Why India remains a functioning anarchy even now

Almost half a century back, John Kenneth Galbraith, the US ambassador to India and a renowned
economist, had called India a "functioning anarchy", where the implication was that the country did well
despite the government not doing much.A lot has happened since then, with India going through a
series of ideological changes ending in a phase of economic reforms where a number of institutions and
structures were created or changed. Have these institutions really delivered or does the epithet -
'functioning anarchy' - still hold?

Here it would be interesting to look at our public institutions to gauge the extent of progress or
regression. Broadly, we can look at political, administrative, economic and social institutions that have
evolved over the years. One does not quite get a clear picture on these institutions and the public
reaction to them is even more intriguing.India remains a democracy despite our disenchantment with
various parties and their opportunistim. Except for the brief period during the internal Emergency of the
mid-seventies, we have had regular elections and several reforms, including control of expenditure on
elections and the anti-defection laws. But today the general feeling is that all parties look alike and there
is little differentiation between them. There was a promise of youth when Rajiv Gandhi took over, or the
illusion of governance when VP Singh came to power on an anti-corruption platform. But little has
changed really and at the end of the day it does not seem that governance standards have improved at
all.

What do people do here? The rich do not vote and live in a world of their own. They only discuss the
decline in standards but do little about it and prefer to concentrate on their own business. The middle
class runs around hoping for change. But the level of interest has dwindled and the disillusionment is
palpable.Indian enterprise has fought to find its way, but the government evidently needs to clean up
the administrative and social institutions which will necessarily have to begin with the political structure

The Aam Aadmi Party could be what they look up to, but one does not know if the interest will remain.
The poor actually matter, as they can be swayed by largesse and can be made to vote for specific parties.
Therefore, ultimately those who sway this group either through monetary benefits or threats get the
votes. It is not surprising that when governments change, names change, but quality does not change
significantly.The administrative institutions strike a more dismal picture. One has less faith in the
bureaucracy and even less in the judicial system - except at the topmost levels. It is hard to get a ration
card without bribery and getting anything through a government department can be frustrating. Systems
are not changed because it affects everyone down the line. One wonders why registering an agreement,
which is anyway not checked, can't be done online. It would mean a loss of income for the entire chain
along the way.

The police force is known to be either inefficient or corrupt, where cases are not allowed to be filed
unless one pays for the same. Our antiquated laws ensure that cases never get solved and are heavily in
favour of criminals. If one does not have money, one can forget about getting justice. What do the
people do here? The rich use agents and pay to get things done. Or they simply keep away from the
masses, as that is the best way to ensure that no crime is committed against them. The middle class tries
to fight it out, but they finally relent as they have no choice. The poor continue to suffer, but frankly no
one cares, as they are a class which has no hope and have the maximum atrocities committed against
them. It is not surprising that most crimes are committed against them, right from exploitation and land
grabbing to physical abuse. As it involves the poor, they go largely unreported.

The social institutions show an even more distressing image. The Constitution as well as manifestoes of
various parties speak the same language of providing education, health and other civic facilities to all
people, especially the weaker classes. Large amounts of money have been spent every year under
various schemes on education, health, water, transport, etc. services. Yet government schools provide
the lowest quality of education. At higher education levels, the lacing of politics to admissions policy has
compromised significantly on quality with a plethora of reservations based on birth rather than merit.
Hospitals are pathetic where patients live in abysmal conditions. Civic amenities are invariably supplied
better to the higher strata of society.

What do people do? The rich never make use of public institutions and take recourse to five-star
hospitals for health requirements. The new bands of IB schools are preferred, where the logical corollary
is to move out of the country for higher studies. The middle class struggles with the system and relies on
our insurance companies for support in times of need. While education is still in a state level school or
the CBSE or ICSE curriculum, they get squeezed when seeking higher education with marks being skewed
heavily through competitive pressure. They are finally opting for taking loans and studying overseas. The
poor remain with government schools from where they enter the category of educated unemployed, as
the job opportunities for them are limited. This leads to frustration and at the margin and gives rise to
crime.

