OPINION 11

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Volume XIX Number 91

MUMBAI | WEDNESDAY, 17 DECEMBER 2014

Waiting for Paris

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Anatomy of aswachh Bharat and

alchemy to swachh

Compromises in Lima declaration on climate change

Good news from Japan

Shinzo Abe routs the Opposition and returns to power

apanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abes bold gamble in seeking a fresh mandate has paid off. Mr Abes Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, won 290 seats
in a house of 475. With its Buddhist ally, the LDP retains the so-called super
majority of two-thirds in the legislature. It means the government can push
through reforms. The Opposition gave a dispirited performance and found little to
attack Mr Abe with. The Democratic Party of Japan, or DPJ, did not even get an adequate number of candidates to run against the LDP. Banri Kaieda, the leader of the
DPJ, lost his seat in Parliament. The last time the leader of the main opposition party in Parliament lost his seat was in 1949. Thats the good news for the LDP. The bad
news is the election was characterised by low turnout and many of the people who
stayed away are likely those less well-off who feel they have not gained from the LDPs
push to end deflation.
Despite the solid victory and the purported mandate for change, Mr Abe will
have to reach out to them to build the case for the reforms he intends to push through.
Abenomics means many things but at its core is the belief after 15 years of deflation,
Japans economy needs a fiscal and monetary stimulus to get out of the rut. Wage
increases would be a popular way out of the morass. But Mr Abes so-called third
arrow of reforms, like Indias own second-generation reforms, will need imaginative selling to the public as well as determination. Mr Abe raised hopes among international investors in the first several months of his premiership but this foundered
as the big reforms are yet to come. He must deliver now.
At the top of the list is the need for agricultural reforms, which means taking
on Japans unwieldy cooperatives. Another priority is the need to reform labour markets. (So far, so familiar for Indians.) There is also the opportunity to sign up to the
Trans-Pacific Partnership with the United States and other countries. Mr Abe has
till end 2018 to achieve some of this but he will have to spend some political capital to get there. As the government found with its consumption tax introduced in
April, moving too fast has its own costs. The tax is blamed for being partly responsible for Japan falling into recession. The second step in that process will have to be
carefully calibrated.
For India, Mr Abes election is an unalloyed good. He and Prime Minister
Narendra Modi have a good personal rapport and Japan seems determined to be a
true friend to India, in part because of its antipathy towards China. Mr Abes security push might weaken because he is dependent on a pacifist Buddhist party as an
ally, but his third arrow of reforms and how he markets them might yet provide Mr
Modi some insights. Wealthy Japan and developing India are a world apart in
many ways but on labour reforms and reforming agriculture, the challenges of transforming the rigid, bureaucratic and risk-averse nations are not that dissimilar.

Pakistans defence lawyer

BOOK REVIEW
MIHIR S SHARMA
To defend Pakistan in the court of public
opinion is a task so difficult that only the
most skilful of defence counsels would
attempt it. In The Struggle for Pakistan the
historian Ayesha Jalal takes on the task.
She valiantly defends not only Jinnah and
the idea of Pakistan, but actually existing
Pakistan. Professor Jalal fails to mount a
satisfactory defence, but then that is not
entirely her fault; finding endless external
scapegoats for Pakistans problems is not
that easy when writing a rigorous history.
What is her fault, I suppose, is the belief
that a history of Pakistan must necessarily
also be a defence.
The Struggle for Pakistan is cleverly

named. The title links the Muslim

Leagues agitation under Jinnah to the
struggles for the countrys soul after
Partition and independence. The not-sosubtle link is one beloved of a certain sort
of Pakistani nationalist: that Jinnahs
struggle for a secular Muslim state is still
for some (to them, incomprehensible) reason incomplete.
As with all of Professor Jalals books,
The Struggle for Pakistan is pleasingly written and flows smoothly. Indeed as a guide
to the events that shaped modern Pakistan,
it is more than adequate: it provides to the
history of the past century a sense of immediacy. But my questions lie elsewhere.
First, there is a certain tone-deafness
about economics and about class politics
that is endemic, in my opinion, to historical writing about Pakistan. That countrys
story is a story of its leaders, never its people: of Bhutto and Zia and Sharif and
Yahya and Musharraf, of the cynical use
of Islamism by a secular elite and never

