Building Democracy in South Asia: India, Nepal, Pakistan 1555878598, 9781555878597

Table of contents :
Building Democracy in
Contents
Maps
Acronyms
Preface
1. Introduction
2. The History of the Democratic Experience in South Asia
3. President vs. Prime Minister: Democratization in Pakistan
4. King vs. Parliament: Democratization in Nepal
5. State and Democracy: The Politics of Consolidation
6. Conflict and Democracy: Kashmir in South Asia
7. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the book

Citation preview

Building Democracy in

South Asia

Building Democracy in

South Asia

INDIA, NEPAL, PAKISTAN

Maya Chadda

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2000 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Suite 314, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner

© 2000 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chadda, Maya, 1943– Building democracy in South Asia : India, Nepal, Pakistan / Maya Chadda. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55587-859-8 (pb : alk. paper) ISBN 1-55587-748-6 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Democracy—India. 2. Democracy—Nepal. 3. Democracy—Pakistan. 4. Democratization—India. 5. Democratization—Nepal. 6. Democratization— Pakistan. 7. India—Politics and government—1977– . 8. Nepal—Politics and government—1990– . 9. Pakistan—Politics and government—1988– . I. Title. JQ98.A91 C46 2000 320.454—dc21 99-089666

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

∞

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. 5 4 3 2 1

To Vijay

Contents ix xi xiii

List of Maps List of Acronyms Preface 1

Introduction

2

The History of the Democratic Experience in South Asia

4

King vs. Parliament: Democratization in Nepal

3

5 6

7

President vs. Prime Minister: Democratization in Pakistan

State and Democracy: The Politics of Consolidation in India Conflict and Democracy: Kashmir in South Asia

1

23

67

111 143

193

Conclusion

221

Bibliography Index About the Book

237 241 247

vii

Maps South Asia

xvi

Nepal

112

Pakistan

66

India

144

Kashmir

194

ix

Acronyms ■

GENERAL

■

INDIA

CTBT GDP GNP IMF LoC LTTE NGOs SAARC SAPTA UN

AASU AGP AIADMK BCs BJD BJP BSP CPI CPI-ML DMK EC JKLF MNF

Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty gross domestic product gross national product International Monetary Fund Line of Control Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam nongovernmental organizations South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement United Nations

Association of Assam Students Union Asom Gano Parishad All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Backward Classes Bharatiya Janata Dal Bharatiya Janata Party Bahujan Samaj Party Communist Party of India Communist Party of India–Marxist/Leninist Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Election Commission of India Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front Mizo National Front

xi

xii

MRD NDA NDC NDP NF NNC NSCN PDA RSS SC/BC SC/ST SCs SGPC SP TDP ULFA

ACRONYMS

Movement to Restore Democracy National Democratic Alliance National Development Council National Democratic Party National Front Naga National Council National Socialist Council of Naga People’s Democratic Alliance Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Schedule Castes/Backward Classes Schedule Castes/Schedule Tribes Schedule Castes Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee Samajwadi Party Telugu Desam Party United Liberation Front of Assam

■

NEPAL

■

PAKISTAN

BNP BVNC NC NDC RPP ULF UML ATO COAS IDA IJI ISI ML MQM MRD NAP NWFP PNA PPP ROC

Basic Needs Plan Back-to-the-Village National Campaign Nepal Congress National Democratic Congress Rashtriya Praja Parishad United Leftist Front United Marxist Leninist Party Antiterrorism Ordinance Chief of Army Staff Islamic Democratic Alliance Islamic Jamhoori Ittehad Interservice Intelligence Agency Muslim League Muttahida Quami Movement Movement to Restore Democracy National Assembly of Pakistan North West Frontier Province Pakistan National Alliance Pakistan People’s Party Restoration of Constitutional Order

Preface A stream of new books on transitology—theories about transition from authoritarianism to democracy—now crowd the shelves of libraries and bookstores. A careful search through these, however, yields only a few volumes on how South Asia fits into the current international debate about third wave democracies. This book is written in the hope of filling this gap and providing an alternative set of propositions about the impact of poverty, violence, and inequality on democracy. I conclude that these factors need not constrain South Asia’s transition to democracy, although they can slow its consolidation, as in India and Nepal, or interrupt its consolidation, as in Pakistan. I also argue that the current discourse fails to assess the relationship between society and state realistically and is wrong therefore about the role of conflict and violence in South Asia. I had three purposes in writing this book. The first was simply to survey recent political developments in South Asia. Although the region consists of seven countries, a thematic discussion of developments in three of them—India, Nepal, and Pakistan—can be useful to those interested in post–Cold War South Asia. My second purpose was to link developments in South Asia to the broader debate about third wave democracies. And my third purpose was to argue that South Asia’s experience offers yet another route to progressive democratization in territorially and politically unconsolidated countries, one that is relevant to transformations elsewhere in the world. In the course of researching this book I came to realize that the story of democratization had two parts and no single part told the whole—that the part about poverty, political instability, and underdevelopment had been told again and again, while other changes had been ignored or discounted. I have chosen to emphasize the latter to

xiii

xiv

PREFACE

correct the imbalance, but no moral judgments are intended in the choice. Of course I agree with those who argue that poverty, corruption, and violence in South Asia should be eradicated. Who would object to building an honest, people-oriented, prosperous, and truly free democracy? And who can deny the perversions of current politics in South Asia? But the yardsticks of rule of law, secularism, representative forms of government, and a limited state—derived largely from the Western experience—are crude tests at best. They do not catch the trade-offs that leaders are required to make in South Asia, trade-offs that have marked the passage to democracy there and arguably in other new democracies as well. In many ways this book was a natural extension of my earlier work on ethnic conflicts and their impact on India’s regional policy. In that work, I explained the distinctive model of federalism that has evolved in India and argued that, contrary to popular and scholarly impressions, it was largely a successful model—notwithstanding failures in Punjab and Kashmir, which have had as much to do with the incomplete nature of nation-state consolidation as with the personal and political predilections of India’s leaders. Similar considerations have shaped the passage to democracy elsewhere in South Asia. Violence and electoral expansions, state coercion and institution-building efforts, all have coalesced to create the “real world” within which democracy has to operate. * * *

I have accumulated many debts in the course of writing this book. I am grateful to Hasan Askari Rizvi for careful reading of the chapter on Pakistan, and to Robert Wirsing and Steven Cohen, who readily and promptly responded to my many queries. The exchange of views with Walter Anderson, Sanjib Baruah, and Prem Shakar Jha was extremely useful in drafting the India chapter. I owe a deep debt to Prem Shakar Jha for careful reading and extensive editorial comments on the manuscript as a whole. Thom Brooks, a former student who has moved on to richer pastures at the University of Dublin, assisted in research and the compilation of material on Nepal. For that and for numerous discussions of events in Nepal, I thank him. I am also in debt to Hafeez Malik at Villanova University, whose invitations to participate in conferences exposed me to the passionate debates about the correct course of politics in Pakistan. Participation in seminars at Columbia University’s Southern Asian Institute, of which I have been an associate research fellow, greatly helped in giving solid shape to many ideas. But I alone bear responsibility for the errors, omissions, and views expressed in this book.

PREFACE

xv

William Paterson University and my colleagues in the Department of Political Science released me from teaching, which enabled me to write this book. I acknowledge their support. Family members come last, not because they are less important in scholarly efforts, but because one tends to take their sacrifices for granted. I thank Vijay Chadda, friend and husband, for his good and constructive advice and unfailing emotional support throughout the long months of writing this book. Without him it would not have been possible.

TAJIKISTAN

AFGHANISTAN

Islamabad

PAKISTAN

Kashmir CHINA

NEPAL

New Delhi

Kathmandu

INDIA

A r a b i a n

BHUTAN

BANGLADESH MYANMAR (BURMA)

S e a B a y o f

B e n g a l

e i v a d c c L a

Andaman Sea

a S e

SRI LANKA

South Asia

1

Introduction

This short book seeks to restore South Asia’s political experience to its proper place in the current discourse on democracy. The debate today is dominated by two opposing perspectives: one claiming the superiority of Western liberal democracy and the other arguing for the efficiency and prudence of the East Asian sequence of development.1 The resulting clash of views has left little room for arguments about other ways to achieve democracy and economic growth. In reality, the democratic spectrum is wide and ever expanding. On it, South Asia—particularly India, Pakistan, and Nepal, represent a distinctive third way of combining democracy with market reforms. Any claims that democratic norms are universal should incorporate the post–Cold War democratic transformations in South Asia. But the current popular discourse remains centered on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. This book seeks to correct this imbalance and relate the experience of democratic struggles in South Asia to available insights into transformations elsewhere. The political experiences of more than 1 billion people of this subcontinent, representing nearly one-fifth of humanity, deserves more than passing attention in the current debate. How do we examine the South Asian experience? What does it tell us about democratic advances in the context of other pressing objectives such as nation-state building and national security? Are these goals mutually contradictory? How do we alter the democratic debate and our understanding of democratization in light of these contradictions? Such questions constitute the central themes of this study. There is, of course, a vast literature on the politics and history of South Asia.2 Comparativists have produced a rich body of critical work on the problems of modernization, poverty, political and economic development,

1

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BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH ASIA

conflict, and social organizations such as caste and ethnic and religious communities. There is also a wealth of studies on democracy and governance in individual South Asian countries. Indeed, India’s governance, the relationship between its democracy and social violence, and its federal design and party politics are all the subject of a very lively debate among its leading scholars.3 In comparison, Pakistan and Nepal have attracted less attention, even though their politics are no less controversial. There is no systematic work however on how South Asian political experience in the post–Cold War years relates to the theorizing about the “third wave of democracy.” The purpose here is to fill this gap and bring the South Asian states of Pakistan, Nepal, and India into the mainstream discussions on the global spread of democracy. These countries make an excellent study in contrasts. Nepal is a Hindu kingdom; Pakistan is Islamic; India, a predominantly Hindu country, is committed to secular democracy. Since the late 1980s, Nepal and Pakistan have been struggling to make a democratic transition away from their authoritarian pasts. A longtime democracy, India is struggling to cope with the vast social and political transformations wrought by fifty years of modernization. Each country is profoundly diverse and preoccupied with political and territorial consolidation. All three acknowledge the imperatives of liberal economic reforms and the primacy of global markets unleashed by the end of the Cold War. The record of these efforts has been mixed. South Asia does not post the spectacular growth in economic indices that China and other East Asian states have posted in recent years. However, one might argue that East Asia achieved both nation-state consolidation and successful market reforms under authoritarian regimes. The European countries experienced a gradual unfolding of market economies and liberal democracy. But they were already established nation-states by the time they began liberalizing. Democracy flowered subsequently and as a result of shifts in economic power and emergence of a substantial middle class in European societies. The South Asian experience is different from both. Its path to democracy—strewn with obstacles though it is—has been distinctive for two reasons: first because it combines democratization with economic development and state consolidation; second because it defines democratization largely as a process of compacts and bargains between the state and its parts, arrived at through free and fair electoral contestations. The first difference underscores an entirely separate sequencing of evolution than in early democracies. The second difference points to the alternative content and form of what might be considered democratic. It is misleading to

INTRODUCTION

3

view this experience as a distorted version of the European democracy. It would be equally misleading to compare South Asia’s economic pace to East Asian economic miracles. We do not know what kind of pressure democratic commitments might have created on East Asian countries had they pursued democracy, growth, and national consolidation simultaneously.4 We do have in South Asia at least one fairly successful attempt to combine all three objectives: India. We also know that demands for democracy in Nepal and Pakistan have become more insistent. The former ended a thirty-year rule of entrenched monarchy in 1990 and committed itself to a parliamentary democracy. Pakistan has made several promising beginnings since 1988. But each time, the military oligarchy stepped in to dismiss elected government officials before they could complete their full terms in office. At minimum these experiences generate important questions about democratic transitions and consolidation that are at the center of the current debate on democracy. In this study, I have used the “elite bargain” perspective as a key to understanding transformations in Pakistan, Nepal, and India in the 1990s mainly because it is more suited to analyses in the short term. Because this book is largely confined to discussion of developments in the decade of the 1990s, the elite bargain approach was more appropriate. I accept the key assumption that elite bargain theorists make: at a particular juncture in history, it is possible for a country to shed its authoritarian past and make a transition to democracy. I do not, however, subscribe to the criteria of democratization laid down by the elite bargain theorists. Instead, I have proposed that democratic development be contextualized to accommodate compulsions of nation-state consolidation in evaluation of democratic advance. This inclusion is not meant to justify excesses of the state, and no moral judgments are intended. The purpose is mainly to construct the “real world of democracy” within which South Asian leaders are compelled to make their choices. This study comes to three broad conclusions. First, in countries trying to combine national consolidation with democracy, the latter is less a matter of upholding individual rights than becoming inclusive through bargains to which both the central state and its parts (defined by ethnic, caste, or religious identities) have to consent. Such bargains may be reached outside the electoral process but have to be legitimized by it if democracy is to be consolidated. Notions of equality, justice, and majority rule are all altered by the nature of this bargain. Second, the presence of poverty, instability, corruption, and violence is problematic but can coexist with gradual democratization. Third, failure of democracy in one part of the

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BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH ASIA

country, on one issue, or at a particular moment does not mean failure of the democratic transformation as a whole. In this chapter I will sketch the main propositions in the new democratic theories and offer a critique based on experiences of the three South Asian countries. Next I will outline an alternative frame for evaluating democratization. ■

DOMINANT PERSPECTIVES OF DEMOCRACY

The idea of democracy as it evolved from its ancient meaning to the form it has taken in the capitalist epoch has been a subject of profound and intense controversy. Democracy is widely and correctly regarded as a Western ideal born in the age of Enlightenment and enlarged by capitalism and its promotion of individual rights. Its cornerstones are equality, liberty, social justice, and limited government. The current discourse on democracy flows from two broad genres of theoretical writings: theories of modernization and political development that look for prior structural transformations and use these as yardsticks of democratic development; and pluralist theories that look for fulfillment of procedural conditions, that is, regular and fair elections, a free press, and democratic participation, to evaluate democratic advance or retreat.5 Whereas the structuralists and pluralist theorists have focused on domestic aspects, a new body of theoretical work has sought to link regime type to international developments. Bruce Russett, a leading proponent of this work, argues that the spread of democracy will lead to peace between democratizing countries. He cites the post–World War II experience among European countries and between the United States and Canada to prove that democracies do not go to war with each other. Russett also extends his thesis to specifically include pairs of regional rivals—Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan—as possible “dyads” to test his democratic peace thesis. Not unlike the elite bargain theorists, Russett defines democracy in procedural terms derived largely from the Western experience.6 In recent years, the emphasis in the study of democracy has shifted from the delineation of prerequisites of democracy to its procedural conditions. 7 This is taking place because of rapid replacement of authoritarian with democratic regimes in Eastern Europe and Latin America. These countries fulfilled very few of the structural prerequisites that had been considered essential for democracy. Despite that, democratic regimes had emerged and, in Latin America in particular, had

INTRODUCTION

5

met with a fair degree of success. To explain this, scholars have been forced to jettison key assumptions about essential prerequisites such as widespread literacy, a modernizing economy generating reasonably high levels of income, and a commitment to the rights of the individual. Thus there are now two competing sets of criteria for judging whether a country can be considered a full-fledged democracy or not. Both have been applied to South Asia, but for different reasons both have come to the conclusion that even India, the most “democratic” among them, was at best a “low-quality democracy.” To understand why, we need to take a closer look at the theories that underpin these criteria.

Structuralist Definition of Democracy

Typically, the structuralists apply economic, institutional, and attitudinal strands of modernization theory to judge democratic development.8 In their view, the development of a capitalist economy creates a rival focus of power to the state. This is an essential precondition for the development of individual freedom. Capitalism also creates a condition in which these individuals are able to band together to attain political or economic goals. Contestation for power among the traditional authoritarian institutions (monarchy and church), the emerging center of power (bourgeoisie), and the increasingly mobilized working class makes power-sharing essential for the continued stability of the state. Democracy emerges as the best method of achieving this goal. A market economy might not lead to equality, but popular participation will produce pressure on the state to remove or ameliorate deprivation and poverty. Other propositions follow from this. A well-organized, vibrant civil society is seen to enhance prospects for democracy whereas an entrenched and powerful class of landed and industrial elites is considered a hindrance to democracy. From this it follows that a moderately high level of income (which, among other things, permits a vast improvement in the spread and quality of education) greatly improves the quality of democracy by increasing the bargaining power of the poor and an awareness of national and social requirements and constraints. One of Barrington Moore Jr.’s works, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, identifies three routes to democracy. 9 He finds that the bourgeois and merchant classes play a pivotal role in bringing about a capitalist liberal democracy from below. He does not find an urban proletariat to be critical in this regard. In contrast, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, in

❑

6

BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH ASIA

their 1992 study of Latin America entitled Capitalist Development and Democracy, find organized working classes of critical importance.10 These scholars might not agree on the causes, but they all look for long-term changes in society and politics. Those who focus on the role of culture and attitudes argue that mass support for democratization comes from society’s own past developments and that before democracy can take root certain mass orientations must be present. Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba regard “civic” culture of pivotal importance to democratic development.11 According to the structural perspective, certain countries make good candidates while others are destined to fail as democracies. A variant of the structuralist argument is also made by various Marxist and neo-Marxist theorists, albeit in a slightly different form. These theorists regard the state as inherently coercive and representative of the dominant and privileged classes in society.

❑

Strategic Choice or Elite Bargaining Theories of Democracy

Instead of concentrating on the social and economic prerequisites of democracy, the strategic choice or elite bargaining theories focus on fulfillment of procedural conditions for democracy. They believe that democracy is born out of contestations between power centers but differ from the structuralists’ view that the contestations that give birth to democracy must necessarily be between established and emergent centers of power.12 Strategic choice theory begins with the premise that in all societies at any given point in time there are already several centers of power. This is because even in most inegalitarian societies the elite is never homogeneous. Democratization begins when the different segments of the elite agree among themselves that they will follow a process of bargaining in order to share power and not try to appropriate all power for themselves. The process of bargaining is therefore allimportant; whether it is between existing elites or between existing and emergent centers of power is a secondary issue. The institutions of democracy can therefore be established without prior structural change. Such change can take place after the advent of democracy just as easily as before. What social change does is alter the nature and number of players who are striking bargains and, therefore, the bargains that are struck. To limit the discussion of democracy only to countries where prior social and economic change has already occurred, as the structuralists do, is to leave a vast number of countries out of the purview of scholarly study.

INTRODUCTION

7

In the elite bargain approach, democratization is explained by examining choices, bargains, power plays, and, most important, the interrelationships between and sequencing of elite actions. Elite bargain theorists are therefore able to distinguish between transitional and consolidated democracies, something that is not easy to do in the structural approach. The consensus that is arrived at within an elite is seldom about the substance or outcome of policy but about open, clearly defined rules of competition in which the winners will not seek to exclude the losers from future contests. Alternatively, the losers will wait their turn to form a government. Democratization is thus a process of institutionalizing uncertainty about political outcomes. The elite bargain theory permits us to focus on actors with definable interests competing with each other to maximize their winnings in the face of definable constraints. This helps to crystallize political interaction between agents of transformation in individual countries. We are not left to deal with faceless forces. This allows us to examine a succession of political changes and relate them step by step to progress in democratization. Elite bargain theories thus seek to free us from the tyranny of Eurocentered historical narratives. Once a country is past the transition and into a stage where “accidental arrangement, prudential norms, and contingent solutions” become routinized and voluntarily accepted by the elites as the basis of democratic governance, it can be said to have reached the stage of consolidation.13 According to Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, consolidation is signaled by three interrelated changes: when no significant national actors or groups or organizations spend time or resources to create nondemocratic alternatives or advocate separation; a majority believes that democracy is the only way to govern collective life; and resolution of conflicts takes place by established procedures, laws, and institutions sanctioned by the democratic process. Consolidation is complete when there is no significant or serious opposition to democracy. ■

SOUTH ASIA IN THE STRUCTURALIST AND ELITE BARGAINING PERSPECTIVES

How have the structuralist and elite bargain perspectives viewed South Asia? For obvious reasons, most students of democracy have concentrated their critiques on India. In comparison, Pakistan and Nepal have attracted less scholarly attention. Somewhat surprisingly, in view of their theoretical differences, both elite bargain theorists and structuralists

8

BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH ASIA

have come to an almost identical conclusion about India: it is a quasiauthoritarian or a low-quality democracy. Atul Kohli, who would be more comfortable among the structuralists, explains the erosion of Indian democracy in terms of the weakening of political institutions, personalization of politics, and popular mobilization without adequate resources.14 The gap between economic and political capabilities, he says, undermines Indian democracy. The state has filled this gap by centralizing the decisionmaking power at the top. Such centralization is seen by Kohli and others to be the principal cause of social violence and ethnic separatism. Comparing India and Pakistan, Ayesha Jalal argues that authoritarianism and democracy should be seen as a case of a continuum rather than opposites in the subcontinent’s politics. 15 Pakistan is overtly authoritarian, India covertly authoritarian. According to her, this is evident from the similarity of challenges they face despite the great differences in their origins, history, and political and economic systems. In her view, both are besieged by conflicts arising from their ethnic, religious, and regional nationalities. The Sikh, Kashmiri, Tamil, and Assamese separatist struggles in India are a mirror image of Bengali, Baluch, and currently Mohajir conflicts in Pakistan. Not unlike Kohli, Jalal also thinks that the attempt to ride roughshod over regional and religious aspirations for autonomy— what she describes as the construction of a monolithic nationalism— is the main cause of alienation and separatism in both countries. Jalal believes India is not a democracy and Pakistan has failed to evolve into one because each has trampled over the autonomy of their constituent parts and ignored demands for distributive justice. Louise T. Brown dismisses Nepal’s transition to democracy for much the same reasons. In the view of Jalal, Kohli, and Brown, the three South Asian countries have, to varying degrees, failed the test of liberty and equality, the key elements of any democracy. Elite bargain perspectives on Pakistan were more sanguine until mid-1997, although most have acknowledged the pervasive influence of the nondemocratic elements, the military, the feudal landed elites, and the high echelons of bureaucracy. In light of these reservations, the denigration of Indian democracy by elite bargain theorists is surprising. By any measure, India fulfills all three criteria laid down by Linz and Stepan. Despite that, Larry Diamond, a leading elite bargain theorist, comes to a wholly negative conclusion about Indian democracy. Diamond bases his condemnation on four additional criteria: political instability, rampant corruption, deep-seated poverty and inequality, and endemic violence.16 In short, he does not consider India a consolidated

INTRODUCTION

9

democracy; at best it qualifies as a transitional one. Diamond’s analysis makes it clear that the three criteria outlined by Linz and Stepan are at best loosely and somewhat subjectively applied when it comes to South Asia. But even if they were not, the same criteria do not apply to other countries in the stage of transition. The subjective nature of this judgment is highlighted by the fact that at the same time Leo Rose, another adherent of the school, believed that despite its short-lived civilian governments and rising sectarian violence Pakistan was moving toward greater democracy.17 Both these judgements cannot be correct at the same time. ■

THE PROs AND CONs OF THE ELITE BARGAIN AND STRUCTURALIST PERSPECTIVES ON SOUTH ASIA

As the elite bargain theorists have pointed out, the main weakness of the structuralist approach is that it is rooted firmly in the experience of European transformation to democracy. Although the elite bargain theories were created to overcome this bias, they have not been able to distance themselves from it. Whether they intended to or not, the structuralists have turned a specific historical experience of a very small number of countries into a template for the entire world and then proceeded to reject the credentials of any country that does not fit that template. There is an obvious naturalistic fallacy in this endeavor, but even if we overlook that, this approach is flawed because, as mentioned earlier, in Europe the three processes—territorial consolidation, industrialization, and democratization—were separated by long periods of time. As a result, democratization in particular took place long after territorial consolidation had been achieved. Thus the question of having to make the trade-offs between the two never arose. In the same way—although industrialization was often coterminous with the establishment of democracy—the rise of capitalism in Europe preceded it by several centuries. The structuralists therefore could afford to take both capitalist development and the consolidated state for granted when studying democracy in the West. This is a luxury denied to the more recent converts to democracy. By turning an end product into a template, the structuralists have left themselves with no conceptual tool to analyze the process of democratization to judge its success or failure. This is what makes it possible for Ayesha Jalal to talk of India and Pakistan in the same breath. This is because structuralism does not permit differentiation between different stages of democratization or between transitional and consolidated democracies.

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BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH ASIA

The elite bargain approach suffers from several weaknesses. The first is that it defines democracy by procedures and form and not by substantive change. The bargaining procedure that it focuses on involves formal organizations and institutions. For instance, elite bargain theorists are interested in the way that the monarchy and church interact with industry, trade unions, and political parties. In the East European context, much of the study of democracy has focused on the position of the communist party after the rise of noncommunist political parties and the assumption of the new economic role by the trade unions. This often leads to a lack of interest in the social and cultural milieu, the historically established patterns of power, and the emergent forces that have not yet taken formal shape. As a result, their theoretical writings run the risk first of overlooking nascent social change that might promote or prevent democratization, then of treating all traditional and inherited elite structures as temporary and headed for extinction as the country modernizes. This is implicit in the very use of the term “transitional.” For instance, the Movement to Restore Democracy (MRD) made Nepal a constitutional monarchy in 1990. But the constitution contained unusual provisions that preserved the special emergency powers of the king. Should such extraordinary powers be considered undemocratic because they constrained popular sovereignty? Or could we argue that democracy is not possible without a unified state and that the special scope of king’s power ought to be considered an integral part of democratic development in Nepal? The elite bargain literature does talk about hybrid regimes in the period of transition. One might, however, argue that hybrid regimes may not be transitional but essential to the operation of a stable democracy. The second weakness of the elite bargain perspective is its preoccupation with well-articulated elite institutions; the elite bargain theories overlook the role that primordial, often inchoate entities can play in promoting or retarding the development of democracy. This is highlighted by the Jan Andolan movement (same as MRD) in Nepal, whereas that of treating all traditional elites as transient is underscored by the rebound of the Nepali monarchy into a position of preeminence after that movement had succeeded in severely curtailing its powers. In Pakistan, too, the power of Islam in shaping the course of democracy cannot be judged by the 3 percent vote that the religious political parties have received in recent elections.18 On the whole, both structuralist and elite bargain perspectives take a negative view of “primordial” identities based on caste, ethnicity, and religion. Strategic choice literature largely perceives ethnic loyalties to be destabilizing, with the exception of Arend Lijphart, who regards ethnic

INTRODUCTION

11

diversity constructively to argue for a consociational democracy in which ethnic nationalities evolve a consensus on power-sharing. Kohli and Jalal are, however, inclined to regard traditional culture and democracy as largely incompatible. Kohli argues that societies riven by parochial and divisive identities make a poor soil to root democracy, although he acknowledges their role in opening the electoral system in the interim. 19 This is because they both share the deep-rooted belief that democracy links the individual directly to the state via the electoral system and are suspicious of any group other than those based on economic interests that claims an intermediate loyalty. Islamic identity is critical to the legitimacy of a Pakistani nation-state. Caste, religion, and ethnicity make precisely this claim, yet we find that groups based on these appeals have made a remarkable adjustment to electoral politics. In South Asia, they have expanded popular participation in the democratic process by mobilizing people on the basis of these loyalties. They have redefined democracy but transformed themselves from inchoate and transient into formal groups capable of entering into lasting bargains with other segments of the elite. This transformation creates formal entities that bear little resemblance to the interest groups and lobbies in the first models of pluralist democracy with which we are familiar. If democracy empowers people against dominant structures of power and privilege (represented by the central state), then such cultural identities, in the broad sense of the term, play a double role. They reinforce the central state but also offset its totalizing influence. Whether ethnic mobilization leads to the defusion or aggravation of conflict depends on the nature of the accommodating mechanism. In this respect, India has been far more innovative than Pakistan and Nepal. India is a democratic state not in spite of but because of its multiethnic, multinational society. The modern Indian state, like the former British and Mughal state, rests on a bed of opposing pulls between regional and central authority. The Indian state exists to reconcile these divergent pulls.20 It could use coercion, but that is unlikely to deliver a stable and viable regime. That leaves for the Indian central state the option of compromise and negotiations, grant of autonomy, and rule by consensus. Even the authoritarian Mughal state and British Raj recognized the need to hold their empire together through judicious application of force and compromise. They recognized that the subcontinental unity of their Indian empire was not possible without also recognizing regional centers of power and creating a layered structure of differential sovereignty in which regions, princes, and communities could all coexist with a large degree of political autonomy. In the postindependence period, modern democratic institutions have served

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BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH ASIA

to reconcile India’s vast heterogeneity. However, their other priority is to protect national unity. Both are the constitutive principles of the modern Indian state. The elite bargain perspective’s third weakness is that it applies the standards of stability and governance derived mainly from the Western experience to evaluate democratic development to countries with an entirely different history and trajectory of economic development. This has, for instance, led to denigrating efforts at combining democracy with national consolidation, a task fraught with gargantuan difficulties for the leaders in the three South Asian states. Elite bargain’s superficial focus on the most visible aspects of political change leads to incorrect assessment of democratic development. A leading scholar of post–Cold War democratization, Larry Diamond, cites four weaknesses in the Indian state—instability, violence, corruption, and poverty—to conclude that it is at best a quasidemocracy or a low-quality democracy. Diamond’s description of the Indian state as unstable is based on the frequency with which governments fall and the prevalence of coalition governments. But this view fails to distinguish between the instability of governments and the stability of the political system. Much the same criticism could have been made of the Third and Fourth Republics in France, but no one considered French democracy to be a low-quality democracy then. Besides, this judgment reflects a preoccupation with politics at the apex. Whereas the central government frequently changed hands in New Delhi throughout the 1990s, the state governments (i.e., in the provinces) have shown remarkable stability, a marked decline in dismissals or governmental collapse, and the beginnings of a fairly stable two-party (three-party) system. Indeed, one might argue that the consolidation of competition at the provincial level makes for an unstable coalition at the center because different states have two distinctly different parties competing for the popular vote. According to Oliver Heath, who has analyzed data for all the elections based on seats won and vote share by parties, India is now a “collection of two-party systems” at the state and constituency levels.21 If one were to focus entirely on the governments at the national level, India appears politically unstable. Still, the locus of power and effective governance has shifted to the states that appear to be operating on a fairly stable cast of political parties and actors. What we must then take into account is the growing stability amid frequent national elections. To focus entirely on the instability of national government as a measure of India’s low-quality democracy is to miss much that is significant and exciting about India’s experience of democratization.

INTRODUCTION

13

It cannot be denied that the Indian state has taken frequent recourse to coercion, whether to quell insurgency or, more regularly, to curb political unrest and communal violence. It is also true that a level of coercion has been institutionalized in laws, like the Maintenance of Internal Security Act and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act, that is far in excess of institutionalized coercion in the mature democracies. But we need to desegregate incidents of violence, because these differ in the way they impact on and relate to democratization. The causes of ethnic violence in Punjab and the Northeast are not the same as those behind caste violence in Bihar or violence between Hindu and Muslim communities in Mumbai in 1993. In Punjab and the Northeast, violence is a result of failure of the central state to respond to ethnic demands for greater power-sharing between New Delhi and provinciallevel governments. It is also a result of factionalism within the ethnic community. Each faction has tried to strike a separate bargain with the state and undermine or eliminate potential opposition to such bargains. The followers of the Sikh militant leader Bhindranwale targeted and killed as many if not more Sikhs than they killed Hindus during the ten years of turmoil in Punjab. Caste violence, in contrast, is rooted in the inadequate land reforms, perpetuation of structures of caste dominance, and growing mobilization of lower castes because of their expansion in the electoral process. The state is implicated more in its absence than in deliberately setting off caste wars. This is not to deny the complicity of local police in failing to protect the poor, the low caste, and minorities but to suggest that the state in its coercive as well as welfare functions is part of the complex process of bargain and negotiation within the broad frame of Indian democracy. It has been so because the process of national consolidation has accompanied the process of democratic expansion in India. Indeed, one might point to Pakistan and Nepal as instances where “public” violence has increased with the advent of elections and party politics. But again the causes of violence are many and suggest a different relationship between governance and violence. In Pakistan, electoral politics has intensified rivalry among the Sindhis, Muhajirs, Pathans, and Balochis in Karachi. The sectarian violence in Gilgit and Jhang happens more or less each year during the same time. Its recent spread to Karachi and cities in Punjab has more to do with Pakistan’s internalization of conflicts in Afghanistan.22 There was undoubtedly more violence in Pakistan in the 1990s than in the previous decade, but there was also more institutionalized oppression in the previous decade. There was certainly no party competition under Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship.

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Democracies are usually less effective in curbing violence than are authoritarian regimes. In Nepal, the leftist militant movement has perpetrated a great deal of violence, but that is hardly a sign of increasing authoritarianism in Nepal. What it shows is the weakness of Nepal’s new democracy to replace extremist groups with political parties that would adequately represent the constituencies in the grip of such violence. Thus we need to desegregate violence and alter our conceptual frame to admit the proposition that democratic transformations are likely to produce an increase in public violence and that violence is an integral part of the negotiation process. A prolonged cycle of violence and coercion has of course a different impact—oftentimes dangerous to the choice between liberty and oppression—when democratic alternatives are tentative, as they are in Nepal and Pakistan. Diamond also overlooks the fact that in the vast majority of cases the state is using its coercive powers to suppress insurgency or social turmoil when other means of accommodation through bargaining have failed. Thus coercion is often if not always a weapon of last resort, much as it is in the Western democracies. This is more true in India than in Pakistan and Nepal, where the state is far less certain of its hold on the nation. The fact that it has to be used more frequently reflects the much less settled condition of the South Asian polities. The unsettled conditions arise partly from the fact that the territorial boundaries of a young state are not yet settled, partly out of the immense changes in social relationships that are accompanying the attempt to force the pace of modernization and industrialization, partly out of the growing political awareness fostered by the exercise of democratic rights themselves. In short, the higher level of coercion is a product of the attempt to do simultaneously what the European democracies did in a staggered manner and over a period of four hundred years. Corruption, the third of Diamond’s reasons for downgrading Indian democracy and, by logical extension, the recent developments in Pakistan and Nepal, is perhaps the most serious of the four he posits. Some degree of corruption exists in all states. Thus to assign it a political role one has to distinguish corruption that becomes a threat to the development of democracy from corruption simpliciter. The main function of corruption simpliciter is to create a way around government regulations. In this regard, the Indian situation is different from those in Nepal and Pakistan. In India the centralizing democratic state has existed for fifty years. Since laws and regulations are framed to protect the rights of existing, identifiable groups and individuals, a rise in corruption often signals the rise of new economic interests in society. Ideally, when these attain a certain strength and maturity they should be

INTRODUCTION

15

able to alter the bargain on which democracy rests. This will be reflected in the modification of existing laws and the enactment of new ones. However, beyond a point corruption can and does create a vested interest in favor of itself, that is, against any change in the existing laws. It thus becomes an obstacle to the striking of a new bargain through open contestation and, therefore, an obstacle to the development of democracy.23 Anyone who is familiar with the existing journalistic and academic literature on the growth of corruption in India and, more particularly, on the nexus that has developed between it—crime and politics— would concede that corruption probably has attained the dimensions where it is hindering political development and economic change. But before passing judgment on its effect on Indian democracy, it would be well to remember that the laws that the corrupt seek to protect did have a purpose and that the purpose may still be valid. For instance, the entire edifice of protective laws that created economic autarchy in India was intended to limit competition. Competition was discouraged because it created not only winners but also losers. And in a poor country, the losers far outnumbered the winners. After four decades of autarchy Indian policymakers realized that the policy was shortsighted and had failed to make India a modern and prosperous industrialized country. As a result, in 1991 the government began a phased program of economic liberalization. Today it is this very program that the vested interests who had thrived on corruption are trying to slow down. Yet the unalterable fact remains that not everyone will lose from their success. There are tens of millions of employers and workers in the unorganized and small-scale sectors of industry and trade who will lose their livelihood if those controls are removed. Protection, subsidies, and attendant corruption, which slows down the pace of change, improves their chances of weathering the transition from a closed to an open economy. Thus even when corruption becomes rampant its impact on a consolidated democracy is likely to be different from what it will be on a transitional democracy. In the former, the hurdles to open contestation that it erects will prove far less harmful in the aggregate because the damage done is offset by the benefits that accrue to some segments of society. In the latter, where the elite bargain is fragile and the rules of open contestation have not had time to jell, these hurdles may suffice to make some actors withdraw from the bargaining process and resort to force once again. While the state-led growth strategy bred corruption and created a wasteful bureaucracy in all three countries, their political structures have impacted differently on their economic performance.

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India grew slowly, but its inward-looking economy shielded it from the shocks of vacillating global markets. Its democracy forced governments to undertake real efforts to eliminate famines, create a structure to reach assistance in the event of floods or droughts, and generally hold the line on inflation. Indeed, Indian governments during the era of Congress dominance and thereafter have been particularly sensitive to inflationary pressures and its consequences for the economy and politics. Despite repeated exhortations, the postreform Indian governments have been reluctant to cut subsidies—which has contributed to the creation of a substantial (estimated to be about 200 million) middle class— precisely because it would endanger the stability and electoral chances of incumbent ruling parties. Whereas corruption has fed and reinforced the “spoils system” that greases the mechanisms of the state, electoral expansion has forced India’s leaders to balance it by extending state subsidies to larger and larger numbers of groups. These range from small businesses, agricultural producers, and peasants to the poorest, who must depend on the state for food and employment. Diamond’s reasoning for considering the mere existence (as opposed to progressive deepening) of poverty and inequality as black marks against the claim to democratization are not easy to follow. If poverty equals lack of democracy, then affluence must make people democratic. More affluence must therefore necessarily make people and societies more democratic. Since this is obviously not the case, the argument must run somewhat differently. One argument that links poverty to democracy is that of the so-called poverty trap. A large number of studies have established that social turmoil arises when people are on a rising curve of income. Conversely, when people are both poor and extremely insecure about where their next meal will come from, they do not have the capacity to bargain for a better deal. If this were true of India, then its poverty would promote political passivity. That would permit the elites to inflict a high degree of inequity on the masses without provoking a backlash. Poverty thus becomes a ready explanation for the coexistence of a high level of coercion by the state and entrenched elites with a substantial degree of political stability. This argument might hold for some other countries, but it does not for India and, for that matter, Pakistan. Even a cursory glance at available statistics on life expectancy, birthrates and death rates, and levels of per capita consumption of food grains, fruit and vegetables, dairy products, edible oils, and cloth shows that incomes and standards of living have risen steadily except where the causes of poverty are structural. The rise has been particularly noticeable in the past three decades and more after the onset of the green revolution. In fact, rising incomes

INTRODUCTION

17

have greatly accelerated the political mobilization of India’s backward castes, Dalits (scheduled castes) and other low-income groups. Many of the incidents of violence that have gone into the negative assessment of Indian democratization, such as between caste groups in Bihar and elsewhere, reflect the rising economic power of the down and out and the consequent increase in their capacity to challenge the status quo. Last, the democratic peace thesis, which is a spinoff of the current debate on globalization of democracy, has also failed to see that consolidation imperatives will forestall progression from democracy to peace between nations. The propositions of the democratic peace thesis are only partly applicable in South Asia. Although Russett specifically mentions India and Pakistan as a likely pair where his thesis has held fast, the course of events in the 1990s shows the opposite. There have been more tensions and armed clashes, cross-border interventions and subversive support, and sanctuaries to separatists not designed to promote peace and harmony, although arguably both India and Pakistan (until 1999) had moved toward more open and freer systems of electoral contestation. Russett either fails to take these factors into account, or he believes that they would be neutralized by desires for democracy and peace. Not unlike the elite bargain theorists, Russett also accepts the standard definition of democratization in which civil society’s triumph over the state is considered to be a democratic step forward. He ignores the way in which consolidation imperatives can overpower the impulse to peace. ■

CONTEXTUALIZING DEMOCRATIZATION

What, then, are these consolidation imperatives? They are: security; development and economic growth; extension of political participation/ democracy; and regime sustenance or leadership survival. The security dimension involves building an adequate defense and warding off undue external interference in one’s domestic affairs. This could mean building self-reliance in arms or obtaining arms from abroad, or forming defensive alliances or its opposite, insulating the region from external power. The economic growth/development aspect focuses on the rate of liberalization and economic dependence or opening up of the national economy. In most developing countries, as in South Asia, the state is the principle economic actor. It can counteract exploitation by the global economy. A democratizing state in the developing world needs to balance its internal need for economic protection against the external pressures to initiate liberal reforms. The

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critical question here is the control over the pace and direction of change. Integration of a national economy into the international market is never without costs. Some measure of regulation will be necessary to even the balance between the “losers” and “winners.” The effort to slow down dislocation is not necessarily undemocratic, even though such effort may not meet the conventional norms of democratic procedures. The pressures to extend participation are ever-present in many developing countries. Participation does not always produce liberal democracies. Majorities can be intolerant and illiberal. Consolidated democracies possess institutional and political mechanisms to countervail illiberal tendencies. Ethnic and regional bargains have frequently mitigated, for instance, the centralizing agendas of the Congress and Hindu nationalist governments in India. Transitional democracies are likely to be more vulnerable to such ideologies. Islamic groups and parties exert far greater influence in Pakistan than warranted by their votes in electoral contests. Finally, there are the personal and political calculations of the incumbents and new leaders. Rivalries and competitions often shape the choices that leaders make. These choices might throw up a variety of survival strategies: in Pakistan it could be Islamization; in Nepal a Panchayat Raj or partyless democracy; in India it could be types of affirmative action legislated to secure vote banks and defuse social strife. In responding to pressures, a country might violate the criteria of equity and competitive elections that are the conventional hallmarks of democracy. But the choices they make are not necessarily antidemocratic, at least not in the context of their own history of development. Consolidation imperatives, then, provide us with a more discriminating conceptual frame for evaluating the progress toward or away from democracy. To recapitulate: this book assumes that democratization can be pursued only within the frame of a nation-state. It distinguishes between democracy and democratization and regards the latter as an unfinished process. Democratization is interpreted as democratic integration of a nation’s diverse parts into a single political community through free and regular electoral contests. Different stages of transition to democracy will produce different problems of democratic integration. For transitional democracies, such as Pakistan and Nepal, progress depends largely on how well they protect the original bargain while progressively expanding its popular base. For more consolidated democracies, such as India, the tests are in ability to forge conflict-defusing bargains with its ethnic and caste-based constituencies. India must do so while moving in the direction of greater equality and representation. The advantage of this perspective is that it captures the “real world” of

INTRODUCTION

19

democracy within which states and their leaders are required to make political choices. ■

CONCLUSION

■

NOTES

Since most countries caught in the “third wave” are in the process of establishing or strengthening democracies, what we urgently need is a roadmap to evaluate a country’s journey toward that goal. The structural transformation theorists illuminate the long-term economic and social developments that propel democratization but offer no perspective that captures the process in the interim period. As a result, they hold democracy hostage to their notions of economic equality, distributive justice, and advances in civic culture. The elite bargain approach has several advantages but is unable in its current formulation to explain fully the process of democratization in South Asia. This is because of their preoccupation with articulated elite institutions and their neglect of (bordering on hostility toward) traditional, often inchoate entities. Elite bargain theory focuses narrowly on leaders and formal organizations but fails to capture the importance of primordial groups or to appreciate their capacity to transform themselves into modern actors without losing their inherent nature. Elite bargain theories fail above all because they, too, do not have a model that can accommodate and explain the trade-offs that become necessary when a country tries to pursue the four objectives—territorial consolidation, regime stabilization, economic development, and democratization—at the same time. Whereas this is what more and more countries are trying to do since the collapse of the Cold War, a study of the democratization process in the transitional and consolidated democracies of South Asia can yield a harvest of valuable insights for understanding and guiding the process of change elsewhere.

1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (1989): 4. Singapore’s foreign minister, Wong Kan Seng, commented that the “universal recognition of the ideal of human rights can be harmful if universality is used to deny or mask the reality of diversity.” Quoted in John Rourke and Mark Boyer, International Politics on the World Stage (Madison: Brown and Benchmark, 1996), p. 167. 2. A short list would include Paul Brass, Politics of India Since Independence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Atul Kohli, ed., Indian

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Democracy: An Analysis of Changing State-Society Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Myron Weiner, The Indian Paradox (New York: Sage Publications, 1989); Maya Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Peter Van Der Veer, Religious Nationalism, Hindus, and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987); Lok Baral, Nepal: Problem of Governance (New York: Advent Books, 1993); Shahid Javed Burki, Pakistan: The Continuing Search for Nationhood (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992); Shahid Javed Burki and Craig Baxter, eds., Pakistan Under the Military: Eleven Years of Zia-Ul Haq (Boulder Colorado: Westview Press, 1991). 3. Rajni Kothari must be credited with pioneering work on India’s political system, particularly the Congress system; Brass has done seminal work in political identity, ethnic conflicts, and the nature of violence in India. Atul Kohli has built on the late Myron Weiner’s work on state-level politics and constructed a conceptual frame to analyze institutional decay and weakening governance. There are several others who have similarly contributed to the literature on history, economics, and legal-political developments of India. 4. Daniel Bell, “Democracy in Confucian Societies: The Challenge of Justification,” in Daniel A. Bell et al., Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia (London: Macmillian, 1995); Lucian Pye and Mary Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 329–334. 5. For left-oriented modernization theorists see Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Stephens, and John Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). For pluralists see Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited,” American Sociological Review 59 (February 1994): 1–22. 6. Although the burden of the democratic peace thesis rests on evidence from established liberal democracies, Russett suggests that while India fulfills his criteria of democracy, Pakistan does not. But Pakistan has begun to do so (since 1988). He then argues that periods under elected governments have been free of conflict in the subcontinent. Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles of the Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 20. 7. Juan Linz, “Transition to Democracy,” Washington Quarterly 13(3) (summer 1990): 143–164; Phillippe Schmitter, “The Consolidation of Democracy and Representation of Social Group,” American Behavioral Scientist 35 (March/June 1992): 422–449. 8. K. A. Bollen, “Political Democracy and the Timing of Development,” American Sociological Review 44(4) (1979): 572–587. K. A. Bollen, “World System Position, Dependence, and Democracy: The Cross-national Evidence,” American Sociological Review 48(4) (1983): 468–479. M. J. Gasiorowski, “Economic Dependence and Political Democracy: A Cross-national Study,”

INTRODUCTION

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Comparative Political Studies 20(4) (1988): 489–515. M. J. Gasiorowski, “Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change: An Event History Analysis,” American Political Science Review 89(4) (1995): 882–897. L. S. Gonick and R. M. Rosh, “The Structural Constraints of the World Economy on National Political Development,” Comparative Political Studies 21(2) (1988): 171–199. R. Gunther, P. N. Diamandouros,, and H. J. Puhle, , eds., The Politics of Democratic Consolidation: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). A. Hadenius, Democracy and Development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 9. Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 414. 10. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). 11. Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963). More recently, the cultural factor is discussed in Russell Dalton Jr., “Communists and Democrats: Attitudes Towards Democracy in Two Germanies,” British Journal of Political Science 24 (1994): 469–493. 12. For discussion of elite bargain and strategic choice theory see Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Allen Unwin, 1942, repr. 1976); Terry Lynn Karl, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,” in Dankwart A. Rustow and Kenneth Paul Erikson, eds., Comparative Political Dynamics (New York: Harper Collins, 1991); Larry Diamond, “Three Paradoxes of Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 3 (summer 1990): 48–60; Adam Przeworski, Scott Mainwaring, Guillermo O’Donnell, and J. Samuel Valenzuela, eds., Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992); Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 13. Schmitter, “The Consolidation of Democracy,” p. 424. 14. Kohli, Democracy and Discontent. 15. Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 6. 16. Larry Diamond, Juan Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Politics in Developing Countries: Comparing Experiences with Democracy (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995), p. 14. 17. Leo Rose and D. H. Evans, “Pakistan’s Enduring Experience,” Journal of Democracy (1997): 83–96. 18. Ian Shapiro comments on this flaw and shows how it leaves important gaps in understanding the democratic dynamics (for instance, in the new South Africa). In his view, the elite bargain theories regard key groups as internally monolithic. In reality, he says, “political parties, trade unions, business organizations, churches and military contain various fissures that may be more or less latent. As political terrain begins to shift during a transition, these fissures come under pressures of various kinds, and different players try to exploit them. The effects, while often impossible to predict, can be massively consequential for democracy’s future.” See Shapiro, “The Third Wave:

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Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century,” World Politics 46(1) (October 1993): 121–150. 19. Atul Kohli writes, “Prevailing cultural traditions in developing countries do not readily mesh with the imported model of political democracy.” See Kohli, “Can Democracies Accommodate Ethnic Nationalism? Rise and Decline of Self-determination Movements in India,” Journal of South Asian Studies 56(2) (1997): 327. 20. Maya Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), chap. 1. 21. Oliver Heath, “The Fractionalisation of Indian Parties,” Seminar (New Delhi) 480, August 1999. This same argument is to be found in Pradeep Chhibber, Democracy Without Associations: Transformation of the Party System and Social Cleavages in India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 80–81. 22. I would like to thank Matthew Nelson for insightful comments on the Pakistani political scene, particularly the connection between violence and democracy in the late 1990s. His observations were based on two recent visits, first in 1997–1998 (August–July), and again in 1999 (January–June); see “Making Sense of Property Rights: Land, Law, and Local Politics in the Punjab, 1849–1999” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University). 23. New York Times, 21 October 1999.

2

The History of the Democratic Experience in South Asia Why did electoral democracy take root in India in the first four decades after independence while it failed repeatedly in Pakistan and Nepal? This question has long puzzled scholars and policymakers of South Asia. To this, a new and equally riveting question has been added in recent years: How did the experience of the past affect the democratic prospects of Pakistan, Nepal, and India in the 1990s? Both questions require some familiarity with South Asia’s postcolonial history. That is the purpose here. This chapter will construct a context to evaluate democratic developments in the three countries. Only key events will be discussed. In the postcolonial period, each country fashioned a distinctive response to the challenges it faced during the last half-century. Some suggest that India turned to democracy because of inherited advantages such as the long history of nationalist struggle, a coherent political party with subcontinental spread, and a phalanx of regional and central nationalist leadership committed to liberal democracy. Others reject this argument and suggest that whether or not a country was destined to be a democracy is determined by the distribution of political and economic power. 1 Although it is true that power and wealth came to be greatly concentrated in all three countries over the passage of fifty years, their individual histories have not been immune to powerful stirrings of democracy. With the exception of one suspension of habeas corpus for about nineteen months in the mid-1970s, India remained committed to elections. In Nepal and Pakistan, mass protests paved the way for brief but potent experiences of democracy. These were soon aborted, but the taste of popular power made it increasingly difficult for the authoritarian elements in Nepal and Pakistan to ignore public opinion. During these decades, considerable economic growth

23

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occurred in all three countries, although poverty remained widespread and acute. Any account of South Asia would be incomplete without considering efforts at modern nation-state building. Admittedly, such efforts were motivated by the desire to protect elite privileges, but they were also propelled by the desire to construct a modern nation-state. This quest led the Pakistani elite to make different choices from leaders in India. In Nepal, the monarchy represented the state. The Nepali king sought to combine the old with the new, the traditional bases of his power with promotion of modern development designed to make Nepal into a modern nation-state. But the conditions of birth proved decisive to the fate of the nation-state and democracy in many instances. Shared borders, unconsolidated territories, and overlapping ethnicity were a combustible mix that frequently exploded into war and covert crossborder interventions. The urge to modernity and its iniquitous effects have produced, generally, three types of movements and conflicts in the region. First was the struggle to create composite national identities. Pakistan, India, and Nepal are all heterogeneous nation-states where identity is fiercely contested. How far does Islam explain politics in Pakistan? How do we fit the rise of Hindu nationalism into a “secular” India? How do we reconcile the notion of individual rights with the caste-based Hindu state of Nepal? Second was the conflict over power sharing between diverse ethnolinguistic regions and the central state. Frequently, the constituent regions of these countries demand the right to self-determination. Such movements undermine nation-state consolidation. Third was the conflict around governance, that is, management and distribution of resources, offices, policies, and positions within a country. How did India, Nepal, and Pakistan manage these conflicts, and what was their impact on the fate of democracy in South Asia? ■

PAKISTAN

In the first decade of independence, Pakistan witnessed a rapid erosion of hopes to make the new nation a democracy. The trauma of partition and the communal killings that followed had made India an enemy and a threat. The partition had also created a geographically absurd Pakistan: a country divided into an east wing dominated by Bengali-speaking Muslims and a west wing ruled by leaders from the Mohajir, Pathan, and Punjabi ethnic communities. In the new state of Pakistan, Punjab and Punjabis emerged to the center of the stage. They dominated the

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25

civil and military services and the top positions in government, which led to increasing resentment by Bengali Muslims in East Pakistan.2 To compound these difficulties, Pakistan lost its two top leaders in a short span of time after independence. In September 1948, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, died. Subsequently, Liaquat Ali Khan, the first prime minister of Pakistan, was assassinated in October 1951. After Liaquat Ali’s death, power passed into the hands of the bureaucracy and military leaders. In 1954, Pakistan’s governor-general dissolved the National Assembly and, in scant regard for democratic norms, appointed Muhammad Ali Bogra as the prime minister. The dismissal of the elected National Assembly was justified on the grounds of separatist threats from East Pakistan. Subsequently, the four provinces of Sindh, Baluchistan, North West Frontier Province (NWFP), and Punjab were consolidated into a single unit. These moves strengthened the military bureaucratic elite against civilian leaders in West and East Pakistan. Pakistan did not get its first constitution until 1956. By then, India had twice gone to the polls to democratically elect its national governments. On 7 October 1958, President Iskander Mirza, with the support of the army, suspended the 1956 constitution, imposed martial law, and canceled the elections scheduled for January 1959. Twenty days later, the military sent Mirza into exile and General Mohammad Ayub Khan assumed control of the Pakistani state.3 The first spark of democratic beginning in 1950 was snuffed out. Pakistan passed into the hands of a military dictator in 1958. Between 1951 and 1958, Pakistan had two governorgenerals, Ghulam Mohammad (1951–1955) and Iskander Mirza (1955– 1958), and one commander in chief, General Ayub Khan, and seven prime ministers who were either dismissed or lost out in the fierce and fractious scramble for power in the assembly. Between 1947 and 1954, the bureaucratic and military elite arbitrarily dismissed nine provincial governments. The conflict between the state and democracy has been stark in Pakistan. Many have argued that democracy has been crushed because Pakistan’s armed forces could not live with the uncertainty of party politics.4 The military’s frequent and arbitrary interventions prevented the development of institutions that could have routinized political uncertainty. In the absence of institutions and rules, civilian regimes performed poorly. Conflicts among the civilian elites gave the armed forces justification to intervene, and these interventions prevented the establishment of democracy. Although the pernicious impact of military interventions is undeniable, we must exercise caution in concluding that a full-blown democracy would have been a viable alternative

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in Pakistan in the early 1950s. Such an interpretation would lead us to the erroneous assumption that the Pakistani state was born whole and strong and seized by the military simply for the purposes of self-aggrandizement. It is true that the military has dominated Pakistan’s political life and profited disproportionately from it. But in the early 1950s, the Pakistani state was neither strong nor integrated. The military’s dominance in Pakistan’s politics, at least in the early years, was a consequence of inherited disadvantages. The civilian leaders could not cope with the perceived threats from India, economic dislocation, and vociferous challenges from its ethnic nationalities. The military moved in to do what the parties could not, and once in that position the military could not be dislodged to make way for durable democratic governments, at least until the 1990s. And even then the post-1990s elected governments were hardly stable. Pakistan experienced two brief moments of democratic stirring before 1988, which is the focus of discussion here. Neither experience qualified it to be a transitional democracy. Each was snuffed out by a military takeover, first in 1958 and again in 1977. For the intervening years, Pakistan was ruled by authoritarian regimes.

First Democratic Moment

The Pakistani state had to emerge from the chaos caused by the migration of 14 million people across the Indo-Pakistani border, then construct a political roof for its nation amid the first Indo-Pakistani war over Kashmir. Pakistan’s civil society was not only fragmented; its government was also too weak to compel or coerce. In 1947, of the 1,157 Indian civil service officers, only ninety-five opted for Pakistan. These were joined by one Christian and eleven Muslim military officers transferred to the civil service from the armed forces. To this, fifty Britons were added, bringing the total number to 157, but it was evident that most British officers would return to England. Only twenty of these total number had more than fifteen years of service, and more than half had less than ten in any kind of service. 5 This is hardly an adequate base to forge a new nation-state or to overpower and suspend party democracy. A certain degree of concentration at the center, a clustering of class power, and an alignment of interests and use of force in the integration of Pakistan’s geopolitically diverse and farflung regions had to then occur. There could be no state without these developments. And if there was no state, then there could be no democratization in Pakistan. These circumstances forged the initial equilibrium between the state and democracy in Pakistan.

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27

Pakistan faced formidable security challenges to its unity in these early years. The threat from India and the difficulty of defending geographically divided Pakistan were overwhelming. The need to establish popular legitimacy receded in the face of these dangers. Pakistan was declared an Islamic republic, but Islam was simply an emblem of unity, not a design for its governance—at least not according to its founding leaders. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan is a subject of considerable controversy.6 From the very beginning, then, no one in Pakistan could agree what its identity was to be. Was Pakistan an Islamic state, or was it a liberal secular democratic state that merely acknowledged Islam as the religion of its majority? The conflict over identity was compounded by Pakistan’s ethnic heterogeneity. There was no compelling political force, party, leader, or ideology that could unify the country. Pakistan’s provinces—Baluchistan, Sindh, Punjab, and East Bengal—had been the hub of ethnic, not Pakistani, nationalism before independence.7 The Hindu-Muslim violence at the time of partition obscured the demands for provincial autonomy momentarily, but that moment soon passed. There was no agreement on how to divide state power between the national and regional governments. This problem was made more difficult by the impossible geographical spread of the new nation-state. East and West Pakistan were divided by a large swath of Indian territory. The East Pakistanis spoke Bengali and identified closely with their fellow ethnics across the border in India. Just before partition, leading East Pakistani personalities had raised the demand for a greater Bengal within the frame of a loosely federated India. That was not to be, but demands for autonomy and democracy remained the enduring refrain in relations between West and East Pakistan. Pakistan as a whole did not possess strong political parties with grassroots organization or a phalanx of national leaders. The Muslim League (ML) was lacking in both. Its organization was weakest in the areas of Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan, NWFP, and East Bengal that had opted for a separate Pakistan.8 The Punjabi landowners had been generally hostile to the League in the prepartition days. The Baluch had hardly heard about the League. In the Frontier Province, the League had some support among the shopkeepers, small traders, and civil servants, but in the Pathan countryside Khudai Khidmatgars of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s party retained a firm hold over the majority. In the Sindh, the League had grown in popularity but was split between the landed elements and their opponents. There was the additional problem of rehabilitating and integrating the millions of new migrants and reconciling their aspirations with the

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prior claims of the powerful feudal elements in West Pakistan. The country’s geographical division prevented the building of a unified Muslim League. In fact, the largely feudal leadership of the Muslim League was adverse to the idea of democratic contestation. Popular elections raised the specter of immediate loss of control over Pakistan. East Pakistan constituted a numerical majority. In an election, the Bengalis in the eastern part of Pakistan were in a position to use their numerical strength to dominate the central government. This was anathema to the civil military bureaucracy and feudal landlords in West Pakistan.9 This same fear had prevented an early consensus on the constitution for Pakistan. While the fear of Bengali domination delayed and undermined democracy, conflict over Kashmir threatened Pakistan’s national security. The problem of overlapping nationalities and ethnic continuity had not ended with partition. In fact partition had created new threats and opportunities for cross-border intervention. In 1947, the kingdom of Kashmir was ruled by a Hindu Maharajah, but the majority of its people were Muslims.10 The Muslim League had argued that the principle of Muslim majority made Kashmir a part of Pakistan. The League ignored the argument that it lacked popular support in Kashmir, that Kashmiri Sufi Islam was distinctly different from the mainstream Sunni Islam of Pakistan, and that Kashmiri nationalist leaders had more in common with the more secular and socialist orientations of the Indian National Congress of Jawaharlal Nehru than with the Muslim League of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Above all, Sheikh Abdullah, Kashmir’s supreme leader, wanted it to be independent of both India and Pakistan. The Muslim League argued that without Kashmir Pakistan remained incomplete. In contrast, India argued that Kashmir belonged to it on the principle of territoriality and the legal validity of the instruments of accession signed by Maharajah Hari Singh. The merits of India’s and Pakistan’s respective claims need not detain us here. It is enough to note that Kashmir thereafter became the symbol of unfulfilled promise and a threat to Pakistan’s security. Pakistan spent 60 percent of its budget in the early years on defense needs.11 Expenditures at such levels aggravated conflicts over provincial autonomy in Pakistan. The rehabilitation of 14 million people had already strained the resources of the fragile state. Its share of the assets at the time of partition had been meager. Meeting defense needs meant extracting more revenues from the provinces and crushing political challenge. Pakistan seemed to have no choice but to resort to what Muhammad Ayoob calls the process of “primitive accumulation of power” to construct its central state. 12 Had there been no security

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threat, the emergent Pakistani state might have had the luxury of evolving a consensus on the distribution of federal power. As it was, executive ordinances and coercion quickly replaced negotiations. The war of 1948 divided Kashmir by an uneasy cease-fire line, but Pakistani leaders were convinced that their larger and more powerful neighbor had not accepted the partition and would use force to regain the parts lost to Pakistan. These fears fed into larger and larger military budgets and denial of political autonomy to provinces. In 1954, Pakistan agreed to become a part of the U.S. Cold War containment strategy. Coincidently, U.S. policymakers were also convinced that the defense of the northern-tier countries—Iran, Iraq, and Turkey—against the Soviet Union would not be effective without Pakistan.13 Pakistani and U.S. interests thus converged, offering the former an international ally against India. Joining the Cold War, however, strengthened the military at the expense of political democracy. After Jinnah’s death in 1948, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan had struggled valiantly to maintain unity in the face of tensions created by the influx of refugees, war, and ethnic disaffection. The fledgling state could not reconcile its inherent contradictions. Pakistan therefore opted for the viceregal model of the state, in which the executive prevailed over the parliament.14 Scholars have argued that the usurpation of power by the military occurred because the central state was too powerful in relation to the civil society. The civilian leaders did not represent the masses but spoke instead for vested interests of the rich and powerful. In any event, they had failed to establish a basis for a responsible government. There is some truth to the above argument, if we look at the course of events before the military took over in 1958. The collapse of the Muslim League, contradictions between East and West, and anguish over Pakistan’s secular, as opposed to Islamic, identity converged in an extraordinary set of regional, domestic, and international dilemmas. Others have, however, argued that it was not the undemocratic character of the parties or their weakness but the deliberate usurpation of power—the continuous interference in politics by the bureaucracy— that crushed the fragile flower of democracy. The bureaucratic undermining of parliamentary supremacy was undeniable. Still, it is hard to tell if parliamentary politics, such as existed in Pakistan during 1950, would have been self-correcting. The Muslim League had held no internal elections. It had failed to discipline its fractious and corrupt leaders. Party democracy was not necessarily the ready-made alternative to authoritarian rule in Pakistan, at least during the early 1950s. No one knew whether the fragile nation-state of Pakistan would endure

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as a country under the unstable civilian governments. Even if it had survived, endemic instability could not have advanced the cause of civil and political liberty.

