Chanakya's New Manifesto: To Resolve the Crisis Within India (11 page)

1.38  The report of the GAP would be evaluatory in nature, and its recommendations or findings would not be binding on the government. However, since it would be in the public realm, it would be significant in enabling people to judge the performance of the government, and providing an outside and independent evaluation to reappraise the government's track record on governance. States would be required to set up their own GAP by procedures analogous to those enlisted for the Centre.

1.39  As is the practice in many democracies, the tenure of the PM should be restricted to a maximum of two terms or, if any one term does not last for a five-year period, to ten years in totality. This will prevent the development of a personality cult inimical to governance and allow fresh talent to aspire to high office. It will also spur the PM to implement his or her agenda within a fixed term.

1.40  Furthermore, a PM must be a member of the Lok Sabha. Any person who has not been directly elected by the people cannot exercise the mandate or the authority to be the chief executive of a government.

1.41  Within a democratic framework, governance requires the PM, as the chief executive, to wield the requisite authority within the cabinet and the government. The practice of real power residing in an unaccountable manner outside the government, and the PM becoming a weak nominee of that outside power, must be strongly resisted by all political parties. When the PM is perceived to be weak, the cabinet system unravels, and governance suffers. A PM must have the freedom and authority to constitute his cabinet, monitor its performance, and reshuffle his team if the desired objectives of governance are being neglected. In a coalition government it is likely that ministers will be nominees of different parties. However, once a minister is sworn in as a member of the cabinet, his loyalty to his party must be balanced by his commitment, under the Constitution and his oath of office, to abide by the collective will of the cabinet. There cannot be a situation whereby chiefs of individual parties instruct their cabinet nominees to follow an agenda which is different to or opposed to the collective decisions of the cabinet. Individual ministers can, of course, present their views to the cabinet in accordance with the thinking of their parties, but once a decision is taken by the cabinet as a whole, party chiefs cannot ask for their nominees to be removed merely because the cabinet decision was at variance with what they wanted, or because the minister has fallen out of favour.

1.42  Party chiefs, after they have volitionally entered into a coalition partnership at the Centre, must understand that their demands on ministers whom they have nominated have to be counterbalanced by the constitutional imperatives of the functioning of the Cabinet system. The absence of such restraint is a prescription for constitutional anarchy. In any case, the ability of the PM to resist such blackmail should be ensured once the lock-in period of three years is adopted. The problem will further be mitigated if a fleshed out Governance Agenda is agreed to between coalition partners prior to the elections.

1.43  Even after the three-year lock-in period, the functional sanctity of the Cabinet system must be protected by the president of India. Article 75(1) of the Constitution states: ‘The prime minister shall be appointed by the president and the other ministers shall be approved by the president on the advice of the prime minister’. Article 75(2) states: ‘The ministers shall hold office during the pleasure of the president’. If a situation arises where there is a conflict between the wishes of the party chief in a coalition and the constitutional duty of that minister in the Cabinet system, the president, as the custodian of the Constitution, must move beyond a merely ceremonial role and intervene decisively to breach any deadlock since all ministers hold office during his ‘pleasure’.
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This again underlines the need to amend Article 42 of the Constitution, whose simplistic interpretation reduces the
elected
head of state to an ineffectual post office that does little more than rubber-stamp the decisions of the PM. In the new challenges of a coalition form of government, the president must play, within the restraint of a constitutional presidency, a more proactive role.

1.44  Fresh consideration must also be given to the size of the Cabinet. For example, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s huge UPA Cabinet with seventy-seven ministers and ministers of state gave new meaning to the word elephantine. Such an outsized political executive leads to inter-ministerial battles of turf, poor coordination, and delayed decision making. It is clear that, more often than not, the size and incumbency of the Cabinet is decided on the basis of intra-coalition compulsions. It is instructive to remember that President Obama, the leader of the world’s most powerful country, has a Cabinet comprising only fifteen members. Parliamentary democracy does impose its own compulsions, but no Cabinet should exceed forty members which is slightly less than 10 per cent of the total strength of the Lok Sabha.

1.45  Good governance also requires talent at the political level to dynamically implement the governance agenda. Normally, the democratic process should itself throw up good people with an ability to govern effectively. However, in addition to this possibility (which has been greatly belied in recent times), the Rajya Sabha must serve as a talent pool from which those with proven administrative and technological skills can be recruited to the Cabinet. People of such calibre should also be in the Opposition, thereby constructively enriching parliamentary debate. The makers of the Constitution intended the Rajya Sabha to be filled with tremendously talented people as well. For a long time now though the upper house has become a sinecure for failed politicians or a parking place for those for whom there is no other place in the political system. We need to use the Rajya Sabha to widen the catchment area of talent for governance.

1.46  The PM, and all members of the Cabinet, must compulsorily retire on reaching the age of seventy. This ceiling will prevail even if a PM has not completed the tenure of ten years or two terms that he is entitled to. India is demographically one of the youngest countries in the world. It is time we took steps to allow octogenarian politicians who are past their prime in terms of both health and intellectual capabilities to give way to younger people. In fact, in many other democratic countries, chief executives are required to retire at an earlier age, and it is recommended that in due course the retirement age should be brought down to sixty-five. The trend in many leading countries of the world is for heads of government to be in their forties. In Bhutan, even the king has to compulsorily abdicate in favour of his heir at the age of sixty-five. India does not need to mechanically follow this trend, but there is functional merit in having chief executives who are in the prime of their physical and intellectual capabilities.

