TEACHING POLITICS
i
TEACHING POLITICS
In this Issue ARTICLES
G. Haragopal and V. Sivalinga Prasad
Administrative Concepts: The Question of Values
B. Venkateswarlu
Theories of Organisation and Development
John Forester
A Critical Empirical Framework for the Analysis of Public Policy
Satya Deva
Administration in Developing Societies
G. Ram Reddy and G. Haragopal
Bureaucracy and Development: Case Study of Rural India
A.S. Narang
Administration, Politics and Society: Indian Case Study
O.P. Sharma
Public Accountability and Administration: Anti-Corruption Strategies in India
BOOK REVIEWS
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ii
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Prof. G. Ram Reddy, Vice-Chancellor, A.P. Open University Hyderabad.
Prof. G. Haragopal, Centre for Economic and Social Studies Hyderabad.
Dr. B. Venkateswarlu, Dept. of Political Science, University Evening College, Warangal.
Dr. Satya Deva, Department of Public Administration, Punjab University, Chandigarh.
Dr. V. Sivalinga Prasad. A.P. Open University, Hyderabad.
Prof. John Forester teaches Political Science at Rutgers Uni., Newark, New Jersey (U.S.A.)
Dr. Amarjit S. Narang, teaches politics at Shyam Lal College, Delhi University, Delhi.
Dr. OP. Sharma, Vice-Principal, Bhagat Singh (Evening) College, Delhi University, Delhi.
1
1ADMINISTRATIVE CONCEPTS: THE QUESTION OF VALUES
G. Haragopal and V. Sivalinga Prasad
Values, which form the basis for human behaviour, constitute an important dimension of social
phenomenon. The study of values of individuals, groups, cultures
and societies can provide a clue to the understanding of the socio, political and economic
transformation. How values are shaped and altered is a cardinal
aspect of any discussion on development or change in any society. While the values of the individual are
largely shaped by the general socio-economic set-up,
the values of the socio-economic set-up are determined by the level and type of productive processes.
The striking variation in the value framework of
different groups in the society is primarily due to the differences in the economic interests of these
groups. The variations in the value set-up of individuals
within the group is on account of socialisation process which includes exposure, schooling, association
with others and contemporary social events etc.
The heterogeneous character of value framework indicates the wide ranging conflict of interests in the
society. It is such factors that account for the
complexity in behaviour which poses problems, if not challenges, to the correct understanding and
analysis of the social behaviour and its value premises.
2
As values get crystallised in a society, they transform themselves into structured institutions through
which they get articulated. In the social pyramid
these institutions range from the family at the base to the state at the top. The grip of the values can be
perceived from the relative stability of these
institutions. Therefore, the study of institutions and their value framework is one important method to
understand the larger social phenomenon. In this
context study of political and administrative institutions assume considerable importance to a serious
student of developmental process. In most of the
developing countries, where the political institutions are not well developed, the administrative
structures have come to play a dominating role. Hence
the study of administration is of critical importance in these countries.
A study of administrative institutions in the past has been undertaken particularly from the point of their
configuration, internal processes and other
managerial aspects. The studies which throw light on the value framework of the institution are scanty.
This may be partly due to the influence of thinkers
like Max Weber who assumed that these instruments can be value-neutral. This raises a fundamental
question whether any institution or an instrument can
be value-neutral at all. The notions of value-bound, value-neutral and value-free institutions exist due to
seeming (apparent) variations in the social,
economic and cultural set-up. While the value-boundedness is sharply reflected in a heterogeneous
society, they get concealed in societies whose value
premises are deep and well entrenched. In Riggsian parlance it is in prismatic societies where valuecomplexity tends to be high. Transformation of a 'prismatic
society' into a 'refracted society' gradually gives rise to a socio-economic framework where the value
premises of the society tend to acquire relative
stability. The process of transition calls for change in the concepts and practices which can be noticed in
the evolution of administrative theory. The
classical concepts of organisation laid emphasis on structured human relations for the purposes of
economy and efficiency, which in turn would step up
the quality and quantity in the productive processes. In the decision-making concept, attainment of the
goals has
3
come to occupy utmost importance. Simon separated values from ethics. For, his theory of rationality
emphasises on selecting appropriate means to achieve
the ends rather than the broader ethical questions involved both in the choice of the ends and in
selection of the means to achieve those ends. Most of
the administrative concepts like Scientific Management (Taylor), Theory of Authority (Chester Barnard),
Human Relations Movement (Elton Mayo), originated
in response to the qualitative changes that were taking place in the larger system. This is significant in
the context of transformation of feudal structures
into capitalist organisations in the West and particularly in the United States.
The concept of scientific management seeks to economise human energy for its efficient and effective
utilisation. Dissipation of human energy was a part
of the feudal structures which were opposed to the release of the productive forces. The release of
productive forces compel the removal of constraints.
It is this attempt that gave rise to the concept of scientific management. On the human relations front,
the worker needed to be better managed for greater
productivity. As a result, the feudal authoritarian structures had to give way to engineering of human
relations. Barnard cautioned the managers that authority
lies in the person who is accepting it than in the person who is exercising it. It is this logic that led to the
reorientation of human relations. The
Hawthorne experiments were mainly intended to understand the human psychology so that the
knowledge it produced could be geared for greater productivity.
Thus human engineering to step up productivity was the main premise of the new experiments and the
concepts.
This only indicates that the debate on the question of values is closely related to the phase of social
transformation and level of economic development.
It is this historical process that raises two basic questions; one, are the countries where these concepts
are being taught passing through the same type
of transition and two, can the present level of development in the third world countries be compared to
the level and type of development obtained in the
western countries when these concepts were evolved. It is these
4
pertinent questions that are discussed in this section.
II
An examination of the syllabi of different universities particularly the papers on administrative theory,
development and comparative public administration
and management science, reveals that there is a common pattern. The paper on administrative theory
in the Indian universities includes the concepts of
Woodrow Wilson, Luther Gullic, Urwick, Mary Follet, Henri Fayol, F.W. Taylor, Max Weber, Elton Mayo,
Chester Barnard, Herbert Simon, F.W. Riggs, Douglas
McGreger, Herzberg, George Homans, Rensis Likert Warren Bennis, Abraham Maslow, Chris Argyris,
Yezhkhel Dror, Mosca, Michels, Colebiwski, Robert Dahl,
Raven, Etzioni, Kingsley, Kelshell, Van Riper, Subramanyam etc. In a couple of universities Marx also
figures in.
The paper on management science includes scientific management, administrative planning, division of
work, coordination, management by objectives, management
by exception, work study, work measurement, work simplification, net-work analysis, systems analysis,
management information systems, inventory control,
O&M, C P M and PERT, PPBS, operations research, cost-benefit analysis etc. These techniques and
concepts are the continuation of the classical approach
which emphasised efficiency, economy and rationality as basic premises of the organisation
phenomenon.
The list of thinkers and concepts indicates the over-riding bomination of the thinkers from West and
more so of the U.S.A. The concepts they developed have
had their origins in the western experience and their needs and demands. The United States of America,
where the productive forces have been triggered
through capitalist mode of development, witnessed major technological break-throughs in the area of
production and experienced major changes in the area
of human relations in organisations. The 'administrative theory' is the response or the result of
developments and changes in organised human relations.
It is these concepts that were imported, if not transplanted, into most of the third world countries. But
to the dismay of many of the western thinkers,
5
the concepts and the practices stemming from these concepts made no impact on the administrative
process. It is this experience that called for a different
conceptual framework to explain the organisation phenomenon.
The rise of Afro-Asian nations in the forties and fifties gave rise to new trends of thinking in the field of
organisational theory. It was found that the
experience gained by the U.S.A. and the west was not relevant to most of the third world countries. For
their economies have been backward in content and
feudal in structure. The transition of a feudal society into a capitalist culture may render the
organisational theory to some extent relevant, but most
of the third world countries are stuck up in crisis of change. The constraints for capitalist development
tend to be both internal and international. Therefore,
the scope for the rise of capitalism in most of the third world countries is quite restricted. Added to it,
most of the governments of these countries
explicitly stated in their policies and programmes that they are 'committed' to 'socialistic pattern of
society'. It is these conditions and postures that
limit the usefulness of the concepts developed in the west. The western thinkers themselves conceded
this point and pleaded for new theoretical paradigms
to explain the organisational phenomenon in the third world countries. It is this recognition that led to
the genesis of comparative public administrative
and development administration approaches. These two trends do find a place in the teaching of
administrative theories in India.
An examination of the syllabi of comparative public administration of different universities indicates that
the countries which are recommended for the
purpose of comparative analysis are; U.S.A., U.K., France and U.S.S.R. The concepts generally discussed
in this paper are; the Weberian ideal type, the
general systems approach, efficiency and rationality model, Riggsian concepts of agraria and industria,
characteristics of colonial administration, administrative
modernisation etc. These concepts compare the developing countries with that of the western models.
The common theme in these papers is to explain the
variations in different administrative patterns. They also attempt to explain the
6
variation and point out that variation as the cause for the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the
organisations in the third world countries; they indirectly
suggest that western models would help in overcoming the growth crisis. Thus the comparative public
administration approach reinforced the western values
and premises as a frame of reference for our understanding the administrative phenomenon.
The paper on development administration which is an offshoot of comparative approach focuses its
attention on the transition or change in the third world
countries. Under this paper the ideas of Hahn Been Lee, Riggs, Milton Esman, Swerdlo, Pai Panandiker
find a place. In addition the concepts of administrative
modernisation, innovations in developing countries, institution building, citizen participation, problems
of bureaucracies etc., are included. The syllabus
of development administration in content is not quite different from comparative public administration
as it also includes several concepts and paradigms
of comparative public administration. In some of the universities these two papers are clubbed into one
paper.
In an attempt to explain the variations on the one hand and transition on the other, the teaching of
'administrative theory' is dominated by the western
capitalist values either as a frame of reference or as a tool to explain the variations in the organisational
phenomenon. The major limitation of such
an approach lies in its failure to explain the general ambiguity and growing complexity in the value
frame of the organisations in most of the third world
countries. The large scale inefficiency, rigid heirarchical structures, authoritarianism, suspicion, absence
of team-work, breakdown of coordination, centralisation
of decision-making are some of the typical characteristics of the bureaucracies in the third world
countries in general and in India in particular. The
concepts that are taught in the class rooms are not capable of explaining as to why the administrative
system behaves the way it does. This indicates that
the value premises on which our bureaucracies operate are entirely different.
7
This debate gives rise to one basic question, viz., what are the value premises of third world
bureaucracies and where
from they imbibe these values. Riggsian analysis does provide a clue to understand the relevance of
social values to the larger socio-economic system. And
this leads us to a point where we have to ask another question whether the administrative concepts in
their present form are capable of explaining the
causal relations that are at work in the administrative phenomenon. Even in a country like France,
Michel Crozier in his analysis on bureaucratic phenomenon
found that there has been a shift in the value framework of the French society which is not adequately
reflected in the French bureaucracy. Hence he finds
the bureaucracy in France not being able to cope with the needs and demands of the society. It is such
factors that limit the utility of western theories
in explaining the organisational or development phenomenon in developing countries like India.
That the third world countries are passing through a rapid transition is now universally accepted. It is
this transition that renders understanding of the
social phenomenon difficult. This complexity arises on account of the fact that these societies continue
to be under the grip-of feudal value framework
but have adopted capitalist strategies for developmental purposes. Added to it they swear by socialist
goals. It is this three dimensional phenomenon with
its inherent contradictions that cause the complexity. The attempt to reconcile these contradictory
values make the task of understanding the organisational
phenomenon difficult. Therefore, the administrative concepts built on western value framework prove
to be inadequate in explaining and analysing the administrative
phenomenon.
III
That the administrative systems cannot be separated from their larger socio-economic systems needs no
emphasis. If this premise is accepted, then the limitations
of administrative concepts are too obvious to need any explanation. If the purpose of theory is to
explain the causal relations, the existing 'administrative
theory' is stuck with superficial causes in explaining the serious efforts that are experienced in the
organisations. As a result administrative theory
incorporated
8
by and large in our syllabi becomes ineffective in explaining the administrative phenomenon. In order to
be more effective the explanation has to go beyond
the administrative system and find the causes in the larger system.
In the study of administration, its inter-relations with the larger system assumes considerable
importance. The study of administration is basically a study
of change and its impact on organisations. Therefore, the focus of administrative concepts will have to
be shifted to the larger issues and broader value
framework. This focus would render the concepts and the thinkers who discussed and analysed social
transformation relevant to the administrative theory.
While western concepts could explain the transition that those societies passed through, the framework
must be broadened so as to include the global experience.
This would enable one to appreciate critically the organisation phenomenon—its strength and
limitations.
The western theories have been emphasising increasing role to the state and its widespread
instruments. They also assume that this intervention is positive.
In contrast, third world thinkers like Gandhi were suspicious of the state and pleaded for the village
swarajya based on the concept of total decentralisation
of power. The scheme that Gandhi suggested included increasing control by the lower level
organisations over the higher levels. In addition his concept
of people's participation through non-cooperation, civil disobedience and satyagraha added a new
dimension to the process of change and the tasks that
the administrative system should face.
Development thinkers like Paulo Friere from Latin America or Frantz Fanon from America discussed in
their works the basic trends in the change process.
The discussion on colonialism and its influences on the one hand and the increasing concientization or
politicisation of the masses on the other does provide
an insight into the challenges and the crisis that administrative systems are facing. The works of these
two thinkers explain the profound changes that
the developing societies are passing through. This comprehensive understanding would give one the
capacity to relate the administrative sub-system to the
larger socio-economic
9
system.
The theories of social change through resolution of contradictions as developed by Marx, Lenin and Mao
should find their due place in the courses on administrative
concepts. For the class struggle, the role of the state and the consequent process of change provide a
wider perspective. The role and nature of administration
cannot be entirely different from those of the state. In a class society, can the administrative system be
above the class interests? Can it cast its support
in favour of the poor against the will of the privileged class? Can the state play a positive role in such a
situation is a fundamental question that a
student of administration requires to appreciate. This understanding provides an alternative angle to
look at the complex value system of the organisation
phenomenon.
References
1. Barnard, Chester, "The Functions of Executive, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1940.
2. Esman, Milton J., "The Politics of Development Administration", in John D. Montgomery and William J.
Siffins (ed.), Approaches to Politics, Administration
and Change, McGraw Hill, New York, 1966.
3. Fanon, Frantz, Wretched of the Earth, Grove, New York, 1965.
4. Friere Paulo, Cultural Action for Freedom, Penguin, London, 1977.
5. Gandhi, "Village Swarajya", Navajeevan, Ahmedabad, 1962.
6. Gulick, Luther and Urwick, Papers on Science of Administration, Institute of Public Administration,
New York, 1937.
7. Lenin, V.I., Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Collected Works, Moscow, 1972.
8. Mao Tse-tung, Collected Works, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1965.
9. Marx, Karl, Collected Works, International Publishers, New York, 1975.
10. Mooney, James D., The Principles of Organisation, Harper and Brother, New York, 1939.
10
11. Nicholas, Henry, Public Administration and Public Affairs, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Engle Wood Cliffs, New
Jersey, 1975.
12. Palombara, Joseph La, "An Overview of Bureaucracy and Political Development", in Joseph La
Palombara (ed.). Bureaucracy and Political Development, Princeton,
1963.
13. Riggs, Fred W., "An Ecological Approach: The Sala Model", in Ferrel Heady and Sybil C. Stokes, (ed.),
Papers on Comparative Public Administration, University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1962.
14. Simon, Herbert A., Administrative Behaviour, Macmillan Co., New York, 1945.
15. Waldo, D., "Scope of the Theory of Public Administration", in James C. Charles Worth (ed.), Theory
and Practice of Public Administration, Scope, Objectives
and Methods. The American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Philadelphia, 1968.
16. Wilson, Woodrow, "The Study of Public Administration", Political Science Quarterly, 2 June, 1887.
11
2 THEORIES OF ORGANISATION AND DEVELOPMENT
B. Venkateswarlu
There has been a growing discontent among the students of administrative theory especially in the Third
World countries like India about the inadequacies
of the western theory of administration as an explanation to the social reality and its criticism.1 They
have begun to realise that these theories, originated
as they are in the west, may provide something of a conceptual framework for analysis of distribution of
power but cannot serve as a substitute for such
analysis. Because, they came to know, of late, that these theories leave many questions pertaining to
social reality unanswered. They have been even expressing
doubts whether there can be a realistic theory of administration at all.2
This being the case with the Third World intellectuals, the thinking in the west, it appears, is in no way
different. The western liberal theorists have
characterised the organisation theory with such phrases as "elephantine" and "jungle".3
In the face of this persisting confusion in the countries of its origin and development, the theory had
interestingly gained prominence among the administrators,
academics and the leaders of the communist parties in Soviet Union and its allies i.e., East European
countries.4 These countries were accused of increasing
bureaucratisation of their societies,5 thus raising serious doubts about the credibility of the
12
socialist system.
Be that as it may, Marxist intellectuals have recently shown concern about administrative theory.6
While this concern has been to analyse and understand
the structure and functioning of the capitalist state, there has been a growing tendency among them to
attempt to arrive at new theories such as "Marxist
theory of administration",7 and "Leninist theory of organisation"8, which involve the risk of vitiating the
use made of the concepts of Marxism.9 Instead
of clarifying the existing confusion, this has actually added to the existing one. What is more, this
tendency has been treated as "yet another jungle".
With a view to understand the nature of the existing confusion in the field of administrative theory, this
article makes an attempt to note the sociological
origins of the theory and its nature. This in itself might contain a clarification to the problem whether
the theory of administration is a universalistic,
realistic and scientific theory that can be useful as an explanation to the social reality. It also examines
briefly the Marxists' concern for the theory
and its repercussions in the pursuit of scientific knowledge about the social reality.
II
The emergence of the theory of administration as a distinct intellectual discipline in pursuing knowledge
about social reality has been a recent phenomenon.
The post-war period has been marked by proliferation of a number of institutions both private and
public, both in the Third World countries and the capitalist
west, for the purpose of teaching, research and consultancy in management, organisation and
administration. Simultaneously the establishment of separate
departments of administrative sciences as estranged from the traditional disciplines such as Political
Science and Economics in the universities was on
the increase. Though the origin of the modern management and organisational techniques can be
traced back to the latter half of the 19th century i.e.,
in the initial stages of the formation of monopolies in the west, the reasons for their increased
importance
13
can be found in the post-second world war developments which forced the monopoly corporate
business to reorganise and reorient their strategies for the
purpose of readjusting themselves to the changed situation.
The process of decolonisation had put a full-stop to the ruthless and naked exploitation of the colonial
type; and the newly emerged nations had begun to
plan national reconstruction of their economies as independent nations. While the former appeared to
have been a potential threat to the capitalist west
for exploiting enormous raw materials and cheap labour, the latter had threatened them of their vast
markets in these countries.
Further, in the first half of this century, the emergence of Soviet Union after the October Revolution as
an entirely different system of society opposed
to capitalism and imperialism, with its proclaimed ideological commitments of solidarity towards the
rising working class movements and social revolutions
in various countries, had posed a major threat to western capitalism and its global interests as a whole.
The War and its aftermath had witnessed the emergence of U.S.A. and the Soviet Union as two major
powers with two different ideologies, and this had resulted
in the bi-polar division of the world into Capitalist camp and Socialist camp. The war was followed by a
short period of cold war between the two camps.
It was a war waged actually between two different ideologies, fought by means of vigorous ideological
propaganda to attract the decolonized nations.
The unfolding reality confirmed Lenin's thesis that with capitalism reaching the highest stage of its
development, viz. monopoly capitalism or imperialism,
what is exported is not capital goods but capital itself. It meant a marriage between the monopoly
capital and the 'indigenous capital' of the newly emerged
nations, the purpose of which had been the pumping out of enormous profits from these nations to the
developed west.
It would not ordinarily be possible for imperialism to accomplish this task. But as there was no
contradiction between monopoly capital and the so-called
indigenous capital whose interests boiled down to one task viz. making huge profits, it
14
became easier for imperialism to accomplish this task. And capitalism met this task by the process of
reorienting the world outlook of the populations in
the newly emerged, underdeveloped nations. This mental reorientation was total in the sense that it
made an all out attempt to condition the thinking of
the entire populace of a given country, socially, politically, economically, culturally, ethically,
educationally and religiously. It had to mould, against
all odds, the total outlook of the population to believe in the virtues of capitalism, in the face of
degradation of human life under ruthless, albeit
indirect, exploitation of the masses. Without such exploitation capitalism could not dream of its survival.
Thus, capitalism in the epoch of imperialism does not only export capital but also capitalist ideology.
And the tasks of this ideology are not merely to
prepare the people to believe in the 'rational' virtues of capitalist development which acquire distinct
nomenclature such as industrialisation, modernisation
etc., but to condition them both mentally and physically to serve capitalism. As part of its overall
strategy, capitalism in the epoch of imperialism exports
ideas. There is a proliferation of educational institutions for the purpose of imparting skills, techniques
of management, organisation and administration
of the societies in the underdeveloped countries, that serve the requirements of imperialism. The
already existing institutions are injected into the system.
Various trusts and foundations like Ford and Rockefeller give scholarships to the intellectuals of these
countries to go to the west to be trained both
directly in their numerous business schools and universities, and indirectly, be attracted to their lifestyles. After their return, these intellectuals
occupy the key positions in the prestigious institution of management and organisation and also in the
administration of these societies.
This being the reason for the origin and existence of the theory of administration or organisation in
these countries which had come to serve the interests
of capitalism and the resultant capitalist class-rule, the students, atleast the conscientious ones of
administrative theory feel rather naively that the
theory can really serve the purpose of the society as a whole. When it cannot do so, they are
disillusioned. And
15
this disillusionment has led them to search for new theories of administration. As a result has emerged
"Marxist theories of administration or organization".
The aims and objectives of the theory and practice of administration, organisation or management, as it
is distinctly called, are not however, intended
for the development of the society as a whole either in the countries of its origin or in the countries
which imported it. Contrarily its aims are, firstly,
to keep the less developed countries persistently underdeveloped which has been the historical
necessity of capitalism in the epoch of imperialism, and
secondly, to protect a small minority of capitalists of their immense wealth and their rights in the
ownership of the means of production as their private
property. In other words, the theory and practice of administration is in reality nothing but the theory
and practice of exploitation and oppression by
a small minority over a big majority, i.e., the capitalist class-rule.
III
Though there are a number of thinkers who have contributed to the theme, for the purpose of a brief
analysis, one could choose from the writings of a few.
They are Fredrick Winslow Taylor, Max Weber, Elton Mayo, Chester Barnard, Herbert Simon and Fred W.
Riggs. The ideas of the first two are considered as
"classical"; the next three were named as belonging to "human relations school". Simon and Riggs fall
under "Decision-making" and "Development" Schools
respectively.
The history of capitalist development11 has been divided into three phases namely, (1) mercantile
capitalism, (2) competitive capitalism, and (3) monopoly
capitalism or imperialism.18 According to Marx, mercantile capitalism was "a system of robbery . . .
directly connected with plundering, piracy, kidnapping
slaves and colonial conquest".13 It was the age of merchant-adventurers who formed themselves into
small joint trades. Thus they were the founders of the
modern system of joint stock companies. Accumulation of wealth through their expeditions had been an
encouragement for them to become small entrepreneurs
who began to produce a limited number of commodities in
16
common circulation. These commodities included the basic food stuffs in more or less unprocessed form
such as grains, meat, fish and meals, dairy products,
vegetables, liquors, bread and biscuits and molasses, tobacco, coal and candles, lamp oils and soaps,
tallow bees wax and paper. Actually, these and many
more other household needs were actually produced by the households in the country-side at their
homes to meet their daily requirements.14 In this period,
the role of the family remained central in the production processes of the society. This process of
production was simple and homogeneous. By 1850 the
capital's capture of this simple process of production of household needs in the country-side was
complete. This gave rise to growth of urban centres where
all these goods were produced by the machinery under factory system, resulting in the bulk production,
available at cheap prices. This hit the harmonious
life of the country-side by uprooting the agrarian population from their stead only to be absorbed as
wage labourers by the factories at the fast growing
urban centres; with this, it did not take much time for the capitalist entrepreneurs to compete with each
other for producing more to amass more wealth.
Production of more commodities resulted in further cheapening of goods, and thus the labour-power.
Those who are familiar with rudimentary laws of capitalist
development know that this process (known as "falling rate of profit") ultimately goes against the actual
producers i.e., workers. With this capitalism
enters the competitive stage.
At the risk of over-simplification Baran and Sweezy described this stage as follows: "The competitive
firm was small relative to the size of the industry
of which it was a member. It brought factors of production (labour, raw material and machinery) and
sold standardized product at prices over which it had
no control. In these circumstances, it could strive for maximum profits only by improving its techniques
and/or organization—in other words, by actions
which were necessarily confined to its own production process. Maximum profits and optimum methods
of production thus went together resulting in the more
and better products at lower cost".15
17
It is at this stage as Godelier had pointed out, that the capitalist does transform one faction of his capital
into labour power and tries to get the best
results from this. This means, influencing the factors of production. Analysis of these factors is the
concern of what is called "scientific labour management"
or "rational organization of labour". At the beginning of this century F.W. Taylor studied this
rationalization of labour with a view to eliminating all
waste of time in the workers' movements and determining the movements and speed of motion best
adapted to the machine. This meant, in short, a predominantly
psychological adaptation of human mechanism to the mechanics of industry. Taylor's axiom was that for
every operation a worker has to carry out the 'one
best way'. The worker has to do his work in accordance with the 'best norms', thereby economising
motion, time and the money of the enterprise. In order
to encourage him to conform to the norms and to faster emulation, the worker is offered a system of
bonuses. Scientific labour management seeks to establish
the conditioned reflex, most profitable for the enterprise, to produce a human production automation
physically conditioned and 'stimulated' psychological
spring of prestige and material spring of the bonus16. And this brought the enterprise huge profits not
only by 'scientifically' exploiting the labourers
of their labour but also an attendant process of capitalist division of labour resulting in deskilling that
conditioned the physical and mental faculties
of human beings for the sole purpose of profit-making. Taylor's "Bethlehem Steel Experiments" proved
this point more than sufficiently. The table on the
next page shows his results.
Each worker who could handle 16 tons of iron ore on an average per day previously, was made to
handle 59 tons, an increase of about 270%. Average cost of
handling one ton of ore was reduced substantially, of course, with a meagre rise of about 63% in the
wages of the workers which is highly disproportionate
to the output. It may be noted here that "Taylorism" was widely prevelant in many industries in America
in the last decades of the l9th century. The implementation
of this principle, as Braverman has pointed out,
18
table with 3 columns and 5 rows
Old Plan
New Plan Task Work
1. The No. of yard-labourers was reduced from below
400&600
140
2. Average No. of tons per man per day
16
59
3. Average earnings per man per day
$ 1.15
$ 1.88
4. Average cost of handling a ton of 2240 pounds
$ 0.072
$ 0.033
table end
Source : Taylor, F.W., Principles of Management, Harper and Brothers. New York, 1911, p. 71.
resulted in "the dissociation of the labour process from the skills of the workers". Workers were made
"to depend not at all upon their abilities but entirely
upon the practices of management". Work under this system of 'scientific management' is in reality
mental and physical violence on the part of the capitalist
over the mass of workers. Studs Terkel in the introduction to his recent book has aptly described the
conditions of workers under such a system. To quote
him:
"This book, being about work, is by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body. It
is about ulcers as well as accidents, about
shouting matches as well as fist fights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is
above all (or beneath all) about daily humiliations.
To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us. . .
It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash for
astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for
a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality too is part of the
quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken or
19
unspoken, of the heroes of this book. . .
For the many, there is hardly concealed discontent. The blue-collar blues is no more bitterly sung than
the white-collar moan. "I am a machine" says the
spot-welder. "I am caged" says the bank-teller, and echoes the hotel clerk. "I am a mule" says the steel
worker. "A monkey can do what I do" says the receptionist.
''I am less than a, farm implement" says the migrant worker. "I am an object" says the high-fashioned
model. Blue-collar and white call up on the identical
phrase, "I am a robot". . .
Nora Watson (an interviewee) may have said it most succinetly. 'I think most of us are looking for a
calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly line
worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people".17
Such is the origin and nature of Taylor's scientific management of the process of production under
competitive capitalism where human beings are transformed
into automations by way of deskilling them through the process of capitalist division of labour. They are
reduced to be a part of 'factors of production',
'personnel' and lastly, a 'resource'. The verb to manage was derived from manus. the Latin for hand,
originally meant to train a horse in his paces, to
cause him to do exercises of the manage.18 In a word, it is a process of dehumanizing the human
beings. People become neurotic. The author of the 'theory'
F.W. Taylor himself was, it appears, "at the very least, a neurotic crank".19
IV
Under capitalism, men are reduced to the status of commodities. However if the commodities (lifeless
products) cannot resist this reduction, David Wells
pointed out, men can and do. The impossibility of reducing workers to mere automata, together with
capital's ever renewed drive to achieve this reduction,
is the fundamental contradiction underlying class-struggle in capitalism.20 In the last half of the 19th
century, America had witnessed a spate of trade
union
20
movements, working class unrest, agitation for higher wages, reduction in working hours and better
living conditions.21
Given the state of dehumanization of the working class and growing trade union movement the results
of Taylorism— new problems of management and organisation
arose in the capitalist industry in the west especially in America, the first decade of the 20th century.
The industry summoned sociologists to investigate
into the problems of industrial unrest and to suggest measures for increasing productivity and efficiency.
Elton Mayo, a professor in industrial sociology
at Graduate School of Business Management, Harvard University, who carried his research with the
support of Rockfeller and Carnegie Foundation Grants,
was one of the important sociologists who came to the rescue of the industry. Mayo and his colleagues,
concentrating mainly on the behaviour of the workers
and their productive capacity, keeping in view physiological, psychological, physical and economic
aspects, came out with the conclusion through their
'Hathorne studies' that the whole problem is one of 'human relations'. For them, the whole problem
appeared as a problem of human attitudes and sentiments,
not capitalist social relations of production. To them, what matters in industrial efficiency or inefficiency,
increase or decrease in productivity was
individual's psychological make-up. For this, what is required is a kind of 'psycho-therapy'. No wonder it
is called 'clinical' approach.
Thus the capitalist relations of production firstly reduces the workers to be psychos, it then examines
the psychology of the workers to adapt them by odious
means to industry for efficiency and productivity. So much for the theory. Any way, it is because of these
efforts by the "cow sociologists" like Elton
Mayo, that industrial sociology (that tries to find humanism in already dehumanised workers), industrial
psychology (that tries to find a normal being
in a worker who was already a neurotic crank) and industrial and organisational consultancy (an immoral
act of sharing in capitalists' decision-making)
came to the fore as separate disciplines to rescue capitalism from outside as it was already endangered
from within. And the 'human relations school'
21
had emerged within the management and organisation theory as a distinct approach. This school was
severely criticised by the later writers on organisation
and management. According to McGregor, these ideas on organisation and management presume that
most people must be coerced, controlled, directed, threatened
with punishment to get them to put forth adequate efforts toward the achievement of organisational
objectives.22 Argyris, another writer, had commented
that the present organisational strategies developed and used by administrators (be they industrial,
educational, religious, governmental or trade union)
lead to human and organisational decay.23 However, the ideas proposed by these critics are in no way
different in that they are indeed intended to help
the management against the interests of the workers albeit in a different manner.
Capitalism treats the individual as the "ultimate entity". It reduces the multifarious relations in society to
just one sort; the mere interdependence of
abstract labour, expressed in the cash nexus. Here people figure not as in the feudal mode of production
as tenants, vassals, burghers, freeholders and
guildmen, or indeed as friends, members of different communities, political allies or opponents etc., but
first and foremost as owners of commodities of
certain value. People are treated without regard to their specific qualities but as 'men'. The process of
market exchange is such that each looks only
to his own advantage, thereby treating his commodities as private property, as property which others
are excluded from controlling. It is worth noting
that the term "private" comes from the Latin "privare" meaning to deprive. Every exchange of
commodity accentuates the principle; mine ergo thine; thine
ergo mine. What is reciprocated is the exclusion of ownership. As owners of private property, therefore,
the equal "men" of commodity exchange are also
equally "individual" men who pursue interests exclusively their own."24 All 'individuals' are supposed to
'enjoy' in the words of Marx, "freedom, equality,
property and Bentham".-5 Freedom because both buyer and seller of a commodity . . . are constrained
only by their free will. They contract as free agents,
and the agreement
22
they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality because
each enters into relation with the other, as with
a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property because each
disposes only what is his own. And Bentham because each
looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each
other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private
interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just
because they do so, do they all, in accordance with
pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all shrewd providence work together to
their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in
the interest of all."26
The process of commodity exchange (i.e., capitalist system), says Marx, "furnishes the Free-Trade
Vulgaris' with his views and ideas and with the standard
by which he judges a society based on capital and wages . . . now strides in front as capitalist; the
possessor of labour power follows as his labourer.
The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other timid and holding back, like
one who is bringing his own hide to market and
has nothing to expect but—a hiding.".27 In such a system "freedom, equality, property and Bentham"
means that the capitalist is "free" to buy the worker's
hide and the labourer is "free" to sell it; the capitalist and the labourer are "equal" because they
exchange equivalent for equivalent i.e., the wage
and the hide. Both possess "property" of their own—the capitalist of his capital and the labourer of his
flesh and blood; each of them bother about their
ownselves—the one to amass profits, the other for his physical survival. These are the individuals who
are considered as the ultimate entity in capitalism.
In a word, they are alienated persons, alienated from their social connection like separating the
umbilical cord and alienated ultimately from themselves.
All the writers on organisation and management from Taylor to Riggs have concentrated their attention
only on this individual person, though they talk about
"group", "cooperation" "coordination" etc.
23
Thus Chester I. Barnard an American business executive thought of organisation as a "cooperative
system" and what was needed accordingly was a "cooperative
social action". To him, organisation was "a system of consciously coordinated activities of two or more
persons".28 "It is a system composed of the activities
of human beings, a system in which the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts and each part
is related to every other part in some significant
way. As a system it is held together by some common purpose by the willingness of certain people to
contribute to the operation of the organisation".89
According to Barnard each individual by contributing his services to the organisation receives, imagine
what—nothing other than satisfaction. He disapproves
the 'theory of economic man' though nobody knows who proposed such a theory, even if there is such a
man where social relations are reduced to money relations
and the worker into commodity. Barnard, after 'demolishing' his imaginary 'theory of economic man'
proposes his own 'theory of contribution-satisfaction-equilibrium'.
Contributions which may be regarded in terms of organisation as activities, are possible only when it is
advantageous to workers in terms of personal satisfaction.
Barnard says "if each man gets back only what he puts in (recall Marx's ironical statement about
"exchange of equivalent for equivalent", i.e., the capitalist
his wages and the labourer his hide) there is no net satisfaction for him in cooperation. What he gets
back must give him advantage in terms of satisfaction,
which almost always means return in different form from what he contributes".30 For this purpose, he
proposed "incentives" such as material inducements
like money and opportunities for distinction, desirable conditions for work, ideal benefactions, pride and
workmanship, patriotism, loyalty to organisation
etc.
According to Barnard, the organisational "cooperative social action" consists in "a system of consciously
coordinated activities". And to achieve this goal
the organisation lures the workers by extending some "incentives"—he rightly called them
"inducements"—mostly non-material. This, in itself explains that
there has been no "cooperation" or
24
"coordination" in the organisation; and that it should be achieved by certain new techniques and
methods as the old techniques are no more useful.
In a society where private property determines the social relations every individual person is motivated
towards his selfish interests without any concern
for others. The individual persons can go to any extent to "satisfy" their selfish interests. This means
perpetual conflict, not "coordination". Those
who can get maximum "satisfaction" are those who possess more commodities viz. private property
under their control. In the perpetual conflict for achieving
"satisfaction", it is only Cromwells who win, not Charleses. Because the former would be a protege of
those 172 and odd most powerful trading families
who earned enormous wealth through piracy and slave trade in the 16th and 17th centuries and who
were eager to expand their business empire for which the
latter became a stumbling bloc. The attempt was in no way less than "a consciously coordinated social
action" but unfortunately for Barnard and also for
Charles, it was a civil war—an historically decisive civil war at which Barnards and Charleses were
doomed to loose. This is not to teach history to the
so-called 'organisation thinkers' for whom business is more important, but to demonstrate that in a
society divided into two warring classes "conscious
cooperative social action" is a dream. At the same time, however, this is doubtlessly possible at two
places, (i) among those who want to dominate by controlling
the entire means of production and who constitute a small minority for the purpose of exploitation of a
big majority since nothing less than this gives
them "satisfaction", and (ii) among the great mass of producers who always try to emancipate
themselves from such an exploitation.
Thus capitalism creates the contradiction in the absence of which it has no existence; at the same time it
makes attempts to pecify contradictory forces
namely, capitalists and workers without adversely affecting both the contradiction and the capitalists.
The so called theory of organisation of Barnard
had its origin in the latter part of this reality.
The spirit of the technique is to preach the worker to
25
"satisfy" himself by a sophisticated way of hiding and the capitalist to "satisfy" himself with the worker's
hide. Barnard advises the capitalist to teach
the worker "pride and workmanship" and also "patriotism" (whose recent Indian version is "Srma yeva
Jayate") for the purpose of a little painless hiding.
