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Can the idea of India survive?

'The Idea of India'
By Sunil Khilnani

August 16, 1999
Web posted at: 5:23 p.m. EDT (2123 GMT)

(CNN) -- This well-received historical analysis conveys modern India's energy, fluidity, and unpredictability -- in its democracy and its voting patterns, in its visions of economic development, in its diverse cities and devotion to village culture, and in its current disputes over its political identity. Throughout, he provokes and illuminates this fundamental question: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?


rule

1

Democracy

In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?

B.R. AMBEDKAR, 1949

On 15 August 1996 the Indian tricolour was hoisted from the ramparts of Delhi's Red Fort in an annual ritual of state invented forty-nine years earlier by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The man who in 1996 presided over this ceremonial observance of the day India gained independence from British rule came from a world galactically removed from Nehru's. H. D. Deve Gowda had taken office a few months earlier, the first Indian prime minister to speak neither Hindi nor English. A self-proclaimed 'humble farmer's son' from the southern state of Karnataka, he had vowed to master Hindi in time for the traditional Independence-day address to the nation. He stepped to the rostrum and valiantly delivered his speech in halting, and sometimes comic Hindi. ('Given the fact,' explained one supportive newspaper, 'that Mr Deve Gowda's familiarity with Hindi is only a few months old his speech obviously lacked the rhetorical flourishes.') It was a talismanic moment in India's public life. The mighty Congress, the invincible juggernaut of India's twentieth-century history, the party so intimately associated with Nehru and his family, which had set the terms of an Indian identity, had crashed to electoral defeat in May. No ready substitute had emerged. The strongest challenger, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), representing a resurgent Hindu nationalism, had made unprecedented advances in the elections, and for a brief fortnight it had actually held office -- so interrupting India's record of government by non-religious parties. But, short of a majority, the BJP too had fallen, and power had passed to the men from the regions, a hastily arranged medley of more than a dozen parties led by the farmer from Karnataka, Deve Gowda.

After almost fifty years of self-rule, the old certitudes of Indian politics had crumbled. Yet one powerful continuity stretched across this half-century of spectacular and often turbulent events: the presence of a democratic state. As a single territory commanded by a state, India has long posed something of a puzzle: even the British who had possessed it as an empire marveled at its oddity. Macaulay, with characteristic but for once justifiable exaggeration, famously described it as 'the strangest of all political anomalies'. As an independent democratic state since 1947, India remains defiantly anomalous.

Few states created after the end of European empire have been able to maintain democratic routines; and India's own past, as well as the contingencies of its unity, prepared it very poorly for democracy. Huge, impoverished, crowded with cultural and religious distinctions, with a hierarchical social order almost deliberately designed to resist the idea of political equality, India had little prospective reason to expect it could operate as a democracy. Yet fifty years later India continues to have parliaments and courts of law, political parties and a free press, and elections for which hundreds of millions of voters turn out, as a result of which governments fall and are formed. Democracy is a type of government, a political regime of laws and institutions. But its imaginative potency rests in its promise to bring alien and powerful machines like the state under the control of human will, to enable a community of political equals before the constitutional law to make their own history. Like those other great democratic experiments inaugurated in eighteenth-century America and France, India became a democracy without really knowing how, why, or what it meant to be one. Yet the democratic idea has penetrated the Indian political imagination and has begun to corrode the authority of the social order and of a paternalist state. Democracy as a manner of seeing and acting upon the world is changing the relation of Indians to themselves.

How did the idea arrive in India? And what has it done to India, and India to it?

2

Contrary to India's nationalist myths, enamoured of immemorial 'village republics', pre-colonial history little prepared it for modern democracy. Nor was democracy a gift of the departing British. Democracy was established after a profound historical rupture -- the experience, at once humiliating and enabling, of colonialism, which made it impossible for Indians to regard their own past as a sufficient resource for facing the future and condemned them, in struggling against the subtle knots of the foreigner's Raj, to struggle also against themselves. But it also incited them to imagine new possibilities: of being a nation, of possessing their own state, and of doing so on their own terms in a world of other states. By gradually raising the edifice of a state whose sovereign powers stretched across the vast Indian landscape, the British made politics the unavoidable terrain on which Indians would have to learn to act.

