India's crises
Ganguly, Sumit
essimism about India is nothing new. Right now, there is no dearth of gloomy news from the subcontinent. Not only was former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi assassinated in a particularly...
...It steadily expanded the electorate, although often it was not magnanimity but the exigencies of electoral politics that led politicians to court previously disenfranchised sections...
...In this past election the press was replete with stories of "booth capturing...
...Following the first OPECinduced oil crisis (1973-74), which saw the quadrupling of oil prices, the then president of the World Bank, Robert MacNamara, expressed fears that the Indian economy might collapse within six months...
...When she did call elections in 1977, after eighteen months of authoritarianism, she was defeated—much to her surprise...
...In marked contrast, some more than forty million 466 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad people perished in China following the collapse of agriculture after the Great Leap Forward...
...And they worry that the exigencies of electoral politics have pushed secular parties, like the Congress, in the direction of the BJP...
...On the one hand, there are grave economic inequities, continuing sectarian strife, periodic lapses in the protection of human rights, and the increasing venality of elected officials...
...Although the Congress party still emerged as the single largest force in Parliament, it fell short of a majority by some twenty seats...
...Any number of post-independence challenges could have tempted the country to authoritarianism...
...Consequently, political parties could ill afford to ignore them...
...Indian politicians can no longer take for granted the political preferences of India's poor and minorities...
...Although there exist long-term impediments to the BJP's ability to expand its electoral base and thereby radically transform the Indian polity, in the short term it is able to exploit Hindu misgivings about the "pampering" of minorities...
...This figure, likely to worsen as New Delhi seeks additional loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is a source of considerable worry to economic analysts...
...In the immediate term, however, they have to be financed through costly foreign borrowing...
...FALL • 1991 • 465 Reports from Abroad Singh sought to prevent a BJP-organized nationwide march to the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi, the BJP withdrew its parliamentary support for the minority regime, ensuring its collapse...
...In the northern states of Kashmir and Punjab, ethnic rebellions threaten national cohesion...
...Last year, when the Janata Dal (literally "People's party") government of V.P...
...In the sixties, a noted American journalist, Selig Harrison, coined the term "fissiparous tendencies" to describe the ethnic and class divisions that were threatening to rend the fabric of India's polity...
...External shocks complicated matters as well...
...Following the electoral defeat of the Congress party government of Rajiv Gandhi in 1989, shaky coalitions sought to govern the nation...
...Later in the same decade, Paul Ehrlich, the population biologist, suggested a Malthusian dilemma: the population's growth would steadily outstrip its ability to feed itself...
...Its ability to widen its political base remains an open question, but it is already a potent national force...
...More important, they often led the election commissioner to "countermand" the results in particular constituencies, thereby serving notice that violations of balloting standards would not be overlooked...
...It would have reserved well over 50 percent of all government jobs for the lower strata of the Hindu caste hierarchy...
...His scenario of disaster did not come to pass...
...Instead, it has become increasingly democratic as broadening segments of the population have become politically mobilized...
...In order to broaden their narrow electoral bases, a succession of political parties resorted to shortsighted populist measures, ranging from dismissing loans to farmers to attempts at implementing the contested affirmative action plan...
...This perhaps offers the most compelling grounds for hope that India as a coherent political entity will not only endure but in its own peculiar way tackle the challenges that vex its leaders...
...Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing war in the Persian Gulf delivered a number of blows to an already shaky economy...
...Such conflicts continue to bedevil the country, yet its national integrity has remained intact...
...Despite various governmental attempts at promoting birth control, population growth is hovering around 2 percent per year...
...In the longer run, regional ties to the "little traditions" should prove more binding than an ephemeral attachment to the Sanscritic "great tradition," on which the BJP would build a Hindu monolith...
...In Uttar Pradesh, a large, populous state also in the north, a controversy surrounds the Babri Masjid, a mosque that, it is said, stands on the ruins of an ancient Hindu temple...
...Two other important facts need mentioning...
...Its practices and rituals vary widely throughout the subcontinent...
...In all likelihood this presages the growth of a competitive party system and the end of Congress dominance, which has been the essential feature of Indian political life since 1947...
...A number of American social scientists, particularly Samuel Huntington, long cautioned that such political participation would strain the limited capacities of a nascent political system...
