Date: Sat, 1 Feb 1997 18:41:03 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: M-I: India: Federalism/Caste&Class/Communalism


Federalism

     An abiding source of political tension in India since 1967 has been
the uneasy relation between the center and states. The quasi-federal
constitution vests the states with considerable power and
responsibilities; yet the center not only retains much greater political
power and economic resources, but can also remove a state government.
Starting with Nehru's dismissal in 1959 of the Communist government in
Kerala, such powers have been repeatedly abused, particularly after the
1967 elections when non-Congress parties formed governments in most
states. Widespread bribing of legislators to break or make parties and
coalitions, not only in the states, but also at the center, has gone on
unchecked despite a law against defection. Most inglorious was the floor-
crossing in mid-1993 by seven opposition members of Parliament who helped
the Central Cabinet survive a "no confidence" motion. Equally startling
was the allegation a few months earlier by H. Mehta, the notorious
stockbroker behind the two billion dollar financial scam of 1992, of
having personally handed over cash worth $200,000 to the prime minister at
his office. The latter denied the charge and ordered the central agencies
to prosecute Mehta, but then the matter was quietly dropped! Such total
disdain for political ethics was never a Congress monopoly; the non-
Congress parties heading the center from 1977 to 1979 and 1989 to 1991
behaved as irresponsibly. When an opposition-run state government could
not be dislodged, the center discriminated against it in the allocation of
funds, in the granting of industrial licenses, in the location of new
central undertakings, the distribution of scarce raw materials, and so on.
A. Mitra (1973) showed how it led to lower growth and regional
maldistribution of income and assets.

     Owing to the multi-ethnic character of the Indian polity, center-
state disputes often have social and cultural dimensions in addition to
the political and economic ones; that is why these are potentially
explosive. Back in 1971, a committee set up by Tamil Nadu suggested an
equitable distribution of all taxes between the center and the states,
routed through an independent constitutional authority; further, it called
upon the center to give up its power to dismiss a state government
(Rajamannar Committee, 1971: 217-219). Almost 20 years later, the Sarkaria
Commission (1988) appointed by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, more or less
concurred; it lamented the "pervasive trend toward greater centralization
of power over the years.... [E]ven the codes and conventions evolved in
the earlier years have been broken too lightly in later years" (pp. 543-
545).

     Actually, this was a critical factor behind the 1947 partition of
British India. "Jinnah never wanted a Pakistan which involved the
partition of India and was all in favor of accepting the British Cabinet
Mission's proposals" of 1946. The Congress differed sharply:
The price of keeping the Muslim provinces inside the union had to be
a weak federal center, incapable of controlling any of its provincial
arms, not merely the Muslim provinces.... But most important of all, such
an arrangement would have meant giving the League a share of power at an
already weak centre (Jalal, 1985: 18-19, 202, 245).
        On the need for a strong center, Congress was backed solidly by the
fundamentalist Hindu Mahasabha, on the one hand, and the big Indian
bourgeoisie, mostly Hindus, on the other hand. The Mahasabha (or its
successors) did not concede the demand for Pakistan, though the others did
(Markovits, 1991). Big business needed a strong center to promote
industrialization and a large domestic market free from interregional
barriers to trade. With their concurrence, the British Indian government
in 1945 transferred most large industries from the provincial to central
jurisdiction (Chattopadhyay, 1991: 335). Conversely, the Muslim League's
business supporters did not relish the idea of a strong, Congress-
dominated center presiding over an undivided
     While enlightened public opinion within the country has veered round
to the need for decentralization as advocated by the two committees cited
above, the World Bank mandarins have now proposed just the opposite; new
excise duties, they feel, should be levied by the center without being
editorial, EPW, September 25, 1993).

     The relation of a state government to local bodies is a mirror image
of the center-state conundrum. Enjoying very little financial autonomy and
unable to raise practically any local tax, municipal and district councils
depend largely on grants from the state governments, which supersede them
with alacrity whenever they have a different political texture. In most
parts of India local elections have been postponed repeatedly. Even though
elections have regularly been held in Left-dominated West Bengal since
1977, the local governments fare no better with respect to financial
autonomy; nor do they have any control over the appointment or dismissal
of employees who are deputed by the state government (Krishnaswamy, 1993).
     This has fueled the demand for separate states by minority ethnic
groups in different regions, e.g., the Gurkhas in West Bengal, the tribal
Jharkhandis in Bihar, the Bodos in Assam, etc. The leaders of existing
states tend to react as violently as a sovereign state does vis--vis
secessionists. Not that the separatists are driven by lofty ideals; above
all, their leaders aspire to power that would elude them within the larger
boundaries of an existing state. On the other hand, the regions inhabited
by minority groups are often rich in natural resources, the benefits of
which (as with Assam as a whole) hardly accrue to the local people; that
goes a long way toward explaining popular support for the separatists.

