The Solution to all India's Problems

Okay, I admit my invention for saving the roads of the third world was half-baked, but this time I am really on to something.

One of the questions I ask myself from time to time is whether India is going to make it. I mean, there is all this enthusiasm about India’s economy and its future as the call-center-and-biotech capital of the world. But India is still incredibly poor and all its public services are a mess: the roads, the telephone lines, the schools, the courts, all of it—and not just in the red tape sense. In the “does not exist as all because all the money was stolen” sense.

So I always wonder if India is going to get stuck at some point because of its miserably bad government. I wonder if India’s future looks a lot like Nigeria at worst or Mexico at best. There are some pretty rich people, there are quality corporations, and there is international investment. But people are poor in some many senses—they have no money, no access to health care or education, no protection from violence, no meaningful rights, and no reason to believe their children’s lives will be any different from their own.

I think India’s problems are manageable. I mean, India is lucky: it is a stable democracy, the government has quite a lot of money and a good credit rating; the military doesn’t want to run the country; and it currently faces no severe internal or external threats.

But India has NO rule of law. Say there is a murder. There are rules on the books about how that murder should be investigated, prosecuted, and punished. But the chances that things will unfold accordingly are, roughly, zero. If the victim is not very important, the investigation will be little more than perfunctory. If the investigation happens, it will be this sort of civil-rights-violation-bonanza of warrant-less searches and confessions under torture. In the event the murderer is identified, the police can be bribed to forget the whole thing. And, even if the murderer is identified and booked, the wait until any sort of trial can be years—decades for less-serious crimes. Civil cases are backlogged by, roughly, a human lifespan. The judiciary is under-staffed and judges are constantly being bribed not to do anything, witnesses get killed, evidence gets “lost.” It’s just disgusting.

The solution wouldn’t be so hard if politicians wanted to do something about it. India’s Central Bureau of Investigations and its highest judiciary are very good—the staff is paid a decent amount and is protected from being transferred, harassed, or killed. So, they do their jobs.

One thing that might help would be real public pressure on politicians to shape up. I think people lack a clear idea of what the alternative would look like. Citizens aren’t that enthusiastic about getting the police and the judiciary more involved in maintaining a decent society because they have no image of those institutions as anything but a bunch of crooks.

So, my idea is: Indian Law and Order!

No, I’m serious. India has no prosecutor dramas, in television or film. It has cops-and-robbers movies. But these are invariably about the gray area between the two. Mafia dons with hearts of gold and such.

What India needs is a show full of high-minded and righteous police and prosecutors. Who confront, in each episode, a “ripped from the headlines” story of brutality and corruption. But then they resolve it in the way it could be settled in a world of high-minded and righteous.

The show would begin with a parental yet passionate voice that would inform the viewers that in the criminal justice system they are represented by two separate, yet equally important, groups: the police who investigate crime and the courts who prosecute the offenders. Then the viewers would watch as the honorable, diligent, and muscular policeman used carefully collected physical evidence and legally obtained confessions to break the case. Then the incorruptible, clever, and shapely prosecutor would see that the dastardly criminal was locked away for ever. This would all take about 60 minutes (minus time for commercials) and the victim’s family would be crying gratefully as the judge announced the verdict. (No jury trials in India). The victim’s family would be mostly cameos by beautiful film stars and cricket players.

Also, in true Law and Order style, either the original or the spin-offs would be on would be on one or more channels at all hours of night and day.

I know this idea might sound trivial, but the idea comes from a study that shows that both male and female respondents' expressed belief in the acceptability of domestic violence went down in rural India as TV came into the area. The investigators believe that is because Indian soap operas show less patriarchal families. Maybe the respondents just learned from the TV that they should self-censor. But, still, changing people's minds about what's normal/cool/tasteful/upper-class is a real change.