Writer of assured tosh Varshney, reviewing a book by fellow cretin Madhav Khosla, writes in the Boston Review-
Since the mid-1960s social scientists have agreed that, of the countries where democracy has emerged, its flourishing has been most improbable in India.
But everybody has since agreed that Social Scientists are as stupid as shit. America started off as a democracy because it could be nothing else. So did India. There was no force in India strong enough to turn it into something else. America, it is true, became rich and other countries became democratic as they became richer. This led them to think of Democracy as some sort of luxury rather than the cheapest way to extract a little in tax in return for a small amount of social services and public goods.
Of course, the health of Indian democracy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, incumbent for the past six years, has caused widespread concern.
Because of the incessant propaganda of a senile, deracinated, academic elite. But Indian voters, who know the reality, show no concern whatsoever.
The Swedish V-Dem Institute’s
which is as stupid as shit.
recent Democracy Report, which laments the decline in democracy globally, warns that India “is on the verge of losing its status as a democracy due to the severe shrinking of space for the media, civil society, and the opposition.” Yet the report also suggests that India’s democracy is in decline, not collapse.
But Swedes know shit about India. What they say does not matter in the slightest. On the other hand, potatoes are well informed.
Rather than understanding social conditions as a creator of politics, India’s democratic project was based on the notion that politics could change adverse social and economic conditions.
This is foolish. Everybody says politics should make things better. What India said was the guy who gets a lot of votes can probably do stuff more cheaply than a guy whom nobody likes. This is because votes reflect popularity.
That judgment, in part, reflects the long-recognized exceptional nature of India’s democracy, established where political philosophers thought its emergence impossible.
But political philosophers are as stupid as shit. Nobody listens to them. As the Chinese say 'Science students look down on Arts students. Arts students look down on Politics students. Politics students look down on their teachers'.
At a time when countries around the world are experiencing democratic backsliding—Freedom House’s widely read annual report warned that “2019 was the 14th consecutive year of decline in global freedom”—we may have much to learn from India’s example.
No we don't- unless we are very large countries with lots of languages and castes and an enormous population of very very poor peeps and the name of our country happens to be India and we happen to be located exactly where India is located.
But to understand what it tells us about the prospects for democracy in difficult settings we must first understand India’s democratic founding.
There is no such need. The Brits were increasing the amount of representative government for one simple reason. They wanted to raise a little more in tax and spend a little more on social services so that Income could rise a little and thus tax revenue could increase. They had tried 'tax farming', but the 'zamindars' kept most of the money and so the share of land revenue in the budget kept declining. Taxation without Representation is possible- but it is costly. There is a danger that the people will rebel. During the Boston Tea Party Whites dressed up as Red Indian. In India, barristocrats discarded their Savile Row suits for loincloths.
This August India celebrates seventy-three years as an independent nation. During these decades of independence, the country has been run democratically (aside from the twenty-one months of the infamous Emergency from 1975 to 1977).
Actually, Mrs Gandhi had a majority. So India was run democratically but not under the Rule of Law.
With the exception of Costa Rica, no other developing country has enjoyed as long a democratic run since World War II.
Sri Lanka got Universal Franchise some 20 years before India. It has been run democratically ever since. Varshney doesn't know this. Why? He teaches a shite subject which makes people stupider and more ignorant than the layman.
And in the case of Costa Rica, it is worth bearing in mind that the country is small, with a GDP per capita six times that of India’s (in 2019 Costa Rica’s GDP per capita was $12,238, while India’s was $2,104).
Sri Lanka too is richer than India though it may get poorer if its leaders continue to do stupid shit.
Modern democratic theory holds that democracies generally live longer when their citizens have higher levels of income.
So the theory is false. Junk it.
And in societies with lower incomes, the mortality rate of democracy is often high.
Because it isn't getting stuff done as cheaply as possible.
For decades now India has defied this conventional scholarly wisdom.
Because democracy is clearly the cheapest way to get what little gets done, done.
Surprise at India’s democratic success is well documented.
What is better documented is the stupidity of Political Scientists.
Barrington Moore was the first major social scientist to note the uncommon and the unexpected.
I've never heard of him. Apparently he was famous for saying ' "no bourgeois, no democracy,". It did not strike him that there had been plenty of countries with no democracy which had a bourgeoisie. This guy must have heard of Franco and Hitler and Mussolini and Salazar.
In 1966 he observed that “as a political species, [India] does belong to the modern world. At the time of Nehru's death in 1964 political democracy had existed for seventeen years. If imperfect, the democracy was no mere sham.”
But it also existed in Sri Lanka!
Half a decade later, in 1971, Robert Dahl—arguably the most influential figure in democratic theory—wrote that India was a “deviant case . . . indeed a polyarchy.” Polyarchy, so used, was Dahl’s conceptual term for democracy. By 1989 Dahl had no doubt that India was “a leading contemporary exception” to democratic theory.
But he too forgot Sri Lanka! By 1968, Mauritius too was a democracy.
