The doctrine of states' rights in India

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• Much of it is devoted to setting out mechanisms of power and methods of exercising it—the British state provides the template for parliamentary government; the American example is reflected in a federal arrangement, with power shared between the centre and states.

• There are significant differences: the 13 colonies that made up the United States enjoyed an independent existence long before the nation was born. In India, the nation-state comes first, and retains the power to reshape its units.

• Federalism was to play a fundamental role in shaping the social and economic landscape of independent India. Designed to defuse potential conflicts arising out of the country’s heterogeneity, it rapidly acquired a second function—that of managing the pace and direction of social change in the interests of regional elites.

• The purpose was not so much to inhibit change as to deflect it, to make sure the deeper roots of power and privilege remained undisturbed. It is this submerged aspect of federalism that forms the subject of my essay.

• From the 1950s to the 1970s, debates about India focussed largely upon economic policy and the prospects of democracy. In the 1980s, as armed revolts erupted in Kashmir, Punjab and Assam, anxiety about the country’s long-term survival grew. In the 1990s, economic policy once again took centre stage as supporters and opponents of “liberalisation” wrangled, with the benefit of hindsight, over the appropriateness of Nehruvian economic strategies.

• We know a good deal about economic policy, secularism, civil conflict, caste and political competition, notions of nationalism and patterns of cultural change. Federalism, by contrast, has received more summary treatment.

• The hegemony of the Congress from 1951 to 1989 is unthinkingly treated as shorthand for centralisation, even though the lack of significant political competition did not affect the powers of state governments or circumscribe their authority.¹

• The nineteenth-century Bengali intelligentsia—an urban gentry exposed to Western ideas, writing a standardised Bengali (which had originally been just one dialect among many)—was, in every way, a product of colonialism. It emerged from a combination of administrative centralisation (in Calcutta), new technologies (such as the printing press) and professional opportunities in the colonial administration.

• Its representatives sought to make sense of their political subjection by asking new questions of history, constructing new narratives and adjusting, reconciling or rejecting Western ideas about politics and society in the light of traditional Hindu thought.

• In this way, they arrived step by step at an anti-colonial position. Now, they were faced with the problem of formulating a collective identity to act as its vehicle.

• A substantial section of the peasantry in western and southern India was integrally linked to colonial structures of production and power. Along with Brahmins, they provided the bulk of the middle class and played a considerable part in politics

• Kaviraj’s assertion that it was conceptually impossible for pre-colonial elites to unite against the East India Company—to conceive of what might be achieved if they acted together—fails to explain why this impasse did not affect their Chinese and Japanese contemporaries, who were striving energetically to interdict Europeans from their territories.

• INDIAN POLITICS, and the specific characteristics of its federal system, can be usefully related to the development of Indian nationalism. Sudipta Kaviraj’s The Imaginary Institution of India, published in 2010, examines the roots and discourses of nationalist ideology in Bengal.

• It shows that the idea of an Indian nation goes back no further than the middle of the nineteenth century, and is co-terminus with regionalism: the emergence of Bengal as a cohesive linguistic region did not predate nationalism, but emerged with it.

• The contention that pre-modern communities were “fuzzy,” in that they lacked any clear notion of boundaries, distances and numbers, ignores peripatetic, countrywide networks created by Brahmins and mercantile castes.

• Most modern nations are no older than the nineteenth century, as Benedict Anderson showed in a classic study. India is no anomaly in this respect

• The real problem—the lack of effective public schooling—is consigned to a footnote. More than anything else, it was to determine how the state came to be envisioned at different levels of Indian society after 1947.

• The conquest of India was achieved not from one centre, but three: the major British “factories,” or fortified trading outposts, of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, maintained separate armies and fought separate campaigns with help from each other.

• The presidencies were autonomous units with distinctive patterns of land settlement: zamindari, marked by large estates and tenant farmers, in Bengal; ryotwari, marked by individual tenures and peasant proprietors, in Madras and Bombay

• The Government of India Act of 1935, designed to placate the restive Indian middle class with a share of power, allowed political competition on a restricted electoral franchise—under it, the Congress fought provincial elections and formed provincial governments.

• Most politicians—with some exceptions, such as Gandhi and Nehru—addressed regional audiences and cultivated regional power bases. It took the ascendancy of the Muslim League to convert federalism into an instrument of politics

• Jinnah’s condition for abandoning Pakistan was a centre so weak as to be virtually powerless. The Congress rejected the prospect angrily, leaving it with an abiding mistrust of excessive decentralisation as a potential threat to the union.