Thus Barnard's so-called theory of organisation is no more than another technique intended to maintain
and cement the exploitative social relations in
an organisation albeit in an apparently sophisticated guise namely, "cooperative action".
But a truely sophisticated theory of organisation can be found in a different and more acceptable
disguise namely 'objective social science' in Max Weber,
a German lawyer and an academic.
Among the numerous writers on organisation theory Max Weber was considered to have occupied a
unique place. His thought had combined in itself all the qualities
of science, religion, philosophy and polemic. Considered as "the St. Paul of the concept of bureaucracy
and capitalist rationality" there is a "dramatic
unity among all his concepts".31 He was shrewd enough to propose "a value neutral and objective social
science"38 which stands as a testimony to his class
nature,33 at the same time can declare unhesitatingly that "ideals ... are just as sacred to others as ours
are to us" (emphasis added).34 The "value neutral
social scientist" in Weber had conceptualised the "social conflict" as an "eternal" phenomenon.35 The
root cause for the "conflict", Weber theorised, was
"competition" for "domination".36 It consists "in physical strength, cunning, greater intellectual ability,
sheer lung power, a better demogogic technique,
greater ingenuity, flattery, a talent for intrigue".3' While characterising such "concepts" (as the one
mentioned above) as "mental constructs, not to
be found anywhere in reality",38 he did not hesitate to attack Rosa Luxemburg and her colleagues in the
German Social Democratic Party who were fighting
against the oppressive Prussian military autocracy (that means, according to Weber, creating conflict in
an
26
other-wise strong nationalist Germany) with all the derogatory phrases which he had mentioned above
in same verbatim while identifying the causes for the
"conflict".39 It is needless to say to whom Weber had attributed other soft phrases. George Lukacs
treated him to be "a prominent spokesman for the bourgeois
imperialism of Wilhelmine Germany", and Wolfgang Mommsen characterised him as one who was
committed "to the welfare of the German military imperialism",40
in whose military bureaucracy one finds Weber's ultimate identification of his "ideal-typical form as "the
highest social embodiment of rationality".41
Here one can make a brief attempt to examine the scientific validity or otherwise of Weber's theory of
organisation, on the basis of his writings.'12 Weber
used the German word verband, the most obvious translation of which is "organisation", to connote
different notions such as state, the political party,
the church, the sect and the firm. This word has also been translated as "corporate group". It is in this
context he discussed certain basic categories
of his philosophy such as "power", "authority" or "domination" etc.
As for the origin and nature of his concept 'organization' (verband), to Weber a person could be said to
have "power" (Macht) if within a social relationship
his own will could be enforced despite resistance. If this "power" is exercised for "the structuring of
human groups", it becomes a "special instance of
power", namely "authority" (Herrschaft). Thus he distinguished between "power" and "authority".
"Authority" or "domination", as it is distinctly known
is instrumental in the emergence of verband. The rules of an organisation Weber terms as
"administration". The most important aspect of the administration
was that it determines who was to give commands to whom. Thus, "every form of authority expresses
itself and functions as administration". To Weber, all
authority is "legitimate" because it is always founded on a "popular belief structure", people may
believe that obedience was justified because the person
giving the order had some sacred or altogether outstanding characteristic. This authority of the person
Weber calls as "charismatic authority". Secondly,
a command might be obeyed out of
27
reverence for old established patterns of order—"traditional authority". Thirdly, men might believe that
a person giving an order was acting in accordance
with his duties as stipulated in a code of legal rules and regulations. This was Weber's category of "legal
authority" to which he added "rational" character.
And this is his "ideal type" of "legal-rational" organisation which is the characteristic feature of modern
administration.
The whole thing can be reduced to the following:
(i) All persons possess "power",
(ii) "Power" by itself is not "authority": only "special instance of "power" exercised for the purpose of
"structuring human groups" can be "authority"
or "domination",
(iii) Social relationship is always one of a dominating and dominated character,
(iv) All authority is administration,
(v) All authority is "legitimate" because it is founded on certain belief structures; and lastly;
(vi) All "structured human groups" are organisations and hence 'personified authorities'.
Now let us examine the scientific validity of the theory as an explanation to social reality. We start with
the last point. Since it reduces the burden
of going into the remaining points which would prove to be trivial points, by themselves. Inspite of great
scientific researches going on in his lifetime
in social anthropology, Weber preferred to believe that organisation minus domination of a small,
powerful minority over a big majority, is a non-existent
phenomenon. What is more, he believed in its "legitimacy". After his life-long researches, living among
the American Indians, Lewis H. Morgan published
his historic findings43 when Weber was in the prime of his youth, zealously seeking knowledge about
social reality.
Morgan had found in the ancient Iroquois gens an 'organised' communitarian life with nobody
processing any kind of "special instance of power" i.e. authority
or domination. To quote Morgan; "All the members of an Iroquois gens were
28
personally free and they were bound to defend each other's freedom; they were equal in privileges and
in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming
no superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, equality and
fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal
principles of the gens. The gens was the unit of the social system, the foundation upon which Indian
society was organised. [This] serves to explain that
sense of independence and personal dignity universally an attribute of Indian character".41 It was an
organisation of society which as yet knew no special
authority, which as yet knew no state. But Weber did not bother about this which by then had already
known 'organised' communitarian social structure.
Men and women "differ in no way from one another, they are still bound to the umbilical cord of the
primordial community", commented Marx on the Iroquois
gens.45". . .it was broken by influences which from the outset appear to us as a degradation, a fall from
the simple moral grandeur of the ancient gentile
society. The lowest interests—base greed, brutal sensuality, sordid avarice, selfish plunder of common
possessions—usher in the new, civilised society,
class society; the most outrageous means—theft, rape, deceit and treachery—undermine and topple
the old, classless, gentile society. And the new society
during all the 2,500 years of its existence has never been anything but the development of the small
minority at the expense of the exploited and oppressed
great majority . . . ."46 What Weber simply did was attributing "legitimacy" to the selfish interests in the
"new society", as against the communitarian
interests. Though specialised in conceiving "mental constructs" his intellectual imagination could go only
to the extent of identifying the "conflict"
as an eternal phenomenon. At times, the social transformation had appeared to him as a "calling",
which centres its attention on the religious aspects
like 'Protestant ethic'.
To accept his concept of 'belief structures' on which the "authority" is supposed to have founded is to
deny the entire history of human development. In
what belief structure—tradition, charisma or law—does Cromwell fit in?
29
Even if people 'believed' in Cromwell's virtues, who were they? And even if all the people believed in the
virtues of Cromwell what was the basis for such
a belief? Nearer home, what was the belief structure that served the Iron Chancellor to "dominate"
imperial Germany? If people believed in either of these
belief structures, was it not tantamount to the view that people passively obliged to be dominated? If
so, is there any need for a belief structure at
all? If people believed in Bismarck's authority where was the necessity for ruthless repression on people
by means of iron laws? These are but a few questions
which Weberism refuses to answer. The intentions of his so-called "philosophy of history" as Weberism
is often called, were to legitimise authority or
domination and thereby charactise class-struggle and civil war as mere 'power polities'. He found such
politics among the German Social Democrats only
when his attempts to find a place in the party had failed him. The Prussian military bureaucracy had
appeared to him as "legitimate" and "rational". But
there was a challenge to this autocratic authority from the working class under the leadership of the
Social Democratic Party. It was in the politics of
Social Democrats that Weber found cunningness, demogogy, lung-power, intriguing etc., the reasons for
this were obvious.
Weber's persons, possessing "power" and in special circumstances possessing "special instance of
power" or "authority" are none other than the individual
persons, who 'enjoy' "freedom, equality, property and Bentham" in the society of commodity exchange.
The concept of abstract individual and the study of
his actions as socially isolated things such as psychological attitudes etc. is not only central to Weberism
but also to "all conventional Social Science
of "establishment"." And Weberians are conscious that without such an individual "sociology will seek in
vain to affirm its validity as an autonomous science".48
This is equally true of Weber's "philosophy of history".
But such an individual can be found only in myths, not in social science. "The lasting fascination of the
Robinson Crusoe myth is due to an attempt to imagine
an individual independent of society. The attempt breaks down. Robinson
30
is not an abstract individual, but an Englishman from York, he carries his Bible with him and prays to his
tribal God . . . (for) a new society".49 A social
scientist is expected to probe into the 'mysteries' of social reality. This is more binding indeed on the
'value-neutral' and 'objective social scientists'
like Weber. Mystifying social reality is the vocation of prophets. It is not difficult for one to understand
whether Weberism is a science or prophecy.
It is not for nothing that Weber, the "dead Saint" is resurrected in recent decades. It is the historical
necessity of imperialism which preaches myth
in the name of science. In his recent work, Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, Maurice Godelier
had successfully proved not only the irrationality
of Weber's 'rational' philosophy but also the irrationality of the bourgeois social theory as a whole.50
VI
With the Second World War, capitalism had entered a new crisis. In fact, the war itself was the result of
a big crisis— the depression of 30s. The working
class, far from being a passive lot, had already developed into an organised force throughout the world.
With this, there arose new problems requiring
new methods and techniques for the purpose of successfully running the gaint western capitalist
organisations of the corporate business across the world.
The success or failure of an enterprise largely depended on thoroughly calculated, timely decisions
pertaining to various aspects of the organisation.
Thus, emerged the 'decision-making theory' whose apostle was Nobel laureate Herbert Simon. The
theory had its origin in the rediscovery of Comtean "positivism"
of the early 19th century. Auguste Comte, whom some hold as "god father of sociology", unlike a
majority of his contemporaries who rejected the rational
humanist spirit of the French Enlightenment, rejected also the achievements of the 17th century, of the
Renaissance and the Reformation. The core of his
vision of society lay in the marriage of modern capitalist industrial production forces with the kind of
social and political relationships which obtained
at the peak of theocratic feudalism. To achieve this end, he proposed the establishment
31
of a caste of scientist priests whose function it would be to endow the industrial and other secular
authorities with the unquestionable transcendental
sanction they intrinsically lacked. The ideological weapon to combat this, was positivism51 It was the
positivism of Comte which behavioralists like Talcott
Parsons made the foundation for their 'theory'. Simon had successfully injected this into his model of
'decision-making' in organisations.
Positivism, to which Simon refers, separates factual propositions and value judgements as if they are
unrelated aspects. According to him, "the former is
validated by its agreement with the facts, the latter by human fiat".52 He contends that every decision
contains "an ethical as well as a factual content"
in it. "The basic value criteria that will be employed in making decisions and choices among alternatives
in an organisation will be selected for the organisation
primarily by the controlling group—the group that has the power to set the terms of membership for all
the participants.53 Bureaucracy provides the facts
and the managers make decisions that best fulfil the values and objectives laid down by the controlling
group. Simon following Weber called this 'rationality'.
Thus bureaucracy which is expected to provide facts may put forward factual information pertaining to
the production needs of cheap and nutritious food
for the impoverished masses of the people. Along with this they may also provide facts pertaining to the
colour T.V. requirements of a small minority.
They may also gather facts pertaining to the purchasing capacity of both the sections and also about the
profits that would accrue to the organisation
if each of these is decided to be taken up. Managers take the decisions in accordance with the "value
criteria" primarily selected by the controlling group
that has the power to set the terms. Now, the 'rational value' of the decisions solely depends on the
values of the controlling group".
Recall the nature of the commodity exchange society; it would not be difficult for one to understand not
only the values of the "controlling group" but
the deceptively apodictic values of the facts themselves. And it is possible for one to understand then
who controls what, in what manner, why
32
and for what purpose. It is not difficult to understand the value orientation of the decisions as also the
intrinsic values of the facts.
Commenting on the 'rationality' of the "decision-making", Baran and Sweezy opined that "the nature
and volume of out-put, the technology employed, the investment
undertaken, the raw materials used, the prices charged—none of these, no matter how rational the
methods by which they were arrived at, can be thought
of as corresponding to the needs of society as a whole or even as reflecting the growth of the forces of
production in one of the component parts. It is
as if a superbly skillful typist operating a perfectly faultless electric type-writer were set to work,
enjoined to avoid a single typographical error
because one hundred type written pages proof read and free of mistakes have to be ready for delivery
promptly at 4.00 p.m. to the janitor for removal to
the dump.54
Further, a decision can be said to be 'objectively rational' only if it is the correct behaviour for
maximising given values in a given situation. For the
purpose of enhancing this 'rationality' what is required, according to Simon, "was training and
indoctrination so that the organisation's criteria of decision
are injected into the very nervous system of the organisation members".
This is nothing less than training the members of the organisation to arrive at decisions which are
apparently apodictic in nature. This is possible because
positivism treats facts as 'givens', as eternal which in fact they are not. The eternal nature of the "facts"
proves itself to be a dubious one and an
outright deception when we come to know that poverty and affluence are not eternal but man made.
The tasks of decision-making lie in the best use or rather
best manipulation of these apparently value neutral facts to fulfil the organisation's goals. The question
of good or bad, morality or immorality does
not arise; what is important is the goals of the organisation, i.e., making more profits.
Outwitting Machiavelli, Simon says that "the terms good and bad when they occur in a study on
administration are seldom employed in a purely ethical sense.
Procedures are termed good when they are conducive to such attainments.55
33
Simon's indifference for ethical values in decision-making can be regarded at the very least as
rationalisation of immorality or at best, as intended to
absolve the decision-makers of their immoral activities—an unavoidable 'fact' in capitalism.
Thus the theory of decision-making, intended to rationalise organisational activity, had proved itself to
be a theory of rationalisation of capitalist immorality.
VII
'Developmental approach' is the latest one in the development of administrative theory. The process of
decolonisation following the II World War resulting
in the establishment of independent states, put a full-stop to the naked exploitation of the colonial type.
The emergence of the capitalist and communist
blocs had thrown two models for the development of the newly emerged nations. The growing
awareness of the people in these countries about the vagaries
of capitalism and imperialism resulting in backwardness and underdevelopment, and their growing
vulnerability for mass revolutions with the help of the
communist bloc had forced the west and its administrative thinkers to come out with new theories of
'development'.
A number of western social scientists have begun to study development politics, economics,
administration and so on. The Comparative Administration group
of the American Society for Public Administration consisted largely of scholars who had served on USAID
missions. The theory of 'development administration'
was put forward mainly by these scholar-bureaucrats, namely, Riggs, Weidner, La Palombara, Diament
and Pye.56
'Development' according to their 'theories' meant westernisation i.e. industrialisation or modernisation.
The underdeveloped countries, according to this
theory, have no scope for development without undertaking massive industrialisation of their societies.
Massive industrialisation is not possible if they
do not seek financial and technological aid from the developed countries of the west. 'Development' in
various spheres of national life was thus linked
to external aid. This is nothing but capitalist development. In the sphere of
34
economics, it may be a transfer of 'green revolution technology' intended to transform the entire
agriculture into capitalist industry the sole aim of which
is opening the doors of the underdeveloped countries for multinational corporations to 'supply' the
required inputs. In the sphere of politics it may be
transfer of ideas for 'nation building' activities for which the theory suggests "greater differentiation and
specialisation", "greater scope for the private
sector, more achievement orientation and recruitment increasingly on the basis of achievement criteria
instead of ascriptive ones". Lastly, if these countries
wish to develop like those in the west they have to undergo and experience all those historical phases of
'development' in the west which may take a few
hundred years.
The whole thing boils down to only one thing that these erstwhile colonies should look forward to west
and its capitalist development as the ideal type;
that they have to go a long way in a phased manner overcoming the transitional problems such as
corruption, authoritarianism, ineffectiveness and dehumanisation
to achieve the status of a developed country. These 'developmentalists' show Britain as the model
which, according to them, took six hundred years to reach
the present stage of development.
One may however ask whether these western countries had no colonies for over a period of 200 years
for ruthless exploitation of wealth and cheap labour
that helped the western metropolis to develop. How do they expect the underdeveloped, erstwhile
colonies to develop without such facilities atleast for
the same period of 200 years. Anyone who asks such questions would be looked upon as doubting
Thomases who always talk about 'perverted' things like exploitation,
leaving out 'progressive' things like 'development'.
VIII
Thus, these theories which have emerged whenever there arose crises in the western capitalist set-up,
have hardly any difference in the spirit and content
capitalist in content and exploitative in spirit. Whenever there developed a new crisis
35
in the system, the theory, in response to the crisis, had developed new skills and techniques to
overcome it by means of studying the administrative structures
and their functioning. So long as there arose manageable problems, these skills and techniques could
serve capitalism as palliatives. When capitalism reached
its highest stage i.e., imperialism, resulting in mass upsurges and revolutions throughout the world,
these theories failed to cope with the situation
and proved to be obsolete. Thus the crisis in capitalism once again reflected in the field of administrative
theories. The theory like its material base
namely imperialism had reached a state of impasse.
Thus in the epoch of imperialism the 'theory of administration' had lost its relevance as an explanation
to social reality and proved its uselessness for
its criticism. This is because the theory had not contained any scientific validity to be a social theory. At
best it had certain methods and techniques
for dominating the working class in capitalist Society.
It is at this stage, the students of administrative theories have begun to search for a 'realistic' theory of
administration. Interestingly they found it
in Marxism and Leninism. Certain ideas of Marx on Paris Commune were taken to be his "theory of
administration in socialist society"57 ignoring its serious
repercussions for the Marxist problematic. Because the 'theory' and practice of administration has its
origin in its separation from political economy.
In other words, its 'strength' is in its apolitical pretence. If this is juxtaposed to Marxism the results
would be that either Marxism would become an
apolitical administrative theory which it is not, or administrative theory would become political theory.
The former results in distortion of Marxism and
the latter in the disappearance of the theory of administration.
The essence of the administrative theories can be said to be that there arise certain problems in
'administering' the people and that they can be solved
through certain techniques or using certain skills, no politics, no revolutions, no nonsense. Whereas the
tasks of the Paris Commune, wherein the students
of administration found 'realistic theory of organisation',
36
were not administrative i.e., technical or merely organisational but political and ideological, to
accomplish a classless society. The commune was a 'regime',
a social formation that was accomplished through a bloody revolution. What Marx had discovered in
Paris Commune was a revolutionary social formation, not
a theory of administration, not a technical replacement of a particular bureaucratic structure but an
ideologically revolutionary overthrow of an Oppressive
system as a whole, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
True, it entails certain principles of techniques for the accomplishment of socialist society. But this
accomplishment is political rather than technical—in
the sense that the principles and techniques may be changed according to the circumstances end
political needs of the time. It is only in this sense that
Lenin had commended Taylorism when he said: "The Taylor system, the last word of capitalism in this
respect, like all capitalist progress is a combination
of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of its greatest scientific achievements in
the field of analysing mechanical motions during
work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the working out of correct methods of
work, the introduction of the best systems of accounting
and control etc. The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of
science and technology in this field. The possibility
of building socialism will be determined precisely by our success in combining the Soviet power and the
Soviet organization of administration with the
modern achievements of capitalism". Though the administration and bureaucracies in the East European
countries are in many respects similar to those in
the west they are not "legal-rational type" of the capitalist west. Thus these measures have to be
treated as certain techniques developed in the capitalist
society. David Wells has rightly warned that one cannot pickout apparently common elements from
contrasting totalities and treat these elements as though
they were the same.58 Thus, these techniques cannot be theorised on their own without political reality
as their base.
It is not difficult to understand what happens if we make an attempt to pursue knowledge about social
reality from
37
Marxist point of view after conditioning our minds to think in terms of organisation, management, skills,
techniques bureaucracy, hierarchy, executive functions
and input-output theories which are as some one holds, the by products of "west oriented knowledge
industry".59 The philosophies of Marx and Lenin would
be reduced to alternative (no doubt 'radical') models of administration, in another context Nicos
Poulantzas has warned that "every notion or concept only
has meaning within a whole theoretical problematic that founds it; extracted from this problematic and
imported uncritically into Marxism, they have absolutely
uncontrollable effects. They always surface when least expected, and constantly risk clouding scientific
analysis. In the extreme case one can be unconsciously
and surreptitiously contaminated by the very epistomological principles of the adversary. This is more
serious, for it is no longer a question merely of
external notions imported into Marxism but of principles and risk vitiating the use made of Marxist
concepts themselves."80
If the dictatorship of the Proletariat (of the Paris Commune) is conceived as 'theory of administration'
with a view to salvaging administrative theory
from the present state of 'theorylessness', Marx would certainly be reduced to a mere technician or as
yet another 'administrative thinker'. To avoid this,
what one has to do is not simply to question the ideological premises of the 'theory of administration',
but the ideology of administration itself. And
what radical thinkers need to do is not to emancipate 'administrative theory' from its bourgeois
progenitors but to emancipate themselves from 'theory
of administration'. It is a welcome sign that the students of administration and organisation have begun
to question the ideological premises of the theory
which is nothing but capitalism and its exploitative class-rule.
Martin Nicolaus once said about the state of American conventional professional sociology, that it
appears to be caught in the pincers of history. The market
tides are turning against the product on which its prosperity chiefly depends... trapped between the
descending sky and the rising of the earth, abandoned
by angels and disciples at once.61 This is equally applicable to the 'theory of organisation'.
38
References
1. All the papers, except two, presented in a session on Administrative theory at the VIII Annual
Conference of the Indian Public Administration Association
held at Jaipur, Rajasthan between 2-4 April, 1983 had expressed their discontent about the western
theory of administration. They came to the conclusion
that the western theory of administration had failed to respond positively to the varied problems of the
Third World countries.
2. Satya Deva, "Theory of Administration", Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XIII, No. 48, Nov. 27,
1982, p. 115, D. Ravindra Prasad, et al (ed). Administrative
Thinkers, (Light and Life Publishers, New Delhi, 1980).
3. V. Subramaniam, "Western Marxist Approaches to Management and Organization Theory", Indian
Journal of Public Administration, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, 1982,
p. 764.
4. Ibid.
5. David Wells, Marxism and the Modern State: An Analysis of Fetishism in Capitalist Society, (Select
book Service Syndicate, New Delhi, 1983) p. 150; Harry
Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital; The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, (Social
Scientist Press, Trivandrum, 1979), pp.11-13.
6. Eugene Kamenka, and Martin Krygier, (ed). Bureaucracy: The Career of a Concept, (Edward Arnold,
London, 1979). Donald C. Hodges, The Bureaucratiza-tion
of Socialism, (University of Massachusetts Press, 1981); Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society,
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, (1969); Gibson
Burrell, and Gareth Morgan, Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, (Heinmann, London,
1979); W. Hyderaband "A Marxist Critic of Organization
Theory" in W. Even (ed), Frontiers in Organization and Management, (Praeger, New York, 1980); P. Nicos
Mouzelis, Organization and Bureaucracy, (Routledge
and Kegan Paul, London, 1975); Steward Clegg, and David Dunkerley, Organization, Class and Control,
(Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1980); Ernest Mandel,
"The Leninist Theory of Organization", in Robin Blackburn, (ed), Revolution and Class Struggle: A Reader
in Marxist Politics, (Fontana/Collins, Glasgow,
1977); Satya Deva, n. 2.
39
7. Satya Deva, n. 2.
8. Mandel, n. 6.
9. Nicos Poulantzas, "The Problems of Capitalist State," in Robin Blackburn, (ed). Ideology in Social
Science, (Fontana/Collins, Glasgow, 1977), p. 242.
10. Though Woodrow Wilson has been considered as 'father of Public Administration', his contribution
to the theory of administration appears to have been
very marginal. His contribution lies in the separation of administration from politics albeit with
vacillations. Before his seminal essay was published
in Political Science Quarterly in 1887 he prepared three drafts on the same topic. The first was entitled
"Notes on Administration", then he changed it
to "The Art of Government" and finally gave it the title "The Study of Administration". See D. Ravindra
Prasad, and P. Satya-narayana, "Woodrow Wilson,"
in Ravindra Prasad, n. 2, P. 2.
11. For a detailed history of development of capitalism, see: Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development
of Capitalism, (International Publishers, New York,
1978), and Dan Nabudere, The Political Economy of Imperialism, (Tanzania Publishing House, Dar es
Salam, 1977).
12. Nabudere, Ibid.
13. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. Ill, (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971), pp. 330-1.
14. Braverman, n. 5, pp. 270-3.
15. Paul A. Baran, and Paul M. Sweezy, "Economics of Two Worlds", in David Horowitz, (ed.), Marx and
Modern Economics, (Monthly Review Press, New York,
1968), p. 296.
16. Maurice Godelier, Rationality and Irrationality in Economics. (Monthly Review Press, New York,
1972), p. 36.
17. Studs Terkel, Working, (Pantheon Books, New York, 1972).
18. Braverman, n. 5, p. 66.
19. Ibid., p. 91.
20. Wells, n. 5, p. 35.
21. Richard B. Moris, (ed), Encyclopaedia of American History, (Harper and Row Publishers, New York,
1965). This book gives an excellent historical account
of the
40
development of industry and commerce and trade union movements in America since the beginning of
the 17th century in a chronological manner.
22. Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, (McGraw Hill Book Company, New York, 1960), p.
34.
23. See D.S. Pugh, et al. fed). Writers on Organisations, (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 95.
24. Wells, n. 5, pp. 58-9.
25. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978), p. 172.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Chester I. Barnard, Organisation and Management, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.,
1948), p. 72.
29. Ibid., p. 82.
30. Ibid., p. 58.
31. Martin Albrow, Bureaucracy, (Macmillan London, 1979), pp. 37-42.
32. Max Weber, The Methodology of Social Sciences, (The Free Press, New York, 1968).
33. After the failure of 1848 German revolution, neither the proletariat was strong enough to take over
the political power in Germany nor the bourgeoisie.
This vacuum was filled by the strong feudal Prussian junker class as opposed to the interests of both the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The German bourgeoisie
neither supported the proletariat nor could put up a strong opposition to the Prussian military
dictatorship. Belonging to bourgeoisie, Weber's 'Social
Science' is neither feudal nor proletarian. And interestingly contained the qualities of the both. At the
best it is zunus-like scientific theology: at
the very least, ideology of imperialism.
34. Ibid.
35. Julien Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber, (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 130.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Max Weber, n. 32, pp. 90-3.
39. Ibid.
41
40. Quoted in Anthony Giddens, Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber, (Macmillan,
London, 1972), p. 7.
41. Martin Nicolaus, "The Professional Organization of Sociology; A View from Below", in Blackburn, n. 9,
p. 48.
42. Freund n. 35, Albrow, n. 31. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Trans), A.M.
Henderson, and Talcott, Parsons (The Free Press, New
York, 1968); Weber, On Law in Economy and Society, (Trans), Edward Shils and Max Rheinstein, Simon
and Schuster, (Rockfeller Center, New York, 1967); Weber,
n. 32.
43. Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery
Through Barbarism to Civilization, (Macmillan, London.,
1877).
44. Quoted by Frederick Engels, "The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State", in Marx and
Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, (Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1977), p. 259.
45. Ibid., p. 267.
46. Ibid,
47. Samir Amin, Unequal Development, (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1979), p. 10.
48. Freund, n. 35, p. 112-3.
49. E.H. Carr, What is History? (Penguin, 1982), pp. 31-2.
50. Godelier, n. 16, op. cit.
51. Nicolaus, "The Professional Organization of Sociology; A View from Below," in Blackburn, n. 9, pp.
47-8.
52. Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behaviour, (Free Press, New York, 1957), p. 56.
53. Ibid., p. 118, emphasis added.
54. Baran and Sweezy, n. 15, p. 298.
55. Quoted in Satya Deva, n. 5.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Wells, n. 5.
59. Satya Deva, n. 5, p. 1336.
60. Poulantzas, n. 9, pp. 241-2.
61. Nicolaus, n. 41, p. 59.
42
3 A CRITICAL EMPIRICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC POLICY
John Forester
Introduction
This essay will argue that Habermas' critical theory suggests a powerful structural and
phenomenological framework for policy research, analysis, and practical
criticism. The theory provides a basis for both the empirical and normative assessment of "policy
implications," or, in another way of putting it, for
the analysis and formulation of "what is to be done" 1 The argument proceeds in five steps.
First in a highly abbreviated manner, we set out the basic conceptual framework of Habermas' recent
work, focusing structurally upon his reconstruction
of historical materialism and phenomenologically upon his theory of communicative action - Second, we
note the complementarity and potential practical
integration of Habermas's structural and action theories This leads us to specify in a preliminary manner
the important notion of the "communicative infrastructure"
of social action and of societal reproduction (production and reproduction) more generally. Third, we
consider the historical constitution, if not the
genesis, of policy "problems" as selectively established claims in the structural dimensions of social
action: claims regarding facts, normative legitimacy,
actors'interests and intentions and languages of attention. Fourth we suggest that policy development
and implementation
43
can be understood systematically to be a process of the modification of the communicative
infrastructure of society. Thus, it is a process altering the
institutional elements that mediate between (and lead us to the analysis of) structural developments of
societal learning and social interactions shaping
immediate personal experience. Here we will consider the recent cutbacks of the Environmental
Protection Agency to illustrate the argument. Fifth, and
finally, the analysis of blockages and restrictions to social learning and citizens' recourse to discourses
suggests those empirical and normative issues
of the assessment of legitimacy and domination so central to a critical theory of public policy.3
I. Historical-Structural and Action Theories: Habermas's Structural Phenomenology
Two of Habermas's central arguments provide the foundations for a critical theory of public policy
analysis: his reconstruction of historical materialism
as an evolutionary process of social learning and his reconstruction of speech act theory and
intersubjective understanding as a theory of claims-making
communicative action. Consider each briefly in turn.
Habermas argues that Marx the concrete historical analyst always distinguished more carefully than
Marx the meta-theoretician between the work of production
oriented to the transformation of material reality and the social interactions of men and women
oriented to the constitution and reproduction of their
social relations. Habermas attempts to clarify the distinction here between work and interaction, or as
he also puts it, between instrumental or purposive-rational
action and communicative action or symbolic interaction. Albrecht Wellmer summarizes,
"Habermas's reformulation of the basic assumptions of historical materialism . . . introduces a
categorical distinction into the theory of historical materialism
which Marx, in his material analysis, had always implicitly presupposed. Marx distinguishes between two
different dimensions in which the self-formation
of the
44
human species takes place: that of a cumulative process of technological development (forces of
production, labour-processes), and that of an emancipatory
process of critique and class struggle (relations of production). What Habermas shows is that this
categorical distinction can be developed consistently
and with all its epistemological implications only if it is reformulated on a higher level of abstraction as
that between "instrumental" or "purposive-rational"
action on the one hand, and "communicative" action on the other .... Only if we make this distinction, is
it possible, according to Habermas, to reconstruct
the independent historical processes of technological and institutional development in a way which
would not blur the differences between technical progress
and political emancipation as well as those between science and critique."4
Habermas writes,
"The categorical distinction between purposive-rational and communicative action thus permits us to
separate the aspects under which action can be rationalized.
As learning processes that place not only in the dimension of objectivating thought but also in the
dimension of moral-practical insight, the rationalization
of action is deposited not only in forces of production, but also — mediated through the dynamics of
social movements— in forms of social integration."5
In Habermas' reconstruction of historical materialism societal development and social learning take
place in two dialectically autonomous but interdependent
dimensions, then: the productive forces of society develop with the advancement of science and
technology within a given form of social organization, productive
relations develop at a given level of scientific-technological capacity reflecting (if not increasing)
substantive democratization. More advanced technology,
however, hardly guarantees progress toward greater political freedom. Habermas thus works to
reformulate a dialectic of production and reproduction, of
forces and relations of production, by clarifying the types of action
45
characteristic of each moment of this dialectic and assessing the corresponding development or
rationalization of each type of action.
The distinction between purposive-rational and communicative action can serve to clarify the
relationship of social action, practice and praxis, to the
development of the forces and relations of production and their corresponding reinter-pretation in
social learning processes. Habermas attempts to justify
the analysis of these two historical-structural dimensions through his analysis of the structure of
communicative action itself, particularly in his essay,
"What is Universal Pragmatics."6 Making a claim with far reaching consequences, Habermas suggests
that social actions generally can be understood to be
derivatives of a paradigmatic type of communicative action oriented to reaching understanding. Raising
four fundamental validity claims, such communicative
action has a double structure: content is referred to, and normative social relations are established in
every act of speech. More precisely,
"In action oriented to reaching understanding, validity claims are "always already" implicitly raised.
These universal claims (to the comprehensibility
of . the symbolic expression, the truth of the propositional content, the truthfulness of the intentional
expression, and the Tightness of the speech act
with respect to existing norms and values) are set in the general structures of possible
communication."8
Habermas is arguing in effect that these reciprocal validity claims provide the basis that makes it
possible for us to understand one another—or for us
to check our misunderstandings or doubts—at all in the first place.
In addition, Habermas argues that part or parcel of the claims-making character of communicative
action oriented to reaching understanding is the practical
but counterfactual anticipation that our claims could in principle be established through theoretical and
practical discourses—given the counterfactual
(i.e., in principle) conditions in which only the
46
force of the better argument prevailed. When for example, we claim that particular industrial chemical
wastes can cause liver or neurological damage (a
truth claim) or that polluting industries should be held responsible for improperly disposed-of wastes (a
legitimacy claim), we do not mean either that
we simply feel this way, nor that with sufficient coercion we could convince others to agree. Rather we
mean quite the opposite: that if it were possible
for the affected public to enter theoretical and practical discourses, to gather evidence and appropriate
arguments pro and con without coercion or domination,
then they would acknowledge the validity of our claims.9 That is an inherent part of what we mean,
Habermas suggests, when we claim a proposition to be
true or a legitimacy claim to be right. The rational foundation of the claims made in communicative
action, then, is to be found in the mutual anticipation
of possible checking, of the in-principle conditions of discourse in which claims could be redeemed or
rejected.
Notice that the double structure of speech and communicative action suggested here dovetails
systematically with the double structure of social evolution
and historical materialism, the dialectic of rationalization of forces and relations of production. The
development of productive forces via instrumental
and strategic actions depends upon scientific and technological knowledge; this is the knowledge
generated as the content claims, propositional truth claims,
are tested and established.10 The development of productive relations via symbolic interaction and
communicative action depends upon the establishment
of the relationship claims, the legitimacy accorded and trust granted as Tightness and truthfulness
claims are established in practice.11 Habermas argues,
then, that these very foundations of speech and sense-making, involving the anticipation of theoretical
and practical discourses, make possible the basis
for actual historical learning in the dimensions of productive forces and productive relations. He writes.
"The development of the productive forces depends on the application of technically useful knowledge;
and the
47
basic institutions of a society embody moral-practical knowledge. Progress in these two dimensions is
measured against the two universal validity claims
we also use to measure the progress of empirical knowledge and of moral-practical insight, namely, the
truth of propositions and the Tightness of norms.
I would like, therefore, to defend the thesis that the criteria of social progress singled out by historical
materialism as the development of productive
forces and the maturity of forms of social intercourse can be systematically justified."12
Habermas attempts then to combine systematically a structural theory of societal development
(historical materialism) with an account of communicative action
(the basis for a theory of action). The structural theory reconstructs Marx's historical materialism to
identify a dialectic of social learning in two
dimensions: that of productive forces and that of productive relations. The action theory reconstructs
ordinary communicative action to identify a double
structure of practical claims-making in two dimensions: that of content claims (of propositional truth
and linguistic clarity) and that of relationship
claims (of normative Tightness and subjective truthfulness). In doing so, Habermas provides us with the
beginning of a structural phenomenology, a preliminary
research framework that enables us to assess policy problems both structurally and
phenomenologically. We attempt to explore this in the following sections.13
II. The Policy Setting: The Communicative Infrastructure of Society
A critical theory of policy analysis must locate concrete policy initiatives, policy development, and
implementation in the framework of social learning
and social action that we have sketched above. We might expect each policy to alter in its own way the
structural processes of social learning on the one
hand and the character of social action and interaction on the other. Yet where in Habermas's account
of structure and action are we to locate and assess
the organizational and institutional forms of policies manifest as
48
reductions in federal spending, alterations in social policy entitlements, subsidies for housing, price
supports, and so on?
Conspicuously lacking in Habermas's work has been an account of those institutional and organizational
forms which mediate between the analytic levels of
social system and social action: e.g., factories, hospitals, schools, unions, churches, firms and companies,
cultural and ethnic associations, and the
like. Yet as I have argued elsewhere, such an account of intermediate social organization might be
developed straightforwardly from Habermas's structural
and action theories.14 Methodologically' as suggested above, this account becomes a structural
phenomenology. It is structural insofar as it attends to
the political-economic, systematic staging and framing of social action; it is a phenomenology insofar as
it attends to the concrete social interactions
(promises, threats, agreements, deals, conflicts) that are so staged.
For the analysis of concrete policies, then, we need an account of what we may call the "mediating
institutions", the elements of the institutional, communicative
or social infrastructure, that connect actions to structures and vice versa, and that a given policy may
alter, thus altering both (macro) systemic relations
and (micro) social interactions. Working between Habermas's account of historical materialism (societal
production and reproduction, learning in two dimensions),
on one hand, and social action as a derivative of claims-making communicative action on the other
hand, then, we must work to fill in the centre of Figure
I.15
If we ask, now, what sorts of mediating organizations support, frame, or generate each type of action
and serve to rationalize those actions for systemic
ends and the functions of production and reproduction, we can suggest several rough and tentative
answers as sketched in Figure II. Consider briefly each
"action type" in turn.
