India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Yes, Indian intellectuals discussed policies, intensely and avidly. But they learned, like the British about their weather, not to expect anything to be done about it. Discussion was an art form in India, an egocentric ritual of simulated conviction or, at best, a secondhand expression of conscience. Its vitality was attenuated by its own irrelevance.

  Thus the terrain of the intellectual had been cheerfully abandoned by the politician. The intellectual dealt with ideas, principles, analyses; the politician thought of power, and chose his party only as a means to it. Indian politicians changed parties the way a filmi dancer changed skirts, as often as it was expedient and as long as it appealed. The rhetoric did not change, since the party label reflected nothing more than opportunism. Who needed an intellectual articulating convictions when the only conviction a politician needed was in himself?

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  The irrelevance of the Indian intellectual was felt most keenly in that bastion of the educated, the Indian press. Khushwant Singh, when he was the editor of India’s then-largest-circulation magazine, the Illustrated Weekly of India, confessed freely that “we have made little or no impact on the villagers. And in return the village has very little impact on us. We view it as a quaint, backward otherworld, peopled by noble savages and dusky, full-bosomed (preferably bare-bosomed) lasses.”

  But the problem of relevance ran rather deeper. For a long time until the collapse of the Emergency broke their psychological shackles, Indian journalists had had every incentive to conform, and neither the resources nor the social sanction to acquire the authority that came from specialization. The vocation became a respectable kind of clerkship; the journalists’ financial worries, their lack of research and travel facilities, the absence of a tradition of social inquiry, their fear of the consequences of governmental displeasure, and their own low social status in relation to those they sought to analyze combined to create a deskbound journalism that filled the news columns with undigested handouts and the editorial sections with strongly expressed but impotent comment. “The national habit of issuing statements at the slightest provocation,” one editor had noted before independence, “has stifled journalism.” In the first thirty years after independence the problem only got worse, and the scope of the statements only became narrower. “You get the impression,” an English editor remarked, “that the entire nation has spent the previous day doing nothing else but exhorting each other, preparing votes of thanks to each other, or giving seminars for each other.”

  V. S. Naipaul wrote of how struck he was by the “limited vision” and “absence of inquiry” of Indian journalism; apart from the editorial pages, “there were mainly communiqués, handouts, reports of speeches and functions.” Indian journalism, in his view, “matched the triviality [sic] of the politics; it . . . reported speeches and more speeches; it reduced India to its various legislative chambers.”

  Yet one of the first victims of the Emergency was the Indian press, whose role in helping create an atmosphere of freewheeling political anarchy was cited by the government as the reason for the introduction of severe censorship restrictions. The deputy minister for information and broadcasting declared in 1976 that “any distortion in the role of the mass media would result in grave imbalances that a developing society cannot afford. . . . What we, therefore, need in Indian journalism today is a spirit of inquiry rather than the luxury of opinions.” What the minister, Dharam Bir Sinha, did not say was that opinions in consonance with the government’s would not be considered a luxury. His prime minister, Mrs. Gandhi, was in no doubt about her relief at not having to wake up and read attacks on her actions in print, attacks that gave aid and comfort to her political enemies. When she locked up Jayaprakash Narayan and his fellow agitators and simultaneously silenced the press, she said, the nation gained doubly: “There was no agitation. The agitation was in the pages of the newspapers.” Sinha argued, more sophistically, that freedom of the press had meaning only if it also worked to ensure justice to the masses. How could a government focus on the progress and well-being of its people, Indira’s acolytes asked, if it was constantly being sniped at and undermined in the national media?

  If the press was targeted as an instance of democracy’s incompatibility with development, so, somewhat more surprisingly, were the basic rites of democracy itself, the process of elections. Since the proclamation of Emergency was soon followed by the postponement of the scheduled 1976 elections, Congressmen were quick to assert that voting alone did not constitute a democracy. Mrs. Gandhi, defending the postponement of elections, went so far as to say that “there had been more elections than necessary” in India, and that the violence and disruption that had accompanied them had severely threatened the very survival of the polity. “If the government was convinced elections would result in mass violence, hinder development activities and threaten the integrity of the nation,” Mrs. Gandhi declared, “it could not stick to the ritual.”

