An Introduction to South Asian Politics

Neil DeVotta, Neil DeVotta

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317369721
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

This introductory textbook provides students with a fundamental understanding of the social, political, and economic institutions of six South Asian countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It adopts a broad theoretical framework and evaluates the opportunities and constraints facing South Asia's states within the context of democracy.

Key features include:

• An introduction to the region.
• The history and political development of these South Asian states, including evaluations of their democratic trajectories.
• The management of conflict, economic development, and extremist threats.
• A comparative analysis of the states.
• Projections concerning democracy taking into consideration the opportunities and constraints facing these countries.

This textbook will be an indispensable teaching tool for courses on South Asia. It includes pedagogical features such as political chronologies, political party descriptions, text boxes, a glossary, and suggestions for further reading. Written in an accessible style and by experts on South Asian politics, it offers students of South Asian politics a valuable introduction to an exceedingly diverse region.

1
An overview

Neil DeVotta

South Asia is an exceedingly diverse region with a long and complex history that the colonial experience further complicated. If the subcontinent’s partition and the disputed borders between India and Pakistan and Pakistan and Afghanistan have ensured tense relations among these states, stark poverty and conspicuous income disparities, rampant corruption, malgovernance, democratic regression and breakdown, and insurgent and separatist conflicts combine to create challenging domestic political environments throughout the region as well. Indeed, it becomes all the more clear why South Asia is going to be even more important going forward when one considers: the radicalization of Hindu extremists in India and Muslim extremists in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and (to a degree) Bangladesh; India’s economic rise and its potential to become a great power; China’s increased influence in South Asia and the tensions this is creating between India and the region’s smaller states; and the threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan. This book, by focusing on India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, seeks to provide students a deeper understanding of the domestic politics within South Asian countries even as global power shifts from western states to countries in Asia in an increasingly multipolar world.

Given that their historical antecedents, complicated relations among and between the different states in South Asia and beyond, and varied modes of governance have influenced each country’s political systems and structures, this book evaluates the opportunities and constraints facing South Asia’s states within the context of democracy (i.e. suggesting that the countries in the region are experiencing different stages of democratic politics ranging from democratic transition to democratic deepening to democratic regression and that this state of flux conditions the politics within each country and their relations among each other and the wider world). In doing so, the chapters pay special attention to each country’s institutions and how these institutions succeed or fail to promote democracy.

Adopting a democratic prism to analyze the region’s domestic politics makes sense given that all six countries currently practice and seek to consolidate democratic governance. A consolidated democracy is achieved when all major stakeholders in a country accept that free and fair elections are the only way to change governments. From this standpoint, India can be said to be the region’s only consolidated democracy—although India’s vibrant democracy gets juxtaposed with troubling malgovernance. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal seek to consolidate democracy, but weak institutions and fractured polities have prevented them from reaching this vaunted stage. Sri Lanka, having regressed from a commendable liberal democracy to an illiberal democracy, was heading in an authoritarian direction when a new government promising significant democratic reforms was elected in 2015. Afghanistan may qualify as a failed state (depending on one’s definition of a failed state); yet the country’s attempts to create democratic institutions have ramifications for its people and the region. Its inclusion in this volume is especially pertinent given the recent American involvement in the country and, consequently, the increased interest it holds among American students.

South Asian states face a democratic paradox in that the region’s people value democracy even as they deal with malgovernance. While many reasons can be attributed to bad governance, what is clear is that democracy in such a milieu cannot be taken for granted, for even the most robust democracies can get undone when people lose faith in governing institutions. Pakistan is a case in point, given how the military on multiple occasions has manipulated elected leaders’ political failures to usurp power. With South Asia facing multiple crises ranging from intrastate and interstate terrorism to separatist conflicts to communal violence, it is understandable why the region’s countries have experienced both democratic gains and democratic regression.

In the chapters that follow, each author focuses on the respective country’s history and political development; institutions, political parties, and elections; how it has managed conflict; its economic development and contemporary political economy; regional/international relations; and opportunities and constraints. This framework makes for easier cross comparisons and highlights the similar and different challenges facing these countries.

The chapter on India by Jason Kirk first provides an overview of the country’s post-independence history, dividing its political development into two broad periods and treating the late 1970s and early 1980s as a turning point. The first half of this history explains the initial dominance of the Congress Party, and the second half discusses new patterns of political mobilization, using the narrative frame of “Mandal and mandir” to capture two particularly important trends of caste-based identity parties and the rise of political Hinduism (Mandal was the chairman of a landmark commission to “identify the socially or educationally backward,” and a mandir is a Hindu temple). The chapter discusses the growing importance of sub-national politics and trends toward language- and region-based parties. It surveys major changes in India’s political economy and development policies from the early Nehruvian mixed economy to the post-liberalization period. An analysis of India’s approaches to managing conflict also considers Hindu-Muslim relations, separatist movements, and the significant Naxalite insurgency that traverses many less developed districts in central and eastern India. It further surveys India’s international relations—focusing especially on Pakistan, China, and the United States—and considers opportunities and constraints facing India in its emergence as a leading Asian and global power.

