India's linguistic, religious, ethnic, and cultural diversities are proverbial. So are the political mobilizations and the violent conflicts and antagonisms which have arisen from time to time among and between persons from its distinctive cultural groups. However, it is important to note that neither political mobilization nor ethnic and cultural antagonisms flow naturally out of India's diversities. The 1971 Census of India enumerated thirty-three languages with speakers of more than one million, but only fifteen of them have achieved any form of significant political recognition.

The 1981 census enumerates a tribal population of more than fifty million persons divided into hundreds of distinct groups. Many political mobilizations have occurred among several of the tribal groups from the nineteenth century up to the present, of which a few have developed into bitter, violent, and secessionist movements directed against non-tribals, against particular state governments, or against the Government of India itself. On the other hand, many tribal groups have not mobilized and have not rebelled. Moreover, the forms which tribal mobilizations have taken have been diverse. Some have focused on economic grievances, have appeared to be class-based, and have drawn support from Marxist political organizations. Others have focused on political demands and have been organized and led by tribal leaders and exclusively tribal political organizations.

The whole modern history of India has been deeply affected and badly scarred by conflict between separatist Muslim political leaders and organizations and the Indian National Congress and by continuing Hindu-Muslim riots and pogroms against Muslim minorities in some cities and towns. Even with respect to these conflicts and the associated violence, however, they must be contrasted against periods of Hindu-Muslim cooperation. Moreover, it must be noted and needs to be explained why such conflicts have occurred more intensely in some parts of the country and have been less intense or non-existent in others where Hindus and Muslims also live side by side.

THE PROBLEM OF THE PERSISTENCE OF THE PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM

India is virtually unique among contemporary post-colonial countries in having functioned since Independence, with the exception of the Emergency, with a parliamentary system modeled on the British form of government. India's parliamentary system has evolved from one in which the Cabinet and the Prime Minister were dominant and the President was a figurehead – though potentially important — into a form of prime ministerial government, in which both the Parliament and the Cabinet play a secondary role. The specific role of each Prime Minister and the relationship between the Prime Minister and other central government institutions and forces has varied somewhat, but one can also see an evolution over the past forty-five years. Nehru's period was one of prime ministerial government in which the Cabinet played an important role as well and Parliament was a place where opinions were expressed but little real power was exercised. Under Shastri, the influence of the Cabinet declined and that of the Prime Minister's Secretariat increased, a trend which continued under Mrs. Gandhi. However, there was a further shift under Mrs. Gandhi's leadership away from reliance upon any of the formal channels of authority in the system to dependency upon a narrow clique of personal advisers accountable only to the Prime Minister herself. Rajiv Gandhi continued his mother's pattern so that, in effect, prime ministerial government moved a further step toward a form of personal authority in which succession was dynastic and rulership was conducted with the counsel of a virtual princely court, and in which both Cabinet and senior bureaucrats were reduced in importance.

During the Janata period, an entirely different pattern, based on a form of coalition politics, developed in which the Prime Minister was only primus inter pares in a divided government, which ultimately fell in a Parliament that came to reflect the divisions within the Cabinet and for a brief period exercised indirectly its ultimate power of granting or withholding confidence in the government of the day. That pattern was repeated in the rise and fall of the National Front government of V. P. Singh.

The first edition of this book was written between 1986 and 1989. It built upon my own work of the previous twenty-seven years on Indian politics, ethnicity and nationalism, and political economy as well as that of my colleagues who had written on these subjects during the previous three decades. The central theme of the first edition concerned the consequences of increasing efforts by the country's national leaders to centralize power, decision making, and control of economic resources in one of the most culturally diverse and socially fragmented agrarian societies in the world. These centralizing drives, intensified in the post-Nehru era, had increasingly contrary effects. The effectiveness of political organizations had been eroded, ethnic, religious, caste, and other cultural and regional conflicts had heightened, and the ability of the central government to implement in the states and localities economic plans and programs designed in New Delhi had declined. These consequences suggested the existence of a systemic crisis in the Indian polity which, I argued, would not be easily resolved. I had, however, also argued that alternative paths toward such a resolution existed within Indian political and economic thought and political practices and that an alternative leadership might yet arise to seek such a resolution, basing itself on India's own traditions.

