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A
Welcome everybody. My name is Ramachandra Guha, I'm at LSE Ideas and I am the moderator of this panel today for which we have four very gifted and very accomplished and highly regarded participants. From my left, professor of the Department of Economics, a very well known development economist who's worked on microfinance, inequality, agriculture and other subjects. On my immediate left, Patrick French, historian and biographer, author of landmark works on V S Naipaul, Francis Young, Husband and the Partition of India, among other books, and most recently a book on India called India A Portrait which will be on sale immediately after today's event. On my right, Dr. Mukulika Banerjee, whose first book was a brilliant study of Afghanistan in Pakistan called the Pathan Anand. I think among her accomplishments is that she was the first and possibly last Indian anthropologist ever to do fieldwork in those very contested areas. Maybe not the last, but the last for some time at least, and has since done work on minorities in India and on electoral democracy. And on our extreme right, Professor Sunil Khelani of King's College London, who started as a historian of France, then wrote a wonderful book called the Idea of India and is now working on Jawaharlal Nehru. So we have a panel which is beautiful in my view, beautifully balanced. We have an economist, a historian and an anthropologist and a political theorist.
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B
Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.
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A
Bad joke. All right, we have two insiders, two LSE faculty, two outsiders and someone in the middle who is at the moment an insider but soon to be an outsider. And we will have about 45 minutes, which I will sort of get the panel to take up different questions in turn and then we'll, as always, open it up to the audience. So I'm going to begin with last week's news, which may not be next week's news, but it's still interesting and important enough. Last week the results were announced for five state elections in India and one of those was the state of Uttar Pradesh, which has more people than France and Germany combined. So it was an election of considerable importance. But there were other state elections too, and the results were striking. Uttar Pradesh now has a chief minister who's less than 40 years old, which is sort of in the gerontocracy that is Indian democracy. It's something of epic importance that you have a 30 year old chief minister in the largest state. The ruling Congress Party fared much worse than it was expected and so on. But I'm not going to discuss the results, I'm going to raise some. I'M going to ask each one of the panel in turn. To raise some about how these elections raise some larger questions about where Indian democracy is going. And I'm going to start with Mukulika because she's finishing a book on, based on many years field work on elections is what you call a kind of feminine festival or theater of democracy. And insofar as there's much else wrong with India, as you know, but the election commission, insofar as it has overseen a free and fair election, I mean, how would you see this in the context of your own work? Just the enactment of these multiple elections in the context of your own work on democracy.
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C
Okay, thank you, Ram. Like all other elections, this one too had an extraordinarily high turnout. Alongside up, there were four other states that went to the polls. It was Punjab, Goa, Uttarakhand and Manipur. And in Goa, for instance, voter turnout was 82%. UP's elections was held in six phases, seven phases. I think this time to make sure that every bit that went to the polls was very carefully policed and held to scrutiny by the Election commission. So as far as the election commission goes, in that sense, it was a very typical election. There was some atypical drama which I think is symptomatic of something bigger, which was the Congress Party's challenge through various individuals of the Election Commission's model code of conduct, which is what it imposes when India goes to elections every time. So the whole country, every time there's an Indian election, we've seen this repeatedly imposes what the Election commission imposes, what's called a modal code of conduct, where the entire country moves into a different gear, the rules are changed, politicians are under close scrutiny, governments cannot announce any new schemes and therefore everybody has to be, in a sense on best behaviour. And the Election Commission has a huge amount of power in regulating this. Now this was challenged, I think twice during the UP elections. And the way the Election commission responded to it and came down very harshly, sometimes perhaps a bit too officiously, raised the debate about whether politicians, in fact, what we need to be doing about preserving institutions like the election commission, which to my mind is probably one of the cornerstones of India's record as an Indian democracy. And absolutely of all the public institutions that should be preserved in India, the Election commission is crucial to it. But, but if you want, I mean, in terms of the second point, obviously we'll come back to these things later, but the second point to make after the election commission is about the electorate itself. The voter Turnout was high, but also when the results came out last week of all the five states, and this had been going on for six or seven weeks, right, the elections, it was really interesting to see that it was impossible to call the results. And this in a sense is fairly typical again of most Indian elections where you really cannot predict how the voters will vote. And this is significant. In the case of Uttarakhand, for instance, a small state which used to belong to UP but now is a separate state, there was such a close finish that there's literally one seat between the Congress and the bjp. And today the Congress has been invited to form the government and name their chief minister. In Uttar Pradesh too, there was a very dramatic difference of seats between the winning Samajwadi Party and the psp, the main opposition. But actually the vote share difference was about 4% between them. And what has emerged in the results of this particular election is a genuine category of a floating voter who is impossible to call. You don't know how they're going to vote. And I think that is partly contributed by the fact, for instance, this time there was something like 1 million new voters because of the new ones who were registered between the last election and this. So there's an unpredictability of the electorate combined with its commitment to voting that again, I think is fairly typical of Indian elections.
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A
Thank you. Mukulika Mukurika used this very interesting phrase, Patrick, the floating voter. So contrary to what journalists and even some political leaders sometimes think, Indians don't vote in vote banks. It's not as if every Muslim, every Dalit, every tribal votes together. So I'm very intrigued by your concept of floating voter. But the paradox, as your work shows, Patrick, is that there are no floating parties and there are not even any floating candidates. Often that, as you show in your recent work so strikingly that you have increasingly political parties run as family firms and even individual constituencies, really going from father to son or husband to widow. And how does one overcome this extraordinary. How do you see this extraordinary, in a sense, deficit? The fact that elections are conducted fairly is great, but political parties are not open institutions. And your work really shows this very same.
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D
Well, that is the flaw. I mean, that is the flaw in, in Indian democracy. I think it's the fact that, you know, I was listening a few months ago to a discussion on BBC's Start the Week on Radio 4 and somebody had written a book about democracy and spoke for perhaps eight or 12 minutes about democracy and what it was and what it did around the world. India was not even mentioned. And yet it seems to me that India is actually really at the heart of how democracy can evolve. I don't think anybody would have imagined in 1950 when, when the Constitution came in, that you would have such a hyper developed form of democracy where you have vote fractionalization in places like up, which could never have been envisaged and in which people very often don't do what is expected of them. Again and again you find people having assumptions that a certain community will vote a certain way. But particularly in the UP results, you can see that, for example, the way that a proportion of the Dalit votes swung away from Myawati was to do with the fact that unless certain things are delivered in the way that is expected, then all expectations among voters are really up for grabs. And I think that that is really a change of the last five or perhaps 15 years. And if you like, one of the reasons why Congress did so badly in this election, certainly in up, was the fact that they were still on the old paradigm, the idea of noblesse oblige. The idea that, as Rahul Gandhi said in some of his speeches, you know, we have given you these things from Delhi, rather than saying, well, these are your demands that you made, these are the things that you are entitled to. You know, the idea of giving things from Delhi, well, in fact, what you're saying is we have taken money from the Indian taxpayer and we've given it back to you. So it's kind of, it's almost looking at it the wrong way around. So you have this highly developed form of democracy and at the same time you have, as Mukulka said, the Indian Election Commission is extraordinarily effective. I mean, in the 2009 general election I watched it in action and it was really quite overwhelming how effective they were at making candidates do what they said. But the one thing that does not function is internal democracy within the parties, as Ram mentioned. And this is something that is getting worse and worse. The survey that I did was only of Lok Sabha MPs, but there's a direct correlation between age and heredity. If you plot a graph between MPs over the age of 70, almost none of them are from political families. Almost every MP got into Parliament on merit. Whereas if you then go to MPs under the age of 30, every single one of them, 100%, are the sons and daughters of eminent politicians. And there's a direct straight line between people who in the different categories of age, 31 to 40 and so on up to the age of 80. And it seems to me that even if you look now at state level, this is a growing problem. The fact that the UP election was projected by the media quite reasonably as in many ways a fight between these two young dynasts of Akhilesh, the son of Malayam Singh Yadav and on the other hand, Rahul Gandhi, these two, what in Indian terms is called young politicians. And again, if you look at the man who almost became Punjab's new chief minister, Sukbir Singh Badal, the son of the man who actually became the new chief minister, he is in a few weeks time going to be 50 years old. His father, who's back in the post again is 85 years old. So there you have the young politicians being 50 years old, which is twice the age of the average Indian. So there is some kind of disjuncture. And I mean it's not every party that is undemocratic internally. The BJP does better, the CPIM does better, but pretty much all the other parties depend more than they ever have before on the sons and daughters of eminent politicians being pushed into positions of power. That I think is the threat to Indian democracy. It's not how democracy functions at the ballot vaults.
