Tripudaman Singh may not be as stupid and ignorant as Maya Tudor but he too has written a foolish article published by the Journal for Democracy.
It's title is the authoritarian roots of Indian Democracy. Apparently nobody told Singh that a Democracy, like any other form of Government, exercises authority. That authority may be imposed on a terra nullis by invaders who bring democratic government with them or else, as happened in Europe and America and Japan etc., authority previously wielded by a Monarch or Shogun or aristocratic or oligarchic class is taken over by the People's elected representatives.
Thus, all forms of government are rooted in authority. Authoritarianism arises where established authority entrenches itself in a manner that extinguishes 'political pluralism'. Thus, if an elected leader bans opposition parties and creates a one party State, we can say there is 'authoritarianism'. Britain was not authoritarian in its rule of India. The Viceroy did not declare his independence of Westminster and appoint his son as his successor. Instead, a Viceroy from one political party very politely handed over power to a new Viceroy appointed by the new ruling party. It is a separate matter that the authority of the Viceroy could be used to kill or incarcerate any who waged war on the King Emperor or who offered unlawful resistance to the government.
After Independence, India could have become a one party state. But, at least in formal terms, it didn't. Bangladesh briefly did but then Mujib and most of his family were massacred. Army rule is generally authoritarian rule. But neither India nor Sri Lanka have had any such thing. They retain the institutions the British endowed them with. No doubt, Dynasticism can easily turn into authoritarianism as Indira Gandhi demonstrated. But assassination tempers autocracy.
Upon returning from the first session of the Imperial War Cabinet in May 1917, Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner,
the first Prince in Rajasthan to set up a Representative Assembly and a proper High Court.
who had served there as representative of India’s hereditary princes, wrote a long and rather extraordinary note
not extraordinary at all. The Princes had learnt the big lesson of the Great War- the age of Emperors was over. The Brits had accepted that India would move to 'representative' not just 'responsible' government. The Princes were sending a signal that they wanted to be in charge of reform within their own territory.
to Austen Chamberlain, the secretary of state for India.
Candidly observing that “the desire for self-government in any educated people is a simple elementary fact of human nature” and arguing for the introduction of the franchise in India, the maharaja resolutely declared: “Self-government is government of the people; that is democracy, as opposed to autocracy.”
But, as Bikaner had done, the other Princes would do this on their own terms. Rajkot State had universal franchise in 1923. Ceylon only got it about eight years later. But, as the Rajkot Satyagraha of 1938 showed, elections increased the power of the Prince. Gandhi was defeated by the son of his own votary.
Years before the (very limited) franchise first became reality,
Three years before the first Indian general election (which was restricted to Directly Ruled areas)
despite being a hereditary autocrat committed to dynastic rule, could perceive with remarkably clear-eyed prescience the inevitability of some form of democracy in India given the structural conditions of British rule and direction of political events.
This is nonsense. The Princes thought that the King Emperor's other headaches would give them more freedom from the interference of the British Resident. In general, they were right. That's why they became complacent and didn't bother to secure a Federal Government which would have protected their interests after 1937. They did not predict that a Second War would force a bankrupt England to abandon India and that they would be the biggest losers.
His argument was simple. “Step after step has been taken and is being taken by the British Government which tends towards the same end,” he noted, observing that “the spread of the English language and Western education; the extension of railways and telegraphs; the creation of a sense of unity among the various peoples; and the steady admission of Indians to some of the highest offices of State, are all preparing the way for representative government.”
The Princes were aware that Chelmsford was listening to people they considered radical. What they wanted was for the Brits to signal support for 'responsible' government without emphasizing that this would have to be representative (in British India) thus giving the Prince's more autonomy. In August, the Princes got their wish when the new Secretary of State announced that ' “the policy of His Majesty's Government … is that of the … gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.”
My argument, with the benefit of hindsight, is simpler still. Step after step has been and is being taken that tends toward the opposite end: an inevitable authoritarianism interspersed with democracy.
This argument could be made if Rahul was PM and he had just banned the RSS and jailed opposition leaders. But such is not the case. The BJP rose by the ballot box and will fall if there is no ballot box.
Even the founding figures of Indian democracy could see, given the burdens of history and the challenges of establishing the incipient republic, the necessity of some level of authoritarianism in the constitution (adopted in 1949) that would bring it into being.
No. Like the Brits, Indian politicians understood that a government needs to wield authority. But authoritarianism involves banning other parties or killing or incarcerating rival claimants to the throne.
As Sunil Khilnani once remarked, “democracy is the most historical of political forms”—
Khilnani is a cretin. 'Limited' or 'Constitutional' Monarchy is, historically speaking, the mother of Democratic polities.
and history has both facilitated and constrained Indian democracy in multiple ways,
because history facilitates and constrains everything. Why not say 'Thanks to the Law of Gravity, politics is possible. Without Gravity we'd all be floating in Space. It is very cold there. Thus we'd all be dead.'
molding it into a distinctive, hybrid form in which a certain authoritarianism is a structural feature.
Which is cool if you get paid for saying 'Trump is a Fascist', Sunak is a Nazi like Zelensky which is why Putin is totes justified in trying to gobble up parts of Ukraine'.
Why not say 'Many people in soi disant Democratic countries have dicks. Dicks cause Rape. Democracy just sodomized me and President Biden did nothing! Help!
This is not meant to minimize the serious contemporary challenges democracy faces in India, but to emphasize that many of them are rooted in its history—and that recent condemnations tend to either forget or ignore this history outright.