• The Constituent Assembly’s conception of a strong centre must be seen in the light of these pulls and pressures.

• Thus, the constitution vested the federal government with the power to reshape state boundaries and temporarily take over state governments. At the same time, it devolved considerable power to these governments by carefully dividing jurisdiction into three lists: central, state and concurrent.

• Language offered a natural, if porous, barrier, enabling the Telugu-speaking middle class to control the region it dominated, rather than competing with its Tamil-, Kannada- and Malayalam-speaking cognates in a unified Madras state.

• In retrospect, what seems striking about linguistic reorganisation is its speed and the lack of internal acrimony with which it was accomplished: the popular agitations that erupted were in favour of separation, not staying together.

• Article 356, allowing the centre to dissolve state governments, was widely used in the 1970s and 1980s against non-Congress administrations. Despite this, federalism continued to work successfully on the whole.

• Across the north, its state units were to be dominated for decades by upper-caste landowners, but, as early as the 1950s, the Tamil Nadu Congress had abandoned its Brahmin leadership in favour of Kamaraj, a Nadar.

• Representatives of powerful farming castes, classified as Shudras in classical Hindu texts—Vokkaligas and Lingayats in Karnataka, Reddys and Kammas in Andhra Pradesh, Marathas in Maharashtra—dominated politics in the peninsula from the very beginning.

• The use of “Shudra” as a synonym for social subjection by ideologues as diverse as Phule, Periyar and Lohia elides the actual complexity of India’s caste structure.

• Caste cohesion is high: small farmers tend to identify their interests with wealthy members of their own caste, rather than socially subordinate groups in the same economic plight.

• The persistent tendency to regard Nehru as the primary architect of the new nation obscures more than it reveals. The divergent trajectories of Bihar, Kerala and Punjab since 1947 can scarcely be explained by invoking his name.

• In eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, grossly unequal landholdings, naked forms of caste oppression and low wages combined to produce decades of economic stagnation.

• In Tamil Nadu, the middle class that underpinned the Dravidian movement was among the strongest in the country—industrial employment and women’s participation in the workforce were regarded as desirable from the beginning.

• In Punjab, the very success of the Green Revolution was to produce intractable long-term problems: soil salinity (through the overuse of water), high rates of cancer (through the overuse of pesticides), recreational drug abuse among rural communities and a gradual decline in industrial growth (for the interests of industry soon became subordinated to those of commercial agriculture)

• VIEWED IN THESE TERMS, federalism was, and remains, a success story. But it also had a darker side. The dual structure of the Indian state enabled state governments to reject, covertly if not openly, central policies they deemed undesirable.

• Provincial governments led by the Congress began passing legislation to break up landed estates soon after Independence. These laws encountered much covert opposition, for zamindars both small and large had flocked to the party in the 1940s with a keen sense of the way the wind was blowing.

• The second stage involved capping the amount of land that could legally be owned. Against this the resistance was much fiercer, for state units of the Congress were controlled by upper- and middle-caste farmers, who had no intention of relinquishing any land to their Dalit fieldworkers.

• The Planning Commission pressed energetically for land reforms, only to run up against the immovable wall of the states’ obstruction. The Green Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s was a technocratic solution to this debacle: since land could not be redistributed, the sole method of increasing agricultural production was to pour resources into selected regions in the hope they would grow enough to feed the whole country.

• In the end, a combination of shoddy drafting, judicial delays and administrative inaction gave many zamindars time to parcel out their most profitable holdings amongst relatives and dependents.

• Environmental regulation remained a dead letter during these decades, for forests and wildlife were state subjects. Following colonial practice, hunting for sport and mass extermination of agricultural “pests” remained legal, as did the export of animals and animal skins. By the early 1970s, the consequences of this policy had begun to raise alarm in influential quarters, but the centre was legally unable to intervene.

• Federalism also magnified the near-universal neglect of public healthcare and education.²

• From the very beginning, caste coalitions running state governments showed little interest in extending meaningful opportunities to caste groups at the bottom of the social pyramid.³

• Reservations should have supplemented a functioning system of schools and hospitals—instead they became a substitute for it. In effect, the Indian state provided a tiny fraction of its poorest citizens with education and state employment in return for waiving elementary services for the rest.⁴

• The reservations system expanded slowly to embrace backward castes, first in the south and much later the north.

• Not unsurprisingly, it was the backward castes, usually recruited at higher levels, who proved more adept at exploiting these opportunities than Adivasis or Dalits.