Table 2 INDIA: TOP 10 STATES NIGHT

Table 1 INDIA: SANITATION USE
Number of households (mn)
With in-house latrine (%)
Piped sewer system
Septic tank
Slab/ventilated improved/open pit
Night soil disposal/open
drain/human/animal
Without in-house latrine (%)
Public latrine
Open

Urban
79
81
33
38
8

Rural
168
31
2
15
13

Total
247
47
12
22
12

2
19
6
13

1
69
2
67

1
53
3
50

States
Urban
Andhra Pradesh
3.41
Assam
2.97
Bihar
1.83
Jammu & Kashmir 8.48
Maharashtra
2.56
Manipur
1.90
Odisha
3.62
Tamil Nadu
8.36
Uttar Pradesh
51.21
West Bengal
6.91
Total
91.25

Source: Census 2011

Table 4 SOUTHERN ASIA: LATRINES (% OF POPULATION)

Open
defecation

3
5
7
8
11
15

Other
unimproved

12
20
31
25
36
49

Shared

22
16
9
6
4
2

Improved

Improved

8
9
9
15
15
11

Open
defecation

Open
defecation

15
16
18
11
12
14

Total
Unimproved

Other
unimproved

Other
unimproved

55
59
64
68
69
73

Shared

Shared

1990
Southern Asia 2000
2012
Southern Asia 1990
without India 2000
2012

Total
1.30
2.79
1.71
22.46
1.21
1.27
3.34
3.48
41.05
16.41
95.02

*India = 100%

Rural
Unimproved

Year

Rural
0.55
2.72
1.67
27.43
0.73
1.04
3.23
1.75
37.44
19.78
96.34

Source: Census 2011

Urban
Unimproved

Region

Table 3 CROSS-COUNTRY: OPEN

SOIL REMOVAL BY HUMANS (%)*

Improved

he United Nations-sponsored climate summit in Lima turned out to be yet

another underexploited opportunity to evolve a blueprint for a strong global agreement on climate protection in Paris next year. Little was gained and
it is not clear if the compromises made would offer an alternative path with
any promise of a better framework. It would, of course, be argued that for countries
like India that managed to keep alive issues important to developing countries, disaster was averted. The fact, however, is that instead of ironing out differences
between various country groupings on contentious issues that are thwarting progress
on crafting a successor to the expired Kyoto protocol on climate change, the summit opted for an easier way out, accommodating various viewpoints on the consensus-based agenda for future negotiations. This, therefore, is likely to have an
adverse impact on the talks for a possible accord at the Paris climate summit in 2015.
Also, any deal structured on the foundation laid down in the compromises-driven Lima declaration is bound to be a much weaker avatar of the Kyoto protocol, which
it would seek to succeed post-2020. While the Kyoto pact had laid down firm targets
for carbon emission reductions by the industrialised countries, the new deal would
make such action voluntary for both developed and developing countries without
any binding obligation to meet even the self-determined goals.
True, the Lima declaration has taken note of the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities that the developing countries have been insisting on.
This concept was stipulated in the 1992 United Nations climate change convention
that formed the basis for the Kyoto accord. However, this has now been watered
down by linking it with national circumstances. The danger, therefore, is that both
developed and developing countries may propose nationally determined action
plans that are too feeble to ensure the kind of effort that is needed to stave off hazardous levels of global warming. This may, in turn, jeopardise meeting the broad
goal of capping the rise in global temperature to two degrees Celsius. Moreover, the
Lima statement is either silent or ambiguous on several other vital issues, more particularly on finance and technology for promoting green energy and environment-friendly economic development. No firm road map has been outlined for the
rich countries to provide the committed $100 billion annually towards the Green
Climate Fund from 2020 onwards. Funding and technical support are indeed
vital also for adaptation to climate change that is already underway and is bound
to turn more pronounced in near future as the countries inch towards peaking their
carbon emissions.
With a likely further slackening of climate mitigation efforts in the wake of concessions offered in Lima, adaptation may assume even greater significance in the
developing countries struggle to cope with global warming and more frequent climate-related natural disasters. The modalities of how adaptation will be addressed
have been left in the Lima declaration to future negotiations. For developing countries, including India, which are highly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate
change, the issue of loss and damages, too, is quite critical, especially to deal with
the consequences of climate change that cannot be fully addressed through adaptation. A strong mechanism for this is also, therefore, called for. The negotiations for
Paris 2015 climate accord will, thus, need to take all these imperatives into consideration to put together a climate deal that is fair to all and yet effective enough to safeguard the earths climate without impeding socio-economic development.

