Indian democracy after forty years

...Briefly, Nandy argues that sati is an aberration that occurs in "epidemics" at times when Hindu institutions are under attack...

...Last year was a year of big stories in India— continued violence in the Punjab, the country's worst drought of the century, Indian intervention in the Sri Lankan civil war...

...These familiar images suggest religion as a destructive force, one that flushes reason out of politics and pollutes it with violence and hate...

...But the marriage was off anyway—he had seen a photograph of the economist's wife and thought her skin was too dark for her to be high caste...

...What is needed is not the abolition of religion or its relegation to a hermetic box outside the political system, but its gradual transformation into a source of positive social energy...

...Agitation started for a national ordinance against sati (superfluous since it is already illegal...

...The other India (Bharat, "the real India") is rural, traditional, speaks the various Indian languages, is largely illiterate, does not understand or care about modern political structures, and depends on the familiar comforts of religion and caste...

...The commemorative newspaper articles were apocalyptic...

...2 An important detail is that there is a difference "between caste at the political level and caste at the social and ritual level...

...After his dismissal, Singh shaved off his mustache and claimed to have abandoned all political ambition in favor of waging a "crusade against corruption...

...15-41, and by Selig Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960...

...The Congress party, which rose to power on the strength of its monopoly of the independence movement, includes virtually the entire ideological spectrum, from moderate socialists to hidebound Hindu revivalists and orthodox Muslims to conservative big industrialists...

...5 The tasks ahead are formidable, but so are the achievements behind...

...To explain the apparent contradiction between a vibrant, caste-dominated local politics and the ideologically empty national politics of secular sloganeering, it is customary to posit a conflict between "modernity" and "tradition...

...People at all levels of society still identify themselves primarily on caste lines or, if they are not Hindus, by their religious affiliation...

...The Indian state, we were told, is dying...

...As a young political scientist said to me last year in Calcutta, "Communalism is a form of Indian politics...

...The problem with this view is that so-called "traditional" attitudes shape, in crucial ways, the so-called "modern" political institutions and discourse...

...In the parts of rural India where exploitation is greatest and the potential for Communist support seemingly the largest, the Communists have been unable to distinguish themselves from the upper-caste exploiters of the peasantry...

...An Indian academic related to me the tale of his family doctor, who asked him to find out the caste of a former colleague, now a World Bank economist...

...In India, religion is politics...

...Mahatma Gandhi was the first to give this religious stereotype a political context—the man who renounces the world in order to change it—and since then the renouncer has been a distinctive feature of the Indian political landscape...

...It is only natural that these groups should form the basis of political associations...

...Fundamentalism" arises not when religion invades political life, but when it is excluded from it, when the political system fails to incorporate religious attitudes and stereotypes, and when social groups to whom religion appeals are denied a political voice...

...But with a per capita GNP of $270, literacy of 36 percent, and an average life expectancy of fifty-six years, India ranks far behind all other democracies in affluence...

...Lack of Opposition Program The reason the opposition always resorts to such sweeping, contentless offensives is that it has no choice...

...It's simply that if you approach Indian politics from a Western point of view, it looks like everything is going wrong...

...This poverty, along with the hierarchical caste system and the incredible variety of religions and languages on the subcontinent, were reasons why many in 1947 thought democracy for India was a foolish dream...

...The obvious ways hardly been repeating: the subcontinent was partitioned on religious lines and India's rivalry with Islamic Pakistan remains the SUMMER • 1988 • 275 largest threat to regional peace...

...But in fact there is nothing destructive about most religious attitudes unless they become vehicles for the expression of economic exploitation...

...But for the Indian media, the biggest story was a series of corruption scandals in Gandhi's government...

...Narayan later became the backstage power of the disastrous Janata coalition that replaced Indira Gandhi in 1977, a regime whose two-year reign of error exposed the futility of basing a government on an essentially negative religious principle...

...Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi gave a long dull speech lampooned by pundits for its inelegant Hindi...

...A few weeks later the doctor came for a visit...

...there was almost no dispassionate investigation of the history and social role of sati (the scholarly debate raged over whether the Vedas sanctioned the practice...

...But it's not...

...militant Sikhs have bloodied the Punjab for five years in a quest for a separate, religiously based state...

...In response, urban intellectuals and the Englishlanguage press indulged in an orgy of condemnation wholly out of proportion to the significance of the event...

...Singh has sought support at various times from both the Communist parties and the ultrarightist Bharatiya Janata (Indian People's) party, which favors a Hindu state...

