Books
MOTHER, WHERE’S MY COUNTRY? Looking for Light in the Darkness of Manipur
by Anubha Bhonsle. Speaking Tiger Books, Delhi, 2016.A little over fifteen years ago, the Manipuri activist, Irom Sharmila began a ‘fast-unto-death’ in protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). In the years since Sharmila has been periodically charged with attempting suicide and acquitted – all the while the Indian state has ensured that she stayed alive by force-feeding her. The AFSPA too remains securely on the statute books. Among other things, the controversial legislation empowers army personnel, down to non-commissioned officers, to use force after giving due warning ‘even to the causing of death’, if they are convinced that it is necessary to do so for the ‘maintenance of public order’. Besides, it allows them to enter premises, search and arrest without a warrant. Furthermore, the act prevents the prosecution of any security personnel operating under its provisions without prior sanction of the central government.
The AFSPA has not only provided latitude for custodial deaths, fake ‘encounter’ killings, rape and torture, but also practical impunity to security personnel. Even when the Central Bureau of Investigation has indicted army officers for a staged killing, the central government has simply refused to sanction their prosecution. To be sure, we need to ensure that officers and soldiers who act in good faith while undertaking counter-insurgency operations do not have to constantly worry about being hauled up in courts. But this does not require the kind of cover provided by section 6 of the act.
The AFSPA attracted public attention following the abduction, rape and killing of Sharmila’s fellow Manipuri, Thangjam Manorama, in 2004. Faced with widespread protests, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced that he would consider replacing the AFSPA with a more humane legislation. Thereafter the government appointed a committee headed by Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy. The committee was mandated to advice whether the act should be amended or replaced. The committee submitted its report in June 2005. It recommended repealing the AFSPA. The Administrative Reforms Commission, too, recommended scrapping the act. And yet, no government has had the courage to do the right thing.
The consequences that flow from the very existence – not just ‘misuse’ – of the AFSPA have been documented by several civil society groups in the north-eastern states and in Kashmir. Anubha Bhonsle’s book takes the story to a much wider audience. A well regarded television journalist, Bhonsle has been tracking the impact of AFSPA on Manipur for nearly a decade. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and documents, court testimonies and reports, she presents a grim portrait of life under a regime of ‘emergency’ powers that have become entirely normal. And her account is all the more devastating for being presented without any hyperbole and in cool, unruffled prose.
Bhonsle’s signal contribution is in forcing us to look beyond the legal, political and strategic abstractions that constitute our thinking about AFSPA. She introduces us to women who have been raped by soldiers, to mothers who have lost their children in fake operations or as ‘collateral damage’, and to families that are constantly and unsuccessfully trying to snatch a semblance of order and normality in the face of a state that can snap their lives asunder at any moment. But she also lets us hear voices from the other side of the hill: of officers in the army and paramilitary forces, of insurgents and local politicians.
Equally admirable is her ability to place these narratives in a historical context. Manipur is currently home to no fewer than thirty active and dormant insurgent outfits. The alphabet soup of their abbreviations can be bewildering. Bhonsle traces the arc of these insurgencies from the time of the princely state of Manipur’s contested merger with India in 1948 through to the present. Today these groups are riven by rivalries and often survive via a nexus of crime and corruption that links the insurgents, businesses and the political class. Bhonsle provides an excellent account of the political economy of insurgency in Manipur and shows how it has corroded the moral economy.
While the story of Irom Sharmila is a running thread through the book, Bhonsle takes us to wider sets of actors beyond Manipur: students from the North East studying in Delhi and elsewhere, lawyers and human rights activists who have struggled valiantly to ensure justice to the victims of state violence. At the same time, she provides an unsentimental account of how difficult it has been to raise public consciousness about the AFSPA, never mind getting the government to repeal it. Above all, Bhonsle leaves us with a sense of why Indian democracy might seem hollow to many of its citizens and yet how others are trying tirelessly to hold the state to the values espoused by its own constitution.
