My favourite picture from today’s polling is of a ninety year old woman being carried to the polling booth.

Some people think their vote counts……

clearly they are not the ones who have been hanging out at GMU.

Yesterday I saw Gordon Tullock. This is the second time I met him. (The first time resulted in an insult within the first few minutes). The brown bag event resulted in a very interesting Q&A session with Tullock. 

When Tullock was asked what he thought to be his greatest contribution he said, “Teaching economists that they don’t have to stick to economics.”

Personally his work convinced me to not just stick to law and to study economics. For that, I shall be forever grateful.

Today’s PPE workshop with Prof Loren Lomasky reminded me of this quote from Through the Looking Glass “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”

Susan Boyle on BGT

I purchased a used car last weekend. As a poor grad student, it is easily my most expensive purchase ever. Naturally I was cautious and wanted to get the best deal, and spent a disproportionately high time searching for the right car.
I called/emailed 70 used car owners, ran 54 carfax reports, and finally chose a few for a test drive and an inspection. It took me a few hours a day for a few weeks to achieve this.

The last few days I have been wondering why I spent a disproportionately high time over it. Perhaps I read Akerlof’s paper too many times, and I was petrified of being stuck with a bad car. One particular incident with a lemon during my car search made me even more distrustful and cynical.

I come from a background where institutions are so weak, and contracts are so weakly enforced, that one learns to be cautious during the time of purchase rather than litigate later. Add to this the usual skepticism ingrained during my training as a lawyer.

Finally I ended up buying the car from a Tamil speaking Indian (like me), because the car was in impeccable condition and also because I was able to judge him well given my past experience. At the DMV after the title was transferred, he didn’t even count the money I gave him and just shook my hand wishing me luck. I think I need to rewire myself to living in a more trusting society where trading with strangers is far easier.

This is why India is far poorer than it could be. People show reluctance in trading with strangers and markets do not flourish.

I started watching news reports at about 3 PM (EST) and have been pretty much glued to the news for the last 10 hours. My emotions went from absolute shock, to non-comprehension, helplessness, frustration, and now I feel the beginnings of rage. Communications with my friends and family back home lead me to believe they share similar feelings. But I cannot help thinking; when will we as a nation feel outrage?

In my lifetime I have never watched one of the largest cities in the world burn for ten hours thanks to a few dozen young men with ammunition. It seems fairly obvious that these are very stupid and highly audacious young men. But it indicates a lot more about the administration and security in place in Bombay and rest of India.

The Maharashtra Police looked as helpless as the bystanders. And one can hardly blame them; they have service revolvers, ridiculous helmets and a joke of a bullet proof jacket, to match the AK-47s of the terrorists. We don’t need to hold our breath for the result.

Saying that the intelligence seems to be completely lacking is both obvious and an understatement. While I do appreciate the courage of the top officers of MaPo and the ATS, it is foolishness and hubris on their part to walk into open fire when they have been unable to assess the strength of the opposing side. Overnight the ATS which had some local knowledge and experience has been wiped out.

What I fine shocking is that this should have been expected and prevented, but it wasn’t. In the last few months there have been serial, perfectly coordinated, bomb blasts in Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, New Delhi and Assam taking over 200 lives. Did the administration expect the terrorists to retire after a successful stint the last few months? And Bombay is not really a farfetched target; there have been serial blasts in Bombay in March 1993, August 2003 and July 2006.

Why have there been no resignations? Actually as a nation we are so immune to lack of action by the executive that we have stopped demanding that pubic servants accountable for the security and law enforcement take responsibility and resign. Ideally Shivraj Patil should have resigned many months ago, or should have been sacked and replaced with someone with a better track record.

I also wonder why we have no specialists in the cabinet. When we are in financial crisis we get an economist in the Lok Sabha or bring in an economist through the Rajya Sabha to take matters in his hand. Is no special knowledge required for other portfolios especially one as important as the Home Affairs?

In times when border security and internal security face very similar threats, it seems odd that the Armed Forces are led by specialists who have served for a couple of decades in the organization. And at the same time the Home Minister is determined on the basis of loyalty to a dynasty and the bureaucrats serving him have been promoted up the ladder based on age, seniority and reserved quotas.

Another extremely irritating aspect of the current political leaders is that they have the audacity to

a) Issue stupid statements “condemning” the attacks, like that would make the world a peaceful place.

b) Request civilians for their “calm” and “cooperation”. This is a polite way of saying “we didn’t do our jobs, but things are bad and this is not a good time to yell”.

c) Praise the spirit of the people who return to their everyday lives as if nothing happened.

