Midnight's Descendants

by John Keay

  Returning to power in 2004, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance under Manmohan Singh progressed less certainly. Growth remained buoyant, but telecom scandals revealed the seedier side of private enterprise, while sectors like retailing and finance were still subject to some protection. Walmart and Ikea, for instance, were kept waiting while the government endeavoured to convince its coalition partners that votes lost by endangering the livelihoods of shopkeeping supporters could be replaced by those of the grateful shelf-stackers signed up by the multinationals.

  The debate, as so often, was conducted in the context of the growing and largely urban middle classes. It was of no relevance to the rural poor who still made up the majority of the population. Their share of every scheme designed to improve their lot was probably no better than the 15 per cent allowed by Rajiv Gandhi’s estimate that 85 per cent of all development funds was pocketed by corrupt officials.

  A Unique Identification Scheme launched by Manmohan Singh in 2009 is designed to eliminate this ‘wastage’. Every one of India’s 1.2 billion citizens is being issued with a biometric ID card to ensure that any benefits to which he or she is entitled actually reach them. The scheme, though fraught with teething problems, is not beyond the number-crunching capacity of an IT-confident people accustomed to conducting the world’s largest electoral count. And by reducing administrative costs and distributive ‘wastage’, it could make existing programmes for poverty alleviation much more cost-effective.

  One such programme guarantees to every person of working age a hundred days’ paid employment per year; another provides heavily subsidised foodstuffs to the poorest. A new version of this latter is intended to benefit over two-thirds of the entire population. Rolled out in 2013, it is not without its citics. Some see the cheap food as a vote-catching ploy ahead of the 2014 elections; others think its cost of 1.3 trillion rupees (about £16 billion) an extravagance that India’s no-longer-buoyant economy can ill afford; and all anticipate a bonanza for the wholesalers and retailers who, in time-honoured fashion, will sell top-quality subsidised cereals on the open market while so adulterating the sub-standard remainder as to make much of it inedible. But if the ID cards help in tracking this munificence through the dealers and the ‘fair price’ shops to the shopping bags of the eight hundred million entitled to it, a mighty obstacle to all schemes of relief and betterment will have been overcome. Armed with their unique ID cards, the next generation of Midnight’s Descendants should be in line for all the maternity, health, educational and training opportunities on offer. Such levelling-up might have reconciled even Pandit Nehru to the rampant consumerism of ‘Shining India’.

  Better still, the ID scheme strikes at that most basic of contradictions identified by the Constitution-drafting Dr Ambedkar and the political scientist Sunil Khilnani: that the Indian Constitution and the bloc voting it encourages reinforces community solidarity to the detriment of individual rights and a sense of shared citizenship based on them.

  On the face of it, community identities seem more entrenched than ever. In 2012 Ms Mayawati, a fifty-six-year-old Dalit teacher who had become leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), completed five years in office as Chief Minister of the largest state in India. Bahujan being another euphemism for Dalit, the BSP relies entirely on Uttar Pradesh’s Dalit vote. Mayawati repays this loyalty by combining a relentless promotion of Dalit identity with dazzling displays of personal wealth and a passion for Dalit-related statuary and public spectacles. The effect is to promote individual empowerment as much as community betterment. According to her biographer, Mayawati is revered above all as ‘a woman belonging to the most crushed community known to mankind [who] has risen through the heat and dust of elections to rule two hundred million people’.35 The message is obvious: even for a Dalit, anything is possible in today’s India. The public celebrity of the few – in politics as in sport, business or the movies – nurtures personal aspirations among the many. By enshrining the entitlement rights of each and every citizen regardless of age, gender, family or community, the ID card should confirm this growing sense of individual identity.

  As a result, the pattern of Indian politics could become even more fragmented and parochial. That may not be a bad thing. The pattern of politics over the last six decades has not endeared itself to everyone. Many in India now argue that domestic instability could best be contained by constitutional reform at the top; and many outside India argue that regional stability could usefully be promoted by some genuine engagement among all the states of South Asia. New, even hopeful, perspectives are opening up.

