A Prince For Our State Of Bother

This is not, alas, the greatest time to be an Indian: never has the potential future looked so bright, yet never has the present looked so depressing. A few months ago, Gurcharan Das presented India Grows at Night, his thesis on what needs to be done to resolve our national crisis. Chanakya’s New Manifesto can perhaps be seen as a companion volume to that. While the former is a cerebral, idealistic approach to the problem, the latter—written by a former bureaucrat with political aspirations—gets down to the nitty-gritty and offers a comprehensive 354-point action plan on how to proceed in five key areas of national priority: governance, democracy, elimination of corruption, security and the creation of an inclusive society. Thus, if Gurcharan Das’s book was the ‘What’, Pavan Varma’s book is a ‘How’.

Varma notes that the basic problem regarding governance is that our Constitution could not foresee today’s era of fractured multi-party coalitions, which result in governments that must focus their energies on simply surviving, rather than on the business of governing the country. The first thing we need to do, obviously, is to fix this absurd situation. Varma touches on alternative democratic systems, such as the American and German systems, but suggests that it would be more pragmatic to, instead, refine our own current system and set down tough—and strictly enforced—rules for coalitions. These would include, among other things, the announcing of coalition groupings, such as the UPA or NDA, before (not after) elections; a mandatory three-year lock-in period for all coalition partners; stinging penalties for anyone who breaks the rules of conduct; and the announcement of explicit common governance agendas for coalition groupings (as, indeed, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats worked out in the UK in 2010).

Varma similarly looks at each of the other five key areas, from democratic reform to inclusive growth, and proposes a systematised set of proposals to address them. His ideas range from the plain commonsensical (and wishful) to the innovative. For example, he recommends pushing for real intra-party democracy in all political parties (how can we hope for any real democracy in our country, he asks, when parties themselves are run like personal fiefdoms?) At the other end of the spectrum, he advocates the creative application of India’s vaunted IT capabilities to help shut down opportunities for corruption.

Corruption, not surprisingly, is the most comprehensive section of this book, accounting for almost one-third of Varma’s 354 proposals. One of the fountainheads of corruption, as we know, is election funding and Varma proposes a raft of rules to try and plug this, from accounting for the huge number of political donations less than Rs 20,000, to the compulsory publishing of annual accounts by political parties. He cautions us against any piecemeal or knee-jerk solutions, though, as they would only impel the corrupt to figure out smarter new ways of operating; any real, impactful solution must obviously be comprehensive, and systemic.

One can debate about the details of Varma’s prescriptions but, nevertheless, Chanakya’s New Manifesto is a commendable book, painting a heart- lifting picture of a new, different India. In today’s cynical times, however, I can’t help imagining a conversation between Chanakya and a certain well-known contemporary politician. Chan-akya sits the politician down and instructs him at length on what to do. The politician patiently hears him out and then, when Chanakya has finished, he repeats to him his classic line: “We all know what to do. We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it”. And that, really, is the issue. Turkeys never vote for Christmas; nor will our fattened political class agree so readily to changes that will clip their wings and curb the powers they have acquired. Unfortunately, beyond appealing to ‘the good sense’ of those in power and talking of the ‘collective power of the citizenry’ to pressure them, neither Varma nor Chanakya can tell us how to get a manifesto like this actually implemented.

Which brings me to one small, final point. If you expect to find any great connect between Chanakya and the contents of this book, you’ll be disappointed: there’s actually very little of Chanakya in here. The few references to the great guru of statecraft are just a creative marketing device. Maybe it was needed. Obviously, the title ‘Pavan Varma’s New Manifesto’ would not have quite the same ring to it.