United we stand, divided we fall. Divided also things have survived and if rectification happens in an earnest way, there are chances that organizations / institutions can be brought back on rails. In a variegated society, polity and governance like ours, some divisive elements and issues would always be there. Might be there are some positive fallouts as well, when at times it works as checks and balances in the system. The challenge is to at least maintain it at that level. When it is a divided or a semi divided house, one generally feels that there can be nothing worse. The beauty is that each of the stakeholders feel that the other will not cross the Lakshman Rekha.
Organizations are made on values and not on just legally mandated documents. If that were the case there would be no difference in the governments in Scandinavian countries, Singapore or India. What Lee Kuan Yew did for Singapore for over 30 years is what governments are made of. Today the city state can boast being a world leader. The moral of the story is that only organic growth can happen and it has to be done the hard way. The goals also need to be crystal clear. Need for achievement is equal to achievement is an old renowned formula. Governments can also be created into well functioning, robust organisations, if organic growth would have been their agenda. The end goal needs to be known to all stakeholders and should be a committed shared vision.
Have governments thought of themselves as any other successful organization? What are the values which they stand for but for the parroted constitutional values, which are too nebulous. Have that been concretized into a hard coded operational blueprint. What has been the training on these values? Then we have the missing link called organizational culture? In real world governance, lack of organizational culture is the organizational culture of the governments. The attrition rate of the political executive has its own challenges. Legally intended to provide democratically enabled governance, has got mired totally. The more the house gets divided, it becomes more harsh and aggressive in crisis ridden times. The passage from a divided to a broken house starts looming large like a predestined fate.
The Maharashtra sordid saga has all the ingredients of a Broken House. It is slowly getting incomprehensible to make out who was which part of the whole, before it nosedived. It seems to have gone beyond the broken house to smithereens. The tragedy of the matter is that many governments get created in that fashion and have to live the congenital fate. The way permanent bureaucracy adapts to its predicament is all too well known. As we move further, this state of administration, whether leaked out in public or not, can at the very best be an epitome of non-delivery and at its worst, an open street fight amongst themselves, as is happening in Maharashtra.
CAN A HOUSE BE CREATED OUT OF A BROKEN HOUSE? NEED A STATESMAN TO DO IT.
Sanjay Sahay