Arun Shourie, our minister for disinvestment, was a year ahead of me in school. We attended an NCC camp together, and on the last day took part in a variety show, where the local commanding general was our chief guest. Some sang, others performed a skit, and Shourie decided to recite a long Urdu poem. During the interminable recitation the general started to fidget. His solicitous ADC noticed it, and tried to catch Shourie's eye. At first Shourie ignored him, but then he stopped abruptly. In a soft, polite, but firm voice, the 15-year-old Shourie said that if the general had another pressing engagement, his eminence was welcome to leave, and the show would go on.
The embarrassed general jumped to his feet, and said graciously, “No no, this is most enjoyable, please continue! By now, Shourie had come near the poem's end, but he said that since everyone was enjoying it so much he would begin at the beginning. And he did.
This is not only a story about Arun Shourie's character; it is an omen of the future of privatisation in India. It seems to me that integrity and fearlessness are devastatingly powerful attributes in public life, and when you combine them with personal conviction and a certain amount of competence, and if the tide of history is on your side, then nothing can stop you. Arun Shourie combines these traits, and this is why privatisation of the Indian public sector will be remembered by history as the greatest achievement of the Vajpayee government, alongside the repair of our relationship with the United States.
It has been an extraordinary sight for much of this year: almost the whole of our self serving political class--the entire opposition, supported secretly by most in the ruling coalition, including powerful ministers, and the RSS--has been ranged against one individual. However, Shourie has not been daunted, for he knows that right is on his side and he knows what he has achieved. In the 24 privatisations completed in 34 months, he has raised Rs 11,000 crores transparently without firing a single worker. He has begun to unlock the value of our public sector companies, which had gained Rs 76,000 crores on the stock exchanges, before George Fernandes and Ram Naik brought them down by Rs 11,000 crores on a single day in September. Many of the losers that day were middle class holders of Unit Trust, the largest holder of the crashing PSU shares.
Disinvestment is one of India's few recent successes, and just when the nation was beginning to reap the rewards of enormous hard work, politicians stopped it because they had second thoughts. It was like stopping a general in the middle of battle and question if war is good or bad. They charged that disinvestment is a loot of public wealth, when they secretly knew that it is they who had looted the public sector for fifty years. They raised perverse arguments that government should not sell profit-making entities, when they realised that these would soon become loss-making entities in tomorrow's competitive, economy, and be worth only a fraction of today's value. They opposed “strategic sales” when they could see that this route had delivered two to ten times more value than public sales.
The purpose of disinvestment is simple--to get the government out of business. Only in India does one have to repeat that the government's job is only to govern. The nation has invested Rs 270,000 crores of its hard earned money in 240 central PSUs and half of them lose money. It is even worse at the state level where 90 per cent of the 946 enterprises are sick. Imagine, how India might have been transformed had we invested this money in schools and primary health centres, training our teachers and para medics, on drinking water, roads and irrigation! Alas, it is the same nasty story of a thrifty, vibrant, hard-working private India carrying a parasitical, corrupt public India on its back.