India After Gandhi (128 page)

R
OBIN
J
EFFRET
, historian, 2000

I
N
ITS
ISSUE
FOR
February 1959, that venerable American magazine
The Atlantic Monthly
carried an unsigned report on the state of Pakistan. General Ayub Khan had recently assumed power via a military coup.
What was missing in Pakistan, wrote the correspondent, was ‘the politicians. They have been banished from public life and their very name is anathema. Even politics in the abstract has disappeared. People no longer seem interested in debating socialism versus free enterprise or Left versus Right. It is as if these controversies, like the forms of parliamentary democracy, were merely something that was inherited willy-nilly from the West and can now be dispensed with.’

The
Atlantic
reporter believed that ‘the peasants [in Pakistan] welcome the change in government because they want peace’. He saw law and order returning to the countryside, and smugglers and black-marketeers being putin their place. ‘Already the underdog in Pakistan’ is grateful to the army, he wrote, adding: ‘In a poor country ... the success of any government is judged by the price of wheat and rice’, which, he claimed, had fallen since Ayub took over.

Foreign correspondents are not known to be bashful of generalizations, even if these be based on a single fleeting visit to a single unrepresentative country. Our man at the
Atlantic Monthly
was no exception. From what he saw – or thought he saw – in Pakistan he offered this general lesson: ‘Many of the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa have tried to copy the British parliamentary system. The experiment has failed in the Sudan, Pakistan and Burma, while the system is under great stress in India and Ceylon. The Pakistan experiment [with military rule] will be watched in Asia and Africa with keen interest.’

Forty years later the
Atlantic Monthly
carried another report on the state of Pakistan. Between times the country had passed from dictatorship to democracy and then back again to rule by men in uniform. It had also been divided, with its eastern wing seceding to form the sovereign state of Bangladesh. And it had witnessed three wars, each one initiated by the generals whom the peasants had hoped would bring them peace.

This fresh
Atlantic
report was signed, by Robert D. Kaplan, who is something of a travelling specialist on ethnic warfare and the breakdown of nation-states. Kaplan presented a very negative portrayal of Pakistan, of its lawlessness, its ethnic conflicts (Sunni vs. Shia, Mohajir vs. Sindhi, Balochi vs. Punjabi etc.), its economic disparities, and of the training of
jihadis
and the cult of Osama bin Laden.

Kaplan quoted a Pakistani intellectual who said: ‘We have never defined ourselves in our own right – only in relation to India. That is
our tragedy.’ The reporter himself thought that Pakistan ‘could be a Yugoslavia in the making, but with nuclear weapons’. Like Yugoslavia, Pakistan reflected an ‘accumulation of disorder and irrationality that was so striking’. Kaplan’s conclusion was that ‘both military and democratic governments in Pakistan have failed, even as India’s democracy has gone more than half a century without acoup’.
¹

Kaplan doubtless had not read the very different prognosis of Pakistan offered in his own magazine forsty years previously. What remains striking are the very different assessments of India. In 1959, the
Atlantic Monthly
pitied India for having a democracy when it might be better off as a military dictatorship. In 1999 the same magazine thought this very democracy had been India’s saving grace.

Two years later the Twin Towers in New York fell. As attempts were made by Western powers to foster democracy by force in Afghanistan and Iraq, India’s record in nurturing democracy from within gathered renewed appreciation. When, in April 2004, India held its fourteenth general election the contrast with Pakistan was being highlighted by Pakistanis themselves: ‘India goes to the polls and the world notices,’ wrote the Karachi columnist Ayaz Amir. ‘Pakistan plunges into another exercise in authoritarian management – and the world notices, but through jaundiced eyes. Are we so dumb that the comparison escapes us?’ ‘When will we wakeup?’ continued Amir, ‘When will we learn? When will it dawn on us that it is not India’s size, population, tourism or IT industry [that is] making us look small, but Indian democracy?’
²

In those elections of 2004 some 400 million voters exercised their franchise. The ruling alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, was widely expected to win by a comfortable margin, prompting fears of a renewal of the ‘Hindutva’ agenda. As it happened, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance defiedt he pollsters and came to power. The outcome was variously interpreted as a victory for secularism, a revolt of the
aam admi
(common man) against the rich and an affirmation of the continuing hold of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty over the popular imagination. In the larger context of world history, however, what is important is not why the voters voted as they did but the fact that they voted at all. Ever since the 1952 elections were described as the ‘biggest
gamble in history’, obituaries have been written for Indian democracy. It has been said, time and again, that a poor, diverse and divided country cannot sustain the practice of (reasonably) free and fair elections.

Yet it has. In that first general election voter turnout was less than 46 per cent. Over the years this has steadily increased; from the late 1960s about three out of five eligible Indians have voted on election day. In assembly elections the voting percentage has tended to be even higher. When these numbers are disaggregated they reveal a further deepening. In the first two general elections, less than 40 per cent of eligible women voted; by 1998 the figure was in excess of 60 per cent. Besides, as surveys showed, they increasingly exercised their choice
independently
, that is regardless of their husband’s or father’s views on the matter. Also voting in ever higher numbers were Dalits and tribals, the oppressed and marginalized sections of society. In northern India in particular, Dalits turned out in far greater numbers than high castes. As the political analyst Yogendra Yadav points out, ‘India is perhaps the only large democracy in the world today where the turnout of the lower orders is well above that of the most privileged groups.’
³