  Under the provisions of the Forty-second Amendment to the Constitution, the powers of the independent judiciary were also curbed, with the specific intention of not affording judges the opportunity to sacrifice socioeconomic legislation at the altar of individual rights. The Emergency, which brought to the fore the question of whether Indian democracy has been obstructive of the ends of social justice, answered at least part of that question by significantly reducing the courts’ capability for such obstruction.

  Part of the problem, to critics of the judiciary, lay in its evolution as a bulwark of Indian rights against the colonial transgressions of the British, a legacy that made it the least politicized institution in Indian public life, but also, therefore, the least committed to the socialistic goals of the government in power. As a result it was accused of having tended, through at least the first three decades of independence, to place the fundamental rights it was created to defend above the social needs of equitable economic development. Since the Constitution lists the right to property in Article 19 as one of the fundamental rights of the Indian citizen, and since Article 226 allows him to petition the courts for writs staying any official action in derogation of his fundamental rights “and for any other purpose,” the judiciary found itself the battleground for some of the stormiest encounters in Indian political history. Maharajahs turned to it in an effort to challenge the government’s abolition of their privy purses; businessmen sought constitutionally to overthrow the bank nationalization ordinance; and landlords attempted to stem the course of agrarian reform by taking the issue out of the fields and into the courthouse. In all these matters, the judiciary, by faithfully interpreting the letter of the Constitution — if not its intent, as embodied in the non-justiciable directive principles of state policy — had upheld individual rights above those of the state. Not until the Constitution was amended on several occasions, to circumvent judicial reservations, did the courts acquiesce in many pieces of legislation meant to promote social justice and economic development.

  The judiciary was thus blamed for in effect colluding with vested interests to thwart development and social justice. Take, for instance, the case of land reform. The issue was left to the states, where powerful landlord interests ensured that reforms either were not enacted or were implemented in ways that preserved the landlords’ power. The failings of the local bureaucracies and the reluctance of state authorities to enforce even legislation they had themselves passed constituted the first line of defense. Then came resort to the courts, the conventional practice being to obtain a judicial order staying implementation of land ceilings on one’s property in order to use the time thus made available to divide up the property among family and retainers, or simply to bribe a menial court employee to block indefinitely the case’s movement up the court calendar. If all else failed, landlords influenced the local record keepers or patwaris to falsify the books. The cautious operations of Indian democracy have also contributed to the problem: initial reform legislation provided for the landlord to retake untenanted land for his “person
al cultivation,” which led to mass evictions of tenant farmers, and to some sharecroppers “voluntarily” surrendering their legal rights to landlords in the hope of salvaging some relationship to the land, even as hired help. In fact, in West Bengal, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh the effect of the land reform legislation was initially to increase the numbers of landless laborers and sharecroppers.

  Scholars who studied the workings of land reform in India, from Wolf Ladejinksy to Hung-chao Tai, had been virtually unanimous in blaming the workings of democratic politics for its failures. According to Huntington and Nelson, “the evidence is overwhelming that land reform one of the most dramatic ways of enhancing both social equality and status level in rural society — is more likely to be introduced effectively by noncompetitive and nondemocratic governments . . ..If [political] participation has expanded [as it has in India] to the point where medium-sized landowners play an active role in politics, land reform becomes difficult or impossible. Parliaments are the enemy of land reform.” In the words of Ladejinsky, “The conclusion is inescapable: if the peasantry is to get what is promised, peaceful and democratically managed reforms are not going to fill the bill. Government coercion, whether practiced or clearly threatened, is virtually unavoidable.”

