Whither civil society?

For a country where democratic institutions have for thousands of years dominated body politic and civic life, 2013 is likely to present the most serious challenge yet to its political and social processes. India is no stranger to agitations, borne as it was out of agitational politics and public ferment. Post-1947, there have been disquiets of various magnitudes, shapes and sizes. Bhoodan, anti-Congress upheavals like the JP movement and anti- Bofors stir and similar examples have dotted the country’s landscape. For the last four decades or so, India has been in the midst of Maoist violence in its heartland, a never-ending spiral of violence egged on by `peoples’ activists. There have been innumerable agitations on a smaller scale in little towns and villages, unknown to the rest of the world, but significant struggles in their own right. So India does not need a Tehrir Square or martyr’s square to prove its political credentials.

What does this new agitational mode of politics dominated by youngsters squatting on Raj Path represent? Is this the combined effect of corruption, crime, nepotism, cronyism combined with seething frustrations on the inability of the system to provide basic essential services; interminably long court cases, graft in government and police services, hospitals etc?

The basic difference between the earlier modes of protest and the current turmoil is that the latter has the backing of a media which is not just technically sophisticated but has the propensity to go viral. Youngsters fed up with a rotting political system and its inexplicable delays give full vent to their feelings on prime time live TV, internet space is occupied by a generation of Indians who apparently spend more time on the web than they do on ground and the atmosphere is jiving with breaking news. With SMSs providing the ultimate fillip to what was once done with the help of wall papers, organising a mass of angry young people to converge at a place is apparently no problem at all. Predictably, TV vans follow to ensure that a troubled atmosphere is created immediately. Not unnaturally, most of the `big national’ stories happen in central Delhi within vantage point of the Parliament and other VIP installations.

Where does this brand of high-decibel chest thumping by the civil society take India and critically, what impact does it have on decision-making, till now thought to be the private preserve of those sitting behind well-ensconced official desks in South and North Block?

As the recent outcry against the rape and killing of a 23-year-old in trendy south Delhi has shown, there are some positives – the feeling that the country lacks adequate deterrence against crime has come to dominate public space.

The suggestions have ranged from hanging, castration to be being stoned to death. But the point is this: when you have relevant sections in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) designed to deal with such infringements, then greater will has to be shown not just by law enforcing agencies but the courts as well to fast track cases of such heinous crime. Justice, after all, has to be seen to be done; merely registering a case or charge sheeting suspects are no longer going to be enough because a generation brought up on global values is demanding much more from the system than its predecessors.

That presents a challenge of epic proportions for a country with incredible diversity and innumerable civilisational fault lines. How we tackle this is going to determine the country’s course. Which brings us to a connected question: what will be the role of civil society, indeed does such a society actually exist outside of TV frames? As the blood curling accounts of the man who survived the rapists’ assault and was thrown out of the bus along with his lady companion on a cold Delhi night indicates, there were no do-gooders in sight when they needed it the most. People stopped and speculated as to what could have happened to the two naked bodies lying half-dead - without lifting a little finger to help. Once the issue became big, it were the same set lighting candles and waxing eloquent about the horrors of rape. It is this challenge that India will have to be alive to.

The state has withered away

Maoist groups and the mindless orgy of violence unleashed by them are regarded as a national scourge. No less than the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself has gone on record to say that it constitutes the single-biggest threat to the country’s unity and security apparatus, even ahead of crossborder terrorism.

But does India’s political elite look too concerned? They should, if they are not. Sitting in the smug confines of the national capital or in one of the metros, the goings on in the country’s boondocks thousands of kilometres away, is no ones’ problem. Yet, if nearly 200 districts, in the heart of some of the most mineral-rich areas of the world, are under the grip of Left radicals, any country should worry. It is not as if policy planners are sitting idle tweedling their thumbs, but the complications of the situation are enormous.

While realms have been written on Maoists, their deadly strategies and human right excesses, this issue of Governance Watch examines a hitherto untapped area of work: the response of the government machinery to Left extremism.

