Why should a secular nation have minority reservations?

Thanks to the Congress party’s unrelenting pursuit of vote bank politics the issue of reservations for minorities in jobs and educational institutions is back in the news. Designed as a ploy to regain a foothold in UP (as a key to capturing power at the centre in 2014), it carved out a 4.5% sub-quota for minorities (primarily Muslims) in the 27% reservation provided for OBCs. In its vulgar greed to capture power at any cost it conveniently forgot the sequence of events, beginning with the creation of separate electorates based on religious lines in the 1930s, which eventually led to the partition of the country. The creation of separate electorates was precisely based on the same logic and for the same reasons that the government now seeks to create reservations for Muslims.

As soon as it came back to power in 2004 the Congress party began planning its long term strategy to woo permanent vote banks that would be beholden to it. In the first fifty years after independence it expropriated the freedom movement as a convenient anchor to lay claim for power. During this period also it tried its best to project itself as a champion for the welfare of minorities.

The Justice Rajender Singh Sachar Committee was constituted on March 9, 2005 to prepare a report on the social and educational status of Muslims (not minorities) in India. The other members of the committee were Mr. Sayyid Hamid, Dr. T.K. Ooman, Mr. M.A. Basith, Dr. Akhtar Majeed, Dr. Abu Saleh Shariff and Dr. Rakesh Basant. Dr. Syed Zafar Mahmood, a civil servant, was appointed as Officer on Special Duty (OSD) to assist the commission. The Committee submitted its report on November 17, 2006.

The Committee was asked to prepare a report on the relative, social, economic and educational status of Muslims at the district, regional and the state levels by obtaining relevant information and conduct[ing] a literature survey. Please note the last part in the first item of the terms of reference. The Committee was not expected to conduct any field research; it just had to conduct ‘literature survey’! This gives the committee led by J Rajinder Singh Sachar virtually the latitude to write anything it wants. (That the said J Rajinder Singh Sachar later turned out to be an honoured guest of Pakistani ISI-Front, Gulam Nabi Fai is another matter.)

PRS Legislative Research (“PRS”) which posted a summary of the report on its website has this to say of the report: “Barring some generic observations about the cause for the ‘development deficit’ among Muslims, there is no explicit or detailed discussion of the causes of such conditions.” (Click here to see the summary: Sachar Committee Report)

Sample some of the recommendations of the report, apart of course from recommending reservations for Muslims which was the latent reason for constituting the committee:

“… Work out mechanisms to link madarasas with higher secondary school board.  

“Recognise degrees from madarasas for eligibility in defence, civil and banking examinations.”

On the other hand governments in various states have been merrily closing down Oriental Colleges, which were established during the British reign to impart Samskritic education in Vedas and allied sciences. The ostensible reason for closing these colleges, most of which were over a hundred years old is their dwindling enrollment.

But the most perilous course that the Committee recommended is in this recommendation:

“Establish a delimitation procedure that does not reserve constituencies with high minority population for SCs.”

If this course is followed the problems the nation is facing in Jammu & Kashmir are likely to surface in other states like Assam, West Bengal and Kerala. (See below for population ratios of these states.)

The following may be summed up as the report’s errors of commission and omission. The report did not take into account the bulk of educated employed Muslims that migrated to Pakistan when the country was partitioned. It did not take into account the numbers of Muslims engaged in trades and other professions. The Committee willy-nilly concedes that the “[…] most striking feature is the relatively high share of Muslim workers engaged in self-employment activity, primarily in urban areas and for women workers. […] Muslim participation rates in traditional manufacturing and trade (especially wearing apparel, auto-repair and electrical machinery) is much higher than for other groups, while their participation in the agricultural section is lower.” It excluded the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes from corresponding Hindu figures thus annulling any equity in its comparisons. Last but not least it excluded educated and well off Muslims from comparisons.