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  So what did the suspension of democracy achieve in India? Within a year of the imposition of the Emergency, there was a great deal of testimony attesting to what government propagandists called the “gains of the emergency.” As a graduate student in the United States, I culled the catalog of commentaries below almost at random:

  In India’s new political order, discipline has become the watchword, the theme of slogans proclaimed from the sides of buses, and of speeches by politicians. In the disciplined new India, the universities, which used to be regularly paralyzed by rioting, are now tranquil; the black market in many commodities has diminished, and the pools of illegal, undeclared capital are drying up. (The New York Times, November 8, 1976.)

  There are no bus hijackings; the students are busy studying and sitting for their examinations instead of intimidating the invigilators. . . . The supply of food is not disrupted by strikes and bandhs. . . . Food prices are down. (Far Eastern Economic Re-view, August 13, 1976.)

  Officials attend office on time, trains run on schedule, bus queues are orderly, some cities (like Delhi) have been cleaned up, there are no strikes or lockouts, no closing down of schools or colleges. Prices of essential things, including food, have come down. (Khushwant Singh, The Illustrated Weekly of India, January 25-31, 1976.)

  Industrial production rose by a record 10.5 percent in the first four months of this year and the pace is being maintained. Man days lost from strikes, now banned, dropped by 74 percent in the second half of last year — from 17.1 million to 4.6 million. In the first four months of this year they had further declined to 2.34 million. Transport bottlenecks were eliminated; power supply has risen 13 percent, industrial outputs have in creased. . . . Even her left-wing critics acknowledge that much more land has been distributed and many more feudal ties on landless labor broken in the twelve months since the twenty-point program was announced than in all the years before. The Emergency has been used to short-circuit approaches to the courts by recalcitrant landlords intent on frustrating the program. (Far Eastern Economic Review, August 13, 1976.)

  Developing a country under democracy, one wise old saw went, is like trying to play poker without bluffing. The Emergency attempted to demonstrate that the game is best played with a stacked deck; yet, to stretch the metaphor, the cards had been on the table a long time. For years Indians had worried that politics served merely the interests of the politicians, that democracy had become an end in itself, unrelated to the welfare of the masses, that responsible governmental action Was constantly being impeded by politically responsive short-termism.

  Even the successes of Indian political practice underscored these arguments. For, even as democracy politicized vast sections of Indian society to a remarkable extent, it led to political activities by persons often ill-prepared by education or orientation to exercise functions of public trust. And democracy also led to such activities being carried out for ends that were widely seen as destructive of the larger goals of the society and the state. Many worried that the primary function of Indian democracy had become to accommodate demands rather than to program and administer social progress. The result was a system of equilibrium that appeared more conducive to stability than to real change. As the strains on the polity increased, however, and demands began to be voiced in the streets and on factory floors rather than in Parliament or the press, even this stability was called into question. The “JP movement” brought this weakness to the fore by exploiting popular discontent in the form of mass protest agitations; responding to the movement politically paralyzed the administration and obstructed the fulfillment of its developmental goals. To sympathizers of the Emergency, not all cynics, the issue became quite plainly whether the democratic freedoms to dissent and organize opposition were more important than the government’s need to mobilize the society toward greater socioeconomic justice. The Gandhian sage Acharya Vinoba Bhave, for instance, willingly legitimized the new order by declaring that obedience and order were the social imperatives.

  So, during the Emergency, with normal democratic processes suspended, Sanjay Gandhi, dubbed by his critics the “Extra-Constitutional Center of Power,” developed a reputation for efficiency based on his determination to cut through red tape and throw off the dead weight of tradition in order “to get the country moving.” He defended the postponement of elections as a duty to posterity: “There are greater things by which the country is judged. The future generation is going to want a strong economy.” That Sanjay expressed such views is not remarkable; what is remarkable, perhaps, is that he echoed theories given respectability in the past by Western scholars. Francine Frankel, an American, had written in 1969 that democracy was of dubious value in “an underdeveloped country where parochial values far outweigh national commitment, where economic conflict is superimposed on traditional regional, linguistic, and caste rivalries, where there is no firm consensus on acceptable rules of competition, and where economic surpluses are either static or growing much more slowly than are demands.” The British scholar Angus Maddison had argued that even Nehru “could not have achieved all his social aims without breaking up the system of parliamentary democracy,” and the sociologist Barrington Moore had theorized that “a strong element of coercion” was necessary before any effective change could come to India. Interestingly enough, most Western liberal analysts had consistently expressed their skepticism about the effectiveness of Indian democracy and linked it with the hope that the polity would not become so democratic as to challenge the Congress’s ability to provide strong governance. Thus The New York Times, in dispatches between 1969 and 1971, frequently noted that Mrs. Gandhi’s reduced power had forced her “to maneuver skillfully just to stay in office,” a position that left her with little of the “flexibility” required to achieve socioeconomic progress; and before the 1971 elections the Times published this remarkable endorsement:

