WITHOUT ANY ATTEMPT TO REFORM AND REMODEL THE BUREAUCRACY, HOW CAN WE EXPECT THE DELIVERY  SYSTEM  TO DELIVER,  ASKS PATRICIA MUKHIM

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh&’s press conference, a rare occasion within the country since he usually briefs journalists on board flights involving foreign junkets, was another insipid and meaningless account of what the UPA-2 has done and how he has been harshly judged by the public. For the record, the Prime Minister has travelled abroad 67 times in his nine-year tenure with not a diplomatic score to talk about.
   His visits to China have not brought the two countries any closer. The Chinese continue with their unabated incursion into Indian territory in the Leh-Ladakh sector, where they have encroached on pasture land belonging to the Laddakhis inside Indian territory, thereby robbing them of their only occupation — livestock rearing.
  Those who have visited Ladakh in recent times have testified to the deep anxieties of the people there about a Central government that refuses to acknowledge their plight, while on the other side of the international border life is progressing at a furious pace. Is their loyalty to India worth the while? I suppose that is also a question many in Arunachal Pradesh think aloud but are yet too respectful to verbalise.
 The Congress  in Assam (not the people) has given its unstinted support to Manmohan Singh as the Rajya Sabha representative, at the cost of one of their own, simply because the Congress high command demands that unquestioned obedience to its “command”. Assam could not have had a more laidback Rajya Sabha representative who visits his “address” not even once a year.
   One wonders also how posterity will judge Mammohan Singh. Jim Collins who has written the books, Good to Great and How the Mighty Fall, speaks of a leader that combines extreme personal humility with intense professional will. Both qualities are missing in the present Prime Minister. Leaders do not always get it right.
  They progress towards an idea through a series of regulated errors and every move is a partial failure to be corrected by the next one. This, too, was not Manmohan Singh&’s style of functioning. Even today he and his government are either in denial about the magnanimity of the Telecom scam (the largest in India&’s history by the sheer number of zeros in the figure) or have underplayed it by blaming coalition compulsions. Ordinary people believe that leaders cannot pass the buck because it stops with them. In the case of this country&’s Prime Minister, he has conveniently passed all the bucks to coalition partners as if he was not in the know of the graft that was brewing under his very nose.
  The Congress is passing through a paralytic phase. There is a leadership crisis since the party cannot look beyond the dynasty, and the dynasty is unable to produce the kind of leader that this country, which is today at the edge of a precipice (going by the economic slowdown, the devaluation of the rupee, etc). If India does not get the right leadership after the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the damage to its economy and its image could be irreversible.
  All the talk about India being a rising economic giant seems to have dissipated into thin air. How effortlessly we, as a people,  have let go off that much image which was a result of some wise policies articulated after the country went through a similar slump during Prime Minister Chandrashekhar&’s infamous tenure. That was a moment of deep dismay for India and Indians. Karl Marx once said that history repeats itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce. If the first economic disaster of the late 1980s was a tragedy, this second one is a farce perpetrated on the Indian nation by populist policies that turned most Indians into people who demanded payment for work not done.
    The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, later prefixed with the name of the father of the nation to sound like a death knell — MNREGA — which most pronounce as Marega, did not exactly empower the rural communities. No community assets have been built. The scheme is steeped in corruption. In the tribal areas, if a person is favoured by the village headman his/her name would be included in the job card and the person could well be employed as a daily labourer elsewhere or just be pottering around at home, but would get his/her wages from MNREGA.
  Then we have those several schemes emanating from the National Advisory Council, a body that is accountable to none — not even to Parliament — which has assumed a “rights” model. No one in the UPA really cared about where the money was going to come from for the Right to Education or the Right to Food Act.
  Of course, economists like Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen would defend such policies to the hilt but that&’s because they don’t have to shell out a penny or to implement it.  In India, it is the implementation that should go through a transformative phase. If we believe that civil servants who specialise in number crunching and paper work are going to supervise the working of a scheme in the field and to monitor it conscientiously, then we have not understood the Indian bureaucracy.
  The Block Development Officer, through whose office all these so-called people-oriented schemes have to be cleared, is also the place where most schemes are “blocked”. Without any attempt to reform and remodel the bureaucracy, how can we expect the delivery system to deliver?
  The Administrative Reforms Commissions have given their recommendations only to reach a cul-de-sac of indifference. No wonder we are where we are today.
  Today we have a system akin to a plutocracy beset by the greed and smugness of the elected. Look at the foreign junkets of legislators of all states to understand the growing aspirations of the political class to serve itself!
   The bureaucracy, in any case, is a class of self-serving, self-preserving elite with no idea of what the common people suffer from. With such a class of rulers, do we wonder at the dystopia that is eating away at the heart of Indian democracy? And then we wonder why Maoism or all forms of socialist movements are gaining ground. What else do people do when the rulers are deaf and blind to their needs? Sadly, the general style of governance in all these decades and irrespective of party (including the Left in West Bengal) has supported the greed, insouciance and arrogance of this plutocracy.
   Let us not forget that poverty, even in hitherto egalitarian tribal societies, has risen by leaps and bounds because of the Central dole intended to reach the poor but which, by a system of default, goes to fill the pockets of the plutocracy. If we think the poor will continue to remain passive and tolerate this feudal and predator capitalism patronised by a liberalised soft state, we are in for a surprise.
  The poor have their way of mobilising their voices and their action. People like Assam&’s Akhil Gogoi may seem like rabble-rousers to some but what they do resonates with the powerless and such movements will haunt the present set of cocky, pompous and brazenly corrupt rulers who have already lost the plot.         
              
THE WRITER IS EDITOR, THE SHILLONG TIMES, AND CAN BE CONTACTED AT patricia17@rediffmail.com