Books

Legal Confidential: The Adventures of an Indian Lawyer (Penguin 2015):

“I learnt soon enough that justice had little to do with the legal system, if at all. I also learnt that justice was of little interest to a great many service providers of the legal system. Last, and definitely most, I learnt that the last thing the service providers in the justice machine wanted to do was be just to each other. It was a dog eat dog world of self-serving street fighting, no quarter was asked or given, and the winner took all. When the velvet gloves came off, there was blood on every hand. It took twenty years for the reality of the legal world to sink in. When it did finally permeate to the depths of my soul, I enthusiastically embraced the ethical void. This book will tell you how I did this, and why. It is about that journey.” Ranjeev Dubey

Excerpt From Legal Confidential:

1. The Learning Years

I had two years of experience as a lawyer when I suddenly found myself handling a number of divorce cases. The story began when I represented Mrs. Hardeep Kaur against a charge of marital cruelty. She was 78, had a forbidding moustache and very bad knees. Her middle-aged daughter-in-law wrestled her into court every time the case came up for hearings. Clearly, the old girl had always been built for comfort, not speed, but her cantankerous 82 year old husband found no joy in her embrace. Despite his immaculately tied turban and his flowing white beard, he was something of a Dirty Harry on steroids, always looking to ‘make his day’ on some imaginary provocation. He out-yelled his lawyer at every hearing, generally about not very much at all. He picked on the opposing lawyer (which was me) and the judge too, leaving everyone holding their sides and falling about laughing.

Mrs. Hardeep Kaur’s children didn’t see the humour in it though. All of them – the old man, my client, the kids and the grandkids – lived in the same 500 square yard bungalow in Green Park. They ate out of a common kitchen. It was a happy joint family, but the old man wanted a divorce. That put the kids in the impossible position of defending their mother against their father. The grandkids – one of whom was my age – said that the old surd was seriously south of sanity. I was fascinated by the idea that the legal system had no institutional mechanism to stop geriatric loonies from suing for divorce long after their prostrates had given up the ghost. The whole system was designed to promote litigation. And litigation, once started, could go on forever. At that point of my life, I pretty much stopped reading fiction. With this stuff going on around me, who needed a made-up story?

Hardeep Kaur’s case didn’t progress very much of course. Neither judge nor defendant wanted it decided. In time, I realized that the old surd didn’t want it ended either: he was in search of emotional catharsis, not resolution. I made some professional progress riding on the back of that case. A joke can be a great foundation for a career. As the years went by, I got more and more of the same. A lot of my clients were women. I particularly recall this woman whose husband was a DTC bus driver. He liked to gamble, and since he didn’t win much, there was never enough money at home. She picked up some day-maid work to cover the bills – sweeping floors and washing utensils in the Karol Bagh area – but he didn’t like her moving about. Their marriage went downhill and one day, he sued her for adultery. He claimed to have come home early and stumbled on her getting it on with the neighbour. There were no witnesses.

It was a bullshit story on the face of it, the kind of story a third rate lawyer would cook up and hope to brazen it out. Adultery is notoriously hard to prove in India, unless the woman gets pregnant and her husband is in another country the whole time: like the much loved Nepali cook with his pregnant wife at home! I was pretty cocky about the case. The problem with cocky is that you know you can win, so you start to get reckless. Inevitably, I royally screwed up the bus driver’s cross examination. Let me explain. You can’t get a divorce under Hindu law because your wife is naked and in bed with a guy watching Kaun Banega Karorepati. For adultery to be proved, you have to prove penile penetration. In my youthful exuberance, that is where I took the guy’s cross examination.

“So when you pushed the door”, I asked the guy, “wasn’t it locked?” “Jhuggi doors don’t have locks sahib”, his eyes twinkled. No alarm bell went off in my na�ve head. “So, when you entered, what was your wife wearing?” “She was as naked as the skull of her bald lover sahib”, he giggled. The judge cringed. He stopped the stenographer and commanded him to write: “They were in a compromising position”. “So where were they at the time?” “Both were in bed sahib!” The judge was now red. He commanded the stenographer to write: “They were in a compromising position”. “Who was lying on the left side of the bed?” “He was on top of her sahib!” the guy was laughing. The judge held his head in embarrassment. He commanded the stenographer to write “They were in a compromising position”. I was too far gone to care. “What was he doing when you saw him?” “He had put it in and was taking her’s sahib”.

The judge couldn’t believe this was happening to him. “Write, they were in a compromising position”, he barked. Then he turned to me. “Vakil sahib, client bacha rahe ho ya maze le raheho?” (Are you protecting the client or entertaining yourself?). Here’s the deal. If a man claims he stumbled onto his wife getting it on with someone, all you need do is go on and on cross examining him about the lack of witnesses. You can ask him how is it possible that when tiny mud huts stand shoulder to shoulder in a jhuggi colony full of unemployed adults and unsupervised kids;his wife found this beautiful patch of perfectly screwable solitude to commit adultery? You can ask him why you should possibly believe such a nakedly self-serving story. You can assail his character. You can suggest he is morally challenged who gambled away his family fortune and cannot be trusted. Heck, you can call him a lying bastard and a rake. What you cannot and should never do is help him flesh out and detail his story. You must never ask a question the answer to which you do not already know. You should most definitely never get caught up in your beautiful insightful understanding of the legal principle and let that dictate your cross examination. At the end of the day, what a judge thinks of a witness is all about human sensibility, not legal principle: it’s to the man inside the judge to whom you must appeal. I had cocked it up big time.

It wasn’t the end of the world: many lawyers lose nearly-won cases but this one remains by far the worst cross examination I have ever done. Mercifully, no harm was done. One year later, when the matter was finally argued before another judge, the whole testimony was nothing but a series of statements saying “They were in a compromising position” which meant nothing. I buried my blunder under the previous judge’s embarrassment and saved the client from damnation. That’s the thing about being a lawyer. Everyone gets paid to do a job right, but how many have so much fun doing it?

LEGAL CONFIDENTIAL: SAMPLE CHAPTER 1 (THE ADVENTURES OF AN INDIAN LAWYER):

1. The Learning Years

I had two years of experience as a lawyer when I suddenly found myself handling a number of divorce cases. The story began when I represented Mrs Hardeep Kaur against a charge of marital cruelty. She was seventy-eight, had a forbidding moustache and very bad knees. Her middle-aged daughter-in-law wrestled her into court every time the case came up for hearings. Clearly, the old girl had always been built for comfort, not speed, but her cantankerous eighty-two-year-old husband found no joy in her embrace. Despite his immaculately tied turban and his flowing white beard, he was something of a Dirty Harry on steroids, always looking to ‘make his day’ on some imaginary provocation. He out-yelled his lawyer at every hearing, generally about not very much at all. He picked on the opposing lawyer (which was me) and the judge too, leaving everyone holding their sides and falling about laughing.

Mrs Hardeep Kaur’s children didn’t see the humour in it though. All of them—the old man, my client, the kids and the grandkids—lived in the same 500-square-yard bungalow in Green Park. They ate out of a common kitchen. It was a happy joint family, but the old man wanted a divorce. That put the kids in the impossible position of defending their mother against their father. The grandchildren—one of whom was my age—said that the old sardarji was seriously south of sanity. I was fascinated by the idea that the legal system had no institutional mechanism to stop geriatric loonies from suing for divorce long after their prostates had given up the ghost. The whole system was designed to promote litigation. And litigation, once started, could go on forever. At that point of my life, I pretty much stopped reading fiction. With this stuff going on around me, who needed a made-up story?

Hardeep Kaur’s case didn’t progress very much of course. Neither judge nor defendant wanted it decided. In time, I realized that the old surd didn’t want it ended either: he was in search of emotional catharsis, not resolution. I made some professional progress riding on the back of that case. A joke can be a great foundation for a career. As the years went by, I got more and more of the same. A lot of my clients were women. I particularly recall a woman whose husband was a DTC bus driver. He liked to gamble, and since he didn’t win much, there was never enough money at home. She picked up some jobs as a housemaid to cover the bills—sweeping floors and washing dishes in the Karol Bagh area—but he didn’t like her going out to work. Their marriage went downhill and one day, he sued her for adultery. He claimed to have come home early and stumbled on her getting it on with the neighbour. There were no witnesses.

It was a bullshit story on the face of it, the kind of story a third-rate lawyer would cook up and hope to brazen it out. Adultery is notoriously hard to prove in India, unless the woman gets pregnant and her husband is in another country the whole time: like the much loved Nepali cook with his pregnant wife at home! I was pretty cocky about the case. The problem with cocky is that you know you can win, so you start to get reckless. Inevitably, I royally messed up the bus driver’s cross-examination. Let me explain. You can’t get a divorce under Hindu law only because your wife is found naked in bed with a guy watching Kaun Banega Crorepati. For adultery to be proved, you have to prove penile penetration. In my youthful exuberance, that is where I took the guy’s cross-examination.

‘So when you pushed the door,’ I asked the guy, ‘wasn’t it locked?’

