ELECTION COMMISSION OF INDIA
GOLDEN JUBILEE CELEBRATIONS
GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF
ELECTORAL DEMOCRACY
PAPERS PRESENTED AT
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
18 JANUARY,
H
H
2001
NEW DELHI
ELECTION COMMISSION OF INDIA
GOLDEN JUBILEE CELEBRATIONS
GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF
ELECTORAL DEMOCRACY
PAPERS PRESENTED AT
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
18 JANUARY,
2001
NEW DELHI
© Election Commission of India, 2001.
Published by Publication Division, Election Commission of India, Nirvachan Sadan, Ashoka Road,
New Delhi - 110 001 and produced by Corporate Communications Division, India Tourism
Development Corporation and printed at M/s. Dhriti Printers, New Delhi - 110 020
Tel :91-11-3717391,3717392
Fax:91-11-3713412
Website : www.eci.gov.in
CONTENTS
Page
• The Global Spread of Democracy - Reflections at the
Beginning of the Twenty-first Century
1
• Electoral Democracy and Social Aspirations in India
11
• India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
27
DR.
M.S.
CHIEF ELECTION COMMISSIONER
OF INDIA
NIRVACHAN SADAN, ASHOKA ROAD
NEW DELHI-110001
GILL
FOREWORD
The Election Commission of India is celebrating its Golden Jubilee, on
the 17th and 18th January, 2001. The President of India, the Prime Minister of
India and other national dignitaries, will take part in the opening function on the
17th.
The Election Commission has invited a worldwide gathering of Election
Commissioners of other democratic countries. They will be meeting with our
Commissioners, in a symposium on the 18th January, 2001. For this occasion,
as background reading, on the Indian and world systems, the Commission is
happy to bring out in this booklet 3 essays, by our leading political writers. I
thank them for their cooperation and labour.
Chief ElectioMiCommissioner of India
The Global Spread of Democracy Reflections at the Beginning of the
Twenty-first Century
E. Sridharan
The fiftieth anniversary of the Election Commission of India, the
institution which has conducted India's thirteen general elections since
independence, falling as it does in the first month of the twenty-first century,
is an appropriate moment to reflect on the global spread of democracy and its
prospects in the century that has just dawned. In this short paper, I will attempt
to reflect on the spread of democracy around the world in the past two
centuries, with special emphasis on the past half-century. I will not limit myself
to elections, a more technical and statistical topic, but focus more on the broader
phenomenon of democracy, of which free and fair elections are a necessary
feature, though not by themselves alone a sufficient feature, as many will argue.
I will not attempt to do a research paper, impossible at short notice on so vast
a subject, but attempt to convey the findings of recent extensive research on
the spread of democracy - and on reversals of democratisation - by
summarising the main trends identified in the recent literature. This paper, then,
does not claim any great originality but is more in the nature of a capsule
summary of the literature on the global spread of democracy and its prospects,
appropriate for a moment of broader reflection, rather than the statistical
technicalities of particular elections, at a historic juncture for both India and
the world, such as this fiftieth anniversary of the Election Commission of India,
following, as it does, shortly on the fiftieth anniversaries of the Indian Republic
and of the independence of India.
2
Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
Three Waves of Democratisation and Two Reverse Waves of Democratic
Breakdown
Rudimentary forms of democracy have existed all over the world in the
form of localised assemblies which deliberated on matters affecting the
community and made collective decisions. These include the sabha and the
samiti in post-Vedic India, the democracy of Greek city-states, and countless
localised assemblies in a variety of societies around the world. However, when
we talk of democracy at a national level, we pre-suppose the existence of
sovereign states in a world-system of sovereign states. That is, democracy in
nation-states in the post-Westphalian (1648) world of sovereign states. The
earliest modern democracy, extremely limited, rudimentary and imperfect as
it was, was post-1688 England, with parliament emerging supreme. This was
followed by the American and French Revolutions, and the emergence of
democracy in the nineteenth century in many European and European settler
states, although they were very limited democracies, with formally limited
franchise, and would not qualify as full democracies by today's standards.
Samuel Huntington has, in a book of sweeping scope, argued that three
"waves" of democratisation are identifiable in the history of the past two
centuries.1 He defines a "wave of democratisation" as a "group of (democratic)
transitions ... that occur within a specified period of time and significantly
outnumber transitions in the opposite direction during that period." The first
wave, a long, slow wave, of democratisation, lasted from 1828 to 1926, almost
a century. This began with the widening of the suffrage to a large part of the
male population in the United States, and included most of Western Europe
and Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and much of Latin America
beginning with Chile in the 1820s. The period after 1918, following the First
World War, added to the number of democracies as new democratic states came
into existence following the collapse of the Prussian, Russian, Austro-Hungarian
1 Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
The Global Spread of Democracy
3
and Ottoman Turkish empires. This first wave brought into existence 29
democracies (by the standards of the times).
This first wave was followed by a first reverse wave which lasted from
1922 to 1942, in which many of the democracies of the first wave were
overthrown and replaced by authoritarian regimes of various types, beginning
with the coming to power of Mussolini in Italy in 1922. The reverse wave was
associated with the inter-war years, the Great Depression and the spread of
authoritarian, including fascist ideologies and conquests and annexations of
independent states by Germany and Italy in the run-up to, and early years of
the Second World War.
A second, and shorter, wave of democratisation, lasting from 1943 to
1964, began with the defeat of the fascist powers in the Second World War, the
re-establishment of democracy in Western Europe, and the decolonisation of
much of Asia and Africa in the 1950s and early 1960s. Most of the newly
independent states became democracies. At the crest of this wave in 1962, there
were 36 democracies in the world, more than the earlier peak in 1926, though
the earlier 29 in 1926 were not all included in this 36, particularly those in
central and eastern Europe.
This second wave was followed by a second reverse wave that lasted
from 1961 to 1975, in which many of these second wave democracies
succumbed to authoritarian throwbacks, principally military coups in the Third
World, not only in newly independent states but also in long-established Latin
American democracies such as in Brazil (1964), Argentina (1966) and Chile
(1973), the last-named country having enjoyed democracy since the 1820s. This
second reverse wave brought down the number of democracies in the world
to 30 at its lowest point.
The third wave of democratisation of the past quarter-century-plus,
began in 1974 with the overthrow of the three remaining authoritarian regimes
4
Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
in Western Europe, Spain, Portugal and Greece. The wave sweeps over Latin
America (six South American and three Central American countries) and parts
of Asia (Philippines, Korea, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Taiwan) up to 1990,
and then to post-Soviet Europe from 1990 onwards, and some African countries
in the 1990s, most notably South Africa in 1994. It is still continuing at the turn
of the century, having lasted just over a quarter of a century, Indonesia in 1999
being the most important recent democratic transition in this third wave.
An idea of the extent of the spread of democracy across the world in
this third wave of the past quarter of a century can be had from the fact that
there were only 39 democracies in the world in 1974, consisting of only 27%
of the 145 independent states in the world then. By 1990, the number had
jumped to a historic high of 76 out of 165 states (46%) in 1990, to 120 out of
191 states (63%) by 1999. These figures are based on a minimalist definition
of democracy, counting as democracies all those states which hold regularly
elections in minimum conditions of political freedom. However, unlike earlier
reverse waves, no third reverse wave has yet set in. There have been only four
major breakdowns of democracy since 1974 in countries with populations over
20 million, the latest being the Pakistani military coup of 1999.
We can observe that each wave increased the number of democracies
and each reverse wave reduced their number significantly but not below the
number at the start of the earlier wave of democratisation, thus justifying the
notion of a wave. There is, of course, much to criticise in this schematisation.
There is some arbitrariness in cut-off dates, and the ending and beginning dates
of each wave and reverse wave overlap to the extent of a few years. And the
definition of democracy varies in strictness, according to the times, and even
in the third wave of democratisation, being a minimalist electoralist definition.
More seriously, to students of history and political science, looking at
democracy as a political system in isolation from the overall economic, social
and cultural development of countries has the potential to be seriously
misleading, not least about the prospects for democratic consolidation and
The Global Spread of Democracy
5
stability. However, the schematisation does capture in broad strokes on a vast
historical and global geographical canvas, the spread of democracy over the
past nearly two centuries, and has become the basis for much debate and
further research on democratisation in recent years.
Going Beyond Electoral Democracy to Liberal Democracy
The waves-of-democratisation schematisation above, while painting a
broad-brush picture of the global spread of democracy, is based on an
essentially electoralist conception of democracy. While free and fair elections
are a necessary condition for democracy, this is a limited and minimalist
conception. Free and fair elections themselves require a number of enabling
conditions that presuppose a broader definition of democracy. Furthermore, a
purely electoralist conception of democracy, abstracted from socio-historical
evolution and economic development of the country fails to explain the
historical fact of widespread breakdowns of democracy; indeed, reverse waves
of democratic breakdown. This raises the issue of whether there are deep-rooted
obstacles to the consolidation of democracy, and whether, in fact, a broader
conception of democracy is not required.
We can define electoral democracy as Joseph Schumpeter did, or Adam
Przworski and his collaborators do, respectively: "a system for arriving at
political decisions in which individuals acquire ..power by a competitive
struggle for the people's vote", or more simply, "a regime in which
governmental offices are filled as a consequence of contested elections".2 Such
definitions are minimalist conceptions of democracy and ignore the extent to
which even competitive, multi-party elections may exclude significant sections
of the population from being able to effectively compete for power, and leave
2 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper, 1947; Adam
Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, Jose Cheibub and Fernando Limongi, "What Makes Democracy Endure?",
Journal of Democracy, 7, No. 1 (1996).
6
Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
significant areas of decision-making beyond the control of elected
representatives.
For electoral democracy to truly be a liberal democracy in which all,
including the poor and ethnic and regional minorities, are able to effectively
compete in elections with non-trivial chances of getting elected, several other
conditions have to be met. These include: the rule of law, constitutional
constraints on executive power, an independent judiciary, strong fundamental
freedoms entrenched as basic rights, including equality before the law, and
freedoms of belief, faith, opinion, assembly, association, movement, residence,
occupation, speech, publication, demonstration and petition, and including
rights for religious, racial, ethnic, linguistic, cultural and other minorities, and
civic pluralism including the presence of independent media.3 Without these
enabling conditions, legal and social, in place, elections can be manipulated.
This leads us to a definition of liberal democracy, or polyarchy in Dahl's
seminal conception.4 This consists of two essential elements: participation
(universal adult right to vote and contest for office) and opposition (political
contestation through periodic, free and fair elections). Both these presuppose
the civil liberties outlined in the last paragraph. Where these civil liberties and
their linchpins, the rule of law, and independent judiciary and constitutional
constraints on executive authority, are missing, the seeds of electoral
manipulations leading eventually to the breakdown of democracy, lie. This, in
turn, leads us to understand the roots of the reverse waves of democratic
breakdown in the history of the past century, and the problems of the
consolidation of democracy.
3 See Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999, pp. 8-13.
4 Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1971.
The Global Spread of Democracy
7
Past Breakdowns of Democracy: Are New Threats Possible in the
Future?
Breakdowns of democracy stem from many causes, both in the
constitutionally-defined political system, the broader political culture of both
the political class and civil society in general, and the heterogeneity of society
- racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural - that, in fact, characterises most
states in today's world. The causes and forms of authoritarianism which
replaced democracy after the first and second waves of democratisation were
varied. The principal causes were: the weakness of democratic values among
both elites and the public, especially with respect to the democratic rights of
minorities, the poor and marginalised groups; economic crises intensifying
social conflict and polarisation; the determination of conservative upper- and
middle-class groups to exclude populist, leftist and lower-class movements
from power; insurgency and terrorism leading to the breakdown of law and
order; intervention or conquest by a foreign power.
New forms of authoritarianism emerged in the first and second reverse
waves. In the first reverse wave of the inter-war period, fascism in Italy and
Germany was the new form of authoritarianism, characterised as it was by
racism, ultra-nationalist majoritarianism, a structured ideology that included
scapegoating of minorities and demonising external enemies, a socially
penetrative mass party and associated organisations, and a leader cult, all of
which distinguished it from earlier, more traditional forms of authoritarianism.
Likewise, the bureaucratic-authoritarianism characterised the military regimes
that emerged in Latin America in the second reverse wave of the sixties and
seventies, principally in Brazil and Argentina, and also in Korea, was
characterised by a deeply institutionalised control and regulation by a
penetrative and corporatist state of the economy and society, unlike earlier
clientelist and patrimonialist forms of authoritarianism.
