Durga Shakti's suspension: Building sand castles in the air

Multiple narratives have emerged around the suspension of the 28-year-old IAS officer Durga Shakti Nagpal. They each have at their centre a different aspect of the controversy: vote bank politics, the erosion of the state bureaucracy at the hands of a venal political class, a civil servant’s attempt to stand up to powerful vested interests, the collusion between the state and the mining mafia, the feudal-patriarchal nature of the state’s governing elite, the environmental destruction wrought by rampant mining in violation of environmental norms, the loss to the state exchequer due to illegal sand mining activity, and so on.

add_main_imageEach of these narratives highlights a distinct facet of the dysfunction at the heart of India’s modernizing project. But the most significant of them is the political dysfunction.

Beneath the layer of vote-bank politicking is a saga of endless self-aggrandizement through rapacious plunder— if not of national coffers, then of natural resources. Only, this time it is not coal, nor spectrum, nor bauxite, nor iron ore, nor natural gas—it is sand.NextMAds

Now, illegal mining is not unique to Uttar Pradesh. Nor is sand mining unique in its rampant illegality or violation of environmental norms. It is a major industry across the country, from Tamil Nadu to Rajasthan to Bihar. While nobody seems to know its exact size, one can safely conclude that it is substantial, given the figures being bandied about: ₹ 10,000 crore in Haryana alone, ₹ 2 crore a day in Punjab, ₹ 300-400 crore a month in Rajasthan, ₹ 8,000 crore in Bihar, and so on. Adding up the business in all the states and applying the prevailing royalty rates would give us an estimate of the revenue lost to the state exchequer. (One gets a rough idea of the magnitude of total revenue lost from the fact that Maharashtra earns ₹ 300-400 crore from legal sand mining.) In a poor country that is under permanent pressure to cut back on welfare provisions and subsidies, the state’s forfeit of thousands of crores that ought to have gone into its kitty is nothing if not a subsidy for criminal enterprise.

Seen from this perspective, the suspension of Nagpal for acting against the grain of such criminality is doubly shameful. That the Akhilesh Yadav government seems to be getting away with it, notwithstanding the feeble protests from the Centre, is fairly representative of the countrywide standards of governance with which India hopes to harvest foreign investment, husband its resources, and sustain its trajectory of growth. To top it all, not only are we used to this kind of (mis)governance, we almost bank upon it.

Here’s a simple question: If sand mined illegally is illegal, then is it not illegal to buy and use that illegal sand? But evidently, there is a roaring market for illegal sand. India is in the middle of a construction boom, driven primarily by the real estate and the roads sectors. This needs tremendous quantities of sand. While India has the sand, it does not have the will or the institutional infrastructure to enforce the legal and environmental norms for sand mining. Were India, in a parallel universe, to strictly enforce these norms mandated by law, at least half the construction projects in progress right now would grind to a halt, if not get scrapped altogether (assuming that such law enforcement would apply not only to sand mining but to all construction projects as such). And that is an eventuality the governing elites cannot stomach—for much of the construction boom is propelled more by debt-financed, speculative capital than by need. The majority of private housing projects are luxury or semi-luxury apartments, and nobody is under any delusion that they will resolve slum-infested urban India’s housing crisis.

More significantly, while a lot of the speculative capital is foreign in origin, not all of it is. A sizeable chunk of it is from the Indian upper and middle classes seeking a safe haven for their savings. It is their hope that rising property values will earn them solid returns on their investment, and perhaps take care of their retirement. So we have a scenario where these very legal investments are funding very legal real estate projects that are being erected with the help of the very illegal sand from the Yamuna and the Hindon and all the other rivers that are being ravished to feed the construction boom.

Taking the absolutely legal route—by either sourcing legal sand or using sand substitutes—would presumably escalate the already prohibitive costs manifold. And so, illegal sand mining goes on—and will go on—with the connivance of the state and the extra-legal business interests that we now call the ‘sand mafia’, secure in the benign indifference of finance capital and the insular self-interest of the middle classes. The legal and the illegal, the law-breakers and the law-abiding, are melded together in such intricate networks of complicity that a state of denial seems to be the minimum condition for carrying on with our lives, and with business as usual.

Nagpal’s attempt to halt illegal sand-mining predictably earned her the wrath of the political establishment that has been patronizing the sand-mining activity. According to some media reports, she was framed by the mining lobby so that she could be shunted out from the sand-mining scene. There are also reports which state that she ‘allegedly’ ordered the demolition of a wall of an under-construction mosque. But this is where politics takes over from economics – in fact, this is how politics is used by those who have its levers at their command.sixthMAds

The Gautam Budh Nagar district magistrate’s report, as well as the Sadar tehsildar’s compliance report, indicates that Nagpal had no role to play in the demolition of a boundary wall of a mosque under construction. Speculation is rife that the wall was brought down by the mining mafia, and the state administration planned the whole incident to trap her and have her suspended. At any rate, politics came in handy to achieve this aim: the ruling Samajwadi Party played the communal card, and in no time an issue of governance and corruption became one of vote banks and electoral politics.

Along the way, a vital question got buried in the mountain of verbiage that has piled up around Nagpal’s suspension: Did Nagpal order the demolition of the mosque’s boundary wall? If she didn’t—as seems to be the case—then who did?

Apparently, an honest civil servant is all it takes for the ‘communal card’ to be played, for vote banks to coalesce along communal lines, and for the government to feel insecure about its majority in Parliament. In such a scenario, where does one even begin to start thinking about good governance? Is it any wonder that a lot many Indians prefer to pin their hopes on a Narendra Modi than in the arduous task of building robust institutions in a country where powerful interests are ranged against such an endeavour?