Indian ingenuity

BS OPINION

Back in the days of Mughal rule, the emperor was always short of money and men. So he found an effective way of getting both: he simply assigned jagirs (land grants) to the local thug and said, "Pay me so much every year and provide me with so many soldiers and I will leave you alone to run your fief."

Since nothing changes very much in India, this system of governance has been revived in this era of coalitions. Only, what was called a jagir in the old days is now called a ministry. Whence the jumbo ministries that we now see sprouting all over the place.

The Central government has nearly 80 ministers of one sort or another, and one in four legislators is a minister in UP; ditto in Bihar. Uttaranchal is expanding its council of ministers so that 90 per cent of the ruling party's legislators become ministers, and so on.

If you add up all the legislatures, including the Central one, far from the generous norm that says only 10 per cent of the total strength of a legislature should be ministers, the proportion is now between 25 per cent and 33 per cent for ministers and those given posts of ministerial rank "" and rising. Soon every ruling party MP or MLA may become a minister or equivalent, just as every little bandit in the Mughal era called himself a raja or a nawab.

There is another way of looking at the phenomenon, though. In a country with nearly 650 million voters, elections cost a lot of money. Even a moderate average of Rs 10 per voter (said to be realistic by those in the know) in every five-year cycle comes to a tidy Rs 650 crore, multiplied by the number of serious candidates in the fray.

That is the minimum order of money needed by political parties and their nominees to fight elections. The inter se distribution between them is important, but it does not reduce the dimensions of their difficulty. That is why they have been asking that the state should fund the elections.

But this has not yet been allowed. Add to this the genuine problem that every party leader faces "" should he ensure his interests first or that of the party "" and you begin to get an idea of some of the dilemmas in Indian democracy.

So, in a typically ingenious Indian solution, the indirect route has been found. It cuts out the state as the intermediary for allocating resources. A legislator becomes a minister so that he can do his bit for the party and, of course, himself "" not to mention a few generations of his successors.

True, this cuts the cake very thin in these days of mounting state level budget deficits. But who can cavil at the principle of equal opportunity? What we have therefore is a happy combination of the past (ministries as jagirs) and the present (an un-intermediated state funding of elections). This could be termed appropriate technology at its best.

There is, of course, another way of describing this, the one that cynics prefer: a dog with a bone in its mouth doesn't bark. In these uncertain days, a silent dog is worth its weight in gold.