The Urban Voter : A second-class citizen

The Urban Voter : A second-class citizen

In the past few months, barely a day has gone by without public mention of the need to upgrade urban infrastructure in India. Bangalore is feeling the ire of the IT czars, not having the support systems to compete with their Chinese counterparts. “Give us the roads and airports and transport systems", they say, “and we will show you how competitive Indian business can be.” In the high-powered corridors of business and government where these arguments are being made, one important detail is being overlooked: the role of the urban citizen. In the same way that a corporate CEO would aver that a company is only as good as its employees, a city can only be as good as its citizens.

Our cities and towns in India provide many comforts: livelihood opportunities; relatively better infrastructure than rural areas; access to choice in education and healthcare, and so on. While the quality compares poorly with developed countries, conditions are superior to what is available even a few miles outside the urban boundaries.

However, viewed in a different sense, our urban centres do not have an essential “rooting”, an organic connection between the urban citizen and the government. From the point of view of the individual citizen, there are significant gaps in urban living. Examples abound: there is no opportunity to participate in decisions on local development, no mechanism to stop the illegal violation of the neighbourhood park, no system to prevent the neighbour’s residence from being converted into a hospital that could soon dump toxic waste in the storm water drains, no grassroot answer to manage the voter roll errors which are upwards of 40% in urban areas, no space to even vent one’s frustrations. While the urban resident can see herself as a producer of urban goods and services, or as a consumer of urban comforts, she cannot so easily see herself as a citizen. In fact, her identity as a citizen in urban India is one that is minimally developed, if at all.

These gaps exist for everyone. For those within government, be it a Supreme Court judge, a Cabinet Secretary or an employee of the railways, they know all about the empty edifice of citizenry and often come to terms with their civic emasculation by leveraging their positions and titles. Even for the elite, this same sense of disconnection prevails: the industrialists, the writers, the media, the film-makers, the intellectuals, even the activitists. None of them can individually survive in the city without the coping mechanisms that their particular position offers them: their networks, their identities. Strip away these identities, and the hollow shell of basic “citizenry” will provide cold comfort. Imagine if this is true for the “empowered” urban Indian, what it could be doing to the 35% and more of the urban dwellers who are the urban poor. They are twice forsaken, once because of their state, and once by the state.

The fabric of any society begins with the individual, her sense of empowerment, her belief in her own agency. In a society that is static or changing at a leisurely pace, most challenges can be addressed at a similar pace. However, in a society that is urbanising rapidly, the changes are faster: old identities are being wiped clean and being replaced with an aching vacuum, the underlying rules of engagement are increasingly transactional. And this is what is happening in our urban areas. Alienation is the underbelly of urban living in our country.

How do we solve this problem? Beyond voting, there was little scope for the average citizen to really engage in affairs of state in India. Until the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments dealing with rural and urban decentralisation respectively. With the 73rd amendment, every rural voter got an opportunity to actively participate in local issues through the powerful concept of the Gram Sabha. This singular act, of placing the citizen at the centre of the governance architecture, is one of the most extraordinary moves of any government anywhere in the world, because it captures the essence of democracy.

However, in the 74th Amendment, there was no such parallel move to place the citizen at the centre. Here, the prism through which the governance challenge was viewed was an institutional one, i.e. creating an appropriate decision-making mechanism to address the relative complexity of urban management. The Ward(s) Committee arose as a solution. Unfortunately, while the ward committee is an important cog to move the wheel of decentralisation forward, it does not go far enough to build an architecture of governance around the individual citizen, just as we have done for her rural cousin. There are critics who say that rural decentralisation doesn’t work either. True, but the two are broken for two opposite reasons: in rural areas, citizens have all the opportunity to participate, but little capacity; in urban areas, citizens have the capacity to participate, but no opportunity.

We have therefore built a complex accountability matrix for cities and towns that is away from the citizen, not towards the citizen. The starting point for democracy in urban areas has been damaged. It is akin to building a complex organism when the nucleus of the cell itself is missing. We don’t see this so apparently because of the veneer of development that coats our cities and towns. But this have nothing to do with citizenry. Indeed, they are like magic mirrors, taking our focus away from the central point of citizen identity. They are the forces that add to the strip mining of the individual. And given the pace of globalisation, we are only increasing the alienation factor every day. The result: meet the urban voter, aka second-class citizen.

It sounds odd to be talking of urban residents needing to be treated in the same vein as the rural citizen, when one compares the quality of life in urban India with the rural areas. However, in this context, the comparison is not about roads or water supply, education or health care, employment opportunities or gender equality. It is about the fundamental right to be treated equally as a citizen fully engaged in the democratic process, with the same rights and responsibilities.

What does all this have to do with the infrastructure war cry of corporate CEOs? Why should all this matter to those whose interest is in getting to the office without traffic jams? Lots of reasons. Good cities need good grassroot governance, not just roads and flyovers that can be parachuted in - CEOs of companies are not going to make sure that local roads and garbage get managed properly, local residents will. Also, employees as active citizens will be more rounded individuals. Most importantly, this is the only win-win solution for all concerned, including the poor.

So, while we pump up the volume on fixing our urban infrastructure, let us make sure that we are singing the right tune.

The writer is Campaign Coordinator of Janaagraha, a citizens’ platform for participatory democracy. He can be reached at ramesh@janaagraha.org