In the four years since the final revisions on the original manuscript were made, the several crises evident then have intensified to that turning point signified by the Greek meaning of the term crisis. That is, the Indian polity has reached a turning point in its post-Independence history. The old political order dominated by the Congress and parties sprung from it is in decay. These parties lack effective or popular leadership, compelling ideals, and local organization.

An alternative leadership has indeed arisen in the intervening years, self-consciously basing itself on India's Hindu traditions while pursuing even more relentlessly a Western ideal model of building a strong, centralized, militarily powerful state, possessing nuclear weapons, able to bring order to the country while commanding the respect of the great nations of the contemporary world.

Most theoretical models of political change and development applied to the post-colonial states of Asia and Africa have emphasized the critical role of “state-building” - stabilizing, extending, and strengthening the institutions of the centralized state - as a virtual precondition for “modernization,” national integration, and economic development. The central issue in these models of state-building concerns “penetration” of the institutions of the centralized state into “empty territories” or peripheral areas and into culturally and economically diverse regions which have undergone uneven economic and social development. It also involves establishing the authority of state laws and values over the traditional laws, customs, and values of autonomous religious, tribal, and other local communities. It includes as well the implementation of state goals of urban industrial development, increased agricultural production using advanced technologies, and agrarian reform in societies whose populations are overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, and dominated by peasant cultivators.

One influential model of state-building has been woven around the argument that there is a basic tension between the needs for strong state authority and the increased demands for participation by populations mobilized by nationalist leaders, party politicians, and others in pursuit of a multiplicity of goals which ultimately come into conflict with each other and with the broader public interest which only an institutionalized and autonomous state can pursue effectively. This view magnifies such demands for participation into a developmental “crisis,” threatening to state authority and civil order.

All these views tend to exalt the centralized state, to assume its inevitable triumph in one way or another, and to give it an anthropomorphic shape while assigning only a secondary role to the specific actions of the wielders of state authority. It is sometimes suggested that the state may adopt federal features and may decentralize power to local institutions, but these are rarely seen as anything but measures to make more effective the capacity of the central state itself. Political leaders, especially the nationalist leaders, and some of the more dynamic contemporary military leaders, have generally been seen as playing the important, but secondary role of transferring their charisma to state institutions and thereby imparting legitimacy to them. The “overloads” and crises which may lead to the collapse or functional irrelevance of “differentiated modern [state] structures” do not arise from the actions of the leaders but occur “when environmental strains become too great.”

Some observers of Indian politics, economic development, and social change since Independence argue that it is not state policies, the complexities of building political power in India, or the centralizing drives of Mrs. Gandhi which are principally responsible for the political disintegration and economic failures of the past twenty years. These are all rather reflections of deeper economic forces and of the dominance of particular social classes over Indian society and economy. One view is that there are structural forces in Indian society, entrenched social classes, whose actions constrain the political elites from implementing policies against the former's interests. State policies increasingly have come to reflect the interests of the dominant classes – the rich farmers who benefit from government price support and input subsidy programs, industrial capitalists who have profited from the import substitution policies and have learned to turn to their advantage the industrial licensing system, and the professional bureaucrats who have gained considerable corrupt income from their administration of programs for the benefit of the farmers and their control over the investment decisions of the industrialists and the business classes.

According to another view, the countryside has come under the increasing political and economic dominance of the landed castes. The commercialization of Indian agriculture in the post-Green Revolution period has let loose forces which have undermined traditional social relations in the countryside and have promoted class polarization and class conflict. The latter are in turn largely responsible for increased political instability and violence in the countryside.

