TNN
By Devesh Kapur
Two-thirds of a century into India's independence, two aspects of the country's political evolution are noteworthy. The first is the institutionalization of the periodic transfer of power, peacefully and predictably, recently evident in NDA's victory earlier this year.
But the journey has been much rockier with regard to another critical question: how to direct that power for the broader public good.
While popular commentary on political power focuses on its misuse for private gain or corruption, there has been less attention on the limited ability of political power to translate intentions into outcomes.
The history of independent India is replete with government programmes, ranging from state-owned enterprises to multiple poverty programmes, where political power did have good intentions, but where outcomes have left much to be desired. Critics have put the onus on misaligned incentives and a craven political-bureaucratic nexus.
These factors have their roots in a distinctive feature of India's political evolution: namely the weakness of the Indian state, hobbled as much by lack of competence as by corruption.
Historically the state in India has always been weak and this changed only modestly after Independence. Yes, the state expanded massively; and yes the social composition of the functionaries of the Indian state has changed markedly.
Size and social legitimacy undoubtedly have built state 'strength' — the negative power of the Indian state to thwart is certainly manifest. But positive power — the power to do something, to execute programmes and provide basic public goods that are the bread and butter of a state's responsibilities to its citizens — is still a far cry.
Why strong states develop in some societies and not in others is a complex historical question. One argument is that a strong state can only be built on a firm foundation of nationhood which itself is still a work-in-progress in India.
Another view is that warfare laid the foundations of the modern nation state especially in Europe and East Asia.
Historian Charles Tilly famously argued that states make war and war makes states, a reference to the rise of the modern European state after centuries of warfare among hundreds of polities and kingdoms.
The ability to wage war successfully requires states to create viable systems of taxation, mobilization and coordination — and only those states that can, survive. But these attributes are also critical for any modern state to deliver public goods and services.
Societies that have been wracked by violence and convulsions may also have a greater desire for 'order' and hence a strong state. Over the last two centuries China underwent massive convulsions that resulted in a staggering death toll.
Between the Taiping rebellion in the mid-19th century which led to an estimated 25-30 million deaths to the famines that followed on the heels of the Great Leap Forward a century later (with an estimated 30 million deaths), China underwent horrific violence whether due to the Japanese invasion or the Civil War.
Dark memories of the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution have left a deep imprint on Chinese political elites and in part explain their phobia towards any prospect of disorder — and of Chinese society for a strong state.
In contrast, other than the Great Bengal Famine and Partition, India did not undergo national trauma in the 19th and 20th centuries remotely comparable to what Chinese society underwent.
The total number of Indian military casualties in all wars after Independence is about one-fifteenth the casualties China suffered during the Korean war alone.
But while these explanations might help understand the past, they are hardly a guide to the future. Wars and social convulsions are wracking countries from the Congo to Iraq — and if anything destroying even the limited state institutions that existed in these countries.
India's political evolution will be incomplete unless it finds better pathways to build stronger state institutions.
A singular weakness of the debate on India's public institutions is that attention is almost exclusively focussed on entry, as attested by the recent uproar on the modalities of the civil services exam conducted by UPSC and the enormous energy spent on expanding reservations.
But what should be the starting point of debates on public institutions has unfortunately also become the end point. What happens post-entry gets short shrift. In particular there is little debate that employment and representation is only one goal of public institutions.
Serving the public is surely more important. This requires that organisations build internal cohesiveness, a shared sense of purpose and an esprit de corps.
Ascriptive identities can be the basis of recruitment, but post-recruitment the organisation's identity must be paramount. Else, the result is fragmentation and the absence of shared goals, and critically the absence of any accountability.
The result is that India's public institutions end up serving their employees more than the public. One public institution that at least today recruits from a reasonably broad social base but then drills and trains the recruits so that they share a common organisational ethos is the army.
It offers a lesson on how debates on public institutions need to shift from who gets in to what happens to them once they get in. When that happens, India’s public institutions will perform better and state power will better serve the public good. And India's political evolution will become more mature.
