State and Politics in India
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Themes in Politics Series
GENERAL ED._ITORS
Rlljeev Bharg ava
Partha Chatterjee
The Themes in Politics series aims to bring together essays on import­
ant issues in Indian political science and politics - contemporary
political theory, Indian social and political thought, and foreign policy,
among others. Each volume in the series will bring together the most
significant articles and debates on each issue, and will contain a sub­
stantive introduction and an annotated bibliography.
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State
and
Politics
in
India
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Edited by
Partha Chatterjee
DELID
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CALCUTTA CHENNAI MUMBAI
1998
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.
Oxford Univ:::,sity Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
J 'J j Oxford
New York
Athens Aue/eland Bangkok Calcutta
·5 /]-1 2 Florence
Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi
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/ <J CJ
8
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne J,,. -.:ico City
Mumbai Nairobi Paris Singapore
Taipei Tokyo Toronto
and associates in
Berlin Ibadan
©Oxford University Press 1997
First Published 1997
Oxford India Paperbacks /998
ISBN O /9 564765 3
Typeset by Resodyn, New Delhi 110070
PrinJed in India at Pauls Press, New Delhi 110020
and published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press
YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi I JO 00/
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Note from the General Editors
T
eaching of politics in India has long suffered because of the
systematic unavailability of readers with the best contem­
porary work on the subject. The most significant writing in Indian
politics and Indian political thought is scattered in periodicals;
much of the recent work in contemporary political theory is to be
found in inaccessible international journals or in collections that
reflect more the current temper of Western universities than the
need of Indian politics and society.
The main objective of this series is to remove this lacuna. 'The
series also attempts to cover as comprehensively and usefully as
possible the main themes of contemporary research and public
debate on politics, to include selections from the writings of lead­
ing specialists in each field, and to reflect the diversity of research
methods, ideological concerns and intellecrual styles that charac­
terize the discipline of political science today.
We plan to begin with three general volumes, one each in
contemponry political theory, Indian politics and Indian political
thought. A general volume on international politics and specific
volumes ofreadings on particular areas within each of these fields
will follow.
RIJEEV BHAR.GAVA
PARTIIA C!-lATfEIUEE
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Preface
'"T'iiis volume has been planned to provide a general introduc­
.l tion to th e study of politics in contemporary India. Given
the limited number of essays that could be fitted into a single
volume, several importmt topics and writings have had to be left
out. Besides, a few other essays I would have liked to include could.
not be reprinted here because of difficulties with getting permis­
sion from the original publishers. However, I am somewhat reas­
sured because several other volumes in this series will take up the
subject of Indian politics in greater thematic detail; the essays that
have been left out here will doubtless appear in some of those
volumes:
This volume is primarily addressed to advanced undergraduate
and postgraduate students of political science in South Asian uni­
versities. However, given the interest in the subject among many
other kinds of readers, it may be of use to a wider readership. I
have attempted as far as practicable to keep the discussion up-to­
date.
Apart from my consultations with Rajeev Bhargava, my co­
editor in this series, I have g1eatly benefited from the help given
by my colleagues at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,
Calcutta, in particular Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, Pradip Bose,
Vivek Dhareshwar and Anjan Ghosh. I must especially thank the
members of the staff of the CSSSC library and reprography
sections for their unstinting support without which I could not
have compiled this volume in the time available to me. Finally,
I thank Oxford University Press for its enthusiasm and efficiency
in handling the planning and production of this volume.
Calcutta
P.C.
September 1996
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Acknowledgements
"T"'he publishers wish to thank the following for granting permis1. sion to reprint the articles included in this volwne.
&momic mul Politi,al Weekly for Sudipta Kaviraj, 'A Critique of
the Passive Revolution', 23, 45-7: 2429-44; Yogendra Yadav, 'Re­
configuration in Indian Politics: State Assembly Elections, 19931995', 31, 2-3: 95-104; T.V. �.athyamurthy, 'Impact of Centre­
State Relations on Indian Politics: An Interpretative Reckoning,
1947-1987', 24, 38: 2133-43; MS.S. Pandian, 'Culture and Subal­
tern Consciousness: An Aspect of the MGR Phenomenon', 24, 30:
pp. 62-8; Amrita Basu, 'When Local Riots Are Not Merely Local:
Bringing the State Back in Bijnor 1988-1992', 29, 40: 2605-21;
Rajni Kothari, 'Rise of the Dalits and the Renewed Debate on
Caste', 29, 26: 1589- 94 and Flavia Agnes, 'Protecting Women
Against Violence? Review of a Decade of Legislation, 1980-1989',
27, 17: WS19-33.
Living Media India Ltd for David Buder, Ashok Lahiri and Pran­
noy Roy, 'India Decides: Elections 1952-1995', in David Buder,
Ashok Lahiri and Prannoy Roy (eds), India Dtades: Ekaions 19521995, pp. 7-41.
Princeton University Press for James Manor, 'Parties and the
Party Sys tem', in Atul Kohli (ed;), India's Dmuxracy: An Analysis of
Changing Statt Society Relations, pp. 62-98.
Cambridge University Press for Paul Brass, 'NationaJ Power and
Local Politics in India: A Twenty-Year Perspective', Modern Asian
Studies, 18, 1: 89-118; Atul Kohli, 'From Breakdown to Disorder:
West Bengal', in Atul Kohli (ed.), Dtm()(Tacy nnd Discontent: India's
Gr<1Wing Crisis of Gov"7Jllhility, pp. 267-96, and Sanjib Baruah,
'Politics of Subnationalism: Society versus State in Assam', Modern
Asian Studies, 28, 3: 649-71.
Myron Weiner for 'India's Minorities: Who Are They? What
Do They Want?', in Ashutosh Varshney (ed.), Tht Indian Paradoz:
Essays in Indian Politia, pp. 39-75.
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Contents
Figures
Introduction: A Political History of Independent
India
Partba Chatterjee
l
I. THE SYSTEM
I. A Critique of the Passive Revolution
Sudipta Kavirllj
41
45
II. THE INS1TIVTIONS
2. Parties and the Party System
89
92
James Manor
3. India Decides: Elections 1952-1995
DtlVid Butler, Asholt Lahiri and Prtm1WJ Roy
4. Reconfiguration in Indian Politics: State Assembly
Elections 1993-1995
125
5. Evolving Trends in the Bureaucracy
B.P.R. VithaJ
6. Impact of Centre-State Relations on Indian Politics:
An Interpretative Reckoning 1947-1987
T. V Satbyamurthy
7. Development Planning and the Indian State
208
Yogmdra Y
""8v
m.
Partba Chatterjee
THE POLmCAL PROCESS: DOMINANCE
8. National Power and Local Politics in India:
A Twenty-year Perspective
Paul Brass
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177
232
271
299
303
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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Contents
9. From Breakdown to Order: West Bengal
AtuJKDbJi
336
10. Culture and Subaltern Consciousness: An Aspect
of the MGR Phenomenon
367
11. When Local Riots are Not Merely Local: Bringing
the State Back in, Bijnor 1988-1992
390
M.S.S. Ptmditm
Amrita B1ZSU
437
IV. THE POLITICAL PROCESS:-RESISTANCE
12. Rise of the Dalits and the Renewed Debate on
Caste
439
13. India's Minorities: Who Are They? What Do They
Want?
459
14. Politics of Subnationalism: Society versus State in
Assam
496
15. Protecting Women against Violence?: Review of
a Decade of Legislation, 1980-1989
521
RAjni KDtbari
Myron Weiner
SanjibBaruab
Flavia Agner
A Bibliographic Guith
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Figures
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
3.6
3.7
5.1
9.1
Voter Tum-out, All-India
Voter Turn-out, Men and Women
Average Turn-out in Lok Sabha Elections
Unequal Size of Constituencies in 1991
The Impact of Drawing Boundaries on the Results
Splits in the Congress Party since 1952
The Janat2 Party and the BJP since 1977
Lines of Authority, Lines of Influence
Political Violence in West Bengal, 1955-1985
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132
139
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150
151
222
343
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Introduction: A Political
Hi�tory of Independent India
Partha Chatterjee
H
alf a century may be considered a reasonable time for begin­
ning to write the outline for a political history of inde­
pendent India. The narrative which follows is a running thread
that connects the particular accounts and analyses contained in
the readings collected in this volume.
Continuities and Transformations
Territory
Independent India was created in August 1947 through a negotiated
act of transfer of power from the British rulers of a colonial empire
to the political leadership of two sovereign countries, India and
Pakistan. The· ,erritories of British India were partitioned between
the two new countries on a principle of religious majorities. Thus
provinces with Muslim majorities constituted the territories o_f
Pakistan, divided into two wings, one in the west and the other in
the east. Two provinces - Punjab and Bengal - were themselves
partitioned according to the religious composition of the district
populations in those provinces. However, even these principles had
to be applied with many qualifications, and several exceptions were
incorporated into the final award of the Radcliffe Commission
which undertook the task of actually drawing the lines of division
on the map of British India.
There were some 565 princely states over which the British exer­
cised pararnountcy without actually incorporating those territories
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
2 State and Politics in India
into the provinces of British India. According to the terms of the
transfer of power, the lapse of British paramountcy meant that the
rulers of those states regained full sovereignty, although they were
also given the option of joining either India or Pakistan. There was
furious diplomatic activity on t h e p- art of the new political auth­
orities of India and Pakistan in the days immediately preceding
independence to get the princes to sign the instruments of accession
to their respective dominions. Vallabhbhai Patel, the deputy Prime
Minister of India, took the initiative in this regard to put together
a single consolidated territorial entity over which the newly inde­
pendent Indian state would exercise sovereignty.1 The princes were
first asked to concede to the Indian union only the powers of
defence, external affairs and communications, and were invited to
continue participating in the upper house of the Dominion legisla­
ture where a new constitution was being made. In the end, most of
the princes of states surrounded by or contiguous to the territory
of India - 554 states, to be exact - agreed to join.
The states were scattered over many regions - in Kashmir and
the Punjab, in Rajasthan, in Gujarat and Saurashtra, in the Deccan,
in the Vmdhya regions of central India, in the Chhattisgarh area,
in Orissa, in Travancore-Cochin and Mysore, on the borders of
Bengal and in the Khasi hills. hnmediately after accession, a con­
certed attempt was made by the leadership in Delhi to consolidate
the territories of the states into larger administrative units similar
to the provinces. The legal forin of seeking the consent of the
ruler was maintained in each case, but the political argument of
the inevitability of popular democratic rule was frequently used,
often with telling effect. The rulers of the Orissa and the Chhattis­
garh states were persuaded to allow their territories to be merged
with the provinces of Orissa and Central Provinces, respectively;
in return, they were allowed a privy purse which they would enjoy
in perpetuity. This method of merger was also followed in the
case of the Deccan and the Gujarat states whose territories were
similarly joined with that of the province of Bombay, and for
several smaller states in other regions. Two hundred and sixteen
states were merged into provinces in this manner. The bulk of the
stat�s were, however, clustered in several contiguous areas in
Kathiawad, Rajasthan, Punjab, the Vmdhyas and central India.
I This is described in detail in V.P. Menon, Tbt Story ofthe lnttgrt,tiun ofthe
Indum StllUS (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1961).
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Introduction 3
After much negotiation, the rulers of these states agreed to form
unions of States called Rajmandals with one of them being called
the Rajpramukh and acting as the head of the union. Six such
unions were formed by integration, viz. Saurashtra, Vindhya
Pradesh, Madhya Bharat, Patiala and East Punjab States Union
(PEPSU), Rajasthan, and Travancore-Cochin, incorporating 310
states. Mysore, one of the largest states, became an administntive
unit on its own, as did a few others. Each union had its own
constituent assembly to draft a constitution for 'responsible gov­
ernment, and most rulers thought they would prefer some kind
of federal arrangement within their unions. However, some of the
states had active democratic movements, often allied with the
Indian National Congress, which played an important role in
shaping the political relations of the states with the Indian Union.
In the end, with the making of the Constitution of India in 1950,
all of the constituent assemblies of the Unions resolved to adopt
the Indian Constitution.
In three cases, however, there were difficulties with accession.
In Junagadh, a tiny state in Kathiawad surrounded by Indian
territory, the ruling prince signed up for Pakistan. The neighbour­
ing states had all joined India, the population was predominantly
Hindu and there was an active Congress movement in the state
which demanded unification with India. The matter became part
of the series of disputes that now flared up between India and
Pakistan and raised the crucial question of whether independence
was to be seen as the result of a legal transfer of power from one
authority to another or of the assertion of the democratic will of
the people. On the question of Junagadh, Pakistan insisted that
with the lapse of British paramountcy, each ruler had the right to
join either India or Pakistan irrespective of the geographical loca­
tion of'his state or the ethnic composition of its population. India
argued that if negotiations with rulers did not produce a satisfac­
tory agreement, the most fair and democratic way of resolving the
matter would be to hold a plebiscite among the people of the state.
Faced with growing popular agitation and pressure from the In­
dian authorities, the Nll,_wab of Junagadh decided in late October
1947 that he could not liold out any more and fled to Pakistan.
The administration of the state was taken over by the Indian
government and a referendum was held in February 1948 in which
there was an overwhelming vote approving the accession to India.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
4 State and Politics in India
The Nizam of Hyderabad refused to join either of the dominions
and insisted on his right to head an independent and sovereign
kingdom. Negotiations for accession continued for several months
in which the Indian government made many concessions that had
not been given to the other states. At the same time, it also insisted
that if the Nizam was unwilling to accede, the matter should be
settled by a popular plebiscite which the ruling group in Hyderabad
was clearly reluctant to race. The Nizam, however, overplayed his
hand and in September 1948 Indian troops moved into Hyderabad.
The Nizam signed the instruments of accession on the same ternlS
as the other princes and in 1950 the Constitution of India came to
apply to Hyderabad.
InJarnmu and Kashmir too, the Manaraja did not sign in favour
of either dominion until late October 1947 when Parhan tribes­
men from across the border in Pakistan threatened to overrun the
Kashmir valley. On a request from the Maharaja for immediate
military assistance, the Indian government insisted that he fust
sign the instruments of accession, which he did. Indian troops
were flown in to Kashmir and after pushing back the raiders some
distance, a ceasefrre was agreed upon. The Maharaja in the mean­
time had agreed to nominate Sheikh Abdullah, the leader of the
National Conference, as Premier. When the Indian government
agreed to refer the dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir to the
United Nations, it pledged to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir under
UN auspices. This plebiscite, however, has never been held. Sub­
sequently, a separate constitution of Jammu and Kashmir was
promulgated in 1953; this was therefore the only former princely
state which finally got its own constitution, highlighting the very
special circumstances of its accession to India. The Jammu and
Kashmir constitution largely resembles the Indian Constitution
with the important qualification, however, that unlike,the other
states of the Indian union, the residual powers belong to the state
and not to the union. A part of the original territory of the princely
state lying beyond the line of ceasefire is still administered from
Pakistan by a government of Azad Kashmir.
There were two other vestiges of European colonial rule in
India: the Ponuguese colonies in Goa and in a few pockets on the
Gujarat coast, and the French settlements in Pondicherry and
Chandernagore. In 1954, following an agreement with France,
Pondicherry became part of India and was subsequently made a
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Introduction 5
.
Union Territory and Chandemagore was incorporated into West
Bengal. The Portuguese government, however, refused to give up
its colonial possessions and in 1960 Indian troops occupied Goa
and incorporated the Portuguese territories into India.
One can see, therefore, that there is nothing natural or im­
memorial about the territorial boundaries of independent India.
They exist as the result of a particular mode of transfer of power
from British colonial rule and of political negotiations between
the leaders of independent India and the rulers of the princely
states. The subsequent process of the consolidation of this ter­
ritory into a domain for the exercise of a new governmental power
is, of course, a part of the story of Indian politics since inde­
pendence. The only addition to that territory was the incorpora, �on in April 1975 of Sikkim as a constituent state of the Indian
union. Earlier, Sikkim was a sovereign kingdom which through
treaties with India had a protectorate status.
The Constitution
The Constituent Assembly which produced the Constitution of
the Indian republic in 1950 was not elected by direct universal
suffrage but was formed in 1946 as a result of indirect elections
by members of the different provincial legislatures who themsel­
ves had been elected by a very restricted electorate. After parti­
tion, as many as 82 per cent of the members of the Constituent
Assembly were from the Congress. However, the political leader­
ship was especially careful to include in the Assembly repre­
sentatives of a large range of opinion from different regions of
the country and sections of the population, including several
leaders such as B.R. Ambedkar, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee or
Mohammed Saadulla who during their political careers had often
been strongly opposed to the Congress. The Assembly also included many leg;u and constitutional experts.
The radically new features of the constitutional system of in­
dependent India, when compared with that prevailing under
colonial rule, were, frrst, a sovereign legislature elected by direct
universal suffrage without communal representation but with re­
servations for the scheduled castes and tribes and, second, the
explicit constitutional guarantee of a set of fundamental rights of
all citizens. It provided for a parliamentary system of government
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, St11te and Politics in India
of the British type with an executive responsible to Parliament but
with an indirectly elected President as the head of state. It also
provided for an independent judiciary with certain powers of
judicial review of laws made by Parliament
The Constitution was also a federal one, but of a very distinct
kind, with state governments responsible to directly elected state
legislatures and a distribution of powers between the union and
the states that was heavily inclined towards the union. As a federal
system, the Indian Constitution was far more centralized than
most federations elsewhere, and in this respect often closely fol­
lowed the provisions of the earlier Government of India Act of
1935.
The State Apparatus
The basic apparatus of governmental administration in inde­
pendent India was inherited from the colonial period, although
there soon occurred a huge incrc;ase in its size. It consisted of a
small elite cadre belonging to the all-India services and a much
larger corps of functionaries organized in the provincial services.
The Indian members of the Indian Civil Service, the much ac­
claimed 'steel frame' of the British Raj, were retained after In­
dependence, but a new service called the Indian Administrative
Service, modelled on the ICS, was constituted after 1947 as its
successor. The crucial unit of the governmental apparatus was
the district administration which, under the charge of the disttict
officer, was principally responsible as in colonial ti.mes for main­
taining law and order but was soon also to become the agency
for developmental work.
The basic structure of civil and criminal law as well as of its
administration was also inherited from the colonial period. The
major difference, of course, was in the creation of a Supreme
Court and its position within the new constitutional system. But
apart from the new issues that arose regarding the relation be­
tween Parliament and the judiciary, the working of the high
courts and district courts maintained an unbroken history from
colonial rimes, continuing the same practices of legal tradition
and ·precedent.
The Indian armed forces too maintained a continuing history
from the colonial period. The British ideology of a professional
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Introductum 7
army strictly under the control of the political leadership was
successfully maintained i n the period after independence, and
unlike most other countries, there was not even a joint command
of the anny, navy and air forces except in the office of the political
head of government.
Framework of a New Order
Tht Reorganization ofSt11tes
When the Constitution was inaugurated in 1950, the country was
divided into four kinds of states. The Part A states were former
provinces of British India, viz. Assam, Bihar, Bombay, Madhya
Pradesh, Madras, Orissa, Punjab, Utt2r Pradesh and West Benpl.
The Part B states were the products of the integration of the prin­
cely states; they were Hyderabad, Jammu and Kashmir; Madhya
Bharat, Mysore, PEPSU, Rajasthan, Saurashtra and Travancore­
Cochin. The Part C states were either the former Chief Com­
missioners' provinces or smaller units formed by the integration of
the princely states, viz. Ajmer, Bilaspur, Bhopal, Coorg, Delhi,
Himachal Pradesh, Kutch, Manipur, Tripura and Vindhya Pradesh.
Finally, there was a Part D state - the Andaman and Nicobar
Islands.
This particular structure did not follow any coherent principle
of organization of territories and was simply the result of a his­
torical cumulation. As f.ar as principles were concerned, the idea
that the units of India should be the linguistic provinces was
something that the Indian National Congress had upheld since
the rise of Gandhi. In 1919-20, the Congress had reorganized its
own provincial and district committee structure according to the
linguistic principle, disregarding the administrative units of British
India. Thus there were Maharashtra and Gujarat provincial com­
mittees in Bombay province, a Kerala PCC when there was no
Kerala, an Andhra PCC when there was no Andhra, and s o on.
In 1953, after a massive popular agitation, the Telugu-speaking
state of Andhra Pradesh was created. This brought up the question
of whether the entire structure of states in India should be reor­
ganized according to the linguistic principle. In 1954, a States
Reorganization Commission was set up to look into this matter.
Following its recommendations, the states were reorganized in
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8 State and Politia in India
I 956. The distinction between the former provinces of British
India and the princely states was completely erased. Instead of the
four-tier stt11cture, there were now only states and union ter­
ritories. The linguistic principle was recognized in the formation
of states, but only partially. The principle, however, continued to
be asserted in mass agitations and in 1960 Bombay was divided
into Maharashtra and Gujarat,· while Punjab was divided into
Punjab and Haryana in 1966.
The Congress Party
Before Independence, the Congress had run some provincial gov­
ernments only briefly.and had joined the interim government a t
the centre only in 1946. Until that time, it was a mass party with
a well-developed organizational structure starting with village and
taluka units at the bottom and then, in ascendin!J order, district,
provincial and all-India committees, each elected by the lower
units. At the highest level, the All India Congress Committee
(AICC) elected a president and a working committee to look after
the regular functioning of the organization as a whole. After
Independence, the Congress was in charge of running the central
government as well as most of the state governments. It soon
became obvious that the entire focus of party activity would now
be on the performance of its governmental wing. But this also
meant a new centre of leadership around the Prime Minister and
his cabinet What would be the relation between the governmental
wing and the party wing? Should the Congress president and
working committee have a say in the making of decisions by a
Congress government? Or should a mass party of such long stand­
ing as the Congress accept that it must now follow the lead given
to it by government ministers?
These were the questions that were raised within the Congress
in the period immediately following Independence. Jawaharlal
Nehru was president of the Congress when he became Prime
Minister in the interim government in 1946. Soon after, he de­
cided to resign bis party post.J.B. Kripalani, the Congress Socialist
leader, succeeded Nehru but immediately ran into serious dis­
agreements with the ministerial wing over the issue of the relation­
ship between party and government. Nehru, along with bis senior
colleagues in gove.rnment, felt that the party should only provide
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'
Introduction 9
long-term guidance in the matter of general policy and could not
expect the government to refer every decision to it for approval.
Kripalani, on the other hand, thought that the party's position was
being undermined. According to him it was the party which kept
in constant touch with the people in the villages and in towns and
reflected changes in their will and temper.
It is 'the party from which the Government of the day derives its
power. Any action which weakens the organization of the party or
lowers its prestige in the eyes of the people must sooner or later
undermine the position of the Governn1ent.2
In November 1947, Kripalani resigned as Congress president;
soon he would leave the Congress altogether along with many
other socialists.
Between 1948 and 1951, the issue of the relationship between
party and government remained at the centre of controversy
within the Congress. The underlying political tensions arose out
of the differences of some sections of Congress leaders with the
emerging policies of the Nehru government. The conservative
groups, in particular, were in favour of a much tougher policy
towards Pakistan and sharply opposed to the proposals for new
social legislation on the reform of personal laws and greater state
control over the economy. They decided to assert their' hold over
the party machinery in order to curb the autonomy of the govern­
ment in pursuing these policies. In the election of the Congress
president in 1948, Pattabhi Sitaramayya, the candidate put up by
Nehru's supporters, won a narrow victory. But in 1950, the right
wing was able to gain ascendancy with the election as president
of Purushottamdas Tandon. The death of Vallabhbhai Patel in
December 1950 deprived this group of its most powerful figure
within the government, and with the first general elections ap­
proaching, the tussle over control of the party organization
reached a climax. In August 1951, Nehru resigned from the
working committee, claiming that there were serious policy dif­
ferences between him and the party leadership. The parliamentary
party expressed its confidence in Nehru's leadership. Within a
few weeks, Tandon was forced to resign and the AICC elected
2J.B. Kripalani's speech to AICC'delegates, November 1947, cited in Stanley
A. Kochanek, The Congress PIIT'tJ oflnditl: Tbt l)yntmricsofOm-PartyDtm()(T11cy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 10-11.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
1 O State and Politics in India
Nehru as Congress president. For the moment at least, the
superiority of the government wing of the party was established
by creating a single unified leadership.
Nehru continued as Congress president until 1954. By then,
the Congress largely came to accept his view that the function of
the party was principally to carry to the people the message rep­
resented by the policies of the government. For the next decade
. or so, this remained the pattern of relationship between government and party. When U.N. Dhebar was elected Congress presi­
dent in 1954, he said quite clearly:
1t is a mistalce to consider that there is a dual leadership in the
country....There is only one leader in India todlly and that is Pandit
JawaharlaJ Nehru. Whether he carries the mantle of Congress Pre­
sidentship on his shoulders or not, ultimately, the whole country looks
to him for support and guidance.3
The Congress in the St11tes
Before 1967, the usual description of the party system in India was
'one-party dominance', the one party being, obviously, the Con­
gress.Sometimes it was also caJleq, simply, the 'Congress system'.
In the ftrst three general elections, the Congress won around 45
per cent of the votes and 75 per cent of the seats in Parliament.
Compared to that, the largest opposition party (the Socialist party
in 1951, the Praja Socialist party in 1957 and the Communist Party
of India in 1962) could manage only around 10 per cent of the
votes and less than 5 per cent of the seats. The concept of 'one­
party dominance' also implied a similar overwhelming position of
the Congress in all of the states. Clearly, this dominance had been
built up in course of the decades of organized political activity b y
the Congress in the nationalist movement in different parts of the
country. However, given the fact that substantial parts of inde­
pendent India were not part of British India, the Congress did not
always inherit a position of equal dominance in all the states at
the time of independence. In fact, in the 1950s, it was often in
those states which included large parts of the territories of former
princely states that the competition to the Congress was the
3 Speech by U.N. Dhebar,Janwry 1955, cited in Kochanek. Ctmgrtss P11rty,
p. 61.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
lntroduaion II
strongest - states such as Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya
Pradesh, Manipur, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan and Tripura.
Despite some variations in strength, however, the Congress did
rule in every state until 1967. The only exceptions wereJammu and
Kashmir where it was the National Conference which was the
ruling party (although from 1953, after the removal and arrest of
Sheikh Abdullah, the National Conference under Bakshi Ghulam
Mohammed virtually became the Kashmir unit of the CongrC$),
Kerala which had a CPI-led government for a brief period in
1957-9 (a government that was removed by central intervention)
and Nagaland which became a state in 1963 and had a Na ga
National Organization government.Just as the governmental wing
of the Congress asserted its dominance over the party at the centre,
so did Congress rule in the states focus around powerful Chief
Ministers.
An interesting characteristic of the one-party dominance system
i n the Nehru period was the large degree of autonomy that the
provincial party units were able to assert in relation to the central
party leadership. The PCCs largely became financially independ­
ent, raising their own party funds for running the organization or
fighting elections and distributing patronage through their mini­
sters in the state government. Their recommendations for can­
didates for parliamentary or assembly seats were almost always
accepted without modification by the central leadership, except
when the state party was de,eply divided. Congress politics in
the states was dominated in die Nehru period by powerful Chief
Ministers like N. Sanjiva Reddy (Andhra Pradesh), B.P. Chaliha
(Assam), Sri Krishna Sinha (Bihar), Y.S. Parmar (Himachal
Pradesh), S. Nijalingappa (Mysore), Y.B. Chavan (Maharashtra),
H.K. Mahatab (Orissa), Pratap Singh Kairon (Punjab), Mohan Lal
Sukhadia (Rajasthan), K. Kamaraj (Madras), Sampoornanand and
C.B. Gupta (Uttar Pradesh) and B.C. Roy (West Bengal), or
occasionally by party bosses such as S.K. Patil in Bombay or Atulya
Ghosh in West Bengal who worked in close association with their
respective Chief Ministers. The influence and autonomy of the
state units in the Congress party structure were shown most clearly
in 1964 when the successor toJawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister
was effectively chosen by Kamaraj as Congress pr�ident in as­
sociation with the Chief Ministers and party presidents of the
major states.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
I2 State and Politics in India
The Developmental State
Apart from the dominance of the Congress at the centre and in the
states, a very important feature of the framework of political rule
, established in the Nehru period ,vas the developmental state, inter­
' vening in the economy, planning and guiding its growth and trying
1 directly to promote the welfare of the population. This was perhaps
I, the principal governmental function t;hat legitimized the position
of the Congress leadership within the new post-colonial state.
It meant considerable state intervention in the economy, not
only through progressive taxation of personal and corporate in­
comes or the provision by the state of public services such as
education, health and transport, all of which had become hallmarks
/ of the new welfare state even in advanced capitalist economies in
the period after World War II. In addition, the state in India in
the Nehru period consciously chose elements from socialist re­
1
. gimes such as the Soviet Union in order to create a planned
/ economy, albeit within the framework of a mixed and not a so­
l cialist economy, where the state sector would control the 'com­
i manding heights of the economy'. The idea was to industrialize
··, rapidly by setting up new public enterprises in areas such as metals,
, minerals, machine building, chemical industries, fuel, power and
J transport through direct investments by the state. Private capital
1
! was meant to be confined primarily to the consumer and inter­
/ mediate goods sectors. Rapid industrial growth was seen to be the
· key to the removal of poverty in the country and the provision of
welfare for the people.)A Planning Commission was set up as an
expert body relatively ihdependent of the central government with
the function of defining the goals and strategies of development
and carrying out investment planning. Although the First Five
Year Plan was launched in 1951, it was really with the Second Five
Year Plan (1956-61), prepared under the guidance of
P.C. Mahalanobis, that the characteristic strategy ofIndian indus­
trialization in the Nehru period was inaugurated.
The Interregnum
End of the Nehru Era
Before speaking of how the framework of political rule built i n
the Nehru period became unsettled, one further feature of that
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Introduction I3
framework - India's foreign policy - must be mentioned. Since
this will be the subject of a separate volume in this series, foreign
policy will not-be discussed at any length in this volume. Neverthe. less, a description of the political order in the Nehru period, and
even of its economic strategy, will be incomplete without a mention
of the policy of non-alignment. The policy was developed in the
context 9f the bipolar world that emerged after World War II with
two rival military blocs around the two super powers - the United
States and the Soviet Union - claiming to represent two opposed
economic and political systems and, indeed, two contending paths
of social development. The Indian policy of non-alignment sought
to strike a middle ground by refusing to align with either military
bloc and choosing a path of state-sponsored development within
the social framework of capitalist democracy. Pursuing this foreign
policy, the Indian government under Nehru sought to build up a
third bloc of non-aligned nations consisting largely of the newly
independent countries of Asia and Africa, and to seek the aid of
both the Western and the socialist blocs in the economic and
technological fields.
The border war with China in 1962 was the first major occasion
when the wisdom of Nehru's foreign and defence policy was
seriously questioned at home. Indian positions at several places
along the disputed Himalayan border had to be abandoned as its
troops retreated; the policy of non-alignment too seemed to lose
credibility because India now had to seek military aid from the
United States. Nehru's biographer writes: 'No one who lived in
India through the winter months of 1962 can fo:-Eet the deep
humiliation felt by all Indians, irrespective of party. Criticism of
Nehru's leadership began to be voiced both within and outside
the Congress. Hardly a year after the general elections of 1962,
which the Congress had, as expected, won, its candidates lost three
by-elections to J.B. Kripalani, Ram Manohar Lohia and
M.R. Masani, three of the government's bitterest critics. In August
1963, for the first time in sixteen years in power, Nehru's govern:­
ment faced a no-confidence motion in Parliament. There were
also reports of Nehru's deteriorating health.
The origins and motives of the so-called Kamaraj Plan have
been a subject of conq-oversy: it has often been attributed to
4 Sarvepalli
Gopal,]1TW11har/al Nthnl:A Biography (Delhi:
Oxford University
·
Press, 1984), vol. 3, p. 232.
.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
14 Statt and Politics in India
discussions between two Chief Ministers - Kamaraj of Madras
and Biju Patnaik of Orissa.5 The Plan,· as proposed by Kamaraj
and accepted by the Congress Working Committee in August
1963, was to ask leading Congressmen in government to leave
their posts and devote themselves to the task of revitalizing the
party organization. Accordingly, front-ranking ministers such as
Morarji Desai, Lal Bahadur Shastri, S.I(. Patil and Jagjivan Ram
and Chief Ministers such as Kamara;, Biju Patnaik, C.B. Gupta,
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed and Binodanand Jha of Bihar re­
signed from their governments. In October 1963, K Kamaraj
was elected Congress president.
The Kamaraj plan has been interpreted in many ways: as
Nehru's ploy to reassert his control over the party, as an attempt
by left-wingers to remove Morarji Desai and S.K Patil from the
government, as a preemptive strategy for a possible battle o f
succession. As events unfolded, it became clear that the most
significant effect ofthe plan was to give to the Congress presidency
and the working committee a degree of authority they had not
enjoyed for many years. Indeed, as factional and ideological loyal­
ties were put to the test in those months of crisis, the most
powerful group that formed within the Congress was precisely
around the new party president. Popularly dubbed the Syndicate,
the group comprised Kamaraj, Sanjiva Reddy, Nijalingappa, S.K
Patil and Atulya Ghosh, all of them Chief Ministers or party bosses
from non-Hindi-speaking states. When Nehru died in May 1964,
it was the Syndicate which secured the election by the parliamen­
tary party of Lal Bahadur Shastri as the next Prime Minister.
The most important event in Shastri's brief tenure as Prime
Minister was the war with Pakistan in October 1965. I t raised his
stature immensely and at public meetings he drew crowds as large
as Nehru did before him. He worked closely with Kamaraj as party
president and in August 1965 played a crucial role in securing,
against the open challenge put up by Morarji Desai, Kamaraj's
reelection to the post.
Lal Bahadur Shastri died inJanuary 1966. This time the work­
ing committee was unable to secure a unanimous succession since
Morarji Desai insisted on a vote. The Syndicate decided to put up
S Michael Brecher, Nth"'� M11ntlt: Tbt Politics of Sucarsion in JndiJ, (New
Yorlt: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966).
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Introduction 15
Indira Gandhi as its nominee. The Congress members of parlia­
ment chose her against Morarji Desai by a huge margin. Once
again, the powerful group of regional party leaders assened its
hold over the central structure of political rule.
.•
The 1967 Ekctions
By this time, however, some of the problems of the economic
strategy of rapid industrialization began to be felt. By the middle
o f the 1960s, there was an acute food shortage in the country,
making it necessary for the government to import large quantities
o f foodgrains. There was also a severe foreign exchange crisis,
exacerbated by hugely increased defence expenditures. Soon after
its formation, therefore, Indira Gandhi's government was forced
to go in for a large devaluation of the Indian rupee. With high
food prices and a slowing down of growth, economic hardship was
at its peak. This was reflected in massive, and often violent, politi­
cal agitations all over the country.
In this situation, it was only to be expected that in the 1967
elections the Congress would not repeat its earlier overwhelming
victories. But the setbacks that occurred surprised even the pes­
simists. The Congress vote dropped by almost 5 per cent, and
while it had held 74 per cent of the seats in the previous parliament,
it now managed to win only 54 per cent. Even more stunning was
the number of states in which it failed to win a majority (or lost
it because of defections soon after the elections): there were as
many as nine states - Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya
Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Madras and Kerala -which
now had non-Congress governments. This brought in a complete­
ly new situation in Indian politics, not only because the Congress
had lost its overwhelming dominance at the centre but also because
the federal structure was now called upon to deal with the relations
between a Congress government at the centre and several non­
Congress governments in the states.
Non-Congress G(f1Jernmmts
Although the Congress was defeated in several states in 1967, it
was not replaced in power by a single party, except in the case
of Madras where the DMK won an absolute majority and
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
16 State and Politics in India
C. Annadurai became Chief Minister. The non-Congress gov­
ernments that were formed in the other states were coalitions of
several parties, often having little ideological similarity, even
though a common minimum programme was usually formulated.
Thus in J3ihar, a Samyukta Vidhayak DaJ was formed between
the SSJ?; the PSP, the Jana Sangh, the Jan Kranti Dal (which
later merged with the Bharatiya Kranti Dal) and the CPI. The
SVD commanded a majority in the assembly and Mahamaya
Prasad Sinha of the JKD became the first non-Congress Chief
Minister of Bihar. In Punjab, all the non-Congress parties in the
assembly - the Akali Dal (Sant Group), the CPl(M), the CPI,
the Jana Sangh, the Akali Dal (Master Group), the SSP and the
Republican Party - came together to form a Popular United
Front which elected Gurnam Singh of the Akali Dal (Sant Group)
as its leader and Chief Minister. In West Bengal, the two non­
Congress fronts, one led by the C.Pl(M) and the other by the
Bangla Congress, came together to fonn the United Democratic
Front consisting of fourteen parties. Ajoy Mukherjee of the
Bangla Congress became the first non-Congress Chief Minister
of West Bengal. In· Kerala, a United Front ministry headed by
EM.S. Namboodiripad of the CPl(M) came to power. In Orissa,
the Swatantra Party, consisting mostly of former princes, formed
a coalition ministry under R.N. Singh Deo with a breakaway
Congress group called theJana Congress, led by the former Chief
Minister, H.K. Mahatab.
In Haryana, where the Congress had won an absolute majority
in the elections, the government of Bhagwat Dayal Sharma was
defeated in the assembly within a week of assuming office. A large
chunk of dissident Congressmen left the party and joined the
opposition. A United Front was formed and Rao Birendra Singh
became its leader and Chief Minister. In Madhya Pradesh too,
there were defections from the Congress, exemplified in particular
i
by Vjay Raje Scindia, the Rajmata of Gwalior, who left the Con­
gress and declared her support for the Jana Sangh. Four months
after the elections, the government of D.P. Mishra was defeated.
An SVD ministry, led by G.N. Singh and consisting of Congress
defectors, the Rajmata's group, the Jana Sangh, the SSP and the
PSP, came to power. In Uttar Pradesh, the Congress could not
win an absolute majoiity and was also hampered by a leadership
tussle between C.B. Gupta and Charan Singh. Nevertheless, the
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Introduction 17
Governor asked C.B: Gupta to form the ministry. Three weeks
later, the government collapsed when Charan Singh, along with
his followers, joined the opposition. Charan Singh became Chief
Minister of an SVD ministry.
However, it was not as though one-party dominance was re­
placed by an alternating party system. The coming together of
opposition parties to form non-Congress governments in the
states did not produce the consolidation of an alternative ideo­
logical or organizational formation, nor indeed, as would soon
become clear, did it mean the end of Congress dominance. Soon
after their formation, the non-Congress governments were them­
selves thrown into crises as they failed to hold their ranks together.
Defections became the order of the day as, one after the other,
the United Front governments in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West
Bengal, Haryana, Punjab and Madhya Pradesh were ousted. A
Congress government was installed in Madhya Pradesh with the
support of defectors, while governments of defectors were in­
stalled with Congress support in Bihar, West Bengal and Punjab.
Even these did not last long and president's rule was imposed in
Haryana, West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. It has
been calculated that whereas in the ten-year period between 195 7
and 1967 there had been in all of India a total of 542 legislators
changing parties, in a single year following the 1967 elections
there were as many as 438 defections.6
This period of the formation and collapse of non-Congress
governments in the states also for the first time turned into a major
controversy the question of centre-State relations and especially the
role of the Governor. In Rajasthan, where no party had an absolute
majority, Sampoornanand, the Governor, faced a barrage of criti­
cism when, after much prevarication, he decided to ask Mohan Lal
Sukhadia as the leader of the single largest party to form the
government. Sampoornanand was accused of having acted in a
partisan manner since he refused to consider the loyalties of inde­
pendents, many of whom had expressed their support for the
non-Congress United Fl'bnt. The protests led to a situation of
serious unrest, forcing the Union government to declare Pres­
ident's rule in Rajasthan for a few months. In Haryana, where
defections by legislators reached the most extreme limits, Governor
6 Subhash C. Kashyap, 11,e Politia ofP(IWer: Defections 1171dState Politics in India
(Delhi: National, 1974), p. 15.
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18 St11te and Politics in India
B.N. Chakravarty recommended President's rule even when Rao
Birendra Singh's ministty commanded a majority since he felt the
government had lost stability and was only retaining its majority by
engineering repeated counter-defections. In West Bengal, in a
situation of growing industrial and agrarian unrest and dissensions
within the ruling UDF, the Governor Dhanna Vira, after urging
the Chief Minister to set an early date for a trial of strength in the
assembly, dismissed Ajoy Mulcherjee's government and installed a
minority ministry formed by defectors with Congress support. The
action was roundly criticized and led to widespread unrest cul­
minating in the imposition of President's rule.
The Congress Split
The 1967 elections were a severe blow to the Congress. Not only
was the party ousted from power in several states, the period
immediately before and after the elections also saw a tremendous
weakening of its internal strength, with constant dissension and
acrimony in the ranks, rampant factionalism and a tide of defec­
tions. There was a general feeling that the old guard was too set
in its conservative ways, mired in corruption and out of touch with
the people. The so-called Young Turks belonging to the Socialist
Forum within the Congress, who now gathered around Indira
Gandhi, were particularly strident in their criticism of the party
bosses and blamed them for the election debacle. The Syndicate,
on the other hand, began to feel that the Prime Minister was
moving away from party control and trying to build up an auto­
nomous centre of power.
Things came to a head at the Baµgalore session of the AICC
in July 1969. Indira Gandhi presehted to the Congress a set of
'stray thoughts' on economi<policy, arguing for land reforms,
restriction of monopolies, nationalization of banks and other
radical measures. Although leaders like Morarji Desai were vocal
against the proposals, the Syndicate members were quick to see
that to oppose them would mean further unpopularity. The Prime
Minister's note was passed by the AICC. The Syndicate struck
back when the time came to select the Congress candidate for
the upcoming Presidential election. Indira Gandhi had suggested
the names ofV.V. Giri, theVice-President, or Jagjivan Ram, the
most prominent scheduled caste member of her cabinet. But the
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Introduction 19
Congress parliamentary board overruled her suggestion and in­
stead nominated N. Sanjiva Reddy.
As soon as the Ban galore session ended, Indira Gandhi re­
moved Morarji Desai from her cabinet, took up the finance
portfolio herself and announced the nationalization of fourteen
major banks. At the same time, V.V. Giri decided to contest the
election for President as an independent candidate and appealed
for a 'vote of conscience'. Nijalingappa, the Congress president,
asked for a whip to be issued requiring all Congress legislators
to vote for Sanjiva Reddy, the official candidate. Jagjivan Ram
and Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, acting on behalf of Indira Gandhi,
declared that all legislators must be allowed to vote 'according
to their conscience'. It was a trial of strength between the Syn­
dicate and Indira Gandhi, with parties like the Communists, the
other left parties, the Akalis, the DMK and the Muslim League
supporting the latter. Giri won the election on second preference
votes, securing a majority in the Parliament and in eleven of the
states. While the Congress was split right down the middle, that
itself would turn out to be a major triumph for Indira Gandhi.
The Prime Minister's supponers now demanded a requisition
meeting of the AICC to elect a new Congress president. In
November 1969, two rival meetings, both claiming to be of the
working committee, were held at the same time, one presided
over by Nijalingappa and the other by Indira Gandhi. A few days
later, Nijalingappa's working committee expelled Indira Gandhi
from the pany, whereas the Congress parliamentary pany, at­
tended by 330 out of 432 members, declared this move 'invalid
and unjustified'. It was clear that Indira Gandhi had asserted her
hold over a majority of Congress parliamentarians. Outside the
party, her, popularity was at its peak. A requisitioned AICC meet­
ing was held in November 1969 at which Nijalingappa was re­
moved from the post of party president. A month later, Jagjivan
Ram was elected president of what was now called the Congress
(Requisitionists).
Sixty-two Congress members of the Lok Sabha had declared
their opposition to the Prime Minister and, forming a bloc called
the Congress (Organization), had joined the opposition. Indira
Gandhi's government was now reduced to a minority but con­
tinued in office with the support of the DMK, the CPI, the Akali
Dal, the Muslim League and some independents. In September
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20 State and Politics in India
1970, Indira Gandhi moved a constitutional amendment for the
abolition of privy purses and privileges of the former rulers of the
princely states. The amendment was very narrowly defeated in the
Rajya Sabha, upon which privy purses were abolished by a Pres­
idential order. The order was then struck down as unconstitutional
by the Supreme Court. In December 1970, the Prime Minister
decided not to continue any further with her minority govern­
ment. For the first time since Independence, Parliament was dis­
solved before completing its full tenn when Indira Gandhi asked
for fresh elections.
The Congress Restoration
The 1971 Elections
At the time of its dissolution, the Lok Sabha of 523 seats had a
party composition in which the Congress (R) had 228 members,
the Congress (0) 65, the Swatantra Party 35, the Jana Sangh 33,
the DMK 24, the CPI 24, the CPl(M) 19, the SSP 17 and the
PSP 15, besides members of other smaller parties and independ­
ents. For the 1971 elections, Indira Gandhi received the support
of the CPI, the DMK, the Akali Dal and a section of the PSP. But
she faced an opposition alliance consisting of the Congress (0),
the Jana Sangh, the Swatantra Party, the SSP and the BKD. Indira
Gandhi's election campaign was stridently populist, the principal
slogan being garibi hatao (remove poverty). It was the most massive
election campaign undertaken in India until that time. It was also
the first time that elections to Parliament were separated from
elections to the state assemblies, making national issues the ex­
clusive focus of the campaign.
The results were a surprise even to her supporters. The Con­
gress (R) won 350 seats, while the parties of the opposition alliance
were routed. Even in the Congress (0) strongholds of Mysore and
Gujarat, it was a sweep for the Congress (R). Only the DMK and
the Left parties, many of which were now aligned with Indira
Gandhi, retained their strength. Ideologically, there seemed to
have occurred a decisive leftward swing in the country as a whole.
In 1971 again, the political leadership in East Pakistan declared
its autonomy from the western wing of the country. There was
virtual military occupation of East Pakistan and a massive influx
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
lntroduaum 21
of refugees across the borders into West Bengal and Tripl11"2.
Indira Gandhi at this time made a series of international diplo­
matic manoeuvres - signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet
Union, withstood the pressures exerted by the United States and
launched a war to liberate Bangladesh. The military action was
well-planned and swift and the Pakistan army in the eastern sector
surrendered within two weeks. The Bangladesh war boosted Indira
Gandhi's image to unprecedented heights and she began to be
acclaimed as the leader of one of the world's more powerful
nations. It also sealed the close ties between her government and
that o f the Soviet Union.
Indira's Congress
To understand the structure of the restored Congress under Indira
Gandhi and how it differed from the Congress in Nehru's time,
we will have to consider the changes that had taken place in the
country in the two decades since Independence. Many of these
changes were, in f.act, the direct result of the policies and actions
of the government in the Nehru period.
First of all, the idea was now fmnly established that the state was -:,
the principal, and in many instances the sole, agent of bettering the 'I
condition of the people and providing relief in times of adversity. _
Unlike in the days before Independence, when most modem in­
stitutions of education, health, culture, sports or social welf.are in
the country had been set up through voluntary action, by raising
contributions from both rich and poor and often under the leader­
ship of nationalist political organizations, now the general expecta­
tion among all classes of people was that _the state must perform
this role. The performance of particular parties and leaders came
to be judged by how much they had 'done' for their respective
constituents.
Second, the particular strategy of economic development fol­
lowed in the Nehru period produced a division between large
public undertakings in the capital goods and infrastructure sectors
and private capitalists, dominated by a few monopoly houses, in ·,
the consumer goods sector. The public sector grew rapidly and �
the urban middle class and a large section of the working class
became dependent upon its-further expansion. Agricultural growth
did not receive much attention and by the mid- l960s there was a
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22 State mul Politics in India
massive food crisis. To tackle this, a strategy for a quick increase
in foodgrains production through state subsidy of irrigation water,
seeds and fertilizers, and government support for minimum food­
grain prices was formulated. Widely known as the 'green rev­
olution', this strategy relied heavily on the enterprise of larger
farmers and was first tried out in the better irrigated zones of
Punjab, Haryana and western UP. This meant, however, that a
new organized class interest - that of the rich farmer - would
now become a player in national politics.
Third, the political consolidation that the Congress represented
as the principal organization of the freedom struggle was now a
thing of the past. Most of the leaders of the major opposition
parties were themselves former Congressmen who were now no
longer prepared to engage in working out a political consensus
under the aegis of the Congress. Even within the Congress, the
problem of establishing a harmonious relationship between the
government and the party, which was first resolved in favour o f
the former in the early 1950s and swung towards the latter after
Nehru's death, became a bitterly contentious issue in the. late
1960s.
The restoration of the Congress under Indira Gandhi relied on
several new political strategies. Following the split, the Congress
(R} became an organization that derived its identity from its leader.
This was not merely symbolic, because even in its organization
the Congress now became strongly centralized, with power flow­
ing directly from the central high command. The older phe­
nomenon of Congress rule through strong Chief Ministers was
gone: Chief Ministers were now virtually nominated from the
centre and held office only as long as they enjoyed the confidence
of the high command. Between 1968 and 1989, there were as many
as fourteen Congress ministries in Bihar with nine different Chief
Ministers; in UP, between 1970 and 1988, there were ten Con­
gress ministries and seven Chief Ministers; in Maharashtra, be­
tween 1975 and 1988, there were eight Congress ministries and
five Chief Ministers; in Andhra Pradesh, between 1971 and 1982,
there were six Congress Chief Ministers.
Second, the developmental ideology of the Nehru era was
now purveyed in a new rhetoric of state socialism with the
1 central executive structures of government playing the pivotal
role. Other structures of government such as the j�diciary, or
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lntroduaiOJI 23
the local bureaucracy, or local political leaders were frequently
criticiud for being conservative, corrupt, and acting as hindran­
ces to development.
Third, welfare packages were now targeted towards specific
groups of the population, such as scheduled castes or tribes, or
minorities, or workers, or women, and delivered in such a way as
to produce the impression that they were a gift of the central \
leadership, Indira Gandhi in particular. In fact, the traditional _J
pattern of Congress support - a somewhat paradoxical alliance
of urban elites and rural landholding castes at the top with low
castes and minority groups below - was accentuated and
strengthened in this period. However, whereas the older Con­
gress, with its loose consensual structure, also relied on a populist
ideology, the populism of Indira Gandhi's Congress W2S far more
centraliud, statist and focused on a single leader.
One particular aspect of the new strategy deserves special
mention - namely the reorganization of the north-eastern re­
gion. After Independence, this region of the Indian union was
administratively organized within the state of Assam, with the
two former princely states of Manipur and Tripura becoming
union territories in 1956. However, within Assam there were
major natural, social and political differences between the plains
and the hill regions. The latter, which was almost entirely in­
habited by tribal peoples, was administered in the 1950s through
elected autonomous district councils which had some limited
legislative powers. However, there was resistance in many areas
to the new order. The Naga National Council under the leader­
ship of Angami 2.apu Phiw organiud a complete boycott of the
first general elections in the Naga Hills district where not a single
nomination paper was submitted and not a single vote was cast.
The insurgency continued in the Naga Hills for most of the nen
two decades, requiring the constant p�nce of Indian army
troops i n the area. Insurgency also arose in the Miro hills in the
1960s and the Miro National Front, led by Laldenga, was out­
lawed. Even in the Khasi and Garo hills, where the Congress
had secured a strong following within the political leadership, the
1967 elections proved to be a major setback when the Congress
lost most of the seats to the opposition All-Party Hill l!.eaders'
Conference. In 1972, the union government effected a major
reconstitution of the region by giving full statehood to Meghalaya,
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24 State and Politia in India
Manipur and Tripura and making Arunachal Pradesh (the former
North-East Frontier Agency) and Mizoram union territories. The
move certainly made possible a political settlement of the unrest
in · the hill states in the subsequent years, although it did not
necessarily improve the position of the Congress in all the new
states.
Unrest and Repression
Despite Indira Gandhi's massive electoral victory in 1971 and the
success of the Bangladesh war, the political scene at this time was
marked by considerable unrest. This came from both ends of the
political spectrum. On one side, there were large-scale agitations
led by the communists and other left parties among the middle
classes and workers in industrialized states such as West Bengal.
To some extent, the nationalization of banks and mines, and an
expanding public sector were meant to satisfy these interests.
However, the industrial economy did not show signs of revival
and, following the international oil crisis of 1973, there were huge
price rises. In 1974, there was a massive country-wide strike by
railway workers that was ruthlessly crushed.
From the late 1960s, there was also unrest among peasants in
many parts of the country. Espe cially in the most backward
agricultural regions where feudal-style oppression' by landlords
and state officials still prevailed, there now occurred locally or­
ganized resistance by poor peasants and agricultural labourers,
often belonging to low-caste or tribal groups. One such move­
ment in a place called Naxalbari in the foothills of Darjeeling
district in West Bengal suddenly came into prominence in 1967
when the local organizers belonging to the CPI(M) clashed with
the party leadership which wanted them to withdraw the move­
ment in the interest of saving the United Front ministry in West
Bengal. By 1969, the radical groups split from the CPI(M) and
formed their own party called the CPl(M-L). 'Naxalite' peasant
movements spread in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala,
Bihar and Punjab, and in all cases were suppressed by the use of
massive armed force by state agencies.
It was at this time that, alongside a centralized developmental
ideology, there also grew a hugely expanded central machinery of
police and paramilitary forces for use against political movements.
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lntroducticm 25
The Defence of India Rules, handed down from colonial times,
were widely used against political opponents, and in 1971 a Main­
tenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) was passed specifically
for tackling political agitations. The Central Reserve Police Force
and the Central Industrial Security Force were also set up at this
time, as was the Border Security Force which too was often de­
ployed for internal security purposes. Finally, there was the Re­
search and Analysis Wmg (RAW), the intelligence agency of the
government, directly under the charge of the Prime Minister.
The waves of unrest that spread through India in the early 1970s
were not confined to Communist agitations. In many parts of
northern India, especially in Bihar, and then in 1974 in Gujarat,
there was widespread agitation against corruption in government,
initially led by students but soon ta.king on the form of a popular
anti-government movement. Some of the ideological and organ­
izational inspiration here was provided by the Socialist followers
of the late Ram Manohar Lohia as well as by Gandhian activists,
and at various stages most opposition parties except the Com­
munists joined the movement. But it was galvanized by the leader­
ship given to it by Jaya Prakash Narayan who emerged from
political retirement to announce a call for 'total revolution'. This
too was a populist movement, making general demands that voiced
the discontent of large sections of the people and specifically
targeted against the ruling government. But Congress populism
at the time of Indira Gandhi was, as one commentator has put it,
a 'jealous populism', utterly intolerant of rival populist mobiliza­
tions, and hence violently repressive.7
The government dubbed the movements in Bihar and Gujarat
anti-national and fascist, and came down on them with a heavy
hand. In June 1975, the Allahabad High Court delivered a judg­
ment on a petition against Indira Gandhi's election to the Lok
Sabha in 1971. Finding her guilty of electoral malpractices, the
court set aside her election. The opposition parties now began to
clamour for her resignation and Jaya Prakash Narayan, at a huge
rally in New Delhi on 25June 1975, declared that the government
had lost all moral claims to rule. That night, a state of emergency
was promulga'ted in India.
7 David Selboume, A.n Eye to India: Tht Umnaslting of a Tyr111111J
mondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 90.
·-·
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26 State and Politics in India
The Emergency
Tens of thousands of opposition leaders and activists from all
over the country, including fifty-nine members of Parliament,
were arrested during the emergency. They were from the Socialist
Party, the Congress (0), the CPl(M), the CPI(M -L), the Alc:ali
Dal, the DMK, the Bharatiya Lok Dal and the Jana Sangh. A
few of those arrested were critics of Indira Gandhi from within
the Congress. Twenty-six political organizations from both left
and right were banned, including the CPI(M-L) and most other
'Naxalite' groups, the RSS, the Ananda Marg and the Jamait-c­
Islami. Censorship was imposed on the press and the fundamental
right of equality before the law (Article I4), the right to life and
liberty (Article 21) and protection against arbitrary arrest (Article
22) were suspended. MISA was strengthened by making it vir­
tually unnecessary for the authorities to give .any reasons
· for
detaining a person.
.
The DMK government in Tamil Nadu (as Madras was called
from 1969) was removed for its 'economic failures' in January
1976 and President's rule imposed. In actual fact, the DMK had
resisted the enension of the emergency regime i n Tamil Nadu
and the Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi had publicly called for
an end to authoritarian rule. In March 1976, the only other
non-Congress government in the country, the coalition rninistry
in Gujarat headed by Babubhai Patel of the Congress (0), was
similarly dismissed for its alleged failure to maint2in law and
order. Now all st2tes in India either had Congress governments
or were under President's rule.
A week after the emergency was declared, the government
announced a 20-point programme to 'change the face of India in
a truly revolutionary manner'. It included implement2tion of land
reforms, liquidation of rural indebtedness, abolition of bonded
-labour, socialization of urban land, prevention of tax evasion and
punishment to economic offenders, participation of workers in
industric;s, and special beneftts to the landless, agricultural
workers, weavers, students and 'weaker sections'. This was meant
to be the legitimizing instrument for the emergency - a package
of beneftts that would be delivered to different sections of the
people. In actual fact, the emergency regime gave unbridled power
to officials and Congress politicians who used it in an arbitrary,
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Introduction 27
motivated and frequently violent manner. Some of the emergency
actions that caused widespread resentment were the cleaning up
of cities by forcibly clearing slums and pavement shops and car­
rying out family planning by forcible sterilization. Apart from the
bureaucracy and the police, the Youth Congress under Sanjay
Gandhi's leadership became a particularly feared instrument of
the Emergency regime.
The life of the Lok Sabha, which had been elected in 1971, was
extended by a year. In August 1976, a series of constitutional
amendments was proposed to severely curtail the powers of the
judiciary, to further �ntralizc the federal system and to introduce
a set of fundamental duties in addition to the fundamental rights
of citizens. The Indian republic itself W2S now to be described as
'sovereign, democratic, secular and socialist'. In November 1976,
the amendments were passed by Parliament, the protests of the
few opposition members not even being reported by a press acting
under censorship laws.
At this time, there was little visible opposition to the Emer­
gency regime. Its powers seemed to be unchecked, overcoming
every resistance it faced. In January 1977, surprising everyone,
Indira Gandhi made the stunning announcement that parliamen­
tary elections would be held in March. The Emergency was not
to be withdrawn but its harshness would be toned down, many
detenus would be released and the censorship laws relaxed.
As soon as elections were announced, four opposition parties
- the Congress (0), the Jana Sangh, the Bharatiya Lok Dal and
the Socialist party - merged to form the Janata Party which was
to have a single list of candidates and a common election symbol.
Three expelled members of the Congress - Chandra Shekhar,
Krishan Kant and Ram Ohan - also joined the Janata party. A
few days later came the sensational announcement by Jagjivan
Ram, one of the senior-most members of Indira Gandhi's cabinet,
that he had resigned and, along with two former Chief Ministers,
H.N. Bahuguna of UP and Nandini Satpathy of Orissa, W2S form­
ing a new party called the Congress for Democracy which would
go into an electoral understanding with the Janata party.
The Janata party was able to work out a common list of
candidates with other parties such as the CPI(M) and the Alcali
Dal, so that in as many as 425 of 539 seats there was vittually a
straight contest between the Congress and the opposition. This
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28 State-and Politics in India
was unprecedented in Indian elections until that time. The results
were stunning. The Janata party: won an absolute majority secur­
ing 270 seats and of its allies the Congress for Democracy won
28, the Akali Dal 8 and the CPI(M) 22. In all of northern India,
from Himachal Pradesh to West Bengal, the Congress won only
ftve seats. In the south, however, it won most of the seats it
contested - in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kamataka and
Kerala - giving it a total of 15 3 seats. Indira Gandhi herself was
defeated from Rae Bareli. Electoral history had been created in
India. The ftrst non-Congress government at the centre assumed
office with Morarji Desai as Prime Minister.
The Janata Government
Restaring Democracy
The Janata government was the ftrst experiment with operating a
coalition government at the centre. In truth, even the experience
of the various non-Congress coalition governments in the states.
since 1967 had not been inspiring.
The immediate task before the new government was to dis.:.
mantle the emergency regime and re-lay the foundations of a
democratic process. The coercive laws and constitutional amend­
ments enacted during the emergency were rescinded and political
prisoners released. A series of commissions were appointed to
investigate allegations of illegalities and excesses against ministers
and government officials. Of these, the hearings of the Shah
Commission in particular produced massive evidence of impro­
prieties committed by those in power during the Emergency,
including Indira Gandhi and especially her son, Sanjay.
In the meantime, assembly elections were held in several states
in June 1978, including UP, Rajasthan and Orissa where the
incumbent Congress governments were dismissed and the legis­
latures dissolved. Now once more there were non-Congress gov­
ernments in most of northern India.
The Janata government tried to project a different develop­
mental strategy, articulated in a Gandhian rhetoric, focused more
on rural areas and relying on giving incentives to farmers and
small manufacturers. The possibilities of this strategy were never
properly tried out since, almost immediately after coming to
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Introductum 29
power, the government fell into a crisis because of internal dis­
sensions. On the one hand, although Morarji Desai was accepted
as Prime Minister through a consensual method, both Jagjivan
Ram and Charan Singh remained aspirants to the post even as
they became senior ministers of the cabinet. On the other hand,
despite the f�ct that the constituents of the Janata party had
formally merged into a single organization, on the ground they
largely retained their separate identities. 1n particular, the Jana
Sangh, which was organizationally the tightest and ideologically
the most articulate of them all, sought to use this opportunity to
expand its own bases of support as quickly as possible.
In the meantime, many of Indira Gandhi's colleagues in the
Congress now began to withdraw their support from her. With
evidence mounting in the hearings of the Shah Commission·, there
was now a serious possibility of her being prosecuted for the
illegalities and excesses of the Emergency. She insisted that the
Congress launch a campaign for an end to the commissions. In
January 1978, she forced yet another split in the Congress, with
most of the organiZ2tion remaining with the president Brah­
mananda Reddy and most of the Congress members of parliament
coming with her to form the Congress-Indira. 1n the assembly
elections in Andhra Pradesh and Kamataka in February 1978, it
w� the Congres s -I which won the majority, while the Reddy
group was wiped out. Once again, Indira Gandhi had proved that
as f-ar as the Congress was concerned, she was the strongest focus
of popular appeal. 1n November 1978, she won a by-election to
Parliament from Chikamagalur in Kamataka.
Dissensi(l11S
One set of troubles. started in UP when in February 1979, the
Janata Chief Minister, Ram Naresh Yadav, formerly of the BLD,
decided to drop two Jana Sangh ministers from his cabinet. De­
spite efforts at a rapprochement and a change of ChiefMinisters,
the rift between theJana Sangh and the BLD widened and affected
theJanata governments in the other north Indian states. In April,
Chief Minister Karpoori Thakur of the BLD was defeated in the
Janata legislature party in Bihar and had to make way for Ram
Sundar Das, a former Socialist. 1n June, Devi Lal, Chief Minister
of Haryana and also formerly of the BLD, was forced to resign
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30 State and Politics in India
and Bhajan Lal was elected in his place. In the same month, Raj
Narain, once again of the BLD, was expelled from the national
executive of theJanata party for his criticism of party policies and
leaders. Within theJanata leadership configuration, Charan Singh
seemed to have been cornered.
The other set of troubles centred around allegati9ns of corrup­
tion against K.anti Desai, son of the Prime Minister. The Con­
gress-I in particular was vociferous in this matter, both in and out
of Parliament. Soon it became an issue in the rapidly developing
conflicts within the Janata government itself. In July 1979, a
no-confidence motion was brought against the government b y
Y.V. Chavan of the Congress. There began a stream of resigna­
tions from the ministry and defections from the ruling party. It
became clear that the government would not be able to get a
majority in the house. Morarji Desai resigned. Charan Singh,
along with a group of defectors from the Janata Party and in
coalition with the Congress, formed a new government with the
suppon of the Congress-I and the Left parties. Three weeks later,
the Congress-I withdrew its suppon, forcing Charan Singh to
resign. N. Sanjiva Reddy, the President, dissolved Parliament and
announced fresh elections to the Lok Sabha.
The Congress-I Decade
Dominance and Opposition
Faced with a divided opposition, the Congress-I won a comfort­
able majority in Parliament in the January 1980 elections, sweep­
ing Andhra Pradesh, Kamataka, Tamil Nadu (in alliance with the
DMK), Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Himachal Pradesh and
Punjab and winning substantially from Bihar, Maharashtra, Rajas­
than and Uttar Pradesh. A few months later, Sanjay Gandhi, who
had emerged as the principal driving force in the Congress-I
organization, died in a plane crash.
Since political developments from the 1980s are covered in
detail in the readings collected in this volume, we do not need to
spend much time here on a general survey of the period. Some of
the significant features of the Indira Gandhi regime of 1980-4 are
as follows.
The main form of rule continued to be one of central command
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Introduction 31
and control. In Congress-I party affairs, the dominance of the
central high command, consisting of people close to the Prime
Minister, was practically total. In matters of government, the
emphasis was on centralization of powers in the hands of the
central executive, with key bureaucrats often playing a more cru­
cial role than government ministers. In economic matters, the
signs were now clear that a different path of development was
being sought from that which had been followed in the early 1970s.
The emphasis was now on freeing the private sector in industry
from the regime of tight government control, liberalizing imports
and promoting exports. In political matters, the attempt was to
break up opposition cons�lidations, at the centre and in the states,
by promoting dissension in their ranks, usurping their political
platforms and, on several occasions, by using the powers of the
central government to disturb non-Congress governments in the
states. Thus several moves were made in this period to win the
so-called 'Hindu vote' for the Congress-I. Dissensions were
promoted within the AlcaJi Dal in Punjab by backing extremist
elements against the moderate leadership. The issue of federal
relations became extremely bitter with the opposition parties com­
ing together to save non-Congress state governments from central
intervention.
One of the most dramatic effects of the growing feeling that
the central government was acting in an authoritarian manner with
respect to the states was the stunning election victory in January
1983 of N.T. Rama Rao's Telugu Desam Party, formed only a
few months before on an explicit emotional appeal of 'restoring
the pride of the Telugu people'. In Kamataka too, theJanata party
defeated the Congress-I to form a government with Ramakrishna
Hegde as Chief Minister. The CPI(M)-led LDF government of
E.K. Nayanar in Kerala fell in October 1981 and the Left Front
government led by Jyoti Basu in West Bengal remained in a
siniation of constant confrontation with the centre. But regional
opposition took on the character of insurgencies in Assam and
Punjab. The movement against 'infiltrators' in Assam turned from
a student agitation into a mass movement and became particularly
violent after 1983 when the centre attempted to hold assembly
elections, practically by force, and to install a Congress-I govern­
ment. In Punjab, the extremist fringe of the Alcali Dal, under the·
leadership of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, became increasingly
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32 State and Politics in India
assertive, demanding a sovereign state ofKhalistan. In June 1984,
the Indian army entered the Golden Temple in Amritsar and, after
a pitched battle, captured a number of terrorists and large stocks
of arms, but left numerous dead, including Bhindranwale himself.
In October 1984, Indira Gandhi herself was killed by members of
her own security guard, ostensibly in retaliation for the attack on
the Golden Temple. Her assassination led to riots against the Sikh
community in several spots in India, but most viciously in the
capital, New Delhi.
Rajiv G(lTldhi's Regime
Rajiv Gandhi was appointed Prime Minister in an extraordinary
way. Unlike in the 1960s, no formal body of the Congress was
called into play to elect a new leader. Rather, Rajiv Gandhi, who
held no significant position of leadership either in the party or in
government, was first appointed as Prime Minister by the Presi­
dent, Zail Singh, on the advice of a few senior Congress leaders,
and only later were the approvals of party organs such as the
working committee and the legislature party obtained. It showed
once more how strongly personalized the nature of authority had
become in the Congress-I.
The eighth general election took place in December 1984 in
the shadow of Indira Gandhi's assassination. It produced the
largest ever victory for the Congress-I. Most opposition parties,
except for the Telugu Desam and to some extent the CPl(M),
were decimated. One of the first acts of the Rajiv Gandhi govern­
ment was to pass an anti-defection law to prevent legislators from
switching parties. The new government, under a young leader
without a political past, attempted to project an image of change,
promising to sweep away hidebound practices and lethargic
routines. In particular, the economic policy of fewer government
controls, liberal imports and greater reliance on the private sector
was sought to be given a new ideological stamp. Politically, some
attempt was made to shake up the organization of the Congress,
but soon it became clear that a command structure based on
rational bureaucratic principles rather than on personal loyalties
would be difficult to put in place without a thorough democratiza­
tion of the party itself. This the political leadership was unwilling
to risk. Instead, the older form of Congress-I politics, with power
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flowing directly from a small group of the Prime Minister's close
advisors, soon reasserted itself.
The agitations in Punjab and Assam had not subsided. Rajiv
Gandhi attempted to arrive at political settlements in both states.
In Punjab, an 'accord' was signed with the Akali Dal leader H.S.
Longowal and assembly elections were held in September 1985.
Unfortunately, Longowal himself was assassinated by extremists
during the election campaign. But the Akali Dal won an absolute
majority for the fust time in the Punjab assembly and formed a
government under Surjit Singh Barnala. The Barnala government,
however, was caught in an unenviable position between extremists
on the one side and an interventionist central government de­
manding tough action on the other. Amidst mounting terrorist
actions, the government was dismissed in May 1987 and Pres­
ident's rule declared. In Assam, the 'accord' led to assembly elec­
tions in December 1985 in which the former student leaders, now
organized. as a political party called the Asom Gana Parishad, won
a clear victory to form the government with Prafulla Mahanta as
Chief Minister. In 1986, the former rebel leader of Mizoram, L.C.
Laldenga of the Mizo National Front, who had already struck a
deal with the central government in 1982 to end his insurgency,
signed an 'accord' with Rajiv Gandhi that gave full statehood to
Mizoram and made him the Chief Minister.
This period also saw a distinct deterioration in the communal
situation in the country. From the early 1980s, there were in
several cities in Gujarat, Ahmedabad in particular, repeated out­
breaks of communal violence. In 1986, an old dispute about the
status of a mosque in the small town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh
suddenly took a new tum when a district judge, presumably on
instructions from political authorities, ordered the padlock to be
removed and allowed Hindus to worship at the place. Agitations
began throughout the country claiming that the mosque had been
built b y Mughal rulers after demolishing a Hindu temple at the
same site and demanding the building of a new Rama temple there.
In the meantime, in 1987, a judgment of the Supreme Court
awarding alimony to a divorced Muslim woman contrary to the
provisions of the Muslim law led to protests from conservative.
Muslim bodies. The central government gave in and passed a law
ensuring that Muslim law would take precedence over secular law
in such cases. These developments led to a unprecedented
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
34 State and Politics in India
organization of acrimonious debates over communal issues on a
national scale.
Another mobilization that had a significant impact in the l 980s
was the farmer's movement Its origins lay in the green revolution,
and through the 1970s, the rich peasants turned capitalist farmers
had become vocal in their demand for greater state support for
agricultural production and marketing. This interest had been well
represented in Indira Gandhi's Congress in the early I 970s, but
from the period of the Emergency, it became identified with
opposition politics and Charan Singh became its principal ideo­
logue. The interesting change that occurred in the 198()5 was the
emergence of large and effective non-party movements of farmers,
such as the Bharatiya Kisan Union led by Mahendra Singh Ti.kait,
the ShetkariSangathana ofSharadJoshi or the Karnataka Farmers'
Association led by M.D. Nanjundaswamy. These movements have
sought to act more as pressure groups, periodically staging huge
demonstrations and intensive campaigns, but not directly identify­
ing with any political party.
One of the features of the centralization strategy followed by
both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s was the complete control
exercised by the central Congress-I leadership over party funds.
With massively expanded campaign expenditures, the Congress-I
nevertheless actively discouraged candidates and local units from
raising their own election funds and preferred campaign materials
to be produced centrally (often on the advice of advertising agencies
specifically hired for the purpose) and distributed to the constituen­
cies. This was to ensure a homogeneous and centrally controlled
campaign and also to reduce the influence of locally powerful forces
on local Congress-I units. The huge party funds were now collected
centrally, mostly as kickbacks from large international deals con­
cluded by the central ministries or public sector companies.
One such deal, a defence purchase involving the Swedish ar­
maments manufacturer Bofors, became the centre of controversy
when it was alleged that large kickbacks had gone to politically
influential people surrounding the Prime Minister himself. The
issue became particularly charged when Vishwanath Pratap Singh,
an important minister in Rajiv Gandhi's cabinet, resigned in 1987,
protesting against corruption in the Congress-I. The issue snow­
balled to become tlte principal focus of opposition unity in the
1989 general elections. A National Front, led by the Janata Dal,
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lntroduaitm 3>
managed to arrive at scat adjustments with the Bharatiya Janata
Party. The Congress-I was defeated, securing only 197 seats in
the Lok Sabha. The National Front could not win a majority on
its own, but formed a government with V.P. Singh as Prime
Minister with the outside suppon of the BJP and the Left parties.
Into the l 990s
Rise md Fa/J of the National Front
The National Front government lasted only a year. It was de­
pendent on outside suppon, and fmally it was its relation with
the BJP, established in the interest of defeating the Congress-I,
that snapped. The communal situation had become especially
charged, with the Hindutva forces, now organized in the so-called
Sangh Parivar consisting of the BJP, the RSS and the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad, carrying out a huge campaign to build a temple
at the site o f the Bahri mosque in Ayodhya. In the state assembly
electiollS in March 1990, the BJP won majorities in Madhya
Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh where, for the first time, they
formed their own governments. In Rajasthan, the BJP formed a
coalition government with the Janata Dal.
The crisis that soon ovenook the National Front government
was both internal and external. Internally, the principal difficulty
centred around the position of Devi Lal, the deputy Prime Min­
ister, whose son, Om Prakash Chauthala, who had become Chief
Minister of the Janata Dal government of Haryana, had been
charged with gross election rigging. Put under great pressure,
including a threat of resignation from the Prime Minister himself,
Chauthala was forced to resign, but Devi Lal became a sworn
antagonist of the government. In August 1990, Devi Lal was
dropped from the cabinet.
The external crisis built up over the confrontation with the BJP.
In June 1_990, the VHP declared that they would go ahead with
the building of the temple at Ayodhya and the BJP aMounced
that its leader L.K Advani would take a Rama rath procession
through the length and breadth of the country, mobilizing sup­
pon for the temple. In August 1990, V.P. Singh aMounced that
the government would implement the recommendations of the
Mandal Commission made several years earlier for the reservation
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36 St11u 1111d Politics in India
of 27 per cent of government jobs for the Other Backward Classes.
The announcement led to violent protests by upper-caste students
and youth in many cities all over India. In October, Advani's rath
procession was stopped in Bihar on the orders of Janata Dal Chief
Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and the BJP leader arrested. A few
days later, VHP volunteers trying to enter the site of the mosque
in Ayodhya were fired upon by armed police deployed by the UP
government of Mulayam Singh Yadav.
The crisis was now complete. In early November, sixty-eight
MPs of the Janata Dal left the party with Chandra Shekhar and
Devi Lal as their leaders to form the JD (Samajwadi). Two days
later, the National Front government was defeated in a confidence
vote in the Lok Sabha - the BJP, the Congress-I and the JD (S)
voting against the government.
The Chandra Shekhar Government
Chandra Shekhar became Prime Minister of a minority govern­
ment with Congress-I support. In Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh too,
the former JD Chief Ministers Chimanbhai Patel and Mulayam
Singh Yadav continued in power with Congres s -I support: The
government was entirely at the mercy of the Congress-I and did
not even make a pretence of formulating a coherent policy. In
March 1991, Chandra Shekhar resigned. The ninth Lok Sabha
was dissolved less than a year and a half after its formation.
Halfway through the general elections in May 1991, Rajiv
Gandhi was assassinated at an election meeting in Tamil Nadu
by suspected Tamil militants from Sri Lanka. The death of the
Congress-I leader affected the results in the remainder of the
elections. The Congress-I did not win a majority but; with 232
seats, became the single largest party. No coalitions being pos­
sible, P.V. Narasimha Rao, elected leader of the Congress legis­
lature party, was appointed Prime Minister.
Congress in Power and in Decline
The most important shift carried out by the new government
was to bring economics to the forefront of the political debate.
,, Manmohan Singh, who became the finance minister, was a senior
government economist who was now given the task of steering
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Introduction 37
through the political process a. policy of structural adjusnnent of
the economy required as a condition for getting loans from the
International Monetary Fund. The policy of liberalization and
loosening of government regulations which had taken place in
small doses through the previous decade was now sought to be
accelerated into a package of economic refonns that would attract
large foreign invesnnents. Although the government was in a
minority in the Lok Sabha, it managed to pass several controversial
measures and survive votes of no-confidence because the BJP and
the NF-left bloc would not combine to bring it down and force
yet another general election.
In the meantime, the BJP stepped up its campaign for the
building of a temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya. InJune 1991,
it had won the UP elections on this issue. With its own govern­
ment in the state, its mobilization reached a peak. On 6 December
1992, /car stValcs stormed the premises, encountering little resis­
tance, and demolished the mosque in a matter of hours. The event
sent shock waves through the country. The government ofKalyan
Singh w:as dismissed in UP, and a few days later the BJP govern­
ments in Himachal Pradesh, R.ajasthan and Madhya Pradesh were
dismissed as well. However, the central government seemed quite
indecisive on how to deal with the situation politically. InJanuary
1993, there were massive killings of Muslims in &mbay and
Gujarat. The communal situation was at its worst ever since In­
dependence.
The situation in Kashmir also became particularly disturbed.
In the mid-1980s, opposition politics inJammu and Kashmir had
found a voice in the participation of the National Conference in
the conclaves of non-Congress parties all over India demanding
greater autonomy for the states. In 1986, after Farooq Abd�ah
went into an alliance with the Congress-I, the resentment against
the power of the centre was diverted into more militant activities.
President's rule was declared in Jammu and Kashmir in 1990 and,
for the next few years, it was a story of constant confrontation
between Indian security forces and a variety of armed militant
organizations, leading to thousands of deaths and a complete
disruption of civic life.
') Narasimha Rao's government, however, displayed great skill in
parliamentary rnanOCUYreS in order to s12y in power. In 1993, it
won over to its side a block of members belonging to the Ajit
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38 State and Politics in India
Singh faction of the Janata Dal. With by-election victories and
small accretions in strength,it finally managed to secure a majority
on its own. However, as far as the internal strength of the party
was concerned, or indeed its power to gather mass electoral sup­
port, the Congress-I was set on a path of rapid and irreversible
decline. By 1995, as many as twelve states - Andhra Pradesh,
Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat, K.arnataka,Maharashtra,Rajasthan,Silckim,
Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal - had
governments run by parties other than the Congress-I. Even more
significantly, it seemed to have lost its position as centre of the
political system. Especially in northern and western India, the BJP
was vying for that position, setting the political agenda and
profiting from the split in the non-BJP vote. With the emergence
of distintt regional party systems in the states, the Congress was
now one of the many parties with a position in several of those
regional systems.
The I 996 Elections
The general elections of April-May 1996 confirmed these trends.
The BJP made a strong showing in the northern and western
states and emerged as the single largest party in Parliament. The
Congress-I finished second. The various regional parties, includ­
ing the Janata Dal, the Telugu Desam Party, the DMK, the
AGP, the breakaway Congress group in Tamil Nadu led by
G.K. Moopanar and the left parties, came together to form an
NF-LF bloc, later called the United Front. President S.D. Shar­
ma decided to invite A.B. Vajpayee of the BJP, as leader of the
single largest party, to form the government, even though the
NF-LF bloc, with Congress-I support, was claiming to have a
majority. The Vajpayee ministry lasted barely over a week, by
which time it became clear that the BJP would not be able to
get the support of a majority in the Lok Sabha. Vajpayee resigned
and H.D. Deve Gowda of the Janata Dal, then Chief Minister
of K.amataka, was asked to form a ministry after the Congress-I
declined to do so. The United Front government passed its first
vote. of confidence in June 1996 with the support of the Con­
gress-I and the left parties. It was also the first occasion when a
left party - the CPI - joined a government at the centre.
Apart from the emergence of the regional parties as a combined
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Introduction 39
force bidding fur power at the centre, the most recent period of
Indian politics has also been marked by the rise in northern India
of a new political assertion of the lower caste groups. In terms of
their organization, they are variously identified with the Janata
Dal, the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party or qie Samata
Party, and even these identities and the pattern of their political
alliances are extremely fluid. Nevertheless, along with the rise of
communalized political identities, the emergence of the new dalit­
bahujan formations is an important aspect of the changing political
structures in India fifty years after Independence.
It is possible that future historians will describe the entire period
we have covered as the Congress era. Certainly, a narrative of the
political history of India as a whole in these fifty years has had to
be built around the story of the rise and decline of the Congress
as the central active force. It is a measure of the fundamental
uncertainties facing Indian politics today that no other force has
decisively replaced the Congress.
•
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I
The System
l'""J""\e early attempts to present a systematic account of Indian
l. politics after Independence were usually placed within a
liberal modernization theory and, more o�en than not, were cel­
ebratory in tone. Certain key institutions of the modem state were
shown to have been put in place in the period of British rule; after
Independence, it was believed that with a liberal democratic con­
stitutional system and universal suffrage, the Indian political sys­
tem would gradually develop its own processes of democratic
decision-making, rational administration �d modem citizenship.
Features such as patronage relations based on caste or religious
loyalties and solidarities based on ethnicity were regarded as ves­
tiges of underdevelopment that would go �way with greater par­
ticipation of the people in democratic institutions. Later, more
complex variants of the modernization theory were produced,
most notably by Rudolph and Rudolph in The Modn-nity ofTradi­
tion (1967) and in the collection on Caste in Indian Politics (l 970)
edited by_Rajni Kothari, in which it was argued that even elements
of 'tradition' such as caste or religion could infiltrate a modem
system of political institutions, adapt to it and, by transforming
themselves, find an enduring place within it as parts of political
modernity itself.
The most influential account of the Indian 'system' from this
perspective was produced by Rajni Kothari in his Politia in India
(I 970). His theoretical tools were largely structural-functional. He
identified the 'dynamic core' of the system of political institutions
in India in the Congress Party. The whole system worked through
the dominance of the Congress. It was a differentiated system,
functioning along the organizational structure of the party but
•
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42 State and Politics in India
connecting at each level with the parallel structure of government,
allowing for the dominance of a political centre as well as dissent
from the peripheries, with opposition parties functioning as con­
tinuations of dissident Congress groups, the emphasis being on
coalition-building and consensus-making at each level and on
securing the legitimacy of the system as a whole. Through an·
accommodative system such as this, the political centre consisting
of a modernizing elite was shown to be using the powers of the
state to transform society and promote economic development.
Kothari gave it the simple name 'Congress system'.
Kothari's framework was criticized at the time from different
perspectives - for overvaluing the consensual character of the
system, for overestimating the autonomy of the elite, for taking
far too gradualist a view of social and political change, and so on.
But its usefulness was overtaken by the events of the 1970s. The
rise of militant oppositional movements and the increasing use of
the repressive apparatus of the state, culminating in the Emergen­
cy, were clearly phenomena that went beyond the consensual
model of the Congress system. From the 1980s, Kothari himself
developed entirely different frameworks for presenting empirical
as well as normative accounts of Indian politics.
Marxist accounts were better able to describe conflicts and the
repressive use of state power as systemic features of Indian politics.
However, much of the literature, especially that produced by
theorists working within rigid frameworks laid down by party
programmes, was dominated by a sterile debate over what was
called the character of the state. More nuanced accounts that tried
not only to describe enduring structures of class power but also
specific changes in political processes and institutional practices
1 began to emerge in the l 980s. The essay by Sudipta Kaviraj
j reprinted in this section is one of the best examples of this genre
, of Marxist writing on Indian politics. The focus is on the state,
:
I but the analysis takes the state as a site over which several dominant
classes try both to outmanoeuvre one another and to work out
coalitional arrangements in order to preserve their dominance as
a whole. The political process can then be described in terms of
changing balances in the ruling class coalition. Politics, in other
words, can be given a structure in terms of class forces as well as
a history in terms of changing balances. The overall historical
pattern is described, following Antonio Gramsci, as the passive
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The System 43
revolution of capital, making institutional changes understandable
in terms of a non-classical history of modernity, but with the
interesting variation that the success of the revolution is not as­
sumed: the apparent successes of Indian capitalism could themsel­
ves lead to an institutional failure of the political system.
Marxist accounts are often strong in describing the central
structures of state power and their relations with dominant or­
ganized forces in Indian society, but when it comes to connecting
such an account with local societal .institutions and micro-level
political practices, they are on much less sure ground. Other
attempts have been made in recent years to theorize Indian politics
in terms of certain systematic state-society relations. Rudolph and
Rudolph in their later work, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political
&ontmty ofthe Indian State (1987), which takes organized interest
groups as the principal actors in the system, have tried to periodize
Indian politics in terms of the tussle between a 'demand polity' in
which societal demands expressed as electoral pressure dominate
over the state and a 'command polity' where state hegemony
prevails over society. Rao and Frankel in their two-volume edited
collection, Dominance and State P(IU)er in Modern India (1990), have
made a distinction between public institutions such as the bureau­
cracy and organized industry and political institutions such as
legislatures and political parties. The history of politics in inde­
pendent India, they say, is one of the rising power of formerly low
status groups such as the lower castes and the poorer classes in
the political institutions and the attempt by upper caste and middle
class groups to protect their privileges in the public institutions.
Atul Kohli in Democracy and Discontent (1991) has described the
recent history of the system as one in which, by surrendering to
immediate electoral pressures exerted by various social groups, �
democratic state institutions have been allowed to decay, leading J
to an all-round crisis of govemability.
Rajni Kothari in his recent writings has attempted to develop
a normative framework that serves less as an explanation and more
as a critique of the present political system. He notes that unlike · i
in the early decades after Independence, the national political elite /
has lost its autonomy and the state has ceased to be an agent of 7
social change and has instead become more and more repressive. )
His argument is that there is a need now to assert, through
grass-roots movements and non-party political formations, the
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44 State and Politics in India
autonomous force of civil society over a repressive and increasingly
unrepresentative state. Another important theorist who has con­
sistently articulated a moral critique of the Indian sate system is
Ashis Nandy, in whose view, derived as he says from a modified
Gandhian position, the modernist sate has repeatedly failed
whenever it has tried to impose on Indian society a set of institu1i tional practices adopted from the modem West that go against
i the firmly entrenched everyday practices of collective living in
local communities. Social change, if it is to be both successful and
just, must emerge out of those collective everyday practices.
l
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1
A Critique of the
Passive Revolution·
Sudipta Kav_iraj
I
'"Tlie story of Indian politics can be told in two quite different
.l �ays, through two alternative but mutually reinforcing con­
structions. I believe that the wk of a proper Marxist analysis of
Indian politics is threefold: first, constructing internally consistent
accounts of our political history in these two ways, and then a
more theoretical enterprise of making these consistent with each ,,
other. One of these would tell the story of structures (if structures
are things of which stories can be told)1 - a story of the rise of
capitalism, the specificities of transition, the formation and mat­
uration of classes, the internal balance and architecture of the
social form, the making and breaking of class coalitions, etc. Such
things take long periods to happen, and occur through slow glacial
movements. Another story would have to be constructed in terms "
of actual political actors, suspending the question of more fun­
damental .causalities for the time being; it must be told in terms
of govenµnents, parties, tactics, leaders, political movements, and
similar contingent but irreplaceable elements of political narra­
tives. The second story - the narrative of the Indian state • This chapter was first presented at the Indo-Soviet seminar on 'The Indian
Revolution' in Leningrad fr o m 14-17 August 1987.
I There is a theory which holds that structures are constructs of such a kind
that they deflect and obstruct historical reflections. On this untenable idea
there is an impressive body of literature, the most well lcnown and long­
winded being E.P. Thompsons's Tbt Pl1Vtrty ofTbeury and Othn-&IIJS (Lon­
don: Merlin Press, 1978).
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46 State and Politics in India
would be related to the successes (in its own terms) of Indian
capitalism and its failures, but is not entirely reducible to them.
For in the growth of a late capitalism like the Indian one, the social
form of capitalism itself realizes that the state is a historical pre­
condition for much of its economic endeavours and for its political
, security. Paradoxically, this state, which seemed remarkably stable
/ and legitimate when Indian capitalism was relatively weak, has
/ come into an increasingly serious crisis with the greater entrenc h ment of the social form. 2 Attempted critiques of the Indian polity,
to be convincing, must attempt to do the three things I mentioned
earlier: they must try to plot the simple narrative line of this crisis,
i.e. provide a structure to the simple flow of political events. This
is to be taken seriously as a narrative. Stories told of the same thing
by various reporters differ: similarly, different types of narratives
would differ as to where the ruptures lie, where the continuities,
how much significance to accord to which incident, etc. 3 This kind
of thing could be called an event-to-event line of causality. But
this simpler narrative account must also reveal a deeper causal
profile related to a structural causal field:4 it must show fundamen­
tal structural incompatibilities which have expressed themselves
through these upheavals. This could be called a structure-to-event
causal line. In this chapter, I have tried to show what kind of a
( political model might work in the structural anal is of Indian
ys
�
politics; but it is inadequate in two ways. First, the model itself is
l sketchy; and second, I have not worked out how the narrative can
be fitted on to the workings of the model adequately. I believe
optimistically that such a model has better chances of success than
earlier, more wooden, ones generally in use.
2 Some modernization theorists do note this paradox, but they would give it
a bland historical solution, by asserting that in the earlier stages the state had
to cope with much lower levels of political 'demand'. Present difficulties of
the state arise from the fact that these demands have multiplied through
greater mobilization but the state's resources for coping with them - its
'supports' - have remained static. This indefensibly marginalizes the ques­
tion of economic development, and is indifferent to the enormous growth of
state resources and i ts deliberate aeation of a network of advantage distribu­
tion.
3 In the periodization of Indian politics, Rajni Kothari, for instance, saw the
break with the Nehruvian system as coming in 1975. On my reading, this
ruj>ture is a much more slow moving affair, and begins much earlier.
4 J.L. Mackie, 'Causes and Conditions', in E. Sosa (ed.), Causation 1111d C1111ditil1'Ulk (London: OUP, 1975).
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II
Long-term structural compulsions on Indian politics, the choices
of both the ruling bloc of propertied classes and the unorche­
strated subaltern classes, arise in several well-known ways: (i)
inclusion of the Indian economy in the capitalist in�emational
market and its division of labour; (ii) the received structure of
colonial economic retardation; and (iii) the fundamental choice
exercised by the leadership of the new Indian state in favour of
a capitalist strategy of economic growth through a set of basic
legal and institutional forms, e.g. the format of legal rights in the
constitution, the set of ordinary laws ruling economic and cor­
porate behaviour, the enacanent of industrial policy and other
similar initiatives. This was, in a historical sense, a choice which
obviously structures all other choices. These structures and their
internal evolution have received a great deal of analytical attention
from Marxist economists. For an analysis of the state, we have
to assume some well-known Marxist propositions on the nature �
of India's capitalist development. The social formation in India
is generally characterized as a late, backward, post-colonial c a p ­
italism5 which functionally uses various enclaves of precapitalist
productive forms.6 Politically, however, it would be wrong to
assimilate the Indian capitalist experience into either the model
of late-backward European capitalism of the Russian kind,7 or
into a lower late-backward form in which the imminent collapse
of an immature caritalism makes the possibility of a socialist
revolution realistic. Although much of the Indian countryside
still shows persistence of semi-feudal forms of exploitation, one
can make a case for a characterization of the social form as
capitalism, for the judgment involved in such things is not a
matter of a simple statistical or spatial predominance. Marx had,
in the famous passage of the Grundrisse provided a methodological
s However, I do not find the theoretical positions worked out by Hamza Alavi
about th e post-colonial state persuasive in the Indian case.
6That is contrary to the traditional linear belief that precapitalism is ingmn-11/
(in this case, taken to mean i n every instance) dysfunctional to capitalist
growth and would be liquidated historically.
7 Of the kind analysed by Lenin in his theory of the Russian revolution. Such
differences arc clearly marked out i n Lenin's discussions of the colonial
question.
8 Of the type exemplifted by China in the Comintern debates from the fourth
to the sixth Congresses.
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48 State and Politics in India
injunction about how to characterize such transitional economies
through a complex, historically inclined, identiftcation.9 To trans­
late his colourful metaphor is not altogether easy - what does
the simile of a predominant light mean in precise economic terms?
- but it would be generally accepted that the capitalist fonn
predominates in terms of controlling the economic trends of the
totality of the social form. The capitalist logic dominates and
gives the general title to the economy through its ability to
reproduce itself on an expanded scale, set the tone, the targets
for the economy as a whole, and therefore to determine the
historical logic of the totality of the social formation. Although
there are obviously other sectors and types of production in the
Indian economy, their reproduction has been subsumed, both
economically and politically, under the logic of reproduction o f
capital. It is the second part of this nexus which ought to be o f
special attention in an analysis of the Indian state.
� In countries like India the process of reproduction of capital
ldepends crucially on the state. Although the state-capital connec­
;tion has been extensively studied in empirical economic terms,
surprisingly little theoretical use.has been made of this in the study
of the Indian state. Still, some minimal generalizations can be
made as starting points of a political enquiry. The state in India is
a bourgeois state in at least three, mutually supportive, senses. (I)
When we say that a state is 'bourgeois' this refers in some way·
(though this particular way can be very different in various his­
torically concrete cases) 10 to a state of dominance enjoyed by the
capitalist class, or a coalition of classes dominated by the bour­
geoisie. (2) The state form is bourgeois; i.e. the sense in which we
speak of the parliamentary democratic form as being historically
a bourgeois form of government. This is not just a matter of
registering that such forms historically arose during the period of
rising capitalism in Europe and spread out through a process of
cultural diffusion. Rather, th_e Marxist view would posit a stronger,
structural connection between bourgeois hegemony (or domina­
tion) and this form of the state.11 It arranges a disbursing of
9 Karl Marx, Grundris.rt (Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), pp. 106-7.
10 For inst.Ince, the different political trajectories analysed by Gramsci
in the
Pris<m Notebooks, especially discussions of the passive revolution.
11 The· sense in which Marx said that it is the democratic form which suits
the capitalist mode most properly.
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advantages in a particular way; and the democratic mechanism
works as a usefully sensitive political index as to when the distribu­
tion of disadvantages, which is bound to happen and intensify in
a capitalist economy, is becoming politically insupportable. This
is the best construction of Marx's idea that democracy was the
most appropriate political form for the capitalist mode of produc­
tion. A more Lucacsian view would see this as a homology between
a Marxist economy and a market-like political mechanism. Besides,
it also lays down norms of management of interest conflicts in a
way that even though political grievances accumulate, their politi­
cal articulation does not assume a pitch and form which makes the
minimal stability required for capitalist production unobtainable.
(3) The state expresses and ensures the domination of the bour­
geoisie and helps in capitalist reproduction and a subordinate
reproduction of other types of economic relations by imposing on
the economy a deliberate order of capitalist planning. Those direc­
tive functions that capital cannot perform through the market
(either because the market is imperfect or not powerful enough,
or because such tasks cannot be performed by market pressures)
the bourgeois state performs through the legitimized directive
mechanisms of the state. The analysis of politics offered below
takes such a minimal political economy argument on trust from
Marxist economists. But what I offer here, in itself, is not a political
economy argument; because I do not subscribe to the view that
Marxists trying to understand politics too do the same enquiry as
the economists, i.e. their cognitive object is the same. In 1ny view,
political scientists should not merely collect the political corol­
laries of the arguments of Marxist economists; their object is dif­
ferent. They study the 'other', the political side.
India has then a bourgeois state, but a state that is bourgeois in
three different senses. The last two features are less problematic
than the first one. A bourgeois format of the state, or the bourgeois
character of its legal system, property structure and institutions of
governance are clearly and undeniably evident. 12 These are re­
vealed in the Indian Constitution -in its central business of laying
Detailed analyses could be fo�d in the worlc of S.K. Chaube and S.
Dan.agupta, on the constituent assembly and the judicial processes respec­
tively. More recently, a more philosophically inclined discussion has been
presented in Chhatrapati Singh, Law berwem Anarrhy {111d Utopia (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1985).
12
--
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50 State and Politics in India
.
down some limits and prohibitions through the rights of property,
etc., although this serious and decisive core is surrounded by looser
reformistic advisory clauses, and based on some necessary illusions
of bQurgeois power, like its extreme constructivism: the myth,
seriously believed by the early ruling elite; that patterns of laws
can direct social relations rather than reflect them, an illusion
which made the framers carry the constitutional document to an
unreadable and agonizing length. 13 However, the original con­
stitution reflected the accepted social plan or design of the ruling
elite at the time of Independence, unlike the subsequent disin­
genuous insertions of ceremonjaJ socialistic principles.14
A second institutional frame was provided by the adoption of
the objectives and incre�ingly proliferating institutions of plan­
ning, which explicitly a¢knowledged the role of the state in the
reproduction of capital and in setting economic targets in a way
compatible with bourgeois developmental perspectives.
Clearly, however, f the three reasons for calling our state
'bourgeois' the last twZ are rather external. They depend, in any
case, on the fust con ition of this characterization, and it is the
first condition which is theoretically most problematic. It is a
straightforward case of bourgeois dominance if the state is
'bourgeois' because it reflects a state of bourgeois dominance over
society, if the bourgeoisie's political predominance is symmetrical
with its directive power over the productive processes in the
economy and its moral-ailtural hegemony. In addition to eco. nomic control and directive power, states in advanced capitalist
countries in the West employ what Poulantzas calls its 'institu­
tional materiaJity'15 to reinforce, extend and elaborate their dom­
inances. Our third condition can also be expressed in a Gramscian
form: one of the crucial legal-formal principles of the capitalist
state is the investiture on the state of the title of universality, a
legitimate title to speak on behalf of the society 'in general'; this
includes an implicit admission that other interests, at least in their
raw, economic form constitute a 'civil society' representing the
ll Tius is not merely a petty and querulous point. Constitutional documents
must be read and understood by the people. The Indian constitution is a
lawyer's document, a document of the lawyers, for the lawyers, by the lawyers.
14 Particularly objectionable is the insertion of the term 'socialist' by recent
amendment.
IS Nicos Poulanu.as, St11tt, PUWtr, S«ill/ism (London: NLB, 1978).
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rule of particularity of interests. Clearly, in the Indian case, though
it would be wrong to underestimate the survival of democracy for
forty years, the Gramscian hegemony model of the capitalist state
does not apply in any simple, unproblematic form. 16 It is suggested
here that the Indian capitalist class exercises its control over society
neither through a moral-cu.ltural hegemony of the Gramscian
type, nor a simple coercive strategy on the lines of satellite states
of the Third World. It does so by a coalitional strategy carried
out partly through the state-directed process of economic growth, \
partly through the allocational necessities indicated by the hourgeois democratic political system. Politically too, as in the fteld of
economic relations, the Indian bourgeoisie cannot be accorded an
unproblematic primacy, because of the undeniable prevalence of (
precapitalist political forms in our govmumce-, also because the J
vulgarly precapitalist form in the political life of rural India must
be given appropriate analytical weight. Attributing political dom­
inance to the capitalist class in a society in which the capitalist
form of production is still not entirely predominant thus raises
some theoretical problems.
•
Coalitional Relations ofClasses
Marxists in India have commonly sought to solve this theoretical
difficulty by offering a coalitional theory of class power. 17 Former­
ly, Communist party literature asserted that power in India was
exercised by an alliance of two dominant classes, the bourgeoisie
(in some cases the monopoly stratum of the bourgeoisie, in others,
all fractions of the bourgeoisie as a whole) and the landlords who
still enjoyed precapitalist privileges and control. This picture did
not standardly include the bureaucratic-managerial-intellectual
elite as a distinct and separate element of the rulin,: coalition. In
my judgment this was a flaw in the original model,1 and stemmed
16 I
have tried to present an argument of this lcind elsewhere: Gramsci and
Different Kinds of Difference, seminar on Gramsci and South Asia, Centre
for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta,July 1987.
17 Since Independence, almost all programmes by almost all communist
groups assert that state power in India is controlled by an alliance of classes,
although they differ about which classes and their relative political weight.
18 This was a flaw primarily because,though in economic life the public sector
and state control on the economy were seen to be important, it appeared
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52 State and Politics in India
from the tendency to underestimate the significance of the politi' cal functions of the state and to view the state as merely an
expression of class relations rather than a terrain, sometimes an
independent actor in the power process. In earlier Marxist analysis
of the 1950s or 1960s the historical necessity of a coalition of
power was derived from the inability of the bourgeoisie to serious­
ly pursue, let alone complete, a bourgeois democratic revolution.
The theory of a ruling 'coalition' highlights another essential
point about the nature of class power in Indian society: that capital
is not independently dominant in Indian society and state; and
for a series of other historical and sociological reasons single­
handed and unaided dominance in society is also ruled out for
the other propertied classes. It is a political, long-term coalition
which ensures their joint dominance over the state. So the coali­
tion is not an effect or an accidental attribute of a dominance
which is otherwise adequate; it is its condjtion. There are several
reasons why despite its weakness capital exercises the directive
function in the coalition. By its nature, it is the only truly univer­
salizing element ·in the ruling bloc:19 among the ruling groups,
the bourgeoisie alone can develop a coherent, internally flexible
development doctrine. Precapit:alist elements have not had an
alternative coherent programme to offer; their efforts have been
restricted mainly to slowing down capitalist transition and ensur­
ing comfortable survival plans for their own class. They have
contented themselves by operating not as an alternative leading
group, but as a kind of a relatively more reactionary pressure
group within the ruling combine trying to shift or readjust the
balance of policies in a retrograde direction.
In class terms, the ruling bloc in India contained three distinct
social groups and the strata internal to or organically associated
with them: the bourgeoisie, particularly its aggressive and ex­
panding monopoly stratum, the landed elites (which underwent
significant internal changes due to the processes of agrarian trans­
formation since independence) and last, but not least, the bureau­
cratic managerial elite.20 It must not be forgotten that the policies
these had no political consequences or effects on class formation and class
behaviour.
19 Altho�gh this is not the place for long or detailed theoretical discussions,
I find Poulantzas's concept of :1 ruling bloc suggestive but in2dequately clear.
20 Though I advocate the inclusion of this group into the ruling bloc of c�sses,
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followed by the ruling bloc often had consequences for its own
structure and internal formation. For instance, as a result of the
policies pursued over the long term, the strucrure of the classes
themselves, especially of the latter two classes, underwent trans­
formation. Although the redistributive aims of the land reforms
were frustrated, they had some long-term effects on the class
structure of agrarian society, particularly its upper social strata.
Over the longer term, as a result of the decline of feudal landlords,
a newer segment of rich farmers came to replace them in areas
where the green revolution took place - a class of capitalist
farmers. This has had, on all accounts, serious consequences for
Indian politics. Similarly, the third element has also undergone
a remarkable expansion in its size, areas of control and power in
step with the development of the state-directed apparatus of
economic growth.
Traditional Marxist accounts of the ruling coalition suffered,
in my view, because they saw the bureaucratic elite as being too
straightforwardly subordinate to·the power of the bourgeoisie, and
saw what was basically a coalitumal and bargaining relation as a
purely instrumental one. Actually, this third group was a crucial
element in the ruling coalition of classes. Although not bourgeois
in a direct productive sense, culturally and ideologically it was
strongly affiliated to rJ:ie bourgeois order. This cl� was, even
before Independence, as some historical works show, the repos­
itory of the bourgeoisie's 'political intelligence' worlcing out a
'theory' o f development for Indian capitalism, often 'correcting'
more intensely selfish objectives of the monopoly elements by
giving them a more reformist and universal form:21 With the
constant growth of the large public sector some genuine points of
conflict between this bureaucratic elite in government and bour­
geois entrepreneurial classes began to develop. Most significantly,
however, they perform a distinct and irreducible function in the
ruling bloc and its sprawling governmental apparatus. It is not
only true that they mediate between the ruling coalition and the
it is important to define the boundaries of this social group with precision.
