The Puzzle of India's Governance

Culture, Context and Comparative Theory

Subrata K. Mitra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134274925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

India no longer gets an easy ride as the world's largest democracy. Spectacular terrorist attacks on its Parliament and places of worship, communal riots of unprecedented ferocity, lingering separatist insurgency and violent caste conflict in impoverished regions have combined to cause a closer appraisal of India's capacity to sustain the rule of law.

This book shows how governance is high when people follow the rules of transaction, derived from binding custom, legislation, administrative practices and the constitution. The key question that underpins this analysis is why do some people, sometimes, follow rules and not others? This study responds to this central question by looking at analytical narratives of political order in six Indian regional States, surveys of social and political attitudes and extended interviews with political leaders, administrators and police officers. It shows how, by drawing on the logic of human ingenuity, driven by self interest rather than mechanical adherence to tradition and ideology, these regional elites can design institutions and promote security, welfare and identity which enhance governance.

1 Introduction
A comparative theory of governance

The problem stated

The transfer of power from colonial rulers to their Indian successors in 1947 marked the birth of the independent Indian state. But this most significant of moments in Indian history was tarnished by post-Partition Hindu–Muslim riots of unprecedented violence. Compared to the violent chaos and uncertainty of those desperate days, the institutions of state such as the Parliament, the Police, the Army, the Civil Service, the Judiciary, federalism and the party system five decades later come across as singularly robust, vital and resilient. Thus, India belongs to a minority of changing societies¹ that have achieved the distinction of having durability, adaptability and innovativeness as characteristics of their institutions. This distinction, of course, also belongs to the People’s Republic of China, except with one major difference. In spite of sporadic inter-community riots, violent insurgency in border regions and Maoist uprisings deeper inland, missing from the Indian case are the vast tragic costs in human lives which have gone into maintaining the resilience of Chinese institutions.²

I argue in this book that the relatively benign elasticity of India’s institutions is the result of effective governance (a concept I shall use throughout this text to imply orderly rule), the result of strategic thinking on the part of her elites. India’s decision-makers in politics, administration and the management of law and order, based in localities, regions and at the national level, often owe their own origin and survival to their effectiveness as brokers between the modern state and traditional society. Indian democracy both ordains and lives by the resonance between elite decisions and mass preferences. In contrast to the prognosis of an earlier generation of scholars, who saw a ‘cruel dilemma’ between democratic paralysis and a ‘strong element of coercion’ (Moore 1966: 410) as conditions for the transition into self-sustained orderly and democratic rule, this book suggests that individual rationality bounded by local context and embedded values, based on the perception of sanctions, welfare and identity as well as general trust, is the main motor for innovative, systematic, orderly change.³

I suggest in this book that governance, more than the innate cohesion of Indian society and culture, or the specific context of colonial rule and transfer of power, is the key to India’s resilience. I develop this argument on the basis of a rational choice, neo-institutional model of political transactions that lead to governance. The model (Figures 1.2 and 1.5 – see later in the chapter) underpins my analysis of empirical data drawn from six regional states of India.

The book thus draws on the case of India to ask a general question: why does governance vary in time and space? Based on the logic of instrumental rationality, I suggest that governance is high when people stick by the rules of transaction, be they customary, administrative, legal or constitutional. But the answer itself begs a deeper question: why do people follow rules in some situations and not in others, and why do people in similar contexts behave differently with regard to specific rules?

Possible answers to these questions usually point in the direction of one of two different scholarly approaches to governance. Advocates of ‘social capital’ (Putnam et al. 1993) find their solution to the problem of orderly rule in trust, shared norms, reciprocity and social networks, all of which constitute a culture of governance. In contrast, evolutionary institutionalism, the second major approach to political order, suggests the context of governance and the continuous and incremental evolution of institutions as the central explanation for orderly rule (Huntington 1968). It attributes the failure of changing societies to sustain governance not to their culture, but to the absence of strong, stable and resilient institutions. While I concede the importance of both culture and context in providing the backdrop to orderly rule, I suggest that order ensues when both sides to a transaction decide for their own reasons to abide scrupulously by the letter and spirit of the rule, and that the decision by the actors to stick by the rules of transaction is not in any way determined by culture or context, but necessarily involves their perception of potential rewards, risk and the comparison of likely outcomes, leading to a choice (North 1990; Baldwin 1995).

