REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE
India's Future and the Citizen Elite
Dipankar Gupta
Rupa Publications
240 pages; Rs 495
Creating a strong corporate enterprise requires leaders to focus not just on the immediate gains or goals, but on a long-term vision for transformation to achieve a fundamental shift towards sustained growth and prosperity. Successful corporate leaders, therefore, are not always held hostage to what the employees or the shareholders want by way of results in the short term or every quarter. They look at the bigger picture and strive towards achieving goals that can help the enterprise reach higher levels of excellence and sustainable growth. This is a well-established management principle.
Dipankar Gupta does not use such management analogies but still succeeds in putting across to great effect his ideas on what helps leaders bring about true and fundamental change in society. Mr Gupta has been an academic with an enviable reputation for the lucidity of his classroom teaching and the ease with which students could access him after lectures. All these qualities show in the book under review - the neat division of chapters, the pithily written abstracts that precede them and the easy-flowing prose that will undoubtedly enhance your reading pleasure. What perhaps has also come to his aid is his experience as a newspaper columnist for several years. Indeed, Mr Gupta has examined some aspects of the central idea of the book in a few of his newspaper columns in the recent past.
So what you get here is a more detailed and reasoned exposition of the idea that democracy survives and prospers not by regular elections alone. For democracy to yield durable gains by way of growth and development, you need "active interventions". And that push, Mr Gupta has argued, can come only from above. Such a push requires bold and ambitious planning by leaders, whom Mr Gupta aptly describes as an "an elite of calling" or the "citizen elite".
There are important caveats here. The planning by the "citizen elite" should be bold but not reckless, Mr Gupta warns. The ideas they espouse can bring out the true potential of democracy and hence they may often appear utopian. Worse, the leaders who constitute the "citizen elite" may even face major economic setbacks in their personal lives. They may even lose elections for a term or two. And the fundamental changes they seek are likely to face stiff resistance from the people, but once these are persisted with and their benefits start showing, they eventually win over public opinion.
In other words, such leaders are not satisfied with just being managers and implementing policies that are already in place. They are visionary leaders who think out of the box, look ahead and force fundamental changes that can lay new foundations for future growth in a new direction. For Mr Gupta believes that one of the aims of democracy is to "alter human nature and not pander to it". A member of the citizen elite will not accept the given in a society and seek an improvement over what already exists. Consider what Bengal reformers achieved with the abolition of "Sati", remarriage of widows and the introduction of the Western education system. All these moves initially met with huge popular resistance; yet the Bengal reformers stuck to their commitment for change that was eventually accepted by all.
What should the "citizen elite" focus on? According to Mr Gupta, the primary area of attention should be health and education. Providing quality services in health and education can bring out the best in people in a democracy. Citing the Indian example, he questions the pathetic state of India's state-owned health and education sectors. His belief is that the benefits to India's democracy would have been immense if a leader belonging to the "citizen elite" could think big and splurge large amounts of resources, without worrying about the fiscal deficit, to create new capacities in physical infrastructure as well as in faculty and doctors.
It is clear that Mr Gupta treats health and education as the primary source of capacity creation in society. He does not ignore the importance of other key social and economic infrastructure like energy, transportation, housing and water, but his belief appears to be that once health and education are taken care of, the spin-off benefits will create an environment conducive to growth of these infrastructure sectors.
Having expounded his central thesis, Mr Gupta then proceeds to examine the Indian political reality to identify if there were any members of the "citizen elite". There are no surprises here. Without doubt, he concludes, Mahatma Gandhi was one such member, who went against the popular mood and yet saw the need for the abolition of untouchability, emancipation of women and protection of minority communities. Gandhi cared little for election and was the tallest member of Mr Gupta's "citizen elite". Jawaharlal Nehru was a distant second as he opted for a Hindu marriage law, going against the popular mood and indeed many Congress members of the time. Mr Gupta mentions Rajiv Gandhi in passing as one who rose to the occasion by introducing the Panchayati Raj legislation. However, his list of members of the "citizen elite" ends with Nehru, a scathing comment on the quality of leadership in post-Independence India.
The highlight of the book is a small section on Manmohan Singh. In one of the most candid assessments of the prime minister, Mr Gupta says Dr Singh "does not draw inspiration from a utopia but is instead intent on maximising the politics of the given". Mr Gupta describes him as a man who would not be philosopher or king. He concludes that the Congress has gained a politician, but the world has certainly lost an intellectual and a possible "citizen elite". What a pity!
