THE PUBLICITY CULTURE OF OUR POLITICS

Politicians cannot stay away from publicity. They depend and thrive on it. Through propaganda, politicians suggest that the polity is in good health, even if the reality might be completely to the contrary. While at other times, this publicity culture creates dense smokescreens of misinformation, in times of a pandemic, it could be fatal.

The publicity culture unfolds in the following way. Often there will be a leader who is ‘doing something.’ This act is inaugurating a new public work or donating for a charitable or worthy cause. If it is an inauguration, the leader will pause a few moments before cutting the ribbon for the photographers. If it is a donation, the giver and the receiver will also pause so that their generous deed is recorded for posterity. The brief moment when these leaders and philanthropists ‘pause’ for the camera is the moment of publicity.

The most recent example of the dependence of politicians on publicity is the statements of Goa’s Chief Minister, Pramod Sawant. While Goa enjoyed a relatively COVID-19-free April, at least going by official figures, the CM jumped the gun to declare Goa a ‘Green Zone.’ The reason was that no new cases were being reported in that month. However, it was common knowledge that many Goans, either in India or abroad, were to be repatriated in the first weeks of May. Naturally, there was a likelihood that more COVID-19 positive cases would come to light. And they did! By the end of May, the official number of cases rose from 7 to 70 (and counting). Now Mangor Hill in Vasco is a containment zone.

One wonders why the CM was so hasty to declare Goa a green zone. The reasons become apparent as one observes the positive coverage in the national press. The national press hailed Goa for being the first COVID-19-free state in the country. Perhaps the country needed some positive news, or it was good PR by the Goan government. But the Goan government and the national media discarded commonsense. They prematurely celebrated the absence of new cases for April. The result was a miscommunication of COVID-related information to the Goan public; people felt that they were safe from the disease.

The health and economic crisis created by the pandemic is a severe challenge to the leadership pretensions, one created by carefully crafted PR, of the politician. The Corona crisis tests a politician’s ability to take decisive actions to ensure that the state or country does not descend into chaos. In times of crisis, one expects politicians to enact laws that protect the citizens; make financial resources available to tackle disasters; and provide the citizens with accurate information about the crisis. The shocks and destruction that the pandemic is leaving in its wake, as, for instance, in the migrant worker crisis, is proof that most of the elected representatives have failed the people.

But the need for publicity is not just a necessity of the politicians. Everyone who engages in a public act of leadership or philanthropy indulges in the publicity culture. I watched with horror as many people reached out to the poor and vulnerable without any regard for the social distancing norms. The images of someone giving foodstuff or medicines to the older person, and thereby standing close to them for a photo-op, was a cause of concern. What if the corona virus was transmitted in the process of ‘handing over’ the foodstuff, medicines, or money?

And politicians, being leaders, are reinforcing such irresponsible and foolhardy behavior. So hungry are our politicians for publicity that social distancing norms are violated to gain publicity. Recently, the CM was pilloried for not following his own orders when he showed up to inaugurate the grade separator of a flyover in Dabolim. More than anything else, the inauguration of the grade separator was a move to earn publicity. The CM and his cabinet colleagues were standing close to each other, no doubt to be photographed as politicians ‘doing something’ for the people of Goa.

I am not questioning the charitable motives of all those who reached out to the poor and vulnerable without social distancing norms. It is important to reach out to the vulnerable and provide them with essential care and relief. Philanthropy is fine so long as it is not done merely for publicity—and in times of corona, done with social distancing.

Our leaders could have lived by example. In other words, they could have set aside the publicity-seeking culture, or altogether jettison it. Photo-ops are not necessary to show that the government is working for its people, or that the elected representatives are performing their constitutional duties. These photo-ops rather suggest that the government is not doing enough for the citizens. After the Mangor Hill cases came to light, the CM was nowhere seen, and the press conference was conducted by bureaucrats. The photo-ops also suggest that there will be no change in the political culture after the corona crisis.

