stylegh
19-12-2010, 10:43 PM
السلام عليكم لدي طلب أرجو تلبيته بارك اللع فيكم
أريد ترجمة هذا النص من الإنجليزية إلى العربية، في أقرب وقت، جازاكم الله خيرا
WHAT SUSTAINS DEMOCRACY
In June 1975, when a High Court ruling invalidated her election to parliament and banned her from office for six years, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi suspended the constitutional democracy that her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, had nurtured and built from independence nearly three decades earlier. Rather than temporarily stepping aside from office and challenging the questionable ruling judicially, the imperious prime minister claimed a conspiracy to subvert social order and economic development in India, invoked emergency powers, and ruled by decree. Fear and submission reigned. The months following the June 16 declaration of national emergency were “marked by mass arrests, suppression of civil rights and all opposition voices, elaborate censorship of the media, and carefully orchestrated campaign to celebrate the values of collective discipline promoted by the national leader, her increasingly powerful son Sanjay, and their nominees.” In the face of the authoritarian onslaught, Mrs. Gandhi’s two-thirds parliamentary majority meekly endorsed her bid to amend the constitution to emasculate the judiciary.
It would not have been unreasonable to expect the dawn of emergency rule to make the end of Indian’s democracy experiment. At the time, many scholars and observers could not understand how India –one of the world’s least developed countries– had been able to sustain a democracy for nearly three decades. Globally, democracy was flagging. In Asia, India democracy was an exception, a curiosity, and a system that was often compared unfavorably with the unity and energy that was said to be delivering a forced march to modernization in China. Neither was there significant international clamor for Mrs. Gandhi to restore democracy. For one things, India was just too big to be pressured successfully. But in addition, the international norms and structures to defend democracy had barely even begun to take shape. And India’s prime minister represented only the latest in a string of Asian emergency regimes, a “season of Caesars.” For well over a year, Mrs. Gandhi seemed secure. The world’s biggest democracy, it seemed, had been reduced to a pseudo democracy. But neither India’s civil society nor its opposition parties accepted such a fate. Despite widespread arrests, torture, and intimidation, democratic activists persisted in the shadows. While the media as a whole did little to resist censorship, “some newspapers expressed their dissent symbolically by leaving the editorial columns of the paper blank or framing the front page with a funereal black border.” A few state courts struck down egregious instances of censorship. When Mrs. Gandhi made the mistake of so many dictators--believing the assurances of her party and intelligence sycophants that the people loved and supported her—she was defeated overwhelmingly in elections she had called in March 1977 in her quest for a fresh parliamentary mandate.
What was it about Indian democracy that enabled it to rally so quickly to sweep an emerging autocrat from power? Why that one, nineteen-month exception –has democracy survived so heartily to such a poor and fragmented country? The remarkable history of India’s decades-long struggle for self-rule and its independence since 1947 reveals surprisingly robust cultural, social, and political support for democracy. While these advantages tend to emerge naturally with economic development and a growing middle class, as I discussed in chapter 4, the seminal lesson of India’s experience is that a country does not have to be rich, industrialized, urban, or even heavily literate in order to acquire the attributes that develop and sustain democracy.
POLITICAL CULTURE
Perhaps the most important reason why this desperately poor, rural, illiterate country—deeply divided by language, caste, and religion—was able to sustain democracy is that from the start, its political and social elites as well as the population at large believed in it. As Amartya Sen has shown, Indian culture displays a readiness for democracy, stemming from traditions that value political and religious tolerance and extensive argument and debate. Some of this may have owed as well to “the inherent pluralism of Hinduism” as a religion. But nearly two centuries of British colonial rule exhibited paradoxical effects on the country’s political culture. It transferred certain British rule-of-law norms and traditions but also an ugly, racist system of exploitation and domination that was intrinsic to the very final several decades of that rule, it gradually introduced competitive elections to representative bodies at the provincial and national levels, stimulating the formation of political parties and movements and enfranchising millions of Indian voters. It opened space for Indian parties and associations, but it did so only reluctantly—thus prompting the political bodies to demand more, to seize the freedom they ultimately achieved while building (especially through the Congress Party) a national identity.
As we saw in chapter 1, no set of values is fully dominant in any society, but most societies have certain types of values, beliefs, and sentiments that shape how their people tend to think and act politically, a democratic political culture values democracy as the best form of government and thus affirms certain basic rights and obligations of citizenship, including the obligation to vote and to participate in politics. If people are going to bother to participate, they need to have some basic of information and knowledge, and some confidence that their own individual participation can make a difference, that it has “efficacy”. Related to this is a certain healthy suspicion of authority. One of the paradoxes of democracy is that sustainable self-governance must be respectful of government authority yet also distrustful of it, “watchful” but not “blindly submissive.” The political philosopher Sidney Hook put it this way: “A positive requirement of a working democracy is an intelligent distrust of its leadership, a skepticism stubborn but not blind, of all demands for the enlargement of power, and an emphasis upon critical method in every phase of social life.”
A democratic culture also embraces moderation, accommodation, cooperation, and bargaining. In a vibrant democracy, people may have strong beliefs and preferences, but then they will have strong disagreements that they must competing interests and ambitions, but it can only survive if it resolves these conflicts peacefully and lawfully. This implies the need for pragmatism and flexibility, an ability to transcend or even at times suspend ideological beliefs and ethnic solidarities. Finally, if people (and parties and interest groups) with sharply different goals beliefs are going to be able to bargain and compromise, they have to respect one another. That requires tolerance of political, ethnic, racial, and other differences, and a shared commitment to democracy.
As democracy began to emerge under colonial rule, India was fortunate to see these democratic norms take root, first among the elite and then among the mass public. With some strange resemblance to the American colonies under British rule, Indian elites embraced liberal values, even when they favored more extreme methods to force the British to grant sovereignty and leave. With the formation in 1885 of the Indian National Congress (which became the long-ruling Congress Party), and then a series of constitutional reforms to grant limited political rights of elections, “a culture of political bargaining” emerged, nurtured by an infusion of lawyers into the ranks of elected representatives and need for candidates to build broad coalitions in order to win sizable constituencies. The independence movement brought forth leaders with “a remarkably democratic temper.” In the last three decades of colonial rule, constitutional reforms greatly enhanced the powers of elected provincial councils and the scope of the franchise, gradually drawing new segments of the society into the political arena, as happened the previous century in Britain itself.
Founding leadership often plays a hugely important role in shaping the political culture of a new democracyµ; just as George Washington legitimated the new American democracy with his personal charisma, affirming values moderation, inclusion, and limited power, so Nehru, during his long tenure as India’s first prime minister (1947-64), made enormous contributions to the development of Indian democracy. “In schoolmasterly fashion, he encouraged parliamentary debate, maintained internal democracy within the Congress party, continued the British tradition of a politically neutral civil service, fostered judicial independence, encouraged press freedom, boosted secularism, and firmly entrenched civilian control over the military.”
