The Long Road to Perdition

On 29 February 2000, India’s then Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha proposed a bold step in the Union Budget as part of his financial reforms: the dilution of equity in public sector banks to below 51 per cent. Sinha told Parliament that the Government had decided to accept the Narasimham Committee’s recommendations on banking reforms and reduce minimum government shareholding in nationalised banks to 33 per cent. Instantly, all hell broke loose. Sundry BJP members and various offshoots of the Sangh Parivar howled in protest. There were also the familiar cries of ‘sell-out’ from the CPM’s ideological bunker in the capital’s Gole Market. But Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was determined to back his Finance Minister. He summoned NK Singh, then secretary in the PMO. “Meet your former boss and enlist his support,” he told Singh. “My former boss?” Singh was not sure if the Prime Minister was referring to P Chidambaram or Manmohan Singh. His last stint was with Chidambaram. “No, I mean Manmohan Singh,” Vajpayee clarified. The career bureaucrat was in for a surprise when he met Dr Manmohan Singh to convey Vajpayee’s message. “Congress should support the move,” he told the Sardar. His head down, Manmohan Singh pleaded in a low voice, “Please spare me.” After a long pause, he added apologetically, “You know my position on this. But the Congress party will never support the proposal, inside Parliament or outside. Our leaders are nostalgic about Indira Gandhi’s nationalisation of banks …” he trailed off, with bent shoulders.

Dr Singh’s pusillanimity would work to the detriment of his own integrity later. As Prime Minister, too, he showed a studied detachment, keeping his head down when India needed leadership. He remained as bland as the décor of his office. Singh’s choice of principal secretary was TKA Nair, a bureaucrat not known for any streak of brilliance in his career as a civil servant.

NK Singh remembers another meeting with Manmohan Singh after he settled down as Prime Minister in 2004. As the conversation progressed, NK Singh asked the Prime Minister who would be in charge of monitoring the implementation of projects, a key function of the PMO. The Prime Minister responded, “Won’t Montek do that?” Appalled by this reference to the Planning Commission’s deputy chairman, NK Singh said, “But Sir, he is in the Planning Commission,” before indicating that the PMO’s principal functions could not be assigned peremptorily to Yojana Bhavan. The Prime Minister fell silent. But for almost 10 years through the stint of UPA-I and II, it was the Planning Commission that functioned as the primary office for monitoring the implementation of key projects. It was only in the dying days of the UPA regime that the PMO was forced—under intense criticism for policy paralysis—to reclaim the assignment, which essentially required the Prime Minister to read out the riot act to non-performing members of his Cabinet, and to ensure that key decisions were taken in a transparent manner.

The decline of the PMO on Dr Singh’s watch allowed an A Raja, the DMK’s telecom minister in his Cabinet, to indulge in chicanery on 2G spectrum allocations, ignoring the meek advice of the Prime Minister. It also allowed his successor Kapil Sibal, who has hubris as his calling card, to blithely claim that Raja’s decision resulted in ‘zero loss’ to the Central exchequer. As head of the coal ministry, too, the Prime Minister’s inclination was to willy-nilly let colleagues and underlings in the ministry twist policy decisions to their own benefit. “For a man who is credited with boldly opening the doors to market reforms in the country, his guiding motto as Prime Minister, strangely enough, was to never light a candle against the wind, never to take a calculated risk in policy and planning. But the trademark of a good leader is not to ride on a concocted consensus, but to shape that consensus. As Prime Minister, his errors of omission were bigger than his errors of commission,” says a bureaucrat in the know. “The only issue on which he chose to come through as decisive during his entire stint as Prime Minister of UPA-I was the Indo-US Nuclear Bill,” he says.


http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/the-long-road-to-perdition

Rishi wrote:On 29 February 2000, India’s then Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha proposed a bold step in the Union Budget as part of his financial reforms: the dilution of equity in public sector banks to below 51 per cent. Sinha told Parliament that the Government had decided to accept the Narasimham Committee’s recommendations on banking reforms and reduce minimum government shareholding in nationalised banks to 33 per cent. Instantly, all hell broke loose. Sundry BJP members and various offshoots of the Sangh Parivar howled in protest. There were also the familiar cries of ‘sell-out’ from the CPM’s ideological bunker in the capital’s Gole Market. But Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was determined to back his Finance Minister. He summoned NK Singh, then secretary in the PMO. “Meet your former boss and enlist his support,” he told Singh. “My former boss?” Singh was not sure if the Prime Minister was referring to P Chidambaram or Manmohan Singh. His last stint was with Chidambaram. “No, I mean Manmohan Singh,” Vajpayee clarified. The career bureaucrat was in for a surprise when he met Dr Manmohan Singh to convey Vajpayee’s message. “Congress should support the move,” he told the Sardar. His head down, Manmohan Singh pleaded in a low voice, “Please spare me.” After a long pause, he added apologetically, “You know my position on this. But the Congress party will never support the proposal, inside Parliament or outside. Our leaders are nostalgic about Indira Gandhi’s nationalisation of banks …” he trailed off, with bent shoulders.

Dr Singh’s pusillanimity would work to the detriment of his own integrity later. As Prime Minister, too, he showed a studied detachment, keeping his head down when India needed leadership. He remained as bland as the décor of his office. Singh’s choice of principal secretary was TKA Nair, a bureaucrat not known for any streak of brilliance in his career as a civil servant.

NK Singh remembers another meeting with Manmohan Singh after he settled down as Prime Minister in 2004. As the conversation progressed, NK Singh asked the Prime Minister who would be in charge of monitoring the implementation of projects, a key function of the PMO. The Prime Minister responded, “Won’t Montek do that?” Appalled by this reference to the Planning Commission’s deputy chairman, NK Singh said, “But Sir, he is in the Planning Commission,” before indicating that the PMO’s principal functions could not be assigned peremptorily to Yojana Bhavan. The Prime Minister fell silent. But for almost 10 years through the stint of UPA-I and II, it was the Planning Commission that functioned as the primary office for monitoring the implementation of key projects. It was only in the dying days of the UPA regime that the PMO was forced—under intense criticism for policy paralysis—to reclaim the assignment, which essentially required the Prime Minister to read out the riot act to non-performing members of his Cabinet, and to ensure that key decisions were taken in a transparent manner.

The decline of the PMO on Dr Singh’s watch allowed an A Raja, the DMK’s telecom minister in his Cabinet, to indulge in chicanery on 2G spectrum allocations, ignoring the meek advice of the Prime Minister. It also allowed his successor Kapil Sibal, who has hubris as his calling card, to blithely claim that Raja’s decision resulted in ‘zero loss’ to the Central exchequer. As head of the coal ministry, too, the Prime Minister’s inclination was to willy-nilly let colleagues and underlings in the ministry twist policy decisions to their own benefit. “For a man who is credited with boldly opening the doors to market reforms in the country, his guiding motto as Prime Minister, strangely enough, was to never light a candle against the wind, never to take a calculated risk in policy and planning. But the trademark of a good leader is not to ride on a concocted consensus, but to shape that consensus. As Prime Minister, his errors of omission were bigger than his errors of commission,” says a bureaucrat in the know. “The only issue on which he chose to come through as decisive during his entire stint as Prime Minister of UPA-I was the Indo-US Nuclear Bill,” he says.


http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/the-long-road-to-perdition

Open has been taken over by the BJP. IT is basically now a BJP propaganda rag. Manu Joseph and Hartosh Bal, the editor and political editor of Open, were removed (Since they were considered too secular) and journalists considered very close to the BJP have been appointed as the new editor and political editor.

Media freedom is about to come to an end going by the example of what happened at Open.