6
No story of the European state can be complete if it does not take into account its effects outside Europe. Francois Guizot's classic history of the European state requires a supplement.1 His magisterial account presents the picture of the state inside Europe's own history, but the story of the European state has an equally significant counterpart, a history that happens outside. Outside Europe the modern state succeeded in two senses—first as an instrument, and second as an idea. First, the organization of European societies produced by the modern state was an essential factor in Europe's ability to bring the rest of the world under its colonial control. Here the state functioned as an immense and unprecedented enhancement of European societies’ capacity for collective action—in raising military resources, producing the economic resources which undergirded its military success, focusing on clearly defined strategies of control and conquest. In fact, when other peoples began to reflect on the reasons for this astonishing success, they often settled on this as its intangible but indispensable instrument. Premodern forms of political authority were utterly inadequate in dealing with the power of the modern European state. It could be restrained and eventually effectively opposed only through a movement that organized the power of entire populations against European colonial regimes.
The European state also succeeded a second time as an idea. Successful nationalist movements, after decolonization, enthusiastically accepted the idea of a modern society centred upon the state's sovereignty—a principle of social construction entirely different from traditional ones. Except for a few odd individuals like Gandhi and Tagore, nationalists did not object to the presence of the modern state, only to its being under European control. With Independence, they did not wish, except in a few cases like Gandhi, to ‘abolish’ the state, but to use it for their own purposes. After two hundred years of colonialism, the European state receded from India, but the idea of the state brought in by colonialism continued its triumphant career. Eventually, the gigantic transformations of third world societies after decolonization, for good or for ill, were driven through by this modern instrumentality of the state. In the absence of other forces—such as great revolutionary social classes like the bourgeoisie or the proletariat that played such an important role in European social transformations—it was the state which almost entirely arrogated to itself the power of proposing, directing, and effecting large-scale social change. There might be great debates about judging what the state has done; but there is no doubt that it has been the single most powerful collective agency in the recent history of these societies. That is why the state is central to the story of non-Western modernity, and Western colonialism is central to the story of the non-Western state.
This essay is not about the post-colonial state in general, only the historically specific form it assumed in India. It is thus necessary to spell out what can be generalized from the Indian case and what cannot. First, although India is a single country, its numerical significance is obvious: what happens to its people politically represents the collective experience of about a third of the non-Western world. Second, as there is little dispute today about the desirability of democracy, the Indian case is particularly important. It is one of the most successful cases of democracy outside Europe. But the ‘success’ of democracy is an ambiguous idea: it is possible to give it a minimal or an expansive interpretation. The narrow and minimalist reading is simply the continuance of a competitive electoral system of government: if this system continues uninterrupted over a long period of time, that draws applause as a success of democracy. But there can be an alternative, Tocquevillean reading of democracy's success—which is not just a continuation of a system of government, but the capacity of this government to produce long-term egalitarian effects. In India, democracy has been a remarkable success in both these senses. First, in a highly diverse society, divided by religion, caste, classes, languages, the democratic system has functioned without interruption or popular apathy for nearly six decades. Second, and more significantly, this institutional continuation of democracy has produced a fundamental social transformation which is in some respects startlingly different from the European social processes. Thirdly, if democratic institutions spread and achieve success in the non-European world, these will produce historical results depending on the forms of sociability available in each historical context. Such cases of possible democratic success are likely to follow trajectories closer to India's than to modern Europe's. To understand the prospects of democracy in the future, the story must include the Indian case alongside Western narratives of the nineteenth century.
This essay interprets ‘post-colonial’ as indicating not the trivial fact that this state emerged after the colonial regime departed, but in the stronger sense to mean that some of its characteristic features could not have arisen without the particular colonial history that went before. I also believe, unlike some other political scientists, that political change in modern India cannot be studied fruitfully except in a long-term historical perspective. To understand the unfolding story of politics and the state today, it is thus essential to start with the historical transformation of political power in the age of colonialism.
Modernity in India, and perhaps also in other European colonies, was largely a political affair. All commentators on European modernity point out the significant, if not originary, role that transformations of the production and economic processes played in the making of European modernity. I wish to suggest that in India, by contrast, the causal powers of economic change were far more limited. The type of capitalist development that eventually took place was determined to a large extent by political imperatives of state control. The colonial state created the conditions for early capitalist development, rather than the other way round. Modernity came to India by the political route, through the introduction of a new activity called ‘politics’. Indeed, the activity was so new that in many vernaculars it is still colloquially referred to by the English-derived word ‘politics’, rather than by an orthogenetic term. This new activity assumed primarily three forms in successive stages of modern Indian history. Initially, it entered with the establishment of new institutions of colonial rule, eventually crystallizing into a colonial state/regime. Sociologically, ‘politics’ was an activity which involved British rulers and Indian elites who engaged in transactions of power with them. In the second phase, its scope was extended through the popular nationalist movement from the 1920s, when Indians from other social groups and classes took part in this as a large, encompassing, transformative activity. Although most Indians were affected by this form of politics, their participation and capacity to behave as actors depended on class and education. Nationalist politics, in spite of its wider appeal, remained more the politics of the wider educated elites, much less of the ordinary Indian peasantry. Curiously, even after Independence, this structure continued unchanged for about two decades. Since the 1970s, in another serious transformation, the business of ‘politics’ has become much more expansive, with lower-class politicians bringing the concerted pressures of their ordinary constituents into the life of the state.