‘Jhuggi doors don’t have locks, sahib,’ his eyes twinkled. No alarm bell went off in my naive head.

‘So, when you entered, what was your wife wearing?’

‘She was as naked as the skull of her bald lover, sahib,’ he giggled.

The judge cringed. He stopped the stenographer and commanded him to write: ‘They were in a compromising position.’

‘So where were they at the time?’

‘Both were in bed, sahib!’

The judge was now red. He commanded the stenographer to write: ‘They were in a compromising position.’

‘Who was lying on the left side of the bed?’

‘He was on top of her, sahib!’ The guy was laughing.

The judge held his head in embarrassment. He commanded the stenographer to write: ‘They were in a compromising position.’

I was too far gone to care.

‘What was he doing when you saw him?’

‘He had put it in and was “taking her’s”, sahib’.

The judge couldn’t believe this was happening to him. ‘Write, they were in a compromising position,’ he barked. Then he turned to me. ‘Vakil Sahib, client bacha rahe ho, ya maze le rahe ho?’ (Are you protecting the client, or entertaining yourself?)

Here’s the deal. If a man claims he stumbled onto his wife getting it on with someone, all you need do is go on and on cross-examining him about the lack of witnesses. You can ask him how is it possible that when tiny mud huts stand shoulder to shoulder in a jhuggi colony full of unemployed adults and unsupervised kids, his wife found this beautiful patch of scrumptiously screw-worthy solitude to commit adultery. You can ask him why you should possibly believe such a nakedly self-serving story. You can assail his character. You can suggest he is a morally challenged loser who gambled away his family fortune and cannot be trusted. Heck, you can call him a lying bastard and a rake. What you cannot and should never do is help him flesh out and detail his story. You must never ask a question the answer to which you do not already know. You should definitely never explore your profound insights into legal principles and let that dictate your cross-examination. At the end of the day, what a judge thinks of a witness is all about human sensibility, not legal principles: it’s to the man inside the judge to whom you must appeal. I had messed up big-time.

It wasn’t the end of the world: many lawyers lose nearly won cases, but this one remains by far the worst cross-examination I have ever conducted. Mercifully, no harm was done. One year later, when the matter was finally argued before another judge, the whole testimony was nothing but a series of statements saying ‘They were in a compromising position’, which meant nothing. I buried my blunder under the previous judge’s embarrassment and saved the client from damnation. That’s the thing about being a lawyer. Everyone gets paid to do a job right, but how many have so much fun doing it?

Occasionally I got to represent a male client in an adultery case. Once a shopkeeper from Chandni Chowk—portly, swarthy but rather lacking in self-confidence—wanted a divorce because his wife was carrying on with his unmarried younger brother. They lived in one happy joint family somewhere in Dariba Kalan. The moment he walked out the door for work, she scampered across to the teenager’s room and they locked themselves in for hours. He had known about the affair for a long time: he came to see me because he could find no way to end it. ‘Doesn’t your family know?’ I asked. Of course they do, he told me. So what do they say? He was crestfallen. They say that if you can’t satisfy your wife, you cannot complain if your brother does. What does your wife say? She says I visit your brother because he makes me happy but I am your wife and it’s your duty to ‘maintain’ me. Doesn’t she recognize that it is wrong for her to sleep with your brother? No, she says all this goes on in other families all the time so what is the problem? Have you told your family that you want a divorce? Yes and they do not approve. What do they say? They say that marriage is a janam janam ka bandhan(a bond that spans lifetimes) which small things should not be able to change. It was culturally insightful stuff, and better than reality TV: better even than pornography!

It didn’t end well though. I filed the case and we had a couple of hearings. The wife showed up with half of my client’s family supporting her. They didn’t say anything: just stood behind her and glared at my client through the hearing. As far as they were concerned, what went on between husband, wife and brother-in-law was private, whereas washing dirty linen in public humiliated the whole family. They were quite ready to produce six witnesses to say that the wife never visited the guy when the husband was at work. Six months later, he stopped coming. Eventually somebody told the court he had committed suicide.

* * * * *

The divorce practice monkey circus had to end sometime. For me, Sharmila was the last one. I guess either the disgust or the self-loathing finally got to me. Sharmila was one of those irresistible self-possessed girls the hotel industry loves to employ. She was beautiful in a characteristically Bong way. She had the curves to launch a thousand Khajuraho temples and her light chocolate skin was clear and smooth as soft clay. She didn’t mince words either. Her husband was a nice guy, no question, but he was a crashing bore. She had been married seven years and she knew exactly what her life would add up to if she didn’t get out right now. Her parents couldn’t comprehend her problem. Her mother-in-law hung on to her skirt and begged her not to do this. Sharmila characterized herself as a very good daughter-in-law, a reasonably exciting wife and an absolute bitch in bed.

‘I want to experience life completely, Ranjeev’, she told me candidly. ‘I sleep with who I like, when I like, where I like. And I want this life without strings or guilt.’ In time, she asked about my fees, adding that the hotel industry doesn’t pay well but she liked me, etc. I got her the divorce.

Talking of divorce cases, here’s one I couldn’t do because the lady in question wouldn’t let me. I knew Sandy Dutta socially. He was one of those charismatically impish young men with mischief in his eyes, piercings in his earlobes and a big, banging chopper bike in the driveway. His charm was irresistible. I thought his wife Ruma was a complete woman. She was a competent interior designer, a talented landscape photographer, an avid trekker and a nurturing soccer mom. She radiated great inner beauty. We intermittently heard of trouble in their paradise. He drank too much and he was rumoured to be abusive. They fell out eventually and filed fourteen cases against each other. He accused her of infidelity, which no one seemed to believe. The guy he accused wasn’t just a close friend: he was a thorough gentleman trying to help her. Other people who tried to help her also had to bite a legal bullet: Ruma’s brother-in-law got arrested for stealing Sandy’s jeep, even though Sandy had lent it to him. When it came to anger management, Sandy was a full contact litigation client!

Ruma consulted me once but settled for a woman lawyer to represent her. The case dragged on for a decade and then, when enough legal fees had been paid, they settled it out of court. That happens often enough. This ancient land with its 5000-year-old living culture regularly calls for blood: when enough has been spilt, the parties reach a compromise, or one of them dies.

I heard Sandy’s side of the story a decade later when he came by to see me about something else. He said he hadn’t been angry about being cuckolded by his best friend. He was angry because he had been manipulated into a vasectomy before he was cuckolded! He blamed his father-in-law. ‘I admired the Colonel, yaar.’ he thumped the table. ‘We had two kids and the bastard said why are you assaulting my daughter’s hormones with these birth control pills?’ So off I went to Dehra Doon and twenty-four hours later, I was dry as a funeral drum. All I got to show was Rs 500 and a 2-kg tin ofshuddh desi ghee while my buddy got to hump my fertile wife.’

By this time, he had remarried several times. His current wife was a lot younger, and the daughter of a powerful politician. She didn’t think her parents would ever say yes to this much married rake so she ran off to Delhi with him. The girl’s father reported a kidnapping, and an arrest warrant turned up at his door. In turn, he stalled the warrant with a well-aimed bribe and produced his new bride in a local court to prove she had accompanied him willingly. You could say the girl’s parents were pissed off. They bided their time. A year later, they found out he was attending a wedding in their town. This time, his estranged mother-in-law filed a complaint stating that he had molested her! The warrant of arrest landed up at the mandap of the wedding. Fortunately, Sandy’s host could retaliate with some heavy pull so Sandy could slip away. By the time the same warrants reached Delhi, he had his anticipatory bail in hand.

Sandy is what every lawyer will call a dream client. Successful law practice is always about getting yourself a bunch of Sandies! They can be individuals, they can be companies, but for one reason or another, they always need lawyers. Many top-gun lawyers have made their careers riding on the back of just one client. The best character profile of a client is the guy who likes to live on the edge of legality and financial solvency. You get them aplenty. It’s not that they can’t make a profit doing things legally, working the percentages. They just have to run close to the edge. They over-leverage their business till it totters in bad times. They illegally shore up the stock prices of their publicly listed company. They trade in their own company’s shares on the side. They creatively interpret regulations and run a dodgy business model with a respectable external face. When the crap hits the fan—and it always does—they run to the lawyer. Never say no to clients who can’t say no to some crappy get-rich-quick scheme they know will blow up in their faces.

