India Has Trappings Of Democracy, However There Is Failure In Terms Of State Delivery : Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee
"On the basis of the standard markers of a successful democracy, India is doing very well. So, all the trappings of democracy are there. However, in terms of state delivery, there is an obvious failure," said celebrated economist and Nobel Laureate, Professor Abhijit Banerjee, on Friday. Relying on his own psephological research examining Uttar Pradesh elections between 1980 and 1996,...
"On the basis of the standard markers of a successful democracy, India is doing very well. So, all the trappings of democracy are there. However, in terms of state delivery, there is an obvious failure," said celebrated economist and Nobel Laureate, Professor Abhijit Banerjee, on Friday.
Relying on his own psephological research examining Uttar Pradesh elections between 1980 and 1996, Banerjee explained, "There is tolerance of people from one's own caste who are corrupt, in both upper and lower caste dominated areas equally. They might be corrupt, but they are apna corrupt. As the share of lower caste parties goes up, the winners from lower castes get worse and worse. Similarly, as the upper caste parties' share increases, the winners from upper caste parties get worse. In effect, the more dominant you are, the worse the legislators you elect." Explaining this phenomenon of people voting for representatives belonging to their castes and tolerating greater levels of delinquency from them, the economist said, "There is an ethnocentrism of indifference," Banerjee said, "This is partly because of the general perception that the system does not deliver much to a voter in any case, so they might as well vote based on the basis of the same last name. A person is ethnocentric because they have no stake in the political game."
Banerjee was delivering the 27th Justice Sunanda Bhandare Memorial Lecture on the topic "Democracy on the Ground: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why?" The event was hosted by the Justice Sunanda Bhandare Foundation in honour of the eponymous judge of the Delhi High Court. In his lecture, Banerjee explained why, despite meeting the superficial criteria of a functional democracy, such as competitive elections, robust participation, high voter turnout, and strong anti-incumbency, the Indian democracy failed to "deliver more". He distinguished between failures by design that are caused due to tensions between competing interests and are built into the system and democratic failures such as the disparity between the high levels of competition between electoral candidates and their low performance.
To explain what failures by design were, Banerjee used the example of the rotation of reserved seats at the local governance level. He said, "We want local democracy even when that does not work perfectly. At the same time, we want reservations. There is compelling evidence that reservations both for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and women have salutary effects. There are often claims of reservations leading to massive incompetence, but there is no evidence of it. Therefore, there are good reasons to have reservations. However, that means you have to rotate the reservations and the terms of the elected representative will be limited." Banerjee added, "So there is a tension between the commitment to reservations and the commitment to letting people who are performing well continue. These tensions are built into the nature of democracy."
He also briefly touched upon a third kind of failure, that is, failure in implementation, although confessing that it was not "a significant part of the story".
On ethnocentrism, which was one of the sources of democratic failure he discussed at length, Banerjee said, "Voters were voting for their own castes less out of any particular commitment to any caste politics, and more out of indifference." This could be effectively combatted by providing them with information about the performance of the politician vis-à-vis the electorate's expectations, and in some cases, by simply appealing to them to choose a representative on the basis of parameters other than caste. In this connection, Banerjee spoke about the experimental work he carried out in India. In 2010, a team led by Banerjee informed a set of Delhi councillors that a newspaper would report on their performance shortly before the municipal elections. It was found that the public nature of the "report cards" incentivised the candidates and led to changes in patterns of expenditure as well as the party ticket allocation. Another experiment was conducted in Sarathi, Uttar Pradesh, where in conjunction with a local non-governmental organisation, Banerjee's team delivered politically neutral campaign messages to villagers through a puppet show which, inter alia, encouraged the audience to prioritise local infrastructure and development needs when casting their ballots rather than vote strictly on the basis of "traditional ethnic affiliations". Empirical evidence demonstrated a visible change in the caste-based voting preference that could be attributed to this campaign.
While speaking about the importance of public information in changing voter behaviour, Banerjee also said, "If we want democracy to work, we need smaller constituencies." To illustrate this point, he drew a contrast between the British House of Commons which has 650 single-member constituencies and the Indian Lok Sabha which has 540 seats. Banerjee noted, "Our population is 20 times that of the United Kingdom, and our constituencies are 24 times as large. West Bengal has 280 seats in the State Legislature, and it has a population twice that of the UK."
"When constituencies are large, it is hard to get information that's relevant to an individual voter. Hardly anything the legislator does ever touches the voters, apart from big policy decisions. This is because of the large number of people in that constituency. There is no direct mechanism for rewarding legislators. Even if people gave out information, it is still going to be information that likely does not involve you. It is easy to become indifferent to the whole thing. And once there is indifference, that indifference feeds on itself," said Banerjee, "Because if the legislator knows that the voter is not going to care very much, then they will only come during the elections and do a dhamaka – give out some money, give out alcohol."
Banerjee concluded his lecture by saying, "The general thought I want to leave you with, especially as a community of legal scholars and lawyers, is how does one change the distribution of formal power within the system so that democracy can actually function better on the ground."
Justice Hima Kohli, one of the only three female judges of the Supreme Court, graced the occasion with her presence, as the Chief Guest. "You don't know the background story of resilience, struggles and strength of beautiful and outgoing women. All you see is what is showcased," Justice Hima Kohli quoted American journalist Germany Kent while paying tribute to Justice Bhandare, an eminent judge of the Delhi High Court, "Justice Bhandare was a trailblazer. My endeavour today was not just to give the audience a flavour of what went into making that strong and resilient woman that Justice Bhandare was, but to give a shout-out to all those women out there who aspire to navigate their career crafts and become trailblazers like her."
Justice Siddharth Mridul of the Delhi High Court presided over the session. On Justice Bhandare, Justice Mridul said, "She inspired an entire generation of not just lady judges or women lawyers, but all of us. She is somebody who has been very appositely described as 'freedom's child' she was born in the year of the Quit India movement." On the role of the judiciary in the functioning of the democratic apparatus, Justice Mridul said, "The premise of antodyaya, which is the rise of the last person...the lowest economic denominator, is precisely where the judiciary has a very important part to play because law without politics, as Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer has said, is blind and politics without law is deaf. The judiciary as an institution is not just a sentinel to safeguard the fundamental rights of the people but to ensure that there is socio-economic and political freedom in India."
Also in attendance at this event organised by Justice Bhandare Memorial Foundation was retired Supreme Court Judge, Justice Madan B. Lokur, as well as other retired judges, academics, social workers, and legal luminaries.
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian-born economist who won the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel. He is currently a Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He shared the Nobel Prize with his wife, Esther Duflo, who is also a professor at MIT, and Harvard University economist Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." Banerjee is a co-founder of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, along with Dufto and Sendhil Mullainathan. He and Duflo have also co-written the best-seller non-fiction book, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.