CHAPTER 7

AFSPA AND OTHER DRACONIAN LAWS

Ujjwal Kumar Singh

On 9 August 2016, a curious drama played out in the precincts of a court in Imphal, the capital of Manipur. Irom Sharmila, popularly called the ‘Iron Lady of Manipur’, was present in court. Since November 2000, following the killing of ten civilians by army personnel of the Assam Rifles, Sharmila, a human rights activist working for peace in the region, took to fasting as a form of public protest. For sixteen years, she was on a continuous fast against the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). Charged under section 309 of the IPC for attempting to take her own life, Sharmila was incarcerated in a hospital-prison, where she was force-fed through a nasal tube. This incarceration involved the playing out of an annual ritual, with the government bringing her before the court each year, where she declared her intention to continue her fast; she was then taken back to her prison-hospital and the life-saving paraphernalia of force-feeding re-installed. Her appearance in court on 9 August 2016 was, however, different. She had come to court this day to declare that she was giving up her fast but would persist with her resistance through other means, including electoral politics.

In a rented hall within the same precincts, another group of women was preparing to take the struggle against the AFSPA forward by fighting for its repeal in court. The women called themselves members of EEVFAM (Extrajudicial Execution Victims Families), set up in 2009 from the proceeds of an international award given to Irom Sharmila. The EEVFAM had petitioned the Supreme Court in 2012 to repeal AFSPA because of widespread human rights violations, asking in particular if ‘the next of kin of the victims of AFSPA, have any rights at all, other than receipt of monetary compensation?’ They asked the court to set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of police officers from outside the state of Manipur to investigate instances of alleged extrajudicial executions and prosecute the offenders in accordance with law. In its judgement delivered on 8 July 2016, the Supreme Court concluded that irrespective of any enquiry the Manipur government would undertake, ‘in situations of the kind that we are dealing with, there can be no substitute for a judicial enquiry’. The court also argued that the use of ‘excessive force or retaliatory force’ was not permissible, and all such deaths must be thoroughly enquired into.

The security state architecture in India is made up of three kinds of legal regimes: preventive detention laws, anti-terror laws and laws for ‘disturbed areas’. The preventive detention system is based on minimal due process and gives pre-eminence to executive decision making and its ‘satisfaction’ in the initiation and affirmation of extraordinary proceedings.

Anti-terror laws like the Terrorists and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TADA) of 1985 and 1987, Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) of 2002 and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act of 1967 (amended in 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2019) constitute the second set of laws. While both the preventive detention laws and anti-terror laws enhance the powers of the executive, the security regime of anti-terror laws puts in place the jurisprudence of necessity appropriate for extraordinary conditions. While TADA and POTA are no longer on the statute books, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) is a permanent law, which, along with special state laws, is used to tackle terrorism.

AFSPA is an example of a different regime of laws, which applies to ‘disturbed areas’, giving special powers to the armed forces to come to the ‘aid’ of civil administration and perform the function of ‘internal-security’. In the context of Partition, armed forces were deployed in large numbers in the border regions of Bengal and Punjab for long periods under the Disturbed Areas (Special Power of the Armed Forces) Ordinances for Bengal and East Punjab in 1947. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance 1942, promulgated by the colonial state to curb the Quit India movement, is largely seen as the precursor of the 1947 Ordinances. The idea of ‘special powers’ and the legal and institutional arrangements that went with it were found useful, and in 1958, when the Nagaland National Council rose in insurgency, the AFSPA was enacted with the claim that it was merely shifting, under logistical compulsion, powers of ordinary policing to the army in Assam and Manipur. Once the governor of a state declares that an area is ‘disturbed’, ‘special powers’ under AFSPA become available to officers of the armed forces. These powers include the use of force by opening fire, even to the extent of causing death in areas where prohibitory orders have been issued, power to destroy hideouts or training camps and search premises without warrant and arrest persons on suspicion. Armed personnel enjoy legal immunity under the Act and connot be prosecuted for ‘anything done or purported to be done in exercise of powers conferred by the Act’, except with the previous sanction of the Centre. AFSPA was extended to the entire North-East (except Sikkim) in 1972 and to Jammu and Kashmir in 1990.

Between 1980 and 1982, the Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights (NPMHR) along with other democratic rights organizations filed a petition before the Supreme Court questioning the constitutional validity of AFSPA. In 1997, the Supreme Court delivered its judgement and upheld the constitutionality of AFSPA.

Opposition to AFSPA mounted among those who saw it as an instrument of territorial control and gained momentum with Irom Sharmila’s fast. It was, however, only in the summer of 2004, when a young Manipuri woman Thangjam Manorama was picked up by the army on the suspicion of assisting insurgents and her body, bearing marks of sexual assault, was discovered that there was a surge of protests. Most notable was the naked protest by the social movement called Meira Paibis (the torchbearers), in front of the headquarters of the Assam Rifles in Imphal, challenging the jawans to ‘take their flesh’. The Apunba Lup, a body of thirty-two women’s organizations of Manipur, made the repeal of AFSPA its primary concern. The state government of Tripura revoked AFSPA in May 2015, stating that insurgency was on the wane in the state. The state had been under AFSPA since February 1997. The continuation of laws like AFSPA manifest the contradictions and duality of state processes in a democracy.

References

EEVFAM vs Union of India, W.P. (Crl) No.129/2012, judgement delivered on 8 July 2016. Available at: http://kanglaonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/judgement-for-wpcril-case-reportable.pdf (accessed December 2018).

ATROCITY

Chandraiah Gopani

The word ‘atrocity’ as a noun means ‘wicked or cruel’. In its adjective form, ‘atrocious’ means the quality or state of atrocity. The idea of atrocity is associated with acts of inhuman assaults and violence against an individual or group. The word atrocity describes both the act of cruelty as well as the nature of cruelty. The word comes from Middle French atrocite or from the Latin atrox, both of which mean ‘terrible or cruel’. The term is used depending on the nature of the offences in parlance with humiliation, genocide, caste violence, gendered violence, rape, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, slavery, torture and social boycott. In Indian languages, ‘atrocity’ is used in different ways, for example, as kroorata and atyaachaara in Hindi, attuliyam in Tamil and duragatam in Telugu. All these words encompass the act of cruelty and violence.

In India, ‘atrocity’ has come to mean a legal intervention as well. Scheduled castes (SCs), or the Dalits (ex-untouchables), are historically marginalized, subjugated and stigmatized in the Hindu social order. The scheduled tribes (STs), generally known as tribal or Adivasis, are aboriginals who are geographically isolated and carry distinctive sociocultural features that have been historically delegitimized by the social order in India. Dalits and Adivasis are victims of the caste system in India. Ghanshyam Shah notes that caste is a structural violence on Dalits and that it is constitutive, relational, historical and deep-rooted in Hindu religious and ideological structures. The system is pervasive both in formal and informal institutions. To map the terrain of caste violence and discrimination, the category ‘atrocity’ is drawn into law from social experience in India. In the context of the growing rampant violence in the mid-1980s against the Dalits and Adivasis, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989 (SC-ST PoA Act 1989) came into existence and was enacted in 1995. In common legal parlance, it is also known simply as the ‘Atrocities Act’.

In a judgement involving the state of Madhya Pradesh, under the SC-ST PoA Act 1989, it was argued that ‘the offences of atrocities are committed to humiliate and subjugate the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes with a view to keep them in a state of servitude. Hence, they constitute a separate class of offences and cannot be compared with offences under the Indian Penal Code.’ While the Act does not define ‘atrocity’, the Act lists eighteen types of atrocities: force-feeding of obnoxious substances; dumping waste matter on land; intimidation during voting; compulsion to vote for a particular candidate; mischievous litigation; false information; public humiliation; denudation; wrongful land dispossession; bonded labour; outrage of modesty; sexual exploitation; fouling of water resources; obstruction of entry to a public place; eviction of habitation; mischief with explosive; destruction of building; and suppression of evidence. Through a Constitutional Amendment in 2017, the Centre added a few new offences such as imposing social and economic boycott, tonsuring of head and/or moustache or similar acts derogatory to the dignity of SCs and STs and garlanding footwear. The Act also rationalized rehabilitation funds to victims and provides special courts at various levels for speedy and transparent justice. In the absence of a clear definition of the term ‘atrocity’, various interpretations, meanings and understandings are drawn depending on the context and nature of the offences. The case aforementioned suggests that ‘in order to constitute atrocity, there must be an element of cruelty, brutality or wickedness in the commission of a particular offence or it should have the background of having been committed with a view to teach a lesson to the Harijans (Dalits)’. Due to difficulties in establishing some of these elements, there are contested views on the implementation and usage of the Act.

In the discourse around atrocity cases, it is apparent that dominant caste perpetrators abuse the law and the very officials entrusted to uphold it abandon their responsibilities. Our understanding of atrocity has to acknowledge the politics of resisting caste violence. And the various aspects of atrocities against Dalits listed above have to be enshrined in the state’s use of the term. The rich body of Dalit writing will help us in this regard as it captures these varied forms of atrocities.

References

Kumar, P. Kesava. ‘Politics of Atrocity: Towards Understanding of Caste Violence’. Uploaded on 25 November 2012. Available at: http://untouchablespring.blogspot.in/search?q=atrocity (accessed December 2018).

Shah, Ghanshyam, Harsh Mander , Sukhadeo Thorat , Satish Deshpande and Amita Baviskar . Untouchability in Rural India. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2006.

AYODHYA (AYŌDHYĀ)

A. K. Verma

Ayodhya is a small town in Faizabad district of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India. Situated on the banks of the river Sarayu, Ayodhya is famed as the birthplace of Lord Ram. The word ‘Ayodhya’ means ‘invincible, not to be fought against’. The city represents religious and cultural confluence in India. It is not only, according to legend, the birthplace of Lord Ram but also a meeting place of the Buddhist, Jain and Islamic faiths. The Jains believe that about five thirthankars (spiritual teachers) were born in Ayodhya. During the Mughal period, Babar constructed a few mosques in this town, of which the eponymous Babri Masjid is famous.

Ayodhya is a city of antiquity. We find its earliest reference in the Atharva Veda: ‘That which has eight chakras and nine entrances, such a city of Ayodhya is full of divine powers. The divinity of this place makes it like heavens’ (Part I: 10/2/31-2699). Valmiki’s Ramayana (fifth century BCE to first century BCE) comprehensively talks about Ayodhya, Lord Ram and his entire lifecycle. It is believed that by the first century BCE, Ayodhya was completely deserted. Then, King Chandra Gupta Vikramaditya (379–413 CE) located several places connected with activities of Lord Ram in Ayodhya and is said to have constructed 360 temples there. But the first detailed account of Ayodhya as a geographical location is found in the sixteenth-century work Ain-I Akbari (vols II–III, pp. 182–3) written by Abul Fazl, prime minister in the court of the Mughal king Akbar: ‘Awadh (Ajodhya) is one of the largest cities of India … It is esteemed as one of the holiest places of antiquity. … It was the residence of Ramachandra who in the Treta age combined in his own person both the spiritual supremacy and the kingly office.’

Babar’s minister Mir Baki is believed to have constructed the Babri Masjid by demolishing the Ram Temple at Ayodhya in 1528. In 1855, following riots in Ayodhya and the Muslim claim to take over the temple Hanuman Garhi, the disputed area was roughly divided equally between Hindus and Muslims. On 29 January 1885, Mahant Raghubar Das of Ayodhya filed a suit in the District Court of Faizabad against the secretary of state of India for the construction of a temple at the ‘Ram Chabootra’, on which the charanpaduka (footprint) of Lord Rama was inscribed. A counter-suit was filed by Mohammed Asgar, mutallavi (guardian) of the Babri Masjid. The Faizabad Trial Court disallowed Mahant’s suit on grounds of possibility of further riots. This status quo was maintained from 1885 to 1949. On 23 December 1949, some Hindus forced entry into the disputed area and placed an idol of Lord Ram within the Babri Masjid. The police on duty lodged an FIR. Ever since, Muslims have not been able to offer prayers and Hindus have had to take darshan (to see the deity) from a distance. However, the court restrained rival parties from removing idols and obstructing puja. This position continued till 25 January 1986, when Advocate Umesh Chand Pandey petitioned to the district judge of Faizabad to open the locks at Ayodhya so that pilgrims could have darshan from inside. On 1 February 1986, district judge of Faizabad K. N. Pandey directed the district magistrate and superintendent of police of Faizabad to open the locks. The opening of the lock catapulted the dispute to the national level and triggered a chain reaction leading to the demolition of the disputed Babri Masjid structure on 6 December 1992 by a large crowd of kar sevaks (volunteers for a religious cause).

In October 1991, the Kalyan Singh government in UP had acquired the premises in dispute along with some adjoining area for ‘development of tourism and providing amenities to pilgrims in Ayodhya’. This move was then challenged in Mohd. Hashim vs. State of UP and other cases. The Supreme Court struck down Section 4(3) of the Acquisition Act which had directed abatement of all pending suits, as unconstitutional and invalid, resulting in the revival of all earlier suits pertaining to the Ayodhya land dispute in the High Court of Allahabad. The High Court, by a majority of 2–1, decided on 30 September 2010 to divide the title to disputed land among Muslims (Sunni Wakf Board), Hindus (Ram Lala Virajmaan) and the Nirmohi Akhara – three parties to the dispute. Now the matter is pending before the Supreme Court.

Today, Ayodhya has come to be a recurrent communal flashpoint. Hindus, represented by activist groups, want to retrieve lost glory by building a grand temple at Ayodhya, and Muslims, represented by activist groups, insist on retaining the Babri Mosque. Efforts are still on to resolve the Ayodhya dispute.

References

Carnegy, P. Historical Sketch of Tahsil Fyzabad, Zillah Fyzabad. Lucknow: Publisher unknown, 1870.

Griffith, Ralph T. H. trans. The Ramayan of Valmiki. London: Trübner & Co. and Benares: E. J. Lazarus and Co., 1870–1874. Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24869/24869-pdf.pdf (accessed December 2018).

BABU/SARKAR/REVENUE OFFICER (BĀBŪ/SARKĀR/REVENUE OFFICER)

Tabish Khair

It is best to begin by taking up a different word: munshi. Like babu and sarkar, munshi is a precolonial term: I use ‘colonial’ in the specific sense of being ruled from outside the geopolitical territory, and hence, in India, it applies only to European colonization and not to the various conquests and incursions before it. Babu and Munshi were equivalent honourifics in the precolonial and/or early colonial period, both usually applied to literate gentlemen, often employed for various bureaucratic purposes by Indian regimes. Their etymology is different: babu deriving from the Sanskrit for ‘father’ and munshi from the Arabic root insha meaning ‘to educate or to compose’. The babus (‘baboo’) and munshis (‘moonshee’) one encounters in the early colonial period were basically scribes and bureaucrats from reasonably affluent and literate Indian families. In this sense, the words still meant what they meant in the precolonial period.

However, the shades of meaning attached to them were to change. Babu, a designation used largely in Greater Bengal (the first region to be extensively colonized by the British East India Company), moved both upwards and downwards, while munshi moved steadily downwards. Upwardly mobile babus came to be associated with the bureaucracy of the colonial government, while downwardly mobile munshi came to be associated – as the Hobson-Jobson Anglo-Indian Dictionary notes in passing – with pedagogy and literacy in ‘languages like Arabic, Persian and Urdu’. It is not incidental that in the late colonial period, the great writer Premchand, who started off writing in Urdu and switched to writing in Hindi, was known as Munshi Premchand. By then, the babus were obviously English-speaking and English-writing Indians, though munshi still had some status in bhasha (Indian languages) circles.

This reveals the other route taken by the word ‘babu’: even as it came to be associated with colonial power, it also came to be associated with being Anglophone, and that inevitably led to dismissive noises by the English. The munshi, as hybrid as the babu, remained where he was and hence was not seen as hybrid in English. But the babu – now that was another matter. He had become the threat to the identity that Homi K. Bhabha associates with hybridity. This led – and still leads – to a confusion of terms, best exemplified by the difference between ‘Babu English’ (a pejorative description) and the ‘babu’, when used as a honourific by ordinary Indians in many languages.

One could argue that ‘Babu English’ is a different matter from babus and English, and it raised the hackles of educated Indians way back in the nineteenth century. Usages like ‘Babu English’ were and remain a different matter from many other usages of ‘babu’. For instance, a rickshaw puller in Bihar is not making a sarcastic reference to your English when he addresses you as a babu even today. What he means is an affluent and educated man, often, but not necessarily, in Western clothes.

In short, ‘babu’ as a pre-British term continues to be a term of social class and respect in discourses that have not been confined to those of postcolonial English-language babuness. A one-sided objection to the usage of ‘babu’ as an emblematic term, while necessary within a certain colonialist discursive context, is also at the same time an indication of the objector’s inability to step beyond the colonial context. In that sense, it indicates the tendency of ‘postcolonialism’ to circle round and round, inevitably, in the discursive space of ‘colonialism’ while ignoring the ‘pre’, ‘para’ and entirely ‘post’-colonial.

The babu had become not just what he was intended to be when Macaulay and his ilk pushed for European education in India in the early nineteenth century, a buffer between the natives and the Europeans. He had also become a dilemma. This comes across most powerfully in Rudyard Kipling’s writings; despite his clear preference for ‘martial Indians’ from the edges of the empire, such as Afghans and Gurkhas, Kipling has his hero exclaim ‘What a beast of wonder is the Babu!’ in the novel Kim. He is referring to Hurree Babu, the quintessential colonial babu, a man with what we would call ‘nerdy’ and anglophile interests, obese, inscrutable, not physically brave, always faintly ludicrous, but who nevertheless saves the entire British Empire by a sustained act of physical and intellectual bravery.

The word ‘babu’ and the word ‘sarkar’ are closely associated. Sarkar derives from the Persian and Urdu, where it was a compound word made of sar (chief/head) and kar (agent/doer). Sarkar came to be used to refer to and address any person in a position of direct authority and to authority/government itself. The babus, in that sense, helped run the sarkar and could be addressed as ‘sarkar’, especially if they had risen to a high administrative status, while by the twentieth century the ‘munshi’ had become a much smaller cog in the governmental machinery.

What was this governmental colonial machinery? It was pretty diverse in the early twentieth century. But it had largely started off under the East India Company and later, after 1857–8, under the British crown, as a revenue-collecting machinery. Collecting revenue was seen as the main function of the colonial head (mostly British) of Indian districts, under whom many babus worked. So much so that even in the 1970s, when the British ‘district collector’ had long been replaced by Indian ‘district commissioners’ and ‘district magistrates’, in taluk towns like Gaya, where I grew up, the district magistrate/commissioner was still referred to as the ‘collector’.

It is an interesting indication of how far we have moved from the colonial period and how close we still are to it in our ‘postcolonial’ period, seventy years after Independence, that the words ‘babu’ and ‘sarkar’ and the designation ‘revenue officer’ (also in its neo-Hindi version of raajasavadhikaaree) still suggest empowerment and authority, except to Anglophone academics who cannot manage to get beyond their English, while the word ‘munshi’ has diminished to a non-status. The rickshaw puller or auto driver is being slightly offensive if he calls you ‘munshi’ anywhere in North India but not if he calls you ‘babu’ or ‘sarkar’. The trajectories of wordly prestige – as the difference between ‘master’ and ‘mistress’ indicates – are excellent markers of power flows.

References

Khair, Tabish. Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Fiction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Nair, Rukmini Bhaya. Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference. Duluth: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

BORDER

Yogesh Snehi

India shares international territorial mainland borders (sarhad in Hindi) with Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Unlike maritime borders, which remain fragile, mainland borders are potentially definable and therefore defensible. The Indo–Pak border that stretches from Sindh–Kutch–Gujarat, Bahawalpur–Rajasthan, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir has, especially after the wars of 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999 with Pakistan, and the 1962 war with China, been heavily militarized and permanently fenced. Violent political conflict in Punjab and J&K have made these regions one of the most volatile zones in contemporary times.

The Partition of Punjab in 1947 weakened the economy and social fabric of most border village and towns. Among the road and rail links that once connected overland and maritime trade and cultural exchanges between Punjab, Bahawalpur, Sindh, Multan and Afghanistan, only a few remain extant today. Partition demographically transformed the region into a Muslim-dominated West Punjab (in Pakistan), and Sikh-/Hindu-dominated East Punjab (in India). Identitarian movements and ethnic conflicts have been a hallmark of these territorialized zones. In 1966, East Punjab was further reorganized and a new state of Haryana, and subsequently Himachal Pradesh, was carved out of the region identified with colonial Punjab. Sikhs, for the first time, emerged as a dominant majority in reorganized Punjab, defining the social and political contours of the state thereafter. Today, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh Jats control the socially conjoined spaces of West Punjab, East Punjab and Haryana. However, the geography of sacred shrines rupture this project of nation-state and region formation in South Asia.

Meanwhile, historic agreements between Indian and Pakistan led to the beginning of Samjhauta train service in 1976 and bus service in 1999 called sada-e-sarhad (call from across the border) along Lahore–Amritsar–Delhi that passes through Atari–Wagah border check posts.

Borders, it is clear, shape the lives of people who live along them. Access to agricultural land inside ‘no man’s land’ (the land between the actual border and the fence) that a farmer may rightfully own, and the right to cultivate it, is dependent on permissions granted by the Border Security Force (BSF). War often looms in the memories of border towns, which were emptied on several occasions, and so do tales of rationing of grain and offering services to the standing army. Nationalist distress narrows the possibility of social and economic wellness of people who inhabit border zones. It is not a surprise, then, that borders are also zones that are severely affected by drug abuse. Some civil society groups like the Hind-Pak Dosti Manch have tried to build bridges and connect people across borders through peace marches, candle light vigils on Wagah and mushairas (social gathering where Urdu poetry is read) to create an alternate discourse on borders.

Maintenance of borders is thus an important nationalist imperative. At the Wagah retreat ceremony, which began in 1959, we see both India and Pakistan creating, rehearsing and performing rituals that define their ‘modern’ nation-state identities. Borders sustain the otherwise complex narrative of the nation-state that has been continually contested by assertion of ethnic and linguistic identities in both India and Pakistan. The Wagah border post has large gateways on both sides, like entry points to sacred shrines, defining those inside and outside the realm of faith, devotion and bodily performance.

Every day, at least an hour before the actual retreat ceremony begins, a soldier on both the sides arouses nationalist emotions through loud ‘patriotic’ music. Later, when ‘Indian’ Border Security Force soldiers and ‘Pakistani’ rangers perform at the daily retreat ceremony – involving lowering of their respective national flags – they stage synchronized drill and similar rituals of opening and closing of entry gates. As tension escalates between India and Pakistan, the mood of the drill becomes vigorously masculine and is performed with loud thuds.

Yet another contemporary phenomena concerning borders are their depictions in several Bollywood films. Most border films have been plotted around the 1971 Indo–Pak war (from Haqeeqat [1964] to Lakshya [2004]). Then there is the war/dispute in the J&K (LOC Kargil [2003] or Wagah (Kya Dilli Kya Lahore [2014]). Other, more nuanced films have problematized borders (from Henna [1991] to Begum Jaan [2017]) and engage directors/actors from both India and Pakistan. These films predominantly feature heroism, hate and love in the midst of war along borders.

However, it has to be noted that rivers, winds, birds, insects and music do not recognize borders. Insects, particularly tiddi dal (swarms of locusts) that devour standing crops, have metaphorically remained alive in the historical memory of people along Indo–Pak borders. The Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan has tried to resolve distribution of waters. But these very rivers often erode the border fence. Winds systems, similarly, do not follow the logic of borders. In recent times, India has blamed pollution from Pakistan for the smog in North India. There has also been a long tradition of musicians (for instance, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) whose compositions do not accept the tyranny of the Indo–Pak border.

