Breaking trust-based relationships

The manifestation of commercialisation and contractual relationship is the result of breaking of trust in many relationships.

The recent controversy over marital rape – the government’s statement that it is not a crime - raises the issue of loss of trust in relationships. Relationship can be between a doctor and patient, teacher and a student, husband and wife, and guru and disciple.

These relationships are institutions by themselves. In an organisational sense, these are called psychological contracts. The clamour is for legalisation of relationships and for tight contractual agreements than strengthening trust. Definitely, old order is vanishing but the prescription is no solution.

Few years back, a child in a large corporate hospital died of administration of wrong medicine by a trainee nurse. The entire hospital was shaken up and the promoters were genuinely moved and were in tears. The nurses cried and the relatives were shocked. The father of the child philosophically said, it was the fate of the child that he died. The father moved on and so also the hospital.

In the US, lawyers would have moved in immediately and it would have been case for a major law suit. What do these law suits achieve? These suits do make the doctors wary of medical negligence but at a huge cost through insurance premiums and more so through defensive medicine. The net effect is, the patient no longer trusts his doctor and he keeps a tab on the meter like he would to a cab driver or a vegetable vendor.

A young, US-based newly married Indian couple kept fighting all the time. The husband was getting physical every time and one day the neighbours rang the emergency number 911.
The police was there the next minute, the husband was counselled and also told to behave. It is doubtful if she would have liked her husband to be in jail. The marriage broke and they divorced. Both later got married.

In the past, something like this would have been handled by a joint family system, the family alternate dispute resolution mechanism. Today both sides declare war.

A young Indian parent in a shopping mall in the US chides and slaps a young child in public. The child, sulking his loss of self-esteem, threatens the parents saying he would call 911. The parents decide to return to India. Who wants to go to jail in bringing up one’s own child? Back home, parents have no time for their children and teachers cannot discipline them. In all these relationships, the societal control was more binding than any legal stipulations.

The trust broke from the dominant side. In universities, there are cases of molestation of students by teachers. The swamijis exploit disciples in the ashrams. Doctors have targets and undertake unwanted tests. It is commercialisation as well as undue exploitation of power and trust.

These relationships were never defined by these legal systems. It is a symptom of social degeneration.  After all, retail chains are everywhere, why should there be peeping cameras only in India?

Middle path

These relationships are intangible and very complex. These are difficult to define and specify a priori. Any contract will remain incomplete. Can one hold a teacher to a performance contract? They can always be charged for a criminal offence but can they be charged for breach of trust on contract?

Can we instead work on building these relationships? Like empowering women, making counselling mandatory for broken marriages, creating teachers who are pro-
fessionals, counselling for students and independent ethical committees for techers and management, peer evaluation in the medical profession, etc?

In an organisational sense, there are practices called psychological contracts. These work where the contracts cannot specify all the contingencies and eventualities.

Aren’t these more in line with our culture than converting these to contractual relationships in terms of exchange, value and benefits and in terms of contracts and violations? Can these become counterproductive and create more broken families, more distrustful students and disciples?

Are the family and societal relationships at the point of no return that we have to go totally contractual? Can we look for vestiges in our society which we can institutionalise and strengthen? We may be behind time but do we need to race to end ends?

(The writer is Chairman, Centre for Public Policy, IIM-Bangalore)