So by 1975 there was a lively debate, but no consensus, on whether democracy actually helped or hindered development. At any rate, Mrs. Gandhi’s suspension of the most cherished freedoms of Indian democracy occurred at a time when critics were already asking, What was the point of India’s democracy if it couldn’t adequately feed, clothe, and shelter Indians?
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At the same time, some posed the argument differently. India, they said, was not really democratic; “the lofty spirit of the Constitution,” as The New Yorker put it, “has touched mostly [those] who have the literacy and the economic means to avail themselves of the letter of the Constitution.” India’s Constitution was, in many ways, an ideal constitution — certainly it was the world’s longest and most comprehensive — and in many ways it was an idealistic one, conferring rights and freedoms born of high principle, so much so that Britain’s most famous constitutional expert, Sir Ivor Jennings, declared that it “is impregnated with the idea that law and government are dangerous and ought to be kept in concentration camps.” Certainly it was arguable whether such a magnificently democratic document, despite being prefaced by its socialistic “directive principles of state policy,” could facilitate the kind of effective governmental action a developing country of India’s magni tude needed. Sir Ivor believed it would “benefit only the country’s largest industry — litigation.” By the time of the Emergency, Indians who prided themselves on their democratic political system had operated their Constitution for thirty-six years, but found it necessary, when its provisions seemed inconvenient, to amend it no fewer than forty-one times.
The leading Indian constitutional lawyer Nani Palkhivala identified the nine essential features he believed made up the “basic structure of the Constitution”: the sovereignty of India; the integrity of the country; the republican form of government; the “democratic way of life” as distinct from “mere adult franchise” (in other words, the existence of fundamental rights, such as due process, judicial redress, and others that you need lawyers to help you exercise); no state religion; a free and independent judiciary; the dual structure of the Union and the states; and the maintenance of a balance among the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. The Indian political system based on this Constitution was, accordingly, a product of the liberal tradition of Locke and Mill, the Fabian socialism of the London School of Economics, the checks and balances of Jefferson and Madison, and the pluralist theolatry of Hindu culture, overlaid with a desire on the part of the founding fathers to enjoy fully the political rights of Englishmen, which the Englishmen had for so long denied them.
During the Emergency, the government sought to institutionalize changes in an altered Constitution incorporating the basic elements of the new order. Law Minister H. R. Gokhale argued that the Constitution was “not only a legal document, [but] a political and social document. It must reflect the aspirations and wishes of the people and it must be an effective instrument for carrying out those changes which are necessary for effecting a socio-economic revolution.” The Constitution’s earlier preoccupation with liberty and fundamental rights thus needed to be replaced with a concern for social equity and “fundamental duties.” The “statement of objects and reasons” appended to the Forty-second Amendment explained that democratic institutions “have been subjected to considerable stresses and strains and that vested interests have been trying to promote their selfish ends to the great detriment of the public good.” One clause sought “to spell out expressly the high ideals of socialism, secularism and the integrity of the nation to make the directive principles more comprehensive and give them precedence over those fundamental rights which have been allowed to be relied upon to frustrate socio-economic reforms for implementing the directive principles.” Another raised the number of judges required to invalidate legislation in order “to strengthen the presumption in favor of the constitutionality of legislation.” The entire thrust of the constitutional changes was ostensibly to facilitate the attainment of socioeconomic progress, which had hitherto, it was implied, been thwarted by the existence of a flourishing democracy.
How had democracy prevented economic development and social justice? One answer lay in the highly developed protections of the Constitution, and another in the federal structure, which granted substantial powers to the states, especially in the crucial fields of education, agrarian reform, and land revenue. Frequent fears of subnational particularism, and occasional fears of Balkanization, were expressed in the early years of independence (a 1964 survey found that only 8 percent of the people showed “nationally oriented loyalties”). The main political threat from the states, however, lay in the risk of their obliging the subordination of national interests, plans, and goals to state problems and desires, a process that began with the election campaigns in which “national” parties had to respond to state-specific concerns. Victorious Congress governments themselves made difficult demands on the central government, not infrequently in contradiction of declared national policies or plans. Mrs. Gandhi claimed, “I don’t really have a lot of power because in every state the chief minister has much more power than I have. I cannot do anything in a state. All I can do is to try to persuade the chief minister or the others. . . . But all the work, or whatever decisions, are his or hers.”
This was a somewhat self-serving assertion, but when opposition governments were in power in the states, there was no doubt that difficulties had arisen with the Center. One prime area of state influence was in the allocation of national resources; states lobbied for favored treatment from the government, and obtained it even when such treatment was not justified on objective economic grounds. State governments also tended to be more profligate than the Center in embracing deficit budgets to buy popular support; in taking actions that aggravated the national food distribution problem by restricting grain trading in their state; and in seeking to increase the number of development projects in their own state while simultaneously minimizing the taxes they would levy within the state.
