Political Transition and Development Imperatives in India

Ranabir Samaddar, Suhit K. Sen

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138662513
• eBook ISBN: 9781000365702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume explores the transition from colonial to constitutional rule in India, and the various configurations of power and legitimacies that emerged from it. It focuses on the developmental structures and paradigms that provided the circumstances for this transition, and the establishment of the post-colonial state. Different articles interrogate the idea of liberal constitutionalism, the spaces it provides for rights and claims, the assumptions it makes about citizenship and its attendant duties, and the assumptions it further makes about what it can, or has to, become in the particular situation of India.

The book locates these questions in the reconfiguration of society, power, and the economy since the shift in the identity of the state after Independence, and deals with issues of constitution-making in a historical and political setting and its outcomes, especially the centrality of law and legalisms, in shaping civil society. With a companion volume on the transition to a constitutional form of governance and the consequent moulding of the citizens, this book emphasises continuity and change in the context of the movement from the colonial to the constitutional order.

It will be of interest to those in politics, history, South Asian studies, policy studies, and sociology.

II
Paradigms of Inequality, Pathways to Entitlement

4
Imaginations and Manifestos of the Political Parties on Ideals of Developmental Governance

Ashutosh Kumar

Introduction

The idea of democratic governance tied with market economy has become a critical component of the neoliberal global agenda in the post-Soviet era. The two institutions of market economy and liberal political democracy are being assumed to be not merely compatible but also complementary to each other. India’s twin success stories in maintaining liberal democratic institutions¹ and also achieving significant market-oriented growth in the last one and half decade have naturally been globally acknowledged and celebrated. India as such belies the experiences of the ‘new’ democracies of Africa and Latin America where neoliberal reforms did not lead to an improvement in terms of governance or economic performance, inviting a backlash against the globalisation.

¹ That democracy both as an idea and as an institution has got embedded in the consciousness of the Indian people has come out in different surveys based on face-to-face interviews with the respondents. In the World Values Surveys conducted all over the world in 2001, 93 per cent of the respondents interviewed in India indicated their approval of the ‘democratic system’ (Sandeep Shastri, ‘Citizen in Political Institutions and Processes in India: A Study of the Impact of Regional, Social and Economic Factors’, unpublished paper, Stellenbosch, South Africa: World Values Survey Conference, 17–21 November 2001, http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/articles/folder_published/conference_66, accessed 20 August 2010). Democrats also outnumbered non-democrats in the SDSA survey conducted between August 2004 and March 2005 in India. In the survey 84 per cent of the respondents in India were found to be either strong or weak democrats whereas only 15 per cent respondents were considered non-democrats (Peter Ronald deSouza, Suhas Palshikar, and Yogendra Yadav, ‘Surveying South Asia’, Journal of Democracy, 19 (1), Baltimore, Maryland, The Johns Hopkins University Press, January 2008, pp. 85, 90).

In a world swept by ‘third wave of democracy’, political parties, and elections, which supposedly bring together the legitimate aspirations to the core of the people, and popular representation and accountability as the primary method of reaching this goal, are increasingly being viewed as an effective method of democratic governance. It is hardly a surprise, then, that the success of India’s democracy is being assessed favourably primarily in its minimalist electoral form, encompassing a multi-party system, regularly held open elections at national, state, and the local levels, and peaceful transfer of power.² Unlike the ‘established’/‘longstanding’/‘old’ democracies of the West, political parties in India continue to attract a high degree of interest and involvement across the spectrum of politics, while shaping identities and economic interests.

² Sunil Khilnani has argued that ‘the meaning of democracy has been menacingly narrowed to signify only ‘elections’, primarily due to the weakening of other democratic procedures in India (Idea of India, New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1997, p. 58).

Much as the robustness of India’s democratic institutions has been rightfully celebrated in their minimalist electoral form in recent years coupled with its adherence to apparent economic success, the present article argues that they are not expected to impact upon the substantive issues of public policy making and setting the national agenda even if it means overlooking the legitimate claims of a significant section of the electorates.

This article substantiates its argument by visiting India’s electoral politics since the initiation of neoliberal economic reforms and taking note of a perceptible ‘disconnect’ between the two. For the purpose, the article mainly refers in a comparative manner to the economic agenda as revealed in the manifestos released and campaigns undertaken by the two coalition-making, polity-wide parties,³ namely the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as well as the two mainstream left parties, namely the Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India in the last two Lok Sabha elections⁴ held in 2004 and 2009 along with the relevant data from the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies-National Election Study (CSDS-NES). The essay also refers to the survey-based, India-specific findings presented in the report of the State of Democracy in South Asia (SDSA) study undertaken by CSDS-Lokniti (SDSA 2008).⁵

³ Parties participating as well as winning across the country both at the federal level as well as at the state level are categorised as polity-wide parties by K. Deschouwer (‘Political Parties as Multi-Level Organizations’, in R. S. Katz and W. Crotty [eds], Handbook of Party Politics, London: Sage Publications, 2006).

⁴ These two ‘regular, timely, well conducted’, and ‘normal’ elections underlined ‘the growing maturity of Indian democracy’ (Atul Kohli, ‘What are You Calling a Historical Mandate?’, edit page, The Indian Express, 19 May 2009).

⁵ The achieved sample size in SDSA study was 5,389 from as many as 26 constituent states in India.

