Unbearable lightness of being the State

Earlier this month, I spent a few sleepless nights binge-watching a fabulous new web series, Dahaad. A gripping crime thriller set in rural Rajasthan, beyond the mystery, acting and wonderful cinematography, what struck me was how evocatively (and perhaps unintentionally) the series captured the social value of government jobs in India. This is a rare perspective in elite discourse on the Indian State, which tends to portray India’s obsession with government jobs as an outcome of a desire for a cushy job with guaranteed job security and power; where apathy, inefficiency and corruption are rarely frowned upon, indeed actively encouraged!

In Dahaad, the chief protagonist is a powerfully portrayed Dalit female police officer. In subtle ways, the series demonstrates how being a government officer empowers her to challenge the clutches of caste oppression by conferring a new professional identity of being a police officer. Just one illustration – there is a scene where an upper caste man tries to stop her from entering his home during a police search. It is her identity as an officer of the State that empowers her to break through this oppressive social barrier and push past him with pride and dignity to perform her professional role.

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I emerged bleary eyed from the world of Dahaad, to fiction meeting reality. News of UPSC results had hit headlines and my eye caught the all-important statistic. Of 11,35,697 applications for the examination, 5,73,735 appeared. Of these, 933 (320 women) lucky candidates made it through. Here is another mind-boggling statistic. Responding to a Parliament question in August 2022, the Department of Personnel and Training revealed that between 2014 and 2022, the over 22 crore hopeful candidates had applied for central government jobs, of which a mere 7.2 lakh made it to the holy grail of a government job.

The world of fiction and its powerful portrayal of the empowering potential of a government job juxtaposed against the harsh reality of scores of young Indians desperate in this elusive quest for dignity and social standing reveals the great burden that the Indian State has long carried. It is a burden of opportunity that is simultaneously empowering and deeply oppressive to society. And the contradictory pulls and pressures this has unleashed lie at the heart of the challenge of State capacity, one that our somewhat lazy debates on corruption, apathy and inefficiency that plague the Indian State fails to acknowledge.

The tyranny of coaching class, widespread cheating due to the intensity of competition, loss of productivity due to scores of educated Indians spending nearly 10 years of their early working lives preparing for exams that they are unlikely to succeed in, rather than acquiring skills or seeking jobs, the emotional and psychological costs are a well-recognised malaise. Underlying this malaise is the failure of the Indian economy to create credible pathways for long-term, secure private sector employment in ways that accord dignity and status for the bulk of India, even in the peak growth years. This is a burden that’s been ascribed to the Indian State in our founding moment and baked in to the democratic compact forged between State and citizens.

With liberalisation, the market ought to have shared in this burden, but this hasn’t come to pass. Consider this statistic from a recent study by economist Kunal Mangal on candidates in the Tamil Nadu Public Services Commission exams -- the number of applicants with engineering degrees doubled between 2013 and 2019. Concomitantly, the engineering wage premium has fallen by half between 2000-2019. Against the vagaries of the market, even in a more developed economy like Tamil Nadu, the State remains the disproportionate provider of opportunity, mobility, and security.

The State has responded to this burden in complex ways. On the one hand, the working of democracy and mobilisation for reservation has ensured that the fictional character in Dahaad mirrors reality. But it is precisely this empowering potential of the State that has also stymied its capacity to perform its core function of public goods provisioning. An insightful paper on the Lalu Yadav years in Bihar by former bureaucrat Santosh Mathew and his co-authors illustrates this contradiction. Between 1996 and 2006, Bihar government actively allowed vacancies in primary schoolteacher positions, despite serious shortages and funds being made available by the Union government, because their goal was to break the historical dominance of upper castes in state institutions. Only candidates from the Yadav electoral coalition were hired, and where suitable candidates could not be found, posts were left vacant.

More important, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta has argued in Burden of Democracy, once the State becomes a means of social mobility, it shifts norms of accountability from accountability for public goods to accountability for access to State power. And when access to power becomes the goal, competing interest groups manipulate institutions to serve particularistic ends rather than their broader public purpose.

This is precisely the challenge that the Indian State and society confronts. The State is, and will, remain for the conceivable future, given the trajectory of our economy, the primary vehicle of empowerment, of dignity and status. In a deeply stratified society that has suffered centuries of discrimination, this is a powerful and critical role that the State can ill-afford to give up. But to avoid trade-offs for State capacity, the democratic discourse has to reclaim the core purpose of public institutions. And this is where political leadership has failed. This piece is published on the day India inaugurates a new Parliament. In the cacophony over symbols and rituals, the purpose of Parliament has been lost. Need I say more.