ET BureauIntroducing "Poke Me", a new Saturday edit page feature in The Economic Times. This feature will first appear every Wednesday morning on ETonline. It will be reproduced in the edit page of the Saturday edition of the newspaper with a pick of readers' best comments. (Readers' comments published in ET)
So be poked and fire in your comments to us right away. Comments reproduced in the paper will be the ones that support or oppose the views expressed here intelligently. Feel free to add reference links etc. in support of your comments.
Decades later when biographers jostle to give the “inside story” of the rise of Arvind Kejriwal from a bored bureaucrat to the Great Helmsman of the World's Largest Democracy, a question would haunt them: Would he still have taken the political plunge if he hadn't witnessed the inside workings of a hopelessly corrupt system from the vantage point of an Indian Revenue Service officer?
You don't need to be an IRS bureaucrat to realise the incestuous relationship between politics and corruption in India. Grease money and patronage form the warp and weft of Indian polity. But if you are tasked with keeping track of incomes and expenses of the legitimate kind, there's no escaping the daily reality that you live in a country where corruption is the very engine that propels its democracy. For a sensitive, idealistic mind, that's the unkindest cut.
Therein lies the rub. No matter whatever noises that Kejriwal & Co makes, they are only going to be another brick in the wall with their one-point entry into mainstream politics. Unless, of course, they let go the caterpillar and cheer the nascent butterfly flapping its wings.
Kejriwal & Co have sought suggestions from supporters on possible names for the political party they plan to launch. Let's assume it's going to be called the Anti-Corruption Party (ACP). Now, just how does ACP differ from India Against Corruption (IAC), the platform through which they raised their demands?
The cardinal difference would lie in the goals. While IAC was content at raising the issue of corruption and black money and arm-twisting the government of the day to clamp down, ACP will have an altogether different aim: to capture state power, as is the wont with any other political party. IAC shot arrows at the dartboard. ACP, if it succeeds, will be the dartboard.
To succeed in that endeavour, ACP will have to climb the first mountain: political funding. Corruption in India attained industrial scale thanks to the complete opacity of political funding. Political parties generate funds for their electoral expenses through plundering the exchequer, sale of patronage and plain extortion. Those who fund Indian politics do so anonymously, in return for patronage; parties and politicians that get funds are happy to return the favour.
With a little bit of imagination, ACP could circumvent this. They can adopt a Barack Obama-like campaign routed through social networks or solicit micro payments on a mega scale using the iTunes model. Either way, ACP will have to go to the masses, unlike IAC that had classes rushing in. But that's easier said than done.
ACP would have already realised by now that its one-point programme of weeding out corruption doesn't have many takers beyond cities and social networks. And it's not because corruption doesn't affect the rural poor – in fact it affects them more than middle class – but they have other serious livelihood issues to contend with.
IAC could afford to hold forth on corruption, calling names. But the political party ACP should understand that corruption is not a curable disease afflicting bureaucrats and politicians who populate New Delhi. Graft takes birth and thrives in polity as well as culture – Baksheesh, the Arabic word for charitable giving, is today part of English lexicon, thanks to its Indian adaptation that is the grand daddy of chai-paani.
IAC fought for short-term goals: Janlokpal, bringing back black money et al. But ACP, if it's true to its core focus, would need to look at ways to find long-term solutions to graft. And that would mean looking beyond the ‘C' word and embracing larger, loftier goals.
For starters, Kejriwal should probe why public assertiveness is such a scarce commodity in India – rural or urban. For the world's largest democracy, it should be a natural trait. But it isn't.
The fact is in the world's largest democracy, people power have been replaced by patronage power, thanks to the politics we have practiced over the last 65 years. Rights-based welfare schemes are a case in point. NREGA, the world's largest employment guarantee scheme, should have taken wings in India by now, seven years after it was rolled out. Minimum wage as a concept should have been de rigueur in the remotest of our hamlets, wage parity between genders should been a reality, and our drought-prone areas should have been converted to picture-post card fertile lands. And if that's not the case, blame our political parties, and not the programme implementers.
The very fact that NREGA guarantees a right-to-work as and when demanded by people needs to be drilled into the heads of India's poor who are not used to Constitutional rights coming their way. A government can perform this awareness role only to a certain extent – the state bureaucracy is not equipped for sustained campaigns. This is the terrain of the political parties – in this case the Congress, the party responsible for the programme. An impassioned campaign by Congress cadres in the nook and cranny of this country raising awareness of this aspect of the scheme – emboldened masses would have taken care of the programme implementation part – would have done wonders for the scheme, the people, and of course, the party. But that was not to be.
That points to the larger malaise haunting Indian democracy: this last mile syndrome. Corruption, nepotism and patronage are only a few symptoms.
ACP could dig in its heel here. For Kejriwal, all those years spent in making Right to Information a reality, should come in handy.
