“Government is omnipresent and we all have to learn to live and work with it,” is a typical statement of advice from well-wishers of my various enterprises. Yet despite best efforts to follow this advice and minor successes, I must confess failure to work with government.
The sticking point has always been the lack of elementary good manners and accountability. For instance, despite sending a complimentary copy of EW — a periodical admired around the world — every month for the past four years, with grovelling handwritten notes soliciting an interview with Union HRD minister Arjun Singh to discuss national education policies — I have never received a reply. Likewise on one occasion when I wrote, faxed and phoned World Bank pensioner and deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, nearly a dozen times for a five minute phone interview, he never responded. Ditto the education ministers of several state governments.
All this confirms a hypothesis developed during my three decades in Indian journalism, viz, that every elected and/or appointed representative of the people is moonlighting to create secondary or multiple income streams. That’s why they are never “in their seats”, or able to discharge their duties to the satisfaction of any of their publics. Secure in their protected jobs, the concept of accountability has become alien to the country’s 18 million public servants.
This prologue is crucial to being able to explain the failure of numerous government agencies to prevent the terror attacks on Mumbai’s top two show-piece hotels, and other contiguous targets on November 26. In September, October and as late as November 19, the National Security Agency, the Indian Navy and the coast guards had been tipped off that a terrorist attack from the sea on Mumbai was imminent. But it can be safely assumed that because public servants who should have been doing their jobs were preoccupied with creating additional income streams, they didn’t have the time or inclination to process and act on the information. Think about it; it’ll come to you.