Piccadilly Circus, the heart of the City of London
The last few weeks of the year is a special time. As Christmas and New Year are around the corner, there is a combination of anxiety and hope that fills most of us with excitement. For me, the threshold of 1990 was particularly invigorating, because coupled with my promotion, I was about to embark on my first overseas trip to London and much of the UK. The theme of my four-month-long training and industry visit was to experience firsthand the dynamics of the ongoing privatization of state-run enterprises including utilities in the UK, which was riding on a wave of Thatcherism that had churned the bureaucracy and public sector management there.
At that time the very word privatization was anathema to Indian bureaucracy and political leadership. Liberalisation was less vulnerable as an idea but even that had connotations with political incorrectness in a land where the entire political discourse was built around socialism and protectionism. Professionalisation and management effectiveness were terms more nuanced to the subtle changes on the horizon.
There were eight of us from my company nominated for the program. On arrival at Heathrow Airport, we were received by our host coordinator for the program, Mrs. Arpita Mogford and she facilitated our checking into the hotel for transit accommodation. The next day, we all assembled at the Royal Institute of Public Administration, located at Regent’s Park. The meticulous orientation and guided tour of the Institute were novel experiences for me. The attention to detail and the personalization of the introduction to the facilities and program details lent a definitive seriousness to the program ahead unlike the tentativeness we were used to in such programs back home.
We met our fellow participants, almost all of whom were from third-world countries from Asia and Africa. Though not a Commonwealth Foundation program, the structure and participation were aligned with the lingering tenuous Commonwealth legacy. We had a few Pakistanis, some from the Middle East countries like Bahrain and Kuwait as well as a handful of African participants from Nigeria, Ghana and Egypt. A sprinkling of Caribbean completed the mosaic of international participation in the program. There were a few Indian participants from the Government departments, both at the Centre and in the States. All in all, it was a motley crowd with a predominant South Asian flavour.
Margaret Thatcher stormed to power in 1979 when the British public reeling under what came to be known as the ‘winter of discontent’, the Labour rule under PM James Callaghan which was beset with labour unrest across sectors including strikes in key public utilities. The voters were impressed by the market-economy-oriented policies proposed by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party and voted her in with a clear mandate. Her prescriptions included the privatization of nationalized industries, a limited role for government, unabashed faith in free markets and low taxes came to be known as Thatcherism. She ruled with clarity of purpose and high determination for over a decade. When I visited the UK, Thatcherism had almost run its course and discontent was gathering across the British electorate, fanned particularly by her fierce advocacy of ‘poll tax’.
The controversial concept highlighted her strong belief that every citizen must pay tax, however meagre and within means that might be, to be eligible to vote. A citizen who relied solely on doles was not a true stakeholder in the electoral process. I saw a lot of merits in what she said, maybe because I was comparing the scenario with the near-lawlessness, high nepotism and widely prevailing ‘free lunch’ culture back home. But the UK had a strong, resilient and assertive electoral culture where poll tax was deemed impractical and anachronic by the larger voter base, including many committed Conservatives.
Irrespective of the losing grip of the Iron Lady’s hold over the electorate and the diminishing appeal of her market-friendly policies, I was convinced that for my country which was way down the learning curve of an open market economy, Thatcherism held plenty of learning points. I was determined to study the privatization process and its outcomes in the UK.
I could visit many privatized government businesses and utilities, including British Rail, British Steel, Royal Mail and Thames Water Supply.
My stay in the UK, visits to the organizations, the lectures, workshops and interactions with my learning cohort and with guest lecturers as well as faculty converted me to be staunch believer in the power of the market economy and the inevitable need to leave businesses to be run by entrepreneurs and companies and not held on by bureaucracy.
I used the weekends to visit the interior of England and made a trip to Edinburgh, the Scottish capital. The cultural variety and scenic beauty of the UK impressed me. The urban vibes of London with its flood of global tourists pouring in and the order and discipline of the urban transport systems including the London Bus and the Underground endeared the place to me. Those were the days before Google Maps, text messages and the internet. Nevertheless, there was a rhythm and predictability in the way the city functioned. What particularly impressed me was that one could exit and move on to the city streets and lanes from the underground station and locate an address almost always without asking for anyone’s help. The directions were marked so very clearly. On the weekends, London’s shopping areas were open much into the night and the light, sound, music and liveliness all around filled the place with unbound energy and activity. On my subsequent visits long after my training, I found London to be as enticing and active as it was on my maiden trip.
