Regional & Federal Studies

Regional & Federal Studies ISSN: 1359-7566 (Print) 1743-9434 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/frfs20 Indian Federalism and Democracy: The Growing Salience of Diversity-claims Over Equality-claims in Comparative and Indian Perspective Harihar Bhattacharyya To cite this article: Harihar Bhattacharyya (2015) Indian Federalism and Democracy: The Growing Salience of Diversity-claims Over Equality-claims in Comparative and Indian Perspective, Regional & Federal Studies, 25:3, 211-227, DOI: 10.1080/13597566.2015.1052965 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2015.1052965 Published online: 25 Jun 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 155 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=frfs20 Download by: [104.192.0.18] Date: 15 March 2016, At: 08:04 Regional and Federal Studies, 2015 Vol. 25, No. 3, 211 –227, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2015.1052965 Indian Federalism and Democracy: The Growing Salience of Diversityclaims Over Equality-claims in Comparative and Indian Perspective Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 HARIHAR BHATTACHARYYA Department of Political Science, University of Burdwan, Burdwan, India ABSTRACT This article introduces a conceptual distinction between diversity-claims and equality-claims in order to reflect critically on the relation between federalism and democracy in India, which is not adequately problematized and somewhat neglected. Federalism and democracy suggest two different problematics, but in India democracy has often played second fiddle to the claims of diversity. As a result, India’s success as a federation has not been paralleled by its record as a democracy in terms of its equality functions. Since the article engages with the issue of accommodation of diversity in the wake of federationbuilding, and the relation between federalism and democracy, critical references are made to the relevant theoretical literature in order to point out federalism’s new problematic and its pitfalls. With the Indian case as a major illustration, it is shown here that the institutional arrangements and governing practices have overwhelmingly been given priority to meet the claims of diversity to the relative neglect of equality-claims. KEY WORDS : Indian federalism, Indian democracy, diversity-claims, equality-claims, reforms, regionalism, localism 1. Introduction Why are not all successful federations as successful as democracies in the sense of producing more equality in society? Why are there large-scale and widening economic inequalities even in advanced federations that are also formally ‘successful’ democracies? Why are there abysmal inequalities (which of late are growing!) in a ‘successful’ democracy such as India? By today’s standards, accommodation of diversity for political unity, order and stability (the so-called Hobbesian problematic, if you like), and the avoidance of state crises and ‘balkanization’ are considered as a mark of success of federalism, and very often also, of democracy. In actual practice, however, these may not always go together. That India is lauded in the existing writings Correspondence Address: H. Bhattacharyya, Department of Political Science, University of Burdwan, JEN/ R. B.Chatterjee Road, Hajidanga, Tikorhat, Burdwan, WB 713102, India. Email: [email protected] # 2015 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 212 H. Bhattacharyya on the subject (e.g. Kothari, 1970; Mitra and Singh, 1999; Kohli, 2001, 2012; Kaviraj, 2011; Tudor, 2012) as the world’s largest democracy has much to do with the achievement of the above goals. The consensus of India’s democracy scholarship mostly centres on the relative success of what Atul Kohli (2001) calls ‘procedural democracy’ and Ramchandra Guha (2013) refers to as the ‘hardware’ of democracy (e.g. regular elections and other formal practices). The relatively successful accommodation of diversity in federalism is but the institutional response to categorical conflicts over language, religion and other such identity markers. It may not be as effective in resolving distributional conflicts. Recent scholarship suggests that democracy is to be measured more importantly by the outcome, more particularly, by democracy’s equality function. Adam Przeworski (Przeworski, 2010: 1–2, 66–98) says that one of the four challenges to democracy is its capacity to generate equality in the socioeconomic realm. Democracy is not to be characterized as equality. But the question is of special importance, for Przeworski, for two reasons. First, the issue of socioeconomic inequality indispensably infiltrates the political realm in an open political system. Second, democracies’ equality performance in terms of generating more equality, in income, expenditure and access to other social, economic and political goods is a cause for more legitimacy (Przeworski, 2010).1 However, globally, there is no single route to examining the effects of federationbuilding on democratic outcomes as defined above. The large-scale economic inequality in the United States may have very little to do with its federal structure although some states in the US South practised slavery for a considerable period of time until the late 1860s (Steinberg, 1996; Linder, 1994; Bhattacharyya, 2001; Erk, 2010). The process of federation-building here was organic, built from below, by a method of what Watts (2008) referred to as ‘federation by aggregation’. The purpose of US federalism was not to accommodate diversity because it was not the ground on which the world’s first and longest lasting federation was built after 1789. Switzerland too is very diverse and relatively unequal in economic terms; there is also a deeply rooted and widespread perception of inequality (Steinberg, 1996; Obinger et al., 2005: 263 – 300). At times, its diverse political institutions, paradoxically, have served to undercut strong demands for redistribution. In Europe, the post-war German federation is not known for its much inequality, nor for its internal diversity. Therefore, it follows from the above brief references to comparative cases that there is no single model of how federalism is related to democracy. Federalism per se may have very little to do with promoting more equality. Much depends on the policy orientation of the state(s), their political leaders