Reactions to the better-than-expected growth numbers for the April-June quarter seem a bit subdued, right? Here’s why: the government’s frequent revisions of its data, some of them very large indeed — as Mint pointed out recently, GDP growth for the post-Lehman quarter has been revised downwards to 3.5 per cent from 5.9 per cent, years after the fact. There is little accountability for past errors; and so there is little trust in new claims. And, sadly, this is true of more than just government statisticians.
Consider the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), which, if it was a TV comedian, would be adored by the viewing public for its bungling pratfalls. The UPA has institutionalised the ducking of accountability. No, I don’t mean “coalition compulsions” — that much-mocked phrase actually assigns responsibility quite clearly. I mean that, for example, Sushil Kumar Shinde probably didn’t deserve a promotion from the power ministry the day India suffered through its largest-ever grid breakdown. Unsurprisingly, as home minister he has been unimpressive, saying that “the government doesn’t censor the internet” just as leaks show that it, in fact, does. Nor will the UPA’s leadership ever learn from such embarrassments. It is being speculated, for example, that Petroleum Minister Jaipal Reddy – who has begun well in the Herculean task of cleaning out that murky ministry – will be shifted out before his improvements have a chance to stick.
The UPA’s flaws have been about more than personnel. The institutional structure it has built up around policy making was problematic: an over-reliance on decisions by groups of ministers, for example, rather than by individual ministries with the prime minister overruling objections by others. Many problematic changes could slide through without there being someone clearly responsible for them afterwards. And if nobody feels responsible for a choice that looks questionable in retrospect, nobody defends it properly — so even decent decisions exude a whiff of corruption and cronyism.
Yet I would be harsher on this government if not for the fact that every institution that is supposed to serve as a check on it has exhibited exactly the same failings. The Supreme Court, for example, is pretty much the definition of unaccountable. As its appointments have become more insulated from any outside influence – through a collegium which Justice Krishna Iyer has called “a curious creation with no backing under the Constitution, except a ruling of the Supreme Court, and that too based on a very thin majority in a single ruling” – its judgments have become more and more problematic in terms of constitutional propriety, stepping further and further into the realm of policy making. Unlike in the rest of the world, though, in India nobody dares tell a Supreme Court bench when it is wrong. Even Chief Justice Kapadia, who understands the problem of overreach, nevertheless worries most that attempts to introduce accountability will instead reduce judicial independence.
Then there is the government’s current bete noire, the Comptroller and Auditor General. The CAG is a worthy organisation with worthy individuals doing worthy work. Unfortunately, it has chosen to court public opinion rather than inform Parliament, as it should. Its report on coal allocations, for instance. There’s a lot of useful stuff in there that should serve to hold the well-connected across parties and states to account, but it’s poisoned by its publicity-hunting desire to put ridiculous and economically illiterate figures to “losses” — an effort without precedent in performance audits anywhere. Meanwhile, instead of being properly and objectively questioned, the CAG is happily soaking up accolades. Most amusingly, the report chooses to, in effect, indict Manmohan Singh by starting its study from 2004; when asked why, the CAG will say because that’s when the government first thought of coal block auctions as a good idea. In effect, in order to chase headlines, a constitutional institution has chosen to penalise Dr Singh for having the right idea in the first place. And we wonder why reform never gets done.
Finally, there’s the media, the final check on the abuse of power. Perhaps, if papers or TV explain to the government how unpopular it is, it will change course — but only if the media’s trusted, too. The big story last week was the recent opinion poll that NDTV carried out in collaboration with Ipsos. It insisted that the margin of error was three per cent. Statistically, that’s a little difficult to believe even if the surveyed 30,000 people in 125 constituencies. That’s 240 people per seat. How did they choose these people and seats, to remove the urban bias of such polls? We don’t know. We do know it means decoding Uttar Pradesh’s 200 million people through 4,416 respondents. Even when your sample isn’t random enough, that could get you a half-decent margin of error — on a single, state-wide, yes/no question. When the subsampling involved in seat choice comes in, and four-cornered contests, it becomes much harder. Yet, in spite of the poor track record of past (non-exit) polls, we’re supposed to believe their numbers, although they won’t release their algorithm? Right.
You want to know where the unfocused anger that all of us can sense seeping into the public discourse comes from? From powerful people – and not just politicians – saying and doing things with a certain impunity. They can chase headlines, bend the truth, overstep their jurisdiction, contradict themselves – but because everybody else is doing it too, they get away with it. We have a system of checks and balances; but no checks, no balance, survive a culture where you can trust nobody and hold nobody to account.