But 'recent condemnation' is totally useless. The West's power has declined. Biden may have condemned the Crown Prince but he had to rush over and bump elbows with that dude.
India, I assert, remains as much a democracy as it ever was.
It is more democratic because the power of the Dynasty has declined.
I offer four related contentions: that a certain authoritarianism is embedded in India’s political and constitutional structure;
because India has a government. All governments possess authority. Sadly, authoritarianism is a different kettle of fish. Being authoritarian may get you assassinated. That's what discourages the thing.
that a normative comparison with the West is thus futile; that the coalition era from 1989 to 2014 skews perceptions about the default nature of Indian democracy;
The coalition era began in 1977. It fell apart on 'dual membership' (of the RSS). That same story repeated itself till 1998. Manmohan was seen as a technocrat. Had he actually had any authority, his successor might have been another technocrat. But, it turned out, he was a 'prone Minister' without any vestige of either authority or self-respect. Still, if Rahul had stepped up to the plate, Congress would probably have won in 2014.
and that much recent criticism can be explained by the “Tocqueville paradox.”
as conditions improve, people become more discontented. This simply isn't true. Weak or ineffective government invites the nuisance of more and more opposition till people feel only new leaders will be able to restore 'the smack of firm government'.
Concentrating Power
India’s constitution, unlike its U.S. counterpart,
US has dual sovereignty. India is unitary. As Singh knows, India could have followed the US pattern re. free speech. But India's first Amendment put paid to any such notion. But this was the British tradition. Don't forget Britain only got a Supreme Court (that too on EU insistence) a dozen or so years ago. Unusually, India got a very activist Bench (because politicians preferred to hand 'wedge issues' to the Courts) and virtually no 'doctrine of political question'. Indeed, since India's Bench is self-selecting, there is greater judicial independence than in America. Sadly, the Bench is a bit crazy and adds noise to signal. My guess is that it will be increasingly disintermediated or ignored.
is not animated by the impulse to limit political power and secure public freedom.
Yet, the Indian Communist was freer than the American Leftist in the Fifties. Some Americans- like Goodwin- even thought of imitating Haldane and settling in India.
On the contrary, it is dominated by the idea of constituting and enabling political power, and channeling it for socioeconomic reform.
Just like Britain. But Britain isn't authoritarian. There is no Churchill dynasty or Chamberlain dynasty or anything of that sort.
This is explained in part by the circumstances of India’s birth—the violence and upheaval of partition,
which did not affect 90 percent of Hindus in any manner whatsoever.
the pressures of establishing political sovereignty,
It was handed to us on a plate. India had big sterling balances to keep it solvent for a decade.
a largely uneducated and destitute population with limited knowledge or experience of democracy,
which turned out to be wholly irrelevant. The illiterate can identify an election symbol on the ballot paper just as well as peeps wot been to Collidge. Rabri Devi, a former CM of Bihar, is believed to be illiterate or, at best, semi-literate. She was actually less awful than her husband.
deep-seated social divisions and hierarchies; and in part by the desires and predilections of its founding figures—their overriding concern with unity, their commitment to socialism and transformative social justice,
which was hypocritical at best
and their need to bolster and secure their own power.
which wasn't hypocritical though some decided the game was not worth the candle.
National unity and the “social revolution” thus form the key strands of the constitutional enterprise, creating a state that is explicitly committed to achieving social, economic and political justice.
Burma had a more radical constitution, indeed it was more radical which is why it fell behind other countries in the region. However, it was only in Afghanistan that a hard-line Communist faction took power. That didn't end well.
In the words of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the founders were freeing India “through a new constitution to feed the starving people
by begging for American PL 480 food shipments
and clothe the naked masses.'
Screw that. The Mill owners may turn against us the way the turned against the Brits. Let's fuck up the Textile sector instead.
And of course, that could not be done without securing the state that was to do it.
That State existed in ample measure. True, Nehru & Co strengthened various paramilitary type forces as an alternative to the Army. But, in South Asia, the Army is like a Vampire. It can't enter the House of Civilian Power, unless some fool invites it in.
One need not be a true believer in Hannah Arendt’s dictum—that attempts to solve social questions through political action are invariably antithetical to freedom—
Arendt had shit for brains. The Brits gave more power to the Trade Unions but did not sink into a dictatorship though, no doubt, Heath may have had a different story to tell in the early Seventies. Come to think of it, Heath's Cabinet Secretary suffered a nervous breakdown. He stripped off all his clothes and rolled around naked on the carpet of Number 10 babbling of a Communist conspiracy.
to recognize that such social-revolutionary zeal inexorably required substantial restrictions of civic freedoms and the licensing of coercive state power to redress socioeconomic inequities (and arguably even to regulate social identities).
All this is nonsense. To do land reform you need to send lots of dedicated people to rural areas and transfer corrupt officials. Then, just get on with the job of giving proper title to land to the tiller in exchange for his paying the Land Revenue on a regular basis. Simples. Nehru & Co realized that the Brits could disintermediate the INC by doing just such a deal with the peasants. Luckily, the clerks were on the side of the INC. Anyway, Westminster would have to sit through endless hours of ignorant discussion to pass the necessary Land Bills. That was the headache they had wanted to shift onto the Indian Legislative Councils.