     Backward Castes and Classes

     A unique feature of Hindu society is the hierarchical caste system,
widely thought to be immutable and sanctified by ancient scriptures.
Eminent scholars have, however, shown that during periods of political
fluidity, lower castes that came into prominence had their status raised,
while kings sometimes demoted certain castes. The rank orders of
individual castes or sub-castes have thus been altered in the course of
history, but the caste system remains very hierarchical (Srinivas, 1966:
Chapters 1-2; Dumont, 1970: Chapter 11 and Appendix).
        Caste and class are overlapping categories, though there are in
practice innumerable exceptions. Nearly all the exploiting strata or
classes hail from the upper castes, while the lower castes comprise
predominantly manual workers in agriculture, industry, and various
services. Thanks to the Hindu notion of "purity" or "pollution," the lower
castes, apart from being economically exploited, have suffered various
forms of social oppression that are rarely encountered elsewhere.
The plight of the lowest rungs, considered "untouchable" by the upper
castes, was so bad that Gandhi launched a special movement in the early
decades of this century to establish their civic rights. Article 17 of the
Indian Constitution of 1950 outlawed untouchability in any form (Basu,
1982: 90). It further provided for the most oppressed sections, the
Scheduled Castes (SC) and Schedule Tribes (ST), reservation of 22.5% of
the seats in parliament, jobs in government and the public sector, and
places in educational institutions. The question of "other backward
classes" (OBC) that were also "socially and educationally worse off than
the rest of citizens" was entrusted by the Constitution to a subsequent
commission. Successive Congress governments shelved the matter until the
Janata Dal Cabinet under V.P. Singh decided in August 1990 to implement
the Mandal Commission (1980: 56-58) recommendation, reserving 27% of
government jobs for the OBC, who constitute 52% of the nation's
population. The educated middle classes in north India, mainly upper
caste, reacted very strongly; high school children and university students
in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi organized protest marches and some even burnt
themselves to death before the pressmen's cameras. Publicity turned the
young innocents into heroes and led to further suicides (Mohan, 1992). In
addition, the Bharatiya Janata Party successfully diverted public
attention by reinvoking the Ayodhya issue and withdrawing support from
V.P. Singh. After Congress returned to power in mid-1991, it was compelled
to support the latter's policy. Late in 1992, the Supreme Court upheld the
legality of reservation for the OBC with the important qualification that
the government must "siphon off the creamy layers" (ET, November 17,
1992).
        The violent reaction of the upper castes in north India was not
unexpected; Frankel (1988: 257-260) had forecast it, quoting from the
Commission's Report: "The ultimate purpose of the Backward Classes
Movement...was the organization of the poor in a double assault on the
caste system and the class structure." Even in the 1980s, two-thirds of
the center's top civil service cadre came from the upper castes, against a
mere two percent from the OBC. In late 1990, a powerful association of
Class I officers demanded that all reservations, including those for SC
and ST, be scrapped altogether (Shah, 1991). As for their supposed
efficiency, the higher echelons of the Indian bureaucracy are, in the
words of Brass (1990: 54, 323), "the leading elements of a vast dominant
class, whose members are the principal beneficiaries of the benefits and
resources produced and distributed through the organs of the Indian
state." Behind a "facade of efficiency, intelligence, and honesty" at the
top, "corruption below the elite levels has been institutionalised." By
the 1980s, even the residual faith in the honesty of most elite
bureaucrats had disappeared.

     Finally, some official data on social oppression may be revealing.
Annually, a little under 4,000 cases of infringement of the civic rights
of the SC population was reported to the police between 1977 and 1985.
Some 60% were just ignored, the courts disposed of only a part of the
cases brought to them, and the conviction rate was a mere 20%; cases of
various types of atrocities (murder, "grievous injury," rape, etc.)
averaged over 14,000 per year during the same period, with a conviction
rate of 10%. Moreover, although the government claims that all "bonded
laborers" have been freed and rehabilitated, the actual number still in
bondage may exceed 1.5 million (Radhakrishna, 1991).

