Sanjay Kumar | SabrangIndia

Authoritarianism and the Crisis of Public Ethics in India

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 06:55:52 +0000

Frequency with which Indians in authority fail to behave ethically in public, indicates that the process of making rational scrutiny, passing judgments and creating moral pressure is non-functional and ineffective.

The failure of Indians in positions of authority to behave responsibly in public, raises reasons for concern over the crisis of public ethics in the country. This crisis is feeding into a particular kind of authoritarianism. Hence, at stake are not just the personal failures of judgment here and there, but the very nature of democracy in the country.

Indo-Pak cricket fixtures are a time of heightened anxiety for many people in the two countries. Traffic thins out as people sit glued to TV screens. Wild celebrations with crackers accompany every victory. Losses are taken as national calamities. Given such an atmosphere, it is hardly surprising that people do not hesitate to ask even complete strangers, about the state of a match. However, an anxious enquiry about the number of wickets down, sounds odd when a state health minister makes it during an official meeting with other senior ministers. In fact, it would be comical, except, the only tiny glitch being that the meeting was called to discuss encephalitis epidemic which had caused the death of more than 100 children in his state.

All societies make distinctions between what is looked down upon, and looked up on, and try to have an effective and functional sphere of ethics in public by appropriate rewards and disapprovals. Modern democratic societies allow significant freedoms in private lives; leaving it largely to the personal judgments of the people concerned, about what they can say or do. On the other hand public actions of all, can be, and are, subjected to public scrutiny. Any scrutiny is a rational judgment, which arrives at a decision on the basis of a more or less sharply defined set of rules. The charm, and the challenge of modern democratic societies, is that unlike tradition based societies, the set of rules are not given in stone, but themselves can be subjected to rational scrutiny. These considerations mean that any exercise of public authority in such societies is an object of scrutiny by people at large, who are free to pass judgment on its appropriateness. The cumulative weight of these judgments create the moral pressure of expectations of a decent behaviour. The effectiveness of this society-wide moral pressure can be determined from how far an ethical public behaviour has become the second nature of the people in authority. The frequency with which Indians in authority fail to behave ethically in public, indicates that the process of making rational scrutiny, passing judgments and creating moral pressure is non-functional and ineffective. People in authority in this country, appear to not even be aware of the fact that they are expected to behave ethically.

The brazenness of people in political authority is the proverbial tip of the iceberg, which actually extends to other sites of authority too.

Bureaucrats prefer taking the easy way out, rather than showing any spine. Media pundits, on the other hand, prefer being cheer-leaders than asking tough questions to power. Spiritual gurus exploit existential anxieties of followers to turn them into ‘blind followers’. Even judiciary appears to be shielding itself under procedural wrangles and wolf-cry. Unlike politicians, who gain authority through popular mandates, and leave office when voted out, bureaucrats and law officials get to positions of authority on the basis of specialised knowledge and skills. Responsible exercise of their authority is supposed to be a part of their training. When it comes to them and them exercising their authority irresponsibly, it is then when one is forced to exclaim, “Why don’t ‘they’ get it?”

In an interview televised during the recent elections, PM Modi claimed that hours before the Balakot strike in Pakistan, Indian experts had second thoughts because of cloud cover over the target area. But he reasoned that the cloud cover would make it difficult for Pakistani radars to track Indian fighter planes, and decided to go ahead with the attack. The idea behind disclosing this information during elections, was perhaps to spread the image of a strong willed leadership brimming with situational intelligence. BJP’s social media cells immediately put up the link to the interview to amplify its intended message. However, these were taken down within a day after the PM’s claim that radar cannot see through a cloud cover, was widely ridiculed. Our PM is known for making unscientific claims, even from the podium of the Indian Science Congress. However, what does this episode say about Indian experts? These experts were paid professional employees of the Republic of India. We do not know what (if any), reasons they gave to the PM for their hesitation or, how did they respond to the PM’s reasoning about radars? Did any of them think of disabusing the PM of his mis-conception? In fact, given the PM’s self-assurance on national TV about his knowledge of radars and clouds, it is very likely that all the experts acquiesced to his claim without a murmur. Passive submission to the higher authority is actually a systemic trait of Indians in authority. One could argue that it is the transposition of the psychology of the graded hierarchy of caste system onto the authority structure of our supposedly liberal democratic republic.

