The Economics and Politics of Corruption in India

By Anjum Altaf

Is there an alternative to taking sides on the Anna Hazare controversy? Could one step back and gainfully employ an historical and institutional perspective to understand it better? Would it help to argue that the mismatch in speeds at which economic and political institutions have rooted themselves in Indian society is contributing to a disorienting disconnect between modern ends and pre-modern means?

The supply and demand of goods and services is mediated through the economic market and Indians have been dragged into it whether they liked it or not; they had no choice. The theory of perfect and imperfect economic markets is well known. In brief, markets can exhibit friction, they can fail, and they can exclude large segments of the population without effective demand. In all such cases, the state has to step in thereby creating the interface between economics and politics.

Corruption is a phenomenon with a bearing on all aspects of the economic market. In its most benign form, it is seen as a lubricant that reduces market friction except that it creates the perverse incentive to simultaneously increase friction in order to maximize rents. In simple economies this is accepted as a part of the culture, a way of life, the price of doing business. When complex markets fail, they need political fixes; corruption increases because alternative fixes can generate very different distributions of costs and benefits. And when economies are growing rapidly, market rules can be altered to yield windfall gains setting the stage for relentless manipulation of those entrusted with rule-making.

India has passed the stage from a simple economy to a very rapidly growing one and the corruption associated with the manipulation of rules has acquired an in-your-face character. The recent repeated exposure of its blatant nature and its casual acceptance by rule-makers has coalesced all the pent-up irritation against small-time corruption into a snowballing movement of protest. While everyone may have paid a bribe to get things done at one point or another, no one has enjoyed the experience or stopped wishing for an environment where it was not needed.

Political interventions to fix market failures or abuses, the analogous supply and demand of economic rules, are supposed to be mediated through the modern institutions of representative democracy. Here we can see the crucial difference between economic and political institutions. While there are strong incentives to expand the domain of the market because there is money to be made, there are equally strong disincentives to expand the effectiveness of representative democracy in order to preserve the power of the representatives. All major political changes in history have been the outcomes of protracted social struggles.

Remarkable enough as they are the institutions of political governance in India have their peculiarities. Sunil Khilnani has written that “Constitutional democracy based on universal suffrage did not emerge from popular pressure for it within Indian society, it was not wrested by the people from the state; it was given to them by the political choice of an intellectual elite.” It was an institution alien to most: Khilnani quotes a nationalist member of the Constituent Assembly lamenting ‘We wanted music of Veena and Sitar but here we have the music of an English band.’ Ramachandra Guha has mentioned how elections have been internalized in Indian life as “a festival with its own unique set of rituals, enacted every five years.”

The proof of the pudding is, as always, in the eating. The deeply entrenched dynastic nature of politics in India, indeed in all of South Asia, says it all. Discussing the degeneration of Indian politics, Guha notes that “When Lalu Prasad Yadav was forced to resign as chief minister of Bihar (after a corruption scandal), his wife Rabri Devi was chosen to replace him, although her previous experience was limited to home and kitchen. The practice has been extended down the system, so that if a sitting member of Parliament dies, his son or daughter is likely to be nominated in his place.” The more noteworthy aspect is a different one: that Rabri Devi was perfectly acceptable as a replacement to the electorate. This highlights an important systemic attribute of civic attitudes to governance.

It is not that these issues were unknown to those who made the institutional choices. Dr. Ambedkar’s caveat expressed at the outset is well-known: “Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” This is no different in spirit from the hope expressed in 1835 by Macaulay in the part of his infamous comment that is almost always left out of discussion: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.” (Emphasis added.)

The problem in both cases is one of very weak incentives for a ruling class to voluntarily extend to the majority either the ability to challenge the status quo or to represent effectively to alter it. Given these two glaring shortcomings, it is little surprise that citizen protests in India take the route they used to before the advent of modern institutions.

Barbra Metcalfe has described the western-educated world of meetings, pamphlets, petitions, and addresses as the “newly emerging framework of public life in the late nineteenth century.” Before 1857, people lived in another world, one of real monarchy, princely states, and colonial rule against which a very different form of protest was effective. This world, in the words of Khilnani, “was held together by a moral ideal or conception of virtue” and relied for the redress of grievances on moral suasion and the power of shame as blackmail. The precedents go back at least as far as Buddha, if not earlier, continue through Gandhi, and still find resonance today.

It needs to be reiterated that this phenomenon recurs even in well-developed democracies when the political system proves unresponsive, for whatever reason, to citizen demands. The enactment of civil rights legislation in the US as recently as the 1960s under the explicitly Gandhi-inspired leadership of Martin Luther King is a case in point.

The place of the individual who does penance and acts as the medium for the voice of the people is well-established in the Indian tradition and modern political institutions have not been effective enough to render it anachronistic. The modern media can amplify such a phenomenon; it cannot create it. Such movements can also be initiated by charlatans, be hijacked by rogues, or be infiltrated by hypocrites but that comes with the territory of this form of a protest movement.

Once again, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: the present anti-corruption movement has forced the Indian government to pay heed to the issue like no other attempt internal to the political institutions themselves. What needs to be acknowledged is that corruption is a felt issue that has emerged as a major demand for systemic change; that the existing political mechanisms do not facilitate an effective channeling of this demand; and that pre-modern methods continue to resonate with the population.