Astonishment at India’s success continued to register among political scientists into this century. On the basis of a massive international dataset spanning 1950 to 1990, Adam Przeworski concluded in 2000 that “the odds against democracy in India were extremely high.”
The odds against any other system were much higher. Congress was too factionalized and weak on the ground to turn the country into a One Party State. No one ethnicity could dominate the country, or even hold a particular State without party rivalry, because of the caste system. The Army didn't want, and couldn't, hold the whole country down. Communists were too stupid. The Hindus had never had a centralized Religion. So what else could India be save what it is?
It then comes as a surprise that Madhav Khosla, author of the new book India's Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (2020), remarks that the founding of India’s democracy—particularly, its constitutional founding—has been “neglected within the history of political ideas.” Khosla is a political philosopher, a faculty member at both Columbia Law School in New York and Ashoka University in India. His surprising observation speaks to the divide between political philosophy and the more empirically driven social sciences—a divide that renders both fields intellectually poorer.
But both disciplines attract cretins. The wonder is that they can tie their own shoelaces.
There should be some degree of intellectual trespassing between political philosophy and the social sciences; without it, neither field can know the other nor heed the other’s explorations. Khosla forgoes any discussion of India’s representation in empirical democratic theory and instead responds to the intellectual terrain of political philosophy.
Which everybody knows to be pure horseshit.
He begins with G. W. F. Hegel,
For heaven's sake why? Where in the world will you find a country whose ruling political philosophy is Hegelian?
who thought that India was doomed to be a despotic polity and speculated that Indians lived according to age-old caste rules rather than as autonomous agents capable of making conscious choices.
So what? All Hegel's ideas were shit. The guy was a shithead. No doubt he said nice things about the Prussian State because Prussian academics were Civil Servants but Prussia didn't actually turn out so great- did it?
In such a society, made up of citizens supposedly devoid of agency, the older order—hierarchical, oppressive, and despotic—would continue ad infinitum, and a modern political order breaking from tradition was virtually impossible.
Unless it was cheaper than any other alternative.
Approximately half a century later, John Stuart Mill considered India through the lens of colonialism. Mill distinguished between colonies that were “of similar civilization to the ruling country, capable and ripe for representative government, such as British possessions in America and Australia” and other colonies “like India (that) are . . . at a great distance” from the British civilization.
Mill had worked for the India Office. His dad had turned out to be right. The Indian comprador class wanted the Brits around because that was the cheapest way for them to get rich. But while Mill was writing shite about India, British officials were realizing that their own salaries and pensions would decline in purchasing power unless the tax-base was increased. The cheapest way to do this was through representative institutions rather than tax-farming. That's why some British officials set up the Indian National Congress. Manchester's Liberals and Radicals started to see that India represented a stagnant market. British manufacturers would benefit if India gained more freedom of a democratic type. Meanwhile, in India, those who got rich through the cotton boom (caused by the Civil War) were financing a new Liberal type of Indian politician. One, Dadhabhai Naoroji, got elected to the British parliament. His statistical work showed that a despotic type of revenue extraction would render India unprofitable to defend. This argument was not compelling so long as British Naval Supremacy was unchallenged and India got a 'free ride'. But geopolitical changes in the Twentieth Century made it inevitable that India would go down the democratic route- if only to be able to pay for its own defense.
These polities, so different from that of their colonists, only allowed for “a choice of despotisms.” Following this interpretation, British tutelage in the form of colonization was India’s best option. In contrast, the advanced European civilizations and their cousins—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and, earlier, the United States—could have democratic rule owing to their higher capability for rational conduct.
But, they would have taken such power in any case. India could have been conciliated so long as it was getting a 'free ride' on British Naval power. But once that power was challenged India would not, indeed, could not, pay a fair price for this 'public good'.
Khosla’s book largely seeks to remedy political philosophy’s failed portrayal of India. In doing so, the book presents an ambitious and novel claim:
The historical conditions of India’s creation should encourage us to see it as the paradigmatic democratic experience of the twentieth century, in much the same way that Tocqueville had seen the United States as the model nineteenth-century democracy.
This is nonsense. India's experience is only relevant to countries with a deeply rooted caste system which has been instrumentalized for political purposes. The other point is that India is Hindu. Hindus had realized that they needed to unite against a renascent Islam. Otherwise, the country would once again be conquered by 'salami' tactics.
Khosla concentrates on India’s democratic origins,
No. That would require explaining why India's own indigenous ideas about 'loyalty' and the need for a virtuous Prince broke down. This would require an encyclopedic knowledge of Indic languages and texts. Khosla, poor fellow, lacks any such expertise. We are happy if he does not masturbate in public. More than that we can't hope for.
while the aforementioned empirical theories examine democracy’s persistence. The question of democracy’s persistence is not fundamentally a normative one; it has well-known empirical tests. But when an institutional framework is originally established, the normative visions of the founders—about the kind of society they wish to build and the reasons for its building—are on full display, and an analytic space for political philosophy clearly emerges.
'Analytic space?'. What if politicians tell lies or are fantasists- as has been known to happen? What sort of space do you get then?
