Democratic Political Systems

The secular, federal, and multi-party political system of independent India has been a huge success story. Since 1947, the country has had to deal with enormous challenges and problems, such as operating in a backward economy with a poor citizenry, being torn apart by violent social conflicts, fighting three major wars and bearing high defense costs, gradually weakening many of its institutions, and being constantly under international pressure. Despite this, the political system has demonstrated remarkable resilience and flexibility, having withstood the test of time and demonstrated the ability to overcome a number of crises, including those of 1967-69 and 1974-77. 

 

•    Political stability has been a key feature of India's political system since independence. Since 1967, there have been frequent changes of government in the states, and since 1989, at the federal level, but political stability has remained. 

•    Different political forces and formations have fought their political battles in the constitutionally mandated political arena. Changes in governments have occurred in accordance with constitutional and democratic rules, and those voted out of power by parliament or the electorate have invariably accepted them quietly and gracefully. 

 

•    People have assumed that elections, which are largely free and fair and held on a regular basis, will determine who will rule the country, a state, or a panchayat. People's increased political participation, including agitation forms, has not resulted in political instability.

 

•    The political system has also gained a degree of unquestioned legitimacy, with the few who have questioned its fundamental tenets eventually falling in line. Thus, the Communists challenged the basic constitutional structure for several decades, albeit only in theory, as being geared to domination by the ruling, exploiting classes. They are now, however, among the most outspoken defenders of the Constitution. 

 

•    Communalists have tried from the beginning to undermine India's secular society and polity, but they even pay lip service to secularism while attempting to distort its character through redefinition. Similarly, while Jayaprakash Narayan questioned the multi-party parliamentary system in the 1960s and early 1970s, he eventually accepted it after the Emergency was lifted in 1977. 

 

•    It's also worth noting that new aspirant groups have been increasingly operating within the broad parameters of the political system to further their goals. In fact, the system's longevity, as evidenced by its continued operation for more than five decades, has given it strength and allowed it to establish deep roots. 

 

•    The firm entrenchment of political democracy and civil liberties, which have become a basic feature of Indian life, is perhaps the most significant of India's achievements since 1947. Today, Indians have a free press, the freedom to speak, travel, and form associations, and the right to freely criticize the government; they have competitive elections, unrestricted political party operations, an independent judiciary, the right to participate in political life and change the government through the ballot box, and they are free from fear of arbitrary arrest.

 

•    India is the only post-colonial country that has maintained a democratic and civil libertarian political system since independence. Most Indians' commitment to democratic values has grown stronger over time. Surprisingly, even the experience of the Emergency emphasized this bond. 

 

•    The belief that social transformation is possible within a democratic political framework has also taken root. The successful and unopposed operation of the system of reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes in several states, as well as nationalization of banks and several industries, land reforms—even quite radical in Kerala and West Bengal—and effective functioning of Panchayati Raj, with its provision for 30% reservation of seats for women, and successful and unopposed working of the system of reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes in several states, has shown that political democracy.

 

•    The steadily increasing political awareness among the people, as well as their increased direct and indirect participation in the political process, has been a prominent and positive feature of Indian political development in the post-independence period. 

 

•    Large swaths of the population had already become politicized as a result of the freedom struggle. This process has been accelerated by popular agitation and electoral politics. With an ever-increasing number of people and social groups being politically mobilized and ‘incorporated into the body politic,' India has undoubtedly become a more politically active society over time. Women, agricultural laborers, small peasants, and the urban poor have all come to believe that their social situation is unjust and that it can be changed, and that the desired change can be achieved through politics and the assertion of their political rights.

 

•    People want a greater share of political power and a larger share of the wealth they create in general. They also refuse to accept certain overt forms of oppression, discrimination, deprivation, and neglect. For example, a government that allowed a large number of people to perish in a famine, as happened during the colonial period's droughts, would not last more than a few weeks.