The writer is director, Centre for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.
Two-thirds of a century into India's independence, two aspects of the country's political evolution are noteworthy. The first is the institutionalization of the periodic transfer of power, peacefully and predictably, recently evident in NDA's victory earlier this year.
But the journey has been much rockier with regard to another critical question: how to direct that power for the broader public good.
While popular commentary on political power focuses on its misuse for private gain or corruption, there has been less attention on the limited ability of political power to translate intentions into outcomes.
The history of independent India is replete with government programmes, ranging from state-owned enterprises to multiple poverty programmes, where political power did have good intentions, but where outcomes have left much to be desired. Critics have put the onus on misaligned incentives and a craven political-bureaucratic nexus.
These factors have their roots in a distinctive feature of India's political evolution: namely the weakness of the Indian state, hobbled as much by lack of competence as by corruption.
Historically the state in India has always been weak and this changed only modestly after Independence. Yes, the state expanded massively; and yes the social composition of the functionaries of the Indian state has changed markedly.
Size and social legitimacy undoubtedly have built state 'strength' — the negative power of the Indian state to thwart is certainly manifest. But positive power — the power to do something, to execute programmes and provide basic public goods that are the bread and butter of a state's responsibilities to its citizens — is still a far cry.
Why strong states develop in some societies and not in others is a complex historical question. One argument is that a strong state can only be built on a firm foundation of nationhood which itself is still a work-in-progress in India.
Another view is that warfare laid the foundations of the modern nation state especially in Europe and East Asia.
Historian Charles Tilly famously argued that states make war and war makes states, a reference to the rise of the modern European state after centuries of warfare among hundreds of polities and kingdoms.
The ability to wage war successfully requires states to create viable systems of taxation, mobilization and coordination — and only those states that can, survive. But these attributes are also critical for any modern state to deliver public goods and services.
Societies that have been wracked by violence and convulsions may also have a greater desire for 'order' and hence a strong state. Over the last two centuries China underwent massive convulsions that resulted in a staggering death toll.
Between the Taiping rebellion in the mid-19th century which led to an estimated 25-30 million deaths to the famines that followed on the heels of the Great Leap Forward a century later (with an estimated 30 million deaths), China underwent horrific violence whether due to the Japanese invasion or the Civil War.
Dark memories of the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution have left a deep imprint on Chinese political elites and in part explain their phobia towards any prospect of disorder — and of Chinese society for a strong state.
In contrast, other than the Great Bengal Famine and Partition, India did not undergo national trauma in the 19th and 20th centuries remotely comparable to what Chinese society underwent.
But while these explanations might help understand the past, they are hardly a guide to the future. Wars and social convulsions are wracking countries from the Congo to Iraq — and if anything destroying even the limited state institutions that existed in these countries.
India's political evolution will be incomplete unless it finds better pathways to build stronger state institutions.
A singular weakness of the debate on India's public institutions is that attention is almost exclusively focussed on entry, as attested by the recent uproar on the modalities of the civil services exam conducted by UPSC and the enormous energy spent on expanding reservations.
But what should be the starting point of debates on public institutions has unfortunately also become the end point. What happens post-entry gets short shrift. In particular there is little debate that employment and representation is only one goal of public institutions.
Serving the public is surely more important. This requires that organisations build internal cohesiveness, a shared sense of purpose and an esprit de corps.
Ascriptive identities can be the basis of recruitment, but post-recruitment the organisation's identity must be paramount. Else, the result is fragmentation and the absence of shared goals, and critically the absence of any accountability.
The result is that India's public institutions end up serving their employees more than the public. One public institution that at least today recruits from a reasonably broad social base but then drills and trains the recruits so that they share a common organisational ethos is the army.
It offers a lesson on how debates on public institutions need to shift from who gets in to what happens to them once they get in. When that happens, India’s public institutions will perform better and state power will better serve the public good. And India's political evolution will become more mature.
The writer is director, Centre for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.
