by Vinod Rai
The complex relationship of civil society and democracy has engaged generations of activists and students of social theory.3 Indian research on these issues of civil society activism draw on the life and contributions of Gandhi calling for direct action by people for the protection of democratic rights. As a young barrister in South Africa, Gandhi had discovered the potential of civil society for the assertion of democratic rights and transformed this ‘experiment’, with his unique political skill, into the concept of satyagraha. On his return to India, he supplemented this with two further concepts—swadeshi and Swaraj—which became the firm basis of an enduring link between India’s civil society and the abstract goal of independence from the British colonial rule. The mobilization of peasants, workers, women and former untouchables gave the moribund Indian National Congress a social relevance. Following Independence, this heritage became an enduring basis of the dynamism and resilience of India’s electoral democracy. However, if Gandhian direct action showed the magical power of civil society activism under colonial rule, the success in Champaran met with its nemesis in the violence unleashed by the enraged masses in Chauri Chaura.4 This duality of civil society activism—its assertion of democratic rights on the one hand, and its potential for rejection of minority rights and violence to life and property on the other—leads to the core question: does civil society activism in India enhance democratic consolidation, or does it stymie institutions of accountability and policymaking, and subvert the course of electoral democracy?
Frenzied Crowds, Entrenched Insurgency, Resilient Democracy: An Indian Paradox?
Agitating crowds pushing at police barricades, contesting public policies they consider illegitimate, and toppling dictators, have been much in evidence in recent politics.5 Spread across vast distances in time and space, the agitation of these foot soldiers suggests a cross-national relationship between the agency of civil society and transition to democracy. Closer home, the East Asian variant of popular mobilization, with authoritarian, repressive and corrupt rulers as the foci of popular anger, provides some comparative features. In Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand, popular anger catalysed democratic transition. In each of these cases, the crowds were pitted against an elite viewed as corrupt, oppressive or venal. India represents a different context. Where does India, whose route to democracy has been different from both that of the European mainstream and East and Southeast Asia, fit in this broad pattern?
In the liberal democratic imagination, the sense of outrage that runs through the crowds of Tahrir Square of Cairo, Lal Chowk of Srinagar, and similar multitudes from Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines connects them to the citoyens and citoyennes of Paris streets in July 1789 and the French Revolution that paved the way for popular democracy. How might one read this Indian mosaic? Other images add to the confusing signals that India sends out. Entrenched insurgencies, election candidates in the campaign mode, and serpentine lines of men and women patiently waiting to exercise their franchise exist side by side, each of them pressing its claim in the name of their democratic rights. The paradoxical character of these routine images hardly attracts media or scholarly attention.
The Indian route to democracy has been different from the European prototype. India is a functional democracy, where change occurs through the normal political process. A plethora of political parties, elections, pressure groups, judicial interventions and public commissions, security forces, and civil services at federal, regional and local levels, jostle for space and influence in the public sphere, generate and implement public policies—without intervention of civil society. And yet, side by side, there is the spectre of crowds on Delhi streets agitating against corruption and more recently, crowds in Hyderabad and Osmania University campus agitating for the creation of a new state of Telangana; the telegenic folk of stone-throwing Kashmiris agitating for ‘azadi’ (freedom) and political parties protesting against demonetization. These phenomena raise several key questions for both students of Indian politics as well as those with an interest in the theory of the transition to, and consolidation of, democracy.
Unlike in East Asian cases, elections with limited franchise were introduced in India in the 1860s. Since Independence, regular general elections at the Central, regional and local levels are held regularly and important political change takes place at these levels on the basis of electoral outcomes. Regulatory agencies and institutions of accountability function effectively. The existence of multiple modes of interest articulation and aggregation, combining conventional methods of campaign participation, voting, lobbying and contacting leaders and administrators with indigenous forms of protest have become an effective basis for governance, transition to democracy and its consolidation in India. The legacy of Gandhian satyagraha, which had blended participation in elections with limited suffrage and rational protest in a seemingly seamless flow under colonial rule, has developed many variants in India after Independence. These have taken radically different forms in regions with well-settled administrative structures, such as Gujarat and Karnataka, where the response of the Indian state to civil society activism differs greatly from that in more troubled regions like Kashmir, the northeast, and the ‘red corridor’ of India, linking the hill districts of central and eastern India with pockets of Naxalite strength in the south.
Are these acts of strategic protest with the ever-present danger of mobs spinning out of the control of their stewards and spilling over into violence the soft underbelly of Indian democracy or a supplementary route to the same goal of democratic consolidation? This broad question requires the empirical specification of ‘civil society’ in the Indian context, its linkages with democratic consolidation and an explanation of conditions leading to such a consolidation as opposed to the dissipation of democratic capital in violent destruction.