There is little doubt that the pre-modern methods are open to all the problems mentioned above. But the alternative is not to hide behind the facade of a mythical constitutional and democratic process that remains impervious to citizen demands. Nor is it useful to discredit the movement by pointing to dubious characters that might have scrambled abroad for the ride or to imply that it lacks moral credibility because most participants might be corrupt themselves.

Both the economic problem and the political demand are real. The weakness of modern political institutions has forced the movement for change into adopting more effective pre-modern forms. Beyond the imperative of dealing with the immediate crisis, there is need to think of the institutional changes needed to make the democratic system responsive to citizen demands. An Ombudsman is not the most critical of these changes. While citizens require protection, the greater need is of measures that empower and convince them that their voice can be made to matter. In this perspective, provisions for single-issue referenda and recall of individual public officials can offer a useful point of departure.

There is an added dimension that needs to be acknowledged in this quest, the fact that the capitalist economy has outgrown the political institutions that historically emerged in parallel with it. Dr. Ambedkar recognized the pre-modern aspect of the disjunction between politics and economics in India: “In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?”

This remains still a yawning gap in India but in the meantime a post-modern disconnect has made its appearance. We are no longer living in the world of one man one vote; rather, we are faced with the reality of one Rupee one vote. The reason is not hard to fathom: the system of representative governance was born at a time when the economy was populated by small owner-operated firms none of which could dominate the system. Today we live in the world of mega-, too-big-to-fail-corporations giving rise to what has been termed the ‘Corporatocracy’.

Dealing with the influence of money in such an economy is conceptually a task of a different order. It is unlikely that authoritarian or draconian measures would prove successful. If the example of the US is anything to go by, the best that might be possible, short of breaking up the corporations, would be to legalize the use of money through the evolution of transparent rules governing campaign contributions and lobbying of legislators. Kaushik Basu’s recent suggestions to legalize the giving of bribes acknowledge the need to explore unorthodox methods for a problem that is progressively becoming more entrenched and more complex.

At the very least, this should serve as a warning that pre-modern solutions to modern problems would be unlikely to withstand the power of big money. The need to disaggregate the problem of corruption and to address it intelligently is greater than ever before. Small-time corruption, one that occurs when ordinary citizens interface with organs of the state, is the cause of the maximum irritation and loss of time and productivity; its scale is beyond the oversight of an ombudsman but it is amenable to better rules and increased choice. In any case, it is a self-limiting phenomenon because it declines as the compensation of low-level public employees increases with the development of the economy. Big-time corruption, on the other hand, distorts economic trajectories, leads to gross injustice, and grows with the growth of the economy if left unchecked. It is the control of this corruption in which big players on all sides are hand-in-glove that needs the support and urgent attention of civil society. Such attention would benefit from an historical and institutional perspective.

References:

Khilnani, Sunil. 1997. The Idea of India. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Guha, Ramachandra. 2007. India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. New York: Harper-Collins.
Metcalf, Barbara. 2009. Husain Ahmad Madani. Oxford: Oneworld.
Altaf, Anjum. January 2010. Macaulay’s Stepchildren. Himal Southasian Magazine.
Altaf, Anjum. 1984. The Strategic Implications of Varying Environments: Aspects of Decision-Making under Instability. Stanford: Unpublished PhD dissertation.
SouthAsian. 2008. The Degeneration of Politics. The South Asian Idea Weblog.

Related Post: Corruption and Democracy: Disputing Neera Chandhoke

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Gandhi and bin Laden: Further Thoughts

By Anjum Altaf

We read not just to be informed but to be provoked, to have our certainties challenged, our biases questioned, and often to have our entire worldviews turned upside down. The texts I cherish most are precisely those that set me off on new lines of thought.

It is in this context that I acknowledge a debt to Joseph Lelyveld’s juxtaposition of Gandhi and bin Laden in his biography. As I mentioned in the earlier post, the connection would not have occurred to me. But having thought about it, I find I have far from exhausted the ideas that have begun churning in my head.

The first and most obvious thought pertains to our understanding of history, something that I mentioned briefly earlier. To what extent are Gandhi and bin Laden important and for what purpose do we study their lives? Revisiting the events of the two periods one begins to identify salient forces that threw up the individuals who would carry events to their next stage. To what degree would the two histories be different if Gandhi and bin Laden had never existed? Would their roles have been assigned to others whose lives we would have been studying with just as much interest?

It seems that the transition to an agitational phase in the Indian national struggle was inevitable once the British decided not to yield any ground to the moderates. Agitation was already in the air – members of the Ghadr Party (should we think of it as a secular Al-Qaeda?) had been deported from North America for “political terrorism.” Subhas Chandra Bose was already elected President of the Indian National Congress over Gandhi’s preferred candidate though Gandhi did manage to marginalize Bose. Can one assume that in the absence of Gandhi, the historical role would have been assigned to Bose or someone like Bose?

