Mammaries of the welfare state

Yesterday night I dreamt that the ghost of M. Visvesvaraya, the great engineer, was haunting the streets of Bengaluru. The old man who lived beyond hundred was a technocrat par excellence, a part of the folklore of Karnataka. He epitomised the bureaucracy as a way of life, a normative system that separated the public and the private,

which saw dam building, character building and nation building as isomorphic activities. For the people of Karnataka, this ectomorphic Diwan of Mysore was the ideal of governance, epitomising punctuality, austerity, discipline, and a vision of India constructed around the discipline of the timetable.
Visvesvaraya now suddenly appears like our equivalent of Rip Van Winkle. He is haunting the streets of Bengaluru, wondering whether privatisation is the answer to poverty.
As he stalks the streets like a futile Diogenes with a lantern, one summons the picture of B.S. Yeddyurappa and the entire cluster of corrupt clowns from H.D. Kumaraswamy, the Reddy brothers to the chief minister’s entire family, to wonder at the stark apposition between the bureaucrat as hero and politician as fixer. One wonders why corruption is seen as normal. Even those caught, act as if there has been a misunderstanding. There is something here we must explore.
I remember when Acharya Kripalani, Paul H. Appleby and A.D. Gorwala wrote the first reports on corruption in the early Fifties.
The documents sounded like exercises in moral science. Of course, they were moments of discordance as when the Kripalani report was met in Assam with protesters asking it to go back.
One thing was clear; each of these reports saw man as central to character building. There was a feeling that character and institution building would guarantee the cleanliness of governance. One could think of a whole generation of politicians and bureaucrats who provided some semblance of honesty. Earlier when we said a government was pollution free we referred to honesty not to hydrocarbons. Where did the change come?
I think there were three reasons for it. The first was the dialect of governance. The idiom was still patriarchal, more correctly patrimonial. The politician was seen as a jajman, a provider. He was seen as patron. Government was not a rational legal system but constructed like a kinship chart. Seniority was not as important as the fact you were someone’s son-in-law. The family domesticated the state. The one separation of powers that India needed was not the classic separation of the three estates but the separation between family and state. Once the state was constructed as a joint family, corruption became literally an expression of a new jajmani system.
Mr Yeddyurappa lets his family graze like hungry goats on the pasture called the state. The state had spread out like an inverted commons allocated to the family. The state became from sacred cow to a mulch cow to be milked by the members of the family. It is this tradition from Pratap Singh Kairon, to Bhajan Lal, to Sanjay Gandhi to Mr Yeddyurappa that sustains the vision of the state as a form of conspicuous corruption.
The second classificatory crime attacked the subsistence economy and sought to extract surplus from it. This was the division between the formal economy and the informal economy. Eighty per cent of Indian life and livelihoods were conducted in the informal sector, yet the irony lies in the fact that the informal economy had no official status. It was not even legal. The hawker, the nomad, the scavenger, the pastoralist, the domestic servant all operated in the informal sector. The informal sector was prey to the policeman and subject to the caprices of the local party boss and goon. Survival was something that needed continuous approval from the official and the official always needed a bribe. A bribe in the informal economy was a guarantee of survival, a promissory note for a future citizenship.
It took till the Arjun Sengupta Commission report for the state to even officially recognise the power and creativity of the informal economy. If the state was the inverted commons, the informal economy was seen as a mine subject to constant over-extraction.
The third confusion was what I dub the irony of democracy. for All its warts, democracy in India actually works, but the way it works is problematic. Democracy through electoral politics changes regimes and this change in regime is seen as a form of distributive justice. The dalit or the OBC (other backward classes) politician is shameless in his corruption claiming, “You had your turn, it is ours now”, and adds, “your complaint is hypocrisy, in fact a form of envy”.
Electoral politics becomes an icon of democracy. It is seen as creating the revolving regimes of power. But what politics does is to create an attitude that the state is a window of opportunity, that power is a legitimate opportunity to milk the state. This rationale first developed in the south and has now been fine-honed by Mayawati and the politicians of Jharkhand. The politician becomes the new middleman milking the state and the people. Yet people’s faith in politician is tremendous. The latter still feel they have obstetric power to deliver the goods. And often they do so by violating the very rule of law that could have created sanity.
The three distortions have to be read as on text. For example, it is the informal economy of votes that keeps the politician in power and lets him milk the system. We talk of the family as the primary institution and yet fail to see it is this very institution that corrupts the logic of the state. These three fissures or distortions of our society make corruption a lethal vector.
I guess Visvesvaraya may not approve of such sociology. He might see it even as a rationalisation removing the values, the morality he valued. But in my fondest dreams I see him walking, bumping into A. Raja, B. Ramalinga Raju and Mr Yeddurayappa, wondering what manner of men these could be. I would love to witness that encounter.
Would the old man’s moralising make any sense to these people or would they see him as an anachronism?
Yet, I guess the final irony is I can see all three of them garlanding his statue while they milk the state he sought to build for the welfare of the people.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist