Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (11 page)

The failures of Indian federalism are most clearly manifested in the insurgencies in Punjab, Kashmir, Assam, Nagaland, and Mizoram. It should be noted, however, that other than Punjab, these were not parts of India that the freedom movement, with its organizations, deeply penetrated—either because British rules did not allow that, or because the areas in question were considered far from the principal theaters of political activity. Punjab in the 1980s was the greatest shock to the history of Indian federalism, but it is also clear that Delhi had badly handled the politics of the state. The failure in Punjab was an example not of the inadequacy of the basic federal principles but of the attempt by Delhi to centralize power. Indira Gandhi nurtured the argument that India’s national unity required weaker states and a stronger center. She also practiced it by repeatedly suspending state governments run by political parties opposed to her. Suspension of state governments, according to the Constitution, was to be an exceptional, not a routine, occurrence.

What of the future? At this stage in the evolution of Indian polity, language as the basis for further state making has more or less exhausted its potential. All major language groups already have states of their own. The next round of state making is likely to be driven by the principle that smaller states are more governable, or they allow better developmental care of all parts of the state. Uttar Pradesh has close to two hundred million people. It would be the fifth-largest nation in the world by population if it were independent. Its breakup into four states is beginning to be discussed in political circles. Two other large states—Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh—might also be split on grounds that some of their subregions
end up getting neglected in decision-making and they economically suffer as a result. Governance and lack of development are more likely to be the principles of state making in the future.

It is sometimes suggested that the rise of a new middle class will allow India to transcend its various diversities—caste, language, and religion—and create a genuinely Pan-Indian consciousness. The recent protests against corruption and gender violence can be viewed as examples of this new consciousness. One might also cite the unifying influence of one of the most potent forces in India’s popular culture: the sport of cricket—or perhaps more precisely, cricket as played in the Indian Premier League. Consider Chennai, a southeastern city historically famous for its proud regional culture, where the Chennai Super Kings have since their inception been led by M. S. Dhoni, a cricketer from Jharkhand in the north, who has no knowledge of the Tamil language. Such a phenomenon would have been inconceivable as recently as the 1960s.

As India’s economy continues to grow and prosperity spreads, the number of those who believe their identity is “only Indian” may multiply. But the relationship between material prosperity and national identity is complex. In many parts of the world, rising prosperity has led to a continued assertion of regional identity. Think of Catalonia in Spain and Quebec in Canada. In India, Mumbai, the richest city for decades, has a long-established sons-of-the-soil movement led by the Shiv Sena, which was first opposed to south Indian migrants in the city, then to Muslims and, of late, to north Indians. A great deal of comparative scholarship suggests modernization has a two-headed character: Both greater uniformity and greater consciousness of diversity can be expected to rise.

What can be said is that regional diversity no longer poses an existential threat to India. The primary objective of India’s federal design was to weave a nation out of its many diverse parts and protect national integrity. In that, India’s federalism has largely succeeded.

Whether federalism, in turn, hurts or aids India’s economic development is an oft-debated question. Federalism’s defenders may point to recent history: India’s rapid growth since the early 1990s has coincided with a more federal polity, a time when the power of the states has undoubtedly
gone up. Moreover, under this more federal system, successful state-level policy experiments have been studied and widely adopted. India’s rural employment guarantee program was born in Maharashtra in the 1970s, and the midday meal program in Tamil Nadu in the 1980s. In recent times, too, a great deal of attention has been paid to some state-level developments: Gujarat’s progrowth policies, often associated with its Chinese-style economic performance; Bihar’s remarkable success in combating its perennial law-and-order problems. In a diverse polity, policy experiments can be a source of learning.

India’s polity seems certain to remain diverse for the foreseeable future. Its own experience so far does not support the argument that greater diversity leads to lesser development.

The experiences of other Asian countries underscore the wisdom of India’s decision to embrace diversity. In Indonesia, the third-largest Asian country, decentralization of governmental authority was extensively discussed after the fall of Suharto in 1998. But the anxiety that powerful provinces could pave the way for secession triumphed. On the whole, districts have been given a great deal of resources and effective power, not the provinces. It is perhaps too early to judge whether this was a good move, but there are many reasons for doubt.

In South Asia, Sri Lanka and Pakistan’s approaches to nationhood differed significantly from India’s—in each case with disastrous consequences. In Sri Lanka, Tamils essentially wanted a federal polity, with a province of their own, right until the mid-1970s. When Colombo did not concede, the result was a bloody civil war that dragged on for a quarter century. In contrast, India’s Tamil Nadu, in great ferment against Delhi till the late 1960s, increasingly became an integral part of Indian polity, as its diversity was recognized and the state became a major political player at the federal center.

Pakistan’s attempt to impose Urdu on a Bengali-speaking East Pakistan,
among other things, led to secession in 1971–1972 and contributed to the creation of Bangladesh. Post-1972, Pakistan has fluctuated between a regionally sensitive polity and a Punjab-dominated polity. No clear conception about how to embrace diversities has emerged.

On the whole, it will be hard to argue in the twenty-first century that erasure of diversity is a way to build national strength or unity. Norms about respecting diversity have changed, and violence against minorities is also watched more closely in the international system. Both on normative and pragmatic grounds, how to accommodate diversities has become an important political project. India was lucky to have had leaders who saw this more clearly than in most postcolonial countries.

Patrick French

Patrick French is the author of
India: A Portrait
and
The World Is What It Is,
the National Book Critics Circle award-winning biography of author V. S. Naipaul
.

India was the first country to give large numbers of illiterate people the vote. The chief election commissioner at the general election of 1952, Sukumar Sen, thought it was “the biggest experiment in democracy in human history.” Many commentators at the time, from different parts of the political spectrum, believed it to be a grave mistake. If voters were unable to read and write, could they not easily be duped by false information? Would it not be safer to have a tough and autocratic leader who could introduce democracy when India was ready?

