The Mirror Cracked? On Democracy, Welfare Politics, and India’s General Election

Salimah Samji Welcome, everyone. We’re going to get ready to get started. Welcome to the Building State Capability Talk series. Today with us, we have Yamini Aiyar, and she’s going to be talking. The title of her session is The Mirror Cracked? On Democracy, Welfare Politics, and India’s General Election. Yamini is currently a senior visiting fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia and Watson Institute at at Brown University. She was the president and chief executive of the Center for Policy Research, or CPR, a leading multi-disciplinary think tank in New Delhi from 2017 to 2024. Yamini’s work sits at the intersection of research and policy practice. During her tenure, she spearheaded the establishment of two important new research initiatives within CPR on state capacity and politics. Prior to becoming president, she set up the Accountability initiative at CPR, known for its work on governance, social accountability and expenditure tracking on social policy. Yamini’s research interests span the fields of contemporary politics, state capacity, social policy, federalism and India’s political economy. Let’s welcome Yamini Aiyar.

Yamini Aiyar Thank you. Thank you so much, Salimah, for inviting me to be here. It’s an absolute privilege to to be on to be here with all of you. CPR has a very close relationship with the Kennedy School because so many of our younger fellows have found their way here and gone on to do bigger and better things with their lives. And for me too, this is a very special place because although I didn’t have a chance to study here, I went to the other Cambridge, the real one. I did a lot of my actual academic training, came through the Kennedy School in different ways. There was a mini Kennedy School in New Delhi. When I joined the World Bank a very long time ago, the first person I met who became my friend, partner in crime, mentor, colleague, everything for the years we spent together, Salimah at the World Bank and Lant came and taught us how to be provocative, creative, energetic, and also always remember that even if you miss a deadline, which, by the way, you will make sure that you tell your boss you remember the deadline and you’re going to miss it. It always helps in ensuring that everyone thinks you’re super professional and you still have missed the deadline. So I learned many things, including survival skills in the professional world thanks to that experience. And so it’s for me, being here is almost like coming back to where it all started for me. When Salimah asked me to speak here and we were discussing topics, I thought to talk about the Indian elections, which was somewhat unusual for a home that is talking about state capability in a sense. This is not pure political science in that sense. But I wanted to talk about the elections on this platform because in fact, the questions of state capability and the way India’s politics has evolved, especially in the last decade or so, are very, very closely intertwined. And I’m going to spend the bulk of my presentation really talking about the politics of all of this. And I say this because one of the reasons why the president, our current prime minister, Narendra Modi, acquired kind of national legitimacy ten, ten, 12 years ago, had a lot to do with a broad disenchantment within the Indian population. But amongst Indian voters and one that found its expression in elite voices about Indian politics abroad, disenchantment with state capacity in terms of its ability to deliver just about anything. Prime Minister Modi or candidate Modi rose to national importance against the backdrop of large scale corruption scandals that had rocked the country back in 2012, 2013, and projected himself as the leader with strong-man capability to govern capably. Maximum governance, minimum government was a slogan that attracted several to his capacity for governance in a country that was in desperate need of good governance. And it was one of the most critical arms along, of course, with the ideological project that gave him large scale credibility and legitimacy and was very much part and parcel of the narrative that unfolded over the decade. In that context, a very important part of what he brought to the table for state capability was this marrying together of a strong leadership, quote unquote, and technology to build out a pipeline for welfare service delivery. And in more ways than one, one of the most visible contributions that he has made over these ten years under his leadership of the Indian state’s transformation over this last decade has been around using technology to deliver welfare benefits at the grassroots level, projected as ways of cutting through the layers of an incompetent, ineffective, apathetic state that delivers on on the back of patronage rather than delivery to all. And it has been part and parcel of the aura and the allure of the Prime Minister himself. But his political body has been positioning himself as the leader who has been able to clean up the pipelines and deliver effectively. This is state capability at its best. India projects itself across the globe. In fact, the prime minister is in New York today. Yesterday, he spoke to various people of the Indian diaspora talking about India’s digital public infrastructure as one of its greatest exports, the deployment to the wall, the deployment of that DPI into state capability. Big, big part of the story. But I do think it’s very important, especially for policy students like you, to also understand that with every attempt at using new tools of state capability, there is also politics. And that politics needs to be engaged with and understood because it does create large amounts of complexities both to the discourse on state capability, what it is, what it is, and how it can be used, and also what it means for  the larger project of democracy, of social inclusion, of equity. And these are questions that we often don’t ask in policy classrooms because we are looking very much at thinking through what the technological fixes are. So so that’s why I thought I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the Democratic context in which the Indian elections unfolded, what that meant and how the discourse on democracy unfolded in India in these last over the last few months. But then I want to spend the bulk of my time focusing much more on welfare politics. And a lot of what I’m going to talk to you about is based on a survey that I that that I was a part of that we conducted in May during the elections. The other lead researcher, along with me is my colleague Neelanjan Sircar, who is a political scientist based out of Ambedkar University in Delhi, who is also a colleague of mine at the Center for Policy Research. And I, a group of other researchers, came together to undertake this survey. And so I wanted to also share findings from that and get your feedback as we move forward with this work. So let me begin just by giving you this broad overview. I will rush through this, but we can talk about it in the Q&A because I wanted to spend a little bit more time on the welfare stuff. I don’t think it would be news to anybody in this room to say that India went into the general elections in its that started in April and went through seven phases till June 4th when the results were announced under the shadow of what I certainly felt significantly was the emergence of creeping authoritarianism in our polity. And we can argue about why I say this, but let me just lay my cards out straight upfront. In in March this year, just on the eve of the elections, the BJP, sort of its big slogan was, this time we will cross 400, 400 seats in the lower House, which essentially meant that there was a push towards total dominance of the BJP Abki Baar 400 Paar. Back into 2019, the election slogan was if Modi is there anything is possible. Modi Hai Toh Mumkin Hai. This time the slogan was Modi toh Aaenge, Modi will come. It was almost seen as accepted that the the outcome of the election is known before the election was going to take place. And there were some very important reasons behind that. This was partly on account of the very well recognized popularity of Prime Minister Modi himself, which was showing up in all the polls. But also a lot had been done by the BJP and by Prime Minister Modi himself to give the appearance of total domination some legitimate and a lot not so legitimate, stifling opposition voices. On the eve of the election, the Congress body, the largest opposition party, announcing that its accounts had been frozen on the eve of the election. One of the most visible leaders of the opposition alliance, Arvind Kejriwal, being put into jail, stifling every kind of civil society voice, dissenting voices in every way. In every form. 95% of the of cases against the coercive officers of the state, the enforcement directorate, the CBI, the tax authorities, all targeted specifically at opposition politicians, 17,000 FCRA, the Foreign Contribution Regulatory Act, licenses of NGOs were being were rejected. My own institution had spent the better part of two years dealing with all of this. There was a very closed media completely. All that you could see when you put on the television was was a narrative of the government. All that you could see when you open the newspapers were the narrative of the government. All that you could see when you were driving around Delhi, the city I live were only pictures of Modi’s guarantee. It was the government and it was this one singular leader that you saw everywhere. It felt like all that needed to be done for total hegemonic control had been done. In January, the Prime Minister sort of became the only visible face of the consecration of the Ram Temple, one of the key ideological sort of pivots of the Hindutva movement and all over parts of parts of the country, North and south, people were being enjoined to