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A
Thank you, Patrick. One of the features of this most recent election was that it showed the growing power of regional parties. Much media attention is focused on the very bad and disappointing results of the Congress, which is quite striking in view of how much energy and investment the most important young Congress leader, Rahul Gandhi had put in campaigning. And these elections are being read probably rightly in that sense is a defeat for Rahul Gandhi. But less, less attention, I think has been paid to the fact that the other, so to say, national party, the Bharatiya Janta Party, also did extremely poorly. And this is important because it is in this state of Uttar Pradesh that back in the 80s, 1980s and 1990s, the Bharati Janata Party really emerged as a national party. UP was where it launched its successful campaign for national attention which culminated in it becoming the party of power in New Delhi in 1998, up till 2004. So this is growing regionalization all across, whether it's in states like UP and Bihar in, in the east, whether it's in Bengal by Mamata Banerjee and her regional Tinubul Party dethroned the Communists after 30 years in the south, in the West. And I wanted to ask Maitresh, because of your own work on economic development and also in the states, in terms of the evolution of the Indian economy as it's unfolding. How does the regionalization of politics, is it healthy because it leads to more decision making being decentralized? Does it make it more difficult because you can't have a pan Indian policy? How do you see regionalization of politics affecting economic policy in India?
- [14:19]
E
Thanks for organizing this panel. And so going back to your specific question, I would say that in the last two decades, the, the most notable thing about India that, you know, certainly within India as well as abroad that people have been talking about is really India's economic performance. And so, you know, the whole sort of, you know, the march of democracy that has been steady and strong. And while there have been indeed these developments as the sort of, you know, strengthening of the regional parties and so on. So I want to draw a couple of sort of really general sort of, you know, sketches of observations rather than really something that is very sort of, well, sort of, you know, researched. But I thought given the sort of, you know, the original discussion we were having. And so, you know, coming up with this panel topic, it was really, I was somehow got fixated on the word ferocious and the fault lines. And I started thinking of the various fault lines that there could be and what are the particular.
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A
Just one minute. Western educated Indians such as myself have an incurable love of alliteration. That's the reason for the ferocious.
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E
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so perhaps it's the ferocious love for alliteration that I did not factor in. So what are the things that I actually was looking at, given the broad frame of it? And I do want to sort of come back to the specific question. But in terms of the economic trends, though, while India has been this big success story, the whole rise of India as a potential economic superpower, et cetera, et cetera, one of the interesting things that if you look at the data of the Indian growth performance in the last two decades is that the growth rates indeed have been very high. Okay, so something like 9% in the last decade as opposed to, you know, decades of very slow growth. What used to be called the Hindu rate of growth in a sarcastic way. So the sort of, you know, slow and steady and so on. But interestingly, poverty has not declined very much. Okay. And one of the key things that if you in the some of the euphoria of the sort of, you could say the sort of, you know, business press as well as, you know, is while the growth in the sort of formal sector, especially services, a lot of it is driven by, it has indeed been impressive. And there's no need to sort of be apologetic about some of the positive effects it has done and while also raising returns to education. So whether you go from the call center to the software developers, clearly there's been some of those aspirational effects that I think has changed some of the narratives of discourse. If you look at even coming back to the UP election, I'm going to come to some of the. So I think the development discourse, the whole idea about economic betterment, about somehow leaving the past behind of the caste and community, other kind of lines. So I think a narrative that has certainly emerged. But the reality of the economic scorecard is while the service sector growth and overall sort of the stock market boom, these are all real poverty alleviation has been kind of the achievements have been modest. They are not insignificant, but they're very modest. I will not bore you with statistics. But you know, one particular striking number that came to sort of my attention is that using the kind of World bank standardized dollar and eight cents a day, adjusting for various things, cutting line, the poverty in 1983 was 44%. 44% of the people were under the poverty line. In 2004, it was 27%. So that is indeed something to be sort of, you know, sort of positive about. But if you look at, even if you compute say twice this number, which is not a huge difference in the standard of living. So if you Instead if say $2.16 right now, 80% of India Indians would be below this line. And that hasn't fallen that much from 84 where it was 84%. Okay, so therefore there has been a decline indeed for the very poor. If you take this very sort of, you know, know, low line and so on. But coming back to sort of, you know, sort of, you know, now setting this background so there clearly, therefore there are two Indias. In fact, I was going to argue three Indias really going back to again the sort of the word ferocious that drove my sort of, you know, or whatever focus my mind the whole tribal area and the Maoist problem, for example, I'm going to argue that's the third India. So there is a service sector India that is really the India shining. And if I use some of the things that, you know, I would say critiques of this economic reforms and so on, if you call them the India drowning kind of, you know, sort of, you know, sort of, you know, characterization, I would certainly say that the, you know, the tribal population and the kind of violation of their sort of, you know, sort of, you know, taking away of property and, you know, the natural resources, forestry and so on. Dispossession has been quite extreme. But even in the middle groups, which you could argue that has not really grown very much, real wages in agriculture have not really gone very much and poverty has not declined significantly, the aspirational effects are very much there. And now coming more to the sort of up, I mean one of the things before up, I would say that Nitish Kumar of Bihar has really set a paradigm, which I think that again is too early to tell, but perhaps the UP model is also a harbinger of that. Nitish Kumar's sort of paradigm is really governance. And having actually done some work there and talking to various people, it actually seems that, you know, the people who are the politicians, the bureaucrats and even the people have bought into that narrative. Now obviously that doesn't mean that it doesn't fray on the edges and there are always counterexamples and so on. But on the other hand, even the bjp, which is an ally of Nitish Kumar, actually has had to turn down its sort of, you know, some of its divisive sectarian rhetoric in the campus campaigning and so on. So there clearly has been Muslim voters who have voted for this NDA alliance which, you know, which has BJP as the junior partner there. So coming to the Uttar Pradesh, I mean clearly there is an aspiration effect. There is an aspiration effect. People want good governance. People not just want money to be given. From sort of the above, it's more likely economic betterment. And that narrative has, if you even watch Bollywood films, that narrative I think sort of permeates a lot of the aspiration effects of the even you would say people who have not directly benefited from the liberalization yet, but they have feel they can make it now, the regional parties I think coming now to sort of, you know, really sort of, you know, that side of the question. What has happened is with this, all this economic growth, India's main political parties have been fairly centralized, hierarchical and as Patrick said, they have run by non meritocratic considerations, except for the CPM or the communists of the bjp, which you could say that they mainly being ideological parties, they have in that sense been a more equal opportunity. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they have any particularly good record to show for overall governance. But so in terms of some of the. So therefore the rise of the regional parties is really the rupture of the centralized hierarchical, vertical model of governance and development. And I think it's really something that even in the cpim, which got defeated in West Bengal very recently after ruling there for 30 years is really trying to sort of put down a centralized model of development and really not being sensitive enough to local considerations, not being participatory or democratic enough. So coming back to so therefore, I would say that in terms of economic policy, I think the rise of the regional parties in a certain way are an expression of, of democratic and more participatory sort of, you know, and that's the positive side of it. But on the negative side of it, though, there is a sense in which you're missing out on the common goals. So even, for example, the Singur factory, which turned out to be a flashpoint in the sort of, you know, conflict in West Bengal between the left front and the opposition party, if you really look at what happened there, a lot of these Indian states are now in a kind of rat's race to offer subsidies to various business houses. And that's where, being regional parties, in the language of US economists, you're not necessarily internalizing the externalities that you're imposing on others. And as a result, that could be a potential sort of problem here. And if you look at some of the rhetoric of this, including Nitish Kumar, I mean, most of the discussion is sort of while a lot of the discussion is about internal improvement, but, but a lot of it is that Bihar needs a special tax status. We need more sort of, you know, basically more resources from the center.
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A
Anyway, thank you, Mantish. One of the consequences of the regionalization of politics could be, I think, on balance, as Mantish has said, is probably healthy because you have a far more direct connection between the party ruling your state and your own aspirations. But on the negative side, India is also part of a complex neighborhood, part of a complex changing world. And what happens when the polity is dominated by a multiplicity of smaller parties, each attending to its small patch of turf? How do you get the bigger picture? And Sudhir, as someone who's had a long interest in, of course, in foreign policy and international affairs and more recently is the prime mover of a fascinating report on India's strategic and foreign policy called non alignment 2.0, how do you see the growth of regional parties or generally the transformations in democracy recently playing out into how India views itself vis a vis the neighborhood and vis a vis the larger world?