Second Democratic Moment

The second democratic moment in Pakistan’s political life came about in the early 1970s, ten years after the first attempt had ended in the declaration of martial law by General Ayub Khan. These ten years had witnessed important changes in the economy and society. Pakistan’s agricultural and industrial capabilities had expanded, but so had tensions between its rich and poor classes. Ayub’s “growth”-oriented policies were deliberately tilted in favor of the rich. He argued that economic inequality—what he called “functional inequality”—was an incentive for investment. But concentration of wealth had made the rest resentful.15 The political aspirations of the new urban middle and working classes created in the wake of growth could not be contained in the framework of the “basic” democracy Ayub had introduced. Denial of political freedom combined with economic discontent heightened social activism, as evident in the long months of mass protest just before Ayub was forced to resign. As one writer explains, “economic development accelerated the rate of urbanization and industrialization, which in turn increased the rate of social mobilization. But . . . institutional development remained low. This generated the crisis of participation.”16 The military stepped in to depose Ayub in March 1969. The military intervention was accompanied by a promise of free elections to be held in December 1970. Pakistan had temporarily resolved the political impasse created by Ayub’s failures, but free elections were to create a dilemma from which it could not easily recover. The elections of 7 December 1970 catapulted Pakistan into a crisis that ended in civil war and defeat at the hands of its most hated enemy, India. The elections produced results that West Pakistan’s civil and military elite had always dreaded. The Awami League secured an absolute majority in the national assembly, winning 160 out of 162 seats from East Pakistan. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, secured the second largest bloc of seats—81 of the 138 in West Pakistan.17 But Bhutto and the PPP were loath to play second fiddle to the Awami League, which was centered in East Pakistan. Also, they could not countenance the Awami League’s demand for maximum provincial autonomy and a loose confederal link with West Pakistan. It is noteworthy that East Pakistan’s left-oriented intelligentsia, middle classes, professionals, trade unions, and peasants had

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provided the Awami League with its massive victory mainly because it had espoused the cause of autonomy. On 1 March 1971, the martial-law government of Yahya Khan balked at accepting the democratic dispensation and set aside the elections. This plunged Pakistan into a civil war and another partition. Yahya Khan was not alone in serving such ambitions; Bhutto had also sided with the military rulers. He therefore shared the “responsibility for the breakup of Pakistan and for the decline of party institutions,” mainly because of his “unwillingness to see Mujib as prime minister.”18 The third war with India ended in defeat and dismemberment. Defeat had discredited the bureaucracy and the military. The economy was chaotic, and Pakistan stood on the verge of total collapse. Ironically, these very conditions precluded a radical break with the past. Pakistan did not get the leadership that might have recast the patterns of political power and institutionalized a new partnership between civil and military leaders. And leaders who emerged from the chaos lacked the political base and organizational muscle to stabilize changes they had created. Fearing political extinction, Bhutto and the PPP resorted increasingly to unscrupulous and corrupt means to ensure preeminence. Bribery and violence aborted progress toward a strong parliamentary government. Bhutto’s civilian rule lasted for about six years. In July 1977, at the height of the election campaign turned bitter by conflict between the PPP and the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), an umbrella of parties opposed to Bhutto, the military intervened and declared martial law. These events raise some interesting questions. Why did political leaders in Pakistan squander the democratic opportunity? What underlying social and economic conflicts ushered in the praetorian state? First, internal contradiction in the PPP, its program, and its conflicting constituencies made the party a weak instrument for sweeping reforms. Without such reforms, Pakistan could not achieve the stable base needed to contain the military. Bhutto had to strike a compromise between his populist left and feudal right. Although he vowed to reduce poverty and speak for the underprivileged masses in urban and rural Pakistan, he made no serious attempts to curb the power of the procapitalist elements in his party. Nevertheless, Bhutto expanded public-sector investment, nationalized the banks and basic industries such as steel, coal, and heavy engineering, recognized labor’s right to strike, and initiated land reforms. His employment policies were greatly aided by the foreign-exchange earnings and remittances by migrant labor to the Gulf countries in the

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Middle East.19 Contradictions soon surfaced. The flow of money from the Gulf buttressed Pakistan’s sagging economy, but it promoted an Islamic orthodoxy that was to have unforeseen consequences. Bhutto had underestimated the difficulties of socialist measures in a country with entrenched feudal-capitalist interests. These latter classes dominated the PPP. Bhutto did not introduce land reforms that might have won him the support from the poor and small landholder, and his industrial policies did not break the stranglehold of a few families on the nation’s economy. In order to change the equation between the bureaucraticmilitary elite and political parties, he purged or moved some senior military officers, restructured the military high command, and abolished the post of commander in chief. But these measures did not diminish the entrenched military elite. He equivocated on the real preserves of the military’s power, which were Kashmir, nuclear weapons, and, most importantly, defense budgets. Bhutto’s administrative reforms soon suffered a similar fate. Bureaucratic supervision inevitably created new opportunities for graft and corruption. As Jalal put it, “Bhutto sounded radical, but was clearly aiming at an attitudinal change and incremental structural transformation.”20 Securing a hold over the political center in Pakistan meant controlling politics in the provinces. Bhutto ignored his own 1973 constitution and its provisions regarding regional autonomy, and he dismissed the provincial assemblies of Baluchistan and NWFP on the flimsy charges of antistate activities and subversion. Popular Baluch leaders Ghaus Bux Bizenjo, Attaullah Mengal, and the president of the National Assembly of Pakistan (NAP), Khair Bux Marri, were arrested. Bhutto now proceeded to bribe the NAP members to form a new, more pro-PPP government. Within six weeks of the overthrow of the elected government, hundreds of NAP supporters fled to the hills to wage a war against the central government in Islamabad. The conflict in Baluchistan lasted longer than five years. Four Pakistani divisions (80,000 men total) were deployed to crush Baluch resistance.21 Bhutto’s civilian government had failed to contain ethnic challenges. Instead of co-opting the Baluchis, which would have strengthened democracy, Bhutto unleashed the army on them. This proved a godsend for the military. It recovered some of the ground lost in the 1971 war with India. Bhutto’s desire for personal political dominance had unwittingly strengthened the very forces he had tried to contain. The rise of conservative Islamic groups who were opposed to Bhutto’s socialistic and secular professions further aggravated his political problems. Saudi financial support had greatly strengthened the Islamic religious parties in Pakistan. Bowing to these pressures, Bhutto

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had jettisoned the left-wing members of the PPP in 1974. It is clear that the PPP failed because of fierce infighting, paranoia, and extreme personalization of power. Although Bhutto alone cannot be blamed, he had certainly contributed to it in full measure. He had failed to institutionalize mechanisms for consultation and consensus within the party. He saw popular support as personal triumph. One might, however, argue that without grassroots organization Bhutto could do little but rely on a personalized network of support. Bhutto won the March 1977 elections, but according to Jalal “it is the post-electoral scene that defeated him. Populist sentiment unmatched by an effective party organization proved to be fatal for a regime facing a determined effort by nine disparate political groupings—the Pakistan National Alliance—to seal Bhutto’s fate once and for all.”22 The PNA refused to accept the results of the elections. It charged that Bhutto had rigged the polls. Massive demonstrations were staged. Businesses came to a halt, and virtual anarchy reigned in the cities and towns. Bhutto could not capture the moral high ground. It is at this juncture that the military intervened to assume the reins of power. The authoritarian ending of the Bhutto government undermined the importance of what it had done to nurture the currents of electoral democracy in Pakistan. His efforts to curb the power of the military through legislative and constitutional means might not have been enough, but had they gone further, then the military would have in all probability seized power on the same justification it did in July 1977, that is, national security. The six years under Bhutto had provided Pakistan a taste of popular democracy. They were heady days in Pakistan, where politicians of every hue and ideological orientation flourished. The civil society learned and gained from it. It is impossible to imagine the post-Zia emergence of democratic politics without the country’s experiences between 1971 and 1977. Populist leaders have a bad reputation among political observers and scholars, but leaders such as Bhutto and Mujibur Rahman serve an important historical purpose in advancing the cause of democratization. The contradictions they reflect are in any case too difficult to solve without completely upturning the existing balance of power. Bhutto alone could not remake Pakistan. The PPP was not a revolutionary party. The promise of rapid change had to be leavened by the reality of entrenched structures of dominance and privilege. However brief in duration, the Bhutto years had expanded and deepened the aspirations for elected governments in Pakistan. Bhutto made many mistakes, but he also needed time to bridge the gap between promise and practice. Unconsolidated states such as Pakistan scarcely have the

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opportunity to construct a democracy free from pressures of time. Pakistan’s postindependence history shows that imperatives of state formation—providing domestic order, strategic security, a modicum of growth, and control over the course of internal events—overwhelmed the goals of equity and participation. Civil and political liberties were repeatedly sacrificed at the altar of the state. Democracy was just one among several equal, if not more important, objectives for the ruling elite. The 1958 military intervention was perceived as a welcome relief by a large number of Pakistanis. There was no popular uprising or large-scale protest when the Bhutto government was dismissed in July 1977. Still, during the three decades since independence, Pakistan had become socially more differentiated and economically more advanced. The 1970 elections were genuinely democratic, and the demand for party democracy remarkably widespread. Bhutto’s ambivalent policies reflected the difficulties of balancing democracy, growth, and political survival. Populism was the product of these conflicting goals, and ultimately it failed. The choices in Pakistan were not between democracy and authoritarianism but between more or less authoritarianism. 23 Democratization required not only initiating change but controlling the rate of change. However, the deceleration of the rate of change is not necessarily and always a reversal of democracy. It can be an attempt to improve democracy’s longer-term prospects. Every step back from democracy costs votes and popular support; every step in the democratic direction heightens the fear of those less enamored of popular control. Ultimately, chance and circumstance determine whether such a path will actually lead to democratization. There is no doubt, however, that the Bhutto years were critical to Pakistan’s circuitous road to democracy.

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Zia-ul-Haq and the Return to an Authoritarian Solution

When Zia-ul-Haq seized power in July 1977, Pakistan returned to an authoritarian mode of government. Political parties were banned, the press was muzzled, and militarism and Islam became the twin pillars of the new order. It is not insignificant, however, that Zia’s seizure of power was facilitated by the mobilization of industrial and commercial groups under the umbrella of the PNA, a compact of political parties that had succeeded in forging a formidable popular opposition to the PPP and Bhutto. The PNA also included several parties and groups advocating Pakistan’s return to orthodox Islam. The alliance with Islamic groups suited both the business and the military elements because it provided

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popular cover and ideological justification to the arbitrary seizure of power by Zia. The political elements in the PNA had hoped to use Zia to get rid of the PPP and Bhutto and make room for a more probusiness regime. The PNA was useful to Zia for similar reasons. The civilian opposition split Bhutto’s constituencies and weakened the chances of another civilian government. By pitting the PNA against the PPP, Zia widened the military’s room for political maneuvering. He was then able to consolidate his regime without too much popular protest. The Zia years in office display a remarkable blending of contradictory tactics, coercion with cajolery, and threats with blandishments.24 Initially, Zia secured his position by issuing a spate of martiallaw regulations. He enlisted support from a select group of bureaucrats and attacked all civilian politicians as venal and greedy. Zia’s new financial adviser, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who had served in every military government since 1954, reversed the PPP’s welfare policies. Land reforms were dropped from the agenda, as was the threat of further nationalization. Still, Ishaq Khan did not dismantle the public sector. The new regime wanted to control the economy as a means to distribute patronage to its supporters. Zia kept promising to hold elections within ninety days. After initial uncertainty, the supreme court ruled in Zia’s favor and legalized the military’s intervention based on the “doctrine of necessity,” provided Zia held fair and free elections. Having secured a stamp of legality from the courts, Zia eliminated Bhutto by hanging him on 4 April 1979. Elections were then canceled indefinitely. The December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan provided Zia a perfect excuse to tighten the reins of power and establish his unchallenged control over the state of Pakistan. The new Cold War in Afghanistan meant large amounts of assistance began pouring into Pakistan. Zia had capitalized on the “frontline” status of Pakistan and rapidly moved to censor the press, strike down the constitutional convention of judicial review, and take over the right to appoint or replace judges. These measures led to serious disagreements among Pakistan’s elite. The original alliance that had catapulted Zia to power was unraveling. The Islamic groups that had sided with Zia in the 1977 coup now threatened to withdraw support because of postponed elections and failure to advance the Islamic agenda. To avert the possibility of a common opposition to his rule, Zia revived the networks of biradari—the old, personalized, clan-based ties— and sought to forestall opposition from the military by offering its leaders top jobs in government. The latter were rewarded with easy access to permits, licenses, and defense contracts. Personalized networks had always played an important role in Pakistani politics, but since the

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Bhutto years—particularly since the 1970 elections—interest groups had begun to replace them. This was now reversed. “Under rules of Zia’s nonparty political system individual candidates had no reason to forge any kind of vertical ties. The focus of electoral energies was squarely on the locality or at best district.”25 Localization of politics did not lead to free articulation of grassroots sentiments or interests. The interlocking of biradari networks with the local arm of the state became a “haven for corruption and electoral malpractice.”26 Obviously, Zia and his military-bureaucratic cohorts realized that control over state apparatus had to be balanced against popular participation. But Zia was determined not to let parties back into politics. This led to Pakistan’s second experiment in partyless democracy. In February 1982, Zia set up an advisory body—the majlis-a shoora— consisting of individuals representing different professions and advocacies. But this did not satisfy the increasingly restive prodemocracy elements in Pakistan. In the early 1980s, Benazir Bhutto picked up the cudgels of her slain father and launched the Movement to Restore Democracy. The MRD evoked a strong response in Sindh but failed to make headway in the crucial province of Punjab. Zia had succeeded in buying off the local and provincial elite through patronage and money. Punjab’s landlords, industrialists, and commercial groups, who had made great fortunes in trade and contracts through Zia’s partyless democracy, had no reason to support the MRD. For them, a prize in hand was better than the promise of a prize in the future. The March 1985 elections reaffirmed the changes Zia had wrought. Even those who were generally sympathetic to the cause of democracy began to echo Zia’s propaganda about the irresponsible nature of party politics and the chaos of civilian governments. As Jalal wrote, “The Zia regime’s masterly social engineering had altered the face of the Pakistani political spectrum. . . . Not only had the PPP’s populism been appropriated by candidates preferring to feather their nests by supporting the military regime but many of its members had participated in the elections in violation of party discipline.”27 Although the PPP boycotted the elections, 50 percent of the voters still turned out to endorse the continuation of the Zia regime. The 1985 partyless elections provided popular legitimacy to the military government, but Zia could not trust even this rubber-stamp assembly. He prevailed upon the new prime minister to push through amendments that barred future governments from holding Zia and his martial-law administration culpable for constitutional transgressions. Additional amendments empowered the president to dismiss

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national and provincial assemblies if they failed to fulfill constitutional responsibilities. Only the president could determine such failure. The president also arrogated the right to route all cabinet decisions to pass through his office before they were presented to the parliament. Pakistan was declared an Islamic society. In one stroke, Zia had reversed the intent of the 1973 constitution and turned Pakistan’s parliament into an impotent branch of government. These amendments set the stage for constant conflict between the prime minister and the president over turf and jurisdiction. Paradoxically, this conflict also became the crucible for the emergence of party democracy in Pakistan. The turf war was to no small extent influenced by the steady globalization of Pakistani security and economy. The Afghan War, Pakistan’s new strategic role as a U.S. partner in the rollback of Soviet forces from that country, and the infusion of large amounts of military and economic assistance have been mentioned. The new Cold War of the 1980s concentrated power in Zia’s hands and emboldened him to launch covert interventions in Afghanistan and the Indian Kashmir. Zia directed the Interservice Intelligence Agency (ISI) to support, train, and extend sanctuary to Afghan mujahideens committed to fundamentalist Islam. He also pursued nuclear weapons without undue U.S. objections and developed closer strategic ties with China. The second thrust consisted of forging closer economic and strategic ties with oil-rich countries in the Persian Gulf, and Pakistan exported many workers to those countries. Their remittances had kept Pakistan financially afloat and the military government securely at the helm of affairs. In the 1980s, these remittances provided as much as 40 percent of total foreign exchange earnings and 8 percent of gross national product (GNP).28 But the Gulf remittances peaked in 1984, and the shortfall was not picked up by domestic savings. Pakistan began to have a difficult time qualifying for loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Defense and debt had consumed most of the budgets, leaving very small and wholly inadequate sums for infrastructure development or investment in education, health, and the environment. The uneven distribution of wealth and opportunities, aggravated by the defense-oriented economy that depended on external sources for survival, made Pakistan highly vulnerable to global actors. The rebirth of Pakistan’s democracy—tentative and weak though it was in the late 1980s— should be understood against this background. Often, denial of rights whets the popular appetite for its assertion. From 1988, Pakistani politics suggests just such a scenario, which is the focus of the next chapter.

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INDIA

For India, the choices between state and democracy were less sharply etched after the partition, although they were no less difficult than Pakistan’s. Indian leaders inherited a fragmented polity, partitioned and battered by the communal holocaust of 1947 and by serious resistance from more than five hundred princely states that were looking for the best bargain before choosing among India, Pakistan, or independence. The dangers for India were especially serious in those provinces where there was a significant Muslim population or where the ruling prince was a Muslim and chose (as did the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Nawab of Junagadh) to join Pakistan. Within the first three years after the British departed, India had successfully thwarted Pakistani attempts to forcibly wrest Kashmir from it, negotiated peaceful integration of the princely states into the new Indian union, and produced a constitution that guaranteed a parliamentary democracy, secular state, and economic equity.29 The government was to assume heavy responsibility for economic development and act as a defender of the poor and underprivileged strata of Indian society. Discrimination based on caste, class, creed, and race was declared unlawful. India became a federal republic, although the central government retained substantial control over national life.30 In foreign policy, independent India chose to be nonaligned, eschewing alliances with the rival blocs in the Cold War that had already divided the world and pulled Pakistan into its chain of alliances. In 1951–1952, India held its first election. Eighty parties contested for 489 parliamentary seats and 3,300 state legislative seats. More than 50 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. The elections took longer than four months because of the remoteness of voting areas and the difficulties of getting to and organizing polls. But in the end electoral democracy was firmly in place. Still, the first serious challenge to India’s political integrity came within a year of the elections. Beginning with a demand for linguistic reorganization of federal provinces in Andhra in 1953, ethnic nationalism surged throughout India. There were riots and massive demonstrations that increasingly ended in street violence.

State and Democracy: The Nehru Legacy

India is a multilinguistic, multiethnic, multireligious nation where the only common official language was English—the language of the colonizers. 31 Substituting English with Hindi, a language familiar to 40 percent of Indians who are all more or less concentrated in the north,

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triggered protests and violence in the south, where the Dravidian family of languages predominated. Other provinces, such as Maharashtra and Gujarat or Bengal and Assam, take pride in their distinctive ethnolinguistic heritage and were reluctant to accept the new status of Hindi. Initially, the government of Jawaharlal Nehru refused to redraw the federal map on the basis of ethnic identities. It feared that ethnolinguistic demands might degenerate into separatist sentiments, reinforce narrower local identities, and prevent the emergence of a modern, unified India. Eventually, Nehru bowed to popular pressures. In 1956, India altered its federal design to give official recognition to its nesting ethnonations. In the view of most scholars, the linguistic reorganization of 1956 strengthened both the union and Indian democracy. It is, however, remarkable that while controversy and debate engulfed the country the regular business of democratic elections continued to be routinely carried out. What model of governance permitted Indian leaders to tilt the balance in favor of elected institutions, something that Pakistan had not been able to sustain?32 I have already mentioned the advantages flowing from the inherited structures of governance: a competent bureaucracy, armed forces, and police forces committed to the supremacy of civilian rule. But much the same had been true of Pakistan in 1947. Not unlike Pakistan, India was deeply divided, poor, and with a majority of people who were rural, illiterate, and tradition-bound. There was a small segment of Western-educated, urbanized professionals, entrepreneurs, and middle classes, but they were an insufficient foundation on which to base a democracy for such a vast country. The social and economic conditions were also less than ideal for that purpose. The main advantage, then, lay in three areas: the Congress Party’s virtual monopoly of power, its model of interlocking governance, and the accommodation of India’s diversity. The Congress Party was an umbrella organization that included diverging ideologies. Socialists and capitalists happily coexisted within the Congress. 33 The nationalist aura clung to the Congress Party and its top leaders, ensuring their dominance in the political life of the country. In the early 1950s, the extremes on the right and left of the party—the communists and the Hindu extremists—were ruthlessly dealt with. The militant Hindu organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), was banned in the early 1950s, and communists were jailed after their failed attempt to stage an uprising in 1949. At the national level, the Congress Party had adopted a clear set of objectives—unity, secularism, liberal democracy, and nonalignment—that was fleshed out in the Directive Principles of State Policy and attached

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to the constitution, as well as in the subsequent programs for planned economic development. Articulation of a focused agenda, however, obscured the fact that the ruling party was a conglomerate of diverse, often narrowly based local political groups, all only generally subscribing to the Congress Party’s modernist agenda. The local organization and leaders of the Congress Party were far less cosmopolitan in contrast to its national leaders, but they acted as a conduit between regional and national politics. Although the party high command faced no serious challenge to its monopoly of nationalist and patriotic symbols, party policies accommodated the more particularistic agenda of its ethnic and regional parts. The Congress Party’s subcontinental spread and federal character permitted India to boldly move toward a parliamentary system. But its dominance in political life prevented development of responsible and viable opposition parties. 34 In the first two decades after independence, opposition to the parliamentary leadership of the Congress Party came from within the party itself. The party came to reflect the nation, but—unfortunately over the passage of time—it also began to see itself as the nation. India’s founding leaders believed that a strong central government with powers over the economy and politics was necessary to build a stable country. They were acutely aware of India’s inherent tendency to disintegrate. India had not been a nation-state until the British fashioned it out of the remnants of the Mughal empire in the subcontinent. India’s history displayed a pattern of integration and disintegration, of ebb and flow to and away from a central authority. Each empire-state had been unified by incorporating within it recalcitrant centers of regional power. History pointed to the imperative of a strong central authority, but history also demanded a layered order and the granting of substantial autonomy to the regions.35 Force alone could not hold an Indian empire-state together. It had to be bound by an overarching ideological order that allowed full and free expression of cultural verities of its parts. Similarly, the vision of an industrialized, advanced, modern India also made a strong center necessary. The Congress Party was to be the vehicle for that transformation. The creation of a layered order and the grant of regional autonomy pointed to an electoral democracy. India could not be governed any other way, certainly not in the long run. If there was a conflict between proximate ethnic communities (for instance, between north and south over Hindi, or between Hindus and Sikhs over a number of local issues) in independent India, then the central state opted for a solution that represented the greatest degree of common position between rival groups. The three-language formula

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(English, Hindi, and the regional language) allowed for the continuation of English and equal status for the regional language—for instance, Tamil in Tamil Nadu—and ended the riots in the south.36 Similarly, the Nehru government supported the language formula evolved by the local wing of the Congress Party, which reflected interests of both the Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab. Secessionist threats were, however, summarily handled, as in case of the Nagas in the Northeast. In several instances, the local Congress Party espoused local interests, even at the expense of the nationalist agenda, but ultimately such conflicts were resolved within the umbrella organization of the Congress Party. The central state insulated the nation from external pressures while it bent to the task of political integration, economic development, and social transformation. There was no significant electoral challenge to the dominance of the Congress Party until the 1970s. Nehru had combined within his person the leadership of the government and of the Congress Party, and when he had shed the latter, it was in favor of a trusted colleague within the party. The legislative majority permitted Prime Minister Nehru to enact a series of legislation that gave shape to his vision of a modern India. The five-year plans gave the ruling party control over resources and the direction of economic change. Such a model of governance allowed a play of interests at all levels of the polity, but until 1990 the rules of the game remained tilted in favor of the Congress. This was not a democracy by competition among political rivals with roughly equal popular support; it was a single-party-dominance model of democracy that relied on consensus and co-opting of competing interests. Competition was within the Congress Party. Political stability was at a premium. When democratic objectives clashed with those of defense and development, the former were sacrificed at the altar of the state. India’s heterogeneity was both an advantage and a hindrance to democracy. The coexistence of multiple nationalities within a single territorial state required the state to consult, persuade, negotiate, and integrate. The central authority could geographically isolate and confine separatism while it mobilized resistance to it in the rest of the nation. The state could pit one ethnic community against another and protect its role as the supreme mediator. The problem becomes difficult to manage, however, when such nationalities build a unified plank—as in the 1954 agitation for linguistic reorganization. In the first two decades of independence, India faced external military threats from both Pakistan and China. 37 But no one challenged Nehru’s preeminence in the parliament. Even when his policy failed to prevent war with China in 1962, which ended in humiliating defeat for

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India, Nehru did not lose political stature or his office. Political survival was not a serious issue for Nehru, although he compromised and even went against his cherished principles (acceptance of corrupt provincial party bosses such as Punjab’s Partap Singh Kairon and Kashmir’s Ghulam Mohammad Bakshi) in order to ensure the Congress Party’s legislative leverage over the state. These factors explain why democracy took root and flourished in the nation of India while neighboring nations were falling under the spell of authoritarian leaders. The Congress Party was, however, like the banyan tree (to use Robert Hardgrave Jr.’s description), in that it shed its grace far and wide and endured against ravages of time, but nothing could grow under its shade.38 What grew was a pale shadow of its political self, a splinter from the main branch that could muster no stable or vigorous existence. The Congress Party devoured fragile new shoots of resistance and dissent. It is important to bear in mind both the beneficial and omnivorous characteristics of single-party democracy in India. The real test of this model was to come when social conflicts multiplied, popular expectations grew, and the Congress Party weakened because of dissent and fragmentation. India faced such a test in the late 1960s, when the two prime ministers, first Nehru (1964) and then Lal Bahadur Shastri (1965), died within a year. The perceptions of a weakened New Delhi encouraged Pakistan to wage a war in 1965 over Kashmir. The Congress Party received its first serious drubbing at the polls in the 1967 elections. The year 1967 is regarded as a turning point in India’s postindependence politics. The Congress Party could no longer command automatic legislative majorities in the national or state assemblies. It managed to hold on to the center but lost six state governments to opposition parties. Still, it is important to emphasize that the political and economic crisis in the 1960s—the failed third five-year plan, runaway inflation, and severe shortages of food and essential commodities—did not create the drive for a military takeover or bureaucratic coup d’état. These were never the choices for the Indian public or their leaders. But the crisis did create unrest and vulnerability to pressures from abroad. The model of governance established in the 1950s was being undermined from within the Congress, and from the outside, by the newly empowered opposition parties. The crisis was ultimately resolved by a new leader and a new political party. The new leader was Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, who had successfully outmaneuvered the old generation of Congress Party leaders; the new party was the Congress Party (Indira), forged by an alliance with the communist and socialist parties against the older, more traditional party bosses in the Congress. Indira

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Gandhi’s new party appealed to the dispossessed of India, which included the backward and schedule castes and classes, Muslims, women, and the poorer segments of the Indian nation.39

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Democratic Expansion and Challenge to Congress Dominance: Indira Gandhi

It is tempting to draw a parallel between Bhutto’s populist experience in the early 1970s and Indira Gandhi’s leftward move in the late 1960s. Both occurred about the same time in South Asia’s history. Not unlike Bhutto, Indira Gandhi nationalized the banks, restricted monopolies, tightened regulations and control mechanisms over industry and business, and declared elimination of poverty as the goal of planned economic development. These measures strengthened the state and gave the Indira Congress greater control of the economy and politics, but they failed to eliminate or reduce poverty. The 1971 Bangladesh War further consolidated her popularity. Therefore, it is surprising how quickly the leftward tilt ended and the popularity turned to resistance in each instance. This is particularly noteworthy in the case of Indira Gandhi, because she had won a landslide victory in the 1972 elections and restored the Congress Party’s legislative dominance at the center and in the provinces. By 1974, she was battling a countrywide protest against rising prices, shortages, and her arbitrary interference in statelevel politics. Gandhi had generally resorted to two methods to retain control: she bypassed her party and local leaders and appealed directly to the people; and she kept a tight rein over the party by appointing individuals loyal to her as chief ministers and governors in the states. Indira Gandhi engineered dismissals of elected state governments—frequently the opposition governments, but sometimes even Congress Party–led state governments that refused to toe the line.40 The way in which power came to be concentrated at the center undermined the model of democratic governance Nehru had established in the 1950s. Gandhi declared a national emergency when opposition forces threatened her position in 1974–1975, and a judgment in the Allahabad court declared her 1972 elections void due to election misdemeanor. The charges were certainly not serious, but the judgment was, and her decision to overturn the court by executive fiat (though constitutionally justifiable) was an even more drastic departure from democratic norms.41 The declaration of a national emergency in 1975—the only such instance in post-1947 Indian history—is a subject of great controversy. Why did Indira Gandhi suspend democracy? Was it a constitutional

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coup d’état? Some see it as a ploy on the part of Gandhi to continue in office. Others interpret it as a manifestation of latent authoritarian tendencies that had been incubating since the 1960s. If we look at the economic and political situation in the mid-1970s, with double-digit inflation due to an unprecedented rise in oil prices, staggering import bills and shortages due to crop failures, and economic bottlenecks because of unfulfilled targets of the plans, we begin to see the national and international pressures that she faced. The United States had kept India on a short leash and demanded support for its war in Vietnam. India was pressured to devalue its currency, although it knew that devaluation would lead to inflation and shortages in the economy. There were domestic pressures as well. By the early 1970s, to rule at the center meant winning legislative majorities in state legislative assemblies. The national government could not implement its economic and social agendas unless it commanded leverage in the assemblies. The momentum of protests, largely swelled by economic hardships, threatened to engulf the nation. The opposition, led by Jay Prakash Narayan, went too far in calling the army and the police to disobey the government. Strikes and protests were impairing the economy.42 Indira Gandhi saw this as a choice between democracy and stability. She understandably (though not justifiably) chose the latter. The declaration of emergency restored order, but it did not give the kind of political leverage she desired. In the 1977 elections, held after the emergency was lifted, the Congress Party and Indira Gandhi lost to the phalanx of opposition parties. One might debate the pros and cons of the declaration of emergency endlessly. What needs to be stressed here is that Gandhi’s response was part of the larger dilemma that had confronted her and her party since the 1967 elections: balancing the needs of democracy against the imperatives of the state. The difficulty of choosing had been accentuated by the fact that the Congress Party was increasingly a weak instrument. The opposition was also incapable of forming a viable alternative to it. The Congress Party’s diminishing appeal was evident in the proliferation of dissident parties and their growing control over state assemblies. It was less and less able to cope with the growing differentiation of Indian society and politics. Gandhi’s fear that the Congress Party could disintegrate and lose power to motley groups of opposition was at least partly the reason for the centralization, arbitrary dismissals of elected governments, and intolerance of dissent within and outside her party throughout the 1970s. It is ironic that the opposition, which rejected this change could not unify to form a viable and stable alternative to the Congress.

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The Janata government did not change either the new emphasis on agriculture or the focus of the development programs (which favored the poor) that Indira Gandhi had adopted earlier. In the Indian experience, there is no correlation between growth and regime type, that is, if we look to the declaration of emergency as the authoritarian regime and the Janata government as the return to democracy. There was, however, a considerably better understanding since the 1970s of the kind of efforts required to help the disadvantaged strata. Although the absolute number of poor remained the same, there was by most accounts considerable mobility among income groups. The rapid expansion in the urban Indian middle classes during the 1980s was preceded by the green revolution in many parts of rural India and emergence of what Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph have identified as the “bullock capitalist.” Did the Janata government manage to alter the choices from democracy and state to a strongly democratic state? The answer is in the negative. A wave of protest had catapulted the Janata Party (an alliance of several regional parties) to power in 1977, but such waves are notoriously ephemeral. The opposition was able to unite to oust the Congress Party, but it could not remain united to govern. There was also the difficult task of securing control in state units. In order to garner sufficient number of seats in the parliament and state legislatures, the Janata government dissolved all Congress Party–led state governments in 1977 and called for fresh state elections, although they had attacked Indira Gandhi for similar practices. Within months of forming a government, the Janata coalition fell apart. The coalition leaders engaged in fierce internecine rivalries and unscrupulous pursuit of political ambitions. The Congress Party and Indira Gandhi were clearly not the only actors with character flaws. In the end, one might argue that the weakening of single-party dominance alternating with an even weaker coalition of opposition parties represented the only choices in India in the 1970s. A coalition government was possibly more democratic, since its unity depended on achieving internal consensus. No such constraint limited the Congress Party (the Indira Congress Party did not have internal party elections after 1972). But the Janata coalition proved a weak instrument for governing India. Single-party dominance provided a more stable government, but only because it limited the uncertainties associated with competitive democracy. The Congress Party government achieved this by orchestrating state politics from the center in opportunistic disregard of federal autonomy granted in the constitution. But neither party suggested eliminating the practice of electoral competition.

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Collapse of the First Opposition Government and the Return of the Congress

Several landmark events in the 1970s and 1980s map the course of democracy in India: the collapse of the Janata government in 1979, the return of Indira Gandhi in the 1980 elections, and the armed assault on the Golden Temple at Amritsar in June 1984 following five years of agitation and violence in Punjab. During the Rajiv Gandhi years (1985–1989), the two outstanding events that have a bearing on the shape of Indian polity were the regional pact with Sikh and Assamese nationalists and the compromise with the advocates of Muslim orthodoxy over the landmark Shah Bano case. The choices in each instance pitted the state against the imperatives of security, regime stability and territorial unity, and demands of an increasingly complex democracy. Having lost the government in 1977, the Congress Party split once again in 1978, but this time the split had no ideological justification. It was an attempt to tighten Indira Gandhi’s control over the Congress Party by jettisoning Congress members suspected of disloyalty to her. The other objective was to preposition the Indira Congress in a favorable situation in all federal units of India. The introduction of extremist Sikh priest Bhindranwale as a wedge to polarize the state of Punjab was an unfortunate innovation by Indira Gandhi and her party cohorts.43 By 1982, Bhindranwale had gathered around him a hardened group of Sikh militants to demand the separate state of Khalistan. The dangerous new developments across the Indo-Pakistani border made unrest in the border state of Punjab truly worrisome. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had revived the Cold War alliance between the United States and Pakistan. The latter had become an important link in the first line of defense against the expansionist Soviet Union. Pakistan was afloat in arms and had begun to actively foment dissension in Punjab and Kashmir. On 6 June 1984, the Indian army launched an assault on the Golden Temple to flush out Bhindranwale; more than 1,200 militants and civilians were killed. Reports of the assault on the holiest shrine of the Sikhs led to a mutiny by the Sikh regiment in the Indian Army. This was an unprecedented event in India’s decades as an independent country. Indira Gandhi had not anticipated the militancy and armed assault when she had initially approved the idea of using Bhindranwale to split the Akali Dal in Punjab. But the assault on the Golden Temple was the consequence of that misguided decision. It was also the consequence of the Congress Party’s steady decline and uncertain hold over national politics.44

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What the Congress Party lacked in the early 1980s, Indira Gandhi’s assassination provided in December 1984. Riding atop a crest of popular support and a solid majority, her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, transcended personal anguish (necessitated by the assassination by Sikh bodyguards in revenge for the assault on the Golden Temple) and concluded a peace agreement with Harchand Singh Longowal, the prominent Akali leader, in 1985. A similar pact was signed with the Assamese nationalists who had also been demanding equal treatment and regional autonomy. Political risks that Indira Gandhi could not afford in the early 1980s were now possible. Rajiv Gandhi had been able to do this because of his landslide victory in the December 1984 elections. Unfortunately, this phase did not last. Contradictions within the Congress Party came back to haunt the Rajiv Gandhi government. Rajiv Gandhi’s attempts to infuse new blood into and restructure the party fell foul of entrenched interests.45 The Congress was still the same, faction-ridden collection of caucuses organized around individual leaders. Concessions to opposition parties—the Akalis in Punjab, the Asom Gano Parishad in Assam, the Mizo National Front in Mizoram—rankled those who had lost position in those states. Rajiv Gandhi soon abandoned the attempt to change. Confident in his popularity in 1986, Rajiv Gandhi had advanced the cause of democracy by pursuing accommodationist solutions to ethnic conflict. The fear of losing popularity was, however, soon evident in the opportunistic compromise Rajiv Gandhi made with regard to the legislation on the Muslim Women’s Bill in 1986. In Punjab, accommodation gave way to coercion and force.46 By the end of 1987, the earlier emphasis on clean government had vanished, and many close colleagues of Rajiv Gandhi had resigned in protest or were expelled from his loyal circle of friends and confidants. To his credit, Rajiv Gandhi had accelerated the economic liberalization introduced by Indira Gandhi a few years earlier. Aggressive schemes were drawn up to eradicate poverty, but these mostly meant extension of subsidies for select classes and constituencies. Defense spending expanded substantially. Large-scale military exercises were carried out on the Indo-Pakistani border, which unwittingly brought the two countries close to the brink of war in 1987. The suspicion of Pakistani support for the militants in Punjab and Kashmir, and the fear of a close U.S.-Pakistan strategic partnership, prevented Rajiv Gandhi from following up on his intentions to improve ties with Islamabad. The show of India’s military prowess in dispatching the Indian peacekeeping forces to Sri Lanka in 1987 and to the Maldives in 1988 did not, however, bring sufficient votes in the

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1989 elections. In that election, the Congress Party and Rajiv Gandhi lost to a National Front (NF) opposition plank led by V. P. Singh.

The Decline of the Congress

In many ways the shifts—from the Congress Party to a coalition and back—came to define the ebb and flow of Indian politics thereafter. The second reign of the Congress Party (Indira Gandhi’s term of office, 1980–1984, then Rajiv Gandhi’s, 1985–1989) was followed by the United Front coalition government (V. P. Singh, 1989–1990), which collapsed well before its term in office and ushered in a third reign of the Congress Party under Narasimha Rao (1991–1996). The Congress Party’s defeat in the 1996 elections brought the United Front coalition government, led by Devi Gowda and then I. K. Gujral, to power. India routinely went to the polls and achieved a peaceful transition to elected government even when leaders were assassinated (Indira Gandhi in 1984, Rajiv Gandhi in 1991) or political turmoil had gripped the nation (the popular protests and demonstrations that brought down the second coalition of opposition to the Congress Party). Several South Asia scholars point to this instability and contend that Indian democracy is in grave danger. In support of this viewpoint, they underscore the surge of separatist movements in various border regions of India (Punjab, Kashmir, and Assam), the rise and popularity of Hindu nationalism, and the declining capacity of the political parties to contain and defuse civil and political conflict. They see rampant corruption, crass opportunism, greed for office and power, and increasing influence of criminal elements in politics as the reasons for democratic decline. Scholars differ on the causes and impacts of these developments, but the general argument is that selfish and shortsighted officials and politicians had sacrificed democratic principles for electoral victories and weakened the legitimacy and moral authority of the state.47 The growth of Hindu militancy and ethnic separatism are more complex than these arguments suggest. Political disillusionment and corruption have undeniably weakened political institutions, but other, more powerful forces have also been at work in changing the template of politics during the four decades of the Congress Party’s hegemony. One might point to the increasing differentiation and complexity of India’s expanding economy and society because of advances in industrial and technological capabilities. Economic changes affect different socioeconomic strata differently. Some may gain, but many lose, and those that lose have an interest in changing the balance of forces in their favor. The opposite is true of those who gain from economic ex-

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pansion. One might also draw attention to the dramatic changes in communication and transportation, the greater mobility of labor, rapid urbanization, and advances in literacy. Finally, we need to bear in mind the decades of electoral participation—more than fifty national and state elections. They have permitted a continuous stream of new social strata to enter the political arena. Maintaining the integrity of the governance model established in the 1950s was a highly difficult exercise under the pressure of these developments. The mechanism of interlocking national and regional interests did fail in Punjab, Kashmir, and other parts of India. But failure did not, on that account alone, make the efforts at conflict resolution irrelevant to democratization. In fact, such failures, more than the successes, revealed the central role of consolidation imperatives in a democratic society.

The Coalition Governments and After

Although the National Front coalition was short-lived, its tenure provides rich insights into the fundamental shifts in Indian politics. With 144 seats, the NF was 129 seats short of a majority in the parliament; it could survive only with the support on the right by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and on the left by the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India–Marxist/Leninist (CPI-ML). By the end of the 1980s, three developments made stable legislative majorities an elusive goal: the expansion of caste- and ethnic-based parties, the decline of the Congress Party as the dominant force in national politics, and the mercurial rise of the Hindu nationalist forces led by the BJP and its family of organizations. Although the political arithmetic was not encouraging, the NF had forged a more coherent secular national agenda than did the previous Janata government, which had unified on but a single issue, that is, to oust Indira Gandhi from power. The NF government had an action plan that articulated a holistic vision of a decentralized, just, and democratic India.48 Unfortunately for the NF, the action plan did not translate into policies. It was stymied by opposition within its own alliance and from the BJP, which had initially supported it. Still, one might argue that the NF had evolved an appealing set of arguments and a distinctive design of national goals. In contrast to the Congress Party’s style of decisionmaking—which was confined to the prime minister’s secretariat and a few trusted individuals close to both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi—the Singh government had introduced considerable transparency in decisionmaking. There was also an important difference in the antipoverty programs of the NF and the Congress Party. The Congress governments

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had brought economic benefits and modernization to rural India, but by the late 1970s its reformist impulse had petered out. The promises of rural welfare, as well as the construction of schools, hospitals, roads, irrigation canals, and power plants, were nicely timed to coincide with elections. The NF action plan envisaged a more fundamental shift. It sought to incorporate the poor and the underprivileged in the structure of power itself. The provisions of the action plan were designed to give the underprivileged a stake in decisionmaking. This was evident in the NF’s 7 August 1990 announcement to reserve 27 percent of all jobs in the central government and public sector for disadvantaged classes, who, for the most part, belonged to the backward and schedule castes in India. The announcement unleashed a storm of protests from the urban middle classes and counterdemonstrations by the backward castes that threatened to plunge India into caste wars. 49 The confidence in the NF’s governing ability reached a nadir when the BJP launched a nationwide agitation campaign to reclaim the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. This agitation was really a bid for power, as BJP leaders hoped that mass mobilization would catapult them to the center. The Singh government became paralyzed. The BJP withdrew support for the NF in the parliament on the reservation and Ayodhya issues. The Singh government split and collapsed in October 1990 and was followed for a few months by the Chandra Sekhar government that commanded all but forty-four seats in the 546-member house. It survived with support from the Congress Party in parliament, but the situation could not last long. In December 1990, within three months of assuming office, Chandra Sekhar resigned and called for national elections for May 1991. While campaigning in Tamil Nadu, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by extremists associated with the Sri Lankan Tamil (LTTE) militants, who sought to take revenge for the deployment of the Indian peacekeeping forces in Sri Lanka. Within a matter of a year and a half, the political situation had turned full circle. Riding a wave of sympathy, the Congress Party was back in power, but that did not reverse the undertow of erosion that had diminished it since the late 1970s. In the 1990s, India presented a contradictory picture: its democracy was safe and firmly entrenched, but its governments were increasingly unstable. ■

NEPAL

Although the historical trajectory of Nepal is distinctly different from that of its two neighbors, this small and mountainous kingdom more closely embodies the kind of contrasts we observed in Pakistan than in

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India. Several historical and geopolitical preconditions are important in order to understand the balance between democracy and the state in Nepal.

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History, Geography, and Economy: Determinants of Nepali Politics

The first of these preconditions is Nepal’s longer history as a distinctive political entity. By the time India and Pakistan were formed in 1947, Nepal had been an independent state for more than a century. It was politically unified in the mid-eighteenth century and ruled by the Shah Dynasty. In the nineteenth century, under the rule of the ambitious Prithvi Narayan Shah, its boundaries expanded until it came in conflict with the other ambitious imperial entity—the East India Company. The British began to view the expansionist Gorkha Kingdom as a threat to their interests in the province of Bengal. After defeat in major battles with the British force, Nepal signed the Treaty of Sagauli in 1816. The AngloNepali rivalry was concluded in a treaty that reduced and weakened Nepal. The British did not formally absorb the kingdom but maintained it as an independent buffer state between their Indian empire and China. Nepal has no significant territorial disputes with its neighbors and thus does not face the kind of security threat such disputes are wont to create. It is, however, inextricably a part of the strategic calculations for India and China. It has retained this role throughout the decades of the Cold War and the fluctuations in Sino-Indian relations during this time. Nepal’s location between these two civilizations has in many ways shaped its distinctive history and society. Modern Nepal is a Hindu state where Indo-Aryan customs and traditions dominate, but at least three major groups of distinctive origins have long resided in Nepal: Tibeto-Burman migrants, who live in the hills and mountainous regions; Indo-Aryans, who mostly populate the plains but who have culturally absorbed the hill communities as well; and the Newari people, who claim to be the original people in the Kathmandu Valley.50 Political unification under the Shah and, later, Gorkha conquests gave Nepal a political identity but did not erase its distinctive culture or regional identity.51 These cultural verities have become politicized in modern Nepal and provide a new edge to old differences. The Indo-Aryan caste hierarchy prevails with distinctly Nepali modifications. Domination by high castes such as Brahmins (known as Bahuns), Chhetri, and the aristocratic Thakuri castes is an enduring part of Nepali political discourse.52 The second permanent condition shaping Nepali politics is its relative lack of modernization and economic development. Geography had something to do with this, but politics was the main reason why

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Nepal remained relatively untouched by the modern current introduced by colonization and integration into the world market. Nepal’s geographic remoteness and difficult terrain made penetration of colonial capitalism nearly impossible. Feudal and traditional elements affiliated with the kings and their courts believed that a closed society would be a politically stable society. This was particularly the case during the rule of the Ranas, a high-caste oligarchy that usurped power from the king and ruled Nepal until being deposed with the help of independent India by the Nepali King Tribhuvan.53 The overthrow of the Ranas in January 1952 was more a palace revolution. It did not truncate Nepal as the struggle for independence had truncated India and Pakistan. Nepal remained far behind its South Asian neighbors in the quest for modernity. The third element that permeates Nepali politics is the dependence on external powers for maintaining a modicum of growth in Nepal. Traditionally poor and landlocked, Nepal has turned to the outside world for resources and technology. This has made it dependent on the infusion of external capital for survival and growth. Nepal’s dependence on India for trade and international access has created a peculiar paradox in its ties with New Delhi. Nepal needs to distance itself from India to retain its separate identity, but excessive distancing threatens Nepal’s economy and political stability. Nevertheless, Nepal’s democratic experience—failures and a new beginning—can be explained largely by the balance of internal politics rather than by the machinations of external powers. India played a role at crucial junctures, but Indian interventions were sporadic and intermittent. They do not fully explain Nepal’s interrupted passage to democracy. During the past five decades, this passage has been paved by a struggle for dominance between the king and the different segments of Nepali elites: the modernizers, which include individuals of both liberal democratic and leftist-Marxist persuasion, and the traditional groups—based on landed wealth and ritual status—which include former members of the ruling oligarchy and entrenched elements in the countryside. The modernizers have divided themselves into political parties that range from Marxist-Leninist to social-democratic such as the Nepali Congress (NC). The king and traditional elements in society have relied on retaining control over the administrative machinery of state. The Panchayat Raj lasted for nearly thirty years between 1960 and 1989, mainly because of its success in retaining such control. Another feature of Nepali politics is the limited nature of popular involvement.54 Poorer Nepalis, although they constitute the bulk of the population, remain on the margins of public life. This is not to deny the

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sharp increase in urbanization, growth of new middle classes in the cities and towns, and a modicum of industrial growth since the 1980s but to stress that these developments took place from an extremely low baseline. More recently, the balance of power has shifted in favor of the new middle and professional classes, but large parts of the country remain mired in poverty and underdevelopment. Nepal’s civil society has been slow to change, and its civic forums are confined to urban areas. These characteristics of Nepal’s political economy go a long way toward explaining why democratic beginnings were scuttled after a promising start in the 1950s; why the Panchayat democracy that replaced the more conventional party democracy failed to take roots; and why it rests on fragile and unstable foundations despite a return to party democracy in 1990. As in Pakistan, the strengthening of the state in Nepal has come at the expense of democracy.55 But the precursors of the Nepali state were not the military and bureaucratic institutions; they were the king, traditional castes, and the families that supported the monarchy. Even in modern Nepal, the king is the symbol of sovereignty. Political parties in Nepal take an ambivalent stance on his role in politics. The parties to the right support dynastic rule; even the centrist parties such as the NC and the leftist parties such as the communists (at least one splinter segment) are reconciled to the preservation of monarchy, although they do want to restrain it by the constitution and parliament’s supremacy. The issue of the king and his powers is a central one in Nepali politics. Relations with India and economic development are equally important. Both are intertwined because of Nepal’s geopolitics and history. Unlike India and Pakistan, ethnic separatism and communal conflicts have been less important in shaping Nepali politics. Issues of caste dominance, privilege, discrimination, and exclusion are more important. These have been aggravated by class conflict (“classes” not in the strictly Marxist sense but rather a clustering of groups that possess economic power and political and/or social status) and unequal distribution of income, wealth, and opportunities. In the forty years since the return of monarchy to power in 1951, Nepal has experimented with two kinds of democracies: party democracy, which lasted erratically until 1960; and the partyless Panchayat democracy, which lasted with important modifications until its collapse in 1990. 56 In 1990, parliamentary democracy was restored in Nepal, and the king accepted the popular verdict to limit his powers under a new constitution. This issue will be the focus of a later chapter. Here we will briefly answer three questions. Why did party democracy not take root in Nepal? What manner of democratization was achieved

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under the partyless alternative of Panchayat Raj? How have these experiences shaped the dilemmas of the state and democracy in Nepal?

The Restoration of Monarchy

In the late 1940s, there were three main players on Nepal’s political scene: the king, who was in exile in India; Nepali political parties, also banned and exiled in India; and the Ranas, who had usurped power from the monarchy a few decades earlier.57 Nepali parties were at an early stage of development and lacked organization and political muscle. The departure of the British from India in 1947 and the triumph of Indian nationalism profoundly altered the equation of power between the main political actors in Nepal. The Rana regime collapsed in 1951, and King Tribhuvan, who was restored to the throne, promptly promised to make Nepal a democracy. Leaders of independent India played a key role in these events and persuaded the king to sign an agreement (known as the Delhi Compromise) by which the king, the Ranas, and the NC—consulted only in the last phase—agreed to share power by a democratic mandate. Nehru characterized this as the “middle way” that “would ensure . . . some advance towards . . . democracy . . . [and] at the same time, avoid the total uprooting of an ancient order.”58 It is understandable why India would want stability in Nepal. Nehru and the Congress Party wanted no extraregional states meddling in South Asia. India wanted full latitude in establishing its territorial boundaries. The first decade of the Nepali experiment with democracy can be divided into two broad periods: the first four years, ending with King Tribhuvan’s death, and the second five years, after King Mahendra’s ascension to the throne in 1955. In the first period, several cabinet governments were formed, but party democracy remained uncertain, the king ambivalent toward civilian rule. During the second period, political parties achieved greater coherence, only to be countervailed by King Mahendra’s determined efforts to impose autocratic rule. Throughout these years, acquisition of power remained divorced from popular mandate. Democracy was shaped by a three-way struggle for ascendancy among the NC, the king, and traditional groups associated with the Ranas. The main target of the NC was the Ranas and their cohorts. The king was not adverse to Congress’s targeting the Ranas. It was a classic tactic reminiscent of Machiavelli’s advice to the prince to keep his enemies divided to strengthen control over the kingdom. The triangular struggle for power reinforced Mahendra’s authority; the NC, given its weak organization and lack of a popular base, failed as a credible

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counterpoint to the monarch. Politics remained essentially what it had been in the pre-1950 days: patronage networks and political intrigue among the elite. The only difference was that it was now conducted more openly. The NC was divided between followers of B. P. Koirala, who favored more socialistic solutions for Nepal, and his brother, M. P. Koirala, who led the promonarchy faction within the party. There was a bewildering procession of governments between 1951 and 1955: the NC government, led by a royal councillor’s cabinet; a second government led by M. P. Koirala; and a third, the National Coalition Cabinet. Internal conflicts and factional divisions strengthened the king against parties. He could pit one faction against another and weaken the whole. This led to the worst kind of scrambling for the king’s favor. Several scholars have argued that the monarchy grew powerful because parties were weak and vacillating.59 Others have looked at the same events and suggested instead that the king participated in the destruction of party democracy.60 Clearly, there were no mass pressures for democratic dispensation in Nepal, nor were there outstanding external threats. India could be a dangerous neighbor, but the 1951 agreement and the Trade and Transit Treaty had regularized Indo-Nepali relations. Nepal’s economic survival was not in jeopardy at the time. What, then, was at stake? The short answer is control over the instruments of state power, not Nepal’s unity or survival. Party democracy failed because it was limited and narrowly based. Its narrow base was at least partly because of Nepal’s cultural peculiarities and economic underdevelopment. The king remained a revered and sacred figure symbolizing the Nepali nation. Democracy was a poor and ineffective alternative to the monarchy in the early 1950s. All it could have achieved at that point was division and friction—a ready recipe for an unstable Nepal.

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The First Democratic Experiment: The Government of M. P. Koirala

The second half of this period began with King Mahendra’s ascension to the throne in 1955. Between 1955 and 1959, he extended control over Nepali politics. King Mahendra found ways to bypass the Council of Ministers and countervail the power of the cabinet should it act against the king’s wishes. He created the Royal Council to advise and strengthen his authority, reorganized the bureaucracy to gain leverage over administrative decisions, and went on extensive tours of the countryside to establish direct contact with the people. Meanwhile, political parties were also shedding some of the negative features of the previous

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five years. The Nepali Congress had forged a more unified front and sharpened its ideological focus. In 1958, several parties came together to demand elections. Bowing to the pressure and cognizant of the negative international image he might project should he refuse, King Mahendra agreed. Nepal’s 1959 constitution was approved a week before the February 1959 elections. It is noteworthy that the constitutional provisions were unabashedly promonarchy, although they granted universal suffrage and a bicameral legislature. The conflict between democratic parties and the monarchy over jurisdiction was bound to come sooner or later. It came much too soon. The elections produced a landslide victory for the NC, and B. P. Koirala became its first popularly elected prime minister. The brief tenure of the elected government is a subject of controversy among scholars of Nepal. Several have argued that the election results and the policies pursued subsequently by the Koirala government created a window of opportunity for democratic forces to root firmly in Nepal. But that is what the king feared most. He therefore dismissed the government on charges of mismanagement and incompetence and aborted the democratic experiment in 1960. Critics of the monarchy point to the number of progressive measures by the Koirala government: the abolition of the Birta tenure; the tax-free landholding system so long exploited by the Ranas; the abolishment of “feudal” principalities; the establishment of a judicious balance between Nepal’s two large neighbors, India and China; and a negotiation of a more equitable Trade and Transit Treaty with New Delhi. Joshi and Leo Rose comment that “the Congress could look back on a record of accomplishments unparalleled by that of any previous government in Nepal.”61 “On the eve of the royal takeover which brought both the Koirala government and democracy to an unexpected end,” writes T. L. Brown, “the Nepali Congress government was not on the verge of breakdown.”62 And the country was not facing an outbreak of lawlessness or economic crisis. Then why did the king stage a royal coup? The superficial answer is that the king saw power slipping away from the monarchy. One might also point out that the progressive measures that the Koirala government introduced were cosmetic in nature. The halfhearted attacks failed to checkmate the traditional classes, although they felt sufficiently threatened to demand an end to the democratic experiment. If politics is to be seen as a game of power among the elite, the above explanation would suffice. But leaders do not operate in a social and political vacuum. We need to consider the range of constraints within which democracy has to be reconciled with other demands on the state. To argue that democracy failed because the king aborted it is

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to argue that democracy can succeed only in the absence of conflict. The history of Western societies does not bear this out. On the contrary, it records lengthy, drawn-out battles, even bloody struggles, on behalf of liberal democracies. History also underlines the staggered and sequential development of Western political systems. Most important, it shows that democracy was possible only after liberal political economy was firmly in place. None of these conditions obtained in Nepal. Nepali society remained deeply conservative. It was unable to sustain the shifts in class power necessary for democratization. The Nepali state was not only the king and his officers but also the traditional elite and the more modern party elite that opposed him. These classes monopolized institutional levers of power. One segment of it did, however, offer a greater chance for opening up Nepal to competitive politics. But even this needs to be qualified in view of the highly personalized network of party power and career calculations of its leaders, particularly of the NC, who sought to monopolize the symbols and slogans of modern democracy. The government of B. P. Koirala in the early 1950s did, nevertheless, represent a tantalizing moment in Nepal’s struggle for democracy.