These structural class and economic explanations agree that “accommodative politics” have failed and cannot succeed in the face of growing class antagonisms in the countryside and the increasing dominance of India's “proprietary classes.” Their prognosis, in the event of the continuation of the present regime and its policies, is for the intensification of violent class conflict in the countryside. To avert it, they propose the displacement of the dominant rural classes through more thoroughgoing agrarian reform, the strengthening of the Indian state and of its autonomy from the now dominant social classes, and a return to and a more rigorous implementation of policies of state-directed, centralized economic planning and heavy public investment in an economy dominated by the public sector.

Parallel trends and counter-tendencies have been at work especially in the post-Nehru period both in center-state relations and in the relations between state governments and district institutions. With regard to center-state relations, the offices and institutions of state government have increasingly been turned into instruments for implementing the will of the central government leadership. The counter-tendencies, partly arising out of India's regional/cultural heterogeneity but also in response to the imposition of Delhi's direct and indirect rule over the states, have been the regionalization of state politics and party systems, the increasing assertion of demands for revision of center-state relations, for regional autonomy, and even for outright secession.

Insofar as district and local politics are concerned, similar processes have been at work. On the one hand, ruling parties in the state governments, particularly the Congress, have allowed district and local institutions of self-government to decline or have limited their powers or have even frequently superseded them altogether in order to maintain tighter control over local systems of patronage and to establish stable bases of local support. The counter-tendency has been the persistence, even the reassertion, of structures of local power which exist independently of government and party organizations and the revival of interest, especially among the non-Congress parties, in the restoration of local institutions of self-government.

STATE POLITICS

Roles of the state governor

The constitutional role provided for the state governors and the practices which have evolved in relation to the office of governor since Independence have provided the focal point of contestation over the relative balance between autonomy and central control in center-state relations. The national leadership in the Constituent Assembly was concerned to maintain the strength of the Center in relation to the states and to have the recourse to intervene in cases of serious instability and political and communal unrest. At the same time, they wished to establish full parliamentary government at the state as well as the central levels, in which a governor with executive power would be inconsistent. The Constitution partly reflects this ambiguity in its specification of the appointment and powers of the state governors.

AGRARIAN ISSUES IN INDIAN POLITICS

The year 1966 was a major turning point in the history of Indian agricultural development policy. In that year, three significant sets of events occurred that profoundly affected the determination of Government of India policy makers to intensify measures to increase agricultural production as rapidly as possible in order to make India self-sufficient in foodgrains. The first was the great drought/famine of 1966-67 in north India, which followed upon a previous bad year for Indian agriculture and which occurred simultaneously with scarcity conditions in other areas of the country. The second was the initial harvesting of the new HYVs of wheat brought to India in the winter of 1965-66 by Norman Borlaug and his associates and planted in several locations in north India and elsewhere during the rabi (winter) season of 1966. The third was a combination of domestic and international factors affecting U.S. government foreign policy making, including the Vietnam war, U.S. balance of payments problems, and the potential use of U.S. food exports for hard currency payments to alleviate those problems.

Although these three sets of events constituted a turning point, the solutions adopted to deal with the crisis events of 1966-67, namely, the drought and shifts in U.S. attitudes toward India, were entirely consistent with previous Indian government policies for economic development, agricultural development, and agrarian reform. Those policies, which focused on the rapid adoption of the HYVs and the associated technology, ignored the long-standing issues of agrarian reform and were designed to be acceptable to the dominant political and economic elites in the provincial capitals and in the Indian countryside. They fed into and reinforced historic regional and social imbalances in economic development in India. They ignored the problems of the small cultivators in vast regions of the country, most notably in the great rainfed paddy-growing areas of India stretching from eastern U. P. to Bengal and including as well large parts of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Assam. They also failed to solve, only postponed facing the hard solutions to, the basic production problems of Indian agriculture in those areas of the country that comprise the bulk of its territory and population and that depend upon the monsoon or lack either adequate irrigation or dependable rainfall.