The requirements of political responsiveness were, the argument went on, not always in tune with the requirements of economic progress: thus, increasing direct taxes on agriculture, extension of cooperative farming, enforcement of land reform, and other types of agrarian change became politically, and therefore practically, unfeasible. Politicians who demand sacrifices don’t usually win elections, but those who make rash promises that will bankrupt their successors are warmly remembered for their own tenures. As Marxist economists argued, the Indian ruling class’s mass base was in conflict with its class interest; they were spouting socialist rhetoric but discovering that you can’t have democracy and preserve your privileges at the same time. The result was deadlock, with slow and uneven growth that was simply insufficient to eradicate poverty or even reduce unemployment.
In his now classic Asian Drama, Gunnar Myrdal wrote that “the combination of radicalism in principle and conservatism in practice, the signs of which were already apparent in the Congress before independence, was quickly woven into the fabric of Indian politics. Social legislation pointed the direction in which society should travel, but left the pace indeterminate. Many of these laws were intentionally permissive.” Others were passed, at the behest of Nehru and other idealists, by politicians who had no intention of implementing them. There was a schizophrenia at the heart of the system: the ruling party was attempting to transcend the limitations of its own support in order to achieve ends that negatively affected the interests of many of its own backers, and to attain this objective through the democratic means of pluralist bargaining. There were, undoubtedly, conflicts inherent in such an enterprise. And, some critics suggested, some cynicism as well; in Barrington Moore’s words:
Some students of Indian affairs have expressed surprise that India’s small Western-educated elite has remained faithful to the democratic idea when they could so easily overthrow it. But why would they wish to overthrow it? Does not democracy provide a rationalization for
their failure to overhaul, on any massive scale, a social structure that maintains their privileges?
Perhaps democracy was a rationalization (though subsequent social change has undermined Moore’s argument). But it was true that democracy did not favor swift change; one had to bring the various political forces along, and one might be dependent for votes on those most resistant to change. Where economic growth was possible as a result of governmental action, local elites utilized their hold on the machinery of state government to preserve most of the gains for themselves, so that economic development in the first decades of independence ended up, in effect, promoting social injustice. India’s socialist-inspired Five-Year Plans rarely benefited the poor directly. The urban-rural dichotomy meant that farmers sought more for their produce while city-dwellers demanded affordable food; the government needed both agrarian political support and urban political tranquillity. The result, again, was compromise, temporizing, half-measures: agricultural subsidies in the countryside, cheap food distributed at ration shops in the cities, no possibility of focusing agricultural production toward economic growth.
And then there was the nature of Indian democracy itself: freewheeling, user-friendly, but completely divorced from anything resembling a performance orientation. Just three months before the Emergency was proclaimed, The New York Times’s correspondent Bernard Weinraub reported in the The Atlantic Monthly:
In the troubled state of Bihar, in the midst of demonstrations and violence, Indian and foreign journalists drop into the office of the chief minister without appointments and are offered sweet, milky tea and some gossip. It may be an innocent, chaotic, and unproductive way of running a government, but it is also zealously democratic.
Mrs. Gandhi’s supporters could, and did, point precisely to that sort of practice as typifying all that was wrong with the way the country was being run: better give up the innocence and the chaos, they said, in the interests of being a little more productive. Weinraub himself had been careless enough to write, in the same article, that “India’s sad and ironic fate is that the brutality and repressive discipline that dictated development in China and the Soviet Union are wholly impossible in this democracy.” Within three months, “impossible” would seem a hollow word indeed.
The formal processes of democracy were eloquently attacked by the Emergency’s advocates. Many a weary Indian bureaucrat or governmental leader argued that most political criticism seemed to fail to understand governmental problems as real challenges that needed to be solved. All too frequently it was criticism unaccompanied by clear or workable prescriptions for feasible implementation. After one parliamentary debate, even Nehru declared memorably:
There has been criticism of our policy. But we have waited in vain these two days for one concrete suggestion. . . . Brave words? Yes; forensic eloquence? Yes; melodrama? Yes; but no concrete suggestion.
During the crises with Pakistan that led to war in 1965, the opposition’s badgering of the cautious Shastri had led one commentator to note that it had yet to discern the difference between being a watchdog and a bloodhound. There was undoubtedly some merit in the government’s charge that opposition was very frequently conducted for its own sake, and that negativism was a major feature of its approach. As Mrs. Gandhi told the opposition in 1976:
When we used to meet [in Parliament House] before the draft outline of the [Five-Year] Plan was ready, we were told: “Why have you called us? What is there to discuss when the government had not made up its mind?” All right, then we draw up the draft outline and call them. We were asked: “Why have you called us? The draft outline is ready. What can we do now?” We have been through many such episodes.
