Anniversaries provide an appropriate occasion to assess India’s experiment with democracy. Perhaps one meaningful way to look at the Indian polity would be to ask the following question: what is the nature of legitimacy that is sought to be built by the state? What ideological planks does the state use to legitimise its power?
Particularly in newly created developing economies, which practice some form or other of democracy, legitimacy is sought through two main ideas : first, nationalism or nationhood, and second, economic development, understood as growth, with re-distribution.
To take the question of nationalism first, at independence, a large number of distinct ethnic, linguistic, religious communities, came together to form the Indian nation state. The idea of nationalism and the nationalist movement gave the Congress party the necessary claim to represent the unity of the nation. But the moment of independence also marked a certain shift away from nation making almost exclusively to state making, the task of administration or governance.
Nation building became something to engage with, in moments of symbolism, (of commemoration) or moments of danger (war). However, understandably, in the case of many groups and communities, their relationship to the collective unity, the Indian state, remained problematic, incomplete, and began to be expressed in separatist movements of varying scales and intensity.
For the state, faced by successive threats to political unity, nation building became interpreted as the task of controlling or eliminating such movements in order to force their compliance to the state. Thus nation building, has taken a coercive rather than a positive, affirmative colour.
In this process, the ethic of nationhood, that was constructed so carefully and laboriously during the nationalist movement, is lost sight of; second, in this process also, the nation state develops a somewhat fragmented relationship to its own history, as the history of distinctiveness of communities is sought to be pushed under the carpet, rather than addressed up front as part of the process of nation building.
This is not to understate the difficult task of nation building; the geo-political urgency of preserving borders, the domestic imperative of preserving order. It is only to underline that nationalism has lost some of its legitimising force; seen in the every day coerciveness that has become necessary to govern India; in the many sub national movements; in symbolic acts of disregard, for example, to the singing of the national anthem in public domains.
On the positive side, economic development, the key to unlock prosperity, and unity, replaced nationalism as the predominant legitimating theme. Statist development, socialistic pattern of society, garibi hatao, nationalisation, have been well known symbols of legitimacy, using class (land reforms) as well as caste (reservations) as reference points.
With the turn towards economic liberalisation, the question of legitimacy has taken a new twist. How does one justify marketisation, decline of state protection, subsidies, and public spending in social sectors, in a still desperately poor country? Economic reforms, mark a significant shift in the Indian model of development, but there is no political ideology to support or anchor this shift.
In the west, market reforms in the 80’s could fall back on a historical legacy of the political ideology of liberal individualism to draw its political legitimacy. In India, political ideology has always spoken of state support for the down trodden and citizens’ claims to educational and other economic opportunities have most often been articulated as group claims. As such, the market, while expanding, does not have a political ideology, or even a political language.
The leadership has understandably shied away from the task of presenting economic reforms in an intelligible language to the public. As such, economic reforms are shrouded in the technical language of economics, not accessible to the largest numbers. As far as these numbers are concerned, the usual poverty related schemes are presented from time to time.
But structural issues are never confronted, in policy or in political debates, such as growing informalisation, that wages will naturally be depressed in the unprotected informal sector given the large supply of unskilled labour, that large number of people remain outside the mainstream, globalised economy. The debate on economic reforms therefore remains confined to the elites, between left leaning intellectuals on the one hand, and market oriented economists on the other.
Extending reservation is an attempt at renewing legitimacy through re-distribution. But, in a rapidly privatising economy, the space for affirmative action in employment is indeed narrow. Second, reservation in higher education would have been meaningful only if matched with genuine and sustained state responsibility to provide basic education to the historically deprived castes. Again, political debates on reservation rarely reflect these obvious contradictions between a shrinking state and affirmative action.
Thus if nationalism and economic development provide the two pillars of constructing the legitimacy of the Indian state, in the current context, there is a deficit on both these counts.
(The writer is with the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore.)
