The democratization of the Indian democracy by Christophe Jaffrelot, Director of Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI)

(Christophe Jaffrelot’s latest book: Inde : la démocratie par la caste - Histoire d’une mutation socio-politique (1885-2005), Ed. Fayard, June 2005)

For a longtime, the Indian democracy was more formal than significant because it functioned in a closed circuit: admittedly the alternation brought new men to assume positions of responsibility, but their sociological profile remained the same. In fact three groups of the Indian elite – all of high caste – shared out the power between themselves: the intelligentsia, largely comprising the Brahmin caste, with a very high presence in the civil service and heading political parties, the business classes, mainly from the trading class (vaishyas), and the land owners from the warrior castes (kshatriyas), at least as far as old princes (Maharajahs) are concerned. These three groups had divergent interests.

The intelligentsia that identified with the government considered that it had the authority to govern and its determination was justified by the need to construct the nation-State. Both out of concern for the liberation of the State, (‘its’ State), from the supervision of the ‘traditional elites’ as well as out of conviction, the intelligentsia therefore antagonized the ‘capitalists’ and the ‘feudal lords’ by proposing nationalizations and an agrarian reform. These two groups had however some considerable assets since they were holding the economy and enjoying a big social power. It was not long before the intelligentsia of the Congress government acknowledged it because its members had come from the same social world. Some of them had even weaved close ties with a certain Maharajah by working in his administration or with a certain businessman by becoming his advocate.

In the face of the opposing balance of power, rather than entering into a purely antagonistic relation from which no one would have easily emerged victorious, these three elites invented a form of conservative democracy from which each one got something out of it. The Congress made a tacit deal with the business community and accordingly gave up on a number of socialist reforms that it had in the pipeline in exchange for financial support that certain company heads were already providing and what’s more even before independence. Between 1962 and 1968, the Indian companies officially donated close to 26 million rupees to the political parties, out of which 20.5 million to the Congress*. But the donations to the parties only represented about one fifth of the funds coming from private sources: the main amount was paid to individuals, the Prime Minister, other members of his government, but also to some candidates running for a seat in the Parliament. These incomes were mainly used for financing election campaigns during the polls that became more and more disputed from the 1960’s, as the opposition to the Congress which was being masterminded by new political parties was getting worse.

The same transition from conflict to collaboration – indeed to collusion of interests – was seen in the relation between the State intelligentsia and the landowners. This conflict was all the more sharp in 1947 because for decades the landowners had been in the enemy camp of the Congress: they had collaborated with the British to replace their authority locally (or even regionally in the case of princes, Maharajahs or other Nawabs). In reaction and in keeping with its socialist ideals, the Congress had included an agrarian reform in its program even before independence. After 1947, it was voted all right, but its implementation turned out to be very laborious. When Nehru was persevering in bringing about reforms, the Congress was multiplying the exemptions in the states (it controlled practically all the states until 1967). The agrarian ceilings were often raised beyond reasonable measures depending on the lack of irrigation or the number of owner’s dependent persons. Above all, the authorities turned a blind eye to frauds: for example, registering a land in the name of a parent in order to remain within the limits of the agrarian ceilings and escape a redistribution of one’s land. Instead of continuing to estrange the worthy country folks, the Congress had finally chosen to make them its allies. These people ended up by becoming the pillars of the ‘ congress system ‘ since in exchange for the State’s indulgence they brought the Congress their tenants’ votes and the votes of all those people, the actual ‘vote banks’, who had been indebted to them.
Vote-catching gimmick and conservatism therefore dominated the first few decades of the Indian democracy. The three elites found the democracy to their taste for each one could highlight its assets. The intelligentsia was in control of the State due to its skills. The business classes could emphasize on their financial strike capacity better than in any other system where the governors would not have had any need of their financial manna to pay their election campaigns. The landowners found themselves in the same situation, even if their main resource was not financial but people – therefore the votes– that they held in their subordination.

The order really changed only from the 1990’s under the impact of positive discrimination measures with great political effects. Such programs were not new in India. In fact, this country served as a first laboratory to this type of social engineering – well before the United-States with ‘ affirmative action ’. The British created schools for the destitute by the end of the XIXth century, then they reserved some posts for them in the civil service from the period between the two wars. But until independence these policies only concerned the untouchable classes and the indigenous tribes. After 1947, the lower castes in turn entered the scene. The Constituent assembly invented the notion of Other Backward Classes out of regard for them. This new socio-administrative category referred to groups other than the untouchables and the indigenous groups who had to get exceptional government aid. In 1953, a national commission was appointed to identify these groups and their needs, in accordance with the procedure indicated by the article 340 of the Constitution. But then it made a list of 2 399 low castes – but not untouchables - and recommended setting up government quotas for them. The government rejected its report because it was not based on homogeneous indicators of social backwardness and it was placing too much emphasis on the caste in the definition of this delay, at a time when the State tried to develop a universalistic (and socialistic) conception of the Indian citizen**. The castes whose names were on this list had however understood the idea of campaigning for the implementation of the first Backward Classes Commission’s report. In several South-Indian states, quotas favoring OBC were therefore introduced in the local governments and certain educational and university establishments. In North India, the process was more laborious, for the balance of power tilted more towards the upper classes. They actually represented up to a fifth of the population in a State like Uttar Pradesh and dominated the economy – especially agricultural – proportionately.

