We still deem us as ‘subjects’ not ‘citizens’ and Indians in government as ‘masters’

What happened in Washington DC at the Capitol Hill Building was watched in horror and everybody said, “Look democracy can fail even in America.”

To me it looked like the triumph of American democracy. Attempts to overturn the Presidential election failed. State after state stood up to power. Court after court thew out petitions challenging the election. In many other countries, those rioters would have been shot dead. But the law is taking its course.

Unfortunately, Indian institutions have ceded ground. Imagine this, an entire state was told that you cease to be a state from tomorrow. Earlier, only a declaration of Emergency could take away citizen’s rights. But this government has shown that citizens’ rights can be taken away not just in Kashmir but throughout the nation.

By invoking the Disaster Management Act centrally, by taking away citizens’ cash through Demonetisation, by getting migrant labourers beaten up by the police merely because they were trying to go back home, by commanding individuals to obtain permission before getting married, by questioning their citizenship– we can see how the government has weakened citizens, and how institutions are not able to protect them.

I was a Collector in Dadra Nagar Haveli, and I remember how people from the tribal communitywould refuse to sit on chairs in my office. They preferred to either stand or sit on the floor. In their own country, in an office run by their taxes, in front of an officer whose salary is paid from taxes, they did so because in our minds we are still subjects and not citizens.

Empowering individuals to become citizens began during the UPA government with rights-based laws like Right to information, Right to Work, Right to Food, Right to Education and so on. But this government on the other hand does not believe in giving citizens, rights. It diluted all those empowering laws we gained after years of struggle but did not add anything new.

Instead, it thumps its chest on service delivery and believes that so long as the government ensures service deliveries, as if they are a charity or favourto the subjects, nobody would ask questions.

I stand for a strong citizenry and for that I would have to work at the grassroots. We need to go to the grassroots and invoke the spirit of democracy among citizens through debates and dialogues, of the kind we had while drafting the Constitution.

We must make it a demand-based governance instead of supply based or charity based. If service delivery is the government’s model, then empower the citizens to demand better services. We need to build a strong citizenry which is able to demand better service from police stations to the tax office and up to the PMO. And that journey of ‘from subject to citizen’ is the most important journey that we as a country must undertake for our people.

(Kannan Gopinathan resigned from the IAS in 2019 in protest against the suspension of Article 370 in Kashmir. He spoke from This govt feels that so long as it ensures service deliveries, nobody would ask questions Kerala to Sanjukta Basu)