Earlier this week, auto-rickshaws in Delhi went on a two-day strike because the state government wanted to crack down on vehicles operating without permits, licences and pollution control certificates. A few years ago, their Kolkata counterparts went on strike because the Bengal government wanted to phase out polluting vehicles.
In Delhi, the strike proved partially successful because the state transport minister declined to back down. Still, it is worth noting that a group of people went on strike for the right to continue breaking the law. In Kolkata, the auto-rickshaw drivers were offered the protection of Mamata Banerjee’s barrack-room politics and their protest for the right to pollute was successful.
Businessmen and industrialists are wont to read into such developments — as they do with protests by those who lose land for industrial projects — the drawbacks of democracy and look enviously at China’s dictatorship as a role model for successful socio-economic management. If only people could be “controlled”, the thinking goes, India will be able to become a world-beater like China.
This is a simplistic outlook. If anything, the lawlessness against even the slightest attempts at discipline and governance that seems to have sprung up all over India probably reflects the lack of genuine democracy.
The unruly Kolkata auto-rickshaw drivers are a case in point. It would be silly to suggest that they wanted to willfully pollute the city. Their problem was the absence of an alternative livelihood or, as importantly, the access to opportunity if their polluting vehicles were scrapped. Yet access to opportunity is what genuine democracy is supposed to offer — even the US, despite its exclusionary racism, had a sizeable African-American middle class long before the Obama phenomenon. But in India, despite liberalisation, this access is still a restricted privilege.
Beyond the right to vote in elections, democracy for those on the margins is largely an illusion. That is why law-breaking has often come to acquire a peculiar legitimacy in India. The Naxalite unrest in large parts of eastern India is one of the most compelling examples of the shallowness of Indian democracy. To any industrialist struggling to run a business here, they are brigands, bandits, terrorists and so on. Many locals who suffer their depredations and demands also feel this way. The reason they continue to flourish despite such opprobrium is that there are many others who see their operations as a more sustainable livelihood than what India’s democracy has on offer in these backward and poorly governed states (though Bihar’s Nitish Kumar is trying to change that in short order). Indeed, industrialists need only look to the origins of the Naxalite movement in the depredations of the plantation industries in North Bengal to understand the truth of this.
If there are lessons to be drawn from China’s miracle it is that form of government matters less to the aam aadmi than its quality. This small story illustrates the point. Some years ago taxi drivers in Beijing demanded that fares be raised. When this was turned down, they started a “pro-democracy” protest. When the authorities conceded to their demands, the democracy “movement” quickly faded out.
China’s lack of individual freedom and its human rights record are reprehensible but the reason the country has not erupted in a vortex of violence is that the leadership has created opportunity for its people.
The acquisition of land for mammoth SEZs and factories went hand-in-hand with state-sponsored two-village enterprises or TVEs that minimised the impact for those who lost lands or livelihoods. History has shown that no amount of heavy-handedness can suppress popular unrest for long — and certainly not in a country of one billion people in an integrated modern world. Indeed, Chinese factory workers have not hesitated to protest when they feel aggrieved.
By contrast in West Bengal’s Singur and Nandigram, many of the unlettered marginal farmers stood in danger of sheer destitution. It is one thing for the state to exercise the universal right of eminent domain when it acquires land for industrial projects. It is quite another when it ignores the universal right of its people to a livelihood. India made an admirable commitment to universal franchise at Independence. If it were able to facilitate the institutions of genuine democracy, it could demonstrate to global and domestic investors the virtues of a model that China would be hard put to match.