 

•    People have also become aware of the importance and power of exercising their right to vote at various levels, from panchayats to parliaments, as well as the benefits that can be derived from doing so. Booth-capturing politics, the sale and purchase of votes, vote banks, and patronage have all faded away, leaving the voter's choice more autonomous. One example is women's growing refusal to vote in accordance with their male family members' wishes. 

 

•    Furthermore, when it comes to choosing parties and candidates, the poor and oppressed no longer accept dictates. They can no longer be easily bullied or bought, despite being open to populist appeals or appeals based on caste, region, or religious community. 

 

•    People are increasingly voting based on issues, policies, ideologies, or group interests in order to benefit more from the government's development and welfare programs. While it is true that caste has become more prominent in electoral politics in recent years, caste as a political factor has frequently emerged when other social, economic, and political issues have been absent from the electoral arena or when such issues have become grouped around caste, as in the case of jobs and educational opportunities. 

 

•    However, when broader national issues have taken center stage, such as in the garibi hatao election of 1971, the JP Movement of 1974-75, the anti-Emergency election of 1977, and the 1984 election after Indira Gandhi's assassination, when the country was seen to be in danger, caste as a factor in politics has invariably receded.

 

•    Voters have become more assertive and demanding, not only in terms of larger social, economic, and political issues, but also in terms of the people they vote for having to respond more actively to their needs and demands. 

 

•    The heightened voter expectation from the electoral process, as well as the pressing demand by voters for performance and fulfilment of promises made during elections, is a major reason for the volatility of voters' behavior in recent times, resulting in wide swings in electoral mandates. 

 

•    Surprisingly, elections at all levels have repeatedly demonstrated that people have little reluctance to vote against those in power because they are no longer in awe or fear of those in positions of power. Politicization and mobilization of the previously unpoliticized has been a continuous and ongoing process that has occasionally taken the form of popular agitations involving many urban and some rural sections of society. 

 

•    However, in large parts of the country, they have so far ignored the rural poor. Demands for social justice, a share of development gains, and participation in decision-making have fueled protest politics. As more disadvantaged and oppressed classes and groups have entered the political arena, it has grown. 

 

•    In the absence of class mobilization and struggle against the caste system, caste oppression, and discrimination, power struggles and popular mobilization in rural areas have frequently taken a casteist form. With the recent inauguration of the newly designed Panchayat Raj, a major step towards further democratization of the political system and greater people's participation as well as greater control over their own lives has been taken.

 

•    Perhaps the most important political task facing the world today is to deepen democracy and make it more meaningful for the masses by allowing them to participate more fully in the political process. 

 

•    Voting in elections held on a regular basis should not be considered a form of such participation. So far, political mobilization of the poor and disadvantaged has largely failed to shift the balance of social and political power in their favor. 

 

•    The capitalists, who have reaped the greatest benefits from economic development, the landed peasants, who have reaped the greatest benefits from land reforms and the Green Revolution, the intelligentsia, professionals, and middle classes, for whom enormous opportunities have opened up after 1947, government and public sector employees, the organized working class, and the upper layers of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

 

•    As a result, they have been able to sway democracy in their favor. The poor, on the other hand, have been unable to do so to any significant extent. They have been excluded from larger decision-making processes and have had little say in day-to-day decisions that affect their lives. Their access to resources produced by the economy and social system has remained restricted. 

 

•    They have been unable to convert their numerical strength into effective power due to a lack of mobilisation. Their political activity has been dormant for a long time. Even radical parties, groups, and organizations have a history of underinvesting in organizational and mobilizations efforts. Of course, the poor rise up in protest and even revolt from time to time, and they exercise their right to vote in elections, often enthusiastically, in the hopes that the people elected will help them improve their social and economic situation. However, much more accountability to the poor's agenda is required.

 

•    Political protest, like the right to vote, is an essential ingredient and a natural part of democratic politics. It is essential for the oppressed sections of society to express their demands and grievances, and it is a critical part of their effective participation in politics. 

