State Politics In Contemporary India

Crisis Or Continuity?

John R Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000313062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política asiática

This volume grew out of a panel on Indian state politics presented at the thirty-sixth Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 1984. Brass, Kohli, Manor and Wood gave papers and Church served as discussant; subsequently, Blair, who chaired the panel, and Lele and Varkey generously offered to participate as well. All of the papers were revised and edited speedily in order to take advantage of Westview Press' rapid publication and distribution through the Replica Edition process.

1
Introduction: Continuity and Crisis in Indian State Politics

John R. Wood

As India prepares for its eighth general election since Independence, there is much speculation about the ability of Indira Gandhi's Congress(I) Party to repeat its election victory of 1980. Myron Weiner has suggested that that election, in which Mrs. Gandhi rose from her 1977 defeat to trounce the remnants of the Janata Party coalition, brought India back to political normality.¹ According to Weiner, this meant "the combination of a popular prime minister, an institutionally weak governing party, a fragmented opposition, and a deteriorating economy."² Many observers would argue that these "business as usual" conditions — with all the variations and exceptions India inevitably produces — persist at mid-decade and indicate a continuation of Congress(I) government for the rest of the 1980s.

Others, including several authors in this volume, are more pessimistic.³ They point out that although Congress(I) won convincingly in the 1980 national elections, it has been beset ever since by dissidence and factionalism from within and by regionalist parties and secessionist movements from without According to these authors, Indira Gandhi's government — ordinarily characterized by strong personal and centralized rulership — appears unable to direct and control events. In many parts of India the struggle for scarce resources has so eroded political values and institutions that government has lost most of its integrity and authority.

These developments, which, in the pessimists' view, add up to a serious crisis for the Indian political system in the mid-1980s, are most dramatically revealed in the politics of the Union's twenty-two states. The significance of the states, many as large and populous as the countries of Europe, is little understood outside of India. Whereas India's states were originally regarded as little more than subordinate components of a highly centralized governmental structure, it is now clear that the political relationship between the Center and the states is an interdependent one. While the states must recognize the Center's constitutional superiority and, in varying degrees, depend on New Delhi for financial support, they have also been evolving as powerful political arenas in their own right Those who rule at the Center may try to influence the outcomes of the struggles in these arenas but, in the end, they must come to terms with the combatants. The combatants who lose may represent a growing political force that cannot, ultimately, be suppressed. The combatants who win, meanwhile, control political resources — organization, money, votes — that are of vital importance to the central rulers. Thus, especially in the bigger or more affluent states, the winners at the state level are able to assert their power against the power of the Center. Center-state relations in India used to be described as cooperative. Now they are conflictual, and they appear to be mutually weakening.

It has been a commonplace since Mughal times that India is too large and complex to be governed from a central capital. As Paul Brass has recently argued, despite periodic appearances to the contrary, the long-term tendency in India is towards pluralism, regionalism, and decentralization.⁴ One of the fundamental reasons for this is that significant political change in India occurs first at the state level and subsequently shapes national political processes. State governments, in effect, are in the front line when it comes to coping with the tensions produced by socio-economic change. The struggles over land and agrarian benefits, the pressures produced by industrialization and urbanization, the demands for education, jobs, better health and living standards — all of these must be dealt with by state governments. New Delhi can produce national plans, but it is too far away from developmental realities to make them work; it is in the states where allocations are effectively decided and implemented.⁵

It is in the states, too, where many of India's most ambitious politicians concentrate their energies. They directly represent and serve the needs, not only of territorial constituencies, but frequently the more tangible ones of primordial groups.⁶ Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) in a given state may differ on ideological or programmatic grounds; class, sectoral or regional interests may also divide them. But over and above these interests, or interwoven among them, primordial interests and ties — usually expressed in caste or communal terms —continue to be powerful determinants of political activity at the state level. Moreover, three decades of democratic elections have brought more and more primordial groups to an awareness of the rewards to be had in politics. Primordial politics, social scientists are now well aware, not only imply that primordial ties influence political behavior; modern democratic politics in turn secularize the meaning of primordial relationships.⁷ But as the essays in this collection and virtually all scholarship on Indian state politics demonstrate, struggles for power between castes or communal groups, however secularized, are intensifying.⁸ While the struggles may occur at any site from the village upwards, they are usually focussed most significantly at the state level where the rewards for winning — or the penalties for losing — are greatest.

Indira Gandhi’s Dilemma

Throughout her Prime Ministership, Mrs. Gandhi has felt continually challenged to intervene in state politics and her tendency to do so has increased in the 1980s. Many have viewed her involvement as a force for national unity and progressive action, but others have seen it as a disruptive interference which undermines the integrity of state government The Prime Minister's dilemma is that her, and the Congress(I)'s, electoral and governmental success — some would say survival — depends on her ability to control politics in the states. Her attempts to exert control, however, often produce dissidence, alienation, and increasingly, violent opposition.