  If Indira Gandhi and her moderately left-leaning New Congress Party can gain a working majority in Parliament, India will have one more chance to work out its staggering problems through the democratic processes of peaceful change. . . .

  An indecisive election result, leaving Mrs. Gandhi in power but subject to the pressures of coalition partners, would mean more of the current indecisive drift toward anarchy. It could strengthen-separatist tendencies.. .. [T]he democratic system can hardly survive unless this election produces a government capable of dealing more effectively with India’s unsolved problems.

  This argument could be carried a step further, and was, by Dom Moraes in the same paper:

  I would say there is no adequate replacement for Mrs. Gandhi as prime minister of the largest free nation in the world. She is the only politician in India with a thoroughly modern
mind. Democracy in the Western sense does not really work in India, and this is provable from the past: It is too large a land, with too many corrupt people in positions of power, and too many illiterate and uninformed people controlled by them. The ruthlessness, the autocracy, for which Mrs. Gandhi has been criticized seem to me, in the context of the country, essential to its prime minister. Without this ruthlessness, this autocratic touch, nothing would ever be done about anything in India.

  The reason these issues are worth revisiting more than two decades after the Emergency is that there are still voices in the country suggesting that freedom is less important than bread; that strong, even dictatorial, rule is the only way to achieve results in India; and that had it not been for the excesses of the family-planning program, which led to compulsory sterilizations and incited a mass electoral revolt across northern India, the experiment in autocracy would even have been vindicated at the polls.

  Mrs. Gandhi’s critics based their opposition to her abrogation of Indian democracy on essentially three grounds: first, that the Emergency was not really necessary and that it was proclaimed and then institutionalized for purely partisan purposes; second, that the abuses of authoritarianism far outweighed the failings of democracy; and, third, that the “gains of the Emergency” were either not as considerable as claimed or were ebbing away as the initial shock of its imposition wore off. Having given the advocates of autocracy a full hearing, let us review the counterarguments — and not just with hindsight: many of these points were made by Indians at the time.

  The charge of petty partisan politicking stuck to the Emergency from the start. The constitutional amendments came in for by far the strongest criticism in Indian intellectual circles at the time, former external affairs minister and Bombay judge M. C. Chagla insisting that the Constitution already provided for “a system of ordered liberty and not license, not liberty without any restraint or without any control.” (The Forty-second Amendment was repealed by the Janata government soon after Mrs. Gandhi’s defeat.) Mrs. Gandhi’s arguments that democracy was impeding social justice were dismissed on the grounds that her large parliamentary majority provided her the opportunity to effect any changes she wanted to, without proclaiming an Emergency for the purpose. The real target was opposition of any sort, not merely of the disruptive kind; the partisan statements of many Congressmen — notably Congress Party president D. K. Borooah’s fatuous assertion that “the country can do without the Opposition; they are irrelevant to the history of India” and Sanjay Gandhi’s declaration that “the future of the Congress is the future of India” — led to speculation that the amendment prohibiting “antinational activities” might be used to ban opposition political parties. (It was not, but the Emergency was clearly not a good time to contemplate a career as an opposition politician in India. The two opposition governments in office at the time were soon dismissed. Two decades later, in May 1996, fourteen of India’s twenty-six states had governments run by parties other than the country’s then ruling party, the Congress.)