Bhonsle points us to one of the reasons why the AFSPA remains in place: the opposition to its repeal by the Indian Army. Senior army officers, she observes, have publicly said that removing the act would be tantamount to asking them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. She could have gone further and asked why the Indian Army gets its way on this issue. After all, in a democracy civilians have supremacy over the military. The answer lies in our peculiar model of civil-military relations where the military is subordinate but also enjoys untrammelled control on operational matters. Indeed, it is by defining the AFSPA as a purely operational issue that the army insists that the political leadership refrain from meddling with it. No government has had the gumption to challenge ‘professional advice’ on this matter.
But the AFSPA is not simply an operational issue. Given the widespread revulsion against its provisions in all regions falling under the act, the question of repealing it has become a political one. Hence, the army’s view cannot be the deciding factor. In any case, there is no reason why the political leadership should feel unduly constrained by the army’s stance. The chain of accountability is clear: the military is responsible to the political leadership, who in turn are answerable to the people. The army must also realize that the line between advising against a course of action and resisting civilian efforts to pursue it is rather a thin one. The AFSPA thus vitiates formal democratic structures as well as the lived experience of democracy in areas that come under the act.
The tragedy is that even from a purely military point of view it is best to let go of the AFSPA. A counter-insurgency strategy based on commitment to the values enshrined in the Indian Constitution may involve some operational difficulties; but these should be viewed against the advantages of being in a position to avoid divisive domestic debates and being able to tap into wider bases of support. The need to avoid aggressive legislation stems from strategic as well as legal and moral considerations. For ultimately the challenge of unconventional conflicts is in the cognitive domain.
It would be naive, however, to expect the military to adopt this line. The pressure has to come from the civilians – both within the government and outside. But in a political climate where the army is being valorized as the embodiment of the nation, and any criticism of the armed forces is tarred as unpatriotic, it is unlikely that any such pressure can be brought to bear. And it is in such a conjuncture that we need a book like Mother, Where’s My Country – to remind us of the stakes and why we shouldn’t allow our pessimism to get the better of us.
Srinath Raghavan
Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi
DIVIDED WE GOVERN: Coalition Politics in Modern India by Sanjay Ruparelia. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2016.
EVEN though a lot has been written on the party system, elections and political parties after the collapse of single party dominance, the rise and fall of coalition governments has for some reason attracted far less attention. Accounts of the working of the Janata Party (1977-1980), the National Front (1989-91) and the United Front (1996-98) coalitions do exist in the literature; however, they are disparate efforts, unconnected with each other. In a comprehensive work, Sanjay Ruparelia examines the rise, functioning and fall of all the three coalitions within a common framework. What sets the book apart is the positing of these coalitions consisting of the communist, socialist and regional parties as constituting a ‘broader parliamentary left’ seeking, since the 1970s, to evolve into a progressive ‘third force’. While the Janata Party coalition drew upon the prevalent anti-Congressism following the Emergency, the other two were more narrowly focused on preventing the BJP from capturing power, fearful of its politics of Hindutva. All three proved short-lived and in the post-Congress phase in 1998, the BJP-led NDA managed to capture power.
In 2004, however, the Congress-led UPA was able to form government with crucial outside support of the communists and, despite subsequently breaking with the communists, once again in 2009, thereby enabling it to carry forward much of the progressive social legislation that the communists and socialists had supported. However, come 2014, the BJP was not merely able to defeat the UPA but also form a majority government on its own, bringing, at least for the moment, the idea of a progressive third force in Indian democracy to a halt.
