Imagine a pyramid-like structure upwards if you may. At the very bottom of the pyramid are the congested urban slums in India’s vast oceans of poverty. Pick any urban slum, and you have the same conditions; tens of thousands of undernourished bodies packed into thousands of ramshackle tenements crisscrossed by black ribbons of clogged up open sewage and excrement. Thanks to India’s failed education systems, most slum dwellers are, if not illiterate, functionally illiterate.
In such a primal world, a strongman inevitably emerges. He controls all utilities – stolen water and electricity, pirated cable television, even internet – real estate, job opportunities and has a say in all small businesses. And if that wasn’t enough, this strongman holds the exclusive “monopoly on use of physical force” in that slum, usually expressed through occasional violent outbursts. In a place where justice does not enter, and contract enforcement is an illusion, such a strongman has enormous control over the daily lives of tens of thousands in his slum.
While serfdom and debt bondage might be officially illegal in contemporary India, the dependency of these tenants is ensured through a mixture of social and economic ties. These ties form the basis of relationships between politically and economically powerful patrons and the weaker clients. Over time, with India’s glacial judicial system ensuring the lack of any viable legal alternative, vast sections of Indian society has deemed these relationships necessary and even honorable, rendering change almost impossible.
With such god-like power, the strongman patron controls the most valuable commodity in India’s democracy – electoral votes. More important, these are controllable and predictable votes. They become the world’s most perfect vote banks; instantly mobilized. As such, when it comes to elections, these people are not free to vote for whoever they want to. The governed have been left with no consent to give.
This strongman then “sells” these guaranteed votes to the next step up in the Pyramid. Civic Corporators (city councilors) running for city elections “buy” these votes by sending choice city contracts to the slum strongman. The strongman gets to control, say garbage collection in a certain area, or a bus station maintenance contract. He can steal all the money he wants while delivering abysmal services, and the corporator ensures that the justice system will look the other way as long as the votes are delivered upwards.
This patronage pyramid affects everyone. For example, in most of urban India up to 25 percent of urban electricity and 30 percent of piped water is stolen by urban slumlords and offered to poor residents. These are the most effective instrument of buying the votes of these massive vote banks, and are thus far too important for local politicians to ignore. Hence the blatant theft is allowed to continue, and state-owned utility boards are prevented from launching corrective measures, improving safety or quality or delivery.
I am not saying that water or electricity should be taken away from the poor. I am saying that there is something deeply wrong with a system that keeps the poor in a constant limbo of deprivation and then uses the basic needs of life as currency to buy votes. Yes, political cronyism exists in many of the world’s developed democracies. However, in India, this cronyism escalates unchecked to epic proportions due to a lethal mix of three core realities; a majority of the demos are functionally illiterate, feel lesser sense of ownership in governance as they do not pay direct taxes (but do pay indirect taxes that they are unaware of), and live in controlled conditions that require them to surrender their votes. As a result, Indian democracy fails in its corrective role of preventing large-scale graft.
Viewed in isolation each contract is quite small, but they combine to form the bottom layer of an enormous pyramid; consisting of tens of thousands of strongmen stealing from civic coffers across the country. It is vital to note that India is not a poor country, but it is a country with large numbers of poor people. It is not for lack of money that these civic services are failing. The city of Mumbai’s 2007-08 budget was Rs, 10,225 crore (US$ 2 Billion), roughly double Tel Aviv’s US$ 1billion budget, yet there are rampant blackouts, endemic water shortages, mass transit resembles cattle transport, and road traffic is horrendous. Governance continues to worsen.
Such trends could be interpreted as “progress towards greater democratic identity and resemblance between governors and governed.” (Manin, 1997). However the end result in practice is that urban India’s face to the modern globalized world is shaped by policies determined locally by its least qualified and most thuggish.
The antics of these urban elected leaders are an endless source of humor in any of India’s urban media. The urban media is full of detailed accounts of fights over petty inaugurations, unnecessary foreign jaunts, naming of miniscule streets and public parks after themselves, speeches full of empty rhetoric and hubris, rampant graft and corruption. But there is nothing funny about how Indian democracy is enabling such inept leaders to run India’s glorious cities to the ground. Instead of being at the forefront of the nation’s push towards modernity, these cities are instead stuck in a time warp brought about by this form of democracy.