The chapter on Pakistan by Anas Malik examines Pakistan’s political development by looking at certain pre-Partition facets and briefly comparing India’s early experience. It pays special attention to the challenges of managing conflict between elected and unelected institutions, the tendency of political parties to have a parochial rather than integrative basis, and election outcomes in Pakistan that have reflected these divides. The chapter reflects on Pakistan’s regional and international relations, particularly its enduring rivalry with India, its variable and sometimes contradictory alliance with the United States, its interests in Afghanistan, as well as the geopolitical challenges arising from the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Malik evidences how all this has allowed politicians and their challengers to pursue political survival and ascendancy within the context of political Islam.

Ali Riaz’s chapter on Bangladesh discusses the developments in that country since its inception in 1971 with due reference made to significant eras—populist authoritarianism (1972–75), military dominance (1975–90), representative democracy (1991–2006); unsuccessful reform (2007–08), and democracy redux (2009–present)—so as to capture the country’s struggles with representative democracy. It also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the country’s economy within the context of its increased integration with the global economy and the impact of growth on poverty. Furthermore, it covers the country’s relations with India and Burma and its involvement in regional and global institutions. Finally, the chapter highlights the successes of the past four decades and addresses the challenges facing Bangladesh in the years ahead.

The chapter on Sri Lanka discusses the development of political institutions during the pre-independence and post-independence periods, considers how ethnocentric politics helped compromise democracy, and specifies the ways in which the Mahinda Rajapaksa government that ruled from November 2005 to January 2015 especially undermined institutions and pushed the island in an authoritarian direction. The chapter also covers Sri Lanka’s relations with India and China and the opportunities and challenges facing the island as it reverts to a more democratic dispensation following the ouster of the Rajapaksa government.

The chapter on Nepal discusses how the country has been struggling to consolidate a democratic political system for more than half a century and the challenges it has faced to create a constitution, which is a country’s most important institution. It discusses the reasons for the failure of democracy in Nepal and evaluates its prospects for democratic governance. The chapter discusses Nepal’s political development and subsequent trajectory by taking into consideration the roles played by the now-deposed monarchy, the country’s ethnic diversity, and regional and global opportunities and constraints.

Finally, Vikash Yadav’s chapter on Afghanistan explores the causes behind the rapid erosion of democratic practices and institutions in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s overthrow and discusses how the underlying political economy and social divisions in Afghanistan have historically limited the state’s capacity and autonomy while fostering dependence on regional and great powers for external assistance in multiple failed projects of “modernization.” Although the state is more present in the lives of Afghans than before the Saur Revolution of 1978 and subsequent civil war periods, the chapter discusses why state institutions remain weak, porous, and personalized. This has led to a parliament that is often deadlocked and marginal to governance as political parties continuously fracture on the basis of personality rather than ideology and a state that is unable to contain social conflicts. Yadav argues that the inability of this embattled state to achieve a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence increases the salience of ethno-linguistic identity and threatens regional stability.

The Trends and Prospects chapter builds on the individual chapters to highlight the opportunities and constraints facing the South Asian region and the individual countries covered in the book. It partly discusses India’s influence in the region while also paying due attention to China’s increased involvement in South Asia and how this stands to impact domestic politics and international relations of the countries covered in the book.

2
India

Jason Kirk

India is old. Humans have inhabited its subcontinent for 7,000 years. Around 2600 BCE, a sophisticated civilization—larger than ancient Mesopotamia—emerged in the Indus River Valley, centered on the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Its five million people achieved civic and technological feats unknown to their Bronze Age contemporaries, but its greatness would be long unknown after its demise around 1300 BCE (probably through climate change, migration, and intermingling with another people, the Aryans of Central Asia). The Indus Valley Civilization was rediscovered through excavations only in the early twentieth century, by which time India had passed through many ages, from the Vedic to the Mughal, to become part of the British Empire. Today, the Indus ruins are in Pakistan—a young state, born in the Partition of India when Britain withdrew in 1947.

India is also young. The “sovereign democratic republic,” as it was proclaimed in the Preamble to its 1950 Constitution, is an institutional feat without precedent. Never before had all of India been brought under a single, unified territorial state and central government. Even during the formal British Raj (Rule) from 1858 to 1947, a third of India’s territory had remained in more than 500 princely states.

Nor had the world seen such an experiment as democracy on the scale of post-1947 India. It embraced universal suffrage for all men and women over 21, so that more than 175 million were eligible to vote in the first general election in 1951–52. Around 85 percent of Indians in 1951–52 could not read or write, yet voter turnout was 60 percent.

