those who do work encounter predictable bureaucratic headaches: the ministry’s departments (six in total, for electrical, staff, engineering, mechanical, traffic, and financial concerns) operate in a stovepipe fashion, with minimal cross-pollination and little effort to coordinate and ensure that the railways as a whole run well. And ultimately Indian Railways has to answer to the taxpayers and citizens who support it, and who quite understandably want assurances that their train set will keep its fares low enough for them to afford.

Somehow it all works out…To grasp the difficulty of the operation, just imagine running a much bigger version of Wal-Mart, and then add a few wild cards, such as an employee literacy rate of 60 percent and terrorists trying to blow up your stores.

…But his single most important innovation at Indian Railways was not a populist move at all. It was an elite one: the hiring of a prodigiously talented civil servant named Sudhir Kumar. Kumar, 50, is from a Gujarati family in Punjab. The family knows business: “If there is money lying around, we can smell it,” Kumar says. His father was a clothing wholesaler, and his brothers and sisters have, according to Sudhir, made a fortune in business for themselves. Sudhir takes pride in having given up the joys of free enterprise to work for the government, a calling he regards as nobler and more satisfying than work done for personal gain. He clambered over thousands of competitors to land in his current job as a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), a sort of Delta Force for Indian civil servants. Every year, out of 300,000 aspirants, no more than 60 make the grade. They fan out all over India to solve the subcontinent’s most intractable problems, before heading back to New Delhi to regroup and take their next assignment.

…Since then, Kumar has labored in an office immediately opposite Lalu’s, but completely unlike the minister’s opulent, wood-paneled lair. The minister lounges on his sofa, watching NDTV, a TV news network.  Kumar’s two flat-screens show real-time data on the country’s main routes. Periodically, a minion walks into Kumar’s command center to present a 20-page stack of papers that represent the day’s statistics on passengers, freight, and on-time arrivals. “Like Jack keeps a daily tab, I also keep a daily tab,” Kumar says, referring to Jack Welch, one of his idols. The contrast with Lalu’s own listless inattention is jarring. When Lalu tells me about his success, mumbling vaguely about winning “the confidence of the business classes,” Kumar shouts from the back of the room, citing revenue figures from memory. And when Lalu drifts off on earthy tangents about dung or latrine systems (“urine—it fall all over the platform”), Kumar winces.

…I asked Kumar whether the temptation of private-sector work would eventually draw him out of the IAS. His response was curt. “There is no temptation, sir. The kind of satisfaction you get there is nothing compared to the satisfaction of serving my country.” He put down his papers, and his offended expression melted into a look of pain. “My father,” the prosperous clothier, “said, ‘Go to serve the people.’ He uttered these words, and within four hours, he was no more. I am living with that every single day.” He put down his stack of papers. “When you are giving shape to the dream of your father—what better way to self-actualize?” Even in the language of Tony Robbins, the speech is affecting. At this the tears welled up, and the prince of the railways wept into his tea.

…Years after Biharis voted him out, Lalu’s picture is still everywhere—in shops, on banners over the road, and even, I am told, on bathroom doors (in lieu of men’s and women’s stick figures, they sometimes use portraits of Lalu and Rabri). But the people who speak to me do not remember Lalu fondly. In the years since Nitish Kumar came to power, the city has flourished, and the state government has fought against the gangsterism that pervaded the countryside. Eight years ago, in Patna and the rural areas alike, murders and kidnappings were common. Now, as in most Indian cities, the greatest safety risk is the traffic. On the train back to New Delhi, a man in my railway berth offered me raisins, and I felt safe enough to try one.

…Lalu mismanaged Patna terribly. So how has he managed a gargantuan state organ so well that students from Kellogg and Wharton are taking notice?

