D. N. Bezboruah
The most significant achievement of the democracy that we have fashioned for ourselves in India seems to be that we have created a succession of governments that have become increasingly anti-people to the extent that today the government regards all but political beings as adversaries. The concept of democracy being government of the people, by the people, for the people has become something of a joke in India where, as I have always claimed, in many parts of the country we actually have a kind of neo-feudalism installed with the rules and adjuncts of democracy. The process is not very complex. The old feudal lord or his progeny or the existing feudal leader has only to file his nomination papers, rig the election, prevent those who do not support him from voting and win the election by hook or by crook. Having achieved this, he or she reverts back to the old feudal ways of the maharajah, rajah, nabob or the feudal leader. The most important realization of the newly-elected lawmaker is that he/she is above the laws that govern the hoi polloi. So are the progeny and the cronies. Being able to stay above the laws of the land and to defy them every time is a prime status symbol for most of our lawmakers. It is small wonder then that a so-called democratic government that has become the exclusive preserve of the lawmakers is a government that exists solely for the small number of insiders and not for the very large number of outsiders who have no means of getting anywhere near the corridors of power.
A very recent article on democracy by Arundhati Roy in the Onlooker begins by extending the familiar question “Is there a life after death?” to “Is there a life after democracy?” to arrive at the conclusion that there may not be one after we have managed to scoop out everything from it. And that is precisely the kind of thing that takes place in India. We are all the time busy taking out what can be had from this cornucopia called government. But this is what only the insiders can manage. The outsiders cannot hope even to reach the periphery of the structure called government. This is a government that believes in governance by exclusion. This is a government that believes in allowing the people no access to its functionaries. This is a democracy where the government exists for the government alone and for no one else. Any reminder that the people are the real masters in a democracy – or ought to be — arouses very high levels of mirth in the political executive and the bureaucracy.
One cannot help conceding that there has been the most remarkable kind of innovativeness in so effectively keeping out people from any kind of participation in governance beyond permitting them to vote in the elections every five years or sometimes more often. It is ironical that the same Johnnies in government, who at one time had lamented the lack of adequate people’s participation in the democratic process, should now be bending over backwards to ensure that the people should have nothing to do with governance at all apart from voting every five years. How does one achieve this? The process, perfected over the years, works on the simple principle that scared people and poor people do not dare to protest. The government is already gifted with a society that teems with people perpetually afraid, people who seem to have collectively lost the gene that has to do with courage. Assamese people are not inclined to take any kind of a stand where personal courage is required. Their failure to prevent our own elected government from turning us into a minority in our own homeland, our failure to protest the fact that we are being treated like second- and third-class citizens in our own State while the imported Bangladeshi voter has been given first-class status in our home State are all clear indicators of the fact that we have lost our courage somewhere along with our vertebral column. The people of Asom have even forgotten to protest the fact their personal arms were taken away from them by the government in the mid-1980s and have not been returned to them even today. However, a government that is hell-bent on keeping out people from having anything to do with governance in a democracy will not rest with indirect tokens to indicate that the people do not have a place under the sun. It must instil fear among the people by treating those who protest even peacefully with the kind of savagery that one expects only at the hands of a despot like Idi Amin or the president of a banana republic like Haiti. So the government deploys the police to brutalize a peaceful protest rally of blind people. A few days later, it beats up the inmates of the school for the deaf merely for demanding better food, better lodgings and better training – a typical Oliver Twist situation on a large scale. Like the typical bully, the government can take on only the most vulnerable and defenceless sections of society: people with disabilities. In any civilized country, the streets would have rung with public protests for weeks together and the newspapers would lambasted the government for its cowardice. Here we had none of this. The government gathers courage from the very fact that the people are too scared and too spineless to protest even in a humanitarian public cause. And scared people do not even recognize bullies. And remember, this is the same great government that cannot stop the Nagas from terrorizing our own people in Merapani and wrest back the thousands of square kilometres of our territory that Nagaland has annexed. It is equally helpless about stopping other neighbouring States from nibbling away our territory. It cannot even tackle law-breaking auto-rickshaw drivers and motorcyclists or people who encroach on government land or the land of others. These tasks call for real courage. The kind of bullying that our government carries out at home to prevent people from getting anywhere near it is no more than an empty illusion of courage.