References

Athique, Adrian M. ‘A Line in the Sand: The India–Pakistan Border in the Films of J.P. Dutta’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (2008): 472–499.

Nayar, Kuldip. Wall at Wagah: India–Pakistan Relations. New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2003.

BUREAUCRACY

Aakar Patel

Modern Indian bureaucracy turned 160 in 2018. Of course, nobody really planned on celebrating it because the bureaucracy, especially the lower one that citizens actually interface with, is and has always been terrifying.

One hundred and sixty years ago, a year after the Mutiny, the Government of India Act of 1858 transferred rule from a private corporation’s board of directors to Queen Victoria’s government and its civil servants, the Indian Civil Services (ICS) (later renamed Indian Administrative Services [IAS]). But much before that, the Mughal bureaucracy had been equally threatening. European travellers have described it in detail. The emperor sat on a platform behind a series of barricades. Entry into the spaces between the barricades was restricted by rank and only the highest were allowed before the final barrier. Petitioners and justice seekers were held by the hand by one of the nobles (to communicate closeness and trust) and taken before the emperor – or as close as they could get. There they had to first perform the kurnish, the Persian three-step bowing salute that Alexander the Great was enamoured enough to adopt, upsetting the Macedonians. And then they had to hope the emperor actually took notice. Gifts usually helped, as we know even in our time.

Transfer to the ICS made things less arbitrary for the Indian citizen. But things were not necessarily more efficient. Lord Curzon, who came fifty years after the Mutiny, likened the Indian bureaucracy to an elephant: ‘very stately, very dignified, but very slow in its movement’. To make it move faster, he said he was ‘prodding the animal with the most vigorous and unexpected digs, and it gambols plaintively under the novel spur’. He said nothing was done in less than six months. ‘When I suggest six weeks, the attitude is one of pained surprise; if six days, one of pathetic protest; if six hours, one of stupefied resignation.’

It is easy to see why the civil servant inspires feelings of such dread. The word ‘cracy’ denotes a particular form of government: democracy, autocracy, plutocracy and so on. A bureaucracy is rule by ‘desks’ (the meaning of the French word bureau). By definition, it announces its interference in the everyday life of the citizen. And who can deny that in India this interference is true? The bureaucrat is a potentate with the power to deny without reason, your right to travel, eat, drink or even be free. This may seem an exaggeration to the outsider, till she notices how important an influence the bureaucrat is, in the issuance of passports and Aadhaar cards, licences and ration cards and the other paraphernalia which keeps the bureaucrat busy.

Gandhi thought the Indian bureaucracy was ‘top heavy and ruinously expensive’. He felt it was useless and ‘even law and order and good government would be too dearly purchased if the price to be paid for it is the grinding poverty of the masses’. S. R. Maheshwari tells us in Indian Administration that Indira Gandhi thought the bureaucracy was a ‘stumbling block’ on the road to economic and social progress. In 1969, the Congress complained, ‘The present bureaucracy, under the orthodox and conservative leadership of the Indian Civil Service, with its upper class prejudices, can hardly be expected to meet the requirements of social and economic change along socialist lines. The creation of an administrative cadre committed to national objectives and responsive to our social needs is an urgent necessity.’ Both Gandhi and Indira knew a thing or two about statecraft, but those who have been in positions of governance in the subcontinent have developed a healthy respect for the ‘steel frame’ that is the IAS.

Stephen Cohen, a scholar of India’s armies, notes two differences between bureaucrats in India and those in the United States. For the Indian, rank was important. He would refuse to meet anyone lower than his direct counterpart even though the official assigned was empowered to decide on the issue. And second, the Indian immediately regurgitated the history of the issue, going back decades, while the American was concerned only with the contours so far as they affected the current position. The bureaucrat sees himself as the guardian of the administration and also its conscience. He knows he is indispensable and not easy to replace systemically. The bureaucrat is in not a few ways more important to the citizen than the politician.

Historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar has an interesting theory on the decline of the Mughal Empire. The incompetent Jahangir lost Kandahar to the Safavids in 1649. This stopped the Mughals from using the land route west to Mecca (empowering the Europeans because of their naval dominance). And it stopped the highly sophisticated Persian Shia from travelling east for bureaucratic work in India. According to Sarkar, the Persian Shia could not be replaced by local Indian talent and the empire began to be mismanaged and declined quickly. For 160 years, the ICS/IAS has tried to show that Sarkar’s observation about the Indian administrator’s quality was not true in perpetuity. Whether they have successfully or not is I think still up for debate.

References

Maheshwari, Shriram. Indian Administration. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1990.

Sarkar, Jadunath. Fall of the Mughal Empire-Vol. I, 4th edn., vol. 1. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 1991.

CHUNAV (CUNĀV)/ELECTION

Mona Mehta

The birth and journey of many a word is directly tied to the advent of political processes and institutions that have become emblematic of modern India. The Hindi word chunav, which means ‘election’, is one such word that started gaining currency in the early twentieth century, a word that is deeply entwined with the story of Indian democracy. The etymology of chunav can be traced to Sanskrit, specifically to the root word chi, which means ‘to select’. The word election in Sanskrit is nirvaachan. A medieval cognate chunana, which also means ‘to choose’, was in use as early as 1354, long before chunav’s relatively recent popularity. Today, chunav has come to denote an instrument, a process, an event. It is a verb and an adjective. And, it is impossible to imagine contemporary India without it.

As a political phenomenon, chunav emerged in British India. In order to elect representatives to the provincial and central legislatures, the colonial rulers began to subject the population to the process of electoral exercise. It was around this time that the innocuous-sounding word chunana began to acquire the specific meaning we associate with chunav. However, chunav remained a tame and insipid word during these early decades of the twentieth century when elections were a colourless event. This is because elections were being organized on a limited elitist suffrage, open only to those who owned property, paid direct taxes or had educational qualification. The masses had little interest in a system that was designed to exclude them. Chunav began to enter mass consciousness only when the Indian National Congress, which was at the vanguard of the nationalist freedom movement, decided to participate in the provincial assembly elections of 1937. This was a decisive moment in the history of the term chunav; it marked a shift in its connotation from a non-participatory political process to a public event, resulting in a corresponding change in popular perception. The masses that made up the Congress-led freedom movement began to perceive chunav not merely as an arena of political contestation but also as an extension of the freedom struggle (azadi ki ladai). Every Congress candidate who contested a chunav was seen as a soldier of the freedom struggle. Chunav was finally on its way to be a currency of mass circulation.

However, this euphoria was short-lived. In 1939, Indian National Congress resigned from all provincial governments to protest against the British decision to drag India into the Second World War, against its will. The patriotic fervour expressed through chunav of the late 1930s transformed into a defiant anger of the Quit India Movement of 1942. In the ensuing years, it appeared as if chunav had lost its way amidst the bloody turbulence of the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the ambiguous uncertainties of a newly independent nation in 1947.

Few perhaps could have anticipated chunav’s spectacular re-emergence in its new avatar as aamchunaav (general election) that was held in 1951. This election heralded the birth of India as the world’s largest and most complex electoral democracy. But this post-Independence version of chunav that indexed the transformation from colonial subjects to citizens was no ordinary avatar. It was loaded with the incredible transformative power of universal adult franchise supplied by a new Constitution of India inaugurated on 26 January 1950. It was to set in motion an unprecedented churning within the age-old society of India with a promise of sociopolitical empowerment and fulfilling economic aspirations.

Chunav began to be perceived by millions of Indians as the operating system of Indian democracy where the mut (vote) was their password to progress. It is difficult to find many examples of a word depicting a government-sponsored and government-regulated event like chunav being used as extensively by ordinary people in their daily life as a noun, verb or adjective. For instance, a regulating body like Chunav Ayog (Election Commission, enjoys a rather unique place in people’s perception). The Chunav Ayog is responsible for overseeing the entire chunav vyavastha (electoral machinery) and it regularly carries out chunav ghoshna (election announcement). It is interesting that words such as prakriya (process), aacharsanhita (moral code of conduct) or adhikari (official) when coupled with an adjective like chunav suddenly acquire a popular understanding which goes beyond their narrow official definitions.

While chunav prakriya (electoral process) may mean the nitty-gritty of the laid-down procedure, chunav gati-vidhi (activity) tells us a different story. Then, there is chunav yachika (election petition) which can be filed either before the Chunav Ayog or a court of law. The physical boundaries of the chunav kshetra (electoral constituency) drawn up by the Chunav Ayog either for the Lōk Sabhā (lower house), Vidhan Sabhā (upper house) or nagara palika chunav (local municipal body elections) are a multivalent entity that holds tremendous significance for different groups. For the umeedvar (contestant) her or his constituency (kshetra) is always a battleground for chunaavi jung (election battle) that must be fought through chunavi ran-niti. From the perspective of the resident-voters of a constituency, chunav offers them the power to make or break the political fortunes of leaders. Political history is replete with fabled stories about the rise and fall of politicians associated with specific constituencies. In this way, the demarcation of an electoral constituency acquires personal and historic dimensions.

A chunav ghoshna (poll announcement) might deal with mere dates and time of the contest, but a chunav ghoshna patra (election manifesto) may deal with anything under the sun. Indeed, the manifesto contains an amazing thing called chunaavi vaada (election promises) – the real stuff of which a chunav abhiyan (election campaign) is made of. However, chunav abhiyan might involve a host of logistical and organizational activities, like putting up banners, sticking posters or distributing pamphlets, but it is chunav prachaar (election propaganda) which ignites the real spirit of the contest. It conjures up the vision of a mass mobilization involving road shows, and mass rallies, generating the real heat, dust and noise of a hot contest, the chunaavi muqaabla.

But even this may not be sufficient if not followed by a chunaavi daura (mass contact at the hustings) by the umeedvar where the umeedvarneta (leader candidate) comes knocking at the doorstep or appears at the local street corner. At the end of the day, a daura involves jan sampark (mass contact). Of all the institutions designed to order human society in India, chunav is perhaps that ultimate equalizer bestowed with the potential to challenge and erase sociopolitical hierarchies and inequalities.

Cynics might dismiss this high-pitched frenzy as a chunaavi jumlā (an electoral subterfuge which may degenerate into a carnival of corruption). But there are others who call this lokaparva: a celebration of democracy. They look at election as a mass catharsis without which political contestation might degenerate into violent conflict. No matter how you look at it, it is difficult to imagine an Indian landscape without chunav.

References

Banerjee, Mukulika. Why India Votes. New Delhi and Oxford: Routledge, 2014.

Shani, Ornit. How India became Democratic: Citizenship and Making of the Universal Franchise. New Delhi: Viking/Penguin, 2017.

COALITION DHARMA

E. Sridharan

‘Coalition dharma’ is a peculiarly Indian English term used to denote the ethics and modalities of behaviour in a coalition, building on the Sanskrit term dharma in its sense of ethics or what is right behaviour. As we know, in a parliamentary system such as India’s, a coalition in politics is never the ideal situation from a political party’s point of view. Political parties want, ideally, to win power and rule on their own without having to share power. But when this is realistically not possible, they have perforce to form either a pre-electoral coalition to contest elections, followed by, if the coalition wins, a post-electoral coalition to form government; or if they contest alone and are unable to win, a post-electoral coalition – if one can be put together – to acquire majority support and form a government.

Coalitions of both the pre-electoral and post-electoral kind involve compromises with one’s coalition partners. In pre-electoral coalitions, this means giving up some seats for one’s partners to contest and persuading one’s base to vote for the partner party’s candidates, with the partner parties expected to reciprocate. It also means making compromises on one’s electoral, ideological and policy platform with one’s partner parties to evolve a common platform. In post-electoral coalitions, it means making compromises not only on the ideological and policy platform of the government to be formed but also on the all-important question of the sharing of power, that is, of ministerial portfolios. Such compromises are never ideal, never easy and run the risk of alienating one’s own support base. This is where the question of behaviour towards one’s coalition partners comes in, that is, the ethics or dharma of coalition behaviour.

Forming and steering a coalition through an electoral cycle or the duration of a government requires both ethics and skill in managing relationships, including reading, reacting to and sending out signals, tolerating brinkmanship by one’s partners up to a point and the like. While there is no codified dharma in coalition management in India, unlike, say, the codified dharma (not law, but inter-party consensus) of the Model Code of Conduct for electioneering, there have evolved two coalition management mechanisms over the twenty-five-year coalition era of 1989 to 2014 (the coalition era still continues since the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]-led National Democratic Alliance in power from 2014 is still a coalition despite the BJP having a majority on its own). These are: (a) the evolution of the mechanism of a common minimum programme between coalescing parties, which can apply to pre-electoral coalitions or to coalition governments; and (b) the evolution of the mechanism of a steering or coordination committee of the coalescing parties to manage differences that might arise and coordinate policy. While these are useful mechanisms and have helped the management of coalitions in India (as they have in other national contexts), coalition dharma is ultimately not just about mechanisms and skills but also about that intangible, political judgement and ethics.

References

Ruparelia, Sanjay. Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Sridharan, E., ed. Coalition Politics in India: Selected Issues at the Centre and the States. New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2014.

COMMUNAL VIOLENCE

Harsh Mander

In South Asia, episodes of violence where persons are attacked because they belong to particular religious identities are commonly described as communal riots. The word ‘communal’ in other parts of the world has quite different and often positive connotations, viewed as a source of integration and social solidarity, and its breakdown, a major source of violence and strife. In a comprehensive review of the chronology of communal violence, B. Rajeshwari suggests that ‘whenever conflicting groups from two different religions, which are self-conscious communities, clash, it results in a communal riot’. An event is identified as a communal riot if (a) there is violence and (b) two or more communally identified groups confront each other or members of the other group at some point during the violence. It is commonplace to use the word ‘riot’ to describe communal violence, both in reportage and scholarship, but the difficulty with the term is that it suggests implicitly that people of two communities battle each other, usually spontaneously. But this may not be the case if the violence is one-sided or engineered by dedicated groups, as is very often the case. For instance, it is a travesty to describe the violence against the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 as anti-Sikh riots, because it was exclusively the Sikhs who were victims of violence in almost all these attacks. The same is the case with many, if not most, other episodes of communal violence. The use in reportage as well as survivors’ own testimonies of the terms, such as storm, are now more popular – the Gujarat survivors widely describe the anti-Muslim violence in 2002 as toofan (storm) – but this alternate terminology is more evocative than analytical. Scholars sometimes deploy the term carnage, slaughter or bloodbath, which is a more accurate description of the character of such violence.

The more pertinent terminology could be ‘hate communal violence’ or ‘targeted communal violence’. In South Asia, the word ‘communal’ has a specific meaning of social and political mobilization of persons based on their religious identity, usually in opposition (sometimes violently) to persons of other religious identities. The prefix ‘communal’ carries negative connotations of hate propaganda, mobilization and sometimes violence against a religious (or as the Sachar report put it, ‘socio-religious’) community. This is because of the peculiar history of the subcontinent’s bloody partition on grounds of religion and the continued fractures created across South Asia by religious identity. Today, when we speak of communal violence, we are concerned conventionally with a specific kind of hate violence which targets people for their religious identity.

The word ‘communal’ is also closely tied up with the idea of communalism or the social and political mobilization of people on the basis of their religious identities. Bipin Chandra describes three stages of communalism: beginning with the belief that people of one religion have common interests; going on to the belief that the common interests of people of one religion are different from those of another; and the most aggressive stage of communalism founded in the belief that the common interests of people of one religion are in implacable opposition to those of another. Chandra views communalism as an ideology comprising these three basic elements or stages; each element functions as an assumption upon which the next is based. The three also form a continuum, feeding into each other. The intensity of acrimony towards other religious groups increases as people move from one stage to the next.

A few more points are in order in the language of scholars and lay observers regarding communal violence. One relates to the prefixing of the word ‘mass’ to communal violence. When does a communal, targeted, hate attack become a mass attack? Is it merely a question of numbers? Is communal killing of one person not mass violence, whereas if three are killed it is mass violence? This demarcation is, in the end, subjective. Also, it can invisibilize seemingly discrete, small acts of communal violence, including the recent rise of mob lynching, each not ‘mass’ in character when seen individually but which actually are part of a larger orchestrated plan.

It is also important to recognize that hate and targeted violence can be directed at people not only because of their religious identity but also because of their caste (as in anti-Dalit atrocities), ethnicity (such as attacks of persons of the north-east in Delhi’s cities), gender (such as in violence against women), region (such as the historical attacks in Mumbai on persons from South India and now from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar), language, sexuality (such as attacks against homosexual men and transgendered persons) and occasionally stigmatized ailments (such as attacks on people living with leprosy or HIV/AIDS). The particularly gendered nature of sexual hate violence, which regards the woman as the property of the men of that community, and sexual violence, the ultimate humiliation of the community and its men has to be underscored.

There is also the question of what constitutes violence as distinct from discrimination or segregation. Religious minorities are subjected to a great deal of discrimination. These include a number of disabilities in accessing housing, jobs, credit, entry into educational institutions and access to basic services in their habitations, such as drinking water. These can also be seen as forms of passive violence. Even more pertinently, there can be communally charged taunts and insults in classrooms, workplaces and places of community gathering. There can be active hate propaganda. And then there is active physical, targeted and hate violence, involving attacks on the body and property of persons of the designated ‘other’ religion, involving culpable heinous offences such as murder, rape, injury, arson and looting.

Finally, hate propaganda. Usually, scholars separate questions of discrimination from active physical hate violence, and hate propaganda stands in a somewhat twilight zone in between. Many recognize that hate propaganda incites violence and therefore regard it to be criminally culpable; even if it is not active violence in itself, it still instigates such violence.

References

Chandra, Bipan. Communalism in Modern India. Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1984.

Rajeshwari, B. ‘Communal Riots in India: A Chronology (1947–2003)’. Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies Report, March 2004.

CORRUPTION

C. Rammanohar Reddy

‘Corruption’ is a word that is everywhere in India, perhaps as much as, if not more than, ‘poverty’, ‘jobs’ and ‘communalism’. It dominates politics; it is always in the media and seems to crop up frequently in private conversations. There is a broad agreement that corruption is an identification mark of Indian society and that the phenomenon is crying out for urgent action. The corruption that is most common in public discourse is the abuse of office for private gain by those elected and appointed to the government. This abuse takes the form of demanding payment for services rendered which may even be legitimately due to the citizen or may even be illegal services.

Corruption in high places involves payment of huge bribes, often made outside the country, for allocation of natural resources, large public works contracts and change in policy to benefit particular entrepreneurs. In the middle layer of government, entrepreneurs need to pay bribes for permissions to run their business and also to evade the application of certain laws. At lower layers of government, honest citizens find themselves oppressed when they are expected to make payments for housing permits which should be provided out of duty. There is also petty corruption by low-level officials in charge of basic services. The weak pay their own bribes to police, such as in payment of hafta (protection or permission money). Every aspect of daily life of the citizen is touched by bribery.

Historians point out that texts from ancient India do not have any definite Sanskrit word for ‘corruption’. They, however, also argue that this does not mean that there was no corruption at the time, only that transgressions which one would today equate with corruption are referred to as violations of one’s duty. Centuries later, under colonialism, early colonialists like Robert Clive, who benefitted from personal plunder and bribery, sought to explain away their riches as an unavoidable enrichment in a society where monetary corruption was considered the norm. The nationalists of the early twentieth century, in turn, sought to explain corruption in India as something that was exacerbated if not actually introduced by colonial powers. Soon after Independence, it was the Santhanam Committee of 1962 that made the first systematic attempt at studying corruption in India. Whatever the historical evidence on the prevalence of corruption in pre- and post-Independence India, the perception in India is that in its spread and magnitude, the malaise of monetary corruption, is only growing over time.

In fact, there have been major cases of corruption in India from the very first decade after Independence. All of these to a greater or smaller degree became election campaign issues in national and state elections. However, none of these compare to the issue made out of the major allegations of corruption made in the late 2000s and early 2010s against the then ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, which led to new political agendas and had important political outcomes. While there were some doubts about the quality of estimates of ‘notional losses’, there was no question of the impact these ‘scams’ had on public consciousness.

The word ‘scam’ became a part of newspaper headlines. The scams of the 2000s at the national level led to the ‘India Against Corruption’ movement of Anna Hazare in 2011, which later resulted in the formation of the Aam Admi Party, the first major political party which, initially at least, put corruption at the heart of its political platform. This impact, however, was outstripped by the centrality of corruption in the campaign for the parliamentary elections of 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party was able to make political capital out of people’s disgust with the scams of the UPA government and ride to power.

There is no evidence to suggest that corruption in the private sector is any less than that in government. It just does not get the same attention. However, as the extent of such corruption in the form of fraud and embezzlement has increased in recent years, this too has entered public discourse.

Another kind of corruption that has made its presence felt more and more is what is considered the unhealthy transformation of a uniquely Indian way of life. The destruction of the Indian way of life by external influences is an old meme, but with globalization, the core of Indian culture is seen to be increasingly ‘corrupted’ by certain ‘Western’ influences which are causing a decay of the social fabric. This could be described as a framing of corruption in moralistic terms.

The most unusual aspect of corruption, at least in high places, has been the very few cases of conviction of people in positions of power. In the handful of cases where elected representatives have been convicted, the legal proceedings have stretched over more than a decade. The causes of such delays and a low rate of conviction are both political and legal. The end effect is despair among the citizenry. In the routine, there is no moral opprobrium associated with the corrupt whether they are serving or elected officials. Anger surfaces only when corruption leads to, for example, poor quality work which causes death and injury. The acceptance of corruption as a part of everyday life has, however, raised questions about the distrust it breeds in the rule of law.

This discussion inevitably leads to asking if India is one of the most corrupt societies in the world. Global attempts to rank countries are subjective and of little value. These show India occupying only the middle ranks in the global league of countries. However, with the rule of law so routinely violated and punishment so rare, public perception is that India is indeed one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Society’s deep concern about corruption has led some to believe that a constant focus on the phenomenon has made it out to be a bigger problem than it actually is and has bred a cynical mood among the citizenry. The validity of such an argument cannot be established, but what has been established, even if only with numerous pieces of anecdotal evidence, is that corruption touches everybody at different points of their lives and in different aspects.

References

Myrdal, Gunnar. Asian Drama, Single edn. London: Pelican, 1971.

Viswanathan, Shiv and Harsh Sethi, ed. Foul Play: Chronicles of Corruption 1947–97. New Delhi: Banyan books, 1998.

DESIVAD (DĒSĪVĀD)

Bhalchandra Nemade

Desivad, from desi, which means ‘of the land’ and vaad (the suffix ‘-ism’), has been a most widely debated theory in Marathi and other Indian languages since 1980s. This has been, partly, a response to the postcolonial situation, anxiously reclaiming the dormant hoary traditions, and partly as an attitude towards the dilemma of homogenizing internationalism and indigenous pluralism encountered in Indian literary culture of enormous varieties-ethnic, religious and linguistic. Being desi is asserting a particular code of the land, self-evident in the inherited lifestyles of immense diversity found in every different region and sometimes in the same place.

Desivad has thus both benign and aggressive dimensions: it sensitively recognizes individuality of each of the numerous tribes, subaltern groups, castes and faiths or religions strikingly expressed in their literature; on the other hand, it confronts any uniform, national, transnational, universalist or cosmopolitan standards, which are bound to be ideologically charged and induce rootlessness in societies. Desivad rejects theories of evaluation that judge the product of one culture by the standards of another, refusing to count native systems as subsets of some abstract national or international systems, because such haphazard praxizes culminate in the breakdown of interrelationships between biodiversity, cultural diversity and linguistic diversity.

