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  Whatever headway India makes in reforming its economy, however, the biggest enemy of the country’s economic progress — corruption — must be tackled. It is important to stress that the sight of a small minority in positions of privilege conspicuously consuming undeclared assets — even though this is a phenomenon that precedes liberalization — is not a good advertisement for the policy of economic reform; indeed, it is likely to create a sense of alienation from the market among people who feel they are denied access to it. Indian economists have estimated that only 15 percent of governmental expenditure actually reaches the intended target beneficiaries. It is impossible to overstate the importance of eradicating, with all the ruthlessness of the law, governmental corruption if the economic reforms are to succeed, because only people who are convinced that they hold within their own hands the capacity for self-advancement will create the saving and production that the reforms aim to generate. And as long as the ordinary citizen of India believes that only those who know how to cheat and deceive, who have the means to bribe and suborn, and who have bureaucratic access or political clout, can succeed, that faith will never take root in the mass of the population.

  It is in this context that the issue of globalization arises; and globalization is, at the risk of sounding tautological, a worldwide phenomenon. Whereas not very long ago, 90 percent of the developing nations — members of the “Group of 77” that went on to comprise over a hundred United Nations member states — ran closed economies, today only Burma (and that, too, not entirely) resists the siren call of the global marketplace. In every country around the world, trade barriers are being lowered, imports and exports increased, foreign capital avidly sought; legal systems are being brought into line with the needs of international business, tax and property laws are being reexamined against foreign standards, and restrictive rules and regulations are being scrapped. More and more economies are being “plugged in” to the global system in what is a self-reinforcing process.

  At the same time, as the economic journalist Prem Shankar Jha has pointed out, India has little choice regarding globalization. India needs to export an additional $2 billion to $3 billion worth of goods each year to service the $15 billion of foreign investment it needs in infrastructure; these exports would have to come out of the increased production made possible by infrastructure development. Export orientation requires openness to the global economy. Questioning the economic nationalism of Atal Behari Vajpayee’s BJP, Jha asks, “With a full 65 percent of all global trade being undertaken between various branches and affiliates of multinationals (and a far higher percentage of all trade in sophisticated manufactures), just how far does Mr. Vajpayee think India will be able to go if it does not become part of the net?”

  This is not to agree with those advocates of globalization who blithely suggest that we have moved from a world dominated by superpowers to a world dominated by supermarkets (a formulation attributed to The New York Times’s foreign affairs columnist, Thomas L. Friedman). That is a rather Occidental view of the world. Most Indians are still far removed from the supermarket shelves of the American globalizes, groaning under their cheery packages of overprocessed food and offering five Western brands for every imagined need. Though Friedman no doubt meant to include stock markets in his aphorism, it is true that globalization, to its most ardent exegetes, often seems to mean little more than the dominance of Western brand-name consumer products over territories abroad. The archetypal image was spelled out by the British magazine The Economist in a futuristic portrait of China published in early 1996:

  In 2006 the better-off Chinese consumer will get up, wash her hair with Procter & Gamble shampoo, brush her teeth with Colgate toothpaste and apply a little Revlon lipstick. As her Toyota grinds to [a] halt in yet another traffic jam, she will light up a Marlboro, glance at a copy of the Chinese edition of Elle magazine on the passenger seat and try to find her Motorola phone to call her secretary. At work she will put down her can of Pepsi by her Compaq computer and load up Windows 06.

  The Economist, as an inveterate advocate of liberal competition, was quick to explain that foreign consumer-goods companies would do well because “the quality of their products is usually much higher, and their marketing far more professional, than their local rivals’.” But whatever the reason, this portrait of “Coca-colonization” — of a country so taken over by foreign consumer products that it no longer has any national economic identity to call its own — is not one that any self-respecting Indian wants to see painted of his country. The difference with China, though, is that India already has excellent, affordable equivalents of all these products, some made with foreign collaboration and many not, and for the most part, given the advantages of culture, habit, and cost, these should be able to hold their own against their more expensive foreign competitors. The Economist’s portrait, if rewritten for India today rather than for the China of 2006, might read like this:

  The better-off Indian consumer gets up, puts Swastik hair oil on her head, brushes her teeth with Vicco Vajradanti toothpaste (which describes itself as ‘Ayurvedic medicine for teeth and gums” and uses ingredients recommended by the sages for three thousand years) and applies a little Lakmé lipstick. As her Maruti grinds to a halt in yet another traffic jam, she will light up an India Kings, glance at a copy of India Today magazine (or Femina, or Stardust, or Society, or another of the dozens of glossy magazines that offer a relevance no Elle or Cosmopolitan can provide) on the passenger seat. At work she will put down her bottle of Thums Up by her HCL computer; and when she goes to lunch, she will walk past the local Kentucky Fried Chicken oudet and instead stop at her favorite snack bar for a masala dosa.