The constitution thus, right from the outset, enshrined centralization and executive supremacy,
Why? The answer is that 'Federalists' hadn't bothered to form a Federal Government in 1937. Their complacency led to their downfall. Nehru & Co tore up all the concessions they had previously made- save to Hindu Dalits who, truth be told, were generally better legislators and civil servants than their 'forward caste' colleagues.
sanctioned the use of state power, and retained the “bureaucratic authoritarianism” of its colonial predecessor.
But the 1935 Act, ending dyarchy, put Civil Servants in the Provinces under the authority of elected leaders. Rajaji, as Premier of Madras, was astonished that his White Civil Servants refused to accept separate licenses to purchase and drink alcohol. They had agreed, as a body, that so long as they were on the territory of the Presidency, they would not just enforce the Prohibition policy, but themselves abstain from drink. This did however increase liquor sales in French controlled Pondicherry.
It empowered the center vis-à-vis the states, enabling it to create and dismember provinces at will (Articles 2 and 3)
because there had to be linguistic and other reorganisation of the States. Nehru did greatly curtail the power of the Presidency towns but that is what the vast Hindu majority wanted. It must be said, Nehru's decision back in 1937 to reserve the Premiership for Hindus in Hindu majority provinces had sent a clear signal. The Boses, cretins that they were, played footsie with Fazl ul Haq or, later, Shurawardy. Nehru was the ultimate Hindu supremacist though, thankfully, the 'Brahminization' he wanted for India did not involve incessant cow worship.
or to impose its writ through president’s rule under Article 356.
This was in conformity with Emergency powers vested in the Head of Government of other Commonwealth countries. Canada used the 'War Measures Act' in 1970. Since 1988, it can use an 'Emergencies Act' which was used last year against the 'convoys'.
It empowered the executive vis-à-vis the legislature, allowing it to routinely usurp legislative functions through ordinances (Article 123)
There is no usurpation if the Administration enjoys the confidence of the House. Constitutionally, the issue is similar to 'delegated legislation'. So long as the matter is justiciable- as it is in India- the thing is lawful and not a 'usurpation' in any sense.
and to dictate when the legislature is summoned or prorogued, as long as more than six months do not elapse between two sessions (Article 86). It empowered the state vis-à-vis the citizen, hedging in and qualifying the fundamental rights guaranteed in Part III in the pursuit of state security and social uplift. Land reform and redistribution necessitated evading the right to private property;
Shanti Bhushan got rid of it.
positive discrimination entailed constraining the right to freedom from discrimination; state security implied engirding the right to freedom of speech.
Just as in England- with the difference that India never had a blasphemy law. The problem is 'collective defamation'. The Bench may regret its 2016 decision and wish to scrap the thing or demand more 'application of mind' by magistrates in a manner favourable to elected officials or other politicians of substance.
With the passage of the Tenth Schedule (the antidefection law, which forces individual legislators to vote according to party diktats on pain of disqualification) in 1985, the constitution cemented the grip of party bosses on legislative parties and emasculated individual legislators.
A very foolish observation! Rajiv was brought down by his own handpicked colleagues- including cousin Arun Nehru! As subsequent case-law has shown anti-defection is not undemocratic. It is part and parcel of reducing corruption in politics.
One could argue, as B.R. Ambedkar forcefully did in the Constituent Assembly, that this was inevitable, even desirable—that political freedom was incomplete without social and economic equality; that it was social and economic equality that would actually produce the conditions for democracy to flourish. One might even go so far as to say that centralization and concentration of power were needed to extricate state authority and social identities from local power structures founded on caste and community, or that an activist and capacious state demonstrated a constitutional commitment to the public, and that ignoring social inequities may have been inhumane or tantamount to condoning oppression in India’s setting. In other words, we needed a strong state to deliver what the constitution had promised, and that strong state needed protection for it to be able to deliver on its promises. That may indeed be the case, but it is also largely irrelevant.
Why mention it? Nobody was babbling that nonsense after 1977.
The truth is that concentration of power and its use by the executive are thus, by design, baked into India’s constitutional order and institutional structure.
Only because India is an actual country with an actual government. Why not mention the sinister fact that the vast majority of Indians are subject to the Law of Gravity? They can't levitate. That's like totes Nazi, dude! Did you know, under Hitler, Germans were not able to levitate? Proves my point- right?
The broadly defined social goals and nebulous criteria of “security of the state” do not really matter—they are vessels into which multiple contemporary ideas can be poured or removed, categories subject to creative interpretation given the flavor of the times. What matters are the facilitation of executive power, the generation of legitimacy for that executive power,
this done by periodic elections. The Dynasty decided that it would eschew the Mujib or Zulfiqar Bhutto route. Assassination tempers Autocracy something fierce.
and the harnessing of executive power—not the social questions being answered. These questions themselves can change, and rather rapidly at that, as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s stint in power is amply demonstrating.
It had a previous stint. So what? If people think somebody else can provide better governance the BJP will be booted out as it has been in Karnataka.
And the “interests of the security of the state” are perennially available as a constitutional base.
No. The Constitution may or may not permit stringent action in the face of exigent circumstances. This is because Constitutions don't matter. What matters is whether a country does what is necessary to survive- law be damned. India has used massive extra judicial killing to contain insurgencies which, to be frank, where the product of the Dynasty's bungling (unless it wasn't bungling but something more Machiavellian. Still, assassination tempers & c)
In effect, India’s constitution enables and underpins a vast armory of coercive laws that it places at the executive’s disposal, and creates a political structure dedicated to promoting executive power. Somnath Lahiri, a Communist member of the Constituent Assembly, described the fundamental-rights provisions as having “been framed from the point of view of a police constable” and taunted leaders of the Congress party in the Constituent Assembly, saying that they wanted even more power than the British government.