and citizens. However, the post-Second World War post-colonial federations were to be built on the basis of diversity and out of diversity. It must, however, be noted here that that the state response to diversity-claims did not clash as much with a centralized state in place. The inherited centralized post-colonial state structures gradually gave way to decentralized state structures in order to uphold political unity. It in fact helped convert yesterday’s rebels into today’s and tomorrow’s state-holders, who with relative autonomy from state administrations had to maintain ‘law and order’, which might have been disturbed by the forces (subaltern, minorities and others) demanding to meeting equality-claims. It is proposed here that federalism in multicultural societies has been over-concerned with the problem of political unity, order and stability so that democracy, although Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 Indian Federalism and Democracy 213 conjoined with the federal project for acquiring, ostensibly, legitimacy , has been allowed to play only second fiddle and suffer in relative terms as a consequence. To put it differently, the democratic issue has been subsumed under the federal issue, if not in theory, then often in practice. The process has not been smooth because the open democratic polity, in the formal sense, and of longer duration, also opens up the possibility of greater mass participation in the political system, which will inevitably demand more equality functions on the part of the state at different levels in a federal polity. This article seeks to introduce a new conceptual distinction between diversityclaims and equality-claims in order to reflect critically on the Indian case of federalism and democracy. Second, a brief reference is made to the appropriate theoretical literature that deals with diversity, and the relation between federalism and democracy. It seeks also to distinguish between federalism’s new problematic and democracy’s problematic. In conclusion, the theoretical implications of the Indian case materials for comparative federalism are highlighted. 2. Federalism and Diversity: The Problem of Political Order and Lurking Monism Paradoxically, diversity did not find favour in much of federal thinking and scholarship from the days of the European Enlightenment until the last decades of the twentieth century. On the contrary, monism in different guises remained, as it were, an underlying concern (Karmis and Norman, 2005: 3 –23). The prevalence of monistic thinking was linked to the process of state-building (read also nation-building), which indispensably entailed territorial unity, order and stability. In the US case, for example, The Federalist’s over-concern with the description of the United States as the repository of ‘one nation’, or ‘one united people’, or the notion of federal government as a ‘pole of allegiance’ was, arguably, evocative of embedded monism.2 Diversity was mostly seen as a ‘problem’ in European Enlightenment thought on federalism, whether expressed by John Calhoun, J.S. Mill or J. Proudhon (Karmis and Norman, 2005: 11). A deep-rooted disdain for diversity and plurality remained present in thinking on federalism during the first half of the twentieth century. In the post-Second World War period the consensus was that ethnocultural identities would disappear in the institutional engineering of the ‘complete nation-state’ (Karmis and Norman, 2005: 12). To take a short detour into history, the Swiss, who founded their modern federation in 1848 (followed by Germany in 1872 in nineteenth-century Europe), showed the way in the first major revision of their Constitution in 1874 in maintaining and promoting diversity as the primary goal of the federation, and they no longer considered diversity a problem of nationhood.3 In the last constitutional revision in 2000, four languages—German, French, Italian and Romansh—were accepted as the national languages of the Swiss people.4 The theoretical importance of the Swiss innovation for nationhood in this regard needs some stressing because it is this nationhood, or nationality question, and that too, in multicultural societies, that remained the most perplexing issue for nation- and state-builders in federal democracies in the post-colonial countries. Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 214 H. Bhattacharyya With the decks somewhat cleared by the Swiss, diversity became a rallying-point in federal designs and the institutional arrangements of many post-colonial countries including India with varying degrees of success and a record of some grotesque failures (Watts, 1966). In the global literature, it was only during the last decades of the last century that diversity—particularity, identity issues, minority cultures, collective rights, locality and regions and so on—came to be recognized. Following Elazar’s famous epithet, a new definition of federalism as a compound polity that combines shared-rule (general, common purposes) with self-rule (for the regions) (Watts, 2008) gained considerable ground, although the original meaning of federalism had nothing to do with diversity. Even going beyond the territorially rooted diversity that federalism thus far addressed to, with the successive constitutional reforms in Belgium since 1970 through to 1993, non-territorial diversity also came to be recognized as a criterion of self-rule (Watts, 2008: 43– 45). Erk’s (Erk, 2010) ‘congruence thesis’ also took cognizance of the ‘ethno-linguistic social structure’ in this regard. Wilfried Swenden’s work (2012) reviews various aspects of how territorial and nonterritorial diversity is managed in India. 