SCAMS AND THE MAN

The Blame Game
The airwaves and the print media, not to speak of the Web, these days are saturated with a war of words in what could be called a "blame game" that targets primarily the politician. As always, it is true smoke could not exist without some flames somewhere. But now the smoke is billowing thick, leaving no doubt in anybody's mind about its source! And it is amidst this thick pall of smoke that one should work trying to separate the perpetrators of the various 'scams' from the 'front guys' and the 'benamis'. A tough task indeed!
But then I for one, with quite a few others that I know, do not want to blame the politicians for the present state of affairs. I know that is a serious statement to make, and at peril to oneself, unless one happens to be  a past master in the art of dodging the brickbats that come flying in one's direction! But patience! A moment's reflection will clarify my stand.

The Democratic Tamasha
The whole 'democratic tamasha' began, as our school text books tell us, back in 1948 --though it must be admitted that it took some decades for the process to become truly 'business-like'. Today's politician is a career politician. And politics is a 'desirable' career. Otherwise respectable parents wouldn't be pushing their offspring into it with the same kind of enthusiasm and expense with which they push their little one into a career in medicine or software. To make it a career and ultimately to obtain a paying position in politics today takes an awesome amount of money and slogging. This will be clear to all but stubborn morons when one considers the cost of air time and print space for ads, the expenses for  multi-colour hoardings and handouts, the money that goes into the wining and dining of your cohorts, the other sundry expenses like 'goonda fees' and such like. And the desperate final fling is when you have to count out hard cash to 'buy votes'--as it is put by the uncharitable ones on the 'other' side. And after all that, it is again a 'maybe' for you to become a politician with a paying post, say like an MLA or an MP --your destiny waits in the ballot box or, today, within the RAM of the electronic voting machine. But once the results are declared and the candidate is 'in', he cuts the umbilical to his "beloved electorate" and soars free like a Helium balloon into the blue yonder of umpteen 'possibilities' of personal enrichment--no strings attched! Only the naive will expect the dyed-in-the-wool politician to be not open to various temptations. And temptations have had a bad press all along from the days of Christ.

After all, the end and aim of every career is personal enrichment, quite often on the material plane. For  the politician, once he is "in the gaddi", thank God, hopefully for five years, what is there to keep him from recouping what he had spent? The doctors do it unashamedly once they start their 'practice', and I am told the engineers too are not much different. Even the humble 'chaprasi', the petty 'babu' or the policeman who bribes his way into the 'system' tries his best to 'recoup' the money that he had spent to make the coveted post his own. Every person who 'invests' a tidy sum to secure an employment knows that this is the reality in our country. Then why single out the "poor career politician" as the odd man out?

Quid Pro Quo
Come to think of it, what really are the incentives for the average politician to tread the narrow path of idealism and principles like integrity and accountability? What will he be 'gaining' if he is only loyal to the people who have voted him into power? You ask him, and he is sure to  enumerate the many difficulties with which he secured the requisite number of votes! The end, as they say, often justifies the means, and the parliamentary electoral system happens to be the only means for the politician to get into the system (except in the case of a few lucky ones--more on that later!) and he used that to his advantage. Once he was in, what happened next was not any more the business of what is politely termed the 'electorate'.
And these days when PR honchos and corporate bigwigs pull the strings to anoint one the uncrowned 'emperor' in a powerful ministry, the mechanics of 'quid pro quo' naturally is the only principle that applies. Ta-ta to the voters, till we have need to meet next! As a wag recently put it, it is more 'quid' than quo! And the 'quids' defy being counted by the man in the street, who I doubt could count anything so stupendous as 1,76,000 crore or even a figure a tenth as large.

Systems and Control
For ideas about what to do in such a situation, I guess you have to turn to a couple of old time masters --one from the Industrial Revolution era and another from the more modern Electronic Era of the 20th C.  James Watt, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine ) as he was perfecting his mechanical monster spewing steam, saw that soon it would 'run away' unless he put bridles on his 'baby'. And the resourceful man bolted on what is called a 'governor' on his machine. The rest, as they say, is history, and we sing his praises for having "harnessed" steam to power man's progress. Flash forward to another era, and we have Harold Black the inventor of the electronic amplifier. It is said that the inspiration for a brilliant way to control his amplifier and make it linear occurred to him while on the Hudson river ferry back in 1927. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Stephen_Black )  His 'feedback amplifier' has revolutionized the pace of the  communications revolution in the decades since.

Is there a lesson in that for us humble humans?  Sure. Any system, to work controllably and usefully, requires some amount of 'feedback'. One look will tell us that in common with many other sociological systems that man has devised, the political system too lacks this essential factor--corrective feedback. And the lack of effective feedback is what has contributed to all this "runaway behaviour" and the attendant troubles in the system. You don't need a degree in rocket or atomic science to tell you that the solution to the ills of the present political system lies in precisely this--the incorporation of corrective feedback.

Come Easy, Go Easy
The practice of periodic and continuous performance assessments is common in academia and industry. Accountability is the keystone of academic and corporate structures; but it appears to be virtually invisible in the political edifice. So, why not have this model implemented in the political arena too? The person who came to occupy a cushy seat in the "gaddi" as a direct result of the votes polled against his symbol has, at the end of the year, to earn at least about 75% approval from his electorate in another 'assessment'.  In these days of on-line everything, it will not be such a hassle to ask the eletorate  (at least those who have no Web access) to go to the nearest government office, log in and record their 'assessment' of their MLA or MP. In order to rule out fraud, there should be a period when the full details of the 'poll' would be posted on-line and complaints received and errors rectified. If the 'humble servant of the people' fails to qualify, he finds himself 'run out' in the middle of the game, and forfeits to the Exchequer all the remuneration that he has received from the taxpayer's money, including the benefits going to his retinue.

It is simple and direct. If he takes the votes of the taxpayer and gets into the House of lawmakers and then only takes orders from some capitalist crony or some female in the garb of a 'PR persona', let him be fully in the employ of that person and get paid from his/her coffers, and not the Nation's. The "aam aadmi" has had enough of the crocodile tears of the "powers that be", whether it is about the personal/privacy concerns of the corporates or the losses of the oil companies and such stuff -- which seem to be the only things that occupy the minister's mind day in and day out. Nobody sheds at least a tear or two for the man in the street --who ultimately has to foot the bill for all the 'tamashas' galore by way of taxes and more taxes. Do we need another definition of irony?

No, no and NO. The buck has to stop here, and now. It is basically a question of accounts and accountability.

Two For Us
Along with this simple modification to our democratic system, a few other changes too should fill the bill for the present. We must have a two-party system, so that the bane of 'coalition politics' will be ended once and for ever. Whatever your political affiliations or leanings, you have to join the system on one side and contest the elections on the strength of your public, declared policies. Finer things like how to tackle a turncoat joining the other side midstream could be to left to our Constitutional experts. But I guess two parties should be the absolute limit in any honest to goodness democracy.

Then again there should be a Constitutional proviso that nobody who is not elected through a duly democratic process should be able to occupy any Constitutional position-- even if s/he were a "laad sahib ka betta". Everybody knows only too well what happens when such a person occupies a key position and s/he is unsure or undecided about his/her priorities and commitments --which obviously are not to the poor voter, who, as a matter of fact, did not elect him/her in the first place!

Let us bring in these simple and basic changes to our Constitution and India could be a model for 'real' democracies --not in another hundred years when idealism will come to prevail universally, but after the very next elections.

JAI HIND --and her people!
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