• In time, reservations were supplemented by other expedients: midday meals for children, house-building grants, cheap rice, bicycles, computers, and the like. These so-called welfare programmes came to dominate public discourse at the expense of the essential building blocks of upward mobility.

• To sum up: colonialism bequeathed a hybrid system—in education, private schools for the elite and state schools for the middle-class; in healthcare, public hospitals for the most part, but also an array of private practitioners and dispensaries.⁵

• According to a September 2018 study in The Lancet, an Indian worker attains maximum productivity—a metric obtained by calculating life expectancy adjusted for health and years of schooling adjusted for quality—for only seven years of his or her working life, compared to twenty for a Chinese worker.

• THE PERIOD FROM 1967 TO 1989 is generally viewed as one in which the Indian state became increasingly centralised under Indira Gandhi: its centrepiece is the Emergency, symbol of her authoritarian instincts.

• In Maharashtra, Congress chief ministers covertly supported the Shiv Sena to break the power of leftist unions, but this did nothing to prevent Bombay’s mill industry from becoming uncompetitive.

• Indira Gandhi sought to overcome it by appealing to the electorate in her personal capacity, but it is striking that the party did best where its social base remained strong—the south stood by the Congress in the post-Emergency election of 1977

• One of the best monographs on federalism published in recent years is Louise Tillin’s Remapping India, from 2013. This is a nuanced study of political developments that culminated in the creation of three new states—Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand—in 2000.

• One of the merits of Tillin’s study is its refusal to simplify: she puts the Indian case in context by discussing the theoretical literature on federalism and boundary-marking within nation-states, and examines the arguments made for and against linguistic reorganisation.

• In the case of Uttarakhand, a popular agitation for separation erupted in the 1990s, when Mulayam Singh’s government accepted the Mandal Commission’s report: opposition to reservations proved decisive in broadening support for statehood in the hills.

• Ear to the Ground: Writings on Class and Caste, published in 2011, collects articles published by K Balagopal in the Economic and Political Weekly over 25 years. Together, they comprise an invaluable study of how power is actually exercised at regional level.

• Balagopal dissects political developments in undivided Andhra Pradesh from the rise of NTR in the early 1980s to the election of that quintessential Congress strongman, YS Rajasekhara Reddy, in 2004—shifting episodes in a never-ending struggle for power between landowning elites, punctuated by open displays of violence against Dalits

• In the house of representatives, where seats were distributed in proportion to population, a slave counted as three-fifths of a free man for purposes of political enumeration, even though he or she was forbidden to vote.

• Even after slavery was abolished, the doctrine of states’ rights enabled the south to erect a system of institutionalised discrimination against black Americans for a century, without interference by the courts.

• A chronic shortage of personnel crippled the state’s regulatory apparatus. In 2010, Ajai Sahni of the Institute of Conflict Management, a right-wing think tank founded by KPS Gill, estimated that India has fewer public servants per thousand of population than even the United States, with its fetish for small government.

• One of the hallmarks of Indian democracy is the anxiety to protect the state from its citizens, rather than the other way around.

• The constitution adopts the legal framework of the colonial state with only a few changes. Seventy-odd years on, it is perfectly possible to be arrested for making jokes about religion, writing a book, “offending” this or that group or protesting against an infrastructure project (definable as treason at the state’s discretion)

• The reflexive idea that India is over-centralised encourages us to overlook the state’s structural deficiencies and snatch at devolution as the solution to every problem. But, as we have seen, devolution is substantial and effective at the level of state governments—indeed, the success of federalism is the principal reason why the idea of India, if not its reality, has been so successful. Below this level, it will not help a great deal as long as our cities, towns and villages remain in the vice-like grip of power brokers drawn from middle and upper castes, and the political representatives of plebeian castes content themselves with symbolic gestures or, what is worse, behave in much the same way.

• Only a far reaching set of reforms across different spheres (election funding, the bureaucracy, social investment, the criminal justice system) looks likely to bring about meaningful change and avert the slow institutional collapse of the republic.

Footnotes

1. What were the regional parties in this period? Did caste based politics only start in India in the 90s? ↩

2. But wouldn’t central planning be equally bad for public health and education? ↩

3. This assumes that the central government would govern without a caste bias (which is not necessary) or that they could have effectively governed across every state with their limited state capacity. ↩

4. Could the state be realistic in striving to provide elementary services for all with its limited capability especially in the 90s (around when reservations came into the picture)? ↩

5. Wasn’t this more because the public sector did not develop the necessary state capacity and also did not trust private sector to fill the gap? ↩