The nakedness, degradation and exploitation of women mental patients in Calcutta’s Pavlov Mental Hospital is engaging the media. No doubt public attention will shift elsewhere in a week or two. Who remembers the taxi driver who tried to kill himself because the police had unlawfully impounded his taxi, and literally kicked him out when he came to reclaim it? Or the man in Howrah who actually took his own life on being pressed for a bribe to have his phone repaired? The Pavlov declaredly protects its patients from such a fate by removing the clothes they might hang themselves with.

Still, it is good that these evils should be exposed. A few individuals benefit, at least for the time being. The authorities realize they have a fleeting, residual accountability. Democracy requires that society should learn of its maladies, so that it can react in admissible ways: complaint, litigation, public protest, electoral defeat. Societies deprived of free speech and free information have no recourse except messy revenge or violent revolution.

But authorities ensconced on their squalid thrones do not understand that free information and public censure might protect them from a worse fate. Though it was a patient’s relative — surely a stakeholder — who complained about the Pavlov, officials chose to view the matter in terms of interference and unauthorized entry. The superintendent grudgingly admitted to a “temporary problem” that had been solved — by his apologizing for the hurt feelings of the offending staff. The director of health services (herself a woman) fumed that the women’s plight was no business of “outsiders” or even the attendant doctor’s. One recalls the (sadly solitary) case of the prison inspection committee member who resigned his charge on being told he could not pay surprise visits.

We talk often, and rightly, of the brutalization of the police; but we overlook the incipient brutalization of the “non-violent” administration, though it harms far more people and offends no less flagrantly against humanity. Every pension cell and disbursing office is haunted by people — the visible tip of an iceberg of deprivation — sentenced to penury by some minute irregularity in their papers, or simply because the file has been lost. The most publicized victims of this neglect are retired schoolteachers, though the publicity has done them little good. The spotlight seldom falls on destitute villagers left out of below-the-poverty-line lists; or erosion victims waiting for years in roadside shanties for the promised shelter; or the rural poor who obtain only 18 days’ work a year under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. As a recent report bears out, this last failure is due not only to corruption (in that case, funds would be disbursed on paper at least) but to sheer laxity and callousness.

The NREGA is implemented not by officials but by elected panchayat members. Democracy does not guarantee justice or humanity, even to the sick or the starving. It notoriously manipulates officialdom by political pressure and corruption. Some years ago, I spoke at a meeting about the customary collection of bribes from newly-appointed teachers by local apparatchiks on school boards. After the meeting, a man came up and introduced himself as the then secretary of the school education department. “Every word you spoke is true,” he said. “I see it happening every day, but of course I’m not in a position to do anything about it.”

I have not made up this story. I recall it whenever I step into a school for children of a lesser India, where the greatest lesson they learn is that they must not expect the same opportunities as their social betters. And I wonder how that obedient servant has been rewarded for his compliance.

Every year, many people die on Calcutta streets owing to racing private buses; hundreds are injured in unreported encounters with (often unlicensed) auto-rickshaws plying in defiance of the Contract Carriage Act. These are not stray cases of rash driving; they result from the modus operandi of the transport in question. The traffic police are no doubt culpable; no less so the transport department that allows such “systems” to flourish. The public brazenness of a very senior officer after exposure of a grotesque driving-licence scandal is the stuff of another forgotten story. To this day, Calcutta (alone among India’s metro cities) has stonewalled all serious attempts to control vehicular pollution. Its residents, especially children, harbour respiratory diseases exceeding even India’s appalling norms. The sedentary functionaries responsible for this state may fairly be said to have blood on their hands.

A year into the Nandigram fracas, we have forgotten how it began with a premature notice of land acquisition unsupported by the requisite preliminaries. When such a notice issues from an officialdom that usually declines to act on much-publicized reforms because “the order has not reached our desk”, one deduces an agenda not listed in any rulebook. The good bureaucrat knows that rulebooks are of limited avail, to be revered or rubbished according to a higher expediency.

Hence there is hope for the Pavlov patients, at least for a few weeks till the tumult dies down: for senior public-savvy politicians have chosen to treat the scandal as a scandal. The health minister, not known to be easily moved by patients’ plight in state hospitals, professes himself dissatisfied; the chief minister has called the report “horrific”. This is where democracy comes into play. When politicians tip the wink, officials must, in the Bengali phrase, swallow the millstone of the public good. The same functionaries who had brushed away the matter may now caution the subordinates they had defended the other day.

That too will be an act of expediency: an increasingly ominous one not only for the underprivileged but for the middle classes and elite, the very beneficiaries of today’s burgeoning India. This happy growth has shrunk the role of the bureaucracy: not their numbers, nor their emoluments or trappings or promotion, but their involvement and responsibility. The nation — at least its affluent and articulate section — has accepted that social services are not primarily the charge of the State. Healthcare must be paid for: hence the state hospitals are reduced to irrelevance, and even the indigent must sell their cooking-pots to save their lives. The school system has always harboured grotesque inequalities between child and child; now higher education seems set to follow suit. Poverty alleviation, gender parity and mother-and-child care become, more than ever, not investments in the nation’s future but perfunctory acts of State charity.

Even the privileged classes may rue the day when, lured by slick PR and surface efficiency, they surrendered their health and well-being, and their children’s future, to vastly powerful, shadowy entities with no allegiance to anything beyond their shareholders’ interest at home or abroad. For the poor and marginalized, the new dispensation poses a new and radical threat: the very rationale of the social order now divests them of full rights to welfare and advancement. Earlier, the official system was formally committed to public service, however flagrantly it flouted that commitment in practice. Now it is absolved of any intrinsic role in the matter: the enabled classes are paying lavishly elsewhere for such ministrations, so the disempowered must settle for a grudging residuary service that, in the brave new world, should not exist at all.

The articulate and influential classes are on honeymoon with this “liberal” dispensation. Its only persistent critics are discredited exponents of the old order. But those very exponents — politicians and state functionaries — have astutely shaped the new order to their interests, improving their own condition while disowning all responsibility to improve anyone else’s. Just when disempowered citizens most need State protection, the State has been ideologically absolved of the duty to render it. Whatever talent and innovation the State system generates is overwhelmingly concentrated in the economic ministries, while the social and human sectors languish in political neglect.

At what unfathomable depth does our public order admit of common humanity? We seem to sink ever further into the slime without touching bottom. The functionaries of the system are, for the most part, human beings privately observing the basic decencies. What is there in the public order that alienates them so profoundly from their fellow-creatures?

The most perturbing result is that those fellow-beings are dehumanized in turn. They resort to lynch law; to terrorism and extremist outrage; even more destructively, to dismantling their deepest norms of conscience. My most harrowing knowledge of the alienation of ruler and ruled concerns a tyrannical official whose own son died under the state health system. The common people of the district told each other: “This proves there is a God.”

If there is, may he save us all. Not all the power, privilege and immunity in the world can compensate for that curse from the people.