But the democratic leadership of government and politics exhibited by Nehru and fellow congress Party leaders was half the story. During the waning decades of the British raj, the more militant campaign for freedom also practiced, preached, and extended democratic norms. No Indian activist so epitomized these norms as Mahatma Gandhi, the British-trained lawyer who led the independence movement with his strategy of satyagraha (mass civil disobedience to resist tyranny). A life-long advocate of religious and social tolerance, Gandhi “emphasized the importance of a consensual resolution of conflict within Indian society in his essentially organic conception of the Indian social order.” His struggle for self-government in Indian was based on the philosophy of devotion to truth (one literal meaning of satyagraha), tolerance for difference, complete and total nonviolence, relentless but peaceful defiance of injustice, courage, humility, and personal responsibility and sacrifice that he had begun to fashion during his tenure fighting racial oppression in South Africa between 1893 and 1914. In affirming the equal worth and dignity of every individual and the possibilities for human empowerment through direct nonviolent action, Gandhi contributed immeasurably to the growth of democratic practice and culture (not only in India but worldwide, as Americans world discover when Martin Luther King Jr. adopted many of Gandhi’s tactics). He also transformed the early liberalism of Indian elites into an inclusive mass movement for self-governance, bringing “an important historical foundation for future democratic development.”
It is possible to argue, given the bloody trauma of partition at independence and the high levels of violence in recent decades, that Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence had no lasting effect on his new nation. But India is a continental country of great diversity and ongoing democratic innovation. Gandhi’s influence persists in the predominantly peaceful nature of Indian politics and public mobilization, in the continuing ability to forge political coalitions across a myriad of social divisions, in the steady incorporation of marginal groups into the politics, and in the extraordinary energy and pluralism of India’s civil society.
CIVIL SOCIETY
Throughout its modern history, India’s diversity has been a threat and a salvation. To survive as a democracy, the country has had to learn to manage and accommodate its breathtaking ethnic, regional, religious, and caste divisions. At the same time, a tremendously rich civic life has been a major foundation of Indian democratic persistence. Over the last century, India’s manifold professional associations, trade unions, grassroots groups, Gandhian social movements, and independent mass media have fueled a vibrant civil society that Alexis de Tocqueville would had admired.
India’s civil society encompasses groups with widely divergent interests and values, and is itself a theater of political conflict. Moreover, not all of the groups in civil society are necessarily committed to democratic values and goals. Yet, the components of civil society do share, by definition, some crucial characteristics: they are independent of the state relates to the public realm; and hold the ability to mobilize resources and act collectively. They may wish to defend and advance group interests, be they economic, professional, or ethnic, or promote broader goals, such justice, and consumer protection.
A spirited civil society plays a vital role in checking and limiting the potential abuse of state power, but it also sustains and enriches democracy. Civil society organizations provide channels, beyond political parties and election campaigns, for citizens to participate in politics and governance, to air their grievances, and to secure their interests. At the local level, autonomous organizations of landless laborers, indigenous people, women, and the poor may challenge authoritarian bosses and entrenched inequalities, transforming power relations. There lies a whole realm of civil society activity devoted to personal development and self-help. When civil society is effective in organizing communities to advance their collective welfare, it takes some of the load off the state and enhances the legitimacy of the overall system.
All of these functions (and more) have visible in the extraordinary performance of civil society in democratic India. The brief bout with authoritarianism during Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule revived anti-colonial norms of resistance to repression and gave particular momentum to human rights groups like the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. Indian grassroots movements in the past three decades have “targeted various forms of injustice,” such as “subordination on the basis of inherited caste status,” wanton destruction of natural resources on which people depend for their survival, and entrenched gender discrimination. They have defended poor and powerless Indians who were being displaced from their homes livelihoods to illegal logging. During the 1980s and ‘90s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) staged protests by tens of thousands of poor people who were threatened by the huge Narmada River Valley dam projects, which were “expected to submerge thousands of villages, displace millions of mostly peasant and ‘tribal’ people, and destroy tens of thousands of hectares of forest lands.” Their dogged public advocacy, Gandhian-style protests (such as fasting, boycotts, and long marches), legal challenges, and international appeals built a transnational coalition and won an indefinite Supreme Court stay on the project’s implementation.
India’s remarkably pluralistic mass media have played a pivotal democratic role, as well, exposing corruption at high levels and despair and suicide among the indebted rural poor. The penchant for challenging wrongdoing goes back deep into the colonial era and was reawakened by the shame of capitulation to censorship during Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency rule. “ an increasingly feisty and sometimes irreverent journalism was born, characterized by an adversarial relationship with authority. Since the emergency, “the Indian press performed a yeoman watchdog role, exposing governmental corruption, taking recalcitrant civil servants to task, revealing governmental indifference to violence against minorities and lower-caste groups, and reporting on failures of governance in all parts of the country. Investigative exposés of bribery and other scandals have brought down a prime minister, a defense minister, a communications minister, and the notorious chief minister of one of India’s most crime-ridden states, Bihar. This renewed assertion of freedom by the press coincided with an explosion in the size of the mass media. By 2006, over sixty-thousand news publications, in 123 different languages and dialects, reached over 200 million readers, and the satellite television audience surged to an estimated 230 million viewers. While “the relentless corporate takeover of the Indian press” has diminished its civic content and contributions, it remains a diverse arena outside government control and with the ability to check governmental misconduct.
Civil society groups have also pushed specific reforms to improve democracy. In India, as in other developing countries, a recent campaign has helped pass Right to Information acts (similar to the U.S. Freedom of Information law) in nine states and in the national parliament in 2005. The acts compel each government department to appoint a public information officer, who must respond within thirty days to requests from the public or the media. The campaign for transparency has created innovative methods of public scrutiny, such as the jan sunwai ‘people’s hearing), during which “local officials and elected representatives are held to account by the people of the village, in the presence of invited intellectuals or distinguished public figures.” This “new type of anti-corruption activism” has sought to expose specific acts of corruption by “utilizing the investigative energies of ordinary people,” and by focusing at the local level, “where theft of public resources was personal, and where citizens could [do] the most to expose the precise mechanisms by which corruption took place.” These grassroots efforts, which have frequently pulled together elite professionals, retired civil servants, and the lower-caste poor, have mobilized an army of “citizen auditors” to secure the wages, food, and government services to which people are entitled, and to combat illegal practices, such as police harassment and slum relocation, that thrive in a context of graft.
By one count, there were over a million NGOs in India by 2001. The largest share of them were over to promoting development and delivering services in such fields as primary education, basic health care, water and sanitation, microcredit, and appropriate technology, others addressed local community problems of traffic, crime, pollution and recreation. While these do not directly enhance democracy, they held to address the social and economic problems that could threaten democracy if they were not relieved. Moreover, in fostering a culture of civic concern and grassroots initiative, these groups sustain the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi while also creating “social capital,” the horizontal relations of trust, cooperation , and reciprocity that enable people to collaborate for thé common good. Still, not all NGOs are good for democracy. Some are illiberal and “uncivil,” preaching ethnic and religious intolerance. Hindu chauvinist groups have organized violence against Muslims and Christians and have freely justified exclusion and discrimination. Even pro-democratic organizations are not always internally democratic of externally accountable; but “even if sections of civil society are themselves characterized by a democratic deficit . . . India’s robust civil society has been a bulwark of its democracy.”
POLITICAL MANAGEMENT OF DIVERSITY
Democracy is not sustain by cultural and social factors alone. The nature and quality of political institutions may have a huge impact in determining whether democracy will be able to address social injustices and economic problems, and thus whether it will be able to generate and maintain public commitment to democracy.
