Category: politics

The Congress Party is a bubble

I think the congress party is a bubble. From what I’ve observed of the party in the last 10-15 years, they have no real ideology other than “loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family”. In other words, they have grown and flourished significantly without having any strong fundamentals. Which means they are in a bubble.

Let’s say you are a congressman and for whatever reason you were pissed off with Rahul Gandhi following his interview with Arnab Goswami on Monday. Now, because the uniting ideology in the party is “devotion to the family”, you cannot come out in criticism of the family or one of its members. If you do, you get hounded by other Congressmen, whose loyalty to the party is chiefly due to loyalty to the family.

Now, imagine a large number of congressmen think thus. If they had a way to communicate to each other about their displeasure with the family, they would come together and raise a no confidence motion against the party leadership. However, the problem is that no Congressman wants to let it be known in the party that he doesn’t like the family, for he can be accused of betrayal and removed from the party. Hence he keeps his thoughts to himself. That he keeps his thoughts to himself means that other congressmen who feel the same way also keep their similar thoughts to themselves, and the general discourse is that all congressmen are loyal to the family.

So why is “the family” is so powerful in the Congress? The answer is that the family is powerful because Congressmen think the family is powerful. A congressman thinks that his career in the party will be furthered if he is seen as being loyal to the family. So irrespective of his opinion, he puts up a facade of being loyal, and that increases the value of being loyal to the family!

A commodity is said to be in a bubble if its price is being driven up solely because other players in the market think that its price is going to be driven up, without the fundamentals being in favour of an increase in prices. You can think of “the family” of the Congress as one such commodity. Congressmen like to praise the family (i.e. go long the commodity) because they think everyone else in the Congress is doing the same, and thus the “price” is going to increase.  You can see the cycle of positive reinforcement that is at play here.

Like all bubbles, the Congress Party bubble is also bound to burst. And like other burst bubbles, this one is likely to end badly for the party – a split in the party cannot be ruled out in the period immediately after the bubble is burst.

The problem with bubbles, however, is that you don’t know when it will burst – anyone who can predict when a bubble can burst would be an extremely rich person. And you don’t want to be shorting a stock thinking the bubble might burst, only for the bubble to continue. And so you continue to dance, for the music is still playing.

Booth level coordinators for AAP

In today’s Economic Times, I was reading this article on the attempts by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to establish roots in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The article mentioned about the party already recruiting booth level coordinators in those two states and thus starting to prepare for the forthcoming elections.

The question, however, is why someone would want to be a booth coordinator for AAP. Before we examine that, let us examine why someone would want to be a booth coordinator for a party – some might see it as a stepping stone – having coordinated a booth, one might find a way into the higher echelons of the party, and might result in an MLA ticket the next time round.

However, in most cases this is rather unrealistic. Given the number of booth coordinators required in each assembly constituency, the promise of at most one of them being elevated to MLA is not enough to motivate them to work. The party needs to find a different way of compensating them.

Cadre based parties do this by paying their members a salary, and booth coordinators are thus paid to do their work. The salary may not be immense, but most cadre-based parties are ideologically driven and it is possible to find party workers who are willing to work as booth coordinators for the given fee.

Less ideological (and perhaps more practical minded) parties use a different method to motivate their booth coordinators – they are promised sweet deals and government contracts in return for their services. Given the size of the government and the discretion of the elected representatives, it is possible to suitably compensate each booth coordinator. For example, the guy who coordinated my booth for the sitting MLA’s party in the last elections also got the contract to desilt and cover the storm water drains on my road!

Coming back, how do you think the AAP will find booth coordinators? While it may be a strongly ideological party, it is still young and is unlikely to have the resources to find enough motivated people to man booths in quantities required to run a national election. Hence the nominally paid cadre route is ruled out. Then, the very ideology of the AAP means that the party is against corruption, and working out sweet deals for its booth coordinators will go against the party ideology, so that is ruled out!

So, the question remains – how will the AAP manage to find the requisite number of booth coordinators?

Dictators and straightening dogs’ tails

There is this story from Hindu mythology I remember reading when I was a kid. I don’t remember the source but I remember the story really well. It basically goes like this.