Having effectively scared and silenced people who ought to be speaking up in a democracy, the government can go about the tasks of alienating the people by making the government totally inaccessible to them. It is all so simple. Make it just impossible for a citizen to meet a minister even with a very genuine and pressing grievance unless that citizen happens to be a very prominent one. But the prominent citizen does not need to meet a minister. He can just ring him up to tell him what he wants. This is where a minister of Meghalaya is very different. People can just walk in to meet him. Nor does he believe in a motorcade and a platoon of security guards. By contrast, a minister in Guwahati is almost totally inaccessible. His mobile phone is generally switched off. Those who pick up his land line tell you that he is at a meeting/in the bathroom or out of town. You can invariably count on being unable to meet him unless you are a party member, someone very important or someone very beautiful who he has met before. This style of functioning, namely, being inaccessible to people, is being emulated very assiduously by the bureaucrats and lesser officials. The mantra that works so effectively in keeping the government exclusive has been learnt very well: keep the people out. So whether it is with the help of forms and slips or with the help of security guards, the ministers and officers are learning to keep the people out. The other steps are just corollaries to this. One is to keep the people harassed all the time with shortages and a total lack of essentials. Let there be power failures and shortages of water and cooking gas all the time (even though the production of LPG actually exceeds our needs). The harassed citizens will spend so much time trying to cope with the domestic crises that the government has created that they will have no time to worry about major issues that concern all of us. Another trick is to keep all government actions that have a bearing on the people well-guarded secrets, so that people cannot prevent wrong or wasteful actions that are carried out in the name of the people but actions that really serve to profit a handful of corrupts associates. This is a way of preventing the citizens from taking preventive action in matters that concern them. It is not enough to keep government actions well-guarded secrets. A supplement to this is giving citizens delayed information even when they approach the government with the new weapon called the Right to Information Act. Finally, combine all this to achieve what is called a fait accompli. The government steamrolls all opposition and does what it wants to like turning the Judges’ Field into a concrete jungle, building ugly pedestrian crossings that no one uses and so on. All it needs is fait accomplis of concrete and steel so that when the citizen goes to court the court tells him that nothing can be done now that the deed has been done. The court does not reprimand the government for perpetrating such fait accomplis. In any case, it would not matter if the court did, considering that the government is a past master at committing contempt of court and going scot-free.
Is this sly, deceitful mode of governance calculated to produce law-abiding citizens or adversaries? The answer is there for all of us to see in our streets and homes amid the frightened adversaries that the government has created. Some strange illusion leads those in government to imagine that they can go on governing like this for ever. People in power who misuse it have all kinds of illusions. One of them is that it does not matter how much injustice they inflict of the people. The police and the military will see them through. Our one-time British rulers too shared this illusion. SOURCE: THE SENTINEL
The most significant achievement of the democracy that we have fashioned for ourselves in India seems to be that we have created a succession of governments that have become increasingly anti-people to the extent that today the government regards all but political beings as adversaries. The concept of democracy being government of the people, by the people, for the people has become something of a joke in India where, as I have always claimed, in many parts of the country we actually have a kind of neo-feudalism installed with the rules and adjuncts of democracy. The process is not very complex. The old feudal lord or his progeny or the existing feudal leader has only to file his nomination papers, rig the election, prevent those who do not support him from voting and win the election by hook or by crook. Having achieved this, he or she reverts back to the old feudal ways of the maharajah, rajah, nabob or the feudal leader. The most important realization of the newly-elected lawmaker is that he/she is above the laws that govern the hoi polloi. So are the progeny and the cronies. Being able to stay above the laws of the land and to defy them every time is a prime status symbol for most of our lawmakers. It is small wonder then that a so-called democratic government that has become the exclusive preserve of the lawmakers is a government that exists solely for the small number of insiders and not for the very large number of outsiders who have no means of getting anywhere near the corridors of power.
A very recent article on democracy by Arundhati Roy in the Onlooker begins by extending the familiar question “Is there a life after death?” to “Is there a life after democracy?” to arrive at the conclusion that there may not be one after we have managed to scoop out everything from it. And that is precisely the kind of thing that takes place in India. We are all the time busy taking out what can be had from this cornucopia called government. But this is what only the insiders can manage. The outsiders cannot hope even to reach the periphery of the structure called government. This is a government that believes in governance by exclusion. This is a government that believes in allowing the people no access to its functionaries. This is a democracy where the government exists for the government alone and for no one else. Any reminder that the people are the real masters in a democracy – or ought to be — arouses very high levels of mirth in the political executive and the bureaucracy.