If this reading is correct, it suggests that Gandhi, or bin Laden for that matter, only imparted a certain color and personality to the events in which they had the central roles but did not initiate or alter them in any fundamental sense. In this context, I think of Qurratulain Hyder’s celebrated novel Aag ka Darya (River of Fire) that vividly illustrates this interpretation. The forces at play were literally like a river of fire that consumed all who were in its path. In the novel, it were the many idealistic and well-intentioned characters who dreamt of keeping India together. In real life, it was Gandhi himself. And it is ironical that it was Gandhi, the ‘greater’ individual, who succumbed to the forces within while bin Laden had, at least, the dubious satisfaction of falling to the ‘enemy’ he challenged.

The second thought concerns the dichotomy between intentions and consequences. If one accepts the fact that the mix of religion and politics is lethal and has fatal consequences, then the only dimension that separates Gandhi and bin Laden is intentions. Here we can stay with the consensus narrative that Gandhi was well-intentioned and bin Laden’s intentions were decidedly evil. But to what extent is that any consolation to those who suffered the violent consequences of the politics of religion whether they were peasants in Malabar or workers in New York?

This dichotomy between intentions and consequences is a much discussed topic in ethics and philosophy and people categorize themselves as ‘intentionalists’ or ‘consequentialists’. This is not my area of focus so I may be out on a limb, but it seems to me that the issue is not one of individual orientation; it really is irrelevant to history how I classify myself as an individual. In thinking over this issue in the context of Gandhi and bin Laden, it seems to me that some societies are more one or the other at a given point in time. And that distinction matters. The illustration that comes to mind is that of medical malpractice. In the case of a wrongful death in the US, the aggrieved does not care much for the fact that the doctor might have been well-intentioned. In South Asia, on the other hand, the intentions carry a lot more weight in the decision to pursue the grievance.

Therefore, despite the fact that in both the cases under discussion, the politics of religion had disastrous consequences, society accords a much higher moral stature to Gandhi than to bin Laden. And this is despite the fact that the grievances that impelled bin Laden found resonance even amongst those who opposed his ways.

Thus there are two issues to contend with: What exactly is the role of the individual in history if history is more like a river of fire than a fork in road? And how do intentions affect our interpretation of events and assessment of the individuals who are the central characters in the drama of history? Needless to say, what applies to history in the large applies equally to history in the small which comprises the personal stories of our lives.

I don’t have good answers but I am glad to be engaged in the search.

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Gandhi, bin Laden and the Global Chessboard

By Anjum Altaf

The thought of any connection between Osama bin Laden and Gandhi would not have occurred to me were it not for a remark in the much talked about biography of the latter by Joseph Lelyveld. At one point in the book, I am told, Lelyveld writes that “it would be simply wrong, not to say grotesque, to set up Gandhi as any kind of precursor to bin Laden.”  The remark piqued my curiosity especially given the fact that it was written before the recent discovery and elimination of Osama. Clearly, Lelyveld was not cashing in on a coincidence. So what was it that provoked the comparison even if it were to be dismissed?

Let me state my conclusion at the outset: the personalities bear no comparison but the contextual similarities highlight major political issues that bear exploration and attention.

The word ‘precursor’ suggests clearly that it is the contextual similarity that prompts Lelyveld’s remark. To spell it out: the existence of a foreign oppressor; the emerging resistance to the oppression; the impotence of lawful resistance; the transition to mass agitation; its reliance on the wellsprings of religious humiliation; the ensuing conflict; and the resulting blowback.

The two scenarios can be described in brief. Gandhi was central to the struggle against the colonialism of the British who had no intention to cede control till such time as Indians were ‘made ready’ for self-governance. Up until the 1920s the campaign for reforms was conducted in an exemplary constitutional manner within the rules of the game and inside legislative institutions by leaders following in the steps of Dadabhoy Naoroji and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. The British refused to yield any ground to the moderates destroying their credibility and paving the way for “extremists” (in relative terms) who took the struggle outside the legislative institutions. The leadership transitioned to Gandhi who rallied popular opposition by espousing the religious grievances of Indian Muslims distressed at the end of World War I by the fate of Turkey, the Caliphate, and the holy places. This popular opposition was combined with agitational methods relying on civil disobedience that was intended to remain non-violent. As it turned out, it was not this opposition that made the British leave; rather it was their exhaustion at the end of World War II. But the politics of religion came back to haunt British India with communal strife and the death of a million of its own citizens.

Fast forward a quarter century from the 1920s. World War II put an end to colonialism that relied on physical presence in the colonies but not to colonialism itself. Neo-colonialism relied on the imposition of local strongmen in newly independent countries to achieve the same purposes. This model, perfected in Latin America with men like Stroessner, Duvalier, Somoza and Noriega, reducing independent countries to banana republics, came to Asia in 1953 with the American intervention in Iran and nurtured surrogates like the Shah, Mubarak, Ben Ali, and House of Saud; Islam, it was claimed, was not ready for democracy. No amount of struggle within the institutions of the United Nations survived the veto to make a meaningful dent in ensuring a voice for the oppressed. Popular leaders were eliminated to the point where the US Congress had to legislate against political assassination as an instrument of foreign policy. The transition to extremism followed, first of Al-Fatah, then Hamas and finally of bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda, tapping again into the feelings of religious humiliation. Yet again, this extremism failed to redress the balance of power but engendered deadly sectarian and factional conflicts within the oppressed societies.

