Synoptic Politico-Economic View of Contemporary India

While the glory that was ancient India, relative prosperity of medieval India and the impoverishment as well as degradation of colonial India are well documented by historians, the notion of the condition of post-independence, contemporary and evolving India is, at best, mixed as well as confusing and, at worst, downright depressing. While on the one hand, there is an image and perception of contemporary India being the largest functioning democracy and a modern, secular nation emerging as an economic power, there is a veritable picture of India being characterized by strident and widespread poverty and whose socio-political fabric is riven by casteism, communalism and insurgency, on the other. While India won its independence from a well-entrenched powerful imperial regime through a non-violent struggle informed by pursuit of politics of high morality, which called for sufferings and sacrifices on the part of its leaders, in post-independence India politics is practiced in increasingly blatant pursuit of power for self-aggrandizement, public life is reeking of corruption and neo-imperialism is unobtrusively creeping in. The salient features of the picture of independent India which has emerged in the last six decades have been discussed in the previous nine posts on this blog titled “Understanding Contemporary India and its Problems”. A synoptic view of this picture is as follows.

In the first two posts titled “India’s Illusion of Democracy”, it has been shown that in the democracy that India has adopted for its governance, the people have hardly any voice in how the governments are constituted at the centre or in the states, or in how the affairs that affect their day to day lives and living are managed at the local levels. In spite of the din, bustle and heat in stark evidence at the time of elections, democracy in India is too indirect, distant and convoluted for the people to make any impact in normal circumstances on how they are to be governed, i.e., how their concerns are addressed and their aspirations met. For this very reason, the basic constitutional stipulation that sovereignty of the nation lies with its people has been rendered insubstantial. This is clearly discernible in the interactions the ‘sovereign people’ have with the ‘public servants’, i.e., the government officials at all hierarchical levels, as discussed in the third blog post titled “Reality of India’s Sovereignty”. In the fourth blog post titled “Secularism in the India Republic”, the real character of India’s secularism, as proclaimed in the Constitution, has been discussed. While in colonial India, the secular government of British India played the religious card as part of their ‘divide and rule’ strategy to keep themselves in power, the communal divides are kept alive as vote banks by the political parties in their bid to capture or sustain power in the Indian republic. Another constitutional principle enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution of India, socialism has been given a formal burial in the name of economic reforms. In the case of India, embracing of the so called economic reforms, i.e., liberalization, privatization and globalization, followed from the government’s colossal failure in meeting its social responsibilities due to its institutional weaknesses, infirmities and aberrations, as discussed in the fifth blog post titled “What Happened to India’s Socialism?” As far as India being declared a republic in the constitution is concerned, one conjures up an image of the republic of India having a governance “of the people, by the people and for the people”. As explained in the blog post titled “Is India a True or Ideal Republic”, this image is not real at all. India is a republic only by its text-book definition of the headship of the state of India not being ancestral as in a monarchy. Ancestry in the Indian polity, however, is far from being uncommon.

The view of India as indicated above points out the basic institutional infirmities, the stark realities as against the illusions nurtured by the Indian republic. These infirmities, however, are very significant and fundamental for the health of the republic and for understanding the problems afflicting the nation. It is like a sick person having the illusion of being healthy will not be motivated to seek diagnosis for the problems he may be suffering from. He will run after symptomatic, rather than systemic, treatments for his problems, only to be frustrated at the end as these undiagnosed or misdiagnosed problems defy those superficial treatments. Similar situation has been happening with the Indian republic. When India became independent on 15 August 1947 and a republic on 26 January 1950, it got the illusion of being a healthy nation while its body politic inherited essentially the same germinal system of governance which had been corroding its vitals for the last century and a half of its colonial existence. It did not undergo the needed catharsis. Consequently, the problems afflicting the nation not only defied the conventional solutions applied but got more pervasive and complex with time. Three such problems have been dealt with in the previous posts on this blog. One is the problem of corruption in public life which has been systematically getting more serious, pervasive and corrosive over the years and decades. Secondly, the problem of insurgency and other disruptive forces crippling India has been increasing in extent and destructiveness over time. Last but not the least, the problem of pervasive poverty that emerged in the colonial period and prevailed in the post-independence period in spite of valiant efforts made for development, has now been perpetuated in the republic India. These problems, which characterize contemporary India, have been dealt with in the previous November, December and January posts. It must also be understood that the problems afflicting the nation are not only confined to these three. There are many others which are related, systemic and quite serious such as cross-border terrorism. Unless the basic illness afflicting the body politic of India is diagnosed appropriately and the treatment prescribed and acted upon accordingly, the prognosis will never be satisfactory and effective. This will be the subject matter of the next post.