So how did India’s founders come to imagine a democratic polity in a setting that conventional wisdom
Wisdom? Some stupid European pedants were wise? Fuck off! They were ridiculed by their own people. Anyway, Whitey kept saying 'listen up niggah. You iz Bleck. You can have a Chieftain. Maybe you can appoint a Witchdoctor as your Cannibal-in-Chief. What you can't have is Democracy coz monkeys don't vote.'
had ruled wholly unfit for democracy? Who, after all, thinks of universal franchise when the literacy rate (at the end of British rule) was a mere 17 percent (Mill thought literacy had to be the foundation of franchise), when more than 60 percent of the country was below the poverty line (Mill was unconvinced that the poor should have the right to vote), and when more than twenty languages were spoken in the country (Mill thought that all citizens must speak the same language if democracy was to function)?
The Brits did not listen to Mill. Universal suffrage, which they gave Ceylon in 1930 worked well.
At independence in 1947, India possessed each of these disqualifying conditions.
But Mill was dead and forgotten.
But India’s early leaders did not view these as insurmountable obstacles. Instead they decided that voting rights would not be based on literacy, income, property, or gender.
This had been done in 1930. Had the minorities not kicked up a fuss. India would have got this in 1935.
Each citizen, however deprived, could be assumed to know their own interests as well as the privileged knew theirs. And, respecting India’s linguistic diversity, citizen education was made multilingual to generate a public sphere diverse in language.
It was the Brits who, over the course of the Nineteenth Century, introduced vernacular education and who encouraged literary production in the mother tongue. However, the linguistic re-organization of the States took some time in independent India.
The founders had confidence in these historically unprecedented
unprecedented? The Brits had provided the precedent! They separated Burma from India and made Sindh a separate State in accordance with the will of the people there. They gave universal suffrage to Ceylon in 1930 and would have given it to the Indians too if the minorities had not objected.
interventions. At the time of independence, as Khosla strikingly puts it, India’s political leadership held a Hobbesian view of politics,
Rubbish! They were either Gandhian or Democratic Socialists. A few were Stalinists but Congress showed it could beat the shit out of them if they wagged their tail.
and “at the heart of the Hobbesian project was the independence of politics.”
Nonsense! At its heart, the Hobbesian project is about concentrating power in the person of the Prince. There is no independent Judiciary or Church or countervailing Guild based power.
The notion of necessary democratic preconditions—literacy, income, language—implied that “human behavior was not the consequence of politics, but instead its cause … a scenario that Thomas Hobbes would have regarded as placing the cart before the horse.”
The truth is we are speaking of a chicken and egg situation. Horsepower can be applied from behind or from in front. It does not greatly matter if you have forward wheel or backward wheel drive.
Rather than understanding social conditions as a creator of politics, India’s democratic project was based on the notion that politics could change adverse social and economic conditions—that “the practice of democracy would create democratic citizens.” If politics was supreme, the improbable could be achieved.
This is false. Elected ministries soon saw that it was difficult to get kids into schools and even more difficult to keep teachers from playing truant. They soon stopped talking about 'each one teach one' and so forth. They concentrated on caste arithmetic and begging bowl diplomacy.
India’s leaders were, of course, not alone in assuming the primacy of politics.
India's leaders soon saw that running the country was difficult. So they relied on the Civil Service just as the Viceroys did. The primacy of politics simply meant Parliamentary Musical Chairs. Cabinets became bloated because everybody wanted to be a Minister. Factionalism was rampant. The politician was primarily seen as 'Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram'- i.e. a man who would turn his coat for a price.
In China, Mao Zedong, too, had similar beliefs.
No. The guy was crazy. He figured out that sowing chaos at the grass-roots level was a good way of getting rid of his internal opponents. Never mind that millions starved. What mattered was that he got to remain Emperor.
For example, the underlying tide of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76) rose from the belief that politics could create a new man—one unconcerned with greed, unselfish, laboring for the country, and obedient to Maoist diktat.
Nonsense! Mao told the students that Exams were a tool of oppression. They should beat the fuck out of their teachers and any one else he didn't like. Then he got the workers out of the factories to beat the fuck out of the students and send them into the countryside to do manual labor.
But despite the deployment of the world’s largest Communist party, no such transformation came about in China.
But Mao stayed Emperor while a lot of people starved or had the shit kicked out of them.
Only after Mao’s death was China fundamentally transformed, albeit in the opposite way. A few years following Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping took control and spread the dictum that “to get rich is glorious.”
In the Eighties Chinese Marxists discovered that what Marx actually said was 'to each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution'. This also meant that property relations should be brought into line with the potential contribution of the worker or entrepreneur. China began to get rich when it discovered that Marx was not Hegelian. He was not a political philosopher. He was a Classical Economist.
In other words, following a Hobbesian conception of politics does not guarantee political transformation:
for the same reason that following a Hogwartsian conception of politics does not guarantee that everybody can ride a broomstick to work.
the result depends on what ends are being pursued and how such pursuits are shaped through institutional designs
No. The result depends on Economics of the old fashioned competitive kind.