It is cause for thought that two men as dissimilar as Gandhi and bin Laden – the first so multi-dimensional, introspective, experimental, questioning, self-made; the second so one-dimensional, dogmatic, fanatical, a Frankenstein monster – were crowned with central roles in dramas that shared so many similarities. What was it that pulled such contrasting personalities into becoming the carriers of similar functional imperatives?

The big issue is clearly the nature of power in our world. We are locked into a configuration of nation-states where ‘national’ interest justifies exploitation of others and confers legitimacy on acts outside national borders that would not be tolerated inside them. And we are also locked into a mode of governance in which lawfully permitted means of protest are impotent in the struggle for change. The resistance inevitably transitions to extremism with, more often than not, terrible consequences for the protesters themselves.

One example of this is Iran where the American intervention in 1953 fatally skewed the development trajectory of the country sealing the fate of generations of Iranians. It cost the American military-industrial complex nothing more than a two-line apology more than half-a-century later. Such a small price is not a sufficient deterrent to exploitation and the abuse of power. Khomeini (and Iranian nuclear aspirations) emerged out of this intervention and exploitation just as bin Laden emerged out of the prolonged exploitation and stifling of popular aspirations by the Americans in the Middle East and the intervention by the Soviets in Afghanistan.

What are the consequences of such a morality of power and what do they portend for the future? Clearly, nothing of significance has changed. While the ‘rogue state’ label is used to denigrate rivals in the way of national interest, it seems hard to dispute that all states with disproportionate power, globally or locally, are rogue states of sorts. Is there any assurance that when India and China emerge as powerful global players, they would not pursue their national interests in exactly the same manner?

And while World War II put an end to British hegemony, what would it take to put an end to American power to which bin Laden proved to be a mere irritant? It is perhaps this frustrating question that provides an explanation for the chord that bin Laden struck across the social spectrum in the Muslim world despite the disputation by most of his unacceptable ways. Bin Laden is dead but the status quo in the global balance of power and neocolonialism survive. What reason is there to expect an end of the resistance to oppression? And what form would it take after Al-Qaeda is swept aside?  Who will be to bin Laden what Subhas Chandra Bose was to Gandhi?

These are important questions that beg attention in the early days of Arab revolutions yet to determine the course for the future. Would there be opportunities to redefine the balance of power or would there be a drift to yet more extremism and another global conflict?  What is the act in the drama that follows bin Laden? Can we only stand and wait?

The discussion is continued in a subsequent post, Gandhi and bin Laden: Further Thoughts.

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9/11: Socrates, Machiavelli, Christ and Gandhi

A year ago, a post (September Eleven) on this blog used the story of Coalhouse Walker in E.L. Doctorow’s novel, Ragtime, to argue that humiliation and injustice were powerful motivators for vengeance that can border on insanity. The post triggered an extended conversation that extracted the following central observation for further discussion:

It is not enough to give historical/sociological/political explanations for vengeful responses to acts of humiliation. These are important but one also has to ask simple questions like: If A insults B, is the best course of action for B to insult A or simply to kill A? What leads B to make a choice? In other words, one has to be analytic and moral as well.

I wish to explore this proposition in this post. My starting point is to assert that in an ideal world, the best course for B in response to an insult by A is neither to insult nor to kill A. Rather, the ideal response is to ignore A. The ideal response has a very old history and a very distinguished pedigree. Before his execution in Athens in 399 BC, Socrates is reported to have spoken as follows to Crito: “One should never do wrong in return, nor mistreat any man, no matter how one has been mistreated by him.”

The reason why we don’t see the ideal response more often, or ever, is best given by Machiavelli:

“The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation. The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.”

This suggests that the simple question posed in the observation is too simple. It is too simple because it ignores the context in which the action and the reaction are supposed to take place. What happens when A insults B? What happens when B ignores the insult by A? Is A held accountable in the first case? Is B insulted even more in the second?

Almost everything depends on the nature of the context. And this is perhaps the reason that two seemingly contradictory sayings attributed to Christ both find a place in the Bible: ‘turning the other cheek’ and ‘an eye for an eye.’

‘An eye for an eye’ does not imply that B should insult A if A has insulted B. On the contrary, it points to a principle of retributive or compensatory justice. It suggests that if A insults B, he/she should be held accountable and liable to compensation equivalent to the damage inflicted by the insult. If the context enshrines such a principle of justice, then B can afford to ‘turn the other cheek.’ If the context does not enshrine such a principle, then ‘turning the other cheek’ would only leave B open to further humiliation.

The key inference is that one needs to ensure a context in which personal vengeance is unnecessary and therefore not tolerated. B needs neither to insult nor kill A because a system of justice, not B as an individual, would deal with A’s provocation. When Gandhi warned, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” it was a warning against a situation in which personal vengeance became the rule because an impersonal and fair system of justice was not there to protect the aggrieved.

The conclusion of this analysis is that morality without justice is not enough. This was Doctorow’s message when he showed how Coalhouse Walker exhausted all means of obtaining justice within the system before he snapped and entered the “mirror universe, with laws of logic and principles of reason the opposite of civilization’s.” A fair hearing at any point in his tortured journey would have averted the 9/11 of the fictional account.