3. Federalism and Democracy According to Stepan (2005: 255– 269), the relation between federalism and democracy remains neglected in the theoretical literature on the subject. However, following Riker’s distinction between ‘demos-constraining’ and ‘demos-enabling’ federalism, Stepan also reminds us that “all democratic federations are demos-constraining” in the sense that the agenda of the demos has to be restricted for the sake of individual rights against encroachment by the federal government (quoted in Bhattacharyya, 2010: 98). Stepan (2005) has, however, pointed out that some federations are more ‘demos-enabling’ than others, and India qualifies in his scheme as an example in the sense that the representation in the upper chamber (Rajya Sabha) is unequal (unlike the US Senate) but more representative of the people. This is an argument that may be undercut by the logic of party politics that reigns supreme in the State Legislative Assemblies in India whose members elect the Members of the Rajya Sabha (Stepan, 2005). To be sure, the so-called ‘demos-enabling’ aspect highlighted by Riker and Stepan is based on the liberal premise of formal-legal political equality which privileges liberty. Stepan’s account of the relation between federalism and democracy does not cut much ice except limiting his argument to accommodation of what I have termed ‘diversity-claims’ . Consider his statement: “Democratic federal devolution of power, and the granting of groups specific rights, has not been a slippery slope to secession, or to the violation of individual rights” (Stepan, 2001: 359). He then goes on to cite the relatively successful cases of accommodation of other diversity-claims such as the Tamils in the 1960s and the Punjab in the 1990s (Stepan 2001: 357). Thus his enquiry does not go below the newly created States to explore how differential policy perspectives at the State level could result in gross violations of individual rights, although with the experience of Kerala in mind, it may produce a different and better result in equality functions depending upon the genuine policy effectiveness of the party (or parties) in power. A limited perspective of democracy not oriented to egalitarian outcomes is thus not of much help in Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 Indian Federalism and Democracy 215 problematizing the relation between federalism and democracy.5 Also, Stepan has neglected the distorting effects of party politics in ostensibly representing the demos whether in the Rajya Sabha, the Lok Sabha or even the Legislative Assemblies.Very often the interests of the demos may be neglected partly yet significantly by the compulsions of party politics. And yet, the relation between federalism and democracy is not made clearer. The democratic credentials of federalism need far greater attention than what is available in the current literature on the subject. In Watts (2008: 135– 155) the importance of democracy for federalism, in the working of federal dynamics etc. has been recognized but again only from a typical liberal point of view that is premised on the representativeness of federal institutions that are ‘supposed’ to reflect many democratic values. Such liberal presuppositions are far from adequate in facing up to the challenges of equality-claims. Bhattacharyya (2010) paid some attention to the relation between federalism and democracy with particular reference to federations in Asia.6 He has considered critically the issues that cross-cut the relation between federalism and democracy, and argued that while democracy helps provide legitimacy to ethnic mobilizations, and also acts as a check on the ethnicization of power, those who command such ethnic power may not necessarily adopt public policies for redistribution. In fact, ethnically based self-rule may result in further ethnic deprivations of sorts, even provoking drives to engage in ethnic cleansing or displacement. In other words, self-rule based on some ethnic marker may not be genuinely democratic (Przeworski, 2010). However, even limited the liberal democratic institutional space of some durability (such as India) creates also the possibilities for political mobilization from below for genuine political, social and economic equality, and thus equalization and redistribution. 4. Federalism’s New Problematic vis-à-vis Democratic Problematic This section distinguishes between federalism’s new problematic and the democratic problematic, and highlights the areas of conflicts. In the post-colonial context of manifold diversity and identities, federalism’s purpose of managing diversity and accommodating multiple identities is meant to serve the overriding objective of maintaining political order. Nation- and state-building issues are the underlying themes of any federation in the post-colonial contexts. However, in complex multiethnic countries such as India, diversity and identity issues are often privileged over egalitarian concerns of the democratic state, a key attribute of substantive democracy. True, identity recognition and autonomy in favour of sub-state nations may perform a democratic function in relation to the recognition of collective/group/community identities, but it may undermine democracy’s egalitarian function, or hinder socioeconomic redistribution. The democratic problematic, by contrast, is centred on equality or egalitarian redistribution in the socioeconomic realm. Recent standard texts on democracy (e.g. Dunn, 1992; Shapiro and Hacker-Cordon, 1999a; Held, 2006) are more concerned with the formal institutional aspects of democracy, with the embedded assumption of democracy as only a matter of political equality. No wonder democracy’s many disappointing outcomes even in the formal institutional realms have not been overlooked by Shapiro and Hacker-Cordon (1999b: 1). Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 216 H. Bhattacharyya Usually, democratic participation is fleeting, accountability is little more than nominal and the true meaning of ‘democratic decisions’ are obscure. In current writings on democracy, globally speaking, Adam Przeworski (Przeworski, 1999: 23–55; 2010) has been foremost in raising the issue of democracy’s relation to social and economic equality, and he reaches rather pessimistic conclusions based on global survey results. Going beyond the political equality-centric meaning of democracy, as most liberal theorists have done and continue to do (Mill, 1864; Schumpeter, 1943; Popper, 1962; Dahl, 1971; Bobbioa, 1984), his first ‘theorem’ of democracy asks the question if representatives chosen freely will take political decisions that result in the redistribution of income on an egalitarian basis (Przeworski, 1999: 23). His critical survey of the issues involved does suggest, negatively though, that although democracy and capitalism are somewhat incompatible, the “private ownership of capital limits the range of outcomes that can ensue from the democratic process” (Przeworski, 1999: 41).7 In his subsequent writing, appropriately