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“Does India need a Revolution to clean up its politics?”
On Friday, 1st of April, 2011, Lord Meghnad Desai, accepted the invitation of
the Research Foundation for Governance in India (RFGI) to speak on “Does India
need a Revolution to clean up its politics?”
Mr. Jainil Shah anchored the function. He thanked Lord Desai for accepting
RFGI’s invitation and then introduced Lord Desai to the audience. Lord Desai has
been an internationally acclaimed economist, professor-emeritus at the London
School of Economics. He was awarded Padmabhushan in 2007 and Pravasi Bharatiya
Puraskar (Distinguished Overseas Indian Award) in the 2004. He is a British
Economist and also a Labour Politician. He finished his Ph.D. from the
University of Pennsylvania. He is a champion of various subjects, especially
economics and has advised various governments on matters of national importance.
In 2003, he retired as the Director of the Centre for the Study of Global
Governance which he founded in 1992 at London School of Economics. He published
the biography of Indian Film star- Dilip Kumar, which he considers very close to
his heart.
After Lord Desai’s introduction, Ms. Kanan Dhru, Founder and Managing
Director of RFGI introduced the organisation. She said she felt proud that in
such a short span of time, an organisation of this nature has grown so well and
the excitement of people about working towards legal and political issues is
very encouraging. Introducing the subject, she said its a topic we all need to
think about, very seriously. We in India stood watching when millions took to
streets in various countries across middle-east to protest against corruption,
unemployment and lack of accountability in governance. We as Indians have hardly
raised our voices against any wrongs that have taken place in our country since
centuries. Is it that we do not care at all as to what goes around? Do we have
required leadership or are we as a country capable of creating a revolution for
our problems at all but then again is revolution the only solution? There are so
many questions that are imperative, that they are debated in public forum like
this and we are extremely fortunate that we have distinguished person like Lord
Meghnad Desai with us to guide us.
After Ms. Dhru’s welcome, Lord Desai started his speech. The excerpts from
his speech are as follows:
“Corruption in India is not new. I once quoted and I want to quote it again a
very typical situation in which a Chief Minister is demanding a resignation from
the minister. And he sends a party person instructing him, ‘Tell the minister to
resign because he has been accused of corruption’. The party person comes back
saying that the minister won’t resign. CM says, ‘No, no tell him we don’t want
the money back, we just want your resignation!’
Although the corruption comes in various forms, I want to concentrate on
today’s context. The central problem of Indian corruption is Indian Political
system. Although we have democracy and we are proud of it and we are very robust
democracy, over the years the way it has been practiced by several practitioners
and political parties, it is quite clear that one principle use of corruption is
to run the political parties and to run the elections. Unlike some of the other
countries, we don’t have transparent financial accounts of political parties, we
don’t have transparent financial accounts of how much money is being spent in
elections, and we don’t have any accounts of incomes of politicians and their
families. We get snippets of information during the elections.
Almost the day Obama left India, we have been hearing scandals every day.
Within half an hour of Obama leaving the country, Adarsh scandal was taken off
and Ashok Chavan was fired, then the Common Wealth Games scandal was taken out
followed by the 2G scam, and then Nira Radia tapes scams. And increasingly the
people responsible, people cited, in these scandals, though not limited to, are
either the top political members of political parties or top corporate.
How do politicians get so much money to play with? This central fact is that,
it is alleged and not fully documented, but the money which is unaccounted for,
is the great obstacle in cleaning the Indian political system. There are
systematic ways through which the public money is being siphoned off. In return
for the public money or public privileges, public property is being sold off to
people. The responsible people have a payback in everything and this payback is
what, creates a hitch in out political system. There are barriers in delivering
public goods and services. In each barrier, somebody claims money from you and
until you pay, you cannot go to next barrier.
It’s also quite clear that it is not just a matter of high corruption that we
are facing. About two weeks ago, the Transparency International Board released
the data that the BPL families in India paid around 800 crores rupees as bribe
in order to obtain the most basic things. For example, most of it goes towards
either getting a birth certificate or getting a child admitted to school or to
police to investigate a robbery or things which, we as people are entitled to as
the citizens. For all those things, the poor are being charged heavily.
Our bureaucratic structure has been created by the British rulers. The
independent Indian government is continuing the same tradition. The attitude of
the state is alienated from its citizens. State doesn’t think that the citizens
have the power or right to claim something. The state stands as a guard in case
the citizens speak up and there is overall a situation of grave mistrust. Now
this tradition of state being above the citizens has continued to stay. The
people who have been between the state and the citizens are politically active
and popularly elected aliens. And because these people are elected, there is
simultaneous play of making people to vote or bribing people to vote as you see.
At the same time, once they are empowered, the access to your rights, the access
to how the system functions closes.