8
Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
An important feature of the reverse transitions from democracy to
authoritarianism throughout the past century, has been that they have almost
always been produced by those in the executive branch of government within
the democratic system, principally the military, but also in some cases, by
"executive coups" in which democratically chosen political leaders have ended
democracy when it suited them. Very rare has been the situation in which
democracy was ended by popular vote or by a popular rebellion capturing
power. This needs to be noted in guarding against possible authoritarian
tendencies in today's democracies.
However, it would be a major mistake to look for the signs of the same
forms of authoritarianism in movement and parties which are outside the
democratic consensus. While the same forms, such as fascist, racist and
majoritarian, ultra-nationalist movements, are very much with us at the
beginning of the twenty-first century in a range of countries, there can be other,
newer and perhaps subtler forms of authoritarianism which could equally lead
to the gradual undermining of electoral democracy.
Religious fundamentalism, and chauvinism aimed at religious, cultural,
racial, ethnic, linguistic and regional minorities, are major new category of antidemocratic threat, articulated by political parties and mass movements in a
range of countries. These may vary considerably in organisation, ranging from
highly organised and ideologically articulated but functioning tactically within
the democratic system, to rabidly chauvinist parties calling for the
disenfranchisement of the targeted minorities, to violent terroristic movements
aiming at ethnic cleansing. These types of parties and movements may be
democratic as far as the favoured majority group is concerned but may be
profoundly anti-democratic as regards the rights and effective electoral
participation and power-sharing of minorities is concerned. It needs to be
clearly recognised that partial democracy that discriminates against whole
The Global Spread of Democracy
9
groups is not democracy at all, the most extreme case of such a regime being
apartheid South Africa in the past. Equal rights and a enabling environment
of institutionalised civil liberties are all the more vital as basic conditions for
free and fair elections today, and all those committed to democracy including
all election authorities must be vigilant about any violations of these.
There could also be new and as yet unrecognised forms of
authoritarianism that threaten democracy in combination with anti-minority
chauvinism and other older forms. These may be made possible by new
technologies of mass manipulation and control that did not exist in the past,
but could be harnessed effectively by older types of undemocratic parties and
movements. The manipulation of opinion polls, election forecasts and so forth
to create an impression that a particular party, movement or strand of opinion
has mass support, intimidating others and especially target groups in the case
of discriminatory and chauvinist movements, in combination with pliant media,
can pose a serious threat to liberal democracy today. Manipulation of mass
opinion and intimidation of target groups, for example by generating "waves"
of hatred and hysteria, using new media and means of communication, perhaps
in combination with more traditional penetrative party organisations and allied
social movements, and even selective and targeted violence, is a potential new
threat to liberal democracy. These sorts of techniques when deployed by
authoritarian and chauvinist parties and movements, especially incumbents and
their front organisations, can create an atmosphere of intimidation not
conducive to truly free and fair elections. Even in an era in which democracy
holds unprecendented sway and where alternative ideologies are in retreat, it
is important not to become complacent. While no serious party or political
movement today opposes democracy itself or even opposes formal equal rights
and the right to vote to minority groups or to the poor and disadvantaged,
they often in practice pose threats to the underlying civil liberties that underpin
free and fair elections in which all can participate effectively and without fear.
10
Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
Hence, it is important to remain vigilant about potential threats to democracy,
including new and subtle threats made possible by the abuse of new
technologies.
The author is Academic Director, University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study
of India.
Telefax: 4604126, 4604127 E-mail: [email protected]
Views expressed are those of the author and not to be construed as endorsed by the Election Commission
of India.
Electoral Democracy and
Social Aspirations in India
Mahesh Rangarajan
It is commonplace to assert that the development of democracy in India
over the last half-century is a testament to the hopes of the architects of the
constitution of 1950. It also attests the growing levels of participation in the
electoral process by the poor who see the process as free and fair. As it turns
out, this is one case where the cliches are not far off the mark. The general
elections of 1952 were at the time the largest ever multi-party elections the
world had ever seen. There remain many problems and numerous
shortcomings which no critical observer can neglect and which do require
explanation. But there is little doubt that democracy as a system of governance
has struck deep roots in India. In the process, however, the internal
contradictions between different tendencies unleashed by it are all too apparent.
Many debates of the present, however, have roots in the past, and even what
seem at first sight to be unprecedented events do have antecedents.
India in 2001 is in the throes of political transformation. The Congress
party ruled in an unbroken spell from the time of independence in 1947 for
three decades, and has returned to power since on more than one occasion. It
has now been out of power for a few months short of five years. India was a
country with no experience of coalitions till as recently as 1977, but the number
of parties taking part in governance has increased in the last three federal
ministries from 12 to 18 to 24. Until just under a quarter century ago, one party
secured a majority in the popularly elected house of the Union Parliament, even
when polling less than half the popular vote. But it has been fifteen years since
12
Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
a single party won a bare majority of 51 per cent of the seats in a general
election. Such volatility of the voters has also been reflected in the shorter
tenures of those who hold high office: the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
held office for 17 years, from 1947 to 1964. In the last fifteen years, the longest
tenure has been for five years. Until 1996, every single one of the country's
Prime Ministers was or had at some time in the past been a member of the
Congress party. Since then, two Union Home Ministers have been drawn from
parties or organisations that were at one time in the past prescribed by law.
This is proof of the flexibility of the system to incorporate even groups, elements
and ideologies that at one time seemed implacably opposed to it.
The changes in the political climate though not in the formal electoral
system have also had an effect on government in the constituent units of the
Indian Union. Despite a federal system, and the world's first freely elected
Communist government (in Kerala state) in 1957, for many decades, the same
party was in power at the provincial level in many states. But over the last
three decades, the situation has changed. At the present moment, parties other
than the two premier national parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata
Party govern several key states. The longest spell in office has been that of the
Chief Minister of West Bengal, who headed a multi-party coalition government
(1977-2000). At another level, the state of Tamil Nadu has had one or the other
regional political party holding office over the last three decades since 1967.
The dissolution of one party dominance has had varied effects on the 28 states
of the Union. In some, it has given way to stable political entities that have
held onto power; in others, all India parties continue to play a significant role
in politics. Even provinces with a long history of one party dominance have
seen long spells of multi-party combinations as in the case of Maharashtra since
1990.
The significance of the flux of the party system is obvious but the
transformation of the social composition of the legislatures receives less
Electoral Democracy and Social Aspirations in India
13
attention than it perhaps deserves. In keeping with the attempt to go beyond
the juridical notion of equality reflected in the idea of one person, one vote,
the Constitution itself provided for further measures to overcome historically
rooted disadvantages. Members of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes who now
make up over 23 per cent of the population have seats reserved for them in
the popularly elected chambers of the legislatures. The voters make up a unified
body, but only members drawn from these sections have the right to contest
these seats. It is a measure of the foresight of the framers of the Constitution,
in particular its chief architect, Dr BR Ambedkar, that the provisions have stood
the test of time. At the present moment, there is a major debate on a similar
provision being introduced through Constitutional Amendment to increase the
ratio of women legislators to at least 33 per cent. While the issue is a
controversial and complex one, what is significant is the acceptance at a
conceptual level of the two key facets of political reservation: a unified body
of voters and special provision for the historically disadvantaged groups in
question.
Yet reservations form a small part of the linkages of social transformation
with the institutions of electoral democracy. The pursuit of equality in a society
with multiple layers of hierarchy has not been an easy one. There are indeed a
few other instances of successful and consistent attempts at pluralism in former
colonial countries. But the scale of the exercise in India with its continent sized
polity and over a billion people requires special attention. All the more so,
because in 1947, less than 12 per cent of the population was literate and over
a third of the land area was under the autocratic rule of princes who were allies
of the imperial power. Most women had never had the right to vote nor had
the bulk of the farming community. The evolution of the institutions of political
representation had followed a very different trajectory in countries such as
France and the United Kingdom, both of which were at the centre of global
empires, and were industrialised relatively rapidly. In the United States, the
numbers involved were far smaller, and the dominant groups were not as
14
Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
culturally diverse as in the Indian case. A half-century on, whatever the
immensity of the social and economic problems faced by this country, there is
little doubt that the system of electoral democracy has struck deep roots. No
government has attempted to challenge or overturn the results of a popular
verdict. The only significant bid to curtail the rights of freedom of expression
and association at a pan-Indian level from 1975-77 was rebuffed by the
electorate, and never again attempted. The Congress party bowed to the will
of the people in 1977, as did a successor regime in 1980. Power has been passed
on peacefully through the ballot box and not the bullet. Given the difficult
moments at the outset, it is worth asking if in some way the success of crafting
institutions has not gained in strength because it left room open for diverse
social aspirations to find expression through public channels. Conversely, the
great challenge today is not merely in the court of political parties but the
system as a whole as it tries to meet rising aspirations for equity and justice.
Unlike most Western democracies, India is combining universal franchise and
representative government with the process of industrialisation. This is contrary
to the normal course of events in much of the developed world. It is both cause
for pride as well as at the root of many of the problems and pitfalls faced by
the country and its people. The will to remain democratic has grown deeper
but the challenges have also multiplied.
Historical Legacies
Even the idea of a vote for each citizen was a huge step forward. It is
rarely realised that the franchise in colonial India was limited on grounds of
both property and educational qualifications. Even in 1946, only one third of
the people in British India had the right to vote in the provincial elections. The
vote was an even more restricted privilege in the polls to the central legislative
body, with ninety per cent of the people having no rights at all. Representative
government was certainly not the proclaimed aim of the British until the onset
Electoral Democracy and Social Aspirations in India
15
of the Great War of 1914-18 when it became imperative to seek support of
educated and politically articulate sections of Indian opinion. Prior to this, Lord
Rippon's Minute in 1883 laid the foundations for a limited system of franchise
in the municipalities and cities. In many cases, though not in all, these were
first initiated in the 'white town' or the Civil Lines where the British military
and civilian officials lived. Over time, a measure of self-government was
introduced: in 1909, then in 1919, and under the Government of India Act of
1935. With each progressive piece of legislation, more Indians gained access to
power, though in a diluted form.
Subjects were not quite citizens, and the issue of defence and finance
were out of the ken of the elected representatives. In the period of dyarchy,
there was a dual system, with some portfolios being handled by ministers who
were elected and others by officials who were not. Broadly speaking the former
had to do with welfare and expenditure and the latter with revenue raising
and law and order. The phase was still significant in places like the Madras
Presidency where access to modern education had been heavily slanted in
favour of the former priestly castes. Those outside this narrow set, some 97
per cent of the population, were attracted to the ideas of social reform, and
saw no harm in holding office under dyarchy. The Justice Party in the south
in 1920 that represented such sections, was a harbinger of major social
upheavals in other parts of India later in the century. The Act of 1935 went
several steps further. Once it was carried into force, there were elected ministries
in 11 provinces, seven of which were headed by the premier nationalist body,
the Congress. Tensions still remained between the Governor, who was an agent
of the Viceroy and the ministries that were responsible collectively to the
legislatures. Even though the Congress ministries resigned at the time of the
start of the Second World War in 1939, they garnered valuable experience in
government formation and decision-making. This was also true of other parties
that had won seats or held a share of power. Despite further broadening of
the franchise, only a fraction of the population took part in the polls of 1946.
16
Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
Two significant points arose early on and remained problematic. An
electoral system based on universal notions of public good cannot recognise
community interests in a direct form. From 1906 onward, some sections of
Indian Muslims felt that without a separate electorate, their interests would
not be secure. The electoral system as constituted by the British in 1909 explicitly
conceded this demand. Whether and to what extent this was responsible for
sowing the seeds of Partition in 1947 is a contentious point, which need not
be gone into here. What is significant is that the nationalist consensus was clear.
The Motilal Nehru Report on constitutional reform of 1928 ruled out any
provision for separate electorates, while affirming the rights of religious worship
and propagation of faiths by all citizens.
The second was the issue of various communities who had been subject
to systematic social discrimination. In 1931, Dr Ambedkar and Mahatma
Gandhi entered into a Pact that anticipated the foundations of the new electoral
order of free India. While the body of voters would be singular, seats would
be set aside for such disadvantaged groups. Those who now call themselves
Dalits (literally the oppressed, now known as the Scheduled Castes) and the
adivasis (Scheduled Tribes) were to secure such rights under the Republican
Constitution of 1950. What is crucial is that the process of positive
discrimination for such groups was seen as integral to the process of nation
formation even as it was a necessary step towards ensuring a life of dignity
and equality.