The Panchayat Democracy

The king prevailed over the parliament in 1960, but he could not totally ignore the pressure for popular participation.63 Influential and articulate sections of Nepali society had been exposed to democratic freedoms. The king had banned political parties, jailed the leaders of the Nepali Congress, and imposed strict control over the press and the people’s civil freedoms, but some form of mass participation had to be conceded. This was achieved by the Panchayat Raj, the Nepali version of “basic” or “guided” democracy popular in Pakistan and Africa. The Panchayat system was a four-tier system of power that divided Nepal territorially in terms of concentric circles beginning with villages, then districts that included a bloc of villages, then the zonal councils that included several districts, and, finally, the Rashtriya Panchayat—the national assembly that was the highest body in the Panchayat pyramid. Each territorially defined assembly elected representatives to the next tier in the four-tier system, that is, village to districts and districts to the zonal councils, and so on. Twenty percent of the Rashtriya Panchayat was appointed by the king. The rest came up through indirect elections. There was no party platform, no organization to canvass or educate people about issues and policy alternatives. There was no vehicle that could act as the grand transmission belt between grassroots

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interests and the government. Instead, there were the bureaucracy and Panchayat councils stuffed with administrative appointees, which merely conveyed decisions and allocated developmental resources. For all its democratic pretense, the Panchayat system had eliminated politics from decisionmaking. The absence of competitive politics led to a reentrenchment of those already powerful and wealthy in Nepal. The old network of caste and class privileges was stabilized and strengthened. The only difference was that now they had new avenues of institutional power to allocate resources and control the pace and nature of change in the countryside. The Panchayat system also had a complementary class organization created expressly to represent interests of farmers, students, laborers, women, and children. These organizations were alien to Nepali society, and they never got off the ground. The apex body—the Rashtriya Panchayat—remained a rubber stamp for the king’s policies. King Mahendra died in 1972, leaving a consolidated Panchayat system and a poverty-stricken Nepal where political opposition had been officially banned. The ascension of his Western-educated son, Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, to the throne raised hopes that he might liberalize and open Nepal to party politics, but such hopes proved to be in vain. The Panchayat operated just as it had during the rule of the former monarch. The 1975 amendment to the constitution, in fact, further consolidated the absolute rule of the king. The establishment of the Back-to-the-Village National Campaign (BVNC), inaugurated by King Mahendra, was reformed into an active political organization by his son.64 The BVNC became so pervasive that even the well-established local political parties could not operate outside the parameters it set. The BVNC turned Nepal into a single-party, authoritarian system in which the king exerted direct control over the villages. A segment of the banned NC now argued that violent opposition to the Panchayat and the king was doomed to fail. Disillusionment spurred defections from the party to the Panchayat and the king. The balance of regional politics also tilted against the NC. The declaration of national emergency in neighboring India in 1975 augured ill for Koirala and his colleagues in the party. Indira Gandhi did not approve of Koirala’s close ties to her opponents, Jaya Prakash Narayan and Chandra Sekhar, and B. P. Koirala therefore returned to Nepal in 1975 proclaiming to work for national reconciliation. It seemed that all opposition to the king had collapsed. This is why the events of 1979 came as a surprise. They show how inadequate current theories are in gauging the stability of a national political consensus. These had certainly failed in Nepal. Just when all

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seemed calm, street demonstrations exploded into a massive anti-Panchayat movement, forcing the king to hold a referendum. The results were both unexpected and devastating for political parties. The referendum asked Nepalis to choose between the Panchayat system and a multiparty system. An overwhelming number opted for the Panchayat. Clearly, the prodemocracy forces had to either expand enough to tilt the balance against the king and the palace in rural Nepal—since votes in the towns and cities had not borne desired results—or reconcile to a continuation of the Panchayat system. The 1980s did not prove to be such a moment in Nepal. Much buoyed by the results, the king instituted reforms of the Panchayat in the 1980s. The Rashtriya Panchayat was now directly elected by universal franchise, the prime minister by the members of the Rashtriya Panchayat. The BVNC was abolished. Brown writes that “the liberalization of the Panchayat System, which was intended to give the regime a new lease of life, instituted changes which would contribute directly to its demise ten years later.” 65 The reformed Panchayat system, she admits, “did create a political environment conducive to the evolution of party politics.” How this led to the MRD in 1990 is the focus of Chapter 4. Democrats and promonarchy elements had frequently overlapped in Nepal. Many prodemocracy advocates had defected to the Panchayat system, and many supporters of the latter sympathized with the cause of democracy. These individuals were undoubtedly tempted by personal profit, but many among them genuinely believed that the Panchayat system had to be changed from within. It is significant that there had been no opposition to the royal takeover in 1960 and no real opposition to the Panchayat system for years after it was initiated in 1962. The decisive vote for Panchayat democracy in 1980 suggests that the regime had managed to forge a national consensus on governance without party politics. What the Panchayat system lacked was a corrective mechanism that responded to change. The political parties had failed to do either; they had neither captured national imagination nor established a grassroots presence in Nepal. Their excuse was that they had been given insufficient time or space to establish themselves, which was true. Besides, the Panchayat was not all bad from the point of view of those who were plugged into its patronage network. It was liked well enough in the hills and in the western and central regions of Nepal. In eastern Nepal and in the towns and cities, the prodemocracy forces prevailed. The Panchayat patronage system delivered goods for those familiar with its rules. Thus one must ask why political parties with a smaller popular base are to be regarded as more democratic than the monarchy and

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Panchayat regime that seemed to enjoy mass popularity in the 1980s? The criterion of a majority produces anomalies that do not fit the conventional definitions of democracy. Therefore we need to look not at the logic of the numbers but the potential of each system for greater openness and competition. On this score, the party system held out far greater promise. By the same token, we also need to keep some comparative perspective in mind about the nature of oppression in Nepal. The Nepali monarchy was nowhere as repressive or brutal as experiences in Africa suggest it might have been. Opponents were not executed. There was no large-scale unleashing of state violence. The struggle for democracy did not involve such choices in Nepal. All the same, the king could not have felt less threatened by his political opponents. They were, after all, proposing to replace him with civilian rule. The fate of democratization in Nepal has been determined by intraelite struggles for power. The deeply conservative nature of Nepali society made alternative sources of sovereign authority—that is, popular government—a difficult proposition. What had endured was the political impasse between the king and the parliament: the king is a powerful force in Nepali politics, but democratic aspirations will not go away. In the late 1980s, these burst forth with renewed vigor in the mountain kingdom. ■

CONCLUSION

The three South Asian countries followed a recursive path toward democratization. At times democracy advanced; other times it retreated, only to advance again when authoritarian regimes or autocratic tendencies had weakened due to war, popular protests, or splits within the circle of elites that supported them. The Bangladesh War had created such a moment in Pakistan. The splits in the Rana regime ushered in greater freedom and openness in Nepal. Expansion in the economy and the emergence of new strata and growth in urban areas produced pressures that the Nepali monarchy and Pakistani military regimes could not overcome. The end to Ayub rule and concessions wrested by the student demonstrators in 1979 in Nepal signaled the changing political equation. Still, authoritarian options were not unpopular—at least not always. The national emergency declared by Indira Gandhi was supported initially by the middle classes. The Nepali people voted in the 1980 referendum to keep the Panchayat Raj. Because of a variety of historical, domestic, and international circumstances, Pakistan was unable to establish and routinize a mechanism of negotiated integration in

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the first four decades of its postindependence history. In contrast, India created institutions and constructed a mechanism of interlocking national and regional interests to shape its unified nation-state. On the whole, electoral democracy became progressively entrenched in India. The same cannot be said of Nepal and Pakistan. By the 1970s, however, the mechanism of democratic integration in India had begun to weaken. This was evident in the growth of separatist movements in Punjab and the Northeast. The state never successfully evolved a mechanism for democratic integration in Pakistan. In Nepal, the traditional economy and relative isolation of the country kept ethnic assertion at bay. The caste divisions were, however, inscribed into the policies pursed by the monarchy. By the end of the 1980s, each country faced a major challenge. We turn next to the successes and failures of their responses. ■

NOTES

1. This is the theme in a recent study by Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 2–5. 2. Leonard Binder, “Islam, Ethnicity, and the State in Pakistan,” in Ali Banuazizi and Myron Weiner, eds., The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics: Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986), p. 259. 3. For an account of Pakistan in the 1950s, see Ashghar Khan, ed., Islam, Politics, and the State: The Pakistan Experience (London: Zed Books, 1985), pp. 69–89, 169–173, 207–210. 4. See Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism, and Tariq Ali, Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970). For the opposite argument, see David Taylor, “Parties, Elections, and Democracy in Pakistan,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 30(1) (1992): 96–115. 5. Peter R. Blood, ed., Pakistan: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, 1995), p. 37. 6. Pervez Hoodbhoy and Abdul Nayyar, “Rewriting the History of Pakistan,” in Ashghar Khan, ed., Islam, Politics, and the State, pp. 169–170; Akbar Ahmed, “Jinnah and the Quest for Muslim Identity,” History Today 44(9) (1995): 34–41. 7.Tariq Ali, Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 42. 8. Ibid. 9. It took Pakistan nearly twenty years to hold its first (with full adult franchise) and fair democratic elections. That election, in December 1970, however, gave the Awami League Party in East Pakistan 160 of 162 seats in the national assembly. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, active mainly in West Pakistan, won 81 of the 132 seats assigned to West Pakistan. Notwithstanding his democratic professions, Bhutto refused to join the newly elected government.

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Following this, Yayha Khan, then president of Pakistan, suspended the national legislature and plunged the country into a constitutional crisis and eventually a war with India over the secession of East Pakistan. 10. For the pro-Pakistani interpretation of the Kashmir conflict, see Alastair Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy (Hertfordshire, UK: Roxford Books, 1991), pp. 101–182; for the pro-Indian position, see Prem Shankar Jha, Kashmir 1947: Rival Versions (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); for other perspectives, see Raju Thomas, Perspectives on Kashmir: The Roots of Conflict in South Asia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991). 11. For details on Pakistan’s political economy in the early years, see Khalid Sayeed, The Political System of Pakistan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), pp. 11–67; Shahid Javed Burki, Pakistan Under Bhutto, 1971–1977 (London: Macmillian, 1980), pp. 11–35. 12. Ashok Kapur, Pakistan in Crisis (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 35–42. See also Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 85. 13. Mohammad Ayoob, “The Security Problematic of the Third World,” World Politics 43 (1991): 270. 14. Ibid., p. 62. 15. Ashghar Khan, Islam, Politics, and the State, p. 215. 16. Saeed Shafqat, “Political System of Pakistan, 1947–1989,” in Shafqat, Political System of Pakistan and Public Policy: Essays in Interpretation (Lahore, Pakistan: Progressive Publishers, 1989), p. 34. 17. Ali, Can Pakistan Survive?, p. 85 18. “Bhutto was the only political leader to publicly welcome the imposition of martial law. For Bhutto, end justified the means. The end being the capture of power, he was willing to use every stratagem to achieve this.” See Mohammed Asghar Khan, Generals in Politics: Pakistan, 1958–1982 (New Delhi: Vikas, 1983), pp. 15–16.; see also Kapur, Pakistan in Crisis, p. 114. 19. By 1981, 2.1 million workers had migrated to the neighboring Islamic countries. They brought an infusion of nearly $2,218 million into Pakistan, an addition of nearly 10 percent of the total GNP. Bhutto vigorously set out to woo Saudi Arabia, Iran, and smaller kingdoms of the Gulf as Pakistan’s new allies. 20. Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism, p. 215. 21. Selig Harrison, “Ethnicity and Political Stalemate in Pakistan,” in Banuazizi and Weiner, The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics, p. 274. 22. Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism, p. 84; see also Shahid Javed Burki, Pakistan: A Nation in the Making (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986), p. 73. 23. Jalal and Tariq Ali, among others, have made this argument. 24. For the Zia years see Craig Baxter, ed., Zia’s Pakistan: Politics and Stability in a Frontline State (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985); and Hasan Gardazi and Jamil Rashid, eds., Pakistan: The Roots of Dictatorship (London: Zed Press, 1983). For a critical analysis of the years 1977–1985, see Jalal, The State of Martial Rule, pp. 319–328. 25. Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism, p. 105. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 106. 28. Ibid., p. 154.

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29. V. P. Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States (New York: Macmillian, 1956): for Junagadh, see pp. 124–151; for Hyderabad, see pp. 314–390; for Jammu-Kashmir, see pp. 390–416. 30. For a discussion of the early years, see Robert Hargrave Jr. and Stanley Kochanek, India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation, 5th ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1993), pp. 59–119; Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and R. J. Venkateswaran, Cabinet Government in India (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967). 31. For a discussion of the language issue, see Paul Brass, Politics of India Since Independence, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 151–192. 32. For different perspectives on the state, see Rajni Kothari, Politics in India (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 1–21; for the left view, see Pranab Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984); Zoya Hasan, S. N. Jha, and Rasheeduddin Khan, eds., The State, Political Process, and Identity: Reflections on Modern India (New Delhi: Sage, 1989); for a historian’s view, see Ravinder Kumar, “India: A ‘Nation-State’ or a ‘Civilizational State,’” Occasional papers on Perspectives in Indian Development No. 8. Nehru Memorial Library, 1989. 33. For the first three decades of the Congress Party’s evolution, see Rajni Kothari, “The Congress ‘System’ in India,” in Party System and Elections Studies, Occasional papers of the Center for Study of Developing Societies No. 1 (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1967), pp. 1–18; W. H. Morris-Jones, “Parliament and Dominant Party: Indian Experience,” Parliamentary Affairs 17 (summer 1964): 296–307. 34. Kothari, “The Congress ‘System’ in India,” p. 6. 35. Maya Chadda, “From an Empire-State to a Nation-State: The Impact of Ethno-Religious Conflicts on India’s Foreign Policy,” in Hafeez Malik, ed., Dilemmas of National Security and Cooperation in India and Pakistan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 207–230. 36. Robert Hardgrave Jr. and Stanley Kochanek, India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace, 1993), p. 146. 37. Sino-Indian relations deteriorated steadily after 1955; China annexed Tibet and fought a border war with India in 1962. India and Pakistan fought two wars over Kashmir between 1947 and 1970. The year 1971 saw the third war over the secession of East Pakistan. 38. Robert Hardgrave characterizes the Congress Party in this way. 39. Hardgrave and Kochanek, India, p. 238. See also Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy, 1947–1977: The Gradual Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 388–433. 40. W. H. Morris-Jones, “India: More Questions Than Answers,” Asian Survey 14 (August 1985): 811. 41. Kuldip Nayar, The Judgment (New Delhi: Vikas, 1977); Prashant Bhushan, The Case that Shook India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978); P. B. Mayer, “Congress (I), Emergency (I); Interpreting Indira Gandhi’s India,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 22 (July 1984): 128–150. Myron Weiner explains the factors that led to the lifting of the emergency. See his India at the Polls: The Parliamentary Elections of 1977 (Washington D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1978), pp. 7–12.

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42. Hargrave and Kochanek, India, p. 244. 43. Ayesha Kagal, The Times of India, 2 September 1982; Maya Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 129–135; Mark Tully and Satish Jacob, Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi’s Last Battle (Calcutta: Rupa, 1985), pp. 58–60. 44. Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism, chap. five, “The Erosion of the Supranational State: India Under Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi,” pp. 102–122. 45. At the Bombay session of the All-India Congress Party meeting, Rajiv Gandhi lashed out at the corrupt and selfish conduct of his partymen as the cause of the party’s decline. See Times of India, 29 December 1985. A retreat form this idealistic position soon followed. See Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism, p. 117. 46. India Today, 31 March 1986, pp. 14–17. 47.Rajni Kothari, Atul Kohli, Paul Brass, and Robert Hardgrave Jr., in their various writings, have put forward this argument. 48. Prem Shankar Jha, In the Eye of the Cyclone: The Crisis in Indian Democracy (New Delhi: Viking, 1993), pp. 112–131. 49. Ibid., pp. 132–261. 50. Newari identity formation can be traced to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. D. N Gellner, Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and Its Hierarchy of Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 63, 86–87. 51. John Whelpton, “Political Identity in Nepal: State, Nations, and Community,” in David Gellner, Joanna Pfaff-Czanecka, and John Whelpton, eds., Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Hardwood Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 40–44. 52. Ibid., p. 45. 53. Dinesh Bhattarai and Pradip Khatiwada, Nepal, India: Democracy in the Making of Mutual Trust (New Delhi: Nirala, 1993), p. 32; Narayan Khadka, Politics and Development in Nepal (New Delhi: Nirala, 1994), p. 355. 54. John Whelpton writes that the 1990 Jan Andolan was an urban, middle-class agitation. The poor were not interested and the rich were too busy accumulating wealth. See Whelpton, “Political Identity in Nepal,” p. 39. 55. Joanna Pfaff-Czanecka talks about the nationalistic model of integration during 1962–1990, stressing assimilation and concentration of political power. She says this model permitted very little free expression to ethnic identity. See her “Vestiges and Visions: Cultural Change in the Process of NationBuilding in Nepal,” in Pfaff-Czanecka and Whelpton, Nationalism and Ethnicity, pp. 422–423. 56. For accounts of events during 1950–1990, see T. Louise Brown, The Challenge to Democracy in Nepal: A Political History (London: Routledge, 1996); M. Hutt, Nepal in the Nineties (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); Urmilla Phadnis, Ethnicity and Nation-building in South Asia (New Delhi: Sage, 1989); and R. Shaha, Politics in Nepal, 1980–1990: Referendum, Stalemate, and Triumph of People’s Power (New Delhi: Manohar, 1990). 57. B. L. Joshi and Leo Rose, Democratic Innovation in Nepal: A Case Study of Political Acculturation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 123–125.

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58. A. Appadorai and M. S. Rajan, India’s Foreign Policy and Relations (New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1885), p. 163. 59. B. C. Upreti, The Nepali Congress (New Delhi: Nirala, 1993), pp. 36–37. 60. A. Gupta, Joshi Rose, and Leo Rose underline the authoritarian trends and manipulative strategies of King Birendra. 61. Joshi and Rose, Democratic Innovation, p. 347. 62. Brown, The Challenge to Democracy, p. 36. 63. Several studies of the Panchayat Raj are available. See T. B. Smith, “Nepal’s Political System in Transition,” in M. Dharamdasani, ed., Political Participation and Change in South Asia: The Context of Nepal (Varanasi, India: Shalimar, 1984); B. P. Shrestha and M. Mohsin, “A Study in the Working of Gaon Panchayats: A Case Study of Six Gaon Panchayats in Kaski District,” Panchayat Study Series 2 (Kathmandu: His Majesty’s Government of Nepal, 1966); R. Shaha, Politics in Nepal, 1980–1990; Phadnis Urmilla, “Nepal: The Politics of Referendum,” Pacific Affairs 54(3) (1986): 429–454; and Joshi and Rose, Democratic Innovation. 64. Brown, Challenge to Democracy, p. 87. 65. Ibid., p. 95.

TAJIKISTAN

AFGHANISTAN

Islamabad

PAKISTAN

Kashmir CHINA New Delhi

NEPAL

Kathmandu

BHUTAN

INDIA

A r a b i a n

BANGLADESH MYANMAR (BURMA)

S e a B a y o f

B e n g a l

e i v a d c c L a

Andaman Sea

a S e

SRI LANKA

TAJIKISTAN CHINA

Islamabad

AFGHANISTAN

Kashmir

Rawalpindi

Lahore

PAKISTAN

Multan

INDIA Karachi

A r a b i a n

S e a

Pakistan

New Delhi

3

President vs. Prime Minister: Democratization in Pakistan This book puts forth the argument that the process of democratization should be viewed in the context of nation-state consolidation because South Asian countries were compelled to pursue both objectives simultaneously. They did not have the luxury of rooting democracy in an already established and consolidated nation-state. In the first forty years, Pakistan failed to manage and balance the twin tasks of consolidation with democracy. Democratic beginnings were aborted at least twice in these years. In the 1990s, the compulsions of national consolidation were no less imposing, but the balance between democratic and nondemocratic forces had shifted in favor of the former. Such a statement immediately runs counter to the growing evidence of governmental instability, breakdown of law and order, attacks on the judiciary and the press, civil strife, and corruption. This chapter does not deny the existence of serious political problems in Pakistan. The purpose here is to understand how the balance fluctuated between civilian and military-bureaucratic elites between the first elections in 1988 and the military coup in October 1999 and what that tells us about the strength and persistence of democratic developments during the past decade. The elite bargain approach suggests that democratic transition can take place without fundamental changes in economy or politics. That was the case in Pakistan during the 1990s. The phrase “elite bargain” generally means an agreement to change the rules of the game and permit popular contests to determine who shall rule and for how long. In the 1990s, Pakistani people had elected at least three governments by popular ballot, although they had not been consulted on their dissolution. Pakistan’s military-bureaucratic establishment dismissed five elected governments between 1988 and 1999. Whether or not Pakistan will make a successful transition to democracy depends—according to

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the elite bargain theorists—on the permanency and stability of the elite bargain, adherence to the rules and outcomes of the electoral contests, and creation of political institutions to sustain democracy through turmoil and crisis. Although the elite bargain approach is useful in understanding the process of transition and has been incorporated in the discussion of civilmilitary confrontations around the Eighth Amendment to Pakistan’s 1973 constitution, it suffers from several flaws. It does not take into account the power of partially articulated groups and communities to derail the passage to democracy. In Pakistan, such groups bear ethnic, regional, and religious badges (like the Muhajir and Shi’a communities in Pakistan). The elite bargain theories ignore also the constraints of national consolidation (like security, economy, and regime stability). In the real world of politics, however, they constitute the limits within which leaders make their choices. The elite bargain approach does not take into account how a segment of the elite might insist that certain issue areas should remain above and beyond the bargain. In these instances, an elite bargain between the civilian and former authoritarian elements will remain limited and narrow in scope. In the following analysis, I focus on three broad questions about Pakistan to gain a fuller understanding of its journey through four elections and five dismissals. First is the evolution of the elite bargain between Pakistan’s military-bureaucratic establishment and political parties and its implications for democratic development. Second is the nature and role of ethnic-religious dissent. Third is the constraints of national consolidation—security and economic dilemmas Pakistan faced in the 1990s—and their implications for the elected governments in the past decade. I have integrated these questions to present a composite discussion of democratization in Pakistan. ■

THE EVOLUTION OF THE ELITE BARGAIN AT THE NEXUS OF THE EIGHTH AMENDMENT

The accidental death of Zia-ul-Haq in August 1988 was a turning point in Pakistan’s politics. Since then, two coalitions of parties have gradually emerged—the Pakistan People’s Party, led by Benazir Bhutto, and the Pakistan Muslim League (PML), in its several incarnations, led by Mian Nawaz Sharif—as the principle contenders in the electoral contests. Pakistan held four general elections between 1988 and 1997. The current democratic transition is, however, far from complete. This is largely because elected governments have been repeatedly dismissed. At the core of these dismissals was the balance of power between the president and the prime minister. The former office has been the

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preserve of unelected elements that have dominated the fate of elected governments in the country.1 Pakistan’s presidents have been able to wield such power not only because of the tradition of military intervention in domestic politics but also because of the special provisions—introduced in Pakistan’s constitution since March 1985 and popularly known as the Eighth Amendment—that gave the president extraordinary legal power over the parliament. The politics of the Eighth Amendment thus reveal much about the changing balance of power in Pakistan. According to the Eighth Amendment, the president can dismiss a government and dissolve both national and provincial assemblies if, in the president’s view, those bodies fail to fulfill their constitutional obligations.2 On the grounds of mismanagement, unchecked domestic violence or instability, intolerable levels of corruption, or other situations that jeopardize the welfare and security of Pakistan, the president can dissolve assemblies and appoint a caretaker prime minister in preparation for elections that have to be held within ninety days from the date of dismissal. Although the constitution proclaimed Pakistan to be a parliamentary democracy, these provisions undermined parliamentary sovereignty. It did not make Pakistan a presidential system along the lines of France, Mexico, or the United States, where a clearer demarcation of executive and legislative powers exists. Instead, the constitutional amendments created an ad hoc compromise between elected and nonelected elements (the president is elected by the parliament, although he has more often than not sided with the nonelected elite in Pakistani politics) that reflected the uneasy balance between the power of the military-bureaucratic oligarchy, on the one hand, and the demand for civilian rule on the other. This compromise symbolizes the travails of a country unsure of its identity and international persona, obsessed by a sense of vulnerability to regional rivals and international great powers, and led by a narrow circle of Punjabi-Pathan elites acting as gatekeepers to the corridors of power. The road from these beginnings has led again and again to military rule and bureaucratic dominance. But each confrontation between these rival forces propelled Pakistan closer to civilian rule and a competitive electoral democracy, at least through elections since 1990.

Zia-ul-Haq and the First Dismissal, 1988

Pakistan’s transition to democracy began during Zia-ul-Haq’s last years in power, although popular momentum had become evident since the launching of the Movement to Restore Democracy (MRD) in 1983. Judging it prudent to allow outlet for popular sentiments, Zia had put

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forward a plan (on 14 August 1983) for holding elections in March 1985. From August 1983 onward, Pakistan moved gradually, if hesitantly, toward a civilian rule that eventually culminated in the lifting of martial law on 30 December 1985. Zia had brought in three key changes in the legal and political framework before martial law was lifted: the presidential referendum of December 1984, the February 1985 partyless elections, and the Restoration of Constitutional Order (ROC) in March 1985. Under martial law, Zia had relied on conditional legitimacy granted to his rule indirectly by the supreme court judgment in the Begum Nusrat Bhutto case.3 But that justification was not sufficient to continue in office after martial law was lifted. To preclude any challenge in the post–martial law period, Zia held a referendum. The whole “process leading to referendum was carefully manipulated” and “paved the way for Zia to stay in power for another five years.”4 Nonparty elections for national and provincial assemblies were held in February 1985. The MRD had boycotted the elections and charged that both the partyless election and the referendum were in violation of the 1973 constitution. However, more than 50 percent voter participation provided Zia with an argument against the MRD and a strong bargaining position against the newly constituted parliament. On 2 March 1985 Zia promulgated the ROC, the third prong of the plan. Its details were disclosed only after the elections. The ROC established an “eleven member National Security Council that included the chiefs of armed services . . . stipulated that a constitutional amendment be supported by all the provincial assemblies . . . in addition to the federal legislature” and gave Pakistan’s president “the power to dissolve the National Assembly when, in his opinion, an appeal to the electorate was necessary; appoint or dismiss the prime minister; and suspend fundamental rights.” “In this way,” writes Mohammad Waseem, “the supra parliamentary institution of the Presidency was imposed on both the federal and provincial legislatures and governments.”5 The president could appoint governors and provincial cabinets, bypassing the parliament in a “singlehanded pursuit of constitutional engineering.” The ROC legitimized the various legal and constitutional changes introduced by Zia in the martial-law period. These changes were articulated in the form of an Indemnity Bill, which thereafter came to be known as the Eighth Constitutional Amendment. The ROC made all decrees and orders issued during the martial-law period retroactively legitimate. Pakistan’s assembly could not challenge this without the prior consent of the president—a position Zia had already secured before constituting the assembly.

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The sequence of these events reveals the emerging balance between elected and nonelected elements in the mid-1980s. Zia obviously felt confident enough to permit a degree of popular participation and mobilization of nonpartisan collective bodies to take place. Yet he feared the common front—the Movement to Restore Democracy—that was forged in reaction to his martial rule. The MRD’s growing strength was evident in the mammoth rallies it was able to muster and in the repeated calls for Zia’s resignation by the opposition leaders, Benazir Bhutto and Ashgar Khan. Rallies often led to riots in Karachi and Lahore. These public protests were reinforced by the militant activities of the Mohajir community organizations in the cities of Sindh Province. Zia’s security forces had put down these protests, but growing resistance to his rule had shaken the leader’s confidence. The 1985 partyless election was meant, therefore, to let the steam out of the popular pressure cooker. Zia had, however, extracted a price for allowing elections: he had insisted on the Eighth Constitutional Amendment. The struggle for ascendancy between civilian politicians and the unelected ruling elements had intensified after the 1985 elections. In April 1986, Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan from a self-imposed exile in England. The cycle of protests, rallies, calls for new elections, and President Zia’s resignation resumed course. Ethnic tensions erupted again between Pathans and Mohajirs in Karachi. On 29 May 1988, Zia evoked the Eighth Amendment and dismissed Prime Minister Mohammad Khan Junejo and his hapless cabinet, citing their inability to maintain law and order and establishing Islamic society as reasons for dismissal. The next day, all four provincial assemblies were dissolved. Was the breakdown of law and order a new and unusual development? Did corruption warrant dismissal? Several scholars have pointed out that corruption had escalated to unprecedented levels during the eight years of martial rule. Prime Minister Junejo could not have stamped it out, particularly when it meant stepping on the toes of the military and top-level bureaucracy; nor was the law-and-order situation worse than usual. Karachi and Peshawar had become the dens of lawless, armed thugs and drug dealers since the onset of the Afghan War and Pakistan’s increasing involvement as a conduit of secret military assistance to the Afghan mujahideen. The violent confrontations between Mohajirs and Pathans had begun in the early 1980s and with the formation of the Muttahida (formerly Muhajir) Quami Movement (MQM), under the leadership of Altaf Hussain. The birth of MQM was, in fact, a reflection of the fissures already evident in Sindh during the early 1980s. Clearly, Zia did not dismiss Junejo for the reasons he said

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he did. What did it signify for the shifting balance of power between the president and the prime minister? The inclusion of the Eighth Amendment had created a small space for sharing power (at least formally), but it was largely circumscribed. Zia had resisted transfer of any real decisionmaking power—legislative or executive—to the assembly or the cabinet. By a tacit understanding, Afghan policy, the nuclear weapons question, relations with India, the defense budget, and the institutional privileges (licenses, directorates of business, and industrial enterprises) of the officer core and military remained the president’s exclusive preserve. Appointments to the office of the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) and heads of the intelligence agencies were also regarded as the president’s prerogatives. Any encroachment by the prime minister in these matters immediately led to friction. This arrangement obviously circumscribed the parliament (subservient and generally accommodating though this body was), given its partyless composition. Collective assemblies, however, have their own organizational logic and requirements for political survival. Even nonpartisan assemblies and an appointed prime minister such as Junejo need to prove their popular legitimacy. After the initial months of caution, Junejo surprised Zia by fighting for greater control over policy. Differences developed over the Afghan policy. Junejo and his colleagues were anxious to consult the political opposition, represented by the MRD, to evolve a joint approach. This meant PPP’s reentry into the system, which Zia vehemently opposed. Junejo’s policy also threatened to undermine Zia’s support base. For instance, the signing of the Afghan Accord would have jeopardized the interests of certain pro-Zia groups and institutions, especially the Jamaat-e-Islami and the interservice intelligence, which were closely involved with the war effort and favored certain Afghan mujahideen factions.6 The 10 April 1988 explosion at the Ojiheri Camp in Rawalpindi further soured relations between Junejo and Zia. Junejo had appointed an enquiry committee, which criticized the military officers responsible for the camp. There were battles over personnel and protocol. Junejo insisted that all files pertaining to the work of all ministries should go directly to the prime minister. He fired a powerful Zia associate who held the post of information secretary in the government. Differences surfaced over relations with India. During the December 1985 journey to New Delhi, Zia had initiated a process of normalization on the advice of Finance Minister Dr. Mehbub-ul-Haq, but Junejo passed a strongly worded resolution on Kashmir in the national assembly and fired Haq. Upon his return from a highly successful visit to the United States in July 1986, Junejo removed General Agha Nek

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Mohammad, a Zia protégé, as head of the Intelligence Bureau. General Zia was convinced that Junejo was wavering in his loyalties and might renege on their earlier understanding. Junejo had stepped up criticism of Zia for occupying the dual positions of the president and the chief of army staff. The military-bureaucracy had won this round of the battle, but the fallout revealed the extent to which the public mandate was beginning to influence political calculations. On 30 May, General Zia addressed the nation to explain why he had sacked Junejo. The latter held a press conference to explain how he—Junejo—was instrumental in ending martial law, pressing for the 1985 election, restoring freedom of the press, allowing greater tolerance of dissent, bringing about the Afghan Accord, and creating the Muslim League. Many commentators in Pakistan concurred. The assertion of civil society, even so flawed and crippled as the one created in 1985, had inexorably led to opening Pakistani politics to competitive pressures. One astute observer commented that by his actions of May 29 President Zia “may have set into motion events that could go in a direction contrary to his game plan. There is no denying the perception that General Zia is weakened and politically lonely after May 29 and somehow he is in a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation. In other words, fair and free elections . . . could have unpredictable consequences for him and not holding any elections at all would further narrow the political options before General Zia.”7 What had created this dilemma? During the eleven years of Zia’s rule, the Pakistani economy had changed in important ways. Shahid Javed Burki, an eminent World Bank economist, observed that Pakistan was approaching the status of a middle-income nation with considerable diversification of industry, increase in export earnings, and impressive and sustained rates of economic growth. The large amounts of remittances from the Persian Gulf countries and substantial infusion of funds from the United States and other donor agencies had brought large amounts of capital into the economy. Although the power structure remained narrowly based on the military, civil service, business and industrial entrepreneurs, and large landholders, the number of those included in the elite and in their networks had expanded the urban and professional middle classes in the cities. The remittances from the Persian Gulf had also changed the face of rural Pakistan. 8 Others suggest that selective suppression of dissent had prolonged the Zia regime. In reality, Zia lasted as long as he did because the political opposition was fragmented. He had benefited immensely from the Afghan War and the U.S., Saudi, and other foreign aid that Pakistan’s

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“frontline” status had brought. Zia skillfully used Islam to create the ideological basis for his regime and divide his opposition. The bottom line was force, but Zia was also a master manipulator of collective psychology.

Ghulam Ishaq Khan and the Second Dismissal

Zia’s accidental death in a plane crash suddenly and violently changed the balance of politics in Pakistan. Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a veteran civil service bureaucrat and the chairman of the Senate, assumed the reins of power as prescribed in the constitution. Ghulam Ishaq Khan was associated with the highest levels of government since the 1950s and was trusted to effect a smooth transfer of power to an elected government. In November 1988, elections were held that brought the PPP a plurality of seats in the parliament. The PPP had fought the national elections with a tacit understanding with the MQM in Sindh and several other small parties. The opposition was represented by the Islamic Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) or Islamic Democratic Alliance (IDA), a coalition of the Muslim League, and several religious parties led by Nawaz Sharif. Benazir Bhutto evoked the memory of her father, Z. A. Bhutto, as a rallying point in her campaign. Her opposition, the IJI, consisted of all the elements anxious to defeat Bhutto and her allegedly radical politics (those who had benefited in business from Zia’s martial-law regime, the pro-Zia members of the dissolved parliament, religious fundamentalists, and conservative parties). Bhutto’s rhetoric did not, however, match her actions. She had not resurrected the class alliance of the poor urban workers with the lowermiddle-income Pakistanis her father had put together in the 1970s. There were no shifts in the economy or its class basis, but the balance of power between the civil and military leaders had begun to tilt in favor of the latter. And, most important, public opinion was beginning to influence the way each fought for turf. Both the IJI and the PPP depended on support from the feudal notables. The November 1988 elections were fair and free. The PPP won the largest bloc of seats but fell short of an absolute majority. In the provincial elections that followed, the PPP’s main opposition, the IJI, won the critical province of Punjab. People had exercised their vote, but the result was a weak central government. The first Bhutto government turned out to be a disappointment. It was unable to implement most of its promises. According to her critics, Benazir Bhutto had abandoned the people in the interest of her own and her party’s political survival. As William Richter commented, “Benazir

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Bhutto found herself confronted on all sides—by the president, whose enhanced powers under the amended constitution seriously limited her scope of authority; by the military, which insisted on retaining authority over Afghan policy and other sensitive subjects; by the IJI opposition in the National Assembly, which sought to remove her through non-confidence motions; by the IJI majority in the Senate; and by Nawaz Sharif, who attempted to strengthen Punjab and other provinces at the expense of central government.” 9 Clearly, the PPP government could not have made much headway in its promises to the electorate. Khalid Mahmud tells us in his book that Benazir Bhutto was being urged by her supporters to take a more independent stand and was pilloried for failing to do so. He also points out that the atmosphere of mutual suspicion and enmity had so marred the relationship between the government and the IJI that the former took every opportunity to topple the Punjab government (which IJI dominated), whereas the latter left no stone unturned to defame, attack, and discredit the PPP and Benazir Bhutto.10 With only a plurality of seats and the ever-present threat of dismissal, it was understandable why Benazir Bhutto remained focused on every move the president made. He had the power to dismiss her. It is against the background of the MQM’s break with the PPP, rising ethnic violence in Karachi, and growing concern about reversals in the economy that President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed the Bhutto government on 6 August 1990 and dissolved the national assembly. The failure to accommodate and contain ethnic aspirations had destroyed the political compact between the PPP and the MQM. That failure shortened the life of the Bhutto government. Ghulam Ishaq Khan also dissolved all four provincial assemblies and appointed Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, the leader of the combined opposition parties in the national assembly, as interim prime minister. The president justified his action on several counts: that the Bhutto government had openly indulged in “horse trading” in the national assembly (a euphemism for bribery and engineering defections), failed to maintain law and order, misused state power to accumulate personal wealth, and was proven incompetent in the administration of the economy. These practices had endangered democracy, according to Ghulam Ishaq Khan. He said he had dismissed the Bhutto government to save democracy from unscrupulous and greedy politicians. That was the official explanation. There were, however, other interpretations. Maleeha Lodhi, in her report in Newsline magazine, states that the top brass of the Pakistani military had “conveyed to the president . . . its decision to remove Bhutto if the President did not act to do so. Reliable

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sources say the deadline of August 14 was given.”11 The army’s complaints included those cited by Ghulam Ishaq Khan in his speech to the nation, but it also included other objections, such as corruption and the issues of Kashmir, Afghanistan, army promotions, control of intelligence agencies, the Sindh situation, and the confrontation between Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif’s Punjab provincial government.12 Bhutto was caught in the pincer of opposite pressures: what the military was prepared to permit and what the electorate expected from her. It is not exactly clear where the decision to dismiss Bhutto originated. Was it in the rift between the president and the prime minister? Was the military top brass anxious to get rid of her? The consensus is that the military initiated the process but the bureaucracy happily went along. All the same, the politics of protests and participation had also come to stay in the 1990s, as had popular distrust of all political leaders. Ironically, the latter was reinforced by the removal of restrictions on the press and expansion of political freedoms effected by Benazir Bhutto. In the three provinces of Pakistan—Sindh, Punjab, and NWFP—electoral contests revolved around two alternative political forces, one led by Benazir Bhutto, the other (anti-Bhutto) by Nawaz Sharif. Public opinion polls published in September 1990 indicated that two-thirds of all respondents approved of Ghulam Ishaq Khan’s order of dissolution. Nearly a quarter of PPP respondents also voiced approval. This was a remarkable sign of growing frustration with politics and political leadership. These polls were not a popular rejection of democracy. When the public approved the dismissals, they were expressing frustrations with Bhutto’s performance, not passing judgment on the desirability of democracy.

Ghulam Ishaq Khan and the Third Dismissal

The elections of 24 October 1990 reversed the rewards of the 1988 elections. The IJI swept Punjab and secured a plurality in NWFP, achieving a narrow but absolute majority of 105 of the 207 contested seats. The People’s Democratic Alliance (PDA, Bhutto’s PPP and others) won 45 seats. The MQM won in urban Sindh. In terms of the popular vote, the PDA percentage was only slightly lower (36.38 percent) than that obtained by the IJI (37.16 percent). Although there were some irregularities and violence in a few constituencies, the election was reasonably fair. Bhutto accused the opposition of rigging and intimidation to obtain favorable results.13 The teams of international observers, however, dismissed such charges, with the lone exception of observers from the Human Rights Organization. Though irregularities were present,

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they could not have substantially altered the outcome. This was the second free election in Pakistan since 1988 that had produced a popular government in accordance with the constitution of the country. For a number of reasons, the first two years of the 1990s were considered almost “make or break” years for Pakistan. These also show how dominating the United States and the World Bank had become in Pakistan’s domestic politics. The dramatic changes in international politics and the triumph of the neoliberal ideology had changed the circumstances in and around Pakistan. The new circumstances were evident in the sudden fall of dollar remittances because of the Gulf crisis, the drying up of foreign assistance because of the end of the Afghan War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, not to mention frictions with the United States over Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear weapons program. In addition, the economy suffered from distortion due to high and endemic levels of corruption, the failing infrastructure, and the absence of a clear interface between the public and private sectors. These circumstances had imparted a new urgency to restructure government policies in the early 1990s. Shahid Javed Burki argued that circumstances had opened a “window of opportunity” for Pakistan to lay down the legal and physical framework for a market-oriented, rulebased economy. The Pakistani economy faced several knotty problems, but in his view the Zia years had achieved high levels of growth. The problem was to sustain this growth despite the diminished availability of foreign financial resources. The obvious solution—one urgently put forward by the donors and international agencies—was to privatize state-held industries and parastatal agencies, raise resources through agricultural taxation, forbear from using the state as a primary instrument of resource allocation (giving that responsibility to the free market), and rationalize and clean up the government to make Pakistan attractive to foreign direct investments.14 Urged and applauded by international agencies, Nawaz Sharif enthusiastically embraced the market solution. Indeed, he had little choice but to do so. According to Rasul Bakhsh Rais, the privatization of “huge and inefficient public sector industrial units, licenses to private banks and cutting down of the bureaucratic red tape led to improvement in the economic climate.”15 The economy performed better in 1991–1992 than it had in previous years. GNP grew at the rate of 6.4 percent, up from 5.6 percent the previous year. Manufacturing and agricultural outputs registered marked improvements. Inflation was down to 9.6 percent, the budget deficit from 8.8 percent to 6.9 percent. Investment took an upward turn to register 17.6 percent.16 Nawaz Sharif succeeded in securing an agreement for the allocation of Indus waters and the distribution

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of revenues between the center and provinces. But several publicized schemes, for instance, the yellow cab scheme that cost the banks millions in lost funds and the collapse of the investment cooperatives, went awry and produced popular disillusionment. There was mounting evidence of mismanagement in the privatization of government-held enterprises, and charges of corruption multiplied.17 But on the whole Nawaz Sharif had turned out to be a businessfriendly and action-oriented prime minister who had made a definite break with Pakistan’s statist economic policies and had retained a parliamentary majority despite the withdrawal of the MQM and the Jamaat-e-Islami from his ruling coalition. Why, then, did President Ghulam Ishaq Khan evoke the Eighth Amendment and dismiss the Sharif government in April 1993, dissolve the national assembly, and install Mir Balkh Sher Mazari as the caretaker prime minister? A short answer is the relative success, not failures of, the Nawaz Sharif government. Nawaz Sharif’s economic policies were, as pointed out, fairly popular with the international donors who were important to the aid-dependent economy of Pakistan.18 Sharif had consolidated his popular base inside and outside the parliament. In these two respects he was in a stronger position in relation to the president than Junejo and Benazir Bhutto had been at the time they were dismissed from office. What followed indicates that the balance of informal power had indeed tilted in favor of the elected elements. And it is precisely the fear of shift in power away from the civil-military bureaucracy that led to Sharif’s dismissal. There were also personal considerations at stake. Several observers of the Pakistani political scene comment on the growing tensions between the president and the prime minister.19 Sharif had tried to break out of the role of a dependent protégé of the civilmilitary bureaucracy and claim powers similar to those enjoyed by prime ministers in other parliamentary democracies.20 Ghulam Ishaq Khan belonged to the viceregal system of authority in Pakistan. He had two objectives: to keep the growing independence of Nawaz Sharif in check, and to ensure his own success in the next presidential elections, scheduled for fall 1993. His second objective depended on securing the first. The sudden death of General Asif Nawaz Janjua in February 1993 brought these matters to a head.21 A new COAS had to be appointed, a matter of utmost importance to both the prime minister and the president since each needed the military’s support for their future goals. All previous COASs had exercised enormous influence on the shape of politics in Pakistan. Pakistan’s constitutional provisions have, however, left considerable room for opposite interpretations about who has the jurisdictional authority to make this appointment. General Janjua himself

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was not a favorite of Nawaz Sharif. The latter had suspected Janjua of secretly conspiring with Benazir Bhutto. For Sharif, then, it was a question of political survival. With a majority in the assembly, Sharif was not willing to meekly accept the presidential decision on this question. Ishaq Khan ignored the recommendations of the prime minister and appointed instead General Abdul Waheed Kakar as the new COAS. He bypassed six senior officers in line for the post as well as the prime minister’s office to do so. This underlines the importance of the COAS in the struggle for power between president and prime minister in Pakistan. It also suggests that the military elite can be neutral at times, partisan at others, but usually the arbiter of ultimate power in Pakistan. This is why both the prime minister and the president were anxious to secure its support. Sharif retaliated against General Waheed’s appointment by declaring (on 28 February) that he would seek the removal of the Eighth Amendment from the constitutional order to restore the original powers of the prime minister. Sharif did not command the two-thirds majority in the parliament necessary to repeal the amendment, although he had “received unprecedented public support on the issue.” “He had underestimated,” says Rais, “the power of the establishment to create political trouble even in his own camp. It seems he equally misunderstood the political game that Benazir Bhutto was playing.” 22 The PPP had opposed the Eighth Amendment, but it was also anxious to form a government. That was possible only if Sharif were dismissed and new elections called. Bhutto offered to support Ghulam Ishaq Khan’s second term in office in exchange for a midterm poll.23 This sealed Nawaz Sharif’s fate. The president immediately called upon his supporters in the parliament to withdraw from the government. Out of desperation, Sharif offered to support Ghulam Ishaq Khan’s reelection to the presidency. When no response was forthcoming, he decided to take the fight to the public and addressed the nation in a highly publicized television speech on 17 April 1993. Thirty hours later, the president exercised the power granted to him by the Eighth Amendment and dismissed Sharif, dissolved the national assembly, and appointed Mir Balkh Sher Mazari as the caretaker prime minister. Ghulam Ishaq Khan cited the same reasons for dismissing Sharif that he had cited for dissolving the PPP government three years earlier: corruption, harassment of political opponents, financial mismanagement, use of bank loans as patronage, and violation of the constitution. For his part, Sharif insisted that his government had not lost the majority in parliament and that the president had violated the constitution and all democratic norms. His government had not ceased to function

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constitutionally, the only other reason recognized by Pakistan’s constitution for a legitimate dismissal. He therefore appealed to the supreme court. In a historic verdict, the court reversed the presidential order at the end of May 1993 and restored the Sharif government to power. However, Ghulam Ishaq Khan was not to be deterred from his purpose. In April, he moved with speed to engineer the collapse of pro-Sharif governments in Punjab, NWFP, and Sindh.24 Needless to say, Sharif also mobilized all means both fair and foul to foil the president.25 The military leaders stepped in to prevent the confrontation, but in pushing the dispute this far Nawaz Sharif ended the possibilities of compromise. Evidently, the boundaries between the powers of president and prime minister were highly irksome to the impatient Nawaz Sharif, as they had been for Benazir Bhutto. But in terms of the elite bargain, Nawaz Sharif was pushing for greater power for the prime minister’s office and for himself personally. These struggles paralyzed the central government. Financial capital took flight. Foreign reserves plummeted, and the economy suddenly became vulnerable. “In a single day in April,” writes Rais, “the Karachi Stock exchange lost Rs 6 billion [6 billion ruppees] of market capitalization.” At this juncture, COAS General Waheed Kakar stepped in and demanded the resignation of both Sharif and Ghulam Ishaq Khan. Sharif abandoned his fight with great reluctance; Ghulam Ishaq Khan also resigned. Influential voices in the military establishment thought it prudent to remove him since the supreme court had reversed his dismissal of the Sharif government. On 18 July 1993, Waseem Sajjad and Moeen Qureshi were appointed the interim president and prime minister. New elections were scheduled in early October. This third dismissal since 1988 appeared to repeat the historic patterns of arbitrary interventions, but something had fundamentally changed in Pakistan’s politics. Sharif’s stubborn refusal to resign on the basis of legal and valid constitutional arguments and the court’s decision to restore his government had strengthened hopes of a truly independent judiciary. Both the judiciary and the political parties were testing the limits of oligarchy’s tolerance to break free from its stranglehold. The critical question here is, Why had the military leaders not sided fully with Ishaq Khan and demanded instead his resignation? Pakistani armed forces are not a monolithic organization. Several scholars have noted the deep differences that have existed in the military. More often than not, ideological and policy differences are aggravated by career opportunities, personal rivalry, and political and financial ambitions. Ghulam Ishaq Khan’s handling of the dismissal had made military leaders highly uncomfortable. Samina Yasmeen, in her

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perceptive essay on the third dismissal, writes that during the impasse in Punjab “the imposition of martial law became a real possibility.” But the military adopted the role of “peacemaker” because, she suggests, it did not want to give the impression that a Pathan COAS was siding with a Pathan president against a Punjabi prime minister. Given Pakistan’s sensitive ethnodemography, such a perception was inflammatory. The military leaders also feared negative public reaction. After the 18 April dissolution, Sharif’s rallies were drawing enormous crowds. Yasmeen observed that after the proclamation issued by Sharif, which brought Punjab under the central government—a proclamation that Khan said he had never received—the armed forces remained silent, “providing no support either to the central government or the pro-president government led by Wattoo.”26 Hasan Askari Rizvi, a leading scholar of Pakistan, views the military’s stance differently. According to him, “the Army chief refused to make any paramilitary forces available to effect the change in the Punjab on the grounds that the presidential proclamation was unauthorized.”27 One might see the military as neutral or propresident depending on the viewer’s perspective. In any event, at this juncture the PPP announced a “Long March” to demand dissolution and fresh elections. Benazir Bhutto decided to organize such a march after consulting Wattoo and probably also Ghulam Ishaq Khan. These developments heightened the possibility of armed clashes in Punjab. The military then stepped in, persuaded Bhutto to call off the march, and arranged for both the president and prime minister to resign. These events expose the complex rivalry between the major players in Pakistani politics. But even more important, they show us that a new factor was influencing the political outcome of these contests, that is, public opinion and public yearning for an effective popular government. The military leaders were aware that even though Pakistan’s history and political legacy gave them preeminence, their authority needed popular justification. The generals needed the public to see them as neutral in the struggle for power and office among politicians, though always vigilant on behalf of the country’s unity and integrity. This created a strange paradox in Pakistan’s history. The fundamental contradictions between military and civilian interests could produce paralysis, but once the contradictions became acute the military could justifiably step in to rescue the country from chaos. The military had usurped power, but it was also acutely aware of the questionable basis of such usurpation. The generals who took over the reins of government soon devised methods for securing public approval. Ayub had devised the system of basic democracy, and Zia put in place the partyless

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Islamic democracy. Pressures to relent power were generated by fears of public protests and unfavorable comparisons with India. Since the end of the Soviet Union and with the triumph of liberal democracy, it became even more difficult to buck the international trends and stand against democratization. The Eighth Amendment gave the military elite and its close ally, the civil bureaucracy, a check on party politics and political leaders. Ghulam Ishaq Khan had let it be known that he was the buffer between the civilian government and the armed forces, and as president he had the discretionary powers granted by the Eighth Amendment to forestall a possible military takeover. The growing independence of party leaders—Junejo, Benazir Bhutto, and then Nawaz Sharif—suggests that the civilian politicians felt equally justified in rolling back the boundaries of presidential power, though such efforts came only after tensions developed between them and the president. The greatest ally in their struggle against the military-bureaucracy combine was public opinion, which had made the military increasingly wary of assuming rule. It is in this context that the independent judiciary’s reversing of the president’s dissolution order was significant. It struck a blow for democracy, if democracy is conceived of as a strengthening of the elected elements. It is not inappropriate to describe Pakistan’s democratization as such, not because of the superficial resemblance Pakistan might develop with Western parliamentary systems but because—in the context of the 1990s—the choice was between civil-military bureaucracy and political parties. Pakistan’s political parties were no doubt corrupt, weak, and narrowly based, their leaders moved more by proposals of personal gain than public good, but they, more than their nonelected rivals, were likely (at least in the mid-1990s) to open the door to wider public participation in government. In contrast, the traditional oligarchy and the military, which sees itself as the guardian of the nation, had only a notional need to refer to the people. The Pakistani public had also become increasingly independent from traditional pressures— biradaris (kinship groups) and feudal connections—in making their choices.

Farooq Leghari and the Fourth Dismissal

The choice in October 1993 was between Bhutto and Sharif. Only 40 percent of registered voters turned out to vote. The result was discouraging. The political mandate was inconclusive. The PPP had won by a slim margin, 86 seats over the Muslim League’s 73 seats. The provincial elections also produced a similarly inconclusive distribution of

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power between the PPP and the League. Yet the 1993 election had consolidated some of the trends evident earlier: the League had emerged as a truly national party, having won significant seats on its own in all four provinces. Pakistan appeared to be moving toward a broad twoparty system, although the social basis of the principal parties was unstable. In the absence of policy differences, parties remained identified with strong leaders, but strong leaders presided over weak political organizations. This was the bane of the party system in Pakistan from the beginning. The frequent trials at the hustings had not changed the situation much. Despite her slim victory, Benazir Bhutto was able to cobble a coalition together and establish a PPP-led government at the center, as well as in the provinces of Punjab and Sindh. The PPP’s major triumph was in getting Farooq Leghari, a close confidant of Prime Minster Bhutto, elected to the president’s office. This had significant implications for the exercise of the Eighth Amendment. Several scholars of Pakistan had argued that Leghari’s appointment had made the Eighth Amendment irrelevant because the president and the prime minister belonged to the same party. Prime Minister Bhutto would have no reason to fear the scope of the president’s power. Ironically, the opposition would also have less incentive to repeal the amendment, since that would mean strengthening Benazir Bhutto. The supreme court decision ordering the restoration of the Sharif government in 1993 had further weakened the relevance of the Eighth Amendment—at least that is what many thought. But three years into the second Bhutto government, President Leghari dismissed the prime minster, dissolved the parliament, and called for fresh elections. Was the fourth dismissal a repeat of the factors that had converged in the first three instances? Throughout 1996, relations between President Leghari and Benazir Bhutto had become increasingly strained, not least because of what was seen as the cavalier and arrogant behavior of Bhutto toward her party’s appointee to the president’s office. In this sense, the immediate causes for the dismissal were not too dissimilar to the earlier dismissals of Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from office. The personality clashes between the two were, however, only a small and less significant part of the story. The military elite was unhappy not because Benazir Bhutto was trying to encroach on their preserves of policy—she had been careful this second time to steer clear of controversial issues—but because her financial policies were likely to jeopardize their ties to the international assistance community, the World Bank, and the United States. Unlike in the past, the reason for the dismissal in November 1996 was due to factors outside the Pakistani power

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structure. The removal occurred because of the erosion of public confidence and the breakdown of institutions. “The situation is qualitatively different this time around. Unlike the past, the current crisis has not been triggered off by a rift within the power structure, but outside it,” writes one astute commentator on the Pakistani political scene in the 26 September issue of Newsline. He goes on to say: The country’s present plight is largely a crisis of state which bears far deeper and more dangerous political consequences. The President has been pushed to the political center stage because of the prevailing economic and political situation and the inability of the government to deal with them. There has been [a] . . . massive institutional breakdown. The virtual collapse of state-owned financial institutions and commercial banks has worsened the . . . economic woes. The parliament appears to have lost relevance. . . . Most bills are imposed. . . . The ongoing confrontation between the judiciary has created a very dangerous situation . . . economic life has been crippled by repeated strikes by businessmen, traders, and industrialists. Almost all the major opposition political forces have rallied against the Bhutto government and their call for civil disobedience threatens to derail the present dispensation.28

Most observers agreed with this assessment of Pakistan in mid-1996.29 In the few weeks preceding the removal in 1996, protests by the country’s main Islamic party had thrown many cities into turmoil, including Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi. The cry in the streets was “corruption.”30 In Pakistan, the figure most often paired with that word was Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto’s husband and her minister of investment. The PPP’s postelectoral alliance with the MQM had fallen apart in 1993. Karachi was in a state of permanent war. A large number of people had been killed in what the MQM charged were fake encounters staged by the army and police. The economic disarray and violence had alienated the middle classes, and the vulgar display of wealth had turned the poor away from the PPP. The Punjab assembly elections provided ample proof of this. The PPP vote among the poor had dropped by nearly 19 percent. Benazir Bhutto had also locked horns with the judiciary. In what came to be known as the appointment of judges case, the supreme court had handed down a judgment in March 1996 curtailing the government’s power to appoint or transfer judges. Previous governments had indulged in these practices freely. The issue became contentious when the chief justice of the supreme court, joined by the chief justices of the four provincial courts, ordered the sacking of twenty-four judges, all of whom had been appointed by the Bhutto government.

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Prime Minister Bhutto, however, refused to abide by the judgment. This confrontation occurred against Jamaat-e-Islami’s persistent demand for Bhutto’s resignation and replacement with a government headed by the judiciary. Benazir Bhutto was convinced that the supreme court was a front for forces determined to topple her government. Whether Bhutto was or was not a victim of a systemwide conspiracy is open to speculation. She had certainly alienated even the judiciary, which was generally believed to be sympathetic to her cause. If elections had been held in mid-1996, Benazir Bhutto would have in all probability lost the government to the opposition forces led by Nawaz Sharif, as she in fact did in February 1997. But the grounds for the fourth dismissal were different. The first two dismissals were clearly a fight for turf, and the military-bureaucracy was able to easily dismiss Junejo and Benazir Bhutto. By the time of the third dismissal, the powerful elements within the militarybureaucratic oligarchy were on the defensive, and the prime minister had put up a fierce fight. The fourth dismissal (and arguably the fifth that followed on 12 October 1999) was more closely entangled with the imperatives of the economy and security and pressures from the World Bank and the United States. Bhutto was unable to retain her populist commitments and “rationalize” Pakistan’s economy. Pakistan’s military-bureaucratic elite also faced a dilemma. Continuing with Bhutto meant continuing the current crisis leading to economic collapse. It jeopardized Pakistan’s position with the World Bank and the IMF. The opposition parties had no economic program to ease the country’s financial debts or offer a clean government. Newsline echoed the military’s dilemma: “Most observers agree that the dissolution of the assembly and holding the fresh elections are not likely to resolve the recent crises of the state. The complexion of the assembly will not change much.” However, the article continued, “strong opinion is emerging in political and intellectual circles that instead of holding fresh elections, a long-term national caretaker government [comprised] of clean politicians and technocrats with the full backing of the army, be formed by the president with a mandate to put the economy back on track and enforce much needed political, financial and tax reforms, a task which successive parliamentarians have been unable to fulfill.”31 Newsline noted that if the drift were to continue the military would feel compelled to intervene. Whether that would have solved Pakistan’s institutional crisis was a moot point. The military would have been dutybound to intervene. At the heart of the national crisis in 1996 was anxiety over the economy. Pakistan was chafing under austerities imposed by the IMF,

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which had refused to release a $600 million standby loan if Islamabad could not remedy its budget deficit in order to service its $28.6 billion in foreign debt. To that end, Bhutto had raised taxes. The collected taxes were insufficient to pay the bills, but the tax increased public discontent. Pakistan’s economic malaise went deeper. First, there was a steep decline in foreign currency reserves. Between July and November 1996, these had shrunk from $2 billion to $600 million. Second, the commercial and state-sector banks were insolvent. Defaulting loans amounted to about $145 billion, nearly 5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of Pakistan. According to Burki, had Leghari not done what he eventually did—that is, to sack the Bhutto government— the defaulting loans would have climbed to 10 percent of GDP by the end of 1996. The bulk of this lending was for nonperforming assets, a politically sanctioned method of siphoning off resources into private coffers from state-owned banks. Third, the fiscal system had collapsed. There was no record of “how money was being disbursed to whom and why.”32 Fourth, the uncontrolled expansion of money supply was leading to an equally uncontrolled rise in prices. The state was crowding out the private industrialists and manufacturers. The consequences were evident in the shutdown of 150–160 textile mills in Sindh. Investable capital was simply not available. On 29 October 1996, in an effort to appease the IMF, Bhutto gave up the finance portfolio she had held since 1993. “The debt servicing is breaking our backs—debt that I didn’t incur,” she told Time magazine in September. “But as Prime Minister, I have to pay it back.” This was true. One could not blame her for all the accumulated ills in the heavily “monetized”—a term often used to describe the illegal flow of money—society of Pakistan. But she had also contributed to this state of affairs in full measure. Still, it is difficult to shake the impression, created by the sequence of events, that the pressure to dismiss Bhutto emanated outside Pakistan in the offices of the World Bank and donor agencies. Shahid Javed Burki, vice president of the World Bank and an individual with influence in various Pakistani governments and the international financial assistance community, was appointed adviser to the finance minister, enjoying the power of an economic czar in the caretaker government. He was given a free hand to bring the economy in line with the latest global economic philosophy of the World Bank. Burki suggests that the Bhutto government began to neglect the economy. “Around December [1995] something happened that convinced leaders. From then on, they were really not interested in the health of the economy, it was a short term thing and they had to get as much out of this as they possibly could.”33

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The Bhutto government had sensed that the opposition forces were coalescing into an ominous repetition of past events. Burki and others had been talking about a nonpolitical government of “technocrats” for months before the Bhutto government was dismissed. Benazir Bhutto had tried to placate the World Bank in a last-ditch effort to save herself by introducing a $40 billion “minibudget,” but this proved of no avail. The squeeze was on. It is not a mere coincidence that the IMF agreed to release the $160 million held up from the $600 million standby agreement as soon as Burki was appointed economic adviser; nor is it merely a matter of chance that Burki had authored well-publicized articles in a prominent Pakistani newspaper, listing the problems and proposing an “action plan” for the government—presumably a postBhutto government. Ever sensitive to the political barometer, Benazir Bhutto knew that the “technocrats” backed by the IMF and World Bank were trying to get her dismissed. Such fears might explain why Bhutto adopted a more defiant and hardheaded political posture in response to the challenges to her government. From the end of 1995, no effort was spared to ensure continuity of her rule even if that meant pushing corruption and patronage to the utmost levels. The result was disastrous. It strengthened the oligarchy’s determination to dismiss her. Her government had become a hindrance to the restructuring of the economy to better fit Pakistan into the post–Cold War global economy. In the February 1997 elections, Nawaz Sharif won a landslide victory. With the advent of the second Sharif government, however, Pakistan faced a new dilemma: on the one hand, the unelected elites—the military and high ranking civil servants—had the conditional authority to abort expansion of parliament’s power; on the other hand, a parliament and prime minister protected by ruling majorities were also in a position to destroy democracy, as Nawaz Sharif was to do eventually.

