One-and-a-half cheers for Indian democracy!

Arundhati Roy's breath-taking essays in Outlook, first this summer's "Walking with the Comrades" about her experiences with the Maoists, and then the latest entitled "The Trickle-Down Revolution," inspire so much debate and commentary in the Indian media that there may not be much to add. But most of it, to be honest, is not very good commentary. Take this response in Outlook by Balbir K. Punj, a BJP MP, which begins with the obligatory nod to Arundhati's sincerity and passion. The problem with her relentless advocacy for the 830 million Indians who live on less than Rs. 20 a day and who do not figure on the horizon of India's aggressively neo-liberal state is, according to Punj, that India has not been industrialized enough! Mining bauxite, big dams, even building five-star hotels, all "create jobs." In time, by following the European model as set out from the 19th-c. on, India too can become a welfare state like Sweden. I need not spend any more words on how ridiculous this is.

Yet there is a nagging thorn in Arundhati's side. Her vivid tableaux of poverty, misery and repression are painted so thick that, by the end, she is so exhausted as only to exclaim, "And you want the Maoists to stand for elections?" Well, not so fast. In an interesting critique in the pages of the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner calls Roy a "reactionary" because "she shows nothing but condescension and contempt for democracy" in general, as a process. For instance, he quotes her as saying that, "the institutions of democracy–the courts, the police, the ‘free’ press, and, of course, elections–far from working as a system of checks and balances, often do the opposite.” In other words, the observable realities of the system in India lead her to believe that it is a sham, the rule of the mighty over the weak. Chotiner responds, "democracy is much more, and much harder, and much more precious than that." He again quotes her on the Indian judiciary as railing against the Supreme Court, which has "become the premier arbiter of public policy in this country that markets itself as the World’s Largest Democracy." Chotiner responds, "A judiciary that settles disputes, that concerns itself with environmental questions, that reviews the laws of the elected branch: imagine!"

Part of the problem with Chotiner's otherwise provocative piece is that he doesn't know too much about India, and that he also misreads her. Roy is not disputing those judicial decisions that deal with environmental questions or review the laws of the executive in a fair manner, or to the benefit of economically and politically disadvantaged groups. She would not object to a court that actually lived up to its ideals, but it is observably true that it does not. But Chotiner is correct that there is a slippage in Roy's thinking that leads her to condemn the very desirability of the ideals of the democratic process. Because elections have not resolved the claims of tribals and the poor, no group advocating for those claims (which she, rightly or wrongly, sees the Maoists as) should ever stand in an election.

This more or less philosophical argument about the nature of democracy as a substantive process masks a deeper and more important set of concerns. Instead of asking, "How democratic is India?" we should seek to describe with as much accuracy as possible the particular features of the Indian state, since that is what Roy and her opponents are essentially arguing about. What does this state do, and how does it work?

There has been a mass of scholarship in South Asian history and political theory on this topic, so I will mention only two or three especially helpful interventions. Partha Chatterjee's Gramsci-inspired formulation from back in the dog days of Subaltern Studies in the 1980s introduced the Nehruvian era as one of "passive revolution," in which the technocratic state appropriated the domain of politics from the more restless and unpredictable activities of mobilised peasants, workers etc. In a more recent essay entitled "Democracy and Economic Transformation in India," Chatterjee has pushed his theories further into the neo-liberal era, showing how the influx of foreign capital and the rise of new dominant classes has changed the playing field of the "passive revolution." Yet the persistence of electoral democracy also means that those marginalised groups, the victims of "primitive accumulation," can and will find redress through the "mechanisms of democratic politics," because "it is unacceptable and illegitimate" for the government to create uprooted and discontented masses. In a sharp retort, Amita Baviskar and Nandini Sundar called attention to the "attempt to use procedural democracy and the existence of independent statutory institutions to subvert a more substantive democracy." This is more than an argument about what "substantive democracy" means. It is about the changing configurations of state power: has the state "retreated" since 1991, is it "colluding" with capital, or are its powers (as Chatterjee argues) merely "re-distributed" among a host of other non-state and non-governmental agencies? So far, an open question.