The economic institutions are probably the only ones that have fared relatively better in the last two
decades but they still present contrasting images. The financial systems are robust - both the institutions
as well as the capital market, with a number of reforms and developments having enhanced access as
well as quality of services. The fact that the system has held on during crisis times is heartening. The rich
have benefited through better access and returns from these segments. The smaller entrepreneurs have
struggled against the systems and still fight for survival. Growth has picked up notwithstanding the
hurdles in policy which have certainly clouded the pace of progress. Infrastructure has shown a mixed
picture with expressways coexisting with the absence of roads, electricity and urban infrastructure. The
middle class has drawn the benefits if located in the metros or larger cities where they have access to
modern lifestyles that promise hope for upward mobility. Government programmes for the poor are
afflicted with leakages, but have helped some of the poorer sections nonetheless. There is evidently a
long way to go here because to reduce inequities in our social fabric, these leakages have to be
eliminated.

Where does this leave us? We have created many institutions which are inundated with several
challenges. The fact that the country has grown is remarkable because it has happened notwithstanding
these obstacles - signs of a functioning anarchy. The economic reforms story has been continuous
despite different governments, which again is a good sign. Indian enterprise has fought to find its way,
but the government evidently needs to clean up the administrative and social institutions which will
necessarily have to begin with the political structure. Therefore, there are still signs of anarchy where the
guilty have an easier time. The rot has set in our institutions fairly deeply.

But the country functions mainly due to the people - driven by motivations of faith or fate or just
pragmatic realism where they try because that is the only way out.

IVORY TOWER

India may function better under Modi, but it has also become anarchicSanjaya Baru By Sanjaya Baru
September 30, 2018 15:36 IST

American economist and diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith, a US Ambassador to India in the early 1960s,
famously dubbed India as a “functioning anarchy”. Beneath the visible chaos there was, even at that
time, visible economic progress and social development within the framework of a constitutional
democracy, based on the rule of law. Galbraith’s oxymoron captured this Indian reality. Yet another
famous characterisation of the India of the 1960s was by Swedish economist and Nobel Prize-winner
Gunnar Myrdal who called India a “soft state”, in his three-volume study of Asia titled The Asian Drama.
A soft state, said Myrdal, is characterised by “all the various types of social indiscipline which manifest
themselves by deficiencies in legislation and, in particular, law observance and enforcement, a
widespread disobedience by public officials and, often, their collusion with powerful persons and
groups... whose conduct they should regulate.”

The combination of a soft state—that tolerated considerable malfeasance on the part of its functionaries
—in a social milieu defined by anarchy meant that there would be limits to the good and the bad of the
‘functioning’ part of both society and state. The views of Galbraith and Myrdal may well have influenced
the thinking, both within the policy making circle and the social elite, that favoured the imposition of the
Emergency by prime minister Indira Gandhi. The Emergency’s ‘hard state’, so to speak, was justified as a
means of improving India’s “functioning” part and dealing with the challenge of social “anarchy”.

Illustration: Bhaskaran Illustration: Bhaskaran

In response to that phase of Indian political development, a range of what have been called ‘civil
liberties’ organisations, as opposed to political parties, came into existence. Counter-intuitively, the
growth of such ‘social activism’, rather than of formal, organised party political activism, may have
contributed to greater anarchism in Indian political life without making the society and the state more
functional. While organised political parties, including the “parliamentary” Communist parties, commit
themselves to working within the framework of the Constitution, many so-called ‘social activists’ feel no
such compulsion, questioning the very legitimacy of the ‘rule of law’. The balance between ‘functioning
India’ and ‘anarchic India’ then gets disturbed.
In many ways that is what has been happening over the past few years with political parties yielding
ideological space to social activists. This phenomenon was institutionalised in the form of the National
Advisory Council during the tenure of the United Progressive Alliance government. Those who resented
this trend and believed in strengthening the role of the state and various constitutional bodies felt that
someone like Prime Minister Narendra Modi would do precisely that. His government, it was felt, would
assert the rule of law and ensure that the institutions of the state are respected by civil society activists.

As we come to the end of Modi’s first term, the question worth considering is whether the Indian state
has become less soft and has been able to assert itself, restoring the balance between a ‘functioning’
and ‘anarchic’ India? It may surprise many to realise that for all his tough image, and despite what his
opponents say, Modi also presides over an India that is still a functioning anarchy. Social anarchism in
India has been bolstered by the new technology of social media, characterised as it is both by an
absence of oversight and regulation and by the dumbing down of discourse in the name of its
democratisation. May be India functions better, but it has also become more anarchic.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the renowned economist who was a much-loved American Ambassador to
India, described this country as a functioning anarchy. Most people would say any more anarchy could
render India non-functional. But talking to an anarchist, Cairn Ross, this week, has left me wondering
whether not just India but many other democracies might need more anarchy.

