When the General Assembly becomes a bourgeois theatre, the bourgeois theatre
must become the General Assembly!
INDIAN democracy is celebrated worldwide for its resilience. The political
stability it has provided over the past fifty years contributed in large
measure to enabling economic growth and development in the country.
Commentators often explain this stability by referring to different
features of electoral politics in India, increasingly viewed as a game
of numbers. In such a reckoning, the fact that interest articulation
of different sections of the people, associational acts, political discourses
and policies of government at critical junctures in history have had
a lot to do with establishing and preserving democracy, tends to get
blurred.
We need
to remind ourselves that underlying the impulses for democracy is the
human urge for freedom and equality. Without conditions of freedom and
continuous efforts towards ensuring a modicum of equality between different
sections of society, the entire apparatus for justice, dialogue and
bargaining to resolve conflicting interests in a matrix of power relations
can collapse. The right to information is inherent in the fundamental
right of every citizen to life, liberty and freedom of expression without
which democracy is unimaginable and social audit is a means of collectively
probing and understanding information instead of this being the exclusive
preserve of any single person, power elite or institution.
These should
not be viewed simply as managerial devices to improve the efficiency
of delivery systems for public and private goods. Of greater significance
is the enhancement of the public sphere to create spaces for people
to directly engage and attend to public issues. These empower citizens
not only marginalized sections like the poor, minorities, tribals
and women but also those who find themselves on the margins in the
everyday exercise of power by state processes. The historicity of the
movement for social audit and the right to information with its wide
remove from electoral politics needs to be first understood to explore
its significance.
In current
discourse, while psephologists wax eloquent about an anti-incumbency
factor in election results to reassure us that it is indeed a competitive
political framework that is in evidence, several observers point with
concern to communalization of electoral politics on religious and caste
lines which threatens democracy and political stability.
A student
of history would wonder whether without the Indian Penal Code being
enacted in 1860, which established the principle of equality before
the law, the very idea of democracy could have ever captured the Indian
imagination. He would also wonder if the Poona and Lucknow Pacts in
the course of our national movement, as bargaining between Ambedkar-Gandhi
and Jinnah-Gandhi on the issues related to separation or constituting
common constituencies for Hindus, Muslims and Scheduled Castes, were
important to establish a secular democracy in India. Further, he might
ponder the moral weight of the national movement to figure that aspirations
of the peasantry to better conditions of life had to be realized immediately
after independence. Sagacious measures for land reforms in the 1950s
provided a settlement without which political democracy with one-party
dominance or any other competitive configuration may have been short-lived.
Unfortunately,
land reforms were not thoroughgoing in implementation. Coupled with
drastically reduced land revenue rates and price subsidies for agricultural
output, in sum, the maaliks gained far more than the mazdoors.
However, the package deal helped the state to gain preeminence. This
was fortified by reserving the commanding heights for government in
the industrial sector and state trading. The bureaucracy proliferated
and, appropriately crafty for comfort, bandied a socialist rhetoric
to rule the roost. Its natural propensity to corruption was fuelled
by the preeminence of the state.
The economy
started grinding to a halt by the mid-sixties. A small peasant uprising
of 1967 in Naxalbari sounded an alarm. Measures such as splitting the
ruling party in two, bank nationalization, coercive population control,
anti-poverty programmes (all under the rubric of garibi hatao)
and going to war in 1971 were the means for Indira Gandhi to regain
popularity.
The excesses
of this totalitarian regime were challenged by the JP movement, a confluence
of widespread strikes by industrial workers and students movements
in Gujarat and Bihar against corruption. Declaration of a state of internal
emergency in 1975, the defection by the leadership of the scheduled
castes away from Congress for the first time, the fumbling with governance
by a motley group of populist leaders for a short while and the resumption
of power by Indira Gandhi are a familiar story. The short point for
present purposes is that Indian democracy has in fact teetered on the
verge of collapse. A social movement, and not electoral politics, managed
to prop it up again.
A well-positioned
bureaucracy was further entrusted huge funds through district rural
development agencies for anti-poverty programmes since the early 1980s.
These funds were governed neither by budgetary procedures of the state
governments nor any statutory framework of devolution for local self-government.
They were propelled only by schemes trotted out by the central government
and delegation by means of administrative orders alone. The bureaucracy
naturally ran riot with its power and corruption. The scale of corruption
reached such proportions that Rajiv Gandhi was forced to remark that
of every rupee only 15 per cent reached the targeted beneficiaries of
programmes.
The
financial crisis by the end of the decade and a structural shift of
the economy towards capitalism in a changed world scenario with its
ideological challenge to socialist rhetoric was an opportune moment
for the political elite to step in by arousing communal sentiments,
both on the basis of caste and religion. Mandal and Mandir
surfaced as the delusions of a headless people while governments were
trussed up and collapsed in quick succession. A climate of coalition
brinkmanship, rather than a framework of competitive electoral politics,
prevailed at the time India faced its worst financial crisis.
