Paul R. Brass
The states of the South Asian region are often thought to have shared a common colonial experience through British rule and/or dominance, which has since profoundly influenced their political trajectories. Most notably, from a political standpoint, is the adherence, at least in form, and in some measure in actuality as well, of the leaders and the public in India and Sri Lanka to the basic principles of parliamentary rule through competitive elections, and the repeated striving, less successfully in the other states, towards the same end. Yet, it should be obvious by now that the differences in these respects are profound. First of all, of the five independent states in the South Asian region, only three—India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—arrived at Independence through a transfer of power from the British. A fourth, Bangladesh, achieved its Independence only a quarter century later after a traumatic civil war that left countless numbers of its citizens dead. As for Nepal, it never experienced direct British rule and has followed a quite different trajectory in the 55 years since its termination. Bhutan, touched on only very briefly in this volume, has remained an independent protectorate of India.
So, the differences are profound, but, at the same time, the striving for open politics, civil liberties, and parliamentary rule has remained alive, active, and renewable in every state in the region.The similarities and differences in these and every other respect are brought out in every section of this volume, which has been organized to encourage comparison. With regard to most topics, the differences among the several countries are so great that a separate chapter on each topic has been required. In other cases, where there are important similarities or where differences have arisen despite a common heritage, the relevant topics have been analyzed in comparative chapters.
With regard to the transition from British rule to Independence, Chapter 2 (Talbot) addresses directly the similarities and differences in the inheritances and legacies that derive from British rule, the nationalist movement, and the partition of the subcontinent. Among those inheritances and legacies, the catastrophe of Partition that occurred simultaneously with the achievement of Independence for both states stands out. It remains a living legacy that has affected both the internal development and the external relations of both states, persistently endangering the peace of the region and retarding its common development. It is a common legacy, but even here there is a profound difference in its meaning for the two countries. For India, Partition destroyed the dream of its leaders for a unified subcontinent. For Pakistan, Partition signified freedom from Indian and Hindu dominance.
Also profound were the differences in the nationalist movement that brought Independence to each country upon the withdrawal of the British. In this case, there are three trajectories: the non-violent Congress movement built over three quarters of a century on the base of a strong, nearly subcontinent-wide organization and led by Mohandas K. Gandhi during the quarter century preceding Independence; the militant Pakistan movement led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, with a history of a mere decade of organization, and with very weak roots in the politically dominant, western parts of the country; and the peaceful granting of Independence to Ceylon that limited the building of a strong nationalist movement.
Further, the nationalist movements in the three countries suffered from different degrees of noninclusiveness. The Indian National Congress, the broadest of the three, did not have equal strength in all regions of the country, and had little or none in some. Pakistan, of course, was created out of two entirely different cultural regions, united only nominally by the predominance of Islam in both. Moreover, within the western region of the country as well, as in India, there were major regional, cultural, and ethnic differences. Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) arrived at Independence with a thin veneer of elite cooperation—which soon collapsed—among the predominant Sinhala population; the minority, regionally concentrated Tamil population; and yet another minority group of Tamils of relatively recent South Indian origin, most of whom the new government promptly sought to disenfranchise and expel from the country.
At the same time, all three countries arrived at Independence with shared commitments to slogans of “democracy” and “secularism,” although they differed on other fundamentals. The latter included, for example, the centrality of the state in development: greatest in India; least in Sri Lanka where the state commitment was not to development in the Indian sense, but, as Wickramasinghe notes in Chapter 3, to “social welfare”; and Pakistan, lacking any ideology of state development, rather more concerned with building an army capable of confronting India as needed. But, all states in the South Asian region, in common with most states everywhere, share an unshakable determination to retain at all costs the boundaries bequeathed to them at Independence in the face of several movements demanding separation. Only in the case of Pakistan—and there only because of the intervention of India— has the division of a South Asian state occurred.
Moreover, in all states in the region, the original commitment to secularism as an ideology has been battered and largely displaced with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, recognition of Islam as the state religion and the rise of Islamic movements in Pakistan, and Buddhist demands for official recognition in Sri Lanka, accepted soon after Independence. Gellner, however, notes that: “Nepal, on the other hand, which was an officially Hindu state from 1962 to 2006, has, with the establishment of a secular republic, gone in the other direction.”1
In the years since Independence, dramatic changes have taken place, affecting all the countries of the region in substantially different ways. India has passed from a political order dominated by the Indian National Congress through a brief period of emergency authoritarian rule under Indira Gandhi to a functioning multiparty system. Moreover, all these periods have been marked by intense political activity, involving an array of political parties across the entire spectrum of ideological differences in competitive elections based on universal franchise, with large voter turnouts in virtually every election. India, it can be safely said, has long ago passed the conventional tests of a stable, functioning democracy, namely, frequent passing of power to alternative political formations, complete and unchallenged civilian control over the military, and massive popular participation in electoral politics. Moreover, the forms of party mobilization and popular participation have been distinctive in India, building on and extending the many forms of nonviolent protest against government policies and actions that were developed during the movement for Independence. Further, these developments have also been accompanied by the gradual incorporation of the middle and lower castes into the electoral process and, in recent years, the capture of political power in several states by parties based on their support.
These changes have been brought about through the agency of vibrant, but highly fragmented, political parties and the struggles for power among them, in the course of which both the predominant parties and the relations among them have changed dramatically. The national one-party dominant system under the Indian National Congress prevailed from Independence until the late 1980s, since when it has been replaced by a multiparty system reshaped into a three-front, but dual coalitional system with the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the principal protagonists.The rise of the militant Hindu party, the BJP, has been the driving force in this competitive realignment.
But the national system is not simply replicated in the several states. Rather, most state party systems have a distinctive character. Indian politics at both state and national levels also have adapted to various forms of coalition politics (Virginia Van Dyke, in Chapter 5) on which there is an increasing literature. At the same time, there has been a general movement in most states towards forms of bipolar competition, that is to say, predominantly two party or two front.
Beneath the veneer of conventional parliamentary democracy in India lie several other features: a political-electoral order increasingly based on money and muscle in which the primary aim of most elected representatives is to gain control over public institutions in order to enrich themselves; in many states also, a further degradation of the political order through the outright criminalization of politics; the move away from nonviolent protest movements to mobilizations that lead to considerable violence, often intended;2 the continued, indeed in some ways increased reliance of politicians on what Harriss (Chapter 4) calls the social “identities of caste and religion” to garner votes; and, most importantly, the still limited ability of the vast population of miserably poor people to benefit from the political process, even to achieve a measure of dignity and self-respect.
The literature on electoral politics in India is fast becoming one of the richest in the world that elucidates the great changes that have taken place in popular participation and the composition of the electorate.3 Not only has there been a considerable increase in the voting population (with variations over time and from state to state), but whole new groups of voters have been incorporated into electoral politics through a process that I have described elsewhere as “caste succession.”4 Whereas, in the early years after Independence, upper castes dominated as candidates and voters (often bringing their lower caste dependents along with them), the “backward” and “lower” castes now are well represented by persons from their own groups and dominate state governments in many of the Indian states. Moreover, despite occasional literature to the contrary, it is not the case that the importance of caste voting has declined.
Far from it, for the drive to garner benefits of all sorts, available from state agencies, on the part of caste groups, and the increased capture of state power by leaders from castes newly incorporated into the political process, has been so central to the politicization of the Indian population that one scholar has characterized India as a “patronage democracy.”5 Although the term is one that applies to many states in the past as well as the contemporary world, its distinctive character in India is the extent to which it implies a high degree of cohesive voting on the part of particular caste groups for persons from their own caste, who alone can be relied on to accommodate their needs and demands.
Pakistan’s post-Independence political history has been markedly different from that of India. Whereas in India there was marked continuity of political leadership under Nehru—and even beyond under both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi—Pakistan lost both its founding leaders, Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan within a few years after Independence, the former through natural causes and the latter by assassination. Neither did the political parties have any substantial base in the electorate at Independence that would enable the firm establishment of parliamentary government or even, for that matter, the promulgation of a constitutional framework. In contrast to India, therefore, it is the military that has been the predominant political force in Pakistan since the initial displacement of the parliamentary regime by Ayub Khan in 1958.
