Democracy, Nationalism, And Communalism

The Colonial Legacy In South Asia

Asma Barlas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429723247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Although India and Pakistan were part of a single state until liberation from British colonial rule in 1947, the former has since emerged as the world's largest "democracy, whereas the latter has been under military control for most of its history. In this thought-provoking volume, Asma Barlas explores the complex and delicate issue of democracy in

1
Introduction

Nearly two centuries (1757–1947) of British colonial rule in the South Asian subcontinent ended with its being partitioned into the states of India and Pakistan in 1947. Within a decade, the latter had degenerated into a “praetorian” state (Gardezi and Rashid, 1983; Richter, 1978) while the former is counted today among the world’s extant “democracies.”¹

In this book I analyze the historical circumstances that have engendered Indian and Pakistani politics in its existing specificity by means of a theoretical and methodological approach drawn from Antonio Gramsci’s works. Prior to specifying this approach, I describe the nature of the problem and why its study is likely to be instructive for theorists of democracy. I then examine some leading theories of Indian and Pakistani politics since it is only on the basis of a critique of these that the strengths of an alternative, Gramscian approach can be appreciated.

The Case: Similarities

The contrast between India and Pakistan is striking because at independence they inherited a shared legacy conditioned by over twelve centuries of Hindu-Muslim association and two of colonial rule. Thus, while Britain’s partitioning of the subcontinent left the successor states with unequal assets, they acquired almost identical administrative structures from the Raj. This included a system of governance fashioned by the latter over the course of almost a century with an eye primarily to facilitating its own control. The result was an “overdeveloped” (Alavi, 1973) state dominated by a powerful civil service, the erstwhile steel frame of Empire, not only inimical to the idea of “native” political control, but also able to obstruct it. (It was the locally-recruited segment of this bureaucracy which inherited administrative power in 1947 and which continues to run the show: in India, behind the facade of “democracy”; in Pakistan, openly and in tandem with the military.)² (Braibanti, 1966; Potter, 1966.)

Similarly, since the Indian and Pakistani militaries were created from the bifurcation of the “British Indian” army (the largest professional volunteer force in the world), they continued to share up to the 1970s³ the same patterns of recruitment, attitudinal biases, and notions of professionalism on the part of their officer corps (Cohen, 1971; 1984). However, whereas in India the army has remained under the thumb of civilian authorities, in Pakistan it has been at the state’s helm since 1958.

While India and Pakistan are at differing stages of economic growth, due partly to the uneven nature of capitalist development under colonial rule,⁴ they are among the top ten industrialized countries in the “Third World” even though they are primarily agrarian societies. Moreover, in spite of the socialist rhetoric of India’s leaders and Pakistan’s brief dalliance with nationalization in the 1970s, both are free-market economies with large private sectors and sizable foreign investments. In both, the state intervenes actively in the economy, often on behalf of private capital (Amjad, 1983; Burki, 1986; Kochanek, 1983; Noman, 1990). However, whereas in India the private sector is strong and independent because of the emergence of a powerful bourgeois class which was able to consolidate its hegemony even before 1947 (Chandra, 1975; Chatterjee, 1993a), in Pakistan, it remains weak and dependent on the state which itself created the conditions necessary for the growth of capitalism after 1947 (Alavi, 1983; Hasan, 1971; Nayak, 1988). As a result, only lately has this class begun to secure its political representation in the state.

Notwithstanding pockets of capitalist “modernization,” however, India and Pakistan are also characterized by many features associated with so-called “traditional” societies such as the existence of a large and underdeveloped agrarian sector, high levels of illiteracy, social “backwardness,” and entrenched ethnic, kinship and communal⁵ loyalties and identities that make the construction of a purely secular nationalism⁶ problematical (Devji, 1992; Hasan, 1986; Krishna, 1971; Mitra, 1991; Upadhyaya, 1992).

Most importantly, at least from the perspective of theorists who emphasize the importance of political processes and institutions to “democracy,” both states achieved their freedom in the wake of successful national struggles (the first avowedly secular, the second ostensibly communal)⁷ led by the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League, the two principal parties of Hindus and Muslims in colonial India. Therefore, both states had seemingly⁸ hegemonic parties in power in 1947. Both parties were dominated by two brilliant but obdurate lawyers noted for their dictatorial miens, M. A. Jinnah and his more acclaimed contemporary, M. K. Gandhi, both of whom died within a year of independence, the latter at the hands of an assassin. Finally, in both states, power has devolved on a small oligarchy: in India, on the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty until recently; in Pakistan, on a landlord-military-bureaucratic junta for most of its history (Ahmed, 1978; Alavi, 1983; Gardezi and Rashid, 1983; Waseem, 1989).

