In India, when it comes to the courts of law, or any interaction with law enforcement, the process itself is the punishment. Everyone, whether the litigant, the defence, even innocent bystanders are victims in this system. There are no winners. Not even eventually when the verdict is passed after so much delay that the whole point of ‘delivering justice’ has been lost by then.The only people the process serves is its own: the various legal authorities, the judges, the lawyers, the clerks, the notaries, the drafters, the typists, the photocopiers, the stationery sellers, the stamp vendors, the police, the bailiffs, the chai and cigarettes vendor sitting outside Gate Number 1, you get my point.
Long ago, when railways became ‘computerised’, I remember standing in the sweltering heat in the long queue of querulous and irritable (and irritated) people to submit a pre-printed form (to be collected from another window and neatly filled out by hand in blue ink by the person wishing to buy the passage) to a railway booking clerk sitting behind a cgalss window in an air-conditioned cabin where she transcribed what I had written meticulously by hand onto her fancy computer (using the famed one-finger typing method) and printed out a ticket on her state-of-art dot-matrix printer, handing it over with the kind of noblesse oblige that the French royalty reserved for the ipeasantsn the late 18th century, while the Minister for Railways and all the bureaucrats connected to the department announced proudly how modern they had become and how user-friendly Indian Railways was, even when the truth was that for a long time after this much tom-tommed ‘computerisation’, nothing changed for the actual users of the system: the paying passengers; indeed, some would argue, things became even more difficult as the railways became more and more ‘computerised’.
Ditto the banks (for those of you who are old enough to remember), followed by many other services, and recently, the vaccine rollout (and subsequently, the vaccine pass that allows entry into public spaces). The entire system that was designed for each of these ‘modernisation’ initiatives considered the user and the customer not only as not central to the exercise, but actually tertiary to it, indeed a hindrance and an obstacle to somehow ignore or go over or around.
This, it goes without saying, is not a revelation to anyone over the age of 20 and has had to deal with anything remotely ‘government’ in their life. Every government service in India is built in a way to serve itself. It is easy to blame the colonial government’s extractive and oppressive systems for this, which were designed to keep the ‘natives’ in check and to favour the ruling classes. But, this is not unique to India, or to the British Raj too. Over time, I have come to realise that this is a feature of all bureaucracies: Chinese, Mughal, Ottoman, British, Russian, Egyptian, French, Maratha, you show me a system which needs to keep law & order, calculate and collect tax, protect its borders, regulate the lives of its citizens, and keep its rulers in luxury, and I will show you a system that exists with the sole purpose of propagating itself.
In that way, I believe it is quite similar to a unit of life, the gene, and very nearly mimics its behaviour. Richard Dawkins gave the catchy name, meme, which has caught on the popular imagination by becoming a, for the lack of a better word, meme. I think it applies perfectly to all systems of administration and governance.
Is it then possible to build a system that works unselfishly for the benefit of those who the system is meant to serve rather than those who operate the system? Perhaps, if we build a system whose survival depended on getting better at serving those it is meant to serve, this could happen. But the trouble is not building such a system, as we humans have realised over the past 5,000 years or so of history. The trouble is defining and coding into the system itself which is the group that it is ‘meant to serve.’
I suspect even the Architect and the Oracle have no answers for this conundrum/contradiction. And all we can hope for is for a system to be built and left to evolve without intervention, hoping natural selection (at all levels) will automatically take it to the ultimate goal of perfection.
Whether you agree with this hypothesis or not depends on whether you are Einstein or Spinoza. Or maybe you are Neo. Or A Smith.
What do you think?
