One doesn’t hear the phrase very often these days, but when Indira Gandhi was in power, every time something went wrong one of her ministers would invoke “the foreign hand”. Everything from the failure of the monsoon to bank rates to poor results in the examinations was put down to this bogey.
Commenting on this trend in this newspaper many years ago, the columnist and polymath P K Srinivasan wrote a brilliant piece asking why a self-sufficient nation like India should give so much credit to the foreign hand. Aren’t we capable of creating our own chaos? he asked, adding it was an insult to our well-honed instinct for getting things wrong to assume it required a foreign hand to mess things up.
Over the years, the foreign hand has been replaced by the Indian. That is why Chief Minister Dharam Singh does not use it to explain the state’s woeful infrastructure. His tactic simply is to shoot the messenger. Is the IT sector refusing to attend the state-sponsored IT.in because of its unhappiness over the infrastructure and the state’s lethargy? This is “systematic propaganda” by the Indian hand, he says.
But the standoff is brief. The IT bosses realise this is an important show for the industry while the Chief Minister says something about not allowing trucks into the city during certain hours. All is well. Especially since the government can’t bully the IT bosses into hiring Kannadigas. Promises all around. And only the Bangalorean is left to wonder how easily the IT big noises are satisfied.
The suspicion grows among the people that neither the government nor the private companies is particularly worried about their welfare. The IT sector has been given too many concessions in the past, and is therefore too easily silenced. It was the same last year, when the threat of a boycott was followed by a reconciliation peppered with promises. Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
The IT industry has given Bangalore a new face. It has provided employment, raised the lifestyles of its employees and introduced the dream of Singapore and Shanghai into the lives of ordinary folk. But when the question of infrastructure comes up, there is a credibility problem, a problem that is the government’s too.
In the year that it was persuaded to withdraw its 2004 boycott, things haven’t changed too much in our city. It is the government’s duty to take care of its citizens; private companies can at best apply pressure. It works sometimes, at other times it does not because there is a difference in focus between elected public servants and CEOs of private companies. If only Chief Ministers could be like CEOs, running their states with the efficiency a CEO has to bring to his job. But then we come up against the question of social responsibility and the need for placing welfare above profitability.
It is important to remember that the IT sector is a strong lobby in the city. It has some very fine men and women in positions of power, and their private dream for Bangalore isn’t very different from that of the average Bangalorean’s.
Roads, transport, power and water – we need these to be so efficiently managed that we don’t think about them at all.
The government will be wary of being seen to be close to the IT sector. Received wisdom is that former Chief Minister S M Krishna had to pay a heavy price for his bias towards it. Dharam Singh is slotting himself as a farmer’s man. He can’t be seen to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds, although that is precisely what he ought to be doing.
The grand reconciliation with the IT lobby followed by the wide publicity might fool citizens into thinking that all the problems have been solved, and we are only a step away from Singapore or Shanghai. That would be a terrible mistake.
Any lobby is only as powerful as it decides to be, shorn of self-interest. Bangalore has faith in the IT lobby not only for what it can do for itself, but for what it can do for the city.
Bangaloreans cannot demand that as a right, only as a service that companies around the world are known to provide to the community they operate in. One hopes the IT lobby will not give up too easily.
Sunday, October 9, 2005
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