A man wishes for a servant and gets one. The servant tells the master, “I’ll do anything you ask me to do. But I’ll serve you under one condition. If at any point in time I don’t have work, I’ll eat you up”. Given the amount of work the master has, he thinks this is a pretty good deal, and hires the servant.

The servant turns out to be super efficient. All the tasks the master gives are completed in a jiffy, and the master is hard-pressed to give more tasks, let he be eaten up. Finally the master pleads with the servant, that he has no more work to give, and that he will “free” him, and the servant to spare him.

The servant doesn’t agree. “This is not according to the terms of the contract”, he says, and threatens to eat up the master. Just then, the master sees this dog, with a crooked tail. The master tasks the servant with straightening out the dog’s tail. Legend goes that the servant is trying to straighten a dog’s tail until this day.

So why did I tell this story? Because I saw this tweet from former chess world champion Garry Kasparov, and found it pertinent.

A powerful and efficient dictator is like the servant in the above tale. Once he is done with “getting the trains to run on time”, he uses his power to come after you. And the only way you can prevent him from coming after you then is to give him some nonsensical work like straightening a dog’s tail.

Notice that the servant in the above story does only one job at a time. So once he started trying to straighten the dog’s tail (a task assigned to him so that the master survives), he wasn’t able to do any other task. In other words, he became useless!

So the moral of this story and Kasparov’s analogy is that a dictator, even if he works for you, will do so only for a short period of time.

 

Trying to understand the Telangana situation

Let me state at the outset that this is a dispassionate outsider’s perspective. It’s also rather abstract – I don’t really care about the emotional factor behind the split or the non-split, or how Andhra Pradesh came into being. All that, in my opinion, is secondary.

So the basic issue is this. There is the state of Andhra Pradesh. One part of the state (a minority) thinks it will be better off being a separate state. So for years now they have been clamouring for a separate state. The rest of the state doesn’t want to let them go. And so we have a deadlock.

Let us go back to 2000, when three new states were created in India, breaking up Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. Those three states also had long-standing demands for separation. All those states had seen “movements” to that effect. The emotional factor was high. The key point, however, is that in each of those states, the rest of the state willingly let go of the breakaway part. Each of the three assemblies passed resolutions recommending the breakaway states. So finally when those states were created the process was rather peaceful and amicable.

That is not happening in Andhra. The Rest-of-Andhra is unwilling to let go of Telangana. Politicians across parties think a breakaway Telangana is a bad idea. The Andhra Pradesh assembly is unlikely to pass a resolution recommending the split any time in the near future. Right now the central government is trying to bulldoze the split and we are seeing the chaos that we are. The question is how we can do this better.

What helped the formation of Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh is that their geography is very different from that of their parent states. More importantly, these three states have the kind of geography that makes it hard to govern them. Hilly or forested tracts, with slow transportation and underdeveloped roads meant that administering these areas was costly. Essentially if you did a cost-benefit analysis it made sense to let go of these states – it made the job of the original state government administratively easier.

The problem with the Andhra split is that the capital city Hyderabad lies in smack in the middle of the region that wants to breakaway. People from Rest-of-Andhra have invested heavily in the city, and fear for their investments in case it becomes part of a separate state. It doesn’t help matters that people from Telangana and from the Rest-of-Andhra don’t particularly trust each other. The former claim that the latter have been persecuting them, and the latter fear the same in case the former get their own state. Events over the last few months have only made this trust deficit significantly worse.

What needs to happen is that Telangana needs to assure the Rest-of-Andhra that the people in the latter won’t lose out due to the state split. One way to do this is to sweeten the deal in terms of Hyderabad. One option that had come up would have made Hyderabad a union territory, thus putting it outside the control of Telangana. Another would be for Rest-of-Andhra to be assured of an annual payment based on the state taxes raised from Hyderabad city. This, however, is unlikely to work given the lack of mutual trust.

There is a third option – which is what is being played out now. Telangana acts as a tough guy, and a bully. One who will bully its way into getting its own state. The way this is probably going to work is that by continuously rioting in Hyderabad, it will force businesses to leave the city. As things get worse, the economic value of the city of Hyderabad fall so much that Rest-of-Andhra see no value in holding on to it and vote for the resolution to split the state. Of course, this is not good for anyone since this involves value destruction, but this seems the way things are headed right now.