* * * * *

When I look back at my career and recall all the crazy characters I have represented, I ask myself if this is why I became a lawyer. For sure I didn’t become a lawyer just because I thought it was good fun. Not that I mind that it turned out that way. What’s there not to love about having fun being a lawyer? Unfortunately, a lot of it was also not fun; it was incredibly hard work with not enough sleep and no money at all. Of course, most people didn’t have money at the time so who cared? It was a great time to be young, not least because of the tectonic cultural shifts going on. Asha Bhonsle and Robert Plant delivered screaming solos from the same radio station. Dope and dupattas were purchased from the same pavement in Chandni Chowk. Jamawars and jeans were worn together in winter. Meanwhile, urbanization and mass migration were shattering the old joint family social structure. Everyone, even my dad, wore a bell-bottom safari suit. The soft-focus Punjabi wannabe Bong superstar hero—and I mean Rajesh Khanna—was done and dusted: reduced to special appearances and a procession of remakes of Tamil hits. The Angry Young Man was well established, to a point where he was making movies about his own real-life marital infidelities! The politics was deafening, and exciting. Indira Gandhi had kicked India’s tryst with destiny squarely in the belly with the Emergency. After her ouster in 1977 (the year I joined the LLB programme at Delhi University), a Jurassic idealist (Morarji Desai) ran the country assisted by a motley crew of ideological oddballs, caste jugglers and court jesters. That didn’t last either. The country went to the polls in January 1980 and the old girl was back. That is when cynicism became the new normal in Indian politics. This is the year I became a lawyer.

I don’t recall puffing out my chest because I had completed my law degree. Everyone remembered that India had recently been screwed over by lawyers. That gallery of eminence included Bengal’s Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray who advised Indira Gandhi to declare the Emergency, President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed who signed the order, ‘kitchen cabinet henchman’ D.P. Dhar who ran a parallel government during the Emergency, newly promoted Chief Justice A.N. Ray who leap-frogged over three of his seniors so that he could write odes to Mrs Gandhi in his judgments, and indeed much of the Supreme Court of India with the notable exception of Justice H.R. Khanna.

Law at the time was a family profession of fathers, children, and cousins, all with uncles who were judges. You always needed a godfather to go to. If you didn’t have a godfather, your faith in the Godfather (who art in heaven) greatly exceeded your common sense. I had a potential godfather, even if it was a long shot. A distant aunt had married Uncle Syal who struggled for thirty years to run an inherited business in terminal decline. When it finally went belly up, he joined the maverick law firm of Duli Chand Singhania.

Uncle Syal was amused that I wanted to be a lawyer. He didn’t think a pretty kid from a snooty school in Rajasthan would survive a brutal contact sport like law practice in India. I wasn’t going to be daunted. He had no job for me but he had good advice. ‘You are not a lawyer till you have learnt to survive in the Tees Hazari courts,’ he told me. ‘This is the only place for you to test your mettle as a man, and as a lawyer. Besides,’ he added for good measure, ‘unless you want to depend on your father for a very long time, this is the only place a young lawyer can make a small living.’

He was right, of course. Throwing me into the deep end was one way of testing my survival spirit. If I didn’t make the cut, I could always tuck my tail in and go home to Dad’s business. As a career launch, it was a huge improvement over becoming a basta vakil(a bag-carrier), carrying files for a hotshot Supreme Court senior for the rest of my life, standing behind him cheering and applauding his brilliant arguments just to get at the sorry crumbs he would throw me when the mood took him. I needed to find someone to work for.

This was a tough one. Every successful trial-court lawyer those days had dozens of juniors. Like the largest and most dominant carnivorous dinosaur with its long powerful tail, the worth of a lawyer was measured mainly in terms of the number of juniors who followed him from court to court. What chance had I to learn anything when so many attention-seeking juniors played groupie with the hotshots? When so many love you, is it the same? What about the competent but less successful lawyers? They had a certain amount of work, it’s true, and besides, youngsters could interact with this class of senior: perhaps learn something. I joined one for a bit—without pay I’ll have you know—and found this wasn’t true. The client hired them because of the personalized service they provided. Their juniors never had the chance to represent the client in court. All the juniors ever did was run ahead of the senior as he went from court to court to tell the judge that the big boss was arriving, or was on his legs in another court, or had a runny tummy and wasn’t going to show. It was a dog-shit job for dummies: like playing a plastic trumpet for a fake Mughal emperor in a budget Bollywood costume drama of the 1940s. In six months, I was ready to slash my wrists.

It was about this time that I noticed that over on the other side of Tees Hazari’s Central Hall, there sat a beatific old man who always had this Buddha smile. On a particularly bad day, I stepped up to him and asked him what he thought of the profession. He was encouraging. ‘It’s the profession of kings, my son,’ he declared. ‘To be a lawyer is to be a master of your destiny. You need not bow to any man. If you don’t like a client, there is always another. If a judge doesn’t like you, there is always an appeal to be filed. No one can say anything to you.’ I must have looked encouraged because he continued, ‘Remember also that lawyers command a lot of respect’. ‘Respect?’ I countered, waving my arms at the riff-raff in the Central Hall. ‘Make no mistake, my boy,’ he warned me, ‘in society, it is fear that begets respect. Everyone fears a lawyer.’ He paused reflectively. ‘There is one problem though,’ he shrugged. ‘When you have teeth, you have no chickpeas to eat. By the time you get your hands on the chickpeas, you have no teeth left to eat them with!’

Thirty years later, I recall his prophetic words and chuckle. I didn’t know it then, but my luck was about to change very quickly.

Reviews:

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Reviews by Readers:

Review by Amish Aggarwala on Amazon

About Bullshit Quotient:

In this incisive, unsparing and eye-opening book, the author argues that we Indians have an extra ‘credulity chromosome’ built into our DNA. He believes that we are wired to unquestioningly trust those who exercise authority over us, or those whom we admire, even as they unashamedly scam us. He sets out to dissect the bullshit that surrounds aspects of modern Indian corporate, social, political and legal life. In doing this, he asks and answers basic questions about our society. Who runs the corporate ship and why? Who is making the stock market tick and how? What are health care facilities here to do? Why do governments support patently absurd Intellectual Property Rights even as they give companies carte blanche to rip off customers? How does the judicial system really work? What is the role of sleaze and grease in the determination of public policy?

In the result, Bullshit Quotient offers radical revelations: Indian industrial might is built on the back of a colossal land grab. Criminal cases are business scores being settled through intimidation. Brands and Trademarks are tools to scam consumers. Corruption is necessary so that we may fund our democracy.

If you want to understand who you are and what you are prepared to swallow, Bullshit Quotient is just the meal ticket!

Synopsis of the Book:

The book examines the all-pervasive bullshit in India in four parts. The first section deals with the three basic legs of the bullshit stool: first, what we produce and what we do to produce it; second, what we consume and how we choose what to consume; and third how we value and preserve life, or monetize its value.

Section two examines the bullshit in the corporate soul. Here, we look first at the stock market and then the corporate governance structure through which the Indian companies are run: shareholders, Board of Directors, Auditors and Bankers.

Section three reviews four snapshots of Indian legal life: first, the inability of the law to defend our privacy; second, how our justice machine naturally favours the law breaker; third the subversion of criminal law to settle commercial disputes; and four the corporatization of the legal system.

Section four brings us at last to politics as seen through four peep holes: first, a short history of political fixing; second the ‘system’ in political payoffs, third the real motives of legislators and regulators; and finally, the cultural dimension to our contempt for our laws.

Section 5 closes the historical, cultural and philosophical loops on bullshit in Bharat. Here, we review our history in order to encourage Indian elites to address the alienation in our post-colonial souls. Next we open the buttons of the Indian mind and interpret our ‘morality’. Finally, we put our living experience in a historical context, drawing conclusions on where we are headed as a society and as a nation.

Excerpts from Bullshit Quotient:

On the basics of Bullshit and Indian Holy Cows

“Absurdly, in our cultural fabric, spotting the little lie is a skill called wisdom; spotting the big one is a sin called cynicism. Between the two is your average Indian yo-yoing like a soap-opera hero between arranged and love marriage.”

“The bullshit is woven most intimately into the corporate fabric. What is the logic to the stock market where prices vary by the minute? Who really captains the corporate ship? What are the real objectives of a corporation? What is this nexus between politics and industry? As we ponder these questions, we stumble upon a world that has been subject to truly incredible spin.”

On Land Grabs by Corporate Empires

“Indian urban elite, who really are people like us, have long sustained the idea that the short answer to life’s existential questions is ‘development’. We have successfully sold the proposition that development must necessarily be defined as swanky houses, fancy cars, nifty gizmos, high speed highways, glitzy hotels and self-indulgent buffet spreads.”

“Since some poor sod owns this land, we have to wrench it out of his hands. To do so we make a convenient law so that the courts will let us do it. In thus doing we reduce this poor guy to a very poor very desperate jhuggi dweller. If he accepts his fate, we give him a job cleaning our potties and despise him for his backwardness. If he does not accept it and retaliates, we call him a terrorist and slaughter him.”

On Branding Frauds, IPR and Manipulative Marketing

“Of all the bibulous ballyhoo that emerges from the loquacious lips of corporate kookaburras, the weirdest is the idea that the business of a company is delivery of value to its customers.”

“Business is about making money and if you are in business, you are only as good as the money you make. To make money, you have to increase the perceived value of what you sell so that your profit can increase. Perceived value is increased through branding. Branding is the art of making customers want to buy things that are not worth what they are sold.”