Postcolonial Politics: The Contrast

Notwithstanding these similarities, however, Indian and Pakistani politics has also been very different. In India, politics has been dominated by a “middle” class,⁹ conducted through parties, and tended to remain within the framework of procedures associated with electoral democracy. The Congress is still the leading party even though it has splintered into factions and has never won the majority of the popular vote after 1947, having been defeated by left and right-wing parties, both. Yet, its control over the political system has been so pervasive until recently as to render depictions of it as the “one-party” or “Congress-system” (Zins, 1988) entirely credible.

The party’s ability to underwrite the social accord necessary for “democracy” has been ascribed not only to its leadership of the national struggle, but also to its noted capacity to accommodate diverse social and political forces in its own ranks. Thus, capitalists and laborers, landlords and peasants, bureaucrats and politicians, women and men, Brahmins and “Untouchables,” Hindus and Muslims, ideologues of the left and the right, conservatives and radicals, and secular and religious intellectuals have all, at one time or another, vied for leverage within it (Andrews and Mookerjee, 1938; Brass and Robinson, 1987; Joshi and Hebsur, 1988; Sisson and Wolpert, 1988). In spite of the contradictions engendered in its policies by this medley, however, the Congress remains “one of the oldest bourgeois parties in the world” and one, moreover, that has exercised “sole power continuously for more years than virtually any party in the West” (Ali, 1977:52). Yet, because of its “all consuming capacity to absorb and synthesize extraneous and even ostensibly incompatible elements,” (Shepperdson and Simmons, 1988:8) it has been able to lay claim to ruling in the name of “the” Indian nation. Popular acceptance (until recently) of this claim has also allowed the state to weather its traumas without falling victim to a military coup so far.

Increasingly, however, the party’s unwillingness or inability to make good on the promise of development and democracy, reflected in growing poverty (Kohli, 1987) and authoritarianism (Kothari, 1988) have engendered erosions in its hegemony, a fact that bodes ill for the future of democracy. Thus, not only is agreement on the rules of the game that representative government entails in the process of unravelling (as witnessed by the rise of separatist movements by the Sikhs of the Punjab and the Muslims in Kashmir),¹⁰ but the ensuing discord has fostered a culture of violence that is inimical to democracy. However, since it is in the interest of the ruling groups to ensure that the legacy of accommodation¹¹ that underpins politics—and, by that token, their own hegemony—is preserved, a watered down form of “democracy” may yet manage to survive in India.

Here, of course, one may question the credentials of Indian politics to be democratic even by the thin standards of a representative system for, as Michael Levin (1983: 93) says, the purpose of such a system “is only manifested when widespread participation actually ensues, i.e., the opportunity has not only to be there, it has to be continuously taken up.” While on such views, even the United States would not qualify as a “democracy” because of the political marginalization of the poor, people of color, and women, the problem is much worse in agrarian societies like India and Pakistan where the majority of the population is a peasantry that has been permanently excluded from any meaningful participation in politics, at least of the “official”¹² variety. Moreover, the top-heavy and exclusive nature of the Indian state, the social inequities fostered by the Hindu caste system, inordinate poverty, and periodic violence against women and minorities like Muslims, Sikhs and “Untouchables,” have also rendered India a “democracy” more in form than in content.

However, too hasty a dismissal of India’s version of democracy runs the risk of disregarding some of the benefits it has conferred on the Indian polity. These include the rule of law (which, admittedly, has been increasingly undermined since the 1970s by what Smitu Kothari [1993: 151] calls “state lawlessness,”) an implicit accord on the way governments are to be run and replaced, and a tradition of pluralism and dissent. While these have failed to prevent violence, including a lethal rash of assassinations and communal brutality, and while ballot-box politics is not necessarily a virtue, in so far as it has deterred military coups, it is not so trivial either, specially in comparison to Pakistan. Second, while “democracy” has not eliminated state repression, it has discouraged it from assuming the almost gratuitous character it has acquired in many postcolonial societies, including Pakistan. Finally, the pluralistic ambience¹³ has been conducive for opening up some spaces for the emergence of social movements based on women and peasants, like the Chipko, that are engaged in challenging the elitist, gender-biased and ecologically destructive strategies of the state (Shiva, 1989). These struggles, if successful, may induce some liberalization in local politics in the future as well.