 

•    As different sections of society become more aware of political life and work for faster changes in their social conditions, India will see more protests, not fewer. Protest movements are also important tools for citizens to compel authority figures, particularly those in positions of political power, to respond to their demands. 

 

•    Perhaps this is the only way for the poor to do so. All of this should be taken as a given. So, in a civil libertarian representative democracy, what are the forms of protest that should be allowed?

 

•    Indians, on the other hand, have yet to develop appropriate forms of protest or reach a consensus on what they can and cannot do. Demonstrations, hunger strikes, hartals, strikes in the workplace or educational institutions, dharnas, bandhs, gheraos, road blockades (rasta roko), satyagraha, civil disobedience or disobedience of laws, leading to mass arrests, and rioting have been the most common forms of popular protest by political parties, students, workers, farmers, government employees, and ordinary citizens. 

 

•    While some of these forms of protest are inherently coercive, others frequently result in violence, a breakdown of law and order, and flagrant disregard for laws duly enacted by elected legislatures or rules established by those with authority. In many cases, the protesters coerce the people they are supposed to represent into joining their actions. 

 

•    Protests, particularly those in the form of demonstrations, frequently result in attacks on automobiles, buses, trains, government and private property, college buildings, and other structures. Overreaction and an equally and often more violent response by the authorities and the police frequently worsen the situation, leading to a vicious circle.

 

•    However, the goal of such protest movements is not to persuade the relevant authority of the legitimacy of their demands, or to win it over by "changing his heart," as Gandhi put it, but to erode that authority and force it to accept their demands. Of course, the blame cannot be placed solely on one side, namely the protesters. Many people resort to violent protest because those in power ignore peaceful protest and only respond to violent agitations. 

 

•    As a result, the government frequently alternates between being unresponsive to the demands of large, peaceful groups and completely caving in to the demands of violent groups. In other words, not only must the organizers of popular agitations try to change the authorities' hearts, but the authorities themselves must be willing to change their minds when the protestors' demands are justified. We believe that, just as efforts to prevent or suppress peaceful protest are undemocratic, violent protest is also an undemocratic threat to democracies functioning.

 

•    Also nonviolent defiance of the law, even legal in a democratic system, and if so, under what conditions or circumstances? For some guidance on this, we can look to Gandhiji, the founder of Satyagraha, and in whose name many post-independence protest movements have been launched. 

 

•    Gandhiji warned the people on the eve of independence that Satyagraha and civil disobedience would no longer be appropriate tactics in a free India against a government chosen by the people. Even when confronted by the British, he insisted that Satyagraha and civil disobedience be nonviolent in both word and deed. In any case, they were to be used as a "last resort" in cases of gross injustice or immoral behavior by the government or other authorities, after all other options for redress had been exhausted. 

 

•    In fact, the forms of protest used in independent India to imitate Gandhiji's methods are more akin to what he called duragraha. We can use a long quotation from Joan V. Bondurant's Conquest of Violence to illustrate the clear distinction between Satyagraha and duragraha as Gandhiji saw them:

 

•    Duragraha serves to distinguish those techniques in which the use of harassment obscures or precludes supportive acts aimed at winning over the opponent in the refinement of language for describing social action techniques... Civil disobedience may be used in cases where democratic procedures have been harmed by default or design, and where the legal machinery has been turned against a travesty of justice... 

 

•    However, if civil disobedience is carried out in the style of duragraha rather than Satyagraha, it may well lead to widespread disregard for the rule of law, allowing those who would use illegal tactics to undermine faith in democratic processes to flourish.

 

•     Gandhiji would never advise citizens to give up their right to protest, which he considered to be the lifeblood of democracy. He would not, however, have taken the path that some Gandhians and the majority of non-Gandhians have taken since his death. He could only be imitated by smaller men. He would, however, have innovated and evolved new forms of protest as well as political activism that are appropriate for a self-governing, democratic, and civil libertarian polity, as he promised. That is also the task that today's protest leaders and organisers should take on. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the anti-nuclear peace movement in the United Kingdom have demonstrated that this is possible.

