Special Reports

Money is ever poor compensation for the physical, mental and psychological trauma suffered by the victim of an assault, more so in cases of sexual assault. It is therefore no surprise that the apex court should see insult being added to injury by the Madhya Pradesh government’s paying a miserly compensation of Rs 6,000 or 6,500 to rape victims. “Are you doing a charity? You value rape at Rs 6,500”, Justice Madan B. Lokur admonished the state government’s Standing Counsel, when sharing the Bench with Justice Deepak Gupta and dealing with a petition on the utilisation of the Nirbhaya Fund for the welfare of victims of such assault. “For Madhya Pradesh the figures are fantastic”, the court observed, “there are 1,951 victims and you are giving Rs 6000-6500 each. Is that good, commendable”; adding that “this is total insensitiveness”.

To be fair, the court came down equally heavily on the fact that as many as 24 states and union territories had not responded to its call for affidavits on their utilisation of the Fund. “It is sad that a large number of state governments are not bothered about the safety of women, in spite of all talk about gender justice…. ” It is worth noting that the Central government claimed difficulty in securing information from the states, clearly there is only lip service paid to the safety of women. A poser for Maneka Gandhi?

Compensation payments are only a small part of the story. Inept policing is another, many victims are hesitant to go to the cops fearing additional shame and pressure. The Womens’ Commissions in several states are comatose ~ Delhi is an exception, though possibly publicity-seeking ~ and traditional misogynistic mindsets still prevail even in urban areas. Sexual harassment at the workplace remains rampant, and the attitude of most politicians is negative.

The indifference of state governments, as pointed out in the Supreme Court, testifies to criminal dereliction of a basic duty. The nation appeared “shocked” at the Nirbhaya incident in the Capital a few years back. Alas that shock was short-lived and there have been several other Nirbhayas subsequently though all have not attracted media attention.

Legal action, no matter how widespread and punitive, cannot succeed in changing traditional attitudes, social action is necessary. From where will that originate? Movies on rape victims do not arouse emotions if religion, caste or community “pride” is not impacted (the furore over ‘Padmaavat’ proves that).

Though the nation is almost permanently in election mode, gender-inequality is never a vote-catching issue: a collective failure of women politicians, regardless of party affiliation. Their non-serious attitude is reflected in the state governments’ tardiness in response to the Supreme Court’s call for information. And finally, can their Lordships “fix” a compensation level high enough to coerce the administrations into effective preventive/punitive action?

I shall be failing in my national duty if I did not speak up even now against the mess the finance minister has made of the economy. I am also convinced that what I am going to say reflects the sentiments of a large number of people in the BJP and elsewhere who are not speaking up out of fear.

Arun Jaitley is considered to be the best and the brightest in this government. It was a foregone conclusion before the 2014 elections that he would be the finance minister in the new government. His losing his Lok Sabha election from Amritsar was not allowed to come in the way of this appointment. One may recall that in similar circumstances Atal Bihari Vajpayee had refused to appoint Jaswant Singh and Pramod Mahajan, two of his closest colleagues in the party, to his cabinet in 1998. His indispensability was established further when the prime minister rewarded him not only by giving him the finance ministry including the department of disinvestment, but also the ministries of defence and corporate affairs. Four ministries in one go out of which he still retains three. I have handled the ministry of finance and know how much hard work there is in that ministry alone. Finance ministry, in the best of times, calls for the undivided attention of its boss if the job has to be properly done. In challenging times it becomes more than a 24/7 job. Naturally, even a superman like Jaitley could not do justice to the task.

Jaitley was, to begin with, a lucky finance minister, luckier than any in the post-liberalisation era. Depressed global crude oil prices placed at his disposal lakhs of crores of rupees. This unprecedented bonanza was waiting to be used imaginatively. The legacy problems like stalled projects and bank NPAs were no doubt there and should have been managed better like the crude oil bonanza. But the oil bonanza has been wasted and the legacy problems have not only been allowed to persist, they have become worse.