To include the entire administration in the ruling bloc would be absurd, but
Iwould include the high bureaucratic elite and industrial management groups.
21 Bipan Chandra, 'Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian Capitalist Class, 1936'
in Nati111111/ism tmd Colonialism in Modern India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979), i n
which G.D. Birla's behaviour i s more startling than Nehru's.
.
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54 State and Politics in India
other classes, they also mediate crucially between the classes within
the ruling coalition itself. They also provide the theory and the
institutional drive for bourgeois rule.
Finally, a coalition is always based on an explicit or implicit
from
protocol, a network of policies, rights, immunities derived
•
both constitutional and ordinary law which sets out, over a long
period, the .terms of this coalition and its manner of distribution
of advantages. Changes in the structure, economic success and
political weight of individual classes give rise naturally to demands
for changes in its internal hierarchy and a renegotiation of the
terms of the protocol; and discontented social groups use options
over the entire range of'exit, voice and loyalty'.22 To understand
the centrality of the third element, and also how the logic of
politics intersects with the logic of the economy, I suggest a
further distinction between what is generally known as dominance
{ in Marxist theory and a different operation or terrain of what
could be called governance. Domination is the consequence of
longer term disposition of interests and control over production
arrangements; and in this sort of calculation the dominant classes
in Indian society would be the bourgeoisie, especially its higher
strata and the rich farmers. This is clearly distinct from governance which refers to the process of actual policy decisions within
the apparatuses of the state. Surely the stable structure of class
dominance constrains and structures the process of governance,
but it is quite different from the first. 'fhis could be extended to
suggest that the movement of public policies would be captured
by a different concept which refers to configurations of vertical
clientilist benefit coalition that these policies create among the
subordinate classes. Concessions to agricultural lobbies 1nay create
an affinity of interests among the large and the small farmers, or
say, all those who sell agricultural produce on the market. Such
benefit configurations are real and influence the policy-makers'
calculations of short-term political advantages accruing from pol­
icies. These also ensure that actual political configurations do not
become symmetrical to class divisions in society. Evidently, this
does not turn the small peasant into a part of the ruling bloc.
But while it would be nonsensical to see him as a part of the
ruling classes, it would be seriously unhelpful for political analysis
l
22 A. Hirschman, Exit,
sity Press, I970).
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to ignore such short-term nexuses of interest built up by directions
of p_olicy, since what are generally known as welfare programmes
explicitly used in this way. We Gan account for some crucial
shifts in political alliances in terms bf such deliberate changes in
benefit coalitions produced by public policy.
The coalitional nature of the ruling group has another serious
implication for political analysis. The groups that are included in
the coalition do not share equal power: power within the ruling
bloc is evidently hierarchical. But if any of these classes is seriously
dissatisfied and leaves the ruling bloc, that not only alters the
structure of the coalition, but threatens it with political disaster.
Theoretically, it follows, any serious political move for each class
or its representatives within the coalition is two valued. These
moves are of course in a general sense directed against the classes
outside the bloc, but the choices of these moves have real effects
on the internal politics of the ruling bloc. If a common objective,
say, in industrial policy, can be achieved by three differently worked
out policy options, x, y, z, their preference for these options would
be often differently ranked by different components of the niling
bloc. These would result in different states of distribution of long­
term and short-term benefits, and among these benefits very often
fig ures the purely political strategic advantage of having a
favourable format of procedure of decisions. This sort of a coalition
theory may help us understand concrete moves and decisions of
political life and link these with configurations of class interests,
rather than standard academic coalition theories which use in­
dividuals as their standard political actors and plot coalition move­
ments in reference to a formal minimality norm.23
are
m
I have suggested elsewhere24 that the story of Indian politics since
1947 ought to be seen in terms of a crucial initial stage of politica_l
realignments, followed by four fairly commonsensically divided
periods i n our political life.
23 Cf. Riker's well-known discussion on the size principle in Tb
tttryofPolitiC11I
COillition (New Delhi: Oxford and IBH, 1970), pp. 71�24 'Economic Development and the Political System', paper for colloquium
on Indian Economic Development, University of Economics, Vienna, O c ­
tober 1982.
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56 State and Politics in India
Realignments 1946-1950
In politics often beginnings, despite their contingent character,
take on the nature of fundamental constraining structures over the
long term. No state is able to erase its .beginnings completely:
initiatives taken in formative years of the state tend to acquire
foundational and determining character simply because of their
historical priority. Political scientists have been, in my view, inat­
tentive towards the significance of this period of fast and crucial
historical change;25 and consequently, discussions on Indian pol­
itics suffer from a myth of exaggerated continuity between the late
years of colonial rule and the early years of independent power.
The Congress which assumed power in 1947 was not in many
respects the Congress that won Independence. The post-war
years, after it was generally known that Independence was coming
in the immediate future, naturally saw a series of quick political
changes. Besides, the formal constitutional structure that was
adopted set the framework of the moves of different social classes
and political actors for quite a long time, until constitutional and
formal language fell into sudden disuse after 1969-71;26 Clearly,
this period formed a crucial stage in the history of the Indian
national movement. Earlier the objective of the movement was
the rather abstract one of making Independence possible; now
the objective of every political group within the broad national
movement changed into struggling for determination of the struc­
ture of power of the independent state - not an abstract end of
25 Recently, after the archives have been opened for these years, there has
been considerable interest among historians about this formative period;
however, not much historical research is yet available.
26 Ordinari.ly, the period of large-scale disregard for constitutional rules is
set at 1975. But it ought to be noted that many of the initial moves against
bourgeois democratic legal norms were begun and legitimized in the imme­
diately preceding period of the 'left tum'. The judiciary, for instance, was
attacked as conservative and opposed to the parliamentary tendency towards
progressive legislation. This was an argument_ taken from British political
arguments of the 1930s. Of course, it is possible to make a case that the courts
generally incline to be conservative, but Indira Gandhi used this to loosen
bourgeois constraints over her government, not to strain towards socialism.
Unfortunately, leftists willingly surrendered their arguments to her, in return
for small favours. These were used systematically to justify precapitalist
irresponsibility in governance. Much of the present wrecking of bourgeois
democratic instirutional norms was done with the help of a disingenuous use
of radical rhetoric.
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sovereignty, but a far more concrete question of the form of the
society and material allocation of advantages. Different political
groups showed their common appreciation of this historical fact
in their differing ways. Muslim separatism became more strident
in demanding a separate state. Communists registered the same
urgency by intensifying their struggles for acknowledgement of
peasant rights. Congress groups responded to this climate of
approaching power by greater ideological polarization and crys­
tallization of political factions. And Gandhi, most interestingly
and unpredictably of all, responded by suggesting that the Con­
gress, bearing the imprint of an earlier age, ought to be disbanded
in a typically theatrical conve,rgence 0£.the symbols of fulfilment
and denouement.
Alongside these secessions from the earlier ambiguous unity of
a single nation:dist'movement there w.ere significant internal re­
alignmen�within the Congress. Congress's paradox of continuity
began from its very early days. It is not only that Indira Gandhi's
Congress was very different from Nehru's although claiming con­
tinuity, Nehru's Congress itself was different from the organiza­
tion it inherited. Within the apparent hegemony of the Congress
over the national movement, these· two years saw serious political
realignments; and what is more, many of these tended to nullify
earlier historical shifts in the Congress organization in a relatively
radical direction. After 1942, Socialists and their assorted allies
came to occupy an important position in the Congress in the Hindi
belt, an area that has been since the mid-1960s the despair of
radical groups. Popular mobilization of a spontaneous form be­
came widespread and began erupting outside the formal structure
of the Congress. In the years just before Independence, the Con­
gress was rising as a paradoxical mass wave, a wave which made
its coming to power irresistible, but also a wave that the Congress
leadership wished to see controlled rather than encouraged. For
it may have meant, if it continued indefinitely, the crystallization
of an early radical popular challenge to its new government.
When the Congress assumed power, since questions of social
design and distribution of advantages through the legal form had
become central, polarization within the party naturally became
more intense. Thus the tussle between Nehru and Patel should
be seen as a serious conflict of strategy within the ruling coalition,
the outcome of which would have seriously affected the fate of
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58 State ll1Jd Politics in India
the state, the nature of the economy and the even purely social
formation of these classes themselves. This was not, as sometimes
claimed, a struggle between a bourgeois and a radical petty bour­
geois programme of development of the nation; but equally cer­
tainly, it was no mere personal tussle for power between individual
factions. It was a conflict between two quite different strategic
perspectives within the general direction of capitalist dexelop­
ment. And a victory of the more reactionary segment within the
Congress could have meant great differences in public policy
regarding the public sector, the extent of state control, the play
of market forces, the nature of planning and foreign policy.
Strategic differences assumed a sharp form between an old style,
liberal, laissez-faire form of capitalist programme, and a refor­
mistic state-centred strategy advocated by the Nehru supporters
within the party. Eventually, the historical outcome of this strat­
egy conflict turned .out to be deeply paradoxical. Through a
combination of economic reasonableness and fortuitous events
(like Patel's sudden death) the comparative reformists around
Nehru won the strategic debate within the Congress, though
their complete dominance in policy-making had to wait till the
Second Plan. But something else, less newsworthy and noticeable,
also happened at the same time within the Congress party. This
highly spectacular victory of the reformists concealed a more
fundamental weakening of their forces. Through a series of politi­
cal squabbles, socialists who were within the Congress gradually
left the party - to form most of the time relatively ineffective
and regionally limited opposition groups. Subsequently, the so­
cialist groups in north India followed suicidal moves common
among political parties under pressure of declining mass support.
Under Lohia's influence, they went in for slogans and motifs
which they thought would stop the erosion of their base and turn
north India into a socialist fortress. Actually, it eventually turned
into a prison. Adoption of the parochial agenda saved their base
temporarily in the north, but ensured that it could not extend its
appeal or mass base in other parts of India. It was a heavy price
to pay for an advantage which eventually did not last. Besides,
the strong anti-communism of the socialists also precluded any
collaboration between the two major left parties outside the
Congress; though, had they worked together as a joint political
pressure group for radicalization of social policies and their
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implementation, it could possibly have counteracted the disin­
genuousness of Congress land reforms.
However, the paradox was that the Congress was formally
wedded to what we now describe as Nehruvian reformist pro­
gramme at a time when the radicals inside the Congress became
woefully wealc, and whatever little striking power they had was
mainly concentrated at the centre. From the early years of the
government, because of the federal distribution of powers, prac­
tically all measures adopted towards any reform of the agrarian
structure were effectively countermanded by its own recalcitrant
and more conservative state and local units. The Nehru govern­
ment, thus, began its career by playing false to its own adopted
programmes. And the quick decline of socialist influence in the
states of Bihar and UP where there had been strong peasant
mobilizations in the not too distant past remains one of the large
uninterrogated phenomena of recent Indian politics. The depar­
ture of the reformist elements from the Congress led to a feeling
among the small elite around Nehru of being encircled within
their own party organization. It provided the initial condition for,
and pressure towards, a 'passive revolution' strategy.
Experimentation 1950-1956
Out of this historical situation arose the enormous programme
of a capitalist 'passive revolution'27 that the Congress adopted in
the Nehru period. First, of course, the programme of serious
bourgeois land reforms was abandoned through a combination
of feudal resistance, judicial conservatism and connivance of state
Congress leaderships.28 Legal arrangement of property institu­
tions, sanctioned by the constitution, reinforced such opposition
and gave it juridical teeth. Thus the only way in which agrarian
transformation could talce place was through a conservative, grad­
ualist and 'molecular'29 process. Feudal and other conservative
resistance could, in principle, be broken down if the Congress
encouraged the mobilization of the masses and was willing to use
the already achieved mobilizational levels for radical purposes
27 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.
28 For a dettiled account of this process, see, Francine Frankel, India's Political
&onomy (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1978).
29 Gramsci, Prison Noteboolts.
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60 State and Politics in India
consistent with its own programmes. But one of the central
decisions of the Nehru government was on this question: even
though it sometimes did not abrogate its reformistic programmes,
it decided to give them a bureaucratic rather than a mobilizatiOMi
form. For the Congress leadership, clearly, the political task after
assuming power was to demobilize its own movement, not to
radicalize it further. It also discreetly renounced promises of
distributive justice which had come to constitute part of its in­
formal programme in the last stiges of national movement. The
basic contradiction of Congress politics in these early years has
been analysed in detiil in recent academic literature: needs of
long-term economic strategy and ideological legitimation in a
poor country made an abstractly redistributive programme im­
perative; but the ends of mobilizing the -effective levers of power
in the countryside during ordinary times made dependence o n
rural magnates equally unavoidable.3° No party can, after all,
expropriate its own power (as opposed to electoral) base.
Although the Congress was content to accept the continuanc:e
of semi-feudal rural power, elsewhere in the economy, it adopted
massive plans for capitalist development. But such plans can as­
sume quite different institutional forms and political trajectories:
Evidently, the Indian elite decisively rejected a trajectory of satel­
lite growth, a common destiny which befell most other newly
independent Third World stites. Consistent with this general
objective, the ruling elite adopted a plan for heavy industrialization
and institutional control of capitil goods industries through the
state sector, a largely untried experiment at the time in the under­
developed countries. Economic plans led to some serious shifts in
the internal power distribution of society, though primarily within
the elements of the ruling bloc itself. Political mistrust of foreign
capital and, to a lesser extent, of the potential power of private
capital in India led to much of this new, crucial and politically
privileged segment of the economy to be given over to a new and
fast growing public sector, in the face of strong political opposition
from internal conservatives.31
T}ie larger theory and the economic projections for this huge
state-controlled sector, which, in turn, controlled some crucial
30 F_rankel, lndu,'s Politic11I &rmtm,y.
31 The politics of planning and the public sector, alas, remains a seriously
under-researched area.
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parts of the larger economy by financial mechanisms, came from
a new bureaucracy of economic and technical personnel who
entered into the earlier, more limited format of the colonial law
and order bureaucracy, and changed its structure and practices.
Planning assisted and ideologically justified an enormous expan­
sion of a 'welfare bureaucracy' which set in motion some internal
conflicts in the adtninistrative apparatus of the state, e.g. the debate
about the relative decisional weight of technocrats and bureau­
crats, and more crucially, the division of their respective domains
of control. At the general level, however, they had some common
interests. They gratefully accepted the chance for a quick pro­
liferation o f bureaucratic occupations and a consequent tendency·
to bring under bureaucratic administration any new field of social
activity. And since the decision about how much the bureaucracy
should expand was made by the bureaucracy itself, though oc­
casionally under some thinly assumed disguises of committees and
commissions, it is not surprising that this sector spread rapidly in
size and increased its strategic control at the expense of more
traditional controllers of productive resources. This led in the long
run to the growth of a large non-market mechanism of allocation
of resources, a process which was originally justified by 'socialist'
arguments of controlling private capitalist power, but shown by
later events to be increasingly prone to arbitrary distribution of
economic patronage by politicians. Originally, this social group
had enthusiastically supported the spread of an intricate regime
of controls through licences, permits and government sanctions,
which they saw slipping out of their grasp and being put to
retrograde uses. So that, eventually, this entire state-directed eco­
nomic regime could be singled out for criticism for its political
arbitrariness and inefficiency; although actually the public sector
is criticized by using examples that travesty its functioning. 32
Anyway, politically this allowed the bureaucracy to have control
over other people's time frames, if not actual decisions. The more
Nehru was politically weakened inside the party organization, the
lZ The ways of the Congress party are truly inscrutable. It
expels leading
members for being too vocal about economic scandals and kickbacks, but
allows Vasant Sathe, an equally important member, to launch frontal attacks
on the public sector, presumably an important part of its own economic
programmes. Evidently, the Congress follows a special logic in defining
consistency and programmatic loyalty.
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62 State and Politics in India
greater the resistance at the state level to his reformist policies,
the more he was forced into the passive revolution logic of bureau­
cratization, which saw the people not as subjects but as simple
objects of the development process. The theoretical understanding
behind this development �trategy was also in several ways exces­
sively rationalistic: it falsely believed that external 'experts' nat­
urally knew more about people's problems and how to solve them
than those who suffered these problems themselves. By the mid­
l950s such an over-rationalistic doctrine became a settled part of
the ideology of planning and therefore of the Indian state, 'The
state', or whoever could usurp this title for the time being, rather
than the people themselves, was to be the initiator and, more
dangerously, the evaluator of the development process. A partly
superstitious reverence for natural science, undeservingly ex­
tended to economists, sociologists and similar other pretenders to
absolute .truth,33 justified a theory which saw popular criticisms of
state-controlled growth as 'civic disorders'. Every advance of this
rhetoricized bureaucracy in the control of social life was celebrated
as a further step towards a mystical socialistic pattern of society
in which although 'socialists' controlled state power, economic
and distributive inequality of other sorts rapidly increased. Al­
though it is important to undermine its unfounded and arrogant
'socialistic' claims, it would be unrealistic not to see that this state,
under this particular balance of its ruling bloc, worked out a fairly
elaborate theory of import-substituting industrialization and ran
a limited, in the sense of unevenly spread, system of parliamentary
democracy. Two points, however, have to be mentioned about the
internal balance of the regime. Successful functioning of this re­
gime depended on, first, the existence of a strong constitutional­
legal system, which enforced legal responsibility; and second, it
worked successfully in the early years because the relation between
the bourgeoisie and the new bureaucracy was relatively antagonis­
tic rather than collusive. Bourgeois political interests attempted
.
This group of course emphatically includes political scientists who had
convinced themselves that the truisms they uttered about Indian politics were
different from popular wisdom by the important fact that theirs were pro­
duced by the application of the scientific method. I have omitted them from
the list because the spirit of the age has not been in their favour, and they
were given much less advisory importance than their colleagues in the dismal
science. Although their labours in the spread of a degenerate form of positiv­
ism was second to none, they never made it to the high advisory councils.
B
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to ftght
it out frontally, in an ideological battle, trying to argue
through political doctrine that a more market-oriented approach
would be better for economic growth, than to allow the ceremonial
programme to stay and buy surreptitious reprieve from its rigours
through large-scale corruption. Both these conditions were
reversed in later years.
Consolidation 1956-1964
To emphasize these features of the political economy of the Nehru
years is not to deny that modern India is still held together by a
partially infringed frame which is a legacy of his period, despite
the best efforts of the party he had once led to break down its
structural principles during the rule of his political successors.34
Unforrunately, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi can be seen only
as his filial, not his political, inheritors. If his policy frame has not
been entirely destroyed, it is certainly not from any want of effort
from his party or those who followed him into power. Nehru's
historical importance is signalized by the fact that any programme
of bourgeois reconstruction still s_peaks of a return to his 'system'
as opposed to the later Congress performance in the political and
economic fields.
It is false to claim, as Nehru's official admirers often do, that
Nehru was a political theorist who had worked out a prior strategy
for 'independent capitalist development' which he slowly unfolded
when in power. In fact, he was no theorist; but he had an over­
whelming sense that political programmes in countries like India
must be set in the frame of objectives in the historical long-term,
so that, for him, political ideology meant an interpretation of
historical possibilities rather than populist gimmicks. Nehru's re­
gime thought seriously that reduction of poverty would necessarily
be slower in a state in which legal bourgeois rights to property
exist; Indira Gandhi's regime cheerfully promised its abstract erad­
ication in the elections of 1971, though none of the conditions
which forced Nehru's hesitation had changed. Although no
theorist, Nehru certainly had a statesmanly nose for reading 'the
dialectic of the concrete', and he picked up the elements of a fairly
34 I have tried to deal with this in 'On the Crisis of Political Institutions in
India', Contributions to Indian Sociology, No. 2, 1984.
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64 State and Politics in India
coherent social and political design as he went along, mainly
reading the logic of colligation between one basic policy and the
next. Use of political power by a ruling elite involves serious
recursive calculations about effects ofearlier policies and ensuring
conditions of success of one policy by means of others. If the bloc
in power survives over a long enough time, this makes it likely
that a coherent policy design would gradually emerge. But here
again a prior political condition is that the elite must feel securely
in power and work on a certain short-term dissociation between
political objectives of continuance and economic distribution and
creation of resources. It is this which can allow tying up resources
in investments with longer periods of gestation, against the temp­
taion to use resources in the form of direct subsidies to volatile
sections. Since Nehru's regime never had serious doubts about its
electoral future, it could embark on programmes like the Second
Five-Year Plan; for later governments similar uses of economic
resources under government control became politically unfeasible.
Although Nehru did not enter office with a fully worked out
programme, he did eventually create a distinct policy design. In
its final form, its elements we1e internally coherent. Political
stability and realization of independence of decision required an
improvement in the food situation, since American food aid, from
early on, was used to exert political pressure on basic policy issues.
This meant that in foreign policy India should seek alternative.
sources of international support. Parallel considerations of pro­
tecting political sovereignty of developmental decisions led to the
major thrust of the Second Plan towards primary sector industrial­
ization. Gathering the results of these policies depended to a
large extent on keeping these sectors of the economy under direct
control of the state. Driven by political-economic calculations of
this kind, the Indian state opened up its diplomatic relations with
the USSR. Of course, a whole range of external cirel.imstances
helped this process of a surprising connection between the leading
socialist state and the country in the Third World in which
capitalism had a somewhat greater chance of success. This was
greatly helped by the fact that the USSR pursued in its foreign
policy minimal objectives as opposed to the unpractically maxi­
malist ones of the US. 35 This mutual need was the ground for
H A simple definition of minimal and maximal objectives in international
politics would be as follows. When state A wishes state B to do what it wants
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early friendship between the two countries rather than an Indian
attempt to build a version of socialism, or Soviet assistance to a
regime trying to build a 'non-capitalist form' of society.36
However, there were two ways in which the Nehru model was
subvened by later political initiatives: much of it was an inversion
'from inside' as it were, as in case of bureaucratic control over the
economy- turning the power of overriding market mechanisms
by the state over to the service of arbitrary granting of favours to
pliable corporate houses, companies and individuals. On some
questions, however, there was a more explicit reversal of formal
government policy about generation of growth and managing its
distributive effects. One significant element of the Nehruvian
growth model discussed at length during the finalization of the
Second Plan was the connection between the industrial and agrar­
ian strategies, a doctrine decisively rejected during Indira Gandhi's
regime. A strong push towards industrialization in the heavy.in­
dustrial sector was supposed to be related to a parallel drive for
land reforms through a large programme for cooperativization.
This involved pressing reluctant and procrastinating state govern­
ments to enact more serious land reform legislation. Government
doctrine asserted that requirements of raising surplus resources
for the massive industrialization, increasing agricultural produc­
tivity, preventing a fast cost-push inflation could be served by
change and redistribution of control over land and resources in
the rural sector in a more egalitarian direction. The Nehru regime,
with its finer sensibilities about legal propriety, felt legally hand­
icapped, because land came under the state list in the constitutional
division of powers.37 Indeed, the federal division of powers could
be seen in terms of our model as a coalitional proposal directed
it to do, that could be called a maximal target; a minimal objective i s one
when A wants B to do something different from what its rival C wishes B to
do.
36 The famous controversy in communist circles about the article by Modeste
Rubinstein arguing that the Nehru government w:is proposing to follow a
non-capitalist path. Ajoy Ghosh wrote a remarkably scathing reply to this
article.
37 It is interesting t o note that lndi.ra Gandhi's regime increasingly freed itself
of these legal encumbrances, leading to a general decline of the institutional
system. Initial arguments in favour of this softening of bourgeois legal norms
were made by using 'socialist' ideas; but, remarkably, the room for manoeuvre
created by this has never been utilized for radical reforms.
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66 State and Politics in India
at the regional bourgeoisie and dominant agriculrural interests
giving them relative autonomy in their own regions. Insistent
requirements of capitalist development now threatened to infringe
that agreement within the protocol. Besides, the decline of the
zamindars and direct feudal landholders left the field free for
accumulation of power in the hands of a stratum of richer farmers
who wished to inherit political immunities implicit in the initial
protocol. This introduced a con- flict of interests within the struc­
ture of the ruling coalition in India, the effects of which were
significant in the long run. Nehru's policy initiatives in the late
1950s and early 1960s led to a double process of polarization in
politics. Government initiatives in three interrelated areas -crea­
tion of heavy industries in the public sector, increasing reliance
on Soviet assistance in their construction, and the pressure from
the planning element in government for changes in the agrarian
sector towards cooperativization -led to sharp criticism of the
Congress. Individual capitalists, sometimes even the entire class,
have to be pardoned for occasionally failing to see what was to be
beneficial to the system as a whole. These Nehruvian policies,
celebrated now as a triumphant design for successful construction
of retarded capitalism, came under strong fire from a panicking
combine of representatives of proprietary classes. The Congress's
industrial policies were interpreted as the thin end of the socialist
stick; land reform proposals, shamefully mild and solidly bour­
geois, appeared to them as a programme of an agrarian revolution
from above; the public sector, intended merely to displace the cen­
tre of control towards the state, was seen as an attack on private
enterprise. For the fust time, a large right-wing coalition of con­
servatives inside and outside the ruling party seemed to be emerg.mg.
Political consequences of such misreadings of Congress policy
were considerable. Two trends of political realignments began
soon after the adoption of the Second Plan package of policies.
Grievances against industrial policy and related issues led to the
formation of a Swatantra party; but more significant changes
happened in the rural political scene. Congress pressure for co­
operativization came just at the time when the beneficiaries of the
agrarian changes were enjoying the first impulse of their power.
This led to serious shifts within the ruling bloc. Although in terms
of distribution of unequal benefits, the rural elite' must be
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considered to have been part of the ruling coalition, they con­
stituted undoubtedly its most quiescent part. Imaginary threats of
disadvantage,38 but, more concretely, grievance against the fact
that they were not getting a larger share of advantages and that
their rising economic power was insufficiently translated into pol­
itical authority because they thought the rules of the parliamentary
game constantly wrong-footed them, made them increasingly res­
tive. 39 The farmers' groups, in other words, demanded a more
equal share of the fruits of inequality. There was large-scale exodus
of farmer support from the Congress and formation of regional
farmers' groupings. This should be seen in my judgment as a move
by these two subordinate and quiescent groups to set up relations
across the boundary of the coalition with other dispossessed
groups.40 All over India, but particularly in the more agriculturally
successful states, peasant parties sprang up and became part of the
growing opposition blocs in the fourth general elections. Their
typical leaders were Charan Singh and Rao Birendra Singh - the
latter more typical than the former, because he later rejoined the
Congress. Because his self-respect was not plastic enough, Charan
Singh could not do that. Some of these disgruntled elements
retained their loyalty to the protocol by announcing that they
would retain their Congress labels with suitable adjectival modi­
fication.41 The fates of the two critical realignments were even­
tually very different. Relative success of the policy of heavy
industrialization and the Second Plan was soon generally accepted
by even the recalcitrant bourgeois groups; and the Swatantra party
consequently sank into political irrelevance. But the session of the
farmers' lobbies over much of northern India, led first to a political
38 There
is always a hypothetical calculation of possible benefits made by
classes and groups quite apan from threats of disadvant2ge.
39 Most of these demands are spelt out clearly in Charan Singh's treatise on
development, Jndu,'r &unomic Polity (Delhi: Vws, 1978).
40 If the whole society is made up of the letters of the alphabet, and abc are
i n 't hat order wielders of power, if c is disgruntled, it can es12blish alliances
across the bowidaries of the ruling coalition with d e f . . . 1bis would bring
instability to the coalition where a + b + c was a amditi1111 for their being in
power. But e's leaving the a b c coalition would not be read properly if we
do not see thi� leaving itself as an offer to return to an a c b coalition.
41 The cowiay-was full of non-national Congresses of all kinds - Bangla
Congress, Kenia Congress and so on -asserting the reassuring concreteness
of the regional identity as opposed to the greater abstracmess ofthe national
one.
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68 State and Politics in India
debacle of the Congress then to internal changes in Congress
policies. Their withdrawal ofsupport from the Congress weakened
it seriously in both class and party tenns; and the Congress leader­
ship saw it as a double-valued move: an exercise of the exit option,
which concealed a proposal to remrn if the protocol was restruc­
tured in their favour. In coalitional politics every threat is an offer.
Changes in Congress policy in agriculmre towards a 'technical'
solution of the food problem, through heavy government invest­
ment in 'advanced' sectors which was known to be likely to result
in an accentuation of rural inequality, showed that the Congress
had read this move correctly and was prepared to make alterations
in its policies to accommodate ambitions of regional £-armers'
groups.42
Foreign policy issues so heavily dominated the last years of the
Nehru period that some of the long-term consequences of his
programme of passive revolution took longer than normal time to
surface. Imbalances left behind by Nehru's government affected
policies of the successor regimes. Its imbalances threatened to
rupmre the coalitional unity of the ruling bloc by creating a rift
of interest between the bourgeois, bureaucratic, urban segment
and regional bourgeois interests and agrarian propertied classes.43
This picmre of the Nehru period should not be taken as an
unhistorically one-sided and pessimistic one. Although all Third
World societies with ambitions of capitalist growth have failed, I
do not deny that the Indian society has failed much better than
others.44 There are undoubted advantages of the Indian case over
42 Surprisingly, the farmer lobbies were proper examples of the theory that
there are wunarked, but very significant frontiers of regional consciousness.
Thus a potential national combine of such groups -which would have been
formidable, if not simply overwhelming-has not really come into existence.
Peasant lobbies seem incomprehensibly tr�pped within frontiers of regional
consciousness; for some reason, they cannot recognize an entirely absttact
we, linlced entirely by modern economic interests, unsupported by any direct­
ly available form of historical se l fconceptualization
like ]at, or Kmnma, or
such et,1ltural identity. If they describe themselves as inhabitants of UP, this
would indicate a more absttact consciousness of territoriality.
43 For an economic pursuit of this phenomenon, see Ashok Mitra, Ttrms of
Trade and Cum Rtl4tu,,u (London: Franlc Cass, 1977)..
44 Nothing illustrates th.is more clearly than the abandonment in the I970s
of the argument popµlar with Western bourgeois theorists that India and
Pakistan were two opp0$Cd models of development for Third World societies.
Although the attachrnent oflarge Western democracies for an oppressive and
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other competing models like Pakistan, or now, more fashionably,
South Korea. It is obviously better than the tinpot but nonetheless
vicious dictatorships in Latin America and also some unproduc­
tively austere regimes in Africa given prematurely lyrical reception
by radicals in the 1960s. Such successes of the Nehru regime are
accepted, but remain unstated here, because I primarily intend to
draw something of a causal line from what we consider our 'best'
period to our worst.
Instability 1965-1975
Contradictions of the policies of the Nehru period su.rfuced after
the somewhat artificial national unity of the mid-l 960s disap­
peared. Nationalist hysteria naturally created a temporary alliance
of sentiment which brought together political forces from the hard
right to the mild left into an easy patriotic combination that
isolated the communists, especially the CPl(M). But the arti­
ficiality of this was shown by the fact that in three years after
Nehru's death, left forces could regroup sufficiently to form coali­
tion governments in states.
India passed through a deep political crisis in the few years
after Nehru's death, a crisis that, in policy terms, was fraught
with the most serious retrograde possibilities. An orchestration
of pressures - from both internal and external reaction - created
a situation in which the Nehruvian plan for a reformist capitalism
with its policies of public sector, state control over resources,
planning, a relatively anti-imperialist foreign policy could all be
renegotiated.45 Indira Gandhi's government initially gave in to
some of these pressures, its most celebrated collapse being the
acceptance of devaluation of the rupee. In the fourth general
elections, Congress fortunes declined alarmingly, and it was evi­
dent that to get out of the deepening politico-economic crisis,
the party needed some drastic measures. Initiatives taken by Indira
Gandhi in the years after 1967 showed that in her view the
<;:ongress was facing a crisis of legitimacy. Unlike the years after
economically unsuccessful tyranny like Pakistan was always difficult to ex­
plain, now Pakistan has become too obvious an ideological liability and is
defended by purely security arguments.
4S I have sketched this out more fully in 'Indira G.indhi and Indian Politics',
EPW. September 1986.
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70 State and Politics in India
Independence, it was not seen as a force of redistributive change,
but a conservative party underwriting social inequality. Legit­
imacy could be reviewed by restating the objectives of distributive
justice with dramatic splendour. Some changes in economic policy
were evident from the early years of the new regime, particularly,
the reversal of the earlier poli cy on agriculture with an implicit
acceptance of the inequitous social consequences of the new line
and gradual decline of emrhasis on planning46 and the policy of
large public investments.4
Politics of the Indian state and the Congress party entered into
a different historical stage by the fourth general elections. Earlier,
electoral survival of the Congress, the simple control over govern­
ments which was a precondition for making and shaping policies,
was never in question although Nehru's electoral majorities were
never dramatic. Going by purely electoral statistics, Nehru would
appear retrospectively to have been permanently insecure, enjoy­
ing unspectacularly simple 1najorities in Parliament. By contrast,
Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi would appear unassailably secure,
riding great waves of popular affection. This only shows, in the
face of much political science of the last twenty years, that electoral
'behaviour' is a rather poor indicator of what a people politically
do to themselves. Actually, there was a displacement of the ques­
tion at the heart of these elections. Formerly, the major question
was not whether the Congress would remain in power. It was
assumed that it would; the debate was about its policies. After
1967, every time, except in the last elections, the question was
46 Planning had become too
much of a slogan for the Congress to be dropped
altogether, and the concept carried pleasant reminders of Nehru. Although
the thing could not be dropped entirely, its substance could be hollowed out
and thrown overboard. Economists who are critiC:11 of government poli cy
have concentrated too much on the technical economics of the plans, rather
than their larger ideological concept. To an untechniC:11 eye, whatever its
mathematical triumphs in recent years, planning seems to have degenerated
increasingly into an accounting and housekeeping operation rather than a
directive mechanism for the productive forces of the economy. Planning was
a blessing for the self-reproducing bureaucracy. Every claim for creating the
post of an unproductive, and possibly corrupt, bureaucrat could be said to be
in the general interest of the country's economic progress. Thus although we
have much less of planning, we have, happily, a much larger commission.
47 Several Marxist economists have forcefully stressed this point. Cf. Pranab
Bardhan, Politic#/Economy ofDrot/opmmtinlndill (New Del hi: Oxford Univer­
sity Press, 1985).
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whether it would remain in power or not. Thus pre-1967 politics
revolved around real ideological issues - what should be the path
of national development, what would be the distributive character
of economic growth? After 1967, the attention of Congress
politicians went entirely into electoral issues and the matter of
staying in power. In my view, contrary to what is often said, Indira
Gandhi's politics became decidedly less ideological.48
By a populist move Indira Gandhi solved this electoral crisis
of her party.49 But long-term effects of her policies have created
a crisis of a different kind. Congress politics was marked by a
paradox of.continuity. No one would normally claim that Indira
Gandhi wished to take the country on a very different line of
development or diverge sharply from the policy design left behind
by Nehru; yet probably no one would claim either that she left
this design unaltered, or deny that her initiatives or interpreta­
tions have had serious negative consequences for the Nehruvian
model.50
48 For the conttaryview, cf. R . Ulyanovslcy, Socialism tmd rhe Newly lndepmdent
N11tiims(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), and his other occasional writ­
ings on Indian politics.
49 I have suggested that this has altered the significance of elections and
turned them into plebiscites, in 'Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics'.
50 Some criticisms of the argwnent of this chapter at the seminar where it
was presented touched on this point. Several critics thought that the line was
too heavily 'strucruralist' in the sense that it did not recognize the possibility
that politics of indubitably bad consequences could have originated in
'innocent', defensible and entirely understandable intentions. Structuralism
need not deny the necessary ulltidiness of political life and the complex,
asymmetric relation between intentions and consequences. It is simply r e ­
quired, in the face of such criticism, to state a sufficiently complex theory of
intentionality and accept a weak truth in these objections. Surely, Indira
Gandhi did not wish to wreck the Indian state, but equally certainly, she
ne,arly did. Part of the problem lies i n our ambiguous use of the verb phrase
'Indira Gandhi did x' which is undetermined between 'intended to do x' and
'effected x'. Even unacadernic observers of politics would admit, I suppose,
that between two lists, the first of which showed what Indira Gandhi wished
to but failed to do, and another showing what she perhaps did not deliberately
intend but nonetheless caused, the second would be the analytically more
serious one. A structural argwnent need not entirely erase intentions, only
de-emphasize them. It has no quarrel with the reporting of intentions as long
as that does not displace the causal line. For instance as long as intentional
arguments do not go into rationalizing forms saying 'Indira Gandhi intended
to eradicate poverty, but unfortunately, and unmipont1ntly, she could not',
they are not seriously harmful. It is in this sense that S. Gopal's book tells
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72 State and Politics in India
It is not necessary to retell the melancholy narrative of how quick
but indecisive victories contributed to a long-term crisis of the state
and how the state structure was centralized to such an extent that
..political difficulties of the leader or the government party became
generalized into a crisis of the entire state.51 We shall simply
mention the political shifts introduced by her 'pragmatic' transla­
tion of Nehru's political strategy.52
In one sense,. Indira Gandhi faced a situation similar to the one
Nehru had encountered, with the difference that she obviously, in
the mid-1960s, lacked Nehru's irreplaceability within the party.
Thus by the logic of the situation she had to intensify the passive
revolution features of the Nehru period, often, however, to a point
where these tended to subvert their own original purpose. Control
over government initially, because of the parliamentary format o f
political power, depended on her control over the party. Since after
Nehru effective power within the Congress had shifted to the state
bosses, and they could and did mount an offensive against her
leadership position, she set about systematically undermining state
Congress caucuses. This had two types of effects: first, party posts
and patronage at the state levels shifted towards less effective
leaders, who had no political base in their states. Though on some
occasions the process of replacement of older Congress leaders by
the new type was accompanied by ideological rhetoric - for in­
stance the new leaders being dedicated removers of poverty- this
was not taken seriously by the public nor the pretence kept up for
too long. No one suspected the new leaders of ideology. In the
event, most of them proved themselves to be men of astonishing
doctrinal suppleness. In the days of the socialist forum they thought
only socialism could end Indian people's sufferings; but during the
Emergency they were quick to appreciate the advantage of the
Brazilian path; and some, the subtlest of all, declared in the days of
the Shah Commission how they had nothing to do with the Emer­
gency regime but helplessly enjoyed its benefits. Second, after the
fall of the earlier, older generation of state leaders, Indira Gandhi's
Congress did not allow electoral processes to be revived, and these
half the story of the Nehru era and gives an account of Nehru's intentions.
To use our argument a trifle lightheartedly, it requires a complement which
would State more fully Nehru's consequences.
SI 'On the Crisis of Political Institutions in India'.
S2 Ibid.
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organizations, nominated from the centre, remained completely
ineffective. The resultant ineffectiveness of state Congress
machinery made it inevitable that power would be shifted even
more towards a bureaucracy53 which would soon declare ·itself
'committed' to unspecified ideals.54 This should not be seen as an
argument that prettifies older state leadership of the Congress.
Earlier leaders of the Congress like Atulya Ghosh, S.I(. Patil or
Nijalingappa never enjoyed great moral stature and dealt in quite
a malodorous form of patronage politics, and thus Congress did not
have much moral eminence to lose. But the new leaders were not
products of even local factional conflicts; they were simply imposed
on state parties externally. They were not even significantly hated,
but were merely unspeakable non-entities. In such circumstances,
it was hardly surprising that although securely in power as long as
they enjoyed the confidence of the central leadership, these leaders
lacked the ability to resolve state problems or serious regional
conflicts, and tended to send up all local issues for a central settle­
ment. But the advisers of the Gandhi regime read their shirking of
responsibility as a touching mark of loyalty. Although this showed
their loyalty to the centre and kept them gainfully underemployed,
it tended to overload the centre in terms of the sheer number of
decisions. In effect, this also shifted the power of decision from
those who knew state politics to those who knew it less, and
accounts perhaps for the wildly fluctuating pragmatism of Congress
rule in the states after 1971.55 The new state leaders lacked the
53 A s the internal linkages in the party rurned increasingly one-way, gover­
nance required some two-way flow, and it shifted to the only alternative a degenerating bureaucracy.
S4 A committed bureaucracy was an odd idea. And it was not consistent with
the professed purposes for which this idea was advanced. If this meant that
the bureaucracy would remain committed t o the elected government, the idea
was redundant, because it was meant to be so anyway. If it meant commitment
to a party irrespective of its electoral fate, this was blasphemous, because it
went right against the principle of den1ocracy. If it meant a comminnent to
socialism, it was the most paradoxical of all, because socialis1n is a matter of
policies; and either before or after the bureaucracy's commitment to the
government, the government failed to commit itself to socialism. If it meant
a coded appeal to leaders for preferment to a small coterie of politicians and
bureaucrats for their commitment to socialism in some n1istily distant past,
this was understandable and part of a solid tradition of sycophancy stretching
into medieval times.
SS Congress pragmatism was fluctu2ting in the following sense; various social
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74 State and Politics in India
ability to hold political equilibria in the states by creation and
manipulation of interest coalitions and factional politics - an
unpleasant but efficacious art that Congress leaders had perfected
·· in the earlier period of condominium with a more distant, non­
interfering centre.
Destruction of state-level Congress organizations was not ac­
cidental, for it happened not only at the time Indira Gandhi was
under pressure, but continued way beyond 1971 when she was in
uncontested control of the party and the state, and the Congress
went on in unembarrassed cheerfulness with nominated state com­
mittees, reducing state leaders to mere clients rather than sup­
porters of the central-authority.56 Thus Indira Gandhi changed
the Congress into a highly centralized and undemocratic party
organization, from the earlier federal, democratic and ideological
formation that Nehru had led. It should be a minor issue of Indian
politics that the party which vowed to defend democracy in India
could not retain it within its own folds. Also the earlier unstated
doctrine was that a strong centre could be based only on powerful
states; in he-r regime, the power of the state governments and of
the centre began to be interpreted in entirely zero-sum terms,
irrespective of whether states were controlled by the Congress or
opposition parties.57 Eventually, we wimess a further paradox of
power. The Indira regime's answer to a general sense of gathering
crisis was an obsessive centralization that defeated its own purpose.
She was arguably a more powerful Prime Minister than Nehru in
terms of control over the party and the state. But she presided
over a system which, though more centralized, had actually be­
come far weaker.
lobbies - ordinarily caste and regional groupings - perpetually contended
for control within the Congress party. Access to high government positions
made it possible to restructure govern.mental benefits in their favour. Often,
one interest lobby of this lcind would be replaced by another, and immediately
restrueture benefit legislations t o the utter detriment of consistency in gov­
ernment policy. In recent years, this has happened most frequently through
caste-related reservation legislations, for example in Gujarat in the very recent
past.
56 Tendencies of this kind towards atrophy of the party mechanism have been
studied for quite sometime, not surprisingly, more often by liberal academics
than by Marxists.
57 The central Congress leadership appears as suspicious of an
H.N. Bahuguna as of a Jyoti Basu, an extraordinary attitude if one took party
divisions seriously.
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Gradually, the redundancy of state parties also extended to the
centre, and effective power shifted entirely to governmental
echelons. Ceremonial leadership of the Congress party became a
redundant function: either Indira Gandhi herself was the leader
but derived her legitimacy from being the Premier; or when it was
someone else, his position was purely decorative. This develop­
ment implied the destruction of one of the checks within the
Nehruvian structure: the party could often balance the govern­
mental wing. Except in times of elections, Indira Gandhi ran what
could ironically be called a partyless government, in which, sym­
bolically, some of her minor office functionaries assumed more
importance in terms of access, timing, powers of facilitating and
delaying decisions than senior party leaders.
But this decline of the party could not have happened had not
Indira Gandhi changed the entire nature of politics. This new,
populist politics turned political ideology- a serious disputation
about the social design during the Nehru era - into a mere
electoral discourse, use of vacuous slogans not meant to be trans­
lated into government policies. Shift of the Congress to populist
politics quickly set up a new structure of political communication
in which Indira Gandhi could appeal directly to the electorate over
the heads of the party organizations. The relation between the
party and its leader was turned around: instead of the organization
carrying her to power, she carried them. Naturally, the Congress
became a less serious political mechanism because both of its
· significant functions were slowly taken away: elections were won
by Indira Gandhi's ability to directly appeal to the masses; daily
governance was slowly given over to the official government ma­
chinery and an increasingly politicized administration. During its
great electoral victories in the early 1970s, amidst the celebrations,
the Congress party as a political organization died an unremarked
death.
A natural correlate to this was the gradual shift of political (as
opposed to administrative) tasks to the higher echelons of the
bureaucracy which became increasingly more powerful at the cost
of becoming more politicized.58 As the logic of modern
S8 'Politicization' here docs not mean the bureaucracy's devotion to social
programmes on ideological lines, but to a personal leadership of the state.
Ironically, it became so devoted that i t lost all capacity for self-defence when
the high coterie fell for the seductions of the 'Brazilian path'.
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bureaucracies is centralist, this aided the tendency towards a mind­
less centralization of increasingly irresponsible power. Counter­
vailing institutions gave way, through a simultaneous decline of
Parliament and the court - though the firSt was less remarked
because much of its humiliation and ineffectiveness was self-in­
flicted. Majorities became so large as to make their tending and
discipline unnecessary, leading eventually to the comic situation
of the present Congress party worrying about the attendance of
its members in crucial debates in Parliament. 59 Although short­
sighted bureaucrats may have initially rejoiced at this accession to
power, often misreading this as an instrument of reformist policies,
it was gradually realized that bureaucrats could not always perform
tasks of political leaders, and the decline of procedural civilities of
capitalist democracy could be eventually used to the detriment of
all elements. Particularly fatal was the loan that the CPI lobbies
made to the Congress of its own slogans, symbols, argument and
language - to their own detriment as it turned out in 1976.
A remarkable feature of the new politics was the quickening
of the political -cycle. Indira Gandhi had carried her party to
power in 1971 on promises which were more radical and propor­
tionately more unrealistic than-earlier programmes. Factors which
obstructed the realization of milder promises still remained and
equally prevented any realization of the stronger promise, if of
course this was taken literally. Governments had to pay the price
of such populism sooner than expected. Under Nehru, electoral
majorities of the Congress had never been comparably large; yet
none of those administrations had difficulty in seeing through
their appointed constitutional terms. Remarkably, after Indira
Gandhi's victory in 1971, no government has actually lasted its
term. By 1973, Indira Gandhi's large parliamentary majority
notwithstanding, she was in deep political crisis. The Janata gov­
ernment, with a large majority, lasted barely three years. Indira
Gandhi, in her second tertn in power, was politically in trouble
at the time of her death. This calls for some explanation. In fact,
the textbook translation of electoral majorities into administrative
capability to rule was failing to take place. Indeed, it seems that
59 The Congress party had to issue a particularly stem admonition to its
members to respect the whip. There was an alarming tendency among par­
liamentarians of the ruling party to take their massive majority for granted
and pursue other interests, when Parliament was in session.
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the larger the majority of the government, the more difficult it
finds the general business of orderly governance. I have claimed
elsewhere that this is due to a change in the narure of elections
- which was initiated by the government party, but later used
by the electorate to register its protest against the current political
dispensation.
Elections have rurned increasingly into populist referendwns, in
which a highly emotive, rhetorical issue is placed before the elec­
torate immediately before the polls, screening off from view the
mixed record of an incwnbent regime. This gave these govern­
ments exaggerated electoral majorities without clear mandates; but,
more significantly, it destroyed the effectiveness of the electoral
mechanism as a register of popular dissatisfaction. Thus govern­
ments which a few months earlier achieved massive mandates could
face equally massive popular movements, as happened in Gujarat
in 1974. Popular criticism of governmental performance, deprived
of its legitimate channel in elections because of populism spilled
out on to the streets. Indira Gandhi's answer to previous electoral
instability under opposition rule in the states was not 111uch better
than the earlier situation. Instability was not reduced, but internal­
ized. Instead of unstable opposition coalitions following one upon
the other, now equally unstable Congress coalitions followed in
quick succession; and since Congress did not have a cle_ar pro­
gramme in tenns of policies they could follow widely divergent
trajectories in distributing benefits to social groups.
Evolution of the Congress in the years of Indira Gandhi ought
not to be seen in purely party or governmental terms. I have
suggested that the Congress debacle in the late 1960s was related
to a threatened secession of the rich agrarian groups from the
ruling coalition. But as every threat is an offer, it represented
their willingness to return to the fold with the terms of the
protocol renegotiated in their favour. Under the pressure of the
Emergency, and partly through the systematic concessions given
to the agrarian rich, the Congress gradually got them back into
its fold. Congress organizational positions were laid open to these
politicians sometimes unused to the subtleties of bourgeois demo­
cracy. Agricultural policy of the government showed reluctance
to either tax or impose other levies on the major beneficiaries of
the process of green revolution.
The Emergency, of course, overshadowed all other political
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questions for sometime. Although initially defended by seemingly
economic arguments, the Emergency regime soon ran out of
arguments of justification in redistributive terms. Politically, how­
ever, it showed an extreme point of centralization. It showed
literally how a personal crisis of the leader could be turned into
a political crisis of the state. It showed how through a combination
of centralization and suspension of normal constitutional proce­
dures of responsible government, actual power could shift to
extra-constitutional caucuses. In a country with such a rich and
varied culture of past tyranny, this is a particularly dangerous
trend. It also showed finally how an excessively authoritarian·
regime blocked off its own channels of communication to the
extent of believing that it could win elections after the Emergency.
Historically, however, the experience of the Emergency demon­
strated that� solution to India's political ills should not be sought
in an authoritarian alternative. Democracy had lumbered on un­
tidily for thirty years; authoritarianism took less than two years
to make the country ungovernable for itself.
Crisis 1975-1987
Though the period after the death of Nehru was one of political
instability, the character of political turmoil and the sense of
pessimism associated with it were of a different character from the
present gloom. What declined then was ·a government party and
not the institutional structure of the state. Slowly such distinctions
have become obliterated, and the general tone of thinking in India
has become perceptibly darker, moving from political disquiet to
a deeper historical pessimis1n. And this sense of apprehension
about the fragility of Indian democracy, and pessimism about the
tasks which the young state had once hopefully set itself, is natural­
ly deeply associated with the dark experience of the Emergency
years. There has been a great deal of debate about the significance
of the Emergency period: whether it was inevitably caused by a
crisis of capitalism or simply a generalization of a personal crisis
in an excessively centralized state; whether it was an aberration or
showed a more insistent long-term tendency towards author­
itarianism. Although the form in which the political crisis erupted
during the Emergency has gone into the past, I think it can be
argued that that period marked the beginning of quite a different
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kind of difficulty for the political order in India. This is a process
in which a crisis laden ruling group is drawing the party, the
governmental system, eventually the state itself, into crisis. Em­
pirically the assertion that the period since 197 5 has been one of
almost uninterrupted political disorder hardly needs demonstra­
tion. Occasionally the crisis has changed form, terrain, expression,
nodal points - in structuralist language, its site, and its bearers.
But a sense of a historical crisis - a sense of increuing vul­
nerability and exhaustion of the state in face of self-produced
disorders - has scarcely ever disappeared, in the last ten years.
The way the Emergency ended showed that authoritarianism
blocks off its own channels of political communication and re­
sponse, and makes a violent retribution highly likely. Emergency
did not improve either the state's economic performance or ad­
ministrative functioning, and appeared a gratuitous exchange of
bourgeois authoritarianism for bourgeois democracy. But it made
some earlier detractors of 'bourgeois' democracy see its limited
advantages - something that had not appeared clearly to some
radical groups in thirty years when rights were available became
clear in nineteen months when these were denied. An ironical
'gain' of the Emergency years has been a greater appreciation of
the value and vulnerability of bourgeois democracy, when no
higher form seems to be in sight.
The end of the Emergency, however, did not see an alteration
of this crisis politics. The Janata regime failed its mandate in all
possible ways. First, it wrongly translated a matter of principle into
a question of personal vendetta, which invited the nation to read
the principles and issues involved in the experience in a wholly
misleading way. Second, it entirely misjudged a negative vote
against the Emergency into a positive vote for its more conservative
policy inclinations. To put it rhetorically, its leaders first thought
this was a vote of no-confidence by the nation against the Nehru
model of policies; while, in fact, it was a vote calling for a return
from the Emergency rule of Indira Gandhi to the policies of Nehru,
a vote for the past Congress against the present one. In any case it
did not have a long enough term to clearly work out its policies on
major politico-economic questions; so that its supporters and critics
can carry on an infructuous debate maintaining that if it had been
in power for a long term this would have been, respectively, for
better or for worse for India than under the Congress regime. Its
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internal factional squabbles, its inability to set its own terms of
policy, its acceptance of the terms that an out of power Indira
Gandhi set to it, converged to bring about an ignominious depar­
ture from ineffective power into abusive exile. But its greatest
failure was in not being able to restore politics to policies and
principles of bourgeois democratic govern1nent. In faet, its attacks
on Indira Gandhi actually increased the indistinctness of persons
and institutions. The joyous enthusiasm with which the liberal
intelligentsia joined these personal debates and debased questions
of principle into a ledger of personal qualities contributed to this
denouement As a result, what could be turned into an occasion for
restating an agenda of political principles went waste.
As the Janata party failed to pose questions of principle, Indira
Gandhi's return to power in 1980 did not involve any serious critical
self-reflection on the part of the Congress. Consequently, several
tendencies opposed to bourgeois principles of democratic gover­
nance, introduced during the Emergency, came back with her
restoration to power. Equation of the fate of a nation with that of
the Nehru family, open support for hereditary succession to power,
total suspension of electoral forms within the Congress remained
entirely unchecked and uncriticized within the ruling party, due
mainly to the ineptness of the Janata party in posing a principled
challenge. These were simply the more dramatic instances of a
reintroduction of retrograde, nearly feudal, forms of irresponsible
power in the bourgeois state apparatus itself. And since the state
occupied such a large space in modem Indian society and was, in a
true sense, the educator of the educators, appointer of appointers
and patton of patrons, these deformations travelled rapidly down
the system into quick subversion of principles and formats of
equality of opportunity and merit at every level of institutional life.
It helped do away with bourgeois principles of recruitment and
advance, and replaced them with a system of patronage in the huge
network of public institutions, starting from the planning me­
chanism to the socially irrelevant universities.60 The dominant
60 Indeed,
the kind of decline the universities hnve undergone, their pitiful
collective inability to ensure the imparting ofskills which their degrees certify,
could have been tolerated by the society only because they were in a large
measure irrelevant. Had it been otherwise, there would have been strong
·counterpressures from interested groups lilce the entrepreneurial class and
the middle classes, to malce them deliver the goods.
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patronage groups in such a system changed rapidly, along with
bewilderingly quick changes of policy orientation - an abject
indecisiveness rationalized in the name of pragmatism. 'fhe 'cor­
rect' ideology in the early 1970s was a vague espousal of socialism
uninsistent on its policy realization. Those who attained eminence
from this political group were replaced during the Emergency by
politicians who favoured the 'Brazilian path' and forced sterilization
as solutions to the country's economic problems, and confused
improvement of society with beautification of its capital cities.
Subsequently, even these leaders made way for a newer group of
'modernist' politicians, believers in the powers of modern advertis­
ing and a judicious combination of religious and electronic super­
stition. What was remarkable about Indira Gandhi's leadership was
the equal tolerance she extended to such diverse 'ideological'
groups and the equal willingness to unsentiment.ally distance herself
from them when the occasion arose. Indira Gandhi's rule, not­
withstanding its rhetoric, resulted in a decline of political ideology,
a delinking of power from ideological and social programmes. This
has led to a general debasement of political ideology in the popular
mind (except obviously.i n states ruled by left parties who treat
ideology as serious business) to which the opportunism and per­
sonalism of her opposition made a distinguished contribution.
Eventually, her last years came to be dominated by two regional
movements, which, though superficially antithetic, were actually
linked to each other by internal relations of a structural sort. These
were related because they show two poles of the intensification of
regional inequality due to unrestricted and unreflexive capitalist
development. At the time of her tragic death, Indira Gandhi faced,
for the third time in her eventual political career, a threat of
encirclement by difficulties and insurmountable problems. And
even if she had fought the elections it is likely that she would have
won with a fur reduced and insecure 1najority. 1-ler career illustrated
the deeper crisis of Indian polity: that even dramatic electoral
victories were indecisive and could tum dramatically quickly into
their opposite.
Indira Gandhi's period in power, underneath the misleading
formal continuity of the Congress syste1n, revised some of the
fundamental premises of the Nehru model. These are not acciden­
tal or style differences, but of principles of structuring the political
order. The Nehru elite tried to take a historical view of the
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82 State and Politics in India
possibilities of social change, and came to the conclusion, written
into its social theory, that construction of a modern, relatively
independent capitalism required a reformist and statist bourgeois
programme. Indira Gandhi's successor regime gradually aban­
doned the element of historical thinking as a matter of dispensable
luxury and went for what it rationalized to itself as a more prag­
matic programme. It reduced even the planning apparatus, en­
trusted by Nehru with the task of serious long-term developmental
reflection, to more short-term accounting, though depending on
its statistical ability to turn the poverty of the people into the
wealth of the nation. Its pragmatism led it to abandon some of the
points of the Second Plan kind of strategy.61 Gradually the govern­
ment allowed a massive campaign to gain momentum for privatiza­
tion of industry and other economic activities, reducing public
investment, altering the nature of the investment where it still
existed. Its successor regime also started plans for extending this
policy of liberalization towards greater foreign collaboration in
order to obtain more sophisticated technology. Politicians within
the cabinet have begun to launch open attacks on the public sector
on the grounds of its inefficiency, though much of the inefficiency
is due to the interference and wasteful exploitation of its facilities
by the government bureaucracy and politicians. It abandoned the
earlier strategy of institutional changes for agricultural growth in
favour of a green revolution strategy unaccompanied by any re­
distributive controls.
Political changes were equally vital. The Congress government
under Indira Gandhi gradually allowed a profitable breakdown of
bourgeois frameworks of formal propriety since they were oc­
casionally inconvenient encumbrances in its path. In bourgeois
political systems, there must be a reliable relation between the
structure of classes and the format of parties.62 Abandonment of
ideological politics by the ruling party and cheerful retaliatory
imitation by opposition groups causes this relation to break down
through defection, bending of constitutional norms, etc. This
61 There is a fairly large and incisive literarure in Marxist economics about
this tum in the nature of government economic policies and the consequent
retrogressive trends in planning.
62 This does not mean, however, that a single class would be represented by
a single party. It simply means that for social pressures to work through the
party system, there must be some reliability of party progra1nmes.
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might destroy popular faith in democratic institutions. Besides, the
breakdown of ground rules of political behaviour tends to make the
political world unfamiliar and unrecognizable to political actors
themselves, encouraging behaviour that is blind, wild and anomic.
The Congress under Indira Gandhi, in effect, renegotiated
some of the fundamental definitions of Indian political life. Two
of these crucial principles were those of 'the national' and 'the
secular'. Some amount of regional politi<:,il articulation was un­
avoidable in the aftermath of Independence. Capitalist develop­
ment increased the economic power of two regionally conscious
groups, the rich farmers and the regional bourgeois interests. In
the face of the first wave of regional movements in the 1950s, the
Nehru government had made a relatively clear distinction between
cultural and economic questions, and had conceded the first kinds
of demands. Demands for linguistic states or the use of vernaculars
in state administration, occasionally even negative sensibilities like
opposition to the introduction of Hindi, were accepted through a
generally consultative process. Strikingly, acknowledgement of
such demands did not wealcen the process of centralization of
planning decisions about the economy. Decisions regarding devel­
opment investments were left, partly due to the political quies­
cence of these groups, to the central planning machinery. Under
Indira Gandhi, the situation changed drastically. Increasing pres­
sures were now mounted for regional allocation of heavy industries
and other such symbols of regional prestige. It is misleading to
believe the vulgar theory that opposition parties alone pressed for
economically unjustifiable regional demands. Indeed, many of
these regionalisms were first articulated within the ruling party
itself, Congress often absorbing regionalist leaders.63 Indira
Gandhi's state increasingly gave way to such internal regionalisms.
Often it would have been better to describe the Congress as the
only party which was hospitable to regionalisms of all areas with
a thin crust of the central leadership and naturally the central
bureaucracy providing a failing counterweight. Worse, occasional­
ly the regime played one regionalism against another, as it also
did with religious communities, hoping to benefit electorally from
The two clear examples of Congress hospitality to regionalism in recent
times are the handling of the Andhra agitations of a dec.ide ago, and the early
encouragement to breakaway groups from the Akalis in the hope of splitting
the Ahli vote in Punjab.
63
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84 St.ate and Politirs in India
their double insecurity. Surely, these were clever manoeuvres in
the short run but which actually, in the long run, undermined the
bases of nationalism. In fact, the region of the national capital
came to develop a pampered regionalism of its own.
Evidently, similar things happen with regard to communalism
too. Concessions given to religious communities as cq,nmunities
undermined the theory of a common individual citizenship and
created grounds for a rapid increase of majority communalism.
Telling Muslims or other minority communities that their fate
was secure only with the ruling party, implied keeping such in­
securities alive. Most seriously, the government allowed a subver­
sion of secular principles of the state by increasingly invoking the
religious principle of sarvadharmasa'11tllnvaya, entirely incompatible
with democratic secularism. The Indian state today declares itself
to be multireligious, a complete reversal of the Nehruvian prin­
ciple that there was an equality of all religions to be practised as
private affairs of individuals. Finally, the inability of the Congress
government to clearly denounce the communal riots after Indira
Gandhi' death provided a significant encouragement to the forces
of Hindu communalism.
The state curiously believes even today that the best way
of controlling religious fanaticism is to lend the government­
controlled media to religious leaders, and give the greatest
coverage on TV to routine religious practices. During the Nehru
period, Dussera, Diwali, Id, Christmas celebrated, presumably,
with customary enthusiasm, passed off unnoticed by radio, in
contrast with the present coverage by secular television. A state
armed with such suicidal weapons does not need communal par­
ties for its destabilization. Remarkably, the subversion of the
definition of secularism was not done by communal forces and
political parties, but accomplished by the state.
Lack of historical self-analysis by the state or its supporting
intelligentsia and its conversion to a doctrine of pragmatism
meant, in effect, that even normal rational procedures of reflec­
tion on effects of earlier policies have been abandoned in favour
of exclusive search for electoral power. Its correlate, pointed out
by econor,nists, is a tendency to channel resources increasingly
into 'dole' programmes rather than creation of productive resour­
ces, which have longer gestations periods and cannot be adapted
to the eventful electoral calendar,
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Politicians of the Nehru era would have been surprised if told
that forty years after Independence, the state they had set up would
be riven by conflicts over two retrograde forces - regionalism
and communalism. And the regionalism that threatens to engulf
the polity today is quite clearly a consequence of the inequities of
the capitalist growth process. Governments have been consistently
inattentive to regional economic inequality inherited from the
colonial period. Capitalist development has intensified these im­
balances even further. Nowhere is this revealed more than in the
internal incompatibility between regional demands. Regionalism
in Punjab is essentially an anti-redistributive agitation which in­
sists on retaining and extending the economic advantage of the
state, particularly of the farmers, over other states, regions and
classes. The Assam agitation presses what are, in essence, re­
distributive demands on the central government; and the two kinds
of demands are incompatible. 64 The centre also sometimes plays
up regional demands with an incredible shortsightedness. At pres­
ent, it is mildly encouraging the causes in Gorlchaland and fighting
the consequences in Punjab, a subtlety of approach truly worthy
of the present Indian elite.65
A crisis can be called structural, not conjunctural, if it arises
from inside the basic laws of movement of a system, rather than
from externalities. Several aspects of the present crisis of the
Indian state need to be noted. It is not a simple crisis of the
economy translated deterministically into a political disorder.
Some of the culrural processes of crisis have hardly anything to
do, directly at least, with the logic of economic development. No
deep economic logic made it destroy elementary definitions of
secularism. The cheerful indifference with which it has allowed
64 It is remarbble how the logic of regional demands of the 1950s and the
1970s differs. The demand for a linguistic state, once conceded in one case
strengthened the case of other, simil:irly placed areas. In case of the demand
for economic resources, the game is principally zero-sun1, with the share of
one state cutting against the share of all others.
65 Since the writing of the chapter the state has brought about a truce in the
hill areas of West Bengal, but how far aod how long it holds is to be seen.
The few years of Rajiv Gandhi's rule have been strewn with the debris of
pacts and accords. He has made more pacts than Metternich; and the fact
that internal conflicts in tl1e lndiarrstate are attended to in a style of diplonucy
says something about the processes of national integration that the Congress
has set in motion.
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.
the education system to decline is certainly not induced by eco­
nomic necessity. This has given the state a great choice of weapons
with which to deal self-inflicted wounds on its own structure.
Interestingly, these trends have appeared not because capitalism
has not been able to develop adequately but precisely because of
the manner of its growth. So with greater growth of capitalism,
these incompatibilities are likely to intensify and not ease off.
The idea that capitalism is a social form implies that to expand
or to simply carry on, its economic structures require some
political-institutional compliments. There are certain types of
political-institutiona1 forms which constitute preconditions for
purely economic reproduction of capitalist society. Indian capital­
ism is in a state of a serious political crisis. Conservative economists
would argue, though I think unconvincingly, that the Indian
economy has done reasonably well, if you ignore distributive
performance of the system; no political analyst can, however,
claim that the Indian state has done reasonably well in quite the
same sense. It is reacting defensively, adopting un'dcmocratic and
precapitalist responses on vital issues. Most alarmingly, it is in­
creasingly proving incapable of providing the most vital precon­
dition foe bourgeois development, provision of political stability.
The state's difficulties should be seen as a structural crisis.
Political crisis may break out through mismanagement of political
options by rulers, or sub-optional decisions by the ruling bloc. A,
crisis is structural if it arises out of self-related difficulties, because·
it emerges not out of the failure of the social form, but its
successes. It is not a condition of 'abnormality' which could be
expected to disappear with a change of leaders or parties. It is
coming to be a condition of stressful, violent normalcy of this
late, backward, increasingly unreformist capitalist order. It is
different even from a standard Gramscian case; because here even
a passive revolution has not succeeded, but is lapsing into failure.
Those who would see present difficulties as 'failures' of Indian
capitalism would find it difficult to explain. It is the 'successes'
of Indian capitalism that have caused them. So if it becomes more
'successful' in the ways it has pursued over the last twenty years,
these problems would not go away, but perhaps intensify. The
tragic thing is that the crisis of ruling class politics plunges not
only the ruling bloc, which has ruptured its protocol, into serious
disorder, but the whole country, the festival of which we are
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87
celebrating. Exhaustion of the politics of the ruling bloc does not
automatically prefigure a radical alternative. It is a particularly
sad chapter of a story which had begun with the promise of
something like an 'Indian revolution', an understandably unprac­
tical and sentimental beginning which promised to 'wipe every
tear from every eye•. Even ifwe consider only the socially relevant
tears, the promise is as distant today as at the romantic time when
it was made.
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II
The Institutions
O
ne set of institutions such as Parliament and the judiciary,
executive apparatuses such as the bureaucracy and the police,
and the formal structures of union-state relations and the electoral
system, have been formed directly by the Constitution. Another
set of institutions, such as political parties and the party system,
is part of the political process that mediates between state and
society. In this volwne, we have chosen to look fll'St at the party
system in order to emphasize the guiding role of the political
process in the working of the state machinery.
The chapter by Manor traces in detail the changes that came
about in the party system in the transition from the 'Congress
system' of the Nehru period to the Congress-I decade of the 1980s.
Despi_te the apparent dominance of the Congress, Manor notes
the crucial weakening in its institutional links with its bases of
social support on the one hand and the apparatuses of government
on the other. The chapter by Yadav carries on the story to the
current phase of the demise of the Congress as the centrepiece of
a national party system and the emergence of several distinct party
systems in the regions. As he notes, the situation continues to be
in a state of considerable flux and no stable patterns have yet
emerged, making it especially difficult to provide a single coherent
account of the political process.
The electoral system is described in the chapter by Butler,
Lahiri and Roy. The Indian form of single-member constituencies
with a fust-past-the-post rule makes for a very distinct kind of
electoral system that has important consequences for the party
system as well. It means, for instance, that with many parties and
in the absence of electoral alliances, a party which has the support
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of about 30 or 35 per cent of the electorate, but whose support is
more or less evenly distributed over the constituencies, could come
away with a very large majority of the scats. Qn the other band,
with electoral alliances, the opposition parties could also win large
majorities in the legislature without any significant swing in voters'
preferences. This chapter provides an introduction to the field of
election analysis, which bas attracted a lot of attention in recent
years in India.
We then move on to consider institutions that are directly
shaped by constitutional arrangements. A common source of
several controversies surrounding the interpretation of the Indian
Constitution lies in the fact that although it has been modelled
on the British parliamentary system, it is a written document and
not, as in Britain, a centuries-old collection of customs, practices
and statutes deeply embedded in the history of the country's
public institutions. In India, most of the institutions of the modem
state have their origins in the colonial period in which British
ideas of the rule of law were mixed up with the absolutist notion
of the right of conquest.
.
An important question that has reappeared in many Indian
debates over the Constitution is the conflict between using the
legal powers of the state to bring about change in social institu­
tions and practices, at the same time constraining political au­
thorities to act within the law. Through the 1950s and 1960s,
courts were widely accused of a conservative bias in defending
the rights of property holders against land refonns legislai;ion. In
the early 1970s, when Indira Gandhi's government nationalized
private banks and abolished the privy purses of former princes,
and the Supreme Court held that Parliament could not change
the basic structure and framework of the Constitution, the issue
was posed as one between 'the will of the people' as represented
in parliamentary sovereignty and the position of the court in
binding legislators to remain within the law as laid down by the
Constitution. After the experience of the E�ergency, there ap­
pears to have emerged a wider consensus that the main body of
the Constitution, and especially the fundamental rights, ought to
remain protected. On the other hand, since the 1980s, there has
been a new spell of judicial activism in which the courts have
acted 'in the public interest' to monitor the work of the executive
branches of government to see whether the law is being followed,
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and particularly to uphold the rights of vulnerable sections of
citizens. This role of the judiciary has assumed particular import­
ance in a conten where many institutions of the state are seen
as having lost their integrity and credibility. Due to constraints
of space, we have been unable to include in this section any
readings focusing directly on the Constitution or the judiciary.
However, there are some references to the relevant literature in
the bibliography.
With regard to the bureaucracy, one set of issues concerns the
relationship between a permanent bureaucracy and the changing
politic:.al leadership; the second set concerns issues raised by the
role of the bureaucracy in c:.arrying out developmental and welfare
projects; and the third set of issues concerns the internal social
composition of the bureaucracy. All these are discussed in the
chapter by Vithal.
The question of relations between the union and the states has
been much debated. The chapter by Sathyamurthy looks at these
debates on Indian federalism and the changing patterns of centre-­
st.ate relations through the entire period since Independence.
Another institution that has played a crucial role through this
period is that of economic planning, which has functioned in an
ambiguous mode as an expert technocratic activity outside the
arena of politics as well as the principal legitimation of the political
leade,-ship's claims of bringing about economic growth and social
equity. My chapter in this section discusses the way in which this
ambiguous function of planning operates as an institution of the
sute.
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2
Parties and the Party System
James Manor
P
olitical systems in which diverse parties compete freely for
mass electoral suppon are increasingly hard to fmd in the less
developed nations, even in those that experienced British rule for a long time thought to yield durable systems of liberal, repre­
sentative government. But India, after nearly four decades of
self-government and eight general elections, and despite hair­
raising traumas and persisting threats to open, competitive politics,
still qualifies. Nevertheless, in recent years, decay within parties
and increasingly destructive conflict among parties have so eroded
the strength of the open political system that its survival is in
question.
There is, consequently, an urgent need for rebuilding, both
within individual parties and in relations among them. Since his
election victory in the last week of 1984, Prime Minister Rajiv
Gandhi has begun, somewhat hesitantly, the process of rebuilding
within the formal institutions of state. He has also, at least for
the time being, restored a modicum of civility to relations between
his ruling Congres s -I party and the opposition, and this has, in
turn, led to an improvement in relations between the central
government in New Delhi and opposition-controlled govern­
ments at the state level. Rajiv Gandhi has also indicated, through
scorching criticisms, that he is well aware of the wretched con­
dition of his own party.1 But he may also have missed his oppor­
tunity to rebuild it. If that is indeed true, then he could eventually
experience the kind of vulnerability that caused him and his
I Times ofIndia, Delhi, 29 Dece1nber 1985, and Times, London, 30 December
1985.
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mother before him to seek all-out confrontation with opposition
parties. It could even lead civilian elites to abandon faith in parties
and in open, competitive politics.
This chapter seeks to delineate the changes that have occurred
within India's parties, especially the Congress party, and within
the party system since Independence, and to explain how forces
within the sphere of party competition have contributed to those
changes.
At first glance, it may seem that few dramatic changes have
actually occurred within and among India's parties. It may appear
that the victory of the Congress party in the 1984 general election
closely resembles all but one of those that have come before the aberration being 1977 - and that one need only dust off and
update the classic studies of the party system that Rajni Kothari
and W.H. Morris-Jones produced some years ago.2 To adopt that
view, however, is to overlook a number of basic changes in Indian
politics over the last two decades that have substantially altered
conditions within parties, relations among parties, and, partly
because parties have provided the main links between state and
society, state-society relations. Some of these changes were dis­
guised by the result of the 1984 election, but they remain realities
nonetheless.
To emphasize the changes that have taken place, this chapter
is divided into four s_ections that deal with the three main phases
in the evolution ·of India's parties and party systems, the periods
from 1947 to 1960, from 1967 to 1977, from 1977 to 1984, and
the year following the election in the last week of 1984. It is not
yet clear whether this last period should be seen as a fourth distinct
phase in the process, but enough has changed since the election
to justify a separate discussion.
2 Rajni Kothari, 'The Congress "System" in India', Asian Survey, December
1964, pp. 1161-73, much of which w:ts foreshadowed in his 'Fonn and
Substance in Indian Politics', &rmumic Wttkly, April-May 1961, pp. 846-63;
W}'.lldraeth H. Morris-Jones, 'Parliament and Dominant Party: The Indian
Experience', and 'Dominance and Dissent: Their Interrelations in the Indian
Party System', in Morris-Jones, Politics Mainly Indian (Madras: Orient Long­
man, 1978), pp. 196-232. Both Kothari and Morris-Jones provided helpful
suggestions during the preparation of this chapter. I am also grateful to
Stanley A. Kochanek for many useful comments on the initial draft.
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94 State and Politics in India
From 1947 to 1967
To understand India's parties and party system from Independence
in 1947 to 1967, just after Indira Gandhi fust became Prime
Minister and the year of the fourth general election, we can do no
better than to tum to the accounts that Kothari and Morris-Jones
provided. Their views are sufficiently similar, though t hey are
developed independently, to be considered together here. They
described a 'dominant party system', that is a multiparty system, in
which fre.e competition among parties occurred but in which the
Indian National Congress enjoyed a dominant position both in
terms of the number of seats that it held in Parliament in New Delhi
and the state legislative assemblies, and in terms of its immense
organizational strength outside the legislatures. It is extremely
important that we recognize that Congress was dominant in both
spheres. Indeed, it was its dominance at the organizational level that
was more important, for on that rested its legislative superiority.
The might, the reach, and the subtlety of its organization also
enabled it to dominate the actions of bureaucrats who were charged
with the implementation of policies and laws at regional and,
especially, at subregional levels.
In this first period, India had a party system characterized b y
'dominance coexisting with competition but without a trace o f
alternation',3 because opposition parties had little hope of prevent­
ing the Congress from obtaining sizeable majorities in the legis­
latures despite the ruling party's failure, on most occasions, to gain
a majority of valid votes cast. Neither, by and large, did opposition
parties share power in coalitions with Congress at the state level
So here was a 'competitive party system ... in which the compet­
ing parts play rather dissimilar roles'. The ruling Congress party
was 'a party of consensus' and the opposition parties were 'parties
of pressure'.4 That is to say, the opposition parties played a role
that was
quite distinctive.... Instead of providing an alternative to the C o n ­
gress party, they function by influencing sections within the Congress.
They oppose by making Congressmen oppose. Groups within the
ruling partyassume the role of opposition parties, often quite openly,
3 Morris-Jones, 'Domillllnce and Dissent', p. 217.
4 Kothari, 'The Congress "System"', p. 1162.
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reflecting the ideologies and interests of other P.artics. The latter
influence political decision-making at the margin.5
In other words, there was 'a most important "openness" in
the relations between Congress and the other parties ... a posi­
tive communication and interaction between them'. This meant
that the main hope that opposition leaders had of exercising politi­
cal influence was to 'address themselves ... to like-minded ...
groups in the dominant party'.6Those efforts by opposition groups
generated ideas and pressure within the ruling party's organiza­
tion, which was sophisticated enough to detect them and com­
municate them upward to the leaders who could respond to them.7
These comments begin to reveal the extraordinary dimensions
of Congress dominance in that period. It was within Congress,
and not between Congress and the opposition �arties, that the
major conflicts within Indian politics occurred. It was within
Congress that nearly all the groups that mattered in Indian politics
could be found. The party possessed a large number of skilled
operatives who were able to arrange bargains between important
social groups, to interpret the logic of politics at one level of the
system to people at higher and lower levels, and to knit together
the varied regions and subcultures of the subcontinent. The Con­
gress organization was also the main instrument that knit together
state and society, which is to say that it was India's central in­
tegrating institution.9 As a consequence, one did not find in India,
as in the West, 'a relationship between the government and the
party organization in which the latter plays an instrumental and
subsidiary role'. 1° Congress was more important than that, and
arguably more important than all of the formal institutions of state
put together.
Congress occupied not only the broad centre of the political
spectrum, but most of the left and right as well. This relegated
s Kothari, 'Fonn and Substance', p. 849.
6 Morris-Jones, 'Dominance and Dissent', p. 218.
7 Kothari, 'The Congress "System"', p. 1163, and Morris-Jones, 'Parliament', pp. 207-18.
8 Kothari, 'The Congress "System"', p. 1163.
9 I have set this argument out more fully in two articles: 'Indira and After.
The Decay of Party Organization in India', Tbt Round T"blt, October 1978,
pp. 315-24; and 'Party Decay and Political Crisis in India', Tbt W11Shington
Q,utrttr/y, Summer 1981, pp. 2 5-40.
10 Kothari, 'The Congres., "System"', p. 1162.
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96 State and Politics in India
the opposition parties not only to the margins of Congress, but
to the margins of the political and party systems as well. To make
matters worse, these parties often found themselves on opposite
sides of the Congress, which killed any hope of their making
common cause against it. 11 To save themselves from absorption
by, or the loss of defectors to, the Congress, opposition parties
tended to develop rigorous ideologies and tightly disciplined or­
ganizations.
Congress was able to maintain its position as a party occupying
most of the space in the political system because 'there [was]
plurality within the dominant party which [made] it more repre­
sentative, [provided] flexibility, and [sustained] internal competi­
tion. At the same time, it [was] prepared to absorb groups and
movements from outside the party and thus prevent other parties
from gaining strength'. 12 The task of creating and sustaining the
immensely broad Congress coalition in that first phase was, at least
in the view of Morris-Jones, facilitated by the complexities and
ambiguities of Indian society, which prevented polarization (in
class terms or any other terms) and the formation of contradictions
that might fracture such an all-embracing alliance of interests.
This insight differs from, but complements, Myron Weiner's ar­
gument that the task of building the Congress coalition was eased
by traditional values and roles of conciliation that Congressmen
astutely took up, 13 and the Rudolphs' contention that traditional
elements of the caste system assisted the development of modem,
representative politics in lndia. 14
But however much the social background may have helped,
and however important Congress's role in the winning of Inde­
pendence may have been in placing the party in a dominant
position in the first place, the survival of Congress dominance
depended on the efficient functioning of the party organization.
Of crucial importance was its effectiveness in distributing the
resources, which it acquired from its control of state power,
II Morris-Jones, 'Dominance
and Dissent', pp. 2I9-20.
12 Kothari, 'The Congress "System"', pp. 1164-5.
13 Myron Weiner, 'Traditional Role Performance and the Development of
Modern Political Parties: The Indian Case', JqurnaJ of Politics, November
1964, pp. 830--49.
14 Lloyd I. and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Tht Modtmity ofTrllllition: PoJitiaJ
Devtlop,,,mt in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press! 1967), p. 1
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among existing and potential clients in exchange for their political
support. This management of resources, at which many within
the Congress organization excelled, was· essential to the proper
functioning of the 'conciliation machinery within the Congress,
at various levels and for different tasks, which (was] almost con­
stantly in operation, mediating in factional disrutes, influencing
political decisions in the States and districts'. 1
The same skill at allotting patronage also enabled the Congress
to co-opt and absorb within itself groups whose grievances had
'been ventilated through agitations launched by the opposition
parties'. This was reinforced by the Congress's 'policy of neutraliz­
ing some of the more important sources of cleavage and dis­
affection' and by the leadership's tendency 'to preserve democratic
fonns, to respect the rule of law, to avoid undue strife', and to
show 'great sensitivity on the question of respect for minorities.' 16
From 1967 to I 977
The second phase extended from 1967 to the defeat of the
Congress party at the general election of 1977, which occurred
in the immediate aftermath of the Emergency. It is of course
possible to see the Emergen cy, which extended over nineteen
months from 26June 1975, as a separate phase in this story. But
a chapter-length study cannot do justice to a more elaborate
disaggregation. It is, nevertheless, worth noting that the Emer­
gency constituted both an intensification of certain trends from
the period between 1969 and 1975 and, at the same time, some­
thing of a hiatus between phases two and three, during which
opposition leaders were jailed, the party system and open politics
were closed down, even Congress leaders were intimidated, and
Mrs Gandhi attempted, only partly successfully, to centralize
power within the ruling party.
Some of the earliest and most perceptive comments on the party
system between 1967 and 1977 came from studies by Morris-Jones
and Kothari after the 1967 general election, which occasioned
important changes.17 One important feature of the old system that
persisted was, in Kothari's words, 'the central role of the Congress
IS Kothari, 'The Congress "System"', p.
16 Ibid., pp. 1168-70.
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98 State and Politics in India
in maintaining and restructuring political consensus'. But he also
argued that:
The soci o e-conomic and demographic profile of the polity is chang­
ing rather fast.... The mobilization of new recruits and groups into
the political process . . . has given rise to the development of new
and more differentiated identities and patterns of political cleavage.
. . . [This gave rise to] the expectation of freer political access ... and
a greater insistence on government performance. Intermediaries and
vote banlcs, while of continuing importance, have become increasingly
circumvented as citizens search for more effective participation in the
political market place and develop an ability to evaluate and make
choices. 18
As a result, 'the dominant party model has started to r,j-ve way to
a more differentiated structure of party competition.'
Morris-Jones also emphasized the emergence of 'a market
polity' in India. This was; of course, nothing very new. 'There
was plenty of competition and bargaining before 1967', but it
had taken place 'largely within the Congress, between groups and
in semi-institutionalized form.'20 In the 1967 election, however,
which saw the Congress los,e power in six states, the competition
had grown too severe to be contained by the party's internal
bargaining, so that 'dissident Con�essmen played an important
role in the weakening of the party . .. in perhaps every "lost"
State except Tamil Nadu.'21 This brought a number of opposition
parties fully into the market place, and competition that had
previously occurred within the Congress was now brought into
the realm of interparty conflict. Competition also increased in as
much as opposition parties formed coalition governments in every
state they controlled except Tamil Nadu, and 'coalition govern­
ments are themselves small markets'.22
17 Rajni Kothari, 'Continuity and Change in the Indian Party System', Arum
Survey, November 1970, pp. 93 7-48; and W.H. Morris-Jones, 'From Mono­
poly to Competition in India's Politics', in Morris-Jones, Politia Mainly
Indian, pp. 144-59.
18 Kothari, 'Continuity and Change in the Indian Party System', p. 939.
19 lbid. Morris-Jones also noted that 'the market of politics has expanded by
the participation of new groups in government', 'From Monopoly to Com­
petition in India's Politics', p. 156.
20 Morris-Jones, 'From Monopoly to Competition in India's Politics', p. 154.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
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That election also made centre-state relations an important
feature of interparty competition. Bargaining had long been an
impo rtant element of relations between New Delhi and the states,
even in Nehru's day when Congressmen held sway at both levels.
After Nehru's death, the power of state-level Congress leaders
had become both greater and more apparent. The 1967 election
created conditions in which quite serious conflict might have
arisen between centre and states, but, thanks mainly to the finesse
of Union Home Minister Y.B. Chavan, this did not occur.23
Another new phenomenon after 1967 was a 'pretty regular and
continuous "defectors market". ' 24 It is easy to forget that this was
so, for our minds tend to rush onward to the dramatic splitting of
the Congress in 1969 and Mrs Gandhi's subsequent surprises,
which gained her the political initiative and the great election
victory of 1971. But defection was an important element in the
aftermath of the 1967 election and two points should be made
about it. First, defectors flowed both ways, both into and out of
the Congress. More flowed out, however, than in, causing the fall
of Congress governments in three states.25 Second, the highly
disciplined, ideologically oriented parties of the Marxist left and
the Hindu chauvinist right remained almost entirely immune to
this new trend. ·(The Communists experienced a split over ideo­
logical issues in 1969, but that was different from defection.)
In other words, the parties to the far right and left tended to
remain 'hard' in that they retained tough shells through which
people did not pass in and out, and in that they maintained their
organizational integrity through centralization, discipline, and
ideological consistency. They also retained narrower social bases
than most of the other parties in that period and narrower bases
than the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M)) and the
Jan Sangh/Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have developed in the
post-1977 years. They nonetheless moved very cautiously along
the road to more moderate policies, a road down which, Stanley
A. Kochanek observed, other opposition parties were motoring
once the possibility of power presented itself.26
23 Ibid., p. 153.
24 Ibid., p. 155.
2S Ibid., and Kothari, 'Continuity and Change in the Indian Party System',
p. 946.
26 Stanley A. Kochanek, Tbe Ctmgress P1trty of India (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1968), p. 446.
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100 State and Politics in India
The 1967 election had created a siruation in which Congress
'dominance was strikingly diminished' because its 'performance in
the art of governance was subjected to harsh judgment by sup­ w
porters and opposition alike'.27 It was a siruation marked by 'am­ �
biguity, blurred lines, flexibility and flux', but this was not seen to 't
represent disintegration. Indeed, the actors in the system had �'
adjusted with such 'amazingly little difficulty' that 'the stability of «
the regime appears more assured than ever before'. This was true b
because the regime had, among other things, 'moved away from (
any degree of dependence on one outstanding leader'. If this raised b
questions about the need for 'clarity and firmness of decision', it 0
was reassuring in as much as decisions 'also re �uire reconciliation b
p
of very varied interests if they are to succeed'. 8
The schism in the Congress in 1969 was a major shock to the a
political system in India. Partly as a result, Mrs Gandhi's version �
of the party faced a largely united opposition in the general elec­ F
tion of 1971. B.D. Graham has compared the polarization of C
India's parties into something close to two opposing blocs in 1971 I
(and 1977) to a few key elections in the Third French Republic t•
when similar polar blocs emerged. This did not occur often in t
France, but when it did, it indicated that a 'crisis of regime' had t
developed and that the two blocs were disputing fundamental
issues about the nature of the political order. 29 Mrs Gandhi's !'
decision to split her country's central political institution produced l
such conditions in India in 1971, conditions that altered the shape r
of the party system at that election. This happened again in 1977 C
when the threat to all liberal institutions created a widely shared t
perception that a 'crisis of regime' had occurred. Such perceptions t
did not arise among most opposition leaders in l 980, as I have s
(
argued elsewhere,30 or in 1984.
I
27 Kothari, 'Continuity and Change in the Indian P,1rty System', p. 947.
28 Morris-Jones, 'From Monopoly to Competition in India's Politics',
pp. 158-9. Kothari was slighdy less optimistic than Morris-Jones on d1is
count. Ibid., p. 948.
29 I am grateful to B.D. Graham for bringing his argument to my attention
in numerous conversations. See also Graham, 'Theories of the French Party
System under the Third Republic', Politic11/St1ulits, February 1964, pp. 21-32.
JO James Manor, 'The Electoral Process Amid Awakening and Decay', in
P�ter. Lyon and James Manor (eds), TrllTISfer 11nd Trtmsformati<m: Politic11/
Instit11tions in tht Nrw Crmmwnwtalth, (Leicester: Leicester University Press,
1983), pp. 87-116.
--
- '
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(
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The lnttitutums 101
Mrs Gandhi's victory in the 1971 election made it appear, in
words Morris-Jones used soon afterwards, that 'the end of the
dominant party had been too readily proclaimed in 1967' and that
'now it is back'. This led him naturally to expect that the opposition
parties would be 'forced to operate less by confrontation than by
interaction with segments of the centre mass'.31 They were not,
however, given many opportunities for interaction by the new
Congress. Mrs Gandhi adopted a more confrontational posture,
both towards opposition parties at the .national level and towards
opposition-controlled governments in various states.32 She also
took a more aggressive line with her own party, and this soon
produced what Kochanek has rightly called 'a new political process'
as the Prime Minister created 'a pyramidical decision-making struc­
ture in party and government'. Although this
prevented threats to her personal power, it tended to centralize de­
cision making, weaken institutionalization, and create an overly per­
sonalized regime. Moreover, the new political process proved unable
to manage the tensions and cleavages of a heterogeneous party operat­
ing in a heterogeneous society, federally gPVemed. A major crisis in
the system followed. 33
The new system ·entailed, crucially, the abandonment of intra­
party democracy, a change that has never been reversed. Positions
in the Congress organizations at all levels were filled by appoint­
ment from above rather than by election from below. This change
caused people at all levels to tend to tell people above them what
they thought those people wanted to hear, so that the ograniza­
tion's once formidable powers as an information-gathering agency
soon wasted away.34 The centralization of power within the party
did not, however, mean that factionalism ceased to be a problem.
Instead, partly because centralization reduced the leaders' ability
to manage conflict, partly because Mrs Gandhi set leaders and
factions at the regional level against one another and partly be­
cause she had largely abandoned the use of bargaining, conflict
JI Morris--Jones, 'From Monopoly to Competition in India's Politics', p. 187.
12 Bhagwan D. Dua, Prtsidmtilll Rule in lndiA, 1950-1974: A Sttldy in Crisis
Politics {New Delhi: S. Chand, 1979).
33 St:.1nley A. Kochanek, 'Mrs Gandhi's Pyramid: The New Congress', in
Henry C. Hart (ed.), Indira Gandhi's India (Boulder: Westview, 1976),
pp. 104-5.
34 This is developed further in Manor, 'Party Decay'.
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102 State and Politics in India
within the organization grew more severe and dysfunctional.All
of this reduced the party's ability to cope creatively or even ade­
quately with conflicts that arose from a society facing increasing
economic hardship.35
Not surprisingly, this created openings for the opposition, and
by 1974, under Jayaprakash Narayan's leadership, an opposition
movement had acquired real substance and momentum. Mrs
Gandhi's reaction, which set the tone of relations between her
Congress and nearly all opposition parties (with the exceptions
of the Communist Party of India and, at times, one or the other
of the two main patties in Tamil Nadu) for many years to come,
was severe. As Kochanek put it:
Dissent within the Congress, party opposition and press criticism
ceased to function as thermostats measuring discontent. They were
now interpreted as anti-party, anti-national, and traitorous, or even
foreign-inspired.... Opposition party attempts to mobilize and ex­
press local pevances, valid or not, were perceived as law and order
problems.3
The opposition's response was similarly forceful and stubborn,
with fasting and agitational techniques brought to the fore. Mrs
Gandhi, who found herself under growing pressure from within
her own party (indeed, it was thence that the main threat came in
mid-I 97 5), turned increasingly to a small circle of confidants in
which her son Sanjay figured most prominently. He began to treat
the opposition to the threats, smears, and organized violence that
remained his trademark until his death in mid-1980.
There followed the Emergency, during which relations be­
tween Congress and the opposition reached their nadir. Not only
were opposition activists faced with imprisonment, but power
within Congress was further centralized. The organization of the
Congress itself, in some regions where it provided a base for
potential rivals to Mrs Gandhi, was systt:matically dismantled the most vivid example being the Maharashtra machine that had
been created by Y.B. Chavan.
But the centralizing often had the opposite effect to that which
was intended. It cut off still further Mrs Gandhi and her circle
from reliable information from states beyond the Hindi belt, so
JS Kochanek, 'Mrs Gandhi's Pyramid', pp.109-11.
361bid.,p.114.
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that, for example, the Chief Ministers of Karnataka and Andhra
Pradesh were repeatedly able to submit reports of huge numbers
of vasectomies, none of which had occurred. And instead of homo­
genizing the regions as intended, centralization made possible the
assertion of their natural heterogeneity, so that they actually di­
verged from one another.37 Mrs Gandhi's centralizing violated the
basic logic by which India had been governed under both the
Crown and Nehru's Congress. According to that logic, the in­
fluence of people at the apex of national and regional political
systems penetrates down through the systems most effectively by
means of compromise. Attempts to rule by diktat paradoxically
weaken the centralizers, as happened to Mrs Gandhi.38
From 1977 to 1984
The third phase in the evolution of India's parties and party system
extends from the defeat of Indira Gandhi's Congress in the elec­
tion of March 1977 to the election victory of the Congress led by
her son Rajiv in the last week of 1984, following her assassination.
I choose the 1984 election and not the assassination as the end of
this phase because it is only thereafter that a set of new, and quite
different, trends emerge. The years from 1977 to 1984 were,
broadly speaking, a time of abrasive conflict and bad feeling be­
tween political parties and a period marked by decay and fragmen­
tation within parties. I will deal with all of that presently, but first
it is necessary to identify several larger themes in this period of
India's politics that provide the context essential to an under­
standing of the changes within parties and the party system.
Two great themes, which had become plainly evident before
1977 and which dominated the phase thereafter, were awakening
and decay. The awakening occurred among the great mass of
India's voters, as people at all levels of society became increasingly
aware of the logic of electoral politics, of the secrecy of the ballot,
and of the notion that parties and leaders should respond to those
whom they represented. It was more advanced among prosperous
groups, but it also occurred among the poor.39 As a result, disad37}:mes Manor, 'Where Congress Survived: Five States in the Indian General
Election of 1977', Asi1111 Survty, August 1978, pp. 7 8 5 803.
38 Manor, 'Party Decay.'
39 See, for example, John 0. Field, Cunsolidating Dnnocracy: Politicization 1111d
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vantaged rural dwellers largely ceased to vote according to the
wishes of the landowning groups that continued to dominate life
in the villages. Voters became more assertive and competitive, and
their appetites for resources from politicians grew. Interest groups
crystallized and came increasingly into conflict, so that it became
harder to operate a political machine that could cater to every
organized interest, as the Congress had very nearly done in the
Nehru years. India became increasingly democratic and increas­
ingly difficult to govern.
The second great theme that marked this period was the decay
of political institutions, which is to say, a decline in the capacity
of institutions to respond rationally, creatively, or even adequately
to pressures from society."° This decay affected both the formal
institutions of state and most political parties, including, above all,
the Congress party. It was partly the result of systemic problems
of ossification within the party. But it was quite substantially the
result of the tendency of Indira Gandhi and her associates to
centralize power and to deinstitutionalize. The awakening of the
electorate and the decay of institutions combined to generate five
further changes as by-products.
The first of these was a change in the way that elections were
won and lost, or to put it more plainly, a change from the days
before 1972, when incumbent governments at the state and na­
tional levels usually won re-election, to a period in which they
usually lost.41 This follows quite logically, for the decay of ruling
parties and the formal institutions through which they govern has
meant that incumbents have been less able to respond to society
at a time when the expectations and assertiveness of the electorate
have increasingly demanded responses.
The second change was a marked decline in confidence in the
state as an agency capable of creative social action (as opposed
Ptn'tis11111bip in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1980); and D.L. Sheth (ed.),
Citizens 1111d Parties: �as of Compttitivt Politics in India (Bombay: Allied,
1975).
40 Samuel P. Huntington, 'Political Development and Political Decay, World
Politia, April 1965, pp. 386-430.
41 Jbis had clearly been the predominant trend since the state assembly
elections of 1972. The general election of 1984 is an exception to this pattern,
but it occurred under extraordinary and emotionally charged circumstances
that are unlikely to occur again.
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to an agency with the coercive power to maintain order). This
occurred within the Congress led by both Gandhis. It was demon­
strated by Indira Gandhi's abandonment of reformist rhetoric in
the election of 1980 and of serious attempts to create legislation
for the betterment of society between 1980 and 1984, and by
Rajiv Gandhi's preference for the private sector. But this decline
was also observable within many opposition parties, among many
intellectuals who were critical of Mrs Gandhi, and among large
numbers of people in local arenas all across the subcontinent.
There were exceptions - notably on the Marxist left, among
certain elements of the Hindu chauvinist right, and in some
parties at the regional level - but the predominant trend was
nonetheless clear.
Tbe third change, which was closely related to the second, was
the tendency for society and politics to diverge. As political in­
stitutions, especially parties, became less able to respond rationally
to appeals that arose from society, social groups tended to give up
on politics and politicians and to tum inwards, battening on par­
ochial sentiments and whatever internal resources they possessed.
This led to an increase i n conflict between social groups as the
social-political divergence and the decay of political institutions
reduced the state's capacity to manage and defuse conflict.42
A fourth change entailed the blurring of the relatively clear
lines that had existed between many political parties and their
social bases, both at the national level and in many Indian St3tes.
This was a destabilizing, and potentially destructive, trend, par­
ticularly as the awakening ofthe electorate made it more important
than ever that parties develop solid, clearly perceived links to social
bases of manageable size.43
The last of the five changes was a growing divergence between
the logic of politics at the national level and the political logic
in various state-level arenas. The most obvious sign of this was
the emergence in the early 1980s of regional parties in several
St3tes. But even within the Congress party, during the Emergency,
See Times (London), 18 May 1984. I have developed this further in NtJI)
S«iny, 12 August 1982.
43James Manor, 'Blurring the Lines between Parties and Social Bases: Gundu
Rao and the Emergence of a Janata Government in �matab', in John R.
Wood (ed.), StilU Politia in C(llltmrportny lndi11: Crisis or Cuntinuity? (Boulder:
Westv:iew, 1984), pp. 139-Q.
·42
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state-level units often went their own way.44 This, like the ap­
pearance of regional opposition parties, was an unintended result
of the excessive centralization of power by Mrs Gandhi.
With these themes in mind, let us now consider the third phase
in the evolution of India's parties and party system. This period,
from 1977 to December 1984, was marked by freer competition
between political parties but also by· greater instability in the party
system and within many parties. It was a time characterized b y
abundant alternation between parties in power at the state and
national levels, by continued decay and fragmentation within par­
ties, by a tendency towards personalized control of parties or
splinters by eminent and not-so-eminent politicians, and by great
fluidity within the party system as factions llnd rumps and in­
dividuals defected or realigned themselves this way and that.
The defeat of the Congress led by Mrs Gandhi in 1977 and the
election of the Janata party - which was actually a motley coali­
tion of parties - brought immense changes to the party system.
Defeat caused the Congress to disintegrate. Some Congress ac­
tivists left Mrs Gandhi because th ey had secretly disapproved of
the Emergency, others because they had had enough of her son
Sanjay's bizarre and often vicious egotism. Some believed that they
could revive the 'real' Congress in the absence of its former, and
supposedly discredited, leader, whereas others saw little reason to
stay now that Congress had lost access to the political patronage
that had been its life blood.
Even before her defeat, Mrs Gandhi had imposed something
very close to personal and dynastic rule on the political system
and the party. Defeat only intensified this tendency within the
Congress, or her version of it. At a 'time when so many were
deserting her, her already extravagant distrust of other politicians
intensified and personal loyalty became an even more precious
commodity. The reconstitution of her version of the Congress
party in January 1978 under the label of the 'Indian National
Congress-Indira', or the 'Congress-I', was emblematic of this
increased personalization. As the badly divided Janata party in­
creasingly demonstrated its incapacity to govern satisfactorily and
Mrs Gandhi's prospects improved, waves of deserters redefected
44 Manor, 'Where Congress Survived'. I have also dealt with this in 'Where
the Gandhi Writ Doesn't Run', The &onomist, 15 May 1982, pp. 55-6.
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to her camp. Each wave tended to operate as a new faction in
an already factionalized Congress-I, and the inability of Indira
and Sanjay Gandhi to apply standards consistently to these retur­
nees actually catalysed further division and strife. Latecomers
were sometimes humiliated or sometimes inexplicably promoted
over the heads of old loyalists. In this atmosphere, every group
thought it had a chance and so remained a contentious force.
This process continued even after Mrs Gandhi's return to power
inJanuary 1980 and Sanjay's death six months later.
TheJanata government that held power between March 1977
andJuly 1979 was a hastily assembled coalition of quite different
opposition groups united mainly by their opposition to
Mrs Gandhi and the Emergency. Victory at the polls meant that
those objectives had been realized, and the natural divisions
among them then began to emerge. The Janata party contained
elements of the old Congress-0, the mainly conservative but
secularist remainder of the out-faction after the 1969 Congress
split. Alongside it stood the Jan Sangh, a party of the Hindu
chauvinist right, whose main support came from high caste,
middle class people in urban areas, particularly in the Hindi­
speaking states of north and central India. Third was the
Bharatiya Lok Dal (BLD), mainly representing prosperous small
peasant proprietors in the Hindi belt. It sought to reallocate
resources away from the urban, industrial sector towards agricul­
ture. Fourth was the Socialist Party, whose base included some
of the rural poor of north India and sizeable hut scattered pockets
of support among urban labour unions. Finally, there was the
Congress for Democracy, a group led out of Mrs Gandhi's
Congress after the Emergency byJagjivan Ram, one of her most
formidable ministers and the leading Scheduled Caste politician.
Its support was greatest among poor, low caste rural dwellers.
Given the heterogeneous composition of the Janata party and
the fierce ambitions of its three leading figures - Morarji Desai,
Jagjivan Ram, and BLD leader Charan Singh - it is no surprise
that the government was unable to achieve much cohesion. One
result was a loosening of ties between the national and state
levels within both the party and the political system. 'fhe factions
that tended to dominate the Janata party in the national Parlia­
ment were antagonistic to those that held sway in severalJanata­
controlled states. This antagonism set the national and state
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governments at loggerheads on some important questions, a
trend that was reinforced by friction between the Janata regime
in New Delhi and opposition-controlled governments in several
other states. This made it impossible to reverse the tendency of
the Indian federation to become an increasingly loose union. It
was not that secession threatened national unity. That problem
has always been greatly exaggerated by observers who have failed
to see that insufficient solidarity exists at the state level to fuel
separatism. But the threat of secession prepared the ground for
further deterioration of centre-state relations when Mrs Gandhi,
returning to over-centralization after 1980, generated regional
movements in reaction and then dealt even more aggressively
- and unconstitutionally - with those movements when they
had taken power in several states.
