Authors: John Elliott

Implosion (65 page)

BOOK: Implosion

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17
. Speaking in September 2012 at an Observer Research Foundation seminar in Delhi on ‘Chatham House’ rules

18
.
https://www.ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/anti-america-and-anti-corruption-are-key-issues-as-india-general-election-looms/

19
. ‘Maid in Manhattan drama exposes rift’,
Financial Times
, 20 December 2013,
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e0bfdc54-6999-11e3-aba3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2otaUNY9F

20
. Seema Sirobhi and Samir Saran, ‘Looking beyond the honeymoon’,
The Hindu
, 29 September 2012,
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/looking-beyond-the-honeymoon/article3946259.ece

21
. Conversation with JE, September 2012

22
. Speaking at Brookings-FICCI Dialogue on the India-US Strategic Partnership, Delhi, 10 October 2012

VII
INDIA’S TRYST WITH REALITY

Conclusions

India has been in a state of denial for years. It is rightly proud of its vibrant and chaotic democracy that has survived and been accepted almost without question across this vast and diverse country for over 65 years. But it is in denial because it has not been prepared to recognise that the vagaries of democracy are providing smokescreens that obfuscate many of the negative aspects of how the country works. Democracy creates an environment where jugaad fixes are easy, and where the failures of the system in terms of poor governance and weakened institutions make the fatalism of chalta hai a welcome safehaven. Democracy has therefore become an unchallengeable fig leaf covering what is not achieved. It allows the negative and underperforming aspects of Indian life to flourish, and it blocks changes and acts as an excuse for what is not being achieved.

The country can no longer afford to allow this to continue. If it does, systems will deteriorate further, possibly leading to implosions as the functioning of institutions is undermined and destroyed. India is far too large and diverse for a revolution to gain hold and dramatically change the way that it is run, but implosion, where government authority crumbles, systems break down, society becomes more lawless, and investment and growth slumps, can already be seen.

This is not an argument for doing away with democracy, but to recognise and change the negative way in which it operates. Democracy has helped to hold India together since independence, providing an outlet for people’s frustrations and anger, sometimes ousting prime ministers, chief ministers and their governments. Though far from perfect, it has given the great mass of the population a feeling that they have a say in how the country is run, however faint and rare that may be and however much they are cheated and maltreated by those they elect. But it has also provided an excuse and a cover for the gradual criminalisation of politics that has been allowed to grow for decades to such an extent that election campaigns are distorted, large bribes are paid when coalitions are being formed, and many members of parliament and state assemblies have criminal charges pending against them, often for serious offences.

Democracy is also used as an excuse for ineffective government. The most recent examples of this have come with the coalitions of the past two decades, especially in the past ten years. Manmohan Singh has attempted to pass off prime ministerial vacillation in policy and questionable decision-making as the inevitable result of the ‘compulsions of coalition government’,
¹and has allowed opposition from other parties to become an excuse for years of policy delays. But, while the recent years have been bad, the problems are deeper and will not be solved simply by switching to another prime minister or political party that carries the baggage of the past. The mission of legitimate governments should be to create inclusive economic development with a sharing of wealth and governance by strong, impartial institutions. On that count, India has failed as corruption and bad governance have facilitated the emergence of a self-serving political system, a politicised bureaucracy, an unprofessional judiciary, and mindless and often cruel policing.

Consequently, the role of politics, democracy, governments, institutions, laws and regulations, which were lauded 20 to 30 years ago as India’s special strengths, have been progressively undermined. They have been replaced by arbitrary powers wielded by individuals, be they ministers, bureaucrats, policemen, or regional politicians and gang bosses. Speaking with the experience of having worked with India’s oil and other ministries as a former chairman of Shell India, Vikram Singh Mehta says institutions are ‘so hollowed out that there is a vacuum and we don’t know who is exercising power’.
²Senior bureaucrats talk about the difficulty of getting officials down the line to follow established procedures and implement decisions. Ministers and officials are reluctant to write notes on policy papers and take decisions because of possible later accusations, fair or unfair, of corruption or other faults, as was seen in the coal and other scandals. Democracy is also a drag on development because, while it has rightly opened the way for dissent and opposition to projects, no effort had been made to curb its misuse by vested interests who corruptly manipulate policies and government action. This has contributed to India becoming an increasingly unpredictable, unreliable, uncompetitive and even difficult place to live and do development and business.

Ungovernable India

‘India has always been ungovernable – the only difference now is that we want it to be so’, a leading newspaper editor said to me, only half-jokingly, when I was writing an article for the
New Statesman
in 2002 and a BJP-led government was in power.
³The first part of that remark reflected the view that India has always been too large to be run efficiently from the national capital and that partnership was needed, but rarely achieved, with state governments.