The anarchist, Cairn Ross, comes from an unlikely background. He was a British diplomat and there
couldn’t be a less anarchic, more establishment, and protocol conscious profession than that. But Ross
became dissatisfied with the way diplomatic negotiations and decision making were conducted and
eventually resigned from the British Diplomatic Service after giving evidence challenging the line the
government took in the Iraq War enquiries. Ross then founded an NGO called Independent Diplomat,
advising non-State groups on conducting their international diplomacy and advocating anarchy.

For Ross anarchy means no one should have power over others and people should govern themselves.
He told me “I start from the premise that democracy is not working well in an awful lot of places
including Britain, America and India because people are being governed by small groups only allegedly
elected by them”. Ross believes in “a political outlook rooted in the notion of direct democracy in which
power moves from the bottom upwards”. The fundamental aim is to take the power to make decisions
from those in the British case Ross describes as “the tiny minority in Westminster”, and give it to the
people.
How is this power to be exercised? Ross says by communities negotiating among themselves to reach
decisions. He quotes the example of Porto Alegre in Brazil, where since 1990 citizens rather than
politicians allocate a significant proportion of the budget. Neighbourhoods get together to negotiate
budgetary priorities and send representatives to a city-wide assembly. Studies have shown that the
result has been a far more equitable distribution of the city’s resources.

But can this work beyond the city level? Ross believes it can be scaled up to the regional level provided
the people have the power to recall representatives who fail to negotiate for the decisions negotiated at
the grassroots level. However Ross doesn’t think its necessarily desirable to scale this up to the national
level. But he adds an important proviso. He doesn’t believe there are many decisions which need to be
taken at that level.The party system, usually seen as an essential part of a functioning democracy, Ross
described as “by and large a travesty, an engine for corruption.” Electoral politics he sees as “incredibly
divisive.”

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Meet to discuss van panchayat issues in Uttarakhand

Modi launches Rashtriya Gram Swaraj Abhiyan to strengthen Panchayati Raj system

Panchayati Raj was instituted to do just what Ross advocates. Decisions are taken at the grassroots and
they are scaled up to the district level. Although elites can still dominate decision-making with the
delegation of financial powers to panchayats, village governance has become more democratic.

Ross’s anarchy may seem to be unrealistic but that doesn’t mean that his criticism of the present state of
democracy in India and elsewhere is not valid. Indian parties have turned into election fighting
machines. MPs and MLAs claim that they represent the people but they are chosen by machinations and
manoeuvring within their parties, not by the people. It is rare for the majority of the whole electorate to
vote for the winner. Political fund raising is one of the main causes of corruption. An ever increasing
number of decisions in India are taken at the national level. The political rhetoric is divisive and
politicians divide people on the basis of caste and religion. Ross maintains that the practice of people
negotiating with each other leads to “a deeper order and a much more stable and flexible system.”
In India and elsewhere the faults in democracy are frequently shrugged off by quoting Churchill’s famous
description of it as “the worst form of government but better than any other.” But do we have to accept
that dismal view? If anarchy is written off as unrealistic shouldn’t democracies around the world at least
be seeking to remedy some of the faults in the system as practised today, to make democracy less worst I
might say.

India is now a ‘non-functioning anarchy’

Topics

IndiaAnarchyManmohan SinghSonia GandhiUPANDAJohn Kenneth GalbraithViews

It was the late John Kenneth Galbraith who called India a functioning anarchy. The last great humanist
economist, who had been US ambassador to India, loved the country, and found much about us to
wonder about. The term he used was hardly disdainful; it embodied, to a significant extent, head-
scratching grimacing admiration. There could have perhaps been no description more appropriate for a
nation where, for everything that is true, the opposite is also equally true. We Indians have incredible
resilience, infinite adaptability, the ability to hold three different viewpoints in our heads, all at the same
time, find loopholes in sheer concrete walls, and enjoy reasonable happiness, helped by a curious
philosophical mix of fatalism and jugaad.