Especially on the last aspect of everyone praising the spirit of the Mumbaikars. Mumbaikars stopped showing resilience a very long time ago. Their return to their lives has two reasons. Most of them need to work to earn their day’s meal and cannot afford to lose their jobs by staying home. The second reason is that the citizens know that the government will not take much action irrespective of their decision to stay home or work. It is wishful thinking to interpret this as courage. In fact the faith and the spirit of the people has been broken so often that they have stopped feeling outrage.

While the attack cannot be undone I wish we would all show our outrage. That we demand an explanation. That heads roll in the senior bureaucracy. That the ministers responsible are sacked and replaced. This is the only way to ensure that the most recent casualities are not in vain like the last 200 lives have been in the last few attacks in 2008.

And some links on the attacks.
The coverage on IBN has been good and can be found here.

The various places in Bombay that have been attacked can be viewed here.

A chronological list of terrorist attacks on Bombay and other cities in India since 1993 here.

Friends who were at the centre of the pandemonium today here.

If we look at Singur, it is a simple case of conflicting wants and divergent preferences among people. Tata wants land to build its wonder car, thousands of workers want the jobs that will be generated; but many farmers want their land which would be acquired.

Now, there are many ways of resolving such conflict. Tata could use violence, employ some gunmen and get rid of the opposition. Unfortunately the government holds the monopoly over violence and Tata cannot legally employ such violence. The second is using rent seeking methods to ensure that the government will favour Tata over others. This sounds like an alternative to violence, but what was witnessed in Singur is violence against this kind of decision-making mechanism. And the last alternative is to use the market to farmers better off than when they owned the land; to make people in the area better off than before by offering them jobs and making Tata better off than before by allowing it to make profits.

The most important thing about the market is that it is an alternative to violence. When people could pillage and plunder the market provides a way of resolving conflict.

The problem with Singur is that the market alternative is unavailable. The government has ensured through that people cannot directly interact with each other; that farmers cannot sell agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes and so on. This is the reason for the violence.

One can hardly blame the Tata for leaving. Anyone who operates peaceably in the market will find it impossible to operate in such an environment and the added costs of police and private protection are probably too high. The only way to bring Tata and others to West Bengal may be to allow sale of land without government acquisition and let the market resolve all conflict. 

My op-ed on the Supreme Court ruling on reservation for OBC was published in the Wall Street Journal Asia a few days ago. You can read it here (subscription not required). Also, on the same day an editorial was carried on the same subject. You can read that here.

It might as well be.

I explain further in my post for blogbharti’s Spotlight Series.

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I enjoy following politics and, even more so, observing politicians. Watching the frontrunners through the debates for the primaries and general mud slinging in the US Presidential Elections or the Cypriots pick a leader from the Communist Party is interesting at the very least, if not entertaining. Far less entertaining is watching the Thackeray tactics of building a following through regionalism. And witnessing Modi win for the third time is, of course, an absolutely distasteful experience.

In India I have heard too many speeches, fewer debates and virtually no distinction in the politics between parties and candidates. The promises are almost always the same, usually focusing on a particular region, caste or community or invoking the names of the same dead people.

Another worrying trend is that demands for good governance are rarely on the forefront of these elections. Governance, among security, law and order, college admission, promises to farmers, and other things is in the long list, but rarely the moot issue. Which brings me to the question - if not governance, which should be the main function of candidates, what is the moot issue during Indian elections? Here I will take liberty to generalize, but often elections are won by (a) appealing to a particular religion, caste, community, region by making specific promises; (b) identity politics through the illustrious family name, (c) by identifying with a small group (large enough to make one win) and, if one is lucky, a combination of the above married with an anti-incumbency wave.

Now I don’t mean to berate our politics and say it is less developed than US or Cyprus, quite the contrary. But it makes me wonder, that despite being the vibrant democracy that we are, why do we not demand good governance?

Since I am a lawyer, I look at the constitution to find answers to these questions. So, is bad governance in our Constitution? It might as well be. There are constitutional provisions which are the reason for the regional and caste based politics in our country. What is worse is they are clubbed under the equality clause!

The story, like most stories with bad endings, begins with a constitutional amendment. Article 14 guarantees equal protection and Article 15 specifically prohibits discrimination based on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth. Nehru, who wanted to uplift the backward classes in his first term, was prevented from making “socially beneficial legislation” because of such a ‘narrow’ equality clause. So Nehru did what he usually did when the judiciary got in the way. He amended the constitution. In the First Amendment Act, 1951 he added a fourth clause to Article 15 that permitted the State to make special provisions for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes and Schedule Castes and Tribes. While this sounds wonderful on paper, much like most of Nehru’s development agenda, it has a huge consequence on how elections are fought in this country.

