India

by Shashi Tharoor

  The specific charges against the institutions of Indian democracy also did not stand up too well. The much-maligned judiciary, for in stance, was just beginning to strike the balance between defending rights and promoting change when the government drastically intervened with its Emergency. The Supreme Court’s decision in the 1974 Keshavananda Bharati case that the right to property was not part of the basic structure of the Constitution epitomized this change in attitude; and other “socioeconomic” legislation, from the Minimum Wages Act to the Contract Labor Abolition Act, had all been consistently upheld by the court. In industrial law, the rights of the employee had been supported over those of his employer; in other areas, the outlawing of discrimination and other social evils was supported by the courts, which also upheld quota-based affirmative-action policies. The entire trend of judicial behavior, one could argue, had tended toward affirming Parliament’s right to bring about social and economic justice through progressive legislation. Curbing the judiciary’s powers in the Emergency therefore proved both unnecessary and destructive. In the two decades since, the judiciary has taken its activism much further, converting itself into a far more effective agent of social change than Parliament or politicians.

  Many of the other charges against the workings of Indian democracy were not vindicated either by their suspension during the Emergency or by subsequent democratic experience. Far from proving to be the unenlightened fortresses of the retrograde, the states have, as discussed elsewhere in this book, brought democracy closer to the people. Politics in India has expanded its reach to the poorest levels of society, so that democracy has brought dramatic transformations to Indian society, empowering the lower and “backward” classes as well as the former Untouchables (the Dalits). Equally important, the changes wrought through the democratic process have found greater acceptance, and are therefore assured of greater durability, than those imposed by fiat from New Delhi. Studies have shown, for instance, that the much-publicized abolition of bonded labor during the Emergency actually worsened the condition of bonded laborers. And, as Amartya Sen has pointed out, democracies are better at preventing famine than dictatorships.

  Rulers are best condemned out of their own mouths. “The purpose of democracy,” Mrs. Gandhi once declared, “is to involve more and more people in policy-making.” Ironically, India became less and less democratic by Mrs. Gandhi’s own criterion as the years wore on, till the authoritarian tendencies in her approach reduced policy-making to the decisions of an individual and a handful of her advisers.

  The abuses of the Emergency far outweighed what little good it did. Minister Gokhale argued, logically enough, that “if the power is required by the authority for the good of the people, the possibility of abuse should not be used as an argument for denying such power to the authority concerned” — yet when the exclusive arbiter of “the good of the people” was precisely the authority seeking such power, abuse was always a distinct possibility. Most of the atrocities committed at the time had little to do with social justice: the mandatory resettlement of Delhi slum-dwellers in a cruel exercise in heartless cosmetology; forced sterilizations by officials anxious to meet targets for fear of losing their jobs; the lack of accountability of the bureaucracy and the police to the public or the courts; the harsh treatment of labor by businessmen certain that the government valued production more than it did wage demands (strikes were banned under the Emergency, but lockouts were not); the misuse of detention powers by vengeful and corrupt policemen; and the loss of judicial redress for arbitrary imprisonment. Even if these improved an economic indicator or two, Mrs. Gandhi, as Chagla put it, appeared to be ignoring the Gandhian dictum that the ends do not justify the means.

  As to the third charge, that the Emergency did not achieve any real gains at all, the argument is more complex. The list of reported successes I quoted earlier (apart from the bizarre reference to bus hijackings, which few had seen as a major Indian problem) were real, and seen as such at the time. The Emergency capitalized on the belief that abandoning India’s traditional democratic — and usually lax — practices and procedures might well provide the solution to the country’s overwhelming problems. Take the bureaucracy, for instance: Anyone who has had the frustration of standing in four separate queues to cash a check, or seeing forms glumly filled out in quadruplicate and duly stamped by three different supervisors before some perfectly simple transaction can be effected, or known the seething rage of having to bribe a clerk to perform the function your taxes are already paying him to perform, will sympathize with the desire of many to see the bureaucracy firmly dealt with. Mrs. Gandhi’s authoritarian experiment is gratefully remembered for the fact that in several ministries there was a sudden shortage of chairs when the customary 40 percent absenteeism rate suddenly fell to practically zero. But there was little evidence that the occupants of the chairs were any more productive after occupying them, nor was there any proof that a performance orientation is easier to obtain under autocratic conditions than democratic ones (if anything, tyranny makes bureaucrats less accountable). There is no denying that it will take an efficient, productive bureaucracy to effect social justice in the face of vested opposition from political quarters, but no proof exists that suspending democracy will in fact deliver one.

