This newsletter is really a public policy thought-letter. While excellent newsletters on specific themes within public policy already exist, this thought-letter is about frameworks, mental models, and key ideas that will hopefully help you think about any public policy problem in imaginative ways. It seeks to answer just one question: how do I think about a particular public policy problem/solution?
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Global Policy Watch: No Telefoon in Rangoon
- RSJ
Mere Piya Gaye Rangoon Wahan Se Kiya Hai Telefoon is how C. Ramchandra immortalised Rangoon (Yangon) in our collective memories all those years ago. Unfortunately, ‘wahan se kiya hai telefoon’ is a tad difficult these days for the people of Yangon.
Myanmar should be aware of the idea of eternal recurrence by now. That all events in the world recur in the same pattern over an eternal series of cycles. The coup earlier this month by the Tatmadaw (the armed forces) was a case of history repeating itself three times over in its short post-war history. The reason served by the military had a familiar ring to it. It alleged widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 elections that led to a landslide victory for Aung San Suu Kyi helmed National League For Democracy (NLD). The quasi-democracy that was in place in Myanmar since 2015 didn’t mean any loosening of the iron-fist of the Tatmadaw. It retained its control on the key levers of power. For it to allege voter fraud in elections is comical. It must follow then it is admitting its incompetence in being dictatorial. Anyway, leave that aside. History has shown logic isn’t a particular strength of military junta anywhere in the world.
But irony is
The senior-most military leader Gen. Min Aung Hlaing had this to say:
“I would seriously urge the entire nation to join hands with the Tatmadaw (Army) for the successful realisation of democracy.”
Then the junta went digital with its defence. In a country where Facebook is the internet, it posted this on its official site:
After many requests, this way was inevitable for the country and that's why we had to choose it.
And soon it blocked Facebook and disabled the internet for the sake of ‘stability’ in the country. The tanks were on the street and midnight knocks on the doors of NLD leaders began. Suu Kyi was taken into custody and the crackdown started. It was 1988 once again for Myanmar. The eternal cycle had recurred.
As Nietzsche wrote:
"Everything has returned. Sirius, and the spider, and thy thoughts at this moment, and this last thought of thine that all things will return".
Myanmar has been living through a transition to a fledgling democracy over the last decade. A new constitution that allowed for representative democracy and elections took shape in 2008. In 2015, NLD won the general elections and Suu Kyi became the State Counsellor (the equivalent of PM) of Myanmar. She is constitutionally barred from becoming the President because she was married to a foreigner and her children aren’t citizens of Myanmar. There was an uneasy truce between her and the military over the last term as Myanmar saw an unprecedented period of opening up to the world, growth and freedom for its people. Anyone who visited it in the last five years would vouch for how ‘normal’ it felt.
So, why the coup now?
There’s never an easy answer to this. For all you know it could be General Hlaing having a bad hair day. But let’s look at it through the frames of political and social philosophy to arrive at few likely reasons.
Firstly, the old Weberian power and legitimacy lens. Power is the ability to impose your will over others despite their resistance. Legitimacy is when this power is considered fair, even appropriate, by those over whom it is exercised. As Weber wrote:
“The basis of every system of authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige”
Power needs prestige to be legitimate. Else, it is coercion. In Myanmar, the junta always had power but rarely legitimacy. In the quasi-democracy era, the junta ceded a thin sliver of power to the NLD. But legitimacy is a strange meal. It can feed that feeble power and bestow it with enormous strength. A second term for NLD would have done exactly that. Power is a zero-sum game. The army generals know it. People sense the winds of change fast. The military couldn’t take any further chances with this version of democracy. Self-preservation kicked in on Feb 1, 2021.