Part of the answer lies in India’s recent economic growth spurt: Lalu stood on the shoulders of an economy that never grew by less than 6 percent per year during his whole tenure as railways minister. (India’s economy has slowed considerably since the global downturn began.) With a boom like that to fuel demand, how could he fail? All he had to do was sit back and let the market propel him forward. Indeed, Sushil Kumar Modi, the politician who claims to be picking up after Lalu’s mess in Bihar, notes that Lalu still spends all his time in Bihar, and rarely visits his own New Delhi office. The railway turnaround began before he took over the ministry, during Nitish Kumar’s reign, although few predicted that it would continue as it has. The most cynical of his critics expect to discover after Lalu has left the ministry that safety corners have been cut, and that his successor will have to deal with a series of derailments and bridge collapses.

*** End of Excerpts ***

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*** Excerpts from Pubs. Liquor Shops and Women Empowerment  by Anil Chawla ***

Maidservants working in our locality live in a slum called S. Farm.  The slum had a country liquor shop. As is usual in many such shops, the shop also had an ‘ahaataa’ (courtyard). The ahaataa is an open area with bare minimum crude furniture. Customers who buy a bottle from the liquor shop can sit in the ahaataa and consume it there. A large number of the men in S. Farm used to visit the ahaataa and blow up their earnings there. This used to cause hardships to their families. A few months ago under the leadership of a social worker (a woman I do not know) all the women of the slum decided to do something about the menace.

One fine evening all the women surrounded the country liquor shop and the ahaataa. They were holding placards in their hands demanding closure of the establishment. All the men who were inside the ahaataa were beaten with footwear. In many cases wife / sister of the man being beaten was cheering the crowd to do a more thorough job. Police watched as spectator only ensuring that the beating did not cross limits. The next day, authorities decided to shift the liquor shop away from the area. The women were jubilant.  They had emerged victorious and felt empowered.

The above incident was not reported in any newspaper or electronic media. Such incidents have taken place in hundreds of places across the country. In most states of the country, there are rules in place that if women of the area protest against any liquor shop, the shop is shifted immediately. Getting these rules made has been a major achievement for women activists who want to ensure that men take care of their families and not squander away their earnings on alcohol.

Contrast the incident of S. Farm with the protest against pubs in Mangalore. The tables have surely turned. Instead of women protesting against men drinking, it is the men who are protesting against women drinking. When women protest against men drinking, there are no issues of individual freedom or human rights or “who gave you the right to do this”. I am not in favour of beating up any one – whether men or women. But surely, for all those who believe in equality of women, beating up of women drinkers is in no way worse or more condemnable than bashing up of alcoholic men. So, one fails to understand the hell that has broken loose after the protest against women-in-pubs by Shriram Sene in Mangalore. Pramod Muthalik, leader of Shriram Sene, has gone on record apologizing for the rough handling of women and has said that they never intended to beat any woman. Pramod has apologized, while there is pride in the heart of women who beat up men at S. Farm.

Yet, strangely the media and official establishment seem hell bent to prove that Pramod Muthalik is a criminal worse than any terrorist, while remaining silent about all women who have gone violent across liquor shops all over the country.

…Women activists in India have never wanted to equal men at all the wrongs that men are accustomed to do. It would have been preposterous for any of the men at S. Farm to offer a drink each to the agitating women. None of the women activists agitating against liquor shops across the country has ever asked for a right of women to have a drink at the shops.
Right to drink is not a fundamental right under Constitution of India or for that matter under any international charter of rights. On the other hand, Article 47 of the Constitution of India says, “The State shall endeavour to bring about prohibition of the consumption except for medicinal purposes of intoxicating drinks”. It is clear that protesters at Mangalore (and also the women at S. Farm) were only acting to raise awareness and force the state to fulfill its duty as prescribed under the Constitution. Nothing can be more legitimate political activity than that.

…Women who forced the liquor shop to shift away from their locality might not have been literate but they were educated and knew their responsibilities to their family and society.  The same cannot be said about the women who are holding up their dirty panties publicly on the internet and other media. The message emerging from Mangalore brouhaha is that Indian democracy must face up to the challenge of growing numbers of literate but uneducated men and women.

