India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Ironically, where the bureaucracy was relatively independent (in places where the political leadership was either highly principled or weak), it tended toward autonomy and self-aggrandizement, serving its own interests, protecting its own powers, and resisting the growth of democratic politics and institutions; but where the bureaucracy was subject to the influence of politics and interference from politicians in its day-to-day work, it became corrupt and inconsistent, retreating into itself, seeking to avoid responsibility for fear of political reprisals, and placing the preferences of politicians above the dictates of policy’ or the regulations. Either way, the workings of Indian democracy did not prove a fertile breeding ground for bureaucratic efficiency or effectiveness. And at the lower levels of the bureaucracy, where posts were all too frequently filled at the behest of political patrons, the system engendered delays, nonperformance, petty bribe-taking, an obsession with routine, and inordinate amounts of paperwork and file-pushing to generate the impression of usefulness.

  Bureaucracy was not the only force upholding the status quo. Independent India inherited a hierarchical caste system from its forebears and an iniquitous class system from the British. The colonial rulers had preserved (and in some cases created) a secure aristocracy and squirearchy across the country, whether one already existed or not, and relied on these “traditional” (or invented) oligarchies to maintain order and stability. Nehru saw the hierarchical structure of rural relations as a major obstacle to progressive change. Nevertheless, he embarked on the “modernization” of India with great hone, in the knowledge that the Congress Party had emerged from the independence movement as an authoritative voice of the nation as well as its legitimate agent of self-criticism and change. Under Nehru, the Congress remained more a nationalist movement than a political party, embracing every ideological tendency and every religious, regional, class, or caste interest within it. If development and social justice were to come to India through democratic means, the Congress Party seemed to be the ideal tool to bring it about.

  The Congress Party’s proudest characteristic, however, and one that had sustained it throughout its heyday as a nationalist movement, was that, instead of a tightly knit, ideologically committed, political party, it was an eclectic agglomeration; my metaphor of choice would be not the “big tent” of American political cliché but rather a Hindu temple, housing many gods and goddesses, hearing many different rituals and chants. To continue to be an influential agent in Indian society it had to stay that way, building up and maintaining its structures of support across the various divisions of society, organizing to fight and win elections throughout the country. In the process, the intellectuals, social reformers, and idealists who formulated policies lost power within the party to the rural elites who could deliver the votes and the businessmen who could fill the campaign coffers. The party mobilized support for aims that the very exercise of mobilization helped defeat, because the acquisition of power required the party to rely on those whom the utilization of power might otherwise hurt.

  The process of democratic bargaining, compromise, and consensus-building inevitably slowed down the government. The need to “carry the party” resulted in concessions to the traditional elites and power brokers. The process was unavoidable and perhaps endemic to all democratic polities. As Myron Weiner explained, “In its efforts to win, Congress adapts itself to the local power structures. It recruits from among those who have local power and influence. It trains its cadres to perform political roles similar to those performed in the traditional society before there was party politics. It manipulates factional, caste, and linguistic disputes, and uses its influence within administration to win and maintain electoral and financial support.” As a result, as Francine Frankel demonstrated in the late 1960s, “The major beneficiaries of electoral democracy were the most prosperous sections of the dominant land-owning castes, individuals who could exploit a wide network of traditional caste, kinship, rank, and economic ties to organize a large personal following.” On the other hand, for many years the rate of politicization of low-caste members was very low. They did not act independently in making demands on the political system; rather, they related to the political process largely, if not exclusively, through the dominant caste leadership. The same pattern of hierarchical mobilization prevailed in the cities, where Congress leadership also came from the prominent figures in their own localities — merchants, contractors, and factory owners.

  Political reliance on the traditional structure of society for mobilization purposes introduced an extra dimension to the process: the organization of caste, community, and tribal associations to press for group interests within the political framework. American political scientists, who pioneered research into this development, waxed enthusiastic about it, for they saw these as equivalents of American interest-group politics. But critics of the Indian system alleged that they overestimated the beneficial effects of such forms of democratic participation on the lowest sections of society. For one thing, caste and other particularism placed intolerable strains on the distribution capabilities of the system, as demonstrated by the attempts of motley groups to get themselves classified as “backward” in order to qualify for various kinds of preferential treatment. For another, the successes of lower castes often benefited only the elites among them, the privileged among the underprivileged. And the challenges of national integration and economic development became more difficult as more and more caste associations entered the political arena solely to advocate their own narrow, parochial interests.