“Most nations have created draconian laws to protect the brand rights of companies through Trademarks and other IPR. Most nations have not created any laws to prevent companies from selling products at higher than intrinsic value to their customers.”

On the Healthcare Hoax

“The corporate beast will cut your belly out to increase its IRR. Truly, healthcare has no holy cows.”

“Law generally allows parties to prices everything – an individual’s time, life, body parts, death and even sexual organ use – and then adjudicates and compensates those who have been denied this use. When human life itself is commoditized, what objection can there be to a profit-centric healthcare system?”

“As a society, we are now turning social Darwinists with great commitment. In this society, healthcare companies are running amuck and patients have become revenue-generating lambs for the slaughter”.

On Stock Markets and Small Investors

“Everyone and his pet monkey know that the road to El Dorado goes past the stock-broker’s office. Everyone hopes to invest a crappy buck, have a dream-run and come out a billionaire on the other side of it. All this is hogwash. The stock market is simply a scam waiting to happen.”

“The stock market is not a free trader haven: someone is running it… For you, it is a gamble at best but for the guy who is making the market, you are the sucker who is going to get gang-banged for betting against him”.

On Small Shareholders

“The thing with gambling is that it can wipe you out. The government knows it too, which is why gambling is illegal in much of India. …Yet, this same state is delighted to have you lose your shirt in the stock market. You have to ask yourself if this is because the people who make the market also make the government.”

“Either ways, small shareholders do not know what is going on, have no means to find out what is going on and cannot do anything about it if the wrong things are going on. If that is not perfect powerlessness, what is?”

On Independent Directors

“Independent directors don’t know anything and can’t do anything if they did know something. In truth, independent directors are wall flowers, perching uneasily on tenuous board seats, good to topple any time the promoter chooses. They can’t protect themselves leave alone the small shareholder.”

“Company boards are the corporate equivalent of Hindu eating habits. Eating to the majority of Indians is a very sacred process, replete with dietary restrictions that apply once, twice or every day of the week… Culturally and psychologically, I don’t see us putting together regulation that will make independent directors the force of moral authority and investor protection any time soon.”

On Auditors

“Every spy thriller has its fall-guy and every full contact sport its bum-of-the-month. In the Great Satyam Scam, the fall guy was the auditor. … Out there in the peripheries of reason where there are only TV talk-show hosts trying to shout up ratings, auditors won the victimization game hands down.”

“It is not an auditor’s job to try to accurately report the facts about the company. He does not understand the company or its business, does not understand the environment in which the company operates and does not understand what is going on in it. His job is to look at books and create more papers. Auditing is about reconciling paper trails, not truths! It’s about fighting terrorism by seeing a movie about it.”

“Many accounting frauds are inevitable because Indian businesses make political pay offs which can’t be reflected in the books of accounts. This is what oils our political and bureaucratic machine.”

On Bankers

“Bankers, who we think are quasi-public officers protecting the wider public interest, may well be the first ones to rip off the companies on whose board their nominees sit if they have half a chance of doing it.”

“Bankers don’t get on to boards to protect public shareholders. They get there to sell products, and protect their own money. If they are able to cross sell, they don’t care a swan’s hind what happens to the small shareholder. And if they do get that kind of business, they aren’t going to piss off the promoter and give it all up just to protect someone as marginal as a small shareholder”.

On Confidentiality in India

“The Government of India seems to operate on the basis that evidence of a possible crime entitles it to call a press conference and expose its citizens in all their fallibilities.”

“Indian culture does not give great primacy to the individual, seeing him only as part of a set of social ties and obligations. This culture also requires him to prioritize his social relationships over his confidentiality obligations. But worst of all, the Government of India has no respect for the privacy of the individual, or of the confidentiality of his or her information in their hands. When the king has no regard for the things you value, how would you rate your chances?”

On India’s Buffalo Jurisprudence

“When it comes to legal contracts, we seem to believe that because we wrote something officious and formal, it is something more than the triumph of hope over experience. Not so. When I was a young lawyer in the trial courts back in the 1980s, my first lesson was this pearl from my senior: ‘Contracts are only made to be broken and a broken contract is only a bill to be paid to a lawyer.’

“Everyone and everyone knows that the legal system in India, if system it is, does not work. Sure, if you are very wealthy, very controversial, very political, a celebrity, a victim of a cause dear to the video and print media or the judiciary, or just a really sordid criminal, the system works just fine. But if you are an ordinary Indian with a great deal of moral outrage and not so much money to fund the anger, you are drifting without a paddle on poop creek. You will drift for twenty years or more before someone provides you a half ass solution you are by then too old to digest.

“In this environment, everybody understands that he who wields the stick owns the buffalo. Companies are not the village idiots in our country. …So the next time a company tries to sell you a probity tale, or tells you that if they sign something, they will honour it, do take the time and subject them to a jeering derisive laugh before you spin on the heel of one foot and walk out the door.”

On false Criminal Cases

“In the land of Buddha, a criminal case is nothing but a business tactic taken to the next level, a handcuff is only strategy well played by your enemies and going to jail is only good legal advice you failed to get, or heed.”

On the corporatization of the legal system

“We have seen the political class go from being lionized as liberators from foreign enslavers to being reviled as despicable rogues in two decades. In this time, we have also seen bureaucrats go from being powerful patriarchs to paralyzed possums. We have seen businessmen go from being crooked weasels to admirable entrepreneurs.”

“Of all the platitudes that it is your privilege to dislike, the platitude you could do well to dislike the most is the idea that this country will never change.”

“I recall setting up my independent practice for the price of half a Yezdi motorcycle in 1989; today, you need the price of a Lamborghini Gallardo. As a result, the client–attorney relationship has become depersonalized and transactional.”

On Political Sleaze

“Companies are freebooters engaged in a game of winner-takes- all, or at least as much as they can. The only rules you follow are the rules you can’t afford to ignore. Like freebooters, winning is sometimes impossible without sleaze. At other times, sleaze is the only business!”

“The age of god-men has passed, not least because the age of moral righteousness has passed. We now live in an age where money is sexy and greed is good. … It is not necessary any longer to assume holy garb to play with dirty money.”

“Business continues to be heavily dependent on government. Relations with government depend on one’s ability to find the right fixer mix. … Net, net, sleaze is the grease that lubricates the world of business”.

On Corruption and the Democracy Machine

“Just as one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, one man’s bribe is another man’s legitimate revenue stream! Given that the Indian economic system runs on a very uniquely Indian parallel economy, this tendency amongst our urban elite to condemn ourselves without evaluation – to see ourselves as corrupt beyond redemption – is at best a distorted view of the reality. … The other side of the moral rhetoric and the hyperbolic hypocrisy, this parallel economy is the mantra that makes the Indian world – corporate and otherwise – tick over smoothly.”

“The dynamic interplay between companies and politicians benefits both, and is necessary to the continuance of our democracy. Calling such processes scams misses their necessity. … If we want them not to be crooked, we need to create new rules of business and till that day dawns, this crookedness is good for all of us”.

On Complying with the Law

“What makes India extraordinarily interesting is the wide diversity of economic models that coexist in our society. The reality of the life in Gurgaon is not the reality of life in Ballia in east Uttar Pradesh. India has one set of laws, more or less, but there are many India’s, some medieval, some agrarian and rural and a few very globalized and modern. Laws made to service one constituency seem to have no relevance to the concerns of the other.”

“At any given time, there are two laws in operation in India: which one do you comply with? We have a law on the statute book which says don’t corrupt the politician. We also have a law applied on the street which says that if you want a licence, you have to pay the politician. …let’s just say we prefer to comply with the laws on the street rather than the ones on the statute book.”

On the cultural dimension to our contempt for the law

“The good thing about the British Raj was that it gave us British liberal institutions, British law and the English language – stuff that now allows us to try and integrate with the world, perhaps even be amidst the leading runners. The bad thing about the British Raj was that it gave us British liberal institutions, British law and British law written in the English language which allows our elite to nurse a very British contempt of indigenous culture and mind set.”

“We are a society in transition and at some point, the law will come closer to our culture, the culture will come closer to our law and both will come closer to where we need to be in order to bring the greatest good of the greatest number of people. Till that day comes, we can revel in our existential angst and cherry pick from our legal menu.”

“Culturally, India is a multi-tribal society with strong group loyalties which dictates how the individual may behave. Historically, we have had 800 year of colonialism which has created laws that are in conflict with indigenous culture. Politically, we are intensely aware that the war for the control of resources which compels the aggressive pursuit of self-interest. Psychologically, we are constantly conflicted between tribal, cultural and political loyalties all of which are in conflict with our legal regime. As we progress towards a more modern society, we will muddle through these conflicts”.

On the contempt our elites have for India and Indians

“It seems India bashing is like your average airhostess: she can touch you but you can’t touch back!”

“We urban Indian elites are utterly unique in our inexhaustible ability to bitch constantly and about our own society even as we sit at the top of the food chain and exploit it to the hilt.”

