Here's to you, Mr. Hazare/ Its more complicated than you would know!

Anna Hazare comes to North Campus on a day after Independence day to up his ante against the Government to reconsider the 'Team Anna' version of the Lokpal Bill. The PM office has snubbed his letter asking for permission to protest for more than three days at JP Park by asking him to 'approach statutory authorities'. That's the way of a democracy, isn't it? Mr. Hazare is a self professed Gandhian. Is he reducing the importance of his movement by taking it a bit too far? We cannot but agree that Gandhiji himself was a master of realpolitik. But is there place for repeated popular protest in democracy? Would Gandhiji himself have allowed it? I haven't read enough of his writings to comment on that. It appears though that his adversary on many occasions, and one of the prime architects of Indian Democracy, B.R. Ambedkar would have been skeptical. This is from Ram Guha's India After Gandhi:

Ambedkar ended his speech with three warnings about the future. The first concerned the place of popular protest in a democracy. There was no place for bloody revolution, of course, but in his view there was no room for Gandhian methods either. 'We must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non cooperation and Satyagraha [popular protest]'. Under an autocratic regime there might have been justification for them, but not now, when constitutional methods of redress were available. Satyagraha and the like, said Ambedkar, were 'nothing but the grammar of anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us'.

(This was said in a speech made by Ambedkar on 25th November, 1949 to the Drafting Committee of the Constitution. Interestingly, the other two warnings were against "unthinking submission to charismatic authority" and contentment with 'mere political democracy'.)


Does Anna Hazare then reserve the right to continue his street marches. Perhaps he does, if the Indian democracy has failed, or is becoming increasing authoritarian (recently Anna did say that the current situation has become much similar to Emergency). Admittedly, the failure of democracy in India, in fact the idea of democracy itself as a just political system, is too severely and widely debated for all the issues to be grasped at once. Yet, here's something I chanced upon.

Question: Is there really any point hoping for a 'non-corrupt' political system in a democracy?

The Policy Maker's Burden?

Consider these two seemingly disconnected pieces.

1.       This is from Steve Landsburg’s blog:

The EPA announced yesterday that new regulations mandating fuel efficiency standards for heavy trucks will cost vehicle buyers $8 billion, but that will be paid for in fuel savings over a year or two. Oh. Sounds like the mandate is quite unnecessary then, no? With numbers like that, consumers will demand high efficiency vehicles with or without the EPA. Unless, of course, the EPA is, umm….lying.

(http://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/08/10/turn-off-their-lights/)

2.       These bits are from an article by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo that appeared in Foreign Policy sometime back:

If the gains are so obvious, why don't the poor eat better? Eating well doesn't have to be prohibitively expensive....why did anaemic Indonesian workers not buy iron-fortified fish sauce on their own? One answer is that they don't believe it will matter -- their employers may not realize that they are more productive now. (In fact, in Indonesia, earnings improved only for the self-employed workers.) But this does not explain why all pregnant women in India aren't using only iodine-fortified salt, which is now available in every village. Another possibility is that people may not realize the value of feeding themselves and their children better -- not everyone has the right information, even in the United States. Moreover, people tend to be suspicious of outsiders who tell them that they should change their diet. When rice prices went up sharply in 1966 and 1967, the chief minister of West Bengal suggested that eating less rice and more vegetables would be both good for people's health and easier on their budgets. This set off a flurry of outrage, and the chief minister was greeted by protesters bearing garlands of vegetables wherever he went... We often see the world of the poor as a land of missed opportunities and wonder why they don't invest in what would really make their lives better. But the poor may well be more skeptical about supposed opportunities and the possibility of any radical change in their lives.  (emphasis added)

(http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/more_than_1_billion_people_are_hungry_in_the_world?page=full)