Rooted in physical and cultural environments of existing mores of society, rather than in the historical archival repositories, desivad asserts plurality of distinct native styles of living. Different population groups have acquired characteristics designated by their geographical and genetic isolation for millions of years, ensuing psychological adaptations and, in turn, cultural differences between peoples are attributed to geographical and environmental causes as well as reproductive isolation. Thus, every human group has evolved its own culture and there is nothing like a universal human culture. Similarities do exist; however, differences are more fecund, especially in human creative faculties.

Basic environment and choice are active in structuralizing an inherited tradition which makes itself distinct from another. Hence the unique value of legacy or heritage in every human group. Despite the characteristic geopiety it manifests, desi-ness may lead to self-centredness, inbreeding and insularity. A vital and ongoing process in all cultures necessitates desikaran (nativization). It entails interdependence between cultures under various historical processes of culture contact, leading to borrowing, often forms, and rarely even features, from ‘other’ cultures, both intra- and international, into the receiving culture.

The borders between desi consciousness and other xenophobic tendencies, such as fundamentalism, chauvinism and revivalism, naturally grow in the interstices of democratically nurtured multicultural society like the Indian subcontinent. The borderline between such degenerate tendencies and desivad appears to be thin; nevertheless, it does exist, is distinctly visible and perspicuous. However, there is a prevailing political strategy to deliberately blur the barriers in order to exploit desi emotions. Every great author, whether Shakespeare or Goethe, wrote for her or his time and place and for her or his own language community. Similarly, every work of art inevitably bears the birthmark of the soil in which it is born. From the desi viewpoint, international recognition, however high in relief, is purely accidental, determined by circumstances, ideologically conditioned and subject to the sociology of reception.

References

Katzenstein, Mary F. ‘Origins of Nativism: The Emergence of Shiv Sena in Bombay’. Asian Survey 134 (1973): 386–399.

Paranjape, Makarand R. Nativism: Essays in Criticism. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1997.

DHARNA/RAIL ROKO/BANDH/HARTAL/GHERAO (DHARNĀ/RĒL RŌKŌ/BANDH/HAṚTĀL/GHĒRĀV)

Samir Kumar Das

These five words refer to various forms of political protest, with an Indian idiom. The Hindi word dharna means ‘sitting in restraint, placing’, originally meaning, lying flat on one’s face in worship in front of a temple till one’s vow is accomplished. In modern times, the word has undergone significant secularization of meaning and now describes holding of peaceful demonstration in front of an office/workplace. The word originates from the Sanskrit verb dhar (‘to hold, to place’). Interestingly, the same verb also lies at the root of dharma (ethic) and is often mistranslated as (organized) religion. Because of its ethical connotation, the act of staging dharna is marked by a certain kind of intransigence insofar as the protesters refuse to leave till their demands are met or at least some promise towards their fulfilment is made. Dharna emerged as a political practice in the villages of Kathiawar in Gujarat against the British authorities in the early nineteenth century and was popularized in modern times by Gandhi. It is often accompanied by fast unto death, self-flagellation or other forms of self-torture, even self-immolation.

The second term rail roko has two components: the English term ‘rail’ and the Hindi term roko. This simply means squatting on the railway tracks while obstructing or halting the movement of trains, usually to publicize local issues. The word rōkō is derived from the Hindi word rukna that implies ‘to stop, to hinder, to obstruct’.

While rail roko is organized by the general public, railway workers’ strike is one in which the workers refuse to report to work in order to pursue their demands and railway traffic comes to a standstill. That brings us to the third word band, which comes from the Sanskrit word ‘bandh’ meaning ‘to bind, pledge’. The word subsequently underwent a transformation of meaning to now connote any striking of work.

The fourth word, hartal, is derived from the Gujarati word hannatala, meaning ‘closing of shops in the market’. The word is formed from two Sanskrit words: hanna which means ‘market’ and tala which means ‘padlock’. Hartal is often accompanied by bhukh hartal (hunger strike), whether relay or indefinite. By all accounts, the word hartal was first used during the freedom movement in India. It refers to a form of mass protest involving total shutdown of shop floors, workplaces, offices, markets, courts of law, educational institutions, industries and so forth, as part of civil disobedience organized to bring home the unacceptability of a government decision.

While hartal and band often appear as synonyms, there are significant differences between the two. First, while hartal is usually called on a much wider scale on issues that are of general character (such as imposition of Goods and Services Tax or withdrawal of subsidies from agricultural inputs), a band is organized on a smaller scale and usually involves local issues. Second, a band may be sudden, spontaneous and unorganized. A hartal, on the other hand, is unlikely to be so, because organizing it on a wide scale requires some level of planning and leadership. Third, in 1997, the High Court of Kerala distinguished hartal from band by holding that while calling of a band per se is illegal and unconstitutional, calling of a hartal is not. The court noted that it is the enforcement of a hartal by force, intimidation and coercion that makes it illegal and unconstitutional insofar as it violates the rights of others who refuse to observe it.

The next term in the sequence, gherao, is of Bengali and Hindi origin, but its first documented usage was in West Bengal. Gherao originally meant ‘to encircle, to surround’, and in the political scenario, it refers to a kind of protest where protesters do not allow the authority or employers to leave the office or workplace until their demands are met. This form of protest was introduced by Subodh Banarjee when he was the West Bengal state minister of labour welfare in 1967 and Public Works Department (PWD) in 1969. The National Commission of Labour in India, however, refuses to accept gherao as a legitimate form of labour protest on the grounds that it threatens to cause physical distress to the persons gheraoed and jeopardizes industrial harmony and law and order.

In Western parlance, each of these words may have its English equivalent with the effect that each may have travelled across continents and lost its distinctively Indian character. But, the Indian words are nevertheless important in ways that are likely to set them apart from their Western equivalents for the following reasons: First, each of these forms is marked by a sense of ethicality and intransigence that distinguishes it from the commonplace forms of collective bargaining and trade union consciousness that expresses itself through such demands as increase in wages and improvement of work conditions etc. Each of them thus speaks of a deep sense of justice that catalyzes it. Justice Krishna Iyer maintained that a strike, even if illegal, could be very well justified. Second, unlike in the West, these practices of protest are also reflective of some form of affect. Often family, caste, kinship and neighbourhood ties play a role in reinforcing or undermining the otherwise political solidarities that form through these practices of protest. Third, the ethical element underlining many of these forms of protest has a tendency of overshadowing the democracy understood conventionally as the regime of numbers. Fourth, these forms of protest face the risk of losing their edge insofar as they get routinized because of their overuse. Sometimes bandhs and hartals are organized more as a show of strength than to fulfil demands.

References

Denning, Lord. ‘Gherao: A Pernicious Technique of Agitational Politics in India.’ Pressure Groups and Politics of Influence 8 (1997): 330.

Spodek, Howard. ‘On the Origins of Gandhi’s Political Methodology: The Heritage of Kathiawad and Gujarat’. The Journal of Asian Studies 30, no. 2 (1971): 361–372.

DM/BDO

Ashok Thakur

The DM (district magistrate) is the executive head of a district in India. The office is a legacy of the Raj, having been introduced by Lord Warren Hastings in 1772, to head and to represent the government at the district level. Interestingly, the model was more akin to the Prefecture system in France, offering unity of command and centralized administration, which the British needed for faster consolidation of acquired territories.

At present, there are 707 districts in India’s 29 states and 7 Union Territories. The officers heading these posts belong to the Indian Administrative Services (IAS), the successor to the Indian Civil Services (ICS). The selection into the IAS is done by an arm’s length agency of the Centre, that is, the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), which selects around 150 candidates each year out of 400,000 who appear for the exam, making it one of the toughest in the world. After an initial two years of training and another three as sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) and additional district magistrate (ADM) she or he is posted as a DM. Apart from the term DM, the office is also known as collector in states where, historically, collection of land revenue was important. In some states, the appellation of DC (deputy commissioner) is also popular.

Generally speaking, there are three broad roles as head of the district. The first one is that of maintaining law and order, which makes the DM technically the head of the police and executive magistracy. The superintendent of police (SP) of the district is supposed to report to her or him on all important matters relating to the subject. Supervision of jails is also one of the duties. The office had judicial powers too, which ended with the separation of judiciary from the executive in 1973. At present, their judicial powers are limited to hearing cases under preventive sections of the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC). Conducting elections fairly and peacefully in the district is another important role, as it is the bedrock of the country’s democracy.

The second role is as that of head of land administration, wherein one is responsible for collection of taxes (now no longer important), proper maintenance of land records, protection of government lands from encroachment and arbitration in land acquisition cases. As collector, she or he is assisted by district revenue officer and several sub-collectors and tehsildars. In times of natural disasters like drought, flood, fire and earthquake, this office takes the lead role.

The last hat that she or he wears is that of the head of ‘development administration’, which implies improving the living standards of the rural families, especially those living below the poverty line, by implementing a host of livelihood and income-generation schemes. Creating tangible rural assets/infrastructure is also an important objective. These schemes are funded by the Ministry of Rural Development and Poverty Alleviation of the Government of India with the state government chipping in. Besides this, most of the major development programmes of line departments of the state government are chaired by DM for effective coordination. Thus, the buck stops with the DM for matters related to the district. The reporting officer of DM is the commissioner who has several districts under her or his control. In turn, she or he reports to the state government for overall coordination and control.

The BDO (block development officer), on the other hand, is a subordinate of deputy commissioner in the area of ‘developmental administration’. Typically, there are about five to ten developmental blocks in a district, each headed by a BDO. The institution of BDO came into existence in 1952 with the launch of the Community Development Programme in the country, with the objective of bringing about social and economic transformation in rural India. The strategy was to increase the income of farmers through increased agriculture production, improving their livelihood opportunities, bettering rural connectivity and augmenting primary education enrolment. The office of the BDO was to be the focal point for all the block-level functionaries of the line departments, namely agriculture, horticulture, industries, fisheries, cooperatives and rural development department and work in coordination under the leadership of BDO, who in turn is answerable to the DM. With the introduction of Zila Parishad under Panchayati Raj (local self-government), the position of the BDO has become complex as she or he now reports not only to the deputy commissioner but also the Block Samiti chairperson.

The institution of DM as well as the BDO are undergoing major changes today due to the increasing role of the elected representatives. The political leadership controls the bureaucracy (DMs and BDOs are no exception) through the instrument of transfer, promotions and posting. The average tenure of a DM in some states is less than a year, which leads to the post becoming less effective. In many states, the line departments headed by ministers now no longer report through the BDO/DM. The Police Department is a case in point where they tend to function independently on most occasions. The ‘steel frame’, as the IAS was referred to in the past, is fast losing its relevance due to the pressures of the changing times.

References

Mukhopadhyay, Asok. ‘Changing Role of the District Magistrate’. Indian Journal of Public Administration 43, no. 3 (1997): 696–702.

Sinha, Chandan. Public Sector Reforms in India: New Role of the District Officer. New Delhi: SAGE Publications India, 2007.

DOMINANT CASTE

Ghanshyam Shah

In the mid-1950s, social anthropologist M. N. Srinivas coined the concept of dominant caste to explain rural sociopolitical dynamics. It was based on a village study in south India. A dominant caste that is, jati (a local social group in which members have an interpersonal relationship of exchange of food and matrimonial network) is not necessarily high in the ritual hierarchy, but it is also not too low in the social order. It numerically preponderates over other castes and also wields significant economic and political power. In the context of rural India, economic power is embodied with landholding and political power – control over caste and village councils. Later, Srinivas added two more attributes to the notion of dominant caste: (Western) education and (non-farm white-collar) occupation.

The dominant caste is not necessarily the same in all villages of a district or block. It may vary from village to village. All dominant castes do not necessarily have all or even most of the attributes of dominance. It is possible that a caste with numerical strength without economic power may enjoy dominance in some spheres but not in all. And, a caste numerically insignificant but economically powerful might enjoy political influence and dominance.

According to Srinivas, when a caste enjoys one form of dominance, it is frequently able to acquire the other forms as well in course of time. Thus, a caste which is numerically strong and wealthy will be able to move up the ritual hierarchy if it Sanskritizes its ritual and way of life and also loudly and persistently proclaims itself to be what it wants to be. The more forms of dominance which a caste enjoys, the easier it is for it to acquire the rest. However, traditionally, untouchable castes do not enjoy an opportunity for upward mobility.

A caste with all the above attributes enjoys decisive dominance. Though there is reciprocity among the castes in socio-economic relationships, dominant caste, more so when it enjoys decisive dominance, enjoys coercive power over other castes. In this scenario, members of the non-dominant castes ‘may be abused, beaten, grossly underpaid, or their women required to gratify the sexual desires of the powerful men in the dominant caste’.

Srinivas showed that at the village level a dominant caste resolves inter-caste as well as intra-caste disputes. Ritually high-caste Brahmins and even Muslims sought the help of patrons of the dominant caste to settle their disputes. However, untouchables did not refer their disputes to the dominant caste. But his observations were confined to a study of one village in South India in the 1950s. Since then, with increased urbanization, coupled with industrialization and the Green Revolution, rural India in different parts of the country may have changed considerably. The scenario of inter-caste relationship observed in the 1950s seems to have undergone shifts in many parts of the country where non-dominant castes resist, protest and confront the dominant caste. At the same time, it seems probable that caste dominance does not easily dissipate. Some sociologists have shown that land ownership in Indian villages moves towards the dominant caste. Correspondingly, landless labourers from a dominant caste have a greater chance of becoming landowners than members of other castes. This is also true for education and white-collar employment.

In their studies on elections and state/region politics, political sociologists thus continue to use the concept of a dominant caste. At a regional level, for example, a jati-cluster that successfully mobilizes other jatis perceived as belonging to a similar denomination will have the numerical strength to constitute a dominant caste. Rajni Kothari observed that ‘politics serve as a medium of integration’ of these jatis ‘though adaptation and change’. These caste clusters may be called dominant political castes. Such dominant castes vary from region to region. They compete with each other in electoral politics and distribution of resources. All of them are not necessarily economically powerful. Though political sociologists use the concept of dominant caste, so far very little effort has been made to conceptualize the idea of a dominant political caste in contemporary times.

References

Kothari, Rajni. Caste in Indian Politics. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1970.

Srinivas, M. N. ‘The Social System of a Mysore Village’. In Village India, edited by McKim Marriott , 21–35. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.

EMERGENCY

Suhas Palshikar

The word ‘emergency’ would ordinarily mean merely a situation of some unforeseen urgency. But, in the context of Indian politics, it refers to certain constitutional provisions, a brief period of effective suspension of democracy and an evocative political polemic implying an authoritarian tendency. The Constitution envisages three types of emergencies: national emergency, state emergency and financial emergency. The third has remained a dead provision as it has never been used in independent India’s political history thus far. The second, more popularly known as ‘president’s rule’ in the states of India, has been controversial right from the beginning but seldom referred to as emergency. That leaves us with the ‘national emergency’ that is declared under Article 352 of the Constitution of India.

When such an emergency is declared, the union government assumes extraordinary powers to suspend fundamental rights and to take away the powers of India’s states – thus, converting the country temporarily into a non-federal and even non-democratic state. This was not always the case. Emergencies were indeed declared when India faced wars with its neighbours, but the severe effects of those emergencies were never felt. It was only the Emergency of 1975 that has created history: it was not declared on grounds of threat of external aggression but rather on grounds of threat of internal disturbance. The argument of the government was that a spate of agitations across the country tended to weaken the Indian state, the alleged appeal by Jayprakash Narayan to the armed forces and the police not to obey illegal orders of the government amounted to a threat of rebellion and that there was an international conspiracy to destabilize India. While the period immediately preceding the Emergency was indeed a period of severe anti-government political activity, critics of the Emergency of 1975 point out that there was hardly an anarchic situation and certainly no organized political violence.

During that Emergency, large-scale arrests of political opponents took place and these arrests were in the form of preventive detentions, that is, there were no specific charges, no trials, no convictions. In a case known for its non-democratic tenor, the Supreme Court refused to entertain the right of the detainees to use the writ of habeas corpus, thus effectively admitting that during Emergency, the fundamental rights to life and liberty did not exist anymore. While India has a system of collective responsibility of the Union Cabinet, the declaration of Emergency in 1975 was not approved by the Cabinet before it went to the president for his assent. He did not inquire about Cabinet approval and accorded his assent. In the absence of most members of the opposition, a major amendment to the Constitution was made (Forty-Second Amendment). Elections were due in 1976 but using the Emergency provision, elections were postponed and then the duration of Lok Sabha was extended by one year – from five to six so that elections would be necessary only in 1978. However, the government actually called for elections in early 1977 and the sitting government was defeated by a combined opposition. This was the first time in independent India that the sitting national government was ever defeated in elections. In the political folklore of India, the defeat was attributed to ‘excesses’ during the Emergency and the outcome was hailed as a second freedom.

Thus, Emergency has become a political code word. It is not merely about the specific political developments of 1975–7 but a reference point. It refers to the possibilities of ushering in authoritarian government through constitutional means. It refers to complete decimation of political opponents using state power. It refers to the failure of the judiciary to protect the Constitution and uphold democracy. It refers to the unprecedented atmosphere of fear and suspicion that practically suspended open competitive politics. It refers to the contingent possibility that people themselves may remove a sitting government if it engages in political excesses. Above all, in the political lexicon of India, the term Emergency refers to two things. One, it refers to unleashing a reign of terror to tame the opposition. Two, it refers to a proclivity to personalized authoritarian rule propped up by use of the bureaucratic apparatus.

In the aftermath of the Emergency and the elections of 1977, some mechanisms of damage control were adopted. For instance, by an amendment to the Constitution, the reasons for declaring Emergency were more strictly defined as war, external aggression or armed rebellion. It is also now mandatory that the advice to the president to declare a state of Emergency must come in a written form by the Union Cabinet. Declaration of Emergency must be approved by the Lok Sabha within one month and after that, it can remain operative only for six months. Extending it beyond six months requires approval of the Lok Sabha for each period of six months.

Since 1975–7, Emergency powers have never been invoked. But the word Emergency continues to have resonance in political rhetoric. Besides the use of Article 352, Emergency refers to a possible curtailing of rights, including the freedom of expression, and a general political environment of fear, suspicion and intolerance. The Congress Party often receives criticism for its infamous use of Emergency powers in 1975–7 (because it has never formally distanced itself from what its leadership did in the 1970s nor has it accepted that it made a mistake). On the other hand, critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi have pointed out to his alleged authoritarian style of functioning, his emphasis on personal popularity and power and the instances of unofficial harassment and/or violence against those with opposing views. The criticism of the prime minister is that without invoking the constitutional provision of Emergency, he is causing an ‘Emergency-like’ political atmosphere that suspends dialogue and brands opponents as threat to the nation.

Thus, beyond its constitutional ramifications and subtleties, the term ‘Emergency’ has assumed a political connotation that draws attention to authoritarian tendencies that are active inside the democratic sphere of competitive politics in India.

References

Nayar, Kuldip. The Judgement: Inside Story of the Emergency in India. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977.

Park, Richard L. ‘Political Crisis in India, 1975’. Asian Survey 15, no. 11 (1975): 996–1013.

FATWA (FATVĀ)

Irfanullah Farooqi

A fatwa is a legal opinion given by a mufti (scholar trained in Islamic law) in response to a question raised by an individual. As an opinion, it responds to a matter/issue that has a bearing on religious conduct. While fatwas have become part of popular discourse quite recently, its history, as a practice of seeking opinion on matters of religious conduct, is very old. It is held that the companions of Prophet Muhammad used to seek his opinion on a range of issues and matters. What is important to note is that on many occasions, Muhammad would refrain from giving his own opinion and wait for revelation on the matter.

Contrary to the prevalent understanding of fatwa, a result of series of simplistic-yet-politically motivated formulations, it is non-binding. In case the inquirer is not convinced with the response, she or he can always approach another mufti. While in most cases a fatwa is sought or requested so as to know the dictate of the shariah (Islamic legal code) about a specific issue, there are instances when a mufti, on his own, announces his jurisprudential opinion on a matter that, according to him, merits an intervention in the light of shariah.

If we look at the sudden prominence of the word fatwa across the globe since the late 1980s, it becomes quite clear that it created an overwhelming corpus of knowledge around the institution of fatwa giving that reduced it to the binary of orthodox/conservative versus liberal/progressive. Rather than understanding it predominantly as a response to an individual’s genuine curiosity around a new social practice and the possibility of its reconciliation with the Islamic legal codes, fatwa has been understood as a declaration that is invariably in line with violence and bloodshed or against freedom and human agency. Starting with the fatwa in support of suicide bombers to the highly infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie, it comes across as violently antithetical to the peaceful functioning of the human world. Interestingly, this massive coverage of political fatwas of a certain bent conveniently overlooks fatwas that were equally political yet signalled the liberal and rational aspect of Islam as a religion. For instance, little or no attention was given to fatwas that openly condemned violence and declared that suicide bombing was against the teachings of Islam and those that made a case for coexistence and accommodation, spoke in favour of gender equality, publicly denounced bigotry in the name of religion and so on.

Given how rapid changes in any society merit the critical intervention of fatwa, it is not difficult to make sense of the massive increase in fatwas in the recent past. Massive movements of labour forces to developed countries, increased mobility and access, technological development, new trends in governance, religious revivalism and so on have all jointly led to a very genuine concern around the assimilation of a series of new social practices within the larger frame of shariah. As against the commonly held perception, interventions through fatwa, in many cases, revealed flexibility within Islamic discourse by stretching the limits of Islamic law. The huge number of fatwas on insurance, investment in share markets, use of technology, political participation and several other important issues categorically hint at, alongside a means of providing religious legitimacy, Islam’s accommodative spirit towards reforms.

One of the most fundamental reasons behind the prevalent sinister understanding of fatwa as a deterrent is to do with the focus of fatwa discourses being restricted to the mufti and absolute neglect of the mustafti (the person who seeks the fatwa) and istifta (the request for fatwa). A mustafti ideally should be driven by a deep and earnest urge to know shariah’s say in the matter concerned. She or he must find a qualified mufti and must be willing to travel to find one in case there is none in her or his area. In fatwa as a process, both mustafti and mufti are to fulfil a set of desirable qualities. Personal preferences should not come in the way and taqwa (God consciousness) should remain at the core of their engagement with the issue.

Looking at India in particular, even a cursory look at the range of fatwas during the colonial period urges one to discard the ‘fear’ of a fatwa. Ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century, fatwas were issued one after another against colonial rule. By the beginning of the twentieth century, serving the British army was declared haraam (forbidden). There were fatwas that openly asked Muslims to express solidarity with the Indian National Congress and, in their opposition to colonial rule, cooperate with the Hindus. The fatwa in support of Gandhi’s call for non-cooperation signed by five hundred muftis followed by an endorsement of a similar scale during the Khilafat Movement remains well-documented.

