India Is On Its Way to Becoming a Fragile State
Shredded social cohesion is the first symptom of fragility. Credit: PTI
I write this article not from any think tank perspective but to share my own sense of a looming fragility about India that has been heightened during the last few months. To share this sense with readers, I have chosen a few articles from The Wire which describe, for me, different facets of the multiple conditions of fragility. They are referred to in five groups as multiple facets – or “fragility conditions” – to get a broader pattern of our inability to cope with ourselves.
These failing conditions have not appeared suddenly like some fever. They have been creeping up on us for decades. Successive governments have covered them up and denied they exist. Each of these conditions – (1) our shredded social cohesion; (2) the uncertainty in the parameters of economic development; (3) a deliberate abrogation of constitutional responsibilities; (4) the cover ups by pushing unreliable macro data into the public domain; and (5) the deteriorating security arrangements in which we live – forms narratives within the epic of our looming crisis.
The perceptions and arguments have not been taken from any academic research paper or think tank policy analysis. They come from the personal experience of having participated in trying to ease the nightmares of ordinary people living in failed states. Each time the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) or United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) sent me on European Union funded missions into the grey parts of Europe to incubate urban regeneration as a healing instrument, whether it was to Kosovo, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Romania or Montenegro, or, further afield, to Palestine and Central Asia, I saw and deeply understood how and why a country slides into unstoppable collapse.
These were not states whose governments had committed slight errors that could be set right. They had far too many interconnecting bad sectors that could not be easily set right. And during all these missions, one engaged with so many citizens, saw so much physical, mental and financial breakdown, talked to so many seeped in disillusionment that, really speaking, one had no idea where to begin the resurrection.
They could never believe they had been terribly governed, robbed and fragmented by overbearing rulers who had squeezed out their intimate community identities and their abilities to be self reliant. For them, life had been so good and then the rest of the world conspired to ruin it.
But state fragility or failure is not a Black Swan event at all. It is a condition that cooks slowly while its sectoral weakenings link across and spread throughout the body politic of the state. Governments can see fragility coming, as happened in the Balkans, and there they hung on, ruling by misleading everybody including themselves, resorting to polarisation and using the distraction to stash away the national wealth before descending into armed conflict.
In India, the process of the incubation of fragility in India begun decades ago. If steps are not taken now, failure will set in.
Shredded social cohesion
In some ways, the incubation is already over. Just by reading a few articles on The Wire, one is convinced that we are are already living in an era of irreversible shredded social cohesion. One such warning was given by Arshad Afzal Khan who has reminded us, in a piece in December 2017, about how the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 started this slide into lasting internal strife.
The complicity of L.K. Advani, who went on to become India’s deputy prime minister, was evident as he directed the demolition and encouraged non-state actors to help weaken our cohesion. In another article on the same watershed event Prof Thomas Hansen wrote:
“In the triumphalist narratives of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Shiv Sena, December 6 was the beginning of a new era where a righteously angry Hindu majority began to shape public discourse and political life in the country. For everybody else, December 6 marks the beginning of an era of unbridled majoritarianism that has polarised and divided Indian society more deeply than ever.”Comments that tell us how we have irrevocably lost confidence in the ability of the government to create lasting peace and stability.
Reading these two pieces together and the one written by Siddharth Varadarajan titled ‘Twenty-Five Years On, India Has Still to Live Down the Shame of the Babri Masjid’s Demolition‘, one gets “a sense of perspective on what the demolition of the Babri Masjid meant then and means today when we consider the global outrage that greeted the destruction of the Buddha statues at Bamiyan by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001”. The recent book by Nazia Erum on the experiences of Muslim schoolchildren across India tells us how deep the polarising project has run.
In the first of the five symptoms of fragility, clearly we have gone beyond the tipping point into the “alert” category.
The economics of the present situation
When we come to the second category, we find our sense of increasing uncertainty in the trajectory of our economic development is clearly justified. There are a number of articles which, if read together, describe different aspects of our long-term economic failure.
Most authors have used a range of external indicators to question progress and provided ample indications about failure. What governments have succeeded in doing all these years is to lie about it while letting extreme income and gender inequality increase to ludicrous proportions. Piketty and Chancel’s conclusions in ‘Inequality Rapidly Rising in India Since 1980s‘ that was published in September warns us that since the early 1980s, India’s growth has been unevenly distributed within the top 10% group. “This further reveals the unequal nature of liberalisation and deregulation processes. India in fact comes out as a country with one of the highest increase in the top 1% income share concentration over the past 30 years.” The latest Oxfam report confirms things this prevalence of inequality.
Since the early 1980s, India’s growth has been unevenly distributed within the top 10% group. Credit: Reuters/Vijay Mathur
Divya Guha’s piece on India’s ‘Bankrupt Billionaires‘ in December gives the kind of alarming information that confirms our fragile condition on the economic front. She quotes a 1999 World Bank report that regards India as “suffering a borderline banking crisis when NPAs (dud assets) reached 11% in 1993-94. In 1995, NPAs of 27 public sector banks were estimated at 20%”. She brings us upto date, almost 20 years on and quotes a CARE rating about how NPAs and restructured loans are at an alarming level of 14-15% of total advances while grappling with $120 billion of gross non-performing loans (90% of which are owned by public sector banks) and $25 billion advances that have been restructured by giving the bankrupt millionaires yet another chance to repay.
The analysis of the Japanese bullet train by Bishwajit Bhattacharyya in October asserts ‘How the Japanese Loan for India’s Bullet Train is a Rip Off‘ and how the project’s economic viability is suspect” for committing Rs 110,000 crores of public funds is “a tragedy for India.”
However, the government continues to rule outrageously in this sector and commits gross errors of judgment as with demonetisation and GST, which are taken up by Karan Thapar where he quotes Montek Singh saying ‘Raghu Rajan’s Note Advising Against Demonetisation Should be Made Public‘ and M.K. Venu‘s piece in November – ‘As Opposing Narratives on Demonetisation Clash, Even Modi Cant Fool All the People All the Time‘. It would seem that our slide into becoming a fragile economy cannot be reversed.
Constitutional responsibilities
We seem to end up watching a government becoming overbearing while it makes inexplicable errors of judgment. Because of the onset of fragility, the government imagines that its constitutional responsibilities are hindering its way. By getting better scores in parliament it hopes to re-draft these responsibilities, particularly those in the the preamble of the constitution.
S.V. Narayan’s piece in December “How Far Have We Deviated From The Ideology of Our Constitution?”, analyses how governments have turned their back on their constitutional responsibilities. There is data about our larger constitutional failures (77% households have no regular salaried person), about our economic failures (the share of national wealth of the bottom 40% has declined a further 4% in the last 20 years), about our desperate food situation to the category of “serious” in the last three years from 55 points to 100 in the Global Hunger Index. ” [ . . . ] FULL TEXT AT: https://thewire.in/217799/india-fragile-state-social-cohesion-executive-judiciary-security/