1.47  Beyond the political level, governments should increasingly bring managerial, technocratic and technological talent into the bureaucracy when required. There is nothing sacrosanct about those who constitute the bureaucracy. Some states, like Bihar, have already taken this sort of initiative. The Nitish Kumar government has decided to recruit thirty-two professionals from the open market to oversee the time-bound implementation of rural development schemes worth
6,000 crore annually. These professionals will be paid a salary substantially above what even the cabinet secretary to the Government of India earns. There should be no hesitation in paying such individuals well, because talent has a price. In any case, this is a very small cost towards the furtherance of better governance. Care, however, should be taken that such outside recruitment does not become a means to merely finesse the legitimate bureaucracy or encourage nepotism.

1.48  In pursuance of the policy of good governance, the time has come for the government to exit all areas it has no reason to be involved in. For instance, hospitality and tourism are areas which the government, apart from providing an enabling policy framework, should immediately exit and leave to private players. Similarly, all loss making or sick Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) must forthwith be divested or the government should sell a majority stake to a plausible strategic partner. The so-called ‘navratna’ PSUs, such as HPCL, BPCL, BSNL, MTNL, CIL—to name only a few—are all incurring heavy losses and are buried under a mountain of debt. The process of incremental disinvestment should commence even in PSUs that are considered strategic, such as ONGC and the oil-marketing countries. This approach should even include public sector industries in the defence sector, whose inherent inefficiency is largely unaccountable and hidden from public scrutiny under opaque and outdated notions of secrecy. Disinvestment through a transparent mechanism to the right strategic partner(s) would bring in much-needed revenue to the government. More importantly, it would signal the end of an ideological era where the government was expected, whether it could deliver or not, to exercise a monopoly in key areas of governance. In the milieu of competition and economic reform, the time has come to finally bury this notion.

1.49  Governance requires the understanding that mechanically doling out subsidies cannot be a substitute for policy. Subsidies are the easiest populist solutions for governments that refuse to take hard decisions involving foundational change. They are also the easiest resort for unstable governments with an eye only on immediate political dividends or survival.

1.50  The deferment of urgently needed decision making through the mechanism of committees must cease. Governments are entitled to have complex issues properly analyzed. But governance through committees, which seem to have a never-ending term, has become endemic in India. Committees, or such instrumentalities like the EGoMs, must mandatorily make their recommendations within a three-month period.

1.51  The unproductive ideological ambivalence to economic reform must also end. The two decades after 1991 have shown that there is an undeniable co-relation between economic growth and the liberalization of the economy. The spouting of socialist rhetoric in the name of the poor, often for motivated and shortsighted political reasons, has lost its relevance. The role of the State would, of course, continue to be pivotal, particularly in aligning economic reform to objectives of equity, and in being the prime mover for overall priorities and their effective delivery.

1.52  New laws to enforce corruption-free governance must be enacted. The bureaucracy and the political leadership must be made accountable for unethical conduct and deterrent punishment meted out expeditiously. This will be dealt with in detail in the subsequent chapter on corruption.

1.53  A fair process must be set in place to weed out, after twenty years of service, non-performing or under-performing bureaucrats. A period of twenty years is a long enough time to judge the overall performance of an officer, even if he or she has on occasion been the victim of motivated or vindictive assessments. For all central government employees, and officers of the All India Services, the decision to terminate services should be first screened by the Department of Personnel and Training (DOPT) and then sent for endorsement to the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT). State-level employees should be screened by corresponding bodies at the state level. The processing for both categories will need to be mandatorily completed within a year from the date on which the first recommendation was made, and in any case before the officer in question completes twenty-one years of service.

1.54  Conversely, those bureaucrats who are honest and competent must be protected from the capricious behaviour of their political masters. Central and state administrative tribunals would suo moto monitor all cases where a bureaucrat is deemed to have been transferred before completing his or her normal tenure or punished for apparently motivated reasons, and immediately intervene to restore the status quo. They would be given a maximum period of three months thereafter to examine each case on merit, and if required, restore the status quo ante.

1.55  In this context, it should be examined whether CAT should be given constitutional status similar to the EC or the proposed GAP.

1.56  In a parliamentary democracy, the bureaucracy is required to be apolitical. However, this trait has been progressively eroded by the clever stratagem of politicians holding out the carrot of reemployment to retired bureaucrats. Most bureaucrats, if they have been promised a comfortable sinecure after they retire, will toe the line of their political bosses, and even collude with them in wrongdoing. This affects good governance objectives. No bureaucrat should be given an extension in service after retirement, including on contract. He or she will also be ineligible for reemployment or for holding any government office for a compulsory cooling off period of two years. The two-year period will apply also to taking up employment in the corporate sector.

1.57  Finally, decentralization should become a constant theme in the pursuit of good governance. India is too large and complex a country to have all policies implemented or conceived at the Centre. Mahatma Gandhi was absolutely right when he spoke of the merits of empowering gram sabhas or panchayats. These administrative-cum-political units should be empowered to become effective conduits of verifiable governance at the grassroots level. Measures need to be devised to monitor their performance, and this could be assigned primarily to the states, in association with the central government.