The government is not the public

State, Market, Society

Many years ago, when there was a problem with the telephone line running into my office, I went to see the local BSNL lineman. He declared he couldn’t do much because various people at several levels above him hadn’t done their job. But, he assured me, it would eventually get sorted -- after all, “we are government”, and I should just be patient and trusting.

I was reminded of that while reading about a recent case in the Supreme Court. The government-owned mining company, Coal India, argued that it was not subject to the jurisdiction of the Competition Commission of India because it is a government company embarked on national goals and cannot be regulated in the usual way. I wondered if my old BSNL neighbour had been posted to the Coal India legal team. The CCI shot that one down.

There is a long legacy to such thinking – that the ‘government’ and the ‘public’ are the same. And the government is good because it is the public’s government. One should trust the government implicitly because in doing so, the public is only trusting itself. Not only that, everything the sarkar touches even remotely is also government, and worthy of the same trust.

Government and public -- in a long list of cases, one can notice the use of these two words interchangeably. BHEL is a public sector company, the school around the corner is a government school. Encroachment happens on government land, which could have otherwise hosted a public library. There are some other words that find a place too -- for a long time, Air India was the ‘national’ carrier.

And all of these are presumed to be on a higher moral plane than the citizens or the market. There is nothing wrong with a monopoly bus operator or power supplier if they are ‘public’, since surely they wouldn’t abuse their position. Government schools and clinics need not meet the same standards as private ones because they’re public. A BMTC bus operating as a school bus does not need to be painted yellow or meet the safety standards that other school buses should meet because...well, BMTC is public. How can we think that the people’s company could be putting them at risk? Hogwash.

Lost in all this is the notion that the government should serve the public and be accountable to it. Why should the people demand accountability from the government? Would they demand that from themselves? Of course not. Not only that, government-owned companies need not bother much with customer service because, by definition, everything they do is for the public. In many cases, there is no regulator for their operations, or the regulator is chosen from among retirees who used to work for the government.

In this, as in many other spheres, 21st-century India is a live recording and performance of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Everyone knows, but no one speaks out. And everything is orchestrated to keep things that way.

Media has also bought into this blur, by yet another compromise -- the government is good because it pays the bills. Advertising revenues from governments and sarkar-owned companies has made it harder for the press to check those in power. It provides a lot more space to small positive steps of the government while ignoring glaring errors and oversights. The introduction of 35 new feeder services of BMTC received plenty of positive coverage, but the overall deficit of 10,000 buses has remained mostly unreported.

None of this is new. Perhaps it began benignly enough. Our history of asserting that development must be led by the State goes back to the founding days of the Republic, and every government since then. Any criticism of the government could be dismissed by claiming that everything it did was for the public.

No wonder that India doesn’t have a significant political party that argues for a smaller government, or even decentralisation of power to local councils. The rush to get government jobs too is only partly for the perks. There is also the prestige of working for the public good -- in theory. And who is to decide what this good is? The government, of course.

We need to end this delusion. The government is not the public. The individuals are different, and their motivations and justifications for their actions are different. And most importantly, governments are elected to serve the public, and be accountable to them. We forgot this, and a long list of development deficits has naturally followed.