The author of the Constitution, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, had no doubt that the mass consent of the governed was essential if India was to progress. At the same time, if democracy was to function, it was vital to abandon the Gandhian methods that had given voice to millions in the freedom movement—“civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha [soul force]. . . . These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.” Only if they had the right to vote and to change the government, he believed, would the most disadvantaged Indians stand a chance of destroying the caste system and altering their fixed social position.

Anyone who has witnessed an Indian election at ground level knows that illiteracy is no bar to understanding what a candidate is offering. In fact, it sometimes seems that those who lack education are especially
able to grasp the potential advantages on offer. If a candidate for the state legislative assembly offers to build a road to your village, or to double the amount of time each day that electricity is supplied, the trade-off is very clear: You vote, and you gain a benefit.

Indian electors also have shown an extraordinary knack for ejecting incumbent politicians who do not deliver on their promises. Voter turnout in many districts is often as high as 80–90 percent, whereas in U.S. presidential elections, for example, it rarely rises much above 50 percent. Any conceptual study of democracy as a system of creating a nation’s government must look at the Indian example, which through the later twentieth century influenced other Asian and African countries that were shifting out of the colonial mode. Today, the administration of elections in India is, for the most part, unexpectedly efficient.

Democracy has brought India numerous intangible benefits. It has a vociferous free press, a sense of national self-belief, and a degree of intellectual freedom that is missing in most of its neighbors. Many Indians believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have a stake in how their country should be governed, and they have no hesitation in expressing their opinions.

The problem in Indian politics is not that the leaders are unelected: It is that once they are elected, they are unaccountable until the next cycle of voting. Democracy functions, but governance does not.

Increasingly, representative democracy has failed to solve the ever more vociferous popular demand for good administration. As people’s economic fortunes have improved, their expectations have risen. Anger over the way the system locks out the overwhelming majority of Indians from parliament and the institutions of national politics is growing. It has shown itself in the anticorruption movement started by the elderly ascetic Anna Hazare, in the intense interest in his former lieutenant Arvind Kejriwal’s new Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party, in the probably forlorn belief that a “strong” new national leader like Gujarat’s chief
minister Narendra Modi might somehow upend the ossified system. That anger also is reflected in the Maoist uprising in parts of eastern and central India. Both phenomena manifest a loss of faith in the alternatives to what Ambedkar called “the Grammar of Anarchy.”

Even while cherishing the right to vote and to speak freely, Indians feel betrayed by their political system. In many circumstances, the rule of law does not apply to politicians, and citizens know that if, for instance, they go to the police to file a complaint against a public figure, they may well face further harassment. In short, there is in India a lack of demonstrable fairness and justice: Although some prominent politicians recently have been arrested and prosecuted, crimes by the powerful and the well connected can quite blatantly go unpunished. In some states, politicians enter politics in the first place in order to protect themselves and their interests, despite having criminal convictions; they calculate that they can operate outside the law.

Until now, no major political party has been willing to challenge this anomaly, which started in earnest in the 1970s. Most Indian parliamentary constituencies have more than a million voters, and an election is inevitably costly. In the decades before and after independence, political parties, and in particular the Indian National Congress, were funded by businesses and industrial companies. In April 1969, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi banned companies from making corporate donations in a plainly partisan move designed to limit the expansion of the promarket Swatantra (Independent) Party. Since the state offers candidates no funding, “black money” from businesspeople hoping for a favor in the future is the only way candidates can finance their campaigns.

Although this system has been slightly updated, it remains impossible to run an election campaign without illicit funds. During the 2009 general election, a candidate seeking to win a parliamentary constituency was estimated to need $2 million to $3 million to have a fair chance of success; officially, each candidate was permitted to spend only $55,000. Some of this money would be needed to run the campaign,
but most would be given to local leaders who promised to deliver the votes of a particular caste or religious group that they claimed to be able to mobilize on election day. The rise of criminalization in some states, and of rich power brokers in others, has resulted in intraparty democracy largely disappearing. The well-entrenched political families who sit in parliament are served by this system; the handful of ambitious or idealistic individuals among them who attempt to alter it have little room to maneuver.

At a national level, that means politics has become ever more elitist and unrepresentative. The lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, has 545 members. Those who come from an established political dynasty already are, on average, nearly five times richer than those who have no nepotistic background in politics. MPs who come from hyperconnected political families—for example, those with a mother-in-law, an uncle, and a sibling in national or regional politics—are on average even richer than MPs who have entered parliament after a successful career in business. At present, two-thirds of India’s sitting MPs under the age of forty already have a near relative in politics. This was not the case a generation ago. Politics has become a family business, because that is the easiest way to make it work. As in so many spheres of Indian life, an amorphous and opaque “family” of relatives, associates, and employees controls each local political operation.

In other democracies, the children of a president or a prime minister often seek to join the political rat race, but the parties themselves are not controlled by individual families. The leadership of the Labour Party in Britain would be unlikely to appeal publicly and plaintively for Tony Blair’s offspring to take the reins of power for the good of the nation. In India, in Pakistan, and indeed in the Philippines, this is what happens. Benigno Aquino III, who became president in 2010, is the fourth successive generation of his family to hold paramount political power. In succession to his grandfather and his mother, the wealthy Bilawal Bhutto Zardari became cochairman of the Pakistan People’s Party after his mother’s assassination in 2007 (although at twenty-four he was too young to stand in the 2013 parliamentary elections). In India, Rahul
Gandhi is the most prominent national scion of dynastic politics, but his position is replicated right through the Congress and other parties.