  Epilogue

  In June 2013 the Katmandu Post carried a report about Nepal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs placing an order for assorted vehicles: ‘twenty-one Mercedes including eight super-luxury bullet-proof ones … eight medium luxurious cars, ten small cars and seven vans’. What made the matter newsworthy was not the purchase but its purpose; for according to the paper, such an order could only mean that the country’s interim government had ‘seriously started preparing’ for the eighteenth Summit Conference of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC). Already much-postponed by Nepal’s delayed elections and constitutional uncertainties, the conference would ‘likely be held’ in February 2014, that month’s ‘pleasant weather’ being an important consideration, said the paper. A venue for the heads of state to meet in had already been chosen, and plans would soon be unveiled for ‘a trade fair, a junket for spouses of VVIPs and VIPs, and SAARC-related exhibitions and promotions’. The total cost was put at 750 million rupees, a third of which would be needed to buy the cars.1

  So far, so good. By the time this book is published, the twenty-one Mercedes should be gliding around Katmandu’s much-contested thoroughfares. Nepal’s delayed elections should have been held, a new Constitution should be in the offing, and the eighteenth SAARC Summit Conference should be getting under way. Alternatively none of these things will have come to pass, in which case the least regretted is likely to be the SAARC Summit.

  Regional cooperation has a rather depressing record in South Asia. In a subcontinent with so much in the way of shared culture, common history, mutual traditions of exchange and matching experience of poverty and displacement, the logic of collaboration has long been recognised. SAARC was officially set up on the initiative of President Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh in 1985. As well as recognising the potential for developmental cooperation, Zia saw the organisation as a way of offsetting the influential role accorded to India by his predecessor Mujibur Rahman. Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal sympathised; and so for similar reasons did Bhutan and the Maldives. Not without misgivings, India also went along with the idea, and thus came into being the seven-member SAARC (later increased to eight members with the admission of Afghanistan; hence the eight bulletproof limousines).

  The Association was – and nearly thirty years later, still is – sometimes hailed as a potential counterpart of ASEAN, or even the EU. Joint initiatives on everything from tourism and counter-terrorism to TB prevention and visa exemption have been explored. Scrupulously fair in distributing its favours, SAARC has awarded its Chamber of Commerce to Islamabad, its Cultural Centre to Colombo, its Meteorological Centre to Dhaka, and its Disaster Management Centre to Delhi. The Secretariat is in Katmandu. Film and literary festivals are held, various awards doled out. Under SAARC’s auspices a South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) was launched in 2006, and a South Asian University in 2010. Although the Association has no political role, informal contact among SAARC members is credited with providing a channel for feelers over contentious issues like Kashmir; similarly, summits help break the ice between hostile heads of state. On the face of it, SAARC is doing more to heal the divisions created by Partition and half a century of mutual suspicion than any other organisation.

  Yet much of this is often written off as the window-dressing to be expected of a talking shop. Mutual distrust, along with instability in one or more of the member states, cripples alm
ost every initiative. Laudable in its intent, the visa exemption scheme applies to such a privileged few, and is so bureaucratically encumbered, that the vast majority of cross-border travel remains of the illegal variety. Likewise SAFTA, once seen as the preliminary to a South Asian customs union and a single common currency, has become bogged down in tariff reduction targets and interminable lists of the items to be excluded from them. The festivals are often a farce, and the summits notoriously unproductive. SAARC remains a good idea whose moment is still to come.

  The second decade of the twenty-first century could prove to be just such a moment. At last the guns have mostly fallen silent, and accountable government prevails. As of 2006 Katmandu ceased to be engaged in war with the Maoists, and as of 2009 Colombo could claim to have defeated the Tamil Tigers. The fallout from these conflicts continues. Nepal awaits a settlement that will permit elections and the formation of a government; and the Sri Lankan regime of President Mahinda Rajapakse and his family has yet to deal convincingly with accusations of war crimes, let alone the roots of Tamil alienation. Nevertheless, normality of a sort has been restored. The integrity of Nepal and Sri Lanka are no longer under threat. Tourism and inward investment, much of it from China, are picking up in both countries. Relations with India are generally good.

