Power to the People: The Great Goan Illusion

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GOD knows how many times in a day we hear one or the other of the NGO activists – Goa’s self-elected redeemers – say: Let people participate in development…Let planning be bottom-up…Let people decide…Give all powers to the people….

To me, it sounds like asking a family of eleven, like that of Mr Lalu Yadav, to decide what vegetable to cook today. So far Ms Rabri Devi has cooked whatever vegetable she thought was right for the day. And her decision was not easy: it depended on hundreds of factors – seasonal availability of the vegetable, sufficient fresh purchases or holdovers in the fridge, the time and help she had, whether the Law of the Average worked with this vegetable in respect to eleven stubborn tongues, and above all, whether Laluji likes it.

So far, Ms Rabari decided what is best for the family. Were all her decisions right? No, some of the decisions actually led the family into very distressing times. Like the girl who hated the sight of the vegetable her mother cooked and was bullied to eat it and fell ill. Or the itching roots.

If Mama can’t always decide what is best for the family, should we still allow her to make decisions? Now, to me, that would be a difficult question to answer. Because I don’t know who else can take decisions. Is there an alternative? There is…Let the family decide. That’s our redeemers, the true democrats, the Bottom-Uppers.

Well, for a day let us have the family decide. Issue: What vegetable we cook today?

Girl 1: Potato. Boy 1: Bad for health. Spinach. Girl 1: Are we goats? Boy 1: You’re already obese. Neighbourhood calls you Aunty. Want to be called Granny? Girl 2: No personal remarks, please. Boy 1: Now, who has asked you to preside? Girl 2: Ladies and gentlemen, we’re discussing what’s the best vegetable to cook for the family today.

Boy 1: Spinach, I’ve already said. Boy 2: I vote for sweet gourd. Boy 1: We are not talking of disserts, for God’s sake. Girl 3: Ridge gourd. The Buddha’s Mean Path. With my beloved green peas. Girl 1: Ridge gourd with green peas! Are you out of your mind? Peas never go with gourd. We can have potato with green peas. Girl 2: I think we have reached a decision. Potato is for those who love the king and peas are for those who love queens (I mean greens). Shall we now go and cook?

The Tiniest: I’ll have only banana in hot milk. Girl 2: Baby, you aren’t growing an inch more if you don’t eat vegetables. The Tiniest: But there are no vegetables in the kitchen. No peas. And only one potato. Girl 1: Why didn’t anybody think of looking into the kitchen before? Boy 1: Don’t glare at me. I am not guilty. I am not your papa. I am just one of your brothers. An ordinary folk of the family like you. What were you doing? You’re only here to eat? Lazybones.

Girl 1: Oh Lord, what’s that sound? Mama giggling? Girl 2: Pull up your socks, folks. We have taken over the kitchen. Mama’s rule is over. We will cook whatever we want. Take out what you have. Let’s pool our resources. The Tiniest: I just finished counting whatever you placed on the table. It adds to two rupees. We can buy nine peas for that, I’m sure. That means one pea for each of us. Or we can buy one leaf of spinach. Or a single slice of gourd. Girl 2: Incredible! Do you mean half of us have to go to bed hungry! Why didn’t any of us plan before?

There is silence. Faces are mutually reproachful and the family looks like the pieces on chessboard waiting for their opportunity to knock each other out of the world.

Girl 2: Anyway, Sweet Baby, take these coins and bring us some vegetable to cook. The Tiniest: Have we decided what vegetable to cook? Laughter surges in the background. Girl 2: It’s a crisis. What does everybody think? Are we unfit? Do we quit?

The pieces on the chessboard are standstill. Just waiting to be told that the game’s over and you can go home in a sack. The scene is sorrowful, yet gleeful, because the members of the family think it’s riddance at last: they don’t have time, skill and resources for planning.

Enters Mama, beaming, hurt but angelic. Girl 2: Wait, Mama. We’re not finished yet. Mama: What’s left there now? A crowd cannot decide. Simple.

Girl 2: OK, you are back in rein. But please remember not to thrust your decision on us. You have to hear and respect our views. Mama: Do you mean to say I ask all nine of you every time I go into kitchen which vegetables we should eat, which way I should cut them, whether I should fry, boil or bake them and which oils and spices to use? When will I cook then? That’s how the family’s day out in people’s democracy went.

Now, replace Mama with Mr Digambar Kamat and the children with the people. Mr Kamat cannot cook, that is make any development because Bottom-uppers want people to decide everywhere. But people cannot decide. As you saw in GBA case, bottom-uppers themselves cannot decide. And, they are less than a dozen! Imagine when we have one million adult Goans deliberating to decide on one million issues. It will never end. We will perish under the weight of opinions and views.

People do not have the broad vision, the technical knowledge, the resource raising and managing capability – and above all, the mandate – to decide the future of a state or a country. It is for all those that we elect a government. If we start sitting with maps, budgets and technical studies, we will become government. People will be doing nothing else but governing themselves!

People must oppose what is wrong. People must freely express their views. And government must respect their views and revise its policy and decisions accordingly. People should also participate in implementation: for instance, beneficiaries in a social forestry project. But people cannot do the planning. Not even for their village or town, what to speak of the whole state or the country. Because they do not have the knowledge or skill or time to do that.

And then, who are ‘the people’? Are they angels dispatched by God? Haven’t we seen how a few people can manipulate gram sabhas if they want to? In the public hearings on projects, it is often the Bottom-uppers who turn up as ‘the people’ and articulate the floor. In short, much like the government we hate, coteries and nexuses can get their own shrewd articulators inside to manipulate decisions in ‘people’s democracy’.