2019-Rafale Hullabaloo – Was It All About Disparaging Modi?

The cynical political desires of those who cannot withstand the success of Narendra Modi to tarnish his image of an incorruptible on the basis of wholly uncorroborated allegations (almost assuredly as a cover for their contempt for his popularity, conviction and the people who elected him) did not, as has been exposed, actually have a case in Rafale. They seemed, rather, to be trying to ride the belief of people that such deals cannot be without corruption, reckonings which had formed over long decades of corrupt governments.

Narendra Modi saw his character assassinated on the basis of (apparently false) claims of theft and wrong doing. He was cast as someone partisan who was trying to benefit some corrupt businessmen. His purported partners in executing the crime were cast as the embodiment of the powerless. To large swathes of society, Modi was inherently guilty, by reason of being a non-congressman and a non-Gandhi-Nehru scion, and his accusers beyond reproach.

In the realms of the Court rooms and in the court of public opinion, both the political class and the media violated all standards of justice and journalistic integrity. Blinded by emotion, the anti-Modi forces inverted the pillar of our legal system of the presumption of innocence, and refused to subject all manner of outlandish claims to even basic levels of scrutiny. Many members of the bar and media alike proved irresponsible and vindictive.

"Modi's image has not been created by the Khan Market gang, or Lutyens Delhi, but 45 years of his toil," Modi told The Indian Express in May 2019.

He was referring to Congress President Rahul Gandhi's statement to a TV channel in which Gandhi said the Congress had dismantled PM Modi's image over allegations of corruption in the Rafale deal. Modi also clarified why he had highlighted late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's holiday at a naval ship in an election rally and made it a poll issue.

The Supreme Court gave clean chit to the Modi government on the purchase of 36 fully-loaded Rafale fighter jets from French company Dassault Aviation, rejecting the plea for registration of an FIR by the CBI for alleged commission of cognisable offence in the deal. The apex court dismissed the pleas seeking review of the December 14, 2018 verdict in which it had said that there was no occasion to doubt the decision-making process in the procurement of 36 Rafale fighter jets. The Supreme Court on Thursday 14 November 2019 not only dismissed the review petition in the Rafale case but also censured Rahul Gandhi for wrongly attributing his remark “Chowkidar chor hai" to the apex court.

Rafale case illustrated that when swept up in a movement, truth-seeking inquiries in pursuit of justice can easily morph into inquisitions that subvert the very justice they claim to seek.

Rafale Review petitions have fundamentally changed something in our society; or perhaps reflect a society fundamentally changed; manifesting itself in the arming of the legal system that has swung the scales of justice out of balance. The narrative seemed to trump the truth.

Currently, lawyers, clients, and witnesses can make defamatory statements in public court filings and depositions without fear of a civil suit or a perjury prosecution. It is in fact exceedingly rare for anyone to be prosecuted for perjury in a civil proceeding. It is these realities that incentivised petitioners to falsely accuse Modi of a crime with complete immunity.

Accusers can effectively "launder" defamatory accusations through the media while protecting themselves from being hit with defamation suits by planting such allegations in court filings, and leaking them to the press.

The accused often has little recourse and there are no consequences for those who file accusations with no offer to prove them and no legal responsibility if they are categorically false and disprovable.

The erosion of fundamental principles of justice as well as a lack of any semblance of fairness in journalism reflects an erosion of our culture.

For victim and victimiser alike, the Indian justice system, and those who report on it, needs to be fair and equal. A case must be judged on its merits, treating parties involved as unique an individual who’s every motive, belief and action cannot just be presumed as convenient. There is a crying need for reforms in our justice system to treat both the accused and the accuser fairly, and for the court of public opinion to do the same. Recognizing that societies are often swayed by their passions, it is an argument that needs to be made. The pressure that can be exerted on judges when they are adjudicating controversial or challenging cases has been greater than ever, in part due to a climate of online hostility. The internet has clearly changed the landscape. Every judge is definitely in the firing line when it comes to online harassment and abuse.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. History teaches us that the desire to bring down the powerful can also corrupt, and the absolute desire to bring down the powerful can corrupt absolutely.

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Perceptual Authenticity of B-Schools

Business schools train their students in specialised fields: management and economics. Over time, their alumni often reach high positions in the business world. Higher visibility of a b-school is often a result of the age of the b-school coupled with its presence in the media – whether earned or bought.

More often than not, increase in visibility of a b-school is also triggered by unpleasant incidents like questionable administrative overheads; mal-practices of teachers and students like plagiarism; moonlighting and conflicts of interest between private consulting and research by the professors; allegations of misconduct by alumni in management positions; offenses against academic and social integrity; and so on.

Of the 3000 plus legitimate (within the legal framework) b-schools in India, some 300 of them have visibility beyond their location.  The legitimacy is provided by the approval to their existence being granted by AICTE, an institution with deficient capacity, suspect calibre and lack of imagination at least in so far as the Business-Management education is concerned.

Many among these B-schools have been making “me-too” investments in topics such as ethics, sustainability and responsibility. Naturally therefore, these values have begun to act as elements of their own public self-description. It is only fair that both the public and the media check these schools and their representatives, especially school leadership and professors, against these self-imposed high standards.

