India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  India/China comparisons have long been a staple of scholarly analysis. Now, in a world that becomes more connected by the day, they have become ubiquitous in popular discourse as well. In this comparison China might win on economic grounds but will lose on political ones. Indians like to harp on their neighbour’s democracy deficit, sometimes directly and at other times by euphemistic allusion. When asked to put on a special show at the World Economic Forum of 2006, the Indian delegation never failed to describe their land, whether in speech or in print or in posters, as the ‘World’s Fastest Growing Democracy’.

  Is this self-congratulation merited? The one area in which India is reliably democratic is in the regular practice of free and fair elections. Indians also have considerable freedom of movement; they can travel or work anywhere they like in the Union, although in some areas, only local residents can buy or own property.

  However, in other crucial respects India’s democratic credentials are flawed, sometimes deeply so. One dark spot, arguably growing darker, has to do with political corruption. The great German sociologist Max Weber once remarked that ‘there are two ways of making politics one’s vocation: Either one lives “for” politics or one lives “off” it.’40 The first generation of Indian leaders lived mostly for politics. They were attracted by the authority they wielded, but were also often motivated by a spirit of service and sacrifice. The current generation of Indian politicians, however, are more likely to enter politics to live off it. They are attracted by the power and prestige it offers, and also by the opportunities for financial reward. Control over the state machinery, they know, can give glittering prizes to those in charge.

  Political corruption was not unknown in the 1950s, as the cases of the Mundhra scandal and the Kairon administration in the Punjab demonstrate. But it was restricted. Most members of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Cabinet, and even Lal Bahadur Shastri’s, did not abuse their position for monetary gain. Some Congress bosses did, however, gather money for the party from the business sector. In the 1970s, politicians began demanding a commission when contracting arms deals with foreign suppliers. The money – or most of it – went into the party’s coffers to be used in the next elections. By the 1980s, however, political corruption had shifted from the institutional to the personal level – thus an increasing number of ministers at the centre and the states were making money from government contracts, from postings of officials, and by sundry other means.

  The evidence of political corruption is, by its very nature, anecdotal rather than documentary. Those who take or give commissions rarely leave a paper trail. However, in the 1990s the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) laid charges against a number of prominent politicians for having assets ‘disproportionate’ to their position. The leaders so charged included the chief ministers of Bihar and Tamil Nadu, Lalu Prasad Yadav and J. Jayalalithaa. Each was accused of amassing hundreds of millions of rupees from the allocation of government contracts. In another case, the CBI raided the house of Sukh Ram, the Union minister for communications, and found 36 million rupees in cash. It was alleged that this represented the commission on licences awarded to private telecom companies.

  In most of these cases, the charges were not converted into convictions, sometimes because of lack of evidence, at other times because of the timidity of the judiciary. There was also a sense of honour among thieves. In the run-up to an election the Opposition made a hue and cry about corruption in the ruling administration, but if it was elected it did not pursue cases against the previous regime, trusting that it would be similarly rewarded when it lost power.41 Indeed, politicians from different parties and different states often exchanged favours. In one documented case, a Haryana chief minister sanctioned the sale of a plot of public land to the son of a Punjab chief minister – while the market value of the land was Rs500 million, the price actually paid was Rs25 million.42

  A major source of corruption has been the state’s control over land, forests, minerals, rivers, coastlines and the airwaves. The reforms of the 1990s had left these sectors untouched. Now, as the economy grew, and globalized, natural resources such as iron, spectrum and oil and natural gas (both offshore and terrestrial) acquired an ever increasing value. Rather than allot them through open auctions, both central and state governments chose to allot these resources to cronies, taking large, indeed massive, kickbacks in return. Likewise, environmental clearances, mandatory under the law, were rarely withdrawn or given on the basis of scientific evidence, but rather on the proximity of entrepreneurs to politicians. This was the case also with large loans made by public sector banks to private capitalists, these often, or even usually, decided on considerations other than creditworthiness.43

  In the words of the political scientist Peter deSouza, corruption was Indian democracy’s ‘inconvenient fact’. Governments in power in New Delhi took kickbacks on purchases from abroad, on defence deals especially. The percentage taken on foreign contracts was in the region of 20 per cent. In most states the majority of ministers were on the take, skimming money off licences to companies, postings of top officers, land deals and much else. Economists estimated that 70 per cent to 90 per cent of rural development funds were siphoned off by a web extending up from the panchayat head to the local MP, with officials too claiming their share. One reason that city roads were in such poor shape was that the much of the money allocated to them was spent elsewhere. Of every Rs100 allocated to road-building by the Bangalore City Corporation, for example, Rs40 went into the pockets of politicians and officials, with another Rs20 being the contractor’s profit margin. Only Rs40 were spent on the job, which was either done badly or not at all.44

  Because being in power was so profitable, there was now an increasing trade in politicians. To make up the numbers and obtain a majority, legislators were bought and sold for a (usually high) price. In the era of minority and coalition governments the trade was especially brisk. Legislators routinely crossed the floor and changed parties. This had become so common that in times of political instability, the MLAs of a particular party were taken en masse for a ‘holiday’ in destinations such as Goa, lest they defect to the other side. Here these men – sometimes up to fifty of them – were kept in a hotel, drinking and playing cards, while armed guards watched out for furtive phone calls or unknown visitors. The holiday extended until the crisis has passed, which could take several weeks.