As we saw in chapter 1, there is a growing amount of evidence to suggest that people are more likely to express support for democracy when they see it working to provide genuine political competition, including alternation in power, and when it has at least some effect in controlling corruption, limiting abuse of power, and ensuring a rule of law. One of the great blessing of Indian democracy has been its resilient political party system. Highly competitive elections have seen political power at the federal level transfer peacefully among parties or coalitions seven times since the end of Congress dominance in the mid1970s, while voter turnout has risen to levels—above 60 percent—that exceed those in the United States. Electoral turnover has been no less vigorous at the consequential level of state government, as the former chief election officer, M. S. Gill, proudly observed: “between 1993 and 1997 . . . elections for all 25 of India’s state legislatures saw the incumbent party go down to defeat of a ruling party winning the next election.”
India’s institutions have also managed to keep the country from tearing apart along any of its numerous divisions; some of this impulse toward moderation lies in the very complexity on India’s diversity, in which the ties of language, ethnicity, religion, class region, state, and “most distinctively, caste . . . create multiple and cross-cutting cleavages.” Individuals shift between identities that vary in salience over time, and so hold a dampened sense of devotion to any single one; political institutions have chosen to enhance the gravitational pull toward the centre rather than the extremes. A seminal influence was exerted by the nature of the Congress Party as “a grand coalition of the major political and social forces” in India, transcending ethnicity , region, and religion. The electoral system also facilitated the success of such an expensive, diverse party against a host of much narrower challengers. By electing parliament through the British-style, “first past the post system” in single-member territorial districts (each of which now contains more than one million voters), competing candidates were forced to appeal to large and socially diverse constituencies. This distinct parliamentary system enabled a long, stable period of Congress dominance after independence, but did not permit complacency, as the Congress faced stiff competition in most districts. Once that dominance collapsed, the system compelled Congress’s main rival, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, or Indian People’ Party) to attenuate its northern, Hindu chauvinist, and upper-caste leanings in order to attract the wider social and regional base needed to win a plurality of seats and assemble a governing coalition.
Two other institutions have contained India’s potential for destructive fragmentation and steered it toward pragmatism, bargaining, and a large national commitment. The most crucial of these has been federalism, which has devolved considerable power and autonomy to state and local governments. Federalism is a particularly powerful tool of ethnic conflict management because it can provide many mechanisms for reducing the points of power, softening conflict between groups by generating conflicts within groups, creating incentives for interethnic cooperation, and encouraging alignments on interests other than ethnicity. In a number of deeply divided democracies, such as India, Belgium, and Spain, federalism has been constitutionally embraced as a successful means for maintaining democratic stability. In recent decades, the devolution of power away from the centre has been one of the most powerful democratizing trends worldwide, especially in Africa and Latin America, people in region or locality, through their own elected governments, have some independent ability to raise and spend their own resources and to set their own development priorities, government is closer to people, the people have more say, and political legitimacy is enhanced. This does not mean that decentralized governance will always be less corrupt and abusive, but in the long run it increases accountability and responsiveness to local concerns, stimulates citizen participation, widens the access to power of deprived groups, checks the potentially overbearing power of the central government, gives opposition parties a chance to govern at lower levels, and so broadens commitment to democracy.
In fact, it is impossible to imagine how such a large and immensely varied country as India could be a democracy except through a system that guarantees constitutionally significant autonomy to elected governments at the state and local levels. Virtually all of the territorially expansive and heavily populated democracies—the United States, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico—are federal systems. This is also why democracy has only been possible in Nigeria under federalism, Indonesia’s democracy has been moving toward a federal system, Sudan needs federalism to establish democratic peace, and the demise of democracy in Russia has coincided with Putin’s evisceration of the country’s federal institutions and restrains.
India, federalism has given the country’s diverse linguistic communities an important element of cultural pride and political autonomy within a large national identity. The scale of the challenge is staggering. “Twelve languages are spoken by more than 5 million people each, and another four languages by more than a million each.” Since the reorganization of India’s states along linguistic lines beginning in 1956, most of these widely used languages have had a state of their own, “which essentially means that the official language of each state is spoken by a majority of its inhabitants.” Yet, state still contain great cultural diversity, which discourages secessionist tendencies. As a result, the federal system in India tends to “quarantine” most identity conflicts at a primarily local level. State governments have also been foundries for economic and social reform. While autonomy means that some states, like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, have lagged miserably behind because of bad corrupt governance, others, like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, have been able to improve human well-being much more rapidly.
Federalism in India has worked far from perfectly. It has not always prevented outbreaks of communal violence and separatism. But often these have some “from the failure to adhere to the norms of federalism and autonomy,” while these norms in turn have led to accommodations for many of the most aggrieved and deprived areas. Federalist devolution of power has enable serious, and abuse of human rights to fester. Moreover, the center’s constitutional prerogative to topple elected state governments and impose direct “president’s rule has been used—infamously by Indira Gandhi—to advance narrowly political objectives rather than good governance and the rule of law. In allowing state autonomy in developmental policies during the last twenty years of economic liberalization, it has facilitated a vast “chasm separating wealthy states like Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Punjab” from the poor states of the northern Hindi heartland.
Yet the system has also created between 1962 and 1987, and another three in 2000, from territorial communities that felt severely deprived within larger states. Crucially, by creating many thousands of offices and points of political entry, federalism has given a wide range of people a stake in the political system. One of the leading scholars of Indian federalism, James Manor, captures it well: “Not only are there elections for the national and state legislative assemblies; elected councils, and in numerous quasi-official boards, cooperatives, associations, and the like. The existence of so many opportunities to capture at least some power persuades parties and politicians to remain engaged with elections and logrolling, even when they are defeated in some arenas.” In addition, regional parties have emerged to prominence within many of the linguistically distinct states, stimulating a fluid from of coalitional politics that has complicated the efforts for stable governance at the national level but also made Indian democracy much more inclusive.
It thus seems difficult to dispute the widespread academic assessment that India’s federal system has been a foundation of its democratic stability. Two of the most distinguished American experts on India, Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph, recently concluded:
Forty years ago, there seemed good reason to fear Selig Harrison was right to warn that India’s “fissiparous tendencies,” particularly its linguistic differences, would soon lead to Balkanization or dictatorship. Today such worries seem unpersuasive. The federal system has helped India to live peacefully with its marked difference.
A second mechanism for knitting India together politically has been the gradual attenuation of social and political inequalities through reserved quotas in political representation, public employment, and higher education for the lowest status groups: the “scheduled castes,” or dalits (the former “untouchables,” about 17 percent of the population), and the “scheduled tribes” (about 8 percent). More limited affirmative-action guarantees have since been provided to the “other backward castes” (accounting for about 44 percent of the population). These extensive quotas have been cumbersome, inefficient, and controversial, guaranteeing roughly half of public-sector jobs and the placements in higher education to these lass privileged groups. However, they have helped to drive a social revolution that has dramatically accelerated social mobility and expanded political participation to the point where voter turnout among lower-caste groups is now higher than among the well-off. Poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, and income inequality continue to blight the performance of Indian democracy, but as Sen argues, the country’s free press and civil society have prevented the occurrence of any serious famine. And according to Sumit Ganguly, the country’s social progress has been greater than the statistics reveal.