...Faced with this picture, many thoughtful observers express misgivings about the country's long-term political and economic viability...
...Ethnic and religious differences are not the only problems...
...The BJP's growth has caused considerable concern to Indian intellectuals weaned on Nehru's vision of a secular polity...
...The recent controversy surrounding the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi is in many ways symptomatic of a deeper malaise...
...Politicians desperate to cling to office increasingly resort to sordid practices...
...The rise of the cost of oil by $1 per barrel drained the Indian exchequer of $235 million in badly needed foreign exchange...
...This is like adding approximately the entire population of Australia every twelve months...
...Such moves have fueled simmering tensions, frequently leading to conflagrations...
...Foreign analysts have not been the only prognosticators of Indian trauma...
...Hinduism is far from a monolithic faith...
...The "green revolution," based on hybrid seeds and increased reliance on farm technology and artificial fertilizers, transformed India from a net importer to a food-surplus nation...
...A number of Indian social scientists and political commentators have written at length about the country's grave disintegrative propensities...
...At a national level, the country is deeply divided over the Mandal Commission Report, a comprehensive "positive discrimination" (affirmative action) plan initially commissioned eleven years ago...
...There are in fact certain structural limits to the expansion of the BJP's influence...
...In the process more problems—both political as well as economic— were generated...
...After all, India's fate involves a fifth of humanity...
...They are fearful that the specter of Hindu dominance will undo Indian pluralism...
...Yet the Indian political leadership, albeit in a fitful and ham-handed fashion, did precisely the opposite...
...These imports, composed largely of capital equipment, will contribute to the long-run modernization of the economy...
...Owing to import liberalization policies pursued during much of the last decade, India's trade deficit has significantly widened...
...Indeed, this aspect of identity is so powerful that India has yet to establish a widely accepted national language (though formally Hindi has that status...
...Second, Hinduism is only one facet of the ethnic identity of most Indian Hindus...
...Nonetheless, Indian democracy is alive and vibrant, even if troubled in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination...
...India's untouchables legally have the franchise but they, and occasionally members of other minority groups, particularly Muslims, encounter local intimidation aimed to dissuade them from political participation...
...For the first time voters were offered three distinct alternatives...
...The country was also faced with the prospect of repatriating some 180,000 Indian workers from the Gulf, and losing their remittances, which in 1990 alone amounted to $500 million...
...Sen's argument is disarmingly simple, since no Indian government could have survived the political costs of mass starvation...
...It stems, first, from the willingness of a range of politicians to exploit ethnic differences for short-term gains...
...With the possible exception of the two Communist parties, virtually every political party has made narrow, sectarian appeals to both majority and minority communities...
...India's tenth general election, held during the months of May and June of this year, was an important gauge of the country's political culture...
...In last spring's election the BJP emerged as the single largest opposition party in the lower house of the Parliament...
...India adds around eleven million people to its population every year...
...The right-wing Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) blatantly attempts to capitalize on this sentiment...
...The consequences are ever-expanding demands on scarce resources and a need to feed, house, educate, and employ larger and larger numbers of people...
...As previously quiescent groups sought political access to social goods, a backlash from members of hitherto privileged communities followed...
...Instead, India went on to cope effectively with the next oil-price hike in 1979...
...The question is hardly academic...
...A troubling feature of this election was its violence...
...Initially confined to northern merchant communities and central India, the BJP now seeks to make inroads into other parts of the nation...
...It contends that Hinduism is endangered due to the supine "minorityism" of the Congress party, with its secular credo...
...First, the BJP is dominated by upper-caste elements, and it therefore holds little appeal for India's untouchables...
...These reports significantly tainted a number of important politicians...
...Harold Gould, an American anthropologist who has long worked on India, describes this tendency as the "apperception of doom...
...Still, it was a free press reporting failures of public policy that ensured this...
...This dispute is emblematic of deeper rifts between the Hindu and Muslim communities...
...Tragically, the local police and paramilitary forces, who should be neutral guarantors of public order, all too often become infected with the communal virus...
...The net result was a dramatic expansion of the electorate and a modicum of improvement in the socioeconomic conditions of minorities...
...All this could not have come at a worse time...
