India After Independence: 1947-2000 (80 page)

The only unfortunate part is that as in other democracies, the Indian political system lacks a mechanism through which the direction and implementation of the policies preferred by the electorate can be enforced. There is, therefore, a strong need to reform and reinvigorate both political and administrative institutions to meet the changed needs of the time,
especially the demands of the poor and the disadvantaged for greater share in the fruits of development and for the lessening of their oppression. The institutions as they have functioned so far have been geared to the maintenance of the social status quo and stability; and they have not performed that task badly. But they have to be reshaped further to undertake the new twin tasks of economic development and social transformation, mandated by the immense politicization of the people brought about by the national movement and the functioning of democracy. Simultaneously, there was and is also the need to create fresh structures and institutions through which the people’s energies are harnessed for these twin tasks. Clearly, the role of political parties and political leaders is critical in this respect. While political leaders of the type and calibre thrown up by the freedom struggle can perhaps no longer be expected, the future of the Indian people depends a great deal on their capacity to produce and reproduce leaders with a basic social and political commitment to the ideals embodied in the freedom struggle and the Constitution.

As we peer into the first decade of the new millennium, fundamental questions confront us. What has India achieved so far? What problems does it face? And what are the tasks and prospects for the future?

Today, our newspapers, weeklies and books on current affairs, besides many intellectuals, tend to see India since independence as an area of darkness. In 1993, a writer, C. Thomas, pithily summarized, the ‘torrent of wretchedness’, though not sharing it, as follows:

. . . language riots, caste riots, communal bloodshed, the assassination of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, wars with Pakistan and China, secessionism in Punjab, an uprising in Kashmir, bloodshed in Assam, anti-Hindi movements in the south, starvation, corruption, pollution, environmental catastrophe, disparities of wealth and poverty, caste prejudice, burning brides,
sati,
killing girl babies, bonded labour, child labour, criminalization of politics, discrimination against women, human rights abuses.
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This ran contrary to the optimism which many intellectuals maintained till Nehru was alive. But, as S. Gopal, one of our tallest historians, put it in 1984, with the passage of time, the Nehru era began to

. . . appear more and more of a faded golden age . . . It is as if, when he died, he took a whole epoch with him. The Nehru age, of confident assumptions, high aspirations and considerable achievements, seems today a vanished world. There is a sickening sense of lost ideals and missed opportunities. Public service is no longer a selfless pursuit, politics in India has become dispirited and the objectives which he gave his people, then so challenging, now seem tired and muddled . . . The collective self-confidence of India has received severe jolts, making the people less optimistic and economically self-assured and more fragmented socially and politically.
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There is, of course, much in India of yesterday and today which gives rise
to despair and despondency among many, for who can deny the existence of mass poverty, gross inequality, intolerable illiteracy, social injustice, gender discrimination, social oppression, corruption, casteism and communalism and poor quality of life in general. But these and many other weaknesses should not cloud our vision. There is not enough reason for us to allow ourselves to be stifled in a pall of gloom, to be drowned in a sea of depression.

Certainly, we have by no means solved all our problems—some quite serious—even after fifty years of independence. Not all that the Indian people had hoped to achieve during the heady days of the freedom struggle or set out to accomplish on the eve of independence has been achieved. Undoubtedly, serious deficiencies have remained; fresh weaknesses have emerged; new dangers have arisen.

Still, it would be wrong not to acknowledge that India has made substantial all-round progress; its achievements in the last fifty-two years have been considerable by any historical standards, especially if we keep in view the level from which it started and ‘how difficult was the terrain along which we had to tread.’
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Vast political, economic and social changes have taken place. In the process, a lot of scum, gathered over the centuries, has also come to the top. But the legacy of the freedom struggle has held—and not got diluted significantly. The qualitative advance made by India in many areas has been ignored by many because it has occurred gradually and without any ostentation or drama. India is now poised to make a breakthrough in many areas. The advance already made in the political, economic and social spheres, when taken in its entirety, should give the Indian people faith in their capacity to find solutions to the many remaining problems and ills of their society.

A major Indian success has been scored in the strengthening of Indian unity politically, economically and emotionally and the pushing forward of the complex process of nation-in-the-making. India’s immense diversity has not hampered the process, even while this diversity has been sustained and has, in fact, flowered. Also tensions generated by immense social churning have not come in the way of further developing the sense and sentiment of Indianness, of Indians being one people.

There have, of course, been several challenges to Indian unity but they have mostly been overcome. The solution of the divisive official language issue, reorganization of linguistic states, refusal to counterpose regional-cultural identities to Indian identity, sympathetic handling of the problems of the tribals and their integration into the national mainstream, firm treatment of separatist movements even when showing an understanding of the feelings underlying them, genuine efforts, even when not very successful, to reduce regional inequality, have gone a long way in ensuring that Indian unity is no longer fragile and that the existence of
India as a viable and assured political entity is under little threat.

Disparities between states still remain, but they do not threaten Indian unity, for they are often caused by infirmities internal to a state and are not the result of internal colonialism or sub-colonialism where a backward region is subjected to economic subordination and exploitation by another more advanced region or by the rest of the country.

A large number of regional or one-state parties have come into existence over the years. They have freely assumed power in the states and have even shared power at the Centre by allying with one or the other national party or becoming part of an alliance on an all-India basis. These parties fight for greater access to central resources and not for their own separate and fuller control over the region’s resources for they already enjoy that.

Moreover, Indian politics, both electoral and non-electoral, has increasingly become national in nature. As a result of regular country-wide general elections, the dominant presence of all-India political parties, especially Congress, nation-wide campaigns on economic and political issues, and the operation of all-India transport and communication networks, including radio, TV, newspapers and films, a single political culture—a unitary ‘language of politics’—pervades all parts of the country. It has, therefore, not been accidental that even after the end of the Nehru era, the electoral waves affecting the 1971, 1977, 1980 and 1984 general elections were national in character, as has been the victory of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in the general election of 1999.