5
7
9
17
18
17

80
68
53
50
35
19

23
31
42
38
47
57

6
8
11
9
12
15

6
8
9
15
16
16

65
53
38
38
25
12

Source: WHO and Unicef, 2014

irmal remained unattained. Now we want to though surprisingly dismal performance persist also in
graduate to swachh, also a laudable objective if rural West Bengal and urban Tamil Nadu. Rural conits broad contours are to be imagined. To begin ditions of Jammu and Kashmir are also poor, notelet me ask rather obviously, was there any centrally worthy in light of pre-election promises being made to
sponsored nirmal scheme that went to local as Kashmiris on development.
opposed to state governments, which central minUsing Census 2011 should not be terribly erroneous
istries were responsible, has there been any impact in light of little improvement over time. A 2014 World
assessment of programmes undertaken under nirmal, Health Organization-Unicef cross-country comparison
and have states been pursued regarding their promise in table 3 lists the top 10 countries that have achieved the
to set up state finance commissions to ensure constitu- highest reduction in open defecation since 1990 as a pertionally guaranteed financing of municipal
centage of population. In the sub-continent, it
and panchayat programmes? Or is swachh to
shows a rapid decline in open defecation in
turn out to be another unfulfilled wish?
Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal. Reflecting
It is one thing to expect the middle class
the numbers on the use of open fields in table
not to litter Indian streets. But the depth of
1, it is not surprising that India does not feature
the problem lies elsewhere. Unless all
in table 3 at all, while Sri Lanka does not feature
Indians are assured a basic right in relieving
for the opposite reason that there is likely to be
themselves decently and in privacy, that is,
little open defecation there. Also to be observed
have access to at least septic tank or
are that Ethiopias reduction is most striking,
slab/open pit, leave alone modern latrines, AGNIKALAM
while Bangladesh, Peru and Vietnam have raphow could they be expected to throw their
idly reduced their incidence to single digits.
garbage in bins, presuming, of course, that adequate
In table 4, the same source reveals that Indias inclunumber of bins are provided?
sion significantly worsens southern Asias performance
Coming to brass tacks, let us examine relevant fig- between 1990-2012 or 2000-12. Clearly, India has been,
ures. Based on Census 2011, table 1 reveals that about and continues to be, an outlier by far. As one indicator,
one-fifth of urban and more than two-thirds of rural 12 per cent of rural plus urban southern Asia other than
households do not have in-house facilities; most of India uses open defecation. But since in India it is 48 per
them use open fields. Table 2 lists the top 10 states cent, southern Asias number jumps to 38 per cent once
shares of night soil removal by humans, one of the India is included in it! Indeed, globally, India repremost degrading human occupations. Unsurprisingly, sents almost 60 per cent of open defecation.
by far the highest occurrence is in Uttar Pradesh,
Thus, the statistics for India on sanitation, in the

DEFECATION (% OF POPULATION)
Country
Ethiopia
Nepal
Vietnam
Cambodia
Angola
Bangladesh
Pakistan
Peru
Haiti
Benin

of, say, the radicalisation of its people in

response to the imperatives of a national
ideology or the aspirations of an urban
proletariat or rural underclass.
This absence of basic economic content
in the narrative leads Professor Jalal to, for
example, express puzzlement at why anticapitalist ideologues would attach themselves to a feudal lord like Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto although, as endless examples
across history attest, a rising industrial
class is the common enemy of the landlord
and the socialist. It isnt surprising, therefore, that the feudal Bhutto declared himself socialist and expropriated the industrial class through nationalisation.
The second problem is discomfort
with, and, therefore, a defensive mockery
of, the very idea of secularism. Even when
saying that Imran Khans anti-Ahmadi
positioning was evidence that his ideology
was far from secular, Professor Jalal puts
the word in scare quotes. There is no
escaping, it appears, the contradiction at
the heart of Pakistani nationalism that has
entrapped even the most non-religious of
that countrys establishment: the desire to
demonstrate that Indias founding ideolo-

