The Hindu Business Line : The tragedy of top-down democracy

If Nandigram-like eruptions in our polity hold one supreme lesson, it is that rulers in a democracy cannot afford to ensconce themselves cosily in their own comfortable ivory towers and hand down decisions on what affects the people without taking the trouble of ascertaining their wishes and complying with them.

It is unbelievably strange that those purporting to represent the people and assuming positions of authority should soon begin to exhibit the obnoxious visages of smugness, degenerating into arrogance, to the extent of forgetting what they owe to their ultimate masters, We, the People, in terms of accountability and minimum decency.

Economic decision making, in particular, and that in a democracy, should never be top down. And for a simple reason: It touches the everyday lives of the people who have a right to an explanation well in advance as to what its ramifications and repercussions, both beneficial and hurtful, are going to be. Regrettably, the Indian democracy is still to shake off the colonial hangover of taking the people for granted, and indeed, of looking upon them as subjects and pawns to be pushed around at will and not as full-blooded citizens whose preferences on what constitutes their welfare and entitlements are paramount.

That is how Nandigrams are born. Viewed from one perspective they are tragedies which are standing monuments to the cussedness of the powers-that-be. Viewed from another, they are long over-due reminders to top-down decision makers that they cannot get away with whatever they want to thrust down the people's throat. The happenings in Nandigram have also brought forth a wry, if rueful, irony: The Left Front, especially the CPI(M), is being paid back in its own coin, and is at the receiving end of all its own techniques for mass awakening, such as processions, blockades, bandhs, the works.

Frightening scenario

If those in authority by the grace of the people persist with their tendency to lay down the law from on high, they will only be inviting on themselves many more Nandigrams. And deservedly. In all such cases, the tragedy is that they could all have been averted with imagination, sensitivity and human touch.

To understand how, just imagine this scenario: You are fairly well-settled in your house, in an environment to which you are long accustomed, with an established routine of attending to your job and looking after your family and children. All of a sudden, one ugly morning, a dozen panjandrums of the government descend on you and order you out of the place, saying that they are acquiring your home, without telling you why, on what terms and where you are going to be resettled. Or, let us even assume that they deign to tell you that you will be given so much as compensation and that your alternative habitation is 50 km away at an unfamiliar location.

Do you think you will benignly thank them, pack up your personal affects quietly, escort your family and children into the nearest conveyance and push off wherever directed? Would you not be distraught, shocked and desperate to hold on to whatever you have?

If so, how dare you expect poor people, living on the margin of subsistence, exposed to daily horrors of oppression and exactions, to genuflect and quit with their meagre belongings in meek obedience to your authoritarian commands?

This is the blunder both the political class in its arrogance of power and officialdom with no emotional empathy with the poor and the downtrodden keep committing even 60 years after Independence. Till they cultivate humility and humanity, there will be no end to Nandigrams.

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