A holistic understanding of fatwa politics in India must take us beyond the convenient reference to supremacy of Muslim orthodoxy or their contentious role in regulating the lives of ordinary Muslims. Invoking fatwa’s anti-progress and anti-reform aspect, a certain political ideology is quite keen on projecting it as something that is against the national interest. Repeated references to fatwas against co-education, music, fashion, modelling, watching TV and films, contraceptives, life insurance, uploading of photos, birthday celebrations and so on have created a world that holds the community responsible for its poor showing. Alongside this huge pile that is moved to articulate fatwa’s role as an impediment in nation-building, what also slips between the cracks are the fatwas against doing the yogic surya namaskar and chanting the Hindu saraswati vandana and the nationalist slogans vande mataram and bharat mata ki jai. As a result, there arises a peculiar mixture of secular, communal and national concerns around the institution of fatwa. These concerns then underline the rigidity of Islamic law and push for doing away with Muslim Personal Law. Needless to say, this fatwa politics that eventually enters the realm of culture feeds sawdust into the already burning fire of communal hatred in India. There is an urgent need to check the sinister meaning that fatwa has acquired. Such false equivalences will prove extremely damaging to the plural ethos of a country like India. Muftis must seek recourse to the much-cherished reticence in calling every other practice un-Islamic and we as a society should be willing to give religious knowledge its due, on occasions that require an uncommonly deep engagement with issues related to rights and representation.

References

Agrama, Hussein Ali. ‘Ethics, Tradition, Authority: Toward an Anthropology of the Fatwa’. American Ethnologist 37, no. 1 (2010): 2–18.

Masud, Muhammad Khalid. ‘The Significance of Istiftā in the Fatwā Discourse’. Islamic Studies 48, no. 3 (Autumn 2009): 341–366.

GHAR WAPSI (GHAR VĀPSĪ)

Rudolf C. Heredia

Any consideration of conversion or reconversion must first come to terms with Babasahib B. R. Ambedkar’s defining decision when he announced at Yeola on 13 October 1935: ‘It was not my fault that I was born an untouchable. But I am determined that I will not die a Hindu.’ Ambedkar’s neo-Buddhist, navayana movement is an enlightening example of such a protest. The only response Hindutvawadis have had to this is to affirm that Buddhism is Hinduism, precisely the opposite of what Ambedkar was emphatic about. Neo-Buddhist Dalits today would consider this to be an act of Manuvādī obfuscation. Buddhists in other countries in Asia would certainly reject this as well. Here conversion is understood as a change of religion, dharmantar, not only a change of heart but also an atmaparivartan within the same religious tradition. Such religious conversions have been recently on the boil because of the Hindu reconversion imbroglio, euphemistically called ghar wapsi (which literally means ‘homecoming’). Our tense and polarized situation demands an honest introspection so that converts and would-be converts are heard in their own right, not in the voices of those who ventriloquize for them.

Conversion from one religious community to another understandably makes the original community of the convert insecure, even hostile. Something held precious is being negated, and something else affirmed. The real concern ought to be, how valid is this negation, how meaningful the affirmation? To respond with reconversions, or ghar wapsi, is but a defensive playback in reverse. To put a cunning spin on the term and pretend that it is not a religious change but a homecoming, ghar wapsi, is disingenuous and cannot hide the patent political agenda under the garb of religion or culture. The issue here is whether the overlay of psychological and social, political and economic motivations which may well obtain, invalidate and even negate religious ones. If they do, then it would not be religious conversion but still a legitimate and ethical exercise of personal freedom.

Converts and reconverts in India and elsewhere often become pawns in the numbers game of converters and reconverters for their own purposes. Both converters and opponents need to carefully discern whether they foreground the best interests and freedom of the ‘proselytes’ or these are being instrumentalized and co-opted to alien causes. Surely, the need is to work towards better inter-religious understanding and dialogue. Those opposed to religious conversions also need to interrogate themselves as to why is it that the wretchedness of would-be converts merits so little attention, except in the event of their changing religious allegiance. They are not accepted in their own religious community, nor allowed to leave, and are virtual prisoners of a ‘no entry, no exit’ policy.

When religious conversions develop into a people’s movement, then the political and economic interests they touch can arouse considerable protest. The movement itself is often both a protest against an oppressive political and economic situation and a hope for a better life. Here the concern ought to be whether such protest and hope is legitimate within the rights and liberties constitutionally guaranteed to our citizens. Religious conversion is an unavoidable stumbling block for any aspiration for religious harmony or any real hope of true religious understanding, both of which are so essential to contain the a faux idea of ‘religious diversity’ which can so easily divide rather than unite people. Extremism on either side leaves alarmingly little room for the middle ground of sanity and common sense free from prejudice and increasingly less space for an awareness of our inevitable prejudgements. Positioning ourselves on common ground, we must enlarge this to engage in a plurality of conversations with the willing. This common ground must be extended to include other areas of human values and concerns that may well be outside these religious traditions but can still serve to question and critique them. This common ground on which our exchanges are premised does not exclude the secular or the non-religious in so far as this helps to further a multifaceted dialogue. The alternative is the violence of ‘might is right’ which settles very little and destroys much.

When a culture entrenches its values and stakes as non-negotiable, a ‘cultural disarmament’ is the only ‘way to peace’, in the words of Raimon Panikkar, by bracketing our cultural differences for an engagement in open and equal dialogue. Today, we need similar commitment to a ‘religious disarmament’ to open a way to intra-/inter-religious harmony and intra-/inter-communal peace. However, tragically there is an inversion of roles today: the religious traditions that once emphasized propagation and proselytization are now converting to understanding and dialogue, and those that once stressed tolerance and inclusiveness are now becoming aggressive and exclusive. Ghar wapsi exemplifies this inversion.

References

Heredia, Rudolf C. Changing Gods: Rethinking Conversion in India. New Delhi: Penguin, 2007.

Panikkar, Raimon. Cultural Disarmament: The Way to Peace. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995.

HINDU RASHTRA (HINDŪ RĀṢṬRA)

Pralay Kanungo

Hindu rashtra (Hindu Nation) constitutes the core ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the fountainhead of right-wing ideology in contemporary India. In the milieu of intense identity politics, communal polarization and Hindu–Muslim riots, Dr K. B. Hedgewar, influenced by V. D. Savarkar’s thesis on Hindutva, founded the RSS in 1925 at Nagpur, Maharashtra, to organize and mobilize Hindus.

Hindutva (lit. Hinduness), being coined by Hindu revivalists the late-nineteenth-century colonial Bengal, remained obscure till Savarkar made it a political ideology in his seminal work Hindutva (1923). He defined the Hindu as a person who regarded Hindustan as his pitrubhumi (fatherland) and punyabhumi (holy land); thus, while only Hindus constituted the Indian nationhood, Muslims and Christians fell outside its ambit as their holy land existed in the Middle East, beyond the sacred boundary of India. Interestingly, in contrast to the usual Indian use of matrubhumi (motherland), Savarkar’s invocation of fatherland showed German influence. For Savarkar, Hindutva not Hinduism constituted the core of Hindustan; while the former is a history in full, the latter is only a derivative. Being an atheist, Savarkar had little to do with religion; he rather displaced Hinduism (religious) by Hindutva (political) as the foundational identity of a Hindu as well as of India.

Savarkar’s nationalism became the guiding doctrine of RSS’s ideology of Hindu rashtra/Hindu nationalism. Being more of a practitioner, Hedgewar innovatively put this ideology into action; he recruited young boys, set up shakhas (branches), imparted both sharirik (physical) and boudhik (intellectual) training regularly and despatched a dedicated and disciplined band of trained disciples as ‘pracharaks’ (propagandists) to open shakhas across India to inculcate in young boys the ideology of Hindu rāṣṭra.

M. S. Golwalkar, who succeeded Hedgewar as the second chief (Sarsanghchalak) of the RSS, further sharpened and amplified the ideology of Hindu rashtra in two ideological tracts We or Our Nationhood Defined (1938) and Bunch of Thoughts (1966). While We became controversial for its explicit and extreme anti-minorities pronouncements, and was later withdrawn, the ‘moderate’ Bunch of Thoughts (1966) was no less provocative as it identified three enemies of Hindu Rashtra – the Muslims, the Christians and the Communists. Golwalkar also propagated ‘Hindi, Hindu Hindustan’ (one language, one culture and one nation). Strategically, Golwalkar did not antagonize the British kept the RSS away from the freedom struggle, thereby enabling it to expand quietly and smoothly. When Hindu–Muslim riots broke out after India’s partition in 1947, the RSS established its credentials as a ‘defender’ of Hindus.

In a highly charged communal atmosphere, in 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, who was a close disciple of Savarkar and a former RSS member. The RSS was banned as a result and its leaders, including Golwalkar, were arrested. The ban was lifted in March 1949, and the RSS pledged to adopt a written constitution and confine itself to the cultural domain. Adverse experiences during the ban led to the birth of its political progeny, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS) in 1951; this new political party, preserving the ethos of Hindu rashtra, would politically challenge the Nehruvian vision of a modern, secular and composite India. Golwalkar also systematically created affiliates like the Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP; the students’ wing), Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS; workers’ wing) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP; religious wing) in order to penetrate and control various spheres of civil society. Thus, emerged a huge network of affiliates commonly known as the Sangh Parivar (RSS family).

Balasaheb Deoras succeeded Golwalkar in 1973. Known for his astute political sense, he soon anticipated a climate change in Indian politics and concluded that the time was right for the RSS to plunge into direct politics. Thus, he aligned with Jayaprakash Narayan against the authoritarian regime of Indira Gandhi, opposing the Emergency. A large number of RSS cadre went to jail, and the RSS was banned. The strategy paid off – New Delhi had the first non-Congress government in 1977, and the RSS became a key player. The BJS merged with the Janata Party; two of its prominent leaders – Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani – became cabinet ministers. As the Janata Party experiment failed over time, the RSS launched the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1980. While the new party got only 2 out of 543 seats in the Parliament in 1984, the RSS adopted a militant religio-political strategy to revive BJP’s political fortune. Thus, the old Ram Temple–Babri Masjid issue was raked up and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the religious affiliate, was given the lead role as it can passionately invoke Hindu religiosity and sentiment effectively. The Ramjanmabhoomi agitation was launched with the support of a large number of Sadhus. Advani’s Rath Yatra (1990) ignited the flames of communal riots across India, and finally, the Babri Masjid was pulled down in 1992. The RSS was banned for the third time. But the Sangh Parivar had already demonstrated its political might through a mammoth mass mobilization unprecedented in independent India.

Ramjanmabhoomi agitation put Hindutva at the centre stage of Indian politics as BJP’s number soared in Parliament and state legislatures. As a consequence, Vajpayee, an RSS member, became the prime minister, first for only thirteen days in 1996 and then for six years from 1998 to 2004. As Vajpayee was moderate and the BJP had to share power with disparate political forces, the core Hindutva agenda like the Ram Temple, Article 370 and Uniform Civil Code were put on the backburner. However, the government saffronized education, raised jingoistic nationalism during the Kargil War and, above all, empowered the RSS affiliates and cadre to expand and entrench. In 2002, unprecedented anti-Muslim riots broke out in Gujarat when BJP’s Narendra Modi was chief minister. In the political wilderness, the BJP captured New Delhi again in 2014 under the leadership of Narendra Modi, an RSS pracharak. Though the ruling BJP had sworn by the secular Constitution and inclusive governance, yet discourses, rhetoric, icons and symbols, glorifying the ideals of Hindu rashtra, have today become familiar in the public domain.

Thus, the RSS, from its founder K. B. Hedgewar to the present chief Mohan Bhagwat, remains committed to the ideology of Hindu rashtra and works to achieve this objective with a calibrated strategy; political power had always given further momentum to their mission, perfectly manifested today in Bhagwat–Modi combine. Yet India’s inherent pluralism and diversity continue to modify the tenets of an unreconstructed Hindu rashtra and PM Modi who has come to power with an impressive majority in the Indian General Elections of 2019 speaks today of an ‘inclusive India’, and ‘sabka vishwas’.

References

Copland, Ian. ‘Crucibles of Hindutva? VD Savarkar, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Indian Princely States’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 211–234.

Raghavan, T. C. A. ‘Origins and Development of Hindu Mahasabha Ideology: The Call of VD Savarkar and Bhai Parmanand’. Economic and Political Weekly (1983): 595–600.

HUMAN RIGHTS

Savita Bhakhry

Human rights are a set of generally taken-for-granted assumptions based on the premise that as all human beings are born equal, everybody has human rights. The contemporary dominant articulation of human rights worldwide draws from the United Nations system of promoting and protecting human rights, predominantly the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It stipulates that all rights are universal, inalienable, interdependent, interrelated and indivisible as they belong to all of humanity because of their shared essence of dignified human existence. And, no one is to be discriminated against with regard to distinctions of any kind, either by the state or the community or the family. The Universal Declaration, though not legally binding, is also reflected in the Constitution of India. This has paved the way for a rights-based constitution in the governance of India after Independence.

The Constitution of India was adopted by the Constituent Assembly on 26 November 1949 and came into force on 26 January 1950. The Preamble, the provisions contained in Part III of the Constitution relating to Fundamental Rights and those in Part IV describing the Directive Principles of State Policy, directs the state to protect and promote human rights, more specifically, civil and political rights plus economic, social and cultural rights, including rights of women, children, vulnerable groups like persons with disabilities, scheduled castes and tribes, minorities and other weaker sections. Fundamental Rights, enshrined in Articles 12 to 35, are justiciable and substantially cover almost all the civil and political rights under six broad categories. These are rights that individuals and citizens have in relation to government and those in authority: the right to equality, right to freedom including the right to protection of life and personal liberty, protection in respect of conviction for offences and protection against arrest and detention in certain cases, right against exploitation and right to freedom of religion. These represent the basic values cherished by the people of India since Vedic times and protect not only the dignity of the individuals but also create conditions in which every human being can develop their personality to the fullest extent. Directive Principles of State Policy, Articles 36–51, focus on economic, social and cultural rights, essential in the governance of the country and it is the duty of the state to apply these while making laws. These have been held to supplement Fundamental Rights and are directed towards the ideals of building a true democratic welfare state by securing, protecting and promoting a just social order. These include right to livelihood, make effective provision for securing the right to work, education and public assistance in the event of unemployment, old age, sickness, disablement or other cases of undeserved want, equal pay for equal work, just and humane conditions of work, raising the level of nutrition and standard of living, improving public health and social and cultural opportunities.

It is important to remember that, conceptually, rights often come packaged with duties. Every right seems to have a corresponding duty, the two representing two sides of the same coin. If we have a right to life, a duty is also cast upon us to respect human life and not harm another person. This concept is reflected in Article 51-A (Part IV-A) of the Indian Constitution which enumerates the Fundamental Duties every citizen is required to follow.

The adoption of the Protection of Human Rights Act of 1993 in India is significant as it led to the establishment of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and State Human Rights Commissions (SHRC). An important function of the NHRC is to study treaties and other international instruments on human rights and make recommendations for their effective implementation. An equally vital function of the NHRC is to review the safeguards provided by the Constitution or any law in force for the protection of human rights and recommend measures for their effective performance. Submissions made by the NHRC to the government and UN Human Rights Council for India’s universal periodic reviews confirm that implementation of the laws, the weakness of new Bills and delay in new laws are areas of concern.

Undoubtedly, India has a powerful and activist judiciary, a free media and watchful civil society, which guards human rights in an open society run by the rule of law. However, gross violations of human rights by the state apparatus continue, both loud and silent. ‘Loud’ violence is directed against children, women, scheduled castes and tribes, Muslims, Christians and critics of the government. Internal strife, custodial violence, illegal detention and torture are a few other grey areas of violation of human rights. Lack of accountability for abuse committed by security forces persists. The inhuman practice of manual scavenging, bonded labour and child labour continues. Blanket shutdown of internet services in troubled areas by the government is the latest form of curbing the right to freedom of speech and expression.

Some ‘silent’ violations of human rights are the pervasiveness of poverty, hunger, illiteracy, maternal deaths, considerably high infant and under-five mortality, sex-selective abortions resulting in sex ratio imbalance at birth, widespread malnutrition, prevalence of anaemia, poor quality of education and infrastructure in villages, child marriages, human trafficking and discrimination and abuse of LGBT individuals. There is often awareness of loud violations but not of such silent violations. With the recognition of the Human Development Index (HDI) as a new measure of development in the 1990s, silent violations were brought centre stage while integrating human rights with human development as a true measure of progress.

The biggest challenge that the state apparatus faces today is that there is no national action plan for human rights. The state needs to work on this if at all human development for everyone and the 2030 agenda of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are to be achieved.

References

Lal, Chaman and Savita Bhakhry . ‘National Human Rights Commission: A Retrospective’. Journal of the National Human Rights Commission, India 12 (2013): 149–90.

Verma, J. S. ‘Human Rights Redefined: The New Universe of Human Rights’. Journal of the National Human Rights Commission, India 1 (2002): 1–17.

IAS, IFS

Yogendra Kumar

IAS (Indian Administrative Service) has become part of common parlance in all parts of the country, both urban and rural. It evokes an aura of state authority and a certain mystique rooted in the history of the British Raj when near absolute power and stratospheric elitism were the hallmarks of the predecessor service called the ICS (Indian Civil Service). Within the democratic and representative system of government in independent India, members of the IAS are still expected, by the wider public, to shed the image of ‘unaccountable authority’ and elitism even though the political leadership at all levels of hierarchy is far more powerful than the civil servants who are drawn from a much more diverse socio-economic background, especially from disadvantaged sections as a result of constitutionally sanctioned affirmative policy.

The power associated with a career in the IAS makes the recruitment process among the toughest anywhere in the world and invests its members with social renown and prestige incomparable with other careers which would, in any other society, be considered no less prestigious and professionally exclusive. Although much admired socially, at the individual level, a pejorative expression, ‘babus’, is also used in public discourse, especially in the clamorous, high-octane electronic media, to put public agitational pressure against government policy or its implementation and evoke the same negative attribute ascribed to them during the days of the British Raj. The word ‘babu’ itself gained currency in the early period of the Raj, as a respectful but also occasionally satirical British term for upper-class Indians educated in the British system and, often, employed in junior administrative positions.

Much like its earlier avatar, the ICS, the IAS is also a catch-all expression for a wide variety of non-technical higher services recruited and managed by the national government, irrespective of their deployment either in the national or provincial structures. These services range from the IAS itself to those relating to the police, taxation service, revenue service, accounts service, railways service, postal service, army cantonments and so on. These are clubbed together in this manner since they are all categorized as Class I services. Admired for offering considerable prospects for upward social mobility, members of these services receive much public approbation if they are seen as being ‘humble’ and as ‘one among the people’. The historical context of such cultivated personality traits is not to be taken lightly as the Indian members of the ICS, maligned for being part of a colonial administrative system during the period of freedom struggle, feared losing their jobs at the time of India’s Independence. Thanks to the non-violent and culturally eclectic nature of the Gandhian freedom movement, their services were, however, retained and many of them served in the government with great distinction. However, the nomenclature for the successor service was changed to IAS after Independence and the service association was renamed as the ICS/IAS Association, as was their official dress which nationalist leaders at time thought should be made of handloom fabric (khadi).

As in the case of the IAS, the IFS (Indian Foreign Service) also had a somewhat approximate predecessor service, called the ‘Indian Political Service’, an offshoot partially of the ICS. Members of the Indian Political Service were deployed in very high positions in various princely states that were in a relationship of subsidiary alliance with the British Crown. The nature of their work was politically delicate as well as administrative. Although influential in the Raj political system, they were not as well known as their ICS counterparts. The IFS was set up in 1946 to conduct independent India’s foreign policy and was anchored in the idealism of the unique nature of India’s freedom struggle. Although both the IAS and the IFS represent the same upper crust of the elite administrative services of the Government of India, the latter service gets subsumed by the former as a generic expression much like the other Class I services, causing, unsurprisingly, a certain heartburn among its members.

Although the wider public, notwithstanding the exponential increase in outgoing international tourism and the growing diaspora overseas, remains largely unfamiliar with Indian diplomatic missions, the mystique and elitism enveloping the persona of an Indian ambassador is even greater in the public eye. Being introduced as an ambassador, either in the government or the wider public circle, evokes a certain awe and smoothens many a passage in difficult situations, both official as well as personal. It is emblematic of the public perception of the pomp and circumstance of international diplomacy and the mesmerizing arcana of statecraft engaged in by the members of the IFS that the appointment of a foreign secretary is seen by the media as meriting a much more prominent coverage than the appointment of a cabinet secretary, the head of the civil services in the Indian administrative system. The nature of work of IFS officers is, however, little understood by the public, resulting in its diminishing popularity among the civil service aspirants largely hailing from non-metropolitan cities and socially disadvantaged backgrounds. In the same vein as the IAS, the effort of the higher Indian diplomatic echelons is focused on ‘public diplomacy’ at home to explain and to demystify the public purpose of Indian diplomacy.

The two expressions, ‘IAS’ and ‘IFS’, encapsulate the flow of Indian history and culture in the colonial and the postcolonial periods. Public admiration for these elite government functionaries is leavened by a certain distrust of the authority enjoyed by them in its name: the ‘Indianness’ of these characteristics makes for the mystique surrounding their status in society. In the vastly different circumstances of the twenty-first century, robustly democratic India, a conscious – governmental as well as personal – effort still continues to be needed to overcome the legacy of their historical origin in the high noon of the British Empire in India.

References

Krishna, Anirudh. ‘Continuity and Change: The Indian Administrative Service 30 Years Ago and Today’. Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 48, no. 4 (2010): 433–444.

Maheshwari, S. R. ‘Strengthening Administrative Capabilities in India’. Public Administration and Development 4, no. 1 (1984): 49–62.

INSURGENCY/TERRORIST/JIHĀDĪ/MILITANT

Sanjoy Hazarika

Labels are powerful weapons that transform public perception of a community. The Rohingya are a case in point. While newspapers were filled with reports of persecuted Rohingyas fleeing into Bangladesh from Myanmar, a Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) advisory announced that forty thousand Rohingya in India were to be sent back, and that they pose ‘grave security challenges’. They were seen as vulnerable and could be recruited to jihadist groups, seeking to cement the public perception from asylum seekers to terrorists. Such words impact audiences and are used as ‘weapons’ in and of communication against individuals and communities. It would be instructive to deconstruct the terms aatankwadi, jihādī, ‘terrorist’, ‘militant’ and ‘insurgent’ towards understanding the problems these labels pose. We will look at them in the specific context of Northeast India, which is a stage of multiple conflicts. Northeast India shares 96 per cent of its frontiers with other nations and is connected to ‘mainland India’ by a thin strip of land. The region is an exceptional case because of its extraordinary ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity and the continued existence of rebel groups despite contemporary ‘rationalist’ agendas.

Insurgency, or ‘asymmetric warfare fought within the boundaries of a state’, usually aims at overthrowing the incumbent government. The word derives from the Latin insurgere which means to ‘rise up’ or ‘rise against’. One who engages in such activity – an insurgent – uses certain non-conventional means to achieve this, including terrorism, propaganda and guerrilla warfare, as Robinson observes. Insurgency is often conflated with Naxalism, which former prime minister, Manmohan Singh, described as ‘the single biggest internal security challenge’. However, numerous other areas such as the North-East, were seen as insurgency-hit and even labelled by the Centre-appointed Administrative Reforms Commission as ‘stable anarchy’. The North-East is the cradle for South Asia’s longest running insurgency – that of the Nagas. Local armed groups have fought for the idea of ‘Nagalim’ or a Naga homeland. Historically, most Nagas have considered themselves distinct from India. ‘Nagaland’ is a state but remains a political construct in the eyes of many Nagas. Such rebellions have also occurred in other states in the region, Mizoram, Manipur, Tripura and Assam. Even parts of Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh, considered to be more peaceful, have been impacted by some violence due to insurgency.