So, what is the picture of the Indian economy today? Private investment has shrunk as never before in two decades, industrial production has all but collapsed, agriculture is in distress, construction industry, a big employer of the work force, is in the doldrums, the rest of the service sector is also in the slow lane, exports have dwindled, sector after sector of the economy is in distress, demonetisation has proved to be an unmitigated economic disaster, a badly conceived and poorly implemented GST has played havoc with businesses and sunk many of them and countless millions have lost their jobs with hardly any new opportunities coming the way of the new entrants to the labour market. For quarter after quarter, the growth rate of the economy has been declining until it reached the low of 5.7 per cent in the first quarter of the current fiscal, the lowest in three years. The spokespersons of the government say that demonetisation is not responsible for this deceleration. They are right. The deceleration had started much earlier. Demonetisation only added fuel to fire.

And please note that the methodology for calculation of the GDP was changed by the present government in 2015 as a result of which the growth rate recorded earlier increased statistically by over 200 basis points on an annual basis. So, according to the old method of calculation, the growth rate of 5.7 per cent is actually 3.7 per cent or less.

Even the SBI, the largest public sector bank of the country, has stated with unusual frankness that the slowdown is not transient or “technical”, it is here to stay and the slowdown in demand has only aggravated the situation. It has openly contradicted what the BJP president said just a few days ago that the slowdown in the last quarter was on account of “technical” reasons and will be corrected soon. According to the SBI chairman, the telecom sector is the latest entrant to the long list of stressed sectors.

The reasons for this decline are not far to seek nor have they appeared suddenly. They have been allowed to accumulate over time to cause the present crisis. It was not difficult to anticipate them and take counter measures to deal with them. But that called for devoting time to the task, serious application of mind, understanding of the issues and then working out a game plan to tackle them. It was perhaps too much to expect from a person who was carrying the heavy burden of so many extra responsibilities. The results are there for all of us to see.

The prime minister is worried. A meeting convened by the prime minister with the finance minister and his officials appears to have been postponed indefinitely. The finance minister has promised a package to revive growth. We are all waiting with bated breath for this package. It has not come so far. The only new thing is the reconstituted Economic Advisory Council of the prime minister. Like the five Pandavas they are expected to win the new Mahabharat war for us.

The performance of the monsoon this year has not been flattering. This will further intensify rural distress. The farmers have received “massive” loan waivers from some state governments varying from one paise to a few rupees in some cases. Forty leading companies of the country are already facing bankruptcy proceedings. Many more are likely to follow suit. The SME sector is suffering from an unprecedented existential crisis. The input tax credit demand under the GST is a whopping Rs 65,000 crore against a collection of Rs 95,000 crore. The government has asked the income tax department to chase those who have made large claims. Cash flow problems have already arisen for many companies specially in the SME sector. But this is the style of functioning of the finance ministry now. We protested against raid raj when we were in opposition. Today it has become the order of the day. Post demonetisation, the income tax department has been charged with the responsibility of investigating lakhs of cases involving the fate of millions of people. The Enforcement Directorate and the CBI also have their plates full. Instilling fear in the minds of the people is the name of the new game.

Economies are destroyed more easily than they are built. It took almost four years of painstaking and hard work in the late nineties and early 2000 to revive a sagging economy we had inherited in 1998. Nobody has a magic wand to revive the economy overnight. Steps taken now will take their own time to produce results. So, a revival by the time of the next Lok Sabha election appears highly unlikely. A hard landing appears inevitable. Bluff and bluster is fine for the hustings, it evaporates in the face of reality.

The prime minister claims that he has seen poverty from close quarters. His finance minister is working over-time to make sure that all Indians also see it from equally close quarters.

The writer, a member of the BJP, is a former Union finance minister

A month before the Brexit vote, the Ipsos Mori polling firm discovered that the British public was systematically misinformed. For instance, Leave voters believed that EU immigrants comprise 20 per cent of the UK’s population. Remain voters estimated 10 per cent. The truth is about 5 per cent. Both Leave and Remain voters vastly overestimated what percent of the UK child benefit goes to children living in Europe. Both vastly underestimated how much foreign investment comes from the EU, and overestimated how much comes from China.