Upper-caste dominance is steadily on the decline, progress has been made toward universal elementary education, [and] absentee landlordism has been legally abolished. . . .Consequently, even fitful attempts to promote equality through public policies have had significant ameliorative effects that cannot be adequately measured through conventional statistical techniques.”
ACCOUNTABILITY AND THE RULE OF LAW
Few features of political life are more corrosive of public trust in government and support for democracy that corruption (and other forms of abuse power). If nothing else, citizens expect that democratically elected officials will be held to the same standards as the people are, and that violators will be punished. When politicians become a class unto themselves, feeding shamelessly and lawlessly at the public trough , they generate an open invitation for citizens for reject democracy.
Sustaining and consolidation democracy therefore entails making it more accountable to the people and more respectful for law. Stable democracy requires a rule of law, in which the constitutional is supreme, all citizens are equal before the law, no one is above the law, corruption is minimized and punished, state authorities respect the rights of citizens, and citizens have effective access to the courts to defend their rights. A democratic rule of law requires a judiciary that is, at every level, neutral, independent from political influence, and reasonably competent and resourceful. Most of all, it requires a constitutional court willing to constrain the power of the mighty and defend rights of the meek. An independent judiciary, however, is only one type of democratic institution to the constrain the abuse of power. A good democracy requires a dense web of institutions that check and balance the executive (and one another), as I explain in chapter 13.
India has not been free of serious problems of electoral violence and banditry, but for such a big and poor country, it has managed to institutionalize an exceptional degree of administrative integrity and competence in the holding of elections and the counting of votes. Regularly every few years, an electorate of over 600 million voters comes to the polls in sizable percentages (well over 50 percent). A decade ago, the chief of India’s election commission, M.S. Gill, described the Herculean administrative challenges: “Holding a general election involves establishing no fewer than 900,000 polling stations from the high Himalayas to the desert of Rajasthan, including areas that can only be reached on the back of an elephant. Yet such is the miracle of our functioning anarchy in India that never has a single polling station failed the test.” One reason the process works well, and with growing credibility and integrity over the past two decades, is because of the career professionalism and total independence of the election commission, which in the period before an election commands 4.5 million staffers from throughout the government. As a result of this capacity and competency, elections in India have been broadly credible, intensely competitive, and largely free and fair.
The single most important institution for upholding accountability and the rule of law in India has been the judicial system. In what will likely remain its darkness moment, the Supreme Court overturned nine High Court decisions that declared Mrs. Gandhi’s state of emergency ended, the Court introduced a system of public-interest litigation that enabled laborers, disenfranchised tribal people, indigent woman, the homeless, and other formerly powerless citizens to approach the bench in search of justice.” Journalists and civil society activists also used this mechanism (roughly equivalent to the class action lawsuit in the United States) “to enforce existing environmental laws, to prevent the maltreatment of inmates in state prisons, and to expose corruption in high places.” As corruption mounted in the 1990s, the Supreme Court moved to strengthen the independence of another institution of accountability, the Central Bureau needed “government concurrence” and consultation with a suspected ministry before it could investigate the ministry or its head. This removed an important constraint on the investigation of government corruption. Supreme Court ruling shut down over two hundred companies polluting along the Ganges while bolstering enforcement of clean air and water laws in the heavily polluted capital. At lower levels, the courts remain horribly slow and inefficient, carrying a backlog of 20 million cases. And as Pratap Mehta argues, the expansion of judicial power raises valid questions about the proper limits of unelected authority in a democracy (and has motivated constitutional amendments to renew limits on judicial power). But at the same time, higher-level judicial actions have not only strengthened the rule of law, they have also served as a main front for deepening the responsiveness of Indian democracy, and hence its popular esteem.
SUSTAINING DEMOCRACY IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY
The persistence of democracy in developed countries presents no real mystery. As we saw in chapter 4, economic development naturally brings about transformations in individuals values and social structures that press societies toward democracy and make it difficult to sustain nondemocratic government. Indeed, there has never been a case of democratic breakdown—ever—in a rich country. This is not an invitation to apathy. There is a natural human tendency to want to corner power and monopolize resources, and thus democracy remains continually vulnerable. For rich countries, the success of reform determines the quality and scope of democracy. For poor countries, the survival of democracy is at stake.
We have seen in this chapter what has allowed India to sustain sixty years of nearly uninterrupted democracy—and that, potentially, any country, rich or poor, can follow its path. Despite its recent economic growth, India has not boasted high levels of national wealth or education, a feverish miracle of development, or a revolution in its governance. Incremental improvements may be good enough—but they must occur.
At the most general level, two things have sustained democracy in India: the decent functioning and gradual deepening of democracy and a rising hope for a better life; over time, Indian democracy has worked substantially to provide electoral choice, rotation of power, checks on ruling elites, exposure of abuse of power, and legal and political redress of grievances. The gains have been uneven, but at critical historical moments, change has been achieved and justice has been won. Aggrieved groups have seen that the constitutional system can be made to work for them—and for everyone. Citizens have come to know that democracy means more than occasional elections, that it provides an ongoing means for achieving accountability and responsiveness, and for making the political leadership more broadly representative—“an accomplishment of which many Indians are rightly proud.”
At the same time, democracy in India has worked in another political sense, with huge implications for other divided societies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe and Latin America. Democracy has provided peaceful means to manage and accommodate deep differences. Again, these have progressed without serious setbacks, but constitutional and legal instruments have prevented or contained large-scale violent conflict while deepening groups stakes in the democratic system. India’s federal structure, its electoral and party systems, and its rules for empowerment of minorities have worked because they fit the country’s particular circumstances over time.
Finally, Indian democracy has been powerfully sustained by the steady expansion of the public’s hope in it. Until the last decade or so, India’s economic development was unnecessarily—really, tragically—retarded by a long-lingering ideological devotion to socialist principles of state intervention and economic autarky. Since the liberalization and opening of the Indian economy began in 1991, economic growth rates have risen well beyond the tortoise like ”Hindu rate of growth” of the country’s first four decades, and transformation is finally under way. But even during those several decades of underperformance, the lives of Indians did improve. Between 1970 and 1992, life expectancy rose from fifty to sixty-one years, infant mortality fell by almost half, and adult literacy rose from 34 to 50 percent. Moreover , “the economy registered a fairly steady, although unspectacular, rate of growth, experienced partial renovation of agriculture production leading to self-sufficiency in food, developed a structure of industrialization that produces most of what the country basically needs, expanded the supply of educated and sophisticated technical workers, consistency held down the level of inflation to one of the lowest in the world, and in the process ensured a level of self-reliance and payment ability that sheltered it from major debt crises.” It was a record that almost any African country would have been glad to have. If it did not lift nearly enough people out of poverty, it did at least make progress and gave people hope for a better life and an increases sense of group dignity and national pride. Weighed against the challenges the country faced at independence and the developmental failures of many of its neighbors, these are no small achievements.
With a better understanding of kinds of economic policies that promote development and of the technical means to fight disease, increase crop yields, and improve human capacity, most developing countries today have the potential to grow faster than India did during its first four decades. But consistent economic development, combined with a decent functioning and gradual deepening of democratic institutions, can sustain a free political system just about anywhere.