Going back again in time, what is specifically "Indian" about Indian democracy as it emerged after 1947? The celebratory rhetoric usually takes as its implicit point of comparison that shadow country, Pakistan. Ayesha Jalal's one-of-a-kind comparative study, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, places the formation of two political systems - electoral democracy and military dictatorship - in a single frame of analysis.
Jalal's explanation centres on those "structural" factors that forced the early Pakistani state to concentrate spending on the military and on the centre at the expense of the provinces. The "truncated" country that emerged out of the partitions of the two richest Muslim-majority provinces, Punjab and Bengal, left Pakistan with far less of an industrial and agricultural base than its neighbour. India also inherited the administrative structures of the Raj wholesale, most importantly the civil service. The extensive patronage networks and organisational capabilities of the Congress machinery (unlike the Muslim League's corresponding weakness and search for legitimacy) allowed it to co-opt the bureaucracy and the army to an extent that was not possible in Pakistan. As Jalal succinctly puts it, "The qualitatively different balance of power between bureaucrats and politicians in the two states helps explain the relative success of formal democracy in the one and its apparent failure in the other."
India also inherited much of the constitutional framework of the 1935 Government of India Act, with the notable exception of removing restrictions on the franchise. What Jalal terms the "steel frame" of the bureaucracy that kept the Raj running could be adapted with far less difficulty to its successor sovereign power in Delhi than in Karachi. Pakistan faced further difficulties in finding a formula for representation that could balance the numerically superior Bengalis with the demands of the Punjabi elite in the West, while the army grew stronger in the context of conflict with India and a strategic alliance with the United States.


So where does this leave us? One of the most eloquent spokesmen for the uniqueness and vitality of Indian democracy has been Ram Guha, who has taken it upon himself to be India's premier popular historian and national conscience-keeper. In a wonderful essay in Outlook entitled "Ambedkar's Desiderata," he composes a paean to the Indian constitution and to its author, elevating Ambedkar's wise warnings about despotism and corruption and his championing of Dalit and adivasi claims into the kind of clairvoyance enjoyed by the Founding Fathers in US national mythology. Undoubtedly Ambedkar was an unusually far-sighted thinker, and Guha's call for a return to a vision of a substantive social democracy is welcome while the Indian state exuberantly dances with Capital nowadays. But it is important to remember Jalal's point, that much of the constitution drafted by the Constituent Assembly was directly based on its colonial precedent; in many ways this was not a revolutionary document, although Ambedkar's efforts made it radical in its promises.

So when Guha writes in his massive survey India after Gandhi that the verdict on Indian democracy must be, in the words of an old Johnny Walker joke, phiphty-phiphty, he is right but it's all a bit more complicated. Indian democracy in its particular form not only co-exists with authoritarian military ventures (Kashmir, Dantewada) but enables them. The close alliance between bureaucracy, politicians and military, coupled with enormous resources and a diverse population, ensure that the state can engage in a variety of coercive measures without fearing for its existence or legitimacy. After all, there will be elections again in five years. The Pakistani army and bureaucracy never enjoyed such a privilege, having to exercise power more nakedly for fear of completely losing control of the provinces or various recalcitrant segments of the population. This also means that, on the "plus" side of the equation, the pressures of "civil society" and non-governmental power are also brought to bear more easily on the Indian state, while in Pakistan only a few voices claiming to be truly outside the political machine (despite her last name, Fatima Bhutto is one of them) can be heard. There, it appears, is where the fight will be for both India and Pakistan in the next century.

Netaji and the Naxalities: Violence, Politics and History

A few days ago, I was sitting on a bench in a small park behind the Jama Masjid in Delhi on a beautiful afternoon. I was talking to a young man named Mohammed Khan, a schoolteacher from the town of Jhansi in U.P. I looked up at a martial statue in the middle of the park and asked him who the figure was. Subhas Chandra Bose, came the reply. I asked my new friend what he thought of him. He nodded energetically, "Very great man." "You are a Muslim," I said, "and he is a Bengali Hindu." It didn't matter one bit. Netaji was a great man to all Indians because he fought for his country.