Unexceptional as these features of Indian “democracy” seem, specially in the West, they acquire significance if one recalls that in Pakistan, the last military regime of General Zia ul Haq (1977–1988) not only had its opponents whipped publicly as late as the mid-1980s, but also adopted legislation reducing the status of two women to that of one man for some legal purposes! (Mumtaz and Shaheed, 1987).

Military intervention in the country’s politics, which is a standard feature and seems to have acquired a logic of its own by now, dates from 1958 when party politics broke down completely in the postcolonial state. Thus the League, which had successfully led the struggle for Pakistan’s creation, not only failed to institutionalize representative democracy but disintegrated itself soon thereafter due to the early death of Jinnah—the moving spirit behind it and Pakistan’s “founder”—the chronic defections and intrigues of its own officials, and its narrow social base (Callard, 1957, 1970; Campbell, 1963; Sayeed, 1970). Accordingly, while Pakistan also had a brief (1947–1958) parliamentary phase, the experiment proved abortive and owed nothing to the party’s effectiveness. Parliament was a colonial relic, neither popularly elected nor even formally democratic as the numerous governments that rose and fell in rapid succession had their origins not in elections, but in deals and conspiracies among the ruling groups, comprising a landed and official¹⁴ class which had inherited the Raj. In spite of their maneuvering, however, these groups were unable to unify or to establish their own hegemony over the state, thereby providing the military an opening to sweep them off the scene in 1958. (However, due to the military’s failure to adopt effective land reforms, the landed class has become part of the junta that has ruled Pakistan since 1947.) (Ahmad, 1971; Ahmed, 1974; Ahmed, 1978; Alavi, 1983; Ali, 1970; Gardezi and Rashid, 1983).

Not only was there no popular protest at the coup but it was heralded as a revolution, notably by Modernization theorists, persuaded of the ability of “modernizing elites” to inaugurate an era of political development and “nation-building” (Feldman, 1966). In the event, the generals failed to distinguish themselves as developers of political institutions or the nation. On the contrary, the intolerant and exploitative nature of their rule provoked a civil war with East Pakistan¹⁵ that culminated in the dismemberment of the state itself in 1971. Discredited and demoralized by the loss of the majority wing (later Bangladesh) and its own defeat by the Indian military which had intervened on the latter’s behalf, the army retreated to its barracks in 1972.

Then ensued a transitory (1972–1977) interlude under Z.A. Bhutto, Pakistan’s first popularly elected prime minister. However, five years into his regime, the generals regrouped, arresting him on charges of electoral rigging and finally executing him on questionable grounds in 1979. Army rule, laced by copious doses of messianism on the part of the last military ruler, Zia, lasted until his death in a plane crash in 1988. Then followed another round of elections in which Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, emerged the winner, allowing her to become prime minister—the first woman to hold such a post in a Muslim country. The second Bhutto era, however, turned out to be even more short-lived than the first. Benazir’s government was dismissed from office after twenty-two months by the former president on charges of corruption. The successor civilian regime met a similar fate in mid-1993. Following new elections in the fall, Benazir was once again elected to office, with the army back in its barracks again, at least for now (1994).

Even though military rule until Zia’s advent lacked the brutality that has become the hallmark of military regimes elsewhere, it has nevertheless bred a harmful political climate in Pakistan. The army’s ban on political activity in the name of law and order, its subversion of existing constitutions and rule-by-fiat and, under Zia, its abuses of Islamic ideology (Khan, 1985) have thwarted the growth not only of democratic politics but accord on what politics is. In the absence of a shared agenda between the rulers and the ruled, two parallel tendencies have emerged. On the one hand, groups excluded from economic development and political power have launched separatist movements in two out of four provinces, Baluchistan and Sind, both of which have been in the throes of a thinly-disguised civil war for years. On the other, segments of society—specially in the Punjab, which appear to have been the main beneficiaries of rule by a Punjabi-dominated milita...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism: A Gramscian Approach
• 3 The Colonial State and Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism
• 4 Colonial Hindu Politics: Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism
• 5 Colonial Muslim Politics: Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index