India is home to one of the most vibrant, engaged and mystifying democracies on the planet. Cambridge academics, across a wide range of disciplines, are working on the ground – with citizens, charities, NGOs, fellow scholars and politicians – to try to untangle it.
In a remote
village in a forgotten corner of West Bengal lives an old man called Fakhruddin
Gazi. He has lived in the village for every one of his long years. However,
since India was partitioned in 1947, Fakhruddin Gazi has lived in fear, unable
to leave the small landholding his family has owned for generations.
A thousand miles
away in Rajasthan, the state’s first female Chief Minister is showered with
garlands and the kind of affection usually reserved for pop stars, not
politicians. The masses clamour to touch her feet. Devotees deify her with all
the reverence of a Hindu goddess.
Just down the
road in Jaipur, an enterprising and popular middle-aged man is making and
receiving calls on one of his three mobile phones. The conversations he
conducts link voters to politicians, slum-dwellers to local officials. If you
need a fake birth certificate, a government job, or your home connected to the
electrical grid – his is the number you need to call.
In Gujarat, a
casually employed labourer is being interviewed. The man is a Dalit, a member
of the lowest caste in India’s order of social stratification. Dalits used to
go by another name – ‘untouchables’. He tells Dr Manali Desai, who has
travelled from Cambridge to interview him, about his political leanings.
“Since the BJP
came there have been no more riots. We live peacefully. It is not as it used to
be. There is progress everywhere. It has become America now... nice cinemas and
long roads have been built. It all seems like a dream.”
This is India on
any given day. A cacophony of more than a billion voices and stories all
straining to make themselves heard. Some shout, some whisper, others scream.
Few are silent. Each and every voice – Brahmin or Dalit, Muslim or Hindu, old
or young – has something unique to tell us about the nature of democracy in
India: its flaws and foibles, its puzzles and paradoxes, its successes and its
shames. All have their part to play in informing our understanding of the
world’s largest democracy; a democracy often celebrated, regularly condemned
and impossible to ignore.
Some of the
stories Cambridge academics are uncovering – like Professor Joya Chatterji’s
experiences with Fakhruddin Gazi – interrogate the foundations and principles
of post-partition democracy, highlighting a legacy of injustice and inequality
against a sub-class of India’s own citizens. The work of others, like social
anthropologist Dr Anastasia Piliavsky, directly challenges the Western world’s
accepted notions of what democracy should look like, arguing that our rush to
brand Indian politics as a basket case of corruption and crime is, in part, a
failure in our own understanding as to the needs and sensibilities of more than
800 million registered voters in India.
Chatterji’s work
on refugees, minorities and the rights of marginalised groups in West Bengal
and beyond raises questions about the history and meaning of citizenship for
minority communities in India, particularly for individuals like Fakhruddin –
an Indian Muslim caught on the ‘wrong side’ at the time of partition.
Once the head of
a Sunni family that owned several acres of good paddy land and many heads of
cattle, Fakhruddin has lived with the consequences of partition since the late
1940s. In the upheaval that came with the new international border and the
Radcliffe Line, his family fled to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) while he
stayed to tend to the graves of his ancestors.
Gangs grabbed
most of his property and burned his home while the police did nothing. In 1965,
India enacted ‘enemy property’ ordinances that gave the state unfettered powers
– which could not be challenged in any court – to seize the property of anyone
‘fraternising with the enemy’. Since then, Fakhruddin has been afraid to leave
the tiny plot he still has, for fear of being dispossessed.
“My work looks
at the origins and precise nature of minority citizenship,” says Chatterji,
Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies. “Unless you understand its
legacies of impoverishment, deprivation and seizure of property, addressing contemporary
problems of minorities in India’s democracy will be less straightforward.
“Minority
citizens are seen as ‘lesser’ and this is enshrined in the constitution. Even
when India and Pakistan accorded these citizens formal membership, they set
them apart legally from full citizenship in vital ways. Their standing is
diminished.”
Chatterji has
made extensive use of records kept in the National Archives of India, and many
regional archives across the subcontinent, to supplement extensive fieldwork
and oral history. Despite the current status quo and unwillingness of
governments to tackle the issues surrounding minority citizenship, Chatterji
does have hope for the future.
“There is much
that is great about Indian democracy and much that is not. My work on
internally displaced Muslims has persuaded me that the impact of partition on
minorities who stayed behind was far less benign than has often been assumed.
However, I do see lots of light in popular organisation and mobilisation around
a host of issues of injustice in India. We don’t see this emanating from the
state or high politics, but the country is absolutely teeming with everyday
movements on the ground. The state has to pay attention to them. There are
protests all the time; we have an Arab Spring of sorts in India every day.”
Sociologist Dr
Manali Desai is another researcher with an ambivalent view on India’s future.
Her recent work has looked into the reshaping of the country’s political
landscape and how the ruling BJP party (historically seen as conservative and
elitist) has won the significant backing of many lower-caste voters in states
like Gujarat.
While the rise,
and aspirational voting habits, of the Indian middle class has been much
discussed and documented, Desai believes that the BJP’s paradoxical success in
attracting voters from the Dalit and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) – when the
personal benefits of voting BJP cannot be demonstrated – has a great deal more
to tell us about 21st-century India.
