With Gujarat strongman Narendra Modi emerging as the BJP/NDA front runner for prime minister in the General Election due next summer, the remarkably long run of the  incumbent septuagenarian Dr. Manmohan Singh of the Congress-led UPA government is all but over. But Singh has little cause to complain considering that contrary to the Lincolnian assertion, he has managed to fool the people for a very long time to become India’s longest continuously serving prime minister after Jawaharlal Nehru.

It speaks volumes of the naïveté and sycophancy of the country’s business community (and the media) that this apotheosis of mediocrity, who was one of the prime architects of licence-permit-quota raj which devastated Indian industry for over three decades — he held every senior position within the civil service including economic secretary, governor of the Reserve Bank and deputy chairman of the Planning Commission — is hailed as the saviour of the Indian economy, and an individual of unimpeachable integrity.

Returning to India in 1991, after wangling postings in the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, he emerged as an economic reformer who liberalised the Indian economy, when actually he dutifully did prime minister Narasimha Rao’s bidding. A decade later he surfaced as Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi’s yes-mam prime minister after the Congress unexpectedly emerged as the single largest party in Parliament in the General Election of 2004. Since then, he has presided over the most corrupt Central government in Indian history, even as GDP growth has nose-dived from 9 percent per annum in 2004 to below 5 percent currently.

With the Nehru dynasty scion Rahul Gandhi indicating a marked disinclination to announce himself as the Congress prime ministerial candidate in 2014, Singh has again thrown his turban into the ring. And given the political illiteracy of the electorate and vested interest of the Indian establishment in corruption, he may well be elected again.

Mofussil mindset fallout

The reshuffle of the top management of Bangalore-based transnational IT (information technology) behemoth Infosys Technologies Ltd (revenue: Rs.44,817 crore; headcount: 150,000 in fiscal 2012-13), and the reappointment of its iconic promoter N.R Narayana Murthy as executive chairman of the company, has provoked considerable speculation whether Murthy, who is credited with piloting the astonishing growth of this company (estb. 1981), will be able to revive its sagging fortunes.

NRNM is widely acknowledged as the man with the Midas touch who charted the growth of Infosys founded by a group of IIT graduates from modest backgrounds, into a globally respected corporate with awe-inspiring campuses and offices in India and abroad. Now the challenge before him is to rectify the damage he himself inflicted on Infosys by imposing several faulty policies and values on the company during his long innings as chairman (2002-2011). The first of them was to reward in rotation, all his promoter-brethren with a stint in the CEO’s corner office regardless of capability. This unwittingly prevented any break from established policies and practices despite a rapidly changing global business environment.

Another strategic blunder that NRNM inflicted upon the company in his first innings which none of his hand-picked successors corrected, was ingrained aversion to advertising and promotion to build the Infosys brand. Indeed, the company’s management under Murthy prided itself on the extensive editorial coverage it received gratis in the media. Yet it overlooked the reality that media publications told their stories of Infosys. The narrative of the company’s  progression up the value chain and its metamorphosis into a full consultancy firm which should have been proclaimed through sustained multimedia campaigns, remained fuzzy.

This penny-pinching antipathy to advertising of this cash-rich company’s top management can be traced to a mofussil mindset disdainful of advertising and sales promotion expenditure. Small-town minds tend to ignore the reality that even the world’s most famous brands — Coca Cola, Pepsi, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Samsung — spend billions of dollars to constantly communicate their messages to the public. Because of the unwarranted parsimony of its founder-promoters, in the public mind Infosys is a provider of generic and indeterminate IT services. This is the image of Infosys that NRNM will need to upturn in his second innings. But to do that he will first have to change his own mofussil mindset.   

Morality meltdown

A commendable report in the delhi-based weekly Outlook (June 17) highlights racial discrimination against foreign students in Indian universities, particularly in Sharada and Lovely Professional universities which heavily advertise their international student profiles on television as proof of academic excellence. According to the report, there are an estimated 7,000 Afghan and 2,500 African students in India and “hate crimes arising from racism or scant appreciation of foreign cultures” are becoming increasingly common in colleges countrywide.

Given the pathetic condition of contemporary India’s education system in which values and good manners are  conspicuously absent from school curriculums, racial prejudice against third world and African students in particular, is hardly surprising and pervasive in Indian society. It’s the mirror opposite of slavish deference and mindless imitation of Caucasians, especially Americans and Europeans within the country’s ill-educated middle class.

Cultural deference and lack of ethnic pride is most prominently displayed in Bollywood where movie stars — whitewashed imitations of Hollywood’s Caucasian leading lights — are thrust upon a brainwashed brown-skinned population. Likewise on television, light-skinned models of indeterminate ethnicity routinely promote skin whitening creams and lotions. To the extent that Hindustan Unilever which cynically markets a cream branded Fair & Lovely, has earned millions of dollars by uninterruptedly marketing this medically unsafe skin whitener for several decades, prompting dozens of imitators in the process.

And with the leaders of major political parties and the establishment merrily engaged in loot and plunder of the people even as the education, law and order, and justice systems are in meltdown, it’s scarcely surprising the nation’s youth has lost its moral compass.