Brexit voters were misinformed about the basic facts, though Remainers on average were less wrong than Leavers. Yet even knowing these basic facts would not suffice to make voters well informed. To cast a smart vote, a citizen would need significant social scientific knowledge. They would need to know about the economics and sociology of trade and immigration, the politics of centralised regulation, and the history of nationalist movements. But there is no reason to presume even a tenth of the UK’s population has a basic grasp of the social science needed to evaluate Brexit.

Brexit illustrates the central problem with democracy. Political decisions are high stakes. To make sound decisions requires knowledge. But voters nearly always lack the necessary knowledge. They are not just ignorant; they are usually misinformed. Democracy is the will of the people, but the people usually have little clue what they are doing.

The fact of political ignorance

In designing political institutions, we face an unhappy dilemma. If we concentrate power in the hands of the few, their individual inputs make a significant difference. They thus have every incentive to use their power in a rational and informed way, but also to use their power selfishly. On the other hand, if we spread power out widely among the many, each individual loses the incentive to act selfishly, but also loses the incentive to be informed or to think in a rational, scientific way. Representative parliamentary government is supposed to split the difference, by making the elites answer to the people while also empowering them to override the people’s choices. Of course, referendums attempt to bypass this check on voter irrationality.

Thousands of years ago, Plato hypothesised that the democratic masses would be too ignorant to run their government. He did not have the data to back up his assertion. We do. It turns out Plato was right.

For over 65 years, researchers in the United States have been collecting data about what citizens know and don’t know. The results are depressing. (Results for other countries are similarly depressing; I use American examples because we have more data.) The American National Election Studies, conducted every other year, gives voters a test of basic political information. In general, the top 25 per cent of voters get about 90 per cent of the questions right, the next 50 per cent do little better than chance, and the bottom 25 per cent do worse than chance. In a typical election year, most Americans cannot identify their congresspeople or which party controls congress. Most cannot guess the unemployment rate within a few percentage points. Most have little memory of recent events.

In the 2000 US presidential election, while most Americans knew that Al Gore was more “liberal” than Bush, most did not seem to know what that term means. Fewer than half understood that Gore was more supportive of abortion rights, more supportive of welfare-state programmes, favoured a higher degree of aid to black people or was more supportive of environmental regulation.

Voters do not know the basic facts, but even if they did, that would not be enough. People choose candidates or parties who push policy agendas. Even if, contrary to fact, voters knew what candidates or parties wanted to do, they would still need to understand some basic social science in order to determine which policies are most likely to deliver their favoured ends. In the same way, even if I know I have stomach ulcers, I do not magically acquire the knowledge needed to treat the ulcers.

In fact, there is a big disparity between how laypeople and economists (both left and right) think about the economy. This disparity is not explained by demographic differences. Further, it turns out that better informed or higher IQ laypeople tend think more like economists.

It is no mystery why democratic voters know so little. The are not stupid; they just do not care. The democratic process gives them bad incentives.

In a democracy, how the majority as a collective votes matters, but how any individual votes does not. An individual vote matters only if it decides the election or the referendum, that is, only if it breaks a tie. Yet the probability that a vote will break a tie in a major election or referendum is vanishingly small. Accordingly, each individual voter has little incentive to be informed. They can afford to be ignorant, to be misinformed, or to indulge grossly irrational beliefs. For most of them, the cost of being informed outweighs the potential benefits.

As an analogy, suppose a university lecturer informed a 47 million-person class that they would take a final exam in three months, an exam worth 100 per cent of their final grade. But suppose she told them, “You will not receive your own grade. Instead, I shall average your grades together and you will each receive the class average.” In such a scenario, the class would likely fail. That is how democracy works, except that we cannot even force people to listen to three months of expert lectures before they take the test.

