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The model of district governance in India inherited from the British has lost its relevance, failing to respond to the demands of the people at the bottom, says K S Subramanian in the first of a new series on conflict resolution and governance. The situation could be salvaged by vesting all powers of governance in the elected PRIs at the village, block and district levels
 While social conflicts and political violence in India today have become complex, multi-dimensional and endemic in areas such as Jammu & Kashmir, the Northeast and the Central Tribal Belt (CTB), conflict analysis in government institutions from the district to the central levels remains imprisoned in rigid, unchanging bureaucratic/police structures.
The district magistrate (DM)-centric administrative structure put in place by the British remains the basic institution for conflict analysis and action at the lowest level of effective governance -- the district. The district magistrate (DM), also called deputy commissioner or collector in some states, and the superintendent of police (SP) are still jointly responsible for conflict management at the district level. The performance of these officials is monitored at the state level by the state home secretary and the home minister with the state chief secretary and the chief minister coming into the picture increasingly frequently. Often, the central government in New Delhi is also compelled to participate in law and order management at the district level though the subject continues to be in the state list in the Constitution of India. To recall a gruesome affair from the past, following a series of incidents of violence in a major north Indian state involving police killings of a large number of rural poor, the Government of India had to step in and set up a central team consisting of several officials, including this writer, to go to the state for a firsthand study. The need for setting up the team arose from the wide divergence in the figures of death from police action reported in the print media (very high) and those reported by police and intelligence agencies (very low). The team was headed by the then member-secretary of the Planning Commission, now prime minister. On arrival in the state, the team found an aggressive DM and SP, proud of their record of successfully maintaining public order at any cost. It was made clear to them that the purpose of the team’s visit was not only to assess the need for police action but also to look at their performance in the sphere of implementation of social welfare legislations, which turned out to be very poor. Further, while the state police and the central Intelligence Bureau (IB) had reported the number of deaths in police action to be 12 ‘Naxalites’, the state chief secretary, in a subsequent meeting in the union home ministry in New Delhi, frankly admitted that the number of those killed in the police actions during the distressing incidents of violence was not 12, as reported by police and intelligence agencies, but nearer 60 -- men, women and children, and that none of them could be described as ‘Naxalite’, in itself an ambiguous term! Examples can be multiplied to indicate the serious deficiencies in policy analysis and policy action at the state level, often inviting central intercession. The district administration in India is focused on maintaining order and security of the state at any cost. The precedents in ‘governance’ set during the colonial period play a significant part in the quelling of such incidents of serious violence, which are viewed as a threat to the security of the state stemming from communist/Naxalite activities in rural India. Traditionally, police and intelligence agencies have been trained to view communism as a basic threat to the security of the Indian state. The British did not bother much about the deeper causes and nature of social and political violence, but this approach cannot remain unchanged in democratic and republican India. However, the British-created administration, which is still in place, defies the tides of time and sticks to conventional practice. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, towards the end of his term, was sensitive enough to admit the problem. He said to a British interlocutor that his major failure was that he had failed to “change the administration”. The introduction in 1993 of the three tiers of panchayati raj institutions (PRIs) or local self-governance at the district level and below, was a positive feature which needs to be developed and sustained. This process has met with delay and resistance from state and central-level ruling groups that are not willing to share political, administrative and financial powers and authority with the PRIs. Hence, the role of PRIs today remains restricted to the implementation of 29 development items specified in the 11th Schedule of the Constitution of India. Regulatory and police powers, including the DM and SP, are not yet under the control of PRIs. There is a long road ahead. The police at the district, state and central levels play a key role not only in the collection and dissemination of information on socio-political tensions and conflicts but also influence the analysis of the information and policy formulation at the highest level. B N Mullik, legendary former intelligence chief and principal adviser to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, has left an autobiographical narrative explaining his significant role in such major events as the arrest of Sheikh Abdullah (1953), the induction of the army into Nagaland (1955), the adoption of the ‘forward policy’ towards China (1960) and the dismissal of the communist government under EMS Namboodiripad in Kerala (1959). The influence of another former IB chief and current national security adviser to the prime minister was clearly visible in the statement by the PM at a meeting of state chief ministers in April 2006 that the Naxalite movement constituted the “biggest national security threat”. This bypassed the more serious threat of communal violence, including in Gujarat 2002, which seeks to make the country safe for the Hindus against the Muslims. While the Naxalite violence is a manageable one with the formulation and implementation of pro-poor policies, communal violence of the type that occurred in Gujarat 2002 is a more complicated and intractable political problem requiring considerable statesmanship which is lacking in the present-day ruling politicians. The major opposition party of today, which clearly played a role in the meticulously organised violence in Gujarat in 2002, remains far from repentant and has remained completely unaccountable to the public on its record in the violence. This poses a graver threat to Indian democracy than the Naxalite violence. The PRIs have been functional in Kerala, West Bengal and Karnataka but non-functional in many other states, where they