When the Janata government disintegrated in mid-1979, many
of the elements that had formed it also splintered. This paralleled
the disintegration that had occurred on the Congress side after
the I 977 election, and the result was a confusing array of frag­
mentary parties, many of which were. little more than personal
cliques presided over by individual politicians. In this conteit,
· Mrs Gandhi's Congress-I appeared to be the only coherent
national party - even though its own organization was in
considerable disarray- and this image enabled it to take advant­
age of the strong popular reaction against the Janata government
and win the I980 election. The diff'iculties of the anti-Congress-I
parties in making common cause persisted from the early 1980s
through the election preparations during the third quarter of
1984. The assassination of Mrs Gandhi on 31 October 1984
seemed to ensure an emotion-based victory for her son and
party, making oppo:;ition unity still more difficult to achieve.
This victory has led many observers to write off the opposition
over the middle and even the long term, but such a judgment is
premature, as the evidence from 1967 to 1984 shows. It should
fll'St be recalled that Mrs Gandhi appeared to be in a similarly
unassailable position in 1972, and that mismanagement led her
into severe political trouble within only three years. If such errors
should recur, the Indian electorate, which is even more aware
and assertive today than in the early 1970s, is unlikely to be any
more patient than on that occasion. Every state in India, like the
nation as a whole, has now had at least one spell of non-Congress
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government. Opposition rule is no longer unthinlcable anywhere.
Misgovemance will generate a credible opposition.
Second, some opposition parties possessed greater promise and
substance (real or, in some cases, potential substance) than the
1980 and 1984 election results implied. These parties retained
either the support of important groups or ideological resources
and respectable organizations or both. Stanley Kochanek has use­
fully identified four broad tendmcies in Indian politics that unite
particular elements in society around certain sets of ideas.45 These
are a communist tendency, a socialist tendency, a non-confessional
rightist tendency, and a confessional rightist tendency. All of these
have at times been represented by non-Congress political parties.
The Congress has at times allied itself with and borrowed a limited
number of ideas from the communist tendency. It has also at times
moved into the territory on the political spectrum normally in­
habited by the other three tendencies and in so doing has drawn
support away from opposition parties there. In recent years, the
socialist tendency can be said to have been somewhat in eclipse,
both within Congress and in the opposition. The main party of
the non-confessional right, the Swat:antra, has long since passed
away, but the Congress under Indira Gandhi, and especially under
her son Rajiv, has begun to give assertive expression to views
associated with that tendency. We shall see presently how the
parties of the confessional right and the communist left have fared
in recent years and how the Congress-I has moved into the ter­
ritory traditionally occupied by the former.
Let us first note, however, that one other possible tendency is
also unlikely to pass from the scene: that represented by the
peasant proprietary group in the Hindi-speaking areas and cham­
pioned by Charan Singh under various labels (Lok Dal, Bharatiya
Lok Dal, Dalit Mazdoor Kisan party). Charan Singh himself is
aged and infirm and unlikely to play an important role again. But
this force has sufficient cohesion to figure in future anti-Congress­
! alliances unless Rajiv Gandhi's new economic policies develop
in ways that attract it to his party.
We should pay particular attention to the CPl(M), and the
BJP, which is a successor to the old Hindu chauvinist Jan Sangh.
These were the two most potent 'hard' parties of the late 1960s,
'
45 I am grateful to Stanley A. Kochanek for suggesting this approach to me.
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and they are the only two opposition parties that are patently
able to rejuvenate themselves by recruiting large numbers of
young idealists. They have also managed to broaden their bases.
This last comment may sound strange in the aftermath of the
1984 election, in which the CPl(M) lost ground in West Bengal
and suffered embarrassments in Kerala, and in which the BJP
was reduced to a parliamentary delegation of two. But it should
be noted that the CPl(M) still came first in a solid majority of
assembly segments in West Bengal, and it did so because it has
managed, since coming to power there in 1977, to cultivate a
solid base among the rural majority, a success managed partly
because it has organizational efficiency in West Bengal that is
said to surpass even that of the party in Kerala.46 If the decay of
other parties and some sort of socio-economic crisis should make
it possible for the CPI(M) to extend the West Bengal model
to other states - an eventuality that seems highly unlikely at
present - we may look back on this acquisition of a rural base
as a crucial change. The CPl(M) has also managed this broaden­
ing without ceasing to be a 'hard' party, without losing or gaining
people through defections, and without suffering too much
erosion of discipline or ideology. It is nonetheless more flexible
and pragmatic than it used to be, as is exemplified by electoral
pacts in states where it is a minor party.
The BJP presents a different picture. It remains a corporate
entity of real institutional sinew and has not suffered from the
drift toward personal rule that has done so much damage to many
other opposition parties and, of course, to the Congress-I. And
although it lost a large number of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha
(RSS) activists to the Congress-I during the 1984 election, it is
generally agreed by observers in India that it retained a majority
of these and that many who decamped to the ruling party are
likely to return, especially after Rajiv Gandhi's moves away from
Hindu chauvinism in 1985. To put that statement into perspec­
tive, it helps to recall that the RSS has no fewer than 700,000
swayamsevaks, or full-time activists, in the fteld.4 7 The figure
dwarfs that of any other party, including the Congress-I, which
has surprisingly few people spending most of their time working
J.
46 I base this on conversations with Thomas Nossiter.
47 I am grateful to B.D. Graham for confirming reports
India on this matter.
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for the organization. In addition, in many states, Congress per­
sonnel are startlingly ineffective. In Kamataka, for example, the
Congress president had to go outside the party to find an efficient
organizing general secretary. 48 A large minority of the RSS
swayamsevaks are adolescents, but many of them are capable of
important political work.49
The BJP has not, however, remained the kind of 'hard' party
that it once was and that the CPl(M) largely remains. It is far
less penetrable than the other non-Communist parties, but it has
become less parochial and uncompromising in its tactics and
ideology, and hence more porous than it used to be. It has both
lost and accepted a surprising number of defectors in the last five
years, and it was possible to identify a number of people during
the 1984 election campaign who had one foot in the BJP and
another in other non-Congress and non-Communist parties, so
that the boundaries between it and some other parties became
slightly blurred.so
Let us now tum to an astonishing development of the early
1980s, the adoption by Indira Gandhi of themes that have tradi­
tionally belonged to the Hindu chauvinist right. To many who
are familiar with Congress in Nehru's time or in Mrs Gandhi's
earlier years as Prime Minister, it may be difficult to believe that
this happened. Yet it appears that at some point during 1982,
Congress-I leaders recognized that a confrontational posture to­
wards the overwhelmingly Muslim National Conference party in
Kashmir and the Sikh extremists in Punjab (whom Mrs Gandhi's
confidants, Sanjay Gandhi and Zail Singh, had initially encouraged
in order to divide the opposition Akalis) might gain them the
support of many Hindus in the Kashmir and Delhi elections.
When numerous activists of the RSS deserted the increasingly
48 Interview with a high official of the Kamatalca Congress-I, 8 January 1985,
in Bangalore.
49 Jnterview with B.D. Graham, London, 8 February 1985.
so Widespread RSS suppon for the Congress-I became apparent from numer­
ous interviews with BJP and Congress-I activists in several Indian states
during December 1984 and January 1985. See also Times ofIndia (Delhi), 23
December 1984; the repon from Ambala in the Hindust1m Timts (Delhi), 14
December 1984, and the discussion of the open letter by veteran RSS leader
Nanaji Deshmukh offering suppon to the Prime Minister in the Jndum
I',zp,w, Bombay, 26January 1985.
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liberal BJP to support Congress-I candidates in those elections,
the tactic seemed to have worked surprisingly well.
It began to seem an even more attractive option after the defeat
of the Congress-I in the southern states ofKamatak.a and Andhra
Pradesh in January 1983. That defeat led Congress-I leaders to
suspect that the south iµight not support them at the nen par­
liamentary election, and that they would therefore need to look
to northern and central India for most of their Lok Sabha seats.
Because their party organization was in such disarray that it could
not cultivate much of a following through patronage - the main
mode of operation during the 1960s - an evocative theme like
Hindu chauvinism, which could be conveyed to voters through
talk of threats to national unity from anti-national minorities,
began to seem all the more useful.
It is impossible to regard this rightward shift as an accident, as
something that happened with Congress-I leaders realizing too
late that it was occurring and merely acquiescing. Too much of
what took place required wilful action by Mrs Gandhi and then
her son Rajiv. Indeed, as early as August 1982, after ��entators
like Pran Chopra had warned against the dangers of courting the
Hindu majority in north India by generating communal anxieties,
I asked a general secretary of the AICC-1 if that really could be
the Prime Minister's intention. He responded, not bydenying that
this was her aim, but by seeking to justify it as a creative strategy. 51
It remained the strategy of Congress-I leaders right through
the election of 1984. Although it may seem difficult to believe that
Hindu chauvinism and .anti-Sikh sentiments were important ele­
ments in the Congress-I election campaign, such was, in fact, the
case. For example at a November rally in Delhi, Rajiv Gandhi
refused to prevent the city's Sikh mayor (a member of his own
party) from being shouted down and then went on to use the word
'bad/a', revenge, in a speech that followed. He also refused to
criticize the Hindu extremist organization, the RSS, which at every
previous el�tion had supported the Jan Sangh/BJP, but which
swung heavily, and in some cases openly, behind the Congress-I
on this �casion. The Prime Minister further refused to disavow
RSS support, thereby conforming to the precedent set by his
mother in mid-1983 in Kerala where the Congress-I received RSS
SI Interview with Satyanarayana Rao, Deihl, 18 August 1982.
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backinf2 - and one of his leading party spokesmen even declined
to admit that it was a communal organization.53Sikh opinion was outraged and many Congress-I leaders were
privately alarmed when two sitting MPs in Delhi who were said
by an independent investigation to have been involved in the
anti-Sikh riots of November were kept on the Congress-I ticket
and when a third activist, also allegedly involved, was given a
ticket that had been denied to a Sikh incumbent. The anti-Sikh
theme cropped up in numerous subtle and not-so-subtle remarks
in speeches by Congress-I leaders, in posters that appeared in
some localities showing Mrs Gandhi being gunned down by
turbaned assassins, and in one of the party's full-page advertise­
ments that appeared nationwide in most English and indigenous
language newspapers. The advertisement began with the question
'Will the country's border finally be moved to your doorstop?'
and, after mentioning 'Assam, Punjab ... ', described the anti112tional forces:
They put a knife through the country and carve
out a niche for their cynical, disgruntled
ambition disguised as public aspiration.
They raise a flag and give this niche the name
of a nation.
They sow hatred and grow barbed wire fences,
watered with human blood.
But it's you who step out and bump into the fences
and bleed while they cash your vote to buy
their ticket to power.
In case the anti-Sikh implications of much of this were not
sufficiently clear, the text asked 'Why should you feel uncom­
fortable riding in a taxi driven by a taxi driver from another
state?'54 Because a great many taxis in north India are driven by
Sikhs, the message was clear.
It is essential that we understand the logic by which this strategy
was reached, because it has major implications for the party system.
First of all, both the Congress-I general secretary who tried to
justify Hindu chauvinism to me in 1982 and, I believe, Mrs Gandhi
52 See, for example, Dtwm Htrllld, 12 August 1983.
53 Sec the sources cited in note SO.
54 Sec, for example, Tbe Suttmum, Delhi, 1S December 1984.
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saw the move to the communalist right as an exercise similar to
her move toward the Marxist left in and after 1969. It was a means
of undermining the parties that stood to the right of the Con­
gress-I - mainly the BJP, but also to a degree the Lok Dal, which
had elements within it susceptible to Hindu chauvinist appeals. It
was clearly from the right that the main threat to the Congress-I
was anticipated.55
The move to the right was also probably based on a curious
belief by Mrs Gandhi that only she (and her son) stood between
India and serious communal strife. So, still more curiously, she
apparently believed that, by catalysing communalist sentiments,
by becoming the main mouthpiece for Hindu communalism, she
was protecting India from the dangers of it. She appears to have
rationalized this dangerous quest for short-term political ad­
vantage by concluding that communalism was safe only in her
hands and that by taking it up, she could disarm it as she had
leftist sentiment after 1969. I heard echoes of this view in Decem­
ber 1984 from several Muslim intellectuals who were clearly
frightened by the anti-Sikh, Hindu chauvinist content of Rajiv
Gandhi's election campaign and who were seeking desperately
for a benign explanation.
Congress-I leaders also adopted what Rajni Kothari has cor­
rectly termed 'the rhetoric of all-out confrontation', in which the
opposition parties were repeatedly attacked as anti-national for­
ces. We should recognize that this intolerant view of the opposi­
tion is in a sense a logical outgrowth of the history of the
Congress. During the struggle for Independence, Congress
sought and claimed to speak for all Indians, to be, as its name
implied, an Indian national coming together. After 1947, this
theme survived as Congress attempted to be, what B.D. Graham
has called, 'a rally of the people as a whole'.56 It is thus not
altogether surprising that some Congressmen tend to see the
party and the nation as identical, or that they tend to see opposi­
tion forces as anti-national.
It was, however, far from inevitable that Congress leaders
should adopt this narrow, intolerant view. Jawaharlal Nehru gen­
erally did not, although he sometimes slipped into this idiom when
ss Pranab Mukherjee's comments in Tmus, London, 29 December 1983.
S6 B.D. Graham, 'Congress as a Rally', South AsiJm Rroiw, January 1973,
pp. 111-24.
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discussing communalist parties, but Indira Gandhi often did, and
so, in the 1984 election campaign, did her son. He claimed, for
example, that the opposition parties were 'receiving assistance
from certain foreign powers, which were interested in making
India weak' and that conferences of opposition leaders 'had sown
the seeds of poison' that endangered national unity. He alleged
that the Janata party, the Bharatiya Janata party, and the Dalit
Mazdoor Kisan party had links with Sikh extremists living in
Britain.57 He offered no evidence to support these charges, and
none of them appears to have any substance. Mr Gandhi also
described the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, N.T. Rama Rao,
as a 'secessionist', a charge he has subsequently admitted to be
false.58 On a visit to Janata-ruled Kamataka, he implied that the
Janata party had assisted those who had murdered Mrs Gandhi.
This was untrue, as were his assertions that the Janata party 'was
working hard to divide the country, and 'shielding extremists',59
and that two prominent members of that party were collaborators
with Pakistan.60
Why did Congress-I leaders adopt this confrontational ap­
proach? Two different reasons come to mind. First, although it
caused a change in relations within the party system, confronta­
tion was also a symptom of changes that had already occurred.
By the early I980s both the Congress-I and most opposition
parties had become so porous that a substantial leakage of per­
sonnel out of any of them became a very real possibility. And
the more that Congress-I and most opposition parties suffered
organizational decay, ideological laxity, and the imposition of
personal control by those at the apex, the more they rese1nbled
each other. Potential defectors from one to the next therefore
felt that they had less distance to travel. By confronting and
reviling the opposition parties, Congress-I leaders sought to im­
pede defections to the opposition by erecting barriers between
their party and the other parties, and by putting distance between
the Congress-I and the others. In this respect, there is a curious
similarity between the confrontational election campaign and the
57 Hindustan Times, Delhi, 13 December 1984 and Indian F.xprtss, Delhi, 26
December 1984.
sa Tbe Hindu, Madras, 7 December 1984.
59 Hindustl,n Times, Delhi, 18 December 1984.
60 Tbe Stllt.el""'111, Delhi, 18 December 1984.
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post-election and anti-defection law. Both are designed to erect
the kind of walls around the ruling party that its organization
had had the strength to generate in the J960s, but which had
wasted away when the organization decayed after 1969.
The second reason for the choice of this confrontational ap­
proach is that, give.n the nature of Congress-I rule between J 980
and 1984 and the assumptions that had underpinned it, the
Gandhis had few other options. I have already noted that by the
time Mrs Gandhi assumed power in 1980, she had lost confidence
in the state as an agency for creative action in society. As a result,
next to no serious attempts were made by the authorities during
her last premiership to develop carefully designed social program­
mes. There were, therefore, few new legislative achievements
between 1980 and 1984 to which Congress-I leaders could point.
Indeed, their election speeches and the party manifesto made
virtually no reference to government programmes after 1980. It
seemed at times as if some other party had been in power during
that period. The only major reference in the manifesto to positive
developments after 1980 was to advances on the economic front,
where credit tended to go to ll)arket forces and not to the
govemment.61
The government had sought, in the period after 1980, to direct
popular attention to a number of major 'spectaculars' in order to
justify the existence of a state in which the Prime Minister had
lost confidence. Much was made of the Asian Games, the Com­
monwealth Heads of Government Conference, Antarctic explora­
tions, and the like. But Congress-I leaders rightly sensed that these
were not election winners. They also rightly believed that Mrs
Gandhi would have great difficulty obtaining a majority in. the
election,62 and, given the absence of any major legislative achieve­
ments and the presence of a highly unreliable party organization,
they were driven to present Mrs Gandhi as a figure of stability
amid increasing instability and to continue to court the votes of
the Hindu majority across north India by making appeals based
on Hindu chauvinism and the notion that India's unity was in
jeopardy. If a party adopts that set of themes, it is impelled by the
logic of chauvinism and its 'India-in-danger' message to raise
61 lndum N11ti<1fllll Crm grtss (I) Ekt:tirm Mtmifttto, 1984, New Delhi, 1984.
62 This is based on interviews with a large nwnber of Congress-I officials in
December 1984.
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alarms and to excoriate the opposition as dangerous, anti-national
destabilizers.
A brief comment is needed here on the manner in which Rajiv
Gandhi and his party won the election of 1984. At least five factors
appear to have had a significant impact, although, as I have argued
elsewhere, we will probably never be able to say with certainty
what their relative importance was.63 First, there was, of course,
a sympathy factor after the murder of Mrs Gandhi, but its impact
has probably been overestimated. It was a 'factor' rather than a
'wave'. Another obvious element was the abject failure of most
opposition parties, especially the so-called national parties, to
provide a credible alternative to the Congress-I. Yet both of these
seem to have been less important than three other things. First,
Rajiv Gandhi's youth, his freshness, and his apparent lack of a
political past helped him to represent himself both as a figure of
stability and continuity, on the one hand, and as a figure of renewal
and ch:µige, on the other. As R�ni Kothari wrote long ago, this
was an unbeatable combination. A second crucial factor was the
widespread (and, I believe, erroneous) perception that national
unity was in danger. This fear was crystallized in many people's
minds by the trauma of the assassination and was relentlessly
exploited by the Congress-I. Finally, there was a related Hindu
backlash that was encouraged by the Prime Minister and his party.
To point to these factors as decisive is to identify this election as
distinct from most of the national and state-level elections since
1972. Those earlier elections tended to be decided on concrete
issues and, particularly, on the quality of the incumbent gov­
ernment's performance. The 1984 election was decided at the level
of anxieties, images, evocations, and symbols. The result bespoke
an aggrieved and fearful assertiveness together with a desperate
need for hope and some prospect of renewal in government.
In order to see how things had changed by the end of this phase,
let us recall some of the specific observations that Morris-Jones
and Kothari made about the party system. In late 1984, India still
had a multiparty system that permitted free competition, a system
in which one party, bearing the name of Congress, occupied a
dominant position in the New Delhi Parliament and in many state
63 James Manor, 'The Indian General Election of 1984', Ekctural Swdiu,
August 198S, pp. 149-S2.
64 Rajni Kothari, 'Government by Mandate', Sm,irulr, January 1972, p. 23.
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118 State and Politics in India
assemblies. However, the Congress-I no longer possessed a party
organization strong enough to place it in a dominant position
outside of the legislatures.
The 1984 election landslide was achieved in spite of serious
organizational weaknesses. The Congress-I organization was in­
substantial, highly corrupt in many regions, wracked by factions
that engaged in severe conflicts, unrepresentative of the broad
array of social groups for whom it claimed to speak, and very
inefficient at delivering goods and services to them and at arrang­
ing bargains between them. It was very short of idealists, intellec­
tuals, and, most essentially, honest, skilled managers. Those it
possessed were often excluded from positions of influence. The
party was, therefore, in no fit condition to administer governments
at the state and national levels in a rational, reliable, effective
manner. It was also distinctly short of policies in many spheres
(although the new Prime Minister has begun to change that), and
where such policies existed, it lacked the personnel at the district
and subdistrict levels to ensure that bureaucrats actually imple­
mented them.
Neither was it true any longer that this was a dominant party
system 'without a trace of alternation'. Most elections at the state
and national levels since 197 2 have led to alternations (indeed,
every Indian state has now had a spell of non-Congress govern­
ment), as an awakening electorate has made re-election increas­
ingly difficult to achieve. And it is hard to see how the 1984 Lok
.Sabha result, which was substantially the product of the extra o r ­
dinary circumstances in which it occurred, can be expected to
change that basic tendency in the system.
Opposition parties in the post-1980 period did not have much
influence over sections of the Congress-I in the legislatures the
latter dominated. There was little 'positive communication and
interaction between them'. This was partly explained by the in­
creasingly confrontational approach that various parties, most not­
ably the Congress-I, adopted toward rival organizations and by
the expectation within many opposition parties that they might
one day defeat the Congress-I. But it is more adequately explained
by the decay that had occurred within many political parties, again,
most notably, within the Congress-I. The Congress no longer
contained an organization rational enough to enable rightist or
leftist factions within it to produce results by applying pressure on
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The Institutions 119
party leaders or within the councils of the party. Information
seldom flowed freely from one level of the organization up to the
next, because the abandonment of intra-party democracy had
caused party operatives to tell those at higher levels only what they
thought the latter wanted to hear. And even when pressure or
information did flow up through the hierarchy, it seldom elicited
an adequate or logical response from an organization crippled by
harsh factional fighting and, in many areas, galloping normless­
ness. So opposition groups saw little point in seeking to strike up
good relations with like-minded Congressmen.
The decay within the Congress-I also made it impossible for
the party to conduct itself with enough efficiency to manage
within itself, as it once had, most of the major conflicts in Indian
public life, to interpret the logic of politics at one level to the
levels above and below, or to play the central role in integrating
India's many and varied regions, subcultures, and social groups.
Indeed, many social groups received such inadequate or even
harmful responses from Congress-I politicians, or were so dis­
mayed by the normless or criminal behavior of Congressmen in
many regions, that they have turned away from the Congress
party and, because many opposition parties have also suffered
decay, from politics in general.
In these circumstances, Congress-I leaders after 1982 or so
sometimes adopted the opposite of their former policy of arrang­
ing accommodations between social groups, subcultures and re­
gions, and actually sought to set them against one another. This
enabled the ruling party to absorb within itself discontented
groups who saw it as the only party capable of providing stability
amid chaos - which the Congress-I had itself wilfully helped to
generate. But these actions and reactions may ultimately cause
more problems than either the Congress or the political system
can cope with and may, in the long term, present opportunities
for rival parties on the extremes of the party system.
There still may have been in this phase considerable validity
i n Morris-Jones's suggestion, made in the late 1960s, that com­
plexities and ambiguities in Indian society prevent the political
system from having to face the kind of serious conflict that
societies more prone to polarization and contradiction might
generate. I t has always been difficult to measure this, for it entails
the enumeration of dogs that do not bark. But there is no doubt
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
120 Stllte and Politics in India
that a great many more contradictions existed in Indian society
in the early 1980s than in the 1960s, contradictions between
interest groups (caste, class, communal, regional, and issue­
speciftc), most of which had not crystallized in the 1960s. Some
of them had not fully formed even in 1984, but they had acquired
enough substance and collective self-consciousness amid the gen­
eral political awakening to produce conflict that could no longer
be defused by bargaining and co-optation.65 This would have
been true even if the ruling party had possessed the means to
perform those tasks well, which it did not
This is not to say that India was on the brink of a social crisis
or breakdown. As I have argued at length elsewhere, Indian society
is particularly well equipped, in both structure and habits of mind,
to insulate itself from damage that might result from decay and
anomic forces originating in the political sphere.66 But it still needs
to be recognized that in the 1980s this society threw up conflicts
and problems that made it well-nigh impossible to maintain the
sort of broad coalition that gave Congress its dominant position
in the party system in the 1960s (and which may have given the
Congress-I its huge victory in the 1984 election).
During this third phase, between 1977 and 1984, the Congress
was a good deal less assiduous than it had been in the period
described by Kothari and Morris-Jones in its efforts 'to preserve
democratic forms, to respect the rule of law, and to avoid undue
strife'. Neither did it sho)' 'great sensitivity on the question of
respect for minoriries'.67 Because these were traits that assisted it
in defusing and even in reaping benefits from opposition-led agita­
tions, it is possible that recent changes may, over time, reduce its
capacity
. . for accommodation and thereby create opportunities for
oppos1aon groups.
In their later reassessments of the party system, Kothari and
Morris-Jones emphasized two major, interconnected points. The
first was the continuing ability of Congress, even after the 1967
election, to play the central role in maintaining and restructuring
65 See, for
example, R.I. Duncan, 'Levels, the Communication of Program­
mes, and Sectional Strategies in Indian Politics', D. Phil. thesis, University
of Sussex, 1977.
66 James Manor, 'Anomie i n Indian Politics: Origins and Potential Wider
Impact', Ecimamic and Political Weekly, 18 May 1983, pp. 725-34.
67 Kothari, "The Congress "System"', pp. 1168-70.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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political consensus in India. The second was the continuing growth
of a 'market' polity, that is to say a polity basedon bargaining. Most
of the important bargaining in that period still occurred within the
Congress, among factions, among representatives of social groups,
and between people at different levels and in different regions. But
bargaining also occurred between the Congress and the opposition
parties.
Much of this sounds unfamiliar in the light of events over the
last decade or so. It is certainly possible to say that the 1984
election victory ofRajiv Gandhi represented both the maintenance
and the restructuring of political consensus. But we need to ask
whether his party is capable of continuing to sustain and renew
that consensus week in and week out throughout the government's
term in office. This seems unlikely, mainly because by 1984 it was
incapable of arranging and maintaining political bargains that are
essential to that task.
One feature, though not the central one, of the 'market' polity
to which Morris-Jones called attention was an increase in defec­
tions. This raises a difficult issue that has never been fully ex­
amined: to what extent can defections be seen as contributions to
the maintenance and restructuring of consensus in Indian politics?
I submit that a defection can be seen as such a contribution,
provided it is primarily the result of discontent among a legislator's
supporters over unacceptable treatment by the party to which he
or she originally belonged, and provided the switch to another
party was.mainly intended to obtain better treatment. Such defec­
tions represent rational responses from social or subregional
groups to parties' misdeeds or omissions, and they serve to remind
parties of the need to maintain consensus.
Many defections in the period that Morris-Jones described
were not of that nature, however. Many, indeed, appear to have
been undertaken by individual legislators to enhance their position
in terms of power, money, or both.68 Defections of this kind are
clearly part of the 'market' polity, for bargains of a sort are being
made. But such privateering is likely to impede the maintenance
and restructuring of consensus, for such defectors are responding
to a logic other than that which governs the maintenance of
consensus. The defections that became such a prominent feature
68 It is not
always easy to identify the motives of defectors. See for example,
Kochanek, Th� Crmgrus PllnJ, pp. 293 and 447.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
122 State and Politics in India
of Indian politics in the 1980s tended overwhelmingly to be re­
sponses to large cash payments by the Congress-I, which, as the
ruling party could alone command such vast financial resources.
In fairness, however, it should be emphasized that more than a
few defectors and near-defectors were turning to the Congress-I
out of frustration with unresponsive leaders. This was especially
true in Andhra Pradesh before August 1984, where N.T. Rama
Rao was excessively autocratic.69
It should be apparent to anyone who glanced at newspaper
reports from India between 1982 and 1984 that very serious
centre-state conflict had developed in cases where opposition
parties were in power at the state level. In the post- l 967 period,
Y.B. Chavan was able to maintain relatively civil relations with
opposition-led state governments because the Congress did not
adopt a confrontational posture towards the opposition and be­
cause it was entirely possible that Congress might join opposition
parties in coalitions at the state level:This happened several tunes
during the period. It is not the sort of thing that happened in
the 1980s, however, except in Kerala, where extraordinary cir­
cumstances applied. The Congress-I was pugnacious towards the
opposition, because the personality of its leaders (or at least its
former leader) inclined in that direction and because it needed
to be stand-offish once so little separated the decayed Congress-I
from decayed opposition parties.
1984 Onwards
The final phase in the evolution of India's parties and party system
is the period since the eighth general election in the last week of
1984. Our conclusions in this section must be tenuous for, at this
writing, the phase is only twelve months old.
In the year since his election victory, which he achieved by
reviling and confronting the opposition parties, Rajiv Gandhi has
been more accommodating in his dealings with the opposition
than his mother ever was. I-le has also been more conciliatory
toward regional movements and parties, some of which he had
sought to topple from power at the state level through bribery70
69This is based on a large number of interviews with legislators and journalists
in Hyderabad, 11 and 12 January 1985.
70 See, for example, /ndi1111 Expren-, Bombay, 1 January 1984.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Institutions 123
and manoeuvres of dubious constitutionality. This has earned
him appreciative comments from the opposition Chief Ministers
of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Moreover, his agreements
with leaders of regional movements in Punjab and Assam, and
the subsequent elections in those states are among the greatest
achievements of his first year in office.
Some doubts still linger, however, about his commitment to
accommodation. His abrupt change from an assertive to a con­
ciliatory stance in Assam lost him a great deal of support among
those who had been attracted by the former approach. The same
thing may also have occurred in Punjab during 1985. Because his
turnabout entails a departure from the Hindu chauvinism of recent
years and because this will disappoint many voters in other states,
he may eventually find the cost of conciliation too great. It is also
possible that he will feel able to pursue accommodation only so
long as he feels politically secure, that if he begins to feel vul­
nerable he may revert to the confrontational stance of 1984. But
for the present, the predominant trend is towards a reconstruction
of the tolerably good relations with the opposition that charac­
terized the p r eIndira
Gandhi years.
Rajiv Gandhi's main preoccupation during his first year in
office has been a reordering within the formal institutions of
state. He has concentrated on changing personnel within both
the bureaucracy and ministerial ranks of the central government,
though not, to any significant degree, at the state level. He has
sought to persuade officials at intermediate levels to take the
initiative more often in order to break the log jams that had
immobilized much of the central government in his mother's day.
He has also rid the Prime Minister's secretariat of the unqualified
personnel who held posts thanks to their fierce loyalty to Indira
Gandhi, and h e has decentralized power somewhat by curtailing
the power of the secretariat.71 All this may suggest a reordering
of affairs within the Congress party. The Prime Minister appeared
to indicate that intention in late 1985 when he shifted key aides
from his secretariat to leading party posts, but very little was said
or done about the party until the last week of 1985.
Then in Bombay on 28 December, the hundredth anniversary
of the Indian National Congress, the Prime Minister delivered
71 James Manor, 'India: Rebuilding amid Awakening and Decay',
History, March 1986.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
124 State and Politics in India
the most scorching critique of the party ever uttered by one of its
leaders.He spoke of 'cliques ...enmeshing the living body of the
Congress in their net of avarice'. He complained of Congress
operatives' 'self-aggrandisement, their corrupt ways, their linkages
with vested interests ... and their sanctimonious posturings ... ',
and he added that 'corruption is not only tolerated ... but even
regarded as a hallmark of leadership'.72
This attack on the Congress party, which was quite accurate,
is likely to produce one of two outcomes. Given the wretched state
of the party, Rajiv Gandhi may take drastic action to cleanse
Congress, or he may conclude that there is so little hope of
restoring a modicum of rationality and probity to the party that
no serious effort will be made.If he takes the latter route, he will,
in effect, be gambling that he can get along without a party
organization. He will be depending on the performance of the
formal institutions of state, manned by his ministers and bureau­
crats, on his personal appeal, and on innovations such as the
liberalization of the economy and the introduction of microtech­
nology to win him the support of the electorate. In a political
system in which parties, particularly the Congress party, have been
the main instruments for integrating and governing the nation,
for detecting and responding to discontentment and pressures
from interest groups, for managing social conflict and for cultivat­
ing electoral support through the distribution of resources, in such
a system, to do without a papy organization is to ask for trouble.
Even a powerful executive presidency on Gaullist lines - which
is an option under consideration - is unlikely to perform ade­
quately the roles formerly played by party organization.
Nevertheless, the evidence from Rajiv Gandhi's first fifteen
months in power suggests that he may eventually be compelled to
do without a strong Congress organization and even to seek a
radical reduction in the importance of parties in the political
system. The Prime Minister appears already to have dallied too
long to revive the Congress-I. During the first few months after
the murder of his mother, he had and spumed a clear opportunity
to make radical changes in the party. That opportunity appears
now to have passed and is unlikely to arise again.
72 Times ofIru!ia, Bombay, 29 December J 985 and Times, London, 30 Decem­
ber 1985.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3
India Decides:
Elections 1952-1995
David Butler, Ashok Lahiri and Pranno:, Ro:,
Voters and Constituencies
I
ndia has had a system of universal adult suffrage ever since
becoming a republic in 1950.1 Everyone over 21 has been
entitled to vote2 in any election to the Lok Sabha or to the state
legislative assemblies, the Vidhan Sabhas. 3 With the passing of the
62nd amendment to the Constitution in 1988, the voting age was
lowered to 18.
The whole country is divided into 4061 Vidhan Sabha con­
stituencies which are grouped together to form the 543 Lok Sabha
constituencies.4 Normally, seven assembly constituencies are
I Though India became independent on 15 August 1947, the Republic was
only proclaimed and the Indian Constitution came into force on 26January
1950. The first elections were held twO years later.
2 According to the Constitution, 'every person who is a citizen of India and
who i s riot less than twenty-one years of age on such date as may be fixed in
that behalf by or under any law ... and is not otherwise disqualified ... on
the ground ofnon-residence, unsoundness of mind, crime, or illegal practice,
shall be entitled to be registered as a voter.'
J The Indian Parliament consists of two Houses: the Council of states or the
Rajya Sabha, and the House of the People or the Lok Sabha. All the members
of the Rajya Sabha, except twelve nominated by the President of India, are
elected by the elected members of the Vidhan Sabhas.
4 The size of the Lok Sabha has varied over the years, as follows: 1952-489;
1957-494; 1962-494; 1967-520; 1971-518; 1977-542; 1980--542;
1984-542; 1989-543; 1991-543; 1995-543. Changes in the number of
seats have occurred mainly as a result of fresh delimitation reports. Between
1984 and 1989, the number of Lok Sabha seats was raised from 542 to 543
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
126 State and Politics in India
arranged to form one Lok Sabha constiruency, but this can vary
from one state to another. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, there
are five assembly constiruencies to each Lok Sabha constituency,
i.e. 85 MPs and 425 Ml.As. A person who is 'ordinarily resident'
and registered to vote in a Vidhan Sabha constiruency is also
eligible to vote in the corresponding Lok Sabha constiruency.
However, not every eligible person actually votes. Some are
absent from the constiruency in which they are ordinarily resident,
or are preoccupied with work, or are unwell. Some stay away
merely because of bad weather or apathy. The average voter
rurnout in Indian elections has been 56.6 per cent, varying from
the low of 45. 7 per cent in 1952 to the record rurnout of64.l per
cent in 1984.5
The upward trend in voter rurnout indicates a greater invol­
vement of the electorate as more and more voters become aware
of the electoral system and understand the power of their ballot
(India's first four elections had an average rurnout of 52 per cent,
while in the most recent four elections the turnout has averaged
60 per cent). The turnout among men voters has consistently
been higher than among women but the participation rate has
improved faster among women than among men. Female turnout
increased 20 percentage points from 38.8 per cent in 1957 to
57.3 per cent in 1989. But strangely the last election in 1991
because one extra seat was allotted to Daman and Diu once Goa became a
state with two seats on 30 May 1987. For simplicity throughout this chapter
we speak o f the Lok Sabha in terms only of its popularly elected members.
But Article 371 of the Constitution authorizes the President to nominate up
to two members to ensure the representation ofthe Anglo-Indian community.
Thus, although we record the 1991 House as having 543 elected members,
it in fact contained 545 MPs including two nominated members.
S Turnout is computed as the total votes polled (valid plus invalid) as a
percentage of the electorate i n contested scats (the electorate i n uncontested
scats is omitted). All turnout figures must have a margin oferror. The electoral
register can never be fully up to date and every register has its mistakes both in duplicate names and in omissions. The accuncy of Indian electoral
registers is reasonably high, but must vary considerably between different
regions and localities. It should also be remembered that a small proportion
of people who actually go to the polls fail to record a valid vote, usually by
inadvertence but occasionally deliberately. The new system of voter identity
cards may cause problems in defining turnout and electorate size. Once the
system is introduced, the electorate will need to be defined as those persons
over 18 who have an identity card.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Tile Institutions 127
65%
60
Average
_55. _56.6%
- - -50
45
40
1952 '57 '62 '67 '71 '77 '80 '84
'91
Figure 3.1 Voter Turnout, A llIndia
-
70%
MEN'
--
60-
-
Men's
Average
§3
...
a.�-
+-�1---+--+- +----t
- ----t�-t---
50- - -
Women's
Average
�MEN
51.4%
30
1957 '62 '67
'71 '77
'80 '84
'89
'91
Figun 3.2 Voter Turno11t, Men and Women
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
TABLE 3.1 Turnout. in Lok Sabha Elections
(percentage)
0
'""
c-
0
a0
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z
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z
State
ALL INDIA
Andhra Pradesh
Arunachal Pradesh
Assam•
Bihar
Goa
Gujarat
Haryan a
HimachaJ Pradesh
Jammu & Kashmirb
Karnataka
Kcrala
Madhya Pradesh
Maharashtra
Manipur
Meghal
c
aya
Mizoram
Nagaland
Orissa
Punjabd
Rajasthan
Sikkim
Tamil Nadu
1952
45.7
44.7
-
47.7
40.5
25.3
-
51.9
71.0
45.0
52.4
51.1
-
1957
47.7
43.9
-
46.6
42.9
37.6
-
52.8
66.6
38.0
55.7
52.7
-
1962
55.4
64.7
-
52.8
47.0
58.0
35.6
-
59.3
70.6
44.8
60.4
65.3
-
1967
61.3
68.7
-
59.3
51.5
68.4
63.8
72.6
51.2
55.2
63.0
75.6
53.5
64.8
67.2
-
Election Year
1971
55.3
59.1
-
50.7
49.0
55.9
55.5
64.4
41.2
58.1
57.4
64.5
48.0
59.9
48.9
-
35.4
55.3
38.4
36.1
55.0
40.6
23.6
65.4
52.4
43.7
71.1
58.3
53.8
43.2
59.9
54.0
S<i,1
12,1
68,8
26,6
21.8
-
-
-
-
-
1977
60.5
62.5
56.3
54.9
60.8
62.8
59.2
73.3
59.2
57.9
63.2
79.2
54.9
60.3
60.1
49.9
49.9
52.8
44.3
70.1
56.9
-
62.1
1980
57.0
56.9
68.6
53.4
51.9
69.5
1984
64.1
69.0
75.5
79.7
58.8
55.4
71.8
57.9
58.7
58.7
61.5
64.8
57.7
62.2
51.9
56.8
81.7
51.2
56.1
63.9
46.3
62.7
54.7
44.7
{i{i,8
66.8
66.4
65.7
·77.1
57.5
61.7
85.7
54.5
-
66.5
56.3
67.6
57.0
57.6
23,0
1989
62.0
70.4
59.2
-
60.2
58.2
54.6
64.4
63.9
31.6
67.5
79.3
55.2
59.9
71.8
51.9
58.3
74.7
59.3
62.7
56.5
72.0
66,9
1991
56.7
61.4
51.3
75.3
60.4
42.4
44.0
65.8
57.4
-
54.8
73.3
44.4
48.8
69.7
53.6
58.6
77.1
53.8
-
47.2
71.6
63,9
Average
56.6
60.1
62.2
52.0
52.3
61.3
56.0
67.4
49.2
54.7
59.3
71.9
49.3
58.1
65.4
52.2
44.6
64.8
44.2
63.3
51.6
61.5
66.0
Continued
128
Tahk J.l (conlj
State
0
,§
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er
""
0
a0
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Tripura
Uttar Pradesh
West Bengal
Union Territories
A & Nlslands
Chandfr h
Dadra Nagar
Haveli
Daman & Diu
Delhi
Lakshadweep
Pondichemr
•
Nous:
C
z
<
m
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:;!�"
..,, -
0�
6
�3
n
:c
Gl
z
)>
1952
1957
1962
57.9
-
57.8
-
68.8
-
47.7
38.4
40.5
64.7
47.8
48.6
68.0
51.0
55.8
FJection Year
Average
1967
1971
1977
1980
1984
1989
1991
67.3.
49.2
76.7
69.5
50.0
63.9
78.5
65.4
78.3
70.5
62.9
69.8
71.0
67.4
68.5
84.5
63.9
72.8
78.8
68.9
74.6
71.7
65.7
72.9
64.3
57.8
66.5
74.2
64.6
71.9
64.5
87.0
54.5
54.3
85.0
67.0
48.5
80.4
60.8
63.3
85.2
74.8
54.5
66.0
69.5
-
74.9
60.8
46.0
61.9
75.8
-
70,1
70.1
56.4
60.2
-
71.3
84.6
73.6
80.0
50.0
70.7
-
64.9
88.8
80.4
77.3
55.8
78.6
-
72,3
83.9
51.3
79.7
66.7
67,7
72,2
No elections were held in Assam in 1989.
No elections were held inJammu & Kashmir in 1991.
C
The seat was uncontested in 1984.
d Elections were held in February 1992, seven months after the 10th General Elections.
Andhra Pradesh refers to Hyderabad in 1952.
Karnataka refers to Mysore from 1952 to 1962.
Kerala refers to Travancore-Cochin in 1952.
Maharashtra refers to Bombay from 1952 to 1957.
Tamil Nadu refers to Madras from 1952 to 1962.
Goa refers to Goa, Daman & Diu from 1967 to 1984.
b
129
130 State and Politics in India
recorded a drop i n women's participation to only 51.4 per cent.
The male turnout only rose 5 percentage points from 5 5.8 per
cent in 1957 to 61.6 per cent in 1991. In other words, the gender
gap in turnout (measured by the number of percentage points by
which male turnout is higher than female turnout) has almost
halved: from male turnout being 17 per cent higher in 1957 to
10.2 per cent in 1991.
Voter turnout in urban areas has always been higher than in rural
areas - by around 6 to 8 per cent. The statewise turnout figures
(fable 3.1) broadly indicate that turnout tends to be higher in the
southern states and in West Bengal (particularly during the period
when West Bengal had non-Congress governments). Kerala, the
state with the highest literacy rate, has traditionally had by far the
highest turnout in the country: even in 1952, 71 per cent voted. But
West Bengal's growth in participation, as the state became increas­
ingly politically volatile, has been the most dramatic: the turnout
in 1991 was 76. 7 per cent, the highest in any state, almost twice the
1952 figure of 40.5 per cent.
More detailed information about voters -their age distribution,
their literacy level, their division by caste, religion and occupation
is available from · the Census. Census data are unfortunately not
published on a constituency basis but only by districts, which makes
it difficult to carry out any detailed socio-economic analyses of
election results.
Who is the Indian voter? How do the various demographic
groupings divide among the parties? It is only with the extensive
use of polls that these questions can be answered. There are no
satisfactory data on who voted how in most of India's elections,
but the very large-scale surveys of 1991 give a profile of the Indian
voter for that year. India Today commissioned MARG and Prannoy
Roy to conduct an exit poll in which 90,005 people were ques­
tioned on how they had voted. Each voter's caste, sex and religion
were recorded. Exit polls tend to be more accurate and the enor­
mous sample sizes make these data a very useful source for analys­
ing election results. The summary results of the 1991 exit poll in
Table 3.2 provide perhaps the most reliable indicator of the dif­
ferences in voting behaviour among various groups in India. Their
answers give a clearer indication of the sections of the population
from which each party was drawing its support.
One reservation should be made about the electorate, especially
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Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
··I
TABLE 3.2 Exit Poll Results 1991
Congress
0
.§:
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N
"n
ii
C")
0
-
�
�
:x,
� 0
:::! o§:"
0�
..,,
"'
:;::
_30
-
n
::c
Q
)>
z
Total
Refused/
DK
36.1
36.5
32.6
20.9
I 3.7
14.8
4.6
3.4
7.5
8.7
5.5
I 5. 7
100
100
(5.1)
up to 21
21-30
31-40
41-50
51+
30.3
34.3
37.0
38.0
41.0
39.2
34.5
30.6
30.3
29.8
13.5
13.2
14.0
15.2
12.4
5.0
4.5
4. 9
4.6
4.2
7.0
7.7
7.8
7
�-.5
5.0
5.7
5.7
5.2
5.0
100
100
100
100
100
(2.5)
(3.6)
(5.4)
(6.8)
(9.6)
Men
Women
35.5
37.5
33.3
31.1
14.7
11.7
4.3
5.2
7.I
8.3
5.1
6.1
100
100
(4.7)
(6.5)
Brahmin
30.4
35.0
28.4
43.5
29.9
53.4
45.4
27.4
59.2
41.1
49.6
23.5
34.9
19.4
3.4
30.0
4.5
8.5
11.5
12.4
17.0
8.5
28.0
6.2
2.3
5.7
1.8
2.4
7.3
0.2
2.5
13.8
6.1
13.7
13.9
0.4
1.0
2.7
1.4
11.7
4.9
4.7
3.8
22.2
100
100
100
100
100
100
100
100
(5.0)
(5.8)
(5.8)
(4.7)
(5.2)
(8.7)
(3.8)
(7.8)_
35.8
36.3
41.2
29.8
12.6
14.0
2.3
5.4
4.6
8.4
3.5
6.1
100
100
(7.0)
.. _(4.8)
AGE
SEX
Kshatriya
z
<
m
Others
OVERALL
Exit Poll
Actual
CASTE
C
JJ'JPI ]ll1Ultll DaV ]111111ta Dal CPI/
Shiv Sma
TDP
CPI(M)_
@.
Vais'r
SCIS
OBC
Other Hindu
Muslim
Other Religion
LOCATION
Rural
Urban
- - - - -- .
5.5
7.0
7.2
6.5
131
132 State and Politics in India
J& K
PUNJAB
CHANDIGARH
ARUNACHAL
PRADESH
RAJASTHAN
;:;,
UTl'AR
,.
/'"' ") PRADESH -�·. ----..__,
.......··· ..·,.
.....
·• ', ·. .. .....,.....,.... ,.... ,·.. BIHAR
: ,.... ., -._,
.)
r--.., GUJARAT,/ . MADHYA PRADES� ·--�
.: .:.!....--·.-..
..�.'...�·-··--.. . ...•....·-········. ..
,·
..
,,_...,..,..,. . ....-.........
':
DAMAN &DIU
DADRAlt
NAGAR HAVEL!
:�
<-..:·
!
...
: ...
,..MAHARASHTRA
• ··� :
�--
•· ......,;---· ·
GOA ··j
A&N
LA
Nore:
ISLANDS
f'igurt 3.3 Avera ge Turrw,a in Lak Sabha EltctitmS
No elections were held in Assam in 1989,J & Kin I 991 and in Pw1jab
elections were held in February 1992.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Institutions 133
in a study that covers a period of more than forty years. lne
differences in electoral outcomes between one election and the
next in a single constituency, or in the country as a whole, are not
solely due to voters changing their party allegiance. The electorate
is not a fixed group of persons - it is a continually changing body
as electors die and new electors come of age and as electors move
from one region to another or even immigrate. The annual turn­
over through death and coming of age will never be less than 2
per cent. The turnover through migration varies widely but may
often be higher than that. In the five years between two successive
elections the turnover among those who compose the electorate
in a particular constituency may easily exceed 20 per cent
However, these factors do not usually produce much instability
in voting patterns. In the absence of other information, the best
way to predict how a constituency will vote is to see how it voted
last time. For most people voting is a habit and party loyalties
endure. Moreover, children tend to inherit their parents' and
grandparents' politics, so that mortality and coming of age makes
less difference than might be supposed. Immigrants too, often
move to an area because their new neighbours are similar people
and they quickly adopt their political habits. The area itself usually
stays relatively constant, exposed to much the same problems,
the same mass media and the same leaders in election after
election. Therefore, although it should be remembered that the
electorate is a changing entity, there is no need to worry seriously
that the turnover of voters will invalidate comparisons between
the results of successive elections.
The Election Commission is an independent body, established
under the constitution. The Election Commissioner has a five­
year term and cannot be dismissed except through impeachment;
his powers over the timing and conduct of any election are very
great6 Despite political attacks and adverse court judgements, the
independence and the neutrality of the Commission has been
6 The Election
1952
1958
1967
1972
1973
1977
Commissioners:
SulrumarSen
1982
K.V.K.Swidaram
1985
S.P.SenVerma
1990
1995
NagendraSingh
T.Swaminathan
S.L.Sha.kdhar
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R.K. Trivedi
R.VS
. . PeriShastri
T.N. SQSban
T.N. Seshan
M.S.Gill
G.VG
. . Krishnamurthy
Orlgmal frcm
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
134 State and Politics in India
generally recognized. On 1 October 1993 the President signed
two notifications prepared by the government which radically
altered the structure at the top of the Election Commission.
Instead of one Chief Election Comtnissioner, the Election Com­
mission would be a multi-member body with three Election Com­
missioners and the two new Election Commissioners would have
equal status as the Chief Election Commissioner. The Chief Elec­
tion Commissioner and other Election Commissioners (Condition
of Service) Amendment Ordinance 1993 was later converted into
an Act of Parliament known as the Election Commission (Condi­
tions of Service of Election Commissioners and Transaction of
Business) Act 1994. The Act severely reduces the power of the
Chief Election Commissioner by stating that all decisions must
be by majority vote among the three Commissioners.
This chapter is mainly about the computation of votes and not
about the forces surrounding their casting. Indian elections are
complex affairs and sometimes there is corruption, intimidation
and violence. Booth-capturing has long been known in Bihar and
in recent contests it has been reported from many parts of north­
ern India. For this and other improprieties, the Election Commis­
sion has made increasing use of its powers to order a repoll at
particular booths or over whole districts or constituencies. In 1991
repolls were ordered in several constituencies because of booth­
capturing, violence or other ele<!toral malpractices. The Commis­
sion has also begun to stagger voting over a longer period to time
with different parts of a state voting on different dates. This allows
all the security forces to concentrate on one area and then move
to the next area - rather than spread the forces thinly across the
entire state. In the most recent assembly elections in Bihar in
March 1995, voting took three weeks and was done in hve phases.
The Election Commission, however, is not in a position to
check every abuse. The existence of electoral fraud provides one
more argument against the pursuit of extreme mathematical pre­
cision in the analysis of votes.
The periodic alteration of constituency boundaries also pro­
vides many difficulties for electoral analysts. Fundamental to any
modern electoral system is the principle of equality of suffrage a vote should have as much value in one constituency as in any
other. Every elected member should represent an equal number
-of voters. But the actual division of the country into constituencies
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Imtitutions 135
is influenced both by administrative convenience and by the desire
of legislators to establish a close connection with their own elec­
torates. The conflict between the twin objectives of equality of
suffrage and administrative convenience inevitably leads to ine­
quality in constituency size. But the main reason why constituency
boundaries need periodic revision is because the population grows
a t widely differing rates in differing localities. The Constitution
(Article 82) prescribes that a fresh drawing of boundaries should
take place after each Census. The first delimitation of constituen­
cies in 1952 (which was carried out directly under the President)
came in for sharp criticism and the Election Commission
proposed, successfully, that an independent Delimitation Com­
mission should be formed to make recommendations which Par­
liament would then approve.
· Lok Sabha seats, on the whole, have been allotted to the states
in proportion to their population (see Table 3.3). Table 3.4 ranks
states according to their average constituency size. The states with
the largest constituencies are the most under-represented in the
Lok Sabha. However, among the major states the deviation from
average is less than 12 per cent. For example Rajasthan is the most
under-represented: each MP has an electorate 11.7 per cent larger
than the all-India avera ge. The Delimitation Commission con­
ducted a minor revision of boundaries in 1956, and comprehensive
revisions in 1966 and 1976. The 1991 elections, however, were
fought in 543 constituencies with boundaries that had been un­
changed since 1977, though one seat was added (the number was
542 until 1989) when Goa got an extra seat on becoming a state.
The constituencies which were drawn up in 1976 by the Delimita­
tion Commission have been used for five elections. By contrast
only two of the first five elections (1967 and 1971) were fought
on the same boundaries (though the only difference between 1957
and 1962 was due to the division of double-member seats into two
constituencies each).
In 1976, the Constitution was amended to postpone the ne;1tt
delimitation until after the year 2001. This was in response to
fears expressed by the states that if they were successful in im­
plementing population control under the national family planning
schemes, they might lose some of their representation in the Lok
Sabha. Therefore, the 1977, 1980, 1984, 1989 and 1991 elections
were fought on the same boundaries and it is likely that the current
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
136 State and Politics in India
TABLE 3.3 Size and Representation of
States in the Lok Sabha
�
:.l
�
�
s:
l
2
3
4
s
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
IS
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
.,
27
28
29
30
ii
;�
79,454,881
50,453,647
48,632,193
41,392,460
West Bengal
42,617,973
Andhra Pradesh
37,708,721
Madhya Pradesh
39,917,777
Tamil Nadu
28,839,296
lumataka
24,882,508
Gujarat
26,513,502
Rajasthan
19,804,564
Orissa
19,657,976
Kerala
11,873,952
Assam
97,258,97
Haryana
60,731,56
Delhi
Himachal Pradesh
30,761,82
15,610,85
Tripura
201,704
Sikkim
12,321,49
Manipur
Goa
754,319
519,315
Arunachal Pradesh
942,513
Meghalaya
57,892
Daman & Diu
31,665
Lakshadweep
593,305
Pondicherry
Dadra & Nagar
75,009
Haveli
Nagaland
814,836
Mizoram
414,412
372,792
Chandigarh
A& N Islands
169.120
Unar Pradesh
Bihar
Maharashtra
't-
3i �
�� !
�
..
J:��
15.9
10.l
9.8
8.3
8.6
7.6
8.0
5.8
5.0
5.3
4.0
3.9
2.4
2.0
1.2
0.6
0.3
neg
0.2
0.2
0.1
0.2
neg
neg
0.1
neg
0.2
0.1
0.1
neg
't- �
.. �...,.
�
�
-E
v., -'(
.,. ...E -
���
ij�
�C;j
85
54
48
42
42
c..;t � ...;:
"
40
39
28
26
25
21
20
14
10
7
4
2
2
2
2
2
2
1
I
I
I
I
I
1
1
"" �
16.2
10.3
9.1
8.0
8.0
7.6
7.4
5.3
5.0
4.8
4.0
3.8
2.7
1.9
1.3
0.8
0.4
0.4
0.4
0.4
0.4
0.4
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.2
Nott: Jamrnu & Kashmir, 6 scats and Punjab, 13 scats, arc not included a s
elections were not held there in 1991.
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Origlr.al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Institutions 137
TABLE 3.4 Average Electorate Size Per Constituency in 1991
l� ll :::Sa� J
�
!:?
:.i
�
�
1 Rajasthan
2 Kamaaka
3 Tamil Nadu
4 Andhn Pradesh
5 Maharashtra
6 West Bengal
7 Kerala
8 Haryana
9 Gujarat
10 Orissa
1 1 Madhya Pndesh
J2 Uttar Pndesh
13 Bihar
14 Delhi
15 Assam
16 Nagaland
17 Tripura
18 Himac;:hal Pndesh
19 Manipur
20 Pondicherry
21 Meghal aya
22 Mizoram
23 Goa
24 Chandigarh
25 Arunachal Pndesh
26 A & Nislands
27 Sikkim
28 Dadn & Nagar
Haveli
29 Daman & Diu
30 Lakshadweep
All India
Nou:
t.
�� f
I
�
.. � i!
:.i
� !:?
t.
t
26,513,502
28,839,296
39,917,777
42,617,973
48,631,193
41,392,460
19,657,976.
9,725,897
24,882,508
19,804,564
37,708,721
79,454,881
50,453,647
6,073,156
11,873,952
814,836
1,561,085
3,076,182
1,232,149
593,305
942,513
414,412
754,319
372,792
519,315
169,120
201,704
25
28
39
42
48
42
20
10
26
21
40
85
54
7
14
1
2
4
2
1
2
1
1
I
2
1
1
1,060,540
1,029,975
1,023,533
1,014,714
1,013,150
985,553
982,899
972,590
957,020
943,074
942,718
934,763
934,327
867,594
848,139
814,836
780,543
769,046
616,075
593,305
471,257
414,412
377,160
372,792
259,658
169,120
201,704
75,009
57,892
31,665
1
1
1
75,009
57,892
31,665
498.363.801
525
94£264
flti �..
�
0
·1 �
oJa
11.72
8.50
7.82
6.89
6.73
3.82
3.54
2.46
0.82
-0.65
-0.69
-1.53
-1.57
-8.60
-10.65
-14.16
-17.77
-18.99
-35.10
-37.50
-50.36
-56.34
--00.27
-60.73
-72.65
-82.18
-89.38
-92.10
-93.90
-96.66
Jammu & Kashmir, 6 seats and Punjab, 13 seats arc not included as
no elections were held there in 1991.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
138 Statt and Politics in India
TABLE 3.5 Major Changes in the Constituency
Map Between Successive General Elections
�� ·af
;s ·�
�i
3<3
't;, s
-�
�ti3
�
� 't;,
401
1952
� ...,,
ti
t...,,
�
c:.::
� ...,,
ti
t...,,
..
c:.::
...t! "'
..
��u
ti�
� I,.. �
t
..
c,, ..e,N
ti� i
72
26
1957
403•
76
31
1962
494b
76
31
1967
520
77
37
1971
518c
76
37
1977
542
78
38
1980
1984
198\?
542d
542
543•
79
78
78
40
41
41
1991
543
78
41
Notes:
3
b
C
d
e
't;,
..
� bO
� la:
�J
c,,u
Delimitation under
President
First Delimitation
Commission
Two-member
Constituencies
Abolition Act (1961)
Second Delimitation
Commission (1963)
Punjab Reorganization Act (1966)
Third Delimitation
Commission (1973)
Goa, Daman and Diu
Reorganization Act
The one triple-member constituency that existed in 1952 was
abolished and the number of double-member constituencies was
increased to ninety-one
The ninety-one double-member constituencies were divided.
The representation of Himachal Pradesh was cut from six scats to
four on becoming a state.
In 1980, elections were not held in 13 constituencies (I2 in Assam
and I in Meghalaya) where there were no c:2ndidates. So there were
never more than 529 me1nbers in the 1980-4 Lok Sabha.
On 30 May 1989, Goa became � state ,vith two Lok Sabha seats
while Daman and Diu remained a union territory with one Lok
Sabha seat Prior to that Goa, Daman and Diu were one union
territory with two Lok Sabha seats.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The lnstitutiMIS I39
constituency boundaries will not b e changed this century. In 1987,
the Chief Election Commissioner did urge the Government of
India to authori:ze an immediate redrawing of constituency boun­
daries within states, without changing the statewise allocation of
seats in the Houses. In 1990 a bill to give effect to this was brought
before Parliament but the V.P. Singh government fell before it
could be enacted. Another bill was placed before a Lok Sabha
committee in 1993 but the prospect of action seems remote.
In addition to changes brought about by the four Delimitation
Commissions, the constituency map of the country has changed
several times a s a result of modifications of the Delimitation Order
which Parliament has approved on other occasions (fable 3.5).
Such changes were introduced, for example, after the Bombay
Reorganization Act, 1960, .which bifurcated Bombay into Maha­
rashtra and Gujarat. Another important alteration was brought
about by the Two-Member Constituencies Abolition Act in 1961.
Multiple-member seats had led to the creation of extraordinarily
large constituencies, high electioneering costs and the absence of
70
63.9
60
oi 50
i::
�
.5 40
'°
-:I"'30
..c:
u
.,
a,
C:
••
�
27.5
20
10
1.2 1.7
2.3
2.5
1.0
BELOW250 500 750 1,000 1250 1,500
250
Average 95o
1500
CONSTITUENCY SIZE
1INTHOUSAND>
Figure 3.4 UntfWI Siu efCon.rtitutncits in 1991
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Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
140 State and Politics in India
�r
TABLE 3.6 Variations in Electorate Size
:.:;
�
..'.3 d
�
lf
l "fl
c,,d
�
�
r: t
1952 4,19,186
68,130
Bilaspur
SM Bhilwara
3,50,437
1952 8,04,512
DM S urguja-Rajgarh Mandi-Mahasu
1,63,252
1957 5,05,891
OuterManipur
SM Guntur
3,20,908
1957 9,26,313
DM S itapur
Mahasu
1962 7,64,016
1,60,883
Bombay
Mahasu
City North
14,505
1967 6,44,638
Bombay
L,M&A
North.East
Islands
14,977
1971 8,58,936
Bomba�
L,M&A
North- ast
Islands
19,471
1977 8,60,316
Madras Central Lakshadweep
1980 9,16,054
20,117
Bombai
Lakshadweep
Nonh- ast
1984 10,82,419
Bomba �
North- ast
1989 15,74,973
Outer Delhi
1991 17,44,592
Thane
21,964
Lakshadweep
�:s.
�
;:,
•
�
�
1 :§
s Qe
Cl)
_ 1;,
...
.e .i
�-a�!
3,56,477
55,197
0.155
7,12,555
67,554
0.095
3,87,501
46,727
0.121
8,13,513
54,672
0.067
4,40,677
52,161
0.118
4,'78,853
79,741
0.166
5,29,140
84,759
0.160
5,92,119
97,563
0.165
6,56,071
1,08,665 0.166
7,38,225
1,25,373 0.174
30,069
9,43,413 1,71,650 0.182
Lakshadweep
31,665
9,56,552 1,75,542 0.184
Lakshadweee
Notes:, SM • single-member and DM • double-member constituencies.
Th� sWldard deviation measures the atent that the size of constituencies diverge from the mean size by using the formula:
.../!.(r;- .r)2 /(n - 1) "."here r is the constituency size. However, even
if the dispersion remains the same, the st:tndard deviation would tend
to increase when the mean constituency size increases over time.
Consequently, the standard deviation is divided by the mean to give
a measure called the 'coefficient of variation' which provides a more
accurate comparison across time.
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The Institutions 141
a close relationship between the electorate and the legislators. AH
multi-member constituencies ceased to exist from 1962.
The differences in the size of constituencies in India have been
significant and have increased over time, (fable 3.6). The co­
efficient of variation rose from 0.118 in 1962 to 0.184 in 1991.
Figure 3.4 shows the unequal size of constituencies in 1991.
The principle of equality of suffrage has never been fully met
in the drawing and redrawing of boundaries. Whether this has
benefited the ruling party (or any other party) and led to un­
fairness in the relation of seats to votes can be tested by analysing
the distribution of party support over large, medium and small
constituencies. The overall figures suggest that no party has
gained any significant advantage by the unevenness of constituen­
cy size. As Table 3.7 shows, the electorate size in Congress and
non-Congress seats has been remarkably similar - and any small·
advantage has shifted to and fro.
TABLE3.7 Party Differences in Electorate Size
FJection Average
FJectorate
Year
in Congress
Seats
1991
1989
1984
1980
9,41,464
9,80,814
7,30,514
6,70,955
Average
Difference
Percentage
FJectorate in
in Electorate Difference
Non-Congress Size
fr<»n 50-50
Seats
9,68,631
9,45,492
7,65,444
6,73,599
I
I
I
27,167
35,322
34,930
2,644
0
Constituency delimitation has the potential to affect the elec­
toral outcome in a major way in any democracy that uses the
first-past-the-post system. However, in India there appear to be
no grounds for misgivings on this account so far.
The manner in which delimitation can have a major effect on
electoral outcomes can be simply illustrated (Figure 3.5). Let us
suppose that a town containing four equal-sized wards or localities
has to be divided into two constituencies and that there are two
parties in the town, Reds with 55 per cent and Blues with 45 per
cent. If the town is divided into two constituencies on a North­
South basis (i.e. A+B and C+D) each party gets one seat (Red gets
the North with 150 voters and Blue wins the South with 130
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142 State and Politics in India
B
A
RED
80
RED
70
RED
30
RED
40
BLUE
70
BLUE
60
Figure ;,j Tbe lmpilCt ofDr1111Jing Bo11ndaritr on the Results
voters). But if it is divided on an East-West basis (i.e. A+C and
B+D), Reds get both the seats (Reds win 110 votes in the West
and 110 votes in the East).
Partisan drawing of constituencies to favour a particular party
is what has come to be known as 'gerrymandering'. The term
was coined in the 1820s after Governor Elbridge Gerry of Mas­
sachusetts drew a constituency specially designed to secure the
election of an adherent. A critic remarked that it looked like a
salamander on the map. 'No', was the reply, 'call it a
Gerrymander'.
In India there have been surprisingly few allegations of ger­
rymandering. It was alleged that the second Delimitation Com­
mission favoured the Congress party in Punjab at the expense of
the Akali Dal. Similarly, it was claimed that the first Commission
created a new double-member constituency in Orissa to defeat a
leader who had defected from the Congress to the Swatantra party.
There have not been any legal challenges to the Commission's
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proposals since the Kothari case in 1967 when the Supreme Court
refused to interfere with any of the Commission's orders on the
ground that Article 329 of the Constitution precludes any judicial
interference in the delimitation of constituencies.
One special feature of the Indian electoral system relates to the
reservation of seats in the Lok Sabha for scheduled castes and
scheduled tribes. Article 330(2) provides that a number of seats
proportionate to their numbers in the population should be re­
served for scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (SI). These
seats should be allocated to states in due proportion to the number
of SCs and STs within its borders. In 1952 and 1957, where
scheduled castes or scheduled tribes constituted more than 50 per
cent of the population in a constituency, it was automatically
categorized as SC or ST. In other cases a double-member seat was
created. In these double-member constituencies everyone had two
votes and the SC (or Sl) candidate who got most votes would be
elected, even if he did not come first or second. After double­
member constituencies were abolished in l 961, the Delimitation
Commission tried to draw boundaries so that they could allot SC
and ST seats in areas where these categories were particularly
concentrated.7 There were 78 SC and 41 ST seats in the 1991
general elections.
Constituencies lie at the roots of Westminster democracy. The
first House of Commons in 1295 started with citizens from each
constituency in England being summoned to send members to
represent it in London. To this day MPs, not just in Britain but
in every country that has followed its pattern, regard themselves
as spokesmen for their particular defmed piece of territory. Th ey
develop a special attachment to it Obviously they hope to con­
solidate support with a view to securing re-election, but they also
see their constituency as pan of their own ego, their sense of
identity as 'the member for X'. Constituencies may be the arith­
metic unit at the centre of election analysis, the cells within which
the statistics of votes are assembled. But we must always remain
aware that there exists that sensitive human reality behind the
figures, the relationship between elector and elected.
7 In one case in north Bengal, there was a triple-member constituency with
one guaranteed SC seat and one guaranteed ST seat. This was abolished
before the 1957 election.
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144 State and Politics in India
Parties and Symbols
Parties are at the centre of Indian politics, as they are in all major
democracies. The choices facing the voters are simplified by the
fact that politicians find it necessary to ally with each other under
party labels. Opinion polls in India have repeatedly shown that
people generally vote more for the party than for the candidate.
But parties vary greatly in their support base and in their per­
manence. They may be rooted in religion, or region, or caste, or
in specific issues, or in general ideologies, or based on leadership
of a charismatic individual. Parties may also be solid, lasting as­
sociations, creating deep loyalties that continue from generation
to generation, or they may be ephemeral groupings that endure
only for a year or two before they split or amalga mate or simply
disappear. India has experience of every type of party.
In India, as in most but not all democracies, parties have to be
formally registered with a central body. The Election Commission
allots symbols to parties so that illiterate voters can identify them
in the secrecy of the booth. Before Independence, different types
of voting methods were used in different parts of the country for
the limited elections that took place. These included the marking
system (with polling staff assisting voters to mark the ballot paper
- which involved an obvious loss of secrecy) and the 'colour box
system' (where a distinctive coloured box was allotted to each
candidate and the voter had to cast his vote in the box belonging
to his candidate). After surveying all the different voting proce­
dures, the Indian Franchise Committee of 1931 advocated the use
of either the colour box system or the symbol system.
For the first general elections in 1952, the Election Commission
chose the balloting system, a compromise between the colour box
and the symbol systems. Each candidate was allotted one symbol
from a list approved and published by the Commission after taking
into account the preferences of the candidate. Each polling station
had as many ballot boxes as the number of candidates in the
constituency with the symbols of the candidates pasted outside the
ballot boxes. As symbols were granted constituency-wise, a p o s ­
sible confusion was that the same symbol could be allotted to
candidates of different parties in different constituencies. Dif­
ferent ballot boxes also endangered the secrecy of the ballot. It
was only in the third general election in 1962 that multiple ballot
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boxes were replaced with just one box and the more secret 'mark­
ing system' now used was introduced. Each ballot paper has both
the name and the symbol=Gf each candidate. Voters express their
choice by marking the ballot paper in the appropriate space.
In 1982, the first experiment was made with electronic voting
machines at some polling stations in the Parur assembly con­
stituency in Kerala. These ingenious battery-operated devices
were designed in India and were the first in the world to be used
in such simple first-past-the-post elections. They n1erely required
the voter to press a button on the voting machine marked with a
candidate's name and the allotted symbol. The design looked very
similar to a ballot paper with buttons where crosses are normally
marked. These machines were used successfully in ten further
contests. But in the meantime the Parur election had been chal­
lenged because of the use of voting machines. On 5 March 1984
the Supreme Court disallowed the voting machines on the grounds
that the expression 'votes shall be given by ballots', used in Section
59 of the Representation of the People Act (1951), does not cover
the recording of votes by voting machines. The Election Com­
mission recommended that the Act should be amended and sub­
sequently the Law Minister said that this would be done in time
for the ninth general election. However, this did not happen. In
1990 a government committee, charged with looking at the ethical
and practical problems involved, reported favourably on the pro1>9sa1. The Act has now been amended enabling the Election
C'..ommission to use the machines. But the batteries have gone dead
ahd will have to be manufactured again. Therefore it is unlikely
that electronic voting machines will be used for the 1996 Lok
fiabha elections.
For the first general election, the Commission recognized 14
'national parties' and 60 'state parties' on the basis of the claims
presented by various political groups. No objective criterion such
as performance in the last election was available to be used. Each
national party had a symbol reserved exclusively for its candidates
throughout India, while each state party had a symbol reserved
for i� candidates in the state. All other candidates were supposed
to choose a symbol from the list of 'free' symbols. After the first
general election the four parties that received more than 3 per
cent of the nationwide Lok Sabha vote were recognized as 'na­
tional parties'; twelve parties won over 3 per cent of the vote in
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146 State and Politics in India
the state Vidhan Sabha elections and these were recognized as
'state parties'.
After the second general election in 1957, the concept of a
'national party' was abandoned (it was later reintroduced at the
time of the 1971 election). Recognition of a party was granted
on a state-by-state basis to parties which had polled 3 per cent
of the vote both in the Lok Sabha contests in the state as well
as in the Vidhan Sabha election. However, for the fourth general
election in 1967, the Election Commission, while continuing with
the procedure of granting recognition on a state-by-state basis,
discarded the practice of making it necessary to win 3 per cent
of the vote in both the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections.
The new criterion was the percentage of votes either in the
preceding Lok Sabha or in the preceding Vidhan Sabha elections.
The cut-off point for recognition was raised from 3 per cent to
4 per cent of the votes. Moreover, in order to discourage the
tendency of parties to field candidates indiscriminately merely to
boost the party's total votes, any votes cast for candidates who
forfeited their deposits were to be disregarded in the calculation.
Shortly after the fourth general election in 1967, the Election
Commission issued the Election Symbols (Reservation and Al­
loonent) Order, 1968, which introduced the present system under
which associations and bodies must register with the Commission
as political parties. A registered political party is not automatically
'recognized'. Recognition is granted to a party (again on a state­
by-state basis) on the basis of one of two criteria: either (i) its
exist�nce and participation in political activity for a period of five
years or (ii) its securing at least 4 per cent of the votes cast in
the state for Lok Sabha or Vidhan Sabha elections (after excluding
the votes polled by the party's candidates who forfeited their
deposits).
The votes polled by a member of the Lok Sabha or Vidhan
Sabha who joined a party after the election is not counted for the
purpose of calculating the threshold required for recognition.
From the second general election onwards, the procedure for
judging whether a candidate belonged to a political party involved
a declaration by the candidate as well as endorsement by party
functionaries. The 'Symbols Order' also contained procedures for
resolving disputes when recognized parties split into rival sections
or when two or more political parties amalgamated.
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Any candidate belonging to a party that is not 'recognized' is
officially recorded as an Independent. For example, candidates of
the Telugu Desam, which emerged from nowhere to full power
in Andhra Pradesh at its first election in 1983, were initially
classified as Independents. This kind of problem often makes it
difficult to compare the performance of a party over time. With
painstaking research, many of the Independent candidates in
earlier elections could be reclassified as nominees of unrecognized
parties so that this anomaly in election records could be com­
pletely removed.
No party in India has survived the last forty years without
splits or amalgamations. In the early l 950s, for example, the
Provincial Zamindara League (Punjab) merged with the Kirshikar
Lok party. The Republican Party of India and the Akali Dal each
split. The Socialist party, first divided into the Praja Socialist
party and the All India Socialist party and then came together in
1964 to form the Samyukta Socialist party only to break up once
again within a year into the Samyulcta Socialist party and the
Praja Socialist party. It was not until after the fifth general election
in 1971 that the two parties merged once again to form the
Socialist Party of India.
From the mid:. 1960s onwards, party splits and amalgamations
became more frequent. In 1964, a substantial section broke away
from the Communist Party of India to give birth to a new party
called the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which has now
emerged as the dominant faction. The Swatantra party, which was
formed in 1961, took into its fold the Janata party of Bihar, the
Indian Democratic Congress of Madras and the United Inde­
pendent Front of Madhya Pradesh.
The Indian National Congress faced its first serious split (in
the post-Independence period) in 1969. The party divided into
two groups, one led by S. Nijalingappa and the other led by C.
Subramaniam (later by Jagjivan Ram); these constituted the anti­
Mrs Gandhi and pro-Mrs Gandhi groups respectively. The Elec­
tion Commission recognized both as national parties and allotted
them separate symbols (charkha-being-plied-by-a-woman and a
calf-and-cow). The original Congress symbol was frozen. The
name was allotted to the pro-Mrs Gandhi, Jagjivan Ram group.
The Commission's decision that the party presided over by Jag­
jivan Ram should be recognized as the Indian National Congress
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148 State and Politia in India
was challenged, but the Supreme Coun upheld the Commission's
ruling and the other Congress faction came to be known as the
Indian National Congress (Organization).
In an unprecedented step just before the I977 election, four
national parties (the Indian National Congress [Organization],
Bharatiya Lok Dal, BharatiyaJan Sangh and the Socialist party)
merged informally to form the Janata party. These parties also
had an electoral understanding with the Communist Party of
India (Marxist). This meant that for the first time the opposition
to the Congress party was almost wholly united except for the
Communist Party of India, which supported the Congress. Since
the Janata party was not formed by a deJure merger, the Election
Commission could not grant legal recognition to the new party.
Consequently, it fought throughout India (except for Tamil Nadu
and Pondicherry) under the symbol ploughman-within-wheel
(chakra-haldhar) which was acrually the symbol of one of its
constiruent parties, the Bharatiya Lok Dal. In Tamil Nadu and
Pondicherry, where the Bharatiya Lok Dal did not have any
organization, the Janata party contested under the symbol of a
charkha of the Indian National Congress (Organization). For this
reason the tables - both in the official Election Commission
Reports and in this Chapter - refer to theJanata party in 1977
as the BLD, the official name under which it contested the
TABLE 3.8 Nwnber of Recognized Parties in the
General Elections
Election Year
1952
1957•
1962•
1967
1971
1977
1980
1984
1989
1991
•
Total
74
16
16
21
25
23
25
26
28
36
National Parties
14
4
State Parties
60
12
16
21
17
18
19
19
20
27
8
5
6
7
8
9
There were no national parties in 1962 and 1967 as parties were given
recognition only on a st:tte-by-state basis.
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The lnstitutionr 149
election. The Janata party was only recognized as a national party
after the 1977 election and the symbol of the chakra-haldhar was
then reserved for it.
Indian democracy was never so close to a two-party system as
· it was during the 1977 election. However, the next few years saw
a complete change. Soon after its defeat, the Indian National
Congress split into two groups - one led by Indira Gandhi and
the other by K. Brahamananda Reddy (and later by Devraj Urs).
After a protracted struggle between the two groups, the Commis­
sion decided to freeze the earlier Congress symbol of the calf-and­
cow, and allot two different symbols to the two groups. Both were
declared national parties. The symbol of the 'hand' was given to
the Indian National Congress-I and the 'charkha' to the Indian
National Congress-U. (The 'I' and 'U' stood for the names of the
leaders of each of the parties: Indira Gandhi and Devraj Urs).
Figure 3.6 records the splits and other changes in the Congress
party since 1952.
TheJanata party also went through major convulsions. By July
1979, it split into two groups, one led by Chandrashekhar and the
other by Charan Singh and Raj Narain. The Election Commission
continued to recognize the Chandrashekhar group as the Janata
party with the chakra-haldhar symbol. The other faction was
recognized as a national party with the nameJanata Party (S), (the
'S' in this case stood for 'secular') and the symbol of a farmer­
ploughing-the-field was allotted to it. This party, however, soon
became popularly known as the Lok Dal. Consequently there were
six national parties on the eve of the seventh Lok Sabha elections
in 1980 - the two Congress parties, the two Janata parties and
the two Communist parties - the CPI and CPl(M).
After die Congress victory in 1980, the disintegration of the
Janata party continued. The two Janata parties split further. The
Janata party divided into theJanata party led by Chandrashekhar
and the Bharatiya Janata party led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The
Bharatiya Janata party was essentially the same as the old Jana
Sangh. Although the Jana Sangh had merged with the Janata
party in 1977, it had always maintained a separate identity and
the break in 1980 was a relatively painless process. The old
symbols - the umbrella and the lotus (earlier with the Jana
Sangh) - were allotted to the two groups. Similarly, the Janata
party (S) broke into two groups -Janata party (S)-Raj Narain
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150 Stlltt and Politics in India
Elections
1952
1957
.
1962
11117
INC
Indian National Congrwu
.
�
'
i
INC
1971
(11 a 25Janl llldl1n �lllllonal CGng,111
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1971
(Mardi)
.
19n
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1978
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(Mardi)
INC(O) ..,._ - - (8LD) o,,1tl>ol oacopl In T- - t,e Jlinela ca1 1a•11C1 - INC(O) o,,1tl>ol
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lndl1n Nllb'lal Congl9•
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1981
1984
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1991
r.!�J"b..(Un)
lndlln Congi111 (Socllllt)
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1998
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- : 0.0,..., IO lonMI Ellclcl1 � ._.uon
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Figurt J.6 Splits in tbt Congnss Ptmy sinct 1952
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11,e lnstitutio,u 151
'
�
,�
BlD
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soc
INC(O)
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CHARANSIGi
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19'(1
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JANAYA .-.......1
JANATA PARTY
HlOWI
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1984
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CHANDAA SHEIOWI
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RAJ �
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
152 State and Politu:s in India
andJanata Party ($)-Charan Singh. Their symbol farmer-plough­
ing-the-field was froun and two new symbols, bicycle and woman
respectively were allotted to the two parties.
However, after Raj Narain's death, the scene changed again
and Charan Singh led the Lok Dal during the 1984 elections.
The disintegration of the Janata party was virtually complete by
1984 when its components contested as four separate national
parties: Indian Congress (Socialist), Bharatiya Janata party, Lok
Dal and the Janata party. In addition some of the breakaway
groups contested as recognized state parties. The Congress faced
a disunited opposition everywhere except in a few states either
where strong state parties had emerged (as in Andhra Pradesh
where N.T. �ama Rao's Telugu Desam swept the polls) or where
the opposition had organized itself into a local coalition (as in
Kerala).
An important development that has had a major impact on the
nature of party politics in India was the Act commonly referred
to as the 'Anti-Defection Act!. (The official title was The Con­
stitution [Fifty-second Amendment] Act, 1985). The aim of the
Act is to stop members who are elected as representatives of one
party 'crossing the floor' to join another party after the election.
Defections had become so frequent that it tended to undermine
the party system, particularly since the reason for changing parties
was often not related to ideological or policy differences but took
place in response to other inducements. By preventing defections
from the Congress, the Act was also intended to provide greater
security to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and to help him to hold
on to his 400 elected MPs. The Act was to prove of major
importance in the party realignments of 1990 and 1991.
The Anti-Defection Act specifies that if a member of any house
(Parliament or legislative assembly) votes or abstains from voting,
contrary to the direction issued by the political party to which
he belongs, he shall be disqualified from being a member of that
house. However, if one-third or more of the members of a party
break away, the Act recognizes this as a 'split' in the party and
does not disqualify the members of the breakaway faction. It also
recognizes the 'merger' of parties where not less than two-thirds
of the members of a party have agreed to the merger. Finally,
the Act states that no court shall have any jurisdiction over any
matter connected with the disqualification of a member. The
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decision is entirely the responsibility of the Speaker of the house
and only technical issues can be taken to court.
The Anti-Defection Act, which was brought in by Rajiv Gandhi
only fifteen weeks after coming to power, played a significant role
in maintaining the stability of his government. During his five­
year rule, although there was considerable dissent within the party,
i t never reached a point where one-third of the MPs could get
together to cause a split. Before the Anti-Defection Act, individual
MPs could leave a party without being disqualified. What would
stan as a trickle of defections would sometimes end up in a flood;
this is now severely curtailed.
Nevertheless, the Rajiv Gandhi government was shaken by a
major loss when a senior leader, the popular Finance Minister,
V .P. Singh, resigned.8 In the run-up to the 1989 elections, V.P.
Singh played a major role in uniting opposition parties to fight
the Congress. He first persuaded several parties, the}anata party,
Lok Dal (A), Lok Dal (B) and others to merge under the label
Janata Dal. The next step was the formation of a National Front
against the Congress. Parties in the National Front, the Janata
party, DMK, CPI, CPI(M), Congress (S), AGP and other small
parties retained their identity but agreed on a common platform
to defeat the Congress. In the final process of opposition unity,
the National Front came to an agreement with the BJP on sharing
seats. The aim was to ensure that every constituency had only
one opposition candidate facing the Congress. In some states the
agreement was total (e.g. Rajasthan, Gujarat); in many states only
partial agreement could be achieved (Madhya Pradesh, Orissa) and
in some states there was virtually no agreement (e.g. Maharashtra,
Uttar Pradesh).
.Despite the Congress winning 39.5 per cent of the vote in the
1989 general elections, it lost heavily in terms of seats. Although
it remained the largest single party, the number of seats it won
fell by more than half, from 415 in 1984 to 197 in 1989. This was
seen as an overwhelming mandate for a change and all the opposi­
tion parties agreed to get together to form a government. V.P.
Singh was sworn in as Prime Minister on 2 December 1989,
leading the Janata Dal which had won only 143 seats. The CPI,
•
8 He resigned as Defence Minister after his portfolio was changed i nJanuary
1988.
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154 Stm nJ Politics ;,, lndill
CPl(M) and the BJP agreed to support the government 'from the
outside'. This meant they would not form part of a coalition
government but would vote with the Janata Dal to ensure a maj­
ority in theLok Sabha.
Once again the Anti-Defection As:t played a role in keeping the
Janata Dal together after serious inner party differences began to
emerge. It was eventually the BJP withdrawing support, rather
than a split in theJanata Dal, that brought the V.P. Singh govern­
ment down on 7 November 1990. However, immediately after
the collapse of the government, the Janata Dal split. A group led
by Chandrashekhar and backed by the former deputy Prime Min­
ister Devi Lal gathered enough support from MPs to cross the
one-third barrier and be recognized by the Anti-Defection Act as
a separate party calledJanata Dal (Secular).
The JD(S) was supported 'from the outside' by the Congress
and formed the new government with Chandrashekhar sworn in
as Prime Minister on 10 November 1990. However, the Speaker
later disqualified eight MPs who had left the Janata Dal to join
the JD(S). After the Speaker's ruling, the party position on 11
January 1991 is listed in Table 3.9.
TABLE 3.9 Party Position inLok Sabha on 11 January 1991
Congress-I
Janata Dal
(incl. 2 associates)
BJP
Janata Dal (S)
CPl(M)
CPI
ADMK
Abli Dal
RSP
Forward Bloc
National Conference
BSP
]MM
Shiv Sena
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195
77
86
54
33
12
11
4
4
3
3
3
3
3
TDP
Muslim League
IPF
MGP
MCC
Congress (S)
Muslim Majlis
KCM
SSP
ABHM
GNLF
Independents
Vac:ancics
2
2
l
l
1
1
l
l
1
1
1
10
29
543
Total
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Institutions 155
Clearly, the survival of the JD(S) and of Prime Minister
Chandrashekhar depended on the fragile support provided by the
Congress. This did not last long. The Congress withdrew its
support and India's tenth general elections followed. The Parlia­
ment that finally emerged (after Punjab elections in February
1992) had a different but equally complex pattern.
Elections in India are normally spread over two or three days.
This is partly to avoid special holidays which always occur in. one
state or another but it is also to allow the Election Commission
to redeploy its pPll-monitoring facilities. In 1991 the polls were
scheduled for 20, 23 and 26 May. But a few hours after he himself
had voted in Delhi on 20 May, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. The
polls due on 23 May and 26 May were postponed to 12 June and
15 June. It is a sad irony of 1991 that the Congress fared measurab­
ly better in the sympathy wave following their leader's death. In
the votes cast on 20 May, there was a 5.7 per cent swing away
from Congress. In the votes cast in June, there was a 1.6 per cent
swing in favour of the Congress party.
This history of party splits and mergers shows how difficult it
is to assess the evolution of support for a party over time. For
example what was the increase in the Congress party's popularity
between the fourth and fifth general elections in 1967 and 1971?
This question is not easy to answer, since there were two Congress
parties in 1971, the 'Requisitionists' and the 'Organization.'9
Similar problems arise with the Socialists, with the Communists,
and above all with the constituents of the Janata party after 1977.
Votes and Seats
India's first-past-the-post syste.m of voting has been tested time
and again in Britain and many other democracies based on the
Westminster system, such as Canada, New Zealand and Jamaica.
It is based on contests between individual candidates in single­
member constituencies; victory goes to the contestant who gets
more votes than any other. When there are several candidates, a
The pro-Mrs Gandhi, Indian National Congress faction led first by C.
Subramaniam and later byJagjivan Ram has been known in popular parlance
by various names such as Congress 0), Congress (R), etc. The Election
Commission recognized this party simply as the Indian National Congress.
9
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
156 State and Politics in India
seat can be won on remarkably small percentages. For example,
in 1991 the Congress won the Rae Bareli seat in Uttar Pradesh
with only 23 per cent of the vote.10
Under this system, there is no simple or uniform relation be­
tween the proportion of votes a party wins nationally and the
proportion of seats it secures in the Lok Sabha. It would, indeed,
be possible for a party with support spread evenly across the
country to win 100 per cent of the seats with a great deal less than
half the votes, provided there were several other parties splitting
the rest of the votes. Even if there were only two parties fighting,
it would be possible to win all the seats with only a little over half
the votes. The voting system is one which, almost invariably,
exaggerates a small lead in votes into a much larger lead in seats.
There has been a tendency, therefore, to despair about predict­
ing party strength in the Lok Sabha. The relationship between
seats and votes has often been portrayed as largely random. That
used to be the general attitude in Britain, 'Canada and Australia.
Over time, in each of these countries formulae have been devel­
oped which reveal a relatively predictable pattern in the system's
tendency to produce an exaggerated majority for the winning
party. There is, however, no single relationship that holds good
for all first-pas t -the-post systems -or even for one country at all
points in time.
One neat general formula that has long attracted attention is
the 'Cube Law'. This suggests that, in a first-past-the-post system,
majorities will normally be exaggerated by a law of cubic propor­
tion. In other words, if votes are divided in the ratio A : B, seats
will be divided in the ratio A3 : B3• For many years this seeme� to
match what was happening in British elections. However, in the
10 Rae
Bareli, Uttar Pradesh, 1991
Ctmdidate
Sheila Kaul (W)
Ashok Kumar Singh
Ram Sh.inkar Verma
Yashpal Kapoor
Sudarshan Ram
Others {19�
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Party
Cong
JD
BJP
SJP
BSP
Aarllll Vote
1,02,331
98,414
91,850
75,128
36,018
40!050
443 791
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
% Vote
23. 1
22.2
20.7
16.9
8.1
9.0
100.0.
The Institutions 157
last two decades, the formula has !=eased to fit the facts. Those
who want to predict the seat outcome .fmd that it is far safer simply
to extrapolate from the actual distribution of votes in each con­
stituency in the most recent election.1 1
The Cube Law, works best in a two-party situation. The 1977
Lok Sabha elections showed that it is applicable to· the Indian
system too, when it is close to a two-party situation. The Janata
party secured 41.3 per cent of the votes in 1977 and the Congress
got 34.5 per cent According to the Cube Law the division of seats
between the parties should have been 283 to Janata party and 164
to the Congress. The actual division of seats was 295 to 152, fairly
close to the Cube Law prediction.
The Congress party has never won more than 48.1 per cent
of the total votes polled in any of India's ten general elections.
Yet it has formed the government in eight of these ten elections,
six times with a substantial majority (see Table 3.10). In fact,
60 per cent of all constituency contests for the Lok Sabha have
resulted in Congress victories although the party has on average
secured only 42 per cent of the vote. The large, stable majorities
which have kept the Congress in power for all but four years
since Independence are larg�ly due to the splintering of the
anti-Congress vote. Over the last ten elections, and especially
more recently, the number of candidates contesting elections
has risen dramatically. While on average seven candidates have
fought per constituency, in the last three elections this has gone
up to thirteen (see Table 3.11). The number of parties fighting
each election has also risen sharply.
One reason why the number of candidates has increased is
because serious contenders find that it is convenient to have an
ever increasing number of friends with an official right to appoint
observers at the polling stations and the count. When over 100
candidates stand in a single constituency (as it happened in East
Delhi in 1991), it is plain that bulk of them are not deluded
hopefuls, but just names put down for a purpose. One side effect
of this plurality of contenders is that, if any of them dies during
the campaign, the contest has to be countermanded.
The extent to which Congress has benefited from the existence
of many opposition parties is demonstrated by Table 3.12 which
11 See J. Curtice and M. Steed in D. Butler and D. Kavanagh (1987).
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
TABLE 3.10 Congress Votes and Seats
0
1n·
"'
3
:l[
CJ
J
% votes
% seats
1952
45.0
76.0
1957
47.8
77.0
1962
44.7
73.5
1967
40.8
55.0
El«tion Year
1971 1977
43.7
34.5
68.l
28.5
Average
1980
42.7
66.7
1984
48.l
76.7
1989
39.5
37.3
1991
36.5
44.5
42.3
60.3
�
TABLE 3.11 Number of Candidates Per Constituency and Number of
Parties in Each Election
Average
Ekction Year
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per consorucncy
No. ofparties
1952
1957
1962
1967
1971
1977
1980
1984
1989
1991
3.9
74
3.2
16
4.0
29
4.6
24
5.4
53
4.5
62
8.6
36
10.2
37
11.6
118
16.7
144
7.3
60
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158
The lnstitutiuns I59
shows the number of seats that the Congress and the other parties
have won for every 1 per cent of the vote. In most election years,
for each percentage vote cast in its favour, Congress won more
than twice the number of seats won by the opposition.
TABLE 3.12 Number of Seats Won for
Every I Per Cent of Votes
Election Year
.... t--,
t--,
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t--,
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2.3 2.4 2.4 4.0 2.9 5.9 3.1 2.4 5.5 4.6 3.6
'Swing' is one of the standard instruments of electoral analysis.
It is a simplified measure of the change in the strength of the
dominant party or p;p-ties between one election and the next In
what have been predominantly two-party systems of Britain and
New Zealand, it has been defined as the average of the change in
percentage margin between the two leading parties. 12 For example,
if party A won the first election by a margin of 6 per cent and the
second by two per cent, then the swing against it between the two
elections is ((6%-2%)/2) .. (4%n) "' 2%. Of course, this 2 per
cent swing is also exactly equal to the drop in percentage votes
won W,A, which is in tum equal to the percentage gain in votes
by B. 1 This direct relation between a change in a party's vote and
the change in margin breaks down when there are more than two
parties. Whether the swing is calculated from state or nationwide
totals of votes, or from a single constituency, it offers a convenient
-----------------------
For an exact dilCUSSion of British de6nitions of swings see M. Steed's
Appendix in D. Buder and A. King (1965).
12
13
.
El«tion
Candidate A
Candidate B
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
160 State and Politics in India
measure of a change in a party's popularity. The variations in swing
in different parts of the country or different types of constituencies
can provide revealing insights into the possible causes underlying
voting trends.
But the 'swing' concept is above all a tool for estimating the
likely relationship between seats and votes. If there is uniform
nationwide behaviour (i.e. every constituency has exactly the same
swing), it is possible, knowing the swing in one seat, to calculate
exactly the total number of seats a party would win. Applying the
swing to the results of the last election it is possible to calculate
how many constituencies would change hands. Nationwide be­
haviour will, of course, never be completely uniform. However,
in most cases the regional or local deviations from uniformity the high swings and the low swings - tend to cancel each other
out. In British and Australian elections over the last forty years,
the results in terms of seats have been extraordinarily close to
those that could have been predicted by assuming a nationwide
uniform swing.
This traditional concept of swing, however, as defined for two­
party systems, is not wholly appropriate in the multi-party situa­
tion in India. Nonetheless, the pre-eminence of the Congress
party over the years does allow 'swing' to be redefined for the
Indian situation. The simple Indian solution is to consider swing
as the 'increase or decrease in the Congress percentage of the vote
between one election and the next'. 14 On this basis swing can be
used to explain the relation between seats and votes in India almost
as neatly as the British definition has done in the United Kingdom.
However, the multi-party Indian system has an additional com­
plication. The splitting of votes between opposition parties has
been almost as important as the swing in influencing the final
outcome of Indian elections. Since 1952 the Election Commission
has recognized or registered more than 200 parties. The degree
of opposition unity, or lack of it, has varied from election to
election and has produced anomalous results. Table 3.13 shows
there is no straightforward link between swings in votes and the
margin of victory.
14 In the analysis of state elections the dominant or the most consistent party
over the years may not be the Congress. In states like West Bengal for
instance, it may be preferable to compute swing with reference of the CPI
(M), or in recent years to use the Telugu Desam in Andhra Pradesh.
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- ___ jJt,JIVERSITY OF MICHIGA!!._
The Institutions 161
In every election except 1991, an increase in votes has been
matched by an increase in seats and a decrease _by a decrease in
seats. But as the last line in Table 3.13 shows, the relationship has
been very variable. In 1991 it broke down completely. Congress
lost votes and gained seats. The increased division of the opposi­
tion, discussed in the following pages, has allowed Congress to
win extra seats over the years on a split non-Congress vote.
For our analysis of elections over the years and for our inter­
pretation of opinion polls, we have developed a generalized meas­
ure of vote-splitting: the Index of Opposition Unity (IOU). This
index is designed to isolate the split factor in Indian elections
from the normal measure of change in party popularity: the swing
factor. Using this index, changes in the margin of victory in any
constituency can be broken down into two components: the
'swing' and the 'split'.
Although this methodology can always be used in ex postf11t:to
analysis, it can only be applied as a method of forecasting if the
swing and split factors are reasonably homogeneous across the
nation (or if their deviations can be reliably detected by opinion
polls). How far swings and splits are homogeneous in India, with
its heterogeneous electorate divided by caste, language and re­
ligion, is di�ed later in this chapter.
The number of parties contesting an election, or the average
number of candidates for each seat, provides a crude measure of
the unity of the opposition. But if there are a number of minor
parties or independent candidates in the field, each attracting a
tiny fraction of the total vote, this can be a misleading indicator.
An alternative way of judging the unity of the opposition is to
use the sum of the percentages of the two leading parties as an
indicator of how near the system is to a two-party situation. This
offers a simple index of how close the two parties are to duopoliz­
ing voting support. But this measure fails on two counts: first, it
is dependent on the percentage vote of the ruling party and,
second, it says very little about the distribution of votes amongst
the opposition parties.
S'ome improvement on this measure of opposition unity can be
achieved by extending it to cover the percentages of the top three
or top four parties. Table 3.14 shows the figures for India's ten
General Elections.
But even this is not satisfactory. A measure of opposition unity,
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
TABLE 3.13 Congress: Votes to Seats Relationship
1952- 1957- 1962- 1967- 1971- 1977- 1980- 1984- 1989- All
Eke7
7
7
9
91
71
62
80
4
"'
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CJ
0
�
(v
Averogt
Eltaion Year
0
.a,..
Averogr
1962-89
tums
Change in
Congress % vote
Change in
Congress scats
Change in number
of seats per 1%
swing in votes
-3.1
2.8
7
-10
2.5
3.2
-3.9
-78
20.0
2.9
69
23.8
-9.2
-198
21.5
8.2
199
24.3
5.4
62
11.5
-8.6
-218
-3.0
35
24.5
n.a.
5.2
97
15.9
6.4
137
20.9
Average • average of absolute figures.
TABLE 3.14 Sum of Percentage Votes of Largest Parties
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Eltaion Year
Sumof% Votes of
Top 2 parties
Top 3 parties
T0p4earpes
1952
1957
S6
61
65
S8
67
73
1962
ss
63
69
1967
1971
1977
1980
59
54
61
67
76
80
83
62
71
77
so
64
1984
ss
62
68
1989
57
69
7S
1991
57
68
75
S8
66
72
162
The Jnstitutitms 163
if it is to be realistic and compatible with a measure of swing,
should possess three main properties:
1. It should reflect the keenness of the competition provided
by the opposition by measuring its cohesion.
2. It should be such that any change in the index is easy to relate
to or compare with a change in votes as well as a change in
the margin of victory.
3. It should be simple to use at every level - constituency,
region, and nation.
The following Index of Opposition Unity (IOU) goes some way
to achieve these three objectives:
IOU =
Vote of the largest oppositionparty
100
Sum of votes of all the opposition parties x
This implies that, in a situation where there were three opposi­
tion parties with votes of 30 per cent, 20 per cent and 10 per cent,
the IOU would be:
30
30
X 100= ro°X 100=50
30+lO+ lO
If there is only one opposition party (i.e. if the opposition is fully
united), th e IOU is clearly 100. Thus the IOU can vary between
zero and 100; the higher it is, the greater the unity of the opposition.
Table 3.15 shows that the level of opposition unity has been
low, averaging only 72 over the ten elections. It reached a high of
9 0 in 1977 when the opposition came together to fight the Con­
gress after the Emergency, but it then disintegrated to its lowest
point of 65 in 1980. This 25-point slump in the IOU was a major
reason for the Congress landslide victory in 1980.
In 1989 there was a widely held view that the opposition was
very united; in fact, the IOU indicates that opposition unity ac­
tually was only 3 points higher than in 1984; and the IOU of 77
in 1989 was far below the level reached in 1977. In 1989 three
states showed major differences from their normal levels of IOU.
Rajasthan (90) - a total seat adjustment raised the IOU to near
1977 levels; in Orissa (91)- the highest level of opposition unity
since 1962 was recorded; and in Bihar (71) the IOU, although low
by national standards, was the second highest ever achieved in that
state.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
164 State and Politics in India
TABLE 3.15 Index of Opposition Unity 1962-1991
r--
ALL-INDIA
Andhra Pradesh
Assam
Bihar
Gujarat
Haryana
Himacha!Pradesh
....
r---
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°'
.... °'
.... ....
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�ction Year
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....
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....
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71 90 65 74 77 66 72
74 86 64 90 90 74 77
41 65
66 51 90 71 73
48 58 86 55 63 71 65 63
86 88 93 82 84 92 90 87
50 76 91 57 65 87 49 68
83 60 62 93 77 82 78 80 77
Karnataka
76 74 88 93 59 86 63 61 75
88 85 89 95 94 88 89 89 90
Kerala
Madhya Pradesh 56 62 82 92 62 73 77 77 73
Maharashtra
67 72 75 93 70 71 72 65 73
Orissa
92 75 52 90 57 79 91 71 76
70
65 57 69 92 77 71 61
Punjab
Rajasthan
62 76 83 94 60 66 90 74 76
73 91 94 87 89 92 81 77 86
Tamil Nadu
52 51 61 91 50 57 64 45 59
Uttar Pradesh
80 74 58 89 86 92 90 76 81
West Bengal
67 76 83 98 79 89 81 69 80
Delhi
Note: The computation ofIOU was carried out constituency by constituency and then aggregated to the st:1tc and the all-India level.
67
74
60
59
82
67
62
In 1991, the Congress gained 35 seats although its vote fell by
3 per cent. This was due, of course, to the drop in opposition unity
from 77 to 66. The year I991 was also the only election in which
the Congress won more seats even though there was a swing in
votes against it.
Opposition unity can be achieved either by parties coming
together to fight under a single common symbol - as in the 1977
elections -or, as in 1989, by 'seat adjustments' in which different
parties agree not to fight from the same seats. Historically Kerala,
which has had almost the largest number of parties of any state,
is a good example of how 'seat adjustments' can result in what is,
in effect, a two-party situation. The average IOU in Kerala, at 90,
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Institutions 165
is the highest for any state in the country because all the major
parties have always allied with one of the two main political fronts
(either the Left Democratic Front or the United Democratic
Front). Consequently, the contest in each constituency has almost
always been between only two serious parties, each one belonging
to one of the two opposing fronts.
Over the years, the opposition to the Congress has tended to
be far more disunited in the northern states than in the south.
Most of the states with an IOU below the all-India average are in
the north. In fact, since 1962 three of the largest northern states
- Uttar Pradesh (85 seats, with an average IOU of 59); Bihar (54
seats, IOU 63); Madhya Pradesh (40 seats, IOU 73) - have had
among the lowest levels of opposition unity in the country. Over
the years, the low levels of opposition unity in these states helped
to ensure clear Congress majorities in the Lok Sabha.
In 1989, the biggest debacle for the Congress occurred in
Rajasthan, where it lost every single seat (having won them all in
1984). The Congress was wiped out not only because of a large
swing against it, but also because it fuced a highly united opposi­
tion: the BJP and the Janata Dal came to an agree1nent on fielding
only one candidate in every seat in the state. In 1991, opposition
unity collapsed and Congress moving only from 37 per cent to 44
per cent of the vote jumped from 1 to 13 seats in Rajasthan. A
higher than normal level of opposition unity in several other states
also contributed to overwhelming setbacks for the Congress: in
Orissa the IOU increased from 79 in 1984to91 in 1989;in Gujarat
the .I 989 IOU of 92 was the highest for any state in the country.
But in many of the other northern states opposition unity talks
broke down over how many seats each party should be allocated.
Consequently, the level of IOU in these states (notably Uttar
Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh) was low; and the primary
reason for the Congress defeat in these states was a massive swing
against the party.
As in most of the previous elections, the opposition was united
in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh,Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
But in Karnataka the Janata Dal government split and its members
stood against each other. With the BJP also fighting separately,
the result was a low IOU and a sweep for the Congress.
Levels of opposition unity can vary widely not only between
states but also from one election to the next. Among the important
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
166 State and Politics in India
states and union territories, the highest IOU ever recorded w a s
98 in Delhi in 197 7 and the lowest was 41 in Assam in 1991. The
IOU has risen or fallen by up to 40 points between two elections.
These large variations in IOU have had a major impact on elec­
toral change in India.