A further profound difference between these two polities has been the deleterious influence of the United States that has repeatedly and disastrously influenced the course of Pakistani politics by supporting and feeding successive military regimes with massive “foreign aid,” most of it used by the military to fortify its armaments and wage wars against India over Kashmir. Moreover, latterly, the United States has been using the country as a reluctant ally in the fruitless war in Afghanistan. Neither has American intervention changed at all the primary focus of the Pakistan military towards confrontation with India.
At the same time, it deserves mention that in Pakistan, as everywhere else in South Asia, there is a mass base that rejects military rule and supports parliamentary government that has twice been decisive in altering the country’s history: the first time in the mass movement that led to the resignation of Ayub Khan in 1969 and the second occasion in 2007–08 that brought down the military regime of Pervez Musharaf and reinstituted civilian government. However, the crux of the problem of the failure of civilian rule in Pakistan, apart from the persisting virtual independence of the military from civilian control, has been, as Burki notes (Chapter 6), the inability of “the civilian leadership, when exercising power … to institutionalize the base of their support.”
Like Pakistan, Bangladesh belongs in the category of a society in which aspirations for the establishment of a democratic political order based on free, competitive elections have remained, but have been repeatedly undermined by violent conflict, including assassinations of heads of state, repeated military takeovers, and deep hatreds between the leaders of the two principal contending parties, the surviving spouses of former assassinated heads of state. Aspirations for independence and democracy arose in Bangladesh initially during one of undivided Pakistan’s longest periods of military rule. The movement was crushed by the Pakistani army, but ultimately prevailed through the military intervention of India in 1971.
But none of the elected regimes in Bangladesh has lasted long. Even in the case of the country’s first leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who had nearly total electoral support, democratic rule did not prevail. Mired in corruption, soon losing respect and support while attempting to shore up his rule by building his own military force, Mujib and most members of his large family were finally slaughtered in 1975 during a military coup. However, one daughter was left alive, Sheikh Hasina, who was abroad at the time, and who ultimately matured into one of the principal contenders for power in Bangladesh politics up to the present day.
One of the leaders of the military coup, General Ziaur Rahman, emerged at the head of a new military regime, which lasted only until his own assassination in 1981. Since the killing of Sheikh Mujib and General Zia, it can be fairly said that politics in Bangladesh has been a form of vendetta, in which Sheikh Hasina, Zia’s wife, Khaleda, and successive military leaders have struggled for power and the support of the people of the country through a series of competitive elections, coups, countercoups, and military takeovers that have persisted up to the present. At the same time, these struggles have often involved the mobilization of large numbers of people from all walks of life in mass movements that continue to testify to the aspirations in Bangladesh society for popular government or, at least, for competitive elections and “civil liberties”(Harry Blair, in Chapter 7).
Indeed, one of the shared characteristics of political behavior in the three states that were formerly part of British-ruled India has been the centrality of mass mobilizations as vehicles for political change, transformation, and even overthrow of military regimes to reestablish elections as the proper mode of achieving the power to rule. It is a curiosity, however, of Bangladesh politics that, although elections are considered the only valid means of attaining power, the losers invariably cry foul, insisting that the elections were marred by fraud or even rigged, often protesting the results by a return to the streets, as Blair puts it. Moreover, no matter which party wins power, the winner takes all the spoils that include especially the corrupt income and the control over the police to protect one’s friends and harass one’s enemies. Indeed, both Blair and Kochanek (see Chapter 25) point out that Bangladesh has most often sur-passed all other countries in the world in Transparency International’s corruption index. Yet, public faith in the idea of popular rule through elections continues to be high in Bangladesh as elsewhere in South Asia, where turnout rates consistently surpass anything in the United States, self-reputedly the world’s “greatest democracy.” Indeed, parliamentary government was again restored and elections called for December 2008. Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League emerged triumphant in a “landslide” victory in an election with more than 80 percent turnout in which the party won a two-thirds majority in parliament,
Throughout all the dramatic changes in Bangladesh politics, however, there has been one persistent feature, namely, the predominance of the bureaucracy in policymaking. This partly reflects the common experience of the pivotal role of the bureaucracy during British rule that has carried over to some extent in all three states. But it also reflects the fact that the parties and the politicians actually have little interest in policy, their primary concerns being in amassing corrupt income for themselves and distributing patronage to their supporters. Moreover, as in Pakistan, the bureaucracy maintains cordial relations with the military whenever the military reasserts its dominance in Bangladesh politics. But, the military in Bangladesh has by no means the power or the resources of its counterpart in Pakistan.
Like India, Sri Lanka has had an unbroken post-Independence history of civilian government in which, despite repeated changes in the constitution of the country, popular elections have always determined which parties and leaders are to govern the country. In fact, Sri Lanka was the first country in South Asia to pass the conventional test of a nonviolent change of government from one party or set of parties to another. Moreover, it passed that test repeatedly in election after election between 1948 and 1977 (DeVotta, Chapter 8). Moreover, despite the existence in earlier periods of a multiplicity of minor parties, the basic pattern over time in Sri Lanka has been alternation between two main parties, the SLFP and the UNP, plus their allies. At the same time, repeated changes in the constitution of the country have shifted the balance of power in the political system to the president rather than to parliament. Further, DeVotta has argued that, despite the façade of a model democratic state, Sri Lanka has not been a liberal democracy, but rather an “illiberal democracy,” in which the basic rules of democratic governance have been repeatedly violated. The violations have included refusal on the part of the ruling party “to hold scheduled elections in 1975,” extending its rule by two additional years; the use and abuse of the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1979 to victimize “innocent Tamils” as the government sought to suppress the rise of ethnic separatism and “manifold human rights violations” justified by the need to defeat the Tamil rebellion led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE); “voting irregularities” and “malpractices” during elections, including the outright “rigging” of a national referendum in 1982 by which the government of the day extended its rule “for another term”; and the “disappearance” of “over 40,000 Sinhalese” during the suppression of an “uprising” by the militant JVP. As in all the other South Asian countries as well, nepotism, favoritism, corruption, and “gangsterism” have been prevalent features in governance in Sri Lanka.
In addition, in common with all the other countries of South Asia, dynastic competition among prominent families for succession in power has been a recurrent aspect of politics. Also, as in Bangladesh, the competition between dynasties provides the basic core of political opposition in a system in which there is otherwise little loyalty of politicians to the parties on whose labels they contest elections. For, as in India and the other countries of the region as well, it is the desire for a ministerial portfolio or the directorship of a public corporation that motivates politicians, who will barter their votes in parliament to the party that will provide them the portfolios or directorships from which they will garner corrupt income. The scramble for such opportunities provides an edge to politics both in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the region that encourages as well resort to violent means to win elections and gain power.
Also of note is the fact that in none of the countries of South Asia, despite bows to secularist ideals, has there been a separation between religion and politics. In Sri Lanka, Buddhism has been declared the state religion and Buddhist monks have been active in numerous political movements, including that for the establishment of Sinhalese as the sole official language of the country in the 1950s, for the suppression of the Tamil revolt, and for strengthening the “unitary state.”
The consequences of the failures of Sri Lankan politicians to accommodate the differences among the several ethnic groups on the island have been great: 70,000 people killed, nearly 600,000 “internally displaced, between 800,000 and one million Tamils” fled from the country during the past quarter century culminating in a humanitarian disaster with the victory of the Sri Lankan army terminating the civil war and, in the process, adding thousands more killed and perhaps another 300,000 persons displaced in its wake. Neither are these figures exceptional for the countries of South Asia, where slogans of national unity and ethnic supremacy justify the carnage and appear quite compatible with competitive regimes that proclaim their devotion to the ideals of democratic participation and governance.
In a region where the unexpected is ordinary and fundamental changes have been taking place everywhere, recent events in Nepal stand out, namely, the overthrow of the monarchy through the success of a Maoist revolution after a ten-year war from 1996 to 2006; the victory of the Maoists in a free, competitive election; and the elevation of Prachanda, the leader of the Maoists, to the position of prime minister. In the process, Nepal has moved dramatically, as Hachhethu and Gellner note (in Chapter 9), from a state whose leaders proudly proclaimed that they were the only true Hindu state left in the world to a “secular state,” towards the transformation of the government from its unitary form to federalism, and towards an “inclusive democracy” in contrast to the high-caste dominated polity that preceded it. Proposals for a mixture of ethnic and territorial federal units are currently (2008) under lively and controversial discussion.
