Current Affairs: Why does the design of democratic setup lead to corruption in India

http://rutadharma.blogspot.in/2017/12/in-run-up-to-2014-lok-sabha-elections.html

In my previous blogpost, I made a case for following problems  with respect to our democratic setup.

• That the people expectations in India are at loggerheads with the institutional roles of MPs, MLAs and Corporators as designed by the Constitution of India
• How, as a result, we have created 
• insufficient and incorrect capacity in law making
• inefficient material development / execution machinery

In this blogpost, I make a case for another terrible consequence of this misalignment of institutional democratic setup and people expectations.  Large scale corruption in general in the country and in particular in the legislature and executive are an outcome of this misalignment. However, the relationship between the two is not evident and requires a keen eye to make the connection. It is a tragic irony of our times that the entire society is deeply and genuinely concerned about corruption but seldom makes an attempt to trace its path in the reverse and meet its root cause in the eye. In a nutshell, corruption is a collateral design outcome of the democratic setup of India.

Our inability to search for its root-cause has some colonial influence to it. It was necessary for the British to showcase Indian as inferior in order to defend the subjugation of its people and claim legitimacy for the British colonial rule. Towards this, it propounded theories of moral and material corruption of the people of India. Over generations, these theories have been considered an absolute reality leading to no deeper exploration of alternate causes. Educated Indians continue to live those theories as they live as myths in the modern India each generation receiving this mythology subconsciously from its previous generation. From the status of a conclusion, it has elevated itself as a belief. This belief renders any attempts for deeper investigation of corruption entirely unnecessary. But, this is a digression - let us leave behind the colonial influence for a moment and return to the democratic design of corruption in India. 

Let us start from the beginning to understand this clearly. As we are all aware, India has largely adopted the Direct Democracy and Parliamentary system of electing its representatives for various assemblies. Thus it elects its representatives for legislative assemblies to make laws which shape and enable the administration of concentric set of bodies. It uses the philosophical and execution framework for Panchayats, Zilla Parishads, Municipalities/Corporations), State assemblies and the Parliament - to guide and drive the respective Executive bodies to perform administration effectively. This direct election system to manage a concentric set of bodies hides some complex problems in its  underbelly.

1. In each of these bodies, the Law Making representatives deal with administrative and legislational complexities but proportionate to their scope and range ie.,The complexity of law making in a corporation, in a state assembly and in the Parliament increases in that order. Hence, the abilities required to make laws and shape executive action are of a different order. While at an intuitive level, we appreciate the difference - we do not understand the specific nature of this complexity sufficiently - neither the political community nor the people. In the local bodies, the responsibility is loaded on the side of executive action, there is limited law making complexity. This gets reversed in the Parliament - which is the highest law making body where MPs have a significant distance from  executive action. I shall explain the implications of not understanding this difference.

2. On the other hand, where they are directly electing representatives, people have similar material development expectations from all such roles. They do not sufficiently distinguish the role of Law Making. Worse, even in the context of material expectations and executive action, people do not evaluate the capability of an individual in alignment. Not just that, it is almost impossible anywhere in the world for such evaluations to be comprehensive, correct and aligned. People stay too far away from the complexities of law making and administrative execution. As a result, People vote based on trust, past performance, standing in the community and the larger society - anything really that can be converted into a trust factor. There is an implicit assumption that such a person who can win the trust of the larger society can also leverage and navigate through the community and drive executive in the right direction, if not contribute towards the design of sustainable and meaningful laws.

These two factors makes electing a Panchayat representative more in the spirit of design of the role, ideally speaking. It makes the election of an MP, MLA that much less aligned. In general, it could be said that the Local Body elections are more realistic, meaningful and true to expectations of the context than the Parliament. The common man lives with maximum intensity within a very small physical sphere of life, almost forming a virtual community, which makes choices in such a sphere easy. Further, in countries like India, real communities are well formed community traditionally and creates a great scope for democracy to succeed. In that sphere of familiarity, people implicitly understand who should represent them and on whom they could pose their trust. The gap between their trust and the trustworthiness of the individual on which it is posed is manage-ably less. However, the Legislative Assembly and the Member of Parliament elections requires them to elect in a much larger space. These spaces contain small regions of high familiarity and large regions of low familiarity. Trust here is less an outcome of personal experience and more an outcome of  construction from different sources outside of personal experiences.  These sources can be manipulated and trust can be manufactured. People do not have enough independent instruments to evaluate these sources. Hence, the gap between the resulting trust and the trustworthiness of individuals being considered can be high.

There are multiple instruments to realize this manipulation and manufacture of trust

1. Money Power

2. Muscle Power

3. Network Power

4. Power of Intelligence
5. Power of Technology

In summary, Money and Power are essential to the efficient construction and sustenance of this manipulating machinery. Wealth with some intelligence can create such a manipulating machinery that it can drive away a genuine representative from standing for elections. The machinery can be so complex and physically intimidating that a genuine representative does not dare stand. It can manufacture an unrealistic trust to such a degree that a genuine representative cannot measure up to even if in reality he/she can deliver better. Worse, a genuine representative looks so weak in front of this machinery that he/she does not generate sufficient confidence in the minds of the common man resulting in people defeating such a person. In summary, the combination of money, brute power and intelligence is designed to triumph over the democratic setup.

But how does this all lead to large scale corruption? We have already seen that elected representatives at all levels are increasingly focused on material development only and less on Law Making. This is both people expectation as well as their inability to appreciate the law making responsibility. The third element here is the killer - arising out of a manipulation machinery for which they have spent enormous money - corruption is a necessity in order to sustain this machinery running. Both people expectations on material development and their law making inadequacy aids them in this process. Over the years, this has led to enormous collaboration and nexus with the Executive thereby institutionalizing corruption. The power of this machinery gradually has attracted the naturally corrupt together to this machinery and driven who can be genuine representatives very far away.

The net result is corruption eating into the very institutional foundation of modern life. Not that people dont understand any of this at all. They have figured out that its difficult to navigate through this complex electoral system and too costly to figure out who their representative should be at various levels. As a result they are constantly in search of that one candidate who can represent them wholely and solely at the national level. This explains our cultural movement towards a Presidential system while the democratic setup continues to be Parliamentary. This I shall reserve for a subsequent blog post.