Objective commentators did not find the charges too far exaggerated. “Some of the opposition parties,” wrote one independent editor, “seem to have been more interested in creating scenes and getting publicity in the press rather than [in] contribut[ing] to informed discussion on vital issues.” Another recalled:
That Parliamentary democracy is government by discussion was forgotten and invective and shouting often took the place of argument and reasoning. Parliamentary privilege was repeatedly and wantonly abused.
Mrs. Gandhi said she found “the abuse, the shouting, the threats, the intimidation” a “constant feature” of parliamentary life, with the opposition’s “obstructive defeatism” going so far as to make cooperation impossible.
The opposition’s frustration was at least partially a function of its own fragmentation, which to some degree conditioned its ineffectiveness. Mrs. Gandhi noted that the opposition groups “ridicule[d] and contradict[ed] each other” and that consultations would continue to be bogged down in procedural trivialities unless they resolved their differences. Until then, she implied, she could hardly take their opposition seriously:
In a motion of no-confidence [in the.government] . . . we look for some alternative policy. . . . But when we find not one alternative policy but as many alternative policies as there are parties and sometimes as there are members in the same party, then I very humbly submit that there is not much sense in such no-confidence motions.
All too frequently the divided opposition, unable to make headway, manifested its frustration through frequent walkouts.
In such a climate, and given the overwhelming need to overcome poverty, disease, and suffering, many wondered whether a democratic multiparty system could play anything other than a diversionary or obstructive role. One leading Indian politician, the Socialist Asoka Mehta, in the early 1960s articulated the view that the opposition’s role should be “corrective” rather than competitive, but he carried that position to its logical extreme by joining the ruling party. Frequently in developing countries, opposition itself was seen as an illegitimate activity; as Lucian Pye explained, “The broad and diffuse interests of the ruling elites make it easy for them to maintain that they represent the interests of the entire nation. Those seeking power are thus often placed in the position of appearing to be, at best, obstructionists of progress and, at worst, enemies of the country. . . . This situation is important in explaining the failure of responsible opposition parties to develop.”
Irresponsibility had indeed become a characteristic of politics in India. Students, labor unions, and political parties raised the politics of protest to the status of a new art form. There were demonstrations; strikes; fasts, often “unto death”; bandhs, or general strikes; gheraos, or virtual imprisonment of authorities by picketing their offices and prohibiting their exit; dharnas, or agitations at the premises of the institution being protested. Despite the havoc they often wreaked, these practices were resorted to by politicians of all ideological hues, and were even defended by government ministers as exercises in public education. Yet extrasystemic pressure like this, when freely resorted to, can become a serious threat to the system, imposing strains on the polity that often paralyze its ability to act in other arenas of public importance. Thus, when the “JP movement” for “Total Revolution” reached its peak in 1974-75, budgetary allocations for the police had to be doubled, major governmental and educational institutions in Bihar were either closed or guarded at considerable expense, and journalists speculated that “the country is being forced . . . away from democracy.” When the Emergency was declared, all Mrs. Gandhi needed to do was to point an accusing finger at the chaos of Indian politics to justify its imposition.
What about that part of the polity least vulnerable, at least in theory, to the limitations of democracy — the Indian bureaucracy? The Indian political system, it has been said, is characterized by centralized policy-making and decentralized policy administration. The importance of the bureaucracy, therefore, as the actor effecting the implementation of developmental policy, was considerable. I incurred much good-humored wrath some years ago by describing bureaucracy as simultaneously the highest of Indian art forms and the most crippling of Indian diseases. Evolved over centuries, under successive empires, Indian administration is usually precise, rule-bo
und, laborious, and slow; it has also been accused of being “an autocratic Anglo-Brahmin structure created to run a static economy,” whose bias “in allocating favors is always inegalitarian and conservative.”
“Politics,” Woodrow Wilson wrote, “sets the tasks for administration.” It also creates some of administrations greatest problems. Independent India soon discovered that structures established during an imperial and then a colonial past, when governments were expected to rule rather than to respond to public demands, were not easy to transform into agents of popular democracy. The attempts to inject some degree of responsiveness into the system created complications both when they failed and when they succeeded. Since administrative systems were far more developed than political ones, the latter were ill-equipped either to determine the appropriate goals of administration or to maintain the integrity of the administrative system. When democratic demands that the bureaucracy be responsive to popular political currents were implemented, however, Indians found their administration becoming “politicized” — so that rural economic elites used their political power to modify governmental policy by trying to influence its implementation by the administration. With the growing strength of the democratically elected politician, especially in regard to appointments and transfers — the strongest levers over a bureaucrat — politi cization became, to the higher levels of administration, what corruption was to the lower.
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