Most postcolonial states have opted for unitary rule by a central government, which has often turned into nothing more than military rule. However, the enormous cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity of the states of South Asia has naturally led to demands from many groups for constitutional arrangements to accommodate and mediate actual or potential conflicts among them. Federalism, combined with various forms of local self-government, has been the method of choice for India, but it has been resisted in all other states in the region. Pakistan early discarded federalism in favor of a unitary state with two wings, east and west, in order to counter the much greater unity of the eastern wing of the country compared to the western part comprised of several major ethnic and linguistic groups.The failure to adopt a federal solution as a means of accommodation, however, was an important factor in the ultimate breakup of the country, with the separation of the eastern wing and the formation of Bangladesh. The latter state has felt no need for federalism since the principal minority group is the remnant population of Hindus who remained there after Partition, then fled during the civil war and returned again after the division of Pakistan.They have no significant regional concentration. Neither would any demands from that quarter for any special institutional recognition be likely to be accepted. Further, no government of Bangladesh has expressed the wish to make significant concessions for institutional change to the small minority of hill tribal peoples who live in the southeastern parts of the country. As for Sri Lanka, various forms of so-called devolution have been discussed and even partly implemented in the northern and eastern provinces as a solution to the civil war that raged there from 1983 to 2009. The government of Sri Lanka steadfastly resisted a federal solution to the conflict in favor of military suppression of the Tamil rebels. Neither was federalism ever seriously considered by the king in Nepal, a situation that has changed dramatically with the victory of the Maoists and the proposed adoption there of a federalist framework.
India has been exceptional in this regard, and has developed distinctive forms of federalism, in which state and national politics have been intertwined and in which the balance of powers between what is called in India, the “center,” and the states has undergone significant changes over time. In fact, federalism in India, perhaps more than in any other federal system, has involved “continuous negotiation” (Rudolph and Rudolph, in Chapter 10) concerning the relations between the center and the states.
India began as a unitary-biased federal system, with a strong center and weak states. That bias was especially evident in two respects: the center retained and used the powers “to create, abolish, divide, or combine states” (Rudolph and Rudolph). It also (mis)used regulary and increasingly, in the first several decades after Independence, its powers to take over governance of the states directly from the center under the constitutional provision known as the imposition of President’s Rule. Moreover, during the heyday of Indira Gandhi, the governing Congress party at the Center virtually controlled the selection of Congress candidates to contest state legislative assembly elections, selected the chief ministers of the Congress-ruled states, and dismissed those who in any way became troublesome to Indira Gandhi herself and to the dominance of the Congress.
Nevertheless, the predominant pattern of shift over the past half century has been towards pluralism, regionalism, and decentralization.6 With the shift in the balance of central and state powers, as well as intervention from the supreme court, the imposition of President’s Rule has been much less frequent. That tendency has been reinforced in the last two decades with the decline of the Congress as the sole ruling party at the Center and its decline as well into permanent minority status in most of the states. Multipartism nationally and multipartism in the states—or forms of bipolar competition with parties that differ from state to state—have been largely responsible for these changes. The fragility of ruling coalitions at the Center has increased the power of parties based in particular states at times—now regularly— when they have sufficient members in parliament to bring down the central government, quite the opposite situation from the days of dominance by Nehru and his daughter. Additionally, the gradual shift since 1991 from a “command economy” directed by the Center and its planning commission to a liberalization regime—which, in India as the Rudolphs describe it, has become a “federal market economy”—has also reduced the levers of control formerly held by the center to influence state governments. The more enterprising and energetic leaders in the states have also used the opportunities opened up by the liberalization regime to directly solicit investments in their states by global corporations.
It is not the case, however, that the central government lacks significant power to influence state powers and politics. It still controls vast resources as a consequence of its continued dominance in revenue collection, which allows it to distribute funds for, and monitor development programs in the states. While a return to the days of central government dominance of the policy process and state politics is unlikely, the relations between the Center and the states continue in “flux” (Rudolph and Rudolph) and continue also to be based on negotiation, bargaining, and the relative political weight of particular states in national political coalitions.
Chapter 11 on the Indian judiciary (by Shylashri Shankar) documents a further aspect of political change and development of Indian institutions, namely, the gradual assertion and reassertion of the authority of the supreme court to oversee and limit, albeit rarely to invalidate, laws passed by parliament. Although it does not in this respect approach the powers of the US Supreme Court, yet, after many setbacks, including strong efforts to control, suppress, and overturn its judgments and interfere in its functioning, especially during Indira Gandhi’s years in power, it has emerged with a stable, authoritative position in the Indian political order and has carved out niches for itself in several areas of public law, in which it has adopted assertive positions, notably, as Shankar has pointed out, in areas involving “social and economic rights.”
Once again, the contrast with Pakistan is stark, illustrated clearly by Newberg (Chapter 12). Whereas, in India, the supreme court has gradually asserted its separate domain of authority against attempts to undermine it, in Pakistan, in contrast, the supreme court— and the judiciary in general—continue to struggle to formulate a set of criteria that would enable it to challenge effectively and consistently the repeated assertions of executive power. Successive political regimes, whether under military or civilian control, have dismissed judges and/or packed the courts with their own, compliant judges. The court, for its part, has repeatedly bowed to executive authority through decisions justifying authoritarian rule and/or dubious transfers of executive authority from the military to civilian leaders and vice versa on the grounds of such doctrines as “necessity” and “revolutionary legality.” It has also repeatedly accepted the legality of granting immunity from judicial judgment and indemnity for the repeated abuse and misuse of power by the executive authority or, contrarily, has accepted the legality of the execution of a former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, ordered by his successor, General Mohammed Zia ul Haq.
Yet, even in Pakistan, the striving for legitimate authority not only of the courts but of all state institutions has continued from time to time to involve intense conflict, mass movements, and violence. The current crisis of authority in Pakistan (2007–08), as yet far from definitively resolved, has put the supreme court at the very center of the struggle for power and legitimate authority of all its institutions (except the Army, which continues to maintain—in reserve at the moment—its separate and often decisive role in the course of political change).The current struggle for power in Pakistan has placed the courts, especially the supreme court, in an extraordinary position. President Musharraf dismissed the chief justice and packed the courts with his own men. However, the dismissed chief justice then succeeded, along with his colleagues in the judiciary and the bar, and with the support of a mass public, in launching a movement that led to the restoration of free elections, the participation of previously banned leaders and parties, and the marginalization of Musharraf himself, and finally (2008) his forced resignation. Yet, neither Musharraf nor the country’s prime minister, brought to power by the movement, or even the new president, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, wished to see the power and authority of the judiciary restored. Musharraf was forced to retire as president under threat of impeachment, but Zardari resisted the restoration of the judges until March 2009.
The position of the supreme court—and the judiciary in general—in Bangladesh since the achievement of Independence from Pakistan has been similar to that of Pakistan. Despite the assertion in the Constitution of 1972 of the “principle of judicial Independence” (Hossain, in Chapter 13), and periodic assertions of that principle by the court itself, it has experienced politicization during parliamentary periods, on the one hand, and subordination during alternating periods of military rule, on the other hand. Attempts to reassert the independence of the judiciary have relied on a stance articulated first in India, namely, asserting that certain features of the constitution (in this case, judicial independence) cannot be altered by parliament since they affect the “basic structure” of the constitution itself. However, the upshot of the struggles for judicial independence in Bangladesh has been the reduction of the independence of the judiciary and its politicization by both “full-blown military governments” as well as “autocratic presidents and elected parliaments.”
The authority and performance of the Sri Lankan judiciary are intermediate between the respective positions of the courts in India, on the one hand, and Pakistan and Bangladesh, on the other hand, but rather closer to India than to Pakistan and Bangladesh.The three successive constitutions of Sri Lanka have, in several ways, limited the powers of the judiciary, especially with regard to judicial review of laws passed by parliament and the powers of the president. Not surprisingly, therefore, the judiciary in Sri Lanka has accorded “deference to the other state institutions,” and avoided direct conflict with the executive and parliament (Shankar) and has not been free from “politicization.” Nevertheless, it has not subordinated its decisions to the whims of the ruling power. Neither has it engaged in “judicial activism” in the manner of the Indian Supreme Court. In practice, however, its deference to other state institutions has also meant that it has provided no protection to the Tamil minorities in the country against discrimination and harassment by the state. Similarly, its decisions on religious freedom have been biased in favor of Buddhism and against the interests of Christians and Muslims especially, for example, with regard to the right to proselytize. Most important, in common with all institutions, policies, and procedures of the Sri Lankan state, judicial decisions on matters of human rights, including the right not to be tortured, have been negatively affected by the debilitating civil war, which has moved Sri Lanka’s polity increasingly towards “executive sovereignty.”
