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TheIndian EXPRESS
www.indianexpress.com

l SATURDAY l DECEMBER 22 l 2012

The Indian EXPRESS

BECAUSE THE TRUTH INVOLVES US ALL

WENTY years after India launcheditsLookEastpolicy, and 10 years after it began a high-level engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the relationship has travelled far. Having stayed outside theregionalgroupingforlong,theelevation of New Delhis ties with the ASEAN to a strategic partnership is a remarkable achievement. India is only the fourth country after China, Japan and South Korea to enter a strategic partnership with the ASEAN. The bottomline, however, has always been, and will continue to be, economic and trade cooperation. Almost three years ago, India implemented its first Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in goods with the ASEAN. The ASEAN-India Commemorative Summit this week in Delhi saw the finalisation of negotiations for the FTA on services and investment, which, once ratified and implemented, will facilitate closer economic integration of India and the bloc. Withacombinedmarketofnearly 1.8 billion people and a combined GDPof$3.8trillion,theASEAN-India Free Trade Area (FTA) and the ambitiousRegionalComprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) which would also include China, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand will redefine the global economic architecture. As it happens, the bilateral trade volume between India and the ASEAN surpassed the $70 bn target for 2012

Strategic partnership and FTA on services mark progress in ASEAN-India ties. The challenges begin now
with$80bnin2011.Thenewtargetof $100 bn by 2015 looks eminently achievable. The services and investments FTA will not only propel Asia into a robust manufacturing, services and investment club, it will also benefit Indias services sector immensely, which accounts for almost 60percentoftheGDP .ThisFTAwill alsoprotectinvestmentstopreventa GMR-Male situation. Having said that, however, Indias challenges havejustgotbigger,astheincreasein tariff-free lines, for example, will demand more comprehensive reforms from India. The strategic partnership bolsters the political and security engagement, with particular focus on maritime security, freedom of navigation and the safety of the sea lanes of communication, as well as international terrorism. The ASEAN has long wanted India to play a larger role in the region. The question is whether Delhi has the appetite to move beyond its diplomatic support for the ASEAN and passive participation in bilateral defence agreements. This is not about containing or balancing the rise of China, but about Indias own transition to a larger role. Once projects like the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway or the Mekong-India Economic Corridor are completed, Southeast Asia and South Asia will be better able to fully embrace the geopolitical and geo-economic significance the new century has thrust upon East Asia.

Eastern wind

AN the government compel business to be virtuous? The Companies Bill, recently passed in the Lok Sabha, has outlined exactly what it expects from large corporations. No less than 2 percentoftheirprofitsaretobeused for socially responsible action. Companies of a certain girth, which have a turnover of over Rs 1,000 crore, value over Rs 500 crore and average net profit of Rs 5 crore in the last three years, have to set up internal committees to choose and oversee socially responsible projects, and if they fail to spend the earmarked moneyinanyyear,offeraconvincing explanation. Obviously, this cuts into the companys right to use its profit in its own interest, as well as shareholders dividends. Rather than seeking to encourage corporate social responsibility (CSR), which is implicitly understood by companies now, the bill wants to enforce it. Thisisnottosaythatcompaniesdo nothaveanethicalobligationtosociety. The idea of CSR has been attacked from left and right. Some believe that it reveals a lack of trust in capitalismandconfusionabouthow it works. They argue that no special

Corporate social responsibility should be encouraged, not enforced

efforts are needed, that seemingly self-interested companies in competitive markets end up serving the common good. Others, profoundly distrustfulofbusiness,thinkofCSR as an elaborate scam to make rapacious companies look benevolent andsociallyresponsible.Thesepoles ofopinionapart,CSRissimplyapart of the way business willingly works, including in India. Many large companies talk grandly of a triple bottom line people, planet and profit that includes social and environmentalconcernsaspartoftheir mission. Given that the costs they often impose on the environment andcommunityareoftenhardtocalculate, these gestures of compensation are certainly significant. The problem is in mandating a specific percentage to be spent on an approved set of projects, whether skill development, education, financial inclusion, or something else. Ethical business is more than philanthropy. It is about how it treats workers, serves consumers, plays by the rules of a competitive marketplace, and how accountable it is. Externalising that sense of social responsibility may not be the best way forward.