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The Army Chief General Musharraf vs. Nawaz Sharif: The Fifth Dismissal

The initial moves by Nawaz Sharif had looked hopeful. In less than two months following the elections, he had proposed to eliminate parts of the Eighth Amendment dealing with the president’s power to dismiss elected governments. The new provision, passed in July 1997, gave the prime minister a larger role in appointing the service chiefs. Benazir Bhutto and the PPP supported the government’s resolution to curb the powers of the president. Many in Pakistan were surprised by Sharif’s bold move to repeal key provisions of the Eighth Amendment. Some believed that curbing the power of the president had strengthened democracy. Others argued that the changes had made it more difficult

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for the military to remain neutral in case of political breakdown—a prophetic argument, as the events of October 1999 were to show. Sharif had introduced the repeal measure, but he was cautious. Rizvi comments that “although the top commanders had valued the president’s dismissal powers . . . since this was one avenue for the military to press for change—the army chief agreed out of respect for Sharif’s electoral mandate.”34 Sharif had not challenged the new institutional constraint introduced by the creation of the Council for Defense and National Security, established in January, a month before the election. The military’s top brass had not permitted Sharif to repeal the provision that retrospectively indemnified the armed forces for any actions taken under martial law.35 The 1997 Sharif government, however, provided a different window on the problems of democratic transition. It showed that a weak opposition will lead to an unchecked and overbearing majority, particularly if it is led by a prime minister impatient to concentrate all power in his hands, which, one might argue, could have been the result of his previous confrontations with the military. Sharif’s comfortable majority became an obstacle instead of a vehicle to democratic development. This was evident in the antidefection rules he introduced. These were meant to enhance party discipline but were used instead to concentrate power in his hands. In interesting contrast to similar legislation passed by Rajiv Gandhi in India in the late 1980s, in Pakistan the party leader—in this instance Sharif—was the final authority in approving the validity of defection. In India, breakaway segments had to constitute a third of the party for the defection to be legal. Sharif’s move augmented his own hold on the Pakistan Muslim League and prevented emergence of an alternative leader. Sharif’s conflict with the judiciary and his use of the parliamentary majority to attack the supreme court was similarly motivated. Stung by the attack, the chief justice used his legal eminence to challenge the government. “Taking advantage of the crisis, opposition leaders filed challenges to [the] Sharif government and the constitutional changes he had introduced.” These were the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth Amendments, the Thirteenth curbing the power of the president, the Fourteenth dealing with defections. The court ruled on the cases and suspended the Fourteenth Amendment. Sharif saw this as an attempt to dislodge him from power and retaliated by amending the contempt-ofcourt law in parliament. “When the President delayed signing the new legislation . . . for 30 days, the ruling party threatened to impeach him. Some of the judges who diverged from the Chief Justice . . . were encouraged by the government to revolt. . . . The Chief Justice approached

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the President and the Army Chief to make troops available to the Court’s security. The opposition parties supported the Chief Justice. The Prime Minister then asked the President to appoint a new Chief Justice.” Sharif repeated his threat to impeach the president even as the chief justice restored the power of the president to dismiss governments. “But this time, crucially, the military elite refused to side with the president” since dismissal “12 months after the elections would have been awkward, especially because the government’s support— both in parliament and outside—was still intact.”36 In summer 1998, the Sharif government launched a systematic attack on the voluntary organization that had openly protested against corruption and attacked Sharif’s attempt to Islamize the judiciary. The so-called Shari’a Bill proposed by Sharif was to set up shari’a courts that would override secular laws and the judiciary. On 5 September 1998, Sharif exhorted thousands of ulemas and religious leaders gathered at the national Consultative Convention to “spread all over the country and stand against all the forces which are opposing the Bill.” “My government,” he said, “ is now at your disposal.” The nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) vehemently protested this as a step back from the hard-won freedoms of the past decade. The government retaliated by banning the protesting NGOs. In May, some 1,900 organizations were deregistered, and forty-one were placed under investigation. In April 1999, Sharif passed the Antiterrorism Ordinance (ATO) to replace the military courts now declared unconstitutional by the supreme court of Pakistan. The official intent of these special courts was to avoid delays and bypass the accumulated backlog that was choking the Pakistani courts. In reality, the ATO could also be a weapon against legitimate opposition and used to intimidate potential dissenters from demonstrating against the government. The ATO ordinance was initially applied in Karachi—where law and order had collapsed because of proliferation of guns and gangs—but Nawaz Sharif sought to expand its scope to all of Pakistan. The beginning of 1999 also witnessed growing attacks on the press. In May, several journalists were arrested, some were beaten, and others were kidnapped. Among them was the well-known Nijam Sethi, the columnist for Friday Times, who was picked up by unknown individuals and questioned without an arrest warrant. Sharif was trying to muzzle the press and public, which had grown increasingly impatient with the deteriorating economy, corruption in high places, and near total breakdown of law and order in Pakistan. Coming from an elected government as it did, these attacks were a setback to Pakistani democracy, but they also highlight what had been

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missing in the previous four decades: a strong and vociferous public opinion firmly committed to participatory democracy. Step by small step, public opinion had edged its way to the center of political calculations. It remained fragmented because its leaders were either exiled, jailed, or were too fearful of being killed to forge a unified opposition to Nawaz Sharif.37 Through these developments, it was impossible to miss the growing weight of public opinion in the elite calculations. Pakistan was rapidly descending into chaos by the beginning of September 1999, and Sharif’s unpopularity had reached an all-time high. Two decisions eventually sealed his political fate: the decision to abandon the intrusion in Kargil in September 1999 under intense U.S. pressure, and the decision to fire Army Chief of Staff General Parvez Musharraf and replace him with the former chief of the ISI. Ever since the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, the border dispute over Kashmir had acquired a dangerous new edge. With both India and Pakistan now nuclear states, the world community had become reticent to support Pakistan’s desire to shake up the status quo and press for a plebiscite in Kashmir. Pakistan planned its Kargil intrusion across the Line of Control (LoC) against these unfavorable shifts in international opinion. The details of this crisis are discussed in Chapter 6; it is enough to note here that the decision to support the intrusion had been taken long before India discovered the intruders on its side of the LoC. By most accounts, the plan was in the works even as Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee journeyed to Lahore to begin a serious dialogue with Pakistan. In any event, India successfully beat back the intruders, the world condemned Pakistan for provoking a war, and the United States bore down heavily on Nawaz Sharif to withdraw the Pakistani forces. Sharif had little or no choice but to agree. But the military saw the withdrawal as a betrayal of Pakistan’s honor and national interests. Above all, the armed forces, which came in for sharp criticism in the international press, felt humiliated and abandoned by Sharif, who had given the impression that he had not been consulted on Kargil. Many in the armed forces believed that Pakistan could have prevailed or would have gained the upper hand in subsequent negotiations once the intrusion had achieved its original purpose. This was to make Kashmir the focus of world attention and nudge the United States and other nuclear countries to pressure India into making concessions. That required Pakistan to prevail against Indian retaliatory attacks. The Kargil operation was, however, abruptly terminated by Sharif, who succumbed to the economic and diplomatic pressures from the West. Under intense criticism at home for giving in to the United States and withdrawing from Kargil, Sharif sought to

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preempt the possibility of a coup by removing General Musharraf— with whom deep differences had developed over the Kargil crisis—and appointing General Ziauddin Khan, the chief of the ISI and a man he could trust. This proved the trigger for the army takeover. On 12 October the armed forces moved rapidly to secure control over vital nerve centers of the state and placed Sharif and his close colleagues under house arrest. The constitution was suspended, a state of emergency was declared, the parliament and all provincial assemblies were dissolved, state-level governors were dismissed, and within a matter of three days Musharraf had announced the establishment of a government led by the National Security Council, consisting of a chief executive (himself) and six other members chosen for their expertise and competence. He announced the establishment of “a think-tank of experts . . . to be formed as an adjunct to the National Security Council to provide institutionalised advice and input; a cabinet of ministers, who will work under the guidance of National Security Council; [and] the provinces, to be headed by a governor, functioning through a small provincial cabinet.”38 There was no indication as to when martial law would end, the constitution restored, or an election held. But Musharraf had pledged to recover the national wealth looted by politicians and public officials, restore law and order, and revive the economy. He had also ordered the unilateral withdrawal of forces from the Kargil sector, offered to settle matters through talks and negotiations with India, promoted an end to the conflict in Afghanistan, and assumed a more flexible stance on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He invited the clergy and ulemas to curb extremist elements that had perpetrated bigotry and intolerance in the name of religion, and he urged the press to take a constructive role in building the nation. These pledges addressed the central problem in Pakistan; more important, they underscored Pakistan’s domestic and external weaknesses, a dependent economy, and the tense international border that was vulnerable to superior Indian military strength. Clearly, the personal confrontation between Sharif and Musharraf was the immediate cause for the coup. The coup underlined, however, the different perceptions of the trade-offs between Pakistan’s consolidation imperatives (as seen by the different segments of its elites) and democratic development. There is no consensus among its power elite as to how Pakistan is to be consolidated as a coherent nation-state. The military seeks to protect its control of defense budgets and policies concerning Kashmir and Afghanistan; civilian governments vacillate between pleasing the public and enlarging their room for maneuver; the fundamentalists, who have grown vociferous over the role of Islam,

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want to consolidate Pakistan’s borders through a jihad and are not averse to using violence within or outside Pakistan to achieve their ends; and the middle classes vacillate between democracy and admiration for military order. As the 1990s drew to a close, Pakistan faced important choices for its future: to be centralized or decentralized, to remain Islamic or move toward secularism. It must choose also between promoting regional peace and a proxy war in Kashmir and Afghanistan. In 1999, Nawaz Sharif vacillated between these choices, letting political expediency guide his hand. When the military sought to use coercion to consolidate Pakistan’s borders in Kashmir, Sharif chose the diplomatic avenue to disengage from it, but initially he pursued coercion as well as diplomacy to consolidate the Pakistani state. The result was the miniwar in Kargil and the total collapse of the bargain that had restrained the hand of the military leaders. There could be no better illustration of how consolidation imperatives can destroy democracy under conditions of dyarchic rule. Although the elite bargain had led to four elections since 1988, its breakdown had led to dismissals. What was different in the late 1990s was the growing weight of public opinion in the outcome of these conflicts. Had Sharif retained his popularity, the military would have been extremely reluctant to dismiss him from office. The military leaders were careful to appeal to the public and refrain from taking any action that could have angered the people. The press was not muzzled, in fact, Musharraf in his 17 October address to the nation promised greater freedom to the press. In the absence of well-organized and stable parties, public opinion in Pakistan remains opaque and disorganized. In welcoming the end to Sharif’s government, the Pakistani public was not rejecting democracy but rejecting the kind of chaotic and corrupt democracy that Sharif had wrought. A prolonged reign of the military is likely to breed a restive public and growing domestic resistence, as evident in the MRD during the late 1980s. This is why General Musharraf was careful to describe his actions not as imposition of martial law but as “another path toward democracy.” According to the BBC report of 27 October 1999, he had promised that the “armed forces have no intention to stay in charge any longer than is absolutely necessary to pave the way for true democracy to flourish in Pakistan.” Although Pakistani military leaders had ignored such promises in the past, what is likely to be different this time is the nature of the internal and international environments that Pakistan faces. It has never been as hostile to the long rule of men in military uniforms as it is at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINTS ON THE TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY

What does the history of development and collapse of participatory democracy tell us about its future prospects? The answer lies in understanding several factors that have shaped the course of Pakistan’s transition to democracy: the personality factor; the patronage factor; the popular power factor; the political identity factor; and the foreign assistance dependency factor. These correspond with the four dimensions of the state outlined in Chapter 1. The personality factor and the patronage factor have to do with leadership contests and survival. Patronage and foreign assistance or dependence focus on the economic development dimension. Popular power flows from expanding participation and mobilization of the public on issues and events. Security dimensions have been redefined to include economic reforms, giving a competitive edge in global markets and greater access to international capital and technology. These aspects are included in the discussion of foreign assistance. Since Chapter 6 will focus more directly on the traditional security dimensions of South Asia, I have only lightly touched upon these here. The political identity factor draws attention to the way in which democratization can advance or retreat in South Asia. Ethnic and religious conflicts underline the centrality of collective identities in the evolution of Pakistan’s politics. This identity factor is discussed in the context of the Muhajir struggles and Sunni-Shi’a conflicts in Pakistan.

The Personality Factor

Clearly, in every instance of dismissal since 1985, personality clashes and individual ambitions played important roles. Conflicts were inherent in the confusion created by the dyarchic distribution of responsibilities and power at the top. It did not spare even Nawaz Sharif and Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who were thought to be likeminded and part of the pro-Zia establishment. Their mutual friendship did not survive the competition for power and status built into the constitution by the Eighth Amendment. The same was true of Benazir Bhutto and Farooq Leghari. Although their relations had soured by October 1996, Bhutto did not believe until the very last day that Leghari would exercise his powers of dismissal. She is reported to have been surprised when told that the president had issued a dissolution order against her government. She believed that shared party affiliations would neutralize the

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rivalry for turf created by the constitutional overlap. She had underestimated the consequences of this overlap. Benazir Bhutto was not particularly popular with the military-bureaucratic establishment. She was allowed to form a government in 1988 because of her demonstrated ability to mobilize the masses. But between 1988 and 1990, the military-bureaucratic oligarchy had been active in encouraging and supporting the IJI and anti-Bhutto forces. Immense amounts of money had poured into the alliance campaign. In Nawaz Sharif, the military-bureaucracy had found an alternative to Bhutto. Sharif was more acceptable partly because he was believed to be less radical, partly because he hailed from the most populous and politically powerful state of Punjab. This is not to say that Bhutto was outside the traditional elite circle in Pakistan. On the contrary, she hailed from a powerful landed family in Sindh, where, with other feudal landowners, the Bhuttos had dominated politics for generations. She was nevertheless associated with her father and his brand of populist politics. Her father’s politics had ended badly in a military coup d’état. The military establishment had declared martial rule and hanged Bhutto to stamp out every vestige of his uncontrolled populism. Benazir Bhutto’s policies were different from that of the elder Bhutto, but the military remained suspicious of her politics. In Pakistan, as in other South Asian states, personality clashes are inseparable from ambitions for career advancement, status, and desire for office and power. Ben azir Bhutto’s confrontation with the judiciary over the right to appoint judges and Sharif’s conflict with Ghulam Ishaq Khan over the appointment of the COAS show that each was trying to get supporters in important positions of institutional power. Fights were for turf and future freedom of action. There were other considerations at stake as well. Since charges of corruption and public accountability had become a major issue, both Bhutto and Sharif wanted to pack the courts with their cohorts to ensure a sympathetic hearing. Nawaz Sharif’s 1999 dismissal can also be traced to his confrontations with the COAS, particularly General Musharraf. In October 1998, possibly emboldened by his successes against the judiciary, Nawaz Sharif challenged the military establishment. The COAS at the time, General Jehangir Karamat, had called for the military to have a greater role in policy through the mechanism of a joint security council with the government. According to reports from the time, the COAS and prime minister held a stormy meeting; for the first time ever, it was the general who chose to quit. Nawaz Sharif moved quickly and appointed

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Pervez Musharraf as the new COAS after promoting him over the heads of two senior military figures. Sharif chose General Musharraf not only to show his own grasp over the military but also to put in place a man he believed would be unable to build a power base because Musharraf did not belong to the dominant Punjabi-officer class in the Pakistani Army. When Sharif took Pakistan out of Kargil and allowed the blame to fall on the military, General Musharraf, in an interview with the BBC, made clear that all the politicians had been “on board” when the offensive began. Shireen Mazari, a Pakistani defense expert, said, “A lot of people in the military are unhappy about the fact that after many years, in fact for the first time probably, we had the Indians where we wanted them militarily in Kargil.”39 “There is a feeling in the military that had there been proper input into this decision, then maybe the decision [of Sharif] to go to Washington might not have happened.”40 Sharif’s critics, like General Hamid Gul, said that Sharif’s attempt to consolidate power and oust Musharraf was a “coup attempt against the army,” the last desperate act of a man under siege. The accounts of the seventeen hours before the coup that pitted Sharif against Musharraf read like a thriller novel, with Musharraf jetting back from Sri Lanka to Karachi, his plane denied landing rights as barely six minutes of fuel remained before it would crash; upon learning this, the army staged a rapid but smooth takeover of Pakistan. Needless to say, the coup had been in the works well before the crisis at the airport, and perhaps Sharif sought to fire his COAS precisely because he believed it to be imminent. Area scholars have frequently commented on the personalized politics in South Asian countries. This is particularly true of political parties and popular movements. Strong leaders and weak organizations are generally the rule everywhere in South Asia. Indira Gandhi in India had, for instance, turned the Congress Party into her personal fiefdom. Still, in India the Congress Party had retained its grassroots appeal and local networks. This is what enabled it to remain at the center of the stage for more than forty years. Personalities similarly played a key role in Nepali political parties, the Nepal Congress, and the Communist Party of Nepal. The Bhattarais and Koiralas dominated Nepali politics in their personal capacities. With personalization of policy came dynastic politics. In India, Nehru was followed by Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, three generations of the same family who were repeatedly elected to office. Pakistan displayed similar patterns in political culture, that is, dynastic rule and the politics of personal loyalty. Pakistan’s political parties were in fact more hollow and more unstable

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than those in India. This was partly because of the long stretches of military rule and partly because leaders ran the party as a personal network of loyal supporters. No elections were ever held in the PPP or the Muslim League for leaders and party officials. It is nevertheless true that in Pakistan political parties have had a harder time building stable grassroots organizations independent of local notables and their network of biradaris. Political parties have usually gathered support by striking a bargain with local personalities. These locals have habitually switched support depending on which party made them the better offer. This prevented institutionalization of party personnel and recruitment of independent-minded activists.

The Patronage Factor

Whether in political parties, the bureaucracy, or the military, personal networks have thrived on access to office, positions, money and contracts, and the distribution of state patronage. The military has had the longest opportunity to entrench itself in the state structure and to dominate the sources of patronage, but it is by no means the only political institution in Pakistan to seek unfettered access. The military cannot administer the country without support from Pakistan’s bureaucracy. The two institutions have therefore developed a symbiotic relationship in which ideologies, policies, and individual preferences have often merged. This is certainly true at the higher levels of the two organizations. At the lower and middle levels of the bureaucracy there was greater resentment of the military’s rule. The lower ranks in the armed forces are more devoutly Islamic, more anxious to cleanse politics of corrupt leaders and secular officials, going so far as to question the value of Western democracy. The same might be said about sizable segments of the middle civil service. As members of the newly emerged educated and urban middle classes, this segment of the civil service would like to see Pakistan become a modern democracy. But as in case of India, the Pakistani middle classes are fickle. In India, the middle classes abandoned the secular parties in large numbers to support the Hindu nationalist party in the 1980s. In Pakistan, the middle classes have failed to play their historic role as precursors of secular democracy and modernization. Instead, they have tolerated bans on parties and welcomed reassertion of military-bureaucratic rule. The first dismissal of Benazir Bhutto triggered some protests, as had Nawaz Sharif’s 1993 dismissal. Other dissolution orders went without any significant public reaction. The public greeted the 1999 coup with a great sense of relief. This is not to belittle popular movements of the past or those that might arise in the future but to stress their uncertain rooting in

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Pakistan’s evolving history. By the late 1980s, uncertainty had given way to a consensus on participatory democracy. Unfortunately, the five elected governments (1988–1999) failed to translate that into a permanent mandate for a stable democracy. Patronage is indispensable to political parties everywhere. In Pakistan, it was the lifeblood of the PPP and the Muslim League. The two parties were driven not only by mutual competition and the need to win elections but also by the need to ensure their survival once in office. I have already mentioned the paradox of weak organization and strong leaders, the personalized nature of inner organization, and general intolerance of dissent. There was another factor aggravating the uncertainty of party politics. In stable and established democracies, losers bide their time, for they know that the opposition would also bide its time should it lose in the next election. Such agreements—the tacit rules of the political game—were being fought over in Pakistan’s transitional democracy. Losers could not be certain that they would be allowed to participate in the contest the next time around. Political leaders have been hanged, removed, and exiled by military regimes. This uncertainty compelled politicians to give short shrift to democratic conduct and use all means—fair and foul—to ensure political survival. This is not to deny the role of sheer greed but to underscore the conditions that created the system of spoils—the use of governmental power to distribute contracts, licenses, loans, and state property to cohorts.41

The Popularity Factor

Although the political parties and their leaders are not different from the military-bureaucratic rulers in what they do when in power—corruption and nepotism had reached high levels during the eleven years of Zia and the decade under Ayub Khan—they are ultimately in competition with those two institutions for control of state resources. Until recently, the dominant belief among pro-order forces in Pakistan was that political parties and their leaders could not be trusted with government, that the military and bureaucracy were somehow more patriotic and nationalistic. These perceptions do not augur well for parliamentary democracy. The second problem is the constraints under which prime ministers have been required to operate. This was evident not only in the president’s power over the parliament but also in the special preserves of policy beyond the parliament’s purview. For instance, the prime minister was required to cut the budget, but he or she could not make substantial changes in defense expenditures. The laws governing accountability of public moneys exempted the military. Since government could not touch defense, all cuts had to come from what little it

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spent on subsidies and public welfare, which included health, education, and infrastructure. These are usually the means to win public trust, but subsidies created problems with the World Bank and donor agencies. Pakistan’s parties sought to buy out political entrepreneurs and their voter banks to stay in power. The only other way to reduce the budget was to raise revenue. Here, options were limited by the fact that parties have been unwilling and unable to tax the agricultural sector. Feudal landlords strongly opposed taxation. In any case, Pakistan did not have an administrative machinery to collect agricultural taxes in the rural areas. The fixed-income, salaried middle classes and professionals, as well as industries, were already paying high taxes. Adding to their burden would have meant loss of support for the party. The traditional classes in Pakistan have been willing to share power with civil leaders only because there was no alternative. There is no agreement, however, on who will exercise what power and over whom. When such agreements were struck, they were unstable and highly tentative. They were certainly vulnerable to changes, even small ones, in the equation among the major political actors. The mutual suspicions prevented Sharif and Bhutto, the two top civilian leaders, from collaborating to get rid of the Eighth Amendment in 1993. Instead, Bhutto sided with Ghulam Ishaq Khan in 1993 to get rid of the Sharif government. Shifts in mutual perceptions of leaders have led to dismissals. In this situation, accepting the logic of the public mandate became highly problematic for everyone concerned, including the leaders of the political parties. It is not difficult to understand why, then, the nonelected elements in Pakistan—the military and bureaucracy— would be fearful of popular mobilization. They know that the popular tide can sweep them into the dustbin of history. Pakistan’s military dictators had thus tried to engineer participation without democracy. General Zia had waxed eloquent about the virtues of Islamic democracy, a proposal that gave him control over who gets what, when, and how. When party democracy emerged in the 1980s, the need to protect the extra constitutional powers and privileges of the nonelected elements became urgent. By the end of 1990s, hung parliaments had given way to a substantial majority for the ruling party, but as we have noted in the case of Nawaz Sharif, that proved dangerous.

Political Identity Factor

This brings us to the identity factor that has shaped events in Pakistan since the mid-1980s, that is, controlling the momentum of democracy;

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not simply expanding popular participation but sharing of power with popularly rooted bodies in civil society. Ironically, even political parties have found it difficult to engage in power sharing for the reasons discussed above. Their survival has, however, depended on their ability to mobilize masses and win majorities. When they have failed to win majorities, party leaders have had to cobble together a coalition of parties. Such coalitions have been fragile, partly because of leadership’s preoccupation with political survival, partly because of the unresolved conflicts in Pakistan’s body politic. If Pakistan is to become a stable democracy, it needs to integrate its ethnic and religious communities through accommodation and compact. The rise of the MQM in 1985, and its demand to be recognized as a fifth nationality, illustrates how complicated the process of introducing democracy can be in a divided and diverse Pakistan. In the 1970s, a section of the Baluch nationality had demanded separation until it was crushed by a ruthless application of force by the Bhutto government. Growth of a separatist movement in 1971 led to the breakup of Pakistan and to the birth of an independent Bangladesh. Construction of the Pakistani nation-state from diverse ethnic and cultural identities has been extremely difficult in the absence of democratically constituted mechanisms of integration. Insistence on monolithic national identity had been based on the mistaken assumption that Bengalis and Sindhis would be willing to merge their rich heritages into the more narrowly defined and less flexible—certainly less advantageous—Pakistani identity. Had the Pakistani elite made an effort to include the language, history, or culture of these groups into a broader definition of Pakistan, had they evolved democratically defined mechanisms of political integration, then the ethnic and cultural fissures within could have been avoided. But that did not happen. These same failures also led to a virtual state of civil war in Karachi. In the view of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, “Federalism faced its worst threat since the Bangladesh crisis as the smaller provinces were openly expressing resentment over what was seen as a blatant encroachment of their rights by the center—which in effect meant Punjab.”42 The ascent of the MQM to the center of identity politics in Pakistan illustrates this amply. The MQM, the party of Urdu-speaking immigrants of Indian origin who live mainly in Sindh and especially Karachi, was extremely influential in the early history of Pakistan, providing political leadership and a raison d’être for the nation-state of Pakistan. The first prime minster, Liaquat Ali Khan, was a Mohajir. When the military-bureaucratic oligarchy assumed power in 1955, the Mohajirs were replaced with Punjabis as the ascendant and hegemonic

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ethnic community in Pakistan. As Sindh gained political importance during the Zulfikar Bhutto period in the 1970s, and Sindhi language was introduced as the official language of the province, the Urduspeaking Mohajirs rioted and later joined in the anti-Bhutto alliance of parties and collaborated in Bhutto’s overthrow by General Zia. But this alliance did not last. The formation of the MRD in Sindh in the mid1980s, and its close ties to the PPP and Benazir Bhutto, convinced Zia that both posed a threat to his presidency and control of Pakistan. Zia encouraged the Mohajir leaders to form a party under Altaf Hussain, who made Karachi its operational base. Zia had two purposes in mind. First, he wanted to divide Sindh along ethnolinguistic lines to weaken the possibility of a unified challenge to his leadership under the Sindhi national banner. Second, he wanted the MQM to be a counterpoise to the PPP. Zia succeeded in the short run, but he had unleashed a pernicious form of ethnic movement that has progressively become more and more violent. The MQM demanded that Mohajirs be recognized as a distinct nationality, that Sindh should be divided to create a fifth province of Pakistan, that the quota system in Sindh should be abolished to reallocate 60 percent of provincial jobs to the Mohajirs, and, finally, that Biharis living in Bangladesh should be repatriated to Pakistan. The MQM position on the status of Muhajirdesh was, however, vague; at times the MQM insisted that it was within the boundaries of Pakistan, at other times Muhajirdesh was separate from Pakistan. Critics of the MQM have argued that the Mohajirs are hardly an oppressed community. The Sindhis vehemently oppose all of the Muhajir demands, for that would marginalize them in their own home province. Although the mutual resentment between these two proximate communities had frequently jeopardized social peace, the migration of Afghani Pathans, the wholesale smuggling of small arms and drugs, and the gang wars and violence had intensified ethnic clashes in the cities of Pakistan, particularly in Karachi, since the 1980s. The growing Pathan presence, because of the Afghan War, had upset Karachi’s demographics and ushered in a fierce and increasingly violent competition for land, jobs, and economic control of the city.43 Out of the twenty-six demands put forward by the MQM in their 1988 Charter of Resolution, more than half concerned the demographic change in Sindh. Suggesting twenty years as a cutoff point for domicile status, the MQM wants Islamabad to drop from the voter rolls all those who had migrated to Karachi since 1988.44 The management of ethnic conflict in Sindh, particularly in Karachi, has significance far beyond that region. First, it is a precedent to similar demands from elsewhere in Pakistan. Unfortunately, neither

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Benazir Bhutto nor Nawaz Sharif, in their two separate stints as prime minsters, succeeded in building an enduring political compact with the MQM. In 1988 the MQM formed a coalition with Benazir Bhutto’s PPP. The PPP had won a slim plurality and needed all the support it could get in the parliament. Within a few months in 1988, differences surfaced between the coalition partners.45 Karachi became a battleground between PPP workers and MQM cadres. In October 1989, the MQM sided with the IJI in voting for the nonconfidence motion against Benazir Bhutto. The alliance broke because Bhutto could not yield on repatriation of Biharis and ending the quotas in Sindh. Subsequently, the MQM forged an alliance with Nawaz Sharif’s IJI. But that government also could not satisfy the MQM demands on the repatriation and quota issues. The armed confrontations between the Mohajirs and Sindhis, Pathans, and Punjabis during 1989–1990 convinced the military that it would have to intervene to reestablish law and order in Sindh. The MQM’s break with Nawaz Sharif led to what was virtually an insurgency against the government in 1991. The army launched “Operation Cleanup” in 1992. Meanwhile, the MQM had split into two major warring factions. Altaf Hussain left Pakistan in a self-imposed exile to London in 1992. This was not, however, the end of the MQM militancy. It was only a temporary respite before the storm. The MQM could have been a genuine counterrevolutionary force in Pakistani politics had it not degenerated into a faction-ridden party playing host to criminal elements and acting as a personal fiefdom of individual leaders. The MQM could spearhead an alternative vision of a federalized, truly democratic Pakistan ruled by consensus and compacts instead of coercive manipulations by Pakistan’s traditional oligarchy. The violence and killings forced other ethnic communities to respond in kind. The hope that the MQM would emerge as a rallying point for a counterrevolutionary force against the political-military nexus in Pakistan was never realized. Instead, the MQM became a threat to Pakistan’s emerging democracy, an outcome for which the protofascist leadership of the MQM was largely to blame. But Pakistan’s military and then civilian leadership also did not deal wisely with the ethnic demands for sharing power. They could have rewarded the moderate elements, given them a real stake in Pakistan’s stability, and, in the process, isolated the extremists and criminals. I have argued in this book that ethnic challenges are not necessarily antidemocratic. We need to distinguish between instability created by meaningless, personal violence from that created by dissident movements. The latter widens the democratic discourse and brings real change in the nature and composition of the state. Ethnic dissidence can

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be a critical source of resistance to authoritarian regimes. Ethnic and regional grievances about jobs, education, development funds, and access to the power structure can broaden the public discourse and create competition over issues that really matter to the people. Elected governments in Pakistan had included and, on several occasions, shared power with ethnically based political parties, but only because they needed to gather sufficient seats in the parliament to become the ruling majority. Such electoral bargains proved to be fragile, because the ruling coalitions were themselves very fragile. A stable and democratic government in Pakistan would have to be based on a series of accommodations and compacts at the local, regional, and national levels. The main political parties need to encourage a continuous dialogue with and among proximate but competing communities. In this respect, both the PPP and the Muslim League failed. Alliances faltered, violence erupted, and before long regions were engulfed in fratricidal killings. The crisis of identity is not limited to ethnic and nationalist visions of Pakistan. Islam has also confounded the domestic and international identity of Pakistanis. Although most Pakistanis believe that Islam should hold a distinctive place in society, they do not agree on its precise role and status. The religiously motivated groups, such as Jamaate-Islami, argue for the strict adherence to Islamic law laid down in the shari’a. Pakistan’s founding leaders have left a legacy of ambivalence on the question of Islam. This ambiguity has promoted the use of religious slogans for political purposes. Islam has been used for popular mobilization and for legitimizing authoritarian dispensation. It has been the favored slogan of leaders anxious to evoke the notions of justice and equality as a cover in their fight against the Pakistani military establishment. Z. A. Bhutto, for instance, popularized the idea of Islamic socialism to bring about reforms. This was meant to win him elections and also provide a new base from which to wrest power away from the military and bureaucracy. Instead of unifying the country, Bhutto’s misguided and autocratic policies had the opposite effect— mobilizing Baluch, Sindhi, and Pushtun nationalists against the centralization implicit in his populism. The opposition to Bhutto gathered under the banner of Islam. Military leaders, such as General Zia, went even farther in Islamizing law and society to secure their position and to forestall democracy. Zia’s elaborate Islamization schemes, however, proved divisive and led to sectarian conflicts between the Sunnis and Shi’as. In the mid-1990s, these rivalries turned violent, resulting in indiscriminate killings on both sides. Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission commented in its 1999 meeting that the violent chain of sectarian killings from Karachi to Peshawar pointed to a coordinated countrywide

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action. Sectarian violence was perpetrated by Deeni Madaris, otherwise the nurseries of sectarianism. There were also widely publicized organizations proudly training youth for a jihad. The products of these Madaris and organizations targeted individuals they considered to be kafirs (infidels), who in their eyes must be put to sword. The commission charged that “if a government that knew about these organizations and institutions did nothing to check activities, it would be seen as giving encouragement to fanatical killings.”46 The Human Rights Commission further said that a parallel judicial system was being nursed with the federal shari’a court. Nawaz Sharif’s attempt to introduce shari’a courts to dispense Islamic laws in accordance with the clerics and ulemas in Pakistan had little to do with piety. The Islamic parties collaborated in full measure to hound and target secular organizations in Pakistan, particularly the NGOs critical of Sharif’s human rights record and antiwomen policies. Time after time, Pakistan’s rulers had used Islam as a ploy to isolate, intimidate, and crush secular prodemocratic forces in civil society. Z. A. Bhutto’s and Nawaz Sharif’s years tell us that there were no exception to this practice in Pakistan. But Islam has failed to unify the nation as Pakistan’s political elites have wanted. Discussions of “who is more Islamic” have led to formation of militant groups to protect their version of true Islam. Ironically, religious parties have fared badly whenever free elections have been held in Pakistan. The reasons for this contradiction are not hard to find. Islam provides Pakistan with a distinctive identity, in contrast to its nemesis—Hindu India. Dominance of Islam in public discourse weakens ethnic, secular, and federalist demands, which, in any case, centralized and unelected regimes in Pakistan have found difficult to accommodate. The example of Iran tells us that Islam can invert the pyramid of power, but in Pakistan it has served more often as a handmaiden of the ruling oligarchy. It has legitimized unelected governments, provided cover for antidemocratic, often draconian legislation, and a rationale for Pakistan’s dangerously adventurous security policies in Afghanistan and Kashmir. The Jamaat leaders in Pakistan and Kashmiri mujahideens hailed the October 1999 military coup against Sharif, but in their view it had come a little too late to prevent the humiliation in Kargil.47

Foreign Dependency Factor

National security concerns have played a central role in limiting Pakistan’s transition to democracy. This is ironic, because so much of the

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current impetus for human rights, open markets, and liberal democracy comes from the collapse of the Cold War and the changes in international politics. These changes are frequently cited as the wedge that cracked open authoritarian regimes and compelled many nations to force a march toward democracy. In Pakistan, external pressures have played a pernicious role. I have already explained how foreign debt and financial dependency compelled the nonelected elite to dismiss Benazir Bhutto and made two individuals (Moeen Qureshi and Shahid Javed Burki) wedded to the World Bank philosophy preeminent in Pakistani policy. The dominance of national security issues on the balance of power within Pakistan can be traced all the way back to the collapse of its first experiments with democratization in the early 1950s, strengthening of the military-bureaucratic oligarchy subsequently, and the militarystrategic reliance on the United States since 1954. Pakistan has been trapped in a vicious cycle: security offers a rationale for dominance of the military that destroys all chances of a healthy movement toward democracy, and lack of democracy reinforces the power of the military-bureaucracy. In a recent article, Kavita Khouri concludes that Pakistan has relied on the external threat to weaken internal dissent and to forge a unified nation closely aligned and subservient to the state. “Three key symbols—India, Kashmir and nuclear weapons—are incorporated into Pakistan’s nation-building rhetoric.”48 She points out that most school texts identify India as the main enemy and link it with the “enemy within,” or those who challenged the central state’s policies. Such linkages were a common explanation of the 1971 Bangladesh War. More recently, the ethnic conflicts in Karachi, Afghanistan, and Kashmir have begun to figure prominently in official documents. Pakistani officials argue that India has aided and abetted the MQM and other terrorist elements as a quid pro quo for its own troubles in Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan’s political elites see India, Iran, and Russia ranged against the Taliban government it favors in Afghanistan. These perceptions of the security threat have determined who is to be considered Pakistan’s friend and who a foe. China and the United States and the Gulf countries are generally regarded as friends. In the 1990s, explicit links have been forged between Pakistan’s strategic and economic thrusts. What impact have these links had on Pakistan’s attempted transition to democracy? In the first three decades, the collusion between the military and international finance capital retarded development of representative institutions and led to extreme concentrations of wealth and income. Acceleration of economic growth aggravated social conflicts

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and plunged urban Pakistan into vicious cycles of violence and gang wars. Contrary to belief, economic expansion increased, rather than diminished, foreign dependency in the 1990s. But its consequences were different in the 1990s compared to earlier decades. In the early decades, foreign monetary and economic linkages perpetuated the classes that favored oligarchic rule. The new class of traders, businessmen, and entrepreneurs born in the past decade of economic expansion favor change. They also want fuller and more robust contacts with foreign markets, international capital, and technology. Stanley Kochanek details the dramatic changes in the relationship between these groups and the government over issues such as taxes, laws, regulations, and budgets. He traces the role of the business community in bringing about the collapse of the Bhutto government in 1990 and the electoral victory of Nawaz Sharif, who was considered business-friendly. Kochanek observes that “every civilian government since Junejo has been confronted by country-wide strikes, processions and demonstrations by the business community over tax policy . . . and law and order.”49 The substantial expansion of small and big business in Pakistan has increased, he says, their ability to influence the government. Pakistan’s economy is no longer the preserve of the twentytwo wealthy families that Gustav Papanek of the Harvard study group had identified in the late 1960s.50 The entry of new classes, and the growing diversity of business activities, has revved up competition and diluted the prior influence of a few. Most important, it has made the unified phalanx of protest of the business classes impossible to ignore. Will the new domestic-international connections lead to greater democratization? There are two views on this question. Based on their general reading of political economy, Jeffrey Sachs and Samuel Huntington believe that it will. Others are less optimistic. They are convinced that if economic expansion leads to improvement in health, education, and welfare, then democracy will not take root. Pakistan’s recent history tells us that economic development and types of political regime are not positively related. Authoritarian regimes (such as General Zia, 1977–1988) have achieved a good rate of growth, as have democratically formed governments (such as Nawaz Sharif, 1990–1993). Mahmood Monishipouri and Amjad Samuel argue that “while economic growth has been successfully achieved under authoritarian regimes in Pakistan, this growth has never enhanced democracy there. No clear pattern has emerged showing the relationship between development and democracy in the country’s brief history.” They conclude that “economic growth without the expansion of civil and political rights is unlikely to lead to democracy in Pakistan.”51 At issue here is not the

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nature of economic development but the definition of democracy. What Monishipouri and Samuel are arguing for is more people-oriented investment, greater attention to improving the lot of the poor, and redistribution of economic and political power. However, at this juncture in Pakistan an elected government does not have to demonstrate its commitment to economic equity; it would be enough if it can convince the people of its honesty and good intentions. Unfortunately, since military budgets are outside its purview and since taxation capacities are severely limited, elected governments have little room for maneuver. Military misadventures such as in Kargil brought additional hardships, like economic sanctions and mounting defense demands. Pakistan’s dependency on the World Bank loans and IMF concessions thus led Pakistan into a trap. These external actors made their concessions conditional upon Pakistan remaining an elected democracy, but the impression of overt dependency widened the differences between the military and the civilian leaders and undermined the elite bargain on which its democracy rested. Sharif’s withdrawal from Kargil under U.S. pressure humiliated the military, which retaliated by ousting him from power and, in the process, weakened future prospects of democratic institutions in Pakistan. But even before the coup took place, the United States had warned Pakistan not to abort its democratic experiment. The pressure to restore democracy resumed with full force as soon as the coup took place. And so the vicious cycle continued as the decade-long experiment with democracy came to an abrupt end. ■

PROSPECTS OF DEMOCRATIZATION IN PAKISTAN

There is little doubt among Pakistan observers that the public wants honest, stable, and responsible government; they want investment in health care, roads, schools, and housing; they want to end the wasteful wars and tensions over Kashmir with India; they want greater freedoms to protect their ethnic and cultural heritage; above all, they want safe cities and just laws. The gap between what people want and what the elite bargains of the 1990s delivered widened as pressing consolidation imperatives—of security, economy, and political survival—sharpened conflicts between elected leaders, military elements, and the public. This rupture became fully evident in the military coup of October 1999. One cannot, however, deny the cumulative effect of incremental changes that occurred over the previous ten years. These changes have become an intrinsic part of the bargain between elected and nonelected actors. We have already noted the growing importance of civic organiza-

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tion, business groups, and the press. One can only marvel at the proliferation of newspapers and magazines since 1990, although the Sharif government had sought to curb press freedom. Even a cursory glance at reportage and editorials shows the stirring of an open and rich public dialogue. Newsline detailed every move by the political personalities in Pakistan—Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, to name a few—with critical commentaries and opinion articles on the four dismissals between 1988 and 1996. Pakistan’s civil society has become more differentiated and active. These groups provide an alternative vision of a different Pakistan from the one dominated by its traditional elites. Pakistan’s best hope is in its civilian leaders, however flawed and deficient they may be. This is because they are more likely to be open to the logic of competitive politics and public opinion. As the 1997–1999 tenure of the Sharif government shows, elections alone will not institutionalize procedures of democracy but the alternative of the military as the midwife to a “true democracy” is even less promising. Popular perceptions and scholarly discussions point to the five dismissals and argue that nothing had changed in Pakistan and that if changes had indeed occurred they were not sufficient to end the military’s dominance in politics. This judgment does not convey the full picture of Pakistan’s struggles to become a participatory democracy. Although the dismissals of five elected governments can hardly be a cause for celebration, we must consider something else. Each caretaker government was short-lived and was replaced by elected assemblies. Elections have been fairly free and fair. No obvious attempt could be discerned, even when money and influence changed hands, to predetermine an outcome. The repeated application of the Eighth Amendment was a sign of weakening, not strengthening, of military-bureaucratic elements, an indication of Pakistan’s changed place in international politics, and an attempt by the traditional elite to retain its power against the tide of public pressures. Public pressure also played a key role in the October 1999 coup against Sharif. Democracy, as this book has argued, is not a static objective; it is an unfinished process of gradual opening of society. Democracy is akin to a learning curve, the end of which is the only avenue to formal political power. Pakistan has not crossed that threshold, but it has learned much about where the dangers lurk in making that transition. Sharp disagreement among Pakistan’s elites over how Pakistan could achieve national consolidation ultimately undermined democratization and led to its sudden breakdown at the end of a remarkable experiment that had lasted for a decade. Even though the military is firmly in place as of this writing, it will have little choice but to eventually return to

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the ballot box. Pakistan was not governed by a democracy, but it can no longer be governed without promise of one—at least not for any length of time. ■

NOTES

1. Ayesha Jalal has used these terms to identify the different segments of elites in Pakistan. See her Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 7. 2. See Abrar Hasan, The Constitution of Pakistan, Defiled and Defaced (Karachi: Asia Law House, 1995), pp. 79–84, 152–156, 247–254. Hasan compares the provisions of the constitution as they existed in 1973 with those that came about as a result of the 1985 Eighth Amendment; he then compares the provisions with subsequent alterations. 3. See the supreme court judgment on Begum Nusrat Bhutto’s “Petition Challenging Detention of Mr. Z. A. Bhutto and Others Under Martial Law, Order 12 of 1977” (Lahore: 10 November 1977), pp. 116–118. 4. Mohammad Waseem, “Pakistan’s Lingering Crisis of Dyarchy,” Asian Survey 32(7) (July 1992): 620. 5. Ibid., p. 621. 6. Ibid., p. 624. 7. Ibid., p. 620. 8. The GDP grew on an average at 6.6 percent during 1983–1988, largescale manufacturing at 16.6 percent; the flow of remittances totaled $25 billion during 1975–1985, a good proportion of which went to the poorer segments of the society. Nearly 11 percent of the Pakistani population was benefiting directly from the exodus to the Gulf. The rising incomes to rural areas and to the relatively poorer Pakistanis provided Zia with the stability he required to stay in power. Shahid Javed Burki, “Pakistan Under Zia, 1977–1988,” Asian Survey 29(5) (October 1988): 1082–1100, 1093. Also see Mahmood Monishipouri and Amjad Samuel, “Development and Democracy in Pakistan: Tenuous and Plausible Nexus?” Asian Survey 35(1) (November 1995): 973–989. 9. William Richter, “1990 General Elections,” in Charles Kennedy, ed., Pakistan: 1992 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), p. 22. 10. Khalid Mahmud, Pakistan’s Politics Scene, 1984–1992 (Lahore: Rhotas Books, 1992), p. 203. 11. Maleeha Lodhi, “Special Report: A Shadow Military State? The Inside Story of Bhutto’s Fall,” Newsline, August 1990, pp. 1–2. 12. Ghulam Ishaq Khan, “Address to Nation and Dissolution Order,” Newsline, 6 August 1990, p. 4. 13. Subsequent revelations pointed to large sums being funneled into the campaign by the COAS. 14. For a discussion of why 1992 was a critical year for the Pakistani economy and what Pakistan could have done then to widen the window of opportunity, see Kennedy, Pakistan: 1992, pp. 47–51. 15. Charles Kennedy and Rasul Bakhsh Rais, eds., Pakistan: 1995 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), p. 3. 16. Ibid.

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17. New York Times, October 26, 1999. 18. Ties to the United States had taken a nosedive because of differences over nuclear and Kashmir issues. The United States was upset over the sale of Chinese missiles to Pakistan and Pakistan’s clandestine efforts to foment insurgency in Indian-held Kashmir. These foreign policy problems created difficulties for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, particularly since continued ties to the United States were important to the military establishment. 19. Ghulam Ishaq Khan had supported Nawaz Sharif on his Gulf policy when COAS Aslam Beg had been critical of Sharif’s stand against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. 20. Hasan-Askari Rizvi suggests that Sharif’s dismissal was brought on because of the power struggle between the prime minister and the president; Sharif’s failure to enlist the PPP’s support in asserting constitutional supremacy of the parliament; Sharif’s inability to prevent splits in his own party; and his misguided attempt to gain advantage in Punjab by issuing a proclamation in the name of the president without securing the latter’s consent. This proved to be the last straw, as it rapidly undermined his legal authority. See “The Year of Dramatic Change,” The Nation (Lahore), 31 December 1993. 21. Maleeha Lodhi and Zahid Hussain, “Is Nawaz Sharif’s Time Up?” Newsline, March 1993, pp. 27–33. 22. Rasul Bakhsh Rais, “Benazir’s Return to Power, 1992–1994,” in Kennedy and Rais, Pakistan: 1995, p. 5. 23. Ibid., p. 6. 24. Supported by the governors, who were his appointees, the president installed Manzoor Wattoo as the new chief minister of Punjab. Wattoo immediately moved to file bogus cases against members of the pro-Sharif party in the parliament and provincial assembly. Bribery and ministerial positions were also offered. Through these blatant and illegitimate means, the president won the round of battle with Sharif and his supporters. 25. While the Punjab high court was still debating the dissolution order for the Punjab assembly, Nawaz Sharif, who had been restored by the supreme court, moved for a resolution in the national parliament to effect administrative changes in Punjab and issued a forged presidential proclamation for the appointment of Mian Azhar as the administrator for Punjab. This was followed by an attempt to take over the governor’s house and the secretariat by force. 26. Samina Yasmeen, “Democracy in Pakistan: The Third Dismissal,” Asian Survey 34(6) (June 1994): 584. 27 My conversations with Rizvi following his reading of this chapter in March 1998, New York City. 28. Newsline, August 1996, p. 25. 29. Robert LaPorte writes, “In the course of 1996, the Bhutto government has succeeded in alienating the business community, the judiciary, the military, the international assistance community (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in particular), and given the lack of protests against the dismissal, the Pakistani public-at-large.” “Pakistan in 1996: Starting Over Again,” Asian Survey 38(2) (February 1997): 119. 30. See the cover story in which Zardari’s illegal financial deals are detailed. According to this report, Zardari is reported to have fully earned his title of “10 percent man” in Pakistan. Newsline, November 1996, p. 34. 31. Newsline, August 1996, p. 29.

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32. Newsline, December 1996, p. 96. 33. Newsline, December 1996, p. 99. 34. Hasan-Askari Rizvi, “Civil-Military Relations in Contemporary Pakistan,” Survival 40(2) (summer 1998): 107. 35. New York Times, 2 April 1997. 36. Hasan-Askari Rizvi, “Civil-Military Relations,” p. 109. 37. In September–October 1999, such a front was in the process of being formed, according to several reports in Dawn, Pakistan’s preeminent daily. 38. Dawn, 17 October 1999. 39. See BBC report, “Pakistan’s Coup: Why the Army Acted,” reported by Jim Fish, 13 October 1999. 40. Ibid. 41. New York Times, 26 October 1999; the story details Nawaz Sharif’s extensive schemes to milk the public exchequer for amassing personal wealth. 42. Dawn, 5 October 1999. 43. Arif Hasan writes, “New patterns of illegal land development emerged, new system of informal banking came into being, the transportation mafia expanded to control the city roads, and the older squatter settlements came under attack.” See “Karachi’s Godfather,” The Herald (Karachi), December 1986, p. 77 44. “Charter of Resolution,” Department of Information and Publication, Muhajir Quami Movement, Karachi, 1988. 45. Farhat Haq, “Rise of the MQM in Pakistan: Politics of Ethnic Mobilization,” Asian Survey 35(1) (November 1995): 9. 46. Reported in Dawn, 5 October 1999. 47. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, FE/3676, 27 October 1999; FE/3682, 3 November 1999. 48. Kavita Khoury, “National Integration and Politics of Identity in Pakistan,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 9(4) (winter 1995): 36. 49 Stanley Kochanek, “Interest Politics in Pakistan: The Growing Power of Business,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 20(3) (spring 1997): 66. 50 Gustav Papanek, Pakistan’s Development: Social Goals and Private Incentives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). 51. Monishipouri and Samuel, p. 975.

4

King vs. Parliament: Democratization in Nepal I have argued that political changes in South Asia and elsewhere should be seen as a process of becoming democratic; that this process is part of a trade-off between territorial consolidation, regime stability, and economic growth; and that the presence of ethnic, religious, and caste conflicts are not in themselves a sign of weakness or flawed democracy. The 1990s Nepali struggle for democracy was a popularly supported struggle in which many individuals lost their lives. But compared to the bloody transitions in other parts of the world in the late 1980s, Nepal’s transition to a parliamentary democracy was far less violent. The elite bargain theorists have argued that the dominant elite, even in a poor country, might enter into a grand bargain at a particular juncture in history and usher in electoral democracy. Such bargains are struck because the risks of not doing so are greater, according to transitologists, than the risks of agreeing to one. This is precisely what happened in Nepal in the 1990s. Elite bargain theories also contend that splits in the regime, international pressure, and economic discontent can lead to a democratic transition or breakdown. In this they are only partly correct. Economic embargo by India weakened the king, and the “snowball” effect of transformations in Russia and Latin America encouraged the Nepali middle classes to demand democratic rights, but the reverse argument does not apply. Economic discontent has not returned Nepal to an authoritarian regime. A split in the authoritarian rule, one of the key propositions and a trigger to the transformation, according to the elite theorists, was far less significant in Nepal. The state is not an enemy of Nepali democracy. A democratizing Nepal requires the state to vigorously and fully discharge its protective and regulative functions. The state must forge trade-offs between competing goals of political consolidation—security,

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development, participation, and stability. Nepal’s transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy was a result of the king’s failure to strike such a trade-off with the emergent Nepali elites in 1990. Difficulties in forging such an accommodation made Nepali transition highly unstable. The following analyzes the nature of the “grand bargain,” the constraints within which it was forged, and the four state imperatives—security, economy, regime stability, and participation—that have shaped its course since then. ■

THE MOMENT OF TRANSITION: THE JAN ANDOLAN OF 1990

The years 1989 and 1990 witnessed dramatic political change in Nepal.1 At the end of 1989, the Nepali economy was in the throes of a crisis brought on by the painful impact of the dispute with India over the Indo-Nepali Trade and Transit Treaty. Nepal’s banned political parties—the Nepali Congress and other left-front parties of a Marxist and socialist genre—were preparing for a popular agitation (henceforth Jan Andolan) to restore multiparty democracy in Nepal. On 28 December 1989, a loose coordination committee was established to mediate between the fragmented Nepali left and the NC and create an anti-Panchayat alliance in the Kathmandu Valley.2 By early 1990, the foundation of the alliance had been laid. In mid-January, the seven communist parties formed the United Leftist Front (ULF). While the left was thus forging a unified opposition bloc, the NC was also preparing to challenge the government. At the end of January 1990, it convened a conference to resolve internal differences and create a common platform to demand restoration of democracy in Nepal. The conference was attended by nine Indian members of parliament, as well as observers from West Germany and the United States. 3 The Nepali newspapers were filled with reports about the collapse of authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe. Urban Nepalis did not miss the import of these dramatic events to their own situation. It was possible that Nepal could also join the “third wave” of democracy sweeping the world. The anti-Panchayat agitation began on 18 February 1990.4 Backed by the professional and middle classes in the towns and cities, students, intellectuals, doctors, engineers, bureaucrats, civil servants, and the small urban working class joined the Jan Andolan and staged huge protest rallies and demonstrations for fifty days between January and April 1990. On 16 April, the king bowed to the popular demands and announced the dissolution of the Rashtriya Panchayat, the apex body of

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the Panchayat Raj, as well as other Panchayat organs and the Council of Ministers. An interim government, led by NC President Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, was announced. The new Council of Ministers included three ULF members, two nominees of the king, and two independents. It was charged with Nepal’s transition to a constitutional, multiparty democracy. The new constitution was promulgated in November 1990, and the first multiparty elections were held in May 1991. The new constitution guaranteed standard forms of civil and political liberties. Nepal became a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature, universal suffrage, and the first-past-the-post system of elections. The king was relieved of the day-to-day running of the government but was given broad emergency powers in case of a national crisis. The nature of “national crisis” was, however, vague. The king could rule by decree up to three months, beyond which his emergency powers required legislative approval. Several articles of the constitution sanctioned political parties, but recognition was withheld from organizations propagating distinction of caste, tribe, or religion. In addition, parties were required to hold regular intraparty elections to make them genuinely democratic. Although during the 1990 protest movement several bloody clashes took place between the king’s security forces and the prodemocracy forces in Kathmandu, commentators noted that “the palace did not really orchestrate wholesale repression of the Jan Andolan. It had the military capacity to wipe out the movement.”5 But there had been no wholesale disintegration of armed forces, as in the case of the critical months before the Islamic revolution in Iran. The Nepali security forces and the army remained loyal to the king. The king refrained from unrestrained use of force mainly because the “international climate was not conducive to crushing of democratic movements. And it was especially unfavorable for a regime that was heavily dependent upon the good will of aid donors.”6 On 9 April 1990, the government lifted the ban on political parties. A protracted process of bargain and maneuver between the palace and the parties followed. According to T. Louise Brown, “the compromise between the palace and the Jan Andolan on the evening of 8 April was a ‘transplacement’ of the traditional order.7 Prior to the massacre in Kathmandu’s Durbar Marg (the main street), each side had believed that it would eventually prevail. But between 6 and 8 April, the palace and the conservative wing of the Jan Andolan made a fundamental reassessment of their prospects.”8 Obviously, the risk of compromise was lesser than the risk of continuing the agitation. Leaders of the NC feared that the movement would be lost to the left if the confrontation continued. The king feared that the popular tide might sweep away the

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monarchy. The ULF did not want to be cast in the role of “spoiler” or blamed for delaying the parliamentary democracy in Nepal. These calculations sealed the grand bargain. Two controversies surrounding the interim government provide important insights into the 1990 grand bargain. The first revolved around demands for trials of those responsible for committing acts of atrocity and violence against the people. The interim government of Prasad Bhattarai was accused of protecting the traditional classes suspected of complicity in the atrocities. It is certainly true that the violators had been allowed to go unnamed and free, but that was because democratic leaders feared that targeting the former elite might destroy the grand bargain.9 To have carried the inquiry to its logical end would have meant investigating the king and his cohorts. The leaders of Nepal’s new democracy were acutely aware of the importance of the monarchy and wished to retain it as a sovereign symbol of a united Nepal. This situation is not very different from the spirit behind the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission meant to protect the democratic transition in South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered a moral justification to the bargain between the African National Congress and the government of F. W. de Klerk. Nepali leaders also thought it prudent to leave the charges of atrocities alone and move on with the drafting of the constitution and holding the general elections. Even the ULF, which had been the main target of the king’s security forces, did not insist on investigations. And the United Marxist Leninist Party (UML) preferred to share power than to insist on setting the record straight. The second controversy provides an equally powerful insight into the nature of the 1990 grand bargain. The issue was the unelected nature of the constituent assembly. Once the king had accepted the compromise in principle, the NC was anxious to consolidate the balance of political forces between itself, the ULF, and the king. It did not want the constitution to be delayed by having to hold a preliminary round of elections for the constituent assembly. Instead, the Bhattarai government agreed to a special commission to draft the constitution. One might argue that such a compromise violated democratic procedures. The interim government of Bhattarai could have either moved toward an election to form the first democratic government in Nepal, or debated the modalities of how such a government was to be elected. Bhattarai chose the first option. Although several parties fought the elections, Nepal appeared to be moving largely toward a two-party system. The NC had staked its claims to power. The United Marxist Leninist Party was the challenger.

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The Panchas belonging to the former Panchayat Raj were the third player in the May 1990 elections, but they had splintered into several relatively small groups. Many former Panchas had defected to the NC during the Jan Andolan and in its aftermath.10 The NC had unhesitatingly accepted them within their ranks. Those who did not defect formed the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Party. A splinter group of the NDC, closely associated with the palace, had formed yet another party with the same name under the leadership of Lokendra Bahdur Chand. A regional party—the Sadbhavana Party—was also formed to represent the plains people in Terai. Some 65 percent of the electorate voted in the May 1991 elections. The NC got 38 percent of the popular vote and 54 percent of the seats. It naturally won the majority and formed the first democratic government under the new constitution.11 The ULF parties occupied the opposition benches in the parliament. The king’s party had splintered into three groups. The elections all but obliterated it from the political map. ■

THE STRUCTURAL CONTEXT OF NEPALI POLITICS

I have argued in this book that democratic transition should be seen as democratic integration within the constraints of nation-state consolidation. Integration occurs as ethnic, caste, or other collective identities acquire a “national,” territorial identity, although the constitution (as in the case of both India and Nepal) may formally subscribe to the principle of individual sovereignty. For more than four decades, the king had balanced the four imperatives of the Nepali state. By the end of 1980s his popularity had begun to erode, the economy was in the throes of crisis, and incomes had declined precipitously because of a trade embargo imposed by India. Why had these occurred, and what structural conditions determined their impact? The answer lies in three enduring features of Nepal’s political economy: Nepal’s landlocked location between India and China; the role of the monarchy as a symbol of unity and sovereignty; and the model of national integration based on Hinduism, Nepali language, geographical isolation, and monarchical dispensation. Economic underdevelopment is largely a result of these enduring conditions. They have reinforced the Nepali monarchy and Nepali dependency on its neighbors. Landlocked between India and China, Nepal must depend on those two countries for trade and transit to the outside world. Their mutual animosities have therefore shaped the course of Nepali politics. For many cultural and historical reasons, India is pivotal to Nepal’s rela-

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tions with the outside world. The latter is heavily dependent on India for the supply of necessary goods and transit facilities. Since the early 1950s, many Nepalis have migrated to India in search of jobs and income. The plains of Terai, a home to nearly 43 percent of all Nepalis, form the umbilical cord that connects it to the economy of the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Migration from the poor hill regions of Nepal to the more fertile plains of Terai and then on to India has provided a safety valve for Nepal. Indian business interests in Terai have economically integrated the two countries into an almost seamless web of trade and commerce. Nepal is extremely vulnerable to Indian policies. A cooperative India can open vast markets and provide substantial capital for investment in the Nepali economy. An unfriendly India, however, can devastate Nepal’s fragile economy. Frequently, since 1950, India has shaped the course of political events in Nepal. India acted as the midwife in the birth of the tripartite agreement between the Ranas, the king, and the NC in early 1950, which led to the first tentative experiment with democracy in Nepal.12 India was the home to the exiled NC throughout the Panchayat Raj period. Nepal’s leftist and Marxist parties drew support and succor from fellow Marxists in India. India accounted for the bulk of economic aid to Nepal in the 1960s and 1970s. From the 1970s onward,13 King Mahendra sought to diversify sources of trade and aid by appealing to China and Western industrial nations. Both responded promptly, the first because of rivalry with India, the second because of fear of Soviet expansionism. Nepal’s geopolitics, then, had several consequences. It has made Nepal aid-dependent. The Nepali elite—the king, the Panchas, and the growing middle classes—did not have to make the sacrifices necessary to generate capital for development. Economic assistance strengthened their privileged position in society. The aid donors had thus unwittingly reinforced the structures of inequity within Nepal. The second permanent feature of Nepali politics is the role of the monarchy as a central symbol of its sovereign nationhood. Both the Hindu-Buddhist theory of kingship and the course of history have determined the monarchy’s pivotal place in Nepal.14 The king is held in great reverence by the Nepalis. He is the personification of Vishnu, one of the gods in the Hindu trinity. Beginning as rulers of a tiny Gorkha kingdom in the mid-eighteenth century, the Shah Dynasty ruled Nepal for three centuries. In the early nineteenth century, the kingdom expanded as a result of conquests by Prithvi Narayan Shah. Even though power passed into the hands of the Rana oligarchy from 1856 onward, the Ranas retained the monarchy as a symbol of Nepal’s sovereign unity. In 1950, King Tribhuvan reinstated (with the help of the newly

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independent Indian government) the kingship to its former place in Nepal. The 1950 tripartite agreement had reestablished the central importance of monarchy. With the exception of a brief democratic interlude in the mid-1950s, Nepal remained the preserve of a monarchical system until 1990. The Nepali kings based their power on the traditional landed elites entrenched in rural areas, on the loyal support of the army and security forces, and on the civil bureaucracy that had expanded in the wake of the aid-dependent economy. In the post-1950 period, the king had come to realize that development and the promise of modernization would reinforce his legitimacy in Nepal.15 The Nepali monarchy does offer the country significant advantages: a coherent state and an overarching frame to unify the nation. Nepal does not have to contend—as India and Pakistan must—with consolidating the identity of its nation-state. Unlike India and Pakistan—whose territorial borders remain in dispute and whose nationalities frequently challenge the unity of the nation-state—conflicts in Nepal are of a conventional variety—about liberalization and progressive democratization of Nepali society. They are not about the consolidation of its territorial nation-state but about meeting popular aspirations for economic development promised by the state. What is noteworthy about the Nepali state (in contrast to the early industrialized democracies in the West) is that its national consolidation has taken place despite and perhaps because of limited access to international markets, investments, and technology and virtually no capacity to compete with others in trade. This situation has changed, however. In the 1990s, Nepal was under pressure to liberalize and open its economy to international capital and markets. It is within the limits of those new constraints that Nepal will be required to achieve democratic integration. The third structural feature is the nature of ethnic diversity in Nepal and the established pattern of integration under the monarchical political and social orders. The Nepali kings used three strategies of consolidation: conquest, war, and coercion; imposition of Hinduism as the overarching ideological order; and monarchy as the focal point of Nepal’s national and international existence. The role of monarchy— the third element of integration—has already been discussed. Conquest and coercion laid the territorial basis of the kingdom. Its administrative and ideological integration into a unified entity was achieved through the Muluki Ain (legal code), a civil and religious code designed to order relations among the kingdom’s diverse communities.16 The Muluki Ain of 1854 divided Nepal’s communities into distinctive castejati (caste and subcaste) categories and assigned each a separate status in the overarching Hindu ritual hierarchy. The Indo-Aryan peoples of the

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hills and the Newaris in the Kathmandu Valley were exceptions to the code. They were officially recognized to have an elaborate degree of internal stratification. Nepali rulers refrained from wholesale prosecution of non-Hindus, that is, the Tibeto-Burman communities practicing Buddhism and shamanism. As a consequence of the Muluki Ain, communities previously defined by regional location were recognized as distinctive jati groups within a single Hindu nation of Nepal. To compete successfully for power and status, ethnic and caste groups voluntarily adopted the culture of the dominant Hindu castes. As a result, the Bahuns, Chhetris, and Thakuris in the hill country—the high-caste groups in Nepali caste hierarchy—came to dominate rural Nepal. According to Nancy Levine, the 1854 code still largely defines group boundaries.17 Terai, or eastern Nepal, was added to the kingdom much later and remained poorly integrated with the rest of Nepal.18 The hill-based Nepali elites looked down on the plains people of Terai. The process of Hinduization undermined local customs, such as the common holdings of community lands, and turned them into the property of the ruling elites.19 Even after the end of the Rana period, in the early 1950s, control of land—now in the guise of land reform—continued to erode the link between landholding and tribal cultural identity.20 Clearly, a close connection existed between culture, power, and control of economic resources in Nepal. The king was at the apex of this system. Even though the role of the king has weakened after the democratic transition, he is still the unifying symbol of Nepal’s identity as a nation-state.