Issues concerning pluralism and national integration have been at the forefront in virtually every multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural postcolonial state. They have been especially difficult and longlasting in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Bangladesh itself was created as a consequence of the politicization of linguistic issues concerning the official language of the state, which, in turn, overlay conflict over broader cultural differences between Bengalis and West Pakistanis. Equally extreme in its consequences has been the civil war in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese-dominated state and the territorially concentrated Tamil minority. For their part, India and Pakistan, far more diverse in all respects than the other states in the region, have had to confront multiple issues concerning the status of ethnolinguistic and religiously distinct groups.
The Indian state has been largely successful in coping with demands for recognition on behalf of the multiplicity of language groups comprised within its boundaries. India’s leaders resolved the issues of official language for the central government through a compromise between Hindi and English as the two official languages of state. Moreover, all the major regional languages of India have also been accommodated through the federal system in a process that began with the reorganization of states in the 1950s and 1960s, but continues in some respects up to the present. Various other accommodations have also been made, including recognition of all regional languages as media of examination for entry into the central government services and the addition of other languages into the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which grants their speakers certain rights and privileges. Problems remain, nevertheless, with regard to minority language speakers within the reorganized states, particularly concerning the provision of educational facilities for such speakers. Further, there is also a considerable differentiation with regard to status and possibilities for advancement among the speakers of the various languages of India such that English remains the preeminent language of the educated elite of the country, who dominate the central government bureaucracy while speakers of the principal vernacular languages, who do not know English, remain confined to opportunities available within their home states. In effect, although there remain movements for recognition of several language groups, the language issue in India as a whole has become less a matter of official recognition and more a socioeconomic and status “issue of differential access to English education” (Annamalai, in Chapter 15).
Pakistan’s solutions to the problems posed by a multiplicity of languages were initially quite different from India’s and had disastrous results. Initial attempts to impose Urdu as the national and official language for the entire country derived from the symbolic importance of the rivalry between Urdu and Hindi language promoters in India before Independence, even though in Pakistan itself only the refugees (mohajirs) from India spoke Urdu as their mother tongue. Lacking any other language that could make a claim as the “national” language of the country, Jinnah chose Urdu on the mistaken belief that it would unite rather than divide the country. However, the attempt foundered against Bengali opposition and provided the symbolic basis for the secessionist movement that ultimately resulted in the Independence of Bangladesh.
The 1973 Constitution of Pakistan, however, provides a similar solution to that of India for the question of the national/ official languages of the country, namely, Urdu formally declared as the “national language,” while allowing for the indefinite use of English “for official purposes” in the country as a whole and for the provincial languages in the several provinces (Rahman, in Chapter 16). Yet, movements demanding greater recognition of the regional languages of West Pakistan, such as Sindhi and Balochi, have persisted. Why? In most cases, language is the emblem for uniting ethnic collectivities against other ethnic groups perceived as dominant in a province (such as the Urdu-speaking mohajirs in Sindh) or against the Pakistani state itself (as in Balochistan). In other words, as Rahman has put it, in such cases language “serves as an identity symbol” for movements that have other ends beyond development and promotion of the use of the language itself.
But there has also been a curious twist in the symbolic and instrumental uses of language identification for political ends in Pakistan, namely, the preference of elite Punjabis—who form the largest and the dominant ethnic collectivity in Pakistan—for English and Urdu, including their resistance to the teaching of their own mother tongue in the primary schools of the province. It is a curious twist that has a parallel in the post-Independence Indian province of Punjab as well where, in order to resist the demands of Punjabi-speaking Sikhs for a separate province in which Sikhs would have a majority, Punjabi-speaking Hindus disowned their own language in favor of Hindi to such an extent that an entire generation switched their language both of identification and actual practical usage.7 These two cases in themselves provide the most striking evidence for the proposition that language movements may be, and often are, symbolic representations of other interests than the protection of the language itself. Those interests everywhere concern primarily power (Rahman) and economic advantage.
One further issue of identity concerns the question of “national language” itself. India has wisely avoided using that term for either Hindi or English, which conveys a sense of superiority for one language among many, preferring instead to characterize all the widespread and predominant regional languages as “national languages,” with those given preference being designated only as “official languages.” Pakistan, however, less sure of its own national identity, made the mistake of attempting to assert it by elevating one language to the emotively powerful status of “national language.” The obvious solution, however, as Rahman points out, is essentially an Indian one for Pakistan, namely, designating “five national languages in the country with Urdu as a language of inter-provincial communication and English for international communication.”
The feature of language use that is most clearly shared by both Pakistanis and Indians is the high status associated with English and the class differentiation in its adoption. It is in both countries the language of the dominant elites in “private sector employment” and in “the upper echelons of Pakistani society” (Rahman). This, indeed, has become the most important consequence of language policies in both countries in the context of “a failed educational system,” that is to say, one that relegates the vast mass of the populations of both countries to utterly inferior, decrepit, and poorly funded government schools while the rich and well-born attend English-medium schools of high standard, the latter even subsidized in Pakistan by government. In Pakistan, there is yet a further consequence, namely the spread of madrasahs as alternatives to totally inadequate government-funded vernacular schools. Although there is no evidence that these madrasahs are producing more anti-American “terrorists” than the ordinary government schools, they are most obviously producing generations of persons for whom religion provides their primary loyalty while the dominant English-educated elites constitute a “secular” governing minority. Rahman concludes his chapter with the very powerful statement that “the present language policies have the cumulative effect of increasing inequality and polarization in the country.” That polarization would seem to place those who have political power, economic security, and secular values on one side in contrast to those disempowered, economically insecure, and oriented towards religious values as a primary identification.
All the countries of the region have, to greater or lesser degree, faced crises of national unity, greatest, of course, in the case of the disintegration of Pakistan. But all have had to confront, placate, or crush by military means demands for secession made by militant organizations on behalf of minority ethnic, linguistic, or religious groups. In the case of India, aside from a secessionist demand long ago abandoned in Tamil Nadu in south India, there have been three regions where violent secessionist movements have either continued since Independence or have recurred from time to time, namely, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, and the northeastern states. In all cases, the government of India over the past 60 years has made it abundantly clear that it will not tolerate any demand whatsoever for secession from the country while, at the same time, always being open to considering demands that fall short of secession, including the creation of separate states and/or autonomous regions within the Indian Union.Those movements that persist in making secessionist demands, however, have met with massive violence at the hands of the various military and paramilitary forces of the Indian state. Further, in the case of Jammu and Kashmir, where support or safe haven has been provided to insurgents against the Indian state by Pakistan, India has gone to war to put a stop to its intervention, notably after Independence in 1947–48 and again in 1965 and, for different reasons, in the short Kargil war of 1999, fought at an altitude of 16,000 feet over the issue of the “line of control” in Kashmir. It also intervened directly to bring about the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in the 1971 war. While India’s intervention might, on the face of it, appear to undermine its own adherence to the principle of the virtually sacred unity of postcolonial states, from another point of view it is wholly consistent with that principle, for it has never accepted the legitimacy of the original partition of the subcontinent, and especially its basis in religious separatism. Its intervention against Pakistan in that case, therefore, was propelled in part by the opportunity to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the original partition and of a state whose creation was based on such a claim.
Indian leaders never tire of making claims for their status as the “world’s largest democracy.” As indicated already, there is much to sustain such a view of India’s democratic politics, but it is a rare kind of democracy whose military forces have killed so many of its own people, perhaps 25,000 in squashing the Punjab insurrection and another 25,000 in Kashmir, and perhaps 100,000 altogether against all insurrectionary movements since Independence. As Gurharpal Singh notes (in Chapter 17), this is a democracy that uses what he calls “hegemonic control,” including “cooption, accommodation and symbolic agreements” in dealing with secessionist movements, but will also resort to “violent control” whenever necessary. Nowhere has this alternation been more apparent than in the northeastern region of the country where agreement after agreement has been reached through compromises with rebel groups that never hold and are inevitably followed by renewed violence and the unbending resolve of the government of India to use in response the utmost force to suppress secessionist movements.