What were the central processes in this transformation? Why has politics of a discursive, representative, democratic character succeeded in India? The basic argument of this essay is controversial, but fairly simple. There can be no doubt that in the last two hundred years Indian society has undergone a most fundamental transformation. The central point of this change, in my view, is the transformation of a society in which ‘imperative co-ordination’, to use Weber's inelegant but useful phrase, was achieved through a religious system based on caste, with comparatively little role being played by the state, to an order controlled by the state—its institutions, its laws, its resources, its functionaries, and its place in ordinary people's imagination. In premodern times, control over the state was relatively marginal to the narratives of significant social change. The most significant upheavals in traditional Indian history were not dynastic or regime changes, but the challenges to the religious organization of society through the reform movements of Buddhism and Jainism against ritualistic Brahminism in ancient India, or the rise of bhakti cults against Hindu orthodoxy in late-medieval times. By contrast, from the middle of the nineteenth century the state's role has been absolutely central in the passage of social change. The colonial state ended in 1947, but the new way of organizing social life through ‘politics’, making the society state-centred, has not merely continued but expanded its jurisdiction over all aspects of social life. The ‘European’ state thus still dominates modern Indian life in those two senses. The institutional apparatuses introduced into Indian society by British colonial power have not been dismantled, but massively extended. Secondly, the idea that to be modern is to live through the state, to organize society through this central institution of power, has had a great vindication—ironically through the demise of colonial power itself.
Following this main idea, I shall present my argument in three parts: the first will offer a brief outline of the arrangement of social power in traditional (pre-colonial) India; the second will describe the changes brought in by colonialism and Indians’ transaction with its initiatives; and the final section will analyse what has happened to this state after Independence—by its becoming a ‘nation-state’, and the manner in which principles of democracy have been interpreted by social forces in India.
Colonial power came to an Indian society which already had a longstanding and intricate political organization. Much of northern and central India had been under an Islamic empire for nearly six centuries.2 Yet the presence of Islam in India was special. In most other societies, a conquering Islamic power had converted the people and transformed indigenous social practices and religious doctrine. In India the irresistible military power of Islamic dynasties learnt to coexist with the immovable social structure of the Hindu caste system. Indian society thus had a dual structure of power, composed of a strange crossing of Hindu and Islamic principles, From very early times, ‘Hindu’ society (an anachronistic description for a collection of different sects united by a single sociological order) had an explicit and intricate arrangement of social power structured in a caste order.3 Caste represents a peculiar structure of social power which tends to circumscribe the jurisdiction of political authority. Caste, as is generally known, has two forms—the formal, ritualistic structure of the four varnas, and the effective sociological structure of much more numerous jatis. Social anthropologists usually give less importance to the formal varna structure, but it is significant for one central reason. It shows that at the centre of the caste order is a scheme of an asymmetric hierarchy, which separates the goods that ordinary human beings seek and value in mundane life, and segregates groups according to these. The underyling theory behind the caste order implied that the primary values/goods of human life were ritual status/religious prestige, political power to rule over society, and the economic power to control wealth. The central logic of the varna version of the caste system was to separate the social groups which exercised monopolistic control over each of these human goods. The social order of castes ritually separated the fields of intellectual authority, political and military supremacy, and commercial wealth.
These arrangements meant that, by contrast with the aristocratic societies of pre-modern Europe, political pre-eminence, economic wealth, and cultural prestige did not coincide in a single social elite. Occupational separation by birth ensured that social groups lived in three types of relations to each other: segmentation, interdependence, and hierarchy. Occupationally divided social groups could not seek the same goods; and therefore, it reduced, if not entirely excluded, competition for wealth and power. Secondly, the caste order was based on a generally recognized social constitution, an authoritative allocation of social roles, rewards, and therefore life trajectories which governed the conduct of social groups in minute detail. Significantly, this authoritative allocation did not originate from political authority. Political rulers could not alter the rules of this social constitution, but were expected to uphold and administer its ‘immutable’ norms, and crucially, were themselves subject to its segmentally relevant rules. Consequently, in this social world the power of political rulers was limited to ‘executive’ functions: that is, to protect the social constitution, punish infringements, and return it to its order of normalcy. In this sense, political rulers did not have the ‘legislative’ authority to reconstitute this order, except in marginal ways. The idea of modern sovereignty therefore did not apply to the power of the political authority in this society.