Such a brief portrait cannot do justice to the complex roots of the Indian
electoral system, but it should dispel the notion that it was simply a transplant
of the Westminster system to India. What was inherited was a complex
amalgam of different traditions. The challenge lay in giving content to the new
forms of politics. It is further worth noting that the right to vote for women
was won without any major protest or dissent against it. Promised as early as
Electoral Democracy and Social Aspirations in India
17
1928 in the Nehru Report, it was written into the Constitution in 1950. Women
in India did not have to go through the travails of the suffragette agitators in
Germany or the United Kingdom. In turn, the Constitutional structure explicitly
linked political rights to social and economic ones. It was in this realm that
the acid test would lie. But it is essential to recognise the conceptual linkage
of the two realms, the political and social, at a time when this was not the
widespread practice in many countries.
One Party Dominance, 1947-67
By virtue of its long history going back to its founding in 1885, the
Congress was best placed to give expression to range of currents of opinion
and this was to be a major factor in its early dominance of politics in
independent India. Unlike many one-party states, India had a democratic,
multi-party system from the outset. The premier party maintained its position
of dominance by virtue of polling more votes than those of its rivals. The first
past the post system enabled the Congress with 46 per cent of the votes cast
in the first general elections of 1952 into a large majority in the House of the
People. It was only as late as 1977 that the House had a recognised Leader of
the Opposition in the sense that a party that was not in power commanded
the loyalty of at least 10 per cent of the members.
The strength of the party had its limits and it had to reconfigure its
appeal to reach out to key sections. In 1952, it made inroads among Muslim
communities who had not voted for it in 1946. It also won significant support
among the Scheduled Castes, due to its programme of social reform. The party
would be distinct from many counterparts elsewhere in the world, in having
a loose, consensual structure rather than a rigid cadre base. This enabled it to
mean many things to many people. In the very first decade after independence,
it bowed to public sentiment in two key respects. The states of the Union were
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
reorganised after 1956 on linguistic lines. This major overhaul was
accomplished peacefully and in record time. The redrawing of boundaries
would in the long run enable the establishment of state level or regional parties
in the future. What is crucial is that it did not weaken the Union, but made it
more flexible.
Another change due to the electorate's pressure was more controversial.
Reservation in public employment as opposed to the legislatures had only been
provided for in the case of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. It was facilitated
for other deprived social groups who were "educationally and socially
backward". The latter was only for public employment and not for
representative bodies, and the exact proportion was left to the states to
determine. The beneficiaries were groups who were not of the former upper
castes but were not from among the Scheduled Castes either. Many were
managers of cultivation or tillers of the soil, a group that had been crucial in
the freedom struggle, but who had hitched their fortunes to anti-Congress
forces in much of the Hindi belt after 1947.
The immense social and economic changes in the country made
democracy both an educative and a difficult enterprise. What stand out are the
individuals that rose to power by peaceful means. At a national level, mention
must at least be made of Babu Jagjivan Ram, a Dalit from Bihar who was a
Union Minister of rare acumen and in office virtually unbroken from 1946 to
1979. Many such instances come to mind. The western state of Maharashtra's
first chief minister was YB Chavan who was from a farming community. In
the south, Kamaraj Nadar's ascendancy reflected the rise of hitherto marginal
social groups via the Congress party. In Punjab, the ministry of Pratap Singh
Kairon saw the axis of power tilt in favour of the country as against the town.
In the early years of Congress rule, many states had powerful leaders with their
own political base and a fair degree of autonomy from the Centre in functional
terms. The party itself had in its rank people of diverse political persuasions,
Electoral Democracy and Social Aspirations in India
19
a feature no doubt facilitated by the nature of the electoral system. It is easy to
forget that the diversity of the country makes such a loose coalition under one
party's umbrella a formidable formation. In the great debates about affirmative
action or on industry versus agriculture, or of the role of state regulation and
private enterprise in the economy, the Congress contained an astonishing
degree of diversity within its ranks.
This was also to prove its great limiting factor, once the loose consensus
ended. It did so spectacularly in 1967. The party still won 283 of 516 seats in
the Lok Sabha with 41 per cent of the vote. But the key opposition parties had
united in many states, giving it a tough fight. The party had even earlier lost
power in states like Kerala (1957-59). Its majority reduced, the Congress split
two years later, and the wing in power was remade into a more centralised
party. The leadership of Mrs Indira Gandhi (1966-77;1980-84) was to be a
watershed in Indian politics. The world's second ever woman Prime Minister
was without doubt an outstanding if controversial leader. But the key change
in the electoral calculus lay in the lessons she drew from the past. If the
opposition could sink its differences and unite, the Congress responded by
becoming a more personalised and centralised machine. In the Indira period,
state leaders came to be less significant than the premier all India leader.
Further, the success of her party due to its slogan of 'banish poverty' in the
elections of 1971 left her in total control of the Congress and much of the
country. In turn, the first non-Congress regime of 1977 saw precisely those
political groups come to power who had experimented with anti-Congress
ministries in the states of north India a decade earlier.
The 1967 polls were a watershed in more than one way. The Congress
though victorious was shown to be vulnerable. States like West Bengal and
Tamil Nadu had non-Congress state governments for the first time. In north
India, the more short-lived ministries demonstrated both the promise and the
pitfalls of the combination of politically and socially diverse groups in office.
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
There was the Bharatiya Jana Sangh with a mainly urban base and a focus on
a strong Centre in combination with the more rural based, populist socialists
of various hues and shades. Displacing Congress was easier than replacing it
with a stable coalition of forces or parties. It was often unclear whether what
had come into being should be an alternative or a substitute. The hurdle was
less about personality and more to do with historical legacy. The Congress was
still capable of re-inventing itself as it did in 1971 as a party of the poor or in
its successful comeback bid in 1980 as a party that could give good government.
But the issues and problems that surfaced in 1967 have stayed ever since,
evidence of a maturing polity.
Congress and its Opponents, 1967-89
1967 was a watershed in more than one sense. The average turnout of
voters in the various State Assemblies elections held that year exceeded 60 per
cent for the first time. National leadership passed into a generation that had
not had a direct role in steering the freedom struggle. In several states, those
who had spent a lifetime in the Opposition benches moved to the Treasury side
for the first and not for the last time. By 1971, the Congress was back in control
and also managed to return to power in most states the following year. Yet
within a short time, the system was plunged into crisis. The imposition of the
Emergency in June 1975, the defeat of the Congress in 1977 and its return to
power three years later are all too well known to bear repetition.
In the process, it is easy to ignore two tendencies that could have had
long term negative impact unless checked. The first was the linkage of the
tenure of state governments to that of the regime at the federal level. In 1971,
the Lok Sabha polls had been held ahead of schedule; the State Assembly
elections followed a year later. In 1977, the new Janata Party government
dissolved Assemblies in several states. Three years later, the Congress followed
Electoral Democracy and Social Aspirations in India
21
suit. Supreme Court judgements in the Bommai and Patwa cases eventually
brought the matter under judicial review. Yet in the period between 1967 and
1989, the power to bring a state under President's Rule to ensure that its
governance was carried on in accordance with the Constitution was abused
by every regime that governed the country. This harmed the federal spirit of
the Constitution, which though weighted in favour of the Centre, never made
it all-powerful. Needless to add, the fact there were different and opposing
parties in power in New Delhi and in particular states accentuated tensions.
The mandate of the people in a state has its own sanctity: this is a tenet that
has been violated at the cost of the country and not merely certain parties.
The second dimension is equally crucial and pertains to regional
formations. Though the various non-Congress regimes that came to power did
not last a full term, they did establish a healthy precedent. In 1977, a coalition
led by Morarji Desai took office, and included for the first time, a regional party,
the Shiromani Akali Dal of Punjab. In 1989, the VP Singh led ministry saw the
sharing of power with other state specific parties such as those from Andhra
Pradesh, Assam and Tamil Nadu. Earlier, a state level politician could only
aspire for national office through membership of the Congress or one of the
all-India party formations. This ceased to be the case after 1977.
The period from the early 1970s to the end of the 1980s was one of
intense political and social turmoil but it need not be seen only in negative
terms. In many states, Dalit voters who had earlier been loyalists of one party
began to move towards other formations, including some with a leadership
drawn from their own communities. This phenomenon took the shape of the
former Dalit Panthers in the west. In the north, the now influential Bahujan
Samaj Party was formed in 1984. In 1977, many Muslims in north India had
voted against the Congress for the first time. Three years later they turned back
to it in large numbers. This phenomenon of electoral volatility was itself a
measure of the willingness to judge parties not by historical legacies but by
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
concrete acts of policy. Volatile voters would also be manifest in other ways,
with upper caste sections in north and central India turning to opposition
currents in a major way by the end of the 1980s. The flexibility of the polity
was manifest in other ways. An adivasi became the head of government of a
large state for the first time in Gujarat in 1985; two years later, a former
insurgent (Laldenga) won election as Chief Minister in Mizoram in North East
India.
The period from 1980-89 saw a Congress government in office all
through. But there were soon Opposition ministries in several states. Most
crucially, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, two key southern bastions of the all
India party passed into Opposition hands. More seriously, several key groups
that had long been loyal to the Congress were in a mood of drift. Political
assertion took the form of voting the government out. In several states starting
from around this time, the incumbent simply lost the elections. In 1989, this
trend was extended to the general elections. Though it was the single largest
party in the Lok Sabha and polled more votes than any other formations, the
Congress was voted out of office. Another phase in Indian democracy had
begun.
1989 and after: Power without Dominance?
By the time the results of the 1989 general elections were out, it was clear
who had lost but not who had won. This odd situation arose from the
heterogeneity of the anti-Congress alliance. VP Singh who became Prime
Minister headed a centrist group comprised mainly of ex-socialists who strongly
believed in affirmative action. A small but influential bloc of regional parties
and another of left wing parties had close links with him. The Bharatiya Janata
Party however, made the major gains; a cadre based group, with a clear
ideological focus and message. The strains soon surfaced around two major
Electoral Democracy and Social Aspirations in India
23
issues, both of which remain crucial to this day. The extension of reservations
announced in August 1990 gathered strong support from possible beneficiaries
in north India but also encountered entrenched resistance. The BJP leader, LK
Advani embarked on a long mass contact programme to popularise his party's
stand on a disputed holy site in Ayodhya. His arrest in October 1990 led to
the defeat of the government in a no-confidence motion. In a sense, this was a
turning point as it was the first time a government resigned because it was
voted out on the floor of the House. The event also marked the ebb of the antiCongress platform as a rallying point: with the rise to prominence of the BJP,
it would soon become a new touchstone of Indian politics. The 1989-90 phase
was also important in other ways for it marked the eclipse of the premier party,
the Congress in two major north Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. As
society became more polarised, the old party of consensus faced new challenges
to its authority. New contenders arose, each trying to transcend and not just
claim its legacy.
Despite the return to power of the Congress in 1991 and its completion
of a full five-year term, there was no return to the old way of politics. In all
successive polls, the party has consistently attracted more votes than any other
formation, even as the number of seats it holds has declined. Conversely, the
Bharatiya Janata Party, which won the maximum number of seats in three
successive general elections in 1996, 1998 and 1999, is still way short of a
majority. The next largest party does not even have fifty, let alone a hundred
seats. However, the weight of such smaller parties has increased significantly.
After decades of giving one party large majority, even two thirds of the seats,
the Indian voter has over the last ten years set a new trend. No government
can now be formed let alone be lasting unless it rests on a combination forged
either before or after the elections. This has had a positive effect on the role of
Parliament and two governments of HD Deve Gowda in 1997 and Atal Bihari
Vajpayee in 1999, have resigned after losing a vote of confidence, in the latter
case by one vote.
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
The dynamics of social change have left a mark on national politics. In
a reflection of the social flux, two Prime Ministers, PV Narasimha Rao (199196) and Deve Gowda (1996-97) have been from southern India. At a state level,
a Dalit woman has been the head of government of the most populous state
on two occasions. At the all-India level, for only the second time in history,
the Leader of the Opposition is also a woman. Such changes have had their
links with the transformation of the nature of politics on the ground. In Bihar,
a state marked by sharp disparities of caste and class, and in Assam,
representatives of the left extremist Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)
won election to Parliament as MPs. Across the country, the rates of
participation of relatively deprived groups in the polls show a marked upward
trend: women, adivasis, Dalits, villagers and the poor. The enactment of the
73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments gave rural and local self-government
a firmer footing than ever before. One in three posts were reserved for women.