“The BJP claims
that the people of Gujarat support [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi because of
the development he has brought to the state,” says Desai. “Yet numerous studies
show that social development in Gujarat lags behind that of many states and the
benefits of development have not reached beyond the middle classes.”
Desai believes
that it is precisely the BJP’s ‘development discourse’ that has attracted
lower-caste votes in high numbers despite many Dalits and OBCs continuing to
face widespread discrimination, lacking access to water and electricity
supplies, and being subject to evictions and relocations. ‘Development’ and
‘peace’ were words often uttered in interviews, something the BJP juxtaposed
with an ‘unruly and chaotic’ past.
“India is still
in the early stages of exploding capitalism, and for hundreds of millions of
India’s young, this is all they have ever known,” says Desai. “Urban voters are
not aware of rural issues and young rural men seek to migrate to cities to find
jobs. This has all helped the BJP’s remarkable rise as India has repositioned
itself in the global economy.”
Looking to the
future, Desai says: “I am both hopeful and not. The established order of things
was stultifying the economy and politics, and new technology and innovation, an
increasingly young population and a new awareness of India’s place globally are
all very positive developments.
“But there has
also been a deepening and normalising of Hinduistic strains. This is
particularly potent when young people should be opening up, not closing down.
That worries me. India has very deep inequalities around caste. When not
addressed, they come back with a vengeance. But overall, yes, India will become
a more democratic place. Lower-caste parties rule in several states despite
being excluded in more and more ways. More quotas and more jobs for lower
castes is the only way around this.”
India’s
democracy is a subject of consuming fascination to Anastasia Piliavsky, who in
2013 went on the campaign trail with Rajasthan’s future Chief Minister
Vasundhara Raje. She was given privileged access to Raje’s campaign machine and
the chance to understand what Piliavsky calls “the logic of Indian democracy” –
an oxymoron to many.
Politics and
corruption in the world’s largest democracy are never far from the headlines,
either in Indian newspapers or on news websites around the world. A Google
search for ‘Indian corruption’ returns almost as many hits as ‘Indian
democracy’.
Piliavsky’s
research occupies the liminal area between the two as she seeks to understand
why a political system so often regarded as corrupt and amoral continually
engages hundreds of millions of voters – and attracts turnouts which are the
envy of many Western democracies.
Piliavsky
believes that looking at India solely through the prism of Western
sensibilities misses the moral significance of ‘relationships’ and ‘community’
that underpins all Indian politics – subjects that Desai also came across
regularly in her interviews with Dalits and OBCs.
“In India,
politics is about relations and hierarchies,” says Piliavsky. “It is about
obligations and loyalties to one’s own. We may call this irruption into the
bureaucratic process and law ‘corruption’. Yet it is precisely this
‘corruption’ – the sprawling, tangled web of human relations – that animates
India’s democratic process and drives hundreds of millions to the voting
booths.”
She contends
that attachments to people, rather than ‘left’ or ‘right’, is what draws many
into political life and shapes political loyalties. Voters expect politicians
to give, be it food, money or public goods, as part of their responsibility to
the voters. Many do not see the distribution of food and alcohol as corruption.
To them, the betrayal of relations is the real meaning of corruption; when
people don’t deliver to those whom they owe.
Getting anything
done in India –
from buying a car, arranging a marriage
or attracting voters – requires ‘approaches’. Cash does pass hands, but there
are few quick and easy sales. Each arrangement works through bonds of mutual
sympathy, favour and trust. Few in politics can
avoid spending
large sums of money
on their constituencies.
As well as
defending a democracy often compared with the scandalised governments of
Sub-Saharan Africa, Piliavsky is also more sanguine than many Western
commentators about Modi’s Prime Ministership.
“Most of those
who voted for Modi did so because they believe him to be a highly effective
leader, a man who can get things done. However sound that belief may be,
delivering on his many (often improbable) promises is what will keep him in
office – not backing a violent ideology rejected by many Indian citizens and
the international community alike. Having promised millions of new jobs and
having brought many Muslims to the BJP, Modi can now ill afford communal riots.
What India has
shown is that no politician is ever good enough. No one can sit pretty, Modi
least of all. He’s going to have to work day and night to deliver a small
portion of what he’s promised. The Indian citizens are not fools, they know he
promised too much, and they will watch him closely. There is no cult of
personality, only a ‘cult of action’. And if Modi’s electorate does not feel he
has done enough by the end of his first term in office, they will expunge him,
just as they did with Indira Gandhi before. This is the way of India’s restive,
fickle democracy.”
Nehru and
Today's India
To complement
the work of Cambridge researchers studying Indian democracy, the University is
also active as a neutral and respected convener of debates in India among
Indian politicians, writers, artists, economists and diplomats.
Following the
success of the inaugural India-Cambridge summit in 2012, the Vice-Chancellor's
Endowment Fund supported a major conference in Delhi in February 2015 on 'Nehru
and Today's India', which was broadcast on NDTV, one of India's leading news
channels.
Both events were
conceptualised by Dr Shruti Kapila (Faculty of History), who also provided
Indian election analysis for Al Jazeera and Bloomberg TV, and has inaugurated a
seminar series on Indian issues in the House of Lords.
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and available at University of Cambridge's Research Page
Image Attribute: India Against Corruption / Source: Wikimedia Common [Link]
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