...Pedigree counts for a lot in India, and despite the party's decay into a network of 276 • DISSENT vested interests and its departure from Gandhi's vision and Nehru's statesmanship, Congress can still represent itself as the avatar of India's nationalist aspirations and the only binding force in a land of four major religions, fifteen official languages, and thousands of castes...

...Most of the "social evils" often attributed to religion and caste are really caused by poverty and competition for scarce resources and will be eliminated only with greater wealth and better education...

...This is what many Indians mean when they talk about the need for recapturing the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi...

...The multifarious other parties represent the separate interests of various castes, religions, and regional groups and have no common ground on which to base a lasting coalition...

...Srinivas, p. 5.) The way in which castes have transformed themselves to become more effective political actors is discussed by Srinivas, pp...

...Because of this, and because a caste's status in the social hierarchy need not coincide with its economic position, "class consciousness" hardly exists in India...

...An instructive example of the fallacy of the Bharat/India distinction was provided by the selfimmolation last September of an eighteen-year-old widow on her husband's funeral pyre...

...the spirit of the freedom fighters has been lost...

...The proponents of this view, for example, V. S. Naipaul, 4 think of religion as a sort of disease to be eradicated by the liberal application of rationalism...

...The allegations have simmered for more than a year without much concrete evidence emerging...

...The lesson usually drawn from such stories is that the psychology of "traditional" India is holding back the development of "modern" India...

...Bofors officials admitted that "winding-up payments" were made, but to middlemen in Europe, not to Indian nationals, companies, or government servants...

...Despite tight organization and massive efforts, the CPI(M) has yet to become a truly national party...

...By disclaiming any desire for office, Singh is exploiting an old Indian tradition: that of the world-renouncer...

...The doctor was trying to arrange a marriage between his daughter and the economist's son, and he suspected the economist of being too low caste for his liking...

...In the West we are accustomed to seeing interest groups as economic classes, loosely speaking, and most people identify themselves readily in class terms—as "working class," "farmers," "businessmen," "professionals," and so on...

...By this April the Jan Morcha appeared to be on the brink of engineering a merger of four opposition parties into a new National People's party, which will contest the next parliamentary elections...

...Much of the following discussion derives from M. N. Srinivas, Caste in Modern India and Other Essays (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1962), which remains the most perceptive introduction to the role of caste in Indian politics...

...the largest opposition party has 28) has steadily inveighed against the corruption of the Gandhi government and has even insinuated, without a shred of proof, that Gandhi himself was paid off...

...According to the Bharat/India school of thought, there are two Indias...

...The first is urban, modern, secular, English-speaking, enamored of Westernstyle democracy...

...Of course we don't pay attention to caste," the doctor hastened to assure my friend, "but certain things are just impossible...

...India has four major religious communities, including the world's fourthlargest Muslim population...

...1988 by Arthur R. Kroeber...

...I don't think it is—the idea that you can separate religion from politics in India is a dream...

...But any analysis of the role of religion in Indian politics that stops there will fall far short of the mark...

...Other examples abound...

...2 Although a few large castes cut across geographical and in some cases linguistic lines, most are small and local...

...79-85...

...In that case it is the exploitation that needs to be eliminated, not the religion...

...But it was not, and one reason was that religion and caste have been co-opted into the political arena, where they have played a key role in both subtle and obvious ways...

...In short, the reaction of "modern India" was a modified version of a classic Brahminical response: horror of the unclean action, which cannot be discussed or examined, only condemned...

...In India this is not true...

...Indians and foreigners alike, accustomed to judging a democracy on how closely it imitates the British or American prototypes, have missed an important point: that Indian democracy has succeeded because it has (often inadvertently) made traditional religious concepts and stereotypes play a role in modern secular politics...

...the politics of religion and caste threaten the foundations of the secular polity...

...To this end he and several allies, mostly expelled Congressmen, set up a "Popular Front" (Jan Morcha...

...Opposition parties control nine of the twenty-five state governments and are likely to make further gains in the next few years...

...This led to the Emergency...

...The intellectual reaction excluded all shades of opinion SUMMER • 1988 • 277 other than outrage...

...It is a sort of brotherhood of the pure...

...much less attention was paid to the plight of women, and especially of widows, in Indian society, which is the real problem and which will take decades of hard work to rectify...

...Sati worshippers were denounced as barbaric obscurantists determined to drag India back to the Middle Ages...

...institutions are decadent and rife with corruption...

...The main scandal centers around reports that various Indian agents, and possibly members of the government, received kickbacks from the Swedish armaments manufacturer Bofors in return for assuring that company a major howitzer contract...

...Over forty years India has slowly developed, and continues to develop, its own system of democratic politics, which is neither "traditional" nor "modern," but which is transforming the social affiliations of caste and religion into political ones...

