Books
INDIA A PORTRAIT: An Intimate Biography of 1.2 Billion People
by Patrick French. Penguin, Delhi, 2011.Patrick French’s earlier book, Liberty or Death is perhaps one of the better narratives of India’s struggle for independence. Sweeping and investigative, it sought to bridge the teasing gap created by the propaganda of ‘nationalist historians’ and nostalgic meanderings of the pre-independence establishment on one hand and reality on the other. India A Portrait: An Intimate Biography of 1.2 Billion People may be read as a sequel to that earlier narrative, covering – or uncovering – the sixty and more years of India’s story since Independence. French’s deep affection for India, his ability to remain dispassionate even while discussing passionate themes, and his inherent willingness to decipher disparate viewpoints make him a sure-footed guide to navigate the complex terrain of India and its circumstance. Absolutely nothing in this ‘intimate biography’ is left to speculation. The eminently readable style is well suited to the aim of explaining India – in its present condition – to both non-specialists as well as the academics.
The aim of this work, conceived and written over a period of several years, is surprisingly to be found at the end of the book, in the Acknowledgements where French asks, ‘We all know how Sonia Gandhi landed up in politics, but do you know how Lalubhai Babubhai Patel gained his foothold?’ That is what this book is about; deciphering the intricate formulations of Indian society and politics by studying and relating the movements of the smallest cogs that make the ‘machine’ of India tick. It is intimate because it examines the minutiae within the larger contexts. The title of the book may seem facetious, arrogant even, for who can make a claim to render in the space of a single book, a biographical account of every Indian? Nevertheless, to focus on the propriety of that misses the point. How many people knew that Mahatma Gandhi and Dhirubhai Ambani came from the same sub-caste of Modh Banias? Or that many of the latter day Guevaras running India’s Maoist insurgency are members of the Velama caste. Pleasingly, French goes on to buttress this unlikely association by quoting a South Indian saying, ‘…even if burning coals fall on a Velama’s thighs, he will expect the bonded labourer to lift them from his body instead of saving himself.’
Nor is it only about the microcosms of India’s political, economic and social movements. Themes like religiosity, economic liberalisation, democratic practices, and the diverse interrelationship between these are debated, though not always conclusively. Vignettes are chosen with great care to illustrate, as graphically as possible, the larger story. The status of the individual and the role of the state upon the individual’s life is therefore rendered a reality that is noticeably missing in the many other ‘biographies’ of India published over the last decade. The book may be about the India of today, a sensitive and sometimes scathing look at how the democracy of 1.2 billion people works, or doesn’t, but the core of the present is strongly linked to the fringes of the past.
Particularly interesting is the continuing dynamic between tradition and modernity and the ways in which specific social groups mobilize and react to the changes occurring in India. Compulsive secularization for one and its propagation as a recognized political position is an unlikely winner in this context. It becomes as artificial and rhetorical as the sectarian appeals it seeks to contest. The only sustainable principles of secularism within political exchanges are those that root themselves in historical pragmatism. Consequently, the role of the state must only be that of a catalyst which encourages and pushes an already established position forward.
The state cannot initiate the process of questioning, analyzing and reinterpreting religious beliefs for the society it governs through direct policy measures. In India, religious beliefs, however mismatched to post-modern systems or lifestyles they may be, precede the foundations of statehood and democratic government and the general apparatus of liberal thought. This also makes traditional beliefs undesirable to some extent as motivations and aspirations as specific segments of society grow. This brings into play the theory of ‘tyranny of the majority’ and adds a validity to the foundations of western political thought such as Hobbes’ Leviathan. However, compulsory political directions cannot be used to act upon long held traditions if one wishes to subvert those traditions and establish a truly modern society.
French’s conclusion on these ideas may be general and sweeping but it is correct. ‘In any village in rural India, you will find men and women with a stronger attachment to their household and family rituals, or to Ram, Murugan or a non-Hindu deity, or only to the ancient distinctions and prejudices of their community, than to the knowledge that they "do not work in the organized industrial sector". A powerful attachment to religion remains at the heart of how most people go about their day, and it is by no means exclusive to Hindus.’ Loudly proclaimed policy measures are, therefore, not as successful an answer to regressive beliefs as practical social (or even traditional) alternatives are and here is where the state can offer itself as an agent of change.