Average life expectancy was 40, but press reports tell of voting by “a 110-year-old-man in Madurai who came propped up on either side by a great-grandson, [and] a ninety-five-year-old-woman in Ambala, deaf and hunchbacked” (Guha 2007, 154). At such advanced ages, they had beheld both the beginning and the end of formal British rule.

India’s huge population and only gradually abating population growth—now an average 2.5 births per woman—have made each successive general election there the largest in world history. In 2014, two-thirds of eligible voters turned out, besting the previous record set 30 years earlier (in a sympathy wave that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984). Of almost 815 million Indians who voted in 2014, fully 100 million were added just since the previous election in 2009. Over nine phases of voting, 11 million election officials were deployed across more than 935,000 polling stations, bearing 1.7 million briefcase-sized electronic voting machines that utilize a symbol-based interface, since as many as 287 million voters are illiterate (Ford 2014). An independent, technically expert Election Commission manages this epic feat. Candidates ritually complain to the news media about its decisions, but this only serves to illustrate its intended insulation from more direct forms of political pressure.

As India’s population nears 1.25 billion, there are more than 600 million under age 25, and 70 percent of the population is under 40. In contrast—and like the octogenarian prime minister who left office in 2014, Manmohan Singh—four out of five Indian politicians are over 70, older than the republic itself (Kumar 2009). As The New York Times reports, there is a “startling four-decade gap between the median age of India’s people and that of its government officials… Among the world’s major countries, India has the youngest population, and the oldest leaders” (Mustafi 2012).

Recently, this demographic disconnect has been a subtext to protests over everything from official corruption, to freedom of speech, to the treatment of women in a society with persisting patriarchal and chauvinist elements. Corruption—the use of public office for private gain—can entice public servants of all ages. But when many of the same personages and parties have been on the scene for so long, the image of a sclerotic system—ill-suited to tackling abuses, providing good governance and addressing twenty-first-century problems—is hard to shrug off.

In 2011, a movement led by the 74-year-old Anna Hazare—but with mostly young and urban supporters—pressured the Indian government to enact a major anti-corruption law. Hazare undertook hunger strikes and courted arrest, tactics that hearken back to Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership in the Indian freedom struggle. Then in late 2012, the anti-corruption movement spawned the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party (AAP), which won office in the Delhi state election just a year later. Its leader, Arvind Kejriwal, 45, served as the state’s chief minister for just 49 days before resigning to lead a national campaign for 2014. Only four of the AAP’s 434 candidates won parliamentary seats, but its meteoric rise may portend more urban voter mobilization ahead (historically, elections have been decided in rural India).

Outside the electoral process, the young-versus-old tension has manifested in showdowns involving freedom of speech. In 2012, police arrested a 25-year-old cartoonist named Aseem Trivedi on charges of sedition and “insulting national honor” when he published two anti-corruption pieces, one replacing the three noble lions of India’s national emblem with three rapacious wolves, and the other depicting the Parliament building as a toilet bowl (Singh 2012). As fate would have it, two months later, an 86-year-old former cartoonist turned political boss died in Mumbai, sparking another incident. Bal Thackeray’s right-wing Shiv Sena party has held a controlling influence in India’s largest city since the 1990s, both in and out of power (the man himself never held public office). When a 21-year-old woman took to Facebook to criticize the city’s virtual shutdown for the old don’s funeral, she was arrested by police, as was another woman who merely “liked” her comment on the social media site (Parmar 2012). Charges against cartoonist Trivedi were dropped, and the two women in Mumbai were released, but the incidents lent themselves to a narrative of growing disaffection among the young—made more urgent by the slowing of India’s recently lively economy.

Finally, in December 2012, global news media were gripped by the gruesome story of a gang rape in New Delhi that led to the death of a 23-year-old young woman. The incident (and several others) set off massive demonstrations in cities across India, compelling the central and state governments to announce new protections for women. Kiran Bedi, a former police officer, told America’s CNN that the case highlighted the need for major reforms across Indian law enforcement, still largely governed by the Indian Police Act of 1861. Human rights advocates argue that the Act, which the British adopted after a major 1857–58 rebellion, makes law enforcement more accountable to politicians than to the public (Daruwala, Joshi, and Tiwana 2005). “It’s a tsunami call, the way the new young generation has taken to the streets,” Bedi said (“India Rape Case” 2012).

So India is old, and so are many of its leaders and laws; Indian voters are young and energetic, but increasingly estranged; Indian elections are enormously large, with the 2014 election the most epic yet. It was also an historic election, resulting in an unprecedented margin of victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party—the first time a party other than the Indian National Congress has secured a parliamentary majority and formed a government without the need for coalition allies.

History and political development

When the East India Company arrived in India at the dawn of the seventeenth century, British merchants encountered a patchwork of regional authorities controlling coastal trading stations. The Port...