On the framework of the Indian mind

“Why should the beggar at the traffic light not grab the gold chain around your neck the first chance he gets? Would it be because Indian policemen carry guns and are crack shots? Is it because our criminal law administration is highly efficient and will inevitably catch him? The fact is that the beggar does not identify your unjust enrichment as the cause of his deprivation.”

“Once we understand the key drives of our life, we see that aspects of our behaviour that we may not approve of have a completely rational basis.”

On India’s future

Change inflicts pain; this is axiomatic. When the Cultural Revolution hit China, millions of ‘intellectuals’ were sent to villages for re-education and slowly starved to death. Parents were paraded in streets in dunce caps, subject to abuse by their own minor children and then ritually slaughtered on the high street in a great spectacle. Monasteries were burnt to the ground, religious institutions were destroyed. We have changed without experiencing significant social cost, without losing our social or family structure and we still have the same political structure as we did in 1947. We have never experienced an economic collapse and we have never had the financial system spontaneously combust as the Russians did after Mikhail Gorbachov. My dad still spends the money he saved in 1947.”

“For a third-rate country of fourth-rate people run badly by a bunch of jokers, we have had a remarkably smooth passage!”

“I can see change everywhere and I ask myself this: Now that Gurgaon’s summer is here, can Jhumri Talaiya’s spring be far behind?”

Reviews:

Print Media: Review in Hindustan Times Review in Economic Times Review in Post Noon, Hyderabad Extract of the Book published in Men’s World Review in Asian Age Review in Business World Review in Small Medium Entrepreneur Magazine Review in Business Standard Review in Money Life magazine Review in Inc. magazine Electronic Media: Review in BusinessWorld Online Sonia Jaspal’s Risk Board Review by Yatin Gupta IBN Live Chat on October 15th, 2012 Reader Review in Flipkart-1 Reader Review in Flipkart-2 Review in Goodreads.com by author Manjul Bajaj Reader Review in Flipkart-3 Review by Sanjeev Kotnala at Sukekha.com Review by Ashok B Heryani at Goodreads.com Review by Abhishek Singh at Goodreads.com

Bullshit Quotient – Sample Chapter

14. Corruption and the Democracy Machine
If corruption is payment for services or materials that is not legally permissible or due, the popular view would hold that the Indian corporate world is famously corrupt. It’s not just a matter of kickbacks, rake offs, bribery or quid pro quos. It’s the whole attitude of muscling others out of the way, with no thought to the means employed to do so. This view argues that the corporate world simply has no sense of equal opportunity, equal access to facilities or equal protection of the laws. Businessmen don’t like to stand in lines, await their turn or give the next man his due. What businessmen can’t get as of right or influence, they use cash to buy. In this view, if corruption is quite the word to use, business practices in India are defined by the corruption that lubricates them.
There is another viewpoint too. In this second viewpoint, our democracy is the procedure by which gang-lords, hoods, crooks and thieves propel themselves from the margins of society right into the legislature, thus acquiring the power to make and implement laws. They also acquire the power to bully the bureaucracy, forcing the executive to do their bidding on pain of transfer. More recently, their powers of transfer have expanded in places like Uttar Pradesh to include the mercy killings of petty bureaucrats who have been caught doing what their political masters have demanded of them. It goes without saying that these politicians use their extensive powers to extort money, selling India by the kilogram so to speak. In this view, they terrorize the Indian corporate world, paralyzing business till it belches out dough enough to satiate the blackmailer, for the time that it does. Then the extortion starts again.
If you look at the naked reality, no one need justify any of this, or from either standpoint. Everyone and their illegitimate cousins thrice removed agree that the political classes and all its constituents have their noses in the flour bin. Everybody but everybody also agrees that business is the other party to this transaction. By what intellectual construct can we claim that one party to a bribe is corrupt while the other is not? Regardless of who is the initiator of this activity, and who the opportunist responder, we will do well to agree that it must at some level work for everyone. The enduring stability of the system is the best evidence that it has not been in most people’s interest to change it. Both viewpoints are sapia images of the same Technicolour reality!
So what makes the world of corruption – if we can call it that – go around? We could get into details and discuss the size of corporate tax evasion, taking up issues like the benefits of not asking for an invoice. Or we could discuss the extent of the black market economy, talking about the out of turn gas cylinders you can get if you wish. Or we could talk about the policy changes, or licences, you can buy for a price. There is a whole world of cash and carry out there – if you will pardon the facetious reference – and everyone knows everything there is to know about it. So instead of sitting around bad mouthing politicians or business for what they do, or are accused of doing, let us instead ask ourselves: ‘Why?’ Why do we have this system that we do? As it turns out, there is perfect logic to all this which is why it must be the way it is and no other way.
Just as one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, one man’s bribe is another man’s legitimate revenue stream! Given that the Indian economic system runs on a very uniquely Indian parallel economy, this tendency amongst our ruling elites to condemn ourselves without evaluation – to see ourselves as corrupt beyond redemption – is at best a distorted view of the reality. It does not strike us that our parallel economy is an entirely different way to run a country. The other side of the moral rhetoric and the hyperbolic hypocrisy, this parallel economy is the mantra that makes the desi world, corporate and otherwise, tick over smoothly.

I’m serious. Let’s go back to the year 2011 when we achieved a new milestone in national hysteria. The provocation was yet another routine parallel economy caper that we grandiloquently named the ‘2G scam’. It was the same kind of caper that found former Telecom minister Sukh Ram with 2.45 Crores of cash in a trunk under his bed in 1996. At the turn of the 21stcentury, this was no big deal: everyone understood how telecom licence terms – indeed most all tender terms in most all government contracts – were manipulated to achieve certain pre-determined results. Law reports of judgments of High Courts across the country were and remain littered with the debris of manipulated tender terms that went just a bit too far in their blatant favouritism, forcing judges to interfere. It was illegal then as it is illegal now but no one claimed in 20th century India that it was anything but business as usual. Yet, in 2011, similar facts led to a feeding frenzy. The media first reported a Rs 22,000 Crores scam. By mid-February 2011, the figure had already crossed Rs 50,000 Crores! Where did these numbers come from?
As far as I can tell, all this was predicated on completely absurd thinking. It was argued that if the telecom minister had not decided to sell Spectrum at depressed prices on an arbitrary first come first served basis, the national exchequer would have made a lot of money. Sure, that’s true. If you don’t subsidize anyone, the exchequer will always have a lot more money. India subsidizes fertilizer for farmers who want to grow more food, food for the poorest of the poor who haven’t enough to eat and diesel for the richest of the rich who own fuel guzzling SUVs. All of these are most definitely ‘losses’ to the exchequer, but are they scams? I think there is way too much muddle-headedness here because we are dealing with two entirely independent issues. First, there is this question of the price of Spectrum: should we sell it cheap to corporations? Second, there is this business of paying a minister to get a telecom licence. Perhaps we can ask if we should favour corporations that fund political parties over those that don’t, or don’t know how to?