*** End of Excerpts ***

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*** Excerpts from “Death is humbling but not synonymous with Bravery” by Gen Vijay Oberoi ***

Preface: I had sent this article to the Indian Express on 26 Jan 09, but they did not publish it. I then sent it to the Hindustan Times last week and it has been published today (04 Feb 2009) in the Chandigarh Edition. Last para and a half of my piece has not been published. My original article is appended below.

An unprecedented eleven Ashoka Chakras were presented by the Rashtrapati on the 60th anniversary of the Republic. That the numbers are exceptionally high may not be an issue, as bravery of the most exceptional order cannot and must not be constrained by numbers.  However, the highest peace-time award must only be bestowed for exceptional bravery and for no other reason. There is a question mark on whether the awards this year were given only to the exceptionally brave.

In writing this piece I am aware that I am touching a sensitive issue, especially as it is about the death of four highly regarded police officers. To that extent, I am guilty of being politically incorrect, but there are times when one has to speak one’s mind, however unpalatable it may be. This is one of those exceptional occasions. My aim in doing so is not to denigrate the sacrifices made by these officers but to caution the national leadership not to succumb to political expediency when considering such weighty issues as conferring of the highest bravery awards.

We Indians are highly emotional when it comes to death, but emotions have no place when it is a question of recognising valour. The highest recognition for exceptional bravery is the award of Ashoka Chakra in peace time and that of the Param Vir Chakra in the face of the enemy during war. These are the only two awards that are bestowed publicly at the Republic Day Parade and for good reason, so that the bravery of the awardees is fully appreciated by the entire nation. All other awards, for bravery as well as for distinguished service, are presented by the Rashtrapati on investiture parades held at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

In accordance with the official website, Ashoka Chakra is awarded for most conspicuous bravery, or some act of daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice otherwise than in the face of the enemy. 

…Soon after the terrorist attack in Mumbai, where a number of senior police officers had lost their lives within a few hours of the terrorist strike, an analyst had termed them “Innocent Casualties”. In amplification he had stated that these three officers, along with a few policemen had been surprised, waylaid and butchered without getting a chance to use their weapons. Perhaps their lack of training did not permit them to anticipate and react with operational swiftness. Their dear ones do deserve our deep sympathy and heartfelt condolences, as well as care and compassion, but do they meet the criteria of “the most conspicuous bravery”? The same applies to another police officer who was unfortunately killed in an earlier incident in Delhi.

By all accounts, all four police officers were highly efficient, dedicated and exemplary officers. Their devotion to duty needs to be recognised and honoured, but this is not the way of doing so. There is a vast difference between gallantry awards and awards for distinguished service. A large number of military personnel, especially from the army, lay down their lives or lose limbs fighting terrorists in various parts of the country, nearly on a daily basis.  Their sacrifices are for the country. Yet most of them do not qualify for earning gallantry awards, even of a lesser category. Let me cite my own example. I lost my leg during the 1965 Indo-Pak War and became permanently disabled, but I did not get any award. Neither did I ever think that I should have been given one. The same is the case with the large number of soldiers and officers who are killed or disabled in wars or warlike situations. That is how it should be.

The trend of bestowing gallantry awards merely because officers had lost their lives in terror-related incidents goes back to the death of two senior officers in Afghanistan in a terrorist incident, who were awarded Kirti Chakras, the second highest gallantry award not in the face of the enemy. The two, one a brigadier from the army and the other an officer of the foreign service, lost their lives as they were driving in when an explosive device was exploded by terrorists at the embassy gate. Surely there was no bravery there. The government must take all actions to help the next of kin monetarily and for subsequent rehabilitation, but it must not be done by bestowing high level gallantry awards. Such hasty and irrational decisions taken by the Government devalue the awards, besides creating embarrassment.

My concern in this piece is that if we persist in this type of populous largesse, the sanctity and aura attached to these highest level gallantry awards that the nation bestows on the bravest of the brave would disappear. Surely, the nation does not want this, even if some political leaders desire it for extraneous reasons.

General Vijay Oberoi is a former Vice Chief of Army Staff (VCOAS).

*** End of Excerpts ***

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