THE DEMOCRACY IN INDIA

India’s Democracy Has Many Voices
Energetic, multiparty system of government relies on consensus

A poster of India’s most powerful low-caste politician, Uttar Pradesh’s Mayawati, with her party symbol, the elephant. (© AP Images)
By Lea TerhuneStaff Writer

Washington -- The world’s largest democracy is distinctive. With dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects spoken, India’s population is among the most diverse in the world.
“It’s very fluid, very dynamic, almost chaotic when viewed from the outside,” said Mira Kamdar, author of Planet India, a book that examines “the turbulent rise of the largest democracy and the future of our world.”
India is a country “going through a continued phase of incredible evolution and change,” she told America.gov. In recent decades, India has moved from the tight control of a political dynasty to a rough-and-tumble era of coalition governments that must respond to broader constituencies.
“You are watching the enfranchisement into the political process of whole blocks of a population whose specific interests and needs really never found expression in that process before in any kind of direct way,” Kamdar said. New parties are coming up and old parties that used to be powerful are losing influence.
According to Sevanti Ninan, media analyst, author and co-founder of www.thehoot.org, regional newspapers have helped that process. “It’s a post-liberalization phenomenon,” she said. In the early 1990s, growth in advertising made it lucrative for vernacular papers to expand regional editions.
There are upwards of 70 such papers in the politically important and populous Hindi Belt in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh alone.
“There’s an emerging rural middle class, it has purchasing capacity, it’s interested in buying newspapers, it’s upwardly mobile,” and it delivers a new, “very broad segment to the advertiser,” Ninan said.
These papers do a great deal of local reporting. “If a bridge collapses, or a shoddily built hospital or road, you start saying, ‘Who built it?’
“When the press gets more local, there is more scrutiny of local institutions and local governments, and in that sense people have a greater say, they know what’s happening, the little fellow who wants to get elected from there becomes accountable.”

LOCAL GOVERNANCE
Ninan said the institutionalization of the panchayat, or council of five, as a formal village governance system has spurred more citizen involvement.
Election of five elders to a village council to arbitrate local disputes is a tradition in India. But in 1994, a constitutional amendment delegated more administrative authority to these councils and reserved one-third of the seats for women and some for lower-caste individuals.

A crowd listens to Sonia Gandhi. Her Congress Party once dominated Indian politics but now shares power in a coalition. (© AP Images)
Panchayats now look after village infrastructure, schools, public health and water supplies and keep local records. Their flowering coincided with the rise of regional newspapers, Ninan said.
“They did a lot of panchayat coverage. ... Village-level democracy gets a big boost from newspapers.” The newspapers helped to localize concerns and give the panchayat members a platform: “It’s another level of democracy. … You have democracy because of local self-governance; you have democracy because of the local press interacting with the local self-governance process.”
Despite big, urban newspapers becoming more consumer-driven, Ninan said, “more than TV, which isn’t really able to do justice to complex issues, I think the Indian press is still doing a good job.”

VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
The people’s voice is being heard in India, but sometimes its volume can pose problems. Kamdar said representation of many interests is healthy, but a coalition government of 15 or more parties makes it “difficult to push through certain kinds of legislation or initiatives” that lack popular appeal. She cited the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement as an example.
That agreement to transfer nuclear technologies for the purpose of clean power generation has been stalled in India by political opposition. (See “President Bush Signs U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement.”)
Analyst Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Stimson Center, agreed. “India’s fractious democracy has to rely a great deal on consensual agreement. The country is so diversified, a high value is placed upon consensus.”
“I think India’s vibrant democracy is a great strength, and it’s also a great inconvenience when it comes to making hard political decisions,” he told America.gov.
“We see it in our own country, where a party that supports something when it’s in office opposes it when it’s in the opposition. That’s part of how democracies work,” Krepon said.
Kamdar sees another similarity between Indian and American politics: supporting a candidate “so that he can get his hands on the goody pot and pass some goodies back to us” rather than for “his or her ideas and policies they propose.”

India contends with violent domestic militancy, so security issues influence its democratic processes. “All of India’s neighbors are very unsettled. India lives in a very tough neighborhood. It’s not just China, the big guy, which seems to be settled, it’s also the smaller countries, that have great domestic turbulence and provide breeding grounds for violent acts,” Krepon said.
India foreign policy expert C. Raja Mohan, currently at Nanyan Technological University in Singapore, added, “The relationship with Pakistan and Bangladesh is very central to the foundation and evolution of Indian democracy, for these two relations are as much domestic as they are bilateral.” Both countries were part of British India.
“The positive evolution of ties with Pakistan,” he said, is “definitely a signal of [India’s] maturation.”
Kamdar said Indian democracy is not like U.S. democracy, but she sees a tremendous opportunity for future cooperation between the two countries, particularly in tackling big issues of mutual concern like global warming