participate in this consecration ceremony. And it. And pull that together into the slogan of This time we’ll cross 400. It was almost as though the promise of the ideological project is about to be achieved, which is why we need total dominance and the election happened. The campaign happened suddenly. You moved away from the dominance of national media, the dominance of put political party leader voices to be forced to interact with ordinary voters. And at that point, a lot of things started changing. I’m just going to highlight three. One really important one was that we began to see a fairly large diversification in sources of information and media. Now, it will be argued, as is often does, that social media has a very limited reach, etc. but it plays a very important role in building narrative. And I just have two quotes here from ordinary voters that we spoke to in in Uttar Pradesh that give you a sense of the extent to which people were looking for alternative sources of information and narrative building to get an understanding of what actually was going on. Dhruv Rathi is a well-known social media influencer who suddenly came up in a big way. Everybody in this room, all of the Indians, probably have seen his short videos talking to us about authoritarianism, talking to us about majoritarianism, talking to us about corruption. The point was just that the numbers were going crazy. I mean, people were looking for this kind of thing. And we find in our surveys some very interesting things. 58% of respondents argue that mainstream media only represents the views of Prime Minister Modi and the BJP. I put that in red because I think it’s important to know that the voter was beginning to recognize that  the extent to which the authoritarian project was actually becoming clear. Does this change how you choose to vote? I have no idea. I will say that in the in our survey, more or less voter choices mapped onto the final outcomes of the election. But that was not the purpose of this. It was to understand people’s perceptions. But I just want to show you where it is that red lines do get crossed from voters perceptions. Lots of discussion about electoral voting machines. A big part of the technology story of why India is invested capacity is improving including of debate in India about whether EVMs are fair or not fair. I personally have absolutely refused to engage in this conversation because I can’t imagine a world in which we have to question the act of voting itself. It’s the most fundamental act of what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. But we did ask this question because it was high on the topics of chatter during the elections. And what is interesting in both ways, 62% say that the electoral voting machine process was fair, but a fairly large 22% say it wasn’t fair. And there’s a strong correlation with those who said it was fair. With support for the BJP, again, just an indication of the extent to which red lines were being crossed. We know from our data, from data from the national Election survey of CSDS that real economy questions, no matter how much we were being enjoined into believing that India was going to develop into this grand future going forward by 2047, Viksit Bharat, the developed India was one of the big taglines of the BJP. We were told that India is on a technological superhighway. India is going to take over the world with its digital public infrastructure, third largest economy. But the reality of most people’s lives was very much caught in the challenges of unemployment. And with that also a sense of price rise, partly because of increased food inflation. And all of these came together into a sense of  There are democratic red lines that are being crossed. There is a real lived experience that isn’t mapping on to what we are being told. And what is really unusual about this election is that the opposition was able to pick up on this for a change, which it hadn’t in the last ten years, and use it very effectively early in the election campaign. A few. And this is where the complex dynamics of Indian society starts coming into play. Political scientists have often argued historically that Indian society has so many different poles and pressures of identity, of stratification, caste, religion, etc., that politics at the national level will always be centrist. And one of the big puzzles of these last ten years is that we move from centrist politics to very close to Hindu hard, hardline politics. And the explanations for that are still evolving. I don’t think we still know in a satisfactory way. But one element of that, particularly in large states like Uttar Pradesh, was the effect was the ability of the BJP to effectively and welfare played a big role in it to a degree create a cross-caste Coalition, particularly amongst the lower castes and the upper costs towards Hindutva. What really happened suddenly in the course of this election, there’s a dominance story, 400 seats for total dominance led in the early part of the campaign. A few of BJP politicians suggested that  total dominance was needed in order to amend the Constitution. And this ran parallel to the reemergence of caste as a very important element in the discourse of the election, and a sense that when they say total domination, they also mean total domination to remove reservations from the Constitution. Now, there are many complicated reasons why the election outcome look the way it did. It was as much a national election as it was many, many state elections. Caste is a complex issue. I’m not getting into the details of that. We can talk about it in the in the Q&A. But what is really important is that particularly in the in Uttar Pradesh, cost and constitution and democracy all kind of came together to build a narrative around the Indian constitution. And so I have a picture here of all the opposition leaders, when they went into parliament after the elections, holding up that little red book, that little red book became a really important part and parcel of the electoral narrative. But what’s really important is in this election, this the combination of the story of the red lines of democracy, the reemergence of I don’t know if reemergence or the caste emerging once again as a critical element in electoral politics after ten years, particularly in states like Uttar Pradesh, brought alive the Constitution and the arena of mass politics, which was very unusual. And it wasn’t just that political party leaders of the opposition, the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh.  Rahul Gandhi, the Congress Party at the national level, were using the Constitution to try and mobilize voters. Actually, you could hear the voters talk about and in very, very fundamental terms and there’s many reasons for it, I don’t have time to go into its details. Again, we can talk about it, but the relationship between the constitution maker, as the author of the Constitution, what this means for Dalit voters in Uttar Pradesh played a very important role. You can see from the quote I have here of a young voter in Agra in Uttar Pradesh, Ambedkar means everything to us. We don’t think it’s easy to change the Constitution, but we do believe the BJP wants to. Whether the BJP wanted to or not as irrelevant thing. So elections are about narratives. The narrative was really strong, a very clear sense of the relationship between constitution, fundamental rights, reservation. Constitution matters because it protects us, says another voter. It gives us reservation. It must be protected. It is our fundamental right. This relationship between constitution, rights, democracy, reservations was a very important part of the narrative of the election in Uttar Pradesh in particular, but it also spread, in my view, to many other parts of the country as well, and played a really important role in bringing to bear the relationships between democracy and fundamental rights and the elections. And of course, I must also note that there are faultlines. This was also a very divisive election on the back of religious lines. None other than our prime minister himself went on in rallies using words and language that frankly, is not appropriate for the leader of a secular country. And when you talk to people, Muslim communities and Hindu communities, this was definitely on people’s minds. But the debate on constitution, on fundamental rights and equality never really spoke to the question of constitutional fundamental rights and secularism or equality between religions. So you would hear about the Constitution in Dalit Hindu, but you wouldn’t necessarily hear about them talking about questions of religious divide. Hindu-Muslim relations and Muslims would always speak about…. Hindus would speak about… Two very different things equality between religions and equality between caste. And so I think that remains. It is regularly being argued that perhaps this is the aim of Hindu majoritarianism. I don’t think so. I think it has seeped much deeper into parts and parcel of Indian society and we need a much more robust debate about that. So that’s a that’s a sort of broad metanarrative in which these elections unfolded. And I do think that democracy, constitution and fundamental rights played an important role in how the dialog on elections and electoral outcomes should play out for the ordinary voter. And this was a very important piece of the story. So I said in March it felt that creeping authoritarianism was about to give way to total authoritarianism. In my reading, I think the Indian voter really saved and protected Indian democracy. It is argued that the fact that it was 240 and not 307 or 370 or 400, which was all which are the numbers that are floating around is on account of democracy, not backsliding. I would argue it’s on account of the fact that voters recognize that democracy was backsliding and needed to be protected. And there’s something intuitive about that sense of democratic instinct in Indian