 

•    As chapters 25 to 31 show, India's economy has been quite vibrant, and its overall performance has been satisfactory. It has made significant progress in almost all of its various aspects, though the extent of achievement falls short of what was possible and required. 

 

•    India has broken the vicious cycle of poverty-underdevelopment-poverty by overcoming economic stagnation. It has also succeeded in breaking free from the colonial economic structure and laying the foundations for a self-sufficient, independent economy. It has thus achieved the goal of the Republic's founders, which was to transition from political to economic independence.

 

•    India has never been autocratic, self-sufficient, or based on national isolation, preferring to live in its own cocoon. That was never going to happen. It could only grow if it became a part of the global economy. 

 

•    However, unlike during the colonial period, independent India's integration with the world economy has been based on the needs of India's autonomous development and free of subordination to the advanced capitalist economies of Western Europe and North America. 

 

•    The Indian economy is no longer enslaved by foreign capital. In fact, independent India's reliance on foreign capital and aid has been minimal. Foreign capital no longer controls finance or any other major or economically strategic industry. 

 

•    In India's economy, multinational corporations have also played a minor role. However, in terms of advanced technology, India remains reliant on a few industrialized nations.

 

•    India successfully developed its own economic pattern, namely, a mixed economy, which placed equal emphasis on the active economic role of the state and the market, and developed a complementary relationship between the public and private sectors, shortly after independence. 

 

•    India has also been able to implement economic reforms in the last decade of the millennium, dismantling bureaucratic controls and the license-quota raj, and gradually integrating with the global economy without harming the economy or people's living standards. India has also managed to transform its landlord-dominated, semi-feudal agrarian structure, albeit with many flaws and to the detriment of the landless.

 

•    India's agriculture, industry, and national income have all grown steadily over the years. The Indian economy has been remarkably stable and has been relatively unaffected by global cyclical swings. It was able to withstand three major adversities in the world economy without serious damage: the oil shock of the 1970s, the collapse of Europe's socialist countries, with which India had close and significant economic ties, and the East and Southeast Asian economic crisis of 1997. It was also able to recover without significant cost or disruption from the fiscal and foreign exchange crises of 1991.

 

•    Agriculture has grown more than three and a half times since 1950, ending the colonial period's stagnation in agricultural production and productivity. India has achieved food self-sufficiency, with food grain production increasing at a rate of 3% per year. Despite periodic droughts, famines have become a distant memory. With time, the impact of the monsoons on agricultural production decreases. 

 

•    Since 1950, the industrial sector has grown by more than seventeen times. Furthermore, it has undergone significant structural change and diversification. The weakness in the basic and capital goods sectors has been mitigated to some extent, but not to the extent desired. The importance of this sector in total industrial production has increased dramatically, reducing India's reliance on advanced countries for basic goods and capital equipment.

 

•    The power, transportation, and banking sectors have all seen significant growth. India has also become more or less self-sufficient in terms of defense production, with the ability to produce long-range missiles and nuclear weapons, though it still needs to import some high-tech defense equipment from other countries. 

 

•    It has also amassed a large scientific and technical workforce that is well-trained. Despite a very high rate of population growth, India's national income has increased more than sevenfold since 1950, and its per capita income has increased by two and a half times. 

 

•    Nonetheless, India still has a lot of economic issues to work out. In the first few years of the new millennium, it is likely to face significant new challenges. By world standards, India remains a poor and backward country, and the economic gap between it and advanced capitalist countries has widened rather than narrowed. This is especially true when it comes to the technological divide between them. 

 

•    Despite the long strides made by the Indian economy, it still fails to meet the basic needs of all of its citizens, let alone their aspirations, in part due to a skewed income distribution. India's economic independence is also not irreversible. We live in a global capitalist system that is utterly unequal and still divides countries into core and periphery. 