How to be good

HE recent revelations that Walmart paid lobbyists in the US to lobby American policymakers to influence policy regarding access to the Indian retail market have caused great indignation among our political leaders. Statements of affront to national dignity by the legal lobbying practices of predatory multinational firms in another country have been expressed by ruling and opposition party leaders alike. While affront is indeed warranted, is this the right target? Walmarts activities in the US, however distasteful or inimical to some Indian interests, were legally conductedandfullydisclosedunderthe 1995 US Lobbying Disclosure Act. The rather more pertinent questions who, when and, how did theirIndianpartner,Bharti,lobbyin India; did other interests with different points of view gain access to this process are curiously absent from the heated rhetoric of our political leaders. Indeed, the entire question of how corporate India lobbies for influence and at what cost to itself and to society, is not a question that our political crusaders seem keen to discuss. What this incident does tell us very clearly is that despite the Mundhras, the Jains and the Radias, we still rely on random chance and the legal rules and capacities of other countries to learn what is happening in our own and that indeed is a national affront. The important question this incident surely raises is, why has the reality of lobbying by special interests not been legally recognised and regulated in India in an effort to introduce at least some transparency and accountability to the process? Lobbying in the corridors of power, whether local, national or international, is how policy is deliberated, designed, passed, implemented and adjudicated in countries around the world, including India. Business groups use a variety of tactics to gain access and influence to elected and appointed officials in positions to influence any of these stages. In addition to contributing money to political campaigns, groups in other countries share their technical expertise, provide data and information, testify in front of committees, inform and educate the public and politi-

When lobbying is legal

Policy influence rests on expertise and credibility, rather than money
VINEETA YADAV
cal elite through studies, press conferences and workshops and mobilise their members to take part in rallies and communicate with their representatives. Lobbying holds both the promise of democratic participation and better policy, and the threat of corruption and a state captured by special interests. Experience from other countries shows that the policymaking culture that political institutions create significantly influences the extent to which these possibilities are realised. A wealth of studies show that despite the prolific financial contributionsUSlobbiesmaketoelected officials and parties, money is not a guarantorofpolicyinfluencethere. Rather the reputations that groups develop as providers of credible high-quality intelligence on polipolicymakers for influence. A recent study (Yadav 2011) reveals the striking contrast with another emerging market struggling withmanysimilarpoliticalandeconomic challenges Brazil. Of 158 business, trade and professional organised interest groups surveyed in Brazil, about 73 per cent cited their technical ability on sectoral issues and 48 per cent their expertise on national policy issues as a source of strong or decisive lobbying influence with elected policymakers. In contrast, of 179 Indian groups, only 30 per cent cited their technical ability on sectoral issues and 23 per cent on national policy issues as a source of policy influence. In specific policy situations, 54 per cent, a majority of Brazilian groups, report using technical information rather than money to

Letters to the

EDITOR Letter of the

How corporate India lobbies for influence and at what cost to itself and to society, is not a question that our political crusaders seem keen to discuss. Why has the reality of lobbying by special interests not been legally recognised and regulated in India?
cies is a significant source of lobbying influence. This lesson has been learned by interest organisationsincomparableemergingmarketssuchasChinaand Brazil.Business, trade, professional and labour organisations in these countries invest in the technical capacity of their organisations and, as a consequence, are able to develop reputations for serving as credible representatives of their members, trustworthy mediators by policymakers and, educators of the public and the political elites on the merits of policies. This allows them to leverage resources other than money their expertise and reputations to influence policy. However, with some notable exceptions such as the CII and FICCI, Indian associations rely heavily on providing legal and illegal donations of money to elected lobby policymakers while only 22 per cent of Indian groups could make this claim. Instead, 37 per cent of Indian groups report the direct exchange ofmoneyforpolicyfavoursinthese situations while less than 10 per cent of Brazilian groups reported the same. Technical information was the single most popular means ofinfluenceinBrazilwhilefinancial donations to parties and politicians were the most popular means of gaining influence in India. These numbers paint a damaging picture ofthepolicymakingenvironmentin India and unfortunately explain why India has yet to develop the rudiments of a regulatory framework for lobbying. Ask yourself do you know how your MP voted on the last significant economic bill? What was your partys position and how did

