Arvind Kejriwal
techapj.com
techapj.com
Arvind Kejriwal is a rookie politician who defeated (three-time Chief Minister of Delhi) Sheila Dikshit in the Delhi Legislative Assembly elections (held today).
He co-founded a political organization named Aam Aadmi Party (Translation: Common Man's Party) that won 28 of Delhi's 70 seats in its electoral debut, just 3 shy of BJP (an established National Party), and more than three times the no. of seats won by Indian National Congress (the incumbent party in Delhi).
Relevant background information on Arvind Kejriwal [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Kejriwal
[Edit: corrected figures based on child comment]
AAP won 38 seats and BJP won 30 [0]
So he is a techy turned bureaucrat, turned activist, turned politician.
1. Elections can be fought with clean money, ( and the kind of donations that they received (in terms of quanta of individual contribution), where the mode should be well below 20$s per cap. makes it kind of a crowd funded campaign )
2. The part that social media can play in mobilizing people and getting point across when traditional news media blacks you out.
3. Targeted manifestos, like targeted advertisements engage people more as compared to conventional 1-state-1-manifesto approach..
4. That there is a space for clean politics.
I am curious about how things will turn out for Delhi now, and for India in the coming LS elections.
The constituency of Delhi is:
1. More educated than the rest of the country 2. Has a higher level of income than the rest of the country 3. Generally more cosmopolitan than the rest of the country.
I can provide sources for the first 2 if you would like. The third is debatable as the only evidence I have is anecdotal.
India will see 500-600 mln voters turn out in May for the LokSabha elections. The US could learn 2 lessons from all this: 1. How a true democracy with 60% voter participation works 2. You can send a man to the moon but cant have a woman President. How do other countries integrate women politicians and why it works
That's not a fair critique at all. Had Barack Obama (first black president) not won, there's a very real possibility that Hillary Clinton would have been elected president. Both of which represent political firsts and a changing system towards greater integration.
Suppose you are running a business that has to pay tax on something (excise tax, tariff, etc). Every month, you put together the amount of tax you have to pay, along with a fixed bribe of around 5000 rupees (approximately 85 dollars) on top. Obviously, if you don't pay the bribe, the IRS will fuck with you until you do pay the bribe, so you pay the bribe.
The tax collector, along with collecting the calculated amount of taxes for each business, has to send 100,000 rupees to his boss every month. This is a fixed amount, the boss will usually not care how much the collector made in bribes as long as he gets his 100k. This boss will have to send 2,000,000 rupees to his boss, eventually culminating with the CM (Chief Minister) receiving a massive amount of bribe money each month.
However, the CM does not keep all of this money. Because the CM is dependent on his political party to keep his job, he will send a large percentage of this money to the party fund (which is usually under his control). During election season, this money is used to blatantly trick/pay off people to guarantee more powerful status for the party, which inevitably leads to a more powerful position for whichever corrupt person is at the top of the food chain.
Suppose you were an idealistic tax collector in this system of corruption, and one month you took some mushrooms or whatever and you decided you would no longer contribute bribes to the system of corruption. Your boss will not retaliate by having you killed or tortured, he/she will simply transfer you to a remote village with no electricity or running water. There, you will be hated by the villagers as the asshole tax collector. The mere prospect of uprooting one's family and lifestyle is more than any tax collector is willing to accept for the sake of idealism, so the systematic corruption continues, even today.
So, as this article suggests, there might finally be a guy at the top who will end the corruption and improve the system of taxation. His background as a tax-collector-turned-activist provides him with a high level of credibility, and I'm sure he'll go very far.
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-12-07/news...
But how can AAP be present in list. Election result got declared today and still they do not have even 1 assembly member (Signature are yet to be made. There is situation of reelection).
AAP was in the list since so many days...
Combined with this, India inherited a dysfunctional governmental bureaucracy and law and order system which was aimed at preserving British control over India and not really do the actual job of governing the country. The founders did the best they could, and copied a bunch of seemingly good ideas from a bunch of western economies. This failed miserably because they overlooked the fact that western economies were fuelled by slavery, colonization, reckless industrialization and exploitation of natural resources. India doesn't have the natural resources like the US because there isn't any land left to be stolen. Exploiting colonial resources like the European powers is also out of the question. Bonded labourers etc. were (are?) present to some extent, but large-scale disenfranchisement and exploitation of entire demographics similar to the model used by westerners fifty or so years ago is not really tenable in today's world.
The point is, it's now obvious that the western model was bound to fail, but unfortunately this wasn't obvious back in the 50s. It's only now that India is making visible progress towards the goal of development, but this is largely because of the ground work laid in the last 50 or so years in raising levels of education and healthcare (which of course still have quite a long way to improve) to a reasonable baseline.
I don't think @sreeni_ananth's comment was discounting the role of colonialism, but rather looking at the way out. There's not much we can do now about what was done to India in the past (except maybe harboring ill will against 'the west'?). But looking to India's future, I'd have agree with him that the main issue standing in the path of India's full recovery and health is corruption.