  VIII

  A second dark spot, also growing darker, is the growing criminality of the political class. As early as 1985, the weekly Sunday ran a cover story on ‘The Underworld of Indian Politics’, which spoke of how, in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar especially, candidates with criminal records were contesting elections, sometimes winning them, and sometimes being made ministers as well. Among the crimes these men were charged with were ‘murder, abduction, rape, molestation, gangsterism’.45 Over the next decade, a greater number of criminals entered politics, so many in fact that a citizens group filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court demanding that parties release details of their candidates. In May 2002, the Court made it mandatory for those contesting state or national elections to make public their assets and their criminal record (if any).

  The group that had filed the original PIL then set up ‘Election Watch Committees’ in the states, these comprising local lawyers, teachers, and students. The affidavits filed by candidates in five state elections held in 2002–3 were collated and analysed. In the major political parties – such as the BJP, the Congress, Uttar Pradesh’s Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bihar’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) – between 15 per cent and 20 per cent of candidates had criminal records. A detailed study of Rajasthan’s 2003 Vidhan Sabha election showed that roughly half the candidates were very rich by Indian standards – they had a declared wealth of more than 3 million rupees each. And as many as 124 candidates had criminal records. 40 per cent of these were charged with crimes that qualified as ‘serious’ – which included armed robbery, attempt to murder, defi
ling a place of worship and arson.46

  Equally revealing was an analysis made of the affidavits of the 541 MPs elected in the 2004 parliamentary polls. The Congress had the wealthiest candidates – their MPs each had, on the average, assets of Rs31 million. Most MPs had assets in excess of Rs10 million; those who ranked lowest on this scale were the Communists. On the question of criminal charges, the lead was taken by parties powerful in UP and Bihar: 34.8 per cent of RJD MPs had been charge-sheeted, 27.8 per cent of Bahujan Samaj Party MPs and nearly 20 per cent of SP MPs. The Congress and the BJP came out slightly ‘cleaner’, having 17 per cent and 20 per cent of their MPs charged with crimes respectively. However, the situation was reversed when it came to money owed to public financial institutions. Of all such debts, Congress MPs accounted for 45 per cent, and the BJP members for 23 per cent. Again, it was Communist MPs who came out best – they reported virtually no debts at all.47

  In 2014, one of the founders of the group that filed the original PIL published a statistical analysis of the affidavits filed by candidates in all state and national elections over the past decade. This revealed that roughly 18 per cent had pending criminal charges against them. What was more disturbing was that 28 per cent of those with criminal records won the seats they contested. In every party except one, those with serious criminal records were more likely to win than those without. This suggested that, despite the secrecy and credibility of the voting process itself, candidates with money and muscle power could impress or intimidate citizens into casting votes in their favour.

  This study further analysed the growth in assets (as declared in their affidavits) of those who won seats in Assemblies or in Parliament. The results revealed that, as in the case of criminal records, the Communists came out cleanest, the Congress and the BJP less clean, and the regional parties the dirtiest of all. The growth in assets of CPI(M) candidates who won was 64 per cent, the corresponding figure for Congress being 201 per cent, for the BJP 142 per cent, for the BSP 499 per cent, and for the Telugu Desam Party a staggering 1,069 per cent.48

  Conducting research in a Bengali village, a Norwegian anthropologist found that the term most often used to describe politics was ‘nungra’ (dirty). Politicians were described as those who promoted ‘abusive exchanges’ (galagali), caused ‘fist-fights’ (maramari) and promoted ‘disturbances’ (gandagol). In sum, politics served only to fill society with ‘poison’ (bish). This was not always so, said the villagers. Once, soon after Independence, politicians were honest, hardworking and dedicated, but now every party was peopled with ‘scheming, plotting [and] unprincipled individuals’.49

  The statements were fairly representative of matters in the country as a whole. A survey carried out by Gallup in sixty countries found that the lack of confidence in politicians was highest in India, where 91 per cent of those polled felt that their elected representatives were dishonest.50

  Some consolation can perhaps be found in statements by scholars writing about other societies in other times. Thus, of his own country in the 1940s, Jorge Luis Borges writes that ‘the State is impersonal; the Argentine can conceive only of personal relations. Therefore, to him, robbing public funds is not a crime. I am noting a fact; I am not justifying or excusing it’. And, speaking of his own continent, Europe, in centuries past, R. W. Southern remarks that ‘nepotism, political bribery, and the appropriation of institutional wealth to endow one’s family, were not crimes in medieval rulers; they were part of the art of government, no less necessary in popes than in other men’.51

  IX

  With corruption and criminalization, Indian politics has also increasingly fallen victim to nepotism. Once, most parties had a coherent ideology and organizational base. Now, they have degenerated into family firms.

