Just Changing the Guard Can’t Save India from Asphyxiation : Democracy: To survive, it needs a looser confederation, with more authority given to the constituent states

War in the Persian Gulf and turmoil in the Soviet Union monopolize today’s news, but what about tomorrow’s headlines? India’s troubles make for a good candidate.

India is going through grave internal turmoil, the potential magnitude of which could severely destabilize international security. Recurring violence testifies to the alarming plight of the world’s largest democracy. There are three related aspects to the crisis: the ascendancy of religious fundamentalism, the rise of separatist movements and the steady erosion in the legitimacy of the institutions of government. Together, they threaten the secular and pluralist lifeline of the political system, crippling its democratic foundations.

Until very recently, Indian democracy had been based on securing the rights of its many ethnic and religious groups by secular guarantees written into the constitution. The intention was clearly to avoid a repetition of the Hindu-Muslim genocide produced by the “divide-and-rule” policy of British imperialism, which led to the bloody partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947. The system that resulted, however, was extremely cumbersome. Charismatic leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi managed to hold it together by the force of their personalities, and, time and again, this nation of millions confounded pundits at home and abroad by abiding by that secular framework.

The current crisis threatens the very roots of that tradition. It has a long genealogy, dating back to the viciously divisive process of religious polarization begun in the late 1970s in Punjab. Today, that unhappy region, once lauded as the granary of the Green Revolution, has been joined by its northern neighbor, the idyllic valley of Kashmir, as tragic testimony to the inefficacy of the Indian politicians who succeeded Gandhi and Nehru. As the current prime minister, Chandra Shekhar, proves as inadequate as his immediate predecessor, V.P. Singh, in dealing with the continuing violence, the problem clearly goes beyond the policies of any specific administration. It lies at the heart of Indian democracy and is one of a singular lack of correspondence between nation and state in the Indian union.

This condition bears an eerie parallel with current events in the Soviet Union. In both countries, a centralized state infrastructure is struggling to cope with the increasingly strident demands of the constituent nationalities. In India, religious conflict further vitiates the problem: in Punjab and Kashmir, the minority population of Hindus is pitted against the majority Sikhs and Muslims; in the rest of the country, the majority Hindus besiege minorities, especially Muslims, in a rising tide of Hindu fundamentalism. Unlike the Soviet dictatorship, however, India cannot resort to authoritarian means to restore order. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi lost political credibility by trying that in the mid-1970s by declaring a state of political “emergency.” Few politicians today want to repeat that experiment. Meanwhile, the system stagnates.

For most of India’s post-independence history, the Nehru family ruled the country. However, Nehru’s daughter and heir-apparent, Indira Gandhi, and her son and successor, Rajiv, governed with decreasing degrees of efficiency and credibility. In fact, it was Mrs. Gandhi’s cynical manipulation of regional politics that encouraged the rise of rabid Sikh fundamentalism in Punjab. In opening that Pandora’s box, however, she eventually paid with her life, gunned down by an outraged Sikh bodyguard in 1984.

The years that followed have witnessed an astonishing pandering by politicians to reactionary religious movements, resulting in the sectarian and caste-based politics so anathemic to Nehru’s cosmopolitan legacy. Political issues have been trivialized and reduced to violent struggles centering around the repossession of temples and mosques. Meanwhile, years of economic hardship and broken political promises have increasingly built up support for Hindu fundamentalists who attack the constitutional protection of minorities as responsible for every problem ranging from unemployment to poverty. They promise to make it very different in a “Hindu nation.” The irony is that this movement is led by organizations that claim direct descent from the very extremists who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the secular ideal.

Is there a political solution? The answer must be a qualified affirmative. Under current conditions, divisive crises undermining stability will recur with progressively vicious predictability, making it imperative to restore the original logic of Indian democracy: inalienable liberty and equality of all citizens irrespective of caste and creed. This is possible only by altering the structure of the system. The hierarchical center-state relationship that prevails at present, with disproportionate power enjoyed by the central government at New Delhi, has proved asphyxiating. It must be shelved. India needs a looser confederation, with more decision-making authority given to the constituent states, thereby more faithfully reflecting dichotomies. A mere change of guard in New Delhi will not solve the problem. Neither will repeated reshufflings of the same pack of power-hungry politicians.

The hope for India lies in a decentralized secular and pluralist system that recognizes the divisions in society and instead of seeking to suppress them by force, seeks strength from that diversity through a system of political checks and balances.

The choice is clear. India’s demography demands a secular political system. The alternative, both domestic and international, is too appalling to contemplate: a nation of nearly 1 billion led by an insular and reactionary Hindu regime, defining its policies in a pattern of clear confrontation with an increasingly fundamentalist Islamic world.