The world's largest democracies are holding great election contests in 2008-09. There are intriguing parallels and contrasts in the way that prominent issues are discussed and managed by the respective political systems in Washington and New Delhi.
Meenakshi Ganguly is senior researcher on
south Asia for Human Rights Watch
Also by Meenakshi Ganguly in openDemocracy:
"Sri Lanka: time to act" (10 September 2006)
"India's Dalits: between atrocity
and protest"
(9 January 2007)
"China and Bhutan: crushing dissent" (4 July 2007)
"India and Burma: time to choose" (14 January 2008)
"Nepal: the human-rights test" (28 April 200
The United States presidential election, which reaches its climax on 4 November 2008, was dominated for a good part of its course by debates about race and gender; the result has been to make the prospects of a first black president and first woman president look far more normal than they once did. India's election (to be held by May 2009) will take place in a country which has had Sikh and female prime ministers, as well as Muslim, Sikh and Dalit presidents; today, a Dalit woman is a serious contender for the prime-minister's job (see KV Prasad, "Can Mayawati do a Barack Obama?", The Hindu, 4 November 2008). In this, India could try to claim that it has already successfully addressed the problems which the US is now only beginning to face.
But the reality is not so benign. India's experience also shows that access to a position of power does not of itself entail an end to rampant discrimination against minorities or marginalised groups. In 2008, some of India's largest political parties and their supporters have instigated or defended violence and hate against ethnic minorities - thus demonstrating that electing a woman or a Dalit is far from enough to guarantee equality and human rights. Rather, electing leaders from disadvantaged populations can - unless this is matched by coherent social action and education - come to be a shiny facade that conceals a vacuum where real commitment by the state to protect minority rights should be.
A turn inward
A number of recent events has focused attention on the wounded status of minorities in India. Since August 2008, Kandhamal district in Orissa state has been the scene of acts of religious violence following the murder on 23 August of an elderly leader of the extremist, rightwing Hindu group the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). In retaliation, mobs went on a protest rampage of killings, rape and arson. Initially, a Maoist insurgent group active in the region was held by many to be responsible for the death of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and his four aides - and even made a claim of responsibility itself. But the VHP and its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal - which are closely affiliated to India's main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - chose instead to blame and target the local Christian community.
For decades, Christian missionaries have offered health and
education programs to marginalised tribal groups in Orissa and similar areas;
this has led many residents subsequently to convert to Christianity. The Hindu groups have over
the last decade demanded that they "reconvert" to Hindusim, in a
campaign that often included force and intimidation. Thus, when the VHP leader
was shot, they found it convenient immediately to assume that local Christians
were responsible (see Jacob Ignatius, "India's Christians: politics of
violence in Orissa",
1 September 2008). <!--[if gte mso 9]>
Among openDemocracy's
articles on Indian politics and democracy:
Rajeev Bhargava, "Words save lives: India, the BJP and the constitution" (2 October 2002)
Rajeev Bhargava, "The political psychology of
Hindu nationalism"
(5 November 2003)
Antara Dev Sen, "India's benign earthquake" (20 May 2004)
Rajeev Bhargava, "India's model: faith, secularism
and democracy"
(3 November 2004)
Ajai Sahni, "India and its Maoists: failure
and success"
(20 March 2007)
Sumantra Bose, "Uttar Pradesh: India's
democratic landslip"
(29 May 2007)
John Elkington, "India's third liberation" (21 August 2007)
Kanchan Lakshman, "India in Afghanistan: a presence
under pressure"
(11 July 2008)
Ajai Sahni, "India after
Ahmedabad's bombs"
(29 July 2008)
Paul Rogers, "China and
India: heartlands of global protest" (7 August 2008)
Antara Dev Sen, "India at 61:
here's looking at you, kid!" (19 August 2008)
Jacob Ignatius, "India's
Christians: politics of violence in Orissa" (1 September 2008)
Muzamil Jameel, "Kashmir's new
generation"
(13 October 2008)
One family described how they managed to flee
into the nearby jungles when the mob arrived. But a relative, confined to a
wheelchair, could not get away and was beaten and killed. Priests described how
they suffered extensive beatings; one of those attacked, Father Bernard Digal, died in hospital on the night of 28-29 October.