In the activity of work itself, the knowledge and control of means-ends strategies is distinctive (but of
course not sufficient), whether in a chemical
manufacturing process or on an integrated assembly line. Organizational forms such as laboratories,
research firms, engineering departments strategic
49
FIGURE I
table with 3 columns and 7 rows
Developing Structural Relations
Mediating Institutions
Social Action Types (Claim Stressed)
(A) Habermas's "System" or Marx's Forces of Production: Instrumental Rationalization and
Technological-Scientific Learning.
(A) Work: Purposive Rational Action
(i) Development of Technical - Strategic and Administrative knowledge
?
(i) Means-ends and Strategic truth claims (reproducing knowledge and belief
(ii) Capacity to attend to nature and material reality
?
(ii) Attention-focusing comprehensibility claims (reproducing attention and investment
(B) Habermas's "Lifeworld" or Marx's Relations of Production Practical-Communicative Rationalization
and Legal-Moral Institutional Learning
(B) Interaction: Communicative Action
(iii) Establishment of institutional normative relations free from domination
?
(iii) Rightness of Legitimacy claims: (reproducing consent and deference)
(iv) Capacity for social cooperation, respect, and solidarity
?
(iv) Truthfulness or Expressive claims (reproducing trust and reliability)
table end
50
administrative and management units, and certain information based services provide the setting for
individuals' actions that generate factual knowledge
or formulate means-ends strategies and thus contribute to advances in the general forces of production.
Consider here, for example, recent corporate-university
joint research ventures through which various corporations have acted to firm up the infrastructure for
their own efforts to advance productive know-how
and technologies of production.17
In parallel fashion, the social capacity to pay attention to needs finds organizational form largely in the
political-economy.18 Financial and economic
institutions—banks and Wall Street brokerages, the Office of Management and Budget and the Federal
Reserve Bank, corporations, firms, factories, and workplaces,
provide the organizational settings in which decisions about the direction and formulation of particular
investments are made and selective needs are consequently
addressed. Thus capital flight (from Northeast to Southwest or abroad), or concessions made to forestall
such flight, mediates between and immediately
threatens both regional and personal budgets, the basic abilities of regions and individuals to attend to
their needs.
The organization of social relations depends upon both the institutionalization of norms and the social
capacity for mutual recognition and cooperation.
The formal institutionalization of norms occurs typically through mediating organizational forms such as
courts, legislatures, "boards of supervisors"
and councils (at town, city, county, state, and national levels), and agencies of the state (from federal
agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service
and the Food and Drug Administration to local welfare and unemployment offices, and the police). Here
are the organizational settings in which rules and
norms, standards and obligations, rights and entitlements may be proposed, at times contested,
established, enforced, and later reformulated. Thus, the
Reagan Administration's social policy legislation is attacked not only for its budgetary implications and
its neglect of social needs, but also because
it subverts a normative framework of rights, entitlements and legal protections thought by many to be
already too weak
51
and business-oriented, questions of bureaucratic size, efficiency and debt notwithstanding.
Finally, then, the social basis for the mutual recognition of intentions exists in the routinized patterns of
social interaction and ritual performances
that we call "organizations," "programmes", and "associations". For as we are able to evaluate one
anothers' participation as a responsible (or lax, or
playful, or serious, or scheming) member of a given organization (a church congregation, a rotary club, a
political party, a union, a cultural association,
and so on), so are we able to judge the consistency of what the other person says and what they
subsequently do. In this way, we are able— via the evaluation
of mutual participation in routinized, ritual-structured social organization—to gauge one anothers'
truthful intentions and honest expressions of self.
In this way, of course, social systems reproduce their social identities: consider simply the socializing
functions, for participants and for observers,
of the various cultural, ethnic and national rituals of dress, speech, cuisine, humour, music and habit,
whether rooted in dance, clan or text.
Figure II then, presents four "families" of institutions and organizational forms that mediate between
specific practical action claims and structural processes
of societal development and learning. The specific historical identification of more and less dominant,
more and less significant, institutions will depend,
of course, upon the specific social setting to be investigated. While "social indicators" reflecting these
dimensions are suggested tentatively below,
further conceptual analysis of the character of the "communicative infrastructure" mediating social
action and social structure is all too obviously necessary.19
These mediating or infrastructural institutions produce conventional results, of course: (i) techniques,
work strategies and propositional, factual, knowledge
(beliefs), (ii) selective attention and investment (patterns of attention); (iii) patterns of consent and
deference (political allegiance); and (iv) patterns
of trust and mutual recognition, (patterns of solidarity). When truth claims are established by these
institutions, factual beliefs and technical knowledge
are generated. When
52
comprehensibility or attention-focusing claims are established —through well formed verbal linguistic
utterances or through conventional, non-verbal economic
tokens (value in the form of capital—then citizens' attention (and possibly labor) is selectively addressed
to particular concerns and needs. When legitimacy
claims are established by various normative institutions, citizens' consent and allegiance are thus
modified. And when expressive and truthfulness claims
are given pattern and established through any of the various social rituals structuring routinized
organizational performances, so then are social recognition
and trust engendered.
FIGURE II
table with 2 columns and 5 rows
Institutional: Elements
Mediating
Administrative, technological and scientific organizations, training programmes, information services,
technical control departments, (representing strategies,
means, and findings)
a. Production via;
(i) work techniques
Financial-economic organisations; corporations, banks, firms, factories, workplaces; (formulating capital
accumulation and investment)
(i) capacity to invest attention
Legal regulatory agencies; Boards of Directors (establishing norms and regulations)
b. Reproduction via:
(i) action norms
Social-moral organizations: cultural and ethnic associations, churches, service programmes, family
structures, special interest organizations, unions (identifying
intentions via organizational performances)
(ii) actor's intentions
table end
53
Yet each of these mediating institutions may develop unevenly, in a potentially contested, contingent
and contradictory manner.20 Systemic pressures push
in the direction of satisfying the functional requirements of production and reproduction: so
corporations buy university research and laboratories, train
their requisite labour force, and so on. Yet popular and oppositional pressures may push in other
directions: populist and trade union groups organize
for their own particularistic causes: class-conscious union organisations attempt to build a powerful
labour movement: cultural and ethnic groups of all
types reaffirm their identities and perhaps occasionally distract their members from the conventional
rewards of the larger political-economy. Variably
"relatively autonomous" historically, these mediating institutions may be contested, challenged, or
alternatively accepted as proper integrating mechanisms
for the larger society.
Policy implementation, then, may be understood not to alter these mediating or infrastructural
institutions "from the outside" as it were, but rather to
alter them by taking concrete shape, form and substance, within them; creating or destroying
specialized budgets (attention), jobs and programmes (organization),
ragulations and enforcement agencies (legal-regulatory presence), and information and innovation
sources (scientific results, technological capacity, and
administrative strategies).1 Any particular policy proposal, then may promise to influence these
institutions so that they may either enable or disable,
empower or dis-empower, specific possibilities of popular political debate and mobilization, of popular
challenge or traditional class struggle. Labour
policies may influence unions to raise or to suppress claims upon corporate power (suppressing them
through the current Workers Compensation System, for
example22). Court decisions or legislation may influence state agencies to grant or restrict entitlements,
services, and information (for example to implement
or subvert occupational health and safety "right to know" legislation). Policy changes may directly affect
research, field inspections and documentation
that may promote public awareness and
54
access to information (the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, for example) or,
alternatively, work as an impediment to public learning.
As these mediating institutions enable or stymie public political discourse, politicization, and processes
of learning, so then is legitimate public authority
itself deprived of its true possible mandates. As specific mediating institutions block citizens' recourse to
discourse, so do they reproduce relations
of power but not authority. And so do they then reproduce domination and only pale legitimating
semblance of democratic political institutions and democratic
political life. By examining specifically the policy-influenced institutional-infra-structural reproduction of
social relations of belief, consent, trust,
and attention, and by then assessing the precarious existence of the legitimating conditions of political
discourse, a critical theory of policy analysis
calls our attention to the concrete organizational processes of the perpetuation of-or the opposition
to—illegitimate power and political domination.23
If it is plausible, given the discussion above, that the families of concrete social institutions and
organizations suggested by Figure II mediate between
structural developments and social interactions, a critical theoretical account of public policy would then
lead policy analysts to ask the following research
questions in detail: How does the passage and implementation of a particular policy immediately alter,
reproduce, replace, or create anew elements of these
mediating institutions and organizations? How, that is, does the policy being assessed alter the
"communicative infrastructure" of societal production
and reproduction, as sketched in Figure II (mediating the contents mapped in Figure I)? We turn to these
questions in Section IV. Before that, however,
we turn to the problem of the context-dependency, the historical constitution, of policy "problems"
themselves.
If the dialectic between the forces and relations of production may be understood as the
interdependence of two historical learning processes, one technological-scientific-strategic
and one institutional-legal-moral, then any concrete policy problem might be located in that context. A
policy
55
"problem" would thus reflect and be situated not only in a certain stage of technological, organizational,
and industrial development, but also in a particular
stage of relations of control, authority, legitimacy, and cooperation. The "given" state of "the problem,"
then, might be understood through an analysis
of historical development in both of these dimensions: through industrial-organizational innovation,
testing, and implementation no less than through institutional
(legal and moral) developments mediated by political and social movements. At any given time, though,
the possibility of policy development is likely to
depend not only upon a given social movement, but also upon the particular "background consenses"
that support or obstruct efforts to alter the status
quo in either dimension of social learning, that of "system" (productive forces) or "life-world"
(productive relations), as Habermas describes these more
recently."1 We consider the importance of these practical background consenses in the next section.
III. Background Consenses: The Problem "Context" Facing Social Movements
We have suggested that public policies may be initially assessed by examining their alteration of the
"communicative infrastructure" of institutions mediating
between structural processes of social learning and the practical, situated claims-making processes of
social interaction. We can now consider briefly
the related issue of the constitution and social context of policy "problems" themselves. If a "policy
problem" is not to be seen as a brute datum, it
might alternatively be considered as an historical product of a vast variety of claims-making activities.
A "problem" is minimally a claim that something is not right. Indeed, "policy problems" are claims about
facts that matter, about "facts" and "values":
claims both about the objective historical and physical world and claims about social norms, about right
and wrong, just and unjust, legitimate and illegitimate.
More precisely, if we are to understand a "policy problem" presented to us, we will need to assess the
four communicative
56
claims that are likely to constitute its presentation: (1) the truth claims representing objective states of
affairs ("these chemicals really do contain
kepone"); (2) the rightness claims prescribing legal-moral norms appropriate to the case ("these
substances should be banned from industrial use!"); 3)
the expressive claims indicating the intentions and perceived interests of affected parties ("the
manufacturer assures us that the chemicals are safe,
not to 'worry' "); and (4) the comprehensibility-attention-directing claims formulating the framework in
which "the problem" is to be understood in the
first place ("the issue should be seen as one of 'rights' not 'dollars' ").
Yet as we pursue such an investigation beyond the most simple preliminary problem-statement, we
come to realize that problem-statements abound, and indeed,
that they conflict with one another. We soon discover that any concrete policy "problem" is in fact many
problems, and "the problem" can be seen as an
historically constituted set of claims, some contradicting one another, in the four dimensions of
communicative interaction which make social understanding
possible. To understand the dimensions of a particular policy "problem," then we need to assess
historically the following four domains of policy-relevant
claims:
1. claims established or presented in the cognitive domain of facts through studies, reports, analyses,
tests, findings, investigations, testimony, research,
historical studies, and objective (vs. arbitrary, biased, whimsical—not vs. subjective) scientific studies
and inquiries;
2. claims established or presented in the interactive domain of normative, authority and power,
relations through corporate policy decisions, legal decisions,
precedents, cultural and social norms, legislation, regulations, taboos, formal and informal sanctions,
and other relations of perceived authority;
3. claims established or presented in the moral domain of actors' expressions of interests and intentions
through expressed desires and needs, conflict
and cooperation, wishes and preferences, demands and challenges, actions of solidarity and opposition;
and
57
4. claims established and presented in the communicative-linguistic domain of shared meaning-systems,
verbal (via words) or non-verbal (via meaningful tokens
of behaviour, e.g., gestures or money), and communicative competence, through the ability to call
attention to the issues at hand through language use,
symbolic presentations (art and music), or investment of resources (economic capital as conventional,
congealed attention).
As we can identify the particular claims that have actually been established (among different classes,
groups, organizational members, or others) in these
dimensions, so can we identify the actual historical background consenses existing that provide the
various social and ideological contexts immediately
relevant to the issue at hand. Recognizing that conflicting epidemiological studies have been publicized
regarding the effects of certain workplace chemicals
for example, we might expect popular understanding of the alleged occupational health and safety
"problem" to be less unified (hegemonic) than if all of
the publicized epidemiological reports were in agreement with one another. Recognizing that low
income communities and neighbourhoods have long been threatened
by so-called "urban renewal" efforts identified with local planning and redevelopment agencies, we
might well expect residents of those communities to
view current proposals by planners and city officials with substantial suspicion, distrust, and skepticism,
if not outright hostility. Such sentiments
simply represent a significant element of the practical background consensus likely to be present in
many neighbourhoods whose residents have rightly wondered
if "urban renewal" did not often mean "urban removal." Any planner, politician, or community organizer
who does not anticipate the existence of such a
background consensus is hardly likely to be trusted, or seen as an ally of these neighbourhoods.
Two points seem important here. First, taken historically, particular background consenses may provide
the practical social context for the on-going struggles
of diverse social
58
movements pressing demands or programmes for policy changes—whether for the development of a
local health-clinic or a national health service, the protection
of social security or social service benefits, reductions in defence expenditures, or the end to nuclear
power plant construction. Second, and as a consequence,
the reproduction of these background consenses is likely to be essential to the maintenance of
established relations of power and to the depoliticization,
the discouragement of politi al discourse, necessary for such maintenance. Consider briefly, then, each
of these points in turn.
Social Movements, Background Consenses and Contra-Dictions
The practical work of maintaining, organizing, and advancing social movements-here including labour,
environmental, ethnic, and feminist organizing, for
example—is fundamentally politically oriented social action. As social action, such practical work
addresses others: seeking to build a membership, to
educate a base of supporters, to articulate a sense of possibility of a better life, to reveal relations of
control that function systematically to repress,
exploit, or deprive vast numbers of people of what might otherwise be theirs—the fruits of their labour,
a clean and healthy environment, relations of
political-economic and sexual equality, and so forth.
The daily work of social movements, then, may characteristically take the form not only of strategic and
instrumental action but of communicative action
and interaction as well. Serious claims need to be made about how the world factually is and could be,
about rights and injustice, fairness and exploitation,
about interests and intentions, feelings and perceptions. And finally all those claims are made in a
variety of linguistic modes running from the most
informal and colloquial to the most formal legal and contract language.
Background consenses do not usually reflect conditions of equality of skill, interest, status, power,
information or knowledge. At any given time, instead,
these background consenses are constituted by established political, social, and
59
cultural institutions and the conflicting relations of power and influence that these institutions manifest.
These established relations of power—the organization
of precedent, symbolic resources, capital, legitimacy and status—may of course be invoked in many
ways, and challengers as a result can then be made to
seem to be nay-sayers, complainers, troublemakers, opportunists, heretics, traitors, agitators, crazies,
"wierdos," the simply "unreasonable", and so on.
In such cases, power is reproduced not simply through "talk" and simple claims about how things are.
Instead, both factual and normative claims may be established,
shaping belief and political consent, through the manipulation of the background consensus making any
shared public understanding of a "problem" possible
in the first place.
Yet all of these practical claims made by members of social movements depend upon a context of
already established claims, a partial "background consensus,"
"ready" for their acceptance. This is why public rhetoric and legitimating arguments are so essential to
the maintenance of power: they work not only to
establish factual claims ("these chemicals are harmless!"), but also, legitimacy claims ("it's only right that
each job should have some risks attached
to it; if a worker doesn't like it, he or she's "free" (sic) to go somewhere else . . ."), and claims of
trustworthiness (thus corporations seek to assure
the public of their concern with safety by claiming that there are more hazards in an ordinary kitchen
than in their workplaces!). The claims of social
movements exist in a context of conflict.25 And this conflict exists not only in political-economic
structure and actions of challenge and opposition,
but in the very background consensus of popular beliefs, senses of legitimacy and rightness, perceived
interest, and conscious needs. The contradictions
between the privatized control of production and the social needs of reproduction are reproduced,
manifest, and established as conflicting practical claims:
literally contra-dictions.26
Background Consensus and the Maintenance of Power
How, though, are these contra-dictions established and "stabilized"? The reproduction of power works
not only
60
through practical claims having content, but through claims that establish and reproduce contexts of
trust and authority. The appeal to understand a health
problem in a particular framework (whether that of cost-benefit analysis or that of a natural "right" to
health) is an action attempting to invoke a legitimate
context of understanding and consideration, a background consensus in which many further corollary
propositions may then be considered as well. Notice
however, that if the listener equivocates or begins to doubt (is this job safe? is this, what you, the state
health official, are telling me about this
dump site, really true?), the speaker may act to reinforce the shaky background consensus by invoking
previously implicit but potentially binding norms:
e.g. (1) "if you want to keep this job, don't raise a fuss"—a latent norm tacitly regulating the actions of
many wage-labourers; or (2) I've got the specialized
training, and I've seen the lab results and the studies; what do you know?"—a claim to normative status
differences and thus the consent accruing conventionally
to those with expert competence.47
Where conditions of democratic discourse and cooperative social organization do not exist those
already in positions of power may make practical claims
and offers about factual conditions, normative Tightness, social interests, and particular needs that may
be conventionally established but simultaneously
removed from criticism—by invoking precedent, incentives, sanctions, exclusion, ostracization, stigma,
threat, and so forth. Under such conditions, popular
beliefs, consent, trust and attention are appropriated through conditions of social interaction—
influenced by policy initiatives—that discourage critical
discourses.28 As Pynchon put it. "If you can get them asking the wrong questions, you won't have to
worry about the answers . . ." The addressees of a
critical policy analysis, then, may be all those so "taken for a ride," so made the objects of political claims
without recourse to collective and shared
criticism. Thus it is cognition, political allegiance, social solidarity, and attention and concern that are
appropriated when a background consensus is
reproduced by policy implementation in a communicative infrastructure, blocking, thwarting,
restricting,' and constraining the possibilities,
61
the actual avenues, of critical scientific and political discourses.
IV. Dimensions of Critical Policy Analysis
What is the point, then? Is it just a pathetically weak claim that a public policy can be understood to
alter elements of the communicative infrastructure
of the broader society into which it is introduced? Taken by itself, that claim might indeed be virtually
trivial, but the consequences for the analysis
of changes in structures of social learning and patterns of social action thus made possible are
potentially substantial. The point of a critical theory
of public policy is not to classify each policy proposal into one of two groups, labelled with the summary
judgements/'legitimate" or "illegitimate." Rather,
a critical theory of public policy ought to deliver upon the promise of an historically concrete structural
phenomenology, showing us how particular policies
promise to alter or "impact": 1) the structural conditions of social action and learning, in the dimensions
of the rationalization of productive forces
and the rationalization of legal-moral and institutional relations: 2) the actual social interactions and
lived experiences of affected persons, the concrete
policy-influenced management and reproduction of citizens' knowledge and beliefs, allegiance and
consent, trust and solidarity, attention and concern:
and (3) then too, the conditions of citizens' recourse to theoretical and practical discourses, the public
capacity to challenge, check, question, and
non-coercively reestablish claims of truth and justice.
To suggest how such a critical, structural phenomenology of public policy might proceed, we first briefly
suggest broad families of the relevant social
indicators by which policy alterations of the communicative infrastructure (Figure II) may be gauged.
Second, we consider as an example of a significant
policy change the recent Environmental Protection Agency budget reductions as they "impact" the
communicative infrastructure of society and thus too the
processes of societal learning and social interaction. (Figure II). In the next section, then we examine the
most difficult problem to which a critical
theory of public policy leads: the assessment of citizens'
62
recourse to scientific and political discourses—and the conditions of power and systematic distortions
that influence that effective recourse and voice.
Families of Measures and Social Indicators
If it is plausible that policy implementation alters the communicative infrastructure, we should be able
to identify groups of empirically sensitive measures
and "social indicators" of changes in each of the four infrastructural dimensions of Figure II.
Changes in those institutions mediating claims of attention will be indicated by shifts in personnel and
budgets, resource shifts, allocations of funds,
and capital shifts more generally, where capital is thus understood here as a capacity to devote
attention. Changes in those institutions mediating claims
of intentions (subjective expressions of self, desire, will, and interest) may be indicated by shifts in
organizational size, membership, structure (role
assignment, membership developments), and participation rates. Changes in those institutions
mediating claims of legitimacy and rightness will be indicated
by shifts in the scope, content, and, number of regulations, rules, directives and legal mandates,
informal norms, entitlements, eligibility requirements,
stipulations, contracts, contract conditions, and so forth. And changes in those institutions that mediate
claims of facts and strategic means-ends effectiveness
will be indicated by shifts in the scope, content and number of research studies, experiments,
technological innovations, social technologies (administrative
and management systems), market and client analyses, published reports and documents, official
findings and results. Such dimensions of the mediating institutions,
then suggest families of measures and indicators that may be monitored and assessed as a policy is
implemented: as health services are cutback or extended,
as environmental regulations are changed, or (to consider de facto policies not issued by the state) as
industry and labour negotiate "give-backs" as Ford
and the auto workers recently have done. Significantly, a change in a budget—for community health
centres or for a
63
wage-benefit package—promises secondary effects in the other three infrastructural dimensions
mediating between social action and social reproduction and
production.
Policy Illustration: EPA Budget Reductions
Consider briefly the Reagan Administration's cuts to the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Proposing a budget reduced from $ 1.36 billion when
she took office to $ 961 million for the coming fiscal year, 1982-83. EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch's
agenda will of course not simply mean that some
people earn less income (perhaps the narrowest economic view), but that profound changes were likely
to occur in the practical social infrastructure that
the everyday work of this agency's staff reproduced, regulated, investigated and nurtured. How did the
budget cuts, then, alter each of the dimensions
of that infrastructure discussed above and indicated in Figure II ?
In the arena of legal regulatory effects, of course, the budget cuts were likely to lead to rollbacks of
regulations and standards, and more certainly still,
to reductions of enforcement activities. Regulations were likely to be eliminated in the name of
overstringency. Enforcement judgments (fines, suits, or
permit restrictions) were likely to dwindle. As Time reported:
"Enforcement procedures have been disrupted . . . The Washington enforcement staff was dispersed
into four unconnected subdivisions, Field offices have
been told to check with EPA headquarters before pursuing cases against alleged corporate violations of
pollution laws. As a result, the number of violations
referred for prosecution has dropped from 230 to just 42 in nearly eight months since (EPA
administrator) Gorsuch took office." {Time, 1. 18.82)
The staff of the EPA attempted to justify this weakening of regulatory effort by arguing that regulations
inherited from the previous administration were
unworkable: too cumbersome, complex, ambitious, and inflexible. While massive
64
evidence of past EPA effectiveness exists, such appeals nevertheless were made to legitimate present
agency actions: to legitimate these cutbacks and so
obtain broad-based public consent. Whether this attempt to manage the consent of a public that may
well know better succeeds remains of course to be seen.
In the arena of changes in social organization, the budget reductions will lead to literal reorganization if
not sheer EPA disorganization. Central and
field office staff are being cut: organizational working relations with state agencies are more ambiguous
than ever. Such reorganization has already meant
massive turnover and layoff for employees. Russell E. Train, EPA administrator under the Nixon and Ford
administrations, wrote of these changes:
"If Gorsuch is allowed to carry out plans that have been circulating within the agency for some time, by
this coming June—one year and five months after
the Reagan Administration took office—80 per cent of EPA's headquarters staff will have quit or been
fired, demoted, or downgraded.
It is hard to imagine any business manager consciously undertaking such a personnel policy unless its
purpose was to destroy the enterprise. Predictably,
the result at EPA has been and will continue to be demoralization and institutional paralysis. Attrition
within the agency is running at an extraordinary
2.7 per cent per month or 32 per cent a year." (The Washington Post, February 2, 1982).
In addition, such organizational changes became public promises not only of diminished activity but of
diminished regulatory concern, attitude and intent;
promises of reduced regulatory pressure by the agency. And thus the expectations of many others may
be altered; state and city official worried that they
may be left with regulatory responsibilities without the funds to carry them out; politicians worried that
a gutted EPA may represent a political liability
in future elections; environmentalists worried that air and water quality will suffer, that toxic waste will
poison the physical and natural environment
65
and human lives; even business may well be worried. Train suggests, about a possible political backlash.
Policy changes alter social expectations. Consider
the somewhat ironic remark of Dennis Abrams, Deputy Attorney General of the State of West Virginia,
as he commented on the EPA budget reductions,
"Any cutback in EPA as a viable organization hurts us. Threatening EPA lawsuits is how we mostly get
voluntary compliance. We don't have the resources to
conduct special investigations. Our hands are totally tied." (National Journal, January 30, 1982, 185).
In these organizational changes, then, not only jobs and morale, but stable and trusted relationships as
well are lost, and new ones are yet to replace
the old. Businesses no less than potentially affected residents near toxic waste dumps may find the
intent of state, local, and federal regulatory organizations
unclear, shifting, and ambiguous, though businesses may well be expected to cope with these
uncertainties of trusted, stable relationships far more ably
than unorganized local residents.
In the arena of scientific-technological and administrative activity, the budget reductions may lead to
four initial results. First, actual field inspections,
monitoring of conditions, and problem documentation may be diminished. Second, basic research
devoted to the understanding of pollution effects and abatement
technologies may be cutback. Third, the publication, issuance, and reporting of findings from field
research and basic research alike may be stymied; public
information programmes at the EPA have been severely restricted. And fourth, administrative
development of aggressive strategies to fulfill the agency's
mandates has been retarded rather than furthered. At stake in each of these activities is the public's
potential knowledge and understanding of the character
of existing environmental problems and possible remedies. The eradication of these activities weakens
the public's capacity to learn and know about the
quality of the water it drinks, the air it breathes, the waste dumps it finds nearby, the materials it uses in
industry and home, and so on,
66
Public and environmentalist outcry notwithstanding, such policy changes due to budget reductions serve
to reproduce knowledge and belief in a very particular
way: here we see the reproduction of public ignorance as information and research which might
otherwise be made available is restricted or not gathered
in the first place."9 Noting Administrator Gorsuch's suspicion of some EPA employees who might
distribute information somehow inconsistent with her plans,
the Time report disclosed,
"Mistrustful of the presumed environmentalist bias of career EPA employees (Gorsuch) has centralized
control. Research scientists now cannot release findings
until they have been approved as "appropriate" by four levels of the bureaucracy; public information
programs, such as slide shows and computer software
dealing with science issues, require seven levels of approval." (Time, January 18, 1982).
In the arena of financial and economic impacts, the budget reductions mean massive changes in the
attention paid, the resources invested, toward the solution
of public health and environmental problems. EPA budget cuts are not likely, these days, to save tax
dollars; rather these resources are more likely to
be spent for weapons of war than for environmental quality and public health protection. Reduced EPA
spending will not only reduce attention paid to research,
public information and education, monitoring and inspection activities, but of course attention to
effective enforcement is likely to suffer as well. And
this in turn, then, may be expected to result in incentives for, and the actual realization of, reduction in
the industrial resources and attention devoted
to the prevention and control of myriad air, water, and ground pollution problems.
Thus another (however weak) source of public regulation and accountability of capital will be further
weakened. Private capital will then likely be redirected
toward uses far less public-protecting than pollution control, and the public at large is again likely to
suffer the costs of pollution as a relatively
few reap the benefits from such "freed up" capital
67
investments. The capital shifts that may be involved here are potentially substantial shifts of attention
away from environmental and health protection:
"by EPA estimates, business has spent $ 70 billion or more on pollution control in the eleven years since
the agency started bringing lawsuits and unwelcome
publicity." (Time. January 18, 1982).
Cutting an agency budget, then, should be understood to be far more than a narrow economic action,
and while this may seem perfectly obvious to some, still
it seems equally obvious that we have few systematic ways of mapping the resulting social-political-legal
impacts of budgetary changes, cuts or expansions.
The suggestion of the communicative or social infrastructure in Part II, Figure II, above provides such a
preliminary systematic map, however, precisely
because that infrastructure is not a mere social prop, simply an abstract analytical construction
connecting structural "learning" with social action and
interaction. Instead, that communicative infrastructure has meaning itself only insofar as it mediates
between, and thus works institutionally to integrate,
the actual claims-making and claims-taking actions and interactions of workers and citizens on the one
hand, with the development, or the setbacks in the
development, of the social relations and forces of production, the general dimensions of social,
structural "learning", on the other hand. Seen structurally,
the EPA cutbacks, for example, were likely to advance neither productive relations nor productive
forces, neither social arrangements increasingly protecting
workers, citizens, and natural environment, nor scientific-technological-administrative arrangements
resulting in great productivity, control, and efficiency.
Seen phenomenologically, the EPA cutbacks managed or mismanaged information and beliefs,
legitimation and consent, trust and expectations, selective attention
and neglect. Policy developments, then, can be assessed as they become manifest as changed elements
of the social infrastructure; and these changes can
then be assessed in their inherently related aspects; with respect to the concrete phenomenological
impacts on personal experience and interaction, and
with respect to the societal ability to develop, not only safer, more efficient, and
68
powerful technologies, but also institutional relations of increasing freedom, justice and social
cooperation.
Policy "Recommendations": Attention to Productive and Reproductive Dimensions—or Systematic
Failure
If it is plausible that policy "problems" are historically constructed patterns of attention to claims
constituting two dimensions of social learning, the
productive and the reproductive, then policy strategies (as official policy implementation efforts or as
oppositional movement strategies) ought to respond
to and address both dimensions—or run the risk of policy failure. Consider the complex problem of safe
disposal of toxic industrial wastes.
First, toxic wastes are immediate threats to social reproduction. Including carcinogens, mutagens,
teratagens, and an array of poisons that stagger the
imagination, these wastes can kill people. Second, toxic wastes are generally products of industrial
processes, whether generated by chemical factories,
hospital test procedures, or heavy industry. As elements of society's productive processes, the
generation of these wastes immediately involves questions
of the organization of production: what is produced and for whom, what equivalents might be
produced, whether functionally equivalent non-toxic chemicals
could instead be used, and so on.
Attention to the "toxics" problem has often focused upon issues of health effects, the threats to social
reproduction. Public health officials and environmental
movement activists alike, it seems, have been predominately concerned with the issues of "proper"
containment, shipping, and disposal of these waste products.
Essential as these efforts are, if, because of a scarcity of the resource of public attention to, say nothing
of ideological blinders, they lead to a simultaneous
neglect of the "productive" side of the problem, then crucial issues are likely to be ignored: strategies of
waste reduction at the source, i.e., production
and its control, will be neglected and effectives incentives for producers to continue to generate toxics
will remain unchanged. Especially when containment
technologies remain primitive, attention
69
solely to the reproductive (generally health effects) aspects of "toxics" may lead to continual policy
failure: for the productive aspects of the problem
promise to overwhelm virtually any remedial or protective public health strategies designed to minimize
risk while toxic waste generation proceeds unabated.
The agenda for policy-makers, public health workers, labour and environmental movement activists
alike, then, must include, not only reproductive, health
protection strategies but productive, immediately political economic strategies as well.
Conversely, attention paid solely to issues of waste generation would obviously avoid the immediate
concerns, fears, worries, and experiences of citizens
who now face possible dangers from exposure to such waste chemicals. Consideration only of either
questions (even technical epidemiological issues) or
issues of the control of production may lead to the actual neglect of citizens' demands for timely
information, for responsiveness from state health officials,
and for counsel that they can trust to be from conflicts of interest. Neglect of health and social concerns
in the name of attacking the problem at its
productive source may then be another recipe for systematic, and particularly callous, policy failure.
V. Assessing recourse to discourse—and domination
As policy implementation alters the social infrastructure of action, then, citizens' bases of knowledge,
norms, expectations of others, and attention may
be thus altered as a consequence. More profoundly still, however, the very abilities of citizens to
check—to find out about, criticize and learn about,
test, appeal or file grievances, challenge or debate—claims in these four dimensions of communicative
interaction (facts, norms, intention, attention)
may be altered as well.
Recall that ordinary communicative action involves a practical structure of four related claims—and the
counter-factual possibilities of checking these
claims—offered by speakers and potentially accepted or challenged by their
70
listeners.30 Whether threatening, asserting, offering challenging, or requesting, for example, ordinary
communicative action: (1) establishes or recreates
a normative (claimed to be legitimate) relationship of speaker and hearer (e.g. a county health inspector
questions, warns, alerts, tells, promises or
threatens a restaurant owner); (2) refers to some content that may be true or false (e.g., the strike will
succeed, the chemical is an organic toxin);
(3) expresses the speaker's intentions and feelings (e.g., sincere or joking, ironic or satirical); and (4) calls
attention clearly in a language or symbol
system shared by speaker and listener (e.g., plain English or technical toxicology).
Which claims are made, when they are made, and which are accepted is historically contingent, of
course. For each of these claims might be challenged by
those on the receiving end as listeners, no less among friends than between politically opposed groups
or classes.31 The questions then arise in fact,
though, in a given policy arena, whether false claims can be publicly distinguished from true ones? Can
illegitimate and oppressive claims be publicly
recognized and rejected in favour of legitimate ones? That is, how possible would it be, under each of
several policy alternatives, for both factual and
normative claims to be regularly checked by affected citizens —checked so that the claims could be
established or revised in a generalizable, non-coercive,
mutually legitimated manner, rather than being imposed by virtue of the will or power of one dominant
group or class?32
To what extent are citizens' and workers' attempts to learn about and make sense of the actual
conditions affecting their lives blocked by systematically
distorting influences in class, power, coercion, and domination ? For example, does a newly proposed
hazardous waste disposal policy help or hinder affected
citizens who wish to learn about the true effects of toxic chemicals? Must those citizens perpetually
reduce the results of laboratory studies to the imputed
political-economic interests of those who funded the research? Does the proposed policy help affected
citizens establish (non-coercively) generalizable
political norms (for example regulating work place exposure to toxic chemicals by making production
71
decisions accountable to workers)? These questions point to the historically precarious possibilities of
institutionally established theoretical-scientific
and practical-democratic discourses. And the degree to which such institutionalized discourses are
systematically distorted by relations of class, power,
ideology, and policy making is a practical issue to which a critical theory of public policy inherently and
immediately leads."
Only as discourses free from socially unnecessary constraints and coercion, exist can we argue that
citizens' beliefs are warranted by scientific standards
of withstanding criticism, that the norms and laws regulating public behaviour are justified by
democratic standards reflecting generalizable interests,
that neither are simply instances of unchecked bias, special interests, bureaucratic or class oppression.
Yet the actual historical extent of domination-free
discourses can never be determined, assured, or established in a theoretical, apriori way.
Historically particular distortions of discourses—scientific and political—must be investigated
concretely. Only then can and must practical judgements
be made distinguishing between the inevitable "socially necessary" and the avoidable "socially
unnecessary" distortions of discourses—to forestall the
foolishness of chasing the mirage of any "perfect" and distortionless communication process. One
contribution of the critical policy analysis is to clarify
the historical, scientific and political importance of domination-free, not distortion-free, discourses:
often unrecognized, this difference is fundamental.
Only to the extent to which discourses free from socially unnecessary distortions are available to
citizens, will it be socially and historically possible
then both scientifically to distinguish misrepresentation from factual knowledge, and democratically to
distinguish misinformed consent from informed consent,
or more baldly, non-coerced political consent from outright political manipulation.
A critical theory of public policy leads, then, first to the location of policy implementation in the
mediating social infrastructure of action, and second
as a consequence to the
72
altered social interactions of practical claims-making (with respect to content and beliefs, norms and
consent, expressions and trust and attention and
comprehension).31 Third, then the analysis leads further to the empirical and critical questions probing
the degree to which these everyday practical claims
are institutionally imposed or conversely criticizable (redeemable, legitimated, non-coercively and
generalizably established) through processes of democratic
and scientific criticism. Thus a critical theory of public policy analysis leads us to examine the systematic,
policy institutionalized reproduction of
citizens' power and powerlessness: of citizens' knowledge or ignorance, free consent or oppression,
cooperation or manipulation, attention to or distraction
from pressing social needs, and the corresponding suppression or realization of socially and politically
generalizable interests.
Without institutionalized means of checking knowledge and truth claims (about chemical toxicity,
administrative efficiency, technological success, energy
efficiency, work safety, housing quality, and so on), citizens will remain subject to the opportunistic
stories and systematically selective respresentations
of those already in power, without being able to check the misrepresentation, false claims,
exaggerations, or unsupportable ideological beliefs that they
may actually face. Without institutionalized means of freely checking and criticizing legitimacy and
Tightness claims, citizens will be politically disenfranchised,
incapable of the autonomous political actions and participation that alone can truly legitimate public
policy.
Without such discourses societal learning loses its systematic institutional basis. While processes of
learning in the dimensions of the development of
productive forces and productive relations are not to be equated with the processes of non-coercive
discourses, still to the extent that the results of
learning processes (local innovation activity, policy demonstration projects, restructuring of production
and work processes, new political forms) cannot
be checked non-coercively through such discourses, to that extent is domination likely to exist.