VALUE FOR MONEY

SUBIR ROY
my showing clear signs of robustness,
growth sentiment for the global economy will be downbeat.
Through the 2000s and halfway into
the current decade, the Indian economy,
as a result of its close integration with the
global economy, has moved in tandem. So
the bets placed on the Narendra Modi
government taking the Indian economys
growth rate sharply up from the dire
below-five-per-cent straits it had fallen
into because of the policy paralysis in the
closing years of the United Progressive
Alliance rule will have to be hedged.
It is quite possible that without hitting the magic figure of seven per cent
the Indian economy will turn out to be a,
if not the, foremost emerging market
performer in a couple of years, beating
Chinas growth rate by a whisker. That

gy could not be secular, for that would

show up the principles underlying
Pakistan as illiberal by contrast.
The final problem is that The Struggle
for Pakistan fittingly for a book that
apparently intends to be the new
Establishment history of that country is
riddled with apologia and defensiveness
about Pakistani agency and choices.
And, as the subtitle of the book A
Muslim Homeland and Global Politics
telegraphs, this defensiveness translates,
essentially, into anti-Americanism. This is
in spite of the fact that the countrys rulers
decided at its very birth to go out and see
what it could get from the West; like other
attitudes of the Pakistani elite, this, too,
can be traced back to the noble Quaid, who
made it so explicit in an interview to Life in
1947 that Margaret Bourke-White suggested Jinnah considered his new state only
as an armoured buffer between opposing
major powers.
The laziness of analysis and the flatness of morality, naturally following a
habitual assignation of malign influence to
the West, crop up everywhere in the narrative. For example, it seems as if Professor

2012

92
86
39
88
57
34
52
33
48
80

37
40
2
54
24
3
23
6
21
54

1990-2012
Reduction
55
46
37
34
33
31
29
27
27
26

Source: WHO and Unicef, 2014

above discussion on latrines in particular, are no less

than shocking. Should any policymaker expect swachh
Bharat from those who suffer such ignominy through
life? The answer is decidedly in the negative, and even
less so from those who hand carry excreta through
urban and village streets, not unusually the subject of
mockery for being of a low caste. These very fundamental challenges have to be addressed through rational allocation of financial resources to the appropriate level of government, ex ante and ex post impact assessment
(IA) and tight monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of an
intelligently designed Swachh Bharat programme.
Implementation of the programme has to be followed by wide induction in awareness of the dignity of
labour and social equity more broadly. When
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi iterated, Karo pahale,
kaho pichhe, he actually cleaned out night soil of the
Bihar Harijan, or so my generation was taught in junior school. In that light, by the time the joy of middle to
high school came to be experienced, tasks following
Gandhis example were meted out to us to be applied
in urban slums. Rhetorically, how many children are
going through a culture of this kind of activity today?
In sum, Swachh Bharat is a correct policy revival but
will fail unless buttressed by a robust, palpable implementation structure. The prime minister has to show
his mettle by revealing his plan to make India clean and
smart. Luckily, there exists a handful of municipalities
from where one could derive inspiration. One such is
the 2013-14 Budget of Berhampur Municipal Corporation in Ganjam district of Odisha that details its Budget
allocation in garbage collection, solid waste management, drainage, public toilet, water supply, housing,
roads and bridges, street lighting, parks, livelihood,
infrastructure and project assistance. It elaborates that
it wants mandatory public disclosure of documents
and allocation, to ensure citizen participation common in developed societies increase allocation for the
urban poor, and for basic services including water, garbage, drainage and public toilets, and implement a development outcome budget to ensure effective government management and accountability. It is
rejuvenating for it sets an example for other local governments to follow. Central government bureaucrats
should pick up such examples consistently and give concrete shape to the prime ministers vision though the
leadership in this endeavour has to continue to be his.

High growth is no panacea

igh growth is not only not a
must to improve our level of
well-being, it is doubtful if it can
be pursued for too long. High growth is
good for those who sell motor cars and
home appliances, but it can make better
sense to tell people they must first learn
to clean their own toilets, find cheap
ways to produce enough safe drinking
water and reform the way we teach children in government schools.
The latest numbers on the Indian
economy arent cheerful. While inflation
continues its downward trend, the
Consumer Price Index for November
recording 4.38 per cent, below the Reserve
Bank of Indias comfort zone of five per
cent, the Index of Industrial Production
has registered a staggering negative 4.2
per cent for October. When industrial output and inflation fall simultaneously,
though it is both a piece of good and bad
news, taken together they can signal clear
signs of an economic slowdown.
What makes the picture more forbidding is that the global economy is
also moving in the wrong direction. The
International Monetary Fund, in its
October revision of the World Economic
Outlook, lowered the forecast for the current year (2014) by 0.4 percentage points,
to 3.3 per cent. With the European and
Chinese economies signalling a slowdown and only the United States econo-