We can easily see how a culture of publicity in our politics and public life could end up being disastrous. In times of severe crisis, our publicity-seeking political culture creates more problems than it solves. In other times, when there is no pandemic or natural disaster, the publicity-seeking culture leaves a trail of ruined or decaying public infrastructure projects. Who among us have not uneasily entered ramshackle buildings or driven over potholed roads? Funnily enough, these infrastructure projects were once inaugurated with fanfare and photo-ops. The commemoration plaques that gather dust and the photographs of the inauguration of any infrastructure project are a grim reminder that our leaders fail us daily.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 3 June, 2020)

THE IMPORTANCE OF PUBLIC SYSTEMS

Widening roads and promoting the auto industry will not solve traffic hassles; but investing in reliable public transport will. Private schools won’t deliver a good education to all except if the public schools get a boost in infrastructure and better teaching methods. Clanging pots and pans won’t make a deadly pandemic go away; but having an efficient public healthcare system will, or at least mitigate dire circumstances.

The corona virus pandemic has brought the importance of an efficient public healthcare situation to the fore. India’s healthcare system is bad—by one estimate about 63 million people in India face impoverishment every year due to their inability to confront medical emergencies. Indians pay as high as 70% out-of-pocket for healthcare in the absence of proper health insurance and bureaucratic blocks in accessing government healthcare schemes. The Indian Journal of Community Medicine, the official journal of the Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine recently published an article identifying five challenges in promoting efficient healthcare: a lack of awareness of health issues and access to healthcare, a dearth of healthcare professionals, high cost of medical treatment, and a lack of accountability in the public healthcare system.

In India, rather than public health services, it is private hospitals that provide healthcare care at a high price. For most Indians, healthcare is either unaffordable or it leads to impoverishment if they somehow manage to pay their medical bills. A 2005 article in the British Medical Journal estimates that the private sector receives about 82% percent of outpatient visits, and 58% of inpatient expenditure of the total patient care in India. The same article mentions that less than 1% of the GDP was spent on public health in 2005. Private health sector grows at the expense of the public one, and successive governments in India have shown an unwillingness to promote public healthcare.

There are exceptions to the high medical in the form of the hospitals and clinics run by minority religious charities. While private, these minority charity institutions offer low-cost quality treatment. Recently, the Shiromani Gurudwara Parbandhak Committee and the Christian Coalition for Health offered their hospitals to treat the corona affected patients. The Christian Coalition of Health has at its disposal over 1000 hospitals and over 60,000 inpatient beds. But clearly the Indian government needs to do a lot more.

Perhaps it is clear by now—if not, it should be—that India urgently needs to completely overhaul its healthcare system. The reason is simple: the existing healthcare system is unaffordable, leads to impoverishment, and is totally ill-equipped to deal with a health crisis. The emphasis on public cannot be overstated. In times of crisis it is not the private institutions but the public ones that make a difference between life and death for the thousands or millions.

In contrast to most parts of the country, Kerala’s response to the corona crisis is a lesson in good governance and the utility of publicly-funded essential services. In addition to pumping 20,000 crores into the economy, the government in Kerala ensured that essential medical and food supplies were not affected. Through regular press conferences and efficient communication by other means the government and civil society made sure that panic and disinformation did not spread. Kerala was able to mount a quick and efficient response to the corona crisis because the state has a long history of investing in public health. From 1960 to 2004, the Primary Health Centers and the number of doctors increased from 369 to 1356 and 1200 to 36,000 respectively. The state also boasts of the highest ratio of bed to population in the country.

The already bad healthcare system made worse by a pandemic speaks to the attitude of the privileged citizenry toward public institutions and infrastructure. This attitude of disdain and apathy toward public institutions is India’s old problem with social divisions; the poor and subaltern castes bear the brunt of the system. The ill-effects of the disdain for public facilities manifests in the development policies of successive Indian governments, cheered on by the middle classes.

The Indian middle class applauds stock market bull runs and multi-crore investments in infrastructure and defense projects, or development, but they are often silent on the shockingly low spending on healthcare. The result of such misplaced priorities and apathy by the middle class, who corner so much of resources and political power, will feed into the crisis of the corona pandemic.

The medical fraternity now has to push for greater share of public funded healthcare. The reports of understaffed and understocked hospitals, particularly the lack of supplies of such basics like masks and hazmat suits, should give medical professionals a pause. They must ask themselves what has happened to their profession and whether starkly unequal access to healthcare is the best for the future of the profession. Doctors as professionals have a moral responsibility and they cannot shirk it.