They had more power. Why? They were Indian and could use power to benefit themselves in India. Brits were birds of passage saving up money for a suburban villa back home. Anyway, Jyoti Basu was happy to let police constables kill Naxals for him. Still, it should be remembered that Lahiri followed the Ranadive line re. violent resurrection. Then Nehru & Co showed they had no objection to slaughtering Reds and so the Commies became very sweet and nice.
Where the underlying plumbing was originally unavailable, it has been created through constitutional amendments.
Which is why the Constitution is useless. Still, at the time, there was some tactical purpose to it because nobody could be sure that some Princes didn't retain the loyalty of 'dominant' yeoman castes.
The first of these started the ball rolling in 1951 by clipping individual rights and providing for a vast array of repressive laws (including one against sedition) even before the inaugural general election. At that point, Prime Minister Nehru even argued that the government’s social agenda, backed by a legislative majority embodying the wishes of the people, must take precedence over constitutional provisions and civil liberties.
Frank Anthony captured the mood of the House when he said India might need a Dictator to slaughter Commies. Nehru was the best man for the job.
Rather than enlarging civic freedom, governments have found ways of constraining it to widen the ambit of political power.
The Brits understood that 'responsible' Government would have more, not less power. The problem was that 'representative' government might involve ethnic cleansing of minorities. That too tends to increase the power of the Government. After all, what happened to a religious minority could also happen to a minority caste group.
Every government, to the extent that it can command a substantive majority in the legislature, has ruthlessly used state force to push its agenda for social transformation
or not, if it wanted no such thing
and promote its version of state security.
Nehru neglected the external security of the Indian Nation State. A government can do stupid shit if it is as stupid as shit.
Yesterday it was Indira Gandhi, today it is Narendra Modi.
No. Yesterday it was Sonia. Today it is Narendra. The former is incapable of handling government work or enabling a proxy to do so in an effective manner. The latter is good at his job and has a cohesive cabinet.
Tomorrow may bring someone else. One may agree or disagree with the agenda being put into action; it does not really matter. The same concentration of power is available if a leader can muster a legislative majority.
Why write a long article if the notion being promoted is nonsense? Why not simply say 'authoritarianism is not what obtains when authority is exercised under political pluralism.'?
And given the Tenth Schedule, such a majority, once mustered, is relatively easy to shepherd along. Hardly surprising, then, that the political theorist Uday Mehta termed Hobbes “the largely unacknowledged mentor of Indian constitutionalism.”
The Brits didn't give a shit about Hobbes. They introduced Constitutionalism to India and the 1935 Act became the basis of subsequent developments.
This kind of authoritarianism comes constitutionally sanctioned, even constitutionally mandated;
No. The Constitution does not say 'the ruling party can kill those of other parties. Also, if there are two sons of the Ruler, the one who kills the other first gets to succeed him'.
antidemocratic tendencies operate through constitutional means, hindering the establishment of “legality and legislative primacy.”
This cretin does not get that a Democracy may want to fuck over or expel minorities. It may wish to jettison the Rule of Law. One may say 'I think Democracy should always be very sweet and nice. If a Democracy is not sweet and nice it is not a true Democracy'. But this is the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy.
Given this structural situation, it is hardly surprising to find governments using the powers they have been granted for the purposes for which they have been granted them.
Nor is it surprising that many citizens of so called Democracies are nevertheless prevented from levitating by the so called 'Law' of Gravity.
This is particularly important because, as recent assessments of Indian democracy argue, India’s current democratic deficits lie not in the electoral arena—where competition continues to be largely free and fair as judged by the criteria of contestation and participation—but in the erosion of nonelectoral freedoms and civil liberties, especially the freedoms of expression and association.
Democracy may mean less freedom for the minority while the majority gains the important freedom of being able to kill the minority. Sad but true.
Such an argument is not only ahistorical, it also rests on shaky constitutional and political ground. It gives the impression that India had an expansive domain of civic freedom that the BJP government has been steadily constricting since 2014—an impression as shaky as the foundations it rests on.
Singh won't admit that his colleagues have been telling stupid lies. He just says their grip on reality is 'shaky'. But they don't give a fuck about reality. They like telling lies about brown peeps in a country far far away.
India has never actually had such an expansive domain of civic action. What space it did have was subjected to executive approval, and even that shrank steadily, as India’s postcolonial leaders moved right away to enclose the remaining civic commons with a ruthlessness that would have caused eighteenth-century British parliamentarians to blush.
Sheer nonsense! I admit that many Muslims suffered but only because Pakistan was being beastly to Hindus. Economically, India may have been a shithole, but some Americans and even the odd (or very very odd) Englishman felt the atmosphere was freer politically speaking. Also nobody greatly cared if you were a homo.
The first piece of legislation passed in democratic India, for example, was the Preventive Detention Act,
Nope. That was passed in 1950. Plenty of other bills had passed by then including one stripping Muslims of citizenship if they had fled across the border.
while the first constitutional amendment took a sledgehammer to fundamental rights.
There was no 'fundamental right' to be a murderous Commie nutjob in any non-Commie country at that time.
The reasons behind these moves—high-minded or not—are immaterial.
Save to Constitutional lawyers. You have to accept the original intention of a piece of legislation but you must show application of mind such that cognizance is taken of it.