However, there is an obvious objection at this point. Is this not an excessively Hindu view of political power? Since large parts of Indian society had been continually governed by Islamic rulers since the eleventh century, does this model apply to those areas? One of the most interesting historical questions about India's political past is the precise relation that Islamic imperial power established with the predominantly Hindu society over which it exercised control. Although Islamic religious doctrine was fundamentally different from Hinduism (e.g. over idolatry, monotheism, egalitarianism, etc.), in sociological terms (i.e. in the relation between political authority and the social constitution) Islam in India observed very similar principles, and tacitly accepted the restrictions the caste society placed on the ‘legislative’ functions of rulers. Thus, the coming of Islam was highly significant in other ways, but not in terms of the fundamental structure of the relation between political power and social order. It required a state of a very different sort, animated by very different intellectual principles of self-organization and endowed with new types of cognitive-statistical appliances, to alter this stable social constitution. The modern state is, by definition, the state which, because of its self-interpretation in terms of the principle of sovereignty, considers this invasive transformation of society possible.
Although the colonial system of states meant a subordination of other societies to some metropolitan European powers, the actual transactions of colonialism were extremely diverse. First, the European states themselves came from vastly different cultural and institutional contexts, and these differences were reflected in the system of political power each of them brought into their colonies. Secondly, much depended on exactly when a territory was brought under European control. Third, European powers followed entirely different projects in different colonies, and the experience of colonial rule in one part of the world often informed decisions about another: British rule in Africa, for instance, was very different from what it was in India. Finally, the exact nature of colonial rule depended not merely on what the colonial power was ideologically intent on doing, or instrumentally capable of achieving, but also the manner in which the colonized society deployed its own cultural and political resources in this encounter. Focusing on India therefore gives us a single story out of many diverse ones of European colonial rule, and because of the strange intimacy that developed between India and Britain, it might portray European colonial domination in general in a misleadingly benevolent light. Not all groups in colonized countries responded to the arrival of European power and culture with the initial enthusiasm of India's elites. European powers did not direct the same amount of attention and energy towards the moral and social transformation of all their dominions. The sharing of at least abstract common political principles between the colonial rulers and the nationalist elite to produce an effective framework of political conflict was also rather unusual, as was the negotiated nature of the eventual withdrawal of British power.
The state established by British colonialism was a historical force of an untraditional kind. Even though its immediate instrument was a commercial company, the dominion established by British power occurred in an intellectual context which presupposed sovereignty as a definitional quality of state power.4 Thus, when the British eventually turned India into a crown colony in 1858, the colonial state explicitly assumed the rights of sovereignty as understood in European discourses of the nineteenth century. Interestingly, as British colonial power did not enter India in the shape of state authority, the initial conflict was not in the form of a struggle between two states—the declining Mughal empire and the British crown. It is the peculiar constitution of society, and the relative externality of the state to the orders of caste practice, which allowed this to happen. By the early nineteenth century, British authorities already controlled much of commercial activity, military power, and quasi-political administrative apparatuses, and had a substantial influence on cultural life in several parts of India. When they finally ended the fiction of Mughal rule after the rebellion of 1857, Mughal authority was already purely nominal. But this first, and rather peculiar, stage in the establishment of British power, stretching over a century, is critical for an understanding of the special dynamics of British colonialism in India. In this stage, we must try to sketch out the contours of advancing colonial power, rather than describe the structure of the ‘colonial state’.
British power, established initially through control over channels and instruments of commerce and revenue collection, and at the second step through the introduction of modern cultural apparatuses, slowly turned into a state of the modern kind—though its actual institutions were quite different from nineteenth-century European models. The most significant implication of this is that Indian opinion was always internally deeply divided about colonial rule. Older aristocracies that lost their power to the British were understandably hostile. Similarly, traditional Hindu holders of social authority and prestige, like conservative Brahmins, often looked at the new influences with hostility. Recent historical research has strongly underlined the fact that the British could establish their control over a large and diverse territory like India partly because they went along with historical trends that had already started in India in the eighteenth century, and for this reason they also drew substantial support from indigenous groups. Powerful commercial interests, aspirant political groups, and relatively modern professional elites produced by new educational institutions strongly supported the establishment of British rule. Eventually, this allowed British government in India to become an interesting arrangement administered by large groups of Indian elites who collaborated with British authority and ran the colony under British supervision.5
In the long term, the colonial state altered Indian society in two ways. The establishment of a new kind of state, with formal legal claims to sovereignty, was itself a major transformative project, which reversed the logic of limited political authority in the segmentary caste civilization. It established and familiarized the idea that the apparatuses of the state, especially its legislative organs, in British or Indian hands, could, in principle, judge social institutions critically, and formally alter them by law. Some of the most fateful and long-lasting effects, however, were not introduced through political policies of the state, but through more indirect cultural changes that it induced through its administrative habits.6 Administrative procedures, like the great statistical enterprises of the colonial regimes, though not political in themselves, nonetheless caused fundamental changes in social identities and their preparation for a new kind of politics. Surprisingly, the colonial administration changed identities by implanting cognitive practices which objectified communities, changing them from an earlier fuzzy or underspecified form to a modern enumerated one. Processes of enumeration of the social world, like mapping and the census, irreversibly altered social ontology by giving groups a new kind of agentive political identity.7 This was not political agency in itself, but a precondition for the development of a political universe in which political agency could be imparted to large impersonal groups—like castes, ethnicities, or religious communities.