To answer the first question, I don’t think those who paid sixteen rupees a minute for mobile services in 1996 would have called lower 2G pricing a scam. Recall that fifteen years back, competitors bid up licence fees to some fantastic figures and then found that at those prices, the user base simply couldn’t support the industry. The government then took the sagacious decision to ignore the hysterical protests of the exchequer fixated lunatic fringe and err on the side of the larger national interest. The licence fees became a revenue share and the rest, to mount a very tedious cliché, is history. There were two lessons in that story. First, if you promote an industry by giving it sops in the short run, it pays you back with a lot more revenue in the long run. Second, if you insist on maximizing revenue in the short run, you get a bankrupt business, not a revenue windfall. All this is common knowledge, common to everyone but the media it seems!
I will give you another example of dubious dealing for good causes. In the beginning, GMS operators monopolized mobility because that is what their licences said. At the time, basic licences meant wires. Somewhere down the line, along came Wireless-local-loop and before you could say Praveen Mahajan, every basic operator and his uncle was offering full mobility. I am sure you were gladdened by the fact that the introduction of mobility by basic operators led to cuts in mobile tariffs. Having said that, did you ask the name of the politician out of the goodwill of whose heart this shifting of the mobile goal post came? Did you even care, because I am sure Sunil Mittal did?
So when we speak of corruption we need first of all to get it into an appropriate context. If a decision is good, the fact that some short sighted politician needed to be paid to take that decision does not take anything away from the quality of that policy decision. At the same time, given the dough under Sukhram’s bed, because a decision is sagacious and timely, it does not mean that some political prick didn’t have to be paid to take it. Here’s the thing: as you evaluate what’s going down, you have to draw a distinction between the decision and the collateral motives of the decision maker. There are mounds of literature to show that in many developed countries – and the US is a very good example – the economy grew quickly and infrastructure got built up at speed because someone was going to make an awful lot of money out of it, and someone got paid to facilitate the process. India has a flourishing parallel economy, but we don’t necessarily run the country badly only because of corruption.
Seen in this context, the high pitched scam fixated protests of opposition politicians don’t fill my heart with nationalistic zeal. I don’t like the idea that opposition parties will jump on to any bandwagon to make their point, even a crank like Baba Ramdev. I like it even less that political parties forget the compulsions that drive the behaviour. Politicians like to trade charges because they live from election to election and need that voting adrenalin to bring citizens to polling stations. Ironically, roles get reversed when opposition politicians become incumbents. It’s a bit of a charade — like wrestling on TV — but the politicians are the last people you’d want to blame for it because public memory is never much longer than six months. We create our own monster-of-the-month, and notwithstanding our protests, we really like our monsters!
This brings us directly to the second question we asked: should we preferably give telecom licences to companies that make political payments over those that don’t, or don’t know how to? My own view is that given the system we have established and nurtured over 60 years, I don’t see how else we are going to do it. The political process is heartless in its expectations and those who have the courage to step up to its demands deal with some terrifying home truths. Democracy is about elections and this means big money, money that is not earned in the usual way.
How is the democracy machine organized in India? First, we find that democracy’s biggest pillar, political parties, are not organized along democratic lines. Most are run as family concerns, others are oligarchies or feudatories. They don’t hold regular elections or otherwise comply with significant features of their own constitutions. There is no such thing as internal democracy within Indian political parties. In this opaque political world, who controls the purse strings is quite the bank breaking question. How election funding is managed is an even bigger question. As is true of many features of our unique parallel economy, law and practice are at great divergence. Political parties are required to maintain lists of all persons who donate more than Rs 20,000 to it and tax exemptions are given to the donators too. However, rarely is the money put into any account that is subject to any due process. No one quite knows what went in and what went out. There are several reasons for this.
First, elections are won on caste combinations and that requires grass root leaders to be purchased for cash. Much of the money that gets thrown at the elective process is chucked not at purchasing TV time or running print media campaigns, but at bribing local level opinion makers i.e. buying votes. This is not something you can do for cheque because those who receive the money neither want to be seen to receive them nor can justify why it was received. Before I part company with this point, I’d like to ask why you think that throwing money at TV advertising in America – i.e enriching the owner of a TV channel – is okay but throwing money at the sarpanch of the next village is not okay.
Second, we live in an era of coalition politics. Since the days of Shibu Soren’s support for the Narasimha Rao government in 1993, it has been quite clear that coalition partner support in Parliament is purchased for cash, not political beliefs. The recent 2G scam is nothing if it’s not a case of cash for political support. Even Dr Manmohan Singh did not deny that coalition compulsions kept him from protesting telecom minister Raja’s actions. In effect, the ruling party was saying to the DMK: ‘Please support our government and we will give you a fruity portfolio you can squeeze all the juice you want from’.

Third there is this asinine cap on electoral expenditure. If you are seeking election to a state legislature, at the time of writing in early 2012, you are not permitted to spend more than Rs 16 lakh. You are of course aware that each of the SUV’s you need to run during campaigning costs between Rs. 18 and 25 lakhs to buy! To win an election, you must have at least 250 workers. You would also need at least 50 MUVs to be able to move around your constituency. Three meals for 250 workers at Rs. 100 per day is Rs 25000 per day of campaigning. Rentals for 50 MUV’s at Rs. 1500 per day per MUV are Rs 75000 a day. For the month of campaigning, at a burn rate of Rs. One lakh a day, you are running out Rs 30 lakhs only on food and logistics for the campaigners. Now you can add the lakhs you spend on posters, gala events to pump up your campaigners, field offices in your constituency, communication costs including 250 mobile phones for your campaigners, the cost of getting in one or more star campaigners, gifts for your supporters, and whatever else besides. Who can possibly run even an ultra low budget bare bones skeleton campaign in less than a Crores of rupees?
Desi reluctance to fill government coffers for no visible benefit is a fourth piece of this puzzle. If you receive revenue streams by cheque, you have to pay tax on it. Cheque payments mean that every participant ends up with a third less than he or she would if it was all cash. This is true at every level of the political process. If you want to rent a car, there is service tax to pay and besides the income in the hands of the taxi owner is taxable. If you want to print a poster, there is sales tax to pay. The election machine in India works on the basis of truckloads of cash. As a politician, or a service provider to the electoral process, what will you get for paying all these taxes? While you are at it, please also answer this question: in how many societies that you know do people happily pay taxes with little expectation of effective responsible governance or security leave alone the funding of the electoral process in return?

This is probably a good time for me to pause and make my perspective clear. I am not for a moment suggesting that you can’t fix the corruption ‘problem’ at a micro level by catching this or that babu, filing charge sheets against this or that cattle-fodder stealing politician or chopping this or that corporate neck. I am arguing that you cannot solve the systemic problem – the institutionalized behavioural pattern – unless you attack it at its roots. So far, we have shown zero-appetite to appreciate the root of the problem, leave alone address it.
The heart of the Indian corruption ‘problem’ is our inability to institutionalize the funding of the political machine through the cheque and banking system. If you want to stand for election, the government is not going to allocate a budget for you. How then is a politician to fund his election? In the old licence permit days, the money was everywhere. Every licence, every permit, every approval, every gate pass and every official nod had a price. It was the purest form of democracy tax and it was fairly spread and universally applicable. If you want to see it in terms of verticals, it came down to three major revenue streams.
First you have the low intensity process-based activities. These include largely sovereign processes that generate low but reliable cash revenue streams: customs duties, sales tax, excise, income tax, industrial licences, construction permissions, customs registrations, et al. Such sources include grant of government jobs, routine repair and maintenance expenses of administration and renewals of approvals. The problem with a process-based graft is that a lot of the cash generated leaks as it travels up the food chain: everyone gets a bite of the burger. There are many reasons for this. When we know that our masters have their hands in the till, we feel entitled to wash our hands in the beatific waters of the flowing river. That however is not the main plot. The truth is that most low to medium level civil servants, especially those who sit in lucrative departments have purchased their jobs. They paid to have a lifelong revenue stream, and by Ganga, they want their upside.
Much of this is of course very small ticket stuff. The real fun and games begin with ‘seats’ that generate large revenues, like octroi posts at state borders. Since collections run to millions of rupees a week, these postings are also sold for cash. An official who wants to make money goes to the minister and says, ‘I will give you half a million rupees to keep this post for a year’. If you think about it, the job of collecting bribes is being contracted out for a price to a civil servant. It works for everyone. The official makes money, the politician doesn’t have to keep tabs on actual revenue streams and the ‘public’ gets the service they want at a standardized price. It’s no different from auctioning a parking lot in a city high street. The problem unfortunately is the inefficiency of the collection: we can call it transmission losses as the State Electricity boards do!
This is true even of the second major revenue stream that generates political funding: Government run pseudo corporations, like State Electricity Boards and Tourism Development Corporations. Last summer I was in Doda district, half way up between Jammu and Kashmir. The 6 bedroom tourist bungalow had 4 full time cooks, of which three were more or less permanently on leave because there wasn’t the work to justify them sitting around. The fourth was on call but could not cook. When I asked him why, he said that cooking skills were not the criterion by which he got his job! Naturally, none of these JKTDC employees had the slightest interest in work.
The economics of the place was another joke. Every time I ordered a plate of chicken for a meal, the staff went off and slaughtered two whole chickens and served me a quarter of one. Since I only paid for a plate of chicken and the rest was eaten by staff on duty as was their right, the tourist bungalow never made any money. So a great many people pay tax so that the Government can establish a tourist bungalow that loses money because the people who run it purchased their jobs! There is a method to the madness though: the politician gets to fight his election, the tourists do go to Doda district and a lot of families of JKTDC employees get to eat every evening.
Ergo, a department that generates political funds will be populated by people who are recovering the money they spent to first get the job and then the post. It’s a leaky way to go and not one by which a high-end politician determined to make a fast buck is going to hit the jackpot. Such an individual needs a high yield alternative. That comes from a high intensity event based fund source. The event based political revenue stream – the third leg of our grease-ball stool – is the one that has the most dramatic impact in print media! This is by far the best way to generate large political funding and for two reasons. First, it is efficient: it doesn’t take a leaky machinery to do it. A few people are involved, the parties negotiate more or less directly and the deal can be done in a simple format. Secondly, the receiver controls the largesse he has to give in return. There is a certainty of process, a direct give and take that both parties find easy to trust. This is the single window clearance that makes China so attractive to westerners!
This brings us to the heart of the problem for the emerging India. Our licence-quota-permit system served its purpose for the best part of 50 years. Then we had to spoil it all by deregulating. The economy is getting deregulated and the system is becoming more transparent all the time. We are cutting down on licences, permissions, approvals and government intervention in private affairs generally. Inevitably, political resources have disappeared wherever deregulation has occurred. This means that areas of opportunity for politicians keep shrinking. Entire Government ministries have now become poor political resource generators. So while on the one hand, departmental resource generation is squeezed, on the other hand, the role of public sector companies in the economy is also declining. What you have left are two residual kinds of fund sources.