Secondly, a recurring self-delusion that most authoritarians suffer from is how popular they are among the masses. The Constitution of Myanmar was drafted in a manner that favours large, majoritarian parties. You get a disproportionate number of seats regardless of the margin of victory on vote count. This was, of course, deliberate. There were two reasons for this. One, Myanmar is a multi-ethnic country with a distinct minority presence in its southwestern and northeastern borders. But the polity (the military and the NLD) is dominated by the majority Burmese Buddhists. A majoritarian Constitution is quite convenient. Two, General Hliang probably harbours political ambitions. His term ends this year. He backed the opposition in this elections thinking a victory would see him transition to being a President soon. The results were a shocker. 83 per cent of seats to NLD. The way the election rules have been drafted (by him) would now suggest an almost permanent NLD majority for the next many elections. This wasn’t acceptable. His network of businesses and the many interests of his family and friends could not be left to the mercy of mere civilian politicians. The general didn’t see himself in his labyrinth.
This is the old authoritarian problem. You overestimate your popularity. No one tells you the truth. You call for the elections. Then you can’t handle the truth (no copyright issue here; Aaron Sorkin is a friend). Exhibit A of this behaviour is Indira Gandhi right after the emergency. Exhibits B, C, D.. are all dictators too many to name here. This is why good authoritarians go the other way. They change the constitution to reduce the freedoms of the opposition, they extend their terms or they take elections out from the political equation. General Hliang must speak more often to his friends who are on his speed dial - Xi, Putin or Erdogan.
Thirdly, this is as good a time to mount a coup with little or no fear of international repercussions. Political cosmopolitanism is in a state of irrelevance now. The idea that states should be subject to some kind of international morality and they must behave in a manner consistent with it is at its weakest. The pandemic has further raised the walls at the borders. Transnational economic or political ideas have to contend with them. It is no surprise that international condemnation of the Myanmar coup is muted. China has asked all parties to resolve their differences internally (ha!). ASEAN, the largest market for Myanmar, has responded in a similar vein. The Biden administration has imposed sanctions and this will be followed by a few other western democracies. They hardly matter. Myanmar has lived in isolation for long to be concerned with them.
So, what does the future hold for Myanmar? Will this emergency be a mere one-year interregnum and will we have democracy back after it? Freedom is addictive. Even in the smallest of doses. There’s a view that whatever passed off for democracy in the last decade will be too strong in public memory for the junta to erase altogether. Despite the internet ban, street protests are spreading and, importantly, the arms of the state like bureaucracy, police and public servants (bank or healthcare workers) are participating in a departure from the past. Will these be enough? As a realist, I understand the state can play the waiting game for long and with an increasing degree of coercion.
There’s little likelihood of a Yangon spring this season.
Global Policy Watch: I am Small, I contain Multitweets
— Pranay Kotasthane
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
— From Walt Whitman's Song of Myself
That's too nuanced a point for social media warriors of all persuasions.
After all, it's now possible to judge and crucify someone — notwithstanding their unique life experiences and resulting perspectives — merely on the basis of what they tweet. Or what they don't.
Just imagine. Our social media profiles — filled with inane and often ill-thought System 1 garbage output — are our most important extrinsic manifestations. It's tragic.
Two recent instances drove home this point to me yet again. One, an Indian-origin Oxford University Student Union President-elect had to step down after someone dug up her old Instagram posts containing some pretty terrible (and not even funny) wordplay about a holocaust memorial. As if the label “insensitive” wasn’t sufficient, more posts were dug up to also label her "racist" and "anti-LGBTQ".
What the person is today in real life, I have no idea. But what seems pretty clear to me is that past Instagram mistakes don't deserve anything more than a sincere apology. That’s unfortunately not the case though. If the internet remembers everything, social media extracts a heavy penalty for everything remembered.
The second instance was a shoddy article in The Caravan titled Establishment Man: The Moral Timidity of Sachin Tendulkar. Among other things, the author was able to make gross generalisations such as "… Tendulkar also shares the worst traits of the Indian middle-class: its indifference to the general good, its lack of commitment to the values of human rights and democracy, and its intellectual vacuousness" merely on the basis of Tendulkar’s Twitter feed.
The specific accusation is that while Tendulkar joined the orchestrated chorus against Rihanna's tweet, his 'Twitter stayed silent' when Wasim Jaffer was removed as the coach of the Uttarakhand cricket team.
