Democracy on the road, p.2
Democracy on the Road, page 2
2
My First Rally at Age Five, 1979
It was not long before the combustible mix of religion, caste and poverty was exploding in national politics, threatening the stasis that had bound India since Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru led it to Independence in 1947. Their Congress party would trade on that liberation dividend to win every national election for the next three decades, but by the 1970s deep discontent was stirring. The Congress’s infatuation with socialism had confined India to a growth rate of 3 per cent, far too slow to keep up with the needs of a mushrooming population. India was mired in poverty and stagnation. When Indira Gandhi tried to silence the growing tide of criticism by imposing the Emergency, the fractured opposition came together to topple her in 1977.
From that year on India became a real democracy, offering voters a genuine choice of parties at the national level. The cult of the Gandhis would remain, but it was increasingly less a nationwide cult than one inside the Congress, and the opposition would repeatedly prove strong enough—if it could unite—to take down any leader.
Babuji took me to see my first election rally in 1979, when I was five, and Indira Gandhi was making her case for a comeback. We rode by rickshaw to the rally grounds on the outskirts of Bijnor and sat shaded by a black umbrella as Indira took the stage, resplendent in white sari and dark glasses. She blasted the ruling coalition, a hotchpotch including everyone from communists to various Hindu nationalists, for destroying the country. Indira came back to power, but the nationalists were just getting started.
During the 1980s and ’90s there were outbreaks of Hindu–Muslim violence across the northern ‘Hindi belt’, which extends across nearly a dozen states from Rajasthan in the west to Bihar in the east. Uttar Pradesh, with a population of 200 million, is its heart. I don’t remember any violence in Bijnor during my summers there but curfews were imposed in surrounding areas, and the tension was palpable, in the way the adults yelled at the censored TV news. Politics is the leading spectator sport in India, and the adults would sit through the same broadcast twice: half an hour in English, and another half-hour in Hindi.
To me the news was dull as dust, dry government bulletins celebrating the accomplishments of the Gandhi governments, run by Indira until her assassination in 1984, then her son Rajiv until 1989. The fun part was not hearing what the prime minister or finance minister did that day, it was watching pillars of our community hurl their choicest insults at the TV, denouncing the lies and propaganda, dismissing the politicians involved with tart Hindi epithets. What I took away from this was that if adults held anyone in contempt for reasons that transcend religion and caste, it was politicians. And the ultimate Brahmin elite—the Gandhis—were not exempt.
Around the age of fifteen, bored during the day and intrigued by all the yelling at the TV in the evening, I was growing curious to see this drama in real life. Since the Ambassador was with Babuji, his caretaker at the farm, a lanky character named Bhagauna, started to drive me over to the town square on the tractor.
Like many of my grandfather’s workers, Bhagauna had inherited his post, taking over as caretaker from his father. Though this feudal system of hereditary jobs had begun to fade by the 1980s, Bhagauna was a special case. His father had been electrocuted while fixing a light around one of the water wells on the farm, and it was always understood that Babuji would take special care of his children, including Bhagauna.
He was from a sub-caste of cobblers, relatively high up among the Dalits, and so I never felt the same adult pressure to avoid his touch that I felt around a mehatrani. I had absorbed many other carefully graded stereotypes of course—the brawny but slow Jats, the warrior Rajputs, the mercenary Banias and so on. I knew too that it was taboo to marry across caste lines, even for a Brahmin to marry into another upper caste, like the Thakurs.
After our brief tractor ride to the town square, I would buy every political magazine or newspaper I could find, and talk to people. Even by Indian standards Uttar Pradesh is obsessed with politics, so it was exceptionally easy for a teenager to strike up these adult conversations.
Denizens of the town square would often complain that Muslims had been emboldened by the coddling of the Congress government to act like minority owners of a Hindu country. They railed at the Congress for lavishing jobs and welfare benefits on Muslims, who then had the temerity to protest Hindu abuses. ‘How can they think of rioting when they are a small minority?’ the Hindus would ask. ‘We are 80 per cent of the country.’
