Hail, Carper-in-Chief

BY VICKY LEEK| IN Opinion | 19/06/2016
Sundays are ruined with his grumbling and mumbo-jumbo. Give your readers a break please, dear Indian Express.
Enough is enough, says VICKY LEEK

Wah, Punditry!
Vicky Leek

On Sunday I opened the papers with a sense of dread that has been customary these days. I think of an earlier time when, even if the temperature was in the late ‘30s at 6 am, you looked forward to a lazy couple of hours on the veranda, with tea, toast and tattle, of pleasant reading, you know, instead of all this posturing and hectoring on the so-called ‘serious’ issues. The Indian Express, in particular, was great at providing soft but semi-serious Sunday reading.

Not anymore, alas. Its Op-ed pages are filled with ghastly outpourings of political, economic and social ansgst, that too by the same people, week after week: P. Chidambaram, Tavleen Singh, Meghnad Desai et al. All of them give you gyan as if you are dumber than dumber. Only that poor dear Coomi Kapoor makes a valiant effort to lighten that dreary page up with her lively gossip.

Carper-in-Chief

Take, for instance, that man Chidambaram, a politician with as fine a brain as you will find anywhere. He knows it, too, I am told. But his sour disposition spoils it all. Instead of making a point cleverly, which he can I am sure, he does it dourly, as though he hasn’t had his favourite coffee that morning. My problem is the way his total lack of reasonableness ruins his message. I am sure a great deal of what he says is right. But there is something called moderation and restraint.

Worse, he seems to have turned into a serial grumbler. Not a week passes without his picking tiny flaws in the NDA government in general and with his successor, Arun Jaitley, in particular. That this is not the best way for a predecessor to conduct himself doesn’t occur to him. No one has told him “It’s not on, dear boy, it’s bad form, stop it.” 

In the last two years he has griped about everything. Toilets (Swachh Bharat), trade and fiscal deficits, elections, diplomacy, Pakistan, are all grist to his acidic mill. Everything that the NDA does is either flawed or wrong or copied from the UPA generally, and him specially. But, my darling man, if it is indeed copied or borrowed from you and the Congress, how can it be wrong unless, you know, the original was wrong too? 

Got you there, didn’t I?

Mumbo-jumbo

But it is not just his style that I have a problem with. He writes on Sunday mornings – Sunday morning! - on economics. What can be more depressing? And, truth to tell, I don’t understand a word of it. Nor, dearies, do I care. The other day he was in full flow about something called GDP. Here’s a sample of what he wrote, and I am truly sorry that the quote is so long but it is necessary to illustrate my point about how the man ruins my Sundays:

“One of the main deficiencies was the choice of deflators. Gross value additions (GVA) are measured in current prices but in order to make them comparable with measurements based on prices in the base year (2011-12), one must ‘deflate’ them with an appropriate deflator. In the cases of ‘trade, hotels, transport, communication etc’ and ‘financial, real estate and professional services’, the GVA at current prices was 6.6 per cent and 7.4 per cent respectively. The CSO applied negative deflators and reported a growth rate of 9.0 per cent and 10.3 per cent respectively. When the 12-month average of CPI inflation in 2015-16 was 4.9 per cent, it is difficult to believe that inflation in these two sectors was negative! There has been no convincing explanation why negative deflators were chosen for these two service sectors.” (June 12, 2016)

Why do newspapers allow this on a Sunday? In any case, all he had to do was to call up someone in the government to get his doubts clarified. Why take a dump on the poor unsuspecting reader instead?

On April 3 he wrote:

“I do not doubt the intentions of the government. My worry is, does the government have a firm grasp of the current economic situation? The dazzle of ‘7.5 per cent GDP growth’ should not blind us to the reality of poor aggregate demand, sputtering investment, stalled exports and near-zero job creation. This is not the time to bask in an illusory sunshine”.

I asked an economist friend whether the Carper-in-Chief was right. He is a strong supporter of Narendra Modi, so he launched into a tirade which gave me a headache. His message was clear: what’s sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander also. The economic conditions that made the economy hiss, miss and splutter since 2011 haven’t gone away; in fact they have become worse in some ways. So why is he blaming the NDA for not reviving exports and private investment, he asked.  Even he couldn't have done anything.

Mr Naysayer

On foreign policy too, he criticises for the sake of criticising, never acknowledge anything positive. Thus, he wrote: 

“Pakistan is not a rogue state but it harbours and covertly supports rogue elements. While war is not the answer, hard or coercive diplomacy could be. India has been forced to defer the Foreign Secretary-level talks to an undetermined date. The time between now and that date must be used to re-examine all aspects of the talks — when, where and on what subjects. These are matters where we must assert our right to exercise our choice.” 

This came after writing earlier in the same article that Pakistan had three agencies that act in the name of the state: 

“The Indian State is a single entity. There is a structure, there is a command and control and, barring minor aberrations, the State acts and can be commanded to act as a single entity. Pakistan is not. There are at least three structures within Pakistan that exercise ‘State’ power. There is the federal government of Pakistan, there is the Army, and there is the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). No one has control over all the three power structures. The Army and the ISI can — and often do — act independently.”

I showed this to a former foreign secretary, a rather dear man even if he is in his dotage. His reply was crisp: “How then is Pakistan not a rogue state?” How indeed?

Or take politics. Here’s a sample:

“As Home Minister, I was convinced that a militaristic (or legalistic) approach to Kashmir will not lead to a solution; on the contrary it would only exacerbate the conflict. That is why I had pleaded for reducing the overwhelming presence of the armed forces and the amendment, if not repeal, of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act.”(April 16, 2016) 

This, from the man who as home minister went after the Naxalites with as much force as he could muster. Why should it be one rule for the poor Naxalites and one rule for those Kashmiris who have the same objective, of overthrowing the Indian state? 

I can go on complaining but I am sure you get the point. The Indian Express should be more careful about who it downloads on its readers on Sunday mornings. P. Chidambaram et al are free to weep, groan and generally carry on with their indignation but you know what? Sunday after Sunday it gets tiresome.

 

Vicky Leek is a hack turned lesser pundit who carps for her daily bread.  She  lurks in the pontificating environs of Central Delhi. 

 

 

The Hoot is the only not-for-profit initiative in India which does independent media monitoring.
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