Often enough, as French points out, the state fails and so does the opposition to it. The Maoist insurgency – and French has met many of the active leaders of these campaigns – is one such source of opposition. Although dogged in its determination, French concluded that it lacked the intellectual energy to fuel its advance. ‘This was a central aspect of the problem with India’s Maoists: they relied on dead mantras.’ Yet, he is willing to correct his position when challenged by reality. ‘I left Andhra in 2002 feeling the Maoist insurgency was in decline… Instead the opposite happened… By 2010, Maoist guerrillas controlled about 40,000 square kilometres of territory in India.’
Prominent among those who accompany the entourage of Patrick French’s researchers is an intriguing figure. Arun Kaul, a member of the ‘hothouse for nerds, geeks, techies and assorted data fiends’ makes an effective apprentice who uses bimodal curves, code lists, logit regression and beta coefficients to establish the provenance of India’s MP’s with revealing results. It is staggering to learn that every representative in the Indian Parliament under the age of 30 is an HMP, or Hereditary Member of Parliament. The term is inventive and likely to remain in circulation long after the particular exigency for which it was coined has disappeared.
It is easy to conclude that Patrick French’s book is perhaps the most sensitive, probing and readable account of modern India in circulation. Most importantly, it is enormous fun to read.
Yusuf Ansari
DEVELOPMENTAL STATE AND THE DALIT QUESTION IN MADHYA PRADESH by Sudha Pai. Routledge, New Delhi and London, 2010.
Developmental State and the Dalit Question is an invaluable book for those interested in state politics, grassroots politics and development in India. It describes the relationship between the state and social and economic change in India. The book addresses the question: Why did land reforms and positive discrimination in business deals favouring the dalits and tribal groups in Madhya Pradesh (MP) lead to the weakening of the Congress Party in that state? The book contains substantial primary data and makes a convincing argument that India is a weak state in a strong society where it is difficult for the state to overpower powerful social forces, despite its best intentions.
The author brings to bear detailed information at every stage of her argument. She describes how development politics in MP is largely a bipolar contest between the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The history of princely states and largely feudal modes of revenue collection in this region during colonial times ensured that the marginalized groups were not politically mobilized. This was not true of neighbouring states such as Maharashtra or Uttar Pradesh (UP) which witnessed substantial political mobilization among the dalits. Bipolar politics in MP also endured in part due to the progressive and lower caste friendly approach of the Congress leaders in the state and the lack of independent political mobilization among the dalits and tribal people in the state.
The high point of the Congress Party’s dalit agenda under Chief Minister Digvijay Singh was the conference held in Bhopal in 2002 where two hundred and fifty dalit and tribal intellectuals debated the methods by which social and economic upliftment could be achieved in a backward state. It was argued that positive discrimination in government jobs was inadequate for securing the livelihoods of the dalits and tribal people in an era of privatization and globalization. Three radical measures were suggested in addition to reservations. These were: (i) land redistribution; (ii) the creation of dalit capitalists; and, (iii) the promotion of literacy among the marginalized sections in the state.
Land from the common areas in a village without a clear entitlement was used for redistributing it to the dalits and tribal people in MP. Land redistribution was known to be a socially disruptive process because it would be opposed by dominant landholders. They were averse to allowing these groups to gain social and economic independence by virtue of access to their own parcels of cultivable land. Given the challenge of development by transforming the social structure, a Gandhian non-governmental organization with substantial experience at the grassroots level, the Ekta Parishad (EP or Unity Council) was made a partner in the process with the state administration in every district. It would collect applications for land redistribution and organize meetings and protests. It also facilitated public courts in the villages.
A fascinating study of four districts based on 763 interviews in Morena (north-west MP bordering Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and home to the notorious Chambal Valley), Shivpuri (north-west MP bordering Rajasthan), Rajgarh (centre-west bordering Rajasthan) and Gwalior (north-west MP) provides insights about the political dynamics of land redistribution in MP. Each of the four districts offers valuable insights about the variables that affect land redistribution.
First, a committed district administration led by V.L. Kantha Rao working closely with the EP in Shivpuri achieved the most substantial redistribution of land. The EP’s tireless activist, Ram Prakash Sharma, helped the administration to locate vacant land for the landless, and in providing these farmers with amenities such as tractors, seeds and pumps to get them started with independent agriculture. This narrative supports the proposition that while the state’s support for redistribution was necessary, it was most effective when it coordinated its actions with social actors.
