Daily Times

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does” — Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason).

Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon as an efficient prison wherein a few jailors would be able to watch over, control, and mould a large number of prisoners at minimal cost. It was a highly successful institutional model that has been copied in such things as schools, hospitals, military barracks and prisons. Its chief virtue is an omnipresent, and somewhat omniscient, overlord — the jailor. But if it were just that, then Anna Hazare’s project to build a panopticon around the higher levels of India’s civil service and politicians would not be half as bizarre as it is. For who are members of the panopticons in institutions such as schools, hospitals, military barracks and prisons? These are people who are there to be taught, trained, cured, moulded or disciplined. They are in some way deficient, and in need of rectifying action. Do our civil service and political leaders belong to this category of people? There is a need to understand this bizarre proposal in all its implications before it further harms our polity.

The panopticon begins by making everybody uniformly and completely visible to the jailor at all times without the subject being able to determine if he is being watched. Hazare would have every bureaucrat and political leader under such a surveillance system where his phone can be tapped, e-mails read, records of his decisions scrutinised at will, financial transactions prized open, personal life put under a scanner. That is the panopticon’s eye that never blinks even if it is not looking at you. The nature of the jailor’s gaze is such that you are forced to assume he is watching you. The effect of the gaze is such that you begin to internalise what is expected of you by the jailor in terms of the discipline that he ordains. The purpose of the discipline is to produce docile bodies that do as they are told. If you obey, success is not guaranteed but you avoid further punishment. Success still depends on the subject himself. All that the panopticon does really is minimise the cost of pervasive surveillance and produce docility in its subjects. Is that something we want or need from the highest levels of our leadership?

In the panopticon, the power of the jailor over his subjects is absolute. The jailor is the judge, jury, executioner, with no higher appeal because the subject has already been tried, found guilty and condemned. Are our leaders, bureaucrats or politicians to be presumed guilty as soon as they hold office? It may be popular to mandate so but the fact remains that these are among the brightest and the best we produce in terms of talent and character. How well will a model designed to manage a prison sit with such talented people? What would be the consequences of forcing such a structure on the civil service and the political leadership? Who would exercise leadership and initiative under such a system without an incentive to stick his neck out?

Politicians and mandarins are indispensable to the functioning of a modern society — whether it is an open democracy like ours or the authoritarian panopticon that Anna Hazare would put us in. What we need is better, brighter, more talented, and farsighted politicians than we have now. Did I leave out honesty from the list of attributes? Yes, because keeping them honest is our job. This is not a problem peculiar to politicians. Businesses have an inherent conflict of interest with their customers despite the mutual dependency between them. Businesses wield considerable power over their customers as well. Yet the panopticon has never been the solution to the management of these conflicts. You cannot legislate away inherent problems. The only solution to such problems has been competition. Societies set up markets and market rules that make businesses compete so that peer pressure keeps exploitative instincts of businesses in check. Democracy itself works better than an authoritarian government precisely because it compels politicians to compete for our votes and favour, forcing them to come up with better solutions to problems than they otherwise would. Competition among politicians is what we need the most.

Why is our system unable to apprehend, prosecute and hand out exemplary punishment to corrupt officials and politicians? The answer is a lack of competition between them and a perverse incentive to collude and collaborate in corruption. Since the 1990s, India has had fractured verdicts and coalition governments. Furthermore, state elections are no longer synchronised with those at the Centre. We now have a situation where Congress rules at the Centre but a variety of regional and opposition parties rule at the state level. But if you look closely, there is no opposition party! Whether it is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Trinamul Congress (TC) or whatever, every party is a ruling party somewhere or the other. Every ruling party has skeletons to hide, elections to fund, party workers to pay, and propagandists to motivate. So what has happened? Competition between and among politicians and political parties has diminished. That is the key that enables them to cut cosy backroom deals with each other and to connive in each other’s misdemeanours. It is the absence of competition that we must address to reform the system rather than put everyone in a panopticon.

So long as elections need to be funded, party workers rewarded, party machinery to be run, propaganda bills to be paid, no matter what you do, corruption will persist. Politics is an extremely risky business. If you do not understand this go take a look at Kashmir or Gadchiroli. Politicians put their lives on the line. We need to shed the hypocrisy that pretends these noble souls are there to serve us out of the goodness of their heart. We need to recognise the need to pay them properly, not only in office but also when we boot them out. Our failure to be realistic about election and party funding lies at the heart of corruption. The state, society, we the people — all of us need politicians no matter how ugly they are. So let us find a transparent, open, legal way to fund them.

The collusive and convivial nature of present politics has created space for a new breed of politicians that partly supplants those who used to belong to the opposition. We must welcome the new players because it means more competition for the existing players. However, that does not mean we must change our system. It does mean we must examine their new ideas closely but insist they play by our rules. We do not belong in their panopticon. We must not compromise our freedoms to be rid of corruption. Their panopticon is not our solution. Democracy works well enough.

The writer is a trader. She can be reached at sonali.ranade@hotmail.com