Paper on Policies for the Polity

The above conclusions are of course not only from my specific experiences around policy discussions, but also from my general scanning what has been going on. My scan also brings to the fore occasional exceptions, and therein lies hope still.

To return to my sceptic conclusions: they are borne out by well-known examples, like the Bank nationalization, abolition of bonded labour, OBC Reservations and and the like). My limited involvement in policy cogitations also corroborates the general thrust of the conclusions above.

I was part of the Working Group on Civil Supplies of the Planning Commission for the formulation of the 10th Five Year Plan. The Group had a life of two or three months and met on three or four occasions. At that time, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns were bursting at the seams. However the situation could change dramatically with a couple of successive bad seasons. But this possibility was by and large ignored and the implicit assumption in the discussions of the Working Group was that somehow the over-full-godowns situation would continue. And therefore the atmosphere during the discussions, even though there was reasonable representation from civil society, was not markedly conducive for any basic changes in the thinking or in policy.

There was a suggestion to encourage the production of so called coarse cereals in the areas covered by watershed development and including coarse cereals in the Public Distribution System (PDS). This would incidentally economise on water, apart from reviving more healthy dietary habits. There was even the nod of appreciation of positive experiences where these traditional crops were grown on the otherwise fallow lands, and where these grains were distributed in a non-official PDS initiated by a civil society organisation! But the enthusiasm stopped there.

Such a streamlining of course would have called for far-reaching changes in policy. The officials pointed out that in any case, it would be for the states to announce Minimum Support Prices (MSP) for coarse cereals and give back-up measures like procurement. We are indeed selectively federal! Thus brief discussions on the suggestion were not conclusive, and the bits and pieces deliberations were not backed by well-articulated official stances or studies for which there was no time. Soon it was time to cobble a final report of recommendations for the 10th Five Year Plan formulation. The predilection was essentially in favour of continuation of policy.

And then, what happens? A couple of bad seasons followed. Wheat had to be imported. Word went round in international markets that India is in need, and the prices went up. We were completely unprepared for this total change in the food grains economy. It would have been prudent for the Working Group to anticipate such an eventuality, particularly since there were signs of sluggishness in the rate of growth of production. Indeed there were muted suggestions within the group.

It is not of course correct to make drastic conclusions from this limited experience on the tendency of policy to stay, or the stickiness of policy.

After all, PDS is only one among several policy areas. Can we generalize on the basis of a single experience? That word of caution is valid. But the general picture I proceed to present now is that our history of the last several decades shows that our system has a built-in bias against changing policies in a rational way: our system is happy to be a no-changer of policy, not a pro-changer, except when change is forced by water entering under the mat, or by exogenous forces with a leverage on our economy and on our policies. Others with first-hand experience around the MNC finger in our pie as regards GEAC, and with the World Bank/IMF prescribed structural adjustment programmes, can attest to these.

Let me now turn to a few observations and a broad analysis of the historical and political factors embedded into our system that have rendered it a no-changer in policy matters except when forced, not because of rationality.

At least the younger members of the civil society of India would protest in disbelief if the civil society is described as a successor to the Gandhian freedom movement. But succession is not always by choice, and succession of civil society to the Gandhian movement flows from the history of India that preceded the change of guard in 1947. Remember the Gandhian (not in the ideological sense) movement was a broad front in which different ideologies were put in the backburner with the sole idea of sending the alien rulers out. But in that process, there was no deafening dissent on what the Gandhian movement tended to reflect and project, Ambedkar being the exception. Thus the constructive programmes which were part of the Gandhian “package” were not scrutinized much in the public discourses of that period, though the leftists (who were part of the Gandhian front) would not go with such an economic programme. But in any case, time was not yet ripe for such a scrutiny of the constructive programmes since the foreign yoke was still on.

The parallel ends there as in India, the leftists (of various hues) no doubt left the Gandhian front, post-1947, but unlike in China, they were not one force (Communists, Socialists, Royists etc.). In any case the left ideology was taken over by the new government, leaving the Gandhian Constructive Programme ideology essentially outside of the state purview. The Gandhian ideology was left high and dry, looking for a peg (pun unintended) to hang on. The state did provide some in the form of KVIC, Central Social Welfare Board (both para-statal), and the like. There it rested until the Bhoodan Movement gave it a coherence which it lacked until then, from Independence onwards, and also unleashed currents that led to the birth of civil society of free India (the Bhoodan activists were described by an analyst as Gentle Anarchists).

While this needs to be more fully documented, it was out of the Bhoodan movement that there was the flowering of civil society in India (in what marks Indian situation as different from the Chinese. In China, of course, there was no question of a civil society). The civil society thereafter has grown beyond its original moorings in the Gandhian movement, without being a single entity thereafter. But over the years, there undoubtedly developed several commonalities within the civil society, best reflected in the idea of networks catching up. The summum bonum of the commonalities was that the state, and its policies, could not be counted upon to reflect pro-people stances even in independent India.

