01-03-2006, 08:46 PM
http://www.cpasind.com/articles/mg-05-07-0...iled-state.html
Is India too a Failed State?
Mohan Guruswamy
July 12, 2004
The term "failed state" entered our lexicon, initially, in the context of Somalia, Afghanistan, and now increasingly for Iraq. It connotes a state of national being where the State is bereft of any authority and power. Authority and power are often confused as being the same. They are not. Authority derives from constitutional legitimacy and respect for the institutions such as the judiciary, parliament, permanent bureaucracy and press, whereas power is really the power to coerce and enforce the will of the state. Authority is abstract while power is physical. It is not to say that in a failed state the power to coerce or enforce does not exist. For instance in Somalia there are more guns in the hands of the various warring clans and then a legitimately constituted state would have ever required. Ditto for Afghanistan. Ditto for Iraq. In these countries the symbols of statehood are much in evidence. For instance, there is a currency and people trade with each other. Goods are imported and exported. Services like electricity, water and transport are still available. Schools and courts function. There is even foreign representation. For instance Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have embassies in New Delhi. Yet we call them failed states because the people who call the shots or more often fire the shots are without any constitutional, legal, moral, divine or civilizational authority. They are in a state in which societies existed before the advent of the modern state, as we now know it. That they are nationalities or even states is not in doubt, but the point is that they have failed to be states where constitutional authority reigns and power does not grow from the barrel of a gun.
In medieval times the state mainly existed to enrich the King and the durbar and increase their power and area of domination. Not so the modern state. Implicit in the notion of a modern state is that the state is tasked with not only providing order, but also to improve living standards and transform society in keeping with the vision of its founding fathers or philosopher kings. Thus, while the ability to provide order is important, to judge whether a state has failed or only partially passed one has to judge it by the other broad parameter also. On the order question India is certainly not in the Somalia league. It is not even in the Pakistan league where the internal situation is so appalling that many western observers have taken to calling it a failed state.
Yet our own performance in this area is not something we can be proud off. In many parts of the country there is hardly any order. J&K, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and significant parts of UP and AP readily come to mind. Even in the states where we consider there is some order what is the record of the police in fighting crime? Recorded crime in Delhi was up by 55% last year. In Mumbai and Delhi, the police have had to resort to extra-legal methods, euphemistically called "encounters", to curb criminals. So bad is the situation that the press and society generally lauds this, apparently not realising that such activities have a tendency to go out of hand and that it is only a matter of time before it starts devouring the innocent also. Instead of exposing the essential criminality of a Rajbir Singh of the Delhi Police or Daya Naik in Mumbai, the media entertains us with stories of their close encounters in which bullets seem to fly in only one direction. We never hear of a policeman getting even a scratch in these encounters when it is well known that most cant shoot straight.
Only about a third of major crimes like murder and dacoity are solved and even less than 10% end with convictions. On a more mundane level, not many people stop at redlights anymore. To stop is considered foolish, so much so at the half-year point nearly 800 persons have already perished in Delhi due to automobile related accidents. Not much of a record. It has been a steep descent from Sardar Patel I to Sardar Patel II and then some more now.
The institutions from which our state should derive authority are in a poor way. It is commonly believed that the quality of justice, particularly, in our lower courts is suspect. Cases are routinely rigged, and it is not always the police that are at it. There is the case of Sanjay Dutt. Here is a man caught with two AK-47 automatic rifles capable of firing 600 rounds per minute, and he is set to be excused because his late father wanted it, and more importantly Bal Thackeray wanted it. In Kashmir or Manipur just the possession of such lethal weapons will invite an "encounter". Not only this Sanjay Dutt gets to have dinner with Prime Minister Vajpayee in New York. The "party with a difference" had as an MP a person who has been "acquitted" of the murder of the husband of the woman he now openly lives with. The murder is apparently unsolvable. Another BJP MP has been known to be an associate of the Dawood Ibrahim gang that set off the Mumbai bomb blasts. All other parties too have similarly experienced persons to offer to the people as lawmakers.