We can concretize this with reference to a very familiar phenomenon, the schoolyard bully.  No parents would advise their child to turn the other cheek to the bully. Either the school would need to take care of the situation or the bully would need to be stopped by other means. Giving in to a school bully is often a stop on the way to a breakdown or a suicide.

Morality without justice is a recipe for the weak and the powerless to be stripped of their most fundamental possession – their dignity – as happened to Coalhouse Walker. This is a sacrifice that can be asked of no human being. Nor should it ever be.  Recourse to personal vengeance is wrong but it will be eliminated only when it is made unnecessary.

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The Road to Partition

Jaswant Singh provides the excuse for this post. We are going to move away from narratives that seek a villain in the story. Rather, we will present a sequence of events that increasingly predisposed the outcome towards a division of the subcontinent. Along the path marked by these events, there were a number of crucial turning points at which different decisions could possibly have led to different outcomes. These remain the big what-ifs of our history.

In this narrative we present just the big picture and the key highlights. Each of the turning points needs a chapter to itself but it is useful to sketch an overview before we begin to start filling in the details. We hope to use the commentary for that purpose.

The British become masters of India

The story can start at any number of points but let us begin it in 1803. Before 1803, the British were one among a number of forces contending for power in India. With the defeat of the Marhattas in 1803, they became the sole masters taking the Mughal king under their protection.

Becoming sole masters meant that the British had now to rule India and a rationale had to be found for this rule. It is at this point that the humiliation of Indians begins because the rationale for British rule was found in the need to ‘civilize’ India, to raise her to the level where it could rule itself. Soon after, with the opening of the Suez route, came the missionaries who added the need to show the benighted heathens the true light. This is when the lingam became the penis as described by Professor Balagangadhara.

The rise of Indian nationalisms

This humiliation festered till it burst in the first outpouring of Indian nationalism in 1857. Note that this was ‘Indian’ nationalism as all the disaffected, irrespective of identity, united to ask their reluctant king to lead them in the uprising. Of course, the uprising was crushed. More important were the uneven (or at least perceived as such) punishments meted out to the groups that had participated in the uprising. This effectively split Indian nationalism along religious lines. Humiliation is a very powerful motivator and the responses to it left lasting impressions on Indian history that are being felt even today. (The most vivid account of this period is by William Dalrymple in The Last Mughal.)

Not only did Indian nationalism split into Muslim and Hindu nationalisms but each in turn split into nationalisms that looked for redemption to the past or to the future. On the Muslim side one can contrast the groups that set up seminaries with Syed Ahmad Khan setting up the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College. On the Hindu side, one can contrast the forward-looking vision of Nehru with glorification of a Hindu past by Savarkar.

Perhaps the lone voice of dissent was that of Gandhi who advised rejecting the British ‘habit of writing history.’ He must have sensed that given the context of India, any invention of a past would be divisive. “I believe,” he wrote, “that a nation is happy that has no history.” Khilnani explores this crucial point:

In contrast to nationalists who sought to construct a reliable future out of a selected past, Gandhi expressed profound distrust for the historical genre. He turned to legends and stories from India’s popular religious traditions, preferring their lessons to the supposed ones of history. The fact that so many on the subcontinent found these fables accessible, and recognized their predicaments and symbols, itself testified to a shared civilizational bond.

But it was too late in the day. It is ironic that Gandhi’s recourse to religious symbolism (including his support of the Khilafat movement in 1920 – which Jinnah opposed as ‘religious frenzy’) itself proved to be divisive.

By far the most influential of these invented histories in terms of impact on the immediate future was the nationalism espoused by Savarkar that equated India with Hinduism with everyone else “relegated to awkward, secondary positions.” Khilnani notes that “the Gandhian Congress adroitly marginalized the Savarkarite conception of Indian history and Indianness, but its presuppositions were never erased: many nationalists outside Congress, and even some within it, shared them.” This sentiment was to make itself felt after the elections of 1937.

The creation of religious identities

The shock of the great uprising of 1857 yielded two immediate lessons to the British – the need to learn more about Indian communities and to find a way to rule indirectly through a pliable elite. The first led to the introduction of the census (conducted in 1871) in which the determination of religion was of primary importance. This was contrary to the practice in Britain itself where a question about religion was not included in the census.

The fascinating story of the census is described in In the Making: Identity Formation in South Asia  by Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik (2007). The notes of the census takers themselves tell the story – no one answered to the category of ‘Hindu’ when asked their religion and so Hinduism was defined as a default category – anyone who could not be classified into any other religion was listed as a Hindu. There was no room for ambiguity; all syncretic communities were put under one heading or another (see a brief description in this post). Thus were religious identities created – as Sunil Khilnani puts it in The Idea of India: “The terminology of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ was itself an inescapable imposition of the political accountancy of the Raj.”

The creation of political identities

At the same time, the mechanism envisaged to involve the local elite into the governance of India was electoral representation. Here again, the practice differed from that in Britain where the unit of representation was a territory. In India, the British chose the units to be communities “with immutable interests and collective rights.” And once again, these were determined on the basis of religion. “Defined as majorities and minorities, they were shepherded into communal electorates whose interest the British had to protect from one another” (Khilnani).