To be clear, it is not as though whatever the majority of the electorate prefers on election day automatically gets translated into policy. Even the Brexit referendum was not binding, the High Court has ruled parliament must take a vote and the Supreme Court could follow suit. More broadly, members of parliament, ministers, and bureaucrats have significant independence. Nevertheless, politicians tend to give voters what they want. But they want what they want because they do not know what they need to know.

The foolishness of crowds

Some defenders of democracy downplay the problems of democratic ignorance. They claim that wisdom is an emergent feature of crowds. Sure, they say, individuals may be ignorant (or worse), but when we aggregate their ignorant beliefs together, we get good results.

This theory sounds delightful, but it holds only in special cases.

Here are some such cases. If we ask carnival goers to estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar, most estimates will be far off. However, the more people we ask, the more accurate the average estimate becomes. Similar results hold for guessing the height of the prize horse or the weight of the prize pig.

If only citizens on the whole were as good at choosing members of parliament as they are at guessing the weight of prize pigs. The problem is that in politics, citizens make systematic mistakes, whereas in guessing the weight of pigs, they make random mistakes which cancel each other out. The so-called “wisdom of crowds” appears only in situations where individual errors are largely random.

In politics, alas, errors are not random. For instance, in the Brexit vote, Leave voters vastly overestimated the number of EU immigrants, while Remain voters slightly overestimated the number.

It is comforting to believe that perhaps the Labour and Conservative Parties will cancel each other’s mistakes out. Yet there is little reason to think the truth lies somewhere in-between. The spectrum between Labour and Conservative political beliefs occupies only a narrow niche in ideological space.

The same point holds for Democrats and Republicans in the United States. In the recent US presidential election, Trump pushed a strongly anti-immigrant agenda, while Clinton pushed to keep the already highly restrictive status quo. When we ask economists, though, we find that both major candidates and parties are far more restrictionist than the evidence supports.

Do not blame the schools

Commentators often think there is an easy solution to the problem of democratic ignorance: education. This just shows we need more and better public education, they say. We need to teach schoolchildren critical thinking, philosophy, politics, and economics.

It is a natural response, but it misses the point. The schools are not to blame. The problem is incentives.

In secondary school, citizens already know most of what they need to know to be good voters. They promptly forget it after their exams end. In fact, studies generally find that most citizens retain only a small fraction of the information they learned in schools.

Citizens allow themselves to forget the information because they do not find it interesting or useful. This type of knowledge is not useful because their individual votes count for so little. If I forget how to drive a car, I cannot get to work. But if I forget the economics of trade and vote accordingly, well, nothing happens.

British citizens are more educated than ever before. But in the UK, as elsewhere, levels of political knowledge have remained stable, and low, over the past half century. Even the internet has made little difference. As the joke goes, we carry devices with us capable of accessing all the world’s knowledge in an instant, but we use them to share pictures of our food.

The injustice of democratic incompetence

Democracies are not just about choosing mundane things like flag colors and national anthems. Democratic decisions affect matters of life and death, peace and war, prosperity and poverty.

The damage of bad decisions can compound over time. Suppose Brexit turns out to reduce the UK’s economic growth by one percentage point year after year. A one percentage point reduction in growth in any given year might not seem trivial. But over time, trivial problems add up to big problems. Had the UK had one percentage point less average growth since 1948, its gross domestic product would be only about £600bn, and the standard of living would be as low as Egypt’s.

Incompetent decision-making is not merely bad; it may be unjust. Consider an analogy. Suppose a 12-person jury hears a murder trial. Suppose the jury is ignorant: they completely ignore the facts of the case entirely, but decide to find the defendant guilty on the basis of a coin flip. Suppose instead they are irrational: they hear the facts of the case, but decide to find the defendant guilty because they believe him secretly to be an evil robot. Suppose instead they are malevolent: they believe the evidence indicates the defendant is innocent, but find him guilty because they hate people of Indian heritage. Or, finally, suppose instead the jury acts in bad faith: They find the defendant guilty because they accepted a bribe.

If we knew a jury behaved in any of these ways, we would judge the trial unfair and unjust. The defendant’s freedom and welfare is at stake. They owe the defendant, and perhaps the British public whom they represent, to decide the case competently and in good faith.

