India After Independence: 1947-2000 (77 page)

Democracy ensured that in India the transition to industrialism was not to be on the back of the working class and the peasantry, drawing
surplus for investment from them. The working class made major advances through collective bargaining and there was by and large a net transfer of resources to agriculture after independence rather than vice-versa. Democracy and a free Press made inconceivable, what happened in China, where the world came to know many years later of an estimated 16 to 23 million famine deaths between 1959 and 1961. In India a free Press (with 8,600 daily newspapers and 33,000 periodicals today) has kept governments on their toes to help avert any scarcity situation and major famines, a regular feature in colonial times.

Democracy has given a voice to the poor in the process of development. Their interest cannot be bypassed. Democracy has, for example, made it unviable for any government since independence to pursue an inflationary strategy which hits the poor the hardest. The early fifties saw falling prices and the trend rate of inflation did not exceed 8 per cent per year between 1956 and 1990 despite two oil-shocks and several droughts. Even when necessary stabilization and structural adjustments were undertaken during the post-1991 reforms, these being measures which make the poor particularly vulnerable through contraction of public expenditure, democracy ensured that they were not left high and dry. Anti-poverty measures were expanded and a quick reversal of the rise in poverty that occurred during the first two years of reforms was achieved. In the dilemma between fiscal prudence and egalitarian commitment (a dilemma which, as Amartya Sen points out, is not a choice between good and bad but a genuine dilemma between two goods
⁷
), democracy ensures that it does not get resolved without adequate weight to the latter.

The fourth major legacy of the national movement has been its equity and pro-poor orientation. The Indian state was certainly influenced by this legacy, though its full potential was far from realized. The impact of this legacy can be seen in the fact that each of the nine Five Year Plans since independence treated removal of poverty as a key objective though the extent of focus on poverty removal varied as between plans. It is not accidental that even the right-wing political formations have repeatedly found it necessary to swear by the poor. Witness the BJP, in one of its incarnations in the early eighties, wishing to bring about Gandhian socialism.

The Indian state was committed to wide-ranging land reforms at independence. The peasantry was essentially freed (except in some pockets) from the power and domination of the feudal-type landlords. Though it was indeed very creditable that India achieved her land reforms within the framework of democracy, nevertheless the reforms occurred in a manner that initially the relatively better-off sections of the peasantry got unequal advantage from it compared to the poorer sections. This happened partially because the class balance at the ground level and in the perspectives of many state apparatuses such as the judiciary, the police and bureaucracy, particularly at the lower levels, was not in tune with that of the government. It was far less favourable to the poor, and the government in a democracy could not force its way. Over time, various governments,
however, persisted with these measures and from the early seventies there was a second wave of land reforms accompanied by several targetted efforts to reach the benefits of the Green Revolution strategy to the poor. The results were commendable though much still remained to be done. There is no comparison between the abject poverty faced by the rural poor all over the country where even two meals a day were not guaranteed and what prevails today in most parts of the country. Radical scholars like Daniel Thorner and other observers reported, on the basis of field surveys, a qualitative change in the lives of the rural poor. The land reforms, the spread of the Green Revolution to most parts of the country, and targetted anti-poverty programmes, particularly since the late sixties, have provided succour to vast masses of the rural poor in India. (See
chapters 28
to
31
.)

Even using the rather inadequate indices available for measuring poverty, it is seen that the proportion of the rural population below the poverty line declined from 58.75 per cent in 1970-71 (estimates for the fifties when it would be much higher are not available to us) to 37.3 per cent in 1993-94. The corresponding figures for the total population, including both urban and rural, were 56.25 and 36. The average life expectancy, which was a miserable 32 years in 1950-51, more than doubled, to over 63 years by 1993-94. The per-capita income in 1996-97 was two and a half times higher than what it was in 1950-51 even though the population too had multiplied rapidly, showing an increase of more than 158 per cent over the same period. The literacy rate had risen from an abysmal 18.3 per cent in 1951 to 62 per cent in 1997. Infant mortality had come down from 146 to 71 per thousand between 1951 and 1997. Food self-sufficiency and public action have made famines a thing of the past.

