Responsibility be damned, accountability goddamned!

Bengaluru has been without corporators for 2.5 years, and the option was surely lucrative for its MLAs

Rasheed Kappan | NT

Bengaluru: Stretched far beyond its infrastructural limits, Bengaluru city even in the best of times finds governance a Herculean task. With its multiutility systems in disarray, the city finds its growing population of over 1.3 crores a massive challenge.

Yet, it has had no elected Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) Council for well over 2.5 years! Local governance is at the mercy of nominated nodal officers. Projects are decided by a top-down approach, with no elected corporator to either represent demands of the citizens or question dubious works, responsibility and accountability are at an all-time low.

Strangely, the mainstream political parties appear to be comfortable with this arrangement. Once fancied as a robust defence against this multihued apathy, citizen activism has seemingly resigned to this indifference. Their only hope is that the nodal officers, and the ward committees would somehow fill the gap. But there is a big problem in this makeshift arrangement.

'Lack of ownership'

“Today, there is a complete lack of ownership and accountability in the absence of an elected Council. We cannot hold the nodal officer accountable. He would say he has thousands of other things to do, or he has been nominated against his will. An elected corporator cannot say that,” notes Srikant Narasimhan from the Bengaluru Navanirmana Party (BNP).

But is this not better than the systemic corruption often associated with elected re presentatives? Srikant offers a counter: “There will be people who argue that corporators were anyway not doing a good job. But just because some wrong judgments were made by the judiciary, doesn’t mean that we scrap the judicial system itself altogether. We have to always counter it.”

The solution, he says, is to elect better corporators. “In fact, there were people who wanted to dismantle the BBMP itself. Then what about the state government, with a 40 per cent corruption allegation, etc? Do you then dismantle the state government structure and have everything under the central government?”

Plagued by delays due to multiple factors, the Palike elections are unlikely to be held before September 2023, says S Raghu, the CV Raman Nagar MLA who chaired the committee that drafted the BBMP Act, 2020.

“Ward delimitation, Covid and other factors have caused the delay. Moreover, the Assembly elections are around the corner, and the focus will be on preparing a voters list. Besides, there are also the changes in ward reservations,” he explains. The long delay, Raghu notes, is not unprecedented. “During the erstwhile Bangalore City Corporation (BCC) days, there was no elected Council for eight years from 1975 to 1983.” But he agrees that this is not an ideal situation.

“We are not against local bodies. We do need the corporators to assist us.” However, there is a catch. Cutting across party lines, legislators have been reluctant to share power with the corporators, particularly if the latter are from rival political outfits.

Raghu does not deny this, contending that this is true of state and local governments across the country. “If there is a BJP MLA and there are Congress corporators, there will be coordination issues. And vice-versa. But there are also enough cases where there is smooth functioning,” he points out.