The year 2012 may well be pivotal for India’s two great transformations: the deepening of its democracy and the transformation of its economy. Both are under stress. Both are the object of immense intellectual confusion. Both are at a potentially game-changing moment.
It is easy to reduce the tumult of Indian democracy to the ebb and flow of personalities and parties. But underneath the tumult, the basic character of power in Indian society is changing. How India fares will depend on how well we understand this. To simplify a great deal, the introduction of constitutional representative democracy was meant to unsettle relations of power in Indian society. The first big phase of that unsettling was the creation of inclusive politics.
Over the years, Indian politics became more representative. Marginalised groups, like the Dalits, found agency and utterance through politics. But the deepening of representation coexisted with an architecture of governance premised on three principles. First, that power can be hierarchically organised and controlled by a small group. Second, that information and knowledge can be controlled in the service of power. And third, that deliberation, such as it existed, could be confined to a small group. The increasing contentiousness of civil society is a sign that these principles are being deeply contested. An old governance architecture is colliding with the realities of new India.
Power in India has always been contested. But implicit in the forms of mobilisation in Indian civil society is the idea that new forms of accountability have to be introduced that more horizontally respond to citizens rather than vertically to power-brokers. Leaders are no longer in control of power hierarchies. All manner of groups in civil society are setting the agenda. Some forms of civil society activism can express a worrying distaste for representative institutions. But it also has the potential for making politics more accountable.
Legal instruments like the Right to Information and an increasingly aware society have also made it difficult for governments to exercise control by covering up. There is something disconcerting about scandal after scandal being uncovered. And many more will appear, leaving politics disoriented. There will be a period of defensiveness, denial and inaction. But there is the astonishing fact that it is becoming harder for governments to get away with scandals. Often, things appear to get worse precisely when they are actually getting better. Politics will have to respond to this new reality—that you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Finally, Indian democracy has, often rightly, been accused of not being deliberative enough. And certainly the precipitous decline of deliberation in representative institutions like Parliament will take time to reverse. But slowly, pressure from society is beginning to make debates over legislation outside the formal spheres of politics more deliberative. Whatever the final outcome, the idea that public discourse would be riveted by the nitty-gritty of a Lokpal bill is astonishing. The crucial question, therefore, is whether or not politicians understand that India needs a new style of politics. We will not do away entirely with the old conventions of power-broking between groups. But existing institutions and structures will have to respond more to this dispersal of power, by becoming more decentralised, more open to new mobilisations, and more sensitive to public reason.
Underneath the machinations of power, there is a real demand bubbling for inclusive governance. But the driving force behind India’s transformation was the economy. Admittedly, growth was uneven, and the scale of human deprivation in India still remains unconscionable. But the quiet transformation that growth had unleashed is impossible to overestimate. It changed aspirations so much that now, even the most deprived Dalit children see returns from education. It unleashed unprecedented entrepreneurship under difficult conditions. It was a source of self-belief that made India less anxious, more confident. It provided the revenue to lay the foundations of a genuinely expansive welfare state. But that story is now at risk.
For all the challenges of vested interests in India, the risk to this story is primarily intellectual. The risk is exemplified by a story heard during one of Rahul Gandhi’s campaign speeches in Bihar. He was talking about his pet theme, that there are two Indias—an India that is Shining, and Bharat, an India that is left behind. A small farmer was asked what he had understood of Rahul’s speech. The farmer replied something to the effect that “Rahulji said there are two Indias”. Asked further if he’d vote for the Congress, he replied, “For 50 years they have ruled, and now they say there are two Indias. If we give them five years more, they will come and tell us there are three Indias!”
The two Indias theme is a self-fulfilling intellectual construct. Inequality should be a matter of concern in India. Growth has provided the state with the resources to address these concerns. But the Congress’s mistake is to project the idea that these so-called two Indias are not connected; that one is not creating the conditions for pulling the other up. And it gets caught in its own rhetoric in two ways. First, it came to the erroneous conclusion that growth does not matter; that somehow high interest rates, high inflation, active discouraging of investment did not have something to do with the poor.
Second, it misread the nature of social conflict in India. There has been considerable conflict in the wake of economic reform—from Maoism to agitating farmers—but a historical perspective is in order. These are nowhere near the order of magnitude of conflict this society experienced from the 1970s through the 1990s, where even the Union seemed in peril. In some ways, there is less protest, because the dynamism of the economy has put people in a position where they fear there is a lot more to lose from disruption. And, in part, the conflicts are the conflicts of success and rising aspirations. The Indian state’s land acquisition policies have been unconscionably bad. But the present wave of protests is different in some respects. Rather than a sign of economic stagnation, they reflect the fact that farmers’ horizons of expectations are now different: they will not be cheated by the old rules and provisions that were made for an era when the state could act with impunity.
Conflicts over land or mining are not a sign that economic reforms did not work. It is a sign that two tectonic plates are colliding: a pre-liberalisation state practice that has failed to understand the new dynamics of aspirations. Since both our major political parties take their cue from each other, the BJP has promptly declared itself to be a Gandhian socialist party. This is wrong twice over. This claim has about as much credibility as me describing myself as Sachin Tendulkar. But it is also a sign of how genuinely confused political parties are about India’s economic direction. Now, 2012 will be a battle for appropriate economic reforms. Indians are clamouring to shape their own destiny. But can politicians look beyond their noses at the larger sweep of history that makes this such a moment of possibility?
The writer is president and chief executive, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi
