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Billionaire Warren Buffet once said
that reputation is built through a set of consistent actions and
behaviour over decades and it is destroyed within minutes.
In 2012, the reputation of India and its 1.2 billion citizens
suffered as they decided to give a go-by to the norm of
demonstrating consistency, transparency and honesty of purpose in
public communications, especially while addressing sticky issues
at hand. The biggest jolt to India's reputation came through a
series of out-of-turn, off-the-cuff remarks by lawmakers,
regulators, law enforcers, political leadership, members of the
opposition, corporate sector, civil liberties groups as perceived
by 1.2 billion Indians, the key stakeholders of world's biggest
democracy.
The year began with media reporting the messy battle by the then
army chief, Gen. V.K. Singh, and the defence ministry over his
age, opening the floodgates for a series of issues marked by
mistrust. General Singh became the first army chief to have
dragged the government to the Supreme Court on the personal issue
of his date of birth. The court's view that his approaching it was
against the generally accepted behaviour of a serving general
ultimately led to his withdrawing the case.
The trust deficit accentuated further as media flashed the army
chief's letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, pointing out that
the army's tanks had run out of ammunition, the air defence was
almost obsolete and the artillery was short of critical weapons,
leading to speculative stories on who could have leaked the
letter, causing grave risk to the country's security.
This was topped up by a national newspaper reporting how in
January, Raisina Hill was spooked with two key army units moving
towards Delhi on the day the army chief's case came up for hearing
in the Supreme Court.
While it's difficult to imagine the impact of the series of events
on the morale of the 1.3-million-strong apolitical army, it would
be naïve to assume that it didn't tarnish the country's
reputation.
The highly-decorated army chief continued to unnerve the
government, this time with a bribery charge against a former
colleague to clear purchase of sub-standard Tatra all-terrain
vehicles.
Criticism that the government seems to be increasingly incapable
of battling corruption only grew louder as allocations of coal
blocks by the government to a series of influential industrial
houses came up for the Comptroller and Auditor General's scrutiny
with its accountants putting the presumptive loss at Rs.1.86 lakh
crore. A set of financial irregularities by an NGO run by a union
minister's spouse too was a cause of embarrassment for the
government.
These incidents cast a shadow of doubt on the propriety of those
involved and pointed to the total absence of transparency - a
trait so essential to building the reputation of a nation.
Unfortunately, the revelations that followed in the media
continued to sully India's image. Efforts by the political
leadership to clear the air only helped muddy the waters with a
series of insensitive, often sexist, foot-in-the-mouth comments.
Inter-ministerial and inter-departmental differences, instead of
being debated during meetings of the cabinet or a group of
ministers (GoM), were allowed to boil over as full-scale duels of
words and public spats.
The lack of a singular voice in pronouncements by union cabinet
ministers and government spokespersons proved time and again that
the government's public communication efforts left much to be
desired. There was hardly a department that could lay its claim to
zero-defect communications. How else would you explain two
newly-appointed ministers being asked to take charge of the same
ministry in a Rashtrapati Bhavan communique?
"I was misquoted by the media" became a common excuse to wriggle
out of unsavoury situations caused by foot-in-the-mouth statements
by politicians - from the naïve to the most experienced. The
shoe-hurling media personnel of yesteryears gave way to eminent
political leaders seeking to keep out certain media houses.
The prime minister acknowledged the "frustration and anger" over
corruption. As the year went by, GDP growth dipped to the lowest
in a decade, strengthening the perception that not enough was
being done to keep up the pace of economic reforms. The opposition
chose to level charges of policy paralysis, with corporate honchos
joining in occasionally. India's reputation suffered even further
as Time magazine, in a cover story, called Manmohan Singh an
"underachiever".
As the news of slowing GDP growth unfolded quarter after quarter,
foreign investors did not take kindly to the retrospective
imposition of taxes on the Vodafone deal inked over a decade ago.
The sovereign rating agencies continued to lower the investment
ratings assigned to India.
Growing intolerance to its criticism, especially in the social
digital media, leading to the government directing service
providers that certain online posts be taken off, dimmed the shine
that India enjoyed by offering freedom of expression to its
ordinary citizens.
The utterances of political leaders - including gaffes from
Narendra Modi, Mamata Banerjee and Shri Prakash Jaiswal - on
women's issues brought out the insensitivity in full measure. Each
of these utterances and the communications crisis they created
would compete for an award for worst communications anywhere in
the world.
The events following a brutal attack on a young woman on December
16 night point to how we have failed make women feel safe even
after 65 years of independence.
It's unfortunate that we have to end 2012 on such a sad note that
where the justified public outrage on the inadequate safety of
women itself has given birth to crisis of a magnitude that despite
all reactive efforts refuses to ebb.
It's time India turned the tragic demise of the young
physiotherapy student into a sensitivity with adequate safeguards
where every mother, sister and daughter can feel safe, like
nowhere else. And women get the equality, respect and safety they
deserve as a human being. The message is clear that "chalta hai
(everything goes") is no longer "theek hai (Ok)".
Sanjiv Kataria is a strategic communications and PR counsel. He
can be contacted at sanjiv.kataria@gmail.com or on Twitter @sanjivkataria
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