FIVE years ago, a system of local governments was introduced against the better judgment of many and the vocal opposition of a few. The proponents of the local government scheme argued with unwitting merit that the executive magistracy possessed by members of the now defunct district management group (DMG) concentrated too much power in too few hands at the “grassroots level.” This had led to several unhealthy and interrelated developments.
First, the excessive concentration of arbitrary powers, inclusive of the supervision of the police, in the hands of appointed sub-sovereigns with no local roots contributed to unresponsiveness and inertia. The principal objective of the district management was the gratification of superior officials to whom they were accountable, not the amelioration of local problems. Second, the executive magistracy contributed to a culture of impunity amongst civil servants that bred inefficiency, corruption, and self-aggrandisement. Third, the arrogance of power demonstrated by civil servants exacerbated the alienation of the governed. In short, the district management, instead of serving the people, served primarily its own interests (naukarshahi) and operated in a manner comparable to a criminal mafia.
The panacea, argued the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) and its affiliates, was the creation of elected local assemblies headed by nazims. These elected assemblies would supervise and control the district management and the police, implement development projects, and address the problems of the people. This new wisdom, termed rather picturesquely the “bottom-up” approach towards “people centred” and “participatory governance”, maintained that without “empowerment” at the local level, national and provincial representative institutions would remain subject to systemic crisis. The assumptions upon which the reformers based their recommendations were devoid of meaningful historical understanding. The most demonstrative evidence of this was their belief, probably derived from American tutelage, that bureaucracy was a product of the “colonial legacy”.
Many do labour under the delusion that bureaucracy emerged as an instrument of control during the British Empire in India and are simply ignorant of the fact that centralized bureaucratic states have been the dominant political species in the subcontinent for, at least, the past 2,500 years. Kautilya, the prime minister of Chandragupta Maurya, in the Arthashastra (300BC) reveals that the Mauryan Empire was a remarkably centralized, complex, intrusive, and oppressive continental bureaucratic state presided over by an omnipotent emperor legitimized by divine sanction.
The entire country was the personal estate of the monarch who claimed and enforced his universal proprietorship. The ruling class comprised, almost exclusively, appointed servants recruited, transferred, or liquidated, at central executive’s will. These servants, including military officers, were bureaucrats organized into about three-dozen ministerial and departmental hierarchies, paid handsome regular salaries, and distributed across the administrative subunits of the empire. This vast apparatus was responsible for law and order, tax collection, communications, espionage, local government and even the maintenance of inns, brothels, and bars. Career advancement within the bureaucratic labyrinth depended on the cultivation of superiors, the accumulation of patronage, and effectively and efficiently executing the will of the monarch. If the emperor was wise, he promoted the most effective officials. If he was foolish, the quality of the apparatus declined rapidly and the empire collapsed, as there were no autonomous institutions to hold and govern in the absence of a strong leader.
The Mauryan Empire, in its success, contributed decisively to the emergence of an arbitrary culture of power that remains with us to this day. At the local level, to ensure effective central control, the Arthashastra State settled villages on the principles of caste and autarky. The village headman was also a salaried employee of the monarch and received 500 panas (silver pieces) a year, and ensured that the village was confined to a sub-political role. Each village was an atom held in stasis with little horizontal association with other villages. Its vertical association was directly with the district officer, who represented an extension of the sovereign will itself, and possessed overwhelming power. Overall, atomization bred apathy towards the higher state structure. When the external force provided by the central state failed, anarchy ensued and continued until a new imperial conqueror emerged. Greek observers were surprised to find that battles took place in plain sight of villages while the villagers continued about their business in complete indifference for the outcome of the conflict would mean, at most, a change in the name of the universal landlord to whom taxes were owed.
Successive cycles of anarchy and despotism reinforced the apathy of the ruled and the thirst for centralization among the rulers. The fact that in most cases the ambitions of the latter exceeded their abilities meant that the smaller states that emerged between imperial unifications were more arbitrary, venal, intrusive, and, of course, unstable than the great pan-Indian empires. For example, even in the smallest Rajput principalities, the ruler constituted himself the universal proprietor and succession was followed by internecine warfare, invasion, and, eventually, the arbitrary redistribution of assets by the new ruler among his favourites.
The Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire were both continental bureaucratic states that Kautilya would have readily lauded and understood. The emperor was the universal proprietor and ruled his sprawling personal estate through an imperial bureaucracy distributed across administrative subunits and lavishly remunerated through a combination of cash salaries and revenue assignments. The 500 or so senior most members of the Mughal bureaucracy under Shahjahan received more than one-third of the 220 million rupees of revenue as compensation for services rendered. Some idea of the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of the fair skinned Turco-Persian settler-colonists that dominated the Mughal bureaucracy can be gleaned from the example of Yamin-ud-Daula, a prominent noble stationed at Lahore during Shahjahan’s period. When he died his estate was valued at 25 million rupees, or, one million rupees more than the annual revenues received by the contemporary Safavid ruler of Iran. Of course, when an officer died or fell from favour, his property and wealth were confiscated by the emperor. The Sultans of Delhi were aware that their state was one dominated by “powerful pen-holders” while Mughal emperors described their own government as a kaghazi raj (paper government).
The relationship between the Turco-Mughal empires and the villages and town were highly imbalanced and not conducive to the development of meaningful local autonomy. Under the Delhi Sultanate, village headmen were regularly beaten by the sultan’s officers to extract revenue, forbidden from riding horses or bearing arms, and reduced to performing chaukidari (keeping a watch) on the imperial communications grid. Under the Mughals, the same patterns continued with village headmen confirmed in possession of land by the emperor in exchange for compliance. The zamindars were not really “masters of the land” but tax farmers subservient to imperial officials. Furthermore, an elaborate network of regular reporters, confidential reporters, spies, and spies that spied upon other spies, coordinated by the post-master general, kept the emperor informed.
In the cities, where the bulk of the Caucasian settlers from Iran and Central Asia lived, the ruling class was dependent on state service and the merchants upon state patronage. Evidence of the power of the city magistrates, appointed with imperial approval, is found in two particularly revealing instances. One is that the city magistrates appointed the heads of merchants and crafts guilds. The other, considerably more amusing and perhaps more instructive, is that “crafty old women” were employed to keep tabs on how well each household fed and clothed itself. Unsurprisingly, given the risk of arbitrary expropriation and extortion, the ordinary people responded by living in studied indigence.
After the death of Aurungzeb in 1707, the succession of competent rulers failed and the Mughal Empire, like its predecessors, rapidly collapsed, leaving in its wake a subcontinent convulsed by chaos. Those groups that attempted to fill the vacuum, such as the Afghans, the Marhattas, and the Sikhs, proved far more capricious, and far less enlightened or effective, than the Mughals. Into this instability stepped the British and, between 1757 and 1849, effected an imperial unification of the subcontinent. However, prior to the advent of the British Empire in India the culture of power of the subcontinent had ossified into that of an arbitrary and omnipotent continental bureaucratic empire. The British had a very different culture of power and, in order to place the reforms introduced by the British in proper perspective and understand the “colonial legacy”, it is to a discussion of that to which we must turn.