     Hindu Communalism, Kashmir, and the State

     The destruction of the Babri Masjid (mosque), as noted at the outset,
constitutes the greatest threat so far to the post-1947 Indian polity. It
was the culmination of a controversy that "has totally communalised our
polity. It even exceeds the degree of communalism before the partition"
 (Engineer, 1992). In the immediate aftermath, there was country-wide
communal violence that killed at least 1,000 persons up to mid-December;
barely a month later, nearly 600 died in the city of Bombay alone and many
more in Gujarat.
        Soon after the incident, the suave and "moderate" leader of the Hindu
fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Vajpayee, told the press:
"some kar sevaks [religious volunteers], forgetting the assurance given to
the Supreme Court, Parliament, and the Prime Minister,...went out of
control and did something which was unfortunate and saddened our hearts"
(ET, December 15, 1992). How did the volunteers dare to do so without the
tacit acquiescence of the Congress government at the center, not to
mention the BJP government in that state? After all, a similar attempt in
November 1990 was forcibly repulsed by the administration, even though
then-Premier V.P. Singh lost his majority in the process.
Before examining the role of Congress, it is useful to look at the
salient features of Hindu fundamentalism, ably summarized by Pandey
(1991):

     1. The Muslims are "aliens" who "plundered and destroyed" countless
Hindu temples to build Masjids thereupon. [The destruction of Babri Masjid
was thus an act of historical revenge.!

     2. "The national life values of Bharat (India) are indeed derived
>from the life values of the Hindus," which excludes Muslims, Christians,
and Communists.

     3. The protagonists of Hinduism dating from the 1920s favored the
existing hierarchical order with the four major castes as "conceived by
     4. Women are "pure" in some respects, and "impure" in others, and
must be "protected," "disciplined, and controlled."

     5. "The world has to see," wrote an ideologue, "the might of the
regenerated Hindu nation. At no distant future the world shall see it and
tremble with fear." Unless the Hindus "instill fear" among non-Hindus, the
latter's "true love" cannot emerge. Another major ideologue gave the
slogan, "Hinduize all Politics and Militarize Hindu-dom."
        This early tradition, with its upper caste and male chauvinist
biases, is strongly contested, however, by a significant group of
contemporary BJP leaders, who belong to the OBC, are women, or both. Even
if the new trend prevails, it is still uncompromisingly "majoritarian" and
militarist, and hence fascist in essence. The Hindu state will crush
political dissidents within and try to subjugate Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid is only the first step; among the
targets publicized several years ago and repeated to this day are several
mosques, including the most sacred Jama Masjid in Delhi, and even the
memorial Taj Mahal, one of the seven wonders of the world (Dogra, 1992).
All this makes Vajpeyee's expression of sorrow over the destruction of the
Babri Masjid utterly hypocritical; even worse, he and his party are bent
on building a temple exactly where the Masjid stood.

     This concept of the Hindu state corroborates the long-held view of
British colonial administrators that the gulf between the Hindu and Muslim
communities is unbridgeable and that they would always be at each other's
throats without the civilizing authority of Pax Britannia (Srivastava,
1991: 49; Pandey, 1991). So does the two-nation theory that apparently
created Pakistan. Yet the latter theory never materialized, as scores of
millions of Muslims remained in different parts of India after the
partition, just as millions of Hindus stayed in Pakistan; with a gap of
two decades, Muslim Bangladesh opted out of Pakistan (Jalal, 1985: 2-3;
Hasan, M., 1991: 283). Further, though it may surprise many in India,
Jinnah never believed in a theocratic Pakistan and was confident that in
the future the differences between the two communities would wither away
(Wolpert, 1984: 339-340). Of course, Jinnah's dream was not fulfilled
either in Pakistan or in Bangladesh.

