Aakar Patel | The State and the Individual: Anger Over Its Failure Led to Minister’s Exit

Many are puzzled by the size of the Cockroach Janta Party-led protests and the rapidity with which they delivered a famous civil rights victory. To understand the environment that produced this anger, we need to set aside the immediate issue on which the youth have mobilised and step back to assess the larger picture.

Let us begin with a question: What is our relationship with the State? A word that we can take to mean the government, whether local or central. For some of us, such as those writing and likely reading this, the points at which the State intersects with our lives are few. This is the upper class (only 3 per cent of India pays income-tax, so we cannot speak properly of a middle class -- only an upper and the rest). Professionally, this class operates in English, and lives in the cities of India. English, which nine of ten Indians do not speak, allows those of us who do speak it and work in it to be global. In cultural and even professional ways, we are inhabitants of a wider world than the majority of Indians.

Physically, our lives are less touched by the State than for most Indians. We are unlikely to have been educated in government schools and our children haven’t spent time in anganwadis. Our health is taken care of by the private sector and its doctors and hospitals, not by the nearly ten lakh women who are Accredited Social Health Activists. Our reliance on the public distribution system, through which the State gives subsidised foodgrain, is low or non-existent. Eighty crore people, two-thirds of India, benefit from PDS, which gives individuals either 5 kg of rice or wheat every month. Over twenty crore Indians are still undernourished because their access to State help is inadequate or absent. This column’s readers are unlikely to be among them.

The flat we live in doesn’t have a toilet built with government subsidy. We don’t use public transport systems -- particularly the cheaper mediums such as intra- and inter-city buses -- as much as most of the population does. Many of us have abandoned trains for planes. So, the deterioration in rail services -- a third of all India's trains ran late in 2018 -- does not affect us much. When the Union government first eased Covid-19 restrictions, it allowed airlines to fly at full capacity but ran fewer than 300 of its 16,000 daily trains for several months. During notebandi, we were either unaffected or less affected than crores of families by the actions of the State.

And then there are the negative points of contact with the State. Here, again, our club is not touched by the criminal justice system as many Indians are. Both in the number of times that we are in contact with it and in the way we are. We may not be familiar with some of the peculiar features of India's criminal justice system, such as administrative detention. This is how the Indian State holds, for months and often years, individuals without a crime or a trial. They are locked up on the mere suspicion of the State and its agents -- the police and the bureaucracy -- that if free, these individuals may commit an offence in future. We, or those we know, have rarely been subjected to a system of justice where there is punishment without a crime. We may not even be aware of it.

The few points of contact we have with the State lie elsewhere and occur infrequently. We may need an electricity connection restored, a road paved, a passport renewed or a driving licence acquired. We feel harassed by the process required to acquire these essentials (there are agents who can smooth things for us). When we complain of the State’s inefficiency. it is through the experience we have in such things, and not in those that are linked to everyday life. Our food, health, shelter and education are not affected by or dependent on the State. It would not be inaccurate to say that we cannot measure or gauge the efficiency of the State to any extent because we are not engaged with it in any meaningful measure. The majority is more informed about the reality of governance than we are, purely because they have primary data that is much richer and whose periodicity is more frequent.

The spaces in which we have first-hand familiarity with the government and what it does, and how well or how poorly, are scarce. We, the elite and the few, likely know less about how well India is governed and how efficient the State is than the many.

Elections are the only time we politically engage with the State in structural terms. Here, our contact with the system is more removed than it is for the majority. Electoral promises and delivery do not mean the same thing to us. How many of us have actually met with or made a demand of our legislator for something that will make a difference to our life? It is the more abstract issues on the manifesto that we may find appeal in, rather than the more direct ones. Identity and nationalism and India's status in the world are important and substantial things for an elite that considers itself, and in many ways is, global. A seat on the UN Security Council, or the threat of firm military action from a strong and firm and decisive figure.

The State’s failure, when it directly affects our lives, through a corrupt exam system, has produced the anger that led to the government’s surrender on Dharmendra Pradhan. Let us then consider the many ways this same State can and does fail the vast majority.

The writer is the chair of Amnesty International India. Twitter: @aakar_patel