Two days later, on 31 October, five police officers were suspended for dereliction of duty after a nun recounted
her rape. Nearly forty people were killed, scores injured and thousands
displaced in the violence.
The perpetrators of this brutality show no remorse. Instead, they display a confident assertion of Hindu identity, no doubt in the hope that such aggression will be rewarded with Hindu votes for the BJP. The attacks on churches and Christians have even spread to other parts of India, including the states of Kerala and Karnataka. In Orissa, where the state government failed to anticipate and prevent the violence, villagers still report that they are allowed to return to their ravaged homes only after they have been through a "reconversion" ceremony.
The VHP and Bairang Dal have also sought to exacerbate tensions in the troubled state of Jammu & Kashmir. In an election-year there, a dispute exploded over the proposed transfer of land to build shelters during an annual Hindu pilgrimage into the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley; some parties (including separatist groups) mobilised to oppose this, and when the transfer was revoked the Hindu-majority areas of Jammu in turn erupted in protest (see Muzamil Jameel, "Kashmir's new generation", 13 October 2008). Some demonstrators attacked police officers and government property. There are persistent allegations that the violence was to a large degree instigated by vote-seekers.
In Mumbai (Bombay), the cosmopolitan capital of Maharashtra, the glorious bustle of emerging India is often disrupted by violence from supporters of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), a regional party that claims to speak for people native to the state. The supporters of the hardline MNS leader Raj Thackeray, regularly harass and assault migrants to the city from the poorer Hindi-speaking states of northern India.
The effect is to coarsen and politicise local discourse and social relations. Two incidents in October 2008 are emblematic. First, MNS activists broke into a railways-recruitment examination, insisting that such jobs should be reserved for locals, and beat up and chased away the candidates from other parts of the country. Second, around a quarter of the near-800 Jet Airline employees who were to lose their jobs appealed to Raj Thackeray for support and found a ready response, including threats to the airline.
From words to action
After a spate of terrorist bomb-attacks in several Indian cities in 2008, police arrested a number of alleged members of the group that claimed responsibility - which called itself the "Indian Mujaheddin" (believed by investigatoes to be affiiliated to the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami [HuJI] and Students Islamic Movement of India [Simi]). The true perpetrators of such indiscriminate attacks should indeed be brought to justice, though a long history of "rounding up the usual suspects" (which usually means Muslims) and failing to arrest the perpetrators mean that there is little faith in the Indian authorities' counter-terror efforts (see Ajai Sahni, "India's urban war: through the smoke", 17 September 2008).
Moreover, Indian politicians usually ignore demands for transparent and independent investigations into incidents of arbitrary arrests or deaths in custody. Now, however, elections are due: and suddenly, the issue of human rights finds itself at the centre of extraordinary attention in political debates. Some parties are demanding judicial investigations into allegations of police killings in New Delhi, while other parties oppose this; each accuses the other of base attempts to appeal to their Muslim or Hindu voters.
An election is supposed to be the cornerstone of a democracy, the event where its core principles of debate, plurality, tolerance, and free choice are displayed and celebrated. The electoral process in India is increasingly distant from this ideal (see Sumantra Bose, "Uttar Pradesh: India's democratic landslip", 29 May 2007). What it churns out is a lot of ugliness, a poisoning of societies with hate simply in an effort to gain votes.
India's political parties would serve citizens, the country and ultimately also themselves better if they remember that what voters want most is safety and security. These can be achieved only through respect for minorities - whether migrants from other parts of the country or people of different religious faiths.
India may have had a Dalit president, and the country has laws that outlaw descent-based caste discrimination; yet the practice remains all-pervasive and deeply rooted. The authorities do little to punish lawbreakers.
Instead of grand pronouncements, strong action is needed to end discrimination based on caste, religious or ethnicity. Active opposition to abuses such as killings, arbitrary arrests or threats against whole communities, from whatever source, should be a minimum qualification for any person or party that wants to govern any nation - and particularly one that prides itself on being the "world's largest democracy."
