New winds of democracy are beginning to blow over the beleaguered nations of the Middle East and the Arab world. They promise the scent of rain needed to revive the parched roots of nascent democracy, rule of law and basic human rights looking for sustenance in a region which houses an estimated 600 million people living fearful lives under brutal dictatorial regimes.

In Afghanistan, still reeling from the after effects of the Soviet occupation through the 1980s, ten years of Taliban cruelty and misrule and the unsuccessful American invasion to ferret out Osama bin Laden which nevertheless had the beneficial effect of ridding the country of the Taliban, a new democratically elected government headed by President Hamid Karzai was sworn in last November. Since then despite the resistance of notorious warlords in outlying provinces, the newly elected government is painstakingly attempting to restore the rule of law and govern with the consent of the people. Likewise on January 30 the people of war-torn Iraq will vote freely for the first time in difficult circumstances to elect a new government. Simultaneously a student and youth movement for greater democracy and freedom is gathering steam in Iran.

Regrettably the response of the government of India and in particular of the Indian intelligentsia to the stirrings of democratic sentiment in the Middle East has been scornful and cynical. In Afghanistan and Iraq they have been quick to discern the not-so-hidden hand of the Bush administration driven by American big business, especially the oil and construction industry lobbies. Undoubtedly there is cause for suspicion. However the motivations of great powers should not obscure the real benefits which will flow to the mainly God-fearing people of the Arab world who have had to suffer the innumerable injustices, arbitrary rule, denial of basic human rights and the thousand unnatural shocks that people living under the rule of sultans, satraps and narrow-minded clerics are heir to.

This argument in favour of moral support for the tender shoots of democracy struggling to flower in the short-changed Arab and Muslim nations of the Middle East should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the imposition of democracy by the US or other external powers. But the struggle of small minorities within the brutal dictatorships of the Arab world to advance the cause of democratic governance needs the support of all right-thinking people in the admittedly malfunctioning democracy that is India. For the simple reason that democratic governance for all its faults and infirmities is infinitely preferable to arbitrary dictatorial rule. 

India’s establishment and intelligentsia need to shed their hysteria that US intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq which (as has often being argued in these columns) had probable cause, was driven solely by the motivation to appropriate the oil and energy reserves of these countries. Democratic opinion in the US and in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran etc will ensure that fair prices are paid for Arab oil. Democratic opinion will also ensure that the proceeds from sale of oil and energy supplies flow to the consistently short-changed people of these erstwhile dictatorships rather than into the palaces of Saddam Hussein and private bank accounts of satraps and princes who squander them in the casinos and fleshpots of the western world.

Unacceptable Excuse for Defeatist Inaction
The prolonged debate over the advisability of enacting the Employment Guarantee Act (EGA) and the widespread scepticism it has aroused within the nation’s intelligentsia is a telling commentary on public disillusionment with government sponsored poverty alleviation initiatives. In nature and intent the bill is unexceptionable and deserves the support of every right-thinking citizen with a social conscience. It proposes to guarantee 100 days of paid employment — at the minimum wage prescribed by the Union government (currently Rs.75 per day) — to one member of every rural household which applies for it.

A curious characteristic of the professedly caring, socialist state fashioned by post-independence India’s notoriously kleptocrat politicians and co-conspirator bureaucrats is its reluctance to measure the extent of unemployment and/or under-employment within an economy of perpetual shortages, the direct consequence of the licence-permit-quota regime which has not been fully dismantled notwithstanding substantial liberalisation and deregulation after 1991. Unemployment data, a staple measure of economic growth in developed nations, is a closely guarded state secret and perhaps the only readily available statistic is of the aggregate number of job applicants on official registers maintained by the state governments — a massive 41 million which translates into 8-10 percent unemployment within the adult working age population of the country. Probably an under-estimate particularly if one computes under-employment which is a way of life in rural India.

Against this background, the proposal to introduce employment guarantee legislation for rural households is an implicit admission that the scale of the problem is much larger than successive governments in Delhi and the state capitals have cared to admit. Another pointer to the extent of the unemployment/under-employment problem in chronically neglected rural India is a government estimate that enacting EGA which proposes only 100 days employment per year and that also to only one member for each rural household, could cost the central exchequer Rs.40,000 crore annually, a massive unbudgeted sum the finance ministry says it just cannot mobilise.

Yet liberals and intellectuals who oppose enactment of this legislation are not as concerned about its fiscal implications — after all unmerited subsidies doled out to the urban middle class by way of electricity, water, cooking gas, higher education etc aggregate a massive estimated Rs.330,000 crore — as by the real possibility that given unchecked corruption within the bureaucracy which will have to implement EGA, only a tiny fraction of the proposed daily wage will reach the rural poor.

However this argument against the bill which is modest in its provision and long overdue, needs to be challenged as it is tantamount to abdication of the basic duty of the state to enforce the rule of law. Fear of mass defalcation and embezzlement is an unacceptable rationale for shelving poverty alleviation legislation which is so patently in the public interest. Informed public opinion should not only insist that EGA is enacted but that provision should be made within the proposed legislation to empower NGOs and citizen groups to closely monitor the implementation of the legislation and have ready access under the proposed Right to Information Act to the books of account of block development officers and/or officials authorised to implement the legislation. While fear of the power and brazenness of the nation’s rogue bureaucracy is understandable, it is unacceptable as an excuse for defeatist inaction. That’s a prescription for anarchy.