The third major lapse of ethics in public by Indians in position of authority, shows another systemic property: failure to separate private concerns from public responsibilities. On 19th April, 2019, an ex-employee of the Supreme Court of India, sent a signed affidavit to all the sitting judges of the court, claiming sexual harassment by the Chief Justice of India, followed by subsequent victimisation and dismissal from the job. There are no procedures in place to handle complaints of sexual harassment against the Chief Justice of India. Instead of deliberating upon how to handle the said allegation, the CJI constituted a three member bench of the court in a special sitting on the very next day, on a Saturday. While sitting on the bench, ‘he’ dismissed allegations against ‘himself’ and also claimed that a larger conspiracy was afoot to ‘deactivate’ the office of the CJI.

On the go, he also mentioned that the woman complainant already had two criminal complaints registered against her, and that he had given 20 years of selfless service with a bank balance of Rs 6,80,000/ only. Subsequently, a three member in-house enquiry panel of senior judges was constituted to find out the truth about the alleged molestation. One of the members of the committee had to recuse himself after the complainant questioned his membership, since he had already made public statements against her allegations. The in-house enquiry panel entertained no responsibility towards the complainant, or towards the public at large. It gave its decision exonerating the CJI of any wrongdoing ex-parte, (i.e. without complainant’s participation in the proceedings). The reasons behind its decision are not in the public domain. It is not even known whether it investigated only the matter of alleged molestation, or also of subsequent victimisation as claimed in the original affidavit.

THE MORAL ATMOSPHERE OF A SOCIETY AND PUBLIC ETHICS

Failure to behave ethically in public, needs to be distinguished from corruption. The latter in fact is a crime, while none of the cases mentioned above fall in that category. Crimes are handled by specialised state institutions through elaborate legal procedures designed to establish guilt and enforcement of punishment. Public ethics, in contrast, fall in the nebulous zone of expectations that carry the moral weight of a ‘should’, rather than the command of a ‘must’. They work through softer powers of argument and persuasion and reside in the moral atmosphere of the society. All members of the society inhale and exhale in this atmosphere; we get our moral compass from it, as well as contribute to it through our own judgments and actions. It is necessary for a healthy public ethic, that the moral atmosphere of the society encourages us to make moral judgments and has a filtering mechanism to warn us if we are wrong.

Public ethics in modern democratic societies cannot be separated from the exercise of public reason. As mentioned above, the scrutiny of an action involves use of our rational faculty to arrive at an evaluative judgment. When we give reasons for our judgments, we also show that our evaluations are not based upon our preconceptions, prejudices, tastes or opinions. Further, our reasons fertilise the domain of public ethics, adding on to the considerations on which we judge whether a public action is appropriate or inappropriate. For example, we may be disapproving of a minister asking a question about a cricket match during an official meeting on the basis of the belief that an official meeting must be distinguished from a private gathering of friends and family. We may also believe that the death of hundred children is sufficient of a crisis for the minister in charge of the state health department to not treat it as a routine affair. Our disapproval of the conduct of experts during the Balalkot air-strike meeting may be based on the belief that technical matters are best decided by experts, rather than folksy wisdom of an ill-informed Prime Minister. Further, we may believe that the primary duty of an expert is to present his/her professional opinion, rather than succumb to what his/her boss demands.

Our rational judgements about public actions are helped by certain dictums, which express wisdom gained over centuries of experiences. For example, the requirement that there should not be any ‘conflict of interest’, emerges from the recognition that public institutional structures are populated with multiple interests which could be in conflict and that the integrity of these structures is of paramount importance. These structures acquire their legitimacy by claiming to serve larger social goals. Even a perception that the larger social goal may have been compromised, damages this legitimacy. Hence, they need to be protected from any real or imaginary conflict with the private interests of the persons occupying a position of authority. A university faculty cannot be an examiner for an examination which anyone of her/his near relative is writing. Further, there may be a conflict between two official positions. As an official of the National Cricket Academy, Rahul Dravid is expected to serve the interest of the Indian cricket as a whole. As an official of Indian Cements, which owns the Chennai Super Kings cricket team, he may be expected to further serve the interests of that team. Both interests are legitimate, but are likely to be in conflict. The dictum on conflict of interests means that the resolution of any such conflict cannot be left to his personal judgment. It is best that the opposing demands that two contending interests be resolved publicly, so that reasons for that resolution are there for anyone to see and scrutinise.