  Those problems were magnified when aggregated at the national level. “National integration,” the Hindustan Times editorialized before the Emergency, “is still a matter of debate and the very leaders who publicly condemn communalism, casteism, and regionalism are often seen to woo communal, caste and regional elements for personal and party gain. . . . Many of the problems which vitiate our national life are the product of party politics conducted at a very low level.” Expedient alliances between national parties and ethnic interest groups have led to situations in which nativist groups have been able to apply pressure on local authorities to restrict the migration of skilled labor to their areas and often to exclude or expel them altogether, even though what is thus politically expedient may not be economically beneficial to the area, the state, or the nation. Yet, before the Emergency, Mrs. Gandhi rationalized the Congress’s adherence to such counterproductive styles of functioning as unavoidable:

  In a country as large as ours, where pluralism is a basic fact of life, a political party has to be not only concerned with ideology but also with effective methods of harmonizing smaller and larger loyalties. Therefore, a national party in a country like India has an additional reason to aim at carrying with it as large a number of people as possible in every region.

  The irony is that Mrs. Gandhi had split the Congress Party in 1969 because she considered its organization an obstacle to reform; now her very success in attracting the bulk of the old Congress to her side guaranteed her failure. The very interests Congress sought to assimilate had been mobilized all too often for negative ends, that is, to preventing government from pursuing some course of action otherwise mandated by policy.

  Nor were the grassroots institutions of popular democracy built up; stress continued to be laid on the acquisition and maintenance of political power. By 1973 Mrs. Gandhi was forced to concede:

  I am afraid our performance is disappointing. The party continues to function in a rather flabby way. It devotes too much attention to elections at the cost of solid fieldwork which alone builds the party’s base. It lacks the apparatus which could enable it to do systematic work among young and rural people, industrial labor and other workers, women and the intelligentsia.

  She mentioned “industrial labor,” and this was no accident, for this was the one section of society that could be said to have benefited from the Indian ruling class’s rhetorical attachment to socialism. Trade unions organized a small percent
age of India’s workers, but they won them considerable benefits — better salaries, benefits, and living con ditions, coupled with fewer obligations to work hard or be productive, the bargain enforced by a startling willingness to go on strike at the drop of an ultimatum. This despite the fact that democratic India had, to borrow a metaphor from C. D. Deshmukh, to “achieve industrialization with its hands tied behind its back . . . whereas nearly all the Western countries completed their industrialization unencumbered by strict labor laws and often unhindered by considerations of international ethics.”

  Most of these charges were equally applicable to the political opposition, which failed to offer a more prepossessing alternative. In reacting similarly to the prevailing social forces, the Indian opposition revealed a remarkable tendency to imitate the Congress both in the issues it championed and in the manner in which it sought to construct its support. As the magnetic pull of nationalism faded, loyalty to the Congress as an institution declined, and politicians who had been (or could have been) Congressmen turned to the opposition to pursue their ambitions. This was not surprising: given a secure rural base, it rarely mattered to a politician which political party he belonged to; if his patron-client nexus was strong and he belonged to the right caste or social group, he could even run — and win — as an independent. Party affiliations then became a matter of convenience, and since, in general, the object of politics was not to overturn the old order but rather to gain entry into it, political defections from one party to another for political gain became astonishingly frequent. In the first twelve months after the 1967 general elections, there were as many as 438 defections in the state assemblies; one Haryana legislator, Gaya Ram, crossed the floor so many times in the expectation of office from one party or another that his name lent itself to a celebrated Hindi pun, Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram: “Ram came, Ram went.”

  So India’s political democracy, its critics argued, had nothing to do with performance, and everything to do with power. What about its watchdogs, the press? Freedom of the press had always been one of India’s proudest practices: the journalist Khushwant Singh even used the occasion of Montreal’s international Expo’ 67 to tell the world:

  We are free, our press is free. We speak our minds without having to look over our shoulders or having to lower our voices. I am emboldened to say that of the many countries of Asia and Africa which achieved freedom in the last twenty years, this is true only of one country, India.

  Despite being free, though, the print media (radio and, when it came, television were for a long time government monopolies) was a target of the left-wing critics of Indian democracy. Many “progressives” saw the press as a reactionary institution intimately linked to the “moneybags” of big business who owned the newspapers and journals that dominated public discourse among the educated classes. Their criticism of Mrs. Gandhis “socialist” actions and sympathy for opposition parties led them to be dubbed elitist and hostile to the masses.

  * * *

  “Much is written, even more spoken, every day about India’s politics and policies,” commented a former Indian diplomat toward the close of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s reign. “In Delhi, in particular, dons, area specialists, and others wax eloquent on these subjects. They participate in public seminars, give radio and television talks and interviews, and publish articles. Their zeal for educating the public and drawing attention to themselves is astonishing.” Even more astonishing, perhaps, is how little that zeal actually mattered. Intellectual activity in relation to Indian politics remained startlingly barren, seemingly unrelated to the empirical realities of Indian policy-making, and virtually unable to make the slightest dent in the armor of the political establishment. It was striking that, despite the prolific punditry, the only “abstract thinkers” whom our politicians bothered to consult were their astrologers.

