Pranab Bardhan as India's Yakov Smirnoff

Pranab Bardhan is the Indian equivalent of Yakov Smirnoff- the popular stand up comedian of the Eighties who said things like 'In America, you watch TV. In Soviet Union TV watches you!'.

Bardhan's schtick is that, in the West,, Democracy was about the revolting masses cutting off the heads of the aristocracy whereas in India it was about... well, see for yourself-

In India groups are based more on ethnic and other identities,

as opposed to America where there is no distinction between White and Black, or the former Yugoslavia where Muslim and Christian constantly cuddled together

although the exigencies of electoral politics have somewhat reshaped the boundaries of (and ways of aggregating) these identity groups (thus two sub-castes in the population may not accept food or marriage connections with each other, but they coalesce into a generic caste group for electoral purposes).

This is so unlike America or Britain where Iyers will not accept food from Iyengars because them bastids putting garlic in the sambar I yam telling you! How else it could be so tasty? Not just garlic, probably they are putting beef fat! What else you can expect from goddam Vaishnavs wot deny the possibility of a Jivanmukta!

Bardhan does not get that a custom peculiar to Hindus will be found wherever those Hindus reside. Such Iyers and Iyengars who refuse to inter-dine or inter-marry are nevertheless likely to vote for the same political candidate whether they live in Chennai or Cincinnati because they have the same class interests.

This has also meant a much larger emphasis on group rights than on individual rights.

Utter shite! India had laws permitting inter-caste or inter-racial marriage which any individual could avail off whereas many parts of the US did not when Bardhan himself first arrived there!

There are no 'group rights' in India. There are affirmative action or other such rights which individuals can access on the basis of belonging to a protected group.

A perceived slight of a particular group (in, say, the speech or behavior of a political leader from another group) usually causes much more of a public uproar than crass violations of individual civil rights even when many people across different groups are to suffer from the latter. 

Is this man utterly mad? Does he really think there would be no great uproar if Trump uses the N word? By contrast, routine violations of individual civil rights often go under the radar.

 There is a distinctly low sense of public outrage (except among a handful of urban liberals) when the state violates an individual’s freedom of expression, the police routinely beat up or torture a suspect, or the authorities ban a book or film on the alleged ground that it might offend the sensibilities of some group.

Bardhan has lived in America for many years. He may believe that there will be a high sense of public outrage if the police behave as they are shown to behave on every single cop show ever.

India does have stronger Hate Speech laws than Britain- which however has moved in the Indian direction. America is a bit of an outlier in this regard.

Why does Bardhan use the word 'alleged'? All judicial actions begin with an allegation. Refuting the allegation reverses the decision. It is not the case that India permits arbitrary decisions not subject to judicial review. What Bardhan should have said was 'In India the authorities can ban a book or film on the basis of a plausible complaint that it violates relevant Law. This decision is open to judicial challenge'.

The issues that catch public imagination are the group demands for preferential treatment (like reservation of public-sector jobs) and protection against illtreatment. This is not surprising in a country where the self-assertion of hitherto subordinate groups in an extremely hierarchical society takes primarily the form of a quest for group dignity and protected group-niches in public jobs.

Unlike in Western Europe democracy came to India before any substantial industrial transformation of a predominantly rural economy, and before literacy was widespread.

Let us compare India and Da Valera's Ireland. Both remained predominantly rural. Literacy was higher in Ireland but the country's population continued to fall. It exported food and people.

This seriously influenced the modes of political organization and mobilization, the nature of political discourse and the individual’s relation to the public sphere, and the excessive economic demands on the state.

There was no 'serious influence' at all in either country which, to be frank, were both formed on the basis of the desire for dominance of a previously oppressed Religion. Both countries only started to do well after getting rid of stupid economic policies. India has been less successful in this regard because of the great patriotism of Economists like Bardhan- who, however, are as stupid as shit.

What were the 'excessive economic demands on the state' in the Fifties and Sixties? Was it not wasteful imports at an overvalued exchange rate? Did not India subsidise Dubai though its stupid policy with respect to Gold?

Why pretend the Indian Government was doling out money to the needy?

Democratic (and redistributive) aspirations of newly mobilized groups outstripped the surplus-generating capacity of the economy, demand overloads sometimes even short-circuiting the surplus generation process itself.

Sheer madness! There was no redistribution whatsoever. The State taxed those stupid enough to pay taxes but did not redistribute the money at all.
One reason the State did so was because everybody knew the Communists would be even worse.

Continuing in Yakov Smirnoff mode Bardhan writes-

In Western history expansion of democracy gradually limited the power of the state. In India, on the other hand, democratic expansion has often meant an increase in the power of the state. The subordinate groups often appeal to the state for protection and relief against the tyrannical ways of dominant groups in their localities. 