  So too is the outlook for democracy in the region. Barring postponements, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, the Maldives and even Afghanistan will all have newly elected governments by the end of 2014. Meanwhile the only coup of recent date, that in the Maldives in 2012, is said not to have been a coup at all, just a temporary emergency. Given a choice between protest and progress, South Asians seem increasingly inclined to put their own interests ahead of those of the communal hotheads. In cities heaving under the weight of ten to twenty million people, more take the metro to the local mall than take to the streets with sticks. Bombings – dare one say it? – are rarer; they may have peaked even in Pakistan. Outside Pakistan the same holds good for communal massacres. Shoot-outs along the Line of Control in Kashmir, which might once have threatened all-out war, are now played down by both Delhi and Islamabad as the work of extremist elements keen to derail any Indo–Pak rapprochement. By mutual agreement the gladiatorial choreography of the daily flag-lowering ceremony at the Wagah border crossing on the Indo–Pak frontier has been toned down; the partisan crowds bussed in by both sides to abet the nonsense no longer rate the spectacle worth the journey. In the east, a train a day links Calcutta and Dhaka, as do several bus services and airlines. Visitors are at last being freely admitted to India’s north-eastern states, and newsrooms are no longer taxed by that area’s proliferation of ‘National/United Liberation Fronts’. Everywhere cross-border trade has increased dramatically, although still representing only a fraction of its potential.

  It all amounts to what could be the most significant lull yet in the fraught affairs of Midnight’s Descendants. After a decade and a half of nation-building, followed by similar periods of populist posturing, assertive confessionalism and then frantic globalisation, the region has a chance to draw breath and take stock. For SAARC, the eighteenth Summit could be a turning point. With US and NATO forces poised to withdraw from Afghanistan, superpower involvement in South Asia’s constituent states has reached a low ebb, and the region has an unusually free hand in determining its future. The worldwide recession may actually have helped. A relapse in India’s growth rate from around 10 per cent in 2010 to under 5 per cent in 2013 has had a sobering effect. The ‘miracle’ of the previous decade may, it is said, have been just a ‘spurt’, a ‘bubble’ even. Bullish projections about India as an emerging rival to China have been revised, and the disparity between Delhi’s economic performance and that of its immediate neighbours looks less unbridgeable. As salaries rise in Bangalore and Gurgaon, outsourcing by international companies is increasingly benefiting Dhaka and Colombo. Incredibly, in 2013 Mumbai’s stock exchange was being outperformed by Karachi’s. Inflation in India remained in double digits, and the value of its rupee had slipped by 27 per cent in as many months. Another spike in oil prices, plus South Asians’ traditional recourse of buying gold in uncertain times, was creating havoc with the balance of trade. Meanwhile inward foreign investment was declining as outward Indian investment to tax-low destinations like Dubai, Singapore and Mauritius was increasing. Global collaboration at the corporate level, having long sidelined regional cooperation at the governmental level, could yet give SAARC a new relevance.

  Breathing life into the bodies politic may be more problematic. The shortcomings of Westminster-style democracy as practised in South Asia have long been conceded; yet incumbent governments, having successfully mastered its dark arts, are not keen to change it. Given constituencies containing up to a quarter of a million voters, many of them illiterate and readily swayed by modest inducements, the trade in block votes is probably inevitable. Likewise, personal attributes like caste, wealth and popular image will continue to count for more when choosing candidates than policies, principles or even party allegiance. The calibre of those elected suffers as a result. Many assembly members aspire merely to retain their seats while angling for lucrative governmental posts that they are often unqualified to hold. Government MPs see their primary task as providing loyal lobby fodder; ‘Opposition members feel that the best way to show the strength of their feelings is to disrupt the law-making rather than debate the law.’2 In this endeavour fists may fly as freely as insults and missiles. On one occasion a vituperative but stickless Raj Narain – he who dogged Mrs Gandhi’s first decade in power – had to be bodily uplifted and borne shouting from the chamber.