society that that that saved us, at least for the moment. Let me now come to the question of welfare. As I mentioned, right up front, and I’m going to try and go through this as fast as possible. The use of technology was a very important use of technology, and direct cash transfers or in-kind transfers has been the hallmark of the welfare politics of the last decade. And this is not something unique to Prime Minister Modi, although he added the gusto with which it was pursued. It was in the making for quite some time with the building of the technology architecture built out on this disenchantment with the capability of the state to really invest in public systems it’s too corrupt it’s too apathetic. It does not work, and we find ways to bypass through these layers. And technology offered a very tantalizing alternative. What Prime Minister Modi’s government did at a national scale, which over time state governments also picked up, was in building out this pipeline building of welfare architecture that was suited to this pipeline. So the biggest push on welfare was not investments in public systems and public and married goods, health and education as two very important examples. Sanitation, yes. But again, with sanitation, it was about. It was about private goods via cash and direct benefit transfers. So it’s basically using public money for private good. So even in sanitation, the hallmark was  subsidies to build toilets rather than investing in big sewage systems or fecal sites, management, etc.. So the whole welfare, the big flagship programs, the biggest public health scheme that was launched in 2018, was an insurance program director to the DVT Architecture. A card was handed out to beneficiary families for a for insurance. So every single big scheme linked itself into the direct benefit transfer system. And it was done in true, true BJP style with its political communications designed in such a way that you knew this was the leader’s benefit being given directly into it to the individual. One of the hallmarks, for example, of you see that picture that the first big DVT scheme was a gas cylinders to women. The Prime Minister is right there. There’s a lot of publicity, massive publicity that was given, and it is seen as Modi’s benefit that is being given to the individual beneficiary. During Covid, the public distribution system for free rice and free food, essentially free rations was the biggest scheme that India launched to to deal with the fallout economic fallout of Covid. Quite literally on bags of rice was Modi’s picture. So the photograph is really important as a device of political communication. But there’s another very important element here that a lot of these schemes were designed to identify categories of beneficiaries legible to the state, largely women who have emerged as a critical constituency. So caste suddenly disappears in some ways from this discourse. It’s women and economic levels of economic capability. Of course, the two intersect, but it’s not openly said. And other categories employ employment, unemployment, age, young women, women with children, women over 45. So so new categories of beneficiaries, were identified. And technology is sort of used as a basis on which I attribute economic attributes of individuals and households are pulled together into data systems. We do not have the capability to actually make any sense of those data systems. That’s where the new consultants are beginning to play a very important role. Again, a very important part of how we think about technology and state capability. As new technologies come in and you don’t skill the stage itself, it opens up space for all these consultants to come in to do the functions of the state. The state has beautiful databases, but between line departments, no one has any idea how to actually read those databases. And while it gives employment to the policy types, it really raises very important questions about the capability and capacity of the state. And for politicians, this is a great thing because you can build a direct link to the voter. And I’ll show you in a second why this matters. The Act of Welfare Benefits serves as a repeated reminder of who’s giving you the benefit. It is coming from the party leader. It has itself kind of it contributes to a politics that is deeply centralized into the individual leadership that almost bears out a deification of the leader. Neelanjan, my coauthor on this work has a very nice framing of how to think about some aspects of this. It’s a politics that is based on Modi uses this word vishwas, which translates roughly as trust. It’s a politics based on trust of the leader, and you trust the leader because the leader is delivering these benefits quite literally directly into your bank account or directly into your ration, into your home food on your plate in the toilet that you see and remove because it removes the needs of intermediaries. Don’t need the local panchayat for delivery. You don’t need the local block office for delivery. You don’t need the local district office for delivery. They may be chains in the game, but it is monies that go into your account. It is a benefit that reaches you directly at the point at which you, the POS, the point of service where you actually go and pick it up. So it creates a very different kind of relationship. You may still see the local government official and the local administrator as critical to your link with the state, but it isn’t local government official who is responsible directly to give you these benefits. And so from an electoral point of view, what does it do? It creates a politics of direct attribution. So when we ask voters who is most responsible for delivering benefits to you, 51% say it’s the prime minister, 19% say it’s the chief minister. And there’s a lot of state variation which I’ll come to in a second because it’s really interesting and you see very strong correlation of support with voting choices for the BJP, where you see people mentioned the Prime minister. So 51% of those who said is the Prime Minister who is responsible for delivering benefits. This is really important because when you didn’t have direct benefit transfers in India’s federal structure, government of India may use a mechanism of financing schemes that it calls its own, which can go back to the voters for. But the implementation requires close coordination with the state government. So if you compare this data with 2014, the national Election survey data, you will see people often mentioning the State Government, the Chief Minister for things like the National Employment Guarantee Program, which is a Government of India scheme, because the states played a very important role in the process of delivery. Now the states are actors of the leadership on the top in the process of delivery, but the direct connection is so closely made with the voter that you can see very clear political attribution. It completely changes the nature of the federal dynamic when it comes to delivering schemes. And so in that sense, it also changes a side of contestation of welfare. Who do you expect to deliver for what and what is the role of the national, state and local governments shifts very substantially in this kind of thing. Some interesting detail which I’m still trying to make sense of, but I presented you anyway on how all of this has changed narratives of corruption. Let me be very clear. We do not have a census in India. We have a household consumption expenditure survey that was only just done. The last census was done in 2011. The household consumption expenditure survey was just done. Only a fact sheet is out. We have a periodic table for survey data which is telling us how serious the employment question is. In India we do not have much independent evaluation like we used to in the past. So it’s your claims or mine. Your observations are, well, mine and I have a little bit of survey data to tell you what people are perceiving. I can’t say anything about what else is going on on the ground. And this is a serious problem for a country that was once known for its statistics. Where we are today is something very scary. Anyhow. We asked people what they thought. What do you believe? That corruption has come down? 43% said yes, that’s not a small number and there is a strong correlation with voter choice. 61% of those 43 said it was BJP voters. And we did also ask why they thought it was coming down. And the two most common answers was strong monitoring by the prime minister and technology. So some combination of that state capability narrative, strong leadership technology has a way of bypassing to reduce corruption and reach the voter reach the beneficiary is an extremely important part and parcel of how welfare programs are being perceived and understood. But it doesn’t mean that anything has gone away. We asked voters, do you have to pay a commission for direct benefit transfers? That is corruption. Effectively, 49% said no, but a very large 32% said yes. This is 16 states, 36,000 households. So it’s not a small sample. The contractor. Does he still take a cut? 43% said yes. So it’s not that corruption has gone away in any substantive in a significant way. But certainly the perceptions of corruption, the nature of corruption has changed and shifted. And I think in some positive ways, which is why overall you see a somewhat more positive response. What about the role of the intermediaries? 44% said that they do see more presence of MPs and MLAs in. Or in comparison to the previous five years in the delivery of welfare schemes. But when pushed in terms of what their role is, it largely seems to be about reminding us that Modi is giving you these schemes or the Chief Minister is giving you these. So, so the nature of their role has shifted, although they still play an important visible presence in the whole thing. You had a clarification question or a deeper question, because we can take the deeper questions later.