Distinction between the rights and privileges is a practical dictum that clarifies the limits of the freedom of action of people in authority, and hence, helps in judging a public action. Our rights create a framework for our personal freedoms. They are universal, are granted equally to everyone and can be taken away only under exceptional circumstances. In a society of equals, all positions of authority are positions of privilege, which can be enjoyed only as long as people in authority satisfy certain conditions. Societies generate authoritarianism through two possible paths. One, when people in authority resist being judged, and begin to believe that their position of authority is theirs as a matter of right, meaning they have personal freedom to enjoy it as they wish. The Emergency imposed by Mrs Gandhi was an extreme form of this condition. However, it should be noted that this condition, which creates a sharp distinction between the rulers and the ruled, has been the nature of authority in our country for the vast majority of Indians who live under multiple deprivations.

The second path to authoritarianism is actually more pernicious. Societies proceed along this path when the people at large stop judging those in authority, and develop a blind faith in the wisdom of rulers. This is the path to fascism. India is inching along this path. The recent National Election Survey and the earlier Lokniti data show that the percentage of Indian voters who think that the country needs a strong leader unencumbered by uncertainties of periodic elections, has increased from about thirty percent in 2005, to more than 60 percent in 2019. This is the real cost of crisis of public ethics in our country.

Sanjay Kumar teaches Physics at St Stephen’s College, Delhi

Courtesy: News Click

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Indian State, Society and ‘Public’ Through the Lens of Panchkula Killings

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 05:51:14 +0000

Nearly forty people were killed last Friday (25^th August) during public disturbances at Panchkula in Haryana after the CBI court verdict in the rape case of Gurmeet Ram-Rahim. Surprisingly, even though these people died in public, till Tuesday, little information was available on how were they killed. The burning, arson and assault by followers of Ram-Rahim hogged the attention of media, state administration and judiciary. Yet, a deafening silence reined on the cause of death of forty people! It is as if the media, state administration, and judiciary, had implicitly assumed that people indulging in arson after conviction of a rapist deserve to be killed any way.

Image: Hindustan Times

According to a newsreport on 28^th August, autopsies done on the people killed on 25^th August give bullet injuries to head and chest as the main cause of death. Hence, it is clear that most of the deaths during public rioting in Panchkula resulted from state police and para-military firing. It is not that public arson and violence are rare events in India, or that perpetrators of such actions face state action, and public wrath at the scale faced by perpetrators of arson at Panchkula. The biggest public act of ‘goondagardi‘ in independent India was the destruction of Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindutva supporters. Twenty five years later, Indian courts are still deciding whom to punish for that dastardadly act. Communal pogroms in public view in 1984 and 2002 are among the darkest spots of the post independence Indian history. Backers of both of these mass killings gained unparalleled political successes afterwards. Haryana itself witnessed widespread public vandalism and violence during the agitation for Jat reservation last year. Dalit homes have been burnt down by organised mobs in Mirchpur and Gohana. Armed gau-rakshaks roam its countryside, terrorising Muslims. Yet state and media responses to these cases of public violence have been remarkably mild in comparison.

The question is not whether a rapist should go unpunished, or whether public areas should not be safe from arson (the answer to both these is an obvious No), but why are Indian state and ‘public opinion’ so selective in responding to acts of public violence? Also, what kind of ‘public’ exists in India, that does not bat an eyelid when upto forty people are killed in shooting by state armed forces during one hour of arson in a relatively small town? Answer to the selective response to public violence lies in the class and caste nature of the social and state power in India.

The politics of liberal governance, the fact that the vote of a dalit and a worker, (Muslims have been calculated out in the electoral calculus) counts for as much as a rich privileged caste’s vote, gives the impression that power in India is only a matter of suitable maneuvering and negotiation. It is widely known that the Dera Sacha Sauda chief, whose followers are mainly from the Dalit (ex-untouchable) castes of the Malwa region of Punjab, and Haryana’s border districts with it, has indulged in negotiations with all major parties. There are media reports attributed to his adopted daughter that the support to BJP in last elections was given in return for a promise of the withdrawal of rape cases against him. Such underhand deals can never be proven. However, even if clinching evidence emerges, it is highly unlikely that privileged caste Hindus which form the core support base of the BJP, and who routinely cry hoarse against corruption of a Lalu Yadav or a Mayawati, are going to shift their loyalty to any other party. Actually, a sinister discourse of ‘vote bank’ politics routinely accompanies political maneuvering by oppressed castes and minorities. Privileged caste Punjabi Hindus, and Bania castes in Northern India have been voting for the right wing Hindu party, BJP since nineteen eighties, and Jansangh before that, ever since independence. Right till the end of Indira Gandhi, Brahmins all over India voted for the Congress. Yet these groups are never counted as a ‘vote bank’.

