State, market, society: Who’s drowning, who’s not?

We’re all in the same boat, and we will sink or swim together. One of the repeating narratives in development is that society matters. While each person strives to maximise economic gains for themselves and their families, there is a sense of one-ness beyond that. Namely that despite our differences, all of us -- rich and poor -- are also part of one great enterprise called India, Karnataka, Bengaluru, etc. Likewise, the notion that government, private citizens and companies all have a role to play for the common good.

We’ve had a very good and literal reminder of our togetherness in the last two weeks, but in the worst possible way. It seems we were all sinking together, as the eastern half of the city collapsed under the onslaught of various accumulated deficits and sins -- bad infrastructure, corruption in government, scarcity of housing, poorly managed land and resources, all made worse by our wishful thinking that someone else will tackle these.

And if you look carefully, there’s something else. As soon as the blaming began, political leaders and bureaucrats who had merrily looked the other way when illegal structures came up in the thousands, swiftly began to find encroachments. But in their selective searching, they never found any of their colleagues who’d been in charge of things when those buildings came up, or their building and contractor friends who put them up. Instead, despite being also responsible for creating this mess, the government suddenly assumed charge of cleaning it up.

We’re not really in it together. It is best to recognise that the interests of people in the State, market and society are different. And their responsibility and accountability are also different. When we let the lines of separation between them blur, we get terrible outcomes.

There’s no way out of this morass if we don’t recognise that some tensions are good for governance. We want public servants we can work with, who are sincere in delivering what the people want. But we also need to be able to question them sharply when things go wrong, and we need to be able to decide and solve more things. It’s important to be both friend and boss to those we have entrusted with our welfare.

This is what it means to be engaged with politics. But we’ve only connected with one side of it. Citizens as well as companies routinely invite political leaders to events -- not just weddings and festivals, but also campus openings, CSR initiatives, awards ceremonies, etc. What we don’t do enough of is the other half -- monitoring the work of public servants, and asking them tough questions. Both these are needed; when we limit ourselves to one, we give up the power to call upon the other when we need to.

There’s another thing to note. There are no elected corporators in the city. So, when people were desperately looking for answers and solutions, they had no local representative to go to or work with. But who decided that the city should not have councillors? The state government. People who have been telling us how powerful the ‘double engine’ is actually prefer to keep one engine in the shed. Having taken away one layer of people who could have been helpful in distress, the sarkar merely arrived late on the scene to take charge.

This is another sphere in which citizens have made the wrong choice. If you have to choose between local, state and national politics and decide which one to pay attention to, choose the local first. Many people do the opposite, paying attention only to distant political leadership and ignoring their own backyard. But the local arena is where the rubber of governance hits the road, and it is in this realm that our voices can be heard powerfully by elected representatives, whereas on state and national issues, for the most part, those in government have never heard of us after the election.

Engaging locally is also important because with good local leadership, there’s a chance of better governance rising into state and national levels, too. The opposite rarely happens, and even if some extraordinary leader can enthuse a trickle-down improvement in politics, it vanishes the moment they leave office.

Role-play matters. If there’s a leak in the water line in your building, you’ll call the plumber. You won’t call the carpenter and hope that by a combination of luck, brute force, learning-on-the-job, prayer, etc. he’ll somehow get the job done. But when it comes to governance, we don’t use this basic filter. We expect the wrong people to solve our problems, and when they don’t, we endlessly debate why they should nonetheless be able to solve them, forgetting that we chose wrong.

The flood waters have receded now, but that’s mostly because there’s a merciful pause in the rains. There’s no reason to think that we won’t again encounter another round of being water-boarded by nature. There’s still a lot of time left in the cyclone season, and the monsoon is about to turn the corner on its long journey back. If we’re smart, we’ll put our backs into new efforts to solve problems, starting with society and properly recognising the roles of government and markets.

Without this, as soon as the waters begin to rise again, we’ll find there’s a scramble to apportion blame, but not responsibility. That game has been going on for a long time, and we all know who’s been bearing the brunt of it.