Secessionist movements have not been the only types that have led to strident and often violent conflicts in Indian politics. More a part of everyday politics, in fact, have been issues pertaining to the status, political power, and access to state resources of caste formations, on the one hand, and the place of the two principal religious communities, Hindus and Muslims, on the other hand. In the latter case, the issue has also increasingly become one not of secession, but of the definition of the Indian state, whether it is to be defined as a Hindu state or a secular state. While intercaste conflicts have from time to time led to intercaste violence, such violence has been sporadic and mostly local in character. Communal conflicts, in contrast, while often arising out of local conflicts, have frequently been magnified deliberately for political purposes, and have been responsible for many thousands of deaths since Independence up to the present in what are labeled Hindu– Muslim “riots.” These riots have been produced or instigated by politicians from many political parties for local advantage in electoral contests since Independence. In the past 15 years, however, the BJP and its sister organizations in the RSS family of organizations have been the principal promoters of such violence in calculated efforts to demonize the Muslim population of the country and mobilize the Hindu population in order to capture power in the several states and in the Indian Union itself. It has had substantial success in doing so in the past, notably in the massive mobilization that led to the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992. It has also been responsible for the pogrom against Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002, under a BJP government that deliberately instigated and promoted the violence for the purpose of shoring up its electoral base in the upcoming state election. Wilkinson (Chapter 18) and others have demonstrated clearly that the strategy did, in fact, work to produce “a crushing victory” for the BJP in the December 2002 elections. The government, and the chief minister who orchestrated the violence, remain in power to this day (2008).Wilkinson, however, argues that communal politics in India have only limited and sporadic uses whereas caste politics are central to Indian politics on an everyday basis and, one should add, remain the most important factors in most elections in most states of the country up to the present.
Indeed, there have been innumerable movements based on caste solidarities and caste antagonisms over the past century, ranging from the non-Brahman movements in southern and western India to the movements of so-called “backward classes” (a term commonly used for the middle status castes) throughout the country, and the more recent rise of “dalit” (“oppressed”) and other movements of low caste groups for recognition, government employment, and access to state resources and political patronage. Indeed, the preferred method of advancing the interests of all the less privileged caste groups in Indian society has been to demand “reservations” of places for designated caste groups in the legislatures and in government service. As a result, various forms of reservation for such groups have been adopted both in the central government and in most, if not all the Indian states. While intercaste conflicts have, as noted, sometimes led to violence, for the most part the jockeying has taken place through the political process, with bidding common among political parties for the support of the more numerous caste groups during elections.
It should not, however, be imagined that the status hierarchy that has always pervaded Indian life will soon be eliminated in consequence of such policies for the benefit of the less privileged classes. In fact, the rise of a vibrant private sector economy associated with the economic liberalization process has made it possible for the upper castes, displaced from positions of power in many Indian states, to retain their eminence in Indian society, for it is the upper castes who get the lucrative jobs in the fast developing private sector while government jobs—especially at the lower levels—and the lower status accompanying them are reserved for the less privileged.
It is also important to note that the primacy of caste politics in India has an effect on communal politics, mainly to undermine it. The BJP’s use of communal politics in elections has been designed to consolidate the Hindu vote in areas where there is a large Muslim population that can be demonized and blamed for the riots that are, in fact, produced by BJP or BJP-recruited Hindu activists. But such unification of the Hindu castes cannot be sustained indefinitely even in particular electoral constituencies and is untenable most of the time in most constituencies in most states in the country. Further, Wilkinson notes that, in states where there are highly competitive electoral contests in which Muslims hold the potential balance in determining the outcomes, the benefits of polarizing Hindu and Muslim votes turn negative for the political parties, thereby decreasing the likelihood of Hindu–Muslim riots produced for political reasons.
The scale and intensity of violence in Pakistan has sometimes seemed to threaten the viability of the state itself, which, after all, was one of the very few states in the world to split apart during the period of bipolar political dominance by the United States and the Soviet Union, when it was in the interest of neither great power to allow such dramatic political changes.Yet, it remains in the interest of none at this time, with the exception of al-Qaeda, to allow such a development in Pakistan. The paradox in all this is that powerful forces remain at work internally and externally to undermine Pakistan’s stability and unity, including those two states that have the greatest interest in maintaining it, namely, India and the United States: India, by its refusal even to consider seriously any kind of settlement in Jammu and Kashmir that would involve significant concessions to Pakistan, and the United States, by its bungling, inadequate, and incompetent intervention in Afghanistan that has added to the destabilization of Pakistan and, as any knowledgeable South Asian specialist could have predicted, to the intensification of the hostile relationship between the two major South Asian countries.
But, Pakistan’s issues of national unity are not at all the creations of other countries— which merely exacerbate them—but arise from the very conditions that led to its foundation and its failures to accommodate successfully regional, ethnic, and Islamic movements and their demands. The status of the Pakhtun population in the North-West Province was a problem from the beginning since its predominant leadership preferred to remain part of India, but, in the midst of the turmoil of 1947, could only boycott the referendum, which resulted in a favorable vote for Pakistan, although with a low turnout. The Khudai Khidmatgars then demanded a semi-autonomous status for the region, which was denied.8 Many Balochistan tribal leaders, for their part, have never accepted the legitimacy of Pakistan’s rule over the province, which has been a site of unending insurgency since the creation of Pakistan, although this huge territory also is internally divided by conflicts between the Baloch and Pakhtun groups.Waseem (Chapter 19) attributes the persistent conflict there and elsewhere in Pakistan to the general preference of all ruling parties and the military for “coercive strategies for unification across ethnic divisions” that stand in sharp contrast to the general policy in India of accommodation of all ethnopolitical movements that stop short of demanding secession and independence. In contrast to India, for example, Pakistan has never seriously considered federal solutions as a means of accommodating ethnonationalist demands. Banned, jailed, and otherwise disrupted by the new Pakistan state, the secular, pro-India Pakhtun movement was ultimately displaced in the NWFP by Islamist movements. Islamist movements have also been supported in Punjab and Sindh by the mohajirs, migrants from India, and their offspring.
Further problems have arisen as a consequence of the very basis for the creation of Pakistan, namely, the idea that it was to be a homeland for the Muslims of India. Although its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, never wished for a homogenous Muslim state, that was the result of the Partition violence that led to the total transfer of the Hindu and Sikh populations from western Punjab to India and of the entire Muslim population from Punjab to Pakistan. Despite Jinnah’s declaration that Pakistan was to be a secular state, not a Muslim state, the result has been the opposite. Although, in fact, most Pakistanis, like most Indians, do not wish to see Pakistan become a state based on religion, the circumstances of Pakistan’s creation have enhanced the influence of the ulema in policy formation and encouraged the proliferation of intolerant Islamist political movements.
A further difference from India has been the predominance of one province and one ethnic collectivity, Punjab and the Punjabis, with 58 percent of the country’s population. In India, in contrast, although the north Indian Hindi speakers constitute the largest single linguistic conglomeration, they have never been able to consolidate into a unified political force that would dominate the rest of the country. It never emerged “as the power base” (Waseem, in Chapter 19) of the country as has Punjab, which is also the most economically dynamic region of the country.
There is, however, in all this a commonality between India and Pakistan in one very important sense, namely, the drive in both countries to find a basis for achieving a political majority to rule in countries that are multireligious, multiethnic, and multilingual and lack an overarching sense of cultural identity. In India, that drive has been most strongly articulated by the Hindu nationalist movement of the BJP. In Pakistan, it takes the form of Islamist movements that seek to override or suppress regional, linguistic, religious, and other cultural identities— including the Islamic faultline of Sunni-Shi’a difference— and are especially favored by those groups that lack an indigenous identity, namely, the non-Punjabi mohajirs, most of whom settled in Sindh where “they remained unassimilated in the host community” (Waseem). Their numbers were later increased by a second influx of so-called Bihari migrants from Bangladesh after its separation from Pakistan.