Positive news from the private sector has become rather a rare phenomenon in the last few years. In the media, top managers are often presented as technocrats maximising their company’s wealth and their own earnings. A failing top manager is an easy prey for the journalists. The rhetoric of ethics, sustainability and responsibility is not lived up to in research, teaching and practice, and b-schools can easily – and rightly – be reproached with paying lip service to key values of the 21st century.

Most of these “top” b-schools operate in a space that is remote from social realities of the country. They function like closed entities. They try to set high admission thresholds for students and thereby promote “elitism.”

Barring an exceptional few, most of these B-schools have been in a rat race of seeking accreditation from “Gora sahib” agencies. In confirming to the expectations of such accreditation agencies, many b-schools are insanely chasing “internationalisation” as called for by and others which is taking its toll. For “internationalisation” a b-school is expected to have a considerable share of international students, international professors and even international administrative staff. This raises a social and political question whether a b-school should chase “internationalisation” when contact between “normal” citizens of the region, their students and graduates, and the b-school is rather limited.

These are not merely theoretical propounding.  There are interesting cases like the Management Development Institute in Gurgaon which is a pioneer in seeking and succeeding in obtaining the AMBA accreditation from UK. While the b-school is third time reaccredited by AMBA, it has suffered deterioration in its domestic accreditation by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA).

Most IIMs are chasing international Accreditations like the EQUIS, AMBA and AACSB but none of them is willing to be subjected to NBA. Within the domestic system, they are the “Bada Sahibs” who control the NBA, dominate its policies and systems but never undergo self-tests. And then there are the coveted b-schools like the FMS or the IIFT or DMS-IIT which seek no accreditation, domestic or international, yet succeed through protecting their social legitimacy.

Many of the B-schools of high visibility are capable of handling normal questioning from the media. They may not be prepared for a serious problem, very often starting with a single and sometimes minor issue, in which social and public media identify a narrative pattern that can lead to scandal.

If a business school has an excellent national and international reputation, delivers relevant results in research, and attracts talented students, it will be able to cope with negative headlines over a certain period of time. However, bad news can severely harm a weak brand. Given the right light, more public scrutiny should increase the social legitimacy of b-schools.

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B-Schools in Delirium

B-Schools offer two kinds of education programmes, broadly, the public programmes and the corporate programmes; though they can take various forms. Public programmes are standard offerings usually leading to the award of some documentation of proficiency; a certificate – duration based, functional or skill based; a diploma – undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate or functional or skill based; or a degree – Bachelors, Masters or Doctoral. Subject to certain norms and requirements, anyone can enrol. Corporate programmes can be standard or customised; for managers drawn from within a corporate entity or from across many corporate, usually theme based; for enhancement or augmentation of some pre-existing knowledge, skill, experience or just adding a sheen to the monotony.

It is no surprise that people in b-schools are living out some kind of delusion. There is a huge gap between what they think they are doing and what the consumers of their service believe they are providing. For example, in public education people often talk about “building skills” and “delivering learning” when in reality most students are just there to get a cushy job through placements, a coveted degree or a diploma certificate and have as good a time as possible while doing so. If nothing else, the astonishing numbers of students who do not bother turning up to lectures, unless forced to do so through compulsions of mandatory attendance, suggests as much; together with the vanishingly small amount of information they retain.

In corporate learning and development b-schools like to imagine that they are “building capability” and “improving performance”– even “delivering the business strategy”. But should they listen closely to their customers, they will find that the corporate entities see the role of b-schools as managing risk through regulatory training and providing the occasional break from work.

This basic mistake which b-schools are making in almost all of their public and corporate education and training programmes is – chucking information at people that they don’t much care about.

So, what should the b-schools be doing instead?

The answer is actually quite simple.

To understand the answer, there is a need to understand that people use either the experiences or the resources or at times both, the experiences and the resources to deal with what they care about.

Resources are typically the sort of things they use when they do care about something – for example when they use Google to solve a problem or a spreadsheet to store data and sort it into information.

People store their reactions to their experiences (rather than the experiences themselves) and use these reactions to re-create the experience in a process which could be called as “recollection”.

Challenges describe the things people are concerned with doing. People learn through challenges. There are challenges people already have and there are challenges which may be coming ahead.

When someone already has a challenge, resources are the best solutions since they will use these to address the challenge. They cannot put the challenge on hold, spend time to gather experience around that challenge and then deal with it using the acquired experience.

But there are cases where people are not yet sufficiently concerned about something; for example sustainability or disruption or inclusivity; and therefore do not seem to care so much about. They may consider such things as challenges, not for them, but for others. In such cases, b-schools need to design experiences that will change how people feel about something as well as give them a chance to practise their response.

For example, most corporate offices conduct “mock-fire-drills” to train their staff and most staff take such drills casually. This happens for two clear reasons – first, the fear of fire is just blocked off using an attitude of denial – “this doesn’t happen to me” and the “mock” is not real enough to evoke fear but is a mockery which evokes flippancy. Making “mock” as real as possible is expensive and risky. By creating a VR experience in which people have to escape a burning building, they might be sensitised to the importance of learning proper procedure.

Instead of designing courses, b-schools should be building resources and designing experiences. Instead of dumping content, b-schools should be delivering development, engagement and performance.

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*Inspired and adapted from - Nick Shackleton-Jones, “The training delusion: the man who thought Play-Doh was for cleaning walls” EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.13, pp. 35-38

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