Comments
My personal 'experience' with the Maharatha & Gujrati Hindutva:
(1)1946 when I was 6 years old, I lost 46 members of my family, on my father's side, in the Bihari villages/small towns of Salarpur and Karai Persarai, where they were butchered; men, women and children by local Hindus; neighbors and friends. About half a million Muslims were 'cleansed'. They were instigated by Marathi and Gujrati "upper caste" Hindus, the same who assassinated Gandhi two years later! No denunciation. No Police action. Zilch!
(2)1964 I was miraculously and kindly saved from being incinerated alive in any one of the industrial boilers in Tata Steel Mills in Jamshedpur which these Upper Caste Marathis & Gujratis used for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims. I was saved by a Sikh neighbor in Jamshedpur. In 1964 the industrial cities of Bhilai and Rourkela were simultaneously targeted. 50,000 Muslims were eliminated.There was no hue and cry, no denunciation and no police action- as always! (3) Between these two years and ever since another half million Muslims butchered, raped, maimed and their belongings torched to ashes. I have lived in Saudi Arabia since 1965 and my two brothers in Canada. We have done very well in diaspora, much better than what we could ever have done had we not been eliminated in the years since 1965.
This article, and every other article on Indian politics on this site reeks of ignorance. I'm not even sure if Indians write these articles.... None of these articles fairly view the stands of the so called "right wing" aka "communal" parties. It's all pro-UPA bulls**t here.
The problem of the political instrumentalisation of civic disorder can not be tackled until people are prepared to accept that their underlying theory of society is fatally flawed. This is because the institutional framework and the consensual category system of public discourse are based on that very same theory of society. If the theory does not match reality, the incentive system is going to generate bad solutions. Preference Revelation is going to be subject to the worst types of manipulation. That is what is happening in India because the theory of society apotheosized in the Indian Constitution- though convincing at that time- is just nonsense now. The entire nature of the economy, of technology, of productive relations has changed.
Vast numbers of people have absolutely no interest in God nonsense or caste nonsense or 'sons of soil' bullshit and so forth. The old thinking was that India was poor coz some rich guys came along and like stole all the wealth while we were in the toilet; actually, I think it was the Brahmins coz they got Magic powers like invisibility- or mebbe it was them Muslims. Must be they got all the oil out of our hair while we were sleeping and smuggled it to Saudi Arabia where they buried it in the sand and anyway that's how they got all that Oil money. So, I mean to say, clearly you have to have all sorts of minority boondogle and like reserved seats for one bunch of people coz....coz...actually that was a British ploy to split the Independence movement... but, obviously, we've got to stick with the program coz...coz...urm.. we want to preserve 'untouchability'? Surely, that can't be right.
The fact that the political process in India is sucking up more and more resources creates a vicious circle whereby the only thing we can afford is more politics and less governance.
Is there a way out? Sure, if 'intellectuals'- people who went to college- actually started thinking about the Indian reality- started formulating a theory to describe how things actually work, began evolving a common language to describe actual social formations rather than the utterly moribund social formations whose ghost can only be raised by upping the numbers slain and brutalized by the lumpen political class- if only people started to think for themselves then perhaps our grand-daughters won't have to write these same sort of articles and comments on articles everytime another general election comes round.
Or is that is what is meant by the continuity of Indian culture?
Even the Greeks knew that the key problem with democracy was how to prevent democracies becoming "mob-ocracies" - in other words, how to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
Gandhiji too famously remarked that the way in which we treat minorities is the measure of civilization in a society.
However, so far it is only Protestant societies that have been able to treat minorities generously for more than three generations.
There was a time in the 1950s and 1960s, known as the 'Golden Age' of Indian democracy, when Indian politics was genuinely a constitutional affair, with vigorous debate within parliament. Over the years, however, with the rise of identity politics Indian democracy has become a very populist one. Now people tend to vote according to their class, caste, region or religion. Debates in parliament often spill out into the streets and result in protests and violence. I'm afraid I can't see things changing for the foreseeable future. There is going to be more violence, a lot of which will be politically inspired.
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