New whine from old aunts

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is being accused of wrong things. His main problem is his view of himself, says T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan

Show me the man and I will show you the rule is an old game in the bureaucracy. It has its origins in Hammurabi's code and the Manusmriti. Both prescribed different punishments for the same crime depending on your wealth (Hammurabi) or caste (Manu).

The self-styled liberals of India -- who I now think of as the Old Aunts' Brigade -- have been unwittingly following this precept when it comes to the Congress on the one side and the rest of the political parties on the other. Basically, it is okay if the Congress does it -- not wholly, of course -- but not if J Jayalalithaa, Mamata Banerjee, Mayawati, Narendra Modi, Naveen Patnaik, etc, do it.

For example, all non-Congress leaders are labelled as authoritarian, as if Sonia Gandhi is not. The point doesn't need elaboration. Res ipsa loquitur as it were (the facts speak for themselves).

Even with Sonia Gandhi, for the aunts, as long as she takes their advice (or pretends to) she is decisive. But if she doesn't, or if she listens to others (god forbid if it is a rival), she is authoritarian.

You can therefore imagine how much worse it is for J Jayalalithaa, Mamata Banerjee, Mayawati, Narendra Modi, Naveen Patnaik and the rest. The liberals give them no wiggle room at all.

Narendra Modi, in particular, gets about half a millimetre. He is labelled a dictator. That he doesn't give a damn makes it all the worse.

The newest whine from the aunt brigade is that he has centralised everything. But the same thing was said at the time about Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. The PMO (or PMS, as it was called till Rajiv embarrassedly changed it) was supreme.

But -- and here's the point which the aunties miss -- that's precisely what the PMO is for: To exercise power, not to abjure it for whatever reason, you know, coalition dharma, 10, Janpath, Nagpur, whatever. In fact, a high degree of centralisation is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for effective government.

That's how they do it in other countries -- the US, Britain, France, Germany and Japan to name just five democracies with cabinet government. Indeed, that's how we also did it till 1996, when coalitions came along. And now that we have single-party rule once again we have reverted to the old normal.

For those who are inclined towards some genuine analysis, the problem of democratic decision-making has been worked on by a number of very brainy economists and political scientists. Allan Gibbard and Mark Satterthwaite are two of the best known amongst them.

Their theorem says that even in the most democratic of systems, in the end, someone has to impose a decision that will be basically dictatorial. If this is not done, good outcomes can rarely be reached. We saw this during the 10 years of UPA rule.

Indeed, it is because the Reserve Bank of India unconsciously follows this theorem that it has been largely successful with monetary policy. The RBI governor is, for all practical purposes, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Attila the Hun (for the finance ministry) combined.

Anyway, disturbed at the direction in which the analysis was pointing, the 1972 Nobel-winning economist, Kenneth Arrow, formulated a 'non-dictatorship rule'. Under it, social choices cannot, and must not, comprise a single person's preferences.

But then a problem arose: These preferences had to be ranked. Alas, however, the problem remained even after that was done: Someone had to choose between the options and that final choice was always dictatorial as voting was no longer possible.

Thus, the simple point, after you consider dozens of collective decision-making theorems, is that there are no fully democratic outcomes. These theorems, in fact, together constitute a major paradox: All decisions taken according to democratic rules always leave more people unhappy than happy!

There will always be an Old Aunts' Brigade mumbling in the corner.

This does not mean Modi doesn't have a problem. He does. And the problem is one that afflicts all good leaders -- the near total absence of self-doubt. Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai and Rajiv Gandhi, none of them ever thought, even for a moment, that someone else might know better.

On the other side are the rest. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, perhaps because they were so highly educated, were filled with self-doubt. Result: dithering on policy.

For Modi, as it did for the others, this means that when he makes a mistake he will persist with it because of the way in which he thinks of himself -- as, well, you know, Casabianca, "Yet beautiful and bright he stood/As born to rule the storm/A creature of heroic blood/A proud though childlike form."

More prosaically, he is like the bridegroom in the Tamil saying, of whom the mother-in-law ruefully says, "He has all qualities but two: He doesn't know for himself and he will not listen when he is told."

All we have to do is to wait for a year or so to see whether Modi fits this description.