The word administrative paralysis in this case would be an understatement. There is virtually no trace of the all powerful Indian state in vast tracts of Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. In fact, deep in the interiors of a Dantewada or Sambalpur district, almost wholly under Maoist control, a casual visitor to the region may be tempted to believe that he is back in 19th century India.

What were once fairly well administered states, like former Madhya Pradesh and Odisha, are mere caricatures of their not-too-distant past, their official delivery mechanisms in shambles because the threat of the gun in the last two decades or so, has been so overwhelming that the civil bureaucracy, including the armed police, have simply made themselves scarce.

The logic of politics is that if you vacate space, someone else will grab it. That is precisely what has happened. Buildings which once housed crucial low-level district functionaries, have been abandoned in favour of Left radicals, hospitals have become safe houses for those on the run and in the near absence of any law and order machinery, the extremists have without fear, marked out their territory.

A ground report from Sambalpur in Odisha demonstrates how fragile the administrative system has become. In one case after the other, remnants of the former administration who despite being in a minority have displayed courage to stay on and work in very trying circumstances, take their orders from Maoists. With no protection, what can be expected? Decisions deemed administrative, like collecting taxes, are now taken by Naxalites in their absence, underlining the state’s ultimate ignominy.

To focus substantially, we have the company of two experts who have seen the Naxalite movement from very close quarters, one a serving administrator and the other, a retired one. An officer posted in Andhra Pradesh in the worst days of Left militancy, shows us a way out. His empathy and involvement in the affairs of the common man won the day for the Indian state in a remote part of the country. For the other, working and understanding the Naxalites or Maoists has been a lifelong passion. It his column, he gives us a perspective that is fresh, as it is old. The rights of the tribals have been usurped and violated and what we now see by way of rural violence is the comeuppance. For a subject which is sure to dominate headlines in the days to come, hopefully this issue would help in providing some guidance.

Chickens come to roost

Rarely has a country been at the economic crossroads as India is. In dictatorships, economic policy runs a course dictated strongly by political logic. To justify centralized rule and the lack of freedom, republics are known to pursue financial policies which have helped them achieve unprecedented growth rates on a consistent basis. A decision taken at the top – and not surprisingly, marked by utmost unanimity – has to be followed in letter and spirit down the line where dissent has no place. The results are always encouraging.

Tragically for India, where more than two million people hold elected posts in political and public life, it is precisely democracy which is being used as a bulwark against growth and development. A global project approved by the central government and likely to benefit local people amongst others is shot down merely because the state government does not deem it fit or conveniently brands it ‘anti-people’.

The chickens are now coming to roost. After a decade of high growth, India is in the throes of a development crisis where investment both foreign and Indian has slowed down. Spiraling inflation, unacceptable corruption levels and weak kneed central government policies have produced an unhealthy situation.

The debate is now centered on two classical strands of Indian economics; one, which seeks convergence with the global economic order, the other dictated by traditional Left or socialist rhetoric which says the country has to chart out its own course, independent of any world economic order. Global investor agencies are drawing dire conclusions of India’s growth story, some going as far as to suggest that its fairy tale GDP graph could now be a thing of the past.

In its latest assessment, Moody’s Analytics believes that “confidence among Indian firms has been crushed by weak demand, elevated interest rates, high inflation and most significantly, the instability created by a weak central government that has badly lost its way.’’ Similar conclusions were earlier arrived at by Standard and Poor, another global agency which has pegged down India’s GDP by several notches in their outlook for 2012-13.

While it is easy to brush aside these assessments as those representing varied interest groups, it is equally a fact that high velocity global investments are tied down to what the agencies conclude. It would be no hyperbole to say that top companies around the world follow their outlook to arrive at their conclusions. By the looks of what the agencies are saying, obviously global investors are not exactly jumping with joy at the prospects of setting up shop in India.

As opposed to what is euphemistically described as ‘neo-con’ economics, there are others who take the view that instead of inviting foreign finance capital to speculate in India’s stock market, the government needs to focus on encouraging private and public investment in productive enterprises.