...If you say that, people think you're saying something reactionary...

...he had found out from another source that the economist was a Rajput (a high-status "warrior" caste...

...Gandhi, never a shrewd operator, damaged himself by dragging his feet in the investigation and by apparently authorizing a campaign of harassment against the most vocal opposition newspaper, the Indian Express...

...He has no program, no ideology, no constituency outside of a section of the Hindi-speaking north...

...1-31...

...The leader of the anticorruption drive is Vishwanath Pratap Singh, minister for finance and then for defense until Gandhi ousted him from the Cabinet and the Congress (I) in April 1987...

...3 An excellent historical study of sati and its role in Indian society is in Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp...

...Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), pp...

...Jaya Prakash Narayan (on whom Singh has clearly modeled himself) was the epitome of this stereotype...

...The fragmented opposition is usually regarded as a failure of Indian democracy...

...The supposed barriers of religion and caste have not prevented India's economic growth: the country now feeds itself and ranked thirteenth in the world in industrial production in 1985...

...After a fifteen-year absence from politics spent doing social work, he returned in 1974 calling for a vaguely defined, Gandhian "total revolution" to sweep out Indira Gandhi...

...Among the opposition parties, the Communist party of India (Marxist), which controls two state governments and until recently held a third, is the most obvious alternative...

...Roop Kanwar, the satiwho came from a middle-class family in a large town and had ten years of schooling, hardly qualifying her as an ignorant product of "traditional India" —was instantly glorified, and about a hundred thousand people streamed to her home town for a ceremony sanctifying her cremation ground...

...India is the world's largest democracy, and its poorest...

...Either way, polls show Gandhi is likely to be returned, though with a smaller majority...

...4 See V.S...

...The hysteria over an aberrant, albeit horrifying, event seems ludicrous at first, but it is not if one forgets the simple modernity-tradition division...

...The only political strategies that work, therefore, are narrow local ones—representing a particular group of castes or a language group—or broad ones relying on almost metaphysical slogans like "total revolution" and "crusade against corruption," which define politics as a struggle between good and evil...

...The splintered parliamentary opposition (Gandhi's Congress (I) holds 415 of the 542 lower-house seats...

...In the absence of evidence, "corruption" has become a metaphysical bogeyman, a supposed all-pervasive contaminant of the Indian state (corruption is, of course, endemic in India, but the notion that Gandhi invented it is absurd...

...He has only a quasireligious principle: the battle of the honest against the corrupt, the pure against the impure...

...Similarly, many evils ascribed to rampant "traditionalism" —Hindu-Muslim riots, intercaste violence—are at least partially the result of modern ideas and economic pressures...

...278 • DISSENT...

...It is not a party: anyone from any party who opposes corruption and Rajiv Gandhi can join...

...Although incidents of sati, or widow-burning, have occurred occasionally since the British outlawed the practice in 1829 under pressure from Hindu reformers, 3 this one was unusual in the reactions it inspired, both positive and negative...

...Precisely because religion and caste have found a place in India's politics, "fundamentalism" has never been a problem in India...

...and India: A Wounded Civilization (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), passim...

...Countless articles condemned the "social evil" of sati and called for remedies...

...This is usually referred to as the Bharat/India distinction, Bharat being the Sanskrit word chosen by independent India's founders to be the "Indian" name for India...

...But one could as easily claim it as a reflection of democracy's success in encouraging local interests to organize themselves on party lines.' Politics, in the broadest sense, is the clash of competing interests...

...And although national politics has always been dominated by the Congress party and its first family of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Rajiv Gandhi, India is not a one-party state...

...It is not clear what Singh has to offer, other than opposition to Gandhi, whose technocratic appeal has worn thin...

...But communism's appeal to urban middle-class intellectuals has meant that it has, in general, drawn its cadres from the Brahmins and other upper castes...

...Every Westerner, and many an Indian, has a favorite story about how seemingly up-to-date Indians perpetuate caste distinctions...

...There is still hope that India has the political means to grapple with its destiny...

...5 The World Bank, World Development Report, 1987, p. 262...

...The number of votes cast in India's last general election-235 million—exceeded the total population of the United States...

...Those elections will be held in late 1989, though it is remotely possible that Gandhi will call a snap poll before then...

...One would hardly have guessed, amidst this relentless self-criticism, that India has been a working democracy for four decades (barring the two years of Indira Gandhi's Emergency, 1975-77...

...and the capital was festooned with miniature Indian flags—minus the chakra, or wheel, in the white center stripe, and hung sideways, prompting one newspaper to note that they looked more like Irish than Indian flags...