. Ideas, practices, and leadership matter.
Nonsense! A Hogwarts with great ideals, practices and leadership still won't be able to get broomsticks to turn into a form of aerial transportation.
If the architecture of the polity is adequately imagined, put in place with resolve and determination, and practiced with nurturing care, the historically exceptional can be realized.
at exactly the moment that pigs start flying around on broomsticks.
With this understanding of politics, Khosla fixes his gaze on India’s Constitution—produced in 1949 after three years of intense deliberation by a Constituent Assembly and still intact today.
Intact? It has been amended out of all recognition. India's First Amendment is diametrically opposite to the US First Amendment.
He focuses on three central constitutional elements:
whose precedent was the British 1935 Act. Incidentally, Burma got out a more Lefty Constitution before India. Indeed, every country got a Constitution. But Constitutions don't matter a damn unless you have a well functioning judiciary and an efficient enforcement mechanism.
the codification of formal rules as opposed to a reliance on tradition,
The Brits codified the shit out of everything from the Nineteenth Century onward.
the centralization of political authority as opposed to villages governing themselves as self-sufficient democratic units,
which had never happened and would never happen because people run the fuck away from villages the moment it starts to happen.
and the prioritization of individual representation as opposed to that of communities.
The Minorities, it is true, were stripped of all they had battled for.
Today India has the longest constitution in the world.
It's not size that counts, darling.
This is largely owed to B. R. Ambedkar, the chair of the Constitution Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly (1946–49).
But Ambedkar dismissed his contribution to the Constitution as 'hack work'. The thing has a Directive Principle on Cow Protection!
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first and longest-serving prime minister (1947–1964), was opposed to extensive codification. However, Ambedkar had other ideas and, in the end, Ambedkar triumphed.
No. Nehru amended the Constitution immediately. Nehru triumphed. That's how come his descendants took over the Congress Party and ruled India longer than any rival collection of parties.
As a central figure in Constitution-making, Ambedkar’s intellectual persona and personal history were both imprinted in the democratic imagination that formed the Constitution.
Sadly, this wasn't the case at all. He was smart but he was in a very weak position. His pal, Mandal, had chosen Pakistan and then been chased out of there.
Having received two PhDs—one from Columbia and another from the London School of Economics—Ambedkar was the most highly educated leader in India in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, according to caste background, he was Dalit. This label relegated him to the lowest social tier, deeming him “untouchable” at that time.
That wasn't the problem. Jagjivan Ram was Dalit and in the Cabinet. But Jagjivan commanded a lot of votes in UP. Ambedkar didn't- even in Maharashtra. That is why Prakash Ambedkar can't get elected whereas Jagjivan's daughter was Speaker. Mayawati, also Dalit, ruled UP and was once considered a future PM.
Though Dalits were not legally bought and sold as commodities as the slaves were in the United States,
Prior to 1860 some High Caste Hindus were castrated and bought and sold as slaves by Muslims.
the institution of “untouchability” deprived Dalits of basic rights and elemental dignities for centuries.
Caste was based on a primitive pathogen avoidance theory. It was not linked to rights. Indeed, it gave countervailing power of the sort enjoyed by Trade Unions. By contrast, slavery had existed in India till it was abolished by the Brits about the same time it was abolished in the US. However, hereditary 'debt bondage' persisted.
The symbolic significance of Ambedkar leading the making of the Constitution is monumental. Imagine W. E. B. Du Bois as a key architect of the U.S. Constitution, were he alive in the 1780s.
This is silly. Ambedkar was put in as Chairman because he was the Law Minister just as his pal, Mandal, was Pakistan's Law Minister. But Mandal had to run away and Ambedkar too was marginalized after he had played a tokenist role.
In India—a starkly unequal society attempting to institute a democracy—the Constitution needed to function as a kind of political teacher.
But every newly independent country got a Constitution! The thing was just make believe. You can't learn anything by reading a Constitution. You have to open your eyes and see how things actually work. Gorbachev, a lawyer, read the Soviet Constitution. That's why the fool inadvertently brought down the Soviet Union.
Ambedkar knew that caste prejudices were deeply entrenched in India, with group and human inequality the system’s governing idea.
But he also knew the solution was economic. The Dalits needed to practice 'Tardean mimetics' and rise up by emulating the smart and enterprising mercantile castes. They needed to get the fuck out of involuted agriculture and benighted villages.
Brahmins—at the top—enjoyed unencumbered privileges,
Nonsense! The vast majority were as poor as shit. These guys thought they had won the lottery if they got a job as a cook for a Dalit Millionaire in Kanpur!
and Dalits—at the bottom—enjoyed none at all. In both government and socio-economic life, Brahmins and the other upper castes dominated positions of power.
That's the reason they were hated. They were disproportionately represented in Government jobs. These weren't well paid but they provided security and sources of unjust enrichment. To this day, a lot of Indian politics is about who gets these jobs.