1990

will be credible in itself; but will question

calculations of sharp reductions in
poverty by riding on the back of eight per
cent plus growth.
However, there is a view that high
growth in itself does not matter if it is not
accompanied with commensurate
improvement in human development
resulting in higher levels of well-being.
Growth will have some meaning if it
leads to higher life expectancy and lower levels of morbidity, that is, people living longer and healthier lives, along with
crucial indicators like maternal and
infant mortality going down.
If along with this the country moves
closer to not just literacy but also universal primary and secondary education, then the so-called demographic
dividend will begin to be reaped. A
healthier and better educated workforce
matters as much as better roads and
more electricity.
Also, a key assumption that you need
to grow fast so that the government can
have the resources to lift large numbers
out of poverty needs to be questioned.
For a healthier and economically more
productive population it is crucial for
the country to have enough toilets, for
everyone to get safe drinking water, and
for meaningful (in terms of outcomes)
primary and secondary education.
The critical point is that these goals

Jalal, somewhat incredibly, blames Nawaz

Sharif for Pervez Musharrafs coup removing Mr Sharif from power. One wonders
what underlies this, until the answer is
made obvious a few pages later: she
patiently repeats the claim that the Sharifs
had become the greatest lackeys the
Americans ever had. Why? Because they
had called for an end to support of the
Taliban, beloved to the army, thereby provoking the confrontation and coup.
When describing Bill Clintons address
to the people of Pakistan on his whistlestop lecture-visit to Islamabad in 2000,
where he memorably warned with Kargil
fresh in his listeners minds against
redrawing borders with blood, she cannot
describe or contextualise this simply as a
historian; the narrative steps out of that role
and responds sharply and jarringly to the
president with the nationalistic pablum
that is the official position on Kashmir.
Here Professor Jalal tells us what
Pakistanis wanted from Mr Clinton in
2000: Some reassurance from the leader
of the most powerful nation on earth that
redirecting energies to regional peace
would bring Pakistan solid post-Cold War

do not cost all that much. The country is

already spending enough to make their
delivery possible. The delivery is not taking place because of a governance, not
resource, shortfall. If the Annual Status
of Education Report surveys have established anything, then it is that the paramount problem is the defect in the way
primary and secondary education are
structured. (Inadequate budgetary support comes later.) For example, instead
of putting children of the same age in the
same class, put those of varying age but
same ability in the same class.
Now comes the issue of sustainable
growth. There is serious concern that the
disappearance of glaciers following global warming means that rivers that are considered to be the life source for north India
may cease to be perennial. There may be
a difference of opinion about when the
Himalayan glaciers will disappear, but
there is no doubt they are retreating.
There is also the issue of seriously deficient air quality over urban India, the
causes being automobile pollution and,
in many cases, the location of thermal
power plants near urban centres. The air
pollution takes a serious health toll.
As the world moves closer to an
agreement to halt climate change,
Indias ability to keep pursuing the path
of high dirty growth will be limited. To
refuse an emission cap, it will have to at
least show that it is reducing the energy
and emission intensity of its growth.
subirkroy@gmail.com

dividends. This is, in its own way, a reasonable representation of what Pakistan
still wants from America and the world. It
is almost tragic that even the apologetic
history that Professor Jalal has offered up
to that point does nothing to disguise the
sheer shared lunacy of this expectation.
Peace, it is clear to the Pakistani establishment, whether liberal (like Professor
Jalal) or Islamist or military-backed, is only
worth it if America bribes you into it. It has
no intrinsic value; nor do tangible benefits
flow from it. That the Establishment can
find justice in this view of peace even when
a hundred children die is beyond tragic.
And it is also too fundamentally pessimistic and illiberal a principle to underlie
a national history. For any country, that is,
other than Ayesha Jalals Pakistan.
A longer version of this review appears on the web

THE STRUGGLE FOR PAKISTAN: A

MUSLIM HOMELAND AND GLOBAL
POLITICS
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press,
2014; 435 pages; ~995