The inquiry into order and anarchy undertaken in this book builds on this core assertion. The explanation takes into account the context in which the actors are ensconced, delving into the landscape of their inner world and embedded values, understanding their perception of reality in terms of their motives and the information at their disposal, and analysing the political process that binds them to the larger moral universe of which they see themselves as a part. Actors see the decision to abide by the rule as a political choice in its own right, guided, like all political choices, by their perception and strategic calculations. Hence, the level of governance ultimately boils down to the strategic evaluation of rules by the stakeholders, a concept I use in this book to imply people who affect or are affected by a decision (Freeman 1984: 46). The stakeholders in India’s governance whom I analyse in this book include ordinary people in the context of their everyday lives as well as local, regional and national decision makers in public life. The motivations that underpin their decisions are guided by such basic concerns as security, welfare and identity, and, in the short run, by the tactical advantages of either abiding by rules, or contravening them in the myriad ways open to political men and women.⁴

Locating the puzzle

A cross-cultural theory of governance faces the challenge of providing a general explanation of governance which could be meaningful to actors at the lowest level of the political system as well as to the managers of the state and international organisations. In this book, I pose this general question of governance in the specific case of India, ensconced in her culture and bounded by her history. I have chosen India as an exemplar of a post-colonial, rich-poor state-nation, where modern institutions are wrapped around a society of which many important segments remains traditional. However, while my understanding of the empirical reality draws its inspiration from its characterisation by Rudolph and Rudolph (1967, 1987), Kothari (1970), Morris-Jones ([1964] 1987) and Moore (1966), conscious and consequent political choice rather than the teleological force that binds social segments with modern institutions is the crucial cutting edge of my analysis of governance.

The political process becomes a governance-generating process only when it is seen to be providing an incentive to those locked in combat to improve their lot through negotiation, or at least to fend off potential loss. On their own, neither culture nor context is sufficient (or, in some cases, even necessary) to generate governance. The normative basis of orderly rule is securely laid only when the decision-making elites are able to take cognisance of the raw stuff of interests, perceptions, identities and anxieties, shape them into negotiable packages, and devise methods of transaction that are both effective and legitimate.

The book builds on this heuristic insight primarily by drawing on the perceptions and strategic choices of elites who constitute crucial nodes of India’s political structure and process. My second source of data originates from a cross-section of citizens, a vast majority of whom, thanks to India’s robust democratic process, are conscious of their status as the ultimate governors of the land and have clear ideas about how their regions and localities should be ruled. Governance, in my approach, is a conceptual variable in its own right, open to measurement in terms of qualitative and quantitative indicators. Taking both ordinary people’s and the elites’ preferences as real and important points of departure distinguishes my approach from that of the good governance approach per se.

The need for an early clarification arises from the very popularity of the concept of ‘good governance’, which, during the past decade, has steadily come to be seen as the panacea for all the ills that might afflict the body politic. As an issue of public policy, ‘good’ governance has steadily moved on to the agenda of international agencies,⁵ national governments and campaigning politicians.⁶ In its most typical form, this usage makes it possible for those with the money and the vision to instil their objectives in the qualifier ‘good’ that precedes governance. Even when the definers of good governance act out of the best of intentions, the pre-qualification lowers the legitimacy of the concept for those affected by it in direct proportion to the hiatus between what they perceive as their interests and those of their minders.

The second misnomer derives from the assumption that as an analytical problem, the issue of governance applies to those societies that need it, much like the concept of development, which, in the decades following the Second World War, became identified with underdeveloped (and later, ‘developing’) societies. By contesting the universal claims of secular modernity worldwide, and near home in India, suicide terrorism has knocked the bottom out of ‘good’ governance and added a moral element to governance which has been, so far, a public administration- and business management-inspired genre⁷ aimed at poor, non-Western societies.⁸ After 9/11, the political discourse of governance has necessarily to be seen as both moral, and global.

The dual character of governance where institutions, policies and methods are juxtaposed with anxiety, identity and insecurity is borne out by the experience of India, which shows that governance is not a linear, irreversible phenomenon. Apparently stable political systems in India’s regional arenas, endowed with order and accountability, have collapsed into violent chaos with bewildering rapidity just as orderly rule has sprouted, phoenix-like, in dead-end, strife-torn localities and regions. Individual perceptions of governance can vary greatly within the same context. Similarly, India has experienced the authoritarian short cut to governance and its fragile, political basis, as well as the countervailing structure of powers of social groups opposed to the national state that can generate the room to manoeuvre for the marginal and the vulnerable (Mitra 1991b; Mitra and Fischer 2002), even though, at least at the outset, the modern state saw this as rebellious behaviour.