This school of thought is convinced that two decades of policies of liberalization, globalization and privatisation have benefited just a few people at the top and agriculture has suffered enormously. They also rubbish claims that a high GDP does not necessarily benefit everyone.

This is a view which suits India’s deeply fragmented political chess board where regional satraps with little or no vision for India, are wont to rail against the ‘global economic order’, stall initiatives like FDI in retail and stand doggedly by their positions. For instance, the biggest opposition to FDI in retail has come from politically crucial Uttar Pradesh.

In between several questions remain unanswered – in fact they have not even been asked. Where do you get high technology so critical for economic growth? Where is the money so vitally needed for investment?

These are questions that this issue of Governance Watch tackles. In a series of high profile columns and interviews, there is no spectrum of economic life which has been left untouched. There are liberal economists, top-of-the line policy honchos, Left analysts, middle-of-theroad egg heads and agriculture experts that have come together for the first time to conduct a micro-level post-mortem of India’s woes. For those following the India growth story, it must make for compelling reading.

Kudankulam effect

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) constitute a critical element of civil society and it would be no exaggeration to say that they are, in fact, its main drivers. The civil society is a motley assemblage: voluntary activists, PIL lawyers, media persons, general do gooders, public spirited fellows and lately, a sprinkling of celebrities who have jumped on the bandwagon eying lollies on the way.

But even in this crowd, the NGO will make its presence felt. Unlike the other civil society players, they know the rules of business, they can research and dig up facts which have not seen the light of the day and have the wherewithal to pursue a case for weeks, even months and years, to take it to logical fruition. In addition, they have the resources to trail relentlessly.

India is home to one of the world’s most powerful, effective and vocal voluntary sectors. There is virtually no field of activity which is untouched: education, health, drinking water, sanitation, environment, industry, information — you name it. From somewhat modest beginnings in the 1960s, it is today a behemoth.

The results of NGO activism too have been encouraging. Some major environmental acts have been enacted at the back of noteworthy ecological campaigns , there is more than ever a starker realisation of communalism post-Gujarat, a young generation has got its teeth into anti-corruption after Anna Hazare’ campaign, a sharper appreciation of development issues has emerged and as the 2G scam demonstrated, NGO action has a sharp cutting edge as well. 

Some recent researches have focused on alternative themes, the most notable of which is the role of foreign-funded groups working as Christian proselytisers, mainly in India’s tribal belt, exploiting the country’s natural fault lines to whip up a frenzy of anti-state feelings and unhealthy secular relations. In an indictment of just how strongly networked such groups are, Rajiv Malhotra and Arvindan Neelkandan in their book ‘Breaking India: Western Intervention in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines’, reveal patronages that go back to the US Congress and influential US and other European politicians connected to the Christian Right who consider proselytising their primary political concern. 

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent indictment of US-backed peace activists in Koodankulum for slowing down India’s nuclear  power acquisition programme, has raised hackles. Opinion is divided. The NGO sector sees it as a direct interference in their affairs, one which is open to competitive interpretations. Coming at the heels of greater scrutiny of their sources of funding by the ministry of home affairs and a 2010 amendment to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), prominent groups are a bit nonplussed over a direct attack on them led  by the Prime Minister himself. 

This, they believe, is a prelude to imposing further curbs. Their rivals say more than 50 per cent of NGOs have yet to account for their global funding. There are still others who say there is need for greater synergy and dialogue between the government and the voluntary sector. 

Happily, there is one consensus: financially hamstrung governments with archaic rules of business cannot work on their own and need the help of the voluntary sector as partners to take their development programmes down to the grassroots. In a government machinery dominated by British-Raj regulations, NGOs have been able to inject a fresh dose of vitality of thinking, displaying a much larger connect with people on ground. Not helping the NGO cause is India’s difficult security environment. Conspiracy theorists are wont to raise questions on NGO funding in those parts of the country which are hit by extremism. There have been sporadic admissions from the government of NGO support for pro-radical outfits in Kashmir and the North East.