Second, when a committed district administration under J.N. Kansotiya fought the powerful Yadavs and Dongis in its quest to redistribute land in Rajgarh, success and violence both ensued. The EP did not enjoy a substantial base in this district. These powerful caste groups were aided by sympathetic lower level administrators (patwaris) and the BJP. Some patwaris had to be jailed. There remained hidden encroachments of land where Dalits had formal possession of lands which were effectively under the control of the powerful caste groups. The BJP would subsequently exploit the backward caste opposition to land redistribution to mobilize against the Congress Party in the state assembly elections of 2003.
Third, the poorest implementation of land reforms occurred in Morena in an environment where powerful social forces and an unsympathetic administration frustrated all attempts made by the EP to redistribute land. Most of the land in this district was uncultivable and was found in villages that were far away from the residence of the dalits. The dominant castes successfully opposed land redistribution in most villages except in a few places which had either a sympathetic patwari (village Nidhan) or a politically mobilized dalit population (Jatavs in Nidhan). Finally, Gwalior was a middling case where neither the administration nor the EP was proactive. Land redistribution here was aided by the substantial availability of fertile land.
These case studies point to the importance of a variety of factors such as the effectiveness of the top district administration, the salience of civil society groups such as EP, the generally negative role of the patwari, and the mobilization of dalits and tribal people that affected the implementation of progressive land reform policies at the local level. The desirable social outcomes need the state to work with society, a quest that can be facilitated by a politically mobilized target group.
The next section of the book deals extensively with the efforts to create dalit capitalists by providing them with easy access to government contracts and credit. The case studies suggest that the greatest success in promoting entrepreneurship has been among lower class entrepreneurs and those who have worked with the upper caste groups. Upper class dalit entrepreneurs are described in this narrative as a privileged class that succeeded largely because of their contacts rather than any entrepreneurial zeal.
Why did the Congress Party lose the state assembly elections in 2003 despite its efforts to ameliorate the condition of the marginalized groups in a feudal society? First, the substantial reasons proffered in this book lie in the realm of the social structure of Madhya Pradesh. The BJP was able to garner overwhelming support among the upper and backward caste groups which was electorally quite significant. The dalits, in turn, were unhappy because much of the land distributed to them was successfully encroached upon subsequently by the upper and backward caste groups. dalit capitalists were too few to affect electoral outcomes. Second, Chief Minister Digvijay Singh worked more closely with bureaucrats than his already divided party, which was endowed with numerous and powerful factions.
The substantial contribution of this book lies in the insight that the state in India needs to work with political parties and civil society organizations if it hopes to uplift the most marginalized sections of society. Moreover, any attempt to benefit the most socially deprived sections at the cost of the more privileged is likely to be seriously challenged. Crisper prose and maps would have rendered the book more reader friendly. The 537 pages of the book are nevertheless of immense value to all serious students of Indian politics and development.
Rahul Mukherji
LISTENING TO WOMEN TALK ABOUT THEIR HEALTH: Issues and Evidence From India edited by Joel Gittelsohn, Margaret E.Bentley, Perrti J. Pelto, Moni Nag, Saroj Pachauri, Abigail D. Harrison and Laura T. Landman. Har-Anand Publications, New Delhi, 1994 and 2011.
WHEN the original edition of this book was published in 1994, it was the first one on the subject in India. In its second avatar too, this feature remains intact, i.e., a marker for an important juncture in the global history of the movement of ideas and policies regarding ‘population and development’ issues.
Beginning in the 1980s and coming to a head in 1994 at the International Conference on Population and Development, several strands of the global women’s health movement came together to place on the table of the world’s nations the agenda that upholding women’s reproductive health and rights ought to be the fundamental basis for ‘population policies’, rather than manipulating women’s bodies and fertility in the interests of achieving demographic goals.
In India – a signatory to the above accord – a crucial prerequisite for implementing the paradigmatic policy change was nuanced knowledge about women’s health outside of their role as fertile, pregnant or nursing bodies, i.e., women’s experience of health and sickness, and the diverse social, cultural and economic contexts that shaped these experiences. This input, however, was missing. The power wielded by patriarchy – all the way from the statist approach to development, through the top-down medical institutional apparatus, to family structures on the ground – ensured that women’s voices remained unheard. The significance of the book rests on breaking this silence.
There are reports from eight field-based studies conducted in rural villages (4) and urban slums (4), of women’s beliefs and perceptions regarding illness, diet during pregnancy, white discharge, menstruation, and both their health seeking behaviour and their reluctance to participate in gynaecological health programmes purportedly meant for them. Girdling these voices from the field are the core chapter that explicates the mix of qualitative methodologies used by the studies and the rationale for the same and the summary of findings and their implications for health policy and programmes.