The longevity and scale of killing that has arisen out of ethnic, communal, and interstate conflicts in South Asia—including the states conventionally classed as “democracies,” namely, India and Sri Lanka—should give pause to their apologists. In the sorry tale of seemingly unending violent conflicts in South Asia, the civil war in Sri Lanka requires attention. The civil war itself was a direct consequence of the nationalist idea that has overtaken the world especially in the past two centuries, namely, that every territory has its rightful nation and every nation has a territory of its own. Since there are no territories in the entire world that fit such a description, this nationalist idea requires that those who do not fit the ethnic definition of the rightful owners of a particular territory be defined as minorities who are either allowed to remain on that territory at the sufferance of the rightful owners or must be evicted, if not destroyed.
The ideological backdrop to the conflicts that arise from this exclusivism are usually ignored in favor of interpretations that stress their origins in inequalities that favor one group over another or in religious or ethnic or other antagonisms. But such differences become irresolvable mainly when the issue of “right” comes to the fore, namely, who has the right to the resources and the privileges and the status of equal citizens of a common territory.
In Sri Lanka, conflicts that arose in part out of resentments—or better, the creation of resentments by a political elite—against the alleged inequalities in Sri Lankan society that favored Tamils over the rightful indigenous owners of the island, the Sinhalese people, became irresolvable not because the issues themselves could not be resolved, but because the dominant Sinhalese elites of all parties found it politically helpful to make use of them to gain power through elections. That there were concrete ways of resolving the conflicts was evident very early in Sri Lanka’s post-Independence history in the agreements reached between Tamil and Sinhalese leaders to resolve the language issue that was the surrogate for the dispute. Those agreements, especially in 1957 and 1965, however, were never implemented because they immediately became hostage to the cries of opposing political formations that the rightful place of the Sinhalese as the dominant people on the island was being undermined.
So, what began as an “ethnic conflict” over language rights—and behind that access to government jobs—in Sri Lanka ultimately turned “into a civil war between the state and Tamil nationalist groups … in the late 1970s” (Uyangoda, in Chapter 20). In the intervening years, so-called ethnic riots in which mostly Tamils were killed, often with the complicity of state leaders, prepared the ground for the final transformation of the conflict. But the progression, Uyangoda notes, arose on account of the “inflexibility of Sinhalese nationalism in responding to minority ethnic grievances” and was fed in a political process whose central feature was “ethnic outbidding.”
The failure to end this civil war through negotiations continued to founder on the issue of whether or not the Sinhalese people own the entire island. Its specific form revolved around whether or not the war could be ended by transforming Sri Lanka into a federal state or agreeing to regional autonomy in the Tamil regions.The possibility of agreement, however, always foundered on the fears of the Sinhalese leaders that any such concession would be but a prelude to secession, with the unstated fear that the party that allowed such a compromise would be wiped out in the next election. By the same token, the Tamil leaders proclaimed their insistence on the right of “national self-determination” (Uyangoda) which, of course, fed the Sinhalese fears.
India’s failed intervention in the conflict in the mid-1980s was itself tarnished by the same brush. Intervening in reality to protect the Tamil population of the island in order to satisfy the feelings of the Tamil politicians and people in Tamil Nadu itself, it evolved into a failed effort to crush the armed Tamil revolt in Sri Lanka. The effort itself, however, was motivated by cross-purposes: protecting Tamils while absolutely rejecting any secessionist ideas that might also cross the waters and thereby revive the long ago abandoned dream in Tamil Nadu for secession and independence from India.
That all such dreams of ethnonational homogeneity of a people and a territory are chimeras is evident in the course of the civil war itself. In every such situation, there are inevitably small or large groups of people interspersed in the contending groups, but who do not belong to either. Such is the case of the Muslims in parts of Sri Lanka, including especially the Eastern Province where they have sizable populations, but also in parts of the Northern Province. The conflict between the Sri Lankan state and the Tamils thus led to a further demand, now from the Muslims, forced, in effect, to discover their “ethnic and political identity” (Uyangoda) as well. As Rupert Emerson put it many years ago: “Who can say the nations nay, and yet who can say what nations are and when and how they may assert themselves?”9 In the meantime, the Sri Lankan civil war continued at the highest level of intensity yet seen until the Tamil insurrection was finally crushed with huge loss of life and displacement of Tamil civilians, “with life going on pretty much ‘as normal’ in most of the Sinhala-dominated parts of the island.”10
Discussion of issues of politics and economic development in the South Asian countries have been handled differently by the several contributors to this volume. As a result, there are two chapters specifically concerning the political economy of India (Corbridge, Chapter 21, and Breman, Chapter 22) and one on Sri Lanka (Lakshman, Chapter 23), but the discussion of economic issues in Pakistan (Burki, Chapter 6) and Bangladesh (Blair, Chapter 7) have been included within the chapters on the politics of those two countries, referenced briefly later in this chapter.
Major transformations are occurring in the political economy of India, heralded in the press and business magazines as the latest addition to the new global capitalist world of high growth. In India itself, the former BJP government adopted the slogan of “India Shining” to proclaim its entry into that new world. Corbridge (in Chapter 21) examines these claims as well as the explanations for the changes that have occurred. That the Indian economy (before the current (2008–09) world economic crash) had been growing at a high and steady pace not previously seen since Independence is clear. That its benefits have not reached in significant measure the poorest of India’s citizens—several hundreds of millions by any measure—who continue to live in the utmost poverty and degradation is also clear. That the changes have increased, rather than lessened, inequalities in a society historically based on one of the most rigid hierarchical systems the world has ever seen is not surprising.
Most observers would probably find little to disagree with these statements. What is mainly contested are the reasons for the new growth and the means for extending its benefits to the population as a whole. Outside India, it is generally assumed that it is economic liberalization, the freeing of the Indian economy from the constraints of state-directed, planned economic growth that is responsible for these changes. Within India, however, where the Left is not dead, it is argued that the earlier stage of planned economic growth laid the basis for the current surge, which would not have been possible without the previous public investments. The argument itself may appear academic, but it carries forward to the present in policy debates concerning the second issue of extending the benefits of the new growth. Can it really be believed, in the jargon of the acolytes of Milton Friedman, that the rising tide of growth and prosperity will “lift all boats,” that public spending on health, education, and other forms of welfare cannot do the trick and that all these matters are best left for the private sector to resolve?
In fact, these are issues of ideological belief that cannot be resolved theoretically. What can be shown are the specific consequences of past and present economic policies for categories of people.Who benefited and who lost or were left behind by the developmental policies of the first decades after Indian Independence and what groups in the population are benefiting or losing now from the new liberalization policies? There is a consensus that crosses ideological dispositions that the beneficiaries of the developmental regime were the “richer farmers,” the “industrial bourgeoisie,” and “the country’s leading bureaucrats” who profited from the corrupt income generated through the “permit-license-quota Raj” (Corbridge). The losers and those who gained little or nothing were mainly the poor and landless in the countryside. With regard to the present, under the liberalization regime, it is clear enough already that the main beneficiaries are the global corporations, the high caste English-speaking Indians who find jobs in those corporations, indigenous entrepreneurs freed from the restraints of the development regime, a loosely defined urban middle class with rising incomes that enable them at last to obtain easily the cherished goods of modernity— refrigerators, TVs, automobiles for the richer among them, and the like. The losers remain the same: the poor, the landless, the “lower” castes, those displaced from their land by land grabs supported by the state to construct large dams or to benefit entrepreneurs and corporations, safely ensconced in “special economic zones.” In brief, as Corbridge summarizes the matter: “The net effect of the reforms has been to widen the gulf between rich and poor people in India, and between rich and poor regions, but that was always going to be the case.”
Another way of putting the matter is to say that the var na system is constantly reproduced in India, that the benefits of economic growth will go virtually exclusively to the upper castes, that the political order will become increasingly marginalized with the economy dominated by the ruling classes and the vast majority of rural and urban poor experiencing marginal benefits and continued grinding poverty.