In pre-colonial India, power was not embodied in the concept of a state, whether republican or absolutist. Across the subcontinent, varied economies and cultures were matched by an assortment of political arrangements. They were nothing like the static 'oriental despotism' conjured up by colonial and Marxist historians: deliberative and consultative forms of politics did exist, but there was no protracted historical struggle to install institutions of representative government, nor (despite a hardly passive rural or urban poor) did large-scale popular movements act to curb the powers of rulers. Most importantly, before the gradual British acquisition of most of India's territory no single imperium had ever ruled the whole, immense subcontinental triangle. India's social order successfully curbed and blunted the ambitions of political power, and made it extraordinarily resistant to political moulding.

The basis of this resistance lay in the village, and its distinct form of community: the jati. These groups, numbering in the thousands, were governed by strict rules of endogamy and by taboos about purity, and arranged a social hierarchy: varna. The precise ideological sources of this system are obscure, but elements may be traced to one of the very late hymns of the Rig Veda, which describes the dismemberment of the cosmic giant Purusha, the primeval male whose sacrifice created the world: 'When they divided the Man, into how many parts did they apportion him? What do they call his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet? / His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Warrior [kshatriya], his thighs the People [vaishiya], and from his feet the servants [shudra] were born.' The resulting intricate filigree of social interconnections and division -- a hierarchical order of peerless sophistication -- defies any simple account. Perplexed Westerners came to describe it by the term 'caste', but a wide distance separates the deceptively well-defined doctrinal claims of the caste order and the actual operations of what is an essentially local, small-scale system. Two of its characteristics, however, are particularly direct. The system of jati and varna deflected responsibility for social outcomes away from human individuals or agencies and diffused it in a metaphysical universe, so making it impossible to assign blame for social wrongs and oppressions to particular individuals or groups. Jatis themselves were far from immutable in their social rank, and regularly rose and fell within the varna order; but the structure itself showed remarkable resilience. Further, the system did not concentrate status, wealth and power exclusively in one social group but distributed them to different parts of the social order, with the result that no one social group could impose its will on the whole society.

Yet India was not simply an archipelago of villages imprisoned by the local ties of caste. The prevalence of common aesthetic and architectural styles, as well as myths and ritual motifs, attests to the presence of a larger, more cohesive power. This derived neither from a unique political authority, such as an absolutist state, nor from a monolithic, codified religion controlled by a Church, but rather from the ideological mechanisms of pre-colonial India. These rested on a monopoly of literacy vested in one social group, the Brahmins. The Brahminic order in India was certainly an oppressive system of economic production, and it enforced degrading rules about purity and pollution. But its capacity to endure and retain its grip over a wide geographical area flowed from its severely selective distribution of literacy. The Brahminic pattern survived not through allying with temporary bearers of political power, nor by imposing a single belief system on the society. Rather, it cultivated a high tolerance for diverse beliefs and religious observances, withdrew from political power -- the realm of Artha, or mere worldly interest -- and directed its energies towards the regulation of social relationships; it made itself indispensable to the conduct of essential rituals, and it provided law for every aspect of social life. Its interpretative powers were recognized as the ultimate sanction and authority for caste rules. By renouncing political power, the Brahminic order created a self-coercing, self-disciplining society founded on a vision of a moral order. This society was easy to rule but difficult to change: a new ruler had merely to capture the symbolic seat of power and go on ruling as those before him had done. India could be defeated easily, but the society itself remained unconquered and unchanged.

Politics was thus consigned to the realm of spectacle and ceremony. No concept of a state, an impersonal public authority with a continuous identity, emerged: kings represented only themselves, never enduring states. It was this arrangement of power that explains the most peculiar characteristic of India's pre-colonial history: the perpetual instability of political rule, the constant rise and fall of dynasties and empires, combined with the society's unusual fixity and cultural consistency. Its identity lay not in transient political authority but in the social order. The ambitions of political rulers could therefore never become absolute, as they readily became in Europe: the rulers could not transform or mobilize society for particular ends. The state as a sovereign agency with powers to change society, to alter its economic relations, to control its beliefs or rewrite its laws, did not exist. The political authority that the many territorial kingdoms of the Indian subcontinent possessed was more a matter of paramountcy than sovereignty: kingship was exercised through overlapping circuits of rights and obligations that together diverse local societies but also sheltered them from the intrusions of any one ruler. Rulers restricted themselves to extracting wealth in the form of rent; they had no means to rearrange the property order or effect large shifts in the balance of wealth from one group to another, and thus secure permanent allies.