In addition to its purely arithmetic or mechanical impact on
margins of victory, opposition unity also has an important political
and psychological effect on election results. There is no doubt that
the opposition loses seats because of the purely arithmetical impact
of a fall in the IOU. But there is also an important additional effect
on the perceptions of the voter. If the opposition is perceived by
the voter to be disunited, a certain proportion of the electorate
may either not vote at all, or vote instead for a more cohesive
party. This secondary political effect of a low IOU would add t o
the percentage of votes for the ruling party. Consequently, voter
perception of a disunited opposition could lead to a rise in votes
of the ruling party and record a swing in its favour. The combined
effect of a drop in IOU, in terms of its arithmetic impact as well
as its political or psychological impact on voting behaviour, has
been a major factor in determining the outcome of Indian elec­
tions. The average voter's perception of a united opposition was,
perhaps, most significant in the 1989 elections, even though i n
arithmetic terms the IOU was not very high.
A comparison of the last two elections highlights the signi­
ficance of the psychological and the arithmetic impact of op-,
position unity. In 1989, it appeared as though the opposition
parties were presenting a united front against the Congress. The
unity talks before the elections went smoothly and the leadership
of V.P. Singh was implicitly assumed. Apart from the diverse
factions of the Lok Dal and the Janata party coming together,
the Communist parties and the BJP were obviously keen on
supporting a V.P. Singh-led opposition in order to defeat Rajiv
Gandhi's Congress. Agreements on seat adjustments were
reached in a number of states; in several others agreements
seemed imminent. These agreements received wide publicity
across the country's electorate. In several states, however, talks
between the BJP and the Janata Dal broke down at the last
moment before the elections. Despite the confused post-election
situation, the overriding pre-election impression left with the
voter was that the opposition was almost as united as it had
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
•
The Institutions 167
been in 1977. This perception of unity perhaps added consid­
erably to the swing against the Congress.
The non-Congress parties began the 1991 election campaign
without any semblance of a united front against the Congress. The
highly publicized and eventual collapse of the J anata Dal govern­
ment destroyed any remaining perception of unity among voters.
In the end, the 1991 elections recorded an IOU of 66, the second
lowest level in twenty years. It was only the second time that the
IOU dropped from the previous election. Since the change in IOU
is often more significant than its level, the 11 point decline be­
tween 1989 and 1991 had a major impact on the number of seats
won by the Congress.
The unity of the non-Congress parties was at its lowest in
Uttar Pradesh which had the lowest ever IOU of 45. However,
the Congress could not take advantage of this because of a huge
swing away from the party. The Congress vote in Uttar Pradesh
dropped to a dismal 18.3 per cent, by far its lowest popular vote;
caused by a negative swing of 13 .5 per cent from the already low
level reached in 1989. In fact, with the Congress no longer the
dominant, or even a significant party in Uttar Pradesh (42 of its
candidates lost their deposits in 1991) it is perhaps time to select
new parties to go into the calculation of IOU in the state. With
the BJP emerging as the dominant party in Uttar Pradesh (al­
though it won only 32.8 per cent of the vote it was clearly the
largest party) the IOU for Uttar Pradesh should perhaps be
computed with reference to the parties opposing the BJP. The
IOU of the non-BJP parties for Uttar Pradesh was a low 32 in
1991 and explains why the BJP won 51 out of 81 seats (or 61
per cent) and 32.8 per cent of the vote. For years the Congress
has benefited from a divided opposition - now in Uttar Pradesh
it is the BJP's tum.
In fact, in many other states the IOU should no longer be
computed for non-Congress parties. Wherever the Congress is no
longer the dominant party the IOU should be computed for the
parties opposing the dominant party.
The central focus of electoral analysis is the percentage margin
of victory. Election studies do not look merely at who won or
lost but also at the size of a candidate's majority and the causes
for any change in his percentage margin of victory compared
with the previous election. The fact that a particular candidate
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168 State and Politics in India
won in two consecutive elections may be less significant than the
fact that his margin of victory was reduced from 25 per cent to
5 per cent. The electoral analyst's main concern must be to
explain the factors behind this drop of 20 percentage points in
his majority.
In a two-party system, only a change in popularity can cause
the margin to change. In a multi-party system, the situation is
more complex. Margins change not only because of a swing in
votes but also because of a change in the degree of unity between
opposition parties. A simple formula can be devised to explain
this:IS
Swing factor
(change in
popularity)
+
Split factor = Change in Margin
(change in
opposition unity)
In Indian elections the importance of swings in popularity
compared with changes in levels of opposition unity has varied
from one election to another. Decomposing the change in margin
shows that over all the eight elections (i.e. from 1962 to 1991),
changes in opposition unity - the split factor - has contributed
as much as one-third to changes in margins of victory (see Table
3 .16). The remaining two-thirds were due to swings in votes.
The first strong impact of the split factor was in the 1980 election
when the opposition defeat could be attributed as much to the
drop in opposition unity between 1977 and 1980 as to the swing
back in favour of the Congress.
IS (M,-M,_1)=(X,-X,_1)(1 + I , _1)+(1,_1 -1,)(100-X,)
Change in margin • the swing factor + the split factor
X • Percencige votes for the ruling party.
M • Margin of victory.
I "' Index of opposition unity (expressed here as a proportion and
not as a percentage, i.e. 0 < I < I).
Subscript rand t-1 indicate the years of the two elections for which the change
in margin is being decomposed. We call the first expression on the right hand
side the swing factor and the second one the split factor. The overall 'split
factor' is, strictly speaking, sensitive to f]le swing in votes and there is a n
important interaction between the 'swing factor' and the 'split factor'. How­
ever, we find that the simple decomposition given here, despite the abstraction
from the interaction terms, is a useful one for analytical purposes.
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TABLE 3.16 Congress Victory Margins: Reasons for Change,
Impact of Swing and Split on Congress Margins
1962-7
1967-71
1971-7
1977-80
1980-4
1984-9
1989-91
Change in Congress
Margin over Largest
Other Pa� ( %2
•
Average
•
Nott:
Change in Margin Caused by:
Swing Factor Split F114.tor
(%)
(%)
-7.5
16.9
-38.5
29.6
4.6
-21.6
3.5
-8.0
· 18.4
-25.0
15.1
10.8
-19.7
-3.6
0.5
-1.5
-13.5
14.5
-6.2
-1.9
7.1
17.5
14.4
6.5
Average of absolute figures.
A negative swing factor implies a swing away from Congress, a nega­
tive split factor implies an improvement in opposition unity.
Contrary to popular belief, the Janata party victory in the I 977
election was much more due to a huge swing away from the
Congress than to the sudden unity of the opposition. In the 1984
elections, the large swing of 5.4 per cent in favour of the Congress
caused margins of victory to go up by 10.8 per cent, but this was
counteracted by an improvement in opposition unity which re­
duced the margin by 6.2 per cent. The net of these two opposing
trends yielded a 4.6 per cent net improvement in the average
Congress margin of victory.
In the 1989 elections, the voter's perception that the opposition
was united was important. It gave the opposition credibility as a
viable alternative to the Congress. As the impression spread that
the opposition could form a government, the notion that a vote
for them would only be a wasted vote was reduced. This perception
of opposition unity is likely to have contributed to the large swing
away from the Congress. Consequently, the psychological or polit­
ical impact of opposition unity was more important than the pure
arithmetic impact of the increase in IOU in the 1989 elections.
Table 3.16 shows that the fall in the Congress margin of victory
of -21.6 per cent between 1984 and 1989, was overwhelmingly
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
170 State and Politics in India
because of the swing factor (which contributed as much as 19.7
per cent to the drop in margin), while the greater unity of the
opposition was less significant (contributing only 1.9 per ceµt to
the decline in margin).
In the 1991 elections the Congress vote fell to its second lowest
point ever, dropping to 36.5 per cent. If opposition unity levels
had not changed, this negative swing of 3 per cent would have
shattered the Congress party: it would have ended up with around
125 seats and lost its position as the largest party. However, despite
this drop in popularity between 1989 and 1991, the Congress won
an extra 35 seats. This is explained by a large gain the Congress
made from a very disunited opposition (see Table 3.16).
Although the impact of swings and splits have varied over time,
a broad rule of thumb applies: the effect of a 1 percentage point
swing is, on average, equivalent to a 3 percentage point change in
the IOU (Table 3.17). In other words, a swing of 1 per cent in
favour of the Congress could be countered by a 3 percentage point
improvement in opposition unity.
TABLE 3.17 Comparison of Swing and Split Factors
1962-7
1967-71
1971-7
1977-80
1980-4
1984-9
1989-91
-Average
Change in Margin Caused by
1%Swing
1%Change in % Change in IOU
IOU
to Offset 1 % Swing
1.77
1.59
1.69
1.99
1.58
1.71
1.78
1.26
0.32
0.65
0.55
0.47
0.60
0.61
1.41
5.05
2.58
3.45
3.36
2.85
2.92
1.73
0.64
3.23
Table 3.13 shows that in recent years a I per cent swing in votes
causes between 20 and 25 seats to change hands. The 3 per cent
swing away from the Congress in 1991 would, therefore, have
meant about 60 to 70 fewer seats for the Congress. On the other
hand, th.e IQ_U dropped 11 percentage points between 1989 and
1991. Table 3.16 shows that this 11 point drop in IOU is roughly
equivalent to a 4 per cent swing in favour of Congress.
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Consequently, the impact of the drop in IOU was to add about 80
to 100 seats to the Congress. It was the net effect, therefore, of the
3 per cent negative swing causing a loss of 60 to 70 seats, and the
11 point drop in IOU causing an addition of 80 to 100 seats, that
in the end led to Congress gaining 35 seats in the last elections.
Although the swing and change in IOU 'by definition' explain
changes in the margin of victory, neither of these measures should
be interpreted mechanically. The swing is merely a final index
which measures the net impact of a multitude of political issues,
social and caste trends and underlying economic realities. The
IOU too is only a summary measure of the alliances that political
parties form and the electorate's perception of these alliances, real
or imagined. The simplicity of these indices should not hide the
complexities of the relationships that they measure.
It would be wrong, for instance, to oversimplify the IOU and
say that 'a divided non-Congress vote always helps the Congress'.
This may not be true in some circumstances. For example if the
opposition to the Congress is the BJP and the Janata Dal, both
being strong parties, the IOU may be low. But instead of the
non-Congress voter support being divided, the Janata _Dal and
Congress may be competing for the same support base. In other
words, in this situation the n o n -B JP vote would be split. A low
IOU would then help the BJP rather than the Congress. Of course,
if the Janata Dal is eating into the Congress vote, this would be
reflected in a lower percentage vote for the Congress - i.e. a
larger swing away from the Congress. It is, therefore, only true
to say that 'a divided non-Congress vote always helps the Con­
gress, for a given percentage Congress vote'.
Moreover, the 'swing-IOU' formula is further complicated by
voter perceptions creating a relationship between the IOU and
the swing. In the current political situation it may be more sensible
to use the swing and IOU in a more disaggregated manner, at a
state level rather than an all-India level. For example in Rajasthan,
where the BJP is the dominant party, an alternative analysis would
be to measure swing in terms of changes in the BJP vote and
compute IOU in terms of the non-BJP vote. In this way a state­
by-state analysis may provide more accurate forecasts.
If the electorate behaved uniformly across the country, it would
be easy to predict elections. Voting trends in one constituency
could then be projected to the entire nation. In fact, no country
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172 State and Politics in India
behaves uniformly, but the swing in some countries is more uni­
form than in others. Britain offers a notable example of uniform
swing, with a standard deviation of only 2 per cent. In contrast,
the swings in elections to the United States House of Repre­
sentatives have shown a standard deviation of around 6 per cent.
In India, while there has been appreciable variation in the swing
across different states, the swings in votes have tended to be more
uniform than is generally recognized. Even at the all-India level,
in most elections, the great majority of the country has moved in
the same direction, though the magnitude of the swing in different
regions varied.
Voting patterns in state elections are often closely related to
those in national contests. A good or a bad performance by a
state government of one party can have a massive impact on that
party's Lok Sabha vote in the state. In the Andhra Pradesh state
election of 1983, the Telugu Desam breakthrough was followed
by a statewide anti-Congress sweep (against the national tide) in
the 1984 Lok Sabha elections. But in the 1989 Lok Sabha elec­
tions, the discrediting of the state Telugu Desam government
was matched by an overwhelming swing to Congress (also against
the national tide). In 1991 when Congress was winning nationally,
there was something of a return to Telugu Desam.
The pattern, however, is not consistent and there is certainly
no exact fit between state and national voting. While much more
research needs to be done in this important area, it is clear that
swings tend to be increasingly uniform as the focus shifts from
India as a whole to the state level or down to homogeneous zones
within states. In any case, the swings at the state level tend to be
uniform enough to make reasonably accurate forecasts of seats.
Consequently, these can be made when the swing in only a few
constituencies is known, either from opinion polls or from the
first reports once the counting begins.
One reason why the all-India swing has become less uniform
since the early 1980s is the growth of strong regional parties. In
1962 regional parties accounted for 6.3 per cent of the total
opposition vote, but by 1984 this had risen to 20.8 per cent of
the vote. In 1989 this dipped again to l 0.4 per cent.16 Of the
Elections in Assam were not held in 1989 and partially held in 1980. If
elecrio.ns had been held, the vote of the regional parties would have gone up
further.
16
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opposition MPs elected in 1984, as many as 57 per cent were
from regional parties. Regional factors have been increasingly
manifest i n Lok Sabha contests and have made the variation in
swing between states more and more significant. In the 1989
elections, however, the sharp decline in the popularity of Telugu
Desam in Andhra Pradesh and the dominance of the Congress
in the southern states resulted in a significant drop in the repre­
sentation of regional parties. In Punjab, however, the Akali Dal
(Mann) virtually eclipsed all the other factions of the Akali Dal;
it won 6 out of the 8 seats that it contested. Its victory resulted
in a militant regional representation in the Lok Sabha. At the
same time the violent form of regionalism in Assam once again
prevented elections being held in that state.
The 1991 elections and the events after it indicate that region­
alism may be increasing once again. Most poll and by-election
results indicate that the Telugu Desam's popularity is rising
(despite the split into the NTR and the Chandrababu Naidu
groups) and so is OM.K's in Tamil Nadu. And while the violence
in Punjab has abated, in Kashmir it has risen sharply. There are
fashions in electoral interpretations. Disaster has regularly been
predicted for Inclian democracy. In the mid 1970s it was said to
be threatened by the autocracy of Mrs Gandhi. In the early 1980s
it seemed to be the rise of regional and separatist parties as the
takeover of Andhra Pradesh by Telugu Desam, coinciding with
publicity for violent breakaway movements notably in Punjab,
Kashmir and Assam, led to fears about the break-up of India.
Anxieties about autocracy and about threats to Indian unity will
persist.
. There will be both ebb and flow in the intensity of these
womes.
Today it is the rapid growth of the BJP that is producing
conflicting views ranging from fears about the rise of religious
fundamentalism to hopes for a change to a clean, efficient ad­
ministration. However, the hope that the BJP would provi<l� a
change, a clean break from the Congress has been undermined by
the rise of dissidence in the party (starting in Gujarat and spreading
to other states). It is clear that election campaigns are increasingly
aggressive and violent as caste and religious differences have be­
come an integral part of politics in India.
The end product of any voting system is to produce a legislature
which will give support to a government. In the Westminster
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174 State and Politics in India
system, a government must command a parliamentary majority.
Eight out of ten Indian elections have produced a definite result,
a clear majority for a single party. That is the norm for most
countries using first past-the-post voting on the British model.
But among parliamentary democracies elsewhere in the world it
is the exception. Where there is proportional representation it is
most unusual for one party to win a clear majority. Coalition
government or minority government provided the usual pattern.
India, of course, has had experience of coalitions at the state level.
In 1989, the Lok Sabha elections for the first time failed to produce
a clear majority and coalitions, in one form or the other, ruled
India in 1990 and 1991. At the state level there are many similar
examples. Usually they have not lasted long (although Kerala
provides an instance of enduring inter-party understandings).
Do governments have a shelf-life? According to one model,
often expressed in textbooks, once a government takes office it is
forced to implement unpopular measures so that the accumulation
of grievances inevitably erodes its support until in the next elec­
tion, when it inevitably loses its majority. However, although in
a democratic system all governments are liable ultimately to fall,
there is no regular pattern to their decline. After a setback in 1967,
Mrs Gandhi increased the Congress's majority in 1971. For four­
teen yearsJyoti Basu's CPM government in West Bengal has gone
from strength to strength electorally. Since 1950 British govern­
ments have increased their majority in Parliament in general elec­
tions just as often as they have had it reduced or eliminated.
In Western democracies the incumbent party is believed to hold
an advantage at elections. In India this may not be true. Tough
and unpopular decisions are more common in a democracy which
is poor and has a developing economy. Since the last General
Elections, the electorate seemed to vote strongly against which­
ever government was in power at the state and national levels
(Table 3.18).
In the early years of Indian democracy after Independence,
the electorate appeared to be less volatile. Table 3.19 reports the
swing between each of the last elections and shows that while
the average swing till 1971 was 3.2 per cent, since 1971 this has
more than doubled to 6.9 per cent. Only in 1977 was there a
change, when the Congress government was decisively thrown
out of power for the fust time at the national level. Since then
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TABLE 3.18 Is There an Incumbent Disadvantage?
Incumbent
1991 Lok Sabha electi011S
1991 Vu/ban Sabha eleai011S
Assam
Haryana
Kerala
TamilNadu
Uttar Pradesh
West Bengal
Pondicherry
Gqypnmp,t
Incumbent
Won/Lost
AGP
JD
CPl(M)
DMK
BJP
CPl(M)
Congress
Lost
Lost
Lost
Lost
Lost
Won
Won
BJP
Congress
BJP
Lost
Lost
Lost
Congress
Congress
Congress
SKSP
Lost
Lost
Won
Lost
JD
Congress
Congress
JD
Congress
Won
JD
Lost
1993 Vidh11n Sabha electi011S
Himachal Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh
Rajasthan
Uttar Pradesh
Delhi
1994 Vidhan Sabha elections
Andhra Pradesh
Karnatalca
Goa
Sikkim
1995 Vu/ban Sabha elections
Bihar
Gujarat
Maharashtra
Orissa
Arunachal Pradesh
Mapipur
Summary: Incumbent Lost: 15 ti1nes
Lost
Lost
Lost
Won
MEP
Won: 5 times
-.... ....
Lost
TABLE 3.19 Increase in Voter Volatility
-"-I
:1
ci
""'
0\
0\
Swing
Average
(ibs'1J11"l
t--
....
�
0\
t--
t--
0\
t-0\
r!.
'C
2.8 -3.1 -3.9 2.9
3.2
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;r l l
�
t-0\
....
-9.2 8.2
0C)
0\
....
0C)
0\
0\
J.
0\
....
0C)
5.4 -8.6 -3.0
6.9
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
176 State and Politics in India
swings in voter behaviour have become more extreme and na­
tional and state governments have been voted out with increasing
regularity. The electorate seems to be increasingly dissatisfied
with the government's performance and is constantly looking for
a change. In addition the Indian electorate appears to have ma­
tured over the years in its understanding of the power of the
ballot. The average voter now seems to be more aware that he
has a powerful weapon at his command and is using it more
ruthlessly.
The party system has changed and will continue to change. But
there is a basic regularity in the relation between seats and votes
which appears to remain. What has altered, however, is the dom­
inance of the Congress party: certainly at the state level and
possibly even at the national level. This implies that the IOU will
no longer always refer to parties opposing the Congress. The IOU
should be computed for parties opposing the dominant party in a
state. For example in West Bengal where the CPI (M) is dominant,
the IOU should apply to all parties in opposition to the CPI (M).
Similarly, in Andhra Pradesh, the IOU should be computed for
parties opposing the dominant party in the state, the Telugu
Desam. Whichever party is selected as the dominant party with
the rest as opposition, the basic arithmetic relationships between
swing, IOU and changes in margin of victory are not affected.
The underlying method of translating votes into seats is likely t o
remain valid and, for the time being, it provides a solid basis for
the exercises in forecasting which are described in the next chapter.
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Reconfiguration in Indian
Politics: State Assembly
Elections 1993-1995*
Yogendra Yadav
A
future historian may remember the three rounds of assembly
elections held in sixteen states from November 1993 to
March 1995 as having ushered in a new phase in democratic
politics in India. 1 This is not because they announced with a bang
a completely new kind of politics. On the contrary, the verdict is
far from obvious, shrouded as it is in a series of apparently localized
•This chapter has profited from discussions at the national seminar 'Assembly
Elections and their Political Implications' organized by the Indian Council
of Social Science Research at New Delhi on 9-11 May 1995, and from
presentationsmade at the Centre for Political Srudies,JNU, Centre for Public
Affuirs, Delhi, and at Departments of Political Science of MS University of
Baroda, Pune University and University of Hyderabad. I wish to thank my
colleagues at the Centre for the Srudy ofDeveloping Societies for stimulating
discussions, Rustam for a critical reading and Sanjay, Kanchanji, Himanshu,
and Hila! for helping me with the tables. I am grateful to Manoranjan
Mohanty and Ghanshyam Shah for reminding me of the larger concerns
beyond electoral politics and to Bashiruddin Ahmed and Rajni Kothari for
inspiration and encouragement.
I The sixteen states included in this overview are Himachal Pradesh, Rajas­
than, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Uttar Pradesh (1993); Andhra
Pradesh, Kamatalc.a, Goa, Sikkim (1994); and Gujarat, Maharashtra, Orissa,
Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Bihar (1995). The three north-eastern states
ofNagaland, Meghalaya and Tripura which went to polls in early 1993 have
been excluded from the analysis. This overview also avoids any independent
consideration of the political trajectory of these states and the state-specific
patterns of electoral outcome which I have analysed in a series of articles in
Frontline from November I993 to May I 995.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
178 State and Politics in India
verdicts and the notorious contingencies of routine politics, such
that, at the end of the day, there is no clear winner. Besides, on
the face of it, there is no clear pattern in the messy verdict of this
first major set of elections since the demolition of Bahri masjid,
inauguration of the New Economic Policy and the departure of
the last charismatic leader of the Nehru dynasty. The future,
however, may place these elections in a different light and bring
out the significance denied to us by our proximity. In fact, it might
indicate that without much noise or drama, quietly and almost
casually, these state elections have provided the first full view of
the post-Congress polity. It is a complex picture as compared not
'only to the sweeping electoral waves of the 1970s and 1980s but
also to the uncertain verdicts of the last two general elections. But
that is precisely what makes it cognitively more valuable to a
student ofIndian politics. In other words, what appears like a mess
needs to be recognized as a new pattern. Though it may have to
wait till the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections or a little longer to
be recognized as such, this new pattern holds the key to making
sense of the future ofIndian politics.
While it would be inaccurate to characterize the change as
'realignment', for the Indian electorate has never been aligned
with parties in the classical Western sense, it may also not be
appropriate to see the new pattern either simply as a radicalization
of democracy or as a plain degeneration. The reconfiguration
intensifies the tension between two fundamentally conflicting
tendencies in Indian politics. While the process of democratiza­
tion has advanced further, thanks to higher mobilization and
greater politicization, particularly of the marginal sections, this
democratic upsurge has not been translated effectively into the
institutionalized world of politics. Electoral volatility has opened
up fresh possibilities without leading to transformative politics.
Political parties have expanded their reach but their legitimacy
has been deeply eroded. The consolidation of the party system
at the state level cannot be aggregated at the national level. The
Congress definitely shows signs of a long-term decline at a time
when the task of occupying the middle ground has become im­
possibly difficult. The effective regionalization of the polity has
been accompanied by an equally powerful internal homogeniza­
tion and the creation of a thin, slippery terrain. Radical concerns
find a place in the political discourse but in an exclusivist and
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fragmentary mode. Finally, the second democratic upsurge takes
place at a time when the logic of carrying on democracy without
prosperity is beginning to tell, when economic limits to politics
have got more pronounced and, as a result, the democratic enter­
prise itself faces a serious, if not immediate, threat. If democratic
politics is headed for a crisis, it is a crisis with transformative
potential.
That this pattern should reveal itself in the electoral arena first
is hardly surprising. Over the last two decades, elections have
acquired a political salience they did not have in the first phase
of democratic politics in India. As all the institutions which
mediated between political power and the people have collapsed
one after another, the institution of elections continues to be one
of the few bridges available for political traffic. Consequently, all
the political aspirations, demands and competing claims to power
must be mediated through the mechanism of elections; the pro­
cess and the outcome of elections are one of the few reliable
indicators available to a student of politics today to read public
opinion and to measure other changes in the larger environs of
politics. Needless to say, elections are not a mirror of political
reality. As a representational device, elections are better compared
is 'out there', but
to a camera:
. in a sense it merely records what
.
it all depends on who holds it, in which direction and with what
focus. Like aesthetic representation, mechanisms of selectivity,
erasure and highlighting are inevitably at work in political rep­
resentation. And what is more, like a camera, elections go much
beyond recording the political reality; in a way, they create a
reality of their own in that life is led for the sake of representation.
Something of that is true of contemporary India, thanks to the
new role elections have come to play in political life. The outcome
of rpe state assembly elections, 1993-5, can be used to trace the
outlines of a new phase in democratic politics, provided we view
it i n a framework sensitive to the complexities of the relationship
between elections and politics.2
Although a good deal of the reluctance of a whole generation of Indian
political scientists to study elections can be explained by a sociology of
academic knowledge (accidents of academic socialization,political correctness
or simply the fear of numbers), there is a genuine intellectual basis for this
reserve.
2
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180 State and Politics in India
Second Democratic Upsurge?
The beginning of a new phase in democratic politics is often
marked by a spurt in political participation and the intensification
of the citizen's involvement in politics. In the case of the elections
under discussion, however, higher participation and more intense
politicization points to much more than a change in political
season: it attests to some of the deeper continuities in India's
democratic career. Here is evidence that the democratic revolution
inaugurated on the basis of universal adult franchise more than
four decades ago is still on, that the mechanism of competitive
politics still retains its dynamism and its capacity to draw out newer
sectors and sections in a society which has historically lacked a
political centre, that notwithstanding the media folklore of an
apathetic, indifferent and apolitical public, politicization continues
to be a defining feature of the constitution of public arena in
contemporary India, and that a continuously expanding circle of
participants in politics, rather than a progressively radical political
agenda, continues to be the predominant mode of democratization
today.
At the same time this trend also serves to remind us of some
of the discontinuities and the resultant dilemmas and dangers
confronting democratization. While there is undoubtedly some­
thing to celebrate about greater electoral participation, the en­
thusiasm needs to be moderated by the recognition that over the
years, electoral participation has come to stand for political par­
ticipation in a way it never did before, that the increasing salience
The routinization of election research by run-of-the-mill election studies
which followed the first generation of vigorous and sensitive survey research
evoked a peculiar response among Indian political scientists: critique of nar­
rowly focused, badly executed and poorly theorized election studies turned
into a critique of election studies as such. Instead of a creative confrontation
of various approaches to the study of the phenomenon o f election, the debate
turned into a rather gross opposition between those who would and those
who would not study elections. Any study of elections came to be associated
with borrowed jargon, mindless use of statistics, spurious fieldwork and
irrelevance, not to speak of political conservatism. The disasttous consequen­
ces this association had both for election studies and the understanding of
Indian politics are amply evident in post-1971 literature (if we dare a study
not by the time of its publication but by the election it studied). The present
chapter is based on the conviction that students of Indian democracy need
to revitalize and, at the same time, reorient the study of electoral politics.
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att2ched to the act of voting as the privileged symbol or the .
defming moment of citizenship is not unrelated to a slide towards
its becoming a momentary symbol, and that the crowding of the
arena of electoral contestation is at least partly due to the shrinking
institutional space for non-electoral modes of efficacious political
activity.
TABLE4.l Participation Trends in Major Assembly
Elections 1952-1995
Year of
Election
States
1952
1957
1960-2
1967
1971-2
19-77-8
1979-80
1984-5
1989-90
1993-5
22
13
15
20
21
24
16
18
18
16
Total Turnout
Total
Seats (per cent) Contestants
3283
2906
3196
3487
3131
3723
2589
3131
3028
2770
45
48
58
61
60
59
54
58
60
64
15,361
10,176
13,665
16,507
13,768
22,396
17,826
26,963
35,187
40 773
Contestants
e_er Seat
Total lndee_endents
4.7
3.5
4.3
4.7
4.4
6.0
6.9
8.6
11.6
14.7
1.9
1.4
1.3
1.9
1.6
2.2
3.2
5.4
7.0
9.1
A 'major' round of assembly elections is denned here as one which
involved, within a year or two, elections to at least 2000 assembly
constituencies.
Source: Up to 1979-80, from V.B. Singh and Shanlcar Bose, Sutt Elections
in Jndu,: D11t11 Htmdbook on Vidbtm Sabha Ekctions, 19$2-8$ (New
Delhi: Sage, 1987), vol. I, p. 14; the rest compiled by CSDS Data
Unit.
Nott:
First, a look at gross figures at the aggregate level. It is, of
course, easy to over-read into figures, but for students of Indian
politics this professional hazard is less of a danger at the moment
than the ridiculous fate of missing altogether the simple message
of some basic data which stare in their face. Time series data of
voters' turnout and the number of candidates in state assembly
elections over the last four decades presented in Table 4.1 clearly
show an upward secular trend. In both these respects the 1993-5
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182 State and Politics in India
elections represent a new peak. Although the 60 per cent turnout
mark was crossed as early as in 1967, the average turnout in all
the major rounds of assembly elections (involving elections in at
least 2000 assembly constituencies) hovered around 60 per cent
with the exception of post-:Janata disillusionment when it touched
54 per cent. An average of more than 64 per cent in these elections
indicates a decisive break with that somewhat stagnant level. It
means an increase of 4 per cent over the previous round of
assembly elections held in 1989-90, not to mention a sizeable 9
per cent increase over the 1991 Lok Sabha elections. The nwnber
of candidates has risen more steadily over the decades, though
here again there is a marked acceleration in the 1990s. Beginning
with a flat decadal growth rate of about one candidate per con­
stituency, reflecting a steady intensification of electoral contests,
it starts jumping by leaps and bounds around the mid-l 980s. The
1993-5 rounds have continued this upward trend in the nwnber
of contestants, taking it past fourteen per seat, and a larger share
of independents in it. If the 1960s were characterized by the first
democratic upsurge, the 1990s are witnessing the second demo­
cratic upsurge in post-Independence India.
At a disaggregate level, however, the deceptive simplicity of this
picture gives way to complex and difficult questions about the
meanings embedded in this upsurge. A glance through 'fable 4.2,
which presents the turnout figures at the state level over the last
three assembly elections, brings out various aspects of a complex
picture. First of all, the increase in participation is quite widespread
without being uniform. Except a very marginal fall in Bihar which
had already experienced a significant increase in the previous
elections, every state registered a noticeably higher turnout. Every
state has its own pace and timing, but their trajectories do not
appear to be moving in different directions. This round of elec­
tions saw Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and, of
course, Uttar Pradesh 'catch up' with the participation rate in the
rest of the country; consequently, they contributed much more to
the average growth rate of 4 per cent than the rest.
Once we tum to accounting for the observed variations in
turnout, the limitations of some of the obvious hypotheses and
data available to us become clear. Neither the level of turnout
reached in different states in this election nor the differential rate
of increase in turnout lends itself to a neat explanation. If the rise
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TABLE4.2 Percentage Turnout in Assembly
Elections 1984-1995
States
Andhra Pradesh
Arunachal Pradesh
1984-5
Uttar Pradesh
66.7
76.3
55.l
55.6
47.7
71.9
69.6
66.3
48.6
87.3
58.3
70.6
51.4
54.0
62.6
44.8
Total
55.3
Bihar
Delhi
Gujarat
Goa
Himachal Pradesh
Kamataka
Madhya Pradesh
Manipur .
Maharashtra
Mizoram
Orissa
Rajasthan
Sildcim
1989-90 1993-5
lntrtast
67.6
68.9
62.2
54.3
51.l
68.7
66.7
63.8
52.8
80.6
61.l
80.4
55.5
56.S
69.5
48.5
71.l
81.4
61.8
61.8
64.7
71.7
71.7
68.8
59.0
88.8
72.0
80.8
73.8
60.6
81.0
57.1
13.6
3.0
5.0
5.0
6.2
8.2
10.9
0.4
18.3
4. I
11.5
8.6
60.3
64.2
3.9
3.5
12.3
--0.4
Notes:
1. Table en{ries in the last column arc fur pcrcent2ge increase in
turnout in the 1993-S assembly election as compared to the previous
usembly election in 1989-90.
2. Table entties fur 1984 and 1989 in the case ofDelhi are for turnout
in Lok Sabha elections; Delhi did not have an asseinbly then.
3. Turnout in the 1991 election to UP assembly was 47.l per cent.
Sount: CSDS Dat2 Unit.
to power of
a new political force representing a new social con­
stituency explains the massive mobilization ·in Maharashtra, Uttar
Pradesh and Sikkim, it doesn't quite apply to the routine alterna­
tion in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. The closely contested nature
of elections may account for higher mobilization in Orissa, but
Rajasthan did not experience it under similar conditions. Besides,
the completely one-sided verdicts in Himachal and Aodhra re­
corded a similarly high level of electoral participation. Something
of the intensity which struggles over extension of suffrage have
historically generated, can be found in today's India in Bihar and
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184 State 11nd Politics in India
Uttar Pradesh along with Sikkim in a manifest form. Perhaps the
same process is at work in a latent manner in the rest of India
barring the southern states where the political rise of backward
castes has already been accomplished. It may be hypothesized
therefore that the fundamental force which has given rise to the
second democratic upsurge is the enfranchisement of the backward
castes. One must hasten to add that this process of enfranchise­
ment takes different political routes in different states; it is not
just that the logic has worked itself out to varying stages in dif­
ferent states but that different states have a somewhat autonomous
logic,
. depending upon the specificity of their political con&guranon.
In the absence of longitudinal survey data on patterns of in­
dividual participation by social background, it is difficult to verify
this understanding. But a quick examination of the intra-state
variations in turnout partly supports it. Practically everywhere
rural constituencies report a higher turnout (8, IO and 17 per cent
higher i n Gujarat, UP and Maharashtra, respectively) than urban
constituencies. The popular impression of a higher Muslim rur­
nout is not borne out by an examination of turnout in constituen­
cies with higher concentration of Muslim votes. The reserved (SC)
constituencies generally recorded a lower turnout than the rest,
but it need not reflect patterns of dalit participation; in all prob­
ability i t is an outcome of the lower intensity and enthusiasm of
non-dalit voters i n. these constituencies. On the other hand, the
reserved (ST) constituencies, which are invariably areas with con­
centration of tribal population, recorded higher than average rur­
nout in Andhra, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Some backward regions
like Vidarbha and Marathwada in Maharashtra, east Delhi and
Bundelkhand in UP recorded a higher than average turnout. But
the evidence on this score is equivocal. Other backward regions
like Vindhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in MP and Poorvanchal
in UP reported lower turnout; Telengana in AP and western
Orissa reported average turnout. In sum, it is not just backward­
ness but its effective politicization or otherwise which seems to
make the crucial difference. This, rather mixed evidence, is in­
sufficient to support the hypothesis about the relationship between
the enfranchisement of backward castes and the rise in turnout
What it does reaffirm is India's difference from the stereotypical
Western models of political participation, and that India's path to
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democratization lies through an effective politicization of pen.:
pheries, both spatial and social.
TABLE 4.3 Contestmts Per Seat in Assembly
Elections 1984-1995
States
Andhra Pradesh
Arunachal Pradesh
Bihar
Delhi
Gujarat
Goa
Himachal Pradesh
Karnatab
Madhya Pradesh
Manipur
Maharashtra
Mizoram
Orissa
1984-5
6.7
3.8
13.0
6.2
8.0
4.3
8.0
7.6
6.0
7.7
4.5
5.4
7.5
Rajastlµn
Sikkim
6.0
14.0
Total
8.6
Uttar Pradesh
1989-90
5.7
1993-5
10.9
2.9
24.9
18.8
13.9
2.8
20.0
10.3
6.3
7.7
6.6
9.1
13.1
4.1
13.0
4.0
6.2
15.4
6.1
11.1
11.4
5.6
16.4
3.0
9.6
12.1
3.6
5.8
14.4
23.0
11.7
14.7
Notes:
1. Delhi did not have assembly elections during 1984-5 and 1989-90.
2. The number of contestlnts per seat in Uttar Pradesh assembly
election, 1991, was 18.S.
Suuru:
CSDS Data Unit.
The disaggregated figures on the number of candidates per
constituency by states (fable 4.3) are relatively easy to explain,
partly because the level of differentiation is much higher in this
case than in turnout. Here again, the general tendency is towards
greater number of candidates with the passage of time. But the
rate of growth and the current level vary from state to state,
depending mainly on th_e'party system. Arunachal Pradesh still
exhibits the low and stagnant level associated with one-party dom­
inance. States-. which have reached or are. close to a two-party
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186 Suzte and Politics in India
system occupy the middle ground with an average of a little over
10 candidates. The general trend is towards a higher nwnber,
though a consolidation of two-party system in Rajasthan,
Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh was accompanied by a
reduction in the nwnber of contestants in the 1993 elections. The
fragmented party systems of UP and Bihar stand out as exceptions
and largely account for the two outliers with an average of 2 3 and
24.9 candidates per constituency, respectively, which considerably
affect the national average. Besides party fragmentation, the entry
of the OBCs on the centre stage of politics also contributes to the
sudden rise in the number of contestants.
Making sense ofhigher electoral participation in this new phase
of democratic politics remains an intellectual challenge which
students of Indian politics are yet to take up. It would take con­
siderable research effort, both quantitative and qualitative, to ex­
plain the overall trend and its internal variations. The preliminary
observations offered here are by way of drawing attention to this
phenomenon. What needs much more attention though, than
simply analysing the figures, is the question of significance of this
trend for the polity. That is directly related to the terrain of
meanings embedded in the act of participation, electoral or other­
wise, which calls for political research informed by anthropological
techniques.
But some points can be made straight away. First, electoral
participation reflects more enthusiasm and involvement in the
polity on the part of the common citizen than the English press
and its academics would have us believe. Second, the degree of
intensity varies from state to state, depending upon the range of
political choices which confront the electorate. A higher turnout
in Orissa does not necessarily mean a more intense involvement
than, say, Bihar. A better predictor of the level of involvement,
thirdly, is the social community. Political participation is still
mediated by communitarian identities and reflects something of
the cleavage between the mobilized and the hitherto unincor­
porated communities. The contestation for power between these
two types of communities in the electoral arena continues to draw
citizens' deeper sense of the self in the act of political participation.
For the millions .of slum- and unauthorized colony-dwellers in
Delhi, sections of dalits and Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, OBCs in
Bihar and, to some extent; in Maharashtra and Sikkim, it was not
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an ordinary election this time; at stake were not just their material
interests
. but their identity and dignity and, in some cases, th�ir
very ClDStCDCC.
Fourth, while greater participation and involvement does in­
dicate a higher level of politicization, it does not necessarily mean
a corresponding increase in the citizen's commitment to and trust
in the political order. The simultaneity of involvement and aliena­
tion which has characterized the Indian electorate3 has been
further accentuated in the 1990s. And what is more, this alienation
does not result from traditional cynicism towards governmental
authority (contra Eldersvcld and Ahmed); it is fumJy rooted in
the experience of post-Independence politics. Finally, it is now
clear that it does not make sense to read the meanings involved
in electoral participation through the tradition/modernity dicho­
tomy. Greater participation is definitely not a sign of modern­
ization, for its reasons are anything but modem. Nor is it b y any
means a traditional response. The state assembly elections have
taken the Indian polity a step further in the effective creolization
of the modem ideas, ideals and institutions of democratic politics
in a non-European setting.
• The consequences of this upsurge in participation for the
process of democratization need to be understood in their com­
plexity. Surely, greater participation is good news for the vitality
of the processes of democratization; it does show that these
processes still retain their dynamic capacity to mobilize citizens,
especially the hitheno unincorporated sections. By drawing more
people and politicizing them, the electoral mechanism does pro­
vide a base for radicalization of democracy; it also creates neces­
sary, though insufficient, conditions for the forging of political
cleavages which cut across social cleavages and thus contribute
to democratic consolidation.
However, participation in a democratic process does not by
itself lead towards participatory democracy. It all depends on what
kinds of meanings the new participants bring with them and
whether this influx can be institutionalized. In this respect the
signals from the assembly elections of 1993-5 seem ambivalent.
Since the participatory urge in this instance arose mainly out of
3 This phenomenon was fust recognized and
theorized by Samuel Eldersveld
and Bashiruddin Ahmed in Citiuns 1111d Politics: Mass Politi",/ Bthtr11ior1r in
lnditJ (Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 1978), pp. 214-16.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
188 State and Politics in India
partisan allegiance, it may not result in a higher level of support
for the democratic order. Especially in the case of new entrants,
the act of participation is inextricably tied to specific expectations.
More often than not, these expectations are linked to cultural
codes which do not jell with the norms of the existing democratic
institutions. Consequently, the recent participatory upsurge can
further intensify the serious problem of institutional consolidation
of democracy. In this sense the second democratic upsurge throws
up a challenge to the future of democratization - a challenge
arising not from the failure of democratic enterprise to take off,
but from its continuous, if partial, success.
Electoral Volatility or Transformative Politics?
The most visible outcome of the assembly elections of 1993-5 is
the large-scale change in governments at the state level. With the
minor exceptions of Arunachal Pradesh, Goa and Rajasthan and the
major exception of Bihar, all the states witnessed the defeat of the
ruling party at the polls. 'Vote against incumbent' by an angry,
volatile electorate suggests itself as an explanation of the outcome.
Even Goa and Rajasthan do not appear to be serious exceptions,
for the ruling parties nearly lost the elections; at any rate a massive
turnover of elites characterized these cases of governmental sta­
bility. It would seem, therefore, that Indian politics has reached a
critical phase characterized by an increasingly volatile electorate
and a party system in advanced stages of decomposition.
The state-wise figures of Pedersen's Volatility index in the last
three elections reported in Table 4.4 provide some reason to
qualify such an alarming picture. On an average, the aggregate
vote swing between 1993-5 assembly elections and the previous
elections held mostly in 1989-90 revolves around 15 per cent.
Compared to Westem democracies, where the process of bind­
i n g -i n -over-long-time of partisan loyalties has resulted in a cr y s ­
tallization of party system, the level of volatility is bound to appear
rather high.4 However, the experierrce of four decades of electoral
Dalton, Back and Flanagan report an average of 8.7 per cent volatility for
seventeen advanced industrial democracies for the period 1970-7. Russel J.
Dalton, Scott C. Flanagan and Paul Allen Beck (eds), Eltmral Cbtmgt in
AdvtmetdIndustrial Dnnocrll<its: RtalignmmturDealignmmt? (Princeton: Prin­
ceton University Press, 1984), p. 10.
4
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TABLE 4.4 Volatility in Assembly Elections 1980-1995
1980-5
1990-5
Orissa
Rajasthan
Sikkim
Uttar Pradesh
4.2
30.5
13. l
6.0
58.3
13.3
11.4
6.0
27.2
9.5
20.5
31.0
9.3
63.7
12.1
1985-90
Total
21.0
29.7
18.5
States
Andhra Pradesh
Anmachal Pradesh
Bihar
Gujarat
Goa
Himachal Pradesh
Karnatab
Madhya Pradesh
Manipur
Maharkhtra
Mizoram
12.6
28.5
24.9
43.7
24.6
23.1
35.3
20.1
48.5
34.4
37.1
54.9
19.6
16.6
21.9
13.9
15.6
15.4
26.8
19.5
15.1
24.0
11.6
13.1
13.9
11.2
24.6
18.1
44.2
10.8
Notes:
1. Table entries are for Pedersen's Volatility Index. Tiiis simple meas­
ure of aggregate volatility is the sum of cwnulative per cent gains
in vote share of all the parties which have improved their perfo�
mance as compared to the previous elections, plus the vote share of
new parties, if any. The three columns present the scores for 19845, 1989-90 and 1993-5 assembly elections, respectively as compared
to the previous election in that state.
2. Table entry for Uttar Pradesh in the third column stands for 19913; the relevant score for 1989-91 is 32.5.
3. Average stands here for simple mean and is therefore subject to
undue influence of extreme values of very small states like Goa and
Sikkim.
Sourc�: Computed from data at CSDS Data Unit.
politics in India is enough to demonstrate the inappropriateness
of this yardstick which cannot but discover India in a state of
perpetual pre-alignment. It may be analytically more rewarding
to give up this teleological expectation in favour of a model which
takes continuous volatility as the structural attribute of competitive
politics in the Indian context. Electoral volatility is but another
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190 State and Politics in India
name for a continuously open-ended negotiation by the citizens
with the organized vehicles of politics. The stubborn refusal of
the Indian voter to live up to models of 'political learning' by
developing rigid partisan loyalties is not just a potential malady;
it is also the potential source of transformativc politics.
Viewed in this light, the level of electoral volatility in the recent
assembly elections is neither very high nor alarming. What is
distinctive about the 1993-5 assembly elections, in fact, is a reduc­
tion in electoral volatility and the stabilu.ation of its pattern. Except
for Sikkim and Andhra Pradesh, the level of aggregate volatility
between 1980-90 and 1993-5 is lower than between 1985 and
1989-90 in all the states which went to polls this time. The swing
between 1980 to 1985 was much lower in several cases, but the
pattern of 1993-5 is more evenly spread acr� different states. If
it is useful to mark significant electoral shifts in India with the label
'critical elections', the assembly elections of 1989-90 are surely a
better candidate for it than those of I 993-5. The turn of the decade
brought in a new political configuration in much of the Hindi
heartland and western India. The long-term effect of the recent
assembly elections would be to consolidate the trend, modify its
direction and translate it into a new pattern of government control.
Since the aggregate measure employed here does not permit any
robust inference about individual or sectional volatility, the im­
plications of this phenomenon for the future of democratization
remain less than clear. It is possible, on the one hand, that the
moderate level of aggregate volatility conceals a massive vote
switching by citizens and communities. On the other hand, the
available indirect evidence about India's recent electoral past sug­
gests that the volatility is much less than it appears, since much of
it is accounted for by the young and the newly mobilized voters
opting for the party of change.5 On current evidence, there are very
few reasons to believe that the aggregate figures are completely off
the mark in measuring vote-switching. Nor does a shift in voting
S For� thesis see, William G. Vanderbok, 'Critical Elections. Contained
Volatility and the Indian Electorate', in Richard Sisson and Ramashray Roy
(eds), Divtnity tmdDominanct m Indian Politics, Vol I: Changing Basa ofCongrm
Support (New Delhi: Sage, 1990). For an insightful analysis of electoral
volatility see, Claus Orum Mogensen, 'Political Disordei:.and Electoral Vol­
atility i n India: An Ecological Study of Eight National Elections, 1957-89',
unpublished MA dissert:ition,Institute for Statskundskab, Aarhus University,
Denmark, 1994.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The lnstitutiuns 191
habit appear to be a ficlde decision for the Indian voter. Over the
years, the proportion of sophisticated voting has registered an
increase. To that extent the phenomenon of electoral volatility
continues to carry the seeds of transformative politics, notwith­
standing the complete non-realization of this possibility today.
Post-Congress Polity?
Whether the possibilities of transformative politics opened by the
democratic upsurge and electoral volatility get reali:zed would
depend upon how these changes are processed through the ap­
paratus of organi:zed politics, namely political parties. In this
respect the assembly elections of 1993-5 have ushered in a new
era in Indian politics. These elections mark the beginning of the
third phase in the reconfigura tion of the pattern of party competi­
tion or, to use the old-fashioned jargon, the party system.
The first phase of the famous 'Congress system' characterized
by single-party dominance, lasted the fust two decades after In­
dependence. It was the big Congress versus small and fragmented
forces of the opposition at the state as well as the national level.
Congress successfully defied Duverger's law - which expected a
two-party system to emerge in a plurality electoral system - by
incorporating political competition and consociational arrange­
ments within its boundaries and yet holding it together through
a delicate management of factions. The second phase, let us call
it the 'Congress-Opposition system', was still characterized by
one-party salience, though no longer dominance, of the Congress.
Beginning of the plebiscitary mode of electoral politics saw the
emergence of genuine competition to the Congress, both at the
state and at the national level, often aided by electoral waves.
Despite remaining out of power very often, the Congress retained
a salience in the party system not only because it continued to
command greater popular support than any opposition party, but
also because it was the core around which the party system was
structured. This phase saw the emergence ofbipolar consolidation
in various states without yielding a b�larity at the national level.
This system of'multiple bipolarities' was structured in such a way
phrase from E. Sridhann who was kind enough to share his
unpublished research and insights with me.
6 I borrow this
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
192 State and Politics in India
that Congress was the only common factor across different pat­
terns of bipolarity in different states.
The third phase inaugurated by the state assembly elections o f
1993-5 has decisively brought to an end the dominant multi-party
system of the previous era. It definitely signals a move towards a
competitive multi-party system which can no longer be defined
with reference to the Congress. It may as yet be too early to expect
a fully worked out picture of what the post-Congress system would
look like. However, some of its features may be noted with refer­
ence to the recent assembly elections.
First, it marks the near completion of the process of bipolar
consolidation all over the country. Most of the southern and the
eastern states had already entered the era of two-party competi­
tions. These elections extended it to Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maha­
rashtra and Sikkim, either by eliminating the minor forces in a
hitherto multi-party system, or by throwing up a second party in
a hitherto single-party dominant system. These elections were
also marked by an intensification of political competition among
the leading parties, whether in bipolar or multipolar competitions.
It must be added, however, that the move towards bipolarity is
never fully realized. There is a tendency, wimessed for instance
in Andhra Pradesh, for the two leading parties to slip back
somewhat in terms of the space they jointly occupied. In this
sense, state politics in India is likely to both promise and frustrate
.. the realization of Duverger's law.
The data presented in Table 4.5 shows the rather high level of
fractionalization in most of the states despite the bipolar consolida­
tion. States like Bihar, Manipur and Uttar Pradesh fall in the
category of multi-party systems tending towards atomization. The
entry of the BJP in Kamataka and SDF in Sikkim has contributed
to a sudden jump in fractionalization score, while Orissa has
experienced it without any new entrant. Andhra Pradesh, Delhi,
Himachal, MP, Rajasthan and Sikkim continue to be comfortably
bipolar.
Second, the outcome of these elections makes the consolidation
of bipolarity at the state level to add up to anything like a two-party
system at the national level more improbable than ever before.
The multiple bipolarity in the previous phase at least had Congress
as a common factor. The assembly electio� of 1993-5 have
removed even that. With the effective marginalization of the
-
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The lnrtitutions 193
TABLE4.5 Party Fractionalization in
Assembly Elections 1985-1995
States
Andhra Pradesh
Anmachal Pradesh
1984-5
.644
Bihar
Delhi
Goa
Gujarat
Himachal Pradesh
Karnataka
Madhya J>radesh
Maharashtra
Manipur
.804
.631
.598
.639
.652
.768
Rajasthan
.835
.643
.721
Sikkim
Uttar Pradesh
.789
Mizoram
Orissa
.555
1989-90
.641
.698
.851
.684
.746
.678
.707
.724
.801
.790
.621
.777
.476
.810
1993-5
.691
.716
.869
.674
.843
.711
.630
.777
.677
.855
.825
.726
.712
.699
.677
.807
Nata:
1. Table entries are for Rae's Fractionalization Index measured by
summating the square of decimal vote share of each party and then
subtracting the value obtained by 1. The closer the scores are to
1.0, the higher the party fnctionalization and vice versa. Since this
index docs not recognize party alliances, it shows higher fnctional­
ization than exists on the ground in a state like Maharashtra.
2. Blank entries arc for states where there was no assembly election
or the data is not available.
Source: Computed from data at CSDS Data Unit.
Congress from the real arena of electoral competition in UP and
Bihar, the two largest states, these elections have begun an ap­
parently irreversible process of the reconfiguration of party sys­
tem. To be sure, it continues to be a case of multiple bipolarities,
i.e. the existence of two-party systems at the state level, the diver­
sity ofwhich collates to give the appearance of a multi-party system
at the qational level. It is more fragmented than before, but it is
not the kind of fractionalization which is bound to result in
atomization.
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194 St11te tmd Politia in India
Third, with the Congress gradually vacating the central posi­
tion (both in th e sense of occupying and denning the middle
ground and being most prominent) there is likely to be a vacuum
in the party system·at the national level. It is becoming more and
more difficult and slippery to occupy the middle space in national
politics. The Co11gress could do so earlier by constandy negotiat­
ing with the median points of the various ideological and social
cleavages which divide Indian society, in order to make them
coincide. In the last decade or so, the changes in the discursive
terrain of these cleavages have resulted in the drifting apart of the
various median points, making it more difficult than ever before
to forge a correspondence required to be located i n the centre of
emerging political configuration.
Fourth, the decline of a dominant, centrist, catch-all party
which retained its pre-eminence through cross-sectional mobiliza­
tion, had already started ·resulting in the rise of exclusivist parties
with sectional political agendas. Situated on the peripheries of the
party system, parties like the BSP are an outcome of the Congress's
diminishing appeal across all sections of the society. Some of these
may only prove 'flash parties' and might disappear as quickly as
they emerged, but some of them are here to stay. Ironically, most
of these political formations, which serve as instruments of demo­
cratization of society in favour of the hitherto disenfranchised
sections, are themselves completely undemocratic in their or­
ganizational set-up as well as style of functioning.
Finally, the above-mentioned features of the emerging con­
figuration of party formations need to be viewed against the baclc­
dr�p of the serious erosion of parties as organized vehicles of
politics. The erosion is taking place from within as well as from
without.There are indications that the well-known collapse of the
organizational structure of the Congress is being replicated in that
of its rivals as a result of the very logic of occupying the middle
ground of politics.
A near identification of parties with elections, their increasing
inability to setde competing claims to power at the time of nom­
inations, and their inability to maintain an organic relationship
with the electorate are some of the tendencies which cut across
the political spectrum today and have been intensified in the recent
past. This form of internal collapse contributes to and is in turn
reinforced by the growing loss of legitimacy and trust in the parties
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The l'llltitutions 195
among the citizens. Over the last decade or more, this intense
dissatisfaction with political parties has taken the fonn of with­
drawal among some sections of society, from the arena of electoral
politics in favour of social and non-party political movements. The
assembly elections of 1993-5 illustrated various consequences of
this withdrawal ranging from middle class cynicism to attempts at
forging a political alternative to the established political parties,
None of the latter came anywhere close to crossing the minimum
threshold of popular support required in the plurality system.
However, its effects on the institutionalization of the party system
should not be overlooked. The Indian party system is undergoing
institutionalization and de-institutionalization simult1neously. On
the one hand, the reach of the parties has increased and their
capacity to draw allegiance expanded at the expense of non-party
competitors. On the other hand, the depth or the intensity of the
allegiance has been very sharply undermined, reducing the act of
voting for parties to an instrumental moment.
Viewed in this perspective, the apparently messy and localized
character of the electoral outcome of 1993-5 begins to make sense
and the infinite details of the performance of various parties yield
something of a pattern. The summary description of electoral
outcome in all these states presented in Table 4.6 brings out some
of the broader patterns.
It is a useful index, first of all, of the decline of the Congress.
Notwithstanding its limited electoral success in those states, like
Orissa, MP and Himachal, where there was no other alternative
to a very unpopular and arbitrary regime, the electoral outcome
has only confirmed the suspicion that a long-term decline of the
Congress has begun. Its performance in these election-: cannot be
described merely as a series of electoral defeats; there are several
reasons to believe that what the Congress faces is a deep and
enduring erosion in its support base. To begin with the most
obvious, not only did the Congress lose power in many states, it
has been relegated to the rank of the third party in the assemblies
of UP, Bihar and Kamataka. At least in UP and Bihar the Congress
may not count any more in deciding the way electoral battle lines
are drawn. Second, its share of popular vote has suffered a serious
erosion. Taking all the sixteen states into account, its vote share
fails to touch the 30 per cent mark. In aggregate terms it means
a decl(ne of 7 per cent votes as compared to Congress votes in
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TABLE 4.6 Vote Share by Parties in Assembly Elections 1993-1995
St11tes
INC
IJ']P
JD
Andhra Pradesh
Anmachal Pradesh
Bihar
Delhi
Gujarat
Goa
Himachal Pradesh
Karnataka
Madhya Pradesh
Manipur
Maharashtra
Mizoram
Orissa
32.3
50.6
16.5
34.4
32.7
37.6
49.4
27.3
40.7
30.1
31.0
33.1
39.4
38.7
15.0
15.1
28.3
3.8
3.4
13.1
42.8
42.5
9.0
36.1
16.7
38.8
3.7
12.8
3.1
7.9
38.6
0.2
33.3
22.5
0.1
17.3
27.6
12.7
2.8
2.8
2.2
4.9
0.2
1. 5
0.4
1.1
33.2
3.9
12.1
6.0
1.1
0.2
1.0
35.4
6.9
1.7
0.2
12.3
13.1
0.6
1.5
,5
"'
"
-<
0.
CJ
C
z
<
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� .ii
-"·
,, -�
Rajasthan
-
-
-
CPI CPM BSP St11tt
-
-
5,6
0.3
-
-
-
0.8
0.5
0.3
0.2
0.9
-
0.7
1.0
0.2
0.5
1.0
Pta,t, 1
1.3 TOP
- JP
1.3 SP
1.9 SP
-
MGP
-
1.4
2.2
1.0 KCP
6.8 SP
-
MPP
1.4 SHS
-
MNF
0.5 JMM
0.4 SP
- SDF
10.7 SP
Voter St11tt
Voter IND
0TH
.
Pta,ty 2
42.2
2.5
6.8 JMMS
0.5
-
22.2 UGDP
- -
7.1
0.6
23.7
16.6
40.4
2.0
0.1
42.0
18.1
-
3.7
8.3
-
KRRS
-
2.6
FPM
BRP
SJP
-
6.1
2.9
-
SSP
-
1.4
-
35.2
6.3
26.2
14.0
6.0
19.3
14.0
9.2
7.0
5.9
5 .1
22.0
23.4
10.1
12.9
5.9
6.9
9.0
9.0
0.0
10.6
2.6
2.7
7.5
3.3
4.4
4.3
13.4
6.1
0.9
5.2
1.5
9.5
-;;: g
Sikkim
Uttar Pradesh
Total
z
Sormt: Data available at CSDS Data Unit, based on constituency-wise election results released by the chief election officer of
0'!!.
�
::i:
-
-
-
-
-
-
the concerned states.
196
The Institutions 197
these states in the 1991 Lok Sabha elections. Even after allowing
for the usual fragmentation of votes of a national party in the
assembly elections, the swing is of a serious order. In Bihar and
UP its vote share has fallen well below the 20 per cent mark and
in Karnataka and Sikkim below the 30 per cent mark. In these
states, the Congress stands at the receiving end of the logic of
plurality system which might further hasten its decline. The third
evidence of Congress decline comes from the fall in the Congress's
success in retaining its own seats. This fall has taken place even
in a state like Madhya Pradesh where the Congress otherwise did
well in the elections.
Apart from statistics of electoral outcome, there is a lot more
to substantiate the hypothesis about the decline of the Congress.
An average Congress vote is more 'shallow' than before in that it
is not backed by a deep conviction or loyalty; quite often it is a
reluctant vote open to shift in the near future. Besides, the erosion
of support for the Congress among the Muslims is quite evident
by now. The available evidence from academic surveys in Bihar
and Maharashtra substantiates the view that given an effective
choice (and in some cases even in its absence) the Muslim voters
would rather choose any party but the Congress. The evidence
about tribal and dalit votes is still unclear. The popular impression
tends to underestimate the resilience of the Congress among these
marginal sections.
These elections also demonstrated the Congress's loss of institu­
tionalized will to power which had characterized its days of dom­
inance in Indian politics. Consequently it has lost the drive even to
win the elections. Its failure to subordinate familial considerations
to winnability at the time of selection of candidates, its meek
acceptance of institutionalized rebellion and its failure to manage
factions are various manifestations of the loss of institutionalized
will to power (not to be confused with personal ambitions). Though
it is difficult to predict the trajectory of Congress decline in the
short run, it is absolutely clear that the Congress would do much
worse in the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections than it did in 1991.
With some risk, it can also be predicted that the Congress is headed
for its lowest ever vote share in any general election to the Lok
Sabha. What remains to be seen is how its votes translate in terms
of parliamentary seats. As far as the medium and the long run is
concerned, there does not seem to be much hope for the Congress.
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198 St11te and Politia in India
Shon of miraculous reinvention, there is no W2}' the existing Con­
gress can serve as a vehicle for the enfranchisement of backward
castes or the recent democratic upsurge. A failure in this respect
spells doom for a party in the times to come. I t is not that the
Congaess will disappear overnight or that it will disappear at all; but
it may tum into just another party, one among many.
Such a possibility immediately raises the question of alrematives.
The eleaoral outcome of 1993-5 does throw some light on popular.
support of various non-Congress parties, though it is too early to
talk about their long-term pro,,peus. Of these, the BJP's perfor­
mance bas been watched most keenly and has aroused some con­
troversy, not bcc:mse the evidence is equivocal but because the
interpreters are narrowly partisan. On balance it is clear that al­
though the BJP's apparendy inevitable march to power has slowed
down and has suffered many upsets, it has not quire been reversed.
During the 1993-5 elections the BJP has consolidated its dramatic
gains in 1989 and 1991 parliamentuy elections, despire a marginal
loss of l per cent between 1991 and 1993-5 in these states. With
the benefit of hindsight, it is better to see the BJP's defeat in
Himachal, MP and UP as a point-er to the limits of the non-political
route to power rather than a final rejection of the BJP.
Currently the BJP shows many signs of a party on the rise. In
the course of the 1993-5 elections it spread out to newer areas
(north R.ajasthan, west UP, Marathwada and south Gujarat, to
mention a few), newer segments of society (Sikhs in Delhi, QBCs
in UP and Maharashtra, tribals in Gujarat and R.ajasthao) and
strengthened its support base among the youth. In the short-term
future, the BJP is likely to make further gains within the limits set
by the absence of its effectivepolitical reach in the coastal belt from
Kerala to West Bengal. But its coming to power at the centre would
be conditional upon its overcoming this limitation and thus con­
verting a large nwnber of its potential supporters into actual voters.
It also needs to successfully internalize the social cleavages of Indian
society and transform its organization significantly to channelize
the recent democratic upsurge. These are difficult tasks. The politi­
cal developments of the last year have shown that despite possessing
an institutionalized political ambition, the BJP has not found it easy
to handle caste cleavages.
The gap between the 'demand' and 'supply' side of politics is
most evident in the case of political formations vying to be the
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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'third force' in the electoral arena. Paradoxically, although social
constituency of the third force has expanded due to the recent
democratic upsurge, electoral support for its leading party, the
Janata Dal, has sharply dwindled. The results of assembly elections
held during 1993-5 conftnn the trend which had already emerged
in the 1991 Lok Sabha elections. Uajike the BJP, theJD has failed
to consolidate its nationwide gains of 1989-90 and has managed
·to survive only in a few regional pockets. However, in those
pockets it has not lost very much since 1991. While a good deal
of the ]D's failure to make use of the historic opportunity of 1989
must be accounted for by its organizational and leadership failure
to put together a credible party, there is perhaps more to it.
Perhaps the newly enfranchised constituency of the marginal so­
cial groups is not yet amenable to macro political appeals. They
are drawn into the arena of competitive politics via partisan al­
legiance to issues and organizations which are primarily local or
at best regional in character. That makes it structurally more ·
difficult for a single political party to effectively represent this
emerging social constituency; regional political formations are the
most likely carriers of democratic upsurge in this new phase of
democratic politics. In this perspective it is easy to see why the
Janata Dal has survived only in those states where it functions, for
all practical purposes, as a regional political party which has its
own identity, leadership and nearly independent ideology. The
project of building a viable and credible political force which may
occupy the third space in Indian politics is going to be crucial for
institutionalizing the second democratic upsurge witnessed in the
recent elections.
The failure of the Janata Dal illustrates how difficult it is to
occupy the middle ground in national politics which is now being
vacated by the. Congress. The legacy of the national movement
enabled the Congress to occupy and define the middle ground
of various ideological and social cleavages. The resultant enduring
loyalties of a cross-section of the electorate to the Congress
ensured its electoral success. Any new political formation without
such a historical advantage finds this ground too slippery now.
If it tries to catch all, it loses any distinctiveness and thus ends
up catching none. If, on the other hand, it tries to acquire and
maintain distinctiveness, it ends up being exclusivist and loses its
capacity for cross-sectional mobilization. 'The political extinction
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
200 State and Politics in India
faced by Janata Dal in most parts of the country is directly related
to this dilemma. It also explains some of the problems which
confront the BJP today.
The absence of a straight path to the occupation of the middle
ground has encouraged enterprising political actors to force their
entry through different routes. Of these, the two which yielded
electoral rerurns involved the forging of a 'master cleavage'. The
BJP worked on the master cleavage of Hindus versus Others with
the help of a sustained communal propaganda and followed it up
with routine political work in local terms. The electoral outcome
shows that Hindu consolidation is bound to be temporary and
fragile, open to other cross-cutting cleavages. Laloo Yadav's strat­
egy in Bihar aimed at another master cleavage: high caste versus
low caste, backed up by a symbolically charged theatre of empower­
ment He reaped the electoral harvest as the BJP did in some states
following the rath yat1·a. It is not clear if his attempt at creating
dalit-Muslim-OBC combine would have a longer lease of life than
the BJP's attempt at Hindu consolidation. Apart from proble1ns of
longevity, both these routes to the centre of politics suffer from
inherent limitations from the vantage point of radical democracy.
Whither Democratization?
This preliminary sketch of the picture of Indian politics as seen
from the window of elections must also note, however fleetingly,
some of the larger processes which constitute a background to the
more obvious movement of parties and leaders. A comparison of
the snapshot of 1993-5 elections with elections of the previous
phase of Indian politics brings out some of the enduring structural
changes which have silently redefined the terrain of electoral
politics. Three of these changes need to be foregrounded here:
one, the simultaneous regionalization and homogenization of the
political terrain; two, new forms of political articulation and in­
vention of social cleavages; and three, the changing terms of
political discourse. All three changes directly bear upon the long­
term prospects of democratization.
In a sense the most significant outcome of these elections is
the lack of a neat pattern which cuts across different states. It
brings into sharp relief the regionalization of Indian polity at the
end of two decades of plebiscitary politics at the national level.
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A comparison with any of the previous 'national' rounds of as­
sembly elections - 1971-2, 1977-8, 1979-80, 1984-5, or even
. 1989-90 - suggests a sharp contrast. In each of these earlier
rounds there was a clear nationwide verdict: one-party coalitions
swept across states, barring exceptions. At the end of the 1993-5
round of assembly elections, the political path of India is more
variegated than ever before. The number and the ideological
range of political formations which have a share in the cake of
state power is unprecedented in post-Independence India.
Thus these elections have quietly accomplished what the par­
liamentary elections of 1989 and 1991 could not fully do, namely
to put an end to the age of nationwide electoral waves. This era,
which began with the parliamentary elections of 1971, was char­
acterized by a series of plebiscites which resulted in mobilization
for or against the Congress, which cut across special boundaries
of constituencies, states and regions (with the partial exception of
the north-south divide) and thus eliminated the local character of
electoral contests. The latest verdict may not have quite restored
the local character of elections, but it did bring back the assembly
elections to their original context, namely state politics. From the
horizon of a future historian one of the most noticeable outcomes
in these elections is the rupturing of the 'Hindi heartland', the
home ground of electoral waves in the 1970s and 1980s. This
region rarely saw any deviation from the direction of national
waves; at the end of the 1993-5 round, the four largest states in
this region were being governed by four rival political formations.
It is not as if the processes of integration and homogenization
which made electoral waves possible have been reversed. In fact,
these elections did witness several waves in different states
(Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and
Gujarat) or in different regions of the state (eastern UP, north
Bihar, Konkan and Bombay). The difference of course is that the
direction of these waves varies from state to state. The locus and
the operative level of the logic of electoral wave has shifted from
nation to states. A state like Madhya Pradesh illustrates very well
the extent to which processes of political integration have levelled
intra-state differences in politicization and party preferences.
Thus this regionalization should not be interpreted as the first
step towards localization of political competition; it may be more
useful to see it :as a typically Indian path to homogenization.
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202 State 11nd Politics in India
Unlike in the West, this process would not obliterate all differen­
ces and create a mass society; here it would mean, paradoxically,
ftrst a segmentation and then effective homogenization within
that segment or sector while rl'taining and foregrounding dif­
ferences v i sa-vis
other sectors. These segments could be ter­
ritorial or social, but the vehicle of their integration is in most
cases competitive politics; no wonder, differences and conflicts
are built into this model of sectoral homogenization. There is no
doubt that an effective regionalization of a polity of this size
would strengthen the process of democratization. However, it is
possible to overstate tliis argument if one neglects the internal
regimentation which accompanies it.
In a similar way, the second long-term trend, namely the new
mode of political articulation of social cleavages also leaves an
ambiguous message for the future of democratization. The most
significant trend of the recent assembly elections in this respect
was the acceleration of the delayed but inevitable rise of the OBCs
to political power in north India. The process began in Bihar ftrst
of all, thanks to the legacy of socialist politics among the backward
castes. This election did not merely continue this long-term pro­
cess but would be remembered as a landmark in the political rise
of OBCs. First, because it has expanded beyond the boundaries of
Bihar into UP. Second, it put a stamp of inevitability and irre­
versibility on this trend by handing a decisive defeat to the most
determined resistance to the rise of OBCs in the Bihar elections
of 1995. Although currently OBC politics in different states is very
unevenly placed (if Bihar and UP define one end of the spectrum,
Orissa and Rajasthan lie at the other end, apparently untouched
by this wave), its extension to the remaining s.tates is now a matter
of time.
The constitution and then the rise of OBCs as a political
community are examples of how marginalized groups can make
an unorthodox and unanticipated use of the levers of competitive
politics to make a place for themselves. Here is a living exam1>le
of what Benedict Anderson had called 'imagined communities'.
The expression 'OBCs' has indeed travelled a long way from a.
rather careless bureaucratic nomenclature in the document of the
Constitution to a vibrant and subjectively experienced political
community. It also confirms the continuing creative role of politics
in articulating and, in the process, transforming social cleavages
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in contemporary India. Needless to say, as much of the contem­
porary social science has reminded us, the redrawing of social
cleavages takes place by forging new identities through shared
narratives of the past and, sometimes, of the future.
This election also witnessed another, though less successful,
route to the same end. Attempts at creating a social coalition of
the marginalized sections of the arena of electoral politics were
made not just in UP, Bihar and Maharashtra but, in a less visible
form, elsewhere too. The break-up of the SP-BSP alliance and
the disastrous performance of the Bahujan Mahasangh serve to
remind us that this coalition building is a very delicate and difficult
operation, bordering on the impossible. And in the absence of
an effective ideological chain of equivalence among these sectional
concerns, the resultant coalition can produce at best stapled iden­
tities which can come apart very easily.
The other major development in this respect was the realign­
ment of the Muslim community following the destruction of the
Bahri Masjid. It will take some more time, perhaps a few more
elections, for the new pattern to settle down, but it is clear that
there has been considerable disenchantment with the established
leadership and the Congress party among Muslims all over the
country. Although this dissatisfaction is not yet captured by a
new political formation, it is clear that the early fears of Muslims
being forced into exclusivist politics were exaggerated. In the long
run, the events of 6 December may have given the various com­
munities which happen to profess Islam a new supra-local Muslim
·•
identity.
This development parallels the emergence of supra-local caste
identities in the recent elections. Increasingly, caste is not a local
consideration which works in favour of a candidate of one's own
caste. Now caste identities and affiliations are imagined at the
level of the state. The disengagement of caste from its localized
context is but another manifestation of sectoral homogenization
discussed above.
On balance, then, the consequences of a new casteism are likely
to strengthen the process of democratization. At the same time it
needs to be remembered that in the absence of political mediation
of sectional claims characteristic of the Congress system, the over­
all effect may not be as benevolent as one might expect. If the
experiments at coalition making continue to fail, it is likely that
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
204 State and Politics in India
the newly acquired identities will get hardened and would conse­
quently be less open to political negotiations. In this respect India
is gradually ceasing to be an exception to the social cleavage theory
of party system which expects political parties to form strictly
along the demographic fault-line in multi-ethnic societies. It is
not that the demographic, cultural and political expressions o f
social cleavages have come to coincide in India. However, we have
taken some steps in that direction in the last few years.
Finally, a look at the world.of ideas or the ideological field as
reflected in the mirror of the state assembly elections. The last
few years have wimessed a sea change in the terms of political
discourse. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold
War, the triumphant entry of globalization and liberalization, and
the rise of communalism have significantly reshaped the concerns,
issues and positions in the elite discourse on Indian politics. These
elections provided an occasion to fmd out if some of these changes
have been reflected in popular discourse as well. Is there a signific­
ant value change underlying the recent political reconfiguration?
Have recent issues successfully drawn new ideological cleavages
which cut across the old ideological lines, or have they been
absorbed by the latter? Are we wimessing an intensification of
ideological polarities?
It is easier to answer these questions with reference to the
production end of the ideological field than its reception. The
changes effected by various political formations in their ideologi­
cal postures are rather well known. They basically involve the
redeployment of the nationalist vocabulary for newer ends. Be­
hind the usual rhetoric of opposition, practically all the major
political formations agreed to shift the political agenda to the
right as understood in the old left-right ideological continuum.
Acceptance of unrestricted entry of foreign firms, retreat not only
from a regime of controls, but also from social welfare program­
mes, tacit acceptance that the majority will prevail in communal
disputes, acceptance of 'tough' policy on Kashmir - all these
have come to constitute the national consensus across political
divisions. Very few polities can claim to have made the transition
from the old to the new world with so little discursive contest­
ation. The amazing ease with which the old rhetoric of socialism
has· given way to the new lingo of global capitalism is not only
a comment on how thin the old ideology had worn, but also on
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how defenceless India's political establishment is in the face of
the latest from the West. These elections also provided an in­
stance of the resilience of the political processes and their capacity
to absorb sharp ideological polarities such as the dispute around
reservations.
Any generalization about the reception of political ideas in the
register of popular sensibilities can at best be suggestive in the
absence of any serious research on this aspect of Indian politics.
On the face of it, it does not seem that anything like an ideological
polarity has emerged in the structure of popular political beliefs.
Rather, ideological cleavages in the public arena do not get articu­
lated as opposite opinions on shared issues and concerns. In India
ideological polarity takes the form of mutually exclusive discursive
fields rooted in social cleavages. Often defined by the master
cleavage of English versus the vernacular and further subdivided
by social hierarchy, these different ideological communities are
characterized b y very low internal polarization and a higher polar­
ization across the discursive boundaries. More often than not,
ideological polarization is rooted in incomprehensibility of dif­
ferent actors situated in different circles of intelligibility. What
appears as an ideological difference is mostly a function of social
origins, for ideas do not disseminate in a social vacuwn. They
travel along established trails which closely follow sociological
fault-lines. That is why higher ideological issues are not accessible
to the subalterns. Even if they are, they are clothed in local
costumes and are inevitably received through the lens of local
partisanship. This is what accounts for the differential response
to issues like Manda! and Mandir, not to speak of even more
remote ones like the New Economic Policy or the Uniform Civil
Code from the localized registers of popnJar sensibility.
The problem of radical incomprehension is not confined to
subaltern reception of elite ideologies; this logic also works the
other way round. The new democratic upsurge does not merely
mean a greater number of voters, it also means a massive influx
of new beliefs not shaped by the high ideology of liberal demo­
cracy. The subaltern acceptance of the democratic invitation
inevitably means a reshaping of the political agenda in accordance
with their tastes, convictions and expectations. Whether it is
Mayawati's venomous utterances or Laloo Yadav's histrionics, the
vocabulary of politics has come to reflect, even if momentarily,
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the world of popular culture. Seen from the vantage point of
high ideologies, this is nothing less than an ideological degenera­
tion, or rather, scandal. The assembly elections did not and could
not have bridged this radical incomprehensibility. The reshaping
of the political agenda to reflect the influence of popular beliefs
in the public arena remains a major ideological challenge in
contemporary Indian politics which, if not met, can corrode the
legitimacy of the democratic political order.
•
What is to be Done?
As interventions in an essentially contested cognitive domain,
interpretations of politics cannot escape the politics of interpreta­
tion. Therefore the political agenda implicit in the reading of
electoral politics offered above is best explicated, even if in an
abbreviated manner. For those who take the consolidation and
radicalization of democracy as the agenda of transformative pol­
itics today, the challenge is to take the recent participatory upsurge
to its radical conclusion. It is a two-pronged political challenge.
It is an organizational challenge on the one hand, involving the
forging of a new political instrument capable of responding to the
democratic upsurge in a way the established political formations
are unable to. The creation of an organization capable of tapping
the enormous energy released into the political process by the
entry of hitherto unincorporated sections into mainstream politics
and the intervention of non-party political formations, working at
the grass-roots level and reflecting the federal character of Indian
society within its organization without ceasing to function at the
all-India level or rejecting the task of building a democratic or­
ganizational structure, is surely a historic need today. But history
does not fulfil its own needs. On the other hand, it is an ideological
challenge requiring innovative institutional designs which may
reduce the existing disjunction between the cultural codes of or­
dinary citizens and the imported institutions of modem liberal
democracy, incorporation of new issues thrown up by social move­
ments into the political agenda and the creation of a chain of
democratic equivalence among various such issues within a single
ideological framework. Such a proposal might sound hopelessly
'
romantic in the face of shrinking horizons of political possibilities.
But the limits of political possibilities are drawn and redrawn as
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much by human imagination and agency as by the external world
of causality and structures. This is one lesson well worth remem­
bering in a society which has, in the last one hundred years,
wimessed an extraordinarily creative and transformative role of
politics.
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Evolving Trends in the
Bureaucracy
B.P.R. Vithal
�e bureaucracy in India is neither monolithic nor homo­
.l geneous. This would, perhaps, be !JUe of any bureaucracy,
to the extent that it reflects the social and class composition of
society at large and of the ruling class in each society in particular.
In the case of India, however, heterogeneity of the bureaucracy
was consciously planned by the British in view of the peculiar
circumstances of their rule. To begin with, the administration of
the East India Company - in India - was entirely in the hands
of Company servants who were British nationals. "When they first
became rulers (from being mere traders), they acquired that statuS
by grants which were in the nature of feudal grants which the then
rulers of India were customarily giving to their own citizens.
Finally, the Company took over the role of the major feudatory,
namely the Emperor in Delhi. For some time the Company re­
tained only this role and as such the question of Indians becoming
direct employees of the Company in any administrative capacity
did not arise.
With the dominion in India extending, and the complexity of
its administration increasing, Indians had to be brought in to take
up subordinate positions. The entire structure underwent a change
as a result of the Crown taking over the administration directly
and. more so, as a consequence of the educational policy of
Macaulay, which aimed to 'form a class who may be in'terpreters
between us and the millions whom we govern'. This class, which
to this day substantially rules India, came to be known by the
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widely prevalent term 'babus'.1 With the entrance of Indians into
it, British administration which was vertically integrated became
highly articulated. It consisted of three modules (which could also
be described as echelons or levels). It is necessary to describe these
three echelons briefly because the evolution of Indian bureaucracy,
its changing self-perception, and its relations with the public in
general and politicians in particular, have varied significantly.
The top echelon consisted of the covenanted services (now
lmown as the All India Services), of which the most typical and
best-lmown service was the Indian Civil Service (ICS).2 The
British concept of the ICS was unique not merely as a colonial
service but, at the time of its original conception, also as a tool
of administration itself. After the ancient Chinese system, this
was, perhaps, the first Civil Service to be deliberately and con­
sciously constituted on the basis of recruitment by means of
examination. The role conceived for this service was also unique
because it heralded the transformation of the British administrator
from ruler to guardian.3 When Indians were taken into the ICS,
the initial screening and separation from their origins and their
admission to a new culture was effected through the educational
system and, subsequently, their training in the Oxbridge milieu.
The Service succeeded, by and large, in building up a tradition
of integrity and professional competence that helped to impart
to it a unique aura.
Whatever may have been its negative aspects, by virtue of its
being the Service of a foreign ruler, were removed with Inde­
pendence. But its aura burgeoned and continued to attract young
men and women to the All India Services. Inflation considerably
reduced its material and monetary attractions, though many young
men and women still chose it partly because of its continuing
prestige and, also, partly as a means of serving the country without
undue sacrifice. As Nehru once remarked, the IAS definitely be­
came Indian; some of its members tried to be civil; and service
I E.P. Moon, The B,-itish Cmque$t and D<miini<m of India (London: Verso,
1990).
2 We shall continue to use the tenn 'Covenanted Services', because not only
are all its connotations not fully brought out by the term 'All India Services',
but also it is homophonic with 'Coveted Services' which would be an apt
malapropism.
3 P. Mason, Mm Wbo RrdedIndia, 2 volumes (London:Jonathan Cape, 1985).
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210 State 1111d Politics in India
was
at least one of its motives. Subsequendy, professions and
management posts in the private sector became economically at­
tractive. Passing the entrance examination of the Indian Institute
of Technology became as much a cause for celebration as passing
the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) e,aroination once used to
be. However, over the years, with professional employrnent op­
portunities not growing adequately and with the tenns and con­
ditions of such employment not always being much more attractive
than those of the IAS (except in the case of large industrial houses
or the multinationals), the higher administrative and allied services
again became an attractive option. Those who were motivated to
serve found that the variety of work of an IAS officer added to the
challenge and attraction of the Service, while the power and
opportunities available for senior civil servants in an administra- _ _
tion with a large number of bureaucratic restrictions and controls
made it attractive for those who liked the trappings of authority.
In 1985, when Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister, the
approach of the government towards the services underwent a
dramatic change. P. Chidambaram, the Minister for Personnel,
brought his influence to bear on the bureaucracy, in an effort to
make it more professional. This resulted in an improvement in
the emoluments of the central government services to make them
comparable with other professions in trade, commerce, and in­
dustry. However, this policy was attacked on the ground that it
was financially ruinous. The effect of the changes was to make
the higher civil services more attractive to young persons seeking
professional careers. A conscious effort was made in the media
to 'sell these Services', and the higher civil services came to be
looked upon as a good career prospect.
This by itself need not have resulted in a change of motivation·
among new entrants, because the pursuit of a career, in a profes­
sional sense, would need the same skills and attitudes that the
earlier approach would have eJ\couraged. However, a .'hard sell'
of the civil services also encourages certain elements who can best
be described as 'careerists'. Such a change of attitude would tend
to underplay the earlier 'service' aspect of the higher civil services
and, �tead, emphasize the opportunities available for exploiting
the power of the state which administers, controls, and dispenses
patronage. That the public are also aware of these particular
. advantages is evident from the· fact that the valuation of these ·
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services in the dowry market has gone up. The dowry market in
Indian society serves the same purpose in evaluating relative job
prospects as the share market does for fmancial invesonents in
Western countries.
The next echelon in the administration is another unique Brit­
ish contribution, namely the gazetted officers (GOs). Such officers
could be Indians even at a time when Indians had not yet been
admitted to the Indian Civil Service. They were given certain
status and symbols, and privileges of office, which distinguished
them from the mass of lower officialdom, who were also Indians
and who then came to be known as non-gazetted officers (NGOs).
It is interesting to note that, apart from other conditions, one of
the distinguishing features of these services was that their postings
and transfers were to be published in the official gazette! By such
innocuous and token formalities, the British managed to generate
status and authority. This was a device which Indians also readily
understood and relished because it reflected, in administration,
their own concept of the 'twice-born' who, by merit of birth
(recruionent) and by peculiar rituals (gazetting), were differen­
tiated from and placed on a higher level than the ordinary people
(i.e. the NGOs). An interesting example of the grip exercised by
this idea on the Indian psyche, which persisted even after Inde­
pendence, is the Andhra Pradesh secretariat In that part of it
which was inherited from the Madras Presidency, there were
NGOs (evdn as late as in 1959) who would wear trousers and a
jacket but not a tie, because it was assumed that only GOs were
entitled by custom to don a necktie!
The next tier down consisted of NGOs who constituted the
rest of the administration. The term 'non-gazetted officer' is itself
a novel classification for, during the colonial period, 'officers'
were, by definition, 'gazetted', and all 'non-gazetted' government
servants were referred to as 'officials'. But with Independence, the
new government sought to 'decolonize' the bureaucracy by erasin g
the distinction between gazetted and non-gazetted government
servants by referring to'both as 'officers'. By a similar process o{
upgradation, peons became attenders and were accorded the status
of Class IV government servants.
There was, however, one top layer of this part of the ad­
ministration in the civil services which acted as a link between
the administration as a whole and the gazetted officers, or in
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212 State and Politics in India
some cases directly with the covenanted services. These were
officials who occupied the key posts of personal assistants to the
members of the covenanted services or those holding top level
superintending posts. In the army, the non-commissioned officers
(NCOs) represented this particular level between the other ranks
(ORs) on one side, and the commissioned officers (COs) on the
other. In the civil services, the picture became somewhat blurred
because the category of gazetted officers was interposed between
the covenanted services and the NGOs.
The importance of this level here lies in the link it provided
between the higher civil services on the one hand, and the mass
of the civil service on the other. The character of this link evolved
from the way in which British officials deployed the particular
Indian functionary in their entourage. The relationship between
the British official and his personal assistant was maintained by
mutual respect. Indian administrators in general have not been
able to emulate the example of their British forbears in this respect,
perhaps because both belong to the same cultural milieu. This
relationship of mutual respect has been preserved to a much
greater extent in the military by means of an artificial ethos built
within and around the armed services. In the civil services, by
contrast, democratization of the civil administrations since Inde­
pendence has stood in the way of the British colonial convention
being continued. As a consequence, i n tra -service links have tended
to become rigidly formalized and the different echelons have
drifted apart. It is interesting to note that, in a few cases where
the peculiar mystique of these posts has been retained, they have
sometimes become conduits of corruption involving officers of the
higher echelons.
Each of the three echelons of administration, namely the cov­
enanted services, the gazetted services and non-gazetted services,
has evolved in its own way since Independence. The most im­
portant changes in respect of the n o n -gazetted services relate to
their unionization. This has resulted in a greater homogeneity in
their outlook, despite the fact that there are usually several unions
representing different categories within the non-gazetted cate­
gory. Gazetted officers as a group have generally lost out during
the post-Independence period. The distinction between gazetted
officers and non-gazetted officers helped the government in deal­
ing with strikes by the latter, but the resulting benefit to the
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gazetted officers was insufficient to compensate the sense of
alienation between the two categories inherited from the Raj. For
with Independence, the government's efforts to improve the
status of gazetted officers foundered on the rock of translating
them into monetary equivalents. Separation from non-gazetted
services has been followed by gazetted officers enjoying commen­
surate non-monetary benefits. As a consequence, gazetted officers,
including professional services such as doctors and engineers,
have tended to unionize. Their problems, however, fall into a
different category because they raise issues concerning generalists
vmus specialists, which are not discussed here.
Administrators as a Sociological Category
How do these three categories fit into the paradigm provided by
Bardhan's concept of 'professionals' as a 'proprietary class' exploit­
'ing their 'cultural capital' and extracting 'rent' income from their
scarce educational and technical sail, .and Rudra's related concept
of the class of 'intelligentsia'. In his discussion of these various
concepts, Vanaik has stated that
bureaucratic elites at the Centre are far less susceptible to the pressure
of the agrarian bourgeoisie ... [while) in the States[,] the more lo­
calized the bureaucracy, the more subordinated it is to the power of.
the rural rich. The industrial bourgeoisie clearly exercises greater
authority on the bureaucracy at the Centre. 4
The NGOs and the GOs, being employees of the state govern­
ments, are mostly subject to pressures from �-agrarian bourgeois
elements which are strongly represented iri the state governments
and legislatures. The IAS officer is subject to pressures from the
industrial bourgeoisie when (s)he is at the centre while (s)he is
subject to pressure by the a&1;�ian bourgeoisie when (s)he works
at the state level. Most politicians, however, are still graduating
from agrarian bourgeois politics at the state level to politics at the
central level. Politicians rooted
in the modern urban-industrial
,
complex, with interests ):r.rfdly distinguishable from those of the
industrial bourgeoisie, are still few in number. This has helped
strengthen the role of the IAS officer at the centre because, among
4 A.
Vanaik, Tbt PainfiJ Transition: Bourgeois Dtmocracy in India (London:
Verso, 1990).
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214 State and Politics in India
the many central services directly employed by the central govern­
ment with whom (s)he has to compete when (s)he is at the centre,
(s)he belongs to the only category of officers which has direct
working acquaintance with the politician at the state level. The
insights o f IAS officers into the mutual interests of agriculture and
industry (or their mutual contradictions) are, therefore, likely to
be sharper than those of other functionaries at the centre. While
their relations may thus be synergic, it still does not make them
a 'Net11-Babu' class, as Krishna maintains.5 Class interests and
cultural background could be expected to fuse together only at the
lower level of district politician and the NGO. Again, at the top
level, an urban-orientated industrial-professional-higher civil ser­
vice class may well be emerging.
In discussing the role of the bureaucracy in the liberalization
programme, Vanaik righ�y points out that the caution in regard
to this programme arises 'not because of subterranean resistance
from a bureaucratic class [but because] significant sections of the
state elite along with important sections of the industrial bour­
geoisie are themselves concerned that liberalization should not
proceed too far too fast. >6
It would, therefore, be relevant to point out that a liberalization
programme has been launched with great speed; we now have to
explain the reasons behind that speed, rather than those underly­
ing the cautious approach of the earlier phase.
Resistance to the liberalization programme is now characterized
as ·mainly 'bureaucratic' in character. Of course, wider issues such
as the role played by international capital, international financial
institutions, industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie, etc. are involved.
But what concerns us in this discussion is that there has been a
noticeable change in the attitude of the bureaucratic elite. Part of
this change is intellectual and professional in origin, but other
motivations have also come into play.
It is necessary to draw attention at this point to the recent
acceleration, especially since the 1980s, of professionalization with­
in the IAS, the main generalist service. Even in the ICS, a certain
informal specialization in finance did take place. Now, as part of
the modern concept of 'career development', specialization, after
s Ibid., p. 23.
6 lbid.
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an initial period of common District experience, is being guided
and encouraged within the IAS. Specialization leading to jobs in
the economic ministries is the most sought after. The interface with
and transition to international financial bodies (such as the Inter­
national Monetary Fund and World Bank) takes place from this
point onwards. As in all interface phenomena, a certain intellectual
seepage occurs at this level. Very soon the players on either side of
the international divide find themselves having more in common
than the national officials and those whom they are supposed to
represent 1bis is also reinforced by the fact that the discipline of
economics, in which those concerned with these decisions are
specialists, has been iiitemationalized with a single ruling paradigm
and ideology within the framework of which professionals work
together.
Jt cannot be deqied, however, that pan of the motivation arises
from the fact that: international financial.institutions provide im­
portant and attractive career prospects for generalist professionals.
Equally importantly, the composition of the IAS itself has under­
gone a chl!,Dge. In recent years, several persons with qualifications
, in engineering or management or eQOnomics have entered the
Service. Children of senior bureaucrats and professionals now
exercise their fust option in favour of professional courses, whilst
the IAS itself is ahnost invariably only a second choice. To the
extent, therefore, that the liberalization programme would be
expected to result in increased opporrunities for trained profes­
sionals in the economy as a whole, the senior bureaucrat would
now look upon it as. opening a broader an<! rnore varied career
spectrum for the next generation of his/her class than public sector
employment, which is all that the exisd,ng model has to offer.
Thus, whilst a large part of the IAS is now identifying with th e
aspirations o f the industrial bourgeoisie, there are still a number
of officers who are interested in agl}lrian problems with which
they are .familiar because of their intimate acquaintance with the
countryside. Therefore, the. higher civil service is not simply the
site occupied by 'political elites'; a significant fraction of it has,
over the last twenty-five years, become involved in 'intra-coalition
conflicts' which have become an important feature of politics a t
the state level.
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Politicization of the Civil Services
Against this general background, let us consider the phenomenon
of politicization of the services. When Rajiv Gandhi drew atten­
tion (1985) to the need to eliminate power-brokers from the
political arena, he also emphasized the need to depoliticize the
services. Without going into a discussion of the tenn 'politic­
ization', we shall use it in the broad sense in which it is generally
understood. Politicization, in the sense of alignment with a politi­
cal party, is hardly applicable to the civil services except in the
case of those whose sympathies lie with one or other of the cadre
parties. Politicization in the sense of commitment to an ideology
is rare even among card carrying members of non-cadre parties
which are really loose coalitions of different groups and interests.
In recent years, however, this situation has changed. Even
though the Congress party was defeated in 1977, up to 1989 it
was widely regarded as the party with power. The defeat of the
Congress in the 1977 election was seen as a reaction to the Emer­
gency rather than as signalling change of a paradigmatic nature.
The Janata government's poor performance _gave-i:ise to-a-wide­
spread belief that the Congress party was the natural ruling party
in India. In 1989, however, this outlook was completely shattered.
The prospect of a single party monopolizing power indefinitely
became truly remote only after the ninth general election.
With the onset of the changed outlook, political parties staned
to take a hard look at their proposed programmes: In the tenth
general election (1991), the preparation of the manifestos of the
different parties were, for the ftrst rime,_ given serious attention
because they could constitute the bases on which coalitions would
have to be forged. Therefore, politicization, in the sense of com­
mitment to the principles of a party, is now (unlike in the past)
possible. However, even today, those elements in the bureaucracy
that are believed to be politically committed would consist of
sympathizers of either of the communist parties or the BJP, which
represent the two tendencies with clear-cut programmes and deep
commitment.
Politicization of the services, therefore, largely refers to civil
servants playing politics. In most cases, the motivation underlying
politicization lies in the furtherance of one's career or in taking
advantage of opportunities to engage in corruption. In the case
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of the NGOs as a category, however, politicization of a more
academic nature, arising from strong unionization, has been pos­
sible. The NGOs - in most states as well as at the centre are now fairly well organized into unions. Therefore, they tend
to form collective perceptions of which govemment(s) is/are likely
to adopt a sympathetic view to their demands. Their approach
is generally econornistic in character.
Political' parties attach much importance to securing the sup­
port of the NGOs. In fact, the importance attached to NGO
support is often out of proportion to their numerical size as
potential vote banks. Rather, their. importance is seen to rest in
their opinion-forming. role. Nearly 7 S per cent of the NGOs are
teachers, police constables, and Class IV officers. These categories
of government employees are widely distributed. They wield
considerable influence and prestige in different segments of so­
ciety. In recent years, however, the importance attached to em­
ployees' unions arises not only because they influence opinion,
but also because they play ah important role in the election
process itself. They are entrusted with the conduct of elections.
No booth capturing - except in the most blatant and violent
cases - would be possible without the cooperation, or at least
connivance, of this category of civil servants. This fact alone has
tended to ·give added importance to transfers 0£ officials on the
eve of elections - a faetor which can influence the electoral
process in no small measure. The politicization of the NGOs
(mainly, though not solely, through unionization) has, therefore,
acquired considerable importance.
Politicization at other levels of the civil services, particularly
in the higher civil service, proceeds from different considerations.
Personal aggrandizement plays a much more important role.
These categories are also involved in the electoral process but
influence is brought to bear on higher civil servants on an in­
dividual basis and not on a group basis (as is the case with NGOs).
H politicization at lower levels is related to unionization, at higher
levels it is the relationship between the civil servant and the
politician (usually a minister) which is important. In the past,
factional struggles within the tuling party, rather than patty
affiliations as such, have influenced this relationship. The political
executive in a number of states has made use of senior civil
servants in dealing with inner-party dissidence. This has been
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true of the centre to date, because of the genealogy of the Prime
Ministers and the Presidential style of functioning that they seem
to prefer.
With the far-reaching recent changes in political equations at
· the centre, here too politicization of the civil servant is becoming
evident. Straightforward and strict officers can be posted to de­
partments under the control of dissident ministers; with no overt
effort, the ministers could be compelled to stick to the straight
and narrow path. On the other hand, posting an accommodating
offtcer'to a department would automatically result in making the
task of the minister concerned easier. The same logic would also
apply to elected local bodies (district boards and below) which the
state government may wish either to curb or to encourage. District
officers can be posted with the object of undermining a dissident
politician in his/her home base.
Outlined above are instances of the political executive using the
flexibility available within the administration in order to serve its
purpose. While it does not automatically follow that these proce­
dures result in politicization, they do initiate and encourage the
process. For in the absence of flexible or accommodating civil
servants, it would be impossible to initiate procedures that would
lead to politicization. The willingness of a civil servant to assist a
minister in the efficient formulation or implementation of a pro­
gramme does not, by itself, constitute evidence of politicized be­
haviour on the part of the former, Thus there may be (in fact there
are) enthusiastic officers whose strong conviction enables them to
implement certain programmes, say in the social welfare and social
justice spheres. Indeed, a number of enthusiastic officers are
identified and posted to such programmes because it is in the
interest of any political party in power to do so in order to win
elections. Thus it should not be assumed that when officers show
enthusiasm or work closely with a minister, or some other political
authority, they are necessarily engaging in politicized behaviour.
Display of enthusiasm by officers who have no axe to grind can
be easily recognized. Their nonconformism may earn them the
reputation of mavericks. There are a number of cases in which an
officer's enthusiasm is motivated by the prospect of reaping politi­
cal dividends. Great dynamism brought to bear on the implemen­
tation of a costly project by an officer of doubtful integrity can
give rise to a difficult choice between the interests of rectitude on
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the one hand, and the effective and speedy implementation of a
worthwhile programme on the other.
The postings of officials in the Indian bureaucracy are expected
to be based on the principle that ministers and officials should be
able to function smoothly on the basis of institutional arrange­
ments and not on the grounds of personal likes and dislikes, though
it is understood that there can be exceptions in extreme cases ot
mutual incompatibility. However, in the course of working to­
gether a mutual understanding and a sense of parmership does
often develop between civil servants and their political superiors.
The basis o f this may be honourable or dubious. If the political
head chooses the same official repeatedly, because the particular
official's abilities are well known from previous experience, (s)he
may give the impression that his/her motive in making the ap­
pointment is 'political'. A senior official of the Government of
India is reported to have remarked that 'we are all well trained
animals but some of us like to become pets'. It is the 'pet' relation­
ship that is suspect. The statement itself may be regarded as
evidence that there are senior officials in the Government of India
who are still inclined to resist such practices. In the states, how­
ever, the attempt to enforce any consistent rule in these matters
has long since been abandoned.
Certain specified posts belong to another category of 'political
appointment'. These are made on the principle that they cm only
be filled by officers with whom the political party in power can
function smoothly. This applies to certain key posts such as the
Chief Secretary of a state or the secretaries to the Government of
India, or even certain sensitive posts identified in the Constitution.
The practice at present is that, within the constraints of certain
conventions of seniority, the Chief Minister or the Prime Minister
(as the case may be) exercises her/his prerogative in making the
selection of Chief Secretary, Director General of police, and
Cabinet Secretary and other secretaries. In these cases, a degree
of discretion must be left to the political executive. Actual practice
is in broad conformity with this requirement. However, the ele­
ment of political choice.has not been openly acknowledged to date,
the justification given for selection or otherwise being on the basis
o f 'neutral' criteria. This - it must·be said - is less than fair
practice. It is necessary, therefore, for the procedure to be formal­
ized and certain convention_ s openly established. This applies also
.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
220 State and Politia in India
to certain other appoinnnents which are formally acknowledged
as 'political appoinnnents' (e.g. certain ambassadorships). A s a
corollary, the officers so posted should automatically vacate their
office when the government changes hands. Once they have been
appointed on the basis of the political criterion, they cannot claim
that they should continue in such posts (beyond the tenure of the
political executive which appoints them in the fust place) on the
grounds that they are experts.
'Political interference' is a phenomenon related to, but different
from, politicization as such. In a democracy, whether it be pres­
idential or parliamentary, a political executive heads the executive
branch of government. (S)he thereby derives legitimate authority
to take executive action through the bureaucratic apparatus, in
accordance with her/his political commitment and within the con­
straints o f the Constitution. An action of a political nature con­
veye d as a direction by the political executive to the bureaucracy
under its control will, therefore, be a legitimate one, even if it is
based on political considerations or has political consequences.
The term 'interference' is, however, applied to actions which
involve political pressure or exercise of influence through channels
other than legitimate ones.
Political interference can take place both vertically and laterally.
It might, at fust sight, appear unusual that interference should be
exercised vertically, as executive power can be exercised through
legitimate channels. However, this occurs wherever an inter­
mediate bureaucratic level resists directions of a political nature
and cannot be overruled because of the legal or constitutional
legitimacy of such resistance. For instance, a minister may have a
secretary who resists taking action along the lines desired - and
has good reasons for doing so - which the minister is unable or
unwilling (sometimes for reasons of adverse publicity) to overrule
formally.
In such cases, it is sometimes easier to influence the lower levels
to initiate action along the lines desired by the minister, so that
when the matt� reaches the secretary's level, it is s/he who would
have to overrule a report or a proposal that has come from below.
These are cases where political interference takes place vertically
down the line to lower levels with a view to weakening or sub­
verting the authority of the higher bureaucratic levels. It is such
interference that establishes a contact between the higher political
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executive and lower officialdom and, eventually, leads to either a
politicization of the lower officials or encourages corruption.
Political pressure is exercised laterally when a person who is
occupying a position of political importance finds that (s)he has
no formal authority over the bureaucracy at that level. For in­
stance, members of the legislature are politically import.ant and
influential persons. Their views are expected to be given due
:weight b y the bureaucracy, but they cannot order the bureaucracy
in the way in which a minister can. Nevertheless, members of the
legislature frequently try to exercise pressure over bureaucrats to
induce them to take certain actions. There is often an implied
threat that if they are not obliged, they would raise the issue in
the legislature or they would approach the minister. When certain
powers are devolved to local bodies and the officials concerned
are placed under their control, the formal lines of authority that
previously ran through the official bureaucracy are transferred to
the local body whose chairperson now exercises authority over the
staff. Nevertheless, the political executive at the state level, such
as a minister, on the one hand, and other political officials, such
as members of the legislature, on the other, tend to exert pressure
directly over the bureaucracy ofthe local body instead ofindirectly
through its chair. Political interference of these various types
undermines the morale of the bureaucracy. It also leads to either
politicization or corruption. Figure 5. I gives, in schematic form,
the formal lines of authority and informal lines of influence or
interference.
The 'Committed' Civil Servant
During the Emergency, civil servants were expected to be
'committed'. It is difficult to define this concept. H 'politicization'
is linked to political parties, 'commitment' is linked to beliefs,
ideologies, or values and,'therefore, to programmes based on these.
But it may also have. a negative connotation when the stress is on
commitment to certain personalities and their political futures.
There. is clearly. a difficulty in the Indian system, where the civil
service remains permanent but governing political parties change.
Hopefully, there will always. be officers in the civil service who,
b y temperament or by convicdon, feel committed to a programme
devised by the party which happens to be in power. This would
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
0
,5
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fil
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Level
Bureaucracy
State
Direct Authority
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Figure 5.1: Lints ofAuthority, LJnes of Injluma
222
The lnstituti<m.r 223
be a fortuitous circumstance. On the other hand, there may be
those who are neutral politically, but still have the capacity to
implement the programme efficiently and honestly. There may
also be officers opposed to a particular programme for a variety
of personal principles. Such officers should be relieved of respon­
sibility for that programme, but not penalized.
