LITMIR.BIZ

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India became independent: ‘By 1949 conservative coalitions built by dominant landowning castes in alliance with urban businessmen had captured effective control of most [local] Congress Committees’ (Frankel 1978: 74). These particular ‘circumstances transmitted from the past’ severely constrained the possibilities for bringing about social and economic reforms on the part of the national political leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, in particular limiting the prospect of resolving the ‘agrarian question’ by means of redistributive land reform (which was implemented in some other Asian countries; see chapter 4).

The way the British governed India also enhanced the significance of caste identities. Caste was thought to be a guide to the qualities and the capacities of people, so identifying people by their caste was an important instrument of rule. It was for this reason that the colonizers sought to enumerate people by caste in the decennial census that started to be made in 1871. Those with what were held to be a martial character, for instance, were sought for recruitment into the army: ‘by the end of the 18th century there was a general push to identify the “manly races” and to identify the “castes” with appropriate martial qualities’ (Michelutti 2008: 73). In this way a process of ‘essentialization’ of caste (or we might say, a ‘hardening’ of caste) took place under colonial rule – and their caste identities took on a new meaning for Indians (Dirks 2001; Inden 1990). Some groups started to become organized in caste associations – a particular form of civil society organization (combining ascription and voluntarism) that has been seen as exemplifying ‘the modernity of tradition’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). In general, there came about an increased awareness of caste identity – and this is another set of ‘circumstances transmitted from the past’ that is of great importance in contemporary India, when caste communities compete through the process of electoral democracy for shares of state resources (see chapter 8).

      One aspect of colonial rule in regard to caste that is of enduring importance is the recognition by the colonial state of the disabilities of those groups, many of them originally agrarian slaves (Viswanath 2014), who came to be described as ‘untouchable’. They were deemed by the colonial state to deserve special assistance, or of what has become known generally as affirmative action. The last major piece of legislation passed by the British government concerning the government of India, the Government of India Act 1935, included the reservation of seats in legislative bodies for the so-called ‘Depressed Classes’, and a government order of 1936 contained a list (or ‘schedule’) of such caste communities. In 1943 the colonial state decided to combine reservation of seats with reserved jobs in government service for members of the ‘Scheduled Castes’ (‘SCs’), and these practices were then incorporated into the Constitution of independent India. This principle, of providing special privileges to those considered to have suffered from historical disabilities, came to be extended by the post-colonial state to many other caste communities – described officially as ‘Other Backward Classes’ (‘OBCs’) – and there continue to be claims being made even by groups that are actually very powerful, for this designation. The reservation of government jobs, and of seats in medical and engineering colleges, for the OBCs, is a powerful incentive for claiming the categorization (see chapter 11) – but it further contributes to the hardening of caste identities that began in the colonial period.

The extent to which colonial rule in India brought ‘social revolution’, therefore, was quite limited. The development of an urban middle class, albeit small, might be called a ‘social revolution’. But unlike the case of some other former colonies (a notable example is that of Vietnam), in which there was an armed struggle for independence, led by a radical political party, the struggle for independence in India was in many ways a conservative one that mainly adhered to the principles of non-violence expounded by Gandhi. There were those in India who took the line of violent resistance to colonial rule – the most notable figure being Bhagat Singh, who is a great folk hero (Maclean 2015) – but the mainstream of the freedom movement generally stuck to Gandhian principles. These included equivocation over caste, and even over untouchability, which Gandhi sought to contest in part by describing people from untouchable groups as ‘Harijans’, or ‘Children of God’. The name, today, is rejected as patronizing by many members of the Scheduled Castes, who call themselves ‘Dalits’ (meaning, literally, ‘broken’ or ‘oppressed’), though it is still used by others among them. The Congress movement that led the Indian struggle was conservative, too, in the sense that the leadership always sought to control potential radicalism on the parts of both peasants and workers (see, for example, Pandey 1982). As independence approached in the 1940s, another of the great leaders of the Congress, Vallabhai Patel, made sure that the Indian police force, created by the British on the lines of the Royal Irish Constabulary (an occupying force) rather than on those of the Metropolitan Police, and that had been used frequently to oppose the freedom struggle, remained in place – further ‘circumstances transmitted from the past’ that have contributed to the making of Narendra Modi’s India.

      The experience of the struggle for independence, however – and it was, probably, the greatest mass movement that the world has yet seen – meant that with the attainment of freedom from colonial rule, there was very little question but that India should be a parliamentary democracy, in line with the liberal ideals that members of the Indian elite had espoused with zeal since quite early in the nineteenth century and had used skilfully against their colonial rulers (see Sarkar 2001 on the historical inheritance of Indian democracy; and on liberalism and India, Bayly 2012). This played a central part in the second moment of historical change that we have distinguished.

1.4 The Invention of Modern India

      Democracy

As we suggested earlier, India was the subject of particular acts of invention through the prolonged deliberations of the Constituent Assembly that drew up the Constitution of India – the longest that there is in the world – in 1946–49. Of central importance was that India should be a parliamentary democracy – improbable though this was according to the classic comparative study of Barrington Moore (1966). India, he thought, presents the paradox of the establishment of political democracy without there having first been an industrial revolution. India (in the mid-twentieth century), Moore said, belonged to two worlds: ‘Economically it remains in the pre-industrial age … There has been no bourgeois revolution … But as a political species it does belong to the modern world’ (1966: 314). India’s democracy was imperfect, but certainly not a sham. Still, many of India’s problems, Moore thought, followed from the fact of the unlikely establishment of democracy in a country that, in the later 1940s had only a very small bourgeoisie – the class often credited with being at least the initial driving force behind democratization – and a very small organized working class, which other scholars find to have been the main social force pushing for the consolidation of democracy. India was still, as we’ve said, overwhelmingly an agrarian society, in which landlords remained powerful. And landlords, as Moore argued, depend heavily upon labour that is unfree, and so they are generally opposed to democratization.

      Yet, for the political elite who were the members of the Constituent Assembly, most of them from the Congress Party that had led the independence struggle, there was no question about it. India must be a democracy. Jawaharlal Nehru – with Gandhi and Patel the third member of the triumvirate that is seen as having led the independence movement, and independent India’s first prime minister – in moving the Resolution on Aims and Objects before the Constituent Assembly, in December 1946, declared: ‘Obviously we are aiming at democracy and nothing less than democracy …’ (CAD, 13 December 1946). The Constitution that was finally drawn up lays down that India is a democracy based on universal adult franchise, embracing women as well as men (and we should remember that women in France had been enfranchised only as recently as 1944, and that Swiss women were not to get the vote until 1971). The first national elections were held in 1952, following an extraordinary bureaucratic effort to register 170 million voters. This effort has been described in detail by Ornit Shani, who argues that democracy was

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