Chandigarh, Mar 22: Anti-incumbency is the accumulated bill of millions of small institutional failures – each too small to generate a headline, but collectively large enough to change a government.
This is the central argument of a forthcoming book by former Haryana DGP O P Singh.
In the book, ‘Fear Tax: When Caution Costs More Than Corruption’, Singh proposes a formula – ‘fear x rules x friction’ – to describe how the three variables interact.
Because the relationship is multiplicative, Singh argues, improving technology or digitising processes without reducing the fear inside the system does not reduce the cost to the citizen.
The 1992-batch IPS officer, who retired in 2025, illustrates ‘rational abdication’ through a case from his service days more than two decades back.
A wealthy businessman’s car ran over a roadside cobbler in Haryana. The officers who tried to summon the accused for questioning were transferred within months. The subsequent officers, thus, drew the rational conclusion – they put the file up, shifted it sideways, or added observations that documented their diligence while producing no outcome.
The cobbler’s wife, meanwhile, approached the police every day seeking insurance compensation. The money was locked behind a file that 15 officers had touched, but none had decided.
“The transfers of the earlier officers were the signal the system sent. Every officer who watched understood the signal. Put the file up. Shift it sideways. Do not be the person whose name is on it when it is completed. That is rational abdication,” Singh argues.
Singh, who was eventually assigned the case, says he chose to arrest the accused.
“The case was finalised. The victim’s wife received justice and the compensation they had been waiting for years,” he says.
The former top cop cited another incident from his service days to show how prompt action can make a difference.
Singh, who also served as Haryana’s sports director from 2008-12, says a coach named Naseem Ahmad walked into his office in 2011 and said he had boys from Panipat who wanted to throw the javelin.
“I said yes that afternoon and sanctioned Rs 1 lakh, which was within my sanctioning authority. One of those boys was Neeraj Chopra,” he says.
Chopra went on to clinch an Olympic gold at the Tokyo Games in 2021.
The book argues that the ‘fear tax’ operates at three escalating levels. At the first level, individual citizens absorb the cost in silence – in delay, complication, cost overruns, and unrealised potential.
At the second level, these individual costs accumulate across millions of citizens over a government’s term, producing the weariness that a democracy calls “anti-incumbency”.
“Anti-incumbency does not come without a cause. It is the ‘fear tax’ bill arriving at the ballot box. No government currently measures this variable. But every government eventually pays it,” Singh says.
Giving an example, Singh says a young woman wants to open a food processing unit. She has the savings, the plan, and the customers, but needs five licences from five government offices.
She estimates one month, but becomes operational in four and a half months. Nobody delays her deliberately or demands payment. The cost she pays appears in no government record. She pays the ‘fear tax’, Singh argues.
The former DGP frames institutional fear as a “negative externality” in the economic sense – a cost generated by the official and paid involuntarily by the citizen.
The book proposes five measurement instruments, collectively termed the ‘fear score’, to give governments an early warning system – the gap between what the government promises and what the citizen actually experiences; the referral ratio, or the proportion of decisions deferred rather than decided at each level; the rule age – how many regulations have outlived the crises that created them.
The remaining two are corrigibility – how quickly the system corrects its own errors – and the informal bypass rate, i.e., how many citizens have abandoned formal channels in favour of private alternatives.
Singh claims that a government tracking these five numbers quarterly would detect the accumulation of anti-incumbency before it reaches the ballot box.
To reduce the ‘fear score’, the book recommends three measures: deleting outdated rules that persist because no official has the incentive to remove them; protecting officers who make good-faith decisions that produce adverse outcomes so that deciding is no longer more dangerous than deferring; and treating non-delivery of results with the same seriousness as corruption.
“The officer who takes a bribe faces prosecution. The officer who lets a file sit for three years faces nothing. Until both costs are in the same ledger, the arithmetic will not change,” Singh argues.
