India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  The Association for Democratic Reforms, the group that had filed the original PIL, then setup Election Watch Committees in the states, these comprising local lawyers, teachers and students. The affidavits filed by candidates in five state elections held in 2002–3 were collated and analysed. In the major political parties – such as the BJP, the Congress, Uttar Pradesh’s Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bihar’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) – between 15 and 20 per cent of candidates had criminal records. A detailed study of Rajasthan’s 2003 Vidhan Sabha election showed that roughly half the candidates were very rich by Indian standards – they had a declared wealth of more than Rs3 million each. And as many as 124 candidates had criminal records. Forty per cent of these had been charged with crimes that qualified as ‘serious’ – which included armed robbery, attempt to murder, defiling a place of worship and arson.56

  Equally revealing was an analysis made of the affidavits of the 541 MPs elected in the 2004 parliamentary polls. The Congress had the wealthiest candidates – their MPs each had, on average, assets of Rs31 million. Most MPs had assets in excess of Rs10 million; those who ranked lowest on this scale were the communists. On the question of criminal charges, the lead was taken by parties powerful in UP and Bihar: 34.8 per cent of RJD MPs had been formally accused of breaking the law, 27.8 per cent of Bahujan Samaj Party MPs, and nearly 20 per cent of SP MPs. The Congress and the BJP came out slightly ‘cleaner’, having had 17 per cent and 20 per cent of their MPs charged with crimes, respectively. However, the situation was reversed when it came to money owed to public financial institutions. Of all such debts, Congress MPs accounted for 45 per cent, and the BJP members for 23 per cent. Again, it was communist MPs who came out best – they reported virtually no debts at all.57

  From these figures we may conclude that, while in power at the centre, the Congress and the BJP have systematically milked the system, the Congress to a greater extent since it has been in power longer. Meanwhile, to get to power in the states, and to retain it, parties such as the SP, the BSP and the RJD had come to rely very heavily on criminals.58

  With corruption and criminalization, Indian politics has also increasingly fallen victim to nepotism. Once, most parties had a coherent ideology and organizational base. Now, they have degenerated into family firms.

  The process was begun by and within that grand old party, the Indian National Congress. For most of its history the Congress was a party run by and for democrats, with regular elections to district and state bodies. After splitting the Congress in 1969, Mrs Indira Gandhi put an end to elections within the party organization. Henceforth, Congress chief ministers and state unit presidents were to be nominated by the leader in New Delhi. Then, during the emergency, Mrs Gandhi dealt a second and more grievous blow to Congress tradition when she anointed her son Sanjay as her successor.

  After Sanjay’s death his elder brother Rajiv was groomed to take over the party and, in time, government. When, in 1998, the Congress bosses asked Sonia Gandhi to head the party, it was an acknowledgement that the party had completely surrendered to the claims of the dynasty. Sonia, in turn, asked her son Rahul to enter politics in 2004, allotting him the safe family borough of Amethi. If the Congress Party retains power in 2009, Rahul Gandhi will have precedence over every other member if he chooses to become prime minister.

  Apart from its corrosive effects on the ethos of India’s pre-eminent political party, Mrs Indira Gandhi’s embrace of the dynastic principle has served as a ready model for others to emulate. With the exception of the cadre-based parties of left and right, the CPM and the BJP, all political parties in India have been converted into family firms. The DMK was once the proud party of Dravidian nationalism and social reform; its cadres are now resigned to the fact that M. Karunanidhi’s son will succeed him, or else his nephew. For all his professed commitment to Maharashtrian pride and Hindu nationalism, when picking the next Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray could look no further than his son Udhav. The Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Janata Dal claim to stand for ‘social justice’, but Mulayam Singh Yadav has made it clear that only his son Akhilesh will succeed him, while when Lalu Prasad Yadav was forced to resign as chief minister of Bihar (after a corruption scandal), his wife Rabri Devi was chosen to replace him, although her previous work experience was limited to the home and the kitchen. The practice has been extended down the system, so that if a sitting MP dies, his son or daughter is likely to be nominated in his place.

