Two trends, one good and one bad, have defined India’s first decade of the 21st century. The good trend is that prosperity has begun to spread, largely as a result of high economic growth. The second trend is the simultaneous rise in corruption. The lazy minded will connect the two trends, but in fact they are quite independent. High growth has been fostered by economic reforms and corruption is due to the lack of the reform of state institutions.
For the first time in history Indians are beginning to emerge from a struggle against want into an age when the large majority will soon be at ease. Like many parts of Asia, India too is slowly turning into a middle class nation. This is not happening uniformly--Gujarat is well ahead of Bihar, but even Bihar will catch up. At that point poverty will not vanish, but the poor will come down to a manageable level and the politics of the country will also change. This is the good news.
The bad news is that prosperity is spreading alongside the most appalling governance. In the midst of a booming private economy, Indians despair over the delivery of the simplest public services. It used to be the other way around. During our socialist days we despaired over economic growth but we were proud of our institutions. Today, the Indian state is in steady decline. Where it is desperately needed--in providing education, health, and drinking water--it continues to perform appallingly. Where it is not needed, it is hyperactive in tying us in miles of red tape.
When I speak of governance failure, I am not thinking only of the politician--Madhu Koda--caught with a bribe. Almost every transaction of the Indian citizen with the state is morally flawed. I have to renew my driver’s license in a few weeks and I am already worried if I will have to bribe someone. It is the poor, however, who depend most on public services and are the least capable of paying bribes. Year after year Transparency International ranks India amongst the most corrupt. In 2005, of the 11 public services it surveyed, India’s police were the most corrupt with 80% of the citizens admitting that they had to bribe someone in the police to get their work done. 40% had paid a bribe to influence the legal system. One in three parents reported bribing a government school or primary health centre. Yet it is these schools and health centres where one in four teachers is absent and where two out of five doctors do not show up. A farmer in an Indian village cannot hope to get a clear title to his land without bribing the patwari or talathi. It is only when I discovered, however, that one out of five members of the Indian parliament in 2004 had criminal charges against him did I lose hope.
What is eating away at our moral fabric is thus not the big scam which grabs the headlines—jehadi terrorism, Gujarat 2002, Naxalism. It is these quiet, everyday failures. When a school teacher is absent, he wounds the dharma of our society, which has always regarded the guru on a pedestal. He also gives his students a terrible lesson in civic virtue. Governance failure is both institutional and moral. If you punished one absentee school teacher, the others would show up. But to teach with inspiration, you need the call of dharma. Artha, material well being, and dharma, moral well being, are two out of the four aims of the sensible Indian way of life. While artha is rising, dharma has been falling during the past decade.
Hence, the reform of the Indian state is even more important today than economic reform. It is also more difficult because it is the rulers who are the oppressors and have the most to lose. We desperately need police, judicial, administrative and political reform. Many societies that we admire today, such as the UK, once suffered from poor governance. But they threw up leaders—Gladstone, Disraeli, Thatcher—who had the courage to fight vested interests and implement reforms. It is one thing to win power and another to wield it. The Congress party has learned to win elections but it has forgotten that it will be thrown out unless it improves governance.
The Mahabharata also had a problem with the self-destructive, kshatriya institutions of its time, and it had to wage a war to cleanse them. Draupadi’s call for accountability in public life in the Sabhaparvan ought to be our inspiration. She questioned the dharma of the rulers when confronted with governance failure. When there is no other recourse, citizens must be prepared to wage a Kurukshetra-like war against corrupt government institutions in order to bring accountability into public life.