You cannot turn to the courts for justice either, though there is now a growing tendency to do so. As a consequence several million cases clog the higher courts. This has had a devastating impact on orderly civil and commercial transactions. The delays in justice routinely lead to broken contracts and agreements with little recourse to the victims. Even the state has joined in exploiting this. Witness the manner in which government departments and companies routinely hang on to properties where the leases have long expired. In fact it is so well established and accepted a practice that not to do it is to invite suspicions of an underhand deal! We have created a system in which encourages distrust. It is small wonder then that after politics, law is the most lucrative profession.
A friend who lives in Haryana was recently relating a harrowing story of how he had to pay an Inspector of Police to get a case of theft registered. This is commonplace. It is not surprising that common people without the wherewithal to get expensive and slow justice seek other avenues. In Mumbai they go to godfathers like Arun Gawli MLA, in western UP they go to the caste panchayat, in Bihar they go the caste Mafia leader, and in Telangana and Bastar they go to the Peoples War Group. The supreme irony is that in more often the quality of justice delivered by the informal system is considered by the parties concerned to be superior to that offered by the constitutional legal system. Even policemen seem to prefer these to the constitutionally ordained system when seeking justice.
Corruption is so well entrenched and accepted that one is not required to dwell upon it. The phrase "to enjoy power" has acquired an entirely different dimension to it. The critical thing is that no action of the state, however highly placed the decision-maker, escapes suspicion. Corruption, as Ms Indira Gandhi once self-servingly pointed out, is a worldwide phenomenon. Compared to the scale, on which the Suharto, Marcos and Bhutto families prospered, the activities of the Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee families, real or adopted, were small change. They can even be condoned as inevitable and a small price to pay in a country where sycophancy and flexible notions of morality are inherent cultural traits. That is if the people are benefiting from the state.
The record of the Indian State in improving the living standards of the majority of its people is abysmal. India continues to languish among the bottom five of the World Bank's annual Development Report. Almost 70% of the Indian nation lives below a reasonable poverty line that would factor balanced diet, shelter, access to education and healthcare, and basic civic amenities. Nearly 60% of all Indians are illiterate. Infant mortality is 137 per 1000 births. On all infrastructure indices we are well below, forget China, even that failed state -Pakistan! The central government earmarks less for health and education than the cumulative pay raise the bureaucracy got last year - Rs.9000 crores. As a matter of fact the State spends more, now much more on the bureaucracy - a whopping Rs.170, 000 crores for all central and state government employees each year. That is a good 10% of the GDP and it is growing. Ever wondered why the service sector is doing well? It is because Public Administration is growing at 11% each year. If we remove this growth from the annual growth of 5-6% about which all our sarkari and pink paper economists crow about, you will get a real growth much closer to the Hindu growth rate of 3% we used to deride!
The bureaucracy has a self-serving methodology to determine poverty. This is 2200 and 2400 calories respectively for urban and rural areas. That is if you are thrown foodgrains that can deliver this much of energy each day, you are no longer poor. Given the rise in foodgrains production and the states ability to make the much smaller investment by way of food subsidies, it is no wonder that every successive regime is able to crow that poverty levels are coming down.
In Dr.Manmohan Singh's last year as Finance Minister the government reported that poverty was down to 19% and tried to make us believe that the benefits of its industrial liberalisation policies were trickling down to the people. An Oxfam report and studies by leading economists like Dr.Tendulkar revealed that due to inflation and contraction of the economy in the initial years of "liberalisation" simple economic logic says that poverty levels actually went up. At that time the BJP said that it would use more parameters to determine poverty. Such a step would have resulted in targeting poverty alleviation differently. Rather than focus on providing just foodgrains, the state would also have to focus on education, health, water, work, transport, sewage and so on. With an expanded focus we would see more investments made in the rural sector, as it is here ultimately that the war on poverty has to be waged. Only by improving living standards and by providing more opportunities in rural areas can the tide of the disastrous urbanization, we are witnessing, will be controlled. On the basis of this parameter, after fifty seven years as a modern state and with very clear non-realization of the founding fathers dreams of becoming a modernized state, we are clearly a failed state.