 

•    Even now, the world system is made up of competing sovereign states and national economies, with the core, developed countries doing everything they can to maintain their privileged position in the global economy while attempting to weaken the relative positions of the periphery states and economies. 

 

•    Despite its independence, India's economic development has not yet reached the point where, as a result of its integration into and integration with the global capitalist system, it is no longer in danger of reperipheralization, or subordination and subservience to the core economies.

 

•    It was attempted to bridge the gap between India and the advanced countries under Nehru and Indira Gandhi by concentrating on heavy industry and electricity generation. This was a necessary task because India had to compress what Europe had accomplished over 150 years into a few decades. However, in the advanced parts of the world, the present was moving into the future as we raced to catch up with the past. 

 

•    While the vision and goals of the Nehru era—catching up with the rest of the world while remaining self-sufficient and economically independent, and building a more egalitarian and just society on that foundation—must continue to inspire the Indian people, the means and goals of technological transformation must change. 

 

•    The global economy has reached a watershed moment. Science's application to industry, agriculture, trade, and communication has advanced yet again.

 

•    Microchips, biotechnology, information technology, new sources of energy, and advanced management techniques are now the foundations of economic development, or the fourth industrial revolution. All of these rely heavily on the development of intellect, also known as "brain power," or the citizens' developed scientific, technical, managerial, and other intellectual capacities. 

 

•    There is a risk that a new international division of labour will emerge, with advanced technology, research and development, and other "brain" activities concentrated in currently advanced or core countries, leaving India and other underdeveloped and developing countries to focus on traditional consumer and producer goods, as well as "muscle and nerves" activities.

 

•    The threat of peripheralization can also take the form of dominance through financial or industrial capital investment. However, not all foreign capital investment is inherently dangerous. 

 

•    The Indian economy, the Indian capitalist class, and the Indian state have all reached a point where they can confidently accept a certain amount of foreign capital, particularly to serve the dual purposes of absorbing technology, organizational structures, and skills, as well as providing competition to indigenous entrepreneurs, whether private or state-owned. 

 

•    What India must avoid is a pattern of dependent development akin to that seen in Latin America, in which multinational corporations control key economic sectors and positions, as well as the dominant patterns of domestic production and international exchange. 

 

•    Although foreign capital investment would result in industrial development, there is a significant risk that it would also perpetuate technological backwardness in comparison to advanced capitalist countries. 

 

•    While some industries from earlier or even later stages of the industrial revolution would be transferred to India, advanced ‘brain' activities would largely remain outside of it, remaining the monopoly of the core, i.e. advanced countries. While it is necessary to temper our previous hostility to foreign capital, the policy of regulating its direction and role must be maintained.

 

•    Because the most recent phase of the Industrial Revolution is based on brain activity, education, particularly higher education, has become increasingly important. It is, however, the quality of the product, not just its quantity that matters. The fact that the vast majority of students in both rural and urban areas receive extremely poor education means that the country is missing out on the vast potential of its brainpower. 

 

•    In fact, this flaw could be characterized as internal brain drain. As a result, the task of renovating the woefully inadequate and dysfunctional educational system becomes even more urgent. Any populist effort to ignore the quality of education, in any of its forms, must be opposed, because the cost of neglect in this area is as high as the cost of neglect in the machine-making and other capital goods industries in previous periods.

 

•    India has experienced a large-scale brain drain to the United States and Europe for a variety of reasons. It is necessary to find ways to prevent and reverse this trend. We need NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) physically back in India more than NRI capital, and we need to figure out how to stop the outflow.

 

•    Planning and the state's active role in economic development, including the role of the public sector in production, are still vital, as India cannot compete in the new technology sector without them. The public sector, on the other hand, must not only be maintained, but also made more productive through better resource management and competition with the private sector. It must also be freed from the shackles of political patronage and a dysfunctional and inept bureaucracy.