This line of analysis points therefore both to the policy
73
influenced reproduction of social interaction and to the socially necessary or unnecessary distortions of
ongoing processes of scientific and political
discourses, the bases of structural and societal learning processes. There are a host of further problems
that a critical account of policy analysis must
address, then. By what particular processes does the reproduction of belief, consent, trust and attention
take place? How does policy implementation alter
these processes? By what means are we to examine the historical justifications for existing distortions of
discourse and judge whether they suffice to
establish those distortions as "socially necessary"? Notice, of course, that the very phrase, "a socially
necessary distortion" implies that generalized
social acceptance or consent, rather than justification appeal to a particularistic of private interest,
ought to distinguish such a distortion from others.
How, though, is that generalized acceptance to be judged by a critical political analyst, a critical policy
analyst? These questions require further research
and attention, and as they are addressed, so will a critical theory of public policy, a critical structural
phenomenology of public policy, advance or
falter.
Conclusion
As an empirical account of the contingent and variable reproduction via policy development of citizens'
beliefs, consent, trust, and attention, a critical
theory of public policy analysis, when addressed to those affected, may be a "practical" political theory.
It can call attention to relations of power,
not simply in terms of the control of capital but in terms of the manipulation of everyday sensibility,
credibility, gullibility as well. It can point
to the limits and vulnerabilities of established power by pinpointing how the exercise of that power
itself depends upon background consenses of taken-for-granted
factual beliefs, normative myths of expertise, meritocracy, or authority, social trust and dependency,
and selective attention and neglect. It can then
identify possible avenues of political opposition and practice: 1) exposing the conditions of dangerous
work places, declining environmental quality, or
economic crisis; 2) questioning and challenging
74
illegitimate "authority" by publicizing the suppression of generalizable interests and citizens'
noncoercive recourse to scientific and political discourses;
3) revealing deceit and manipulation by those heretofore trusted: and 4) focusing attention on more
substantively democratic policy alternatives and concrete
programmes for social betterment.
When we suggest that critical theory can be practical, then, we can hardly mean that it unleashes or
unlocks the latent forces lying in waiting of an historically
suppressed proletariat in the United States. Any such mobilization can only come from the efforts of
activists in workplaces, in communities, in ethnic
and gender-based social movements whose practical efforts and strategies—if they are not to work
divisively at cross purposes- must be informed by an historically-based
theoretical analysis of established power, emancipatory strategies, and future political-economic
possibilities, including both dangers and opportunities.
Yet by enabling a systematic assessment of the social and political-economic contexts that current social
and political movements face, a critical theory
of public policy analysis may anticipate practical obstacles (the systematic manipulation of trust and
consent, the misrepresentation of history and pressing
problems, the obfuscation of pressing needs), and so it may then point to oppositional strategies of
practical action in each case.
Yet any critical social theory has its own limits. It can be no panacea, no guarantee, no key or gimmick to
'social transformation," "major structural changes"
(or the euphemism you prefer). A theory can reveal, expose, reevaluate, illuminate, encourage, explain,
decipher, simplify, inform, educate, challenge,
threaten, or support only as it is articulated in practice, including in situated text: article, tract,
pamphlet, leaflet media report, newsletter item,
position paper, and so on. A critical theory can have little meaning indeed apart from the understanding,
the application, the continued articulation as
the actual calling of others, attention, that it receives from its bearers. To paraphrase the ordinary
language analysts, we might well say that it is
not properly a "theory'' that is confused, but rather theorists: and in the same vein, it is likely not to be a
"theory" in the abstract that is critical
and
75
"practical" but those who articulate that theory in the course of their lives, those human beings who by
virtue of interpreting their shared world anew
become able together to change it, who by virtue of being able to anticipate and respond to the exercise
to domination are able to organize practically
against it, who by virtue of being able to distinguish authority from tyranny are able to articulate and
move concretely toward a vision of a free and
democratic society.
References
Thanks to Kieran Donaghy, Cathy Campbell, the other members of the Spring Habermas seminar, and
Renee Pink for their assistance. Thanks to Jan Rutledge
for preparing the manuscript.
1. Here I refer to the recent work of Jurgen Habermas (Boston: Beacon Press: 1970: Toward a Rational
Society: 1973: Theory and Practice: 1975: Legitimation
Crisis: and 1979: Communication and the Evolution of Society). For insightful recent attempts to
distinguish the differences and continuities between Habermas's
work and that of the Frankfurt School critical theorists before him, see Axel Honneth. "Communication
and Reconciliation: Habermas' Critique of Adorno."
Telos. 39, Spring, 1979. Douglas Kellner and Rick Roderick, "Recent Literature on Critical Theory" New
German Critique. No. 23. Spring/Summer. 1981, and
David Held, introduction to Critical Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. For secondary
works on Habermas, the most comprehensive is
certainly Thomas McCarthy's The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T.
Press, 1978).
2. An important analysis of Habermas's relationship to Marx is Albrecht Wellmer, "Communication and
Emancipation: Reflections on the Linguistic Turn in
Critical Theory" in John O'Neil. ed. On Critical Theory, New York: Seabury Press, 1976. This section
presents an emaciated, bare bones presentation of
the conceptual skeleton of Habermas's critical theory essential to frame a critical theory of public policy.
For the necessary systematic discussions of
his analysis of power, the suppression of generalizable interests, the logic of discourses, legitimation
76
problems, and so on, see the extensive assessments in McCarthy and Held, cited above.
3. For a related argument, see John Forester, "The Critical Theory-Policy Analysis Affair: Habermas and
Wildavsky as Bedfellows?," Journal of Public Policy
v 2: 2, 1982 (1982) and Working Papers in Planning#56, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. It is worth
noting the preliminary nature of the present essay.
Little "middle-range" work has been done integrating the structural and action theories that Habermas
has sketched out so far. The present essay leaves
many more questions unanswered than answered, and it only, roughly suggests directions for further
and far more empirically, detailed critical policy studies—assessing
in fact infrastructural changes, changes in learning capacity, changes in social interactions, and changes
in the institutionalization of discourses.
4. Wellmer, n. 2, pp. 245-46.
5. Habermas, 1979, n. 1, p. 120.
6. Ibid., Chapter 1.
7. See Habermas, 1979, Ibid., p. 1.
8. Habermas, 1979, Ibid., p. 97.
9. See here the excellent essay by Tony Smith, "The Scope of the Social Sciences in Weber and
Habermas, ''Philosophy and Social Criticism, 8: 1, Spring,
1981.
10. On the relationship of development of the forces and relations of production to the pragmatic truth
and right-ness claims made in action, see Habermas,
1975. Section 1 (e.g., p. 9-10) and Habermas, 1979, Ibid, Chapters 3-4.
11. Cf. Habermas, 1979, Ibid., p. 119. and note 10 above.
12. Habermas, 1979, Ibid., p. 142, cf. p. 177.
13. The characterization of a structural phenomenology is one way of understanding Habermas's
reference to the contribution of the theory of communicative
action as providing the basis for a 'structural analysis of life-worlds." See Axel Honneth, Eberhard
Knodler-Bunte, and Arno Widmann, "The Dialectics of
Rationalization: An Interview with Jurgen Habermas. "Telos, 49. Fall, 1981,Cf. here the notion of a
structural phenomenology with Anthony Giddens' notion
of "structuration" in his Central Problems in Social Theory, Chapter 2, 1979, his earlier
77
hesitations about phenomenology notwithstanding (in New Rules of Sociological Method, 1976), and
see note 14.
14. See for example, John Forester, "Critical Theory and Organizational Analysis," Ithaca: Program in
Urban and Regional Studies, Working Paper#50 and forthcoming
in Gareth Morgan, ed. Research Strategies (in process).
15. The center of Figure 1 may be largely missing because to date Habermas has considered
"organizations" to be predominately strategic, patterns of purposive-rational
action, rather than patterns of routinized social action with productive and reproductive aspects
corresponding to those organizational actions stressing
content or relationship validity claims respectively, Cf. note 14.
16. Reformulating and broadening Habermas's analysis of "comprehensibility claims" here, the appeal to
"attention focusing" claims makes possible the inclusion
and consideration of non-verbal as well as verbal (speech) acts. See note 18 below.
17. David Nobel, "The Selling of the University," The Nation, February 6, 1982.
18. This analysis deviates from (but perhaps extends) Habermas's analysis in his "Reconstruction of
Historical Materialism and The Development of Normative
Structures" and his account of universal pragmatics. In particular, Habermas has been silent about the
character of institutions that might mediate or
serve to frame, stage, or set up claims of "sincerity" and comprehensibility." Here we attempt to specify
or suggest the institutional and social conditions
which facilitate the ready and routine acceptance of such claims. Just as scientific and engineering
laboratories (and the knowledge producing service
sector) routinely provide the institutional infrastructure for the establishment (offering and grounding)
of factual and truth claims, so may we understand
traditional and secular ritual structures—more generally routinized social organization, routinized social
relations—to provide the social infrastructure
for the ready establishment of sincerity claims, claims to trustworthiness of expressed intention. As we
are able to assess another's performance of conventional
social rituals, so are we able to judge the consistency between what they say and what they do in deed.
78
The parallel argument for the infrastructure of the "comprehensibility claim" is more difficult, but
equally significant. It is important to remember that
the "universal pragmatics" is developed explicitly for verbal speech acts, while the programmatic
intention of the argument there includes (in principle)
non-verbal action, as well for which Habermas has not yet provided an analysis. First, then, we can
generalize the character of the comprehensibility claim
from the narrow meaning of the claim, producing a well-formed utterance in a spoken language, to the
broader meaning of producing a well-formed token in
a shared field of conventions (if not in "forms of "life"). Once we make this move, we can render as a
claim to the production of meaning (intelligibility,
comprehensibility, recognition, uptake) non-verbal actions such as: paying for a commodity after asking
for it, writing someone a cheque after a bribe
has been offered and agreed to, issuing a cheque as a wage in return for labour, or leaving a "tip" or
gratuity in a restaurant after a meal. Each of these
resource movements and economic actions may be non-verbal, but they are actions (for which the
actors may be held responsible—as customer, perpetrator
of a bribe, employer, patron or cheapskate), nevertheless, and not only because they are each rulegoverned (thus counting as payment-making or tipping),
but also because each one produces (generates and here thematizes) a well-formed, conventionally
defined token (not an utterance)' i.e.. the payment or
the gratuity. Such a meaningful "token" may be as ordinary as a conventional gesture (a wave of the
hand to greet someone) or as richly economic as the
investment of capital (presupposing of course the framework of economic institutions in which the
movement of resources, labour, wealth and machines may
be recognized as capital investment—of. here Wittgenstein's Philosophical lnvestigations#313, with
"economics as the relevant grammar." If we then ask
what societal instructions provide the framework in which such non-verbal, conventional tokens may be
generated, recognized as meaningful, and emphasized
in their very production, the answer appears to point toward the economic institutions and framework
of society. Within those institutions, for example,
mechanisms such as budgets and accounting procedures are the special "linguistic" (if not ordinarily
verbal) means by which the generation, expenditure,
and consumption of such "tokens" (resources, staff assignments, debt, credit, and
79
so on) are organized and monitored. If this line of argument can be developed and clarified, we could
support the proposal that the economic institutions
of a society provide the social infrastructure for the generation and establishment of actors'
"comprehensibility" (or more generally then attention-directing)
claims, Figure II suggests.
19. Figure II is suggested as a preliminary analysis of the mediating instructions that may fill in the centre
of Figure I-suggesting therefore the concrete
social forms through which social action and social structure reproduce one another. The identification
of mediating institutions may not be very specific
for two reasons. First, each actual type of institution itself reflects patterns of action and interaction,
and it will therefore (while stressing one)
involve each of the four claims constituting communicative action. A research laboratory and a church
congregation will both reproduce norms and rules
that their members (ought to) follow: they will both refer to truth claims about the ways that the world
is held to be: they will both depend upon the
mutually recognized sincerity claims of their members, so that cooperation rather than manipulation
may be the order of the day; and of course, they will
both depend upon these comprehensibility claims ordinarily made so that their members can
understand in the most minimal way what they are saying. Each
type of mediating institution, then, involves the claims that happen to be stressed, thematized, or
oriented toward by the other three types of mediating
organizations. Second, however, these mediating institutions can only be presented as "families" of
institutions and organizations, for their specific
forms will vary historically with regional, cultural, urban-rural, industrial-agricultural characteristics and
so forth. What distinguishes these organizational
forms is only the type of action claim that they may particularly stress, support, and provide the context
for: thus research laboratories are directly
oriented toward the production of factual knowledge, (for whatever subsequent systemic function),
while legislatures are correspondingly oriented to the
production of norms and laws (again for various functions), but not vice versa.
20. These mediating institutions are not wholly uncoupled or disjoined, of course. Under a capitalist
political economy, we might expect that the legal
institutions do not
80
treat questions of the socialization vs. privatization of production equally, i.e., that regulations and
incentives will be structured again and again to
reproduce capitalist market relations. Likewise, we expect social-cultural institutions to reflect
individualistic traditions. Nevertheless each of these
mediating institutions might also provide enclaves for new democratic forms and counter-movements
(pockets of resistance?) to the continuation of the private
appropriation of the social capacity for production.
21. We may expect different policies to alter some dimensions of this 'social infrastructure' more than
others. Tax policies alter rules and regulations
of financial management primarily, then obviously resource flows, and then only secondarily do they
foster new organizational forms, and alterations in
public beliefs and knowledge. Welfare policies alter rules, resources, and organizational forms
immediately, and public beliefs less directly. Symbolic
policies (those which are never actually implemented despite rhetoric to the contrary: local resolutions
passed without resource commitments for adequate
follow up, e.g., are effective, if at all, primarily insofar as they influence public beliefs, while
organizational, legal, and economic changes may be
negligible. Correspondingly, then, we might expect to have different "politics" associated with them.
Where knowledge and belief are at stake (the National
Institute for Occupational Health and Safety is threatened, or the National Center for Health Services
Research is cutback), the political role of scientific
experts will be significantly more important than if social security payments are threatened. This
suggests that there might be several clusters of "policy
politics" representing those special cases where a policy does not promise changes in most of the
infrastructural dimensions but rather seems to emphasize
changes in just one or two of these dimensions.
22. See e.g., Daniel Berman, Death on the Job, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1978.
23. See Section V below.
24. See, e.g. Legitimation Crisis, 1975. I use "background consensus" to elaborate the sociological and
political meaning of the term as Habermas uses it
in his discussion of the "universal pragmatics", the core of his communications theory. In particular,
"consensus" here
81
is taken to a shared position or attitude, not the end-point of an argumentative process.
25. !f social movements and policy problems alike ought to be understood in the context of the interplay or dialectic of forces and relations of production,
of system, and life-world as Habermas reformulates them, then we must examine the ways in which
policies and movements alike alter the communicative infrastructure
of society. To date, Habermas has combined and sought to integrate two complementary but different
types of analysis: an analysis of social learning understood
as structural developments in the reproduction of society, and an analysis of social action and
intermediate level of social organization (factories, firms,
hospitals, trade associations, unions, cultural associations, churches, and so forth), perhaps because he
has tended to equate "organization" with a pattern
of purely purposive-rational, instrumental, or strategic action. Nevertheless, if we seek to integrate
action theory and structural systems theory along
the lines made possible by the communications account that Habermas has provided, formulation of
this intermediate level of social organization this communicative
infrastructure of society is required. Figure II tentatively suggests one formulation of this infrastructure,
26. On "Contradictions", cf. Legitimation Crisis, pp. 26-27.
27. These claims are historically contingent, and that is neither to say that they are arbitrary, random,
purely ad hoc and unsystematic, nor to say that
they are simply the products of speakers (as the methodological individualists would have it). Instead,
speakers and listeners find themselves always already
not only in a normative communications community (they share languages together in rule governed
ways), but also in an institutional setting of relations
of production and power. See note 34.
28. See Legitimation Crisis, Part III.
29. Consider;
". . . the Federal government is not well equipped to investigate separately all of the tens of thousands
of facilities involved in the generation, discharge,
transportation, and use of hazardous substances. Federal agencies often have all they can do to issue
permits as fast as the applications come in. There
is seldom the
82
opportunity to do extensive monitoring or inspecting to double-check the honesty or the accuracy of the
permit applicant " The Toxic Substances Dilemma,
(Washington, D.C., The National Wildlife Federation. 1980), p. 33.
30. On the assumption of the possibilities of checking, of "recourse to discourse", see note 9 above.
31. See note 27.
32. See R.R. McGuire, "Speech Acts, Communicative Competence, and the Paradox of Authority,
Philosophy and Rhetoric, 10:1, Winter 1977, pp. 30-45.
33. On the importance of discourse, see Thomas McCarthy's introduction to Legitimation Crisis, and his
Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas. pp. 304-310,
314-317, Cf. Habermas, 1973, n. 1, Chapters 3 and 5. See also Frank Fischer, Politics, Values and Public
Policy. The Problem of Methodology, Boulder, Colorado,
Westview Press, 1980.
34. See also John Forester, "Planning in the Face of Power", Journal of the American Planning
Association, Winter, 1982 and the related "Critical Reason
and Political Power in Project Review Activity", Policy and Politics, 1982.
83
4 ADMINISTRATION IN DEVELOPING SOCIETIES
Satya Deva
In this section an attempt will be made to examine the nature and problems of administration in
developing countries, with special reference to India. Administration
is only one aspect of the exercise of class rule, other aspects being economic, political, social and
cultural. Administration refers to the exercise of
control through a bureaucracy. Since the exercise of control is deeply related to the possession of
power, wealth, social status and cultural hegemony,
administration can be understood only in the total social setting. It is in this perspective of the totality,
therefore, that we must try to place administration,
however stupendous the task.
The study of administration in developing countries assumes special significance in view of the
imposition of military dictatorship, one after another,
in these countries. Since the military is a part of the bureaucracy, the military-cum-civil bureaucracy
comes to rule. The situation in many of these countries
seems to be comparable to that obtaining in France after the seizure of power by Napoleon Bonaparte
on Dec. 2, 1951 with the help of the army, a scene
described by Marx as follows: "The struggle seems to be settled in such a way that all classes, equally
impotent and equally mute, fall on their knees
before the rifle butt."1 Such a situation, in which the bureaucracy is able to subdue all classes", is of
great interest from the theoretical as well as
the
84
practical point of view; for, here the power of the bureaucracy becomes overriding in nature and
influences (in a dialectical fashion, over economic, social,
political and cultural factors.
In the developing countries, as a general phenomenon, capitalism is rising, old social formation is in
dissolution and a new one is seeking to take its
place. This transition tends to lead to a exceptional type of state. Frederick Engels points out that as a
rule, the economically dominant class, through
the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class; hence the state functions as the
instrument of this dominant class. By way of exception,
however, "says Engels (in 1891), periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly
that the state power, as an ostensible mediator,
acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both"2 Engels gives some examples of
such an autonomized state, as follows:
(a) the absolute monarchy in 17th and 18th century Europe—it held the balance between the nobility
and the class of burghers;
(b) Bonapartism, particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat against each other; and
(c) the New German Empire under Bismarck—here capitalists and workers were balanced against each
other and equally cheated for the benefit of the impoverished
Prussian cabbage junkers (aristocratic landholders).
The nature of the autonomized state has been discussed at length by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte. He points out that the bourgeoisie
in France in mid-nineteenth century was "split" into two sections. One of these consisted of large
landowners who had been "rendered thoroughly bourgeois",
and the other of the "aristocrats of finance and big industrialists."3 Each of these wanted "its own
supremacy and the subordination of the other." However,
they both faced the antagonism of the other classes, namely the petty bourgeoisie and workers. The
bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all
the
85
weapons which it had forged against feudalism, now turned their points against itself. It understood that
all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs
of progress attacked and menaced its class rule. In this situation, and in its condition of being split, it
perceived that a parliamentary regime, which
"lives in struggle and by struggle" would be "a regime of unrest." Hence it realized that its own interests
dictated, "that it should be delivered from
the danger of its own rule; that in order to restore tranquility in the country, its bourgeois parliament
must, first of all, be given its quietus; that
in order to preserve its social power intact, its political power must be broken; that the individual
bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes
and to enjoy undisturbed property, family, religion and order only on condition that their class be
condemned along with the other classes to like political
nullity. . . ."4 Hence the bourgeoisie "recognized the army as the decisive state power" and "had to
confirm" "the fact that it had long given up its claim
to dominate this power."5
Marx makes it clear that the role of the bureaucracy under the second Bonaparte was different from
that under the parliamentary republic. Under the parliamentary
republic the bureaucracy was "the instrument of the ruling class," the bourgeoisie. Under the second
Bonaparte, however, the state seemed "to have made
itself completely independent."6 "As against civil society", the "state machine" had consolidated its
position under an "adventurer" (Bonaparte); he, in
turn, had provided liquor and sausages to the soldiery.7 The civil and military bureaucracy (consisting of
half a million each, of officials and soldiers),
"this appalling parasitic body," enmeshed the body of French society like a net and choked "all its
pores." While Marx calls the bureaucracy a parasitic
body, that is one living on others without making any useful and fitting return, Engels refers to it (in
1847) as the "class" which had come to exercise
power in Germany: "The present political system of Germany is nothing more than a compromise
between the nobility and the petty bourgeoisie, which amounts
to resigning power into the hands of a third class, the bureaucracy."8
While in all developing countries the society is in transition
86
and capitalism is underdeveloped, there are great variations within as well as between them. The
situation is further complicated by the telescoping of
stages of development. The Asiatic mode of production involving state ownership of land, a large
number of small peasants who pay ground rent either direct
or through intermediaries, and an exchange through barter of goods and services produced in the village
community, is still in existence in parts of under-developed
countries. A study of the Planning Commission in India in 1956 showed that 45% of village artisans
produced their goods for use within the village.9 The
feudal mode of production made a late entry, chiefly through the conferment of proprietary rights in
land by the foreign power, as in some areas in India.
Merchant capitalism developed mainly through compradors; industrialization was impeded by
colonialism. Consequently underdevelopment today means some kind
of mix of the Asiatic, feudal and capitalistic modes of production. The classes also are in a flux; if one of
them is able to dominate over the rest, it
uses the state to maintain "order". Thus if the bourgeoisie is relatively developed and confident, it rules
through a parliamentary regime. However, if
the landlords, or the proletariat, or the small-holding peasants, either alone or jointly, are difficult to
curb, a dictatorial or autonomized state tends
to arise. If the bourgeoisie is divided into equally powerful sections, none of these sections can be
supreme and an autonomized state can result. "The
"order" is in the interest of the exploiting class or classes, but the executive justifies its authoritarianism
as being necessary to protect the interests
of the exploited classes. The situation suits the exploiting class and also the ruling bureaucracy.
Administration, then, consists in perpetuating this
situation. The state machine maintains exploitation and impedes basic structural change.
Administration of Agriculture
Agriculture continues to be the base of the economy in underdeveloped countries. A large majority of
the people are engaged in agriculture or related occupations.
Also, agricultural produce often constitutes the major share of the
87
produce. Hence the role of the state can best be understood by examining the condition of agriculture.
The base of agriculture, in turn, is land. The ownership
of land, then is a crucial factor of the social formation. As Prime Minister Indira Gandhi noted while
inaugurating a conference of Chief Ministers as
far back as 1970 "land reform is the most crucial test which our political system must pass in order to
survive."10
The importance of land reforms for landless labourers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers and small-holding
peasants goes without saying. They often constitute
the majority of voters; the government claims that it "protects them against the other classes and sends
them rain and sunshine from above."11 Hence pronouncements
by governments such as the one quoted above. However, the lack of a national bond and political
organization prevents the peasants from functioning as
a class. On the other hand, the big farmers and landholders tend to function more and more as one
section of the bourgeoisie—becoming so, if not already
so. They form powerful associations and enter political parties. In India they often constitute the upper
rung of the parties who come to rule at the state
level. State leaders and chief ministers often belong to this class and derive support from it. National
leaders acquire their power by representing capital
and balancing the two sections of the bourgeoisie. The maintenance of the status quo requires the
continuance in power of both sections. Hence in India,
ruling party candidates for parliament are carefully chosen by the national leadership from among both
sections of the bourgeoisie.
If we examine the programme of land reforms we find that its only part which has succeeded, concerns
the abolition of statutory landlordism created by the
British. As noted by the National Commission on Agriculture, this part of the reforms brought nearly 20
million cultivators into direct contact with the
state. However, the reform has been carried out in such a way that it has led to the conversion of feudal
landlords (owning 57% of the privately owned
land in British India in 1947-48) into farmers, through the payment of compensation at "high" rates and
also through leaving large areas of land
88
in their possession in the name of these being sir, khudkasht or khas lands (except in West Bengal).12
Other reforms, relating to the rights of tenants
and the imposition of a ceiling on land holdings, have largely failed. It is, therefore, notable that both the
success and the failure of land reforms,
are such as to lead, more and more, to the creation of a rural or agricultural bourgeoisie. This is
obviously at the cost of landless labourers and tenants;
however, this tends to balance the power of landholders with that of the capital-owning section of the
bourgeoisie.
The National Commission on Agriculture has raised the question of the responsibility for "the tragedy of
land reforms in the country."13 In its view, while
both, the legislator and the administrator are responsible, "the major responsibility" lies on the
administrative set-up. The Commission says that the
official machinery has been "trained and conditioned to function as the guardian of status QUO and the
defender of existing property relations."14 Hence
it cannot, on its own, function as a "change agency" for bringing about "basic structural changes". This
indicates the role of a bureaucracy which is an
adjunct to an autonomized ruler. It also gives the lie to Hegel's view of the bureaucracy as being the
"universal class" or Weber's belief of it as being
"efficient"
Other programmes relating to agriculture also mainly help the rising agricultural bourgeoisie, often at
the cost of weaker sections. Thus inputs, like high
yielding varieties of seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and mechanized implements are mostly used only by rich
farmers. A study in Haryana has shown that tenant
and low caste farmers have been unable to use high yielding varieties of seeds.15 However, the prices of
these seeds have been subsidized by the Government
out of general revenues derived largely from indirect taxes affecting the poorest of men. In other words,
resources are being transferred from the poor
to the rich through programmes aiming at the green revolution. The programme of support prices for
agricultural commodities also benefits only the rich,
surplus producing, farmers. In short agricultural administration is weighted in favour of the growth of an
agricultural bourgeoisie.
89
Administration of Industry
As has been discussed above, the national leadership performs the function of maintaining a balance
between landholders and big farmers on the one hand
and the owners of capital on the other, and also of maintaining "order" in their interest by controlling
the working class through the bureaucracy. Hence
each section of the bourgeoisie tends to be controlled in its intercourse with the other one. Thus the
Government regulates the availability and prices
of agricultural products (like cotton, jute and oil seeds) which constitute the raw materials of industry,
and also of industrial products (like fertiliser,
pesticides and implements) which are needed by farmers. This regulation balances the interests of the
two sections of the bourgeoisie. However, where the
interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat conflict, the bourgeoisie is given preference. Thus during
the Emergency workers' bonus was sought to
be reduced, strikes were banned and trade union activity was curbed with the help of the police and the
army.
The relationship between large and small industries is to some extent comparable to that between large
and small farmers. Like small farmers, small industrialists
also are ill-organized. The Government constantly proclaims its great concern for small-scale industry.
However, where the interests of large and small-scale
industry conflict, large-scale industry gets preference. The definition of small-scale industry is being
changed, almost every six years, to make benefits
intended for it, be available to larger and larger industrial undertakings. Industries with an investment of
up to twenty lakhs of rupees are now treated
as small. Large industrialists also avail of these benefits, by starting smaller ventures as ancillaries, for
which the limit is rupees twenty-five lakh.
Further, the larger an undertaking, the easier it is to get a loan from a Government agency;16 which is a
queer way, to say the least, of administering
a programme for assisting small-scale industries. The same applies to other assistance programmes,
such as those of marketing research, quality marking,
and testing and supply of scarce raw materials.
It is thus notable that both the policy and its implementation,
90
result in the cornering of the benefits, which are said to be intended for small industrialists, by larger
and larger ones. Small industrialists are not
able to exercise sufficient pressure and are not properly represented in the legislature. The political
executive and the bureaucracy both act in favour
of large industry. On the one hand, the laws, rules and regulations are so drawn up as to serve its
interest; on the other hand their implementation also
has the same result. Thus officials tend to exercise their discretion in favour of bigger industrialists for
larger loans. For, there is less risk in giving
loans to bigger industrialists. Hence the "rationality" of the bureaucracy leads to the fulfilment of its
own interests as well as those of the powerful.
In this light, corruption is only one variant of the mode of the fulfilment of the interests of the powerful.
Thus if a bureaucrat has the discretion to
grant a loan but is unwilling to take the risk, an "incentive" can make him do so. It can be, for example,
in the form of a recommendation to the minister,
or consideration in cash. In this way, every small official act comes to have a price. Hence small
industrialists have to regularly pay bribes to numerous
inspectors. A sample survey in Ludhiana District of Punjab, revealed that 76 out of 99 small industrialists
faced this problem;17 some of them were even
afraid of putting up a signboard for fear of attracting inspectors. Large industrialists often avoid the
inspectors by giving donations for the ruling
party or the minister. The size of the business, the donation, and the extent of benefit are, thus,
correlated: the small industrialists remains small,
if he remains at all, for all his bribing.
One of the results of thus favouring big bourgeoisie is the growth of monopolies. It is not that the
executive does not have the instruments to control
monopolies, evasion of labour laws, tax evasion, smuggling, or black money: the fact is that bourgeois
political parties share the legal and illegal gains
of both sections of the bourgeoisie for fighting "democratic" elections. There is also no law in India to
control donations by business corporations to
political parties. However, given a bureaucracy whose interests coincide with those of the bourgeoisie
and the political executive, much cannot be
91
expected from changes in the law.
Given the will, however, the executive can exercise checks on the bourgeoisie in many ways.
Participation in the share capital of joint stock companies
through the agency of Indian residents abroad is only one such method. Hence the executive both
supports and restrains the bourgeoisie so far as it is
in the interest of "tranquility."
"Socialism" and the Public Sector
Marx describes graphically how in the autonomized state of France in mid-nineteenth century every
programme was claimed to be socialistic: "Even bourgeois
liberalism is declared socialistic. . ."18 Louis Napolean Bonaparte claimed to be the champion of the
poor—"chief of the lumpen proletariat." At the same
time, in keeping with the government's role of exercising a check on both sections of the bourgeoisie,
government participation in economic activity has
greatly increased, "whole of the banking business" being "interwoven in the closest fashion with public
credit."19 The public sector expanded greatly:
"Every common interest was straightaway severed from society, counterposed to it as a higher general
interest, snatched from the activity of society's
members themselves and made an object of government activity, from a bridge, a schoolhouse and the
communal property of a village community to the railways,
the national wealth and the national university of France."20 This led to the contralization of
governmental power. "All revolutions perfected this machine
instead of smashing it." The unemployed surplus population could now obtain, in this expanded
machine, "state offices as a sort of respectable alms."21
The bureaucracy came to function as the base for the second Bonaparte's rule: "How could it be
otherwise, seeing that alongside the actual classes of society
he is forced to create an artificial caste, for which the maintenance of his regime becomes a bread-andbutter question?"2-
Marx's analysis brings to light the close relationship between the maintenance of the autonomized state
and the expansion of governmental activity. In countries
like India governmental activity has expanded greatly in the name of socialism, but only in name. The
public sector is heavily
92
subsidized from public revenues; its products, being mainly key goods for industry or agriculture, are
mostly used by one or the other section of the bourgeoisie.
The public sector thus constantly functions as the channel for the transfer of resources from the poor to
the rich. Some other functions of public undertakings
are to provide jobs to powerful politicians as chairmen and to their constituents as functionaries, and
contracts to businessmen who give donations to
the ruling party. In the process, a whole "artificial caste" of bureaucrats is created whose interest
coincides with that of the regime; it becomes a bulwark
of order in a situation of imperilled tranquility due to the agitation among workers, small peasants and
small industrialists, and the infighting between
factions of the ruling party itself.
The slogan of socialism is useful also for keeping in check democratic liberties. Thus in the name of
socialism restraints have been placed upon the judiciary,
the press, the legislature and citizens in general. These restrictions of democratic liberties indicate that
not only was the state in India autonomized
during the Emergency, but that it continues to be so, even though in less acute form. Thus during the
Emergency jurisdiction of the Supreme Court was reduced
by the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution; more recently the Supreme Court and High Court judges
are sought to be controlled, through the promotion of
"committed" ones supersession of others, through the transfer of those who deliver unpalatable
judgements, and through the continuation of additional judges
who are acceptable to the executive on the basis of their "performance". The Prevention of Publication
of Objectionable Matter Act, 1976, was an all-India
law for rigorous provisions aimed at the press. The repeal of the Feroze Gandhi Act led to restrictions on
the publication of certain proceedings of Parliament.
The 42nd Amendment also provided for exceptions to citizens' Fundamental Rights and the imposition
of Fundamental Duties. Given the fact that the Government
is committed to the maintenance of the bourgeois order, the interaction of '•committed" judges and
restrictions on liberties can only lead to the accentuation
of exploitation—as everyone who is involved in the workers' movement knows.
93
Centre-State Relations
We have seen above that in countries like India chief ministers of states derive their main support from
landholders and big farmers, while the central
leadership has the role of both, representing capital, and maintaining the balance between the owners
of landed property and capital. In this light, centre-state
relations are seen as relations between the sections of the bourgeoisie. Before the Emergency, M.L.A.'s
in Gujarat and Bihar were forced by the people
to resign—this was seen as the weakening of the rural bourgeoisie. The state chief ministers constantly
champion the cause of large farmers and bargain
with the centre for support prices of agricultural commodities. The centre, on its part, provides
incentives to the capital-owning bourgeoisie, for example,
even by helping to "whiten black money through special bearer bonds, and also balances the interests of
the two sections of the bourgeoisie. Since the
Central Government maintains the balance, it must have an upper hand. This explains strengthening of
the Central Government at the cost of State Governments,
even though the Constitution envisages sovereignty for each over separate areas of functions.
International Relations
The national leadership partly derives political and economic support from abroad, the better to be able
to keep in check "all classes" within. Thus the
treaty of friendship with the U.S.S.R. provides for political support, both external and internal. It has
helped the national leadership in obtaining some
support even from workers' movement in India. At the same time, the government, as well as the
industrial bourgeoisie, functions in alliance with international
monopoly capital, as indicated by the facilities given to multinational corporations. Some of these
corporations even avail of the concessions meant for
small-scale industry. The I.M.F. loan provides much needed economic support to the government at a
time when the strife of classes, exemplified by work
stoppages, leads to scarcities. The purchase of more and more arms from abroad helps in many ways ;
(i) in maintaining
94
relations with the ruling class of developed countries, (ii) in obtaining whole-hearted support of the
military bureaucracy within, and (iii) in building
up the image of the leadership as being "tough". Foreign assistance is sought even in building satellites,
which bring glory to the leadership and helps
it in projecting its image through electronic media. International events, such as the ASIAD and the NonAligned Meet also help to buttress this image.
Administrative Reform
We have seen above that in an autonomized state the bureaucracy comes to be an "artificial caste" or
"class" which exercises power in the name of the "adventurer"
who happens to come to the top. He in turn rules through the bureaucracy. The ruler and the
bureaucracy, in other words, act as complementaries to each
other. In this situation it is futile to expect any reform which would lead to the reduction of the power of
the bureaucracy. Thus the Administrative Reforms
Commission had recommended the conversion of the Indian Administrative Service into a functional
service, instead of being a generalist one.23 According
to its recommendation, high administrative posts in the secretariat, whose incumbents would
participate in policy formulation and implementation in their
capacity as advisers to ministers, were to be filled from among experienced specialists after training in
administration. This recommendation, which the
Commission considered to be of great importance, has, however, been shelved by the Government. It is
apparent that the acceptance of this recommendation
would have greatly reduced the power of both, the Central leaders and the I.A.S.; for, the I.A.S. functions
as the steel frame of the administration—its
members serve at the top at all levels of government, central, state and district, and the central
government exercises influence at state and district
levels through it.
This indicates how and why administrative reform is often difficult to achieve because it would interfere
with the power of the rulers. Thus there has been
much criticism of the weightage given to the interview in the recruitment to all-India and central
services. The interview is called a "personality
95
test" although none of the known tools, such as psychological tests, for testing the personality are used.
These tools have been in use in the armed forces
for long. Their avoidance in recruitment for the civil service gives a discretion to the rulers. One
chairman of the Union Public Service Commission acknowledged
in a personal communication to the author that the present system is biased. Since the bias is obviously
in favour of the powerful, reducing it would mean
reducing their power. Hence administrative reform must wait until power has been more evenly
dispersed.
Conclusion
We have seen that the widespread phenomenon of military dictatorship in developing countries can be
explained through the Marxian concept of the "independence"
of the state, caused by unresolved class struggle in a transitional situation. If the dissolution of feudalism
led to the autonomized state in Europe during
the 17th and 18th centuries, the dissolution of colonialism and feudalism has led to it in mid-twentieth
century in much of the Third World. The telescoping
of the development process leads to greater complexity in the Third World. In a vast country like India,
the situation may vary from area to area. Thus
there are more of capitalist farmers in Punjab and Haryana than elsewhere. However, the capitalowning bourgeoisie being of an all-India character, the
role of the "national" leadership comes to be to balance it against landed property owners in general.
Checks, therefore, have to be exercised over both
sections of the developing bourgeoisie, as well as the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. The ruler
thus has to keep in check "all classes", and
does so with the help of the military and civil bureaucracy. The "tranquility" which authoritarianism
brings serves the interests of the bourgeoisie.