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B
Thanks, Ram. Well, a couple of things. I'll come to that in a minute. The question of the regionalization of India and its effects on policy, particularly international policy, if you like. But I just wanted to, to pick up on some of the very interesting points that were made earlier about what, the most recent elections, but, you know, continuously the elections that India is always having elections. Every year there are some elections. And what is this sort of telling us about the nature of our democracy, of Indian democracy? And just a couple of things I wanted to say about that. I mean, I think quite rightly, you know, we focused on some of the positive aspects about Indian democracy and Bukhalika mentioned them, which are things like the increasing participation of electors across the board in India, particularly voters from the lower parts of the social structure, the social order, who are participating in rising numbers and things like an actor like the election commission, which guarantees the openness of elections and the general fairness of the way they've conducted. But I think what has happened is a kind of over attention both within India, but also amongst scholars and commentators in some ways on the winning of power and the processes of winning of power in India to a kind of relative neglect of the actual exercise of power. So, you know, the counterpart of the good performance of the election commission are the disastrous legislative assemblies in the states, the disastrous parliament in India. So, you know, you have a good process, or rather a legitimate process to get politicians elected into these offices, but then what they do once they're in these offices is, you know, basically mayhem at best, I mean, in their own interests. So I think, you know, it's very important that there's a kind of, I think, a switch in our focus to thinking more harder really about, if you like, the outputs of the whole process, you know, what kind of. Because at the end of the day, you know, you can have a legitimate system that is legitimate in getting people into power, but if they constantly abuse the exercise of power, that actually starts to drain the legitimacy of the system overall. And indeed you are, you know, at the same time, as you're seeing, you know, certainly climbing, although I think probably rates of participation, although I think we may be reaching something of a plateau in participation rates. We're also seeing lots of Indians who are not going into the electoral process who are taking in, you know, taking to other methods because they are so, so frustrated and obstructed in pursuing their end. So whether it's armed struggle or whether it's the movements that we've seen that have gone onto the streets in Indian cities in the past year, not necessarily in a very clearly sort of achieving way as yet, but still it's a sign, I think, of also some trouble in the democratic process. I think that's something that one needs to, I think we need to think harder About. I mean, yeah, I think absolutely. You know, one of the interesting things for me, you know, there's been a lot of commentary in the last few days on these recent elections and which party's up, which party's down, what it means for 2014 and, you know, the next election and is the BJP, et cetera, et cetera. And there will continue to be a lot of that. But I think. I think that the longer, or rather the bigger question that we face is the one you raised, which is, you know, what is the effect of this headlong process of regionalization in Indian politics? The fact that for the foreseeable future, national governments are going to be coalition governments made up increasingly of regional parties. I mean, the fact is that the two national parties, the BJP and the Congress, now get less than half of the vote share in national elections. So, you know, in what sense are they national parties? Yes, of course, they're still larger than any other regional party, but put together, it's less than half of the vote share. So more than half of Indians are voting essentially for regional parties. So there is a kind of regionalization of the political imagination, of the national imagination, if you like. And, you know, by definition, parties who are, who come from these regional parties, what makes them so electable is their focus on local interests, on local questions. I mean, that's their strength. So, as you say, yes, there's a good aspect to that because it does bring a different kind of set of voices and arguments and so on to Delhi, which is very important. But what you're also seeing is a very big change in the personnel of who was in government, both in these states, in the 28 states, and in the national government, there's a change in the kind of political sociology of the Indian political elite. And so then one wants to ask, well, what does that mean for.
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C
Four.
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B
Questions of policy, which really do require thinking over long horizons, thinking coherently at a national level, how is that going to happen? And that, I think, again, is a very big challenge. And you know, what I would say about international policy, both in the region, but more generally, is one of the things that is striking to me and one of the things we tried to bring out in this report, which Ram referred to, is that actually the distinction now in India between what is considered domestic policy and international foreign policy is blurring by the day. It's becoming less and less analytically defensible. In fact, it's no longer analytically defensible. It's just a nominal distinction. South bloc and north bloc, you know, you have the Home Ministry or the various ministries that are dealing with supposedly domestic affairs and you have the ministry, external affairs. Actually all the critical issues cut across those jurisdictions. Whether it's agricultural policy, whether it's the choice of energy policy and its effects on climate change and the environment, whether it's issues of public health, I mean all of these issues, the idea that somehow they are domestic issues and that foreign policy is a luxury for India just no longer makes any sense in analytic or causal terms. So there are then a whole series of step on questions from there and how are we going to think about national governments who in 5, 10, 15 years time are going to be made up of people who have very, very different agendas, very different backgrounds, very different education from the kind of suave, urbane people who strut around Delhi now.
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A
You.
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B
Know, and what kind of international imagination or some of the, a lot of non suave, non urbane people who also struggle, I should make clear. But you know, what is the, how is that going to shape? So I mean, I think it's a question for us, there's no clear answer but I think it's really going to be a very important process of self education for these new political elites to begin to understand and realize that they have to think at this national level at the moment. Of course they don't. So you know, the Prime Minister of India goes to Bangladesh, makes a very important statement about waters which really actually has the potential to integrate, to help integrate a very unintegrated region. He comes back to Delhi and the chief Minister of West Bengal, the neighboring state to Bangladesh, says, you know, sorry, we're not going to share water like this, you know, because it's not good for my state. So the whole policy falls apart. So the kind of the expansion of veto points in any kind of national policy now is endless and it's proliferating and that could have a very again debilitating effect on the conduct of national government which in turn will have effects on its legitimacy. So I think that we're at a very critical period now in terms of consolidating the expansive moment of the Indian democratic project which I think has been very much there in the last two decades, but trying to consolidate that and turn it into actually legitimate, effective exercise of power.
- [33:22]
A
Thank you Sunil. I'm now going to turn to some individual fault lines which were ferocious, are ferocious or might become ferocious in the future. And if you think of the fault line that was most ferocious in the past, clearly that's religious. I mean India was born against a backdrop of bloody civil war between Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs which led to perhaps 1 or 2 million dead and more than 20 million displaced. And in a sense that background has affected Indian politics ever since. Tension between Hindus and Muslims provoked by extremist Hindus from within, provoked by Islamic jihadism outside, provoked by cynical politicians who don't really have a belief either way. And it remains really a deep, deep fault line. The fault line between Hindus and minorities last month marked the 10th anniversary of the riots in Gujarat in 2002. As far as I know, I might be wrong. It's the first 10 year period since Jawaharlal Nehru's death in 1964 that there has not been a serious Hindu Muslim riot, which is a very modest thing to be content with. The fact is that there have been minor riots, there's evidence of discrimination, of other crimes and so on. But I wanted to, what I'll do now is I'll raise a series of fault lines and ask only partially, partly arbitrarily ask each of the panelists to respond to them. And I wanted to ask you, Mukulika, because of your own work on Muslims, you know, is this a kind of, is it kind of uneasy social peace? Is it general syncretism? I mean, how do you see this fault line between Hindus and minorities playing out in the next few years?
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C
It is interesting that the bjp, as you said in this last week's election, got absolutely nowhere in the larger state where in fact it absolutely relied on to become a national party. Now whether this means that religious tensions have gone away, clearly not. What has happened since gotra and the Gujarat riots of 10 years ago that Ram mentions is that a very significant thing happened on this minority's issues in the last 10 years which was the publication of the Sachar committee report which was a report on the state of the Muslim community in India. Post this report 2006 onwards, it is now possible to raise this issue in public and have an open debate. This was the first time that there was a cross party consensus. In a sense you could not deny this because the committee produced a report that was well done that put forward the state of complete abject underdevelopment amongst the Muslim minority community in India even when compared to other depressed castes classes comparison. So in terms of literacy rates below poverty line numbers etc. On social health indicators, development indicators, education, access to anything, Muslim community came out right at the bottom of the heap. Now because this was out and this was debated, it is also, it is now possible, so Today's news is the President of India opens the budget session in Parliament and one of the first announcements she makes is a 4.5% quota for Muslims in the OBC category. Now this is something that's been discussed for a long time. There hasn't the opposition critiqued the government on a number of things. But this is not something that is going to be critiqued because there is a certain understanding, I think, that this is a real problem and this needs to be addressed. So in a sense, to go back to whether electoral politics, what we are celebrating through a discussion of electoral politics, it's almost as if some people have called this a domestication of fault lines such as religious minorities through the electoral democratic process, where it is now possible through electoral arithmetic. And the way elections are played out, that a lot of these issues become election issues. And the writings on the wall, it either flies or it doesn't fly. The BJP flew on this some years ago and became a national party, formed a national government. It's not cutting any. It's not cutting the mustard anymore. That's one point. The second thing is that this notion of vote banks, especially with minorities, so we talk about Adivasi vote banks or Muslim vote banks. This has been the kind of language that we've talked about minority votes in India for a long time now. Again, what recently has been shown and certainly this week's results is that this notion of the vote bank is disappearing. You cannot now predict the Muslim, the famous Muslim Yadav coalition of Uttar Pradesh, for instance, the. MY coalition of the Samajwadi Party who won the election this year, their votes are split. So you can no longer predict that Muslims as a vote, as a bloc, will vote for any political party. And I think what is symptomatic, what this is symptomatic of is, is that there is a larger complete, I think, lack of understanding and ignorance about what minority communities generally, not just religious minority communities, but say the Adivasi, the tribal community in India or the ATI Dalits, or any sort of numerical. After all, minorities are a numerical demographic category. They are not preformed. They're formed through social processes. And while in the Muslim case there has been this sort of chauvinistic Hindu chauvinistic agenda of seeing them really as matter out of place as seeing, you know, the anthropological categorization of dirt is what has been really applied to the Muslim minority in particular. But this idea that somehow by religion you can define people into predicting how they will behave and what their political opinions will be and who they are likely to support. That is something that actually a close look at the electoral results shows that that is no longer the case. You cannot predict anymore.