■

WHY WAS THE MONARCHY REPLACED BY PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY?

Weakening of the Monarchy and the Panchayat Raj

A successful challenge to the Panchayat Raj could only be mounted on the solidarity of opposition forces and the mobilization of the masses against the political status quo. A common front meant agreement on at least two issues: the future role of the monarchy; and relations with neighboring states, particularly India. The embargo unified the opposition against India and the king, whose imprudent policies had landed Nepal in such dire straits. By the beginning of 1990, the leftist parties and the NC had accepted the fact that they could not dislodge the Panchayat Raj or replace the monarchy, although each would have liked to form a government on their own without the encumbering presence of the other. Both wished the monarchy gone but knew that the king

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was the only weapon they could use against the unchecked ambition of the rival party. The NC leaders had frequently argued that the monarchy was the first line of defense against a putsch by the leftfront forces. Although the democratic explosion did not occur until 1989–1990, several developments in the previous decade prepared the path toward it. First among these was the economic policy introduced by King Birenda Bikram Shah, who had succeeded to the throne after the death of King Mahendra in 1972. Nepal’s political leaders had hoped that Birenda Bikram Shah, who was educated at Eaton and Harvard, might usher in party democracy. Birenda Bikram Shah did not fulfill these expectations. He did, however, attempt to be a benevolent ruler. Birendra resurrected the Back-to-the-Village National Campaign introduced by his father.21 The salutary impact of the new developmental campaign was controversial, but most Nepal experts agree that the BVNC strengthened the king’s control over rural Nepal and eventually broke the alliance between he and the Panchas. The idea was that the BVNC would become the new impartial mechanism to direct, monitor, and support rural development efforts. In reality, the BVNC became the party of the king, whose approval became necessary to gain election to any tier of the Panchayat Raj.22 Traditional political elites, who had previously operated through the four-tier system of the Panchayat, were now forced to operate through the BVNC. Many traditional Panchas resented the BVNC’s encroachment of their preserves. It had undermined their support and patronage system. Appointed largely from Kathmandu, the BVNC functionary came to be universally disliked for corruption and arrogance. As the BVNC’s image became tarnished, more and more Nepalis began to argue that their revered king was not, after all, above petty politics. As the Panchayat Raj weakened, hope sparked among the exiled and underground political parties. But they had little or no organizational muscle or grassroots presence in Nepal. B. P. Koirala, the leader of the NC, believed that the king and the Panchayat Raj were too firmly entrenched. The NC’s best chance was in negotiating with the king. The leftist-front parties, in contrast, advocated the path of militancy.23 The political situation remained stymied because of weakness on all sides. The parties had begun to gain a voice but were too feeble to mount a challenge to the king. The monarchy had weakened, but there were as yet no clear alternatives.

Greater Space for Party Politics

The king had nevertheless recognized that the Panchayat system needed to be restructured to provide a degree of popular participation.

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To deny this would have meant continuing challenges to his government and monarchy. Flush with victory in the 1980 referendum, the king ended the practice of indirect elections and introduced direct elections to the Rashtriya Panchayat, the apex legislative body of the Panchayat system. Henceforth, the prime minister was elected by the Rashtriya Panchayat. These changes altered the structure of social power just enough to permit parties to flourish and gain strength. L. R. Baral has explained the evolution of party politics during these years. He observed that the direct elections had promoted “groupism” within the system.24 H. Gurung observed that the 1981 elections to the Rashtriya Panchayat led to the rejection of more than 70 percent of the old-guard Panchas. Election of new entrants changed Nepali politics.25 The Rashtriya Panchayat came to be divided henceforth by proreform and antireform Panchas. The 1982 elections strengthened the Panchas who supported reforms. It is important to bear in mind that “liberal” and “conservative” divisions in the Rashtriya Panchayat were not of the same genre of ideological divisions found in Western industrialized democracies. Both pro- and antireform Panchas wanted continuation of the Panchayat system. The liberal Panchas wanted to dislodge the previously entrenched individuals to make room for themselves. The conflict among the Panchas had nevertheless opened a window to greater play of competitive politics. By the mid-1980s, the “groupism” gave way to de facto involvement of political parties. The king looked the other way and did not strictly enforce the ban. Emboldened by these events, the NC launched a series of satyagraha (protests) in 1985. These had elicited enthusiastic and popular response in Kathmandu, but the momentum soon died. Factionalism and infighting within the NC and the communist-left parties prevented sustained popular mobilization. In the 1986 and 1987 elections, the leftist and then the NC parties won some representation. The king continued to be ambivalent toward the parties, but the party leaders were inexorably edging their way to the center of Nepali politics. Both the leftist and NC parties were vying to capture the popular base. The Jan Andolan would not have succeeded without the convergence of these two broad blocs of political opinion in Nepal.

The Snowball Effect of Global Democratization

International events also proved propitious for democratic change in Nepal. The call for perestroika and glasnost, the new policies adopted by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, had led to political reassessment among the leftist parties in Nepal. They decided to bypass, if not drop altogether, the ideological opposition to an alliance with the NC. While

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political parties were thus moving toward an alliance, the Panchayat government was split between Panchas favored by the king and those outside the royal circle. Bereft of the traditional moorings, the latter covertly supported the parties. Elite bargain theorists make much of the splits in authoritarian regimes as a precursor of democratic transformation. Splits had undoubtedly occurred, but they were not sufficient to bring down the king and his Panchayat Raj. Without mass support in the towns and cities, the Jan Andolan would have failed. Divisions among the king’s loyalists had weakened the entrenched Panchayat system, but they do not explain why a populist explosion engulfed Nepal in 1989 and 1990. Thus we need to look for the spark that ignited the transformation. This was provided by the economic hardships produced by the trade embargo by India. The structural causes, that is, economic failures of the past few decades, compounded the hardships.

Dependency and Development

Economic development has played a contradictory role in shaping events in Nepal. Its relative success in urban Nepal laid the basis for a liberal democratic transformation. Its failures in the rural areas sealed the fate of the Panchayat government. Nepal’s dependency on foreign aid and on India for trade and transit further sharpened these contradictions. Since 1956, Nepal’s economic policies have been shaped by development ideologies and the strategic interests of donor countries, particularly India. According to several Nepal scholars, foreign economic aid stabilized and prolonged Panchayat rule and vastly expanded the power of the traditional elite, the high-caste Chhetris, Bahuns, and Thakuri castes in the hill regions and the Newaris in the Kathmandu Valley. Foreign assistance not only legitimized their vision for Nepal; it gave them modern instruments to strengthen political dominance. According to Nanda Shrestha, “In Nepal, foreign aid and development projects are synonymous, and so are elites and development. One cannot exist and function without the other. Planning has long been subverted to serve the political and economic interests of a small class of Nepali elites. Instead of creating a new, progressive social order . . . planning has . . . served to . . . propagate the old order and subsequently the disparity and poverty inherent in it.”26 With a per capita GNP of $180, Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. 27 More than 92 percent of Nepalis make a living from agriculture, and most of them reside in rural areas. More than 40 percent of Nepalis live below poverty level. Although urbanization has grown, only about 10 percent of the population lives in cities and

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towns. Forty years of planned economic development and millions in foreign aid failed to establish a self-sustaining industrial base or expand and diversify Nepal’s exports to any substantial degree. Agriculture accounts for more than half of Nepal’s GDP.28 Much of it is produced in the flat plains of Terai, which contributes about 70 percent of the country’s agricultural production and 33 percent of the population. The hill regions are chronically deficient in food and must depend on the access to the Terai—in terms of jobs as well as income, food, trade, and transit—to remain economically viable. In contrast to many other developing countries, poverty in Nepal is not confined to the landless poor.29 Most of the poor rent or own land, but their plots are too tiny to sustain them and their households. Land reforms have been an important means to alleviate poverty, but they have been resisted by traditional elites who derive their status and power from landownership and control of development resources. Since 1956, the ideology of development has become central to Nepali national life. In the 1950s and 1960s, Nepali plans focused on infrastructural development. In the 1970s, agriculture became the main concern. In the 1980s, basic needs strategy assumed critical importance. None of these schemes produced any real improvement in the conditions of the poor Nepalis although “development corridors” have connected rural and urban Nepal. David Zurick notes how development schemes and new institutions have created “horizontal links between village systems and wider political economy.”30 But he concludes that establishing development corridors hurt the poor more than it helped: “The inability of the development process to produce substantial new opportunities for mountain communities contributes further to deterioration of mountain economic systems and to dislocation of rural people from their traditional . . . linkages, one that bound such communities to productive land base and provided a certain stability.”31 In other words, land reforms—there were several pieces of legislation to redistribute land more equitably—not only failed to distribute land but also impoverished the peasantry in the process. This came about because of the growing market in land and the consequent concentration of landownership in the hands of wealthier Nepalis.32 Mounting rural discontent weakened the base of the Panchayat Raj. The contrast between promise and reality became visibly stark when the king announced that the sixth five-year plan would focus on providing the majority with basic needs such as food, shelter, education, safe drinking water, and health facilities;33 one could have asked— as many Nepalis did—why after decades of planning and substantial access to foreign aid Nepal was still deficient in providing basic needs

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to its people. The irony did not escape the donor community. Five years into the Basic Needs Plan (BNP), most had lost hopes that Nepal would meet its goals. The reasons are not hard to see. Nepal’s political structure lacked the flexibility, and the king lacked the will, to harness popular energies for development projects. The Panchayat system was a “sharing of the economic spoils” system in that projects that did not benefit the Panchas were ignored. Second, the BNP became bogged in red tape and bureaucratic wrangling, an inevitable consequence of the overcentralization of authority and state intervention in distribution of goods. The BNP could not and did not break the Panchas’ monopoly of assets and patronage or weaken their control of development plans. This is why the plan was doomed to fail.

Growth of Middle Classes

Although development plans had made few inroads into rural poverty, urban Nepal represented a picture of rapid change: expansion in urbanization, education, new towns, the presence of international organizations, and, most important, growth of the middle classes. Brown comments that Nepal’s

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elites were no longer necessarily landowners: they were consultants to the aid industry, property speculators, businessmen, traders, hotel owners and tour operators. A tiny but expanding urban proletariat was also in evidence. The country’s social structure in 1990 was therefore more diversified and complex than it had been a generation before. A professional middle class had grown and matured, largely thanks to the funding by foreign aid donors. A small but influential proportion of this class had received education and training abroad. In the process, they had gained expertise, self-confidence and knowledge of their political potential.34

The late 1980s saw an emergence of human rights groups and professional organizations that were to have a profound “influence on the pro-democracy movement which was out of all proportion to their size.”35 By the end of the Panchayat regime, some twenty major multilateral and bilateral donors were involved in aiding Nepal. In 1988, aid receipts totaled U.S.$22 per capita compared to U.S.$2.60 for India and U.S.$13.30 for Pakistan. This scale of assistance led to political change unforseen by the donors. Instead of an alleviation of poverty, bureaucracy, and government, institutions expanded. According to D. R. Panday, there were 7,000 civil servants in 1951. 36 By the end of the 1980s, that number had risen to 90,000. 37 Brown comments that this

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expansion absorbed the growing number of educated youths looking for careers and jobs and therefore contributed to stability in the short term. But this could not continue indefinitely. The situation turned volatile when job opportunities stagnated and middle-class aspirations were thwarted by lack of productive expansion in the economy. By the early 1980s, Nepal was moving toward an economic crisis. This would explain the student outbursts and riots protesting Bhutto’s hanging in 1979. It also explains why the king promised to reform the Panchayat system and announced the referendum to secure a popular mandate. In the final analysis, aspiration outstripped the king’s ability to deliver. Frustrated by unfulfilled expectations, many in the middle classes, particularly in the lower and middle levels of civil service, turned to other avenues to gain a voice in Nepal. They turned to the banned political parties. Students also increasingly turned to either the Nepali left or the NC. A growing number of Nepalis had come to believe that state resources and benefits would be more equitably distributed to the people under a multiparty system. By the end of the decade, the revolution of rising expectations had firmly gripped Nepal, sending ripples into hitherto insulated and passive segments of the population. The urban poor and working classes dependent on tourism, and export industries such as carpets were politicized. Three developments converged to unify the urban classes into solid opposition to the Panchayat Raj. First, rapid urbanization— Nepal registered one of the highest rates of urban growth in the 1980s—in absence of a concomitant expansion in urban infrastructure, such as sanitation, water, and housing, made everyday life unbearable. Second, the aid agencies, particularly the World Bank, demanded an end to subsidies and a reduction in welfare expenditures. The financial restructuring depressed the economy and reduced the income of the urban poor. Third, amid economic distress, the government became besieged by bribery and corruption scandals that further angered the middle classes. Nepal was hit by a devastating earthquake in 1988. The foreign aid meant as disaster relief—at least large sums of it—was diverted into the pockets of Panchas and high government officials.

India, Nepal, and the Economic Embargo

By the end of the 1980s, the Panchayat regime was precariously perched on growing middle-class anger.38 The fatal push came with the sudden worsening in the economic situation due to the suspension of the Trade and Transit Treaty with India. On 23 March 1989, India announced that it was closing down all but two of the twenty-one tra-

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ditional trade points and five transit points along the border, thereby restricting the export of essential commodities to Nepal. Since Nepal depends upon India for these facilities, India’s decision affected every aspect of Nepal’s economy. The sudden interruption of oil, kerosene, and medicine caused enormous hardships. There were long lines to obtain rationed supplies of these commodities, and prices skyrocketed as speculators hoarded what supplies were smuggled across the border. Most of the industries and projects supported by foreign agencies came to a halt for lack of markets, supplies, and transit facilities. Most seriously affected were the large power projects and manufacturing industries in jute and textiles. The World Bank assessment of 1990 shows the crippling impact on Nepal’s small industrial sector.39 The retail and wholesale trade, transport, and banking were severely affected. The government of Nepal faced financial disaster. Savings, investment, and income declined dramatically. According to the government’s own assessment (which could be expected to put the best face on worsening economic conditions), the fiscal deficit for 1989–1990 was estimated to be 61 percent of the total budget. Nepal’s GNP dropped below the population growth, and, according to one estimate, Nepal lost 5 percentage points of GDP growth during 1989–1991. Andrew Nickson observes that “among educated Nepalis, the conflict was blamed squarely on King Birendra.”40 Many in Nepal argued that the king had provoked a confrontation with New Delhi to divert attention from the failure of his BNP, which had failed to do what it had promised. Anti-India sentiments are ever-present among Nepalis, given the popular perception that India is a regional bully wishing to reduce small and vulnerable Nepal to satellite status. India had suspended trade not so much because of differences over its terms but because of the fear that King Birendra had struck a strategic deal with China.41 The dispute with India galvanized the opposition to the Panchayat Raj and the king in Nepal. NC leaders charged that Chinese arms were brought in not so much to defend or gain leverage over India but to suppress the democratic movement within the country. The leftist parties also capitalized on anti-India sentiment. The defeat of Rajiv Gandhi and the ascent of the more friendly National Front government, led by V. P. Singh, was thus propitious for the defusion of the “India issue,” which might have rallied Nepalis around the king. In fact, the king also tried to win sympathy by tapping into anti-India and nationalist sentiment. The Singh government declared its commitment to rebuild friendly ties with all neighboring states and ended the embargo. The presence of political leaders in the Indian government friendly to the NC—Chandra Sekhar and Foreign Minister Inder Gujral—

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provided a boost to the prodemocratic forces in Nepal.42 The Rajiv and Singh governments thus dealt a double blow to the monarchy in Nepal. The first had undermined the king’s authority by imposing the trade embargo; the second had actively supported democratic forces against the king. The collapse of the Panchayat Raj and the transition to a constitutional monarchy in April 1990 was thus a result of complex domestic and external factors. Poverty, unequal distribution of economic and political power, corruption, and growing disaffection in towns and cities were important, but these alone might not have led to the Jan Andolan had other triggers not converged to create the explosive mix of anger and alienation among the middle classes in Nepal. Similarly, trigger factors might have produced a different result had structural conditions not created a dissatisfied middle class and a powerful leftist movement in urban Nepal. The king made many mistakes. His miscalculations with regard to Indian reactions were particularly damaging. The hamhanded behavior of the police and security forces added fuel to the fire of rebellion. Wholesale arrests, rubber bullets, and tear gas hardened the resolve of the protesting public and brought an ever-increasing number of people into the streets of Kathmandu. Within three months of the Jan Andolan, Nepal was a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary democracy. These changes did not bring fundamental shifts in class power. A different segment of the Nepali elite had gained ascendancy. Was this shift, then, sufficient to create a momentum toward democratization? ■

DEMOCRATIC PROSPECTS FOR NEPAL: DEBATE OVER POSSIBILITIES

Most Nepal scholars offer three broad reasons why the prospects of democratic consolidation are dim in Nepal: weak and faction-ridden political parties, poverty, and a paucity of available resources to fulfill both the promises of economic development and the stranglehold of deeply rooted traditional culture. These have produced a widening gap between promises and popular expectation that will, in the view of many scholars, lead to democratic breakdown. The breakdown will occur because of conflicts over policy within and among the main parties. It is pointed out that neither the NC nor the ULF parties are likely to resolve the contradiction between what the people want and what the market, and its powerful international champions, dictate—at least not in the foreseeable future.

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A similar conflict is evident in NC and UML policies toward New Delhi.43 Ideological contradictions do not end here. According to several commentators, rural Nepal, where the bulk of its people live, is too tradition-bound, too deferential to authority, and too reverential of the king and his ritual status to permit liberal democratic values to take root. Critics argue that notwithstanding the liberating slogans of the Jan Andolan the patron-client networks remained intact, and the notions of chakri (servitude) continued to dominate as did the unassailable power of the thule mancho, the “big man” who could dispense favors to his underlings and supporters.44 According to the critics, genuine competition was absent in Nepal’s party system. Nepal’s traditional culture did not allow it. Are the critics right?

Is Weak Party Structure a Problem?

Although strong representative political parties are desirable and weak ones can jeopardize democratic development, Nepal’s critics have ignored several possibilities that can become the basis for sustained democratization. Nepal’s multiparty democracy is now only six years old. Although no elected government has survived a full term in office, every transition is propelled by a desire to sustain a party-based democracy. When the first NC majority collapsed in April 1994, Nepal went to the polls to elect a new government. These elections returned a hung parliament, but the dilemma was peacefully resolved. In keeping with the provisions of the 1990 constitution, the king invited the party with greater plurality—the UML—to form a government. This is remarkable in light of the king’s aversion to the leftist parties and the NC’s fears about a communist takeover. It is also remarkable in light of the fact that communist parties were collapsing everywhere across the world. The UML government lasted because its rival—the NC—did not test the ULF’s majority in the parliament. Fear of electoral backlash stayed the hand of the NC. Public opinion was imposing a degree of restraint and discipline on political parties. The UML resigned when it, too, lost a nonconfidence motion and called for general elections. These elections produced a coalition government consisting of the NC, the Sadbhavana Party of Terai, and the Rashtriya Praja Parishad (RPP), known for its promonarchy sympathies. The collapse of this coalition led to yet another coalition from within the parliament when the compromise candidate for prime minister was RPP leader Lokendra Bahdur Chand. The Foreign and Finance Ministries were also held by the RPP. This pointed to a strengthening of the forces traditionally hostile to multiparty democracy. But it also pointed to Nepal’s ability to include a

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range of parties in the task of governance. This experience can be invaluable in the progressive maturing of a party system into a responsible institution. In the May 1999 elections, the Nepali voters, tired of six governments in ten years, awarded the NC a majority. The opposition UML pledged to act as a responsible parliamentary opposition. The return to power of conservative, promonarchy elements through the ballot in 1996 can be seen as a dilution of the NC by elements associated with the previous authoritarian governments, but it can also be seen as a sign that traditional elites had accepted the popular writ and abandoned any secret thought of returning Nepal to a monarchy. The same can be said of the ULF elements, which had advocated the violent overthrow of the monarchy in the late 1980s and preached socialism to eradicate poverty. There are several Maoist outfits that have advocated violence, but they do not occupy center stage in Nepal. Clearly, Nepal’s newly created democracy does not lock any significant political group permanently out of power. The outcomes of such contests remain unpredictable, as evidenced by every election since 1991. But this uncertainty—what Guillermo O’Donnell refers to as “bounded uncertainty”—has not destroyed the grand bargain among the three main players in post-1991 democratic politics. There is little doubt that Nepal has become gradually more democratic since the Jan Andolan. Competition has driven the political parties to extend participation to more and more of the social strata within Nepal. The May 1999 elections put all worries about the return of the promonarchy forces to rest. The NC returned with an absolute majority.45 The Chand-led RPP and the extreme leftist parties received a severe drubbing in the polls. The Marxist-Leninists failed to win even one seat, although they had held forty seats in the earlier dissolved parliament. The electorate had rejected smaller parties and voted for the NC because it offered the best chance for stability. Voters had responded to the fact that the NC had patched up the internal quarrels between Bhattarai and B. P. Koirala and banded together with a promise to tackle Nepal’s economic and social problems. The 1999 elections showed a maturing public committed to the norms of government by contestation. Strong and coherent party organizations are desirable for a stable system, but they are not imperative to progressive democratization. This is because in a transient system democratic expansion takes precedence over institutionalization, the new entrants have to learn the rules of the game, and the game itself might change as expansions add to the volume and types of demands the government must meet. The process of learning the rules can lay the foundation of viable political institutions in transitional democracies. Criticism of personality-based politics

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assumes that democracy is defined by issue-based politics. This is certainly not the case in neighboring India, which has endured as a competitive electoral democracy. Conflicts over personalities do not necessarily obscure differences over issues. Koirala and Ganesh Man Sigh were identified with distinctly different approaches to the monarchy and to India. They were at odds on economic liberalization and privatization of the public sector. Ganesh Man Sigh stood to the left of Koirala. Personalities can then become identified with different solutions to problems. Even in advanced democracies such as the United States, commentators have often bemoaned the absence of issue-based politics. Political choices in the United States, the bastion of liberal democracy, turn on image and personality of individual candidates, who are packaged and manipulated by their handlers, public relations experts, and the media. Only in the ideal world of democracy does a political party truly reflect its constituency, offer alternative choices about real issues, and fulfill campaign promises. And Nepali parties do not fail to offer policy alternatives. On the three critical questions— relations with India, approach to monarchy, and economic strategy— the NC and the UML advocate distinct approaches.46 Although older leadership—the Koiralas and Adhikaris—monopolize top positions, younger leaders have found a way to make their influence felt in the inner-party dialogue. The Jan Andolan produced many younger leaders who became well known when the older leaders were arrested and jailed by the monarchy. It is they who sustained the momentum of the MRD. The uncertainty of the electoral process and frequent changes in political alignments provide opportunities to younger leaders to push forward from within and outside the parties. Older leaders seeking to oust rivals have had to look for untapped political constituencies to shore up their positions. O. Borre comments that although the far left was active in urban areas and was popular among students and working classes in Nepal’s towns and cities, its greatest support came from the rural poor, who had been mobilized against the traditional elites and the NC’s compromise politics.47 The leftist parties organized consciousness-raising campaigns among the younger segments of the rural poor. These changes infused new blood into the party, compelled it to extend participation, and recast agendas to accommodate interests of the new entrants. Instability and flux is not a bad thing for a transitional democracy.

Is Mobilization a Problem?

The impacts of consciousness-raising campaigns are not quantifiable in terms of party membership, yet political debates do enlarge political

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choices. The Nepali political discourse since 1991 is certainly very different from that under the Panchayat system. Subjected to different sides of the debate, an electorate will make such questions a part of the political calculation even if the village “big man” still continues to hold sway in everyday life. The privileged and powerful will have to legitimize their positions by addressing these concerns. The ubiquity of the rhetoric of Bikas about development—whether in commitment to integrated rural development programs or back-to-the-village schemes— during the authoritarian regime of the Panchayat system underscores the pervasive power of the idea of development in Nepal. The traditional landholding elites had monopolized political power for four decades in post-Rana Nepal, but ultimately the gap between what they promised and what they delivered became too wide in the late 1980s to sustain the monarchical system. The growing discrepancy between expectations and popular disillusionment sealed the fate of the Panchayat Raj in 1989–1990. It did not matter that 90 percent of Nepalis lived in the villages or that a majority was illiterate. It did not matter that most of them were extremely poor and bound by tradition. When alternatives become available, most people are capable of rational choice. Such a choice may be between what they actually have and what they have been promised. If the balance of perception tilts in favor of hope, then change will certainly occur. What form that change takes will depend upon the nature of political agents that are actively seeking to organize the dissent. In Nepal, the alternative to the Panchayat system was a multiparty parliamentary democracy. Elections in Nepal have elicited consistently large turnouts since 1991. Nepali people were not unfamiliar with the process. Nepal was moving toward greater popular participation since the referendum of the 1980s. In the ensuing years, political parties—though banned until 1989—had begun to covertly campaign and mobilize public opinion. In a poor country with a conservative society, democratization may follow a zig-zag path. However, each setback had goaded the democratic forces to reassess tactics. Poverty and illiteracy need not, then, prevent Nepal’s transition to greater democracy, although their persistence will make consolidation that much more difficult.

Is Poverty a Problem?

Poverty and illiteracy are a problem in the long run, but competitive democracies have mechanisms to correct the situation. Nepal is not locked into ideological contradiction to the point where its democratic government has become paralyzed. On the contrary, both the NC and UML have taken special care to normalize relations with India and the

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UML has in fact abandoned its socialist aversion to monarchy and market. The logic of competition requires that each party include that which is most popular and that which sets it apart from its rivals. Reduction of poverty, social welfare programs, and education are the obvious issues on which both the NC and the UML promise to do better than its rival. The NC and the UML both have proposed land reforms, more jobs, and health care to the rural and urban poor. They have also pledged vigilance on behalf of Nepal’s sovereign independence. These planks have become a part of regular public discourse in Nepal. Immediately after the May 1999 elections, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai promised that eradication of poverty and improvement in the living standards would be the NC’s top priority. He declared, “I will do my best to change the face of Nepal in the next three years undeterred by the prevailing mood of skepticism in the country.”48 Even if a rump organization of the Panchas, such as the RPP, were to gain strength in the future, it will have to make the same promises to stay aloft in the political arena. The intense politicization of the Nepali public makes a coup d’état by the RPP a remote possibility. Such a system is long on promises and short on performance. All the same, it precludes former authoritarian regimes from recapturing power. A vigorous democracy might not be in Nepal’s immediate future, but return to authoritarian monarchy is even less likely. According to several studies by the World Bank and the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), economic cooperation will provide Nepal with a wider market, access to a larger pool of capital and technology, and the means to exploit natural resources that would spread benefits to an increasing number of rural Nepalis. Nepal has proposed the formation of a SAARC “growth quadrangle” to give a fillip to subregional cooperation between India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. This growth polygon will encompass parts of the four contiguous neighboring states to build networks of transport, irrigation, energy, environment, tourism, trade, and investments with the active participation of the private sector from the start.49 Nepal’s foreign minister, Prakash Lohani, underscored how India and Nepal can mutually benefit from collaboration under SAARC. First, he pointed to the lack of infrastructure in the eastern subregion of the SAARC and Nepal’s and Bhutan’s landlocked existence. He then suggested that Nepal was in a position to provide India with hydroelectric power if it agreed to favorable conditions for trade and investments in Nepal. To maintain a 7 percent projected growth beyond the 1990s, India needs to double its hydroelectric power production every four years. If Indo-Pakistani relations stabilize on the nuclear issue, economic

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compulsions will produce a better environment for closer economic ties between regional clusters such as Nepal, Bangladesh, and the regions of Bengal, Bihar, and Assam in India. These new trends in South Asia are not state-driven as in the past, at least not entirely so. Pressure for regional cooperation is being created by a powerful class of traders and merchants anxious to do business on both sides of the Indo-Nepali border. The formation of the Federation of Nepal Chambers of Commerce and Industry’s joint economic council has strengthened these trends. It has boosted trade, tourism, and investments and placed Indo-Nepali economic relations on more pragmatic footing. Traders on both sides of the border wield considerable political influence. India might gain more than Nepal in these transactions because of the strength and size of its economy, but isolation will cost Nepal even more than would conceding unequal advantage to India. The new forces of trade and industry prefer a multiparty democracy to a closed system of a landed, Panchayat-type government. Nepal’s democratic governments have realized that although liberalization of the economy was critical to growth it could produce popular frustration among those who lost from it or were unable to gain the same proportion of benefits as their more fortunate compatriots. They have therefore sought to devolve decisionmaking power to lower levels of the polity. It is too soon to gauge the impact of decentralization as these measures are only a year old. If properly implemented, decentralization can strengthen grassroots democracy and lay the foundation for future growth. On 17 May 1997, Nepali voters went to the polls in large numbers to elect representatives to local bodies, such as village development councils and municipalities. The Chand government announced that it would hold elections to local bodies in May 1997 and acknowledged that economic development was not possible without decentralized allocation of resources. These announcements came just as the Chand government was moving ahead with agreements on major power projects with India—the Mahakali and Karnali projects—which would make India a partner in Nepal’s economic and political development. The World Bank’s reluctance to provide funds for large dams compelled Nepal to turn to Indian companies. By 1997 almost all parties had agreed that Nepal’s economic future lay in pragmatic management of economic issues. Most also wanted to revise the Trade and Transit Treaty with India in a way that would protect India’s security concerns while providing greater flexibility to Nepal. Existence of widespread poverty need not breed authoritarian solutions. India provides even better evidence for this contention. Elected

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governments may devolve power even if they do not eradicate income inequalities. But this is a gradual process. The rate at which it occurs may often fall short of popular expectations, encourage violence, and strengthen dissent. But such instability is healthy in the long run, because it will deepen the experience of democracy and root it more firmly in the Nepali body politic. Compared to Pakistan, Nepal is less likely to succumb to authoritarian control. Unlike Pakistan, Nepal does not have severe international security problems: Nepal’s greatest security threat is India, but the post-1990 Indian government has supported party democracy and accommodated Nepal’s security and economic concerns to a considerable extent. The same is true of domestic violence, which is certainly on the increase but not to the same extent as in Pakistan. The security state of Nepal, its monarchy and bureaucracy, are not strong enough to snuff out the democratic process and establish authoritarian control over the nation and government. In contrast, Pakistan’s military and bureaucratic oligarchy considers itself the trustee of the nation and hence duty-bound to terminate party politics should the popularity of current civilian leaders decline and external pressures become acute. Most important, Pakistan’s oligarchy is unwilling to accept limits on its power in foreign and military policy and on appointments to high positions in the armed forces or intelligence agencies. These turf wars have been largely resolved by the constitutional limits—which the king accepted in 1990—imposed on the Nepali monarchy.

Is Tradition and Culture a Problem?

Traditional culture and the conservative nature of Nepali society represent the third reason, cited by scholars, why democracy cannot strike deep roots in Nepal. This presumes cultural attitudes to be immutable and unchanging. This is simply not true in post-1990 Nepal. The Panchayat system had emphasized conformity to a national ideal of “Nepaliness” based upon Nepali language, Hinduism, and loyalty to the monarchy. Such conformity discouraged expression of diverse caste and ethnic identities. Increasing politicization of Nepali society since 1980 has changed the conditions of integration within Nepal.50 Now it is fashionable to claim distinctive ethnic and culturally based identities. Brown observes that in contemporary Nepal “emphasis is not placed upon the similarities between communities but rather upon the differences between them.” She further comments that a “distinct process of cultural fragmentation is . . . perceptible as individual groups maneuver in order to carve themselves a niche in the new democratic order.”51 This process

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of fragmentation will not pose the kind of threats ethnic identities pose for the Indian nation-state, but Nepal does not have the mechanism for ethnic integration that India possesses in the center-state ordering of its federal democracy. Nepal is a unitary state. One might argue that the strengthening of ethnic identities is potentially dangerous to Nepal’s democracy. However, democracies are better equipped to contain and integrate distinctive identities. Most India experts will acknowledge that ethnic diversity reinforces India’s democratic polity. A multiparty democracy has the means to absorb the expressions of distinctive identity. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the backward castes and classes in India gained political recognition through exercise of voting power. In the 1990s, they matured as a political force to demand and capture political offices in national government. It took three decades of democratic process to achieve this, but the downward devolution of power and formation of caste alliances across and within India’s federal state units provided these groups with an experience that enabled them to be a part of ruling coalitions. As in India—but unlike Pakistan—Nepal does not have a single ethnic group that is numerically preponderant enough to dominate the rest. Tibeto-Burman groups in the hills probably constitute the largest racial group, but they are divided by caste, region, and tribes. Since no single group predominates, communities can gain representation only through alliances and coalitions. The logic of ethnic fragmentation is likely to truly open up the electoral system in Nepal. Indo-Aryan peoples are also divided into hills and plains groups and are further stratified according to caste. At the beginning of a new century, there is no strong pull to organize Nepal’s hill minorities into a single, large party, nor is there a serious secessionist movement in Terai. The prospects of hills and plains polarization is, however, real, as is the possibility of a separatist movement in Terai52 should the party system fail to integrate their demands into agendas and rescue them from the burden of grinding poverty. Even if democracy fails, an authoritarian regime is not the answer to the caste and ethnic fragmentation within Nepal. Commentators committed to the idea of modernization as a prerequisite for democracy decry the assertion of ethnic identities. Post1990 Nepal shows that ethnic assertions can be a wedge to open society to democratic change. The demand for a new language policy is a case in point. Selma Sonntag explains how the attempt to replace the hegemony of Nepali with a multiplicity of languages has mobilized ethnolinguistic groups in the country. The new policy is a radical departure from the previous monopoly accorded to Nepali language as an instrument of national unity and integration. The new policy will permit

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use of a particular language for education and broadcasting, provided it has achieved a certain level of development and deserves that status because of popularity and usage. Sonntag points out how, for instance, the “choice of Tamang language is spurring the creation of pan-Tamang ethnic identity; conversely the Tharus are creating a language to add to the belongings of their imagined community.”53 The language of the uppercaste Hindus of the hills—the Bahuns, Chhetris, and Thakurs—is no longer unquestionably accepted as the sole language of Nepal. The 1991 census showed that for the first time since 1961 the number of Nepali speakers declined. More Nepalis claimed another language as their primary language in 1991. This shift also suggests a shift in distribution of economic and social opportunities. Being a nonNepali speaker no longer locks one out of access to social goods, nor has democratic Nepal totally failed to develop new mechanisms to create the founding base for its democratic politics. The establishment of language policy with recommending bodies, such as the Radio Nepal Committee and the National Language Policy Recommendation Commission, as well as the intensive search for a fair and free criterion to decide which language to include and which to exclude, point to development of democratically oriented institutions. Sonntag suggests that the new language policy will have a profound impact on intergroup boundaries and ethnic identities in Nepal.54 It is true that the poor do not wield political power and that the privileged continue to dominate the political system in Nepal. Corruption is rampant, and populist rhetoric is producing disillusionment with party politics. However, it is equally true that the entire context within which the powerful seek office has changed. What we see in post-1990 Nepal is the beginning of a competitive system in which parties have struggled hard to protect the grand bargain between the NC, the ULF parties, and the palace. In the years since the inception of the grand bargain, the balance of power has shifted from one to the other, but no individual player is capable of neutralizing the other two and imposing its unchallenged dominance. This may not make Nepal a stable democracy, but it does stop the authoritarian regime from making a comeback. Nepal’s geostrategic position between two Asian powers, its inescapable ties to India, and its dependence on foreign aid will continue to shape the Nepali future. ■

IMPLICATIONS FOR DEMOCRATIZATION AND DEBATE

What elements of this transformative experience should we consider in thinking about global definitions of democracy?

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As several elite bargain theorists have correctly argued, economic crisis was a catalyst in Nepal’s transition to democracy. The other side of this proposition does not apply. Existence of poverty and failure to rapidly improve conditions have not led to a breakdown. Several writers have also suggested that authoritarian regimes are better able to withstand the pain of economic transformation because they do not have to please the public. The East Asia experience is frequently cited as a case in point. This is certainly not true in Nepal. The king and the Pancha system were committed to the idea of bikas (development) but did little to ameliorate poverty in Nepal during the thirty years they were in power. Critics are largely correct when they argue that the transition to democracy does not change the social and economic structure, but they have ignored the implications of mobility within strata in society. Nepal’s urban population has expanded substantially, and many in the cities have moved from a marginal existence, or outright poverty, into the growing middle classes. The growth in the population over the decades has kept the percentage of poor at 40 percent, but there is no denying the mobility among income groups in urban Nepal. Such changes tilted the equation of power against the traditional classes in the 1990s. Nepal’s multiparty democracy will not produce social justice and equality on short order, but the new openness in the system will create its own momentum toward accommodation of diverse social interests. Democracies are only tangentially related to economic distribution. It is not the only or even primary justification for democracy. Democracy is desirable for its own sake, for the openness and alternatives it is likely to create. The rational choice theories have all too often justified democracy on the instrumentalist argument, that is, democracy is good because it will bring economic prosperity. What they have frequently ignored is the widening of political choices—options previously unavailable—produced by an expanding circle of new actors and groups. Scholars ignore these changes because richer public discourse does not necessarily bring good governance and political stability. But that is precisely how we are required to measure democratic advance in a transitional society. In the case of Nepal, do we applaud the Tamang and Tharu mobilization as a move toward greater democratization, or do we lament the conflicts and political stress their mobilization has produced? Do we lament the fact that they enter politics on the basis of their ethnic Tharu identity instead of as individuals liberated from the pull of tradition? Should we reject the notion of democratic advance because Nepal has not removed poverty, redistributed wealth, and become a modern, developed

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nation-state? I believe we are on surer ground analyzing what has actually come to pass and whether or not it is a step toward democratic advance than to bemoan the fact that it has not met the standards of prosperity and efficiency set by early democracies. Nepal’s experience suggests caution in succumbing to the ruling stereotype about what is and what is not democratic. It would be misleading to cast the king as an authoritarian and the parliament as a democratic force. Initial democratization was possible only because the parties were willing to integrate the monarchy into the new order. That was dictated not by any sympathy for the king but because Nepal’s national identity required it. Conventional notions of democratization required jettisoning, but Nepal had to incorporate the monarchy to be a democracy. In the foreseeable future, Nepali democracy will have to depend on a balance between king and parliament. Democratization is relatively easier when problems of state formation and consolidation are separated from those of democratic advance. Monarchy permits Nepal to separate the two. It provides an anchor to the Nepali state while the political elite can concentrate on the routine of competitive politics. India and Pakistan did not possess this advantage at birth. They had to build democracy at the same time they were consolidating their territorial nation-states. The monarchy is intrinsic to the process of democratization in Nepal, not inimical to it. Democracy will, however, diminish if the king and his party become major players in the formation of government and policy. The literature on transitional democracy needs to reassess the role of instability in light of Nepal’s experience. It suggests that instability can serve a purpose. Mobilization of hill tribes and castes that usually have been bypassed by political leaders will produce conflicts, even violence, but if Nepal’s parties continue to expand, become more inclusive, and learn to accommodate its varied ethnic and caste communities through compacts, violence will give way to participatory democracy. Expression of caste and ethnic interests are not necessarily antidemocratic or irrational. Ethnic differences can gradually deepen and widen competitive democracy if no single group is able to dominate the rest. ■

CONCLUSION

Since 1990, Nepal has remained a parliamentary democracy, though a highly unstable one by Western standards. This becomes clear in the context of the conflicting pulls of the four imperatives of participation, security, development, and regime stability. The logic of leadership sur-

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vival has produced two broad outcomes: integration of the monarchy in the new politics; and government by coalition. But that compromise has yet to be institutionalized. Compulsions of development, modernization, and popular disappointment have driven political parties to rein in economic nationalism in deference to liberalization and market reforms, expand participation to diffuse popular demands, and redefine their quest for development within a larger geoeconomic cluster of neighboring regions in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. The future of democracy in Nepal hangs on the economy and its discontents. Political maneuvering and populist rhetoric can buy time, but not too much time. Nepal has made a successful transition to electoral democracy, but it is far from a consolidated democratic nation-state. ■

NOTES

1. For details of events leading up to the Jan Andolan, see O. Borre, S. R. Panday, and C. K. Tiwari, “The Nepalese Election of 1991,” Electoral Studies 19(4) (1991): 357–362; R. Shaha, Politics in Nepal, 1980–1990: Referendum, Stalemate, and Triumph of People’s Power (New Delhi: Manohar, 1990); Prem Sharma, Fifty Days of Pro-Democracy Movement in Nepal, 1990 (Kathmandu: Tribhuvan University Center for Economic Development and Administration, 1991); and M. Hutt, ed., Nepal in the Nineties (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). 2. Forum for Protection of Human Rights (FOPHUR), Dawn of Democracy: People’s Power in Nepal (Kathmandu, 1990), p. 23. 3. Nepal Press Report, 23 January 1990. 4. It was on this day in 1950 that King Tribhuvan had ended the rule of the Ranas and committed Nepal to a parliamentary democracy. That promise had remained unfulfilled. Before democracy could take root, King Birendra, who had succeeded his father, King Tribhuvan, dismissed the parliament and established a partyless Panchayat Raj that lasted for nearly thirty years. 5. The total number of people killed during the Andolan was around sixty, although this is disputed. The final number was not very much above that. Gorkhapatra (Kathmandu), 27 October 1990. 6. T. Louise Brown, The Challenge of Democracy in Nepal: A Political History (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 125. 7. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), pp. 152– 153. 8. Brown, The Challenge of Democracy, p. 140. 9. There were several groups of counterrevolutionaries rumored to be funded by the palace. These tried to destabilize the interim government by fomenting anarchy. They indulged in looting and intimidation. In response, vigilante groups of progovernment elements were voluntarily established. The police were reluctant to offer loyalty to the new government, although the army was quick to support Bhattarai and his cabinet.

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10. Nepal Press Digest, 1 April 1992. 11. The UML received 28 percent of the popular vote and 34 percent of the seats. The parties of the former Panchas won only four seats, far less then the seats won by the far-left parties. The UML had swept the Kathmandu Valley, defeating Prasad Bhattarai of the interim government. 12. For early decades of Indo-Nepali relations, see B. L. Joshi and Leo Rose, Democratic Innovation in Nepal: A Case Study of Political Acculturation (Berkeley: California University Press, 1966), p. 364; and B. K. Jha, IndoNepalese Relations, 1951–1972 (Bombay: Vora, 1973), p. 77. 13. Nehru said, “Any aggression against Bhutan and Nepal would be regarded as aggression against India.” Government of India, Lok Sabha Debates, 35(10) (2d Series, 27 November 1959), p. 2211. 14. For the role of the king, see Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, “Vestiges and Visions,” in David Gellner et al., eds., Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), p. 426. 15. Nanda Shrestha, “Enchanted by the Mantra of Bikas: A Self-reflective Perspective on Nepalese Elites and Development,” South Asian Bulletin 13(1–2) (1993): 9. 16. Prayag Raj Sharma, “Nation-building, Multi-ethnicity, and the Hindu State,” in Gellner et al., Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom, pp. 480–481. 17. Nancy Levine, “Caste, State, and Ethnic Boundaries in Nepal,” Journal of Asian Studies 46(1) (1987): 71–87. 18. T. Dignan, “Land and Landless Among Urban and Rural Migrants in Nepal’s Terai Region,” International Regional Science Review 12(2) (1980): 189–209. 19. The monopoly of power by the three high castes did not go unchallenged, and an integration through legislative fiat and land reforms was not without violence. The anti-Bahun uprising by Limbus in 1948 suggests that subjugation of tribal people was not without protest and struggle. See Levine, “Caste, State, and Ethnic Boundaries,” p. 76. 20. L. Caplan, “From Tribe to Peasant? The Limbus and the Nepalese State,” Journal of Peasant Studies 18(2) (1991): 312–313. 21. L. R. Baral, The Oppositional Politics in Nepal (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1977). 22. Shaha, Politics in Nepal, p. 57. 23. In the early 1970s, a radical faction of the Communist Party began to orchestrate class warfare in the Jhapa region of eastern Nepal. In 1974 an attempt was made to assassinate King Birendra. 24. L. R. Baral, Nepal’s Politics of Referendum: A Study of Groups, Personalities, and Trends (New Delhi: Vikas, 1983), p. 8. 25. H. Gurung, “The Sociology of Elections in Nepal, 1959–1981,” Asian Survey 22(3) (1982): 313. 26. Nanda Shrestha, “Enchanted by the Mantra of Bikas: A Self-Reflective Perspective on Nepalese Elites and Development,” South Asian Bulletin 13(1–2) (1993): 19. 27. World Bank, Nepal: Poverty and Incomes (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1991), p. xi.

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28. World Bank, World Development Report, 1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 180. 29. International Monetary Fund, Nepal: Recent Economic Development, 1989 (Washington, D.C.: IMF), p. 58. 30. David Zurick, “The Road to Shangri La Is Paved: Spatial Development and Rural Transformation in Nepal,” South Asian Bulletin 13(1–2) (1993): 37. 31. Ibid., p. 44. 32. According to W. C. Thiesenhusen, by 1988, after twenty-four years of implementation, only 1.5 percent of the area currently in farms had been redistributed to some 10,000 families. 33. Narayan Khadka comments, “But according to the planning authorities of Nepal, the results had been disappointing. The sixth plan had failed to introduce ‘dynamism’ in the country. It is against this failure noted by the authors of the sixth plan that the king of Nepal pledged to meet basic needs by the year 2000. He promised a firm political commitment through systematic planning, programming and follow up. A task force was set up to implement the goals. The BNP received the highest priority and much publicity.” Politics of Development in Nepal (New Delhi: Nirala, 1994), p. 307. 34. Brown, The Challenge of Democracy, p. 106. 35. Ibid. 36. D. R., Panday, “Administrative Development in Semi-dependency: The Experience of Nepal,” Public Administration and Development 9(3) (1989): 320. 37. World Bank, Nepal: Maintaining Structural Reforms and Managing Public Resources (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, Report No. 8352-NEP, 1990), p. 68. 38. S. K. Upadhyay, Tryst with Diplomacy (New Delhi: Vikas, 1991), pp. 90–91. 39. World Bank, Nepal, p. 29. 40. Andrew Nickson, “Democratization and Growth of Communism in Nepal: A Peruvian Scenario in the Making?” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 30(3) (1992): 364. 41. J. W. Garver, “China-India Rivalry in Nepal: The Clash Over Chinese Arms Sales,” Asian Survey 31(10) (1991): 959–960. 42. Dinesh Bhattarai and Pradip Khatiwada, Nepal-India: Democracy in the Making of Mutual Trust (Jaipur: Nirala, 1993), pp. 112–116. 43. Ananta Raj Poudyal, “Nepal in 1995: The Communist Rule Experiment,” Asian Survey 36(2) (1996): 209–211. 44. Ibid., p. 212. 45. Hindu, 21 May 1999. 46. Poudyal, “Nepal in 1995,” pp. 209–216. 47. O. Borre et al., “The Nepalese Election of 1991,” p. 64. 48. Hindu, 2 May 1999. 49. Hindu, “Nepal for SAARC ‘Growth Quadrangle,’” 19 February 1997. 50. Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka comments that “the new Nepalese constitution does not merely shift sovereignty from king to the people, reintroducing a multi-party parliamentary democracy. It declares the kingdom to be multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, which is a drastic departure from . . . measures . . . during the preceding decades.” See “Vestiges and Visions,” in David Gellner et

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al., Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom, p. 419. She and others believe that this will be a central dilemma for Nepal because problems of ethnicity and identity will surface with growing frequency in the future. These are no longer contained within the unitary (and hierarchical) framework of government as they were contained before. 51. Brown, The Challenge of Democracy, p. 217. 52. For discussion of the Terai ethnic movement, see D. R. Dahal, “Grasping The Terai Identity,” Himal (May–June 1992). 53. Selma Sonntag, “Ethno-linguistic Identity and Language Policy in Nepal,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 1(4) (1995): 109. 54. Ibid., p. 119.

5

State and Democracy: The Politics of Consolidation in India The sizable number of scholars who have sought to demonstrate that India is a covert authoritarian state or at best a low-quality democracy give pride of place in their analyses to the occurrence of ethnic, religious, and caste violence and to the deployment of the state’s coercive laws to contain such violence. They argue that the derogation of democracy became general as these laws were applied and often misapplied over large parts of the country, instead of remaining confined to insurgency-affected areas. In addition to the increasing incidence of violence, scholars also point to the existence of large-scale poverty and the perennial state of political instability characterized by a procession of short-lived governments since 1990. All of this, in their view, makes India a covertly authoritarian, low-quality democracy. The principle weakness of this argument is its dependence on the European paradigm of democratic evolution. Unlike in Europe, India has attempted to use democracy to build the state. Nothing could be farther from the European experience, in which democracy evolved in opposition to the state. India’s founding fathers had to make democracy a tool of nation-building because its vast diversity left no other option. In contrast, European nations, which were also multiethnic, used coercion to create the nation-state. Had India been able to follow the European route, the violence unleashed by the state in Punjab, and the Northeast (ethnic) or Bihar (caste), would have been the rule and not the exception and would have been, therefore, unremarkable. It is remarkable only because India followed the route of peaceful, democratic accommodation. Studying these regions is important, but not as illustrations of covert authoritarianism. They need to be studied to understand, first, why the accommodation process broke down and, second, how the state is attempting to restore it and what constraints

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shape its choices. The purpose of coercion in these instances is radically different from what it was during the nation-building phase of European history. Here, its purpose is to remove obstacles to the restoration of the bargaining process. This is why we find the state trying to mediate between antagonistic ethnic and caste communities. It may not do this well, or it may even fail. But failure in that instant cannot be an argument about the failure of the whole, particularly if the violence is geographically confined to specific pockets, as in case of recurring caste and ethnic violence. In European history, violence was frequently used to obviate the need for bargaining altogether. It follows, then, that even though the use of force could be unrestrained in the European era of nation-state formation, it has always to be restrained in India. This may be a curious argument, as almost all recent literature on India harps on the adverse relationship between conflict and democracy. That conflict is likely to undermine democracy is not a new argument, but its application to India must be approached with caution. This is because the contours of state, nation, and democracy are being determined simultaneously, which creates strange paradoxes, such as the coexistence of democratic expansion and violence. Areas that may have resorted to violence before elections return to peaceful competition in the next elections. The violence might erupt again, but only to prepare the ground for groups and communities that vie for a larger share of economic and political power. It is in this sense that violence, at least a large part of it, is restrained. It is not restrained for those who suffer it or lose lives because of it. The critics of India’s democracy are wrong to view ethnic, caste, and religious mobilization in a wholly negative light and are also wrong to see all violence as a proof of India’s democratic failure. This is so because mobilization of these groups works to mitigate the concentration of power. It opens up society to a greater and deeper experience of democracy and forces the state to accommodate its constituent parts. The first widens the electoral net to make the system more inclusive; the second challenges the natural tendency of a state to arrogate increasing power to itself. India’s democratic state is constituted on the principle of shifting equilibrium and constant adjustment to differential mobilizations of culturally defined communities, whether these are caste communities across Bihar, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh in northern Indian states or geographically compact ethnic communities in individual states such as Tamil Nadu, Assam, Punjab, and Maharashtra. India’s democratic state is not like the “stable” state in Western nations today, with well-marked terrain of political competition within a fixed territory and established rules of conflict resolution. The Indian state needs

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to assume a robust and interventionist role in directly defining the political arena, not only to set up the rules for it but also to enhance the ability of groups blocked from it by history and custom. Although poverty, violence, and instability are the favored focus of commentaries on India, they are seldom seen in tandem with the transformations India’s democracy has wrought and absorbed over the past five decades. No story of India’s democratization can be complete without it, and no assessment of its progress can be fair without their inclusion. Below I discus three key transformations, including their significance for democratic development within the constraints of security, regime stability, participation, and growth that have shaped them. The key transformations are: the caste revolution, particularly the rise of backward castes to power; the history of accommodation and its breakdown in two of India’s most troublesome regions, Punjab and Northeast; and the decline of the Congress Party’s dominance and the emergence of coalition politics. These transformations do not exhaust the list of changes we might examine under the rubric of democratization, but they constitute a substantial part of India’s democratic development. The arguments presented here do not deny the existence of poverty, violence, and instability or seek to gloss over the misdeeds and self-seeking behavior of some Indian leaders. Instead, the purpose is to stress how they are a part of the larger picture, one defined by democratic pursuit constrained by imperatives of nation-state consolidation. ■

THE CASTE REVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY

The caste system, one of the most iniquitous systems of power and hierarchy, has defined India’s social order for centuries. Broadly, the caste system has been based on varna, or vertical division, in which the Brahmins are at the top, Kshetriyas the next, then the Vaishays, followed by the Shudras. Each varna category is divided horizontally into hundreds of subcastes (jatis) based on the kind of work or professions they are traditionally associated with. At the bottom and beyond the pale of caste order are the “untouchables” who do “polluting” work, such as cleaning latrines, removing hides of animals, and making shoes and other items for use. Access to economic opportunities and social status is largely defined by these caste distinctions, particularly among the lower rungs in the caste hierarchy. Despite its rigid structure, the caste system is far from static. It has been changed and reconfigured repeatedly over the passage of history, the change being particularly evident after 1947.