entitled Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government (Przeworski, 2010), he again considered the extent to which democracy produces equality as a major challenge to democracy. Yet, one may qualify his strong emphasis on the negative relation between capitalism and equality because, as Dahl suggested, the negative correlation between capitalism and equality materializes in the long term (Dahl, 1971), but not in the short run. Any discussion on the equality-centric democratic problematic remains incomplete without reference to how Alexis de Tocqueville confronted the issue of equality because there was a novelty in the ways in which he viewed equality’s relation with democracy. For him, “equality, the characteristic of the new social state” is an “infinitely active principle, disrupting all aspects of social and political life, all aspects of human life. This new equality is not a state, it is a process— ‘growing equality of conditions’—whose outcome is very difficult to predict” (Manent, 1995/1987: 103). While examining the peculiar American conditions where individuals are born equal rather than intended to become so, and where the political institutions are designed to reflect this social state, Tocqueville argued that the principle of ‘equality of conditions’ was a creative principle. (Manent, 1995/1987: 104) The possible instrumental lesson one can draw from this idea of democracy qua ‘equality of conditions’ is that the latter could be forged by the appropriate political institutions to help minimize injustice rather than establish a just order or a state of absolute justice, by following what Amartya Sen called, in a critical spirit, ‘transcendental institutionalism’ (Sen, 2009: 4 – 10).8 Sen favours instead what he called a ‘realization-focus’ or policy-driven approach, which is but a transformative and specific policy-driven to minimize injustice (Sen, 2009: 4 – 10). 5. Equality-claims and Diversity-claims As a sequel to the above discussion, a conceptual distinction between the equalityclaims and the diversity-claims is in order, in particular, to strengthen the theoretical argument for understanding Indian federalism in comparative perspective. To begin with, neither diversity nor equality per se makes sense until and unless it is articulated and demanded. Again, demanding equality or accommodation of diversity does not mean anything unless their concrete components are identified for political mobilization or for redress. All aspects of diversity may not be relevant to federalism; if we wear as a Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 Indian Federalism and Democracy 217 community a different dress style, or have a different food habit, it cannot be claimed for a federal solution. Language rights, for example, are recognized, but not all language issues do require a federal solution. Many 8th Schedule languages (in the Indian Constitution) (22 at present) are not territorially so rooted as to demand some kind of Statehood status. Sanskrit, Santhali and Urdu are cases in point. Nonetheless, since the beginning of the Republic (1950), language and other ethnic issues have received unusually privileged attention from the rulers for the sake of unity and integrity, for statebuilding and for ensuring political order and stability. Equality-claims refer to various equality provisions for the individual citizens: formal political equality (right to vote and to stand for election) and civil rights as well as redistributive social and economic rights such as land to the landless, work, income, housing, health, guaranteed employment, social security, education and so on. However, diversity-claims have crowded out the concerns of equality. The Constitution of India (1950), Baxi (2014) provided firm legal guarantees for a host of fundamental rights in Part III of the Constitution: freedom of expression, life and liberty, freedom of assembly, freedom of opinion, right to religion and language , equality before the law and the equal protection of the law. Furthermore, a series of social and economic rights (such as right to work, education and public assistance) have been incorporated in the Directive Principles of State Policy (DPSPs) (Part IV) (not justiciable in a court of law unlike the former). If a polity is less oriented to equality-claims, its policy performance on the distributional realm is less likely to be satisfactory. In fact, the miserable policy performance on the latter score may overshadow the formal successes of procedural democracy or of federalism. Rising global inequalities (Piketty, 2014) have drawn attention to the need to pay greater heed to distributional concerns. (UNDP, 2011) There is here a lesson or two to be learned. Amartya Sen (2005: 35) rightly argues that even the ‘equity of recognition’ (pertaining to diversity-claims), when separated from other priorities and objectives, does not advance the cause of equality or distributive justice.9 As Upendra Baxi (1998: 342) has pointed out, it is only since the 1980s that many social and economic rights in Part IV have received the recognition as ‘basic rights’ and that too, through various rulings of the Supreme Court of India in a number of litigation cases. The Constitution stated though that the DPSPs would be ‘fundamental to the governance’ of the country. However, the effects in producing democratic outcomes have left much to be desired. Drèze and Sen (2014) have dealt at length with the democratic outcome of India’s democracy with particular reference to inequality, taking into account the effects of neoliberal reforms in India since the early 1990s. Noting the abysmal performance of India as a whole, they opined: The massive continuation—and sometimes even accentuation—of different kinds of inequalities, in India, . . .. . . provide strongly incriminating evidence against taking Indian democracy to be adequately successful in consequential terms. (Dreze and Sen, 2014: 244) The following section on the Indian case details the specific way in which federalism and democracy have been linked and illustrates the extent to which federalism has crowded out substantive democracy. 