أريد ترجمة هذا النص من الإنجليزية إلى العربية، في أقرب وقت، جازاكم الله خيرا
WHAT SUSTAINS DEMOCRACY
In June 1975, when a High Court ruling invalidated her election to parliament and banned her from office for six years, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi suspended the constitutional democracy that her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, had nurtured and built from independence nearly three decades earlier. Rather than temporarily stepping aside from office and challenging the questionable ruling judicially, the imperious prime minister claimed a conspiracy to subvert social order and economic development in India, invoked emergency powers, and ruled by decree. Fear and submission reigned. The months following the June 16 declaration of national emergency were “marked by mass arrests, suppression of civil rights and all opposition voices, elaborate censorship of the media, and carefully orchestrated campaign to celebrate the values of collective discipline promoted by the national leader, her increasingly powerful son Sanjay, and their nominees.” In the face of the authoritarian onslaught, Mrs. Gandhi’s two-thirds parliamentary majority meekly endorsed her bid to amend the constitution to emasculate the judiciary.
It would not have been unreasonable to expect the dawn of emergency rule to make the end of Indian’s democracy experiment. At the time, many scholars and observers could not understand how India –one of the world’s least developed countries– had been able to sustain a democracy for nearly three decades. Globally, democracy was flagging. In Asia, India democracy was an exception, a curiosity, and a system that was often compared unfavorably with the unity and energy that was said to be delivering a forced march to modernization in China. Neither was there significant international clamor for Mrs. Gandhi to restore democracy. For one things, India was just too big to be pressured successfully. But in addition, the international norms and structures to defend democracy had barely even begun to take shape. And India’s prime minister represented only the latest in a string of Asian emergency regimes, a “season of Caesars.” For well over a year, Mrs. Gandhi seemed secure. The world’s biggest democracy, it seemed, had been reduced to a pseudo democracy. But neither India’s civil society nor its opposition parties accepted such a fate. Despite widespread arrests, torture, and intimidation, democratic activists persisted in the shadows. While the media as a whole did little to resist censorship, “some newspapers expressed their dissent symbolically by leaving the editorial columns of the paper blank or framing the front page with a funereal black border.” A few state courts struck down egregious instances of censorship. When Mrs. Gandhi made the mistake of so many dictators--believing the assurances of her party and intelligence sycophants that the people loved and supported her—she was defeated overwhelmingly in elections she had called in March 1977 in her quest for a fresh parliamentary mandate.
What was it about Indian democracy that enabled it to rally so quickly to sweep an emerging autocrat from power? Why that one, nineteen-month exception –has democracy survived so heartily to such a poor and fragmented country? The remarkable history of India’s decades-long struggle for self-rule and its independence since 1947 reveals surprisingly robust cultural, social, and political support for democracy. While these advantages tend to emerge naturally with economic development and a growing middle class, as I discussed in chapter 4, the seminal lesson of India’s experience is that a country does not have to be rich, industrialized, urban, or even heavily literate in order to acquire the attributes that develop and sustain democracy.
POLITICAL CULTURE
Perhaps the most important reason why this desperately poor, rural, illiterate country—deeply divided by language, caste, and religion—was able to sustain democracy is that from the start, its political and social elites as well as the population at large believed in it. As Amartya Sen has shown, Indian culture displays a readiness for democracy, stemming from traditions that value political and religious tolerance and extensive argument and debate. Some of this may have owed as well to “the inherent pluralism of Hinduism” as a religion. But nearly two centuries of British colonial rule exhibited paradoxical effects on the country’s political culture. It transferred certain British rule-of-law norms and traditions but also an ugly, racist system of exploitation and domination that was intrinsic to the very final several decades of that rule, it gradually introduced competitive elections to representative bodies at the provincial and national levels, stimulating the formation of political parties and movements and enfranchising millions of Indian voters. It opened space for Indian parties and associations, but it did so only reluctantly—thus prompting the political bodies to demand more, to seize the freedom they ultimately achieved while building (especially through the Congress Party) a national identity.
As we saw in chapter 1, no set of values is fully dominant in any society, but most societies have certain types of values, beliefs, and sentiments that shape how their people tend to think and act politically, a democratic political culture values democracy as the best form of government and thus affirms certain basic rights and obligations of citizenship, including the obligation to vote and to participate in politics. If people are going to bother to participate, they need to have some basic of information and knowledge, and some confidence that their own individual participation can make a difference, that it has “efficacy”. Related to this is a certain healthy suspicion of authority. One of the paradoxes of democracy is that sustainable self-governance must be respectful of government authority yet also distrustful of it, “watchful” but not “blindly submissive.” The political philosopher Sidney Hook put it this way: “A positive requirement of a working democracy is an intelligent distrust of its leadership, a skepticism stubborn but not blind, of all demands for the enlargement of power, and an emphasis upon critical method in every phase of social life.”
A democratic culture also embraces moderation, accommodation, cooperation, and bargaining. In a vibrant democracy, people may have strong beliefs and preferences, but then they will have strong disagreements that they must competing interests and ambitions, but it can only survive if it resolves these conflicts peacefully and lawfully. This implies the need for pragmatism and flexibility, an ability to transcend or even at times suspend ideological beliefs and ethnic solidarities. Finally, if people (and parties and interest groups) with sharply different goals beliefs are going to be able to bargain and compromise, they have to respect one another. That requires tolerance of political, ethnic, racial, and other differences, and a shared commitment to democracy.
As democracy began to emerge under colonial rule, India was fortunate to see these democratic norms take root, first among the elite and then among the mass public. With some strange resemblance to the American colonies under British rule, Indian elites embraced liberal values, even when they favored more extreme methods to force the British to grant sovereignty and leave. With the formation in 1885 of the Indian National Congress (which became the long-ruling Congress Party), and then a series of constitutional reforms to grant limited political rights of elections, “a culture of political bargaining” emerged, nurtured by an infusion of lawyers into the ranks of elected representatives and need for candidates to build broad coalitions in order to win sizable constituencies. The independence movement brought forth leaders with “a remarkably democratic temper.” In the last three decades of colonial rule, constitutional reforms greatly enhanced the powers of elected provincial councils and the scope of the franchise, gradually drawing new segments of the society into the political arena, as happened the previous century in Britain itself.
Founding leadership often plays a hugely important role in shaping the political culture of a new democracyµ; just as George Washington legitimated the new American democracy with his personal charisma, affirming values moderation, inclusion, and limited power, so Nehru, during his long tenure as India’s first prime minister (1947-64), made enormous contributions to the development of Indian democracy. “In schoolmasterly fashion, he encouraged parliamentary debate, maintained internal democracy within the Congress party, continued the British tradition of a politically neutral civil service, fostered judicial independence, encouraged press freedom, boosted secularism, and firmly entrenched civilian control over the military.”
