India. Craig Jeffrey
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Odisha
But how has democracy worked, in what has remained a country in which the population is largely rural, and in which – in spite of dramatic economic growth since the 1980s – not much less than a half of the labour force is still employed in agriculture? In the 1950s and early 1960s, in the era of what is sometimes referred to as the Nehruvian state, because of the dominance of Jawaharlal Nehru, India had a ‘dominant party’ system of government, in which one party, the Congress, usually won elections at all levels, even in an open, multi-party democracy. This reflected its authority, as the political party born of the successful movement for independence, and the fact that it had an organization that extended both across the country and from the centre down to local levels. Detailed studies showed, however, that the party mobilized support through intermediaries, at local levels usually from among the dominant landowning communities (as we noted earlier), and that it functioned through a great pyramid of patron–client relations (Manor 1988). The intermediation of political leaders at different levels, and clientelism, have remained highly significant in Indian politics, and the labelling of India as a ‘patronage democracy’ is a powerful idea (see chapters 7 and 8). The writer most associated with it, Kanchan Chandra, has shown, too, how and why ethnicity plays an important part in Indian politics (Chandra 2004). Many people are most likely to trust someone from their own community. Mobilization has often taken place on the basis of group identities, and the objective of political leaders has often been to win resources from the state for their own people (see chapter 8). Politics has become more and more of a kind of business in which sometimes thuggish individuals with known criminal backgrounds have become increasingly important (as we discuss in chapters 7 and 8). There is, in some parts of the country certainly, where criminal bosses exercise considerable power, what has been called ‘mafia raj’ (Michelutti et al. 2019). These are problems in the way in which democracy works in the country. They follow from the paradox of India’s democratization that Barrington Moore noted.
One of Narendra Modi’s claims, following the 2019 elections, was that he and his party had won their great majority because they had successfully transcended caste and community-based voting, and there was support for this argument in the findings of post-poll surveys conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. But it was reported (The Hindu, 28 May 2019, referring to calculations by the Association of Democratic Reforms) that 43 per cent of the newly elected MPs had criminal records (and that 29 per cent of them had records including serious crimes) compared with ‘only’ 34 per cent in 2014. The extent to which Modi has really made a difference to the modalities of electoral mobilization in India remains uncertain.
Socialism
Not only was India to be a democracy. It was also intended to be, according to the constitutional design, set on a path towards social democracy. When he moved the Resolution of Aims and Objects before the Constituent Assembly, Nehru made clear his own commitment to socialism – in the sense of economic democracy – even though he said that he and his colleagues had decided not to include the term in the Resolution, given the sentiments of many other members of the Assembly. In practice, Nehru himself and the other important leaders of the Congress equivocated, and were unwilling as well as unable to confront the power either of big business or of the dominant landholders – as Dr Ambedkar, the great leader of India’s untouchables, pointed out. In response to Nehru he said, ‘I should … have expected the Resolution to state in the most explicit terms that in order that there may be social and economic justice in the country, that there would be nationalisation of industry and nationalisation of land’ (CAD, 17 December 1946). Neither was ever seriously contemplated, and – as we discuss in chapter 8 – economic and social rights were relegated in the Constitution to the ‘Directive Principles’. These are statements of good intention, enjoined upon the government, but without any force in law. Thus it was that Ambedkar spoke, towards the end of the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly, of the ‘life of contradictions’ into which India was entering: ‘In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality … How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we do so only by putting our political democracy in peril’ (CAD, 25 November 1949). The later trajectory of Indian democracy bears out his fears.
But Nehru’s commitments were not only rhetorical. He had spoken before the Constituent Assembly of its being the responsibility of the members not only ‘to free India through a new constitution’, but ‘to feed the starving people, to clothe the naked masses, and to give every Indian the fullest opportunity to develop himself according to his capacity’ (CAD, 22 January 1947). Entirely in line with the development theory of the time (Harriss 2014), Nehru and his colleagues in government believed that these objectives, vital to the legitimacy of the new state that came into being in 1947, could best be achieved through economic planning, and a project of development in which the state would play the central role. But Nehru, as he once said, saw India as pursuing a ‘third way’ between the capitalism of the West and the communism of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, combining directive planning and accommodative democratic politics (Corbridge and Harriss 2000: 43, 55). The results (as we argue in chapter 2) were not entirely disappointing, but they did lead India, eventually, into a pattern of economic development in which growth barely, if at all, kept pace with population growth, being sacrificed to the special interests of monopolistic big business, rich peasants, and bureaucrats and white-collar professionals. This was the era of what came to be described as the ‘licence-permit-quota raj’, in which big profits could be made from rents rather than from the improvement of productivity. Agriculture, still by far the most important sector of the economy, was at first rather neglected by the state, and then was sought to be modernized through the application of technology and of improved varieties of wheat and rice (in the ‘green revolution’). This did successfully increase the production of cereals, but it left behind the very many cultivators in the large areas of the country lacking in assured irrigation. The environmental impact of the pattern of development, in agriculture and more generally, was accorded scant attention (see chapter 5). But perhaps the most serious failures were the neglect of investment in health and the lack of attention to education. There was a glaring failure to realize the promise in the Constitution that there should be universal primary education within ten years of its promulgation. Given pervasive ill-health and poor educational opportunities, what chance did most Indians have of ‘developing themselves according to their capacities’? We discuss these continuing problems