Dhan Vapasi: "mo money no problems"

When I first heard the phrase "Dhan Vapasi" it seemed like a war-cry for the repatriation of funds, affectionately dubbed as black money, stashed by rich Indians in overseas bank accounts in the shady watering holes of the financial world such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. In contrast, Dhan Vapasi called for the repatriation of money – Indian money – from a much closer proximity: from India's governments. 

Dhan Vapasi is the brain child of serial tech-entrepreneur Rajesh Jain, one of the masterminds behind the BJP's election campaign during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. He is a man of big ideas – one of his other goals is to rewrite the Indian Constitution along of the lines of the American Constitution – and Dhan Vapasi is certainly a very big idea. 

Dhan Vapasi is centered around the idea of Public Wealth and the right of every Indian citizen to derive income from it. Public wealth is defined as everything not owned by private parties such as public lands, mineral deposits, forests, public sector undertakings, government guest houses, ambassadors with red sirens, etc. 

The argument for Dhan Vapasi rests on the following equation:

When public wealth is suitably and effectively utilized it can create sustainable income for its owners, the Indian public. Due to a combination of historical and political reasons, most of India's public wealth is legally owned and controlled by the Government of India and state governments. Starting from the Chanakya's Arthashastra the ruling classes have tried to usurp and control natural wealth, particularly land, in the name of public welfare. This process was accelerated by the British and hasn't slowed a beat since Independence in 1947. Dhan Vapasi conservatively estimates public wealth in India as Rs. 15 lakh crores (15 followed by 14 zeros!), or roughly Rs. 50 lakh per family. 

Governments (states and center) are sitting on this incredible stockpile of public wealth. And yet, instead of effectively utilizing this wealth to generate prosperity for all Indians, Dhan Vapasi claims that governments across all political stripes have done the opposite. They have willfully mismanaged this wealth to enrich their own pockets. Dhan Vapasi claims that such mismanagement and corruption is unavoidable given the improper incentives baked into our political system. To come to power politicians have to spend obscene sums of money and grease multitudes of palms. Once in power, they have a very limited timeframe to recoup this vast investment. This incentivizes public loot for personal enrichment. Public wealth is treated as a cash-cow and on those occasions publicly-run enterprises go belly-up thanks to incompetent administration, the government bails them out using more public money. A case in point is the recent Air India bail-out. There is no reason for the Indian government to run an airlines and yet it continues to prop up a shambolically-run organization. 

Convinced that governments cannot be trusted to effectively utilize public wealth for public welfare, Dhan Vapasi calls for the liquidation of most of India's public wealth. It argues for the immediate auctioning of public lands, mineral deposits, privatization of public undertakings, etc. and distributing the generated income to every Indian as an annual payment of Rs. 1 lakh per family. Dhan Vapasi asserts that this income will have transformational benefits to India, including eliminating extreme poverty, generating millions of jobs, reducing the avenues for public corruption, and rendering unnecessary most public assistance schemes.  

Dhan Vapasi's website includes a booklet and a deeply informative wiki on India's public wealth. The booklet is rambling, repetitive, long on moral justifications and short on implementation details. It is also self-contradictory in places. For instance, to the question of whether the people can be trusted to responsibly spend the income from Dhan Vapasi, the booklet retorts, "If the people are capable enough to assume the responsibility of choosing their political leaders — that’s democracy — why are they incapable of deciding what they should do with their own wealth?". Dhan Vapasi's invectives against the political system would suggest that the people are clearly incapable of selecting the right political leaders; wouldn't it follow that they cannot be trusted to spend their wealth responsibly? 

I see Dhan Vapasi are an interesting garb for a Limited Government manifesto. The movement calls for the complete disentanglement of most of the Government's powers, leaving behind just three – the  Army, domestic law & order, and the courts. A Dhan Vapasi Bill has been crafted and the organization appeals to politicians across the political spectrum to rally around this singular objective. Instead of organizing around abstract ideals such as Libertarianism or Classical Liberalism, Dhan Vapasi is a call to organize around an end-product – Rs. 50 lakh per family – and sees Limited Government as a natural fallout of this desirable end-goal. 

Though the scheme may seem too simplistic, its true power rests in its simplicity and potential 'to go viral'. Like the war against black money, Dhan Vapasi could become a powerful rallying cry in the public imagination. It is ripe for adoption by anti-establishment movements. Even if the idea of Dhan Vapasi is impractical at a pan-national level, it could be applied to every level of public governance  – panchayat, municipal, state, and federal. Could we devolve lands and resources owned ineffectively by city municipal boards? Could we offload government interests in at least a few PSUs? Are there more such low-hanging fruits for Dhan Vapasi? 

It is self-evident that the Indian state is too big and too powerful. The remedy cannot be a call to cut it down to the size of a post-card. The government has to do more than just manage the army, the police, and the courts. It has to protect the environment, regulate responsible business practices, promote welfare-schemes for the historically downtrodden, provide basic education and healthcare for the neediest, and more. It remains my hope that by offloading the government of things it need not do, it can better focus on the things it should do. 