Terrorist movements in the North-East, while indigenous in nature, have often required foreign support and bases, particularly Myanmar, Bhutan and Bangladesh. While no single definition of terrorism exists, certain boxes need to be ticked: (a) violence as the means used; (b) the act needs to be politically motivated; and (c) the objective is the intimidation of the local population. The August 2015 attack near Kokrajhar in Assam demonstrated the deadly striking capacity of a small group of terrorists with sophisticated arms. The target was civilians. It was carried out by the breakaway Songbijit faction of the National Democratic Front of Boroland (NDFB). Like other factions, the Songbijit faction was birthed by those who felt ‘betrayed’ by leaders who forged agreements with New Delhi.

Insurgency and terrorism come together in the term ‘ethnic terrorism’. This term foregrounds ethnic groups’ use of violence and populist narratives of ‘freedom’ and liberation to grab attention, as Upadhyay notes in India’s Fragile Borderlands. In Assam, for instance, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) announced its intent to free Assam from India’s ‘colonial’ clutches. They have engaged in assassinations, ambushes, militancy, terrorist attacks and have created a parallel taxation economy. However, their influence has waned enormously over the years, as has their striking power.

Jihādī, from the Arabic jehad (‘struggle’), refers to the struggle or fight for Islam. A jihādī is one who wages this war against the enemies of Islam. Muslim extremists are said to pose an incipient risk to the North-East region, particularly in Assam, in light of the state’s large Muslim population (34 per cent) and that of neighbouring states and countries. Many of these militant groups allegedly operate from across the border, in countries such as Bangladesh. However, there is little independent verification of the influence or even the size of such groups which surface in occasional media reports or selective official briefings. Some security analysts see a possible threat from the Rohingyas, pouring out of Myanmar. Specialists contend that the Rohingya of Myanmar could connect to Bangladesh and, in the future, possibly draw in elements from Assam and the North-East. Facing such a growing wave of right-wing communalism, which governments are either unable or unwilling to tackle, is rendering the region more vulnerable.

The word ‘militant’ is derived from the Latin militare which means ‘to serve as a soldier’. Much like insurgency, increased militancy in the North-East is drawn from anger growing at a range of unfulfilled demands for greater autonomy and changing demographics. For example, in Tripura, demographic change led to the rise of a number of tribal militant groups such as the Tribal National Volunteers (TNV), All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF) and the National Liberation Force of Tripura (NFLT), with the aim of ousting Bengalis from the state. With the creation of states like Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Mizoram, numerous ethnic groups have increased the use of militant tactics to promote their causes.

Further, there are often connections between underground groups and state governments. For example, Bethany Lacina claims ‘the resilience of armed groups in Northeast India is not because of the advantages traditionally associated with guerrilla groups. They thrive by taking advantage of the imperfections in the rule of law; they maintain ties with mainstream actors in politics and business, and engage in strategic violence.’ Manipur, the state most affected by insurgency in the region, has suffered from successive blockades in 2017 organized by the United Naga Council (UNC) leading to a shortage of goods and services and violent unrest. The problem then resurfaces: how can such groups espouse themselves as representatives of the people? The latter are rarely, if ever, consulted in the matter.

Militancy is also often linked to criminality, where groups engage in illegal economic activities in order to increase their control over resources and administration. In doing so, a tapestry of crime and violence is created, fed by the identity politics of the region.

References

Lacina, Bethany. ‘Does Counterinsurgency Theory Apply in Northeast India?’ India Review 6, no. 3 (2007): 165–183.

Upadhyay, A. India’s Fragile Borderlands: The Dynamics of Terrorism in North East India. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009.

JUMLA (JUMLĀ)

Mona Mehta

The word jumla suddenly became popular in the Indian public discourse in 2015, taking on a life and meaning distinct from its conventional usage. Jumla is derived from the Arabic root jumla (pl. jumal) and refers to ‘totality, sum, whole, sentence or clause’ in Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati. Although the word itself is not new, its popularity in recent times was triggered when a prominent ruling party politician, speaking in Hindi, used jumla to refer to ‘a mere statement made by his leader during an election campaign’. Defending his leader, he said, ‘Such a jumla was not to be taken literally as an election promise.’ Why has this seemingly innocuous word unexpectedly caught the public imagination at this moment in history?

The remarkable story of the word jumla’s recent ascent from relative obscurity has to do, in large part, with the advent of post-truth politics in India and the world over. Specifically, jumla’s popularity lies in its ability to capture the new realities of our contemporary political landscape, where doctored facts, fake news and false propaganda have rapidly come to occupy a central place in political campaigns and public discourse. Going beyond its standard meaning of a mere sentence or clause, jumla’s current usages connote the ideas of ‘empty promises’, ‘concocted statements’ and patently ‘deceptive claims’. For instance, commenting on the political leadership of India, one twitter user noted, ‘The mice following the Pied Piper never realize their fate before it’s too late. The Piper always has lots of jumlas to save himself.’ Here the term jumla is used as a noun to mean ‘tricks’ to cover up the regime’s faults or mistakes.

Jumla’s tremendous plasticity as a word has meant that it can be deployed as a noun, adjective and verb, in various combinations with English and regional language words, and produce a fascinating repertoire of newly coined terms. Consider, for instance, these terms that reveal jumla’s versatility: jumlanomics alludes to the manipulation of statistics to exaggerate economic performance; jumlabaaz refers to an individual who deploys tricks of deception to promote his personal interest; jumlajayanti is the birth anniversary of a person who is considered a jumlabaaz; or chunaavijumla is a false promise made during an election campaign.

Despite jumla’s strong association with falsehoods, it should not be confused with the petty lies and assorted shenanigans of a street-smart politician typically on display in the daily life of any liberal democracy. Jumla is particularly applicable to a category of politicians who have recently emerged in liberal democracies the world over and who might be considered as ‘elected autocrats’. Symbolizing the era of post-truth politics, these types of politicians come to power through popular democratic mandate and use their popularity to advance authoritarian agendas. Jumla may be understood as an authoritarian political strategy used by ‘elected autocrats’ who show scant regard for personal rights or individual dignity.

The execution of jumla uses various instrumentalities of the state, and as such it is possible to identify three types of jumlas, categorized on the basis of the objectives they are required to serve: ‘projection jumla’, ‘demolition jumla’ and ‘diversion jumla’. ‘Projection jumla’ involves a carefully crafted media campaign to forge origin stories about the humble roots of a politician and her or his awe-inspiring rise to the pinnacle of political power through sheer grit and personal merit, beating all the odds of an unfair socio-economic system. Such projection jumla circulate, for instance, as comic strips on social media, published children’s books or doctored photographs of a past humble life. While ‘projection jumla’ is used to craft a certain larger than life image of the elected autocrat, ‘demolition jumla’ is meant to destroy the credibility and career of a political opponent. Demolition jumla makes ruthless use of security agencies, tax authorities and even media to collect or even fraudulently dig up damaging information about the opponents’ financial or personal life. In Russia, the term used for the deployment of such demolition jumla is kompremat (compromising material), which has already made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps the most audacious of all jumlas is the category of ‘diversion jumla’. This may involve ruthless use of state power to wage war or undertake risky economic measures, which can destroy the lives of millions of innocent people. It is used as a diversion tactic to shift away attention from real problems through reckless events designed to create fear psychosis or hate frenzy. Jumlanomics may well work as a ‘diversion jumla’ when reckless economic adventurism is undertaken by launching dubious economic measures ostensibly to eradicate evils, such as corruption. Here jumlanomics becomes a diversionary tactic to convince segments of the society, such as the poor, that the policy was needed to improve their lot even as they were adversely affected by it.

Just as nobody could have guessed jumla’s unexpected entry into contemporary Indian public discourse, it is difficult to foresee its future trajectory. Given that jumla’s present currency is closely tied to the advent of post-truth politics, a lot will depend on the prospects of this form of politics and the ways in which the vulnerabilities of liberal democracies are addressed.

References

Kaul, Nitasha. ‘Rise of the Political Right in India: Hindutva‐Development Mix, Modi Myth, and Dualities’. Journal of Labor and Society 20, no. 4 (2017): 523–548.

Schöttli, Jivanta and Markus Pauli . ‘Modi-Nomics and the Politics of Institutional Change in the Indian Economy’. Journal of Asian Public Policy 9, no. 2 (2016): 154–169.

LAL BATTI (LĀL BATTĪ)

Manish Thakur

Beacons in general are used intentionally to draw attention to places, people, objects and situations of importance. Beacons are of many types and are widely used for navigational, military (including law and order), traffic, security and various other purposes. They come in different colours, such as red, blue, yellow, orange and green. The colours and sounds beacons make indicate what they mean. Among all the coloured beacons, it is the red one that is generally most prominent. Across the world, red beacons can symbolize many things: the state, restricted or no access, danger, state of alert, failure, bankruptcy and so on.

In India, the red beacon or lal batti, in Hindi, was, until as recently as 2017, a symbol of all of these mentioned in the previous sentence but with a difference. Above everything else, the Indian public associated the lal batti with not just institutions of state/government but also with the latter’s ability to wield legitimate power or, as Max Weber said, authority. It multiplied manifold in the event of the vehicle moving, either as part of a secured motorcade or independently, with the lal batti switched on, rotating in high speed and the (police) siren blaring. An unlit, static, silent lal batti then was a benign sign of state authority, while a lit, mobile and audible one stood for modern, sophisticated, legitimate political power.

Until recently, Indians saw a white Ambassador car fitted with a lal batti as the most palpable and publicly visible display of power. Those privileged to have a lal batti vehicle were the ones who had access to the state – the ultimate symbol of public legitimacy in the euphoric aftermath of India’s Independence. Lal batti was not meant to be a brutal and archaic show of power. It was not one of those premodern insignias which often inhabited the dynasties and monarchies of the past. It was not even a deliberate genuflection to the much-derided VIP culture that ultimately led to the total ban on colour beacons (except for use in ambulances and police vehicles) in May 2017. The countrywide endorsement of the fact that ‘Lal batti is Off’, as one national daily put it, had more to do with the accumulated public dislike of the contemporary political class and their bureaucratic co-conspirators. In other words, it was the passing of the nētā–babu centric lal batti (VIP) culture and not the lal batti per se which received public approval. In effect, the power symbolized by the lal batti was never absolute. It was not necessarily a symbol of unalloyed state power intended to create islands of privileges in an otherwise poor country teeming with deprived millions. The character of the lal batti also meant that it fuelled aspirations for one and all. Amidst the general constraints of resources and myriad situations of powerlessness in the everyday lives of millions of compatriots, the lal batti, however, symbolized the concentration of real and effective power in the hands of a select few.

Even as the lal batti was a way of representing a person’s privileged access to state power, it had the embryonic potential to signal a new and more ‘enabling/empowering’ type of social stratification. At the time, when old certitudes of caste, land, khandaan (clan) and biradaari (caste association) were fast disappearing or at least did not carry the same weight as they did in the past, lal batti turned out to be some kind of civic–secular way of displaying a person’s ‘achieved’ status as against older forms of primordial identities/statuses. It connoted an individual’s merit, hard work, sailing through stiff competition to come at the top, perseverance and other such virtues which were supposed to be the stuff that successful men and women were made of. But of course, at another level, the lal batti was, to reiterate, part of an assortment of other insignias – siren, security cover – that distinguished this class of people from other ordinary Indians. This lal batti-aided class, consequently, contributed towards the making of an oppressive, undemocratic political (lal batti) culture.

Throughout history, the state has required communicable signs and symbols to assert its authority over citizens or, more generally, the ruled. Mostly, they were symbolic of crystallized hierarchy. However, in a democracy, the idea of political equality birthed a discourse where overt display of power and its attendant hierarchy was frowned upon. Not surprisingly, the recent ban on lal batti evoked an all-round unadulterated appreciation and a huge sigh of relief. Indeed, there was and continues to be an inherent incompatibility between (lal batti-signified) VIP culture and the principles and practices of democracy. The opposition to lal batti and its subsequent and successful ban points towards the specific case of resistance by the aam aadmi (common man) towards state-constructed hierarchies of power and privilege. In a larger sense though, it also indicates the spread of egalitarian principles of democracy that have made lal batti one of the most illegitimate of contemporary symbols.

References

Gupta, Krishna. ‘Political Marketing in India 2014: Case of New Political Product AAP’, January 2015, SSRN Electronic Journal, DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2917075.

Jauregui, Beatrice. ‘Beatings, Beacons, and Big Men: Police Disempowerment and Delegitimation in India’. Law & Social Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2013): 643–669.

LOK ADALAT (LŌK ADĀLAT)

Siddharth Peter De Souza

The term ‘Lok adalat’, which means ‘people’s court’, is used with reference to an alternative dispute resolution forum, aimed at introducing informality, conciliation and accessibility to the otherwise adversarial court system of the state in India. Upendra Baxi documented one of the earliest templates of a Lok adalat in Rangpur, Gujarat, which was organized by the prominent Gandhian Harivallabh Parikh and grew largely due to his personal goodwill. ¹ This forum was designed to adjudicate both inter- and intra-village disputes as well as disputes with administrative units. Disputes ranged from those relating to violence against the bodily integrity of a person to disputes regarding payment of debts or ownership of land as well as disputes around domestic and marital issues. The sanctions of the Lok adalat in these disputes included fines, public censure and social ostracism.

Around the 1970s, Justices Krishna Iyer and Bhagwati, in reports about legal aid reform, spoke of the need for forums that reflected conciliatory and indigenous traditions to be included and utilized in the administration of justice, as they felt this would enable making justice more accessible. Gujarat was the first state to use the term ‘Lok adalat’ in 1982 for a state-backed legal aid initiative. In this instance, a group of retired and sitting judges, social workers and socially aware members of the bar worked out of a van, a ‘legal aid ambulance’, and visited several villages giving free legal advice and encouraging potential litigants to find ways to negotiate a settlement for their disputes. ²

With Lok adalats gaining popularity, there was an increasing demand to institutionalize these forums. In 1987, the Legal Services Authorities Act was passed. ³ This Act gave the Lok adalats statutory recognition and mandated that they be organized by state and district authorities in a manner they saw fit. Today, the Lok adalat is made up of a bench of a judge, an advocate and a social worker. In September 2017, the first transgender judge in India was appointed to a Lok adalat in West Bengal, in fulfilment of the requirement for a social worker on the bench. ⁴ Lok adalats have the jurisdiction to determine or find a compromise or settlement for any case referred to it, whether the case is pending before a court of law or is at a pre-litigative stage, provided it is a compoundable offence.

The decision of the Lok adalat, according to the Act, is deemed as the decree of a civil court and binding on the parties with no appeal to any court. An amendment to the Act in 2002 introduced the idea of a ‘Permanent Lok adalat’, which deals with specific kinds of cases, particularly those related to ‘public utility services’ such as transport, postal services, power and sanitation issues. There are various kinds among the regular Lok adalats: (a) the ‘Mega Lok adalat’ is organized on a single day across all courts of a particular state (i.e. the high court and the district courts); (b) the ‘Mobile Lok adalat’ involves taking a van to different areas to resolve petty cases as well as to spread legal awareness; (c) the ‘Daily Lok adalat’ is organized on a daily basis; (d) a ‘Continuous Lok adalat’ discusses issues for a number of days and encourages parties to reflect on the different terms of the settlement and (e) the ‘National Lok adalat’ is held throughout the country from the Supreme Court to the courts at the taluk level.

Lok adalats have been heralded over the past few years for also reducing pendency and backlog of cases. According to the National Legal Services Authority, as of 30 September 2015, 15.14 lakh Lok adalats have been organized across India and over 8.25 crore cases have been settled. ⁵ In 2016, National Lok adalats were organized for matters relating to family or marital disputes, bank loan recovery claims, motor accidents and insurance claims, public service disputes over electricity, water, telephones and for transport and municipal matters. ⁶ For these reasons, there has been a growing push by the government and the judiciary to increase awareness around Lok adalats. Doordarshan has recently tied up with the National Legal Services Authority to highlight how Lok adalts have helped settle lakhs of cases around India in a series titled, Akele Nahin Hai Aap (‘You are not alone’). ⁷

Despite Lok adalats expediting justice delivery, relaxing procedures and reducing costs, they have also received much criticism. Justice Krishna Iyer, who was one of the major proponents of the forums, criticized the Act because he felt it produced ‘clumsy imitations of courts, not social mobilization schemes’. ⁸ Marc Galanter and Jayanth Krishnan argue that the only clear benefit of Lok adalats has been that they reduced the ‘transaction costs’ associated with the formal court system. According to them, these forums were instead instances of ‘debased informalism’ because they were built on aspects of avoidance of trial in the formal court system, rather than the benefits of an alternative model of dispute resolution. ⁹

The Lok adalat has been associated with multifarious adjectives – from being an ‘innovative’ Indian contribution to enhancing access to justice by providing a hybrid type of dispute settlement, to an informal and indigenous forum with relaxed procedures aimed at justice for the poor, to stinging criticism for being nothing more than a poor imitation of a formal court. The Lok adalat has divided stakeholders, from litigants, lawyers and judges to academics, but it remains central in the imagination of those prescribing justice reforms, especially in the fight against pendency and in terms of improving the affordability and accessibility of the legal system in India.

REFERENCES

Baxi, Upendra. ‘From Takrar to Karar: The Lok Adalat at Rangpur’. Journal of Constitutional and Parliamentary Studies 10 (1976): 52.

Galanter, Marc and Jayanth K. Krishnan . ‘Bread for the Poor: Access to Justice and the Rights of the Needy in India’. Hastings Law Journal 55 (2004): 789.

Krishna Iyer, V. R. Legal Services Authorities Act: A Critique. Society for Community Organisation Trust, 1988.

MINORITIES

Peter Ronald deSouza

The term ‘minorities’ has been a keyword in Indian political discourse particularly since the partition of India. The two-nation theory which argued that Hindus and Muslims constitute two nations who could not live together gained parallel political constituencies, as the Muslim League and the Congress, during the struggle for independence from colonial rule, campaigned respectively for and against the idea. Since then the Indian political project of state-building has tried to debunk the theory through a four-pronged strategy of laws, institutions, policies and political discourse. Although the term ‘minority’ entered the political lexicon of India as a result of the Census of India 1881, when groups got a sense of their numerical strength vis--vis other groups, it gained traction during the Constituent Assembly which gave protection to religious and linguistic minorities (Articles 25–30). In its political usage today, the term ‘minorities’ has been expanded to refer to sexual minorities, especially after the Supreme Court judgement of September 2018 that struck down Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code that had hitherto criminalized homosexuality and to refer to minorities within minorities, that is, to groups within religious minorities who struggle internally for reform and who face oppression by the orthodox elements of the religious community.

As a descriptor, ‘minorities’ is a relational term that only makes sense when seen in relation to another group that is a majority. By itself there is no minority. Unlike European and North American history when states have used different strategies to deal with minority claims, from genocide (Jews in Nazi Germany), to expulsion (Kurds in Turkey), to suppression (Palestinians in Israel), to assimilation (Arabs in France), to integration (Hispanics in the United States), India has adopted a policy of accommodation of minorities. Both the traumatic experience of partition, where the country faced communal violence and killing, and the inspired leadership at independence, especially that of Jawaharlal Nehru, gave newly Independent India a philosophy on how to deal with its minorities. It is this philosophy that has guided the actions of the Indian state till the recent (2014) coming to power of a majoritarian political party, the BJP.

One area where minorities have faced challenges both internally, from their own minorities, and externally from majority groups, is in the area of reform of their personal laws. While many minority groups have willingly reformed their personal laws, the orthodox elements among the Muslim community have resisted this reform. In such conflicts, the courts have intervened with cases such as the famous Shah Bano case of 1985 and subsequent cases where gender justice and individual rights have, in the last instance, overridden community resistance. There is also a robust debate in the public sphere on legitimacy of a Uniform Civil Code for all communities where the public positions taken by the various groups have ranged from gender justice to religious freedom to community rights arguments. The jury is still out on this proposed initiative by the Indian state.

The edifice of protections available to minorities, that is, laws, institutions, policies and discourse, each of which needs to be studied, has produced a politics in India where groups are seeking to be formally recognized as minorities. Three such attempts may be mentioned, the Lingayats of Karnataka, the Ramakrishnan Mission in West Bengal and the Jains across India. Only the last has succeeded.

References

deSouza, Peter Ronald, Hilal Ahmed and Sanjeer Alam . Democratic Accommodation: The Minority Question in India. New Delhi: Bloomsbury India, 2019.

deSouza, Peter Ronald. ‘Minority Rights and Democracy in India’, chapter 64, The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology, 2 vols., edited by William Outhwaite and Stephen Turner. London: Sage, 2018.

NAGAR PALIKA (NAGAR PĀLIKĀ)

George Mathew

In India, a municipal council is called nagar palika. The word nagar comes from the Sanskrit word nag which means ‘static’, like a mountain or a tree, and, therefore, nagar is a locality that doesn’t move. The word palika is from the Sanskrit verb palan, which means ‘one who fosters or brings up’. In the Dravidian language Tamil, nagaram refers to ‘town’.

In ancient India (c. 2350 BCE), Harappa, Mohenjodaro, Kalibangan, Lothal, etc., were cities. By 600 BCE, several cities emerged in the Indo-Gangetic plains, of which there is reference to about sixteen janapadas (city states), such as Varanasi, Vaishali, Champa, Saket and Kaushambi. The British colonial rulers, who concentrated their attention mainly on establishing coastal trading centres, established the first municipal corporation in Madras on 29 September 1687. It was modelled on the British town council. Madras municipality is the oldest in the Commonwealth outside of the United Kingdom. Viceroy Lord Ripon gave a big push to the idea of local government in his Resolution on 18 May 1882. His idea was to nurse the citizens to emerge as local, provincial and national leaders. It may be mentioned here that Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the first prime minister of India in 1947, was elected as the chairman of the Allahabad municipality during 1923–5. Likewise, Sardar Vallabbhai Patel, the first home minister of independent India, entered public life as a municipal commissioner of Ahmedabad municipality in 1917 and later became its chairman in 1924. Subhash Chandra Bose was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Calcutta municipality and became the mayor in 1930.

Municipalities were not an integral part of the Constitution of India, which came into effect on 26 January 1950. They were given constitutional authority only four decades later, on 23 December 1992, through the Constitution (Seventy-Fourth Amendment) Act. On 1 June 1993, it came into force as Part IX A of the Constitution.

At present, there are 2,796 municipalities at three levels in India: (a) 149 municipal corporations which have a population of over 300,000; (b) 927 municipalities which have a population of up to 300,000; and (c) 1,720 nagar panchayats/town panchayats, each of which have a population of 25,000 or above.

In the nagar palika, members are elected for a term of five years, who in turn elect their chairman (mayor in the council system). In some municipalities, mayors are directly elected. More than 33 per cent of the members and mayors are required to be women. State government officials are appointed to handle the administrative affairs of the nagar palikas. Eighteen subjects, including urban planning, water supply, public health and poverty alleviation, have been transferred to the nagar palikas, according to the Constitution.

References

Bhagat, Ram B. ‘Rural‐Urban Classification and Municipal Governance in India’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 26, no. 1 (2005): 61–73.

Singh, U. B. Revitalised Urban Administration in India: Strategies and Experiences. New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2002.

NATIONAL, ANTI-NATIONAL

Kaisser Rana

The word ‘nation’ originated from the Middle English nacioun, which was in turn borrowed from the old French word nacion and the Latin word nationem, both literally meaning ‘birth’. Historically, the word nation constituted a stable community of the people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and ethnicity.