The decision to use separate electorates based on religion was a crucial decision taken in 1909. Any other marker of identity – territory, language, ethnicity – could have been used, if at all one was needed. Or proportional representation could have been employed to give adequate representation to the various groups that the British felt were vulnerable in the electoral system. But the British opted for religion. Ostensibly it was the Muslims who asked for separate electorates. It is well known now that the British principal of the Aligarh College and the private secretary of the Viceroy drafted the memorandum spelling out these demands. The Viceroy readily agreed to the demands. Thus “the dice were loaded against Hindu-Muslim unity” (see Raghavan here).

So religious affiliation was turned into a decisive distinction. Here is a quote from the conclusion of the Indian Statutory Commission in 1930:

So long as people had no part in the conduct of their government, there was little for members of one community to fear from the predominance of the other. The gradual introduction of constitutional reforms, however, had greatly stimulated communal tension as it aroused anxieties and ambitions among many communities by the prospect of their place in India’s future political set-up.

This is followed by the verdict of the Indian historian K.N. Pannikar: “the introduction of the principle of elected representation in public institutions actively promoted the rising of communalism in India.” (Both these quotes can be found in this post.)

The next crucial turning point came in 1932 when the draft Indian Constitution proposed by the British included separate electorates for Dalits – a proposal that was supported by Dr. Ambedkar.  Gandhiji began a hunger strike because he felt that separate electorates for Dalits would “disintegrate Hindu society.” Apprehensive of the consequences, Dr. Ambedkar withdrew his support. Later, on his own deathbed, he is reported to have said that it was the “biggest mistake in his life.”

Two things are important to note here. First, no one in Congress opposed separate electorates for Muslims on the grounds that it would disintegrate Indian society (as it did). Second, the entire process of representation was not based on any consistent principle. The choice of separate electorates for Muslims was a bad one; but having made it, separate electorates for Dalits could have lent coherence to the system. Together, the Muslim and Dalit vote could have provided a balance to the Congress that could have made a first-past-the-post electoral system work. By giving separate electorates to one but not to the other the system became lopsided and unworkable.

The rules of the game

There is an important feature of this period of Indian history that is often overlooked. I will borrow the terminology of game theory to explain it. There are some contests that take place within well-defined rules of the game; there are other contests that take place to determine what the rules of a future game are going to be. There is a profound difference between the two. Think of two teams playing a game of cricket or negotiating over what the rules of cricket are going to be. Contests over rules are resolved most often when the balance of power is one-sided – thus the formation of the UN after WW2 when the big powers decided there was going to be a Security Council, they would be the permanent members, and they would have the right to veto. When the balance is not so lop-sided resolution becomes very difficult – as is the case in the negotiations over the WTO or climate change. Brinksmanship is common and statesmanship of a very high order is required to arrive at any mutually acceptable consensus. When the game itself is alien (as electoral representation was in India), the difficulties get compounded many times.

 The 1937 elections

Given the electoral system in place, the Congress won an overwhelming majority in the 1937 elections. But as Khilnani notes: “there is real force to the point that that the practical experience of Congress rule in the provinces after the elections of 1937 was instrumental in encouraging political alienation. Congress governments, subject in many cases to the influence of nationalist Hindus, lost the trust of Muslims and so helped to kindle support for the Muslim League. It was this erosion of trust that fanned a desire to redescribe a ‘minority’ within British India as a separate ‘nation’, and to take it outside the boundaries of India.”

The demand for Pakistan

Khilnani concludes the above line of argument with the statement: “The Muslim insistence on a separate state crystallized only in the decade before 1947.” It was in this period that Jinnah, the secular ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity (as vouched for most recently by LK Advani and Jaswant Singh) became the champion of Muslims only.

And here there is another critical twist in the story. Recall that all the leaders who mattered at this stage of history represented India but were not representative of India. They were all British-trained lawyers with whom the British felt at ease because of their competence and intellect and degree of comfort with European ideas. Khilnani remarks how unrepresentative Indian political parties were and that “most people in India had no idea of what exactly they had been given. Like the British empire it supplanted, India’s constitutional democracy was established in a fit of absent-mindedness.”

Pratap Bhanu Mehta in his book The Burden of Democracy writes:

The significance of India’s democratic experiment was itself disguised by the historical process through which it came about…. It was not the object of ideological passion, it was not born of a deep sense of conviction widely shared, but it was simply the contingent outcome of the conflicts amongst India’s different elites, or an unintended by-product of the British having produced too many lawyers adept in the idioms of modern politics.

The fact that the leaders representing India were lawyers and not politicians by tradition or training had a major impact on subsequent events. When Jinnah took on the brief for Pakistan, his entire focus converged on winning his case. Like it would for any lawyer, the case became the world and everything outside blurred in significance. Professor Ralph Russell has a perceptive take on this dilemma when he notes that there had indeed emerged a “sophisticated” case for Muslim separation based on secular or quasi-secular concepts (see here).