The Committee also had to concede that the literacy rate among Muslims @ 59.1% was slightly below the national average of 64.8%, “with the greatest gap in urban areas” for reasons already mentioned above, but that “the literacy rates were higher than those of SCs and STs.”

The Committee ignored the fact that the country did provide fair and equitable opportunities to all and those Muslims who availed of them did prosper - in filmdom, in industry, in government / university jobs or in politics. If you go by the findings of the report, Asghar Ali Enginner, A. G. Noorani, Azim Premji, Syed Shabuddin, the Khan trio and other Muslim celebrities of Bollywood and a host of other Muslims in high places (Sayyid Hamid, T.K. Ooman, M.A. Basith, Akhtar Majeed, Abu Saleh Shariff and Syed Zafar Mahmood included) - all need reservations in government jobs!

The National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) has concluded that the findings of the Sachar Committee were manipulated. The committee’s job was all the more easier as it was given the theories; it was only expected to go out and find facts to fit into them! Lo and presto, it did it and how? Try as you might, you cannot accuse the Committee of objectivity or doing anything right either by commission or omission. The Committee’s report, to borrow from information technology jargon, was doomed to be GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) right from inception. The Committee set out with faulty assumptions, faulty data collection and faulty analysis and of course ended up in arriving at faulty conclusions.

However the report made certain interesting findings with regard to the Muslim population in India. The states with the highest percentage of Muslims include Jammu & Kashmir (67%), Assam (30.9%), West Bengal (25.2%) and Kerala (24.7%). In 2001 the population of Muslims in India was 138 million which grew to 150 million by 2006. Between 1961 and 2001 their population grew from 10.7% to 13.4%. The committee estimates it is likely to grow to between 18% and 21% by 2101. These statistics are quite significant in that they raise a query about the definition of minority as applicable to Muslims.

The Constitution of India in Article 15 (1) ordains that “[t]he State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them.”; and in Article 16 (1) that “[t]here shall be equality of opportunity for all citizens in matters relating to employment or appointment to any office under the state.”

By its latest executive fiat and in spite of court of after court questioning its motives the government at the centre seems to pursue a perilous course that might once again threaten the unity and integrity of the nation.  

The Devotion of Suspect X

Book Review

Higashino, Keigo. (2011). The Devotion of Suspect X. Translated from Japnese by Alexander O. Smith & Elye J. Alexander. London. Little Brown.  Pages: 374. Price Rs. 350

The story has all the elements of a normal whodunit. There is the murder; there is a beautiful woman, there is her secret lover and the rich, single third man, for whom her feelings are a bit ambivalent. There is jealousy; the secret lover hates the other man.  But the similarity with an ordinary whodunit ends there. As the criminal investigation moves apace, it grips the reader in suspense. Will the murderer be caught or not? It is a situation in which, the reader for a change, is not on the side of justice but sympathises with the criminal.

The female protagonist, Yasuko Hanaoka and her teenage daughter, Misato (from her first marriage) live together in a flat. As Yasuko’s ex-husband Shinji Togashi (obviously not Misato's father) who has been stalking her for awhile, barges into their flat little did the mother and daughter know of the storm that was about to blow into their lives. After another futile argument with Yasuko during which Togashi proposes they reunite, he was about to leave but attacks Misato for supporting her mother. Yasuko first tries to extricate her daughter from Togashi but when she fails, in a fit of rage, she strangulates him with an electrical cord. As Misato frees herself, she helps her mother in the murder of her ex-husband. After mother and daughter get over the initial shock, they come to grips with the enormity of their crime. As they were arguing as to who should confess to the crime before the police, their neighbour Tetsuya Ishigami – who secretly loves Yasuko – steps in. He helps them hide the crime and constructs an iron-clad alibi for them. Ishigami is a genius mathematician who teaches in a nearby high school. He foresees each move that a crime investigator is likely to make and plans countermoves with the meticulousness of solving a mathematical problem step by step.  