...India's political and economic record since Independence in 1947 has undoubtedly been mixed...
...For all its shortcomings, the polling underscored the institutionalization of a democratic political process...
...Moreover, the national government's professed commitment to political opportunity for all and its use of affirmative action furthered the lot of some members of disadvantaged communities...
...Some are already sounding the tocsin that India may be sliding into the debt trap in which other oil-poor developing nations, like Brazil, are mired...
...There is what anthropologists call the "great tradition" of north Indian Sanscritic Hinduism, but it is often in competition with various "little traditions" that inform local ritual and practice...
...It did not...
...Despite the multiple crises that the country faced this year, it successfully went through another nationwide ballot...
...The eminent economist Amartya Sen contends persuasively that a free press has saved India from many of the horrors that have visited other developing nations, notably, China...
...The persistence of another democratic institution, a free press, is also raising the price of election malpractices...
...Four decades of holding elections at the national, state, and local levels have embedded democratic norms in India...
...An ardent and growing number of Hindus refer to the area as Ram Janmabhoomi or the birthplace of Lord Rama, one of the principal figures in the Hindu pantheon...
...Eventually demands would outstrip governmental capacities, leading to political disorder, according to this theory...
...BJP inroads into the Congress party's traditional strongholds may convince the latter's leaders to reorient their electoral strategies...
...Will India become, to use John Kenneth Galbraith's pithy phrase, a 464 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad "functioning anarchy...
...Currently, India's debt service ratio is as high as 27 percent of all export earnings...
...Accordingly, the BJP demands that Hinduism be restored to pride of place...
...When all is said and done, there was a legitimate, if chaotic, transfer of power...
...Gandhi's failure in 1977 should have laid to rest a popular Western notion that democracy is dependent on a certain threshold of economic development...
...In contrast, India's large reserves of poor, illiterate peasantry resoundingly demonstrated that they cared about their civil and political rights...
...The press's willingness to expose governmental incompetence and corruption is one reason India has not suffered large-scale famine since independence...
...Surrounded by sycophants and relying on reportage by a muzzled press, the prime minister lost touch with the electorate...
...The second source of political violence is the willingness of many politicians to flout the most rudimentary norms of democratic conduct through voter intimidation, ballot-box tampering and even multiple voting...
...Underlying these matters is an important transformation of the Indian polity...
...Alternatively, it might encourage a continued search for short-term political advantage through partisan appeals to the artifact of Hindu nationalism...
...However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the news of India's impending (or imminent) demise is greatly exaggerated...
...This produced substantial discontent following its recent resurrection...
...q FALL • 1991 • 467...
...Adult franchise has become so widespread that local satraps can no longer assume that the poor, illiterate masses will vote "as expected...
...The sheer costs of using force to deter voters from exercising their right of franchise are becoming staggering...
...Not only was former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi assassinated in a particularly violent election campaign last spring, but two separatist insurgencies continue to wrack the country...
...The short period of dictatorial rule during the late seventies, when Indira Gandhi declared a "state of emergency" to secure her political fortunes, bears out Sen's claim...
...In the worst cases they actually become participants in the rioting and mayhem, while in other instances they have proved to be mere ineffectual observers...
...These problems have deflected attention from another potentially devastating issue: demography...
...In principle, this proposal aimed to improve the lot of the so-called "Other Backward Castes...
...Gains made by Indian Muslims and Hindu "untouchables" are perceived by segments of the north Indian Hindu community as an erosion of their social dominance...
...In fact, ethnic tensions are no longer confined to particular regions as they once were...
...Another crucial dimension is linguistic...
...This political mobilization came, however, with social and political costs...
...Still, in the long run, politicians will probably have to abide by democratic norms...
...True, specialists from a variety of disciplines have long expressed doubts—which were surely reinforced by the spring's electoral violence—about the state's viability...
...Most pronounced in north India, these divisions are now threatening to spread elsewhere...
...As increasing numbers of minority groups entered the political arena, they were perceived as potential vote banks...
...The Indian press remains a continuing source of the nation's resilience...
...Consequently, political mobilization at once expands democracy and poses a significant challenge to it...
...This might well result in the Congress reaffirming its traditional credo...
Vol. 38 • September 1991 • No. 4
