One is a ‘political entrepreneur’ like the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) supremo and Telangana Chief Minister Kalvakuntla Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR), one can wilfully mismanage, destroy, even loot the enterprise’s finances and dishonour every promise made to its stakeholders (voters) and employees, break every law, every rule, and yet don over the enterprise unquestioned.
It is every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare, especially in the early stages of their journey. It can lead to employees deserting their enterprise in droves, especially the most talented and valuable ones. It can have a long-lasting adverse impact on their enterprise’s ability to attract talent in the future. Moreover, it could expose them to costly, protracted litigations that seem never-ending. It can cause panic attacks due to fear of harassment by regulatory agencies, even more than the fines and penalties one is bound to pay them lawfully. Eventually, it could destroy their entire enterprise and even send them to jail.
Yes, reneging on contractual promises made to employees – be it paying salaries in time, paying bonuses, delivering on promised salary hikes, contributing the employer’s share of the Provident Fund (PF) or insurance (ESIC), or timely paying of taxes that are due to the government can lead to devastating effects mentioned earlier.
But all that applies only to entrepreneurs, meaning private employers. They may have created hundreds, thousands, or even lakhs of jobs, brought a lot of innovations to the market, accelerated the economy’s growth, taken up initiatives under corporate social responsibility, and even earned foreign exchange for the country. Still, none of those contributions will save the entrepreneur. Politicians, bureaucrats, the law, or trade union leaders will not side with the entrepreneur unless they are well ‘connected’. That’s how free enterprise and our system work.
On the other hand, if one is a ‘political entrepreneur’ like the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) supremo and Telangana Chief Minister Kalvakuntla Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR), one can wilfully mismanage, destroy, even loot the enterprise’s finances and dishonour every promise made to its stakeholders (voters) and employees, break every law, every rule, and yet don over the enterprise unquestioned. All one needs is the uncanny ability to achieve two things. Firstly, concentrate power in one’s hand by eliminating all political opposition while making every institution pliable: the higher-level bureaucracy, the police, the trade union leadership, to the left-wing political establishments like the Communist parties who never tire singing paens to labour rights. Secondly, overwhelm everyone with propaganda that the political entrepreneur, in this case, the Chief Minister, has achieved what no other leader has achieved anytime or anywhere in the country.
The plight of around 9,500 Junior Panchayat Secretaries (JPS), essential for providing various government services to the rural public, recruited four years ago by the Telangana government, is a case in point. The JPSs have been striking for the past two weeks, demanding the regularisation of their services. When it hired the JPSs, the government imposed a three-year probationary period, after which their services were supposed to reviewed for regularisation. However, it has been four years, and the government led by KCR is unwilling to either start the process of their regularisation or open a dialogue with them.
Instead, the KCR government threatened the ill-paid hapless JPSs with termination unless they dropped their demands and ended their strike without any certainty about their future. In the words of the Secretary to the government: “Regularisation of service of any contract employee cannot be for all but will be subject to the assessment and evaluation of their performance”. Of course, no one disputes the logic. But what is appalling is the government’s claim that even four years was insufficient to assess the JSPs’ performance. The same Secretary, an IAS officer, is aware that even for IAS officers, the highest-level recruits, the government only needs two years of probationary service to evaluate their performance.
The JSPs’ situation is not an isolated case. The government’s approach was similar when the RTC employees went on strike. KCR adamantly refused to talk with the striking employees and declared them “self-dismissed”. After 52 days and the death of 25 of their despondent colleagues, the RTC employees resumed duties without any assurances. Notable was that until then, the government had not paid a single payment towards their PF accounts since the RTC’s bifurcation.
Employees were at the forefront of Telangana agitation, and separate statehood wouldn’t have been possible without their participation. Yet, KCR, who rode on their support to become the Chief Minister, had repeatedly treated them with contempt while reneging on his obligations towards them.
If any private employer had destroyed their enterprise’s financial health and could not pay salaries on time, diverted their PF funds, and reneged on promises to regularise services and the like, like how KCR did, KCR and his officers would have already filed multiple cases and set the law in motion against the entrepreneur. At the same time, every politician, especially the Communists and trade union leaders, would have taken the podium to demonise the entrepreneur as a cheat and demanded the harshest punishment. One can’t miss the irony – in a country where the government is supposed to be the ideal and preferred employer.
(The author is BJP
TS spokesperson)