Today, there are over two million elected representatives in the country, a small
proportion of whom are in the legislatures. State governments were not only
more stable than in the past, but many state parties began to play a key role in
all-India politics.
The achievements are significant and do merit a closer look. The country
has remained one, despite the immense changes such as the creation of
linguistic states or the absence of special representation for religious minorities.
It is also noteworthy that the polity now has diverse kinds of political
formations, from the cadre based parties to looser consensual ones, from those
with a base cutting across states to others that are largely confined to one
province. Nor should the general apathy of the middle classes be allowed to
obscure the growing levels of participation in the democratic process by the
poor. The question is whether juridical equality can translate into the equality
of opportunity. There is little doubt that this will be no easy task.
Electoral Democracy and Social Aspirations in India
25
It would be incorrect to pretend that all has been well. Disparities of
caste and gender especially with regard to educational attainment and property
rights make equality seem a distant mirage for many. Equally so, ethnic cards
are difficult to resist in a society where the diversity of cultures and faiths is
proverbial. In certain regions, this has been compounded by the brute power
of landed elites who do not hesitate to try and bend the law to force their will
on others. What is positive is the rising level of public awareness of such abuses
and the unwillingness of people to tolerate the violation of democratic norms.
In recent Assembly elections in a prominent state, women's groups successfully
campaigned against candidates of prominent parties with a poor record on
gender issues. Elsewhere, such groups have led parties to modify their
manifestos to address their concerns.
Indian democracy is at a crossroads. One party dominance has given
way to the reality and inevitability of coalition politics both at the Centre and
in many key states. The future will rest not on the ability of specific interest
groups to have their way but on their ability to arrive at a new consensus.
Several issues faced by electoral democracy in India are by no means unique
to it: the enforcement of standards of ethical conduct for elected representatives,
the gap between promise and performance. Yet it is possible to look to the future
in a mood of cautious optimism. Half a century may be long in the life-span
of a single person, but is only a moment in the life of a nation. The journey
continues.
The author is an independent political analyst and researcher based at Delhi.
E-mail: mahesh3@ndf .vsnl.net.in
Views expressed are those of the author and not to be construed as endorsed by the Election Commission
of India.
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
Yogendra Yadav
Less than fifty years since the inauguration of democratic elections based
on universal adult franchise, the phenomenon of election has ceased to surprise
the students and observers of Indian politics. Like tea, cinema or cricket, there
is something about the Indian elections that makes it appear like an age-old
Indian passion. Elections have come to be like a familiar household object and
symbolise the mundane and the quotidian routine of politics. We often forget
how recent an import these are.
It is therefore worth remembering that this normal, taken for granted,
naturalised world of elections is an extra-ordinary and recent development in
the Indian society. A simple thought experiment can help us understand this
point. Let us imagine whether it was possible to hold something like the
modern elections in the time of Akbar or Harshvardhan. The very idea that
all the inhabitants of the country should come together and, on an appointed
day and time, make a simultaneous choice would appear a very strange idea
to any pre-modern society. But for the encounter with modern West under the
conditions of colonialism, it would have been impossible to think of the kind
of elections we have today. The modern practice of elections requires at least
four sets of beliefs that had no currency in pre-British India. It requires a specific
kind of public arena, a set of actors with a given role definition, a purpose
which orients the entire activity and some agreed rules of the game. In the
absence of these four conditions, it is impossible to conceive of the modern
practice of elections.
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
First of all, elections presuppose the existence of a modern public sphere,
the fictional assembly of a set of people bound together by abstract affection
produced by sheer imagination. This is what enables a tea garden worker in
Assam and a farmer in Tamil Nadu and a doctor in Mumbai to think that they
all belong to the same body. The existence of this notional sphere is necessary
for any mass activity like elections which involves simultaneous collective
action. Secondly, it presupposes the idea of citizenship, for that is what defines
the rules of inclusion and exclusion for the electorate. The inhabitants in the
reign of Akbar were only subjects of Akbar, the emperor. The empire, the
physical entity of which they were a member, could keep changing its boundary
depending on the conquests, without making any difference to the identity of
the subjects. It gives the people a new identity, a new role definition - that of
an elector - they lacked in the traditional society. Thirdly, it presupposes the
idea of popular sovereignty, the extra-ordinary belief that the final power for
deciding the destiny of common people rests not with the emperors or the
nobles but with the people themselves. The fact that all the citizens can
periodically choose their rulers and replace them gives the activity of elections
its meaning and purpose, it gives the activity of modern elections the kind of
salience these have acquired. And finally, elections presuppose acceptance of
the procedures of political competition and some rules of selection. These rules
vary from place to place. The two dominant types of these rules in modern
democracies are the proportional representation and the first-past-the-post
system. Whatever the exact nature of these rules to decide the competition,
modern elections are tied to the belief that common good can be achieved by
a free competition of different and often conflicting interests. It also grants the
possibility that these different interests being organised politically.
The encounter with colonialism laid the foundations of the modern
public sphere in India, making it possible for the multitude of people living in
this land to think of themselves as Indians. The successful national movement
ensured the passage from subject-hood to citizenship, thus creating the
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
29
collective agency which participates in the election ritual. The creation of a
republic institutionalised the idea of popular sovereignty. In operational terms
it was translated in the form of universal adult franchise granted by the Indian
constitution. The constitution also laid down the rules of deciding the winner
in the electoral race. It implicitly accepted the existence of organised political
interests in the form of political parties.
In other words, the institution of elections came to India at the founding
moment of the Indian nation-state along with the package of liberal democracy
accepted at that time. While there was some discussion about the nature of
electoral rules to be adopted, there is no evidence to suggest that anyone in
the Constituent Assembly seriously contemplated a non-competitive form of
democracy or a democracy without elections. Yet the institution of elections
does not explain why elections have come to be the hub of public activity,
almost a public festival, in contemporary India. It does not explain why
elections took roots in India and not everywhere else. A look at the experience
of democracy in other post-colonial societies of Asia and Africa helps to
illustrate the alternative paths electoral democracy could have taken. In many
of these countries, elections have simply not taken roots. Free and fair elections
still remain a distant aspiration. The official results of elections very often do
not reflect popular choice. Grave doubts are expressed about the authenticity
of election results. Very often the elections are followed by bloody battles among
political rivals over the validity of the verdict itself. Instead of settling
contending claims to power, election results themselves become one of the
issues of the dispute. Even when elections are held in more or less free and
fair manner, party competition at the time of elections is a simple reflection of
the pre-existing ethnic divide in the society. Elections end up exacerbating, for
example, the inter-tribal tensions to a point of explosion.
In this context the challenge of understanding the experience of electoral
politics in India becomes more complex. Particularly so, since right from its
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
inception Indian democracy has had to respond to an agenda which bears only
a tangential relationship to its inner trajectory and account for its life in a
register kept to write someone else's history. India is not unique in this respect.
This is true of all the democracies save the 'classical' democracies of Europe
and America. Contemporary models of democracy are based on a very narrow
experience, narrow both in space and time. The experience of European and
American democracies is the privileged site for theorisation, while the
experience of the rest of the world falls under the domain of application of the
theory. This limitation of democratic theory has contributed to a paradox of
our times: while democracy is expanding all over the globe, our notion of what
it means to be a democracy is actually shrinking. A rigid check-list model of
democracy has taken over the global imagination. It leaves little room for plural
conceptions or even multiple forms of democracy. It is far from obvious if the
percolation of this model all over the globe represents a benign extension of
human reason or a triumph of truth.
A fair assessment of India's experience of electoral democracy must,
therefore, be anchored in an understanding of the Indian model of
democratisation in its specificity. That perhaps is the first striking attribute of
the post-independence Indian state that distinguishes it from all the
predecessors. It did not merely have attributes; it had a design. This is not to
say the state actually followed that design, but merely to insist that we cannot
even begin to understand the modern democratic state in India without
reference to that design. This paper begins by describing that design or the
Indian model. It then goes on to map how it fared in the three phases of
democratic politics. Finally, it comes back to a synoptic assessment of the last
fifty years of electoral democracy.
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
31
II
Fifty years ago when India began the journey, it was easier to project a
destination and a route, for the privilege of describing it lay without much
contestation with a small section of India's westernised elite. All of them did
not think alike, but their differences were not unbounded. There was a
significant overlap underlying the various differences of ideologies and social
contexts. The model of Indian democracy was founded on that consensus. And
much of it was neatly scripted in the document called the Constitution of India.
Since then, the number of those who wish to participate in the process of
defining the Indian model has increased phenomenally, thanks no doubt to the
success of the processes initiated by the original inheritors to the legacy of the
British Raj. There is no longer a neat document in which these newcomers can
register their aspirations. Moreover, our awareness of the complexities of mass
ideologies and the crooked logic of collective action has rendered the question
of the meaning of the Indian model less amenable to a confident answer.
Questions like "which India" and "whose model" are more likely to crop up
today than they were fifty years ago.
At first sight, the initial design of the Indian democratic enterprise does
not look original at all. So many of the attempts to articulate the vision of
democracy in an independent India appear as a desire to imitate the experience
of liberal democracy in the West. The speeches and the writings of the
nationalist leadership and the debates of the Constituent Assembly are full of
fond references to the democracies in the West. Indeed, the basic design of the
Indian Constitution was consciously borrowed from the European and the
American tradition. The parliamentary system of relationship between the
executive and the legislature, the federal structure for governing the interaction
between the centre and the states, the idea of fundamental rights, an
independent judiciary to safegaurd these rights and the constitution itself...
all this would sound very familiar to the students of constitutional history of
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
the West. A large number of the provisions of the Constitution retained verbatim
the corresponding provisions in the Government of India Act of 1935, the
political framework evolved by the colonial masters.
Yet the Indian constitution was not a simple imitation of the British
model or any other existing constitution, for no attempt at copying can be free
of value addition. Elements picked up from various Western models
(parliamentary system from Britain, judicial system and bill of rights from the
US, Directive Principles from Ireland and so on) were combined together in a
unique mix. Besides, various specifically Indian elements were introduced by
way of 'redefinition' of some of the familiar Western ideas and institutions.
Community rather than individual was acknowleged as a possible basis of
citizenship in the affirmative action policies of the state. Secularism was
redefined in a specifically Indian manner. These and many other examples
demonstrate that creativity in the garb of imitation has been the preferred mode
of political innovation in modern India. Right from the beginning, the Indian
model of democracy involved a selective usage and subtle adaptation of the
language of modern liberal democracy. To be sure, the framers of the
constitution did not foreground their innovations. Given their understanding
of universalism and the awe of the West, they were rather reluctant almost
shame-faced innovators. But they did not allow their embarrassment to get the
better of their sense of the specific practical needs of the country they were
serving.
The constitution, however, was not the core of the innovative aspect of
the Indian path to democratization. Its essence lay in the unwritten political
model that informed the practice of democracy in the last five decades. The
Indian model, as its most shrewd interpreter Rajni Kothari argued in his
magnum opus Politics in India, involved the primacy of the political and a
redefinition of the boundaries of the political. Thus, politics was not just one
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
33
of the areas which the Indian elite sought to transform. It was at the heart of
India's tryst with modernity.
In a bold move that broke from the political models available at that
time, the Indian elite chose to pursue multiple goals simultaneously: to make
democracy work; to create a single political community in a large and diverse
society; to pursue Western style economic development; and to bring about
fundamental changes in the society.
They opted for political democracy, more specifically the constitutionalrepresentative-democratic-republican form of government, in a society which
lacked any historic precedent of such governance at the scale they confronted.
By opting for democracy they also exposed themselves to radical egalitarian
expectations of a political community of equals, a community in which the
people were ruled by none but themselves. Some of them did realise that this
was a distant ideal from the form of government they had established. The
second goal was built into the first one: the survival of democracy in the face
of the amazing diversities which defined India required the creation of a single
political community across the recently acquired political boundaries of the
Indian state. The lessons of the partition of territories between India and
Pakistan were too painful a reminder of the need for what was called then
national integration and later nation-building. This was a newly acquired need.