The author favours the umbrella term ‘broader parliamentary left’ to describe these coalitions. While this usage appears broadly justified for the communist and socialist party components, it is questionable whether most of the regional/state parties in these coalitions can be seen as falling within the category ‘left’. Rather, the two other concepts deployed – ‘progressive’ and ‘third force’ – to refer to the social democratic agenda of the leading parties in the coalitions and the attempt by these coalitions to replace national governments at the Centre respectively, appear more appropriate. The use of the latter two terms is also closer to the key questions the study addresses while studying the trajectory of these coalitions: What explains the rise of the socialist, communist and regional parties post the 1970s? Why were they not able to construct a stable, federal Third Front and why, despite the failure, the idea of a ‘third force’ persists? In what way were their agendas different from those of the two national parties – the Congress and the BJP?
One signal contribution of the book is the attempt to develop a theoretical frame for the study of coalitions in India. Earlier exercises chose to either emphasize the specific context of caste, region and language, or favoured classical theories of coalition politics drawing upon the European experience to explain the formation of successive minority governments in India since 1989. The author, while embedding the study of these coalitions within a comparative framework, nevertheless privileges the need for a theoretical frame based on the specific institutional and socio-political features within which coalitions function in India.
It is argued that the existence of a parliamentary or presidential system, the constitutional rules regarding formation of governments, the executive-legislature relationship, the number of parties and whether the electoral system has FPPS or proportional representation, among others, determines the possibility, formation and stable functioning of coalitions. The FPPS usually produces a two party system and single majority governments. But, a parliamentary system, even with FPPS, also creates a strong pressure to form coalitions, as the government must enjoy the confidence of the House. From 1952 to 1989 single party, federal governments existed. But from 1989 onwards, no party by itself managed to gain a majority as the sheer number of state level parties resulted in a fragmentation of the vote.
In the absence of well institutionalized parties and structured party competition, examining the preferences, interests and goals which motivate leaders of the coalition acquires a special importance. This study identifies three: the power-maximizers for whom achieving office is important for its own sake; leaders for whom a realization of specific policy goals based on particular ideology and interests and minimum common economic interests underlies the desire to form and run a coalition; and, leaders whose strategies are solely driven by a desire to maximize their vote share and win elections.
By drawing upon and dissecting these distinctive features, Sanjay Ruparelia avers that standard institutional theories are not particularly useful in explaining the problems of coalitions in India. Rational choice theories encounter severe methodological limitations in such complex settings. Western models assume both utility maximizing actors who possess rationally formed beliefs and a stable political environment. In this situation, relying on historical narratives serves as a more useful technique as they provide diverse forms of explanations and mitigate selection bias. The narrative method makes possible process tracking linking causes, mechanisms and effects, thereby generating insights into possible auxiliary outcomes. It enables detection of the complex causal chains that produce the larger outcomes.
The book provides a narrative history of the working of the three coalitions, their ideologies, agendas and the role played by individual political leaders. In the process, it provides an interesting re-evaluation of their functioning and impact. An attempt is first made to trace social and historical developments in the Indian subcontinent that have contributed to the rise and persistence of the third force. The growth of the communists, socialists and regional forces can be traced to the colonial period, as they, while being a part of the broader Congress-led national movement, also enjoyed a separate existence and space. After independence, the reorganization of states along linguistic lines in a country of diverse regions resulted in each state emerging as a distinct socio-cultural and political arena which facilitated the rise of regional/state level parties, eventually electorally challenging the national parties. The de-linking of state and national elections by Indira Gandhi in 1971, created two separate political arenas – national and state specific.
Long-term processes of democratization and regionalization in the states after independence were responsible for the emergence of a ‘progressively regionalized federal parliamentary democracy’, creating impetus for the formation of coalitions. The rise of specific state party systems in a federal polity, however, also made it difficult to form horizontal political alliances across states. These processes accelerated in the 1980s, creating ‘multiple bipolarities’ across India and resulting in political fragmentation in Parliament. Rivalries at the state level were carried over to the Centre as regional parties became partners in central governance, often creating further tensions between allies within the ruling coalition. The rise of movements based on caste and communal identities as distinct from the centralizing and nationalist tendencies of the two national parties further contributed to this process. Finally, policies of liberalization resulted in heightened ideological differences across parties. The crystallization of the idea of a third force in Indian politics was thus a result of this complex two-way process: a need of the Centre to form coalitions by contextually allying with the regional parties and the pressure on the regional parties to pursue their specific agendas by gaining power. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the same process which contributed to the rise of these coalitions also made it difficult for the constituents to pull together to govern. Thus, from the late 1980s, we have seen a highly competitive system in which maintaining a diverse central coalition of many parties is increasingly difficult.