What might also work (destructive, but not as much as the above) is for Rest-of-Andhra to get a strong message that the state is going to be split sometime in the near future and they have no say in it (this is probably the Central Government’s message currently). Currently, people from Rest-of-Andhra are hopeful that the split won’t happen and are thus holding on to their investments in Hyderabad. As there is more conviction that the state is going to split, they will start slowly withdrawing their investments, so that at  some point in the near future, there will be enough politicians from Rest-of-Andhra that will vote in favour of the split in the state.

Note that not all legislators from Rest-of-Andhra need to support the state split. Telangana contains 119 out of the 294 seats in the Andhra Assembly. Assuming that there is bipartisan support for the split among Telangana MLAs, they need the support of only 29 more legislators to have their way. Of course there is the Anti-Defection Law and all that, but this is some food for thought.

Lastly, I don’t think the current process of the Union Government bulldozing the state split is going to work out in the long term. You don’t want to have neighbouring states that mistrust each other. Yes, Andhra Pradesh is a vast state and might be tough to administer. But no decision on its split should be taken without the resolution by its own assembly.

Modi and Advani

Here’s how I think the BJP should’ve reacted to the fact that LK Advani wasn’t too happy about Narendra Modi being announced as their candidate for Prime Minister in next year’s elections.

Yes, Mr. Advani is still not on board yet. However, we are a democratic party and there was strong demand from an overwhelming majority of our party workers that Mr. Modi’s name be announced as the Prime Ministerial candidate. As in any democratic process, there will be the minority who will not be happy, but we are sure that they (including Mr. Advani) will respect the democratic process and extend their support to Mr. Modi.

 

Governments and agendas

Say what you may about the inefficiencies of the BS Yeddyurappa government in Karnataka, you must accept that the initial days were great. While the miners may have been allowed to prosper, which led to plunder and constant government instability (which led first to the BJP split and then the humiliating loss in these elections), the government did rather well in its first year of operation. Infrastructure (especially in Bangalore city) saw an improvement. I moved out of Bangalore in August 2008 (three months after Yeddy took power) and returned in June 2009, and there was a significant visible change in the city (for the better). Policing and law and order also seemed to improved (in those initial days of the Yeddy government).

It might be early days still, only four months since Siddaramaiah has taken charge, but I don’t see anything in this direction. Bangalore roads are all torn up and travel times have doubled (primarily due to potholes). Law and order seems broken (cases like this one and this one come to mind). The chief minister reportedly feigned illness and backed out of a meeting with industry captains at the last minute (heard this from two independent sources but can’t find a link). Any way, the industry in the state is not happy.

Typically, when a new government takes over, it wants to be seen gathering some “quick wins’. Typically the easiest problems to solve are to fix law and order – all it takes is to decision the police, and it typically improves whenever a new government comes to power. Another quick win is improvement of basic infrastructure – such as asphalting roads or improving water supply. Meeting industry leaders and making global statements also don’t take much effort, but go a long way in getting the support of the industry.

If it is all so easy, and the earlier government did that, why has the current dispensation not implemented any of it? I blame it on the Re. 1 per kg rice scheme. The problem with the current government is that it has a specific agenda – as soon as he came to power, Siddaramaiah announced this cheap rice scheme and promised to implement it in a month or two. This has resulted in two things. Firstly, the statement meant that most of the management bandwidth of the government bureaucracy went in managing and implementing this cheap rice scheme. Since the CM wanted this to be done in a certain number of days, officers probably scrambled to meet the deadline, thus not being able to pay attention to other issues.

More importantly, the government saw this cheap rice scheme as a quick win. The people will be generally happy  with the government if this is implemented, they might have reasoned, thanks to which other potential quick wins (policing, basic infra) took a backseat. I’m not a beneficiary of the Re. 1 per kg rice scheme so I can’t comment objectively but I’m not sure if the recipients of the scheme are happy that the scheme has been implemented or unhappy that other developments have taken a backseat.

The point with the Yeddy government is that it didn’t have a specific agenda – no “global” quick win scheme, thanks to which the government had to push on several fronts to try and score a win. And so they pushed on all fronts where quick wins were possible and managed to get them. (It is another matter, of course, that in the longer run they ran an increasingly unsteady ship and messed things up right royally, because of which they were (rightly) voted out in the next elections).

