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Dither, delay, defer

Now imagine Donald Rumsfeld and three chiefs finding the time to preview something like Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket? If our entire defence top brass has the time to get together merely to pre-censor a popular film it can only mean that permanent peace has broken out and there isn’t much else to do!

That, however, is not the real story here. The brass most generously, and correctly, cleared the film. But there were more hiccups. Just a day later, the Animal Welfare Board that had earlier given the film a no-objection certificate withdrew the approval. The result: the producer was again running around doing last-moment damage control, which included a 20-second cut as cinema halls across the country were preparing for the film’s release.

The issue here is not what the producer of one particular film was subjected to. The issue is what this episode tells us about our approach to decision-making. Over the years, Indian establishment has relaxed and loosened its decision-making processes to such an extent that it takes so long, is so lacking in conviction as to leave the right of veto even with the least important stake-holder. The film is a good example, because once the film certification board had cleared it, that should have been the end of the process. But it continued to get re-opened, by defence, by the animal rights board and so on.

A more serious example is the by now messy Mumbai and Delhi airports story. For five years, successive finance ministers have been promising this in their budgets. That our airports suck, and need immediate modernisation is a no-brainer. That the government should get out of most areas of business, particularly those in the service industry, is also a no-brainer. Yet the process goes on and on giving time for lobbying and muddying of waters by bidders as well as other vested interests.

Politicians, from among the opposition and the allies, can all exploit the confusion and indecision and so can old vested interests dug-in for decades in the civil aviation ministry establishment. It has even given hope and time for some of the senior most officials of the civil aviation establishment, who see their empire slipping away from their hands, to engage tantriks and swamis to hold yagnas and pujas on a weekly basis to invoke celestial intervention to block this. It has given time, meanwhile, for a (probably well-meaning) maverick in the Planning Commission to come up with a spectacular attempt to rubbish the whole process. The air in Delhi is now thick with rumours and gossip.

This decision had across-the-board political support and should have been left to professionals once a transparent bidding process had been drafted and announced. The rest should have been a mere formality. While it was a good idea to constitute a Group of Ministers (GOM) under Pranab Mukherjee, one of this Cabinet’s most competent ministers, the repeated postponements of the decision, doubts and finally the recourse to a review by an ‘unimpeachable’ authority, namely E Sreedharan, the builder of the Delhi Metro, was wrong in instinct as well as wisdom.

When a government sets up a decision-making process, it has to have faith in it. Also it has to then have the courage to take the decision and then be held accountable for it. The tendency to call in ‘other’ authorities —on some other occasions governments have tried to ‘pre-clear’ commercial, defence and other deals, with the Central Vigilance Commission is self-defeating, amounts to seeking a political anticipatory bail and also exposes your flanks to all sorts of critics, doubters, saboteurs and busybodies.

This is exactly what has happened with the airport decision now and the prime minister has to ensure that there are no further postponements and doubts as this modernisation cannot brook a day’s delay with the aviation sector booming and, for Delhi in particular, preparations already behind time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

He has to also make sure that we do not fall into the familiar trap of half-solutions. Let’s clear one, and call fresh bids for the second. Or, letís clear one, and leave the other to an SPV to be set up by the airports authority. No civilised country can tie itself down into knots over decisions as vital, and as reasonable as this. A country that talks about investing hundreds of billions of dollars into its infrastructure in a decade has to learn to get a move on.

Like Rang De Basanti, the airport story is only one more illustration of our confused, under-confident decision-making processes. Governments are elected to take big decisions and they do not need to pre-clear these each time through a referendum of sorts. Did Indira Gandhi and then Atal Behari Vajpayee seek anybody’s clearance or political consensus before deciding on Pokharan I and II? Similarly, once the prime minister, in his wisdom, signed the nuclear agreement with Bush last July, all doubting should have ended at least in the establishment. No decent nation that wants to be taken seriously can allow an impression to grow that even its major strategic decisions and commitments are subject to doubts and confusion. Once again, did Indira Gandhi bother to collect support from all political parties and newspaper editorial writers before signing the treaty with the Soviet Union in 1971?

This is not a critique of this UPA government. Decision-making at the topmost levels had fallen into this trap even under NDA which could not, after so many meetings, clear the decision to increase telecom FDI to 74 per cent. The UPA cleared it, but then took months notifying the norms. If you just do a listing of the number of top-level meetings that have taken place on the purchase of new aircraft by the two state-owned carriers in the past seven years you’d know exactly why businesses like those, in open, competitive domain, should be completely unshackled from government control. In the time it has taken for two successive governments to clear the purchase of nearly 100 aircraft (which will fetch up 2012), India’s new private companies, without the luxury of sovereign guarantees, have already added over a hundred aircraft to our civil aviation business and would have added another 50 before the two national carriers even begin to receive their first new ones.

The prime minister likes to say that a stint in government is an exercise in public trust, and he is right. Governments are elected to govern, governance is about taking decisions and having the confidence and moral courage to be held accountable for these. You cannot govern by seeking to cover all your decisions with anticipatory bail of one sort or another.

Veteran journalist Shekhar Gupta is Editor-in-Chief of Indian Express