Why we have a cowardly state instead of a strong one

What is it about India that we keep yearning for a strong state, but all we end up doing is weaken it further with our actions? In recent years, most intellectuals have ritually lamented the failures of the Indian state. The last week has brought two more laments, one by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express, and another by Abhijit Banerjee in the Hindustan Times today. Last year, Gurcharan Das wrote an entire book on it (How India grows at night: A liberal case for a strong state). Every Indian should read all three. For they contain the kernels of why we are failing as a people. Indians, it seems, put their faith in people and their transient emotions, not institutions or the law or public reasoning. We want to be seen to act, but we don’t want to know the consequences of our actions. This is probably why we have never built a strong state – though we keep yearning for one. [caption id=“attachment_652076” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AFP.[/caption] I may be doing the three writers an injustice by oversimplifying, but this is my main takeout from the two articles and the book (which I haven’t read, but I base my views on an interview with Gurcharan Das we ran in _Firstpost_ .) Abhijit Banerjee believes we are becoming a Wannabe nation – where we want to emulate and fantasise about strength without basing it on any agreed principle or a strengthening of institutions. He cites the example of the execution of Afzal Guru. There may be good reasons for executing him, but, he says, the reason why we chose to do it was because we wanted to prove we were not a soft state. Writes Banerjee: “Hanging a man who is in a maximum security prison without telling anyone is the moral equivalent of squealing - even cowards can do it . The real challenge is now - what about the body, and the anger in the Valley? And there I sense a certain ambivalence - we want to be friends again, or if not friends (we haven’t been friends for a while have we?), back to the truce.” Even the Supreme Court confirmed the Guru death sentence saying nothing else will satisfy the “conscience of the nation.” What Banerjee suggests is that we can be a strong state based on fundamental liberal principles; but since we are not that, we fantasise about strength, and end up being neither strong nor hard (like Israel or China). We could have been a hard state and created a Tibet or West Bank out of Kashmir, but we chose not to be so. On the contrary, we weren’t even strong enough to prevent the complete ethnic cleansing of Pandits from the Valley. You can’t be a strong state just by acting inconsistently or remaining passive in response to developments. You have to discuss first principles. Banerjee underlines this point with the example of the recent Delhi gangrape, where one of the alleged rapists was a juvenile: “Its (the state’s) reaction to the public outcry when it turned out that one of the Delhi rapists was in fact a juvenile and, therefore, entitled to some degree of lenience, was not to explain to the public why any civilised legal system should have special protections for juveniles but to look for some loophole in the law so that he could hang with the rest.” The fact that the government rushed through with an anti-rape ordinance also shows why we think action, any action, is worth more than the principles underlying them. We act first in response to public demands, never mind the long-term consequences. This is why we have the best laws and the worst implementation. If some laws don’t work, we have even more laws. We have amended the constitution more than a 100 times – but the state has still failed to deliver. The US has gotten by with around 27 amendments in 237 years of independence, with its last constitutional amendment being made as far back as 1971. A nation run by laws and principles would have fewer laws and better implementation. Pratap Bhanu Mehta also stresses the importance of a strong state driven by principle and reason in the context of the Union budget. He wrote: “India’s future depends on the state of its state. And the evidence provided by the Union budget, particularly the economic survey, on the state is truly dispiriting. The state is now the black hole of reforms, swallowing everything thrown at it.” Take the case of inflation, which UPA-2 has been particularly unsuccessful in taming. The reason is an inability to be honest about the diagnosis. We have the PM and the finance minister blaming global winds for our problems – which means solutions do not lie with us. Or take the decision to tax the rich more. Mehta says he state “still does not seem to understand the importance of a framework for justifying its decisions in terms of public reason. The issue is not tax rates. A good case could have been made for taxing the super-rich. But it should have been made with the courage of conviction and on principled grounds. Instead, what we got was something like, ‘We are in trouble, so let us do this for a year and then we will roll back.’ This will hardly cement the state’s reputation as a credible taxer.” Put another way, the government’s actions are informed by expediency, not reason or principle. Gurcharan Das also makes the case for a strong state with this insight: we are a ground up nation, where change happens when people start pushing change themselves, never mind the law, but the downside is haphazard growth driven by exigency and necessity – not well-thought-out reasoning. He compares the case of the growth of Faridabad and Gurgaon. In the former, investments were planned by the state, but Faridabad never delivered on its promise.  Gurgaon turned out to be a success because the state was absent and the people decided they would fill in. Says Das: “Faridabad still hasn’t got the first wave of modernisation that came to India after 1991. It escaped Faridabad. Only now it’s kind of waking up. And Gurgaon did not have a municipality until 2009. This contrast really is in a way the story of India grows at night. And the fact is that the people of Gurgaon deserve a lot of credit because they didn’t sit and wait around. If the police didn’t show up they had private security guards. They even dug bore-wells to make up for the water. The state electricity board did not provide electricity, so they had generators and backup. They used couriers instead of the Post Office. Basically they rose on their own.” So is bottom-up growth better than state-mismanaged growth? Das’s answer is neither: “My point is that neither Faridabad nor Gurgaon is India’s model. Faridabad is a model where you have an excessive bureaucracy. Why did Faridabad not succeed? Because the politician and bureaucrat tried to squeeze everything out in the form of licences. “And Gurgaon’s disadvantage turned out to be its advantage. It had no government. So there was nobody to bribe. But at the end of the day Gurgaon would be better off, people would have happier if they had good sanitation, if they had a working transportation system, they had good roads, parks, power, etc.” India needs a strong state. But the critical question is: are we as a people willing to let principles and institutions become larger than individuals? When handing over the Constitution for adoption, BR Ambedkar had this to say: “I feel that the constitution is workable, it is flexible and it is strong enough to hold the country together both in peacetime and in wartime. Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that man was vile.” Are we vile? Or just too wily for our own good? Read the full Mehta article here, the Banerjee one here, and the Das interview here )