A lot of governmental bureaucracy and the mechanisms for implementing law and order was cloned from the British not the west and the "redesign" that Nehru, Ambedkar and friends attempted, tried to borrow ideas from the US and Soviets without any real success. Just one example of the inherited system failing miserably is the judicial system which is a clusterfuck today purely because it simply doesn't scale. India has 1 judge per 100,000 people, while the US has something like 1 per 1000 while Sweden has 4 per thousand. Why is this? Partly economics and partly because the British weren't really interested in a working judiciary. They wanted a kangaroo courts to put dissidents into jail, not enforce law and order.
In retrospect, the ideal solution would have been to legitimize, educate and train the native law enforcement mechanisms like the panchayats. But again, this didn't happen because the (a) the british weren't interested in solving this problem and (b) Indians were enamoured with copying the west.
> But you're also saying the government laid the groundwork over 50 years
Yes it did and not because they had any brilliant ideas or execution here. Far from it. But instead, for the first time in about 200 odd years somebody actually tried to do what was good for the Indians instead of bleeding the country dry.
> There's not much we can do now about what was done to India in the past except maybe harboring ill will against 'the west'?
This is a mistaken notion. I'm reminded of Obama quoting Faulkner, "the past isn't dead and buried and in fact it isn't even past." That's very much true today and it's important to point out that western riches weren't gained by brilliant ideas but were simply stolen at the cost of great human suffering in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas.
The least we can do now is campaign for free immigration. If westerners really think all humans are equal, they shouldn't discriminate for jobs based on imaginary lines in the ground. Of course, they don't really think so and they want to preserve their stolen wealth so they won't agree to this but we mustn't be afraid to point out their hypocrisy here.
> I'd have agree with him that the main issue standing in the path of India's full recovery and health is corruption.
You're very very very mistaken. I suspect you come from a privileged middle-class background and think of the bribes you have to pay in government offices as problems that India needs to solve. Even if all corruption stopped instantly today - what would that actually achieve? Do you think the 40% of the country that's living without toilets would get access to them? And more importantly, do you they think would start using these toilets if they had access to them? There are toilets being used as godowns in various places across the country. Think about why this is. Do you think hundreds of millions of malnourished children would suddenly have food in their mouths? Do you think the millions of students learning from incompetent teachers would suddenly get better teaching? Would they even get better facilities? Do you think electric plants would magically appear and solve the power crises across the country?
None of the above would happen. Don't confuse the effects of corruption and incompetence. Incompetence is the real problem in India, and that's mainly because of a poor education system. That in turn is because you can't start from 300 million people who couldn't read/write 60 years ago and somehow magically produce the hundreds of millions of people in a highly trained and educated workforce, which is what India needs today to solve its challenges.
Do you think hundreds of millions of malnourished children would suddenly have food in their mouths?
Don't confuse the effects of corruption and incompetenceCorruption contributes, but you're utterly clueless if you think all inefficiency will go away with corruption. For starters transportation infrastructure is poor, fuel is much too costly, people don't have the facilities to cook. Just throwing rice at kids won't work. You need vegetables, you need clean water, you need stoves. All of this is just not there. If you'd been to a village you would know people still cook using firewood and a three thousand year old stove design, they don't have easy access to drinking water, they're utterly dependent on self-grown vegetables. They don't have refrigeration or electricity. Fixing all this will cost serious money on top of organizational and logistical skills which simply aren't there at the scale that is required.
There are states like kerala where all of the above problems have been solved in past.
Bullshit. Did you even try a google search for malnutrition in Kerala before making this claim? Kerala is better than other Indian states for sure, but it's nowhere near the levels of a developed country. The communist government and associated land reforms have a lot more do with Kerala's successes than "reduced tolerance for corruption". Which isn't to say Kerala is less corrupt than the other states, it's just that you have the causation the wrong way.
So what you are saying is that everything that Mr Kejriwal, Mr Hazare and others are struggling for is ultimately meaningless -- they are not solving any significant issues by tackling corruption.
Here's another way of looking at it: Let's assume some brilliant person (like you, perhaps?) is able to come up with a solution that solves all the problems that you describe -- food production, sanitation, power plants etc "magically" appear to meet the needs of the poor. How long do you think it will last? Corrupt politicians will again begin to meddle and take advantage and in 10 years, we would be back to the "clusterfuck" stage, as you so colorfully describe it.
>I suspect you come from a privileged middle-class background
I come from a lower-caste background, if you need to know. And don’t worry, we are not likely to let anyone bury the past and forget either colonialism or casteism. Or are you forgetting that India's past riches were also obtained through caste-based oppression? I suspect you have nothing better to say than “Everything is broken, it’s all the fault of the British and so I want free immigration”.
You know, your opinions are beginning to convince me that maybe you are right, incompetence is a far bigger problem than corruption ;)
from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi
"A union territory, the political administration of the NCT of Delhi today more closely resembles that of a state of India, with its own legislature, high court and an executive council of ministers headed by a Chief Minister."