Unlike the history of Europe, that of pre-colonial India shows no upward curve in the responsibilities and capacities of the state. The very externality of politics, its distance from what was taken to be the moral core of the society, was the key to the society's stability. But this also made politics an exposed flank, an arena of contact with the outside world. Along with routines of trade and commercial exchange, politics became the vestibule where the alien was received, entertained, and usually contained. Here Indians were willing to learn techniques of statecraft from others without feeling that this endangered the inner core of their own identities. This shaping of social space made it easy for the concepts of Western politics to force an initial bridgehead in India and then, with their historically unprecedented powers, to overwhelm the society itself.

No issue divides India's historians more sharply than the impact of colonialism. Did British rule ruthlessly fracture the patterns of Indian society, or was it compelled to adapt to native styles, and merely preside in glorified manner over the more subterranean movements of India's history? Whatever view one takes of its economic and social consequences, the political effect of the British intrusion was unambiguous and resounding. The foreign rulers brought with them to India a concept of the state -- with its distinct, if often locally influenced, administrative and military technologies, its claim to rule over a precise territory, its determination to initiate social reforms, and its reorganization of the texture of community -- that drastically changed ideas about power in India. The British gradually but decisively defined power in political terms and located it in a sovereign, central state. The colonial template of rule altered over time, diverted by changing British ideologies about the state's legitimate purposes and the character of Indian society. Shifting historiographical fashions in interpreting Britain's own medieval history, for instance, directly affected the Raj's political practices: the view of India as a 'feudal' society with a natural ordering of lords, chiefs and yeomen, which called for little interference by the British, by the end of the nineteenth century gave way to one of a society composed of permanently feuding 'communities' that had each to be represented and paternally protected by the British Raj. Initially, British rule was often little more than a series of severely local expedients of a commercial agency, the East India Company, but by the end of the nineteenth century it began to acquire a more tangible presence. This imperial state was charged with relatively restricted duties: to siphon off commercial and economic benefits more efficiently and, above all, to prevent any repetition of the Uprising of 1857, when a rebellion begun by Indian troops in north India spread to become the most serious domestic military challenge the British Raj was ever to face.

The state which the British built in India came to stand in a peculiar cultural relationship with Indian society: the British considered their most urgent task the Hobbesian one of keeping order over a bounded territory, but the Raj could not rely on preserving the peace simply through coercion or even by the deft manipulation of interests. It had to govern opinion. This it did by ostentatious spectacle, imperial Durbars and ceremonial progresses. These despotic tea parties won over a small circle of British loyalists, but there was no reshaping of common beliefs in the society at large. The barrier was essentially linguistic, and it endured after 1947. The language of administration used by the Raj -- for example, for revenue collection and property law -- had to be understood if it was to be effective, and so an elaborate and sonorous mongrel jargon of everyday usage was created, a Hobson-Jobson vernacular vocabulary. But the language of politics and legislation did not stray from the Queen's English. The British rulers swathed themselves in mystique by proclaiming in an alien and powerful language, but few among the ruled could actually comprehend what was said.

The British began therefore to cultivate a local elite who could understand them and their concepts of rule, who were willing to be inducted into politics, into a 'public arena' where they would freely give allegiance and loyalty to the British crown, 'a class of persons', as Macaulay had put it in the blunt instructions of his 1835 Education Minute which led to the foundation of the Indian university system, 'Indian in colour and blood but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect'. The imposition of English as the language of politics transfigured Indian public life in at least two ways: it obviously divided the British rulers from their Indian subjects; and it also divided Indians themselves, between those who could speak English, who knew their Dicey from their Dickens, and those who did not. These often immaculately anglicized elites were also, it is essential to remember, fully bicultural, entirely comfortable with their own Marathi, Bengali or Hindustani milieux: it was, after all, exactly this amphibious quality which made them useful porters to the British Raj. The slow extraction of power from the society and its concentration in the state was in India's case crucially a matter of language. The social power that Sanskrit -- and then Persian had once held was replaced by a new, still more mysterious, more potent language of state: English.