What makes the second reprint, with its new Prologue by Saroj Pachauri summarizing developments in the field of population and reproductive health since 1994, interesting are two features. It allows us to reminisce about the birthing of the new field of reproductive health studies through the agency of the Ford Foundation. The Foundation had been a long-term supporter of India’s development initiatives post-independence; a major source of stimulus for the population policies of the earlier era, it now took on a crucial role in shaping the field of reproductive health globally and in India. Additionally, the new edition reminds us of the distance that the field has traversed in the 17 years, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and the diversity of audiences that are now familiar with the principal issues that it has raised.
In the years leading up to 1994, the Ford Foundation faced an uphill task to get the field going in India. The narrow and overwhelmingly quantitative demographic orientation of traditional population studies institutes in the country, and the lack of interest in policy-related issues among traditional academic social science departments, meant that researchers trained in qualitative social science research methods tuned to investigating the invisible and deeply private world of women’s reproductive health and sexuality were unavailable. Participants willing to enter the research waters of the brave new project had to be identified. They needed to be trained in the methodology of doing qualitative social science research. And they required technical supervision and collegial support to be able to produce tangible outcomes in the form of written products as a basis for policy. The majority of the early entrants proved to be physicians or gynaecologists, mostly those working in NGOs engaged in community health or community development and, to a lesser extent, faculty members of medical colleges, and nutrition or social work departments of academic institutions. What they shared in common were commitment to women’s health and empowerment issues, and access to local communities.
Faced with the challenge of having to build academic skills outside academia, the foundation launched a project ‘Building Social Science Capacity for Research in Women’s Health in India’. The project created and supported a network of these participants, thus cobbling together an incipient community. It organized a regular schedule of training workshops and conferences, led by academic consultants brought in from social science departments in U.S. universities who generated the course materials and training manuals. The multiple editors of the volume are evidence of the collective effort and extended period of engagement that this involved.
By the end of the 1990s, many other international agencies such as the MacArthur and Packard Foundations, also entered India and offered support for research, and for community and policy-level interventions in reproductive health. This has led to a massive expansion of the field, and the professional community sustaining it. The pioneering contribution of the Ford Foundation to creating the conditions for this growth is undisputable. In the years since 1994, several volumes have been published documenting the unfolding trends in reproductive health research in India, and international journals regularly publish papers from India. Understandably, the process of actual social change moves ahead more slowly. The issues raised by this book continue to be invaluable in aiding this process.
Radhika Ramasubban
CRAFTING STATE-NATIONS: India and Other Multinational Democracies by Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz and Yogendra Yadav. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2011.
‘One of the most urgent conceptual, normative and political tasks of our day is to think anew about how polities that aspire to be democracies can accommodate great sociocultural, even multinational, diversity within one state’ (p. 1). The old wisdom holds that the territorial boundaries of a state must coincide with the perceived cultural boundaries of a nation. More starkly stated, the assertion is that every state must contain within itself one and not more than one culturally homogeneous nation, that every state should be a nation, and that every nation should be a state.
Unlike what such a proposition might suggest, not only do most states incorporate a large degree of diversity – cultural, religious, linguistic – but that most states have not been created by a coherent nation actualizing itself. Rather, they are the result of rulers successfully imposing themselves, often by wars or international settlements following wars. A nation-state without a prior state helping construct it, is today inconceivable. The authors of this dense, and often provocative, monograph instead suggest an alternative category of state-nation as an overarching umbrella concept to more successfully manage diversities. While the promotion of the category is in itself not new (Rammanohar Lohia too, for instance, preferred it over nation-state; similarly, historian Ravinder Kumar advanced the notion of a civilization-state), what is far more valuable are their policy suggestions which are supportive of the crafting of state-nations – policies, they argue, which better fit and help manage the complexities of culturally diverse modern democracies.