  So what does globalization mean in the Indian contex? Not, I believe, an inundation of foreign goods driving out Indian ones, but principally more choice for a few, and more jobs for the many. As Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs has suggested, the main reason developing countries have not caught up more rapidly with developed ones is that they were closed to the world economy and therefore to the benefits of increased trade and foreign investment. This was understandable in the postcolonial context, because India’s closed and statist economic policies were principally a political and cultural reaction to imperialism. Indian self-reliance combined a Nehruvian concern for distributive social justice with a profound mistrust of the international economic forces that had enslaved the country for two hundred years; as citizens of a newly independent nation, Indians pursued economic autarchy out of both pride (“We can do it too”) and suspicion (“We cannot rely on others to supply what we need when we need it, so we must make everything ourselves”). Economic self-reliance thus became an axiomatic corollary of independence itself, and became seen as synonymous with it. The most significant proof of India’s maturity as an independent country is the willingness of its leadership to realize, at long last, that economic interdependence is not incompatible with political independence.

  8

  “Better Fed Than Free”

  The Emergency and Other Urgencies

  To understand the crucial debate about Indian democracy — to attempt to respond to the question of whether India’s democratic institutions can, quite literally, deliver the goods to the Indian people — it is important to examine the actual workings of Indian politics in the democratic system. This can be done from many angles: scholars might look at specific aspects of the country; reporters might travel through it; a social anthropologist could study the way in which the poorest Indians in the most humble villages have experienced democracy; and area specialists could analyze governmental actions, economic development, or human rights. All of these approaches would be valid, but there are many others better qualified than me to undertake them. My concern here is with institution building, since democracy is an engine rather than a vehicle; it is the engine that powers the vehicle of state. That vehicle stalled for a while in the Emergency of 1975-77, but it has been chugging on steadily since, a creaky, rattling, rusty machin
e taking the Indian people noisily on into the twenty-first century.

  The Emergency framed the “bread versus freedom” debate in India; it took the argument out of the salons and into the country’s actual political experience. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of national emergency in India on June 26, 1975, analysts in the Western world wrote almost unanimously of their regret that a great experiment had come to an end — the experiment of India’s development within a pluralist democratic framework. Mrs. Gandhi’s suspension of civil liberties, her arrests of opposition leaders, her attempts to amend the Constitution, and her postponement of scheduled national elections appeared to confirm liberal fears that an era of authoritarianism had dawned in India.

  Mrs. Gandhi and her governmental colleagues, however, had a totally different interpretation of the situation at hand. Democracy, they said, had failed in India, at least as it was conventionally practiced. Instead of providing the mechanism for the establishment of a progressive national consensus, democracy had disintegrated into an expensive luxury, with effects that were divisive to the nation and detrimental to its development. Events had reached a point where the choice was clear: democracy or social justice — democracy for the elite few, or social justice for the downtrodden many. With such a choice before them, Mrs. Gandhi declared, the government had no doubt where to cast its lot.

  Though Mrs. Gandhi briefly attempted to mend her public-relations fences with the West by claiming democracy had only been “temporarily” suspended, her basic argument was that the excesses of Indian democracy, as she declared in her nationwide radio broadcast, “weaken[ed] the capacity of the national government to act decisively inside the country,” and “the threat to internal stability also affect[ed] production and the prospects of economic development.” The thrust of the political changes the government attempted to introduce during the Emergency, culminating in the fifty-nine-clause Forty-second Amendment to the Constitution, also suggested there was nothing temporary about the transformation she was trying to bring about. They confirmed that Mrs. Gandhi intended to establish a system with fewer institutional impediments to the implementation of governmental directives. The traditional checks and balances of independent India — an unrestrained opposition, a free and critical press, an independent judi ciary — were all severely curbed. The new emphasis was not on the individual’s rights against the state, but on the community’s duties toward it. Effective official action was made easier than before.

  Despite the fact that the Emergency appeared to many to vindicate the fears expressed in India’s Constituent Assembly when emergency provisions were proposed, some scholars were not unduly perturbed by its imposition, viewing the crisis as only the most severe of many that had arisen since 1947 in a polity unsuited to a developing nation. “Put bluntly,” one noted American expert argued, “ . . . when the per capita annual income is approximately one-hundred dollars a year, how can one expect anything other than ‘emergencies’ to occur from time to time?” The question reflected a perception of priorities that was most tellingly epitomized in the words of a government official defending the continuation of the emergency: “We are tired of being the workshop of failed democracy. The time has come to exchange some of our vaunted individual rights for some economic development.” Newsweek put it aphoristically: “In India, it is more important to be fed than to be free.”

