Infirmities of the welfare state

After clinically analysing the rich theoretical literature on the issue of citizens’ rights and evaluating the salient arguments of every significant scholar, author Dipankar Gupta concludes that the “equality of states” and “equal access to all socially valuable assets” are the fundamental characteristics that define “citizenship” in a democracy. The goal of modernity is achieved only when the equality of individuals as the foundational principle of social relations is firmly established, he asserts, forming a logical link between equal citizens and their equal access to basic universal services that have to be provided by a liberal democratic state. In other words, the state in a democracy should deliver its welfare programmes to every citizen on the basis of the universal principle of equality of citizens. As the author explains, “The argument in this book leans towards the protection of the individual in the belief that if that [concept] is well and truly established, other forms of differences can be taken care of at much lower costs.” Put another way, if basic welfare services like health, education, a guaranteed job to everyone et al are provided to every citizen as an “equal social being”, other inequalities and differences can be taken care of. This basic argument links eight chapters of this book that are devoted to analysing the efficacy of India’s myriad welfare programmes. The author has x-rayed every beneficiary-target-oriented welfare programme launched by the Indian state for the past 70 years. On the basis of his own field studies and a study of the experiences of other countries Dr Gupta concludes that services provided to the people on the basis of “targets” or “beneficiaries” have failed not only to deliver the services efficiently but have also generated considerable corruption in the actual process of executing these policies. The real message of this empirically validated study is that the guiding principle of the liberal democracy has to be “citizenship” because people got together and made the Constitution and those who had agreed to this document became citizens.

This process of forging equal citizenship, Dr Gupta admits, is not a simple or linear one: Human beings have to make determined struggles continuously to strengthen the roots of liberal democracy and only when such struggles are made will “people” become “citizens”. Though this is a difficult project, he points out that examples can be found when struggles for the birth of “citizenship” did succeed. Human societies have grappled with the “idea” of majority and minority for establishing a system of equality-based citizenship. “There was no majority, readymade, as it were, …[it] was created over a period of time through the deliberate intervention of laws that were informed by the ethos of citizenship,” he writes, adding that, “majority culture emerged after “series of negotiations within culture and between cultures”.

By applying the yardstick of “citizenship”, the author argues for the need to “forget about the poor” as targets or beneficiaries and plan for “universal services” and positive and active state intervention for “skill creation” which would lead to “equality of opportunity”. The author says only if the state follows universal policies of health, education, and skill creation will “such low order labour force” become a thing of the past. The basic question the author asks is this: “Is it really helpful to have a quantitative threshold marker to take people out of poverty?” His answer is clear; based on available data, he says, “social welfare services for all are essential for civic consumerism”. The author provides evidence from underdeveloped Basque Spain, which created universal services like health, education, science and research for all “citizens” and made underdevelopment a thing of the past. The author establishes an interconnection between citizenship, liberal constitutional democracy and modernity, and he argues that the goal of citizenship will be achieved if the other two, democracy and modernity, are moving forward. However, the larger issue of citizenship and democracy in a society of absolute inequalities of incomes, status and assets remains unresolved. Indeed, the contradiction between the idea of liberty and equality as embedded in the French Revolution of 1789 remains unaddressed, which led a commentator to describe John Stuart Mill’s seminal study “On Liberty” as a treatise on “empty liberty and abstract individual”.

All the same, the quest for citizen’s equality did not abate in Europe. The famous Beveridge report, which brought into sharp focus the idea of welfare state in England in the 1940s, had catalogued the social services that the state should provide its citizens by the state. European democratic state systems, especially after World War II, adopted programmes for the welfare of the working classes, children, women, unemployed and other marginalised sections of society on the basis of the principle of “universality of service for every citizen”.

The author has offered a deeply researched and sophisticated critique of Indian welfare programmes and examined the philosophical underpinnings of why they have failed to transform the country’s “people” into “citizens”. How far his arguments will convince the Indian political class, steeped as it is in the easy gains of identity politics, is another question altogether.

FROM ‘PEOPLE’ TO ‘CITIZEN’: DEMOCRACY’S MUST TAKE ROAD DIPANKAR GUPTA Social Science Press 219 Pages, ~650