I will take your mind to Dr. Ambedkar’s warning, which nobody heeded, on the 26th of January 1950, three years after Independence. He warned, “we are going to enter a life of contradictions. And if the contradictions are not removed, those who suffer from inequality, will blow up the structure of political democracy, which this (Constituent) Assembly has so laboriously built up with the Constitution”. This, the blowing up of the Constitution, began with the most privileged people in our society, including Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, when she imposed the Emergency.

I am going to make two major propositions in my address. The first is that the keys to the quality of life are freedom and good governance. These are the two things which have come out in the last fifty years of our history – that a society must be adequately free and it must have relatively good governance. For example, a comparison between Singapore which has no resources, and Jamaica which has good tropical resources, will show a world of difference in terms of the quality of life. Or when you compare Japan and Nigeria. Though Nigeria has far more natural resources than Japan, Japan is heaven compared to the Nigerian hell. In our country take Bihar. Bihar is the richest State in India – North Bihar has the richest quality of soil (alluvial soil) in the world. South Bihar has the country’s richest mineral resources. But what is Bihar today? It is India’s Central Africa.

Now if we want to emerge – we have not emerged – if we want to emerge out of twenty five centuries of feudalism, casteism, communalism, misgovernance, to enter the 21st century with a better track record, India needs to fundamentally modernize and gloablise its mind.

It has to begin with the mind, especially of the upper and ruling classes, whom I hold primarily guilty. I remember when I was young, I was in a very small minority, which favoured the only good decision that I feel Nehru took, and that was “adult franchise”. 99% of my class thought it was disastrous, but to my mind, this is the one thing that has given India stability. Our class, the upper class, the top 5%, have let this country down very badly, in the last half century. There are marginal signs of what is now called “India Unbound”, in other words, India is changing.

But the forces of India Bound are stronger than the forces of India Unbound. It has to gather momentum to move atleast the top 100 million. It needs to know what it means to compete in the modern world of global geo-politics,global trade and technology, beyond personal sauda which has been with us since the Arthashastra. Kautilya knew his society and it is the same society even now.

In the 21st century world, there must be a clear political and civic recognition that the lesson of 2000 A.D. is that the freer the country, the more prosperous and democratic and strong it is. This is one of my fundamental beliefs. We have got to free ourselves. We have got to free ourselves from authority, from all that comes in the way of our making free choices. This was established in the Economic Freedom of the World 2000 Annual Report of Canada’s Fraser Institute, along with 54 other institutions around the world. This was a global study and India had one such institution, called Centre for Civil Society which participated in this study.

In this Report, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, USA and UK share the top five places. The least free economies are Myanmar, Zaire, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Madagascar. India’s place was 86 out of 123 countries. Life expectancy was longer for people in twenty four of the most free states – most free than in the twenty four of the least free ones. Average income per capita in the top twenty was $18,000 compared to $2,000 for the least free twenty at the bottom of the scale. The extent of inequality was also lower in the top twenty compared to the rest. In other words, the social objective of income inequality was achieved by the top 20 because they were free societies, not just prosperous societies. They also had far lower rates of illiteracy, poverty, and corruption. They had better access to safe drinking water, more political rights and civil liberties and higher labour productivity.

We believe that in 1947 the people of India became free. To my mind, all that happened in 1947 was a transfer of power from ‘white’ hands to ‘brown’ hands and the same colonial administration has continued. 1 It was a mere transfer of power. What is that which we did not do in 1947 and thereafter? We did not discard the colonial and pre-1947 legacy in governance. In 1947 we took over all the laws, the Official Secrets Act, the Criminal Procedure Code, the Indian Penal Code, the IPC, the Police Administration, and so on, and thought we had changed it when in 1950, we gave ourselves a Constitution. We didn’t. The Constitution is only a thin layer on the cake. The cake was colonial. And the new people in power, after 1947, of all parties, were only too happy to exercise those colonial powers.

What should have happened was there should have been a coalition of the best political and administrative minds together with the country’s new class of top business managers and the media in this country who could have acted as a countervailing power to the government and the political parties. We have to build up such a countervailing power. You saw recently in Gujarat, how even the country’s top business leaders in the CII cringed before Chief Minister Narendra Modi and apologized to him. Certainly they did not know how to tackle a situation like this.