But such sophisticated concepts could not arouse the mass Muslim enthusiasm which the leadership needed if acceptance of its demands were to be enforced. With the illiterate and half-literate Muslim masses, what carried weight was precisely the ideas of the ‘most undesirable reactionary elements’… An appeal to the Muslim masses to come into the political arena could, in the late 1930s and 1940s, hardly have had any other result than to fan this sort of Muslim chauvinism. The response to Jinnah’s call in December 1939, to celebrate a ‘Day of Deliverance’ when Congress ministries resigned, already showed this; still more horrifying was the response to his Direct Action Day of 16 August 1946.

Borrowed concepts

This aspect needs to be mentioned briefly although it is perhaps of the greatest importance. The European concepts that dominated the thinking of Indian elites were grafted onto Indian soil without much analysis of their compatibility with local realities. Their efficacy and applicability were assumed to be universal: Westminster-style democracy was introduced in a vertically stratified and horizontally polarized society and nationalism in a multi-national polity, to mention only two dimensions. Khilnani remarks on the latter: “The special frisson of Savarkar’s ideas lay in their translation of Brahminical culture into the terms of an ethnic nationalism drawn from his reading of Western history.” Gandhi who was most skeptical of these borrowed concepts was swept aside because the alternatives he presented were not considered modern enough.

Conclusion

We have reached the end of the road on this whistle-stop journey and can pause here to recap. The following were the key markers of the road to Partition: The establishment of British supremacy in 1803; the humiliation of Indians; the rise of Indian nationalism and the uprising in 1857; the discriminating punishments and the splitting of Indian nationalism into Muslim and Hindu nationalisms; the first census in 1871 and the creation of religious identities; the separate electorates for Muslims in 1909 and the creation of political identities; the denial of separate electorates for Dalits in 1932 and the resulting imbalance in the electoral calculus; the contest over the rules of an alien game and the resulting brinksmanship; the elections of 1937 and the disappointment of the Muslims; the lack of experience with electoral compromise and the dominance of lawyers; the determination of Jinnah to win his brief; the mechanisms to mobilize the political support of largely illiterate voters; the Day of Deliverance in 1939.

By this time things had reached such a pass and sentiments had hardened to such an extent that the leaders, brilliant and clever and selfless as they were or might have been, had lost control of events and were just being sucked into the undertow. Put these happenings in the framework of intellectual concepts and ‘modern’ systems borrowed from Europe without consideration of their appropriateness to local conditions and one can get a sense of how overwhelming and impossible the challenge would have been to the ‘best and the brightest’ in British India.

Each one of the great leaders got something right and something wrong. None of them got everything right. And that was the tragedy of India.

Essential Reading:

Sunil Khilnani: The Idea of India
Kamljit Bhasin-Malik: In the Making: Identity Formation in South Asia
Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The Burden of Democracy
William Dalrymple: The Last Mughal
Ralph Russell: Strands of Muslim Identity in South Asia in How Not to Write the History of Urdu Literature
Bettina Robotka: Democracy in India – A Historical Perspective in The Cultural Construction of Politics in Asia by Hans Antlov and Tak-Wing Ngo (eds.)
Karl E. Meyer: The Invention of Pakistan - How the British Raj Sundered, World Policy Journal, Spring 2003.

Note: I would like to experiment with this post keeping it as a live text almost like a Wikipedia entry. Let us see if we can end up with a shared history of this period in British India. 

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An Idiot’s Guide to Music – 2

By Anjum Altaf

Is architecture frozen music?

I asked this question because it consumed many years of my life and in arriving at an answer I discovered things about myself that I now wish to explore because they have a bearing on who we are, where we come from, and how we see the world.

Think back to Macaulay’s child, the babu-in-the-making, desperately looking for architecture in music. Taught only reading, writing and arithmetic (in English) with a polishing of calculus and Fourier transforms, it was natural to assume that music was music was music and it was only a matter of diligent search that would reveal to me the architecture that Goethe had seen.

And so it was a blinding (to an idiot) flash that opened up the possibility that there could be music and there could be music and that the two could differ and therefore the metaphor that applied to one need not apply to the other.

Post-flash the differences that had never occurred became embarrassingly obvious. It also became embarrassingly obvious that anyone who had been decently educated (as opposed to been meticulously trained), familiar with his/her heritage, and comfortable in his/her skin need not have suffered the agony of searching for architecture in music.

It is obvious now that the Indian and Western music traditions differ in their aesthetics, their technical foundations, and their organization. Despite years of dabbling I am still not equipped to say much about the first two because they require a domain expertise that was not part of my education. Based on the bits and pieces I have picked up I can make some semi-intelligent comments mixed up with some horribly misplaced conjectures and I wish now to leave that discussion to others who know more.

The organization of music, on the other hand, requires less specialized knowledge and more application of common sense and I wish (ultimately) to focus on that dimension. To give a preview of the type of question I wish to explore I would ask you to imagine yourself at concerts of Western and Indian classical music. A question that intrigues me is the following: Why is the central figure in the Western concert the conductor and why is there no conductor at all in the Indian concert?

Now these are not the kinds of questions that will radically change the world but they do have some value in exploring. First, they help us to understand the social organization of society that is reflected in the organization of its music. And, second, they open up the possibility that if the organization of music is local and not universal so could the organization of many other things, like politics, for example.