The idea that connects them is simple. If there are intertemporal arbitrage possibilities or a possibility of investing a small amount today to reap substantially higher returns in the future, when liquidity (or the availability of money to spend) is not a binding constraint, why are such opportunities not made use of? The standard economic justification would be the high discount rates that make the future look much less attractive to people involved in decision making today. However, high discount rates are not a typical feature of consumers in developed countries. Even in case of poorer consumers, the discount rate effect is likely to be nullified if the gains are relatively larger. As Banerjee and Duflo report- “in another study, in Indonesia, researchers tested the effects of boosting people's intake of iron, a key nutrient that prevents anaemia. They found that iron supplements made men able to work harder and significantly boosted income. A year's supply of iron-fortified fish sauce cost the equivalent of $6, and for a self-employed male, the yearly gain in earnings was nearly $40 -- an excellent investment.” Then the constraining factor evidently is the lack of information. People are unable to forsee into the future and cleverly calculate all the trade-offs to be made. This is not surprising, though I feel that it an important point to be appreciated. Perhaps, this is like saying that present self of the consumer imposes an externality on her future selves. In Coasean spirit, then, this points to the existence of transaction costs in the bargaining process between the selves in different time periods. The transaction costs arise as there are hindrances, psychological or physical, in accessing and processing the required information. In general, it is similar to the market failure argument. (I am aware, though, that with the last statement I am stepping on risky ground owing to large literature in economics debating the definition of ‘externality’, a part of which has been criticised for confusing externalities with market failure in general.) It is then a natural corrective to provide relevant information to those who display a seeming lack of it.

This brings me to two related issues. It is possible to dismiss such an approach as excessively paternalistic towards the poor, considering them incapable of deciding for themselves, a sort of ‘policy maker’s burden’. It is a valid point, especially when economists in their positive outfits are more than willing to treat preferences as exogenous. But I have three objections against this. One, as first piece tells us, it is not only the excessively poor who might suffer from informational constraints of this sort but also the relatively better educated and wealthier middle class consumers in the United States. Two, this sort of humanistic chauvinism that puts excessive emphasis on the individual might well be self defeating. After all, humanism is about all of us being humans, with our talents and rationality, but also with our failings. And three, this again appears to be classic problem of putting means before the ends. We must not let a basic value (letting a poor person uplift herself out of poverty/ a car owner make gains that she’s ready to forgo because she’s not aware that they can be had) be overridden by a less fundamental one (of imposing on her a mask of individual dignity). The problem of not being able to lead dignified lives in society is not solved by anointing the ‘underprivileged’ by facile notions of dignity, but by letting them realise a dignified living for themselves.

Also, it underlines the importance of situating policy prescriptions well within the institutional setting, or the policy makers will always come away with vast amounts of resources wasted, if not garlands of vegetables. Dr. Amirullah Khan, , pointed out during a guest lecture that even though under sanitation programs the government has spent a lot of money constructing proper toilets, they aren’t being used because people traditionally prefer to defecating in the open. Similarly, to gut information down people’s throats would be useless. Perhaps they won’t even care for it. This is surely the case with some of the environmental awareness programs which do not help people see any stake in conserving the environment, making a mockery of the entire thing instead. So, while education might be the best solution, it might not mean education in a conventional sense. It is important to make people believe in the information, which they may be unwilling to do in some cases. Thus, it is about credibility of the authorities in some sense. And such credibility tends to be institutional, in the sense that it is a self perpetuating 'rule of the game'. Obviously, this is not to deny that the information must actually be true. Otherwise believing in wrong things will end up doing more harm than good. The feedback is apparent here: If we do not believe our governments to be saying the right thing, we will not want to believe them, even if they say the right thing. 

And in this way the entire system falls apart. To a large extent, isn't this what is happening in our country?

The Morality of Violence

The Naxalites have stepped up their offensive against the Indian state, including civilians, in the past few weeks. It has brought forth a flurry of reactions from the government, the media and civil society at large. Some view it as an indication of bolstered naxal strength; others consider it a last gasp for survival by a faltering rebellion. However, in this absolute frenzy, (as always) there are certain underlying issues that are undermined by the necessary concern of realpolitik. The question that baffles me follows from amateur considerations of moral philosophy: What is the right thing to do? Nevertheless, a preliminary enquiry only manages to throw up further questions.

