India, as Thomas Blom Hansen (1999: 5) notes, presents us with “the longest, most sustained, and most successful trajectory of democracy anywhere in the postcolonial world …”. The coming of national independence in 1947 witnessed the introduction of universal franchise and a system of electoral democracy that—with the exception of the Emergency period from 1975 to 1977 1 —have remained stable for close to seven decades. As media pundits are quick to point out every time India gears up for general elections, this makes for a favourable comparison with other countries and regions in the global South where democratic rule has tended to rest on feeble foundations and often has given way to outright authoritarianism. “For the 64 years since independence, democracy has perhaps been India’s greatest asset,” wrote one commentator in 2012, “the magic that has kept the country’s dizzying array of linguistic, ethnic and religious groups together as a nation” (Denyer 2012). Moreover, Indian democracy is unique in the sense that the poor exercise their right to vote more eagerly and in greater proportion than India’s middle classes and elites: “In India alone, the poor form not just the overwhelming majority of the electorate, but vote in larger numbers than the better-off. Everywhere else, without exception, the ratio of electoral participation is the reverse” (Anderson 2012; see also Thachil 2014 and Banerjee 2014).
There are, thus, very good reasons for finding inspiration in India’s remarkable experience with democracy over the past seven decades. Yet despite its stability and evident popularity among the country’s poor, there also remain critical questions to be asked about Indian democracy. In a scathing critique of the country’s developmental trajectory, Drèze and Sen (2013) have noted that in terms of basic social development indicators—for example, infant mortality rates, life expectancy, mean years of schooling and female literacy rates—India is falling behind its poorer South Asian neighbours. This fact reflects a wider failure to translate the impressive growth rates of the past two decades—growth rates that have averaged between 6 and 7 per cent, and in some years reaching double digits—into substantial advances in the standard of living for the majority of the country’s population, 53.8 per cent of whom still lived in poverty in 2015 according to the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHDI 2015: 1; see also Nayyar 2006; Parry 2014; Kohli 2012; Corbridge et al. 2012: Chaps. 3 and 4). As Jayadev et al. (2011) have shown, persistent poverty combines with increasing inequalities to create a scenario of unequal and uneven development that particularly affects marginalized groups such as Dalits, women, Adivasis, marginal peasants and the working classes in India’s countryside and in its vast informal economy (see also Walker 2008 and Breman 2016). In sum, a long period of “rule by the people” has coexisted with an increasingly secure position of the propertied classes (Pedersen 2011: 37). For critical scholars, this raises important questions about the extent to which democracy has in fact ensured the ability of subaltern groups and popular classes to make effective claims for redistribution and recognition in relation to the Indian state. The exploration of this question lies at the heart of this book and animates the critical analyses pursued in the ten chapters that follow.
As Patrick Heller (2000: 487–488) has proposed, formal democracy is characterized by “universal suffrage, regular and competitive elections, accountability of state apparatuses to elected representatives, and legally codified and enforced rights of association.” The presence of these institutional constellations, however, does not equate an effective democracy—that is, a form of democratic rule that is diffused throughout society to such an extent that it also regulates relations between citizens in the public sphere—or a substantive democracy that ensures “the political and economic integration of subordinate classes” (ibid.: 486). Rather, the extent to which mutually reinforcing connections between these three dimensions of democracy are forged depends upon trajectories of mobilization from below in specific contexts. Exploring the case of Kerala and its substantial advances in social development since the coming of independence and contrasting it to other states in India with less successful records of redistribution and poverty reduction, Heller argues that the decisive factor in bringing about these achievements has been “the dynamic interaction of political and civil society” (ibid.: 511). In the Kerala case, the combination of radical class-based social movements and a strong left party have ensured land reforms that redistributed property and eradicated landlordism, entrenched collective bargaining rights for workers and extended access to health care and education through strong welfare institutions (see also Desai 2007). This, according to Heller, constitutes a significant process of democratic deepening.
