The outage in politics and the audacity of hope

Outage, it is the word of the week. The lexicon defines outage as an interruption or failure in the supply of power, especially electricity. It is also the metaphor for India 2012. Millions suffer power outage for over 10 hours every day, the political class suffers from leadership outage, governance is stranded for lack of political will power, and the economy is stalled. Pause and look around, and there is outage of every kind stalking India. Outage and outrage dominate national discourse and hope is an audacious bystander.

On Monday, the nation was interrupted and by Tuesday, India topped the list of the worst 12 power outages in the world with the top two entries. The India Story found place on front pages of global newspapers and news channels. Appropriately, dark humour took centrestage. On Twitter, it was defined as progress with the number affected rising from 360 million on Monday to 600 million on Tuesday. Outraged Indians also awarded the government the gold medal for outage.

Outrage notwithstanding, let us face it that the systemic collapse fuelled by vote bank politics was waiting to happen. Technically, the outage happened because states drew above their allotted quota. But it was encouraged by the outage of political power. A minority government at the Centre can scarcely act. The guilty state could be ruled by a declared ally or an undeclared ally which will vote with them in Parliament, or for instance in the poll for the Vice-president. Overdrawing is also encouraged by policy. States overdraw because it is profitable. If the penalty was twice the market rate for power on that day, states would not find it profitable to overdraw. But above all, grid failure is about rising demand and short supply.

India has trailed targets for power generation since 1951. In five years, China has added more capacity than India has in 65 years. New projects are stalled because the government has been debating bills on land acquisition and mining rights since 2005. Those plants which have come up don’t have fuel. Over 10,000 MW of generation capacity is idle without fuel, awaiting the end of the civil war in the Congress. State governments cannot fund projects and private producers can’t help either because State Electricity Boards—laden with debt of nearly `2 lakh crore and annual theft of `30,000 crore—can’t pay for power.

None of this is unknown. Each of the factors is listed in the two Five Year Plans and the Integrated Energy Policy report cleared by the UPA. The parking of the power ministry as additional charge with the Corporate Affairs Minister is both evidence of callousness and an admission that nothing can and will be done in a hurry. Neither the Centre nor states can fund new projects. Between them, the Centre and the states will borrow nearly `6 lakh crore to bridge their deficits. India already has the highest fiscal deficit among the peer group of BRICS. Consolidated deficit of Centre and states may now touch 9 per cent of GDP. Yet every party is racing downhill to shower voters with freebies and those in power race faster. Voters know they are being sold lemons but seem powerless. As historian Will Durant once said, “The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.”

It is expected that the two principal parties—the Congress and BJP—would take a lead to work out a solution for what is a national crisis. But there is a serious outage in leadership. Neither knows what it stands for. Like Alice in Wonderland, they don’t know where they want to go. The BJP has failed spectacularly in its strategy. In the presidential polls, it had no candidate and ended up backing Purno Sangma much to chagrin of old-timers who regale dissidents with the former speaker’s speech when Vajpayee lost by a vote. In its quest against corruption, it outsourced agitation to Team Anna only to find it has created a popular competitor. Sixteen months after challenging the entrenched political class, the agitators have voted to join them. The “electorate of the virtuous” has now decided to get elected. What it will stand for or how it will fund its ambition is yet to be seen. As for the BJP, it could only “welcome” the prospect of a split in the Opposition votes.

Nobody has accused the Congress of grand strategy either. It did beat the Opposition in the Presidential poll but the survival of the UPA is predicated by daily doses of carrot-and-stick politics. The Grand Maratha Sharad Pawar has already spelt out his mood. The DMK will sing soon enough. Mamata Banerjee may have sent a rakhi to Mukherjee but it is unlikely that she will lick her wounds quietly. All this will visit the Congress in the Monsoon Session of Parliament and more importantly, the economy.

Much hope on the revival of the economy is built around the return of P Chidambaram as the finance minister. Consider the odds. He must cut expenditure, borrowings and deficit to bring down inflation. Which means his party must agree to cutting subsidies and pushing disinvestment. He must promote investment which means his party must decide on the contentious issues of land acquisition, the Mining Rights Bill and FDI limits investment is bogged down by. Policy paralysis is but another form of outage.

Solutions evade India because the pyramid of power grid is inverted. Policy is crafted around the construct of electoral profitability, babudom revels in evading accountability and voters are satisfied just defeating parties. Good governance needs to be made electorally profitable if babudom is to be forced to deliver desired outcomes. Ergo voters must vote for ideas, leadership and governance not cast their vote against parties. Till such time, outage and outrage will reign.

shankkar.aiyar@gmail.com

Shankkar Aiyar is a senior journalist who specialises in the politics of economics