Tuesday, August 7, 2012

India's Political Patronage Pyramid II - The Top


     On the next step up, these votes are bundled and sold up to the next level at a corresponding higher price – a larger opportunity for graft. Multiple city level politicians combine these vote bundles and sell them up to the Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) of each state.
     The same process is repeated during national parliamentary elections as local leaders sell these bundled votes to national party leaders in each constituency.  These transactions usually occur within party parameters, but it is not unusual for middle and lower level politicians to switch parties and take their entire vote banks with them. A greater opportunity for graft is always the catalyst for such party switches. Party ideology means nothing. The mere threat of a switch is often used as a bargaining tool by middle layers of the pyramid to extract more graft opportunities from the upper level decision-maker layers.  
     At every level of this pyramid, every politician sends choice public contracts down, and looks the other way as blatant graft occurs. In exchange he gets the votes from below, and far juicier public contracts from above. Of course, the contracts get bigger and the kickbacks juicier as one moves up the Pyramid. Every part of the Pyramid patiently waits for his turn to rise up within, each behaving far worse than his predecessor when he gets there. A majority of voters are too poor to care, too uneducated to understand, and too afraid to demand change. Most of the demos is essentially disenfranchised, and India’s democracy fails in its most basic role of correcting governance.    
     At the penultimate layer sit the heads of every major political party in India. Not only are these leaders well aware of how they got there, they are also constantly securing their positions by actively rewarding the pyramid below with massive opportunities for graft. The Rs. 12,000 Crore (US$ 3 Billion) National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) is one perfect example. The bill was sanctioned by Parliament in 2007-08. National English daily The Indian Express reported in 2008 that it did not reach 96% of the households that it was supposed to.[i]
     There are thousands of such schemes. There is the Rs. 43,000 Crore (US$10 Billion) Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), which pays for the construction contracts of roads, bridges, and flyovers in urban India. Urban India is now full of flyovers, built at enormous expense, but offering questionable improvement. Such public contracts have historically been the most effective way to steal public money; leading to a distortion of fair competition, the waste of limited resources and the neglect of basic urban needs, perpetuating poverty. Massive market inefficiencies also arise from such corruption and lead to the destruction of development opportunities.
     As Indian democracy is built on the principle of proportional representation, the Political Patronage Pyramid is a byproduct of that system. It exists in every party, of every ideology, in every state. It is such an endemic part of the political landscape that most Indians have come to accept it blindly.
The ignorance argument – that the leader simply does not know – popular among India’s educate classes, is simply impossible. A political leader cannot go about his daily political life without being exposed to the pyramid in multiple ways. At this point we have two viable choices; the leader knows about the Pyramid and actively perpetuates it. Or the leader knows and does nothing about it. This is a classic Morton’s Fork; two equally unpleasant alternatives leading to the same undesirable outcome.


[i] Ravish Tiwari and Ganesh Pandey, “UPA Guaranteed 100 days of work, over 96% did not get it,” The Indian Express, January 6, 2008.

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