The cultural reach of British rule was steady as far as it went, but it was never very deep. The enduring effect of the Raj lay not in its ability to implant affection among native hearts for the empress across the seas, nor even -- contrary to fond post-imperial imaginings -- to seal a deep bond of Anglo-Indian cultural intimacy, but in its structuring of political possibilities. The extractive, suppressive, strange-tongued Raj was no mere clone of the British state, an expatriate station in an exotic location. When Henry Sumner Maine spoke of how India's British rulers were required to keep their watches set simultaneously on two longitudes, he captured the foundational duality of the Raj: it faced in two directions, towards two audiences or 'publics', British and Indian. From its very inception, impelled by both secular and Christian solicitude for benighted idolaters, it spoke the language of reform. After the mid nineteenth century, resolutely this-worldly political doctrines of utilitarianism dominated, but by the time their remedies began to surface in the ordinances of British administrators in Calcutta and Bombay, their original radical impulse had wilted into what has been called 'Government House utilitarianism', a decisively authoritarian and paternalist vehicle for the ideas of intellectual bullies like James Fitzjames Stephen. The corrective accent inspired zealous administrators to enlarge the field of the Raj's activities: it began to pry into Indians' social customs and habits, legislated the abolition of sati (an interference in social customs by political authority without historical precedent in India), and established the principle -- if a rather deformed conduct -- of representative politics.

The language of representative politics thus entered India through a utilitarian filter, at a time when British liberalism was at its most rampantly collectivist and paternalist. The possible forms of liberalism in India were still further reduced. The idea of natural rights, essential to modern liberalisms, was only faintly articulated and failed to find a niche in nationalist thought. The interests of Indians, the British had decided, could not be individual. It followed that when elections to provincial legislatures were first introduced -- as a result of constitutional reforms devised in -- 1909 by the Secretary for India, John Morley, and the Viceroy, Lord Minto -- the units of representation were not defined (as they were in Britain) as territorial constituencies containing individuals with rights and changeable interests. The legislatures of British India's administrative provinces, arbitrarily demarcated territories, represented societies of communities, not individuals. The extent of that representation did widen over time, being increased by the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford reforms which granted to Indians for the first time the principle of responsible government, and most of all by the Government of India Act of 1935, which established the Raj as a federal structure and brought more Indians into its administration; but even then, less than one-third of the Raj's subjects had the vote (the subjects of princely India -- a quarter of the subcontinent's population -- remained altogether excluded).

The groups who were accorded political representation were identified as religious 'communities' with immutable interests and collective rights: these Hindu and Muslim, Christian and Parsi communities were tagged as the eternal elements of Indian society. Defined as majorities and minorities, they were shepherded into communal electorates whose interests the British had to protect from one another. Representatives of these communities, along with the princes, were inducted into an ambiguously political world where they had to mouth the language of legality and representation, but these municipal and provincial chambers had no powers to legislate; they were enjoined simply to nod their approval of colonial laws. This was an anaemic conception of public politics. Instead of the threatening spaces of India's streets, squares and bazaars, it offered the soporific chambers of Indo-saracenic municipal halls. Men like Lord Curzon, who worked his viceroyalty so hard to institute this twilight world of spectacular impotence, tried to restrict the scope of Indian politics by ruling through the Indian princes, who were required to be at once conservative and liberal, to blend eastern splendour and western constitutional propriety, to sport turbans and read Bagehot.

Yet even this stilted acquaintance with the inconsistent bundle of ideas and protocols of the British imperium began to excite and then to irritate the Indian elites. It led to their first organized response to the Raj: the formation in 1885 of the Indian National Congress. Initially Congress merely requested that the privileges of British subjects be extended to obedient Indians, but by the 1920s it started to lay claim, in the name of the nation, to possession of the state and its territory. The history of Congress is that of a protean party with an exceptional capacity constantly to reinvent itself. What unites the party of Allan Octavian Hume, the theosophist and ornithologist who helped in 1885 to launch the Congress Party as a stiff debating club that met annually during the Christmas vacation with that of Annie Besant and Motilal Nehru, or these incarnations with Mahatma Gandhi's squabbling but determined mass organization, or any of these with Jawaharlal Nehru's expansive yet prim ruling party, let alone with the bedraggled rump of jobbers it became by the mid-1990s, is far from plain to the naked eye. Nehru once described Congress as 'the mirror of the nation', and it is indeed best seen as a screen on which the nation has projected its shifting politics rather than as itself a coherent agent with a unified will.

