National

The Great Unseen Famine

Whether it’s our leaders, neighbours or law and justice, trust is a commodity in short supply in our republic

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The Great Unseen Famine
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It had a touch of delicate irony. Launching his Make in India initiative in September 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had remarked, “The biggest factor (in India) is trust. Why do we not trust our fellow countrymen? Let us begin with trust, if there’s an issue, the government can intervene.” If the national character had to be bolstered, he into­ned, one had to eschew the ‘mera kya, mujhe kya’—care two hoots—attitude and act so as to benefit the country.

But trust, it seems, is in short supply everywhere. The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer results show a nine-point drop in global trust levels, giving an overall score of 43 per cent for trust in governments. In India, the legal system just closed all doors on Yakub Memon, a profound inflection point for those who saw ‘justice’ being meted out inequitably—with talk of a breach of sovereign guarantee, even if informal, colouring the reception of the news. The refrain: “He trusted the system, and it failed him”.

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Leader sab chor hain This is the refrain you hear in city centre and remote village alike when netas go out to campaign. The voter just doesn’t believe they’ll keep any of the promises being made. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

Like an evil sprite, the idea pops up everywhere, across domains. You can’t trust your food, your water, your emp­loyer, your emplo­yee, the government, the monsoon, the air itself. Maggi noodles, ladled out lovingly to kids for decades, suddenly became a byword for toxicity in food, fairly or otherwise. It’s often companies themselves that undervalue, even undermine trust. After Voda­fone, investors can’t trust India’s reforms, and MNCs are no icons of trustworthiness anyway. The government does not trust ngos, no one trusts the police, election promises are not met, cricket matches are fixed, the middle class feels cheated by the vegetable vendor, the tenant thinks the landlord is overcharging.

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In a sense, it seems to be a global crisis of sorts. Francis Fukuyama, in his book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, said a “nation’s well-being as well as its ability to compete is conditi­o­ned by a single, pervasive cultural cha­racteristic: the level of trust inherent in society”. He was of course forecasting an economic decline for the US, tied to a loss of social security. Management gurus Chris Argyris and W. Edwards Deming say, “Buil­ding trust is not rocket science, it should be pretty simple in fact”. They too hold it up as an abstract good that’s at the core of performance. Political scientist Edward Banfield, in his work on the small Italian town of Montegrano, had said that for its residents, all those who fell outside the small circle of family were seen as potential competitors, and therefore also potential enemies. “In such a society,” he says, “people will distrust the government while simultaneously believing in the need for a strong state to control their fellow citizens.”

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India Pakistan relations Ties perpetually plagued by trust deficit. Secretary-level talks are scheduled to begin, but the Gurdaspur, Udhampur attacks have again led to distrust. One step forward, two backward.

In India, the level of distrust, according to author and commentator Gurcharan Das, probably stems from an unfinished project in our country. “We have not been able to sell the language of the Constitution to the people as understood by the people,” he says. “They just think it dropped down from heaven and doesn’t belong to them. The notion of trust comes from a shared ideal about our Republic, and we need to institute the project of educating the people.” The other lack of trust he sees is in the market. “Manmohan Singh had initiated a market-based economy, but he forgot to sell it. Modi should tell the people that market creates competition, but one must distinguish between rules-based capitalism and crony capitalism. Pro-market doesn’t necessarily mean pro-business.”

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Professor D.L. Sheth, a political analyst at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, however, says there’s no crisis of trust among ordinary citizens. “Our surveys since 1967 show a high degree of trust, particularly in the higher judiciary,” he says, “but there’s diminishing trust in the police and among politicians lately.” Sheth thinks the way public discourse went wrong in the Yakub Memon case created the impression that complete justice was not done. “Apolitical Muslims have now lost trust because of the sentiment spread through public discourse that Yakub didn’t get justice. This was unfortunate.”

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Vodafone retro tax When the income-tax department levied on India’s leading mobile service provider a retro tax of Rs 11,000 crore, tremors went down in many world markets about India’s intentions.

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But while Sheth blames public discourse for Yakub’s hanging being perceived as injustice, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury firmly believes the one-sided delivery of justice has led to the erosion of trust. “The Srikrishna Com­mission rep­ort listed the causes of the Bombay riots as class conflict and changing political discourse; the demolition of the Babri Masjid as one of the major triggers, but none of those responsible for the riots has been given the necessary punishment. Why?” he asks. Both B. Raman and Maseeh Rahman’s writings sugge­s­ted that Yakub provided important evid­e­nce to link his brother Tiger’s deeds with Pakistan, but neither he nor his family got an opportunity to become app­­­rovers in the Bombay blasts case, which may have led to lighter sentences.

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Yechury believes the fundamental basis of trust is equality, equality of opportunities and according dignity to all diversities. “People from different backgrounds are not being treated equally on grounds like religion, gender and caste, and this is only growing. Unless definitive action is taken by the state, trust will become more and more remote,” he says.

B.R. Ambedkar had pointed to this very same notion long back when he said that the minorities in India had accepted the rule of the majority, seeing it as a communal and not political majority. “It’s for the majority to realise its duty not to discriminate against minorities,” he had stated. “Whether the minorities will continue or will vanish must depend on this habit of majority. The moment the majority loses the habit of discriminating against the minority, the minorities can have no ground to exist, they will vanish.”

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No trust in law The aam aadmi has little or no faith in either the police or the judiciary, unlike in the developed world. He goes to a policeman or knocks at court doors only as a last resort. (Photograph by Apoorva Salkade)

But instances of lopsidedness, as in the Yakub Memon case, will only make distrust more virulent, say thinkers and political scientists. This trust deficit spreads to other spheres of life as well, such as religion, arts, culture, medical ethics or even sport. Astrologer Bejan Daruwalla says that most politicians are not fulfilling their promises, there’s corruption, negativity, poverty and unequal distribution of wealth. “In such an environment, people cannot trust others,” he says. “And this is only bound to grow.” Samiran Nundy, a gastroenterologist at the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi, says, “In the medical profession, people still trust doctors overall”. Distrust is most prevalent in politics, he thinks, and it percolates down to the common man.

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This complex, nebulous and subjective idea of trust is being debated in other parts of the world as well. Talking about the perceived lack of ability to innovate among the Chinese, New York Times op-ed columnist Tom Friedman said that they lack something even more basic: trust. “Chinese are caught between two modes of living; the rural society of farms and families where there is trust and an urban society that ought to be governed by the rule of law, but isn’t. This latter mode has not yet developed and indeed some argue that the Communist Party and its monopoly on power have stalled progress,” he argues. Similarly, in his study of businesses in Hong Kong, S. Gordon Redding  in his book The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism showed that “the key feature would appear to be that you trust your family absolutely, your friends and acquaintances to the degree that mutual dependence has been established... (and) with everyone else you make no assumptions about their goodwill.”

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The question of trust seems to be an institutional crisis. It is breeding insecurity, self-centredness and possessiveness. Be it the recent Yakub Memon case, the ‘jumla’ over black money not so long ago or the soup Maggi got into, they are all a reflection of a society where each person looks out only for himself. Where will this take us?

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