Even though the negotiated nature of electoral politics permits some flexibility, there are clear limits to what Indian state is ready to tolerate. Houses of Dalits can be burnt in villages, minorities can be attacked on highways and in trains; street thuggery in mofussil Sirsa can yield handsome returns to minions of Dera Sacha Sauda, however arson and looting in the enclaves of the socially powerful and rich is a clear no. Panchkula enjoys highest property prices in Haryana. The bureaucratic, political, and professional elites of the state live there. It is an enclave, where the hoi polloi of society can enter only to work, and then have to leave. Arson inside this enclave is a clear challenge to fortifications of class privileges in India. It is the class hatred of the privileged, inflamed by fear, that lies behind the silence on Panchkula killings.

Actions of the Indian state administration before public arson by Dera Sacha Sauda followers highlight another character of the Indian state. The crowd at Panchkula hardly looked like one organised for physical assault. Old men, women and children carrying clothes and food on their head formed a good part of it. They virtually lived in the open for two days. It was not at all like the mass of kar sevaks that destroyed Babri Mosque, gangs that killed minorities on streets of Delhi and Ahmedabad, or more recent gangs of gau rakshaks. Any responsible administrator could have managed a crowd like that without much force. Yet the bureaucratic elite, that manages the city, and lives in it, showed criminal incompetence. Opportunism of the political class is often cited as the reason for administrative degeneration. However, much more is happening here. The bureaucratic elite which actually mans the state administration, not only shares the contempt for the marginalised common to all privileged, it is also professionally incompetent. While it hogs lion’s share of state exchequer as salaries, and perks, its professional contribution to the general well being is minimal.

Finally, these killings and reaction to them show how fractured the ‘public’ in India is. In a formal sense all activities beyond the confines of private spaces are public. The disillusioned army of Dera Sacha Sauda followers walking for days on state highways back to their villages in distant districts of Punjab is public. So are shoppers at the Sector 17 market of LeCorbusier’s Chandigarh. Yet the two publics are not only worlds apart, their realities and imaginations are often in conflict. Privileged strata manage to create a sense of public in societies through successfully projecting their ideas of social living as hegemonic, which the underprivileged not only accept and incorporate, but also imitate. Indian reality is far from it. Actually, with his bombastic self representation, which is seen as cartoonish in elite cultures, some one like Gurmeet Ram Rahim, ‘pitatji‘ (divine father) to his millions of Dalit followers, appears to be mocking any pretense of hegemony by India’s ruling groups. Any public imagined in India is actually fragmented. This is the curse of Manu, which Indian society is still living through. Prescient observers like Ambedkar and Kosambi had long ago noted that the caste ridden Hindu society is actually not even a society, it is an arithmetic conglomeration. Hindutva, which marries caste privileges with hatred against minorities and jingoistic nationalism, is interesting sociologically as an attempt towards organising Hindus under a hegemonic project. Its successes will lead India only towards greater disasters. The other possibility, a society with a modern public arena can emerge only with the annihilation of caste.

Another indicator of the lack of a genuine public in India is the absence of public morality, and its confusion with a glib discourse on corruption. Corruption is illegal personal gain. Lalu Prasad and his family accumulating wealth beyond legal means is corruption. Indians lack the moral framework to judge the betrayal of Muslim voters of Bihar by Nitish Kumar, who got their votes through Mahagatbandhan, but then hitched himself to Hindutva band wagon. Public morality is built upon shared codes of evaluation, that judge actions primarily on the basis of their effects on others. Hence, it can be reasonably argued that political discourses through which state power is gained should not rely on lies, half lies, unfounded allegations, and be tempered by a little bit of self reflection which is necessary for course correction. Yet the political success of Hindutva, Mr Modi’s specifically, is precisely the result of the kind of discourse which will be disapproved by any public conscious of its morality.

Indian elites living in enclaves like Panchkula lack any framework of public morality in which the killing of forty people by state armed forces will be a shock. This matches well with their self interest, which is focused on maintaining their privileges. The real tragedy of India is that other Indians, people like followers of Dera Sacha Sauda, put their faith in crooks and criminals like Gurmeet Ram Rahim.

Sanjay Kumar teaches Physics at St Stephen’s College, Delhi.

Curtesy: Kafila.online

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