Considerable achievements these—yet despite all this progress India still faces the intolerable situation where more than three hundred million of its people continue to remain below the poverty line and nearly half the population is illiterate. The continuation of poverty despite considerable advances is partly a result of relatively slower growth (East Asia, particularly Indonesia and China, are good examples of high growth enabling dramatic reduction in poverty) and is partly reflective of the nature of the Indian state and the failure to sufficiently alter its class balance in favour of the poor through popular mobilization.

The sovereign, democratic national state that came into existence at independence was multi-class in nature and was open-ended in the sense that the class-balance among the constituent classes could be altered. The Indian national state in other words constituted the arena in which several classes contended for influence, the capitalists in trade, industry and finance, the upper sections of the peasantry, a broad middle class consisting of professionals, clerical and managerial staff or ‘knowledge workers’, the organized working class and the rural and urban poor
consisting of agricultural workers, poor peasants, petty artisans, unorganized urban workers and so on. (As argued above, the feudal landlords and the metropolitan bourgeoisie or international capital were not contenders in this internal struggle for hegemony over the state.) The manner in which this competition for influence would get resolved was to depend on how the various classes were politically mobilized and which class perspective was able to exercise a greater ideological hegemony or influence over society as a whole.

From the very beginning the Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy of growth with equity had assumed that popular mobilization from below would be necessary to effectively implement radical measures in favour of the poor (such as land reforms, cooperativization, universal education, and so on) initiated by the government led by Nehru. The problem, however, was in locating an ‘agency’ which was going to perform this task. With independence, the Congress party with Nehru at its head got transformed from a party of struggle and movement to a party of governance. Efforts to make Congress workers perform the former role, rather than try to learn the ropes of the latter, proved essentially unsuccessful. (Gandhiji anticipating this denouement had unsuccessfully called for the disbanding of Congress at independence and forming of a separate organization to struggle for people’s causes, to he distinct from the one which governed.) Nehru tried to fill the void by creating a developmental bureaucracy from the local village worker to the highest level, and unwittingly created a byzantine institution whose main purpose increasingly appeared to be that of multiplying and feeding itself.

The task was essentially political and the bureaucracy could not be expected to act as a substitute. In fact, Nehru had expected the left would perform this task and he tried repeatedly, though unsuccessfully, to garner its support so that radical government programmes could be implemented and a gradual social transformation and an altering of the nature of state could take place. The left had however initially characterised Nehru as ‘the running dog of imperialism’ and hence naturally to be opposed and overthrown. Later, after the left gave up this position, it still refused to cooperate as it saw such a task as ‘reformist’, which would only strengthen the ‘bourgeois’ state, while their role was to sharpen the contradictions and prepare for its overthrow. The left thus abandoned the space provided by the open-ended democratic structure of the Indian state (dismissing it as ‘bourgeois’ democracy), and did little to either try and alter the class balance in various state apparatuses such as in the bureaucracy, media (dismissed as the bourgeois press), judiciary, education system etc., or to mobilize the poor so that they had a greater say within the existing state structure. Not recognizing the transformative possibilities of the Indian multi-class national state, it waited and still waits, at least in theory, endlessly for the maturing of the contradictions so that an insurrectionary overthrow of the state can occur. This failure of the left, and a superior understanding of the nature of the democratic state by other forces such as the Indian business leaders, has led to a capitalist developmental perspective with an inadequate pro-poor, welfare orientation
prevailing over the state apparatuses and society as a whole. It has also led to the democratic space increasingly getting occupied by casteist and communal tendencies which hurt the poor, even though the latter is often mobilized by them.

The political space for mobilization in favour of the poor has thus largely remained untapped—though simple democratic arithmetic has secured the poor several concessions as all political formations have to seek their votes. Sporadic and scattered non-governmental organizations have often provided idealistic youth fora for such activity but these efforts, in the absence of their generalization through wider political intervention, can have only limited results. The recent efforts to empower the local self-governing institutions with the Panchayati Raj amendments to the constitution offer much promise. How far that promise gets realized will depend on what extent the progressive political forces try to occupy this democratic space available at the grassroots level.

