BATTLES HALF WON
Ashutosh Varshney
Viking/Penguin; xiv + 414 pages; Rs 599
This has been a season for "incredible India" books by itinerant journalists and peripatetic academics alike. I follow a simple yardstick about them: does the book tell me anything new or enlighten me in any way? If it does, I recommend it to others, as I have done with Bibek Debroy's tome on Gujarat and Ravi Venkatesan's interesting take on India as a training laboratory for multinationals. The present book, despite the gravitas of its author, Ashutosh Varshney, holder of a prestigious chair at Brown, an Ivy League university, and the enormous weight of scholarship and professional idiom it carries, unfortunately belongs to the other category, for the simple reason that it has left me none the wiser.
The starting point of this quest is the path-breaking analysis by the Polish-American political scientist, Adam Przeworski, and his colleagues. They found that income correctly predicted democratic regimes in 77.5 per cent of cases in a sample of 140 countries over a period from 1950 to 1990. India belonged to the other 22.5 per cent - and the poorest one in terms of per capita income to boot - that improbably stuck to democracy. The obvious question is: how and why did this happen?
This excitement is created in the first 40 pages in the opening - and the only entirely new - chapter. The remaining nine chapters are addressed to the second of the two-part task Professor Varshney sets for himself, "convey ... why ... India's democracy has survived...[and] analyse the achievements and failures of the Indian democracy." The title of the second chapter, "Why democracy survives", is misleading because it more accurately discusses the features of a surviving democracy, not its causes. Others are similarly addressed to specific features of a continuing democratic process, such as ethnic and religious identities, federalism and state autonomy, entrepreneurship and castes, regional inequalities and imbalances, endemic poverty and the evolving nature of markets.
These are standard-issue concerns for any recent work on India. Unfortunately, despite the heavy load of citations and some statistical data (not always the most relevant or revealing), the overall impression is that we have been here before. This happens because, despite clear attempts at updating, every one of these chapters was written earlier. Five of the nine are more than a decade old. So obviously their concerns and the line of thinking are things we have known. Yet there are some glaring omissions. There is no discussion on the Naxal problem, nor is there much attempt at analysing caste violence. Moreover, Professor Varshney does not dwell on the radicalisation of Islamist thinking in India, which one expects as a companion argument for his analysis of Hindu nationalism.
My repeated delving into these rather verbally forbidding treatises left me with the impression that India chose democracy and continues to stick to it because its politicians wanted it to be so. Since this is not accompanied by the question as to why they did so, it remains a tautology; without politicians at Independence wanting it, India would not have been a democracy, and their continuing participation in it is necessary for not just its functioning but its legitimacy (contrast this with the impasse in Bangladesh). So that is not a statement of causation.
Professor Varshney uses the lens of modern Western political analysis, notably that of his mentor, the late Myron Weiner. That is no problem, but he does so with an ahistoric perspective. Any discussion of the West's progression to democracy must begin with the republican Athens, Sparta and Rome, then the Magna Carta leading to Parliaments, the French and the American Revolutions and their recourse to constitutionalism and so on to the modern era.
India has had a similar history, and does not quite fit the pattern of oriental despotism. The city republic of Vaishali flourished even as Chanakya advised Chandragupta, the founder of the Maurya empire, on raj dharma. Panchayats had a pan-India presence throughout history to decide on matters temporal and legal to the village community, whose decisions even the local satraps could not easily overrule. Trade guilds (or mahajans) held sway over coastal regions engaged in national and international commerce, much like their counterparts in medieval Europe. The jajmani system of patron-client barter transactions introduced a fair degree of interdependence. All these institutions meet with the twin criteria of contestability and participation Professor Varshney proposes for assessing democratic institutions. Even though the caste system was a cast-iron girdle around India, the religious discourse, too, tolerated heterodoxy and saints came from all castes.
Thus, the numbers of argumentative and vocal Indians were growing well before Independence. The British Raj and modern education caused this population to explode. The fact that India at Independence possessed a large number of educated people ready to espouse modern values, possibly larger than in many European democracies, needs no corroboration. It is, thus, as inconceivable to expect that the Constituent Assembly or any party therein - and not just the Congress or Jawaharlal Nehru, as Professor Varshney would have us believe - would have chosen any system other than democracy as it is today to find any Indian not supporting an anti-corruption drive. That preference has changed not one whit over the last six decades, as Indira Gandhi found to her chagrin in 1977 or the Naxals have now realised.
Western scholars may not be too well aware of the aspects of Indian history that made democracy the only choice for India, rather than an exceptional one. When a scholar of Professor Varshney's repute lends credence to their "improbability" theory, the battle for cogent thinking is very far from being half won.
Ashutosh Varshney
Viking/Penguin; xiv + 414 pages; Rs 599
This has been a season for "incredible India" books by itinerant journalists and peripatetic academics alike. I follow a simple yardstick about them: does the book tell me anything new or enlighten me in any way? If it does, I recommend it to others, as I have done with Bibek Debroy's tome on Gujarat and Ravi Venkatesan's interesting take on India as a training laboratory for multinationals. The present book, despite the gravitas of its author, Ashutosh Varshney, holder of a prestigious chair at Brown, an Ivy League university, and the enormous weight of scholarship and professional idiom it carries, unfortunately belongs to the other category, for the simple reason that it has left me none the wiser.
More From This Section
To be fair, a major reason for this letdown is the book's subtitle, "India's improbable democracy". Professor Varshney has widely published learned discourses on Indian politics. He is a regular columnist for The Indian Express and a frequent presence on television discussion panels. Therefore, when he says at the outset, "for the first time in human history, a poor nation has practised universal franchise for so long" (emphasis original), our interest is aroused because, like him, "We need to ask why Indian democracy has lasted so long".
The starting point of this quest is the path-breaking analysis by the Polish-American political scientist, Adam Przeworski, and his colleagues. They found that income correctly predicted democratic regimes in 77.5 per cent of cases in a sample of 140 countries over a period from 1950 to 1990. India belonged to the other 22.5 per cent - and the poorest one in terms of per capita income to boot - that improbably stuck to democracy. The obvious question is: how and why did this happen?
This excitement is created in the first 40 pages in the opening - and the only entirely new - chapter. The remaining nine chapters are addressed to the second of the two-part task Professor Varshney sets for himself, "convey ... why ... India's democracy has survived...[and] analyse the achievements and failures of the Indian democracy." The title of the second chapter, "Why democracy survives", is misleading because it more accurately discusses the features of a surviving democracy, not its causes. Others are similarly addressed to specific features of a continuing democratic process, such as ethnic and religious identities, federalism and state autonomy, entrepreneurship and castes, regional inequalities and imbalances, endemic poverty and the evolving nature of markets.
These are standard-issue concerns for any recent work on India. Unfortunately, despite the heavy load of citations and some statistical data (not always the most relevant or revealing), the overall impression is that we have been here before. This happens because, despite clear attempts at updating, every one of these chapters was written earlier. Five of the nine are more than a decade old. So obviously their concerns and the line of thinking are things we have known. Yet there are some glaring omissions. There is no discussion on the Naxal problem, nor is there much attempt at analysing caste violence. Moreover, Professor Varshney does not dwell on the radicalisation of Islamist thinking in India, which one expects as a companion argument for his analysis of Hindu nationalism.
My repeated delving into these rather verbally forbidding treatises left me with the impression that India chose democracy and continues to stick to it because its politicians wanted it to be so. Since this is not accompanied by the question as to why they did so, it remains a tautology; without politicians at Independence wanting it, India would not have been a democracy, and their continuing participation in it is necessary for not just its functioning but its legitimacy (contrast this with the impasse in Bangladesh). So that is not a statement of causation.
Professor Varshney uses the lens of modern Western political analysis, notably that of his mentor, the late Myron Weiner. That is no problem, but he does so with an ahistoric perspective. Any discussion of the West's progression to democracy must begin with the republican Athens, Sparta and Rome, then the Magna Carta leading to Parliaments, the French and the American Revolutions and their recourse to constitutionalism and so on to the modern era.
India has had a similar history, and does not quite fit the pattern of oriental despotism. The city republic of Vaishali flourished even as Chanakya advised Chandragupta, the founder of the Maurya empire, on raj dharma. Panchayats had a pan-India presence throughout history to decide on matters temporal and legal to the village community, whose decisions even the local satraps could not easily overrule. Trade guilds (or mahajans) held sway over coastal regions engaged in national and international commerce, much like their counterparts in medieval Europe. The jajmani system of patron-client barter transactions introduced a fair degree of interdependence. All these institutions meet with the twin criteria of contestability and participation Professor Varshney proposes for assessing democratic institutions. Even though the caste system was a cast-iron girdle around India, the religious discourse, too, tolerated heterodoxy and saints came from all castes.
Thus, the numbers of argumentative and vocal Indians were growing well before Independence. The British Raj and modern education caused this population to explode. The fact that India at Independence possessed a large number of educated people ready to espouse modern values, possibly larger than in many European democracies, needs no corroboration. It is, thus, as inconceivable to expect that the Constituent Assembly or any party therein - and not just the Congress or Jawaharlal Nehru, as Professor Varshney would have us believe - would have chosen any system other than democracy as it is today to find any Indian not supporting an anti-corruption drive. That preference has changed not one whit over the last six decades, as Indira Gandhi found to her chagrin in 1977 or the Naxals have now realised.
Western scholars may not be too well aware of the aspects of Indian history that made democracy the only choice for India, rather than an exceptional one. When a scholar of Professor Varshney's repute lends credence to their "improbability" theory, the battle for cogent thinking is very far from being half won.