Sunday, July 6, 2003		Books

Mapping India’s journey on the road to democracy
Ram Varma

India’s 1999 Elections And 20th Century Politics
edited by Paul Wallace & Ramashray Roy. Sage, New Delhi. Pages 443. Rs 850.

INDEPENDENT India’s Constitution promulgated in 1950 gave voting rights to all adult citizens, men and women, literate or illiterate. It was a bold and revolutionary measure. In the West where the present form of democracy grew, suffrage was won in painful stages over centuries. It came in one stroke in India. By all accounts it has awakened the mass of mankind that lay wrapped up in a cocoon of slavery and obscurantist ideas of governance for centuries, oblivious of their individual rights. The book under review maps India’s momentous journey of half a century on the road to democracy, with particular focus on the 1999 general election to the Lok Sabha.

Paul Wallace, one of the co-editors, in his perceptive critique of the articles written by the several contributors notes that the most striking development during this long march on the road to democracy is the mushrooming of political parties based on caste, religion, language, and geography, making coalition politics essential. This development introduced high volatility and instability in the polity in the 1990’s, which witnessed five votes of no confidence and three general elections to Lok Sabha in a short span of 1996 to 1999. In 1999 it culminated in the disparate and fragile 24-party National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coming to power despite being incoherent in political ideology and beset with numerous internal contradictions. Rather than being perturbed over this development, Wallace rationalizes it. He says it was no longer possible for the relatively broad-based political parties, Congress and BJP, to win a parliamentary majority on their own, and that coalition politics had come to stay. In his opinion it was merely a transition from one-party dominance in the earlier era to a ‘catch all’ coalition now.

According to Wallace the Congress party was a ‘catch all’ political party under Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and to a lesser extent under Indira Gandhi, and provided an ideal type of broad-based party. It aggregated India’s diversity of castes, religions, regions, and ideologies, representing almost all major political cleavages through which it maintained links with opposition groups outside the party. In the same manner, the 24-party NDA, led by BJP, constructed before the elections, is the new all’ spectrum of political parties which includes major regional parties based on language such as the Telugu Desam Party, non-Hindu Sikh-based Shiromani Akali Dal of Punjab and Muslim-based National Conference from Kashmir, besides Mamata Banerjee’s ‘niche’ party Trinamool Congress and Chautala’s non-ideological, Jat-dominated INLD. He agrees with Arend Lijphart’s thesis that India’s deeply divided society has evolved into a ‘consociational’ democratic system of power sharing, where autonomous cultural groups come together in a grand coalition based on proportionality of political representation and civil service appointments, with the minority groups enjoying a kind of veto on vital minority rights and autonomy. This adjustment is in response to the extreme political instability that had existed in the 1990’s. "It is possible", he says, "that India’s political system has made the necessary adjustments so that short-lived coalition governments will not continue into the 21^st century." Certainly, NDA government has completed 5 years, but its fragility is all too apparent.

Jyotirindra Dasgupta, in another essay reviewing the ‘epic story’ of India’s elections over five decades, asserts that the phenomenon of proliferation of small political parties was the welcome result of the ‘inclusionary’ political arrangements, which in turn have aided multicultural collaboration for national development. While Wallace only accepts the imperative of coalition politics in national governance, Dasgupta exults in it. There is nothing negative about it, he exclaims. "The growing importance of collaborative national government calling for a combination of parties cutting across ideologies, regional concentration, and cultural sentiments indicates a new horizon of opportunity for both the multicultural national project and social deepening of democratization." It manifested "the increasing confidence of the regional voices speaking for the nation". The elitist equation between the center and the nation was now ready to be replaced. He sings a panegyric to Indian democracy, which gave birth to ‘parliamentary communism’ in 3 states and endorsed radical social and economic reforms pursued by the communist governments. He cites the creation of separate states on the basis of language, region or tribe as celebration of our cultural autonomy, and recognition that the small was entitled to the same dignity as the big in the structure of democratic federalism. Reading him, one wondered whether it was entirely silly to bemoan the unprecedented rise in governmental expenditure due to the creation of economically unviable states. Was the Mandalized fragmentation of the society to be eulogized? Would it not be desirable instead to forge a common national identity submerging all and sundry diverse identities into it? Coalition governments may have to be accepted as necessary evil at the present juncture. But by no stretch of imagination can they be considered a happy development. Such governments have a short-term, self-serving agenda making the nation fall a prey to rank opportunism and cynical survivalism. There is dithering, non-governance and pervasive corruption.

Included in the book are essays analyzing the voting behavior of people in the major states of the Union. They vividly capture the vicissitudes of the electoral graph and bring back the cataclysmical, yet bloodless, political events that shook the nation. Each essay offers a mosaic of myriad community formations contending for their place in the sun. The learned contributors weave a web of theories and discern plausible causes behind the electorate’s seemingly unpredictable behavior. While some may agree with the dictum ascribed to Hegde that ‘the mysteries of the ballot box are difficult to unravel’, others may find the reasoning of the contributors and the wealth of statistics contained in this pithy book as rewarding. The book should have aroused intense debate if it had come out within a year of 1999 elections. Now it’s a trifle stale and, one suspects, built around the miraculous longevity of NDA.

The publishers have done a remarkably good job in the production of the book.