It’s time to truly end the British Raj

With great power comes an even greater reluctance to give it up.

The British created laws, systems and processes in India to rule a colony. These were designed for the benefit of the Crown and its representatives, not its Indian subjects. Yet, when India became independent, we adopted them wholesale, ostensibly for reasons of continuity and convenience.

Successive generations of politicians and bureaucrats of independent India, irrespective of political affiliation, have tasted the vast, all encompassing, intoxicating power, and its spoils, once enjoyed by the elite whites. Having tasted it, they have found it rather pointless to give it up and dismantle the structures created to enslave us.

At the peak of British Raj, only a few thousand Britishers actually lived in and ruled India, a country of 350 million people. It needed, and created, a desi middle layer, consisting of darogas, tehsildars, sipahis, chaprasis, babus and the like. This layer was responsible for turning the wheels of governance and the actual day-to-day interface between Her Majesty's majestic government and her humble, impoverished colonial citizenry.

The design challenge facing the British was to keep this administrative layer loyal to the British under any and all circumstances and ensure it didn't shift its allegiance to the people.

The British Raj made them believe they were the “chosen ones”.

Everyone else was dishonest, conniving, incompetent, immoral or conspiring against the state. It was the duty of the chosen ones to suspect everyone else. And harass them into submission. Various instruments of harassments were created, written into vaguely worded laws and put at their disposal. The simplest of things were complicated beyond comprehension. Complications and vagueness imply interpretations. Interpretations imply discretionary power. There's no power like discretionary power.

The chosen ones were also given wide latitude to abuse their discretionary powers without consequences. A daroga, for example, could—and did—accuse, threaten, charge and detain anyone. He could be shameless with women, merciless with men and answerable to nobody. A clerk in the revenue department could make you run around for years for the copy of a document. The only way out was to pay in cash or kind and buy peace. This ensured the relationship between the state machinery and the people remained asymmetrical, antagonistic and adversarial, as it does till today.

To allow for smooth neglect of duty and abuse of power, the British Raj created an illusion of justice. When you read about the decade long Central Bureau of Investigation cases that go nowhere, the open embezzlement of lakhs of crores by our public servants and their relatives without a single conviction, the shoddy forensics, the blatant tampering of evidence and the endless appeals, don't be shocked; it is designed to be so.

One of the philosophical underpinnings of the British Empire was its self-perceived moral superiority. It truly considered itself as a civilising force for the pagan and barbaric natives. To prove its civilisational superiority, it set up a formal, structured network of courts to dispense justice. However, it was extremely pragmatic. It couldn't create a justice system that produced tangible results; especially the kind of results that punished an erring state official speedily and effectively. But it could create a process where a complaint could be filed, and thereafter the law could take its own course. This course of law was excruciatingly long, convoluted, torturous and perpetually enveloped in procedural fog, as it remains today.

An under-appreciated gem of the British Raj has been the “transfer” system. To begin with, the daroga was not a local and had no social checks and balances. When he abused his powers, his parents were not there to be ashamed of his actions, his village elders were not there to talk to him and his childhood friends were not there to remind him of his limits. He had been transferred from somewhere and would be transferred somewhere else, without developing roots; or any sense of attachment and empathy with the local population. If, through an accidental pang of conscience, or through a misplaced sense of karmic duty, he did act in the interests of the people, he could be promptly transferred, as it gets done today.

Independent India has continued to expand the role of the state, the requirements for compliance and the radius of suspicion. The number of chosen ones and the complications of compliance have increased exponentially, under every government.

A few tweaks have been made. The British Raj system, unlike the totalitarian systems of the Left and the Right, is flexible enough to create space for a bit of democracy, a bit of justice, a bit of private enterprise and wealth creation, a bit of protest, a bit of class mobility and a bit of hope.

But the systemic architecture of independent India remains the same in 2020 as it was in 1920—to rule a colony. With similar results.

The consequence has been the brutal concentration of state power, complete opacity in functioning, a chronic and lethal inefficiency in implementation and a total lack of accountability in all state organs spanning everything.

If you are wondering why the roads of Patna get flooded every year when a bucket of rain falls, or why a flyover in Bangalore takes eight years to construct, and why we, the people of India, are still so helpless against our own municipal corporations, sewage boards, panchayats, circle officers and still so terrified and reluctant to go to a police station, it's the British Raj in action, circa 2020.

It's comic, or tragic, to aspire to be a superpower when we can't fix our drains; let alone attract people to set up world-scale manufacturing units in India.

We need to trust our people. No state has prospered if it doesn't trust its own people. Trust means designing processes, systems, laws and institutions around the people; not around the chosen ones. If we wish India to truly prosper, we can't continue to be suspicious of everyone and have them run for years for permissions for everything in an endless loop. For this, we have to dismantle the British Raj.

We need speed of execution. We need accountability of public servants. We need total transparency in the budgets of municipal corporations. Speed, accountability and transparency require specialists with domain knowledge and implementation experience; not generalists spending three clueless years in a random position. It also requires the total, complete and absolute dismantling of every single bureaucratic privilege and protection conferred upon the chosen ones by the British Raj.

And, finally, we need a working justice system. An illusory justice system has provided carte blanche immunity for the chosen ones across the political spectrum and their cronies. They protect each other. Together, they believe, they can get away with anything. And they do.

Dismantling the British Raj needs a change in our mindset. Or, we can continue to be ruled like a colony and pretend that we are not. After all, the greatest triumph of colonialism is the colonisation of the mind.

These are the author’s personal views.

Aditya Nath Jha is CEO of Krayon Pictures.