Special to ‘Le Monde Diplomatique’

by Praful Bidwai

It is in this nasty, bewildering, even gut-wrenching, contradiction that the many flaws, inadequacies and failures in India’s evolution as a democracy may be located. Anyone who is concerned about the future of the world cannot be indifferent to the state of the one-sixth of humanity that lives in India. That said, some of India’s achievements over 60 years are not inconsiderable. In 1950, an Indian could only expect to live for 32 years. Today, her/his life expectancy has risen to 68 years. An abysmal 18 percent of Indians were literate in 1950. Now, 68 percent can read and write, if only just. India’s infant mortality rate is still unconscionably high, at 53 per 1,000 live births. But it has fallen by more than one-half, from 134 in 1950.

Even more important, political democracy has stabilised in India. Except for the one-and-a-half years of Emergency rule in 1975-77, there has been no declared suspension of constitutional rights. And unlike many Third World countries, Indian politics has remained outside the shadow of the military.

Most crucially, hundreds of millions, excluded for centuries from political life because they belonged to low castes in the Hindu hierarchy or were too poor and marginal to count, have entered the public sphere and are asserting themselves in numerous ways. Indian democracy is indeed vibrant, especially insofar as the masses go out and vote. Unlike in many Western countries, the poor in India vote with gusto and in large numbers, raising the overall turnout to 65 percent from the low 50s over four decades. India’s two richest parliamentary constituencies—South Mumbai and New Delhi—have the lowest turnout.

More often than not, the poor punish their rulers by throwing them out of power. Three-fourths of all parties in power in India’s 28 states and seven Union Territories have been voted out over the past quarter-century. And only two Prime Ministers have been elected for a second consecutive term since 1977—and that too without a parliamentary majority for their parties. The Congress Party, whose coalition got re-elected last year, has only 205 seats in the 543-seat Lower House of Parliament. The Indian people have put their rulers on notice.

And yet, India’s governments have served their people remarkably badly. Five failures of governance stand out: persistence of caste-based hierarchy; discrimination on grounds of religion; routine violation of human rights, especially of the dispossessed; appalling gender inequality; and enduring poverty and widening income inequalities, coupled with failure of public services provision.

Caste-based discrimination remains a central fact of life in India, especially in villages, where two-thirds of the population lives. Discrimination is particularly gross against Dalits, the former Untouchables who form one-sixth of India’s population and who suffer abuse and humiliation despite numerous laws banning discrimination. Dalits are typically landless. More than one-half suffer from under-nourishment. Dalits face discrimination right from school, where they are often forced to sit and eat apart from other children and made to wash their dishes. In many states, Dalits live in a state of near-apartheid, outside the village. They cannot draw water from the common village well and must take off their shoes when walking through a caste-Hindu locality.

Caste practices, sanctified by religion and custom, were fiercely opposed for more than a century by India’s social reform movement, itself closely related to the struggle for independence from British rule. But the reform movement has run out of steam. Few religious leaders and theologians talk of eradicating casteism.

Since Independence in 1947, caste has taken on a political expression, through the rise of parties representing subaltern social groups and asserting “self-respect”. But in social intercourse, marriage, kinship and ritual hierarchy, caste prevails. Worse, it is treated as a normal by the bureaucracy. The upper castes dominate the civil services, the professions, and plum private sector jobs.

India instituted affirmative action for Dalits and Adivasis (typically forest-based indigenous people or tribals, 8 percent of the population, through quotas in educational institutions and government jobs. Over two decades, many states and the Central government have also reserved quotas in government employment for the Other Backward Classes (OBC), officialese for middle and low castes. But the upper castes continue to dominate those positions. Caste discrimination is rampant even in premier colleges like All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where Dalits are forced to stay or eat in separate hostels.