But the democratic leadership of government and politics exhibited by Nehru and fellow congress Party leaders was half the story. During the waning decades of the British raj, the more militant campaign for freedom also practiced, preached, and extended democratic norms. No Indian activist so epitomized these norms as Mahatma Gandhi, the British-trained lawyer who led the independence movement with his strategy of satyagraha (mass civil disobedience to resist tyranny). A life-long advocate of religious and social tolerance, Gandhi “emphasized the importance of a consensual resolution of conflict within Indian society in his essentially organic conception of the Indian social order.” His struggle for self-government in Indian was based on the philosophy of devotion to truth (one literal meaning of satyagraha), tolerance for difference, complete and total nonviolence, relentless but peaceful defiance of injustice, courage, humility, and personal responsibility and sacrifice that he had begun to fashion during his tenure fighting racial oppression in South Africa between 1893 and 1914. In affirming the equal worth and dignity of every individual and the possibilities for human empowerment through direct nonviolent action, Gandhi contributed immeasurably to the growth of democratic practice and culture (not only in India but worldwide, as Americans world discover when Martin Luther King Jr. adopted many of Gandhi’s tactics). He also transformed the early liberalism of Indian elites into an inclusive mass movement for self-governance, bringing “an important historical foundation for future democratic development.”
It is possible to argue, given the bloody trauma of partition at independence and the high levels of violence in recent decades, that Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence had no lasting effect on his new nation. But India is a continental country of great diversity and ongoing democratic innovation. Gandhi’s influence persists in the predominantly peaceful nature of Indian politics and public mobilization, in the continuing ability to forge political coalitions across a myriad of social divisions, in the steady incorporation of marginal groups into the politics, and in the extraordinary energy and pluralism of India’s civil society.
CIVIL SOCIETY
Throughout its modern history, India’s diversity has been a threat and a salvation. To survive as a democracy, the country has had to learn to manage and accommodate its breathtaking ethnic, regional, religious, and caste divisions. At the same time, a tremendously rich civic life has been a major foundation of Indian democratic persistence. Over the last century, India’s manifold professional associations, trade unions, grassroots groups, Gandhian social movements, and independent mass media have fueled a vibrant civil society that Alexis de Tocqueville would had admired.
India’s civil society encompasses groups with widely divergent interests and values, and is itself a theater of political conflict. Moreover, not all of the groups in civil society are necessarily committed to democratic values and goals. Yet, the components of civil society do share, by definition, some crucial characteristics: they are independent of the state relates to the public realm; and hold the ability to mobilize resources and act collectively. They may wish to defend and advance group interests, be they economic, professional, or ethnic, or promote broader goals, such justice, and consumer protection.
A spirited civil society plays a vital role in checking and limiting the potential abuse of state power, but it also sustains and enriches democracy. Civil society organizations provide channels, beyond political parties and election campaigns, for citizens to participate in politics and governance, to air their grievances, and to secure their interests. At the local level, autonomous organizations of landless laborers, indigenous people, women, and the poor may challenge authoritarian bosses and entrenched inequalities, transforming power relations. There lies a whole realm of civil society activity devoted to personal development and self-help. When civil society is effective in organizing communities to advance their collective welfare, it takes some of the load off the state and enhances the legitimacy of the overall system.
All of these functions (and more) have visible in the extraordinary performance of civil society in democratic India. The brief bout with authoritarianism during Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule revived anti-colonial norms of resistance to repression and gave particular momentum to human rights groups like the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. Indian grassroots movements in the past three decades have “targeted various forms of injustice,” such as “subordination on the basis of inherited caste status,” wanton destruction of natural resources on which people depend for their survival, and entrenched gender discrimination. They have defended poor and powerless Indians who were being displaced from their homes livelihoods to illegal logging. During the 1980s and ‘90s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) staged protests by tens of thousands of poor people who were threatened by the huge Narmada River Valley dam projects, which were “expected to submerge thousands of villages, displace millions of mostly peasant and ‘tribal’ people, and destroy tens of thousands of hectares of forest lands.” Their dogged public advocacy, Gandhian-style protests (such as fasting, boycotts, and long marches), legal challenges, and international appeals built a transnational coalition and won an indefinite Supreme Court stay on the project’s implementation.
India’s remarkably pluralistic mass media have played a pivotal democratic role, as well, exposing corruption at high levels and despair and suicide among the indebted rural poor. The penchant for challenging wrongdoing goes back deep into the colonial era and was reawakened by the shame of capitulation to censorship during Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency rule. “ an increasingly feisty and sometimes irreverent journalism was born, characterized by an adversarial relationship with authority. Since the emergency, “the Indian press performed a yeoman watchdog role, exposing governmental corruption, taking recalcitrant civil servants to task, revealing governmental indifference to violence against minorities and lower-caste groups, and reporting on failures of governance in all parts of the country. Investigative exposés of bribery and other scandals have brought down a prime minister, a defense minister, a communications minister, and the notorious chief minister of one of India’s most crime-ridden states, Bihar. This renewed assertion of freedom by the press coincided with an explosion in the size of the mass media. By 2006, over sixty-thousand news publications, in 123 different languages and dialects, reached over 200 million readers, and the satellite television audience surged to an estimated 230 million viewers. While “the relentless corporate takeover of the Indian press” has diminished its civic content and contributions, it remains a diverse arena outside government control and with the ability to check governmental misconduct.
Civil society groups have also pushed specific reforms to improve democracy. In India, as in other developing countries, a recent campaign has helped pass Right to Information acts (similar to the U.S. Freedom of Information law) in nine states and in the national parliament in 2005. The acts compel each government department to appoint a public information officer, who must respond within thirty days to requests from the public or the media. The campaign for transparency has created innovative methods of public scrutiny, such as the jan sunwai ‘people’s hearing), during which “local officials and elected representatives are held to account by the people of the village, in the presence of invited intellectuals or distinguished public figures.” This “new type of anti-corruption activism” has sought to expose specific acts of corruption by “utilizing the investigative energies of ordinary people,” and by focusing at the local level, “where theft of public resources was personal, and where citizens could [do] the most to expose the precise mechanisms by which corruption took place.” These grassroots efforts, which have frequently pulled together elite professionals, retired civil servants, and the lower-caste poor, have mobilized an army of “citizen auditors” to secure the wages, food, and government services to which people are entitled, and to combat illegal practices, such as police harassment and slum relocation, that thrive in a context of graft.
By one count, there were over a million NGOs in India by 2001. The largest share of them were over to promoting development and delivering services in such fields as primary education, basic health care, water and sanitation, microcredit, and appropriate technology, others addressed local community problems of traffic, crime, pollution and recreation. While these do not directly enhance democracy, they held to address the social and economic problems that could threaten democracy if they were not relieved. Moreover, in fostering a culture of civic concern and grassroots initiative, these groups sustain the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi while also creating “social capital,” the horizontal relations of trust, cooperation , and reciprocity that enable people to collaborate for thé common good. Still, not all NGOs are good for democracy. Some are illiberal and “uncivil,” preaching ethnic and religious intolerance. Hindu chauvinist groups have organized violence against Muslims and Christians and have freely justified exclusion and discrimination. Even pro-democratic organizations are not always internally democratic of externally accountable; but “even if sections of civil society are themselves characterized by a democratic deficit . . . India’s robust civil society has been a bulwark of its democracy.”
POLITICAL MANAGEMENT OF DIVERSITY
Democracy is not sustain by cultural and social factors alone. The nature and quality of political institutions may have a huge impact in determining whether democracy will be able to address social injustices and economic problems, and thus whether it will be able to generate and maintain public commitment to democracy.