     Although it has always blamed the Muslim League for the partition,
the Congress party always had one foot in the Hindu fundamentalist camp.
Back in 1927, 30 prominent Muslims of Delhi, supported by the Muslim
League and Jinnah, put forward a formula for sharing power after
independence between the two communities; at first "substantially
accepted" by the Congress, the latter eventually rejected it under
pressure from Hindu fundamentalists (Ibid.: 94-95; Hasan, M., 1991: 349-
351). Had it been accepted, "it would have eroded the very basis of the
vivisection of India" (Engineer, 1991: 187).
        After the assassination of Gandhi in 1948 by a Hindu fanatic, for
about three decades the fundamentalists kept a low profile. Since 1977,
however, when the first non-Congress government came to power in Delhi,
large numbers of Muslims and Scheduled Castes shifted their loyalty to
other secular parties. With no dependable vote bank, Indira Gandhi upon
her return to power in 1980 made a conscious rightward move to wean away a
good chunk of militant Hindu votes monopolized so far by the BJP (Hasan,
Z., 1990). Nurturing covert links with the Hindu fundamentalists in the
north, she even made an electoral alliance with the most notorious Hindu-
Maharashtrian chauvinist party, Shiv Sena. In Kashmir, the elected
National Conference ministry was dismissed unconstitutionally to appease
the Hindu communalists (Aslam, 1989: 275; Manor, 1988: 97). In Punjab,
Indira Gandhi first flirted with the Sikh secessionist Bhindranwale, who
even campaigned for Congress in a few constituencies to weaken the
"moderate" Akali party of the Sikhs. With elections just a few months a
way, she ordered the army to launch an assault in June 1984 on the Golden
Temple, Amritsar, to flush out Bhindranwale and his "extremist" followers.
        The assault...cost thousands of lives, of Sikhs in the Temple...[and]
of the Indian Army.... [It embittered] virtually the entire Sikh
population.... Mrs. Gandhi was herself assassinated by two Sikh body
guards in November 1984. A massacre of thousands of innocent, mostly poor
Sikhs, in Delhi, Kanpur, and Begusarai followed with the complicity or
malign neglect of the authorities, the police, and the Congress leaders
(Brass, 1990: 173, 192-193; Manor, 1988: 80-81).
        The new Premier, Rajiv Gandhi, wished to capitalize on the sympathy
wave among the Hindus at the ensuing elections.  In the 1980s, there was a
sharp upswing in the number and intensity
of communal riots. During the first five years, 4,000 were killed - four
times as many as in the whole of the 1970s. Between February 1986 and
early 1988, in Uttar Pradesh alone there occurred 60 riots with over 200
killed and 1,000 injured (Hasan, Z., 1990). It is far from accidental that
Muslims constituted about two-thirds of the victims in the riots; most
police firing was directed at Muslims (Brass, 1990: 200). Most incredible
was the behavior of the armed police in Uttar Pradesh, who joined the mob
in looting and arson during the Meerut riots of May 1987. Nearly one-half
of the town's population of one million was Muslim, many of whom had
become prosperous. They controlled most of the 40,000 power looms and
small industries, which became the target of attack by hoodlums financed
by rival Hindu businessmen (Engineer, 1988). A similar pattern was
observed in other times and places (Shakir, 1984; Engineer, 1984a, b;
Brass, 1990: 202; Gopal, 1991: 18-19).

     As with the OBC, the poor representation of the Muslims in government
services should have emboldened the Hind aggressors. Against a population
share of 11.4% in 1981, the Muslims, according to the 1983 official Report
on the Minorities, constituted barely between 2.0 and 2.5% of graduate
engineers, doctors, and top-grade civil servants, and 4.4% of all central
government employees (Mitra, S., 1992). On the other hand, the center has
always considered the fundamentalist, mainly religious leaders as the
authentic spokesmen of the Muslim community; in matters of marriage,
divorce, maintenance for divorced women, property rights, etc., Muslims
are guided not by the common codes for other Indians, but by traditional
Islamic rules. Most heated was the debate around the divorcee, Shah Bano,
whose plea for adequate maintenance under the civil code was upheld by the
Supreme Court; however, Rajiv Gandhi amended the Constitution since its
Article 44 called for a uniform civil code (Basu, 1982: 386), and passed
in 1986 a new law overriding the judgment. More than anything else, this
enactment lends substance to the BJP charge that the Muslims "have always
been pampered" by the "pseudo-secularist" Congress. That many Muslim men,
not to mention the suffering women, took a very different view has been
demonstrated by the stirrings within the community in the aftermath of
Ayodhya. Muslim intellectuals in particular have for the first time openly
challenged the moral authority of the ulemas [Moslem scholars or religious
leaders!, who may have lost a good part of their traditional influence
among Muslim voters in general.

     Returning to the Babri Masjid, the first clash over the mosque
occurred in 1855 (Engineer, 1990: 5-6). After nearly a century of
unfruitful litigation, in 1949 an idol of the Hindu god, Rama, was
stealthily installed within the mosque; the local court put a lock at the
entrance and the Muslims could not pray. As a quid pro quo over the Shah
Bano affair, and in search of Hindu votes, Rajiv Gandhi had the lock
opened in 1986 and let the idol be worshipped (Noorani, 1991). The Hindu
fundamentalists organized a rathayatra (journey by chariot) across the
country to bring in bricks, solemnized in religious ceremonies, for the
construction of a Rama temple; the foundation stone was laid on November
9, 1989. A leading newspaper commented editorially: "History cannot pardon
the Congress for its direct and indirect contribution to the spectacular
growth of Hindu chauvinist forces today and for tightening the hold of the
fundamentalists on the Muslim community" (cited by Hasan, M., 1991: 115).
During the abortive BJP assault in November 1990, Congress capitalized on
the division among non-Congress parties and did nothing to counter the
BJP. It directed its ire at the incumbent premier, V.P. Singh, who was
resisting the onslaught, and foisted on the nation a government of rag-bag
defectors from the ruling party. After the new Congress government assumed
power in 1991 with a minority, it engaged in a balancing act, running with
the hare (Left parties) and hunting with the hound (BJP). As the BJP
prepared its attack on the Babri Masjid, the center moved the judiciary,
met the fundamentalist leaders, "secular"-minded Hindu priests, and
ulemas, but lacked the conviction to confront the fanatics. After the
Masjid was demolished, the prime minister solemnly promised the same
evening on national TV to rebuild the mosque at its original site, but has
since failed to repeat it.