There has also always been a sense that India’s massive problems of poverty and backwardness defy effective government and are too big to be solved – a problem that is growing as aspirations expand and several million people flood the job market every year. I suggested that acceptance of the ungovernable idea stemmed from the country’s ‘fatalistic and (traditionally) easy-going Hindu culture’ – a suggestion that provoked intense criticism when the article was reprinted in
Outlook
magazine. In this book, I have taken that view further with the theme that jugaad and chalta hai provide the approaches of quick fixes and fatalism that resist basic change.

It is, of course, possible to put a positive spin on India’s way of doing things. Shivshankar Menon, Manmohan Singh’s national security adviser, tried to do this in his November 2011 lecture on foreign policy. Answering a question about the turmoil in Indian politics and government, he said: ‘We love arguing about it [India’s problems]. We love bringing ourselves down ... that’s up to us. It’s part of the way we do our business. We make a huge amount of noise ... I tell my Chinese friends, “We do in public everything that you do in private – all the arguing, all the policy making”. At the end of it, after getting to all the extremes, we come somehow to the middle and we find our way through, and we normally find a good solution, so I’m not worried by turmoil – turmoil is creative, tension is creative, and it works.’

The second part of the editor’s remark raised a more vital point – that powerful vested interests do not want India’s problems to be tackled and therefore impede effective government. The elite, I suggested in the article, had shuddered since 1947 at the prospect of the poorly fed and poorly educated half of the population rapidly entering mainstream society. That elite has expanded massively in recent years to include the newly rich and powerful, who have their own vested interests in resisting change. Sooner or later, I wrote, the electorate would tire of non-performing governments. Then a new grouping would emerge, led by younger politicians ‘probably involving the Congress without Sonia Gandhi in the lead’. India would then move forward again, as it always does. Quite possibly, a national crisis would suddenly trigger change and help to set the country on a new course, as had happened in 1991. I thought, however, that the dominant picture would continue to be the dichotomy of a country that was becoming internationally important in geo-political and economic terms, but whose democracy was becoming anarchic. That was not the India I had seen when I arrived in India in the 1980s when newspaper headlines and politicians’ speeches were peppered with phrases saying the country was ‘poised for take-off ‘ and ‘on the springboard for success’.

The question now is whether India has reached that point when it will move forward. Certainly, the government of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi has led people to ‘tire of non-performing governments’. There is a generational change in prospect with Rahul Gandhi, 42, emerging at the top of the Congress party to challenge Narendra Modi, the 63-year-old controversial and abrasive chief minister of Gujarat who is the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. But they are both being challenged by a popular movement that started with the country-wide anti-corruption protests three years ago and led on to the mass demonstrations over rape and the treatment of women at the end of 2012. Out of this emerged the Aam Aadmi Party, led by Arvind Kejriwal, 45, which has provided a platform for people to become part of a movement that could be an alternative to self-serving and corrupt national and regional political parties. India’s middle classes – especially the young – are not (yet) cohesive enough to be mobilised to fight collectively for change, but they are angry enough to spread the AAP’s presence. How far Kejriwal can go, having conquered New Delhi and become chief minister, is hard to judge. The AAP’s best chance of making a difference would be to grow as a minority party that maybe forces established politicians to change the way they behave.

In his independence speech in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru used the memorable phrase ‘tryst with destiny’. India is now facing its tryst with reality, not just over immediate problems of economic growth and a weak government, but over its long-term failure to tackle mounting problems in the way that democracy functions. On my first visit to India in 1982, my driver from the Taj Hotel in Bombay had gone up the wrong side of a central reservation on the road to Pune. When I asked him why, his charming reply was, ‘Don’t worry, sahib, both roads go same place’. That, I had soon learned, was a metaphor for the way India likes to work, but it is no longer apt. There are choices to be made about which way India will go – whether democracy will continue to provide a cover for the country’s inequality, injustice, corruption and appalling governance, or whether new and younger political leaders and a more vocal expanding middle class will ensure that India, with all its advantages of history, culture, brain power and aspiration, avoids the risk of implosion.

Notes

1
. Examples of Manmohan Singh using the phrase are here
http://www.mydigitalfc.com/news/i-am-not-blocking-deal-jpc-says-pm-750
and
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/upa-government-bows-to-allies-mamata-banerjee-m-karunanidhi/1/178501.html

2
. Vikram S. Mehta, now chairman, Brookings India, in conversation with JE, and in an article, ‘Dimming of Brand India, Indian Express’, 2 September 2013,
http://m.indianexpress.com/news/dimming-of-brand-india/1163302/

3
. JE, ‘A BMW kills six, no questions asked. India has become ungovernable. But who cares? Good government might threaten the elite’,
New Statesman
, 22 April 2002,
http://www.newstatesman.com/node/142790?quicktabs_most_read=0

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