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The Indian national movement was ideologically opposed to caste and committed to removing this age-old system of inequity and social distance. India’s founding leaders hoped that democracy and economic modernization would undermine and finally eliminate caste divisions. The first would empower the underprivileged by giving them the vote, and the second would destroy the segmentation based on birth and create instead an integrated labor market. The results of the past fifty years of political and economic developments have, however, produced some unintended results. The caste still retains its hold on Indian society, albeit in a different way. Caste identities have been strengthened because of the democratic transformation over five decades. Its entry into the political arena has altered the way in which it now functions. The outward structure of the caste system is still recognizable, but the status and power of individual castes, and their access to public goods and office, have undergone large shifts. The constitution of India singled out three categories of caste to be granted preferential treatment: the schedule castes (the untouchables) and other lower castes subjected to similar treatment; the tribal communities; and the backward castes/classes. Whereas the first two categories were more easily identified, the last category was always vague and subject to periodic extensions. Over time these came to include a vast number of shudra castes—the Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Kunbis and Marathas in Maharashtra, Vallalas in Tamil Nadu, and Vokkaligas and Lingayats in Karnataka, Ahirs, and Jats in the three states of northern India. These jatis were not necessarily the most underprivileged strata in rural India, but they were the more numerous compared to those numbers in other caste categories. The backward caste category was particularly amorphous. 1 Many middle castes were then able to take advantage of the constitutional provision to gain higher status and political power. According to a report produced by the commission headed by B. P. Mandal in 1980, the upper castes constitute 16.1 percent, the schedule castes 15 percent, the schedule tribes 7.5 percent, and the backward castes/classes 43.7 percent of the population.2 To implement the provisions laid down in the constitution, Indian leaders pursued three broad strategies: they extended a variety of benefits, legal protection, and programs to schedule castes and tribes, including reservation of seats in the legislature and educational institutions, and employment in government departments; created a large number of antipoverty programs, including food for work and employment guarantee schemes designed generally for the poorest segments of the population (a disproportional part of which belonged to the

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schedule castes and tribes); and used electoral politics to co-opt and include larger and larger numbers of lower castes into the democratic process. Some scholars have argued that the first strategy of extending compensatory preferential treatment has failed because the benefits provided by the “reservations” have fallen far short of the requirements. 3 A vast number of Schedule Castes/Schedule Tribes (SC/ST) still remain mired in poverty and subject to violence and humiliating treatment on a daily basis. The judicial machinery has failed to enforce the law or prevent atrocities against them. Others are less condemnatory in their assessment. Although admitting that the achievements fall short of the targets, Barbara Joshi and Marc Galanter, two leading scholars in this field, point out that these programs have created a “huge mass of educated, often socially conscious men and a few women, with capacity to operate within the system.” Joshi remarks that “public education plus public sector jobs have produced a swelling pool of skills, information and disposable income.” 4 Galanter describes the government programs as a “partial and costly success.”5 The “reservation” policy has, in his view, “undeniably succeeded in accelerating the growth of a middle class” within the SC/ST. “Members of these groups have been brought into central roles in society to an extent unimaginable a few decades ago.”6 Galanter agrees with Joshi that “significant redistribution of education and employment opportunities have taken place” and that SC/ST concerns have been “firmly placed on the political agenda and cannot be readily dislodged.” Similarly sharp differences exist over the success of the second strategy, that is, the antipoverty programs meant to ameliorate the conditions of the poorest among the poor in rural India. Although all those below the poverty line are not SC/ST, a substantial part among them belongs to this category. Many scholars have argued that despite the much publicized antipoverty measures the incidence of poverty remains more or less unchanged. This is because moneys allocated to the antipoverty programs have been siphoned off by the economically stronger strata or by public officials, local politicians, and village notables. Recent findings have, however, painted a different picture. There is evidence that benefits have trickled down and improved conditions of the poorest of the poor in India. According to V. M. Rao, “From the early 1980s onwards there was a sizable expansion in the employment programmes and the number of beneficiaries covered by them.” 7 Writing about poverty reduction in Andhra Pradesh, Parthsarathy observes that despite a slowdown in agricultural growth the proportion of people below the poverty line went down during the

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1980s. He attributes the decline to employment and other antipoverty programs. Studies in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the hardcore poverty areas, also show that despite graft and corruption benefits did reach the poorest of the poor.8 Maharashtra’s employment guarantee scheme has been noted for its remarkable success by many observers. In their study of agricultural growth, S. D. Sawant and C. V. Achutan show that agricultural growth had spread to large areas beyond the green revolution.9 Vaidyanathan reports similar diversification and the poverty-ameliorating impact of agricultural crops spread across many states. Rural wages rose during the 1980s, and poverty declined.10 Even more important than absolute numbers is the movement among and within various economic strata. Often, such a movement leads to greater political mobilization and increased participation. Social mobility and political awareness strengthen the sense of “relative deprivation” among caste communities that are proximate in social status. This produces greater competition between them. The rise in the status of lower castes, in contrast, endangers the entrenched position of the powerful who have struck back by sabotaging the propoor programs or with threats of violence. The partial success of preferential quota strategies suggests that Indian democracy has been successful in extending participation and mobilizing communities, bringing greater awareness of rights and privileges, and incorporating their concerns in the national discourse, but it has not changed the structural conditions that consign these castes to a life of poverty and deprivation. One might argue that the rural poor are poor not only because they are SC/ST but also because they possess no economic assets or skills to meaningfully participate in a market economy. To attack the problem head-on, Indian leaders had to radically change the property relations through land reforms. However, democracies are seldom capable of rapid structural change. Usually, change occurs in stages and within the constraints of available resources, which determines the extent to which the state might accede to competing demands of its diverse strata. There have been several land reforms—first in the 1950s, then in 1964, and again in the 1970s—that sought to tilt the balance in favor of small farmers, poor peasants, and the landless. Although the first reform eliminated the class of big landowners and the second strengthened the class of peasant proprietors, the landless and very poor farmers did not benefit in the same proportion from the reforms. But this conclusion must be qualified in three ways. First, with implementation of the reforms, land ceilings, and wages, antipoverty schemes are the responsibilities of the individual state governments that have been since the mid-1960s dominated by the middle-caste peasant proprietors

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who have little incentive to consider the poor. Second, in large parts of the country, small farmers and peasants who had lived on the margins of poverty have benefited from the technological inputs, availability of ready credit, fertilizers, and the government’s procurement and price support schemes. Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph have talked at length about the “bullock capitalists” who eventually benefited from the green revolution. The bullock capitalists are peasants who own little more than a pair of bullocks and an acre or two of land and are, therefore, an extremely vulnerable section of the rural population.11 In areas such as Central Bihar, North Arcott in Tamil Nadu, Telangana in Andhra Pradesh, and Ahmednagar in Maharashtra, exploitation of the lower castes and lower strata intensified because of the agricultural revolution.12 In other areas of the country, there was a real improvement in the life of the poor. It is, then, more appropriate to talk about a gradation of benefits and access to them rather than a bipolar division of rural India between rich and poor. There has been no peasant revolution or mass uprising in the countryside, which underlines the partial success of the economic and political strategies Indian leaders have followed. The third qualifying condition is the choice of development strategy and resource constraints within the economy. These have to be balanced against the imperatives of national consolidation. The neglect of agriculture until the late 1960s, the narrow focus on the green revolution, and expansion in food grain production—and then only belatedly in the 1980s—show the leadership’s changing priorities. Indian leaders initially stressed heavy industry and only later focused on agriculture, because they wanted to make India industrially self-reliant. It became apparent by the 1960s that food deficits would make India even more dependent on foreign governments that might (as the United States did in 1966) demand a political quid pro quo. India needed to become selfreliant in food, which meant supporting those who could produce agricultural surpluses, notably the more prosperous peasant proprietors. But that meant focusing energies on technology and credits rather than on poverty. The adequacy of the preferential compensatory policies have to be seen against this broader perspective of resource constraints, national priorities, and the limits of democratic politics. It is well known to India observers that humiliating dependency on U.S. shipments of grains in exchange for India’s support for U.S. intervention in Vietnam propelled Indira Gandhi to push for the green revolution. The green revolution polarized class and caste politics in Punjab and eastern Uttar Pradesh initially, but the green revolution extended over time to

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smaller farmers, marginal peasants, and even the landless wage earners. The political consequences of economic prosperity in Punjab were far from peaceful. Its mixed consequences were a direct outcome of having to balance the imperatives of security, growth, and democracy. The difficulty in balancing the norms of equity with competitive democracy are even more starkly visible in the vast expansion of the backward caste/class category. In most southern states of India, where forward castes (by espousing an anti-Brahmin ideology throughout the 1930s and 1940s) had emerged from the landowning Shudra peasantry, the backward-caste Hindus had gained a share without displacing the former. By the early 1980s, reservation and quotas were extended to 68 percent of government positions in Tamil Nadu. This included 15 percent for the schedule castes. Another category, “most backward,” was added in the late 1980s. Remarkably, these extensions did not break the social compact of castes and was contained within the competitive politics of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the two main political parties espousing the anti-Brahmin, Dravidian ideology in Tamil Nadu. The expansion and accommodation of caste compacts were supported by high levels of welfare expenditures and loan amnesties, in addition to guaranteed employment schemes for the poor and schedule castes.13 The Tamil Nadu pattern of expansion and compact has been replicated to a different degree throughout India under the umbrella of Congress Party dominance until the 1980s and then under regional, ethnically based or caste-based opposition party coalitions at the center. The Telugu Desam in Andhra Pradesh, the Shiva Sena in Maharashtra, the Akali Dal in Punjab, and the Asom Gano Parishad (AGP) in Assam are quintessentially the ethnic-based parties. The Bahujan Samaj Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Uttar Pradesh are instances of caste-based parties. More often than not, ethnicity and caste overlap. Shifts in support constituencies, creation of new parties, and breakup of old ones are the subject of the third section below. Here it is enough to note that the first Janata Dal–led coalition government (1977–1979) exemplified the ascent of backward castes and classes in politics. The second coalition government of V. P. Singh represented a more pronounced articulation and compact between prosperous backward castes (Yadavs, Jats, and Kurmis plus other middle castes) and lower and schedule castes as well as Muslims. The Singh government’s decision to extend the reservation was meant to consolidate the caste and class alliance he sought to forge as an alterative to the rival national parties—the BJP and the Congress Party. It was also meant to create social peace by providing greater

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space in government for the lower rungs of the backward classes, which had become impatient, in his view, for a greater share of power and office. The mobilization of the backward class/caste alliance had, however, created a backlash among the upper castes in the new middle classes. The latter resented the preferential treatment, the quotas, and the assured spaces in medical and engineering schools set aside for the Schedule Castes/Backward Classes (SC/BC). Violence erupted in Gujrat in 1981 and again in 1985. It was repeated in August 1990 when V. P. Singh announced the expansion of “reservations” based on the Mandal Commission’s report. The crisis over the Mandal Report exemplifies a fundamental clash between different definitions of democracy in India, one based on just rights of communities and groups, the other on the conventional idea of individual rights. The upper caste’s argument was not without merit. Many among them could not afford higher education and were therefore deserving of government support. Instead of becoming the focus of enduring debate, the middle class’s violent objections have, however, moved the reservations debate off the national agenda. Had the reservation policies been a complete failure, there would not have been the vast revolution in the status and power of the SC/BC that we are witnessing today. And such a revolution could not have been achieved in absence of a genuine working democracy. It is also noteworthy that the advancement of castes occurred not on the basis of individual rights but on community rights. Democracy in India has meant accommodation and bargains between the previously powerful and newly empowered caste and ethnic communities within a democratic framework. The brutal violence against the SCs in Central Bihar and Telangana is often described as an expression of violent castism and primordial sentiment. But this is patently misleading, because it overlooks the recent causes of caste violence and instead stresses the immutability of caste in India and its logical conclusion that traditionally defined societies such as India make poor candidates for rooting a modern democracy. In reality, caste violence occurs repeatedly and generally in the same areas and same villages because of convergence in land relations, state benefits, and caste alliances. If similar elements converge in other areas, they too will succumb to caste violence. The atrocities against the SCs rose in Bihar after 1977, precisely when SC demands found powerful articulation in the assertive leadership of Karpoori Thakur. Between 1990 and 1999, at least thirty-five instances of caste violence were recorded in Bihar. Not surprisingly, they coincided with the ascent of SC leaders in state-level politics. 14 Also, the land reforms and legislation meant to protect and provide re-

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lief to the landless SC communities have been sabotaged and deflected by the more powerful landed castes. Moreover, the SC landless have since 1990 begun to resist and launch counterattacks against the uppercaste villages that had hitherto monopolized all power. To counter their hold over village economy, the SCs have been organized under the banner of the militant Marxist left in Bihar and Telangana. Democracy has certainly failed to negotiate caste conflicts in these states, but it has succeeded in protecting and improving the life of the SCs in other states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and Maharashtra. To some degree, the story of violence in Bihar is also the story of change in caste politics wrought by democracy, of new attitudes, of first-time resistance, demands for equal rights, just wages, and a life of dignity. According to several reports, the agricultural movement in Bihar got a boost from the returning migrant labor from Punjab and Haryana, where the green revolution had altered the rural equation of economic and political power.15 C. Chandramohan writes that such conflicts exhibit the involvement of militant peasant organizations like the Savarna Liberation Army, or the Ranbir Sena of the middle-caste land proprietors and the Kisan Sabha, or the self-defense squads organized by the landless SC peasants to stage a land grab and harvest crops without landlords’ assent.16 On a broader canvas, it is interesting to ask why the peasant revolution did not occur in India when many scholars have argued that the conditions had been ripe ever since independence. One might cite the immense diversity and social divisions based on ethnicity, caste, and geographical distance in a vast land, but when all is said and done we cannot deny the power and profit of democracy and its ability to blunt, absorb, and co-opt potential challenges to the state. The eventual outcome depends on the flexibility and resilience of the mechanism of democratic integration. A multination state cannot govern unless it is able to balance the opposites and negotiate a series of compacts among its parts at the local, state, and national levels. Sometimes these bargains might fail, but all do not fail at the same time, and when one bargain fails others are being forged in other parts of the country. ■

DEMOCRACY AND NATION-STATE: PUNJAB AND NORTHEAST

We have seen how the exclusive focus on violence against the SCs in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh distorts assessment of India’s democratic developments; a similar bias plagues discussions of ethnic conflicts in

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India. There is a tendency among critics, especially many belonging to the “subaltern” persuasion, to romanticize insurgency, particularly when it is rooted in ethnic separatism, as an expression of democratic resistance. In the process, the authoritarian and often violent history of their ethnic subjects has been overlooked. Even a nodding acquaintance with the ethnic separatist movements in Punjab, Kashmir, and the Northeast in India, and the Muhajir and Baluch nationalist movements in Pakistan, show that they are hardly democratic. For the most part, they have risen around a charismatic leader who demands unquestioning loyalty. We therefore need to guard against what R. A. Schermerhorn has pithily described as the “pathos of minorities”—the presumption that challenges to the state are by definition liberating and democratic.17 I suggest that there is an alternative way of looking at this history, one informed by imperatives of democracy and nation-state consolidation. Both Punjab and the Northeast are border states of India, and each has a history of shared ethnicity and culture with India’s neighbors: Pakistan in the case of Punjab, and Bangladesh, Burma, and Nepal in the case of the Northeast. These are also the two regions where ethnic self-assertions had assumed secessionist forms in the 1980s and 1990s. The transborder ethic overlap is a cause for serious tensions between India and its neighboring states. India’s territorial security has been a critical imperative in the central state’s policies toward Punjab and the Northeast.18 The Indian government’s policies towards Sikhs, who constitute a substantial part of the postindependence Punjab, were shaped by the trauma of partition and the communal carnage that followed and the three wars with Pakistan, in which Punjab served as the front line. Partition and its communal aftermath had similarly shaped Sikh demands in India. Partition had meant the loss of fertile lands and homes, as well as the need to forge a new compact with the Hindus in the eastern Punjab and reconstruct their community under a new political dispensation in New Delhi. Autonomy and scope for cultural freedom were critical to the Sikhs, a majority of whom had migrated to eastern Punjab. The Northeast is equally critical to India’s national security and even more difficult to integrate within the Indian Union. This is partly because of the remoteness and lack of infrastructure, roads, railways, and the like within the region, partly because it is a bewildering mosaic of communities and tribes, many of which were only nominally under central authority from New Delhi. The British Raj had divided the Northeast into excluded and partially excluded areas; the former were not to be colonized, whereas the latter could be colonized with the permission of authorities.19 In many ways, the colonial policies of exclu-

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sion and inner line set the stage for the later conflicts between natives and immigrants (the Sons of Soil movement in Assam), between hills and plains populations (Nagas and Mizos with Assamese), and advanced plains people with pockets of tribes on the plains (the Bodoland tribes with the Assamese). The poor integrations of the Northeast aggravated the problem of India’s defense in that region. India’s northeastern states are surrounded by Tibet (a bone of contention between India and China) and Bhutan in the north, China in the northeast, Burma in the south, and Bangladesh in the west but are connected to India only by narrow, twenty-mile-wide strip of land, the Silliguri Corridor. Defense of this region is thus a complicated and difficult proposition. China has been suspected of providing arms and assistance to the Nagas and Mizos. The Nagas and Mizos have used Myanmar, and the militant, ultra-left organization of Assamese nationalists has sought safe sanctuaries in Bangladesh to conduct war against New Delhi. These security imperatives, the problem of territorial consolidation, and that of defense of India’s international border have been forever present in the central state’s response to events in the region. The economic imperatives have changed with the developments in the region and in response to changes in the Indian economy in general. The persistence of food deficits and dependence on imports in the 1960s, for instance, propelled the Indian leadership to invest in agriculture and push for the green revolution in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. That altered the political landscape in Punjab by reinforcing the power of the Jat peasant proprietors, who rapidly replaced the urban, business-oriented Sikh leadership in the two principle political organizations of the Sikh community—the Akali Dal (Shiromani Akali Dal, the Sikh party in Punjab) and the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee (SGPC, the main Sikh religious congregation). Their efforts to translate economic power into political control in the 1970s and then again in the 1980s inevitably brought them up against the entrenched political presence of the Congress Party in Punjab. India’s economic imperatives in the 1960s had thus set the stage for either accommodation or confrontation in Punjab.20 The economy similarly shaped the choices Indian leaders made in the 1980s. It is noteworthy that even during the ten years of turmoil and insurgency (roughly 1980–1990), the agricultural production in Punjab did not suffer much. Had Punjab’s economy collapsed, the central state would have either stepped up coercion or speedily resolved the conflict. In fact, the 1980s were years of higher growth for the Indian economy. The central governments of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi were therefore cushioned from food deficits (politically a dangerous

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condition in India) and free to focus wholly on the “political imperatives,” what I referred to in Chapter 1 as the survival and stability dimensions of the state. Rich in minerals, timber, tea, and oil, the Northeast is a valuable source of raw material on which the rest of India heavily depends. Although these are critical to Indian economy, the security imperatives have forced the state to invest large amounts in infrastructure, defense, education, and welfare. But such expenditures have been far from adequate, and corruption has diverted substantial portions of it into the pockets of local- and state-level leaders. Popular anger has led to ethnic separatism.21 The security and economic imperatives are thus different in Punjab and the Northeast. Extension of democracy and growing political awareness have, however, intensified identity politics and reinforced the desire for a compact territorial home base (for the Assamese, Mizos, and Khalistanis) in both regions. Whether ethnic aspirations in Punjab and the Northeast would remain confined to demands for autonomy, or spiraled into a demand for separation, depended largely on conflict within the Sikh community between Sikhs and Hindus in Punjab and between them and the government in New Delhi.

Punjab: 1947–1997

Although the decade of the 1980s was marked by turmoil, violence, and collapse of democratic processes, ethnic assertions in Punjab before then had been peaceful and within the norms of democratic process. In fact, until 1982, Sikh ethnic stances had challenged mainly the policies of the government, not its suzerain authority. The important questions are these: How democratic were the compacts that maintained peace in Punjab and why did these early compacts break down, and, second, how do ethnic compacts fit into the broader process of democratization? The history of Sikh nationalism is long and complex.22 For the purposes of this study it is enough to note that until the 1970s two compacts had maintained ethnic peace and promoted rapid economic and political development in Punjab. The first such compact was hammered out in the early 1950s.

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Sikh natio nalism and the Indian state: the first co mpact. On the eve of partition, the Akali Dal, the main Sikh party then led by Master Tara Singh, had raised the demand for a separate Sikhistan, but neither the Congress Party nor the Muslim League had supported the idea; the British authorities had ignored the demand.23 After independence, Tara Singh launched a series of agitations and demanded a separate Punjab

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Suba in which the Sikhs would have a majority. These agitations poisoned the ethnic climate in Punjab. Tensions mounted between Hindus and Sikhs over the language issue. Although Punjabi Hindus speak Punjabi language, they chose to declare Hindi as their language in the 1951 census. The Hindu organizations in Punjab were suspicious of Tara Singh and his agitation for the Suba. They believed it to be a ploy to establish Sikh domination in Punjab. The Congress government of Prime Minister Nehru rejected the demand for a Punjabi Suba (because it was based on religion) and created instead a state of Greater Punjab by merging adjacent areas in it.24 In the Greater Punjab, the Sikhs became a minority. The Nehru government produced a regional formula and a new interethnic compact for Punjab. It created two committees of Punjabi- and Hindi-speaking communities in the provincial assembly to legislate on regional matters, and the Akali Dal was persuaded to limit its activities to religious and cultural affairs. Most scholars agree that the accommodation proposed by the Nehru government was democratic and balanced, though it had granted Punjab less than what had been granted to other federal units of India. The compact between the Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab defused the territorial threat to India’s unity, but it also advanced the cause of democracy. The compact was based on acceptance of the formula by substantial numbers in each community, requiring the Hindus and Sikhs to share office and power. Neither the Hindus nor the Sikhs achieved all they wanted, but they had got enough to end the confrontation. Politics was effectively separated from religion, and Sikh fears about being swamped by the Hindu majority had been dispelled. The success of the formula rested on a series of negotiations with Hindu and Sikh leaders and marginalizing extremists like Master Tara Singh. It also rested on the Congress Party’s control of the Punjab legislative assembly, which in the 1950s and early 1960s was almost automatic. The negotiations to evolve the formula were carried out not by the central leaders in New Delhi but by its chief representative in Punjab, Pratap Singh Kairon, a Jat Sikh, the head of the state Punjab Congress Party, and the elected chief minister of the state.25 This strategy had adhered to what I have identified (see Chapter 1) as the conditions for democratic advance in India:26 the central state retained the autonomy and reputation for impartiality; a compromise settlement was backed by significant numbers on both sides of the dispute; and the compact was institutionalized through a political formula legitimized subsequently by popular elections. The question still remains whether Nehru’s rejection of the Sikh demands was not undemocratic. In the context of a young nation-state

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trying to overcome traumas of partition and build a secular federal democracy, a different internal arrangement for a region on the hostile international border is not antidemocratic, especially if the arrangement is supported by the majority of those immediately affected by it. Nehru had less hesitation in deciding the demands for drawing ethnolinguistic boundaries for the rest of India (with the exceptions of the Northeast and Kashmir). The Akali Dal had, in fact, put forward a religion-based argument for the autonomous Suba. Master Tara Singh had pronounced repeatedly that the Sikh faith could be safe only within a Sikh homeland. This could not be met without compromising India’s secular commitment and risking violent clashes between Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab.

Linguistic agitatio n and grant o f Suba: the seco nd co mpact. The demand for the Suba was revived again in the 1960s. It must be noted that such demands are rooted in the religio-nationalist themes that define the ethnic boundaries of the Sikh community and are strengthened because of rivalry among leaders in the SGPC and the Akali Dal. In response to the Sikh demands in the 1960s, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi reversed the regional formula. She did not, however, reverse the principles on which the earlier compact had been forged. Gandhi broke up Greater Punjab and divided the state into three separate federal units: Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh. The Akali Dal’s demand that the city of Chandigarh be included in Punjab was to be ruled on separately and at a later date, when a commission appointed to work out the fair territorial quid pro quo for Haryana had made its award. The trifurcation of Greater Punjab gave Sikhs a majority in the new Punjab, but there was still a significant number of Hindus within it. The division was not, therefore, made on a religious basis. It had been granted because in the 1960s Sikh leaders had eschewed the religious rationale and reiterated their demands in linguistic terms. The 1965 war with Pakistan had given India an edge over its adversary. It had little to fear from an ethnically based Punjabi border state. The Sikhs had banded firmly behind India in the war and had, in fact, fought bravely to defend its frontiers. Sikh nationalism had clearly found a home within the larger pan-Indian nationalism with the grant of the Suba. The decision to grant the Suba had coincided with serious food shortages and increasing vulnerability to pressures from food donors and suppliers abroad. As the potential granary of India, Punjab was important to the balance of growth and security. Peace in Punjab meant a chance to improve India’s food situation and make the country more independent of U.S. food shipments. Purely political considerations also weighed into Indira Gandhi’s decision. After Nehru’s and Shastri’s deaths, the Con-

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gress Party and Indira Gandhi faced a formidable opposition from within and outside the party. Indira Gandhi needed support from any quarter that was willing to give it. The grant of Punjabi Suba and accommodation with the Sikh leaders gained her support in the newly created states of Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh. Creation of the Suba and ethnic majority for the Sikhs did not, however, translate into political dominance for the Akali Dal.27 The Congress Party remained popular with the Sikh masses, particularly the lower caste, poorer Hindus, and Sikhs in Punjab. All the same, after 1967 Congress could not take its dominance for granted. It had lost six states in the 1967 elections. Although the triumph in the 1971 Bangladesh War had brought temporary respite, by 1974 Congress was again facing dissent within and stronger opposition from rival political parties. The political imperatives of survival and stability thus became increasingly important. Indira Gandhi’s continuation as prime minister was at stake because of the countrywide agitations launched by Jay Prakash Narayan that year. These developments coincided with the caste and class polarization brought about by the green revolution. They undermined the ethnic compact in Punjab, making it more and more difficult for Congress to retain its hold in that state. The Janata victory in 1977 halted the Sikh agitations temporarily. But that government collapsed within a short time, ending the hopes of a new compact based on a more federalized-decentralized India. Indira Gandhi’s return to power in the 1979 elections had been engineered by splitting a number of regional parties and weaning them away from the Janata coalition. In Punjab this strategy was spearheaded by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, an obscure Sikh priest who was assigned the task of breaking the Akali Dal from within. He eventually did so by resorting to religious extremism and accusing the Akali Dal of collaborating with the central government led by a Brahmin-bania cabal (the two highest caste groups), its supreme leader none other than Indira Gandhi. This was ironic, for it was Congress that had aided and abetted Bhindranwale’s rise in Punjab. Obviously, Bhindranwale had also used Congress to promote his own agenda.28 He had done what Congress had originally desired—break up the Akali Dal government in Punjab. When that was accomplished, he proceeded to fulfill his own dream of an independent Khalistan. Bhindranwale built up a following and embarked on a violent path to establish a separate Sikh state. He targeted Sikhs as well as Hindus for murder. Punjab’s descent into violence and the government’s failures to settle with the moderate Akali leaders (which failed also because of lack of consensus among Sikh leaders) led in June 1984 to the army assault on the Sikh temple at Amritsar and the

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death of Bhindranwale. In November of that year Sikh bodyguards murdered Indira Gandhi, which led to a spate of mob killings in which more than 3,000 innocent Sikhs were killed. The ethnic compact in Punjab had broken down. Punjab had become a battleground between Sikh militants and the security forces, and imposition of draconian legislation had ended any electoral process. Indira Gandhi’s reliance on her trusted inner circles at the expense of political activists and grassroots leaders had borne bitter fruit in Punjab. Anxious to recapture power in states and at the political center in the 1980 elections, the members of her coterie had resorted to underhanded practices and violated the key principles of India’s secular democratic state. Given the past experience with Sikh religious revivalism of Tara Singh, Bhindranwale should never have been inserted into the volatile political milieu of late-1970s Punjab. The central leaders should have found a way to negotiate with the Akali Dal and prevented the polarization of the state along religious lines. Above all, Gandhi should have found different strategies to contain and isolate Bhindranwale instead of mounting “Operation Bluestar” to eliminate him. Gandhi and her advisers bear most of the blame for the immediate course of events in Punjab. However, their actions assume a different meaning when viewed in the larger context of state imperatives. It also reveals their mind-set and perceptions. The Congress was no longer able to muster automatic legislative majorities, which in the view of Indira Gandhi was essential not only to perpetuate the party’s dominance but also to retain at least a modicum of control over the national agenda. Second, neither Indira Gandhi nor any of her advisers had anticipated Punjab’s descent into murder and mayhem. Bhindranwale was supposed to split the Akali Dal, open a wedge for Congress to score a victory in Punjab, and politely bow out of the scene when his work was finished. Bhindranwale, of course, did not oblige the Congress leaders. He began to believe in his own legend and martyrdom.29 Using Bhindranwale as an instrument was thus a disastrous move that spiraled out of control. But Bhindranwale and his followers had crossed the boundaries of what any state could tolerate. They had murdered a large number of Hindus and Sikhs, the latter because they were suspected collaborators. Above all, Sikh separatists had sought sanctuaries in Pakistan and returned with arms and plans to foment insurgency. Once Bhindranwale and his cohorts had embraced separatism and defied the central state by targeting for murder its “loyal agents,” the leaders in New Delhi felt justified in using force. Third, the Akali leadership was far from united.

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The splits between Harchand Singh Longowal, P. S. Badal, and Gurucharan Tohra made negotiations nearly impossible. Each leader vied to represent the Sikh community in talks with the center and did not hesitate to sabotage any agreement that had been secured with a rival faction. But even extreme factionalism need not have led to the events described above had other historical elements not provided the insurgents with religious justifications. The Sikh revivalist subculture had been divided over how to coexist with the democratic pluralist state of India. The early splits between Tara Singh and Fateh Singh and, later, between Longowale and Bhindranwale suggest that the revivalists cannot decide whether to include heterodox Sikhs within its fold, to bargain with the government, or to use violence and protest to gain its goals. More often than not, their goals have included religious and ethnic exclusivist demands. Yet the Indian state has, from the very beginning, retained a degree of ambivalence toward the Sikh claim to an exclusive identity based on religion— Sikhism. The Indian state’s reluctance to accept the notion of a Sikh political community has shaped the sentiments of the revivalist elements and ensured that the demand for autonomy is used as a cover to push for an exclusivist agenda, even if that meant violence. One might also argue that the sequence of events might have been different had the green revolution not polarized Punjab and created a growing number of unemployed Sikh youths, had Sikh nationalism drawn clear boundaries between religion and politics, and had the personal rivalry among the Akali leaders not tempted them to sabotage every agreement concluded by their rivals. These factors played an important role in converting political disagreements into sullen resentment and converting that resentment into a violent militancy in Punjab.

T he third co mpact and its failure. Throughout the 1980s, violence in Punjab forestalled all attempts to forge a new formula for peace. The militancy operated by a logic that was not amenable to a settlement. This was evident in the way the Punjab Accord, signed by Rajiv Gandhi and Longowale in August 1985, was shattered. The accord had offered a real chance for peace in Punjab. Its political conditions had replicated the principles that had secured the first two compacts in Punjab. But the militants feared any agreement that marginalized them and invested politicians with power. This is why they murdered Harchand Singh Longowale, the moderate Akali leader who had bravely come forward to sign the agreement on behalf of the Sikhs. Clearly, the security and stability imperatives were not in place for the accord to succeed, nor

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were the political conditions appropriate to institutionalize the accord. The Rajiv Gandhi Congress did not enjoy the kind of natural dominance that had enabled Nehru and Indira Gandhi to accommodate Sikh nationalism in 1956 and 1966. Rajiv Gandhi came under intense criticism from his own party for ceding the state to the Akalis. By the late 1980s, Congress leaders feared losing power to caste-based and ethnically based parties that were rapidly rising to power in most states of India. Had the Congress not used political maneuvers to engineer majorities—that is, retain its dominance at any cost—Punjab and Kashmir might not have descended into violence in the 1980s and 1990s. This argument is now widely accepted by most students of India. It has been reiterated with theoretical sophistication by Atul Kohli and Ayesha Jalal. We might, however, ask why we see no end to strife in Kashmir and the Northeast when the Congress (notorious for its centralizing tendencies) had been replaced in the 1990s by pro-autonomy coalition governments in New Delhi. There was no letup in the violence in Kashmir. Tensions continue to fester, and confrontations between Kashmiri extremists and state security forces daily claim civilian lives. And if decentralized national governments are apt to foster autonomy, as argued by its academic supporters, why did the National Front coalition government not hold elections in Punjab? It was the Congress government of Narasimha Rao that initiated the normalization process in Punjab. And the normalization in Punjab might never have got off the ground had the militants not been marginalized through use of force in the previous years and, even more important, had Akali leaders not forged new alliances within Punjab. The last two conditions were equally if not more important to Punjab’s successful return to democracy. Devolution of power alone is not an answer to ethnic conflict; other elements have to be in place to achieve it. In the teeth of all this opposition, Prime Minister Rao forced assembly elections in Punjab in March 1992. The militant organizations as well as the Akali Dal boycotted the elections, leaving the field free for the Congress Party and its Punjab party head, Beant Singh, to sweep to office. This first election did not provide a popular mandate. Only 22 percent of voters participated.30 The media in India and abroad ridiculed the elections as a farce. Subsequent events, however, showed that this was the right first step toward Punjab’s return to democracy. The popular indifference to the cause of Khalistan was reflected in the large turnout for the municipal elections held six months later. In the village and Panchayat elections that followed—the third tier of government introduced in 1993—voter participation recorded normal levels of over 60 percent.

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How did this come about? By early 1993 the militants had been virtually eliminated, enabling the Akalis to extricate themselves from the coils of the extremists.31 Determined to stage a comeback, Prakash Singh Badal (its leader and the chief architect of past coalition governments in Punjab) pursued a two-track strategy. First, he unified all the splintered segments of the Akali Dal and convinced its leaders that a stable legislative majority for the Akali Dal required a unified Akali front. Second, he rebuilt the tactical alliance with the BJP. For good measure, he also included the third important party in Punjab at that time, the lower caste–dominated Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Though the Akali-BSP alliance proved weak, it underlined the large shifts in the political economy of Punjab. Paul Wallace, a leading scholar of Punjab politics, comments that it was now possible for “formerly antagonistic parts of the social structure” to forge “mutually beneficial alliances.”32 In the 1990 parliamentary elections, the younger generation in the schedule castes had voted for the Akali Dal, forsaking the Congress, then the BSP. To borrow the language of the elite bargain theorists, a new set of bargains had been struck that was to underwrite the new compact for Punjab. These paid spectacular dividends in the February 1997 state assembly elections. The Congress Party was marginalized, and the Akali-BSP alliance swept the polls. The Congress returned victorious in the September 1999 elections and defeated the Badal government, demonstrating that Punjab had become reintegrated within India’s democratic fold. This shows why, contrary to the conclusions reached by Larry Diamond and others, the mere exercise of coercive power by the state against a section of its subjects does not in South Asia, particularly in the Indian context, denote a derogation, much less a failure, of democracy in the country as a whole. The violent-phase politics in Punjab had been preceded and followed by a return to normality, elections, and ethnic peace. Although state coercion had violated people’s human rights and personal freedoms, its main purpose had not been to destroy Sikh ethnic nationalism but to contain it and persuade its leaders to enter into a new bargain with other elected elites in India. The breakdown of democratic procedures in Punjab in the early 1980s had not been preceded by ethnic cleansing, massive population migration, or the kind of chaos and breakdown experienced in many parts of multiethnic Balkan countries or even Sri Lanka, the other electoral democracy in South Asia. The postindependence story of Punjab is hardly one of unmitigated oppression of the minority Sikh community by the central state of India or the Hindu majority that it allegedly represents. The reasons for ethnic conflict are to be found in failures to

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forge and manage compacts that advance democratic integration within the constraints of consolidation imperatives. ■

THE NORTHEAST: NATIONALISM, DEMOCRACY, AND INSTITUTION-BUILDING

Notwithstanding the intensity of conflict witnessed in Punjab during the ten years of insurgency and civil strife that followed the breakdown of the bargains struck by Hindu and Sikh nationalists in the 1960s and 1970s, it can be argued that the area in which the Indian state has experienced the greatest difficulty in reconciling the objectives of territorial consolidation and democratic integration is the Northeast. The Indian state faced a multiplicity of challenges in the region: it had to extend its administration and promote popular participation while also containing ethnonationalist backlashes that were bound to occur. The history of the Northeast is thus a history of attempts to reconcile these objectives using a variety of methods. No other part of the country has seen so much experimentation and innovation in the democratic institutions; yet no other part of the country has witnessed such prolonged and sustained use of force. Even before the British left India, changes had begun to take place in the Northeast that presaged a breakdown of the limited bargain that had existed between the center and the region. The main destabilizing factor was migration to the region of people from other parts of India and Nepal. Three streams of migrations into the region had already begun before independence.33 Tribal Indians migrated from the plains of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh as laborers in tea plantations, Muslim Bengalis were lured by the fertile plains of the Brahmaputra Valley, Hindu Bengalis migrated in search of jobs, and Marwaris and others migrated to profit from trade and commerce. The waves of migration ebbed and flowed with the colonization of the Northeast by the British, then, later in the 1950s, because of the partition. From 1961 to 1970 there were high levels of migration. These accelerated to the maximum just before the 1971 Bangladesh War. The bulk of it flowed from what was then East Pakistan. The Indira Gandhi–Mujib pact of 1972, which followed the war, also failed to stem the flow.34 There was a fourth stream of migration from Nepal, which assumed destabilizing proportions in the 1980s. Economic changes also proved to be destabilizing. Isolated and poorly linked to the economy of the Indian mainland, the economy of the Northeast was far behind that of the rest of India. The extension of central administration and development of infrastructure, roads, trans-

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port, and communication had an unintended adverse effect upon it that provided a strong impetus for alienation. Modern roads opened the way for the inflow of factory-made goods, and these destroyed the market for the products of artisanal industry. The destruction of the artisanal industry created widespread underemployment and impoverishment. Since educational levels were high, partly because of missionary activity, the Northeast found itself with large numbers of young people in search of jobs, but there were very few jobs to be had in the modern sector of the economy. The government tried to meet the demand for employment by recklessly enlarging the bureaucracy and investing large sums on infrastructure. But there were limits to the former, and the latter only deepened the penetration of factory-made goods while facilitating the export of the Northeast’s abundant raw materials to the rest of India. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that every attempt by the state to integrate the economy of the Northeast with the rest of the country was perceived as a threat by the local people. Conditions were ripe for insurgency.35 The challenge to the center’s authority developed in two distinct phases. The first came from the Nagas and Mizos within a few years of independence. The second arose in the Assam Valley itself. It took the form of a sudden upsurge of Ahom ethnonationalism in the late 1970s. The Indian governments have followed three broad strategies in the Northeast: provision of legal and institutional frameworks to accommodate ethnic and tribal aspirations; deployment of force in defense of territorial integrity and against insurgencies; and expansion of party politics and accords to secure grand bargains. Although some of these strategies had been applied in Punjab, institutional innovation went farthest in the Northeast. Compared to Punjab, India faced formidable problems of ethnic diversity and underdevelopment in that region. For that reason alone, the Northeast can be regarded as a distinctive case of democratic integration.

Legal Accommodation and Institutional Framework

On the eve of independence, India faced two immediate problems in the Northeast: conflicting visions of ethnic accommodation envisaged by the communities residing in the Northeast and containing the fallout of the partition.36 At the time, the Nagas and Mizos were divided between demands for autonomy and independence; the Mikirs were content to remain within Assam but with guaranteed autonomy. The Garos wanted the hills to be linked to the plains with a common government, some leaders in Assam wanted a composite Assam, and others favored

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creating a federal state of the hill peoples within Assam. The Nehru government was determined not to allow the “matters to drift,” that is, continue the practice of British policies.37 But peaceful integration meant that the central government had to refrain from overadministering the Northeast. Creation of East Pakistan—what is now Bangladesh—and the border dispute with China complicated the defense of the Northeast. It was necessary, then, to balance the aspirations for autonomy with the imperatives of national and territorial security. With this in mind, the founding leaders of India inserted a special section—the Sixth Schedule in the Indian constitution—for governing the region. According to the Sixth Schedule, the Northeast was broadly divided into three areas with special arrangement for each: the hill areas include the tribal communities of Garo, Khasi, and Jaintia, as well as Nagas and Mikirs who have traditionally controlled their own affairs; the frontier tracts (Sadiya and Balpara and Naga areas) were made an administrative responsibility of the government of Assam; and the tribal areas on the plains of Assam were protected under the provisions extended to all minorities in India. This included representation in the legislature and inalienable rights to tribal lands. The Sixth Schedule also established District Councils with wide-ranging powers over matters of local economy, culture, religion, and customs of the tribal communities.38 Seventy-five percent of the District Council members were elected by the community; the remaining 25 percent of seats were filled by nomination of former tribal chiefs and village headmen. The District Councils exercised substantial powers over finances allocated by the central government.39 The Sixth Schedule created a new administrative map for the Northeast, brought electoral politics to the hill communities of Assam, and investments for the development of its infrastructure. But it also produced an adverse reaction in some tribal nations, such as those of the Nagas and Mizos. They demanded separation from India and took to violence to press their demands. New Delhi had already conceded autonomy to the Nagas under the purview of the District Councils. To bring an end to the violence, the Nehru government conceded the state of Nagaland in 1963. Once that had been ceded, the rest of the tribal communities in Manipur, Meghalaya, and Mizoram could not be denied similar status. By the end of the 1960s, the clamor for autonomy could no longer be accommodated within the existing framework of legal and political institutions. Ceding to these demands meant dividing Assam into several separate federal states of India. By any measure this was a risky undertaking, but two fortuitous developments reinforced the search for a solution. First, in 1971, India had emerged as the dominant military power

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in the region; its confidence had been restored by the spectacular victory over Pakistan. Second, Indira Gandhi had successfully vanquished her rivals in the Congress Party and won a landslide mandate in the 1971 general elections. The circumstances were thus ripe for the second major institutional initiative for the Northeast.

A New Federal Division of the Northeast

In 1971, at Indira Gandhi’s behest, the parliament passed the Northeastern Areas (Reorganization) Bill, which divided Assam into seven separate federal states and created a regional planning authority—the Northeast Council—to coordinate economic development and security for the entire region. The Northeast Council was, however, an advisory agency and was barred from infringing upon the authority of the newly created states. The grant of statehood certainly restored calm and defused many existing and potential insurgencies, but introduction of party competition failed to produce responsible or honest governments in the hill states. Corruption and nepotism became rampant, and local officials and civil servants had acquired a reputation for inefficiency, bribery, and political chicanery. State investment expanded the infrastructure, but it was far from adequate. There were insufficient jobs for the growing number of educated youths in the hill economy. The entry of new “Indian” businesses led to dominance of contractors and jobbers. This was early capitalism with an ugly face. The Indian governments had hoped that planned investment would permit them to skip this stage of capitalist penetration.40 But the combination of economic dependency and autonomous statehood of the hill states was a recipe for office without accountability and power without responsibility. Although impressions of failure and frustrations predominated, there was also a positive side to the new arrangements. Over the decade many new political and ethnic parties and tribal groupings were born to represent their communities. They learned the art of compromise and accommodation, bargaining, and alliance politics. There was greater political awareness within the community and high rates of political participation among all strata, particularly among the new layer of educated middle classes, which began to articulate their vision of politics within the boundaries of India and look beyond their state for an appropriate political model (i.e., Tamil Nadu, Kashmir, based on Article 370). The emergence of this new middle class in the hills and plains of the Northeast would not have occurred without the introduction of democracy and a closer integration of the Northeast into the Indian Union. But even though modernization and party politics

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were the sinews of modern democracy, the government remained constrained by considerations of territorial security and stability.

Integration by Force

Many scholars have argued that the Nagas historically and culturally were never properly a part of India and that their demand for separation was therefore just. This argument is, however, problematic in the Indian context. First, cultural diversity does not provide a legitimate ground for separation, because ethnic communities in the rest of India are also extremely diverse in terms of language, religion, historical background, and origins. If India were to grant self-determination on these bases, it would not be able to claim many parts of the periphery that now make up India. The same would be true of Pakistan. As far as the leaders in each country were concerned, partition was a fact and had to be accepted, at least in principle, despite the anomalies and contradictions it had created in Kashmir. India as well as Pakistan have been driven by the fear that secession in one part would encourage secession in another part and that soon the whole would unravel. Besides, there is no guarantee that the separated part would become democratic. Ethnically, these parts were not homogeneous. They, too, contained hostile communities within them. Rivalries between them had been the cause of violence in the first place. Granting the right to self-determination would not have, then, advanced the cause of democracy; it would have only meant endless divisions and conflicts. There are thus no easy answers to what might advance democracy, self-determination, and integration within a broader democratic framework. This dilemma is compounded when communities are divided from within and subscribe to different definitions of political identity. In Punjab, the Sikhs were divided on the proper relationship to the central state. The Nagas and Mizos in the Northeast were similarly divided on where they belonged. The Naga Hills were allocated three seats in the Assam legislative assembly, and one in the Lok Sabha, under the autonomous District Council arrangement. But from the very beginning, under the leadership of A. Z. Phizo, the Nagas rejected the offer of protection under the Sixth Schedule.41 In 1951, Phizo organized an independent republic of Naga and took to armed insurgency to force India to cede his republic. Another faction of Nagas, calling themselves the Naga National Council (NNC), broke with Phizo and accepted Nehru’s offer of District Council and local autonomy. As soon as this happened, Phizo launched attacks on both the NNC and Indian armed personnel. The NNC asked the Nehru government for protection. In any event, India’s porous

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boundaries in the region had to be protected. Phizo and his followers had slipped across the border into East Pakistan and begun their protracted war for a separate Naga Republic. During the entire decade of the 1950s, the Indian Army carried out armed operations against Phizo and his supporters. By the beginning of the 1960s, the Naga insurgency was brought under control, though the loss of men and materiel on both sides was immense. The first sixty-member state assembly of Nagaland was elected in 1963 with 76 percent popular participation. But Phizo and his followers continued the armed violence. The Indian government sent many peace delegations to Phizo, but he remained adamant and sought to internationalize the dispute. New Delhi alternated between coercion and offers of peace. The most important such offer came in the late 1960s. After several rounds of talks with Phizo, Indira Gandhi offered to jettison the current constitutional provision applying to Nagaland and instead proposed maximum autonomy—along the lines granted under Article 370 to the state of Jammu and Kashmir—to the Nagas in exchange for their consent to remain within the Indian Union. She was willing to amend the constitution to make this possible. But talks collapsed when the government discovered that Phizo was receiving arms and assistance from China.42 The offer had, however, split the militants. One faction surrendered to the Indian Army and returned to Nagaland. They were disillusioned with Phizo’s dictatorial style of leadership and exhausted by the protracted war with India. Peace can be sabotaged by factional infighting within an ethnic community. We have already noted how such factionalism paralyzed Punjab. In 1975, most of the Nagas returned to Nagaland, and Phizo’s support had been reduced to a few loyal followers. Sensing Naga weakness, Indira Gandhi promptly moved to sign what came to be known as the Shillong Accords to end the state of war in Nagaland. But two prominent Naga leaders traveled to Beijing and sought China’s support for an independent Naga Republic. This faction, calling itself the National Socialist Council of Naga (NSCN), had also enlisted support from Burmese Nagas in the hope of establishing a greater Nagaland between Burma and India. In the subsequent years, India and the NSCN signed many agreements to cease their fire, but they collapsed because of the factional splits within the NSCN.

Strategy of Democratic Integration

The manner in which Mizo insurgency was settled offers insights into how coercion operates side by side with electoral contests.43 The purpose

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of state coercion is not to eliminate dissidents but to force them to operate within the framework of the Indian state, where democracy is pursued not by upholding individual rights but by compacts arrived at through negotiations between ethnic communities and between them and the state. The militant NSCN and the moderate NNC functioned side by side, the first devoted to insurgency, the second to electoral participation. After 1974, the Naga majority accepted statehood and its political constraints. The percentage of participation in most elections remained high. Complains about jobs, corruption, and exploitation by “foreign” commercial elements continued, but they have not led to a large-scale new insurgency. A similar passage—from insurgency to democracy—is visible in Mizoram as well.44 The Mizo Accord of 1986 ended the violence. The Mizo National Front (MNF), which had waged a war of liberation in the previous years, agreed to accept the boundaries of India in exchange for maximum autonomy and guaranteed political control of Mizoram by the MNF and its leader, Laldenga. There was one noteworthy exception in the terms of the accord. Despite Laldenga’s objections and threats, New Delhi insisted on retaining its protective role over minority tribes in Mizoram. The government did not withdraw the Sixth Schedule from the new federal state of Mizoram. The MNF and Laldenga won the 1987 elections. In subsequent elections both he and his MNF lost to the Congress. In the 1989 and 1993 elections, the Mizo voters abandoned Laldenga in preference for the mainstream, “national” Congress. This shows that violent ethnic demands can be transformed eventually into constructive participation in a democratic framework, but the path from one to the other is not paved by good intentions, moral considerations, or peaceful negotiations. The strategies of democratic integration that India followed do not meet the test of morality or political ideals, but they did extend democratization to the poorly integrated, underdeveloped, and geographically remote Northeast.

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Autonomy, Not Separation: Ahom Nationalism in Assam

Unlike the Naga and Mizo movements, which were separatist from the start, the Assamese ethnic self-assertion led by the Association of Assam Students Union (AASU) and later Asom Gano Parishad (AGP) aimed at gaining control over the levers of power in Assam. The Assamese alienation from New Delhi has in fact a long and turbulent history. Resentments over illegal migration and language issues had flared up in the late 1960s. The division of Assam into several separate states soon followed, which fueled popular anger. The Assamese feared that

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under the pressure of new migrations and neglect by the central governments the native Ahom culture would be eclipsed and that the Assamese would not find jobs in their native homeland. Most were also convinced that the Congress governments (which had dominated Assam until 1979) had manipulated migrant voters to deny Assamese control over their own economy and politics. Popular resentment erupted in 1978. Protests and strikes turned violent and nearly paralyzed Assam. But in sharp contrast to the Nagas and Mizos, the Assamese (barring a fringe group) did not demand independence. What they demanded was autonomy and control over Assam’s natural resources (timber, oil, gas, and tea); they wanted to stop and deport illegal migrants and redraw the electoral rolls; finally, they wanted recognition of the Assamese language and cultural heritage. In August 1985, Rajiv Gandhi signed an accord that offered Assamese nationalist leaders a compromise formula that set the procedure and a cutoff date for identifying illegal immigrants in the state. In the December 1985 elections, the AGP, which had been formed two months previously, won an impressive victory. Prafulla Mahanta, the head of the AGP, became the chief minister. He promptly declared that the AGP was dedicated to regionalism with a nationalist outlook.45 Having assumed the reins of popular power, the AGP moved on to become a partner in the National Front government of V. P. Singh in New Delhi. Chief Minister Mahanta reneged on almost all the promises he had made to the Assamese people during the months of agitation. The lure of office, the pressure of issues, and the responsibilities of governance had changed angry young men of the AGP into career politicians. The triumph of the Assamese nationalists, however, produced a countermovement among the Bodos and other tribal communities on the plains of Assam. The Bodos demanded federal intervention because they feared that the new AGP government would force their assimilation in the larger Ahom culture and deprive them of their rights under the Sixth Schedule. Beginning in 1990, the Bodo agitation became progressively more violent. In 1993 the Narasimha Rao government renewed the federal promise under the Sixth Schedule and offered the Bodos an Autonomous District Council with new features that would meet their demands. The Bodos agreed and signed an accord in that year.46 This underlines the innovative capacities of the Indian democracy and the experience it has gained in balancing the opposite pulls of ethnic demands against the interests of security and stability over the past fifty years. The accord should have ended the violence had the Assamese nationalist government, then at the helm of affairs in the state, not postponed the elections for the Autonomous District Council

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in pursuit of political expediency. Similarly, the more radical among the Assamese nationalists broke away from the AGP to form the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). In the view of ULFA leaders, the AGP had betrayed the Assamese cause and become collaborators of the Indian imperialists. Initially, the ULFA caught the imagination of the Assamese people. But the reign of terror, arbitrary killings, and extortions in which the ULFA soon engaged produced a negative reaction. By the early 1990s the ULFA fractured into tiny cells organized around self-styled leaders. The central government also organized armed operations against the ULFA, which had taken refuge in neighboring states and sought arms from other insurgent factions in the Northeast. Several observations can be made from this turn of events. First, the strategy of accommodation alone might not be sufficient to ensure and maintain ethnic peace. Compromise settlements (the Assam Accord of 1985 and the Shillong Accord of 1975) have to be balanced against the interests of nation-state consolidation. Second, democratic integration, dissident violence, and state coercion may exist side by side in such a state. Although it is true that the Indira and Rajiv Gandhi governments could have, perhaps, defused the agitation by accommodating Assamese demands earlier than they actually did, their tardiness can be explained by the understandable (though not justifiable, even by the criteria of enlightened self-interest) pressures of “survival and stability” that guided them. We have already noted how Rajiv Gandhi was forced to backtrack on the Punjab Accord because of criticism from within the Congress and his party cohorts in Haryana. The agitation in Assam was, nevertheless, produced by the failure to forge a new bargain with an ethnic nationality “awakened” to its rights under four decades of democratic dispensation. Finally, all violence was not the result of the central state’s denial of ethnic autonomy. Many times it was the result of the cascading effect of countermobilizations in ethnically diverse India. The demand for an autonomous Bodoland was a direct result of such countermobilization against the AGP and its Ahom nationalism.47 From the point of view of the Indian state, the reconciliation of territorial consolidation and democracy in the Northeast was achieved in several stages. Each stage shared one common feature: the ceding of greater autonomy in exchange for progressive integration within the Indian polity, however tardy such concessions might have been in the view of ethnic protagonists. The first stage was marked by creation of the Autonomous District Council, the second by a grant of separate

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statehood, and the third by a further devolution of power within each state to Autonomous Councils to cope with the cascading effects of the second stage. ■

FROM CONGRESS DOMINANCE TO COALITION POLITICS

Whereas the rise of the SC/BC and of ethnic nationalism changed the social and economic landscape, the end of the Congress system and the rise of Hindu nationalism and regionalist forces in its place has altered the balance of political and ideological forces in India. The end of Congress dominance coincided with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the command economies in retreat or in a state of collapse, market forces and market-driven strategies of growth have moved to center stage. These developments have affected India profoundly. As India entered the 1990s, the foundations of its domestic and international policies began to unravel, and new visions and political parties began to stake a claim to its future. How do we assess its impact on democratization? Did the era of coalition governments advance or retard the development of democracy? Did it expand participation, power-sharing, and better management of conflicts among newly empowered ethnic, caste, and regional forces? And how well did it manage all of the above within the economic and security constraints of the post–Cold war era? Many scholars believe that Indian democracy has deteriorated steadily in the past decade. This is because, in their view, there has been a marked rise of ideological and political incoherence. They point to the decline of the pluralist, secular consensus that was represented by the Congress, and the meteoric rise of Hindu nationalism and its more narrow-minded and bigoted elements. They regard the rise of ethnonational parties as a sign that Indian nationalism—the consciousness of India as a single nation-state—is weakening. They view the rise of sectarian parties that appeal to narrow, caste-based loyalties, such as the Dalit-based Bahujan Samaj in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Maharashtra, and the backward, class-based Rashtriya Jana Morcha in Bihar, as new threats to the smooth functioning of democracy; and the rise of intercaste violence in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and some other parts of the country as indicators that the social fabric of the country is coming apart. They point to the short lives of all governments that have followed the last Congress government of Narasimha Rao, the consequent paralysis of policymaking at the center, the collapse of executive power and the invasion of the realm of the executive by the judiciary,

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the rise in insurgent movements, the deterioration of the judicial system, and the progressively greater use of force by the state to solve its immediate problems of governance as harbingers of systemic collapse. These negative perceptions are at least partly a result of unconscious biases that have crept into the study of democracy. From claiming that democracy promotes stability in a country or region, students of the subject have imperceptibly reversed the causal sequence and begun to regard stability as an important prerequisite of democracy. These negative perceptions also stem from a tendency to underestimate the capacity of the Indian political system to correct its own excesses. To cite four important examples: First, the causes of insurgency in Punjab received a great deal of adverse attention from scholars all over the world. But when it petered out in 1992–1993, few of these scholars attempted to study why it had failed. Second, the insurgency in Kashmir has also fluctuated but has received little scholarly attention so far. Third, the sudden rise of caste-based parties in northern India in 1996 made many scholars predict a new and potentially dangerous instability in the political system. But the equally sharp decline in their numbers in the 1998 parliamentary elections has not attracted the attention it deserves, nor has their total incorporation into competitive party politics received the kind of critical commentary (except from a few). Fourth, the rise of Hindu nationalism has been widely studied, but few scholars have tried to find an explanation for the rapid moderation of the BJP’s stand on virtually each and every one of the key issues of Hindu nationalism. This moderation was reflected in the omission of planks that had marked the BJP’s rise to power: the insistence on reclaiming many mosque sites for building of Hindu temples; removal of Article 370 from the constitution, which had protected Jammu and Kashmir’s special status; and imposition of a uniform civil code that would have ended the use of Muslim personal law to adjudicate disputes within that community. In the September 1999 elections the BJP and its allies ran on a platform of economic reform, stability, and greatpower status for India. Many of these changes, for the better, took place or began during the last Congress government, but others are products of the period of coalition rule.48 In fact, it can be argued convincingly that coalition governments have forced political moderation upon all political parties. This can hardly be considered deterioration in the quality of democracy. It also needs to be pointed out that Congress dominance ended only in 1996. The farthest back that one can trace its demise is to Rajiv Gandhi’s defeat in the 1989 elections. A decade is far too short a period

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to complete the transition from a dominant party to a multiparty democracy. If the growth of democracy is to be judged by a multiplication of centers of power within a society—an expansion of civil society—then the end of Congress dominance and the rise of coalition governments has seen several changes that strengthen democracy in India. First, the end of the Congress and the rise of new political parties able and willing to form alternative governments has meant a wider distribution of political power, office, and responsibilities. The Congress Party no longer retains a monopoly on public allegiance, national government, or state assemblies. Its preeminence in these areas has been eroding since the 1967 elections when, for the first time, it lost six state assemblies to opposition parties. From an umbrella party that was regarded as the “reflection of the nation as a whole,” the Congress shrank in the 1990s to the level of two other nationwide groupings, one led by the Janata Party, the other by the BJP. The Janata coalition that ruled during 1996–1998 was an alliance of fourteen parties; the BJP government during 1998–1999 represented a coalition of thirteen political parties; the BJP-led government elected in September 1999 is an alliance of twenty-four state-level and regional parties. In the 1990s, a large number of parties participated in forming the government and gained experience in making national-level policies. In the 1999 national elections, the National Democratic Alliance, led by the BJP, consisted of the AGP in Assam, DMK in Tamil Nadu, Bharatiya Janata Dal (BJD) in Orissa, Akali Dal in Punjab, Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in Andhra, and Janata Dal (JD) (United) in Karnataka and Bihar. Yogendra Yadav, in his seminal study of political changes in 1990, has argued that during the past decade India entered a third electoral system distinguished from the previous two by the “participatory upsurge” among women, schedule castes, schedule tribes, and minorities that had brought them on par with their upper-class counterparts. 49 According to Yadav, this has altered the current political discourse and made it more sensitive to concerns about social justice. The social-base criteria—that is, caste, religion, and ethnic identity—are beginning to be blurred in favor of larger, state-wide groupings. But above all, Yadav points out, state-level politics has captured the center stage. In the 1970s and early 1980s, state assemblies and governments presented a picture of acute instability, frequent collapse, and dismissals while the national government seemed stable. In reality, the stability at the center was frequently bought at the expense of instability and dismissals engineered by the Congress-led governments in New Delhi. The situation was reversed in the 1990s. During the past decade, more

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and more state governments have completed their full terms in office. India had undoubtedly moved toward a genuine federal system in which state-level parties are more likely to determine the outcome of national elections than are the national parties, such as the BJP and the Congress, standing on their own. The development of stable rules of the game and the broadcast of political characters at the state level is a significant step toward grassroots democracy in India. Frequent elections are no doubt costly and unsettling affairs, but their frequency can be hardly a sign of democratic decline, especially since they are fair and largely peaceful. Both the losers and winners in the elections have accepted the outcome without question and moved forward to form governments at the center. Second, the prime minister’s office has lost the imperial aura and power of the Indira and Rajiv Gandhi days. The post-1990 prime minister of India is truly the first among several equally powerful political leaders within the ruling coalition, cabinet, and parliament. Similarly, the average member of parliament is less sophisticated and less well educated but also closer in background, beliefs, and perceptions to constituents than was the more cosmopolitan and educated parliamentarian in the early decades after independence. A public opinion survey by India Today found at the end of the Rao government and amid the Havala scandal that the average voter considered corruption to be a serious problem, but that did not deter some 95 percent of voters from approving of the representative government. Most would choose an effective representative who may be corrupt but delivers on his or her promises to an honest leader who is unable to bring schools, clinics, roads, and drinking water to the people.50 As popular participation in the democratic process has increased, the gap between the skills needed to win elections and those needed to guide national policy has widened. But this drawback has to be weighed against the advantages of greater popular participation in decisionmaking. A higher proportion of the poor in India cast their votes than the poor in the United States, which underlines the assimilative capacity of Indian democracy. The September 1999 elections provided yet another indication of increasing maturity of voter perceptions regarding the prime minister’s office. The issue of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin was believed to be a critical element in settling the contest between the Congress and the BJP. As it turned out, it was not a central consideration for a majority of the voters. Sonia Gandhi won in both constituencies, and opinion surveys exposed the gap between the media perception of how the public would vote and how the public actually voted on the foreign-origin issue. 51 The BJP had tried to appeal to the patriotic sentiments of the

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public to deny the vote to Sonia Gandhi and the Congress, but for the most part a substantial number of Indian voters ignored the BJP’s arguments. Congress’s defeat in the 1999 elections had many reasons; chief among them was the richly deserved reputation for opportunism and lack of a coherent strategy. The Congress was caught between going it alone and forging multiparty arrangements in response to the decisive regionalization of Indian politics. The vacuum of leadership turned out to be the single most important reason for its defeat in the 1999 elections. Third, the success of a politician is frequently determined by his/her ability to work the system and build ever-widening networks among the local to the upper echelons of bureaucracy and government. These machine politicians have nurtured the powerful caste alliances we have already discussed. Others, such as the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and the National Congress Party of Sharad Pawar, are important splinter groups (both are from the Congress Party) that have emerged as the dominant voice in their respective states. The deeper penetration of the party system and electoral politics is evident from the proliferation of hundreds of parties across India; some among these are confined to a state, others straddle two or three states, and a third kind represent specific constituencies such as the Dalits (the untouchables). Their alliance decisions depend largely on the strength of their immediate opposition in the region and constituency and their connections with the national parties. Fourth, policymaking under coalition governments has required decision by consensus. This certainly makes decisionmaking slower and more cumbersome, but it also makes decisions more representative of the will of the nation. For parties and leaders who do not belong to the Congress culture, who have never been exposed to the need to debate national questions, partaking in decisionmaking has been an immensely valuable learning process. Its importance to the future of Indian democracy can hardly be overstressed. Coalitions are thus creating a wider pool of knowledge and experience about policies among a broader range of parties and leaders. To cite one important example: ever since the United Front government came to power in 1996, the central government has been using the National Development Council (NDC) to take hard decisions affecting the future of the country. The NDC, which consisted of the prime minister and all the chief ministers of the states, was provided for in the constitution but was almost never called in the heyday of the Congress when it ruled at the center and in all the states. Instead, the functions that were to have been carried out by the NDC were routinely performed by the Congress Working Committee. Despite the Congress’s loss of strength after

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1967, and the fact that the Congress never again controlled all the state governments (except for a brief period after 1972), neither Indira Gandhi nor Rajiv Gandhi showed any enthusiasm for calling the NDC; its meetings were rare, its proceedings desultory. The NDC took on a new role—that of debating choices before the nation and the best way of making them, as well as coordinating state policies to achieve the agreed goals during the prime ministership of V. P. Singh (1989–1990).52 Narasimha Rao continued the practice of calling it several times a year but once again diminished its decisionmaking role. For many of the constituents of the United Front–controlled state governments, too, the NDC came fully into its own only after the eclipse of the Congress in 1996. It therefore became the forum where differences between state and national perspectives were regularly ironed out. The BJP-led coalition, despite its very different political orientation, has continued the practice. A singular example of using the NDC to shape and coordinate difficult national policies is the responsibility that Prime Minister Vajpayee gave to it to find a way of reducing the state governments’ fiscal deficit and making them solvent once more. 53 It was not too long ago that critics of Indian democracy condemned the high-handed and arbitrary tendencies of the Congress governments in the 1980s. The style of governance epitomized by the use of the NDC could not be further away from it. Fifth, the absence of a single dominant party has reinforced the reference to constitutional checks and balances. This is evident in the severe circumscription of the central government’s right to use Article 365 to dismiss elected state governments by judicial decisions and pronouncements.54 During the Indira Gandhi years, this article was used more than eighty times to dismiss elected non-Congress officials and occasionally rebellious Congress state governments. In the past ten years, the states have succeeded not only in wresting control back from the central government but also in forcing a reversal of ordinances to dismiss state governments. In the 1993 case S. R. Bommai v. The Union of India, the Supreme Court of India laid down the conditions under which the use of this dismissal power was justified and those under which it was not. Since then, this court judgment has become a touchstone for the president of India in deciding whether to accept the cabinet’s advice to dismiss a state government or to return it for reconsideration. The Gujral government failed to dismiss the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh in 1997, and the Vajpayee government failed to dismiss the government of Rabri Devi in Bihar twice in 1998 and 1999. In the first and second instances, President K. R. Narayanan returned the proposal for reconsideration, citing insufficient grounds for dismissal.