- [39:39]
A
Thank you. Patrick, I'm going to ask you a direct question about a second fault line in India, which is partly national, partly ethnic, partly religious. And the question is, is Kashmir India's Tibetan?
- [39:55]
D
Well, just while my mind is processing that question, I think what follows on from what you said is that essentially as people become richer, more prosperous, they have a better diet, as their aspirations increase, then they stop voting along religious and caste lines. That's my hunch, but the answer is no.
- [40:15]
A
Tell us why Kashmir, since Patrick is, among other things, the author of a wonderful book on Tibet.
- [40:25]
D
I mean, I think it's very complex. Both of these situations are very complex. They developed in different ways. But crucially, the way in which the relevant governments respond to them is completely different. Essentially, the New Delhi response for the last 20 years has been sending troops and sort of ignoring the problem. Whereas, I mean, to take this one example, you can go to Kashmir and you can interview people and you can have them expressing in the most vivid and vociferous language exactly what they think, exactly what they demand. Whereas when I was in Tibet trying to do research, it was almost impossible even to have a conversation, even to do an interview with somebody puts them in a state of extreme fear. And if you look at the form of protest in Kashmir, whether it's the sort of earlier, earlier phase of Pakistan supported militancy or whether it's the present, more kind of grassroots, street based opposition, and you compare that to what has happened in Tibet over the last two years, where people are, if you like, sort of, they're almost like private suicide bombers. People are burning themselves to death in public as a statement of the level of their despair about the nature of Chinese communist rules in Tibet. So I think the reactions are quite different and the way in which the two governments deal with those problems is quite different. But maybe just to link one thing to it, which kind of ties in with what Sunil was saying earlier, I think one of the difficulties in the way India deals with insurgency, whether it's in the northeast, whether it's in the response to Maoism in central India, whether it's in the way the state reacts in Kashmir, is that very often the Indian state only appears at all as a soldier or a policeman or a paramilitary with a gun. It is extraordinary in central India the way that there are villages where the state doesn't exist at all, where no representative of the state might be seen for maybe 20 or 30 years. And you know, very often we talk in terms of the red tape and the bureaucracy in India which can, you know, we can all be frustrated by it, but often what it actually amounts to is a lack of bureaucracy. It's almost as if the question of implementation, the question of making policy changes happen, the mechanisms for delivery are simply not there. To give just a single example, look at one of the difficulties of Indian foreign policy generally. If you meet Indian diplomats, they are extremely, extremely impressive. But the mea, India's foreign service, is Lilliputian for the demands of a country like India, you then have the whole question of, well, you know, is India going to have to become a superpower? And if so, how? But again and again, the face of the state is simply not as highly developed as it needs to be in the 21st century.
- [43:22]
A
Let me link Patrick's remarks to something I wanted to ask you, Sunil, about institutions. We've spoken earlier on about the election commission and its robust role, but it stands out. That's the reason we go back to it again and again because other institutions, our universities, our hospitals, our law courts, have declined. There's been some recognition at, at the central level of the need to correct this. There have been commissions, there's been a knowledge commission, now there's a skills commission, but one doesn't know what will come out of it. And it assessed that decline. Atrophy, degradation of institutions is a hidden foreclosure. It's not something that comes up. And I wondered what your thoughts are on it and how does one start thinking seriously and constructively about the lack of institutional capacity that you talked about? And now Patrick has kind of reinforced.
- [44:16]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, it's again, really important. I think what Patrick says is exactly right. I mean, it draws attention to the fact that the Indian state is a kind of incredibly malformed state. I mean, it's muscular in many of the wrong parts and it's completely wimpy in many of the parts it should be. So it's like, you know, kind of exquisite corpse made up of, you know, the Charles Atlas figure in the comic books and then the kind of wimpy guy next to him who wants to be Charles Atlas. And you just gotta stuck these two things together and that's the Indian state. And so, you know, when people talk about the need to kind of shrink the Indian state and so on, I mean, yes, in bits you need to, but in other bits it really needs to be bolstered. And one Thing that is absolutely right, that you know, the very small amount of expertise often that the state needs. You know, for example, today, again, coming back to the internationalization of issues, you know, many of the things that Indian ministries are dealing with concern international law. Now the government of India has virtually no in house international lawyers. So if there's anyone doing international law here and wants to work in India, you may have a good career ahead of you because, you know, there just isn't that kind of expertise. And in a whole number of different areas you can find that. And so, and yes, in parts of the country, the state doesn't exist at all. It's very, very thin on the ground. I mean, I think, I think, you know, if you look at the history of institution building in India, the great moment of institution building was the 1950s. Of course, that was a great period of when many of the institutions that in a sense we're living off the capital, the institutional capital of that initial founding decade and decade and a half. And it was those institutions, whether it was higher education, scientific institutions, public administration, a whole series that were created.
- [46:19]
A
Even the election commission.
- [46:20]
B
Absolutely, the election commissions. And we've been living off the capital of that. And I think, you know, there's now a period where the thing about India is that bad institutions never die. They're simply replaced or complemented by another new institution that you create. So you have this incredible undergrowth of institutions in India, most of which are really weeds, but you just keep adding new ones to it. So there isn't really a kind of very Darwinian process, I think in Indian institution building they just sort of linger on. But I think, I mean, a couple of things to say about that as well. I mean, you know, one of the things I think one has seen which is very worrying is the decline of a kind of professional ethics in the Indian professions where, you know, you did have a certain kind of self invigilation of the professions where certain kind of standards and competence and so on were recognized. But you know, now when you get on that Jet Airways or Indigo flight, you don't quite know how much the pilot has paid to get their license. And this is not a joke, it's true. I mean, there have been, you know, cases of people similarly, you know, with hospitals, where basically these professions are, you know, up for sale. And so the kind of the total decay of the professional ethics, which I think is again another very, very worrying development. Just one final thing, which is a kind of puzzle about the state of institutional health and its economic impact I mean, it's always puzzled me that, okay, so the 1950s and 60s were the era of great institutional building and of relatively efficient functioning of institutions, but it was also the era of our lowest economic growth. Now, when our institutions are so bad, we're actually growing economically quite well. So maybe it doesn't matter so much. I don't know.
- [48:32]
A
Coming to you, Matish, I wanted to ask you about inequality. Many years ago, the French anthropologist Louis Dumont wrote a book about the caste system called homo Hierarchical. And, you know, many Indians were outraged by the title because the argument was that India Indians are homo hierarchical. And certainly in a scriptural sense, in a philosophical sense, they have defined, elaborated, practiced, enforced inequality in a far more sophisticated and, dare one say, diabolical way than any other culture. So we are homo hierarchicus. And if you look at economic liberalization, in a sense, it's increased income inequalities. It certainly has made a dent in poverty, as you suggested. But, you know, sometimes it is said by optimistic people that there's a Kuznets curve, and if you look at the west, the middle class will grow, inequalities rise in the first phase of development. Then they kind of narrow down. But you already see signs of the resentment that inequality causes. You mentioned Maoism, very rightly. Another sign is actually less noticed, is less noticed for this reason is farmer suicide. Indebtedness and the failure of the monsoons is endemic in Indian history. But farmers never kill themselves. Why do they do so now? I think there is a real resentment against this real sense of failure, a real resentment against the celebration of success by the media. How much inequality can a democracy sustain? You talked about the Maoist movement. Will we see, you know, violence as is against the rich and the kind of luxury classes, as is there in South Africa or Latin America. How much inequality can a democracy sustain?
- [50:18]
E
That's a great question. And the answer is, up to a point, really not extreme level. So just sort of some thoughts on this topic. So, I mean, clearly you have to. I mean, there are several dimensions of inequality. I mean, you know, and there's an entire branch of economics which is really about computing various sort of, you know, measures of inequality. Because roughly speaking, it's a bit like, are the poor getting poorer? That could lead to inequality. But it's like the poor are constant, but the rich getting richer, that could lead to inequality. So there's good inequality, bad inequality. And also there is, of course, some sort of, I think, generally accepted, at least within economics, that full equality might not be Sort of an achievable sort of, you know, just from the nature of economic processes and how market system work. But having said that, I agree with you that in sort of, in terms of, I think the biggest scandal about India's sort of, you know, both the democratic experiment as well as the economic success, success story, there's something that sort of we almost like is the crazy aunt we keep in the attic or it's like the stuff you leave behind the curtains is really how we treat our poor. I mean, you know, and they, they obviously, you know, there's several dimensions of it. And one of the things that I was reflecting and actually I also. This is discussed in your very nice article in 2007 EPW about the position of scheduled tribes. So actually the only group in India that does worse than the Muslims is actually the scheduled tribes.
- [51:47]
A
Worse than the Muslims. And the Dalits.