  Legislative business suffers accordingly. In its 2010–11 sitting the Indian Lok Sabha was so often adjourned, usually as the result of unparliamentary behaviour, that it sat for little over half its allotted hours; two-thirds of Bills pending at the beginning of the year were still pending at the end of the year. The legislatures of Bangladesh and Nepal have an even worse record; boycotts and suspensions are there the norm, with sittings being the exception. In a three-year period in the early 1990s, Bangladesh’s opposition parties ‘walked out of parliament or boycotted its sessions on fifty-seven occasions’.3 When an assembly is actually sitting, procedural wrangles often edge out constructive debate, which may be as poorly attended as it is infrequent. Little wonder, then, that governments throughout the region, however ostensibly ‘democratic’, often feel obliged to bypass Parliament and legislate by presidential ordinance.

  In India it has been suggested that a solution to this state of affairs may lie in the adoption of a formally presidential Constitution. Naturally the preferred models are said to be those of France or the USA rather than Sri Lanka or Pakistan. Under such a dispensation, Parliament’s democratic credentials as a directly elected assembly would not be affected. They would simply be counterbalanced by a directly elected President whose equally democratic credentials would be rewarded with supreme executive power plus the option of choosing his Ministers from outside Parliament. Thus law-making and policy-making would be disentangled, the legislature and the executive separated. Presidents accountable to the nation rather than to Parliament would enjoy guaranteed terms of office, during which they should be able to provide the stable direction and speedy execution that necessarily eludes prime ministers beholden to some unwieldy coalition of disparate parties. China’s rapid transformation into a superpower has often been linked to the discipline imposed by an authoritarian Communist Party at the helm of a command economy. It is supposed that a presidential Constitution in India, while retaining democratic accountability, might have something of the same effect.

  None of this, though, is likely to happen. Thanks as much to Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency as to the dictatorial examples of Pakistan and Bangladesh, any constitutional add-on within which might lurk the germs of autocratic rule is out of the question. But the existing machinery could be reconditioned. In the 1960s, state governments in India were commonly formed or felled by
assembly members being bribed to change their party allegiance. This floor-crossing reached epidemic proportions, with at least one politician changing sides nine times in a couple of decades. The practice infected the national Parliament in the 1970s, and was in part responsible for the quick collapse of the post-Emergency Janata government. But in 1985, amid the closing of ranks that followed Mrs Gandhi’s assassination, an anti-defection Bill finally made it onto the statute book. Individuals defecting from one party to another could now expect disqualification.

  Unfortunately nothing at the time was said about whole parties defecting, a threat which in the context of today’s coalition governments is all too common, and makes for inertia and instability. But, like the endless parliamentary adjournments and the unseemly conduct of members, this too could surely be rectified, if not by Parliament itself then by the existing provision for presidential ordinances.

  Given the current lull in protest and dissent, another long-overdue reform might also be undertaken. On 3 November 2000, Ms Sharmila Irom, a young would-be poet and activist from Manipur in India’s far north-east, ate her last meal. Twelve and a half years later, when flown from hospital detention in Manipur to appear before a Delhi magistrate on a charge of attempted suicide (an offence under India’s Civil Code), Ms Irom had still not taken either food or drink. A feeding tube trailed from her nose as she was helped into court, and her hair looked in need of a brush. Some 4,500 days of forced feeding had also taken a toll of her constitution. Not, though, of her resolve. She duly denied the accusation of suicide, as she has at countless other hearings, and said she wanted to live. As to her fast, which by any standards is ‘the longest hunger strike anywhere by anyone’, she said she would happily end it there and then; all she asked was that the Indian government first repeal ‘AFSPA’.