What is material is that these freedoms are, and have been since the beginning, heavily constrained and dependent on the capriciousness of the executive.
Not if the matter is justiciable. Singh is a fool. Any executive may be described as capricious or cannibalistic or showing a predilection to suck off hobos. What matters is whether a Court of Law can decide that an executive action was ultra vires or in conflict with established precepts of Constitutional law.
The legal and constitutional tools to squeeze them when desired have always existed, have been used regularly, and have remained unchallenged by parties of all stripes. India has, and has always had, a constitutional structure relatively inhospitable to extraparliamentary democracy.
Yet, Delhi and Punjab are ruled by a Party which did not exist a decade ago. It arose out of an extra-parliamentary anti-corruption movement of a 'Gandhian' type. The plain fact is that 'grassroots' movements (Mamta's 'Trinamool' means grassroots) flourish all over the place. In Tamil Nadu, where I come from, the film industry took over politics some 55 years ago! Reel Society transformed Real Society. But then Reagan was a two term Governor and President.
As an example, think of a legal instrument such as the Uttar Pradesh Gangster Act, which enables the state to confiscate the property of alleged gangsters on the orders of a bureaucrat, without the need of any sanction from the courts or the prosecutor—a law now emblematic of India’s political climate.
But the same result could have been achieved without that Law. The US has made aggressive use of 'in rem' actions to seize property.
Having been on the books since 1986 and used haphazardly over the years, it has now achieved notoriety in the hands of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who has used it with renewed ferocity to seize (and then, using urban-planning laws, demolish) properties in what is considered the most egregious example of India’s current antidemocratic upsurge—with negligible judicial interdiction.
That's why he was re-elected. The thing is totes democratic. I may not like Brexit. But it was a democratic outcome.
This begs an obvious deeper question: What does forty years of this law say about India’s constitutional settlement?
Nothing. We have had twenty years of the British 'Proceeds of Crime Act'. Nobody is saying it involves any 'deeper' question.
I am not suggesting that these freedoms were entirely absent, nor am I suggesting that they have not shrunk. What I am suggesting here is that they have always been unstructured, available when, and to the extent that, the executive has loosened its grip—expanding and contracting as per the executive’s determination to intervene in social questions.
But that 'determination' is itself ultimately determined by what voters want. We don't blame Apple for the type of music people want to download from iTunes.
Democratic backsliding is, at least on this score, a misnomer in my opinion,
It is foolish. Democracies, like other types of Government, do different things under different circumstances. Dynasticism may be called 'backsliding' as may jailing opposition leaders. But that's the exact opposite of what Modi has done. His first book was about his participation in the anti-Emergency underground. Even now, he emphasizes that he is the Democratic leader who has put an end to Dynasticism at the Centre.
given that the boundaries of the playing field are yet to be altered—
They were altered significantly when AAP took power in Delhi.
and this movement is part of a continuum within which Indian democracy has historically oscillated without (at least as yet) going out of bounds at either end.
Singh forgets the Emergency. Indira went way of of bounds.
Outside the Capital
The period between 1989 and 2014, referred to rather euphemistically as the coalition era,
or the era when people realized Rajiv was a cretin and Rahul might be worse.
generally seems to form the backdrop against which arguments for India’s democratic deficit—or its drift into electoral autocracy are made.
Though TN Sheshan's stint as Election Commissioner is one of the high water marks of 'minority' administrations like that of Chandrashekhar.
This, I contend, skews perceptions about the nature of democracy and political power in India, providing a powerful rhetorical tool to direct attention to the post-2014 period but saying little about why the coalition era proved especially profitable for the extraparliamentary aspects of democracy.
Judicial activism rose because weak politicians preferred to kick the can into the Courts.
The post–Rajiv Gandhi era in Indian politics, beginning in 1989,
i.e. when people realized he was stupid though he wasn't blown up till a couple of years later. Still, many thought Rajiv had learnt from his mistakes.
brought economic liberalization, the shattering of Congress hegemony, the rising assertiveness of OBC (Other Backward Classes) groups,
which was evident in the Fifties and Sixties. Kamraj Nadar is an example.
and escalating communal tension. OBC demands and determination combined with the implementation in 1990 of the Mandal Commission report (1980) brought about a deepening of the representative character of India’s legislative institutions (and bureaucratic institutions, to a certain extent), as the proportion of OBC legislators almost doubled. This demonstrated the capacity of mobilized social groups (but importantly, not individuals) to resist and renegotiate power relations within India’s democratic structures.
Dominant agricultural castes which were good at beating people did well. Jis ki lathi- he who wields the stick gets to decide who owns the buffalo.
Concurrently, first V.P. Singh’s Janata Dal and then new caste-based and region-based parties smashed Congress’s dominance, especially in the crucial northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar,
This had been happening since the mid-Sixties. It is conventional to blame Lohia or JP to opening the door to the RSS which enabled non-Congress parties to rise.
resulting in splintered mandates at the national level and leading to the need for multiparty coalitions as no single party could muster a legislative majority.
The Dynasty saw that it could bring down coalitions so as to show there was no alternative to its perpetuation. Mamta rebelled when she thought Pranab was going to ally with the CPM. Sonia had not yet asserted control otherwise perhaps there would have been no TMC.
By their very nature, coalitions prevented concentration of power and provided for a wider dispersal of executive authority.
No. A coalition can be held together by money in which case concentration of cash means concentration of power to push through the agenda of the financier.
