The poor state of the Indian state

The poor state of the Indian state

The pillars needed for a strong state

• Strong states, according to political and social historians, are founded on three pillars.
  • They are built with support from the people;
  • They have a strong administrative machinery to provide stability and deliver public services, and
  • They have the managerial ability to shape and implement change.

Support of the people

• Strong support of the people is essential.
• Mere election by a majority is not sufficient.
• Historically, as Francis Fukuyama points out in The Origins of Political Order, builders of strong states have bound people around a shared identity: ethnic, racial, or religious; Aryan, Han Chinese, Japanese, Muslim, Catholic Christian.
• The peoples’ identity is not formed by legal constitutions.
• Strong leaders who unite people around their shared identity are even given liberty by the people to change constitutional structures because they trust their leaders do it for the sake of citizens.
• Thus, dictators emerge loved by the people.

Can India unite its people amidst its diversity

• Confirming this thesis, Michael Cook points out, in Ancient Religions, Modern Politics, that builders of the Indian state have a difficult problem.
• It is hard to unite Indians around a shared ethnic or religious identity because, in addition to the diversity among India’s races and religions, there are entrenched caste divisions even within the Hindu religion of the majority.
• If Indians must be united to support a strong state, it must be around a modern, inclusive idea of India, as the Constitution imagined.
• The present ruling dispensation, while trying to force a majoritarian identity, is dividing Indians and weakening the state.

Indian bureaucracy’s role

• Fukuyama and other historians have highlighted the role that professional civil services have played in the formation of strong states, in Han China, the Ottoman empire, France, and Japan.
• India inherited the ‘iron frame’ of civil services from Britain.
• It was designed to provide stability and compliance with rules: it was not equipped to shape change, the third requirement of a good developmental state.
• Therefore, there are demands for its reform. Even the Prime Minister has complained that bureaucrats seem not to care for the country’s progress as much as entrepreneurs do.

The Great Debate

• Simultaneous management of both change and stability is necessary for the evolution of good states and societies.
• Unmanaged change can cause chaos, while too little change entrenches the established system.
• This was the essence of the ‘great debate’ in the 18th century between Edmund Burke, the leader of the conservative movement in Britain, and Thomas Paine, a thought leader of the French and American revolutions.
• It was also the ‘birth of Right and Left’ in politics, according to Yuval Levin in his eponymous book, The Great Debate.
• The great debate, about stability versus change for good governance, evolved into new arguments in the 20th century: capitalism versus socialism; and markets versus governments.

Domination of Capitalistic ideology

• By the end of the century, capitalism and markets were positioned in the public imagination as the prime movers of economic growth, and socialists and governments as retarders of progress.
• Capitalists took on the mantle of ‘wealth creators’, relegating governments to the role of ‘redistributors’.
• A popular slogan that wealth must be created before it can be redistributed leads to the conclusion that there should be less government when countries are poor, and more freedom for large, private, wealth creators.
• Moreover, with the logic that governments are stodgy, even public services such as health and education are handed over to private enterprises.
• The logic of economics is not the same as the logic of society.
• The ideology of private is good and public is bad requires that public servants should think like private sector managers — committed to growing the pie — and not think like socialists concerned about the condition of the people who are waiting for wealth to trickle down to them.
• To assist them, consultants from the private sector are brought inside government to help the state run more like a business corporation.

Where the focus should be

• Private corporations are not states designed for citizens.
  • CEOs are not elected by employees, and they have the authority to hire and fire workers.
  • Whereas leaders (even unelected ones) of states cannot lay off citizens to trim populations to fit the size of economies.
• The state must perform primarily for its poorest citizens for economic growth to be equitable and sustainable, and not for investors in corporations.
• Leaders of states must ensure that all citizens have opportunities to work and earn.
• They must also ensure that all citizens, even those who cannot afford it, have good health and education.
• Private sector managers move from one competitor to another, like professional mercenaries, serving the interests of owners of corporations wherever in the world they may be.
• Whereas public servants, whose mission is to build their nations and states, are expected to devote their lives to the care of citizens in their own countries.

GDP cannot be the scorecard (Way ahead)

• Economic justice, environmental sustainability, and improvement of the dignity of all citizens must be measured too, and these must improve much faster.
• The present ‘top up the top’ model of India’s economic growth, with hopes of trickle down, is not delivering these.
• Political leaders, administrators, and business leaders must work together, with a shared vision, to build an Indian state that is good for all citizens, especially the poorest.

Time is running out.