Many upper-caste Hindus in particular felt wronged by the Congress, accusing the party of appeasing all the religious minorities including the Christians, but especially the Muslims. The animus may have been especially bitter in Bijnor because Muslims were a 40 per cent minority here, more than triple their 12 per cent share of the national population at that time. Given the tenor of the times, familiarity did not make hearts grow fonder.
Hindus in the town square saw Muslims as a fifth column, working secretly in the service of arch-enemy Pakistan, fomenting terror and crime. They would get particularly upset if Muslims cheered for the Pakistan cricket team in one of its many tense matches against India. After Indira Gandhi’s comeback win in 1979, many Hindu nationalists united under the banner of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP. I would hear its more extreme supporters in Bijnor repeat an offensive limerick so often, it stuck in my head with other childhood jingles: ‘Musalman beiman, kutte ki khopdi bilai jaise kaan.’ Muslims are crooks, they have heads like dogs, and ears like cats.
Among upper-caste Hindus, Muslims weren’t the only source of resentment. They also felt that the Gandhis with their socialist ideas were favouring the poor and the Scheduled Castes, and the feeling grew more acute as Dalit leaders began to rise, demanding ‘empowerment’ for their people. Empowerment meant social justice and equality, an end to their daily indignities. Even into the late 1980s, it was commonplace for lower castes to be refused entry to the same buses, temples, or even police stations occupied by members of the upper castes.
No name was more discomfiting to the upper castes than Mayawati, who grew up in a nearby town but first ran for office in Bijnor which, like nearly a quarter of India’s parliamentary constituencies, was reserved for candidates from Scheduled Castes or the smaller group of Scheduled Tribes. Mayawati was a Jatav, a Scheduled Caste known as leatherworkers, several rungs above the mehatrani. The daughter of a postal worker, she would later insist that she had not suffered discrimination because she would not stand for it. This fiery personality made her a rising star in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which championed Dalit empowerment.
In 1985, Mayawati faced the Dalit political bosses Meira Kumar and Ram Vilas Paswan in a by-election for the Lok Sabha seat in Bijnor, and finished a surprisingly strong third. After that she adopted Bijnor as her own, and would score her first parliamentary victory there four years later. Her party whipped up support with a rebellious call to all Dalits, from the leatherworkers to the mehatrani and the night soil workers: ‘Tilak, tarazu aur talwar, inko maro joote chaar.’ The upper-caste Brahmins, Bania and Thakurs, thrash them with shoes.1
3
The Broken State and Babuji’s Last Days, 1993
Until 1989, with the exception of Indira’s brief fall from power, at the national level India had effectively been ruled as a one-party dynasty since decades before I was born. Nonetheless, I was star-struck by the latest scion of the ruling family, Rajiv Gandhi, the suave prime minister who had been in power for five years. I simply could not understand why so many voters in Bijnor didn’t care for a leader I saw as the only candidate with a real shot at raising our nation’s global stature. One of the sceptics was Bhagauna, and when I asked him why they did not back Rajiv, he replied: ‘We have made up our minds that we want to give everybody a chance.’ I realized only later the depth of what he was saying: it was time to end a quasi-feudal political order, in which only upper-caste leaders from one party, often one family, got an opportunity to rule.
Frustration with the 3 per cent ‘Hindu rate of growth’, grinding poverty, rat-infested schools and health clinics and a bureaucracy incapable of fixing any of the above were giving Indian voters a reflexive tendency to vote against seated leaders, no matter what party. Though the economy had picked up a bit of speed in the 1980s, thanks in part to reforms introduced by Rajiv, it was too little too late.
Rajiv had been caught up in the worst corruption scandal the country had ever seen, accused of receiving kickbacks from the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors in return for a $1.4 billion contract to supply the Indian army with field howitzers. His star was tainted. In the 1989 general elections the voters threw out my hero, sophistication be damned.