Regardless of whether those in power were raving casteists, the hegemonic hold of caste-based beliefs in India made it clear to Ambedkar that an insidious form of caste prejudice was only to be expected.
But the thing didn't matter provided Dalits could rise up economically and if they had enough solidarity to create a countervailing power to defend their interests. Still, spewing hate at Brahmins and Banias (businessmen) is sensible because they are a minority. The dominant 'backward' castes don't like them.
As a result, Ambedkar did not want to give discretion to legislators. Rather, he believed that “constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated.”
But it was killed by the First Amendment. The Legislature is Supreme. True, at a later point, the Bench tried to make out that the Constitution had a 'Basic Structure'. But what that is, nobody knows. Anyway, Judges depend on the Ruling Party for post-retirement sinecures. Sooner or later a Party which keeps getting re-elected can do anything it likes. However, it is wiser for it not to do so. Why? Sooner of later it will be out of office and at the mercy of its rivals.
From his perspective, the Constitution had to be an elaborate document with extensive codification containing not only the larger framework within which the legislature and government would function, but also specific laws. It also had to include the details of pivotal administrative arrangements.
But Nehru quickly showed that Ambedkar had been wasting his time.
In India—a starkly unequal society attempting to institute a democracy
though Sri Lanka had done so already
—the Constitution needed to function as a kind of political teacher.
But a teacher who gets amended and bent out of all recognizable shape is not one who has any credibility
This could only be accomplished if it went beyond the two standard and contrasting constitutional doctrines: the constraining of executive/legislative power (“legal constitutionalism”),
which India does not have as its First Amendment proved
or the enabling of executive/legislative power (“political constitutionalism”).
which it doesn't have because constitutions can't create resources by magic. What enables executive power is tax revenue which in turn depends on the productivity of the working population.
At its deepest level, the Constitution had to nurture a system of “meanings” that all actors in the polity—executives, legislatures, bureaucracies, citizens and even courts—would share.
It failed to do this as was made obvious almost immediately.
The Constitution had to be a “textbook . . . a pedagogical apparatus,” not solely a “rulebook.”
It was neither. The first Amendment showed Parliament was Supreme. Judges were chosen by the Government. Later, politicians saw the wisdom of a 'Collegium' system. After all, they might lose the next election and be at the mercy of their rivals.
The unprecedented length of the Indian Constitution was thus dictated by
the fact that Indian lawyers are gaseous windbags. In the old days they would charge by the word for petitions they drafted.
However the precedent for the Indian Constitution's inordinate length was the 1935 British Act which is the longest law it had ever passed.
the country’s undemocratic social circumstances: the necessary restriction of legislative and judicial discretion in a land of caste prejudice, and the need to create both democratic powerholders and democratic citizens. Ambedkar knew that democracy and its democratic citizens would not organically emerge; they had to be created by design.
Nonsense! Ambedkar had stayed both in America and Britain. He could see that Britain's unwritten constitution was better than America's constitution- at least for 'coloured' or poorer people. Remember, Frankfurter- a progressive Judge- told B.R Rau not to have a due process clause. Back then, the guys chiefly interested in the Constitutions were Princes and 'zamindar' tax-farmers. They thought of the Constitution as their last line of defense in hanging on to their inherited privileges. However, Mrs Gandhi amended the Constitution to strip them of their titles, immunities and privy purses. At the time Left-Liberals viewed the Constitution with dark suspicion. Only in the Eighties did its reputation, and that of the Bench, begin to revive. But Governments too found it convenient to refer things to the Courts and thus kick the can down the road by saying 'sab kuch sub judice hai'- I can say nothing because this is the hands of the Court.
The allocation of power between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches turns on the distribution of horizontal authority. But those making the Constitution also had to consider the vertical distribution of power. Which levels of government—central (federal), state, and local—would have what kind of power?
The short answer is that Power was centralized in the hands of the Prime Minister. There were no 'States rights'. The Constitution itself could be amended by the ruling Party. Thus it was merely hot air and pi jaw.
A strong central government was integral to the success of national integration; but, to Ambedkar and Nehru, it was also necessary to shatter the power of tradition.
The power of tradition had already been shattered when the Princes acceded. India was determined to have a strong center without any minority protection because it had seen for itself that a weak center with minority reservations meant famine and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.
Ambedkar’s response to this question was again informed by a distrust of Indian social norms.
He, quite rightly, hated them.
Much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
who was literally insane
Mahatma Gandhi
who was stupid and ignorant
had long argued in favor of empowering local governments and encouraging local participation, asking for “village republics.”
Gandhi went further. He wanted to forbid trade and the division of labour. But his big idea was- no sex. The human race should die out.
Ambedkar fundamentally disagreed with this perspective.
He thought, quite rightly, that Gandhi was a maniac
In his eyes, villages were “the ruination of India . . . a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism.” Nehru concurred, and, together, the two left behind the Gandhian idea of village republics.
Because it was as crazy as the notion that we should give up sex and modern education and hospitals and Armies and trade and the division of labour.