The creation of a modern public sphere gave birth to this seemingly impossible
requirement to bring together a huge number of communities which have had
little to do with each other. The modern public sphere also provided the
resources for meeting this requirement.
In the realm of the economy, the Indian elite opted for western style
development in the hope that the path to development was open to anyone
who cared to step in. They may not have hoped for a miraculous entry to the
world of consumer goods for everyone, but they did expect a substantial and
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
speedy economic growth in aggregate terms. The economic goals included a
reduction in the historical gap that distinguished India from the developed
world and a substantial trickle down of the gains of economic growth to the
worst off. Finally, they aimed at bringing about fundamental changes in the
structure of the society they inherited. Even those who did not share the radical
desire for the abolition of traditional social hierarchy and its inequities did look
forward to mitigating the worst effects of the caste system. At any rate, the
goal of social modernisation that would transform the traditional, 'parochial'
beliefs of the masses into modern, 'cosmopolitan' values was widely shared.
Democracy was not just one of the goals, it was also the principle
instrument of realising all these goals simultaneously. The power of a modern
state, the mobilising capacity of universal adult franchise, the dynamics of
competitive politics, the firm grip of a system of political institutions, and the
vision of an enlightened elite were the main elements in the politics centred
approach to modernisation adopted by India. The colonial state had expanded
considerably the boundaries of the political and had annexed for politics the
crucial self-reflexive privilege of deciding what the boundaries of the political
were going to be. The nationalist movement expanded it further by including
within the political domain various social and economic issues which the
colonial power had steered clear of. The modern Indian state was to exercise
power over this wide arena and bring about the social transformation necessary
to the realisation of the four-fold goal mentioned above. Its reach was to be
made effective by a wide range of bureaucratic apparatus, while the
constitutional institutions would ensure that the game was played according
to the rules. The introduction of universal adult franchise was meant to draw
in a hitherto unprecedented number of participants to the game of governance
as also secure their acceptance of its outcome. Open electoral competition was
to harness the energy of the political actors while political parties were to
streamline this energy for purposes of creative transformation. The enlightened
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
35
political elite was supposed to steer the way, keeping its gaze fixed on the larger,
if distant, goals.
All this was not spelt out anywhere, at least not in the formal text of
the Constitution. Looked at from a distance of fifty years it is easy to read a
clear design in what must have been a mix of prudent judgements, halfexamined convictions and sheer hope. The above formulation of the 'Indian
model' draws heavily upon Rajni Kothari's subtle interpretation of the working
of democratic politics in the first two decades of independence. Kothari insisted
that the historical trajectory of Indian politics must be assessed against this
'model'. In arguing for the Indian model to be the starting point of the
discussion, he had already parted company with the then dominant mode of
thinking about democracy in non-western societies. Cast in a somewhat simple
universal framework of modernisation , the dominant approach measured
political development by the extent to which a traditional society had come to
resemble the political system of the advanced societies of the West. Western
democratic theory has changed considerably since then, but the check-list
models of democracy which expect non-European societies to take the same
route as the West still persist. To that extent, the approach implicit in Kothari's
work still provides a useful starting point for any attempt to assess the
experience of the last fifty years.
At least some of the designers of this Indian model were acutely
conscious of the fact that they were stepping in an uncharted territory, that they
were attempting something for which there was no precedent. The Indian elite
had already done to the received western models of democracy what the Indian
masses were to do to their own model. By selective adoption and adaptation,
they had already begun creolisation of the idea of democracy, a process which
was to have profound historical consequences for the real life career of this idea
in India.
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III
Establishment of democracy was an invitation by the Indian elite to the
ordinary Indians to join them in playing a new game. It is true that the
invitation must not have come as a surprise to keen observers of nationalist
politics in the decades prior to independence. In opposing the British rule, the
nationalist leaders drew upon the most progressive strands of modern
European thinking. No wonder, democracy was an article of faith for them.
Besides, the last two decades before independence were marked by
intensification of popular movements that gave rise to expectations of self-rule
among the lower orders of society. All this left a very narrow range of options
for the Indian elite when it came to choosing the form of government. Yet those
options were more than is realised now. Pakistan's choice of what in effect was
a Viceregal system illustrates the options open then. The establishment of
democracy in India was undoubtedly a bold invitation, for the rules and the
possible consequences of this game were not entirely clear to the elite, and more
importantly, they did not know their guests very well.
The history of Indian politics since independence is the story of how
the Indians accepted the invitation and discovered this new game, at first with
hesitation and amusement and then with an obsessive fierceness. It is a history
of what this encounter did to them and to the game itself. What happened
afterwards is not difficult to anticipate. After the initial unease, the guests felt
at home in this new setting and then changed the rules to suit their taste. For
the first few years, everyone felt guilty about demanding language to be the
basis of political reorganisation of the federal map of India, but very soon it
became an indisputable principle. The invitees now turned their back to the
hosts and started enjoying themselves. It was a different game now. It took a
life of its own and was played for purposes substantially at variance with the
textbook versions or the intentions of the original hosts. The consequences of
the game of democracy turned out to be radically different from what anyone
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
37
had intended or anticipated, throwing up a new set of opportunities and
constraints for which there were no well known precedents in the history of
democracy in the West.
It is a comment on the imaginative charms of the original model that
Indian politics is still understood as a series of deviations from it, that every
deviation is seen as a sign of decline and disorder. This tendency contributes
to the predominant way of telling the story of Indian politics. The storyline is
simple and powerful. Like all stories of its kind, it has the power to give
meaning to any event, big or small, and to supply the yardstick for
distinguishing normal from deviation. Like all stories, it looks at things from
one vantage point and whispers a moral in our ears. Thanks to its charms and
the English speaking elite pedigree of those who publicly articulate ideas about
Indian democracy, this narrative continues to dominate the imagination of all
the political analysts, academic or otherwise. Implicit in this dominant story
of Indian democracy, or for that matter in the contemporary democratic theory,
is what may be called a hardware approach to democracy: democracy is above
all an institutional mechanism that can be made to work properly in any setting,
given the right conditions of installation.
The story of Indian democracy can be told differently.
The challenge
of understanding India at fifty requires that we tell this story differently. It
requires that we treat democracy like a language or a software that cannot even
begin to work without establishing a firm protocol of shared symbols with its
users. If it has to have a life, democracy must exist in and through the minds
of ordinary people, it must learn to work its way through the beliefs and values
they happen to have. It is necessary to change our approach, for the palaceeye-view of politics has hidden from us for far too long the story of popular
contestation of designs imposed from above, of the participatory upsurge of
the lower orders of society, of the less known attempts to weave dreams of
social emancipation in the language of modern democracy. It is also crucial to
contest the dominant story, for its moral is deeply, if subtly, anti-political.
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
IV
The first phase, the famous 'Congress system' of the 1950s and 1960s,
was characterised by a wide gulf which separated the all-powerful westernised
elite from popular beliefs. In this period the Indian National Congress, the party
that led the national movement, dominated the political scene. It won all the
national and practically all the state level elections in this period. India was
undoubtedly a democracy, for the rulers were being elected by the people in a
system of open and fair competition among different political parties. But in
the realm of ideas it hardly followed the democratic principle of equal respect.
'Guided Democracy' was a euphemism used by some Asian leaders to describe
their versions of semi-authoritarian regimes preferred by them in the postcolonial setting. That, of course did not apply to the decision making structure
of Indian democracy. But in terms of ideas, Indian democracy was firmly
guided from above in the first phase.
The democratic invitation, which meant an invitation to participate in
the new spectacle of elections, was accepted by an ever growing number. The
turnout jumped from 46 per cent in the first general election in 1952 to 55 per
cent in the third election in 1962 and to 61 per cent in the fourth one in 1967.
The new entrants had begun to defeat the English speaking inhabitants of the
Indian state. Yet the structure of the game basically followed the rules set by
the hosts. There were deviations and distortions. But on balance, the game was
manageable, or at least recognisable. There was no dearth of political opposition
to the Congress rule. There were the Socialists and the Communists as well as
the right wing opposition parties. The Communists actually managed to come
to power in 1957 in the state of Kerala, the first time a Communist party
anywhere in the world won a democratic mandate. But in cognitive terms,
barring some followers of Gandhi and the indigenous socialism advocated by
Ram Manohar Lohia, there was little dissent to the vision of democracy shared
by India's English speaking elite.
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
39
Nehru's school-teacher-like mannerism symbolised the didactic
relationship in which the political elite stood vis-a-vis the ordinary people in
this first phase. If we focus on the flow of ideas, it clearly was a one-way traffic.
The ordinary citizens were autonomous in this realm only to the extent to which
they misunderstood, deliberately or otherwise, the ideas they received from
above, a privilege lower orders of society have enjoyed throughout history.
From a certain vantage point, it was a fairly satisfactory state of affairs. If you
were born in the right kind of family, took care to keep away from the heat
and dust of this country and took a telescopic view of things, Indian democracy
could appear very much like an authentic or at least a 'developing' liberal
democracy.
The insulation of democracy from popular beliefs gave it a certain
breathing space, an initial settling in period for the new set of institutions. The
legacy of nationalism meant that the new regime enjoyed a high level of
popular legitimacy even if the people did not quite understand what they were
supporting. Thanks to these favourable conditions, the modern Indian state
could not only inherit the powers of the colonial state but also expand
considerably the scope of its activities to cover what was regarded earlier as
the private or the societal domain. Rather than be dictated by the relations of
production, politics was very much in a position to fundamentally alter the
property relations. In the first decade after independence, the Indian
government passed a series of land reform laws all aimed at changing the
pattern of land ownership. There already was, to be sure, micro-level collusion
of the politically powerful with the dominant economic interests but there were
very few overt, macro or structural economic limits to politics. Thus the smooth
transfer of power in 1947 brought into existence something which might appear
as an astonishing accomplishment in retrospect. Without much fuss it signalled
the beginning of an era of the centrality of politics in the public sphere. It is
amazing to see the extraordinary power modern political agencies have come
to occupy in a society which was characterised by an absence of a political
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
centre, where politics was a limited and self-limiting activity. A future historian
might remember these fifty years not for the more noticeable political events
but for the creation of the space on which these events took place.
Behind these appearances, however, the content had already begun to
change. If one takes cognisance of what the actors thought they were doing,
rather than go by an external descriptions of their behaviour, it is clear that a
new and unfamiliar life was being infused in the formal structures of liberal
democracy. The few field studies of local politics and the fictional accounts
available through contemporary literature in the Indian languages show that
patron-client network and systems of reward distribution were already in place
in the first decade after independence. And what is worse, most of these were
based on criterion other than those liberal democracy could approve of.
Competitive politics had already formed linkages with the pre-existing social
divisions. Caste acquired a new salience in political mobilisation. This
development, initially condemned as casteism in politics but later theorised as
politicisation of caste, was to have enduring effects both on democracy and
the institution of caste.
The fact that the basic building blocs of competitive politics in India are
not individuals or groups based on ideas and interests but communities based
on birth has been something of a scandal in the eyes of commentators, analysts
and some elite practitioners of Indian politics, irrespective of their ideological
preferences. It has been interpreted as the Indian corruption of the ideal of
liberal democracy. This sense of shame informs the dominant story of Indian
politics. It may not be out of place here to remember that this gap between the
self-image and the reality of liberal democracy is not specific to India alone. A
comparison, for example, with the history of democracy in the United States
in the nineteenth century bears out that this gap lies at the very heart of the
practice of liberal democracy. The problem is not that the real life has failed to
live up to the theoretical ideals, but that theory has failed to take into account
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
41
the nuances of real life. A more sensitive theory would have noticed that this
gap may have helped the growth of democracy, for its articulation through the
pre-existing social divisions helped competitive politics take firm roots in the
society and become something of an organic growth. A closer look at the
interaction between caste and politics would have shown that the basic building
blocs were never really the product of 'primordial loyalties'. Before becoming
the basis of politics, units like caste or community underwent a secular process
of packaging in which interest and to some extent ideology mattered as much
as they did anywhere else.
The working of the famous "Congress system" in the first phase should
be viewed in this context. The one party dominance system, in which both
the governmental and the effective oppositional roles were performed by the
different factions of the Congress, served as a nursery of the multi-party system.