218 H. Bhattacharyya Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 6. Indian Case: Institutional Arrangements and Governing Practices The case materials on the uneasy relation between diversity-claims and equality-claims in Indian federalism are critically presented below. The Indian Constitution (1950)10 contains provisions for a host of fundamental rights (Articles 19– 32; including civil and political rights, cultural and minority rights, language rights, the right to religion11 and so on) though hedged around with limitations (all emanating from the state authorities),12 and the latter aspects are placed in an otherwise unimportant part (Part IV Arts 36 – 51) of the Indian Constitution (known as Directive Principles of State Policy). Despite state-imposed limitations on the enjoyment of fundamental rights in India’s constitutional democracy, diversity-claims (linguistic rights; right to religion; identity issues; ethnic entitlements; locality and regions, etc.) and various degrees of statehood within the federation since 1950 in India’s federation-building efforts came to be recognized and conceded. Such institutional responses entail both states reorganization and the provisions of sub-statehood under the 5th and 6th Schedules of the Constitution. Some of them are given a constitutionally exalted position so that the equality-claims or democratic concerns in favour of various redistributive issues for the individual and the socially disadvantaged were relatively neglected. Students of Indian federalism will be aware in particular of the complex ways in which federation-building from above, by ‘disaggregation’, has taken place in India since independence. Since India’s territorial inheritance from the departing British colonial power was very complex in that, apart from the nine provinces directly governed by the British, there were some 550 princely kingdoms of varied sizes and complexions to be integrated and right-sized. Both types of territory were heterogeneous and called for re-sizing on the basis principally of language, which was a nationalist pledge of the Indian National Congress to the people of India (added). Articles 2 and 3 of the Indian Constitution (in particular, Article 3) have provided mechanisms for redrawing the political map of India by giving almost unilateral powers to the Union government. To cut a long story short, starting in 1956 (when major reorganization of territory on the basis of language took place), Indian federalism has continued to recast its territory in different phases and at different times and also on the basis of newer criteria—specifically in 1960, 1966, 1972, 1987, 2000 and 2014 (Bhattacharyya, 2001, 2005, 2010; Sarangi and Pai, 2011; Tillin, 2014; Mukherjee, 2014). Although the diversity-claims for further federalization of the Indian territory on the basis of some ethnic markers are active in parts of India, the spectacular success of India’s federation-building lies in resolving most of its ethnic conflicts by effectively and successfully responding to diversity-claims. Thus, yesterday’s ethnic rebels have been transformed into today’s and tomorrow’s stakeholders (Mitra and Singh, 2000). India today has 29 States with symmetric and asymmetric powers and status, and many elected tribal autonomous district councils at different tiers of the polity, most notably in the North-East. A durable political order and stability, quite predictably, has been in place. Beyond the above provisions for diversity-claims, the 5th and 6th Schedules of the Constitution provide for autonomous district councils for self-government for the aboriginal peoples (known as Scheduled Tribes in India) in areas outside the NorthEast and in the North-East respectively. In both cases, these Schedules provide for Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 Indian Federalism and Democracy 219 the autonomy of the Scheduled Tribes, but the provisions of the 6th Schedule are more empowering and provide for more autonomy than those of the 5th Schedule. The criterion of introduction of such rule is tribal ethnicity of the people inhabiting a particular area. In the North-East of India with a large concentration of tribes, the 6th Schedule has been routinely demanded and introduced, and has served as an effective territorial response to most ethnic conflicts in this militancy-prone region of India. The autonomous district councils which dot the North-East are like states within a state. Added to the above are further asymmetric arrangements within Indian federalism that provide for Special Category State status to backward states needing additional central government support. Until 2015, 11 such states including Jammu & Kashmir and all 8 states in North-East had that status. Until the abolition of the Planning Commission in January 2015, the Central government discretionary financial support constituted 90 per cent as Grants and 10 per cent as loan, while the general category states (i.e. the other 18 states in the federation) received 70% as loans and 10% as grants. Drawing on the National Sample Survey data, Dreze and Sen (2014: 29) show that between 1993 – 1994 and 2009 – 2010 social per capita expenditure grew by only 1% a year. The rural labouring classes have since witnessed growing inequalities of per capita social expenditure (Dreze and Sen, 2014: 29). With the introduction of the rural employment scheme by way of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005), real agricultural wages, particularly for women, grew, but only from 0.05% in 2005 –2006 to 3.7% in 2010 –2011 (Drèze and Sen, 2014: 30). Drèze and Sen (2014: 257) conclude therefore that Indian democracy has failed to face up to the challenge of India’s manifold and some basic inequalities. With India’s neoliberal reforms since 1991, those ‘basic rights’ remain far from being realized! However, the dialectic between diversity-claims and equality-claims remains central to the functioning of Indian federal democracy as evidence has shown that satisfaction of the former (e.g. through the achievement of statehood on the basis of language or other ethnic markers) has not always empowered the majority of people within the newly founded territorial or cultural communities. In most cases, mini ‘ethnocracies’ were created in which the dominant castes and/or classes, or tribal elites in the regions concerned were empowered. When placed in relation to the successes of India’s federalism, India’s abysmal performance on the redistributive realm, as indicated above (added), is conspicuous. India’s macro level success in accommodating diversity