It is in the nature of sovereignty that some things are difficult to privatize: income tax, customs, sales tax. These are and will in the near future continue to generate political revenues. As for the other source, the best event based opportunities still come from what survives of the licence permit Raj — ministries where the biggest licences are handed out – and that means infrastructure projects of any kind, especially power and — what else — telecom. In recent years, such events have also attracted the greatest media exposure. You bang harder for your bucks but that brings out the vultures.
What you get at the end of the day is national hypocrisy. Unless we change the rules and address electoral funding in a way that is relevant to the reality on the ground, people at the top would continue to perpetuate the system while mouthing empty platitudes on TV and breast beating about the decline and fall of Indian morality or whatever other mindless self-righteous rhetoric comes to lip. We have here a stable system that works. If you want to change it, you need to come up with a better one. More significantly, you need to debate this whole question in a pragmatic non-judgmental way because whatever else may be, nobody gives you money for nothing. When a company agrees to fund an election, what is it paying for?
This is the heart of the matter. In a level playing field, companies would struggle to keep at the competitive pace. The whole point of business is to get ahead of the pace and to do that you need to have a grip on the political process. When Sant Singh Chatwal organizes a dinner for Hillary Clinton and thousands of ABCDs buy high priced dinner vouchers, we are quite content to call it a fund raiser. Do all these ABCDs buy these expensive meals because their gourmet taste buds can’t resist the culinary experience? Corporate funding of politicians is a global reality and we have to see it in context. Politicians in the US provide corporations with the conditions necessary to make lots of money, like building a new highway or running a really destructive war with Iraq. It’s the same in India. Politicians in India provide corporations with arbitrary rule changes or changes in tax structures so that they can make a lot of money. It’s just a different system, that is all.
Am I saying that there really is no difference between India and the world’s greatest power? No I am not. There is at least one very real difference. The difference is that one country runs on one set of accounting books while in India we run on two sets of books. Why you may ask should you care? The only guy who doesn’t get a piece of the second set of books is the tax man. That does not mean that the politician in power is not collecting his taxes through alternative channels. It just means it’s not part of the budget that gets to Parliament. Do you really care what gets into the taxman’s net? If you go by track records, I would say not. India has shown little appetite to respect the sentiments of the tax payer, or to reward them. It has shown even less appetite to spend the tax payers’ money wisely.
I am not trying to take away from your right to try and change the system. I am arguing that the language in which you couch your objection is unfairly moralistic and self-righteous. Our objection may well be that we need to bring this parallel economy into the national budget because transparency is good for a democracy. Our objection may well be that transparency is more efficient. Our objection may well be that transparency will mean a more equitable, more just society. That said, our argument can never be that we are a sordid immoral people or that our companies are crooks. At the end of the day, all the moral hoopla is just a question of perspectives and contexts. The question we have to ask is this: what do we need to do to get to the next stage of our historic economic journey?
To answer questions like these, we need to understand that all close up views of current events are deeply flawed. What we really need is the sanity of perspective: the Big History picture. We are not the world’s first emerging economy and we are not the first to experience the trauma of growing up. As we see India’s destiny unfold, we find parallels in all sorts of unlikely places. What are we to make of these parallels?

There are two ways to look at corporate underwriting of the parallel economy depending on who you hate more – politicians or business. If the first is your target, in your perspective, criminals have taken over our government and prey upon their own people. They set up rules that make it impossible for honest commercial life to survive and then extort money to let you live. Seen from this perspective, it becomes easy to recall the manner in which Chinese communists – sponsored by Stalin – took power in the 1930s and reduced their people to penury within a decade. Am I the only one who hears corporate hotshots in India favourably compare China while disparaging India in the same breath? How many people today breast beat about the terrible price that China had to pay to grow out of its feudal culture, suffer the cultural revolution, then jettison every communist ideal — and the financial security that went with it? And may I remind you that nobody accuses Chinese politicians of being transparent or incorruptible.

If, on the other hand, you hate wealthy businessmen even more, you would see India as a country of crony capitalists who promote whichever politicians best dish up rules that serve their purpose best. So you have the argument that Dhirubhai Ambani persuaded politicians to create rules to kill his competition (of which Orkay and Bombay Dyeing are usually most cited). You would then see the 2G scam as Dhirubhai ‘technology’ once again: a group of companies’ subverted administrative due process, jumped the queue and persuaded Raja to allot licences and Spectrum to them to the exclusion of others in the breadline outside. Seen in this perspective, you would see India as the happy hunting ground of a group of robber barons of the kind that dominated the American business world between the civil war and the turn of the century. Commonly known robber barons who acquired vast empires include John Astor, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Joseph Seligman and Cornelius Vanderbilt. The empires they created were and are revered as the engines that drove the American economy at the time. How many people in India today breast- beat about the great crimes on the back of which the American economy was built?
Within the American context, this is what business historian Allen Nevins did in his biography of John D. Rockefeller when he argued that while Rockefeller may have engaged in some unethical business practices, he brought order to the regulatory and industrial chaos of the day. Many would agree that modern day Robber Barons made the United States the foremost economy of the 20th century. Many others would agree that Dhirubhai Ambani made the Indian stock market what it is today. He also taught us project finance.
This takes us back to the heart of the parallel economy problem: what is so terribly immoral about it? The government creates tax rules so that it can collect legitimate taxes, as much and as efficiently as possible. Similarly, the operators of the parallel economy create rules not so that they are followed, but so that it is easy to channel money into the parallel economy. I will give you a small example.
Indian customs disallow the import of any but the smallest radio-control helicopters. There must be logic to this. Theoretically, they can be used to kill politicians if you can find more than a handful of pilots who can keep them in the air for longer than a fraction of a second at a distance greater than 50 yards! Yet India is chocker blocked with these endearing little models. I hear Mr Rahul Gandhi loves to fly his model choppers too. Why have we set up this absurd rule? Let me assure you that the purpose of this rule is not to secure the well-being of people like Mr Rahul Gandhi who always run the risk of being attacked by unmanned aerial vehicles: it is to secure a Rs. 1500 payoff for the customs official who lets such a parcel slip through his fingers. This is what collaterally motivated regulation is all about.
If you understand this, you will see that the issue may well be one of the efficiency of parallel taxation or the wisdom of unregulated tax collection. From the Big History perspective, breast-beating on TV about corruption misses the whole significance of the way we run our country, and the enormous heat we have generated since 2010 in an attempt to change it. The industrialization of America was a historical process and not a morality epic war between good and bad. Just as the Robber Barons were part of a historic process within an economic context, the Indian parallel economy is part of a historic process, and even more significantly, the unearthing of the Indian scams are part of a historic process that could have great long term significance. In this context, defocused debates about vaguely defined moral issued based on unexamined ideological assumptions cannot produce a useful understanding of what is going on in India today.

The Bullshit Quotient: India runs two parallel economies in part because it has failed to legitimize the funding of the electoral process. Politicians rely on three main election funding streams: sovereign functions like tax collection, job auctions in public sector undertakings and big bang sales of licences, quotas and tax holidays. The first two types of activities generate huge funding but remain low yield and quite leaky. The licence-permit-quota Raj was a stable system that has been subverted by deregulations, forcing political players to rely increasingly on big bang one-off funding events such as sales of licences. Politicians need to offer windfall gains to business so that business will underwrite these elections. The dynamic interplay between companies and politicians benefits both, and is necessary to the continuance of our democracy. Calling such processes scams misses their necessity. The media has highlighted the nature of the deal without suggesting any viable alternative to the compulsion that drives it. There is substantial historical evidence to support the view that political skulduggery and business perfidy is good for the economy. In short, companies are crooked, but there is no viable short-term alternative to their being crooked. If we want them not to be crooked, we need to create new rules of business and till that day dawns, this crookedness is good for all of us.

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Winning Legal Wars:

This book is written for business manager. Young lawyers will also profit from the author’s experience.

This book is based on certain fundamental premises (in which the author firmly believes):

• If business managers can understand marketing, sales or production sufficiently well to take informed decisions on these subjects, they can also understand legal wars sufficiently well to take optimal legal decisions as well.
• Effective decision-making in legal matters does not require a technical understanding of the laws. The legal manager only needs to understand the legal ‘terrain’ in generic terms. Business decisions regarding litigation can be taken on the basis of generic first principles.
• This is a handbook of simple rules, rules that have the widest application to practically any area of business that has a legal facet. In that sense, this work is a bridge, a kind of hitchhikers guide to the world of legal strategy and tactics.
• By employing these simple rules, laymen are capable of taking decisions pertaining to corporate strategy, to external contractual relationships with partners, customers and suppliers, to internal relationships with employees and employers, to ‘third party’ relationships such as consumer groups and green activists, to relationships with government including specifically revenue collection agencies, and of course, if it becomes inevitable, to litigation. Each point made is illustrated with case study: the facts, the issues, the strategic options, the course adopted and the result achieved, all of course with the lay man audience in mind.
• Legal strategy is not primarily about fighting court cases. It is true that this book relies extensively on actual court cases to demonstrate the practical application of each of the rules but in-court litigation represents a very small part of legal strategy. Most legal issues are resolved through pro-active action at the level of the Board of Directors, at Shareholders Meetings, in the market, in the corridors of government, through strategic position play and through the tactical conduct of legal strategy.
• Litigation is a business tool, one of a variety of weapons employed by business to survive and grow in the market. There is no need to import into legal decisions, an overriding environment of morality and equity.
• The legal machine tries to enforce the law. It does try to provide justice. In any event, how we define justice depends on what axes we choose to grind.
• All closed circuit loops naturally tend to service themselves and not necessarily the purpose for which they were built. Institutional irrelevance is a fact of contemporary life. Is it a surprise if we are to find that this may be true of the legal world?
• All legal systems suffer from ‘systemic’ problems of delays and inefficiencies. This is a necessary part of any meaningful discussion on legal strategy.
• The adversarial system of justice that we follow in India requires lawyers to not merely protect their own clients but to directly and substantially harm their client’s opponents. Psychological and moral violence is an inherent part of the legal world.