There was very little ideological polarisation, except on the very extremes of
the political spectrum, as the Congress occupied a wide range of middle
positions through which different interests could be articulated. At the macro
level the catch-all character of the Congress ensured that its support was evenly
spread across different sections of society, a feature mirrored by its major
opponents. The composition of the political elite was heavily biased in favour
of the upper caste, upper class and the English educated.
Occasionally the game threatened to break down, for the popular beliefs
refused to be tamed on at least some questions. The questions of the 'linguistic
states' proved to be one such question. A skilful political handling routinised
and thus rendered harmless the legitimate political expression of regional
diversity. As already observed, popular self-identities in terms of local
communities were also granted a back-door entry by all the parties through a
process of politicisation of castes. A combination of a robust design, skilful
execution and good fortune thus ensured that the new democracy did not
create alienation or face deep-seated hostility from those sections of population
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
whose beliefs did not find much play in the system. It is true that these sections
were not very active in the first phase of electoral politics. Consequently, the
first two or in some cases the first three elections witnessed a relatively low
level of popular participation and competitiveness. But it actually helped the
structure of competitive politics to take roots and thus contributed to early
institutionalisation. Electoral system, party organisations, legislatures, judiciary
and the bureaucracy got a grace period where their capacities were not
subjected to the strenuous test of popular democracy.
The first phase of Indian democracy is widely seen, and rightly so, as a
period of consolidation. The achievements of this phase and of Nehru in giving
a long-term institutional base to democracy in a fragile moment must not be
undervalued. But it must be remembered that these were made possible by a
big discursive chasm between the elite and the masses. Such a reminder is
necessary, for a loudly proclaimed nostalgia for Nehruvian democracy is a
common refrain in Indian politics. Many a times this desire to recreate Nehru's
India reflects a longing for an infinite extension of the times when politics was
not spoilt by the entry of the commoners. It barely conceals a desire to save
democracy from the people.
V
The second phase of Indian democracy can be said to have begun with
the fourth general election held in the year 1967. In this election the monopoly
of the Congress power was broken for the first time. Due to what may be
characterised the first democratic upsurge — marked by higher turnout and
intense participation of the backward communities — the Congress was voted
out in many states, though it managed to retain a reduced majority at the centre.
The Congress party was far from finished - its reincarnation was to win an
unprecedented majority in the next election — but the 'Congress system' came
to an end. A weaker candidate for the beginning of the second phase is 1969,
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
43
the year in which the Congress faced its first major split. The legislative wing
under the leadership of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi broke from the
organisational wing led by many regional stalwarts. It was also the year of the
beginning of the Naxalite movement, the extreme left-wing protest which was
to attract a new generation of radical youth and address itself to the question
of inequality of land. Alternatively, the break could be located in the year 1971
when Indira Gandhi scored a decisive electoral victory on the plank of poverty
removal. It was the first of the four 'wave' elections - where one party swept
through the poll with the help of massive swing of votes cutting across various
states — which changed the electoral geography of India. But none of this
created the kind of world-turned-upside-down feeling that was generated by
the results of the 1967 elections.
Whatever the exact cut-off point, it is clear that after about two decades
of the initial phase of installation and incubation, the nature and the character
of Indian democracy changed significantly. This second phase of Indian
democracy is recalled in all the stories as signalling the failure of the system,
as the beginning of its regrettable decline. It is at least equally plausible to read
this phase as the natural outcome of the first phase of successful installation
and consolidation. It marked the coming of age of Indian democracy. The infant
was now taken out of the incubator and placed in the more natural if also more
risky environment. Far from being a result of the failure of the system, it was
a direct consequence of the extra-ordinary success of democratic politics in
drawing out some new sections of the people into the political arena.
As more and more participants came to see this game as their own, they
brought to bear on it their expectations, demands and beliefs. At least some of
the sections hitherto excluded from centres of power thought it was about time
they had a say in framing the rules of the game. The most notable group among
these were the peasant-proprietors belonging to the middle castes, well below
the 'twice born' castes but distinctly above the ex-untouchables. Traditionally
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
involved in agriculture and handicrafts etc., this group of castes had lagged
behind the upper castes in education and the modern public sphere. But they
were the first ones to take advantage of the opening offered by democratic
politics. Taking advantage of their relatively secure economic background, these
castes staked their claim to political power. This phenomenon sometimes took
the form of new political parties. But in most of the cases their rise was
facilitated by the major parties.
This phase was marked by the beginning of an interaction between elite
ideologies and popular belief systems. As political competition grew more
intense, political actors were forced to pay attention to the tastes and
preferences of the ordinary voters. The grace period was over and generalised
pleas for hope in an incomprehensible ideological language were simply
insufficient. The first casualty of the new compulsions of the political market
was the edifice of borrowed high ideologies, both of the government and the
opposition. These had to be quietly and quickly replaced by home spun, or
rather home made patchwork, ideologies.
The overall impact on the ideological map was admittedly shabby.
Stitched in a haste by tailors of varying skills, the new clothes did not quite fit
the customer. English speaking analysts and pure ideologues interpreted this
development as the decline or demise of ideology in politics. Yet a paradigmatic
change had taken place. Everyone save the diehard ideological purists came
to recognise that the clothes must fit the customer, and not the other way round.
To be sure, much of the political innovation was taking place through the
backdoor, in response to the 'regrettable compulsions of practical polities'. None
of the innovators had the audacity to call it an innovation; usually the tendency
was to dissimulate, to deny that these changes were at all significant.
The immediate result of this paradigmatic shift was the rise of populism
as the dominant political ideology. The label needs to be understood carefully,
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
45
for it has become a word of abuse in the commentaries on Indian politics.
Populism is equated with political irresponsibility, with short-sighted measures
meant to appease the people without really helping them. As such it has come
to be seen as pure evil and a sign of ideological corruption. Such a reading
fails to understand the role of these non-standard ideological packages in the
process of democratisation. Populist ideologies bridged the gap between
popular aspirations and the language of high ideology without formally
displacing the latter from its hegemonic position. Not many of the populist
schemes proved successful and indeed the motives behind these were far from
noble. Yet these 'corrupt' versions made the language of democracy accessible
to the newly enfranchised and reduced the yawning gap between the theory
and the practice of politics. At the same time, populist ideology did not
necessarily reflect popular beliefs, let alone rework high ideology in the light
of the popular aspirations and needs. At this stage it was not easy for ideas to
travel bottom upwards.
Indian version of populism involved a selective appropriation of the
language of socialism, which had been incorporated in the political mainstream
following the official adoption in 1956 by the Congress of the "socialist pattern
of society" as its goal. Socialist symbols and rhetoric served to package
substantive policies which had little to do with either the pure socialist doctrine
or an egalitarian agenda. If anything, mainstream politics grew less sensitive
to the real needs of the people, at least those which did not lend themselves to
easy aggregation. Yet, insofar as rhetoric tends to bind down the actors, the
language of socialism set limits to what could be defended and legitimately
argued in the political arena. First used to reap electoral harvest in 1971,
populism continued to be the reigning ideology of Indian politics till the end
of 1980s. Different political brands were worked out by recombining familiar
elements under the socialist label.
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
Elections were about whose claim to offer the same menu was found
more credible by a nation-wide electorate. That changed the character of
elections. In the first phase, elections were about electing a representative. The
sum total of these localised verdicts constituted the national verdict. Beginning
with 1971, elections became something of a plebiscite. The entire country was
addressed as one single audience and asked to give its verdict on one single
issue. And they responded in the same spirit by voting for their MPs (Members
of Parliament) as if they were directly electing the PM (Prime Minister). A
regionally fragmented electorate gave way to a national electorate, whose
swinging moods could cause a more or less uniform swing of votes across the
country (or at least across the Hindi heartland) resulting into massive electoral
waves from 1971 to 1984. It was not impossible to defeat the Congress in this
phase, yet it continued to be the pole around which party competition was
structured. The picture at the state level looked somewhat different. The
Congress was displaced from the ruling position in 1967 in most of the north
Indian states. The party or, as in most cases, the coalition of parties that replaced
it varied in their social base and ideological persuasion as also the duration
for which they could replace the Congress.
If the party system in the first phase was called 'the Congress system',
the second phase should be described as the Congress-Opposition system.
Congress was still the only political party with a truly all-India spread. Yet it
could not take electoral victories for granted. Ranged against it were a number
of political parties with different ideologies and varying levels of political
support: the ever splitting and re-uniting versions of Janata family of parties
mainly in the north; the right wing BJP, the reincarnation of the Jansangh,
moving from its traditional base in the north to the west; the two Communist
parties which were effectively contained by then to the three states of West
Bengal, Kerala and Tripura; besides there were the regional parties. Political
competition was organised on Congress versus non-Congress lines.
Occasionally all the non-Congress parties — routinely referred to as 'the
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
47
opposition' even when in power — would come together to defeat the Congress
as in 1977 and 1989. The system of one party dominance in the first phase had
by then given way to a system of one party salience.
The Congress itself had been reinvented by Mrs Gandhi following its
split. The coalition of social forces which formed its support base was also
reconstituted. It retained its capacity for cross-sectional mobilisation but its
support was not randomly scattered across all social groups: its core was now
constituted by a rainbow coalition. It was a rainbow with thick edges: groups
on the margins of society tended to vote for Congress much more than anyone
else. These included dalits, the 15- 16 per cent ex-untouchables at the bottom
of Hindu social hierarchy, the adivasis, the 8 per cent tribals who lived outside
the pale of Hindu social order and the minorities, mainly the 12 per cent
Muslims. The reinvention of the Congress and the occasional electoral success
of the opposition resulted in a rapid turnover of the elite and some enduring
changes in the social composition of the political elite. Leaders from non-upper
caste background had their first taste of power, especially in the South and the
West. Their entry in the centres of political power accelerated the process of
cultural encounter set in motion by the introduction of universal adult franchise.
This first encounter of Indian democracy with popular beliefs left it at
once deeper and weaker. It helped Indian democracy take roots. Greater
participation and more intense politicisation showed that the process of
democratisation was still on and that the system of representative democracy
had greater acceptance among the people than was imagined at the beginning
of India's democratic career. Repeated, almost ritual, alteration of governments
gave the people a sense of control and contributed to their sense of political
efficacy. The social constituency of politics was considerably widened in the
south as political power passed from the hands of the twice born to the peasant
proprietors. The rise of the dominant Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the
south had some impact in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
the western state of Gujarat. Tough the tide was yet to turn in these states, an
inexorable process of downward percolation of power had been set in motion.
This period also showed the weakness of political institutions
exemplified in the Emergency (June 1975 to March 1977). Mrs. Gandhi used
the internal emergency provisions of the Indian constitution to turn her
personal crisis into a national emergency and suspended basic human and
political rights of the citizens. The following nineteen months showed how
fragile the institutional edifice of Indian democracy was. In some ways it was
a part of the larger crisis of political institutions. In this phase the logic of
imported liberal democratic institutions came into clash with the cultural codes
embedded in the everyday practice of Indian public life. Consequently there
began a process of erosion of political institutions, especially those which
required functional autonomy. The emergency was by no means the necessary
outcome of this erosion, but it was surely one of the possible outcomes. What
brought India out of that phase was not so much the individual heroism of
the opposition but something that must be described as the spirit of democracy.
Something of that spirit continued to give the rulers a bad conscience during
Emergency and ultimately forced a general elections in 1977. It was the same
spirit that translated into the loss of popular legitimacy of the regime at least
in the north, the epicentre of Emergency excesses. The 1977 election was a
golden moment in the history of Indian democracy, for it established like
nothing else did, the legitimacy and the fairness of the electoral exercise. To
that extent the Emergency demonstrated that Indian democracy had developed
self-corrective mechanisms and could invent new anchors for itself in times of
crisis.
Two decades of plebescitary politics considerably weakened the local
character of democracy, giving rise to the need to articulate issues which did
not and could not find expression in mainstream politics. Since the fate of the
representative did not depend on what he did or did not do, there was very
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
49
little incentive to raise local demands at the centre. Besides, the organisational
capacity of political parties shrunk as leaders established a direct relationship
with the people, sometimes consciously with a view to undermining their own
party. Governance became more remote than ever. Although the governments
came to power with hitherto unprecedented majorities, they soon lost popular
confidence. The failure of the socialist rhetoric to deliver the goods also
contributed to a deep-felt popular frustration. The gap between the people
and the centres of power was filled by protest movements. A large number of
non party political formations and some parties with a movement character
filled a crucial gap in influencing the political agenda of the mainstream at a
time when it was growing insensitive to popular demands.