However, the colonial state was subject to contradictory impulses. It set in motion large information-gathering processes under the rationalist belief that, in order to rule such a large and complex society, officials had to know it accurately and exhaustively. This statistical project was not part of a state-directed agenda of wholesale social reform. One strand of administrative thinking advocated a state of deliberate inactivity, which would not meddle in social affairs that colonial rulers did not understand fully, and which might unwittingly create disaffection. Even in the case of a barbaric practice like sati (suttee)—the burning of widows on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands—the initial response of the colonial regime was extremely cautious. Only the righteous indignation of the native reformers eventually pushed it into legislation banning it.8 Apart from cultural scruples, the colonial state also mistrusted over-expansion of its activities on purely prudential grounds. British policy oscillated between an urge towards reform, which wanted to restructure Indian society on rational lines, and a policy of restraint, which wanted to leave the social affairs of Indians alone. The self-limitation of the colonial state, justified at various times by arguments of financial prudence or cultural relativism, allowed a wide space for the development of a distinctive elite associational politics in nineteenth-century India. This initial ability to form associations, exercise group solidarity, pursue economic interests, and transact business with the colonial state gave the modern Indian elite the confidence to develop eventually larger projects of self-government, and led to the growth of Indian nationalism.
Ironically, the specific ideological culture in which the British colonial state operated played a part in the eventual growth of nationalist arguments in India. The time of the greatest expansion and power of British colonialism in India coincided with the time when principles of modern liberalism were being established in British political culture. The Indian empire thus witnessed all the internal contradictions of an imperialism which also sought to subscribe to liberal doctrine.9 Liberal political theorists were arguing passionately against the substantial remnants of despotic power, and advocating dramatic expansion of citizens’ freedom. Such principles sat uneasily with the demands of expanding empire. In the colonial context, liberal writers were often at pains to oppose precisely such extensions of freedom to colonial subjects. Educated Indians by now had gained considerable fluency in the theoretical arguments of liberalism and looked with interest at the practical extensions of suffrage. They were quick to convert to universalist liberal doctrine and demand their instant extension to India.
Liberal imperialism also produced a peculiar dynamics through the exchanges between Indian and British authors on the question of political morals. Indian intellectuals quickly realized that the best form of injustice was the injustice administered by liberals. The philosophical anthropology and procedural universalism of liberal doctrines required that political principles of liberty and equality should be declared as universal truths. Liberalism enunciated its principles in an abstract, impersonal, and universal form, but often made ungainly attempts to avoid their realization in practice. This was done in one of two ways—both unwittingly allowing nationalists to develop compelling counterarguments. In some contexts, the ‘universal’ principles were simply ignored in practice, which made it easy for nationalists to accuse the British of dishonesty, and to embarrass the administration by comparing the stated principles with actual practice. In other contexts, theorists like John Stuart Mill tried to produce a more serious intellectual argument using a stage theory of history, similar to that of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers.10 Mill's writings argued that representative institutions were incontrovertibly the best form of government, but incongruously counselled an indefinite postponement of their conferment on Indians. Although liberal institutions were, in the abstract, best for all mankind, they were not suitable for most of human societies until they had attained a required stage of civilization.11 This ingenious argument saved the abstract universality of liberal ideals, but justified imperial rule for an indefinite future. Not surprisingly, this line of reasoning appeared more persuasive to the British than to the Indians. Yet this particular ideological configuration contributed subtly to the surprisingly amicable nature of the central political conflict in colonial India. The intellectual form of the British arguments subliminally acknowledged that denial of self-government was not right in principle, and could not be continued indefinitely. It also created a subtle sense of defensiveness, if not guilt, in the ideological defence of the empire. Interestingly, in their critique of British imperial rule Indian nationalists could appeal to the same principles. This sharing of principles, admittedly at a very abstract level, contributed to the slow but steady sequence of constitutional shifts, which eventually led to the transfer of power to Indians in 1947.
After 1947, the defining structures of the Indian nation-state were produced by a combination of structural pressures and conjunctural openings. The state after Independence had a double and in some ways contradictory inheritance. It was a successor both to the British colonial state and to the movement of Indian nationalism. To combine the two sets of attributes—ideals, institutions, aspirations—that emerged from these contradictory legacies was not an easy task. Broadly, the legal institutions and coercive apparatuses of the state remained similar to the last stage of colonial rule—to the disappointment of those who expected a radical overhaul of the state. During its nationalist agitations, Congress had identified education, the police, and the bureaucracy as the three pillars of colonial domination, and made repeated promises to introduce radical changes in their functioning. In the event, when they assumed power, especially after the panic of Partition, they left these three apparatuses of persuasion and control entirely unreformed. On one point, however, a major transformation took place—though its full effects became apparent only after a certain historical interval. From the early decades of the twentieth century, the British authorities had cautiously introduced partial representative institutions.12 Despite apprehensions about widespread illiteracy, the new state introduced universal franchise in a single dramatic move of inclusion.13 The ideological discourse of nationalism had also created vast popular expectations from the state once it was taken over by the Congress, in sharp contrast with the rather limited objectives of the colonial state. Apart from the conventional responsibilities of the state in law and order, it was expected to play an enormous role in the ill-defined and constantly expanding field of ‘development’.