  Conducting research in a Bengali village, a Norwegian anthropologist found that the term most often used to describe politics was nungra (dirty). Politicians were described as those who promoted ‘abusive exchanges’ (galagali), caused ‘fist-fights’ (maramari) and promoted ‘disturbances’ (gandagol). In sum, politics served only to fill society with ‘poison’ (bish). This was not always so, said the villagers. At the time of Independence politicians had been honest, hard-working and dedicated, but now every party was peopled with ‘scheming, plotting [and] unprincipled individuals’.59

  The statements are fairly representative of matters in the country as a whole. A survey carried out by Gallup in sixty countries found that the lack of confidence in politicians was highest in India, where 91 per cent of those polled felt that their elected representatives were dishonest.60

  Some consolation can perhaps be found in statements by scholars writing about other societies in other times. Thus, of his own country in the 1940s, Jorge Luis Borges writes that ‘the state is impersonal; the Argentine can conceive only of personal relations. Therefore, to him, robbing public funds is not a crime. I am noting a fact; I am not justifying or excusing it.’ And, speaking of his own continent, Europe, in centuries past, the historian R. W. Southern remarks that ‘nepotism, political bribery, and the appropriation of institutional wealth to endow one’s family, were not crimes in medieval rulers; they were part of the art of government, no less necessary in popes than in other men’.61

  IX

  Corruption in contemporary India is widespread not merely in the legislature, but in the executive branch as well. In times past it manifested itself more in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy, with minor officials taking bribes to allot housing sites, sanction electricity connections or shortlist candidates for jobs.62 In recent years it has become widespread among higher officials too. The CBI has charged even secretaries to the government of India and chief secretaries of states with having assets ‘disproportionate’ to their income. The lifestyle of some of these officials certainly suggests as much – with private farmhouses and family holidays in exotic locations whose cost must many times exceed their official lifetime earnings.63

  In Jawaharlal Nehru’s time the civil service was shielded from politics; transfers, promotions and the like were decided within the executive branch itself. From the 1970s, however, individual bureaucrats came increasingly to ally with individual politicians or political parties. When the party they allied with was in power, they got the best postings. In return, they energetically implemented the partisan agenda of the politicians. On deals high and low, officials now work closely with their ministers, and are rewarded with a share of the proceeds. The rot runs deep down the system – thus, every MLA has his own favoured district magistrate, police officer, and so on.

  As P. S. Appu points out, the founders of the Indian nation-state respected the autonomy and integrity of the civil services. Vallabhbhai Patel insisted that his secretaries should feel free to correct or criticize his views, so that the minister, and his government, could arrive at a decision that was the best in the circumstances. However, when Indira Gandhi started choosing chief ministers purely on the basis of their loyalty to her, these individuals would pick their subordinates by similar criteria. Thus, over time, the secretary of a government department has willingly become an extension of his minister’s voice and will.64

  In a letter to the prime minister, the retired civil servant M. N. Buch has highlighted the consequences of this politicization of the administration
. The way the government is now run, he writes, means that ‘the disciplinary hierarchy of the civil services (including the police) has completely broken down. A subordinate who does not measure up and is pulled up by his superior knows that he can approach a politician, escape the consequences for his own misdeeds and cause harm to his superior.’ Since failure cannot be punished, ‘there is no accountability, there is no monitoring of work, there is no financial discipline and there is a visible breakdown of the system’.65

  Particularly in northern India, the alliances between politicians and civil servants are often made on the basis of caste. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, when the Samajwadi Party is in power, backward caste and especially Yadav officials seem to get the most influential and lucrative postings. If the Bahujan Samaj Party were to win the next election, however, then many of these Yadavs will make way for Dalits. If corrupt acts are sometimes undertaken on the basis of caste, they are often justified on the basis of that other great and enduring Indian institution, the family. The money made by illegal means is spent on educating children at expensive schools and colleges abroad, and generally in feathering a nest for future generations.