Principally, nationalism is the outcome of the theory of nation that believes sharing a common language, history and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination. In fact, the new system that emerged in the modern world is the consequence of the shattering of the old despotic rule of monarchs by the outbreak of revolution in some parts of Europe and later in other countries. Obviously, one can’t deny the fact that the new system also brought in new types of despots who were scientifically more advanced, technically savvy and politically shrewd. So, we can conclude that though the mode of production changed with the arrival of a new system, the profit motive of the individual remained intact in the new system, that is, capitalism. Therefore, in the words of George Orwell, ‘Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.’

Independence from tyrannical colonial rule gave rise to a new India that was in the early stages after being liberated. Historically, even before the arrival of Islam, Indian society has remained a diverse society – divided along lines of caste, language, religion and culture. The entire subcontinent was fragmented into small and big kingdoms. The invasion of the Mughals from West Asia did not transform Indian society and politics. Instead they fitted themselves within this framework by adopting the habits and manners of the society they encountered. These fragmentations continued to exist even during the British rule and in post-Independence India. That is the reason why the Indian Constitution never proclaimed the idea of one language, one religion and one identity. Though it declared India as a nation, it significantly stressed the idea of a country rather than a nation. This meant that India could not be called a nation objectively, as it could never be identified with the theory of nation in principle. However, ironically, there have been, in existence, groups that are against the policy of coexistence of diverse communities. They oppose the very idea of a secular India and advocate expulsion of minority communities from the country. In Bunch of Thoughts, M. S. Golwalkar, the second sarsanghchalak (chief) of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (an organization that urges India to be a Hindu nation with one language and one identity), while hailing Hitler and Nazism, expresses, ‘To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here.’ Further, writing on religion and politics, he targets Muslims, Christians and Communists while claiming that ‘hostile elements within the country pose a far greater menace to national security than aggressors from outside’.

In recent times, both within the political establishment and in a section of society, the issue of nationalism or the nationalist is hugely debated. Most of these debates or discussions centres around either praising one as a nationalist or defaming a dissenting voice by labelling her or him as anti-nationalist and sometimes or occasionally a section as Pakistani or Maoist. The outcome of the 2014 parliamentary elections, especially, has given rise to a new trend in society; if you are against any of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policies, or disagree with RSS’s fanatical ideology, and if you voice it out publicly, then you are bound to be called anti-national one day or the other. The fallout of this sentiment is that Muslims are being publicly lynched, the atrocities on Dalits have risen to alarming heights and students who have traditionally held dissenting voices are not being spared.

Today, the words nation and nationalism need a deeper and wider debate, especially because of the emergence of a grave force of spectre which haunts minorities, progressive sections of society, women, students, the working classes and peasants. One also needs to exactly define with more accuracy the difference between nationalism and anti-nationalism. This is so that the crowd doesn’t act as policeman, judge and executer.

References

Gorski, Philip S. ‘The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of the Modernist Theory of Nationalism’. American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 5 (March 2000): 1428–1468.

Greenfield, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

NAXALITE (NAKSLĀ’IṬ)

Bela Bhatia

The term ‘Naxalite’ entered the Indian political scene in 1967. An uprising of labourers and peasants against the oppressive jotedars (landlords) in the villages of Naxalbari, West Bengal, was to open a new chapter in the history of the Communist movement in India. The uprising was carried out under the leadership of the more radical within the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]). Peasants forcibly occupied land and cancelled old debts by burning records. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the state government, ironically with the CPI (M) as its main constituent, leading to a split within the ranks of the party and the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI[ML]).

In its self-definition, the CPI (ML) was a revolutionary party and adhered to Marxism, Leninism and Mao Tse-tung as ideological guides. The uprising and the dramatic events that followed caught the interest of the media and in that flame of reportage was born the ‘Naxalite’ – the revolutionary who wanted not only practical change but also a change in the political order. The CPI (ML) was factious almost from the start. It had undergone one major split in 1971 even before the death of one of its main leaders, Charu Mazumdar. After his death in 1972, more splits and mergers occurred for ideological and other reasons.

Today, it is difficult to say exactly how many CPI (ML) parties there are. According to one estimate, there were dozens of CPI (ML) parties at one stage. These parties, along with those who remained outside it but also organized themselves into similar parties (e.g. the Maoist Communist Centre [MCC]), together form the Naxalite movement. Revolution is the common aim of all these parties, though differences on questions of strategy and tactics remain.

The CPI (Maoist), formed in 2004 after a merger of the CPI (ML), People’s War and the MCC is considered as the largest party today. It is often overlooked that while Maoists are Naxalites, not all Naxalites are Maoists. For the people who are part of the mass base, however, they are annas (elder brothers, in Telugu), sathis (companions, in Hindi) or simply ‘comrade’. Lal salaam is a familiar greeting in these parts.

State repression followed the initial spurt of the Naxalite movement in the late 1960s. Midnight knocks on doors by the police, torture in prison and thousands of stories of fake encounters shocked the nation. The declaration of Emergency led to the arrest of many leaders of the movement, while many others went underground. The second phase of the movement began after 1975. Those in prison were released, mergers followed and a phase of powerful mass movements began. Three features mark this phase. First, the Naxalites were effective in mobilizing those at the lowest rungs of society for their basic economic, social and political rights against the powerful feudal elements. Second, even though the Naxalites were armed during this phase, the nature and scale of violence was different. There were occasions when a struggle for minimum wage, payment of overdue wages, land rights or rape of labouring women took on the colour of war. Third, despite lethal conflicts between Naxalite parties in the Bihar of the mid-1990s, a parallel history of caste senas (armies) and numerous massacres perpetrated by them on the mostly Dalit landless labourers and farmers, and the fake encounters that had become routine, the Naxalite movement had become a force to reckon with. The third phase of the Naxalite movement can be said to have begun with the ushering in of the new economic policies in India in the early 1990s. Its practical ill effects on the ground could be discerned by the early 2000s in the tribal areas of Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh, when memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with mining corporates surfaced. It is hard to think of the timing of the then prime minister’s pronouncement of the CPI (Maoist) as ‘the greatest internal security threat’ as a mere coincidence. This war has included several operations from the side of the state, including the police, paramilitary and local vigilante groups. The most notorious of these vigilante operations is the Salwa Judum (purification hunt, in Gondi), which was a brutal exercise in ‘strategic hamletting’, initially projected as a spontaneous people’s movement against the Maoists.

At the time of my research on the Naxalite movement in Central Bihar, in the mid-1990s, the term Naxalite was part of people’s everyday vocabulary. The term, however, was understood in many different ways. Even those who were part of the movement gave very diverse answers when I asked them, ‘Everybody calls you naxalites. What is your understanding of who a naxalite is, and what does the term mean?’ People’s responses revealed telling perceptions of the term and of the Naxalite movement itself.

Often, Naxalites were known mainly for their violent deeds, but there were many interesting variants as well, based for instance on thinking that ‘naxa’ means ‘map’ (naksha) or that ‘lite’ means ‘light’ (prakash) or the more upbeat view of ‘naslite’ as the ‘next light’. The Naxalites were popularly called garibon ki party (The party of the poor) in Bihar.

‘Naxalite’, however, had also become a term of abuse in the hands of the upper castes, the administration and the police. Sometimes, the abuse was taken to ridiculous lengths. For example, pro-poor public administrators have also been labelled as Naxalites in Bihar.

The Naxalite movement is a class struggle and has had to face retaliatory anger from those who felt threatened by it. Without acknowledging the rights that the movement tried to uphold, rights that they were complicit in suppressing, these opposing forces focused only on the violence of the Naxalites and called them ugravadi (extremists) or aatankvadi (terrorists). This notion of the Naxalite also gained currency after the formation of the CPI (Maoist) and the large-scale military actions undertaken by the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA). These actions, involving sophisticated weapons like improvised explosive devices (IEDs), have caused mass killings of security forces and politicians. Guerrilla warfare is resented also because it is seen as war by deception and, hence, cowardly.

Ever since right-wing governments have come to power at the state and national levels, talking of the movement as a terrorist movement has gained salience. Increasingly, the movement has been purged of its ideological content, and left and democratic forces have been branded as ‘Maoist’, ‘naxali dalal’ (Naxalite agents) or ‘Naxali sympathizer’ (Maoist samarthak).

The future of the Naxalite movement is uncertain. On the one hand, the policies and circumstances that pushed people to join or support the movement continue. Counter-insurgency operations themselves, freely overstepping the rule of law, have contributed to the survival and spread of the movement. On the other, reliance on violence and fear can have corrupting influences and that applies to the Maoists as well. While the Indian state is primarily responsible for the creation of the Naxalite, perhaps the time has come for the Naxalite movement to reinvent itself.

References

Bhatia, Bela. ‘The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar’, unpublished PhD dissertation submitted to the University of Cambridge in 2000.

Bhatia, Bela. ‘The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar’. Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 15 (2005): 1536–1549.

NORTHEAST INDIA

Pradip Phanjoubam

In the Indian context, the word ‘northeast’ is now a proper noun. Unlike what the name suggests, northeast no longer connotes just a region of India located in that direction but has come to have many layers of nuanced meanings. These include cultural, developmental, geographical, strategic and racial. Northeast points to a group of eight states in India’s extreme east, connected to subcontinental India by a narrow corridor which, at its narrowest, is about twenty kilometres wide and is often referred to as the Siliguri corridor. What makes the region unique is that it shares only approximately 2 per cent of its boundary with the country it is part of, and the remaining 98 per cent with Bhutan, China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Nepal. The immense cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity of the region, therefore, is only to be expected.

The British formally annexed Assam in 1826 with the signing of the Treaty of Yandaboo with the then Ava (Burmese) kingdom which had invaded and occupied Assam. After its annexation, Assam was initially made a part of Bengal, and British administrative records began using the term North-East while referring to this new territory.

In 1873, the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation was introduced. This regulation created the contentious ‘Inner Line’ drawn along the foot of the hills which virtually surround Assam’s two major river valleys, dividing the revenue districts in the plains and the non-revenue hills inhabited by ‘wild tribes’.

Territories beyond the Inner Line were considered as backward tracts and largely excluded from modern revenue administration that the British introduced. In 1914, some hill tracts in North Assam were marked off as the North-East Frontier Tracts (NEFT). By the Government of India Act of 1919, the NEFT and all other territories beyond the Inner Line were classified as ‘Excluded Areas’ and left out of the newly introduced partly representative provincial government.

After Independence, NEFT was made a part of Assam state and in 1951 this region was renamed North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA). On 21 January 1972, NEFA became a Union Territory and was rechristened Arunachal Pradesh. On 20 February 1987, Arunachal Pradesh was given full statehood. While NEFA thus ceased to be the name, the phrase ‘North-East’ remained and began to be used to jointly refer to all the eight states of the region.

The British did not consider the North-East as emotionally, culturally and ethnically part of subcontinental India, and this outlook became pronounced as Indian Independence became imminent. Administrative notes by British civil servants are loud testimonies of this. Olaf Caroe, for instance, wrote a paper ‘The Mongolian Fringe’ (1940), which referenced the Himalayan region, including areas such as Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Northern Assam, as racially different from ‘India Proper’, as it was inhabited predominantly by people with Mongolian ethnic affinities.

Indeed, this alienation continued after Indian Independence. No document is a more pronounced alibi than Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s letter dated 7 November 1950 to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In this letter, Patel is unambiguous about an irredentist suspicion of the ‘non-mainstream’ North-East: ‘The undefined state of the frontier and the existence on our side of a population with its affinities to the Tibetans or Chinese have all the elements of potential trouble between China and ourselves.’

One of independent India’s early efforts at coming to terms and undoing some of these psychological scars suffered was the formation of the North Eastern Council (NEC) in 1971. In 2001, the union government created a minor (state) ministry with independent charge, called Development of the North Eastern Region (DoNER) and the NEC came to be one of its charges. However, alongside these commendable efforts, the Northeast continues to be administered as a frontier inhabited by people with dubious emotional affiliations with the nation. The continued promulgation of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) 1958 in the region is evidence of the same. India has not heeded appeals, even by the United Nations Human Rights Commission, to repeal/modify AFSPA. Expectedly, charges of state atrocities on civilian populations in the Northeast and Kashmir are aplenty.

Besides AFSPA, there are two other laws peculiar to the Northeast: the Protected Area Permit (PAP) and the Restricted Area Permit (RAP). The PAP requires all foreigners who wish to travel to some Northeast states to first acquire a special permit. The RAP restricts foreigners from travelling to certain designated areas within these states even if they have the PAP. Since 1 January 2011, the PAP has been conditionally relaxed for extendable leashes of one year at a time. Foreigners, except nationals of Afghanistan, Pakistan and China, can now visit these states, though they are required to inform state authorities of their presence at their points of entry. The RAP areas have also been considerably reduced.

In recent times, economic stagnation and spiritual ennui have compelled many from the Northeast to migrate to the vibrant metropolises of India in search of better education and employment, Delhi and Bangalore being the choice destinations for now. In these cities, many of them are again exposed to the ugly reality of cultural clash. They discover in everyday civil life that ‘the Mongolian Fringe’ is generally seen as ‘non-mainstream’ in culture, food habits, dress and social mores. This is not always in hostile terms but also at times in wonderment, the way tourists would experience exotic cultures, people and landscapes – appreciative so long as the distance between the observer and observed is not allowed to collapse. Things however change when the exotic comes to be next door. The Northeast person then begins to suffer routine microaggressions, such as being condescendingly addressed as ‘chinky’, ‘momo’, ‘pahari’, etc. They also face widespread ignorance about their home states and are often asked if they are Indians. When they reply in the affirmative, their answers are met with disbelief. Earlier charms of the exotic also transform to images of primitivism, tribal affiliations, underdevelopment, , easy-going and laidback lifestyles and so on. It is amidst this milieu of hopelessness, stagnation and alienation, together with the historical disconnects that British administrators pointed out, that several violent ethnic insurrections, fighting for goals ranging from autonomy to complete sovereignty, came to be born.

In this sense, the Northeast is a challenge to its nation’s capacity to reinvent the idea of India to accommodate the ‘non-mainstream’. The effort has more often than not, descended to a paternalistic political correctness, marked by exaggerated overtures to avoid imagined hurts to the Northeast person, or else calling upon the latter to join the mainstream, implying inadvertently that the Northeast people as they are cannot be fully part of the idea of India.

The term Northeast carries all these meanings. It is, in short, the story of a postcolonial struggle of communities in the region on one plane, and India on another, to give a dignified place to an identity forged at its inception by colonial administrative needs.

References

Baruah, Sanjib. ‘The Mongolian Fringe’. Himal Southasian 26, no. 1 (January 2013): 82–86. Available at: http://himalmag.com/the-mongolian-fringe/ (accessed 20 October 2017).

Scott, James C. Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchic History of Upland South East Asia. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2010.

PANCHAYATI RAJ (PAN̄CĀYATĪ RĀJ)

George Mathew

The term panchayati raj refers to self-governing village communities characterized by agrarian economies that existed in ancient India. The word panch means five in Sanskrit. Panchayats in the early days meant five people managing the affairs of their village. Panchayats could decide as to what those living in the village can or cannot do. Panchayats are mentioned in the Rig Veda which dates back to 1200 BCE. Panchayats were the line of contact with the higher authorities on all matters affecting the village. They had both police and judicial powers. Religion and custom elevated panchayats to the sacred position of authority leading to different castes in Indian society (mainly in the Indo-Gangetic plains) having caste panchayats to ensure that persons belonging to different castes adhered to its code of social conduct and ethics. In South India, village panchayats had village assembly with an executive body having members of various groups and castes. In both North and South India, panchayats were the pivot of administration and the centre of social life and solidarity. It remained unchanged right up to the medieval age.

During the Mughal period, judicial powers of the panchayats were curtailed, but local affairs remained unregulated from above. Village officers and servants were answerable primarily to the panchayat. Although Charles Metcalfe, a British provisional general of India, called these village communities ‘little republics’, they were caste-ridden and feudal and far from democratic and participatory. During the British colonial period, self-contained village communities and panchayats were replaced by formally constituted institutions of village administration. Lord Mayo’s resolution of 1870 on local self-government revived the traditional village panchayat system in Bengal through the Bengal Chowkidari Act, which empowered district magistrates to set up panchayats of nominated members. The government resolution of 18 May 1982, providing for local boards with a large majority of elected non-official members, presided over by a non-official chairperson, is considered as the Magna Carta of local democracy in India.

In fact, village panchayats were central to the ideological framework of India’s national movement. For Gandhi, his vision of village panchayats was a complete republic based on perfect democracy and individual freedom. The village panchayats were therefore included in the Directive Principles of State policy (Part IV, Article 40) of the Indian Constitution after Independence. In 1957, Balwant Rai Mehta committee recommended democratic decentralization and ‘public participation in community works … through statutory representative bodies’. This report urged to accelerate the pace of constituting panchayats in all the states. The first Panchayat was inaugurated by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on 2 October 1959 in Nagaur, Rajasthan. The term Panchayati raj came into vogue conceptually as a process of governance only later, after the Parliament amended the Constitution on 23 December 1992, making panchayats the ‘institutions of self-government’. Today, Panchayati raj refers to a system of organically linking people from gram sabha (village assemblies) to Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. Elections are held to posts every five years at three levels: village, block and district. As of 2014, there are a total of 2,950,128 elected representatives in Panchayati raj institutions out of which almost 50 per cent are women.

References

Mathew, George. Panchayati Raj from Legislation to Movement. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1994.

Mathur, Mukut Vehari and Iqbal Narain . ‘Panchayati Raj, Planning and Democracy’. In Panchayati Raj, Planning and Democracy. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1969.

PARTITION

Salil Misra

The twentieth century may be designated as a century of partitions. While a large number of partitions occurred throughout the century, the partition of the Indian subcontinent into two nation-states of India and Pakistan is in some ways the most unique. It is distinctive above all in its scale of violence and displacement. Close to 3 million people died in the violence that accompanied Partition and well over seventy thousand women were abducted, raped and displaced. The partition of India actually included two other partitions, the partitions of Punjab and Bengal. About 12 million people migrated from West Punjab to East Punjab and Delhi and from East Punjab to West Punjab and Sind. The migrations in Bengal occurred in a continuous, seamless manner. This is easily the largest migration in human history around a single event. What is more important, these migrations were driven not by a search for better opportunities but by the desire for survival. Often people left a life of comfort and settled for a life of penury and misery.

What was the partition and why did it happen? India was, and still is, a large and multireligious society. Before Partition, Muslims constituted nearly 25 per cent of the population in British India. They constituted a majority in four regions – Punjab, Bengal, Sind and the North-West Frontier Provinces (NFWP) – and were scattered in the rest of the country as religious minorities. On the whole, two-thirds of India’s Muslims were organized as a regional majority and one-third as minority. With the beginning of modern politics in the twentieth century, different political claims for concessions and safeguards were made from time to time by political leaders and organizations claiming to represent Indian Muslims. These demands were sometimes made to the British colonial government and sometimes to the Indian National Congress, since it was the largest political organization that claimed to represent all Indians, irrespective of religion, region and language.

Around 1940, a novel claim was made by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the president of the All India Muslim League. The claim was that Indian Muslims were not a religious minority needing safeguards but a separate nation and were therefore entitled to their own separate, representative and sovereign nation-state. The new demand was that Muslim majority provinces (Punjab, Bengal, Sind and NWFP) should be carved out from India and constituted into a single sovereign state. This demand came to be known as the Pakistan resolution and after prolonged and acrimonious negotiations involving the colonial state, the Congress and the Muslim League, it was conceded. In 1947, India became free and was partitioned. Punjab and Bengal, two provinces with significant non-Muslim minorities of nearly 44 per cent were also partitioned. Yet until as late as 14 August that year, most people in Punjab and Bengal did not know which districts would go to Pakistan and which to India.

Why did Partition happen? The question can be explained by explaining three major transformations that swept the subcontinent during the nineteenth and initial decades of the twentieth centuries: social, politico-ideological and programmatic. First, social transformation. An enormously large number of small, local, ritualistic and syncretic communities began to be transformed into pan-Indian, internally standardized, externally differentiated, religious communities. This was a fairly long process and resulted in the creation of the finished product of pan-Indian communities of Hindus and Muslims out of an extremely complex and diverse raw material of local communities. Second, politico-ideological transformation. This transformation was later designated as communalism; however, it began with looking upon religious communities as political constituencies and transform them as such. Communalism was initially confined only to the upper classes and only reached out to the middles classes in the 1920s. However, by the late 1930s, it had successfully reached the masses and had transformed into a mass force. Third, programmatic transformation. This was a transformation that occurred in the politics of the Muslim League. From an organization demanding safeguards and concession for Muslims as a minority, it transformed into a platform seeking nationhood for Indian Muslims as a national community.

The story of Partition is not simply that of an episode that occurred in 1947. It unleashed a huge chain of events which have cast their spell on the political and social life of South Asia. Partition was meant to solve the minority problem; but it actually ended up exacerbating the minority problem in both the new countries. This was also the beginning of the Kashmir problem, which remains unresolved even today. India and Pakistan have not really lived like happy neighbours, as was anticipated by some during Partition. The two countries have gone to war with each other four times (1947, 1965, 1971 and 1998). Pakistan was partitioned once again in 1971, with the creation of the new country of Bangladesh. Much of South Asia, therefore, still lives in the shadows of the Partition of 1947.

References

Kudaisya, Gyanesh and Tan Tai Yong . The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. London: Routledge, 2000.

Singh, Anita Inder. The Origins of the Partition of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.

PATWARI (PATṢVĀRĪ)

Ramana Murthy V Rupakula

Patwari is the traditional village administrative and revenue official at the grass-roots, with the assigned duties of keeping land records and statistical data for crop production. The term Patwari may vary from region to region; for example, near synonyms of the word include terms such as Kulkarni, Karanam, Adhikari, Talati, Patel, Lumberdar, and so on in different regions of India.

The historical roots of the office of the patwari date back to Munsabdari system, introduced by Sher Shah Suri in sixteenth century, improved by the Mughals and later modified by the British. Patwari traditionally came from the Brahmin and Kayasth castes and were subordinate to other villager officials called Mali Patel (the term varied) who would assess and remit irrigation cess to the treasury. These officials would in turn work under police as patel or mansab in charge of law and order. A patwari was trained in the measurement of land, cropped areas, agricultural production and the assessment of tax, and received a salary from the Mansabdar. Under this system, the post was acquired by inheritance and called watandari.

The role of the patwari changed with the introduction of ryotwari settlements by the British administration, under which individual property rights were introduced. In addition to the assessment of production and tax, the patwari was now assigned the duty of maintaining the Record of Rights (Register of Land Titles); record of private lands and their mutation; and record of government lands, common lands, uncultivable wastes, roads, tanks, ponds, canals, tank bed and forest land.

After independence, when this agricultural taxation was abolished, the duties of the patwari concerned three things: (i) the maintenance of the records of rights and mutation, the record of public and common properties and the assessment of water cess; (ii) the maintenance of the statistical record of acreage under different crops and (iii) the maintenance of the statistical record of births and deaths, livestock, certification of caste, profession and income of village people. This is supposed to have involved maintaining sixty-four different registers.

Beyond the mundane functions of the patwari, his role in the political economy of rural affairs must be understood. As a revenue official he was an extractive agent in the Mughal period. In the colonial period, besides the traditional extractive role with discretionary power, he had acquired another important function: that of the custodian of the Registry of Rights. He thus wielded considerable social and political power in the village and possessed detailed confidential information. Property rights, always a bundle of rights, have to be associated with interpretation. Among a largely illiterate peasant society, the patwari thus enjoyed considerable socio-economic and bureaucratic power, with the predictable effect that his office could involve corruption.

