Walk into the office of a senior government official anywhere in India and you will find the same scene. Behind a large desk sits the man (or, occasionally, the woman) in charge. Arrayed in front of him are neat rows of chairs. And on those chairs sit supplicants patiently awaiting their turn to petition for justice, relief or favours. Many more clamour outside. Periodically the official rings a bell, signalling to a peon to usher in the next hopeful.
From the offices of district magistrates in remote backwaters to those of the bureaucratic elite in the national capital, and from provincial municipal commissioners to senior tax inspectors, the physical manifestation of the Indian state can often remind visitors of a plastic-chair-cluttered reconstruction of a noble court. That is because Indians are not governed. They are ruled.
Indian officials, laments a senior bureaucrat from behind his desk as Banyan perches on one of 16 chairs, still possess a “feudal mindset” inherited from Mughal administrators and British officers. The bureaucracy is not unique in this. Imperiousness pervades every branch of officialdom. The army retains the old British custom of assigning soldiers to work as sahayaks, or personal assistants, of senior officers. Young men who enlisted to serve their country instead find themselves serving drinks to colonels and their friends—as well as cooking, ironing, washing cars and walking dogs. Senior officers are granted official cars and palatial bungalows. So are top judges, police commissioners, and bosses of public-sector firms.
Even less exalted souls receive special entitlements. Some 25 types of officials are exempt from paying road tolls, including every member of parliament. Airports display a 32-point list of categories that can skip security screening, not forgetting the boss of one specific government think-tank. Private airport lounges are obliged to offer free access to hundreds of people, down to public-university vice-chancellors and members of obscure government bodies.
The results can be seen not just in the high-handed behaviour of officials towards citizens (try asserting your rights to an Indian policeman) but, worse still, in the delivery of public services and formulation of policy. One planner complains that public-transport decisions are made by people who have fancy cars and taxpayer-funded chauffeurs to drive them around. “Things will look very different if they start to experience life the way all the other people experience life,” he says.
Narendra Modi, the prime minister, has tried to make the state more effective by curbing the discretion of bureaucrats. The delivery of welfare through cash transfers and the use of biometric ids have helped. “In many ways the system today is more empowering of citizens than it was earlier,” says Suyash Rai of Carnegie India, a think-tank in Delhi.
Yet the reforms have also allowed politicians to claim personal credit as benevolent monarchs. Mr Modi has spent the past decade rebranding welfare entitlements as coming directly from him, printing his face on everything from vaccination certificates to sacks of grain doled out to the poor. This proved so effective that chief ministers of many states have followed suit.
But hundreds of millions of Indians receive no welfare. For their benefit, infrastructure development too has recently been recast as munificence. In January, when Mr Modi inaugurated a temple in the northern town of Ayodhya, he came with the “gift” of a new airport and railway station. The same month the government boasted that “Mumbai gets [the] gift of India’s longest bridge”. In March Mr Modi presented to Jharkhand, a poor state, the “gift of development projects” worth $4.3m. Regional bosses are catching on. The chief minister of one eastern state, had a “new year gift for Odisha: a metro”.
Mr Modi says that India has for too long been burdened by colonial baggage. Only under him is it finally achieving true independence “from the slavery mindset”. In 2022 his government renamed Rajpath (Ruler’s Way), a broad Delhi avenue lined with ministries, to Kartavyapath, or Way of Duty. Early in the prime minister’s first term Race Course Road, which houses his official residence, was renamed Lok Kalyan Marg, or Public Welfare Road.
These are good signals. But much more than language needs to change before the state stops treating Indians as subjects and starts respecting their rights as citizens. ■
source : economist