Ideologically, when India became independent, there were suspicions towards
capitalism, suspicions towards foreign trade. We started with the idea that the
state should protect the citizens, the market should be controlled. The state
may be neutral and above everybody, all that sounds fine on paper. But in
reality, the market is a political market - a political market, which actually
interferes between the access to rights of services that the citizens have which
they should be entitled to without any undue interference.
Now I have lived in UK for 45 years, I never ever-ever had to pay or offer a
bribe for getting any service from the Government - without having to go to MP
or local councillor for any public facility- water, electricity, gas, birth
certificate, death certificate, anything at all. I have never had to pay a
single penny. And no one should have to pay a single penny for the things they
are entitled to. We really have to ask how come we have come to this stage now?
Uncertainties that India has had after independence, have a huge role to play
in contributing towards our present situation. Uncertainty whether India will
break up, uncertainty whether India will emerge from poverty, uncertainty about
whether India will be able to protect its territorial frontiers. I think, all
those uncertainties are past. India can be confident at this stage now. India
can be confident that its territorial integrity is safe. India can be confident
that no country in the world can dictate anything to us. India can be confident
that even the experiment of democracy has been successful. Of course, there have
been some agitations in Nagaland or Kashmir or elsewhere but by and large the
bulk of the population has been staying within democracy. So now I think, one
has to start worrying about the quality of the democracy, now I think it’s time
for us to be concurrent that we can be critical of political system.
The quality of our democracy is largely dependent on the way our political
parties function. Currently, political parties have become private entities
without much accountability. They are like private operations but unlike other
private companies they have not set procedures for transparency and
accountability. If political parties were to be treated with same law that
private companies have to go through, we would have much cleaner system of
political parties. I know that Kanan has done a thorough research on the
structure of political parties. But it is true that, whatever constitution
political parties have, no political party in India has democratic structure. It
is known in the election that there have been no contestant elections for the
leadership of the Congress party for, I think, 60 years or may be 55 years. Not
only, you know, the contest for leadership, but even for other top positions.
None of the top echelons of leadership nowadays gets elected; they all are
appointed by the leaders and yet there are rumours that, you know, PCC in Uttar
Pradesh waiting to have the decision of Mrs. Sonia Gandhi to see who is going to
be the leader of PCC in Uttar Pradesh.
One of the great original parties, Congress stopped any practice of internal
party democracy. And for BJP, as for instance, Mr. Gadkari was a thrust upon BJP
by RSS. RSS which also belongs to completely opaque structure and don’t have
transparency in finances. So in a sense, one can imply that these parties are
actually administered by private mafias! That’s the only word you use for them.
I don’t know who gave them the legitimacy to govern or contest elections? They
have absolutely no democracy in what they are doing it, but they are doing it.
And I think it’s up to citizen who should begin to ask, while searching
question, as to why is it that the political system has succumbed to the violent
practices of political parties. It’s very interesting that except the judicial
and one or two independent institutions like Election commission, all the other
institutions of state including the police have been corrupted by political
parties. And so one of the things, Indian citizen has to do is to ask what’s the
way to clean the political parties?
I think I feel very excited by what happened in Tunisia, Egypt and so on.
Knowledge and power have been decentralised by the new technology while the
whole secret of the political power is to monopolise and to restrict access to
power. I mean, the contrast for the old and new technology is very interesting.
The new technology disallows the political system from standing as guards and
denying access to citizens. If we use this decentralised knowledge, we are able
to actually subvert some of the restrictions that the state has been exercising
over us. I think what we have been able to say again very partially is that in
number of cases for example when political high ended massacres have taken
place, where police are abusing their powers and so on, some citizen takes a
mobile and takes a picture on that mobile and sends it off to a TV channel.
Suddenly the whole dynamics of the situation changes. Now, that kind of power
creates a beginning of a new possibility in our democracy as well. A possibility
that the present obstacles of the political system can be overcome with the help
of the new technology.
As for possibility of having a revolution in India, forms of mass movement,
will monitor, expose and talk about the roots of corruption, like Tahrir
Square. But many more places are needed for a revolution in our country. We need
a ‘Democratic Strike’, just like what Gandhi was able to create. To change the
current state of affairs, which is a sorry one indeed, what is needed is to map
what kind of rules and regulations were brought to oppress the ordinary
citizens. We need to expose the paths that are created to oppress.”
After the talk of Lord Desai, a session of question and answer with the
audience followed. The question and answer was followed by launch of RFGI’s two
new reports, ‘One person, one vote, one voice: choosing the system of
representation’ and ‘Acquisition of Land for development projects in
India: the Road ahead.’
A memento was presented to Lord Desai as a token of thanks from RFGI and Mr.
Apoorv Shah, Senior Research Associate at RFGI gave a vote of thanks. After the
singing of national anthem, the event came to an end.
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