India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  That elections have been successfully indigenized in India is demon-strated by the depth and breadth of their reach – across and into all sections of Indian society – by the passions they evoke, and by the humour that surrounds them. There is a very rich archive of electoral cartoons poking fun at promises made by prospective politicians, their desperation to get a party ticket and much else.7 At other times the humour can be gentle rather than mocking. Consider the career of a cloth merchant from Bhopal named Mohan Lal who contested elections against five different prime ministers. Wearing a wooden crown and a garland gifted by himself, he would walk the streets of his constituency, ringing a bell. He unfailingly lost his deposit, thereby justifying his own self-imposed sobriquet of Dhartipakad, or he who lies, humbled, on the ground. His idea in contesting elections, said Mohan Lal, was ‘to make everyone realise that democracy was meant for one and all’.8

  That elections allow all Indians to feel part of India is also made clear by the experience of Goa. When it was united – or reunited – with India by force in 1961 there was much adverse commentary in the Western press. But where in 400 years of Portuguese rule the Goans had never been allowed to choose their own leaders, within a couple of years of coming under the rule of New Delhi they were able to do so. The political scientist Benedict Anderson has tellingly compared India’s treatment of Goa with Indonesia’s treatment of East Timor, that other Portuguese colony ‘liberated’ by armed nationalists:

  Nehru had sent his troops to Goa in 1960 [sic] without a drop of blood being spilt. But he was a humane man and the freely elected leader of a democracy; he gave the Goanese their own autonomous state government, and encouraged their full participation in India’s politics. In every respect, General Suharto was Nehru’s polar opposite.9

  Considering the size of the electorate, it is overwhelmingly likely that more people have voted in Indian elections than voters in any other democracy. India’s success in this regard is especially striking when compared with the record of its great Asian neighbour, China. That country is larger, but far less divided on ethnic or religious lines, and far less poor as well. Yet there has never been a single election held there. In other ways too China is much less free than India. The flow of information is highly restricted – when the search engine Google setup shop in China in February 2006 it had to agree to submit to state censorship. The movement of people is regulated as well – the permission of the state is usually required to change one’s place of residence. In India, on the other hand, the press can print more or less what they like, and citizens can say exactly what they feel, live where they wish to and travel to any part of the country.

  India/China comparisons have long been a staple of scholarly analysis. Now, in a world that becomes more connected by the day, they have become ubiquitous in popular discourse as well. In this comparison China might win on economic grounds but will lose on political ones. Indians like to harp on about their neighbour’s democracy deficit, sometimes directly and at other times by euphemistic allusion. When asked to put on a special show at the World Economic Forum of 2006, the Indian delegation never failed to describe their land, whether in speech or in print or on posters, as the ‘World’s Fastest Growing Democracy’.

  If one looks at what we might call the ‘hardware’ of democracy, then the self-congratulation is certainly merited. Indians enjoy freedom of expression and of movement, and they have the vote. However, if we examine the ‘software of democracy, then the picture is less cheering. Most political parties have become family firms. Most politicians are corrupt, and many come from a criminal background. Other institutions central to the functioning of a democracy have also declined precipitously over the years. The percentage of truly independent-minded civil servants has steadily declined, as has the percentage of completely fair-minded judges.

  Is India a proper democracy or a sham one? When asked this question, I usually turn for recourse to an immortal line of the great Hindi comic actor Johnny Walker. In a film where he plays the hero’s sidekick, Walker answers every query with the remark: ‘Boss, phipty-phipty’. When asked what prospect he has of marrying the girl he so deeply loves, or of getting the job he so dearly desires, the sidekick tells the boss that the chances are roughly even, 50 per cent of success, or 50 per cent of failure.

  Is India a democracy, then? The answer is well, phipty-phipty. It mostly is when it comes to holding elections and permitting freedom of movement and expression. It mostly is not when it comes to the functioning of politicians and political institutions. However, that India is even a 50 per cent democracy flies in the face of tradition, history and the conventional wisdom. Indeed, by its own experience it is rewriting that history and that wisdom. Thus Sunil Khilnani remarked of the 2004 polls that they represented

  the largest exercise of democratic election, ever and anywhere, in human history. Clearly, the idea of democracy, brought into being on an Athenian hillside some 2,500 years ago, has travelled far-and today describes a disparate array of political projects and experiences. The peripatetic life of the democratic idea has ensured that the history of Western political ideas can no longer be written coherently from within the terms of the West’s own historical experience.10

  III

  The history of independent India has amended and modified theories of democracy based on the experience of the West. However, it has confronted even more directly ideas of nationalism emanating from the Western experience.

