The Spirit of Democracy, page 22
India’s institutions have also managed to keep the country from tearing apart along any of its numerous divisions. Some of this impulse toward moderation lies in the very complexity of India’s diversity, in which the ties of language, ethnicity, religion, class, region, state, and “most distinctively, caste . . . create multiple and cross-cutting cleavages.”26 Individuals shift between identities that vary in salience over time, and so hold a dampened sense of devotion to any single one.27 Political institutions have chosen to enhance the gravitational pull toward the center rather than the extremes. A seminal influence was exerted by the nature of the Congress Party as “a grand coalition of the major political and social forces” in India, transcending ethnicity, region, and religion.28 The electoral system also facilitated the success of such an expansive, diverse party against a host of much narrower challengers. By electing parliament through the British-style, “first past the post system” in single-member territorial districts (each of which now contains more than one million voters), competing candidates were forced to appeal to large and socially diverse constituencies. This distinct parliamentary system enabled a long, stable period of Congress dominance after independence, but did not permit complacency, as the Congress faced stiff competition in most districts. Once that dominance collapsed, the system compelled Congress’s main rival, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, or Indian People’s Party) to attenuate its northern, Hindu chauvinist, and upper-caste leanings in order to attract the wider social and regional base needed to win a plurality of seats and assemble a governing coalition.29
Two other institutions have contained India’s potential for destructive fragmentation and steered it toward pragmatism, bargaining, and a larger national commitment. The most crucial of these has been federalism, which has devolved considerable power and autonomy to state and local governments. Federalism is a particularly powerful tool of ethnic conflict management because it can provide many mechanisms for reducing conflict, including: dispersing conflict from the center by reducing the points of power, softening conflict between groups by generating conflicts within groups, creating incentives for interethnic cooperation, and encouraging alignments on interests other than ethnicity.30 In a number of deeply divided democracies, such as India, Belgium, and Spain, federalism has been constitutionally embraced as a successful means for maintaining democratic stability.31 In recent decades, the devolution of power away from the center has been one of the most powerful democratizing trends worldwide, especially in Africa and Latin America. When people in a region or locality, through their own elected governments, have some independent ability to raise and spend their own resources and to set their own development priorities, government is closer to the people, the people have more say, and political legitimacy is enhanced. This does not mean that decentralized governance will always be less corrupt and abusive, but in the long run it increases accountability and responsiveness to local concerns, stimulates citizen participation, widens the access to power of deprived groups, checks the potentially overbearing power of the central government, gives opposition parties a chance to govern at lower levels, and so broadens commitment to democracy.32
In fact, it is impossible to imagine how such a large and immensely varied country as India could be a democracy except through a system that guarantees constitutionally significant autonomy to elected governments at the state and local levels. Virtually all of the territorially expansive and heavily populated democracies—the United States, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico—are federal systems. This is also why democracy has only been possible in Nigeria under federalism, Indonesia’s democracy has been moving toward a federal system, Sudan needs federalism to establish democratic peace, and the demise of democracy in Russia has coincided with Putin’s evisceration of the country’s federal institutions and restraints.
In India, federalism has given the country’s diverse linguistic communities an important element of cultural pride and political autonomy within a larger national identity. The scale of the challenge is staggering. “Twelve languages are spoken by more than 5 million people each, and another four languages by more than a million each.” Since the reorganization of India’s states along linguistic lines beginning in 1956, most of these widely used languages have had a state of their own, “which essentially means that the official language of each state is spoken by a majority of its inhabitants.”33 Yet, states still contain great cultural diversity, which discourages secessionist tendencies. As a result, the federal system in India tends to “quarantine” most identity conflicts at a primarily local level. State governments have also been foundries for economic and social reform. While autonomy means that some states, like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, have lagged miserably behind because of bad, corrupt governance, others, like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, have been able to improve human well-being much more rapidly.
Federalism in India has worked far from perfectly. It has not always prevented outbreaks of communal violence and separatism. But often these have come “from the failure to adhere to the norms of federalism and autonomy,”34 while these norms in turn have led to accommodations for many of the most aggrieved and deprived areas. Federalist devolution of power has enabled serious, and in some states appalling, problems of corruption, misrule, and abuse of human rights to fester. Moreover, the center’s constitutional prerogative to topple elected state governments and impose direct “president’s rule” has been used—infamously by Indira Gandhi—to advance narrowly political objectives rather than good governance and the rule of law. In allowing state autonomy in developmental policies during the last twenty years of economic liberalization, it has facilitated a vast “chasm separating wealthy states like Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Punjab” from the poor states of the northern Hindi heartland.35
Yet the system has also been adaptable. Six small, culturally distinctive states were created between 1962 and 1987, and another three in 2000, from territorial communities that felt severely deprived within larger states.36 Crucially, by creating many thousands of offices and points of political entry, federalism has given a wide range of people a stake in the political system. One of the leading scholars of Indian federalism, James Manor, captures it well: “Not only are there elections for the national and state legislative assemblies; there are also positions of influence available in three tiers of decentralized, elected councils, and in numerous quasi-official boards, cooperatives, associations, and the like. The existence of so many opportunities to capture at least some power persuades parties and politicians to remain engaged with elections and logrolling, even when they are defeated in some arenas.”37 In addition, regional parties have emerged to prominence within many of the linguistically distinct states, stimulating a fluid form of coalitional politics that has complicated the efforts for stable governance at the national level but also made Indian democracy much more inclusive.