Audience Member 1 No, just a clarification question on the last point, did you ask something about Panchi.

Yamini Aiyar We did, we did, we did. And those numbers are 43%, if I’m not wrong, said that they see more presence of the Panchi. But for data collection. So all the data that goes into the MIS system is collected by the Panchi and the Panchi officers in Andhra Pradesh. I’ll come to that in a moment. We saw something very interesting. Now, when it comes to electoral gaming, while the BJP has been a better at it than anybody else, it’s not to say that other state, that other regional political parties and indeed BJP’s own state governments haven’t recognized the very, very electorally powerful relationship between welfare, politics and electoral gains in this context of direct benefit transfers and in. And so you have particularly in the last five years, there has been this emergence of what I call competitive welfarism. Regional parties have figured out that this is one important way in which they can also play the same game that the BJP is playing at a national level in the region, in regional politics. And so direct benefit transfers, particularly to women at state government levels, are also playing a very, very important role. One of the questions I get asked a lot after the 2024 result is so, you know, you say that there was a direct attribution. It played an important role in shaping the legitimacy of Modi, but it didn’t work this time, clearly, because in places like Uttar Pradesh, they didn’t do so well. So where do you stand on that? My answer to that is competitive federalism. Chief ministers are smart enough. All political parties in India today, in my reading, tend to operate in exactly … are prone rather to exactly the same political party leadership centralized form of inner-party lack of democracy. That is how they operate this centralized power into the Chief Minister’s office, the centralized power into the Prime Minister’s office. And they look at ways in which they can electorally play the same game. Direct benefit transfers are a good way to do that. Revenue you could see data across states will tell you that 9% of revenue and expenditure now across multiple large big states is being deployed for direct benefit transfers. So you get lots of an idea across states, which is interesting to see how this plays out in voter data to a degree. Andhra Pradesh, the state of Andhra Pradesh, you can see up here the picture below that is he lost the election. Jagan Reddy, who started a massive direct benefit transfer scheme. Some of my colleagues from CPR who are here at the Kennedy School work with us on some of the work we did on these projects. And the picture above is of the BJP, Madhya Pradesh government, that launched a scheme called Ladli Behna. It was meant for women direct cash transfer of ₹12,000. Andhra Pradesh, you see the red line. There was a lot more direct attribution to the chief Minister than the blue line, which is the Prime minister. BJP doesn’t have a strong presence in the state, but Andhra Pradesh also gets a pretty high yellow line of others. It’s a two party complex, competitive state, the TDP, which won the election. And a lot of and one of the ways in which the direct benefit transfer schemes were implemented in Andhra Pradesh had the creation of a bureau of a contracted bureaucratic arm at the village level, kind of bypassing the the local elected local government structure. So voters that were not keen on the party often use said government officials are responsible for delivering those. Government officials were essentially a way to say we recognize that schemes are being given, but we don’t want to attribute directly to YSR. And most of those who said others ended up in terms of their voter choices were gave voter preference to the TDP.