Untouchability’s lived effects informed Ambedkar’s perspective on village rule.
To be fair, Ambedkar did a lot of research and found out that 'village republics'- i.e. places where the land revenue was collectively discharged in an equitable and voluntary way- did not exist. Indeed, some India returned MPs were pointing this out in Hansard in the 1860s! Even where pro-cultivator legislation was brought in, farmers were losing their land. Why? You must have Cooperative Credit alongside pro-tenant legislation. As the Shah of Iran was to discover in the 1960's, Land Reform without access to credit hurts the peasant. He has to flock to the shanty towns in the Cities. The Regime has dug its own grave.
Unlike race, untouchability was not inscribed in the color of one’s skin, the texture of one’s hair, or the shape of one’s nose.
This was also true of 'one drop' Jim Crow states. A person may look white, pass as white, yet be subject to highly discriminatory laws.
It was given away by one’s name and, often, one’s traditional profession. One could easily recognize castes in a village, less easily in the anyonymity of a city, and only with great difficulty at the national level. Caste names tended to be regional or local, because India hosted many languages and names were understood in a linguistic register. Brahmins and “untouchables” were found everywhere, but there were no comprehensive caste names in the country.
Actually, Sharma is such a name.
Brahmin names in the South were very different from those in the North,
No. Plenty of Sarmas in the South.
and the same was true of “untouchable” names. Local or regional knowledge was necessary to correctly identify caste.
So what? One could always find the thing out- if it really mattered as it did when it came to marriage.
Though Khosla largely ignores this anthropological reality, his conceptualization of caste allows him to explain the vertical distribution of power in India. To counter the impact of caste and to foster the idea of uniform citizenship and equal rights, Ambedkar thought it necessary to concentrate power at the federal center with less authority given to the states.
This is nonsense. Ambedkar had no power whatsoever. He had been brought in because he was smart. Better to have him inside the tent pissing outward than outside the tent pissing inward. Anyway, if Jinnah has Mandal as his Justice Minister, Nehru must have his pal as his Justice Minister.
The reason power was concentrated at the center was
1) India had had a disastrous experience of a weak center
2) The demand for the linguistic reorganization of the States, more particularly after the accession of the Princely Realms, meant that the Center would have to cut the Gordian knot and re-draw India's internal map.
This would launch a top-down battle against the hierarchical, caste-based, local power structures.
This is mad! In the Nineteen Fifties, there was no 'top-down battle' against Brahmin/Kayasth/ Bania domination. In the Sixties there was a rebellion from below. The dominant agricultural castes kicked the 'Forward Castes' in the crotch and stole their lunch money.
He saw no other way to defeat a deep-rooted ascriptive caste hierarchy.
Ambedkar was not a fool. He knew he was doing 'hack work'. But he did a good enough job of it- precisely because he was smart.
This approach did not stray far from that the United States took during Reconstruction (1865–77).
Very true! Dalits were appointed lieutenant Governors and swaggered around in top hats with their carpetbagger buddies- like the scene in Gone with the Wind. Then Scarlett O'Hara organized the Ku Klux Klan to put dem uppity Dalits in their place. How fucking stupid and deracinated is Varshney?
Political leaders and citizens all knew that race relations in the South would never reconstitute themselves and federal oversight and push were necessary. The project of racial equality could not be left to the discretion of the southern states.
This is crazy! Varshney has lived for many years in the States. Does he really not know what followed Reconstruction? It was the Klan and Jim Crow and Woodrow Wilson chucking 'Negroes' out of Federal Employment.
Substituting caste for race, Ambedkar’s mantra pushed for a stronger Delhi and weaker states.
Ambedkar had no say in this whatsoever. He did have a mantra. It was that Dalits can only arise through Tardean mimetics. The first step is to adopt a prestigious Religion- Buddhism- and a better lifestyle and mode of making a living. He had seen the Dalit Millionaires of Kanpur. He knew what the Justice Party and one or two of the Princes had done for Dalits. He had backed the wrong horse, like his pal Mandal, but he was not jealous of those Dalits who had backed the right horse and who had risen by merit into the Cabinet.
This approach had an interesting manifestation for local governments. Ambedkar knew that political power in villages would likely mirror social power—oppressing Dalits. Accordingly, he persuaded the Constitution drafters to not legally require elections for the third tier of government.
They needed no persuading. Elections are expensive. The country faced a fiscal crunch. Land Revenue was still a sizable proportion of the budget. The question was, how could it be cheaply collected? If you have elected panchayats they will refuse to hand over the land revenue unless they get something back for it. But what could the Government offer? Only pi jaw.
It was not until 1992, decades later, that two constitutional amendments were passed by parliament, mandating elections for local government. Prior to these amendments, India had only two tiers of elected government: central and state.
This came to be known as centralized parliamentary federalism.
Why? The State was unitary, not Federal. The Center can change the borders of a State or turn it into a Union Territory without any consultation with the State Legislature.