This issue of Governance Watch takes a comprehensive look at this critical area of Indian social and political life. Along with interviews, columns and views that do not tread the beaten path, it should throw light on a subject which is both vast and significant at the same time.

Clear eyed look

The Union Budget is one of the most crucial days in the Indian calendar. On that one afternoon that heralds the advent of spring, the financial health of the country, its growth rate, future projections and investment climate is kept on the table, a copious piece of public document which concerns the economic well being not just of a group of people or a community but the country at large.

Important as Union Budgets have always been, the last two decades of globalisation have added to the growing significance of India’s capital markets and with each passing year, budget proposals are received eagerly by India’s burgeoning market leaders and multinational companies in the fond hope that their sectoral aspirations are going to be met.

Yet for a vast majority of Indians, most budget proposals which are one of the most mammoth exercises of economic stock taking anywhere in the world, the number crunching and economic jargon does not make great sense out of the immediate circle of stakeholders, professionals, traders and business honchos.

For instance, a growth in exports may not tell the common man how exactly it is going to impact his or her life. Neither will the story of agriculture surplus or the baffling chart of tax exemptions explain how the country’s biggest economic draft is going to change common lives.

It is keeping this in view that Governance Watch is taking perhaps the most comprehensive look at the Indian Budget ever undertaken. It explains in a language which everyone understands the importance of the Union Budget, its implications and the subtle nuances that go into its making.

An imminently readable new element is the historic role of successive Union finance ministers and the major policy initiatives taken during their budget speech: there have been finance ministers who have presented as many as half-a-dozen budgets. Some of their presentations have great archival value and narrate in a significant way India’s growth story from a license permit raj regime in the 1950s to a free flowing global economic powerhouse at the turn of the millennium, despite teeming poverty and many other problems.

Away from the nitty gritty and of great significance is the history of the Indian budgets since Independence, the economists who put into place India’s planning cycle, men who displayed uncommon vision in shaping the country’s economic future, which despite the warts and all that, has managed to become the second largest economy in the world, keeping in view that strictly democratic methods were used in trying to attain goals.

The cover package of this latest issue looks at the role of lobbies which influence the budget making exercise: highly organised industry bodies who have a big stake and therefore try their level best to influence the finance minister into granting this or that concession; agricultural interests who press for loan waivers, better farm inputs and other freebies and the mass of common people who find their representatives in a plethora of citizens’ associations. The thrust and parry which goes into making of the budget are no less than a thriller and are worthy of being recorded. That is precisely what the current issue does.

There is the conventional wisdom that any serious yet simple understanding of the Indian budget is possible only in some top notch global economic publications.

Instead of just vomiting out numbers, facts, figures and bland statements, some global publications are able to give out the big picture story which is understood easily. This view is not entirely inaccurate either.

It doubly makes sense therefore to completely deconstruct the budget so that every facet is laid out in the simplest possible narrative.

Hopefully, the readers will get a bird eyes’ view of what is possibly the most significant document in the country, referred to under the unassuming nomenclature of the Annual Financial Statement under Article 112 of the Constitution of India. A country with a near 8 per cent growth rate is entitled to such clarity.

Making a difference

An appointment to the civil service of the Company,’’ noted the Macaulay Committee Report in 1854 giving India its first modern bureaucracy which recommended that the patronage-based system of East India Company be scrapped in favour of tough competitive examinations, “will not be a matter of favour but a matter of right. He who obtains  such an appointment will owe it solely to his own abilities and industry. It is undoubtedly desirable that the civil servants of the Company should have received the best, the most finished education that the native country affords.’’

In retrospect, these were words that looked out well into the future, even though the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) is by no means the British Indian Civil Service (ICS), neither is 2011 akin to the 19th  and 20th centuries. The pulls and pressures of a modern, vibrant, ever expanding and often corrupt India have taken a toll on the working of the bureaucracy. An increasing number of idealistic officials have been silenced into  insignificant posting or worse.

Indian civil servants who ran state and central administrations in the immediate aftermath of Independence, remember them as times where a political boss could take ‘no’ for an answer from officers not willing  to oblige outside the prescribed limits of law.