Gradually, the cult of the Gandhis had been giving way to a new political religion: anti-incumbency. The trend started around 1977, when Indira’s landmark defeat broke the virtual stranglehold the Congress had held on the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, and accelerated from 1989 onwards.
Before 1977, going all the way back to 1952, Indian voters had voted out the incumbent—usually a Congress government, in those days—in only around 10 per cent of all elections. In the years since, they have voted out the incumbent national or state government two-thirds of the time, in a kind of permanent revolt against the broken state.
Over that same period in the United States, where Americans like to complain about broken government but have no idea how bad it can get, voters chose to throw out incumbent governors and presidents in only one of every three elections. The word ‘anti-incumbency’ was popularized if not coined in India and if you google it, the first few dozen hits come mainly from India, including definitions of the word in a dozen different Indian languages. Some academics argue that while other emerging democracies are also prone to anti-incumbency, it is particularly acute in India because it granted universal suffrage unusually early in its development when the average voter was painfully poor, and the Indian state woefully unprepared to meet their needs.
Even Indian leaders with the best intentions struggle to deliver, because the Indian state is simply not up to the task of delivering competent services to more than a billion people speaking in more than thirty official languages (and hundreds more unofficial tongues) across twenty-nine states, which are in effect much like separate countries. Beyond the mind-bending logistics that the Indian state has to deal with, it also suffers from a unique combination of dense regulation and thin staffing: of 140 countries tracked by the World Bank India ranks 123rd for police officers per capita, with 150 per every 100,000 citizens. It ranks 111th for teachers per pupil.
Frustrated citizens go to the bureaucracy for help. Often they can’t even find a staffer to talk to, and if they do reach one they are greeted with a thick haze of indifference and regulatory mumbo-jumbo—particularly if they lack the connections or money to command attention. So voters take their pleas for everything—permits for gas cylinder connections, broken water pipes—to their local legislator, who is obliged to listen to constituents, but has to try to coax action out of the same broken state. Many politicians give up, and soon after getting elected, avoid their home district and frustrated constituents entirely. Over the years one of the most common complaints I have heard from voters is that their Lok Sabha representative has not been seen since election day.
By 1991 I was finishing high school, already a political junky and rooting for Rajiv, who was trying to lead the Congress back to power but was struggling to counter the rise of Hindu nationalists and the defection of lower-caste voters to regional parties. Then tragedy intervened.
Indian elections can take place in up to seven phases over as many as six weeks. The slow pace allows security forces time to saturate every voting district, in order to stem both communal violence and malevolent tricks like ‘booth capturing’—in which party goons seize control of a voting booth and block voters from casting ballots for rival parties.
The unintended consequence of drawn-out election periods is much more time for mid-election surprises, like the one that unfolded in May 1991. Separatist rebels from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam sent a woman strapped with explosives to attack Rajiv at a campaign stop in Tamil Nadu, and he died in the blast. Devastated, I felt Indian democracy faced one of its darkest hours, a view echoed by many leading political writers at the time.
The country had lost its third prominent leader to sectarian violence: Mahatma Gandhi, the great leader of India’s freedom struggle shot by a Hindu extremist; Rajiv’s mother Indira, shot by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. A surge of popular sympathy swept her son Rajiv to power, but he was assassinated too, just forty-six years old, same age as John F. Kennedy when he was shot. Rajiv’s death unleashed another surge of support for the Gandhis, but this time they had no successor waiting in the wings. Scrambling to find a leader, the Congress settled on a nondescript politician from the south, the scholarly former foreign minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.
These epic dramas combined with my tractor forays into the town square had inspired in me a deep desire to follow politics as a career. I yearned to write for the newspapers, but no editor would give the coveted political beat to a seventeen-year-old, so I found an unoccupied niche covering global economics, first for The Business and Political Observer for a year, then The Economic Times. In the Delhi offices of the Times I gravitated to the political writers, and was struck by how their Machiavellian intrigues, with constant personality clashes and shifting loyalties, mirrored the internecine warfare of Indian politics.
