One of the most useful insights provided by Thomas Sowell, economist and conservative American thinker, goes like this: “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” While we all claim to seek “solutions” to various problems at the individual or collective levels, when we choose one option, it is tantamount to giving up others. Every “solution” is thus actually a tradeoff in which we gain something and lose something. The trick is to ensure that we gain more than we lose. And this cannot be ensured without an active plan to check if the choice actually works in practice.
It follows that there is no perfect solution to any problem, whether it is questionable electoral voter lists or feral stray dogs, taxation policy or ethanol blending with petrol.
This article will focus on two judgments delivered by the Supreme Court last week, on stray dogs and Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. The latter appears more balanced than the former.
The Supreme Court’s original “solution” to the dog menace in the National Capital Region (NCR) was to decree that all strays must be moved to shelters within two months. Let alone the short deadline, even if it had been given two years, the “solution” would not have seemed like a solution to many on opposing sides of this issue. This judgment, delivered by a two-judge bench, was widely welcomed by those claiming to speak on behalf of dog-bite victims. It was modified within days by a three-judge order, which has gone in the other direction. It has left dog-lovers smiling while the other side thinks it would not work.
The modified order says that dogs, far from being removed from the localities where they currently live, should be captured, vaccinated, sterilised and de-wormed before being put back into the localities where they came from. Dogs that are rabid or overly aggressive will be put in shelters away from human habitats. The other part of the verdict was that this order is now not restricted just to Delhi, but has been extended to the whole country.
Also read: SC’s stray dog order fails Delhi. Courtroom absolutes don’t solve bad policy
What’s wrong with the street dogs order
There are three things wrong with this verdict. First, you cannot make an order apply to the whole country without longitudinal evidence that the ”solution” actually works as intended. Second, the problems may not be the same in all cities. NCR may have a problem with unchecked growth in the feral dog population, but Dehradun or Nagaland may not have any such problem. Third, by making a choice for the whole nation rather than just the NCR, the three-judge bench has closed other options for 1.4 billion people. It has also not put in place a monitoring system to periodically check whether its “solution” actually works. The court could be wholly wrong, wholly right, partially right or wrong, but we will never know for sure. The option of correcting a mistake now needs another case to reach all the way up to the Supreme Court. We then may get another all-encompassing verdict, which may be equally problematic.
Consider the cons of the three-judge “solution”. It does not ask whether municipalities have the resources to implement its verdict, or who should be responsible for the outcomes. Can those who got the previous two-judge verdict overturned not be charged with the responsibility (along with local bodies) to ensure the desired outcomes? Then again, if dogs — after deworming, vaccination and sterilisation — are to be returned to their original locations, how does this solve the issue of dog attacks and dog bites? Dogs are pack animals and territorial by nature. This implies that sometimes they will attack humans, with negative consequences for health and disease. Dogs leave faeces all over the place (some pet dog owners too are guilty of this, but there is at least a law demanding that dog owners scoop the poop), but who will ensure that this happens with strays?
Do we have enough veterinarians, vaccines, and “dog whisperers” who can divine which dog can be released into human habitats and which ones are to be relocated to dog pounds or shelters? We simply do not spend enough on human health to think that disempowered local governments will spend an arm and a leg to deal with the feral dog menace. As for dog-lovers’ claims that having these canines in localities helps keep other pests down, there is as yet no evidence to prove this. Maybe the problem is garbage, which attracts rodents and other pests, and not just dogs that are reluctant to do the job of clearing areas of pests. We must also not forget that dogs don’t just attack humans: they attack other animals too. I have personally seen them attack a hapless cat, and but for human intervention to save it, that cat would have been a goner.
The simple point is that courts cannot give us sweeping judgments without putting in place a monitoring system to check if their “solutions” tackle the issues that bother society. A temporary judicial panacea will, in due course, be forgotten as we move on to other issues of more immediate import.
