Around the dining tables of New India, on its social networks and in its apartment-block stairwells, the judgments grow harsher daily: Delhi is steeped in moral compromise, with a power elite that genuflects only to politicians and political parties, with a media so in thrall to political sources that it won't tell you the truth.
This is a fortunate sort of belief, in that any evidence piling up against is transformed with magical ease into evidence that in fact supports it. Another politician pilloried for corruption or for incompetence? Not: look, another politician cornered by an independent media and an activist private sector, but: see, another corrupt and incompetent politician. Another member of "civil society" or of the bureaucracy or of the judiciary pushes this tottering government? Not: look, how empowered are non-political actors, but: see, how brave is that nice educated man. Ah, if only all those nice educated men in the police and the bureaucracy could be truly independent, if only those good committed people in civil society had a bit more power, they'd clean this mess up in a heartbeat.
Thus the rapturous joy greeting the latest brave rebellion against the evil empire of democracy, the Central Information Commission (CIC's) decision that political parties are public institutions and subject to the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Sadly, the RTI is a terribly blunt and quite inappropriate instrument to impose transparency on what are, in fact, not organs of the state. What is public and related to the state, and thus the proper domain for greater transparency, is the electoral process, not parties themselves. To strengthen democracy, we must regulate that better - begin by adopting the Election Commission's 2011 suggestion that all campaign donors provide their PAN numbers. If the problem with that is that elections are run on unaccounted-for cash, then the swooning fans of the CIC's decision should please explain to me precisely how the RTI, which is supposed to dig out paperwork, will help? Surely nobody imagines an RTI application will duly turn up a memo saying "The UPA-III, mortgaged to Mukesh Ambani, signed Ahmed Patel". Such transactions aren't accompanied by photocopied forms.
So cleaner elections aren't the real reason for all the joy, are they? No, the real reason the CIC's decision is welcomed is that it makes politicians, well, uncomfortable. We, the people, have been given another lever against those elected by, presumably, other people. And so, as with so many other progressive laws, the middle class has decided how it wishes to pervert the RTI: what was conceived of as an instrument for the powerless to receive information about themselves that the state refused to provide will now be used by the proudly apolitical to put elected representatives in their place.
And the instrument of this righteous vengeance? That storied democratic hero, the unelected state functionary. In this case, the CIC, but it could be any of the other exam-passing types we have lionised of late, a Comptroller and Auditor General, a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) chief. One of the great ironies of UPA-II is that the most bureaucratic-minded government in recent history is also the one that is so delightfully at the mercy of, well, bureaucrats. Oh, and also judges and policemen and the occasional army chief, but they're all as solidly middle-class as bureaucrats. You take a stand against the executive, take pot-shots at the legislature, and you're automatically a democratic, middle-class hero.
Certainly, that's what your press will say. Remember when I said that the Delhi media was supposed to be in thrall to politicians? Wrong power centre. The people journalists need and want to please are bureaucrats. Those are the people who will sell each other and their politician bosses out, thus helping the hard-working reporter get ahead in his cut-throat newsroom. Plus there's class solidarity, both being good English-speaking sorts who will retire and become neighbours in some pleasant suburban colony. Is it any surprise that the "independent" state officials are universally hailed by the media?
And that's the great myth of these, the closing months of the Decrepit Progressive Alliance. The myth of the bureaucrat-as-saviour, and that "independence" is a panacea: the unmovable belief that if we just have enough "independent" positions, positions not just bipartisan but beyond electoral politics altogether, all will be well, and democracy will be strengthened.
An "independent" CBI will clean up corruption, for example. Oh, and there's absolutely no chance such a body would ever be taken over by power-crazed corrupt types. What's that you say? J Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation? Don't worry, couldn't happen here; he'd never pass the UPSC's stringent criteria. Only good, honest, humble boys become officials of our state. And fortunately, in India there is never even the shadow of a suggestion that they have motives that're anything but high-minded. The current CBI director, for example, must be deeply, deeply distressed to be going after the ministry that sacked him from the Railway Protection Force.
See, look at our experience with an independent auditor. It isn't as if any of them ever expanded their domain to, say, pronounce on policy choices. And consider the Supreme Court! Totally independent of the other branches, and things are definitely more democratic now that it decides everything. Oh, if only we had some decent private-sector types in positions of power, like that nice Srinivasan who runs cricket. After all, if things go wrong, we can always get rid of them.
"Independent", you see, is also "unaccountable". And the more unaccountable authorities we have, the more powers we give CICs and the less oversight there is for CBI chiefs, the more democratic is India. Yes, that makes perfect sense.
India's middle class, all little Musharrafs and Lee Kuan Yews and Gaddafis, loves every step that nudges us closer to powerless parties and a powerful technocracy. After all, public-spirited middle-class Indians wouldn't ever be politicians. But every one of us is a petty bureaucrat.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in
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