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: The king of a state should be like him— thus spoke Mohammad Ismail, a resident of cyclone-hit Dhamakhali in North 24-Parganas, where West Bengal Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi went to see post-disaster relief operations. This is exactly where the previous day the CM had faced tough questions and the local MLA had been heckled.
Barely a month had passed since the Left Front’s disastrous performance in the elections when Cyclone Aila struck the state. The Left administration’s poor relief and rehabilitation operations in its wake have been met with surprising anger from affected people in and around South Bengal. Independent of blame games, this is democracy behaving as it should. This also has a lot to do with the other great democratic exercise that took place a month ago.
In a well-known paper, using Indian data, economists Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess show that public food distribution and calamity relief expenditure are higher where governments face greater electoral accountability and where newspaper circulation is highest. Measures of accountability consist of voter turnouts, election timings and the extent of political competition.
The suggestion that media and political competition are key supports Amartya Sen’s well-known thesis about media and democracy’s role in preventing famines. This is what we would expect. Without informed consumers, competitive markets cannot guarantee quality. In fact, there can be a race to the bottom. This is also true if consumers are informed but there is no competition.
In Bengal, the media is relatively free and pro-active. For example, during 1958-92, it ranked fourth (after Kerala, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu) in per capita newspaper and periodical circulation. So, information is not scarce. But given the seeming invincibility of the Left Front and the disorganised state of the Opposition, voters didn’t believe they had any way of changing the government’s behaviour. The last elections have changed this. Voters feel they can stand up to government officials and politicians without the fear of reprisal.
In the political scenario of Bengal, this fact is worthy of note. Among the indicators suggesting high political participation, the figure that sticks out like a sore thumb is of the number of people who ask questions in local government meetings. Most studies and surveys reveal that less than one-third of those attending gram panchayat meetings ask questions, while in a relatively low-political-participation state like Karnataka, the figure is close to half....
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