In North India, the situation of the rural areas evolved in favour of the low castes following the Green Revolution of the 1960s due to which small farmers experienced a relative economic growth. They then understood that their strength lied in their number and joined forces behind the political parties such as the Socialist Party and Charan Singh’s Bharatiya Kranti Dal (Indian Party of the revolution), which, founded in 1969, was renamed Bharatiya Lok Dal (Indian people’s Party) in 1974. At the end of the 1970s, these formations participated in the power struggle through the Janata Party (People’s Party) with which they merged in 1977. In 1978, the Janata Party government – where Charan Singh was Deputy Prime Minister – appointed a new Backward Classes Commission, named Mandal Commission named after its President, B.P. Mandal. It submitted a report in 1980, which made out a new list of the OBC castes totalling 52% of the Indian population this time. To help them work their way up socially and economically, the Mandal report recommended that 27% of the central government posts be reserved for them.

The Congress came back to power in 1980 and the successive congress governments were very careful not to enforce this document. But the success of the opposition in 1989 enabled the new Prime Minister, V.P. Singh, to announce its implementation in August 1990, as much in the interest of social justice as for earning the favours of the OBC ‘s electorate for themselves. Some members of the upper castes reacted violently to the measure that questioned the quasi-monopoly that they enjoyed in the high civil service***. The demonstrations were particularly violent in Delhi where large number of students of upper castes came down to the roads. Some of them even immolated themselves as a protest. Some upper class Hindus referred the constitutionality of the Mandal report to the Supreme Court, and soon after, it deferred V.P. Singh’s decision. A counter action of the OBC ensued, which crystallized a new political identity: the OBC started to become aware of the interests that they had in common - the prospect of government quotas was its symbol - and the need to form a united front to exploit their main strength, the number. Therefore, they voted together and for their own people, as indicated by the evolution of the sociological profile of the elected Members of Parliament from the ‘Hindi belt’. In this zone that brought together Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi and Chandigarh, the members elected to the Lok Sabha were to a great extent from the upper classes until the 1970’s. The 1977 elections, those of the first alternation, had marked the beginning of a change, since the percentage of Members of Parliament from the upper classes touched below 50% (48.2% to be precise) for the first time. This phenomenon got worse during the second alternation in 1989, when the percentage of OBC’s was practically multiplied by two, to reach one fifth of the elected members, while that of the upper casts fell below 40% - hardly above 38.2%. The V.P. Singh government represented therefore many lower castes in the process of climbing the social and political ladder. The return of the Congress in 1991 did not however question this growth and the simultaneous decline of the upper classes within the Assembly, which did not stop from getting more pronounced ever since. The upper class Members of Parliament are but 33% today of the elected members of the ‘ Hindi belt ’ while those of the OBC castes have crossed 25%: the gap has never been so weak and it will undoubtedly reduce even further until the elected members of the lower classes outnumber the upper classes. Already, the power was handed over to the hands from the lower castes in the Indian Union states. The big North Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan were governed by the OBC’s most of the time since the beginning of the decade. A noteworthy fact, the presence of an untouchable heading a state – for example in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra – and not anymore only as the head of the country (as it was the case with Narayanan, President of the Republic altogether honorary in the 1990’s, now become commonplace.

The political trajectory of the ‘post Mandal period’ resulted in a democratization of the Indian democracy: henceforth, for many cases the alternations give way to transformation of the sociological profile of the keepers of power because they revolve around positions of responsibility of the parties that become the mouthpiece of lower classes, be they untouchables or OBC’s. In so doing, India steps out on the path of a real silent revolution. While it is far from having entered its maturity phase, the current process is unique in its genre, for the transfer of power has not yet reached all the decision-making organisms, to begin with the central government - no country has actually seen a mob bearing the scars of its birth gain power in this way through the ballot box, without bloodshed. Paradoxically, the caste will have been the vector of this mutation because it will have been the structure to incorporate the interests of the masses and weigh on the political game. The castes do not place themselves in the vertical organization of the yesteryears any more, where un underling with a demoted status deferentially watched these dominant Brahmins and the other kshatriyas; henceforth they are a part of a horizontal logic where they are none other than interest groups in competition in the political and social arena. In so doing, the caste has contributed in giving the Indian democracy a base that it was in need of: the peripheral groups that remained external to the system are now integrated and put a lot of effort, even more than the elite, whose members – the party having lost – willingly lapse into an anti-parlementarism in a traditional ‘ all rotten’ vein. In fact, this high-class elite henceforth believes less in democracy than in the market, which enables the two to coexist in a quite rare alchemy in the Southern hemisphere.


* Gopal Krishna, ‘One party Dominance, Development and Trends’, in CSDS, Party System and Election Studies, Bombay, Allied Publishers, 1967, pp. 41-42.

** Kaka Kalelkar, Report of the Backward Classes Commission. Vol. 1, Delhi, Government of India, 1955, and Govind Vallabh Pant, Memorandum on the Report of the Backward Classes Commission, Delhi, Ministry of Home Affairs, [s.d.], p. 2.

*** The Indian Administrative Service, an elite body recruited through competitive examinations, was comprised of 37.67% Brahmins, against 2.04% of OBC, according to the Mandal report (while the Brahmins represent less than 7% of the population). Generally, the OBCs represented only 12.5% of the central government (Report of the Backward Classes Commission, 1st Part, Vol. 1 et 2, New Delhi, Government of India, 1980, p. 42).