by meeting various diversity-claims stands out in sharp contrast to her democratic performance. In the Global Slavery Index, India ranks fifth (with as many as about 14 million plus people; The Frontline February 2015 ‘Data Card’: 122 – 123). The relative success of diversity-claims may entail limited egalitarian and hence democratic functions in terms of social identity in a hierarchical society of castes. The available research on aspects of diversity-claims via positive discrimination (Mitra, 1990; McGarry and O’Leary, 1993; Bhattacharyya, 2001, 2010; Adeney, 2007; Sarangi and Pai, 2011; Tillin, 2014) is doubtful of the equality-generating effects of diversity-claims. In the case of federation-building by way of conceding statehood, not just the four States created in 2000, but most others created since the mid-1950s contain some dominant caste or tribal groups and classes who have benefited at the expense of the vast majority of the people.13 While positive discrimination satisfied the identity needs of the 220 H. Bhattacharyya Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 targeted groups to some extent, the impact has not been as effective for equality-generation because the benefits, which are limited in any way, are reaped by a few at the top of such sections euphemistically called ‘creamy layers’. Since the days of the making of the Indian Constitution (1946– 1950), and its inauguration in 1950, diversity-claims have received greater attention than the equalityclaims. To cite but one example from the debates in the Constituent Assembly (CA) on the issue of preferential treatment for the sons of the soil (under the constitutional language of ‘residential requirements’) regarding employment and so on: Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution, seemed to have had the final say. He said that he was aware that the residential requirements deviated from the value of equality and common citizenship, but he urged the CA to recognize the practical reality: At the same time [ . . . .] you cannot allow people who are flying from one province to another, from one State to another, as mere birds of passage without any roots, [ . . . ] just to come, apply for posts and so to say take the plumb and walk away. (Quoted in Weiner and Katzenstein, 1981: 24) The above was to be read in conjunction with the historical transactions of the INC (Indian National Congress) with various ethnic entitlements since its formation in 1885, and the defence of diversity-claims by the party ever since.14 Consider how the constitutional provisions for ‘equality of opportunity’ (Art. 16) have been contradicted by Article 16 (3): Article 16: No citizen shall, on ground only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth, residence or any one of them, be ineligible for or discriminated against in respect of any employment or office under the State. Article 16 (3): Nothing in this Article shall prevent the Parliament from making any law prescribing, in regard to a class or class of employment or any appointment to any office . . . ..within a State or a Union Territory, any requirement as to residence within that State or Union Territory prior to such employment or appointment. As has been explored in detail by Bhattacharyya (2012a: 23– 41), since 1950 India’s governing practices are replete with legislations, cabinet decisions, government circulars, directives to employers including the private ones and other policy prescriptions adopted by both the Union and the State levels that have defended diversity-claims of various kinds. No less a person than the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi spoke out in favour of preferential policies in her address to the Lok Sabha (popular chamber of Indian Parliament) on 13 December 1972: While we stand for the principle that any Indian citizen be able to work in any part of India, at the same time, it is true that if a large number of people come from outside to seek employment . . . ..that is bound to create tension in that area. Therefore, while I do not like the idea of having any such rule, one has Indian Federalism and Democracy 221 to have some balance and see that the local people are not deprived of employment. (quoted in Weiner and Katzenstein, 1981, 25– 26) [emphasis added] Various State governments followed suit ad infinitum. Apart from making reservations for the Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes (OBC), preferential policies for the local people have also been pursued. Consider another example from the State of Karnataka in 1982: Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 It is the desire of the State government that to the maximum extent possible preference should be given to local persons in the matter of appointment in the state public sector undertaking. (Quoted in Bhattacharyya, 2012: 36) Again, the above passage clearly demonstrates how equal citizenship rights have been subjugated to the diversity-claims at both union and state levels. Baruah (2005) has found the situation in India’s North-East as appalling in this regard. He says that in Meghalaya, nearly 85% of public employment is reserved for the Khasis (ST) (dominant tribe); as many as 55 out of 60 seats in the Legislative Assembly are reserved for them (Baruah, 2005: 183). His argument is that a ‘protective discrimination regime’ (rather than an egalitarian one) marks this regime (Bhattacharyya, 2008). For example, the case of social justice for the dalits (the most backward caste group in India) in Uttar Pradesh (UP) comes to mind when its state government was headed by Ms Mayawati, the dalit Chief Minister whose party seeks to further dalit interests. Dalits represent about 21.1% of the state population and about 87% of the Dalits in UP are rural. Mayawati’s party, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), ruled UP between 2007 and 2012 and earlier . Yet, this prolonged period in power did not improve the social position of the Dalits of whom only 34.7% were in some form of employment in 2001 (Census Report of India, 2001). Second, in terms of poverty line, the improvement was very limited: 49% of the Scheduled Castes (Dalits) were below the poverty line in 1987, and this went down to just 46% by 2005 (Sachar Committee, 2006: 367).15 Similarly, of 19 Indian States, UP’s ranking on the Human Development Index was 15th, and