Audience Member 2 Can you speak to Kerala?

Yamini Aiyar Kerala is really important because Kerala has very strong local governments. So you’ll see a very high others then because we had broken it up. The bulk of the other in Kerala goes to local governments. Kerala does not have as robust. There is also the same centralizing element of party politics in Kerala, but it’s its broad welfare schemes are. So they’ve been around for so long, they’re so entrenched. And the local governments play such an important role that DBTs are an add on, but not core to the structure of welfare, of the nature of the welfare architecture as it exists today. And I just point out to others, Madhya Pradesh, which has this largely been the scheme with for women, which was that now they had a state election in December 2023. In the run up to the national elections, the BJP won phenomenally. One of the reasons was the scheme was very popular. It had just been launched in the run up to the elections. What happens when you have a BJP, state government and the Prime minister from the BJP on the top of the national government attribution goes to the Prime Minister. So you can see and the same thing happens in Uttar Pradesh as well. Political attribution goes straight to the Prime Minister. West Bengal is another place which has a strong regional party, opposition party chief minister. Again, she was very popular for her direct benefit transfer cash schemes to women, direct attribution to the BJP. And I have a whole bunch of slides which I’ll show you later in the Q&A, because I know I’ve talked too much, but you see a very close correlation between where you’re attributing and how you’re voting or how you say you are voting. And I think that those are very important relationships to understand between welfare, politics and all of this. So let me close by just saying this. I think one of the challenges to me, I’m a big believer in a robust welfare state, but I do believe that the discourse on state capability suddenly as it has unfolded in India, has taken us to a place where we valorize the possibilities of strong leadership and technology in ways that are legitimizing uses of technology such that we no longer invest in public systems. This is politically super powerful. After a while, if you can beat the national Party that is dominant at its own game. I mean, this is only one part of many reasons why people vote, but it’s an important part, particularly in state elections. Why would you not try it out? It has become the dominant way in which we are building our welfare architecture. It also feeds into the dynamic of our democracy in that we are building a very, very centralized political parties where the presence of the party leader, the individual party leader, dominates over everything else. One of the important elements of this is that it converts the idea of the citizen as a rights bearing agent as a beneficiary, because it obliges the state to look for you, look at you as a beneficiary to whom the party leader is delivering these benefits. It’s solved an important role. I, in my view, in cutting through some of the the the the the the the the societal cleavages around caste by creating this beneficiary category. The Hindi word for it is … the recipient, the beneficiary. And it allows political parties to say we are giving welfare benefits to all your caste, Your religion doesn’t matter. Show me how there’s discrimination. And party workers mobilize on the back of these of this beneficiary category of the Lab Harti, which works sometimes as it has for the BJP in the past and other times. Other parts of the mobilize of mobilization around identity and caste that comes up and creates new cleavages. But it’s an important tool that party politicians have started have have been using more or less effectively. It raises very important questions about local democracy. Where do contestations on welfare go? You when your MP, your MLA, your panchayat is an agent of the centralized leadership who is delivering benefits to you and therefore it raises questions about who receives benefits, how inclusive those benefits are. But above all, what is your welfare architecture? Is it about handing over cash and in-kind private goods to individual to beneficiaries? Or is it about building a broader imagination of a capability oriented society in which solidarity and equity are foundations? And I think these are important questions that we should ask when we debate state capability. I’m sorry. I think I spoke longer than I should have.

Salimah Samji We’re going to move on to Q&A and we’ll take a set of three questions. But before we do that, I just want to Yamini a question. This is just really fantastic. Yamini, you talked a lot about politics and the importance of of politics in, you know, this is a school of government. A lot of people in this room are going to go back maybe and work in government. In a situation like India where there is this narrative, what are how does one engage in this space? One, And what are some skills that students here can think about, you know, muscles that they can strengthen before they go out and play this game?