There is an interesting continuation of bureaucratic power of the patwari even in the post-independent period, even as his functions underwent fundamental alterations. The postcolonial state, being a modern bourgeois welfare state, proposes several reforms and welfare measures. Now the functional role of patwari changed from being an extractive agent to that of a gatekeeper of governmentality. The collection of agricultural taxation gradually disappears during this period and water cess remains nominal, thus reducing an old source of power that the patwari previously had. However, new sources of power simultaneously open up. Land transfers remain a prominent area of rent-seeking and even fraud. Cases of land reform are even more notorious, where landlords manage to conceal swathes of surplus land with the active collusion of the patwari. Ironically, the office remains a subject and agent of the rural oligarchy, as governments often refused to pay salaries to the patwari in several states.

A similar situation obtains regarding welfare schemes for the poor. Several anti-poverty schemes are introduced by the state in rural areas over time, and these are resented by the rural elite since they fear losing control over labour processes. In many states, benefits are usurped by landlords again with the collusion of the lower bureaucracy. Issuance of ration cards, voter cards, caste and income certificates, employment guarantee schemes, pensions, scholarships, and so on, all involve the endorsement of the patwari, whose efficiency often reflects the prevailing configuration of class power in the countryside.

Having discussed the historical role of this office, it would be incorrect to say that it has not evolved. First, the inheritance or the watandari system and single caste dominance was abolished. Second, several state governments have recently made the office of the patwari a salaried and transferable post, so that their local influence is reduced. Of late, after land records have been computerized in several states, the role of the patwari in land transfers has been reduced, especially in the South Indian states. However, there is no denying that the patwari has played a significant role in shaping bureaucratic power in contemporary rural bourgeois society. At the present time, the patwari is capable of becoming a catalytic agent in urbanizing rural spaces, converting agricultural land into real estate. In the precolonial, colonial, as well as the postcolonial periods, the role of the patwari appears to have been pivotal in reflecting the political economy of society.

References

Baden-Powell, Henry. The Indian Village Community: Examined with Reference to the Physical, Ethnographic, and Historical Condition of the Provinces; Chiefly on the Basis of the Revenue-Settlement Records and District Manuals, 598, 735–736, 1896. Available at: https://archive.org/details/indianvillage.com/page/n8.

Dantwala, Mohanlal Lalloobhai and Shah, C. H. Evaluation of Land Reforms: General Report, 167, 179–180, Dept. of Economics, University of Bombay, 1971.

Mishra Prachee and Roopal Suhag, 2017, Land Records and Titles in India. Available at: http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Analytical%20Report/Land%20Records%20and%20Titles%20in%20India.pdf-.

PEASANT MOVEMENTS

Muzaffar Assadi

Any explanation of peasant movements requires explanation of the social category called peasantry. The term ‘peasant’ originated from the fifteenth-century French word paisant, which means ‘one from the countryside’. During this period, the equivalent terms of use in North India were rayat, kisan and dehati. Rayat is used in the common sense to mean farmers, while kisan is used for any cultivator who lives on agriculture for her or his sustenance. Another term used to refer to a peasant is dehati, which literally means ‘rural bumpkin’. The terms used in South India to denote peasants include raitha and raithulu (in Telugu), vivasaayikal (in Tamil), shetkari (in Marathi) and raithapi and krishikaru (in Kannada). There are different categories within these broader peasant category: for instance, poor peasants are called bada raitha, middle peasants are called madhyama raitha and rich peasants are called shrimanta raitha. In academic discourse, two terms have come to be broadly used with the changing political economy: ‘peasant’ and ‘farmer’. The peasant is often identified with the rural population, who depends on agriculture for her or his livelihood and uses simple tools and technology for their subsistence. The farmer is a new category of peasant who produces surplus. They are peasants who have transformed into a market-dependant social category as a result of the changing political economy and are, therefore, known as ‘market-oriented autonomous farmers’.

Kulak is another term used as an academic category in India. The kulak is largely seen as rich peasant category with reactionary tendencies. The origin of the term lies in the European context and was extensively used by Karl Marx in the American context and Vladimir Lenin in the Russian context. Lenin used this category to analyse why kulaks became reactionary in the context of the Russian revolution. Indian Marxists have also used this term, but with caution, as Indian kulaks did not play the same role as their counterparts in Russia. On the contrary, Indian kulaks did play a significant role in defeating land reforms and cornering the benefits of the Green Revolution.

This brings us to the crux of this entry on peasant movements in India. Differentiations and multiple meanings of the term ‘peasant’ have distilled into understanding the peasant movements as well. In fact, peasant movements in the Indian context can broadly be divided into two neat categories: peasant movement and farmers’ movement. The term ‘peasant movement’ is used to refer to those movements that surfaced much before the Green Revolution. Multiple terms have been used to describe such peasant movements: peasant resistance, peasant revolution, peasant revolt, including the fact that such movements were also treated as satyagrahas (non-violent civil resistance movements). Locally, they are referred to as raithapi pratiroda, raithapi kranti, raitha chaluvali, raithara dhange, kisan prathirod, kisan sangarsh and kisan andolan.

Many a times, such terms are coined by and during the movements themselves. Deccan peasant movements came to be known as the Deccan Revolt of 1875, the movement led by the Mapillas became the Mapilla rebellion or riots (1921), the Nagar movement of 1830–4 in modern-day Karnataka became known as Nagara Raithara Dange or peasant uprising. In such cases, the terms revolt, rebellion and uprising are used synonymously as they convey the meaning of a series of severe uprisings or resistances led by the peasants, spanning many years, against exploiters such as the zamindars, middlemen or even the state. Mostly, they are not free from violence.

Almost all the peasant movements that came under the influence, or were led by the nationalist movement or Gandhi, are categorized as peasant or kisan satyagrahas. For instance, Champaran, Bardoli and Kheda satyagrahas led by Gandhi and the Oudh peasant movement led by Kisan Sabhas are categorized as peasant movements. Two more terms are used for peasant movements: kisan pratirodh and raitha chaluvali. These are used to explain the peasants’ opposition through different forms such as picketing, band, long marches and sitting in dharna. These protests occurred in post-Independence India and largely followed the Gandhian path of non-violent resistance. They protested against price rise, heavy taxation and deteriorating conditions of agriculture.

We now come to the second category of protests following the Green Revolution, that is, during the 1980s, known as ‘farmers’ movements’. In fact, the term farmer’s movement has now been replaced in academic discourse with the phrase ‘new farmers’ movement’. Scholars such as T. J. Byrce, Tom Brass, Jairus Banaji, Zoya Hasan and Muzaffar Assadi have used this term to explain the arrival of a new set of farmers’ movement in the states of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Punjab. These movements conceptualized their rhetoric using the local idiom and used strategies such as gav bhandi (village closure), chakka jam (stopping production) and chalo padayatra (start of long march) in their struggle. Their demands included kajra mukti (freedom from debts), sala manna (loan waiver) and lakshmi mukti (freedom from dependency). And, the green cap (hasiru topi), green shawl and green flag they sported became symbols of their resistance.

An important question at this juncture is the following: can we refer to tribal struggles as peasant movements? While the terms Adivasi, moola nivasi, budakattu and vanavasi are used to identify populations whose practices are animistic or those who live in and depend on forest resources, they have been victims of land appropriation and physical violence by the state, market forces and global capital. Since tribals are subjected to land alienation and exploitation just like peasants, scholars such as A. R. Desai have treated their struggles as part of peasant struggle. This is why the academic discourse is filled with terms such as Adivasi dhange and Adivasi horata, despite being explained as either a ‘struggle’ or ‘rebellion’ or ‘insurrection’. For instance, the following cases of tribal movements have been characterized variably as farmers’ movements and Adivasi uprisings: the Halba rebellion (1774–9), the Koli uprising (1784–5), the Tamar tribal revolt (1794–5), the Kond tribal revolt (1850), the Santhal insurrection (1855–6), the Tana Bhagat struggle (1914), the Birsa Munda rebellion (1900), the Koya tribal revolt (1920) and the Gond revolt (1940). These inconsistencies show that such terms have no fixed meaning in academic discourse, rendering the demarcation of a movement from struggle or resistance rather difficult to identify. They have either become overlapping or ambiguous categories.

References

Banaji, Jairus. ‘The Farmers’ Movements: A Critique of Conservative Rural Coalitions’. The Journal of Peasant Studies 21, no. 3–4 (1994): 228–245.

Brass, Tom. New Farmers’ Movements in India. London: Routledge, 2014.

POLITICAL PARTIES

Ashutosh Kumar

The word ‘party’ is derived from the Latin word patir which means ‘to divide’. For close to two centuries, the term was usually applied in a negative sense to describe divisions along the lines of political ideas, support for a particular leader or personal interests which would threaten peaceful government and disturb national order. It was only by the early twentieth century, with the huge expansion of the electorate and an increase in the power of the legislative, that a number of competing political parties made their appearance. They began performing a range of tasks, including acting as a mediating link between citizens, candidates, lawmakers and government, and in the words of Schattschneider, modern democracy came to be considered as ‘unthinkable save in terms of the parties’.

Among Asia, Africa and Latin America, India stands out as an electoral laboratory for the study of political party. A number of national as well as regional parties were formed in the country before it became independent. Some of those parties have survived into the present, such as the Congress (established in 1885), Muslim League (1906), Shiromani Akali Dal (1920), Communist Party of India (1925), National Conference (1939) and Dravida Kazagham (1944; rechristened as Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in 1949). The last three decades, characterized as ‘post-Congress polity’, have been witness to a huge number of parties. While the number of national parties has remained relatively stable at seven as of 2018, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of registered recognized parties (59) and registered unrecognized parties (2044), according to data from the Election Commission of India. Most of the newly emergent parties are regional-ethnic in character as they thrive on the assertion of identity politics, based on politicization of social cleavages and regional disparity. Decline of the Congress (‘dominant or hegemonic or system-defining party’) during the period along with other national parties with the sole exception of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, formed in 1980; earlier as Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951) in terms of their electoral presence has created political space for the state parties, especially in the states where the BJP did not have electoral presence. The resultant fragmentation of party system has incentivized the powerful and ambitious state-level leaders, who have the support of a core social constituency that is created and cultivated through sectarian ethnic patronage and clientelism, to break away from their original parties and form state-level or substate-level parties of their ‘own’ to have greater political bargain in a coalition system.

While the rise of regional parties may be in line with the global trend, Indian ‘exceptionalism’ when compared with the ‘older’ democracies of the West is reflected in the fact that not only has the number of parties increased in India but the level of electorates’ participation has also risen with every new election. Centre for the Study of Developing Societies –National Election Studies (CSDS–NES) data notes that poor and uneducated electorates tend to vote in larger percentage than the rich and educated. Also, the level of electoral participation in India goes up further in the elections held for lower bodies, attesting to the ‘assertion from below’ thesis. Indian ‘exceptionalism’ with reference to party and party system, what in Hindi is termed as dal and daliya vyawastha, Diwakar notes, also emerges from the ‘complex interaction of various sociological, institutional, and contextual factors’ that do not apply the application of the theories – such as Duverger’s law – and classifications of parties developed in the context of the Western democracies.

References

Diwakar, Rekha. Party System in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Schattschneider, E. E. Party Government. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1942.

RAJYA SABHA, LOK SABHA (RĀJYA SABHĀ, LŌK SABHĀ)

Valerian Rodrigues

The upper and lower houses of the Indian Parliament are formally known as Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha, meaning Council of States and Council of People, respectively. The party or coalition of parties that wield a majority in the Lok Sabha form the government.

The Rajya Sabha consists of 250 members, of whom 238 are elected by members of state assemblies and 12 are nominated for their contribution to science, literature, the arts and social service. While domicile in the concerned state was essential for contesting candidates earlier, it no longer is. Membership of the house widely varies from state to state, due to demographic difference, and few of them are represented by only a single member. No seats are reserved in the house on grounds of community or other preferential considerations. It is a permanent house, where a member has a term of six years. Every two years, one-third of the elected members make way for others.

The Lok Sabha consists of 543 member selected through universal adult franchise in a first-past-the-post system. The lower house also includes two nominated members from the Anglo-Indian community if it fails to have such representation among the elected members. Here too, membership of the house varies greatly across the states mainly due to demographic variation. Fifteen per cent of the seats in the Lok Sabha are reserved for the scheduled castes (SCs), the traditional defiling and marginal caste and communities, and 7.5 per cent for scheduled tribes (STs), the ethnic communities with strong indigenous moorings and distinct ways of life. These representatives are elected in joint constituencies where only candidates from the relevant category can contest. The term of the Lok Sabha is five years, unless it is dissolved earlier.

The two houses together pass legislation, decide public policy, air popular grievances and hold the government accountable. They also endorse emergency measures, including president’s rule in the states. They are also the field where the complex system of constitutional amendments is brought to effect. While the Parliament cannot interfere with some provisions of the Constitution, it can amend most provisions. If there is a serious deadlock on a Bill between the houses, it can be resolved through the joint sitting of the two. While the Rajya Sabha has coeval powers with the Lok Sabha, there are a few cases when there is difference in power. In the case of money Bills, the powers of the Rajya Sabha are only recommendatory; money Bills are introduced in the Lok Sabha and passed by it. The Rajya Sabha can transfer a subject pertaining to state powers to the Union for a year, create All-India Services and approve a state of emergency under Article 352 of the Constitution when the Lok Sabha remains dissolved.

The vice president of India, who is elected by both houses of Parliament, is ex-officio chairman of the Rajya Sabha. The Lok Sabha elects its own presiding officer, the Speaker, whose term is coterminous with the house unless she or he resigns or is removed. The Parliament functions through a committee system of great complexity. While some of these committees do the housekeeping, others do the spadework for parliamentary chores, including estimates and accounts of public expenditure. Departmentally related standing committees, numbering twenty-four as of 2018, review and assess the functioning of departments under their charge and make recommendations to the Parliament.

The Parliament of India is an institution of unparalleled reach and hope, as the voice of the nearly 900 million electorate. While both the houses, particularly the Lok Sabha, have become more inclusive of India’s proverbial diversity, the representation of women and Muslims remains woefully inadequate. Criticisms of the system are many. Through its command over enormous resources and control over ruling party/parties, the executive has tended to tower over the houses, manoeuvring consent and evading accountability. Grandstanding and obstruction to the functioning of the houses have replaced debate and discussion. There is shrinkage in the number of working hours of the houses due to boycott and obstruction. Members of the houses and political parties are more concerned with the electoral impact of their action rather than their responsibility as representatives. The zero hour, when members raise the great concerns of the day, has tended to overshadow long-term and wider concerns. And, private members’ bills find little support in the houses. While the anti-defection law has reined in defection of elected representatives from one party to another, the law has made members too cautious to express their true opinions because they are apprehensive of offending the party leadership. The excessive focus on elections has led many criminals to become members of the houses, has stoked communal prejudices, curbed intra-party democracy and led to the enormous increase of corruption.

References

Pai, Sudha and Avinash Kumar , eds. The Indian Parliament: A Critical Appraisal. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2015.

Shankar, B. L. and Valerian Rodrigues . The Indian Parliament: A Democracy at Work. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.

RAPE

Mary E. John

Rape, as the universally known sexual violation of women without their consent, which became central to feminist campaigns worldwide since the 1960s, has been critical in contemporary India’s history as well. So much so that the English word ‘rape’ finds equal mention in our contexts as do its equivalences in Indian languages, such as the Hindi balatkaar. The term rape officially entered the subcontinent through the Indian Penal Code (IPC) of 1860, devised by the British and formulated in the English language. Rape is a crime against the state and can be found in Section 376 of the IPC, where it was defined as peno-vaginal penetration by a man against the woman’s consent. The term rape has withstood the test of time better (in spite of recent amendments suggesting the term ‘sexual assault’ instead) than have other sexual crimes in the IPC whose terminology confines them within Victorian frames of understanding. Consider for instance the phrase ‘outraging the modesty of a woman’ for sexual harassment (IPC 509) or the highly problematic notion of ‘sex against the order of nature’, which includes punishment for homosexual acts (IPC 377), which has now been reformed.

Everyone would remember the outrage caused by the gang rape of Jyoti Singh, the physiotherapy student who boarded a bus in Delhi with her friend on the night of 16 December 2012. The horrific and fatal nature of the gang rape undoubtedly played a large part in the national and international outcry that followed, including the state’s response in setting up the Justice Verma Committee and the rapid enactment of the Criminal Amendment Act of 2013 and the Sexual Harassment at Workplace Act of 2013. It brought issues of sexual violence into public discourse in a way that decades of agitation had not been able to achieve. What is particularly noteworthy is that we gained many fresh insights into sexual violence through considerable effort, often by going against the kind of common-sense perceptions that the Delhi rape case was dangerously close to cementing – that the greatest danger to women lies in the stranger lurking in the streets after nightfall, and that the only way to curb such crimes is through the death penalty. During the protests, for instance, it was calls for women’s freedom (azadi) that could be heard as much as demands for more stringent punishment. Moreover, new research (including scrutinizing rape data records of the police) revealed that by far the most prevalent form of rape in India is by perpetrators known to the victim (98 per cent of rape cases all over India are classified as acquaintance rape). In all likelihood, some rapes should not even be categorized as such; these include charges of kidnapping and abduction which are levelled against the boy in an eloping couple by the parents of the girl. On the other hand, however, the Delhi gang rape also crowded out media attention to the shocking avalanche of rapes of Dalit girls and women that were taking place during the same time in the neighbouring state of Haryana. These were often young girls too but whose vulnerable social position, in relation to the perpetrators, made justice much more elusive.

The women’s movement in India has had quite a distinctive and extremely complex history of campaigning against rape. The first national campaign in 1978 took up the case of the custodial rape of a young Adivasi woman, Mathura, by two policemen in the precincts of a police station in Maharashtra. As commentators point out, it came as a shock to feminists that what seemed to determine whether a woman had been raped was not an assessment of evidence but her past sexual history. Equally shocking was the realization that the nation’s rape laws had not been subjected to any review since when they were first prepared in 1860. Over the last few decades, the women’s movement has foregrounded cases of rape which go beyond the kind of general characterization made famous by Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will. Rape, as a form of extreme violence, is not incidental but systemic in ways such that women’s relative vulnerability to men is further exacerbated by structures of power, whether they be those of caste hierarchy, class exploitation, communally charged contexts and especially state violence (such as by members of armed forces). Though campaigns against violence such as rape and legal reform have gone hand in hand, one might say that a sense of just redressal through the law has been few and far between, with conviction rates in India being very low. Only those perpetrators who are socially marginal (as was the case in the Delhi gang rape) seem to stand a greater chance of being brought to book, compared to so many high-profile cases whom the courts find some reason or another to acquit. Even so, neither the state nor judicial recourse to justice can be dispensed with.

References

Kannabiran, Kalpana and Ritu Menon . From Mathura to Manorama: Resisting Violence against Women in India. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2007.

Srinivas, Rukmini. ‘The Many Shades of Rape Cases in Delhi’. The Hindu, 29 July 2014. Available at: http://www.thehindu.com/data/the-many-shades-of-rape-cases-in-delhi/article6261042.ece (accessed December 2018).

SAARC

Rahul Tripathi

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was established in 1985 to promote economic, social and cultural cooperation among the member countries. Initially, it started with the membership of seven countries, namely, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Maldives and Sri Lanka; Afghanistan became the eighth country to join the group in 2007. Headquartered in Kathmandu, SAARC has completed more than three decades of a rather lacklustre performance, which has often led to the criticism of the structure and functioning of the arrangement for a variety of reasons. Though a bit on the extreme, some commentators, such as Girish Mathur, have been quick to dismiss SAARC as a still-born baby!

The central issue that has hampered the spirit of the SAARC process is that of political dynamics. Even though SAARC was conceived as a forum that would keep political and bilateral issues out of deliberations, political friction between India and Pakistan and at times other smaller neighbours has vitiated regular interactions. The clause that mandates that decisions must be taken by consensus of all members often becomes the pretext for decision not been taken at all. Moreover, the bureaucratic-structural hierarchy that highlights the operational programme of SAARC gives greater onus to the structure of cooperation rather than its substance. SAARC works through a number of layered committees, including technical committees, council of ministers and summit meetings that often lead to signing of lofty declarations without appropriate provisions to translate them effectively on ground, leading to a number of initiatives remaining confined to just the declaratory phase. One such notable initiative is the SAARC Convention on Suppression of Terrorism, which has failed to become an instrument of effective cooperation countering terror in the region.

A major area where SAARC has been unable to utilize its potential pertains to its inability to tap the economic potentialities and complementarities that make the region a natural geographical and economic unit for cooperation in the area of trade, commerce, energy and infrastructure. Intra-regional trade within SAARC countries continues to be well below its potential compared to its global trade. The region has still not been able to make effective use of transboundary resources for energy and infrastructural cooperation and transport connectivity across borders. People-to-people contact within SAARC member countries remains limited. The Group of Eminent Persons report of 2001 has listed a number of studies and suggestions on how to take SAARC forward, but they are yet to make a deeper impact on policymaking within SAARC. The body needs to reinvent and revive itself to meet the emerging geopolitical and geoeconomic realities, which would otherwise make extra-regional cooperation more attractive for member countries. Being the only manifestation of regional spirit in South Asia, SAARC needs a greater focus on implementation and an abiding concern for improving the quality of life of 1.6 billion people who inhabit South Asia.

References

Mathur, Girish. ‘SAARC: A Still-born Child’. Link 29, no. 15 (16 November 1986): 6–9.

Obino, Francesco. ‘SAARC: The Political Challenge for South Asia and Beyond’. Economic and Political Weekly 44, no. 9 (28 February 2009).

SARKAR (SARKĀR)

Chandan Sinha and Neilabh Sinha

The word sarkar is derived from the Persian language in which it means ‘chief agent’ (literally ‘head of affairs’), although the Persian form may have definite connotations depending on the context. During the reign of Sher Shah Suri, it referred to a large territorial administrative unit. In India, in its most common usage, sarkar refers to the government of the day. However, it does not connote local government bodies, such as a panchayat body, or a municipal corporation The usage of sarkar at all levels of the public sphere has been facilitated in particular by the media, which uses the word on a day-to-day basis while referring to the central, state or a foreign government and their representatives. From this usage of sarkar is also derived the adjective sarkari, meaning ‘of the government’. Thus, the word sarkari may be prefixed to agencies, institutions, procedures and public policy pronouncements, among other things, to indicate their governmental provenance.

Another implication of the word sarkar has to do with its long-standing usage in popular social discourse. As such, sarkar has a feudal connotation and is used to refer to the ruler or landholder. It remains in currency at the level of local discourse and characterizes the relationship between rich and poor or landowner and peasant/sharecropper.

At the family level in early colonial Bengal, sarkar would often refer to the person in charge of running the household of a European. Entries in P. T. Nair’s collection of correspondence and descriptions from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Calcutta show that the sarkar (or ‘sircar’) sometimes acted as the personal creditor of the European employer, thereby making himself indispensable to the said employer. He was often also responsible for appointing or dismissing other servants. As an aside, such persons generally belonged to the Kayastha class, and the household title may have evolved into the eponymous last name commonly found in Bengal today.

Finally, sarkari also continues to refer to the central funds of a joint family household in North India, a connotation that resonates with an older Persian meaning of ‘sarkar’ as state or royal treasury. The joint family was the basic social unit in traditional rural India and has now given way to a large extent to the nuclear family of the industrial era. The joint family survives in some parts of the rural hinterlands even today. Joint families had a code of behaviour and functional arrangements that, although not necessarily written down, were followed punctiliously. The keystone of the arrangement was the family ‘treasury’ or fund. Revenue from commonly held property/land would flow into this fund. The everyday expenses of the joint family would come from this central sarkari fund. This connotation of the adjective is often used to refer to the common household funds from which presents for individuals in a family are purchased for festivals or other communal occasions.