It thus seems difficult to dispute the widespread academic assessment that India’s federal system has been a foundation of its democratic stability. Two of the most distinguished American experts on India, Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph, recently concluded:
Forty years ago, there seemed good reason to fear that Selig Harrison was right to warn that India’s “fissiparous tendencies,” particularly its linguistic differences, would soon lead to Balkanization or dictatorship. Today such worries seem unpersuasive. The federal system has helped India to live peacefully with its marked difference.38
A second mechanism for knitting India together politically has been the gradual attenuation of social and political inequalities through reserved quotas in political representation, public employment, and higher education for the lowest status groups: the “scheduled castes,” or dalits (the former “untouchables,” about 17 percent of the population), and the “scheduled tribes” (about 8 percent). More limited affirmative-action guarantees have since been provided to the “other backward castes” (accounting for about 44 percent of the population).39 These extensive quotas have been cumbersome, inefficient, and controversial, guaranteeing roughly half of public-sector jobs and half the placements in higher education to these less privileged groups. However, they have helped to drive a social revolution that has dramatically accelerated social mobility and expanded political participation to the point where voter turnout among lower-caste groups is now higher than among the well-off. Poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, and income inequality continue to blight the performance of Indian democracy, but as Amartya Sen argues, the country’s free press and civil society have prevented the occurrence of any serious famine. And according to Sumit Ganguly, the country’s social progress has been greater than the statistics reveal.
Upper-caste dominance is steadily on the decline, progress has been made toward universal elementary education, [and] absentee landlordism has been legally abolished. . . . Consequently, even fitful attempts to promote equality through public policies have had significant ameliorative effects that cannot be adequately measured through conventional statistical techniques.”40
ACCOUNTABILITY AND THE RULE OF LAW
Few features of political life are more corrosive of public trust in government and support for democracy than corruption (and other forms of abuse of power). If nothing else, citizens expect that democratically elected officials will be held to the same standards as the people are, and that violators will be punished. When politicians become a class unto themselves, feeding shamelessly and lawlessly at the public trough, they generate an open invitation for citizens to reject democracy.
Sustaining and consolidating democracy therefore entails making it more accountable to the people and more respectful of the law. Stable democracy requires a rule of law, in which the constitution is supreme, all citizens are equal before the law, no one is above the law, corruption is minimized and punished, state authorities respect the rights of citizens, and citizens have effective access to the courts to defend their rights. A democratic rule of law requires a judiciary that is, at every level, neutral, independent from political influence, and reasonably competent and resourceful. Most of all, it requires a constitutional court willing to constrain the power of the mighty and defend the rights of the meek.41 An independent judiciary, however, is only one type of democratic institution to constrain the abuse of power. A good democracy requires a dense web of institutions that check and balance the executive (and one another), as I explain in chapter 13.
India has not been free of serious problems of electoral violence and banditry, but for such a big and poor country, it has managed to institutionalize an exceptional degree of administrative integrity and competence in the holding of elections and the counting of votes. Regularly every few years, an electorate of over 600 million voters comes to the polls in sizable percentages (well over 50 percent). A decade ago, the chief of India’s election commission, M. S. Gill, described the Herculean administrative challenges: “Holding a general election involves establishing no fewer than 900,000 polling stations from the high Himalayas to the desert of Rajasthan, including areas that can only be reached on the back of an elephant. Yet such is the miracle of our functioning anarchy in India that never has a single polling station failed the test.”42 One reason the process works well, and with growing credibility and integrity over the past two decades, is because of the career professionalism and total independence of the election commission, which in the period before an election commands 4.5 million staffers from throughout the government. As a result of this capacity and competence, elections in India have been broadly credible, intensely competitive, and largely free and fair.