As India, we have bumbled our way along, through ups and downs, periods of despair and great hope.
Like the Indian mind, the Indian nation is more comfortable with what seems to be chaos to Western (or
even most Asian) minds than linearity. We turn our elections into festivals, our festivals into commerce,
and commerce into pure politics. A European who spends a fair bit of time in India—and I have met quite
a few of them—either falls in love with the whole damn mess or flees in panicked confusion.
The trouble is that, over the last few years, the anarchy has remained vibrant, but the functioning bit
seems to have vanished. From the top of the pyramid to the bottom, confusion reigns. We have gone
through huge churnings before—the Emergency and its aftermath, the Mandal upheaval that changed
political arithmetic for ever—but it probably never came to this stage that no one appears to be sure
what the hell is going on. The core question is: Who’s running the country?

Our Prime Minister speaks little. This is not, in itself, a bad thing. The story goes about the famously
reticent US President Calvin Coolidge that at a party, a socialite had a bet with her friend that she could
make the President say at least four words to her. She went up to Coolidge and told her about the wager.
Coolidge replied: “Madam, you lose," and walked away. But our Prime Minister also does not appear to
have much control over what is going on. In recent months, he has focused on the international arena
rather than national affairs. But whether that has brought India any benefits remains to be seen. The
border agreement he has signed this week with China certainly does not seem to have made India’s
position any stronger.

Of course, Congress chairperson Sonia Gandhi, having put a massive burden on the finances of the
government with her welfare schemes, says nothing at all. I may have missed a few news items, but I
can’t recall any meaningful policy declarations in the last two years that would help the economy grow,
generate jobs, bring prices down, make the average Indian’s life a bit easier in a real sense. Right from
the beginning of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime, there has been a problem of coordination
between ministers. A respected economist, part of several post-reforms governments, told me a year
ago that he quit his post early in the first UPA government because, even in those first few months, he
could see a “policy paralysis" coming. “Man for man, the ministers in the UPA may be better, more
efficient than those in the NDA (National Democratic Alliance)," he said, “but no one would listen to
anyone."

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has stepped into the policy area, and sent an already fumbling
government into panic and even more confusion. Add to that a barely functioning Parliament, and what
we have is a situation where the roles and responsibilities of all our primary institutions have got mixed
up. With all due respect, whatever the irregularities and whatever the actual scale of the 2G scam,
scrapping more than hundred cellular service permits in one stroke smells like overkill. The Supreme
Court order has not only put the future of the country’s entire telecom policy in jeopardy, it has also run
shivers down the spines of all foreign investors looking at India to put their money on. How does the
government now auction spectrum? What would be the rules? What would be the base price? Who in
government is going to take a chance with all these now? If I pass a file today, how do I know that I won’t
be hauled off to prison when I am 80? If I invest today, what guarantee is there that six years from now, I
won’t suddenly be on trial charged with something I didn’t even know about?

And this Coalgate, it’s become that ghost in the house that stays quiet for months and then suddenly
pops out of a closet when you least expect it and shouts Boo! at you.

The Supreme Court has also decided that every large suspected scam should be handed over for
investigation in toto to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Now, over the years, the CBI hasn’t
exactly covered itself with glory as a gimlet-eyed the-guilty-must-pay band of bloodhounds. The average
Indian citizen and observer associates the agency more with adeptness at cover-ups. Just consider its
record on Bofors and the many disproportionate income cases against politicians. In case after big case,
it has calmly contradicted itself in court, closed files, reopened them, exonerated the accused and then
changed its mind, following its political masters’ diktats. Is the CBI now truly autonomous, as the court
has been demanding and appears to now believe? Does the CBI itself know? Suddenly the sleuths are all
over the place, indicting India’s top industrialists and sniffing at the doors of the Prime Minister’s Office.
Are they serious? One suspects the CBI is as confused as the rest of us. It just wants to cover its own
bottom. It can always retract later, that is the agency’s core competence.

So what we have is utter uncertainty, at all institutional, policy and functioning levels. After this, if you
believe that any large firm, Indian or foreign, is going to invest big money in India, you might as well
believe in Santa Claus.

And if anyone did want to invest, would any bureaucrat, however honest and diligent, put his signature
on any file? As former cabinet secretary T.S.R. Subramaniam said: “Every bureaucrat will just play
crossword or golf." Who knows what who will be accused of, and when? Today, no bureaucrat feels he is
safe as long as he is alive. In the meantime, the harassing of perfectly honest bureaucrats continues
unabated, as the case of Ashok Khemka in Haryana demonstrates.

So the answer to the question is rather simple: No one is running the country. It’s every man for himself
now. And don’t think just because you’ve been filing all your taxes scrupulously and on time, you’re all
right and have nothing to worry about.