Democracy weather report: Cloudy, with a chance of easy living

During the week, we had two different sets of data to tell us how we’re doing. First, the US-based NGO Freedom House told us that we’d gone down a rung on its ratings of freedom in countries around the world, saying that we were losing the opportunity to be a global democratic leader. On the plus side, we also learned this week that Namma Bengaluru had topped the Ease of Living index among the major cities of the country.

In this era of information overload, there is no shortage of rankings. A lot of institutions putting out such data seem to believe in boiling complex things down to simple figures. Quite often in the process, the nuance of what’s being measured is diminished, and sometimes even wiped out. To top that, there are people who don’t need surveys to tell them anything, because they have already made up their minds about answers to any questions.

Also read: India falls to 53rd position in EIU's Democracy Index

The net result is that a lot of the debate immediately after a survey is put out is about the credibility of the surveyor, their possible motives and hidden agendas, and so on. That usually goes on till the sun sets, more often than not without coming to any conclusion.

Not all surveys are loaded with such scope for argumentative believers. The Passport Power rankings, for example, are quite straightforward. Some countries allow visa-free travel to Indians, others have some small procedure to be followed, and still others have erected various kinds of requirements that one might more accurately describe as entry barriers. If you tally these up for each country, some kind of score emerges from that.

Every news magazine has at least one ‘survey’ issue each year, and some of them even have more than one issue, devoting the front pages to rankings and indices. There’s no shortage of material -- university rankings, ease of doing business, popularity of governments. Pick a topic, and there’s probably a ranking of some kind for it.

So, what should we make of the latest ones, especially Bengaluru’s great leap forward from last year’s dismal rank to this year’s table-topping performance? Should we be happy to be living the easiest life on offer in an Indian metro? Or should we point out that however high we may rank, it’s only in comparison to other places just like ourselves, and there’s still a long way to go before ranking high on a list of Indian cities also puts us among the top ranks of places around the world?

The indices are only as good as we want them to be, and they say more about our priorities than anything else. During the last few weeks, I found myself twice in conversations about the ‘great work’ being done in other states -- in Chennai and also in several cities in Odisha. There was genuine happiness in the voices of those telling me about what’s going on in those places, and even hope that there would be lessons from them for other cities.

Also read: Bengaluru tops Ease of Living Index, Pune ranks second

I pointed out that in Chennai, there has been no elected local government since 2016 -- a delay that is so long that almost a whole term could be fit into it by now. In Odisha, my friend freely admitted that elections to several cities and towns were behind schedule,
leaving bureaucrats in charge of running them.

That story is familiar to us. Bengaluru, too, hasn’t had an elected council for the last six months. But does that matter? Should our metrics for how good our cities are be so poor that if we don’t have an essential piece of democracy in them, we would only lose a few points in the rankings? One could say, reasonably, that there should be minimum standards that we set for these things, and that properly functioning institutions of democracy are among them.

My friends telling me about Chennai and Odisha admitted this as a failure. But in each case, they quickly moved on to telling me how, in the absence of an elected council the administrators were able to get a lot of good things done. And the more that can happen before the next election the better, lest the councillors muck up the whole thing in their usual ways. I’ve heard that in Bengaluru, too, several times in the last 10-15 years, as we’ve gone through gaps in local council terms repeatedly.

That isn’t right. Freedom fighters didn’t stand up to the British risking life and limb for this. Our Constitution, which we teach widely and speak proudly about, doesn’t have any place for it. The laws don’t permit it. But somehow, when we look in our collective mirrors and assess ourselves, we seem to discount the very meaning of freedom, reducing it to merely one factor among many in deciding how we’re doing.

More than Freedom House telling us about ourselves, we should be thinking about freedom in our own house. Our liberties are important. If we take the view that in some cases they can be set aside, even for a while, because some other things matter more, we put at risk the freedoms that were hard-fought and won. And from there, it’s only a short distance to being not quite free.

Any ranking of anything we want to take pride in should begin with a minimum qualification to be considered. Elected and accountable governments.