Rise of the Plebeians

A recurrent theme interweaving most of the studies of electoral politics in recent India is the phenomenon designated as ‘democratic upsurge’.⁶ India is depicted as experimenting with ‘a silent revolution’ as political power is ‘being transferred, on the whole peacefully, from the upper-caste elites to various subaltern groups … The relative calm of the Indian experience is primarily due to the fact the whole process is incremental.’⁷ Legitimacy of traditional social authority is being undermined. A changed mode of electoral representation is being viewed as paving the way for the assertion and subsequent empowerment of the hitherto politically dormant poor, unprivileged, and marginalised men and women and the social groups they belong to. The turnout of these groups has been higher than the average turnout, indicating a greater level of political involvement and participation. In terms of presence, a whole new generation of political entrepreneurs representing these marginal groups have come up. All this has resulted in a high level of aggregate volatility or a high degree of swing in the vote share for all parties as well as a high level of individual volatility or the proportion of electorates who changed parties across two elections. The resultant high rate of regime alteration has kept political parties on their toes, seeking new forms of political alignments and support with increased frequency.⁸

⁶ The overall turnout level in assembly elections touched around 70 per cent up from around 60 per cent in the 1990s. There has also been a substantial narrowing of the gender gap in voter turnout and an upsurge in the turnout among Dalits and adivasis, though not necessarily the Muslims and the very poor (Y. Yadav and S. Palshikar, ‘Revisiting “Third Electoral System”: Mapping Electoral Trends in India, 2004–2009’, in S. Shastri, K. C. Suri, and Y. Yadav (eds), Electoral Politics in Indian States: Lok Sabha Elections in 2004 and Beyond, 2009, p. 397). See Y. Yadav, ‘Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in Electoral Politics in the 1990s’, in F. Frankel, Z. Hasan, R. Bhargava, and B. Arora (eds), Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 121–45.

⁷ C. Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of Low Castes in North Indian Politics, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003, p. 494.

⁸ O. Heath, ‘Party Systems, Political Cleavages and Electoral Volatility in India: State-wise Analysis 1998–1999’, Electoral Studies, 24 (2), 2005, pp. 177–99; Y. Yadav and S. Palishkar, ‘Revisiting “Third Electoral System”: Mapping Electoral Trends in India, 2004–2009’, in S. Shastri, K. C. Suri, and Y. Yadav (eds), Electoral Politics in Indian States: Lok Sabha Elections in 2004 and Beyond, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 393–429.

The increased level of contestation and participation is being considered good as it apparently helps to deepen a participatory mode of democratic governance by empowering the poor and the marginal in terms of policy making. How valid is such a claim? Has it made the political class more responsive and accountable? In order to interrogate the optimism about the marginal ones getting empowered as citizens under a ‘new regime of governance and governmentality’, we need to consider four facts that relate the emergent nature of electoral politics to the ongoing process of neoliberal reforms and underline the implications.

National Election Studies

Fact number one, always suspect, is the empirically grounded knowledge that the new economic policies right since their initiation have been disapproved of by a significant section of the electorate, especially the poor and marginal one. In the national election studies undertaken by Lokniti, CSDS, of all the Lok Sabha elections since the 1996 elections,⁹ the respondents were repeatedly asked three different but related time-series questions aimed at (a) determining the level of awareness about the neoliberal economic reforms among the voters coming from different sections of the society; (b) their opinion on the entry of the foreign companies in India; and (c) their views on the privatisation of existing government companies/public sector units.¹⁰

⁹ In the NES 1996, NES 1998, and NES 1999 the achieved sample sizes were 9,614, 8,133, and 9,418, respectively. It was 27,151 in the NES 2004. The sample size further increased to 36,238 voters in the NES 2009 post-poll survey which covered 29 states, 2,386 locations spread across 536 parliamentary constituencies (The Hindu, 14 May 2009). The NES 2004 and 2009 have arguably been the two largest social scientific studies of the Indian elections, for building evidence based understanding of the electorates choices (S. Shastri, K. C. Suri, and Y. Yadav, Electoral Politics in Indian States: Lok Sabha Elections in 2004 and Beyond, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009a. http://www.csdsdelhi.org/index_pg1.htm, accessed 20 August 2010.

¹⁰ Ashutosh Kumar, ‘Rethinking State Politics in India: Regions within Regions’, Economic and Political Weekly, 44 (19), 2009a, pp. 14–19.

The data revealed that awareness about the economic reforms was abysmally low among the electorate even after a considerable period of time since their initiation. If only 19 per cent of the respondents reported having some idea of economic reforms in 1996, it was 26 per cent in a 1998 post-poll survey.¹¹ Among those who were aware of the reforms, the percentage of scheduled caste (SC) and scheduled tribe (ST) respondents was much lower than of other caste groups. Among the respondents, only 13 per cent of SCs and 6 per cent of STs had awareness about the reforms in the 1996 survey. The figures were 20 and 17 per cent respectively in 1998 survey.

¹¹ The question asked was: During the last five years, the central government has made many changes in its economic policy (policy regarding money matters, tax, Indian and foreign companies, government and private sectors, industry, and agriculture). Have you heard about them?

The data also show that there has been no consensus on new economic policies. Opinions have been divided across classes, castes, occupations, and locations. A large segment of the Indian electorate, in fact, has had a negative perception of the ongoing economic reform process.¹² The NES of 2004 found that 44 per cent of all respondents were of the opinion that the rich had benefited from the reforms whereas the poor had become poorer. The upper-caste respondents were split nearly equally on the question but a very large portion of the respondents from the poor and peripheral groups viewed reforms as beneficial only to the rich. Among those who shared this opinion were 45 per cent of the respondents belonging to other backward castes (OBCs), SCs and STs and nearly 55 per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section I: The Juridical–Political Route to Norms of Governance
• Section II: Paradigms of Inequality, Pathways to Entitlement
• Bibliography
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Index