References

Landau, Amy S. ‘Reconfiguring the Northern European Print to Depict Sacred History at the Persian Court’. In Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North , 67–68. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014 (and accompanying footnotes).

Nair, P. T. A Tercentenary History of Calcutta, Volume 2: Calcutta in the 18th Century, 168–19. Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1984.

SCHEDULE

Justice Suhrud Dave

The word ‘schedule’ has its roots in the fourteenth-century Latin term, schedula, which currently means appendix, part, appendage or list. The Constitution of India contains twelve schedules. Schedules are required in the Constitution for listing subjects that could not be conveniently included in the text of the Act but have been recognized in law as the part of the Act.

For example, the Eighth and Ninth Schedules are two important Schedules in the Constitution of India. A conjoint reading of the Eighth Schedule (official languages of the republic) and Article 351 (directive for the development of Hindi language) would reveal the duty cast upon the Union to promote the spread of Hindi language and to secure its assimilation with Hindustani and other languages specified in the Schedule. Because of this process of assimilation, it was believed that the forms, style and expression of the scheduled languages will gain promotion and development without any interference. Moreover, this Schedule lays the foundation for the preservation of the linguistic diversity of India. The First Amendment Act of 1951 along with Article 31-B added the Ninth Schedule to the Indian Constitution. This Schedule prevents any land reform laws enacted by the various state governments from being legally challenged so as to facilitate agrarian reforms. Therefore, it placed a set of laws outside the purview of judicial review. With the Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala judgement, however, the Supreme Court held that despite such inclusion in the Schedule, any enactment of the Parliament could be challenged on the grounds of being violative of the basic features of the Constitution. So, the Ninth Schedule has played a crucial role in arguing for an essence of the Constitution, envisaged by the Constituent Assembly, that is inviolable by any Act of Parliament.

Regrettably, in our political and social discourse, the term ‘schedule’ has come to be pejoratively associated with certain castes and tribes. Articles 341 and 342 define as to who would be ‘scheduled castes’ (SCs) and ‘scheduled tribes’ (STs) with respect to any state or Union Territory within the Union, empower the president of India to draw up a list of such communities and specify enabling provisions which are provided in the Fifth and the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. The inclusion of castes and communities as schedules is a prerogative of the legislature and is not pejorative at all. The Sixth Schedule, for instance, provides for the establishment of Tribal Advisory Councils to advise the governor on matters pertaining to the welfare and advancement of the STs and for the non-applicability of the provisions of the central and the state Acts. The inclusion of any caste or tribe or language in the concerned Schedule would come with many benefits and advantages, including the legally acknowledged concept of reservation in the fields of education, service and elections. The terms SC and ST have not been defined under the Constitution and any community would be regarded as so only on their inclusion in the Schedule as a consequence of social and legal battles. The Supreme Court was, until sometime back, vigorously engaged in deciding such battles. Moreover, the inclusion of certain castes or tribes, as SC or ST, has brought in a divide in popular opinion. However, this classification will have to persist for their betterment. The social and political forces, acting otherwise, shall have to be discouraged.

References

Bijoy, C. R. ‘The Adivasis of India-A History of Discrimination, Conflict, and Resistance’. PUCL Bulletin (2003). PDF available on Academia. https://www.academia.edu/6171880/The_Adivasis_of_India_A_History_of_Discrimination_Conflict_and_Resistance .

Osborne, Evan. ‘Culture, Development, and Government: Reservations in India’. Economic Development and Cultural Change 49, no. 3 (2001): 659–685.

SECULAR

Rajeev Bhargava

The term ‘secular’ comes from saeculum, meaning a century or age. Within Christianity, it began to be used for those clergymen who lived their lives in ordinary time, the time in this world as against those sections of the clergy who turned away from this world to spend their time in the monastic order, closer to eternal time. The contrast here was not between a comprehensive secularity wholly opposed to a comprehensive religiosity. Instead, one might say there are secular religious and religious religious people, those who are doubly, wholly and intensely religious. The Christian God has devised two sets of laws, one that applies directly and immediately in the church and the other indirectly mediated by a set of laws devised by political rulers. The separation of church and state was not a conflict within Christianity but an internal matter.

In the past three millennia, however, Christianity itself began to be undermined in the West. The idea of another world and eternal time was radically questioned and dismissed as implausible. Humans existing in this world in ordinary time have exclusive ontological validity. All that is real is secular; everything else exists only in human imagination, in their dreams and fantasies.

Political secularity or secularism comes in three principal variants in the Western world. In its most radical version, all matters pertaining to this world must be governed exclusively by laws devised by humans through the agency of the state. Since it is false and illusory, religion must be dispelled from political and public life. The second variant retains its original Christian character, suitably adapted to modern conditions. Here, all temporal matters come under the strict jurisdiction of the state, while all godly issues, those that pertain to eternity, fall under the jurisdiction of the church and its chief officials. There is nothing anti-religious about this form of political secularity; at best, secular here means non-religious. The third variant is predominantly non-religious but accommodates the values of the dominant church in society. Thus, in many aspects of political and social life, religion plays no role. But, at least in some matters, the traditional laws of the church continue to reign.

Even in Europe, then, the word ‘secular’ or ‘secularism’ has no single connotation. This is even truer as we move across cultures. As these terms travel outside the Christian West, they acquire new connotations by virtue of the historical and cultural trajectory of non-Christian societies. One such region is the Indian subcontinent. Indians inherited specific versions of secularism from the West, but they did not always preserve them in the form in which they were received. They added something of enduring value to them, drawing from their own cultural traditions and further developing the idea. One crucial point to grasp is that in India, the terms secular and secularism developed in the context of deep religious diversity. This makes the Indian version completely different from all Western variants, where it developed after the creation of predominantly single-religion societies.

In Europe, with the breakdown of Latin Christendom, wars erupted between Catholics and Protestants. Simultaneously, peacemakers began to explore ways of preventing violence. In the ensuing negotiations, a consensus to adhere to one principle emerged: ‘one king, one law, one faith’. The idea behind this was to have each ruler within her or his territory declare or confess her or his allegiance either to Catholicism or to one or the other Protestant sects. It was agreed that the subject population within the ruler’s territory would then be compelled to embrace the religion confessed by her or him. Those who did not comply were expelled or eliminated. This is how European societies were homogenized and England became Anglican, Scandinavia became Lutheran, Spain and Portugal became Catholic and so on. The wars of religion did not result in the birth of secular but of extremely religious, confessional states. Political secularism emerged only when the rulers and the subject populations, which they governed, began to view their church as socially oppressive and politically meddlesome and challenged them. Hence, the demand for state–church separation.

This historical context was largely absent in India, at least until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The first major religion-oriented war in the entire history of the subcontinent occurred at the time of India’s Independence. Despite some exclusionary movements, religious diversity and pluralism have been the norm in India. Adherents of radically different religio-philosophical world views – the many different groups that fall under the umbrella term ‘Hindu’, Buddhists, Jains, Syrian Christians, Pārasī, Jews, Muslims, Latin Christians, Sikhs – have all lived together, despite friction from time to time. None saw the other as an existential threat. When the terms ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’ began to be used here, their connotation could never be anti-religious or simply non-religious but rather the principled management and accommodation of religious diversity. Those anxious to prevent the partition of the subcontinent along religious lines used these terms to refer to a principled distance of the state from all religions in order to promote a reasonable sociability among them. Secular as multireligious, or against communal self-aggrandizement, became its principal meaning. However, a distinction was also made between valuable religious practices and those that legitimated hostility to other communities or oppression of women and ‘lower castes’. With this, it radically transformed the original Christian or Western meaning of the term, investing it with a significance that has enormous transcultural potential. Ironically, it was only during the period of the notorious Emergency in 1975–6 that the word ‘secular’ was formally incorporated, via the Forty-Second Amendments, into the Preamble to the Indian Constitution.

References

Bajpai, Rochana. ‘The Conceptual Vocabularies of Secularism and Minority Rights in India’. Journal of Political Ideologies 7, no. 2 (2002): 179–198.

Nandy, Ashis. ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’. Alternatives 13, no. 2 (1988): 177–94.

SUBALTERN

Shail Mayaram

The concept of the subaltern as interpreted in the last quarter of the twentieth century has changed forever the idea of the political. Initially used to refer to a junior position in an army, the term was transformed by the intervention of a school of history called ‘subaltern studies’ to signal subalternity, a condition of deep marginality that arose from the intersection of knowledge and power. Phenomena such as peasant rebels and social banditry that had hitherto been seen as pre-political now began to be viewed as political. The focus on the subaltern was embedded in a conceptual framework, which was one of the few to have come out of the work of scholars working on India. Engaging with Gramsci’s formulation of hegemony, Ranajit Guha, the founding editor of the editorial collective of subaltern studies, argued that British colonialism represented dominance rather than hegemony, the latter being based on the consent of the governed.

The collaborative research agenda of the group of scholars who gathered around Guha augured a new approach to history. It has been suggested that Ranajit Guha established the ‘Guha dock’. The metaphor of the shipyard is significant as many ships continue to anchor and take off from here even though the official subaltern studies project has wound up after publishing twelve volumes. It has left in its wake, besides the essays of these volumes, a large number of monographs of individual authors of the subaltern studies editorial collective. The work of the collective reinterpreted colonial and postcolonial Indian history. Gyanendra Pandey highlighted the colonial sources of violence, challenging the communalism and secularism binary. Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana foregrounded the concern with caste and gender. The group also marked a fresh focus on Muslims and Dalits.

The early criticism of the collective had been of the romanticization of the subaltern rebel rather than seeing her agency as one that could collaborate with sovereignty or be co-opted by the dominant discourse. With the intersection of postcolonial theory, epistemic issues of representation and voice were raised. In her famous lecture of 1985 titled ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ Gayatri Spivak emphasized that subaltern speech is both silenced and gendered and that scholars cannot claim to ‘give a voice’ to subalterns, given the problems of translation. She remarked that what subaltern studies stood for is a theory of consciousness and culture rather than a theory of change vide modes of production.

There have been other lines of difference and internal debate as the category of the subaltern continued to evolve over time. Dipesh Chakrabarty challenged Ranajit Guha’s use of terms such as false consciousness, pointing out that Kanu and Sidu, the Santhal leaders, represented different temporalities and cosmologies that assume imagined worlds in which gods and spirits, gurus and pirs figure. Nonetheless, subaltern studies have provided new ways of approaching the question of religion and secularity. Milind Wakankar’s work seeks the ‘prehistory of religion’ before it became entwined with the nation, state and civilization as also the coexistence of the miracle and violence.

New questions regarding the deepening of subalternity and the understanding of the state continue to rise. Landlordism as usury has given way to corporate and finance capital as the dominant form of capital. Further, communities identified as subaltern, including significant sections of Adivasis and Dalits, have come to participate in genocidal terror. Simultaneously, there is a new edge to the subalternity of other sections of Adivasis trapped between state and revolution, as Maoists continue their onslaught on Adivasi culture while sovereignty assumes new forms with the state’s use of paramilitaries and the war against terror that renders minorities particularly vulnerable.

References

Guha, Ranajit. Domination without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Morris, Rosalind C. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

THANA (THĀNĀ)

Santana Khanikar

A thana refers to a level in the police hierarchy in India with both geographical and institutional connotations. Spatially, a thana may refer to both the physical buildings and compound of a police station. Etymologically, the word is derived from the Sanskrit root sthaanak or Hindi thaan, meaning ‘a station or a place’. Historically, however, the institutional structures or authorities performing police functions were not referred to by this term prior to the Mughal period. Griffiths and Singh note that historic texts such as Kautilya’s Arthashastra and the edicts of the Ashokan empire tell us of systems of maintaining law and order in the cities, namely that of nagarikas or kotwals and rajukas, which were of a composite nature, embodying in them the functions of judiciary, investigator and executioner. Law and order was maintained in rural areas through a village-based system that survived until the British period, enforced by the village headman at times answerable to large zamindars, assisted by one or more village watchmen or chowkidars, Bayley observes. The word thana does not occur in these documents.

However, this system of policing, essentially based in towns managed by kotwals and in villages maintained by local landlords and village councils, continued during the Mughal period. Some changes in the administration of police, giving it a more military character, were made during this period, where responsibility of maintaining law and order at the provincial level was entrusted with a governor known as the subedar. Madan notes that the provinces were divided into large districts or sarkars under a fauzdar, and the districts were further divided into parganas, which were then further divided into thanas at the bottom, looked after by a thanedar, who was responsible for the maintenance of law and order.

The modern British colonial police system of the 1860s brought in a province–district model of administration. While the Police Act of 1861 provided the legal backbone to the system, composed of British officers at the top and a large rank and file of natives at the bottom, it failed to spell out the lower-level or subordinate formations at the thana level, resulting in a centralized management. Training programmes were devised for thana-level police officers, nonetheless, which detailed rules and procedures to be followed in a police station, such as maintenance of a station diary, weapons and people in custody, and also listed documents to be maintained, such as those recording individual and community crime histories, as Kumar and Verma point out.

In contemporary parlance, a thana, the point of direct contact between common people and the state coercive machinery, is a place that is seen as both a necessity and a problem. Popular Bollywood films have frequently represented images of thana and thanedars both as righteous heroes taking up social causes and as evil and corrupt men. Recent ethnographic studies of thanas and policing in Northern India, such as those by Jauregui, Wahl and Khanikar, narrate how thana-level policing is ridden with colonial vestiges of hierarchy, violence and inefficiency and are still routinely called to perform as the first line of sovereign power.

Police forces in contemporary India are organized at the state/provincial level and have slightly varying organizational structures. All police forces, however, have thanas at the bottom of the hierarchy, sometimes supported by police chowkis (outposts) further down. The Bureau of Police Research and Development under the Ministry of Home Affairs records 15,579 police stations or thanas in India as of 2017. These thanas are headed by an officer, usually of the rank of inspector or sub-inspector, drawn from the subordinate police, who are in charge of allocating work and supervising overall functioning.

Thanas are responsible for ensuring safety and security of people and property, and investigating crimes within the area under their jurisdiction, and operate round the clock by deploying personnel in shifts. In order to perform these functions, various mechanisms of record-keeping and surveillance, such as crime-record registers and patrolling, are used. Suspects are arrested and interrogated within the premises of thanas. There are holding cells for suspects, known as ‘lock-ups’, where, legally, the thana can hold a suspect for up to twenty-four hours prior to producing her or him in a court of law and up to fourteen days with permission from a judicial magistrate. In an attempt to make the space of the thanas friendlier for visitors from all sections of the society, some police forces in contemporary India have attempted to compulsorily employ women personnel at the level of the thana. The recruitment of subordinate police in such contexts thus sees reservations not only for constitutionally defined groups of scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes but also for women.

References

Bayley, D. H. The Police and Political Development in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Madan, J. C. Indian Police: Its Development upto 1905, An Historical Analysis. New Delhi: Uppal Publishing House, 1980.

UPSC

Maruthi Prasad Tangirala

Synonymous with ‘civils’ in the southern parts of the country and ‘civilwa’ in the northern, UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) is a convenient shortening of the rather unwieldy name of a venerable eighty-year-old institution and represents either a somewhat naive belief or a fairly passionate faith among a significant section of India’s employment-age youth about the emancipatory potential of a civil service job. While it conducts many different recruitment examinations every year, UPSC is now predominantly associated with the annual recruitment examination to the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and a number of other cognate government services. The examination extends the legacy of the colonial-era aspiration for Indians to be associated with governance activity into the more egalitarian present. There is some evidence in recent times of the diversification of the aspirant pool for the IAS examination, from a largely urban and English-medium educated elite into the vast Indian semi-urban hinterland. Successful UPSC cohorts now consist of a greater variety of Indians from different backgrounds.

In conversations across different languages, the term UPSC can signify a variety of disparate things. To many in the middle classes it represents an entrepot to a life of middle-class respectability, a yearning for a better life if not power and pelf. UPSC can also indicate the mad rush to join cramming shops and finishing schools, in view of the extreme difficulty of the examination that requires above all stamina and staying power. Consistent with this perceived toughness, the term is often used to denote the pinnacle of individual intellectual achievement, as in ‘she’s obviously very good because she’s come through UPSC’. It signifies the fairness of the meritocratic process to some; for many others who may not succeed, it is a perfect example of a hopelessly intractable obstacle race.

In the lanes, hostels and libraries around Mukherjee Nagar or Karol Bagh in Delhi or in Ashok Nagar and Gandhi Nagar in Hyderabad, and many other cities and towns across the country, UPSC means many years of physical hardship and mental labour, personal expense and sacrifice and singular dedication to ‘cracking’ the exam. To prepare for UPSC is reason enough for parents to remit additional money to their children living away from them, and the admit cards for the exam have considerable evidentiary and exchange value in hostels and homes across the country. UPSC also represents bonds of friendship between aspirants often born even a decade apart, of hierarchies and relationships forged among fresh-faced first-timers and veterans who have made multiple attempts, bonds and alliances that persist in spite of intense competition and often last a lifetime.

Sometimes described as a favourite national pastime for the intellectually inclined, the repeated attempts made at the UPSC exams represent a perverse incentive and a colossal opportunity cost. For a number of senior employees of public sector companies and banks, UPSC represents what might have been if they had made it through the exam, and for those others who had not the foresight to opt for a fall-back job while taking the exam, UPSC denotes the many productive years laid to waste without hope of recovery.

UPSC can be described as a foundational institution, at least by virtue of the articles expended on it in the Constitution. Its incorporation represents a desire on the part of the founders of the republic to eschew the patronage principle in appointments to the permanent executive. In its recruitment role in appointments to the services of the Union, UPSC has maintained a quiet efficiency over the years and has managed to largely stay free from taint and notoriety, unlike its constitutional counterparts in some states that are beset with performance problems and allegations of corruption.

UPSC has, over its history, earned a place among the few successful institutions in independent India. The sense of pride – of being a UPSC recruit – is manifest among its alumni, and the public perception too largely treats them as deserving of praise and respect. Elements of the selection process, most notably the general studies papers and the IAS interview, have achieved cult status.

Problems persist, nonetheless. UPSC has been one arena where the tension between a neoliberal governance paradigm above and the newly assertive subaltern aspiration below has played out, and this has had its effects on both the organization itself and the public’s perception of it. The annual list of selectees put out from Dholpur House (where UPSC has been housed since 1952) no longer remains unquestioned, and the disclosure of fine details of evaluation is aggressively sought as a matter of right. The stakes being what they are, every issue, every mark not given, every question not strictly within the published syllabus, every interview question asked or not asked, every statistical evaluation tool not disclosed is contested and litigated by unsuccessful candidates in an unending dance of hope and desperation. This mirrors the larger failures in the education system that has not been able to teach our youth the difference between failure and rejection. Then again, the intense contestation is also reflective of the narrow pathways for public service and the abysmally few opportunities available to the educated unemployed to engage meaningfully with the nitty-gritty of governance. In spite of its faults and follies, however, UPSC will continue to remain a powerful proxy for aspiration and hope for the foreseeable future.

References

Gopalakrishnan, M. ‘Direct Recruitment to the Higher Civil Services of India – The Personality Test for the IAS Examination – Some Observations’. Indian Journal of Public Administration 22, no. 2 (1976): 174–196.

Shurmer-Smith, Pamela. ‘Becoming a Memsahib: Working with the Indian Administrative Service’. Environment and Planning A 30, no. 12 (1998): 2163–2179.

VIOLENCE

Neera Chandhoke

Of what is it that we speak when we speak of violence? The term possesses a great deal of rhetorical value, commands immediate attention and evokes strong reactions. But, we no longer seem to know the difference between torture in the police stations of Delhi and little babies dying of malnutrition in remote areas of India .

Consider these differences: the imposition of draconian acts such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which grants immunity to army personnel during the course of their duty in the Kashmir Valley and in Northeast India, amounts to discrimination. When the owner of a textile unit makes his workers labour for long hours without adequate remuneration, that is exploitation. When millions of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes suffer from avoidable harm, continue to be subjected to rank indignities and die premature deaths, we call it social injustice. When security forces or militants fire upon unarmed people and cause death, we properly term this violence.

We can distinguish between four broad categories of violence. First, the quotidian incidents of violence we often see: road rage, domestic abuse, lynching, terror attacks, arson, destructive demonstration and humiliation of fellow citizens. The second kind of violence is that which is harnessed towards the attainment of specific ends. For instance, the aim of caste and communal violence is to redraw the normative map drafted by Indian democracy. In this case, violence tries to restore a pre-democratic social order based on hierarchy and exclusion and to reverse the new democratic order based on principles of non-discrimination and equality. The third category of violence is that which is employed to make demands upon the state and force changes in policy. Groups use violence to wrest collective benefits from the state, ranging from the extension of affirmative-action policies to this or that group to the demand for a separate state within the federal system. Fourth, a group can resort to violence because it wants to simply opt out and establish a state of its own. Notably, groups that want benefits from the state do not renege on political obligation but secessionists do. They renounce the sovereignty of the state and wish to establish a new one forged out of the territory and the people of the existing state. Keep your society unequal, corrupt, exploitative and rotten they seem to say, just give us a state of our own.

The issue is much more complex in this last case. While we do not agree with their use of violence, we recognize that revolutionaries, too, seek to transform the institutional context in which people live out their lives and make it more just. Unlike secessionist politics, revolutionary violence does not seek to break off a piece of the territory of the existing state and establish a new state. The group that wields revolutionary violence reneges on political obligation to the state but not on their moral obligation to fellow citizens, particularly the most deprived, oppressed and exploited and in general those who are victims of a history not of their making.

In India, democracy and violence occupy the same political space. When institutions of the democratic state foster injustice, when the interest of citizens are betrayed, this space should have been filled with democratic contestation, social movements, campaigns, marches, strikes and negotiations between the state and civil society. Instead, we have violence at our hands as an instrument of last resort. Certainly, the institutionalization of justice will not make violence go away. Violence is part of the human condition. The political trick is to make the beast stay on the margins and prevent it from occupying the space of democratic politics. The political negotiation of violence demands innovation, creativity and imagination, but it can be done. Otherwise, Indian society will continue to pay heavy costs for the waylaying of democratic justice.

References

Gupta, Akhil. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Urdal, Henrik. ‘Population, Resources, and Political Violence: A Subnational Study of India, 1956–2002’. Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 4 (2008): 590–617.

NOTES

1 Baxi (1976).

2 Gujarat State Legal Aid and Advice Board, ‘Gujarat Legal Aid Ambulance Project: Lok Adalat’.

3 ‘The Legal Services Authority Act 1987’. http://nalsa.gov.in/acts (accessed 3 November 2017).

4 ‘In Another First, Bengal Gets a Transgender Lok Adalat Judge | Kolkata | Hindustan Times’. http://www.hindustantimes.com/kolkata/west-bengal-gets-a-transgender-lok-adalat-judge/story-PoFwwMctcQtQ8UFJiT13MK.html (accessed 3 November 2017).

5 ‘Lok Adalat | National Legal Services Authority’. http://nalsa.gov.in/lok-adalat (accessed 3 November 2017).

6 Ibid.

7 ‘Doordarshan to Broadcast Series on Cases Settled in Lok Adalats | The Indian Express’. http://indianexpress.com/article/india/doordarshan-to-broadcast-series-on-cases-settled-in-lok-adalats/ (accessed 3 November 2017).

8 Krishna Iyer (1988).

9 Galanter and Krishnan (2004).