Column : All change

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: It is the considered view of your columnist, expressed on occasion in these columns, that India—particularly the government—changes and reforms only under the shadow of a grave crisis. The dramatic economic crisis of 1991, which brought the country on the verge of default, led to a clear break from the moribund economic policies of the past, and elevated us, permanently, to a higher plateau of economic performance and clout.

Can the 26/11 terror attack on Mumbai be a similarly defining moment for political, institutional and governance reform, all left largely untouched by the economic reforms of the last two decades? While one would certainly hope that 2008 does to politics what 1991 did to the economy, let us not under-estimate the difficulty of the task ahead. While economic reform required the government to simply stop poking its nose into business (which it had no business doing in any case), political and governance reform requires the government to amputate and rebuild many parts of its own institutional apparatus. Any such process will be painful and run into entrenched vested interest.

Yet, there is no other way out at least for internal security reform. Certain functions like intelligence, law and order and other essential public services have to be run by the government—there is no way we can consider outsourcing or privatising these functions to non-government agencies. That doesn’t happen anywhere in the world.

Unlike other parts of the world, however, there is very little ministerial accountability in India. After all if CEOs lose their jobs when companies do badly, ministers ought to lose theirs when the ministry they command fails in its duties. There was indeed a time ministers in India did resign owning up moral responsibility: Madhavrao Scindia’s resigned as civil aviation minister after the crash of a leased Uzbek plane in the early 1990s. There have been plenty of instances after that—excluding corruption and criminal accusations—when ministers ought to have quit(but did not) because of a failure on the part of their ministry.