  The process was begun by and within that grand old party, the Indian National Congress. For most of its history, the Congress was a party run by and for democrats, with regular elections to district and state bodies. After splitting the Congress in 1969, Mrs Indira Gandhi put an end to elections within the party organization. Henceforth, Congress chief ministers and state unit presidents were to be nominated by the leader in New Delhi. Then, during the Emergency, Mrs Gandhi dealt a second and more grievous blow to Congress tradition, when she anointed her son Sanjay as her successor.

  After Sanjay’s death, his elder brother Rajiv was groomed to take over the party and, in time, government. When, in 1998, the Congress bosses asked Sonia Gandhi to head the party, it was an acknowledgement that the party had completely surrendered to the claims of the dynasty. Sonia, in turn, asked her son Rahul to enter politics in 2004, allotting him the safe family borough of Raebareli. Although his mother remains (as of this writing) Congress president, it was Rahul Gandhi who led the party into the 2014 general elections, and is likely to replace his mother soon as party president.

  Apart from its corrosive effects on the ethos of India’s pre-eminent political party, Mrs Indira Gandhi’s embrace of the dynastic principle has served as a ready model for others to emulate. Many political parties in India have been converted into family firms. The DMK was once the proud party of Dravidian nationalism and social reform; its cadres are now resigned to the fact that M. Karunanidhi’s son will succeed him. For all his professed commitment to Maharashtrian pride and Hindu nationalism, when picking the next Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray could look no further than his son Udhav. The Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Janata Dal claim to stand for ‘social justice’, but Mulayam Singh Yadav made sure that his son Akhilesh would succeed him, while when Lalu Prasad Yadav was forced to resign as chief minister of Bihar (after a corruption scandal), his wife Rabri Devi was chosen to replace him, although her previous work experience was limited to the home and the kitchen. (More recently, Lalu has placed two of his sons in top ministerial posts in Bihar). Moreover, once a party has caught the disease of dynasticism, it cannot or will not return to the meritocratic or ideological principles by which it was founded or once run.

  Nor is the dominance of a single family active only at the level of the top leadership of India’s political parties. The practice has been extended down the system, so that if a sitting MP dies, his son or daughter is likely to be nominated in his place. The historian Patrick French has coined the term ‘hereditary MPs’ (abbreviated to HMPs) to describe a phenomenon little known in the West but of considerable significance in India. In an analysis of the Lok Sabha elected in 2009, he found that some 29 per cent of MPs were HMPs, who had entered politics through family connections, with one or more members of their family having previously been an MLA, an MP, or a minister. The phenomenon was especially pervasive among the regional parties and among the younger generation. Thus as many as two-thirds of MPs under the age of forty were from political families, but less than 10 per cent of those over seventy years of age.52

  After the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the proportion of HMPs fell from 30 per cent to 22 per cent, still a substantial figure. The practice is encouraged by political parties across the board; on the whole, 75 per cent of dynastic MPs were renominated by their respective parties, as against 65 per cent of non-dynastic MPs. Candidates often spoke proudly of their family background while campaigning, sons promising to carry on the work of the fathers who had gifted them their seat.53

  The figures cited above come from analyses of successive Lok Sabhas. Studies of the constitution of state assemblies would most likely reveal a similar pattern. Notably, even the BJP, a party that prides itself on its cadre-based, ideology-driven, non-nepotistic nature, has increasingly fallen prey to family-based politics. Thus 15 per cent of the BJP MPs in 2014 were from political families (the corresponding figure for 2009 was 19 per cent). And in the states where the BJP has ruled, the relatives of ministers and chief ministers have become increasingly powerful. In 2011, the veteran BJP leader and former Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Shanta Kumar remarked that ‘the culture of parivar-tantra (family politics), replacing Loktantra (democracy) has arisen even in the BJP .
. . BJP has been the party of workers but right from Himachal Pradesh to Karnataka, it is becoming a party of sons, daughters and relatives.’ Kumar added that ‘if we compromise with the corrupt to remain in power, we have no right to call ourselves a party with a difference.’54

  Nepotism in Indian politics is by no means ubiquitous. However, it is now common enough to be worrying. In a mature democracy, anyone with any interest or ability should be able to enter a political party of one’s choice, and, once there, to acquire more authority and responsibility on the basis of one’s performance. Angela Merkel and Barack Obama came literarily from nowhere, becoming German chancellor and American president respectively entirely on the basis of their own achievements. There was no family member to assist or inspire them in their political journey. Such is the case for the vast majority of lesser German and American politicians as well.

  Interestingly, that the dynastic principle is at odds with democratic practice has been noticed, and taken advantage of, by some Indian politicians in recent years. In the campaign of 2014, Narendra Modi often stressed his own, lowly, non-political origins in contrast to the radically different background of his main rival, born into privilege in India’s pre-eminent political family. Among chief ministers, both Nitish Kumar of Bihar and Arvind Kejriwal of Delhi owe their success in part to the fact they were the first, and remain the only, member of their family to be active in party politics.