This line of reasoning applies just as well to the electorate. Political decisions are also high stakes. The outcomes — including all ensuing laws, regulations, taxes, budget expenditures, wars, and so on — are imposed upon us involuntarily. These decisions can and do harm us, and can and do deprive many of us of property, liberty and even life. At first glance, we should think that voters, like jurors, have a moral obligation to vote in a competent and morally reasonable way. But it appears that voters systematically violate this obligation.

Some might say this analogy fails. They claim voters are only hurting themselves. But that is not true. If I eat a dozen Cadbury Dairy Milks per day, I may get diabetes, but only I suffer the consequences. When voters vote, the majority decides not just for itself, but for the dissenting minority, and for the tens of millions affected by the decision who cannot vote. The disproportionately elderly Leave voters wish to impose their will upon the disproportionately young Remain voters.

We cannot fix democracy

The problems of political ignorance, misinformation, and irrationality are built-in to democracy. They are not superficial flaws, but problems democracy itself creates. We cannot “fix” the problem with more democracy anymore than we can fix a flood with more rain.

At the very least, these problems highlight why representative parliaments are important and why referenda are, in general, terrible ideas (especially in large democracies). We want our representatives to represent us. But sometimes that does not simply mean promoting the policies we favour. Sometimes, instead, it means doing what is good for us rather than what we want. Members of parliament are much better informed than the public as a whole, and they recognise their decisions have real weight.

A recent study on US politics seems to confirm that representative government explains why democracy performs as well as it does. Princeton University political scientist Martin Gilens asked, when voters at the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles disagree about policy, with whom do US presidents side? He found that presidents were about six times more likely to implement policies high-income voters want than what middle- or low-income voters want. (Surprisingly, George W Bush was more likely to side with low-income voters than more left-wing presidents.) We might say that this shows democracy does not work. But there is an upside: As Gilens notes, high-income voters are also in general high-information voters, and low-income voters are also in general low-information voters. Even within the Democratic Party, high- and low-information voters have different policy preferences. High-information voters are far more in favour of free trade and immigration, less in favour of war, and far more protective of civil liberties. Perhaps representative democracies overperform because politicians do not quite have to answer to the median voter.

If we want even better performance, though, we might need to depart from democracy altogether. The economist Robin Hanson argues we should use specialised betting markets to choose policies. We should, he says, bet on beliefs but vote on values. Law professor Ilya Somin of George Mason University argues that we need a system in which people can “vote with their feet”. This means having radically devolved political systems so that citizens can choose where to live. Both Hanson’s and Somin’s ideas mean to overcome voter ignorance by making mistakes costly and truths beneficial. University of Southampton philosopher Ben Saunders argues we should bypass voting and instead choose leaders through sortition, the random selection system used by the Athenians. Finally, in my recent book Against Democracy, I argue (expanding on an idea from John Stuart Mill) that we should consider implementing electoral systems in which citizens’ votes are weighted by their degree of  objective political knowledge.

These proposals set off alarm bells, especially among people who have not studied them in any depth. But they at least illustrate our dilemma. A misinformed electorate is the price we pay for universal, equal suffrage.

(Jason Brennan is a professor of strategy, economics, ethics, and public policy at Georgetown University, Washington DC.)

When India attained freedom in 1947, its people were not familiar with the democratic system. Democracy was once described by Abraham Lincoln as a system “of the people, by the people and for the people’. But, such a definition hardly mirrors the reality of politics. It implies, ultimately, the existence of a system of Government formed by the majority of the people.

However, the autocratic rule of the British Raj for two centuries ruined the spirit of the people and the widespread illiteracy compelled them to live in sub-human conditions. No wonder some political thinkers had remarked that democracy would fail to strike roots in the Indian soil.

Jonhn Stuart Mill, the distinuished British political philosopher, had suggested that ‘universal education must precede universal adult-franchise’. In Britain, the voting right was actually extended step by step with the march of time and the spread of education. But, Article 326 of the Constitution of India overnight granted   adult franchise in spite of nationwide illiteracy.