This would not apply in the case of opposition to principles
incorporated in the Constitution (for example 'untouchability is
against the law'). A civil servant cannot, for example, plead un­
willingness to implement welfare schemes for the 'Scheduled
castes', 'dalits', and 'scheduled tribes' on the grounds that (s)he
is opposed to the abolition of untouchability. Rather, we are
referring to examples such as the case of a senior Muslim official
in Hyderabad state (in pre-Independence days) whose wish not
to be Commissioner of Liquor Excise because of his religious
conviction was respected by the government. In other words,
subject to constitutional limitations, an element of agreement
between the authority and the official should be allowed in the
process of selection for postings. But the commitment that was
elicited during the Emergency appeared to border on the brink
of becoming a 'loyalty test', implying that 'if you are not com­
mitted, you are omitted'. On the other hand, some officials
exploited the idea of committed civil s�rvice as a means of rapid
professional advancement.
As against those officials who, during the Emergency, may have
used their professed commitment as a means of advancement,
there have always been those1 often belonging to younger age
groups, who htnJe been committed - in the positive sense of the
word - to ideals and values. Any political party in power can,
with justification, select such officials and put them in charge of
programmes with a social content, which will then be well imple­
mented. Conversely, when a party in power wants to 'soft-pedal'
certain schemes (which may be identified with its predecessor), its
instinct would favour the transfer of such officers. A transfer by
itself is entirely innocuous and within the government's remit
(particularly those newly come into power), but in such cases the
transfers might signal the intentions of the new government.
Commitment, however, need not be identical with, or even
result in, political affiliation. It is, therefore, necessary to examine
how politicization of the civil service appears to have spread in a
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224 State and Politia in India
system i n which genuine political affiliation or commitment is not
widespread. Political affiliation, in the sense of a more than usu2l
affinity to those belonging to the political executjve, arose in the
early phase of Independence. It was more_..or less characterized by
the common class background of those who constituted such
groups.
Immediately after Independence, not only were the Congress
leaders who took office widely accepted and respected but they
also shared the social background of the senior civil servants whom ·
they inherited from the colonial state. Thus, for example, the
Nehrus' social background was no different from that of the senior
ICS officers of those days; even Patel, who was from a run]
background, had trained as a barrister in London; Rajagopalachari
aetually felt more at home with the ICS officers when he wa.,
Prime Minister of Madras (1937-9) than with certain elements in
the Congress party (which .would later support Kamaraj). Against
such a background, not only did the senior civil servants experience
no difficulty in functioning closely and loyally with the political
executive, but they could do so to an extent which today could be
labelled 'po liticization'.
The political process subsequent to Independence gave rise to
changes in the class composition of the political executive that
were more &r-reaching and rapid than changes i n the social com­
position of the civil services. Recruitment to the political executive,
especially at the state level and below, came to be increasingly
based on vernacular education, whereas recruitment to the civil
services continued to take place for a long time through the
English medium. The growing disparity between the class back­
ground of the political executive and the civil servants was, there­
fore, a reflection of the difference between the criteria for entty
into the two spheres. As a consequence, the political executive
came to represent a much wider social and class span than the civil
.
servtces.
The Caste Factor
The entty of the caste factor into the civil services changed the
nature of the processes outlined above. Even without formal reser­
vation, caste was an unstated but relevant factor which entered the
process of recruitment both to the political executive and to the
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civil services. In the initial phase, the upper castes were heavily
represented in both spheres and the general congruence in outlook
between them could not be separated easily from their class ori­
gins. With the introduction of caste reservation in the services,
the composition of the services changed progressively. However,
despite reservation, the representation of the scheduled castes
(SCs) and backward classes (BCs) in the services is still below the
percentages stipulated in the statute.
In Andhra Pradesh (as at the beginning of 1989) the proportion
of SC employees in the services as a whole was close to the
statutory figure of 15 per cent. But if this figure is disaggregated,
w e will find that the overall percentage is made up of 22 per cent
SC employees in the Class IV category, 12 per cent i n the Class
category, 5.5 per cent in Class II, and only 4 per cent in Class
I (against a statutory figure of 15 per cent in each Class). This is
partly due to the earlier imbalance not yet having been rectified,
but it is also due to the fact that, even in fresh placements, the
Employment Exchanges have been able to place only 57 per cent
of the vacancies reserved for the SCs. Therefore, in the higher
services the proportion of SCs is only in the range of 4 to 6 per
cent. The backward classes would be better represented than the
SCs, but would still not meet the reservation figure. Nevertheless,
a s a result
, of these reservations the services now have the same
spread of castes as the political executive. In this respect, there has
been a decisive shift in the caste composition of the services.
The spread of castes occurs even in categories where there is
n o formal reservation. For instance, there is no statutory provision
for a proportionate number of different castes in the cabinet.
Equally, there are no such provisions for Vice Chancellors of
universities or the higher judiciary. In fact, however, an informal
caste rotation does apply to all these categories. There is thus a
rainbow coalition not only in the political executive and the civil
services, but also in the judiciary and all other important public
offices. As a result, the gravitational pull between different spheres
of life, including the political executive and the civil services,
operates along caste lines. Thus, for example, durin_g an earlier
period, an officer wishing to use political influence would go to
the minister with whom he worked or had previously worked, or
who belonged to his !fistrict. But, since the 1970s and 1980s this
situation hu changed radically." Officers now go, to ministers
m
'
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
226 State and Politics in India
belonging to the same castes. Each minister, whose appoinnnent
owes much to his importance as leader of his caste, considers
himself to be the protector and godfather of all the officials in
the government who belong to his caste. The civil servants, for
their part, .reciprocate such a sentiment, though there are rare
cases of choice running counter to such a practice.
This raises the question of whether only those officials belong­
ing to a particular caste can be entrusted with the task o f im­
plementing, efficiently and enthusiastically, schemes intended for
the welfare of that caste. There may be officials belonging to
other castes who are genuinely devoted to the welfare of the SCs
and BCs. In some cases, they may even be the most suitable
among the officers available for the task. In such a case, should
a less suitable officer be selected merely because (s)he belongs to
a particular caste? Here a distinction has to be made between
schemes which are purely of a welfare nature and schemes which
are intended to protect specific castes or instil confidence in them.
In the former case, the efficiency and enthusiasm of the official
should be given greater weight than his/her caste origin.
The position is, however, different where the confidence of the
caste is an important factor. Many instances are known in which
SCs fmd it easier to represent their grievances to a Collector
belonging to their own caste. Even solicitude expressed by a high
caste person may carry a hint of condescension or patronage. The
response of the SCs is reflected in the difference between their
attitude to Gandhi and their feelings towards Ambedkar. The
latter symbolizes what the SCs can achieve by themselves whereas
the former represents, at best, only· support, sympathy and an
admission of guilt.
New links between the bureaucracy and the political executive
at different levels have been developed along caste lines during
the last twenty years. There are also other horiwntal links de­
veloping as a result of the process of politicization already outlined
and institutional changes such as the strengthening of the local
bodies to which a number of functions have been devolved. At
the same time, the traditional vertical linkages of the bureaucracy
through the conventional line of control and authority are being
weakened if not altogether vitiated. They are weakened partly as
a consequence of these very horiwntal links, which provide an
opportunity for the lower levels to bypass their superiors through
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the political channel. The vertical link has also suffered on account
of the weakening of the normal mechanisms of control and
promotion. Acute controversy surrounds the question of whether
merit, as differentiated from seniority, can be a criterion for
promotion without undermining the vertical links of control.
Thus there is a great deal of scepticism about the integrity of
superior officers and a corresponding readiness to believe com­
plaints alleging caste prejudice.
The link of administrative control has also been weakened by
judicial intervention, which deals even with such trivia as transfers.
All that is needed is an allegation of mala fides and all that is
required is a stay order. Neither proof nor final orders carry any
importance because of the inordinate time consumed by the judi­
cial process. Officers against whom adverse remarks :ire passed in
assessment reports are given an opportunity to appeal against
them. This procedure can lead to the author of an adverse remark
having to spend more time justifying it th.an the subject of the
remark defending him/herself. These processes have resulted in
an erosion of discipline in the bureaucracy.
Yet the same bureaucracy can be periodically shaken into action
and made to perform tasks of considerable administrative com­
plexity with great efficiency. The conduct of elections, despite
growing complaints about booth-capturing, is one such example;
disaster management is another. Such instances point to the fact
that if a clear-cut objective is given and intervention (except orders
through the direct line of command) is absent, the administrative
machinery can still deliver the goods. But a vast proportion of the
normal work of the administration does not deal with such well­
defined and specific tasks. Public bureaucracy, by definition, must
develop the general capacity to deliver the goods. Such capacity
should not be dependent upon the nature of the task that the
bureaucracy is called upon to perform.
There arc of course constitutional and sometimes moral limits
to the nature of the tasks that an administration can be called
upon to handle. But within these limits, a spirit of neutrality must
be cultivated. The Indian bureaucracy has been considerably
weakened in this respect. It is doubtful whether the bureaucracy
today can be regarded as an instrument of change. Its composition
reflects many of the contradictions inherent in the society. In the
implementation of any programme of change, the conflicts that
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
228 State 1111d Politia in India
may arise in the society at large are lilcely to.be replicated within
the microcosm of the bureaucracy, thereby affecting its efficiency.
Sometimes, however, the class heterogeneity of the bureaucracy
and the class coalition within the political executive reinforce each
other. In the case of a programme such as land reform, in which
the ruling coalition itself is unable to resolve its inner contndic­
tions, contradictory signals are sent through legislative measures
and then through administrative implementation. The former are
radical in content but the latter is crippled by confusion and
prevarication. It may be genuine confusion arising out of the mixed
character of the bureaucracy, or it may be confusion engineered
by certain elements in the ruling coalition acting in collusion with
similar elements in the heterogeneous bureaucracy. If, however,
a political executive is elected to power which follows objectives,
its programmes may be obstructed by i n tr a -bureaucracy conflicts.
The communist parties have not found the bureaucracy an easy
instrument for the pursuit of class-orientated objectives. A party
such as the BharatiyaJanata Party is also likely to encounter similar
difficulties.
On the other hand, an interesting experiment has been launched
recently in the sphere of literacy. Literacy progiaimnes are being
implemented under the overall guidance of the District Collector;
but the key staff are selected from among the officials on the basis
of aptitude and willingness to carry out the work. Literacy pro­
grammes have the advantage of not provoking political resistance.
The impression given is that the staff on these programmes fall into
three broad categories - nearly 50 per cent are enthusiastic about
the programme; nearly 25 per cent are in it merely for the sake of
duty; and the remainder bear an attitude of sullen and barely
concealed resistance.
The general attitudes prevailing within the bureaucracy may well.
follow a similar pattern. Many have arisen over a long period of
more or less one-party rule. The bureaucracy has been exposed to
the dynamics of genuine political plurality at the centre only during
the last few years. In certain states, however, such a development
has taken place over a longer period. These changes may well result
in a renewed appreciation of the need to restore the neutrality o f
the civil services. Meanwhile the way forward seems t o point to the
maintenance of a distinction between programmes with a social
content and activities basic to an administration and mostly of a
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The Institutions 229
regulatory nature. The bureaucracy is still an instrument uniquely
suited to discharging the latter type of functions, provided the
damage to its morale and efficiency is repaired.
The other types of programmes, with a high social content,
may be better implemented by political executives down the line.
This would require a strengthening of local bodies (i.e. Panchayati
Raj institutions), which should be given responsibility for the
implementation of such programmes. They would be better fitted
t o take the kind of decisions that would be required in respect of
value-loaded social programmes because they can reap political
dividends through success or pay a political price through failure.
That this point is widely appreciated is evident from the move to
amend the Constitution in order to provide for such institutions.
However, it is not yet sufficiently appreciated that, as a conse­
quence of such a development, conflicts in the past between the
political executive and the bureaucracy will now surface as con­
tradictions between different levels of political executive. For thir­
ty years, the main contradiction in the Panchayati Raj was between
the officials and non-officials. Today, it would appear that the
main contradiction in this area is between the elected members of
higher and lower level bodies. This has had an unexpected effect
on the bureaucracy.
At the time of Independence, the civil services of the local
bodies consisted of their own employees (with the exception of
executive officers). One of the administrative features of the post­
Independence developments has been to convert all these services
into government services (on the persistent demand of employees),
by a process of'provincialization'. As a result, the formal horizon­
tal links between the Panchayati Raj institutions and their own
civil services have become weak. This has made intervention by
the state government in the functioning of such institutions,
through the control that they can exercise over their civil services,
more frequent. Simultaneously, however, Panchayati Raj has also
increased the informal horizontal links between civil servants and
politicians. This has resulted, on the one hand, in an increase in
opportunities for political intervention at all levels and, on the
other, in greater politicization of the civil services (Figure 5.1).
A reversal of the process of vertical integration of the services
that has been under way since Independence is, therefore, neces­
sary, not only for statutory devolution to work effectively but also
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230 State and Politics in India
to remove confusion in the lines of administrative control. How­
ever, given current political realities and the strength of unioniza­
tion of the civil services, it is doubtful whether any such process
can even be initiated, let alone succeed. Nevertheless, the fact
remains that if what one is looking for is an instrument of social
change, the bureaucracy is hardly the appropriate vehicle. One
ought to look to political institutions such as the Panchayati Raj
on the one hand, and political cadres on the other, which at the
present time exist only in the communist parties and the BJP.
Note
The comments and observations made in this chapter are based mainly but not entirely - on the author's experience of administration in the state
of Andhra Pradesh. Nevertl1eless, some qualifications in regard to their gen­
eral applicability are necessary.
The stamp of the British period has long remained on Indian administra­
tion, although it is slowly fading. Colonial administration made a basic dis­
tinction between the areas in eastern India which were brought under
Permanent Serdemcnt and tl1e rest of the country where the Ryotwari Set­
tlement was imposed. Even today, the Permanent Settlement can still explain
certmn features of the social and agrarian situation in eastern India. British
administration had distinct features in me Madras Presidency (based in Fort
St George), the Bombay Presidency, me Bengal Presidency and adjoining
territories (under the aegis of Fort William), and me north Indian Hindi
heartland and Frontier states, the Indian parts of which are now represented
by Pw1jab and Haryana.
The present observations and comments would broadly apply to the states
in southern India and western India (what used to be me Madras and Bombay
Presidencies).
However, in southern India, conditions in Kerala have a distinctive quality:
1.
There is a high literacy r.ite, particularly among women, with attendant
impact on me social structure;
2.
the Muslim and Christian con1mu11ities are characterized by social and
cultural features which differ from those of the two communities else­
where in India (this is accompanied by Kerala's political distinctive­
ness);
3.
there is a strong communist movement in the state; and
me social structure of Kerala, unlike other states, i s not village-based.
4.
Conditions in the state of Tanul Nadu have also diverged considerably
from me initial pattern co1nmon to tl,e Presidency of Madras as :i whole,
mostly because of me influence of the Dravidian political movement and me
long and continuous control of the state by parties mat have emerged from
that movement.
With these qualifications it can be said iliat conditions are comparable
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within these two regions and therefore the observations contained in this
chapter are broadly applicable t o both. The conditions prevailing i n the Hindi
region and the eastern states have always differed from those in the south
and the west, and therefore, some at least of the obserwtions made here are
not applic:able to those states.
The observations il1 this chapter may well apply to states in which the
Congress party has enjoyed long and uninterrupted stints in power, with the
exception ofstates in which cadre parties mch u the CPI, CPI (M), and BJP
have displaced it from power.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
6
Impact of Centre-State
Relations on Indian Politics:
An Interpretative Reckoning
1947-1987
T. V. Sathyamurthy
D
wing the last four decades, the Indian state has addressed
the task of coping with the tensions arising in different
regions of th� country by resorting to a variety of means, depend­
ing upon the particular facet -economic, political, constitutional
or cultural/linguistic - involved in each specific conflict. Shifts
have occurred in the major thrust of centre�tate1 conflicts and
contradictions since Independence which - by virtue of their
magnitude and in view of the political actors involved - can be
best analysed by appropriate periodization. The interest of these
conflicts for the student of politics stems from the following main
considerations:
(1) Major political tensions within the ruling party at the centre
- the ruling Congress party in its different transmogrifications,
undivided Congress, Congress (R), and Congress-I, except during
the brief post-Emergency interregnum of 1977-9/1980 - as well
as tensions between it and a wide variety of opposition parties,
which offer more or less plausible alternative centres of power in
I The constitutional, political and financial aspects of centre-state relations
during the first three decades of Independence are reviewed in the author's
work entitled India sin£e lntkpmdmce: Studies in the Droelopmmt of the PU1Dtr
ofthe lndum Sutt: Vohmu I: Cmtn-Sutt Relations: The Case ofKn-ala (Delhi:
Ajanta Publications, 1985), pp. 20-101.
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The lnstitutums 233
different regions (and also at the centre, albeit in coalition)2 are
clearly reflected in the unfolding of centre-state tensions in any
given period.
(2) Major economic tensions have tended to follow parallel
lines. On the one hand, the contradiction between the rising urban
and rural working classes (consisting of unskilled, semi-skilled and
skilled industrial workers, and their multiplex trade unions rooted
in the major political formations in the country - Congress, the
Communist Party of India (CPI), the Socialist Party (SP), the
Janata party OP), and the Communist Party of India-Marxist
CPl(M); and unevenly and sporadically organized agricultural
workers and poor peasants) and the ruling classes has, at least since
the early 1970s, been successfully deflected by the state. Not only
have working class organizations become fragmented and emas­
culated, but also the ideological underpinnings which impaned
class 'militancy' to them have been undermined as a consequence
of the emergence of a number of trade union satrapies of which
the Bombay textile millworkers under Datta Samant' constitute
but the most recent and dominant example.
At the same time, the logic of economic development under
Indian conditions of dependence and unevenness4 has rendered the
working class as a whole unstable in composition. The instability
of the working class, during recent decades, has been endemic due
to the rationalization of industry and sudden shifts from labour­
intensive to capital-intensive production, and the large-scale trans­
formation of subsistence agriculture into cash crop agriculture. As
a result, widespread displacement of labour has occurred, leading
to the expansion of marginalized, unorganized and seasonal migrant
2 The tension between and within different political panics is analysed in the
author's essay entitled 'Maturity at the Polls: Contradiction, Dissent and
Dissidence', Delhi and Calcutta: Tbt Sundi,y StatmNm, 16January 1983.
3 Datta Samant is but one ex.ample of trade union initiative being grasped
from the well-established unions by ambitious individuals. During the 1970s,
for example, A.K. Roy, a communist trade union leader, broke away from the
communist trade unions and established a personal following among workers
in eastern India.
4 See, for example, AshokMitrn, TtrmSofTr,uk in India's&anomiclxvt/opmtnt
(London: F. Cass, 1976); A.K. Bagchi, P,·iwte Irrvmmmt in India: 1900-1939
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); and Francine Frankel,
India's Po/itiCl,I &onomy 1947-1977 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1977).
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234 St11tt 11nd Politia in lndill
labour forces which are, politically and economically, even weaker
than the unionized workforce.S
On the other hand, as I have argued elsewhere,6 there h� been
an intensification of the horiwntal contradiction 'U1ithin the dom­
inant class during recent decades. The conflict, at least in the short
run, between the industrial bourgeoisie (which has been, o n the
whole, the greatest beneficiary of central planning and public
sector expansion policies of the central government) and the rising
rich and middle peasant classes (which have effectively displaced
the 'feudal' landed classes of the colonial period) has not been easy
to contain. By adopting the green revolution strategy, the Indian
state created conditions under which the devdopment of agricul­
ture took place along lines that ensured not only a sharp differen­
tiation of rural classes and contradiction between them in the
countryside (i.e. between the rich and middle peasants on the one
hand, and the poor peasants and landless labourers on the other),
but also a divergence of interests between the industrial bour­
geoisie and the rural rich.
This horiwntal conflict has been activated since 1972 when,
for the first time, India attained self-sufficiency in food.
Throughout the 1970s and .1980s, the tension between the in­
dustrial capitalist forces and the rural rich has been :sggr avated,
with centre state relations providing the political arena in which
it is manifested. Except during the brief period (1978-9) when
Chaudhuri.Charan Singh was successively Finance Minister and
caretaker Prime Minister, the central government has been seen
invariably as the custodian, by and large, of the interests of India's
national industrial bourgeoisie in this conflict. Over the last two
decades, the state governments (especially in regions where the
green revolution has been successful - for example Punjab,
s For an excellent study illuminating this process, seeJan Breman, 'Seasonal
Migration and Co-operative Capillllism: The Crushing of Cane :md of
Labour by the Sugar Factories of Bardoli, South Gujarat' (in two parts), Tbt
]ou1'7llllefPt11StmtSl1Jdits, vol. 6, nos land 2, October 1978 andJ:muary 1979,
pp. 41-70 and pp. 168-209.
6 T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'State Power and Social Confticts in India',Mirin.rrrt-,
vol. 21, no. 38, 23 June 1983, pp. 1-8; 'Piloting a Nation into the Twenty-first
Century: The Changing Context ofState Power and Class Contradiction in
India', &OMmic muJ Political Wetltly, 20 (20 July 1985): 29, pp. 1218-22; 'India
Since Independence: A Research Note on the Development of the Power of
the Indian Stllte', South Ari4 Rtst11rcb, vol. 6, no. 1, May 1986, pp. 39-50.
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. Haryana and Uttar Pradesh) have emerged as the natural champions of the interests of the rich and middle peasant classes.7 This
aspect of power sharing between the centre and the states has
undergone some modification since the assumption of power by
the Rajiv Gandhi government.
(3) Cultural and linguistic differences, which have no doubt
contributed to the political idiom specific to centre-state relations
right from Independence, are generally given too much or too
little importance in the two major strands of the literature functionalist and Marxist. Whilst political and economic conflicts
develop centre-state conflict dimensions of their own, conflicts
involving linguistic and cultural (and even communal) dimensions
have tended to assume significance under certain circumstances. 8
First,· language and culture are emphasized (especially in the
regions lying outside the Hindi-speaking heartland of India, em­
bracing Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan) as
features unique to the different 'nationalities' comprising India.9
Demands for an equitable distribution of political power and
privileged access for weaker regions to economic resources are
often couched in the language of demands for greater autonomy
for the different states as well as for a more generous investment
of central plan resources in remoter regions far away from the
'heartland'. Second, poorer states which do not have an active
classes, which roughly correspond to middle castes in a number of
heartland states, have come to dominate the entire spectrum of political
parties including Congress (or Congress-I) and the Socialist Party (for ex­
ample Bihar) but not the communist parties. 1bis has been particularly true
since the Emergency. See, for CDmple, T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'State and the
People' (in two pans), Tbt St11tmn11n, Calcutta and Delhi, 14 and 1S March
1985.
8 The most recent instance of linguistic and cultural passions flaring up at
apparently short notice is provided by Goa (1986). Not unconnected with
the unrest in the region has been a recent decision of the Indian cabinet to
introduce legislation in the Lok Sabha conferring statehood on Goa, thus
inducing the twenty-fifth state of the Indian wuon since Independence. A
few months ago, another union territory in north-eastern India, Mizoram,
w:as also given the political status of a state. See, for example, 'Mizo Fighters
Seek Ballot-box Victory', Tbt Times, London, 17 February 1987.
9 Sec, for example, T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'Indian Nationalism and the "Na­
tional Question"', Millmnium: Jourtllll efJnttmlltiaru,J Studies, vol. 14, no. 2,
Swnmer 1985, pp. 172-94; and Prabsh Karat, umgrugt tmd N11ti-1ity in
JndiJ, (Madras: Orient Longman, 1973).
7 These
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236 State and Politics in India
'producing' class capable of accumulating surplus through agricul­
tural or small industrial economic activities have shown themselves
to be specially skilled in raising the banner of rebellion against the
centre.
Thus the Assam agitation10 must be distinguished from move­
ments such as Udayachal,Jharkhand and Gorkhaland movements
in which the sheer despair of oppression by a majority community
is believed to justify rebellion. The difficulties in the relations
between the centre on the one hand, and on the other, small but
strategically significant states on India's periphery can be legit­
imately viewed in terms of pressures generated by the ruling
elements of the various 'nationalities' involved. Thus, for example,
the ruling elements in the societies of Jammu and Kashmir and
the 'seven sisters' of the north-east (with the exception ofTripura),
which may be more or less adequately characterized as 'non­
productive' petit bourgeois forces, have been involved during re­
cent decades in constant agitation to secure increased flow of
resources from the centre and the state governments' right to
exercise control over them.
In the existing literature on the cultural and linguistic dimen­
sions of centre-state relations, one strand lays far too great an
emphasis on aspects relating to such questions as 'Hindi imperial­
ism',11 'unitarization of the federal polity'12 by manipu�ting the
Indian Constitution, and 'foreign influences'.13 Another strand
tends (mistakenly) to dismiss these as unimportant in preference
to locating centre-state conflicts in the tensions and contradictions
between classes qua classes, without providing a detailed empirical
characterization of the class configuration developing in India and
of the role played by the Indian state in the process of its unfolding.
The characterization of the roots of the Assam agitation has been the
subject of acute controversy which is still being carried on in the columns of
such journals as &u,wmic tmd Politic"/ Wttk/y (especiaJly during the period
i980-5), Mainsm11111 (especially during 1982; 1985), Frontier (since 1980).
II See, for example, a recent well-researched Ph.D. thesis submitted to the
University of Barcelona by Pilar Casamada entitled English in India, 19471980 (Barcelona: 1987, unpublished).
12 See, for example, Subrat:1 Mitra, 'Competing Models of the State in Indian
Political Discourse' (a paper presented at the Political Studies Association
Conference) (Aberdeen, 1987, under publication).
I l See, for example, various articles in the two special issues on the Punjab,
St111inar, nos 294 and 326, February 1984 and October 1986, Delhi.
10
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Only very tiny segments of the literature show evidence of an
appreciation of the complex character of the inter-weaving be­
tween linguistidcultural and political/economic factors underly­
ing centre-state conflicts in independent India. 14
During the fust four decades of Independence, three major
shifts have occurred in the pattern assumed by centre-state con­
flicts. The original impetus for these was provided by the cultural
and linguistic divisions between heartland or hinterland states in
which Hindi is spoken and the states/regions on the periphery in
which non-Hindi languages predominate. Whilst the importance
of the centre-state conflicts of the 1950s for the unity of India was
magnified and exaggerated out of proportion outside India,15 they
were viewed within India as no more than teething troubles of the
new federation in which power was shared between like-minded
politicians and mutually compatible economic groups in the states
and at the all-India level. 16 Even so, it is worth remembering that
intra-Congress rivalries between state-level leaders and the centre
did take place i n the political aanosphere surrounding a not-as-yet
sufficiently fortified Indian state.
As political opposition to the Congress party grew in the states
on the periphery, apparently cultural and linguistic divergences
acquired economic overtones and developed into competition be­
tween different segments of the ruling elements in a number of
states for control over the executive power in governments. With
electoral success, state-based 'nationality' movements in regions
such as Tamil Nadu, along with much weaker national opposition
parties have been able to mount a steadily accelerating challenge
to the centre's power. 17
14 This author is currently engaged in researching a series ofvolumes on this
theme with a view to producing an empirically substantiated characterization
of state power in India since independence. The second volume of the series
entitled /ndi11 sinct lndtpmlim<e: St1uiies in the Dtvelopmtnt oftht Puwn- ofthe
Indian St11tt: Volume 2: Ctntrt-St11te Relations: Tbt Cast oftht Punjab is currently
under preparation.
IS For example Selig F. Harrison, Indui: Tht Most D11ngtr0us Dt<lllks (Prin­
ceton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1960).
16 A glimpse of the amity that prevailed in the relationship between the centre
and the states during the first fifteen years of Independence is provided in
the recently published correspondence between Prime Minister Nehru and
the ChiefMinisters of different states.
17 T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'Indian Nationalism'.
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238 State and Politicr in India
The relationship between the Congress party and the opposi­
tion parties in general and provincially based opposition in par­
ticular was modulated in a rapidly changing political atmosphere
in which the Indian state was being steadily strengthened and its
coercive power was becoming capable of ever more rapid deploy­
ment throughout the country. Even so, within a period of less
than two decades ending with the Emergency, centre-state rela­
tions had come full circle with the dawning of the realization that
the era of massive centralization of power in the state as in the
central ruling party did not automatically result in the victory of
the centre over the states. However, since the end of the Emer­
gency, and to an even clearer extent since the induction of the
Rajiv Gandhi government to power, an entirely new chapter of
co-existence between rival segments of powerholders at the centre
and in the states seems to have been begun in the history of
independent India.
The periodization suggested in this article is as follows: (1) the
era of linguistic/cultural differentiation within a framework of
unchallenged unity and integrity of the Indian state (1947-67);
(2) the era of centralization following the challenge from the
states (1967-77); (3) a brief interregnum of attempts to redress
the balance of influence in favour of the centre (1977-84); and
(4) the era of coalition and co-existence between the centre and
the states (from 1985).
I
The political emphasis of the Indian Constitution rapidly shifted
from a confederal to a federal to a unitary conception of the Indian
union during the brief lifetime of the Constituent Assembly.18 The
overwhelming popularity of the Congress party throughout the
country at the time of Independence, ensuring a homogeneous
government at the centre as well as in all the states, enabled the
Indian government to successfully create the impression that the
Constitution was federal in character and power would be shared
between the two levels of government rather than imposed by the
centre on the states.
18 See, for ex:imple, Granville Austin, Tbt Indian Constitutiun: Tbt Comentun.:
ofa Natiun (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966); and Chandra Pal, St11ttAutonomy
m Indian Federalism: Eme,ging Trtnds (Delhi: Deep and Deep, 1984).
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The pressure in favour of linguistic states intensified during
the initial stages in the provincial Congress organizations in the
non-Hindi regions, except in Tamil Nadu where a widespread
popular opposition to Hindi led by non-Congress elements went
hand in hand with demands for a Tamil state defined by the
regional language which emanated from the Tamil Nadu Pradesh
Congress. Very early on, the Indian state established a double
standard in the measures that it adopted to �eal with mass agita­
tions (for example the linguistic agitation of Telugu-speaking
Andhra people led by the Congress) and class agitations (for
example the Telengana agitation, also in Andhra) led by the
Communist Party of India (CPI). 19 Even though national leaders
(for example Nehru) were not nearly as keen after Independence
as they had been before on the idea of linguistic states, the
Congress party organization (which continued to bear the imprint
of Sardar Patel's style of functioning even after his demise) was
not averse to the idea of strengthening the state governments as
a means of maintaining its mass following.
During the period 1947-57, there was no other party in any of
the Indian states which posed a sustained electoral challenge to
the Congress.20 With the CPI tamed after Telengana into a par­
liamentary opposition force (after being forced to all but give up
its insurrectionary or revolutionary role) and the Congress at the
helm both at the centre and in the states,21 the centre appeared
to yield to linguistic pressures in line with the ruling party's
commitment, during the nationalist struggle, to redivide India into
politically homogeneous states reflecting the country's national
unity in culturaVlinguistic diversity.
As a result of the recommendations of the high powered States
Re-organization Commission (SRC), large new states were
brought into existence: Andhra Pradesh,Maharashtra, Gujarat and
Kamataka. Nevertheless, the general understanding of the non­
contradictory (in fact, even mutually complementary) character of
the power-holders at the centre and in the states underlying the
19 See, for example, P. Sundarayya, Ttknglffl4 Ptopk'sStn,gglt 1111d Its Lmrms
(Calcutta: Desh Raj Chadha, 1972).
20 PSP in coalition with other minor parties did pose a challenge to Congress
dominance in Kerala for a short time, but its leader Pattom Thanu Pillai was
bought off by the Indian government with the Governorship of the Punjab.
21 Except in Kerala (1957-9).
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240 State and Politics in India
fust great spurt of recarving the internal boundaries of multi­
lingual India did not extend to three specific areas.
In the case of Uttar Pradesh, a powerful argument was ad­
vanced by K.M. Panikkar (one of the three members of the SRC)
to the effect that the opportunity provided by linguistic events
to redraw state boundaries should also be taken advantage of to
divide the administratively unwieldy and economically unevenly
developed state of Uttar Pradesh into two more viable states.
This recommendation, in the form of a lengthy dissenting minute,
was greeted with such hostility by the ruling party that it was
widely believed to be animated by a touch of 'Hindi imperialism'
and 'hegemonism of the north'.
The linguistic demands of the Punjabi-speaking population, lar­
gely but not exclusively Sikh in composition,22 were ignored by a
provincial leadership dominated by Hindus which engaged in politi­
cal manipulation of the linguistic census in such a manner as to cre­
ate a false impression to the effect that the Punjab was a largely
Hindi-speaking region. Nehru believed that the Punjab should be
regarded as a special category of state (bordering as it does on Pakis­
tan} to which the restrictions of'unitarism' rather than the flexible
adjustments characteristic of 'federalism' ought to apply.
In the case of Assam, compounded by the rising tensions of the
north-east as a whole,23 the linguistic conflict which took on a new
dimension (by virtue of the fact that the economic, educational
and administrative life of the state was dominated by an immigrant
upwardly mobile Bengali community, and the economic future of
the mass of the people belonging to the Assamese linguistid
cultural nationality was being imperilled by the regular exodus of
22 Between 1947 and 1966 Punjab included the predominantly Hindu
Haryana and parts of Rajasthan. Since 1966, with the redrawing of state
boundaries resulting in the creation of Haryana, the Punjab became a Sikh­
majority state by a small margin. This margin has since increased.
23 Tension developed along the two broad lines of the various tribal peoples
of the sprawling north-east region (Assam and NEFA) seeking autonomy,
and thi: indigenous Assamese-speaking population seeking to free itself of the
Bengali economic and administrative stranglehold on Assam. Over a period
of twenty years, the north-eastern stretch of the country was divided into
seven states and union territories (of which Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram
have been conferred statehood during the last two years), Assam itself be­
coming truncated with the formation of Meghalaya. See T.V. Sathyamurthy,
N11tionalim1 in the Contm1pornry World: Political and So.iologiCJll Perrpectivtr
(London: Frances Pinter, 1983), chapter 8.
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Bengali people - 1nainJy poor Muslim peasants and landless
labourers - from East Pakistan into Assam) was not given the
attention that it deserved until it exploded into a big violent crisis
for the first rime in 1962. In the north-east as in the north-west,
arguments of national integrity, unity and security were invoked
to suppress political demands in Assam that were met as a matter
of course in other parts of the country.
By and large, however, 'federal' India, during the period 194767, was characterized by political homogeneity. The power of the
state, as indeed power in the states, was wielded by the same
political force represented by the Congress.24 No great conflict
had yet surfaced between the captains of industry who envisaged
a dominant role for the state in the modernization of the Indian
economy on the one hand, and on the other, the newly arisen
'rural rich' whose interests in the states were largely represented
by the Pradesh Congress leaders in control of executive power.25
During this period, significant economic changes were intro­
duced mainly through the instru1nent of central planning. The
expansion of industry throughout the country under the aegis of
the state, the widening of the market accompanied by i ts penetra­
tion of wider and wider sections of the population, the vastly
increased scope for the expansion of private industry in general
and small and medium industries in particular, and the opening
up of the whole of the country to entrepreneurs from any part of
i t wishing to invest, produce and sell, contributed to a process of
economic unification of India and of giving its rising industrial
bourgeoisie a 'national' (as differentiated from a sectional, regional
or partial) identity. The Indian national bourgeoisie, for its part,
welcomed these changes and the opportunities that they presented
for industrial expansion and diversitication.26
24 Only in Kerala was a CPI-led government formed after the state assembly
election of 1957 which was prevented from completing its normal legislative
term by the centre at the instigation of the national and Pradesh Congress
organizations.
2s The relationship between Prime Ministers Nehru and Shastri on the one
hand, and on the other, the ChiefMinisters of the larger states of the Indian
Union was cordial and more or less equal. In fact, Chief Ministers of states
such as Madras, Bombay (latterly Maharashtra and Gujarat}, West Bengal,
Uwr Pradesh and Bihar were accorded greater respect than union cabinet
ministers within the Congress hierarchy. See note 17.
26 See, for example, Prarnit Chaudhuri, The Indian &urumzy: Puvmy IINI
Droe/opmmt(London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1979), especially pp. 17-75.
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The agrarian economy of India, also in the throes of far-reaching
transformation, however, presented a somewhat different picture.
Indian agriculture was even more unevenly developed than Indian
industry. The social and political changes required to place Indian
agriculture on a modem footing were enormous in comparison to
the modest beginnings which most Congress governments were
prepared to contemplate during the first three five-year plans.27
Even though the days of the pre-capitalist landlord class of the
colonial period were numbered, feudal relations of production
continued to exercise sway in many parts of India.28 The rise of a
new class of more or less 'capitalistically' orientated rich and middle
peasantry (drawn largely from the ranks of the 'tenantry' of the
colonial era) on the one hand, and on the other, the emergence of
a 'wage' conscious landless labour class and poor peasantry (in place
of bonded serfs in a state of perpetual indebtedness) with a potential
claim to the land tilled by them, was a slow process, the full dynamic
of which had not yet begun to unfold itself.
The drama of subsequent decades, located in a plot dividing the
agrarian and industrial segments of the Indian capitalist class into
mutually antagonistic elements- combining together to constitute
an increasingly fractured ruling class impinging upon a rapidly
fraginenting political system - was scarcely discernible, except as
a distant portent, so long as Congress successfully appeared to
perform the tasks of a ruling umbrella party capable of serving the
interests not only of antagonistic classes but also of mutually an­
tagonistic segments within the same class.
On the eve of the fourth general election (1967), India presented
a picture, the main components of which were a considerably more
powerful state (than at Independence), capable of exercising coer­
cive power on the mass of the population more or less at will, an
economy dominated at the national level by the state acting mainly
in the interests of the national bourgeoisie and a rising class of as
See, for eX2mple, B.H. Farmer, Agricultural Colunizatiun in lndill sinct
/ntkpmdmcr(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), especially pp. 87-117,
211-26, and 261-98.
28 On the long and fruitful debate on the mode of production in Indian
agriculture which deals with this question, see Alice Thomer, 'Serni­
Feudalism or Capitalism? Debate on Classes and Modes of Production in
lndia',&r,,u,mir11ndPolitic11/Wttkly, vol.13, nos49-S l, 4,11 and 18 December
1982, pp. 1961-8; 1993-9; and 2061-6.
27
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yet not strongly differentiated rich and middle peasantry, and a
polity in which the intra-party differences of the Congress revolv­
ing round the question of the relative autonomy of the states within
the federal framework of the Indian constitution were rapidly yield­
ing place to conflicts of a substantial nature between the Congress
party on the one hand, and on the other, the national and regional
opposition parties belonging to the entire political spectrum from
the left to the right29
The failure of successive Congress administrations at the centre
and in the states to alleviate the harsh economic conditions of the
mass of the Indian people led to widespread alienation and disaf­
fection throughout the country which were reflected in the dis­
astrous performance of the ruling party in the 1967 general election
in a number of states and in its much reduced majority i n the Lok
Sabha.
II
Of the several opposition governments which took power in the
states during the interregnum between the indecisive fourth gen­
eral election and the much more decisive fifth general election
(1971), the government of Tamil Nadu led by the Dravida Mun­
netra Kazhagam (DMK) pany3° was the first to take on board the
question of centre-state relations on a political level in a systematic
manner. In the other states where the Congress party had lost
control, executive power was wielded for brief uncertain periods
(interspersed with intervals of President's rule under the Governor)
by far-flung coalitions. They were inherently unstable by virtue of
their. eclectic political colouration, and their sole purpose seemed
to be to keep themselves afloat in the face of the machinations of
the Congress party which manifested a decisive proclivity to en­
couraging defections from almost all n o n c- adre parties (especially
in the Hindi-heartland states) with the aid of monetary and other
incentives.31
29 T.V. Sath yamurthy, 'Marurity at
the Polls'.
39 T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'Dravidtt Mrmmtra Kilzbaga111 in the Politics ofTamil
Nadu: 1947-1971', in B.N. Pandey (ed.), uadn-sbip in South Asia (London:
Asia Publishing House, 1977), pp. 426--60; R.L. Hardgrave Or),Tbt Dravidian
Mwnnent (Bomb ay: Popular Pralcashan, 1965).
31 In more recent years, Congress-I has been known to have purchased
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244 State and Politics in India
On the left of the political spectrum, the 1964 split of the
undivided CPI had the effect of hamstringing the much more
popubr CPI(M) in West Bengal, Tripura, and Kerala. For the
CPI(M) was, on the one hand, not well placed (especially in West
Bengal) to cope with opposition from Naxalires or Communist
Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-M-L) elements32 without
unleashing violence and resorting to desperate measures, whilst
on the other, it was unable to prevent the CPI from slipping into
the role ofthe Trojan horse of the left by edging closer and closer
to the new brand of shibboleth socialism that the ruling party was
propagating during the run up to the 1971 general election.
Although the CPI(M) did raise the issue of centre-state rela­
tions during the 1967-9 United Front experiments in Kerala,
West Bengal and Tripura (in which it shared executive power with
other parties), its substantive contribution to the debate had been
minimal. The Rajamannar Repon,33 commissioned by the Tamil
Nadu government, was the fust detailed official document pub­
lished by a state government to deal with various aspects of the
political, fmancial and economic relations between the centre and
states.34
The ruling party at the centre was much more concerned during
this period with refurbishing its image in the eyes of the mass of
the Indian electorate, whilst the Indian state embarked upon a
strong programme of containing popular unrest, of destabilizing
popularly elected but opposition-controlled state governments,
and of attempting to emasculate and crush left parties in general
and the CPI(M) in particular. The already impressive and far­
reaching coercive power wielded by the Indian state apparatus was
massive floor crossings from opposition parties to the Congress prior to the
swearin gin
- ceremony ofnewly elected state legislatures, for example Haryana
(1982).
JZ See, for example, Mohan R.un, Maoism in India (Delhi: Vikas, 1971),
especially pp. 38-77 and 122-36.
Jl Government ofMadras, Report on Cmm-Statt Re/ations(Chairman:Justice
P.V. Rajamannar) (Madras: Government Press, 1968).
34 The Rajamannar Report should be read in conjunction with others such
as K. Santhanam, Union-State Relations in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing
House, 1960) and P.B. G.ijendraga dkar, The Constitution ofIndia: Its Philosophy
1111d Batie Ponuitrus (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1969), especially
pp. 63-88. See also T.V. Sathyamurthy, India Since lndtpnuknct Vol I, pp. 68101.
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funher augmented in the performance of these repressive tasks by
repeatedly invoking the need to safeguard India's unity, integrity,
and security from internal and external threats.
The strategy adopted by the leadership of the Congress party
to improve its public standing consisted of provoking an internal
split aimed at cleansing the organization of the baleful influence
o f the so-called 'Syndicate' and entrenching the sway of a catchy
brand of pseudo-radical populism championed by those in posi­
tions of influence who favoured a greater centralization of power
and a much more dirigiste orientation to politics in the states.
It was, in fact, during this period that the practice was begun of
the central organization of the party imposing its own nominees
for the Chief Ministershifs of Congress-ruled states and of changing
their incumbents at will. 5 At the same time, the practice of demo­
cratic election of office-bearers at various levels within the party
was brought to an indefinite standstill.36 Thus even though the
immediate reason behind the 1969 crisis within the party was pro­
vided by intra-party differences over who should be the Congress
nominee in the presidential election (1969),37 the organizational
35 During the second phase of this period (1971-7), Chief Ministers of
Congress-ruled stlltes (for example Gujarat, Bihar, Utt2r Pradesh, Maha­
rashtra and Andhra Pradesh) were changed frequently and i n an arbitrary
f.ishion by the Congress Parliamentary Board. During the Indira Gandhi
(Mark II) government's rule (1980-4) Chief Ministers in Congress-I-ruled
stlltes (with the single exception ofVishwanath Prat2p Singh ofUmr Pradesh
who resigned before he was asked to leave) were changed at the Prime
Minister's whim.
36 Thus, despite extravagant promises to the contrary on the occasion of the
centenary celebration ofthe Congress party (December 1985), Congress-I is
yet to carry out inner parry election at any level. It would appear that the
parry has become too sclerotic to submit itself to the upheaval of election.
37 See T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'Crisis i n the Congress Party: The Indian Pres­
idential Election of 1969', Tht WM'ld Today (November 1969). Prior to the
1969 crisis there was only one instance of the presidential candidate's nomina­
tion for a second time (1956) being under inner party discussion because of
Rajendra Prasad's known opposition to the Hindu Code Bill. Since 1969,
however, there have been at least two major occasions on which constitutional
issues have arisen on the question of the correct relationship between the
President and the elected executive. The first concerned the manner in which
N. Sanjiva Reddy was thought to have handled the question of whether o r
notJagjivan Ram should be invited to form a government when Desai lost a
confidence vote in the Lok Sabha (1979). The second concerns the major
difference of opinion over the role of the President between Prime Minister
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changes initiated during the 1969-70 period were to have far­
reaching effects on the internal working of the Congress party, on
the role of the Indian state in dealing with legitimate opposition,
and on the role of the Indian Constirution and the machinery of
government established under its provisions.
During the period 1969-75, attempts were made b y the centre
to clamp down on opposition which manifested itself mainly in
the form of trade union agitation by organized sections of labour,
a brief but unconvincing return on the CPl(M)'s pan to revolu­
tionary activity38 after its retreat from the parliamentary path
compelled by the ruthless application of state power against the
organization and its cadres, and the mass movement (especially
but not only in Bihar and Gujarat) against corruption under Jaya
Prakash Narayan's leadership.39
Compared to these large-scale manifestations of discontent,40
the challenge - already watered down in content and portent
due to years of less than incorruptible exercise of power, to say
the least - posed b y a regional opposition party in control of
executive power in a single state (DMK of Tamil Nadu) was
negligible. The centre under the Congress party and the Tamil
Nadu state under DMK had become habituated to a regimen of
c o -existence without wires being crossed between the two sides
about the extent of leeway a state could expect from the centre.
All this notwithstanding the political wisdom enshrined in the
celebrated Rajamannar Report
The impetus for the Indian Emergency (1975-7) was thus
derived not from any contradiction between the different instru­
ments of federal power representing the centre and the states, but
predominantly from political challenges that sprang from outside
the confines of government and which were interpreted by the
Indian.state as a threat to its integrity and security rather than as
demands for a new democratic mandate for the control of its
power. The full impact of the Emergency can only be understood
Rajiv Gandhi and President Zail Singh (1986-7). See, for example, the article
entitled 'The President: Deepening Crisis' in India Today, 31 May 1987, p. 27.
38 See, for example, Achin Vanaik, 'The Indian Left', Nw Ltft Rroiw, no.
159, September/October 1986, pp. 49-70.
39 See R . Rajagopalan, 'Background to India's State of Emergency', The Black
Liberator, vol. Z, no. 4,January 1975-August 1976, pp. 313-19.
40 See Anm Shourie, Sympt<mis ofFascism (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978).
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against a background of three related considerations. First, with
the success of the green revolution, powerful political forces rose
to the surface in a number of regions which represented the
interests of the 'rural rich', more specifically the rich peasantry
and the middle peasantry.41 Whilst the Congress party was in a
position to put itself forward as the champion of the interests of
the rich and middle peasant classes through the ranks of its re­
gional elites, its influence among these classes was being eroded
for two major reasons:
(1) The centre came under increasing pressure from industrial
capital to release some of the surplus derived from agriculture for
furthering the industrialization and modernization of the Indian
economy. With the achievement of self-sufficiency in food, it was
argued, the balance between industrial capital and agricultural
capital should be reconstituted by government policy at the state
level aimed at reducing grants, keeping down procurement prices
and introducing a measure of agricultural taxation.
(2) The rural poor (and in particular, landless labourers and
poor peasants), largely consisting of low caste people and Muslims,
who looked up to the Congress party which they supported in
elections, bore the brunt of local oppression by landowning castes
whose interests were served by the ruling party as well as several
regionally based opposition parties.42 Over a period of time, the
rural poor became disenchanted with the Congress as well as with
other non-left regional parties.43 Except in Kerala, West Bengal
and Tripura where the CPI and CPI(M) had shown themselves
41
In Kenia and West Bengal, as well as in certain parts of Andhra Pradesh
where the CPI had long been active i n the countryside, rich peasant domina­
tion was limited in comparison to that in states such as Unar Pradesh.
42 These parties generally championed different caste members o f the rural
rich classes. Thus in Bihar, the Lok Dal championed the c:iuse of the lower
of the four landowning castes (the upper ones being served by the Congress
party), whilst in Andhra Pradesh the Telugu Desam party reflects on balance
the interests of the Kamma landowning caste.
43 Even during the brief periods in which they were in office (1967-9 in
certain states, 1977-80 in the centre, and since 1982 in certain states), non-left
regional parties have shown themselves to be incapable of or unwilling to
address the problems of the poorer peasantry and landless labour. Of special
interest is the role played by the DMK and AIADMK in Tamil Nadu where,
during the last twenty years, the content of politics has been systematically
Jumpmiud as a consequence of the indifference with which the state govern­
ment deals with the democratic demands of the agricultural poor.
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capable of introducing limited but enlightened land reform, and
in Kamataka where the relative lack of entrenched rich peasant
power enabled the Congress Chief Minister Devraj Urs to imple­
ment (during the l970s) a liberal land and agricultural policy, the
plight of the poor peasantry and landless labourers rapidly wor­
sened throughout India in an economic aonosphere of downward
differentiation leading to an expansion of the ranks of agricultural
(and especially landless) labourers. The Emergency simply added
a new dimension of state oppression and tyranny to the economic
and social oppression that they suffered in their daily lives. All the
more ironic, in view of the government's claim in its iO-point (and
Sanjay Gandhi's five-point) justification of the Emergency that it
was solely inspired by concern for the welfare of th e poor and
oppressed.
Moreover, the 1969 split, far from healing the rift within the
Congress, simply had the effect of opening the floodgates of
factionalism, groupism and dissidence even wider. In order to
deal with the process of internal disintegration and the momen­
tum rapidly gained by the growing contradiction within the party
between those in control of state power (for example the central
leadership personified in the Prime Minister)44 on the one hand,
and on the other, the Pradesh-level leaders, power was con­
centrated in the hands of a coterie which enjoyed the confidence
of the Prime Minister and her family. The Pradesh Congress
organizations were pitted against opposition parties (for example,
the Bharatiya Kranti Dal [BKD] and its various subsequent frag­
mentations and transmogrifications) which put themselves for­
ward as champions of the rich and middle peasant classes in their
struggle against a centre eager to seize the political opportunity
to compel them to agree to a policy of transferring surplus from
agriculture to industry by reversing the terms of trade between
the two sectors of the economy. They were also confronting the
central Congress leadership which took advantage of endemic
dissidence within the ruling party45 to impose its own nominees
as Chief Ministers of Congress-ruled state governments and
leaders of the various Pradesh Congress organizations.
44 During the Emergency, the Congress president
(Deb Kanta Barua) earned
notoriety by making the statement 'India is Indira and Indira is India', a slogan
which he was to rue after the Emergency ended.
4S See note 36.
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The Pradesh Congress organizations were thus undermined
and their leaders (with individual exceptions) lost touch with the
mass of the people. At the same time, money power became a
substitute for mass contact. A huge parallel economy fuelled by
black market money became the engine through which such a
basic transformation of the Congress organization was achieved
in such a brief period of time. Several leaders who had a talent for
making the right contacts with black market barons emerged
within the organization resulting in support for the government
being purchased rather than won by argument and persuasion.46
The Indian state did little to curb the black economy which, from
the early 1970s onwards, had become the demi-goddess presiding
over the fortunes of the ruling party of the government.
Further, the literature on political developments in India rightly
lays stress on the enormous increase in the coercive power of the
state during the last quarter of a century and the consequent
undermining of democratic processes, values and elementary lib­
erties guaranteed under the Indian Constitution. At the same time,
popular democratic resistance to the government's arbitrary politi­
cal behaviour has also markedly increased during the last two
decades, though it is not invariably manifested in a concerted
manner except when electoral opportunities become available.47
Established political parties including cadre-based organizations
had failed to provide adequate leadership in channelling popular
discontent i n a democratic and constructive manner. However,
during the Emergen�, they did take part in a joint organized
democratic resistance to the central government's arbitrary rule
which spread far beyond the confutes of party-based action to
46 For
example, Lalit Narayan Mishra (mysteriously lcilled in Samastipur in
1974), ChiefMinister A.R. Antulay ofMaharashtra and Kamalapathi Tripathi
(until recently the 'working president' of the Congress-I party). Even before
Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister, money politics was introduced in a
substantial manner by S.K. Patil, a member of the Congress 'Syndicate'.
47 See, for example, Rajni Kothari, 'The Non-Party Political Process', &o­
Mmic ,md Political Weekly, volume 19, no. 4, 4 February 1984, pp. 216-24;
'Will the State Wither Away?', The /IIJ1StT11ted Weekly ofIndi11, 8 July 1984,
pp. 8-14; D.L. Sheth, 'Grassroots Initiatives in India', &/111Q/11ic 1171d Politic11/
Weekly, volume 19, no. 6, 11 February 1984, pp. 2S9-62.
48 New organizations were established for the promotion of the democratic
rights and civil liberties of the people. These have remained active since the
end of the Emergency (for exa1nple PUCL and PUDR).
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250 State and Politics in India
mass-based opposition. The success of such a general strategy of
opposing the Emergency was reflected in the resounding defeat
suffered by the ruling party at the centre and in a majority of the
states in the general and state legislative assembly elections held
in 1977.
Centre-state relations, during the 1969-77 period, were prac­
tically reduced to a state of near non-existence as a problematic
of federal politics in India. Unitarism triumphed under the aegis
of a strong state whose power was controlled by a ruling party
which had lost its democratic mainspring. Centre-state relations
were, at Independence, orchestrated in accordance with an equi­
librium model in which politically homogeneous states on the
one hand and the centre on the other acted as countervailing
forces in the evolution of a powerful post-colonial state. At the
end of the Emergency and on the eve of the 1977 general election,
however, they had undergone a paradigm shift characterized by
a puissant centre presiding over a federation of thoroughly en­
feebled states.
The Indian state itself was no longer controlled by a popular
mass party functioning through a complex and reticulated or­
ganization but by a clique of powerful elements which could be
relied upon to strike terror among potential opponents of the .
, new brand of politics.49 The 1977 elections exposed the shallow­
ness of the achievements of the Congress as the ruling party and
helped reverse the process of paradigmatic shift described in this
section by strengthening democratic opposition to the regime
and once again bringing out the question of centre-state relations
into the open as one of fundamental importance for the future
of the Indian state.
m
The 1977 general election provided the first occasion for the
transfer of the control of state power from the Congress party to
the loose-knitJanata coalition representing a variety ofruling class
interests5° without putting on an artificial gloss of homogeneity
49 During the Emergency, Sanjay Gandhi, the Prime Minister's
son, led such
elements.
so In an interesting discussion, Sudipta K:iviraj argues that as power has
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to cover their disparateness and contradictions. Even though the
new ruling coalition, unlike the Congress party, WllS both or­
ganizationally and ideologically weak, it did preside over a state
which had become immensely strengthened during the previous
three decades.s•
Despite its impressive majority in the Lok Sabha,Janata's grasp
of state power was, however, severely compromised by its lack of
political clout and by the chronic inability of its ageing leaders to
unite together on a positive programme.s2 The abrupt change
from an autocratic unitarist to an entropic polyglot pattern of
wielding state power was accompanied by centrifugal tendencies
plaguing the very heart of the political system in its day-to-day
functioning.
Yet the new leaders (who were uncompromisingly 'consti­
tutionalist' in their determination to restore the primacy of par­
liamentary institutions and their practices -in spirit as in letter)
shared the political orientation of their predecessors on the ques­
tion of centre-state relations.Sl They were not basically sym­
pathetic to demands for increased autonomy from the states
except in certain well-defined spheres, and certainly not when
accumulated i n the Indian state, paradoxically, institutions designed to safe­
guard democratic functioning of the state have weakened. In this author's
view, this disjuncture between the power of the state and the institutions of
democratic rule has in no way undermined the ordinary people's &ith in
parliamentary institutions and civil and democratic rights for the citizens or
even the preference shown by the powerful classes to cling to the rule of the
civil constitution in times of crisis. See Sudipta Kaviraj, 'On the Crisis of
Political Institutions in India', Contributions to lndilm Socio/or;, (N= Series),
volume 18, no. 2, 1984, pp. 223-43.
SI T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'India since Independence'.
S2 With the exception of Jayaprakash Narayan who acted as peacemaker
between the querulous parmers of the Jana ta leadership, all the others were
busily engaged in publicly undemuning each other. Thus Prime Minister
Moratji Desai, Home Minister Chowdhury Charan Singh and deputy Prime
Minister Jagjivan Ram were always at odds with one another. The Janata
coalition did not need an enemy to destabilize it. It acted as its own worst
enemy. Within eighteen months, a formidable parliamentary majority was
whittled down and the ruling coalition had disintegrated into two or three
mutually hostile coalitions bent on destroying the government.
SJ The Prime Minister of the Jana ta government and deputy Prime Minister
Jagjivan Ram (as well as Chowdh ury Charan Singh) were reared in the same
political tradition as their predecessors in office whose view of centr-tate
relations was cast in the unitary rather than in a loose federal mould.
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they were couched in combative political terms. Their grounds
for believing that a strong centre and weak states did not represent
an unhealthy combination were similar to the arguments advanced
by the Congress party when it was in power.
The sudden removal of the Congress party from the centre,
followed by the election of a number of state governments led by
parties other than the Congresss4 breathed new life into the ques­
tion of centre-state relations which had been put under constitu­
tional sedation following the systematic destabilization by the
centre and the Congress party of the non-Congress state govern­
ments during the period 1967-70. The resurgence of interest in
this question in post-Emergency India was manifested in three
different forms.
(1) States in which there was a strong tradition of Congress
rule, where its popularity had not suffered during the Emergen­
cy,55 found themselves on the defensive for the first time since
Independence. Their governments attempted to raise the ques­
tion of the autonomy of states by protesting against imagined
encroachments by the centre which was under the control of the
traditional opposition forces. The very act of restoring the Con­
stitution to its p r e 1- 975 condition by the new government at the
centre was criticized by the Congress Chief Ministers of the
southern states of Kamataka and Andhra Pradesh, and by the
Pradesh Congress organizations as a deliberate attempt to curtail
state autonomy. In the event, not much political mileage could
be derived from such protests. S6
(2) Following Janata's landslide victory in the 1977 general
54 Upon its receiving a big majority in the 1977 election, the Janata govern­
ment dismissed a number of state governments where Congress was in power.
This controversial decision, which was sustained by the Supreme Court, was
followed by state assembly elections in a number of states. In several states
Janata coalitions took power. In West Bengal and Tripura, CPI(M)-led
United Left Front coalitions received substantial majorities. In K.erala, which
went to the polls at the time of the parliamentary election (March 1977),
electoral choice had gone against the grain of the rest of the country and a
Congress-led coalition won by a narrow majority.
ss For example Andhra Pradesh and K.amatalca (and, t o a lesser degree,
Maharashtra).
56 Characteristically, the Congress-led Andhra Pradesh government blamed
the central government for failing to come to its rescue when the state was
faced with famine, floods, drought and other disasters.
.
.
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election, a number of non-Congress governments won majorities
in the state assembly elections that followed in its wake in many
states. Janata, CPI(M)-led United Left Front (ULF) and other
governments57 took control of executive power based on substan­
tial majorities in the assemblies. In putting the centre-state rela­
tions issue back on the political agenda, the leaders of these new
ruling parties/coalitions were seeking not to confront the centre
but rather to raise a number of crucial questions affecting eco­
nomic development.ss In other words, the question ofcentre-state
relations was raised by a number of state governments as a means
of readjusting the relations between the two sides and of achieving
a modus vivendi that would take account of genuine economic and
political grievances. Despite the new Prime Minister's personal
reluctance to depart from his predecessor's general line on the
subject, the Janata government - itself new to the art of wielding
political power and accustomed much more to an oppositional
than to a governmental role - was, by and large, prepared to
accommodate these pressures mainly by a return to the Constitu­
tion and by reactivating such instruments as the National Devel­
opment Council (NOC).59 The Janata government also reviewed .
the process of planning, sp,cifically with the aim of bringing about
a mutually acceptable readjustment of fiscal allocations by the
centre to the states, and of �tiating agricultural procurement
policies from a much more differentiated perspective than that to
which the centre had been accustom� in the past under successive
Congress Prime Ministers.60
(3) From the perspective of centralists/unitarists, agitation for
greater political autonomy for the states assumed its most dan­
gerous form whenever it was advanced in the name of more or
less direct mass democratic political participation of aggrieved
segments of the people. Thus in the Punjab, in Jammu and
S7 A SAD-led government was formed in the Punjab; the AIADMK govern­
ment of Tamil Nadu had a big majority in the Tamil Nadu legislative
assembly.
S8 For aa.mple questions relating to the method and criteria of allocation of
resources for development, and how the interests of the regional classes and
social groups represented by the new parties in control of fedenJ and state
power should be presented.
S9 It consists of the Prime MiniStcr and Chief Ministers.
60 With the exception of the brief interrcgillllD (1964-6) when Lal Bahadur
Shastri was Prime Minister.
'
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Kashmir,61 in Assam, and in several of the north-eastern states,
pressure for a radical reordering of centr�tate relations did not
arise during this period (1977-84) from political parties/coalitions
in control of state governments as such. Rather, it arose from
powerful political movements enjoying a degree of mass popu­
larity62 which they were in a position to augment by carrying the
banner of political protest and by raising demands of a basic
nature which would have been stifled in the past by a powerful
centre on the grounds that states on India's periphery were
specially sensitive and vulnerable to foreign penetration and in­
filtration.
During the Janata interregnum, these popularly based forces
seriously reared their heads for the first time with the covert
encouragement of Congress-163 whose main aim was to expose the
political weakness of the Jana ta, to undermine it by exploiting its
inner contradictions, and to bring its rule to an end b y whatever
means available.
In the Punjab, the Congress-I strategy took the form of sup­
porting Jamail Singh Bhindranwale as a fundamentalist Trojan
horse within the political sphere of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD)
and the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC).
As a result, the SAD-led government (1977-80) was successfully
destabilized more or less simultaneously with the bringing down
of the Janata itself.64
61 Jammu
and Kashmir has a Constitution of its own. Its special status is
recognized in Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. See Roop Kishen Bhatt,
'Kashmir: The Politics of Integration', in Iqbal Narain (ed.), Statt Politics in
India (Meerut: Meenakshi Pralcashan, 1976), pp. 146-76; for a recent analysis
of political changes in that sensitive state, see Balraj Puri, 'Fundamentalism
in Kashmir, Fragmentation inJammu', &unomic and Political Wttkly, volume
22, no. 22, 30 May 1987, pp. 835-7.
62 In many instances, as in the case ofTelugu Desam, for example, the political
forces that arise out of these move1nents reflet.'t the interests of narrow
segments of the population.
63 For example Jamail Singh Bhindranwale's emergence as a leader of the
fundamentalist Sikh mass could not have been smooth and sudden without
the collusion of Zail Singh, one of Indira Gandhi's closest followers.
64 The Janata government was brought down in July 1979. In a series of
moves i n which Indira Gandhi, President Sanjiva Reddy, Chowdhury Charan
Singh and Raj Narain were involved, Jagjivan Ram, who could have formed
an alternative government under Janata, was sidelined. Charan Singh fanned
a government which was toppled in a fortnight.
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It is important to note that the Janata party in particular and
the Janata government as a whole were deeply opposed to the
fundamentalist Sikh political forces which gave an entirely new
twist not only to the spirit of the Ananadpur Sahib resolution,65
but also to the question of state autonomy itself. They were equally
disapproving of the Assam students' movement and of p �ulist
movements such as the Mizoram National Front (MNF). But,
unlike the Indira Gandhi (Mark I) government (in its 1969-77
phase) which deployed all the political and governmental power
a t its command to thwart such movements, the Janata coalition
found itselftoo much at odds internally to be able to give attention
to these new tensions and contradictions entering the picture o f
centre-state relations in the aftermath of the ruling Congress
party's defeat67
When Congress-I was returned to power in 1980 under Indira
Gandhi (Mark
the crises which it had helped keep stoked up
when it was out o f power had already become firmly embedded
in the political life. of the country. My aim here is to outline the
strategy a4opted by the new Congress-I government to deal with
centre-state tensions during its four years in power.68
The Janatil was a weak and badly organized political coalition
which accidentally gained control over an extremely powerful
state. The weakness of the ruling coalition during the 1977-9
interregnum was reflected in the reduced effectiveness of the state
i n dealing with political tensions and conflicts.69 By the same token
when the Congress-I took power, its hold over the state was
m,
6S T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'India's Punjab Problem:
The World Toda:,, March 1986, pp. 46-50.
Edging towards a Solution?',
66 'Mizoram: Vote
ofHope' (editorial), &ontmtic and Political Weekly, vol. 22,
no. 9, 28 February 1987, p. 347.
67 The internal dialectic ofthe Indian ruling class was reftected in a deepening
of the horizonail divisions within it. Janata was sim_ply a political reftection
of th e impasse which had been reached earlier dunng the decade (1972-7)
in the intra-ruling class relations between the national industrial capital and
the agricultural rich.
68 See T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'Centre-State Relations: A Pre-Election
Reckoning', Eamomicand Po/itia,I Weekly, vol. 19, no. 38, 29 September 1984,
, pp. 1692-5.
69 The industrial policy of the government under George Fernandes and its
agricultural poli cy under Bamala (and Charan Singh) reflected the conflictual
nature of the relations between the rival segments of the bourgeoisie. See
Charan Singh, India's Eamomic Nigbtmart (Delhi: Allied, 1981).
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256 State and Politics in India
qualitatively different from what it had been under the Indira
Gandhi (Mark I) government.
Democratic opposition in different forms, once given a power­
ful voice not only by parties other than the Congress-I enjoying
executive power in certain states, but also by mass-based opposi­
tion movements challenging the centre's right to limit the demo­
cratic rights of the people, could no longer be stifled. Congress-I
was returned to power by an elcct0rate which foundJanata want­
ing, but which had by no mean� forgotten the Emergency .or
forgiven its perpetrators. There was no doubt in 1980 that the
Congress-I government was elected as a lesser evil and not as a
popular alternative to the Janata.
The reinheritance of state power by the Congress-I in 1980
was marked by two other major shifts in Indian politics. First, the
agricultural bourgeoisie had emerged as a formidable national
force capable of claiming a share of central state power. It was n o
longer to be confined to the narrower limits of state politics.
Chowdhury Charan Singh, as caretaker Prime Minister (July
1979-January 1980) became the political symbol of the insistent
demands in favour of a shift in the terms of trade between industry
and agriculture which had gathered momentum during the mid1970s. Even though it was not yet in a position to sustain itself in
control of the commanding heights of state power, the agricultural
bourgeois class had so successfully entrenched itself in the state
structures that no ruling party (including Congress-I)could afford
to underestimate its importance. The increased political restive­
ness of a number ofstate governments - not limited only to those
governed by opposition parties but also extending to such impor­
tant Congress-I-ruled states as Maharashtra - should be viewed
as a reminder that India's agricultural bourgeoisie has come to
stay as a dominant class force .with considerable potential for
national cohesion in the foreseeable future.
Second, during its brief tenure, theJanata government, released
from the stranglehold of its predecessor's socialist shibboleths and
slogans, embarked upon the second stage of the Indian state's task
of strengthening capitalist development in India.70 It took the
Under the first five five-year plans, state policy gave great emphasis to
heavy industry which the national industrial bourgeoisie could not be ex­
pected to develop out of its own capital resources. See Ranjit K. Sau, Jndil,',
70
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initiative to open up the Indian manufacturing industry to power­
ful thrusts of foreign and multinational capital under the guidance
of George Fernandes, the 'socialist' Minister for Industries. The
task of financing the engines of capitalist development of the
gigantic, but nevertheless chronically dependent, Indian economy
would, the Janata government believed, require subst:mtial par­
ticipation of foreign capital.
Whilst eager to continue the Janat:a policy of encouraging
foreign capital in Indian industry, the Indira Gandhi (Mark II)
government was unable to reverse the democratic political trends
set ,in the country as a consequence of the re-emergence of
self-confidence among different (and especially the relatively
deprived) segments of the ruling class and its supporters among
the petit-bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia (as well as organized
labour) during the 1977-80 interval.
Notwithstanding attempts made by the Indira Gandhi (Mark
II) administration to reintroduce the Emergency by the back­
door,71 indecision and drift were the characteristic features of its
policy towards the various regionally based opposition parties and
popular movements in different pans of India. The Prime Minister
continued to espouse the view that opposition to the centre was
ipso faao against the interest and integrity of the nation. But the
ruling party which controlled state power was far too riven by
internal dissension72 (the main feature being the revolt of the
agricultural middle classes) and by confliqts appearing in the seem­
ingly menacing guise of protests by different nationalities, to
prevent the creeping paralysis of the system of conflict manage­
ment that a democratic polity backed by a powerful state ought
to be in a position to wheel into action.
Paradoxically, the centralizing and autocratic approach adopted
by the Indian government to centr�tate relations and to such
regionally based opposition to the centre as the Assam students'
&onomi, Gntwtb: Cunstrllint1 and Prospects (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1973)
for a background to these developments.
71 See, for example, Ashok Mitra's three pan essay entitled 'The Legacy of
Indira Ga.ndhi', 11,t lllustr11ud Wttk� efIndi11 (15 December, 22 December
1985 and 5 January 1986).
72 See, forenmpl e ; Achin Vanaik, 'TheRajiv Congress inSearch ofStability',
Nn11 Left Reuit'IJI, no. 154, November/December 1985, pp. 55-82, especially
pp. 55-70 and 76-7.
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258 State and Politics in India
movement, as exemplified in a repeated resort to President's rule
in the offending states, had the effect of exposing the limitations
of deploying the main force in the form of an unbridled use of the
coercive power of the state apparatus in order to stifle democratic
dissent At the same time, not only was the Congress-I severely
defeated in a series of state legislative assembly elections during
the period 1982-4, but also essentially democratically organized
opposition to the centre in such states as the Punjab, Assam, and
Jammu and Kashmir quickly acquired an overlay of communalism
and 'extremist' violence. Operation Bluestar and the eventual as­
sassination of the Prime Minister thus appeared as the obverse
and reverse of the same coin.
IV
Indira Gandhi's efforts to restore the balance of influence in
centre-state conflicts in favour of the centre failed because she
was not willing to change her political methods of the early 1970s
in the changed socio-economic circumstances of the 1980s. The
Janata coalition had an adequate understanding of the tensions
brewing in the relations between the national industrial bour­
geoisie and the agricultural bourgeoisie which could only be re­
solved by loosening the political grip of the centre over the states
and by establishing a broad consensus between the different op­
posing segments of the ruling class dominating different spheres
of the economy and in acute competition with each other for
resources for development. Its failure lay in its inability to build
a ruling political party capable of reflecting such a consensus as
an alternative to the Congress party.
The failure of the Indira Gandhi (Mark II) government lay in
the fact that the Prime Minister refused to acknowledge the need
for a coalition between the agricultural and industrial (as well as
other) segments of the dominant class, preferring instead an im­
mobilized state to a centre in which different interests would be
reflected as they manifested themselves at the level of the state
and in society at large. In an epoch demanding power-sharing
between competing segments of the ruling class, the anomalous
political behaviour of the Indira Gandhi (Mark II) government
resulted in a petrification of the centre's resources for compromise
and consensus.
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Rajiv Gandhi's government (from I 985) has not depaned from
the style of functioning of the Indira Gandhi (Mark Il) govern­
ment; however, its instinctive understanding of the social and
economic forces at odds with one another in the Indian polity is
somewhat more pragmatic and Jess rigid than that of its predeces­
sor. The development of centre-state relations during the present
period must be viewed within a larger framework of the major
tensions and contradictions of contemporary Indian society.
Under the Rajiv Gandhi government, the rhetoric of forging
ahead into the twenty-first century73 is being used to justify in­
egalitarian policies as well as an economic strategy directed towards
an expansion of industrial capacity and towards increasing the
resilience of industrial capital. Whilst the economic trend set in
I977 of injecting significant amounts of international and multina­
tional capital has been given an additional fillip by the present
government, theJanata government's policy of even-handed treat­
ment of the industrial and agricultural bourgeoisie no longer fits in
with its general economic orientation. The needs of the agricultural
bourgeoisie - a crucial class rooted in the states - which is
committed to a general policy of modernization, expansion of its
productive base, and a more rapid reproduction of capital in its
sphere (all with the continued aid of the state) can no longer be
given the same importance as those of the industrial bourgeoisie.
It is a characteristic feature of the Indian political economy that
agricultural and industrial capital cannot, in the long run, expand
simultaneously within an indigenous framework. Each segment of
the bourgeoisie would inevitably regard the preponderant de­
velopment of the other as taking place at its expense. In recent
years this trend has been increasingly discernible.
Dependent capitalist development under acutely uneven con­
ditions of development of production relations cannot take place
without giving rise, in the long run, to conflicts between different
segments of capital or without transforming existing intra-ruling
class conflicts from a basically non-antagonistic to an increasingly
antagonistic state. But in adopting Rajiv Gandhi as its most fa­
vourite candidate to date for piloting the ship of state into the
future, the industrial bourgeoisie of India may have been prema­
turely confident of the potential for growth inherent in Indian
73 T.V.
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260 State and Politia in India
capital and of its own capacity to withst:md, even with the aid of
state power, the vigorous onslaught of the rural rich that is bound
to follow sooner than might be anticipated. It is against this general
background that centre-state relations during the fmal phase of
this discussion must be viewed.
Since its accession to power under Rajiv Gandhi's leadership,
Congress-I has had to face sineen state legislative assembly elec­
tions. Of these, ten states went to the polls within six months of
the eighth general election (1985). State legislative assembly elec­
tions in the Punjab (1985), Assam (1986) and Mizoram (1987)
were called on the basis of accords signed between the govern­
ment at the centre and leaders of popular movements based in
the states. Of the three most recent state legislative assembly
elections (March 1987), those in West Bengal and Kerala were
regular quinquennial ones required under the Constitution. The
election inJammu and Kashmir took place after a brief interrup­
tion of President's rule during which a deal had been hammered
out between the National Conference (Nq (led by Farooq Ab­
dullah)74 and the Congress-I. These developments throw into
bold relief three trends of importance for the future of centre­
state relations in India.
In the heartland states and in the states in peninsular India,
the Congress-l's strategy of frightening the electorate by means
of warnings that state governments controlled by parties other
than Congress-I could be starved of development resources was
counter-productive to varying degrees. The sense of disgruntle­
ment of local elites (predominantly rural in character, with some
links with the wider economy through small industrial enterprises,
especially in the south) laced with popular support for 'demo­
cratic' values (in the given conten) led to opposition parties being
returned to power with comfortable majorities.75 In Uttar Pradesh
the 1982-3 period, Abdullah had been a key opposition Chief
Minister who mustered support for a sustained agitation of the states against
the centte. In the event, his government was toppled by Congress-I machina­
tions which resulted in detaching a clique led by Abdullah's brother-in-law
(GM. Sadiq) from the NC. Overnight the government ofJammu and Kash­
mir changed hands and GM. Sadiq became Chief Minister dependent upon
Congress-I support in the state legislative assembly.
75 Since 1982, Telugu Desam in Andhra Pradesh and Janata in Kamatalca
appear to have consolidated their position by winning two successive state
assembly elections. In the former case, the clumsy effort to topple a popular
74 During
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and Bihar, the Dalit Mazdoor IGsan Party (DMKP)76 emerged
as a substantial force on the opposition benches of the legislative
assembly with the Congress-I in a majority.77
In Maharashtra, the People's Democratic Front (PDF), a coali­
tion representing powerful agrarian interests, established itself as
a substantial presence in the assembly, though not in a majority,
after a successful campaign demanding crop protection insurance
by the state and better procurement prices for jowar and cotton.
The Congress-I's two-pronged strategy of dealing with a potential
crisis in Maharashtra consisted of replacing the locally chosen
compromise candidate for Chief Minister's post by a more power­
ful figure from the central cabinet and of wooing Congress-S,
the most influential segment of PDF, back into the Congress-I
fold. 78
The case of Maharashtra also illustrates a fundamental weakness
of the political organization of the Congress-I. We have already
noted that the erosion of internal democracy was an imponant
factor in the debilitation of the ruling party in a number of states.
Central dictation as to who should be Chief Minister as well as
the arbitrary removal and replacement of elected and incumbent
Chief Ministers of the Congress-I-ruled states with lightning
rapidity and without proper consultation have sharpened the con­
trast between them and the states in which executive power is held
by opposition panies which invariably function according to well­
recognized democratic principles, practices and procedures.79
government gave rise to mass protest of unprecedented intensity spreading
fa r beyond the boundaries of Andhra Pradesh (1984).
76 T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'Piloting a Nation'.
77 The existence of such a large number of legislators belonging to a party
exclusively devoted to the interests of the rich .ind middle peasantty (even
though the party has been subject to numerous splits based on personal
rivalries among the leaders and particularly on the question of who should
succeed Chowdhury Charan Singh as party leader) is itself a factor contribut­
ing to the instability of the Congress-I majority and to increased dissidence
within the ruling party.
78 With S.B. Chavan as Chief Minister and Sharad Pawar, the Congress-S
leader and influential spokesman ofthe agricultural lobby, back in Congress-I,
a brief respite has been gained in the conflict between different segments of
the dominant elements of Maharashtra's politic:il economy. But it is 1nore
than likely that within a brief period of time the struggles which have persisted
in Maharashtra since the mid-l970s will reswne.
79 Even in regional parties such as the AIADi\1K and Telugu Desam which
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
262 StaU llnd Politics in Jndu,
The second broad trend relates to t�ons arising in states
closely linked to the heartland where a political backlash bas
affected the relations between the different segments of the re­
gional elite. In Gujarat, for example, where the numerical propor­
tion between 'forward' and 'backward' classes/castes80 is more
balanced than that prevailing in states such as Tamil Nadu, say,
the policy of showing positive discrimination towards 'backward'
castes, pursued by successive Congress governments of the state,
was believed by 'forward' castes to have resulted in unfair disad­
vantage to them over the years in the spheres of education, em­
ployment, social welfare, etc.
The movement led by the late Jayaprakash Narayan during the
mid-I 970s against government corruption caught on in a big way
in Gujarat. After the Emergency, however, fresh agitation for social
and economic justice was moW1ted by the socially 'forward' but by
then deeply aggrieved castes. Their leaders claimed that 'forward'
castes had indeed been rendered economically 'backward' as a result
of
. three decades of Congress governments' policy affecting their
mterests.
The central government, led successively by Janata, Indira
Gandhi's Congress-I, and Rajiv Gandhi's Congress-I has been
unable to deal with this intra-elite strife in Gujarat in an effective
manner because of the fear that (I) a reversal of the policy of
'reservation' under pressure would be a cure worse than the disease
because well-entrenched political and socio-economic forces rep­
resenting the interests of 'backward' castes/classes would be up in
anns81 and (2) Gujarat is not alone in racing the problem of the
imbalances where decades of working a policy of 'reservation' has
come home to roost in the form of new pressures which cannot be
satisfuctorily dealt with by a mechanical reversal of existing policy. 82
The case of Gujarat is of particular significance in view of the
fact that its relations with the centre have always been close, even
as its influence on the national economy has been considerable. 83
depend upon the charisma of a single leader, a semblance of local de,nocracy
is observed either in the. party organ or in the election of local authorities
with a modicum of devolution.
80 'Forward': 'Baclcward' castes - 3: 4.
81 &um,mi, and Politu:11/ Weekly, vols 18, 19 and 20 (various issues), 1983-5.
82 Jbid.
83 T V.
. Sathyamurthy, 'Indian Nationalism'.
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But the ruling Congress-I, which was returned to power in the
1985 state legislative assembly election with a sizeable majority,
had so completely miscalculated the mood of the middle class
elements belonging to the 'forward' castes, that its administration
was brought to a halt by strikes and social clashes84 within weeks
of assuming power. The centre's response to the crisis in Gujarat
was to change the Chief Minister rather than to give political
leadership by tackling the question of 'reservation' in a sensitive
manner. Thus even though Gujarat poses no great threat to the
existing scheme of federal relationships in India, it illustrates the
practically intractable nature of the socio-economic tensions and
contradictions that can emerge under the specific conditions of
adjusting political power relationships between unequally devel­
oped segments of ruling elites exemplified in the context of this
discussion.
To the third tier of development of centre-state relations in
contemporary India belongs the far more complicated questions
posed by those states in which the economic logic of protest is
overlaid by a clearly augmented consciousness of cultural, com­
munal, linguistic, jurisprudential and other forms of neglect on
the part of the Indian state. At the present moment, Punjab and
Assam clearly belong to this category, but the states on India's
land periphery (for example Jammu and Kashmir and the north­
eastern states such as Miroram)85 are equally susceptible to such
pressures. Such social and cultural aspects of their role accrue to ·
these peoples as minorities or separate nationalities (not to be
confused with 'nations')86 and they can only be brought into the
mainstream by taking cognizance of their susceptibilities which
have been suppressed by a stepping up of coercion on the part of
the state apparatus.
The Rajiv Gandhi government's initiatives in respect of the
Punjab question have, to date, wavered between extending the
olive branch of conciliation to the aggrieved Sikh community in
.
84 T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'Piloting a Nation'.
8S See, for example, Balraj Puri, 'Fundamentalism in Kashmir, Fragmentation
in Jammu', &un11111ic IITld Political Wtekly, vol. 22, no. 22, 30 May 1987; and
Udayon Misra, 'Assam: All Assam Students' Union - Crisis of Identity',
Eanwmic IITld Political Weekly, vol. 22, no. 13, 28 March 1987, pp. 535-o.
86 T.V. Sathy.unurthy, N11tionalism in the Cuntmtpur11ry Wurld, chapters 2
and 3.
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the hope of isolating Sikh 'extremists' on the one band, and on
the other, lapsing into a continuation of the repressive policy
orientation of the Indira Gandhi (Mark II) government. 87
The Longowal-Rajiv Gandhi accord (1985) seemed to open a
fresh chapter of healing the rupture between the centre and the
state of Punjab based on a serious attempt on the fonner's part to
remove the political, social and economic grievances embodied in
the Anandpur Sahib resolution of the SAD. But the Akali Dal
government which took power in September 1985 received no
· real support from the centre which was content to blame the
popularly elected state government for the persistence of terrorism
and o f tension and conflict between the Sikh and Hindu com­
munities. Not a single undertaking by the centre outlined in the
Longowal-Rajiv Gandhi accord was carried out.
Apart from the centre's belief that the administration of Punjab
could not be left entirel in the hands of the government duly
elected for the purpose,ri8 it was subject to enormous pressure
from elements within Congress-I, particularly in neighbouring
Haryana89 (and, to a lesser degree, Rajasthan) which successfully
87 T.V. Sathyamurthy, 'Problems i n Punjab' (an essay in three pans), Tbt
St11tmtt4n, Calcutta and Delhi, 12, 13 and 14 December 1983; 'Punjab: The
Real Problem', The llluttr11ttd Weekly ofIndia, Bombay, 4 March 1984, pp.
36-43.
88 See, for example, Special Feature on 'Haryana: A Fortress Besieged', lnduz
Today, vol. 12, no. 10, 16-31 May 1987, pp. 38-43.
89 The Haryana state legislative assembly election, along with the West
Bengal and Kerala polls, was held (17June 1987) in the expectation that a
spectacular victory in it would enable the centre to retrieve its fast eroding
popularity. The main contenders were the Lok Dal-B led byChaudhury Devi
Lal, a senior opposition figure representing the interests of the lcuJaJcs and
· the middle peasantry Qoined by the largely urban-based BJP) on the one side,
and by Congress-I on the other Qoined in a marrillgt tk cunvtn1111Ct by a Lok
Dal splinter purporting to represent the interests of the Chaudhury Charan
Singh dynasty). Even although the Haryana opposition parties' campaign
started on local issues in general, and on the divergence and conflict of
interests between Haryana and the Punjab, it soon fanned out to issues of
national importance on which the Haryana electorate was called upon to
pronounce a verdict. The latter included the corrupt and authoritarian be­
haviour of the centre bedevilled as the ruling party then was by a mounting
catalogue of scandals reaching well beyond the pale of national politics into
the international arena. Of particular importance to the main thesis argued
in this discussion is the importance attached by Chaudhury Devi Lal, during
the election campaign, to rich and middle peasant interests. This was reflected
in his attack against the central government's mode.mization policies, which
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frustrated even the tentative moves which the Indian government
appeared to be ready to initiate in relation to the demands .of
Punjab.
The Punjab situation deteriorated despite Chief Minister
Barnala's determination to sustain the credibility and viability of
the SAD government until, finally, the centre dismissed it (May
1987) on the ground that it was no longer capable of restoring law
and order. In fact, however, the immediate motivation for dismiss­
ing the popularly elected government of Punjab and imposing
President's rule lay in the fact that the state legislative assembly
election in Haryana was fast approaching90 in which the Congress­
I would have to acquit itself well if the massive erosion of the
popularity of the Rajiv Gandhi government as signified in the
r�ults of the March 1987 state legislative assemblies' elections in
different parts of India was to be staunched.91
h e sometimes couched in 'rural versus urban' terms and on other occasions
in terms of a confilct between the Western-oriented upper class minority and
the mass of the people! (See, for example, the editorial, &o,u,mic 1171d Politiad
Wttkly, vol. 22, no. 25, 20 June I 987, p. 959). The significance of this state
assembly election thus went far beyond the confines of the Pwljab versus
Haryana issue. One of the main planks of the platform of the Lok Dal-B
election campaign consisted of a promise to write off all loans under Rs
15,000. In fact, it even threatened, albeit for brief moment only, to add to
the uncertainty prevailing in the constitutional conflict then still under way
between the Prime Minister and the President (Zail Singh); for were the
opposition to win a decisive victory in one of the heartland states, there could
well be a concerted effort on the part of the non-left opposition parties to
provoke a split within the ruling party by malcing use of the presidential
election that was due to take place inJuly 1987. The spectacular victory won
by Lok Dal-B-BJP alliance even exceeded the 1977 victory of theJanata party
in Haryana. Devi Lal's nyaya yatrt1 thus ended in the coalition led by him
winning more than 75 per cent of the total seats, with Lok Dal-B itself
winning a clear majority in the assembly. Congress-l's defeat in Haryana may
thus be said to have increased the chances of its future in the rest of the
heartland being problematic during the interval between the Haryana state
assembly election and the ninth general election due in 1989.
90 See, for example, Special Report on 'Haryana Election Analysis: A Delicate
Balance', Indi11 Today, vol. 12, no. II, 1-15 June 1987, pp. 32--4.
91 West Bengal returned the Left Front to power with an enhanced majority
(and a majority for the CPI(M) component); Kerala returned a Left ·Front
coalition to power, defeating the United De1nocratic Front which, under the
leadership of Congress-I held power from I982 to 1987;J amrnu and Kashmir
returned the National Conference under Abdullah's leadership to power. NC
fought the election with the support of Congress-I.
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266 Statt and Politics in India
The Punjab and Assam crises point out different dimensions of
the question of centre-state relations. In Punjab, the main dif­
ficulty arose from the Sikh view of the link between politics and
religion on the one hand,92 and on the other, the reluctance of
the Hindus to identify themselves primarily as Punjabis rather
than as a part of the Hindu mainstream of India. The crisis
engulfing Assam arose out of the indigenous Assamese population
feeling outnumbered and marginalized in its own home ground.
To some degree the problem faced by the Assamese in relation to
the Bengalis and Bangladeshis has also been experienced by the
different 'tribal' peoples of the north-east in relation to non-tribal
settlers in their midst.93
By 1973, the proportion of indigenous Assamese to the total
population of the state had dropped by over 20 per cent to well
below 50 per cent, spreading alarm among a population which,
only in 1967, had achieved a new stability with the formation of
Meghalaya.94 The formation of Bangladesh, far from allaying the
fears of the indigenous population, aroused anxiety afresh with
each successive wave of Bangladeshi immigration into Assam.95
The ruling party at the centre and in Assam was unconcerned
about the impact of this massive influx of Bengali Muslims for the
understandable reason that they,96 in contrast to the Assamese
inhabitants of the Brahmaputra valley (in the upper reaches of
Assam), could be relied upon to give electoral support to the
Congress. But the resulting social disruption posed a threat to the
communally organized agrarian economy of the state because the
new immigrants who were accustomed to radically different
methods of cultivation sought to establish themselves on die land
that they cultivated as individual owners.
issues specially devoted to the Punjab, entitled 'The Punjab
Tangle' (no. 294, February 1984) and 'Punjab Perspectives' (no. 326, October
1986) deal with this aspect of the Punjab crisis in several contributions.
93 See T.V. Sathyamurthy, N11ti111Ulimr in tbt Crmtem/Jllf'ary Wwld.
94 Ibid., chapter 8.
9S During the 1960s and 1970s, when Assam's importance to the Indian
economy rose with the sinlcing of oil wells, massive influxes ofBengalis from
East Pakistan • Bangladesh continued, variously estimated at one to two
million. By 1973, the proportion ofindigenous Assamese to the total popula­
tion of the st2te had dropped to less than 50 per cent.
96 Along with a section of the tribal population, tea garden workers as well
as other non-Assamese people living in the Barak vaUey of lower Assam.
92 Smut11r
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The defeat of the Congress party in the state legislative assemb­
l y election in 1978 was followed by the emergence of a mass
movement, led by ·the students, highlighting Assamese grievan­
ces.97 It focused attention on one main demand arising out of a
grievance going back to the 1960s.
Declaring that the East Pakistan/Bangladeshi immigrants were
'foreign' nationals, the student movement demanded that they
should be repatriated to their 'homeland' or sent to any other
part of India. The Janata government of the state (1978-80) was
paralysed by strikes, blockades, and demonstrations which evoked
massive support from the population.
When the Indira Gandhi (Mark II) administration took power,
the Janata administration in Assam was summarily dismissed. Its
place was taken by a much less popular Congress-I administration
which was defeated in the legislature within a short time. The
state could not be governed by the centrally appointed bureaucrats
who stepped into the political vacuum resulting from the collapse
of elected government. The student-led movements continued to
demand that the Assamese people and not the centre had the right
to disenfranchise 'foreign nationals' in the state as a prelude to
expulsion.
A constitutional imbroglio of unparalleled intensity was thus
injected into the very heart of the dispute between the centre
and the state of Assam. Even though the central government
maintained a pretence of keeping negotiations alive with the
student leaders, the Prime Minister was unwilling to resolve the
dispute in a spirit of accommodation. The state legislative as­
sembly election, called in February 1983, ended in widespread
mayhem and murder.98 A government of questionable legitimacy
was installed in power in a political atmosphere which reeked of
97 By l979 (November), popular discontent in Assam with the centre cry s ­
tallized around two student organizations - the All Assam Student's Union
(AASU) and the All Assam Gana Sangr:im Parishad (MGSP). Between them,
the two organizations were able to bring public life to a complete halt for
prolonged periods. Their challenge to the centre with the support of the mass
of the Assamese people belonging to different socio-economic groups was at
times reminiscent of the 4 May 1919 Movement in China.
98 ln one area (Nellie) alone, many hundreds were massacred on election day.
The boycott called by the Assam students in Assamese constituencies had
been so successful that in one parliamentary constituency only 11 electors
turned up to ast their votes on election day!
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
268 State and Politics in India
divisions between Assamese and 'tribals', Assamese and Bengalis,
Hindus and Muslims, and Hindus and Christians.
The Rajiv Gandhi government's approach to the Assam ques­
tion appeared to be at least as positive in character as its Punjab
initiative. The new Prime Minister seemed to appreciate that in
order to maintain the rtatus quo in broad terms in the country as
a whole, the national 'ruling classes' ought to share state power
with political forces dominant in the various regions. The Assam
accord was signed in an improved atmosphere as a prelude to a
fresh state legislative assembly election.99 It is worth noting that
the original demands of the student leaders which had been
rejected by the Indira Gandhi (Mark II) government on the
grounds that they were constitutionally impertinent and injurious
to India's integrity were accepted by the Rajiv Gandhi govern­
ment on purely pragmatic considerations.
By thus distancing itself from the lame duck Congress-I gov­
ernment, on the eve of the 1985 state assembly election, the
centre weakened its already enfeebled position even further. In
October 1985, the student movement gave birth to the Asom
Gana Parishad (AGP), the first regional party in Assam's history
which came to power on a platform emphasizing its simultaneous­
ly national and regional character. 100
The communal polarization of the state had reached such
serious proportions that the new goven1ment was obliged to begin
its career cautiously under the careful scrutiny of the All Assam
Students' Union (AASU) which has kept its identity entirely
separate from that of AGP. During the last seventeen months of
its existence, the AGP government has not been signally successful
in gaining the cooperation of the centre in the implementation
it, the centre undenook to ensure that all illegal immigrants who
entered the state during the 1961-71 period (especially 1966-71) would be
disenfranchised (though they might be allowed to stay in the state) until 1995,
and to expel those immigrants who had illegally entered Assam across the
porous Bangladesh border after the cut-off date of 25 March 1971.
100 The AGP contested 117 out of a total of 125 assembly seats and 11 out
of 12 Lok Sabha seats. It won 64 asse1nbly seats and Congress-I 25, and 7
Lok Sabha seats and Congress-I 4: The United Minorities Front (UMF)
which broke away from Congress-I because of its opposition to the Assam
Accord won 17 Asse1nbly seats and one Lok Sabha seat. AGP, Congress-I
and UM. F gained 35 per cent, 23.4 per cent and 11 per cent of the total votes
polled, respectively.
99 Under
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of the Assam Accord, especially with reference to the 'foreigners
issue'. With the centre far too slow to respond to these pressures
and the AASU radicalizing rapidly on the issues underlying the
tensions engulfing Assam since the mid- l 970s, the AGP govern­
ment has lost a good deal of its initial momentum. 101 As in the
Punjab, so too in Assam the centre has been caught in a con­
tradiction between an awareness of the need to enlist the coopera­
tion of regional elites and an unwillingness to modify the centralist
orientation of the Indian state to which the Indian government
has long become habituated.
During the last four decades, independent India has undergone
a transformation from a homogeneous polity in which power was
shared between the centre and the states under the control of the
ruling Congress party into one in which control is shared between
a centre which has continued to be governed by the Congress
partyand the states in which a variety of different parties (of which
the Congress-I is one) have won executive power in the legislative
assemblies.
A vigorous and determined effort on the part of the Indira
Gandhi (Mark I) government to prevent this change from setting
in by destabilizing non-Congress state governments and imposing
the central leadership's writ on Congress-controlled state govern­
ments in an arbitrary manner failed. But the Indian state has
continued to grow in power and has been able to increase its coer­
cive capacity steadily throughout the post-Independence phase.
Since the end of the Emergency, attempts have been underway
to accommodate the horizontal conflicts between the two main
segments of the ruling class (namely, the national industrial bour­
geoisie and the regional bourgeoisie, mainly but not exclusively
rural in character). These have resulted in the emergence of fairly
stable regional parties well entrenched in a number of states, in a
strengthening of national parties such as the CPI(M) and Janata
in certain states, and in enhancing the influence of the rural
element in the agriculturally important states where Congress
-control of the state legislative asse1nbly is becoming predicated
IOI See, for example, Udayon Misra, 'Assam: All Assam Students' Union',
pp. 535-6. The loss of momentwn lus been further exacerbated by the
economic problems caused by the recent floods (August-September 1987).
See, for example, 'Assam: Some Boeing, Some Flying', &1J111111tic and Political
Weekly, vol. 22, nos 36 and 37, 5-12 September 1987, pp. 1515-16.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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more and more on its capacity to collaborate and to share power
with its competitors. 102 India may well be on the verge of a new
era of power sharing in which, despite new uncertainties over the
correct constirutional relationship between the elected represent­
atives in control of state power on the one hand and the indirectly
elected President on the other,103 powerful states can benefit from
a strong Indian state controlled at the centre b a coalition of
parties representing diverse ruling class interests.tc04
genres of opposition have thus developed - one, opposition in the
fonn of st:1tes governed by parties/coalitions opposed to the Congress-I and
the other i n the form of internal opposition in agriculturally impoltlnt st:ltes
&om rich and middle peasant classes irrespective of whether their supporterS
vote Congress-I or one of the peasant parties. The former has now become
so entrenched that they express opposition to the centre in a more or less
concerted form through periodic meetings of Chief Ministers of non­
Congress-1 states (Madras, Vijayawada, Calcutta, Srinagar, Bangalore during
the 1980-4 period, and Delhi in April 1987). See, for example, this author's
'Southern Chief Ministers' Meeting', &onamic lffld Po/itict1I Weekly, vol. 18,
no. 15, 9 April 1983, pp. 576-9; Sumit Chakravarty, 'Meeting of Chief
Ministers', M11instrum, 2 May 1987, pp. 3-4, 34.
103 The crisis in the relationship between the President and the Prime
Minister (1986-7) is without precedent and holds a portent of deep potential
signifiance for the Indian Constitution and its political expression. No clear
analysis has yet appeared. about its nature and import, but a number of
thoughtful observations have been published all the same. See, for example,
Prabhu Chawla, 'The President: Deepening Crisis' ,Indi11 Todlly, 31 May 1987,
p. 27.
104 Recent developments, not only in the states lying outside the heartland
but also in the heartland states such as the Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh
would point in this direction. Furthermore, the general drift of the political
implications of the main findings of the Sarlcaria Commission report, the
twists and turns in the political processes underlying the consolidation of
national opposition to Congress-I around the National Forum (which in­
cludes regional and central opposition parties) in general and the Janata Dal
(embracing different centrist parties of the national opposition) in particular,
and last but not least, the tendencies evidenced by the results of the elections
tc;> the state legislative assemblies of Tamil Nadu, Nagaland and Mizoram in
January 1989, would seem to contain intimations of the hernlding of a new
era in centre-state relations on the eve of the next decade.
102 Two
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7
Development Planning
and the Indian State
•
Partha Chatterjee
A )though it is a virtual truism that the state is the central actor
.l"1in any programme for planned economic development, its
role in planning is not for that reason any less problematical. What
does it mean to say that 'the state' acts? Does it act on its own?
Do others act through it? Who does it act upon? On other entities
outside the state? Or does it act upon itself? To talk about the
state as an 'actor' is to endow it with a will; to say that is acts
according to coherent and rational principles of choice is further
to endow it with a consciousness. How is this will and conscious­
ness produced?
These are not, one would presumably agree, questions with
which the economic literature on planning has concerned itself.
For the most part, that literature has taken what it calls 'socio­
political conditions' as parametric for its exercise. What the state
thinks as politically necessary or feasible is 'given' to the planner;
it is determined by a process of politics that is extraneous to the
planning exercise perse. The task of the planner is to work out the
consistencies between different objectives, weigh the costs and
benefits ofdifferent alternatives and suggest an efficient or optimal
mix of strategies. Planning, many would say, is an exercise in
instrumental rationality. And yet it is curious that when debates
about planning have led to fundamental disagreements within the
discipline, economists have not managed to hold themselves back
• I am grateful to Asok Sen, Gautam Sen, the participants of the London
conference, and my colleagues in the Kanlrurgachhi Hegel Qub, for their
comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
272 State and Politics in India
from arguing about the relative priorities among 'socio-political'
objectives or about their political feasibility and have defended or
attacked particular planning strategies by appealing to conside r a ­
tions that are presumably external to their practice.
As someone whose professional preoccupation is to marvel at the
ways in which logic becomes perpetually in1plicated in rhetoric,
knowledge in power, I am not surprised by this transgression of
avowed disciplinary boundaries. My own practice within my hap­
pily i l l -defined discipline has taught me (notwithstanding the fact
that some of my colleagues still go on pretending that they can
usefully do for politics what the economists have done for the
economy: may they remain at peace with their intellects!) that not
only are instruments chosen according to goals that are desired, but
goals themselves are very often fixed because certain instruments
have to be used. Indeed, instruments in politics can become goals
in themselves, just as the very declaration of an objective can
become an instrument for something else. The once-fashionable
debate about the separability of means and ends was, as far as I can
understand it, only another way of establishing their unity. To me,
then, the interesting question is not whether the idea of a domain
of instrumental rationality clearly demarcated from the-disorderly
terrain of political squabble can be logically sustained. Rather, the
interesting question is how this very assertion of a technical dis­
cipline of planning can become an instrument of politics, i.e. of the
exercise and contestation of power.
I will address my question directly to the experience of Indian
planning. But in order to do that, let me begin with a bit of history.
Planning for Planning1
In August 193 7, the Congress Working Committee at its meeting
in Wardha adopted a resolution recommending
to the Congress Ministries the appoint1nent of a Committee of experts
to consider urgent and vital problems the solution of which is neces­
sary to any scheme of national reconstruction and social planning.
Such solution will require extensive survey and the collection of data,
as well as a clearly defined social objective.
I This section is largely based on Raghabendra Chanopadhyay, 'The Idea of
Planning i n India, 1930-1951 ', Australian National University, 1985, u n ­
published Ph.D. thesis.
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The immediate background to this resolution was the forma­
tion by the Congress, under the new constitutional arrangements,
of ministries in six (later eight) provinces of India and the ques­
tions raised, especially by the Gandhians (including Gandhi him­
self) about the responsibility of the Congress in regulating (more
precisely, restricting) the growth of modem industries. The left
within the Congress, including its two stalwarts,Jawaharlal Nehru
and Subhas Chandra Bose, sought to put aside this nagging
ideological debate by arguing that the whole question of Congress
policy towards industries must be resolved within the framework
of an 'all-India industrial plan' which this committee of experts
would be asked to draw up. Accordingly, Bose in his presidential
speech at the Haripura Congress in February 1938 declared that
the national state 'on the advice of a Planning Commission' would
adopt 'a comprehensive scheme for gradually socializing our en­
tire agricultural and industrial system in the sphere of both pro­
duction and appropriation'. In October that year, Bose summoned
a conference of the Ministers of Industries in the Congress min­
istries and soon after announced the formation of a National
Planning Committee with Nehru as chairman. Of the fifteen
members of the Committee, four (Purushottamdas Thakurdas,
A.O. Shroff, Ambalal Sarabhai and Walchand Hirachand) were
leading merchants and industrialists, five were scientists (Megh­
nad Saha, A.K Saha, Nazir Ahmed, V.S. Dubey and J.C. Ghosh),
two were economists (K.T. Shah and Radhakamal Mukherjee) three, if we include M. Visvesvaraya who had just written a book
on planning - and three had been invited on their political
credentials - J.C, Kumarappa the Gandhian, NM. Joshi the
labour leader and Nehru himself. The Committee began work
in December 1938.
The National Planning Committee, whose actual work vir­
tually ceased after about a year and a half, following the outbreak
of the War, the resignation of the Congress ministries and finally
Nehru's arrest in October 1940, was nevertheless the first real
experience of the emerging state leadership of the Congress, and
of Nehru in particular, with working out the idea of 'national
planning'. Before making a brief mention of the actual contents
of the discussions in that Committee, let us take note of the most
significant aspects of the form of this exercise.