The most vivid illustrations of this dilemma have occurred recently in three border states: Punjab, Assam, and Jammu and Kashmir. A detailed analysis of the politics of these states is not presented in this volume; each day's newspaper headlines unfold new dimensions of complexity in them and they may be too controversial for dispassionate study.⁹ But even a brief reference reveals the elements of continuity and crisis which in one way or another are inherent in the politics of all the states of India.

In Punjab, the struggle for power between the Akali Dal party and an incumbent Congress government dates back to Independence. The demand by Sikh separatists for an independent Khalistan originated in the trauma of Partition, which highlighted the Sikh minority's plight of being squeezed between Muslim and Hindu majorities in what were to become Pakistani and Indian Punjab respectively.¹⁰ In the aftermath, the Akali Dal in India's Punjab developed its role as defender of Sikh interests against Congress governments in the state and at the Center. Though it won a major victory in agitating for a Sikh-dominated Punjabi Subah (province) in 1966, the Akali Dal was always able to find and champion further Sikh causes in the succeeding years — protection for Sikh religious rights, access to inter-state river water and other developmental resources, and exclusive possession of Chandigarh as Punjab's capital. The Akali Dai rode these demands to victory in the 1977 election and formed a coalition government Indira Gandhi's return to national power in 1980, however, brought in its wake the dismissal of the Akali Dal government, the imposition of President's Rule and, after fresh state elections, the return of a Congress(I) government in Chandigarh. In the turbulence that followed, Sikh extremists under Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale revived the demand for Khalistan and fanned Sikh discontent with terrorist violence. Moderate Sikhs projected their demands in the form of the Anandpur Sahib resolution of 1973, which would give Punjab greater autonomy within the Indian federation. With an eye to other states' autonomist designs, the Center largely ignored these demands. Meanwhile, the Congress(I) state government, thrust on the defensive amidst escalating Sikh-Hindu bloodshed, became increasingly unable to govern. President's Rule was again imposed, and then, on June 6, 1984, the central government, to the world's amazement, sent in the army to militarily defeat the terrorists and control the state. Whether its resolute action will serve to extinguish the secessionist threat or create a new generation of Khalistan sympathizers remains to be seen.

In Assam, geographically India's most peripheral and, many Assamese would allege, India's most neglected state, regionalist sentiments have similarly been in a state of ferment for many years.¹¹ Native Assamese antagonism against in-migrants from other parts of India, principally Bengalis, was longstanding but it increased greatly as a result of the refugee influx from Bangladesh both before and after the secessionist war of 1971. The Assamese, fearing the subordination of their language and culture and protesting Bengali dominance in administrative and economic activity, struck back in 1979 when it became known that illegal aliens from Bangladesh had swollen the voters' lists. So violent was the reaction that the January 1980 elections in Assam were postponed. The All-Assam Students' Union staged demonstrations that were met by police firing, and the crisis quickly escalated when extremists cut rail links to the rest of India and interrupted Assam's oil production. Mrs. Gandhi and the central government undertook negotiations with moderate agitators and installed a Congress(I)—led coalition ministry in December 1980, but it lasted less than six months. When it became constitutionally imperative to hold an election in Assam in February 1983, the voters' list issue had still not been resolved — because, the agitators charged, the illegal aliens would vote for the Congress(I). Amidst unprecedented violence and an election boycott, the election produced an overwhelming Congress(I) majority on a voter turnout of less than 33 percent Since 1983, New Delhi has strengthened the hand of Assam's state government with infusions of military and economic aid. Its response to the illegal immigration issue has been to begin building a half-billion dollar fence around the Bangladesh border. The Assamese attitude to these moves has been underlined by fres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Book and Editor
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Map
• Preface
• Addendum to the Preface
• Contributors
• 1. INTRODUCTION: CONTINUITY AND CRISIS IN INDIAN STATE POLITICS
• 2. DIVISION IN THE CONGRESS AND THE RISE OF AGRARIAN INTERESTS AND ISSUES IN UTTAR PRADESH POLITICS, 1952 TO 1977
• 3. STRUCTURAL CHANGE, THE AGRICULTURAL SECTOR, AND POLITICS IN BIHAR
• 4. COMMUNIST REFORMERS IN WEST BENGAL: ORIGINS, FEATURES, AND RELATIONS WITH NEW DELHI
• 5. THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE LEFT AND DEMOCRATIC FRONT IN KERALA
• 6. BLURRING THE LINES BETWEEN PARTIES AND SOCIAL BASES: GUNDU RAO AND THE EMERGENCE OF A JANATA GOVERNMENT IN KARNATAKA
• 7. ONE-PARTY DOMINANCE IN MAHARASHTRA: RESILIENCE AND CHANGE
• 8. CONGRESS RESTORED? THE "KHAM" STRATEGY AND CONGRESS(I) RECRUITMENT IN GUJARAT
• 9. CONCLUSION: THE PATTERN OF STATE POLITICS IN INDIRA GANDHI'S INDIA
• Index