Opinion Debate’s just started

Trust and credibility often matter more than ideas. So the question is this. Parliament has salvaged some of its institutional authority. But will politicians be able to fill the credibility gap this movement revealed? Rahul Gandhi’s intervention,whatever its content,was oddly ill-timed,with no real follow-up. The judgment of key members of the cabinet stands discredited. Both the BJP and the Congress were led by the scruff of their necks,though in the end the BJP followed a tad more gracefully than the Congress. Both parties displayed a singular lack of intellectual and political self-confidence. They may still dodge the full force of Anna Hazare’s conditions in the select committee; but that dodge has more the imprimatur of scheming than forthright intellectual conviction. The authority of politics still remains at a crossroads.

Parliamentary proceedings were riveting. Sushma Swaraj’s deconstruction of government was spot on. It raised the point,why are so many state institutions used to target opponents of the government? Sharad Yadav and Lalu Prasad were giving inimitable lessons in India’s political economy. They provided the strangest of juxtapositions: the most ringing defence of parliamentary procedure and constitutionalism with the opportunistic appeal to caste. Sandeep Dikshit,in a powerful performance,suggested that the government had been for a strong Lokpal all along,conveniently eliding the history of government’s broken promises. The Left parties were strong on federalism,but typically called for an even greater expansion of state power.

Did Parliament cave in? It can claim a formal victory; it can still consider various proposals. But this debate was more about ending a fast. And debate under the threat of a fast-unto-death produces an anodyne consensus. Whatever the end result,a fast-unto-death remains an imposition on the liberty of those who disagree. Serious disagreement on the fundamentals of the Lokpal no longer remained an option. Someone could have enriched the debate by questioning the inclusion of the prime minister under the Lokpal. Someone could have raised questions about the institutional dynamics of large bureaucracies superintending other large bureaucracies. Speakers referred to how the Supreme Court,in the Jain Hawala case,had unwittingly short-circuited the careers of innocent politicians. Yet the implications of that kind of charge for institutional design were not followed.

The movement,in turn,was an organisational triumph. It tapped into new idioms and aesthetics. There was occasional rhetorical disfigurement. But the fact that there was a platform where thousands could peacefully coalesce around the symbolism of Anna Hazare is not a mean achievement. These signal new forms of mobilisation in future: the combination of the media,urban India,middle-class support is a potent force. All social mobilisations tap into a sense,however temporarily,of empowering citizens. This sense only grows with success.

The catalyst for mobilisation was an apocalyptic vision of corruption. But this is an unfashionable thing to say. Mobilisations happen when things are getting better,not worse. Hitherto,governance had two premises: secrecy and hierarchy. Government could presume that most of its files would remain hidden from public gaze. It could presume that government was so hierarchically ordered that everyone in the system would do its bidding. The Right to Information Act,the play of incentives in the media have now made it very difficult for government to hide things. That a lot of dirt is coming out is a sign of how the premises of governance are shifting,not a sign of things getting worse.

The second big shift is that power is now genuinely divided. A lot of independent institutions — from the SC to the Comptroller and Auditor General — enhance their power by holding other institutions to account. The states have been experimenting from everything from citizens’ charter to social audits. The focus on the pressure in the streets must not take anything away from the fact that a system of checks and balances has kicked in,albeit with some delays. There are now too many actors in the system for governments to presume that they can control them.

This narrative is important to remember. We must not create institutional designs that short-circuit a lot of mechanisms already in play. We also need to understand the place of reform in all this. Economic reform is increasingly being blamed for our ills. Certainly,the scale of rents the state has been able to extract from certain sectors which it still has not reformed — real estate,natural resources,mining — is staggering. That extraction only deepens the humiliation felt by citizens in ordinary transactions with the state. The government was right to say that the proper response is fixing the state sector by sector. But its lack of action has left it with no locus standi on the issue. Finally,in the name of democratic power,we need to be careful not to reinstate statism. The political mood is ominously shifting in that direction. A presumptive distrust in politicians is,ironically,paving the way for greater presumptive trust in an elite cadre of bureaucrats and judges.

Our democracy has pulled back from a precipice. Even rival interpretations of what happened allow the game to go on. But the politics of symbolism is not a substitute for the nitty-gritty of what it will take to balance liberty and innovation with accountability. The argument has just begun.

The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi,express@expressindia.com