From its very earliest days it claimed to speak for the nation and did so by stressing India's right to collective liberty. Even during Congress's most strongly liberal phase, the period of 'mendicant constitutionalism' which ran from 1885 until the end of the First World War, its demands were not for the equal rights of all individuals but that culturally Indians should be at liberty not to have to suffer the petty -- and therefore all the more infuriating -- slights of colonialism and that economically they should be free to enrich themselves. Liberty was understood not as an individual right but as a nation's collective right to self-determination. It is hardly surprising that the individualist accent was muted: Indian society did have a place for the individual, but in the form of the renouncer, a category relegated to the margins of the society. Individuality as a way of social being was a precarious undertaking. All this left Indian liberalism crippled from its origins: stamped by utilitarianism, and squeezed into a culture that had little room for the individual.

Gandhi entirely remade this fastidious rule-book liberalism of the first generation of Congressmen. He turned Congress into a mass movement, though paradoxically preserved its conservative, distinctly non-revolutionary character. Congress was never the voice of a single class, but its conservative temperament was encouraged by the manner in which it had to enter representative politics. The British Raj, in, its efforts to widen its representative base and devolve more responsibilities to the method of indirect rule, had in 1937 held elections to the enlarged provincial legislatures announced by the Government of India Act in 1935. Congress, initially hesitant, decided to compete and to win it was forced into alliances with powerful landed interests, upper-caste landlords, and rich peasants in the countryside. During these years of slow entry into the portals of the Raj, democracy did not capture its concentrated attention. Nor (contrary to subsequent nationalist self-congratulation) did the internal rules of the party organization explain the choice of constitutional democracy after 1947. For the duration of Gandhi's dominance, from 1920 until the early 1940s, policy within Congress was determined by the Working Committee, known as the High Command:. this small group included powerful leaders from the provinces. Typically, except for a brief period in the early 1920s Gandhi preferred not to be a formal member of the Working Committee, yet he used it repeatedly to push through decisions that contradicted the wishes of party members. Most conspicuous was his removal of Subhas Chandra Bose from the elected office of party president in 1939. Gandhi did establish a culture of dialogue and publicity with Congress, but his fierce disciplinary regimes -- fasts, silences, penances -- gave him a grip on the party that relied at once on coercion and seduction. These were the immensely effective techniques of an eccentric parent, but they were not designed to nourish commitment to democratic institutions. By the 1930s and 1940s, Congress nationalism was divided between opinions that had little interest in liberal democracy. Gandhi's powerful vision of direct self-rule, with the majority in possession of political power unmediated by a state, rejected talk of rights and constitutions, while a dissident strain, articulated by Bose and Nehru and more obviously influenced by Western ideas, held that liberal democracy had been historically superseded by socialism.

So, before independence Congress could not pretend to any developed meditation on democracy, though it did embody a formidable will to political power. Its history demonstrates the impressive capacity of Indians to respond to the opportunities offered by a state, their readiness to mobilize for power. But what was to be done with that power? As the prospect of independence approached and as the prize of power loomed, the fissures within Congress became prominent. Its diversity of voices -- Gandhian, socialist, conservative, capitalist, Hindu -- meant that Congress, like so many other visionary nationalisms, had no coherent programme of independent government. And democracy itself was certainly not the object of close study. India's history in the first half of the twentieth century teems with new ideas, arguments, languages, hopes, but amidst these intellectual festivities the idea of democracy stood in a lonely corner. Then, after 1947 it swept all before it. But there was no surrounding world of arguments, theories, commitments or speculations about the consequences of implanting it on Indian soil. Apart from the standard colonial thrust against it and the nationalist parry that Indians could be parliamentarians too, little prepared the people who would soon entrust their destiny to democracy's exigencies.

Copyright © 1997 Sunil Khilnani


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