First, planning appears as a form of determining st.ate policy,
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initially the economic policies of the provincial Congress mini­
stries, but almost immediately afterwards the overall framework
of a coordinated and consistent set of policies of a national state
�t was already being envisioned as a concrete idea. In this re­
spect, planning was not only a pan of the anticipation of power
by the state leadership of the Congress, it was also an anticipation
of the concrete forms in which that power would be exercised
within a national state. Second, planning as an exercise in state
policy already incorporated its most distinctive element: its con­
stitution as a body of uperts and its activity as one of technical
evaluation of alternative policies and determination of choices on
'scientific' grounds. Nehru, writing in 1944 5, mentioned this as
a memorable part of his experience with the NPC:
We had avoided a theoretical approach, and as each particular prob­
lem was viewed in its larger context, it led us inevitably in a particular
direction. To me the spirit of co-operation of the members of the
Planning Committee was particularly soothing and gratifying, for I
found it a pleasant contrast to the sqU2bbles and conflicts of politics.2
Third, the appeal to a 'committee of experts' was in itself an
important instrument in resolving a political debate which, much
to the irritation of the emerging state leadership of the Congress,
was still refusing to go away. This leadership, along with the vast
majority of the professional intelligentsia of India, had little doubt
about the central importance of industrialization for the develop­
ment of a modem and prosperous nation. Yet the very political
strategy of building up a mass movement against colonial rule had
required the Congress to espouse Gandhi's idea of machinery,
commercialization and centralized state power as the curses of
modem civilization, thrust upon the Indian people by European
colonialism. It was industrialism itself, Gandhi argued, rather than
the inability to industrialize, which was the root cause of Indian
poverty. This was, until the 1940s, a characteristic part of the
Congress rhetoric of nationalist mobilization. But now that the
new national state was ready to be conceptualized in concrete
terms, this archaic ideological baggage had to be jettisoned. J.C.
Kumarappa brought the very first session of the NPC to an
impasse by questioning its authority to discuss plans for industrial­
ization. The national priority as adopted by the Congress, he said,
2 Jawaharbl
Nchru,J111J1UffllU Nthnl's Spe«Jia, (New Delhi: 19S4) vol. 2.
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was to restrict and eliminate modem industrialism. Nehru had to
intervene and declare that most members of the Committee felt
that large-scale industry ought to be promoted as long as it did
not 'come into conflict with the cottage industries'.Emphasizing
the changed political context in which the Congress was working,
Nehru added significantly:
Now that the Congress is, to some extent, identifying itself with the
State it cannot ignore the question of establishing and encouraging
large-scale industries. There can be no planning if such planning does
not include big industries ... [and] it is not only within the scope of
the Committee to consider large-scale industries, but it is incumbent
upon it to consider them. 3
Kumarappa kept up his futile effort for a while after virtually every
other member disagreed with his view and finally dropped out.
Gandhi himself did not appreciate the efforts of the NPC, or
perhaps he appreciated them only too well. 'I do not know', he
wrote to Nehru,
that it is working within the four corners of the resolution creating
the Committee. I do not know that the Working Committee is being
kept informed of its doings.... It has appeared to me that much
money and labour are being wasted on an effort which will bring
forth little or no fruit.14
Nehru in tum did not conceal his impatienceJWith such \risionary'
and 'unscientific' talk and grounded his own position quite firmly
on the universal principles of historical progress: 'We are trying
to catch up, as far as we can, with the Industrial Revolution that
occurred long ago in Western countries.'5
The point here is not so much whether the Gandhian position
had already been rendered pofitically unviable, so that we can
declare the overwhelming consensus on industrialization within
the NPC as the 'reflection' of an assignment of priorities al,ready
determined in the political arena outside. Rather, the very in­
stitution of a process of planning became a means for the deter­
mination of priorities on behalf of the 'nation'.The debate on
the need for industrialization, we may say, was politically resolved
by successfully constituting planning as a domain outside 'the
• 3 Jaw.iharlal Nehru, Jll'IV11btm11I Nthn,'s Spttrbts.
4 M.K. Gandhi, Colkcttd Works {New Delhi: 1958), p. 56.
S JaWllharlal Nehru,J11W11b11rl,,/ Nt""4's Spttcbts, p. 93
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squabbles and conflicts of politics'. As early as the 1940s, planning
had emerged as a crucial institutional modality b y which the state
would determine the material allocation of productive resources
within the nation: a modality of political power constituted out­
side the immediate political process itself.
The Rationality of the New State
Why was it necessary to devise such a modality of power that could
operate both inside and outside the political structure constructed
by the new post-colonial state? An answer begins to appear as soon
as we discover the logic by which the new state related itself to
the 'nation'. For the emerging state leadership (and as the bearer
of a fundamental ideological orientation this group was much
larger than simply a section of the leaders of the Congress, and
in identifying it the usual classification of left and right is ir­
relevant), this relation was expressed in a quite distinctive way. By
the 1940s, the dominant argument of nationalism against colonial
rule was that it was impeding the further development of India:
colonial rule had become a historical fetter that had to be removed
before the nation could proceed to develop. Within this frame­
work, therefore, the economic critique of colonialism as an ex­
ploitative force creating and perpetuating a backward economy
came to occupy a central place. One might ask what would happen
to this nationalist position if (let us say, for the sake of argument)
it turned out from historical investigation that by every agreed
criterion foreign rule had indeed promoted economic develop­
ment in the colony. Would that have made colonialism any more
legitimate or the demand for national self-government any less
justified? Our nationalists would not have accepted a purely nega­
tive critique of colonial rule as sufficient and would have been
embarrassed if the demand for self-rule was sought to be filled in
by some primordial content such as race or religion. Colonial rule,
he would have said, was illegitimate not because it represented the
political domination by an alien people over the indigens: alienness
had acquired the stamp of illegitimacy because it stood for a form
of exploitation of the nation (the drain of national wealth, the
destruction of its productive system, the creation of a backward
economy, etc.). Self-government consequently was legitimate be. cause it represented the historically necessary form of national
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development. The economic critique of colonialism then was the
foundation from which a positive content was supplied for the
independent national state: the new state represented the only
legitimate form of exercise of power because it was a necessary
condition for the development of the nation.
A developmental ideology then was a constituent part of the
self-definition of the post-colonial state. The state was connected
fO the people-nation not simply through the procedural forms of
representative government, it also acquired its representativeness
by directing a progra1nme of economic development on behalf of
the nation. The former connected, as in any liberal form of gov­
ernment, the legal-political sovereignty of the state with the sover­
eignty of the people. The latter connected the sovereign powers
of the state directly with the economic well-being of the people.
The two connections did not necessarily have the same implications for a state trying to determine how to use its sovereign
powers. What the people were able to express through the repre­
sentative mechanisms of the political process as their will was not
necessarily what was good for their economic well-being; what the
state thought important for the economic development of the
nation was not necessarily what would be ratified through the
representative mechanisms. The two criteria of representative­
ness, and hence of legitimacy, could well produce contradictory
implications for state policy.
The contradiction stemmed from the very manner in which a
developmental ideology needed to cling to the state as the prin­
cipal vehicle for its historical mission. 'Development' implied a
linear path, directed towards a goal, or a series of goals separated
by stages. It implied the fixing of priorities between long-run and
short-run goals and conscious choice between alternative paths.
It was premised, in other words, upon a rational consciousness
and will, and in so far as 'development' was thought of as a process
affecting the whole of seciety, it was also premised upon <mt
consciousness and will - that of the whole. Particular interests
needed to be subsumed within the whole and made consistent
with the general interest. The mechanisms of civil society, work­
ing through contracts and the market, and hence defining a
domain for the play of the particular and the accidental, were
already known to be imperfect instruments for expressing the
general. The one consciousness, both general and rational, could
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not simply be assumed to exist as an abstract and formless force,
working implicitly and invisibly through the particular .interests
of civil society. It had, as Hegel would have said, to 'shine forth',
appear as an existent, concretely expressing the general and the
rational.
Hegel's penetrating logic has shown us that this universal ra­
tionality of the state can be concretely expressed at two institu­
tional levels - the bureaucracy as the universal class and the
monarch as the immediately existent will of the state. The logical
requirement of the latter was taken care of, even under the r e ­
publican constitutional form adopted in India, by the usual pro­
visions of embodying the sovereign will of the state in the person
of the Head of state. In meeting the former requirement, however,
the post-colonial state in India faced a problem that was produced
specifically by the form of the transition from colonial rule. For
various reasons that were attributed to political contingency
(whose historical roots we need not explore here), the new state
chose to retain in a virtually unaltered form the basic structure of
the civil service, the police administration, the judicial system
including the codes of civil and criminal law, and the armed forces
as they existed in the colonial period. As far as the normal executive
functions of the state were concerned, the new state operated
within a framework of rational universality whose principles were
seen as having been contained (even if they were misapplied) in
the preceding state structure. In the case of the armed forces, the
assertion of unbroken continuity was rather more paradoxical, so
that even today one is forced to witness such unlovely ironies as
regiments of the Indian army proudly displaying the trophies of
colonial conquest and counter-insurgency in their barrack-rooms,
or the Presidential Guards celebrating their birth two hundred
years ago under the governor-generalship of Lord Cornwallis! But
if the ordinary functions of civil and criminal administration were
to continue within forms of rationality which the new state had
not given to itself, how was it to claim its legitimacy as an authority
that was specifically different from the old regime? This
legitimacy, as we have mentioned before, had to flow from the
nationalist criticism of colonialism as an alien and unrepresentative
power that was exploitative in character and from the historical
necessity of an independent state that would promote national
development. It was in the universal function of 'development' of
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national society as a whole that the post-colonial state would find
its distinctive content. This was to be concretized by embodying
within itself a new mechanism of developmental administration,
something which the colonial state, because of its alien and ex­
tractive character, never possessed. It was in the administration of
development that the bureaucracy of the post-colonial state was
to assert itself as the universal class, satisfying in the service of the
state its private interests by working for the universal goals of the
nation.
Planning, therefore, was the domain of the rational determina­
tion and pursuit of these universal goals. It was a bureaucratic
function, to be operated at a level above the particular interests of
civil society, and institutionalized as such as a domain of policy­
making outside the normal processes of representative politics and
of execution through a developmental administration. But as a
concrete bureaucratic function, it was in planning above all that
the post-colonial state would claim its legitimacy as a single will
and consciousness - the will of the nation - pursuing a task that
was both universal and rational - the well-being of the people as
a whole.
It is in its legitimizing role, therefore, that planning, constituted
as a domain outside politics, was to become an instrument of
politics. If we then look at the process of politics itself, we will
discover the specific ways in which it would also become impli­
cated in the modalities of power.
Planning and Implementing
We could first describe the political process in its own terms and
then look for the connections with the process of planning. But
this would take us into a lengthy excursion into a wholly different
disciplinary field. Let us instead start with the received under­
standing of the planning experience in India and see how the
political process comes to impinge upon it. Chakravarty has re­
cently given us a summary account of this experience from within
the theoretical boundaries of development planning.6 From this
perspective, the political process appears as a determinate and
6 Sukharnoy
ford, 1987).
Chakravany, Droelopmmt Planning: Tbt Indian F.rptrinKt ( O x ­
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280 State and Politics in India
changing existent when the question arises of 'plan implementa­
tion'. He discusses the problems of plan implementation by treat­
ing the 'planning authorities' as the central directing agency,
firmly situated outside the political process itself and embodying,
one might justifiably say, the single, universal and rational con­
sciousness of a state which is promoting the development of the
nation as a whole.7 An implementational failure, Chakravarty says,
occurs when (a) the planning authorities are inefficient in gather­
ing the relevant information, (b) when they take so much time to
respond that the underlying situation has by then changed, and
(c) when the public agencies through which the plans are to be
implemented do not have the capacities to carry them out and the
private agencies combine in 'strategic' ways to disrupt the expec­
tations about their behaviour which the planners had taken as
'parametric'. Chakravarty adds that the last possibility - that of
strategic action by private actors - has greatly increased in recent
years in the Indian economy.
Let us look a little more closely at this analysis. What does it
mean to say that plans may fail because of the inadequacy of the
information which planners use? 'fhe premise here is that of a
separation between the planner on the one hand and the objects of
planning on the other, the latter consisting of both physical resour­
ces and human economic agents. 'Information' is precisely the
means through which the objects of planning are constituted for
the planner: they exist 'out there', independently of his conscious­
ness and can appear before it only in the shape of 'information'.
The 'adequacy' of this information then concerns the question of
whether these objects have been constituted 'correctly', i.e. con­
stituted in the planner's consciousness in the same form as they exist
outside it, in themselves. It is obvious that on these terms an entirely
faultless planning would require in the planner nothing less than
omniscience. But one should not use the patent impossibility of this
project to tum planning into a caricature of itself. While the
epistemological stance of apprehending the external objects of
consciousness in their intrinsic and independent truth continues, as
is well known, to inform the expressly declared philosophical foun­
dations of the positive sciences, including economics, the actual
practice of debates about planning is more concerned with those
7 Ibid., pp. 40-2.
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objects as they have been constituted by the planning exercise itself.
Thus if it is alleged that planners have incorrectly estimated the
demand for electricity because they did not take into account
the unorganized sector, the charge really is that whereas the
'unorganized sector' was already an object of planning since it was
knuum that it too was a consumer of electricity, it had not been
explicitly and specifically constituted as an object since its demand
had not been estimated. The point about all questions of 'inade­
quate information' is not whether one knows what the objects of
planning are: if they are not known the problem of information
cannot arise. The question is whether they have been explicitly
specified as objects of planning.
It is here that the issue of the modalities of knowledge and
implementation become central to the planning exercise. All three
Conditions which Chakravarty mentions as leading to faulty im­
plementation concern the ways in which the planner, representing
the rational consciousness of the state, can produce a knowledge
of the objeets of planning. In this sense, even the so-called im­
plementing agencies are the objects of planning for they represent
not the will of the planner but determinate 'capacities': a plan
which does not correctly estimate the capacities of the implement­
ing agencies cannot be a good plan. Consequently, these agencies
- bureaucrats or managers of public enterprises - become en­
tities which act in determinate ways according to specific kinds of
'signals' and these the planner must know in order to formulate
his plan. The planner even needs to know how long his own
machinery will take to implement a plan, or else the information
on the basis of which he plans may become obsolete.
If one is not to assume omniscience on behalf of the planner,
how is this information ever expected to be 'adequate'? It is here
that the rationality of planning can be seen to practise a self­
deception - a necessary self-deception, for without it it could
not constitute itself. Planning, as the concrete embodiment of
the rational consciousness of a state promoting economic develop­
ment, can proceed only by constituting the objects of planning
as objects of knowledge. It must know the physical resources
whose allocation is to be planned, it must know the economic
agents who act upon these resources, know their needs, capacities
and propensities, know what constitutes the signals according to
which they act, know how they respond to those signals. When
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the agents relate to each other in terms of power, i.e. relations
of domination and subordination, the planner must /mow the
relevant signals and capacities. This knowledge would enable him
to work upon the total configuration of power itself, use the legal
powers of the state to produce signals and thereby affect the
actions of agents, play off one power against another to produce
a general result in which everybody would be better off. The
state as a planning authority can promote the universal goal of
development by harnessing within a single interconnected whole
the discrete subjects of power in society. It does this by turning
those subjects of power into the objects of a single body of
knowledge.
This is where the self-deception occurs. For the rational con­
sciousness of the state embodied in the planning authority does
not exhaust the determinate being of the state. The state is also
an existent as a site at which the subjects of power in society
interact, ally and contend with one another in the political process.
The specific configuration of power that is constituted within the
state is the result of this process. Seen from this perspective, the
planning authorities themselves are objects for a configuration of
power in which others are subjects. Indeed, and this is the paradox
which a 'science' of planning can never unravel from within its
own disciplinary boundaries, the very subjects of social power
which the rational consciousness of the planner seeks to convert
into objects of its knowledge by attributing to them discrete capa­
cities and propensities can turn the planning authority itself into
an object of their power. Subject and object, inside and outside the relations are reversed as soon as we move from the domain of
rational planning, situated outside the political process, to the
domain of social power exercised and contested within that pro­
cess. When we talk of the state, we must talk of both of these
domains as its constituent fields, and situate one in relation to the
other. Seen from the domain of planning, the political process is
only an external constraint, whose strategic possibilities must be
known and objectified as parameters for the planning exercise.
And yet, even the best efforts to secure 'adequate information'
leave behind an unestimated residue, which works imperceptibly
and often perversely to upset the implementation of plans. This
residue, as the irreducible, negative and ever-present 'beyond' of
planning, is what we may call, in its most general sense, politics.
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The Politics of Planning - I
Let us return to history, this time of more recent vintage. Chakra­
varty says that in the early 1950s, when the planning process was
initiated in India, there was a general consensus on a 'commodity­
centred' approach.8 That is to say everyone agreed that more
goods were preferable to less goods and a higher level of capital
stock per worker was necessary for an improved standard of living.
Obviously, the central emphasis of development was meant to be
placed on accumulation. But this was not all. Chakravarty also
says that in the specific context in which planning was taken u�
in India, accumulation had to be reconciled with legitimation.
'Adoption of a representative form of government based on uni­
versal adult suffrage did have an effect on the exercise of political
power, and so did the whole legacy of the national movement
with its specifically articulated set of economic objectives.' These
two objectives - accumulation and legitimation - produced two
implications for planning in India. On the one hand, planning
had to be 'a way of avoiding the unnecessary rigorm of an industrial
transition in so fur as it affected the masses resident in India's
villages'. On the other hand, planning was to become 'a positive
instrument for resolving conjlia in a large and heterogeneous
subcontinent' (emphases mine). What did these mean in terms
of the relation between the state and the planning process?
In the classical forms of capitalist industrialization, the original
accumulation required the use of a variety of coercive methods
to separate a large mass of direct producers from their means of
production. This was the 'secret' of the so-called 'primitive ac­
cumulation', which was not the result of the capitalist mode of
production but its starting-point, and in a concrete historical
process, it meant 'the expropriation of the agricultural producer,
of the peasant, from the soil'. 10 The possibility and limits of
original accumulation were set by the specific configuration in
each country of the political struggle between classes in the
pre-capitalist social formation but in each case a successful tran­
sition to capitalist industrialization required that subsistence pro­
ducers be 'robbed of all their means of production and of all the
a Ibid., p. 7.
9 Ibid., pp. 2-3.
10 Karl Mark, C11pit41 (Moscow: Progress, 1971), vol. I, pp. 667-70.
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guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements'. 11
Whatever the political means adopted to effect this expropriation
of direct producers, and with it the destruction of pre-capitalist
forms of community concretely embodying the unity of producers
with the means of production, they could not have been legitim­
ized by any active principle of universal representative democracy.
(It is curious that in the one country of Europe where a 'bourgeois'
political revolution was carried out under the slogan of liberty,
equality and fraternity, the protection of small-peasant property
after the revolution meant the virtual postponement of indus­
trialization by some five or six decades.)
Once in place, accumulation under capitalist production proper
could be made legitimate by the equal right of property and the
universal freedom of contract on the basis of property rights over
commodities. Original accumulation having already effected the
separation of the direct producer from the means of production,
labour power was now available as a commodity owned by the
labourer who was entitled to sell it according to the terms of a
free contract with the owner of the means of production. As a
political ideology of legitimation of capitalist accumulation, this
strictly liberal doctrine of 'freedom', however, enjoyed a surpris­
ingly short life. But in the third and fourth decades of the
nineteenth century, when the first phase of the Industrial Revolu­
tion had been completed in Britain, the new context of political
conflict made it necessary to qualify 'freedom' by such notions
as the rights to subsistence, to proper conditions of work and a
decent livelihood. In time, this meant the use of the legal powers
of the state to impose conditions on the freedom of contract (on
hours of work, on minimum wages, on physical conditions of
work and living) and to curtail the free enjoyment of returns
from the productive use of property (most importantly by the
taxation on higher incomes to finance public provisions for health,
education, housing, etc.). While this may be seen as being con­
sistent with the long-term objectives of capitalist accumulation,
on the grounds that it facilitated the continued reproduction of
labour power of a suitable concretized quality, it must also be
recognized that it was a political response to growing oppositional
11 T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds), Tbt Brmntr Dtbatt: Agrllrilm Cltus
Strwture1111d &orurmicDrotlopmmt in Pr tlndustria/
Europt (Cambridge: Cam­
bridge University Press, 1987).
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movements and social conflict. As a political doctrine of legitima­
tion this meant, first, the creation of a general content for social
good which combined capitalist property ownership with the
production of consent through representative political processes,
and second, the determination of this content not mediately
through the particular acts of economic agents in civil society,
but directly through the activities of the state. The course of this
journey from the strictly liberal concept of 'freedom' to that of
'welfare' is, of course, coincidental with the political history of
capitalist democracy in the last century and a half. What we need
to note here is the fact that as a universal conception of the social
whole under capitalist democracy, the elements of a concept of
'welfare' had already superseded those of pure freedom and were
available to the political leadership in India when it began the
task of constructing a state ideology.
The 'unnecessary rigours' of an industrial transition, conse­
quently, meant those forms of expropriation of subsistence pro­
ducers associated with original accumulation which could not be
legitimized through the representative processes of politics. This
was, our planner would say, a parametric condition set by the
political process at the time when planning began its journey in
India. Yet accumulation was the prime task if industrialization
was to take place. Accumulation necessarily implied the use of
the powers of the state, whether directly through its legal and
administrative institutions, or mediately through the acts of some
agents with social power over others, to effect the required degree
of dissociation of direct producers from their means of produc­
tion. As Chakravarty himself says, the development model first
adopted in India was a variant of the Lewis model, with a 'modern'
sector breaking down and superseding the 'traditional' sector, the
two significant variations being that the modem sector itself was
disaggregated into a capital goods and a consumer goods sector,
and instead of capitalists in the modem sector the major role was
assigned to a development bureaucracy.12 Despite these variations,
the chosen path of development still meant conflicts between
social groups and the use of power to attain the required form
and rate of accumulation. Since the 'necessary' policies of the
12 Sulchamoy Chakravarty, Dtvtlapmmt Pl1111ning: Tht Indian Exptrim.t
ford University Press, 1987), p. 14.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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state which would ensure accumulation could not be left to be
determined solely through the political process, it devolved upon
the institution of planning, that embodiment of the universal
rationality of the social whole standing above all particular inter­
ests, to lay down what in fact were the 'necessary rigours' of
industrialization. Given its location outside the political process,
planning could then become 'a positive instrument for resolving
conflict' by determining, within a universal framework of the
social good, the 'necessary costs' to be borne by each particular
group and the 'necessary benefits' to accrue to each. But who
was to use it in this way as a 'positive instrument'? We have still
to address this question.
The specific form in which this twin problem of planning accumulation with legitimation -was initially resolved, especially
in the Second and Third Five-year Plans, is well known. There
was to b e a capital-intensive industrial sector under public owner­
ship, a private industrial sector in light consumer goods and a
private agricultural sector. The first two were the 'modern' sectors
which were to be financed by foreign aid, low interest loans and
taxation of private incomes mainly in the second sector. The third
sector was seen as being mainly one of petty production, and it
was there that a major flaw of this development strategy was to
appear. It has been said that the Second and Third Plans did not
have an agricultural strategy at all, or even if they did, there was
gross over-optimism about the long-term ability of traditional
agriculture to contribute to industrialization by providing cheap
labour and cheap food. 13 The problem is often posed as one of
alternative planning strategies, with the suggestion that if suitable
land reforms had been carried out soon after Independence, a quite
different development path may have been discovered which
would have avoided the 'crisis' in which the planning process found
itself in the middle of the 1960s. The difficulty with this sugges­
tion, if we are to look at it from a political standpoint, is precisely
the confusion it entails regarding the effective relation between
the whole and the part, the universal and the particular, in the aets
of a state promoting and supervising a programme of planned
capitalist development. To discover the nature of this relation, we
·need to look upon planned industrialization as part of a process
of what may be called the 'passive revolution of capital'.
13
Ibid., p. 21.
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Passive Revolution
Antonio Gramsci has talked of the 'passive revolution' as one in
which the new claimants to power, lacking the social strength to
launch a full-scale assault on the old dominant classes, opt for a
path in which the demands of a new society are 'satisfied by small
doses, legally, in a reformist manner' - in such a way that the
political and economic positions of the old feudal classes are not
destroyed, agrarian reform is avoided, and especially the popular
masses are prevented from going through the political experience
of a fundamental social transformation. 14 Gramsci, of course,
treats this as a 'blocked dialectic', an exception to the paradigmatic
form of bourgeois revolution which he takes to be that ofJacobin­
ism. It now seems more useful to argue, however, that as a
historical model, passive revolution is in fact the general frame­
work of capitalist transition in societies where bourfeois hege­
mony has not been accomplished in the classical way.1 In 'passive
revolution' the historical shifts in the strategic relations of forces
between capital, pre-capitalist dominant groups and the popular
masses can be seen as a series of contingent, conjunctural mo­
ments. The dialectic here cannot be assumed to be blocked in
any fundamental sense. Rather, the new forms of dominance of
capital become understandable, not as the immanent supersession
of earlier contradictions, but as parts of a constructed hegemony,
effective because of the successful exercise of both coercive and
persuasive power, but incomplete and fragmented at the same
time because the hegemonic claims are fundamentally contested
within the constructed whole. 16 The distinction between 'bour­
geois hegemony' and 'passive revolution' then becomes one in
which, for the latter, the persuasive power of bourgeois rule
cannot be constructed around the universal idea of 'freedom';
some other universal idea has to be substituted for it.17
In.the Indian case, we can look upon 'passive revolution' as a
14 Antonio Gramsci, Stkt:tiuns frr,m Pris<ln Nottboolcs (New York,
1971).
IS Asok Sen, 'The Frontiers ofthe Prison Notebooks' in &rmomic 111111Politiuzl
Wttk/y: Rroit-w ofPoliti"'/ &onomy, vol. 23, no. S, 1988, pp. PE 31-6.
16. Ajit Chaudhuri, 'From Hegemony to Counter Hegemony', &onumic 111111
Politi"'/ Wttkly: Rroit'W ofPolitical &onomy, vol. 23, no. S, 1988, pp. PE 19-23;
Partha Chatterjee, 'On Gramsci's "Fwidamentil Mistike" ', &onumic qnd
Politiuzl Wttk/y: Rroirw ofPolitictd &onomy, vol. 23, no. S, 1988, pp. 24--6.
17 I am grateful to Kalyan Sanyal for suggesting this point
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process involving a polirial-ideological programme by which the
brgcst possible nationalist alliance is built up against the colonial
power. The aim is to form a politically independent nation st:ice.
The means involve the creation of a series of alliances, "-ithin the
organizational structure of the national movement, between the
bourgeoisie and other dominant classes and the mobilization�
under this leadership, of mass suppon from the subordinate clas­
ses. 'fbe project is a reorganization of the political order, but it is
moderated in two quite fundamental ways. On the one hand, ic
does not attempt to break up or transform in any radical way the
institutional structures of 'rational' authority set up in the period
of colonial rule. On the other hand, it also does not undertake a
full-scale assault on all pre-capitalist dominant classes: rather, ic
seeks to limit their former power, neutralize them where neces­
sary, attack them only selectively, and in general bring them round
to a position of subsidiary allies within a reformed state structure.
The dominance of capital does not emanate from its hegemonic
sway over 'civil society'. On the contrary, it seeks to construct a
synthetic hegemony over the domains of both civil society and the
pre-capitalist community. The reification of the 'nation' in the
body of the state becomes the means for constructing this hege­
monic structure, and the extent of control over the new state
apparatus becomes a precondition for further capitalist develop­
ment. It is by means of an interventionist state, directly entering
the domain of production as mobilizer and manager of investible
'national' resources, that the foundations are laid for industrializa­
tion and the expansion of capital. Yet the dominance of capital
over the national state remains constrained in several ways. Its
function of representing the 'national-popular' has to be shared
with other governing groups and its transformative role restricted
to reformist and 'molecular' changes. The institution of planning,
as we have seen, emerges in this process as the 1neans by which
the 'necessary rigours' of these changes are rationalized at the
level, not of this or that particular group, but of the social whole.
For the development model adopted in India, the 'modem'
sector is clearly the dynamic element. Industrialization as a project
emanated from the particular will of the 'modem' sector; the
'general consensus' Chakravarty refers to was in fact the consensus
within this 'modern' sector. But this will for transformation had
to be expressed as a general project for the 'nation', and this
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could be done by subsuming within the cohesive bQdy of a single
plan for the nation aJl of those elements which appeared as
'constraints' on the particular will of the 'modei'n' sector. If land
reform was not attempted in the 1950s, it was not a 'fault' of
planning, nor was it the lapse of a squeamish 'political will' of
the rulers. It was because at this stage of its journey the ideological
construct of the 'passive revolution of capital' consciously sought
t o incorporate within the framework of its rule not a repre­
sentative mechanism solely operated by individual agents in civil
society, but entire structures of pre-capitalist community 'taken
in their existent forms. In the political field, this was expressed
in the form of the so-called 'vote banks', a much talked about
feature of Indian elections in the 1950s and 1960s, by which
forms of social power based on landed proprietorship or caste
loyalty or religious authority were translated into 'representative'
forms of electoral support. In the economic field, the form pre­
ferred was that of 'community development' in which the benefits
of plan projects meant for the countryside were supposed to be
shared collectively by the whole community. That the concrete
structures of existent communities were by no means ho1no­
geneous or egalitarian but were in fact built around pre-capitalist
forms of social power, was not so much ignored or forgotten as
tacitly acknowledged, for these were precisely the structures
through which the 'modernizing' state secured legitimation for
itself in the representative processes of elections. It is, therefore,
misleading to suggest as a criticism of this phase of the planning
strategy that the planners 'did not realise the nature and dimen­
sion of political mobilisation that would be necessary to bring
about the necessary institutional changes' to make agriculture
more productive. 18 Seen in terms of the political logic of 'passive
revolution', the strategy called for was precisely one of promoting
industrialization without taking the risk of agrarian political mo­
bilization. This was an essential aspect of the hegemonic construct
of the post-colonial state: combining accumulation with legitima­
tion while avoid�ng the 'unnecessary rigours' of social conflict.
Rational strategies pursued in a political field, however, have
the unpleasant habit of producing unintended consequences. Al­
though the objective of the Indian state in the 1950s was to lay
18 Sukha1noy Chakravarty, Drotlopmmt Planning, p.
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the foundations for rapid industrialization without radically dis­
turbing the local structures of power in the countryside, the logic
of accumulation in the 'modem' sector could not be prevented
from seeping into the interstices of agrarian property, trade,
patterns of consumption and even production. It did not mean a
general and radical shift all over the country to capitalist farming,
but there were clear signs that agrarian property had become far
more 'commoditized' than before, that even subsistence peasant
production was deeply implicated in large-scale market transac­
tions, that the forms of extraction of agricultural surplus now
combined a wide variety and changing mix of 'economic' and
'extra-economic' power and that a steady erosion of the viability
of small peasant agriculture was increasing the ranks of marginal
and landless cultivators. Perhaps there were conjunctural reasons
why the 'food crisis' should have hit the economic, and immedi­
ately afterwards, the political life of the country with such severity
in the mid-l960s. But it would not be unwarranted to point out
a certain inevitability of the logic of accumulation breaking into
an agrarian social structure which the politics of the state was
unwilling to transform.
There were other consequences of this phase of planned in­
dustrialization under state auspices which were to be of consider­
able political significance.
The Politics of Planning - II
The object of the strategy of 'passive revolution' was to contain
class conflicts within manageable dimensions, to control and mani­
pulate the many dis persed power relations in society to further as
best as possible the thrust towards accumulation. But conflicts
surely could not be avoided altogether. And if there were conflicts
between particular interests, mobilizations based on interests were
only to be expected, especially within a political process of repre­
sentative democracy. In fact, the very form of legitimacy by elec­
toral representation, in so far as it involves a relatirm between the
state and the people, implies a mutual recognition by each of the
organized and articulate existence of the other, the general on the
one hand and the particular on the other. Mobilizations, conse­
quently, did take place, principally as oppositional movements and
in both the electoral and non-electoral domains. The response of
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the state was to subsume these organized demands of particular
interests within the generality of a rational strategy.
The form of this strategy is for the state to insist that all conflicts
between particular interests admit of an 'economic' solution 'economic' in the sense of allocations to each part that are consis­
tent with the overall constraints of the whole. Thus a particular
interest, whether expressed in terms of class, language, region,
caste, tribe or community, is to be recognized and given a place
within the framework of the general by being assigned a priority
and an allocation relative to all the other parts. This, as we have
seen before, is the form which the single rational consciousness
of the developmental state must take - the form of planning. It
is also the form which the political process conducted by the state
will seek to impose on all mobilizations of particular interests: the
demands therefore will be for a reallocation or a reassignment of
priorities relative to other particular interests.
It is curious to what extent a large variety of social mobilizations
in the last two decades have taken both this 'economic' form and
the form of demands upon the state. Mobilizations which admit
of demographic solidarities defined over territorial regions can
usually make this claim within the framework of the federal dis­
tribution of powers. This could be either a claim for greater shares
for the federal units from out of the central economic pool, or for
a reallocation of the relative shares of different federal units, or
even for a redefinition of the territorial boundaries of the units or
the creation of new units out of old ones. On the one hand, we
therefore have a continuous process of bargaining between the
union and the states over the distribution of revenues which is
sought to be given an orderly and rational form by such statutory
bodies as the Finance Commissions, but which inevitably spills
over into the disorderly immediacy of contingent political con­
siderations such as the compulsions of party politics, electoral
advantage or the pressures of influential interest lobbies, and
which takes the form of an ever-growing series of ad hoc alloca­
tions that defy ration·al and consistent justification. On the other
hand, we also have many examples of demands for the creation of
new states within the federal union. While the solidarities over
which these demands are defined are cultural, such as language or
ethnic identity, the justification for statehood invariably carries
with it a charge of economic discrimination within the existing
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federal arrangement, and is thus open to political strategies operat­
ing within the 'economic' framework of distribution of resources
between the centre and the states.
For mobilizations of demographic sections which cannot claim
representative status of territorial regions, the demands made
upon the state are nevertheless also of an 'economic' form. This
includes not only the demands made by the organizations o f
economic classes, but also by social segments such as castes or
tribes or religious communities. Examples of the management o f
class demands of this kind are, of course, innumerable and form
the staple of the political economy literature. They affect virtually
all aspects of economic policy-making and include things like
taxation, pricing, subsidies, licensing, wages, etc. But for the
economic demands of 'ethnic' sections too, the state itself has
legitimized the framework by qualifying the notion of citizenship
by a set of discriminatory protections for culturally underpriv­
ileged and backward groups (lower castes, tribes) or minority
religious communities. The framework has virtually transformed
the nature of caste movements in India over the last fifty years
from movements of lower castes clai1ning higher ritual status
within a religiously sanctified cultural hierarchy to the same castes
now proclaiming their ritually degraded status in order to demand
protective economic privileges in the fields of employment or
educational opportunities. In response, the higher castes, whose
superiority has historically rested upon the denial of any notion
· · of ritual equality· with lower castes, are now defending their .
economic privileges precisely by appealing to the liberal notion
of equality and by pointing out the economic inefficiencies of
discriminatory protection.
The point could therefore be made here that the centrality
which the state assumes in the management of economic demands
in India is not simply the result of the large weight of the public
sector or the existence of state monopolies, as argued; for instance,
by Bardhan 19 or Rudolph and Rudolph.20 Even otherwise, a dev­
elopmental state operating within the framework of representative
politics would necessarily require the state to assume the role of
Pranab Bardhan, Tht Political Economy of Drot/opmmt in India (Oxford,
1984).
20 Lloyd H. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, In Search of uzkshmi: Tbt
Political Ecurwmy oftht Indian State (Chicago, 1987).
19
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the central allocator if it has to legitimize its authority in the
political domain.
The Ambiguities of Legitimation
There is no doubt that the fundamental problematic of the post­
colonial state - furthering accumulation in the 'modem' sector
through a political strategy of passive revolution - has given rise
to numerous ambiguities in the legitimation process. In the field
of economic planning these ambiguities have been noticed in the
debates over the relative importance of market signals and state
commands, over the efficiency of the private sector and the
inefficiency of the state sector, over the growth potential of a
relatively 'open' economy and the technological backwardness of
the strategy of 'self-reliance', and over the dynamic productive
potential of a relaxation of state controls compared with the
entrenchment of organized privileges within th!! present strucrure
of state dominance. It is not surprising that in these debates, the
proponents of the former argument in each opposed pair have
emphasized the dynamic of accumulation while those defending
the latter position have stressed the importance of legitimation
(although there are arguments which defend the latter on the
grounds of accumulation as well). What should be pointed out,
however, is, first, that these ambiguities are necessary consequences
of the specific relation of the post-colonial developmental state
with the people-nation; second, that it is these ambiguities which
create room for manoeuvre through which the passive revolution
of capital can proceed; and third, that these ambiguities cannot
be removed or resolved within the present constitution of the
state.
Let me briefly illustrate this point. Given the political process
defined by the Indian state, the ambiguities of legitimacy are
expressed in the well-known forms of'interest-groups'. These are
the variety of permanent associations of businessmen, profes­
sionals and trade unions as well as temporary agitational mobiliza­
tions based on specific issues. There are competing demands in
this sector, and the state may use both coercive and persuasive
powers to allocate relative priorities in satisfying these demands.
But the overall constraint here is to maintain the unity of the
'modem' sector as a whole, for that, as we have seen before, stands
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forth within the body of the state as the overwhelmingly dominant
element of the 'nation'. The unity of the 'modem' sector is spe­
cified in terms of a variety of criteria encompassing the domains
of industrial production, the professional, educational and service
sectors connected with industrial production, and agricultural pro­
duction outside the subsistence sector, and also embracing the
effective demographic boundaries of the nwket for the products
of the 'modem' sector. The identification of this sector cannot be
made in any specific regional terms, nor docs it coincide with a
simple ruraVurban dichotomy. But because of its unique standing
as a particular interest which can claim to represent the dynamic
aspeet of the nation itself, the entire political process conducted
by the state, including the political parties which stake their claims
to run the central organs of the state, must work towards produc­
ing a consensus on protecting the unity of the 'modem' sector.
Any appearance of a fundamental lack of consensus here will
resonate as a crisis of national unity itself. Thus the political
management of economic demands will require that a certain
internal balance- an acceptable parity- be maintained between
the several fractions within the modem sector. Seen from this
angle, the analysis of the 'political economy' of Indian planning
as a competitive game between privileged pressure groups within
a self-perpetuating 'modem' sector21 will appear one-sided, for it
misses the fundamental ambiguity of a state process which must
further accumulation while legitimizing the 'modem' sector itself
as representative of the nation as a whole.
Indeed, more profound ambiguities appear in the relations be­
tween the 'modem' sector and the rest of the people-nation. On
the one hand, there is the system of electoral representation on a
territorial basis in the form of single-member constituencies. On
the other hand, competing demands may be voiced not only on
the basis of permanent 'interest group' organizations but also as
mobilizations building upon p r eexisting
cultural solidarities such
as locality, caste, tribe, religious community or ethnic identity. It
would be wrong to assume that no representative process works
here. Rather, the most interesting aspect of contemporary Indian
politics is precisely the way in which solidarities and forms of
21 Pranab Bardhan, The Politial &mwt.y ofDtvelopmmt; Lloyd H. Rudolph
and Susanne H. Rudolph, In St'"fb ofLakshmi.
'
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authority deriving from the pre-capitalist community insert them­
selves into the representational processes of a liberal electoral
democracy. This allows, on the one hand, for organizations and
leaders to appear in the domain of the sate process claiming to
represent this or that 'community', and for groups of people
threatened with the loss of their means of livelihood or suffering
from the consequences of such loss to use those representatives
to seek the protection, or at least the indulgence, of the state. On
the other hand, the state itself can manipulate these 'pre-modem'
fonns of relations between the community and the state to secure
legitimacy for its developmental role.22
An instance of the latter is the shift from the earlier strategy of
'community development' to that of distributing 'poverty removal'
packages directly to selected target groups among the under­
privileged sections. The new strategy allows for the state to use a
political rhetoric in which inccrmediate rungs of both the social
hierarchy (local power baron-., dominant landed groups) and the
governmental hierarchy (local officials and even elected political
representatives) can be condemned as obstacles in the way of the
state trying to reach the benefits of development to the poor and
the package of benefits directly presented to �ups of the latter
as a gift from the highest political leadership. 3 From the stand­
point of a rational doctrine of political authority, these fonns of
legitimation .doubtless appear as 'pre-modem', harking back to
what sociologists would call 'traditional' or 'charismatic' authority.
But the paradox is that the existence, the unity and indeed the
representative character of the 'modem' sector as the leading
element within the nation has to be legitimized precisely through
these means.
There is the other side to this relation of legitimation: the
ambiguous image of the state in � pular consciousness. If, as has
been pointed out in some studies, 4 it is true that the state appears
in popular consciousness as an external and distant entity, then,
22 Kalyan K. Sanyal, 'Accumulation, Pove")'. and the State in the Third
World',&rm-ic""'1Politia/ Wttkly: Rt'Vi=ofPolitiCIIIEconumy, vol. 23, no. 5,
1988, pp. 31�.
23 Arun Patnaik, 'Grarnsci's Concept of ;Hegemony: The Case of Develop­
ment Administration in India', &-kIndPolitiCIII Wttkly: Rt'VitTIJ ofPolitiCIIJ
Eamomy, vol. 23, no. 5, 1988, pp. PE 12-18; Atul Kohli, TbtSt11tttmdP11Verty
in lndiJ,: Tbt Politia ofRefo?,1Cambridge, 1987).
24 Partha Chatterjee, Bm(-1: Tb, umd Qutstiun (Calcutta, 1985).
'
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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296 State and Politics in India
depending upon the immediate perception of local antagonisms,
the state could be seen either as an oppressive intruder in the
affairs of the local community or as a benevolent protector of the
people against local oppressors. The particular image in which the
state appears is determined contextually. But this again opens up
the possibility for the play of a variety of political strategies of
which the story of modern Indian politics offers a vast range of
examples.
Such ambiguities show up the narrow and one-sided manner
in which the 'science' of planning defines itself - a necessary
one-sidedness, for without it the singular rationality of its practice
would not be comprehensible to itself. From its own standpoint,
planning will talk about the inefficiency and wastage of the public
sector, about the irrationality of choosing or locating projectS
purely on the grounds of electoral expediency, about the granting
o f state subsidies in res ponse to agitational pressure. The con­
figuration of social powers in the political process, on the other
hand, will produce these inefficient and irrational results which
will go down in the planning literature as examples of implemen­
tational failures. Yet in the process of projecting the efficiency o f
productive growth as a rational path of development for the nation
as a whole, the particular interests in the 'modern' sector must.
shift on to the state the burden of defraying the costs of producing
a general consent for their particular project. The state sector,
identified as the embodiment of the general, must bear these social
costs of constructing the framework of legitimacy for the passive
revolution of capital.
What we have tried to show is that the two processes - one
of 'rational' planning and the other of 'irrational' politics - are
inseparable parts of the very logic of this state conducting the
passive revolution. The paradox in fact is that it is the very
'irrationality' of the political process which continually works to
produce legitimacy for the rational exercise of the planner. While
the planner thinks of his own practice as an instrument for
resolving conflict, the political process uses planning itself as an
instrument for producing consent for capital's passive revolution.
It is not surprising then to discover that the rational form of
the planning exercise itself supplies to the political process a
rhetoric for conducting its political debates. 'Growth' and 'equity'
- both terms are loaded with potent rhetorical ammunition
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which can serve to justify as well as to contest state policies that
seek to use coercive legal powers to protect or alter the existent
relations between social groups. We have shown how the very
form of an institution of rational planning located outside the
political process is crucial for the self-definition of a developmen­
tal state embodying the single universal conkiousness of the social
whole. We have also shown how the wielders of power can
constrain, mould and distort the strategies of planning in order
to produce political consent for their rule. What is science in the
one domain becomes rhetoric in the other; what is the rational
will of the whole in the one becomes the contingent agglomera­
tion of particular wills in the other. The two together - this
contradictory, perennially quarrelsome and yet ironically well­
matched couple - comprise the identity of the developmental
state in India today.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
III
The Political Process:
Dominance
..
I
t is a truism that dominance and resistance must be seen as two
integrally related aspects of the same structure and process of
political power. We have divided the chapters in the remaining
two sections into 'dominance' and 'resistance' only to focus better
on each of these two aspects in tu,rn.
An important problem that faced the analyst of Indian politics
in the first two decades of Congress dominance was to explain
how the myriad fonns of local power all across the country were
tied together over districts and states to give the Congress party
i ts overwhelming position of power. The usual
line of explanation
1
started by assuming that the Congress for the most part did not
put in place a new structure of power in the localities but rather
built up its dominance by incorporating within its own structure
of rule the existing dominant groups in the various localities. The
much acclaimed accommodative political style of the Congress
system was thus a way of superimposing the Congress structure
on the existing structures of local pqwer. The most common way
in which these local elites were brought and kept together within
the Congress fold was through the faction. There were Cotigress
factions in each party forum and at each level of the organization.
Through complex and changing alliances between these factions,
the ruling party arranged to satisfy to the best of its ability the
interests of all the elite groups dominant at different levels of the
political system. In regions where there was a dominant caste or
dominant caste coalition, as in Maharashtra or Gujarat or Mysore
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
300 State and Politics in India
or Andhra Pradesh, lineage and caste ties could be usefully mobi­
lized for purposes of securing winning percentages of votes in the
majority of the constituencies. In other areas, there would be
complex coalitions of caste, ethnic or religious factions at the
district and state levels put together through the mediating skills
of powerful Congress leaders.
This form of aggregating local powers into Congress domin­
ance at the state and national levels changed considerably in the
period from the early 1970s when Indira Gandhi emerged as the
unquestioned leader of the ruling party. She changed the mediat­
ory form of politics into what has been called a plebiscitary one.
The 1967 elections showed that the powerful regional Congress
leaders of the earlier period were no longer reliable vote gatherers.
Indira Gandhi's refurbished Congress did not try any longer to
cobble together electoral support by mobilizing the resources of
locally dominant groups. Rather, by separating parliamentary elec­
tions from state assembly elections and by relying on the much
higher rates of voter participation, it turned the general elections
into a plebiscite on the leadership of Indira Gandhi. This enabled
the Congress to build an elector.n support bloc of low castes and
minorities led by uppe r caste elites. It also meant that locally
dominant middle castes were often alienated from the Congress,
but this was consistent with the general technique of dominance
through centralization of powers rather than through dispersed
and mediated powers. Some of these techniques of dominance,
and the changes in them over two decades, are illustrated in the
chapter by Brass.
One apparent advantage of the plebiscitary form of dominance
was that by separating the periodic moments of elections from
the everyday business of exercising and negotiating local power
it could leave the structures of dominance in the localities largely
undisturbed. In any case, the local elites would often prove in­
dispensable in the matter of daily governance. This meant, fust
of all, that despite the apparent stability of Congress dominance
at the upper levels of the power structure, its bases of support at
the local levels were not regularly renewed through any con­
tinuous process of organized political activity. Second, given the
dissociation of the central power structure from the regional and
local arenas of political life, it became possible for these local
powers to acquire, over time, the shape of distinct regional power
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The Political Pt·ocess: Dominance 301
structures, each with a dynamic of its own. Paradoxically, there­
fore, it was the very attempt to centralize the process of dom­
inance during the Congress-I period that created the possibility
for the emergence of regional political systems in the states.
Third, when the plebiscitary form worked against the Congress-I,
as in 1977 or 1989 or 1996, or indeed in a large number of state
elections during this period, its support bases seemed to evaporate
overnight across huge regions.
Of the alternative forms of dominance that have emerged in
the states, four patterns can be described. First, where local
powers are allowed to negotiate through a democratic process in
the localiti�, where developmental programmes of the state are
effectively tied· to these local negotiations, and where the overall
structure is closely monitored and controlled by a tightly or­
ganized party machinery. The most successful example of this
form of regional dominance is to be found in West Bengal, where
the Left Front government has created a record of stable political
rule unmatched in India in the last two decades. The chapter by
Kohli describes this pattern.
The second pattern is where a plebiscitary form is sought to be
instituted at the state level, supported by ideological props of
cultural autonomy and often, in the more effective cases, by the
charismatic appeal of a leader, and where a set of populist pro­
grammes of the government becomes the means of legitimizing
dominance. This pattern can be seen most prominently in Tamil
Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. The fragility of such do1ninance,
dependent as it is on the continuing charisma of the leader, on his
or her plebiscitary standing at the time of elections and on the
sustainability of populist programmes, has also been demonstrated
in the recent history of those two states. The chapter by Pandian
describes one aspect of this pattern.
The third pattern consists in the attempt since the late 1980s
to forge majority electoral support by appeal to Hindutva. It is
not as though religious majoritarianism was not tried before as a
tactic of dominance: it has always been available as a means of
building local or regional electoral solidarities and was often used
even by the Congress for this purpose. However, the perceptible
weakening of Congress dominance in recent years is directly re­
lated to the current attempt by the IlJP to tie together local power
structures over large regions into a parliamentary majority. There
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'
are two aspects to this attempt: on the one hand, to demonstrate
the ability to build and preserve large and oomplex �ances in th e
same way that the Congress once did, and on the other, t o sustain
an atmosphere o f communal confrontation in order to activate
when necessary the ideological sentiments of religious major­
itarianism. The communal riots in the 1980s were a crucial part
of the process of building up these sentiments. The chapter b y
Basu shows in detail how one such local riot was connected in
complex ways with much larger structures of power.
The fourth pattern is that of building majorities through an
alliance of backward castes, dalits and minorities. This is the new
dalit-bahujan movement that has become particularly significant
in north India in recent years. Its electoral success� so far have
been relatively fragile, the Janata Dal government In Bi.bar being
the only case where it has held power for any length of time. To
what extent this represents a viable strategy of dominance is as yet
not clearly demonstrated.
It must be emphasized that all four patterns are emergent fonns
of do1ninaoce and therefore still retain a significant aspect where
they can invoke the idiom of resistance. Thus despite two decades
in government, the Left Froot in West Bengal can i-epresent itself
as resisting the dominance of the all-India ruling classes and as
voicing the demands of peasants and workers. The charismatic
appeal of an MGR or an NTR rests, even after theiE death, on
the image of a saviour of the poor. The support for Hindutva is
often expressed as a feeling of outrage against the way Hindus are
supposedly discriminated against in their own country. And the
element of resistance in the new dalit movement, even in its quest
fo r power, is so strong that we have discuss.ed it i n our last section
on 'Resistance'.
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8
National Power and
Local Politics in India:
A Twenty-year Perspective·
'
Paul Brass
l'""'fiie study of federal political systems, particularly parliamen­
.L
tuy or representative federal political systems, such as those
in the United States, Canada, or India involves complexities that
d o not exist in unituy states such as Great Britain or France. In
the first place, there are three or more institutional levels in such
systems, each of which has its own arena in which political strug­
gles take place. Second, the balance of power among the levels in
federal systems varies in different systems and in the same system
• This chapter is an expanded version of my Kingsley Martin Memorial
�. sponsored by the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of
Cambridge and delivered on 2 March 1983. It is based on research conducted
i n India between September 1982 and January 1983, during the tenure of a
Faculty Research Fellowship of the American Institute of Indian Studies
(AIIS). During much of my stay in India, I was a guest of the Institute of ·
Public Administration, University of Lucknow, to whose Director, Dr D.P.
Singh, I owe a great debt for his hospitality and patience. The article w.as
written during my residence at St John's College as ao Overseas Visiting
Scholar for two tcmlS. During my residence at St John's Col!_e�, I also held
a grant from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) (US) in support
of my research. This article is part of a larger project on Structures of Local
Power in Contemporary North India, supported by both AIIS and SSRC.
Mr Sunil Singh assisted me in field research and Ms E. Mann in newspaper
rcacarch and the typing of various versions of the original manuscript.
I am grateful to the agencies and persons above, none of whom, however,
bear any responsibility for the accuracy of the facts and interpretations pr. o­
vided in the article.
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304 State and Politics in India
at different times. Third, the study of the extraparliamentary
organizations such as political parties, and of social movements,
also becomes a more complex task since it cannot be assumed that
a political party or social movement with the same name is the
same sort of formation in New York and Mississippi or in Uttar
Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Moreover, in federal systems with a
high degree of regional cultural diversity, each federal unit in the
country may have a distinctive configuration ofextraconstitutional
political formations and social forces. This is certainly the case in
India, the most culturally diverse of all existing federal parliamen­
tar y systems in the world today. Fourth, politics in federal systems
takes place bdween levels as well as within levels, again i n far more
complex ways than in unitary systems.
The analysis of federal parliamentary systems such as India's is,
therefore, an especially challenging task for political scientists or
historians who wish somehow to convey either a whole view of
the system at a particular point in time or in its historical develop­
ment. Even if one aspires for less than a whole view, an initial
question must be: at what level or entry point into the system can
one learn most about the dynamic processes that are characteristic
of the system as a whole? For many years after Independence,
many political scientists thought Indian politics could not be un­
derstood at all except at the state and district level. This view was
so widely held, in fact, that serious detailed political studies of
many of India's most powerful central institutions have yet to be
done. Others have argued that the society, in all its diversity, has
been held together by one or another major national institution
- the 'steel frame' of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) or
the gelatinous mass of the Indian National Congress being two
leading candidates. In recent years, particularly since the imposi­
tion by Mrs Gandhi of an authoritarian 'Emergency' regime from
1975 to 1977, it has been often argued that the Indian political
system has become increasingly centralized and nationalized and
that the essential characteristics of the Indian political system can
now be read only through the study of executive power and par­
ticular·central institutions.
Twenty years ago, when I did my initial fieldwork at the district
and state level, focusing on the Congress organization, I thought
I had identified the critical levels of the Indian political system
and the inner dynamics of its politics. It appeared to me then
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The Political Process: Dominance 305
that there was a vast difference between the politics of national
integration, of government and opposition, of planning, of secu­
larism, and of rapid industrialization which Nehru symbolized
and the politics of faction, caste, patronage, nepotism, com­
munalism, and mixed subsistence and cash crop agriculture that
operated at the state and district level.1 Moreover, I thought then
that the latter patterns had a greater reality than the former and
that the answer to the old question, 'After Nehru, what?' was the
bubbling up to the national level of the politics of the state and
localities.
Fortunately, I didn't put my predictions into print, for that is
not quite what happened. For a while after Nehru's death, par­
ticularly in the period from 1967 to 1971, when there was per­
sistent instability at the state level in most of the Indian states,
and when Mrs Gandhi seemed unable to consolidate her power
at pie central level, it seemed that the tendencies were clearly in
the direction of localization, factionalization, and ruralization.
What neither I nor most other observers bargained for was the
tenacity of Mrs Gandhi, her adherence to the basic elements of
N�hru's policies and strategies, and her willingness to assert
ruthlessly the prerogatives of executive authority and the goals
of national integration and rapid industrialization at the cost, if
necessary, of state autonomy, opposition freedom, and individual
civil liberties. Yet, equally surprisingly to many observers, Mrs
Gandhi withdrew in 1977 the Emergency she imposed in 1975
and held free elections in which she and the Congress were
thrown out of power in a stunning opposition victory. As the
victorious Janata coalition disintegrated in internecine conflicts
and personal squabbles during the next three years, it seemed at
last that national, state, and local politics had become as one.
However, again in 1980, Mrs Gandhi and the Congress returned
to power with a two-thirds majority in Parliament and a renewed
commitment to old policies.
It appears, then, that the system will not move decisively in one
These contrasts were noted at the time in two important articles: one by
W.H. Morris-Jones, 'India's Political Idioms', in C.H. Philips (ed.), Politics
- and an­
and Sodtty in India (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), pp. 1 3 354,
other by Myron Weiner, 'India's Two Political Cultures', in his Political
Changt in South Asia (Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyaya, 1963), pp. 1151
52.
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306 State 1111d Politics in India
way or another, that the centre and its goals will not prevail over
state and local patterns and that, conversely, state and local politics
will not percolate upwards and tranSform national politics. And
that leads me to my theme and argument, namely that there is a
persistent tension and dynamic in the system between two sets of
goals and two patterns of politics, that one set and one pattern
will not prevail over the other, but that the system is characterized
by interpenetration between the two and mutual dependence of
one upon the other. This tension and dynamic takes place in a
system in which national power is extremely difficult to build and
maintain because of the enormous size, diversity, and fragmenta­
tion of the country, among other reasons.
Although I believe this dynamic interpenetratioQ is essential
to understanding the system and is a permanent aspect of it, its
features are not themselves unchanging. The balance of power
among levels has changed in the past twenty years and will, no
doubt, change again. Some institutions have declined in impor­
tance while others have enhanced their power. Patterns ofpoliti­
cal mobilization have also changed. However, there are many
continuities as well. I want to emphasize one of these continuities
in this chapter, namely the persistence of structures of local
power independent of party organization, but not independent
of government, which must be taken into account by any leader
or party that seeks to build national power in India's political
system.
The Changing Context of Indian Politics
Four important political changes have affected the nature of the
dynamic tensions in the Indian political system in the past twenty
years. The first has been the disintegration of the Congress
organization as an institutionalized force at the local level. The
second has been the decline in power of independent state pol­
iticians, of powerful bosses with links to the district which sus­
tained them in control of or in struggles for control of the
provincial Congress organization and the state government. The
third has been the nationalization of some issues that were less
prominent twenty years ago or were considered local issues. These
issues include the condition of India's poor and landless, the
treatment of minorities, particularly Muslims, alleged atrocities
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The Politiclll Process: Domintmte 307
committed against scheduled castes2 by some of the landed castes,
land refonns, and the general state of law and order. A fourth
change has been a succession of attempts by national leaders,
particularly Mrs Gandhi, to centralize power by ruling through
ordinances, by frequent and arbitrary imposition of President's
rule over the state governments, by direct control of local party
decisions on such matters as distribution of tickets to contest
elections for the state legislative assemblies as well as Parliament,
by the creation of new centralized institutions of police and
intelligence, and by other means.
The economic and social context in which politics takes place
at the district level has also changed and continues to change,
though not quite with revolutionary speed. The major changes,
most of which cannot be discussed in this brief chapter, include
the following: the so-called green revolution in agriculture, re­
newed efforts in the 1970s to enforce land ceilings legislation,
the increased political assertiveness at the local level of the middle
peasant castes, the increased prominence of issues concerning the
well-being of s�eduled castes, the poor, and the landless, the
increased salience of issues of law and order, the increasing
importance of issues concerning the well-being, safety and cul­
tural identity of the Muslim minority, increased problems of
student unrest, and the expansion o f government employment
and the consequent increased importance of state employment
and state employees as factors in the local political economy. It
will be noticed that many of these issues were prominent twenty
or more years ago and that I have used terms such as 'increased
prominence' or 'increased importance' to refer to them. Even
those terms may be an exaggeration for some of the issues and
problems noted above. The point is that none of the changes
taking place are revolutionary and most involve continuities with
the past. Most important, there is great local variation in the
speed and the impact of these changes.
The changes that are most relevant to the issues to be discussed
in this chapter concern land ceilings and law and order. In so fa r
as land ceilings are concerned, pressure from the central govern­
ment in the 1970s led to renewed efforts by the state governments
2 Scheduled castes i s
the official term used for persons of low or 'untouchable'
caste in India, who are also often referred to as harijans.
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308 State and Politics in India
to enforce more effectively land ceilings legislation and to reduce
the permissible ceilings. This change has resulted in increasing
the pressure on the descendants of the former great zamindars and
talukdars who have managed to hold on to extensive landholdings
during the post-zamindari abolition years. Like most·such laws in
India, land ceilings are selectively enforced and their enforcement
leaves some remarkably big new fish out of their net, but it is a
continuing factor in the local political context.
The second change relevant to this article concerns law and
order. New problems of law and order have arisen partly out of
the new tensions in the countryside between landowning cul­
tivators and their labourers. They have also arisen because of the
addition of a new dimension to an old problem, namely the as­
sociation of local politicians with criminals and dacoits and the
entry of the latter directly into politics in some places. Another
major new source of violence in the countryside has been the
police themselves, who now and then wreak havoc in the villages
for their own reasons. The result is that control over the local
police has become a very critical matter for district politicians.
These several changes in local patterns of law, order, and violence
mean that district politics now cannot be properly understood
unless one can unravel the interconnections among criminals,
politicians, and the police.
The major changes that have taken place in the Congress and in
its socio-economic environment in the past twenty years have
affected the Congress support bases and local structures of power
in important ways. First, electoral support for the Congress eroded
in the 1960s to the point where its dominance and control over
government were threatened. The Congress no longer has a
monopoly over power at the higher levels of the Indian polity.
Second,. the internal struggle for control over the Congress or­
ganization that led to the split in the Congress in 1969 and the rise
of Mrs Gandhi to the position of pre-eminent leader of the Con­
gress had severe consequences for the party organization, par­
ticularly in the north, but elsewhere in India as well. In so far as the
critical north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) is concerned, a
weakened Congress organization became increasingly dependent
on segments of the locally dominant landowning communities. A
major new opposition force, the BKD of Charan Singh, emerged
out of one of the former Congress groups, with a reliable base o f
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The Politi,·al Process: Dominance 309
support among the middle peasantry. In order to build sufficient
electoral support. therefore, the Congress has had to try to combine
elements from the top and the bottom of north Indian society, from
the old landed groups and from the poor and the minorities. Finally,
the old pattern of aggregating power from the bottom up, which
enhanced the importance of state and local factions and leaders in
the Congress, was replaced by a syste1n of control from the top
down. Mrs Gandhi, like her father, has intervened decisively in state
and local politics fro1n time to time. Unlike her father, however,
she has intervened n1ore frequently and with less effectiveness and
has relied upon advisers who lack adequate knowledge of, and
genuine authority in, local political arenas.
In the remainder of this chapter, I will illustrate the changes
I have discussed above and the mutual dependence that has arisen
as a consequence of the1n between national power and local
politics. My illustrations will be drawn from two districts in UP,
in which I did fieldwork in 1961-2 and to which I returned in
October and November 1982. The two districts are Gonda in
Oudh and Deoria in eastern UP on the Nepal and Bihar border.
They illustrate rather different aspects of the local political eco­
nomy of the state of UP. Gonda, as part of Oudh, was a district
dominated by great landed estates before Independence. The
great former talukdars have continued to play irnportant roles in
local politics. Deoria, in contrast, was never dominated by the
great estates, though there were three i1nportant ones in the
district. Rather, it has been a district that has been noted for its
small landholdings and was, in 1962, one of the poorest and most
agriculturally backward districts in the state with an agricultural
economy based on intensive paddy cultivation, a large force of
mostly landless agricultural labourers, and hardly any oppor­
tunities for off-farm employment outside of a declining sugar
industry. In the past twenty years, however, Deoria has experi­
enced a number of changes in its politics and political economy
- considerable agricultural change, increased assertiveness of the
backward or middle status agricultural castes, and the rise of the
Lok Dal, the latest incarnation of the agrarian political party of
Chaudhuri Charan Singh. These two districts, therefore, provide
a sufficient contrast, and one of them has undergone sufficient
change, to make a comparison of structures of local power and
politics in them of broad interest.
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3IO State and Politicr in India
Structures of Local Power
Gonda: The Persistence ofLocal Power
In 1962, the most impressive structure of local power I found in
my research in five districts of UP was that maintained by the
ex-Raja of Mankapur in Gonda district.3 Although the Mankapur
estate was only the fourth largest talukdari estate in the district in
revenue payments and collected revenue only from 149 villages,
it had become politically the most important estate in the district
even before Independence. After Independence, despite the pas­
sage of legislation eliminating the tax-farming system that had
sustained the economic and political power of the great landlord
families of Oudh and other parts of UP during British rule, the
heir of the Mankapur estate, Raghvendra Pratap Singh, succeeded
in maintaining substantial economic resources and impressive po­
litical power in the district until his death in 1964. In fact, he
dominated the Congress organization in the district after Inde­
pendence until 1956, when he left it to go into opposition. His
departure from the Congress at that time left the district organiza­
tion in disarray, but left him still by far the most powerful political
force in Gonda. Raghvendra Pratap was a Raja in the grand
manner, not in the sense that he lived ostentatiously, but in his
natural enjoyment and exercise of power and authority. Moreover,
he revelled in politics, which he entered of his own volition during
the nationalist movement.
His son and sole heir, Anand Singh, is of an entirely different
temperament fron1 his father. He dislikes politics, and does not
enjoy, in the obvious manner of his father, the exercise of power
over men. However, like his father, he does enjoy the life in
Mankapur: the peace, tranquility, and security of the great palace;
the loyalty of the local population who are eager to be of service
to the scion of the Mankapur estate, whose protection they want;
and the satisfactions of an agricultural life involving the control
of land and the resources derived from the produce of the land.
In order to maintain such a life style, however, it is not possible
to remain aloof from politics.
In 1964, therefore, when his father died, Anand, who was then
3 See Paul R. Brass, Fat:tif1fllll Politics in tm lnditm State: Tbt Cungrtn Pany in
Utt11r Pradesh (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1964), chapter 4.
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only in his mid-twenties, was in a difficult situation. His father had
fought successfully against the Congress for eight years and had
maintained his hold over the district in the face of several major
campaigns involving the importation into the district of persons
from outside with great fmancial or political resources to challenge
him. Anand, in contrast to his father, preferred not to continue to
fight in a perpetual state of siege against powerful outside forces,
but to work within the existing structures of external power. Con­
sequently, he joined the Congress and contested the legislative
assembly elections successfully in 1967.. Thereafter, for ten years,
he consistently miscalculated the direction of the political currents
and found himself and his estate under unrelenting pressure from
external authorities. In 1969, when theCongress split, Anand chose
to remain with the Congress (0). Although in 1971, he succeeded
in winning the parliamentary election on the Congress (0) ticket
in the face of the massive victories of the Congress led by Mrs
Gandhi nearly everywhere else in north India, he found himself
politically isolated thereafter. The Congress returned to power in
the state of UP and with a two-thirds majority at the centre. The
pressure by the state authorities against the former landlords in­
creased with the passage of new land ceilings legislation in UP and
the publication of a report by the state government that identified
various former zamindars and talukdars, including Anand Singh of
Mankapur, as still in possession of vast illegal landholdings. In 1972,
after the war with Bangladesh, when 1nany n o nCongress
MPs and
MLAs decided to join the Congress-I, Anand also joined the ruling
party. His decision to enter the Congress-I did not protect him
from further pressures irom the state government when, during the
Emergency, Mr H.N. Bahuguna became the Chief Minister of UP.
Anand himself lost an election for the first time in the great anti- .
Congress wave of 1977, and the Janata party came to power in the
state and country thereafter.
Remarkably enough, in the face of this series of political blunders
and miscalculations, when I returned to Mankapur in 1978, in 1980,
and for an extended period in 1982, I found Anand Singh as relaxed
as always, the Mankapur palace in excellent condition, a consider­
able personal following at his command, and his political influence
at a peak by 1982.4
is drawn primarily from interviews
conducted by me in Gonda district in November 1982.
4The information in the rest ofthis section
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312 Statt and Politicr in India
Although the wealth and lands still under the control of Anand
Singh cannot be identifted precisely because they are under litiga­
tion, there is no doubt that he commands great economic resources.
He maintains that he retains only that amount of land to which h e
is entitled under land ceilings legislation and that the rest has been
given to educational trusts and to former tenants or has been sold
off. Others say he continues to control directly or through trusts
approximately 1500 acres of land, on which he grows foodgrains,
sugar cane, mangoes, teak and other forest products, and various
other cash crops such as citronella. Anand also maintains a variety
of agro-based and agro-related enterprises, divided into sixteen
departments. His lands, trusts and enterprises extend throughout
the countryside around Mankapur, scattered here and there, in a
radius of approximately 10 kilometres.
Anand has sufficient economic resources at his command to
retain an extensive and loyal political following and to control the
important political and economic institutions in the district - the
cooperative banks, the land development committees, the coopera­
tive cane unions, the block development committees. He also con­
trols the police. Whenever Anand is in Mankapur, local people
acknowledge his power by their visits to the palace to request his
aid on every kind of matter from providing emergency medical
transportation to adjudication of local disputes over land to requests
for intervention with the local administration for postings, permits,
and redress of grievances of all sorts. Those who recognize the
authority of Mankapur can also be assured of police protection
when they need it and of freedom from police harassment
In 1980, in her successful strategy to return to power, Mrs
Gandhi chose to rely whenever possible on men like Anand Singh,
who could be counted upon to deliver votes. Anand himself
contested for Parliament and won the Mankapur seat with a
massive majority. In the distribution of tickets for the Congress
in both the January 1980 parliamentary and the June 1980 legis­
lative assembly elections, Anand was given control over all but
two legislative assembly tickets. All but those two were won by
the Congress in Gonda in its most impressive victory in that
district since Independence.
In the normal course, a man who can deliver nine out of eleven
legislative assembly and two out of two parliamentary seats in a
district could be expected to demand and receive an important
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ministry or two in the state and central governments for himself
and/or his followers. However, Anand does not like state and
national politics. He prefers to spend as much time as possible in
Mankapur and begrudges the time he must spend in Lucknow and
Delhi. His main interest is in the survival of his estate, his palace,
and, therefore, his local political influence. Consequently, Anand
chose to ask for a factory for his backward and remote district
lac.king in any industry rather than for a ministry for himself or
his closest supporters.
The story of how Anand Singh acquired a factory for his district
reveals how national policy and local politics are nowadays often
directly linked without intermediation through the state level.
Sometime in 1981, the central government proposed to set up
four fertilizer gas plants in four districts of UP, of which Gonda
was to be one. However, when the technical information concern­
ing the appropriateness of the four sites was fed into the computer,
negative results were received back on two sites - Amethi in
Sultanpur district and Gonda. Amethi being the constituency of
Sanjay and later Rajiv Gandhi, the computer ultimately corrected
the results for Sultanpur district but not for Gonda. Anand, there­
fore, went to see the Prime Minister once again to remind her
that he wanted a factory for his district, in response to which Mrs
Gandhi promised Anand a new telecommunications factory to be
built by the French at a cost of Rs 300 crores to employ 5000
persons. Once again, technical studies were done concerning the
feasibility of the proposed site for the factory and were fed into
the computer, which again gave negative results. At one point,
Anand suggested to the Industries Minister that the computer
might be used to 'fetch the votes then next time'. He advised Mrs
Gandhi that the computers were giving negative results only be­
cause the Indian Administrative officers and technicians and the
French collaborators preferred a more attractive place such as
Bangalore, which would also have good educational facilities for
their children, to a remote and backward district such as Gonda.
At this point, Mrs Gandhi awarded the factory to Gonda district,
basing her decision on its backwardness and consequent need for
new industry and employment. By awarding the telecommunica­
tions factory to Gonda, the centre also was acknowledging the
political value of Anand Singh and his capacity to deliver votes.
Preliminary work is now going on at the site of the ·factory,
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314 St11te 1111d Politics in India
which is to be constructed only a couple of kilometres away from
the palace atMankapur on barren land that was provided by Anand
himself. In bringing the first major modem industry to Gonda
since Independence, Anand has provided the possibility of consid­
erable new employment for some of his constituents and the
prospect of generating enensive further industrial, commercial,
and employment opportunities that are expected to be provided
b y the creation of some thirty to forty ancillary industries. Anand
himself is expected to set up one or two ancillary industries of his
own, for which sites have already been selected.
This incident of the telephone factory brings out several impor­
tant features of contemporary politics in India, some of which are
different from the days of Nehru's dominance; The first feature is
the demonstrable high value of a persisting structure of local power
such as that at Mankapur. The second is the necessity for anyone
who wishes to maintain such a structure to go into politics at the
local level and to develop external linl<s at the im portant decision
points outside the district The third feature and one that is dif­
ferent from twenty years ago is the fact that the important external
links are in Delhi, in fact in the office of the Prime Minister. The
state government and politicians had nothing to do with this de­
cision. Twenty years ago, the ChiefMinisters would have vied with
each other before Nehru to demand the siting of such a valuable
project in their state. The fourth point follows from the third.
Centralization of power in the hands of the Prime Minister i n
India's political system in effect means that the Prime Minister is
free to decide whose local support is most critical for her own
persistence in power. For the power of the Prime Minister and
Congress power at the centre are dependent upon those at the state
and local levels who can deliver votes and seats and who cannot be
ignored. In north India, direct relations between powerful persons
at the local level and those at the centre, including the Prime
Minister and her close advisers, have become common, although
not always to mutual advantage and satisfaction, as the following
contrasting case from Deoria district suggests.
Deoria: The Persistence ofDivisiun
In Deoria, as in Gonda district, the Congress under the leadership
of Mrs Gandhi and her son, Sanjay, attempted t o work through
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local structures of power to establish a stable support base in the
countryside. However, in Deoria, there are no local structures of
power comparable to Manlcapur, the district has for long been a
highly politicized one, and inter-party competition bas been very
keen. In 1962, the Congress in Deoria district was weak, frag­
mented, and f-actionalized. Inter-party competition between the
Congress and the Socialist parties was intense. The politics of the
district focused especially upon two issues: the problems of sugar,
especially the issue of the cane price, and struggles centring around
the increasing political assertiveness of the backward castes in a
district whose politics and local instirutions were then dominated
by the elite castes of Brahmans, Rajputs, and Bhumiban. The
district then was a symbol of extreme poverty and backwardness
that provided a solid base for the Socialist parties.s
In 1982, as in 1962, inter-party competition in Deoria district
was very keen. However, there was an outward change in its form.
In the intervening years, the_Socialist movement had disappeared.
The more moderate leaders, many of them of elite caste status,
had joined the Congress in the 1960s. The more radical leaders,
some of elite caste status, but others of middle caste status, con­
tinued in opposition but joined with the agrarian, backward--caste­
oriented movement of Chaudhuri Charan Singh. The present
political form of that movement in UP and in Deoria district is
the party known as the Lok Dal. As a consequence of the disin­
tegration of the Socialist movement and the rise of the Lok Dal
as the principal opposition party in Deoria district., conflict be­
tween the elite and backward castes has become somewhat more
sharply focused, though by no means as yet completely polarized.
As for the Congress in Deoria district in the intervening
years, it acquired some new strength in the 1960s as a conse­
quence of the incorporation of the moderate socialist leaders
into it. Since the two most prominent moderate Socialist leaders
were of Bhumiliar caste,6 the Congress also strengthened its
support amongst this powerful local caste and its clients. How­
ever, the Congress remained throughout these years in Deoria
district a highly fragmented party, with its leadership drawn
principally from persons of elite caste status, especially Bnhmans
s See Brass, FIICti11n11I Politia, chapter 6.
6 Genda Singh and Ramayan Rai.
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316 State and Politics in India
and Bhumihars, and its support base mostly among those same
castes along with some support from the lower castes and the
Muslim minority. Moreover, in successive elections during the
past twenty years, the backward castes have made their presence
felt increasingly as voters and candidates, mostly in opposition
to the Congress.
In 1980, in their search for allies in north India who could help
to bring them back to power at the centre, Mrs Gandhi and her
son, Sanjay, found in Deoria district another member of a landed
family who seemed well-suited to their needs. Although Deoria
district was not, like Gonda district, dominated by great landed
estates before Independence, there were three substantial estates
in the district. Of the three, the best-endowed fmancially was
Padrauna, which at one time owned three sugar mills as well as
landed property. The Padrauna Rajas were Sainthwar by caste, a
local backward caste considered by m.any people to be part of the
Kurmi caste category. In 1980, Mr C.P.N. Singh of the Padrauna
estate was recruited by Sanjay Gandhi to contest for Parliament .
on the Congress-I ticket and, having done so successfully, was
made a minister of state in the Government of India. It is also
generally believed in the district that he was given the major say
in the distribution of tickets for the June 1980 legislative assembly
elections in Deoria district. In this way, it would seem, the Con­
gress would have the double advantage of a base in a powerful and
wealthy landed family in the district, through a person from a
backward caste.
In contrast to Gonda district, however, the strategy of relying
upon C.P.N. Singh to control the district failed. The Lok Dal
won six of thirteen seats in the district and a candidate from
another opposition party won a seventh, leaving the Congress with
less than half the seats in the district. Moreover, in 1982, the
Congress was bitterly divided in Deoria district and the leadership
of Mr C.P.N. Singh was held in contempt by some of the strongest
local leaders of the Congress.
Three reasons for the failure of the Congress in Deoria to
acquire as much strength as in Gonda have been given already the higher degree of politicization in the district, the greater
traditional strength of the opposition, and the comparative weak­
ness of the Padrauna estate in comparison to Mankapur. Still, on
the face of it, the Congress leadership might have hoped for a
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more favourable result i n electoral terms and, at the least, a much
less badly divided party.Let us examine, therefore, in more detail
the leadership of C.P.N.Singh, the manner in which he acquired
it, and the way in which he has exercised it.7
First of all, it is felt by even the mildest of his critics in the
Deoria Congress that C.P.N. Singh's leadership was not earned
independently. For example one of the oldest and most faithful
Congressmen of the district was asked about C.P.N.Singh and
gave the following reply:
Respondent:He has no political ground.
How can that be?
PRB:
Background, he has nothing.
Res:
So how did he become a 1ninister in the central govern­
PRB:
ment?
Res:
Now the policy is quite different. . . . Previously the
main point of consideration used to be sacrifice and work.
Now sacrifice and political-social work or public wor.lc
[are] in the background.
PRB:
And what is in the fore ground? ...
Foreground, how far he has ... got contacts with the
Res:
leadership....
Is it a fact that Mr C.P.N.Singh was simply an appointee
PRB:
of Sanjay Gandhi?
Res:
That is a fuct.That is a fact.
A rather more embittered and hostile Congressman opposed to
the leadership of C.P.N.Singh put the matter more strongly.He
claimed that the father of C.P.N.Singh had been patronized by the
British and had fought against the Congress and that the son
himself had originally entered politics in 1969 in opposition to the
Congress as a candidate of Charan Singh's BKD, 'though he was
not political at any time ...by thinking, by working, by any means.'
After the election, he left the BKD and joined the Congress.
Res: [In 1980, C.P.N. Singh] became MP and now he is minister.
He has no backing, he has no following, ... no ...political
thinking.
PRB: But he is [the] only central minister in the Congress govern­
ment from Deoria district? How can this be?
The information in the rest of this section, unless otherwise indicated, is
dr�wn primarily from interviews conducted by me in Deoria district in
October 1982.
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318 State and Politics in India
Res: Yes.I don't know why ...Ab, Mr Sanjay Gandhi is no more
in the world....
PRB: So we can't spcalc ill of him!
Res: We can't say about him.... (But,] perhaps Mr C.P N.Singh
is not [even a] member of [the] Congress Party ...in Deoria
district.
PRB: But he was a man of Sanjay Gandhi?
Res: Undoubtedly.
According to this view, the selection of C.P.N.Singh to be the
leader of the Deoria district Congress had nothing to do with his
political background or lack of it, his position in the Paclrauna
estate, or his backward caste status, but was because of his personal
and familial connections with Sanjay Gandhi.His wife is the cousin
of the Punjabi industrialist, Kuldip Narang, who bas had close
connections with Maneka Gandhi, the wife of Sanjay Gandhi.
Because of these connections, it is alleged, he was made Minister
of State for Defence while Sanjay was alive and later was given
the portfolio of technology.8 He was brought into the central
government for the first time in March 1980 without having had
any previous parliamentary or ministerial experience.
Those close to C.P.N. Singh reject these allegations.However,
it is not disputed by anyone that, as one person put it, Mr C.P.N.
Singh 'was a great follower of [Sanjay Gandhi]', that he had known
him since 1971, that he 'admired him', and that he felt Sanjay
Gandhi 'was really what India needed'.Moreover, in so far as the
Emergency of 1975 to 1977 is concerned, with whose most un­
popular measures Sanjay Gandhi was identified, C.P.N. Singh is
known to feel that there was nothing 'wrong with it'.
When his detractors say that C.P.N. Singh has no background,
they mean that he has not been a loyal Congressman throughout,
that he did not build his political career by establishing a local,
· grassroots following, and that he was not closely and steadily
involved in district-level politics. However they are interpreted,
the facts are that he entered politics in 1969 to fight against the
Congress after a local Congress MLA interfered with his authority
over his employees on his own farm. He was offered the BKD
8 In February
1983, in a cabinet reshuffle, Mr C.P.N. Singh lost the portfolio
of Science and Technology, among others, and was left with only Non­
Conventional Energy Sources: Hindu, 5 Februa.r y 1983. He resigned from
the government a few days thereafter.
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ticket after meeting with Charan Singh and won the election with
a large majority. In 1970, he left Charan Singh and joined Mrs
Gandhi. However, in 1974, he was denied the Congress ticket.
He also did not contest in 1977. Then, in 1980, he was given the
Congress ticket for Parliament. It is true, therefore, that C.P.N.
Singh began his political career in opposition to the Congress,
that he lacked sufficient influence in the party to obtain a ticket
in either 1974 or 1977, and that he acquired his political influence
in the district after receiving the ticket for Parliament in 1980 and
a position in the Ministry thereafter. He won the Parliamentary
scat itself partly because there were two strong non-Congress
candidates against him who divided the opposition vote.
The primary reasons for C.P.N. Singh's failure to effectively
lead the Congress in Deoria district, however, are.the inadequacies
of his resource base in the north of the district and the antagonism
he aroused among the important Brahman and Bhumihar leaders
in the southern part of the district. It is claimed that he was given
control over the selection of candidates in 1980 by Sanjay Gandhi
and that he was given such control more because of his personal
and family connections than because of the strength of his political
base in the district.Moreover, instead of seeking an alliance with
the dominant Brahman and Bhumihar Congressmen in the
southern part of the district, he is said to have simply cut them
from the list of candidates, and that, too, at the last minute and
in a humiliating manner. According to the account of the matter
given by his rivals, they left Delhi by train on the day before the
final date for filing nomination papers, assured that they had the
nominations, only to learn from the newspapers upon their arrival
in Deoria that they had, in fact, not been allotted the tickets.
Although C.P.N. Singh claims he had absolutely nothing to do
·with the selection of candidates for the legislative assen1bly, both
those who did not receive the tickets and those who did believe
that C.P.N. Singh played a critical role in the final decision. The
way in which the list of candidates was allegedly determined in
1980 is described by one of the local leaders of the Deoria Con­
gress who was cut from the list:
. . . the district leaders of the Congress were debarred
Res:
from the ticket.. .
PRB: Because of Sanjay Gandhi, you mean...
Res: Due to C.P.N. Singh. Why, SanjayGandhi will not know who
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320 State and Politics in India
is X, and who is this leader, or that leader, [or anybody in] this
district organization .... He was completely in the hand of
Mr C.P.N.Singh....And this district was allotted to C.P.N.
Singh in the same way some districts were allotted to Mr X,
Mr Y, Mr Z, who were nearer to Mr Sanjay Gandhi. And they
allotted tickets to their friends or their relations and the politi­
cal rivals were debarred....And we are political rivals.
Although those close to C.P.N.Singh deny that he played any
such role in the distribution of Congress tickets in Deoria district,
there is no doubt that he has seen himself in the role of diminishing
the influence of the previously dominant leaders from the southern
part of the district and from the northern part as well. He claims,
in fact, to have broken the influence of such leaders, whom he
considers 'manipulators'. In C.P.N. Singh's view, his rivals 'don't
matter', 'if they manage to get tickets, they will never win' an
election.Rather, 'they are zero.They have done nothing except
manipulate things from the top'. It deserves to be noted that the
criticisms that the two sides in Deoria make of each other are
identical, namely that they have no genuine local sources of in­
fluence and popularity based on work in the district, but depend
for their local position on influence with powerful persons in the
state capital or in Delhi.
A comparison of the local leadership of C.P.N.Singh in Deoria
district with that of Anand Singh in Gonda district will help to
bring out several features of the relationship between national
power and local politics in contemporary India. First, in both cases,
it should be noted that the Congress leadership in Delhi sought
allies from the most powerful local families with the greatest
economic and/or political resources.The Congress operates more
than ever before through existing structures of local power, which
its economic policies are supposedly designed to eliminate.
Second, it is obvious that, if the national leadership is going to
rely on one person primarily for local leadership, they are taking
a considerable risk. In Gonda, they chose the scion of the most
powerful local landed estate, a man in full control of that estate's
own resources and with extensive local influence beyond his own
estate.In Deoria, they chose a man who was a member of an estate
once the largest in the district. But that estate never occupied a
comparable position in Deoria to that of Mankapur in Gonda; the
present Padrauna estate is divided economically and politically into
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two main segments and several subsections, C.P.N. Singh does
not control all its resources, and its political influence has not
extended very far from its original domain.
This contrast brings out a significant difference between pat­
terns of local control now and twenty years ago, namely that the
national leaders in Delhi lack the local knowledge that state leaders
had then. Twenty years ago, candidate selection in the Congress
was a grand and complex struggle that took place at three levels
primarily - the district, the state, and the centre. The state
leadership played a pivotal role in the process, though the final
decisions were often made in Delhi. The results often led to
discontent at the local level and to disaffected Congressmen con­
testing against or sabotaging the election campaigns of the official
candidates. But everyone knew who everyone else was. The state
leaders knew their local allies and their allies' enemies. They could
go to Delhi and say to the national leaders that Mr X in con­
stituency X is an appropriate or inappropriate candidate because
he has worked or not worked hard in that constituency for a long
time, because his caste is such and such and the caste composition
of the constituency is as follows and, for these reasons, he will or
will not be a good candidate. The national leaders in Delhi nowa­
days do not have this kind of local knowledge. They do not wish
to leave the decisions to state leaders or even allow them too big
a role in the process, for then they become dependent on the state
leaders. So they take a chance and select, with partial knowledge,
one local man to do the job for them. Sometimes th ey choose
sensibly, as in Gonda, sometimes they choose less sensibly, as in
Deoria.
Finally, despite the differences between the local leadership of
Anand Singh and C.P.N. Singh, their relationships with the na­
tional leadership bring out clearly the mutual dependence between
the two.Moreover, despite the apparent centralization of decision­
making power in New Delhi, it is the national leadership that is
more dependent on effective local leadership than vice-versa.
Anand Singh needs the help and patronage of the central govern­
ment to expand his economic resources and his political influence.
But the structure ofMankapur's local power has persisted through·
several generations in the face of considerable external opposition.
In Deoria, C.P.N. Singh lacks a strong independent base such as
that of Anand Singh. The national leaders lack local knowledge.
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322 State and Politics in India
Therefore, they remain dependent upon ineffective local leader­
ship and do not know how to find an alternative.
The Manipulation and Control of Incidents of Violence
It would be an extraordinarily difficult, in fact an impossible, task
to build national power in India solely through the methods of
material exchange that I have just described. To build power and
broad support in any large-scale system, political leaders must be
able to move large numbers of people, preferably whole blocs of
voters, with appeals to their ideals, values and emotional needs.
The primary emotional need for most people in all societies, as
Thomas Hobbes pointed out vividly long ago, is for a sense of
personal safety and security. In India, that primary need is often
unsettled and replaced by fear of violence and sudden death or
loss of property. Such fears exist particularly among Muslims in
South Asia, the atrocities recently perpetrated in Assam being the
worst example of the legitimate bases for their fears since Inde­
pendence. They also exist among many low caste people who fear
the power of the landed men to beat them, kill them, or steal their
lands. They exist generally among poor people who fear the local
power of the police. They also exist a1nong the rich and high caste
people in large parts of north India, who fear the apparent decline
in law and order generally, and who demonstrate their fear by
going out with guns in the evenings and sleeping with guns close
by their bedsides. Consequently, there is no issue more likely to
make a broad emotional appeal to large numbers of people in India
than issues of law and order and violence.
The manipulation of incidents of violence by political leaders
to appeal to the emotional needs of whole categories of voters has
been a central feature of Indian politics for a decade now. I now
want to show how such incidents are used, with two examples,
again, from Deoria and Gonda districts. In these examples, I will
demonstrate that a critical element in the relationship between
local and national leaders is the ability of the fonner to control
the local police, to prevent local incidents of violence from occur­
ring, if possible, and most important to prevent them from being
used by the opposition as a symbolic issue against the government
when they do occur.
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Deoria: Local Violence as a National Symbolic Resource
In January I980, an incident occurred in Narainpur village in
Deoria district, which received national attention in the press, in
Parliament, and in the state legislative assembly. An old woman
of the village, grandmother and sole support of two young children
whose parents were dead, was crushed to death by a passing bus.
The villagers stopped the bus and demanded compensation for
the woman's cremation expenses and for the maintenance of the
two children left alone. After son1e time, the driver was allowed
to leave with the understanding that the owner of the bus would
be informed of the incident by him. Accounts of the incident differ
from this point on.9 According to the villagers, the owner came
to the village with a police party, a crowd collected, the police did
not like the look of the crowd and began caning the people, and
the people retaliated. Later, the villag�rs were taken to a nearby
bus stand with the understanding that they would be given the
desired compensation. In the presence of the local member of the
legislative assembly (MLA), the bus owner, and the police, it was
decided that Rs 5000 would be paid after two or three days to the
villagers for the cremation of the old woman and the upbringing
of the two children. However, after the bus owner and the MLA
departed, the villagers allege that they were surrounded by the
police, kept under surveillance for three hours and not permitted
to leave until th ey signed or made their thumb impressions upon
a document presented to them, after which they were beaten one
by one, subjected to various indignities and injuries, and had their
belongings stolen before they were released. Later in the night, a
party of police and goondas (toughs) from the surrounding villages
descended on Narainpur and beat the villagers again, after which
a number of them were taken to the Captainganj police station
for further beatings, where the legs of some villagers were broken
and where all were subjected again to indignities, after which they
were taken w a jail in another town.
The account of the local police differs somewhat. According to
one account, the villagers stopped another bus two or three days
after the death of the grandmother, beat up the driver, and decided.
to detain the bus until compensation was paid to them. When the
9 Unless otherwise indicated, the information
on the Narainpur incident in
this section comes front my interviews in Deoria district in October 1982.
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UNIVERSITY OF Ml€t-llGAfl.l •·. ·•·
324 State 1111d Politia in India
Captainganj station officers and constables happened to pass by,
they stopped, asked the people to release the bus, and promised
them that compensation would be paid. However, someone in the
crowd pointed towards the station officer and shouted that he had
accepted a bribe from the bus owner, whereupon the people began
beating the station officers and constables. Later, a larger party of
police came to the village, arrested the people who had beaten up
the police personnel, and registered a case against them. According
to another police account, the villagers were correct in saying that
the sub-inspector had been bribed and had given only a small
proportion of the amount paid by the bus owner to the villagers.
Consequently they were enraged on that account when they at­
tacked the police party. According to this same account, when a
larger police party returned, th ey beat up all the men mercilessly.
A case was then filed by the villagers against the police.
The Narainpur incident took place on 14 January 1980, just
after the parliamentary elections which brought Mrs Gandhi and
her Congress-I back to power at the centre, but before the state
legislative assembly elections held in ten states in June 1980, in
which Mrs Gandhi extended her power to the state level by
winning majorities in nearly all of them. The Narainpur incident
was a major symbolic issue made use of by Mrs Gandhi and the
Congress-I to demonstrate the incompetence of the Janata gov­
ernment still ruling in UP and in other states and its alleged
mistreatment of Muslims and scheduled castes and the consequent
need for mid-term legislative assembly elections. It could be used
to suggest mistreatment of both Muslims and scheduled castes
because the village is predominantly Muslim and also contains a
large population of scheduled castes.
The first headlines on the incident in the national press on 29
January referred to a 'Mass Rape Incident' and to 'Mass Rape,
Plunder by UP Cops'. 10 Later news stories placed the Narainpur
incident in the context of other 'excesses committed [in the coun­
try] on its weakest sections'.11 There were reports that a Muslim
man and a Harijan woman had been murdered.12 Three days after
the first notice of the incident in the national press, Mr Sanjay
Gandhi himself visited the village and said that what 'happened
10 Indian &press and Times oflndui, 29 January
II Ltiukr, 30 January 1980.
12 Hindu, 9 February 1980.
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in Narainpur was unprecedented. There was not a single girl or
woman in Narainpur who was not raped. Nor was there a single
man who was not beaten up. T o cap it all, there is not a single
house which was not looted'.13 He later said that the Narainpur
incident was one of several 'cases which showed that the state
Government was encouraging disruptionists to spread terror', as
a consequence of which 'the people in the state were feeling
insecure'.14 In an exchange of letters with the Chief Minister of
the state, Mrs Gandhi said, 'I doubt if there has been any other
instance of such magnitude since independence.' As fo r the police
firings that took place during the Emergency, they were 'negligible
in comparison with what happened in the Pantnagar police firing
or now in Narainpur'. 15 On 9 February, Mrs Gandhi herself, with
a large entourage of Congress-I political leaders and ministers,
proceeded to Narainpur and, after meeting the villagers, report­
edly said her visit had given her an 'emotional moving feeling' and
made her 'feel very angry with a system which allowed that sort
of thing to happen'. She said that 'her government would try to
give whatever relief was possible'. 16
However, Sanjay Gandhi and Mrs Gandhi did not visit Narain­
pur only to console the villagers and to promise them justice and
relief. The incident occurred in a constituency long dominated by
the opposition and held at the time by a Lok Dal representative.
The state government was in the hands of the Janata party and
the Lok Dal. The Congress-I was seeking a pretext to dismiss the
UP government, preferably in disgrace, to enhance its chances of
winning a big majority in the state legislative assembly elections
that would soon be called, Mr Sanjay Gandhi put the incident to
such political use after his visit to Narainpur when he demanded
that the UP government resign because of its failure to prevent
or to respond effectively to the Narainpur incident.17 Mrs Gandhi
also made similar use of her visit to Narainpur, after which she
11 Lelllkr, l February 1980.
14 Hmdu, 9 February 1980.
IS Ibid., On the Pantnagar police firing, which' also occurred during the period
ofJaiµt:1 rule in UP, see Paul R. Brass, 'Institutional Transfer ofTechnology:
_
The Land-Grant Model and the Agricultural University at Pantnapr',
in
Robert S. Anderson, Soma, Politia, lffld tbe AgriaJtund Rl'DOltltitm in AM
(Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1982), pp. 103�3.
16 St11tm,uni, 8 Febnwy 1980.
17 Lelllkr, l February 1980.
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326 State 1111d Poutics in India
reportedly said that the'Banarasi Das government has no right to
exist'. 18 The union Home Minister, who makes the legal case for
dismissal of a state government in the central cabinet, said on 11
February that'the Union Government would invoke its constitu­
tional powers if incidents like Narainpur happened in states'.19 On
18 February, the President of India, acting on the advice of the
cabinet, dismissed the UP government and nine other state gov­
ernments in India and ordered elections to be held in them inJune
1980. Although the case for dismissing these governments was
made on legal constitutional grounds and had a precedent, the
Narainpur incident was the principal symbolic pretext used to
. justify the dismissal before the public.
The leaders of the Janata and Lok Dal parties, of course,
defended the UP government. The UP Chief Minister said that
'the Narainpur incident had "been blown out of all proportion"
and was being used "as a handle to malign the State Govern­
ment"'.2 0 He accused Mrs Gandhi of'making political capital out
of a human tragedy'.21
As a consequence of the furore created over Narainpur, a com­
mission of inquiry was appointed to examine the incident. The
commission submitted its report to the state government of UP
on 3 July 1981, when the Congress was back in power. The report
dismissed as totally without foundation the charges of rape of any
woman in Narainpur, although it did support the charge that there.
had been severe beatings and 'wrongful confmement' of villagers.
The printing of the report was delayed for nearly a full year and
was not placed before the House until 22June 1982 and then only
on the last day of the monsoon session, thereby preventing any
debate on it.22
I t is not entirely clear how the Narainpur story broke on to the
state and national stage. It appears, however, to have become
magnified because of the failure of local politicians to control the
police and because of internal rivalries between segments of the
ruling coalition in the state government. The local MLA was a
Lok Dal member. He attempted to intervene to pacify the villagers
18 LeiUkr, 8 February 1980.
t9 LeiUkr,
11 Fcbruary 1980.
20 Le11der, 12 February 1980.
11 Times ofIndia, 9 February I980.
2 2 Hindu, 11 September I982.
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and prevent further incidents, but could not prevent the police
from going back to the village to beat the villagers again. He,
therefore, reported the incident to the Chief Minister. The Chief
Minister, Mr Banarasi Das, was an appointee of the Lok Dal
segment of the coalition and had been made Chief Minister against
the wishes of the Janata segment in an earlier and uneasy com­
promise. Janat2 party workers also found out about the case and
reported it to the Chief Minister, who then sent one of his min­
isters to Deoria district and to Narainpur to investigate. The
minister came back to Lucknow with his report of mass rape,
plunder, and 'the death of two persons' in the village and blamed
it on 'st2te government officials [who] wanted to destabilize the
Lok Dal ministry' at the bidding of the Congress-I. The Lok Dal
MLA attributed the incident to upper caste police officers who
wanted to ' "punish" voters, mostly Muslims, who had supported
him in the previous elections'.13 It was after the Janata-Lok Dal
state government itself revealed the incident that the Congress-I
leaders entered the scene.
Although accounts of the incidents at Narainpur continue to
differ somewhat, the available evidence three years after the events
suggests the following f.icts and ele1nents in the situation. First,
there is no evidence that Muslims were selected for harassment
because they were Muslims, or that Harijan women were raped.
Nor were there any deaths except that of the old woman killed by
the bus. Second, the local judicial system was not brought into play
and is, in fact, of no use whatever in such a situation, which is not
uncommon in rural India. Consequently, justice must be worked
out locally among the villagers, the guilty or responsible parties,
the police, and the politicians. Third, in the absence again of
·effective local political control, such issues become confrontations
between the local population and the local police. These confron­
t2tions are not ordinary or even extraordinary police actions involv­
ing maintaining law and order and crowd control. They are pitched
battles, waged with venom andviciousness, in which the police may
initially be understaffed and, therefore, may get beaten up them­
selves, but will certainly return with larger forces and superior
power to take revenge. Fourth, if there is no stable structure of local
power to handle such a situation effectively, it will go out of control
23
Timu ofIndia, 29 January I 980.
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328 State and Politicl· in India
and become magnified into a political issue in the larger arenas of
state and national politics. Finally, once the issue is introduced into
external arenas, it is shaped t o fit larger purposes that have very
little to do with the actual circumstances. In this case, the issues in
the external arena included the following: the competence of the
state government and its right to rule, the treatment of low caste
people and Muslims by the Janata-Lok Dal government, the gen­
eral state of law and order in the country in recent years and in the
p os tIndependence
period, and who was responsible for its alleged
deterioration. Finally, it should be evident that these violent inci­
dents are at once an enormous liability to any government under
whose rule they occur and a great resource for the opposition. The
stakes involved are the stability of the existing government and the
outcome of the next election. In the immediate aftermath, such
incidents may be used to embarrass an existing government and
even may be used as a pretext to dismiss it. In the longer period
after such an incident, in preparation for the next election, the
purpose of the opposition will be to demonstrate that the incident
in question is but a reflection of the broader inability of the govern­
ment to protect, or even its deliberate policy to harass, certain
'sections' of the population, particularly Muslims and low castes.
The danger for the ruling party, therefore, and the hope of the
opposition is that a whole bloc or blocs of voters in the state or
country will be turned in the next election through the manipula­
tion of local violent incidents.
Gonda: The Importance of Local Control ofthe Police
That incidents of local violence need not be magnified, distorted,
and manipulated for external use in wider political arenas can be
demonstrated by comparing the Narainpur incident with a similar
incident that occurred in the village of Kurman Purwa in Gonda
district in July 1982. At this time, the Congress was in control of.
the district, the state, and the central government. As in the
Narainpur incident, the principal events are not difficult to estab­
lish, but the details and the explanations vary. 24
In so far as the events are concerned, it appears that a party of
police and local toughs descended on the village inhabited entirely
24 All information in this section is derived from interviews conducted by me
in Gonda district in November
1982 .
.
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The Political Process: Dominance 329
b y persons of low and backward caste status on the night of 13
July 1982 and engaged in a brawl.with the villagers wl)ose outcome
was indecisive; that is to say the villagers gave back-as good as they
received. However, a second and larger party returned that night
and beat the villagers, and possibly dragged the women out 'of
their houses, and did some damage and looting. On the 17th, the
police returned with a decree of confiscation and allegedly
removed grain and other property of the villagers. The villagers
say that a number of their men were also taken to the police station
that night and robbed there and that six of them were left in jail
for nearly three months.
Between the 13th and the 17th, the local Congress MLA in­
tervened and was promised by the police that no further retaliatory
action would be taken against the villagers. As in the Narainpur
incident, however, the local MLA was not able to control the
police, who returned to the village on the 17th despite their
promises not to do so. Anand Singh also intervened personally in
an attempt to keep the situation under control. However, the local
police apparently w�re not even restrained by his intervention.
Between 13 July and 9 August, the Congress MLA from the
adjacent constituency and the local opposition also became in­
volved in the incident. By most accounts, the police violence
perpetrated at Kurman Purwa was carried out by the local police
constables on their own, without the authority or support of the
station officer. However, the Congress MLA from the adjacent
constituency, Umeshwar Pratap Singh, wished to have the station
officer transferred because the officer was not willing to accept his
authority locally. Both the Superintendent of Police and Anand
Singh wished to transfer the constables, but retain the local station
officer, whom they both considered to be a good and loyal (to
them) police officer. Umeshwar Pratap, therefore, joined with the
opposition to protest against the police atrocities committed at
Kurman Purwa. At this point, Anand Singh and the Superinten­
dent of Police considered it best to have all the local officers,
including the station officer, transferred in order to defuse the
situation. When the station officer was transferred, Umeshwar
Pratap withdrew from the protest, which then became entirely an
opposition affair.
Opposition involvement took two forms. The runner-up
candidate for MLA in the constituency in which the incident
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330 St11te and Politia in India
occurred, an attorney and local leader of the Democratic Socialist
Party (DSP), rushed to the village and made inquiries on the
spot. He also agreed to act as attorney on behalf of the villagers.
Second, in cooperation with the local Communist party, he or­
ganized political protest meetings on 27 July and 9 August 1982.
To these meetings, CPI and DSP leaders from all parts of the
district and several state party leaders also came. The opposition
leaders demanded that a judicial inquiry be held into the police
atrocity at Kw-man Purwa, that the cases pending against the
innocent villagers of Kurman Purwa be withdrawn, and that the
police personnel involved in the incidents be punished. None of
the opposition demands were conceded.
Anand Singh did not intervene beyond seeing to the transfer of
the officers. He clearly wanted the incident to be kept as quiet as
possible. Although he was not able to keep it out of the hands of
the opposition and the press entirely, it did not acquire anywhere
near the publicity associated with the Narainpur incident.
There are three versions of the reasons for the police atrocities.
One is that it arose out of a quarrel between a Kahar villager of
Kurman Purwa and a Gosain of the neighbouring village in which
the Gosain enlisted the aid of the police on the basis of friendship
and/or bribery to retaliate against the Kahar. The second is that
the Kahar and other villagers of Kurman Purwa who deal in cattle
had a successful day at the Tuesday cattle market in Colonelganj
and that the police learned that they had made some money and.
went to the village to rob them. The third version is that the police
went to Kunnan Purwa for some reason or other and were beaten
by drunken villagers, after which the police returned with a larger
party. In one variation on this version, both the villagers and the
police were drunk.
Whichever account one accepts of the Kunnan Purwa incident,
it is of a different type from the Narainpur incident. In Narainpur,
an accident precipitated a quarrel between the villagers and the
police in which it is not at all clear who struck first, though there
is not much doubt that the police struck last and hardest. In
Kunnan Purwa, most accounts of the incident suggest an un­
provoked attack by the local police on the villagers, precipitated
in most versions by enmity between persons of neighbouring
villages of clifferent castes.