It received huge support in the Constituent Assembly, but not for the reasons that Ambedkar advanced. Many members worried that, in the absence of a strong national government, some regions might secede. The fact that Muslim-majority states had broken away and formed Pakistan only deepened this anxiety. Indeed, a strong central government was integral to the success of national integration; but, to Ambedkar and Nehru, it was also necessary to shatter the power of tradition.
Which had already been shattered when the Princes acceded. Both Imperialism and Monarchical Government were dead.
In writing the Constitution, the final matter to address was political representation: would India be conceptualized as a society composed of communities or individuals?
This had already been decided by Congress in 1930.
The British were convinced that Indians could not reason as individuals.
But the Brits also thought Hitler was a nice guy who had no further territorial demands in Europe. They believed a 'ten year rule'- i.e. the assumption that nothing will change over each and every decade- kept Malaysia and Singapore and so on safe from the Japs.
British voters decided their ruling class could not reason for shit. So they kicked out Churchill and gave Labour a Majority.
Rather, they believed that ascriptive communities of religion and caste were so preponderant that they preempted individual agency. Accordingly, the British formed separate electorates at the local and state levels. In separate Muslim electorates, only eligible Muslims could vote and run for office—non-Muslim participation was forbidden in Muslim constituencies.
The Brits did this because that's what the Muslims wanted. True, they were pissed off with Congress but they didn't create Muslim suspicion of Hindus, though they turned it to their own advantage.
Individuals needed to form judgements autonomous from their birth-based groups, and this required new rules of representation.
Varshney is being silly. So long as you have a vote and anyone can stand for election, your autonomous vote may be for your 'birth-based group' for the excellent reason that kin-selective altruism has evolutionary survival value.
India’s freedom fighters believed that this communal structure of British Indian polity had prevented the emergence of a common political arena, one that could have joined the Hindus and Muslims—India’s two largest religious communities—together as a coherent nation.
They were proved wrong by the 1946 election.
If anything, they thought the colonial privileging of a group-based polity created the Muslim nation of Pakistan.
Non Muslims getting massacred or forcibly converted or having to run away from Muslim majority areas showed that 'colonial privileging' meant shit. Islam just isn't very nice to minorities- or so its long history would suggest.
Separate electorates promoted separatism, not integration.
But the only way to deal with separatism was either to run away or to beat it into submission. Nothing else works.
Upon independence India moved to privilege the political representation of individuals, rather than pre-determined group identities.
But Dalits got reserved seats because, by and large, they had been loyal to Congress. This was also the reason more Muslims weren't chased away.
It did away with religion-based electorates. Instead “a model of citizenship centered on the political participation of individuals…would allow the categories of majority and minority to be . . . defined and redefined within the fluid domain of politics.”
But if that domain really was fluid then so were any definitions it created. But, a definition which keeps changing is itself indefinite. It is not a definition at all.
Ambedkar, though a proponent of individual autonomy, also favored group-based representation for specific categories. In particular he believed that electoral constituencies should be reserved for Dalits and Adivasis (the tribals) in accordance with their demographic proportions. Because Dalits comprised 16 percent of the national population and Adivasis 6.5 percent, the Constitution reserved 22.5 percent of parliamentary constituencies for these two groups. Each state assembly was also required to make reservations based on the demographic share of these two communities in their state populations.
So the guy looked out for his own people. But the reason they got protection is because they were by and large loyal to Congress.
But the reserved constituencies differed from the despised separate electorates.
Why? Because Gandhi had gone on a fast unto death till Ambedkar agreed to let the majority chose which Dalit got a reserved seat. Had Gandhi died, Dalits would have been slaughtered in the villages. The Brits and the Muslims would have abandoned them to their fate.
The key difference lay in the conceptualization of the voting publics. Like separate electorates, only Dalits and Adivasis could run for office in the reserved constituencies, but all communities, unlike separate electorates, could vote in the elections. In other words, Dalit politicians could not win these seats by appealing only to Dalits. They needed the support of the larger community to win office. Herein lay a significant tension: How could one allow group reservation, however different from separate electorates, if individuals were to be the unit of representation? If religion was to be dropped as a basis for electoral constituencies, why were the lowest castes worthy of special group representation?
Because they had plenty of meritorious candidates who backed the ruling party.
Khosla’s resolution to this puzzle is noteworthy.
There is no puzzle. Look at the quality of Dalit politicians like Jagjivan Ram. The bureaucrats came to feel that these guys did well no matter which portfolio they were given. Dalit merit, on the one hand, and Dalit support for the ruling party on the other, are the reason Dalits do well in Indian politics.
He extracts from Ambedkar’s argument a threshold-based reasoning: “Caste based domination was so entrenched that the problem could not be entirely solved by suffrage. . . . the path to individualization of identity lay in permitting special treatment towards members of groups that had remained constrained.” In other words, “for individual liberty to be realized, the stubborn practice of superior groups needed to end.”
