New agenda for a new year

As we begin 2014, the political discourse in the country shows the promise of a radically new agenda.

At first glance, an anti-corruption campaign sounds almost trivial and may evoke a yawn. But for the first time in decades, the rhetoric on corruption that seemed to slip out of political lips so meaninglessly has now acquired a context — a framework that invites action.

Arvind Kejriwal, the new chief minister of Delhi, and his party claim first prize for setting the foundation stone of that framework along with Anna Hazare. They sounded the tocsin against corruption and the need for a Lokpal for three years, though with decreasing intensity.

But it is to the Congress and Rahul Gandhi that the honours should go for having steered the amended and much strengthened Lokpal legislation through a Parliament eager to confront,

en bloc for once, the new kid on the block on his own terms.

Lokpal as framing device

The Lokpal law and the initiative that states will have to undertake on their respective Lokayuktas will provide, in the years to come, the means by which corruption can be brought to book.

Every political party gearing up for the last lap to the elections should think of ways to incorporate a commitment to the fight against corruption, not as rhetoric anymore but as an item on their agenda for purposive action. But the legislation will remain, assuming it is fully fleshed out and operational in all states, an act of punitive recourse.

It may prove a deterrent, but equally it may not. Laws need an environment, a social context that can render the misuse of power that much more difficult to plan, execute and hide from the public eye.

Corruption owes its impetus to the concentration of power; the more centralised the power, the more amenable to corruption it gets, the greater the temptation to use it for personal or for party purposes.

For all the federalism of Indian democracy, it still operates on the inverted pyramid structure of power and decision-making, with New Delhi as the head and state capitals the branches of executive power. And it stops there for all operational purposes.

This is evident, for instance, in the allocation of public funds. The use of natural resources is fashioned either by political expediency, global pressures, economic punditry or combinations thereof.

Centralised power is distant both in time and space; national capitals are like the palaces of old.

They are also far removed from the jungles of Chhattisgarh, for instance, so that a policy for road building fashioned in New Delhi or Raipur may sound rational, and so natural to a policymaker trained at Harvard University but it may appear like the kiss of death to a backward tribe’s conception of life as it has been lived for centuries.

That is why the development strategies should move closer to the people for whom the plans are made.

The decentralisation of power, or rather the stress on local governance, would reduce the self-serving temptations of concentrated power.

Such dispersion is not really as frighteningly radical as it sounds at first glance.

Constitutional provisions already exist to strengthen local governance in, or devolve power to both villages and towns.

The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts (CAAs) of 1992 were Congress-inspired initiatives, representing, ironically, an initiative from the Centre to diffuse power to the periphery.

Over the years, the record has been patchy with state government more often than not reluctant to relinquish powers befitting the devolution envisaged in the two amendments.

That was the conclusion of an Indian Institute of Public Administration study last year about the implementation of the 73rd amendment.

Based on several devolution indices it had developed, the study found that on average panchayats existed without the empowerment the amendment had intended them to have.

Ditto for the 74th constitutional amendment relating to devolution of power to urban local bodies (ULBs) or municipalities. Mumbai University’s Abhay Pethe reviewed municipal finances in Maharashtra, a State that topped the indices in the panchayati raj study.

He draws our attention to the inability of the ULBs to expand their functions as intended since successive state governments have not devolved additional taxation powers — as required by the concerned amendment.

Agenda for 2014

Since political parties, barring the Samajwadi Party, have put their imprimatur on the Lokpal, they should just as well pitch for the two CAAs as a vital source of honest governance.

Kejriwal and his AAP should put it on their agenda because the fight against corruption is their reason for existence, not just to offer free drinking water or take the metro to office.

The Congress and Rahul Gandhi should slip it into theirs because of the CAAs’ origins. Asserting devolution would help Congress reclaim the authorship of these two significant reforms.

The BJP would have to jump onto that bandwagon because, churlishly or otherwise, it also nodded its head on the Lokpal law in Parliament. Given its strenuous efforts at positioning itself as the model for clean economic growth, what else can it do?

The larger frame

The inclusion of decentralisation may not go down well with a middle class that thinks corruption can be tackled by a strong personality with a huge broom or vacuum cleaners and straight talk.

But devolution would chime well for the village poor, for the rural heartland that most commentators think no longer counts in the calculations of the political contestants.

But the village is no less aroused to rage than the middle class, though for entirely different reasons.

The latter wants more of what it has and pins its hopes on Mr Clean for a sanitising of its self-image. The villager wants more too, but of power to decide how those natural resources he has enjoyed for centuries will be appropriated and for whose development.

But local governance in the real sense of the term would also enable participative politics and in the process transform democracy from a purely formal into a maturing ideal.

That awakening awareness about politics and power would be more real than what social media or candle-lit protest marches can provide.

And finally, local governance would reassert local traditions within a modern-state setting.

For the BJP it would mean a far more progressive nativism than it has espoused so far, for the AAP it would be a logical conclusion to its formal divestiture of imperial (that is centralised) power trappings, e.g. the lalbatti .

And for the Congress it would mean a rediscovery of that rich heritage its founding fathers culled from a nation’s past to build its future.

What a year it can be!