Preface by Lord Paul:

Page under construction…

Synopsis of the Book:

Winning Legal Wars is split into four parts:

• Part I looks at Assessing Litigation Potential and deals with the question whether one is capable of fighting a legal case.
• Part II, it looks at Litigation Preparation and deals with the plans that must be made if one decides to start a litigation.
• Part III looks at the seven golden rules of Litigation Strategy, which lies at the very heart of successful legal warfare.
• Part IV looks at the seven �theatre of action� Litigation Tactics applicable as events unfold.

Selected Excerpts from the book:

Introduction: Winning Legal Wars
Part I – Assessing Litigation Capability
“Whether we are or are not capable of fighting a winnable war with our adversary is a function of two simple facts. First, we must decide whether we are ‘inherently’ capable of fighting a war. A good example would be a man with one leg contemplating if he can win the next national marathon. Second, we must also decide whether we are capable of fighting a war given the nature of the adversary. With reference to the illustration already used, this would be the equivalent of someone of poor athletic ability wondering if the other athletes in the marathon are of such ability that it would be a waste of time to run the distance.”
Conditions Precedent 1: The Balance of Internal Power
“Fighting strength flows from conviction: it is when organizations act cohesively with conviction that victory is gained. It is impossible to fight a war when half of you say ‘we need to fight’ and the other half say, ‘maybe there is another way’.”
Condition Precedent 2: The Governing environment
“The fate of the war will be determined not merely by the internal power of the two warriors but equally it will be determined by the larger forces impacting the theatre of war…the governing environment. …Thus, the aggressor is thwarted by rain; the besieged defender is protected by it.”
Conditions Precedent 3: The Occupation of the Field
“Thus, it is seen that in any complex scenario, it is by no means preordained that one party shall be a natural aggressor and another a natural defender. In many circumstances, both parties have the potential to institute hostilities and occupy the controlling terrain. …To occupy the field is to gain a great advantage, and the effort necessary to neutralize that advantage is substantial.”
Condition Precedent 4: The Leadership
“Without leadership, almost any group of men anywhere is reduced to a confused mass of milling souls who cancel each other’s effort out.”
Condition Precedent 5: Organization and its Management
“Shorn of all rhetoric, the art of litigation is ultimately the art of employing all available resources in the most efficient way, in the widest sense.”
Conclusion: Litigating to win
“When warriors ask themselves if they are going to be fighting a winnable war, they really ask themselves if they can so configure their strategy that the war becomes winnable. Every legal situation throws up multiple strategic options. Some of these options can demonstrably result in victory, some not.”
Part II – Litigation Preparation: the Five Preparations
“Between the decision to fight and the commencement of litigation lies a critical period of preparation, a period when the potential litigant prepares for full-blown conflict. Wars are not started on a whim, they are not fought casually, and they are not won without great effort.”
Rule 1 – Planning amorally
“Wars are not for the squeamish. …They are also difficult to win. They are impossible to win if we also burden ourselves with additional moral considerations which have no relevance to the business of fighting.”
Rule 2 – Planning the defence
“There is no such thing as absolute unconquorability, complete invincibility. Every litigant must … assess its ability to absorb that loss or damage.”
Rule 3 – Planning Defensive Litigation
“Parties contemplating or facing litigation proceed from a natural presumption that all litigation has a finite life with a beginning a middle and an end. This is true only in an obscure theoretical way.”
Rule 4 – Planning Attack Timing
“War gaming teaches us that it is not in the ability to attack alone that victory is gained: it is in attacking with immaculate timing that victory is secured.”
Rule 5 – Planning for Stalemates
“Thus it is seen that there are occasions aplenty when litigation cannot be won. What can be done is to secure clean advantage and thereafter to focus complete attention on perpetuating the stalemate.”
Conclusion: Act Immaculately
“In all that litigants do, and all that they perceive, cold rational planning must be the underlying theme. Fortunes change, life ebbs and flows, but cold rationality must never be forsaken.”
Part III – The Seven Strategies
“Strategy is the means by which the war machine is deployed and victory achieved. As language binds a culture, culture binds society, and society binds a nation, so strategy binds a war machine, bringing relentless power and compelling force to bear on the endeavour.”
Rule 1 – Match magnitude of engagement to resources
“We have seen that litigation, if viewed correctly and in perspective, is not the final resolution of an essential conflict of cultures or philosophies: litigation is a tool to achieve other ends, be they business or personal.”
Rule 2 – Seek Quick Results
“The litigant who rushes into litigation without a clear recognition of the inherently destructive nature of war runs the risk of suffering that destruction. … In the result, every litigation must be short, focused, self-limiting, and decisive.”
Rule 3 – Optimize logistics
“Logistic efficiency is a matter of strategic planning.”
Rule 4 – Avoiding costly annihilations
“Thus, the true goal of war, and litigation for that matter, is subjugation, not death. The best warrior is not he who fights and wins all the time but one who wins all the time without or with very little fighting.”
Rule 5 – Priority of targets
“The secret of a good war strategy is to make continual war expensive and unremunerative for the adversary without ever getting the adversary personally involved in it. The strategy is good when the adversary is aware that there is no business case to go on fighting. A strategy that compels an adversary to fight for its very survival is generally a bad strategy.”
Rule 6 – Factor Force Levels
“Litigation strategy is not a matter of inflexibly attacking when you can and defending when you can’t attack. Indeed, there are occasions when it may well be the opposite.”
Rule 7 – Avoiding Entanglements
“Litigation is a complex web of factors, actions, people and issues. It is very easy for a litigant to get ‘sucked into’ a situation it cannot control, complexities it cannot comprehend. …It must secure that it does not get entangled in a web it cannot extricate itself from, a fight it cannot disengage from, a war it cannot finish.”
Conclusion: The myriad colors of strategic choices
“Litigation strategy is … a passionate worship of an elusive goddess. …The difficulty with strategic rules is that they are never immutable. The secret is to know when a rule is immutable and when it is not. It is to know when to change the pitch.”
Part IV – The Seven Tactics
“After all, litigation strategy is the overall manner in which the stage is set for war and then rolled out. … It is not enough to have the right war strategy: it is also necessary that the correct battle tactics be employed to project the war strategy.”
Rule 1 -The orthodox and the unorthodox
“Orthodox tactics are tried and tested and their very value lies in their proven quality. To dispense with orthodox tactics is to risk all. On the other hand, unorthodox tactics are difficult to predict and therefore difficult to combat. But unorthodox tactics are risky. …Orthodox tactics yield substantial benefit but victory is possible only through the unorthodox.”
Rule 2 – Seize and Control Initiative
“He who controls the initiative controls the war.”
Rule 3 – Control the Enemy’s Response
“Anticipation and pre-emption are necessary if the litigant is not to suffer defeat, but victory is only possible if the litigant can in effect dictate when, how and to what extent the opponent will fight.”
Rule 4 – Exploit the momentum
“One of the hardest lessons that litigants learn at their peril is that it is not in the substance of their case alone that victory is achieved, it is the momentum they are able to generate and in the impact their strong points have on the opponent’s case that victory is achieved.”
Rule 5 – Employ the Blitz
“It does not matter what the absolute forces ranging on either side add up to, what matters is how much resource and legal attack the litigant can throw at a focused narrow point in order to overwhelm the enemy.”
Rule 6 – Be unpredictable
“There is no such thing as rigid strategic configuration in litigation. The ebb and flow of strategy and tactical action flows with the terrain.”
Rule 7 – The rule of deception
“To achieve strategic power, the litigant must so conduct itself that it is not capable of being anticipated and pre-empted by the opposition.”
Conclusion – The paramount rule of war
“Anger and frustration have no role in litigation. The night turns to day but acts that have been done, cannot be undone. …This is the secret of a successful personal and professional life. It is also the secret of good litigation.”

Reviews:

Review in Business World Review in Hindustan Times Review in Hindu Business Line Review in The Sunday Tribune Review in The Economic Times