NaMo’s Art of Managing India: A Trick Bureaucrats Must Learn

Lately, my otherwise chaotic city of Ahmedabad has started looking really different! I can actually see vehicles standing behind the Stop line and no one is opening the car door at a traffic light to paint the town red by spitting!

I don’t know if everyone across India can relate to this as a miracle but I do, because I have lived in this town for fifty odd years and has never seen things change, till now. And now, suddenly, almost overnight, things are different.

The reason behind this change is surprisingly simple. We have a municipal commissioner and a police commissioner working in tandem, who have decided to stop fearing public ire and come together and take strict action against law-breakers.

Aided by CCTV technology and an innovate idea of e-rickshaws patrolling streets to deliver on-the-spot instant justice, citizens of Ahmedabad are now getting weaned off habits that are as old as the city.

When I see such a transformation, I am always forced to think of Narendra Modi as a pioneer of a unique management style that is worth learning from for all of us, and more so for Indian bureaucrats, as it is a simple idea that has delivered amazing results for India.

If I am to sum up NaMo’s way of dealing with India-management, all he seems to be of this firm belief that all hell never breaks loose.

Till now our political and administrative leaders have mostly worked under the fear of all hell breaking loose. Whenever a tough decision is required to be taken, they have sidestepped to avoid confronting such issues head-on.

The only difference Narendra Modi has brought to the way India was managed is to stop fearing the breaking loose of hell, as he seems to instinctively know that the hell never does break loose.

No one had dared do something as drastic as demonetisation, fearing the hell to break loose.

No one had dared implement GST, fearing the hell to break loose.

No one had dared an open surgical strike against Pakistan, fearing the hell to break loose.

No one had dared to take a clear stand with minority appeasement, fearing the hell to break loose.

No one had dared to pit an out and out Hindu face in the election, fearing the hell to break loose.

He did it all and is still around!

If you don’t go into qualitative judgement about his decisions and look at them purely for their essence, each of these decisions has one theme common.

All the NaMo has done is that he has called every bluff that we have been fearing and taken on every bogeyman that was used to scare us, and yet the net result is nothing that we were fearing has happened.

After doing everything that others considered to be suicidal or damaging, ranging from demonetisation that should have angered people and thrown him out of power to a surgical strike that should have triggered a nuclear war with Pakistan, nothing that we were fearing happened.

In fact, after doing all this and more, he came back to power with an ever better mandate from people.

It is clear that NaMo has either understood India and her people better than his predecessors or he knows that most of the bogeymen of the past were constructed for a purpose by those with vested interests.

If this learning has helped him deliver in probably the hardest fought election in India history, it is something worth applying for those who are expected to manage people of India, i.e. Indian bureaucrats.

There is a strong possibility that India is changing. Our great nation and her people are not what we have cynically imagined them to be and there is a possibility of ushering a better future.

If this is the moment of reckoning for India, it is a moment that Indian bureaucracy must grab and do what is right without succumbing to traditional fears. I hope that all the young people entering the empowered cadres realise this as a once in a lifetime opportunity for us as a nation and act.

The simplest way we can have a new India is by stop fearing what we are taught to fear. Only if we can let go of the fears from our past, we will have a different and better future ahead for us.

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Source: ToI

Image Courtesy: PIB

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