Ambedkar had no illusions about his 'hack-work'. It was meaningless pi-jaw. Nehru could do what he liked so long as he commanded a majority. Dalits needed to work out their own salvation in the time honored way- by adopting a prestigious Religion and living better lives than others in a similar socio-economic position. But this has been happening all over India for thousands of years! It also happened in Europe and America. You became a Pietist or a Quaker or Unitarian or whatever so as to rise up socially and economically. In the Seventeenth Century, the 'Dissenter' was a ranting agricultural labourer. By the beginning of the Twentieth Century these guys owned the biggest Banks and Newspapers and so forth. Plenty of them had risen from the 'purple of Commerce' into the ranks of ermine clad Peers of the Realm. This is also happening in India.
In a society that is deeply unequal, democracy will have a great deal of difficulty unless the architecture of the polity devises means to address its inequalities.
The 'architecture of the polity' is nothing but a 'hasrath-e-tameer'- a blue-print for a Castle in Spain. It means shit.
Groups such as Dalits that had faced centuries of social repression needed state support.
Hilarious! No. What they needed for the police to stop raping their women and burning down their huts. But we all need that. That's why we may vote for a gangster of our caste. He will kill policemen if they go too far. Anyway that was the old theory. Now we wonder whether the gangster is in cahoots with the Station House Officer.
Only after a certain threshold had been crossed and some semblance of equality had been reached could one rely on individual agency to climb the economic and social ladder.
This is sheer fantasy. India was and is a very very poor country. The Government can't extract more than ten percent of Gross National Product- not Surplus, mind you!- and it needs to spend that just on the 'night-watchman' basics. Since the country is very big, there is a little money to be spent on cretins like Varshney talking bollocks in crap Departments of increasingly ramshackle Universities. But most students of Poli Sci end up earning the minimum wage in menial occupations. So do a lot of engineers- coz the standard of instruction is so low. But fixing Engineering Colleges can raise productivity. There is no point fixing Poli Sci. It is utterly shite.
Muslims did not need the same kind of support, as they were not part of the Hindu caste system and therefore not repressed by the force of tradition.
Amazing! Varshey does not know that Muslims in India have castes as well as a notion of 'najis' untouchability! The Hindus pretended this was not the case so as to exclude all Muslims from reservations. Thankfully, this has changed and is changing.
Though many Muslims were indeed poor, Muslim princes and aristocrats had ruled large parts of India for several centuries. Dalits, entirely devoid of such privileges and never part of the ruling class, were comprehensively subaltern. After centuries of being rendered destitute, Dalits required affirmative action.
They got it because they had meritorious leaders and were themselves very able and productive. However, they would have done far better under free Enterprise, provided availability of credit was rational and fair. In other words, market failures in finance had, and have, to be tackled by proper mechanism design.
One other point- there are plenty of Royal and Warrior lineages of Dalit origin. Why? Dalits have often shown superior courage and military skill. Ambedkar's own 'Mahars' helped the Brits win their wars against the Marathas. Later, however, they excluded them from Army recruitment. This was a foolish mistake.
Though empirical theories have long recognized the exceptional nature of India’s democracy,
though Sri Lanka has had universal franchise longer
political philosophy has largely ignored the country’s remarkable democratic founding.
but political philosophy is utterly shite.
By grounding Indian constitutional debates in political philosophy, Khosla has given an entirely novel
but wholly vacuous when not misleading or actively mischievous
perspective to India’s democratic origins. Perhaps now political philosophers will have reason to more intimately engage with India’s constitutional ideas—ideas addressing codification, the conceptualization of separation of powers, and balancing individual and group representation—critical areas of thought for any modern polity and constitution.
I don't get this. Every Western country has had these ideas. Group representation turned out to be foolish- as Lebanon now realizes. India's affirmative action for Dalits on the other hand will continue because Dalit tend to be more, not less, able than average. This is also the case with women- and we may see a Constitutional change to give Women half the seats in Parliament. But these are pragmatic measures. More important than either Dalit or Female representation is throwing criminals out of politics. Lock them up. Don't let them loose on the floor of the Legislature.
India’s constitutional history also presents lessons about creating democracy in unlikely settings,
i.e. places where people have dark skin
highlighting that progressive politics and careful institutional engineering can be used to sustain democracy.
No. What India shows is that Democracy can be the cheapest way of providing a very basic system of governance though its reach may be very limited. But India had no other alternative. It didn't want to turn into a bunch of princedoms perpetually at war with each other. But the only alternative to that was Democracy of a somewhat vacuous, but earnest, kind.
In a society that is deeply unequal,
India wasn't deeply unequal. Almost everybody was as poor as shit.
democracy will have a great deal of difficulty unless the architecture of the polity
and the cosmography of the celestial underpinnings of the hegemonic Sublime
devises means to address its inequalities.
Very true! We need to know the mobile phone number and Email address of various types of inequalities. Then we can ring them up, or email them, and tell them to quit being so mean otherwise we will beat them with our hockey sticks
Clearly the value of such lessons has not yet disappeared.
Such lessons have no value whatsoever. Let them disappear by all means. Good riddance to bad rubbish is what we will say in between texting threats to Inequality.