Civil Society, Democratic Transition and Consolidation: A Complex Relationship
The ambiguity of the concept of civil society and its location within the social and political space contributes to the uncertainty that marks the interpretation of how civil society activism is linked to democratic transition and consolidation. Equally underspecified is the incentive that leads to the formation of the crowd and its mobilization for a political purpose. For clearer understanding, it is important to note the typology of civil society activism (Table 3) and analyse the evolution of the specific types and their implication for democratic consolidation.
Table 3: A Typology of ‘Angry Crowds’
Core values of the groups
Level of location Materialist/secular Identity/religion
National Type 2
Anna Hazare movement Type 4
Hindu nationalists
Local/regional Type 1
Farmers of Singur Naxalites of Andhra Pradesh Type 3
Khalistan movement
Locating Civil Society and Incentivizing Civil Society Activism
Civil society defines the space between the private sphere and the institutions of the state. As Larry Diamond defines it, civil society is ‘the realm of organized social life that is open, voluntary, bound by a legal order or set of shared rules’.6 Civil society activism involves private citizens acting collectively to make demands on the state or to express in the public sphere their interests, preferences, and ideal or to check the authority of the state and make it accountable. In terms of these roles and functions, civil society encompasses several organizations concerned with public matters. They include civil, issue-oriented, religious and educational interest groups and associations. Some are known as non-governmental organizations, or NGOs; some are informal and loosely structured.7 In the Indian context, if one considers private spheres of family, caste, kin, religious groups and corporations as the private sphere of society and civil service and other institutions of the state as the state sphere, then the space between the two is occupied by the elusive civil society. This is the political space where the agency of the private sphere meets that of the
state to negotiate an agenda that neither the state nor the private sphere is able or willing to implement. The moment for this is generated by crowds—like those that came together to demand the creation of Telangana, or to protest against corruption as part of the Anna Hazare movement.
A Typology of Civil Society Activism
Not all instances of civil society activism are the same. Based on their spatial location (local/regional as against national) and political interests (such as material issues, or the protection and promotion of religious values and/or ethnic identity) that motivate the participants, one can visualize four types of civil society activism (Table 3).
The ‘Responsive’ State and the Process of Evolution of Civil Society Activism
How these different types evolve and their consequence for democratization depends on a number of factors. Most important of these are the salience that the core elements of the civil society activists attach to their shared goal, the number and territorial catchment of the imagined community they draw on, and the response of the state. Based on comparable cases,8 one can trace the evolution of sub-national movements (figure 9), as an exemplar of the evolution of Type 1.
Figure 9: Sub-National Movements
Source: Adapted from Mitra and Lewis (eds.) (1996), p. 27.
As one can see from Figure 9, many demands for secession from the Indian state begin as very high-intensity movements led by a handful of activists. The Central government reacts with a double strategy of accommodation and repression, just as the secessionist movements promote their cause with a combination of protest and participation. Typically, such movements transform as they gain in strength. The average intensity of the movement comes down as numbers grow and the leadership seeks to exercise its authority over the followers. As the transformation of Assam into seven different states, or the creation of new entities such as Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Telangana shows, such movements eventually lead to the creation of new federal states with leaders of the separatist movement becoming new rulers. These post-Independence movements have a pre-Independence origin. The call for a federal division of powers advocated by the Indian National Congress in the twenties, when it organized its provincial committees on the basis of linguistically contiguous areas, originated from the need to safeguard regional and sectional identity. But economic policy, especially in a country with formidable problems of development, required central coordination. Out of these contradictory needs emerged ‘cooperative’ federalism—a form of power-sharing in which national, state and local governments interact cooperatively and collectively to solve common problems rather than acting in an adversarial mode.
With the second type of civil society activism, the state may concede the main elements of the agenda without much resistance if they are consistent with the goals of the ruling party or the coalition, though the negotiations might become stormy if the leaders of the civil society exceed their original mandate. This was the case with the Anna Hazare movement that became political when elements of Hindu nationalist groups began extending it their support. The ‘navnirman’ movement of 1974, which was keen on replacing the elected government of Gujarat, did not get much headway and came up against a roadblock to transform itself into a national movement, aimed at resisting the authoritarian rule of Indira Gandhi. The third type, promoting ethnic identity, has found accommodation within India’s flexible federalism but the state draws a clear line when such demands openly contradict the secular goals of the Constitution, as in the case of the Khalistan movement. The solutions offered by the state have sought to accommodate the economic and political grievances of Punjab while firmly rejecting the religious and territorial demands.
