Not all observers see these developments as entirely positive. Columnist Rajeev Srinivasan is trenchant:
After centuries of oppression, today we finally have a nation, one that is even beginning to awaken. One that can marshal its resources . . . stand up to canny foreign capitalists and demand concessions as the ticket to enter the billionperson market they salivate over. At this crucial juncture, to let the states follow their own selfish (and competing) agendas would be disastrous. . . . It would be unpardonable to give in to some romantic notion about federalism and allow our nation to fall apart.
The Financial Times editorialized, as India’s election results emerged in May 1996: “Perhaps the greatest threat posed by such a [coalition] government is to India’s fragile fiscal stability. Since each regional party has a strong incentive to insist on the largest amount of spending and the least amount of taxation in its own area, a coalition of regional parties could bankrupt India.” But it went on to suggest that “the entrenchment of a more decentralized federal structure” would oblige the states to “take more responsibility for their fates and the central government would be restricted to providing the framework within which they operate, in addition to defence, foreign policy and a sound currency.”
There are more and more signs of “a more decentralized federal structure.” Prime Minister Deve Gowda startled the country in his Independence Day address on August 15, 1996, by announcing that his government had decided to grant separate statehood — under the name “Uttarakhand,” though the variant “Urtaranchal” was also mooted — to the hill districts of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. There had, fortunately, been no violent agitation making such a demand, so the government could not be accused of having caved in to pressure; rather the prime minister seemed to be acknowledging that the giant size of a state like Uttar Pradesh (which, if it were independent, would be the tenth most populous country in the world) made effective government increasingly difficult. Inevitably, the establishment of Uttaranchal gave rise to similar demands from Jharkhandis, Bodos, Gurkhas, Ladakhis, and others, who see statehood as an answer to the alleged neglect of state governments whom they consider unresponsive to their groups Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh were duly established as new states of the Indian Union in 2000 and 2001. A further reorganization of states to create smaller units less distant from the reach of the state capitals may not be immediately on the cards. (Indeed, some might well argue that the last thing India needs is half a dozen additional sets of governments, bureaucracies, and political offices.) But a first step has been taken toward recognizing that the key units of government must come closer to the people government is meant to serve.
There is much to be said for “de-centering Delhi.” It is a refreshing change for India to see the national capital in the hands of those whose roots are in the distant soil and not in the federal ministries. The process has also made some unlikely converts. A case in point is UF finance minister Chidambaram, a Congress politician with a long record of ministerial office at the Center. His conversion to regionalism occurred just before the 1996 elections, when the national party ignored his advice and entered into an alliance with a deeply unpopular regional leader, leading him and others to set up a Tamil Congress party that resoundingly defeated the candidates of the parent body. Chidambaram today speaks of an irreversible change in the nature of federal politics in India — one that will remain valid even if, as is widely rumored, his party decides to merge back into the national Congress. “National parties, if they are to survive, have to convert themselves into federal parties,” he declared. “We cannot have centralized, centrally run national parties. They are simply becoming increasingly unacceptable at the local level.”
But regional decentralization can create as many problems as it solves. States begin thinking of themselves virtually as independent political entities, even when they are ruled by parties serving side by side in the same coalition government in New Delhi. The UF government was not very old when a major row erupted over the construction of the Alamatti Dam on the Krishna river between Karnataka (the state of Prime Minister Deve Gowda) and Andhra Pradesh (the state of Mr. Chandrababu Naidu). Karnataka’s work on the dam was, it was feared, likely to reduce the water flow into Andhra; a request by Andhra to suspend the construction was, however, rejected. The problem was seen as much as a political one among constituents of the ruling United Front as a problem of national governance; indeed, the prime minister’s first instinct was to refer it to a UF Steering Committee panel of four UF chief ministers rather than to an organ of the central government. The controversy drags on as of this writing, but its outcome is less important than the fact that it is a problem arising within India that is dealt with as a quarrel between two entities defending the interests of Kannadigas and Andhraites, rather than as an issue for a national government to settle in the interests of Indians.
The fears of excessive regionalization in India echo recent arguments in Africa, where most countries are essentially artificial po litical constructs superimposed on an array of tribes, clans, and linguistic groups whose diversity is comparable to India’s. The African experience with national government in the face of such potential disunity is instructive. For years the answer was seen to lie in centralized, one-party government; with the economic and political failures that followed, African countries have moved away from that formula, and in many countries this has enhanced regional and tribal consciousness. As the formerly all-intrusive state has, under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF, granted economic autonomy to far-flung regions and individual economic actors, rural and minority populations have developed a greater consciousness of their own identity. In Africa this has been abetted by the decline of the detribalized professional class that was in the vanguard of anticolonialism, and that has, in many places, ceded its place to ethnic elites whose power comes from authority over their own regions or tribes. In some African states the writ of the central government does not run much beyond the capital; observers report increasing instances of unregulated trade, local unsanctioned taxes, regulations imposed by regional authorities, all at variance with official “national” policies. The journalist Richard Dowden describes a continent in which “the bureaucrats are being replaced by the barons, the state by the region.” This has not happened in India, largely because of the continuing power of the national civil services, the “steel frame” of the British (and now Indian) Raj. In parallel, barriers to interstate commerce and the movement of labor are falling, but the process is occurring within orderly structures that have so far held up better than their African counterparts.