  In any case, to her critics, Mrs. Gandhi’s motives were fundamentally suspect; she was seen not as a dedicated socialist using emergency powers to effect changes she could not otherwise bring about, but as a schemer “slightly to the left of self-interest.” An American analyst predicted soon after the Emergency was imposed that “if she does get the economy turned around, most Indians will say that authoritarian rule was worthwhile. But Mrs. Gandhi has never been much of an economic administrator, and she is far more interested in political tactics than economic reform.” The New Delhi lawyer and civil libertarian V. M. Tarkunde argued that her objective “is not to remove Indian poverty, but to create a strong executive unhindered by the checks and balances which characterize every democratic constitution. That is why the fundamental rights of the people are being taken away, why the wings of the judiciary are being clipped, and why the deceptive doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty is being propagated.” Whatever her motives, even a callow twenty-year-old graduate student like me was able to write in mid-1976 that “it is by no means certain that even the ‘gains of the Emergency’ will persist once the jolt of its imposition has worn off and a couple of bad monsoons occur.”

  The fact was that, despite the failings of democracy in India, Indian democracy did ensure that progress was made toward greater social justice. It was the vote that gave the lower strata of Indian society their power; the political clout of the “backwards” is directly correlated to their numerical strength at the polls. One striking example of democracy’s direct impact on society was its effect on the iniquities of the caste system in Tamil Nadu, where Brahmins who had been dominant for millennia found themselves the victims of governmental “reverse discrimination” favoring the voting majority against whose numbers (and resultant political weight) the Brahmins could not hope to compete; as one local commentator put it, “the forces of democracy have turned the tables upon them.” Though those who argued that democracy had impeded social justice had the elements of a case, there was enough evidence on the other side to prove the opposite.

  In any case, it remained true that Indian authoritarianism could not long be authoritarian, that the nature of the country would have reasserted itself in the face of any long-term attempt at regimentation. We are too vast, diffuse, and varied a people to be ruled for long under the kind of restrictions Mrs. Gandhi sought to impose; “emergencies” can oblige us to snap to attention, but they wear off after a while. Any government would have had to accommodate other points of view sooner or later, incorporate alternative sources of power into the governing consensus; there are few countries less susceptible to sustained one-person rule. Yet that is precisely what was being attempted during the Emergency; as the American
writer J. Anthony Lukas put it at the time, a trifle colorfully, “Even if only thirty million Indians played some active role in the old system, that is 29,999,998 more than today, when only two — a mother and her son — make any significant political decisions.”

  Despite the hyperbole, the point is well taken: this sort of overcentralization would have been impossible to sustain. One of the reasons Mrs. Gandhi called elections when she did in 1977 — apart from her misplaced conviction that she would win them — was that, without elections and the related trappings of democracy, she had no means, under “Emergency” rule, to renew her own standing, legitimize her rule and that of her party, identify the currents in society she needed to co-opt, receive feedback from the people, and convey a sense (as well as a mechanism) of political participation to the vast multitudes in whose name she claimed to speak. In any case, a one-party system, even one claiming to be oriented toward the promotion of economic development, risked discovering that it could meet popular demands (however feebly expressed) only by using economic resources — without the process of pluralist bargaining that democracy provides, which helps determine who gets how much and why. In a country as diverse and plural as India is, a wide range of demands are always going to arise that will have to be recognized, accommodated, and to some extent satisfied, if the polity (and the nation) is to survive. Emergency rule cannot provide the answer to such demands.

  But this is not to suggest that, with the Emergency an increasingly distant memory, complacency about Indian democracy is warranted. First, some of the factors that made the Emergency possible are latent in the system; they were exacerbated and exploited by Indira Gandhi, but they have not disappeared with her. Second, other failings of democracy have either emerged or intensified since the Emergency, notably in the increasing corruption, violence, and criminalization of Indian politics. It is worth examining both of these concerns in the interests of advocating realism as well as principle — democracy without illusions.

  Mrs. Gandhi throughout preferred to rule rather than reinstitutionalize, to control rather than reorient, to subvert rather than balance: she mastered tactics and ignored strategy, ruling the country as its democratically elected head but doing nothing to help strengthen its democracy. The Emergency merely marked the logical culmination of this approach. Mrs. Gandhi weakened or undermined the institutions she found obstructing her dominance — the judiciary, the presidency, the press, the cabinet, Parliament, the Congress Party — but she failed to replace them with alternative institutions of her own, preferring instead to exercise her authority through no recognized procedure (as with the largely arbitrary appointment of Congress chief ministers in the states) or autocratic and sometimes unconstitutional pressure (as with the doings of her son’s “caucus” during the Emergency).

  Part of the reason for the damage that Mrs. Gandhi was able to do to the Indian polity lay in India’s political culture itself. Despite two orderly successions (after Nehru’s death in 1964 and after Shastri’s in 1966), India had failed to evolve sufficiently strong institutional structures or deeply entrenched political norms, so that when the system proved unable to cope with the mounting economic, political, and social crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the situation was ripe for the classic “man on horseback” who could impose order and purpose on the prevalent chaos. It may have been ironic that the man on horseback was a woman, but the metaphor is startlingly relevant. In a trivial decision early in her rule, Mrs. Gandhi revealed her attitudes to the wielding of power and to those who were subject to it. The decision related to the widespread criticism in India, especially from liberals and socialists, of the riding test administered to trainees in India’s civil and foreign services. The critics considered the practice a relic of the colonial era; not so Mrs. Gandhi, who affirmed (in the account of an admirer, the diplomat K. P. S. Menon) that “riding had a psychological value. It instilled a feeling of self-confidence and fearlessness, qualities essential in men holding positions of responsibility. A man who could control a horse, said Mrs. Gandhi, would also know how to control a mob.” Not surprisingly, Mrs. Gandhi was herself a good rider, and “self-confidence and fearlessness” were attributes she prized in herself.