This diluted government control, creating space for a variety of institutions to exert degrees of independence—the courts, but especially, bodies such as the Election Commission and the Comptroller and Auditor General.
Chandrashekhar let Sheshan make the EC independent. But, had Rajiv lived, the thing would have been defanged. Manmohan was probably fighting a guerrilla war against some of his Cabinet colleagues and the CAG may have been a weapon both sides were using against each other. Don't forget, the Dynasty likes humiliating its former servants. Rao was sentenced to jail.
Inevitably, a greater degree of liberalism and a wider domain of civic action ensued.
Productivity had increased for a large section of the Society. Politics changes when productivity changes.
Globalization brought a dash of added glamor. It is little wonder that when plotted on a graph, India’s democracy indices peak in the late 1990s and the 2000s at the height of the coalition era. These peaks, however, had rather prosaic underlying causes.
Rajiv was dead. Rahul could, as he said, have become PM at the minimum age- 25- but preferred to remain abroad. Once he returned home, his Mummy could win an election though Rahul refused to let her be PM. The question is why he himself shied away from a Ministerial portfolio.
In the states, where mandates were not splintered, things were very different. There, with concentration of power made even more acute by the Tenth Schedule, and thus largely secured against backbench rebellion and intraparty conflict, chief ministers—especially those from regional parties who also doubled as party bosses—quickly transformed themselves into “supreme leaders” and pioneered a “Chief Minister model of governance.”
This already existed in Tamil Nadu. Nadar's mistake was to play politics in Delhi. Karunanidhi, MGR, Jayalalitha etc. had no such ambitions.
Personalization of authority, capture of state institutions, symbiotic relationships with the bureaucracy, political violence, intimidation of opponents and dissenters, the malicious use of First Information Reports (the first reports of possible crimes, written by police) and false cases, and widespread surveillance were key parts of this model, which was replicated across multiple states.
Unless it already existed. What changed was that CMs lost the appetite to move to Delhi. Look what happened to Charan Singh or Deve Gowda! Mulayam's claim to be PM was based on UP having turfed him out in favour of his son. Being PM was a consolation prize! Modi is different because he can actually get elected from UP. He is just as good a Hindi speaker as a Gujarati orator.
This indeed became the de facto, tried-and-tested model for running a government—first fashioned in the states, and then implemented in the center once a legislative majority was mustered in 2014.
No. What made Modi different was
1) he had never won an election before being made CM of Gujarat. Thus he could claim to be a 'technocrat'- like Manmohan.
2) Modi rejected the traditional 'mandala' theory- viz. keep your enemies close (i.e. put them into the Cabinet) but in such a manner that their mutual animosity cancels out, while relying on the fact that everybody outside the circle wants to get in and thus is the enemy of the incumbents. Instead, Modi demanded a free hand to choose his colleagues. This was the CM as CEO running a tight ship and doing deals with interest groups (e.g. farmers who gave up 'free electricity' for good electricity supply at an affordable price) and showing aplomb when attacked by people outside the state. Modi was able to appeal to the whole of India by promising to be their CEO. Moreover he said, I'm giving you my cell number. If there is any problem with 'last mile delivery', give 'missed call' to my number. My people will get back to you within a couple of days and sort out the problem by the end of the week.
This may not have been true, but it is what people wanted to hear. Modi had noticed that people liked Manmohan precisely because he was an incorruptible technocrat. Modi cast himself in the same mould. Manmohan could not deliver because his own party cut him off at the legs. Modi could deliver- indeed, he has done so. Modi and Prashant Kishor have turned Indian politics into a managerial enterprise focused on 'deliverables'. In Karnataka, Kharge & Co, showed they could put together a better package than the BJP though, no doubt, what brought down Bommai was widespread corruption.
Mamta may be quite an emotional politician whose great strength is the love she commands for her extraordinary courage. But she herself took notice of the new trend and was prepared to disintermediate her party rank and file from 'last mile delivery'. It turns out bureaucrats are happy to do an honest days work provided they are protected from the thugs who turn out the vote.
That Narendra Modi was a chief minister who ran his state on this model
There was no model. What Modi did was sui generis. That's why everybody thought he'd be made the scapegoat for Godhra and thus was a lame duck. That's when he showed 'governance chamatkar'- i.e. a miracle of improved administration and governance.
for more than a decade is not insignificant. I am unaware (perhaps because I am a historian and not a political scientist) of major theoretical explorations of this phenomenon, but as the journalist Rama Lakshmi once wrote: “If you have covered Indian states long enough, you would know that this is how several chief ministers govern—like regional satraps and chieftains . . . .
Utterly mad! A 'satrap' is a Governor appointed by a Persian Emperor. Strong Regional CMs- Mamta, Naveen Patnaik, Comrade Vijayan, Stalin, Kejriwal, Nitish etc weren't appointed by anybody. They may be part of NDA today UPA tomorrow- nobody knows or cares.
Many in the Delhi commentariat chose to look the other way because a lot of this was happening during haloed coalition years in the centre.”
Who gives a fuck about the 'Delhi commentariat'? The only people stupider are brown skinned Professors of Poli Sci at Oxbridge or Ivy League.
At this point, I am not even going into the criminality, corruption, and gangsterism that became a regular feature of politics in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; the political violence and thuggery in places like West Bengal and Kerala; or the state-sanctioned use of extrajudicial violence in Punjab, Kashmir, Bombay, and the like.