While persisting poverty has been the most important failure in India’s post-independence development, the survival of the democratic structure has been its grandest success. The further deepening and maturing of this democratic structure is an important step in the direction of meeting the needs of the underprivileged.

However, a major political development that threatens the pursuance of a viable developmental path may be highlighted. The very success of India’s democracy has led to growing demands on the state by various classes and groups including the poor. To accommodate these demands all political formations, since the late seventies, began to indulge in competitive populism using state resources to distribute largesse to the various constituent classes of the Indian state including the poor. Subsidies (often reducing costs to the consumer to zero) for food, fertilizer, diesel, exports, electricity, to name just a few, proliferated to unsustainable levels pushing the country to the brink of default and economic chaos.

The survival and growth of the sovereign, democratic Indian state, requires a ‘strong’ state. Strong not ‘as counterpoised to democracy, decentralization and empowerment of the people’
⁸
but strong in the sense that it can, while accommodating moderate deviations, suppress forces that threaten democracy by operating outside its limits—viz., terrorists, separatist insurgencies, fanatical, fundamentalist and violent casteist or religious communal forces and so on. A strong state can discipline capital which does not perform competitively (as Japan and other East Asian states have successfully done) as well as discipline sections of labour which do not perform at all or perform below societally accepted standards of productivity. A strong state, without resort to populism but keeping social justice as one of it’s central objectives, can guide the economy on to a path of rapid development and modernization, based on the advanced scientific breakthroughs of the contemporary world. A strong state can participate in the globalization process in a manner which not only does not diminish its sovereignty but increases it. A tall order but certainly not beyond the genius of the Indian people who have crossed some of the most difficult milestones creditably over the past fifty years.

Among the most significant features of India’s political development has been the commitment of its leaders to democracy, national unity and economic development, accompanied by their ability to establish the necessary political institutions, both of the state and civil society, and to root them in Indian society—in other words, to create and maintain the structure of a democratic state. These institutions have been sustained despite rapid social change, with new social groups regularly entering the political arena and asserting their rights. The repeated successions of governments at the Centre, that have been brought about peacefully and constitutionally, have been a sign of the basic inner strength of this democratic structure.

For the last twenty-five years or so, however, the political system has been under strain, facing an increasing loss of vitality. There has been a certain disarray, a deterioration in political institutions. These are not able to respond adequately to the challenges posed by economic development and social change; the growing political awakening among the people and their aroused and rising expectations, the refusal of the oppressed and the disadvantaged to accept their social condition, and the growing class and caste conflict among contending social groups, especially in the countryside, for a larger share of political power and gains of economic development.

Most of the political institutions, as a consequence, have been losing their moral authority and the country has been difficult to govern—at least, difficult to govern well. This ‘crisis of governability’ takes multiple forms: unstable governments, frequent elections and changes of electoral moods, inability to accommodate and reconcile contending demands and needs of different social groups and classes, weakening of law and order, growing civil discord and disturbance, sometimes reaching the proportions of insurgency, communal violence, increasing recourse of people to violent and extra-constitutional agitations, growing corruption, and, above all, the failure of the governments at the Centre and the states to implement their policies or to provide effective governance.

At the same time, it would be wrong to suggest that the political system or its institutions have been crumbling or that India has been
undergoing a crisis of the state. In spite of all their weaknesses, the political system and its institutions have proved to be quite resilient and have managed to function, even though inadequately; they have also retained their legitimacy, in part because of their very longevity, but much more because of the greater participation by the people in the political process, especially in elections.

Undoubtedly, apart from the skewed socio-economic structure, the major culprit for the weakening of the political institutions has been the quality of political leadership. It is the quality of political leadership which plays a critical role in nation building and the development of political institutions. More than a crisis of the state or the political system, there had certainly been a crisis of leadership as the calibre of leaders both at the Centre and in the states has been going down over the years.