There is a contention in the public sphere regarding the how the Naxal ‘threat’ should be tackled. The government and a sizeable chunk of public policy and security analysts have a clear stand: While there is room for non-violent discourse if the ‘Rebels’ even temporarily abjure violence, every blow on the Indian state must be met with an equal retaliation. There is also, however, a group of intellectuals and human rights activist, who justify the movement on grounds of inequitable development in the Indian Union, and insist that the resolution must be through dialogue (which may need to be initiated by the state). They contend that, even in the present scenario of heightened violence by the naxalites, retaliatory state violence will only further hurt the adivasis. The former strand of thought, however, believes this to be contradictory, as they argue that the insurgency is inhibiting development and developmental activities can proceed only when order, peace and permanence is established. An important point is in order here: both sides agree that violence on the part of Naxals is categorically wrong, and their actions, be they for whatever reason undermine their objective. Where they differ is on consequentialist grounds – how will an armed retaliation affect the welfare of tribals. And while the Naxalite ‘sympathizers’ may be accused of an agenda against the State and the actions of the State (as most glamorously captured by ‘Operation Greenhunt’) be justified on numerous grounds, perhaps what the former are making is a stronger, more subtle point – the manifestly good intentions of the state in performing its welfare duties may in fact have negative, unintended consequences on the ground. Thus, ironically, those being blamed for being detached from reality in justifying a ‘political’ solution, might actually be anticipating a more consequential reality.

Though it may seem a little heretic, at least in two ways a case can be made for justifying the means adopted by the Naxalites. One argument that was once put before me some time time ago (and so is obviously borrowed) was fashioned as follows: ‘They had a choice to live with arms or die without them. What could have they chosen?’ Another reason, which I can vie to be partially novel, draws on a sense of karmic balance. It has been contented by several influential scholars that not only has progress in any form has bypassed tribal regions more than sixty years of independent Indian polity, but a steady process of deprivation has been instituted by the State (See This Fissured Land by Gadgil and Guha and Environment and Ethnicity in India by Sumit Guha). Not only have the tribals been dispossessed of their land, they have been disenfranchised of their basic means of subsistence by the State having restricted their access to traditionally shared forests and commons. The effects of a misguided continuation of ‘scientific’ colonial forestry post 1947 era appear to have been accentuated by rent seeking and formation of power clouts and nexuses. This has clearly meant slow but sure death for several communities over time. If the Indian state, which is supposed to have perpetrated this form of social penury, is taken to represent the civil society as a whole in a democracy, then perhaps by some standards a violent confrontation may be justified.

However, this rationalization can be severely dented if viewed in light of the present. It has been well established that in Naxal dominated areas, basic amenities, schools and hospitals are almost non-functional. Moreover, there have been allegations of cold blooded murder of the tribals themselves, and then attempts to cover them up by labelling the victims as ‘police informers’. This would make the Naxalite Movement liable for accusations of losing track, of first, becoming an angry vendetta, and then transforming into a bloody battle for power. Such actions undermine the very motive of the movement, and thus, disrobe it off a possible legitimacy of violence.

Each time a brutal attack is carried out, the media, the experts and the public, almost unanimously display anger, angst and outrage. It is a frenzied incidence of public emotion. But this opinion is definitely not the best one to consult for formation of policy. In a digression, McCloskey, in one of his popular columns in the Eastern Economic Journal, concedes that expecting undergraduates to ‘think like economists’ is fruitless for “economics, like philosophy, cannot be taught to nineteen-year olds. It is an old man's field. Nineteen-year olds are, most of them, romantics, capable of memorizing and emoting, but not capable of thinking coldly in the cost-and-benefit way.”[1] Public policy is not far removed from economics. Such words are disheartening when someone, marginally older than nineteen attempts to do moral philosophy in the domain of Public Policy. But then, it isn’t the nineteen year-olds only who are capable of ‘memorizing and emoting’.

[1] McCloskey, D. (1992). ‘Other Things Equal: The Natural’, Eastern Economic Journal, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 237-239