- [51:48]
E
And the Dalits, exactly. So if you actually look at the numbers, so there is this entire, you could call them native Indians in the sense of these were the Adi basis or the original inhabitants who really live in largely forest and covered areas which also happen to be mining rich. So that's why some of the recent kind of liberalization induced sort of, you know, intrusion of capital into this area have led to various conflicts. And that is clearly one big sort of thing associated with the Maoist movement. But in general though, there are various other types of inequalities and one of the, I think again, I mean this makes the sort of, as I said, the broad point is that the Indian state has not done very well at all, to put it very mildly in terms of dealing with abject poverty. And whether it's, you cut it by economics or we cut it by social categories and so on, this is where I'll just give you one small example. If you look at the Indian government's budgetary allocation, given the economic globalization, there's a fair bit of formal sector tax revenue that both the central government and the state governments, they get in various ways. If you actually look at the expenditure patterns that I think will tell you I really don't need to say much more. So basically most of it is spent on essentially formal sector salaries and formal sector kind of, you could argue, non essential expenditure as opposed to development projects or as opposed to redistribution, whether in cash or whether in the form of public services to the poor. So this is a situation where we have a hinterland of abject poverty and which, you know, in some cases where it is accentuated by some of the predatory behavior under, you know, sort of some of the, you know, in the mining areas and in the tribal areas, but in other cases, often it's not so much an accentuation of the problem, it's more like benign and sometimes not so benign neglect of a whole sort of, you know, agriculture informal sector where all during all this period there has not been any growth, but coming back to it. And I don't want to paint an uniformly sort of gloomy and sort of, you know, picture here. It was implicit in your question one of the striking things, I don't think it's been quantified enough to give statistics, but some of the Dalits and scheduled castes during the liberalization period, those who could take advantage of the service sector boom have actually, there have been several stories in the media, the New York Times published several and so on. So that's the aspirational story where they basically said that the so called Nehruvian planning bureaucratic infrastructure which had its noble elements and something that was, was commented among. But over time it increasingly become ossified and captured by various interests that were basically not true to the original objectives. Essentially what this liberalization, for all its sort of some of the attendant problems really decentralized and to some degree sort of reduced the power of the centralized state. And through that some flowers have bloomed. I mean some amount of enterprise, some amount of aspirational effects and have happened. It has not trickled down sufficiently in some groups of people. They have actually led to imagerization. So there's nothing to sort of, you know, go on with. But clearly there is a certain sense and this goes back to the point about how Muslims are voting and the whole, you know, the fact that people are no longer looking at the state as Sarkarma baap, which is like the government as the, you know, parental state which is basically supposed to, you know, deliver things to you, which it has not really been successful, you know, successful. And you know, so there is a sense of individualism, there's a sense of individual aspiration. So in these senses, at least within the sort of, you know, I would say the formal or modern sector, the India shining sector, certain dimensions of inequality have actually gone down.
- [55:34]
A
Thank you, Matthij. We've had a series of fascinating reflections, responses, perspectives from our speakers. It's time now to open it out to the audience and I will take two or three questions before so. Yes, you wait for the mic.
- [55:52]
E
Well, I'm a student at LSE. I just want to ask Ms. Banerjee, do you agree with Professor John Kenneth Galbraith when he said that India is a functioning anarchy.
- [56:06]
A
When you have one third of India.
- [56:08]
E
Is under the influence of Naxalism, Northeast India, you have this ethnic divide. And in Kashmir, the presence of Indian army is the only symbol of India's sovereignty. Now that is the seriousness the whole country is going through. So we are a functioning anarchy.
- [56:27]
B
Just for a sec.
- [56:27]
E
There are some very important points. Number two, don't you think that we are a geographic entity? We have not yet become a nation state. And Professor Ramchandra Goha could address why India is not having a revolution, a bloody revolution with so much of poverty and discrimination? Is it because our poverty does not make people perform into class because of caste and religion and ethnic divide?
- [56:52]
C
Thank you.
- [56:53]
A
Thank you. In the middle there. Yeah, the gentleman there with a black T shirt.
- [56:59]
D
Yeah.
- [57:03]
B
Hi.
- [57:05]
E
Going back to the start of the.
- [57:06]
A
Lecture, isn't it true that the large.
- [57:09]
E
Sums of money that are required to.
- [57:10]
B
Run for election, right, like organizational costs.
- [57:13]
E
Things like that, really prevent any but the richest people, who are often sons.
- [57:20]
D
And daughters of politicians, from running for.
- [57:22]
E
Power in the status quo?
- [57:25]
A
Yeah, you got here. This lady in the red.
- [57:37]
C
Thank you for your interesting panel discussion. If I'm not wrong, the present composition of both the houses of the Parliament and the state legislative bodies is based on a census which was conducted in 1980. There was a constitutional amendment, I believe the first 44th amendment and the figures are frozen to take effect I think from the 2020 census. So we are actually living in a position where, for instance, let's say Jammu and Kashmir, where the population, where Jammu in 1980 probably had greater population and therefore more MLAs and more MPs had representation of in the houses of Parliament and state legislative assemblies. However, because of floating population and several other factors, the demographic compositions in different states have changed and that has not been replicated in the structure of both houses of Parliament and the state legislatures. Do you see that as a fault line?
- [58:43]
A
So, thank you. I mean, these various questions all really point to the gap between the form and content of democracy, whether philosophically, institutionally, in terms of rights or. Some quick reactions.
- [58:54]
B
Well, let me just react to that last point because I think it raises a very, very interesting and important question, which is how do you create and maintain legitimate forms of political representation in very, very large states like India, America, the eu? You know, these are problems that you, each of these large states are grappling with. And what you touch upon is a crucial point, which is that with population changes, I mean, the fact is that now in India at the national Parliament, a member of Parliament represents constituencies which vary in size from 1 to 3 million, sometimes even just below 1 million to 3 million. So that straight away means actually the value of a vote is not the same. It depends where you are and where you're voting. Your vote can be worth one third of what the vote. The value of a vote of someone who's voting in a constituency that's 1 million if your constituency is 3 million. So there's this great variation. So in a sense, when we talk about every vote is equal in India, it's not. So it depends where you're voting from. And there's this great discrepancy, and this is something that we haven't really addressed. It's a very sensitive issue. So there's that question about the size of constituencies. And again, you know, compare it with the size, the relationship that an MP and say in this country has with an electorate, a constituency of what, 50, 60,000? I'm not sure, but certainly much, much, much smaller. So that's one very, very important issue about the scale of representation. Representation and the discrepancy in it. The other, of course, is I think what you're touching on, which is that the disproportion of representation between different parts of the country, between different states, but also now very, very importantly between the north and the South. What you've seen is that population growth has expanded much more rapidly in the North, Growth rates have tailed off in the south, but the distribution of representation has not changed. So it basically means the north is underrepresented in national parliaments. Now, this is again a very, very tricky question because in trying to rebalance that, do you want to, in a sense, penalize those states which have actually brought down their growth rates, that is, the southern states, give them less representation in national government, and actually, in a sense, reward the more highly populating states, as it were, of the north by expanding their representation. Now, so there are complicated questions of political equity policy, you know, a whole series of different issues, and no. 1, it's 2 cents. It's a kind of football which gets kicked, keep being kicked forwards. So no one has really addressed it. What did happen recently was just before the last election, national election, general election, was an interesting and important rebalancing of greater representation to urban India. So that had, you know, the cities had been underrepresented because they had expanded greatly in population size, but the numbers of seats hadn't kept it. That actually was done, I think, quite subtly and cleverly. And so there is a better representation of the cities. But this north south question and the question of the size of constituencies remain, you know, very complicated issues to address.
- [62:28]
C
Yeah. Respond to two of those questions. The first thing you know about Galbraith's skepticism. That's precisely. I think that the last 60 year record is really a riposte to that kind of observation where he wasn't at all alone.
- [62:43]
B
But it wasn't a skepticism, it was a congratulation to India.