One cannot help conceding that there has been the most remarkable kind of innovativeness in so effectively keeping out people from any kind of participation in governance beyond permitting them to vote in the elections every five years or sometimes more often. It is ironical that the same Johnnies in government, who at one time had lamented the lack of adequate people’s participation in the democratic process, should now be bending over backwards to ensure that the people should have nothing to do with governance at all apart from voting every five years. How does one achieve this? The process, perfected over the years, works on the simple principle that scared people and poor people do not dare to protest. The government is already gifted with a society that teems with people perpetually afraid, people who seem to have collectively lost the gene that has to do with courage. Assamese people are not inclined to take any kind of a stand where personal courage is required. Their failure to prevent our own elected government from turning us into a minority in our own homeland, our failure to protest the fact that we are being treated like second- and third-class citizens in our own State while the imported Bangladeshi voter has been given first-class status in our home State are all clear indicators of the fact that we have lost our courage somewhere along with our vertebral column. The people of Asom have even forgotten to protest the fact their personal arms were taken away from them by the government in the mid-1980s and have not been returned to them even today. However, a government that is hell-bent on keeping out people from having anything to do with governance in a democracy will not rest with indirect tokens to indicate that the people do not have a place under the sun. It must instil fear among the people by treating those who protest even peacefully with the kind of savagery that one expects only at the hands of a despot like Idi Amin or the president of a banana republic like Haiti. So the government deploys the police to brutalize a peaceful protest rally of blind people. A few days later, it beats up the inmates of the school for the deaf merely for demanding better food, better lodgings and better training – a typical Oliver Twist situation on a large scale. Like the typical bully, the government can take on only the most vulnerable and defenceless sections of society: people with disabilities. In any civilized country, the streets would have rung with public protests for weeks together and the newspapers would lambasted the government for its cowardice. Here we had none of this. The government gathers courage from the very fact that the people are too scared and too spineless to protest even in a humanitarian public cause. And scared people do not even recognize bullies. And remember, this is the same great government that cannot stop the Nagas from terrorizing our own people in Merapani and wrest back the thousands of square kilometres of our territory that Nagaland has annexed. It is equally helpless about stopping other neighbouring States from nibbling away our territory. It cannot even tackle law-breaking auto-rickshaw drivers and motorcyclists or people who encroach on government land or the land of others. These tasks call for real courage. The kind of bullying that our government carries out at home to prevent people from getting anywhere near it is no more than an empty illusion of courage.
Having effectively scared and silenced people who ought to be speaking up in a democracy, the government can go about the tasks of alienating the people by making the government totally inaccessible to them. It is all so simple. Make it just impossible for a citizen to meet a minister even with a very genuine and pressing grievance unless that citizen happens to be a very prominent one. But the prominent citizen does not need to meet a minister. He can just ring him up to tell him what he wants. This is where a minister of Meghalaya is very different. People can just walk in to meet him. Nor does he believe in a motorcade and a platoon of security guards. By contrast, a minister in Guwahati is almost totally inaccessible. His mobile phone is generally switched off. Those who pick up his land line tell you that he is at a meeting/in the bathroom or out of town. You can invariably count on being unable to meet him unless you are a party member, someone very important or someone very beautiful who he has met before. This style of functioning, namely, being inaccessible to people, is being emulated very assiduously by the bureaucrats and lesser officials. The mantra that works so effectively in keeping the government exclusive has been learnt very well: keep the people out. So whether it is with the help of forms and slips or with the help of security guards, the ministers and officers are learning to keep the people out. The other steps are just corollaries to this. One is to keep the people harassed all the time with shortages and a total lack of essentials. Let there be power failures and shortages of water and cooking gas all the time (even though the production of LPG actually exceeds our needs). The harassed citizens will spend so much time trying to cope with the domestic crises that the government has created that they will have no time to worry about major issues that concern all of us. Another trick is to keep all government actions that have a bearing on the people well-guarded secrets, so that people cannot prevent wrong or wasteful actions that are carried out in the name of the people but actions that really serve to profit a handful of corrupts associates. This is a way of preventing the citizens from taking preventive action in matters that concern them. It is not enough to keep government actions well-guarded secrets. A supplement to this is giving citizens delayed information even when they approach the government with the new weapon called the Right to Information Act. Finally, combine all this to achieve what is called a fait accompli. The government steamrolls all opposition and does what it wants to like turning the Judges’ Field into a concrete jungle, building ugly pedestrian crossings that no one uses and so on. All it needs is fait accomplis of concrete and steel so that when the citizen goes to court the court tells him that nothing can be done now that the deed has been done. The court does not reprimand the government for perpetrating such fait accomplis. In any case, it would not matter if the court did, considering that the government is a past master at committing contempt of court and going scot-free.
Is this sly, deceitful mode of governance calculated to produce law-abiding citizens or adversaries? The answer is there for all of us to see in our streets and homes amid the frightened adversaries that the government has created. Some strange illusion leads those in government to imagine that they can go on governing like this for ever. People in power who misuse it have all kinds of illusions. One of them is that it does not matter how much injustice they inflict of the people. The police and the military will see them through. Our one-time British rulers too shared this illusion. SOURCE: THE SENTINEL
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