H�re, then, were solid materials for a ca,;e to be made of police
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atrocities committed against persons of low and backward caste
origins. However, such an issue can be expanded only through
collaboration between locally knowledgeable politicians and inter­
ested outside leaders. Since the Congress controlled the con­
stituency and the district, it was in the interests of the local MLA
and Anand Singh to keep the issue quiet and to settle it peacefully,
without further fuss. They were prevented from doing so by the
activities of a renegade Congress Ml.A. whose sole interest in the
matter was to get the local police officers who refused to obey him
transferred, and by the local opposition politicians who naturally
wished to capitalize on_ the issue. The Congress MLA's activities
were stopped by satisfying his demands. Anand Singh, at ftrst
reluctant to transfer the station officer, ultimately agreed to do so
when it became clear that the local police were continuing to
harass the villagers. The activities of the local opposition could
not be stopped, but they were not deeply threatening because the
opposition parties involved were the least effective ones in the
politics of the district and the state. The two leading opposition
parties in UP, the Lok Dal and the Bharatiya Janata Party, had
no interest in becoming involved in an incident from which other
parties stood to gain.
The central political significance of the Kurman Purwa incident
is its clear demonstration of the national importance of effective
local control over the police. Before and since the Kurman Purwa
i.ncident, the most powerful political leader of the district, Anand
Singh, has had to face challenges to his and the SP's control over
the district police from a local CongressMLA who himself wishes
to control the police in his area for his own purposes. In the
Kurman Purwa incident, the police broke free of all political
constraints, thereby providing the potential for a symbolic political
issue of state and national importance focusing on police atrocities
and victimization of middle and low caste people. The incident
probably had very little, if anything, to do with caste victimization.
It does, however, reveal the local police in a characteristic mode
- implicated directly in local conflicts, open to bribery, capable
of loot and harassment of innocent persons, and a potential danger
to the exercise of national power when they cannot be controlled
effectively at the local level and cannot be used to restrain and
conceal potentially embarrassing situations instead of creating
them. Although the police in Gonda, as in Deoria district, thus
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332 St11te 11nd Politics in /ndill
provided the opposition with a symbolic issue to be used against
the ruling party, they were prevented from doing so partly by
circumst2nces and partly by quick action taken by Anand Singh
to defuse the situation. The circumstances include the relative
ineffectiveness of the local opposition, the non-involvement of
major opposition leaders from outside the district, and the fact
that the state legislative assembly was not in session at the time.
However, Anand Singh's role was also important in keeping the
matter under control. In this way he demonstrates his value to the
leadership at the centre through his ability to prevent the opposi­
tion from using a local incident as a symbolic resource in the
national political arena as well as to deliver votes in the district.
Conclusion
The four brief case studies that I have presented from two districts
in one state of north India cannot tell us everything that we want
to know about the relationships between national power and local
politics and the changes that have taken place in the relationships
between the two during the past twenty years. However, I believe
. they illustrate some critical features of the ways in which the
Indian system of federal politics works and the ways in which it
has changed. The following features are fundamental to under­
standing both.
First, national power lacks a furn institutional base independent
of government. Twenty years ago, there were two principal in­
stitutional avenues towards and sources of, national power - the
Indian National Congress and the Government of India. More­
over, they were interdependent Politicians could move back and
forth between the two and use one as a base for influence in the
other. To ignore one and concentrate on the other, moreover,
was the surest way to ensure that one's tenure of power would
be brief. Nowadays, the party organizational avenue to national
power is closed.
Second, when the Congress was a major avenue to power in
Indian politics; it was also in touch with the people in the districts
and localities. It was an instrument of information and knowledge
as well as of power. Or rather, it was powerful because its members
and leaders had roots in the villages and towns throughout the
countryside. Assuch, it was a formidable instrument for gatherµig
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votes. In north India at least, the Congress as such is no longer a
significant electoral machine.
Yet Mrs Gandhi and the Congress continue to win elections,
usually with greater pluralities than other parties in most states
and in the country as a whole. How is it done? Two methods are
now used. One is to attempt to nationalize issues and to appeal to
blocs of voters through such issues. The second, which lias been
the princ;ipal method discussed in this article, is to work through
local notables who are believed to maintain an extensive structure
of local power or some other broad base of local influence that
can be used to gather votes.
An example of the first method is Mrs Gandhi's slogan of 'garibi
h/ltll()' (abolish poverty), which has been part of her broad appeal
to the poor and landless of the country and has involved the
introduction of many government programmes for their benefit.
Other examples include Congress and non-Congress slogans, ap­
peals to, and programmes for, the benefit of backward _classes,
Muslims and other minorities, scheduled castes, and the middle
peasantry. It is in this context that violence in the countryside is
particularly relevant, for it provides a convenient basis for sym­
bolizing the plight of certain categories of voters. Mrs Gandhi and
other politicians do not visit these scenes of violence only to shed
tears, btit with very clear and specific political goals in mind.
The attempt to nationalize politics and create national con­
stituencies of voters has been only partly successful: only certain
categories of voters have been affected; even fewer have developed
stable loyalties to the Congress or to non-Congress parties; and
i t has not displaced local considerations for most categories of
voters. The attempt has, however, been successful enough to make
the parliamentary and legislative assembly elections far more ex­
citing than in Nehru's days for the results have, in the last decade,
turned partly upon big swin gs in the voting patterns of large
categories of voters, particularly in the north, leading to great
electoral 'waves' such as the 'Indira waves' of 1971 and 1980 and
the Janata wave of 1977. It is in the hope of precipitating such
waves by moving blocs of voters that politicians in India manipu­
late and exploit such incidents of violence as that at Narainpur.
However, such shifts in voting patterns by large blocs of voters
are only part of the story, especially in determining the results of
state legislative assembly elections. In the districts, structures of
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334 St11tt and Politia
m l111U11
local power persist that are sometimes strong enough to stand
aga�t a wave and are even more critical when there is no wave.
These local structures of power are also critical in preventing local
incidents of violence from being exploited in wider arenas to
precipitate such waves, as in Kurman Purwa. Therefore, links must
be established and maintll.ined with persons who can still control
or are perceived to rontrol a local clientage, or a local bloc of
votes.
My third point, therefore, is that the continuing importance of
the localities and districts of India and of local structures of power
in a society so diverse and fragmented as India means that central­
ization of power cannot be truly effective in that country under a
representative regime. I have tried in the examples given in this
article to show that the system is, in fact, not really centralized
but is based upon linkages of dependency among different levels
and particularly between the centre and the districts.
My fourth concluding point is that there are three main per­
sisting sources of power in contemporary Indian politics outside
the electoral process. The first is government, that is to say
government patronage and protection. Government is the source
of valued goods and services in contemporary India, from seeds
and fertilizers to government jobs to places in educational in­
stitutions to whole factories. Control of government is also the
main source of protection: from harassment by its own officers
on such matters as enforcement of land ceilings, or from police
violence. The second source of power is a persisting structure or
network of influence such as arises from control over the land
or prestige within a local caste group. The third source of power
arises from networks of kin-clan-cast e -personal ties in groups that
interpenetrate party, bureaucracy, and educational institutions. -It
is through such a network, for example, that it is believed that
C.P.N. Singh became close to Sanjay Gandhi and rose to become
a minister in the central government.
It should be noted, moreover, that all three of these sources of
power are interdependent. Government patronage is meaningless
without persons and groups to whom it is to be distributed. Local
structures of power cannot persist without control over or in­
fluence in government institutions. Networks of group and per­
sonal influence are important most of all because they give access
to government patronage by 1neans other than party or a local
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'
structure of power. Such networks extend throughout north India.
They are innumerable and pervasive. They are more important
than party ties.
In such a system, which I have described elsewhere as highly
pluralized, decentralized, and fragmented,25 politicians may try to
build national power in two ways. They may do so by careful,
patient cultivation of linkages from top to bottom through bar­
gaining, compromise, and exchange. They may also attempt to
bypass the persisting structures of government, local and group
power through appeals to large categories of voters on transcen­
dent or very dramatic issues.
The fust pattern is a politics of patronage. In Nehru's days,
it involved building power from below, leaving satraps in com­
mand at the district and state levels, and leaving national policy­
making to the cabinet, the Planning Commission, and the senior
bureaucrats. The second pattern is a politics of crisis that plays
upon or manufactures dramatic issues. It is a pattern that has
often been used by Mrs Gandhi and distinguishes her political
style significantly from that of her father. The second pattern,
however, does not really transcend but only covers or attempts
to hide a persistent politics of patronage that, as I have noted,
involves linkages of mutual dependency between the centre and
the districts, with the centre prepared to hand over whole districts
to individuals, sometimes with advantageous, sometimes with
disadvantageous results. The system, therefore, shifts back and
fonh between jobbery and demagoguery and fails to confront
effectively major issues concerning the economic future of India
and the spread of lawlessness and violence in the countryside.
25 Paul R. Brass, 'Pluralism, Regionalism, and Decentraliung Tendencies i n
Contemporary Indian Politics', in A. Jeyaramam Wilson and Dennis Dalton
(eds), Tbt Statu ofSouth Asilt: Probltms ofN11tirmal Integration (London: C.
Hurst, I982), pp. 223-64.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
9
From Breakdown to Order:
West Bengal
Atul Kohli
"l X Test Bengal is something of an exception in India's contem­
VV porary political landscape. Whereas many states have ex­
perienced political instability over the past two decades, West
Bengal has been relatively well governed since 1977. That stability
has been remarkable because it has not been the result o f low levels
of political mobilization; West Bengal was probably India's most
politically mobilized and chaotic state in the late 1960s. West
Bengal's restoration and maintenance of political order naturaJly
direct our attention to the issue of how growing crises of gover­
nability can be reversed.
This chapter traces the roots of West Bengal's recent stability
to the fact that a well-organized reformist party has remained in
power. The Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPl[M]}, has
repeatedly been elected to office in West Bengal since 1977.
The party is communist in name onJy and is essentially social­
democratic in its ideology, social programme, and policies. The
party's disciplined, effective organization has minimized the de­
bilitating elite factionalism and the relatea elite-led mobilization
and counter-mobilization so common in some other states. The
CPI(M) has also consolidated a coalition of the middle and lower
strata by implementing some modest redistributive programmes.
That systematic incorporation of the poor has reduced the attrac­
tiveness of populism and its emphasis on deinstirutionalization. And
6.nally, the CPl(M) has adopted a non-threatening approach toward
property-owning groups, whose roles in production and economic
growth remain essential for the long-term welfare of the state.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Political Process: Dominance 337
The CPl(M)'s rule in West Bengal has not been without its share
of problems. The CPl(M) may be well organized, but its relations
with other parties, especially other leftist parties, have occasionally
led to political discord. Two years of ethnic strife in one of West
Bengal's sixteen districts- the 'Gorkhaland' troubles in Darjeeling
- cast doubt on the CPI(M)'s capacity to accommodate non-class
types of conflicts. The CPl(M)'s attempts to maintain an alliance
of the middle and lower groups have generated serious problems
for its ongoing programme of redistribution. Moreover, like other
ruling communist parties elsewhere, the CPI(M) is beginning to
give rise to a 'new class' of privileged members who are resented
by those excluded from the perks of power.
The CPl(M) type of rule in West Bengal does not offer a model
for the rest of India. Even if it did, there are historical and cultural
reasons because of which it would not be likely to be replicated.
Thus a discussion of the West Bengal experience serves not a
prescriptive purpose but an important analytical fwiction. In spite
of its many problems, West Bengal under the CPl(M) is probably
India's best-governed state: the coalition that supports the CPl(M)
is relatively stable; the gap between the government's commitments
and its capacities is modest; and political violence along caste, class,
o r religious lines has been minimal. An understanding of how the
CPl(M) has achieved such effective government tends to re-enforce
m y earlier emphasis on the political causes of the governability crisis
in India.
The Background
West Bengal is relatively industrialized, but it also has more rural
poverty than many other states in India.1 The roots of its industry
1 This d,iscussion builds on my earlier work on West Bengal politics: Atul
Kohli, 1 From Elite Activism to Democratic Consolidation: Political Change
in West Bengal', i n Francine Frankel and M.S.A. Rao (eds), Domiffllfl(t 11114
St11tt Prt11Jtr inModn-n lndi11: Dtelim ofII SrxilllOrdtr, 2 vols (Oxford University
Press, 1989-90), vol. 2; idem, Tbt Sutt 11114 PU1Jmy in lndill: Tbt Politia of
Rtform (Cambridge University Press, 1987), chapter 3; ide1n, 'Communist
Reformers in West Bengal: Origins, Features and Relations with New Delhi',
in John R Wood (ed.), St11tt Politia in Crmtmipor'"] lndu,: Crisisor Crmtmuityl
(Boulder, Colo.: Westvicw Press, 1984), pp. 81-102; idem, 'Parliamentary
Communism and Agrarian Reform: The Evidence from India's Bengal',Asum
Survey,July 1983, pp. 783-809.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
338 State 11nd Politics in India
are traceable back to the colonial period, as are the origins of its
agrarian structure, which supports a large population on little
land. The agrarian structure has undergone some important chan­
ges since the zmnindari abolition. Towards the bottom of the
landownership hierarchy, nearly half the population owns no land
o r has access to less than one acre of land.2 These are the rural
poor. In the recent past, a substantial rural minority used to be
tenant farmers. That, however, has changed over the past decade.
Legislative and political changes introduced by the CPI(M) g6v­
ernment have modified the old forms of tenancy; new arrange­
ments have emerged under which tenants enjoy almost permanent
leases on land.
The pattern of landholding in the middle range (1-10 acres)
h as changed only minimally over the past three decades. The big
changes have come at the top of the pyramid. Both the area under
cultivation and the number of farmers cultivating large landhold­
ings (above 10 acres) have declined. That reflects both the pressure
of land reform legislation and, more important, the division of
property at inheritance. The agrarian structure of contemporary
West Bengal is characterized by numerous cultivators with access
to middle- and small-size landholdings and a very substantial
population of landless labourers.
Certain peculiarities of the caste and community make up of
West Bengal are also important. Nearly half the population of
the state is not 'mainstream' Hindu. It comprises rather scheduled
castes and tribes (27 .5 per cent) and Muslims (20 per cent). Among
the Hindus, moreover, the caste divisions do not follow the
'normal' fourfold division.3 There are no indigenous Kshatriyas
or Vaishyas in Bengal. The numbers of the twice-born castes are
also relatively small (about 7 per cent), certainly in comparison
with the neighbouring state of Bihar. The line of demarcation
between Brahmans and such 'clean Sudras' as Vaidyas and Kayas­
thas is not sharp. The Brahmans will 'take water' from these
clean Sudras, though intermarriage remains rare.
2 For land datll, see Kohli, The St11te tmdPwmy;,, lndui, Table 3.4 on p. 118,
and for more detailed discussion of the changing agrarian sttucture, see
chapter 3.
l Srudies of caste in Bengal includeJyotirmoyee Sarma, Caste Dy,um,ia RNmg
the Bengali Hindus (Calcutt.I: Firma KLM Private Ltd. 1980); Hitesranjan
Sanyal, Social Mobility m Bmgal (Calcutt.I: Papyrus, 1981).
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Political Process: Dominance 339
The patterns of landownership according to caste in West
Bengal have important political consequences. Many Brahmans in
West Bengal, as in other states, own sizable pieces of land. How­
ever, landownership by caste in West Bengal is extremely hetero­
geneous. There are no castes that can be considered dominant
statewide. In addition to the Brahmans, other clean Sudras like
the Kayasthas are concentrated in certain districts and own con­
siderable amounts of land there. In other districts, landownership
is in the hands of 'lower Sudras' who farm, such as the Sadgops,
Namasudras, Aguris and Kaivartas.4 Unlike the situation in many
other Indian states, therefore, political concerns in West Bengal
do not readily crystallize along statewide caste cleavages. Although
caste remains politically significant at the local ·level, the absence
of dominant castes at the state level opens up possibilities for
political parties to forge coalitions along lines other than caste.
Both in the cities and in the countryside of Bengal, the domina­
tion of the privileged over their subordinates was not as con­
solidated as in many other parts of India. Thus the Bengali lower
castes and classes provided radicalizable political material. s Al­
though we should not overestimate lower class radicalism in con­
temporary West Bengal, the fact is that mere elite radicalism,
without peasant and worker support for the CPJ(M), could not
have led to a democratically elected communist government.
Another important factor in the success of the left in West
Behgal has been an effective, centralized political party. I have
argued elsewhere that the origins of that can be traced to the
terrorist backgrounds of many communist leaders.6 Thus a signi­
ficant minority of Bengali political activists already understood
the significance of disciplined organizations before they were
introduced to communism.' Such recent communist leaders as
4 For
an excellent historical study that traces how that pattern ofcontrol over
land evolved, see Ramalekha Ray, Change in Bmga/ Agr11rilm S«itty, 17601850 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979).
S For discussion of labour activism in the first half of this century, see R.C.
Majumdar, History ofBmgal, (Calcutta: G. Bhardwaj, 1971-8) vol. 4.
6 See Kohli, 'From Elite Activism to Democratic Consolidation'. For histori­
cal details of Bengal's terrorist past, see Majumdar, History ofBmglli, vol. 4,
chapter 5.
7 For interviews that establish links between 'old terrorists' and the 'new
communists', see Gautam Chattopadhyay, Communism and Bmg11/'s FrttM111
M1111emtnt (New Delhi: PPH, 1970).
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
340 State and Politu:s in India
Pramode Das Gupta, Hare Krishna Konar and Binoy Chowdhury
were all former terrorist revolutionaries who later convened to
communism. Having embraced the new ideology, the organiza­
tional principles of democratic centralism must have come easily
to that group. Discipline, hierarchy, and party before all else were
the values integral to the political terrorist subculture. In all
probability, those political-cultural traditions have facilitated the
growth of relatively cohesive parties in contemporary West Ben­
gal. Of course, this is not to ignore the legendary factionalism
and sectarianism of the Indian left.8 Nevenheless, the CPl(M) in
West Bengal stands out today as a cohesive political force in
India, and the long tradition of disciplined organization is at least
partly responsible for this political characteristic.
By the time of Independence, radical politics had already es­
tablished strong roots in Bengal. A small but significant number
of the political elite had embraced communism; and the lower
classes - workers and peasants - had shown ample susceptibility
to radical appeals. The political traditions of the area further
enabled the radical elite to organize a small but disciplined party,
which would in time grow into the ruling party.
None of this should lead to a view that Congress was an in­
significant force in post-Independence West Bengal. On the con­
trary, Congress in West Bengal, as elsewhere in India, emerged as
the most popular party. The Congress party was India's nationalist
party, and West Bengal, though somewhat on the periphery, was
still very much a part of India. Thus the euphoria of nationalism
carried West Bengal along and led to the Congress's electoral
victory in West Bengal. Bengali leaders like Atulya Ghosh and B.C.
Roy, who were close to Nehru, were able to ride the wave of first
generation nationalism; they formed popular governments that
ruled West Bengal for nearly fifteen years.9
The historical factors that contributed to Congress's weakness
have already been mentioned. A few additional changes following
Independence further reinforced those tendencies. First, many
among the Bengali elite held Congress responsible for the parti­
tion and loss of nearly half of Bengal to Pakistan. Thus Inde­
pendence had been a mixed blessing for the Bengalis: as part of
8 The theme
offactionalism was emphasized by Marcus Fnnda, RildiCJIJPo/ma
in Wtst Bmglll (Ca�bridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1972).
9 Ibid.
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The Political Process: D1m1in111Ue 341
India, they had gained sovereignty; as a region with a strong
'subnational' identity, however, they had suffered considerable
loss. The historical ambiguity of the Bengalis toward Congress
was only reinforced.
Second, zamindari abolition in the 1950s eliminated the inter- ·
mediaries between the government and thejotedars. It was the latter
who controlled land and exercised influence at the village level.
Unlike the situation in other parts of India, the emergence of
fatedars as local influentials did not always bode well for the Con­
gress. Although those groups had benefited from Congress's ac­
tions, and thus quite a few were attracted to the national party, there
were many such village-level influentials who had opposed Con­
gress in the pre-Independence period. Thus their loyalty to the
Congress was tenuous. Bengalijotedars were also heterogeneous in
terms of their caste composition. They could not easily be as­
sembled to form a cohesive caste base for the Congress party, as
were, for example, the Vokkaligas and the Lingayats in Karnataka,
or the Kammas and the Reddis in Andhra Pradesh. Finally, the
already precarious political hold of the landowning castes over their
subordinates was further weakened as adult suffrage spread and new
attempts at mass political mobilization were undertaken.
TABLE 9.1 Seats Won by Major Political Parties in West
Bengal Assembly Elections 1952-1987
l
Congress
CPl(M)
CPI
Forward Bloc
Suurre:
Notes:
--
-
r:--- °'
i--.
¥"'
'C
'C
t'-t'-Oo
°'
°'
°'
°'
°'
°'
°'
°'
°'
°'
... ... ...
... ... ...
...
�
r:---
�
150 152 157 127 55
28 46 50 43 80
16 30
14 8 13 13 21
�
�
105 216 20 49 40
113 14 177 174 .187
13 35 2 7 11
3 0 25 28 26
Computed from the reports of the Election Commission.
a The other significant parries that have come and gone and are not
listed here include the Bangla Congress, the Praja Socialist Party,
and the Revolutionary Socialist Party. The latter continues to be
significant; it won 20, 19 and 18 seats in the 1977, 1982 and 1987
assembly elections, respectively.
b The newly fonnedJanata party won 29 seats in 1977, only tovanish
completely in the 1982 elections.
c Data from /ndu, Todlly, lS April 1987.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
342 St11te 11nd Politics in buiitz
Thus the Congress in West Bengal never put down deep roots.
Prior to Independence, the Congress had never led a government
in the British-controlled legislatures. Following Independence,
Congress inherited natiorwist legitimacy and thus managed to
rule West Bengal for nearly fifteen years. Both before and after
that fifteen-year interregnum, West Bengal was controlled by a
n o nCongress
political force. Therefore, those fifteen years ap­
pear in retrospect to have been exceptional. As Table 9.1 shows,
the Congress in West Bengal has steadily lost its electoral base
since 1962. What has captured the Bengali political imagination
is a party that has emphasized the themes of regional nationalism
and the anti-rich solidarity of the middle and lower classes.
The Decade of Chaos 1967-1977
The story of the changing patterns of politics in West Bengal is
illustrated in Figure. 9.1. The data support a commonly held
impression: there was significant increase in political violence and
rioting in the late 1960s and early 1970s in West Bengal. The
fairly sharp decline shown in 1972 appears more significant than
it was, because in the aftermath of the Bangladesh war, Indira
Gandhi virtually obliterated democratic politics in West Bengal
and utilized state terror to eliminate many of the revolutionary
groups. A 'normal' political process resumed only in 1977, and
under the CPl(M) government the level of political violence has
actually declined.
The main analytical components of the West Bengal story are
fairly straightforward. The decline of the Congress in the mid1960s created a power vacuum within West Bengal that was not
filled until 1977, when the CPl(M) emerged as the new ruling
party. The intervening period was a period of turmoil. Coalitional
instability and the related ineffectiveness of the government com­
bined with socio-economic conflict to yield civil disorder and
political instability.
The electoral decline of the Congress in the mid- l 960s was a
nationwide phenomenon. In that limited sense West Bengal was
part of a national trend. But a number of factors exacerbated the
impact of Congress's decline in West Bengal: the first generation
nationalist leaders had passed away and no one arose to take charge
of the West Bengal Congress. More than in many other states,
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The PolitiCIII Process: Dominance 343
400
300
200
100
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
Fipn 9.1 PolitiuJ Viokn« in West Bengal 1955-1985
(number ofriots pa-million popuilltion)
Nou: The data for 1955-82 are from an annual publication: Government
of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Crime in lndiil (New Delhi: Gov­
ernment Press). Data for 1_ 983 and 1984 are not available. The figure
for 1985 is an estimate provided by government officials.
Congress in West Bengal had remained a personalistic force. 'Tall
leaders' like Atulya Ghosh and B.C. Roy had managed to create
a party machine that kept factionalism within limits and helped
tnnsform nationalist aspirations into electoral victories. Aher the
death of B.C. Roy in 1962, however, Congress's factionalism
became more obvious. Even before the national Congress party
experienced its major electoral setback in 1967, the Congress in
West Bengal had split; the fo�ation of the offshoot party, the
Bangla Congress, further weakened the centrist alternative that
Congress had offered within West Bengal.
Second, two consecutive droughts in the mid-l960s had led to
food shortages, inflationary pressures, and political difficulties for
the Congress throughout India. The situation was especially dif­
ficult in West Bengal. Following the partition, West Bengal had
l'llken in more refugees than any other state in India. That had
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
344 State and Politia in India
increased the demand for food, especially grain. The partition had
created another disequilibrium: a large proposition of the state's
arable land had come to be devoted to the production of cash crops.
Prior to partition, F.ast Bengal had produced many of the raw
materials necessary for industrial production. As those sources of
supply began to be cut off, the scarcity of raw materials led to high
prices; the 'rational peasant' began producing cash crops. An un­
fortunate side effect was a decline in food production. Thus the
impact of the mid-l960s drought in West Bengal was fairly serious.
A third important factor that was at work in West Bengal in
the mid- l960s was the significant political presence of leftist
parties. The leftist parties, including the undivided Communist
Party of India (CPI), the Forward Bloc, and the Revolutionary
Socialist Party, had won respectable numbers of seats in both the
1957 and 1962 elections (Table 9.1). Their collective share of
the vote in each election was more than one-third of the total.
They had taken advantage of a faction-ridden Congress confront­
ing a worsening food situation and declining popularity. Food
shortages, especiallf, provided a significant issue for political
mobilization. Strikes and demonstrations against the Congress
government became common. As Figure 9.1 shows, rioting and
violence continued to increase throughout 1965 and 1966, leading
up to the crucial elections in 1967. It was at those elections that
the Congress was finally defeated. Congress remained the largest
single party within West llengal; it won 127 of the 280 assembly
seats (Table 9.1). A number of other parties, however, including
the two main communist parties (the CPI had split into the
CPI[M] and CPI in 1964) and the Bangla Congress, succeeded
in forming a United Front (UF) coalition government.
The formation of the UF government in 1967 led to a decade
of chaos in West Bengal. The ftrst UF government lasted less than
a year. It was replaced, for two months, by a Congress-led coalition.
When that also came apart, presidential rule was imposed. A second
UF government was formed in 1969; it was also replaced by presid­
ential rule in 1970. A coalition government with the Congress as
the leading force again came to power in 1971; that also did not last
long. Aft.er the Bangladesh war in 1971, Congress fmally swept to
power with a huge majority, but under a considerable cloud of
suspicion of electoral fraud. The democratic process in West Bengal was resumed only after the 1977 elections.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Political Process: Duminance 345
Figure 9.1 shows the sharp increase in political violence that
accompanied governmental instability between 1967 and 1971.
The data indicating that increase were collected by the police and
did not include figures on the state terror unleashed against various
political groups during 1972-7. The independent group Amnesty
International has documented the extent of the violence. 10 A de­
scriptive conclusion is inescapable: the decade of 1967-77 in West
Bengal politics was characterized by a severe govemability 'Crisis.
What were the roots of that crisis? The causal dynamics clearly
were quite complex. Both socio-economic conflict and anomic
unrest played their parts. The decisive variables, however, were
political. It is clear in retrospect that coalitional instability during
that period made the government relatively ineffective as an agent
of law and order, and that opened the door for a variety of conflicts.
Moreover, competing factions among the political elite mobilized
their forces, over which they soon lost control, thus adding to the
chaos. And finally, Indira Gandhi used the cloak of the Bangladesh
war to impose presidential rule and eliminate many of her armed
political enemies. The crisis subsided only after resumption of the
democratic process in the 1977 elections and the electoral victory
of a relatively cohesive political party.
Both the cities and the countryside o( West Bengal were en­
gulfed in political violence during that period. Violence was mainly
of two types: seemingly 'revolutionary class violence', typified by
the rebellion in Naxalbari, and the land grab movements en­
couraged by the UF government, especially by the CPI(M).
Before analysing those factors, it is important to recall some of
the traits of the UF government. The ideologically divergent
parties within the UF were nearly as wary of each other as they
were of the Congress. They spent considerable energy devising
political strategies that could help transform their temporary hold
on government into an expanded political base. The CPI(M) was
the major force in that coalition government, especially after 1969.
The CPl(M) adhered to a more revolutionary line during that
period. It defined its main task in government as 'expanding and
strengthening worker and peasant alliance'. In practice, that led
to a two-pronged political strategy: neutralizing the tendency of
10 The reportwas discussed byMarcus Franda, 'Rural Development, Bengali
Marxist Style', American Universities Field Staff Reports, Asia, no. 15, 1978,
p. 4.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
346 St11te and Politia in India
the state to be an agent of 'class repression' from above, and using
its party organization to mobiliu the lower classes from below.
The CPI(M) repeatedly sought and eventually gained control
over the ministries of labour, land and land revenue, and home
(which controlled the police). An important aspect of the
CPl(M)'s ruling strategy - an aspect that would eventuaJly con­
tribute heavily to the fall of the UF government - was to order
the police not to interfere in 'class struggles'. The CPI(M) thus
neutralized the regional state apparatus as an agent of political
order. Whatever the merits of such a strategy for fomenting
revolution in nation states in general, as a regional strategy its
effectiveness was highly doubtful. The CPl(M) had only neutral­
ized the 'near state' and thus invited the wrath of the more 'distant
state' (i.e. invited federal intervention). It took the CPI(M) some
time to internalize one of the hard lessons of realpolitik: its powers
were lim.ited. Meanwhile, the neutralization of the police provided
encouragement for many of the subsequent conflicts within West
Bengal.
The best-known peasant rebellion of the period clearly was
the conflict in Naxalbari in the north of West Bengal. There
have been thorough studies of that rebellion. 11 For our purposes,
its details are not important. What is important is to find the
main causes of the rebellion. General explanations in tenns of
'exploitation' of the peasantry, though clearly part of the overall
equation, will not suffice, because peasant exploitation in India
is widespread, but rebellions are not. The Naxalbari rebellion,
moreover, was not really a peasant rebellion; its protagonists were
mainly semi-nomadic tribals, the Santhals. Not being socialized
in the rigid and hierarchical Hindu caste structure, the Santhals
of the area had often rebelled in the past. The border location
of Naxalbari facilitated- revolutionary organization. In addition,
tea plantations dominated the local agriculture in Naxalbari, and
they provided better conditions for political organization than
would the atomistic family-owned smaJl farms common in many
·other areas.
Given those contributing 'ecological' conditions, the decisive
11 See,
for exan1ple; Shanlcar Ghosh, Tht Nualitt Movtmmt (Calcutta: K.L.
Mukhopadhyay, 1974), especially pp. 24-35; Biplab Dasgupta, Tht NIIZlliitt
Movement (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1975), especially pp. 1-14; Franda,
Radical Politia in West Bengal, chapter 6.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Political Process: D'1mmtmct 347
causes of the rebellion were political. The local Santhals had been
organized by a militant subgroup of the CPl(M). After the CPI(M)
came to power in 1967, the local party officers decided to take
advantage of their new power. They undertook a militant land
grab movement. Local tribals, armed with primitive bows and
arrows and spears, provided the main force for the movement.
The tribals claimed 'above-ceiling' land to be legally theirs. (fhere
was legislation on the books stipulating a ceiling on the amount
of land that one could own.) They forcibly occupied such land,
and, if necessary, they killed the landlords, thus establishing
'liberated' areas.
That land grab 1novement spread to some sixty villages and
lasted nearly two months. It is clear in retrospect that the move­
ment would not have gained strength but for the fact that the UF
government, especially the CPI(M), decided to keep the police
out of the conflict. A militant peasant rebellion led by the CPl(M)'s
own cadres had put the CPI(M) leaders in a dilemma: the CJ,>I(M)
in government was responsible for protecting basic constitutional
rights, including the rights to private property and life; however,
the CPI(M) was reluctant to use state repression against its own
revolutionary cadres. The CPI(M) sought to resolve that dilemma
by pursuing a two-pronged strategy: keeping the police out of the
conflict, and simultaneously trying to impose the party line on its
own cadres. The CPl(M)'s strategy failed. The local cadres con­
tinued to undertake militant mobilization, including the killing of
landowners in the name of 'revolutionary justice'. Because the
scope of the 'revolution' was limited to one comer of one region
·m a giant-size nation state, the results were predictable.
Eventually the CPl(M) had to dismiss the leaders ofNaxalbari
from the party, and the UF government ordered the police back
into Naxalbari to restore order. The 'revolutionary movement'
collapsed within weeks. Most of the leaders were imprisoned. The
ease with which the entire movement was crushed strongly sup­
ports the argument that the temporary withdrawal of state �wer
had been the most important factor in the short-term success of
the Naxalbari uprising. To the extent that such deliberate absten­
tion from the use of state power is a somewhat unusual occurrence
in functioning states, theNaxalbari uprising can be viewed as an
aberration. More generally, a broader insight of comparative pol­
itics also gains support from that experience: disintegration of state
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348 St11te and Politics in India
power may well be an important precondition for transformation
of latent socio-economic hostilities into overt conflict. 12
Before analysing other types of agrarian conflicts during that
period, especially those led by the CPI(M) itself, it is important
to note that both the temporary success of the Naxalbari uprising
and the subsequent state repression had significant political con­
sequences. The uprising led to the creation of a third communist
party, a Marxist-Leninist party that did not believe in parliamen­
tary democracy, but instead was committed to fomenting a revolu­
tion by following a 'Maoist' strategy of 'armed struggle'. The
temporary success of the uprising created an overinflated sense
of efficacy among the Naxalites; they began acting as if a Chinese­
style peasant revolution was possible in India. The participation
of the CPI(M) in the government that repressed the Naxalbari
uprising alienated the more militant Bengalis from the CPI(M)'s
'reformism'. Thus the stage was set for battle: an alienated milit­
ant minority whose members had recently renewed their sense
of political efficacy versus a fragmented state. that, in spite of its
strong leftist orientation, stood delegitimized in the eyes of the
militants.
That same theme of the role of an ineffective state, or, more
precisely, a state deliberately made ineffective, ran through the
other major agrarian conflict of the period, namely the land grab
movements initiated by the CPI(M). For reasons of both ideologi­
cal commitment and power, the CPI(M) leadership was committed
to expanding its peasant base. The brief pockets ofNaxalite success
had shown how strongly the peasants felt about the 'land question'.
Not wanting to be left behind, the CPI(M) began pursuing its own
limited version of land grab movements.
Hare Krishna Konar was the CPl(M)'s radical land minister.
He sought to identify and to redistribute all bmami lands (above­
ceiling lands registered under false names) and to ensure the
occupancy rights of sharecroppers. Because the CPI(M) was not
fully in control of the government, it could not use the state
machinery to attain those goals. Instead, its strategy was, again, to
keep the state - especially the police, but also local administrators
and, if possible, the courts - out of land conflicts and to use
12 For a broader statement of this hypothesis with reference to co111parative
and historical material s, see Theda Skocpol, St11tts 1111d Sod11I RroolutianI
(Cambridge University Press, 1979).
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party-led mobilization to implement land refonns.13 Because of
the short durations of the two UF governments, major redistribu­
tion did not occur. The important aspect of that experiment,
therefore, was not any concrete realization of the redistribution
programme but rather the political dynamics set in motion.
The CPl(M) sought to limit the reach of the state from above
and to mobilize from below. Two important consequences fol­
lowed. First, even limited gains by the CPl(M) were politically
threatening to the other partners in the coalition government
Every redistributive success meant new and more loyal supporters
for the CPl(M). The membership of the CPI(M)-affiliated Kisan
Sabha (the peasant organization) rose during that period from
approximately a quarter of a million to more than half a million.
The other coalition partners did not want to be left out of the
game of political competition. They sought to enter the fray,
attempting their own versions of land redistribution, sometimes
even competing with the CPl(M) over the same piece of land. As
one analyst pointed out, 'there were innumerable physical clashes
between the major political parties in the United Front between
1969-70 in which two or more parties attempted to seize the same
plot of land'. 14 Clearly, political competition within the ruling
coalition became a source of socio-economic conflict and violence.
A second consequence was that the CPl(M) leadership often
failed to control its own 'enthusiastic' local cadres, which led to
'excesses' in land grabbing and to nwnerous physical clashes.
During my fieldwork in the early 1980s, for example, a number
of local observers reported that the party line on the land question
under Hare Krishna Konar was quite confusing. Konar, on the
one hand, would trwnpet revolutionary rhetoric, suggesting that
militant confiscation of land was integral to the party's pro­
gramme. On the other hand, the real party line was to act with
restraint on the issue, that is to use the land programme differen­
tially according to local circwnstances and mainly to enhance the
party's electoral and organizational position. The need to make
adjusnnents for local variations necessitated a decentralized strat­
egy. Not all local cadres, however, were totally clear on how far
and how fast the land programme should move. The more
13 For details, see Franda, Radie•/Politicsin West Bmg"', especially pp. 182-90.
14 Ibid., p. 184.
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350 State and Politics in India
militant cadres chose to take Konar's highly rhetorical speeches
as representative of the party line, and they moved fairly rapidly
and decisively during 1969-70. l'hat was certainly true, for ex­
ample, in parts of Midnapore and 24 Parganas where I did
fieldwork. The results were increasing nwnbers of physical clashes
between landowners and CPI(M) cadres and a simultaneous rush
of newspaper stories proclaiming the breakdown of law and order
in West Bengal.
The UF experiments in West Bengal created peculiar condi­
tions under which those who were in power, or, more precisely,
exercised partial power, came to have a vested interest in foment­
ing radical mobilization. Political fragmentation within the state
and deliberate, elite-led mobilization in the civil society thus com­
bined to generate considerable violence in the agrarian sector.
The nature of the violence in West Bengal changed midway
through the decade of chaos unleashed by the UF experiments.
The second ftve years of the chaotic decade, especially the periods
1971-2 and 1975-7, were characterized by increasing state repres­
sion. Because the violence in that period was unleashed by the
government, official statistics do not reflect it well. The exact
numbers of 'revolutionaries' and other political enemies who were
killed or imprisoned will never be known. There is no doubt,
however, that the extent of such repression was significant. During
my field visits to West Bengal in 1979-80, 1982, 1984 and 1986,
nearly everyone I interviewed, including Congress leaders who
were in a position to know,15 admitted that the government had
committed atrocities during 1971-7. Scattered evidence gathered
from those who were close to the situation during that continuing
crisis of governability provides a picture of wide-ranging, brutal
repression by the Congress government.
After each of the two UF governments was dismissed, New
Delhi established direct control over West Bengal. Two important
'administrative' changes created a fra1nework in which govern­
mental repression would be relatively free of constitutional con­
straints. First, it was decided that a police shooting would not
require a 'compulsory executive inquiry'. That protection gave the
I5 Especially relevant here was an interview with Subrato Mu.kerjee (Calcutta,
3 May 1986), who was West Bengal's Home Minister between 1972 and
1977. For references to pre-1984 interviews, see Kohli, The State and Puverty
··
in lndi•, chapter 3.
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police a free hand in their dealings with 'extremists', especially
Naxalites. The second crucial change was that 'Naxalite problems'
came to be assigned to the same detective department that was
responsible for common criminals. Having thus abolished the
distinction between political extremists and criminals, and having
freed the police from virtually all political oversight, the govern­
ment had set the stage for state-sponsored terrorism.
Two scholars, Sajal Basu, who is now an observer for Amnesty
International in Calcutta, and Shankar Ghosh, who was a cor­
respondent at that time for the Times of India, independently
recorded what they wimessed fust-hand during the early 1970s. 16
Their accounts help fill out the picture of what went on in those
years. For example S:ijal Basu reported that Congress's electoral
victory in 1972 was accompanied by 'widespread rigging and
fraud'. During the period leading up to the election and imme­
diately thereafter, the police and the ma.rtans (hired hoodlums)
unleashed what was known as 'white terror'. He described the
aftermath of the UF experiment in the following terms: 'Pseudo­
revolutionary violence of the later sixties has been replaced by
the counter-terrorism of the establishment that culminated in the
violent election of 1972.' 17
Shankar Ghosh provided further details. For example he re­
ported that after the Birbhum Naxalite rebellion fizzled out, the
consequences of'police action' were'not that there [were] no more
killings; in fact the daily average was three to four, which was
higher than the average during the peak period of the Naxalite
movement'. 18 As another example the most brutal of the police
massacres of Naxalites clearly was the Cossipore-Baranagar inci­
dent in the summer of 1971, six weeks after the establishn1ent of
presidential rule in June 1971. More than 150 young men with
Naxalite sympathies were murdered within days. Ghosh, who
covered the story for the Hindusthtm Standard, reported that 'dead
bodies were everywhere - bodies with heads cut off, limbs lost,
eyes gouged out, entails ripped open. They were there in the
streets in broad daylight. Later they were carried in rickshaws and
16 See Sajnl Basu, Wtst Bmgal: Tht Violmt Yt111T(Calcutta: Prachi Publications,
1979); Ghosh, Tht Naxalite Muvnnn:,t.
17 Basu, West Bmgal, pp. 80-3.
18 Ghosh, The Naxalite Muvnnmt, p. 155.
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352 State and Politics in India
handcans and thrown into the Hooghly [the Ganges)'. 19 Ghosh
also captured weU the general mood within West Bengal as Indira
Gandhi turned the police loose to do the 'dirty work':
Panic and terror among the people at that time was so high that no
one could stay at home at night, no young man could think of not
being implicated in cases of arson and murder to be instituted by the
police, no middle-aged man could avoid severe beating up in course
of interrogation in a police loclc:-up.20
And finally, Ghosh's conclusion concerning the scope of the state
repression is noteworthy:
Even in the absence of published figures it may be safely assumed
that the number of Naxals killed exceeds the number of those killed
by Naxals. There should be no doubt that the Naxalite movement in
India [the largest concentration of which was in West Bengal) has
taken a toll of several thousand lives.21
One prong of the government's strategy was to kill Naxalites
and anyone suspected of being associated with them. The other
was simply t o imprison anyone suspected of being a threat to 'law
and order'. Again, firm evidence on the extent of such imprison­
ments is not available. We lc:now little about those who were
imprisoned for political reasons and under what circumstances.
The imprisonments went on during the first half of the 1970s and
increased considerably during 1975-7, the period of the national
Emergency, when even the minimum constitutional niceties could
be set aside. Amnesty International estimated that around that
time nearly 25,000 people, mostly members of the CPI(M) and
Naxalites, were imprisoned for political reasons.22
The exact numbers of people killed and it11prisoned for political
reasons in West Bengal during the 1970s will never be lc:nown.
Nevertheless, the important point for this study is that for much
of that period the democratic rights of many citizens were violently
ripped away, and repression of the left, especially the revolutionary
left, virtually became the norm. The socio-economic situation of
the state also suffered adverse consequences. Much of the sig­
nificant decline in industrial production in West Bengal was due
19 The author quotes his own newspaper story in his book. Ibid., p. 167.
20 Ibid., pp. 155-6.
21 Ibid., pp. 178-9.
22 Reponcd in Franda, 'Rur.il Development, Bengali Marxist Style', p. 4.
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The Politial Process: Dominance 3 53
to capital flight during the fi.rst half of the crisis, that is during the
two UF experiments, when labour militancy rose sharply. The
second half of the chaotic decade brought many reverses in the
land redistribution prognmmes. For example whatever modest
gains the CPl(M) and other leftist parties had made in securing
tenancy rights came undone, as did their progress in the redistribu­
tion of disputed lands. Again, exact figures will never be known.
It was clear during my fieldwork in 1979, however, that eviction
of tenants during 1971-7 had been a crucial factor behind the
CPl(M) government's decision in 1977 to give the highest Eriority
to policies that would ensure the rights of sharecroppers. 3
Crises of govemability are defined with reference to three
criteria: coalitional instability, policy ineffectiveness, and, most
important, escalating violence in politics. It is clear from the
discussion in this chapter that West Bengal indeed experienced a
severe crisis of govemability during 1967-77: it proved nearly
impossible to form a ruling coalition; much of the government's
energy was devoted not to dealing with issues of socio-economic
development but rather to managing political conflicts, and viol­
ence became the norm for settling political disputes. Although
many factors contributed to the increase in political violence, two
related political variables must be emphasized in this analysis of
the origins of the crisis: a fragmented and ineffective state ap­
paratus, and an elite-led, deliberate mobilization for short-term
political gains. As the focus of this study now shifts to the political
changes since 1977, the contrast between developments in the two
periods will further substantiate this analysis: the emergence of
cohesive party rule has led to the development of a more con­
solidated state and has focused the attention of the ruling elite on
long-term developmental goals, thus ameliorating West Bengal's
crisis of gc;1vernability.
The Decade of the CPl(M): A Government that Works
The CPI(M) emerged as West Bengal's ruling party in 1977 and
has won all subsequent elections. The past decade in West Bengal
has been relatively free of political violence. Prior to an analysis
of what the CPl(M) has done to provide a moderately effective
23 For discussion, see Kohli, Tbe St11te 111111 Pwmy in India, chapter 3.
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...
354 State and Politics in lndill
government, another question must be addressed: how did the
CPI(M) manage to become the state's ruling pany?
The answer is not complicated. Table 9.2 shows the shares of
the popular vote received by the major parties in West Bengal
between 1967 and 1982. This table reveals three important facts,
each of which requires some explanation: the crucial year in which
the CPl(M) enlarged its power base was not 1977, but 1971; the
1972 elections were aberrational from the point of view of the
CPI(M) and the CPI(M) emerged victorious in 1977 when the
two centrist parties, Congress-I and the newly formedJanata, split
the non-communist vote.
TABLE 9.2 Percentages of Vote Won by Major Parties i n
West Bengal Assembly Elections 1967-82
Par!:J.
CPI(M)
Other Left
Front parties
Janata
Congress-I
CPI
Others
Total
S11U1Tt:
1967
18.1
1969
19.6
1971
33.8
1972
27.5
1977
35.8
1982
38.5
7.5
10.7
8.5
6.6
41.l
6.5
26.8
40.4
6.8
22.5
29.8
8.6
19.3
49.1
8.4
8.4
10.5
20.5
23.4
2.7
7.1
9.9
0.8
35.7
1.8
13.3
100
100
100
100
100
100
Compiled from the reports ofthe Election Commission.
In 1971 the CPl(M) emerged from the two UF experiments as
a major contender for power. Because the CPl(M) already had a
strong base in the urban working class, the significant increase in
its share of the popular vote in 1971 must be attributed to a
successful mobilization drive in the countryside. As discussed ear­
lier, the CPl(M) during that period chose to keep the police out
of agrarian conflicts and simultaneously mobilize both the middle
and the lower rural strata. The resulting increase in the member­
ship of the Kisan Sabha - an organization of peasants with small
landholdings - has already been noted. The Krishak Mazdoor
Sabha (an agricultural labourers' organization) also made signi­
ficant membership gains during that period.24 And finally, the
24 For det:iils, see Sengupt:i, CPl(M).
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The Politic.al Process: Domin1111Ce 355
CPl(M)'s concerted efforts to secure tenancy rights for sharecrop­
pers, as well as its periodic efforts at land redistribution, must have
established a significant degree of political affinity between the
CPl(M) and the Bengali peasantry.
Why, then, did the CPl(M) do poorly in the 1972 elections?
As a comparison of Tables 9.1 and 9.2 will show, the CPl(M)'s
share of the popular vote did not drop nearly as dramatically (from
33.8 to 27.5 per cent) between the 1971 and 1972 elections as did
the number of seats it won (instead of 113 seats in a house of 280
in 1971, it won only 14 seats in 1972). The dramatic decline in its
legislative representation was primarily a function of the nature
of the first-past-the-post electoral system. The CPl(M)'s share of
the vote in 1972 was, in spite of the sign ificant decline since 1971,
still substantially higher than it had ever been in the 1960s.
What requires explanation, therefore, is why Congress's popu­
larity went up fairly sharply and why the CPl(M)'s share of the
vote declined by some 6 percentage points. In the absence of
detailed public opinion surveys, only the major issues that may
have influenced public 'moods' can be noted. Congress's popu­
larity was in alJ likelihood improved because of Indira Gandhi's
decision to intervene in the civil war in East Pakistan that led to
the 'liberation' of Bangladesh. Given a sense of shared cultural
identity with Bengalis across the border, that action by Indira
Gandhi must have attenuated the normal hostility of Bengalis
toward New Delhi and may even have inclined them temporarily
to view Indira as a leader on their side. The decline in the CPl(M)'s
share of the vote, in t11m, was in part simply the flip side of
Congress's gain, but in part it must also be attributed to some
combination of the following: the pervasive, intimidating presence
of the army during the elections; the imprisonment of thousands
of CPl(M) members; and, ofcourse, the electoral fraud and rigging
that many independent observers have noted, if not documented.
The third set of factors requiring explanation in the CPI(M)'s
rise to power included some post-Emergency developments..The
CPI(M) had clearly expanded its power base significantly during
the two UF experiments. A number of changed circumstances
finally helped the CPI(M) transform that popular base into a
. decisive electoral victory. First, the Congress party in West Bengal, as elsewhere throughout India, had lost considerable popu­
larity because of the Emergency. The newly formed Janat:r par.ty
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356 State and Politics in India
was the main beneficiary of that decline. Because the CPl(M) was
already a well-established force within West Bengal, it appears
that what happened was that the non-left vote was split between
Congress and theJanata party (Table 9.2). Additionally, the CPI,
because of its close association with Indira Gandhi throughout the
Emergency, lost a significant share of its popular support. It is
probably fair to assume that much of that decline benefited the
other leftist parties of West Bengal, including the CPI(M).
The CPl(M) thus emerged from the 1977 elections as the party
with the largest share (35.8 per cent) of the popular vote (Table
9.2). If one includes the other leftist parties that were in alliance
with the CPl(M) in the Left Front, their total share of the vote
approached 50 per cent. In India's first-past-the-post electoral
system, especially under the circumstances of a split in the centrist
vote, it is not surprising that the Left Front won nearly 80 per
cent of the total seats (Table 9.1). It is also important to note,
however, that the CPI(M) alone won 177 seats in a house of 280,
more than sufficient to form a comfortable majority government,
all on its own.
Part of the explanation for the CPl(M)'s· effective ruling strat­
egy since 1977 is its changed ideology. By the time the CPl(M)
came to power in 1977, it had moved away from a revolutionary
inclination to a reformist orientation. I have discussed this in detail
elsewhere,25 but it is important to repeat the main points: First,
the political experience under the Emergency gave the CPl(M) a
clearer understanding of the value of democratic institutions; the
CPl(M)'s capacity to mobilize support and increase power was
found to be heavily dependent on the openness of the political
process. The CPl(M) thus increasingly diminished its rhetoric of
'a dictatorship of the proletariat' and committed itself to preserv­
ing India's democratic institutions. Second, the government's in­
ability to control mobilized forces during the UF experiments led
to a clarification of the 'types of struggles' that the party would
encourage. As a result, labour militancy and gheraoes in the fac­
tories, and land grab movements in the countryside, came to be
replaced by 'legal' and 'constitutional struggles'. And finally, re­
lated to both of those changes, the CPl(M) began defining who
the 'enemy' was and who its allies were according to political
2S See Kohli, Tbt St11tt tmd Povmy in India, chapter 3.
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standards rather than class criteria; members of nearly all social
classes - except for big industrialists and wealthy landowners,
especially 'non-productive' absentee landowners - were wel­
comed into the party.
That new commitment to reformism made the CPI(M) more a
social democratic party and less a traditional communist party. Two
irnpor:tant features of the CPI(M), however, continued to distin­
guish it from other Indian parties. First and foremost, the CPI(M)
retained the democratic centralist pattern of internal party or-·
ganization, �d that made it a much more cohesive party. Second,
in spite of attempts to broaden its membership, the CPI(M) has
remained primarily a party of the middle and the lower strata, with
an explicit commitment to reforming the social structure along class
lines. The post-1977 CPl(M) in West Bengal is best understood as
a well-organized, class-oriented reformist party.
The CPI(M)'s slow but steady evolution toward a reformist
party increasingly made it a viable alternative in a democratic
capitalist setting. The experience of fmally coming to power with
a significant majority further accentuated the CPI(M)'s reformist
tendencies. Once it formed a majority government, two dramatic
changes followed. First, the CPI(M)'s political horizons shifted
from the short-term concerns of mobilizing and expanding its
power base to the longer-term concerns of consolidating its newly
acquired power. Related to that was a second important change:
the CPI(M)'s political prospects for the future increasingly became
a function of its capacity to provide effective government. That
further shifted the party's political attention away from mobiliza­
tional activities. The search was on for strategies to create political
stability, facilitate economic growth, and, within those constraints,
back up its rhetoric with some genuine land redistribution.
Now, it should be clear that nearly all ruling parties in the
various states in India would like to facilitate political stability,
economic growth, and some redistribution. Two traits distinguish
the CPI(M): it was slower than other parties to accept those
'ordinary goals' as governmental goals; more i1nportant, having
accepted that ideological shift, its political capacity to pursue those
goals has turned out to be greater than that of numerous other
Indian parties. The differences in political capacities, in turn, are
traceable back to the organizational cohesiveness of the CPl(M).
A well-developed party organization has enabled the CPl(M)
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358 State and Politics in India
•
to devise and implement a fairly well-designed ruling strategy
that
is periodically updated. The strategy has three main components:
imposition of the party's reformist ideology on disciplined cadres,
thus making the more 'normal' debilitating factional conflicts and
personal ambitions of the political elite subservient to larger or­
ganizational goals; implementation of modest but genuine re­
distributive programmes, thus solidifying the coalitional base with
something more than rhetoric and symbolic gains; implementa­
tion of 'pragmatic' policies to placate the propertied groups and
encourage production based on the principle of profit.
In the last twelve years i.e. 1977-89, that the CPl(M) has been
in power, it has achieved some success in all of these areas. Im­
mediately after coming to power, the C.Pl(M) had the difficult task
of limiting the expectations of the economically disadvantaged.
Instead of making empty promises that could not be kept - a
recurring recipe for short-term political gain and long-term dis­
aster -the CPl(M) from the beginning set a cautious ruling tone:
The aim of our programmes is to alleviate the sufferings of the rural
and urban people and to improve their conditions to a certain extent.
We do not claim anything more, as we are aware that without struc­
tural changes in the socioeconomic order it is hardly possible to bring
about any basic change in the conditions of the people.26
Because 'structural changes' cannot be expected to be imple­
mented in a single region of a large country, the CPI(M) has been
able simultaneously to point out the factors that it cannot control
(thus shifting the blame to New Delhi) and to minimize what
people can expect from the state government it does control.
One reason that the CPl(M) has succeeded in minimizing de­
institutionalizing populism since 1977 is that it is a well-disciplined
ruling party. Empty populist promises are often made by leaders
atte1npting to hold together unstable coalitions. By contrast, at
both the elite and mass levels, the CPl(M)'s support structure has
been relatively stable. Party discipline has forced competing fac­
tions to work within politically feasible boundaries. Modest but
concrete rewards have, in turn, strengthened the CPl(M)'s coali­
tional base among the middle and lower strata. The gap between
26 Government of West Bengal, Left Front Guvemmmt m Wtst Bmglll: Eight
Years (Calcutta: Department of Information and Cultural Affairs, 1985), from
the Foreword by Jyoti Basu, Chief Minister of West Bengal, pp. 1 2.
-
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The Politiclll Process: DominllrKt 359
promises and results, therefore, has been narrower in the CPI(M)'s
West }Jeng'21 than in many other parts of India.
, It is important to elaborate on this last statement: though the
CPl(M) has promised less, it has done more, especially for the
lower sttata, than most other ruling parties in Indian states. The
most successful of the CPl(M)'s programmes has been one aimed
at enhancing the security of. tenants in the countryside. This
programme, called 'Operation Barga', has ensured tenurial rights
and improved incomes for as many as one-quarter of all the rural
households in West Bengal. As discussed elsewhere, the role of
the disciplined, cadre-based party has been central in the im­
plementation of this reform programme.27 Keeping in mind that
the security of these tenants had often been threatened in the past,
especially under Congress governments, the political bond that
has now been established between the sharecroppers of West
Beng'21 and the CPl(M) becomes readily understandable.
The CPl(M) has not come up with anything as successful as
Operation Barga for the landless labourers. The labour-abundant
agrarian economy, with its high levels of underemployment, has
proved a formidable obstacle. The CPl(M) has put its energy into
· strengthening the political organization of landless labourers. Al­
though the results have been less than spectacular, West Benp
has little of the open brutal repression of the kind seen in Bihar.
This is in part a function of a less oppressive caste structure, but
it is also related to the organizational presence of the CPI(M) in
the Bengali countryside.
Familie� with small landholdings provide the CPI(M)'s main
political base. Many of the party's ideologically loyal cadres arc
from this social background. Additionally, the CPI(M) has sought
to build its own version of '1nachine politics' to incorporate this
social stratum. The revamped ptmd,ay11ts (local governments), for
eumple, provide one crucial component in this design.28 The
CPl(M)'s popularity has enabled it to win the largest number of
local government positions. The CPl(M) has also 'decentralized'
power in the special and limited sense of giving p1171(hllJllts sub­
stantial resources for local development. These activities have
been closely supervised through the party hierarchy and have been
27 For documentation
and details, see Kohli, Tbt Sutt 1111d Pwtrty in lndu,
chapter 3.
28 For a detailed discussion, see ibid., chapter 3.
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360 State and Politics in India
aimed at minimizing corruption and waste of public resources.
Although this has not eliminated charges of corruption, especially
because the CPl(M) is no less partisan than other parties in select­
ing its own supporters for positions of authority, it has nevertheless
had two important consequences. First, many of the local develop­
ment programmes sponsored by New Delhi - especially such
programmes as the Food for Work Programme (later renamed
the Employment Guarantee Scheme) - have been better imple­
mented in West Bengal than in other states. Second, systematic
governmental penetration into the countryside has enabled the
CPl(M) to sustain a powerful network of supporters.
Landless labourers, sharecroppers, and small landowners con­
stitute the majority of the rural population in West Bengal. These
are also the groups that have become the CPl(M)'s main sup­
porters, enabling the CPl(M) to win three consecutive state elec­
tions. As one would expect in the case of a leftist party, larger
landowners, businessmen, and industrialists tend to oppose the
CPl(M). It is important to note, however, that the CPl(M) has
gone out of its way to make itself acceptable to such groups. For
example the CPl(M) has argued that subsidized agricultural inputs
and 'fair prices' for agricultural products are necessary to ensure
agricultural production. It has also offered numerous incentives
to industrialists so as to increase invesnnent. Although these policy
initiatives are clearly not sufficient to turn property owners into
CPl(M) supporters, th ey do go some distance towards creating a
workable relationship between the leftist government and the
society's producers of wealth.
An additional point concerning the relationship between the
CPl(M) government and property-owning groups is worth noting.
The memory of the chaotic UF experiments is still fresh in the
minds of Bengali businessmen. They also know that the CPl(M)
has a strong organizational network among workers and peasants.
Whereas in principle the business community would definitely
prefer Congress to the CPl(M) in power, the practical issue is
more complex: it is not at all clear to property-owning groups that
they would be better off with another party in government and
the CPl(M) as the opposition. Since coming to power, the CPI(M)
has restrained both labour militancy in factories and land grab
movements in the countryside. During my visits to West Bengal,
I heard numerous landowners and representatives of Chambers of
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Commerce acknowledge this restraining role of the CPI(M). If
forcibly removed from power, the CPI(M) could make West Ben­
gal ungovernable. That possibility has restrained Bengali property
owners from inviting New Delhi's intervention in West Bengal
politics.
This emphasis on the CPl(M)'s effectiveness in government is
not meant to draw attention away from the serious problems that
remain unsolved in West Bengal; some of these are intrinsically
difficult problems, and others are of the CPl(M)'s making. First,
the CPl(M)'s simultaneous attempts to sustain an alliance of the
middle and lower strata and to avoid any further alienation of
property-owning groups have placed serious constraints on any
further redistribution of wealth. The problem of severe bottom­
level poverty is not likely to be solved by political intervention
alone. Second, business groups and industrialists have not received
guarantees sufficient to encourage them to bring substantial new
investments into West Bengal. That is readily understandable: if
the CPl(M) should lose an election, the party leadership could
again unleash labour militancy. Third, the CPl(M)'s sustained rule
is giving rise to a powerful 'new class', and that naturally evokes
hostility among all those left out of the power game.
The presence of entrenched cadres in an atmosphere of limited
industrial dynamism and minimal new redistribution has begun
to create a sense of political stagnation in West Bengal. If the
CPI(M) fails to correct these tendencies, they could lead to its
undoing. Such possibilities raise an important question: was the
price that the CPl(M) paid to restore. order too high, that price
being political stalemate and the related problem of economic
sluggishness?
Whatever its future, the CPI(M) has two other important
problems over which it does not have full control. First, one of
West Bengal's sixteen districts, Darjeeling, experienced consid­
erable political strife between 1986 and 1988. That turmoil pitted
one of West Bengal's ethnic minorities, the Gorkhas, against the
Bengali-dominated CPI(M) government. The Gorkha demands
varied from greater political autonomy within West Bengal to a
separate Gorkha state - Gorkhaland - in India. The issue was
eventually settled in mid-1988, when the CPI(M) made some
concessions and Gorkha leaders accepted an arrangement that
would leave Darjeeling a part of West Bengal but also would give
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362 St11tt and Politia in India
Gorkha leaders considerable financial and administrative control
within their district.
Prior to the final settlement, however, the Gorkhaland agita­
tions during 1986--8 caused considerable loss of life and property
in Darjeeling. The dynamics of that conflict are not difficult to
understand. Darjeeling is a small district in the mountainous north
of Bengal. Of West Bengal's nearly fifty million people, only one
million live in that remote district. The district is nevertheless
quite important; it has strategic importance because of its proxi­
mity to China, and it has economic importance because of tea
plantations and tourism. More than 80 per cent of the district's
people are non-Bengali Gorkhas. The Gorkhas are both racially
and linguistically distinct from the Bengalis. The Bengalis tend
to view· the Gorkhas as 'backward' people who are relatively
innocent in the ways of the world and who make good domestics
and hardworking labourers.
The Gorkhas of Darjeeling were never politically integrated
into either the Congress or the CPI(M). In the past, a Gorkha
League usually won the political support of many Gorkhas and
then often formed a coalition with the ruling party in Calcutta.
The increasing identification of the CPI(M) in West Bengal as a
Bengali party and the growing political awareness among a new
generation of Gorkha leaders altered that pattern in the 1980s.
During the past decade the Gorkhas have demanded greater politi­
cal control over their own affairs. The CPI(M) had itself argued
for such rights for the Gorkhas in the 1970s, when the Congress
was in power in West Bengal.
Once in power, the CPl(M) dragged its feet on Gorkha de­
mands. That was mainly because any major concessions to
Gorkhas could have hurt the CPI(M) politically with its major
constituency, the Bengalis. What complicated that fairly normal
give and take of politics was that the leaders of the Congress party
saw in the conflict an opportunity to weaken the CPl(M). Follow­
ing the Punjab pattern of a few years earlier-when Indira Gandhi
had decided to support Bhindranwale as a vehicle for weakening
the Akali Dal - the Congress leadership decided to promote the
Gorkha leader, Subash Ghising. Thus encouraged, the Gorkha
movement became increasingly strident in its demands against the
CPI(M) government.
The Congress leadership, however, was clearly of two minds
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on the issue of Gorkhaland. Given Rajiv's reconciliatory position
on Punjab and Assam in 1985, one faction within the ruling circles
appears to have argued that national interests should come before
Congress's political interests. That line of thinking would have
suggested that the Gorkhaland agitation should not be encour­
aged, lest it become one more major ethnic strife. Conversely, the
difficulties that Gorkha agitations would create for the CPl(M)
must have been far too tempting a political opportunity for the
Congress to resist. That both of those arguments were operating
i s evidenced in the confusing policy position of the Congress:
between 1986 and 1988, the Congress went back and forth several
times in encouraging and discouraging Ghising and the Gorkha
movement.29
The conflict was eventually settled when Congress leaders
decided that the creation of a new state for Gorlthas was out of
the question. That had always been the CPl(M)'s position. The
Gorkha movement was far too insignificant a political force to
win out against both the national government and the West
Bengal government. It was able to flourish only because of the
political space created by a conflict between New Delhi and
Calcutta. Once New Delhi had clarified its position, and the
CPI(M) had offered some concessions that clearly fell short of a
separate state but were nevertheless significant, Gorkha leadership
had little choice but to accept the deal.
The Gorkhaland crisis demonstrated that whereas the CPl(M)
was quite adept at dealing with class conflict, its capacity to
manage ethnic conflict was questionable. Conversely, it was also
the case that the CPI(M)'s organizational cohesiveness enabled
it to devise a consistent policy position. Unlike Congress's con­
flicting positions and mixed signals - probably reflecting fac­
tional divisions or, worse, changing leadership whims - that
encouraged the conflict, the CPl(M)'s consistent and compromis­
ing position eventually facilitated conflict resolution.
The second major political problem in West Bengal over which
the CPI(M) government has little control is the organizational
decline of the Congress party. Of course, its organizational
get a quick sense of the confusion in Congress's policy toward Gorkha­
land, see the following news coverage in India Todlly: 15 January 1987, pp.
32-3; 28 February 1987, pp. 26-7; 15 May 1987, pp. 32-3; 15 January 1988,
pp. 32-4.
29 To
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364 State and Politia in India
disintegration does not negate Congress's continuing capacity to
attract popular support (fable 9.2). Congress remains India's
major national party and therefore attracts considerable support
in all of India's states. Within West Bengal, the Congress's main
support comes from several groups: non-Bengalis, especially in
Calcutta; those who are ideologically anti-left; many of the rich
peasants and most of the very large landowners; many of those in
business, trades, industry, and com111erce; a significant minority
1:>f the numerically significant Muslims; and those generally de­
prived of governmental patronage and benefits.
The main significance of Congress's organizational decline is
not in its reduced capacity to attract popular support. The main
significance lies elsewhere. Nearly all observers of West Bengal
politics are agreed - even those who do not assess the CPI(M)
favourably - that an electoral victory by Congress would mean
less effective government for West Bengal. The Congress party
of West Bengal is deeply factionalized, and its leadership is of very
low quality, composed mainly of former Youth Congress rowdies
who moved in to fill the vacuum created by the disintegration of
the old Congress. Thus electoral support for Congress in West
Bengal mainly reflects anti-CPI(M) sentiments and support for
the national leadership of Congress. For the time being, almost
no one expects that the West Bengal Congress could offer effective
government.
Related to that, factional squabbles within the Congress con­
tinue to be sources of civil unrest in West Bengal. Much of that
conflict is concentrated in urban areas. Given the CPl(M)'s organ­
izational cohesiveness and control over the government, Congress
in West Bengal has shied away from aggressive mobilizational
strategies. Congress would likely be a loser in any such direct
conflict. Given Congress's internal make-up, however, if the
CPl(M)'s hold on power were to weaken, Congress's resurgence
would undoubtedly generate considerable political turmoil in
West Bengal.
In sum, West Bengal is not without its share of serious political
problems, some of which are inherent to the region, whereas
others reflect poorly on the CPI(M), and yet others are of Con­
gress's making. In spite of these, West Bengal under the CPl(M)
remains a relatively well-governed state. This assessment is espe­
cially significant if one keeps the points of comparison in mind:
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the chaotic decade of 1967-77 in West Bengal, and the growing
turbulence in such neighbouring states as Bihar.
When assessed relatively, the coalition underlying the CPI(M)
rule in West Bengal is stable. The CPl(M)'s record on economic
policy is not spectacular, but not without merit: its growth record
is no wor&e than those of many other Indian states, and its
redistribution record is distinctively superior. The m_o�t impres­
sive achievement of the CPI(M), however, has been restoration
of political order - and that without repression. Moreover, West
Bengal remaihs relatively free of communal conflicts of various
types, including caste and religious conflicts. This is especially
impressive in view of the fact that nearly 20 per cent of the
Bengalis in West Bengal are Muslims. The cwnulative results are
clearly evident in Figure 9.1. What is mainly responsible for this
moderately effective ruling pattern is a well-organized ruling
party that has put together a coalition of middle and lower groups,
has not made extravagant promises but has delivered more re­
distribution than most other Indian parties, and has contained
the usual debilitating intra-elite conflicts and the related attempts
to politicize existing socio-economic cleavages.
Conclusion
After having been one of India's most chaotic states in the late
1960s, West Bengal has emerged in the 1980s as one of India's
better-governed states. Surely there are lessons in this turnaround
for any study of India's growing crisis of govemability. For pur­
poses of this concluding discussion, these lessons can be broadly
divided into prescriptive and analytical.
The prescriptive lessons are limited. What has worked in West
Bengal may not work in other states in India - and_ is even less
likely to provide an a l lIndia
model. The emergence of the CPI(M)
as a disciplined ruling party in West Bengal is a product of an
unusual socio-political configuration -its long regional traditions
of elite radicalism and centralized organizations, the weakness of
caste as a principle of political organization, and the historical
weakness of the Congress party. A different set of conditions could
facilitate the emergence of left-of-centre parties as ruling parties
in some other Indian states (for example Kerala). Given the ab­
sence of strong leftist traditions in most states, however, and given
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366 State and Politics in India
the widespread presence of caste and communal cleavages, the
CPl(M) type of rule is not likely to emerge in much of India. Even
if it did, the outcome under different circumstances might not be
as favourable.
In spite of the limited utility of the West Bengal case for
generating any direct prescriptions, the analytical implications are
very important. The West Bengal case highlights the significance
of a well-organized reformist party for generating political order.
The roots of the political chaos between 1967 and 1977, though
complex, were mainly two related political conditions: the frag­
mentation of the state itself and virulent elite-led mobilization.
The emergence of the CPI(M) as a ruling party tamed many
of the conflicts within West Bengal. As a well-organized party
with a clear electoral majority, the CPI(M) was able to create a
cohesive government and fill the existing power vacuum. Or­
ganizational discipline also enabled the CPl(M) to limit elite fac­
tionalism and the debilitating elite-initiated political conflicts that
often follow. Thus, organizational cohesion at the heart of the
state was crucial for taming political chaos.
It is important to reiterate in this conclusion that organizational
cohesion is a necessary, but not sufficient, variable in the explana­
tion. If cohesive party rule is also to be democratic, the ruling party
must put together a sustainable majority coalition. This is where
the significance of implementable reforms and thus the party's
reformist ideology comes into the picture. If the ruling party is not
willing to reform or not capable of implementing reforms, one of
two outcomes is likely: either the party will rapidly lose power or
it will be attracted to deinstitutionalizing populism, thus exacerbat­
ing the long-term problem of establishing legitimate order.
The CPl(M)'s reformist orientation has enabled it to pursue
some redistributive programmes without fundamentally alienating
property-owning productive groups. The CPI(M)'s performance
in West Bengal has by no means been spectacular; it has left quite
a few problems unresolved, and it has created some new problems.
At the same time, however, it is undeniable that a reform-oriented,
disciplined party has generated moderately effective government
in West Bengal.
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10
Culture and Subaltern
Consciousness: An Aspect ,.
of the MGR Phenomenon
M.S.S. Pandian
I
S
ocial scientists working within the broad Marxist framework
have achieved substantial advances in understanding varied
forms of protest movements, revolts and anti-establishment or­
ganizations in India. Two volumes on peasant struggles in India
edited by AR. Desai1 and six volumes of'subaltern studies' edited
by Ranajit Guha2 would bear ample testimony to this achievement.
To study protest movements and revolts is to inquire into the
counter-hegemonic projects of the subaltern classes. While it is
no doubt important to study these counter-hegemonic projects
and draw lessons from them, it is equally important to recognize
that such projects are few and far between in time and space. In
other words, the dominant reality has been one of the subaltern
classes accepting the hegemony of the elite through such processes
like deference to the elites and emulation of elite values.
• This chapter would not have been written but for the encouragement and
intellectual partnership ofS.V. Rajadurai and V. Geetha. I have also benefited
a lot from my discussions with the following friends: Aron Pamaik, Baron
De, Anjan Ghosh, R.S. Rao, Nirmal Sengupta,Sarajit Majwndar, A. Venbta­
chalapathy, J. Jeyaranjan and S. Anandhi. My thanks are due to all of them.
I A.R. Desai, Pt1111tnt Stn,gglts in J,uJi11 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979);
and Agrllriim Struggles in Jndill 11fttr lndepmdmn (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1986).
2 Ranajit Guha (ed.), S""4lttrn Stwlits: Wriringr on South AsiJm History mu/
Society; vols I VJ
- (Delhi: Oxford Unive.rsity Press, 1982-9).
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368 State and Politics in India
However, there is hardly any study on how the ruling elites
produce consent from the subaltern classes in concrete situations. 3
This lack in the current scholarship has already been pointed out
by some scholars.4 The present essay takes this as a point of
departure and makes a modest attempt to explore into subaltern
consciousness while under hegemony, through a case study of
the immense popularity enjoyed by the late M.G. Ramachandran
(MGR) among the people of Tamil Nadu. 5
There are specific reasons for choosing the MGR phenomenon
as a concrete instance to analyse the problem. The eleven-year
rule of MGR did not cause any particular structural changes in
the economy to benefit the subaltern classes in Tamil Nadu. Their
material conditions indeed worsened during this period.6 On the
other hand, his government ruthlessly used the state machinery
to put down even the mildest of protests from workers, peasants,
fisher people, teachers, government employees, etc. Also, his rule
diluted unrecognizably the cultural gains achieved by the subaltern
classes due to the drawn-out struggles of the Dravidian movement
3 James Freeman's excellent srucly of Mull, a scheduled aste labourer in a
Orissa village (Untaucbabk: An J,u/ilm Lift Hirtary [London: George Allen and
Unwin, l 979])and Michael Moffutt's srudy of Pariyans o f Endavur village in
Southern Chengleput district (An Untoru:h11bk Ctmmnmity in South lndu:
Strumnt1111d C1111Smsus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979]) are two
of the exceptions.
4 Swnit Sarkar, 'The Condition and Narure of Subaltern Militancy: Bengal
from Swadeshi to Non-co-operation,, . 1905-1922', in Raruijit Guha (ed.),
Subaltern Studies, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984) vol. m; Arun Pat­
naik, 'Gramsci's Concept of Commonsense: Towards a Theory of Subaltern
Consciousness in Hegemony Process', &onomican;/Political Wttk/y, vol. xxm,
no. 5,January 1988.
S M.G. Ramaclundran presided over Tamil Nadu as its Chief Minister from
1977 to 1987 with a brief break in 1980. He was born in Kandy in Sri Lanka
in 1917. Driven by poverty, he began his career as a child actor in plays by
joining at a tender age Madurai Origirutl Boys Company owned by M.
Kandaswamy Pillai. After protracted struggle, he emerged as an immensely
popular 6.ln1 star on the Tamil screen. Along with his acting career, he became
active in DMK politics. In 1972 he founded a separate party, Anna Dravida
Mwmetra Kazhagam, which w:is rechristened as All-India Anna Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam during the Emergency. After prolonged medical battle
and ill-health, he died on 24 December 1987 as the most popular leader of
the poor in Tamil Nadu.
6 MIDS, Tllfflil N111m &momy: Pttfo,nllmCt a,u/ Imm (New Delhi, Bombay
and Calcutta: Oxford and IBH, 1988).
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during its early progressive phase. Given this, one would expect
that the subaltern classes would have resented MGR's politics. On
the contrary, MGR enjoyed a stable, if not growing, popularity
among the poor in Tamil Nadu throughout his tenure in office.
His party polled a third of the total votes in every election, and
his followers exhibited an almost personal bond with him through­
out. When he died on 24 December 1987, several lakhs of people
converged on the city of Madras and his funeral witnessed an
unprecedented spectacle of grief. Besides, thirty-one of his fol­
lowers committed suicide.7 Thus the 'ascribed' consciousness and
the 'actual' consciousness of the subaltern classes are substantially
divorced in Tamil Nadu. {It is because the material life conditions
of the subaltern classes do not produce the immediate conscious­
ness of their existence, that their 'actual' consciousness can be
effectively mediated. Thus it has been possible for MGR to pose
real problems and offer imaginary solutions.) For this reason, an
exploration into the MGR phenomenon would further our under­
standing of how the elite produce consent among the subaltern
classes.
Moreover, there exist only a few studies on the MGR pheno­
menon.8 All these studies, except Sivathamby's, are empiricist,
sometimes adulatory, and do not raise questions concerning the
subaltern consciousnessvis-a-vis the MGR phenomenon. (fhis is
a secondary reason for taking up the MGR phenomenon for the
study.) However, I must hasten to add that the chapter is not going
to explore all aspects of the MGR phenomenon. The phenomenon
being multi-layered and complex, I will take up only one of its
aspects for analysis: how a specific image of MGR was presented
on the screen, where in the cultural mosaic of the subaltern classes
this image is rooted, how and why this image became popular and
what the nature of its ideological content is.
7 The St11tm,um, 17 January
1988.
8 Robert L. Hardgrave, 'When Stars Displaced the Gods: The Folk Culture
of Cinema in Tamil Nadu', in Essays in tbt Political Sociokigy of &!utb India
(New Delhi: Usha, 1979); Stephen Samuel, 'Film and Politics in Tamil Nadu:
1947-1980' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University ofMadras, 1983); R. Than­
davan, 'All India Anna Dravida Munnetra K.izhag:1111 - A Study' (un­
published Ph.D. thesis, University of M,1drns, 1983); K.irtigesu Sivathamby,
The T11111il Filmsas a Medium ofPoliticalCrmrmunicflrion (Madras: New Century
Book House, 1981).
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370 State and Politics in India
II
Before we embark on a discussion of the phenomenon itself, it is
important to spell out a few things about the central analytical
category employed in the essay, i.e. the category of common sense
of 'the philosophy of the non-philosophers' developed and elab­
orated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci developed
the category of common sense as a critique of the Enlightenment
tradition which held the worldview of the common people as
devoid of any sense and at the same time, as a critique of the
pre-Enlightenment tradition as well which celebrated their world­
view as the philosophy.9
According to Gramsci, common sense is the ensemble of cul­
tural presuppositions by which the subaltern classes make sense
of the world they live in. This worldview or consciousness is
pre-theoretical, unsystematic, inchoate and contradictory. In
Gramsci's words, 'Its fcommon sense's] fundamental characteristic
is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual,
is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity
with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philo­
sophy it is'. 10 This consciousness is primarily dominated b y sedi­
ments of the ideologies of the elite:
.•. this same group {subaltern classes) has for reasons of submission
and intellectual subordination, adopted a conception which is not its
own but is borrowed from another group; and it affirms this concep­
tion verbally and believes itself to be following it, because this is the
conception which it follows in 'normal times' - that is, when its
conduct is not independent and autonomous but submissive and
subordinate.11
However, common sense is not completely regressive carrying
9 On
Gramsci's category of 'common sense', see: Alberto Michael Cirese,
'Gramsci's Obsetv2tions on Folldore', in Anne Showstack Sasoon (ed.), Ap­
proatht.f to Gramsci (London: Writers and Readers, 1982); Alastir Davidson,
'Gramsci, the Peasantry and Popular Culture',Journ11/ ofPellSlfflt Studies, vol.
1, no. 4,July 1984; Arun Pamaik, 'Gramsci's Concept ofCommonsense', and
Denzil Saldanha, 'Antonio Grarnsci and the Analysis ofClass Consciousnew.
Some Methodological Considerations', &vrwmic tmd Politiul Wttkly, vol. 23,
no. 5,January 1988.
10 Antonio Grarnsci, Stlrttiuns frum the Prison Notebooks (New York: Interna­
tional Publishers, 1973), p. 419.
11 Ibid., p. 327.
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only the elements of dominant ideologies, but contains progres­
sive, autonomous elements as well which assert themselves when
the subaltern classes act against the elite 'occasionally and in
flashes', This is the healthy nucleus that exists in 'common sense',
the part of it which can be called '-good sense' and which deserves
to be made more unitary and coherent 12
This contradictory character of common sense gives it a certain
plasticity, i.e. it can be selectively appropriated and reconstituted
by different political forces. Given Gramsci's own political con­
cerns, he suggested that any movement of the people should
develop a critique of the common sense by 'basing itself initially,
however, on common sense in order to demonstrate that "every
one" is a philosopher'13 and it should make the good sense or the
progressive elements within the common sense 'more unitary and
coherent'.14 In other words,
Ideology, in this meaning of common sense, is not just an instrument
of domination or a set of false beliefs. Rather it is a terrain of struggle.
It is the site on which the dominant ideolo§Y is constructed but it is
also the site of resistance to that ideology.1
The present chapter is about how dominant ideologies succeed
in this site of struggle and produce consent among the subaltern
classes. This process is illustrated, as I have already suggested, by
exploring the screen image of MGR and its insertion in the pre­
existing common sense of the subaltern classes in Tamil Nadu. I
shall begin with how MGR's image was constructed in films.
m
Varanthira R.ani (a popular weekly with a circulation of about three
lakh copies) predicted, in its issue dated 15 February 1987, that
12 Ibid., p . 328.
13 Ibid., p. 330.
14 According to Gramsci [ibid., pp. 332-3]: 'Ifit [Philosophy ofPraxis] affirms
the need for contact between intellectuals and simples it is not in order to
restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses,
but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral block which can
mllke politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only
ofsmall intellectual groups.'
IS Roger Simon, 'Gramsci: A Glossary of Revolution', Mar.rim, TodllJ, April
1989.
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372 State and Politics in India
the then Tamil Nadu state assembly would be dissolved and fresh
elections held. Though the prediction proved wrong, the basis for
this prediction was itself interesting and significant. The predic­
tion was made in the knowledge that new prints of MGR starrers
were being produced! MGR films were repeatedly screened during
election campaigns and the All World MGR Fans Association
(which had about 10,000 branches in Tamil Nadu) served as the
backbone of the AIADMK.16 MGR himself openly admitted: 'Fans
Association and party are not different.'17
There has always existed a symbolic relationship between films
and politics of Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu. While this may
sound like a truism, yet it is important to detail the modes through
which films have sought to intervene in politics. This has hap­
pened in one of three ways: There have been films that have
indulged in direct political propaganda, for instance Parashakthi,
Velaikari and Oor lravu. More usually, reference to party symbols,
and anagrammatic usage of party leaders' names in songs and in
the course of dialogues have been a common feature of DMK­
style political propaganda. An interesting third usage has been
the mixing of docu1nentary footage with.shots of the actual film
in question. In Pantrm and Thangarathnmn, during the course of
a dialogue sequence, as an answer to a query, the scene shifts to
reveal documentary shots of DMK party conferences. And, of
course, M. Karunanidhi and C.N. Annadurai were film script­
writers, and there has been no dearth of film personalities being
involved in party politics in Tamil Nadu. In fact, film actors
beginning with N.S. Krishnan, K.R. Ramaswamy, S.S. Rajendran
and, of course, MGR have always drawn crowds, especially to
party conferences.
MGR began his acting career in films in 1936 with Ellis R.
Duncan's Sati Leelavati. His acting career spanned forty years and
13 6 films and for the first twenty years, he, by and large, acted in
mythological roles. 18 Only from the late 1950s he was seen in
16 Soon after
MGR founded Anna DMK in 1972, the DMK promoted an
organization called 'Ta1nilar Padai'. The members of 'Ta1nilar Padai', who
were mostly urban lumpens, tried their best to disrupt the screening of MGR
starrers.
11 Thuglak, 1 February 1984.
18 MGR appeared as Vishnu in Dakshayagam (1938), as Indra in PrahladJI
(1939), as Parameswara in S,.; Murugan (l 946) and as Indirajit in Stttha
Jantm11m (1947).
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social roles, achieving recognition in this regard with Thirudathe
( l 96 l ). Henceforth, MGR's screen roles comprised several stereo­
typed characters all of which constituted 'MGR'.
A characteristic MGR role was that of a working man com­
bating every day oppression. Thus he had acted as a peasant,
fisherman, rickshaw puller, carter, gardener, taxi driver, quarry
worker, shoeshine boy, cowherd, etc. In fact, many a successful
MGR films were titled thus: Thozhilali (l 964) (worker), Vivasayee
(1967) (peasant), Padakotti (1964) (boatman), Mattukara Ve/an
(1970) (cowherd Velan), Rickshawkaran ( l 971) (rickshaw puller),
and Meenava Nanban (1977) (fisherman's friend). Even in films
where he assumes dual roles, it is the subaltern MGR who is
given cinematic prominence. A striking example is Mattukara
Ve/an (1970) in which he acts both as a cowherd and a lawyer.
The cowherd outsmarts the lawyer throughout. Aptly enough the
film was named after the cowherd.
These films are ostensibly about the oppression faced by the
poor with MGR, of course, being constituted as one a1nong them.
By employing a carefully constructed system of mise en stene, these
films, celebrate his subalternity and create a 1nood for the audience
to identify themselves with him. We shall cite just one such
element of mise en scene here, that is food which constitutes the
central concern of the everyday struggle of the poor. In Thozhilali
(1964) MGR, as a manual worker, drinks gruel from an earthen
pot and licks pickle from off his fingers. In Kanavan (1968) he asks
for Neerakaram (water in which previous day's cooked rice has
been soaked) in his rich wife's house. In Ninaithathai Mudippavan
(I 97 5), he eats Ragi dosai, drinks sukku kappi (a hot concoction
made of dry ginger, jaggery and water) and expresses his desire to
have cold rice and cooked cereal. MGR's films endow these food
items with a specific semiotic significance. It is immaterial whether
the poor actually eat these kinds of food, though they often do.
What is being presented here is a food-sharing structure that
integrates MGR the Hero with the subaltern masses. In Mattukara
Ve/an (1970), a cowherd MGR in1personates as a lawyer. When
good food is served to him, he laps it up avariciously without
botherin u about upper class n1anners, smearing his face in the
process. 1 Along with food, other props like the design and colour
19 The films I cite in the course of the chapter are only ex.imples. The patterns
presented repeat with little variation in a large number of MGR films.
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374 State and Politics in India
of the costumes are also used to define MGR as a subaltern on
the screen.
The social universe of MGR films is a universe of asymmetrical
power. At one eµd of the power spectrum are grouped upper caste
men/women, landlord/rich industtialists, literate elites and, of
course, ubiquitous male - all of whom exercise unlimited
authority and indulge in oppressive acts of power; at the other end
of the spectrum can be found the hapless victims - lower caste
men, the landless poor, the exploited workers, the illiterate simple­
tons and helpless women. Power is seen as all-pervasive, omni­
potent and undifferentiated while its victims are always already
meek, beaten and homogeneous in their suffering. Thus we have
landlords who try to grab peasants' land (Vivasayee (1967)), rural
rich who wield whips on farmhands (Yenga Veetu Pillai (1965)),
moneylenders who exploit the poor (Padakotti (1964)), industtial­
ists who dismiss workers at their whim (Thozhilali (1964)), avari­
cious men who desire others' property (Mukar11Si [1966)), city
slickers who leave poor rural girls pregnant (Theier Thiruvizha
(1968)), casteists who do not allow their lower caste servants to
enter their houses (Nadodi [1966)), married men who desire other
women (Vivasayee [1967)), etc.
The conflict between these superordinate oppressors and MGR
as a subaltern, and its resolution form the core of his films. MGR,
in the course of the conflict, appropriates several signs of authority
of those who dominate. In a semi-feudal social formation whc;re
a wide specttum of everyday practices like speech, dress, body
language and food are semiologically differentiated into signs of
authority and deference, this .appropriation of signs of authority
by a subaltern is significant.20 Let us take up three such signs which
20 For a general discussion on this, with illustr.ition fro1n peasant insurgencies
in colonial India, see: Ranajit Guha, FJmrmtary Asperts ofPtllSlmt lnsurgmcy
in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), chapter 2.
On this semiological differentiation of everyday practices into signs of
authority and deference note what Brenda E.F.Beclc, Pt11s1111t Society in Kllnh
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1972), p. 155, writes
' ... Food passes between so1ne groups but not between others, and guests
of a given community are invited to sit on the porch of some honies but in
the courtyard of others, Ranking i s also implied in the form of address used
between groups, and by subtle body gestures that accompany conversation.
For exa1nple a ,nan of one community may cover his mouth when speaking,
or. stoop slightly and look at the ground, while another from a caste that
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repeatedly and prominently appear in MGR films. They are: (a)
the authorityto dispense justice and exercise violence; (b) access
to education; and (c) access to women.
(a) He fights oppression as an individual - though belonging
to a subaltern class. As Sivathamby put it, 'The world of conflict
exists as a world centred around the hero and his personal eman­
cipation �bolizes the emancipation from the social evil
depicted.'2 The odds he has to face and overcome in his struggle
against injustice are insurmountable for ordinary mortals; but he
brings humanly impossible situations under control and establishes
justice.
MGR's role as an individual adjudicator, unfolds itself with
particular emphasis on the stunt sequences that are present in any
MGR film. These sequences are an articulated expression of his
struggle against oppression: an unarmed MGR fights an armed
claims superiority to the first may stand erect, fold his arms on his chest, and
look straight ahead. Adjustment io clothing can also serve as indicators of
status. Women generally draw the end of their sari over both shoulders when
in the presence of superiors. Men, similarly, lower their long s.kirt like vesti
. . . so as to cover their calves when they wish to indicate deference.' Tiie
widesp�d prev:alence of such feudal semioticity in Tamil Nadu has been
established in several studies (Shastri Ramachandran and K. Manoharan,
Agriculturlll u,brn,rrn in T11111il Nlldu [Delhi: Lolcayan Reports and Papers 6,
1981]; J.H.B. Den Buden, 'Social Stratification as Expressed through Lan­
guage: A Case Study of South Indian Village', Contribution tJJ Indian Soriology
[NS], vol. 13, no. 1, January-June 1979; Anthony Good, 'A Symbolic Type
and Its Transformation: The Case of South Indian Ponlcal', Contributions to
lndiAnSo<iology, vol. 17, no. 2,July-December 1983, pp. 232-33; Uma Ramas­
wamy, Work, Union mu/ C01nmunity: JndunrilllM1111 in &iutb lndu, [New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1983) ..PP· 104, 108; Chandrasekara V, Naidu, St,,,u
Asptm ofAgro-E.vnmnic Trtmsjurm,,tion in Ttm,il N11du - A CtUt Study of
&ulthinulplllti-11111 Vil'4gt, Working Paper No. 86 [Madras: Madras Insti�
of Development Studies, 1988), pp. 119-20 and E. Muthaiah, 'Nalliravu
Chadangugal - Samuga Panpattu Manithdayiyal Paarvai', Ar11ichi, January
1989 [in Tamil)). Several news reports have also brought out this fact. (For
eumple see:],mior Viklltlffl, 25 September 1985, 23 October 1985, 21 M ay
1986, 23 November 1988 and 3 May 1989.) Again, this is true not only among
the Hindus as ably shown by Poomam M.X. Demel, C11stt Ditcrimin4tion
11gmut Cbristums of&bediJed Castt Origin 1J1itbin Christian Cummimitia: A
Study of T'fVO Villllgrs in T11111il N11du, Chidambaram, 1988 (unpublished
M.Phil. thesis submitted to the Annamalai University) in his study of the
relationship between Vanniar Christians and Harijan Christians.
21 Kartigesu Siv:athamby, Tllmil Films, p. 41.
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adversary single-handedly or engages in fighting the landlord's
hirelings. For instance in Maadapura (1962) MGR with a fractured
arm in sling fights with a mafia chief. Also, in quite a nwnber of
ftlms, MGR demonstrates his skills in the extremely popular rural
martial art of siiambam. These fast-moving sequences are so popu­
lar that MGR fans can recount effortlessly how many of them
there are in different films and provide graphic details of them.
Everytime a new MGR film is released, film magazines carry
letters from MGR's fans expressing their admiration of MGR's
fighting skills.22
It is not just that MGR fights exploitation and oppression but
he is always invincible in his struggle. He can only win and he
wins with remarkable ease. He can bend crowbars and maul fero­
cious tigers with bare hands. In fact, MGR's invincibility has
become a byword in popular consciousness and MGR himself has
acquired cultic power. For example in Mana/ Kayiro, a non-MGR
starrer, it is significant that a cowardly character, inspired by MGR
appearing with a whip in his hand in the poster of a hit ftlm of
yester years (Enga Veett, Pillaz) is suddenly transformed and beats
up and defeats the villain.23
MGR's role as a subaltern hero fighting for justice reveals two·
aspects: First, MGR appropriates to himself the right to dispense
justice. Second, he appropriates the right to emplol physical
violence. Both are in real life monopolies of the elite.2
(b) The second sign of authority of the superordinate classes
which MGR appropriates on the screen is education/literacy. In
Padakotti (1964) MGR is the only literate fisherman in the whole
fishing hamlet. In Thazhampoo (1965) he is the first postgraduate
22 The comments in these letters run as follows: 'MGR's fight from the
rickshaw is wonderful', 'MGR who fights from the rickshaw is indeed an
youth', 'MGR rotates like a top and fights. No actor in the world can fight
like him' (see, Cinema l<Adir, March 1970 and August 1971).
23 Stephen Samuel, Film ll1Jd Politics m Tamil Nadu, pp. 2 7 23.
24 It would be interesting to note here what E.J. Hobsbawn, BJmdits (Har­
mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 3 5 writes about social bandits: 'These
are the men who establish their right to be respected against all comers,
including other peasants, by standing up and fighting - and in so doing
automatically usurp the social role of their "better" who, as in the classic
medieval ranking systetn, have the monopoly of fighting. They may be th e
toughs, who advertise their toughness by their swagger, their carrying of
anns, sticks or clubs, even when peasants are not supposed to go armed, by
the casual and ralcish CO!!rume and manner which symbolize toughness.'
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in the family of an ordinary plantation worker. In 1'hozhilali (1964),
MGR, a manual worker, spends endless nights reading and earns
a degree. In Pana Thottanz (1963) and Naan Yean Piranthaen (1972),
he pledges his house to acquire literacy. In Petra/than Pillaiya
(1966), MGR, a honest tramp, adopts an abandoned child and
yows to give him English medium, education!
In MGR films the hero's use of literacy as a weapan ofstruggle
against oppressian is often contrasted with its use as a weapon of
oppression in the hands of the elite. In Padakotti (1964), the villain
who is a rich fish trader forces the poor and illiterate fishermen to
put their thwnb impressions on promissory notes, keeping them
ignorant of their contents. But MGR, the only literate fisherman
in the hamlet appears on the scene, reveals what is written in the
promissory notes and saves the illiterate from the manipulations of
the trad�r. In Yenga Veett, Pillai (1965), MGR, a literate worker,
exposes the landlord's plan to grab other people's property through
fake documents. Thus literacy, hitherto a privilege of the elite, now
becomes an instrument of subversion in the hands of a subaltern
hero, a challenge to education as a sign of authority.
(c) The third sign of authority which MGR appropriates on the
screen relates to women. In a n1ale-dominated society where the
landlords could easily rape peasant girls and have concubines as a
status symbol, access to and control over women's bodies is a sign
of authority. Here, control over men of subaltern classes is exer­
cised inter alia, by emphasizing their inability to defend their
women from being molested and raped. MGR deftes this norm.
In his ftlms, he starts off as a poor 1nan hut ends up marrying a
rich woman or as a lower caste man 1narrying an upper caste
wo1nan. If a powerful villain comes in his way, the poor MGR
invariably succeeds. In Mattukara Ve/an (1970) he marries the
daughter of a lawyer who earlier throws him out of his house for
being a poor cowherd. The pattern repeats in Thazhampoo (I 965),
Peria ldathu Penn (1963), Yenga Veett, Pillai (1965) and Pana Thot­
t11111 (1963). In Nadadi (1966) and N11T11 Nadu (l 969), a lower caste
MGR marries an upper caste wo1nan. In ftlms like Pa//andu Vazhga
(197 5),Ayirathil 0,1,van (1965), Mahadevi (1957), Theier Thin,viz­
ha (I 968) and Padakotti (1964) MGR 1narries the desired girl after
intense struggle against powerful villains.
It is significant that in MGR ftlms, the upper class/caste women
always desiiea lower class/caste MGR. In this sense, MGR seems
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to grant women the 'freedom' to fall in love and get married
despite class/caste difference. This 'subversion' of norms granted
a certain notional freedom to women and at the saane ti.tne asserted
the virility/valour of men and subaltern classes.
These three instances are not the only ones where MGR ap­
propriates the signs of authority. In subtler and surer ways, he
likewise uses other signs of authority such as dress, body language,
etc. When the rest of the poor submit to the rich with folded
hands, MGR confronts them, standing erect, with arms akimbo.
Unlike others, he refuses to tie the towel around his waist, which
is a sign of deference, but instead ties it around his head. And
MGR was well aware of the significance of such a presentation.
In his words:
It is not enough if you are a good man. You must create an image
that you are a good man. Every man must have an image. Take Nagi
Reddy or S.S. Vasan or myself. Each of us has a distinct image. The
image is what immediately strikes you when you see a person or hear
his name. You put forward an image of yourself if you want to get
anywhere.25
Where and how does this screen image of MGR fit into the
pre-existing cultural presuppositions or common sense of the sub­
altern classes in Tamil Nadu? It is in the heroic ballads which are
a dynamic element of subaltern common sense in Tamil Nadu
that one may look for answers.
IV
The border area between Tiruchi and South Arcot districts is a
country of dense cashew forests. Sometime in the recent past, in
certain villages in this area, there existed a degrading custom that
every woman has to spend her marital night with the village
Nattanmai or the headman. This custom was put an end to when
KodukoorArumugam beheaded threeNattanmais. Kodukoor Aru­
mugam is still a hero of the poor in the region, celebrated in folk
songs.26
25 N. Krishnaswamy, 'From Hero to Mesiah ... Step by Step', lndilm&prm,
i1adras, 9 January 1988.
26Jtmiur ViJ:11um, 9 September 1987. Though the report does not give details,
it is only evident that .the women thus degraded should have belonged to
poorer households/lower castes.
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The Political Process: Dominance 379
Throughout the Tamil countryside, there are such folk heroes.
To name a few: Muthupattan, Chinnanadan, Chinnathambi,
Jambulingam and Madurai Veeran. They are remembered from
generation to generation through popular heroic ballads.
Chinnathambi is a Ch�kkiliar (an untouchable leather worker).
Lowly Chinnathambi accepted the local king's offer of a reward
for venturing into the forests to kill wild boars which were de­
predating peasants' crops. He valour launched him on a successful
career which was traditionally denied to Chakkiliars. He became
the commander of the garrison guarding the king's fort at Thiruk­
kurunkuti. The jealous upper caste Maravas, who were the tradi­
tional commanders of the garrison, murdered him. But the people
from among whom Chinnathambi rose to power did not allow
him to die; they immortalized him in ballads which are in circula­
tion in Tirunelveli district. 27
The ballad on Chinnanadan also belongs toTirunelveli district.
Chinnanadan alias Kumaraswamy married his two-year old cousin
when he was eighteen. But he fell in love with a lower caste girl,
Ayyamkutty, and refused to accept his cousin as wife. Though he
had to forgo his family property, he did not flinch from his resolve.
While he was murdered by his own kin, his wife and Ayyamkutty
committed suicide. The cult of Chinnanadan is alive in four vil­
lages and there are shrines dedicated to him around the small town
of Eral inTirunelveli district.28
Madurai Veeran ballad and cult are very popular especially in
northernTamil Nadu. Madurai Veeran, like Chinnathambi, was
a Chakkiliar who eloped with King Bommanna's daughter and
defeated his army single-handedly and with much valour. His
spreading fame earned him the admiration of the king ofTiruchi
and he worked for him combating the upper caste Kallar bandits.
He recklessly flirted with women of the royal household and
finally managed to carry away the kjng's sweetheart, VeJlaiammal.
An incorrigible adventurer and violator of sexual and caste norms,
Madurai Veeran was finaJly quartered by the king of Tiruchi.29
It is not only that he is remembered in ballads and through several
hundred shrines dedicated to him, but his pictures decorate the
toddy and arrack shops in Madurai and Ramanathapuram districts.
27 V. Vanamamalai, /11ttrprtt11tirms of Tamil Folk Crrations (Triv-andrum:
Dravidian Linguistic Association, 1981), pp. 161-3.
28 Ibid, pp. 160-1.
29 Ibid.
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380 State and Politics in India
The last of the ballad that I would cite is that of Muthupattan,
a rebellious Brahman. After discarding his sacred thread and
removing his tuft, he skinned carcasses, ate beef and drank liquor
- all these in order to marry two Chakkiliar · girls, Timmakka
and Pommakka. This Brahman-turned dalit protected the cattle
of his father-in-law from marauding bandits backed by local
landlords.He was finally murdered by the bandits by deceit.30
.Near Papanasam dam, there is a temple dedicated to him. And
there are such other revered heroes like Kathavarayan and Kou­
thalamadan.31
The common characteristics of these tales of love and valour
are only too evident. In the words of Vanamamalai: 32
All the heroes ... are l o wcaste
men who protect crops (Chinna­
tha1nbi), protect the cattle (Muthupattan), protect the rights of the
lower caste women (Hanuma, Kouthalamadan, Jambulingam), chal­
lenge sexual caste norms (Muthupattan, Chinnanadan) challenge the
privilege of the higher caste groups and demand equal rights for the
lower caste men with talent and skill (Chennanna and Lak:shmanna). 33
The analysis of the heroic ballads so far when read together with
the points made about the celluloid image of MGR in the previous
section, would show that there is remarkable correlation between
MGR on the screen and heroes of the ballads. However, the
relationship between the themes of MGR films and ballads is not
only one of unity, but of divergence as well.This divergence in the
themes demonstrates how MGR &ltns have appropriated the bal­
lads and reconstituted them. This divergence is important to see
the differences in the ideological content of the films and ballads.
V
For at least two reasons the heroic ballads constitute a progressive
element/good sense in the ambiguous and contradictory mosaic
30 Ibid., pp. 15 5-8.
31 Stuart H. Blackburn, 'The Folk Hero and Class Interest in Tamil Heroic
Ballads', Asian Folklore Studies, vol.37, no. 1, 1978.
32 V . Vanamamalai, Interprttatitm.r ofT11111iJ Polle Crtatiims, pp. 172-3.
33 The same conclusion has been arrived at by other folkJore scholars like
Stuart H. Blackburn, 'The Folk Hero' and Tey Loordu, 'K:ithai Padalga lin
Iyalbugal', in S.V. Subrn·manian (ed.), Ta111il Nattupp11ra !ya/ Ayyu (Madras:
International Institute of Tamil Studies, I 979) (in Tamil).
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of the common sense of subaltern classes. First, in a social milieu
where common people's life is disrupted by landlord-instigated
adventures like crop destruction, denial of irrigation water, dis­
pensation of arbitrary justice, �nd raping of peasant girls, the
people will naturally aspire towards a condition of stability in life
processes. But if people aspire for adventures, these are adventures
carried out on account of their own free will to achieve what they
consider to be just.34 Thus the people's aspiration that can be read
in the popularity of heroic ballads is an aspiration to use their free
will to get justice done.
Second, Madurai Veeran, Muthupattan, Chinnanadan and
others, in their deaths affirm their essential humanity and this
defiance of established norms and vindication of a common hu­
manity have endeared them to subaltern classes ever since.
The ballad-like MGR films are bereft of this progressive con­
tent. At this point, one should reme1nber that cinema, especially
the Tamil cinema in question here, follows a linear narrative
sequence with the beginning rising to a climax and dovetailing to
a neat finish. In these closed narratives, contradictions are rather
ironed out than being allowe� to intensify leading to a rupture of
the narrative. In MGR films the closure is such that a neat solution
is offered for the injustice within the moral economy of the system
itself. In other words, the subaltern protagonist in the film, i.e.