If this phase led to the creation of a national political community, its
catch-all character also squeezed out some of the claims to power based on
regional and ethnic diversity.
The insensitive handling of two such claims in the states of Assam and
the Punjab led to prolonged crises. The rise of regional parties restored
something of the voice of diversity as also the faith in the self-correcting
mechanisms of democracy. For all its problems and weaknesses, this phase
established that the people could not be kept out of the democratic process.
VI
The third and the ongoing phase of democratic politics began
somewhere around the turn of the decade with the almost simultaneous arrival
of the three Ms on the domestic horizon and the collapse of the USSR which
silently but very effectively signalled the demise of the hegemony of the
language of socialism in Indian politics. The three Ms stood for Mandal, Mandir
and Market. Mandal, the chairman of a governmental commission constituted
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in 1980 that recommended reservation of government job for the OBCs to
improve their social and educational conditions, came to refer to the entire
phenomenon of the assertion of the OBCs and their quest for empowerment,
when the recommendations of the Commission were suddenly implemented
by the Janata Dal government in 1990. Mandir, or the temple, refers to the
movement supported by the BJP in favour of the claim that the Babari mosque
situated in the holy city of Ayodhya was actually a temple of Lord Rama. The
movement culminated in the demolition of the Babari mosque by Hindu
fundamentalists in December 1992. The third M, Market, stands for the policy
of economic liberalisation and integration into the global economic regime now
controlled by the World Trade Organisation, that was initiated in 1991.
The third phase takes the encounter of the language of democracy with
popular imagination a step further. The sudden ideological unsettling has
created a context in which for the first time ideas from the lower order can
leave their impress on high ideology. The removal of the token supremacy of
the idea of socialism had both a liberating and a debilitating effect on
democratic contestation of meanings. Some of the new set of beliefs which come
into play in this phase are from the lower orders of society and articulate
interests which could not be articulated under the previous ideological
hegemony. This development liberated the new leadership from backward
classes from having to pack their sectional demands in the language of high
ideology which weighed against it. It also made possible a reconfiguration of
the 'third force' to allow for a coalition of regional parties with the left,
something their fundamental ideological differences would not have allowed
in the past.
This does not apply to all the dimension of the ideological terrain. The
New Economic Policy and its ideology of privatisation and free-trade is by no
means an ideological influence from below. The price paid for the influence of
the lower orders on the political discourse was the shrinking of the agenda
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
51
itself. Economic policy no longer figured on the menu of political choices. Major
economic decisions are now in the technical domain for the experts to settle.
Something of the extraordinary autonomy that politics enjoyed since
independence has alredy been eroded in the current phase .
If the second phase had turned the ordinary voter into a customer
whose tastes had to be taken into account by political entrepreneurs, the third
phase turns them into demanding and often discerning customers. In that sense
there is, for the first time, a two-way traffic in ideas. It is not surprising that
this also happens to be the period when a democratic upsurge is taking place
among the hitherto disempowered sections. In this context, some of the findings
of the two wide-ranging and representative national surveys of the Indian
electorate conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)
during the 1996,1998 and 1999 general elections are worth noting. The surveys
report a dramatic upsurge in all forms of political participation from voting to
membership of political parties among dalits. There is a beginning of change
among adivasis too, for their turnout recorded a sudden jump in the 1996
election, though a similar change is not evident in other activities. For women,
the increase in participation has affected all the levels including turnout which
recorded a marginal improvement in 1998 and 1999. These are not meaningless statistics. Nor is the fact that India is perhaps the only major democracy
in the world where the turnout and political activism is higher among the very
poor than among the upper middle class. These are nothing if not instances of
participatory upsurge associated with the journey of the idea of democracy .
This radicalisation of the encounter of ideas does not by itself produce
a radical agenda of politics. The erosion of the established language of high
ideology and the inability to replace it with a home spun alternative has
deprived political formations of the lower order of any aggregating or screening
ideological devise. The beliefs brought to the centre of politics by the rise of
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
the lower orders (especially dalits and the OBCs) are often fragmentary in
character, concerned only with one section and with a single issue.
The new slogan "Vote hamara raj tumhara nahin chalega" (Our vote and
your rule: No more) captures the evocative power and the narrow vision of
these ideologies. On the one hand it holds out the promise of liberation by
asserting the democratic right to self-rule. At the same time the 'our' and 'your'
in this equation are defined in strictly sectional terms. 'My rule' in this context
means no more than the rule of those born in my community. Thinly wrapped
in a language of liberal democracy, these sectional claims do not even attempt
the task of ideological mediation of competing sectional claims, let alone
provide an integrated vision for the polity. What was achieved in the previous
phases through mediation and accommodation within various parties is now
attempted through political coalition among different parties by stapling
together different ideological fragments that each brings to the process.
Politics in this phase represents the fuller working out of the logic of
universal adult franchise. Electoral politics has now become the central arena
of democratisation. It is marked by higher participation, specially in the statelevel and local level elections, of the lower orders of society and their greater
politicisation. The urban, upper middle classes have obviously not shared the
participatory enthusiasm. While the political system continues to enjoy fairly
high legitimacy, the legitimacy of the political agencies and actors has suffered
a decline. If the second phase was accompanied by the first democratic upsurge,
what we have seen in the last few years is best described as the second
democratic upsurge.
The most noticed political development in this period is the dramatic
rise of the BJP to power. The BJP's rise should be viewed as a part of the larger
reconfiguration of the party political space. Though it may not be correct to
speak of a realigning election in the Indian context, for there was no stable
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
53
alignment to begin with, the changes brought about by elections from 1989 to
1999 show many similar features. Step by step these elections have brought to
an end the one-party salience. At the national level India seems to be moving
towards a multi-party system. The decline of the Congress, or the move towards
a post-Congress polity, is accompanied by a fresh drawing of the relationship
between social cleavages and political loyalties. If the Congress dominance in
the first two phases was characterised by a rainbow coalition of social
communities, its decline has meant that the various slices of the rainbow are
coming apart. While the Congress has held on to a shrinking but more or less
evenly spread rainbow, all its major competitors are rather skewed in their
social support. It is as if everyone is running away with a slice of the old
rainbow. Even the Congress does not have the same social profile in all the
regions of the country. Wherever it faces the BJP, the Congress is a party of the
lower sections of the society. But in states like West Bengal and Kerala where
it is pitted against the Communists, it is a party of the privileged. For the first
time since Independence, political parties are developing macro-level
identification with communities. This is accompanied by a widening of the
social basis of political elites. The much-delayed transfer of political power to
the OBCs has started taking place in North India.
This national picture does not tell us very much about perhaps the most
salient aspect of the emerging political reality of the 1990s, namely the
bifurcation of the national political arena from the arena of state politics.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the arena of state politics was often no more
than a reflection of the developments at the national level. The citizens voted
in the state assembly elections as if they were electing their Prime Minister. Now
the logic has almost reversed. Not only is the state arena largely free of the
influence of the national developments, in fact now people vote in the national
election as if they are electing their Chief Minister. This was true even of the
1999 Lok Sabha elections though it was contested in the wake of patriotic
fervour generated by the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan. The focus
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
on national politics also conceals developments at another level of local
governance. The passing of the 73rd and the 74th amendments to the Indian
Constitution has made the local government institutions at the village or the
town level into constitutional entities whose election is now mandatory. By
now two rounds of elections have taken place at the Panchayat level in all but
a handful of states. There is some evidence to show that the opening up of the
third tier has kicked off a dynamic process that will go a long way in defining
the character of Indian democracy. It is still not clear if the existing framework,
that denies substantial powers or economic resources to these elected bodies,
will allow this dynamic process to realise its full potentials.
The emergence of state or region as the effective level of political decision
making has changed the party system. While the national picture appears as
if there is a multi-party system, a look at the level of state shows the effective
emergence of two-party system. The emerging party system is best described
as a system of 'multiple bi-polarities'. Practically every state is moving towards
a bi-polar political competition, but the pairs differ from state to state, thus
creating the impression of a multi-party system.
It will take some more time before the mist surrounding the emerging
picture of this latest phase of democratic politics clears up. But one of the trends
is already fairly significant and might appear in retrospect as the defining
characteristic of this phase. Compulsions of economic globalisation and
sharpening of ethnic cleavages has significantly eroded the autonomy of the
Indian state. This process is most evident in the case of economic liberalisation
that has taken place largely through what a scholar has described as 'politics
of stealth'. In the long run this is bound to affect the quality of democracy. As
the second democratic upsurge brings the hitherto disempowered into positions
of state power, they might discover that history has cheated them once again,
that there is very little they can do with state power. This is perhaps the deepest
irony in the story of the journey of the idea of democracy.
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
55
VII
Let us now leave this story and turn to an audit of the working of
democratic politics in the last fifty years. Here one needs to distinguish between
two different questions: Has India succeeded in establishing a democracy ?
And, has the Indian democracy succeeded in achieving its goals ? While the
first is a question about what democracy is, the second is about what
democracy does, or can be expected to do.
The first question allows a more cheerful answer, if only because of the
sad record of most other post-colonial polities which this question reminds us
of. If one goes by the base-line definitions of procedural democracy, India is
and is likely to remain in the foreseeable future a democracy. In order words,
democracy has come to be the 'only game in the town'. And that, as the
students of comparative democratization never forget to remind us, is no mean
achievement. This is recognised across the political spectrum in India, including
by the harshest critics of the system. A few years ago, when the Communist
Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) came overground after years of underground
violent anti-system politics and decided to contest elections, they were
unwittingly paying a big compliment to Indian democracy.
To say that India is a democracy is not merely to make a statement about
the formal constitutional structures of democratic governance that India has
retained, and not just in name. More importantly, it is a statement about the
presence of the language of democracy in India. India has, to use Shiv
Vishwanathan's memorable phrase, "by-hearted" democracy: this
characteristically Indian English expression captures so well how Indians have
creolised the idea of democracy. They have accepted the western idea of
democracy as their own and then proceeded to take liberties with it as one does
with one's own things. As a result the idea of democracy has been localised
and routinised. Note, for example, the frequency with which the virtually
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unlimited franchise election is used in settings that do not require it: from
academic council of the universities to managing committees of colleges to the
chairmanship of the cooperative banks to sports selection committee. Election
has come to be the principal mode of settling competing claims to power in
the entire public arena. Or witness the ubiquity of protest culture, from matters
significant to trivial: collective public protest is an ever present reminder of the
belief in democratic rights. In its Indian version the idea has come to shape
ordinary Indians' beliefs about citizenship, their political rights and virtues of
political participation. It has, above all, come to supply the only valid criterion
for claims to legitimate rule and correspondingly the moral basis of political
obligation.
The idea is embodied in the political processes which have on balance
retained a certain dynamism upto this point. Barring some pockets, the
fundamental trend towards greater participation and more intense politicisation
has continued to spread the idea of democracy both vertically and horizontally.
Competitive politics has retained its dynamic capacity to draw hitherto nonpolitical segments, articulate cleavages and build bridges. Thanks to its capacity
to connect itself to the pre-existing social cleavages and to transform them,
democracy has taken roots in Indian society.
The idea of democracy also has by now powerful and reliable carriers.
India has a wider catchment area for recruitment of political elite than most of
the post-colonial polities. A rough estimate suggests that the number of elected
political representatives at one or the other level, from national to the village
level, is no less than 3 million. Consequently, there is a large contingent of
political actors (at least 10 million including representatives, rivals, hopefuls
and also-rans) whose instinct of self-preservation can be relied upon in defence
of democracy. The logic of competitive politics has ensured that these active
participants do not come only from within the traditional social elite, though
they continue to enjoy a larger than proportionate share. There are a large
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
57
number of parties, though their dynamic capacity and legitimacy has sapped
somewhat over the last two decades. Party is no longer a western import; it
has merged into the landscape of every village and found its way into
practically every Indian language. Last but not the least, there are the
movement groups, non-party political formations and various other
organisations of the civil society including many NGOs that have done a lot
to deepen the idea of democracy in India. They have taken up causes which
do not lend themselves to easy aggregation, demands of groups which are
electorally non-viable and issues which are yet to make their mark on the
national political agenda. They have kept the spirit of democracy alive as and
when the machinery of competitive politics has failed to nourish it.