- [62:46]
C
I think, to be ordered anarchy. Yes, it's in the same spirit as Ram's comment about India being the most interesting but also the most infuriating place on earth, which is in that spirit. But it is, I think of all the three fault lines that you mentioned, again, I would come back to, I think I have to defend an optimism corner here because it's getting very bleak and doom and gloom and there has to be room. We have to find what we can to keep the optimism. The ways in which the democratic revolution has been talked about, if you talk to ordinary people, which is what I do a lot of, is talking to ordinary voters, they talk about their votes as weapons. So the choice of armed struggle is definitely a choice taken up by some. But actually the number of districts in India where elections cannot be held are 15 over 600 districts in India. So let's keep perspective. There is, yes, there is an armed struggle in large parts of central India and you absolutely can see what is going on and why there is cause for grievance. But there is a danger of overstatement. You talk about the Northeast and ethnic divides and so on. Again, Manipur is a very good example. And last week's triumph of the Congress chief minister is not because he's a thoroughly corrupt, thoroughly malfunctioning bad governance, no delivery mechanisms, et cetera. But really it was done on the basis his victory is basically because the electorate thought he was their best bet in dealing with this particular issue. So elections emerge and electoral politics, in this case democratic politics, emerges as a preferred avenue. And this, I'm saying this really from the perspective of the electorate. I should add here, if I may, Ram, that most people in India, most enthusiastic voters in India, which would preclude the apathetic middle classes who live in cities, they vote the least. But if you're poor and low caste and live in a small town or a village, you're likely to be a very enthusiastic voter in India. And this is counter to a lot of other global trends in other democracies. If you ask these people why they vote it is not because they think politicians are good and they're going to do something for them. They vote for hope. It's like Akhilesh Yadav's, what was it called? Umit ka Cycle. That was his slogan this last week. For those of you who understand in the UMI there's hope. It's about and cycle was their election party symbol. So he was talking about how really elections is a time of hope. But really the electorate are saying, we understand that politicians are corrupt and venal and dishonest. But we can throw them out in five years time if they don't deliver. And I think it is. It isn't just about being able to eat and drink and gain some prosperity and therefore not vote according to your vote banks. There is a certain element of that, of course, but it is about rewarding post clientelistic delivery mechanisms which is happening much more. Every government that has done even the slightest bit and the Left Front's 34 year rule in West Bengal is impossible to explain otherwise. Any government that has done even this much for poverty alleviation gets rewarded. And that has been a huge incentive to actually do something. And I think it will be interesting to see whether the UPA government is able to get a third term on the basis of that. If they get their act together very briefly on elections and money. Which I think is a really important question to have raised. Most people cannot be bemoan the fact that people don't enter electoral politics. And the going rate at the moment is one one crow to fight an election. And this might explain what Patrick's been saying about the nepotism and the hereditary family forms of politics. But again, fighting the optimistic corner. If I may just make an observation about this week's results with both Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi. For those of you who are following the results. And Akhilesh Yadav is, as Ram said in his introductory remarks of 40, 30 something, 38 year old man, son of. You know. So on the face of it, this is a classic case of what Patrick is describing, right? Mulayam Singh Yadav, head of the Samajwadi Party. His son becomes the Chief Minister. He's been anointed chief Minister. If you look at Akhilev Yadav's biography though he is exactly. He's a bad son. He fought with his father. He wanted to marry a Brahmin woman. His father threw him out of the house. He said he stuck to his his guns. He married her. Father excommunicated him. He came back and now in his politics, right, in the last five days that they've been dithering about whether to appoint him as Chief Minister, he has basically gone against everything that Mulayam Singh Yadav has stood for. He hasn't given his cronies tickets, he hasn't. He's talked about a third wave and Mulayam Singh. So all I'm saying is that if you look at him, Akhilesh Yadav and in interestingly also Rahul Gandhi, who of course is the, you know, you just have to say Rahul Gandhi. If you want to talk about dynastic politics you just say Rahul Gandhi and everybody seems to understand what we're talking about. But again, and I have sympathy with that, take. But again if you look at Rahul Gandhi's particular interest in politics, he cannot commit to being a Prime ministerial candidate or indeed Chief Minister of up, which is why there was no way the Congress was going to win. But what really moves Rahul Gandhi's interest in politics, we are told is a genuine interest in what he calls a third tier of democracy, local level democracy, of bringing in people. You know, the observation that he made is that look, There are about 100 people in India who choose the 5,000 odd elected representatives that we have of all the different tiers of democracy to rule a billion people. This must be wrong. And therefore the tickets given to 150 OBCs unprecedented for a Congress government. And the Congress hasn't been, I mean lost in Punjab precisely for that reason. It picks paternalistic old elite all the time. Not letting new blood in, but on the face of it. So you know, even our dynastic, our discussion of dynastic politics has to be nuanced. Looking at the particular actors where they may be sons but their agendas in politics might be either anti their fathers or anti entrenched party interests.
- [69:15]
A
That's a good point. Just one remark before I ask for more questions. And that's to do with a wonderful organization called the association for Democratic Reforms that urge those of you who don't know to go to the website which sets out a charter of practical practicable electoral reforms. But we'll go to more questions. Yes, sir. At the back. Yeah. Wait for the mic. Yeah.
- [69:36]
E
Do you think the time has come.
- [69:37]
A
For, for a radical reexamination of this idea of India? And as Arundhati Roy suggested recently that it's time that this state which is absent in many parts of India, as Patrick says, only appears in a kind of an imperial form in states like Kashmir and Manipur and Nagaland and so on. And hasn't the time come for India to get out of there?
- [70:13]
D
Yeah.
- [70:14]
E
My question has to do with the uniqueness of Indian democracy. And so the question is, to what extent do you see the Indian democratic model in itself as an offspring of the Western liberalization policy, which often marry liberalization with democratic changes, or is it a homegrown democracy that we can say it's demand from within or the normal population?
- [70:37]
B
Yeah.
- [70:37]
A
At the back of it, we have another round of that.
- [70:41]
C
The Kashmir problem has been going on.
- [70:43]
E
For the past 60 years now.
- [70:45]
A
India and Pakistan have fought four wars over Kashmir. Do the panelists think that the Kashmir problem is perpetual or it is soluble?
- [70:56]
E
Thank you very much.
- [70:57]
A
That's a good question. Anyway, let me start from here on any of these questions, all of them.
- [71:02]
E
Okay, so whether we should essentially liquidate India. That was one of the questions. And if you use business terms, it's time to sort of.
- [71:11]
B
That the LSE considers big questions.
- [71:14]
E
Exactly. You know, I, again, I'm not a political scientist. You know, I obviously, if you do economics, you have to, you know, put a lot of weight on political forces and political economy and so on. My general sense, though, is, you know, I think what Mokulika said a couple of. I agree with some of the empirical sort of studies she's referring to and some, you know, and so on. I genuinely think that Indian democracy is very. It's hardwired into our cultural sort of DNA to use sort of, you know, sort of fashionable terms. And therefore, I think it's very authentic. And indeed, if you, I'll give you sort of a state of West Bengal, where I come from, and most of my empirical studies are about West Bengal. So even the left movement, which fundamentally is not a democratic, in the sense of parliamentary democracy movement.
- [72:08]
B
Right.
- [72:08]
E
It has been really about capturing state power. And of course, in that sense, Maoists have always been the true followers or the true sort of, you know, sort of, you know, whereas allegedly the CPIM and others have kind of, you know, made compromises. But even if you look at the discussions within that, they accept that the Soviet model or the China model, whatever, you know, the democracy is something that you have to sort of accept. It sort of almost comes before everything else. You can have markets, you may not have markets, you can have liberalization, you may not have liberalization, but democracy is not kind of being questioned. Another thing that, you know, going back to, I would, you know, just really expressing my hope that India really doesn't sort of you know, dissolve itself. I really think that in this discussion, this role of civil society NGOs didn't come up because I think some of the really important legislative developments that have happened in real, you know, recent years is not the Nehru Mahalana Bist sort of, you know, standing on the top and sort of, you know, doing reforms, which some of them were obviously infrastructure building were very important ones. But it's really grassroots. If you take the Right to Information act, which is Aruna Roy, and essentially it's an NGO that started it. So I genuinely think that both the formal sort of, you know, machinery of democracy, but more informal, you know, aspects of it. You know, for example, Patrick mentioned the kind of conversations he had in Kashmir makes me optimistic. It doesn't mean that one has to be complacent. It is true that our media or our focus is often away from the really difficult or dark areas which do not have the representation that really they deserve. But on the whole, I think Indian democracy is in very good shape and I feel optimistic about the future.
- [73:48]
D
There are so many questions I would like to answer and discuss. I'm also broadly in the optimism corner and I don't think there's any advantage, for example, Manipur succeeding. If you look at places where the state dissolves, you look at Congo, you look at Afghanistan, they don't seem to me models which really have anything to offer India. And I know that's quite an unpopular view. I was in an east coast university at the end of last year and I was attacked quite bitterly for privileging the nation state by saying this. But, you know, to me, that is actually quite an important thing to say, because the alternative for India, when you look at some other neighboring Asian countries, is so much worse. And I think one of the things that is quite startling when you're in India is how little social resentment there is. One of the questioners said, why is there not a bloody revolution? And at one level, you can look at the statistics and say, well, you'd think that people would react in that way. And yet again and again, social surveys show that there is quite a high degree of contentment despite those high levels of inequality in India. It's also perhaps worth mentioning that some of the things that are commonly cited, for example, the statistics on pharmaceutical suicides, don't really stack up. When you look at the data, if you look at the survey that is often quoted of 200,000 farmer suicides, you look at the levels of reported suicides in some parts of Maharashtra, and then you look at the data for UP where it appears in theory at least, there are almost no suicides at all. You begin to think, well maybe people are picking the numbers in order to put forward a particular point of view. So just very quickly because we're running out of time, I'll just allude to three things. On Indian democracy. Is there a specific version of homegrown if you like non western democracy in India? I think there definitely is. It becomes more and more complex and more and more interesting and more and more specific to India itself. Whether that can in the future be replicated in other large countries. Who knows? Is Kashmir soluble? I think it is because I think that in a way the existing stalemate is almost certainly going to at some point in the future to determine what the solution will be. I don't think anybody on either side thinks seriously that the actual line of control is likely to alter significantly. And just one final allusion is to what Sunil said of the increasing lack or the growing lack of suave and urbane people in government in New Delhi in the future. I think that is probably true but I don't think it's too much for worry. I think in many ways that might actually bring India certain benefits on the world stage. And I'm, I'm thinking in particular of an anecdote which I heard around the time when Malayam Singh Yadav became Defence Minister and he went on his first visit to an army outpost in Kashmir and the officers wives had prepared him cucumber sandwiches with homemade mayonnaise and he had a look at them and then said in rough Hindi get me a glucose biscuit.