This last is important because Macaulay’s children have interpreted the world through a European lens and assumed European concepts to have universal validity. And this can have far-reaching consequences. In The Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani says the following about Savarkar who in 1923 wrote Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?: “The special frisson of Savarkar’s ideas lay in their translation of Brahminical culture into the terms of an ethnic nationalism drawn from his reading of Western history.” It was only Gandhi amongst the nationalist leaders who saw through the dangers of such a course summing it in one of his enigmatic remarks: “I believe that a nation is happy that has no history.”

Nationalism, the nation-state, democracy – all these were European ideas that assumed an unquestioned universality for Macaulay’s children. How often have we heard Churchill’s famous dictum: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried.” The idea of democracy was not born in the Enlightenment; it had been around at least since Plato and Aristotle. So how was it that it did not occur to anyone for almost two millennia that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that were being tried? Did it have anything to do with the social organization that made the political organization of democracy infeasible over this long period?

At the very least this is a question worth asking. Europe is not the world, just another province in the world. This is the thesis of Provincializing Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty which unfortunately is written at a level that is beyond my ability to follow.

And so I am motivated to attempt something simpler – to explore some musical metaphors and look through the organization of music into the organization of society. From there I would like to work back up to the organizations of art and politics that would be compatible with a given social organization and test these predictions against the reality that exists. And then I would like to discuss what we might and might not borrow realistically from Europe to our advantage in South Asia.

The third post in this series is here.

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Similar and Different: Common and Problematic

Two books have come out within a year pointing to a serious problem common to India and Pakistan.  

Before describing the books let us note that we are now talking about what is common between India and Pakistan. This makes a lot more sense than debating whether Indians and Pakistanis are similar. Indians and Pakistanis have so many differences within their own communities that it is futile to try and reduce them to a single dimension that can then be compared. To take a very simple illustration: there are secular Indians and communal Indians just as there are secular Pakistanis and communal Pakistanis. There is no one type of Indian or Pakistani. 

But one can argue that the proportion of the population that is communal today in Pakistan is greater than in India. We are now in different territory – we are talking about a difference between Pakistan and India. Specifically, we are asking what has made Pakistan more communal than India in its outlook?

This is a plausible but hypothetical question. We really do not have evidence to make any such claim with confidence. As we have mentioned in a previous post, we tend to generalize from the small community that dominates the media. We do not have a good sense of how the majorities that are still rural in both countries feel about these issues. All we can say is that on this count there this not much to choose between the newsmakers in the two countries. So, let us leave this as an open empirical question for the moment and return to the books we mentioned at the outset.

The book on Pakistan is Islamisation of Pakistani Social Studies Textbooks by Yvette Claire Rosser (2009). In his review of the book Yoginder Sikand summarizes the key finding:

Although Rosser does not say it in so many words, the current turbulent political scenario in Pakistan, in particular the rise of radical Islamist forces in the country, cannot be seen as inseparable from the narrow political agenda that the Pakistani state, ever since its formation, has consistently sought to pursue as is reflected in the social science textbooks that it has commissioned, and through which it has sought to impose its own ideology on its people.

And this is his conclusion:

Rosser’s findings are of critical importance, particularly in the context of present developments in Pakistan, which is witnessing the alarming growth of radical Islamist groups, impelled by a version of Islam very similar to the one these texts uphold. Obviously, explanations of the growing threat of radical Islamism in Pakistan cannot ignore the crucial role of these texts, which are compulsory reading for all Pakistani students, thus playing a central role in moulding their minds and worldviews. The texts are also a reflection of, as well as a cause for, the pathetic state of social science research and discourse in present-day Pakistan.

The book on India is RSS, School Texts And The Murder Of Mahatma Gandhi: The Hindu Communal Project by Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula Mukerjee and Sucheta Mahajan (2008). Khushwant Singh refers to it here and observes:

I wasn’t aware that the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS had set up many schools across the country, known as Saraswati Shishu Mandirs and Vidya Bharati Schools. The number of teachers employed runs into thousands; the number of students into hundreds of thousands. They also have a publishing house to print their own textbooks. I was happy to learn this as our country needs more schools — the more the better — as well as more textbooks. However, when I discovered what they teach in these schools, I was sorely disappointed. It is make-believe historical fiction to boost our morale and foster suspicion and hatred against Indian-born minorities who don’t share the same kind of pride in our past, notably Muslims and Christians….

Before you accuse me of anti-RSS and BJP bias, take a look at a booklet — RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi (Sage). It is compiled by three distinguished professors of history at JNU. The source of every quotation is given to prove its authenticity. The basic text is barely 80 pages.

Finally, ask yourself, is this kind of brain-washing of young minds and filling them with hate good for the country? It will turn our sweet dreams of a hate-free Hindustan into a nightmare of vicious civil strife.

The question prompted by these two books is the following: Why do we have this common phenomenon in Pakistan and India?

In Pakistan, analysts are used to attributing it to one person (Zia ul Haq) or to a special juncture in history that aligned the interests of American intelligence, Saudi money, and the Pakistan army in this unholy enterprise. But what explains the emergence of something quite similar in India that had no connection with the Afghan war?

We are forced to concede, at least as a hypothesis, that there are more systemic forces at work that are giving rise to fairly common responses in the two countries.

What could these systemic forces be? We will come back to this question in subsequent posts.

Suggestions from readers are welcome.

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