It is similar to the NDA government of 1999. There were no grand quick win plans, and that gave the government the bandwidth to push on several long-term fronts, including infrastructure projects such as the Golden Quadrilateral and the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, further disinvestment and the new Electricity Acts. UPA1 on the other hand quickly came up with schemes such as the NREGA which served as a good vote-catching quick win (and it probably did its job given the enhanced majority the UPA got in 2009).

Thus, from the point of view of sustainable development and investment in public goods, it is possibly better off to have a government which has no specific idea. If not, the specific ideas might come in the way of other development.

Why Should Anyone Invade Syria?

I don’t understand why the US or the UK or any other country should invade Syria now. Yes, there are gross human rights violations in that country now, and the civil war has been raging for a while now. However, before any foreign country wants to intervene, they need to ask themselves the following questions:

1. what is the objective of the invasion? 

The objective of the US invading Afghanistan in 2002 was to track down Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the WTC attacks of 2001. The then Afghan government (Taliban) was not cooperating with the US’s efforts in locating bin Laden, and sensing that having bin Laden on the loose for too long would be a further threat to America’s national security the US invaded. So far so good.

The objective of the US invading Iraq in 2003-04 was that Saddam Hussein was apparently harbouring “weapons of mass destruction”. The US decided that if any such weapons existed with Iraq, it would harm their national interest and so went ahead and invaded. That no such weapons were found is a different matter.

The question is what would be the objective of the US or the UK or any other invading power in Syria? Do they know what they want? Or is it just that they want to invade simply because they can? I repeat – Syrians might be dying but why is it in the national interest of any other country to intervene?

2. What does the invading country seek to achieve by invading?

This is similar to the previous point, but different. Basically what does an invading power seek to achieve in Syria? Rather, what is the event that needs to happen at which point the invader will decide to call off the invasion and return? In Afghanistan there was one such objective – get rid of bin Laden, get rid of the Taliban, put in a new government, stabilize it and go. Yet it’s taken this long. The objective in Iraq wasn’t as clear, still it’s been an extremely long invasion. What would an invading power’s objective be in Syria? Remove Assad? But what would that achieve?

3. What about the chemical weapons then?

Agreed that both the sides in Syria might possess chemical weapons, but why would the US or Western European countries want to invade because of that? If anyone would want to invade for that particular reason it would be one of Syria’s neighbours – Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, etc – for they are the ones that are likely to be vulnerable to collateral damage. Given that both sides are likely to have chemical weapons it is unlikely that by taking sides in the civil war the chemical weapons could come under control.

Moreover, the nature of the civil war in Syria seems rather uncivil, and I don’t think either party will care about any convention that restricts the use of a particular kind of weaponry. So hoping that one side will give up the use of chemical weapons just because you take their side is futile .

To me, the civil war in Syria is like the Battle of Kishkindha, where Vali faced off Sugriva in a one-on-one combat. There, Rama had a strategic reason to intervene, for he had 1. struck a deal with Sugriva. 2. having no army of his own, he could count on the support of the victor in his campaign against Lanka. As far as any Western nation is concerned, there is no such incentive here. There is no treaty, and it is unlikely that help in this war will lead the victor to be an ally of the invader. The reason I qualified the previous sentence with a “Western” is that it doesn’t apply to Russia. Russia (and formerly USSR) has a pact with al Assad, and they have been long-standing allies. By taking al Assad’s side in this war, Russia knows that they will have a valuable ally in the Middle East in the event of his victory.

None of the Western countries have any such agreements. The only organization which has any sort of alliance with either side in Syria is the al Qaeda, which is supposedly supporting the rebels.

That Western powers such as the US and the UK want to intervene in Syria, and that too on the side of the rebels (in alliance with al Qaeda) shows that these countries are yet to get rid of the cold war mindset. They seem to want to intervene in Syria on one side only because Russia is supporting the other side. In fact, if the US or the UK were to want to invade Syria, the only thing that might make sense is to get in on Assad’s side and take out the Islamist rebels.

What should we do about the falling rupee?

So the more perceptive of you would have realized that the rupee is falling. And fast. At the beginning of the year, fifty four rupees bought a dollar. Now you need over sixty rupees. That’s a fall of over ten percent in half a year.

