The clampdown on conspicuous consumption in government by Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and the prime minister’s office, has come not a day too soon. There was something more than unseemly about S.M. Krishna and Shashi Tharoor, the presiding deities of the foreign office, lodging for over three months in the uber-luxury suites of Delhi’s Maurya Sheraton and Taj Mansingh hotels where room tariffs are priced at Rs. 50,000 per night upwards. The stately homes that Union ministers in imperial Delhi are provided, were not up to their exacting standards and are undergoing extensive renovation — at public expense. The Rt. Hon ministers’ disingenuous defence to the volley of criticism directed at their fastidious epicureanism — that they were paying for their luxurious temporary accommodation out of their pockets — far from assuaging public misgivings merely served to rub salt into public indignation, and raised troubling questions about the sources of the fabulous wealth of the former Karnataka chief minister and former UN bureaucrat.
Quite evidently these ministerial worthies fail the first test of being sufficiently knowledgeable about the state of the nation. If they were, they would be aware of the report of the Arjun Sengupta Committee (2007) which states that over 800 million citizens, whom these epicurean public servants have served for several decades in various capacities and now represent in Parliament, make do on a mere Rs.20 per day.
Meanwhile, such ritual reprimands to lightweight ministers apart, there is no real effort to curb the lavish lifestyle of government worthies. The prime defence, foreign, and home ministers continue to fly in customised Embraer jets priced at Rs.200 crore each, and helicopters when not in massive motorcades.
If the Congress party and government leadership really mean to cut public spending, they should register these customised jets for auction on e-Bay. That would signal the dawn of a new era of true government austerity.
Garden city inferno
There’s much that’s gone wrong during the past half century in the southern state of Karnataka, and Bangalore in particular. For one, because of the intrinsic deficiency of Soviet-style central planning which neglected small town and rural development, the population of the city has swollen from one million to over 7 million during the three decades past, even as its automotive population, negligible right up to the mid 1970s, has multiplied to over 2.2 million. Yet perhaps the unkindest cut inflicted upon the city by a deadly conspiracy of greedy builders, politicians and bureaucrats has been its steady descent into open, uninterrupted and continuous corruption.
A silver lining is the activism of Karnataka’s bold and resolute Lok Ayukta (ombudsman), former Supreme Court judge Justice (Retd.) N. Santosh Hegde who (like his predecessor Justice N. Venkatachalliah) has been waging a lone and unequal battle against corruption. Since he assumed office in 2006, Justice Hegde and his brave band of vigilance officers have filed 19,325 corruption and disproportionate wealth charges against bureaucrats and public servants. Gleefully highlighted by the media, Justice Hegde’s reports indicate that thousands of government clerks and line engineers of the state electricity supply monopoly have accumulated Croesus-like fortunes in brief tenures of power and authority.
Yet typically and unfortunately for Karnataka’s long-suffering population, in consonance with Article 311 of the Constitution and s. 80 of the Civil Procedure Code, the Lok Ayukta Act 1984 confers mere recommendation-to-prosecute powers upon the ombudsman. And in brazen defiance of public opinion, successive governments in Bangalore, manned by hand-in-glove politicians, have consistently refused to sanction prosecution of patently corrupt bureaucrats and government officials in criminal courts.
Hence the steady descent of this once green and pleasant cantonment city into an inferno of developers, realtors and continuous corruption. Sic transit gloria.
Descent into epicureanism
Alas, it’s not only politicians who are susceptible to the corrupting charm of the 5-star culture against which your correspondent repeatedly warned in his capacity as editor of the country’s first business magazine, when luxury palaces rather than hotels were merrily sanctioned in the interest of tourism promotion in the bad old days of licence-permit-quota raj. Media personnel and journalists in particular also tend to be enamoured of these islands of ease and privilege.
More recent proof of the siren song of la dolce vita offered by these islands of affluence is provided by celebrity television maven and former Hindustan Times editor, Vir Sanghvi who has forsaken the labour-intensive journalist’s vocation and re-invented himself as a 5-star lifestyle guru for a television channel. These days instead of highlighting instances of government maladministration and advising the powers that be on ways and means to improve governance — the essential role of a self-respecting print media editor which he discharged with considerable competence — Sanghvi invests his talent in advising the filthy rich on how to purchase best quality suitcases for Rs.10,000 upwards and feast on exotic food and wine, priced at several times the country’s annual per capita income.
Sanghvi’s descent into effete epicureanism to the hosannahs of a charmed circle of 5-star scribes in the Delhi imperium, is of special interest to your editor, who several decades ago introduced this then-struggling Bombay-based editor of an eponymous city magazine to Kolkata-based media tycoon Aveek Sarkar, who appointed him editor of the then-best selling political weekly Sunday (alas, since deceased). Making smart career moves, Sanghvi transformed himself into the host of a political talk show in Delhi and editor of the Hindustan Times, which during his time re-invented itself as a contemporary daily newspaper and also launched (a now languishing) Bombay edition.
Yet with typical ingratitude, Sanghvi declined to introduce this writer to HT chairperson and media mogul Shobhna Bhartia, when the then struggling EducationWorld was desperate for venture capital. Therefore there’s perhaps an element of natural justice in this once media maven’s descent into indulgent consumerism.