Maybe it’s an Indian thing. A similarly conspiratorial mindset divided my mother’s family, which battled over money, land and how the house would be split after Babuji died in 1993. He had been the glue who held things together, and when he was gone my visits to Bijnor became infrequent, partly because of the family battles over his legacy.
The manner of his passing left my family enraged at the negligence typical of many Indian government bureaucracies. Stricken by a heart attack, Babuji was rushed to the nearest public hospital, which was nearly two hours away in Meerut. The facility was short of qualified surgeons on the night shift and assigned the job of implanting a pacemaker to a doctor in training, who had no business attempting heart surgery. When his fumbling effort failed, one of my uncles drove Babuji another two hours to Delhi, but it was too late. He arrived at the hospital in a coma and passed away a couple of days later.
Around the same time, India implemented the Mandal Commission recommendations, which vastly expanded the list of communities who qualify for reserved government jobs by including the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) alongside the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Tribes (ST) for the first time. That landmark move expanded the share of government jobs that are reserved for underprivileged communities from 23 per cent to 50 per cent. Inadvertently, it deepened the role of caste in Indian politics, since caste-based parties now had more patronage to offer their supporters.
Neither Babuji nor I was around in Bijnor when Mayawati went on to win her first term as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1995. As India’s first female chief minister from the caste once known as untouchables, she was celebrated as a ‘miracle of democracy’. Babuji, like most Brahmins in Bijnor, would have been appalled to see Dalits taking over the halls of power. The old feudal order was showing some signs of fraying when he was alive but by the mid-1990s, at least in political terms, it had been smashed.
4
The View from New York Indians
General Elections, May 1996
In 1996, as the next big national election approached, I was about to take a job with a New York–based investment firm and was visiting its Mumbai office. Some of the firm’s top executives, all Indian expats, had flown in from Manhattan and were giddy with excitement about what the accidental prime minister, Narasimha Rao, had done for India. He had taken office as India fell into a balance of payments crisis, and he responded by opening the country to world trade and easing the grip of the crippling bureaucracy known as the ‘licence raj’.
The economy had accelerated in the 1980s from 3 per cent annually to around 5 per cent, but it was boosted by public spending and artificial stimulus, which set it up for the crash in 1991. Rao’s reforms made 5 to 6 per cent growth more sustainable by shifting growth to the private sector, and the visiting Indians were certain that voters would reward Rao with a second term and a mandate to push deeper free-market reforms. India’s rapidly growing middle-class and consumer society would grow even faster, they figured, and the stock market would boom.
To be fair the India bulls were completely in tune with the global conventional wisdom of the time, which had begun hyping India as the next China or even better: a booming democracy where reform was more likely to stick than in China because it had been blessed by voters. In theory at least, capitalism should work best in a democracy where voters hold their leaders responsible for economic results.
It wasn’t only New York Indians catching the free-market bug. By the 1990s many members of the Delhi and Mumbai elite had dumped Gandhian socialism for the Washington Consensus—the growing global movement in support of free-market reform. Even the communist writer R.K. Mishra was a convert. A former editor of The Patriot, the leading pro-communist publication in India, he was by 1990 the editor of The Business and Political Observer, the business paper where he gave me my first writing assignment in 1991.
Mishra had been a leading adviser to prime ministers from Indira Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao. He was now pushing Rao to open India further to market forces and the outside world. Mishra also introduced me to Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, who had built a reputation as a free-market sage.
The elections were held in May 1996, and the Congress went down to a stunning defeat, losing to a classically Indian coalition of strange bedfellows, from communists to regional satraps. It is hard to overstate the shock among New York Indians. They had assumed that every Indian thought liberal reform was great, rapid growth was great, so Prime Minister Rao was great and deserved a second term. They had formed this opinion before reaching Mumbai, much less the backwaters where caste politics ran deep. Lost in their own Wall Street thought bubble, they didn’t recognize that Rao had no mass base and was never able to sell the benefits of economic reforms to the public at large.