your party vote? The sad reality in the Indian context is that the more pertinent question is, did your party or your MP bother to show up at all to vote on bills that would reshape important policies such as insurance or intellectual property rights or pensions in India? Political posturing is surely a universal parliamentary practice, but when was the last time you witnessed Indian party leaders and MPs engaging in a serious policy debate on the plenary floor? Important bills in recent years have been passed in minutes, with little debate and often without the requisite quorum of MPs present. As in the Walmart case, members seem more interested in storming the well of their parliamentary chamber prior to storming out in yet another meaningless protest rather than in engaging in a serious, educated debate on the relevant issue in this case, regulation of lobbying practices in India. Since neither party leaders nor MPsseeanygain totheircareersby developing policy reputations with voters or their peers, there is little incentive for business lobbies to invest in and use policy expertise to build productive relationships with policymakers. The result is that while 32 per cent of Brazilian groups in the 2006 survey reported suffering at least a significant impact from the sale of parliamentary votes to special interests, almost 60 per cent of Indian groups reported significant impact. This gets us back to our original question why the process of lobbying remains unregulated in India, despite the obvious costs to corporate India in terms of domestic and global reputation, not to mention the larger cost to society, and why we must infer what Walmart or Bharti may or may not have done rather than having access to concrete information that such regulation would disclose. None of the parties to these transactions have any interest in acknowledging the domestic origins of these incentives and practices. Yadav teaches political science at Penn State University, and has written the book Political Parties, Business Groups, and Corruption in Developing Countries
express@expressindia.com

WEEK

Make no mistake

must be hailed for taking a firm stand on reservation in promotion for SCs and STs in government jobs (SP isolated as Rajya Sabha clears quota Bill, IE, December 18). It is possible that her strong position helped the Rajya Sabha to pass the bill quickly. A quota for Muslims, as Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav demands, is unlikely to have a political effect. If Yadav is serious about the upliftment of Muslims, he should empower them politically in his party. How many tickets did the SP give Muslims in its recently declared list of probables for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections? S. Faizan Musanna Lucknow

BSP leader Mayawati

Third time lucky

GUJARAT voted for what

seems to be corruptionfree and efficient governance (Im your man: Hat-trick Modi to India, IE, December 21). Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi seems to aim at development and has attempted to make Gujarat an industryfriendly state with continuous power supply. Lokesh Nagpal Ludhiana

Lazy law

legislators that Indias crime rate is alarmingly high (Sheila seeks draft law to turn Delhi gangrape outrage into action, IE, December 21)? One possible reason for this is the lazy legal process. The largely toothless law doesnt seem to instil enough fear in the minds of potential criminals. Priyashree Pal Panchkula

DOESNT it strike

RAVINDER KAUR
NE is left numbed after reading the facts and figures on violence against women. Yet it is easy to gloss over the statistics and move on to reading about what else is wrong with the country corruption, inefficiency and other such malaises. What is not easy to forget, especially for women themselves (and yes, there is a gender difference here), are the graphic details of various forms of violence perpetrated against them. Delhi has seen extreme examples of such violence against female infants, children and older women, leaving no demographic untouched. Understanding the depravity of the perpetrators may need individual psychological attention, but it would do nothing to reverse the harm done to the victims. Descriptions of the latest gang-rape in Delhi, which has left a young girl fighting for her life, suggest that for a woman who steps out of the house, every male is a possible predator. Delhis statistics show that this may not be far from the truth. She may try her best to avoid the unwelcome gaze, to forget the muttered sexual obscenities and fend off physical advances with not much more at her command than a dirty look if she is not to simply resign herself to enduring their behaviour. Is India, and at this moment,

We need to make public spaces less threatening and unfriendly for women
Delhi, a difficult place for a woman? It is hard to answer in the negative. As women take on new roles and greater responsibilities, they need to be out in public space more, not less. Yet public spaces are threatening and unfriendly. If they reduce their use of this space, they concede victory to the perpetrators who get further emboldened, especially given the lack of any real punishment. If, on the other hand, they decide not to back down and insist on exercising their right to be in public space as citizens, they run the risk of being raped. They tacked acting provocatively? The answer, clearly, is no, and one does not even need to waste time elaborating. Should it be considered that women are asking for it if they are seen to be behaving provocatively? The answer, again, is an emphatic no. Let us not forget that north India has an abysmal sex ratio, and a male surplus in societies has been associated with higher levels of sexual violence against women. The NCR region is full of young men who will remain unmarried due to the shortage of women. Unfortunately, these are also violence and, at another level, against young couples? Is the greater sexualisation of society due to changing norms and the medias depiction of new choices in personal lives to be blamed? It is a fact that many young couples are beginning to experiment with pre-marital relationships and sexuality more frequently and openly than before. These young people are often the targets of violence, whether by khap panchayats, parents, other relatives or young men who take it upon themselves to exercise moral policing. Older, traditional males argue that early marriage should be promoted, and cell phones and other allegedly trouble-causing innovations that lead to love affairs and elopements should be banned. My view is that neither the media nor technology is to be blamed for the current state of affairs. What we need to do is to find ways of transitioning from the type of rigid gender relations which promote a view of women as mere sexual objects. We need to work towards reducing the importance of virginity and marriage in womens lives. Creative public campaigns on gender relations and gender education in schools and colleges might be helpful in this regard. The writer teaches at IIT Delhi
express@expressindia.com