The entire story of the state for the half-century after Independence can be seen in terms of two apparently contradictory trends. Paradoxically, the Indian political world saw the simultaneous strengthening of two tendencies that can be schematically regarded as the logic of bureaucracy and the logic of democracy. The antecedents of both these trends can be found in the history of colonial rule. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, a process of gradual domination of society by modern state institutions had brought all significant social practices under its surveillance, supervision, and control. The colonial state also began a slow and cautious introduction of practices of representation—so that this increasing control could be seen not as the imposition of external rules of discipline, but the imposition of rules and demands generated by society itself. Both trends became more extensive and powerful after Independence.
Under British rule, the extension of bureaucracy was mainly sanctioned by a rhetoric of state efficiency; under nationalist leadership, this was replaced by the rhetoric of ‘development’. For entirely fortuitous reasons, at the time of the state's foundation, Jawaharlal Nehru came to enjoy an extraordinary degree of freedom in shaping its institutions and basic policies. The death of Gandhi and Patel, who had very different ideological inclinations, left conservative sections of the Congress without effective leadership. Unopposed temporarily, Nehru imbued this state with a developmentalist and mildly redistributivist ideology. According to this political vision, the state was seen as the primary instrument of development, with extensive responsibilities in the direct management of production and redistribution.14 In part, this was because the massive industrialization programme undertaken after Independence could not be financed or managed by private capital; in part, because private capitalist development was expected to worsen income inequality, while state-managed development could simultaneously contribute to redistribution of wealth. Eventually, this led to a massive expansion of the bureaucracy without a corresponding change in its culture. Rapid over-extension of the bureaucracy intensified its inefficiency, reduced observance of procedures, and this produced large zones of corruption and malpractice. By the late 1960s this led to the familiar paradox of the overextended state. It was expected to supervise all aspects of activity, from managing the army and running the administration to running the railways and the postal system and providing schools and hospitals. Its vast reach and responsibility resulted in a reduction of the reliability of social services. The state in contemporary India became ubiquitous, but also universally unreliable.
However, over the half century of its existence, subtle changes took place in the character of the developmental state itself; since the 1970s, its structures and practices have changed imperceptibly. Initially, during the Nehru years, the developmental state was seen primarily as an engine of production, specially active in the production of essential industrial capacities and in creating infrastructure. But the ideological justification of this constantly expanding state machinery was in terms of arguments of distributive justice. If the state managed heavy industries, the argument went, existing inequalities of income would not increase; and it would also act against the concentration of resources in a few private hands—classical Marxist arguments for socialist politics. In the first two decades after Independence, state institutions with the responsibility of establishing and running heavy industries performed with reasonable efficiency. They helped set up and run a considerable heavy industrial base driven by the current economic theory of self-reliance and import-substituting industrialization. By the early 1970s, a certain change in the character of state enterprises was discernible, and a corresponding change in their relation with political authority. ‘The state sector’, as it was called in India, came to control vast economic resources—through its gigantic, interconnected networks of financing, employment, and contracts emanating from both the productive and welfare activities of the state enterprises.
Nehru's government accorded to these enterprises a relative decisional and managerial autonomy to ensure technical correctness of decision-making. With the vast increase of their resources, however, political leaders and ministries began from the 1970s to seek more direct control of their operations. The government leadership under Indira Gandhi slowly abandoned the earlier Nehruvian aspiration of giving serious direction to the economy through directive state planning. Instead of being seen as segments of an internally coherent policy of development planning, these enterprises sank into uncontrolled bureaucratization, which increased unproductive activities, pushing them deeper into inefficiency. Anxiety over inefficiency made managements more dependent for their survival on the support of political leaders. The price the political class extracted for this support was indirect access to the use of these resources for political ends—for example, raising funds for the parties in power, or distribution of patronage. The huge economic bureaucracy of the developmental state increasingly had little to do with realistic redistributive objectives, but became utterly dependent on a disingenuous use of that rhetoric. The sizeable economic surplus under the state's control came to be used for illegitimate purposes by elected politicians who developed a vested interest in defending this large, overstretched, inefficient state.15 From 1991, successive Indian governments have rather reluctantly begun some restructuring of the state under the general slogan of ‘liberalization’ of the economy. But compared to the swift and large-scale structural reforms carried out in other parts of Asia and Africa, liberalization in India has been remarkably slow. The logic of bureaucracy still pervades and dominates Indian political life.
