Indian Democracy: Problems and Prospects (Anthem South Asian Studies) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8190757040 ISBN 13: 9788190757041

Publisher: Anthem Press, 2009

Synopsis

‘Indian Democracy’ is an attempt to understand the development of democratic polity in India. It covers a wide range of issues – theoretical concepts, political institutions, federalism, electoral process, individual and group rights and mass media – drawing attention to the significant broadening of Indian democracy.

About this title

About the Author

M Manisha and Sharmila Mitra Deb are Senior Lecturers in the Department of Political Science, Loreto College, Kolkata.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Indian Democracy

Problems and Prospects

By Sharmila Mitra Deb, M Manisha

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2009 Sharmila Mitra Deb and M Manisha
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-81-907570-4-1

Contents

List of Contributors, vii, 
Introduction, xi, 
DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IN INDIA: CONCEPTS, CHALLENGES AND DEBATES M Manisha, 
1. RECONSTRUCTING DEMOCRATIC CONCERNS IN INDIA Rajarama Tolpady, 1, 
2. ARE WE READY FOR DEMOCRACY? A FEW OBSERVATIONS Gautam Kumar Basu, 20, 
3. DEMOCRACY AND POVERTY IN INDIA Yogendra Yadav, 26, 
4. DEMOCRACY AND FEDERALISM IN INDIA: TWO EPISODES AND A SET OF QUESTIONS Peter Ronald deSouza, 39, 
5. INDIA'S COALITION FUTURE? Rakhahari Chatterji, 51, 
6. HOW DEMOCRATIC IS OUR PARLIAMENT? ELITE REPRESENTATION AND FUNCTIONAL EFFICIENCY OF LOK SABHA M Manisha, 66, 
7. DEMOCRACY'S JANUS FACE: A REVIEW OF ELECTIONS IN POST-INDEPENDENCE INDIA Samir Kumar Das, 90, 
8. THE NATURE OF THE OPPOSITION IN INDIA'S PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY Sanjukta Banerji Bhattacharya, 107, 
9. RESTYLING DEMOCRACY? MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND PUBLIC SPACE VIS-À-VIS INDIAN TELEVISION Dipankar Sinha, 129, 
10. THE POOR WORKING WOMEN: THE ACHILLES HEEL OF INDIAN DEMOCRACY – A PROFILE OF THE MAIDSERVANT FROM THE BUSTEES OF KOLKATA Sreeparna Das Gupta, 152, 
11. HOW IS DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH ASIA? A COMPARISON OF THE ELITE AND THE MASS ATTITUDES K C Suri, 171, 

CHAPTER 1

RECONSTRUCTING DEMOCRATIC CONCERNS IN INDIA

Rajarama Tolpady

This paper attempts to provide an outline of the contributions of the Indian democratic socialist tradition to the expansion and radicalization of the canvas of democratic theory and practice in India. While doing so, it also briefly discusses and highlights the historical and cultural context of the emergence of democratic imagination in India. Besides, the paper also tries to grapple with certain central issues of democracy in contemporary India, and shows how the socialist input into Indian democracy could help in overcoming some of its predicaments. This analysis is done in three sections. The first section discusses the historical and cultural context of the emergence of democracy in India in terms of the nationalist movement and the framing of the Indian constitution. The second section identifies the central issues that Indian democracy confronts today. Finally, the third section highlights the significance of Indian democratic socialist discourse both in identifying the problems of Indian democracy as well as in evolving amicable solutions to them.

I

Democracy as a political idea owes its origin to the west. However, the western genesis of the idea of democracy does not necessarily make it Eurocentric as different societies have different ways of articulating or rearticulating democracy in their distinctive cultural and historical pursuits. In India too, the chronicle of democratic imagination and pursuit has been historically specific and culturally distinct. Although the democratic imagination in India might have had its lineage in the historical experience of Western Europe, it cannot be either reduced back to that historical experience or be treated as an unproblematic transposition of an alien idea. In other words, the narrative of the Indian democratic pursuit is by no means a simple and mechanical re-enactment of the western history of democracy.

In India, democracy as a family of ideas emerges and takes shape in the course of events and eventualities associated with her historical encounter with colonialism. The nuanced and fairly long historical relation of India with the west, mediated through the hegemonic rule of colonialism, produced a wide range of ideas, which in due course constituted part and parcel of the Indian idea of democracy. To map out this extremely complex picture of Indian pursuit of democratic imagination, one needs to traverse through the dense historical occurrences of nineteenth and the twentieth century India. This helps us to understand under what circumstances and responding to which events, ideas were articulated, institutions were envisaged, and processes were initiated. The complex history of India's encounter with colonialism could be overviewed in terms of a range of responses of the Indian people from social reform to the nationalist movement; from demand for constitutional rule to the cry for Swaraj; and from efforts of social change to endeavours for social, economic and political transformation. The early response of Indian society vis-à-vis colonialism can be identified in terms of varying kinds of demands for social reform. It varied from the demands of Bengali elites for the abolition of sati and for introduction of women's education, to the Dalit demands for self-respect and social justice. These different kinds of demands can be identified in a number of movements that emerged in different parts of India; and in different contexts of her evolution as a modern society in the larger background of colonial rule. They included movements and struggles against varying kinds of social, political and cultural conditions of oppression as well as injustice. These conditions of oppression and injustice could have been propelled either by native structures of exploitation or by colonial interventions or by both. Different kinds of peasant struggles, working class agitations, Dalit upsurges, tribal resistances, and women struggles are some of the Indian responses to conditions of oppression or non-freedom caused by native or alien forces.

