Rule of fewer laws

Bursting with patriotic pride, I told the customs officer at Dum Dum airport who asked what foreign currency I had brought back that I had only Indian rupees. I even took out my wallet to show him that returning through the Far East after a summer at Harvard, I had changed my last cent into rupees in Bangkok.

But he went into hysterics, averting his head and screaming, “Don’t show me! Don’t show me!” That was in 1964, and I didn’t fully appreciate the man’s kindness then, not knowing that bringing Indian money into India was forbidden.
My next glimpse of the complexities of foreign exchange was five years later when banks were nationalised. Living in London, I went to see Lord Aldington, the First World War hero and chairman of Grindlays Bank, which was a huge and historic presence in India for well over a century. Aldington was sympathetic to the takeover, citing France’s precedent, but not to attempts to track down Indians with accounts abroad. When the Reserve Bank demanded the names of Indian customers he retorted he had no idea whether “Mr Patel” was Kenyan, Ugandan, British, Pakistani or Indian.
Now that the circus is over, the danger of the Jantar Mantar, Ramlila Maidan and Hardwar crusaders baying for those Patels to be hauled to Delhi and strung up at Khooni Darwaza has passed. Their leaders’ cleansing fervour echoed the “Death to aristos!” chant that sent the tumbrils of the French Revolution trundling to the guillotine. But the song is serious even if the singer wasn’t. The government would be ill-advised to ignore signals that India’s first President, Rajendra Prasad, anticipated when he warned that corruption would “verily prove a nail in the coffin of the Congress”.
Not just the Congress but the entire polity, including Opposition politicians squatting on the Hazare-Ramdev bandwagon, faces chaos. The good thing is that the crisis has erupted on the watch of a Prime Minister at whom no finger can be pointed and whose globally-respected credentials place him above the political throng. If anyone can break the stalemate, it’s Dr Manmohan Singh.
When a Swiss-German reporter remarked during his first visit to Singapore as finance minister that no one in Switzerland thought of Indians as poor, Dr Singh replied calmly that he hoped to get some of the wealth back to develop India. Efforts to do so can continue but the time has come for a fundamental change in thinking. The focus should be on correcting the abuses at home that generate illicit money instead of obsessively chasing the astronomical riches — Ramdev mentioned `400 lakh crore and Opposition leader Lal Krishna Advani on the election stump trotted out an even more mind-boggling `1,400 lakh crore — supposedly salted away in exotic tax havens.
Wild estimates of black money echo the excitement over the tumbrils and add to public frenzy without achieving anything. Stolen money should, of course, be repatriated from Liechtenstein, the Cayman Islands or wherever, but that alone won’t stop the mills at home continuing to churn out more and more unaccounted, untaxed wealth to be stashed in other tax havens. We need disincentives to sending money out of the country (why don’t Americans do it?), as well as enforceable measures to prevent fiscal crime, plug export-import loopholes and stamp out tax evasion. These can’t be achieved with bent politicians, underpaid policemen, tortuous court procedures and a “lagging justice system, which has approximately 13 judges per million people”, according to a WikiLeaks cable.
But demands for more judges, honest policemen, better-equipped court rooms, dutiful court staff, simplified paperwork or expeditious prosecutions were too mundane to thrill villagers who sought entertainment. They wanted to listen to stirring sermons, watch acrobatic displays, witness fasts that were not private penance but public spectacle, enjoy the antics of actors dressed up like Mahatma Gandhi (even to the supporting nieces) and be titillated by dollops of song and dance when strident calls to teach medicine and engineering in Hindi began to pall.
All this diverts attention from the real tasks in a society where, as Dhirubhai Ambani famously told Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate, who had seen “all the right people” — including the Prime Minister and finance minister — in his bid to get a foothold in India, that only “the wrong people” can get things done. It follows they are above the law. They might even have been behind the distraction.
Someone of Dr Singh’s stature should not fall into their trap and set off on a wild goose chase instead of bringing to heel the smugglers, black-marketeers, Bollywood personalities, party financiers and murderers of the investigative journalist, Jyotirmoy Dey, “the wrong people” right in our midst. Even if the exercise affects his political career, he will have his professional eminence to fall back on and the knowledge that he tried to save India in a way no other Prime Minister, not even the first, dared. Decisive implementation of existing laws matters more than endless cogitation over a Lokpal Bill.
It was said in the bad old days of P Forms that there wouldn’t be an Indian left in India if travel restrictions were relaxed. But those who wanted to migrate did so despite the thicket of regulations. The exodus petered out only after travel became easier. It’s the same with currency. Everyone knows the story of Mumbai’s disgruntled elite complaining of scarce foreign exchange to Lord Nicholas Kaldor, the distinguished British economist, at a meeting at the Taj Mahal Hotel in the mid-1950s. “But I am constantly being offered pounds and dollars by vendors outside the hotel!” a surprised Kaldor replied. “They cost so much!” his Indian interlocutors protested. Enlightenment dawned. “So, you’re suffering from a scarcity of rupees”, Kaldor exclaimed, “not hard currency!”
The blackmarket premium that the Taj audience complained of fell dramatically after Dr Singh made the rupee almost freely convertible with few restrictions on export. Rules mean loopholes. In Churchill’s words, “If you have 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law”.

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is a senior journalist, columnist and author