  In an essay summarizing a lifetime of thinking on the subject, Isaiah Berlin identifies ‘the infliction of a wound on the collective feelings of a society, or at least of its spiritual leaders’, as a ‘necessary’ condition for the birth of nationalist sentiment. For this sentiment to fructify into a more widespread political movement, however, requires ‘one more condition’, namely that the society in question ‘must, in the minds of at least some of its most sensitive members, carry an image of itself as a nation, at least in embryo, in virtue of some general unifying factor or factors – language, ethnic origin, a common history (real or imaginary)’. Later in the same essay, Berlin comments on the ‘astonishingly Europo-centric’ thought of nineteenth – and early twentieth-century political thinkers, where ‘the people of Asia and Africa are discussed either as wards or as victims of Europeans, but seldom, if ever, in their own right, as peoples with histories and cultures of their own; with a past and present and future which must be understood in terms of their own actual character and circumstances.’11

  Behind every successful nationalist movement in the Western world has been a certain unifying factor, a glue holding the members of the nation together, this provided by a shared language, a shared religious faith, a shared territory, a common enemy – and sometimes all of the above. Thus, the British nation brought together those who huddled together on a cold island, who were mostly Protestant and who detested France. In the case of France, it was language which powerfully combined with religion. For the Americans a shared language and mostly shared faith worked in tandem with animosity towards the colonists. As for the smaller east European nations – the Poles, the Czechs, the Lithuanians etc. – their populations have been united by a common language, a mostly common faith and a shared and very bitter history of domination by German and Russian oppressors.12

  By contrast with these (and other examples) the Indian nation does not privilege a single language or religious faith. Although the majority of its citizens are Hindus, India is not a ‘Hindu’ nation. Its constitution does not discriminate between people on the basis of faith; nor, more crucially, did the nationalist movement that lay behind it. From its inception the Indian National Congress was, as Mukul Kesavan observes, a sort of political Noah’s Ark which sought to keep every species of Indian on board.13 Gandhi’s political programme was built upon harmony and co-operation between India’s two major religious communities, Hindus and Muslims. Although, in the end, his work and example were unsuccessful in stopping the division of India, the failure made h
is successors even more determined to construct independent India as a secular republic. For Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues, if India was anything at all it was not a ‘Hindu Pakistan’.

  Like Indian democracy, Indian secularism is also a story that combines success with failure. Membership of a minority religion is no bar to advancement in business or the professions. The richest industrialist in India is a Muslim. Some of the most popular film stars are Muslim. At least three presidents and three chief justices have been Muslim. In 2007, the president of India is a Muslim, the prime minister a Sikh, and the leader of the ruling party a Catholic born in Italy. Many of the country’s most prominent lawyers and doctors have been Christians and Parsis.

  On the other hand, there have been periodic episodes of religious rioting, in the worst of which (as in Delhi in1984 and Gujarat in 2002) the minorities have suffered grievous losses of life and property. Still, for the most part the minorities appear to retain faith in the democratic and secular ideal. Very few Indian Muslims have joined terrorist or fundamentalist organizations. Even more than their compatriots, Indian Muslims feel that their opinion and vote matter. One recent survey found that while 69 per cent of all Indians approve and endorse the ideal of democracy, 72 per cent of Muslims did so.And the turnout of Muslims at elections is higher than ever before.14

  Building democracy in a poor society was always going to be hard work. Nurturing secularism in a land recently divided was going to be even harder. The creation of an Islamic state on India’s borders was a provocation to those Hindus who themselves wished to merge faith with state. My own view – speaking as a historian rather than citizen – is that as long as Pakistan exists there will be Hindu fundamentalists in India. In times of stability, or when the political leadership is firm, they will be marginal or on the defensive. In times of change, or when the political leadership is irresolute, they will be influential and assertive.

  The pluralism of religion was one cornerstone of the foundation of the Indian republic. A second was the pluralism of language. Here again, the intention and the effort well pre-dated Independence. In the 1920s Gandhi reconstituted the provincial committees of the Congress on linguistic lines. The party had promised to form linguistic provinces as soon as the country was free. The promise was not redeemed immediately after 1947, because the creation of Pakistan had promoted fears of further Balkanization. However, in the face of popular protest the government yielded to the demand.

  Linguistic states have been in existence for fifty years now. In that time they have deepened and consolidated Indian unity. Within each state a common language has provided the basis of administrative unity and efficiency. It has also led to an efflorescence of cultural creativity, as expressed in film, theatre, fiction and poetry. However, pride in one’s language has rarely been in conflict with a broader identification with the nation as a whole. The three major secessionist movements in independent India – in Nagaland in the 1950s, in Punjab in the 1980s and in Kashmir in the 1990s – have affirmed religious and territorial distinctiveness, not a linguistic one. For the rest, it has proved perfectly possible – indeed, desirable – to be Kannadiga and Indian, Malayali and Indian, Andhra and Indian, Tamil and Indian, Bengali and Indian, Oriya and Indian, Maharashtrian and Indian, Gujarati and Indian and, of course, Hindi-speaking and Indian.