Nonetheless, the fragmentation of the electorate manifested in the 1996 elections is seen by many as another serious threat to Indian democracy. Even the BJP draws most of its support, and all of its parliamentary seats, from just eight states and union territories out of a total of thirty-five in the country — twenty of which returned no BJP legislator at all. The election of regional parties running on state-specific issues and electoral calculations raises the risk of India becoming ungovernable at the center. The pan-Indian elites with a “na tional” view of Indian affairs have been supplanted by those for whom the only realities are provincial ones. One veteran politician and rival of Deve Gowdas, Ramakrishna Hegde, has warned of the dangers of “municipal politics at the national level.” As Britain’s Financial Times thoughtfully editorialized in the wake of the election results, “The question is how to make democratic politics produce effective government at the all-India level. It is beginning to look as though politics as usual are no longer able to provide the answer.”
* * *
Where, then, can one find grounds for any optimism at all about India as it enters the brave new world of the twenty-first century?
It may seem unforgivably complacent, at a time when the Soviet Union has unraveled and Yugoslavia has torn itself apart, and when the ideal of the multiethnic state has rarely seemed more discredited, to say that India has survi
ved crises before and will do so again. But it is true: whereas no one convincingly predicted the breakup of the USSR, every observer of India in the 1950s and 1960s predicted its collapse, dissolution, descent into dictatorship, or revolutionary transformation, and all were proved wrong. There is a remarkable resilience about the Indian state, one that is sustained by an intangible sense of nationhood and shared destiny. India is a country held together, in Nehru’s evocative image, by strong but invisible threads that bind Indians to a common destiny. Indians are comfortable with multiple identities and multiple loyalties, all coming together in allegiance to a larger idea of India, an India that safeguards the common space available to each identity, an India that remains safe for diversity. It is this quality, taken for granted by most Indians, that foreign analysts tend to miss; and it is this quality that will prevent the disintegration so widely predicted for my country.
Of course, one can look beyond the bad news to ample evidence of good. There are the remarkable levels of food production and distribution that enabled the country to withstand a drought in 1987 that would have cast the specter of famine across any other developing country. (Yes, India has conquered starvation, though not yet hunger.) There is the profusion of skilled workers, talented professionals, inventive technicians, and able managers at all levels of Indian industry. There is the entrepreneurial spirit that, when unshackled at last, has begun to prove a remarkable engine of growth. There is the very stability of the economy — for decades a vehicle of slow but steady growth — that suggests a capacity to absorb and transcend the problems that now beset it. There is even the immense size of the country, which has converted serious insurgencies into “local” problems, leaving most of the rest of India unaffected and ensuring that the center holds even when things fall apart on the petiphery. Above all, there is the flawed miracle of Indian democracy, which has given the country a functioning political system, based on a written Constitution and incorporating an extensive register of civil liberties, that has successfully allowed the expression of— and has so far managed to contain in telatively harmonious concordance — the competing claims of the various forces in Indian society. Since independence, Indians have sought to define their interests within differing coalitions and alignments, making political bargains within a common framework of democratic rules. Things work in what John Kenneth Galbraith called, not unaffectionately, a “functioning anarchy.” Despite all its stresses and strains, the system has brought about several peaceful changes of government through the ballot box. And it is within this system of political pluralism that one finds hope for the vital changes necessary to surmount India’s current crisis.
After all, conflict is inevitable in any diverse society, where groups (defined in a variety of ways) contend for opportunity and influence. The real question is whether there are successful, workable mechanisms for dealing with, and resolving, such conflict. Indian democracy has, despite all the stresses and strains we have described, proved to possess such mechanisms. But all institutions must change and adapt if they are to survive in a turbulent world, and India’s democratic institutions are no exception to this rule.
So what should be done to improve the prospects for India’s future? For a land of maddening paradoxes, the answer may lie in a seeming contradiction: greater decentralization on the one hand, and a switch to a presidential system on the other. To explain this, a small digression into constitutionalism is necessary.
