G. SAMPATH - Why everyone loves ‘good governance’
Democracy without politics and citizenship without rights
are the twin pillars of ‘good governance’
India is in the throes of a fierce passion for governance.
Not just any governance but ‘maximum governance’; preferably in a combo with
‘minimum government’. We are the only country in the world that officially
celebrates Christmas as ‘Good Governance Day’. Nobody speaks of the need for a
good government anymore – only good governance.
Behind this mass enthusiasm for the virtues of ‘good
governance’ is none other than the prime minister himself. His own website says so:
“It is due to Narendra Modi that governance has become the talking point all
over the country; from the conversations teenagers have over a cup of coffee to
heated debated in newsrooms.” While the degree to which adolescents obsess about good
governance may be a matter of debate, there is no doubt that it occupies pride
of place in the publicity spiels of the Modi regime — so much so that it’s now a truism
that the Modi mandate of the 2014 polls is “a mandate for good governance”
(http://tinyurl.com/pwyotg2)
But what exactly does ‘good governance’ mean? According to
Mr. Modi, “good governance is putting people at the centre of the development
process”. Well, if that is what it is, then some obvious questions pop
up, such as: Is it good governance to eliminate the need for people’s consent
in land acquisition, as the NDA’s land bill amendments want to do?
Mr. Modi has also said that good governance must be
‘pro-people’ and ‘pro-active’. If so, then is pro-actively cutting public
expenditure on health and education, as has been done in this year’s budget,
good governance? Or, for that matter, is the dilution of the rights of industrial
workers, which is what the proposed labour reforms seek to do, good governance?
The short answer to all these questions is a resounding yes.
For the long answer, we need to visit the history of the concept of governance
itself, and how it has come to occupy such a central place in development
discourse.
A brief history of ‘governance’: The term ‘governance’ was first used — in the sense in which
it is deployed today — by the World Bank in a 1989 report on African economies.
Trying to account for the failure of its Structural Adjustment Programmes
(SAPs), the World Bank put the blame on a “crisis of governance.”
But ‘crisis of governance’ doesn’t convey much unless one
defines ‘governance’. The World Bank initially defined it simply as “the
exercise of political power to manage a nation’s affairs”. This early
definition is quite indicative of the animating logic and future discursive
career of governance: it is silent on the legitimacy or otherwise of the
political power in question. So whether the Bank’s client was a democracy or a
dictatorship didn’t matter. What mattered for governance is that efficient
management must trump politics. Efficient management, just to be clear, means
the withdrawal of the state in favour of the market.
Over the years, the World Bank expanded its ‘governance’
model to include elements of a liberal democracy, such as a legal framework for
enforcement of contracts, accountability, etc. At the same time, it brokered a
marriage between governance and development. Nations deemed to be in need of
‘development’ could now be told that the only way to get ‘development’ is
through ‘governance’ — that is, by embracing the free market.
But for this, it was necessary to first create a demand for
good governance. That meant identifying the markers of ‘bad governance’.
Unfortunately, what constitutes ‘bad governance’ in the neo-liberal text book —
an activist state trying to even out socio-economic disparities through
distributive justice — is rather popular among the masses, especially the poor.
In an electoral democracy, a direct attack on welfare was never going to
resonate beyond the rich and middle-classes, as successive governments in India
have found to their cost.
Corruption and governance: Enter corruption, the godfather of good governance.
‘Corruption’ is not an ahistorical, value-neutral descriptor. Even in the short
span of India’s post-independence history, it has been deployed in different
ways in the service of different political agendas. Matthew Jenkins, a
historian of corruption, has written about how, for instance, in JP Narayan’s
movement for ‘total revolution’ in the 1970s, corruption denoted something very
different from what it did in the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption agitation of
2011.
see also: What is corruption?
For Narayan, corruption was a moral evil. As Jenkins puts
it, Narayan “viewed the capitalist system itself as corrupt”. He cites
Narayan’s famous quote that “wealth cannot be amassed except by exploitation.”
But the anti-corruption discourse that grew around the Hazare movement did not
share Narayan’s reservations about the corrupting influences of the profit
motive. Corruption as a morally charged idea had disappeared altogether. What
replaced it was a narrow, technical idea of corruption as bribery, which went
well with the economistic notion of man as a rational agent who responds to
incentives.
Overnight, the entire political class, the bureaucracy, and
social infrastructure (such as the public distribution system, for instance),
began to be deemed as hotbeds of corruption and held solely responsible for the
state’s failures to deliver the benefits of economic growth. Conversely, any
government engaged in the delivery of socially critical economic goods was held
to be offering incentives for corruption.
