By Aakar Patel
Many are puzzled by the size of the current protests and the speed with which they sprang up. To understand the environment that produced this anger, we need to set aside the immediate issue over 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? Here, the State refers to the government, whether local or central. For some of us, such as those writing—and likely those reading this—the points at which the State intersects with our lives are few. This is the upper class. (Only 3 per cent of Indians pay income tax, so we cannot properly speak of a middle class—only an upper class and the rest.) Professionally, this class operates in English and lives in India’s cities. English, which nine out of ten Indians do not speak, allows those of us who do speak it and work in it to be global. In cultural and professional terms, we inhabit a wider world than the majority of Indians.
Physically, our lives are less touched by the State than those of most Indians. We are unlikely to have been educated in government schools, and our children have not spent time in anganwadis. Our healthcare is provided by the private sector—its doctors and hospitals—not by the nearly ten lakh women who serve as Accredited Social Health Activists. Our reliance on the Public Distribution System (PDS), through which the State distributes subsidised grain, is likely to be low or non-existent. Eighty crore people—roughly two-thirds of India’s population—benefit from the PDS, which provides each eligible person with five kilograms of rice or wheat every month.
Yet more than twenty crore Indians remain undernourished because their access to State support is inadequate or absent. Readers of this column are unlikely to be among them.
The flat we live in does not have a toilet built with government subsidy. Nor do we rely on public transport—particularly cheaper modes such as intra-city and inter-city buses—to the extent that most Indians do. Many of us have replaced trains with planes. So the deterioration in rail services—a third of all Indian trains ran late in 2018—does not affect us much. When the Union government first eased Covid-19 restrictions, it allowed airlines to operate at full capacity but ran fewer than 300 of its 16,000 daily trains for several months. During notebandi, we were either unaffected or far less affected than crores of other families by the actions of the State.
Then there are the negative points of contact with the State. Here again, our class is far less likely than many Indians to come into contact with the criminal justice system—both in terms of frequency and experience. We may not be familiar with some of its peculiar features, such as administrative detention. This is how the Indian State detains individuals for months, and often years, without charging them with a crime or putting them on trial. They are imprisoned merely because the State and its agents—the police and the bureaucracy—suspect that, if left free, they may commit an offence in the future. We, or those we know, have rarely been subjected to a system of justice in which there is punishment without a crime. Many of us may not even be aware that such a system exists.
The few points at which we do interact with the State lie elsewhere and arise only occasionally. We may need an electricity connection restored, a road repaired, a passport renewed, or a driving licence issued. We feel harassed by the processes required to obtain these essentials, although agents can often smooth the way. When we complain about the inefficiency of the State, it is usually based on such experiences rather than on aspects linked to everyday survival.
Our food, healthcare, shelter and education are not dependent on the State. It would not be inaccurate to say that we are poorly placed to judge the efficiency of the State because we engage with it only in limited and superficial ways. The majority, by contrast, understands the realities of governance far better simply because its interactions with the State are more frequent and more consequential.
The spaces in which we have first-hand familiarity with the government—what it does and how well or poorly it performs—are limited. We, the elite few, probably know less about the quality of governance in India than the many.
Elections are the only time we engage with the State in structural political terms. Even then, our engagement is more distant than that of the majority. Electoral promises and their delivery do not mean the same thing to us. How many of us have actually approached our legislator with a demand that would materially improve our lives? We are more likely to be drawn to the abstract themes in election manifestos than to the practical ones. Identity, nationalism and India’s standing in the world matter deeply to an elite that considers itself—and in many ways is—global. A permanent seat on the UN Security Council, or the promise of firm military action under a strong and decisive leader, carries more appeal.
The failure of the State, when it directly affects our lives through a corrupt examination system, has produced the current wave of anger. Let us now consider the many ways in which the same State fails the vast majority of Indians every day.