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.

Insurgency and Other Disruptive Forces Crippling India

Apart from the problems of precipitous decline in political morality, rampant corruption, growing impoverishment and stark economic disparities, other serious problems, which are distinct but related to or caused by these problems, plaguing India are insurgency and other disruptive movements raging in, and outraging various parts of, India. These movements appear in diverse forms which may be categorized broadly as separatist including secessionist movements inspired by cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic identities or movements caused by socio-economic disparities and marginalization. Very often these movements are violent, being directed against established authorities of government. Sometimes, they are directed against certain groups of people who, being outside the identities characterizing the local population, are perceived to be either exploiters or undue beneficiaries at their cost. Depending upon the nature and strategy of perpetrating the violence, the movements may be termed as militant, extremist or insurgent. With the advent and currency of suicide bombing, these movements, particularly those associated with religious fundamentalism, even deploy terrorism involving wanton killings in order to make their point.
Except for religion-based movements which originated in pre-independence India due to the British rulers playing the religious card in an attempt to preserve and perpetuate their colonial rule and promoting the preposterous principle of religion as the rationale for nationhood, all other movements are post-independence phenomena. Even if the seeds of these problems existed then, they remained dormant and subjugated to the British rule. They blossomed and bloomed in the post-independence Indian republic, bringing the Indian nationhood in question and to ransom. The salient such movements and consequent disruptions in various parts of India are indicated below.
India’s independence accompanied by its partition into two nation-states based on the two-nation theory, which was unacceptable to India, set the stage for future separatist movements in free India. One example is the emergence of many self-styled organizations in Kashmir demanding autonomy, self-determination, independence, or even accession to Pakistan, often using violence, mostly aided and abetted by cross-border instigations and occasionally accompanied by terrorist activities. For the last at least two decades, Kashmir has been an insecure and disturbed part of India, resulting in several hundred thousands of casualties involving civilians, militants and security personnel in insurgency and counter-insurgency operations, and in near collapse of the thriving tourist and related trades. Another example of unrest and violent movement emanating from the acceptance of religion as a basis of nationhood is the Khalistan movement aimed at creating a separate Sikh nation, which rocked the Punjab region by violence, militancy and terrorism for almost two decades in the seventies and eighties. It was preceded by a movement for creation of a Sikh majority state, which was done in 1966 through an Act of the Parliament. The high points of the Khalistan movement were Operation Blue Star of the Indian Army in order to quell the armed secessionist movement, assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the subsequent outbreak of anti-Sikh riots in Delhi and the mid-air blowing up of the plane of an Air India Flight. The movement, in which the Sikh Diaspora have played an active role, is now at least dormant largely because of other overwhelming developments in the country.
Another part of India which has been one of South Asia’s hottest trouble spots since the sixties is its seven north-eastern states. As many as 30 armed insurgent organizations such as ULFA (United Liberation Front of Asom), NDFB (National Democratic Front of Bodoland), PLA (People’s Liberation Army) of Manipur, NSCN (National Socialist Council of Nagaland) and NLFT (National Liberation Front of Tripura) have been operating in the region, fighting the Indian state with demands ranging from right to self-determination and autonomy to secession. As this region having an area of 255,000 sq. km. (8% of India’s geographical area) has 4500 km long highly porous borders with four countries, China, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar, this insurgency has been rendered complex and intractable due to its trans-border ramifications and operations. It takes several diabolical forms such as extortion, kidnapping, wanton killing, particularly of people having migrated from other parts of India and settled here, as well as confrontation with the police and the army. Even though some of these organizations have been banned because of their patently anti-national activities and agenda, insurgent activities have been going on, overtly or covertly, for the last four decades or so in this region.
Apart from these major insurgencies, various other events and activities such as narrow regionalism in the name of ‘sons of the soil’, demands for bifurcation of states with the professed objective of more balanced development and various water disputes are actually manifestations of negation of integrity and unity of India. Moreover, due to these forces of separatism, India has increasingly become a soft target of pan-Islamic terrorism.
The above-mentioned insurgencies are abetted by, and ultimately aimed at, separatism and are based essentially on religion or ethnicity. In the last four decades, however, altogether another type of insurgency has gripped parts of India and is growing. Originating in an obscure West Bengal village called Naxalbari, marked by strident poverty, as a left-wing extremist uprising against the establishment, this movement now afflicts almost half of the 28 states of India, concentrated mostly in tribal and mine rich parts of eastern and central India. This insurgency has been expanding both in area and population being affected as well as in level of violence associated with it. Today, the Naxalities or Maoists as these insurgents are called control about 92,000 sq. km. of India, where only the writs of their parallel government run. Their cadres consisting of both men and women are mostly recruited from their rural strongholds and are given professional training in armed insurgency. Their primary targets are police, government property and installations, highways, railways and the activities symbolizing present day governance such as elections and even developmental works.
Thus, we see that basically two types of insurgency afflict contemporary India, one based on fractured identities of religion, ethnicity, region and language as against a national identity, and the other based on increasing impoverishment and widening socio-economic disparity. At the root of both these types of insurgencies lies a sense of non-participation and alienation from the prevailing system of governance. While the first category of insurgents reacts to this sense by seeking a separate institution of governance in which they matter, the second category expresses their wrath at the failed system of governance which has not been able to deliver the goods over the decades. Whatever, these insurgencies cost a tremendous amount of national energy and resources. A nation saddled with such disruptive and dissipative forces can hardly hope to get out of the woods.