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In the third instance, he approved the ordinance, but the BJP government failed to get the bill ratified by the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of parliament) and had to allow it to lapse. It is thus not coincidental that regionalization of political power weakened separatist demands in the 1990s, which saw no new demands for secession from India, as well as the gradual erosion of old ones, as in Punjab. Nor have there been challenges to the idea that the central government must have transcending power and authority over federal units in order to protect India’s security, economy, and political integrity. Sixth, ethnic separatism is certainly on the wane, although the incidence of caste and Hindu-Muslim violence fluctuate in response to shifts in the local balance of social power. For instance, in the coastal Ramanathapuram District in southern Tamil Nadu, eleven persons were killed and several injured in October 1998. Six of the dead were Dalits; the five others belonged to the Thevar community, a backward caste group. All the victims were from among the economically weaker sections. Violence involving the Thevars and Dalits had rocked the same district for at least a half-decade. The main cause was the struggle for power between the leaders of the two communities and the inability of the state-level party (the AIADMK, with whom they are closely associated) to act as a mediator and defuse conflict. According to the publication Hindu, the AIADMK and its supreme leader, Jayalalitha Jayram, were “caught up in litigation” on corruption charges and therefore “rendered inactive.” 55 Communal violence (i.e., HinduMuslim violence) peaked in 1989 and again in 1992–1993. Much of the violence related to the dispute over Babri-Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi in Ayodhya and its spillover effect in India’s other states, Maharashtra and particularly Mumbai. We have already noted how the BJP sought to activate the Hindu-Muslim cleavage to unseat the National Front government of V. P. Singh and make a bid for national power. That strategy expanded the BJP’s following, although it failed to win the 1990 elections. In 1992–1993, it again reactivated the mosque issue, mobilizing its followers to converge in Ayodhya and destroy the Babri Mosque. That event led to widespread rioting across many cities in India. Throughout the 1990s, riots occurred in places where a pro-Hindutva party had been in control (as in the case of Shiva Sena in Mumbai) or where Hindutva forces were making a bid for power (as in the 1997 riots in the city of Coimbatoor). In 1988 the number of victims of communal riots was 259. From then it rose sharply to 802 in 1989, 1,241 in 1990, 1,972 in 1992, and 960 in 1993.56 It is not a coincidence, then, that in 1998–1999 the number of victims in riots declined.57 In 1998, the BJP had assumed the reins of power and shelved

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its Hindutva agenda. Clearly, violence is part of the process of negotiation and bargain, even where public participation is routine and governments are based on sharing power. When the Congress system had worked well, as in the 1950s and 1960s, ethnic and caste violence was defused through a series of local and regional accommodations and compacts under Congress dominance. Rivalry among ethnic and caste groups occurred within its umbrellalike structure. However, once alternative parties began successfully to compete with the Congress for legislative majorities, they became the alternative port of call for ambitious ethnic and caste leaders. However, in the 1990s, even the national parties were reduced to having only a regional base (for instance, the BJP is popular in western India and in the northern Hindi belt states). With the exception of Karnataka, the Janata and its affiliates are also concentrated in only three states— Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Orissa—and the Congress has been virtually wiped out in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu. Under these circumstances, coalitions between national parties—like the Congress, Janata Dal, and the BJP and ethnonational state parties— have become not just necessary but normal and routine. Ethnic peace has been an unforeseen byproduct of the institutionalization of powersharing between national and ethnonational parties. This is because the Indian democracy is more open to regional demands and to the regionally powerful, ethnically based political parties. Seventh, the civil society is far more vibrant today then ever. There are a huge number of NGOs catering to every cause and need among India’s vast problems. 58 The voluntary organizations have received a boost from international NGOs, which are increasingly spearheading the post–Cold War agenda of justice and human rights. Similarly, there is a significant growth of public-interest litigation in Indian courts; several cases have been filed on issues like the environment, corruption, and private land developments that have displaced the poor. The courts have responded with alacrity and dispatch. In 1996 the supreme court took over the administration of cases of corruption and money laundering registered against ten important political leaders from the three major political parties—the Congress, the BJP, and the Janata Dal. In the same year it imposed a ban on child labor and enforced the closure of brick kilns and other polluting industries around Delhi and in Agra on environmental grounds. In a judgment delivered in May 1999, the Delhi High Court banned the registration of cars that did not meet the Euro 2000 emission standards and gave those that did not meet the Euro 2002 standards a time limit within which to do so. Although the scales of justice still weigh heavily and overwhelmingly in

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favor of the entrenched elites and their control of economic and political power, growth of NGOs and public-interest litigation corresponds with the expansion in the Indian middle classes and their growing influence over governmental priorities. The vibrant NGO movement and the growing importance of social-justice issues in the political discourse suggest that the Indian democracy is able to create new avenues of resistance against the power of the state. In 1997, under a no-nonsense chief election commissioner, M. S. Gill, the Election Commission of India (EC) tightened the interpretation of the Representation of the People Act to eliminate persons who had been convicted of various crimes but were out of jail pending the hearing of their appeals. His predecessors had taken the line of least resistance and interpreted “conviction” as the failure of all appeals. The slowness of the Indian judicial system had ensured that even persons convicted of murder remained eligible for and did succeed in getting elected. According to an assessment by G.V.G. Krishnamurthy, another of the election commissioners, if this provision was strictly enforced, about 7 percent of the Eleventh Lok Sabha, the lower house of the parliament, would become ineligible to stand for any future election. The EC has also raised the expenditure limits for candidates and framed rules for allocating free airtime on state-run television to recognized political parties. This may reduce election costs and improve the reach of the candidates. The EC was even stricter in making a wide variety of activities subject to the new “code of conduct” it laid out during the September 1999 elections. Indeed, political parties complained repeatedly that the EC was unreasonably strict in imposing its code of conduct and that its interpretations of incidents held to be egregious violations of that code were interfering with the normal functions of government. During the 1999 elections the EC won the right to impose the code of conduct not from the date of the notification of elections but from the day of the announcement of the election schedule. It also confronted several political parties—the BJP, as well as the TDP in Andhra—on the practice of transferring high-level civil servants and initiating welfare schemes to influence elections.59 Although the cumulative weight of these measures still falls short of producing legislation on how India should finances its elections, the EC has helped to clean up the process and make it more accountable to its neutral authority. Eighth, and last, critics of coalition governments have argued that the end to Congress dominance has led to a vacuum of ideology and an incoherence in politics and that the ascent of the BJP and Sangh Parivar (BJP affiliates) on the one hand and of narrow-based, regionalist

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forces on the other has endangered Indian democracy. To begin with, the Congress has long ceased to be the focus of a coherent ideology or an issue-based politics. Its progressive thrust ran out of steam in the mid-1970s, and since then its organizational discipline has steadily deteriorated. The Congress is today nothing more than a congery of competing caucuses held together by the need to fight elections. The end of Congress dominance is not, therefore, a loss for India’s democracy. One may characterize current Indian politics as an arena of three competing visions represented by three loosely organized groupings. Although the previous four decades witnessed many oscillations, the Congress vision (at its best) might be described as a secular, pluralistic, moderately progressive, and welfare-oriented vision. The Congress subscribed to the idea of national integration through the centralization of decisionmaking and power. This did not rule out accommodation and compacts. On the contrary, the Congress Party was far more federated in its articulation than critics would have us believe. But it favored, nevertheless, a strong center with subordinated federal states. The Hindu nationalist vision, projected by the BJP and its affiliates, also advocates integration through centralization, but it has already determined who will occupy the center, that is, the Hindu majority, those who believe Indian nationhood cannot be separated from India’s religiocultural Hindu roots. This notion of majoritarianism is radically different from the Congress’s ideology. For the Congress, national consolidation had never meant the cultural dominance of the Hindu majority. Rather, it meant a pluralistic and culturally differentiated India in which groups retained their social and cultural identities and entered into local and regional accommodations in their collective capacities. The state, by virtue of its eminence, played the role of mediator and guarantor. The third vision is a “regionalist” one that shares the pluralism of the Congress but explicitly disavows both the need for and desirability of having a strong center. In the regionalist perspective, the ideal path to national integration is through the decentralization of power. It wants many of the powers exercised by the central government to be devolved explicitly to state governments and even farther down from the state to elected village councils—the Panchayati Raj. But far from threatening Indian democracy, the existence of these alternative visions has strengthened it. For the remorseless pressure of the simple majority voting system, which forces all parties to woo the center of the political spectrum—by definition, moderate—has forced a gradual convergence of visions upon the Congress, the BJP, and the secular middle-left. It has, for instance, relentlessly diluted both the BJP’s and the Congress’s commitments to a strong center and to a monolithic India. One example is the convergence of opinion on the

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need for devolution and decentralization of political power. This is exemplified by the growing consensus in favor of strong Panchayati Raj institutions. Begun in Karnataka by R. K. Hegde, the chief minister of the state in the mid-1980s, the Congress was quick to recognize the political importance of devolving genuine power to the village councils; it actually stole the program from the Janata Dal and passed a central act of parliament in 1989, making such devolution compulsory (though it did not come to fruition until 1992). In the same way, in 1999, Vajpayee’s government devolved a large variety of powers, including the supervision of rural cooperative banks and the implementation of centrally funded rural development programs, to the village councils. A second example is the convergence of views on the need for job and educational reservations for the schedule and backward classes. Pushed hard by V. P. Singh in 1990, this has not remained a preserve of the Janata Dal but has become part of the political platform of the Congress and the BJP. These parties differ from the caste-based parties on how far they will push the principle of reservation, because both woo and therefore are reluctant to alienate the urban middle-class and upper-caste voters. They have, nevertheless, recognized the immense electoral potential of the SC/ST vote. A third example is the BJP government’s quiet abandonment of the Hindutva program, which had won it millions of adherents in the early 1990s. The BJP has for a long time advocated the notion of one nation, one culture, and one law for India. To that end it has pressed for removal of Article 370 for the state of Jammu and Kashmir (because that bars non-Kashmiris from migrating or buying land and therefore altering the demographics in that state); a uniform civil code (which would try all Muslim citizens under secular courts); reconstructing Hindu temples on many mosque sites across the country but particularly in Ayodhya, Dwarka, and Mathura; and support for Hindi as principle medium of instruction and official discourse. In addition, they favored a nationalist stand on the economy and opposed liberalization and free access to the Indian markets by international capital and firms. This advocacy was accompanied by religious Rath Yatras (chariot processions), relentless agitations over temples, and mobilization of Hindu masses in protest rallies over Kashmir and economic reform. In fact, the BJP’s rise to national power was paved by turmoil, riots, and Hindu-Muslim violence. But the BJP as a government has acted differently from the BJP as a movement. The former has been singularly pragmatic although its affiliates, and the organizations in the “Saffron Brotherhood” (common name for the BJP family of organizations), have pushed hard to fulfill the cultural agenda. The Saffron Brotherhood vehemently opposed the

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economic liberalization policies of its own government and launched agitations and attacks on Christian churches and missions in February– March 1999 in order to force the BJP leadership to adhere more closely to the party’s declared manifesto. In contrast, the Vajpayee government refrained from raising the questions of Article 370, the uniform civil code, and the Ayodhya and Mathura temples. It pressed forward with better relations with Pakistan and amicable ties to the West, particularly the United States. In the view of many, the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992 was a turning point for the BJP. It opened up an internal debate between the moderate and the hardcore ideologues in the party. The national revulsion to that act of wanton destruction, the retaliatory bomb attacks by some pro-Islamic, pro-Pakistani elements in Mumbai, followed by pogroms against poor Muslims (carried out in full complicity with Shiva Sena, a regional clone of the RSS) in that city widened the gap between the Saffron Brotherhood and the BJP moderates. It also alerted the middle classes of the dangers the BJP’s extremists posed to their safety and advancement. The BJP has thus failed to push for its Hindu Rashtra agenda. As a party in power in the states—Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh—and at the center, the BJP has been pragmatic and remarkably accommodating of India’s diverse cultural and religious communities. Clearly neither vision—the one seeking to invert the pyramid of caste power, the other anxious to relegate India’s minorities to second-class status—had succeeded in destroying the operational logic underlying India’s democracy, that is, integration through accommodations and political bargaining. We might ask, however, how the new actors at the center—avowedly Hindu rather than secular nationalists—will balance the imperatives of security, development, and participation. A brief look at three BJP government initiatives provides some clues to the answer: (1) India’s entry into the ranks of nuclear weapons state; (2) the momentum on reforms evident in the 1999 budget; and (3) the Cauvery River waters settlement. There is no agreement among India observers whether the 11 and 13 May bomb tests were a response to any immediate threat to national security or whether the BJP government detonated the bombs to silence critics at home. The Vajpayee government argued that rapid advances in China’s nuclear capabilities and its clandestine help to the Pakistani nuclear and missile program in the previous decade had made India increasingly vulnerable to its enemies. The previous governments had, in its view, ignored the danger. The critics point to the serious fissures within the BJP-led coalition, as well as the persistent threat by its AIADMK partner that it would withdraw

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support, as the main cause for the BJP’s decision to carry out the tests. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that both reasons had persuaded Vajpayee to depart from India’s traditional posture. The tests were very popular, and although subsequent fallout dampened public enthusiasm, on the whole the BJP managed to ride out the sanctions and condemnations from the international community. It was able to do so through a spirited defense of its policy after the initial diplomatic fumbling and by the remarkable persistence in negotiations with the United States. Its February 1999 budget was universally praised as a responsible document that maintained not only a momentum in reforms but made a serious effort, the first since the early years of the Narasimha Rao government, to cut the mounting fiscal deficit and thereby gradually reduce the ratio of the public debt to the GDP over a period of time. Much of the deficit was caused by the government’s mounting subsidy bill. Subsidies accounted for a substantial portion of government expenditures. Indeed, a rigorous calculation of the explicit and implicit subsidies in the economy by the National Institute for Public Finance and Policy showed that in 1994–1995 they amounted to no less than 14.7 percent of GDP. Commitment to reforms suggests that these should be eliminated or cut down, but cuts are politically risky, because a large number of powerful lobbies of farmers, small-scale industries, and Schedule Castes/Backward Classes regard them as the quid pro quo for continued political support. Despite opposition from its ideological hardcore, the BJP has welcomed foreign private investment and set up a fast track for processing applications. Similarly, the success in securing the interstate dispute over distribution of the Cauvery River waters in 1998 shows that the BJP had accepted the logic of autonomy, consultations, and compromise notwithstanding its formal commitment to a strong Hindu nation. This realization has been reinforced by its poor performance in Uttar Pradesh (an important state in the calculus of ruling majorities) during the 1999 elections. The Congress and the Samajwadi Party (SP, of Mulayam Singh Yadav) gained at the BJP’s expense because of its failure to deliver on the promise to grant a separate statehood to the hill regions of Uttar Pradesh. Despite government instability, what we saw during the 1990s was a strengthening of India’s most fundamental democratic institutions—its electoral system, its party system, and the level of participation in the democratic process. Short-lived governments at the center have not prevented the emergence of new and imaginative responses to the challenge of globalization and the construction of a post–Cold War international order. The moderation of the extremes—advocated by the proponents of

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Hindutva, reservations, and regionalism—was as important as the slow pace of change in explaining the nature of Indian democratization. Both reflected the reluctance to break previous compacts with groups that had gained influence through the exercise of the ballot. These trends strengthened with the September 1999 election results. It was the first time since the beginning of the decade that the same party was returned to power by a popular vote. The BJP had won 181 seats, one more than it had won in the previous election. The NDA alliance garnered a comfortable majority, winning close to 295 seats in the parliament, which requires 272 votes to withstand a motion of nonconfidence. This meant that the new government was more an NDA government than a BJP government and that the BJP would have to trim its ideological sails to keep its partners rowing in line. The policy statements of the BJP party chief, Vajpayee—that the BJP will deregulate and liberalize the insurance sector, make tough decisions to strengthen India’s fiscal and financial integration with world markets (which means cutting subsidies that have garnered votes for a number of statelevel parties), resume the Lahore diplomacy to build amicable ties with Pakistan, and negotiate a deal on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)—suggest that the NDA government will forge ahead with its reformist promises and relegate its Hindutva agenda to the background. It is also noteworthy that the alliance members ran on the consensus manifesto and scored impressive victories. The NDA coalition is a step toward greater stability compared to the previous coalition governments, partly because all the parties have realized that the voters will punish their opportunistic switches that destabilize popular governments at the center. The poor performance of the Congress under Sonia Gandhi’s leadership suggests that unless the Congress can pull together its factions, forge a clearly articulated platform, and show itself to be a responsible party committed to governance and stability, then the voters will continue to look elsewhere for leaders. The decimation of the Janata—the third force—in the elections also suggests a shift toward a loose two-party system, each with a cluster of regional and state-level parties attached to it. The main question is whether these attachments will remain stable or whether regional parties will continue to switch sides to gain political advantage, a ministerial portfolio, or better positioning in the next elections. Should they continue this practice, coalition rule will remain unstable and of short duration. That does not, however, diminish the importance of the dramatic changes since the demise of the single-party dominance of the Congress: emergence of a markedly stable two- or three-party system at the state level, a voting public that seeks to discipline opportunism and irresponsible behavior,

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and strengthening of new democratic forces such as the NGO, the EC, and public-interest litigation. In the real world of Indian democracy, combining imperatives of consolidation with democratization has meant becoming inclusive through bargains to which both the state and its parts (defined by ethnic, caste, and religious identities) had consented. Such bargains were subsequently legitimized by popular elections. Also, the presence of poverty, instability, corruption, and violence did not prevent gradual democratization. Governments were capable of innovative solutions—regional formulas, ethnic compacts, constitutional provisions, and construction of creative structures—to recapture the electoral rhythms. These solutions were not adequate or effective in many instances or were overtaken by economic and political developments over the passage of time. They had been offered, nevertheless, as solutions within the framework of electoral democracy and were sustained by it. Finally, failure of democracy in one part of the country—Kashmir, Punjab, or Northeast (about 2 percent of the total population)—on one issue or at a particular moment did not mean failure of the democratic transformation as a whole. In fact, it was remarkable that such a vast, diverse, and poor country stayed largely secular, federal, and democratic while experimenting with new forms of politics and government, all the while meeting—albeit slowly— the demands of the post–Cold War political economy. India’s democracy is well established and stable; the rules by which governments are formed and dissolved are also in place; as is the broad consensus on an incremental, gradualist pace of democratic development. ■

NOTES

1. For the evolution and dilemmas of the government’s preferential policies, see Ghanashyam Shah, “Strategies of Social Engineering: Reservation and Mobility of Backward Communities of Gujrat,” in Ramashray Roy and Richard Sisson, Diversity and Dominance in Indian Politics, Vol. 2 (New Delhi: Sage Publishers, 1990), p. 120; and A. Ramaiah, “Identifying Other Backward Classes,” Economic and Political Weekly, 6 June 1992, p. 1203. 2. Government of India, “Report of the Backward Classes Commission,” Vol. 1, pt. 1 (1980), p. 56. 3. T. Vijayendra and P. Pradeep, “Reservation Policy for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes: An Overview,” in Public Enterprises Center for Continuing Education, Implementation of Reservation Policy for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (New Delhi: Public Enterprises Center, 1982), p. 602. 4. Barbara R. Joshi, Untouchable! Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement (London: Zed Books, 1986), p. 14. 5. Sudipta Kaviraj, ed., Politics In India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 192.

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6. Ibid. 7. V. M. Rao, “Economic Reforms and the Poor,” Economic and Political Weekly, 18 July 1998, p. 1950. 8. G.C.D. Parthasrathy, Rural Poverty and Economic Reforms: A Case Study of Andhra Pradesh, cited in Rao, ibid. 9. S. D. Sawant and C. V. Achutan, “Agricultural Growth Across Crops and Regions: Emerging Trends and Patterns,” Economic and Political Weekly, 25 March 1995. 10. Cited in Rao, “Economic Reforms and the Poor,” p. 1951. 11. Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 49–55. 12. C. Chandramohan, “Political Economy of Agrarian Conflicts in India,” Economic and Political Weekly, 10 October 1998, p. 2649. 13. For backward-caste politics, see Paul Brass, The Politics of India Since Independence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 253–257. 14. See Venkatesh Ramakrishnan, “A History of Massacres,” Frontline 16(5) (27 February–12 March 1999). This same issue has several articles about the caste atrocities and politics in Bihar and its implications for government in New Delhi. 15. Ibid. 16. C. Chandramohan, “Political Economy,” p. 2649. 17. See R. A. Schermerhorn, Comparative Ethnic Relations: A Framework for Theory and Research (New York: Random House, 1970); Paul Brass writes that while the “peace in Punjab after 1991 was gained by brutal elimination of militants, the militants were no less brutal in their conduct. Many so-called militant groups are outright criminal gangs . . . others have engaged in deliberate massacres and other killings of civilians particularly Hindus, for the sole purpose of demonstrating their power and the inability of the police to prevent them . . . or . . . frightening the Hindu population in general in order to encourage their flight from Punjab.” Brass, Politics of India, p. 200. 18. For a comprehensive discussion of security and domestic politics, see Maya Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), chap. 6. 19. “Ethnic Nationalism in Northeast India: Overview of Its Legacy,” in Girin Phukon, Politics of Regionalism in Northeast India (New Delhi: Spectrum Publications, 1996), pp. 3–9. Also see B. B. Kumar, “Frontiers During the British Days,” in Kumar, Reorganization of Northeast India: Facts and Documents (New Delhi: Omsons Publications, 1996), pp. 9–15. 20. For a socioeconomic interpretation of the Punjab crisis and Sikh militancy, see Paul Brass, “Socio-economic Aspects of the Punjab Crisis,” in S.W.R. de A. Samarsinghe and Reed Coughlan, eds., Economic Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), pp. 224–239; and Robin Jeffrey, The Perils of Prosperity: India’s Dilemma in Punjab (Bedford Park, South Africa: Flinders University, 1985). 21. J. B. Bhattacharjee, “Socio-Economic Roots of Regionalism in Northeast India,” in B. Pakem, ed., Regionalism in India: With Special Reference to Northeast India New Delhi (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publishers, 1993), pp. 192–193.

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22. For a short list of useful sources on Sikh history, see Rajiv Kapur, Sikh Separatism: The Politics of Faith (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986); Richard Fox, Lions of Punjab: Culture in the Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); J. S. Grewal, From Guru Nanak to Maharaja Ranjit Singh: Essays in Sikh History (Amritsar, India: Guru Nanak Dev University, 1972); Kenneth Jones, “Communalism in Punjab: The Arya Samaj Contribution,” Journal of Asian Studies 26 (1968); and K. L. Tuteja, Sikh Politics, 1920–1940 (Kurukshetra, Punjab, India: Vishal Publications, 1984). For a short but succinct history of Sikh identity formation, see M. S. Dhami, “Communalism in Punjab: A Socio-Historical Analysis,” Punjab Journal of Politics 9 (1985): 1–30. 23. Harbans Singh, The Heritage of the Sikhs (New Delhi: Manohar, 1985), p. 302. 24. Nehru thought the idea of a Punjab Suba was “inviting disaster . . . for consequences similar to the earlier partition would follow . . . there is no doubt that it has grown up (the demand for Suba) not as a linguistic issue but as a communal issue.” Quoted from the Lok Sabha Debates by B. R. Nayar, Minority Politics in Punjab (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 52, n. 18. 25. As a chief minister, Partap Singh Kairon recruited Sikhs, mostly former Akali Dal leaders, to his cabinet and government, initiated a large number of agricultural projects that won him support of the Jat peasantry, and isolated the Tara Singh faction in the Akali Dal, which had since 1943 agitated (though sporadically) for a separate Sikhistan. With its support rapidly waning in the face of Kairon’s popularity, the Akali Dal muted its strident calls and eventually accepted the “regional formula” offered by the States Reorganization Commission. Nehru tolerated the scandals and corruption attached to Kairon as long as Kairon was able to check the recalcitrant and disaffected elements in the Sikh community. On this, see Joyce Pettigrew, “A Description of the Discrepancy Between Sikh Political Ideals and Sikh Political Practice,” in Myron Arnoff, ed., Ideology and Interest: The Dialectics of Politics, Political Anthropology Yearbook 1 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1980), pp. 151–192. 26. For details on these conditions, see Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism, chap. 1. 27. The chronological construction and analysis in this section draws on the voluminous work available on electoral politics in Punjab, center-state relations, and the course of Akali politics from 1950 to 1989. Some of the important ones are Paul Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 277–336; P. S. Varma, “Akali Dal: History, Electoral Performance, and Leadership Profile,” in Gopal Singh, ed., Punjab Today (New Delhi: Intellectual Publishing House, 1987), pp. 257–284; and Robin Jeffrey, What’s Happening to India? (London: Macmillan, 1986). 28. For firsthand interviews with Bhindranwale and his followers, see Cynthia Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 50–107; for analysis of events that led up to Bluestar, see Mark Tully and Satish Jacob, Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi’s Last Battle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985). 29. See interviews of Bhindranwale by Kuldip Nayar and Khushwant Singh in their Tragedy of Punjab (New Delhi: Vision Books, 1984), p. 70.

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30. This was down from more than 60 percent in past elections. Rural participation was even lower (15 percent). 31. India Today, 15 October 1992. 32. Paul Wallace, “General Elections, 1996: Regional Parties Dominant in Punjab and Haryana,” Economic and Political Weekly, 15 November 1997, p. 2965. 33. Atul Goswami and Jayanta Gogoi, “Migration and Demographic Transformation of Assam: 1901–1971,” in B. L. Abbi, ed., Northeast Region: Problems and Prospects of Development (Chandigarh, India: Center for Research in Rural and Industrial Development, 1984), pp. 60–80. 34. Ibid., pp. 88–96. 35. The Northeast accounts for perhaps the largest share in revenues received by any state government in India. The state is the largest employee in all the hill states (the ratio is 1:17 in Nagaland, 1:20 in Mizoram, 1:29 in Tripura, and 1:37 in Arunachal Pradesh, in contrast to 1:113 in the rest of India). See B. G. Verghese, India’s Northeast Resurgent (New Delhi: Konarak Publishers, 1996), p. 340. 36. The Northeast records 209 schedule tribes. Lipi Ghosh provides a profile of ethnic, tribal, and religious identity politics in the Northeast. See “Ethnicity, Religion, and Identity Question: A Northeast Indian Profile,” in Girin Phukon and N. L. Datta, eds., Politics of Identity and Nation Building in Northeast India (New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1997), pp. 83–97. 37. Verghese, India’s Northeast Resurgent, p. 223. 38. The District Council exercised administrative and legal control of land, customary law and adjudication, inheritance and property, use of water resources, and agricultural practices. These were closely tied to the tribal “way of life.” 39. B. B. Kumar, “The Sixth Schedule and District Level Autonomy,” in Reorganization of Northeast: Facts and Documents (New Delhi: Omsons Publications, 1996), pp. 16–21. 40. For a brief sketch of economic conditions, see Abbi, Northeast Region, pp. 94–122. 41. For the evolution of the Naga ethnic movement, see Sunil Acharya, “Insurgency in Nagaland,” in P. S. Datta, ed., The North-East and the Indian State: Paradoxes and a Periphery (New Delhi: Vikas, 1993), pp. 223–230; and C. L. Imchen, “Naga Politics: Regionalism or Non-state Nation,” in Pakem, Regionalism in India, pp. 103–122. 42. The Indian government feared that China was aiding and abetting the Naga insurgents. In June 1968, an “army patrol captured Chinese weapons and documents providing irrefutable proof of . . . connections which the underground had kept denying.” Verghese, India’s Northeast Resurgent, p. 93. 43. R. N. Prasad, ed., Autonomy Movement in Mizoram (New Delhi: Vikas, 1994), pp. 170–182. 44. For a brief sketch, see C. Nunthara, “The Maintenance of Ethnic Boundary in Mizoram: A Case Study of Identity Politics,” in Pakem, Regionalism in India, pp. 157–167; and B. G. Verghese, “Zoram’s Blue Mountains,” in Verghese, India’s Northeast Resurgent, pp. 135–165. 45. India Today, 15 January 1986, p. 10. 46. The Bodo Council controls 27,000 villages and twenty-five tea gardens. Bodo activists were released from jail as a part of the agreement; in return, 2,000 militants surrendered their arms. Sunday (Bombay), 18 July 1993, p. 56.

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47. Anuradha Dutta, “Bodo Movement in Assam,” in Phukon and Dutta, Politics of Identity, pp. 179–189. 48. “To Appease an Ally,” Frontline, 13–26 February 1999. 49. Yogendra Yadav, “The Third Electoral System,” Seminar 480: Cruel Choices (August 1999), pp. 14–20. 50. Pradeep K. Chibber, Subhash Misra, and Richard Sisson, “Order and the Indian Electorate: For Whom Does Shiva Dance?” Asian Survey 32(7) (July 1992): 607. 51. Hindu, 8 October 1999. 52. Prem Shankar Jha, In the Eye of the Cyclone: The Crisis in Indian Democracy (New Delhi: Penguin, 1993), pp. 115–116. 53. Prem Shankar Jha, “Getting Serious About Subsidies,” Hindu, 1 April 1999, p. 16. 54. See Frontline, 27 February–12 March 1999. 55. Hindu, 24 October 1998. 56. Iqbal Ansari, ed., Communal Riots: The State and Law in India (New Delhi: Institute of Objective Studies, 1997), p. 15. 57. Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, Internal Security, Assessment 1998–1999. Online at http://mha.nic.in/isass.html. The Ministry of Home Affairs had this to say: “On the communal front, there has been a marked decline in communal violence during the year 1998 as compared to the previous year. The year witnessed 626 incidents claiming 207 lives and 2065 injuries as compared to 725 incidents resulting in the death of 264 persons and injuries to 2503 as in the previous year. Although the communal violence has been on the decline since 1993, the communal divide has widened due to aggressive postures adopted by both Hindu and Muslim fundamentalist organisations. Clearly, the threshold of communal tolerance has become low. The Southern States are showing greater tendency to communal disturbances. . . . Some of these cases were crime oriented and it was a co-incidence that the victims were Christians. In a few cases the attacks were deliberate and dastardly, as the burning alive of Graham Stewart Staines and his two sons in Orissa would go to show.” This suggests that there are a wide variety of political actors seeking to use religious cleavages to gain a political base. 58. Smitu Kothari, “Social Movements and the Redefinition of Democracy,” in Philip Oldenburg, ed., India Briefing (New York: Asia Society, 1993), pp. 131–163. 59. Hindu, 24 August 1999.

6

Conflict and Democracy: Kashmir in South Asia Bruce Russett’s democratic peace thesis is an important part of the international discourse on democracy. Russett contends that democracies do not go to war with each other. Although his thesis is largely supported by experience in Western democracies, Russett maintains that his peace thesis is valid even for countries that are developing democracies. The more they become democratic, the less they are likely to go to war with each other. He especially talks about dyads of rivals (e.g., Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan), where wars had occurred previously because one of the pair was not democratic. In the 1990s, however, both India and Pakistan moved toward greater democratization, which in Russett’s view is likely to lead to negotiated resolution of disputes between them. Democracies refrain from going to war, Russett says, because the internalized norms of democracy by the decisionmakers blunt the urge to expansion and strengthen the desire to resolve disputes peaceably, through negotiations. 1 The nature of a political regime—a democracy or dictatorship-authoritarian state—will determine the course of war and peace between states. Russett defines a democracy as a state “with a voting franchise for a substantial fraction of citizens, a government brought to power in contested elections, and an executive either popularly elected or responsible to an elected legislature.”2 This definition closely follows the supposition of the elite bargain theorists and therefore suffers from some of the same drawbacks that the elite bargain perspective suffers, that is, conflicts arising from consolidation imperatives are excluded from the process of democratization and nonstate actors (i.e., overlapping ethnic nationalities) are given short shift. Both have been central to the course of Indo-Pakistani relations since 1947. The South Asian experience, in fact, suggests that Russett is only partly right. Democratic development

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in the 1990s did create a new window of opportunity in South Asia, but considerations of security, economic imperatives, and regime stability overpowered the impulse to peace. In South Asia, peace will come only if both India and Pakistan are able to successfully balance their consolidation imperatives against the pressures of democracy. We might ask two broad questions of South Asia from the perspective of Russett’s thesis. First, is the regime type a critical cause for war and peace between India and Pakistan? Second, has greater democratization in post-1990 India and Pakistan improved the prospects of peace between them? To answer these, I have focused on Kashmir, mainly because it is an enduring dispute that enables us to compare the effects of democratization on questions of war and peace in South Asia.3 The first section below examines the connections between the regime type and conflict and concludes that the international environment, ideologies of local actors (Kashmiris who were not legally a party to the conflict), and perceptions of weakness or strength shaped the course of war and peace between India and Pakistan. The second section examines the prospects for peace in view of post-1990 democratization in both countries. It concludes that more than regime type, consolidation imperative—particularly those of economy and stability—are the significant determinants of Indo-Pakistani relations. ■

CRITICAL CAUSES OF CONFLICT: INDIA AND PAKISTAN (1947–1990)

Before we examine the trade-off between democracy and nation-state building in India and Pakistan, a sketch of the events might be in order. These events—the partition and the communal carnage it triggered, the legacy of abiding mutual suspicion it bestowed on India and Pakistan, the manner of early integration of disparate parts of British India into the two nation-states of India and Pakistan, and the different conditions under which each sought to forge independence and unity—are of enduring significance to the course of peace and democracy in the subcontinent.4 They expose the embedded fears about political disintegration and separatism in South Asia. Above all, they have determined the way in which India and Pakistan responded to developments in and around Kashmir.

Partition and Wars: Historical Antecedents

The British withdrawal from India was contingent upon the fulfillment of certain legal and political conditions: the India Independence Act of

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1947 and the British interest in maintaining a foothold in the region. The first prompted a proposal for a loose federation between what are today India and Pakistan, limited by the five hundred or so princely states that were asked to choose between them. The Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 had proposed such a scheme to forestall a division of the subcontinent. However, the federation plan was soon abandoned because of extreme suspicion and distrust between the two national independence movements, one headed by the Congress Party, the other by the Muslim League. The failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan eventually led to the partition of British India into India and Pakistan. The kingdom of Kashmir was an important princely state on the border of the new nations.5 In accordance with the 1947 India Act, the maharajah of Kashmir wanted to exercise his right to remain independent. While the idea of an independent Kashmir was greeted with enthusiasm by the people in Kashmir, the same majority—also Muslims by religion—did not want to be ruled by the Hindu Dogra kings. Spearheading the opposition was the immensely popular Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who had a vision of making Kashmir the Switzerland of South Asia, an independent and neutral state. On the eve of partition, however, the goal of ending the Dogra rule took precedence over making Kashmir an independent state. Before the maharajah could resolve his differences with Sheikh Abdullah, Pakistan sent tribal raiders (backed by soldiers in the Pakistani regular army) to infiltrate Kashmir.6 Fearing total loss of control, the maharajah turned to India for help. Whether he signed the instrument of accession to India under duress and as a quid pro quo, or whether the maharajah had already decided to accede to India, are questions that have been mired in controversy ever since. However, once the instrument of accession was signed, India sent in its army to defend what was now legally Indian territory.7 This led to a war over Kashmir. This first conflict has been variously described as religious, fratricidal, or the first interstate conflict between India and Pakistan. However one may describe it, the 1948 clash partitioned the princely state between the Indian- and Pakistaniheld portions of Kashmir. The rival national interests that produced this outcome have endured thereafter. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since 1947, pursued military alliances abroad, and spent enormous amounts of precious resources on arms, including nuclear weapons. In 1965, Pakistan again sent raiders in the hope of inciting the Kashmiri population to revolt against India.8 Pakistan’s leaders had hoped to use the cover of popular revolt to wrest Kashmir by force. Unfortunately for Pakistan, the Kashmiris did not revolt, and the Indian Army was able to conclude the war to a draw. Nothing was settled by the 1965 war.

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This early history reveals the enormous importance of local Kashmiri politics in the security calculations of the two countries. Kashmir was not then or thereafter exclusively a dispute between India and Pakistan. The first war was triggered by crossborder infiltration by Pakistani raiders who hoped to provoke a revolt against India in the valley; the second war was also triggered by similar intrusions. Neither incursion panned out as expected. But both were based on perceptions and misperceptions of how the Indian parts of Kashmir would respond. The transborder spread of ethnic Kashmiris across India and Pakistan and their artificial divisions as parts of separate nation-states was at the root of the Indo-Pakistani conflict. The third war between India and Pakistan was precipitated by a similar rupture between ethnicity and nationalism, although this time it was between the predominantly Bengali-speaking East Pakistan and the Urdu-speaking West Pakistan. Initially, Pakistan sought to suppress the demand for autonomy in East Pakistan, and when suppression hardened the demand into one for independence in 1969 the government of General Yahya Khan sent in the army to crush the rebellion. The Indian armed forces intervened on the side of the rebels through a provision of arms, training, and subsequently with troops to liberate what became the nation of Bangladesh. Kashmir was not the trigger point in the 1971 war, but its settlement firmly linked the war to Kashmir.9 Pakistan sought to forestall India from changing the territorial status quo in Kashmir. India sought to convert the 1949 cease-fire line into a legitimate international border between India and Pakistan. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi used India’s military victory to press Pakistan to accept a de facto partition of Kashmir at the 1972 Simla Summit. This division was to be formalized once Pakistani Prime Minister Bhutto had prepared the political groundwork for its acceptance. Bhutto did not, however, fulfill the promise at Simla and was deposed by the military in 1977. Having failed to secure international acceptance for its claims, India moved forward to consolidate control over its part of Kashmir: by manipulating Jammu and Kashmir politics to get pliant chief ministers in office in the state, arresting Sheikh Abdullah whenever he stepped out of line on the question of Jammu and Kashmir’s political status, subsuming Kashmiri nationalism under the Indian nationalism, delinking the Muslim majority in Kashmir from the Hindu-Muslim questions in the rest of India, restraining the chauvinistic demands of the Kashmiri Hindus, and, lastly, transferring huge amounts of revenues to maintain all the pieces of the Kashmiri puzzle in place and within manageable limits. These measures were backed by deployment of large numbers of troops on the border. In the 1980s, the situation unraveled partly because of developments beyond India’s control (i.e., growing

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influence of fundamentalism infused through Saudi-sponsored religious schools in Kashmir or war in Afghanistan), partly because the Indira and Rajiv Gandhi governments flagrantly interfered in Kashmir’s electoral process. Popular anger at this perfidy burst forth in 1989 in the form of an insurgency, aided and abetted by Islamic groups from Pakistan and the Pakistani intelligence agencies across the border. Needless to say, growing turmoil in Kashmir and war in Afghanistan gave President Zia the opportunity to weaken Indian control over Jammu and Kashmir (the Indian part). These same conditions compelled Indian leaders to pursue consolidation imperatives over constitutionally granted promises of autonomy to Kashmir.

K ashmir: the regio n and the great po w ers. Had South Asia not been the arena of U.S.-Soviet rivalry and an important link in the chain of containment design of the United States, Indo-Pakistani relations might have followed a different course. But that was not to be. In fact, Pakistan’s decision to seek out the United States and then China as military and strategic allies had the most profound effect on India’s regional perceptions and stance toward Pakistan. Much the same can be said about the impact of Indo-Soviet ties in Pakistan. But these did not figure in the early 1950s. By then India and Pakistan had already fought a war over Kashmir, and Pakistan had begun to edge closer to the United States and Great Britain. There had been a window of opportunity in 1948 to solve this dispute peaceably when Prime Minister Nehru had submitted the dispute to the United Nations (UN), but for India it turned out to be a case of misplaced faith. In the early 1950s, the UN was dominated by the Western powers, which were more interested in Third World support for their anti-Soviet campaign than in impartial resolution of regional conflicts. The United States and Great Britain saw Pakistan as a useful ally in the chain of containment around the communist Soviet Union. Pakistan was willing to be such a link, provided the Anglo-U.S. bloc supported it against India. The Indian leaders soon came to the conclusion that the UN could not be fair and objective on the Kashmir dispute. Prime Minister Nehru began to backpedal on the question of a plebiscite and withdrew his request for UN mediation. Yet Pakistan saw international mediation as a means to pressure India on Kashmir. Pakistani leaders argued that India had reneged on the promise of a plebiscite, forced the maharajah to accede to New Delhi, and even jailed Kashmir’s popular leader, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, to prevent a democratic resolution in Kashmir. Pakistan joined the U.S. military alliance and signed a mutual defense agreement with the United States in 1954. The flow of U.S. arms

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and economic aid since then fluctuated with the state of the Cold War, particularly with U.S. anxiety about the Soviet advances in the Middle East and South Asia.10 The late 1950s and 1960s witnessed considerable flow of U.S. assistance, even as the era of détente brought a decline in the U.S. interest. In the 1980s, the renewing of the Cold War with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which is close to the rich oil fields of the Persian Gulf, brought massive amounts of U.S. arms and economic assistance to Pakistan.11 The Soviet Union responded to the U.S. presence in Pakistan by extending first economic and then military assistance to India. Grafting of the Cold War onto the IndoPakistani dispute intensified the arms race and exacerbated regional tensions. The 1965 Tashkent Agreement that followed the second war between India and Pakistan was mediated by the Soviet Union. The U.S. interest in South Asia had waned in the wake of the Vietnam War. The Tashkent Agreement ended the state of war and persuaded the two sides to maintain an amicable status quo but failed to resolve the dispute over Kashmir. Disturbed by the U.S. disengagement from South Asia, Pakistan turned to China for strategic support, which the latter happily gave because of its own territorial dispute with India and rift with the Soviet Union (India’s great-power supporter). The 1972 Simla Summit between India and Pakistan bought what was at best an uneasy peace until the mid-1980s. Sometimes defeat and destruction can lay the foundation of new peace, as between Japan and the United States after World War II. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s defeat in the Bangladesh War did not prove to be such a turning point. India did emerge as the unchallenged military power in South Asia, but its claims to preeminence only goaded Pakistan further. Pakistan stepped up efforts to forge a mutually profitable military relationship with China. The growing friendship between Pakistan and China had already compelled India to sign a friendship treaty with Moscow before intervening in the 1971 Bangladesh War. This treaty included several secret conditions that obligated the Soviet Union to extend military support in the event China opened a second front against India. Clearly, neither India nor Pakistan was willing to abandon Kashmir or compromise their core claims at the behest of the great powers (though they were willing to enlist their support) and the great powers were less interested in “solving” Kashmir than they were in enlisting South Asia on their side of the global rivalry. These external involvements by the United States, China, and the Soviet Union, more than the regime type, determined war and diplomacy in South Asia. The decade of the 1980s only strengthened the importance of external actors in the course of the Indo-Pakistani dispute. The Soviet

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invasion of Afghanistan had created a dangerous new situation in South Asia. Pakistan was inundated with fleeing Afghan refugees and bristling Afghan mujahideens ready to battle to the death to get the Soviets out. Sensing Pakistan’s vulnerability, Indira Gandhi offered a friendship treaty to Zia in 1981. Zia was, however, waiting to conclude a massive aid and weapons agreement with the United States. Anxious to roll back the Soviet troops, the Ronald Reagan administration offered Pakistan $3.2 billion in economic and weapons assistance over the next six years. All chances of Indo-Pakistani détente were ended once Pakistan became a “front line” state in the U.S. rollback strategy. Pakistan modernized its armed forces with U.S. assistance and nearly $1 billion that came pouring in regularly to assist the Afghan mujahideens. It trained, armed, and funded on a sustained basis a large number of guerrillas for crossborder action in Afghanistan and India (Punjab and Kashmir). Zia hoped to gradually whittle away Indian control over Kashmir and pin down large numbers of Indian military forces in Kashmir. He was also confident that the United States would not punish Pakistan for acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities. Signing the friendship treaty Indira Gandhi had offered in 1981 could hardly match the advantages of serving as the conduit to the Afghan mujahideens and guardian of U.S. interests in the region.

Perceptio ns o f strength and w eakness. The first Indo-Pakistani War, in 1947, was caused by the colonial divisions of the subcontinent and the difficulties of identifying any single acceptable basis for the division. Ethnicity and religion could not coincide with the territorial divisions the British had made. And the 1947 war was to settle nothing. Usually, status quo is more easily changed if one of the pair in Russett’s antagonistic dyad is weakened by events and circumstances. For Pakistan, Nehru’s death in 1964 offered such an opportunity. Nehru had been the unchallenged leader of India’s postindependence transition to democracy. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the next prime minister of India, was well liked and greatly respected, but he lacked the natural command and charisma of Nehru. The Indian economy was facing serious shortages, inflation had spiraled out of control, and hardship was breeding protests throughout urban India. Pakistan’s military probes in the Rajasthan sector of the India-Pakistan border, in the early part of 1965, had drawn only mild responses from the Shastri government. In fact, its weak handling and conciliatory tone convinced Pakistan, then under General Ayub Khan, that India would not be able to withstand a surprise Pakistani attack in Kashmir. Ayub could then “right the wrong,” as he saw it, and fulfill Pakistan’s quest in Kashmir. The 1965 war had more to do with the perception of strategic strength and weakness than with the regime type.

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A similar perception of Pakistan’s strategic vulnerability propelled India into the 1971 Bangladesh War. The armed confrontation between East Pakistan and West Pakistan had offered India an unprecedented opportunity to permanently weaken Pakistan. Not surprisingly, it seized that opportunity. It is true that these were not the sole motives behind the 1965 and 1971 wars. Other calculations often intervened: 10 million Bangladeshi refugees were a great burden and had to be repatriated to Bangladesh. But perceptions of weakness provoked each to gain advantage and tilt the balance of forces in its favor. In the 1980s, Pakistan sought to take advantage of the popular alienation building up against New Delhi in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. For months before the outbreak of armed insurgency, in 1989, Kashmir had been in the grip of turmoil. Acts of terrorism had intensified; destruction of government property, killings, and murder had become a frequent occurrence. Pakistan had provided some support to the Sikh militants in Punjab throughout the 1980s. The Pakistani involvement in Kashmir followed exactly the same pattern of clandestine support but on a far larger scale. The pattern of sponsorship, pieced together from a variety of credible sources, suggests that Pakistan enlisted the services of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) initially, then split that body and established a rival Hizbul mujahideen organization to better control the course of “liberation struggle” in Indian Kashmir. Pakistan provided safe sanctuaries, logistical and monetary support, and small arms to the militants. The chairman of the JKLF, Amanullah Khan, revealed in an interview to Zahid Hussain of the Karachi monthly Newsline in February 1990 that the planning for the liberation of Kashmir was begun by Zia in 1986. The actual operation was launched two years later, in 1988. Amanullah Khan had been deported from England to Pakistan in September 1986 for illegal possession of explosive substances. Hashim Qureshi (predecessor to Amanullah Khan and the president of the JKLF), who later settled in Amsterdam, revealed that Pakistani military intelligence had started training and arming Kashmiri youths as far back as 1984. Amanullah Khan’s interview, published in Newsline in February 1990, confirmed Hashim Qureshi’s account. Militant leaders claimed that the JKLF had 10,000 supporters. Although this might be a gross exaggeration, even a small number of determined operatives aided and abetted from the outside would have been, and were in fact, sufficient to plunge Jammu and Kashmir into a state of turmoil. The 8 December 1989 kidnapping of Dr. Rubiya Sayeed, the daughter of the Indian minister of home affairs, by the JKLF was perfectly timed to coincide with the advent of the National Front government of Prime Minister V. P. Singh. For months prior to the 1989 elections,

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National Front leaders had been criticizing the Rajiv Gandhi government for undermining Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy and causing alienation among otherwise loyal Kashmiris. Although their criticism was valid in the main, their views of the militancy were clearly misguided. This became evident when the negotiated release of five militant leaders from custody was greeted as a great triumph by the JKLF and used to recruit angry youths into the insurgency. The coalition government of V. P. Singh was not only weak but also wrong in believing that negotiations would bring the militants back into the national fold. In the weeks and months that followed, dozens of insurgent groups emerged in Jammu and Kashmir with support and encouragement from Pakistan. Perception of a weakened India had once again tempted Pakistan to foment turmoil in Kashmir. This pattern of crossborder subversion continued throughout the 1990s. In the second half of the 1990s a growing number of Afghan Pathan militants began to intrude, disguised as Kashmiri militants. The local population in Kashmir had tired of the violence and become disillusioned with the criminal behavior of the militants in the valley. There were increasing number of Afghan mujahideens crossing over into Kashmir to boost the insurgency. Press reports suggested that in 1995 close to 1,000 militants were crossing over from Pakistan into the valley.12 This alarmed India even more; Pakistan had too much to gain and too much invested to back away from its purpose. Between the militants and Indian security forces, however, the state of Jammu and Kashmir had been nearly ruined. More than 200,000 Hindus had fled the valley since 1989. According to most estimates, close to 400,000 Indian Army and paramilitary personnel continued to occupy Kashmir. The number of those killed until 1996 was close to 20,000, including militants and Indian police as well as other security and army personnel. This continuity of wars and confrontations over the passage of five decades and through many changes in government and politics suggests that strategic policies can be relatively impervious to domestic shifts and considerably more responsive to strategic imperatives. This is not to argue that domestic politics does not affect Indo-Pakistani relations. Far from it. All the same, regime type alone does not explain the course of war or peace between countries in South Asia. Had that been the case, there may have been greater Pakistani flexibility on Kashmir under Z. A. Bhutto’s democratic period, its reverse under the military boot of Zia-ul-Haq, and a lessening of tensions when India elected the National Front government of V. P. Singh. Instead, Zia and Rajiv Gandhi had eased tensions, at least initially, whereas the National

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Front’s commitment to good-neighborly ties had been set aside in preference for a belligerent posture toward Pakistan. The Singh government’s dependence on the BJP made any new initiatives with Pakistan impossible while Zia, who was confident of his hold over Pakistan and assured of support from the United States, felt less constrained to make conciliatory gestures.

Ideo lo gies o f lo cal acto rs: separate narratives o f K ashmiri natio nalism. Ideologies of nonstate actors have similarly sustained the atmosphere of conflict and tension over the past five decades. The number of actors that contribute to war and violence in Kashmir is large and their story complicated, but briefly we can identify two broad sites of rival nationalism. First, there are the official Indian and Pakistani claims to Kashmir. India claims Kashmir on the basis of the instruments of accession by which it says Kashmir became a part of India, albeit with a special status. Indian leaders further argue that their secular commitment obliges them to uphold territoriality as the organizing principle for the Indian nation-state. To do otherwise was not only undemocratic but likely to precipitate the disintegration of India. Pakistani leaders—from Jinnah to Nawaz Sharif in 1997—have argued that Pakistan is incomplete without Kashmir, a Muslim-majority province adjoining Pakistan. They believe that Kashmiri Muslims would have chosen to join Pakistan had they had the right to self-determination. Over the decades, these beliefs spurred Pakistan to force a change in the status quo in Kashmir— and India to maintain it with the use of equal counterforce. These beliefs have also shaped India’s and Pakistan’s policies within their portions of Kashmir. Maintaining control has become more important than autonomy or local self-determination to their respective Kashmiris. These policies have brought unforeseen results, particularly for India. Although the official ideologies have kept the dispute alive, these are not the only and perhaps not even the most significant trigger points of war and peace in the region. For that, we must turn to the local narratives of nationalism in Kashmir. These challenge the very definition of democracy Russett has used in his analysis. The democratic peace thesis generally ignores the role of nonstate actors and conflict within the state. There are at least three different local versions of Kashmiri history. For the sake of clarity, the first is referred to as the “Kashmiri nationalist narrative,” which argues for an independent or at least autonomous Kashmir; the second, the “Islamist narrative,” converges with Pakistan’s claims to Kashmir; the third, the “Indian version of Kashmir’s identity,” stresses Kashmir’s cultural contiguity with India.

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In the Kashmiri nationalist version, Kashmiri culture is perceived as unique, distinctive, and separate from that of its neighboring regions; Kashmiri Islam is said to be totally different from the Islam in Pakistan, as the former’s origins are to be found in the Sufi and Rishi traditions and not in the Wahaby Sunni tradition of the Islam in Pakistan or larger parts of India. The nationalist movement against Kashmiri Dogra kings, led by Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference Party, and, half a century later, the movement for self-determination, led by the JKLF in the 1980s, have drawn on this argument. In the 1990s this version of nationalism has been eclipsed by the Islamic version. In this later version, Kashmiri identity is defined by virtue of the majority of the population being Sunni Muslim. It is argued by a small but highly vocal and now armed segment of Kashmiris (with the help of Pakistan) that Kashmir belongs in Pakistan and that the partition of 1947 has left this matter unresolved. In the third narrative, common, historic bonds with India and Hindu culture are stressed. In this version, Kashmir’s tolerant and humane Islam originates from its Sufi traditions and is said to be permeated with Hindu customs and values. Kashmir’s unique religion and culture can therefore be best preserved, it is argued, in a secular and democratic India. This view is held by Kashmir’s Hindu population, some fraction of the valley Muslims, and the vast majority of people in India. From time to time, it has also been espoused by various National Front leaders (i.e., Farooq Abdullah, Jammu and Kashmir’s chief minister in 1980s) and those of the Hindu parties in Jammu. It had fewer adherents in the 1990s. In any event, India and Pakistan see Kashmir separately as either an extension of Hindu civilization or Islamic imperium. The Kashmiris themselves are divided about the status of Kashmir and the kind of rule they would prefer. The Hindus of Kashmir—those that have been left behind in the valley and those who fled to India— have rejected a compromise with the insurgents. The Kashmiri Muslims are similarly divided between those who want greater autonomy and those who demand total independence. Most Kashmiri Muslims would like independent Kashmir to include both halves of the divided state. Others are content with the current territorial status quo but want greater autonomy for the people of Kashmir. Yet another segment—small in number—favors merging with Pakistan. Those who favor independence are also divided. Some desire a secular Kashmir, whereas others favor an Islamic state of Kashmir.13 Kashmir has, then, come to mean different things to different people—the Kashmiris, Indians, and Pakistanis. Religious loyalties are particularly significant in the competing discourses about Kashmiri identity. The slogan “Islam in danger” can unleash serious social disturbances within Jammu and Kashmir. Although

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Russett is right in focusing attention on the failure of democracy and secularism—for there have been egregious failures of both in each part of Kashmir—larger events in the region as a whole have been more important to the course of dispute over Kashmir. Gul Wani writes that Islamic resurgence in Kashmir occurred “only after the consolidation of Zia’s regime in Pakistan and Islamic revolutionary struggles . . . in Iran and Afghanistan” and it “paved the way for the emergence of Islam as an alternative source of inspiration for the masses” in Kashmir. Wani observes that the Jamaat-e-Islami of Kashmir “became a bridge connecting Kashmir with the overall Islamic resurgence. . . . The collapse of communism as the leading anti-Western ideology seems to propel Islam into this role.”14 Both in theory and practice, the Jamaat forces of Kashmir and Pakistan have much in common. Both reject what they see as Indian colonialism and Brahminical imperialism and wish to establish instead an Islamic state in their respective spheres. The Kashmiri Hindus likewise seek to unify the Pandit community in the valley and Jammu around the themes of Hindu identity and Indian nationalism. These antagonistic ideologies have produced a dangerous paradox. The Hindus are a minority in Kashmir, but the Kashmiri Muslims see them as the extension of the Hindu majority in India; the Kashmiri Muslims are a majority in Jammu and Kashmir but see themselves as an oppressed minority that must protect its identity by maintaining a distance from New Delhi. Exhaustion had dampened popular support for the insurgency in 1996–1997, but there was no agreement on how it could be ended. The solutions proposed by the United States and other Western powers had revolved around two broad themes. The first emphasizes restoration of human rights and the creation of conditions to settle disputes based on democratic norms, such as fairness, popular mandate, and equal justice for Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim communities of Kashmir. This solution presumes the applicability of the democratic peace thesis—that internal democracy will lead to international peace. But Kashmir’s differing nationalism does not allow objective determination of what is fair or just or democratic. The notion of justice in the Islamic version sharply differs from the syncretic views of Hindu and nationalist Kashmiris. Whereas the Western states favor the logic of Russett’s thesis, India and Pakistan see a different reality, one shaped by imperatives of security and governance. They both, nevertheless, agree not officially but in fact that neither human rights nor democracy is possible in the fragmented state of Kashmir, and that integration of Kashmir along the line they individually suggest would be the way to secure the rule of law and democracy in Kashmir. Of course, they differ in who should integrate Kashmir or how it could be integrated, but both believe their national integrity and unity depends on the future status of Kashmir.

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Pakistan defines democracy in Kashmir in terms of a referendum but seeks to seal off any spillover of such a mandate on its side of the border. It regards Azad Kashmir as a fait accompli but wants to renegotiate the future of the Kashmir Valley, which constitutes the bulk of Indian-held Kashmir. India interprets application of democracy in terms of federal autonomy and an overall balance between Kashmir’s ethnic and religious communities. But India wants law and order and its own control restored first. Neither India nor Pakistan favors an independent Kashmir. The international community wants the Kashmiri people to be party to any settlement. They argue that any negotiations that ignore the Kashmiris will not last or be just. Moreover, they argue that democratization—defined as acceding to the principle of self-determination for the Kashmiris—is more important than the outcome of that process. As pointed out earlier, such a position implies a different trade-off between the goals of security and democracy. Since 1990, the United States has frequently offered to act as a third-party mediator (unofficially representing Kashmiri interests) but the idea of U.S. mediation conflicts with India’s insistence that Kashmir is a bilateral dispute between India and Pakistan.15

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The conflict in Kashmir thus had not responded positively to the era of greater democratization in the 1990s. In 1988, Pakistan had begun its transition to democracy, and from 1989 India had moved toward coalition rule. But those years also witnessed the intensification of violence in Kashmir and large fluctuations in Indo-Pakistani relations. Nor had changes in world politics after the end of the Cold War brought peace, although the security perceptions in India and Pakistan had changed drastically. Consolidation anxieties about territorial and national security, in fact, heightened as tensions escalated over Kashmir. Democratization had, however, opened up several new options that had not been available previously.

❑

The New Options for Pakistan and India

Pakistan. Pakistan has at least three options to strengthen its territorial and national security. It can pursue the Islamic option by moving closer to the Islamic countries and groups in the region. The Islamic option

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consists of two aspects. The external aspect would require closer ties to Central Asian republics and Iran and stability and peace in Afghanistan, which serves as the main corridor to Central Asia. Pakistan has articulated this option by establishing economic ties and evolving common diplomatic positions with Central Asian states on a number of regional issues. But the Islamic option is fraught with great uncertainties. In terms of culture and political preference, the Central Asian countries are closer to Turkey. There are also vast differences in their social and political compositions and levels of development. These differences pose formidable obstacles to an Islamic bloc within which Pakistan might ensure its security. The internal aspect of the Islamic option is downright dangerous. Should Islam become Pakistan’s ruling ideology, there would be endless conflict between groups dedicated to different versions of Islam. Chapter 3 noted the growing incidents of armed conflict between Sunnis and Shi’as in Pakistan. The Islamic option would also mean acting as a home for the Islamic groups in South Asia, a condition not easily fulfilled given Pakistan’s reluctance to accept the 240,000 Biharis languishing in the refugee camps in Bangladesh and waiting to “go home” to Pakistan. Pakistan fears escalation of ethnic conflicts in Sindh and elsewhere should the Bangladeshi Biharis come home to Pakistan. We have already noted the close relationship between Islamic parties and groups in Pakistan with Kashmiri and Afghan mujahideens. Pakistan is the connection between the Pushtun Taliban triumph in Afghanistan and the larger presence of non-Kashmiri militants in Indian Kashmir. In both instances, Islamic groups have provided important support to the militancy. Until now, Pakistan’s governments have provided only covert aid to these groups. If the subversive strategy were to become overt and official, it will precipitate a war. The June 1999 crossborder infiltration in the Kargil sector of Kashmir is a case in point. Pakistan has denied being involved. But Kashmiri militants could not have mounted such a well-equipped and large operation without help from the ISI or the Pakistan Army. Nawaz Sharif’s August 1999 agreement to “withdraw” the intruders confirmed what everyone had suspected from the beginning. The fact this operation occurred when the Vajpayee government was reduced to the status of a caretaker government was not a coincidence. What is noteworthy is that the intrusion coincided with the Sharif government’s shift toward greater Islamization of law and society in Pakistan. Since that shift was accompanied by attacks on the press and voluntary organizations in Pakistan, they were hardly a harbinger of deepening democracy. Democratization had not prevented armed conflict between the dyads of rivals, but armed clashes certainly threatened to reverse the democratic

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gains. This became evident when on 12 October 1999 the Pakistan military abruptly ended Sharif’s tenure, dissolved his government, and appointed a government dominated by the armed forces. The second and third options for Pakistan are more properly the focus of this book: democratic liberalization and pursuit of regional cooperation. These two options are complementary, although Pakistan does not have to be democratic to pursue regional cooperation. But if it were to continue to democratize, the chances of regional cooperation will be enhanced. In Chapter 3, I discuss two opposing views on the military-civilian relationship in that country. Many scholars have contended that subordination of Pakistan’s nascent political institutions to military rule in the 1950s had set the pattern for all of Pakistan’s history thereafter. The military’s control crippled political parties, and when parties formed governments during moments of military weakness (i.e., in the mid-1970s), they did not endure. This happened, some suggest, because the Pakistani military sees itself as the guardian of the nation. Others suggest that it is because political parties lack organization, grassroots support, and enlightened leadership. It follows from the second argument that Pakistan’s security threats have been invented by its military to protect its dominance and that they would diminish or even disappear should Pakistan move toward democracy. The Pakistani military is predatory, but Pakistan’s external threats are not all imagined. India and Iran are hostile powers, and instability in Afghanistan—not to mention the ethnic overlap on almost all borders of Pakistan—is real and dangerous to its security. The post-1990 years have offered no decisive evidence to support the validity of the liberalization and democratic peace option, although on several occasions Indo-Pakistani ties have showed promise of improvement. Pakistan’s domestic politics has not displayed the kind of positively causal connection with peace that the Russett thesis presumes. We have already demonstrated the structuring influence of consolidation imperatives that results in continuity rather than abatement of conflict between India and Pakistan. This was true before and after 1988, when Pakistan moved toward elected governments. The other question raised by the democratic peace thesis has to do with internal reforms. Russett argues that democratic development— greater participation and regular and free elections—will automatically, though gradually, increase the desire for peace. There were indications—in 1997 and then in early 1999 before the Kargil misadventure—that a growing number of people in Pakistan favored friendly ties with India and greater government attention to Pakistan’s pressing

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domestic problems. But for the moment, Pakistan’s leaders seem incapable of moving toward negotiations. They must restore democracy and restart economic reforms before improving ties with India. However, restoration of democracy will not mean much if it returns to power the same leaders who led Pakistan down the path of economic ruin. What is more, reforms—whether political or economic—are difficult to sustain given Pakistan’s ethnic configuration and financial woes. No one can say with certainty whether efforts at distribution— should they be made—will sharpen even more the existing social and ethnic conflicts in Pakistan. The second question is whether Pakistan can achieve such reforms given that nearly half its budget goes to service foreign and public debt and the other half to finance the armed forces. Since Pakistan’s external viability and international credibility require it to meet the debt first, any shift to the welfare account would have to come from defense expenditures. However, military budgets are more or less beyond the purview of elected governments. Besides, reduction in the military budget does not always translate into greater expenditure on health, education, and welfare. There is an intervening factor: compulsion of stability and calculations of leadership survival. In all likelihood, savings from defense expenditures will go to appease special-interest groups or powerful lobbies that support the incumbent. In India, such subsidies have stabilized many a government. In Pakistan, the logic of political survival requires enormous political patronage (e.g., the Yellow Cab scheme of Nawaz Sharif) and bribery, dispersing loans or contracts to supporters and influential individuals who can be counted on in a political crisis. These are wasteful expenditures of national resources. Reduction in the military budget does not, then, guarantee investment in welfare for the needy in Pakistan, or India, for that matter. But blatant siphoning off of the national wealth and widespread bribery has several times put an end to elected governments.