MGR, establishes what is considered to be just within the system
and thus reaffirms the system itself. It is a world of transformed
exploiters with untransformed property and power relations. In
Yenga Veetu Pillai (l965) and in Vivasayee (1967), the cruel land­
lords become 'good' landlords. In Ayirathil Oruvan {1965) the
pirate king who oppresses the poor undergoes a change of heart,
but remains a king. In Nadodi (1966), the rich casteist finally gives
his daughter in marriage to MGR who is a poor man and of lower
caste origin.
The moral economy of the system is reaffirmed through a
different mode in films where MGR acts as an elite hero. Here
he often plays the role of a renouncer: in Naan Anaiyittal (1966),
MGR constructs hundreds of houses on his land and asks the poor
to occupy the houses and coloniz.e the land. In Nadodi {1966), he
34 See Antonio Gramsci, Stltaumsfrom Cultural Wrirmgr(London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1985), pp. 3 72-4 for an elaboration of this argument.
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382 State and Politia in India
gives away his plantation to the workers. In Ithaya .Kani (197'5), he
divides the profit equally between himself and workers. The ex­
amples can be multiplied. Here
an appeal to the idea of sacrifice was really an appeal to the power
that flowed from inequality. In order to be able to 1nalce sacrifices
one needs to po�ss; he who did not possess could not sacrifice. The
glory of the renouncer belonged to the "possessor"; to tallc of sacrifice
was to taJlc of possession, and hence of power. 35
Thus the glory in these films is to the 'possessor' and not to the
dispossessed, unlike in ballads.36
This transformation of the folk hero of the ballads into a
non-problematic hero on the screen who seeks justice within the
moral economy of the system is a reconstitution of the former
hero to serve elite interests.37 This reconstitution is possible as the
common sense of the subaltern classes is -largely contaminated by
the sediments of elite ideologies. For instance there are folk songs
in rural Tamil Nadu which adulate the 'good' landlords. 38 But this
is not all. The subaltern classes give assent to the reconstituted
narrative since, as far as they are concerned, fragments of their
reality are presented in these narratives. Besides the speedy and
effective dispensation of justice and redressal of afflictions allow a
3S Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Trade Unions in a Hierarchical Culture: The Jute
Workers of CaJcum, 1920-50', in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subt,Jtn-n Studies,
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), vol. m.
36 For a n example of how this category of renouncer was used by the Indian
National Congress to mobilize people during the nationalist struggle, see,
David Hardiman, The Cuming of tbt Devi: Adivasi Anmion in Westtna lndu
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 169-70.
37 The effons to change the radical content of ballads is a regular process.
In this regard, Vanamamalai, lnttrprtt11tions of Tmnil Folk Crt11tions, p. 187
cites an important instance. In the recent recitals of Muthupattan ballad, rus
wives are narrated as Brahman girl's brought up by a Chal<lciliar. Unlike in
the original ballad, they are not Chaldciliar girls. On inquiry it was found that
Muthupavalai of Kallidaikurichi who sings the ballad was pressurized by
upper caste Vellalars and Brahmans to change the ballad. In the same way,
there are puranic insertions in ballads which portray lower caste Madurai
Veeran and Kathavarayan as Brahmans (Simon Blackburn, 'The Folk Hero',
pp. 140-3). Here one must bear in 1nind that ballads are, essentially,oral
narratives that stand to be transformed over periods of time, often reflecting
the reconstituted social milieu. Thus they are open-ended and capable of
infinite reinte.rpret2tions.
38 Vanamamalai, lnt�rprr:utions o[Ttrmil Folk Creations, p. 10 I and Aru Alagap­
pan, N11ttuppar11 Padlllg11/-Tbirfl1UJ'll11, (Madras, 1973) (in Tamil).
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The Political Process: Dominm,ce 383
measure of vicarious pleasures to creep into their otherwise im­
poverished lives.
VI
In the previous section we have noted the thematic divergence
between ballads and MGR films and the ideological content of
this divergence. The question is how MGR, whose presentation
on the screen is ideologically regressive, could e1nerge as a hero
for the whole of the Tamil-speaking area, while the heroes of the
ballads could not.
Two things have to be borne in mind here: one, the process by
which the localized folk heroes have been reconstituted as pan­
Tamil heroes through the mediation of MGR, the actor figure.
Two, the selective appropriation of follc traditions that has care­
fully distilled away the defiance and the bravado of folk heroes to
project a non-subaltern figure as the quintessential Tamil hero.
The first was made possible through the technology of filmic form
itself and through the political lineage granted to MGR by party
support - both of which helped the emergence of the first all­
Tamil hero. The second, can be seen in the alternate kind of hero,
promoted by Tamil Nadu's political elite.
A stark example of the second type of heroes in Tamil Nadu
would be that ofVeerapandya Kattabomman. Kattabomman was
a feudal chieftain of Panchalamkurichi in southern Ta1nil Nadu
who fought the British in his own interest and was eventually
executed by them at Kayattaru on 17 October I799. The elite in
Tamil Nadu have made this non-subaltern a hero of the whole
Tamil-speaking area. Sivaji Ganesan erected a memorial for him
in Kayattaru in l970;l9 the then DMK government renovated the
ruins of his mud fort at Panchalamkurichi at a cost of seven lakh
rupees in 1974.40 Every year a Kattabomman festival is organized
at Kayattaru with state patronage, and during the festival various
forms of folk art depicting Kattabomman's life are performed.41
39 Cinnru Klldir, August 1970, pp. 70-3.
40 M. Karunanidhi,Nmch,Jiku Needhi, vol. II: Trnmu1galPathipag11111 (Madras,
1987) (in Tamil) pp. 421-3.
41 Note that ABVP and RSS observe Kattabomman's death anniversary every
year (see, M111111V11r Sakti, l November 1988, p. 14).
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An extremely popular film on the life of Kattabomman was made
in Tamil with Sivaji Ganesan in the lead role.42
Now let us turn to the first type of hero - i.e. MGR in the
Tamil context. Unlike the folk heroes who are disadvantaged not
to reach a wide audience, MGR had access to the medium of
cinema. In dealing with the role of cinema in projecting a par­
ticular presentation of MGR and its effectiveness in reaching a
wide audience, one has to analyse two aspects: (a) social context
of cinema as a medium compared to other forms of performance
and (b) the popularity of cinema as a medium in Tamil Nadu.
Cinema as a medium is relatively 'democratic'; cinema tickets
being comparatively cheap, it is possible even for the poor to
watch a film once in a way. Moreover, the seating arrangement
within any cinema hall is not according to one's social status, but
according to whether one can afford a ticket or not This is
important because in witnessing shows of performing arts in rural
Tamil Nadu, the order of seating of patrons is done hierarchically
depending on social position. 'The cinema hall was the first
performance centre in which all the Tamils sat under the same
roof. The basis of the seating is not on the hierarchic position
of the patron but essentially on his purchasing power'.4
These two factors -the affordability of witnessing a spectacle
on the screen and cinema hall as 'social equalizer' - made film
an extremely popular entertainment for the subaltern classes. The
popularity of the medium can be gauged from the fact that most
of the village monographs brought out by the Census of India,
1961 record watching films as the only entertainment of the rural
people in Tamil Nadu. It is indeed a thin line that divides enter­
tainment from ritual and various kinds of social festivities. In fact,
watching MGR films has become almost a ritual in itself. One can
witness crowds gathered to watch MGR films, burning camphor
before huge cut-outs of him, distributing water to the populace
- as one would before a deity during temple festivals.
In addition, the proliferation of cinema halls in Tamil Nadu is
extensive. In the whole of India, next to Andhra Pradesh, Tamil
Nadu has the largest number of cinema halls. On 31 March 1986,
Tamil Nadu had a total of 2153 cinema halls out of which 820 are
42 The film bagged the best actor award in the Afro-Asian Film Festival held
at Cairo in 1960.
43 Kartigesu Sivathamby, T(1111il Films, pp. 18-19.
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temporary halls.44 The temporary cinema halls which are located
in rural and semi-urban areas, are usually 'touring talkies' that are
shifted from one place to another. The price of the ticket is very
nominal. The 'touring talkies' are almost exclusively visited by the
rural and semi-urban poor, while the rich, given their social status,
go to the nearby town to watch films in proper cinemas.
This means that throughout Tamil Nadu, people have access
to cinema halls and cinema is a very popular medium among the
people. While heroic ballads can circulate only within a limited
locality due to elite hostility and non-availability of such an elite­
controlled medium like cinema, films could present MGR to a
wide audience throughout the state. MGR could thus emerge as
a hero of the Tamil-speaking area as a whole.
VII
At least one important question remains: How did the subaltern
classes fail to differentiate the screen image of MGR from MGR
in real life? One of the reasons could be the large-scale circulation
of a constructed imllginary biography of MGR that projectS his real
life as not being different from his life on screen. Political platforms,
newspapers, pamphlets, films, calendars and party posters were
used with remarkable skill in constructing this biography. The
process of this biography-construction could be the subject of a full
length essay and I shall cite only some stark examples here to
illustrate this process.
MGR's early life was no doubt a life of misery. When· he was
just two and a half years old, he lost his father. Due to acute poverty,
he had to forgo schooling and join a drama troupe as a child actor.
It took him many years of hardship as a low-paid stage artiste before
he could gain a foothold in films. His modest beginnings and acute
poverty of early days were well-propagated through public
speeches, pamphlets, party newspapers, etc. MGR himself often
referred to his early days of sweat and tears.45 For instance, in an
All India Radio talk on 30June 1982 on the free noon-meal scheme
for school-going children in Tamil Nadu, he said,
This scheme is an outcome of my experience of extreme starvation
44 Scrte_n, 19 December 1986.
4S R . Thandavan, p. 159.
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386 State and Politia in India
at an age when I knew only to cry when I was hungry. But for the
munificence of a woman next door who extended a bowl of rice gruel
to us and saved us from the cruel hands of death, we would have
departed from this world long ago.
The inexpensive biographies of MGR which are sold in village
fairs and urban pavements and bought by the literate poor also
provide graphic details of MGR's poverty.46 Thus MGR is not
only an elite person who tells tales of other peoples' oppression
on the screen but is himself a victim of oppression telling his own
tales and those of similarly placed men and women.
If MGR is a renouncer of wealth in films, he is, as these
constructed biographies would have it, a renouncer of wealth in
real life as well. Even before MGR became Chief Minister of
Tamil Nadu, his munificence was well propagated. Hardgrave.47
.
wntes:
MGR is a symbol of hope for the poor in South India. Without
children, he has adopted the poor as his wards.He is always the first
to give for disaster relief; he supports orphanages and schools. . ..
MGR's generosity is well advertised, for it is the grist of his fume.
When fires had destroyed some Madras hutments, he gave a la.kb of
rupees for relief and announced that the hundredth day of a film then
running would not be celebrated because of the slwn dwellers' s u f ­
ferings.... As one fun puts it, 'He is always there when the huts are
burnt.'
The party organization of DMK had an enormous role in
propagating MGR as a real life renouncer of wealth. DMK leaders,
including its founder and popular leader, late C.N. Annadurai,
repeatedly projected MGR as a giver of wealth to the poor.48
Pro-DMK dailies like Dr11Vida Nadu and Murosoli, and magazines
like Mutharam, celebrated MGR's munificence. A DMK propa­
ganda song used during the 1962 elections ran as follows:
The Palm of Bharatha Kaman
Became pink because of
For example see, Kalaipadam Velan, Nam Yt11n Pir11rnhtn? Pur11tehi
Tb11llziv11r MGR (Madras, undated), p. 26. Jeya Ponmudi, S11thy11 M11inthtm
SadtmJli(Madns: Sri Laxini Pir.isuram, 1988), p. 6. I shall refer to such books
as 'Popular Biographies' in the rest of the chapter.
47 Robert L. Hardgrave Jr., 'When S�rs Displaced the Gods', p. 102.
48 For the collection of speeches by CN. Annadurai on MGR, see:
R. Srinivasa1Purthy (ed.), MGR: Ym ldt,ya Ktmi: Anna (Madras: Sathya Thai
Patipagam, 1984).
46
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His munificence.
But the whole body of Dravida Kaman
Became pink because of
His munificence everyday.49
The Dravida Kaman is of course MGR.
The 'popular biographies' which circulate among the poor,
again, celebrate MGR as a renouncer. One of the events which is
repeatedly mentioned in these biographies is MGR's auctioning
off of a sword made of 110 sovereigns of gold to raise war funds
during the 1962 lnde>-China war. Often it is rhetorically posed,
'who will have the large heart to donate 110 sovereigns of gold'.
People do have an obsessional attachment to gold and such nar­
ration effectively poses MGR as a renouncer of wealth.so If MGR
gave up his acting career and became the Chief Minister, it is
because, according to these biographies, he was a renouncer:
If he produces four or five films, he can earn crores of rupees. He
lcnows this very well.
Then why is he not acting in films? If he decides to act in films, no
law can prevent him....
Do you know what is the reason for his giving up film acting?
He wants to serve the people of Tamil Nadu.
He wants to wipe out their problems....51
MGR's supposed invincibility was, time and again, constructed
by various kinds of media so much so that he was conferred a
degree of immortality in real life as on the screen. He was pres­
ented as one who was thrice-born: The fust one was when he was
actually born like the rest of us; the second birth was when he
survived an attempt made on his life by his fihn world associate
and popular Dravida Kazhagam propagandist, M.R.Radha, on 12
January 1967, and his third birth was when he recovered beyond
expectations from his debilitating illness in 1984. In fact, unlike
most of the DMK leaders, MGR's birthday was never celebrated
and his age was a secret. After 196 7, his followers were encouraged
to celebrate 13 January, the day on which MGR recovered from
bullet injuries, as his birthday. In his autobiography, he writes: 'As
49 M11'4i Mur11m, 6July
1987.
SO See, for example: Vetri &lv11rMGR Vem, V
11r11lllru, (Madras: Sri Thanalax­
mi Puthaga Nilayam, undated), p. 35. Kalaipadam Velan, N111111 Ytim Pirm­
thm? Pur11tchi Tb11/lliv11r MGR (Madras, undated), p. 48.
SI Kalaipadam Velan, N111111 Yt1111 Pir1111thm?, p. 63.
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388 St11tt and Poiitia in India
you all know, I was shot at on 12 January 1967. People think that
I died on that day and I was reborn on the next day. That is why
they greet me on that day.'s2
Thus through particular constructions of MGR's biography,
bis films were portrayed as an imitation of his real ·life. One can
cite several examples of the effectiveness of this obliteration of
distance between the cinematic and the real. G.K. Ramaswamy in
bis study on MGR fan clubs notes:
The members are not able to go beyond the impressions created
through the films and MGR's character is believed to be what is
depicted in his films. This is clear fro1n the fact that when the
followers were asked to substantiate their contention that MGR is
good or a principled man, they invariably cited instances from his
films.SJ
The most resounding proof of how people do not differentiate
MGR, the image and MGR, the real, can be had from what his
followers did during his serious illness in 1984. In 0/hi Vilakku
(1970), MGR's hundredth film, MGR carries on a losing battle
with death. A widow to whom MGR has provided asylum sings
to god, with inconsolable sorrow, to spare MGR's life and take
away hers instead. This very song echoed throughout Tamil Nadu
when MGR was ailing. If god replied to this song of grief in the
film by sparing MGR's life, it could happen in real life also! He
survived. When he finally died, it was so sudden that the people
were not given an option!
VIII
The significance of MGR as a phenomenon and the elite who
supported him, thus, lies in the recognition that the mosaic of
common sense or the untheorized philosophy of the subaltern
classes is an important terrain of political intervention. By using
this site of struggle, which is often ignored by other political forces
and by reconstituting a progressive element of the common sense
for reactionary politics, MGR could join the ranks of Madurai
S2 M.G. Ramachandran, 'Naan Yean Pirnnthen', part
45,Arwnd., Vik11um, 14
February 197 l.
S J G.K. Ra1naswamy, 'The MGR Manrams: A Study in Political Sociology'
(Wlpublished M.Phil thesis, University of Bangalore, 1979), p. 5S.
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The Political Process: Dominance 389
Veeran, Muthupattan and Kathavarayan and supersede them.
MGR's success rests, to a large extent, on this.
Unfortunately, the various shades of political dissent in Tamil
Nadu, ranging from the DMK to the CPI-ML, dismissively
characterize MGR as a 'lunatic' and a 'clown'. It is ti.me these
self-jlssured 'philosophers' sit up and take a few lessons from
'lunatic:$' and 'clowns' - of course, not to practise MGR-style
reactionary politics but to appropriate its 'other'.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
11
When Local Riots are Not
Merely Local: Bringing the
State Back in, Bijnor
1988-1992*
Amrita Basu
I
n October 1990 the town of Bijnor, in western Uttar Pradesh,
experienced a major Hindu-Muslim riot. Official sources es­
timate that 87 people were killed; unofficial estimates range from
198 to 300.1 This was among the most serious of the many riots
that took place in the wake of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP)
campaign to build a temple at the supposed birthplace of Lord
• A number of people offered valwtble comments on an earlier version of this
chapter. They include Zoya Hasan, Roger Jeffrey, Marie Kesselman, Arul
Kohli, Austin Sarat, and members of the CFIASoudi Asia Seminar at Harvard
University. I am also grateful for research and writing support from the Karl
Lowenstein fellowship and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foun­
dation.
I Estimates of casualties vary widely. Official estimates, according to Raj
Kumar, the current district magistrate are: 87 persons lcilled, 127 injured (of
which 42 were identified as serious injuries and 85 as simple injuries) and
1038 cases of arson and looting. Kumar noted that the previous district
magistrate had reported only 36 people killed; after he had been replaced,
many more people had come forward and filed reports. The district magistrate
had no record of how these figures broke down by religious commwtity.
However all unofficial estimates, including those of militant Hindu na­
tionalists, report much higher casualties, mostly among Muslims. Nanclaji,
the pracharak of the RSS in Bijnor, estimates that 14 Hindus and 184 Muslims
wer,: lcilled. According to J. B.L. Shanna, a reporter for the D11milt J11grn
who toured Bijnor right after the riots, 75 Hindus and 225 Muslims were
lcilled and 400-500 people were injured.
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Ram in Ayodhya. Other violent events took place in the cities of
Ahmedabad and Baroda in Gujarat, and in Shamili and Gorakhpur
in UP; tensions were also reported in Allahabad, Faizabad and
Bareilly.
Bijnor 1988-1991
Over the course of several visits to Bijnor, I asked caste Hindus and
Muslims from a range of social backgrounds for an account of the
riot ofOctober-November 1990. Although their accounts differed
in many important respects, the people with whom I spoke sharply
demarcated the years before 1988 in which communal violence had
been absent, from the succeeding years. However, they considered
the riots of 30 October-3 November a continuation and culmina­
tion of a series of other events. The four incidents that they
repeatedly mentioned were: the municipal council elections in
November 1988, a conflict over a plot of land in town on 25 August
1990, the banning of the so-called ram jyotis from Bijnor on 4
October ancl a rally organized by the Chief Minister on 9 October.
Nagar Palika Elections
Many Hindu men and women in Bijnor traced Hindu-Muslim
tensions back to the 1988 nagarpa/ilea (municipal council) elections
in which a man named Zafar Khan was elected chair.2 The.two
principal contenders for the position were Sandip Lal and Zafar
Khan. Some powerful groups like the BJP combine and the Bijnor
Times news �aper, backed Lal and characterized Khan as a com­
munal man. The evidence cited was that two years earlier, during
2 In nwnerous cities and towns I found that BJP members had infiltrated
municipal councils in order to strengthen their urban base of supfort. Such
an approach parallels the CPl(M)'s strategy of gaining contro over the
panchayats to strenl!'then its base in rural West Bengal.
I have used pseuclonyms to describe all the people I interviewed with the
exception of public officials whose actions are subject to open scrutiny.
3 The tenn BJP combine refers to the nexus of organizations which are
affiliated with the BJP, most prominently the 'parent organization', the
Rashttiya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the religious organization, the
Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). S1naUer affiliated groups include the Durga
Vahini (the women's wing ofthe VHP), the Bajrang Dal (the VHP's youth
wing), and the · BJ P's mahila morcha (women's organization). The RSS
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392 State and Politics in India
the Meerut riots, he had collected relief funds for the Muslim
victims. His detractors further accused Khan of souring Hindu­
Muslim relations by bringing baclc the bodies of Muslims who had
been killed in a riot in a neighbouring town so they could be buried
in Bijnor.4 As we will see below, Bijnor's demographic composition
- of 48 per cent Muslims and 42 per cent caste Hindus and 8 per
cent untouchables - posed an important challenge to Hindu
organizations.5
However, Lal represented a poor alternative to Khan. Lal was
relatively uneducated; he was reputed to be personally corrupt after the riots even BJP members admitted that he and his sons
had acquired vast new wardrobes as a result of having looted
Muslim shops. Politically, he was an opportunist. Between 1957,
when he became active jn politics, until 1992, he shifted party
allegiances seven times: from the Jan Sangh, to Congress-I, to the
Swatantra Party, back to Congress, to the Lok Dal, Janata Dal
and fmally to the Janata Dal-S (JDS, the Chandra Shekhar faction).
Many of these shifts were prompted by his desire to achieve elected.
office. By the spring of 1991 the J anata Dal had expelled him from
the party. A local intelligence officer explained that in his anger
that the JDS had not nominated him to run in the 1991 legislative
assembly elections, Lal had engaged in the production of ex­
plosives which he planned to detonate in the home of the JDS
candidate. However, the bomb self-detonated in Lal's own home.
By contrast, Khan was a highly educated, sophisticated lawyer. In
1988 he appeared to be the obvious alternative, particularly to
educated, middle class people. Muslims also coalesced around
Khan; according to the BJP, electoral turnout was much greater
among Muslims than caste Hindus.
The competition which surrounded the nagar palika election
exercises tight conttol over these organizations and ensures that they work
closely together.
4 When I questioned Zafar Khan about the incident he admitted .he had
brought back the dead bodies but denied that his actions were communal.
How could his action he considered communal, he asked? The families of
the young men who had been killed were friends and neighbours. Khan felt
he owed it to the community to grace the dead with a proper burial.
S The proportion of Muslims in Bijnor district is larger than in any other
rural district in UP. In the district as a whole, the scheduled caste and Muslim
population outnumbers caste Hindus; this has especially significant conse­
quences for parliamentary and legislative assembly elections.
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continued in its aftermath. The nagarpalika consisted of 24 mem­
bers, I 8 of whom were elected, 11 among them Muslim and 7
Hindus. Unlike the Muslims, many of the Hindu members were
political activists. Ram Gopal was the local Shiv Sena president,
Raghuvir Singh, the local Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP, translated
the World Hindu Organization) president, and Tilakwala, the
head of the Bajrang Dal. There were six other nagarpalika mem­
bers: three of them were nominated to reserved seats for won1en
and scheduled castes; the other three included an MLA, MP and
the chair. A core group of elected members plotted to undermine
Khan through allegations that he was misusing public funds and
political office to serve partisan (Muslim) ends and discriminate
against caste Hindus. As we shall see, their strategy was to use any
means possible to gain majority support.
Singh, a lawyer by profession and Khan's keen competitor,
provided his explanation of how Khan had communalized Bijnor
politics by misusing his office. He alleged that Khan had expended
80 per cent of the nagar palika's funds on sanitation and street
lighting in Muslim neighbourhoods and only 20 per cent of these
funds in Hindu neighbourhoods. Of the land under the nagar
palika's control, the allegation continued, Khan had allotted 95
per cent of it to Muslims and only 5 per cent to caste Hindus
(the latter in the form of a 'dharamsala' for scheduled castes).
Furthermore Khan had sought to ensure that Muslims would
monopolize political office. Although customarily if the chair of
the nagarpaJilta was a Muslim, a Hindu was appointed as the vice
chair, Khan had appointed Mustafa Aziz a Muslim, the vice chair.
Moreover with one exception, Khan had appointed Muslims to
all the other key posts on the 1111gt,rpalilta. Through these actions,
Singh claimed, Khan was trying to build his future as a Muslim
leader.
Singh reported that over the past three years, Khan's Hindu
opponents had done whatever they could to remove him from
office. Singh had already gained the support of two of Khan's allies
on the nagar paiika: Nikhil Sharma, a scheduled caste, and Ashraf
Hasan, a Muslim. However, even this skilful move had not borne
fruit for the Chief Minister had intervened to protect Khan by
changing the nominated 111Jgar paiika members, for reasons that
will be explained below. The opposition in tum brought charges
of undue interference against the former Chief Minister. It. also
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394 StiJU 'lfflil'P.o/itics in India
brought charges against the district magistrate for refusing to hear
its,.no-oonfidence motion. Given the possibility that the Chief
Minister would continue to protect Khan, the opposition had
simultaneously. pursued another strategy. It had coordinated with
to ensure
Deepak:Mehra,
• editor and proprietor-of the Bijnor Times,
that.the newspaper would discredit Khan and pave the Wllf for his
def.eat i n th� 1993 ruzgarpalua elections: (Although DeepakMehra
was,not a BJP supporter his ambitions to chair the nag11r palilta
made h'im an ally of Hindu groups in ·this struggle.)
The pages of the Bijnor Tima were filled �th stories which
tlenig:rated Khan and sought to·build up · an ·alternative Muslim
leadership which locally dominant caste Hindus could control.
One example concerned aMuslim ·woman who-was raped by police
constables while in the cmtody of the:superintendent of police.
The·Bijnor Tna provii:Jcd: extensive coverage of the incident in
order to discredit Khan fo., his inaction. While aqcusing Khan of
concern for the• most vulnerable
bcimg an opportunist who had'
members of his.
community, it 'praised. two· members of the
Muslim, communi·ty, AshrafHasan·and Niaz Zaidi, fcir organizing
a . demonstration in protest>. (Coverage of rape and other atrocities·
agaiilst ,women, particularly Hindu women; were otherwise COD-''
spicuously absent from the Bifaar' Times.)
· Zafar :JChan responded .to:thesecharges in some detail over
the course of several· lengthy interviews. First he challenged the
notion ·that he ha·d demonstrated Hvouritism to Muslim wards.
Khan showed me a letter whiah he had sent to the eighteen wad
members who·were elected to the· nagar palaa, authorizing them
to ov.eriee sanitation: fun ·their particular wards; He, then showed
me.led gers they had.initiated, consenting·to undertake this work.
Another ledger contained a page which was divided into colwnns:
on the first column was a list containing the names of the ward
members and on an adjoining column the names of two sanitation
workers for each ward. A third column was left blank for ward
supervisors to sign every month, thereby certifying that the work
had been performed satisfactorily. Another led ger contained sim­
ilar. information about street lighting. Khan showed me copies of
the.ledgers between 1989 and 1991; Hindu members in wards 2,
6, 7; 11, 12, 17 and 18 had all reguJarly signed them. Khan had
sent copies of these documents to the district magistrate for
safe-keeping.
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Khan also clarified the process whereby officers were selected
to serve on the nagar paJiluls subcommittees. He explained that
the entire council, and not the chair alone, appointed the vice
chair. Khan had favoured a Hindu vice chairman and proposed
Pyare Lal for the post. He proposed that Radhika Seth, who had
been nominated to fill the seat reserved for a woman, should serve
as assistant vice chair. However, by that time his opponents had
won Pyare Lal over to their side so he declined the post Radhika
Seth also refused the appointment. In what he later regarded as
poor judgment, Khan then entrusted the council to decide upon
another vice chair. He continued,
The meeting that day went on for a long time and we ·were unable
to decide on a vice chair before we adjourned. So we scheduled
another meeting. The day before this meeting was to be held I
dropped in at Pyare Lal's house. I found my opponents assembled
there. They had met without me and made Wajid Khan the vice chair
and Sharif Mujahid [both Muslims] the assistant vice chair in order
t o discredit me and divide my supporters.
Khan did not let the matter rest there. He appealed to the
administration to nullify the decision on the grounds that he had
been deliberately excluded from the meeting. Khan consulted with
the Commissioner in Morababad who declared that the resolu­
tions which the meeting had passed had no legal standing. In
addition to the allocation of posts, these resolutions had reduced
the chairman's fiscal and administrative powers. Khan also con­
sulted with the district government counsel who told him - in a
letter that Khan showed m e -that members had to be told about
nagarpaiilta meetings at least three days before they were held. If
the chair was absent, he had to appoint a presiding officer who
would attend the meeting in his place. In the absence of such
measures, meetings of even a majority of nagar palika members
would have no legal standing.
However in the long run, Khan could not win the battle over
political appointments. K.L. Joshi, Shanna and Seth, who had
earlier supported him, had turned against him. The other four
Hindu members of the nagar palika had long been his bitter
opponents and appointing one of them as vice chair would have
been suicidal. The press widely publicized the fact that Zafar
Khan's two principal lieutenants were both Muslims.
The allegation that Khan had allocated other influential posts
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396 St11te 1111d Politia in India
on the 1111g11r paJiluz to Muslims proved equally unfounded. Every
year the chair appoints 1111g11r paliluz members to serve as subcom­
mittee conveyors to oversee octroi, construction, lighting, taxa­
tion, health and sanitation, and five subcommittees on cultural
and recreational activities. Khan showed me official letters of
appointment that he had drafted. In the f1ISt year that h e was
chair, five of the posts were occupied by Muslims and another
five by caste Hindus. In his second year as chair, although the
persons within particular posts rotated, caste Hindus and Muslims
were represented in equal numbers. Indeed, caste Hindus were
over-represented for 11 of the 18 elected 1111g11r palilta members
were Muslims and only 7 were caste Hindus. Moreover, by the
second year, Khan knowingly appointed caste Hindus who were
attempting to undermine him.6
Khan reported that on two different occasions his opponents
had brought no-confidence motions against him by enlisting the
support of a majority of the twenty-four municipal council mem­
bers. Included among those who signed the resolution was Kanshi
Ram, an ex-officio member of the Bijnor nag11rpalika and a voting
member of the recently elected municipal legislative council. The
district magistrate agreed to the nagarpalika's request that Kanshi
Ram be allowed to vote at its meetings. With the support of
thirteen nagarpalika members, the opposition was confident that
the state administration would support its no-confidence motion
against Khan.
When Khan learned of this ploy, he amassed evidence to prove
that Kanshi Ram was an ex-officio member who did not have
voting rights on the Bijnor nagar palika. But even without Kanshi
6Zafar Khan provided me following account of the allocation of posts in _the
first and second years, respectively on the municipal council when he was
chairman. I have noted members' religious identities in parentheses.
Nikhil Shanna (Hindu): Octroi chairman: Mustafa Aziz (Muslim)
L.K. Chaudhury (Hindu): health and sanitation: Surendra Bishnoy (Hindu)
Ralcesbwar Pal (Hindu): convenor of music conference: Rakeshwar Pal
Ram Gopal (Hindu): k:avi samelan: S.L. Rajagopal (Hindu)
Praveen Kashyap (Hindu): k:avali:
Avdesh Khanna (Hindu): wrestling: same
Zaidi (Muslim): mushera: same
Sharif Ahmad (Muslim): tu: Rafiudin (Muslim)
Rais Ahmad (Muslim): lighting:.Niaz Ahmad (Muslim)
Niaz Ahmad (Muslim): oonstruction: Sh:irifAhmad (Muslim)
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The Political Process: Drmsinance 397
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Ram's support, his opponents would have been disqualified be­
cause they had excluded Khan from voting. By including Khan
and excluding Ram, support for the no-confidence motion fell
from 13 to 11. To prevent the recurrence of such an incident,
Khan then informed Mulayam Singh Yadav who changed the
three nominated municipal council members.
In June 1990 Khan's opponents tried once again to disqualify
him by winning over the newly nominated members. They suc­
ceeded in gaining the support of Chandra Shamber, a scheduled
caste. However, Khan recounte(I, he was able to get the nom­
inated members disqualified by showing that they had missed
three consecutive meetings. Once again the Chief Minister
changed the nominated members and foiled the no-confidence
motion. At this stage, following upon its unsuccessful attempts it
would seem, the opposition's strategy shifted from institutions to
the streets.
Disputed Plot ofLand
The most serious Hindu-Muslim conflict that Bijnor had ex­
perienced until that point erupted on 25 August l990. Singh, Goel
and Khan's other opponents, now joined by other members of
Hindu organizations, alleged that Khan's anti-Hindu sentiment
had most clearly emerged around a dispute concerning a vacant
plot of land in a Hindu locality in the centre of town. Nandaji of
the RSS claimed that the land belonged to a Hindu man who was
living in Lucknow. When he had failed to pay his taxes on time
the 1111gar palika had threatened to take over his land, whereupon
he submitted the amount he owed. However, Khan cancelled his
lease and allotted the land to aMuslim. Singh added a sensational
twist to the story: the newMuslim tenant had planned to open a
butcher shop where beef would be sold. In the meanwhile, accord­
ing to this accoWlt, the nag11r paJika had denied caste Hindus'
request to build a dharamsala on the land.
Rummaging through nagar palika files, Khan pulled out its
property registry. On it was marked the plot of land (measuring
roughly 41 by 55 and 39 by 26 -feet) adjoining a mosqu�. The
req>rds indicated that the municipal council did, in fact, own this
land. It had leased out a small parcel of it to Hari Das from
Lucknow but had regained possession when he had ceased to pay
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
398 State and Politia in India
his rent. Khan then showed me letters he had received from
various groups and individuals, who were seeking to 'rent nagar
palika land in different parts of town. Among these WU a request
from a group of scheduled castes for land on which build a
dharamsala in another part of town, to which the nagar alika had
agreed. Overall, most of the requests that the municipa\ council
had authorized came from caste Hindus rather than from Muslims.
In the case of the disputed land, the nagarpalika.only received one
request for rental and that was from a Muslitn; as mandated by
the rules governing the council, a majority of its members had
approved his lease. Had the chairman tried to usurp the council's
powers by making a unilateral decision, his detractors would cer­
tainly have publicized his actions. Nowhere in the files was there
a letter from caste Hindus requesting authorization to build a
dharamsala on this land.
Early on the morning of August 2 5 a small group of caste
Hindus encroached upon the disputed plot of land and declared
their intention of constructing a temple upon it. Among them
were militant young activists of the Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena,
joined by older RSS and BJP members. 'Tilakwala', the local head
of the Bajrang Dal who acquired his name from the enormous
tilak (red mark) that covered most of his forehead, provided a vivid
account of the events. Tilakwala's excitement was almost uncon­
tainable as he recounted the incident.
We got up early in the morning and set off for the land bearing murtis
of Vishnu and Lakshmi.When we arrived there we installed our idols,
lit our incense and began doing Ramayana paath on the land. Later
in the day we began constructing the mandir wall.
Some time later Muslims came to the mosque for prayers. My
friends were afraid of a fight but most of us held our ground. In fact
we began to read our Ramayana paath even louder.
By 8 pm the crowd at the spot had grown. Many im portant caste
Hindus of the town joined us. All the time rumours kept circulating
that the Muslims were gathering anns and planning to attack us. We
had come heavily armed ourselves. I heard the Musluns shouting
threatening slogans. A little while later the Muslims began throwing
stones at us. At midnight the SDM, ADM and the police arrived at
the spot. The Muslims began stoning then1 and hit a policeman [sic];
the police were enraged and opened fire. They killed two Muslims.
Then the police took our murtis and destroyed the wall we had been
building.
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The Political Process: Duminance 399
The next day the police took us to the kotwal's office to bring
charges against us but Hindu lawyers went on strike to protest our
arrests. The Hindu shopkeepers joined the protest by closing down
their shops for two days. Outside the kotwal's office caste Hindus
organized a steady stream of people to court arrest: first women and
children, then men. The women told the officers: 'If you won't allow
us to have our mandir we will do Ramayana paath right here' and
they did puja right outside the kotwal's office. Kalyan Singh [the
current ChiefMinister of UP) came from Lucknow to encourage us.
Nandaji, an RSS pracharak, provided additional details:
What infuriated the Muslims were rumours that caste Hindus had
captured their mosque. That was what made them collect stones and
arm themselves. But we felt secure because we were in a Hindu locality
and we thought we could gain co1nmunity support. In the morning
we must have been twenty-five people, but by evening there were
hundreds there with us. Even the policemen who had arrested ten
Shiv Sena activists secretly told u s that they were on our side.
Khan reponed that he wanted to avoid confrontation at all
costs. He refused to accompany a group of Muslims to the spot
on the 25th afternoon. The group then approached Niaz Zaidi,
a more aggressive Muslim leader, who consented. However, other
than some stone throwing, Muslims' response to Hindu aggres­
sion was extremely mild. Khan said that the administration had
asked him whether he believed that the Hindu activists who were
being held in custody should be released. He consented for fear
that relations between the two communities would otherwise
detetjorate further. The administration released the activists and
took temporary control of the disputed land. To many caste
Hindus this in itself was a victory, for the Muslim to whom the
land had been allotted was thereby deprived of it.
Several aspects of the struggle over leadership of the nagar
palika and the land are significant. Although Khan persuasively
demonstrated that the charges his Hindu opponents had brought
against him were unfoundec:1, they succeeded in depicting him
as a communal leader who discriminated against caste Hindus.
Furthermore, the nagar palika, which has limited responsibilities
for municipal governance, became publicly associated with the
hated state. The next step was for Hindu groups to transfer this
hatred of Khan on to a more powerful leader, Mulayam Singh
Yadav.
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400 State 11nd Politics in India
B1111ning ofRmn Jyotis
The second incident to which people widely referred took place
on 4 October. The VHP had planned a 'asthi kalasb' ceremony
which entailed organizing a group of'ramjyotis' (devotees of Ram)
to wind their way through the state with burning torches in hand,
seeking to keep alive the tire it had ignited in Ayodhya. The Chief
Minister had declared that the ramjyotis' entry would be banned,
and the barrage over the Ganges river, which provided the only
entry point into town, had been cordoned off. The ram jyotis
arrived at the river banks the day before they had announced, on
5 October. What subsequently transpired was told to me by Rani
Bansal, from the Durga Vahini, Ritu Chandra of the BJP mahila
morcha and Rukha, a rasbtra sevilta. In Rani Bansal's words:
I was stunned when I learned that the ramjyotis stood at the barricades,
unable to enter Bijnor. I dropped everything and ran from one house
to the next calling women to join us. Women poured out of their
houses with babies in their arms. Some of them had gathered arms,
stones, sticks, whatever they could tind to defend themselves. I did
not even have time to put on my chappals - I marched bare feet for
12 kilometres. Along the way we kept calling people out to join us.
By the time we reached the bridge there must have been 10,000 of
us. We did not need any leaders to tell us what to do. With our bare
hands we tore down the barricades and threw them into the river.
The police just stood by and watched. No one tried to stop us.
Bansal's romanticized recollection of the event, and her highly
inflated account of the numbers of people in attendance, convey
some sense of the empowerment women experienced in defying
the state that day.7 More reliable accounts suggest that 1200-1500
people gathered together. I n what became a victory procession,
the group marched back to town with the ramjyotis. Ashok Varma
reported that he had asked the district magistrate how he planned
to stop the procession and was told:'There is nothing we can do.
There are far too many people here for us to stop them.'
This entire episode was largely organized by women for whom
this provided an important opportunity to dramatically break with
their traditional roles by engaging in direct action. Yet their ac­
tions had the blessings of their husbands and fathers for the VHP
7 This particular event was a C.ltalyst for women's activism in Bijnor which
then continued into the_period of the riot.
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The Political Process: Dominance 40I
had decided to enlist women in this phase of its RamJanmabhoomi
campaign. The incident provided an imponant precedent for wo­
men's subsequent activism, culminating, as we will see below, in
their leading a procession through the Muslim quaners of Bijnor
where violence broke out on 30 October.
Mulayam Singh Yadav's 'Communal Harmony Rally'
The founh incident that people agreed had sparked serious com­
munal tensions was a rally that Mulayam Singh Yadav held in
Bijnor on 9 October. This was one of a number of 'communal
harmony rallies' that the former Chief Minister had organized
throughout the state. Their purpose, he stated in an interview,
was to assure Muslims that he would prevent the rath yatra from
entering the state and would do everything possible to ensure their
safety. Instead, in grotesquely ironic fashion, the rally itself became
the occasion for violence in which 3 people died -2 caste Hindus
and I Muslim - 30 shops were looted and burned to the ground,
and 95 people were arrested.8 Although everyone I spoke to
regarded the rally as a critical marker of the further deterioration
of Hindu-Muslim relations, they disagreed as to why this was the
case.
Mulayam Singh's sharpest critics, all of whom were caste Hin­
dus, contended that he had encouragedMuslims to arm themselves
and use force when necessary in self-defence. He had succeeded
in whipping up Muslims' passions and fears to the point that those
in attendance filled their trucks with stones as they left the rally
to return home. Some people felt that Muslims had come to the
rally anticipating a fight. A few miles outside Bijnor, Muslims
attacked the car of Janardhan Agarwal, the district president of
the VHP. Agarwal described the incident as follows:
I was on my way to Kiratpur with my family when I saw a mob heading
towards Bijnor. When they saw my car they surrounded it. They
threw stones at the car and damaged it. They would have killed me
if some caste Hindus had not come to my rescue. Meanwhile rumo�
circulated that I had been killed. Naturally there was some reaction.
Others, both Muslim and Hindu, denied that Mulayam Singh's
B In a grossly exaggerated estimate, the Bijnqr Tm,es reported thi)t 200 people
had been killed as a result of the rally. Bijnqr Timrs, 11 October 1990.
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402 Statt and Politics in India
speech had been inflammatory. They claimed, as a report in the
Pioneer newspaper corroborated, that he had blamed the Ram
Janmabhoomi campaign for riots and accused Hindu organiza­
tions of distributing arms but urged Muslims not to retaliate.9
However, these observers felt that the sheer sight of thousands
of Muslims from outside the district had frightened caste Hindus
and provoked a backlash. In this vein, Ashok Varma recalled that
he had opposed the rally in his editorials and predicted that it
would ferment :l riot. Khan reported that although the BSP o f
which he was a member had supported the rally, he had opposed
it and refused to attend.
Sandip Lal, the principal local organizer of the event, denied
that Mulayam's speech had been inflammatory. What was pro­
vocative, he asked, about stating that he would not allow the
mosque in Ayodhya to be destroyed? What was provocative about
stating that he would abide by a court verdict on the status of
Babri masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi? What was provocative about
ensuring Muslims' safety? Lal held the BJP combine responsible
for the violence. While declaring a boycott of the rally, the com­
bine had arranged for ten truckloads of caste Hindus to come to
Bijnor from surrounding towns on 9 October. These people had
fanned out to line all the major access points to Bijnor from where
they tried to stop those who were headed to Bijnor from attending
the rally. Once Mulayam Singh began speaking, Hindu groups
returned to the town and set fire to effigies of Mulayam Singh.
When the rally was over, caste Hindus once again lined the main
roads and attackedMuslims as they returned home.
Several other people confirmed Lal's tale of the BJP combine's
complicity. Among the most revealing was Tilakwala, who boasted
of the bonfires that the Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena had lit to burn
the Chief Minister's effigy. 'We shouted slogans calling Mulayam
Singh a donkey', he laughed, 'and we carved his name on a donkey's
back'! According to local intelligence sources, the BJP combine had
been making plaps to obstructMulayam Singh's rally weeks earlier.
The combine also planned the incident involving Agarwal and then
circulated rumours that Agarwal had been kidnapped and killed,
although in fact he had never been physically attacked.
Like the land dispute, the 9 October rally further polarized
9
The Pionerr, 13 October 1990.
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The Political Process: Dominance 403
Hindu and Muslim communities. Shopkeepers, a key constituency
of the BJP, once again closed their shops for four days to protest
the rally. The police arrested runety-five people, all of whom
were caste Hindus. The Shiv Sena and its affiliates orgaruzed
demonstrations outside the administrative headquarters in Bijnor,
protesting the anti-Hindu character of the government, and ques­
tioning why it had only arrested caste Hindus. The government
caved in under this pressure and dropped all charges against those
who had been arrested for vandalism, looting and violence; sup­
port for Hindu organizations continued to grow.
The Riot
The BJP-VHP combine had arranged for thousands of so-called
kar sevaks (voluntary workers) to converge on Ayodhya from all
over the country on 30 October. Acting on instructions from the
Chief Minister, the admirustration arrested 63 7 of these young
men from various points surrounding Bijnor, at Balwali, Hardwar,
and the barrage near the Ganges.10 Since there was no room for
them in the local jail, it detained them in a girls' intermediate
college in Bijnor. The next day, on the 26th, the kar sevaks
launched a protest against 'prison conditions', demanding better
food, sanitation, and other ameruties. That evening they at­
tempted to escape. The police intervened and opened fire. Al­
though K.L. Joshi, a Dainik Jagran reporter, visited the jail and
found that the police had only killed one person, it was rumoured
that the police were gunning down kar sevaks by the dozens. On
27 and 28 October shopk.eepers closed down their shops with
allegations that the government had treated the kar sevaks in­
humanly. The following day several hundred people marched
from the Arya Samaj manair to the collector's office where it
engaged in a )ail bharo antic/an' (fill the jails campaign of volun­
tarily courting arrest). Hindu women from Bijnor were at the
forefront of this protest.
Many observers derued that kar .revaks had been mistreated
while in confinement. Asbok Vanna reported that he had in­
spected the girl's intermediary college and found that the kar
sevaks were better housed, fed and clothed than the large majority
of prisoners. Furthermore, the term imprisonment was highly
10
The Bijm,r Tmus, 21 October 1990, p. 4 .
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404 Statt and Politia in India
misleading, for security at the girls' college was minimal; the kar
· sevaks would usually spend the evenings in town fermenting
disturbances and return to their lodgings at night.
By 30 October, the day when the kar revaks reached Ayodhya,
tensions dramatically escalated. The VHP had organized a large
group of women to assemble outside the Arya Samaj mandir to
do 'lrirtan' that morning. They were joined by the hundreds of
kar sevaks who had been detained en route to Ayodhya. The
atmosphere was extremely tense. Around 11 am, a police officer
who had been listening to the radio rushed to the mandir with
news he claimed he had heard over the BBC: the kar sevaks had
reached Ayodhya, placed their flag on the mosque and started to
demolish it. Within an hour, a victory procession of several
hundred people marched through Bijnor shouting slogans about
their determination to build a temple in Ayodhya. The procession
marched towards Ghanta Ghar, a clock tower in the centre of
town where the road forked, dividing the Muslim and Hindu
quarters. The group disagreed over which way to proceed. The
more militant members prevailed and the procession marched
through the Muslim section.
Muslim families had congregated on their rooftops from which
they watched the procession with horror and fear. The Hindu
demonstrators shouted ugly, provocative slogans like: 'Musalmlum
kth do hi statm, Pakistan aur kabristan' (There are two places where
Muslims belong: Pakistan and the graveyard) and 'Ttlligakt Dab11r
ka, masjid girao babar ka' (by applying Dabar [a brand name] oil
eradicate Babar's mosque), 'Hindu bachcha ram ka, Musamum
h11ram ka' (Hindus are the children of God; Muslims are bastards).
At some point along the way Muslims began to pelt stones at the
processionists who responded in kind.
Then one of the most tragic and inflammatory incidents of that
day took place. Mushir Ahmed, a Muslim d0ctor who had a clinic
in the centre of town, saw that Hindu women who were at the
forefront of the procession were getting caught in the crossfire
and provided them shelter. The account that follows was provided
by Fazlul Hyder, a Muslim veterinarian.
Ahmed was the most humane and secular-uunded person. He had
kept his clinic open that day because he felt that people should resist
chauvinistic attempts to divide the two conununities. That was also
why he took those woJl}en into his clinic. But a rumour spread that
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The Political ProctSS: Drmtinanct 405
Ahmed had abducted Hindu women; some angry Hindu men broke
into the clinic and murdered him.
When Muslims carried Ahmed's body back to moh11Jla Charshiri
where he had lived, people went out of their minds with grief and
rage. A group of Muslims marched to Barwan [the neighbouring
Hindu mohaJ/a] and attacked the caste Hindus there. Once the viol­
ence started, some other Musli111s joined in because they wanted to
settle scores with a Hindu from Barwan who had been having a love
affair with a Muslim's wife. Several hours later the Muslims had killed
twelve people in Barwan.
By the evening the administration had declared a curfew and all
the Muslims went home. But RSS and VHP men roamed through
the town spreading rumours that Muslims in Barwan were raping,
kidnapping and murdering Hindu women.
Significantly, Muslim violence in Barwan was directed at OBCs,
a relatively vulnerable, subordinate group among caste Hindus.
Upper caste Hindus later capitalized on this by plyingjhuggir with
both relief as well as BJP propaganda. Riots in Bijnor as in other
parts of the country galvanized caste Hindus to overcome caste
divisions and confront their common enemy.
The period of Muslim violence against caste Hindus was short­
lived. Sharma from the DainikJagran reported that whereas Mus­
lims observed the curfew, for they were afraid that they would be
pulverized if they stepped out, caste Hindus roamed freely through
the town, looting Muslim shops. What the administration termed
a curfew in fact trapped Muslims within their walled quarters while
giving caste Hindus free reign.
From 31 October to 3 November, violence took on a wholly
different character: it was no longer perpetrated by one com­
ml,lllity against the other but rather b y the state against Muslims.
During this phase, as elaborated in greater detail below, district
administrators, the police and above all the Provincial Armed
Constabulary (PAC) accompanied by local Hindu residents, traclc­
e d down Muslim shops which they looted and destroyed. They
searched out Muslim men and women, tortured them and shon
them at point-blank range.
It would do great injustice to the riot victims to shift too
quickly to questions of causality without first providing a fuller
account of the violence itself. As Gyan Pandey aptly notes, the
liberal media often assumes that even if one community has
suffered disproportionately more, objectivity necessitates equal
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406 State 1111d Politics in India
time to both communities.11 To rectify the distortions associated
with such attempts at evenhandedness, the account below mainly
relies upon Muslims' testimony. I visited the mohallas which had
experienced the most severe violence, and spoke to informants I
met there who then put me in touch with others. All of the people
I describe below are ordinary men and women; none of them
were political leaders or activists.
The fll'St Muslim mohal/a I visited was Charshiri, a site of some
of the most severe violence. I 1net Abdul Shamim sitting on the
stoop of his house and asked him to describe the violence that he
had personally witnessed. He recounted:
The PAC arrived here on JI October around 2.30 pm. Some boys
from the Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena were identifying houses. One of
the PAC members was holding a gatore [an instrument used to spray
pesticides in the fields] which was filled with petrol. Th ey systemati­
cally went fro1n one house to the next, spraying each house with
petrol and setting it on fire.
There is a masjid across the street [he points it out to me] where
about nine Muslims had taken shelter. I saw the PAC march in, drag
people on to the streets, and beat them severely. None ofthese people
tried to escape. But the [SOM] subdivisional magistrate ordered the
PAC to open fue and shoot seven people.Two men who had been
beaten severely still lay there. The PAC poured kerosene over them
and burned them. The PAC did not w;ant to shoot them because their
bodies were covered with bruises so instead the officers burned them
to death.
Shamim took me to visit his friend Abdul Sarkar who lived a
few homes away from him to introduce me to some of the. people
who had personally experienced the violence. We found the old
man sitting in his bed which I was told he rarely left. Tears
streamed down his face as he spoke:
They killed both of my sons, 1ny two only sons. I am a widower and
now I have no one in this world ... they killed both of my sons....
The SOM and sub-inspector ofpolice came to my house and searched
for arms. We have no arms but I had collected 40,000 rupees for my
older boy's wedding; he was to be married on 5 June. That was all
11 Another example of the way in which scholarly biases against Muslims are
manifest is found in the tendency for works which purport to address the
problem of communalisn1 in India to confine their attention to Muslim
comn1unalism as ifHindu comrnunalism was non-existent.
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The Political /lrocess: Dominance 407
the ,noney I had. They took the n1oney, then they hauled my sons
out of the house and shot them.
When the sub-inspector who had been searching my house leaned
over, his identification card fell out of his pocket. I kept it and made
copies of it. Then I wrote to the Prime Minister and enclosed a
photocopy of the ID. I said 'This officer .has killed my son. I saw hi.m
shoot my son with my own eyes. What sort of a government do you
run?' The government then awarded n1e Rs 1,00,000 in compensa­
tion.
Shamim gave me a copy of the ID card bearing a picture of a
clean-cut young man who must have been about the same age as
his own son. For several weeks I carried it around with me and
often stare4 at the photograph as if it would give me some ex­
planation for these senseless murders. When I would imagine to
myself that I had surely heard the worst because I could not bear
to hear more, thea: were always 1nore people, often with strikingly
similar stories to tell. Within the same 11UJhal/a Jived a widower
named Habib Afshar.
When we heard that the PAC was invading Muslim ho1nes and killing
innocent people, we wanted to run away. But where could we go? A
cmfew was in force and the police had been given shoot on sight
orders - which meant that any Muslim roaming the streets would
be at great risk. So we could not run away. We were trapped in our.
houses like prisoners.
On the 31st afternoon, the PAC accompanied by Ra,npal and
Jaspal, two local [Hindu) boys, broke into 1ny house. They looted my
house and took all my savings. Then they dragged my son out of the
house and tied his feet to a 'bail gari' (ox drawn cart) and took off.
Once we could safely leave the house we searched everywhere amidst
the st.cnch of decaying corpses. I could not give up hope until I found
his body . near the railway crossing. He was my only son. He lived
. with me. He supported me. He was 1ny reason to live.
I visited Qasaban, a small, isolated, extremely poor Muslim
mahalla, accompanied this time by a few Muslims whom I had met
in other moha/Jas. Since I wanted to meet some Muslim women,
they had brought me to the home of a widow who had suffered
greatly. In or<ler to reach her house we had to pass through a long,
narrow cobblestone path lined on either side by high walls. We
went to a small house where I met a woman who must have been
in her late thirties and her 5-year old daughter. The child sat by
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408 St11te and Politia in India
my side looking haunted and sometimes terrified. Her mother
spoke:
It happened on the 31st afternoon. Four PAC men entered my house
and said they had learned we were storing anns so they had come to
search my house. Then they made all of us leave the house except
for my 14-year old girl. They spent the whole night in the house
violating my daughter. [She breaks into uncontrollable sobs.] I was
outside, banging on the door, throwing my whole body against the
door, trying to get in. The next day they brought her out to the
courtyard and locked me inside. They doused her with kerosene and
burned her to hide all proof of rape and murder.
My home has become like a prison now. I wanted to run away but
I bad no place to go and for days I lay awake all night afraid that th ey
would come back and attack us.
The Bij,wr Times reported that four mosques {but no temples)
had been destroyed. I spoke with the imam ofNi,trani masjid, near
B24 mohalla Charshiri, a frail and saintly man, whose home ad­
joined the mosque. He reported:
On the 31st afternoon the PAC barged into my house. My daughters
Tasleen, Nusrat and Rani were with me. They stripped Rani and took
her to the other room. Then the SP [superintendent of police) and
SDM entered the house. I thought that they would stop the PAC but
instead the SP was shouting orders: 'shoot, shoot, shoot!!' They
seemed to have lost control of their senses. The SDM shouted at us
'we have destroyed your chairman Zafar Khan and now we will
destroy all your imams' [religious leaders)! After they had left my
house I watched them from my courtyard. Twenty-one Muslims were
killed in this moba/Ja and five arc missing; I saw the PAC kill three
of them with my own eyes. And I saw that the SDM wa. s goading
them on.
Most of the violence was confined to urban Bijnor but there
were reports of some violence in the surrounding villages, above
all in ·Rampur Baldi which was about a mile east of Bijnor. Al­
though judged by the extent of construction, Baldi bore greater
resemblance to an urban area than a village, most of its residents
depended on agriculture for a livelihood. Patterns of agricultural
production were quite typical of western UP as a whole. Baldi
contains 256 houses of which 106 are Muslim and 150 Hindu.
According to one account by Sharma from the Dainik Jagran, the
damage done included: 17 people killed, 15 missing, and 620
•
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The Political Process: Domintma 409
injured; 21 houses were burned and 66 looted; 223 people were
arrested. Sharma reported that although he did not have precise
figu res of the damage incurred by each community, Muslims had
suffered much more than caste Hindus.
My first interview was with a Muslim family who owned about
6 acres of land and a spacious pucca house surrounded by a large
courtyard. According to a woman in her late thirties:
There is no history of communal violence here - not at all. When
we heard news of the tensions in Bijnor we wanted to leave but our
Hindu neighbours persuaded us to stay on. They said, 'Whatever
happens in Bijnor, you know you are safe here.' At the time we
believed them but now we feel that they deceived us.
On the first night hoards of people descended on the village. Most
of them had come from the town. With them were so1ne members
of the PAC. They went to the Hindu homes and asked for help. Our
neighbour Rakesh was helping them.
When the Muslims saw this, most of them ran away. Some went
to Bakshwala [a neighbouring village]; so1ne hid in the fields. We left
at that time too. Those who remained here were killed. After about
four days, the police came and found us and escorted us back to our
houses. What a sight we found when we returned.
The woman walked with 1ne through her compound. The
granary had been set on fire and all the stored grain had been
burned; the walls and roof of the granary were charred black. She
then led me to the field where the tube well had been damaged
and the plough dismantled. Inside her house was a small store­
room which had been ransacked and all the household valuables
- money, jewellery, and equipment-had been looted. The most
lasting damage was to their agricultural equipment. Since they
could not afford to repair it, work on the land had virtually come
to a standstill. The theft of the m9ney they had been accumulating
meant postponing their son's marriage. I asked this woman how
she explained what had happened. She responded:
It all began on 9 October with Mulayam Singh's rally. We did not
attend; in fact we were opposed to it but it made people very angry.
Then there has been this whole Ram Jan1nabhoomi issue. Frankly we
don't care whether a mosque or a temple stood there. What does it
matter to us? And it didn't matter much to our neighbours either
until recently. But now they have changed. Now we no longer trust
them and we never can trust them again. Because when the mobs
came here, Hindus became caste Hindus.
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Her comment suggests how the identities of even those Mus­
lims who were indifferent to the Ayodhya dispute were redefined
by it. Once caste Hindus had asswned the role of aggressors,
Muslims inevitably became defined as victims.
Makin g Sense of the Bijnor Riot
One of the central paradoxes in explaining Hindu violence against
Muslims is why caste Hindus, who form the dominant economic
community, should feel threatened by the relatively powerless
Muslim population. Most Muslims in Bijnor are poor; they are
employed as workers in the sugar factory, rickshaw drivers, ar­
tisans, and craftspeople. The past few years have not wimessed
the growth of a Muslim business class; remittances from the Gulf
have not made their way back to Bijnor. If, compared to caste
Hindus, Muslims are economically weak, they are also politically
quiescent. Not even their most hostile Hindu critics claimed that
Muslim fundamentalist organizations had been very ·active in
Bijnor.
There is only one respect in which Muslims dominate over
caste Hindus and that is numerically. The town of Bijnor has a
population of 65,000 of whom 48 per cent are Muslims and 42
per cent caste Hindus; 8 per cent of the Hindu population are
scheduled castes. These statistics have acquired overwhelming
significance in Bijnori politics. Interviews with Hindu men and
women revealed an obsessive concern with the size of the Muslim
population; given larger families among Muslims than caste Hin­
dus, they said, caste Hindus would soon be reduced to an insigni­
ficant minority. The more numerous, the argument continued,
the more aggressive Muslims would become, for it was only their
minority status that had kept Muslims' violent tendencies in check.
Struggles over control of the nagar palik11 mimic struggles over
parliamentary seats at the national level. In the system of vote
bank politics, the critical question is how many seats parties can
claim, not what they plan to do with the power they acquire. As
in the national electoral context, some of the most acrimonious
disputes on the nagar palika centred on the question of how the
sympathies of women and scheduled castes would alter the balance
of power.
In Bijnor, caste Hindus openly enacted their fears by attempting
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to appropriate and transform public spaces. As caste Hindus de­
fiantly marched through the heart of the town, they drove Muslims
off the streets and on to their roofto ps or into their houses, thereby
claiming public spaces as their own. But the demonstrations did
not simply intend to confine Muslims to ever smaller spaces: they
wanted to establish that there were no safe spaces for Muslims,
and certainly none that.they could share with caste Hindus. It is
in this context that the murder of Mushir Ahmed must be seen.
Mushir Ahmed had doubly violated the strictures of Hindu mobs:
he had defied their attempt to keep Muslims in their homes on
30 October, and he had also provided shelter to Hindu women.
The state was also complicit in redefining public spaces as
Hindu. For example according to innumerable sources, when the
administration placed Bijnor under curfew, caste Hindus were able
to secure passes which allowed them to move about freely, whercls
Muslims were trapped inside their homes. Ironically, even the rt1m
jyotis who were being detained in the girls' intermediary college
had more freedom than Muslims to wander through the streets at
night Some of the most serious incidents of violence took place
when PAC and government officials forced their way into Muslim
homes during the curfew period. The message was clear: there
were no safe spaces for Muslims in Bijnor; their alternatives were
either death or departure. The strategy apparently bore fruit: six
months after the riots, many Muslim homes remained boarded
up. Friends and neighbours of the departed reported that they had
either relocated to other parts of town or left permanently.
Caste Hindus' appropriation of what had traditionally .been a
shared public space is significant in several respects. As explored
below, it finds its corollary in the attempt to establish Hindu
electoral supremacy. But to dwell further on the symbolic dimen­
sions of this attempt, in October-November 1992, caste Hindus
appeared to be punishing Muslims for the wrongs they had al­
legedly committed over the centuries.12 One has only to recall
12 One way of understanding the repetition of r.vents, which adds a deeply
disturbing, even haunting, quality to the violence in Bijnor, is by exploring
the manner in which events are linked in temporal sequence through m e t.1 phor and metonymy as Veena Das describes in the case of liindu violence
agai11st Sikhs in 1985. In Das's illustration, Hindus madeSikhs metonymically
imitate the fate of the assassinated Prime Minister.Similarly in Bijnor, Hindus
sought revenge against Mugbal rulers several centuries earlier and demanded
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412 S111te and Politia in lndill
caste Hindus' charge that Muslims feel no loyalty to India; their
true loyalties arc pan Islamic. Why else would they cheer for
Pakistan during cricket matches? Why do they sclJ swcclS in the
streets of Bijnor when Pakistan defeats India? Reall too the fears
Hindu organizations expressed at the growth of Muslim economic
and political influence. As if to rectify these supposed injustices,
the curfew confined Muslims to their homes while allowing ram
jyotis who were supposedly imprisoned to roam freely through
the streets.
The pattern of killings also suggeslS a symbolic resolution of
Hindu fears of Muslims. My interviews with Muslims who had
lost family members shows that the killings were not random: few
women, older men and children had been killed; the major targets
were young men, many of whom were soon to b e married. I n
losing their sons, parenlS were deprived of the principal income
earners in the family and of the possibility of grandchildren. In
several cases families reported that the money, jewels and clothing
that they had been accumulating for their sons' marriages had
been taken. This particular form of looting seems to be designed
to ensure that Muslims will be defecscless in the future.
The rioters were also quite explicit in their attempts to cripple
Muslims across the class spectrum. Muslim rickshaw pullers found
their riclcshaws burnt to ashes, Muslim shopkeepers found their
shops looted and Muslim farmers in Bakli found their agricultural
equipment smashed. Similarly, some of the resentment against
Zafar Khan must have been based on economic resentment, both
at his relative affluence as well as his control over ""gllT JJillika
resources. The caste Hindus who attempted to claim the plot of
land on 25 August probably realized that this was a valuable piece
of real estate.
What then explains the Bijnor riot? In turning to the literature
on communal riots for some guidance, one finds that two ex­
planations stand out. The fust approach argues that communal
violence is of a primordial nature in that it expresses people's
retribution by building a temple a t a site adjoining a mosque. This act in
Bijnor was metaphorically linlced in tum to Hindus' attempts to build a temple
in honour of Ram at Ayodhya. Veena Das, 'Introduction: Communities,
Riots, Survivors-The South Asian Experience', in Veena Das (ed.), Minon
of Violmct: Communitit1, Riots 1111d Surviwn in S1111th Asi4 (Delhi: Oxfurd
University Press, I 990), pp. 26-7.
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The Political Process: Dominance 413
most deep-seated, irrational anxieties and fears. The second ap­
proach depicts communal violence as closely associated with eco­
nomic rivalries.
Neither approach fully explains the Bijnor riots. Participation
in communal violence was to some extent irrational; for example
it contradicted the material interests of shopkeepers, who form an
important part of the BJP's constituency. Even violence that is
employed in a purposeful fashion may become increasingly irra­
tional as it unfolds. However, people usually riot for reasons that
are complex, multifaceted and rational. Furthermore, the primor­
dialist approach ignores the role of external agents in orchestrating
what might appear to be a spontaneous outpouring of primordial
sentiment Both points are illustrated by caste Hindus' fears of
being reduced to an insignificant minority.Judged by the superior
resources and influence that caste Hindus command within the
society, such fears are patently irrational. However, judged by the
BJP's aspiration to dominate electorally in the town of Bijnor,
where Muslims from the 1najority of the population, such fear
become more comprehensible.
Some of the problems with the pri1nordialist perspective are
reflected in the concept of communalism. The term communal
lumps together diverse explanations for prejudice and violence,
which it assumes are related both to one another and to tensions
concerning religious identifications. In Bijnor, the use of the term
communal to describe either Khan or his opponents, obfuscates
the diverse reasons for people's attitudes.Because DeepakMehra,
editor of the Bijnor Times, was one of Khan's major opponents, I
assumed initially that he was sympathetic to the BJP. When I asked
him why a photograph of Karl Marx hung above his desk, he
answered, somewhat defensively, that he was a Marxist. Deepak
Mehra was in fact so critical of the BJP that he said that some
Hindu militants had threatened to burn his office down during
the riots. Deepak Mehra's vendetta against Khan was motivated
by the agreement he had struck with Sandip Lal, I was told by the
editor of the Dainik Jagran. If elected, Lal had agreed to allot
nagar palika land to the Bijnor Times group.
Similarly, Sandip Lal, who was one of Khan's most fervent
opponents, was closely allied with Mulayam Singh Yadav, the
BJP's most important critic. Recall that Lal was one of the
principal organizers of the 9 October rally which was said to have
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contributed to communal tensions in Bijnor. Yet Lal, like Deepalc
Mehra, used the tenn communal to describe Khan for it was the
easiest way to discredit him. Moreover the tenn 'communal' that
they used was inevitably and dangerously vague. Khan was com­
munal because h e was attempting to build up a Muslim vote bank
they alleged, as if he was the first to employ this strategy. But
the term communal also implied that Khan had employed more
dangerous, divisive and potentially violent means of pitting caste
Hindus against Muslims.
Two important points emerge from this analysis: first, the BJP's
growth provided Khan's diverse rivals with a common language
with which to depict him: not simply as an ambitieus and possibly
opportunistic individual but as a Muslim chauvinist who would
damage Hindu interests by furthering his own. Second, the four
events beginning with the nagar plllika rivalries and ending with
the riots are related in the minds of many Bijnoris with whom I
spoke. At the same time it is important for external observers t o
remember that the growth of the BJP lent coherence t o what
might have otherwise remained a discrete set of rivalries.
If on the one hand we must reject an idealized picture of
communal harmony in the past, we must also challenge the seem­
ing timelessness of Hindu images of Muslim villainy. Even the
most bigoted Hindu families reported that they had traditionally
hired Muslim workers as domestic servants; it is unlikely that they
would have done so if they had seriously questioned Muslims'
trustworthiness. This does not mean that tensions between Hindu
and Muslim communities were entirely absent Mohan Ram said
that there were longstanding tensions between Muslims and his
community (scheduled castes) in Raiteen mohalla: Muslims ex­
pected to be greeted with 'salaam' and complained that their
neighbours played loud religious music while th ey were doing
namaz. However, such derisive depictions of Muslims could only
become the source of violent conflict through the BJP's attempts
to construct stably derisive images of Muslims throughout north­
ern· India. Notions of the Muslim man as rapist, Muslim woman
as subjugated, and all Muslims as anti-national, are part of the
standard currency of Hindu communal ideology throughout the
country because the BJP has polarized these conceptions.
As I note below, one of the BJP's greatest achievements has
been to create an aura of spontaneity around its carefully
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orchestrated initiatives. Some of the slogans which caste Hindus
shouted in Bij�or on 30 October were exactly the same as the
slogans in Ayodhya, and during riots in Indore, Jaipur and New
Delhi between October-December 1990. Similarly, although
there is a linguistic tendency to speak of rumours spreading in
the passive tense as if they had spread themselves, there is strong
circumstantial evidence that the BJP combine was in fact respon­
sible for circulating rumours which provoked violence, including
the notion that Zafar Khan had allotted Hindu land to Muslims,
that the VHP presidentJanardhan had been kidnapped and killed
on 9 October, and that Mushir Ahmed had abducted Hindu
women on 30 October.
The circulation of numerous, vicious rumours, also helps explain
why ordinary Hindu 1nen and women would suddenly tum on their
Muslim neighbours. What n1ade these rumours so credible is that
they were often spread by institutions that enjoyed widespread
legitimacy: the press, administration, and political parties. For or­
dinary citizens who relied on these official channels of information,
particularly at a time when everything most precious to them was
at stake, it would make sense to abide by ominous warnings. The
role of rumours, in other words, is critical in dispelling assumptions
o f either prlmordialism or false consciousness on the part of the
ordinary Hindu men and women who silently wimessed or actively
participated in the riots.
Similarly, the local press played a critical role in exacerbating
tensions between Hindu and Muslim communities. The growth
of towns like Bijnor in western UP, in which literacy rates are
relatively high, has created a large market for newspapers. In the
town of Bijnor itself, one Urdu language paper and five Hindi
papers were widely read: Amar Ujala, Bijncr Times, Dainik Jagran,
Chungari, and the Uttar Bharat Timu. The combined circulation
of these newspapers was several lakhs in the Bijnor township. But
even smaller papers like the Bijnor Times and Amar Ujala, which
were restricted to Bijnor proper, had beco1ne very influential
because of detailed coverage of local issues. Nor was their inter­
vention exclusively editorial. Several newspaper proprietors had
become active in local politics: Deepak Mehra, senior editor of
the Bijnor Times and Kashya p of the Uttar Bharat Times, had both
stood for nagar palika elections.
The biases of larger newspapers like Dainik Jagran emerged in
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416 Stlltt and Po/itia in India
their reporting on Ayodhy:a. Indeed, the Press Council of India
censured the Dainik Jagrtm for its biases in this context. Local
papers, of which the Bijnor Times is the most important example,
described events surrounding the Bijnor riot in a highly inflam­
matory fashion. Concerning the Chief Minister's raily, for ex­
ample, the paper reported on 11 October that 100 people had
been killed and injured, thereby inflating the casualties and con­
flating injuries and deaths; that same day the Dainik Jagran re­
ported that only three people had been killed. Similarly, while the
Dainik Jagran of 29 October reported that three kar sroalts had
been injured by bullets and twenty others in a subsequent fight,
the Bijnor Times reported a day later that security forces had
violently attacked and injured 100 kar sroalts. To add pathos to
the account it stated that many of those injured had not even been
bandaged. It quoted some women who had visited these kar sevaks
as commenting that not even the British had acted in such a
repressive fashion.
On 31 October the Bijnor Times offered an account that held
Muslims responsible for the violence. It reported that stones from
rooftops pelted down on a peaceful Hindu procession which then
forced caste Hindus to respond. The report stated: 'It has become
clear that today's rioting was pre-planned. Until the 30th morning
the fight was between the government and majority community;
no one thought that the minority community would get involved'.
As if to remove any ambiguity that might have arisen from this
account, the Bijnor Times featured an article on 1 November
entitled 'Riots Pre-Planned'. The reporrstated that the riots could
not have been spontaneous for it would have been illogical for
people to attack a peaceful procession. It noted that the first shop
to be burned belonged to a Hindu. Moreover, all the violence
emanated from the Muslim moha/Jas.
Compared to the primordialism argument, the economic ap­
proach provides a more plausible explanation for what transpired
in Bijnor. Whereas Muslims hardly engaged in any looting of
Hindu shops, caste Hindus looted Muslirns' goods and burnt their
shops to the ground. Similarly in Bakli, caste Hindus not only
looted Muslims' houses but destroyed their means of production.
In the events preceding the riots, economic rivalries most likely
fuelled Hindu resentment of Muslims. One source of resentment.
against Zafar Khan that transcended party divisions may have
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been his economic standing and his control over nagar paJika
resources.
However, the economic explanation is inadequate, for the BJP
combine orchestrated much of the material damage that was
inflicted upon Muslims. This in tum suggests that for both the
BJP combine and its followers, economic and political motivations
were closely interwoven.
Most of the looting and destruction of Muslim shops took place
between 1 and 5 pro, when the curfew was in effect. Given the
need for curfew passes to leave home during this time, the numbers
involved with this looting must have been relatively small. Fur­
thermore, my intelligence informant reported that Hindu shop­
keepers had emptied their shops by this time. For example the
police had fowid that one affluent Hindu shopkeeper was storing
ninety-two television sets in his home for his friends in anticipation
of the riots.13 The elaborate arrangements associat� with trans­
porting heavy consumer durables out of their shops belies the
notion of a spontaneous riot. It seems more likely that Hindu
shopkeepers took advantage of the riots by looting Muslim shops
than that they provoked the riots in order to engage in looting.
Another excellent example of the close relationship between
the economic and political dimensions of the riots concerns the
arms production in Bijnor. Muslim and Hindu informants re­
ported that arms production had proliferated for several years
preceding the riot. In the villages bordering Moradabad and Bij­
nor, arms production had become a lucrative cottage industry. In
Nagina, Ahmed reported, a gun that normally cost Rs 500 was
selling for twice that price during the riots. Although the in­
dividuals who produced arms and explosives may have been eco­
nomically motivated, the political context enabled them to act.
Ashok Varma reported that he had met the seniormost admini­
strative officials in 1988 and told them they should stop the arms
build up on the part of both commwiities, but they had not heeded
his warnings. Khan, the ADM who been posted to Bijnor after
the riots, said that for the first time in years the administration
had stopped freely issuing licences for gwis. Since taking office it
had brought 125 cases against the manufacturers of illegal arms.
13 Titis officer informed me that many of these Hindus had made significant
amouncs of money from insurance cl:lims on goods which they had hidden
during the riots.
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Thus while many individuals inight have still hoped to profit from
arms manufacturing, political considerations precluded their pur­
suing economic motivations.
The close relationship between the economic and political
dimensions of the riots is best explored by returning to the
question of why Zafar Khan was the object of such virulent hatred.
To the extent that caste Hindus provided any ·one explanation
for the riots, it centred upon his role. Indeed Khan had received
so many death threats that the district magistrate had hired a
full-time bodyguard to protect him. What was most striking was
that Khan was so often accused not only of communalizing the
local administration but also of subsequently instigating violence.
However, nobody questioned the fact that Khan had opposed
and even boycotted Mulayam Singh Yadav's rally. Nobody alleged
that Khan had even been at the site of the violence on 30 October
or in the days that followed. What then made Zafar Khan so
threatening?
I would argue that Khan represented a seriqus threat to Hindu
communal groups by virtue of his position in the nag/ITplllik11. As
different as they appear, antipathy towards the state and a despera­
tion to capture state power may be closely related. Both sentiments
demonstrate an appreciation of the access to life chances that
control over the state yields. Atul Kohli notes,
The 1nore control a governn1ent has over its people's access to life
chances in a society, especially in a society in which alternative routes
to satisfactory livelihood are scarce, the more the everyday struggles
of livelihood take on a political character. Getting one's children
admitted to a school, getting a loan to buy an irrigation pump, getting
a job on a new public-works project, helping a relative g� a job iri
the municipal govern1nent - all of these require the influence of
someone in power.14
As both the struggles over leadership of the nagar p11Jika and
the land demonstrate, the resources which people sought are at
once economic and political, material and symbolic. Khan's rivals
resented his chairpersonship in part because it enabled him t o
allocate valued resources; similarly, the land on which Hindu
groups sought to build a temple was both materially and sym­
bolically valuable. But, as Kohli points out, these conflicts arc
14 Atul Kohli, Dmu,cracy and Piscontent: India's Gnn»mg Crisis ofGwer,u,bility
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 198.
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1'he Political Process: Dominance
419
ultimately political because they are provoked by political parties
and a highly interventionist state. What made Khan especially
threatening was not that he had communalized Bijnor politics, as
his rivals alleged, but the very opposite: by virtue of the diverse
support he enjoyed and continued to cultivate, he prevented the
BJP from gaining caste Hindus' unified support. Recall that Khan
was elected chair of the n11gar paiika with significant H.i,ndu sup­
port. Not surprisingly, his rivals' first move was to try and win
over Khan's scheduled caste and Muslim allies, for, without their
support, caste Hindus could not achieve electoral dominance.
Moreover Khan did not confine his broad-based alliances to the
1111garpaiika. He also sought to cultivate them in the Bahujan Samaj
Party (BSP), a party of scheduled castes, and by forging linb with
the then Chief Minister, Mulayam Singh Yadav. The BSP, a re­
gionally based political party which represented a relatively small
force in national politics, was a major force in the Bijnor political
scene. In 1989 a woman named Mayavati had been elected t o
PjlI'liament from Bijnor. A scheduled caste herself, Mayavati con­
structed her coalition from an alliance of scheduled castes and
Muslims against middle and upper caste Hindus. Intense Hindu
resentment at the nagar paiika's decision to allot scheduled castes
land to build a dharamsala must be viewed in the context of the
recent scheduled caste-Muslim alliance under the BSP's aegis.
In some striking ways, Mayavati's appeals simply inverted those
of the BJP. For example the alliances that she created were based
upon the arithmetic of caste and communal electoral calculations.
Rhetorically her style resembled that of inflammatoryi3JP leaders
in that it was impassioned, exclusionary, and often vulgar. At one
of Mayavati's public meetin gs she coined the slogan, 'Musalman­
Harijan bhai-bhai, yeh Hindu yahan kaiseh aye?' (freely translated:
Muslims and Harijans are brothers, how did the caste Hindus get
here?) In another speech, she described BJP leaders as impotent.
Much of her campaign for the 1990 elections focused on her
determination to prevent the construction of a temple in Ayodhya.
One important explanation for why the BJP found Khan so
threatening was that he was the BSP's most prominent leader in
Bijnor. Khan commented:
What were the real sources of Hindu resentment against me? I had
helped the BSP to forge a powerful scheduled caste/Muslim com­
bination in this area. When Mayavati first won the elections in 198 5
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420 Stilt� 1171d Politia in India
she did not have Muslim backing. But by 1989 she won because of
it This was what caste Hindus resented most. Then during the riot,
in many areas scheduled castes provided protection to Muslims. This
bas been one of the BSP's major achievements.
A further source of Khan's unpopularity was his close relation­
ship with Mulay.am Singh Yadav. Recall that when faced with
harassment by Hindu 1111gar paiika members, Khan simply ap­
pealed to Mulayam Singh Yadav who had the nominated members
replaced.
If Zafar Khan was hated by many caste Hindus in Bijnor,
Mulayam Singh Yadav was despised by virtually all of them.
Mulayam Singh was a Yadav, a member of the so-called other
backward castes (OBCs), a group which had traditionally rejected
the BJP and its predecessor, the Jan Sangh, which were based
among the middle and upper castes. Furthermore, Mulayam Singh
Yadav was a strong supporter of the Manda! Commission recom­
mendations to reserve 27 per cent of seats in pub_lic employment
for the 3000 caste groups which constitute the OBCs. Historically,
the rise of the 'backward castes' represented the mos_ t profound
challenge to established patterns of dominance in state politics. 15
Only a few months earlier, the country had been rocked by agita­
tions against the V.P. Singh government's decision to implement
the Manda! Commission recommendations.
Mulayam Singh Yadav had also emerged as one of the most
outspoken critics of the BJP and its Ramjanmabhoomi campaign.
In October he had held 'communal harmony rallies' throughout
the state where he vowed to prevent the 'kar sevaks' from making
their way to Ayodhya. Many caste Hindus in Bijnor described
his speeches as highly inflammatory and claimed that he had
polarized Hindu-Muslim relations by resorting to repressive
IS Zoya Hasan relates two concurrent developments in Uttar Pradesh in the
decade beginning in 1967: the politicization and 1nobilization of the middle
and backward castes and the decline of Congress party dominance. She argues
that through OBC support, Charan Singh's Bharatiya Lok Dal was able to
challenge the political dominance of Brahmans and Thakurs. One important
consequence, which was to have salutiry consequences for the BJP, was
renewed cooperation between Brahmans and Thakurs from the 1980s o n ­
wards. Zciya Hasan, 'Power and Mobilization: Patterns of Resilience and
Change in Uttar Pradesh Politics', in Francine R Frankel and M.S.A. Rao
(eds), Dam;,11mce mid State Pl1ll)tr in Modern India: Dtcline of II Social Order
.(Delhi: Oxford University, 1989), p. 189.
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means. However, Mulayam Singh was placed in a 'no win' situa­
tion: although banning the kar sevalcs from entering the state was
likely to backftre, allowing them to enter see,ned likely to provoke
even greater violence.
The antipathy of the middle and upper castes towards Mulayam
Singh Yadav sheds new light on the events which preceded the 30
October riot. It calls into question assumptions of primordialism
and single-minded material calculation. Rather, it suggests the
significance of popular antipathy to the state combined with ex­
pressions of caste dominance in explaining opposition to the Chief
Minister's rally on 9 October. Similarly, two of the women who
had participated in the 24 October events described the actions of
the state as being the major source of their rage. When the kar
sevaks in the girl's intermediary college went on a hunger strike,
it
was images
of state repression that once again galvanized women
.
.
into acnon.
A slightly different way of understanding the hatred that upper
caste Hindus expressed towards Zafar Khan and Mulaya,n Singh
Yadav, along with Mushir Ahmed, the third protagonist in this
story, is by noting the way all three men transgressed caste and
'communal' boundaries. 16 Hindu support had enabled Khan to
become chair of the nagarpalika; his rivals thus sought to refashion
Khan as a communal leader to deprive him of Hindu support.
Mulayam Singh had similarly challenged notions of a pan Hindu
identity by forging a caste-based alliance among OBCs, untouch­
ables and Muslims. Although he was not a political leader and had
no political ambitions, Mushir Ahmed posed a threat to Hindu
nationalists by seeking to protect Hindu women just when tensions
in Bijnor were becoming explosive. 1-Iis simple gesture challenged
Hindu chauvinist depictions of the sexually predatory Muslim man
raping the pure and vulnerable Hindu woman. The political di­
mensions of this struggle are extremely significant: by the I 990s
Hindu nationalism was both cause and effect of the narrowing of
social identities. Attempts by Khan, Mulayam Singh and Mushir
Ahmed to keep identities fluid, had thus become increasingly
threatening to the BJP's project.
Compared to the attention that the BJP's attempt to harden
communal identities has received, relatively little attention has·
16 I am gr.1teful to Udh ay Mehta for this insight.
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been accorded to its preoccupation with caste. However, in many
respects Muslims simply provide the BJP with a nee� ttope
in order to fulfil its more critical objective of overcoming caste
divisions among caste Hindus. Events in Bijnor can be fruitfully
reinterpreted from this perspective. The upper caste Hindus who
opposed Khan's. leadership were undoubtedly enr2ged by Khan's
· temporary alliances with a scheduled caste nagar paJi& member
and an OBC ChiefMinister. Had Khan allotted the land in town
to a Muslim, it might have been less infuriating than his decision
to allot it to scheduled castes for a dhar2msala. Similarly, Hindu
communal groups were enraged.by Mayavati and Mulayam Singh
Yadav identifying them as 'brahmans, Baniyas, and Thakurs' and
thereby uncovering their attempt to speak on behalf of all caste
Hindus.
Rok ofthe BJP Combine
One of the major sources ofBJP·strength in Bijnor is the close links
it has forged with the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena, and Arya
Samaj. Sometimes the distinctions between these organizations are
barely discernible: Rajiv SociTilalcdari, recoUl)ted thatVishan Bhir,
an RSS 'pracharalc' had visited Bijnor and made him the district
president of the Bajrang Dal and the president of the BJP's youth
wing, thereby rendering distinctions between these two organiza­
tions insignificant. In the course of my research, I found members
of these organizations constantly visiting each other's homes, sug­
gesting that they enjoyed close personal relations.
On each of the occasions described earlier, there was extensive
co-ordination among Hindu organizations. On 25 August Shiv
Sena and Bajrang Dal activists closely co-ordinated with the BJP
in planning the occupation ofnagarp11Jik11 land. Similar co-ord�­
tion was evident on 4 October when the Durga Vahini, rashtra
sevikas and BJP mahi/a morcha organized women to accompany the
ram jyotis to Bijnor. 17 The BJP has been the chief beneficiary of
17 At times tensions between Hindu organizations in Bijnor were evident.
Ram Gopal complained that while the BJP mouthed empty rhetoric about
Hindu rashtra, if often moderated its stance in the electoral context and
distance<! itself from the more radical Hindu organizations; the Shiv Sena
was much more consistent in its stance. Confirming Gopal's view, Dineshji
asserted, despite evidence tQ the contrary, that the RSS refused to ally with
the Shiv Sena, The BJP's strategy ofallying with militant Hindu organizations
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these close relationships among Hindu organizations. When one
adds together the membership of local chapters of the RSS, BJP,
VHP, Bajrang Dal, Durga Vahini, BJP mahila morcha, Shiv Sena,
and Arya Samaj, the network of influence that the BJP combine
has established bears greater resemblance to an urban guerilla
army than that of a political party.
Atnidst sociai cultural and religious . organizations, the BJP
stands out as being the only political party. The BJP has played a
double game. As a political party it has sought to demonstrate its
moderate, responsible character, at times by distancing itself from
militant Hindu groups like the Shiv Sena. However, at other times
it has relied upon these groups to cultivate the anti-Muslim fervour
which is critical to building a liindu electoral constituency. F u r ­
thermore, its ties with social, cultural and religious organizations
appear to link the BJP with traditional values and thereby confer
upon it a legitimacy that most political parties lade. For example in
Bijnor the BJP is closely identified with the Arya Samaj, which has
been active there since 1901. Although the Arya Samaj.has de­
generated over the years, it is still respected because of the leading
role it once played in social reform and women's education.
A second source of BJP strength is the considerable autonomy
that national leaders accord to local party units to interpret and
implement the party's larger objectives. This approach sets the
BJP apart from the two major competing ,nodels. The Congress
party allows local units a high degree of latirude but does so from
weakness rather than strength for its party organization is in
shambles. The CPl{M), by contrast, maintains a more centralized
party apparatus and allows for little spontaneous initiative at the
local level. 18 In contrast to the CPl(M), which generally designates
the precise timing of demonstrations, BJP leaders in New Delhi
do not determine exactly when riots will occur. Rather they en­
courage local leaders to create an environment in which at some
point a spark will lead to a forest fire. Thus the BJP combine in
Bijnor created several opportunities for riots, on 25 August, 9 and
· 24 October and finally 30 October. The likelihood of a riot continuously increased with each successive incident.
at the local level while ,naintaining a principled ideological distance from
them worked to the BJP's advantage.
18 SeeAmrita Basu, TwoFMuofProtut: Contrasting ModesofWomnu'A(tivim,
in ]ndi11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
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424 State and Politics m India
Leading activists carefully orchestrated the 25 August incident
with litde popular support. This probably explains why Hindu
leaders dropped their. demand to build a temple on nagar palika
land. Scheduled castes were most explicit about their disinterest
in the issue. A man I interviewed from mohalla Raiteen asked
rhetorically why they should help construct a temple from which
they would be excluded.
By 9 October, popular support for Hindu organizations had
grown. Again it was the local leadership that made elaborate plans
to obstruct the Chief Minister's rally by plastering the town with
anti-Mulayam posters, persuading caste Hindus to boycott the
event, organizing a bandh, and preparing effigies of the Chief
Minister. However, the leadership succeeded in sufficiently arous­
ing passions that in some villages caste Hindus stoned Muslims
as they wound their way home. The Durga Vahini's leading role
in 'freeing' the ram jyotis on 24 October was partly a response
to VHP directives that it shoulder the Hindu cause while men
were away in Ayodhya. But if women's actions were not wholly
spontaneous, nor were they wholly orchestrated. By 30 October,
in comparison with the preceding incidents, high-ranking male
leadership was less visible and popular participation was more
extensive.
A third skill that the BJP has employed has been to link events
at local and national levels. Consider the following �pie: on
25 August a small group of caste Hindus protest against the
anti-Hindu bias of the Muslim leader of the town. They do so by
seeking to build a temple on land near which a mosque presently
stands. Tilakwala commented: 'There was a masjid on the land; it
was just like Bahri masjid. We used to think of it as the same masjid
and we even referred to it that way.' In an exact repetition of their
actions in Ayodhya, caste Hindus instal idols and begin to worship
there. Similarly, in protesting against the banning of kar sevaks
and their subsequent detention within the town, the BJP seemed
to be linking events in Ayodhya and in Bijnor. If Bijnor occupied
a more prominent place on the Indian map one might be tempted
to trace events in Ayodhya back to earlier events in Bijnor. lnstead,
Bijnor seemed to be the BJP's dress rehearsal for its performance
in Ayodhya. The riots placed Bijnor on the national map and
defined its national identity in communal terms.
However, it is not religious belief that incited people's passions
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on either 25 August or 30 October. None of the caste Hindus who
were interviewed described their actions in these terms. Moreover,
the small group of caste Hindus who occupied the land on 25
August attracted very little support .from the broader Hindu com­
munity. Even Tilakwala admitted that what had finally infuriated
people was the arrest of ten people who had occupied the land.
Ten days after the arrests the Commissioner of Moradabad had
informed Khan that he was going to release the detainees because
he could no longer withstand public pressure. In the 25 August
incident, as with the banning of ram jyotis from Bijnor and the
'prisoners' strike, the BJP identified a theme which had deep
cultural resonance: a group of innocent people had been martyred
by an unjust state.
The BJP embodies and exacerbates peoples' ambivalent at­
titudes towards the state. On the one hand, the BJP affirms
peoples' deep-seated alienation from the state and from the Con­
gress system in particular while attempting to channel this aliena­
tion arounc\ the state's supposed appeasement of Muslims. In this
context, Abbay Saxena, the local VHP president, informed me
that there were two incidents which formed milestones in the
BJP combine's growth in Bijnor: Rajiv Gandhi's decision to-over­
turn the Supreme Court verdict on Shah· Bano and V.P. Singh's
decision to declare Prophet Mohammed's birthday a national
holiday. On the other hand, given the BJP's electoral aspirations,
it cannot afford to simply convey disinterest or distrust in the
state. Rather it implies that if elected, a BJP government would
remedy all of the state's current failings. In both its distrust as
well as its reliance on the state, the BJP identifies a deeply felt
popular ambivalence towards the state.
Role ofAdministration
In analysing the role of the local administration in Bijnor, three
phases might be distinguished. In the first phase, which spanned
the period between 25 August and 30 October, despite provocation
by Hindu communal groups, the state was indecisive, unprepared
and relatively inactive. For example Hindu militants occupied the
nagar pa/ilea land early on the morning of 25 August. Although
Khan had notified the police by 10.30 am, they did not arrive at
the spot until 9 pm. By this time the gathering was larger, more
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426 St11te 11nd Politics in India
vociferous and harder to disperse than it had been several hours
earlier. Furthermore as if to compensate for their earlier inaction,
upon arriving at the spot, the police quickly opened fire, thereby
killing two Muslims who had been entirely peaceful.
Given the backdrop of the 25 August incident and of a com­
munally charged context nationwide, the administration's lack_ of
prep;u:ation for the 9 October rally was even more surprising.
According to several informants, it had not made adequate security
arrangements along the major roads leading to and from Bijnor.
Even if the administtation had somehow not anticipated violence
earlier, by the time Muslims had assembled in Bijnor it should
have recognized that tensions were running high, for fights had
broken out at several spots along the way. During the several hours
in which Muslims were attending the rally, the administration
could still have deployed more forces to ttouble spots but it failed
to do so.
Similarly, when crowds rushed to the site of the Ganges river
to bring back the ram jyotis, local police and government officials
did not even attempt to stop them. Rani Bansal commented that
a few uniformed police watched helplessly as the crowds dis­
mantled the barricades. The combination of the government's
early bravado - as in Mulayam Singh's vow that not even a bird
would enter the state - and its later inaction increased people's
sense of efficacy. Several women described the sense of empower­
ment they experienced at defying what had earlier appeared to be
inviolable government resttictions.
Those who argue that the governll\ent was unprepared because
Bijnor had no history of communal violence forget the warnings
that the government had received on 2 5 August, 4 October and
9 October. Even aside from these incidents, there was other
evidence too of an explosive political climate. For example schools
and colleges had stopped functioning on 25 August and had not
yet reopened. Furthermore, on 27 October, a huge meeting took
place in front of the Arya Samaj, to plan a procession for the
following week. According to an eyewitness who wished to remain
anonymous, Shiv Shankar, the additional disttict magistrate
(ADM) who was at the meeting, made no attempt to disband it
although section 144 prohibiting such gatherings was in effect at
the. time. Numerous lower ranking government officials were
apparently also present.
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However, the most shocking descriptions of government inac­
tion pertain to the events that transpired between 30 October and
3 November. Four different sources provided almost identical
accounts of pleading with the leading administrators to stop the
procession. Sandip Lal saw the procession assembling outside the
Arya Samaj temple on the 30th morning and asked the district
magistrate (OM) to call it off but the OM apparently informed
him that there was nothing he could do to stop it even though Lal
said he reminded the OM that the law was on his side. Zafar Khan
sought out the superintendent of police that same morning to
request that he place Bijnor under curfew. 'The SP was evasive',
Khan reported, 'he said he would discuss it with the DM. Then
he disappeared and for the next several hours as tensions were
mounting, they were nowhere to be found'.
Two of the most noteworthy accounts were provided by gov­
ernment officials. J.P. Gerola, deputy magistrate, was one of the
few officers who was not transferred out of Bijnor after the riots.
Thus he.was among the few offi�ials who could provide an eyewit­
ness account of the riot. Gerola reported that he had accompanied
the deputy superintendent (DSP) to the Arya Samaj mandir on
the 30th morning.
When I saw the huge mob assembled there I pleaded with the ADM
and the DSP. 'Call off the procession or there will be trouble,' I told
them. The DSP replied, 'We have discussed matters with the Hindu
leaders and they have assured us that nothing will go wrong.' I said
'Even if the leaders are responsible, they cannot speak on behalf of
the whole conununity.' But no one would listen to me.
An intelligence officer who remained in Bijnor after the riot
provided a second official report. When he saw that the procession
could no longer be halted, he asked the DM to prevent it from
passing through the Muslim quarters. The DM apparently re­
sponded that there was nothing he could do to stop it because
women and children headed the procession. He and others also
suggested that the administration immediately impose a curfew
but it failed to do so until 31 October at 1.30 am.
Shortly after the procession began, the first phase, which had
been marked by inaction, came to an end and the second phase
of n1ore aggressive official complicity commenced. Muslim fam­
ilies described in detail the atrocities that Hindu officers had
committed, for the image of supposedly neutral officials engag ing
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in brutal violence ,vas so vividly etched in their minds. The precise
cause of the administration's more ag�essive stance was Muslim
violence against caste Hindus in Barwan, which was precipitated
in turn by caste Hindus' murder of Mushir Ahmed. According
to Ashok Varma, when the ad,ninistration and police witnessed
the casualties that Muslims had inflicted on caste Hindus they
sought revenge, 'At that stage', Vem1a continued, 'Hindu or­
ganizations were no longer necessary.' The deprofessionaJization
of the civil services had reached a point such that officers could
display their naked communal identities. The third phase of
violence commenced on 31 October when the Provincial Armed
Constabulary arrived in Bijnor and began to comb Muslim resid­
ential quarters. The violence that occurred during this phase was
of the most extreme and brutal form that Bijnor had experienced
in the course of the riot. However, the entry of the PAC did not
supplant either government officials or members of Hindu or­
ganizations. Indeed, an interview with a group of PAC members
who were still stationed outside '3ijnor was extremely revealing
in this respect These officers were at pains to emphasize that
they had never been to Bijnor before and knew nothing about
the lay-out of the town. Thus they were accompanied and directed
by police, administrative officials and often some members of
Hindu organizations.
Sunil Mehra, editor of the Bijnor Times, reported that the
administration further confused people by misleading them about
its own actions.19 On 1 November the Inspector General of Police
told the press that 1000 people had been arrested in connection
with the riot; the radio broadcast this information. Four days
later the senior superintendent of police announced that only 326
people had been arrested.
After the riots, the Chief Minister had the entire administration
changed. The new administration was reputed to be extremely
secular in orientation and diverse in its composition; the district
magistrate in the new administration was a scheduled caste, and
the ADM and SOM were Muslims. Since December when this
administration had been appointed, there had been no reports of
communal violence in Bijnor. I asked the district magistrate
19 Raghuvansi, 'When Hell Broke Out as Riots Took an Ugly Tum' (un­
published paper, n.d.).
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whether he had taken action to prevent the recurrence of riots
and he replied,
During asthi kalash the VHP workers toured the state, carrying urns
containing ashes of the kar sevaks who had been killed in Ayodhya.
In other parts of the state this provoked riots so we maintained very
tight security to niake sure that they could not enter our town.
We faced an even more dangerous situation on 16 April when
Muslims observe Id. The BJP had planned a rally that day. We put
our forces on alert. We created thirteen police assistance centres in
the town and we encouraged people to report to these booths if there
was any trouble. We did not allow the BJP to pass through Muslim
localities and we banned loud speakers and provocative slogans.
In Nagina the pillar of a mosque was damaged that day. At night
we posted officers to guard the spot and quietly had it repaired. By
the morning Muslims went to Nagina to do namaaz and did not even
notice the damage..
The district magistrate said that he had relied heavily on peace
committees, made up of local residents, on more effective use of
intelligence officers and more preventive measures to detect and
ease communal tensions.
What explains the complicity of the local ad1ninistration in the
riot? And why did the form that state co,nplicity assumed change
from inaction to ;ictive intervention? The contradictory actions of
the state a t the national, regional, and local levels should warn us
against depicting the state as a monolithic entity. This in turn has
several implications. First, it suggests that we should not exag­
gerate the abyss between the local state and civil society. In the
context of Bijnor, the middle and upper castes shared many of the
same values, including opposition to the Manda) Commission
recommendations, whether they happened to be situated within
civil society or within the state. However, for a variety of reasons,
government bureaucrats preferred not to openly defy the Chief
Minister's orders; instead they engaged in foot-dragging and pas­
sive resistance. For example while formally agreeing to the Chief
Minister's diktats, local administrators did not make security a r ­
rangements for his rally; nor did they keep ram jyotis out ofBijnor.
It would be misleading, however, to explain the bureaucrats'
inaction as wholly purposeful. Their indifference reflected the
erosion of their sense of moral responsibility. This was related
in tum to the absence of procedural mechanisms to ensure
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accountability. Even when the complicity of administrative of­
ficials in the Bijnor riots was amply docwnented, these officials
were not demoted, let alone fired. Rather, they were transferred
to positions which were of equal rank with their earlier posts.
The weakening of state institutions provides an additional ex­
planation for the passivity of the local administration. Whereas
strong states intervene decisively to prevent riots or limit their
spread, weak states are more likely to alternate between inaction
and repression when matters get out of their control. A weak state
at the local level is susceptible to the appeals of the BJP which has
made government bureaucrats one of its prime targets. The fre­
quency of changes in administrative personnel in Bijnor, as a result.
of both civil disturbances and frequent elections, further weakened
the administration and contributed to political instability. A weak
state also hindered effective communication between high-rank­
ing administrators on the one hand, and between the police, the
PAC and their superiors on the other.
A third explanation for the ineffectiveness of the local ad­
ministration has to do with an erosion in the chain of political
command between centre and periphery. 20 The Congress system
traditionally maintained national control over state administra­
tions who in turn controlled local administrations. However, with
the demise of the Congress system, conflicts and divergences
increasingly characterized relations between local, state and na­
tional governments. For example although on the surface
Mulayam Singh Yadav and V.P. Singh appeared to have agreed
upon a strategy for blocking Advani's rath yatra, closer inspection
shows that they were quite divided about how to handle it. Con­
flicts between them inadvertently contributed to the growth of
the BJP which in turn provoked communal violence.
The argument thus far may be useful in explaining the local
administration's 'passive aggression', but is less helpful in explain­
ing the violent behaviour of top-ranking local officials. Once
tensions had exploded on the 30th afternoon, people acted in
unpredictable and unusual ways. Zafar Khan co1nmented that he
20 Howard Spodek describes a si.Jnilar phenomenon when he amibutes the
Ahmedabad riots of 1985 in part to the erosion ofthe Congress party's chain
of command in Gujarat Spodek, 'From Gandhi to Violence: Ahmedabad's
1985 Riots in Historical Perspective', Motkm Asum Studies, vol. 23, no. 4,
1989, p p . 765-95.
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had always enjoyed cordial relations with the DM and his staff
and would never have thought them capable of committing viol­
ence against Muslims. The transformation of their relationship
with Muslims in the course of the riot may neither have been
prediet2ble before the riot nor even wholly explicable in its
aftermath.
If people's actions were informed by a range of complex
motivations, one of the few moments in which caste Hindus
displayed explicitly communal hatred of Muslims was when local
administrators engaged in violence themselves. When officials
witnessed Muslim aggression, 'hindus became Hindus'. Muslims'
tendency to initiate violence against the police and PAC, based
on the justified assumption that they were there to protect caste
Hindus, further communalized officials.
Conclusion
This chapter has sought to raise a variety of questions about
prevailing approaches to the study of 'communal' riots. First, it
seems imperative that scholarship on riots incorporate both the
view from above and the view from below, for each perspective
illuminates only part of the story. The external, contextual view
that is illuminated in Engineer's work, helps explain changes in
the character of the state from the Nehruvian secular model to its
opportunist majoritarian incarnation under Indira Gandhi to its
more open pandering to communal forces under Narasimha Rao.
Without this sense of historical evolution it would be difficult to
explain why Bijnor experienced riots in 1990 rather than thirty or
forty years earlier.
However, if this focus on 'the big picture' is necessary to situate
Bijnor within the changing national context, its perspective is also
partial. Particularly in the Indian context where the history of the
state is so closely intertwined with the history of the Congress
party, state-centred analyses tend to be inattentive to societal
influences. Conversely, the advantage of ethnographic analysis at
the local level is its more holistic character. In their attempt to
remove Khan from the Bijnor nagar palika, for example, Khan's
rivals simultaneously sought political power, control over eco­
nomic resources and Hindu dominance. A similar range of m�tiva­
tions were at work in rivalries over the disputed plot of land. My
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432 State and Politics in India
point is that a close examination of conflictS at the local level
reveals the interweaving of economic, political and social strands
that are more difficult to disentangle at the national level.
This study of the local level also shows that the BJP often
benefits from a greed for power that is not implicitly communal.
Though in retrospect we may come to see the causes of its growth
as linear and uniform. In Bijnor, Zafar Khan's opponents were not
all BJP supporters. Indeed, his principal rival, Sandip Lal, was a
close associate of Mulayam Singh Yadav. Lal's animosity towards
Khan arose from rivalry over chairing the nagar palika. In Bijnor,
as in many towns in northern India, the BJP sought to gain control
over the nagar palika to expand its networlcs of influence; it thus
capitalized on the opposition various individuals expressed towards
Khan. And yet it is important to emphasize that the caste Hindus'
relationship with political parties in Bijnor was far from uniform
in the period preceding the riot.
Third, I seek to complicate our understanding of the concept
of agency by exploring the ways in which it is often inextricably
linked to victimization. Bijnor's caste Hindus imagined themselves
to be persecuted by Zafar Khan, whose power and influence they
greatly exaggerated. Their sense of rage at