India risks turning into a princely republic

Back in the late 1940s, modern India’s founding fathers gave the country’s ambitious political experiment an august beginning. The newly formed Constituent Assembly set aside political partisanship to appoint B.R. Ambedkar, a bitter critic of the ruling Congress party, as chair of the committee tasked with framing a constitution. What mattered was that he was a brilliant constitutional lawyer, and they reasoned that the nation needed her best minds to work together.

It was a prescient move. Ambedkar shaped a noble document that promised a multi-party political system, a secular state and social reform while specifying the mechanisms to be used for achieving this creed. Yet the inheritors of India’s political system have largely failed to uphold their political forebears’ early promises of constitutional integrity and bipartisanship.

William Gladstone, the British statesman, once noted that the British constitution “presumes more boldly than any other the good sense and the good faith of those who work it.”

Those working India’s Constitution, however, have possessed neither the good sense nor the good faith to honour its primacy and have sanctioned vast deviations from its spirit for political expediency.

Nehru, in his inaugural address, described independence as the moment when, “the soul of the nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

In its early days, the Indian parliament was dominated by erudite, upper-caste lawyers and it hosted erudite debates on a wide range of national issues.

Today, Nehruvian self-expression is a fantasy: parliament often resembles the first circle of Dante’s Inferno. Legislators are interrupted and shouted down by their political rivals, papers are torn up, fist-fights occur and furniture is flung about in anger. Last year, three out of a session’s four weeks saw no work due to boycotts, despite the fact that several bills lay pending.

Even when parliament does function, discussions in the house are less about analysing laws and more about partisan point-scoring. Opposition parties will stymie a ruling party’s initiatives, only to push for similar laws once they come to power. That the role of the opposition is to criticise government policy, and to educate public opinion, is largely lost on India’s lawmakers.

This may be because parties are separated more by narrow sectional interests than by issues of policy. However, much of the blame rests with the monarchic nature of politics. Barely any of India’s political parties have any internal democracy. They are run as feudal fiefdoms, with a single monarch or family commanding absolute power and selectively allowing it to cascade downward to loyal satraps. Power flows from patronage, which requires unquestioning fealty — not to the constitution or to the people, but to the party monarch. And yet, these autocratic politicians get repeatedly re-elected by the people. Why?

It may be that Indians, whom the French sociologist Louis Dumont famously described as “Homo Hierarchicus”, have been conditioned over centuries to bow down to autocracy. They blindly accept the wealthy and powerful, despite their faults. After all, despite all the grand talk of India’s progress, it is still, as one writer put it, “a survival society — characterised by hierarchy and want.”

Or perhaps it is the impersonal culture that thwarts effective democracy. As the noted political thinker, Andre Beteille wrote, “How does one build institutions when the obligations of caste, kin, and community play such a determining role in public life?”

The institutions provided for by the constitution, which were painstakingly nurtured by the British and later by Nehru and its ministers, have been routinely degraded by his political successors. In particular, Indira Gandhi’s rule in the 70s (especially the 21-month long “Emergency” period of de-factor dictatorship) can be singled out for conditioning the political culture.

Once called the ‘Empress of India’, she brazenly nurtured a culture of sycophancy and appointed pliant judges and civil servants to supposedly independent positions. This process has been extended by her political successors, in total violation of the spirit of the constitution. The contempt for the ordinary Indian voter has continued on.

Ambedkar and his colleagues were not unaware of the frail nature of India’s constitutional spirit. Speaking to the Constituent Assembly in those early days, he warned that “democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.”

Despite the proliferation of political parties, and the elaborate procedures of vote-seeking and the forming of governments, it is a failure of Indian politics that it has failed to promote a broader democratic and civic spirit among citizens. Public opinion is largely immobile and, despite rising education levels, is sooner driven by religious or regional identities than by public interest. In many cases, it has been possible for actual gangsters to be voted into political office.

In many ways, as the historian Ramachandra Guha argues, Indian democracy was a reckless experiment. Never before had a largely poor and illiterate population, deeply divided along caste and linguistic lines, been immediately given universal adult franchise. Most societies earned their franchise gradually — allowing the public to ease into their political rights and responsibilities and do justice to it. The British, for example, did not offer universal suffrage until 1928!

Ambedkar was clear that the success of the experiment would depend greatly on the political conduct of the voting populace: “The constitution is flexible and strong enough to hold India together in peace and war. Indeed, if things go wrong, the reason will not be that we had a bad constitution. What we will have to say is that man was vile.”

Indeed, he is. The Indian republic’s constitutional culture remains, at best, a work in progress. Without serious effort to reform it, however, we risk turning India into a princely republic.

— Rakesh Mani is a writer and Mumbai-based teacher working with low-income schools.