To begin with, God did not declare who are “scheduled” to be in the SC/ST list or determine the cut off for “socially, economically, culturally or educationally” backward. It is a creation of man. Usually a man who is sitting in the legislature or is hoping to get there soon.

Imagine a class in primary school where the rule is that the students sit according to their height. The short ones in front and the tall ones behind. This implies the short ones never get to have much fun in class, since they are sitting right under the teachers’ nose. Students elect the class leader among students, usually a popularity vote, and one of the duties of the class leader is seating arrangement. The other duties such as keeping the board clean and ensuring supply of chalk are fairly irrelevant to the current situation. If there are 2 candidates; short and tall (since this is as good a random sample as any) standing for the post of class leader, what might happen?

If the short candidate is also a smart kid (and why shouldn’t he be?) he will promise the short people who like to have fun that he will seat them at the back. There is some immediate support for his cause, though he doesn’t have the numbers to back it. The tall students have no such agenda because they already sit at the back in the current regime. And the short student manages the numbers to win. If there had been more than 2 candidates in this class leader election, he would have the numbers to back him, since the percentage required to win gets smaller. Of course, if there is no election and the teacher picks the candidate, then the one who is picked is usually the geekiest, insufferable know-it-all student who sucks up to the teacher and couldn’t be bothered with class seating. This would be the primary school equivalent of a totalitarian regime.

This is precisely what happens in elections in India. The community is divided into narrow groups that are as easily distinguishable as tall and short people. The constitution encourages such divisions for the purpose of “targeted” beneficial legislation. It becomes easy to round up people from one caste or region, find a leader who supports that caste and promises them seats. Not seats in the front or the back of the class. But in engineering and medical colleges and job appointments in the government. The groups, that feel they have been persecuted historically, engage in this dialogue. This is the political equivalent of economic rent seeking.

How do the numbers work? Let me give you a real example not involving primary schools, since real elections never do involve primary schools. In the 2004 Parliamentary Elections, Uttar Pradesh had voter turnout of only 48% - one of the lowest in the country. Of the 80 seats in UP, 65 seats had over 10 candidates per constituency with some constituencies having up to 32 candidates. In the Mohanlalganj constituency where there were 10 contestants, the winner won by a margin of 0.004%. The winner won only 25.8% of the votes implying three quarters of the electorate was not in favor of the winning candidate. His policies will reflect the choices of only a fourth of the electorate. All you need to unseat the incumbent is 25% in this case and even lesser in other cases where fractionism is even greater in the constituency. This is also known as the First-Past-the-Post system of elections.

This is precisely what we see in Indian politics. The candidates do their homework on the demographics of their constituency. They round up the backward communities and minorities (and minorities can be the majority vote bank in the First-Past-the-Post system) and make their particular cause the election agenda.

Bijli-sadak-paani is reduced to rhetoric, behind which the important agenda of social advancement and seats in engineering colleges and job appointments is cleverly hidden. Of late, they are not even cleverly hidden. It is all out in the open. Clear appeals are made to voters on the basis of religion, caste, race, and as in the Thackeray case, place of birth and residence.

So, am I seriously suggesting that the constitutional provision for social advancement of the backward communities is a bad idea and must be done away with? Absolutely not! That is the subject of another piece, perhaps even a book.

Am I saying that such populist and caste based politics is an unintended consequence of this constitutional provision? Again the answer is no; it is not an unintended consequence. The legislators intended precisely this when they supported the constitutional amendment and passed such beneficial legislations. The ‘educationally backward’ figured this out and the rest of us are just deluding ourselves with the equality and development agenda.

All I am saying is that we must stop expecting good governance. There is no point. The numbers will not allow it, nor will the people. The special interest groups are way ahead in this game. Unless we prohibit legislation which violates equality and benefits a certain class of people (which would have to be done constitutionally since legislators are going to show no such restraint); policies and governance will never be at the forefront of political debate. But the unintended consequence downside will be that political news on television will be far less entertaining!

A few days ago my philosophy professor, while discussing legal etymology, gave us the most delicious analogy.

He quoted Humpty Dumpty, “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”. And said that legal positivists are much the same when it comes to what the law is and ought to be.

It also made me re-read some of my favourite parts in the book, and here’s another passage, which I could use to describe legal positivists and most people I meet.

`That’s the way it’s done,’ the Queen said with great decision:`nobody can do two things at once, you know. Let’s consider your age to begin with — how old are you?’
`I’m seven and a half, exactly.’
`You needn’t say “exactly”,’ the Queen remarked. `I can believe it without that. Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.’
`I ca’n't believe that!’ said Alice.
`Ca’n't you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. `Try again: draw along breath, and shut your eyes.’
Alice laughed. `There’s no use trying,’ she said `one ca’n't believe impossible things.’
‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. `When I wasyour age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”