Reshaping the State-citizen relationship

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

Context:

Caught on a now-viral video, ordering police to “break the heads” of farmer protesters, a Haryana bureaucrat achieved notoriety last week. 

• His vulgar display of State power needs to be understood in this larger context of culture and norms that govern relationships between the bureaucracy and the public. 
• He is an inevitable consequence of a corrosive culture that distances the State from the public and legitimises demands for public “discipline” to achieve policy goals.

Recent examples of high handedness by officers

• District magistrates have been caught on camera slapping errant citizens, spraying them with sanitisers, and smashing their phones, all in a bid to secure “public cooperation” to comply with lockdown rules.
• The Haryana chief minister (CM)’s insistence on “strictness” to maintain law and order, speaks volumes for how the State has demonised farmer protesters and their right to protest.
• These incidents are merely extreme illustrations of this widely prevalent legalistic culture.

“Deliberative” vs “legalistic” norms: 

• Deliberative norms promote a culture of dialogue and collective problem solving where bureaucracy engages the public. 
  • Citizens are partners, not passive subjects of administration. 
• Legalistic norms privilege compliance, rule-following, and deference to hierarchy. Performance is understood as adherence to procedure. Hierarchy is deployed to exercise power and trust is replaced with a desire for discipline.
  • Legalistic norms shape much of the Indian bureaucracy. Command and control are the means through which accountability is extracted within the bureaucracy. Technology has aided and abetted this culture.

Interaction between the bureaucracy and the public in managing the pandemic 

• A recently conducted survey by the Centre for Policy Research to capture perceptions of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) on public administration during the pandemic illustrates this phenomenon. 
• When asked about imposing lockdown rules and interacting with the public, 45% of responding IAS officers stated that it was through the “fear of law”, rather than willingness and cooperation, that compliance to lockdown rules was ensured. 
  • This, despite widespread acknowledgment of the importance of public communication. Discipline was still valued over possibilities of cooperation. 
• Bureaucrats in poorer states, where capacity is considered weak — Assam, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh — gave greater weightage to the fear of law.
  • They also pointed to an important relationship between State capacity and the fostering of legalistic norms.
  • In states such as Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Himachal Pradesh, Bureaucrats expressed greater faith in public understanding and cooperation in complying with lockdown rules. 
• Poor public health outcomes: Social norms, values, and practices were expressed as the real barriers to expanded testing. And while officers acknowledged the limitations of State capacity and communication failure, much of the responsibility and, significantly, blame was placed on the public.

Concerns:

All this points to deep tensions in the underlying norms that govern the relationship between the bureaucracy and the citizens it serves, and how the bureaucracy perceives the “public”. 

• Legalistic norms are in conflict with the public-facing role of administrators. 
  • When trust is replaced with a tendency for disciplining, the temptation to meet goals through coercion, rather than building solidarity, shapes bureaucratic responses to the public. 
  • Command-and-control centres, equipped with biometric surveillance systems and GPS trackers, to monitor officials and track progress on administrative tasks are now a familiar sight in state governments across the country.
• Citizens are seen as interfering in the bureaucracy’s ability to achieve policy goals. The assumption is that the “public” often lacks awareness, willingness, and capability.
  • Even when it comes to routine bureaucratic processes such as scheme implementation, the public is viewed with suspicion. 
  • To be recognised as a rightful beneficiary in welfare programmes, for instance, the bureaucrat appropriates the power to determine the “authenticity” of citizen claims. 
  • Words like beneficiary “verification”, “authentication” are routinely deployed, and their import vis a vis how they construct the “public” in the minds of bureaucrats are never critiqued. 

In the outrage that routinely follows, demand for reform, changes in recruitment and training dominate headlines. Yet, without challenging the norms that shape bureaucratic behaviour, no amount of discipline, training, and new recruitment rules will likely bring about real change. The govt. should bring reforms that challenge existing norms and reduce the distance between the bureaucracy and the public.

The Hindustan time’s link:

https://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/reshaping-the-state-citizen-relationship-101630588152467.html

Question: Recent case of bureaucratic highhandedness in Karnal shows that public services still suffer from colonial mentality. Elucidate.