 OPINION • THINK 

A Case For Societism

 6 Jun, 2017  Pranay Kotasthane

The ability of Indian

society to correct itself
is underplayed,
underestimated,and
undermined by the
Indian State.

Consider these questions: Indian

languages are being displaced by
English; who should protect them
from ‘dying’? Indian cities are
spatially segregated along caste
lines; who should desegregate
them? Our social media feeds are
increasingly polarised; who
should extricate us from our
closed echo chambers? And, brave
Indian two-wheeling commuters
prefer injury over wearing ugly
helmets; who should be entrusted
with ensuring that they do?

Instinctively, our answer would be

another question: duh! Aren’t
these exactly the kind of things
our governments are supposed to
solve? Well, not quite. I am going
to make a case for why tasks that
require behavioural and societal
changes are best left for the
society to resolve. In short, I will
make a case for what I call
Societism.

Institutionally, there are three

major actors in any sovereign
community— the market, the
State, and the society. They are
complementary—each of them is
better at some tasks and is worse
at others. For example, the state is
very adept at employing force, but
e몭cient usage of resources is not
its forte. A market is e몭cient, but
is oblivious to inequality. And a
society has several self-correcting
mechanisms, but is susceptible to
majoritarianism.

What are societies good at?

Among the three institutions, the
몭rst two are the focus of the most
popular streams of political
thought; I want you to zoom in on
the third one: the civil society.
the third one: the civil society.
Loosely de몭ned, a civil society is
“an aggregate of non-
governmental organisations and
institutions that manifest
interests and will of citizens”. In
his seminal work, Democracy in
America, Alexis de Tocqueville had
this to say on American civil
society in the early nineteenth
century:

“ There is nothing,
according to me, that
deserves more to attract our
regard than the intellectual
and moral associations of
America. We easily perceive
the political and industrial
associations of the
Americans, but the others
escape us; and if we discover
them, we understand them
badly because we have almost
never seen anything
analogous. One ought
however to recognize that
they are as necessary as the
몭rst to the American people,
and perhaps more so.
”
Needless to say, all of us have
heard of many successful civil
society initiatives but broadly
speaking, they are of three kinds.
speaking, they are of three kinds.

The 몭rst amongst them is

philanthropy: generous donation
of money to good causes. Or to
causes that the state wouldn’t or
couldn’t care for at that particular
moment. Andrew Carnegie’s
public library legacy, the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation’s work
on healthcare, and Tatas’
contribution to research
establishments fall under this
category of civil society initiatives.

The second category comprises of

social movements, aimed at self-
correcting the underlying
organisational fundamentals of
the society. Such movements are
often led by reformers, of which
we had quite a few in India. Ram
Mohan Roy’s contribution to
abolition of Sati, Dhondo Keshav
Karve’s work on women’s
education, Jyotirao Phule and
Periyar’s e몭orts to eradicate caste
discrimination, and Baba Amte’s
rehabilitation of leprosy patients,
are all successful examples of civil
society led reform.

The third category of civil society

initiatives are aimed at correcting
market failures: situations in
which allocations of goods and
services is sub-optimal. Non-
services is sub-optimal. Non-
governmental groups that
mobilise people to plant more
trees in the city, or to clean lakes,
or to raise awareness about noise
pollution are a few examples of
this category.

Why is the society’s ability

to self-correct
underplayed?
Though civil society initiatives
have wide-ranging abilities aimed
at self-reform, the emergence of
the welfare state has slowly and
steadily sidelined society. A
welfare state is the one whose role
goes far beyond provision of basic
public services to all members of
the society; its primary role is
thought to be to change society
itself.

Now, this idea — the welfare state

as an actor more powerful than
civil society for social change —
has wide acceptance across the
political spectrum.

In the conservative canon, free

markets are considered to be the
best way to achieve prosperity.
But in situations where markets
fail, the State—and not civil
society—is seen as the agent of
change. The role of the civil
society is undermined: it is merely
seen as an advocate and an
agitator that should force the
State to address these market
failures.

The primacy of the State remains

true on the other side of the
politics as well. If you ever try
typing the word Societism on your
phone or laptop, it will get
autocorrected to Socialism. But
that’s where the similarity ends.
The socialist canon sees the State
as the most powerful actor for
social change; the role of society
itself is again undermined. In fact,
socialism is more statism and less
societism.

So what if the State is seen as

society’s biggest troubleshooter,
you ask? Well, the nature of the
State as an institution is such that
it is terrible at making social
change happen. Even if it does, it
has many unintended and
unanticipated negative
consequences that can make the
society worse-o몭. Tocqueville
again, described this eloquently:

“ A government can no
more su몭ce on its own to
maintain and renew the
circulation of sentiments and
 ideas in a great people than to
conduct all its industrial
undertakings. As soon as it
tries to leave the political
sphere to project itself on this
new track, it will exercise an
insupportable tyranny even
without wishing to; for a
government knows only how
to dictate precise rules; it
imposes the sentiments and
the ideas that it favors, and it
is always hard to distinguish
its counsels from its
orders.
”
The State’s largesse has several
other knock-on e몭ects.