Politicians of the period, most of whom had made their bones during the freedom movement, realised the strain it would place on governance if an official was summarily kicked out — or even implicated in  motivated cases —  simply because he had declined to comply with illegal orders from the top.

These men of eminence are merely mirroring what the Constituent Assembly of India had in mind when it said that the “bureaucracy  should be able to speak out freely, without fear of persecution or financial insecurity as an essential element in unifying the nation.’’

Given the political shenanigans of the   day, this situation seems idyllic. There is little doubt that many of the billion dollar scams that the country and the government of the day finds engulfed in, would not have taken place if the officialdom had been more resolute and upright. The civil service continues to dominate policy as it did  earlier and is well within its rights to refuse signing on the dotted line if he or she deems fit.

That is happening increasingly less. It makes sense to understand the anomalies that have crept into the system. Now political bosses are  averse to being turned down, no matter how outrageous or venal their request. 

They take serious offence at refusal, are prone to turn vindictive and use their ultimate power to toss and turn around the bureaucracy and break its back. There is little point in blaming officials if this is happening across states; sooner or later a lot of people will crawl when asked to bend. Sadly for the country, that seems like a malaise that has come to stay.

The current issue of Governance Watch deals with this critically changing asymmetry. We profile and interview some young civil servants who after spending a few years in service, remain undeterred by power  and pelf, disregard for personal safety, possess no overarching ambitions and are willing to work with their heads down, minus the light and sound. In this, the country should consider itself fortunate. Our interviews  conducted on a pan-Indian basis reveals this timber and that can only be considered good news.

So you have a north Indian IAS officer  serving in insurgency-ridden north east India with guts and conviction, another civil servant is   single-handedly tackling the mining mafia in Karnataka, a lobby of such clout that it routinely makes and unmakes chief ministers and counts as a factor in elections. 

There is the officer in Punjab who set in place a PDS system in an impoverished district on his own steam while a policeman in Uttar  Pradesh is hell bent on cleaning a virtually uncleanable system. 

On the way, innumerable punishment postings, personal threats, disturbed family lives and an insecure, less lucrative future stares them in the face. But no sweat. 

They continue to carry on in the face of odds, diehards who  are willing to implement government policies by the book and not afraid of taking on the high and mighty of the land. It is their seminal contributions that this issue seeks to record.

Terrorism Combat

The clich� ‘is India soft in combating terrorism’ can now easily be replaced by ‘can India combat terrorism at all’? By any reckoning and by a variety of reasons, some in India’s control and some not, the dice appears loaded against her.

Let us examine the complexities. India cannot alter geography, sharing a 4057- kilometre porous border with Communist China in her east whose interest is to keep India down, both politically, militarily and from becoming an economic rival. On the west are traditional rivals Pakistan with whom India shares a 2,900-kilometre often hostile border. Both countries are long standing allies and for China, Pakistan has come handy in keeping India bottled up in south Asia. India can do as little about the China-Pakistan all weather friendship as it could about the China-Pakistan nuclear non-proliferation agreement, details of which are slowly but continuously emerging.

“The Pakistan-China axis is an old one and we have to be na�ve to believe that the two are not acting in unison. Please read AQ Khan’s latest revelations,’’ says G Parthasarathy, former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan and an analyst not known to mince his words.

China’s quiet but steady plans of increasing its military capabilities on the Indo-China border are on the radars of Sinophiles. Recent reports from the Pentagon have confirmed that China has successfully deployed long range CSS-5 missiles close to the Indian border while also having developed contingency plans to move airborne forces to the region at very short notice.

For India this is a matter of serious concern, given the somewhat fragile relationship between the two countries which saw a border war in 1962 in which India’s political class was exposed as having no knowledge of either warfare or the terrain that the battle was to be fought.

