India

by Shashi Tharoor

  At the same time the increasing devolution of authority to the locally elected village panchayats, local councils, set in motion by Rajiv Gandhi in 1989 and gathering momentum ever since, has brought democratic empowerment to the grassroots. There can be no better education in democratic rights than the chance to exercise them yourself, and with two and a half million villagers elected to positions on the panchayats (half of whose presidents must, by law, be women), governance has come to mean more to ordinary men and women than ever before, making democracy a genuinely mass phenomenon.

  Yet there is no denying the disillusionment that does exist in India with aspects of Indian democracy. All too often, democratic politics appears to be practiced in India as an end in itself, unconnected to the welfare of Indians. As a result, one disturbingly encounters, in conversations across middle-class India, a frequent wistful longing for benign authoritarianism. It is startling to me, for instance, how the Emergency is remembered in many middle-class homes as a time of order and relative honesty in government, when officials came to work and didn’t ask for bribes, when the streets were free of agitations and demonstrations, and when blackmarketeers and hoarders were locked up along with troublesome politicians. Political contention breeds inefficiencies, and the subcontinental penchant for taking our differences to the streets in the form of strikes and agitations undoubtedly costs the country a great deal in lost production. Slogans do not fill stomachs, and, when shouted too loudly and too often (along with those inventive Indian forms of proletarian coercion, the gherao, dharna, and hartal), could well scare off foreign investors. Democratic politics also distorts the complexity of governance, predicating political judgment to the short-term logic of the next election, making difficult visionary decisions (especially those that involve short-term individual pain for long-term societal gain) impossible. This is why authoritarianism holds some attraction for those who genuinely claim only to have the national good at heart. Democracy, they say, doesn’t deliver the goods, it merely impedes their delivery.

  Tyranny usually serves the interests of those who are themselves untouched by it, so autocrats and dictators everywhere have always enjoyed some popular support. In India, I had thought the decisive repudiation of the Emergency in the elections of 1977 had ended the allure of authoritarianism for all time, but I was wrong. In December 1993 a major polling organization questioned respondents in India’s leading cities about whether they thought the problems of the country could best be tackled through democracy or dictatorship. A startling 58 percent chose dictatorship; in Bombay and Madras, cities whose populations are considered better educated and more cultured than Delhi’s, over 70 percent preferred dictatorship to democracy. Democracy, in their mind, was associated with inefficiency, corruption, and argument, the inevitable side effects of political conflict.

  So it was not entirely surprising to read in the newspapers in January 1996 that a venerable nationalist hero, the former Orissa chief minister Biju Patnaik, had proposed, amid the wave of scandals engulfing the government, that the army should take over the country. As it happened, the week that comment appeared, my official work obliged me to spend a lot of my time in India in the company of army officers. They were unanimous in their embarrassed rejection of the suggestion made by the grand old man of Orissa politics. It was not surprising that they disclaimed any interest in taking on the running of the country; like all true professionals, they only wish to do what they are trained do do well. But equally important, getting involved in governance would only ruin one of the few institutions in the country that has not yet been besmirched by the prevailing mores.

  The army, despite recent corruption scandals unearthed by investigative journalists, is still splendid advertisement for India. The qualities it prizes and the ones it instills in its men from their earliest days as cadets in the Indian Military Academy (IMA) are those that are increasingly rare in our country: high standard of performance, honesty, hard work, self-sacrifice, incorruptibility, respect for tradition, discipline, team spirit. The army has no place for bigotry in its ranks: prejudice or discrimination on account of caste or religion are completely unknown. I spoke to young cadets at the IMA, and marveled at the values and aspirations they were proudly taking into adulthood. (“The honor and security of your country come first, the honor and safety of your men come second, your own personal safety comes last,” says the IMA motto, and it was clear that everyone there, from the commandant to the youngest cadet, takes this credo very seriously.)

  But the best of India can only be preserved by insulating the army from the pressures of the worst of India — from the unceasing contention of region and religion, from the national habit of cutting corners, from the selfishness and indiscipline of the prevailing ethos, and from the politician’s practice of profiting from the power to permit. Mr. Patnaik appears to forget that the very qualities he wants the army to bring to government are the ones the army would lose if it stayed in government.

  As I watched the massed bands of the armed forces “beating the retreat” outside Rashtrapati Bhawan, with the skirl of bagpipes incongruously rising over the turbaned riders of the camel corps silhouetted against the Delhi twilight, I was filled with admiration. No one knows how to put on a splendid show better than our armed forces, a point underscored a few days earlier at the Republic Day parade. The precision marching of our soldiers, the colorful variety of states’ floats, the pluralism of India on display in the uniforms, headgear, visible ethnicities, and even the heights of the different military units, the moving sight of the widowed mother receiving the medal so heroically earned by her officer son, all suffused me with pride and gratitude. Pride and gratitude, too, for the fact that the beribboned uniforms were on the marchers, not on the reviewing stand. The Indian Army knows its place — and takes it with honor.