  Oddly enough, the corruption of the Indian state has been mimicked by actors that aim at its destruction. Across the north-east insurgent groups have found in kidnapping and extortion a profitable alternative to fighting for ethnic or national freedom. In the tiny state of Tripura, as many as 1,394 abductions were reported between 1997 and 2000 – an average of over 300 a year. The ransom demanded could be as low as Rs20,000 for a child – and as high as Rs3million for the manager of a tea plantation.66

  At a press conference in January 1997 the former Meghalaya chief minister B. B. Lyngdoh lashed out at the media for ‘lionizing’ the guerrillas. ‘They’re cowards, petty thieves, robbers and extortionists,’ insisted Lyngdoh. ‘Insurgency in the north-east died two decades ago.’67 Other politicians have been less brave. A BJP leader in Manipur had fallen foul of an insurgent group called the KYKL; when he decided to stand for a parliamentary election, he took out an advertisement in the papers apologizing for his past ‘mistakes’ and appealing to the KYKL to forgive him. Apart from this public apology, a private understanding was also reached between the politician and the militants. Reporting the incident, the columnist Harish Khare grimly observed that, like everything else in the north east, ‘clemency from an insurgent group is also on sale’.68

  X

  There are, of course, still many upright officers in the Indian administrative and police services. Based on anecdotal evidence, again, it appears that the percentage of corrupt officials is probably considerably lower than the percentage of corrupt politicians. What then of the third arm of government, the judiciary? While here too corruption and negligence are not unknown, ‘ordinary people look up to judges in a way in which they no longer look up to legislators, ministers or civil servants’. This judgment is of the distinguished sociologist André Béteille, who adds that ‘judges, particularly of the higher courts, are by and large believed to be learned, high-minded, independent, dutiful and upright, qualities that one no longer associates with either ministers or their secretaries’.69

  When politicians can no longer be trusted, and where the sectarian identities of caste and religion determine so much of what passes for public policy, the High Courts and the Supreme Court have witnessed a spate of public interest litigations aimed at stopping violations of the law or the constitution. It was such a PIL that forced candidates to declare their wealth and criminal records. Other PILs have spanned a wide gamut of issues. Some are aimed at protecting the environment from industrial pollution, others at protecting the rights of disadvantaged social groups such as tribals, the disabled and pavement dwellers.

  The Supreme Court is usually a court of last resort, appealed to when protest and persuasion have failed. Some of its judgements have been socially emancipatory, enabling bonded labourers to be freed and India’s notoriously dirty and badly run prisons to be opened up for public scrutiny. Others have curbed political corruption, cancelling licences issued under dubious justification or retrieving land grabbed by MPs and ministers. However, the Court has sometimes exceeded its brief, pronouncing judgement on complex technical matters – the building of a dam, for example – on which its own competence is open to question. And some judges have taken their ‘activist’ role too seriously, creating rights which cannot be enforced and ordering the cessation of economic activities without a thought for the unemployment and discontent this would generate. And some others have shown an unfortunate penchant for showmanship, as in a Madurai judge who, while allowing anticipatory bail to an MLA charged with criminal intimidation, instructed him to spend five days in the city’s Gandhi Museum, reading Gandhian literature.70

  XI

  In so far as it holds regular elections and has a multiparty system and a free press, India is emphatically a democracy. But the nature of this democracy has profoundly changed over the years. In the first two decades of Independence, India was more or less a constitutional democracy, with laws passed and enacted after due deliberation in Parliament, by political parties which were themselves run on deliberative lines. The third and fourth decades were a period of transition, as the ruling Congress sought to reshape the constitution to give it itself more power. At the same time, it led the move away from inner-party democracy towards the anointing of a Supreme Leader. The opposition answered by moving outside the constitution itself, through a countrywide agitation that sought to delegitimize elected governments and their authority to rule.