Yamini Aiyar That’s such a difficult question, to which I don’t have a good enough answer. I think, look, I speak to the challenges I, I the questions I ask myself often, and they were particularly alive to me in the last couple of years, which was, I think engaging in the policy space requires you to work very closely and in and in collaboration and to be relevant to governments that you work with. And what are how do you balance out collaboration and relevance with critical thinking, which is a really hard question, especially in a context where politics is moving in directions of very, very centralized, semi authoritarian forms of governance which are legitimized in the framework of state capability. And it’s not there are no for how you play the role of being the critic, but also at the same time continue to being relevant and contributing to the actual delivery of systems. There is no good way of doing this, but the one thing that I think we’ve tried to do not very successfully in CPR was when you work with government and you at least ask yourself and therefore your government counterpart, what are the skills and capabilities that you can build within the system so that those stay in the long term? And part of that process of building those skills and capabilities requires degrees of reflection. So, for example, when we work with data systems or when we work with data systems, it’s very normal for bureaucrats and us to talk about eligible beneficiaries who need to be verified. We need to remove the duplication, duplicate benefit beneficiaries, we need to remove the non eligible ones. Everyone is reduced to a number. If you stop for a minute and say it’s a number in your data system, but it’s an individual. It’s a household, it’s a citizens. How do we think about the words that the vocabulary that we are using? Can we ask if there’s a different language that we can deploy when we are using engineering terms to refer to people in households? How do we think about you know, I’m not making any argument against technology per se. I use it as much as all of us do, and I recognize its benefits. But how do you use technology as an aid rather than an end? And if direct benefit cash transfers is the preferred mode of service delivery and we effectively think about public dialog, deliberation and engagement even around that. So I got my deed back in the days of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was being thought was passed and implemented with Salimah in early days of of that we we were observers, participants, students of the social audit process. There’s a lot of good bad ugly complicated aspects about it. But one of the elements that it had which I think have gone away, which we can bring back, is that through the act of the of the the village dialog, you brought this debate into the public sphere. Technology is an it’s an individual act. I have received the money into my bank account, or I have not. If I have not received it, I will go to X to lodge my complaint. If that X officer does not take my complaint because I belong to a certain caste or I belong to a certain religion, or I or I am of a particular gender, where is my site of redress? If all public spaces of contestation and deliberation and dialog go away? So can we bring some of this back in to our everyday democratic experiences, however complicated and painful it is, to go and lodge a complaint at the block office or the district office, which is how it used to be. In days before you dealt with a server, there was a physicality about you as a citizen going to a state office. You may be mistreated. You may have to stand in lines for hours and hours, but it is the obligation of the officer of the State to deal with you under all circumstances. And even if he or she doesn’t want to. I mean, endless numbers of times when we go to block offices and district offices, you see citizens milling around and the block and the offices are refusing to talk to any of them, using us as the excuse. We want to talk to the Day Madam instead of talking to the doing a real job. We’re just talking to citizens. But ultimately we go and you have to face them as you go out to sit in your car. So I think that there’s a there’s a huge importance to the physicality of governance, which is actually at the heart of building state capability that we shouldn’t let go and we need to be alive to it. So every time you walk into a government office in just remembering and trying to bring that piece of it back in to how programs are designed, how information is shared. Why did we need transparency on  village panchayats, which was the heart of the right to information? It was because that act empowers people into a dialog within the village, and I think bringing that back in is really important. I mean, I for one, am I am just amazed that one of the positive things about moving Hill my children are going to a public school in Providence is how much communication there is between the schoolteacher and the principal and us parents. In the private school in Delhi, where my children go to the school doesn’t talk to us. But this is I mean, this is like community engagement in ways that we all imagine that would be possible. And I know that there are many flaws to all of this and many challenges there. But bringing that back into the debate is really important.

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you very much. Strengthening systems and looking policy is about people recognizing that human side. Thank you. We’re going to take three questions. Please make sure you end with the question mark and then Yamini will respond to your questions. Yes, please.

Audience Member 3 Thank you for the wonderful presentation. And I was just looking at the spread of the states that you presented here. I was wondering if Orissa was at any point part of the mix because the fact that DBT was important and women and also the fact that the same prime minister ruled for 25 years and now there’s a flip.

Yamini Aiyar Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there you go. That’s why I do this. I still need to make better sense of it. I we’ve just been slicing through the data, but. But it is quite interesting, as you can see, that you do get there’s direct correlation between voters who identified the Prime minister as the primary person responsible for delivering benefits and voter choices for voting for the BJP and similarly for the BJP with the Chief Minister. So, so, so, so to the extent that when there is competition, you do see these deviations in voters minds and those who say benefits come from the Prime Minister also tend to vote for the BJP. Those who say benefits come from the Chief minister also tend to vote for the  for the regional party. That line is very clear, but obviously there are lots of other factors contributing to voter choices, which is why the but the BJP just had a thin edge, at least in the state assembly. So also, for those of you who don’t know how the state government with a chief minister who had been around for 25 years, Naveen Patnaik, who also had a simultaneous elections for national and state at the same time, and the BJD lost the election to it. Akin But it was a very big thing for them to lose after 25 years. He was the longest standing chief minister in India and the BJP won. And they also won a larger number of seats for the in the national elections compared to the BJD and compared to previous years, the previous election. So it was a big upturn. One of the reasons why the BJP is still a single party majority in the national parliament is because it did much better in Orissa than had previously done before.

Salimah Sanji Thank you. There was a hand here and then I will go there.