Ruparelia’s narrative is replete with fascinating details of the formation, programmes and working of the three coalitions, together with interviews and rare personal confidential accounts from leaders. Most scholars aver that the failure of these experiments was mainly due to personal ambition of power hungry politicians, leading to short-lived governments; conflicts over caste, class, regional identities and state level agendas added to the pressure, and thus that failure was foretold. Ruparelia argues instead that the cumulative story of these coalitional experiments must be correctly understood, in particular that they emerged at crucial turning points in a country undergoing rapid social change.
Hence, examining the strategies and tactics of power sharing, forging of interpersonal relationships and the mechanisms of responding to new policy issues and unexpected events and, most important, the ‘political judgement’ of leaders, is more likely to provide useful insights into the complexity of these federal coalitions and the difficult situations they encountered. With core ideas which are sufficiently distinct from the national parties, the regional parties, even though constrained in implementing their social democratic ideals, nevertheless managed to project a ‘distinctive political vision’ and a better version of the asymmetric ‘federal nationalist’ principle, establish new institutions, aided deeper engagement with restive regions, thus helping improve both Centre-state relations as also with India’s neighbours. The failure to consolidate these coalitional arrangements has meant a missed historical opportunity to forge a more progressive coalition representing the broader Indian left.
A larger question emerging from the study relates to the need to more rigorously explore the various driving forces in the unfolding of India’s federal democracy. Is it the emergence of communist and socialist parties, regional/state parties and regionalization of politics resulting in the states determining national patterns? Or, is it the national parties and their attempts to form central coalitions with regional parties and thereby trying to manage and work with regional/state forces? The truth perhaps lies somewhere in between, with centrifugal and centripetal forces constantly challenging each other. It remains to be seen if the majority won by the BJP in 2014 has given rise to a new phase of centralizing forces or whether India will return to coalition governments with some space for a progressive third force.
Sudha Pai
Former Professor of Political Science, JNU, Delhi
POISED FOR PARTNERSHIP: Deepening India-Japan Relations in the Asian Century edited by Rohan Mukherjee and Anthony Yazaki. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2016.
THIS compact and comprehensive collection of essays is a competent analysis of the foreign policies of both countries which is of value to researchers and students alike. It is also a practical handbook for practitioners in the foreign offices of countries which have an interest in this growing relationship between two of Asia’s largest economies.
The book has essays by experts in four main areas: economic cooperation, energy and climate change, security and defence and global governance. The editors have allotted each chapter to two authors, one of whom is a senior person in the chosen field and the other a younger scholar actually engaged in such an area of research. Thus, for example, on climate change Shyam Saran, an acknowledged expert is joined by a younger scholar, Radhika Khosla. This division of labour has worked well.
On economic cooperation most authors have highlighted the obvious complementarities that exist in the economies of the two countries. They emphasize that from 2003 onwards India has been the largest recipient of ODA from Japan. And that Japanese investment in the automotive sphere and in infrastructure needs to be widened to include waste management, energy and water conservation and environmental protection. The Japanese have faced severe problems in these areas in their journey to current levels of prosperity. Their technologies/techniques used for overcoming these problems thus have great relevance for India.
India as a donor to less developed countries needs to take lessons from JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) and JBIC (Japan Bank for International Cooperation) in maximizing the leverage to be gained from the aid offered to recipient countries. India has so far not been able to do this effectively because it has not worked sufficiently with recipient countries and organizations before determining the quantum and quality of assistance.