  Back in 1949, in his last speech to the Constituent Assembly, B. R. Ambedkar had urged that disputes in India be settled by constitutional means, not by recourse to popularprotest. He had also warned against the dangers of bhakti, or hero-worship, of placing individual leaders on a pedestal so high that they were always immune from criticism.

  Ambedkar’s warnings have been disregarded. As shown most dramatically by the Mandal and Mandir disputes, the settlement of political differences is as likely to be sought on the streets rather than in the legislature. This process has been encouraged by the rise of identity politics, with groups organizing themselves on the basis of caste or religion and seeking to assert themselves by force of numbers rather than by the quality of their arguments. Parliamentary debates, once of a very high order, have degenerated into slanging matches. At the slightest excuse political parties organize strikes, shutdowns, marches and fasts, seeking to have their way by threat and intimidation rather than by reason or argument. The law-makers of India are, more often than not, its most regular law-breakers.

  The decline of Parliament, and of reasoned public discourse in general, has meant that the

  Government forces are swarmed by the opposition almost instantly after an electoral mandate. There is no patience, either on the part of the government or the opposition, to respect the authenticity of the mandate to rule given by the voter to a parliament or legislature. Unbending postures adopted by government even in defiance of persistent and legitimate demands of parliamentary oppositions lead to cynicism and a tendency to take to the streets. Having tasted the tumult and mighty disharmonies of plebiscitary mass mobilizations, the opposition gets addicted to it and never wants to return to the mundane task of rational parliamentary debates and ventilation of grievances.71 At the same time, most political parties have become extensions of the will and whim of a single leader. Political sycophancy may have been pioneered by the Congress Party under Indira Gandhi, but it is by no means restricted to it. Regional leaders such as Mulayam, Lalu and Jayalalithaa revel in a veritable cult of personality, encouraging and expecting craven submission from their party colleagues, their civil servants and the public at large. Tragically, even Ambedkar has not been exempted from this hero worship. Although no longer alive, and not associated with any particular party, the reverence for his memory is so utter and extreme that it is no longer possible to have a dispassionate discussion of his work a
nd his legacy.

  Sixty years after Independence, India remains a democracy. But the events of the last two decades call for a new qualifying adjective. India is no longer a constitutional democracy but a populist one.

  29

  * * *

  RICHES

  Meet the pissed-off [American] programmer . . . He’s the guy – and, yeah, he’s usually a guy – launching websites like yourjobisgoingtoindia.com and nojobsforindia.com. He’s the guy telling tales – many of them true, a few of them urban legends - about American programmers being forced to train their Indian replacements.

  Article in Wired magazine, February 2004

  I

  IN 1954 A BOMBAY economist named A. D. Shroff began a Forum of Free Enterprise, whose ideas on economic development were somewhat at odds with those then influentially articulated by the Planning Commission of the government of India. Shroff complained against the ‘indifference, if not discouragement’ with which the state treated entrepreneurs. He believed that ’if the Government of India shed some of their impractical ideologies and extend their active support to the private sector, very rapid industrialisation can be brought about with in the next 10 years’.1

  At the same time as Shroff, but independently of him, a journalist named Philip Spratt was writing a series of essays in favour of free enterprise. Spratt was a Cambridge communist who was sent by his party in the 1920s to foment revolution in the subcontinent. Detected in the act, he spent many years in an Indian jail. The books he read in prison, and his marriage to an Indian woman afterwards, inspired a steady move rightwards. By the 1950s he was editing a pro-American weekly from Bangalore called MysIndia. There he inveighed against the economic policies of the government of India. These, he said, treated the entrepreneur ‘as a criminal who has dared to use his brains independently of the state to create wealth and give employment’. The state’s chief planner, P. C. Mahalanobis, had surrounded himself with Western leftists and Soviet academicians, who reinforced his belief in ‘rigid control by the government over all activities’. The result, said Spratt, would be ‘the smothering of free enterprise, a famine of consumer goods, and the tying down of millions of workers to . . . soul-deadening techniques’. His own preference was for a plan that would create ‘the psychological and economic conditions needed for a forward march by private enterprise’.2