Further reading:

• An excellent conversation between Amit Varma and Rajesh Jain on The Seen and the Unseen podcast. 
• The Dhan Vapasi booklet and wiki. 

A Reading Challenge ramble

Goodreads is not for everyone. The website isn't the most responsive, the reviews are mostly unorganized, and the iOS app can be clunky... and yet, I have stuck with it for five years now, despite not logging in for several months at a stretch. The reason is that Goodreads has become a place to chronicle my personal reading habits and preferences. On Goodreads I reflect upon my past readings and discover new things to read. My social interactions on the social network begin and end, for the most part, through additions to the 'Want to Read' and 'Currently Reading' shelves.

One aspect of Goodreads that has enriched my reading over the years is its annual Reading Challenge. The idea is simple: at the beginning of the year you set a personal goal of reading some number of books during that calendar year. The rest of the year, through a combination of personal drive and fear of public shame, you try to read enough to meet the goal. Nobody wants to be the person who aims to read 60 books in a year and yet stands at 3 books read by the beginning of December. 

Despite reading being a mostly private affair, a reading habit is often flaunted in very public ways. When I first signed up for the challenge in 2014, driven partly by this desire to flaunt, I set myself a target of reading 50 books – a ridiculous reach considering I was to join grad school midway through the year. Unsurprisingly I failed to hit my target, but I didn't fail too badly. I managed to read thirty five books that year – the most I have ever read in a calendar year. The quality of my reading was fairly high as well. From Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; from Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence to Hamid Kureishi's The Black Album, I was exposed to a wide breadth of ideas and writing styles that year. By the end of 2014, I was inspired to write this about my reading that year. 

2015 was a regression to the mean. I could read just seven books, albeit books of remarkable note such as Fahrenheit 451 and Donna Tartt's The Secret History. This was also the year I truly discovered Salman Rushdie, despite having read some of his works back in India. You see, to realize the magic of his words one must have experienced the life of a cultural transplant, lost between two cultures, forever in known places and yet never at home. Shame, his book on Pakistan, ranks in my all-time top five. To me, Rushdie and Arundhati Roy are in a league of their own. They are like glass-blowers with words, they make language weave and twist in mesmerizing ways that one can't fully understand but still recognize as beyond one's abilities to mimic. 

The poor showing in 2015 lowered my expectations for 2016. A book a month was all I asked of myself. The score at the end of the year was a very healthy 15. One book that stands out, in hindsight, from that year is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. I have always fancied melancholy in literature, especially when it is tied to a good plot and relatable characters. 2016 was also the year I was introduced to graphic novels, thanks to my friend Clint. 

If 2014 was my Steven Spielberg year – voluminous – then 2017 would be my Daniel Day Lewis year. I read half as many books, but each one was a hit out of the park. Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses will rank as one of the most involved reading experiences. The North Water was chilling and brutal. Zadie Smith's On Beauty was wise and cool. I was breezing through incredibly complex works and my writing improved, including my technical writing at work! At one point I was reading over two hours a day. 

Sadly 2018 was another regression. I was still spending time with the occasional gold nugget, such as Salman Rushdie's Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights, but the bulk of my reading during the year consisted of Tintin on my iPad. For most of the latter half of the year, I didn't touch a physical book. This continued into the early months of 2019. Eventually in March, I logged into Goodreads and saw Reading Challenge progress updates from many of my friends. I was very disappointed with myself and set myself the lowest bar yet. I challenged myself to read merely six books in the remaining nine months of the year. 

When you are coming back to reading after a long layover, it doesn't bode well to start with an award-winning literary work. My incipient attempts at reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North or the Moor's Last Sigh quickly failed. The books were too deep and the language was too convoluted. I needed an easier read that could keep me engaged. Around this time, I ran into my school friend Radhika who highly recommended The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh. She gifted me her own personal copy, rife with her underlinings. The gift became my motivation and I plowed my way through the book. It was a work of non-fiction that ruminated the lack of climate change as an actor in contemporary literature. While Ghosh's searing insights into the depredations of the western model of economic growth was enjoyable, the bits I loved the most were his anecdotal passages that bore resemblance to his works on fiction. Fiction will always remain my first love. I followed it up with Sing, Unburied, Sing. It was a weird book; a mishmash of the scars of racism in the deep south and the unquenched thirsts of spirits roaming in the afterlife. It was marvelous, dull, and terrifying in parts. Next came When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. As expected it was a tearjerker. Paul's life reaffirmed something I have long believed in – it is through the confluence of disparate ideas and interests that the greatest writing is born. Paul's deep interests in literature, philosophy, medicine, and morality was evident and inspiring. 

My rapid progress encouraged me to rise my target for the year to ten books. Let's see if I can achieve it. I am currently reading Shrilal Shukla's Raag Darbaari, and John Le Carre's The Honorable Schoolboy. I will be tweeting about my reading this year on Twitter chain. 

You can find my Reading Challenge scorecards here:

2014 Reading Challenge

2015 Reading Challenge

2016 Reading Challenge

2017 Reading Challenge

2018 Reading Challenge

2019 Reading Challenge