it was 9th (out of 17 states) in the Global Hunger Index (http://www.in.indp/content/dam/india/docs/ UttarPradeshfactsheet.pdf, accessed 13 July 2014). The limited space here does not permit a full-length discussion on the designing and functioning of democratic institutions at the grassroots, which is the real basis for measuring the space of democratic intentions at play. But critical reflections on the institutional designs and practices of rural self-governing institutions known as the panchayats in India in the post-1992 period bring out, with a wealth of empirical evidence, the many limits born of social hierarchies and inequalities, and discrimination (social, economic and political) imposed on citizen participation at the base of India’s democracy (Bhattacharyya, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2005; Baviskar and Mathew, 2009). As far as the States are concerned, the UNDP’s estimates show that most States16 except Kerala tend to lose average value in inequality measurement higher than the all-India average. In terms of the global performance standards, India ranks in the ‘Medium Human Development Category’; apart from Kerala, its federal units mostly fall short of that (UNDP, 2011: 11 –13).17 222 H. Bhattacharyya Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 7. Conclusion This article has sought to reflect critically on a thus-far neglected issue in federalism and also democracy scholarship, namely the relation between federalism and substantive democracy.18 In India, the outstanding democracy scholarship has ignored federalism, and hence failed to explain why Indian democracy fails to make significant equality outcomes. Globally as well as in India, federalism and democracy have been treated in isolation from each other. Beyond doubt, India has been a success story in federalism in accommodating many diversity-claims in favour of upholding political order and stability and preventing secessionism. This success answered the puzzle or the paradox in the current debate on federalism as to why self-rule does not result in secession (Erk and Anderson, 2009; Erk, 2010) in the sense in particular that conceding some form of self-rule has served to dissipate elite-based ethnic conflicts and some limited redistribution. While federalism scholarship in India does not examine democracy beyond the formal-institutional dimensions, democracy scholarship is somewhat bogged down to what may be called ‘the Tocquevillian enchantment’ with the great ‘equality premise’ (Kohli, 1990, 2001; Kaviraj, 2011; Beteille, 2012, 2013) without paying adequate attention to the impact of Indian federalism on limiting democracy in generating equality outcomes in the socioeconomic realm. The one-sided emphasis on ‘diversity-claims’ at the expense of ‘equality of opportunity’ is an important factor explaining India’s poor record in generating equality. The new federal problematic is that of order and political stability in the midst of diversity, while the democratic problematic is that of significant social and economic changes since social identity cannot be recast without redistributive measures.19 This article has not argued against diversity-claims, but argued that an overemphasis on diversity accommodation has undermined redistributive policies (equality-claims) in India. Second, political democracy, or what Ramchandra Guha (2013: 34– 38)20 calls the ‘hardware’ of democracy has served a great instrumental and strategic purpose. However, in a land of inequalities, poverty and large-scale discrimination, democracy continues to attract the poor and socially and economically underprivileged. They are members of what Partha Chatterjee (2011) calls ‘political society’, as distinguished from civil society. They need democracy more than the social, economic and political elites in India. However, they also suffer the consequences of an unequal distribution of limited benefits. Third, with India’s shift to a free market economy since the early 1990s, Indian federal democracy is confronting an evolving but contradictory reality: a relatively long sustained democratic facade with limited genuine democratic orientations but faced with a highly mobilized society (along many ethnic fault lines). This has generated a rise in democratic pressures from below (Alam, 2012) demanding expansion of the ambit of democracy—evident in demands for greater decentralization and participation; smaller territorial units for recognition and development; more institutional guarantees for protection of rights of the socially underprivileged; and greater actual participation of the thus underprivileged sections in the institutional political process. The above has been taking place at a time when Indian democracy has since the early 1990s been confronting the real possibilities of greater corporate control over democracy in the wake of ‘reforms’ so that observers of the Indian Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 Indian Federalism and Democracy 223 economy and politics have expressed grave concern about the very foundations of the democratic system because now the Indian “state tends to be more accountable” to the “invisible sentiments of the market” (Raghavendra, 2013) than the more visible problems of its poverty-stricken people. Partha Chatterjee (2008: 53– 62) argued how the new corporate capital of India (Indian and foreign) had since the 1990s been appropriating what he called ‘political society’ via Indian electoral democracy conceding in the end only some benefits to the inhabitants of political society, that is, rural and urban poor, in order to assuage the injured feelings of the people born of what he called ‘primitive accumulation of capital’. While the greater intellectual attention to the equality-claims21 is called for, there is a lesson for the stakeholders in diversityclaims that they are unlikely to have the same leverage as before when the macroeconomic policies have shifted significantly from social welfare to market freedom. Atul Kohli (2012) argues that in India as many as 450 million people subsist on less than $1.25 a day; nearly half of all the children are malnourished; and the ‘new alliance’ in power has prioritized economic growth over poverty alleviation. The resultant inequalities limit the impact of growth on poverty alleviation and large-scale exclusion. That certainly is a