The hypothesis of the autonomization of the state helps to explain a number of paradoxes of our
society. The annoying failure of land reforms becomes understandable
when we realize that their function of the abolition of feudalism has been largely fulfilled; the reforms
are not allowed to go further since this would
weaken the process of the formation
96
of a rural bourgeoisie. Similarly, industrial policy mainly benefits the industrial bourgeoisie. Workers and
the petty bourgeoisie, rural and urban, continue
to suffer but are kept under check in the name of "order."
The riddle of a public sector which has been set up in the name of socialism but is subservient to the
bourgeoisie is solved when it is seen in its three-fold
role of supplying subsidized producer goods to the bourgeoisie, providing jobs as sinecures and alms,
and serving the political executive as a prop. The
perplexing centre-state relations become understandable when the economic bases of the power of
central and state governments are examined. Similarly,
the paradox of a national government running to imperialist powers for succour can be explained by its
need to subdue "all classes." The failure of vital
administrative reforms is thus, due to the fact that reforms which would reduce the power of the
bureaucracy—the prop of the ruler—cannot be allowed to
succeed.
The hypotheses discussed above may be said to constitute a model whose applicability in different
developing countries would vary, and which can be tested
in the light of more data.
References
1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works
(Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 168.
2. F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, (Moscow, Progress Publishers,
1977), p. 168.
3. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, pp. 110 and 118.
4. Ibid., p. 131.
5. Ibid., p. 163.
6. Ibid., p. 170.
7. Ibid.
8. F. Engels, The Constitutional Question in Germany in Marx and Engels, Collected Works (New York:
International Publishers, 1976), Vol. VI, p. 79.
97
9. Cited by Anupam Sen, The State, Industrialization and Class Formations in India, (London, Routlegde
and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 111.
10. Report of the National Commission on Agriculture (New Delhi, Controller of Publications, 1976). p.
79.
11. Marx, n.1.p. 171.
12. Report of the National Commission on Agriculture, pp. 50-51.
13. Ibid., p. 89.
14. Ibid., p. 90.
15. Satya Deva, "The National Seed Project in India", Journal of Administration Overseas, Vol. XIX (1980),
n. 4, p. 268.
16. Shashi Bala, Government Policy and Administration with regard to Small-Scale Industries in a Punjab
District— Ludhiana (unpublished doctoral dissertation,
Dept. of Public Administration, Punjab University, Chandigarh, 1982), Ch. III.
17. Ibid., p. 413.
18. Marx, n. I, p. 130.
19. Ibid., p. 157
20. Ibid., p. 169.
21. Ibid., p. 174.
22. Ibid.
23. Administrative Reforms Commission, Report on Personnel Administration, (Delhi: Manager of
Publications,
(1969), pp. 17, ff.
98
5 BUREAUCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT CASE STUDY OF RURAL INDIA
Dr. G. Ram Reddy and G. Dr. Hargopal
The bureaucratic organisation is considered as one of the best forms of organisation by thinkers like Max
Weber. This derivation is based on an understanding
that this type of organisation functions on the basis of a set of objective norms. However, there has
been considerable debate on this aspect as the experiense
all over the world in general and the third world in particular has been too distinct and different from
what Max Weber portrayed in his discussion on
bureaucracy. It has come to be widely accepted that working of an organisation is based not only on its
normative premises but the realities of the context
in which it has to operate. Any organisation for that matter reflects the larger socio-economic processes
occuring in the society as a result of either
state intervention or the public response to the developmental process. Therefore an empirical
investigation into the characteristics of the bureaucratic
organisations help both in understanding the limitations of such organisations on the one hand and in
recognising the need to widen the theoretical basis
so as to incorporate fresh experience on the other. It is only such a process that can revitalise the theory
and make it capable of explaining the causal
relations in varied situations. The present essay is one such attempt to analyse the rural bureaucracy
with special reference to
99
Andhra Pradesh based on empirical data.
The role of bureaucracy is examined mainly in the context of anti-poverty programmes for rural
development. The post-independence development strategy in
India laid stress on removal of poverty. This approach gained further momentum in sevedties. The green
revolution and land reforms programme which were
initiated in fifties and sixties did not make the intended impact. In the late sixties an anti-poverty
strategy aimed at frontal attack on poverty was
launched. As a result, a number of special agencies such as SFDA, ITDA, SC BC Corporation, Women
Finance Corporation etc , came into existence. The special
agency approach has been an attempt in post-colonial phase which put bureaucracy once again in a
pivotal position so far as rural development is concerned.
It is necessary to analyse the organisational experience and see whether the existing set up possesses
the vitality for carrying on such onerous responsibilities.
Organisational vitality, in turn, depends upon: one, the structure, which is intended to establish formal
relations among the members of the organisation;
two, the value disposition and proper orientation of the group to the goals of the organisation; and
three, the general conducement of environment with
which the organisation has to continuously interact. These factors are vital in addition to the
commitment of political elite, ideology of the system and
the policies that emanate from it. The level of political consciousness in the society determines the
challenge to and response pattern of the bureaucracy.
The discussion in this paper is confined to the characteristics of the bureaucracy in relation to these
three vital factors.
Characteristics of Bureaucratic System in Rural Areas
The operational style of rural bureaucracy vis-a-vis the anti-poverty programmes require to be different
from the traditional bureaucracy. It has to be
seen whether and how the bureaucracy in the rural areas has developed the new disposition suitable to
anti-poverty programmes. In case it has failed to
develop positive characteristics, what type of bureaucracy is in vogue?
100
A significant and widely noticed characteristic of the bureaucracy, has been the propensity for
centralisation in decision-making. There are several instances
where functionaries working at the lower levels look to the higher levels even for small and routine
matters. For instance, the applications for loans
by the rural poor, instead of getting processed at the block level, are sent to the district headquarters
for processing and final decision-making. One
can cite an example for this: in a district of Andhra Pradesh, clarification was sought whether to include
coconut trees in social forestry or not. These
instances are illustrative of the centralized nature of the structure. Such an over-centralisation of
decision-making leads to a few consequences.
(i) The feed-back which is essential in a complex rural situation where anti-poverty programmes are
being implemented is totally absent. Each level depends
upon and waits for the instructions from the higher levels and does not display any sense of initiative.
The feed-back mechanism is stifled due to absence
of free and frank communication. The existing mechanism ignores the field experience and depends
heavily on the ideas and sometimes fads of the functionaries
sitting at the 'top' and not those who are down the ladder. (ii) Centralisation and absence of proper
communication also results in distorted reporting
from the field. There are quite a few instances where the records are manipulated for the consumption
of the higher levels, who are in no position to varify
physically about the figures supplied. For instance it was noticed that "those who were included in the
list of the beneficiaries under anti-poverty programmes
did not even know about it. Some of the officials openly admitted the existence of these practices and
said: "what else do you expect when the targets
are thrust on us and the higher levels are not prepared to listen to our difficulties in the field." (iii) It is
observed that the programmes and priorities
are frequently altered without any adequate notice, information and involvement at the field level. It is
not uncommon that suddenly a new programme is
thrust on the field functionaries while they are engaged in some other programme, For instance when
the
101
field functionaries were engaged in special component programme meant for the scheduled caste, they
were asked to give higher priority to family planning.
This ad-hocism of the top keeps the field functionaries under continuous tension and renders any
planned and systematic effort difficult.
The second characteristic noticed in the rural organisational structure has been the proliferation of the
agencies at the district level. This includes
several agencies such as panchayati raj, agricultural and cooperative agencies, revenue department,
banks etc., which operate with vertical linkages. These
vertical structures, instead of operating as a pyramid, acquire the shape of parallel ladders—each
operating in its own style and jurisdiction. They rarely
share a common purpose or perspective. Their understanding of developmental policies is not only
varied but sometimes even contradictory. Added to it,
there is no collective responsibility in attaining the developmental goals. This results in two negative
consequences; one, the rural poor are made to
go from pillar to post to have access to benefits that the policies offer and two, the agencies, sometimes
operates at cross purposes neutralising the
developmental effort. For instance "the electricity department insisting on the 'would be' beneficiary to
possess electric motor for getting electricity
connection and the banks demanding the beneficiary to produce electric meter with connection for
getting the electric motor", epitomises the crisis of
linkages among various agencies engaged in developmental effort.
The third characteristic of rural bureacracy has been the criss-cross linkages. Functionaries placed at
various levels in the formal administrative ladder
have 'non-formal' linkages. As a result the formal arrangement is put to undue stress. Sometimes an
individual placed at a particular point in the hierarchy,
because of his 'non-formal' and personalised linkages with the top officers or influential leaders of the
ruling party including the ministers, wields
considerable influence in the organisations. As a result the immediate higher level, instead of
supervising the work of the subordinate. is compelled to
ignore his shortcomings, if not submit
102
itself to his "supervision". Non-formal linkages greatly affect the formal functioning of an organisation
and such an effect will not be visible to those
who are not familiar with the organisation.
Another dimension of organisational relations has been the tendency on the part of higher levels to lean
on one or two members of the group instead of the
entire team. These individuals, it is observed, wield extra institutional influence. It is noticed that the
relations between members of the team are based
not on the formal structure but on various extraneous considerations such as caste, region, religion,
language and sometimes "common interests". This sort
of non-formal linkages cause tensions in human relations. In one samiti the progress assistant who
belongs to the ministerial staff wields considerable
influence because of his "outside" linkages. In another instance an engineering supervisor was feared by
his colleagues because of his linkages with the
samiti president. In the third case an assistant project officer relatively junior was considered important
as the project director leaned on him very
heavily. There are quite a large number of such instances which cause strain in human relations and
upset the 'hierarchical' arrangement.
The rural administrative structure has also developed stresses as the relations between the "line" and
the "staff" are strained. The line functionaries
are responsible for achieving the targets in the field while the staff agency is expected to assist them in
achieving the goals. Contrary to this assumption
the clerical staff confined to the office wield considerable 'influence'. They delay payment of T.A. and
D.A. and sometimes even salaries. This is done
to prove their supremacy. They make the field functionaries go round them a number of times even for
small and routine matters. The field functionaries,
on the other hand, look down upon the office staff as men of no consequence. They show "extra"
respect when they have work and ignore them the other times.
There have been several such instances which divide these two set of functionaries almost into two
hostile camps. This lack of positive attitudes on the
part of each
103
other render work place tension-ridden and team work difficult.
The rural bureaucracy has no built-in mechanism for proper evaluation. It is rare that a hard working
man is rewarded and a defaulter punished, instances
are not lacking where the officers at higher levels go out of the way to safeguard even those who are
guilty of either violation of the rules or negligence.
The performance in achieving the target is the least important consideration in the evaluation of the
merit of a functionary. There is also an impression
among the functionaries that it is not the work that is important but the access to and the connections
with key persons that matter. As a result, carrying
of tales, flattery, exhibitionism, indulging in 'private' service to the officers or influential leaders,
arranging dinners, etc., are becoming increasingly
important in the bureaucratic culture in the rural areas. They seem to make traditional bureaucratic
values such as hardwork, integrity and devotion to
duty either irrelevant or out-moded in the present day administration.
There is also the trend by way of expansion of the bureaucracy more at the mid points than at the
cutting edge. For instance, most of the special agencies
started in seventies have a number of assistant directors and full-time project directors. A number of
new posts are created in various departments at
the district level. This expansion should be viewed as an expansion in the work-load on the
administration. If this is so, this additional load falls on
the field functionary who is to deal with the target groups. Yet there has not been addition of new
functionaries commensurate with the expansion at the
grass-roots level. This type of expansion in the middle levels can partly be traced to the pressure that
the organised sector of employees apply on the
system for new avenues of promotion. But such an expansion would hamper the accessibility to the
decision-making levels, further, it would take away the
experienced persons from the field administration.
The rural bureaucracy has also been characterised by a low level of competence-administrative and
technical. This is partly a result of the promotional
system which pushes
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experienced functionaries into the offices and retains relatively junior, inexperienced and less qualified
ones in the field, and partly due to over emphasis
on generalist administrator. There are instances of an extension officer of agriculture not being able to
diagnose a pest and a veterinary doctor failing
to treat an animal. The failure of an engineering supervisor to plan any construction with available local
resources is yet another example. There is paucity
of geologists, mechanical and electrical engineering staff to help the minor irrigation schemes. The fact
that the scheme were launched without adequate
technological support speak of the lopsidedness in the organisational arrangement for execution of
developmental policy.
Lastly, most of the precious time of the functionaries is swallowed up by the meetings and paperwork.
They complain that they are locked up in unnecessary
paperwork and there is considerable duplication in such work. Although huge data is available at the
State and district levels, frequent demands are made
for the same information. The field staff wonder about the repetitiveness of the demand for
information. None in the field knows about the fate of the
information. This indicates the unscientific nature of information maintenance. There is a need to
systematise the total paperwork through modern techniques.
The field functionaries maintain that the scope for reduction or elimination of such wasteful effort is
quite large.
Behavioural Trends of Bureaucracy
The second important dimension of the rural bureaucracy is its behavioural disposition. It is not only the
smooth structure but also the behavioural and
attitudinal pattern that determines the performance of a bureaucratic organisation.
Keen observation of administration at work in the rural areas reveals that the total developmental effort
is guided neither by any concern for the poor
nor any clear-cut social purpose. It has become common in the meetings to invoke the name or office of
the key officer at the superior level and caution
that they would incur the wrath of the higher-ups if the programmes are not implemented. It is this sort
of
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'personality cult' devoid of social purpose that make the field functionaries feel that they are 'servants'
of a few individuals and not of the public.
This in turn perpetuates a tendency to treat the rural poor as subjects and not as citizens.
Lack of social purpose breeds cynicism among the functionaries. The comments such as this country will
not develop', 'it is impossible to improve the conditions
of the poor', 'the development programmes can never succeed', 'all the help for down trodden is a
waste of national resources', etc., indicate the cynical
attitudes of the functionaries. Such an attitude is bound to be counter-productive in the case of
developmental programme and more so to the programmes
intended for the rural poor.
An analysis of the capacity of the bureaucrats to comprehend the developmental phenomenon reveals
that they hardly attempt to go to the root of the problems.
It is this poor and superficial understanding of the causal relations that accounts for ascribing the failure
of anti-poverty schemes solely to the target
groups. They offer different types of explanations for the failures but rarely examine them in their larger
socio-economic context. Such a poor understanding
incapacitates them as agents of development. It also stifles their innovative ability in coping with the
complex problems of development.
There is also the trend for a widespread elitistic bias of rural bureaucracy. Most of these functionaries
think that the benefits are doled out to the poor.
There are persons who maintain that if the same investment is extended to the medium and rich
peasants, they would not only avail it but would also get
production increased. Such thinking is the exact negation of the philosophy of anti-poverty programme.
It is widely complained that officers contact only the influential persons in the villages. It is these
persons who decide whether a person should get a
scheme or not. The officers confirmed this feeling and posed a counter-argument saying that it is
physically not possible to contact all the villagers
in person. They add that implementing the programme without the support and cooperation of the
village
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elite is difficult. A few of them concede that they are compelled to go to the houses of rich people in the
village as there is not even a tea stall in
most of the villages. As a result, the decision-making is influenced by the whims and fancies of rural rich.
The rural bureaucracy further tends to possess a depersonalised nature". The Weberian norms expect
the bureaucracy to be impersonal for reasons of "objectivity"
and "impartiality". These characteristics are hardly found in the operational style of the rural
bureaucracy. On the contrary the rural bureaucracy is
depersonalised which is manifest in the large-scale indifference and hostile attitude towards the target
group. Making a poor villager go round a number
of offices, deliberately delaying the decision, not showing a sense of personal involvement, etc, are
symptomatic of 'depersonalisation' of rural bureaucracy.
The bureaucratic organisation in India has also been marked by a strained human relations within. A
number of other problems stem from this trend. The higher
levels, in matters of supervision and guidance, resort to authoritarian assertions preventing the field
functionary from frankly articulating his opinion.
There is a widespread feeling that free and frank expression would invite the wrath of higher ups. As a
result they silently accept the decisions coming
from above knowing fully well that they cannot be implemented. The relations among the various
functionaries particularly between the officers and subordinates
suffer from fear psychosis. This can be observed from the way they behave in the meetings and in their
personal 'encounter' with the higher level functionaries.
Flattery on face and hatred on back has been one of the striking trends in human relations in these
organisations.
Another characteristic is the "sons of the soil" trend. Most of them hail from the neighbouring places.
For instance, several of the grass-roots functionaries
we covered are drawn from the villages of the same samiti area. They not only engage themselves in
agriculture, business or some other subsidiary occupation
of their own but treat such occupations as primary and their regular jobs as part-time 'headache'.
'Localism' not only made the employee a part-time
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member but result in favouritism to their kith and kin reinforcing the traditional network of kinship ties.
Personal promotion and not the promotion of their official work is yet another feature of this
bureaucracy. Self development, if not aggrandizement, engages
the attention of employees more than the development issues. Most of the time they are engaged in
discussing the questions of D.A., T.A., pay revision,
chances of personal promotions, comparing their lot with the employees of other departments, etc.
They are rarely found discussing exchanging their experience
with developmental programmes. It appears as though each functionary is an island unto himself. This
indicates a high degree of individualistic and personalised
thinking among the functionaries. The consequence of such an approach appears to be the general
escapistic tendency manifesting itself in widespread buck
passing. It is rare that accountability for implementing a programme is fixed and much less enforced.
Lastly, there is a widely shared feeling that subsidy based schemes accentuated the unhealthy practices
like corruption in the rural areas. A fixed percentage
to various functionaries in the delivery of development benefits is an open secret. The pilferages in all
facets of administration including development
administration have almost got institutionalised. While this phenomenon is neither peculiar nor isolated
from the general bureaucratic behaviour, its harmful
effects on the programmes are devastating.
Impact of Environment on Bureaucracy
The third dimension of the rural bureaucracy relates to contextual conduciveness. The bureaucracies are
largely shaped by the environment in which they
operate. The socio-economic environment can stimulate or strangulate the bureaucracy. In view of its
importance one could point out the emerging trends
in the 'environment climate' vis-a-vis the development bureaucracy, as based on field observations.
During the last three and half decades the rural administration has been interacting with the rural poor
at several
108
points because of the focus of the public policy on rural poverty. There has been a shift in public policies
dealing with poverty and rural development
from time to time. Each policy give rise to new hopes. And the performance prove to be no match to the
publicity given to these programmes. No wonder there
is a growing disillusionment among the poor. The net result has been a gradual and increasing erosion of
the credibility of the bureaucratic organisation
and its capability to perform the developmental role.
Not with standing their despair, one finds growing consciousness of development programmes among
the people resulting in increasing articulation of their
demands. They are found to be vocal, outspoken and sometimes critical of the administrative system.
There are instances of the rural poor openly demanding
the developmental benefits. As a result the bureaucracy which is habituated to treat the people as
subjects, started finding itself in a quandary. Thus
the administrative system which lacks the culture of accountability to the masses is subjected to
increasing pressure. The organisation with its inherent
rigidities is in continuous conflict with rapidly changing socio-economic conditions.
The logic of growing consciousness among the people results in a sharpening of social conflict in the
rural areas. For the people in the rural areas are
divided into various groups on the basis of caste, traditional feuds and gap between the prosperous rich
and poverty stricken poor. The administrative
machinery has to perform a tight-rope walking. The success of these programmes depends on its
willingness to cast its support in favour of the poor even
at the risk of antagonising the richer groups. Whether the existing type of bureaucratic organisation can
face such a challenge would determine the overall
place and role of the bureaucracy in rural transformation.
It is observed that the subsidy based developmental programmes in the rural areas gave rise to the
institution of middlemen in a number of villages. This
institution enjoys the peoples support as it is rooted in the social, political economic and cultural ethos
of the rural society. The middleman is a result
of widespread illiteracy, lack of proper
109
information and inadequate exposure of the rural people to the bureaucratic procedural rigmarole. The
field observations reveal that bureaucracy indirectly
encourages the institution of middlemen for various reasons. This gives rise to doubt about the capacity
of development bureaucracy at the grassroots level
to take up the responsibility of directly dealing with the target groups. Absence of direct linkages
between the people and the administration impedes
correct understanding of the problems and difficulties between the bureaucratic organisation and the
people.
Conclusion
The characteristics in the working style of the bureaucratic organisations in the rural sector do not fit
into any existing conceptual paradigms. For, while
the goals set for the organisation are ambitious, the structure suffers from innumerable infirmities. The
growing centralisation of decision-making, proliferation
of the agencies, criss-cross and 'non-formal' linkages among the agencies and functionaries characterise
the structure of the organisation. Further, absence
of reward and punishment, expansion at mid-points, low-level of technical and managerial competence
and wastage of time in the routine meetings and paper-work
render the organisation so feeble that it cannot cope with the dynamic social system where the process
of social change is triggered through a conscious
design. In these conditions, structures of this kind are likely to develop inverse relation with the
developmental tasks.
The structural infirmities can be countered, if the behavioural pattern is adequately geared to the tasks
of the organisation. The rural bureaucratic behaviour
is largely characterised by absence of concern for the poor which breeds pessimism, if not cynicism. The
elitistic bias, authoritarian attitudes and a
depersonalised approach to the people are likely to prove counter-productive. Added to it growing
'localism', obsession with self-development, superficial
understanding of the magnitude of the problems lead to negative disposition harming the purpose of
organisation.
These structural infirmities and the bureaucratic disposition
110
has not been in consonance with the goals of development. The rural socio-economic environment has
been undergoing qualitative changes throwing up new challenges.
The growing aspirations and political consciousness of people results in increasing conflict of demands
on the scarce resources of the society. This gives
rise to new middlemen institutions outside the framework of bureaucratic organisations as support
structure. As the environment keeps on changing and changing
rapidly, the slow, lethargic and indifferent bureaucratic organisational style neither fits into economyefficiency model developed in the west nor Weberian
legal-rational model. Even the the Rigssian prismatic model also does not help us to understand it. This
calls for a more dynamic and comprehensive conceptual
framework which is capable of embracing the totality of the development phenomena.
The administrative theory developed in response to the needs and demands of western societies cannot
explain the nuances of organisational experience of
a developing country like India. The existing theories mostly look within and not to 'outer' conditions of
the organisation. It is both the inner processes
and the larger socio-economic system and its political processes that determine the nature and
character of any administrative system. Any theory that
does not deal with the larger system and its dynamics and dialectics would be inadequate, partial,
lopsided, if not misleading. The discussion on the experience
with rural development bureaucracy further confirms the need to broaden the very base of the theory.
Any failure to take note of this factor would reduce
the usefulness of the theory as an analytical tool to explain the social reality.
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6 ADMINISTRATION POLITICS AND SOCIETY: INDIAN CASE STUDY
A. S. Narang
Political regimes conventionally depend on public bureaucracy to make their will felt on the societies
over whom they preside. The civil service is a key
instrument not only for the repressive and entractive activities of the government but also for their
efforts to transform and develop societies. Even
while the function of indicating broad national development objectives and priorities, does not belong
to them, the task of planning and administration
has traditionally been left in the hands of the career based civil service system of administration. It is
more so in the developing societies, where it
is assumed that the administration is the only significant social sector willing to assume responsibility for
transformation. That is why it is generally
recognized that forces for change in Indian society are predominantly located in a narrow range of
occupational sectors.
The agricultural sector is thought of as basically conservative and oriented towards the status quo. In
the business community, though there are individuals
and institutions who operate technologically and managerially sophisticated enterprises, much of India's
entrepreneurial activity is still directed by
particularistic family concerns that see the maximization of short-term profit margins as the key to
business success. And in the political sector despite
the
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dynamic character of Indian party politics, the more successful Indian parties have drawn their support
from the generally traditional and conservative
agricultural and business sectors, which makes them unlikely sources of support for modernizing
change. Thus, the major thrust of translating ideas of
modernity into significant patterns of social and economic change is generally seen to be taking place
not in the private sector of the economy, nor in
the competitive political sector of the government, but rather in the public sector of the economy and
the administrative sector of government. For most
advocates of modernization in India, it is the higher levels of the public administration that hold the key
of social and economic modernization.1 Therefore
despite various alternatives which have been suggested, public bureaucracy in India retains the politicoadministrative set-up of the country. Both as
an organisation and as an instrument of management the administration in India handles the bulk of the
country's programme of development.
It may be reminded here that at the time of independence India's leadership had committed itself to
secure and protect a social order in which justice,
social, economic and political shall inform all the institutions of the national life. To attain this good a
strategy of planning under a democratic pattern
of socialism was adopted. It was assumed to be a creative approach toward solving the problems of
production and distribution, an approach that sought
to combine goal of increase in growth and reduction in disparities, while avoiding the violence and
regimentation of revolutionary change. It was in this
framework that the bureaucracy had to play a pivotal role as agents of change and effective instruments
of modernization, initiating and managing social
change and to bring justice to every citizen.
Needless to say that in order to be an agent of change, public bureaucracy must have the capacity to
forecast, project and understand the direction and
tempo of major of significant changes in its environment, to plan for necessary or desirable changes, to
adapt itself to changes demanded or planned by
the political system and to innovate on its own. In other words, before embarking or on the gigantic
venture of initiating and
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administering social and economic changes, the bureaucracy must itself undergo structural and
attitudinal changes so as to acquire the right type of perception,
attitude, change orientation, values and skills essential for the success of developmental tasks. How far
bureaucracy in India has played this role? What
have been its strains and problems? And what is its nature in general? These are important questions
today with regard to overall political process and
developmental strategy.
The Colonial Legacy
Like many other governmental institutions, the administration also did not start with a clean slate. In
fact of all the political institutions that the
British bequeathed to India, the civil service was by far the most vital and significant. It was, no doubt,
par excellence the main support of British
imperialism. The Indian Civil Service (ICS) consisted of a small administrative aristocracy, generalist and
non-technical in character, highly educated
and carefully selected by a difficult competitive examination, remarkably adaptable, exceptionally
devoted to duty, imbued with an intense espirit de corps,
and, perhaps most important of all, Pan-Indian rather than regional or provincial in its loyalties.
It did possess strength and efficiency, coupled with aloofness, and exclusivences and conscious of its
class position. It was a set of hierarchies, a close
well-knit administrative service, designed to maintain the stability and continuity of the British power. It
was top to bottom authoritarian, though benevolent
in intentions. Primarily devised for maintenance of law and order and collection of revenues it was a
government by civil servants, who were not responsible
to the people over whom they ruled. Their colonial and paternalistic attitude towards the local people
blocked communication. What they thought was good
for the people was based on their social and professional prejudices. With little or no involvement in the
development, it was fundamentally non-action
oriented.
This tiny body of senior-men ran the affairs of a vast country through a mass of not-very-highlymotivated minor
114
bureaucrats, educated in the arts of absorption rather than of thinking, and trained mainly in the literal
application of a formidable collection of detailed
regulations, hopefully providing for every possible contingency. Correctness rather than initiative was its
watch word : find the right regulation, apply
it and, for the rest, carry out orders, treat superiors with deference, and do nothing that might prejudice
job security. Despite the introduction of limited
self-government, the administrator, at least upto 1946, regarded himself as master. Nationalist
politicians, from Nehru downwards, presented him with a
law and order problem. Whatever his private opinions may have been, his professional loyalties were to
the British raj.2 Obviously, the Indian Civil Service
was the most despised and notorious as the instrument of foreign exploitation.
This was the legacy which India inherited at the time of freedom: a generalist higher civil service, not
used to any tasks of gigantic nation-building,
trained in the traditions of law and order machinery based on fear and awe and without any
institutionalised system of accountability to the people. An
irresponsible, unresponsive, autocratic, and bureaucratic structure was inherited by the country with a
poor, and backward agricultural economy.3
Administrative System in Independent India
After independence, the total environment and ethos of the country underwent a qualitative change.
Elections, political parties, competitive politics. Parliament
and ministers came on the scene. India launched her massive programmes of community development
with a view to liberate the teeming millions. With the
adoption of planning the country attempted to embark upon a silent, arduous and non-violent socioeconomic revolution to ensure social equity and economic
justice. The nature of governmental tasks in independent India, thus underwent a marked change. Its
emphasis shifted from mere care and maintenance of
law and order to social welfare and individual progress. A suitable administrative arrangement was
called for to plan and implement the developmental tasks
on the one hand and meet the immediate
115
mounting challenges created by the partition of the subcontinent of India on the other.
As already mentioned, most of the nationalist leaders were suspicious of the colonial Indian Civil Service.
They also considered its inbred, elitist and
caste-like characteristics to be incompatible with India's new democratic institutions. This demand,
however, was strongly resisted by the more experienced
leaders, who because of their own orientation and background and the class interest they represented,
saw the virtues of an Indian equivalent to the British
administrative system, both as a source of much needed administrative competence and as a means of
cementing national unity. Sardar Vallabhai Patel, as
Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, particularly insisted on continuing with the old. He told the
Constituent Assembly, "I have worked with them during
this difficult period...Remove them and I see nothing but a picture of chaos all over the country." Even
Nehru, who had once denounced the ICS for its
"spirit of authoritarianism" declared "the old distinctions and differences are gone. . . In the difficult
days ahead our service and experts have a vital
role to play and we invite them to do so as comrades in the service of India."
Thus, whatever changes came about subsequently, had to be in the form of piecemeal and minimal
reforms rather than a comprehensive review of radical type.
In fact the privileged conditions of service of the officers of the ICS were protected by constitutional
guarantees. The successor Indian Administrative
Service(IAS) established by Patel (with its own terms and conditions of service guaranteed under the
Constitution) retained the structure and style of
its elite forerunner, perpetuating a national administrative system that, in numbers and outlook, was
more suitable to carrying out the narrow colonial
functions of law and order than the broad responsibilities for economic development of a nationalist
government.
The Administrative Structure
The structure of the public services, the "steel frame" of the British raj, was thus, left largely intact. The
services are characterized by "open entry
based on academic achievement;
116
elaborate training arrangements; permanency of tenure; responsible, generalist posts at central,
provincial and district levels reserved for members of
the elite cadre; a regular, graduated scale of pay with pension and other benefits and a system of
promotion and frequent transfers based predominantly
on seniority but partly on merit. The services are divided into three categories: state services, central
services and all-India services. Each state has
its own services, both generalist and specialist. These are recruited by the states own Public Service
Commissions. Structurally and organisationally,
the state's services are very similar to the all-India and central services. The central government services
numbering more than twenty, include the Indian
Foreign Service, the Central Secretariat Service, the Postal Service and the Indian Revenue Service.
Personnel for the more technical ones are separately
recruited on the basis of relevant qualifications, the others, although operating independently, rely on a
common competitive examination. One of the characteristics
of these services (which is paralleled by the corresponding services at the state level) is a strong
tendency to develop a caste-like exclusiveness. which
is inevitably accompanied by considerable and sometimes bitter inter-service jealousy. As each service
has evolved its own grades, salary structure, promotion
rules and disciplinary regulations, transfer from one to another becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Normally a man's only way out of the narrow confines
of the superior services which he has joined is deputation to the secretariat—a privilege that cannot be
enjoyed by more than a small minority.*
The Constitution specifies two all-India services, the Indian Administrative Service and the Indian Police
Service, but additional all-India services can
be created by Parliament, provided there is approval by two-thirds of the Rajya Sabha, With concern for
national integration the States Reorganisation
Commission recommended in 1955 the creation of three new all-India services—engineering, health and
medical, and forestry. The states have generally opposed
the creation of new all-India services, however. They have argued that the higher pay for ail-India
officers would impose a financial
117
strain; but in fact the states resist sharing the control over the services, with the central government.
They also fear that local candidates may fail
in all India competition and that the posts will be filled by candidates from outside the state.5
Although centrally recruited by competitive examination organised by the Union Public Service
Commission, the officers of All India Services are assigned
to state cadres, just as in British days they would have been assigned to provincial cadre. To this cadre
an officer remains attached, at least in theory,
for the rest of his official life, even though the greater or at least more, significant part of it may be
spent in one of the coveted secretariat posts
in New Delhi. When serving the union government he is on assignment to the centre with the
agreement of the state concerned.
The Union Public Service Commission, is responsible for all matters relating to recruitment,
appointment, transfers, and promotions and its advice is generally
decisive. The Commission also concerns itself with disciplinary matters affecting members of the
services and functions to protect the services and the
merit system from political interference. Its relations with the government are coordinated by the
Ministry of Home Affairs. The process of recruitment
and training serves to reinforce the elitist character of the IAS. Approximately 25 per cent of the yearly
recruitment of less than one hundred are promoted
from the state services, but the remainder is directly recruited through competitive examination. Once
the highest position to which a youth might aspire,
the IAS has lost much of its functional attraction for India's brightest youth, who now find business to be
offering better both by way of greater prestige
and financial reward. The service continues to be dominated, nevertheless, by the urban, educated and
wealthy classes.6
Socio-economic Background of Bureaucracy
Empirical studies confirm the elitist character of our higher civil services. With the expansion of the
educational facilities, the boys and girls of the
middle and lower middle classes have been entering the administrative services. Vast increase in the
functions of the government is partly responsible
118
for broadening the social base of the administration. But the entry of the boys and the girls coming from
the lower classes are thwarted because the norms
and methods which were followed during the colonial period have been bodily lifted and adopted after
1947. This approach has prevented the administrative
services from becoming 'non-elitist' as well as the democratisation of the services. Consequently those
who man the top bureaucracy "generally come from
the wealthy, urban and educational classes." Their parents belong to the upper layer of society and are
engaged in the modern professions such as law,
engineering, medicine and teaching in the universities.7 The bureaucrats, generally, belong to the higher
castes and are drawn from the urban and rural
elitist classes. Their origin quite often decide their approach. A study of the IAS probationers has
revealed that a considerable number of the new entrants
to the IAS, do not believe in equality, democracy, secularism, economic planning or reservation policy.
They maintain very good relations with the business
community. Many of the retired civil servants get positions in the large business houses. More often
than not the retired civil servants form the lobbyists
of business houses. As Stanley Kochnek says "Such people are selected because of their knowledge of
government procedure or their ability to gain access
and because of former association with government, personal contacts based on school ties, and
particularistic loyalties of caste, religion, community,
and language. Among the specially recruited personnel are former ICS and IAS officers, former members
of the military or other government civil services."9
The civil servants also become governors, chairmen or members of the boards of the public corporations
and the employees of the associations of the business
community. Against this background, the concept of the neutrality of the civil service cannot really be
maintained. Many commentators have noted that the
attitude of the civil servants to socio-economic change has been 'negative'.
Even at the rural level, the lower level bureaucrats whose work is of crucial importance, do not have
sufficient rural background. According to Charles
Bettleheim, "Most of
119
them (village level workers) come from the urban petty bourgeoisie. They therefore have some difficulty
in making contact with the peasants. There seems
to have been a tendency recently to recruit the better-off peasants' sons who have a fair level of
education. This is a step forward, but the essential
problem of how to get through to the peasantry has not been solved. Because of their social origins,
most village level workers are inclined to help the
richer peasantry and ignore the others.
Of late representation of scheduled and backward castes is gradually increasing in the bureaucracy
because of reservation of seats and increased opportunities
for education. However it is still not satisfactory. Moreover, members of scheduled castes also belonging
to relatively better off families get into higher
bureaucracy. People from these castes compete because of their aspirations to occupy important
positions in the government hierarchy. They are motivated
by an understandable psychological complex, derived from their original social position, which tells
them that a civil servant enjoys power and privileges
irrespective of birth. After gaining access to bureaucratic elite class, these people quickly adopt with a
vengeance all the traits and characteristics
of their new found status. They become equally snobbish as the upper middle class officials and seek to
compensate for childhood and adolescent snubs;
they also severe all connections with ordinary people and are often helped by matrimonial
arrangements which ease their transformation into the new ruling
class. In these circumstances the poor masses feel alienated by the bureaucracy completely.
Role of Bureaucracy
After independence, though the system of bureaucracy continues to exist in the same shape as it was
established by the British, it functions in a context
which is, in some fundamental respects, different from that of the British colonial rule. It has now to
function under democratic political leadership
and operate within the framework of responsible cabinets, questioning legislatures, ever critical political
parties
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and the highly demanding pressure groups. It has to be sensitive to the policies laid down by the
cabinets and legislatures, the values and purposes of
the leadership and the interests and pressures of political parties and groups. One of the senior civil
servants himself puts this position thus:
"The civil service in India is expected to play manifold rules. There is need to match the role perception
and role expectation so that the role performance
by the civil service is the optimum and may satisfy the diverse needs and urges of the community .... (It)
is an instrument for implementation of people's
will and aspirations as expressed in the Constitution. It is the focal point of stability and order in the
shifting sands of politics. At the same time,
as an elitist class, it is an instrument of modernization and social change. It is an instrument of planning
and economic development. It may be expected
to safeguard the rights of the underprivileged sections in society. It has to be all the time aware of the
political milieu and the democratic context
in which it has to operate. Therefore, the civil service has to undergo radical structural, procedural and
attitudinal changes if it has to serve as an
effective instrument of change and progress in a developing society. The civil service has to cultivate
much wider social awareness and responsiveness
as well as social base apart from the traditional virtues of integrity, functional efficiency and a sense of
fair play and impartiality."10
In practice, however, the administrative ethos has suffered very little change during more than thirty
years of independence. In some respects it has become
reinforced as a result of the decline in the quality of secondary and further education and the increase in
the severity of competition among the growing
mass of the half educated, for a limited number of government jobs. Hence, despite the developmentmindedness of many of the newly-recruited top-level
administrators and the capacity shown by some of the older ones to take on new and unfamiliar tasks,
together with some rather half-hearted attempts to
implement the impeccable recommendations of innumerable administrative reforms commissions, both
central "and state, Indian administration remains, to
a remarkable extent, stuck in its pre-independence
121
posture. This is the despair of the social and economic planners, who are always proclaiming, although
with decreasing hopefulness, the urgent need to ginger
up the administrative machine so as to make it a more efficient instrument for the attainment of their
goals.11
The dead weight of tradition is felt from the top to the bottom of the administrative hierarchy. For
instance, the organisation of the secretariat, where
both at the centre and in the states, the most vital of administrative decisions are taken, is not
substantially different from what it was in British
days, except to the extent that, with the expansion of governmental functions, particularly in the field of
social and economic development, it has become
more cumbersome and complicated. Aloofness from ordinary people and alienation are generally
characteristic, not only of the ICS-IAS, but of administrators
generally. The board observations tend to support the view that although there has been much
discussion about the development of a more democratic administrative
style, there has been little change in the actual operation except to the extent that administrators' at all
levels have, of necessity acquired the habit
of treating elected politicians with at least outward respect.