Why not? It is highly relevant. The reason Indians voted for a Gujarati is because they believed Gujarat had less violence and a more business friendly environment. But that's what all Indians want. Botched land-reform (where title in land became ambiguous or 'appropriable') inevitably meant the rule of the Mafia because, in theory, they are the 'stationary bandit' who can do 'contract enforcement'. Of course, this is a pipe dream.
I am only pointing out the cementing and overt manifestation of authoritarianism in India’s political structure during the coalition era.
A mad enterprise! Why not point out the manifestation of prostitution in a nunnery run by a coalition of highly moral and spiritual ladies? If there is no sex in that place, how can there be prostitution? Similarly if nobody has much authority (because there is a coalition) how the fuck can you have 'authoritarianism'?
While the dispersal of power allowed institutions to exert a degree of independence in Delhi, unprecedented concentration of executive authority caused supposedly independent institutions to completely collapse or surrender in the states.
Which ones? The Bench? The EC? No! It was the Army! Have you noticed that all the top officers are now Gujaratis?
Thus the coalition era, in that sense, was a mixed blessing as far as the quality of Indian democracy went. So, what indeed does all this imply?
It implies that Singh is as stupid as shit.
A Singular Experience
In his book India’s Founding Moment, the political theorist Madhav Khosla
a fool who doesn't get that the Brits gave Democracy to all their colonies- provided the colony accepted it. Sri Lanka got universal suffrage in 1931. India could have got it along with independence in 1924.
Khosla's book is supposed to be about the means India’s founders used to foster a democratic ethos.
The problem is that 'India's founders' were Brits or people closely associated with the Brits. They knew that neither literacy nor a property qualification nor anything else was needed to 'foster a democratic ethos'. Sadly, they also knew that a democracy may want to fuck over minorities. Could minority protection be done constitutionally? No. It was obvious that constitutions could be ignored or rewritten. The only question that remained was whether civilians would maintain the democratic facade inherited from the Brits or whether some fool would invite in the Army. India and Sri Lanka didn't. Burma, Pakistan and Bangladesh did. That's it. That's the whole story. But not for Khosla-
They knew the people would need to learn ways of citizenship, but the path to education did not lie in rule by a superior class of men, as the British insisted.
Did the Brits think Maharajas and Zamindars were superior? No. Still, if they had authority and could pay something by way of tax or tribute, why not leave them alone?
Rather, it rested on the creation of a self-sustaining politics.
The Indian National Congress created by AO Hume was self-sustaining, just like the Muslim League, the Justice Party etc, etc.
The makers of the Indian Constitution instituted universal suffrage amid poverty, illiteracy, social heterogeneity, and centuries of tradition.
They could have done this in 1924, if they had all agreed on the matter and stuck to their guns. Instead, Gandhi surrendered unilaterally in 1922.
They crafted a constitutional system that could respond to the problem of democratization under the most inhospitable conditions.
Burma got its first Constitution out and held elections before the Indians. Then U Nu invited General Ne Win to take power.
Returning to Singh's article, we find he says that Khosla
argues that India’s constitutional experience was singular, its founding the response to a unique and exceptional set of questions.
India was just like Pakistan and Burma and Sri Lanka.
The peculiar and specific historical conditions of the constitution’s creation, both domestically and globally, Khosla wrote, “should encourage us to see it as the paradigmatic democratic experience of the twentieth century.”
Unless you are from Myanmar in which case you can point out that the Indians were merely copying the Irish. Burma had a more Socialist constitution that either.
To do so, however, requires accepting that the normative foundations, and therefore the political and constitutional structure, of Indian democracy are distinct.
'Normative foundations' is meaningless gibberish. It is obvious that the sub-continent was divided up on the basis of Religion. This meant that people of the same caste who had the same 'norms' nevertheless ended up on different sides of the border because what mattered was the Religion they have merely nominally professed.
At their heart lay questions about the realities of India’s condition and its suitability for democracy.
This was wholly irrelevant. Westminster would have had no objection if the Indians had decided to have a Raj Purohit as PM and a 'Chakravartin' or 'Samrat' as head of State. Democracy means the majority gets to do what it likes.
And these were answered with significant local innovations to the transplanted Westminster system to acclimatize it to local soil, which was vastly different from Britain and the white-settler dominions.
Like what? Directive Principles? But that was copied from the Irish. Panchayati Raj may be called an innovation but Britain had Parish Councils.
Allowing the executive to legislate in place of the legislature, in peacetime and without the declaration of an emergency—executive power at legislative expense, unheard of in Westminster—was only one of these local innovations.
Nonsense! This is merely 'delegated legislation' by another name. Justiciability was less in the UK till recently. Moreover, the British Bench has a broad doctrine of political question.
There were many, collectively transforming India’s Parliament into what Harshan Kumarasingham called an “Eastminster,” a beast very different from Westminster beyond the likeness of superficial institutional forms.
Indians are brown. But so is the current PM of the UK. If Rahul becomes PM, India will have a whiter Head of Government.
What I am getting at here is this: If we accept the normative singularity (or at least specialness) of India’s democratic experience,
we are stupid and ignorant. Sri Lanka has had regular elections with universal suffrage since 1931. France only gave women the vote after the Second War.
and the specificity of its conditions, then it follows that normative comparisons with the older democracies of Western Europe and North America are relatively unproductive.
No. Indians do look at norms regulating Western institutions. For example the CAG's office was affected by training received from the Brits at a time when British norms were having to change to come into line with EU requirements.