In this context, Breman (Chapter 22) provides a reality check. What really are the conditions of life in “Shining India” for the wretched of the earth, the poorest of the poor, the laborers in agriculture? Agricultural policy in India in the post-Independence period focused primarily on eliminating the dominant tax farmers in the countryside and replacing them with a countryside dominated by a self-sufficient middle peasantry.Very little was done to improve the living and working conditions of the landless poor. Instead, they were offered a chapati in the sky of a bright future as factory laborers in a soon to be developed urban economy. In fact, however, most of those who have moved to the cities have merely shifted their underclass status to an equally wretched urban environment, while those, the vast majority, who have remained in the countryside, continue to live a bleak subaltern life of labor for pay insufficient for decent nourishment of themselves and their families while faced with physical beatings from their overlords should they dare to protest or demand higher wages or even the legally mandated wage. Many of those who leave the land do not migrate to the city, but to backbreaking “unskilled jobs such as digging, hauling and lifting work” for which they get paid little more than the prevailing wage for agricultural labor (Breman).
Yet, however wretched the contemporary existence of the landless, there has been some improvement in their condition from the 1960s and 1970s: marginally better living quarters and nourishment, some elementary education, and some improvement in health care. Many of these improvements, however minimal, have come about through the political process as the Congress, especially during the heyday of Indira Gandhi, provided specific benefits for the landless laborers, including tiny plots of land on which to build their homes. In Uttar Pradesh, where the BSP, under the leadership of Mayawati, has provided considerable funding for the improvement of the lives of the lowest castes in the villages as well as employment opportunities in government service (including most significantly in the police) the status and assertiveness of the lowest castes has decidedly increased.
Yet, the bulk of the population classified as living below the famous “poverty line” continues to come from this class of landless poor. How then to summarize the improvement in living conditions for the poorest compared to their past wretchedness? In a word, however much conditions have improved, the gap between the poorest and those who live a comfortable—or luxurious— life has increased so that there is “even greater inequity than before” (Breman). Not only that, the Indian countryside continues to harbor large “landless colonies” whose populations consist of paupers and lumpen elements, living a “sub-human existence” without hope of any improvement for themselves or their children. Neither can the statistics of the government of India concerning the reduction in poverty in India be taken at face value for two reasons: first, they ignore the question of how decent life is, in fact, just above the poverty line. Second, as Breman has suggested, it is very likely that the data are being cooked to fit the image of “Shining India.” Finally, Breman argues very strongly that a combination of a policy of “market fundamentalism” in a society with “an ingrained ideology of social inequality are a deadly combination” that offers little or no improvement in any near future for the poorest of the poor.
The political economy of Sri Lanka has differed in many ways from that of India and the other countries in the South Asian region. For one thing, a small island republic, it was, during British rule, a classic “tropical” export economy, “an export economy par excellence” (Lakshman, Chapter 23) based on estate tea cultivation and “other primary commodities” such as coconut and rubber. Sri Lanka’s social economy has also differed significantly from that of India in its emphasis on “social expenditures programs,” namely, education, health, and food subsidies. In consequence, Sri Lanka, in sharp contrast to the rest of South Asia has had a very high PQLI (Physical Quality of Life Index), as high as 82 in the early 1980s.
In other respects, however, Sri Lanka has followed a somewhat similar track to that of India and other developing economies, namely, a movement from “import substitution” to liberalization. Throughout the post-Independence period, however, the performance of the Sri Lankan economy has been, as Lakshman puts it, “lackluster.” Meanwhile, however, there has been a significant reduction in the share of the economy contributed by primary agricultural production, although it remains relatively high even now in both percentage of GDP and total employment in the country. The social consequences of the shift to liberalization policies has, of course, increased income inequalities, enriching the already rich and the newly rich and concentrating wealth in the hands of entrepreneurs, politicians, and high level bureaucrats. Contrariwise, the poverty ratio has hardly changed during the past 20 years, remaining at “around 20–25 percent.” Overall, however, the Sri Lankan combination of a liberalization regime with significant social welfare benefits stands in sharp contrast to the tremendous inequalities and degradation of life for the poorest in most of India, a contrast that is starkly visible in the obvious differences in the quality of human life to anyone who spends some time in both countries. That the same combination could work in India is evident also in the Indian state of Kerala, where the quality of life is at least equal to that of Sri Lanka, if not even better.
In Chapter 6, Burki has noted that, in the repeated alternations of power between the military and the politicians in Pakistan, the latter have failed miserably to promote either responsible government or economic development. All the political leaders of the last several decades, from Bhutto père to Bhutto fille to Zardari and Nawaz Sharif have amassed enormous wealth and property by— to put it mildly—quite dubious means. Burki has placed great importance on the failures of the regimes led by the politicians to produce economic results as favorable as those produced by the military regimes (with, of course, American economic aid) as a factor in the acceptance by the public of the repeated interventions by the military.
Throughout all the political changes, at least since the 1990s, and despite the instability and corruption, the Bangladesh economy, still overwhelmingly dominated by the agricultural sector, has done well, a paradox (Blair, Chapter 7) for which there is no easy explanation, although clearly massive foreign aid has had a great deal to do with it. Whatever the reasons, Blair notes that there has been a significant rise in foodgrain production during the past two decades, which translates into greater “food availability per capita” at reduced prices; some movement in “off-farm” sectors such as “transportation, construction, [and] retailing,” leading to some upswing in wages; and a significant overall drop in “the proportion of rural workers whose primary occupation was in agriculture.” Blair attributes these favorable results to a combination of policy changes towards a liberalization regime, fortified initially by massive foreign aid, both of which overrode—providing the paradox— the obvious “misgovernance” in the country since Independence.
The similarities and differences among the states of South Asia are brought out especially clearly in the comparative chapters in this volume. One of the most distressing features of “development” in virtually all postcolonial countries has been the growth in importance of the military, not only or even especially to prepare for battle with foreign enemies, but for the purpose of controlling their own populations and quelling protest movements amongst them.
India and Pakistan inherited substantial military forces (Cohen, Chapter 24), including considerable elements with experience in battle in the Second World War. The Bangladesh component of those forces, however, was quite minimal. Sri Lanka had only very small military forces. However, in the latter cases, the military have vastly expanded in size, power, and importance since Independence, decisive in politics in Bangladesh in fact, although firmly under the control of the civilian power in Sri Lanka. Moreover, the two largest countries in the region, India and Pakistan, have been engaged for many years in a nuclear arms race, subterranean for decades, but marked by blatant displays of their existence from time to time, beginning with the travesty of India’s first “peaceful nuclear explosion” in 1974 and culminating in the successive nuclear explosions by both India and Pakistan in 1998. Neither have the two enemies shrunk on several occasions from making outright nuclear threats (Cohen).
The dispersion of military forces in South Asia has, moreover, gone far beyond traditional forms in Weberian states that maintain a monopoly of the legitimate use of force. There has been, in addition, a proliferation of paramilitary forces, some under the control of the state, others maintained surreptitiously by the state, and still others engaged in rebellion against the state, and in some cases, especially Sri Lanka, in the form of outright civil war. In Nepal, a Maoist insurrectionary force succeeded in 2007 in holding their own11 against the weak and “ineffective” (Cohen) Royal Nepal Army, thereby bringing about the downfall of the king and the transformation of the political regime towards parliamentary rule.
Although India has experienced the proliferation and dispersion of various military elements, it has maintained absolute and unchallenged civilian control over the state military forces. Sri Lanka, too, has largely maintained civilian control over the military, with the exception of one farcical near coup d’état attempt in 1962 that was “called off ” at the eleventh hour.12 At the same time, the very extensive use of the military in dealing with “domestic violence” (Cohen) in both these countries and the very considerable military expenditures lavished on the military forces in them is part of the common pattern in the region. Moreover, it is rather a well-kept secret that Sikh forces posted in northern India engaged in outright mutiny at the time of the Indian army’s assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984 and had to be rounded up as they sought to head towards Amritsar.13
The differences among the South Asian countries with regard to corruption and the criminalization of politics are rather less than their differences with regard to the role of the military. All countries in the region rank high on the various indexes of global corruption, although Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal persistently rank higher than either India or Sri Lanka. The literature on corruption in South Asia differs in its assessment of its consequences. Kochanek (Chapter 25) argues that it has negative consequences for economic growth, while others suggest that corruption has it uses, not merely in greasing palms, but in greasing the wheels of government to speed up economic development projects. Thus, the term “speed money” has been used in South Asia, as elsewhere, to summarize its positive effects.