Equally serious is the discrimination that non-Hindus, in particular Muslims (13.5 percent of the population), face in India. Muslims are India’s poorest and socially and educationally most backward minority, next only to the Dalits. Muslims are grossly under-represented in government employment with only 5 percent of all jobs. They are often deprived of municipal and social services. More important, Hindu-sectarian (communal) organisations like the Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—an extreme-Right-wing all-male secret society-like cabal which regards the Nazis as their role-model—blame the Muslims for partitioning India and regard them as a virtual Fifth Column for Pakistan and jehadi terrorists.

Muslims have suffered numerous pogroms. Increasingly, the state machinery, with communal leanings, has become complicit in these. The latest violence was in 2002 in Gujarat, in which 2,000 were burned, speared and hacked to death with the full collusion of the state ruled by the BJP. The Indian state, often effete when confronting Hindu-sectarianism, has repeatedly failed to bring the culprits of anti-Muslim violence to book. This is also true of the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 following Indira Gandhi’s assassination by a Sikh bodyguard, and several recent attacks on Christians (2 percent of the population).

The Hindu-communalists reject India’s fundamentally pluralist identity as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multilingual society and demand primacy for the Hindus (four-fifths of the population). They have been active since the RSS’s formation in 1925, and were implicated in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. Until the 1980s, the BJP failed to attract much support despite its majoritarian appeal.

Then, it launched a militant agitation to demolish a mosque which, it baselessly claimed, had been built by destroying a Hindu temple. This helped it build support and catapult to power nationally from 1998 to 2004 in a coalition. For the BJP, democracy is only a tool to come to power, unrelated to the equality of citizens. But the BJP’s national vote peaked at 26 percent. It no longer strikes a chord with a majority of Hindus. Although in government in six states, it is in decline.

The threat to secularism has not ended. India is still struggling to define a line of separation between religion and politics, which is often blurred by the practices of parties, including the Congress, in power for 50 years since Independence. Denial of impunity for religious hate-speech and hate-crimes, and creation of a truly inclusive pluralism, remain unfulfilled agendas.

There is widespread violation of civil and political rights by the Indian state through over 30 draconian laws, including anti-terrorism acts which allow preventive detention, and give powers to the army to shoot down suspected insurgents in Kashmir and the Northeast—while granting them immunity from prosecution.

India is not a rule-of-law state. The police is extremely corrupt—a bribe equivalent to 20 multiples of India’s per capita income is necessary to become a constable—and ineffective in preventing or investigating crimes. It is notorious for extorting money from the poorest people, such as street-vendors, rickshaw-pullers and beggars.

India abounds in custodial deaths—totalling almost 17,000 between 1994 and 2008: 1,200 a year, or 100 deaths a month. The number has doubled since 2000 to 1977. There are scores of non-judicial executions, falsely described as “encounter deaths” (killing in self-defence). In recent years, excesses by the police and state paramilitary forces have sharply risen as hundreds of innocent citizens are rounded up for suspected involvement in terrorist activities. The police now consciously target human rights-defenders, such as Binayak Sen, a physician and activist, who was detained for two years under a harsh law on charges widely believed to be trumped up.

The most disturbing recent development is the state’s armed campaign ostensibly targeted at Naxalites, Maoist groups active in Chhattisgarh in Central India, Jharkhand and Orissa in the East, Maharashtra in the West and Andhra Pradesh in the South. These are also some of India’s most minerals- and forest-rich states, where huge mining and industrial projects are being promoted which will rob the poor of their land and livelihoods. The current military operation called “Green Hunt” involves 40,000 troops and aims to clear large tracts of Naxalites. Inevitably, the police brutalise innocent civilians suspected to have Naxalite sympathies. In Chhattisgarh, the state arms and funds a private anti-Naxalite militia called Salwa Judum.

Indian women face systematic discrimination—in nutrition, healthcare, education and job opportunity. Between 40 and 50 million women are estimated to have gone “missing” as the ratio of females per 1,000 males has plummeted from 972 to 927 over the past century. Sex detection and abortion of the female foetus is widespread in more prosperous states like Punjab and Haryana. The wealthy and upwardly mobile classes are most likely to practise dowry (paying of bride price) and female foeticide. The state has failed to punish these acts despite the outlawing of foetal sex determination, in which thousands of doctors collude. Female foeticide on this scale requires the collusion. Yet, only a handful—at last count, under 20—doctors have been prosecuted.