This conversation reminded me of another talk I had with a friend in Berkeley, who astutely complained that the problem he had with the Subaltern School historians, many of them Bengali bhadralok (I assume he was speaking of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty et.al.), was their romanticization and glorification of violence. This meant they were prone to expressing at least some degree of affection toward the ongoing Maoist Naxalite rebellion in West Bengal, Orissa and Chattisgarh, but also admired that far more mainstream revolutionary, Subhas Chandra Bose (conveniently ignoring his alliance with the Axis and his un-democratic aspirations for India). In one sense, Netaji and the Naxalites are far apart on any spectrum, whether political, ideological or even from the standpoint of Bengali history. The Naxalites are leading a peasant revolt that seeks to destroy that stratum of middle-class life and culture so carefully built up by the bhadralok over the last two hundred years. They are even fiercely against the Communist government of West Bengal, who they accuse of readily capitulating to bourgeois interests (the Nandigram massacre of two years ago represents only the most visible and shocking aspect of the growing divide between peasants and the CPI(M) elite in Calcutta). Bose, while not entirely de-coupled from a kind of authoritarian socialist philosophy by his Axis alliance (a marriage of convenience), represents something totally different: he was the last vessel into which the bhadralok placed their hopes and dreams, the final attempt to rescue the leadership of the nationalist movement from its westward drift to Gandhian ashrams in Gujarat and Nehru's parliamentarianism in New Delhi. Bose, an educated, cosmopolitan, and charismatic leader, shares with the low-class Naxalite agitators only the principle of an ethics of organised violence as the solution to a political claim.
Indeed, Bose is often viewed as Gandhi's counterpart, the other side of the conventional wisdom that India's freedom was won by non-violence. He is also the alternate examplar to emerge from the freedom movement. A recent obituary in the Economist of the Tamil Tiger leader, V. Prabhakaran, tellingly noted that his hero was "not Gandhi but Subhas Chandra Bose."

While having these thoughts, I happened to be reading Ramachandra Guha's collection of essays, The Last Liberal. Guha is one of the most (and few) popular historians in India, and he has undergone something of a transformation in his scholarly career. He made his name by writing a detailed sociological analysis of Chipko, the famed environmental protest movement in the Himalayas. This great book, hitting all the right notes in the "history from below" category, gave way to an increasing focus on individuals and a shift to politics Guha himself describes as "liberal." Aside from withering criticism of Marxist academics and the Communist political establishment in Calcutta, Guha calls himself as a Nehruvian and tries to establish the Congress leadership of newly independent India as the "Founding Fathers" of a democratic, secular and liberal country. This is all well and good, but it raises the most interesting questions when considering the relationship of the historian to social protest and resistance.

For one thing, as Guha points out, historians often confuse their scholarly methodology with their political beliefs. Someone who works on peasant rebellions in Bengal is quite likely to be sympathetic to the Naxalites, while someone who condemns the Indian Left is more likely to view history not as struggle and resistance but as other kinds of narratives, most notably a modernising and democratising trajectory that views violence and "identity politics" as obstacles to be overcome. For the Subalternists and those who Guha quite uncharitably calls "so-called feminists," it's hard to be ideological allies with bands of terrorists who have repeatedly expressed their desire to do away with intellectuals altogether. For those Subalternists working in well-funded academic establishments in the United States, the contradiction is even more glaring. On the other hand, it's hard to be a convincing critic of caste and patriarchy while reflexively reacting against any form of political organisation of the oppressed classes. Guha may have activist clearance on the environmental front, but he dismisses Dalit parties and the "so-called feminists" all too easily.

This brings us to the Indian election of 2009. The defeat handed to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in U.P. by the Congress was seen by many Western-oriented, modernising observers as a defeat of the "politics of caste" by the benign and rational considerations of economic development. Mayawati, while easily hailed by leftist historians as a hero (a Dalit woman in charge of India's most populous state), is considered by urban liberals to be a corrupt gangster. Lalu Prasad, formerly chief minister of Bihar and railway minister, is a garish thug, who presided over the most backward and violent of all Indian states. The greatest difficulty lies here for the historian: as well-meaning and anti-caste as one can be, there is simply no way to justify or even excuse the rise of a man like Lalu in Indian politics. No amount of caste oppression can adequately explain the arrogance and venality of such a figure. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to take on caste without a radical challenge to the establishment - which may involve the rise of Mayawatis and Lalus in the bargain. Dismissing them as "identity politics" isn't very useful when caste or regional identity in India cannot simply be made to go away by being wished away, or not thought of at all.

The historian of India today has few options. One can always be a card-carrying communalist, writing textbooks about Muslim invasions and finding a safe home in the arms of the BJP. One can be a righteous leftist going on about protest and resistance while the backyard burns from Naxalite murders and bombs. Or, one can try and walk the middle path, conscious that most historians are middle-class people working in that bastion of middle-class respectability: the university. If, however, one decides to forge this happy compromise and label oneself as "liberal," more questions are raised about what gets left out in such a definition, and whether there is any serious message to the contemporary world of politics left to offer.