are only ‘elected extension agencies of the district administration’. To make them effective, devolution of functions along with functionaries and finances is needed. This has not yet happened. Under British rule, the DM, aided by the SP, was the kingpin of the district administration and was expected to safeguard British rule by brute force when necessary. But the DM was also expected to dispense some justice in a largely authoritarian set-up ruled by feudal oppression and injustice. The scheme of governance formulated in the Government of India Act, 1858 following the suppression of the 1857 revolt, elaborated the basic features of the new administration. The structure was custom-built for the use of coercive power institutionalised in the 1861 Police Act buttressed by the IPC, the CrPC and the Evidence Acts, to protect imperial interests against Indian resistance. The leaders of the freedom struggle, who understood the nature of the system, unfortunately did not spend much time deliberating on what to do with it after independence. Jawaharlal Nehru’s pre-independence resolve to abolish the “spirit of the ICS” in independent India, remained unimplemented. He not only retained the undemocratic and oppressive colonial administrative structure but went on to rely on it uncritically, as explained above. In a dissenting note to the Asoka Mehta Committee report on decentralisation, EMS Namboodiripad pointed to the contradiction between “democracy at the top and bureaucracy at the bottom”, which was unsustainable. Namboodiripad was perhaps ahead of his times but his dream of devolving both regulatory and development functions to local government institutions was only partly realised when the PRIs were set up in 1993. Unfortunately, the 73rd amendment to the Constitution superimposed a structure of representative institutions of local governance on an entrenched and powerful system of district administration headed by the DM, which meant that the police were free from democratic control at the bottom and the PRIs would only deal with specified developmental functions, that too without sufficient functionaries and finances. The British had made the police accountable to the DM at the district level in view of the former’s known reputation for oppression and corruption. The accountability of the SP to the DM provided a channel of grievance redressal to the people. After independence, the check on the power of the police through the magistracy was removed or reduced and the police were made a convenient tool of political manipulation by the ruling groups in every state. This resulted in a sharp deterioration of the standard of district administration. Then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi could make the uncontested statement that the district administration had become “unresponsive, inefficient, unsympathetic, often callous, and sometimes even cruel to those whom it was intended to serve”. Further, the half-hearted introduction of the PRIs led to a nebulous and uncertain relationship between the DM and the zilla parishad (ZP), resulting in a stalemate in both developmental and regulatory functions of the district administration. This affected good governance, which has resulted in various forms of local militancy to push forward demands relating to economic, linguistic and ethnic injustices and grievances. This militancy should, of course, be distinguished from externally supported terrorism, often known as ‘low intensity warfare’. The demands of the various Naxalite groups, broadly considered, have a common origin in the non-performance of the local administration in diverse areas of governance such as revenue, police, forest, irrigation and others, which affect the vast majority of the rural population. The militants find a safe haven among the disgruntled citizenry, who have been denied justice from the organs of rural governance, and they provide an outlet to the demands of the local population which they seek to resolve by direct violence or threat of violence. Naxalite violence, once confined to one police station in one district in one state (West Bengal), is now reported to have spread to over 460 police stations in several districts and states. And the police budget of the Government of India and the state government is said to have increased over a thousand-fold from 1967 to 2007. This is a sad commentary on district governance in India today. The existing model of district governance in India has lost its relevance. It has failed to respond to the demands, grievances and expectations of the people at the bottom. The violent response of the state to the violence of the extremists has failed to bring peace and has exacerbated the cult of violence. The situation could conceivably be salvaged only by vesting all powers of governance -- regulatory and developmental -- in the elected PRIs at the village, block and district levels. The zilla (district) parishad (ZP) should be the representative district government, subsuming under it all existing line departments including the police. Being more representative, the ZP would be responsive to the urges and aspirations of the people below. The present hiatus between the DM-centric district administration and the development-oriented PRIs leads to non-governance and to acute dissatisfaction among the people. Civil servants must render professional and technical services to the different levels of the PRIs and be directly responsible and accountable to them. The chairperson of the ZP would have the status of chief minister with regard to the district under his jurisdiction with the DM functioning as his chief secretary. Gap-filling exercises would be needed to make representative government at the district and levels below functional and effective. A democratic district administration, with the stipendiary bureaucracy at the local level functioning under its control, would be more responsive and accountable to the local people than the present authoritarian bureaucratic structure is capable of being. If the institutions do not perform well, they would face the wrath of the people who would throw them out of power in the next panchayat election. Far-reaching administrative reforms are thus the need of the hour along with radical reformulation of development policies in a pro-people direction as suggested by thinkers and activists such as Amit Bhaduri and Medha Patkar. The challenges of conflict resolution and governance in India would then cease to be ‘national security threats’ and would become locally manageable and accountable exercises. (K S Subramanian, formerly of the Indian Police Service (IPS), was Director-General of the State Institute of Public Administration and Rural Development, Government of Tripura. He has benefited from discussions with D Bandyopadhyay, former Rural Development Secretary, Government of India) Infochange News & Features, September 2009
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