For several decades now, the political leadership has functioned without any strategic design or perspective, ideology or well thought about tactics for managing the political system. It has relied instead on
ad hocism
and gimmickry for meeting the challenges in the polity and on populism, personal appeal, and use of big and black money to maintain itself in power. At best, it has taken recourse to such tactical measures as opportunistic coalitions of ideologically and programmatically disparate political parties and groups, or putting together of caste and communal coalitions or the centralization of the party and government processes through coteries. Consequently, even major parties and political leaders have been living from hand to mouth; they are able to win elections but thereafter are neither able to govern nor maintain their authority. Even such a tall leader as Indira Gandhi was not able to check the erosion in institutions like the party, the parliament and the bureaucracy.

Next to elections and civil liberties, the parliament occupies a pivotal position in a parliamentary democracy. In India, the parliament and the state legislatures not only legitimize a government, but they are also the supreme organs for formulation of policies, overseeing their implementation, and in general acting as ‘watchdogs’ over the functioning of the government. Unfortunately, over the years, there has been a general downslide in its performance, and signs of decay in the institution have set in.

Jawaharlal Nehru worked incessantly to instal respect for the parliament and ensured that it functioned with decorum and responsibility. He attended its settings regularly, however busy he was otherwise. He paid full attention to the views of the opposition parties, treated them with respect as an integral part of the democratic process, and often let them influence and even change government policies. The opposition parties, in turn, acted responsibly, abiding by the parliamentary rules of the game. The system continued to function quite well in the Nehru and immediate
post-Nehru years. However, gradually, over the years, the parliament started becoming ineffective. Its role began to diminish and its policy-making powers to atrophy. Its proceedings began to degenerate in the late sixties. From then on, parliamentary procedures have been routinely ignored and parliament’s and state legislatures’ sessions have been marked by shouting and abuse and rowdy behaviour, even towards the prime minister. Also, frequent walk-outs, unruly, scenes, disgraceful disorderliness, demonstrations by the members inside parliament and legislatures and other disruptive tactics, including the staging of dharnas (sit-ins), have progressively taken the place of reasoned arguments and parliamentary give and take. In recent years, quite often the parliament has not been able to transact any business for days because of the disruption of its sittings by one party or the other.

Unlike in the Nehru period, in recent years, in general it is observed that once a government gets a majority in the legislature it formulates and tries to implement its policies, irrespective of the views of the Opposition, and the latter, in turn, opposes government policies and actions irrespective of their merit. Parliament and state legislatures seldom witness a confrontation between well-worked out alternatives. There occurs a great deal of denunciation but little meaningful debate takes place. Often, the worth and efficacy of a government decision is not tested in parliament or a state legislature but in the streets and in the media. The Question Hour, once a pride of the parliament, has degenerated into a shouting slug-fest and is often suspended.

Defectors, who crossed floors, changed parties, and toppled governments, not for political or ideological reasons but for personal gain, leading to rapid changes of governments, became common in the states after 1967. At the Centre, the malady was reflected in the toppling of the Janata government in 1977. It appeared at one stage that the entire parliamentary system would be turned into a mockery when a few defecting MLAs or MPs could make or unmake governments. The situation was, however, saved and the governments given greater stability and longevity by the anti-defection law of 1985. But in recent years defections and break-up of alliances and coalitions have again become common with the defectors smartly remaining within the ambit, though not the spirit, of the anti-defection law.

Overall, as a result of the inefficient functioning of state legislatures and parliament since the late sixties, parliamentary institutions have been brought into disrepute, have declined in authority among the people and have been playing a diminishing role in policy-formulation and governance. Even so, they have not become totally ineffectual. They continue to perform, though inadequately, the role assigned to them under the Constitution; they still give some voice to public opinion and reflect the popular mood. The government still dreads the opening of a parliamentary or assembly session. Above all a government can continue to hold power only if it retains the confidence of the House—since 1977, seven governments at the Centre have fallen because of their losing a majority in the Lok Sabha.