The national liberation movement that emerged in India in the early part of the twentieth century is, in fact, a culmination and a combination of all these divergent developments. It should be stated here that the national liberation movement did not incorporate into its fold each one of these developments, but provided expressions to quite a few of them. Although the national liberation movement in India drew the ideological strength from the constitutional liberal tradition of the west, it radically reconstructed the liberal tradition in accordance with the specific cultural and social needs of Indian society. This was possible precisely due to the fact that the national movement was profoundly and unequivocally anti-colonial in its sensibility. The strong rooting of the national liberation movement in the Indian cultural tradition enabled the movement to redefine the central values that it sought to achieve and formulate strategies to realize them. For instance, some of the early leaders of Indian nationalism like Ranade, Gokhale or Bannerjee appeared naive and straightforward imbibers of English liberal ideology. However, a closer examination of their ideas reveals their striving to domesticate and internalize western influences in the context of India. Other nationalist leaders like Tilak and Gandhi exhibited exceptional sensitivity towards the cultural roots of Indian society in different ways. Similarly, the nationalist leaders of the subsequent generation like Nehru, Jai Prakash Narayan, Lohia and Ambedkar were keenly aware of the historical and cultural perplexities of their time. Consequently, the ideas of democracy, secularism, social justice, federalism and decentralization, which constituted an integral part of the Indian democratic imagination, were subjected to critical scrutiny. This resulted in these ideas being creatively rearticulated keeping in view the cultural and historical context prevalent in India. The nationalist leadership, above other things, intensely recognized that India was a society of diversity and disparity and that the former needed to be strengthened while the latter had to be sorted out. Indian democratic imagination, therefore, departs from its western counterpart in as much as it reconstructed the ideological content of democracy in the context of and as a response to the different kinds of differences in India. Thus, Indian democracy theoretically reflects and politically articulates diversity as its foundation.

Similarly, the idea of secularism which is integral to the idea of democracy in India has different roots of its own. The secular imagination in India has very little to do with the history of secularism in the west. The history of secularism in the west is always caught up in the Church–State controversy resulting in differentiating the private domain from the public one. This eventually led to a fairly reasonable distinction between politics and religion in the west. Whereas in India, secularism is a historical product of a multicultural and multi-religious social reality. The nationalist leadership tended to conceive secularism not as a tightly woven theory but as a broadly visualized perspective emerging out of practical necessities. It was envisaged and found necessary to resolve hostility and establish peace among conflicting communities. Secularism in India, therefore, implies on the one hand the formulation of a state policy that maintains a critical and principled distance from religious communities, and on the other, the creation of a civil society consciousness that fosters principles of tolerance, recognition of difference, and mutual respect among religious communities. In this context, Rajeev Bhargava aptly characterizes Indian secularism as a model arising out of religious strife in India. This 'religious strife' model of secularism, he holds, is fundamentally different from the 'Church–State' model.

The idea of social justice is one of the central principles of Indian democracy and is inscribed into the core of the Indian practice of democracy, as it was widely recognized that democracy in India had to be carried out in a thoroughly unequal and unjust society, which is historically disadvantaged partly due to colonial intervention. Social justice is envisaged and incorporated into the corpus of Indian democracy with a great deal of awareness and care towards the prevalence of divergent kinds of differences and disadvantages. What is significant to note here is that, the idea of social justice, institutionalized through the practice of positive discrimination or affirmative action in India, was perceived only to wipe out those differences that breed inequality and disadvantage. This is to suggest that affirmative action instrumentalized through reservation policy in India is intended only to set right and reorganize unequal social and economic arrangements, and to promote cultural diversity. Thus, social justice is an all-pervasive principle that runs all the way through the Indian text of democracy.

The idea of difference and disadvantage takes us to another principle or philosophical aspect of the Indian democracy – federalism. The Indian idea of federalism also departs from the classical idea of federalism in the west, as it does not rest upon the principle of devolution of power. Instead, it is a distinct idea of distribution of power based on the considerations of regional difference and political disadvantage.

Finally, the idea of decentralization, reflected through the Panchayati Raj institutions, constitutes another important aspect of Indian democracy. Although this idea did not take off in the initial years of the Indian experiment with democracy, it gained momentum as years passed by. The contemporary cry for decentralization predominantly present in the democratic politics in India is the result of the rise of a new kind of demand politics seeking greater popular participation in democratic decision-making. Peter de Souza characterizes this new demand as the second wave of Indian democracy. In other words, the increasing demand for decentralization in Indian politics is the beginning of a massive process of democratization of democracy in India.