The fourth type, aimed at transforming the core values of the national state, as many suspect the Hindu nationalist groups aim at, has been thwarted by two different factors. The first is the growth of rival movements from within the same social groups and the second is competition between ideologues and office-seekers. The Patel agitation in Gujarat in 2015 led by the younger segment of the Patel community who felt they have been denied their just share of jobs and admissions to coveted educational institutes, illustrates the first of these deterrents. The Patels—entrepreneurial, self-reliant in the sense of not being dependent on state subsidies, and financially secure—represent an important social base of the BJP. The community has been among the most ardent supporters of Narendra Modi. The defection of a section of them under the leadership of Hardik Patel, the twenty-two-year-old leader of the agitation suggesting ‘get rid of reservation or make everyone its slave’,9 was harking back to an emotive and violent phase of the anti-reservation movement in Gujarat in the eighties. India’s complex quota system, which seeks to balance the principle of merit in recruitment to public services and highly-prized places in medical, engineering and other branches of education with a preferential treatment to designated communities belonging to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, is the cornerstone of institutionalized distributive justice that underpins Indian democracy. The Patels, though normally content to pursue life within the broad framework of the law, have been ferocious agitators when the occasion demanded it.10 The Bardoli Satyagraha of Sardar Patel, which had inspired Mahatma Gandhi, still remains a historical marker.
The second deterrent on the evolution of Hindu extremism into a national force and its ‘ambivalent’ moderation11 calls for a detailed discussion.
The BJP is the most important voice of Hindu nationalism in India today. Literally, the Indian Peoples’ Party, successor to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) and set up on 21 October 1951, shortly after India’s independence with the mission to promote an exclusive Hindu view of the nation, state and collective identity in India, the party today is the core of the national government. In its current form, the core ideology can be summed up under ‘five principles’, namely: nationalism and national integration; democracy; positive secularism; Gandhian socialism; and value-based politics. Right from the outset, the party became a dual presence, with a division of labour between the political wing espousing a hybrid liberal Hindu nationalism and the organizational wing, supported by the RSS which supplied the dedication, energy and staff to make the new party work. Its network of several thousand pracharaks—full-time, educated, unmarried, male staffers—was put at the service of the BJP, giving the party overnight an effective group of campaigners. The political strength of Hindu nationalism soon became clear once the Ram Janmabhoomi issue became a central argument that galvanized Hindu sentiments and eventually propelled the BJP to power in 1998.
The dilemma between the pursuits of office as opposed to the assertion of ideology persists. The Hindu nationalist movement is constantly caught in the dilemma between political mobilization versus electoral representation; integration versus accommodation; ideology versus populism; shakha (cadre) versus janata (mass, people).
How India Copes with Civil Society Activism?
Protest movements, including those with a certain degree of violence, are not uncommon in India. They emerge as an act of complaint against a specific grievance, gather momentum if they have a cause that is widely shared and an effective leadership with good communication abilities is available to mobilize these elements into a mass movement. Often, the violence that results when protesters disobey orders meant to prohibit their actions adds ‘police outrage’ as an additional support to their cause. The life cycle of the movement comes to an end when a settlement is made. As a matter of fact, as one has seen time and again, and most recently in the case of the Anna Hazare Movement against public corruption, protest movements become an additional entry point for new issues, leaders and political vocabulary in India’s noisy but effective democracy. ‘Rational’ protest thus complements institutional participation, spreading the message of democracy, empowering those who have been outside the tent, and contributing to the resilience of democracy in a non-Western setting.
Has India found a unique, idiosyncratic route to democracy trans
ition and consolidation, or is the Indian solution capable of being understood in general terms? The paths indicated in Figure 9 show the multiple routes that are available to civil society activists in India. Today, representatives of civil society can directly approach administrators and policymakers for implementation of state policies if they find them lacking, and call on regulatory agencies like the judiciary and the media to vent their grievances. The discussion of the four types of civil society activism (Table 3) has pointed to the political route where, turned into movements, such activists eventually enrich the social base of politics by contributing new leadership to supplement the existing group of elite.
Democracy transition occurs when the existing authoritarian rulers are thrown out. What follows might be chaotic, or even worse, and democracy transition might induct a new set of authoritarian rulers. Democracy consolidation happens when orderly, democratic rule takes place, possibly with the induction of new elite from below. This can be termed as ‘rebels into stakeholders’ as was seen in Telangana and the northeast.
India’s hyperactive media, NGOs, proactive judiciary and national political parties articulate these regional and local phenomena. Thanks to the multiple modes of participation, state–society relations in India benefit from systematic intermediation of both modern and traditional institutions, creating an ethos of effective and continuous interaction that helps rebels become stakeholders. The combined effect of all these methods is to dull the sharp edges of class and ethnic conflict and to transform what could have become a state of polarized conflict into a series of protracted negotiations. As such, even while an effective electoral route to power exists, nevertheless the undemocratic route seems to have a parallel life of its own. This adds a touch of ambivalence to democratic consolidation in India.