The Cabinet, chosen and headed by the prime minister and constituted by the senior ministers forms the effective executive branch of the Indian political system and functions on the principle of collective responsibility. The strength of a government is measured by the strength of its Cabinet. Unfortunately, the role and significance of the Cabinet as a policy and decision-making institution has also been declining since 1969, that is, with the beginning of Indira Gandhi’s government. Since then the Cabinet has most often been bypassed and ignored by the prime minister, especially in policy-making. The cabinet ministers, owing their office to the prime minister’s pleasure, have often accepted this position, expressing their dissent at the most on some minor issues. Moreover, there has hardly been reversal of prime ministerial dominance over the Cabinet under the much weaker political personalities that have occupied the prime minister’s chair subsequent to Indira Gandhi. Individual cabinet ministers have continued to have some degree of influence depending on their personal calibre, the extent of their own political support base and the extent of popular support they bring to the party in power.

This decline in the role of the Cabinet is because of the increasing centralization of power in both government and party in the hands of the prime ministers, which is in its turn due to the reliance of the ruling parties on them for winning elections.

A second factor contributing to the erosion in the authority of the cabinet has been the emergence of the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, known popularly as the PMO, as an independent and virtually parallel executive that encroaches on and usurps the powers and functions of individual ministries and the Cabinet. The PMO gathers information, gives advice, initiates policies—even economic and foreign policies—oversees their implementation, and takes a hand in deciding appointments and promotions of high administrative officials. The domineering role of the PMO, starting with Shastri and Indira Gandhi has continued through the Janata period to the BJP-led government, headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee.

This concentration of power in the hands of the prime minister has been rather unhealthy and has had a deleterious effect on policy-making as well as governance in general. While it is necessary that the country and the government is provided with a strong leadership, such strong leadership is not to be equated with the concentration of power in the hands of one individual. A strong cabinet also enables a multiplicity of interests and regions and cultural zones to share power and take an effective part in decision-making.

One political institution that has held its ground in all essentials is the judiciary. The high judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, has fully utilized its right and obligation to enforce and interpret the Constitution.
It has set up high standards of independence from the executive and legislative arms of the government. It has also been in the forefront of the defence of fundamental rights. For these reasons, it enjoys high legitimacy and respect among the people.

An important criticism of the Indian judiciary has been with regard to its socially conservative and status quoist character. This, it is argued, has made it insensitive to social issues and movements and resulted in its standing in the way of radical socio-economic legislation in the name of the defence of individual rights. For example, for years the Supreme Court interpreted the right of property to negate land reforms, nationalization of banks, etc. It also tended to ignore the Directive Principles of State Policy laid down in the Constitution. But these conservative rulings of the Supreme Court were largely rectified because of the easy procedure provided in the Constitution for amendment of its provisions. As we have seen in the earlier chapters, this procedure was repeatedly used by Nehru and Indira Gandhi to bend the stick the other way.

Moreover, in recent years, the Supreme Court itself has become more sensitive to social issues, from the rights of women, workers and minorities to ecology, human rights, social justice and equity and social discrimination. An example of its social activism has been the introduction of public interest litigation under which even a postcard dropped by a victimized citizen to the Chief Justice is treated as a writ petition. This does not mean that the poor and the disadvantaged have actually acquired an easy access to the higher courts. But it has opened a window that was completely shut earlier.

Perhaps the two most negative features of the Indian judicial system today are (i) the inordinate delays in the dispensation of justice as a case can drag on for years and even decades—the backlog of the cases in the High Courts alone amounting to several lakhs, and (ii) the high costs of getting justice, thus limiting access to the courts only to the well-off.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has also been accused of ‘judicial depotism’ by arrogating to itself powers which are vested in the executive or the legislature by the Constitution. Judicial ‘activism’, some have suggested, can go too far.

Two other constitutional institutions, namely, the President and the Election Comission, have also performed quite well in independent India. The Presidents have functioned with dignity and in a non-controversial manner and within the widely accepted interpretation of presidential powers as provided in the Constitution. Similarly, the Election Commissions have on the whole fulfilled with credit their constitutional obligation to hold free and fair elections involving millions of voters, nearly a million polling booths, and thousands of candidates in state and central elections.

Perhaps the most important institutional crisis India faces is that of the quality of public administration and the bureaucracy. The deterioration of
administration, even while its role in the life of the citizen has grown manifold, lies at the core of the ‘crisis of governability’ in India, including the breakdown of law and order and growth of crime in several states and large cities. Even the best of social and developmental legislation and policy measures are nullified in the course of their implementation.