Audience Member 4 Yes, I have one clarifying question. We see that based on your survey the attribution of Uttar Pradesh, for instance, is still pretty high, which is surprising to me, honestly, because I feel … pretty strong. And so there’s attribution there to the Prime Minister. But yet we saw a very surprising result in the largest states with a high number of constituents. I think it affected their power narrative. So if you have any thoughts on that one and you alluded to this a little bit in your presentation that you were like, so there is this sort of mechanism where technology and state capacity is there, but you have to go to consultants for that. The actual ministries and departments don’t really have the kind of prowess we want them to the on that one. So can you speak to that a little bit? Maybe the remaining? I know. I mean, as a student and development economist, we see so many. So, for instance, my team was setting up a like a RCT sort of arrangement with the government of Odisha, for instance, and we are trying to create that entire data policy life cycle situation there where we build in monitoring and evaluation and things like that. So if you have any thoughts on that, on how we can do that better and maybe how we can play a role in that, I guess.

Audience Member 5  Seeing this data and the election. Does it look like what is the how one nation, one election will play out. But what does it data tell us? What will happen if we have one nation, one election?

Audience Member 6 Thank you so much for coming and sharing this. A reflection question I’ve been sitting on since the election results is that what are elites getting wrong about the socioeconomic political development of India?

Yamini Aiyar Thanks. Fantastic questions. Uttar Pradesh. I think one of the biggest factors that contributed to the attribution. So in the double engine states, which is the term that the BJP users, where BJP is in power in states and at the center, you do see an overwhelming dominance of the Prime Minister’s imagery in the minds of voters, even in Uttar Pradesh and Assam, which are two places where state chief ministers are relatively stronger players within the party. And this has been this is going to be one of the BJP’s biggest problems, which is that it has effectively all of these last ten years done what many used to accuse Congress of doing in its heydays, which is undermining state leadership to the point that everything gets centralized in the national party leadership, which which which is argued to be one of the reasons why the Congress kind of one of many reasons why the Congress atrophied as it did, But in U.P. in particular a while, Chief Minister Yogi has a very, very, very strong presence, visible presence on welfare. The biggest game changer was the public to my reading. And I was I spent some time in Uttar Pradesh during the state elections, just on the aftermath of Covid in 2022 which the BJP won was the presence of the on welfare was the presence of the public distribution system. This played a huge role in how it was relatively better delivered. It was delivered literally. I mean, women would tell me,party workers have called us to say two bags of rice have come, please come and pick it up, dal come down, has come, etc.. So the inter-fusing of the party cadres on the ground, the the fact that this was seen as Modi’s ration scheme in a big way and it’s the central role it played in deeply distressed economically distressed households as a consequence of Covid was very, very important in the 22 election. And I think you just still see the hangover of that in how people see welfare and why it comes to attribution goes largely to the Prime Minister on this one. And in fact, the PDS is fantastic because it tells us what you can achieve when you actually genuinely do build a public system. Because the evolution of the PDS Salimah will remember in the early 2000s when she was in India, there was this constant argument about getting rid of the PDS system and moving directly to cash. This is undermining our nutritional capability. It is causing all the Punjab, Haryana problems with farmers. It is people. People don’t want it. People don’t need it. It’s too corrupt. It’s completely messy. And lots of effort was made by state governments, actually not in the elite discourse, which is one of the reasons why the elites got it wrong. Elites were debating cash. But state governments recognize that this is still the central backbone in a very, very economically complicated, complex society of Social Security. So they started investing in basic systems and the technology and PDS was built into that in a somewhat more ground up way, building on the experience of Chhattisgarh, Orissa. Eventually Bihar also made huge success and then the National Food Security Act. So when it came to Covid and there were two things that were done right back in 2020, enhancement of budget for … and using the public distribution system to distribute free grains and rice. And they expanded the total number of beneficiaries. There’s still lots of problems of PDS, as we saw, including the presence of the contractor and the intermediary. But it worked better than the past. And in our survey data, we see like we asked a question about of all the schemes that you receive, which is the one that benefits you the most and 69.7%, I think at national level, I haven’t yet looked at it. I disaggregated by state said that PDS is the most critical scheme that they need and it actually it’s for all its flaws of the past, it works. So now we’re not talking about cash anymore. We still have the Punjab Haryana problem, but that’s a whole different issue. So, so I think that’s one of the reasons why you see this attribution. Of course, the election dynamic in is much more than welfare. And in Uttar Pradesh, as I mentioned, the, you know, both the story of the BSP, the question of reservation, the complex dynamics of the BJP and unemployment and became a big issue was a big issue even in 22. But it came to a head. Now all of these different features played a role in ensuring that the BJP was really humble and no better way to describe it than the loss of the BJP’s candidate seat in. In the home of the Ram Temple in Ayodha. So it was and I do think that I mean, what I gather from the ground, it’s not like this is a rejection of him. It is that it was just not enough. And, you know, while everyone had been mesmerized in some ways by the charisma of Modi, some it kind of was breaking and people were like, yes, it’s no one said that I’m temple consecration was bad. Is that okay? But that was to be expected. Now what what about our employment? You know, those were the things that people were talking about. And frankly, even very obviously, BJP party workers  saying that if you put on the media, all you see is Modi. It it had it had got too much. I think on the question of the role of consultants, which is a longer and different conversation, I hope we can have it, because I think it’s really, really crucial. But I do find that the biggest and most overwhelming challenge that the Indian State and our discourse on state capacity concerns is the emergence of the consultant as I mean, it’s not just India, it’s happening across the world. But you go to state governments and you think that, you know, elites are talking about public private privatization. On privatization, you are a leftist. If you don’t want private privatization of public health systems, you’re a rightist. If you say, let’s do some PPD, God only knows what’s happening on the dock, what state governments are just like this, stop investing in the state they’re calling in BCG, E&Y and why all of you will get really good jobs in all of these places. God bless you. You will earn very well. Please use that money well and sensibly. But you’re not building state capacity. Let’s be very clear. You are contributing to solving a particular problem, but leaving in its wake a huge vacuum of of what actually needs to be built, because ultimately you will go away. But the implementation, thus says still rests with the frontline worker. Well and actually in the if you look carefully at what India has achieved, especially in the last 10 to 15 years, we’ve got overrun with  DPI and technology and jam and all these nice things. But we where we have invested in public systems, they are looking really well and these need to be documented health and wellness centers and public health. They are actually one of the most important and impressive achievements. And if you want to be political about it, I would say if somebody asked me what is the best thing that Modi’s welfare has done, it is the setting up of these health and wellness centers. They have they have an imagination of comprehensive primary health. They are building the conduit between patients and the tertiary system where they exist, where they’ve been invested in. They are working well, went up in Delhi, did a lot to try and fix government schools. Good, bad, ugly. A serious attempt was made and some movement on a very hard question of pedagogy and learning outcomes was some. Some movement was made there in a short span, which is not an easy thing. The Asha worker, the reason why we were able to do Covid 19 vaccine is relatively better than for a completely broken health system, the Covid. Well, because the Asha work was so great, where we have invested in public systems, it actually does some it actually does work. And I think we keep forgetting that in this disenchantment with the larger story of of the state and the enchantment with the possibilities of technology. And then we also forget that actually there’s a very complex interface between states and citizens, and that’s what we need to be investing in. And here dynamics, of course, gender, everything plays out and it’s at that level where our investments we need to be made, where the discourse on state capability needs to move back. So I’d be very happy if we stop talking about consultants and MIS systems for a few years. Then we’d be able to move the needle further. One Nation. One election is an appalling idea. It’s completely anti federal. It is anti-democratic. It makes absolutely no sense. It speaks to why are we obsessed. We valorize efficiency to a point where we undermine democracy. What is the argument that is being given that legitimizes one single election? It is that our elections take too long. Nobody asked for a seven phase in the middle of June election. Certainly, not voters and those who had to go and sit in those hot rallies because all the politicians had coolers and fancy helicopters in which they showed up. It was because of our Prime minister and the BJP and the election commission collectively thought this might be a good way. I don’t know. Some complicated calculation was made. I will stop short of saying something silly. But, you know, if you can guess, if we if efficiency is what you need. Have elections over two days, don’t have elections over two months and have counting. We we have the capability to do it, especially if we have EVM machines. So I don’t buy the efficiency argument. How can you be a democracy if you say elections are a problem, they’re too expensive because of the nature of our political economy, not because we have simultaneous elections and because we have multiple elections. Reduce the time, reduce and make them more efficient that way. Deal with the big black box of election financing, which no country in the world, certainly not one has been able to achieve. But you can try if you want. And don’t tell me that simultaneous election is going to solve the problem. What it will do is. 