India's national leaders had to confront several language problems in the first two decades of Independence and what appeared to some of them in the aftermath of Partition to be a real threat of the “Balkanization” of the country. These problems included the official language issue, demands for the linguistic reorganization of the provinces of India whose boundaries during British rule did not conform to linguistic divisions, and the status of minority languages within reorganized states. Most of the language conflicts in the Nehru period, some of which became at times bitter and violent, were ultimately resolved through pluralistic solutions. The central government and the national leadership of the Congress sought to avoid direct confrontations with the language movements and their leaders and adopted instead arbitrating and mediating roles wherever possible. In the case of the movements for linguistic reorganization of states, until mutual agreements were reached among contending language groups and their leaders, the Center attempted to ensure that the state governments were under the control of strong leaders whom it supported in efforts to maintain civil order.

In the post-Nehru period, however, several linguistic, ethnic, and regional movements have escalated to levels of bitterness and violence never experienced in the Nehru period except in the tribal regions of the northeast. It will be argued in the following chapter that the centralizing drives of the Indian state under Mrs. Gandhi's leadership and the manipulative and interventionist strategies pursued by the central government and its leaders in state politics have contributed to the intensity of such conflicts during the past two decades. Most of the problems discussed in this chapter, however, were resolved during the Nehru period and will provide a base for comparison with the unresolved problems which have persisted into the 1980s and 1990s.

THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE PROBLEM

Before independence, the most salient language issue in Indian politics concerned the relative positions of Hindi and Urdu and of the Devana-gari and Persian-Arabic scripts.

Party politics in India display numerous paradoxical features, which reveal the blending of Western and modern forms of bureaucratic organization and participatory politics with indigenous practices and institutions. India's leading political party, the Indian National Congress, is one of the oldest in the world, yet it has not succeeded in providing the nucleus for an institutionalized party system which can be fitted easily into any one of the conventional categories of party systems known in the West. There has been a strong Marxist and Communist revolutionary tradition in modern Indian political history. However, unlike other such traditions in most parts of Asia, its dominant parties and movements have neither succeeded in threatening the stability of the Indian state nor been threatened with physical extinction as in Indonesia, but have instead been integrated in the form of reformist political parties within routine politics in the country. The diversities and social fragmentation of Indian society have produced a proliferation of regional and other political parties which often give to each state in the Indian Union a unique party system imperfectly integrated into the “national party system.” Some characteristically Indian features pervade virtually all parties in the country — factionalism, dynastic succession to leadership, and the presence of ideological differences among the parties without ideological cleavage in the party system.

Indian politics are distinctive among contemporary developing societies in having had forty-five years of nearly continuous—excepting the brief Emergency period — competitive electoral politics in which also alternation in power has occurred in all the Indian states and at the Center as well. Here, also, there are numerous paradoxical features and indigenous adaptations of an essentially British electoral system. These include: varying, but often quite high turnout rates among a population still overwhelmingly agrarian and illiterate; a special form of representation for “untouchables” or Scheduled Castes; electoral arenas not yet fully dominated and controlled by organized political parties; and the critical importance of the electoral process as a mechanism for the successive introduction of groups of voters, particularly caste groups, into politics, which impart to the Indian electoral process a quality which is quite different from the classic ideal of the electoral arena as a place where the “independent intelligence of the individual voter” is exercised.

India arrived at Independence after a long struggle and with a multiplicity of heritages and legacies which influenced its post-Independence course in complex ways. Among the legacies were the long experience of British rule itself, which extended back more than two centuries, and of the various institutions, ideas, and practices, introduced by the British. Of particular importance at Independence was the Government of India Act of 1935, which was the most recent framework of rule under which the country was governed and which included a considerable measure of responsible government for Indians in the provinces. A second legacy was that provided by the shared experience of those Indians who participated in or identified with the nationalist movement and its great leaders. A third was the existing social order, the social structure and social conflicts which surrounded and influenced political movements, ideas, and practices. Finally, there was the great body of traditions and cultural practices which preceded British rule in a civilization of great depth, complexity, and diversity.