Right-wing and laissez-faire economists, of course, blame the developmental state for the high incidence of corruption in postcolonial societies. Kochanek agrees. Further, the stakes have become sufficiently high in the developmental states of South Asia, where control over the distributional resources of the state has become the primary aim of nearly all politicians, so much so that the political process itself has become increasingly criminalized.
Any assessment of the state of democratic politics in South Asia that fails to note the pervasiveness of corruption and criminality that permeates all levels of the state and the electoral process itself must be considered deficient. In Bangladesh, criminality and violence are integral to ensuring success in elections. In Pakistan, several of its heads of state have had well-established records of massive corruption. Even India, where most heads of state have had reputations for honesty, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and Narasimha Rao all had dubious records in these respects.
Like all other features of the developmental state, the corruption system promotes inequality. The principal beneficiaries are those who have “money, status, and connections” (Kochanek). Those who cannot pay, the poorest, are unlikely to receive even those benefits that are specifically designated for them.
The states of South Asia, in common with other postcolonial states, have all faced, and continue to face violent insurrectionary movements that challenge the authority, legitimacy, and/or the boundaries of the existing states. The parliamentary systems, India and Sri Lanka—as the chapters on pluralism and national integration illustrate— have been no different in this regard from the others. But there have been other forms of violent challenge to the states of South Asia, common primarily to India and Nepal, namely, challenges to state authority coming from radical leftist and Communist movements, called in India “Naxalites” and also, in both India and Nepal, “Maoists.” Nor, as Banerjee points out in Chapter 26, has India been able “to resolve them through a democratic process,” whereas, in Nepal (2008), such a process is already underway (Hachhethu and Gellner; see Chapter 9).
But the rebellions against state authority in India do not threaten the authority and power of the Indian state to anything like the extent they have in Nepal. In fact, the earliest rebellions, including especially those promoted by the Communist parties in Telangana and elsewhere, were either defeated by Indian armed force or their leadership was integrated into the parliamentary process. Both the earlier and the current anti-state violence has come from “the most desperate segments of the population who have remained deprived of the benefits of development following Independence, and who find that the prevailing ruling system has failed to fulfill its promises” (Banerjee). They have also drawn support disproportionately from the most marginal segments of society— especially tribal populations living in the more remote areas of the country—while articulating the broader “demands of the poor and landless peasantry” in general (Banerjee).
Reports are periodically published by various groups showing that a large swath of territory down through the middle of the country has been experiencing or is continuing to experience violent insurrectionary movements, including the assertion of control over isolated pockets.There is even a weekly death count for the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chattisgarh, Jharkand, and Orissa—areas said to be infested by “left-wing extremism”—published by the right-wing, authoritarian online journal, South Asia Intelligence. Banerjee also asserts that the current leading organization promoting “guerilla war” against the Indian state maintains effective control over large swaths of Indian territory, exceeding even the area under the effective control of rebel groups in the northeastern part of India discussed by Gurharpal Singh (Chapter 17). As yet, however, these violent, mostly agrarian movements, pose no serious threat to the stability and power of the Indian state, which retains the capacity, if it chooses to exercise it with full force, to decimate, if not crush them all.The government of India also retains the nonviolent ability, successfully exercised from time to time, to adopt “reformist measures” (Banerjee) that undercut movements against its authority. At present, however, the tendency on the part of the GOI is more towards the use of increased force that includes the tried and tested Indian police tactic of cornering and killing groups of rebels and “their sympathizers” in what are euphemistically called “encounters,” but in which the gunfire is only in one direction. The Indian government has also perfected a tactic in the northeast that was used by the United States in Vietnam: village “pacification,” which, of course, translates into “razing of tribal hamlets,” just as the US burned Vietnamese villages to the ground. For these and so many other reasons noted by Banerjee, the Maoists in India cannot achieve the success of their counterparts in Nepal.
Perhaps the most striking feature of international politics and interstate relations in South Asia is the extent to which they arise and are overwhelmingly influenced by domestic considerations. That is to say not that popular domestic opinion influences policy so much as that issues concerning the sovereignty and boundaries of the states of the region are all contested. It is also to say that even relations between the states of South Asia and extra-regional actors during most of the period since Independence have revolved around domestic issues. Although Nehru and his successors sought to formulate a distinctive foreign policy in relation to the world system, namely, nonalignment, even these efforts turned into another aspect of interstate relations in the region. For, whatever India did, Pakistan did the opposite, in this case turning towards outright alignment with the United States in the Cold War. This in turn influenced India’s own policies, which increasingly then “tilted” towards semi-alignment with the Soviet Union, culminating in the 1971 Friendship Treaty, which also arose at a time when India was about to go to war to dismember Pakistan.
The states of the region, the least integrated region in the world, where even trade relations and travel from one state to the other have often been highly restricted, have sought external relations and alliances not only or even primarily for their own sake, but to counter the moves of regional enemies and/or dependencies.
The linchpin around which so much has turned in South Asian history and international politics is, of course, the unending conflict between India and Pakistan over the status of Kashmir, which, in turn, has been so bitter because it reflects the fundamental conflict over the very definition of the two states and even—in the eyes of many in India—not just who should have sovereignty over Kashmir but whether Pakistan itself even has the right to exist.This conflict alone has spawned four wars between the two countries, including one that led to the breakup of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh as an independent state.
Further, the policies of the states are heavily influenced by internal domestic conflicts such as those described in several chapters in this volume, and discussed earlier. As Hewitt has put it: “The states of South Asia … must be concerned as much with securing the state from its own populations as from other states, and from competing sub-nationalist claims and ethnic separatism” (see Chapter 27).
Moreover, the interplay between domestic and international considerations in South Asia, most especially between India and Pakistan, continues to be reflected in the current “War on Terror,” which, like the older Cold War, draws into its net states around the world that make use of it to pursue their own interests. So, India now seeks to tar Pakistan with the brush of support for “terrorists” in what its leaders describe as cross-border attacks in Indian-held Kashmir and bomb attacks within India itself while Pakistan, as always, supports American interests largely for the sake of feeding the insatiable demands of its army, whose eyes are always turned primarily towards India and Kashmir and preparation for the next war with India. In this contest, the “subtext,” as it were, in America’s war against terrorism in Afghanistan is the struggle between India and Pakistan for influence and control in that country.
Neither has this interpenetration of domestic concerns and regional interstate relations been restricted to Indo-Pakistan relations.They affect as well relations between these two countries with the other states of the region, each of the two large states opposing whatever action the other takes in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan or even in the Maldives. However, in relation to all these states, India remains the predominant power, far overshadowing Pakistan, despite the fact that relations between India and Bangladesh have deteriorated considerably since the halcyon days of India’s support for Bangladesh’s Independence and that India’s dominance and intervention have also been resented in Nepal and Sri Lanka from time to time.
1 Personal communication.
2 Especially important in this regard have been the movements launched by the militant Hindu organizations that are ostensibly non-violent, but are in fact deliberately provocative and generally productive either of violence between Hindus and Muslims or outright victimization and killing of Muslims, with the aid of the police.
3 The leading source of such writings is the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi, and especially those of Yogendra Yadav.
4 Paul R. Brass, Caste, Faction, and Party in Indian Politics, Vol. II: Election Studies (New Delhi: Chanakya, 1985).
5 Kanchan Chandra, Why Ethnic Parties Succeed, Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India (Cambridge: University Press, 2004).
6 Paul R. Brass, “Pluralism, Regionalism and Decentralizing Tendencies in Contemporary Indian Politics,” in A. Jeyaratnam Wilson and Dennis Dalton (eds), The States of South Asia: Problems of National Integration (London: Hurst, 1982), pp. 223–64; revised and updated in Paul R. Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison (New Delhi: Sage, 1991), pp. 114–66.
7 Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India (Cambridge: University Press, 1974).
8 Mukulika Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed (Oxford: James Currey, 2000).
9 Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples (Boston: Beacon, 1960), p. 297.
10 Comment from David Gellner.
11 In a personal communication, Gellner notes that the Maoists “held their own” against the Nepal army, “but they were not capable of overrunning it—and it was the realization that military victory was not possible, along with strong pressure from India, which persuaded the Maoist leaders to join the parties in overthrowing the King.”
12 Donald Horowitz, Coup Theories and Officers’ Motives: Sri Lanka in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1980).
13 Personal interview.