India – FRACTURED COUNTRY?

WHO CAN UNITE THE NATION ?

Terrorist attacks in our bazaars, the violence against Biharis in Mumbai, the Naxalite uprisings, religious strife in Orissa, the list goes on: India is being torn apart. We need strong leadership to bring Indians together to protect our collective national interests. But our political system is dysfunctional and our most important institutions are failing. Our best hope is that a great political leader emerges to build trust across various interest groups and knits our country together.

India is a deeply fractured country today. We are divided by state, religion, caste, community, language, forwards vs. backwards, left vs. right, secular vs. communal, promoters vs. workers, and on and on.
Tossed about among all these divisive interest groups, the Indian state is floundering. Each interest group seeks to capture the state apparatus to serve its narrow demands ranging from getting hundreds of SEZs approved to reserving seats at higher educational institutions to resisting national identity cards that will restrict illegal immigration. In aggregate, these demands are imperiling our physical security and bankrupting the state.

India's great divides have always been our weakness. Chandragupta Maurya overwhelmed the Nanda Empire by enlisting the kings of the Punjab, who were supposedly loyal to the Nandas. Once Chandragupta defeated the Nandas, he turned on his erstwhile allies. Mohammed Ghauri gained the support of several Rajput kings who were at war with Prithvi Raj Chauhan, making it easy to defeat the isolated Chauhan kingdom. Akbar allied with the Rajputs of Amber, Gwalior, and Malwa to destroy the kingdom of Mewar. Robert Clive conspired with Mir Jafar and various Calcutta merchants to vanquish Siraj ud Daulah at the Battle of Plassey. Subsequent British rule in India was based on its infamous "divide-and-rule" strategy.

Indian history is thus replete with examples of bickering rulers unable to deliver peace and prosperity to their citizens.

Game theory provides a profound insight to understand this dynamic. It is called the Prisoner's Dilemma, a stylized non-zero-sum game where two prisoners (who do not know each other and cannot communicate with each other) can either stay silent or betray each other. If they both stay silent, they each get a 6 month sentence. If one stays silent and the other one betrays, then the silent one goes to prison for 10 years and the betrayer is set free. If both betray each other, then they both go to jail for 5 years. Unfortunately, given the various payoffs, the betrayal strategy dominates the silent strategy in every case. Acting in their rational self-interest, the prisoners choose to betray each other; as a result, they both go to jail for 5 years. In such types of situations, playing cooperative win-win strategies is very difficult because it requires both prisoners to trust each other totally.

India's rulers have mostly chosen to fight each other for a share of the proverbial pie, rather than cooperating to grow the pie through win-win strategies. Robert Wright in his excellent book NonZero shows how successful societies have evolved various strategies to build trust and achieve win-win outcomes. Most successful societies have become progressively more complex through mechanisms such as a constitution-based political system, the army, the civil services, financial markets, workers unions, guilds, and companies. These integrative structures build trust by getting people to work together and tangibly deliver the benefits of grow-the-pie cooperative strategies. Thus a bicameral legislature, with representation from all parts of the country, can efficiently formulate laws; a very valuable public good.

Apart from various religious organizations, India did not evolve any integrative structures prior to the British Raj. Yes, most rulers had armies and tax collectors. But their goal was principally rent-extraction. British rule led to the creation of many integrative structures in India. Most of these structures, such as the civil services, a professional army, and the judiciary were transplanted directly from Britain, where they had organically developed over hundreds of years.

After Independence, the stalwarts of the Freedom Movement (steeped as they were in British traditions and values) trusted that these institutions coupled with a democratic political system would result in a modern, progressive society. However, over the last 60 years, we have subsided back to Indian-style governance; namely, using the powers of the state to run a cynical rent-extraction system for the ruling group.

In modern-day India, the ruling group emerges primarily through elections, which pit one group against another. The goal is no different from our pre-British past: capture the state so as to capture rents. Voters recognize that our political system is dysfunctional; hence anti-incumbency rates are high to prevent permanent capture. Under these circumstances, our political system will not succeed in getting various interest groups to work together.

Our rent-seeking political system is also corroding our most important institutions. We cannot rely on the civil services, the police, judiciary, or any other institution to get various interest groups to work together cooperatively. Each of these institutions has been debased and is barely serving the national interest. Corrupt bureaucrats wanting money to pass a file, bomb blasts in Mumbai's trains, farmers dying of drought, Naxalites in our forests — how many more proof points do we need?

We need a prophet of unity who can rise above these narrow interests, kindle the national themes that can unify us, inspire us to rebuild the country, and revitalize our key institutions. Note that Barack Obama's historic victory speech included the following lines: "We are one nation. We are one people. Our time for change has come."

Independent India has been rescued before by an inspiring political leader. JP's sterling leadership brought together many different parties to contest against the Congress after the Emergency and saved Indian democracy. JP was able to break the Prisoner's Dilemma and convince all the anti-Congress parties to put up a united front. As long as he was alive, the Janata Party stayed together. Tragically, the Janata Party experiment collapsed soon after his death in October 1979.

The last few years have been deeply divisive. Dependent on external support, the UPA government has been unable to push through any reforms, its fiscal policies have been highly populist, corruption has been rampant, and domestic security has deteriorated. Regional parties have become increasingly powerful and small parties with even a few seats in Parliament can topple a government. The coming General Elections may throw-up another fractured Parliament at a time of grave national and global crises. Now is the time we truly need a great leader who can unite the nation.

November 25th, 2008

by jayantsinha

ADDITIONAL READING
Extremism....Not only a muslim domain