The second undeniable historical feature of Indian political life has been the irresistible expansion of democracy. But the lines of its movement were at times surprisingly different from the history of European democracy in the nineteenth century. First, unlike the gradual, incremental development of the suffrage in most European states, democracy was introduced to India in a single, dramatic gesture of political inclusion. Although the colonial administration had slowly introduced representative institutions from the early twentieth century, the electorate at the last election under colonial administration was about 14 per cent of the adult population. The constitution adopted in 1950 installed universal adult suffrage in a country that was still 70 per cent illiterate. The new entrants into the arena of politics thus instantly outnumbered social elites already entrenched in representative institutions. This was likely to result in a conflict over representation, with entrant groups contesting the claim of elite politicians to ‘represent’ the entire nation—an eventuality that did happen, but after a considerable lapse of time. The probable reason for this comparatively placid introduction of an electoral revolution was that poor people showed traditional habits of deference towards socially dominant groups. Similarly, it also took time for lower classes in a caste society, used to social repression, to understand the historic possibilities of the strategic use of the right to vote. For about two decades, although the poor and the disprivileged in Indian society had the formal right to vote, they actually left the arena of institutional politics entirely in the hands of the modernist elites. Paradoxically, the institutions of democratic government seemed to function with impeccably formal propriety precisely because levels of participation were low, and popular expectations from democratic government were limited. The usual problems of electoral politics—resource allocation on the basis of electoral pressure, which makes rational long-term decisions particularly difficult—did not affect Indian democratic government in the Nehru years.16
By the 1970s, however, the situation had changed significantly in two ways. Politicians of all parties had lost the inexhaustible fund of legitimacy that Nehru's generation had from their leadership in the national movement. The new generation of leaders, including Congress leaders like Indira Gandhi, had to acquire support in the short term by electoral promises of resource distribution. It was also clear that ordinary voters, especially the urban poor and the lower castes in the countryside, had learnt strategic use of the vote. They made greater demands on the political system, and politicians from these under-privileged groups began to emerge first in state assemblies, and later in parliament and national government. This somewhat delayed but decisive entry of the common people into the life of the state utterly transformed its character. Politics came to be practised increasingly in the vernacular—in two senses. Literally, much of political discourse was carried on in the vernacular, in contrast to the first decades when English was the mandatory language of high politics. But more significantly, after the 1970s, the political imagination of major social groups came to be shaped by a kind of conceptual vernacular as well, used by politicians who did not have the conventional education through the medium of English and whose political thinking was not determined by their knowledge of European historical precedents.
Nationalist leaders who had devised the constitution had expected democracy eventually to have wider social effects; but their expectations followed the familiar trajectories of European democracy. The introduction of modern democracy in Europe made the stark class inequalities of nineteenth-century capitalist society increasingly unsustainable. Radical leaders like Nehru had accordingly anticipated that, as ordinary Indians acquired a democratic consciousness, they would cease to identify themselves through traditional caste categories and demand greater economic equality. Democratic institutions would thus lead, in the long term, to modernist movements for the reduction of poverty. But what happened through half a century of democratic politics defied and confounded such expectations.17 Democracy certainly led to vast revolutionary effects in the Indian context as well—but that historic change resembled Tocqueville's ‘revolution’ more than Marx's.18 Democratic polities produced a fundamental transformation of Indian society—but not in terms of class. By contrast with Europe, the logic of democracy did not force changes of policy encouraging greater equality of income, but led to a real redistribution of dignity. The deep European influence on India's intellectuals made them subtly pre-disposed, irrespective of ideology, to underestimate the social presence of caste, and to underestimate the adaptive fecundity of traditions. Both liberals and socialists, who dominated the discourse of India's political world in the decades after Independence, expected that traditional forms of belonging and behaviour would disappear under the twin pressure of the economic logic of industrialization and the political logic of electoral democracy. Historically, the actual unfolding of modernity has proved enormously more complex.
The most comprehensive defining principle of India's social life before the coming of modern influences was undeniably the caste order. That order determined the individual's life chances, and its structural principles governed the relation between the collective bodies of castes in the social system. In all parts of India, despite regional variations, the expansion of economic modernity—urbanization and industrial development—led to a decline of caste observances in daily life. Hindu rules forbidding intermixture in marriage, social intercourse, and commensality lost their former ability to constrain individual behaviour and private lives. Ironically, in the public arenas of political life, by contrast, caste identities seem to have become much more assertive, defying modernist expectations. Caste affiliations have not broken down or faded in political life under the impact of electoral politics; the order of caste life has simply adapted to the operation of parliamentary democracy to produce highly effective large caste-based electoral coalitions.19 Paradoxically, the historical demand of this form of caste politics is not the end of caste identity, but a democratic recognition of equality among self-recognizing caste groups—a state of affairs unthinkable according to the traditional grammar of caste behaviour.
