It was more than two decades ago that I, then an insignificant employee of this vast socialist and centralised Indian State, lost complete faith in central government. Perhaps it was the three years I spent in Pondicherry between 1985 and 1987 that made me think of "local government," for tiny Pondicherry then had a huge government - lieutenant-governor, chief minister, a cabinet, chief secretary and many secretaries, inspector-general of police and so on - but the tiny city seemed quite a mess, especially the areas outside the small French enclave. Every night I used to take a walk with my dog on Beach Road, and pass the old Mayor's office from the French era, and which now lay disused. I used to wonder always whether a Mayor might not be far better for this little city than this vast socialist government.
When I resigned from government service in 1989 and proceeded to the LSE, I did not take up any course in Economics. I pursued a Master's programme at the LSE's Department of Government. My principal area of interest was a paper titled "Comparative Local Government." The paper comprised 20 lectures and seminars over two terms. These were conducted by Professor George Jones, then on the British "Who's Who" as an authority on local government, the principle that lies at the very foundation of the unwritten English constitution.
Since then, I have continued to be deeply interested in local government. In recent years, I studied "New Public Management" at the International Academy of Leadership in Gummersbach, Germany. New Public Management (NPM) is a movement in public administration worldwide, aimed at using The Market to provide local services. I met NPM practitioners in Germany. I met the head of the German Liberal Mayors' Association. And my course mates, from all over the Third World, revealed to me how their own countries had suffered and gone horribly wrong because of a strong central State, that too, usually a socialist one. Interestingly, I met and interacted with participants from Egypt, Tanzania, Ghana and Yugoslavia, and discovered that my early hunch so long ago was quite right. For they revealed how all those great socialist friends of Nehru - Nasser, Nyrere, Nkrumah and Tito - had destroyed their countries.
You can read my brief monograph on NPM here.
It is a curious fact that my year-long course on comparative local government held in the heart of London did not include a word on the Olde City of London and its Lord Mayor, its traditions, its history, and its dominant role in British capitalism. Perhaps because the LSE is a socialist institution and the Webbs hated the Lord Mayoralty for its naked capitalism. However, I have since studied whatever I could get hold of on this pillar of English local government, and you can find an interesting essay on this subject in my new book Natural Order: Essays Exploring Civil Government & the Rule of Law, which can be read and downloaded for free here.
Today, more than 20 years since I began my intellectual journey, a journey that has never stopped, it seems quite apparent that the idea of a strong, socialist central State sitting far away in New Delhi, ruling a vast sub-continent, and "planning" for over a billion people, has been a colossal error. As my numerous posts on the city of Hassan in Karnataka make clear, this country needs to urgently think of urban local self-government. (You can read all the posts on Hassan by clicking the label "Hassan" on the right-hand bar.)
Thus, for 20 years and more, I have never wasted any thoughts on how a central government can be run. My area of specialized interest has always been local government, and I daresay I have made some intellectual contributions towards a proper understanding of the theory, the history and the practice of local government.
Jim Morrison once sang: "I'm a freedom man, that's how lucky I am."
I guess I must be equally lucky. I too am a freedom man. Further, I am a local government man.
I never think of the State in New Delhi. As they always said in the rest of India: Dilli door ast. (Delhi is far away.)
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