THE CONSTITUTION AND THE COLONIAL LEGACY

In some ways, it is possible to view Independence and the adoption in the early years after Independence of a new Constitution as another stage in the evolution of India toward representative government in a process that dates back to the Indian Councils Act of 1861 and continues through the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909, the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919, and the Government of India Act of 1935. At each of these reforms, the participation of Indians in the central and state legislatures and in the executive councils was increased and the franchise was extended to ever larger numbers of people.

It has often been noted especially that there was a considerable degree of continuity between the Government of India Act and the Constitution of India. The features of continuity included the adoption of a federal system of government with three legislative lists of powers to be exercised exclusively by the Union, exclusively by the states, or concurrently, and a combination of a considerable degree of provincial autonomy with extensive powers left to the Center, including emergency powers which made it possible to convert the federal system into a unitary one.

Linguistic federalism has proven to be a satisfactory means of maintaining the unity of India and the loyalty of the citizens of its principal language regions. No territorial solution to ethnic problems, however, can by itself satisfy the claims of all minority groups. We have seen that many minority language speakers have remained within the linguistically reorganized states and that several political movements have arisen among them claiming discrimination against their language by the speakers of the dominant regional language in a state.

Moreover, the political leaders of India have not been able to resolve as satisfactorily as in the case of the major language groups the political demands and the political status of non-Hindu and tribal minority groups. States reorganization has either failed or been a far more prolonged and violent process before satisfying the political aspirations of the Sikhs in the Punjab and the tribal peoples in the northeastern region. Outright secessionist movements accompanied by bitter, prolonged, and bloody confrontations between insurrectionary groups and government security forces marked the politics of Punjab, Assam, and the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir as well in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Finally, forty-five years after partition, Indian state leaders had failed to resolve satisfactorily the persistence of Hindu-Muslim communal division, which continued to find expression in vicious killing in cities and towns in many parts of the country.

The question naturally arises, therefore, whether India has departed from its proclaimed secularism and become a state based implicitly on a Hindu definition of nationality. It will be argued here and in the following chapter, on the contrary, that it is the secular ideology itself together with the persistent centralizing drives of Indian state leaders and the unending struggle for power in New Delhi, intensified during Mrs. Gandhi's leadership of the country, which have been more responsible for the failures to resolve the political problems of non Hindu minorities.

Ideas play a large role in Locke's philosophy. In Locke's view, everything existing or occurring in a mind either is or includes an idea; and all human knowledge both starts from and is founded on ideas. The very word “idea” appears more frequently in the Essay concerning Human Understanding than any other noun, - its occurrences outnumber even those of such common words as “he” “have,” and “for.”

Locke's ideas have, however, perplexed readers and provoked critics from the time of the Essay's first publication. His contemporary Edward Stillingfleet, the bishop of Worcester, noted the novelty of the term “idea” and charged that Locke's use of it had encouraged “ill men” to take up the “new way of ideas” and use it “to promote scepticism and infidelity, and to overthrow the mysteries of our faith” (W IV: 129-30). Stillingfleet had no objection to Locke's own use of the word, much less to ideas themselves, since he took these to differ only nomine from the “common notions of things, which we must make use of in our reasonings” (ibid.). But John Sergeant, another contemporary critic, found “idea,” as used in the Essay, to be “highly Equivocal, or Ambiguous”;and he argued that in at least one of the meanings assigned it by Locke the word stands for nothing at all, a “meer Fancie” (Sergeant 1697: 3; Preface). This charge of ambiguity, especially, has been a staple of Locke criticism for three centuries: Thomas Reid advanced it, and so did Gilbert Ryle, who wrote, echoing Sergeant, that not only is “the term ‘idea’ . . . used by Locke in a number of completely different senses,” but “there is one sense in which he uses the term . . . in which it must be categorically denied that there are such things as ‘ideas at all. And, ” Ryle continued, “had this been the only sense in which Locke used the term, then his whole Essay would have been, what it is not, a laboured anatomy of utter nonentities” (Ryle 1933: 17).