Western Europe was characterised by limited monarchies. State power gradually increased thanks to a prolonged movement towards universal suffrage and ratcheted up thanks to two World Wars. Later, the Cold War and 'fiscal drag' meant that 'Wagner's Law' continued to operate. The scope of State intervention has increased even after Privatisation thus raising compliance costs.

Bardhan, however, lives in an alternative reality.

While in Europe democratic rights were won over continuous battles against aristocratic privileges and arbitrary powers of absolute monarchs, in India these battles were fought by a coalition of groups in an otherwise fractured society against the colonial masters. 

No country in Europe saw a 'continuous battle' of the sort described. Aristocracies sought to curb Absolute monarchs and both were influenced by and could influence powerful Middle Class leaders. Democratic rights frequently came into existence only to disappear, or be rendered wholly ineffective, for geopolitical reasons.

Bardhan forgets that 'India' once included what is now Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Only India followed a consistently Democratic route. Why?

Democratic rights had a peculiar importance for Hindus- particularly High Caste or 'educated'  Hindus- because everybody could agree that only democratically elected politicians had sufficient legitimacy to change customary law save in so far as such custom had no 'externality'. (I should explain that Islam and Christianity and even Buddhism are far less bound by customary as opposed to canon law.)

Thus Hindus could get rid of stupid and evil caste based rules and superstitious practices in a rational manner once it was clear that Hindus would be the dominant element in a potentially powerful, independent polity.

So long as some foreigner was ruling India, Caste restrictions could not be lifted because they might be portrayed as 'the thin edge of the wedge' of conversion of a mimetic, Tardean, sort. Moreover, those who were strictest in terms of Caste observance, would always be able to extract a rent from the conqueror because of their symbolic status. Only once it was clear that Hindus and Hindus alone would dominate India, did democracy- which puts Hindus in the driving seat and totally marginalises Muslims- become the Schelling focal solution for almost all our coordination problems.


True, at one time, hysteresis effects associated with the Nehru-Gandhi Dynasty's accidental roi faineant status- a period during which Hindu 'Public intellectuals' felt it incumbent on them to shit on Hinduism as often and as publicly as they could- did create a corresponding and equally noisome backlash. But first there was Atal Behari and now the body politic is getting the Vaajpeya of Narendra Modi doing his work in a conscientious fashion.

Bardhan does not give any importance to Hinduism- though there would be no India, and no Democracy in India, without it.

He does not understand that people like Gandhi and Nehru represented modernism in Indian dress because both were determined to make Hindus dominant within India. Muslims naturally reacted by wishing to create a Pakistan for themselves, but Islam had never needed such extensive internal reform to overcome fossilised caste and regional heterogeneity. Thus, Pakistan broke up and Democracy proved fragile and evanescent in the successor states. The same was true of Burma which was separated from India in the mid Thirties.

Bardhan views the Congress party machine as a coordinating and consensus building device rather than a forum whereby Hindu reformers from the regions gained legitimacy in the eyes of their peers.

Thus he writes-

Even though part of the freedom struggle was associated with on-going social movements to win land rights for peasants against the landed oligarchy, the dominant theme was to fight colonialism.

This is nonsense. No part of the freedom struggle was associated with 'winning land right for peasants'- something the British would have readily granted on the Irish pattern. Consider the Champaran movement- which targeted European run indigo factories. The British were already aware that indigo was not a paying proposition and had employed British agronomists at an Agricultural Insitute (financed by an American friend of Viceroy Curzon) to try to persuade these stupid Whites to shift to Tobacco. Later, these mainly Scottish people did switch to Tobacco under the wing of the I.T.C.

The Indian National Congress was about making Hinduism cohesive and ensuring that it would dominate the country intellectually and culturally. Congress under Gandhi and Nehru represented a hard line- 'no cooperation save on our terms'- which had an invigorating effect on Hindus. Rather than retreat into casteist redoubts of a fossilised kind, they scented the opportunity to become the dominant power across the length and breath of 'Bharatvarsha'.

And in this fight, particularly under the leadership of Gandhi, disparate groups were forged together to fight a common external enemy, and this required strenuous methods of consensus-building and conflict management (rather than resolution) through co-opting dissent and selective buyouts.

The British already had a mechanism for representing different interest groups and would happily work with Trade Unionists, Peasant Parties, as well as Religious and Caste based Associations. Furthermore, they showed willingness to do a deal with Parsi and Hindu industrialists from Gujarat and Marwar- this was the Modi-Lees agreement- and to pour oil on troubled waters through selective benefits and honours.

Congress gained salience because it insisted on its own hegemony- though it did take office in 1935, rather than risk being deserted by an increasingly opportunistic political class. Its main achievement was to make good its claim, in most parts of India, to represent the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. In Bengal, however, the popular S.C leader Jogendranath Mandal took an independent line and threw in his hand with the Muslim League. Later he fled Pakistan, despite having been made a Minister, along with hundreds of thousands of his caste fellows.

Long before Independence the Congress Party operated on consensual rather than majoritarian principles.