The economic
reforms of 1991, followed quickly by the constitutional amendments in
1992/93 for statutory devolution of powers for local self-government,
ushered in some hope for stemming corruption of the bureaucracy. It
was at this juncture that the concerted struggle for the right to information
and social audit also began at different sites of the Indian state.
Prior
to this, human rights activists had for long agitated over the right
to information against the nefarious practices of the police in handling
political prisoners. As one of them put it, the right to information
always existed under the constitution; what was needed was a right of
access by the ordinary citizen to information unmediated by any
public institution. A Ministry of Information and Broadcasting undertook
publicity. Questions could be asked by elected representatives in the
legislatures. Courts could summon information and the press could ferret
it. The CAG had a special right of access to all government records.
But these institutional preserves crowded out the locus standi of the
ordinary citizen to directly ask for information. Two of the struggles
in the 1990s, notable for the issues they highlighted and the public
interest they have generated, deserve mention.
The first
was the public outcry against fast track power generation projects in
the context of reforms in the power sector. It was well known that the
theft of electricity, aided and abetted by officials, had led to mounting
distribution losses suffered by state electricity boards. This resulted
in their inability to pay for the power purchased by the boards from
NTPC and NHPC who, incidentally, were very efficient generators of power.
Curiously, instead of tackling theft by means of changes at the distribution
end, reforms in the sector were initiated by first inviting private
sector participation in generation of power.
As news
of the power purchase agreement of Maharashtra State Electricity Board
with an Enron subsidiary for the Dhabol Thermal Power Project came in,
questions about the terms of the contract were raised in newspapers
and fears were expressed about the runaway cost of electricity in the
post-reforms scenario. It was a matter that touched everybody. People
from different walks of life engaged in social audit of the terms of
the contract, trying to understand phrases such as negotiated price
as against notified tariffs, paying for deemed generation of power,
guarantees by the state government and counter guarantees by Union
government.
Information
was slowly laid bare by the efforts of the association of employees
of the electricity board, pressmen, knowledgeable engineers and financial
analysts. The weak ineffectuality of the remonstrances by the Central
Electricity Authority, a regulatory body, came to light. The CEA complained
to Ministry of Power that sufficient disclosures had not been made by
the Dhabol Power Company about the cost estimates underlying the price
at which the company was offering power. This remained a closely guarded
secret of the government of the day until information was gathered,
marshalled and made intelligible to petition the courts in Mumbai. While
The Times of India ran an ad-campaign by Dhabol Power Company
of Enron titled Truth About Power, The Indian Express
contributed the power of truth by way of plucky exposures in a controversy
that was continuously featured in the media for over a year until the
cancellation and renegotiation of the contract by the Maharashtra government.
With the
collapse of Enron in the USA due to exposures of its failure to include
loans taken by its subsidiaries in the balance sheet of the holding
company and the unethical practices of well-reputed professional auditors
in certifying such accounts, the entire struggle carried on in India
was vindicated. When the eerily similar case of accounting irregularities
with the complicity of professional auditors in Worldcom was added on
soon thereafter, the issue of the ethics of professional auditors came
sharply into focus.
On another
site of the Indian state, a struggle had already begun in 1990. A demand
for minimum wages to be paid to women workers at famine relief works
near Dev Dungri village in Bhim tehsil of Udaipur district in Rajasthan
led to an interesting development. The demand was refused on the grounds
that they did not work. The workers protested, but were told that
the measurement books for the works filled in by junior engineers of
PWD showed they had not worked. Their hard labour had been penned off!
The stupefied workers naturally demanded to see the records. Administrators,
who quoted the Official Secrets Act of 1923, told them that they could
not see the records.
The
need to access records was hammered home and rural workers organized
themselves as a union Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) to struggle
for ways and means of wresting their right to know from government.
The struggle illustrated that the right to information was not just
a component of peoples right to freedom of speech and expression but
was also a part of their fundamental right to life and liberty. It was
needed to obtain the basic living wage, entitlements under the ration
quota at the fair price shops, the medicines the poor ought to receive
in public health centres and for contending with coercive abuse by the
police.
Communicative
action characterized the movement for social audit and the right to
information. When the initial phase of agitation began with a sit-in,
the Government of Rajasthan reluctantly passed an order whereby people
were given the right to inspect records. Certified photocopies were
later grudgingly allowed. While inspecting the records of a panchayat,
the MKSS found that irregularities and malpractices were evident. To
share the documented evidence with illiterate rural workers, a public
hearing was organized. Known as a jan sunwai, this became an
incredibly powerful step in revivifying face-to-face democracy.