The failures of the first fifty years very clearly set out the task for the BJP, India's first truly non-Congress government. This must be emphasized since when it the BJP came to power, the Congress truly symbolized corruption, venality and an uncaring leadership. Instead of change we got five more long years of the same. We saw the same monumental corruption. The same concentration of all powers. The same uncaring attitudes to the real problems of the country. The same kind of statism. Only, instead of a doting father, we now had a doting father-in-law. Liberalisation became Suhartoism instead of an all-encompassing reform process.
The two UPA budgets have made no significant shift in the general direction of the previous decade. Worse, the actual spending reveals a decline of spending on critical sectors. Even today the Central Government spends less on Agriculture and Irrigation than it spends on Civil Aviation. To get a better fix on the priorities of our political and bureaucratic elite, consider this. About 70% of our people are dependent on agriculture, which still accounts for 43% of the GNP, whereas there were only 12 million air-passengers last.
Today Delhi has been determined to have the highest levels of air pollution in the world. The Ganges is so polluted that health experts have determined that exposure of an even a small wound to it will result in infection. All urban, human and industrial wastes routinely flow into water-bodies and thence into the groundwater or into rivers. All over the country groundwater tables are falling alarmingly as the state has abandoned its responsibilities to provide for proper water harvesting and irrigation. The area under forest cover is rapidly dwindling. Felling of forests takes place openly with the connivance of forest officials and politicians. On a recent visit to the forests around Srisailam, which are part of the biggest Tiger Reserve in the country, this writer was not able to spot a single teak tree in forests that once abounded in them. They have been selectively cut. Even more sadly the Tiger population in this reserve has fallen by half in the last four years. Admittedly there will be some cost if we have to develop and advance industrially. But the question is have the people benefited by any of this?
Over centralization is not without its costs. Amartya Sen showed that famines in Communist China have cost the lives of more than 20 million people, because the people at the top who make all the decisions get to know about what is happening on the ground very late. Having a free media in India should help in highlighting our plight and compelling the regime to react. But what is the media focused upon? It seems to be less on real people and their issues and more on Paris Hilton. Who is Paris Hilton anyway?
Is India too a Failed State?
Mohan Guruswamy
July 12, 2004
The term "failed state" entered our lexicon, initially, in the context of Somalia, Afghanistan, and now increasingly for Iraq. It connotes a state of national being where the State is bereft of any authority and power. Authority and power are often confused as being the same. They are not. Authority derives from constitutional legitimacy and respect for the institutions such as the judiciary, parliament, permanent bureaucracy and press, whereas power is really the power to coerce and enforce the will of the state. Authority is abstract while power is physical. It is not to say that in a failed state the power to coerce or enforce does not exist. For instance in Somalia there are more guns in the hands of the various warring clans and then a legitimately constituted state would have ever required. Ditto for Afghanistan. Ditto for Iraq. In these countries the symbols of statehood are much in evidence. For instance, there is a currency and people trade with each other. Goods are imported and exported. Services like electricity, water and transport are still available. Schools and courts function. There is even foreign representation. For instance Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have embassies in New Delhi. Yet we call them failed states because the people who call the shots or more often fire the shots are without any constitutional, legal, moral, divine or civilizational authority. They are in a state in which societies existed before the advent of the modern state, as we now know it. That they are nationalities or even states is not in doubt, but the point is that they have failed to be states where constitutional authority reigns and power does not grow from the barrel of a gun.
In medieval times the state mainly existed to enrich the King and the durbar and increase their power and area of domination. Not so the modern state. Implicit in the notion of a modern state is that the state is tasked with not only providing order, but also to improve living standards and transform society in keeping with the vision of its founding fathers or philosopher kings. Thus, while the ability to provide order is important, to judge whether a state has failed or only partially passed one has to judge it by the other broad parameter also. On the order question India is certainly not in the Somalia league. It is not even in the Pakistan league where the internal situation is so appalling that many western observers have taken to calling it a failed state.