The extraordinary situation of the corona pandemic forces us to think of better public systems and infrastructure. The lessons learnt (or those that we will learn in the next few weeks) must be transferred into other sectors of our social and political lives. We need accountable public systems that will not only efficiently deliver services in times of peace but withstand shocks in times of crisis. It is time to demand from out elected representative offer more than personal favors. Once the crisis is over and we will begin to pick up our lives, we must demand better schools, roads, safe and unadulterated food, regular and efficient supply of water and electricity. These facilities are the basic to sustaining life, and we cannot fail ourselves with the basics again.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 1 April, 2020)

POWER FAILURES AND POWER POLITICS

From April onwards, there have been several power failures in the state; they are not over yet. At the beginning of June, it became crystal clear that the cause of the power failures was not just faulty and aging equipment, but also gross mismanagement by the electricity department. Goans even learnt that to keep a particular big time corporate builder happy, the department had decided that an entire taluka could suffer a day-and-a-half without power.

One can think of the frequent power failures as a metaphor for the sorry state of affairs in Goa. Every year one witnesses a spectacular display of inefficiency in the management of public infrastructure by the administration. At other times, the administration deliberately denies the public services and utilities as it happened when two of the Panjim-Betim ferries were used for the benefit of casinos. There is no accountability and no one has been able to hold the administration accountable for simple and basic services. The result is quite plainly visible – flooded streets, overflowing sewage, leaking roofs of public schools, snapped electric cables, damaged footpaths, and general chaos all around.

One needs to ask why does such chaos, emerging from mismanagement and an unaccountable administration, recur every year? The reason is that the elected representatives – across party and ideological lines – have failed to provide the leadership that the positions they occupy demand. I am not making an argument that perfunctorily blames politicians – or corruption – in general. But what I am suggesting is that there is a particular systemic problem within the administrative system with the elected representatives having abandoned completely the idea of public good. If we would turn the formulation on its head, corruption results because elected representatives have abdicated responsibility, trust, and accountability – or public interest so vital for the system. One could think of elected representatives in the past as crafting the Constitution, or formulating land reform laws in Goa as promoting ideas of public good.

Abandoning ideas of public good has consequences for the administrative machinery. One has to understand that the administration can be divided into two broad sections: the executive, which is occupied by the elected representatives and the cabinet ministers; and the bureaucrats or the government servants, who are employed to run the administrative machinery, which includes the implementation of the policies and laws that the executive formulates.

If we consider the incident wherein the whole of the Tiswadi taluka was left without power, it appears that certain decisions were made by the Power Minister (the executive) without taking the concerned bureaucracy into confidence (or without informing them properly). Alternately, one can suggest that the bureaucracy did not properly respond to the decisions of the executive. Sample this: when news of the builder being unfairly favored emerged, the Chief Engineer of the Electricity Department admitted that he had no knowledge of the work being carried out. Given the fact that there is a stop work order from 2017, the bureaucracy should not have allowed the workers to go ahead with the work since due process was not followed. In any case, the Department was not prepared to undertake the work of such proportions, and one doesn’t know who exactly gave the orders to commence the work.

Goa may have many leaders with thousands of supporters, and who shower them with countless favors, but the fact is that once in power – in ministries, or in legislature/parliament, where it matters the most – they are rarely able to run the affairs of the state efficiently. Contrast this with the spectacular display of promises and popular support during the campaigning for elections. Also, consider the situation immediately after the results are declared, when cutthroat power negotiations take place. All these theatrics give the impression that the political class wields immense power to change the world for the better, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Indeed, they do wield very real and tangible power but that is often used (or misused) for private gain and to further the interests of big businesses.

Perhaps, the rot goes deeper considering the fact that the elected representatives are rarely seen conducting the business of the state inside the parliament/legislature, or through the administrative system. It is becoming increasingly clear that more and more politicians spend their time in election rallies than anywhere else. For one reason or the other (legitimately or not) sessions of Parliament or the Legislative Assembly have been wiped out. In Goa, for instance, there wasn’t a single cabinet meeting held for the last three months. The important budget session was conducted in an unprecedented rush because the Chief Minister was ill. If any laws have been passed in the last 4 or 5 years, they are done so without any public discussion. Many of these laws are detrimental for the people and the environment.

It is important that citizens extract accountability from the administration; emphasize that the affairs of the state be conducted through proper channels like the legislature and local governing bodies. One can suggest that if the system is collapsing – or not functioning properly – it is largely because the persons in the administration have not ensured that it runs smoothly. The elected representatives, and to a lesser extent government servants, do not seem interested in upholding public interest. Selling off public resources – and therefore public interest – to the highest bidder today is the norm. The manner in which power is expressed in our society needs to change, one that privileges public interest and not private gain. 

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 20 June, 2018)