Contradiction the key to India's democracy
Though riddled by undemocratic forces and frequently predicted to be on the verge of extinction, the world's largest democratic exercise is under way, defying expectations while posing the question: why does Indian democracy survive?
Contrary to standard democratic theory, it is India's undemocratic core that furthers democracy. By allowing undemocratic and tribal loyalties that predate democracy to thrive, and by incorporating them, Indian democracy offers a new set of freedoms that democracy, as developed in the west, does not.
These possibilities makes Indian democracy an example for both undemocratic states to transform themselves and to the apathetic inventors of democracy - the west - where voter turnout is in free fall.
Even the first black presidential candidate could not motivate US voters to cast their ballot in greater numbers than in 1960. In Britain, turnout has fallen from the 1950 high of 85 per cent to about 60 per cent.
Though democracy is a recent vintage in India, and despite hurdles unimaginable to westerners, Indians brave long treks to polling booths, intimidation and outright violence to frequently vote in greater numbers than the west.
Democracy, the grandest of political concepts, faces a dual threat: the developed world does not vote; while certain elites in the developing world deny their masses the vote. The innovation that Indian democratic practice brings to staid western theory is that Indians do not assume all citizens are equal or expect the democratic state to enjoy the total loyalty of the people. Indians made democracy into a system designed to further older, ingrained ways. Some run directly counter to modern, democratic principles. In the west, democrats tried to mould traditional peoples into a democratic society. In India, it is the opposite - democracy has been moulded to further the aims of a traditional people. It is this very flexibility which ensures that Indian democracy thrives.
In practice, this means Indian democracy frequently furthers narrow, sectarian group interests. Parliamentary seats are reserved for particular castes. For some, electing a lower-caste leader is revenge for millennia of caste oppression.
Indian democracy was finished, predicted academics and analysts raised on western theories, in the 1970s when democracy was briefly suspended. They were wrong because they dismissed the undemocratic forces that Indian democracy allowed to flourish. That ensured competing groups wanted democracy because, paradoxically, it furthered undemocratic loyalties.
By developing a democracy that does not try to coerce people to become democratic citizens, and instead co-opts older undemocratic loyalties, India offers the ultimate freedom - that to undermine democracy. It demonstrates to undemocratic regimes that democratisation does not have to be at the expense of older, historically ingrained loyalties, and shows the west that the answer to the problems of democracy is not coercion, but more democracy.
Deep Kisor Datta-Ray is a London-based historian and commentator on Asian affairs