The case comes up for investigation by Shunpei Kusanagi. His old college-mate and a university lecturer in physics, Manabu Yukawa helps him unravel the crime. Kusanagi who usually takes his more difficult and intricate cases to Yukawa for resolution nicknamed the latter, Detective Galileo. By a strange coincidence Ishigami and Yukawa were also classmates. The story progresses as a chess game with Ishigami and Yukawa indirectly matching wits. Ishigami’s moves were to throw the investigators off the scent of evidence that would put Yasuko and Misato in the dock. Yukawa helps the police to be back on track.  

In the meanwhile Kudo, a rich single man whose wife died of cancer enters the scene. He was an admirer of Yasuko when she was a bar dancer. Yasuko gets attracted to him. Misato disapproves of her mother’s relationship. While not exactly suggesting that her mother should have a relationship with Ishigami, Misato wonders whether her relationship with Kudo might not anger Ishigami. However Ishigami who observes every move that Yasuko makes, is stung by pangs of jealousy. He was about to warn her.  

Kusanagi brings together the old classmates and friends, Yukawa and Ishigami. At first when Yukawa informs Ishigami that he was helping the police solve the crime and his own suspicion of Yasuko’s alibi he did not suspect his old friend’s hand in it. As he unravels the mystery and inches closer to the truth, he seeks his old friend to subtly warn him. The hint from Yukawa warns Ishigami that the game was up. 

The story takes a quite unexpected turn and ends in a stunning denouement, for which the reader is absolutely unprepared. The only distractions from a tense plot in the story are the two discussions on mathematics and physics. 

This review is part of the Book Reviews programme at Blogadda.com          

'You Can Sell!'

Book Review

Khera, Shiv. (2012) You Can Sell. Chennai. Westland. Pages: 316. Price: Rs 275

For some strange reason, selling is referred to as the second oldest profession in the world. A number of other professions compete for the second spot including spying.  Designating selling as the second might be an attempt at disdain, ascribing to it associative notoriety with the first. Notwithstanding the fact that sales people are generally unwelcome and viewed with suspicion, they do have a useful function in the society. A successful sales manager was fond of saying, ‘the only person in the world who prays for your long life is your insurance salesman!’ Quite true! The reason is simple. An insurance salesman receives commission on a life policy as long as the insured person lives, but his heirs bequeath his property when he ceases to.

The lighter side apart, every human interaction has an element of selling in it. It need not be selling goods or services. It could be selling ideas. The obvious implication of this idea is that to get ahead in life, one has to sell oneself. Quite often we find the same attributes or prerequisites listed as factors for success both in self-improvement / success literature and selling skills manuals. They are a pleasing personality, a positive outlook, an ability to forge harmonious interpersonal relations and good communication skills. Conversely this is the reason why for sales people success literature has been a first manual.

Napoleon Hill’s 16-lesson The Law of Success (1928) was one of the earliest tomes on the subject in modern times. This was followed by Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people (1936). Since then there has been a steady stream of success literature, the most popular in recent years being Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. Some like Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) and Robert Schuller’s Tough Times Never Last but Tough People Do (1983) had religious overtones embedded in them. Parkinson & Rustomji’s Business is People, Walter Veira’s booklet on salesmanship, revised and updated as The New Professional Salesman and Spencer Johnson's The OneMinute Sales Person deserve mention in this context as they are precisely and very well written books on the subject. There are hundreds of others, including biographies of great sales people and fiction, which among them must have covered every aspect of selling skills.

Therefore there is not much new ground left for Shiv Khera to cover in his (new) book, You Can Sell.  However one must give it to him for putting together a comprehensive manual for sales people which covers the entire range of mechanics from positive thinking to professional pride; from prospecting to selling; from goal setting to time management.  There is also a chapter on ethics. He has provided an exercise at the end of each chapter for self assessment of readers as they go along. The book is peppered with interesting anecdotes. Old salesmen’s jokes have been skillfully used to make points. For people in the profession they might sound jaded but planted in a context, make for interesting reading. Even the Rotary Club’s four way test is planted in the chapter on ethics. 