People argue based on differences in interest rates and interest levels between India and the United States, and India’s current account deficit, that the rupee deserves to depreciate. Some argue that the rupee should actually trade even lower. That is correct. What makes the fall of the rupee worrying, however, is that it has happened so quickly. No theories on trade imbalance or rates imbalance or inflation can account for the fall of ten per cent in half a year.

The issue, of course as everyone knows, is to do with capital flows. While India has run a persistent current account deficit, the continuous inflow of foreign investment into the Indian markets (either direct or indirect) had ensured that the rupee was relatively stable over the years. With India maintaining a high growth rate in the GDP over the noughties, the inflow was persistent. Things aren’t so good now, however.

India’s GDP is slated to increase at a paltry 5% this financial year. The growth story is seemingly over. And that is not all. Things aren’t looking great in other parts of the world also. Due to this concept of margin financing, sometimes when some of your holdings lose value, you are forced to liquidate other holdings in order to comply with “margin requirements” (we will not go into the technical details here). So with markets around the world not doing great, and India’s growth not as spectacular as it used to be, and with the country’s muddled policies (check out how difficult the government has actually made it to invest in India – irrespective of your nationality), investors started exiting. With some investors exiting, asset values dropped and the rupee dropped. Consequently other investors exited. And so forth. It did not help that there was nothing inherent in India’s government policies to hold them here.

So that’s the story so far. Question is what we should do going forward. As I mentioned earlier, there are two levers that can help shore up the rupee – the capital account and the current account. Within the current account there are two components – imports and exports. What normally happens when a currency depreciates is that exports become more competitive and go up further. Imports become costlier and thus reduce. On the current account front, thus, we have what is called as “negative feedback”.

Notice that in the past whenever an economy staged a recovery, it was generally preceded by a devaluation of the local currency. So since our currency is already devalued the stage is set for recovery, right? Unfortunately it’s not so simple. While it is true that our exports are now likely to be more competitive, fact is that Indian industry is not well placed to capitalize on that. Investment bottlenecks, labour laws and bureaucracy means our entrepreneurs haven’t been able to move fast enough to take advantage of the falling rupee and up exports. This can be borne in the fact that the Reserve Bank of India, which normally shies away from controlling exchange rates (as long as they are not too volatile), has issued several public statements on this matter in the recent past, and taken steps to prevent further fall in the currency levels. That the Central Bank has had to step in to protect the currency shows that we are in extraordinary times. The natural corrector to a falling exchange rate (increase in exports) is absent.

Matters are not helped, of course, by the fact that one of our largest imports is an asset – gold. Thing with asset prices is that unlike prices of “normal goods”, the demand for assets increases with price. When asset prices increase, people see “momentum” in the asset and want to get on to the bandwagon. So there goes part of another natural corrector to a falling exchange rate (less competitive imports).

So coming back to where we started off with – what should the Government do? While this is going to be a time-consuming process, what the government needs to do is to ensure that exporters can exploit the falling rupee. Reforms in this direction are not easy of course – since they require significant efforts in removing bureaucracy and making it easier to do business – which means we need significant administrative reform. There is also the small matter of possibly having to reform labour laws (while on the matter of labour laws, check out this paper by Takshashila Scholar Hemal Shah, who presents some easily implementable reforms in the labour law). While these are difficult things to implement, the fact that there is a crisis gives the government an alibi to push ahead with the reforms. PV Narasimha Rao had done that once in 1991. The problem now is that the government may not have political will given that elections are less than a year away. In this context, it would be advantageous to have early elections, for a new government with a fresh mandate might be more prone to taking tough short-term measures.

Currently, the government is trying its best to shore up on the other levers. Gold import is being curbed – except that it will be hard to implement since they will simply get diverted to the black market. The Finance Minister is traveling the world putting up a roadshow to get investments to India. That, however, is akin to putting lipstick on a pig since there is little in India’s fundamentals and current economic scenario to attract foreign investors. Even if some of these measures succeed, they will only lead to temporary respite to the currency. Fact is that for sustainable improvement in currency, tough reforms are mandatory.

The Problem with Smaller States

I’m a fan of smaller states. I think our states are currently way too large and we could do with more states since that could lead to greater administrative efficiency and federalism. So yes, I’m fully in support of the Telangana movement – only because I think AP is too huge and unwieldy a state (42 parliamentary constituencies) to be managed from one place.