  Mr. Patnaik was soon reported to have retracted his statement, or at least claimed to have been misquoted, but inevitably his disclaimer failed to get the same attention as the original remark. That it struck a chord among the antipolitical middle class was, however, troubling. A Gallup poll in April 1996 found that 84 percent of Indians expressed confidence in the army, while only 25 percent trusted Parliament. The level of disillusionment with democratic institutions, by comparison with an institution widely seen as meritocratic and incorruptible, was revealing. But it does not suggest that people would prefer the army to rule them — rather, that they wished their political institutions would acquire some of the characteristics they admired in the army.

  India is unusual in that democracy there is not an elite preoccupation, but one that matters most strongly to ordinary people, as sociologist Ashis Nandy puts it, “The poor seem more committed to it than the ultra-rich.” Nandy argues that “democracy in India is neither an imported consumable nor the creation of an enlightened, determined minority. It is a style of governance that has neady fitted the lifestyle of a majority of Indians.” The poor turn out to vote in greater strength than elsewhere, because they know their numbers make a difference and they are able to bring about change through their ballots. (It is striking how the electoral strength of the poor has served India’s Communist parties so well, not to foment revolution against Indian’s “bourgeois democracy” but to bring about evolutionary change in Kerala and West Bengal.) Former prime minister V. P. Singh, who has spoken of angry Indians using the vote to express their anger, declared in 1996 that “there is no cynicism about elections among the poor and lower castes. For them, every election means a little more power.”

  Foreign journalists covering Indian elections are often struck by the faith in the process shown by the poorest of India’s citizens. As John Burns wrote in The New York Times in April 1996 from the village of Luckham in Kerala’s tea-growing hill country:

  What permeated the mood was something as old as independent India itself — the sheer pleasure of taking part in a basic democratic rite, the business of appointing and dismissing governments, that has survived all of the
disappointments that Indians have endured in the past half-century.

  On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress espe cially for the occasion. . . . None quite voiced the thought, but those who came in a steady stream to vote seemed to be saying that India may have fallen far behind its neighbors in the struggle for prosperity, but as long as it can choose its governments, it can hope for better in the future.

  “It is my duty to vote,” Burns quotes a sixty-year-old tea picker as saying, “like everbody else. More than that, I don’t really know.”

  It is a beginning, but voters like him are already beginning to know more than that, and to assert their rights in the process. Manmohan Singh was right: in the long run, only a participative, pluralist democracy will prove sustainable.

  * * *

  The quotidian functioning of Indian democracy has also undergone dramatic changes. We have seen how Mrs. Gandhi inherited a strong and relatively autonomous prime ministry, and, while initially fettered by strong party leaders, asserted her dominance in a significant transformation of the nature and conventions of Indian prime ministerial authority. The personal nature of her power was underscored in the vast influence of her close advisers, who frequently bypassed existing decision-making channels and were not above breaking a rule they couldn’t bend. While formal institutionalization existed in the shape of party organization, cabinet, and committees, Mrs. Gandhi in practice ignored these institutions or, at best, used them to ratify decisions over which they had little control. The expression of public opinions did not always imply the existence of public opinion — or at least of effective opinion — in a land impeded by illiteracy, poor resources, and every imaginable socioeconomic constraint. Political communication was often a one-way process, frequently tutelary and with little expectation of an upward filtration of ideas or demands from the populace. Intellectuals who exercised themselves on policy questions were ignored, co-opted, or corrected, but rarely heeded; interest groups, where vocal, were manipulated. The opposition parties shared, to a great extent, the assumptions of the government. Where they transcended this worldview, it was frequently in impractical or demagogic terms, unre lated to realistic evaluations of interests and costs. Where they further went beyond these limitations and articulated coherent objections to policy or suggestion for change, they were routinely overridden by the government’s numerical majority. Worse, the Gandhi administration increasingly came to question the legitimacy of opposition inputs, treating opposition criticism as only destructive. The nature of governmental authority under Mrs. Gandhi “deinstitutionalized” the policy-making structure and militated against the possibility of bureaucrats compensating for the prime minister’s limitations. Then, in the decade after Indira Gandhi’s death, India moved strikingly in the opposite direction, toward a system of fragmented power, coalition rule, and political federalism. Today the concern is less about authoritarian centralization and more about the risks of pluralist decentralization.