You Can Sell is highly recommended. For people in the business of selling it makes for a thorough revision of all that they have learnt over the years.  For others it is a comprehensive, useful primer on the subject.

This review is part of the Book Reviews programme at Blogadda.com 

Scammed - Confessions of a Confused Accountant

Book Review

Anonymous. (2011). Scammed - Confessions of Confused Accountant. Bangalore. Grey Oak Publishers. Pages: 175. Price Rs. 175/-

Auditing and business consulting cannot be combined just as oil and water do not mix. The reasons for this are simple. Auditing is retrospection. It deals with hard, cold facts. It advises against adventurism and advocates conservation. Caution is its watch word. On the other hand business consulting is prospective in nature. Optimism is its mantra. It functions in uncertainty. Its principle is gung-ho adventurism. It favours exploration of new ideas and new markets. ‘The only safe ship is the ship in a port’, business consultants wryly quote! Therefore the twain cannot meet. The split and demise of Arthur Andersen LLP is attributed to the firm’s overweening ambition to ride the dichotomy between auditing and business consulting at the same time. Eager to compete with its (own) business consulting arm, Andersen Worldwide in revenue generation, Arthur Andersen compromised on accounting standards, as a result of which Enron, the Texas-based energy firm sank. Along with it the original accounting firm Arthur Andersen broke up and its regional fragments merged with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young, KPMG, three of the ‘Big Five’ Accounting firms (which included Arthur Andersen) and Grant Thornton. In order to ward off the stigma attached to the name Andersen, Andersen Worldwide is now renamed Accenture.

However auditing firms jockeying into business consulting is not new. James Oscar McKinsey a Professor of Accounting at the Chicago University founded McKinsey & Company in 1926. McKinsey was hired to turn around Marshall Field & Co a company manufacturing and marketing readymade garments that ran into doldrums during the great depression of the 1930s. Many decades before words like ‘downsizing’ were heard, McKinsey proposed that Marshall Field & Co do exactly that to turn the company around. Unable to implement his radical suggestions the company brought him in as CEO and charged him with implementing them. McKinsey was initially successful but because of his overbearing nature, made potential enemies. As he ventured into areas he knew nothing about and his mistakes caught up with him, the pressures of work finally got him and at the age of 47 McKinsey died of pneumonia.

If we delve into the history of businesses and accounting firms, we are likely to come up with many more such cases. Do we learn any lessons from these stories? The answer is ‘no’ going by the experience of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. (Satyam) and its auditors PwC – well, the Indian ‘member firm’ of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited (PwCIL) anyway. The two were charged with fudging accounts for several years and a partner of PwC along with the Founder Chairman of Satyam and some others of the two firms were arrested on charges of criminal conspiracy to defraud the public. The charge-sheet ran into 55000 pages. Did the story of Satyam and PwC inspire Anonymous, the author of Scammed ­to write the novel? It possibly did. The setting of the novel is Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam. (The British, who could not pronounce Visakhapatnam, made it Vizagpatam and then shortened it to Vizag. For several years now the state has reverted to its original Telugu pronunciation but the author seems to have not noticed it. He insists on calling it Vizag). Its characters  ‘speak with a thick South Indian accent’! (What else would you have them do?)

There was a time when literary critics in the West dismissed fiction by authors like Arthur Hailey and Irving Wallace as pulp fiction, meaning really not serious literature. This of course leads to the question whether literature should really be as sombre as a Russian novel to be considered serious literature. While authors like Somerset Maugham were hailed by critics in their life time, others like Jane Austen achieved this distinction only with passage of time. Although Indians have been writing in English for a long time it was only in the last few decades that they have really made it big on the international scene. At the same time the Indian approach to learning, writing and speaking English has been dramatically changing. There was a time when people who could speak and write grammatically and idiomatically correct English were in a minority. The purists lament that as the numbers of English speaking and writing people multiplied, there has been a dilution of standards. There is less exactitude with regard to grammar and syntax. Fastidious adherence to the ‘English pure’ gave way to colloquial Indianisms. This is because the curriculum of English teaching in the country has also been changing. Instead of studying Shakespearean plays, Milton’s poetry and Johnsonese, students are taught, what has come to be known as business communications in English - writing letters, advertisements and notices etc.