The democratic constitution of India is a culmination, institutionalization and textualization of all the normative aspects enumerated above. The constitution as a synoptic statement or as a vision document of a given society, enshrines values, establishes institutions and initiates processes. The Indian constitution too performs this delicate historical function. In the light of this, the parliamentary form of government, with a certain mechanism of checks and balances and a notion of the supremacy of the parliament, upholds the sovereignty of people. Similarly, the principles of democracy, secularism and social justice strive to hold a diverse citizenry together in harmony. The reasonably independent judiciary enforces and safeguards the rights of all the citizens and controls the activities of the state. Federalism attempts to ensure regional and cultural identities; and the notion of decentralization endeavours to diffuse power and ensure representation. This is supposed to be the normative frame of the Indian constitution.

Such an identification of the normative frame of the Indian constitution demands an extremely difficult hermeneutic effort. It meant a careful journey not only into the text of the constitution but also into the complex context in which it came to be produced. One can identify at least four contexts as inextricable for an appropriate understanding and interpretation of the Indian constitution. They can be identified as follows:

The first among them is the whole context of the British colonial administration during which a large number of constitutional reforms were introduced. Constitutional Reforms of 1909 and 1919, and the Government of India Act of 1935 are the most important among them. The constitution of India is partly an outgrowth of these various constitutional reforms, which the British introduced from time to time. The parliamentary model that we have evolved in India is entirely attributable to these reforms. However, this does not either mean that the Indian constitution is a carbon copy of the constitutional reforms the British introduced in India or that the Indian parliament is a replica of the British parliament. What is to be recognized here is the immense historical linkage that modern Indian constitutional democracy has had with British colonial rule. It also needs to be emphasized here that the constitutional reforms that the British introduced in India bear testimony to the liberal side of the British colonial rule. It is remarked by a significant section of scholarship on colonialism that among all the colonial regimes the British colonial dispensation in India happened to be the most generous. In historical retrospect, it can be reasonably maintained that the English educated intelligentsia in India was successful in creatively occupying the liberal space that British colonialism offered to India.

The national liberation movement with its divergent ideological ramifications constitutes another important context that determined the nature and meaning of the Indian constitution. Axiomatically, the national liberation movement in India is one of the most powerful and popular upsurges that forged a formidable resistance to the ideology of colonialism churning out a wide range of ideas and values. However, among these ideas the liberal, democratic and ideological strand tended to overpower the course of the nationalist movement. It also determined the tone and the tenor of the nationalist discourse and influenced the formation of the Indian constitution. As a result, ideas of democracy, liberty, equality and social justice have become the cornerstones of the Indian constitution. Significantly, along with the force of ideas the national liberation movement produced a wide variety of institutions that played an important role in sustaining democracy as a social phenomenon. In this sense social organizations like the Brahmo Samaj and Servants of India Society are institutions responsible for fostering democracy as a formidable social philosophy.

Amazingly, the liberal and democratic values that were churned out during the nationalist struggle had a massive impact on the minds of the Indian people. In fact, there was a great deal of unanimity and consensus among them in the reiteration and incorporation of these values into the fabric of constitutional and political life of modern India. Consequently, it was resolved without any glimpse of disagreement that India shall be a democracy founded on the principle of universal adult franchise. What a developed democracy like England could achieve over centuries, India could by a single stroke of a pen as it were. Further, the notion of equal rights, with due recognition of difference and disadvantage, was also a matter of unanimous acceptance. Although there were a great deal of heated debates on the issue of reconciling the notion of rights with that of social justice, rights were by and large recognized as sacrosanct.

The live debates in the Constituent Assembly and the kind of problems, perplexities and the challenges that invoked various responses among the framers of the constitution form another inextricable context to understand and interpret the Indian constitution. Significantly, the Constituent Assembly held its deliberations under the dark shadow of partition. The havoc that partition caused and the widespread hostility that prevailed among the two dominant religious communities in India compelled the Constituent Assembly to go seriously into certain core issues of social harmony and national integration. With enormous violence around and hatred looming large, the Constituent Assembly deliberated on issues of inter-religious harmony and national unity. As a result, questions as to whether India shall be a federal state or not and if yes then what kind of federalism should it be; what is the nature and extent of religious rights and whether religious rights are individual rights or community rights; and how does the state intervene and resolve conflicts among religious communities, and whether India should adopt a uniform civil code were the dominant issues deliberated upon. Eventually, India was envisioned as a union of states striking a balance between aspirations of national integration, regional autonomy, and a secular political order representing diverse cultural identities and religious tolerance.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8190757040
• ISBN 13: 9788190757041
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 254
• Editor: Manisha M, Mitra Deb Sharmila