It is also pointed that of the many variables contributing to the implementation gap between planned
goals and their achievements, perhaps the most significant
is the bureaucratic machinery whose function is to translate planned goals into action. Influenced by
western education, experience and concept of development,
and encouraged by administrative feasibility our planners and administrators have interpreted
development as economic growth without caring for distributive
justice. The non-implementation of land ceiling acts involving social and economic principles of agrarian
reform is due to the fact that the administrative
machinery particularly at the lower levels which is responsible for the implementation of all legislative
measures is either lethargic or indifferent or
hostile or corrupt. Of course for failure of land reforms, the bureaucracy cannot be squarely held
responsible. In many cases non-implementation is due
to lack of political will in the corridors of powers. Yet the role of
122
administration in this regard remains significant.
There are several reasons as to why changes in styles have been more than very gradual. An obvious one
is the fact that the heirarchical structure and values
in the administration are constantly stimulated and sustained by the casteism that is still the
predominant feature of the whole social order. Another
factor is to be found in recruitment to the IAS (and, to a considerable extent to the other superior
services both at the centre and in the states) from
a very narrow social stratum. Typically, the top administrator comes from an urban family which enjoys
advantages that approach a western standard of living
and has at least some of the elements of a western outlook. When to all this is added a need for
proficiency in English, as the main all-India language
for mutual communication among the educated, it is clear that one has a public service which, at least in
its higher echelons, is hardly more representative
than it was in British days. Given the actual distribution of both opportunities and expectations, it is
inevitable that this should be so.12
Another factor is the creation of compartmentalisation of the various departments and organisations to
deal with various aspects of administration. The
separate services, with their wide disparity in pay scales, have become rigid and self-conscious "classes",
and thereby have stimulated jealousies and
resentment. According to Paul Appleby "there is too much and too constant consciousness of rank,
class, title and service membership, too little consciousness
of membership in the public service, and too little consciousness turning on particular job
responsibilities. Various services do not cooperate with each
other. They sometimes operate under a cloak of secrecy in a situation which often requires openness,
consultation and coordination."
Further, the prevalence of formalism has served to stifle bureaucratic initiative and imagination. The
normal procedure involves what Appleby has called
"the hierarchical movement of paper." Unwilling to accept responsibility even for minor decisions, thepetty bureaucrats refer the files, neatly tied in
"red tape", to a higher level. In India, it is said, "the British introduced red tape, but we have perfected
it." Responsibility
123
is diluted by delay and inaction. "Red tape becomes a technique of self-preservation", writes Rajni
Kothari, "and reverence for traditional forms is matched
only by attachment to strict routine and unwholesome preoccupation with questions of accountability."
Appleby argues, that it is not a question of too
much hierarchy, but rather that there is an irregular hierarchy, disjointed and impeding effective
communication.13
One major element in the effective operation and in the public image of bureaucracy is corruption.
Corruption may be greatly exaggerated in India. According
to some commentators administrative corruption is almost unavoidable in developing societies, where
western type bureaucratic norms have not become fully
internalised, and where the social system is such that the distinction between corruption and the
loyalties associated with caste, community and the extended
family cannot easily be discerned, it is also argued that economically frustrated individuals seek a
scapegoat in official misbehaviour. But as A.D. Gorwala
argues, that "the psychological atmosphere produced by the persistent and unfavourable comment is
itself the cause of further moral deterioration, for
people will begin to adopt their methods, even for securing legitimate right, to what they believe to be
the tendency of men in power and office. Moreover,
the public may decry corruption, but traditional attitudes often condone it, and fatalism may lead many
to accept it as inevitable. Nepotism is officially
condemned, but in traditional terms it may be viewed as loyalty to one's family, friends and
community."14 Particularly when corruption is prevalent on
a large scale at the political level, the scope for corruption at administrative level, where the power of a
public servant far exceeds his income, is
much greater.
Administration and Politics : Committed Bureaucracy
From the above discussion it emerges that the bureaucracy still exhibits a continuity with preindependence traditions with its emphasis on formalism, impersonality
and deferential character, security and lack of initiative. The Indian administrative ethos have
undergone very little change during the
124
thirty-seven years of independence. However, with the passage of time there has been a marked
increase in the change propensity of the people. The urban
section, particularly, is increasingly prone to changing the government for better and timely services.
Even the rural people, of late are displaying much
more desire to participate in local political activities simply because of the desire to extract real benefits
from the government. This has led to a power
struggle between the elected representatives and the bureaucracy for deciding the political issues
relating to development administration. The bureaucrat
on the one hand, claims the sole authority to determine and administer the various governmental
programmes. On the other hand, the political leaders take
a stand that they alone as the representatives of the people, know what is desirable, suitable and
acceptable to their people.
The civil servants have expressed that they are prepared to do their best but are prevented from
discharging their functions by political interference.
They feel that after the introduction of Panchayati Raj "political pull" had increased. Political
interference in matters of appointment, promotion and
transfer, and the charges of favouritism, nepotism and corruption against the political leadership have
been some of the most important factors causing
frustration among the bureaucrats. It is also pointed out that whereas in parliamentary democracy the
ultimate responsibility for policies rests with the
minister and not with the civil servants, in case of detection of error or anamoly in policy formulation
and decision-making, the entire responsibility
is thrown upon the bureaucrats. It is easy for the political leaders to blame the bureaucrats for their own
ignorant or negligent or otherwise motivated
actions.
On the other hand politicians allege that in the name of neutrality and anonymity and under the cloak of
ministerial responsibility the bureaucracy has
been augmenting its own authority. In the years immediately following Nehru's death, particularly the
governmental instability following the 1967 elections,
the administration assumed increasing importance; at the same time it also became more irresponsible.
Referring
125
to the relationship between political leaders and the civil servants the Administrative Reforms
Commission however pointed out that there has been a basic
failure on the part of the administrative leadership which has contributed to the present situation in the
administration and that not all of it can be
attributed to the impact of democratic institutions. There has also been a recognisable fall in service
standards for which full responsibility must be
accepted by the heads of administration. In its view there is no valid explanation for the failure to
exercise supervision, for the various instances of
administrators' slackness and for their tacit acceptance of the present state of administration.
It is also argued that in a developing democracy, bureaucracy is neither neutral nor anonymous. For
neutrality of civil service presupposes agreement on
the fundamental values in society. This is not possible in India of today. It may be possible in consensusbased societies where clashes and conflicts
can be resolved within the system and not in a transitional society like ours which is conflict ridden.
Therefore it is required that a "commitment" to
a new social and economic order has to be consciously built and nurtured through the career of civil
servants. It has been alleged that the commitment
to the new social and economic order envisaged in the Constitution is not there in the bureaucracy.
However in actual practice the commitment is being degenerated to compliance which has resulted in
the increasing politicisation of administration. The
politicisation has been the result of a relentless pursuit of political power at a cost, if necessary, of the
existing norms and standards of politico-administrative
relationship. Often the political leaders have sought to preserve their power by controlling the
apparatus. Politicisation of administration has been a
phenomenon of unprecedented character and has permeated at all levels from the Union Cabinet to a
Gram Panchayat.
Politicisation has had both healthy and demoralising effects on administration. It has had a healthy
effect in the sense that it has provided a democratic
check on the growing power of the administration. It makes the administrators responsible and
accountable on a day to day basis to the
126
elected representatives of the people and responsive to the latters' problems. However, this process as
yet operates in a most complex and sometimes even
in an uncontrolled manner. Consequently the administrative apparatus is often accused of becoming
more and more servile to the political apparatus even
while shedding its earlier authoritarianism, whether or not the directions are legitimate and
constitutional.
References
1. Stanley J. Heginbotham, "The Civil Service and the Emergency", in Henry C. Hart, ed., Indira Gandhi's
India, (Westview Press, 1976), p. 70.
2. A.H. Hanson and Janet Douglas, India's Democracy, (Delhi, Vikas, 1972), pp. 131-32.
3. C.P. Bhambhri, Bureaucracy and Politics in India, (Delhi, Vikas, 1971), p. 61.
4. Hanson and Douglas, n. 2, p. 138.
5. Asok Chanda, Indian Administration, (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1958), pp. 102-4.
6. Robert L. Hardgrave jr. Indian Government and Politics, (2nd ed. 1975), p. 67.
7. V. Subramaniam, "Representative Bureaucracy: A Reassessment", The American Political Science
Review, December 1967, p. 1050.
8. C.P. Bhambhri, "Administrative Elite and Political Modernization in India", Indian Journal of Public
Administration, Jan-March 1971, pp. 47-64.
9. Stanley A. Kochanek, Business and Politics in India, University of California Press, 1974, pp. 313-14.
10. T.N. Chaturvedi's "Foreword", in A.R. Tyagi, ed. The Civil Service in a Developing Society, (Delhi,
Sterling, 1969).
11. Hanson and Douglas, n. 2, p. 132.
12. Ibid-, P. 147.
13. Hardgrave, pp. 69-70.
14. Ibid., p. 71.
127
7 PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY AND ADMINISTRATION: ANTI-CORRUPTION STRATEGIES IN INDIA
O.P. Sharma
Democracy in modern times is often distinguished from the other models of government, mainly from
the point of view of its accountability and responsiveness
to the people, their aspirations and questioning. In all developing societies, due to the increased role of
the State, the scope of activities for the
government has expanded manifold. In actual concrete terms this has meant a vast addition to the
powers of the administration. With the social order not
changed drastically to a socialist pattern, but at the same time the public sphere magnified, this has
resulted in the phenomenon of what is commonly described
as "corruption". The developing countries, therefore, have been forced to reckon with this problem and
adopt measures to deal with them.
Corruption is the widely discussed topic in India. The problems of corruption are so complex and
widespread that they have roots and ramifications in society
as a whole. Though corruption has been with us from the pre-independent days, the scope and incentive
is much greater today.
The Government seems to be aware of the existence of corruption and has taken various measures to
check its monstrous growth. It has had innumerable committees/
commissions of inquiry on corruption. It has set up special
128
police establishments and vigilance units in departments of administration. We have a Central Vigilance
Commission and Central Bureau of Investigation.
Some states have set up Lokayukts. We have all the laws necessary to combat corruption. But none of
them have been effective enough in reducing the general
prevalence of corruption. Why? If one looks at the impact and effectiveness of anti-corruption
measures, it looks like (a) the more effective and adequate
the anti-corruption measures, the greater is their impact on society, and (b) that the anti-corruption
measures will be effective, if the commitment of
political leadership is strong.
An attempt has been made in this chapter to critically examine the efficacy of various anti-corruption
measures initiated by the Government to contain the
corruption, both administrative and political. Towards this a few selected measures have been chosen
for detailed investigation. While analysing the selected
measures; it makes an attempt to suggest some other remedies that might be fruitfully adopted to
contain the evil within some managable proportion, if
not to root it out completely.
Definition
Before analysing strategies for combating corruption, it may be desirable to have a working definition of
corruption. Corruption, we would all agree, involves
a deviation from certain standards of behaviour. What criteria shall we use to establish those standards?
Broadly speaking there are three criteria from
which to choose: the public interest, public opinion and legal norms. The referents of all three overlap
considerably but each implies a distinct analytical
focus and each raises certain operational problems.
On the basis of workability alone, the public interest and public opinion criteria pose great difficulties.
Both the criteria are subjective in nature and,
therefore, it may not be desirable to adopt them as definitional criteria. By purposely leaving both
considerations from the definition itself, we can
then empirically ask how a corrupt act affects the public and how it is regarded by the public.
The third alternative of relying heavily on legal norms in
129
defining corruption, while it too has shortcomings, seems the most satisfactory alternative. Nye has
followed this approach and, defined corruption as:
Behaviour which deviates from the formal duties of a public role (elective or appointive) because of
private regarding (personal, close family, private
clique), wealth or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private—
regarding influence.1
Though this definition of corruption is not entirely satisfactory in terms of inclusiveness of behaviour
and the handling of relativity of standards but
it has the merit of denoting specific behaviour generally called corrupt by both developed and
developing societies standards. For our present purpose
we, therefore, accept and adopt this definition. It covers most behaviours commonly referred to while
discussing corruption in public life. Most abuses
of public power for private ends would fall into its net. It also includes favours done from motives of
personal loyality or kinship as well as favours
done for cash.
Administrative Corruption
There is a popular belief that administrative corruption is extensively widespread, that nothing moves
without money and that favours can be purchased.
Had the things been so, the social fabric would have collapsed long ago. The fact that this popular
impression is wide off the mark is not important, but
the fact that this impression does exist has great significance. This 'folklore' of corruption can do
incalculable harm in shaping the moral fibre of the
people and in bringing about the cynicism and resignation in which such corruption itself will flourish. In
India, the government is not only aware of
the problem but is stated to be "deeply disturbed by it". It has, therefore, taken from time to time
"systematic" steps to deal with this problem. Such
steps are said to be "vigorously implemented" by it. A mere listing of the measures taken by the
government to check administrative corruption should inspire
confidence. However, a close examination of such measures shows the
130
hollowness of the tall claim made by the government in this respect. For the reasons of space and time,
we are not going to examine all the measures adopted
by the government to curb administrative corruption. We are going to select only two institutions, which
have been established to deal with the problems.,
for detailed examination. The institutions selected are the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the
Central Vigilance Commission (CVC). These are
two main instruments of the government to deal with administrative corruption.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)
In pursuance of the recommendation of the Committee on Prevention of Corruption, popularly known
as the Santhanam Committee after its Chairman K. Santhanam,
it was decided by the Government of India in 1963 to set up the CBI to cope with the problems arising
out of expanding economy of the country. The nucleus
around which the CBI was formed, was the Delhi Special Police Establishment which was responsible for
investigation of offences of bribery, misappropriation,
etc. against Central Government servants and certain other cases in which interests of the Government
of India were involved. Thus, the CBI is an investigating
agency of the Government of India, which is concerned with investigation and detection of offences
involving Central Government funds and Central Government
employees, as also infringement of economic and fiscal laws. To be precise, the main responsibility of
the CBI is to collect intelligence about corruption
in the public services and the projects and undertakings in the public sector of the Central Government.
It is required to investigate and prosecute the
cases of corruption in the Courts.
For making preliminary inquiries about the offences, scientific investigations, collection of evidences and
initiation of proceedings, the CBI has been
organised in eight divisions. Out of eight divisions, five divisions, which deal with corruption cases are
under the Department of Personnel and Administrativa
Reforms. The other three divisions dealing with normal conventional offences (Indian Penal Code crimes
131
and all that) are under the Ministry of Home Affairs (proper). The division of the CBI between the
Ministry of Home Affairs (proper) and the Department
of Personnel and Administrative Reforms is artificial. This arrangement does not look sound as far as
cohesive working of the CBI is concerned. In actual
practice, it has created problems of coordination, delays and responsibility. This duality of control, has
adversely affected the functioning of the CBI.
According to many, no consideration other than political is responsible for this duality of control.
Since its inception (i.e. 1964) to 1981, the CBI has investigated 29,435 cases of which 3421 were
convicted and 1731 were punished departmentally. In addition,
3248 other persons were convicted and 2188 firms were fined or blacklisted. The percentage of
conviction has been only 35.9, but for a institution like
the CBI which is responsible for eliminating corruption, the performance record is by no means
satisfactory.
Detail about the nature of cases are not available. However, we have details of work done by the CBI
during 1977 to 1981, which is given at Appendix I.
Though the number of cases registered with the CBI had gone up from 1186 in 1977 to 1229 in 1981, the
percentage of cases ending in conviction (out of the
cases decided by courts) had come down from 82.1 per cent in 1977 to 67.9 per cent in 1981. The main
reason for this decline, as advanced by the Government
of India, is that now the CBI is not taking simple and petty cases where the proof is easy to obtain. The
corruption is direct in lower echelons of the
administration while in higher echelons of the administration it is indirect. The Government also feels
that this decline in the conviction rate did not
indicate deterioration in the standards of investigation. The argument advanced by it in support of this is
that the conviction rate in normal IPC cases
is 55 per cent whereas in respect of CBI cases it is 68 per cent. Though the performance of the CBI is not
satisfactory yet the Government feels that is
has played an important preventive role. It is believed had there been no CBI, the size of corruption
would have been more.
132
Though the statistics explains many important things yet it hides vital things. It tells us about the
number of cases but nothing about the nature of cases.
Normally, the CBI takes up only big cases of fraud involving Rs. 25 lakhs or more. The cases of smaller
amounts are looked into by the local police. Thus
the services of the CBI are not available in cases of "small" corruption. The genesis of this novel idea
goes back to 1952 when the Enquiry Committee on
Special Police Establishment (1949-52) suggested that Special Police Establishment should concentrate
its attention on really important cases and should
not dissipate its energies and time in pursuing cause of minor irregularity or petty dishonesty.2 The
Government of India accepted this recommendation
of the Committee.
The idea behind acceptance of this recommendation was that successful prosecution in a comparatively
small number of big and important cases makes a greater
impression on other actual or potential wrong-doers than mere numbers of cases of major and minor
importance sent upto Court. The Government was of the
opinion that from the point of view of society the punishment of persons occupying important and
responsible positions is both more satisfactory and more
salutory than seeing conviction of say a petty official who has exorted a bribe of Rs. 5/-.3
Theoretically, the logic of the Government sounds quite convincing. The limited resources of the CBI
should be utilised in the most effective and telling
manner by restructing the jurisdiction of the CBI. However, in actual practice it is not so. Actually, the
restruction of the scope of the CBI has served
the interest of the Government in many ways. Firstly, to date not a single influential, important and big
person has been successfully convicted by the
CBI. Inspite of exposures of politicians in corrupt measures by the press, to date no single politician of
some stature has been convicted and successfully
prosecuted by the CBI.
Secondly, this helped the Government in defaming and winning its big and influential opponents. This
can be achieved by threat of handing over the cases,
where they are involved, to the CBI for investigation. The Government can
133
pressurise the CBI either to expedite or to withdraw such cases in accordance with its political
expediency. It is not common to find such cases. Thirdly,
it can help the supporters and friends of the Government. It can help them indirectly. If they are
"caught" or exposed and there is a mounting pressure
from the public and/or the opposition political parties, the government can calm it down by referring
the case to the CBI for investigation. The CBI will
take its own time to complete the investigation, which may be delayed by the Government on one
reason or the other. Cases may be delayed to the extent
that people might loose interest in them. If, however, the CBI for one reason or the other has been
successful in filing the case in the Court, then the
Government has the power of withdrawing the cases. And this power has been successfully used by
governments irrespective of which political party they
belong, to serve their own interests. To give one example of such misuse of power is the case of
Jagannath Mishra of Bihar. Mishra's Government in Bihar
withdrew the |vigilance case against Chief Minister Mishra which was initiated by its predecessor
government.
Secondly, the statistics do not tell us about the time taken by the CBI in deciding the cases. The
maximum and average period for conclusion of a vigilance
case in the CBI was as under :
Maximum
Average
Major cases 144 months
47 months
Minor cases 122 months
33 months
It is clear form the above that the CBI takes a lot of time in completing its investigations in both major
and minor cases. Such long delays, actually,
whittle down the deterrent effect of punishment; the more prolonged the proceedings the greater is the
difficulty experienced by the witnesses and greater
still is the hardship of persons involved.
The above delays become lethal when viewed against the back drop of the delays in law courts in
deciding cases. As against 541 CBI cases pending in courts
in 1965, there were 1625 cases pending in courts in 1981.4 Cases filed by the CBI in courts are pending
for many years. Some cases are
134
pending since last 10-15 years. The persons who were involved in those cases have since retired and
some have even died. Hence, it is not possible to successfully
pursue the cases in courts.5 Delays apart from causing the hardships to concerned persons lead to an
increase in corruption and malpractices.
What are the factors responsible for this sad state of affairs of the CBI? Firstly, there is an acute shortage
of staff. Though the staff of the CBI increased
from 1432 in 1964 to 3178 in 1982s yet it is not sufficient to carry out the work of the CBI. With this
strength, it has to look after all the employees
of the Central Government and public undertakings which are around 70 lakhs. Thus, keeping in view its
jurisdiction, the CBI has a small force. With the
existing strength, it is capable of dealing with 1000 cases annually at the maximum. However, on an
average, it takes up 1200 cases annually.7 It is, therefore,
necessary that the CBI be strengthened on a war footing and be provided with more staff. Apart from
shortage of staff, the CBI is also facing problems
in getting people from states on deputation. People will come only when they will have some financial
gains. The CBI has been repeatedly requesting the
Government to look into this aspect. However, the matter is still pending with the Government.8
Secondly, the financial resources of the CBI are inadequate. Though the expenditure of the CBI has
increased from Rs. 2.65 crores in 1972-73 to Rs. 4.88
crores in 1981-82 yet it is not sufficient for its activities. The increase in expenditure has been mainly
due to sanctioning of additional DA from time
to time and general increase in establisnment charges and contingencies.9 Keeping in view the
responsibilities of the CBI the funds available with it are
inadequate. For investigation work and appointment of new personnel, the CBI does not have requisite
funds.11 To strengthen the administrative set-up of
the CBI and to make available more resources, the CBI has been sending its proposal to the Government
since last five years. However, the Government has
not taken any decision to implement them,'0
Thirdly, the CBI face some problems while dealing with
135
state governments. The CBI is empowered to investigate offences, modified by the Central Government,
in the states with the consent of the Government of
those states. If a state government does not consent to the jurisdiction of the CBI over that state in
respect of any offence, the CBI will not be able
to investigate cases even against Central Government servants or cases pertaining to Central Acts within
the territorial limits of that state. Apart from
this, the CBI is also dependent upon states' police for the exercise of its functions. Though such
assistance is generally forthcoming on an informal basis
but in some cases it is not for one reason or the other. The CBI has no power to compel state
government to cooperate with it. This affects the functioning
of the CBI especially in those cases where state governments for their own reasons do not want to
cooperate.
Last but not the least, the CBI has not paid, for the reasons best known to it, attention to inform public
about its activities. Though, the CBI had published
brochures giving detailed information about the type of cases investigated by it and the same were
distributed among public. There is also an Information
Officer who attends to publicity side by maintaining liaison with the press.12 However, the number of
brochures published and distributed does not appear
to be very high. And this exercise is not done regularly too. Under the circumstances, its impact is going
to be not much. In a country like ours where
illiteracy is quite high, the impact of printed material, which is not only limited but also insufficient, is
not going to be much. Almost all the rural
people, whom we happened to talk, in several parts of the country, were quite ignorant about the
functioning of the CBI. As a matter of fact almost all
of them had not heard the name of the CBI. Though situation was better in urban areas but was not
satisfactory. Thus, there is an urgent need to make people
aware about the activities of the CBI. This is so when, in a country like India, the only ray of hope for
curbing and punishing the corrupt lies with the
people.
All the above factors affect the functioning of the CBI. The problems faced by the CBI in its work are
those problems which can be solved, without much
efforts, by the Government.
136
It has not solved them simply because the CBI, as constituted presently, is serving its purpose. The
Government is interested in using the anti-corruption
bodies to serve its own interests and not in actually curbing the corruption. So far, the CBI has nervously
served the interests of the Government. However,
the people are not satisfied and have expressed a deep resentment about the working of the CBI. The
people have started thinking that those cases in which
the Government wants to suppress the truth13 or save its own party men14 or harass the persons
belonging to opposition parties15 are referred to the CBI
for investigation. They believe that the CBI now functions in accordance with the wishes of the
Government. The Estimates Committee of the Seventh Lok
Sabha was very critical about the functioning of the CBI as an agency to curb corruption. It stated that
the CBI "has, despite two decades of its existence,
failed to make any significant dent on the problem of corruption. The deterrent effect of the CBI has not
been felt to the extent that it could be said
that corrupt practices are on the decline if not on the way out."16
Inspite of all the shortcomings and criticism of the CBI, the people still have some faith in it. This is
primarily because there is no other agency on
which they can depend for independent and impartial investigation of corrupt practices and crimes.
They don't believe in the state police machinery for
investigation of corrupt practices because of the fact that it is amenable to the pressure easily. They,
therefore, either send their complaints direct
to the CBI or exert pressure upon state governments to entrust services and controversial matters for
investigation to the CBI. Recent experiences tells
us that whenever a state government wants to shift its burden or to make a matter complicated or
interested in lingering on or wants to harass its political
opponents, it refers the matter to the CBI.17 As a result the CBI is burdened with many complicated
matters. To make the things worst, there appears no
end to cases of corruption amongst public servants. Under the circumstances, how effectively can the
CBI work? If it has been successful, howsoever slowly,
in catching the corrupt people, then legal
137
hurdles come in the way of awarding punishment to them. Courts take their own time in deciding these
cases. People of low rank and status involved in the
corruption cases suffer whereas the big and influential flourish and are not affected at all. Rather they
become more active in their corrupt practices.
Under the circumstances, we have to contend with by accepting the CBI as a part of our system. It may
not be Utopian to expect the CBI will be able to
eliminate or even curb corruption from our society.
The Central Vigilance Commission (CVC)
On the basis of the recommendations of the Santhanam Committee, the Government of India set up the
CVC by an executive order in 1964. While the recommendations
for setting up the CVC was accepted by the Government, the scheme of the CVC as finalised by the
Government did not contain many of the important features
recommended by the Santhanam Committee. The basic objective to set up the CVC was to fulfil the
need for an independent body with extensive functions designed
to ensure that complaints of corruption or lack of integrity on the part of Government servants are given
prompt and effective attention and that offenders
are brought to book without fear and favour.
The CVC has jurisdiction and powers in respect of matters to which the executive powers of the Union
extends. It can undertake or have an inquiry made into
any transaction in which a public servant is suspected or alleged to have acted for an improper purpose
or in a corrupt manner or into any complaint that
a public servant had exercised or refrained from exercising his powers with an improper or corrupt
motive or into any complaint of misconduct or lack or
integrity or any malpractices or misdemeanour on the part of a public servant. Where it appears after a
preliminary enquiry that a public servant had acted
or refrained from acting for an improper or corrupt purpose, the Commission advises the appropriate
disciplinary authority regarding suitable action to
be taken.
The CVC has also been charged with the responsibility of exercising a general check and supervision over
vigilance and
138
anti-corruption work in the Ministries/Departments and public undertakings, etc. The Commission calls
from administrative authorities such reports and returns
as it may consider necessary for this purpose.
Though the jurisdiction of the CVC is co-terminus with the executive powers of the Union and extends to
all employees of Government and central public undertakings,
it has been decided that the Commission will advise on cases pertaining to gazetted Government
officers or officers of public undertakings who are in receipt
of pay of Rs. 1000/-per month or more.
The CVC, however, exercises a general check and supervision over vigilance cases relating to nongazetted officers and officers of public undertakings drawing
less than Rs. 1000/- per month, by obtaining periodical returns and progress reports.
As a preventive measure, the CVC may advise changes in procedures on practices when it appears that
they afford scope for corruption.
The functions of the CVC are purely advisory. As per para 4 of the Ministry of Home Affairs Resolution of
11 February 1964, the Commission exercices its
powers and functions with the same measure of independence and autonomy as the Union Public
Service Commission. The Government did not give it statutory
status because the Santhanam Committee recommended that the Commission should be given a
statutory form only after sufficient experience had been gained.18
The Commission is a one member Commission. The Central Vigilance Commissioner is appointed by the
President. In actual practice, the selection is made by
the Home Minister and placed before the Prime Minister. After being approved by the Prime Minister,
the name is submitted to the President for appointment.
The Government has not laid down a formal procedure for the selection of the Commissioner. There are
also no general guidelines and qualifications, legal
or otherwise laid down for selection. The only stipulation in this regard is that the Home Minister has
got to submit for consideration of the r rime Minister
the reasons why a
139
particular person is recommended.19
The sanctioned and actual strength of the staff of the Commission is as under :
table with 3 columns and 3 rows
Year
Sactioned strength
Actual strength
31 March 1968
164
153
31 December 1981
168
151
table end
Though with the increase of number of public servants, the work of the Commission has increased yet
its staff has not increased. Whereas the Commission
has 164 posts as on 31 March 1968, it had only 168 posts as on 31 December 1981. The position of staff
actually in position is not satifactory since there
were 17 posts lying vacant on 31 December 1981. Since the details of vacant posts are not available one
is not in a position to comment on how it is affecting
the work of the Commission.' But one thing is clear, for an organisation like the Commission this number
of vacant post is alarming especially in view
of its nature of work.
The budget of the Commission forms a part of the budget of the Ministry of Home Affairs. Its budget has
been as under:
table with 2 columns and 3 rows
Year
Budget (Rs. in lakhs)
1965-66
9.45
1981-82
32.4
table end
The budget of the Commission is mainly meant for pay and allowances of officers and establishment.
The increase in budget is due to increase in allowances
of staff, office expenditure and the creation of new posts.
Before discussing the work done by the Commission, it may be desirable to make a distinction between
the functions and work of the CBI and the Commission.
This is necessary for an appreciation and evaluation of the work done by the Commission.
Actually, there is some confusion between the functions of the CBI and the Commission. The CBI makes
an inquiry and makes its report to the particular department
through
140
the Commission. It is not the function of the Commission to make an inquiry either separately or jointly.
The Commission calls for records of the CBI, if
any, calls for defence statement, consults the department concerned and gives its decision. It may be
possible that on the basis of the records produced
by the CBI, it does not find that this is a case fit for prosecution or for departmental inquiry. That is a
question of opinion. The Commission being an
independent and autonomous authority, is required to discharge its functions in a judicious manner. It
has to bear in mind the principles of justice. It
is not its functions to detect an offender as the CBI does.20
Thus, the Commission acts on the advice of the CBI. Final reports of investigation by the CBI in the cases
involving gazetted government servants are required
to be sent in the first instance to the Commission. Action is taken by the department concerned on the
recommendations of the CBI only after considering
the advice of the Commission. Since its inception till 31 December 1931, the Commission has completed
9,878 cases only.21 This performance of the Commission
was by no means satisfactory. On an average it had completed 581 cases per year. In a large country like
India, such a performance is not going to have
any impact on the practice of corruption among public servants.
The things look bad when this performance of the Commission is viewed against the time taken by it in
completing the cases. The maximum and average period
for conclusion of a vigilance case in the Commission was found to be :
table with 3 columns and 3 rows
Nature of Cases
Maximum period
Average period
Major
132 months
29 months
Minor
81 months
18 months
table end
Thus, we find that the Commission takes a lot of time in completing a vigilance case. It becomes worse
when viewed against the time taken by the courts
in disposing of these cases. This aspect has already been discussed in detail while discussing the
functioning of the CBI.
141
The CVC and the CBI : Difference of Opinion
It is inherent in the nature of relationship between the Commission and the CBI, as discussed above,
that both may not necessarily agree with each other
in awarding punishment in corruption cases. In a large number of cases investigated by the CBI, the
Commission had differed with the recommendations of
the CBI and had advised the administrative authorities a course of action different from that proposed
by the CBI The total number of officers against
whom action at various stages has been recommended by the CBI and the Commission in all cases
completed between 1964 and 1981 is as under :
table with 12 columns and 3 rows
No. of Gazzetted and Equivalent officers involved
CBI Investigation Report
CVC's First Stage Advice
CVC's Second Stage Advice
Prosecution
Major
Minor
Others
Prosecution
Major
Minor
Others
Major
Minor
Others
4,485
298
2439
519
1229
227
1766
766
1657
687
541
942
table end
It is clear from the above table that in a fairly large number of cases the Commission had differed with
the recommendations of the CBI and advised a course
of action different from that proposed by the CBI. This is so because of the difference in appraisal of the
material on record and the chances of successful
prosecution. The advice of each one is based on the merits of each case. However, something could
certainly be done to minimise the differences between
both of them. The Commission could have formulated and supplied guidelines to the CBI with a view to
minimise such differences and thereby avoid a substantial
amount of infructious work at both ends.
The functions of the Commission are advisory in the same sense as those of the Union Public Service
Commission (UPSC). It is expected that administrative
authorities, to whom it will make recommendations, will implement them. However, to put some check
on the Government, it has been made obligatory for the
Commission to mention, in its annual report to the Ministry of Home Affairs, those cases where
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recommendations made by it had not been accepted or acted upon by the concerned department. The
Ministry of Home Affairs, in its turn is required to lay
down in Parliament the report of the Commission along with a memorandum explaining the reasons for
non-acceptance of any recommendations of the Commission.
In the initial years, the recommendations of the Commission were given utmost attention by the
departments. Hence, upto 31 March 1968 there were only three
cases of non-acceptance of its advice by disciplinary authorities-one in 1965-66 and two in 1967-68.22
However, with the passage of time the situation
changed. The number of such cases rose to 14 in 1979, 16 in 1980 and 27 in 1981.23 Thus, the
arrangements made for ensuring the acceptance and implementation
of the recommendations of the Commission by departments have not worked to the satisfaction of the
Commission as well as of the public. The government,
for the reasons best known to it, have chosen not to agree to the recommendations of the Commission.
If those persons on whom lies the responsibility of
making the Commission an effective and efficient organisation to curb the incidence of corruption,
choose to by-pass the Commission then nothing can be
done. Members of Parliament press etc. may criticise the government but have not been able to compel
it to accept all the recommendations of the Commission.
The success of the Commission depends upon the cooperation extended to it by the people. One major
source of work of the Commission is in the field of complaints
received from the people against corrupt charges/practices amongst public servants. Out of 2,791 such
complaints received by the Commission during 1965-68,
only 18 per cent were found to contain serious charges of a verifiable nature. Of the rest, 71 per cent
were found as "vague and unverifiable" and 11 per
cent were found as "not worth pursuing". During the present authors' visits to various parts of the
country he tried to find out from the people about
functioning, etc. of the Commission. Not a single person in rural areas knew about it(though a few of
them had heard the name
143
of the CBI) and very few knew about it in urban areas (the number of such persons was less than those
who knew about the CBI). Thus, on the whole very few
people knew about the existence, and functioning of the Commission. It is clear from the above
discussion that there is an urgent need for a concerted
effort by the Commission as by the Ministry of Home Affairs to make the general public aware of the
functions of the Commission and of the nature, type,
manner and content of complaints which the Commission takes effective notice of.
However, no concrete programme for publicity is formulated by the Commission. The Commissioner
told that "apart from extensive tours and visits to almost
every part of the country by his predecessor and his meeting the press informally, no publicity was
undertaken, nor was it possible for the Commission
with present work-load, to do so".24 He confessed this in 1969 but the things have not changed since
then. The situation is the same at present.
The role of the Commission may broadly be divided into two parts i.e., preventive and punitive. A
perusal of the annual reports of the Commission shows
that it has so far been concentrating mainly on the punitive side i.e. dealing with actual vigilance cases.
The preventive side, which is really more important,
has rot so far received adequate attention. While detection and punishment of corruption and other
malpractices is certainly important, what is even more
important is the taking of preventive measures which could reduce the number of vigilance cases
considerably.
The task is not limited to interfering after faults and errors have been committed. The foremost object is
to prevent faults. The extent of corruption can
not be judged by the number of vigilance cases. In fact, a vigilance case arises only when there has been
lack of vigilance and what we describe as "vigilance
case" is, in actual fact, a minus vigilance case.
It is clear from the above discussion that the Commission has not been able to discharge its
responsibilities in a most effective and efficient manner.
This is so because of the number of difficulties faced by it in its working. Some of
144
such difficulties are found in the constitution of the Commission—certain things have been inveriably
kept vague so as to give the Government the option
of acting in accordance with its interests. What are the problems/difficulties faced by the commission?
In the first instance, the Commission does not
enjoy statutory status. This affects the functioning of the Commission vis-a-vis government
departments. It does not get the requisite cooperation from
them. Its recommendations are not accepted in all cases and in some cases inordinate delays take place
in their implementation. Inspite of repeated requests,
both inside and outside Parliament, the Government has not given it a statutory status.
Secondly, the Commission faces the problems of inadequate resources, both personnel and financial.
