India has achieved a relatively high economic growth rate and wants to be a leader among nations. However, her performance in delivering basic services to citizens is pathetic. Governance experts fail to provide a convincing diagnosis of the growing gap between what the state delivers and what people expect it to deliver. In one form or another standard western prescriptions of ‘governance reform’ are advocated. What exists is a colonial construct, which is in irreconcilable conflict with the Indian conception of rights and duties. To move forward we need to learn from Indian experience in statecraft, and Chanakya-Kautilya’s Arthashastra is a valuable classic in this regard, notes S.Udayan
India has achieved a relatively high economic growth rate and wants to be a leader among nations. However, her performance in delivering basic services to citizens is pathetic. Governance experts fail to provide a convincing diagnosis of the growing gap between what the state delivers and what people expect it to deliver. In one form or another standard western prescriptions of ‘governance reform’ are advocated. What exists is a colonial construct, which is in irreconcilable conflict with the Indian conception of rights and duties. To move forward we need to learn from Indian experience in statecraft, and Chanakya-Kautilya’s Arthashastra is a valuable classic in this regard, notes S.Udayan
India is among the top five countries today in terms of the rate of GDP growth, but it lags far behind other countries in providing quality education and health care to the population. India lags behind even its much smaller neighbours on this count, not to speak of the more advanced countries. It is well behind Sri Lanka in most social indicators. It is also way below global standards in maintaining public productive assets such as roads, buses and water pipes.
Numerous scholars and journalists have highlighted the glaring gap between word and deed in India today – between budgetary outlays and developmental outcomes, between what is recorded in official documents and the ground reality. One may call this the Governance Deficit. A few illustrations will help to explain what this means.
Hordes of data on rising numbers of schools, teachers and education budgets hide the fact that little or nothing is learnt in most government funded schools. Data on the number of public hospitals, rural health centers, doctors and nurses, hide the fact that conditions in the majority of public facilities are so bad that whoever can afford it goes to private doctors and clinics. Policemen more often flout the laws for personal gain than defend them for the greater common good.
While there is no dearth of descriptions of the miserable state of governance, there is a shortage of convincing diagnosis. Governance experts of the World Bank, for instance, say there are numerous weaknesses in the "institutions of accountability". Solutions are advocated based on the presumption or prejudice that what worked in Europe and North America in the 19th and 20th centuries is best for India in the 21st century.
What really is the root cause of the governance deficit? Why does the delivery of public services in modern India appear as mimicry, an imitation of something it is not, while the real business in government departments is largely off the record? What accounts for this twofaced character of the Indian state and its delivery mechanisms?
In order to address these questions, one has to look at the origin and metamorphosis of the present day State in India, and its relation to the conception of right and duty ingrained in Indian minds, a residue of millennia of indigenous experience with statecraft prior to the colonial conquest.
Duties of the State in pre-colonial India
It is useful to study how one authoritative treatise on statecraft, viz., the Arthashastra, defines the duties of the State. In this article all references are to ‘The Kautilya Arthashastra: An English translation with critical and explanatory notes’, by R P Kangle, University of Bombay, 1972.
According to the Arthashastra, which is between 2000 and 3000 years old, the karman or mandatory obligations of the State (Chapter 2.1, 2.1.1, 19-20) include the following:
•Sunyanivesana – settlement on virgin land
•Setubandha – building of dams, tanks and other irrigation works
•Vraja – providing pastures for cattle
•Vanikpatha – opening trade routes and ensuring safety on them
•Khani – working on mines.
There is a conception of reciprocal rights and duties embedded in the relationship of the State to those who till the land, those who rear cattle, conduct trade, work the mines, or in short, the members of society engaged in producing material wealth. The State is duty bound to ensure the conditions necessary for the producers of wealth to play their role, and in turn has the right to collect a portion of the product as its revenue. The producers, on their part, have the right to receive state support in the form of secure land allotments, irrigation facilities, pasture lands, safe trading routes, etc. They are duty bound to turn over a prescribed portion of their product as revenue to the State.
In its elaboration of how the ruler should deal with the allocation and use of land, the Arthashastra says, in Chapter One of Book Two:
•He should allot to tax-payers arable fields for life;
•Non-arable fields should not be taken away from those who are making them arable;
•He should take away fields from those who do not till them and give them to others;
•Or village servants and traders should till them;
•Or those who do not till them should make good the loss to the treasury.
Here again, the confluence of right and duty can be seen. Land can be taken away from one who is not performing his duty of tilling it, but not from one who is performing one’s assigned duty. It is explicitly stated that land cannot be taken away from someone who is performing such a socially useful thing as converting Non-arable into arable land.
With respect to trade, whether domestic or foreign, the Arthashastra prescribes the principle of prajanam anugrahena, meaning that the people must benefit by such trade. It is explicitly laid down that any profit by individuals that may be harmful to the people as a whole should be avoided (2.16, 4-6).
It is interesting to note the elaborate procedures advocated by the Arthashastra for the selection of important ministers, including tests that involve secretly instigating them and seeing if they fall for the bait of corruption or remain loyal to their duty.
