While the threat to the unity of India in Punjab and Kashmir antedates the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the outbreak of the Serbian-Croatian armed conflict in Yugoslavia, these developments have put the issue in a much sharper focus and given the advocates of drastic decentralisation of power new courage and legitimacy.
The threat to the country’s unity is patent and cannot be denied. But this threat is not the result either of non-viability of India as a political union on account of the presence in its territory of scores of “nationalities”, or of the inadequacy of constitutional arrangements as such. It is the product, above all of a combination of powerful and sustained external intervention and short-sighted and inadequate political leadership. Punjab is a case in point.
Short-sightedness
Indira Gandhi’s short-sightedness in promoting Sant Bhindranwale in order to embarrass the Akalis, her decision to dismiss the Badal ministry and refusal to make a deal with the Akalis for fear of losing some support in Haryana have been the staple of our public discourse for years and need not be gone over again here. The inability of Akali leaders to hold together in office and their penchant for “radicalism” and agitation out of office have not attracted the same kind of attention in recent years. But these too are sufficiently well recognised to need discussion.
Notwithstanding Indira Gandhi’s miscalculations and the Akali leaders’ demagogy, we would not have faced a terrorist-secessionist threat in Punjab if Zia-ul-Haq in neighbouring Pakistan had not decided to train, arm and finance disoriented young men in search of adventure and a cause. A solution within the framework of the Constitution and the political process would have been found in course of time.
The story of secessionism in Kashmir in the past two years is similar, though not identical. There too Indira Gandhi’s decision to dismiss the Farooq Abdullah ministry and Rajiv Gandhi’s to force Dr. Abdullah into a coalition with the Congress as the price for restoring him to office, on the one hand, and Pakistan’s ill-disguised support to terrorists, on the other, account for much of the trouble.
This is not to deny that the Centre has concentrated too much power in itself for the health of Indian polity. But it is a gross simplication to suggest either that the source of the mischief has been solely the allegedly unitary nature of the Constitution and/or the personality of Indira Gandhi, or that the remedy lies in suitably amending the Constitution or otherwise bestowing a much larger measure of autonomy on the states, however desirable that may be in itself. The concept of centralised planning with heavy emphasis on promotion of the public sector as the engine of rapid economic growth has been principally responsible for skewing the constitutional arrangements and spawning an unbelievably corrupt and inefficient regime.
With the Planning Commission functioning as a super-cabinet in all but name and with inner party democracy reduced to a formality within the ruling Congress party under Nehru himself, Indian democracy was debilitated at the very start of its career. It has not recovered since. Indira Gandhi only aggravated the malaise.
Rajiv Gandhi, if anything, improved on his mother’s record as far as dismissing and appointing Congress chief ministers is concerned. One of his last “gifts” to the nation was Mr S Bangarappa who as Karnataka’s chief minister has perhaps delivered as big a blow to the unity of India as Bhindranwale. Surely, this is not a tragedy which can be blamed on over-centralisation of authority in New Delhi as such or which could have been taken care of if we had a “genuinely” federal constitutional arrangement. On the contrary, Mr Bangarappa would almost certainly not have acted the way he has on the Cauvery waters issue if he had reason to be more respectful towards the authority of the Centre.
Thus, on a dispassionate and realistic assessment, the conclusion is unavoidable that the problems we face are extremely complicated and do not admit of single point and neat solutions. We have to proceed cautiously in a spirit of pragmatism.
To cite one example, it is open to question whether freedom of expression and association, as we have known it with the brief exception of internal emergency, can survive in a number of states if they come to enjoy the kind of autonomy that is being recommended currently.
Not Fortuitous
Similarly, it will be a brave individual who can be sure that anything like a fair and free election is conceivable under dispensations such as Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav’s in UP or Mr Laloo Prasad’s in Bihar in the absence of a central Election Commission armed with enormous powers. It is not fortuitous that no opposition party trusts the local administration in this regard.
Democracy as an institutional arrangement, let us face it, has been handed down from the top not only in the sense that Congress leaders in office have believed in it, however half-heartedly, but also in the sense that concentrated in large metropolitan centres we have had an intelligentsia large enough and resourceful enough to be able to fight encroachments on it from would be dictators.
Indira Gandhi could not overcome this “little” obstacle. A similarly powerful figure in Chandigarh, Lucknow, Patna, or any other non-metropolitan state capital would not have had to worry too much about the local intelligentsia. Witness our having had to appeal to Mrs Gandhi’s “good sense” against chief ministers such as Mr AR Antulay, Mr Jagannath Mishra and Mr Chenna Reddy.
The need to defend democratic norms and forms would be a strong enough argument against a schematic approach to the question of Centre-state relations. As it happens, however, the survival of India as one economic and political entity is also critically dependent on the health of democratic institutions which state bosses in many states cannot be relied upon to protect.
Threats To Unity
Under discussion is the country’s political unity and the threats to it. So the solutions – there cannot possibly be one solution – have to be sought and found in political arrangements and actions. It will not do to rely on the country’s cultural unity, though in the absence of cultural unity, the task of preserving political unity in this age of mass awakening, mobilisation and assertion would have been well nigh impossible, as the Soviet example amply demonstrates. Cultural unity provides the foundation on which political unity can rest. The former cannot guarantee the latter.
We have clearly entered a new era in our politics. As far as we can foresee, the age of the near monopoly of Congress power and of the ascendancy of the Nehru-Gandhi family in the party is over. The Nehruvian framework (with its emphasis on socialism, non-alignment and secularism), which helped legitimise the Congress raj, has also been rendered obsolescent by the march of events – failure of all centrally-planned economics, the collapse of the Soviet bloc and resurgence of non-Westernised masses within the country, for example. So we have to wait and see what kind of forces emerge and how they can be harnessed to our long-term purposes.
If the current policy of liberating the economy from the stranglehold of state controls succeeds, it will release forces which would, in course of time, transform India’s social scene and with it the political process beyond our present comprehension. If, on the other hand, the policy runs into unmanageable difficulties, the country will be plunged into a crisis of unknown proportions.
The stakes are extraordinarily high, making it necessary for us to tread warily. This is not the time for messianism. The unpredictability and the potentially dangerous nature of the likely security environment in coming years reinforces the need for caution. Witness Senator Pressler’s statement in New Delhi last Saturday on the possibility of an Islamic confederation on our border with three of its members being nuclear weapons powers.
The Times of India, 16 January 1992