As we saw in chapter 1, there is a growing amount of evidence to suggest that people are more likely to express support for democracy when they see it working to provide genuine political competition, including alternation in power, and when it has at least some effect in controlling corruption, limiting abuse of power, and ensuring a rule of law. One of the great blessing of Indian democracy has been its resilient political party system. Highly competitive elections have seen political power at the federal level transfer peacefully among parties or coalitions seven times since the end of Congress dominance in the mid1970s, while voter turnout has risen to levels—above 60 percent—that exceed those in the United States. Electoral turnover has been no less vigorous at the consequential level of state government, as the former chief election officer, M. S. Gill, proudly observed: “between 1993 and 1997 . . . elections for all 25 of India’s state legislatures saw the incumbent party go down to defeat of a ruling party winning the next election.”
India’s institutions have also managed to keep the country from tearing apart along any of its numerous divisions; some of this impulse toward moderation lies in the very complexity on India’s diversity, in which the ties of language, ethnicity, religion, class region, state, and “most distinctively, caste . . . create multiple and cross-cutting cleavages.” Individuals shift between identities that vary in salience over time, and so hold a dampened sense of devotion to any single one; political institutions have chosen to enhance the gravitational pull toward the centre rather than the extremes. A seminal influence was exerted by the nature of the Congress Party as “a grand coalition of the major political and social forces” in India, transcending ethnicity , region, and religion. The electoral system also facilitated the success of such an expensive, diverse party against a host of much narrower challengers. By electing parliament through the British-style, “first past the post system” in single-member territorial districts (each of which now contains more than one million voters), competing candidates were forced to appeal to large and socially diverse constituencies. This distinct parliamentary system enabled a long, stable period of Congress dominance after independence, but did not permit complacency, as the Congress faced stiff competition in most districts. Once that dominance collapsed, the system compelled Congress’s main rival, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, or Indian People’ Party) to attenuate its northern, Hindu chauvinist, and upper-caste leanings in order to attract the wider social and regional base needed to win a plurality of seats and assemble a governing coalition.
Two other institutions have contained India’s potential for destructive fragmentation and steered it toward pragmatism, bargaining, and a large national commitment. The most crucial of these has been federalism, which has devolved considerable power and autonomy to state and local governments. Federalism is a particularly powerful tool of ethnic conflict management because it can provide many mechanisms for reducing the points of power, softening conflict between groups by generating conflicts within groups, creating incentives for interethnic cooperation, and encouraging alignments on interests other than ethnicity. In a number of deeply divided democracies, such as India, Belgium, and Spain, federalism has been constitutionally embraced as a successful means for maintaining democratic stability. In recent decades, the devolution of power away from the centre has been one of the most powerful democratizing trends worldwide, especially in Africa and Latin America, people in region or locality, through their own elected governments, have some independent ability to raise and spend their own resources and to set their own development priorities, government is closer to people, the people have more say, and political legitimacy is enhanced. This does not mean that decentralized governance will always be less corrupt and abusive, but in the long run it increases accountability and responsiveness to local concerns, stimulates citizen participation, widens the access to power of deprived groups, checks the potentially overbearing power of the central government, gives opposition parties a chance to govern at lower levels, and so broadens commitment to democracy.
In fact, it is impossible to imagine how such a large and immensely varied country as India could be a democracy except through a system that guarantees constitutionally significant autonomy to elected governments at the state and local levels. Virtually all of the territorially expansive and heavily populated democracies—the United States, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico—are federal systems. This is also why democracy has only been possible in Nigeria under federalism, Indonesia’s democracy has been moving toward a federal system, Sudan needs federalism to establish democratic peace, and the demise of democracy in Russia has coincided with Putin’s evisceration of the country’s federal institutions and restrains.
India, federalism has given the country’s diverse linguistic communities an important element of cultural pride and political autonomy within a large national identity. The scale of the challenge is staggering. “Twelve languages are spoken by more than 5 million people each, and another four languages by more than a million each.” Since the reorganization of India’s states along linguistic lines beginning in 1956, most of these widely used languages have had a state of their own, “which essentially means that the official language of each state is spoken by a majority of its inhabitants.” Yet, state still contain great cultural diversity, which discourages secessionist tendencies. As a result, the federal system in India tends to “quarantine” most identity conflicts at a primarily local level. State governments have also been foundries for economic and social reform. While autonomy means that some states, like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, have lagged miserably behind because of bad corrupt governance, others, like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, have been able to improve human well-being much more rapidly.
Federalism in India has worked far from perfectly. It has not always prevented outbreaks of communal violence and separatism. But often these have some “from the failure to adhere to the norms of federalism and autonomy,” while these norms in turn have led to accommodations for many of the most aggrieved and deprived areas. Federalist devolution of power has enable serious, and abuse of human rights to fester. Moreover, the center’s constitutional prerogative to topple elected state governments and impose direct “president’s rule has been used—infamously by Indira Gandhi—to advance narrowly political objectives rather than good governance and the rule of law. In allowing state autonomy in developmental policies during the last twenty years of economic liberalization, it has facilitated a vast “chasm separating wealthy states like Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Punjab” from the poor states of the northern Hindi heartland.
Yet the system has also created between 1962 and 1987, and another three in 2000, from territorial communities that felt severely deprived within larger states. Crucially, by creating many thousands of offices and points of political entry, federalism has given a wide range of people a stake in the political system. One of the leading scholars of Indian federalism, James Manor, captures it well: “Not only are there elections for the national and state legislative assemblies; elected councils, and in numerous quasi-official boards, cooperatives, associations, and the like. The existence of so many opportunities to capture at least some power persuades parties and politicians to remain engaged with elections and logrolling, even when they are defeated in some arenas.” In addition, regional parties have emerged to prominence within many of the linguistically distinct states, stimulating a fluid from of coalitional politics that has complicated the efforts for stable governance at the national level but also made Indian democracy much more inclusive.
It thus seems difficult to dispute the widespread academic assessment that India’s federal system has been a foundation of its democratic stability. Two of the most distinguished American experts on India, Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph, recently concluded:
Forty years ago, there seemed good reason to fear Selig Harrison was right to warn that India’s “fissiparous tendencies,” particularly its linguistic differences, would soon lead to Balkanization or dictatorship. Today such worries seem unpersuasive. The federal system has helped India to live peacefully with its marked difference.
A second mechanism for knitting India together politically has been the gradual attenuation of social and political inequalities through reserved quotas in political representation, public employment, and higher education for the lowest status groups: the “scheduled castes,” or dalits (the former “untouchables,” about 17 percent of the population), and the “scheduled tribes” (about 8 percent). More limited affirmative-action guarantees have since been provided to the “other backward castes” (accounting for about 44 percent of the population). These extensive quotas have been cumbersome, inefficient, and controversial, guaranteeing roughly half of public-sector jobs and the placements in higher education to these lass privileged groups. However, they have helped to drive a social revolution that has dramatically accelerated social mobility and expanded political participation to the point where voter turnout among lower-caste groups is now higher than among the well-off. Poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, and income inequality continue to blight the performance of Indian democracy, but as Sen argues, the country’s free press and civil society have prevented the occurrence of any serious famine. And according to Sumit Ganguly, the country’s social progress has been greater than the statistics reveal.
