One of the heartening features of the present government’s behaviour is that there is considerable focus not only on short-term goodies, e.g. loan waivers, but on tough longer-term measures that would involve ensuring an adequate tax-GDP ratio so that India does not inexorably decay into a failed state. There is also a new and unusual attempt to communicate with citizens, seeing them as active agents in the development story and not as passive subjects to be manipulated, as has been the habit of the Indian state for several decades.

The people of India will go along with belt-tightening, with sacrifices, with transitional problems, provided they feel that the government is not made up of self-serving crooks, but of relatively honest and hard-working folks. The Indian bureaucracy continues to try its best to act as a barrier between the political leadership and the citizen and sets up as many hurdles as possible to ensure that economic reform is stymied or sabotaged, or at a minimum, delayed. The continuing wrangles and even public spats between different ministries pursuing their own pet agendas subtly defying the new strong leadership which wants to break logjams, is worthy of the best Applebys. It is now time for the government to prove that they are willing to grasp difficult and long-delayed nettles in the economic area. Surprisingly, addressing some long-term gridlock items may also throw up quick and perceptible gains that can be capitalised on politically.

Between demonetisation, the Real Estate Regulation Act (RERA), re-auctioning of mines, tough positions on non-performing assets (NPA), actions against benami assets and the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST), traditional Indian businesspersons are a bit nonplussed. They have been accustomed to years of lip service to reform while cozy crony capitalism has flourished on the side, ignoring the rhetoric of reform. The present situation represents one of acute discomfort to many as they are yet to be convinced that things have changed fundamentally. Who knows, things may just slide back. In order to remove this fear and eliminate reservations about the purity and the emphatic nature of reforms, there is one major action that the government can take.

The government can announce and implement a universal “no appeals” strategy. Any time the government loses a case in a tribunal or in an arbitration council or in a court, the government can and should unilaterally state that it will not appeal the decision. It can go further — any payments resulting from the verdict should be promptly made within seven days and should be in the public domain on a website.

The bureaucracy which makes a sumptuous living from appeals and from postponing legitimate government payments, will oppose this move with all the shrillness and hysteria they have at their command. This will result in a loss of revenues; this will set up bad precedents; this will kill government flexibility; this will leave us at the mercy of corrupt tribunals which are fixed by scheming businesspersons; this will be seen as a pro-suit and pro-boot measure; this will be an attack on our sovereignty; this will attract allegations of corruption; this will devastate our already weakened public sector entities; this will result in our blowing our fiscal deficit commitment — a tacit acceptance that we as a country try to meet these commitments on the backs of vendors and tax-payers, by denying them their dues. Needless to say all of these are bogus self-serving arguments.

To suggest that lower tribunals are dishonest or fixable is an insult not just to the tribunals but to all of us. Let’s get rid of corrupt tribunal members. Let’s not tar all of them with the same brush and sabotage the very purpose with which the state has set them up. The endless saga of appeals which makes the Indian state the largest and most obdurate, if not vexatious, of litigants, has resulted in the clogging up of our courts and a conviction on the part of citizens that the Indian state is immoral (how else would you describe one who does not pay his dues — he who denies his “runa”, that virtue-laden Sanskrit word) and anti-citizen.