  Under Mrs. Gandhi, legitimacy came to adhere not to the system but to her. She characterized her critics as congenitally irresponsible, politically incapable, and electorally frustrated conspirators of dubious patriotism who were threatening India’s democratic institutions by attacking her. Her final political nemesis, a family friend since her childhood, Jayaprakash Narayan, felt constrained to write to her from what he thought was his deathbed: “Dear Indiraji, please do not identify yourself with the nation. You are not immortal, India is.” At that very time Mrs. Gandhi had acquiesced in the slogan “India is Indira and Indira is India.”

  This blurring of distinction between nation and individual was, to a great extent, reinforced by Mrs. Gandhi’s own conviction that she was the embodiment of the popular will. It was a conviction she derived from her father’s instinctive identification with the Indian masses. Nehru had always made much of his connection with, and responsiveness to, the public at large. “I found in India’s countryfolk something . . . which attracted me,” he wrote. “The people of India are very real to me in their great variety and, in spite of their vast numbers, I try to think of them as individuals rather than as vague groups.” But his knowledge of them, inevitably for a busy prime minister, was largely intuitive: he believed he had his hand on the pulse of the Indian masses, that with each emotionally charged contact with an adoring crowd, he knew their feelings and hopes, understood what they wanted. Nehru tried to educate the public in his mass meetings with schoolmasterly explanations of his policies. But as one historian, R. K. Dasgupta, described it: “Nehru addressed the Indian masses as a democrat, but the Indian masses revered him as a demi-god. . . . In his last years he had no means of feeling the pulse of the people he wanted to serve. The masses were either mute or would throw at him their acclaim at crowded meetings.”

  A problem with leaders relying on their intuitive sense of the aspirations of the masses was highlighted by former diplomat Badr-ud-din Tyabji’s requiem on India after Nehru: “Subjectivity still rules the roost, though the great Subject himself died in 1964. His successors new quibble over the contents of his system, though he had no system. He had only behaved like himself, and no one can do that any more for him.”

  One person was prepared to try. Indira Gandhi saw herself taking over the country in an apostolic succession from Nehru: “My father and I went to the people,” she said to me once. “We talked with a large number. . . . We were in touch with the people [at large] . . . not just [with] limited sections.” Mrs. Gandhi told another audience that “people from all over India — peasants and others — were always coming [to her childhood home]. I was meeting them. I was in touch with their problems. . . .” Mrs. Gandhi’s direct contacts with the masses were, of course, limited to her morning darshans (essentially, brief “at-homes”) and public meetings. At the latter she began poorly, an inarticulate and self-conscious speaker, but crowds came to see if not to hear her; yet initially they were often more curious than supportive, and the largest meeting she addressed during the 1967 election campaign was at Madurai, where her party failed to win a seat.

  Despite her undoubted popularity at certain points of her career — particularly during the Bangladesh War of 1971 and for the year or two that followed — it is important to remember that Mrs. Gandhi never won a majority of the popular vote. It was India’s first-past-the-post electoral system that, by rewarding pluralities against a fragmented opposition, gave her Congress Party its crushing majorities in Parliament

  Yet Mrs. Gandhi found it easy to impose herself. At least in theory, India was governed by the same principle of collective cabinet responsibility that characterized parliamentary government in Britain or elsewhere, but in practice she reduced the cabinet to a rubber stamp. Several factors contributed to t
his, among them the ministers’ lack of interest and ability: many were incapable of formulating policy, preferring to act as monitors for decisions taken and plans initiated by their senior civil servants, and they functioned more as the presiding political heads of their ministries, handing out favors and exercising political clout, than as policy-makers in their respective fields. The bureaucracy, meanwhile, exploited both the ministers’ incapacity and Mrs. Gandhi’s policy of strengthening the officials’ hands in order to curtail the power of the ministers. All this underscored the preeminence of the prime minister herself. Under her, the old notion of primus inter pares was replaced by a pseudo-presidential one in which the prevailing view was that it was the prime minister rather than the party that had obtained the electoral mandate, while the cabinet ministers were seen as merely those chosen by her to assist in the implementation of her policies. Accountability now rested not on the cabinet but on the prime minister, from whom all policy flowed. Most ministers were either politically dependent on her goodwill or unquestionably loyal to her; if not, they rapidly ceased to be ministers. The formal cabinet itself was downgraded by Mrs. Gandhi’s reliance on a “kitchen cabinet” of close advisers from the earliest days. These were usually junior or middle-grade ministers who were her personal favorites: one analyst even distinguished between Mrs. Gandhi’s “kitchen cabinet” and the “verandah cabinet,” depending on the degree of their proximity to the prime minister.