In the literary arena, it all started (perhaps) with Shobha De who introduced Hinglish in her writings. She was not taken seriously (or kindly) by critics at first. But as her novels acquired popularity – from those readers who did not have a stomach for more serious authors like Nirad Chaudary, V. S. Naipaul or Salman Rushidie – her publishers recognised her as a saleable author. If one can say De marked a turning point in Indo-Anglican literature, she opened up the market for more authors who catered to the needs of a certain type of burgeoning English-speaking class.

The explosion of communications through the IT, ITES and off-shoring of jobs truly Indianised English and there is no looking back. Employees of the Business Process Outsourcing Centres (BPOs, popularly known as ‘Call Centres’) have created their own patois - different of course from what they were expected to speak with their customers outside. In short, the expansion and proliferation of the English-speaking elite (?) has resulted in a ‘dumbing down’ of standards. Shobha De did not have serious competition for maybe a decade and a half till Chetan Bhagat debuted. He found a winning formula by precisely identifying his target audience. If the (Indian) English-literature consuming market is largely populated by the information technology guys (and girls) why not directly address them? This he did and was an instant success.

Scammed is in the Chetan Bhagat mould. Its setting is the accounting / business management industry. Its protagonist Hitesh Patel was entrusted by his accounting firm to audit a motor car company in Visakhapatnam, where he espies a lot of white-collar crime and siphoning of funds in it. While making a report of it to the principal board members he finds himself making some useful suggestions for the expansion of business. To an outside observer his formula of forward integration may not be very appealing. For example if a motor car company wishes to diversify into car-hiring business is it necessary that it should confine itself to cars manufactured by the parent company, unless it was for captive consumption? Be that as it may, the director was so impressed with the idea that he offers him a job at five times his salary to implement it. As fate catapults Hitesh into the big league of five figure salaries, five star hotels and of course beautiful girls he also willy-nilly gets sucked into a vortex of organisational politics, political intrigues and financial wheeling-dealings and finally financial offences. The novelist seeks to paint Hitesh as a self-righteous manager with only a weakness for a few girls. How else could he plant those steamy scenes so essential in a formula novel?

In Indish, the adjective ‘homely’ has a cultural connotation, quite different from what the word means in general English, and qualifies a woman as dutiful, home-loving and not coquettish. Therefore high-paid eligible bachelors look for ‘homely girls’ in matrimonial advertisements. In this story too after Hitesh had had his flings with attractive but unfaithful girls he finds succour in his ‘homely’ personal assistant Payal, whom he had ignored for long. As she dotes on him as a mother-hen he finally finds his soul-mate. She lends him a shoulder to cry on when he is down and generally offers him solace and succour. The characters are too linear and colourless but the book may be a good travel companion in a short journey. The novel could have done with some editing and proofing - its Indish notwithstanding. But the last two chapters seem to have been written by a more professional hand.

This review is part of the Book Reviews programme at Blogadda.com 

A modern management seminar!

You'll find here all there is to learn from modern management wisdom. Follow its simple steps to ascend the management ladder. Not since Parkinson has management wisdom been imparted in such succinct and easy to follow form. It is not the usual ‘how to succeed’ stuff which requires you to be “a little more intelligent, a little more hardworking, a little more painstaking” to succeed. As Parkinson said, if you were all that you would not require a guide to succeed. So here’s to success and ascendance to the top!

......................................................................................................