The new caste politics therefore defies characterization in terms of the easy dichotomy of modernization theory.20 It is not a wholly modern practice, since it is based on caste; equally, it is not wholly traditional, as it puts caste to an unprecedented modern use. An anomalous accompaniment of this development is the peculiar translation of the language of rights in contemporary Indian culture. In Indian society, despite the pressures of modernity, the process of sociological individuation has not gone very far. Consequently, although the universe of political discourse is ringing with unceasing demands for recognition of rights, rarely have these advocated the rights of atomistic liberal individuals. In a world made of very different principles of sociability—marked by the primacy of castes, regions, and communities—the strident new language of rights has sought to establish primarily the rights of contending groups. Most major radical demands in Indian politics are now for group equality rather than income equality between individuals—leading to a strange fading, from the discourse of one of the poorest societies of the world, of the distinctive arguments of socialism. The largest numbers of the Indian poor themselves seem to be more intent on removing degradation rather than poverty.21
It is not surprising that elite groups, who have most to lose from the assertion of demands of lower castes, have given large-scale support to a historical countermove made through the reassertion of religious identity. Hindu nationalist parties were relatively unsuccessful electorally in the period of Congress's hegemony. The Jana Sangh, the party of Hindu nationalism, had stable support among some social groups in particular regions of northern India, but it never came near threatening Congress dominance.22 But in a climate of intensifying lower-caste assertion, their insinuation against the muddled secularism of the Congress—that it discriminated against the Hindus in return for secure voting support from the Muslim minority—attracted substantial upper-caste backing. Assisted by an inflammatory rhetoric of restitutive justice, centred on an old mosque allegedly built on a destroyed temple in the sixteenth century, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the successor to the Jana Sangh, made dramatic electoral gains in the elections in the 1990s. It finally emerged as the largest single party in parliament and has ruled India for five years with the support of volatile coalitions.23 What is remarkable is that the BJP sought to fashion a response to the politics of lower-caste groups by appealing to the emotions of another form of community. Communitarianism in Indian politics takes complex and at times extremely unpleasant forms.24
But democracy is a complex ideal which appeals equally to two types of political principles. On the one hand, it claims its legitimacy from the pursuit of conflict through established, transparent procedures, which ensure that no groups lose out finally and irreversibly, and so that they continue to follow their objectives through recursive electoral contests. On the other hand, it appeals to the principles of participation in both the deliberative and expressive forms. The politics of community assertion in India has created a potential conflict between these two principles. Political parties representing large communities with a strong sense of grievance have often regarded the procedures of liberal government as unjustified obstacles in their pursuit of justice. Procedures, which are central to the successful operation of democracy, can, as Indian experience shows, be threatened by some forms of participatory politics.
Another peculiarity of the story of modern politics in India is the simultaneous power of democracy and bureaucracy. Although theoretically, bureaucracy and democracy seem opposing tendencies—as the increased power and reach of the state seems to conflict, in principle, with democratic demands against it—this apparent paradox is not difficult to resolve. Democratic participation has increased ordinary people's expectations about the conditions and quality of life. In a society which does not generate enough wealth to enable interest groups in society to pursue their institutional aims with their own resources, all demands for amelioration—for hospitals, schools, roads—are directed at the state, which is the only possible source for the creation of collective goods. Thus the rise of democracy has reinforced the tendency towards a constant extension of the bureaucratic state.
For an understanding of how Europe affected the history of other cultures over the long term, the Indian story is significant for two reasons. A common pessimistic argument asserts that the ‘export’ of the state, with bounded territories and modern institutions of governance, to other parts of the world through European colonialism has largely failed, ending in most cases in disaster. It has forced people to live their lives, unsuccessfully, under unintelligible institutional frames, leading to increased tension and expanded capacities for violence. Eventually, the argument runs, such historical experiments have failed, leading in most cases to the common experience of state collapse. The Indian case encourages a more optimistic conclusion.25 It shows that a country comprising nearly a fifth of the world's population has successfully mastered the techniques of establishing a modern state. Despite the complex demands on its ideological and material resources, India has not seen a collapse of its institutional structure leading to breakdown of minimal social order. Interestingly, although its state has been over-stretched, it has managed to avoid bankruptcy and failure to provide basic services. India has avoided both the economic and the political forms of ‘state collapse’.
Perhaps the most astonishing part of the Indian story has been the relative success of democracy. There are some familiar arguments in political theory which stress the economic or cultural ‘conditions’ for the success of democratic government. Either a certain level of prior economic growth, or an underlying cultural common sense which accords equal value to individuals, has been regarded as a necessary condition for the success of democratic institutions. The relative success of Indian democracy defies both arguments. In the politics of one of the poorest countries of the world, with a traditional order based on the pure principle of hierarchy, democracy has for half a century been a universally uncontested ideal. But the ‘success of democracy’ in India can mean two different things. In much of Western journalism, and in a part of academic analysis as well, the success of democracy simply means the uninterrupted continuance of electoral politics. Actually, however, the ‘success’ of Indian democracy ought to be viewed in Tocqueville's terms—as the historical development of a social force that has transformed fundamental social relations of everyday lives. It is true that the historical outcomes, the political trajectories of this story of democracy, have been quite different from the great European stories of democratic transformation. But that is hardly surprising. Formal institutions of democracy operate on the basis of a template of the specific sociabilities available in each society. If democracy achieves success in other non-European societies in future, their trajectories are more likely to resemble the Indian narrative than the European ones. It is impossible to predict the exact direction that this narrative of political transformation of a hierarchical society might take; but, despite the fact that it has happened in relative historical silence, without the spectacular violence that accompanied the American or French revolutions, it will rank as a story of one of the great transformations of modern times.