The Indian love of voting is well illustrated by the case of a cluster of villages on the Andhra/Maharashtra border. Issued voting cards by the administrations of both states, the villagers seized the opportunity to exercise their franchise twice over.
⁴
It is also illustrated by the peasants in Bihar who go to the polls despite threats by Maoist revolutionaries. Dismissing elections as an exercise in bourgeois hypocrisy, the Maoists have been known to blacken the faces of villagers campaigning for political parties, and to warn potential voters that their feet and hands would be chopped off. Yet, as an anthropologist working in central Bihar found, ‘the overall effect of poll-boycott on voter turnout seems to be negligible’. In villages where Maoists had been active for years, ‘in fact, election day was seen as an enjoyable (almost festive) occasion. Women dressed in bright yellows and reds, their hair oiled and adorned with clips, made their way to the polling booth in small groups.’
⁵
Likewise, in parts of the north-east where the writ of the Indian state runs erratically or not at all, insurgents are unable to stop villagers from voting. As the chief election commissioner wryly putit, ‘the Election Commission’s small contribution to the integrity of the country is to make these areas part of the country for just one day, election day’.
⁶

That elections have been successfully indigenized in India is demon-strated by the depth and breadth of their reach – across and into all
sections of Indian society – by the passions they evoke, and by the humour that surrounds them. There is a very rich archive of electoral cartoons poking fun at promises made by prospective politicians, their desperation to get a party ticket and much else.
⁷
At other times the humour can be gentle rather than mocking. Consider the career of a cloth merchant from Bhopal named Mohan Lal who contested elections against five different prime ministers. Wearing a wooden crown and a garland gifted by himself, he would walk the streets of his constituency, ringing a bell. He unfailingly lost his deposit, thereby justifying his own self-imposed sobriquet of Dhartipakad, or he who lies, humbled, on the ground. His idea in contesting elections, said Mohan Lal, was ‘to make everyone realise that democracy was meant for one and all’.
⁸

That elections allow all Indians to feel part of India is also made clear by the experience of Goa. When it was united – or reunited – with India by force in 1961 there was much adverse commentary in the Western press. But where in 400 years of Portuguese rule the Goans had never been allowed to choose their own leaders, within a couple of years of coming under the rule of New Delhi they were able to do so. The political scientist Benedict Anderson has tellingly compared India’s treatment of Goa with Indonesia’s treatment of East Timor, that other Portuguese colony ‘liberated’ by armed nationalists:

Nehru had sent his troops to Goa in 1960 [sic] without a drop of blood being spilt. But he was a humane man and the freely elected leader of a democracy; he gave the Goanese their own autonomous state government, and encouraged their full participation in India’s politics. In every respect, General Suharto was Nehru’s polar opposite.
⁹

Considering the size of the electorate, it is overwhelmingly likely that more people have voted in Indian elections than voters in any other democracy. India’s success in this regard is especially striking when compared with the record of its great Asian neighbour, China. That country is larger, but far less divided on ethnic or religious lines, and far less poor as well. Yet there has never been a single election held there. In other ways too China is much less free than India. The flow of information is highly restricted – when the search engine Google setup shop in China in February 2006 it had to agree to submit to state censorship. The movement of people is regulated as well – the permission of the state is usually required to change one’s place of residence.
In India, on the other hand, the press can print more or less what they like, and citizens can say exactly what they feel, live where they wish to and travel to any part of the country.

India/China comparisons have long been a staple of scholarly analysis. Now, in a world that becomes more connected by the day, they have become ubiquitous in popular discourse as well. In this comparison China might win on economic grounds but will lose on political ones. Indians like to harp on about their neighbour’s democracy deficit, sometimes directly and at other times by euphemistic allusion. When asked to put on a special show at the World Economic Forum of 2006, the Indian delegation never failed to describe their land, whether in speech or in print or on posters, as the ‘World’s Fastest Growing
Democracy
’
.

If one looks at what we might call the ‘hardware’ of democracy, then the self-congratulation is certainly merited. Indians enjoy freedom of expression and of movement, and they have the vote. However, if we examine the ‘software of democracy, then the picture is less cheering. Most political parties have become family firms. Most politicians are corrupt, and many come from a criminal background. Other institutions central to the functioning of a democracy have also declined precipitously over the years. The percentage of truly independent-minded civil servants has steadily declined, as has the percentage of completely fair-minded judges.

Is India a proper democracy or a sham one? When asked this question, I usually turn for recourse to an immortal line of the great Hindi comic actor Johnny Walker. In a film where he plays the hero’s sidekick, Walker answers every query with the remark: ‘Boss,
phipty-phipty
’. When asked what prospect he has of marrying the girl he so deeply loves, or of getting the job he so dearly desires, the sidekick tells the boss that the chances are roughly even, 50 per cent of success, or 50 per cent of failure.

Is India a democracy, then? The answer is well,
phipty-phipty
. It mostly is when it comes to holding elections and permitting freedom of movement and expression. It mostly is not when it comes to the functioning of politicians and political institutions. However, that India is even a 50 per cent democracy flies in the face of tradition, history and the conventional wisdom. Indeed, by its own experience it is rewriting that history and that wisdom. Thus Sunil Khilnani remarked of the 2004 polls that they represented

the largest exercise of democratic election, ever and anywhere, in human history. Clearly, the idea of democracy, brought into being on an Athenian hillside some 2,500 years ago, has travelled far-and today describes a disparate array of political projects and experiences. The peripatetic life of the democratic idea has ensured that the history of Western political ideas can no longer be written coherently from within the terms of the West’s own historical experience.
¹⁰

The history of independent India has amended and modified theories of democracy based on the experience of the West. However, it has confronted even more directly ideas of nationalism emanating from the Western experience.