I have one concern, however. I was thinking of the case of Karnataka and the possible demand by areas of North Karnataka for a separate state. While I support this demand (Karnataka again I think is too huge and unwieldy to be managed from Bangalore which is in a corner of the state) I was suddenly worried about power supply.

From what I last remember, Karnataka’s biggest source of power is the Raichur Thermal Power Station in Shaktinagar. Assuming that it breaks away from “Mysore” as part of a new “north Karnataka” state, what will happen to the energy security of Mysore (the smaller southern portion)? I guess there might be some agreements and long term power supply contracts put in place, yet the loss of this massive captive power source would significantly hurt Mysore.

My concern is that if the demand for a separate North Karnataka grows, the government of undivided Karnataka would be loathe to invest much in any area that may fall under a part of the state that wants to “break away”. And this could lead to concentration of investment in areas that are close to the seat of power, and further skew the development of different parts of the state. Power supply is just one example that I took here – it could be any other massive government investment – say SEZs or large industrial plants and so forth.

There is another issue with smaller states but I think this is a problem for which a solution has been found and is under implementation. The problem with having too many states is that we will end up with too many inter-state boundaries and thus too many “checkposts”. However, the proposed Goods and Service Tax regime (if/when it were to get implemented) will ensure that India would become a common market and inter-state commerce would become more seamless. Nevertheless it is important to get the GST regime in place before we get too many more new states – for it also means less stakeholders to deal with!

Kabaddi, Jesus Navas, Digvijaya Singh and Modi Bhakts

Writing during the last FIFA World Cup in 2010, I mentioned a concept that I named after the Spanish (and now Manchester City) winger Jesus Navas. It was the strategy of one guy breaking off separately from the rest of his teammates, and ploughing a lonely furrow in a direction different to what his teammates were working on. So when the rest of the Spanish team played tiki taka and relied on a slow build up based on intricate passing through the middle, Jesus would come on and run away on his own down the right flank. It was a useful distraction for the Spanish team to have, for now the opposition could not mass its defences in the centre.

In the same post, I had mentioned that it is similar with Kabaddi. When a team is “defending” all but one person in the team form a chain and try to encircle the attacker. The other guy works alone, and his job is to lure the attacker deep into the territory so that the chain can close in around the attacker. This way, the lone ranger and the team work together, towards a common objective, just like Jesus and the rest of the Spanish team.

Having observed Indian politics for a while now, I realize that the Indian National Congress has successfully adopted this strategy, while the BJP has failed to keep up. Now, the reason you want to use a lone ranger in politics is slightly different, but on the same lines. Sometimes, there can be disagreements within a party on certain issues. For political reasons, the party can officially adopt only one of the two possible paths. Yet, they know that by sticking to this official path, they might lose out on some support. How then can parties tackle this issue of giving out the “dissenting judgment” while still appearing united?

This is where people like Digvijaya Singh come in. Digvijaya is a known loose cannon, and has mastered the art of taking a line different from the mainstream Congress line. In case he turns out to be right, later on the party can claim that he was right all along – and quietly bury the official party line. In other cases, the party can publicly castigate him, and distance itself from his claims. In a way that I can’t fully understand, the Congress has mastered the art of managing the loose cannon, such that they “recognize” his statements when he is right and unceremoniously ditch him otherwise.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), however, hasn’t got its act together. The biggest problem with the BJP is that there is no one loose cannon with whom an agreement can be struck on the lines of what the Congress possibly has with Digvijaya. At different points in time different party leaders espouse views that are out of line with the party’s official line, and this being hard to control, the party gives off an image as being disunited. The matter is made worse by the thousands of online fans of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who like to voice their personal opinion which may not tally with the party line, but whom the party cannot publicly dissociate from.

It is in this particular issue that the BJP significantly lags the Congress when it comes to media management. As a BJP supporter mentioned on twitter yesterday, Digvijaya can say whatever and the Congress can get away with it, but whatever a Modi Bhakt says gets attributed to the BJP. It is this differential handling of fringe elements that leads to significantly worse press for the BJP than for the Congress. The answer lies in appointing an official lunatic whose job it is to make outrageous statements and be prepared to get censured by the party frequently.

Too many fringe elements, all of them shooting off in different directions, weakens the core, and weakens the focus of the attack. One can be managed, and is useful. More is the problem.