Yet it is a stark reality that elections in India have revealed considerable enthusiasm among the masses (Sachdeva Gupta, Indian Constitution, p. 211). Since the first general election in 1952, a large number of people have evinced keen interest in voting. Even the villagers have taken part in the electoral process despite a variety of hazards. It would be instructive to note that as many as 1,635,000 votes were declared invalid in the first election. Many voters, because of illiteracy, left the ballot papers on the floor of the booths or on top of the ballot box. This would imply that the right to vote was granted long before the proper time (Dr AC Kapoor, The Indian Political System, p. 424). But, it can, by no means, be ignored that they were keenly interested in the electoral affairs and many disabled people reached the booths with the help of others in order to cast their valuable votes.

Indeed, the success of democracy largely depends upon the participation of the people in the elections. As SL Sikri puts it, “Elections lie at the heart of every democratic process”. They are actually the accepted means for modern democracies to establish legitimate Governments ~ they secure people’s participation in public affairs, ensure peaceful transfer of power and combine the authority of the Government with legitimacy. (Indian Government and Politics, p. 89)

But, from that point of view, our experience has not been particularly encouraging. True it is that a large number of people take part in the elections; but it is equally true that many others stay away from the polling booths for various reasons.

But, as Dr H H Das has pointed out, political participation is vital to the proper functioning of a democratic polity. It actually provides vitality and creativity of democracy and it also offers a defence-mechanism against tyranny and autocracy. (India: Democratic Government and Politics, p. 367)

The usual method of political participation is to exercise the right to vote in the elections. Yet a large number of people are averse to political participation or they participate at the lowest level. Political scientists have determined four reasons for such aloofness. First, there may be “apathy”, which would mean the individual’s indifference towards or abstention from electoral affairs. Such a mentality stems from a lack of interest in political affairs. Second, there may be a certain “cynicism” rooted in suspicion towards and distrust of the motive and activities of others. This attitude develops because of the feeling that politics is a dirty game and that the politicians are , usually, unscrupulous persons. Third, there may even be a degree of “alienation” or hostility towards politics. In such cases, the person keeps a distance from the active political system. Then, there is also a sense of “anomie” ~ a feeling of personal ineffectiveness and divorce from the society.

It is because of these reasons that some people keep themselves away from the centre of affairs. It is significant that in the parliamentary election of 1984, the voter participation was the highest (64 per cent), but subsequently, the figures remained between 55.3 per cent and 62 per cent. A recent report reveals that the voter-participation in some provinces has reached 70 per cent, but the overall figure is not at all sufficient when compared with the 80 to 90 per cent polling in the Western countries.

Obviously, there are some cogent reasons for this poor turnout. Politics in India has, in recent years, often become a dirty game and this is one of the reasons why many honest and idealistic people take no interest in it. Men of principle and morality are increasingly remaining outside the electoral arena and, in their place, self-seeking persons of less than third- rate quality, have occupied a dominant position in the polity. Moreover, people often feel that sometimes crime and politics go hand-in-hand and the mafia-dons have polluted the social life by their unholy alliance with the ruling party leaders.

The Vora Committee once reported that the crime-world was running a parallel administration in our country and that no effective measure has ever been taken to stem that pot. This is why, many people have lost their interest in political affairs.

Of course, democracy means demos (people’s) kratia  (Government or the rule of the people). But if a large number of people stay away from the polling booths, democracy surely becomes a misnomer. Modern democracy has become an indirect system due to the enlargement of territory and population. So, people’s rule through elections has come to the fore. Naturally, it requires the active and full-fledged involvement of the people in electoral affairs.

Hundreds of thousands of people remain away from the polling booths and some others turn up only to cavil that they do not support any candidate fielded in the particular constituency. Hence they press the NOTA (None Of The Above) button. Indian democracy is now suffering from a chronic ailment and it urgently needs to recover. Instead of blaming the absentees, it is imperative to purify our democracy so that it can serve the real interests of the people.