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First published in States and Citizens, ed. Quentin Skinner and Bö Strath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
1 Guizot 1997.
2 See Bayly 1989. For a different argument, and based on a different regional perspective, see Dirks 1998.
3 Al Biruni, the great Islamic scholar, despaired of discovering any doctrinal singleness in the Hindu sects, but decided, brilliantly, that the key to their unity lay in a sociological order of Brahminism. Al Biruni 1914.
4 One of the most interesting accounts of this underlying connection between the commercial and political impulses in the Company's India was given in Burke's famous indictment of Warren Hastings before the House of Lords. Edmund Burke, ‘On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 15–19 February 1788’, in Burke 1998, pp. 31–8. The question of ‘sovereignty’ also figured prominently in discussions among British utilitarians and their critics about economic policy. For an excellent analysis, see Stokes 1959.
5 For the new historical arguments suggesting this ‘indigenous’ force in favour of British success, see Bayly 1989, Washbrook 1988, and Stein 1985. Parallel arguments are advanced in Subrahmanyam 1990. For an excellent analysis of the contradictory impulses that shaped the early colonial state, see Washbrook 1999.
6 Recently, much work has been done on how the information order of colonial India was created, and how it underpinned colonial administration. See, for instance, Irschik 1994, and Bayly 1996.
7 I have discussed this in greater detail in Kaviraj 1994. Cf. Appadurai 1996.
8 For a detailed account of the intellectual debates around sati, see Mani, 1998.
9 For an excellent general treatment of this particular dilemma of liberal theory, see Mehta 1999. For the ideology of the British empire, see Armitage 2000.
10 Mill's arguments about India can be found in his On Liberty, introduction, especially p. 73, and his Considerations on Representative Government, chapters 16 and 17. His detailed comments on Indian government are collected in Mill 1990.
11 One of the most famous cases of such arguments in J.S. Mill are in On Liberty, chapter 1, and Considerations on Representative Government, chapters 10 and 12.
12 Major institutional changes were introduced several times in the first half of the twentieth century. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 began the processes of institutional change; further changes in the structure of government with Indian parties in the provincial legislatures and executives were introduced by the Government of India Act of 1935. The first elective governments took office in 1937. This act formed the main legal template for certain parts of the constitution adopted in 1950.
13 Austin 1964, chapter 2, section 4, analyses the discussions about universal suffrage. More detailed treatment can be found in Rao 1964. An excellent analysis of the theoretical bases of democratic institutions can be found in Bhargava 2000.
14 Chakrabarty 1987 provides a clear exposition of the economic objectives of the developmental state. Its historical development is analysed concisely but acutely in Bardhan 1985. Two careful, detailed analyses of the state's role in development can be found in Frankel 1978, and Rudolph and Rudolph 1987.
15 For a serious attack on the basic principles of the developmental state, and an argument that it has slowed down economic growth, see Bhagwati 1993.
16 The dialectic between government's ability to take long-term decisions and the insistence of electoral pressure is discussed in extensive detail in Rudolph and Rudolph 1987.
17 I have sought to analyse this surprising turn in caste politics in ‘Democracy and Social Inequality’ in Frankel 2000.
18 In fact, one of the major weaknesses of Indian Marxist writing about politics has been its reluctance to take the democratic upsurge seriously as a process of real, not illusory, social change.
19 M.N. Srinivas, the eminent Indian sociologist, who did pioneering work on the operation of caste practices in modern conditions, called these new configurations ‘monster castes’ to indicate that they are vast coalitions in size, but also that they defy the traditional segmentary logic of the caste system. Srinivas 1986.
20 Scholars have pointed out these trends and their theoretically unsettling implications since the late 1960s. Cf. Rudolph and Rudolph 1968, and Kothari 1970.
21 Communist parties in India had been traditionally reluctant to take up the cause of caste indignity as a central issue, preferring to focus on poverty and economic inequality. In the last decades, they have sought to adapt their agenda to the politics of the lower castes.
22 For an excellent analysis of Hindu nationalist politics till the late 1960s, see Graham 1990.
23 The fact that the BJP has come to power only as part of a coalition is highly significant: since some of its coalition partners do not share its strong anti-Muslim programme, it has imposed some moderation on its administration.
24 There are several excellent studies of the recent growth of Hindu nationalism. See especially Jaffrelot 1994 for a detailed history. Hansen 1990 links the Hindu upsurge with a Tocquevillien understanding of democratization. Rajagopal 2000 analyses the associations between creating collective emotions and the use of semiotics and the media.
25 In comparisons of this kind, size matters. The pessimistic argument that states have failed in hundreds of cases should be weighed carefully against the fact that India, although representing a single state, accounts for a very large proportion of the non-Western world. Although one state, it is a powerful counterargument to the claim that modern states have failed outside the field of modern Western culture.