In other words, it is not neo-liberal economic polices but
corruption that is to blame for the benefits of economic growth not trickling
down — or not trickling down enough — to the masses. Now that corruption had been identified as the biggest
hurdle to economic development, the stage was set for its antidote: good
governance. This trajectory – of aspirations first raised and then betrayed by
economic reforms, leading to mass discontent, which zeroes in on corruption as
the problem, with good governance presented as the solution – is very evident
in recent Indian history.
But it is by no means unique to India. As Jenkins
points out, the “international anti-corruption consensus” has been a powerful
vehicle for manoeuvring recalcitrant nations onto the neo-liberal track. With the UPA II regime showing no signs of progress on the
second wave of economic reforms, the demon of corruption was summoned to boot
it out. And in its place, we now have the NDA, which is good governance
incarnate, and invested with the mandate to roll out the next phase of reforms
that its predecessor could not.
Elements of good governance: So, what’s definitely out is welfare expenditure, for not
only is it a bad idea economically, it also represents what everyone hates –
corruption. Also out is political interference in policy-making – which can
lead to distortions to please vote banks. Major policy measures shall be
decided by unelected experts, who don’t have to worry about winning the next
election.
What’s in are accountability, transparency, empowerment, and
citizen participation – all of which are key elements of Mr. Modi’s ‘good
governance’ agenda. On the face of it, these don’t seem like bad ideas. But
like development, they all have a dual meaning – one in the context of social
transformation, another in the neo-liberal vision of good governance.
So if we take, for instance, accountability, good governance
doesn’t mean accountability to the people – it is about accountability to
business and to investors, who are risking their money with expectations in
return.
Similarly, transparency doesn’t necessarily mean that the
state should render its decision-making transparent to its citizens — if that
were the case, a regime going gaga over good governance wouldn’t have kept the
post of Chief Information Commissioner vacant for nine months. Again, the
transparency in question is with regard to business, especially foreign
investors, who are tired of trying to find their way through the intricate webs
of political patronage (also known as corruption) and often lose out to
domestic capital, which enjoys a cultural advantage (so-called crony
capitalism).
As for empowerment, the good governance version of it, which
imagines the state giving power to the disempowered, say, through technology
(e-governance, m-governance), is a cruel joke on the original meaning of the
term.
In human history, there has never been an instance of a
powerful political group voluntarily giving up its power. Which is why real
empowerment is always an outcome of political confrontation and struggle – the
civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and all other rights-based
movements are examples of attempts to empower people through the institution of
legally enforceable rights. The good governance model of empowerment is
allergic to any rights-based empowerment. It conceives of empowerment in
individualistic-consumerist rather than collective terms. It offers little
scope, for instance, to remedy the social disempowerment caused by caste.
Finally, we come to citizen participation. In social
movements, citizenship was a powerful tool for obtaining political and economic
rights for the marginalised, such as refugees, or the displaced. But in the
good governance model, citizenship essentially means ‘market citizenship’ – the
individual’s acquisition of the legal and other paraphernalia required for
accessing the market.
Participation means participation in the market – as a
wage-earner, consumer, producer. It could also mean participation in the
limited domain of project implementation, which serves the purpose of
conferring a sheen of democratic legitimacy on development projects decided and
designed by an elite. It certainly does not mean participation in the sense of
political contestation – of having a say on the model of development to be
adopted.
To sum up, good governance is today a major discursive tool
enabling the global transition of democracies to a form of government that some
academics have labelled “soft authoritarianism”. A more accurate description
would be “authoritarianism with a democratic face”.
Good governance entails the substitution of politics – which
is what democracy is all about — with management. It seeks to insulate
policy-making from the chaotic pressures of democracy. So what kind of a government does good governance mandate?
Given that there is only one model of development possible in the good
governance framework – market-led development – a government that upholds good
governance will have to cease being a guarantor of the citizens’ socio-economic
rights. It would instead function as a facilitator and enabler of the market,
which would deliver these goods and services to those who can afford them.
As for those who can’t afford them, if they behave well,
they might get the carrot of cash/credit, which is essential to function as a
market citizen. If they misbehave, the stick of repression is an ever-present
threat. Democracy without politics, and citizenship without rights — these are
the twin pillars of good governance as it’s advocated today. The beauty of it
is that everyone seems to love it.
see also:
The Broken Middle (on the 30th anniversary of 1984)