This is sheer nonsense. As Govind Vallabh Pant said 'Italy has its Il Duce. Germany has its Fuehrer. We have our Mahatma'. It was this iron control of the Party exercised by a deeply religious Hindu which made Congress so effective a weapon in the Hinduization of the Polity.

The various methods of group bargaining and subsidies and ‘reservations’ for different social and economic categories that are common practice in India today can be traced to this earlier history.

Congress invested in gestures designed to show it was the vehicle of a unitary Hindu nation staking its claim for dominance. Ambedkar was not fooled. Nor were the champions of Peasant rights or many Trade Unions. Still, in the main, they too were Hindu. If they sided with the British, they paid a price in terms of losing votes. The Communists, in particular, suffered greatly because they had to adhere to Stalin's line.

Notice Bardhan's veiled contempt for 'reservations'. People from other parts of India understand that without reservations, popular prejudices would never have broken down. Ambedkar had studied at the LSE and Columbia. He was a barrister with two PhDs. Yet he was thrown out of a Parsi lodging house because of his caste. A Christian colleague refused to shelter him. Why? Back then, stupid people thought that ability was inherited. The son of a Dalit could no more be a high level official than a cow. Indeed Gandhi himself said to a Christian missionary that attempting to convert a Dalit by reasoned argument was as foolish as talking to a cow.

This has also meant that in India, unlike in much of the West, democracy has been reconciled with multiple layers of nationality, where a pan-Indian nationalism coexists with assertive regional nationalisms in the same citizenry

Utter balderdash. There is not a single Western democracy which does not have multiple layers of nationality- which is why Scotland may go its own way as Catalonia appears to wish to do.
What matters in India- where the Tamil and the Telugu may have a bitter dispute about sharing river water- is that Hindu dominance is assured only by the country's territorial integrity and continued flourishing. That is why the Dravidian separatist movement collapsed the moment the Chinese invaded. The Tamil people wanted to fight in the Himalayas because of their Religion- nothing else.

The collective action problem has become more acute in the last three decades as more newly mobilized groups started asserting themselves, and as the massive country-wide organization of the Congress Party which used to coordinate transactional negotiations among different groups and leaders in different parts of the country fell into disarray.

Congress was utterly shit at 'coordination transactional negotiations' as opposed to distributing parliamentary seats and associated rents. That is why the country languished in the Fifties and Sixties. Farmer's leaders left the Party and sometimes succeeded in forming administrations in the Provinces. However, Congress well knew how to bribe legislators and engineer factional splits- thus it could always survive.

Still, once it was clear that the country would either starve or have to yield to American hegemony, Hindu pride reasserted itself. At this point, farmers who could produce the necessary surpluses were given the security and other incentives to do so. This wasn't a bribe. It was a necessary payment. Had the Government permitted market based reforms, there would have been no need for the item to turn into a fiscal drain. However, people like Bardhan- economists supposedly concerned with inequality- prevented any intelligent, that is decentralised, response to the problem.

One reason of the decline of the Party is the erosion of the mechanisms of intra-party democracy since the 1970’s, as a result of which the organizational channels of demand articulation and conflict resolution got clogged.

WTF? There have never been any 'mechanisms of intra-party democracy' in the Congress Party. Rather than have been cabals and 'Syndicates' and rivalries and vendettas within those cabals and Syndicates.

There was never any channel of 'demand articulation'. You could make a speech and then find yourself de-selected or intrigued against only to find, a couple of years later, that your speech had been plagiarised for some grand statement- which however would be completely meaningless, save from a rent seeking perspective.

Indians wanted land reform in the Fifties. One or two states delivered- but this was no thanks to Congress. Instead, there was the 'Bhoodan' scam- a pair of nutjobs touring county-side asking the rich to give their land to the poor. Hilariously, the whole State of Bihar was gifted away- 'Bihardan'- without any poor person actually benefiting.

The lack of inner-party democracy in all major parties in India in recent years has led to a proliferation of small and regional parties, as ambitious politicians found it more difficult to rise through the usual channels and ladders inside a national party; they staked their claims from outside forming their own parties and strategically used their support for advancing their personal and regional or group agenda.

What does this tell us? Only that inner-party democracy is a meaningless shibboleth. Its presence prevents the emergence of a party. Its lack may cause it to flourish if its competition is slightly shittier.

 In the evolution of democracy in the West the power of the state was gradually hemmed in by civil society dense with interest-based associations.

Nonsense! In every single democracy in the West, the power of the state gradually increased because civil society developed taxable surpluses as a result of interest-based associations. Thus if Trade Unions managed to raise wages, the Govt. could dip its beak and charge first National Insurance and then, later on, even Income Tax.

Every single Western democracy started off as a limited monarchy- in England there wasn't even a standing army or nation wide police force- and gradually got richer and thus able to afford a more and more powerful state- more particularly in response to grave military threats.