Yet our own performance in this area is not something we can be proud off. In many parts of the country there is hardly any order. J&K, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and significant parts of UP and AP readily come to mind. Even in the states where we consider there is some order what is the record of the police in fighting crime? Recorded crime in Delhi was up by 55% last year. In Mumbai and Delhi, the police have had to resort to extra-legal methods, euphemistically called "encounters", to curb criminals. So bad is the situation that the press and society generally lauds this, apparently not realising that such activities have a tendency to go out of hand and that it is only a matter of time before it starts devouring the innocent also. Instead of exposing the essential criminality of a Rajbir Singh of the Delhi Police or Daya Naik in Mumbai, the media entertains us with stories of their close encounters in which bullets seem to fly in only one direction. We never hear of a policeman getting even a scratch in these encounters when it is well known that most cant shoot straight.
Only about a third of major crimes like murder and dacoity are solved and even less than 10% end with convictions. On a more mundane level, not many people stop at redlights anymore. To stop is considered foolish, so much so at the half-year point nearly 800 persons have already perished in Delhi due to automobile related accidents. Not much of a record. It has been a steep descent from Sardar Patel I to Sardar Patel II and then some more now.
The institutions from which our state should derive authority are in a poor way. It is commonly believed that the quality of justice, particularly, in our lower courts is suspect. Cases are routinely rigged, and it is not always the police that are at it. There is the case of Sanjay Dutt. Here is a man caught with two AK-47 automatic rifles capable of firing 600 rounds per minute, and he is set to be excused because his late father wanted it, and more importantly Bal Thackeray wanted it. In Kashmir or Manipur just the possession of such lethal weapons will invite an "encounter". Not only this Sanjay Dutt gets to have dinner with Prime Minister Vajpayee in New York. The "party with a difference" had as an MP a person who has been "acquitted" of the murder of the husband of the woman he now openly lives with. The murder is apparently unsolvable. Another BJP MP has been known to be an associate of the Dawood Ibrahim gang that set off the Mumbai bomb blasts. All other parties too have similarly experienced persons to offer to the people as lawmakers.
You cannot turn to the courts for justice either, though there is now a growing tendency to do so. As a consequence several million cases clog the higher courts. This has had a devastating impact on orderly civil and commercial transactions. The delays in justice routinely lead to broken contracts and agreements with little recourse to the victims. Even the state has joined in exploiting this. Witness the manner in which government departments and companies routinely hang on to properties where the leases have long expired. In fact it is so well established and accepted a practice that not to do it is to invite suspicions of an underhand deal! We have created a system in which encourages distrust. It is small wonder then that after politics, law is the most lucrative profession.
A friend who lives in Haryana was recently relating a harrowing story of how he had to pay an Inspector of Police to get a case of theft registered. This is commonplace. It is not surprising that common people without the wherewithal to get expensive and slow justice seek other avenues. In Mumbai they go to godfathers like Arun Gawli MLA, in western UP they go to the caste panchayat, in Bihar they go the caste Mafia leader, and in Telangana and Bastar they go to the Peoples War Group. The supreme irony is that in more often the quality of justice delivered by the informal system is considered by the parties concerned to be superior to that offered by the constitutional legal system. Even policemen seem to prefer these to the constitutionally ordained system when seeking justice.
Corruption is so well entrenched and accepted that one is not required to dwell upon it. The phrase "to enjoy power" has acquired an entirely different dimension to it. The critical thing is that no action of the state, however highly placed the decision-maker, escapes suspicion. Corruption, as Ms Indira Gandhi once self-servingly pointed out, is a worldwide phenomenon. Compared to the scale, on which the Suharto, Marcos and Bhutto families prospered, the activities of the Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee families, real or adopted, were small change. They can even be condoned as inevitable and a small price to pay in a country where sycophancy and flexible notions of morality are inherent cultural traits. That is if the people are benefiting from the state.