  Some degree of regionalism and regional feeling is inevitable in a country the size of India. Though the China war in 1962 united Indians as nothing else had done since the freedom struggle, there were voices raised in Kerala wondering why the sons of that state, more than two thousand miles away to the south, should spill their blood for a patch of snow-covered Himalayan land; and I heard a similar speech in my mother’s village during the equally popular 1971 war over Bangladesh. But these were minority views, and it is to the credit of Indian democracy that they were allowed to be expressed. Southern separation had always seemed the greatest danger for a country ruled from New Delhi (which is why Mahatma Gandhi had quixotically called for the capital to be shifted to the hot and dusty town of Nagpur, which had the sole merit of being located in the geographical center of the country). In the state of Madras (later to be renamed Tamil Nadu), a combination of anti-Brahminism, Tamil pride, and resentment at the norths attempts to impose Hindi on the country as a national language fueled the rise of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). The DMK spoke of seceding to form a separate “Dravidastan,” defeated the Congress Party in state elections in 1967, formed a government, and was quietly co-opted into the Indian democratic system. The conversion of the DMK from a separatist move ment into a regional political party (now split into several offshoot parties), allied with “national” parties at the Center and a partner rather than a threat to the unity and integrity of the country, is one of the great unsung achievements of Indian democracy.

  At the same time, India’s federalism was distorted most thoroughly when the “national” parties, particularly the Congress, were in power. Few things are more revelatory of the sham of India’s federalism, and more humiliating to the pride of Indians in the far-flung states, than the way in which Delhi interferes in the appointment — one cannot rightly say election — of the chief minister of the states. Though the chief minister is supposedly elected by the majority party in the state legislature, this only happens in practice if that party is a “regional” party (i.e., one whose roots are local and whose top leadership is the state leadership itself). Otherwise the “national” party in Delhi imposes its choice of chief minister on the state legislatures, while rival contenders for office fly (or, as Indian newspapers prefer to put it, “airdash”) frantically to Delhi to press their claims on leaders far removed from the state and its immediate concerns.

  Indian federalism was, in practice, far more strongly centralized than the Constitution suggested, particularly in the era of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whose arbitrary appointments and dismissals of chief ministers in the states reduced federalism to a farce. (“I came in because of Madam,” admitted one bewildered chief minister of Andhra Pradesh upon his unceremonious exit, “and I am going because of her. I do not even know how I came here.”) Article 356 of the Indian Constitution permits the central government to dismiss a state government and impose federal or “President’s Rule,” a provision intended to be used in the event of a breakdown of normal government but one frequently misused by Indian prime ministers after Nehru to get rid of inconvenient opponents (the article, used just eight times in the first fourteen years of India’s independence, was applied on nearly seventy occasions between 1965 and 1987). The ceremonial governor, a replica in the states of the president at the Center, has been used far more as an agent of the central government to control (and recommend the dis missal of) a state government than as the disinterested constitutional figurehead the office is supposed to represent.

  The overall issue of Center-state relations was studied extensively (more than 4,900 pages) and intensively (with 247 separate recommendations) by a commission headed by R. S. Sarkaria, a distinguished Sikh Supreme Court justice, who labored nearly five years to study the subject. Predictably, the Sarkaria Commission’s report (denounced by some critics as “halfhearted” for its failure to advocate a constitutional overhaul) was shelved by the Indira Gandhi government as soon as it was submitted, though the indications are that its recommendations — ranging from the sparing use of Article 356, to increasing the powers of the states and appointing nonpolitical governors — have struck empathetic chords in the United Front.

  The UF government marked a radical departure from the old way of doing things because, for the first time, the government in Delhi was really a coalition of state governments. Many of its constituents — such as the Telugu Desam of Andhra Pradesh, the AGP of Assam, the DMK of Tamil Nadu, and the Tamil Maanila Congress — are state parties with neither a base nor aspirations outside their states, who see the interests of their states as the first purpose of their politics. None of them can realistically aim for power at the Center except through a coalition. This is also true of the “national” parties in the UF: the Communists have only ever held power in three of India’s twenty-six states, Kerala, Tripura, and West Bengal, and even the prime minister’s party, the Janata Dal, which likes to think of itself as
a national party, is a credible force in only three states, Bihar, Karnataka, and Orissa. Most central ministers were nominees of far more powerful state chief ministers, and used their federal positions to advance the interests of states in general, and of their states in particular.

  Under pressure particularly from Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, who emerged from relative obscurity as a savvy champion of states’ rights and a coalition-builder par excellence, the United Front government agreed to devolve much more power, and the concomitant financial resources, to the states. The Nehru-era institution of a Planning Commission, drawing the states into a national framework plan and leaving them little room to develop their own priorities, turned out to be a potent tool of centralization; it also, on occasion, served as a political tool, cutting down planned outlays for opposition-ruled states. Crucially, the practice of the federal government transferring development resources directly to local bodies in the districts, a classic instance of the centralization practiced in the name of federalism, was to end; Naidu argued that the money should go to the state governments, which would be better able to set priorities and allocate funds than a distant national bureaucracy. (It would also improve accountability for development performance, which would now rest with the states rather than the faraway national government.) The Common Minimum Program adopted by the UF-provided for all centrally sponsored development schemes to be finally transferred to the states. But the catch lay in resource generation: as the central government cut taxes to stimulate growth, it had less and less money to spend on the states. In recent years, states have proved enterprising in raising their own investment funds abroad, particularly from their own expatriate populations. Few have been more successful than traditionally entrepreneurial Gujarat, few as indefatigable as Communist-ruled West Bengal.