The single most important institution for upholding accountability and the rule of law in India has been the judicial system. In what will likely remain its darkest moment, the Supreme Court overturned nine High Court decisions that declared Mrs. Gandhi’s state of emergency unconstitutional.43 However, once the emergency ended, the Supreme Court “embarked on an unprecedented burst of judicial activism” that dramatically expanded access to justice. “To this end, the Court introduced a system of public-interest litigation that enabled bonded laborers, disenfranchised tribal people, indigent women, the homeless, and other formerly powerless citizens to approach the bench in search of justice.” Journalists and civil society activists also used this mechanism (roughly equivalent to the class action lawsuit in the United States) “to enforce existing environmental laws, to prevent the maltreatment of inmates in state prisons, and to expose corruption in high places.”44 As corruption mounted in the 1990s, the Supreme Court moved to strengthen the independence of another institution of accountability, the Central Bureau of Investigation, by overturning a requirement that the bureau needed “government concurrence” and consultation with a suspected ministry before it could investigate the ministry or its head. This removed an important constraint on the investigation of government corruption. Supreme Court rulings shut down over two hundred companies polluting along the Ganges while bolstering enforcement of clean air and water laws in the heavily polluted capital.45 At lower levels, the courts remain horribly slow and inefficient, carrying a backlog of 20 million cases.46 And as Pratap Mehta argues, the expansion of judicial power raises valid questions about the proper limits of unelected authority in a democracy (and has motivated constitutional amendments to renew limits on judicial power).47 But at the same time, higher-level judicial actions have not only strengthened the rule of law, they have also served as a main front for deepening the responsiveness of Indian democracy, and hence its popular esteem.
SUSTAINING DEMOCRACY IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY
The persistence of democracy in developed countries presents no real mystery. As we saw in chapter 4, economic development naturally brings about transformations in individual values and social structure that press societies toward democracy and make it difficult to sustain nondemocratic government. Indeed, there has never been a case of democratic breakdown—ever—in a rich country. This is not an invitation to apathy. There is a natural human tendency to want to corner power and monopolize resources, and thus democracy remains continually vulnerable. For rich countries, the success of reform determines the quality and scope of democracy. For poor countries, the survival of democracy is at stake.
We have seen in this chapter what has allowed India to sustain sixty years of nearly uninterrupted democracy—and that, potentially, any country, rich or poor, can follow its path. Despite its recent economic growth, India has not boasted high levels of national wealth or education, a feverish miracle of development, or a revolution in its governance. Incremental improvements may be good enough—but they must occur.
At the most general level, two things have sustained democracy in India: the decent functioning and gradual deepening of democracy and a rising hope for a better life. Over time, Indian democracy has worked substantially to provide electoral choice, rotation of power, checks on ruling elites, exposure of abuse of power, and legal and political redress of grievances. The gains have been uneven, but at critical historical moments, change has been achieved and justice has been won. Aggrieved groups have seen that the constitutional system can be made to work for them—and for everyone. Citizens have come to know that democracy means more than occasional elections, that it provides an ongoing means for achieving accountability and responsiveness, and for making the political leadership more broadly representative—“an accomplishment of which many Indians are rightly proud.”48
At the same time, democracy in India has worked in another political sense, with huge implications for other divided societies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe and Latin America. Democracy has provided peaceful means to manage and accommodate deep differences. Again, these have progressed without serious setbacks, but constitutional and legal instruments have prevented or contained large-scale violent conflict while deepening groups’ stakes in the democratic system. India’s federal structure, its electoral and party systems, and its rules for empowerment of minorities have worked because they fit the country’s particular circumstances and because they have been able to adapt to changing circumstances over time.
Finally, Indian democracy has been powerfully sustained by the steady expansion of the public’s hope in it. Until the last decade or so, India’s economic development was unnecessarily—really, tragically—retarded by a long-lingering ideological devotion to socialist principles of state intervention and economic autarky. Since the liberalization and opening of the Indian economy began in 1991, economic growth rates have risen well beyond the tortoiselike “Hindu rate of growth” of the country’s first four decades, and transformation is finally under way. But even during those several decades of underperformance, the lives of Indians did improve. Between 1970 and 1992, life expectancy rose from fifty to sixty-one years, infant mortality fell by almost half, and adult literacy rose from 34 to 50 percent.49 Moreover, “the economy registered a fairly steady, although unspectacular, rate of growth, experienced partial renovation of agricultural production leading to self-sufficiency in food, developed a structure of industrialization that produces most of what the country basically needs, expanded the supply of educated and sophisticated technical workers, consistently held down the level of inflation to one of the lowest in the world, and in the process ensured a level of self-reliance and payment ability that sheltered it from major debt crises.”50 It was a record that almost any African country would have been glad to have. If it did not lift nearly enough people out of poverty, it did at least make progress and gave people hope for a better life and an increased sense of group dignity and national pride. Weighed against the challenges the country faced at independence and the developmental failures of many of its neighbors, these are no small achievements.
