A Very Hard Place: Democracy in India

• In Event: Democracy in Hard Places

Abstract

Since independence in 1947, India has held 16 national and 366 state elections. Power has changed hands eight times in Delhi and tens of times at the state level. The latter phenomenon is by now so common that political scientists have stopped counting state-level turnovers. Until 1992-3, the third tier of government – at the district and village level – was not elected, but a constitutional amendment finally filled that gap. Since the mid-1990s, roughly 3 million local legislators have been elected every five years. Elections have undeniably become the political commonsense of India.

Tracking polities worldwide since 1973, Freedom House has called India “free” for all but nine years, when it was categorized as “partly free”. The V-Dem dataset is both longer and more comprehensive. Its time series begins in 1900 and it has five democracy indices: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative and egalitarian. Of these, following standard democratic theory, my paper would like to stick to the first two: the electoral (which focuses on free and fair elections and freedom of association) and the liberal (which concentrates individual and minority rights). With the exception of 1975-77, the V-Dem scores for electoral as well as the liberal democracy in India have consistently hovered between 0.7 and 0.8 on a 0-1 scale (1 represents the highest possible score).

The V-Dem summary of India’s overall democratic performance since 1947 is worth noting:

“The V-Dem data reflects … a rapid improvement in all aspects of democracy after India achieves independence in 1947 and adopts a constitution in 1949. In the mid-70s a significant drop … is captured by the data. The decrease relates to the state of emergency declared, which led to the suspension of elections, the curbing of civil liberties and the restriction of political dialogue. After the end of the “emergency period”, India returns to the same or even slightly higher levels as before on all democracy component indices.”

This summary statistical portrait, which the paper will explore at some length, agrees with three of the best-known assessments of Indian democracy by scholars. In the mid-1960s, Barrington Moore Jr was among the first to make a strong claim about India’s democracy: “..as a political species, (India) does belong to the modern world. At the time of Nehru's death in 1964, political democracy had existed for seventeen years. If imperfect, the democracy was no mere sham. . . . Political democracy may seem strange both in an Asian setting and one without an industrial revolution.” About two decades later, Robert Dahl pronounced India “a leading contemporary exception” to democratic theory. Finally, after a little over another decade, Adam Przeworski et al argued that in their vast 1950-1990 international dataset, India’s democratic longevity was the most surprising: “The odds against democracy in India were extremely high”.

What kinds of odds, according to the mainstream democratic theory, was India up against? Three obstacles stand out -- massive ethnic diversity, low incomes, and the enormous hierarchies of the caste system.

The next question obviously is: how did India overcome these obstacles? Some answers are structural. For example, according to the more recent thinking about the relationship between ethnic diversity and democracy, a large number of ethnic groups can actually facilitate democratic functioning and if there are only two or three ethnic groups in a country, democracy is more seriously challenged.

But structural reasons are not the only reasons. Without paying attention to politics – the principles adopted by India’s freedom movement against British rule, the kind of nation-making in which the founding fathers invested their organizational and ideological efforts, the type of Constitution that was created and which remains largely intact until now, and the democratic temper demonstrated by the early leadership – we can’t understand India’s democratic longevity.

Much of the paper will go into the politics of democratic creation and the politics of democratic maintenance. The former, inter alia, requires that we return to a forgotten element of democratic theory: the link between types of nationalism and types of polities. And the latter requires that we analyze institutions such as political leadership and political parties on one hand and the functioning of oversight institutions such as the judiciary on the other. Rather than derive democratic longevity primarily from the structural features of Indian society, my paper will locate the principal causes in patterns of politics.

Author

• Ashutosh Varshney, Brown University