Heller’s emphasis on dynamic interactions provides a fruitful starting point for exploring the extent to which social movements can harness the state to their projects of empowerment, and how this may contribute to the deepening of Indian democracy. It also aids us in moving the debate on social movements and the state beyond polarized positions in which, generally speaking, one perspective sees the Indian state as an elite-controlled entity that offers little or no scope for subaltern empowerment; while another perspective posits the state as the primary—and in some cases the only—conduit for the oppositional projects of social movements (see Nilsen 2015). A key ambition of this volume is, in contrast, to address the complex relationship between what Bob Jessop (1982: 224) has referred to as the “conjunctural opportunities” for, and “structural constraints” to, emancipatory change that social movements encounter as they seek to advance their collective projects via the institutions, discourses and governmental technologies of the state. It is in light of these considerations that the chapters that follow explore the interrelationship between social movements, state formation and democracy in India. To what extent, we ask, have social movements been capable of deepening democracy in India in such a way as to enhance the political capacities of subaltern groups and thereby enable them to contest and challenge marginality, stigma and exploitation?
We ask this question not only in light of the persistence of uneven and unequal development in the country, but also in light of a distinct understanding of the evolution of the Indian state from the late colonial era to the present and the role that social movements have played in this process. In particular, we are concerned with the contradictory trajectory of change that has followed in the wake of the unravelling of Congress hegemony from the late 1960s. As Radhika Desai elaborates in her contribution to the volume, this unravelling was both constitutive of and constituted by social forces that animated a protracted turn away from state-led developmentalism and towards market-oriented reforms—a shift that Corbridge and Harris (2000) have aptly designated as an “elite revolt”. Yet the very same period also witnessed a “less than orderly democratization of Indian democracy” (Hansen 1999: 58) propelled—as we explain in greater detail below—in no small part by the political mobilizations of subaltern groups. What we set out to explore in this volume, then, is first the extent to which these political mobilizations have indeed forged a more effective and substantive democracy in India; and second, the prospects for social movements to challenge the momentum of neoliberalization in the country. These two interrelated concerns are explored across the chapters that follow, chapters which analyse the Dalit and Other Backward Caste (OBC) movements; India’s feminist politics and the women’s movement; rights-based struggles for work, transparency and land; and movements organized around labour, class and Maoist strategies of armed insurgency.
The Making of a Formal Democracy in India: A Brief Outline
Any exploration of the relationship between social movements, state formation and democracy in India has to start with the country’s struggle for liberation from colonial rule. It was in and through this struggle that a specific constellation of social forces emerged that would define the nature of the postcolonial state and the workings of Indian democracy in the immediate decades after independence.
When the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885, it was as a socially narrow organization of members of the urban educated and professional classes that aimed at negotiating moderate constitutional and administrative reforms (see McLane 1977; Sarkar 1983: Chaps. 2 and 3; Chandra et al. 2000: Chaps. 4, 5 and 9). By the early 1900s, different ideological and strategic orientations had developed within the Congress organization between Moderates who favoured the continuation of constitutional agitation and Extremists who believed in more confrontational methods and pursued more radical demands for self-rule. The Extremists departed from the organization in 1907 and subsequently rejoined in 1915. Yet, as Sumit Sarkar (1983: 151) notes, Congress remained “a purely deliberative body not geared to any sustained agitation” until Gandhi’s entry into the fray three years later (see also Brown 1972: Chaps. 1 and 2). The advent of Gandhi’s rise to power brought about a new orientation within the Congress: the participation of the country’s rural masses was to be secured, and the organization was fundamentally restructured towards this end in 1920 (see Krishna 1966). Three spectacular campaigns of popular mobilization—the Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–1922), the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930–1934) and the Quit India Movement (1942)—were interspersed with periods of council participation in the 27 years leading up to independence in a trajectory that “alternated between phases of extra-legal mass struggle and phases of truce functioning within the four walls of the law…” (Chandra 1988: 23).
According to Bipan Chandra’s (1988: 23) interpretation, India’s struggle for national liberation was centred on a strategy of “building reserves of hegemonic power with a view to wresting political power from the colonial state”. In pursuing this strategy, he and his colleagues maintain, Congress was at the helm of “a mass movement which mobilized the people to the widest possible extent” (Chandra et al. 2000: 14). Chandra’s identification of an overall pattern of alternation between struggle, truce and renewed struggle on an expanded scale in the nationalist movement is clearly apposite in the sense that it captures the steady extension and consolidation of Congress as an organization and hence also its growing ability to mobilize nationwide campaigns. However, what this app...