There is only one person namely the Chief Vigilance Commissioner
to look after the work relating to giving advice on the basis of the investigation reports of the CBl and
Central Vigilances Officers. All the cases coming
to the Commission are decided only by one persons i.e, the Commissioner. He has to study each and
every case personally and take decision himself. In addition,
he has to undertake tours to various parts of the country and also attend various meetings, etc. It is
humanly impossible for one person to handle the
large volume and variety of work transacted by the Commission. Inspite of repeated requests26, the
Government has not done anything to help the Commissioner
to discharge onerous duties entrusted to him. Though the work of the Commission has increased
manifold (both quantitatively and qualitatively), the staff
of the Commission has not increased. As long back as 1969, the Commissioner was complaining about
the shortage of staff.26 The staff of the Commission
at that time was 164 and in 1981 it was 168. With a staff of 164 he was finding it difficult to cope with
the work of the Commission which was much less
than what it is in 1981. With an addition of just four persons, how can the Commission discharge its
responsibilities to the satisfaction of all?
Thirdly, only public servants drawing a salary of Rs. 1,000/-per month or more are under the purview of
the Commission. This has been done so because the
Commission
145
has to undertake a heavy load of work with a limited number of staff and, therefore, should concentrate
on few officers to ensure optimum deployment of
their meagre personnel resources. While at the face value it may sound logical but in actual practice it is
not so. The setting up of the Commission has
served the dual purpose of the Government. First, whenever there is a pressure from whatever quarter
it may be, the Government can easily meet that by
referring the case to the Commission for necessary action.
In this way, the opposition is subdued. Since cases pertaining to big officers are going to attract public
attention at large, the Government has brought
them under the purview of the Commission so that demand of the people for an inquiry can be met
easily and without causing any problem. By this very act
(i.e. referring the matter to the Commission) the Government either saves or damages (as the need of
the situation may be) the personality concerned. If
it wants to harass the person, it can "ask" the Commission to expedite the matter. On the other hand, if
it wants to save the person, then it is ensured
(either by asking investigation officers to go slow or by not extending cooperation to the Commission
through denial of documents, etc.) that maximum possible
time is taken in investigating the matter. Apart from the Government, such a provision also helps
politicians belonging to opposition parties. Because
high level corruption, as C.V. Narasimhan, former Director of the CBI tells, poses special problems for
detection as there is no adequate machinery to
deal with it effectively.27 In his opinion, the Commission, like other anti-corruption agencies, can not be
expected to measure up to the. task.
Political Corruption
Interest in politics is a national obsession in India. This was an asset in the pre-independence days
because it provided the nation with a single-minded
determination to free itself of foreign rule. But after independence it has not been such an unmixed
blessing. With the decline in national leadership
in independent-India and with the intellegentsia by and large shunning politics, politics has become the
146
preserve of those who generally cannot make much of a headway in other walks of life. The 'power elite'
which has emerged in India especially after the
sixties, is unseasoned, cultureless and alienated. It is politically uneducated, morally morbid,
intellectually deficient, asthetically insensitive and
has no great values of life. Political corruption is a consequence of the rise of this class to power and
eminence. For want of creative genesis, sociological
imagination, and lack of affinity with the people, they resort to short cuts, compromises and
adjustments. In order to conceal their inherent weakness
and in a bid to remain in power, they raise slogans, pass ordinances/acts and play gimmickry. As a
matter of fact, the power elite has built up a closed
monopolistic power grid in which they insist that power must flow along such channels as will promote
their interests and the interests of their principals.
As a result of this the incidences of corruption in political life have increased manifold.
We have enough legal provisions to deal with political corruption. However, most of them have in
practice become inoperative due to one or the other procedural
defect or obstacle. In what follows, an attempt is made to critically examine some of the important
measures initiated for eradication of political corruption
in India. The measures selected are: "the Election Commission, Codes of Conduct, the Commission of
Inquiries Act, the Anti Defection Bill and the Scheme
of Lok Pal and Lok Ayukt.
The Election Commission
To deal with political corruption in the field of elections. Article 102 and 171 of the Constitution appoint
the Election Commission as the permanent statutory
body to look into complaints of some types of misconduct by Member of Parliament (MP) and Member
of Legislative Assembly (MLA). On the recommendations
of the Commission, the President or the Governor, as the case may be, has got to dismiss the MP or MLA
concerned.
However, the powers of the Commission are limited in this respect. It has no power to enforce the
attendance of witnesses or the production of documents.
The Chief Election
147
Commissioners have repeatedly requested the Government to ask the Parliament to frame rules under
Article 118 for MPs and under Article 208 for MLAs so
as to confer the necessary powers to the Commission. However, so far the Government of India has not
done anything in this respect.
The Commission can be a most potent agency for inquiring into cases of misconduct during elections if it
is given those powers which the Election Tribunals
are empowered under Section 92 of the Representation of Peoples Act, 1952. The Commission's powers
of inquiry may also be widened by adding a new clause
on the lines of Section 163 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) defining more precisely the disqualifications of
MPs and MLAs in the event of their found guilty
of accepting illegal gratification during the course of their official work.
Apart from the Commission, the judiciary in India is also given power to try cases pertaining to
fraudulent and corrupt-practices adopted by the candidates
during election times. However, this power of judiciary has failed to make any visible impact on the evils
of corruption. In the first instance, judiciary
takes lot of time in deciding a case. Normally it takes couple of years to decide a case. And, secondly, if a
case is decided then there is no guarantee
that findings of the judiciary will be implemented. In many cases the findings remained inoperative. For
example when in 1975 the Allahabad High Court
indicted the then Prime Minister of India using, what the Court believed to be, the corrupt practices
during election times, the election law itself was
later changed with retrospective effect to declare those practices on which the Court held the candidate
guilty, as not corrupt practices. Though this
was done in a constitutional manner but political morality did suffer a crushing blow.
Codes of Conduct
The question of providing some institutional safeguard to ensure integrity among Ministers was, first,
raised and discussed at the time of framing of the
Indian Constitution. K.T. Shah and H.V. Kamath, members of the Constituent Assembly, moved certain
amendments requiring Ministers to
148
declare their assets. B.R. Ambedkar, Chairman of the Drafting Committee while agreeing with the
principle of the amendments conceded that it was a laudable
object to maintain the purity of administration but did not agree to incorporate these amendments in
the Constitution. He was of the view that there should
be a declaration at the time of appointment as a Minister and also at the time of quitting office. In cases
of assets being found abnormal, the Minister
concerned should be required to explain and penalised. Instead of a legal sanction in this respect, he
was of the view that a much better sanction would
be to mobilise public opinion and focus it in the legislature.28
The Congress Party took the initiative in this regard. The Congress Working Committee during the
presidentship of Sanjiva Reddy in 1960, asked the Government
to ask the ministers to submit an annual statement of assets and liabilities. This was only a party affair in
the sense that ministers were required to
submit the statement to the President of the Congress Party. Hence, the general public had no right to
know details of these annual statements. Besides,
the practice also did not have any constitutional sanction since these statements could not be presented
to the legislatures for scrutiny.
H.V. Kamath was not satisfied with the reply of Ambedkar and was determined to frame some sort of
code with regard to assets of Ministers. In 1963, he revived
the issue and introduced in the Lok Sabha a Private Member's Bill to provide for the periodical disclosure
of assets of Ministers. The Bill was called,
The Disclosure of Assets of Ministers Bill 1963'.29 The Government opposed the Bill and thus it was lost.
The Government was of the view that the basic
thing that would prevent Ministers from misbehaving was to accept certain conventions that they would
themselves disclose their assets, if they wanted
to, to their chiefs and they would not hide anything. Declaration of assets was matter of party
convention and could not be really laid down by legislation.30
Thus, the Government did not want to make this matter, a matter of public concern but was willing to
make it a matter of party. Because in this way, no
outside people can exercise.
149
direct or indirect, any check or pressure on the Government. However, if the Government was honest in
its endeavours then why it was fearing from the disclosure
of assets of its Ministers to public?
The Santhanam Committee while suggesting measures calculated to produce a social climate both
amongst public servants and in the general public in which
bribery and corruption may not flourish, urged the evolution of a code of conduct for ministers including
the provisions suggested by it for public servants
relating to acquisition of property, acceptance of gifts and disclosure of assets and liabilities. The code of
conduct was to be placed before Parliament
and state legislatures. The Prime Minister and Chief Ministers were to consider themselves responsible
for enforcing the code of conduct.31
In pursuance of recommendations of the Santhanam Committee, the Central and State Governments
framed codes of conduct for ministers. The code of conduct
for Central and State ministers was published by the Government of India on 29 October 1964. The code
inter alia provided for the disclosure of the assets
and liabilities and business interests of himself and all members of his family by any person taking office
as minister, accepting of contributions and
gifts and other related matters. However, to this day the code has been practised more in breach than in
observance. The practice of individual ministers
at the Centre and in the states submitting annual statements to the Prime Minister and Chief Ministers
has lost its relevance. Certainly, the public has
ceased to treat it with any seriousness, like the statements about election costs submitted by candidates
before the Election Commission. Neither the successive
Prime Ministers nor the Chief Ministers, who were responsible for ensuring the observance of the code
of conduct could exercise any moral influence on
their colleagues.
In 1969, the Madras Assembly adopted a resolution about the disclosure of assets of members of
lagislature and Ministers and requested the Central Government
to enact a law in this respect. The Assembly was of the opinion that in the public interest "it is necessary
to avoid even the slightest
150
degree of suspicion in the mind of the common people regarding the absolute integrity of the Members
of the Legislature and the Ministers".32 The Central
Government did not take any action on this resolution.
R.P. Ulaganamli, a member of Lok Sabha from Madras, however, pursued this resolution by introducing
on 27th July 1973 a Private Member's Bill (no. 47 of
1973) in the Lok Sabha. The Disclosure of the Assets of Members of Parliament Bill, 1973 was introduced
with a view to providing for compulsory disclosure
of assets of members of Parliament and their families. Whereas Kamath Bill sought to cover only
Ministers, this Bill required all members of Parliament
including a Minister who might not be a member of either House to declare their personal and family
assets. The Bill could not be passed because of the
opposition of the Government.
On 5 April 1974, B.K. Das Chowdhury introduced in the Lok Sabha another Private Member's Bill (no. 24
of 1974) on the subject of the conduct of members
of Parliament. The Parliamentary Integrity Commission Bill, 1974 sought to provide for the constitution
of a Parliamentary Integrity Commission to examine
declaration of income, assets and liabilities which would be required to be made to it by every member
on becoming such member and every year thereafter.
Like earlier Bills in this respect, this Bill could not be passed because of opposition of the Government.
There is a code of professional ethics for doctors and lawyers and, the Government is seriously thinking
of framing a code of conduct for teachers. Whereas
it seems to be worried about others and has tried to regulate their working through the system of codes
of conduct, it has avoided the framing of a code
of ethics for politicians who, after all, largely determine the conditions which vitally affect all sections of
society. Whenever and wherever the issue
of code of ethics for members of legislature has come up, the Government opposed its formation and
giving it legal sanction on the plea that such norms
should be governed by convention. The sanction of public opinion, in a democratic society like ours, is
more powerful than the legal sanction. Surprisingly,
all the political parties have agreed with the
151
Congress in this respect.
Defection
After independence, the persons who came to occupy the ministerial office in the governments at the
Centre and often in the states were men of high quality
and prestige, considerable personal and political integrity and were influenced with a sense of national
purpose. However, the tall leadership of the freedom
movement gradually departed from the scene. As a result, politics became more of an exclusive
profession and a specialised craft of something getting to
positions of power and retaining and augmenting that power by all means. The same desire of sharing
the fruits of power that kept people together in political
parties also caused discussions, dissidence, defections and splits. During the years following the fourth
general elections when the ruling Congress Party
grip over states loosened, the conduct of legislators including ministers was subjected to much open
criticism in the context of unprincipled floor-crossings
or defections on a large scale. The defections began to occur with a frequency and on a scale which
undermined political stability and started undermining
respect of people for politicians and confidence in the political process. It is not possible to give upto
date figures of defections in the Indian politics.
However, according to some studies during 1967-73 some 45 state governments were toppled in quick
succession with as many as over 2700 cases of defections
by legislators. Over sixty per cent legislators all over the country were involved, many of them changing
their affiliations more than once and some of
them as many as four or five times within a year.33 These figures are bound to be much higher if the
statistics for the last ten years are also available.
However, the old figures give a clear idea about the dimensions of defections and their destructive
effect on political stability and morality. What are
the causes of defection? The most motivational force behind defections is the prospect of political
power and the lure of ministerial office.34 Many also
defect because of temptations of office other than ministerial, money or status.
152
The public became concerned about the defection of legislators. The matter was discussed in the Lok
Sabha at length. It resolved that a committee of constitutional
experts and representatives of political parties be set up to consider the problem of legislators changing
their party allegiance.36 Accordingly the Committee
on Defections was appointed under the Chairmanship of Y.B. Chavan, the then Home Minister. The
Committee made a number of recommendations which were of
a not too radical character. The report of the Committee was placed before the Parliament on 18
February 1969. Thereafter a Bill was drafted in 1970 and
its provisions were discussed by the Prime Minister with leaders of political parties. The views expressed
by leaders showed considerable divergence. However,
the Bill, the Anti Defection Bill— Constitution (Thirty Second) Amendment Bill 1973, was introduced in
Lok Sabha on 16 May 1973 and referred to a Joint
Select Committee of the Parliament. But before the Committee could submit its report, the Lok Sabha
was dissolved in January 1977. However, defection continued.
For example, in Sikkim the Congress Party, which had come to command an overwhelming majority by
accretion of strength through defections, changed over
wholesale to the Janata Party. In 1978, yet another Anti Defection Bill—Constitution (Forty Eight)
Amendment Bill—was sought to be introduced but because
of strong opposition within the Janata Party itself, the proposed legislation was withdrawn. So Janata
became even with the Congress. On coming to power,
the Congress-I has not shown any interest in bringing out the Anti-Defection Bill.
Inspite of all hue and cry made by political parties about the defections, the defections are going on
unabashedly. This is a reflection on the abysmal
depth to which political standards have sunk. The arguments put forward against an anti-defection law
have been the importance of the individual member's
freedom of association and the need to allow healthy polarisation of political forces. As a matter of fact,
defections have had little to do with either
and have continued to be patently unprincipled and self-serving. Thus politicians in their own interests
had not been able to adopt
153
any measure, to curb the evil practice of defection in Indian politics.
The Commissions of Inquiries
The most popular device to investigate into the alleged deeds of misconduct and political corruption
used in India has been the Commissions of Inquiry Act,
1952. The Act provides for appointment of special inquiry commission(s) to deal with inquiries into
'definite matters of public importance'. Though the
Act is much wider in scope but its provisions can be set in motions only if the Central or State
Government so desires.
Of late, a large number of Commissions have been set, under the Act, concerning the conduct of persons
in authority and the particular subject has acquired
special importance in the recent past. Cleanliness of public life is a matter of vital public concern. Public
life of persons in authority ought to be
such as would not admit of allegations of abuse of official position being levelled against them. It is not
that whenever an allegation of misuse of position
is made against a person in authority we should hasten to presume his fall from norms of public
conduct, because cases have not been wanting where political
rivalry motivated the making of such allegations. However, whenever such allegations are made and are
not frivolous, prima facie, an inquiry is both necessary
and desirable, either to establish the allegations or to clear the names involved.
Suspicion, howsoever grave, can not substitute evidence. Commissions, are, therefore, entrusted the
task of collecting reliable data and of giving dependable
findings on facts, with a view to enlightening the government in regard to true state of affairs on definite
matters of public importance.
During its existence of about 31 years, more than 200 commissions have been set up by the Central and
State Governments.36
The working of the Act so far as it relates to inquiries into the allegation against ministers has not been
free from controversies. In the first instance,
the discretion to launch an inquiry is kept vague so as to give leverage to the ruling
154
party to use it as a powerful political weapon. The Prime Minister claims that it is for her "to determine
whether or not there is a need for a Commission
of Inquiry" (in her letter to Jyotermay Basu). Thus, inquiries into charges of ministerial misconduct are
entirely for the government of the day to institute
and its discretion has been exercised almost invariably on partisan grounds or in deference to a public
demand which could not be evaded. In other words,
commissions of inquiry are ordered only under extraordinary pressure or when there is polarisation of
political affiliations.37
Secondly, Commissions have followed different procedures and adopted different approaches and in
some cases converted themselves into trial courts.38 Yet
in almost all the cases, the verdict given by these commissions of inquiry has won public acceptance
instantly. The pity of it is, as Noorani puts it "that
many an offender went scot free and many a charge sheet has been ignored". The Central/State
Government concerned decided to leave them well alone. If
the offenders in the front rank of the administration are thus shielded, the result can only be a steady
deterioration of public standards and a demoralisation
of the public services. Thus, failure to evolve a uniform code of rules concerning inquiries into charges of
ministerial misconduct, which is acceptable
to the country at large, is a grave lapse.39
Thirdly, there have been cases of parallel proceedings by the commission and the court. This creates
problems not only for the commission but also for the
court. Such a situation creates embarrassment and difficulties for the court. When a court is seized of a
case and has to go into the facts and circumstances
pertaining to it, it would be most inexpedient for a commission to go into the matter and give its
findings especially if the evidence before both the
forums is practically the same. If a commission were to arrive at certain findings, the invisible effect of
such findings as a brooding omnipresence in
the mind of a court cannot be denied by anyone who makes a realistic approach to the question.40
Fourthly, there have been cases of parallel commissions ordered on the same subject by the Central and
State Government.41 Such commissions faced difficulties
in conducting
155
their proceedings effectively. As a matter of fact, sometimes to halt the functioning of a commission, the
Central/State Government resort to such an exercise.
The motives behind such an exercise are purely personal-cum-political.42 Also, the Act does not make it
clear as to what would be the final outcome in
the event of the two commissions, one centrally appointed and the other state-appointed, submitting
materially variant findings and recommendations. In
the event of there being a contradiction or clash between their respective reports, how are the two to
be reconciled or harmonised and whether one of them
is required to give way to the other, and if so, in what respect and to what extent, are matters all left
unprovided in the Act. Though so far no such
problem has arisen. But the fact that the practice of appointing parallel commissions may be used by the
governments, central and state to harass each
other, it is necessary that these matters are clarified in the Act itself. Though, the Central Government is
aware of these problems, it has not done anything
so far to rectify the situation.
Commissions take fairly long time to complete their inquiries. Whereas, many commissions have taken
as long as six years to complete their work, the average
time taken by a commission has been two years.43 By the end of such a period, the public interest in the
matter is likely to diminish considerably. In
order to be effective, a commission should finish its work as early as possible. This can be so only if a
commission is not burdened with too many cases
involving a large number of persons and necessitating the recording and sifting of voluminous evidence.
There has to be discerning selectiveness when deciding
about the matters referred to a commission.
Further a period of six months has been allowed by the Act to enable the appropriate Government to lay
before the appropriate House of the Legislature the
report submitted by a commission. This period is too long. The findings and recommendations of a
commission should be made public at the earliest so that
people know the facts of the concerned case. However, governments, both the Central and State, have
shown the least concern for public in this respect.
They
156
place the report of a commission in the legislature at their own convenience and in some cases, for one
reason or another, (however, none convincing and
justifiable), they have not made the inquiry report public.44 Under the circumstances, it should be made
obligatory for the government to lay before the
legislature the report of a commission, and the time for doing so needs to be reduced from six months.
The Commissions also face problems of non-cooperation from the concerned quarters. Government
departments not willing to supply the necessary information,
government servants and common men not willing to give evidence, non-cooperation of the very
persons in the proceedings of inquiry who had made complaints
in the very first instance and the commission's helpness in securing it are some of the problems which a
commission faces while carrying out its work.
!t is asked to perform a job but has not been statutorily adequately equipped to perform it.
Section, 3 (4) of the Act provides that the appropriate governments shall lay down before the legislature
the report of a commission along with a memorandum
of the action it has taken on the report. Thus, there is no obligation on the part of the appointing
government to implement the recommendations of a commission.
Implementation of the recommendations of commissions is a political question. Despite the talk of the
majesty of law, or of the law taking its own course,
the issue is a political one and is invariably decided on the basis of a careful calculation of political gains
and losses. A study of the implementation
of recommendations of commissions makes a painful reading. The Shah Commission pursued the
findings of the earlier commissions appointed by the Central
and State governments to probe into the conduct of ministers of the State Governments45 and stated
that it was "not aware of the action taken, if any,
in response to these Reports submitted from time to time".46 It is really astonishing that the guilt of all
those indicted by these commissions were later
condoned by the political parties they belonged to or by succeeding governments. Thus, corruption
gains respectability."47
157
And lastly, a word may be mentioned about the attitude of the people towards commissions of inquiry
especially with regard to the implementation of the
findings of the commissions. The common masses have lost faith in the commissions. This may be
gauged from the fact that inspite of being indicted by commissions,
the people have supported the politicians. Strictures, etc. have not made the slightest difference to the
political and electoral fortunes of indicted
gentlemen. Almost all of them have repeatedly won elections hands down. The most instructive case in
this regard is that of Devraj Urs. The Janata Government
dismissed his ministry and appointed the Grover Commission that found him culpable on several counts.
And yet Urs won a resounding victory in the State
Assembly poll in 1978 under the Congress-I banner. This has happened despite the findings of the
Grover Commission which, if pursued to the logical conclusion
might have led to prosecution and possible conviction. It is a typical case of a democratic society
negating the very values of its own criminal justice
system and highlights the growing dichotomy between formal law and public perception.
Lok Pal and Lok Ayukt
As long ago as July 1959, CD. Deshmukh, the then Chairman of the University Grants Commission and
former Finance Minister demanded the establishment of
a "high-level, impartial, standing judicial tribunal to investigate complaints" against people in high
places. He claimed to be in possession of evidence
relating to improprieties committed by Ministers and offered to lay it before such an investigative
tribunal. But Nehru, the then Prime Minister, opposed
the formation of such tribunal on the ground that it would be repugnant to democratic practice and
result in an atmosphere of mutual accusation.48
Compelled by the deteriorating situation, the Government set up the Santhanam Committee which
recommended that President may constitute, on the advice of
the Prime Minister, a national panel from which three persons may be chosen from time to time to set
up ad hoc committees for enquiring
158
into allegations against Ministers.49 No action was taken by the Government to implement this
recommendation of the Santhanam Committee.
The Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) headed by Morarji Desai picked up the thread and
recommended the appointment of a Lok Pal. The Lok Pal is the
Indian version of Scandinavian Ombudsman. During her earlier administration, Indira Gandhi had a Lok
Pal Bill and introduced it in the Parliament in 1968
and again in 1971.50 But both the times it lapsed when the Parliament was dissolved.
Morarji Desai, on assuming the office of the Prime Minister, initially showed signs of translating his
moralism into practice as the Lok Pal Bill was further
refined and made more comprehensive during the Janata regime by also bringing within its purview the
office of the Prime Minister.51 However, when it came
to the crunch, the Janata Government failed, taking recourse to the well-worn parliamentary escape:
the Bill was referred to an unwieldy Joint Select Committee
of the Parliament. The second phase of Indira Gandhi also has shown no interest whatsoever to rescue
the Bill from the legislature dung-heap.
How serious are political leaders to set up the Lok Pal can be guaged from the above discussion. That all
the Prime Ministers of India—barring Lal Bahadur
Shastri, who never really got a chance—should have developed cold feet in the face of this measure is
an eloquent testimony to its potential effectiveness.
Lok Ayukt
A number of states have enacted laws for the appointment of Lok Ayukts.52 The Lok Ayukt, assisted by
one or more Upalok Ayukts, is expected to go into complaints
of corruption against ministers and the bureaucracy. In some states, the Chief Minister comes under the
purview of the Lok Ayukt. There is, however, no
uniformity in this respect.
The working of the Lok Ayukt in various states shows that the governments had not been serious about
it. In some cases, it is appointed in such a hurry
that instead of waiting to get the bill passed by the legislature, the government
159
appoints it through an ordinance. The seriousness of the government in this respect may be seen from
the fact that the ordinance is allowed to lapse because
it could not be given statutory footing within the stipulated time. Then, again an ordinance is passed for
its creation.53 Secondly, the government takes
lot of time in appointing the Lok Ayukt and Upalok Ayukt.54 Further, the government failed to provide
office accommodation and supporting staff to Lok
Ayukt. After several months the supporting staff, etc. is provided to the Lok Ayukt by the government.
Still that staff was not adequate for the working
of the Lok Ayukt.56 The powers and jurisdiction of Lok Ayukt are also so designed that it may not be
possible for it to discharge its responsibilities
in an effective way. For example, the Lok Ayukt and Upalok Ayukt of Maharashtra believed that the
limitations placed on their jurisdiction under the Act
were stringent and numerous and had affected their functions. They further said that the various
provisions of the Act gave almost complete immunity to
the police from their jurisdiction. They found it difficult to see in which case of corruption, they had
jurisdiction at all. They were of the opinion
that the Act, in its present form, would not achieve the very useful and laudable objective for which it
has been framed.56 Last but not the least, the
government has not extended full cooperation to the Lok Ayukt. On the other hand, we find from the
annual reports of the Lok Ayukt of various states the
incidents of negative and uncooperative attitude of governments.57
Thus, we find that though state governments have created an impressive authority to deal with maladministration and graft complaints, it proved to be a
thoroughly hypocritical measure. This is so, as shown above, because of the cumbersome and hurriedly
enacted legislation under which the office of Lok
Ayukt has been established. The powers vested in the Lok Ayukt by one section of the Act are so sharply
eroded by other provisions and the number of listed
and unlisted 'sacred cows' is so large that the sum total of the entire exercise under the Act worked out
to an easily distinguishable naught. The irony
of the situation is that state governments have not tried to learn from the experiences of
160
other states which have set up Lok Ayukt earlier. Had they done so, they might have avoided problems
which now their Lok Ayukts are facing.
Wherever, the Lok Ayukts have been appointed the impression created is that the governments are
trying to hoodwink the public by playing possum and pretending
to be waging a relentless war against corruption. However, the functioning of Lok Ayukts in various
states has shown that the object of the governments
was merely to play to the gallery. The Central Government is also watching the whole exercise in a
detached way. It also does not seem to be keen about
the institution of Lok Ayukts. Otherwise it would have issued directives so as to make the law uniform in
all the states. Thus, the Central Government
as well as the state governments do not appear to be keen in eradicating corruption.
Attitude of Legislature
A word may also be said about the role of legislature in eradication of corruption. Whenever discussions
about corruption takes place in the Parliament,
we find that the 'willing-to-wound-but-afraid-to-strike' attitude marks most of the speeches made by
members belonging to both the treasury and opposition
benches. Perhaps, this is not difficult to understand, considering that it is not only the politicians in
power at the moment who can claim the distinction
of misusing authority in overt or covert ways. After all many of those who are now in opposition did
wield power at the Centre or in States at sometime.
And, thus, they have a "past" of their own not qualitatively very different from the past or the present of
today's rulers. And those members who had no
ministerial berths have also, in their own limited way, enjoyed the fruits of corruption.58 Bringing out
skeleton from cupboards is a game both sides can
play and both are only too conscious of this fact. We, therefore, always witness colourless debates
which bring out nothing—neither facts nor serious thinking
about ways to check the growth of malpractices of all kinds.
161
Concluding Observations
An analysis of various anti-corruption measures adopted by the Government to fight both administrative
and political corruption in India confirms both the
hypotheses which we set to test about the efficacy of anti-corruption measures. The fitst is actually
dependent upon the second in the sense that the efficacy
of anti-corruption measures is dependent upon the commitment of political leadership. If there is a
strong political will to eradicate curruption then
anti-corruption measure are going to be adequate enough so as to be effective in curbing the
corruption. If during the course of their working some of
their shortcomings have come to the notice then the government is going to take immediate steps to
remove those shortcomings. If the commitment of the
government is not strong than it is going to make only promises and nothing in concrete terms. It will
formulate schemes which would not be perfect. Thus,
its anti-corruption drive ultimately will turn out to be fake and it will be a form of corruption in disguise.
The above review of anti-corruption measures of the Government of India shows that the basic problem
in fighting corruption has not been lack of avenues
or suggestions of reforms but the lack of desired will to enforce the available remedial measures. The
problem is three-fold. First, the fault lies with
the thinking of the government with regard to the problem of corruption. The fundamental fallacy of
our thinkers and law-makers in matters pertaining to
corruption, as also social and moral reforms, is that they cannot conceive of aims and objects that are
modest, moderate, practical and within reach. The
government has postulated for itself the object of preventing corruption altogether—and not
checkmating it by removing its many causes to the extent possible,
and by starting the attack from the fountain-head levels of corruption. Even, otherwise how can an
unwanted, undesirable and unethical thing like corruption
be prevented altogether in Indian society? It can only be curbed, controlled and contained. For this too
an environment is needed.
Second, vocal condemnation of corruption may be a
162
shrewd exercise in political pragmatism but without positive action at an operational level, it amounts to
little else than spouting political shibboleths.
Inspite of pledging to eradicate corruption, all the political parties have done nothing in concrete terms.
They have not implemented the suggestions/
recommendations made from time to time by several bodies; and, done nothing to remove the
lacuna/loopholes experienced in the working of various Acts and
institutions. In this context, especially New Delhi has dismal record and this manifests gross indifference.
Today, the penalty for ministerial corruption
amounts to mere dismissal from one office and immediate appointment (in some cases after some time)
to other office. Thus, instead of awarding punishment,
the person is rewarded. And lastly, contrary to their assurances, all the political parties have not brought
out legislations like anti-defection law or
an act to appoint Lok Pal which are going to hit them directly.
Conditions of Success
Combating corruption in any field is not merely a matter of having perfect conduct and disciplinary rules
or appointing an adequate vigilance organisation.
This is, however, not to suggest that all this has no role to play in curbing corruption. They are important
and going to play an important role. But with
these the battle against corruption cannot be won unless a social climate can be created in which
corruption is recognised as a social evil and integrity
is rewarded. It is for both the state and the society to change their attitudes towards corruption and
corrupt. Unless political leaders at the top can
bring about a basic change in their attitudes, it may not be possible to eradicate or even significantly
reduce the volume of corruption—howsoever strict
the anti-corruption laws or howsoever perfect the conduct rules or howsoever efficient the CBI or the
CVC or police establishment may be.
Who can create the social climate needed for the purpose of eradication of corruption? People are the
only one who can do this job. While the general public
is very much concerned over the evil of corruption and its extent, they are unfortunately neither
organised not effective. The Sadachar
163
Samiti, the one attempt so far made to organise public opinion, has a chequered career and lies
dormant now. Similar has been the fate of Peoples' Committees
organised during the Janata regime. It is essential that public opinion should be organised so that it can
create a social and moral climate in which corruption
cannot flourish, which will foster high ethical values and develop and sustain the will and capacity of the
people to fight corruption.
In organising and educating public opinion, the press can play an important role. Inspite of its limitations
(low level of literacy as well as limited circulation
of newspapers) the press has a role to perform in ensuring that Indian democracy does not degenerate
into mobocracy and anarchy. The press should expose
wrong doing in high places so that those in authority feel compelled to observe some standards of public
morality. Such an act on the part of the press
can also influence the people and can create an enlightened and aroused public opinion. Thus, the press
can make a contribution, howsoever limited it may
be, to the creation and sustenance of a public opinion against corruption.
Political parties can also play an effective role in mobilising public opinion against corruption. They can
organise mass protest and mass action against
corruption and corrupt persons whether in the political set-up or in the administrative. However,
political parties, have to exercise a sort of self-restraint
while organising public opinion—not for furthering their own interests but for the sole purpose of
creating a social climate conducive for eradication
of corruption.
Apart from bringing about a fundamental change in the attitude of people, there are certain conditions
which are necessary for the successful working of
anti-corruption measures. In the first place, there should be a basic soundness about the administrative
machinery before anti-corruption measures can
succeed. There is a need for right type of people not only at the top but also in lower echelons of
administration. There should be men of integrity and
should inspire confidence in the public. For anti-corruption measures succeed most where they are
needed least and they succeed
164
least where they are needed most. It hardly needs to be emphasised that the institution can never be a
substitute for a good and just administration; nor
can it help much to discipline an administration which has very low standards of integrity. It is,
therefore, necessary that the Government should initiate
a special drive for general improvement of administrative and political standards.
Secondly, there should be a special public relation campaign to explain to the political leadership, the
officials and the public the implications of various
anti-corruption measures. The successful functioning of these measures needs a clear understanding
among the political parties to keep above party politics.
These measures must be allowed to operate effectively irrespective of the fate and vicissitudes of
political parties.
Thirdly, the public officials must be impressed upon to accept and quickly implement the findings and
recommendations of various anti-corruption bodies.
Unless there are reasons to the contrary which are positively in the larger public interest and can be
explained to the Parliament, all recommendations
be implemented without any delay.
Fourthly, the legislature must exercise its power and authority to compel the executive to accord due
respect to various anti-corruption measures. It should
see to it that the executive is not able to bypass it in this respect. A vigilant legislature is a sure check on
the misuse of the privileges by the executive.
And lastly, even after the introduction of various anti-corruption measures, it will be necessary for the
administration to play a major role in eradication
of corruption on an extended and more effective basis. The responsibility of government departments
to deal adequately with corruption must squarely be
faced by them at first instance. Various anti-corruption measures serve as the ultimate and not as the
initial remedy for an aggrieved citizen. The final
answer to the problem of eradication of corruption lies not in anti-corruption measures but in making
the administrative system more efficient and responsive
in terms of need of the citizens.
165
The success of various anti-corruption measures will, therefore, depend not only on their character,
jurisdiction and powers but equally on the toning up
of the wider framework within which they operate. Anti-corruption measures are not a panacea for the
evils of corruption nor a substitute for good, efficient
and honest administration. The age-old problem of corruption is far too complex to be solved by anticorruption measures alone. We need a whole variety
of controls over administrative and political action and the strategy of anti-corruption measures must be
accompanied by a number of other reforms, as
suggested above, that are needed to plug the gap in our systems of control. Otherwise our anticorruption strategy may fail.
References
1. J.S. Nye, "Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis", American Political Science
Review, vol. LXI, no. 2, June 1967, p. 419.
2. India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Report of the Special Police Establishment Enquiry Committee: 19491952 (New Delhi, 1952), p. 12.
3. India, Fourth Lok Sabha, Estimates Committee, Seventy-Eighth Report (New Delhi, 1969), p. 44.
4. India, Central Bureau of Investigation, Annual Report. 1982 (New Delhi, 1983).
5. This information was given by J.C. Bawa, Director, CBI in an interview. See, Dharamyug, 2 October
1983.
6. India, Fourth Lok Sabha, Estimates Committee, n. 3, p. 25 and India, Seventh Lok Sabha, Estimates
Committee, Forty-Ninth Report (New Delhi, 1983), p.
20.
7. This information was given by J.C. Bawa, Director, CBI in an interview. See Dharamyug, 2 October
1983.
8. Ibid.
9. India, Seventh Lok Sabha, Estimates Committee, n. 6, p. 21.
166
10. Ibid.
11'. This information was given by J.C. Bawa, Director, CBI in an interview. See, Dinman, 17-23 July 1983,
pp. 16-17.
12. India, Fourth Lok Sabha, {Estimates Committee, n. 3, p. 45.
13. LN. Mishra's case is one such example. Results of the CBI's investigations are not made public even
after number of years.
14. Bobby case of Patna (wherein a woman named Bobby was found dead) is one such example. The
case has been referred to the CBI to save the criminals who
are prospering under the disguise of servants of people namely politicians belonging to the ruling party.
15. Baroda Dynamite case involving George Fernandes and others is one such example.
16. India. Seventh Lok Sabha, Estimates Committee, n. 6, p. 29.
17. The number of cases sent by the State Governments to the CBI for investigation over the years are as
under:
table with 2 columns and 10 rows
Year
No. of Cases
1972
34
1973
29
1974
9
1975
39
1977
9
1878
23
1979
67
1980
19
1981
37
table end
Compiled from the Annual Reports of the CBI from 1972 to 1981.
18. India, Fourth Lok Sabha, Estimates Committee, no. 3, p. 5.
19. Ibid., p. 13.
167
20. Ibid., p. 43.
21. Details of 9,878 completed cases according to groups of misconduct are :
table with 2 columns and 10 rows
Abuse of Power
3,218
Disproportionate Assets
350
Cheating
149
Making or Using False Records
1,304
Favours
1,754
Misappropriation
652
Negligence
1,435
Private Business
140
Vengeance
49
Other Misconducts
827
table end
See India, Central Vigilance Commission, Annual Report: 1-1-81 to 31-12-81 (New Delhi, 1982), pp. 8083.
22 India, Fourth Lok Sabha, Estimates Committee, n. 3, p. 81.
23. See India, Central Vigilance Commission, Annual Reports: 1979 to 1981 (New Delhi).
24. India, Fourth Lok Sabha, Estimates Committee, n. 3, p. 80.
25. Ibid., p. 38. Time and again members have raised this point in the Parliament.
26. Ibid., p. 18.
27. Indian Express, 4 December 1983.
28. India, Constituent Assembly, Debates, vol. VII, pp. 1158 and 1185-88.
29. Bill was introduced on 3 May 1963 and discussed on 20 December 1963 and 14 February 1964.
30. India, Lok Sabha, Debates, 14 February 1964, cols. 5993-99.
31. India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Report of the Committee on Prevention of Corruption (Delhi, 1964),
pp. 101-10.