Women have faced violence for decades. Yet, India has only just enacted a domestic violence law. Women remain severely under-represented in legislatures and organised employment. A Bill tabled 12 years ago to reserve one-third of legislature seats for women remains unpassed primarily because of opposition from the socially conservative and retrograde Hindi belt.

Finally, the performance of the Indian state on alleviating poverty and reducing obscenely high income and regional disparities is embarrassing. India has blindly pursued neoliberal policies since 1991, largely without even the pretence of creating a social safety net. Indian policy-makers are devoted to GDPism—elite-consumption-driven growth, regardless of distribution and fast-rising greenhouse emissions, now growing at twice the global average.

High GDP growth has failed to reduce poverty significantly. Seventyseven percent of Indians earn less than half a dollar a day. In some parts, poverty has increased under the impact of policies causing dispossession of the underprivileged through development projects. India is witnessing a further worsening of already-high income disparities.

The Indian state is at best half-hearted in launching poverty alleviation programmes although normal economic processes have failed to dent poverty. The only major scheme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, promises to provide work for 100 days a year to each designated rural poor family. It has only met 40 percent of the target. Its budget is less than $8 billion, under one-fourth of military spending.

At work here is a historic tussle between the forces of privilege, wealth and power, which dominates the ruling system, and those driven by the aspirations of the poor majority for a life with human dignity and its assertion of its democratic rights. The masses do not attach much legitimacy to the state, but see political democracy as an opportunity to express their will or (dis)approval of the powerful. This has thrown up a disorderly party system which is not fully representative of the poor majority and its rights and aspirations. The way the system has evolved, parties are not demarcated along class lines, except for the Communists. This opens up an anomaly.

The natural centre of gravity of Indian politics lies on the Left. But its actual centre, determined by the balance of forces at the party level, and reflected through the media and its own projection of social processes, is much more indeterminate. The Indian media is middle-class, elitist and unabashedly neoliberal. It has evolved through heavy dependence on corporate advertising. Many media groups have become important players in the stock market, and drive it up through sunshine stories of high growth and globalisation’s fake virtues. This profoundly distorts reality, creates illusions and influences people’s political perceptions and choices, while criminalising dissent and ridiculing the rights of the poor.

Indian politics has become increasingly multipolar. Regional parties have mushroomed mainly because national parties (Congress, BJP, Communists, etc.) don’t adequately represent people’s interests, which are often location-specific. Regional parties have significantly gained in parliamentary strength over 50 years.

A noteworthy phenomenon is the rise of caste-based parties, the most important being the Dalit-biased Bahujan Samaj Party, which rules in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh (twice as populous as Germany), through an unlikely and now-faltering alliance with the upper castes. The OBCs too are strongly represented in important parties both in the North and in the South. But there is, remarkably, no alliance between Dalits and OBCs, a potential election winner, because their interests often clash at the village level.

Most Indian parties do not have clearly defined membership, programmes or policies on a range of issues. For them, personalities and their images count, much more than programmes and manifestos. This is one reason for the dynasty factor which is so starkly obvious in the Congress’s Nehru-Gandhi obsession and only less so in some other parties including the BJP which is building a cult around Varun, Rahul Gandhi’s first cousin.

Where parties fail to differentiate themselves through distinct social bases and programmatic agendas centred on specific social groups, all manner of individual entrepreneurs can jump in and set up a new party around a local issue or themselves. Thus, film stars have played a disproportionate role in politics either by endorsing political parties or setting up one themselves, especially in the South, where the hero is depicted as the saviour, friend or ally of the poor.

Indian society and politics can still evolve in a more equitable, balanced and human direction. That demands exceptional moral and political clarity about the central objectives of the Republic, commitment to and work among the masses, and real leadership at multiple levels. This may not be about to materialise.