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| We must shed tag of soft state | | | Inder Malhotra
It was in the second half of the 1960s, that the eminent Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, called India a "soft state", an epithet that immediately caught on. In 1972, Indira Gandhi — at the peak of her power and glory after her personal victory in the 1971 general elections and the tremendous national triumph in the war for the liberation of Bangladesh — went to Stockholm to be the principal speaker at the first UN conference on environment. At a banquet in her honour, at which Myrdal was one of the guests she took the opportunity to confute him.
In view of how India had handled the grave problem of Bangladesh, "it cannot be called a soft state," she declared, looking directly at Myrdal. But he shook his head and told one of her senior aides sharing the table with him that the Bangladesh war had in no way changed his verdict.
Sadly, four decades later, Myrdal’s description of this country holds; Indira Gandhi’s doesn’t. In fact, the soft state has become incrementally softer. Unless we watch out and take appropriate corrective measures, the Indian state could even be in danger of crumbling. Nothing could have underscored this nightmarish reality more vividly than the unprecedented terrorist attacks on Mumbai. Ten murderous thugs of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, came through sea at the country’s major port that is also the headquarters of the Western Naval Command, could strike at 11 different targets and hold to ransom not just three luxury hotels and a building inhabited by Jews, not just the "Maximum City," but the entire country for 60 long hours.
Reams of newspaper reports vouchsafe that the necessary warnings were scattered in secret files of rival agencies but never shared with those who should have been told. What those in charge of overseeing these agencies were doing is not known. No one has so far been held accountable for this unpardonable dereliction of duty, which seems to be the standard practice. No questions are being asked either about the 12-hour delay in the National Security Guards’ gallant commandos — who eventually controlled the situation — reaching the terrorists’ targets. If all this proves anything at all, it proves that almost the entire machinery of the Indian state has degenerated appallingly. Those whose mandate it is to govern the country cannot shrug off their share of responsibility for this alarming state of affairs.
To put the matter bluntly, there is a glaring leadership vacuum in this country of a billion-plus people. The heavily fragmented polity is mired in petty parochial and partisan pursuits, based on caste, religion and region. Visceral hatred between the two mainstream parties, the Congress and the BJP, has made impossible even the most elementary cooperation between the government and the Opposition, without which a democracy cannot function.
Moreover, each of the two main parties behaves in one way when it is in power and in exactly the opposite manner when in Opposition. To make matters worse, in the absence of the sagacious Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who kept them under control at least to some extent, Hindutva extremists have virtually taken over the BJP. This, combined with the Congress party’s defence of secularism that is more verbal than muscular, has led to communalisation of almost all issues, including terrorism.
In May 2004, when Sonia Gandhi garnered huge goodwill by renouncing the office of Prime Minister and appointing Manmohan Singh to it, there were high hopes that, as the Congress president, she would concentrate on rebuilding the moribund party, while he would be left free to run the government. Unfortunately, on both counts there has been deep disappointment.
About the spectacle the Congress has made of itself in Maharashtra, never mind other states, the less said the better. As for the state of the government at the Centre, the good doctor has never been in control of it. Some of the Congress ministers have been more reluctant to accept him as the captain of the team than the ministers representing the allied parties whose main objective is to run the ministries allotted to them as personal fiefdoms. At no stage has there been any synergy between the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and the periodically changing establishment of the Congress president.
Unless the Congress president and the Prime Minister, in that order, realise that the present pattern of governance at the top needs to be made more effective and purposeful, all the breast-beating and tear-shedding over what has happened would be meaningless, no matter how long the present dispensation is dragged on or what the results of the five Assembly elections now and of the Lok Sabha polls later are.
It may not be the fault of the present leadership alone that the governance in the country has plummeted so miserably. The erosion of all the institutions and instruments that comprise the infrastructure of the republic — the civil services, the police, the paramilitary and so on — through relentless and remorseless politicisation is making them practically dysfunctional. The pernicious process goes back to the Emergency in the mid-1970s. But the successive 11 governments have given it a further push, not tried to reverse it. In all civilised democracies, the police is the servant of the law. In this country it has been made the servant of the politicians in power. Every time a government changes in a state, the new chief minister, even if he belongs to the party already in office, instantly changes the chief secretary and the director-general of police.
The partisan DGPs taken off election duties by the election commission are rather numerous. For every politician anxious to bend the bureaucracy to his purpose, there are at least six civil servants bending over backwards to do his behest.
On top of it, there is the galloping cancer of corruption in every walk of life that has been eating into the nation’s vitals. Among other things, Mumbai showed that the head of Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorist Squad and others would not have lost their lives if their bosses hadn’t bought for them sub-standard and useless bulletproof jackets.
To stem this rot is imperative as well as a stupendous task. In its present shape the Manmohan Singh government cannot even attempt it. |
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