That battle has left permanent scars as successive Indian governments — with the exception of Indira Gandhi in the early seventies — have simply refused to react to Chinese provocations including border incursions passing them off as ‘routine’, a throwback to the disastrous days of ‘Hindi-Chini bhai bhai’ and the Bandung spirit, all of which was thrown out of the window in 1962 never to come back again.

China’s top envoy Sun Yaxi told the Indian media a couple of years ago that all Arunachal Pradesh or south Tibet as he calls it, is Chinese territory, reiterating publicly what their diplomats have been saying across the table.

In its annual report to the US Congress titled “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” officials from the American department of defence have stated that “Beijing remains concerned with persistent disputes along China’s shared border with India and the strategic ramifications of India’s rising economic, political, and military power”. It is little surprise that Beijing is diplomatically opposing the proscription of Jaishe Mohammed as a terrorist group even though India has supplied mountains of evidence to back their claim.

What India can control, it is unable to do so. The cross-border terror exported by Pakistan-based ISI-sponsored militant groups and their attacks on the Indian mainland in the last decade or so — including the November 2008 savagery in Mumbai — does not seem to have an endgame.

Much of India’s inability is counter terror or attacks on its installations can be directly attributed to its own internal contradictions. India’s response to the Mumbai attacks, for instance, have degenerated into a farce. Not only has it not been able to provide a list of the attackers by frequently going wrong on their names and whereabouts, recent Wikileaks revelations suggest India was not even serious about extraditing one of the main accused in the attack and that its protest was at worst a mock, at best a mere formality to keep up pretenses.

It is little wonder that the case appears to have gone off peoples’ radars except for the three Americans killed in the attack and whose representatives appear determined to drag the ISI and top Pakistani army brass to their New York courts. But by far the biggest security threat to India emanates from its inability to reform security systems. The police has not been modernised and its system of investigation and information collection belongs to the days of the colonial raj where the sophistication to take a case to its logical conclusion remained strictly limited.

The police and security systems are putty in the hands of politicians and the civil bureaucracy who have no intention of letting go of their powers to control the police. “It is a well known fact that policemen are forced to do the bidding for politicians and their stooges. They are compelled to run errands,’’ says former CBI joint director NK Singh, one of the petitioners before the Supreme Court, whose PIL has sought to know why police reforms proposed in 1977 continue to gather dust.

The other bane of security: vote bank politics. By accusing the police of being unduly harsh on minorities which has been revealed in some instances but not all, security forces have been put on the back foot. Top police officers say that it is routine after every blast for the authorities to say ‘there should be no harassment of minorities’. That has led to its own repercussions.

In Delhi, since the 2008 Batla House encounter and as a matter of policy, the Delhi Police has not arrested any ISI agent or Pakistani module. Result: chances of terror attacks have gone up considerably in India’s capital.

Analysts say if the moment of suspects is to be judged by their community, we may as well forget about fighting terror. Above all, the lack of an aware political leadership has come in the way of India being unable to safeguard its flanks. Political instability and coalition politics have contributed directly to the state of security in the 1990s when in the days of United Front governments, national security was given the least priority, the saving of the government being the first.

India has to hold many crosses. Cyber war for instance. Officially, the likelihood of a Chinese cyber-strike has been played down, but say experts, could be a big mistake.� A recent investigation by software security firm McAfee has revealed that as cyber-attacks rise globally, India is emerging as an easy hunting ground. It has other implications as well because the vulnerability not just poses a threat to the government, military, and infrastructure, it also carries a huge risk for international businesses that have outsourced IT operations or bought software in India. 

“That India is under-prepared is well known, and experts often raise concerns about how the government’s IT systems could be crippled in a war. While that threat is valid, I think the real worry is someone attacking the IT systems of the private sector,’’ Shivarama Krishnan, an IT security expert told the media recently.� 

Says Gen. Shankar Roy Chowdhary, former army chief and Rajya Sabha member, “When we talk of state being soft on terror, the implication is that the government succumbs to pressure. It’s an ineffectual state. It’s ineffectual because it’s ineffective. It’s ineffective because it’s inefficient.’’ Sadly, that is a face off which the Indian establishment is not ready to take on.