Business Standard: New Delhi: Saturday,
June 08, 2013.
Around the
dining tables of New India, on its social networks and in its apartment-block
stairwells, the judgments grow harsher daily: Delhi is steeped in moral
compromise, with a power elite that genuflects only to politicians and
political parties, with a media so in thrall to political sources that it won't
tell you the truth.
This is a
fortunate sort of belief, in that any evidence piling up against is transformed
with magical ease into evidence that in fact supports it. Another politician
pilloried for corruption or for incompetence? Not: look, another politician
cornered by an independent media and an activist private sector, but: see,
another corrupt and incompetent politician. Another member of "civil
society" or of the bureaucracy or of the judiciary pushes this tottering
government? Not: look, how empowered are non-political actors, but: see, how
brave is that nice educated man. Ah, if only all those nice educated men in the
police and the bureaucracy could be truly independent, if only those good
committed people in civil society had a bit more power, they'd clean this mess
up in a heartbeat.
Thus the
rapturous joy greeting the latest brave rebellion against the evil empire of
democracy, the Central Information Commission (CIC's) decision that political
parties are public institutions and subject to the Right to Information (RTI)
Act. Sadly, the RTI is a terribly blunt and quite inappropriate instrument to
impose transparency on what are, in fact, not organs of the state. What is
public and related to the state, and thus the proper domain for greater
transparency, is the electoral process, not parties themselves. To strengthen
democracy, we must regulate that better - begin by adopting the Election
Commission's 2011 suggestion that all campaign donors provide their PAN
numbers. If the problem with that is that elections are run on unaccounted-for
cash, then the swooning fans of the CIC's decision should please explain to me
precisely how the RTI, which is supposed to dig out paperwork, will help? Surely
nobody imagines an RTI application will duly turn up a memo saying "The
UPA-III, mortgaged to Mukesh Ambani, signed Ahmed Patel". Such
transactions aren't accompanied by photocopied forms.
So cleaner
elections aren't the real reason for all the joy, are they? No, the real reason
the CIC's decision is welcomed is that it makes politicians, well,
uncomfortable. We, the people, have been given another lever against those
elected by, presumably, other people. And so, as with so many other progressive
laws, the middle class has decided how it wishes to pervert the RTI: what was
conceived of as an instrument for the powerless to receive information about
themselves that the state refused to provide will now be used by the proudly
apolitical to put elected representatives in their place.
And the
instrument of this righteous vengeance? That storied democratic hero, the
unelected state functionary. In this case, the CIC, but it could be any of the
other exam-passing types we have lionised of late, a Comptroller and Auditor
General, a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) chief. One of the great
ironies of UPA-II is that the most bureaucratic-minded government in recent
history is also the one that is so delightfully at the mercy of, well,
bureaucrats. Oh, and also judges and policemen and the occasional army chief,
but they're all as solidly middle-class as bureaucrats. You take a stand
against the executive, take pot-shots at the legislature, and you're
automatically a democratic, middle-class hero.
Certainly,
that's what your press will say. Remember when I said that the Delhi media was
supposed to be in thrall to politicians? Wrong power centre. The people
journalists need and want to please are bureaucrats. Those are the people who
will sell each other and their politician bosses out, thus helping the
hard-working reporter get ahead in his cut-throat newsroom. Plus there's class
solidarity, both being good English-speaking sorts who will retire and become
neighbours in some pleasant suburban colony. Is it any surprise that the
"independent" state officials are universally hailed by the media?
And that's
the great myth of these, the closing months of the Decrepit Progressive
Alliance. The myth of the bureaucrat-as-saviour, and that
"independence" is a panacea: the unmovable belief that if we just
have enough "independent" positions, positions not just bipartisan
but beyond electoral politics altogether, all will be well, and democracy will
be strengthened.
An
"independent" CBI will clean up corruption, for example. Oh, and
there's absolutely no chance such a body would ever be taken over by
power-crazed corrupt types. What's that you say? J Edgar Hoover and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation? Don't worry, couldn't happen here; he'd never pass the
UPSC's stringent criteria. Only good, honest, humble boys become officials of
our state. And fortunately, in India there is never even the shadow of a
suggestion that they have motives that're anything but high-minded. The current
CBI director, for example, must be deeply, deeply distressed to be going after
the ministry that sacked him from the Railway Protection Force.
See, look at
our experience with an independent auditor. It isn't as if any of them ever
expanded their domain to, say, pronounce on policy choices. And consider the
Supreme Court! Totally independent of the other branches, and things are
definitely more democratic now that it decides everything. Oh, if only we had
some decent private-sector types in positions of power, like that nice
Srinivasan who runs cricket. After all, if things go wrong, we can always get
rid of them.
"Independent",
you see, is also "unaccountable". And the more unaccountable
authorities we have, the more powers we give CICs and the less oversight there
is for CBI chiefs, the more democratic is India. Yes, that makes perfect sense.
India's
middle class, all little Musharrafs and Lee Kuan Yews and Gaddafis, loves every
step that nudges us closer to powerless parties and a powerful technocracy.
After all, public-spirited middle-class Indians wouldn't ever be politicians.
But every one of us is a petty bureaucrat.
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