A short commentary on how India Strengthened its Democratic institutions.

India is an interesting example of how a third world country without having the credentials, which
the successful democracies of the first world possess, managed to institutionalize a viable form of
democracy. India owes its success in maintaining a democratic setup to many factors but I would
like to focus on the way how federalism and gradual decentralization were managed in India so
that most of the minorities i.e. religious, ethnic and regional ones were kept satisfied. In my view
it is not ethnicity itself which is an obstacle in establishing democratic systems in third world
countries, but the state structure from within which it tends to originate and is then managed later
on. In this case India has countered these divergent ethnic forces by keeping a fine balance in its
policies while accommodating the various interest groups during the last 5 decades.
India has been able to quite successfully maintain its democratic multiplicity for fifty years since
its independence. This has not been threatened except for the two years during the office of
Indira Gandhi when state of emergency was imposed for what she cited as exceptional
circumstances threatening the Indian domestic national political scene. There were allegations
that she proclaimed emergency to keep her government safe from a no confidence move as it
lacked the necessary votes to stay in power. The Indian public opinion seems to have paid heed
to those allegations and made her pay for that folly as in the subsequent election her party faced
the first defeat in thirty years. But that emergency rule was an isolated incident after which the
country was again put on the path to democracy. After the death of both Indhira and Rajiv Gandhi
Congress party suffered a massive decline in popularity and this resulted in a vacuum in the
political sphere. This void was filled by parties like the BJP which used religion and nationalism as
a tool to gain popularity. This rise of the nationalist and fundamentalist parties in the 90s is a very
disturbing factor for Indian politics as it is threatening the very secularist polity that has helped
democracy take its present shape in India and held the various ethnic groups together.
Ayesha Jalal describes India as a formal democracy resting on the well-worn authoritarian
stumps of the colonial state and accuses the Indian Government of being too centralized, while
attributing success of its formal democracy to the original strength of the Congress and the
political skills of its leaders. I tend to disagree with this point of view to a certain extent. In my
opinion the fact that the Indian Government kept the Colonial setups unitary system intact was
quite necessary because there was a need for a strong federal unit to keep all the periphery
states and ethnic minorities from breaking away, which was quite likely especially when the sub
continent had just gone through partition.
India democracy in its initial phase was aided by the fact that after independence it did not have
to face a very volatile political society. Mainstream Politics like before partition was dominated by
the northern states that is mainly Uttar Pradesh which was the power base for the Congress
party. Furthermore political conflict on regional basis was usually restricted to demand for greater
sharing of power and resources between the centre and the regional elites. This was in most
cases handled very amicably by the Nehru administration by creating a federal system that was
quite accommodating to the demands of these regional elites. Another reason why these regional
conflicts did not blow out of proportion was that most of these demands had only the backing of
the regional elites rather then having any mass movement behind them. Since these regional
elites were more interested in power sharing the Initial Congress Governments managed to keep
the political heterogeneity of the Country from hindering the development of its democracy by
gradually granting some political autonomy to the constituent assemblies of the provinces. These
demands of the regional elites calling for more autonomy were carefully analyzed and in quite a
few cases were rejected as well but enough were conceded to show a tendency towards
decentralization.
The Congress party while implementing these accommodating policies had to rely on the Indian
civil service a fact which contributed to the allegations of India having a very centralized system of
governance. The British raj had left India a very efficient and reliable Civil service which did not let
down the political government at any point while keeping their own interests intact. Thus like the
third world countries of Africa poor governance did not turn to be a major hindrance to the
development of democracy in India. On the other hand this enabled the Congress to become a

key governing institution which had the potential to incorporate the various classes and civil
society pressure groups within it as power sharers rather then keeping them as loosely knit social
movements gathered around congress under the banner of national independence. An important
point which needs to be observed over here is that while during the early years Congress was the
only major political party on the political scene; institutions and democratic roots were established
which lay down a framework for other political parties to emerge later on. Indian Supreme court
have been very instrumental in this regard as unlike their counterpart in Pakistan where the
Supreme Court is probably the only court in the world to have faced a recurrent round of
challenges arising from as many as six martial law and government dissolution proclamations in
less than a quarter century of its existence apart from various other highly politicized cases. The
Indian High Courts have always tried to keep a secular outlook in their judgments and in most
cases have proved to be very accommodating to the various ethnic and religious minorities.
I strongly believe that a very important factor in keeping a democratic system of government
intact in India is the way how Indian political parties and representative governments kept the
military in check. Even though after the 1965 war Indo- Pak war India launched an ambitious
military buildup plan but it never let the military enter into the political sphere and thus set a
tradition of keeping the militarys role limited to the battlefield and barracks. Even Ayesha Jalal in
her book admits to this slight edge in the containment of the military which proved to be a
critical factor in the institutionalization of Indias formal democracy. On the other hand most
third world countries have suffered from a malaise of becoming embroiled in militarism and
presenting the army as the most modern and dependable institution of the country which is called
upon for help in case of both political and military turmoil. It can be argued over here that the
demographic features of India also contributed to this because India is a huge country with the
military being stationed mostly on the border areas of the country which is quite dissimilar to
countries like Pakistan which has the military stationed in nearly all its important cities. Hence a
military coup in India is not that easy as any other Third World county where all you need is to
capture the presidential compound and the TV and Radio stations.
In the last decade much criticism has been targeted at India for being centralized and that its
much touted democratic federalism has been corrupted to a great extent. The recent policy of
the nationalist and ethnically based parties to manipulate communal divisions among linguistic
minorities is not appreciated at all either but the fact that democracy depends upon more then just
the practices of political parties is over looked. As I have argued in this article that the success of
the Indian democratic system is a result of the whole institutional framework around the political
sphere which has evolved over the years and how ethnically diverse forces have shaped that
process. India's democracy now has an institutional framework which is quite expansive in its
approach and its multi-tiered--national parliament and government, state (province) parliaments
and governments, each with its panoply of institutions, down to the municipal and village- council
levels are perfectly suitable for such a vast and diverse country. As Sumantra Bose in her article
A Culture of Corruption? Democracy and Power in India says The conflicts in Indian society
and politics are legion, but the system has a capacity to diffuse (and eventually, defuse) most
conflicts by multiplying the arenas of contestation to lower levels of government, which
simultaneously act as arenas of brokerage. This means that by producing power brokers at all
levels which tend to reduce the transaction costs of conflict resolution the Indian political system
has evolved a framework both at the provincial and local government levels in which there is
greater scope for resolving social tensions without any serious damage to the democratic
system.