  Our sociocultural heritage had only served to reaffirm the divorce between India’s intellectuals and her rulers. Indian intellectuals were heirs to one of the most elitist intellectual traditions of the world. The Brahmins of the post-Vedic era in India enjoyed exclusive intellectual distinction in principle, and the caste system confirmed their elitism in practice. To be an intellectual was to be a member of a caste of the learned, a caste that axiomatically desired nothing other than to be learned. Kings and warriors enjoyed temporal power, but they bowed before their gurus, who did not: intellectual distinction was thus an end in itself, and the Brahmins prided themselves on being above politics. In ancient India, this was no problem, because they were still eagerly sought out for their wisdom, and being above politics did not prevent them from giving sage political advice, which was almost invariably heeded. Increasingly, however, this Brahminical elitism became a hallmark of all Indian intellectualism. The search for knowledge, and in turn the entire realm of ideas, was detached from the everyday concerns of the rest of society. Over the years — from the earliest simple divisions between the Brahmins (as the intellectual and priestly caste) and the Kshatriyas (as the warrior and ruling caste), to the gulf that separates the twentieth-century academic from the politician — intellectuals abandoned worldly affairs to those qualified to act rather than to analyze.

  In modern India, too, intellectuals remained aloof from the quotidian concerns of governmental policy, but this distance no longer reflected a Brahminical superiority. Instead, intellectuals were a deprived breed, shorn of that which made their elitist forebears respected — influence over the wielders of power. Power was in the hands of the state, and as the institutions of the state had grown in importance in independent India, an increasingly populist politics and a career bureaucracy had taken over the symbols of state authority. The spread of education had ended the Brahminical monopoly on intellectualism, but learning was now a means to an end, and the end that mattered was power. Anyone could be an intellectual, but only a few could exercise real authority. The intellectual had correspondingly been reduced to irrelevance. In the new formulation, those who could, did; those who could not, theorized.

  The value preferences of middle-class India inevitably reflected those norms. “Society” had come to accord more respect (measured by any yardstick, including that of the price commanded in the marriage market) to the most junior Administrative Service officer — or, indeed, to the customs or tax official — than it did the most qualified academic or journalist. Intellectuals, therefore, formed a segment of the educated class from which spring the country’s rulers, but they were not members of what Gaetano Mosca would have called the “ruling class.” Many intellectuals had come to regret this. In independent India they sat in judgment all too frequently on those whose seats they would gladly have occupied, had they been given the opportunity. Far from advising kings or even constituting a jury of peers in a people’s court on governmental performance, intellectuals were — as the subjects of their prescriptions realized — by and large passing verdicts on their betters. Sentenced to a lower social status, his livelihood often subsidized by government grants, the Indian intellectual was a poor relative of the Indian bureaucrat, and he knew it.

  Indian intellectuals, torn between the pull of an ancient tradition and the attractions of the modern world, schooled in Western ideas but conscious that those ideas to some degree obliged them to commit cultural and spiritual matricide, already felt they were one step removed from the rest of their countrymen. Worse, by their very acquisition of the attributes of intellectualism, they had lost the direct mass contact that alone would have enabled them to influence either rulers or ruled. For many, their status as intellectuals symbolized privilege, and made them acutely conscious of their distance from the concerns of the masses — as well as vulnerable to attack because of this distance.

  Nor did Indian intellectuals have any other support base. Their audience was limited by language, literacy, communications problems,’ socioeconomic factors, and a simple shortage of resources, which severely reduced the numbers of those with the time, the inclination, or the learning to suppo
rt intellectual life. Even today, in a country with a literate population of 400 million, a book that sells four thousand copies is already a best-seller. The only exception is textbooks, but textbooks have to be government-approved, and non-textbooks hardly sell. Not surprisingly, therefore, intellectuals had not developed a significant audience among the general public. Such a situation both resulted in and perpetuated a tragic paucity of sophisticated literature on political ideas. The sheer struggle for economic survival, even among the educated middle economic class, had underscored the low priority of book-reading in Indian culture. Indian intellectuals therefore had no constituency but themselves. No wonder they apologetically accused themselves of being “out of touch with the people.”

  What was the outcome of this self-conscious divorce from the masses? In many cases, reflexive guilt drove intellectuals to mortgage themselves to the most visible self-proclaimed representative of the masses — the government. To some, support of the government’s socialist goals appeared to elitist intellectuals as a low-risk gambit to salve their consciences on the cheap. Abject conformism followed, masquerading as “commitment” to a more progressive society. Those who thought they were sitting in an ivory tower felt they had no right to challenge the premises of those who claimed to be toiling in the slums.

  In this climate the elite public opinion represented by Indian intellectuals often bore little relation to analyses of reality, and even less to prospects for action. While opinions were expressed, it was usually without expectation that policy change would result. As the onetime U.S. ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, dryly recalled: “I had been long in Delhi before I realized how urgent could be the discussion of economic planning, village development, schemes for health and educational betterment, development of village crafts and, of course, family planning, and how slight would be the consequences.”