Upper-caste dominance is steadily on the decline, progress has been made toward universal elementary education, [and] absentee landlordism has been legally abolished. . . .Consequently, even fitful attempts to promote equality through public policies have had significant ameliorative effects that cannot be adequately measured through conventional statistical techniques.”
ACCOUNTABILITY AND THE RULE OF LAW
Few features of political life are more corrosive of public trust in government and support for democracy that corruption (and other forms of abuse power). If nothing else, citizens expect that democratically elected officials will be held to the same standards as the people are, and that violators will be punished. When politicians become a class unto themselves, feeding shamelessly and lawlessly at the public trough , they generate an open invitation for citizens for reject democracy.
Sustaining and consolidation democracy therefore entails making it more accountable to the people and more respectful for law. Stable democracy requires a rule of law, in which the constitutional is supreme, all citizens are equal before the law, no one is above the law, corruption is minimized and punished, state authorities respect the rights of citizens, and citizens have effective access to the courts to defend their rights. A democratic rule of law requires a judiciary that is, at every level, neutral, independent from political influence, and reasonably competent and resourceful. Most of all, it requires a constitutional court willing to constrain the power of the mighty and defend rights of the meek. An independent judiciary, however, is only one type of democratic institution to the constrain the abuse of power. A good democracy requires a dense web of institutions that check and balance the executive (and one another), as I explain in chapter 13.
India has not been free of serious problems of electoral violence and banditry, but for such a big and poor country, it has managed to institutionalize an exceptional degree of administrative integrity and competence in the holding of elections and the counting of votes. Regularly every few years, an electorate of over 600 million voters comes to the polls in sizable percentages (well over 50 percent). A decade ago, the chief of India’s election commission, M.S. Gill, described the Herculean administrative challenges: “Holding a general election involves establishing no fewer than 900,000 polling stations from the high Himalayas to the desert of Rajasthan, including areas that can only be reached on the back of an elephant. Yet such is the miracle of our functioning anarchy in India that never has a single polling station failed the test.” One reason the process works well, and with growing credibility and integrity over the past two decades, is because of the career professionalism and total independence of the election commission, which in the period before an election commands 4.5 million staffers from throughout the government. As a result of this capacity and competency, elections in India have been broadly credible, intensely competitive, and largely free and fair.
The single most important institution for upholding accountability and the rule of law in India has been the judicial system. In what will likely remain its darkness moment, the Supreme Court overturned nine High Court decisions that declared Mrs. Gandhi’s state of emergency ended, the Court introduced a system of public-interest litigation that enabled laborers, disenfranchised tribal people, indigent woman, the homeless, and other formerly powerless citizens to approach the bench in search of justice.” Journalists and civil society activists also used this mechanism (roughly equivalent to the class action lawsuit in the United States) “to enforce existing environmental laws, to prevent the maltreatment of inmates in state prisons, and to expose corruption in high places.” As corruption mounted in the 1990s, the Supreme Court moved to strengthen the independence of another institution of accountability, the Central Bureau needed “government concurrence” and consultation with a suspected ministry before it could investigate the ministry or its head. This removed an important constraint on the investigation of government corruption. Supreme Court ruling shut down over two hundred companies polluting along the Ganges while bolstering enforcement of clean air and water laws in the heavily polluted capital. At lower levels, the courts remain horribly slow and inefficient, carrying a backlog of 20 million cases. And as Pratap Mehta argues, the expansion of judicial power raises valid questions about the proper limits of unelected authority in a democracy (and has motivated constitutional amendments to renew limits on judicial power). But at the same time, higher-level judicial actions have not only strengthened the rule of law, they have also served as a main front for deepening the responsiveness of Indian democracy, and hence its popular esteem.
SUSTAINING DEMOCRACY IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY
The persistence of democracy in developed countries presents no real mystery. As we saw in chapter 4, economic development naturally brings about transformations in individuals values and social structures that press societies toward democracy and make it difficult to sustain nondemocratic government. Indeed, there has never been a case of democratic breakdown—ever—in a rich country. This is not an invitation to apathy. There is a natural human tendency to want to corner power and monopolize resources, and thus democracy remains continually vulnerable. For rich countries, the success of reform determines the quality and scope of democracy. For poor countries, the survival of democracy is at stake.
We have seen in this chapter what has allowed India to sustain sixty years of nearly uninterrupted democracy—and that, potentially, any country, rich or poor, can follow its path. Despite its recent economic growth, India has not boasted high levels of national wealth or education, a feverish miracle of development, or a revolution in its governance. Incremental improvements may be good enough—but they must occur.
At the most general level, two things have sustained democracy in India: the decent functioning and gradual deepening of democracy and a rising hope for a better life; over time, Indian democracy has worked substantially to provide electoral choice, rotation of power, checks on ruling elites, exposure of abuse of power, and legal and political redress of grievances. The gains have been uneven, but at critical historical moments, change has been achieved and justice has been won. Aggrieved groups have seen that the constitutional system can be made to work for them—and for everyone. Citizens have come to know that democracy means more than occasional elections, that it provides an ongoing means for achieving accountability and responsiveness, and for making the political leadership more broadly representative—“an accomplishment of which many Indians are rightly proud.”
At the same time, democracy in India has worked in another political sense, with huge implications for other divided societies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe and Latin America. Democracy has provided peaceful means to manage and accommodate deep differences. Again, these have progressed without serious setbacks, but constitutional and legal instruments have prevented or contained large-scale violent conflict while deepening groups stakes in the democratic system. India’s federal structure, its electoral and party systems, and its rules for empowerment of minorities have worked because they fit the country’s particular circumstances over time.
Finally, Indian democracy has been powerfully sustained by the steady expansion of the public’s hope in it. Until the last decade or so, India’s economic development was unnecessarily—really, tragically—retarded by a long-lingering ideological devotion to socialist principles of state intervention and economic autarky. Since the liberalization and opening of the Indian economy began in 1991, economic growth rates have risen well beyond the tortoise like ”Hindu rate of growth” of the country’s first four decades, and transformation is finally under way. But even during those several decades of underperformance, the lives of Indians did improve. Between 1970 and 1992, life expectancy rose from fifty to sixty-one years, infant mortality fell by almost half, and adult literacy rose from 34 to 50 percent. Moreover , “the economy registered a fairly steady, although unspectacular, rate of growth, experienced partial renovation of agriculture production leading to self-sufficiency in food, developed a structure of industrialization that produces most of what the country basically needs, expanded the supply of educated and sophisticated technical workers, consistency held down the level of inflation to one of the lowest in the world, and in the process ensured a level of self-reliance and payment ability that sheltered it from major debt crises.” It was a record that almost any African country would have been glad to have. If it did not lift nearly enough people out of poverty, it did at least make progress and gave people hope for a better life and an increases sense of group dignity and national pride. Weighed against the challenges the country faced at independence and the developmental failures of many of its neighbors, these are no small achievements.
With a better understanding of kinds of economic policies that promote development and of the technical means to fight disease, increase crop yields, and improve human capacity, most developing countries today have the potential to grow faster than India did during its first four decades. But consistent economic development, combined with a decent functioning and gradual deepening of democratic institutions, can sustain a free political system just about anywhere.