     By far the biggest blot and festering wound on India's state
secularism is the Kashmir imbroglio. By the logic of the partition of the
subcontinent, the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley should have gone to
Pakistan and the Hindu-majority Jammu region to India. Taking advantage of
Pakistan's impetuosity in sending irregular troops into the valley in the
autumn of 1947, India occupied most of the valley and appealed to the
United Nations against Pakistani aggression. India also pledged herself to
allow a "free and fair plebiscite" under U.N. auspices and her 1950
Constitution contains Article 370, which confers a special status to
Kashmir. Over the decades, successive prime ministers, beginning with
Nehru, have refused to honor the pledge on the plebiscite by pleading that
"freely elected" governments in Kashmir have sworn loyalty to India.
Meanwhile, the Hindu fundamentalists, who never reconciled themselves to
the loss of Pakistan, have considered Kashmir to be an integral part of
India and demanded an abrogation of Article 370. The secular state
formally rejected the demand, but in practice Nehru felt no qualms about
imprisoning, in violation of that article, the elected Chief Minister,
Sheikh Abdullah, and installing in his place Mir Quasim. Much later,
Quasim admitted: "if the election [to the Kashmir Assembly in 1972! were
free and fair, the victory of the [secessionist Plebiscite! Front was a
foregone conclusion" (cited by Noorani, 1991). Over the last few years
hostility to India has evidenced a manifold increase. Despite barbaric
repression by the Indian armed forces, the militants in Kashmir have held
forth and driven all Hindus out of the valley.

     The basic equation has changed with the collapse of the USSR, which
used to veto consistently at the Security Council any attempt by Pakistan
to reactivate the old U.N. resolutions on Kashmir. From all accounts,
Russia is unlikely to continue in that manner. The U.S., it appears, is
seeking to intervene decisively in the dispute at a suitable moment.

     The "secularists" and the Left parties apprehend that if Kashmir
secedes, Muslim lives in India will be endangered. Looked at differently,
the Kashmir Muslims are then held as hostages to keep the Hindu terrorists
at bay. Is the state not appeasing the potential aggressors? Instead of
weakening them, the policy actually strengthens the Hindu fanatics. The
Indian state, by systematically denying the democratic rights of the
Kashmir people over nearly 50 years in violation of its own Constitution,
is effectively promoting the theory of "might is right."

     The Kashmir and Babri Masjid issues reveal the malaise afflicting the
Indian polity, which is spreading fast like a gangrene. There is a scant
regard for "the rule of law," which cannot be established in a piecemeal
fashion. Land hunger among the rural masses is now more acute than ever;
yet laws on agrarian reform are violated everywhere, barring Kerala and
West Bengal, decades after they were enacted. Oppression of the Scheduled
Castes and Tribes, and of the OBC continues in a virulent form. The
position of women in society, despite progressive laws for non-Muslim
women, has improved marginally, if at all. Moreover, the ruling classes
are engaged in primary accumulation, amassing fortunes through various
extra-economic and state-aided monopolistic practices.

     This is amply reflected in the steady degeneration, though at varying
rates, of political life throughout the country, including Left-dominated
West Bengal. Among the legislators and ministers, many have themselves
been hoodlums or depend heavily on hired goons. Criminalization of
politics and business has been aggravated beyond recognition after the
demolition of the Babri Masjid. In the Bombay carnage of January 1993,
which was largely masterminded by the Shiv Sena, not only were Muslims
killed or hounded, but Hindus from other states were also equally
threatened; trains full of refugees, numbering at least 200,000, left
Bombay for Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, Trivandrum, and so on. Indeed, some of
the Bombay-based top industrialists of the country, particularly the non-
Hindu Parsis, were so disturbed that they openly criticized the government
for the first time and called for the army to take over the city. This was
far from a panic reaction. The police force has everywhere in the country
become highly communalized, with a strong streak of regional chauvinism;
yet they have no qualms about working for smugglers and lawbreakers from
any faith.




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