For example, in counting the number of journalists jailed, what meaningful comparison is really possible between a country with a constitutional commitment to freedom of the press, such as the United States, and a country such as India, where it is legally and constitutionally permissible for a bureaucrat to seize your property on accusations that you are a gangster?
This is foolish. A journalist accused of terrorism or other similar offences would be sent to jail in America. America has more 'in rem' prosecutions- sometimes this is a device used by Sheriffs to enrich their own Police Departments.
Indian democracy should thus be assessed on its own terms.
It should not be assessed by people with shit for brains.
On its own terms, the formal practices of Indian democracy remain intact, even if one could argue that its substance is threatened by the bureaucratic authoritarianism underpinning it.
One could argue this about Trump or Biden or Sunak or Macron. But why bother? People understand that you are either crazy or a Professor of some shit non-STEM subject.
By the standards of electoral contestation and voter participation, as Ashutosh Varshney has observed, “India’s democratic vitality has held steady.” In states such as Delhi, Bihar, and West Bengal, smaller and more poorly resourced parties have roundly defeated the BJP.
West Bengal's TMC is richly resourced. But what matters is whose thugs are better at killing people.
Voter turnouts remain high. No one disputes the validity of results. Space for well-organized civil society action, even in a relatively inhospitable institutional context, remains available, if diminished, as demonstrated by the 2020–21 farmers’ protests.
Canada used Emergency powers against the COVID related 'convoy' protests. Macron, however, is the man facing the biggest threat from mobs of various types.
The informal practices of democracy—civic action and liberal freedoms of expression and association—may well be constrained, but that is, and has been, a feature of Indian democracy and not a bug.
It is a feature of every democracy which hasn't gone extinct.
An overt manifestation of authoritarianism is embedded in India’s constitutional structure and political culture,
Authority, not authoritarianism.
where it is threaded tightly with democracy and grounded in history and pragmatism. Crucially, this is accepted by all shades of political opinion. No party or social movement
What about the Communists under Ranadive or the Naxals today?
has yet sought to challenge or promised to undo the legal and constitutional architecture on which such authoritarianism is premised—one can only assume that it enjoys a degree of political consensus.
Amongst Hindus- sure, unless those Hindus fear demographic replacement.
The reign (I use this word deliberately) of Nehru saw bloody battles over territorial sovereignty in Hyderabad, Kashmir, Manipur, and Nagaland; India’s worst anti-Muslim violence in Hyderabad in 1948,
That was a tea-party compared to what was happening in Delhi itself where the Muslim share of the population fell from one third to five percent. Singh must know this.
which claimed thousands of lives; the constitutional clipping of civil liberties via the First Amendment; and draconian legislation such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The reign of Indira Gandhi saw the Indian Air Force bombing its own citizens; mass relocation of villagers in Mizoram; the Emergency (1975–77) and rampant anticonstitutionalism; forced sterilization; blood-letting in Punjab; a massacre of Muslims in the Nellie area of Assam; and Operation Steeplechase and brutal anticommunist violence in West Bengal in the early 1970s.
So, Indira was a Fascist- like Sonia's daddy- just as her husband said. Cool. A Democracy may elect a crazy Dynast who likes chopping off the goolies of the common folk.
Consider what those eras might have looked like if social media, camera phones, 24-hour news cycles, the internet, and mass information flows had existed; if Twitter feeds across the world had been flooded with videos and testimonies from places such as Nagaland in 1956, at the height of the insurgency; Bastar (then part of Madhya Pradesh) in 1966, during the police massacre of tribal people; or Bengal in 1971 during Operation Steeplechase.
People with camera phones would have been delighted. They would have tried to find ways to get in on the action. No doubt, a few libtards would have clutched their pearls, but they would have kept quiet after receiving one or two thrashings.
The reign of Modi in that sense is less a departure from the norm than a confirmation of it.
Modi is doing none of the things Indira did. She had a motive- viz. to make her useless son her successor. His motive is to preserve the good ethos of the RSS and make the BJP a technocratic party of national governance. That's why he has people like Jaishankar and Nirmala in his Cabinet. They are of the wrong caste and region to sway any votes but they probably are good at their jobs.
Singh doesn't get that spending tax-payer money on killing people is bad economics. Soon the killers will get lazy and ask for Dearness Allowance and Statutory Sick Pay. After all, killing people is hard work- more particularly if you have to chase them.
Despite appearing to deviate from recent history, the BJP government
like Biden's or Sunak's government
in fact utilizes existing legal tools, building on and solidifying trends and practices that were already prevalent in the states.
So, 'nothing to see here. Move along folks'.
Modi’s reign has seen, and will see, its share of ostensibly “authoritarian” actions, and one may disagree with their intended social outcomes. But unless the formal structures of democracy struggle or break down, or a political consensus against the concentrations of power that enable such “authoritarian” actions emerges and proclaims as a political goal the liberalization of the constitutional structure, there is little, as yet, to suggest that the broad continuum of Indian democracy is anything but intact. We may have to wait for a new coalition era (or perhaps for the wheels to come off entirely) to know for sure. But until then, Indian democracy remains as it ever was: messy, normatively unique, and intertwined with a large dose of authoritarianism.
No. Indian democracy like American or Ukrainian democracy responds to circumstances in a manner already laid down or else in the only manner effective response is possible. True, Indira did try to turn Indian democracy into a Dynastic autocracy but 'assassination tempers autocracy'- which is why Rahul is safe because he actually is the mooncalf we take him to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment