Divide and Deal: The Politics of Distribution in Democracies

10 Democracy and Distributive Politics in India

280 Chapter 10 Democracy and Distributive Politics in India Pranab Bardhan To most theorists of democracy in the West, India is an embarrassing anomaly and hence largely avoided. By most theoretical stipulations India should not have survived as a democracy: it is too poor, its citizens are largely rural and uneducated, its civic institutions are rather weak. It is a paradox even for those who believe in a positive relationship between economic equality or social homogeneity and democracy: its wealth inequality (say, in land distribution, and even more in education or human capital) is high, and its society is one of the most heterogeneous (in terms of ethnicity, language, caste, and religion) in the world. Yet this country, with the world’s largest electorate (it is now larger than the electorate in North America, Western Europe, and Japan combined), keeps lumbering on decade after decade as a ramshackle, yet remarkably resilient, democratic polity.1 Of course, depending on the defining features of democracy the depth of Indian democracy may be rather limited. It is useful to keep a distinction between three general aspects of (liberal) democracy: (a) some basic minimum civil and political rights enjoyed by citizens, (b) some procedures of accountability in day-to-day administration under some overarching constitutional rules of the game, and (c) periodic exercises in electoral representativeness. These aspects are of varying strength in different parts of India. In general the performance in much of the country over the past half a century has been really impressive in terms of (c), some pitfalls and electoral malpractices notwithstanding . If uncertainty about the outcome of elections, giving the opposition some chance of winning office, is key to a polity’s minimum democratic Democracy and Distributive Politics in India 281 character,2 then India comes off in flying colors, at least in the past three decades or so. If, however, you care as much or more about (a) and (b), then India’s performance has been somewhat mixed, satisfactory in some respects but not in others. Also, except in three or four states in India, all these aspects of democracy are weaker at the local village or municipality level than at the federal or provincial levels. There are several ways in which the historical and social origins of democracy in India are sharply different from those in much of the West, and the indigenous political culture has fundamentally reshaped the processes of democracy. These differences are reflected in the current functioning of democracy in India and its impact on distributive politics, making it somewhat difficult to fit the Indian case to the canonical cases in the usual theories of democracy. In the rest of this chapter we point out some of these differences (as well as similarities) and spell out their effects, particularly in terms of economic reform, governance, and distributive policies and transfers. A. Whereas in Europe democratic rights were won over continuous battles against aristocratic privileges and arbitrary powers of absolute monarchs, in India these battles were fought by a coalition of groups in an otherwise fractured society against the colonial masters. Even though part of the freedom struggle was associated with ongoing social movements to win land rights for peasants against the landed oligarchy, the dominant theme was to fight colonialism. And in this fight, particularly under the leadership of Gandhi, disparate groups were forged together to fight a common external enemy, and this fight required strenuous methods of consensus building and conflict management (rather than resolution) through co-opting dissent and selective buyouts. Long before Independence the Congress Party operated on consensual rather than majoritarian principles. The various methods of group bargaining and subsidies and “reservations” for different social and economic categories that are common practice in India today can be traced to this earlier history. This context has also meant that in India, unlike in much of the West, democracy has been reconciled with multiple layers of nationality, where a pan-Indian nationalism coexists with assertive regional nationalisms in the same citizenry. 282 Pranab Bardhan B. Unlike in Western Europe, democracy came to India before any substantial industrial transformation of a predominantly rural economy and before literacy was widespread, which seriously influenced the modes of political organization and mobilization, the nature of political discourse and the individual’s relation to the public sphere, and the excessive economic demands on the state. Democratic (and redistributive) aspirations of newly mobilized groups outstripped the...