Leading
up to a jan sunwai, typically, the MKSS first obtained the records related
to the public works carried out by the panchayat. Once the documents
were accessed, the Sangathan took the records to each village where
the works were supposed to have been executed and checked them out by
asking the village residents and the workers who had been employed on
the site to authenticate the records. On the day of the public hearing
in front of the general assembly of the village residents, the details
were read out and testimonies sought. A panel of men of letters from
different walks of life, like lawyers, writers, journalists, academics
and government officials, were invited to the public hearings to act
as a jury. In the presence of officials from the district administration,
an effort was made to arrive at appropriate corrective measures for
the irregularities identified.
Jan sunwais
have touched a social chord. The malpractices usually uncovered at sites
for anti-poverty employment generation works are over-billing in purchase
of materials, fake muster rolls, under-payment of wages and, in some
very interesting cases, ghost works (construction works that are there
on record but do not exist on the ground). Workers denied payment after
repeated visits to the sarpanch over years have been often paid overnight
at the mere announcement of a jan sunwai. Cases where, after an embezzlement
being proved at a public hearing, the sarpanch has promised and has
in fact paid back the amount into the panchayat account are not rare.
Action has sometimes been initiated by government against officials
without whose complicity the embezzlement could not have occurred or
remained unnoticed.
The
willingness of people to testify at jan sunwais against persons in power
who often belong to a higher caste with a social standing that is intimidating,
is in stark contrast to the phenomenon of witnesses turning hostile
at formal court hearings. Jan sunwais are now being arranged by many
activists and NGOs in the country to probe information related to ration
cards and registers, electoral rolls, accounts of municipal corporations
and agencies for slum development.
Those who
dismiss jan sunwais as merely kangaroo courts would do well to ponder
the fact that arbitration plays a major role in the world of commercial
contracts. There is no reason why it cannot be applied in the realm
of the social contract. The only regulatory requirement, to stave off
mere settling of accounts between political rivals at jan sunwais,
would be that acts of popular justice be clarified politically under
the direct supervision of the mass gathering. Acts of popular justice
by the people have a purging and educative effect whereas the historical
function of a court is to ensnare popular justice, to control it and
to strangle it, by re-inscribing it within institutions which are typical
of the state apparatus.1
Social
audit assumes even greater importance in the context of democratic decentralization
since 1992-93. Structures for accountability are the weakest in panchayats
and municipal bodies who are implementing anti-poverty programmes and
providing basic social services. Half-hearted devolution of powers by
most state governments continues to stymie their effectiveness. Planning
by district planning committees as envisaged in the constitutional amendments
has hardly been operationalized. At the sub-district level of taluk
and gram panchayats, poor book-keeping is coupled with audit certification
by Examiners, Local Funds of the state governments, which is by and
large no more than an exercise in stamping and signing inadequately
authenticated accounts. Hearing the complaints of residents before certifying
accounts, as is the audit convention for local authorities in Europe,
is nowhere even on the agenda in India. The sheer spread and numbers
of the local bodies, to be considered against the availability of ethical
auditors, are daunting.
Union
and state finance commissions that are charged with the responsibility
of recommending the allocation of funds for the local bodies have little
information to go by on the existing revenues and expenditures of these
bodies. At the behest of the Union Finance Commission, the CAG has recently
undertaken an exercise in providing technical guidance and supervision
to Examiners, Local Funds, which needs to be supported by a vigorous
movement for social audit. It must be remembered that, as against the
concerns of departmental auditors for classification of transactions
under relevant schemes and programmes, citizens are interested in the
veracity of the details in BPL surveys, vouchers and muster rolls. The
actual construction of permanent assets along proper specifications
also matters to them.
We
now have the right to information acts in seven states and recently,
notification of the Central Act with important amendments was passed
in the previous session of Parliament. As the battles lost and won,
it is natural to wonder if like so many pieces of enlightened legislation
in the past, this too will soon start gathering dust. Will more and
more people take heart from the legislation to investigate the details
of how things work at the level of their ongoing subjugation in different
domains? Or will they continue to only condemn the entirely rotten
system to rationalize their own participation in corrupt practices
that help them negotiate and survive in such totalizing systems? It
is perhaps too early to tell.
There are,
however, indications that electoral politics is being increasingly viewed
as divisive by citizens and the networking, in place of the separation
envisaged by the Constitution between functionaries of different organs
of the state, has become a cause for disaffection. Alternative channels
are being sought for participation in face-to-face direct democracy
or engagement with information technology-based portals and web sites
by citizens to investigate, inform and deliberate creatively on matters
that touch their lives.
Constitutional
amendments in 1992-93 for local self government which introduced provisions
for accounts to be placed before the gram sabha and municipal wards
are a revealing pointer to the need for accountability, not to a hierarchy
of officialdom or representatives of the people but increasingly to
people themselves, since they are the only stakeholders. That is the
writing on the wall.