32. Quoted in Subhash C. Kashyap, The Ministers and the Legislators (New Delhi, 1982), pp. 146-47.
168
33. Quoted in Kashyap, n. 32, pp. 12-13.
34. This is also confirmed by the study conducted by the Ministry of Home Affairs in 1967 in this respect.
Quoted in UP. Singh, Morality in Public Affairs
(New Delhi: CPR, 1983), mimeo, p.
35. India, Lok Sabha, Debates, 8 December 1967.
36. Some of the notable Commissions that were appointed by the Central and State Governments in
India to inquire into the alleged misuse of power, authority
and use of corrupt practices by men holding high public offices in the Government are:
(a) Chagla Commission (1956): To inquire into the Mundhra Group of Companies and the alleged role of
the Ministers of Finance and the Principal Secretary
and the Chairman of the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) to influence the decision of the LIC underwriting Mundhra shares.
(b) Das Commission (1963): To inquire into the allegations of corruption, etc. against Sardar Pratap Singh
Kairon, Chief Minister of Punjab.
(c) Ayyanagar Commission (1965): To inquire into the allegations of abuse of office and acquisition of
wealth, etc. against Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, Chief
Minister of Jammu and Kashmir.
(d) Khanna Commission (1967); To inquire into the charges of corruption and improprieties allegedly
committed by Biju Patnaik and other Ministers of Orissa
who were in office from 1961 to 1967.
(e) Aiyer Commission (1967): To inquire into the allegations against K.B. Sahai and five other Minister of
Bihar.
(f) Mudholkar Commission (1968): To inquire into the charges against Mahamaya Prasad Sinha and
thirteen other ex-Ministers of Bihar.
(g) Mudholkar Commission (1968): To inquire into certain allegations against Dr. V.K. Mahtab regarding
169
acquisition of wealth, withdrawal of criminal prosecutions, grant of remission to kendu leaves
contractors in 1959 and grant of lease of Chromite mines
to M/s. Serajuddin&Co. in 1957.
(h) Kapoor Commission (1969): To inquire into the complaints received by the Government of India
against the Dayanancd Bandodkar, Chief Minister of Goa.
(i) The 1 969 Commission to inquire into the allegations against P.K. Kunju, a Minister in E.M.S.
Mamboodripad's Ministry.
(j) Sarjoo Prasad Commission (1971): To inquire into the conduct of M.K. Mehtab, ex-Chief Minister of
Orissa.
(k) Mathew Commission (1975): To inquire into the general background and facts and circumstances
pertaining to the incident that occurred at Samastipur
on 2 January 1975 resulting in the death of L.N. Mishra, a Central Minister and two others and serious
injuries to a number of persons.
(I) Sarkaria Commission (1976): To inquire into the allegations of misuse of official position and bribery
and corruption on the part of the former Chief
Minister of Tamil Nadu, Karunanidhi and some of his cabinet colleagues.
(m) Shah Commission (1977): To inquire into complaints of excesses, mal-practices of abuse of authority
during the Emergency and other related matters between
1975-77.
(n) Reddy Commission (1977): TO inquire into the allegations relating to the contract entered by the
Government of India during Bansi Lal's tenure as Defence
Minister.
(o) Graver Commission (1977): To inquire into certain allegations against Dev Raj Urs, Chief Minister of
Karnataka and some of his cadinet colleagues.
170
(p) Iqbal Hussain Commission (1977): To inquire into certain allegations levelled against the Karnataka
Chief Minister, Dev Raj Urs and some of his cabinet
colleagues.
(q) Vimadalal Commission (1977): To inquire into the allegations against the Chief Minister of Andhra
Pradesh, Vengala Rao and some of his cabinet colleagues.
(r) Gurdev Singh Commission (1979): To inquire into the allegations of nepotism in making appointments
and misuse of authority regarding export of wheat
during 1974-75 against Zail Singh, Chief Minister of Punjab and some of his cabinet colleagues.
(s) Vaidyalingam Commission (1979): To inquire whether any prima facie case exists against Kanti Desai,
son of Prime Minister, Morarji Desai for wielding
extra constitutional authority to interfere in the top affairs of the Central Board of Taxes and Smt.
Gayatri Devi, wife of Charan Singh, ex-Prime Minister
of India.
(t) Kailasam Commission (1981): To inquire into the spirit scandal that rocked Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
(u) Sadasivan Commission (1981): To inquire into the spirit scandal that rocked Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
(v) Ray Commission (1981): To inquire into the spirit scandal that rocked Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
37. How partisan politicians can be in asking for and/or appointing commissions of inquiry may be
gauged from the following incidents. Politicians change
their stand in accordance with their political convenience. When Mrs. Gandhi was the Prime Minister a
motion was moved in August 1968 against Morarji Desai,
who was then Deputy Prime Minister by George Fernandes for instituting an inquiry against Desai for
some charges. Mrs. Gandhi opposed and rejected the
demand. And in 1978 with the change in political situation i.e. Janata Party coming
171
to power at the Centre, the Conpress-I members of Parliament (who opposed the inquiry ten years ago)
were asking for an inquiry into the charges labelled
against Morarji Desai, Prime Minister. George Fernandes who was asking for an inquiry ten years ago,
was now opposing the inquiry. This is an example illustrative
of partisan attitude of politicians.
As for the inquiries ordered under extraordinary pressure, the inquiries ordered against Pratap Singh
Kairon, Biju Patnaik and Bakshi Ghulam Mohamad by
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru may be mentioned. More recently, the Vaidyalingam Commission was
set up under pressure. It was set up in 1979 by the Government
following the mounting protests both inside and outside Parliament against the wielding of extraconstitutional authority by Kanti Desai. It was set up
to inquire whether any prima facie case existed against Shri Kanti Desai, son of Prime Minister Morarji
Desai for wielding extra-constitutional authority.
There had been many inquiries which were instituted as a result of polarisation of political affiliations.
The most recent one had been the setting up of
the Ray Commission (June 1981) by the Central Government to inquire into the spirit scandal that
rocked the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Before the
Ray Commission, the State Governments of Kerala and Tamil Nadu had appointed the Kailasam and the
Sadasivan Commission to look into the spirit scandal.
The genesis of the appointment of the Ray Commission is deep rooted. It goes back to the time when
the AlADMK appointed the Sarkaria Commission to inquire
into corruption charges against its predecessor DMK Government headed by M. Karunanidhi. The
Sarkaria Commission found Karunanidhi and his colleagues guilty
on several counts. The DMK men were irked at the verdict and wanted to take revenge by humiliating
the AlADMK Government at the first opportunity available.
The DMK had been an ally to Mrs. Gandhi in 1980 mid-term polls to Parliament. They, therefore,
persuaded
172
Mrs. Gandhi to appoint another commission of inquiry against the AIADMK Government. Also, the
Congress-I was in opposition in Kerala and was eager to discredit
the CPM Government. So when 21 Members of Parliament, many of them from the DMK and some
Members of Legislative Assembly of Kerala submitted memoranda,
the Central Government appointed the Bay Commission.
The appointment of the Ray Commission was challenged by the affected parties and they got the stay.
Thus, the work of all the three Commissions had come
to a halt. The Secretary of the Ray Commission has time and again requested the Central Government to
expedite the Courts proceedings. But all such requests
have been treated with indifference. Reportedly, the Central Government is deliberately keeping the
matter in abeyance. Mrs. Gandhi has not yet finally
chosen her electoral ally out of the two parties—DMK and AIADMK. Once a decision is taken on this
score, she would decide either to wound up the Ray Commission
or expedite the court proceedings.
When Mrs. Gandhi came to power in 1980, she wound up all the commissions which were probing into
the allegations against her or her men. Also she had rejected
the demands for instituting inquiry commissions against Antulay, Gundu Rao, Jagannath Mishra, Ram Lal
and Bhajan Lal. Evidently, the retention of the Ray
Commission, in6pite of legal hazards that the Government is facing, is not solely guided by her concern
for public morality.
38. This happened particularly in the case of Das Commission enquiring against Pratap Singh Kairon.
39. A.G. Noerani, Minister's Misconduct (New Delhi, 1973), pp. 31-41.
40. Justice K.K. Mathew faced these problems while enquiring L.N. Mishra's case. See, K.K. Mathew,
"Introduction"
173
in S.C. Gupta, The Law relating to Commission of Inquiry (Delhi, 1977).
41. For example, the Karnataka Government appointed Santosh Commission to inquire into allegations
of ill-treatment of Lawrence Fernandes and Snehlata Reddy
and the Central Government appointed Shah Commission to inquire into allegations of excesses during
"Emergency'. The Santosh Commission had ultimately
to be wound up, for the reason inter alia, of overlapping subject matters of the two Commissions.
Another case is the appointment of Iqbal Hussain Commission
by the Karnataka Government and Grover Commission by the Central Government, both to inquire into
allegations against the Karnataka Chief Minister and
his Cabinet colleagues. Another case is the appointment of Kailasam Commission by the Kerala
Government and the Sadasivan Commission by the Tamil Nadu
Government to enquire into the spirit scandal that rocked Kerala and Tamil Nadu. While these two
Commissions were working, the Central Government appointed
the Ray Commission to look into the same problem.
42. Kailasam Commission and Sadasivan Commission were appointed by the Kerala and Tamil Nadu
Government to inquire into the spirit scandal which took place
in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
43. The illustrated Weekly of India, 24 July 1977, p, 10.
44. Mathew Commission's report in L.N. Mishra's case has not been made public so far.
45. The Shah Commission examined the reports of S.R. Das Commission, which inquired into the conduct
of Pratap Singh Kairon, Chief Minister of Punjab (1963-64);
Rajgopal lyengar Commission, which inquired into the conduct af Bakshi Gulam Mohammad, ex-Chief
Minister of Jammu and Kashmir (1965-67); Venkatarama Iyer
Commission, which inquired into the conduct of certain ministers of Bihar (1969-70); Mudholkar
Commission, which inquired into the affairs of the ministry
of Mahamaya Prasad Sinha, Chief Minister of Bihar and other
174
ministers (1968-69); A.N. Mulla Commission, which inquired into the affairs of Govindan Nair and T.V.
Thomas, minister of Kerala (1969-71); and G.K. Mitter
Commission, which looked into the Kendu leaves purchases in Orissa (1969-74).
46. India, Shah Commission of Inquiry, Third and Final Report (Delhi, 6 August 1978), p. 332.
47. Khushwant Singh, "What We Can Do About Corruption", Hindustan Times, 18 February 1982.
48. Nehru opposed the formation of such a tribunal at a Press Conference on 8 January 1960 and also in
Parliament. He suggested the appointment of a judge
for looking into the allegations made by Deshmukh.
49. India, Ministry of Home Affairs, n. 31.
50. Bill No. 51 of 1968 and No. 3 of 1971.
51. Bill No. 88 of 1977. Introduced on 28 July 1977.
52. Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Rajasthan, and
Tamil Nadu have set up Lok Ayukts.
53. This has happened in Karnataka.
54. For example, the Maharashtra Government took more than ten months to find an incumbent for the
post of Lok Ayukts and another ten months after that
to appoint Upalok Ayukt.
55. Most of the Lok Ayukts have complained about the inadequacy of accommodation, staff etc.
56. R.K. Dhawan, Public Grievances and the Lokpal: A Study of the Administrative Machinery for Redress
of Public Grievances (New Delhi, 1981), p. 236.
57. See for example, annual reports of Maharashtra and Rajasthan Lok Ayukts.
58. It is not suggested here that all the Members of Parliament had been corrupt. Few of them were/are
really honest person but their number is not very
large.
175
BOOK REVIEW
ORGANIZATION, CLASS AND CONTROL by Stewart Clegg and David Dunkerley, London, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1980, pp. x+595. Price £ 14.50.
Theorists of administration have, so far, generally tried to be pragmatic and hence concerned with the
maintenance of organizations. Taylor, Fayol, Gulick,
Urwick and Barnard were all managers or administrators; many of the contemporary theorists like
Argyris, Likert, Katz, Kahn, and Rice are consultants and
hence identify with managers. This seems to partly explain as to why the theoretical frameworks, which
were devised to legitimize the social "order" in
times of crisis, have now become obsolete in other areas of social theory but still continue to hold the
field in organization theory. Thus positivism
arose in early 19th century as a new religion for legitimizing industrial capitalism, with its elitism, social
disorganization and pollution. Functionalism,
which is based upon the assumption of a moral order, arose in the United States during the Great
Depression of the 1930's when millions had become unemployed.
The method and theory deriving from positivism and functionalism were incorporated into modern
social theory and proved to be particularly useful for organization
theorists. Thus positivism became the base of the behavioural approach and Simon's theory of decisionmaking; and functionalism became the foundation of
the systems approach. Now, in social theory in general, " 'Positivism' has today become more of a term
of abuse than a technical term of philosophy", as
pointed out by Giddens1; and the death knell of functionalism was sounded by Gouldner in 1971 in The
Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. However, Simon's
theory, behaviourism and the systems approach still continue to reign supreme in Public Administration
as well as Business Management.
1. Anthony Giddens, "Positivism and Its Critics" in Tom Boilomore and Robert Nisbet,ed., A History of
Sociological Analysis, London, 1979, p. 237.
176
On the other hand, theorists of administration have treated Marx's critique of bureaucracy as anathema.
The importance of this critique is obvious from
the fact that most later theory has been a "debate with Marx's ghost".2 Thus Max Weber tries to
legitimize capitalism and bureaucracy by describing them
as rational, but is constantly aware of the truth of Marx's critique: he realizes that these involve
"dehumanization" and other aspects of alienation.
Similarly, Veblen refers to "trained incapacity", Dewey to "occupational psychosis", Warnotte to
"professional deformation", Merton to "timidity, conservatism
and technicism" and "domineering attitude", Likert to "exploitation", McGregor to "coercion", and
Argyris to "human and organizational decay". Thus theorists
subsequent to Marx have accepted his critique of bureaucracy conceptualized as "alienation"; however,
texts of administrative theory hardly ever contain
an analysis of his contribution. The work of other revolutionary thinkers and leaders like Lenin, Mao,
Gramsci and Ho Chi Minh is also excluded from the
courses. It is not that Western writers are unaware of the incisiveness of these contributions. If that
were so the refutation, for example, by Selznick
of Lenin in The Organizational Weapon, would be unnecessary. The stance, mainly, is not to allow the
younger generation in universities and business schools
to come into contact with this body of critical thought.
In this perspective the work of Stewart Clegg and David Dunkerley is of great value. They have
published, individually and jointly, several volumes between
1972 and 1980. They adopt a Marxist point of view and make a number of valuable theoretical and
methodological contributions. Organization, Class and Control
provides a good critique of much of mainstream organization theory. Basing themselves upon a mass of
literature, mainly in the field of sociology, they
examine critically the classical theory, "human relations", systems approach, behaviourism, and theories
related to decision-making and technology. They
also provide a number of alternative hypotheses. An incisive
2. Irving M. Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, New Delhi, 1969, p. x.
177
point is that modern technology and Taylorism together aim mainly at maximum control over labour,
through de-skilling and the denial to the worker of any
judgment, discretion or decision-making (p. 342). About power, their criticism, that it has been typically
formulated as a variance from formal structure
in organization theory" (p. 458) is perceptive. Also highly perceptive, is their criticism of Tavistock
researchers' conceptualization of uncertainty as
causing informal organization (p. 326). They have rightly emphasized the possibility of developing a nonalienating system of workers' self-management
(p. 552).
The suggestions for new research are contained in the last chapter. Two abstract models are presented.
The basic principle of both is that "organization
theory become more historically sensitive and less empiricist in theory construction" (p. 502). One of the
models aims at the study of rationality as contained
in rules of different types-extra-organizational, technical, social regulative, reproduction, strategic and
State. The relationship of these rules with
the orientations of workers, managers and entrepreneurs are to be examined. The second model
concerns the classification of organizations in a table, one
side of which represents different kinds of capital and the other different sectors. The different kinds of
capital are industrial, merchant, finance,
technological, agricultural, and extractive. The sectors are as follows : non-capitalist state activities,
capitalist state activities, monopoly, competitive,
and residual labour power.
Some other merits of the book are discussion of Gramsci's concept of hegemony, description of workers'
self-management in Yugoslavia, and critical examination
of the re-emergence of one-man management in the U.S.S R. and China. Of particular interest to
students of under-developed countries is the discussion
of the functioning of multi-national corporations. The book also contains a good bibliography, mainly
relating to contributions from a sociological point
of view.
What one misses, however, is an extended exposition of the Marxian view of bureaucracy. It is true that
Marx
178
himself has not dealt with bureaucracy in detail at any one place. However, he has referred to it in many
of his works and it is for students of this field
to bring his ideas together. The authors hardly attempt this. What is worse, they make some misleading
observations. Thus referring to Marx's ideas on
bureaucracy they say that, "the type of middle classes he envisaged were composed largely of domestic
servants and the relatively uncomplex category of
commercial wage-workers—the type of clerk characterized by Dickens in many of his novels. In the
twentieth century domestic servants have disappeared..
. ." (p. 485). This certainly is a caricature which does no credit to the learned authors. One wonders
whether they have read The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France, which contain a far-seeing, even if not a rounded, theory of
bureaucratization in capitalist society and de-bureaucra-tization
in socialist society.
The authors' interpretation of Lenin's ideas on management also seems to be in error. They do note that
Lenin was aware of the refined brutality of bourgeois
exploitation of the Taylor system; they also note that the "objective conditions" in the U.S.S.R,
immediately after the Revolution were not conducive to
workers' self-management. However they maintain that Lenin's views changed between 1917 and 1921
and came closer to the traditional conception. It is difficult
to agree with this thesis of change in his views. As a matter of fact, Lenin was highly critical of the
bureaucratization and the concentration of power
in Stalin's hands. However, his health deteriorated and he was unable to save the achievements of the
Revolution.
While the work does not purport to be a history of organization theory, one does wish that the
discussion of particular topics were in chronological order.
Thus it hardly stands to-reason that in the same chapter Weber should be dealt with before Marx. Also,
the size of the book could be reduced with out harm
if it were not cluttered up with long extracts from other works: it almost gives the impression of being a
dissertation by a brilliant student who is afraid
of an ignorant examiner. There is some avoidable duplication also; it seems
179
that the text incorporates what the authors sometimes wrote separately.
One last failing is common to all those who have been brought up under the present system of reified
knowledge. The authors say (p. 374) that/This is not
the place to investigate" questions relating to the inter-relationship between organizations and the
politico-economic environment. It would be well to
remind ourselves that one of Marx's most important contribution was to highlight the need of studying
the totality.
Satya Deva
Dept. of Public Administration
Punjab University, Chandigarh.
DEVELOPMENT BUREAUCRACY by V.A. Pai Panandiker, R.N. Bishnoi and O.P. Sharma, New Delhi, Oxford
and IBH Publishing Company, 1983, pp. 248, Rs. 75/-
The relevance of development administration a sub-discipline of Public Administration is growingly felt
in the developing societies like India. Centuries
of colonial exploitation and union government have left the countries of third world socially depressed
and economically backward. Mass poverty, unemployment,
illiteracy and social instability are the legacies of foreign rule. Development administration had to
undertake a gigantic task of nation building. Only
rapid socio-economic transformation can ensure their prosperity, security and stability. It will require
honest effort and constant hard work on the part
of the people, planners and administrators to ensure economic growth with social justice. For the
enormous task of national reconstruction and rehabilitation
a suitable organizational structure has to be built up. Such institutional arrangement has to involve the
people into the governmental process. It creates
an environment of shared partnership between the administrators end the administered. In this way the
efforts of the people themselves can be united with
those of the governmental authorities to bring about a balanced economic growth which will start the
process of social and political development. It is
needless to emphasise
180
that the governmental apparatus will have to be decentralized and taken to the door steps of the people
where the involvement of the masses can be ensured.
The book under review attempts at putting the performance of development bureaucracy in proper
perspective. The book of Pai Panandiker and his colleagues
is a comparative study of rural upliftment of two districts—Karnal (Haryana) and Gorakhpur (U.P.) and
attempts at identifying the prerequisites of successful
performance of grass-roots bureaucracy. As regards development, in the opinion of authors, inspite of
having similar development potential the two districts
have performed differently. Why it is so, perhaps, is the basic problem before the researchers.
According to the authors the answer lies in the characteristics
of bureaucratic structure, articulation and orientation of administrators towards development and
management and organizational strategy. The way to successful
performance of bureaucracy in Karnal in the opinion of the authors, lies in the better administrative
strategy and planning.
With regard to administrative structure in the districts, extent and nature of co-ordination, skills and
tactfulness of officials, the responsiveness of
cultivators and interaction between the cultivators and bureaucracy, the valuable data were collected in
1977-78 through intensive field study technic.
The merit of the study also lies in the fact that it provides detailed socio-economic profile of both the
districts—Karnal and Gorakhpur. The comparative
study of two districts reveals many developmental contradictions.
The effectiveness of the bureaucracy depends on how they motivate the cultivators and enable them to
enter into the competitive market and snatch the opportunity
in their own favour. A point in hand is whether the small and marginal farmers were benefited because
of bureaucratic activities. So far as the improved
irrigational practices are concerned, the authors point out "no adoption was not due to any lack of
motivation on the part of the non-adopter (small cultivators)
but because either they could not have the improved facilities or these facilities were not available to
them".
181
The most striking and valuable contribution of the book under review lies in its recommendations in
regard to management system. The recommendations, if
taken in proper perspective, will certainly help the policy makers in diagnosing the problems at the
implementational level. It is a useful contribution
to the literature of rural development administration.
S.N. MISHRA
Indian Institute of Public Administration,
New Delhi.
INDIANISATION OF ALL-INDIA SERVICES AND ITS IMPACT ON ADMINISTRATION by J.D. Shukla, New
Delhi, Allied, 1982) xiit+500p., Rs. 175/-
In recent years there has been a revival of interest in the study of British imperial policy and
administration in colonial empire in general and in India
in particular. Hopefully the passage of time enables us to look at the issues with greater perspective,
while the opening of archives and growth of monographic
studies based upon fresh sources give us better command of a number of complex and vexed aspects of
the whole. The new vantage point we can now attain
does not, obviously, render less complex the imperial processes of administration. The subject matter
continues to demand a high degree of analytical skill
and an awareness of the many faceted nature of the process under investigation.
The British imperial rule in India has to be studied at a variety of levels. Among its contributions in India,
the creation of the civil services is one
of the most remarkable. These services constituted the spine of the Indian body politic and to them
people looked for the protection of person and property,
of life and liberty. Their form and character developed under the rule of the East India Company.
A number of works both scholarly and memoirs, are available about the formation and development of
the Company's civil services, but most of them do not
deal with the indianisation of the civil services. L.S.S. O'Malley's The
182
Indian Civil Services 1601-1930; N.C. Roy's The Civil Service in India; and, B.B. Misra's The Administrative
History of India are some of the studies which
have tried to deal with the Indianisation but their treatment of the subject is scanty and inadequate. The
book under review tries to fill this gap by
focussing its attention to this aspect. It presents a coherent and comprehensive account, based on
primary sources, of the attempts made, and with what
results, towards the Indianisation of the civil services. It also tries to find out the impact of Indianisation
on administration.
In the political field, the British officials formed a solid phalanx against a common threat, namely the
educated Indians. The goal of the officials was
to maintain their monopoly of the elite covenanted positions. British officials were of the view that
increased Indian representation in Superior Services
would dangerously lower the status and prestige of the services. A.P. MacDounell's racial response to
one moderate reform proposal typifies the general
response of all his colleagues. Ending the virtual British monopoly of posts would tantamount to
destroying "one of nature's own monopolies—monopoly in
the sense that strongest man wins".
On the other hand, the Viceroys, especially of late nineteenth century, showed move readiness to give
some positive response to the educated Indian class
than did the British officials. Atleast outwardly, Lytton, Ripon and Dufferin showed some degree of
willingness to Indianise one or another segment of
the Superior Services. But British officials repeatedly showed that this was one area in which they would
defy the initiatives of Viceroys. These officials
often based their resistance on the specific charge that it would not be possible for Indians in Services to
handle disturbances arising from religious
divisions of the Indian society. Lacking, what the British called "depth of character", Hindu or Muslim
officers in high posts would presumably risk throwing
large areas of the country into communal turmoil.
Neither the vindicative judgement of some Viceroys and British aristocrats nor the unsupportable praise
of British officials by scholars were (or are) correct.
As a mattar of fact
183
the comments of Lytton, Dufferin, Curzon, Hamilton and others demonstrated more class bias than
objective analysis. The assessment of scholars were (and
have been) based on little more than nostalgic memories of what ICS men thought they had done in
India. However, the truth lies elsewhere. It lies partly
in the conclusion that the major impetus of British official behaviour was basically human: promotion
and security of individual officers. Self-interest
is the mare of British imperial bureaucracy. It clearly played an important role in the formation of
imperial policy.
While analysing the impact of indianisation of the Services on the administration, the author has heavily
relied on the views expressed by some of the former
British and Indian members of the Services. He has not tried to assess this aspect with various
administrative and political measures introduced in India
from time to time, by the British Government. For example, the 'Dyarchy' in 1921 influenced, heavily,
the impact of indianisation on the administrative
and political fields. The introduction of the 'Dyarchy' actually proved the impracticability of the hopes
raised about the services. Dyarchy was a stage
between bureaucratic supremacy and popular control. It created difficulties an both sides. For example.
Governments of Bihar and Orissa wanted the indianisation
of All India Services. They wanted to have indianisation in a form that might extend their own control
over them. They, therefore, advocated provincialisation,
which is essence was Indianisation but which could also ensure popular provincial control.
The new form of indianisation through provincialisation was not based on sound administrative
considerations. It arose immediately from the introduction
of ministerial control over the 'transferred' subjects, a measure which the British had adopted to satisfy
the demands of politics rather than to weaken
the hold of the Government of India over the Superior Services. However, as the Indian politicians
regarded provincial autonomy as the first step to national
independence, any popular demand for the provincialisation of these services had the merit of being
looked upon as a step forward in the direction of control
over the Central Government itself. Thus,
184
in their preoccupation with politics they failed to appreciate the broad national significance of the
existing administrative arrangements and favoured
the provincialisation of the All India Services from motives of immediate and narrow political gains. It
made the members of the services to feel insecure
about their future. Their sense of insecurity gave birth to many Service Associations. The European
Government Servants' Association, for example vied
with the association for the Indian members of the Services. All this took a racial turn and affected the
quality of administration.
The issue of indianisation of Civil Services, as pursued during the British rule, led to a number of
problems to be faced by the Services themselves and
the Government in independent India. Politics arose as part of an agitation to secure increasing
employment for Indians in the Superior Services. It remained
limited for a time to Indian vs. Europeans and Anglo-Indians, and then extended to Hindus vs. Muslims,
its repercussions filtering downwards with the growth
of political democracy at a later stage.
So far as the methodology and data of the study is concerned the sources used in the study tend to
support narrow and traditional points of view. Prominent
in the references are Parliamentary proceedings. Command Papers, administrative reports and
publications methodically produced by the British Government.
While these documents undoubtedly contain a wide assortment of valid information, still they mirror
what the colonial administrators wished to discuss
or to make public. Thus, these documents need to be examined with great care. Otherwise, the scholar
is easily going to be absorbed in the suppositions
and the aura of competency, omniscience and "order" underlying these polished productions. The things
become worse in the Twentieth Century when the British
unabashedly are playing to audiences both at home and in outside world. We all know propoganda,
distribution of "correct news" and cultivating a "friendly
press" lay at the heart of much of colonial political strategy.
The reinterpretations about the themes and processes involved in a decentralised and at times fragile
bureaucratic system have broader implications than
just arranging the
185
historical record concerning one colonial administration. Indigenous subjects should be given priority for
research as well as indigenous source material
like newspapers, tracts and institutional records available in indigenous languages. While the author has
chosen an indigenous topic for investigation,
he has not used indigenous source material for his study.
O.P. SHARMA
Bhagat Singh College,
Delhi University, Mew Delhi
PANCHAYATS AND DEVELOPMENT, by V. Shivalinga Prasad, Light&Life Publisher, Trivandrum, 1981, pp.
219.
The present book under review is a study of organisation and working of Panchayats in Andhra Pradesh
which is based on the empirical work done by the author.
In sequence to many books on Panchayati Raj and Rural Development, the book seeks to answer some
of the questions that relate to operational dynamics in
achieving the objectives of rural development. The book has been divided into ten chapters with an
index suffixed. The first chapter is an introduction
where the concept of development, inherent rural development problems and reference to the
historical perspectives of development etc. together with evolution
of Panchayats and its importance has been highlighted. The methodology and the organisation of the
study is also given in the first chapter.
The socio-economic and political setting of the panchayats is given in the second chapter. The author
has observed that "Although the socio-economic pattern
in Haveli exhibits certain changes, it has not undergone any fundamental transformation. For, traditional
institutions such as caste and religious rituals
continue to have a strong grip on the social life."
This village retains its traditional nature largely intact. The economic pattern of the village also exhibit a
structure based on inequality. The author
has found that political pattern is characterised by divisions in the village centred around certain
individuals, based on personal considerations.
186
In fact the political parties, though exist in the village, their ideological base is very poor. The author has
summarised these shortcomings and has observed
that "The result of the socio-economic pattern in the village in the inegalitarian social, economic and
political structure which is not conducive for
concentrated community effort".
In the third chapter, the author has presented the various methods that were adopted by the different
contestants. Interestingly the personal qualities
of the candidates were found to be just an obscure reason. The other things included invoking group
interest and caste feelings, casting aspirations on
the character of opponents, putting voters under personal obligations, putting pressure on them,
making promises and taking full advantage of their economic
power, political prestige and political links of the groups etc. The author has also brought about the
question of Harijan participation in the elections.
He has commented that "Harijans and other labourers felt that their direct involvement in the elections
was a luxury." Thus the total electoral process
in the village in found to be largely devoid of democratic content and political development of rural
people for which it is meant. As a result of this
the objective of rural development is either subverted or is totally lost sight of.
The fourth chapter and the subsequent chapter is devoted to the panchayat systems and the principal
political executive of this panchayat, i.e., the Sarpanch.
The author has found that different members and sarpanch and other leaders have not been able to
constitute the statutory committees under panchayat due
to the simple reason that awareness and understanding and clarity about their role is not there.
This has resulted in lack of involvement on the part of members. The author has found that all the
institutional devices viz.. Gram Sabha, Panchayat and
Committees intended for direct and indirect participation proved to be falling short of expectations.
Even though the institution of Sarpanch is powerful
enough to initiate faster development, the institutional arrangements, socio economic factors and the
behavioural
187
style of different Sarpanchs have been highly unfavourable.
Subsequent chapters deal with linkages, the financial resources, working and case histories of the
panchayats. The author concludes that "the linkages are
based on personal convenience of leaders and devoid of any principles", the auditing of expenditures is
a mechanical exercise" and the panchayati infrastructure
has benefited the richer sections and impact on the life of poor people is negligible."
Finance is the life of any organisation. Financing of Panchayats has always been a matter of debate. The
author has given the sources of Panchayat incomes
and has observed that the examination of audit reports and its impact on functioning had just become a
routine and mechanical exercise which does not throw
any light on the performance of the Panchayats. Further, the financial management of the village
panchayat was found to be wanting on developmental thrust
and direction.
In chapter VIII and chapter IX working of the panchayat and case histories are given. Most of the
functions undertaken by the Panchayat reveals that they
are mostly civic welfare and infrastructural in nature which mostly benefited the richer sections in the
village. The activities to improve upon the conditions
of the rural poor have simply been ineffective. In addition to this, the author feels that "For want of
perspective plan, whatever is designed to be achieved
is incidental in nature. The case histories throw enough light as to how the enthusiasm of the Panchayat
functionaries wane after a period of time and
the commitment, supervision, technical guidance and public cooperation which are considered essential
for the successful functioning were found lacking.
In the last chapter the author has given conclusion and an outlook for the future. Though the book gives
quite an enriched information about the state of
panchayats, their modus operandi etc. it has not taken into consideration the kind of new steps which
can be taken up for the development. Also, effort
has not been made to deal with the local level planning and people oriented development schemes
188
which is needed in villages. Moreover, the panchayati Raj institutions, which are expected to make a
significant contribution in dealing with the vast task
of rural development, demand certain steps. Now, what were the steps taken by the Panchayat Haveli
and how they could be brought into functioning is also
missing. Predominance is not the reflection of deficiency. Mere narration does not lead anywhere near
to finding out any solution for rural development.
In fact the book though highlighting many issues, has not taken into consideration the disequilibrium
and imbalances in the availability of resources and
its deployment which perhaps is the main cause of socio-economic disruption of life in rural areas. In
short the book is another useful addition to an
already existing vast field on Panchayati Raj and Development.
J.N. UPADHYAY
Indian Institute of Public
Administration,
New Delhi.
PATTERNS OF PANCHAYATI RAJ IN INDIA, edited by G. Ram Reddy, Macmillan Company of India Ltd.,
Delhi, 1977, p. 312, Rs. 29/-.
India is a land of villages. More than 75% of its people live in villages. Naturally, therefore, the Indian
democratic polity must have its roots in the
village community. It is a well-known fact that there was a well established system of local Government
in ancient India. "The village communities are
little republics, having nearly everything they can want within themselves and (are) almost independent
of any foreign relations", wrote Metcalfe. There
existed village Panchayats which attended to the needs of the village folk. Later, the Mughal and the
early British rule led to their disintegration. However,
some viceroys, specially Lord Ripon tried to revive these institutions and laid foundations of modern
local government in this country. A number of legislations
were passed to this effect. During the national struggle for independence great emphasis was laid on the
role of local bodies. The founding fathers of
the Indian
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Constitution, under the influence of Gandhian ideology and to fulfil the aspirations gave this directive
under Article 40 of the Constitution of free India:
"that the State should take steps to organise village panchayats and endow them with such power and
authority as may be necessary to enable them to function
as units of self-government.
The book under review is a compilation of original essays on the working of Panchayati Raj System in 15
states of the Union of India. Each essay in the
book is devoted to the study of Panchayati Raj institutions as they operate in each state highlighting its
distinctive features and making a comparative
study within the socio-economic and political background obtaining in each state. The book begins with
an exhaustive introduction of almost 30 pages wherein
the author presents a comprehensive picture of the Panchayati Raj in India. In this introduction, the
author has dealt with the origin, philosophy and
patterns of the local self-government institutions operating in various states of India.
Dealing with the structure of Panchayati Raj the author identifies 3 levels of local Govt.—Panchayats,
Panchayat Samities and Zilla Parishads. The Panchayats
represent the lowest level of popular participation in Government. The samities represent the next
level, and at the apex are the Zilla Parishads. Though
it is true that there is panchayat raj of some kind or the other in almost all the states but they vary in
respect of number of units. While Kerala and
J&K have only one-tier, the village panchayat, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Orissa have two tier
system, the village panchayat, and panchayat samities.
In fact, there is a four-tier system in West Bengal. The author provides elaborate statistics relating to the
distribution of panchayat raj institutions
in the country and says that by the end of March, 1973 there were 222,050 village panchayats covering
5,56 lakhs villages. Thus, 90% of the total villages
in the states and union territories were covered by village panchayats. Similarly, the all India average of
Panchayat Samities is 53.3 village panchayats
per panchayat samiti and the average per Zilla Parishad is 13.7 panchayat samities. These figures reveal
that 54.3% of districts in the country have been
covered by Zilla
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Parishads.
The Panchayati Raj institutions in the opinion of ShrijjRam Reddy have not yet settled down and are in
some kind of formal and it will take some more time
for them to stabilise. He correctly points out that although the Panchayati Raj institutions are charged
with the responsibilities of developmental work
the experience of most of the states seems to be that these bodies have not been given enough
freedom to function. They have no choice with regard to administrative
and technical personnel with whom they have to work as also the constraints on their functioning
imposed by financial limitations. The lack of government
support and bureaucratic apathy further add to depletion of efficacy of these institutions. Towards the
end, the author poses the problem of the extent
of autonomy to be given to the Panchayati Raj vis-a-vis the state Government and bureaucracy. He says
total autonomy is inconceivable as they have to conform
and fulfil the plan objectives and limit them to local needs. Though certain amount of autonomy is
postulated yet it has not been concretely spelt out.
The Panchayati Raj in some states like Maharashtra and Gujarat seems to have fared better than in the
other states. Whether their superior performance is
due to the structural differences in the Panchayati Raj institutions in these states is not very clear. The
more plausible reason seems to be the greater
confidence reposed by the respective state governments in these institutions than in the other states. If
one is to ask the question, how far they have
succeeded in democratising the real political structure or have they succeeded in ending the
stranglehold of bureaucratic mal-administration the answer
is no. The panchayats still remain institutions specially lacking either in vision or in mission and still
under the tutelage of political bossism, elitism
and bureaucratic patronage. The reasons for all this, as in all other spheres of life, is our approach to
institutions, our sincerity in taking democracy
to grassroot levels, our social fabric and social awareness which have remained stagnant for so long and
without which no meaningful democratisation of
institutions is possible.
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So far as acquainting an interested reader or a layman with this unique experiment in participative
government is concerned, the book is able to impart
knowledge on the basis of facts and figures. At the end, however, one wishes that the actual role of this
experiment had been assessed and evaluated in
a more detailed manner so that one could get an idea as to how far we have or have not succeeded in
our efforts to involve over five hundred million people
living in Indian villages in the decision-making process and whether we could think of adopting
alternative systems of participative government and decentralised
administration and decision-making.
K.S. GOYAL
Dyal Singh College,
University of Delhi, New Delhi.