Audience Member 5 My question is what does the data tell us?

Yamini Aiyar So I have looked at the Orissa data from 2019, where you actually saw strict ticket voting. And so a lot of people argue that without being careful about it or nuanced about it, that a simultaneous election will essentially mean voters will vote for the same body. It’s not so simple. Voters are much more astute. They’re able to pick. And as you can see, they make very clear distinctions on credit attribution and who and how they choose to vote. What does happen, though, in these very centralized body structures is when you have competition between political parties in the same election, your money, your mobilization capability and the issues on which you vote for become much more fuzed. And that’s where the national large national parties will have an added advantage that that that’s my sense on this. But but as an idea, I think it’s absolutely flawed. And I think more electoral competition is a good way in such a large and complex democracy of keeping governments accountable in their different ways. Elites are getting it wrong for many, many reasons, including that they don’t actually interact with a large part of the country, and that includes the BJP elites and the trolls. They spend too much time on Twitter and too little time actually dialoging and engaging. But I do think I mean, there’s many aspects to this, But, but, but I’ll go back to where I started, which is the disenchantment with the Indian state and the enchantment with the possibilities of what 1991 offered us. What did it do? It basically, you know, the the kind of quip  that the Indian state grows at night when the state sleeps. It had a lot it had a lot of resonance in, shifting our imagination about what the state can and cannot do, what we look for from our political parties, what we look from our politics. I think one interesting way of understanding this is in the discourse that we’re having right now about the question of cost and consensus and and where that plays. It’s it’s you know, it’s kind of it’s sort of seen as the messy realities of politics in which, you know, identities compete with each other, in which democracy has been the only site where voices can find ways of prizing open and accessing state power. That messy reality is always seen as something that undermines our efficiency. And I think that is what lurches us in not just the elite discourse in directions that that they do. We are much more towards centralization of power and seek a certain kind of delivery and an assumption that then the the, the good, the good spirit of the market will be able to do everything. And without looking at our own professions. I think and I’ll end here. One really lesson that India needs to learn over these last ten years and ask itself why this happened. Why have our collective professions so easily fallen prey to demands of state power? Why did media fall prey so easily? Why did academia fall prey so easily? Why did civil society fall prey so easily? Why did our courts fall prey so easily? What is it about our professions that follow, that seek state power and fall prey to state power? I can I can actually see it much more clearly in that in state capital relations, it’s it’s much clearer to me. But what about everything else? Why did journalism end like this the way that it did? Why did academia end up the way that it has? These are really important questions that we need to ask. You know, no democracy is robust if it’s association life isn’t. And if our professions fall so quickly, what happens going forward is a big question.

Salimah Sanji Great with that. We are at time, so we’ll still be in the room if you have questions, but we’re going to end the session. I’d like to thank Yamini Aiyar.