One, a welfare state ends up

becoming a perfect alibi for the
sel몭sh citizen. A citizen at the
margin refuses to take up acts of
compassion, empathy or
philanthropy. This is because she
considers that the execution of
these functions are, in fact, the
raison d’être of the State. Citizens
are more likely to claim that their
tax contributions are by
themselves their generous
contributions towards social and
behavioural change.

Two, the welfare state then becomes

a ma몭a lord. In its march to
appropriate all tasks for
reforming society, the State
demolishes all other competing
philanthropic agents that come in
its way. The lack of competition
reinforces our bias, making us
ignore its crimes. Acts of
wrongdoings by governments
then become fait accompli —
almost as a collective cost that the
society necessarily needs to incur
in order to ensure that the State
performs its welfare role. Bryan
Caplan’s warning in this context
is very useful.

“ Welfare states melt

people’s consciences, leading
them to excuse and minimise
the most horrible of crimes …
When organisations that kill
people for a living — like
crime families or
governments — loudly help
the needy, we should indeed
shudder. Why? Because their
perceived philanthropy
makes it easy for them to get
away with murder. Maybe
they’ll use their power over
life and death wisely and
fairly. But they probably
won’t — especially if they’re
surrounded by devoted fans
 surrounded by devoted fans
eager to excuse their
shortcomings.

The Indian Context

”
The problem of the welfare state
acquires a whole new dimension
in the Indian context. Created in
the backdrop of a deeply
fractured, poor, and unequal
society, the Indian Constitution
came hardcoded with a social
revolution algorithm.

Until then, the idea of social

revolution by constitutional
methods was not common. A
conservative document like the
constitution served primarily to
establish rights and institutions in
a society, and protect its citizens
from an eager, overreaching state.
To use a document like that to
bring about a social revolution in a
society was a bold and imaginative
experiment.

My bias is in favour of this

laudable experiment. Maybe it was
this that held India together in its
infancy, but the project did have
its share of unintended and
unanticipated consequences.

First, as described earlier, the

welfare state became an alibi for
the citizen. Governments further
exploited the State’s primacy,
imposing cesses or even taking
away forcibly from unsuspecting
citizens to clean cities, to fund
toilets, and to correct caste
discrimination — goals that
actually need massive societal and
behavioural changes.

Second, because the State was

overly concerned with reforming
the society, it miserably failed at
the task it was supposed to be
doing: providing basic public
services. How else can we explain
that even after seventy years of
independence, over twenty
percent of our population
continues to live in extreme
poverty, many dense habitations
have poor access to schools,
water, and electricity, and law,
order and public safety show little
improvement.

Third, once the State failed in

providing basic public services,
even well-meaning civil society
initiatives were directed towards
plugging the government’s leaky
bucket. Instead of complementing
the state, civil society initiatives
started supplemented the state.
So, we do have philanthropy, but a
lot of it is for providing basic
amenities, which fall squarely in
the domain of the State.
Philanthropy for the big, bold
tasks that governments can’t do,
like Carnegie’s public library
network, is yet to come of age.

Fourth, society’s own attempts at

correcting market failures
similarly attempts to substitute
for the missing State. For
example, The Ugly Indian is an
anonymous group of committed
volunteers that clears garbage
from city streets every weekend. A
wonderful civil society initiative
indeed, but wasn’t exactly this the
task of our governments? How can
we expect a State that cannot
provision the most basic of public
services to end caste
discrimination or ‘protect’ Indian
languages?

Finally—and arguably—society’s
attempts at self-reform have
su몭ered. At the very least, the
nature of social movements has
changed. Once in a while, when
civil societies manage to mobilise,
they act as petitioners to the State,
merely demanding quotas of
various kinds.

Looking Ahead
So, the case for Societism is this:
let the State not introduce new
 let the State not introduce new
legs to the social revolution
project. Let the State not invent
new ‘rights’ in the name of social
reform. Instead, let us hold the
State accountable for intervening
where there are acute market
failures. Let the State be judged on
its capability to provide water,
jobs, electricity, safety, and
security to every Indian. Given
that we cannot undo the social
revolutionary tenets of the
Constitution with manageable
costs, a compromise is to let the
State continue to work on them.
For the rest, Indian society can
look out for itself.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pranay Kotasthane
Pranay Kotasthane heads the geostrategy
programme at the Takshashila
Institution. His research interests focus
on geostrategy, geopolitics of the Indian
subcontinent, public policy, economic
reasoning and urban issues.
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