However, regional economic and developmental disparities still pose serious problems along with the communal and caste divide. Communalism, in particular, continues to stalk the land. For decades, communal forces were being contained electorally, and their ideological spread was also restricted. But in the last two decades or so, there has been a weakening of the anti-communal consensus among secular forces. Quite often, as in 1989, and more recently in 1998 and 1999, they have directly or indirectly allied with communal forces, thus giving the latter credibility and respectability. Communalism is today the chief threat to Indian unity for India cannot remain a strong and united nation except on the basis of secularism. We have seen in chapter 24, on Punjab, what can happen if communalism is not dealt with firmly and squarely in time, if religion is not completely separated from politics and if, instead, an effort is made to compromise with and conciliate communal forces. In this respect, an area needing particular attention and innovation is that of culture and tradition. Indigenous cultures and traditions and popular religions play an important part in the life of a people. If the communal and obscurantist forces are not to be permitted to appropriate India’s cultural heritage, it is necessary for modern and secular forces to establish creative and critical links with the country’s cultural heritage and tradition. They have, unfortunately, not fully explored this area of public life. In particular, secular, democratic elements must distinguish between religion as philosophy, spiritual experience, guide to morality and psychological
solace and religion as dogma, bigotry and a vehicle for communalism.

In any case, it is very necessary to carefully nurture the process of nation-in-the-making as it is not a unilinear process and can therefore suffer setbacks and interruptions as it faces new challenges.

The great success story of independent India has been its secular, federal and multi-party political system. The nation has had to face tasks of immense magnitude and confront numerous problems, e.g., having to function in a backward economy with an impoverished citizenry, being torn by violent social conflicts, having to wage three major wars and face high costs of national defence since 1947, gradual weakening of many of its institutions and being constantly under international pressure. Despite all this, the political system has, however, shown remarkable resilience and flexibility and has stood the test of time and exhibited an ability to overcome several crises, for example those of 1967-69 and of 1974-77. Indira Gandhi was to put it pithily in August 1972 when asked to list India’s achievements since 1947: ‘I would say our greatest achievement is to have survived as a free and democratic nation.’
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Political stability has been an important characteristic of independent India’s political system. There have been since 1967, rapid changes of governments in the states and since 1989, at the Centre, but political stability has persisted. Different political forces and formations have, waged their political battles in the political arena prescribed by the Constitution. Changes in governments have taken place according to constitutional and democratic rules and have invariably been quietly and often gracefully accepted by those voted out of power by the parliament or the electorate. People have taken it for granted that elections, largely free and fair and held regularly, would decide who would rule the country, a state or a panchayat. Greater political participation by the people, including in its agitational forms, has not led to political instability.

The political system has also acquired more or less unquestioned legitimacy, the few who have questioned its basic tenets having fallen in line in the end. Thus, the Communists for several decades challenged, though only in theory, the basic constitutional structure as being geared to domination by the ruling, exploiting classes. But today they are among the more vocal defenders of the Constitution. The communalists have been trying from the outset to undermine the secular character of Indian society and polity but even they pay verbal obeisance to secularism though they try to distort its character through redefinition. Similarly, though Jayaprakash Narayan questioned the multi-party parliamentary system during the sixties and the early seventies, in the end he too accepted it after the lifting of the Emergency in 1977. It is also significant that new aspiring groups have been increasingly functioning within the broad parameters of the political
system to advance their interests. In fact, the very longevity of the system, its continued functioning for over five decades has given it strength and enabled it to strike deep roots. What W.H. Morris-Jones wrote in 1966 is equally valid today: ‘The combination of political stability with the establishment of a free, and freely moving, political system is what we are entitled to call India’s political miracle.’
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Perhaps the most significant of India’s achievements since 1947 is the firm entrenchment of political democracy and civil liberties which have become a basic feature of Indian life. Indians enjoy today a free Press, the freedom to speak, travel and form associations, the right to freely criticize the government; they have competitive elections, unrestricted working of political parties, an independent judiciary, the right to participate in political life and to change the government through the ballot-box, and freedom from fear of arbitrary arrest.

India alone among the post-colonial countries has sustained a democratic and civil libertarian polity since its inception. Commitment to democratic values has deepened over the years among most Indians. Paradoxically, even the experience of the Emergency underlined this attachment. The belief has also taken root that social transformation through a democratic political framework is possible. Nationalization of banks and several industries, land reforms—even quite radical as in Kerala and West Bengal—and effective functioning of Panchayati Raj, with its provision for 30 per cent reservation of seats for women, and successful and unopposed working of the system of reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes in several states, has shown that political democracy as such is not an obstacle to social transformation and socio-economic reforms in the direction of equity and equality.

A prominent and positive feature of Indian political development in the post-independence period has been the steadily growing political awareness among the people and their greater direct and indirect participation in the political process.

The freedom struggle had already politicized large sections of the people. Popular agitational and electoral politics have pushed this process further. India has certainly become over time a politically more active society with an ever larger number of people and social groups being politically mobilized and ‘incorporated into the body politic’.

The disadvantaged—women, agricultural labourers, small peasants, the urban poor—have increasingly come to believe that their social condition is unjust and is capable of being changed and that the desired change can be brought about through politics and by the assertion of their political rights. The people in general want a share in political power and a greater share of the wealth they produce. They are also no longer willing. to tolerate certain naked forms of oppression, discrimination, deprivation
and neglect. For example, a government which would let a large number of people die in a famine, as happened during the droughts in the colonial period, would not last even a few weeks.