Also read: Bihar mimics 19th-century American South. Citizenship is now weaponised to exclude voters
On Bihar SIR, balanced but not ideal
On the other issue of Bihar’s SIR, the Supreme Court’s judgment is more balanced, since it does not put a stop to the Election Commission’s drive to weed out doubtful names from the voters’ list. Instead, it restrains the Commission from conducting a citizenship verification drive by saying that those with Aadhaar but without any of the other 11 documents listed for SIR can still be reinstated as voters. This is a sub-optimal solution, but possibly justifiable since the Bihar assembly elections are just a few months away. It does not solve the problem of removing the names of illegal migrants from the list, for Aadhaar is not proof of citizenship. This implies that the government must, sooner or later, conduct a nationwide survey to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC), and periodically update it. It is worth noting that most opposition parties dependent on the minority vote have opposed this.
The verdict is balanced to the extent it applies only to Bihar’s SIR, but the long-term “solution” lies elsewhere.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is doing no service to the nation by aggressively trying to delegitimise the Election Commission by claiming that it is in league with the BJP to cheat voters out of a fair voter list. It is one thing to say that voter lists are nowhere near as accurate as they need to be, but quite another to allege systemic fraud enabled by the Commission. Nobody, not even the Commission, believes that voter lists are foolproof. That is why Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar drew a distinction between voter lists, which may contain all kinds of duplicate or fake names, and actual voters, who cast their votes in polling booths. Duplicate names may exist as voters move from place to place, but double voting is probably a minor problem and unlikely to have tilted any election one way or the other.
Also read: Bihar is ripe for civil disobedience over electoral roll revision. 50 yrs ago, JP showed the way
Move beyond temporary solutions
If there are no perfect solutions and only tradeoffs, the implications for sensible public policy-making — whether it is cleaning voter lists or reducing the dog menace in city streets, improving tax compliance or reducing fossil fuel imports — are that we treat every issue with nuance and understanding, not as a political football. That way, even temporary “solutions” will come back to bite us later.
On the big issue of “vote chori”, it may be an attractive political slogan, but “vote chori” does not happen only in one direction, and the solutions to prevent it may involve sacrificing some other objective. For example, you can have more perfect voting lists, but the only way to verify voters is by mandating intrusive invasions of privacy and giving the exercise longer time-frames for execution. The downside is less up-to-date lists before every election. The “solution” lies in the tradeoff between high accuracy and speed, or by linking various currently private databases (Aadhaar, death and birth certificates, migration reporting, etc.) to weed out dubious names, with loss of privacy a side-effect. Cleaner voter lists do not come without tradeoffs. The Supreme Court’s order to the Election Commission to put all the deleted voters in Bihar’s SIR in the public domain will make the details of every voter now available to the general public. It will impact the privacy of data.
On the stray dogs problem, the only real “solution” is a messy compromise between dog lovers, municipal authorities, and dog sceptics, which includes those who have had to face the ill-effects of dog bites or even deaths of loved individuals. No municipality has the resources to arrest and impound all strays in shelters or vaccinate them all in double-quick time. The “solution” involves a steady and well-monitored reduction in stray dogs over an extended period of time, and this may have to include putting down some of the most aggressive and feral dogs — which no one is talking about right now. Vaccination too is not a full solution, for these dogs may still bite hapless children and elderly people — which is not acceptable.
Thomas Sowell got it right, and it is time our politicians and social activists realised that “solutions” lie in the spaces between two extremes. And even these won’t be perfect, for vote fraudsters adapt to new rules, dogs and humans adapt to new conditions, and tax evaders find new ways to stay ahead of the tax authorities. Job and education quotas will be abused and may, additionally, push away some of society’s most meritorious and useful citizens to seek opportunities elsewhere — which will be India’s loss.
No “solution” is permanent, and societies must have mechanisms to monitor the choices they make regularly. That’s the message for Rahul Gandhi as well as the Election Commission. And the Supreme Court, one must add.
R Jagannathan is the former editorial director, Swarajya magazine. He tweets @TheJaggi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)