The Majesty of Governance

Indian exceptionalism must start with people, resilient systems and institutional integrity

Almost every Indian Army officer of my father’s generation, and most who came after, had read Philip Mason’s A Matter of Honour, usually more than once. Fewer had gone on to the two volumes he had written earlier under the name Philip Woodruff, his mother’s maiden name, The Men Who Ruled India, which did for the old Indian Civil Service what A Matter of Honour later did for the Army. Somewhere in those pages Mason speaks of the majesty of governance. The phrase has stayed with me for years, partly because it sounds faintly imperial and partly because its meaning is almost the opposite of imperial power. It suggests that there is something larger than the authority of the man who occupies the chair, something that resides in the institution itself, in the manner in which power is exercised and, most importantly, in the confidence of the people who live under it.

It is not the same thing as power. Power can be displayed; governance has to be lived. Every Republic Day we put power on display with great gusto. Tanks roll down Kartavya Path beneath a pale winter sun; missiles glide past on their carriers; contingents march in immaculate formation towards India Gate and, at the end, aircraft come low over Raisina Hill while the entire avenue tilts its head upwards to watch. It is magnificent theatre, and there is nothing wrong with it when it celebrates what a country has built and what its people have sacrificed to defend. Yet somewhere within that spectacle lies a confusion that has become increasingly common in the Indian mind. The soldier on a frozen post along the Line of Control, the jawan of the Central Armed Police Forces standing guard at a difficult frontier and the policeman waving traffic through the fumes at ITO are all gathered together under the convenient phrase “the security forces”, as though the uniform itself were the institution. It is not. Their constitutional responsibilities are different, their training is different, their relationship with the citizen is different and, perhaps most importantly, the circumstances in which the citizen encounters them are completely different.

The soldier is usually encountered at a distance, and often at his best. The citizen sees him in a flood, on a landslide-scarred mountain road, at an airport during an emergency, or on the evening news standing against the wind on some distant pass. The policeman is different. He is the uniform most citizens actually meet. He is at the traffic junction, in the police station, outside the court, at the protest, on the road accident site and sometimes at the door of a house on the worst evening a family has known. The citizen does not usually meet the Army when everything has gone wrong in his own life; he often meets the police precisely because something has. Institutions acquire their reputations not from the speeches made about them but from the accumulated experience of the people who encounter them.

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The Delhi Durbars were designed to awe the governed, which, lest we forget, meant us. So was much of the stone that went with them. Lutyens’s Viceroy’s House, now Rashtrapati Bhavan, crowns Raisina Hill in red and cream sandstone, while Baker’s Secretariat buildings flank the approach like enormous courtiers. The architecture was not accidental. The Raj understood the theatre of authority and the distance it could create between the governed and those who ruled them. The hill, the Durbar, the uniforms, the ceremonies and the buildings all reinforced the same message: authority stood above you.

That world disappeared at midnight in August 1947. The white man in his solar topee evaporated from the machinery of government and, within a few years, the chairs of authority were occupied by people who were unmistakably us. The collector, the police superintendent, the brigade commander and the citizen being governed now came from the same country, often from much the same social world and sometimes from the same schools. The line between those who governed and those who were governed had, in theory, disappeared. Yet physical structures change much faster than institutional habits. The sandstone remained, the files remained, the desks remained and the uniforms remained, and some of the distance that had once been created deliberately by an imperial system survived in places where the Republic had no reason to preserve it. It survives most visibly in the places where citizens actually meet the State. It is there in the dim police station with its peeling walls and fat registers, in the government office where a file appears to have acquired geological permanence, in the passport office where a missing signature can turn a straightforward application into a pilgrimage and in the district court where a citizen can spend an entire day waiting for his name to be called. Every country has imperfect institutions. The deeper problem begins when the citizen believes the institution was never really designed for him, that the rules are negotiable for those with influence and immovable for those without it, and that somewhere behind the desk sits a small piece of the old Raj still convinced that authority means keeping people at a distance.