Does the Future of Democracy Lie With India?

Book excerpt: ‘The Great Indian Rope Trick: Does the Future of Democracy Lie With India?”, by Roderick Mathews

The Great Indian Rope Trick: Does the Future of Democracy Lie With India?

Roderick Matthews

Hachette India

Rs 599, pp 354

Roderick Matthews, a freelance writer specialising in Indian history, examines what keeps the Indian democratic system ticking and what explains its resilience in his latest book, ‘The Great Indian Rope Trick: Does the Future of Democracy Lie with India?’ In the following excerpt, he discusses the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and the diminishing returns of caste equations:

“…the BJP has effectively replaced the Congress as the dominant national party, at least for the near future. Nor is the end of the Congress unthinkable. We are halfway there as of now, and parties do die. In 1910 the Liberal Party in England was a political fixture, a party of government with new ideas and welfare schemes aplenty. But over the next decade it underwent a crisis of relevance that it could not have foreseen and which it had insufficient resources to overcome or outlive. The result was its estrangement from government for a century, only to return under a different name in a different era. Liberal England died, as G.B.Dangerfield explained in a 1935 book, a victim of social, economic and global changes. Now, with a once dominant party under a similar set of pressures, are we witnessing the strange death of Congress India?

Even if we are, this does not of course mean that support for centre-left politics has disappeared in India. What it means is that the Congress is having a hard time representing that demand effectively. Welfare issues are often very local in India, and this has not helped a national body like the Congress…

…The big question is whether poverty, and with it caste and the reservations issue, is about to mean less in Indian national politics. And if caste is less of a factor, which is as we should suppose, then the BJP may hold the ring in national electoral contests for a while.

The 2014 election has its place in the parallel narratives of the two national parties, but it may also signal a new stage in the story of the mismatch between parties and the state. Caste-based reservations were an argument about the state and its possibilities, about who was entitled to special treatment by right. [Narendra] Modi transformed this argument by refusing to equate the economy and the state, and thus opened up a new area for political ideas beyond the aegis of government. This liberation had the effect of making the standard political arguments seem pessimistic, limited and limiting. His emphasis on growth changed all these equations and the other parties could not speak well on this change, or could not embrace it because their roots were buried in the system. They were the beasts that grazed on the grass, and could not do without it. Modi-nomics released the BJP from this dependence. This does not mean that the BJP cannot and will not use the reservation system to its own advantage; it just means that the cord is cut, and the issue is reduced in importance beside the greater goal of wealth creation.

In 2014, BJP ran its most focused campaign ever, concentrating on economic issues as never before. Long-standing BJP cultural concerns were still present in the manifesto—the Ram temple, Article 370, the Uniform Civil Code – but the main emphasis of the campaign was on growth, development, better governance, infrastructure projects including roads and railways, fighting inflation, repatriating black money and reducing corruption. The campaign was slick, with a high-octane media team at work, directed by the London-based Manoj Ladwa. It used innovative techniques, including holograms and a heavy social media presence. But it also had a clever, earthy charm, with ‘chai pe charcha’. There was better organization on the ground too, skilfully targeted by Amit Shah. His success in delivering seats all across Bihar and UP might seem to suggest that vote bank politics is not dead, even within an election dominated by national visions. But perhaps it has just changed a little, becoming more flexible in two ways: the banks are smaller, and they are less loyal.

There are several reasons why this might be so. One is that caste reservations only operate in the public sector, and there are finite limits to how much of it can be reserved, especially as liberalisation has curbed its growth. Both factors have tended to diminish the political significance of schemes of reservation. The political solution to this decline was to float the idea of extending reservations to the private sector. But corporate India has always been intensely resistant to the idea of non-merit based recruitment, especially if made a statutory requirement. The prospect that this might happen flickered  temporarily at the end of UPA-II, but the chances of any such scheme being introduced under a Modi government are zero. The leverage that reservations can exercise on castes is thus limited, and is of increasingly less use to parties.

Another reason is that vote banks are sometimes more imaginary than real, such as the alleged Muslim vote bank that appears and disappears at different times and places, and is or is not compatible with other groupings. Yet another is that one long-term effect of Mandalization has been the subdivision of caste groups into smaller sections – so called sub-castes and caste clusters – which are often mutually competitive. This makes it harder to assemble solid blocks of support on the basis of caste alone. Fielding the right sort of candidate is still a good way to maximize caste loyalty but, away from reservations and benefits based on social identity, it seems likely that it will be more difficult to figure out caste electoral equations or to mobilize distinct groups over wide areas.

The BJP judged this very well in 2014, which materially contributed to the scale of the party’s success. One in four Dalits voted for the party, more than ever before.  The BSP, however, who should know a thing or two about caste mobilization, seems to have got it wrong. In 2009, the Congress got 21 seats in UP on an 18 percent vote share: in 2014 the BSP got zero on 19 percent, in a state where 21 percent of the population are Scheduled Castes. This serves to illustrate that in Indian elections, even with national issues in play, what determines the outcome is not swings of opinion so much as splits within social layers, which vary in their precise details. The overall effect is always then related to macro- and micro-economic contexts, and especially to the level of turnout. In a low turnout a social grouping of ten percent will have a proportionately much greater effect than in a high turnout. This does not mean that principles can never be part of the equation; it means that it is difficult to treat vote banks as solid entities especially within the very wide backward caste layers. And it may well be the case that caste will remain an influence in local elections to a much greater degree than in national, based on a rough division in voters’ perceptions between personal and national interests.

What will certainly remain is the willingness of India’s party leaders to accuse others of using vote banks while trying to explore them themselves. One man’s vote bank is another man’s targeted outreach project.”