This is not a defence of Tendulkar. As much as I admire him as a cricketer, I understand that a great cricketer can also be a craven follower. But I do have a problem when this judgment gets made merely on what he didn’t tweet about.
For instance, the author is quick to conclude, on the basis of a Twitter feed that “..his personal decency has always been accompanied by a deeply ingrained timidity towards authority, a primal fear of upsetting any establishment, whether cricketing or otherwise.” Yet, Tendulkar’s 2009 statement “Mumbai belongs to all Indians”, going against the well-entrenched parochial ‘Marathi Manoos’ politics, doesn’t get even a cursory mention. Similarly, the author doesn’t even attempt to show if he investigated Tendulkar’s off-Twitter support for Jaffer’s shameful ouster. After all, there is a lot someone like Tendulkar can do — and we can expect him to do in this case — than merely signal virtue on Twitter.
The Wrong Path Chosen
These two instances illustrate that we give others’ social media feeds way too much importance.
The first instance follows a well-established practice of digging up old tweets to defame a present-day achiever. This tendency ignores the fact that the most important human preference is our ability to change our past preferences.
Moreover, the more we label people, the more we polarise our politics. Philip Tetlock claims that text analyses studies show that people already tweet more like politicians (signalling virtue) or as prosecutors (assigning blame) rather than as hypothesis testers. And so, disproportional attention to our social media past will only make more people don the role of politicians and prosecutors — ready to fight every battle across the world while burning bridges in our vicinity.
The Tendulkar case is a more recent trend — people are to be judged not only on the basis of what they tweet but also what they don't. This too has a similar effect of pushing us into becoming prosecutors who are obligated to jump from one burning issue to the next without solving any.
Finally, to pay disproportional attention to our social media selves is both foolish and dangerous. To rebuild broken bridges, we need to assume by default that people contain multitudes. It's going to be tough.
Answer to the Quiz in #108
Yes, the answer is BR Ambedkar, who else? Those were the excerpts from the election manifesto of the Scheduled Castes Federation from 1951. SCF was a precursor to the Republican Party of India.
The entire election manifesto is a fascinating read. As one can expect from Ambedkar’s writings, this manifesto is not just a vague litany of promises but a rare well-reasoned agenda. Sample this:
IV. Co-operation between Scheduled Castes Federation and other Political Parties
51. Mere Organization does not make a party. A party means a body of people who are bound by principles. Without principles a party cannot function as a party for in the absence of principles there is nothing to hold the members of it together. A party without principles is only a caravanserai. The Scheduled Castes Federation will not, therefore, ally itself with a Political Party which has not laid down its principles and whose constitution does not demand a pledge from its members to stand by those principles and whose principles are not in antogonism with these of the Federation.
52. It is not enough to have political ideals. What is necessary is the victory of ideals. But the victory of ideals can be ensured only by organized parties and not by individuals. For these reasons the Federation will not support independent candidates who belong to no party except in exceptional cases.
..
54. As regards other Political Parties, the Scheduled Castes Federation’s attitude can be easily defined. The Scheduled Castes Federation will not have any alliance with any reactionary Party such as the Hindu Mahasabha or the R. S. S.
55. The Scheduled Castes Federation will not have any alliance with a Party like the Communist Party the objects of which are to destroy individual freedom and Parliamentary Democracy and substitute in its place a dictatorship.
The manifesto can be read here (page 386). Don’t miss it. We found out about this document in a Puliyabaazi with prominent Dalit intellectual and entrepreneur Chandra Bhan Prasad.
HomeWork
Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters
Sabastian Strangio in the Foreign Affairs: “Myanmar’s Coup Was a Chronicle Foretold”
Are coups good for democracy? A paper by George Derpanopoulos, Erica Frantz, Barbara Geddes and Joseph Wright. Answer: “We find that, though democracies are occasionally established in the wake of coups, more often new authoritarian regimes emerge, along with higher levels of state-sanctioned violence.”
#110 Will There be a Yangon Spring? 🎧