Lest this description makes democracy look more secure a possession
than it actually is, let us also recall the aspects which cause concern for the
future of democracy in the procedural sense, even if there is no immediate or
imminent danger of its collapse. The formal institutional apparatus of Indian
democracy has never been quite strong; the institutions of liberal democracy
did not quite undergo the kind of by-hearting the idea of democracy did. It is
true that these are still stronger than their counterparts in other post-colonial
polities; but they are not the strongest links in the democratic chain, and the
very process of democratisation is weakening these further. Claims which
cannot be processed in the electoral arena have not found anything like
adequate attention. The judicial apparatus never appeared like taking on the
load of litigation thrust upon it. Over the years its effectiveness has gone down
sharply, especially at the lower rungs where it matters to the people,
notwithstanding the recent activism of the upper levels of judiciary. The civil
service was always politicised, right from the colonial times. Democratisation
has made it more politicised without the corresponding benefits of
accountability, for the bureaucracy has still to outgrow its colonial legacy. The
combined effect of both these maladies is the denial of an effective rule of law
to ordinary citizens.
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
Intermediary political institutions which were to act as the link between
the people and the centres of power have declined considerably. The near
collapse of democratic procedures within political parties has left a major void
which of late has been filled by managerial style politics and criminalisation.
The very autonomy of the political process, which lies at the heart of India's
path to democratisation, faces encroachment as a result of the instrumental
linkage of political power with the dominant economic interests as also the
structural limits created by the integration of Indian economy in the world
market. To be sure, all these are not signs of the impending demise of
democracy, as many radical democrats would have us believe. But if these
trends continue to grow without adequate counter from within the political
process, we could be moving slowly towards a "low intensity democracy".
VIII
As we proceed from a procedural to a more substantive definition of
democracy, from a definition focused on a set of institutional inputs to one that
demands a desired set of outcomes, the distinction between the two questions
suggested above, between what democracy is and what democracy does,
disappears. At this level it also becomes difficult to sustain a universal check
list definition: democracy cannot be defined without reference to the historically
specific dreams and ideals which got articulated through this label. This brings
us back to the four goals implicit in the Indian model with reference to which
the achievements and failures of democratic polity can be discussed.
Achievement and sustenance of procedural democracy itself partly
realises the first goal of political democracy. A democracy provides dignity and
liberty by simply being there. Given the Indian model, democracy was also
the key instrument, the necessary condition, for the realisation of all other goals.
In that sense, taking into account the growing limitations mentioned above,
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
59
Indian polity has achieved something worth defending. It has also met, at least
until now in most parts of the territories which fall within its boundaries, the
minimal substantive expectation from any regime, democratic or otherwise:
protecting its own form and protecting its citizen from complete anarchy. The
fact that India has kept at bay even a remote possibility of a military takeover,
has successfully defended (at times through severe and less than desirable
methods) the territorial borders it inherited and that most of its citizens do not
ordinarily experience complete anarchy is unlikely to enthuse a radical
democrat. But it is useful to remember that democratic regimes usually collapse
not because they fail to realise the higher ideals associated with democracy but
because they cannot be relied upon to meet the bare minimum expectations.
The achievements of democracy as a set of institutions or as a regime
does not, of course, satisfy the deeper ethical impulse associated with the idea
of democracy. As a political ideal, democracy gives rise to the promise of a
community of equals, where the ordinary citizens enjoy true liberty and are
governed by none except themselves. The nationalist movement in India had
translated this ideal as the goal of swaraj, of self-rule in a deeper sense. It would
indeed make impossible demands on one's credulity to suggest that Indian
democracy has come anywhere close to meeting this ideal. Perhaps no
democracy has, but this constitutes a poor consolation to those who accepted
the ideal for its ethical appeal. Ever since the famous 'tryst with destiny' speech
on the midnight of the 14-15 August 1998, the promise of a community of
equals has been an unfulfilled promise. What has come about as a result of
the working of democracy is neither a community nor equality. The political
community, or rather politicised social communities, it brings into existence are
no communities, for their shared life is shallow, if not perverse. The liberty it
offers, at least formally, is distributed in extremely unequal measure. The power
it brings to the people as an abstraction is rarely, if at all, exercised by the real
people. And there are still many people — full citizens of the Republic of India
60
Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
— who feel as powerless under this democracy as they did under the British
rule.
The performance of Indian democracy in achieving national integration
has left a lot to be desired, but as the examples from India's neighbours show,
we could have done worse. There are areas and periods which constitute an
exception, but on balance the Indian elite has stuck to the "salad bowl" rather
than the "melting pot" model of integration of diversities. That is to say, various
communities and aspiring nationalities have not been forced to give up their
identity as a pre-condition of joining the Indian enterprise. They have been
accepted as distinct and different ingredient in the Indian mix of multiculturalism. And, again on balance, it has worked: legitimate political
articulation of social and regional diversities and the mediation of competing
claims through mechanisms of political accommodation has achieved what
consociational arrangements for power sharing among different social groups
do in other societies. There have been more than one instances of majoritarian
excess, but democratic politics seems to have evolved mechanisms of selfcorrection in this respect. In retrospect, effective political accommodation of
visible diversities might look like one of the outstanding achievements of Indian
democracy in the last fifty years.
But by its very nature, it is an inherently fragile achievement, ever
contingent on the skills of the political actors in working out the power sharing
arrangements or in allowing the mechanisms of self-correction to work
themselves out. This is a lesson well worth remembering as politics of
diversities has come under stress in recent years. The most serious challenge
to the survival of diversities comes from forces which are less organised, less
visible and may not even be considered political in the ordinary sense: forces
of cultural homogenisation, the monoculture of modernity and the ideology
of nation-state. While there is something to be said for the capacity of
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
61
democratic politics to deal with the more obvious and political challenges to
diversity, it has proved a very weak ally in the struggle against these deeper
threats from within.
The promise of social revolution which the democratic invitation always
contained has been realised only in parts and in fragments. It is not that
democratic politics left the society unaffected. In fact, these fifty years may be
recorded in the history of Indian society as years of fundamental transformation
triggered above all by the mechanism of competitive politics. At least in one
respect it did bring about something of a revolution: the role of ritual Hindu
hierarchy as a predictor of secular power diminished dramatically over the last
fifty years. While it is a fundamental change, it does not in itself guarantee
equality. On balance, unsurprisingly, the functioning of democratic politics has
contributed more to a vigorous circulation of elite and to expanding the circle
itself than to the establishment of social equality. Its contribution to social
equality is mainly by way of politicisation of castes and communities, which
then struggle in the secular domain for equality of self-respect.
Since gender divide does not lend itself to easy aggregation on party
political lines, competitive politics has failed to bring about the kind of change
in this aspect that it has on caste inequality. The representation of women in
the parliament and the state assemblies has stagnated at abysmally low level
of 8 and 4 per cent respectively over the last fifty years. The national movement
may not have had a greater proportion of women's participation but it did
ensure that women had a stronger voice in public life. If women's question
gets talked about much more in the political arena than their presence in
legislatures or voice in political parties would warrant, the principal reason is
the politics of ideas to which the growing women's movement has contributed
a great deal. Consequently, India has had fairly 'progressive' legislation on
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
gender justice including the provision for reservation of one-third seats in the
election of local democratic bodies.
The single biggest failure of democratic politics lies in the non-fulfilment
of the promise of material well being. Far from ensuring a life of equal and
reasonable comfort for everyone, it has not succeeded even in providing the
minimum needs of the people, or in removing the worst indignities or the
ugliest disparities in the material conditions of life enjoyed by its citizens. It is
true that the conditions of life for most of the people have not deteriorated
substantially, that India did achieve some reduction in the proportion of the
poor in its population, that the Indian economy is not caught in the impossible
spiral of inflation or in a debt-trap. That is perhaps an achievement, at least in
comparative perspective. It is also true that a majority of the population feels
that its economic condition has improved in the recent past and an
overwhelming majority thinks that their children have better opportunities in
life than they did. But there is a significant minority - mainly artisan
communities and scheduled tribes - that disagrees and has experienced an
overall deterioration in the quality of their life. For others too, there has been
a visible decline in some of the crucial resources like the availability of public
health and the quality of public education.
Democratic politics only provided a formal mechanism for conversion
of the potential majority of poor into a political majority which then take charge
of the state power to redistribute the material resources and to augment them
in such a way as to meet the needs of the most disadvantaged. The functioning
of democracy by itself does nothing to ensure that the mechanism is actually
used to this end. The other conditions, that of the availability of political agency
which can transform the potential majority into political majority (class in itself
to class for itself) by winning their political trust has proved to be highly
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
63
contingent. The Indian model expected politics to provide three crucial elements
to what was then called economic development: politics was to provide the
blueprint for economic development; it was to give the political will to
implement the design in the face of structures of economic interests and it was
to create a popular support for egalitarian politics. In practice, it succeeded in
providing only the third component and that too partially. The most recent
phase of 'globalisation' and liberalisation threatens a retreat from politics of
egalitarianism. A combination of political amnesia and cognitive paralysis on
the question of poverty poses the most important challenge to the ethical
impulse underlying the Indian enterprise today.
IX
Let me round off this story by asking a general question implicit in it:
what happens when the idea of democracy travels downwards? Fifty years ago
no one felt it necessary to ask this question. Fifty years ago the decision to
establish democracy in a poor, unequal, post-colonial society did not look as
courageous as it does now in retrospect. The spirit of the time helped everyone
overlook the fact that no other society had successfully taken this path before.
Nor has anyone done so since then. India failed to remove poverty or inequality
or shake off the cultural burden of colonialism, yet it succeeded in remaining
a democracy. Fifty years ago hardly anyone had thought about this possibility,
of democracy being the lone survivor in the family of ideals we set out with.
Neither the historians nor the political theorists of democracy had prepared
us for this possibility, nor have they done so ever since.
There was another reason for not thinking about this question. The
founding fathers of our democracy, the original hosts to this game, entertained
the illusion that the democratic idea will remain intact as it travels downwards.
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Global Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
Indian model assumed a pure diffusion of ideas; it was assumed that the grafted
institutions and ideas of western democracy would percolate down in their
pure form to the masses. The model was unspoilt by the suspicion that the
recipients of these ideas were themselves thinking minds, that they could
transform the received ideas just as the elite had done to the doctrines of
liberalism. What this model did not have, to use the recent vocabulary of social
science, was a theory of reception. This was a crucial lacunae, for the success
of democracy depended in large measure on recreating the democratic dream
in popular imagination, in anchoring the universal ideal in the specifically
Indian context. Some of the founding fathers may have entertained a different
kind of illusion: that the idea of democracy will be automatically transformed
by the people when it travels downwards. In this romantic version the people
make democracy speak their language and devise the system best suited to
their needs.
The experience of the last five decades confirms neither of these versions.
The journey of the idea of democracy in India not only changed the lives of
the millions it touched, it also changed the idea of democracy itself in ways
more than one. Call it creolisation or vernacularisation of democracy, this
transformation is at the heart of whatever success democracy has achieved in
India. Serious attempt to marry the democratic idea to the popular beliefs, to
develop shared protocols with the pre-existing language of the people, is what
has distinguished India from other countries where the democratic enterprise
never took off. And that is also what can continue to maintain this distinction
in future.
Creolisation by itself is no magic remedy. Indigenisation of democracy
is a necessary condition of the working out of this idea, but is not a sufficient
condition. A large historical process like this one follows no one's script. It does
India's Electoral Democracy, 1952-2000
65
not therefore produce neat outcomes. It leaves gaps, it produces contradictions.
And there is no hidden hand at work here which might straighten every
wrinkle. There is, in other words, no short cut to creating and sustaining the
language of radical democracy except weaving every strand and tying every
thread.
The Author is Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 29 Raj pur Road, Delhi
110 054 Phones: +91-11-2942199, 3951190, 3971151. Fax: +91-11-2943450. E mail:
<[email protected]>
Note:
This paper does not in any way reflect the views of the Election Commission of India. The
author alone is responsible for the opinions expressed in this paper. It reports the outcome of
an ongoing enquiry. An early version of this paper was presented at a workshop, India at Fifty,
organised by Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London in May 1997. A subsequent version
was carried in Marshall Bouton and Philip Oldenburg, eds., India Briefing: A Transformative
Fifty Years , New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999 and then presented at the International Workshop
"The state in India: Past and Present", 1-5 December 1999 at the Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.
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