Rural votes are also delivered by similar strongmen that are best able to deliver freebies such as agricultural output price supports and input ceilings. Such blatant vote-chasing results in immense market distortions at the taxpayers’ expense; subsidized fertilizer results in overuse, free electricity results in gird overloads, free water lowers the water table, and so on. Indian rural conditions that are not much different from urban – illiteracy, functional illiteracy, low female empowerment, lack of the rule of law, and other consequences of failed public services – have converged to ensure that there is no collective outrage. Additionally, low to nonexistent sense of ownership in governance can be attributable mostly to non-payment of direct taxes. Elections occur but democracy fails in its most basic corrective role. The Pyramid’s rural bottom layer continues to send its most thuggish upwards.
India’s underdevelopment is often attributed to the stark quality shortage it faces in critical areas of public management – urban architects, city planners, ecologists, public health specialists, environmental engineers, and so on. By extending that argument, the international development community concludes that a mere transfer of these ‘technical skills’ to Indians would automatically result in development. But India’s Political Patronage Pyramid renders that argument null and void. India remains underdeveloped due to no other reason than the debased form of democracy practiced in the country.
EXAMPLE: Road works in India
Pune was the fastest growing city in India for the two years
leading up to 2008. City roads were being widened, and flyovers were being
built at a glacial pace that India called hectic. Be that as it may, they were
being built, and they were being hailed as the harbingers of progress. The
entire city seemed like one endless construction zone.
I had been in cities experiencing construction booms, so the mess was expected. And good citizens were expected to be patient with the march of progress. “Working Towards a Better Tomorrow” announced endless panels covering construction sites of the Delhi Metro. But Pune construction seemed to take forever. A simple flyover built over the Pune university intersection took three years and cost Rs. 61 crore (US$ 12 million). A Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS), meant to emulate Bogota’s success, took three years to build, and cost Rs. 1200 crore (US$ 240 million). In 2008, at the end of three years, the designated bus lanes were gone, the so-called rapid buses were crawling through regular traffic, and none of the other back-end systems worked. In other words, US$ 240 million disappeared into thin air, a few buses as the only residue left behind. Pune was not a poor city; it was a city with a majority of poor people.
Roads were constantly being built, but almost none finished up to the curb. In some of the older parts of the city, so many layers of asphalt had been laid on older roads that the street was up to 5 feet higher than the ground underneath surrounding buildings. Of course, come monsoon time, those buildings would be flooded, but citizens were conditioned to believe that flooding is a natural byproduct of the rain. “Even the best roads succumb to the strong Indian monsoon,” was a common theme I heard. Even Nabokov couldn’t have made this up. I remembered that Hong Kong roads and drainage systems were so well-managed, that even tropical hurricanes would leave barely a puddle the day after.
DJ, a former state boxing champion I met at the gym, explained all this to me, over a few rounds of bagwork. He had the broad droopy shoulders of a boxer, and drove a new Mituibishi Pajero SUV. He made his living as a contractor supplying construction materials to the Pune Municipal Corporation. Barely 27, he drove a better car than any middle aged lawyer, doctor, or IT professional that I had met in urban India.
Urban India was booming he explained, and tax intakes were skyrocketing. However, upto 60% of most cities still consisted of semi-literate poor living in slums. Voter turnout in most cities continued to be quite low, with the educated classes refraining from voting. Bangalore for example, India’s IT center, had 43% in the 2009 parliamentary elections, mostly from the slums. These slums constituted the most perfect vote banks – controllable, purchasable, and demanding almost no accountability after any election.
“How does all this tie in to road works?” I asked.
He was clearly a well-traveled man. “Anywhere in the world, road works have traditionally been the most vulnerable to graft. Even in the U.S., graft takes the form of campaign contributions, but it remains miniscule. In most countries, leaders refrain from stealing too much out of fear; perhaps fear of prison or even death in some theocracy, but most important is the fear of public humiliation and/or electoral defeat in a democracy.”
“But in India’s democracy, these elected leaders – their positions secured by poor vote-banks that demanded no accountability – were free to steal far more. So, while tax intakes from the IT sector were rising, and mega-projects were being lined up, the end results were abysmal.”
I was speechless. “Are you telling me that the very structure of Indian democracy is the cause of bad roads? And things will continue to get worse?”
“Yes. And yes.” he said with a shrug, a smile for me, and a vicious jab for the bag.
“Okay, well …” I wondered why he was telling me all this. “What if I wrote an article in the paper about this?” I suggested, with another smile and my best right cross to the bag.
“It would make no difference. Those majority vote-banks don’t read, and even if they did, come election time, new freebies will help them forget.”
Then, with a smile, he continued, “Speaking of election freebies, the Tamil Nadu state government is seeking bids for one million TV sets to be given out before the next election. You lived in Hong Kong. Got any friends that can get us cheap TVs from China? They dont even have to work longer than a few weeks ...”
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