One of the more interesting statistics to emerge from the psephologists after the 1991 general elections is that Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination may have swung as many as 40 seats to his party. Had the former prime minister been allowed to conclude his campaign unscathed, the Congress Party would have had no more than 180 seats in the Lok Sabha, with the extra 40 going to three other parties. In that scenario, even the minority government that Narasimha Rao put together might have been impossible to form. By voting three political groupings of roughly equal strength into Parliament, the Indian electorate would have produced a recipe for governmental instability. And instability is precisely what India, with its critical economic and social problems, could not afford; without his stable government, Rao could never have embarked on the economic reforms that have begun to bring solvency, if not yet prosperity, to India.
A human tragedy, therefore, brought the nation a breathing space. Then, five years later, what might have happened in 1991 did occur: no majority party emerged, and an uneasy coalition of thirteen parties, backed “from the outside” by the Congress, came to power. The United Front government survives because no political party wants another election; but its fragility is underscored by the dissensions within the coalition, which expelled two leading national figures within weeks of assuming office, and by the fact that the Congress is in opposition in many states while supporting the government at the Center, and could be prompted at any time to withdraw that support. While the government lasts, the time has come for Indians to ask ourselves whether the country can again afford to keep taking the risk that our elections might produce inconclusive results and unstable governments.
Pluralist democracy is our greatest strength, but its current manner of operation is the source of our major weaknesses. India’s many challenges require political arrangements that permit decisive action, whereas its parliamentary system increasingly promotes drift, faction alism, and indecision. That system has not only outlived its utility; it has in fact become clear that it is unsuited to Indian conditions and is primarily responsible for many of our principal political ills.
To suggest this is political sacrilege in New Delhi. Like the American revolutionaries of two centuries ago, Indian nationalists had fought for “the rights of Englishmen,” which they thought the replication of the Houses of Parliament would both epitomize and guarantee. Clement Atdee was intrigued, as a member of a British constitutional commission, to note that Indians considered the Westminster system “the only real one for democracies”; when he suggested the U.S. presidential system as a model to Indian leaders, “they rejected it with great emphasis. I had the feeling that they thought I was offering them margarine instead of butter.” Even our Communists have embraced the system with great delight, reveling in their adherence to British parliamentary convention (down to the desk-thumping form of applause) and complimenting themselves on their authenticity. One veteran Marxist legislator, Hiren Mukherjee, used to assert proudly that former British prime minister Anthony Eden had felt more at home during Question Hour in the Indian Parliament than in the Australian. Indian faith in the parliamentary system was reaffirmed in the open jubilation of the country’s political class when the postwar regimes of Pakistan and Bangladesh both opted to discard the presidential form of government in favor of the parliamentary; in the open regret when the latter nation reverted to it (and when Sri Lanka adopted a presidential system in 1977); and in the public outrage expressed in most of the editorial columns that Mrs. Gandhi should, during the Emergency, have contemplated abandoning the parliamentary system for a modified form of Gaullism.
Yet the parliamentary system assumes a number of conditions for its successful operation that simply do not exist in India. It requires the existence of clearly defined political parties, each with a coherent set of policies and preferences that distinguish it from the next, whereas in India a party is merely a label of convenience that a politician adopts and discards as frequently as a Bombay film star changes cos tume. The Congress party is a fuzzy agglomeration of every political tendency, from Marxist to corporatist. The principal opposition parties, whether “national” or regional, are just as vague about their beliefs: every party’s “ideology” is one variant or another of centrist populism, and their separate existence is a result of electoral arithmetic, not political conviction. With two exceptions — the Communists, who are not serious contenders for national office except as part of a larger coalition, and the pro-Hindu BJP, whose actual electoral manifesto has little to do with the reasons for its appeal — I
ndia’s parties all profess their faith in the same set of rhetorical clichés, notably socialism, secularism, a mixed economy, and nonalignment, terms they are all equally loath to define. (Even the BJP, till a few years ago, proclaimed its belief in “Gandhian socialism.” Gandhi, of course, was not a socialist, but that may have been the BJP’s point.)
So India’s parties are not ideologically coherent, take few distinct positions, and do not base themselves on political principles. As organizational entities, therefore, they are dispensable, and are indeed cheerfully dispensed with at the convenience of politicians. The sight of a leading figure from a major parry leaving it to join another or start his own — which would send shock waves through the political system in other parliamentary democracies — is commonplace, even banal, in our country. (One prominent politician, the suave Ajit Singh, has switched parties more than a dozen times in the last two decades.) In the absence of a real party system, the voter chooses not between parties but between individuals, usually on the basis of their caste, their public image, or other personal qualities. But since the individual is elected in order to be part of a majority that will form the government, party affiliations matter. So voters are told that if they want a Mrs. Gandhi as prime minister, or a local film star as their chief minister, they must vote for someone else in order to accomplish that result indirectly. It is an absurdity only the British could have devised: to vote for a legislature not to legislate, but in order to form the executive.
India Page 42