History has produced kings and public authorities that acted according to the rules of raj dharma; such kingdoms tended to last long, bringing relatively greater prosperity and progress. There were kings who violated these rules, those who neglected public irrigation works, levied onerous revenue obligations on the producers, or drained the treasury through costly military adventures beyond their means. Such kingdoms faced rebellions and instability, and went into decline sooner rather than later.
Thus, as time passed and as centuries of historical experience was summed up by the learned, works such as the Arthashastra gained respectability and the status of political theory, or raj dharma.
Statecraft in the colonial period
Political theory and the fate of kingdoms were in a state of flux in this sub-continent when the East India Company began to entrench itself. As the Company conquered more territory, the indigenous course of development was arrested. An alien system of governance, justified by European theories and concepts, was imposed on this land.
The theory underlying British colonial rule is summed up by the concept of "white man’s burden" – according to which the monarch of England was divinely mandated to rule over this sub-continent and civilize the backward natives. There is no concept of duty of the monarch towards her subjects in this colony. God had given her the right to rule over India with no reciprocal duties whatsoever!
The Queen of England issued a Charter to the East India Company to carry out its trading and colonizing activities, which clearly specified that all such activities must be beneficial to the Queen. That was the yardstick of good governance under colonial rule, that it must benefit the colonial power.
The institutions that were established for carrying out the British colonial mission in India were suited to the stated objective of maximum plunder to enrich those in power in London. The Lords and Generals who were sent to take charge of Indian affairs had the right to pocket some booty provided they first enriched the Board of Directors of the East India Company and later the moneybags of imperial Britain. Thus, there was a quid pro quo within the ruling elite, while there was none between the rulers and the ruled.
British rule violated Indian sensibilities in every possible way. People rose up in rebellion all over the sub-continent, right from the period of Company rule, to put an end to the adharma of a power that recognized no duty towards the people who produced all the wealth. Several kings and princes took the side of the kisans who tilled the land, and refused to pay tax to an illegitimate ruler who failed to fulfill his obligations to the ruled.
The Indian resistance to the illegitimate and alien authority gathered steam and exploded in the form of the Ghadar of 1857. Following brutal suppression of that massive revolt, the British colonial rulers systematically destroyed institutions and even symbols of Indian philosophy, economic and political theories. They concocted the lie that Indians only had spiritualism, no theories or knowledge that were worth anything.
The most powerful authority of the colonial state in a rural administrative district was the District Collector, also called the District Magistrate, with supreme power to administer justice and to enforce the executive orders of the government. He was executor and judge rolled into one – virtually the ‘lord and master’ in the district. Colonial rule gave rise to an entirely new concept of authority, hitherto unknown in this sub-continent. Each level of authority had duties towards a superior authority but none towards the people; while the people had duties and no rights. The supreme authority located in London, on the other hand, enjoyed unlimited rights and had no duties; the Crown was accountable only to God in theory, to the richest class in practice.
Mimicry in post-colonial India
The founding fathers of independent India, in their wisdom, chose to retain the basic structure of state institutions inherited from British colonial rule, including the communally structured Army, public administration manned by career bureaucrats and headed by an elite Indian Civil Service (or ICS), and the District Collector (or District Magistrate) acting as Lord and Master in each rural district. The scope of elected legislative bodies was extended beyond the Provincial Legislatures to include a central Parliament, modeled after the British Parliament. The arbitrariness of power was sought to be legitimized by a legislative body that was at arms length from the executive machinery. This separation of executive and legislative powers was alien to Indians, who had several thousand years of experience of statecraft which was not based on such a separation.
The mission of the colonial State was not to provide services to the public. It had the mandate to put down disturbances and maintain ‘order’, which meant enforcing compliance of the public with a system of plunder to enrich a minority of wealthy foreigners and their collaborators among Indians.
Post-independence, the mission statement was changed, but not the institutions and incentives required for realizing such a change. The Constitution of India borrowed freely from the constitutions of advanced countries in the world at that time, including from the socialist Soviet Union, to formulate a beautifully worded vision called Directive Principles of State Policy. One who reads it would think that India must really be a humane paradise. However, the District Collector remains Lord and Master of rural districts in independent India, whose performance is measured by whether he served the rulers in New Delhi and in the state capitals, not on whether essential public services are being delivered to the people of the district.
Conclusion
Over 3000 years of experience with a well developed philosophy, along with economic and political theories based on that philosophy, has left a deep imprint on the minds of people in this sub-continent. A couple of hundred years of colonial statecraft, followed by six decades of mimicry, have not wiped out the imprint of thousands of years prior to colonial conquest. That is the reason why the ‘governance reforms’ designed by western educated brains will not and cannot end the yawning governance deficit in India. The mimicry can be ended; word and deed can be harmonized, if and only if a new, modern Indian basis is laid for governing this country. Such a modern theory of governance, fit for India in the 21st century, can only emerge if we Indians stand on the shoulders of the wisdom of our wise ancestors and not if we ignore their contributions and remain enslaved to the Eurocentric rendering of science, including political science and the theory of governance.
S. Udayan is an economist who writes on questions of political economy in a language that ordinary people can understand