As always, Subbu barged in crying ‘Guruji, I need your help! I have to make a presentation at our annual sales conference next week. The boss wants me to make a presentation about how I plan to double my sales in the coming year. Top management will be there and if I goof up, it will be outer darkness for me.’ ‘No problem’, I said. I have just returned from a management seminar myself and acquired all the wisdom there was in it………  

In the post lunch session, a Senior Vice President has been droning on for over half an hour. Half the participants were dozing from the exhaustion of overnight travel and the effects of a sumptuous lunch. He was saying, “we live in a 24/7 world.” Yeah, at least I do. In fact 24 hours in a day are not enough for me even to browse through the torrent of communications I receive. I receive mails from my boss, his boss and the head office. EDP (electronic data processing department for the uninitiated) sends me enough paper to drown in. Lest I forgot its existence, ‘HR’ sends me communications. In the olden days it was ‘Personnel’; now ‘Human resources’ has a nice ring to it. The only thing I could make out of ‘HR’ was it regularly denies me the type of increments, I feel I deserve. I receive circulars from ‘Logistics’ (in the days of yore it was called ‘Distribution’). I also receive communications from ‘Corporate Communications’. In the olden days the function of CC was mainly to produce the monthly in-house magazine and occasionally liaise with the press if there was a need. There were no pink papers and businesses did not make it often to the media. Now CC has a larger role. It is to see big-boss’ mug-shot appears in the newspapers at least once a month and he makes it to the television at least once in a quarter for his fifteen seconds of fame. The rest of the time CC throws its weight around and takes it out on minions like us.

…“We must leverage our core competences for greater customer focus.” A colleague who was sitting next to me whispered, ‘oh yeah, his core competence is in placating the boss and flattering his wife. Leverage, certainly he does. Last weekend he was out playing golf with him. His wife was quite unhappy; nowadays he spends his Sunday mornings at his boss’ residence you know.’ The last part jerked me out of my reverie. So my colleague was a regular visitor at our boss’ residence. How remiss of me? Haven’t I lost my customer focus?

…“in order to take on competition, we will have to look for synergy within, benchmark our efforts with the best practices in the industry and think out of the box. Let us ask ourselves if we are able to achieve a strategic fit; if not we should revisit our game plan. I call upon you ladies and gentlemen, let us become more proactive.” Yes, be at the boss’ side throughout the seminar and bring him coffee and cookies during breaks. Carry a pack of his brand of cigarettes. It comes in handy when he runs out of his pack, which to be sure he often does.

…“let us empower our team members” (for some inexplicable reason, in modern management parlance, the word ‘subordinate’ is taboo; so ‘team members’ it is.) “We need to change our mindsets and expeditiously look for a paradigm shift; let us think win-win.” Yeah, for sure! We do all the donkey’s work and you promote your favourite acolyte. He wins and you win because you get promoted!

…“As you all know the competition is breathing down on our necks. If we are serious about outpacing it, we will have to fast-track in enhancing our knowledge base. Let us come out of the loop and provide value-added service to our customers, for it is a result-driven world.”

...“don’t forget, the truth is at the end of the day, it is the bottom line that counts.” Yes Sir, we are looking forward to the end of the day. The bottom line is, that at the end of the day there would be dinner and drinks. Bosses would be around, so the party would begin on a cautious note but after a couple of rounds the lions within would come out.

… “Good Luck folks, God go with you, till we touch base again!”

The seminar made me wiser. I knew I have picked up the essence of management ‘Gita’. I gave Subbu a list of twenty five words. I suggested that he sprinkle these words throughout his presentation and presto, he would be a hit with his bosses. Here they are, in alphabetical order: “at the end of the day - benchmark - best practice - bottom line - client focus - core competencies - empowerment - expeditious - fast track - game plan - knowledge base – leverage - mindset - out of the loop - paradigm - proactive - result-driven - revisit - the truth is - think outside the box - touch base - strategic fit - synergy - value-added - win-win.” I told him, ‘don’t forget the most important of them all is “24/7”.’