- [76:37]
C
That's lovely.
- [76:38]
A
So yeah, yeah, you're next.
- [76:43]
D
Next.
- [76:43]
E
I just wanted to ask about how would the effect of, compared to politics between the different parties say let's talk about FDI in retail or even Kashmir or on the, on the foreign policy. Because you see often the BJP would oppose what the Congress would try and do in the power and vice versa.
- [77:00]
A
That's a very good question. Yes sir. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [77:06]
D
I'd just like to hear your take on whether you think corruption is a ferocious fault line and how it impacts on all the areas that we've been.
- [77:14]
E
Discussing so far because it does seem.
- [77:16]
D
A bit like the elephant in the.
- [77:17]
A
Room right at the back.
- [77:19]
D
That's an allusion to Myawati, right? No, sorry.
- [77:24]
A
Maybe.
- [77:27]
E
Is the Indian economic experience a clear example of the discreditation of the trickle down effect or is the trickle down effect the perfect opiate for a bunch of people intoxicated by hope.
- [77:42]
A
Okay, one last and then we'll have some final comments. I'll take two more questions, then we'll have a last wrap up. Yeah, go ahead.
- [77:53]
C
Pointing to I think a more obvious elephant in the room, perhaps India's democracies biggest ferocious fault line is not its corruption issues but it's gender partiality. And to what extent, I mean it's something we haven't mentioned. But if you're looking at social demographics, economics, human development studies, I mean even down to international relations studies, where are the women? And surely isn't that going to have.
- [78:19]
B
Some effect on India's future?
- [78:22]
A
Hopefully we'll have one more round of questions but let me get the panelists to respond individually.
- [78:31]
B
Well, okay. A lot of things to say. I mean on the question of policy differences between the political parties and you know, continuity and so on, actually it's quite interesting in a number of the sort of critical areas of policy for India, although when the party is in opposition they will make a lot of rhetorical play of disagreeing. Actually there's a lot of continuous, particularly on foreign and economic policy. So actually there have been changes of government since the, since the early 90s, several India said coalition governments, Congress governments, third front government, BJP governments. There's been a basic continuity of economic policy and also essentially a foreign policy. So there's quite a lot of, there's quite a lot of actually policy stability. In fact it becomes actually policy inertia. It becomes so stable a lot of the time. So that's a different matter. On the question of corruption, yes, it's there. It's not going to go away soon. It's also an avenue of opportunity for many Indians. And I think it's actually a way in which, you know, for many Indians it's their best form of social mobility. So, you know, corruption is a complicated thing. I just quickly wanted to say a couple of things about domestic democracy. And so I mean I don't think democracy is hardwired into any society. Democracy is a fragile experiment that can go wildly wrong. Most of human societies and most of human history have lived without democracy. So the fact that it exists in India is actually an extraordinary, extraordinary achievement. And you know, it'll only exist as long as Indians manage in some kind of ramshackle way to maintain the skill of doing it. But it's very easy to fall off that bicycle. So there's nothing hardwired I think about it. It's a totally, you know, it's a totally fragile project. And I think in fact the answer to Kashmir is actually whether or not India can start to create a system, a political system in India that is open more to democratic representation. The moments when it has done Kashmir has much receded as a problem. And actually there's very clear experience of that. So I would just say that. The other thing I would say is it's absolutely right that, you know, there's a lot of stuff happening at the level of civil society. There are a lot of extraordinary people doing all kinds of extraordinary work all over India and that's an amazing inspiration and example. But at the end of the day, it has to be scalable. India is a huge society and it has to be, in that sense have a state which functions. So the idea that somehow one can bypass the state, I totally agree with Patrick on that. That's an illusion. You know, the only thing, and the only thing worse than not having a, than having a state is not having a state, really. And so in that sense, you know, Indians have put their destiny in the hands of a state and now we have to make that work.
- [81:26]
C
Very briefly, just two quick points on corruption. It's very interesting that corruption is always an issue and whenever there is an alternative, people go for it. So it is punished, at least when people can, and most of the time they can't, which is a problem. The question about hope and your slightly, your tongue in cheek representation of popular hope being opiate, I think, you know, if I had to pinpoint one fault line that I think is the most important one, it would be that it is what is India's strength or Indian democracy's strength at the moment is also its most tenuous fault line, which is precisely that. It hangs on a politics of hope, participation by people. The fact that they feel invested, that 50, 50% of Indians still express satisfaction with the governments that they have is extraordinary given their performance, as we've been in great pains to show, how completely abysmal their record has been. More than 50% of Indians are actually happy with their government and they continue to engage with the political system and continue to participate with enthusiasm and hope because they think this is the best way to contain and to aspire and to build a better world for themselves, if that shifts. And I think the danger here is that if there is a flattening out of political choices, if there isn't a growth in political capacity of people, which is about awareness and connections and efficiency and so on, that hope is very fragile. So actually this system is turning on it.
- [83:13]
D
I'll just take the question on Gender partiality. I think it's very interesting. I mean there are again reasons for hope. There's the fact that in this particular election last week there was very high female turnout to vote. There's the fact that there's been an amendment to the constitution which puts a reserve or will shortly put a reserved number of seats for women in all elected bodies. And just one thing that I, if you like, on the more negative side, when I did the study of hereditary politics I noticed there was a possibly coincidental exact correlation between the three places where hereditary politics was most intense. Delhi, Punjab and Haryana with the rates of the feticide of female children. So it was almost as if the two things were quite closely tied in together. But I didn't investigate it any further than making the observation.
- [84:09]
E
Okay, thanks. Just a couple of quick comments. One on trickle down economics. I agree that in fact the statistics I reported does show that trickle down has not quite worked out for large sections of the population. But having said that, I think that we should also think in terms of benchmarks when we make statements like that. If you take the Chinese model development, clearly the level of dispossession and sort of expropriating farmers and some of the movements relating to land that is again it's not even sort of forget trickle down, it's sort of state sponsored expropriation at a large scale which doesn't even because of the controlled media, doesn't get the kind of media publicity, having said that, not to deny China's investment in basic education and health that are of course there are some, you know, positives from that. So it's not clear which economic model. So it's not like there's a beautifully worked out model for inclusive growth that we could sort of, you know, so therefore I think India is really stumbling and sort of, you know, stumbling along and I believe on an upward trajectory and also just a kind of quick remark on the issue about the values of democracy being in our DNA. So just want to clarify, I think based on Sunil's comment what I meant was institutionally democracy is of course very fragile. You can't take that as given. But I think in our value system and people's expectations, you know, form around certain things that if you look at India's experiment with formal democracy it's remarkable that if you compare that with any peer country, the fact that except for a brief two year period of the emergency which was severely punished by the electorate when Indir Gandhi was voted out of power. So I want to make the distinction, yes, the democracy as an institution is a fragile project that is continuous work in progress. But in terms of core values of what India sort of, I think freedom of expression, exercise of electoral rights, I think these are things that I don't think any political party in a long term sense can really mess around with given sort of the expectations and the sense of entitlements that people have, I.
- [86:14]
A
Suppose also given how many times people have exercised already. So then you can't, you know, the LSE generally ends its public programs at 8pm, but this is a discussion on India and Indians are ferociously unpunctual. So I've got to allow a last round of questions. First, from the top there.
- [86:39]
E
I see.
- [86:39]
B
All the non Indians are leaving.
- [86:43]
E
Hello, I'm a student from Kings. My question is regarding public finances. When you look at the present situation in the eu, there are a lot of states which are going bankrupt. And if you look at the Indian scenario, we're all happy about the economic growth and we're all excited about it, no doubt. But at what cost is this coming? As in, if you look at the state finances, in most states, the public debt is going up dramatically and we have no way to control it. Half of it is nearly towards government salaries or towards interest payments. So in light of that, how sustainable is India's growth?
- [87:23]
A
That's a great question. Yeah.
- [87:28]
E
Yeah. My question is to Professor Matri. To what extent do you think India's liberalization policy post 1990 failed to trigger this whole trickle down effect? What you were mentioning, especially in terms of talking about regional income inequality, and to what extent do you think something like land acquisition policy would play a major role in addressing this issue of whole regional inequality in the future?