So, we have to get these groups of people together, we have to get a kind of national consensus for change. I am putting this before you as the central objective of the country. The central objective: To virtually discard the legacy of the 19th century colonial, authoritarian administration and to design a 21st century post-licence, post-permit raj era – a modern efficient administrative architecture. This is an architectural job. This is not a question of a little interior decoration. You have to change the entire architecture of the governance of this country. For better policies and decision-making, for governments as economic, viable facilitators, not as Tughlaks; for better national security and intelligence, for better public delivery systems, with a degree of privatization, for more efficient tax collection, and for more people’s raj in local communities, which to my mind is the test of the freedom of the people.

As government departments have proliferated with the world’s largest cabinets and bureaucracies there is need to re-design the architecture and functions of state governments. We need to determine what are the central functions of the central government and can we design a cabinet around those central subjects, and not to accommodate the X, Y and Z’s of politics and of politicians. We must contain the seizing of power by the entire political class; otherwise the legislature becomes the government. In fact, the legislature today is partly government and partly an interference in government’s day to day activities. They are the least productive institution in this country if you were to analyze how they spend their time.

Rajaji, the best of minds of pre-and post Independence India, used a beautiful phrase to sum up our thoughts. He said we have a government-less civilisation. And he was right. As a historian, I support that because we did not have good governance for twenty out of twenty-five centuries. So we became a government-less civilization. But how did our society last for all these centuries? It is one of the most sustained cultures and civilisations in the world. It lasted because we had institutions of customary local management by local communities with access to local resources.

We have got to go back to those local customary systems of governance. This is not easy. This is not a black and white world now. Because in the last 50 years, we have introduced politics, we have introduced electoral systems, and so on. But there is a thirst for this kind of change, and there are many cases of success. There has been a constitutional change, in the mid-seventies for local government. But no proper implementation of these changes.

The last point I would like to make, is the Dismantling of the Control Raj and Economic Reforms. You will not get economic reforms that we need unless you dismantle the control raj. Now, dismantling the failed colonial control raj has failed to deliver the development in public services like distribution. There have been surveys on that too. 80% to 90% of the people are dissatisfied with all the public services. And if you analyse who are those 10-15% who are satisfied, you will find those are the fellows who have reach, contacts and sources to get permits, licences. Now the people who don’t have the reach, are the ones dissatisfied with the public services.

To summarize, we have an irresponsible, predatory political class without countervailing power outside the government. The so-called captains of industry have no countervailing power. If anything, they are afraid of the people in government.

The intellectual class. There is no countervailing power. Hundreds of small NGOs, are becoming small countervailing powers. You take the media. Is the media the counter-vailing power? Not much. Witness the record from the Emergency to Tehelka. But we have to build institutions of countervailing power.

We have a soft sauda-driven state. I do not use the word corruption. “Sauda” is the word because the whole political system has become a bazaar where people buy and sell themselves. The governance of this country has become a bazaar. Stop the sauda driven state, consuming all of the revenues and mounting debts, living on increasing borrowings, with diminishing amounts for people’s development, damaging the security of India, and the inability to deliver public services to the satisfaction of the public; a weak unorganized public opinion and weak countervailing power.

What India needs to do is also what all of us need to do – be more effective in our way of working.

Finally, what sustainability will seminars like this have? I seriously suggest that groups among us must take up the various issues to some of which I have drawn attention. For example, one group may feel that constitutional changes are important, another group may share my view that we need to change this 19th century admini-stration of ours. Can we pursue these and form study groups. Can we network with other organisations across our country; because there are so many institutions thinking along similar lines, but are lost, having no countervailing power.

Let us give thought to make these seminars sustainability, if we do not want to treat these seminars as intellectual picnics.

1. Read my book (The Failed Mahabharata: Making of the Indian State: History and Present Avatar, Allied publishers, Mumbai).

(An abbreviated and edited version of a talk delivered on September 27, 2003 at St. Xaviers College, Mumbai).

Mr. A. D. Moddie was a member of the first batch of the IAS (1947-48); a representative of Industry to governments. Author of the well-known book ‘The Brahmanical Culture and Moder-nity’, until recently Chairman of the Central Himalayan Eco-development Group.