Along with some of my fellow participants, I visited the major European cities around, notably Paris and Amsterdam. I believe that the more one sees around the world, the more one will imbibe the power and magic of the diversity that our world holds.
Most of my training cohort members lamented during our relaxed interludes about how their country was in the grip of poverty, nepotism, corruption and mediocrity. I started wondering what was it that held back the so-called ‘third-world’ countries from development. Not that they lacked natural resources. A typical case that gnawed at my sensibilities was of Nigeria. It had sizeable crude oil reserves and was in fact among the top five oil-rich nations then. Lack of political stability, internal sectarian strides, widely prevalent corruption and connivance of the bureaucrats and politicians with private businesses resulted in a bad economic scenario there. As for Pakistan, my fellow trainees talked about the nexus between the army and the bureaucrats as well as the plight of politicians whom no one in the country took seriously. The recurring coups in the country were tolerated and even welcomed by the people at large because they considered the army nepotism and greed as a lesser evil than the politicians’ avarice to loot the public wealth.
As for India, the situation was, apparently, a shade better than in most other developing countries. But one thing was clear to me based on what I saw, listened, read and introspected. India was unable to realise even a fraction of our potential because of the pseudo-socialism affectation that permeated across the political spectrum and the lacklustre public sector performance, especially in the core sectors where most government companies were leaking tanks draining the budgetary support poured into them by successive governments.
Plentiful Indians who moved overseas and ventured into businesses in Africa, East Asia, the Americas and the Middle East were prosperous and grew rich on the back of entrepreneurship. It must however be considered that in many nations especially in Africa and the Far East, Indian businessmen, many of whom indulged in money-lending and practised unfair employment practices were hated by the local population. We know of the antagonism that Ugandans, Kenyans, Filipinos and Malays had against Indian businessmen which even led to some cases of violence and rioting against the highhandedness of the Indian diaspora.
Luckily with the educational and aspirational uplift of the successive generations of Indian settlers and with visible integrative approaches coopting the local populace in their businesses and employment, slowly the acceptability of Indian immigrants has improved, although there is much room to cover still.
It was ironic that though I was deputed to the UK training from a premier public sector enterprise, by the time I completed my program and was ready to return, I was already converted into a strong advocate for boosting the role of private enterprise in India’s economy. The seeds of corporate business affinity were sown in me because I kept my eyes and ears as well as my thinking faculty open and receptive to ideas while I was in training overseas. In retrospect, I feel that was why I took back many learning points from my exposures.
Just before I left for the UK for the training, a change of Government took place in India; VP Sigh became the Prime Minister on 2nd December 1989, heading a precarious and tentative coalition of obviously disparate political parties. Every day I used to search through columns of local newspapers at our library at the London Institute (RIPA) for any Indian news. The coverage of India was sketchy, peppered with bigotry and almost always relegated to the less visible corner of the papers.
One thing that irritated me in our sessions was that whenever any Western professor or visiting government official spoke to us, they invariably referred to India and Pakistan in hyphenation that stood out at once as hollow and deliberate. Thank God, now after many years of humiliating hyphenation India is mercifully decoupled from our troubled neighbourhood.
The disdain and calumny with which the developing world saw the ‘brown and black’ counterparts from ‘lesser’ backgrounds can be borne out by a news report, a story, supposedly a true anecdote, as presented in the paper. It said that a World Bank team on a visit to an African country to spread the message of population control lectured to a gathered crowd mostly of black men and women. “If the men use this while having sex, you can prevent unwanted births.” The presenter inserted the condom on his forefinger to demonstrate how it should be worn. The story said that when the team revisited after a year and a half, they found most women in the crowd, supposedly the same people who attended the previous meeting, carrying newborn children, a few months old. “Of course, we wore the condom the way we were shown”, the men sounded in unison. What a crude and humiliating narrative that was! I remember reading this story in a London newspaper one day, I forget which paper!
We had a farewell dinner and gave gifts to each other and parted ways, perhaps never to meet again, at least those from countries other than our own!
As my training and stay in London wound up, I was a chastened and committed enthusiast for private entrepreneurship and an advocate of ‘the lesser the government, the more effective it is’.
The VP Singh government turned out to be a disaster. By opening a Pandora's Box of communal reservations and advocating an enlarged quota for Other Backward Classes, VP Singh set the cat out of the box to destroy the delicate balance and semblance of sectarian tolerance for a long time to come.
The India to which I returned was a much more divided, aggressive and chaotic one than the one I had left barely four months back.
Comentários