When billionaire entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani began his UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) project in 2009, he was seen as a technocrat who fit the profile well - after all, he was the founder of one of the most successful technology companies in India.
The job was technical and hugely organisational - two areas in which he apparently did remarkably well. Sooner than later, rights activists and others realised what Nilakeni was setting out to do was not a technical fix, but a complex undertaking that required people’s mandate and their participation.
It was not something that the people had asked for, but something that experts such as Nilekani decided the former couldn’t live without. He was to undertake what the New Yorker called the “biggest social project on the planet” without ever asking its “beneficiaries” if they needed it or wanted it. More or less similar to how Manmohan Singh decided on the importance of India’s nuclear deal with the US.
The UIDAI project now looks messy with critics questioning its intent to violate the privacy and rights of people, and to implement neo-liberal tools such as targeted cash transfers. The government is threatening withdrawal of fuel subsidy if people don’t have the card given by the UIDAI. In terms of implementation, it’s most likely to be perpetually incomplete because of the extremely complex socio-economic realities of India.
A real people’s representative would have anticipated it, not a technocrat. Nilekani’s rise to power is a typical example of technocrats assuming roles that are meant to be part of democracy or participatory decision-making processes. His job was not that of an advisor who would help a cabinet of politicians chosen by the people, but to be a backdoor entrant to that cabinet itself.
Now, the Congress wants to legitimise his backdoor entry by fielding him for the Lok Sabha elections from Bangalore south. It’s not a question of Nilekani or the Congress alone. Technocrats are making a beeline to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the BJP as well. In a technocracy versus democracy debate, what stands out is the conflict between argument and authority or the “aam aadmi’s” priorities or wishes versus the technocrats’ belief in their superior knowledge and the scientific and economic rationale of their decisions.
Nothing else explains why Nilekani persists with UIDAI or Manmohan Singh persists with the Indo-US nuclear deal or the FTA with the EU with no evidence of people’s support. It’s not what people want, but what they think are good for people. It’s utterly top-down and against the principle of democracy. Interestingly, this is a trend of troubled times.
The Eurozone crisis has seen an increasing influx of technocrats in top decision making roles in Europe, which was followed by social unrest in many countries. That the political beneficiaries have been the conservatives cannot be overlooked. In the context of the European crisis, The Economist noted: “Technocrats may be good at saying how much pain a country must endure, how to make its debt level sustainable or how to solve a financial crisis.
But they are not so good at working out how pain is to be distributed, whether to raise taxes or cut spending on this or that group, and what the income-distribution effects of their policies are. Those are political questions, not technocratic ones. And they will not go away just because a technocrat has been made prime minister.” In a democracy, there is absolutely nothing wrong with technical experts getting into the policy domain, but not unrestrained and without people’s mandate.
Otherwise, they will continue to consider themselves superior at problem solving and decision making than ordinary people and hence authorised to make decisions on their behalf. Although it’s an effort to retro-fit, the silver lining in Nilekani’s candidature is that the process might democratise him. People in Bangalore south should ensure that he understands what their priorities are and what they want him to do so.
If the early signs are anything to go by, one party that will have a lot of young and old experts flocking to them is the AAP. Some of them may contest and win elections too. One can only hope that the party will stick to the principles of participatory and deliberative democracy as well as decentralisation of power that it swears by.
Democratising the technocrats should be a task they should pay utmost attention to. As author James Surowiecky writes in his best-selling “The Wisdom of Crowds”, “trusting an insulated, unelected elite to make the right decisions is a foolish strategy, given all we now know about small-group dynamics, groupthink, and the failure of diversity.”
Manmohan Singh was a technocrat - like the prime ministers of Italy and Greece who agreed to the dictates of the IMF - who ruled the world’s largest democracy for two terms without the approval of people. He also made rule by a technocratic elite look legitimate. Look at the state of affairs now.
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