A world of hostility

Education first

Control (IE, December 20). The problem does not lie only with the five accused of the gang-rape in Delhi. It lies with all of us who have contributed to creating a deplorable society where women are treated as mere objects of entertainment. We seem to indulge in or ignore eveteasing, and allow some events to escalate into cases like this. Lets teach ourselves and more importantly, our children to respect women of all ages and classes. Varun Singla Delhi

THIS refers to Crime and

Test trust

EST BENGAL has seen a series of incidents of campus violence in the last year-and-a-half, giving the lie to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjees election promise to depoliticise education. That was shrugged off stoically by the people of the state, which boasts of a long tradition of studentrestivenessdatingalltheway back to the Naxalite movement. But this week, even they were startled by an outbreak of gheraos in which school students barricaded their teachers. The contagion spread virally to four schools in Kolkata and nearbytowns.Atissuewerepre-tests, whichschoolsruntoqualifystudents to take the Class X and XII exams. Large numbers of students who failed barricaded their teachers, demanding to be passed. Worst hit was a girls school in Kolkata, whose students gheraoed

Now an outbreak of gheraos by schoolchildren in West Bengal

their teachers for 22 hours, right through the night. Their protest was on the lines of the labour unrest of the 1970s, when the offices of executives were equipped with beds and well-stocked refrigerators to withstandprolongedsieges.Theprotests spread virally to three more schools, political groups including the TMC became involved and the West BengalCouncilofHigherEducationhad to announce a re-test. The incident has reaffirmed the publics suspicion that poriborton actually means more of the same. The TMC had promised to end the era of bandhs, strikes and lockouts that had crippled Bengal under Left rule. But if even schoolchildren are launching gheraos, the politics of protest clearly remains mainstream, and it is not surprising that Banerjee is finding it almost impossible to lure investors to Kolkata.

Poriborton?

Until and unless the flux that rigid gender roles are undergoing begins to be acknowledged and accepted, we are in for a very rough period.
face the unenviable choice between missing out on life and labour opportunities and facing physical and emotional violence. Their difficulties are further exacerbated by a recent, extreme surge of blaming the victim. Womens clothes, attitudes, their very participation in various occupations and walks of life (let us not forgot the two Bhanwari Devis, one who was gang-raped after she tried to stop a child marriage and the other who was driven to suicide by unscrupulous politicians) are seen to be at fault for their fate at the hands of lewd men. Are all women who are atmen at the bottom of the pyramid who do not have adequate education, jobs or means of livelihood. In a patriarchal society in which the male is expected to be the breadwinner, they lack self-esteem. Such men are often likely to exercise power and violence over the weak or those whom they see as challenging power norms. Patriarchy traps both men and women in its tentacles. Until and unless the flux that rigid gender roles are undergoing begins to be acknowledged and accepted, we are in for a very rough period. Where do we look for answers to the escalation in anti-female

WORDLY WISE
Cheris Kramarae

Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.

HE publication of the Pollard review, which examined the BBCs managerial inadequacies; and, second, any sense that it is reaxing of Newsnights expose on Jimmy Savile, was greeted as sponsible not to its own staff, but to the viewers not just for the a news event of unparallelled importance. The schedquality of its journalism, but for every penny of their money ules were virtually cleared so that the corporations fearless that it spends... The Savile affair might have shaken the inquisitors might turn their gaze upon their cowering colBBC to its core, but so far, there are depressingly few signs leagues. Yet while the storm of self-criticism was intense, it PRINTLINE that the right lessons are being learnt. was also brief... What is missing is, first, the humility to accept the scale of the From a leader in The Telegraph, London

The BBC must take responsibility for the Jimmy Savile affair with greater humility

Not sorry enough?

changer? (IE, December 20), Virat Kohli is still too young and raw to be entrusted with the taxing job of captain. Though he is definitely captain material, it is still early days for him. He needs to concentrate on his batting for the sake of the Indian middle order, which has been badly hit by the retirement of Rahul Dravid and V.V.S. Laxman. A captain has to earn the unswerving respect of his side; there are quite a few seniors on the Indian side who may be tricky customers for the youngster to handle. In spite of his latest performance with the bat, M.S. Dhoni should continue as captain for some more time. Under Dhoni, the future captain must be nurtured. Mohammad Kaif was once talked about as a future captain, but he no longer seems to be in the running for this national role. The transition to a new captain must be smooth and planned, not sudden. Ganapathi Bhat Akola

APROPOS Game