bad omen for a vast multi-ethnic federal democracy with potentialities for renewed regional and ethnic tensions and conflicts. Finally, diversity-claims in any federations in multi-ethnic countries are unavoidable; they are to be recognized appropriately. But such recognition must not be delinked from distributional issues, or allowed to overrule equality issues (Basole, 2014). The lack of a fine balance between the two may pave the basis for persistent ethnic conflicts in such societies. Thus, self-government as meeting the diversity-claims for some ethnic groups may not by itself be enough, but ought to be backed up by appropriate redistributive concerns. Acknowledgments The author wishes to record his gratitude to the three learned anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestion. He also records his sincere thanks to Jan Erk for having read the draft twice and offering very useful suggestions. Willfried Swenden’s editorial interventions with comments and suggestions moved the draft further in the right direction, for which thanks are also due. My son Sahon performed the last rites in matters of technicalities and deserves some thanks. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Notes 1 This inequality has been increasing after 1982 including in Poland after the end of communist rule when there was an egalitarian redistribution of income. (Przeworski, 2010: 87). 2 Alexis de Tocqueville (1968) had, however, noted the inconsistency between federalism and popular sovereignty in the case of US federalism. Intrigued by what he called ‘the rules of logic’ being ‘bent’. Tocqueville wrote: 224 H. Bhattacharyya Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 3 “The lawgivers adopted a middle path which forcibly reconciled two theoretically irreconcilable systems . . . ..The principle of state independence prevailed in the shaping of the Senate, the dogma of national sovereignty in the composition of the House of Representatives” (Tocqueville, 1968: 140). 4 One of the basic purposes of the Swiss federation as per the Constitution of 1874 was to uphold “unity, strength and honour of the Swiss nation” (quoted in Bhattacharyya, 2001: 356). 5 The Preamble to the new Swiss Constitution (2000) mentions that “We, the Swiss People and Cantons . . . .” and under Article 4 declares all four languages of the federation—German, French, Italian and Romansh—as national languages. 6 The detailed empirical based studies have shown how existing caste, party and class domination have acted as deterrents to popular participation in the functioning of democratic bodies within the States (Baviskar and Mathew, 2009). The Gujarat pogroms (mass killing of the Muslims in Godhra and Post-Godhra in the 1990s) could also be cited as glaring example. West Bengal since 2011 is another story of a heavily politicized administration that has created a near anarchy and rendered the State to the control of the thugs and anti-socials. 7 Bhattacharyya (2010), chapter 5 ‘Federalism and Democracy in Asian federations’, (pp. 97– 112). 8 The reason for him and Wallenstein (1988) is the “structural dependence of the state on capital” (quoted in Przeworski, 1999: 41). 9 Sen argues that the European Enlightenment thinkers emphasized the need for establishing “just institutional arrangements for a society” for resolving the problem of social justice and equality. This approach is called “transcendental institutionalism” by Sen (2009: 5). 10 Massive and growing inequalities the world over have remained a central concern in the writings of Sen (Sen 1992; 2005; 2006; 2009). 11 The pre-independence developments and half-hearted and unsuccessful experiments with federalism in British India have been adequately explored and examined. See, for example, Bhattacharyya (2010) chapter 2, pp.20–45. 12 These fundamental rights to religion entail the right to profess, practise and propagate one’s religion, and even maintain minority (including religious) educational institutions with state financial support. However, a territory demand (in favour of a state or sub-state, is ruled as going against the spirit of India’s secular state. Article 25 2 (a) of the Indian Constitution forbids the conduct of any secular activities “associated with religious practice” (Baxi, 2012: 75). 13 That is, they are called not ‘state-free spaces’ (see, Baxi in Mohanty et al eds. 1998: 335– 352). 14 As Robert King (1997) pointed out, Nehru’s cynicism about the linguistic provinces was therefore not very surprising. 15 No wonder he has a made a distinction between what he calls ‘citizens’ and ‘denizens’ in respect of the North-East. The proliferation of ethnic homeland demands in the region has also been quite logical. 16 During the same period, the all-India performance was better: 38% in 29% (Sachar Committee 2006: 367). 17 The UNDP Report (2011) states that the loss of value in HDI due to inequality in education is more than the national average (43%) in such States as Karnataka, Haryana, Chhatishgarh, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh—the states that came out as a result of the fulfilment of diversity-claims since 1953 (UNDP Report 2011: 10). 18 The other studies on the subject focusing on the period since the early 1990s (when India embraced the Reform process) strongly suggest that inequalities of varied sorts have since increased. (See Pal and Ghosh, 2007; Frankel, 2005; Nayar, 2007; Tendulkar and Bhawai 2007). 19 For a recent examination of federalism and procedural democracy, see Burgess and Gagnon(2010) 20 However, even in the West especially since the 1970s, diversity-claims have found their way into the political system and have been met with significant successes in autonomy and devolution in Italy, Canada, Spain, Belgium and the UK. See, for example, Gagnon and Tully (2001), for some detailed case studies in the Western democracies. 21 However, Guha’s subject, though quite interesting, dealt with only episodic violence rather than the daily one, which would have made more theoretical sense. In his episodic sense, the violence in Northern Ireland and those in Kashmir and Sri Lanka (on the Tamils) India would safely claim a comparative position with United Kingdom. Indian Federalism and Democracy 225 Downloaded by [104.192.0.18] at 08:04 15 March 2016 References Adeney, K. 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