What was not clear in 1947 was getting clearer as years passed, that 1947 was a landmark in a limited sense only. There was a change of guard, in which there was symbolism rather than substance. There was a new flag but the same person continued as the head of the state. The Vice-chair of the Viceroy’s Council became the Prime Minister, and the old bureaucracy in its entirety was retained with statutory protection. Often this step is described as a masterstroke of the new dispensation. But the fact is that those who were rounding up the freedom fighters during the ancien regime, continued as bureaucrats of the new. They were to aid those ex-freedom fighters who moved now into formal positions of power. But these ex-freedom fighters were not the constructive workers in the Gandhian movement (a dichotomy extremely important in that era) and the former lacked experience in ground realities or knowledge on what could be appropriate policy. The continuing bureaucrats advised the inexperienced new rulers on continuation of policy rather than changing it. Continuity was the watchword.

The Bhoodan movement somewhat redressed the situation by throwing up a land movement outside the state policies and involving the Gandhian constructive workers in that exciting work. More importantly, the Bhoodan movement paved the way for an inclusive civil society to emerge; the latter had to make serious efforts to shed the inherited inferiority complex. Ideological discussions started within the civil society, Gandhianism allowing space to leftism and Ambedkarism, as also certain professionalism, all imparting a degree of confidence to civil society (the search for confidence was at times hilarious as when Gandhians once commissioned a German economist to do advocacy with the official planners, in the course of a dialogue, on the virtues of, and the necessity for, a Gandhian approach in Indian planning! Nothing to take exception to, as Gandhi belonged to the entire humanity).

Indian state policy is a product of the relative strength of various contending forces:
Mr. Sastri is quite right when he says that Indian policy has high inertia. But this holds true for the voiceless-the poor and the environment. For those with a voice, Indian policy has changed for their benefit. Two examples substantiate this: 1) The discarding of the Nehru-Mahalnobis thesis which was the backbone of the Indian development model formulated post-Independence, and the acceptance of liberalisation policies that benefit the haves. 2) The recent erosion of environmental law, like the 2006 Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification which enables industrial and development projects to be cleared with haste, to the complete detriment of the environment and what it traditionally supports. (We recently found that the net primary energy loss on farmlands in a 25 km radius around the proposed 1,000 MW Nandikur power plant is 15% of gross energy the plant will produce annually. This does not include energy loss in the nearby Western Ghat forests and their consequent impacts on biodiversity and river water flows).

Indian civil society owes a great debt to pluralism that Indian society has always exhibited:
No doubt that civil society in modern India owes a debt to Gandhi and the institutions that Gandhism spawned. But it owes a greater debt to pluralism of thought that has been a part of Indian ethos for eons before Gandhi. For the moment, without going into the history of Hinduism, civil society origins can be traced back to Gandhi's mentor-Gokhale and his attempts to form civil society organizations. Even Tilak's effort to use religious festivals for his political agenda can be seen as an experiment in forming civil society organizations. However, our belief is that the factor that contributed the most to the shaping of modern India's civil society is the multi-national character of the Indian state. This allowed for democracy, however imperfect, to sustain, while most societies in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East have never experienced sustained democracy.

We also believe that civil society has grown in India, a bit chaotically to say. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain the emergence of a wide variety of civil society organizations-trade unions, NAPM, religious organizations, Maoists, SHGs, bahujan samaj organizations, NGOs, Al Qaeda, etc. Without such a growth of civil society organizations, it is difficult to explain the emergence of Mayawati and the forces she represents. However, the state power has grown too, at an even faster rate than that of civil society organizations. Therefore it appears that civil society continues to remain at a disadvantage in comparison to the state.

How long trend will sustain is moot, particularly when it is beginning to be publicly realized that "trickle down theory" has failed to deliver, the implications of which will be a greater readiness on the part of the have-nots and the state to say "draw"; unless they have the wisdom and buy themselves a little more time by forming a pan-South Asian Union, somewhat along the lines of the EU. The failure of trickle down theory will also see the tapering of non-government funding sources and NGOs hence decrease pluralism in civil society.

Apocalypses or a stronger civil society? We don't feel that invoking Shelley is right at the present historical juncture. Either human society will be ripped apart beyond recognition by tipping points that current energy throughputs in society will cause in the form of climate change, overuse of fossil fuels (hence other natural resources) followed by collapse of the global economy, accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and consequent inequity; or the society that survives it will discard the state in favour of a many-splendored civil society. If society is to survive at all, it necessitates changing human outlook from "gain maximization for a few" to "risk minimization for all species". Doing that is no mean task, and there is very little time to do it before peak oil hits us.

Sagar Dhara and T. Vijayendra

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