But to tackle the last mile syndrome, you'd need a feast of democracy, not fast.
So be poked and fire in your comments to us right away. Comments reproduced in the paper will be the ones that support or oppose the views expressed here intelligently. Feel free to add reference links etc. in support of your comments.
Decades later when biographers jostle to give the “inside story” of the rise of Arvind Kejriwal from a bored bureaucrat to the Great Helmsman of the World's Largest Democracy, a question would haunt them: Would he still have taken the political plunge if he hadn't witnessed the inside workings of a hopelessly corrupt system from the vantage point of an Indian Revenue Service officer?
You don't need to be an IRS bureaucrat to realise the incestuous relationship between politics and corruption in India. Grease money and patronage form the warp and weft of Indian polity. But if you are tasked with keeping track of incomes and expenses of the legitimate kind, there's no escaping the daily reality that you live in a country where corruption is the very engine that propels its democracy. For a sensitive, idealistic mind, that's the unkindest cut.
Therein lies the rub. No matter whatever noises that Kejriwal & Co makes, they are only going to be another brick in the wall with their one-point entry into mainstream politics. Unless, of course, they let go the caterpillar and cheer the nascent butterfly flapping its wings.
Kejriwal & Co have sought suggestions from supporters on possible names for the political party they plan to launch. Let's assume it's going to be called the Anti-Corruption Party (ACP). Now, just how does ACP differ from India Against Corruption (IAC), the platform through which they raised their demands?
The cardinal difference would lie in the goals. While IAC was content at raising the issue of corruption and black money and arm-twisting the government of the day to clamp down, ACP will have an altogether different aim: to capture state power, as is the wont with any other political party. IAC shot arrows at the dartboard. ACP, if it succeeds, will be the dartboard.
To succeed in that endeavour, ACP will have to climb the first mountain: political funding. Corruption in India attained industrial scale thanks to the complete opacity of political funding. Political parties generate funds for their electoral expenses through plundering the exchequer, sale of patronage and plain extortion. Those who fund Indian politics do so anonymously, in return for patronage; parties and politicians that get funds are happy to return the favour.
With a little bit of imagination, ACP could circumvent this. They can adopt a Barack Obama-like campaign routed through social networks or solicit micro payments on a mega scale using the iTunes model. Either way, ACP will have to go to the masses, unlike IAC that had classes rushing in. But that's easier said than done.
ACP would have already realised by now that its one-point programme of weeding out corruption doesn't have many takers beyond cities and social networks. And it's not because corruption doesn't affect the rural poor – in fact it affects them more than middle class – but they have other serious livelihood issues to contend with.
IAC could afford to hold forth on corruption, calling names. But the political party ACP should understand that corruption is not a curable disease afflicting bureaucrats and politicians who populate New Delhi. Graft takes birth and thrives in polity as well as culture – Baksheesh, the Arabic word for charitable giving, is today part of English lexicon, thanks to its Indian adaptation that is the grand daddy of chai-paani.
IAC fought for short-term goals: Janlokpal, bringing back black money et al. But ACP, if it's true to its core focus, would need to look at ways to find long-term solutions to graft. And that would mean looking beyond the ‘C' word and embracing larger, loftier goals.
For starters, Kejriwal should probe why public assertiveness is such a scarce commodity in India – rural or urban. For the world's largest democracy, it should be a natural trait. But it isn't.
The fact is in the world's largest democracy, people power have been replaced by patronage power, thanks to the politics we have practiced over the last 65 years. Rights-based welfare schemes are a case in point. NREGA, the world's largest employment guarantee scheme, should have taken wings in India by now, seven years after it was rolled out. Minimum wage as a concept should have been de rigueur in the remotest of our hamlets, wage parity between genders should been a reality, and our drought-prone areas should have been converted to picture-post card fertile lands. And if that's not the case, blame our political parties, and not the programme implementers.
The very fact that NREGA guarantees a right-to-work as and when demanded by people needs to be drilled into the heads of India's poor who are not used to Constitutional rights coming their way. A government can perform this awareness role only to a certain extent – the state bureaucracy is not equipped for sustained campaigns. This is the terrain of the political parties – in this case the Congress, the party responsible for the programme. An impassioned campaign by Congress cadres in the nook and cranny of this country raising awareness of this aspect of the scheme – emboldened masses would have taken care of the programme implementation part – would have done wonders for the scheme, the people, and of course, the party. But that was not to be.
That points to the larger malaise haunting Indian democracy: this last mile syndrome. Corruption, nepotism and patronage are only a few symptoms.
ACP could dig in its heel here. For Kejriwal, all those years spent in making Right to Information a reality, should come in handy.
But to tackle the last mile syndrome, you'd need a feast of democracy, not fast.
( Originally published on Aug 08, 2012 )
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