Rajeev Chandrasekhar and his Idea of India

Rajeev Chandrasekhar is coming to THiNK2012. Here is his interview to Vijay Simha in 2009 from Tehelka Archives on his Idea of India. 

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, was one of the three architects of the Pentium microprocessor. He returned from a happening stint in the Silicon Valley after a meeting with then Congress idealist Rajesh Pilot convinced him that things were changing in India.

In India, he began BPL Mobile and built it into a fast-growing company. He also started working in public life, with his pet passion of getting integrity and efficiency back into government. For instance, Chandrasekhar works with the Karnataka Government for more than half a week to improve the state of Bengaluru.

He now heads Jupiter Capital, a conglomerate that also runs media organisations like Asianet in television and Radio Indigo. Chandrasekhar is a Member of the Rajya Sabha from Karnataka who seriously ideates about India. The following are excerpts from an interview with Vijay Simha for the series Young MPs and Their Idea of India.

Let’s begin with electoral issues as we head into a General Election. Do you think voting must be made mandatory to increase participation?
Mandatory voting will not work. There will be a mini industry that will develop to support and document the exemptions. We should rather give the Election Commission a budget to spend four months before every election on advertising and educating people to vote. That’s a more practical solution to getting more people involved in the democratic process.

Once in office, our MPs and MLAs seem to forget their job description. Should we have a right to recall them for non-performance?
We can change accountability of our leadership by amending the Constitution to include the power to recall. This is a powerful tool that shatters the comfort zone of the Indian ruling class that once elected, there’s no way to hold them accountable for performance till the next election, and that too only if they contest again. Five years is too long a window for malperformance to go unpunished.

What other electoral reform do you think we should bring about?
Right to recall, simultaneous elections to the states and the Centre, and fixed terms for governments and legislatures, meaning if a government loses confidence, there’s no automatic election. President’s Rule will continue till the term of the legislature ends.

An elephant in the room is reservation. Do we continue with this policy?
Reservations are a good way of mainstreaming the disadvantaged. However, all reservation policies must have exit criteria and sunset clauses after the objective of economic penetration is met.

Another growing issue is religious conversion. What is your position on conversion?
This is an important issue because it seems religions and faiths are in a competition and race to increase the size of their flock and believers. This is wrong. Conversion started with good intentions but is clearly now some form of race. Most tribals and others in India have been practicing some form of indigenous faith. I see no reason for this to be disturbed and inducements used to convert them from their ancient traditions to some mainstream religion, however distant or disconnected they may be from mainstream religions. Induced conversions should be prohibited.

As a Young MP, do you have fresh thought on how to deal with Pakistan, especially in an unstable neighbourhood?
I see this less of a problem with Pakistan and more of a problem of how do we deal with anybody that is a potential source of threat – a potential source of a terrorist attack or a terrorist movement. There is no need to create a Pakistan-centric strategy. It needs to be a secure India -centric strategy and game plan. This should consist of pre-emption and prevention, which is counter-terrorism and intelligence, law enforcement on the ground, which is the police, the response to an attack, which is civil defense and otherwise, and prosecution, which is fast-track courts.

What kind of response are you talking about in the event of a terrorist attack?
We saw in Mumbai that we are hopelessly ill-equipped ill-organised and badly led in terms of command, control and coordination. It has to be far more cohesive and mission-oriented. It is not at all cohesive now. You saw that it in the Indigo hijack. At a hint of a crisis, our system breaks down. It is purely because of individual pursuits of excellence and commitment that we manage to finally prevail. Institutionally, we are collapsing. We don’t have a go-to person who is responsible for civil defense.

How do you think we need to improve the systemic problems? Give me your perspective as a young parliamentarian.
This has less to do with Parliament and more to do with the government organising itself around threats and missions. The government must be clear that apart from awarding Padma Shris and Padma Bhushans once a year, they have a reorganised focus on deep challenges of today. The challenges of today are not normal law and order and riot management. Terrorism requires our internal security and ministries, and arms of the government to be reorganised around those challenges and not treat those challenges as one of many things to do.

In many ways Afzal Guru has come to symbolise our response. How do we deal with him now?
Afzal Guru doesn’t symbolise any of this. The delayed prosecution in the Mumbai blasts, the delayed sentencing of Afzal Guru, the delayed sentencing in white-collar crimes – all of this points to one thing, that prosecution is prolonged and effectively ends up as justice denied. That is not an indictment of Afzal Guru. It is an indictment of our prosecution process. Let’s assume that you can’t reform the entire judicial process because there are fewer judges and more cases, we should at least separate the terrorism and violent crimes and put them on a fast-track adjudicating process. We should have, as in the US, terrorism courts. So that they are not mixed up with the others and there is no delay. If a person is found guilty, he or she has an appeal process. At the end of the appeal process, the government cannot sit on a file. If a man is found guilty and is to be hanged, he has to hang. If a man is found guilty and has to go to jail, he has to go to jail. There should be no discretion available in the government to sit on those files.

People from other countries coming in illegally are a related strand in the complex security issue. What do we do with illegal immigrants from our neighbours?
Indians should enjoy India and its economic prosperity. There are a lot of people working very hard to make India a better place. If that prosperity is increasingly divided among Indians and illegal immigrants, it is to the detriment of an Indian citizen. At the end of the day the tax payer and the government have to foot the bill. So there is no other way but to prevent illegal immigration. That is not to say that all forms of migration will be opposed. Every society has provisions for legal immigration, where people leave for better opportunities. The primary motivation for illegal immigration is that the opportunity and safety in India represent a beacon of hope.

So what do we do with those who come in? Do we welcome them, send them back, or put them in camps?
There has to be a firm but not heavy-handed approach to this. If you are here illegally you have to go back. There is an argument that you can compound the illegality and then have some kind of a waiver or amnesty. The problem with this amnesty is that you have to define it in objective terms. There are two issues in illegal immigration. One is the Census. An authentic accurate estimate of who are they, how many are they, where are they. Then you can have a cut-off date, say 1970 or 1971, saying you can apply for legal citizenship. And your heirs can apply for legal citizenship. But it cannot be that this amnesty `can be from 1 January 2009. There will be a total outcry from civil society in India. They will say, excuse me but why. This is standard procedure. Everybody knows what civilised mature societies do. The US is grappling with illegal immigration for many years. They take a firm but reasonably non-heavy-handed approach to amnesty.

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