  That, in India, unity and pluralism are inseparable is graphically expressed in the country’s currency notes. On one side is printed a portrait of the ‘father of the nation’, Mahatma Gandhi; on the other side apicture of the Houses of Parliament. The note’s denomination – 5, 10, 50, 100 etc. – is printed in words in Hindi and English (the two official languages), but also, in smaller type, in all the other languages of the Union. In this manner, as many as seventeen different scripts are represented. With each language, and each script, comes a distinct culture and regional ethos, here nesting more or less comfortably with the idea of India as a whole.

  Some Western observers – usually Americans – believed that this profusion of tongues would be the undoing of India. Based on their own country;s experience, where English had been the glue binding the different waves of immigrants, they thought that a single language – be it Hindi or English – had to be spoken by all Indians. Linguistic states they regarded as a grievous error. Thus, in a book published as late as 1970, and at the end of his stint as the Washington Post’s man in India, Bernard Nossiter wrote despairingly that this was ‘a land of Babel with no common voice’. The creation of linguistic states would ‘further divide the states from each other [and] heighten the impulse toward secession’. From its birth the Indian nation had been ‘plagued by particularist, separatist tendencies’, wrote Nossiter, and ‘the continuing confusion of tongues ... can only further these tendencies and puts in question the future unity of the Indian state’.15

  That, to survive, a nation-state had necessarily to privilege one language was a view that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin shared with American liberals. Stalin insisted that ‘a national community is inconceivable without a common language’, and that ‘there is no nation which at one and the same time speaks several languages’.16 This belief came to inform the language policy of the Soviet Union, in which the learning of Russian was made obligatory. The endeavour, as Stalin himself put it, was to ensure that ‘there is one language in which all citizens of the USSR can more or less express themselves – that is Russian’.17

  Like Bernard Nossiter, Stalin too might have feared for the future of the Indian nation-state because of its encouragement of linguistic diversity. In fact, exactly the reverse has happened: the sustenance of linguistic pluralism has worked to tame and domesticate secessionist tendencies. A comparison with neighbouring countries might be helpful. In 1956, the year the states of India were reorganized on the basis of language, the Parliament of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon)introduced legislation recognizing Sinhala as the sole official language of the country. The intention was to make Sinhala the medium of instruction in all state schools and colleges, in public examinations and in the courts. Potentially the hardest hit were the Tamil-speaking minority who lived in the north of the island, and whose feelings were eloquently expressed by their representatives in Parliament. ‘When you deny me my language’, said one Tamil MP, ‘you deny me everything.’ ‘You are hoping for a divided Ceylon’, warned another, adding: ‘Do not fear, I assure you [that you] will have a divided Ceylon.’ A left-wing member, himself Sinhala speaking, predicted that if the government did not change its mind and insisted on the act being passed, ‘two torn little bleeding states might yet arise out of one little state’.18

  In 1971 two torn medium-sized states arose out of one large-sized one. The country being divided was Pakistan, rather than Sri Lanka, but the cause for the division was, in fact, language. For the founders of Pakistan likewise believed that their state had to be based on a single language as well as a single religion. In his first speech in the capital of East Pakistan, Dacca, Mohammad Ali Jinnah warned his audience that they would have to take to Urdu sooner rather than later. ‘Let me make it very clear to you’, said Jinnah to his Bengali audience, ‘that the State Language of Pakistanis going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function.’19

  In the 1950s bloody riots broke out when the Pakistan government tried to impose Urdu on recalcitrant students. The sentiment of being discriminated against on the grounds of language persisted, and ultimately resulted in the formation of the independent state of Bangladesh.

  Pakistan was created on the basis of religion, but divided on the basis of language. And for more than two decades now a bloody civil war has raged in Sri Lanka, the disputants divided somewhat by territory and faith but most of all by language. The lesson from these cases might well be: ‘One language, two nations’. Had Hindi been imposed on the whole of India the lesson might well have been: ‘One language, tw
enty-two nations’.

  That Indians spoke many languages and followed many faiths made their nation unnatural in the eyes of some Western observers, both lay and academic. In truth, many Indians thought so too. Likewise basing themselves on the European experience, they believed that the only way for independent India to survive and prosper would be to forge a bond, or bonds, that overlay or submerged the diversity that lay below. The glue, as in Europe, could be provided by religion, or language, or both. Such was the nationalism once promoted by the old Jana Sangh and promoted now, in a more sophisticated form, by the BJP. This reaches deep into the past to invoke a common (albeit mostly mythical) ‘Aryan ancestry for the Hindus, a common history of suffering at the hands of (mostly Muslim) invaders, with the suffering tempered here and there by resistance by valiant ‘Hindu’ chieftains such as Rana Pratap and Shivaji.