This uncertain and problematic juxtaposition of the perception by elites and ordinary people, and by the modern state and traditional society, describes the two faces of governance. While I do not set much store by the ‘can do’ optimism of the good governance approach, my general approach to the prospects of orderly rule in changing societies is not one of unmitigated pessimism either. The empirical spectrum of governance in India, just like the situation worldwide, is replete with both successful and failed cases of orderly rule. Contrary to the prognosis of the escalation of inter-community conflict (Huntington 1996; Brass 2003), results of the empirical investigations I report in this book do not show conflict based on the cleavages of caste, class or religion to be inexorable, or unavoidable.⁹

India commands attention as a challenging site for a theoretical and comparative inquiry into the politics of governance, seen in this study as a key to her resilience and a coping mechanism for the terrific strain that the pressure for change imposes on their carrying capacity (Figure 1.4 – see later in the chapter).¹⁰ Despite regional variations discussed in Chapter 4, overall, India’s continental dimensions and complex social structure manifest themselves in a cascade of political groupings that nevertheless are able to sustain coherent and orderly rule. Her political institutions and process, bearing the complex legacies of English utilitarianism, colonial rule and resistance to it through the mobilisation of marginal social groups and indigenous values, speak in a thousand and one voices but still ensure a general continuity in public policy. The book casts this puzzling resilience in terms of a general theory of governance by asking how much of this is attributable to a general explanation as opposed to accounts that inspire themselves mainly from India’s culture and the specificity of her context.

India’s famous inertia and surprising dynamism, finely ensconced within a façade of overall social equilibrium, have made her a favourite empirical base for theories of macro social change from Marx to Weber, Lerner, Moore and Huntington. Is this yet more evidence for the structural inertia of ‘eternal’ India, or is there a political process accessible through comparative theory that accounts for the resilience of India’s institutions? The book responds to this question by exploring the conditions under which orderly rule is feasible. The hypotheses based on a deductive model, the research design that grounds the abstract model and the concrete realities of Indian politics in her regions and localities, and the actual empirical investigation are based on a study of institutions, policies, elite strategies and mass attitudes. While the book shares the neo-institutional approach to the analysis of governance with public administration and business management, its concern with values and identity adds the inner world of the decision-maker, the violent cusps of institutional discontinuity and historical memory, to the research agenda, all of which make its method more general in its scope and in the depth of engagement with the stakeholders.

Power and legitimacy: the two faces of governance

Thanks to the surge of suicide terrorism, security, more than welfare, has emerged as the main concern of governance worldwide. However, an exclusive preoccupation with terrorism and demonisation of the terrorist can divert attention away from some simple facts that give rise to violent political action in the first place. If ordinary people commit extraordinary acts at considerable risk to themselves, then, instead of dismissing them merely as irrational, one can consider their actions in the context where they occur. I argue later in the book, drawing on Tilly (2003) and Pape (2003), that looking at terrorists in context, as agents of their own destiny, might be a better guide to comprehending their behaviour, and, eventually, to effective policy.¹¹ In its cross-cultural analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, the book asserts that governance is critically conditional on the ability of political institutions to accommodate embedded values and undertake strategic reform (Kohli 1987; Drèze and Sen 1995). The combination of innovative policy and the difficult balancing of sanctions and co-option can produce the best results. This is particularly true of post-colonial and post-communist states whose institutions lack indigenous roots in local society or collective memory. Of equal importance is the commitment of the state to individual and group rights as the cornerstone of democracy rather than the derivation of legitimacy from some predefined ideological, cultural or religious essence.

The existing literature gives empirical shape to the question as to why political order in changing societies evinces the tendency to go off tr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: A Comparative Theory of Governance
• 2. Measuring Governance: A Design for Empirical Inquiry
• 3. The Institutional Arrangement of Governance: Structure and the Formation of the State In India
• 4. The Regional Context of Governance: Six Analytical Narratives
• 5. Policing and Strategic Reform: Culture, Context and Welfare In the Organisation of Order
• 6. The Agency of Public Institutions: Leaders, Administrators and Governance
• 7. Modern State, Pre-Modern Identities: Culture and Governance In Changing Societies
• 8. Negotiating Governance In Changing Societies: Beyond the Indian Model
• Appendix: Elite Questionnaire, With Marginals (All States Aggregated, N=161)
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography