There’s something seriously suspect about the mental equilibrium of India’s 20 million-strong neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) class which has the nation in a thrall with its idiosyncrasies enacted on the national stage. A case in point is Union sports minister M.S. Gill (who like his tutor and mentor prime minister Manmohan Singh), is a former bureaucrat and election commissioner who has parachuted into politics and ministerial office without making any significant contribution to the national development effort, while serving in the IAS for several decades.
On September 15 when India’s Beijing Olympics (2008) bronze medallist wrestling champion Sushil Kumar Solanki returned in triumph to Delhi after bagging India’s first-ever gold medal at the FILA World Wrestling Championship in Moscow, in his enthusiasm to publicly welcome the 66 kg category champion, Gill visited huge embarrassment upon the champ. At a photo-op for several national television news channels, Gill was shown shooing away Kumar’s coach Dronacharya Award winner Satpal out of the frame as he posed with the champion. Subsequently despite Kumar expressing dismay and Satpal forgiving him, Gill refused to express any regret for his headlines grabbing behaviour.
Unfortunates — including your editor — who have had a run-in with this garrulous babu whose outsized ego is in inverse proportion to his job performance, are hardly surprised by the minister’s boorish behaviour which has a long history. Your editor met with Gill way back in 1984 when writing a cover feature for Businessworld on the entry application of soft drinks and processed foods multinational Pepsico Inc into India. At the time Gill was secretary of the Union agriculture ministry which was involved in processing Pepsico’s business licence application because, then unknown to the Indian public, the MNC’s foods processing business was larger than its soft drinks business. For over an hour Gill monologued about I-me-myself projecting himself as God’s gift to government without committing himself for or against Pepsico’s entry application. Looking back, I’m convinced that Gill has majorly contributed to the mess which is Indian agriculture now.
It’s a strange world in the Delhi imperium, where the best lacking all conviction disappear into the footnotes of history, while the worst mediocrities with king-size egos rise to ministerial office.
Die hard habits
The Commonwealth Games 2010, scheduled in New Delhi between October 3-15, has established the reputation of shining India — the world’s second fastest growing economy with aspirations for a permanent seat on the five-nation Security Council of the United Nations — for its many vices than its few virtues. For one, it has impacted the open, uninterrupted and continuous corruption that the citizenry has been heir to, as the outome of the fateful decision taken at the historic conclave in Avadi (Tamil Nadu) of the Congress party way back in 1956, that newly independent Nehruvian India would follow the “socialistic pattern of society”, upon the nation’s somnabulistic intelligentsia and public.
Belatedly it has become plain that CWG 2010 would not have descended into chaos, confusion and shoddy workmanship, if the games projects had been sub-contracted to private sector majors such as Hindustan Construction, Larsen & Toubro, GMR and GVK (which have built the state-of-the-art Delhi and Mumbai airports), and food and catering entrusted to the Taj Mahal, Oberoi, Leela, Lalit or other upscale hotel chains with reputations to lose.
The way to go would have been for the organising committee to have parceled out the major games projects to the country’s private infrastructure, construction and hospitality corporations, leaving low-end jobs for the PWD. But so brainwashed is the citizenry, including the intelligentsia, that the national outcry has been to press-gang top-level government ministers to lead the eleventh-hour operation to rescue the games from ignominious failure. Which in effect is calling upon the people who caused the problem for solutions. Old habits die hard.
Akbar’s resurrection
India Today — the country’s pioneer news magazine initially launched by Delhi-based media tycoon Aroon Purie during the dark night of the Emergency (1975-76) to project India in good light abroad, but which found its bearings soon after the end of the Emergency to establish itself as the most successful periodical in Indian history with an estimated readership of 15 million in five languages — will get a fresh lease of life following the appointment of media veteran M. J. Akbar as editorial director.
This development is of particular interest to your correspondent, who began his career in journalism in the same era, as editor of Business India. Almost simultaneously Akbar emerged from obscurity to become the first editor of the country’s most low-priced (Re.1) weekly magazine Sunday for the Calcutta-based Ananda Bazar Patrika group with whom I signed up to launch Businessworld in 1981.
Therefore for almost a decade, I was in the same corporate stable as Akbar as he morphed into one of the country’s best political analysts as editor of Sunday and later, the Calcutta-based daily The Telegraph, which against all predictions, dislodged The Statesman to become Calcutta’s largest-selling English language daily. Next he emerged in a new avatar as publisher-editor of the Asian Age, funded by the Hyderabad-based publisher-politician T. Venkatram Reddy. Unfortunately, but typically, after Akbar established Asian Age as a transnational multi-edition daily (with a London edition) under a uniquely innovative franchised model, about two years ago, he was peremptorily fired by Reddy. Since then he was working somewhat sub-optimally as publisher/editor of a newsmag titled Covert, and latterly a weekly Sunday Guardian.
The appointment as editorial director of the best-selling India Today will come as a well-deserved break not only for this pioneer media innovator, but also for the weekly which needs revitalisation. Perhaps the best-ever ambassador for Indian education — unlike most editors of front-rank English language dailies and periodicals, Akbar has been educated within India — with his extraordinary English language skills, and penetrating analyses of Indian politics, Akbar is certain to infuse new life into India’s premier newsweekly. Bad news for Vinod Mehta, editor of the rival Outlook.