- [87:55]
A
Thank you.
- [87:57]
E
Wait for the mic.
- [87:58]
A
Wait for the mic.
- [87:59]
D
Come back to the question of corruption, because there's a question I'd like to ask. To what extent do you think the furore about corruption and unprofessionalism in Indian political and elite society is really a code for deep seated hostility and hatred of the rise of OBCs and particular Dalits to positions of wealth and power? I mean, one example I would give, and, and I don't particularly hold much of a candle to Mayor Watti, but I was in India in January and the media frenzy and hostility to the question of her statues in UP seemed to me to reflect not really the question of Mayor Wati and her statues, but the absolute hostility that there should be Dalits who have statues of them in up.
- [88:54]
A
Well, yeah, yeah. One last question. Maybe last two. Yeah.
- [89:01]
E
Very quickly.
- [89:02]
C
I just wanted to. So do you think Indian democracy and the governance deficit that is we're facing right now in policy paralysis, is that actually testing the doctrine of separation of powers, specifically the Supreme Court and the media, which is erecting itself as this fourth pillar? What are your thoughts on that?
- [89:18]
A
And you said last, last question.
- [89:20]
E
Absolutely. Why is it that in a democracy, and we've been a democracy for most of the last 60 years, that no one ever thinks that providing primary education or primary health is important and it now is even off everyone's agenda?
- [89:39]
A
So I'll request the panelists to also fold in your concluding remarks as if any. Along with the answer question. But since there was questions on public finance, etc. We have to start with you.
- [89:51]
E
Okay. So economist first. I thought we were in a pretty liberal. I didn't realize we were in a pretty liberal environment. So I already made my concluding remarks, I think a couple of rounds ago. But I'm happy to. No, no, no, no, no, no. Definitely no. No. I'm so coming to sort of, you know, you know, the questions about public finance. No, I agree that essentially there are so many things I already mentioned, this whole expenditure on salaries and, you know, and so on that is eating up the development budget and so on. So I really think that in some ways it's not a matter of, you know, growth has happened in India in a way because state chose to sort of, you know, not stay away from certain sectors. And indeed, the whole telecommunications revolution, which has of course led to things like the 2G scam, but talking about corruption, which has also led to sort of, you could say that kind of mobile to the people as opposed to power to the people, like mobile phone revolution has happened. And in lots of ways there are micro studies that are showing some of the economic kind of benefits of that. So clearly a lot of this growth has happened in some ways because the government basically chose to deregulate certain sectors. And it's not so much it was really government investment in the sectors that caused the growth. But what has happened is, of course, in other sectors, in large parts of the economy, like agriculture and manufacturing, the growth has not happened. And eventually, given the various sort of, you know, problems with the budget, including sops to the rich, lots of corporate subsidies, you could say kind of corporate welfare type things, and a total neglect of, or really absence of a good delivery mechanism for primary health and education. Going back to some of these questions. So they. But I would not really draw the analogy of the EU budget Because that's where basically these are people who are all in the formal sector and technically tax paying. Whereas in India there are large sectors of the economy that are simply not within the, you know, agriculture also being that, and that benefits the richer farmers. So that's sort of, you know, and you know, I therefore think that really, if you ask me in terms of bullet points as to some of the, I really think that at some level we should focus and not, you know, try to undermine the growth enhancing aspects of certain policies. But really what the real problem is effective redistribution, effective public service delivery, effective creation of a welfare state. And essentially, you know, and that is where there's an ongoing debate about the India Shining guys who think it's a waste of public money and so on. And indeed some economists, such as Prana Bardhan has shown, doing some budgetary arithmetic, that if you cut say certain sops to richer farmers, such as fertilizer subsidies, you can actually generate resources that would, you know, essentially enable us to run this public distribution systems and other delivery things quite well. And secondly, most importantly, decentralization. So often it's not so much about the market economy and so on, it's really the centralized government sort of administration, while it has certain good things, but it also stifles certain individual initiatives. So I think decentralization should be a big bullet point. And finally, legal reform. I think in India one of the shocking things is that, you know, we have lots of ways of cutting discrimination or injustices, including, but riots in the end are murder if you have a good legal system where murder is penalized. Okay, so if you have, and this is just to take a dramatic example, but also all the extrajudicial killings, the encounter killings and so on. So, and coming to more economic domains where you have legal sort of, you know, processes that prevent say land acquisition and so on, that you clearly don't want to freeze up the land market, but on the other hand you don't want predatory expropriation. And, and clearly we can learn from other legal systems how to balance the need for transfer of properties. I mean, if you all believe in freezing the land market in London, we would not find places to live. So we certainly need to have some market transactions in land, but what we need to have is protection of property rights.
- [93:48]
D
So I don't think I'll tackle the question of trickle down economics because I've never really found anybody who completely believes in trick trickle down economics. You can believe in economic liberalization in the case of India, as I do, but that doesn't mean that trickle down economics works. The point on primary education and healthcare is I think unanswerable. It's undeniable. That has been the case. They have been completely ignored by successive governments from 1947 onwards. The point about corruption and Mayawati statutes, I have to say I would absolutely agree with you. I mean what is extraordinary if you're in luck now is quite how popular those statues are. You read the Delhi media and you would think that Mayawati was the most corrupt person in India. Well, she's not, she's certainly not the richest person in India who's made money by dubious means. And okay, I mean she's lost the election. Her vote share didn't go down that significantly. But again and again you find people who absolutely love the fact that she's there holding the handbag in the statue with Kanchi Ram opposite. And there's Bedka reading the book and the new. You've got the elephant statues and everything. They are popular. Obviously if you're kind of traditional, kind of Lucknow type, you don't like it. But that's another story. And the final point I'd make is that this key question of whether democracy has rooted itself in India better than it might do elsewhere, rather in the manner of Nostradamus al Biruni about 1,000 years ago seemed to predict some form of democracy. There were a few centuries of invasions and finally, you know, you had to get the British out in 1947. But once democracy started, it seems to me that what he said, which is that Indians don't like to stake their life on a religious issue but they will happily talk and debate about it at great length, seems to be some kind of pre figuring of the flourishing democracy that we see in 2012.
- [95:37]
C
Okay, just a couple of observations really. One, somebody mentioned the media there and something we haven't talked about at all, which is a fairly invisible but very prevalent fault line, is the growing nexus between corporations and television stations. For instance, Mukesh Ambani has recently acquired a majority stake in TV18 which controls one of the best English language channels on television. And this is just a growing trend. So paid news is a big issue and I think if there is got to be a plurality of opinion, the media, which we so far have held to be largely free and fair, is going to be severely compromised and we need to think about that. I can't resist in fact endorsing and Patrick's done that already with Mayavati. The issue about Mayavati, I don't. It's yes, you're right. That it is, it's galling that there is no understanding of how important statues of Mayavati are to a growing Dalit public sphere. That there is a Dalit public sphere that has grown out of having a BSP government is something that most journalists, especially who don't write in any other language but English, they don't understand this. But Mayavati did also lose a lot of credibility, mainly because of what wealth did to her and her inaccessibility. And that is what was punished, in a sense, by the electorate. So they're completely different reasons of what was thought to be happening and what happened about trickle down economics. I'm not. I just wanted to remind us that, you know, we have say, I think Jem Meyner in a recent piece pointed out a comment by Narasimha Rao where he says very, very clearly, when he first as India's prime minister liberalized the economy in the early 90s, he very clearly said that this was not about trickle down economics, it was the social democrat model. And it is that model. I think this is what you were saying, Patrick, as well, that there is a, it is not about growth rates somehow trickling down to alleviate poverty, but there is a very central role of the state, which is, which is, I think, why a lot of us endorse the importance of the state that the government and the state themselves believe, including the current government and arguably even the NDA government, the BJP government. So, yeah, and therefore the revenues, again, the figures on public deficits and so on, the revenues that the central government has been able to the state government revenues for expenditure on development have at least quadrupled in the last five years. And that is so the budgets, the kind of money that is available for social programs has increased enormously. So it's not a problem of not enough money, that's for sure.
- [98:33]
B
Thank you. I'll just focus on one question which I think raises some interesting points about the separation of powers, because I think that there's a very interesting contest going on. And in the Indian system, I mean, there isn't a very kind of strict separation of powers. Power is separated in a variety of different ways. I mean, there's obviously the three branches, but there's also the federal and the state separation of powers. And in fact, there's often a kind of blurring of boundaries between them. So you have the federal and state division, but then you also have what's called the concurrent list. So there's a kind of set of responsibilities and duties which extend to both elements and increasingly a number of things to say about that. So I think increasingly, as you've seen, in a sense, the elected elements of government actually not functioning well. You've seen more and more power and exercise of power by the non elected elements of government. So the election Commission is obviously one example which keeps but the Supreme Court is, is another very clear example where the Court has increasingly intervened and indeed interfered in political subjects, subjects which.