Attacking the aam aadmi's swabhiman

Sun, Mar 1 05:54 AM
Sudheendra Kulkarni
In a recent interaction with my party's young campaigners in the coming parliamentary elections, I asked them, "What is the first and foremost expectation of young people like you from the next government?" I was expecting them to say "employment", "better education" and so on. One of them, an alumnus of IIT Delhi who studied and worked abroad and has now taken to political activism, gave a one-word reply: "Swabhiman" (self-respect).

My instinctive interpretation of his answer was that he was referring to India's honour and self-respect. "No, I am not talking about desh ka swabhiman and desh ka gaurav. Every patriotic Indian, belonging to any party, wants India to be heard, honoured and respected more by the international community. What I am referring to is the self-respect of ordinary citizens. When the aam aadmi deals with the government in his own country, why is his self-respect routinely bruised? Why do government officers and employees behave with citizens as if they are our masters and we their subjects? Why do they make us feel that they are doing us a favour when the service or information we are seeking is our right as citizens? And, often, the 'favour' is done to us only after we have met their demand for bribes."

Why have we failed to make the system respect the citizens more? It's a complex problem, but some roots of it lie in the fact that the government has two parts-the democratically elected executive that is accountable to the people and has to seek their mandate; and the 'permanent government' of the bureaucracy that is largely unaccountable and remains unchanged even after Party A is voted out and Party B is voted in. It is high time the progressive section of our political class and leaders of civil society paid serious attention to reforming these "permanent rulers" to make them truly citizen-friendly. Good governance is being much talked about in the current election campaign. We can move towards this goal only by introducing radical citizen-centric reforms.

Write to: sudheenkulkarni@gmail.com
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