DNA Edit: When a political system is alive & kicking

Dubbing America ‘the failed state’ right-wing thinker Francis Fukuyama this week in Prospect magazine wrote of the deep-rooted malaise of a system he calls a ‘vetocracy’ that, in 2013, entrapped Federal workers in a complete government shutdown and levied sanctions if they showed up to work. An electoral collegiate that doesn’t work to boost the candidate with the most votes. A parliamentary process that almost didn’t let the budget pass. And an economy rigged by the elites to reward themselves and hand the bill to the poor. “I define ‘political decay’ as the capture of political power by well-organised interest groups that bend the system to their own interests, at the expense of broader public interests. A decayed system is also one that cannot fix itself, because those entrenched interests and ways of thinking prevent reform,” Fukuyama writes. America and Britain, both have been examining the failures of their systems to adapt to the needs of a changing society and economy.

It is good to look at this in the context of the constant flip flops of the Reserve Bank of India and the Ministry of Finance in wake of the recent demonetization process. Is the ability to change the goal posts a good thing, or a bad one? In parenting, it’s typically a flaw to be so rigid as to resist going back on one’s position, but it’s equally a surrender of power to change it too often and too readily.  

Deep inside the Indian government, that lumbering machinery that for decades has done a slow, rusted-cog crawl, the wheels of change are finally turning. Everything we thought would never change, is. On the one hand, law statutes are being reviewed to cut down hundreds of defunct codes to a few necessary ones. Maharashtra’s legal provisions are undergoing a review, as are those of Rajasthan, and Jharkhand.

At another end, the status of autonomous institutions is being questioned. In yet another, the status of 72 coal blocks allocated either through auction or allotment are being scrutinised. Judicial appointments are being touted, and even the validity or redundancy of income tax versus a more generic transactional tax is being questioned. It is whispered that the next to face change will be the way in which we count our data—ethnicity, gender, religion, caste—to be dropped for pure data ceterus paribus, all other things being equal.

The LCD of social change, in a country where every influencing factor has been a ready excuse to resist change, is possible only when we are all reduced to an unbiased statistic.

Finally, something is moving. Don’t look now, it’s us.