The record of the Indian State in improving the living standards of the majority of its people is abysmal. India continues to languish among the bottom five of the World Bank's annual Development Report. Almost 70% of the Indian nation lives below a reasonable poverty line that would factor balanced diet, shelter, access to education and healthcare, and basic civic amenities. Nearly 60% of all Indians are illiterate. Infant mortality is 137 per 1000 births. On all infrastructure indices we are well below, forget China, even that failed state -Pakistan! The central government earmarks less for health and education than the cumulative pay raise the bureaucracy got last year - Rs.9000 crores. As a matter of fact the State spends more, now much more on the bureaucracy - a whopping Rs.170, 000 crores for all central and state government employees each year. That is a good 10% of the GDP and it is growing. Ever wondered why the service sector is doing well? It is because Public Administration is growing at 11% each year. If we remove this growth from the annual growth of 5-6% about which all our sarkari and pink paper economists crow about, you will get a real growth much closer to the Hindu growth rate of 3% we used to deride!
The bureaucracy has a self-serving methodology to determine poverty. This is 2200 and 2400 calories respectively for urban and rural areas. That is if you are thrown foodgrains that can deliver this much of energy each day, you are no longer poor. Given the rise in foodgrains production and the states ability to make the much smaller investment by way of food subsidies, it is no wonder that every successive regime is able to crow that poverty levels are coming down.
In Dr.Manmohan Singh's last year as Finance Minister the government reported that poverty was down to 19% and tried to make us believe that the benefits of its industrial liberalisation policies were trickling down to the people. An Oxfam report and studies by leading economists like Dr.Tendulkar revealed that due to inflation and contraction of the economy in the initial years of "liberalisation" simple economic logic says that poverty levels actually went up. At that time the BJP said that it would use more parameters to determine poverty. Such a step would have resulted in targeting poverty alleviation differently. Rather than focus on providing just foodgrains, the state would also have to focus on education, health, water, work, transport, sewage and so on. With an expanded focus we would see more investments made in the rural sector, as it is here ultimately that the war on poverty has to be waged. Only by improving living standards and by providing more opportunities in rural areas can the tide of the disastrous urbanization, we are witnessing, will be controlled. On the basis of this parameter, after fifty seven years as a modern state and with very clear non-realization of the founding fathers dreams of becoming a modernized state, we are clearly a failed state.
The failures of the first fifty years very clearly set out the task for the BJP, India's first truly non-Congress government. This must be emphasized since when it the BJP came to power, the Congress truly symbolized corruption, venality and an uncaring leadership. Instead of change we got five more long years of the same. We saw the same monumental corruption. The same concentration of all powers. The same uncaring attitudes to the real problems of the country. The same kind of statism. Only, instead of a doting father, we now had a doting father-in-law. Liberalisation became Suhartoism instead of an all-encompassing reform process.
The two UPA budgets have made no significant shift in the general direction of the previous decade. Worse, the actual spending reveals a decline of spending on critical sectors. Even today the Central Government spends less on Agriculture and Irrigation than it spends on Civil Aviation. To get a better fix on the priorities of our political and bureaucratic elite, consider this. About 70% of our people are dependent on agriculture, which still accounts for 43% of the GNP, whereas there were only 12 million air-passengers last.
Today Delhi has been determined to have the highest levels of air pollution in the world. The Ganges is so polluted that health experts have determined that exposure of an even a small wound to it will result in infection. All urban, human and industrial wastes routinely flow into water-bodies and thence into the groundwater or into rivers. All over the country groundwater tables are falling alarmingly as the state has abandoned its responsibilities to provide for proper water harvesting and irrigation. The area under forest cover is rapidly dwindling. Felling of forests takes place openly with the connivance of forest officials and politicians. On a recent visit to the forests around Srisailam, which are part of the biggest Tiger Reserve in the country, this writer was not able to spot a single teak tree in forests that once abounded in them. They have been selectively cut. Even more sadly the Tiger population in this reserve has fallen by half in the last four years. Admittedly there will be some cost if we have to develop and advance industrially. But the question is have the people benefited by any of this?
Over centralization is not without its costs. Amartya Sen showed that famines in Communist China have cost the lives of more than 20 million people, because the people at the top who make all the decisions get to know about what is happening on the ground very late. Having a free media in India should help in highlighting our plight and compelling the regime to react. But what is the media focused upon? It seems to be less on real people and their issues and more on Paris Hilton. Who is Paris Hilton anyway?