  Indeed, the Emergency came at a time when the political situation had disintegrated to a point where the very viability of the system had been called into question. By early 1975, as much of the country was paralyzed by the mass movement for “Total Revolution” led by the saintly Gandhian Jayaprakash “JP” Narayan, observers wrote of “a growing belief that the democratic process was failing to meet the needs of the masses” and of an increasing “distaste for democracy.” Though the actual declaration of the emergency was principally determined by the political threat to Mrs. Gandhi after the Allahabad High Court judgment, it was explicitly coupled with a sense of the failure of the nation’s traditional democratic system to deliver the goods to the Indian people.

  Despite the Nehruvian enthusiasm for democracy, its inadequacies had long been the subject of debate within and outside India. It was not long after independence that India’s leaders began to express publicly their irritation with “politically motivated” and “unrealistic and impractical” demands made by special interests ranging from refugee associations to trade union and peasant leaders. During the 1950s things began to get worse. As the eminent American political scientist Myron Weiner described it:

  In place of a growing sense of national unity, caste, tribal, religious, and linguistic bodies multiplied. Instead of being dedicated to increased production, trade unions, under leftist control, were launching strikes. Harmony was not growing in the countryside — the Communists and Socialists were busy fomenting class struggle. Young people did not seem determined to increase their technical skills, but instead student “indiscipline” increased. And instead of uniting to work as a single force to rally the country, the Congress Party became increasingly split by factionalism. From the point of view of the national leadership, it was “politics” — in the sense of narrow ambitions for power and the parochial loyalties of small men — which threatened national unity, economic development, and political order.

  As India coped with these pressures, observers expressed doubts about democracy as a suitable system for a country facing such overwhelming challenges. Political scientists wedded to “modernization” bemoaned the relatively poor productivity of democratic systems; in countries like India, many argued, the challenges of mobilizing labor, of changing traditional practices, and of obliging people to postpone their material expectations and make sacrifices could not be met democratically, and rapid industrialization was impossible under governments that needed to compromise among different groups. The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal termed India a “soft state” that required “extraordinarily little” of its citizens. In turn, Indians, too, protested the limitations their democracy imposed upon them. The economist and cabinet minister C. D. Deshmukh suggested that India suffered

  economic and sociological handicaps in the establishment of a democracy. The old feudal or colonial regimes were destructive of the dignity of the individual and made no efforts to raise it by education. The average citizen is therefore uninformed and in a poor state of readiness to exercise the franchise. Often there is not a large informed middle class to acquire enlightened views and influence others. Moreover, whatever independence of opinion there is can soon be corrupted in an environment of near destitution for the bulk of the population. The few that climb to leadership sometimes lack ordinary correctives and learn to serve themselves rather than the people.

  Not surprisingly, India’s democratic system, with its emphasis on gradualism and consensus, was perceived as being ineffective in developing the country, especially when contrasted with its totalitarian but economically more successful neighbor China. “What is crucial,” according to the American historian Robert Heilbroner, “is that communism, as an ideology and as a practical political movement, is prepared to undertake the revolutionary reorganization of society — a task before which the noncommunist governments shrink.” Given these circumstances, declared Heilbroner, “I opt for. . . ‘total’ change. . . . If I had to take my chances here and now as an anonymous particle of humanity in [India] . . . I would unhesitatingly choose the Communist side.”

  Apprehensions about this kind of reasoning frequently threw India on the defensive in international forums in the first decades of independence. One senior civil servant, B. K. Nehru, confessed to “a consciousness of the presence of China,” which had adopted “a pattern of development different from that which the noncommunist world has adopted” and was progressing “at a rate more rapid than that of democratic India. We are not indulging in a race with China,” he hastened to add, “we want to develop at our own pace, but the fact of the matter is tha
t . . . people . . . do make comparisons.”

  Some of those comparisons helped create an entire field of scholarship that investigated the correlations between democracy and underdevelopment. Predictably enough, the conclusions differed widely. Most initial analyses suggested that a high level of economic development was a prerequisite for pluralist political democracy to work (which excused those developing countries, notably in Latin America and Southeast Asia, that said a little dictatorship was necessary to raise per capita income and that democracy would come later). In reaction, some commentators cited India’s low GNP in refutation of that thesis (arguing that poverty and democracy could go together). Others insisted that there was no correlation at all between rates of growth and types of political systems. Then scholarly emphasis shifted from economic growth to social equity, and here the findings tended to be no more uniform. Some suggested, looking at the figures, that the effects of democracy on social equality were actually negative: in a democracy, influential elites prevented social change that benign dictators could have imposed. The eminent American scholars Samuel P. Huntington and Joan Nelson disagreed, writing in a highly influential study that while “greater economic participation does not lead to greater political participation,” there is “some evidence that greater political participation tends to lead to a more egalitarian distribution of the national product.”