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A
common past-time in the drawing rooms of India’s middle class is
the pervasive debate on who is to blame for the sorry state of the
nation’s economy - the bureaucrat or the politician!
Some
blame the politician. It is the self-seeking neta, they say,
who has introduced cronyism, ad hockery, caste and religion based
populism and money as the way of getting into power and retaining
it. The result is the massive and now systemic inefficiencies and
corruption that are evident in every facet of a citizen’s life.
Others
blame the bureaucrat. It is the self-interested administrator, they
proclaim, whose mafia-like biradari is responsible for the
convenient twisting of rules, the elitist mindset, and arrogance and
non-transparency of procedures which help them attain and maintain
control over the machinery of governance. The result is the same,
intensified and systemic inefficiencies and corruption that are
evident in every facet of a citizen’s life.
It
is not difficult to guess who is on which side of the debate. But
that is not the point. They are all correct, though they see only a
part of the larger picture. Politicians, administrators and drawing
room elites make hay while the other 800 million or so people
helplessly weep their lives away. "A plague on both your
houses" is one possible response. After all, for the average
citizen, they are both sarkar — representatives of the
"government". The rulers of today.
Another,
more constructive, response is to find ways to revive the
institutions of democracy so that no one, political leader or
administrator, can hold the country to ransom and ignore the
interests of the people.
One
fundamental source of the systemic problem lies squarely in the
Constitution we adopted soon after independence from colonial rule.
Unfortunately, other than the "Fundamental Rights" section
at the front of the document, the bulk of it is simply a
regurgitation, much of it verbatim, of the colonial instruments of
governance - whose primary purpose, understandably, was to subdue
and exploit the wealth of the colony, not to nurture its sense of
nationhood.
Ever
since 1950, the dynamic tension set up under the Constitution
between politician and administrator (which was intended by the
founding fathers to provide a healthy system of checks and balances)
has been gradually subverted into a mutually supportive relationship
where both can rip off the system at the expense of the public. Read
any Indian newspaper and see how much trust the people have in their
government. This is not, as is often suggested by those in
government, because of the propensity of the media to rake muck. It
is because there is much muck to rake.
Although
most people in India, even those in positions of power, control or
wealth, would like to see a more functional economy, few are willing
to work for the changes needed to make this happen. Only the people
themselves will have to mobilize the resources to do this. The
question is who will mobilize them!
The
answer is: the same person who mobilized the people to demand and
attain national independence: Mahatma Gandhi.
What
we now need is a Gandhian democracy, underwritten by a Gandhian
Constitution that introduces a genuine participation in governance
of all our fellow citizens. Such a democracy would be based on the
four sovereign rights of our people neglected in the present one:
the rights to information, consultation, participation and
referendum.
And
who can mobilize those in power to introduce a Gandhian
Constitution? People who care about the future of our country, of
course: individuals, institutions, the civil society. Once the
people are empowered by such a Constitution, they will be able to
mobilize their own social, economic and political resources to bring
about the fair, just and equitable society we all deserve.
The
time for drawing room debates on who is worse - politician or
bureaucrat - is over: place them where they belong, under the
people, and they will automatically perform much better. q
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