The declining population of Japan and the rising demographic graph in India require Japan to adopt more imaginative policies on immigration. So far Japanese inhibitions have prevented them from using Indian skilled manpower in any significant manner; there are only about 20000 Indians living in Japan!
On multilateral cooperation, all authors focus on the UN, specifically UNPKO, in which India has been a major contributor of manpower while Japan has been a significant donor of finance. There is a consensus that on UN Security Council reform the G-4 does not see an immediate prospect of expansion and permanent membership, with or without a veto. China’s opposition to Japan and ambivalent support for India make this goal a distant one. Reform of the UNSC short of that goal, is seen as a worthy dimension of bilateral cooperation. Japan and India are also partners in the Asean, Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Indian Ocean Rim Organization. Future cooperation in APEC and the Arctic Council too would benefit both countries.
On climate change and energy, notwithstanding bilateral dialogue, there is need for stronger institutional mechanisms to govern the transfer of technologies. Clean coal, solar energy technologies and the ongoing discussions on nuclear technologies are some areas for cooperation that have been emphasized. NEDO in Japan needs to transfer technologies on the use of nano technology for reducing the space needed for solar panels. On the nuclear question, Japan needs to manage the traditional domestic aversion to dealing with a country that is not a signatory of the NPT and the CTBT. India, in turn, needs to be sensitive to these sentiments and to the more practical problems arising from the infirmities in its liability laws, which the BJP while in opposition, did much to shape. Both sides need to emerge from these straitjacketed positions on nuclear matters.
The security relationship between the two countries is seen by most authors as an area with the greatest potential. The last 15 years have seen the growth of this partnership from a global one in 2000 when Prime Minister Mori came to India in August of that year, to a ‘Global and Strategic Partnership’ when Manmohan Singh visited Tokyo in December 2006. The authors correctly pinpoint the manner in which the improving relationship with the USA has had a concomitant impact on the relationship between India and Japan. Our bilateral strategic partnership has more than once moved forward in the ‘slipstream’ as it were, of stronger defence ties with America.
In the growing partnership, which was elevated to a ‘ Special Strategic’ level, in September 2014 when Prime Minister Modi was in Japan, both countries have been conscious of the attitudes of China. Both countries have a robust economic relationship with China, which neither country would wish to jeopardize. Yet, there is no gainsaying the fact that a rising and assertive China, with its aggressive postures in the South China and East China seas is the principal factor propelling India and Japan into a tighter embrace at a bilateral level, and multilaterally with the USA, Australia and indeed Vietnam.
Narendra Modi and Shinzo Abe are both right of centre leaders who have the ability to keep the bilateral relations on a growth trajectory. They are both aware that our history is devoid of the kind of ‘baggage’ that bedevils Japan’s relations with Korea and with China, countries where the Imperial Japanese Army is remembered, by and large, with hate and loathing. That India is conscious of the need for a balance between its relations with China and Japan, can be seen in its reluctance to accept Japanese requests to raise the annual dialogue between the defence and foreign ministries from the secretary to the ministerial level.
In order to give substance to this unique relationship, both governments need to boost the levels of exchange in the field of culture and education. It is glaring to see a mere 727 Indian students in Japan co-existing with 94,000 Chinese; even Nepalese, Bangladeshi and Vietnamese students outnumber the Indians!
The shared culture rooted in Buddhism, where hundreds of Japanese temples have images of Saraswati, Ganesh and other Indian gods and where even nowadays, Sanskrit based chanting and havans can be heard and seen in Japanese houses of worship, this shared culture can make for a solid foundation for our growing partnership.
The old donor recipient relationship which marked the interaction between India and Japan for the best part of the last 50 years has now given way to a more mature partnership of equals. This healthy trend needs strengthening. This book will surely assist in taking this laudable development in our ties forward and upward.
Aftab Seth
IFS; former Indian Ambassador to Japan