Of course, both nation-states and state-nations have to be working states. Also, to be a viable state-nation, even if the state recognizes and supports different languages, cultures, even nations within its policy, the citizens should have a high degree of identification with the state, be comfortable with multiple but complimentary political identities, show a high level of trust in the state’s institutions, and demonstrate a high degree of positive support for democracy among the diverse groups of citizens in the country. Interestingly, a comparison between countries closer to the state-nation and the nation-state pole (Switzerland, India, Canada, Belgium, Spain as examples of state-nations and Germany, Austria, the U.S., Australia, Argentina and Brazil as examples of nation-states) shows that countries closer to the state-nation pole actually score higher on the degree of trust in six key political institutions of the state. In short, they argue that multiple but complimentary identities and democratic state-nation loyalties are possible to craft even in a polity with robust multinational dimensions and a plethora of intense linguistic and religious differences. India is a case in point because in addition to cultural diversity, it also has territorially based linguistic/cultural cleavages which need to be creatively managed if the country is to hold together.
Clearly context matters. Crafting a nation-state (unitary or federal) is easier if only one significant, territorially concentrated, politically activated sociocultural identity exists, as in France or Japan. If the society is characterized by more than one significant mobilized socio-cultural identity, as in India, crafting a nation-state will be far more conflictual than a state-nation. And, if we have a situation of unbounded plurality, a pure multinational context, as in the erstwhile USSR or Yugoslavia, then crafting a democratic, federal polity in one territory becomes extremely difficult. Such states are usually held together by force and are likely to fall apart when the context changes. States can be multinational societies but not multinational states.
It is true that following the disintegration of the USSR and Yugoslavia, most countries have become vary of institutional arrangements containing an ethno-federal dimension. The authors argue that such a defensive tendency is not helpful; that it is possible to outline identifications, norms, practices and institutions that can facilitate the construction of a democratic state-nation polity, one that both respects individual rights and cultural diversity. Their preferred arrangements include: an asymmetrical federal state; individual rights and collective recognition; a parliamentary instead of a presidential system; polity-wide and centric-regional parties; politically integrated but not culturally assimilated populations; cultural nationalists versus secessionist nationalists; and a pattern of multiple but complimentary identities. Importantly, each of these policy choices and arrangements need to cohere in an unusual, almost counter-intuitive ‘nested policy grammar’, i.e., no one feature by itself is likely to deliver the desired results.
Of particular interest is the discussion on India as a state-nation, what many see as a relatively successful example of creating a shared political community amidst deep cultural diversity. Drawing on both historical and sociological literature as also survey research, the authors demonstrate the efficacy of many of the policy arrangements arrived at – secularism, language policy, federalism and multi-tier polity, multiparty parliamentary democracy, among others. They also discuss the many challenges that the Indian arrangement faces – both the tendency towards political centralization and the worrying growth of Hindu majoritarianism. Nevertheless, despite the challenges, including the growth of political violence, they remain confident about the future of Indian democracy.
They also point to the limits of the state-nation model by discussing the vexed cases of the insurgency in Punjab, Mizoram, Nagaland, Kashmir and Tamil Nadu. The ability to relatively successfully negotiate these challenges – except in Kashmir – is testimony both to the sagacity of Indian politicians, contingent political practice, and the complex set of institutional arrangements that were crafted to meet the specific situations. Interestingly, while many mainstream politicians rail against Article 370, guaranteeing a special status to Kashmir, rarely does anyone discuss Art. 371(g), a special provision to safeguard the autonomy of Mizoram, though in many ways it is as, if not more, restrictive than the provisions governing Kashmir. One may quibble with the details, but there is no denying that the Indian state has been able to weather these storms. The contrast with Sri Lanka and its handling of the Tamil problem is instructive. Had Sri Lanka been more accommodative and less willing to impose authoritarian solutions of a unitary state, it is likely that it would not have gone through a two-decade plus long civil war, one whose ‘successfuly’ conclusion has, so far, done little to assuage the ‘hurt’ of the Sri Lanka Tamils.
Though of less interest to the general (Indian) reader, most interested in India and its neighbourhood, comparative theorists would gain from the discussion on European countries, Ukaraine, and the federal system of the United States. Minimally, it points out that our (Indian) problems are neither unique not suigeneris. Only by comparing our context and strategies with the experience of other countries, can we begin to appreciate what works, how, to what degree, and when. Of particular significance is the stress on both institutional design and the culture of political practice. One can only hope that our policy-makers and political ideologues make the necessary time to go through this path-breaking study and learn from its careful and nuanced deliberation of potential choices and trade-offs they entail.
Countries like ours are not amenable to one-size fits all, quick-fix solutions. Managing diverse subcontinental polities demands both patience, a willingness to hear and learn from evidence, and above all, resist the temptation to forcefully mould a diverse peoples into a common frame. In that lies the path to disaster.
Harsh Sethi