India. Since the end of the Cold War and demise of traditional dominance of the Congress Party, India also has more options in domestic and international policy. It can pursue domestic centralization with defensive dominance in the region, the policy it followed for more than forty years until the 1990s. This policy is identified with the previous Congress governments. In this, the central-state concentrated decisionmaking in its hands, often at the expense of its federal parts, and tried to maintain leverage over neighboring countries so that it could structure interstate relations in the region as a whole. Steve Cohen has identified

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this as the “forceful India” option. In another study devoted to the domestic parts of this policy, I have called it “unity through centralization.” The center remains the depository of secular democratic nationalism and seeks the territorial status quo—for instance, in Kashmir—along the line of actual control. To this end, it incorporates local ethnic nationalism within its syncretic fold. The second option also means a strong center with concentration of decisionmaking at the helm, but in this the center is the seat of Hindu nationalist power. In earlier decades, the RSS had promoted this idea; in recent years, the BJP espoused its cause. In foreign policy, the Hindu nationalist vision centers around establishing Hindu Rashtra’s unchallenged regional dominance. In its reading of history, Hindu nationalists argue that India’s cultural scope stretches from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka. This is not, then, a model of negotiated integration of ethnic nationalities within India or cooperation with neighboring states regarding ethnic nationalities that are transborder in character. The extreme strand of Hindu nationalism is expansionist and statist, with marked preference for authoritarian control over democratic accommodation. The more moderate strand of this thinking is ambivalent about extending the borders of the Indian state but favors a tough, security-oriented foreign policy and an uncompromising stance toward Pakistan on Kashmir. During 1998–1999, under the Hindu nationalist Vajpayee government, India experimented with this option, though the responsibility of ruling over such diverse and politically assertive nationalities forced the Hindu nationalists to abandon their extreme planks regarding Kashmir and Pakistan. Making India a nuclear power was one exception to its otherwise moderate foreign policy. Vajpayee did not jettison Article 370 of the constitution, which the BJP had promised to revoke. Nor did he make any drastic changes in the Kashmir policy. In fact, in February 1999, Vajpayee resumed the interrupted dialogue with Pakistan, made his historic “Bus Journey” to Lahore, and offered to discuss even Kashmir in the interest of good relations. In the weeks following the bus journey and the warm welcome Sharif extended to Vajpayee, hopes were raised that perhaps Indo-Pakistani relations had moved to a new level. The Lahore diplomacy was particularly welcome, because it had come a year after the May 1998 nuclear tests. In the second week of May 1998, the Vajpayee government had shocked the world by carrying out five nuclear tests in the deserts of Rajasthan. Pakistan responded with its own nuclear tests. These were followed by some tough and threatening statements from both governments, although

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Vajpayee was at pains to explain that India’s nuclear capabilities were defensive in character. They were not directed toward Pakistan; they were meant to provide India a minimum deterrence against China, whose rising ambitions had changed the balance of power in Asia. Additionally, Vajpayee argued that China’s export of advanced weapons technology to Pakistan, including M11 ballistic missiles, had created a window of vulnerability that threatened to widen with the passage of time.16 India thus had little choice but to go nuclear, particularly since world nuclear states were unwilling to shed their nuclear weapons. Once India had declared itself a nuclear state, Pakistan had no choice but to follow suit. Indo-Pakistan relations since then have traversed a predictable path. India raised the ante in carrying out the tests to which Pakistan replied in kind; talks followed partly because both were nuclear weapons states and because international pressure compelled each to make some effort at diplomacy. The tests brought economic sanctions, worldwide criticism, and pressures to sign the CTBT. Each country was trying to cope with the aftereffects of these punishing reactions. The February 1999 bus diplomacy was initiated against the backdrop of these developments. But while Vajpayee and Sharif were talking warmly about improving ties, Pakistan’s military and ISI were recruiting Kashmiri and Afghan mujahideens for a large-scale, covert offensive across the Kargil sector in Kashmir. This came in June 1999, as soon as the snows melted in the Himalayas. Timely pressure from the United States forced Pakistan to withdraw the intruders behind its side of the Line of Control (LoC) in the Kargil, but Pakistani misadventures led to the military coup of October 1999. Although the military government led by General Musharraf has withdrawn the troops from the LoC, it is unlikely to lead to a rapid dispersion of tension in Kashmir, particularly since in the 17 October address to the nation General Musharraf promised continuation of Pakistan’s support to the liberation of Kashmir. The Kargil miniwar left deep scars on both sides with little possibility of a rapid solution to Kashmir. These events suggest that Indo-Pakistani relations are relatively impervious to the regime type, that the logic of the Kashmir situation imposes itself on governments irrespective of their ideological agenda. The BJP did not and could not do what it had been advocating for many years in Kashmir. If Sharif’s February 1999 overtures were genuine, then he, too, could not override the Pakistani military and ISI over the intrusion in Kargil. Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies had torpedoed all that was agreed to between India and Pakistan in February 1999. Nor is it a coincidence that the intrusion occurred two

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and half months before the general elections scheduled in India, including in Kashmir. Democratic decentralization within the framework of regional cooperation is the third option for India. This has been variously called a “regionalist” or “decentralization and confederation” option. I have argued elsewhere that India faces as many threats from within—from separatist and militants of all kinds—as it does from ethnic overlap and crossborder subversion from the outside. Others who concur in this assessment have suggested that India can better protect its territorial integrity by decentralizing its domestic political structure and forming a loose confederation of South Asian states.17 This may not solve all security problems for India, but decentralization will, they argue, mitigate them. Borrowing from the democratic peace theorists, Raju Thomas argues that “a confederation of South Asian states may be expected to promote larger markets and free trade, thereby ending the threat of wars in the region.”18 These options, then, envisage economic liberalization leading to greater democratization, which in turn is expected to bring regional peace. In India, the decentralization-liberalization option is identified with the coalition governments led by the Janata Party under Prime Ministers V. P. Singh (1989–1990) and Deve Gowda and Inder Gujral (1996–1998). Although India’s ethnic heterogeneity had defeated the extremist agenda of the Hindu nationalists, it also weakened the effectiveness of coalition government. The difficulties of implementing the decentralization option was apparent in the V. P. Singh government’s failure to end the Kashmiri militancy or persuade Pakistan to desist from supporting it. Kashmir succumbed to an insurgency in 1989, and Punjab continued to fester. This showed that a government dedicated to decentralization and good-neighborly relations was not going to prevent Pakistan from giving up its strategic advantage. The United Front government of Deve Gowda and Inder Gujral again implemented this option. Their quest came against the backdrop of important shifts within Indian Kashmir. As a first prong of the decentralization strategy, the Indian government released several important leaders of the Kashmiri separatist movement, notably Shabir Shah, Inquilabi, and Yassen Malik. It has been clear since 1995 that popular fatigue was fragmenting the separatists into rival blocs. Weakening of the insurgency had produced an opportunity to normalize the situation in Jammu and Kashmir. Elections were proposed in 1996 in Kashmir, along with general elections that resulted in the defeat of the Congress government. For the first time since 1989, the released Kashmiri leaders acknowledged the futility of continuing with the militancy or securing independence

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from India and Pakistan. Instead they stressed a compact on terms of maximum autonomy—a grant of quasisovereign status to Kashmir with a soft border between its two partitioned segments. Encouraged by these acknowledgments, the United Front government moved ahead with Kashmiri elections in September 1996. The legitimacy of that election and the government of Farooq Abdullah it produced are matters of intense controversy, but clearly the United Front had hoped to replicate the Punjab scenario of elections, ethnic accord, and peace. The Kashmiri elections did not, however, stem the flow of militants or arms across the border. The external prong of the decentralization strategy was fleshed out in April 1997 by Prime Minister Inder Gujral. It was popularly referred to as the “Gujral Doctrine,” and the prime minister initiated a new and more serious commitment to a dialogue with Pakistan. The Gujral initiatives were based on two pivotal beliefs that have important longterm significance for Kashmir and Indian democracy in general. First, decentralization of power within the federal framework of India (that is, a more balanced center-state relationship) would diminish the need for heavy-handed control of overlapping ethnic nationalities; such a balance would secure India against ethnic separatism. Concessions would convince smaller regional states that India did not seek hegemony or military dominance. Prime Minster Gujral claimed that his “nonreciprocity” formula, in contrast with the centralizing and militarizing drive of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, would bring peace. The Gujral Doctrine envisaged a reduction in tensions and expansion in trade and investments, as well as a solution to illegal migration, terrorism, and drug smuggling. Even more important, it sought to lay the groundwork for sharing natural resources such as river waters and collaborations in building power plants, a common market, and more space for Indian businesses to grow. The Gujral Doctrine was based on the argument that India needed to move away from the moorings of the Cold War and open itself to the new global political economy. This required India to redirect its energies from regional security to global competition, liberalize the economy to make it attractive for international capital and trade, and provide a consistent and decisive leadership committed to these goals. At the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) meeting in Male in May 1997, Prime Minister Sharif agreed to talks. In June it was decided that eight “working groups” would be established to discuss topics of mutual concern. Further progress was, however, bogged down on whether or not Kashmir was to be a separate focus of a working group. No progress was made, and the talks were abandoned

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in September 1997. At the end of that year, the United Front lost the election to the BJP-led coalition. The decentralization strategy never had sufficient time to bear fruit. It is, nevertheless, important to stress that in 1997 the idea of détente with India was not unappealing to a cross-section of Pakistan’s elite. Democratization had produced a powerfully tantalizing alternative to war. A recent Kashmir Study Team report suggested a strong linkage between normalization of Indo-Pakistani ties, domestic economic compulsions, and post–Cold War shifts in international environment.19 The Study Team reported that Nawaz Sharif had several meetings with senior Indian leaders through October 1997; although the meetings with Indian Prime Minister Gujral at the United Nations ran into a snag, Nawaz Sharif was committed to achieving a breakthrough with India. According to those interviewed by the Study Team, motivating the desire for a dialogue “was an array of compulsions—the economy chief among them—that had converged in recent years to create an unprecedented crisis for Pakistan’s leadership. Pakistan’s alarming economic problems had obviously placed the country under greater strain.”20 Unfortunately, the nuclear tests aggravated these even more and slammed the door on friendship between the two countries. Looking back, one might argue that 1997 provided a small window of opportunity to move forward on Kashmir. Nawaz Sharif’s two-thirds majority in parliament had certainly tilted the political-military equation in his favor. This tilt was evident in his move to abolish the Eighth Amendment. A segment of the armed forces was also not adverse to talks with India. The Gujral government was positive in its response, and the 1996 elections in Jammu and Kashmir had produced a government of sorts that could spearhead the normalization process. There were important economic considerations driving both India and Pakistan toward opening up trade bilaterally and within the framework of the SAARC and the South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement (known as SAPTA). India was more anxious than Pakistan to end the status quo on trade and resolve the dispute over Siachen. According to some estimates, while legal bilateral trade was a meager $64 million, illegal trade across the border had expanded to $500 million. This could go up substantially, if the rapid expansion of a liberal trade regime between India, Nepal, and Bangladesh in the late 1990s was any indication. There was a growing sentiment in South Asia that trade and economic exchanges would build confidence and change the relative weight of these issues in Indo-Pakistani ties. The advent of the BJP in India and the nuclear tests in May 1998, however, ended the quest for the time being.

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But the economic and international pressures continued unabated. Bowing to these, Vajpayee made sincere efforts in February–March 1999 to break the logjam in Indo-Pakistani ties. Had these been reciprocated with equal sincerity, Indo-Pakistani relations might have moved forward to a new level. Before they could bear any fruit, however, Pakistan’s intrusion in Kargil was discovered. These events suggest what has been stressed throughout this study: that democratization cannot be evaluated independent of consolidation objectives in heterogeneous countries where the process of nation-state building is still incomplete. Throughout these years of hopes and fears and missed opportunities is the undeniable constancy of economic, stability, and security imperatives for both India and Pakistan. India will not accept any significant change to the line of actual control that it insists should be the international boundary between it and Pakistan. For Pakistan, accepting the LoC means abandoning its claims to Kashmir; that in turn means a permanent second-class status to India. It also means quelling popular expectations created by fifty years of propaganda. Kashmir has become such an intrinsic part of the struggle for power within Pakistan that any impression of ceding it to India is likely to trigger turmoil and violence. Unfortunately for Pakistan, liberating Kashmir through subversive means strengthens groups that operate on both sides of the border with equal impunity. New Delhi’s constant propaganda has similarly bedeviled any compromise in Kashmir. The prospects of democratization leading to peace seem remote in the near future, although both India and Pakistan made some attempts to test its logic in the 1990s. There is clear evidence to suggest that democratization alone will not lead to a quest for peace; peace will have to be pursued in the context of other objectives of India and Pakistan, that is, security, development, and, above all, regime stability. Russett’s thesis does not, then, fully apply to South Asia. That brings us to an important question. Can the international actors—the United States, Europe, and the United Nations—use their considerable influence to bring a settlement to the Kashmir dispute? The answer to this is uncertain at this juncture. International agencies and actors can mediate and exhort, but the Kashmir dispute does not lend itself to the kind of “intervention for peace” scenario implemented in Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia. Many Western countries recognize that a demand for a plebiscite in Kashmir no longer makes sense, because events of the past five decades have overtaken such an option. All the same, they see no possibility of a just and long-term settlement without accommodating Kashmiri nationalism. The growing influence of human rights groups and organizations in world forums has put

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India on the defensive in Kashmir. Asia Watch, Amnesty International, the State Department Human Rights Report, the European Human Rights Organization, and the expatriate Kashmiri nationals have focused attention on the collapse of the democratic process in Kashmir, the massive buildup of Indian security forces, and the continued violence that daily claims life and property. The human rights groups have been persistent in demanding that the United States should link democratic solutions in Kashmir to trade, investment, and an agenda of nuclear nonproliferation. The United States has vacillated between pushing for third-party mediation to support the 1972 Simla Agreement, which India insists is the mutually agreed basis for negotiations between it and Pakistan. The new nuclear situation has, however, led to a fundamental reassessment of South Asia’s place in the global security. The United States and Europe would, above all, strive to delink Kashmir from nuclear confrontation. This is the main reason why Pakistan found little support in the international community for its foray into Kargil or for claims that it is entirely a matter between Kashmiri freedom fighters and Indian security forces. International support for Pakistan is likely to diminish even more in response to the October 1999 coup. This is evident in Pakistan’s expulsions from the commonwealth of nations and widespread condemnation of the coup. Economic assistance from donor countries, the World Bank, and the IMF is suspended for the time being, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has urged Pakistan to speedily return the country to civilian rule. But Pakistan faces two highly unattractive choices. Prolongation of military rule is likely to isolate Pakistan in the international community and lead to a loss of access to capital, loans, markets, and technology—not to mention world opprobrium; in contrast, a return to party politics will mean a return of the same or similar civilian leadership, which brought Pakistan to the edge of ruin. Although in the post–Cold War period the United Nations and multinational forces have been mobilized in response to crisis or serious regional conflicts, Kashmir does not fulfill the conditions obtained elsewhere in Eastern Europe or northern Africa. Unlike Bosnia, it was not strategically critical to the powerful countries that shaped the world in the 1990s, at least not until May 1998, when India, followed by Pakistan, tested their nuclear devices. These have added a new urgency to resolving the dispute in Kashmir and preventing armed confrontations. The intervention in Kosovo suggests that great powers are not averse to finding a new basis for intervention, provided their vital interests are at stake or they perceive no alternatives to intervention. The possibility of

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a nuclear conflict will certainly bring pressures on both India and Pakistan to desist from war; short of that, Kashmir is an unlikely place for UN-led intervention. ■

CONCLUSION

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NOTES

War and peace do not follow the same logic in unconsolidated democratizing states that is followed in established democracies with fully consolidated nation-states. The connection between democracy and peace was at best tenuous in South Asia. Democratic periods did not bring peace; nondemocratic regimes did not always pursue the path of war. Kashmir’s experience shows that more than regime type is responsible for conflict. In Kashmir we need to consider the scarred history of partition, the communal divide, the rival versions of historical narratives, the perceptions of weakness and opportunities, and the strategic alliances, both military and diplomatic, with powerful actors on the world stage. These are the compulsions of nation-state consolidation. Russett could have limited his theory to fully established nation-states that were democratic. In that case, his thesis would have been irrelevant to India and Pakistan, but he specifically comments on them in advancing his argument. The courses of war and diplomacy in South Asia suggest that he is wrong to think that democratic development will eliminate the scourge of war. That proposition applied to neither the pre-1988 period nor to the 1990s, when Pakistan began to make its transition to democracy. As far as Kashmir is concerned, imperatives of national consolidation have trumped the forces of democracy every time.

1. “If people in democracy perceive themselves as autonomous, selfgoverning people who share norms of live and let-live, they will respect the rights of others to self-determination if those others are also perceived as selfgoverning and hence not easily led into aggressive foreign policies by a selfserving elite.” Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post–Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 31. 2. Michael Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating Democratic Peace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), p. xvii. 3. I am using “democratic peace thesis” as shorthand for the debate on this question. It is more appropriately a hypothesis establishing correlation between democracy and peace, that is, that democracies do not wage wars on each other and therefore the spread of democracy will lead to world peace.

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4. For a historical account of the origins of the Kashmir problem, see Jyoti Bhushan Das Gupta, Jammu and Kashmir (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968); Sumit Ganguly, The Origins of War in South Asia, 2d ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); and H. V. Hodson, The Great Divide: Britain-IndiaPakistan (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1969). 5. The kingdom of Kashmir consisted of what is today the state of Jammu-Kashmir, Azad Kashmir, Ladakh, Jammu and its northern territories, and Aksai Chin. Since the 1948 cease-fire, Azad Kashmir is held by Pakistan; Jammu-Kashmir, Ladakh, and Jammu are within India; the northern territories have been absorbed into Pakistan; Aksai Chin was occupied by China after the 1962 war with India. 6. Major General Akbar Khan, Raiders in Kashmir (Karachi: Pak Publishers, 1990). 7. Reliable accounts suggest that Prime Minister Nehru agreed to extend assistance to the maharajah only if he signed the instrument of accession and if the sheikh endorsed the accession to India. The first was necessary to provide legal cover to military assistance; the second was necessary to gain popular endorsement from the people in Kashmir. The maharajah signed the instruments of accession in late October 1947. The Indian troops were promptly airlifted into the valley. They managed to halt the advance of the raiders, but not before Pakistan had gained a third of the valley. In January 1948, believing in the validity and justness of India’s claims, Nehru submitted the dispute to the UN. Since then the UN has made numerous proposals to resolve the dispute, but they have been rejected by India and Pakistan. Alistair Lamb believes that the Indian troops were in Kashmir even before the maharajah had signed the order and that India forced Maharajah Hari Singh to accede in its favor. Prem Shankar Jha has refuted Lamb’s construction of events of 1947–1948. For these controversies, see Alistair Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, 1846–1990 (Hertingfordbury, UK: Roxford Books, 1991); and Prem Shankar Jha, Kashmir, 1947: Rival Versions of History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). 8. For a reliable account of the war, see Russell Brines, The IndoPakistani Conflict (New York: Pall Mall, 1968). 9. For the latest study of the 1971 conflict, see Richard Sisson, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); for a brief account of India’s role in the Bangladesh War and its implications for Kashmir, see Maya Chadda, Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 84–101. 10. For a masterful account of U.S. policy toward India and Pakistan, see Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 11. For Pakistan’s role in President Reagan’s anti-Soviet strategy during the Afghan conflict, see Maya Chadda, Paradox of Power: The United States in Southwest Asia, 1973–1984 (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1986), pp. 175–193. 12. Harinder Baweja, “Resounding Rebuff,” India Today, 30 November 1995. 13. The fragmentation of the insurgent movement is detailed in Mushtaqur Rahman, Divided Kashmir: Old Problems, New Opportunities for India, Pakistan, and the Kashmiri People (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996), pp. 148–155.

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14 Gull Mohd.Wani, Kashmir Politics: Problems and Prospects (Springfield, Va.: Natraj Books, 1993), p. 112. 15. For rival views on Kashmir, see 1947–1997; The Kashmir Dispute at Fifty: Charting Paths to Peace, report on the visit of an independent study team to India and Pakistan sponsored by the Kashmir Study Group, 1997. 16. Associated Press, 14 June 1995; Reuters, 31 December 1995. 17. Raju Thomas, Democracy, Security, and Development in India (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 158. 18. Ibid., p. 147. 19. Kashmir Study Group, The Kashmir Dispute at Fifty. 20. Ibid., p. 35.

7

Conclusion

Both the methods adopted and the conclusions arrived at in this study of democracy in South Asia are sharply at variance with the current discourse on the subject. The existing literature takes the poverty, corruption, instability, and endemic violence in the region as evidence that democracy is either nonexistent or, at best, of a very inferior variety. It arrives at these conclusions by comparing “actual” conditions to an idealized template of how democracy functions in Europe and North America and, therefore, how it ought to function elsewhere. I have pursued a different line of inquiry. I have preferred to study the process of democratization in three countries of South Asia—Pakistan, India, and Nepal—and to embed this study in a broader context of nationstate consolidation. These countries were chosen because they provide three very different starting points in the democratization process and because of the widely varying degrees of success they have achieved thus far. I have concluded that democracy is well established in India; its prospects vary in Pakistan and Nepal. Democratic breakdown cannot be ruled out, but it is more likely in Pakistan, as the October 1999 events show, than in Nepal. In its short life of just over half a century, Pakistan has already undergone one surgical excision, in 1971. This not only halved its population and reduced its territory by a third but severely eroded its raison d’être as a homeland for Muslims of South Asia. Inevitably, it is a country where the consolidation not just of territory but of national identity is an overarching concern. At the other end, Nepal is a territorially stable monarchy (a constitutional one since 1990), where the evolution of democracy has been closely linked to its modernization and the emergence of a middle class, much as it was in Europe. However, this development has been severely skewed by structural hindrances and

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political chicanery, not to mention economic dependence on its giant neighbor, India. The century of exploitation by the Ranas and then the monarchy had legitimized the feudal system of spoils until the early 1960s. It had made Nepal economically stagnant and underdeveloped. Its small, landlocked domestic market—and that for four out of the five decades since the British departed from the subcontinent Nepal’s only natural market, the northern Indian plain, was all but closed to India (because of the country’s own autarchic model of development)—severely limited the pace of internal change. The stagnant economy and a slow pace of modernization delayed the emergence of a vocal, modern middle class that could have spearheaded a movement for political change. In Pakistan, the oligarchic elements dominated by the military and bureaucracy have prevented or crushed popular movements for democratic change. Nepal and Pakistan, are, for very different reasons, therefore, transitional democracies, liable to break down and revert to the previous autocratic pattern of governance. India, by contrast, is much farther down the road and—it is the argument of this book—deserves to be treated as a relatively consolidated democracy. This book has a secondary purpose. It is to correct an imbalance in the study of democracy that is becoming more and more noticeable with the passage of time. The study of democracy has so far largely bypassed the experience of the very large number of countries in Asia and Africa that have adopted it as the chosen form of government. This has been especially true of South Asia and has been least explicable in the case of India, where democratic modes of governance have enjoyed an unbroken record of development, change, and adaptation for threequarters of a century. This may be partly because the comparativists who write on democratization as a global process have paid little attention to developments in South Asia; the area experts have produced a rich body of work and have for the most part stressed the uniqueness of South Asian states. This book seeks to bridge this gap. It argues that the experiences of countries that together represent almost a quarter of humanity ought to be included in any discourse if its purpose is the identification of universal norms. There are two broad streams of argument about the way democracies evolve and the criteria that should be used to gauge their progress: the structuralist and the elite bargain theories. The structuralists make the removal of poverty and social inequality—and the dissolution of traditional loyalties to intermediate groups based on caste, ethnicity, and religion—a precondition for democracy. This is what one might call the normative, or “template,” approach to the study of democracy. The elite bargain theorists, by contrast, focus on the way in which various

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elites—both traditional and modern—strike the bargains that result in stable consensus or compromise-based government. This approach has the advantage in that it eschews explicit value judgments. But by virtue of the methodology it adopts, it focuses too much on the “bargaining process” among elites that are fully articulated at a given moment in time. It therefore fails to catch within its model the implied, usually unacknowledged bargains that these explicit actors strike with new elites that are in the process of formation—whose influence they feel but whose leaders have either not emerged or whom they cannot identify. The elite bargain approach, therefore, fails to account for the process by which democracies adapt to and survive even in societies that are experiencing rapid social and economic changes. Neither approach, therefore, fully captures the “real world of democracy,” of which the three South Asian countries studied here form an important part. The structuralists fail because they examine political democracy from the endpoint of its development. This, almost by definition, makes it difficult for them to evaluate the process of development, that is, of democratization. The elite bargain approach to the study of democracy fills this lacuna to a considerable extent by distinguishing between transitional and consolidated democracies. But theorists of this school have not been able to resist the temptation to pass value judgements on historical processes that do not replicate the experience of Western Europe or the United States. As a result, their analysis has gradually become permeated with the notions of low- versus high-quality democracies that reflect the abiding influence of the structural perspective. This study accepts the key assumption elite bargain theorists make: that at a particular juncture in history it is possible for countries to shed an authoritarian past and make a transition to democracy. It does not, however, subscribe to the criteria of democratization laid down by the elite bargain theorists. Instead, it proposes that democratic development be contextualized to accommodate the compulsions of nationbuilding and consolidation and the stresses that are generated when social and economic change, indeed the exercise of democratic power itself, throws up new elites. The inclusion of nation-building compulsions is not intended to excuse, much less justify, the excesses that a state (born out of the bargain between existing fully articulated elites) may perpetrate on its subjects; rather it is to understand them and to assess whether they are transitional or terminal. The purpose, therefore, is to construct the real world of democracy within which South Asian leaders are compelled to make their choices. This study comes to three broad conclusions. First, in countries that are trying to combine national consolidation with democratization,

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the progress of the latter can be gauged less by the success of the state in upholding the rights of the individual than by its success in widening the area of consent by striking bargains with an ever-larger number of its constituent parts. These parts are its ethnic, caste, and religious nationalities. Such bargains may be reached outside the electoral process but have to be legitimized by it if democracy is to be consolidated. The nature of this bargain alters notions of equality, justice, and majority rule—the key ideas that define democracy. Second, this study suggests that the presence or absence of poverty, instability, corruption, and violence are not so much indices of failure or success in establishing democracy as limiting parameters within which the attempt has to be made. Far from being a sign of failure to democratize, poverty is an inherited condition born of one of several possible causes—colonial exploitation, smallness of market, lack of natural resources, an inclement nature, or lateness in attempting to industrialize. It therefore molds and limits the range of options before the state as it attempts to democratize. Success depends upon building institutions that are capable of functioning within these parameters. To varying degrees this is also true of corruption, instability, and violence. Autarchic state policies have often led to corruption; forging of new bargains among distinctive ethnic and caste communities that are inherently unsettling, and are a challenge to the entrenched power of privileged classes, is likely to result in violence. It is, nevertheless, true that corruption and violence and excessive personalization of politics can reverse democratization in transitional societies that are yet to develop the habit of regular elections within a constitutional framework. Pakistan’s collapsed democracy in October 1999 is a case in point. Third, a failure of democracy in one part of a country, on one issue, or at a particular moment does not mean failure of the demo cratic transformation as a whole. Briefly, this book defines democratization as democratic integration in which development is constrained by consolidation imperatives of the state (security, economy, regime stability, and participation). In transitional countries, democracy advances when mechanisms of inclusion or integration are created and attempts are made to institutionalize them through routinely held free and fair electoral contests. In other words, a successful transition can be evaluated by the success in broadening the original elite bargain and evolving the rules of peaceful transfer of power from one government, representing one combination of elites, to the next. Whether a democracy is transitional or consolidated depends upon the degree to

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which the transfer mechanism has become institutionalized and is able to withstand the shock of endogenous and exogenous social and economic changes. An analysis of events between 1988 and 1997 suggests that Pakistan began its transition in the late 1980s. It gathered momentum in the early and mid-1990s, but thus far Pakistan has not evolved the rules of consultation and power sharing between contending elites that is necessary to sustain the supremacy of civilian government. This became apparent in the tragic denouement of the entire experiment of the previous ten years. On 12 October 1999, General Pervez Musharraf, the army chief of Pakistan, staged a coup, placed Nawaz Sharif and his principle supporters under house arrest, dissolved the parliament and dismissed the provincial chief ministers, suspended the constitution, and brought Pakistan under a state of emergency. Since the abolition of the Eighth Amendment, there was no constitutional basis for dismissing elected governments, however unpopular they might be. The military could have waited out Sharif’s official term, but it felt compelled to act partly because Sharif was challenging the special preserves of the military and partly because he had alienated vast sections of the Pakistani population. One of the most serious charges against Sharif was the systematic ruination of the nation’s institutions. As of this writing, it is not clear whether the military will continue in power indefinitely, acting through an appointed caretaker-technocratic government, or, after a short period, hold elections and return Pakistan to civilian rule. Angry and frustrated by the crass abuse of power and the rampant lawlessness and pervasive corruption under Nawaz Sharif, the Pakistani public did not resist and in some instances even rejoiced in the imposition of martial law. But that was neither a rejection of democracy nor a sign of preference for military. The military takeover was perceived by most Pakistanis as a surgical necessity to save the country from the tyranny of Sharif’s majoritarian rule. The political parties and civilian leaders had failed to take Pakistan past the threshold of transition to a stable and participatory system. The quest for a democratic Pakistan has not, however, ended. The immediate question after the coup was how to reinstate the process of democracy that would avoid the downward spiral into corruption, instability, and endemic violence that had accompanied the elected governments. This question has acquired urgency because donor countries, the IMF, and World Bank have all made their financial assistance conditional upon restoration of democracy. Pakistan faces a terrible dilemma: military rule brings order, but it is the order of the graveyard; democracy

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provides space for widening public participation, but it also brings uncertainty and lawlessness that defeats the very purpose of democracy. That is the real world of democratization for Pakistan. Clearly, Pakistan needs to find a way to make civilian governments more accountable and responsive. That cannot happen unless such governments are first restored and periodically punished by the people for their failure to deliver. Although the Eighth Amendment was abolished by Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan continues to be a dyarchy, ruled at once by the civilian authority and the armed forces. The relationship between the two has been problematic throughout Pakistan’s history. Important areas of economy, security, and governance remain outside the civilian purview. And it is not clear whether the postcoup civilian government will ever gain control over these areas. Pakistan’s transition is incomplete and fragile mainly because its leaders have failed to balance the pulls of democratization with the pressures of state consolidation. Nepal’s transition is threatened by deeply embedded structural economic problems and a rising gap between expectations from democracy and its results. Regime stability remains a serious issue and prevents a successful transition. Chapter 5 examines three transformations in India—the caste revolution, ethnic conflicts, and the emergence of rule by coalitions—the most explicit form of elite bargain possible in a democracy. It concludes that India is a consolidated democracy in that there is no other avenue for forming governments but elections. India’s experience suggests that democratic development can take place side by side with sporadic violence, sporadic use of the state’s coercive apparatus, corruption, and poverty. Although these may slow down the democratic transformation, they are unable to prevent it. In studying the development of democracy in India, we need to separate the stability of democracy from governmental stability and evolve a different framework for assessing what is good governance (removal of poverty, clean government, rule of law, preventing violence) and what is essential for democracy in view of its different setting. The wider implications of these differences are discussed below. ■

LARGER IMPLICATIONS OF DEMOCRATIC DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTH ASIA

First, democratic development cannot be studied in a social and historical void; it needs to be studied within a historical context. It should not be seen as an end in itself but as a means to an end—national consolidation. The interactions between the inherited past and the aspired-to

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future define the social setting within which democracy must function. This book argues that democratic integration—an integration not only of diverse social and economic groups but of diverse dreams for the future—is the test for evaluating advance or retreat of democracy. Second, cultural heterogeneity and ethnic overlap make South Asia’s democratic development different from that presumed in models of early democracies. The difference lies in the culturally defined communities, the way they define identities, the fierceness with which they contest them, and the burden of history they carry. The discussions of Sikh and Assamese ethnic nationalism, the Mohajir violence in Pakistan, and the ethnic mobilization in Nepal provide instances of how the confluence of history, politics, and identity challenge democracy in these late-developing democracies and why the state is the only agency to mediate conflicts if democracy is to stay on course. Third, this book underscores the different role that democratic institutions have to play in South Asia. The fact that the elite bargain is between culturally defined groups based on caste, ethnicity, and religion in addition to modern ones, like trade unions and industrial associations, means that South Asia’s political parties have to fulfill demands that arise from the traditional identities and demands of their supporters, in addition to the interests of the modern ones. This burdens them with tasks that their counterparts in mature industrial democracies do not face. For instance, not only must they mobilize voters and distribute offices; they must safeguard the identities of the communities they represent. The Akali Dal, for instance, represents Sikh interests in local and national politics. It also assumes the nonpolitical role of administering the Sikh Gurdwaras and temples through its affiliate organization, the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee (SGPC). The marriage of politics to ethnicity or religion makes compromise, which is the basis of all elite bargaining, much harder to achieve. The dual demands on the representative institutions argue for a qualified understanding of political instability, inasmuch as conflicts over inclusion may advance the cause of democracy rather than retard it. In South Asia, institutions are required to accommodate particular ethnic or caste interests and are therefore subject to pressures as new groups challenge the earlier, entrenched ones. Instability is partly a result of the fight for inclusion among the established by the newly emerged groups. The contrast between Tamil Nadu (or different parts of Tamil Nadu at different times) and Karnataka, on the one hand, and Bihar on the other shows how inclusion and power sharing defuses ethnic conflict and enhances democracy and how resistance does the opposite. Tamil Nadu saw a

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powerful backward-caste revolt against elite-caste domination as far back as the early years of the century; Karnataka witnessed a similar movement in the early years of independence. Both were accommodated, and neither state witnessed anything but transient violence on this account. By contrast, in Bihar the state apparatus tacitly joined hands with the elite castes to resist similar movements. This led to a rising spate of violence that has now virtually become institutionalized in several parts of Bihar. In all three cases, the main objective of the culturally defined group that adopted agitational and, later, violent tactics was to be included in the benefits of democracy and modernization. The behavior of the Akali Dal in Punjab, the Asom Gano Parishad in Assam, and the Mohajirs in Pakistan also reveals this tactical use of violence. It follows from this that the strength of the democratic impulse cannot be measured by the absence of conflicts, as the elite bargainists and structuralists seem to argue. It has to be evaluated side by side and in the context of violent conflict. Fourth, in contrast to the European democracies, the process of democratization should not be seen as being in opposition to the process of state formation. In Europe, this opposition arose from the fact that the nation-state was formed several centuries before democratization began and was formed as a monarchy. The conflicts are therefore between democracy and monarchy or, later, between democracy and other forms of authoritarian states. In South Asia the European precondition was fulfilled only in Nepal. In India and Pakistan democratization had to take place alongside the formation of the state. The upsurge and establishment of ethnic constituencies are not, therefore, manifestations of the democratic impulse; it is a process of bargaining with the existing state. That is the lesson to be learned from the secession of Bangladesh, where the Pakistani state was unable to make the compromise, and the return of democracy to Punjab after nine years of violence, where the Indian state was able to make that compromise. From this it follows that the progress of democracy, or the strengthening of democratic sentiment, can only be gauged within the framework of the existing state. A movement that seeks to break away from that state cannot be called democratic or undemocratic. It is a movement for the creation of another state, not a movement for creating or enlarging democracy. Fifth, the existence of violence and instability is not an indication that democracy is failing to take root, because by themselves they do not necessarily prevent democratic integration or extension of the elite bargain in a consolidated democracy. Violent agitation poses a more serious problem for transitional democracies precisely because the elite

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bargain is fragile and likely to be easily upset. This book differs in assessing the role of violence in democratizing countries from the role assigned to it by the structural and elite bargain theorists. The most important difference concerns the significance of violence and the use of coercive power by the state. Both the structuralist and the elite bargain perspectives regard violence as the response of small groups to the oppression by the state. The oppression can be cultural, as when the dominant ethnic group seeks to erase the identity of the other; political, as when an authoritarian regime tries to suppress demands for democratization; or economic, as when indigenous people rebel against colonial exploitation. In all such cases, there is a presumption that the violence was somehow morally justified and liberating. This assessment has been strongly reinforced in the post–Cold War period by the rise of a very large NGO movement that professes to speak for the oppressed and regards the state and its functionaries as insensitive, corrupt, and brutal. Most analyses of ethnic upsurges in India share these views. This book takes a different view of the nature and purpose of violence in South Asia. If in international relations war is diplomacy by other means, then in a multiethnic state, violence is politics by other means (this is not meant to be a moral endorsement of violent tactics but a description of ground reality). In India, both in Punjab and the Northeast, the outbreak of violence signaled the loss of legitimacy of an existing compact, or bargain, between elites. Such bargains have unraveled when central leaders have feared for their political survival and become moved by the mistaken belief that somehow the nation is safe in their hands (Indira Gandhi, the legatee to Nehru, believed that the opposition was too fragmented to rule). Bargains have collapsed when an ethnic community is hopelessly divided into a large number of warring factions. Political bargains erode also because of larger changes in the society and economy unforeseen at the time of the original compact. In Punjab, both the immediate and larger causes were present in the early 1980s. But in itself, neither can explain Punjab’s descent into violence. In addition to the partisan agendas of the Congress and the Akali Dal, we must also consider the social change triggered by the green revolution and rapid industrialization in the towns; shrinking opportunities in nonagricultural employment, the government, and armed forces; and the closing of the escape hatch represented by immigration. In Assam, it was the advent of modern industry and trade, immigration, and modern education and the rise of exclusionary ethnic ideologies that resulted from the combination of the three. Excessive centralization of decisionmaking at the apex is certainly to blame for turning protest into insurgency, but that alone does not explain the whole. The

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advent of coalition governments in New Delhi since 1990 has not ended violence in the Northeast and Kashmir. They would have, if centralization of power alone was the cause of violence. India’s central state has steadily lost power to regional parties and ethnically defined states since 1989. One might point to the fragmentation within the secessionist movements as a contributing cause. Ethnic militants are seldom unified. Rivalries within these groups have frequently sabotaged negotiations and prolonged conflicts. Violence has also resulted from the inability or reluctance of existing elites to accommodate the new groups and new demands; however, the examples of Punjab and Assam show that an important reason for the inability to accommodate may be the priority given to territorial consolidation and political control through regime stabilization (of Congress governments in both cases). The latter was the main cause of rigidity in Punjab before “Operation Bluestar.” In Assam the imperative of territorial consolidation dominated the central government’s responses from the very beginning. The above two imperatives have put constraints on the political accommodation that underpins India’s democracy. This brings us to the second important difference between this book and both the elite bargain and structuralist analyses of democracy. In both of them, no matter who fires the first shot, there is a strong predilection for believing that the violence was initiated by the state. This is obviously so when, as in several Latin American dictatorships and China, the authorities have responded to peaceful demands for democratization with imprisonment, externment, or assassination by government death squads. But it is also deemed to be so when the insurgents have fired the first shot, because they are seen to be reacting to entrenched and institutionalized structures of oppression. In the Indian experience, however, violence by subordinate groups can serve a different purpose: to signal the need for a new power-sharing agreement. Armed insurgency thus becomes one end of a very wide spectrum of coercive acts initiated by the subordinate groups to draw attention to their demands. These range from bandhs and gheraos—extremely aggressive forms of collective actions that have no parallels in the West—to huge rallies involving hundreds of thousands of people, to the systematic burning of state property. The reaction of the authorities is therefore correspondingly different to what it might have been had the violence been aimed at the state. It is characterized by reluctance to take stern repressive action or mete out severe punishments, because such responses could harden the agitators’ demands and make later compacts more difficult. This is certainly the case with potentially

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large-scale ethnic militancy that involves overlapping ethnic nationalities that threaten India’s borders. Such violence must be separated from localized caste and communal violence, in which, frequently, police inaction or partisanship has permitted the violence to spiral out of control. In the former category of violence, everyone (with the exception of hard-core separatists) understands from the start that it would be transitory in nature, its purpose to bring the state back into a new equilibrium and not disrupt equilibrium once and for all. Many apparent paradoxes are explained by this reluctance (for instance, the reluctance of the central government to act even against those who have committed heinous crimes in pursuit of political ends; the killer of Baba Gurbachan Singh is now the head priest of the Golden Temple, and Laldenga, once a terrorist, became the chief minister of Mizoram). Sixth, this book takes a different view of poverty and its connection to democratic advance. Although equality is a laudatory goal, democratization can coexist with substantial levels of poverty. Removal of poverty can be a goal of both authoritarian and democratic governments. In fact, one might argue that the command economies of China and the Soviet Union made equality a primary goal. It is thus difficult to understand why Louise T. Brown dismisses Nepal’s struggle to stabilize a parliamentary democracy because elected leaders have failed to ameliorate poverty. Removal of poverty was not the principle objective of the grand bargain between the king and the Nepali Congress that ushered in democracy in 1990, nor was it their central quest thereafter. The main thrust behind the developments since 1990 was to expand the role of political actors, leaders, ideologies, groups, and parties. Promises of clean government and economic growth were made, but their main purpose was to score an advantage over opponents in popular contests. Much the same is true in democratic countries in Europe and North America. Why should we thus hold Nepali democracy to a higher standard of performance on promises of economic equality? Seventh, critics frequently characterize Nepal and Pakistan as nondemocracies and India as a low-quality one because of political instability. Transforming democracies are by definition unstable, since the process remains to be institutionalized; the rules of the game are subject to diverse interpretations. The records of coalition rule in India under the National Front, United Front, and BJP governments argue for a more nuanced assessment of instability. As pointed out in Chapter 5, we need to separate democracy from governmental instability. This distinction is routinely drawn by students of French and Italian politics. It is not easy, therefore, to understand the reluctance to draw the same

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distinction in the study of Indian politics. The end of Congress dominance has expanded choices and enlarged the space for political contestation. Since 1985, at the state level a stable two- or three-party competitive system has come into effect; underprivileged sections of the population, the schedule castes, and schedule tribes have gained enormous political voice through the BSP and Dalit-dominated republican parties. The regionalization of Indian politics has also given ethnic, caste, and religious communities greater leverage in determining the national agenda. This is why many scholars have pointed out that the “social justice” agenda has become increasingly prominent in India’s post-1990 political discourse. Behind the unstable and short-lived coalition governments at the center, there is growing stability and deepening of democratization in the Indian polity. This is not to suggest that all is well with the state of India or that corrupt leaders and ineffective governments are not a problem. But they have not prevented steady decentralization of politics, greater dispersal of power, and expansion of democracy based on a whole range of local-, district-, and state-level accommodations among competing groups and parties. Looking back over the decade of the 1990s, one might suggest that India has been engaged in reconstituting its state within the regionalized frame of the post–Congress Raj democracy. As far as the public is concerned (despite resentment over base practices of politicians and excessive corruption in public life), there are no second thoughts about democracy, and elections remain the only avenue for constituting a legitimate government. Eighth, and last, the ideals of democracy have different meanings in heterogeneous countries attempting to achieve democratization within the constraint imposed by the need to consolidate the state. In all three countries studied here, equality frequently means equality of political and economic opportunity for ethnic, caste, and religious communities in their collective persona. Likewise, freedom is often interpreted as cultural and political autonomy to fully and freely express culturally defined identities. Notions of economic rights are similarly regarded. Laws and regulations are also subject to tests of group advancement. This acknowledgment of group identity does not imply a derogation from the state’s duty to protect the rights of the individual. It is an acknowledgment that these rights are also mediated by the individual’s group identity. It constitutes an acknowledgment that the protection of one at the expense of the other can have an adverse effect on national consolidation, stability, and security and can, therefore, on occasion be self-defeating. This study does not subscribe to the thesis argued by

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Atul Kohli and Ayesha Jalal: that decentralization is the key to democracy in South Asia. Decentralization alone will not enlarge the sphere of democracy. We need to strengthen the mechanism of democratic integration based on bargains between the state and its constituent parts (ethnic, caste, and religious communities) and a popular process by which such bargains can be routinely legitimized. The current policy debate on centralization versus decentralization is not only misleading; worse, it fails to understand how democracy advances in South Asia’s cultural and historical setting. Not a single one of the political transformations in India—the devolution of power to the federating states of the Union, the creation of a third and fourth tier of self-government in the Regional Development Councils and mandatorily elected local village councils (Panchayats), the fall of the Congress from dominance and the rise of ethnic and caste-based parties—supports Jalal’s argument that India is a quasiauthoritarian state because it is engaged in constructing a monolithic nationalism. The Indian political system is diverse and multicentered. Political discourse between its constituent groups is not only intense but getting more so all the time, as reflected in the steady rise in the share of the electorate that casts its vote. One needs to distinguish between what leaders say and what they actually do. They may reify the notion of one culture and one nation in their speeches, but in practice they opt for the politics of collective identities and bargains between them. This book has argued that, contrary to the arguments of the democratic peace thesis, development of democracy does not necessarily promote peace. Democracy is circumscribed by the consolidation imperatives of security, growth, and regime stability. The democratic peace theorists show the same unacknowledged biases derived from Western historical experiences that elite bargain theorists and structuralists have displayed in their discussion of the global spread of democracy. This book disputes the proposition that regime type determines the state of war and peace. Democratization in India and Pakistan in the 1990s has led to quite the opposite outcome. Tensions have mounted on the Indo-Pakistani border throughout these years and led to serious armed clashes between India and Pakistan. The reasons are to be found not in inadequate democratization, although that may be true, but in exogenous factors: shifts in the international and regional balance of power and mutual perceptions of threats and opportunities and weaknesses. Pakistan’s elected governments have been no less warlike than its pre-1990 military governments. And in India, the advent of the Hindu nationalist government led to fence-mending instead of preemptive forays against Pakistan that everyone had feared.

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The inclusion of the state (a particular kind of state) in the definition of democracy—as in this book—does, however, raise a moral question. Are we condoning violence and reprehensible state conduct by including its imperatives in the descriptions of democratization? This book is not intended to rationalize police misconduct, caste and communal atrocities, abuse of power by government functionaries, or the violation of individual and human rights by governments. Its purpose is to plead for a historically and culturally informed perspective within which to chart the journey to democracy. It is to construct the real world context within which South Asia’s democratic leaders are daily called upon to make decisions. This means that the state is both an overarching entity and a subject of bargain as South Asian countries journey toward or away from democracy. Nowhere are the contrasts between the ideal and the real more starkly evident than in the events leading to the dismissal of the elected government of Nawaz Sharif in October 1999. For Pakistan, the journey to democracy will be through a series of advances and setbacks in which one may be called upon to choose between a lawless democracy that undermines the institutions of the state or a state without democracy that forever locks out freedom of expression, participation, and assembly for the people. Clearly, leaders will have to be constrained from mistaking ruling majorities as a license to abuse power. A compromise formula that establishes such parameters might not be “democratic” in the ideal sense of the word, but it might take Pakistan past the initial stumbling blocks, enhance the prospects of genuinely representative political parties, and educate political actors in the art of democratic integration. There is no respite, however, for the students of democratization. They would be required to judge whether autocratic majority rule of civilian leaders like Nawaz Sharif is less likely to harm future prospects for a democracy, whether martial-law government offers a better alternative for the restoration of democracy at a future date, or whether some compromise arrangement will better serve the cause of democratization in the long run. Current theories have ignored the context and judged outcomes as if they could be separated from the pressures of economy, security, and stability, that is, of nation-building. The implications of South Asia’s experience for other heterogeneous, newly democratizing countries can hardly be overstressed. Where overlapping ethnicity is a serious problem and where states are a conglomeration of segmented cultural communities, as in Russia and Eastern Europe, democracy can advance only by forging accommodation and bargain between the state and its constituent parts, although that alone may not be enough. Such bargains have to be based on cre-

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ation and institutionalization of a composite, overarching identity (even if it is an artifact). This effort requires a strong state that enjoys authority over the national agenda and is able to thereby permit free and fair exercise of regional autonomy. Only a democracy can handle the range and complexity of accommodations required to achieve this. India has succeeded in creating a mechanism for forging accommodation, although its application is both selective and discrete. Despite these deficiencies, the Indian experience offers a distinctive third way to achieve both democracy and national consolidation. The current international debate needs to include that experience in the democratic norms to make them truly universal.

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Index Abdullah, Farooq, 213 Abdullah, Sheikh Mohammad, 196 Afghan Mujahideens, 37, 71, 200 Afghan War, 37, 71, 100 AGP. See Asom Gano Parishad Akali Dal, 46, 156, 162 All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), 151 All-India National Congress. See Congress Annan, Kofi, 216 anti-panchayat movement, 59 Antiterrorism Ordinance (ATO), 89 Asom Gano Parishad (AGP), 47, 151, 170 Assam: autonomy, 170–173; migration, 164; political movement, 47, 154; recognition, 166 Association of Assam Students Union (AASU), 170 autarchy, 15 authoritarianism: control, 210; covert, 143; institutional power, 5 authoritarian regime, 26, 102–105, 131, 134, 137 Awami League, 30

Babri mosque, 50, 179, 184 Back-to-the-Village National Campaign (BVNC), 58, 59, 120 Backward Castes, 17, 43, 146, 151 Backward Classes (BCs), 152 Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), 151, 163 Baluch, 25, 27, 32, 99, 154 Bangladesh War, 60, 199

bargaining theories, 6 Basic Needs Plan (BNP), 124 Begum Nusrat Bhutto case, 70 Bharatiya Janata Dal (BJD), 175 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 49 Bhattarai, Krishna Prasad, 114 Bhindranwale, Jarnail Singh, 13, 46, 159, 161 Bhutto, Benazir, 68, 74, 83, 84, 93–96, 100, 107; execution of, 34; and military, 94; return from exile, 71 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 30, 103, 202; execution of, 34; party leadership, 30–34, 103; relationship with bureaucracy, 31, 102; relationship with military, 31, 34, 102 Big Man, 128, 131 Bihar, 17, 143 bikas, 137 Bizenjo, Ghaus Bux, 32 Bogra, Mohammad Ali, 25 Britain: and India, 11, 38, 54; Raj, 154 BSP. See Bahujan Samaj Party bullock capitalists, 150 Burki, Shahid Javed, 73, 77, 86, 87 BVNC. See Back-to-the-Village National Campaign

Cabinet Mission Plan (1946), 196 castes: as basis of discrimination, 10; conflicts, 13, 50, 153, 173, 179; elimination, 147; hierarchy, 146; mobility of, 130, 137; and mobilization strategies in India, 145,

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154; most backward, 151; revolution, 146; social differentiation along lines of, 11, 122, 227; support base of congress, 162; support base of Janata, 49. See also Backward Castes; Schedule Castes central state: in India, 159; in Kashmir, 195 Chief of Army Staff (COAS), 72, 78 China: and India, 40, 166, 169, 184, 197, 211; and Nepal, 50, 126; and Pakistan, 104 Coalition Government, 12, 173–187, 232 COAS. See Chief of Army Staff Code of Conduct, 181 Cold War, 29, 35, 46, 177, 179, 185, 199, 206, 209, 213, 216 Communist Party of India (CPI), 49 Communist Party of India–Marxist/ Leninist (CPI-ML), 49 compacts, in Punjab: first, 156; second, 158; third, 161 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), 91, 186, 211 Congress Party, 146, 151, 159, 182 Congress Working Committee, 177 consolidation, of nation-state, 9, 221–223 corruption, 14, 16, 48, 125, 127, 136, 149, 167, 176, 187, 209, 224, 234; simplicitor, 14 CTBT. See Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

defensive alliances, 17 deKlerk, F. W., 115 democracy: accommodation, 210; collapse, 156; consolidated, 7, 18; defined, 193; demand for, 3; development, 226; different theory, 152; dominant perspectives, 4–7; electoral, 23; end, 106; evolution, 18, 222; failure, 224; globalization, 17; integration, 169, 227; low-quality, 5, 8, 143; party-less, 36, 53, 81; structural definition, 5–7; study of, 4; transitional, 7, 15, 107, 129, 138 Democratic Peace Thesis, 17, 203, 205, 208, 293 democratization, 6, 9, 18, 60, 138, 206, 214, 215, 223; contextualizing, 17; progressive, 118

development corridors (Nepal), 123 Doctrine of Necessity, 35 Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), 151 dynastic rule, 95

East India Company, 51 economic nationalism, 139 economy: capitalist, 5; in India, 15, 40, 43, 46, 148, 155, 156, 164, 167, 185; in Nepal, 53, 124–137, 226; in Pakistan, 31, 73, 77, 85, 86, 89, 105 Election Commission of India (EC), 181 elite bargaining, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 67, 80, 92, 122, 193, 223 emergency, declaration of: Indian, 43; Pakistan, 225 ethnic: accommodation, 165; conflicts, 104, 153, 179, 227; fragmentation, 135; heterogeneity, 165; nationalism, 163; separatism, 8, 134, 179 Ethnic Compact, 160 four-tier system, 5, 7

Ghandhi, Indira: assassination of, 47; elections, 43, 166; and emergency, 43; and Greater Punjab, 158; and Green Revolution, 150; and military, 197; and opposition government, 43; personalized style of politics, 160; state-level politics, 43 Ghandhi, Rajiv: and Assam, 171; assassination of, 50; defeat of, 126; elections, 174; peace policy, 47 Ghandhi, Sonia, 176, 186 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 121 Gorka Kingdom, 50 Gowda, Deve, 48 Grant of Suba, 158 Green Revolution, 16, 45, 150, 161 gross domestic product (GDP), 185 gross national product (GNP), 122, 126 groupism (Nepal), 121 growth quadrangle, 132 Gujral, I. K., 48, 212 Gujral Doctrine, 213

Haq, Mehbub-ul, 72 Haq, Zia-ul (General): death of, 68, 74; and elections, 13; and Pakistan, 34, 37

INDEX

Hindu: Dogra, 196; militancy, 48; nationalism, 48, 96, 173, 210; in Punjab, 159 Hindu-Muslim violence, 179 Hindutva, 183 Hussain, Altaf, 71, 101

IMF. See International Monetary Fund Indemnity Bill, 70 India, 38–50; and Britain, 11, 38, 40, 54; caste politics, 49, 145, 153; Center-state relations, 159; and China, 40, 166, 169, 184, 197, 211; coercion, 13, 145, 155, 163, 169, 172; communal holocaust, 38; and communism, 39; congress rule, 16, 28, 39, 41, 146, 151, 159, 209; constitution, 39, 169; as democracy, 11, 14; early consolidation, 9; economy, 15, 40, 43, 46, 148, 155, 156, 164, 167, 185; elections, 23, 38, 43, 169, 176, 198; as empire-state, 40; ethnic separatism, 38, 40, 48; five-year plan, 42; France compared, 12; geography, 155; Ghandhi, Indira, 43, 150, 158, 166; Ghandhi, Rajiv, 46, 47, 174; industry, 150; integration, 41, 165, 182; and Islam, 198, 206; language, 38, 39, 41; map of, 144; National Development Council, 177; national emergency, 43, 60; nation-state making, 40, 61, 153; under Nehru, 39, 41, 156, 166; nuclear weapons, 184, 196, 210; opposition governments, 43; and Pakistan, 41, 46, 183, 184, 206; party politics, 150; princely states, 38, 196; separatists, 8; state-level politics, 43, 152; state stability, 12; as two-party system, 12; war, 41 India Independence Act (1947), 195–196 Indian Kashmir, 37 Indian National Movement, 147 Indian version of Kashmir’s identity, 203 Indira-Mujib Pact, 164 Indo-Nepali relations, 117, 129, 132 Indo-Pakistan relations, 183, 193, 206, 211, 214 Indo-Pakistan Wars, 196, 200

243

International Monetary Fund (IMF), 37, 87, 216 Interservice Intelligence Agency (ISI), 37, 101 Intra-elite struggles, 60 Islam: ideology of Pakistani state, 102; in India, 198, 206, 207; in Pakistan, 71, 102 Islamabad, 47 Islamic Democratic Alliance (IDA), 74 Islamic Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI), 74. 101 Islamic resurgence, 205 Islamist narrative, 203

Jamaat-e-Islami, 78 Jammu and Kashmir, 204, 205 Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), 201 Jan Andolan, 113, 121, 122, 125 Janata Dal, 175 Janata government, 45 Janata Party, 125 Janjua, Asif Nawaz (General), 78 jatis, 146 Jinnah Mohammed Ali: death of, 25; and Muslim League, 28; secular beliefs of, 27 Judiciary, 80, 83, 88 Junejo, Mohammad Khan, 71

Kakar, Abdul Waheed (General), 79 Kargil, 90 Kashmir: Bosnia compared, 216; center-state relations, 195; constitution, 174; election, 174; insurgency, 174, 205, 212; Islam, 198, 204; map of, 194; military, 197; nationalism, 203, 204; nation-state consolidation, 217; partition, 217; president’s rule, 197; regionalism, 217; role of Pakistan, 28, 195; separatism, 212; war, 29, 195–206 Kashmiri Dogra, 204 Kashmiri Nationalist Narrative, 203 Kashmiri Sofi Islam, 28 Khan, Abdul Ghaffar, 27 Khan, Amanullah, 201 Khan, Ghulam Ishaq, 35, 74, 75, 79, 93–96, 107 Khan, Liaquat Ali, 25, 28, 99 Khan, Mohammad Ayub (General), 25, 30

244

INDEX

Khan, Yahya (General), 197 Khudai Khidmatgars, 27 Kisan, Sabha, 153 Koirala, B. P., 55, 58, 129 Koirala, M. P., 55

Leghari, Farooq, 82, 93–96 liberalization: in India, 208; in Pakistan, 209; in Nepal, 118, 133, 139 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Sri Lankan Tamil) (LTTE), 50 Line of Control (LoC), 90, 211 linguistic regionalism, 136, 158 Lohani, Prakash, 132 Long March, 81 Longowal, Harchand Singh, 47, 161

Madhya Pradesh, 164 Mahanta, Prafulla, 171 Marri, Khair Bux, 32 martial law, 25 Mazari, Mir Balkh Sher, 78, 79 Mengal, Attaullah, 32 militant groups, 183 military-bureaucratic oligarchy, 104 Mirza, Iskander, 25 Mizo National Front (MNF), 170 Modernization Theory, 135 Mohammad, Agha Nek, 72 Mohammad, Ghulam, 25 monarchy, 5, 10 Movement to Restore Democracy (MRD), 10, 36, 69, 72, 92, 100 MQM. See Muttahida Quami Movement MRD. See Movement to Restore Democracy Musharraf, Parvez (General), 87, 90 Muslim League: in India, 156; in Pakistan, 27–29, 73, 82, 97, 102 Muslim Women’s Bill, 47 Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), 71, 74, 84, 99, 101

Naga National Council (NNC), 168, 169 NAP. See National Assembly of Pakistan Narayan, Jaya Prakash, 44, 58 Narayan, K. R., 178 National Assembly of Pakistan (NAP), 32; dissolution of, 25

National Coalition Cabinet, 55 National Democratic Alliance (NDA), 186 National Democratic Congress. See Nepal National Development Council. See India National Front (NF), 48, 49, 126, 162, 171, 202 nationalist struggles, 23, 154 National Socialist Council of Naga (NSCN), 169 Nawab of Junagadh, 38 NC. See Nepali Congress Nepal: caste politics, 51, 53, 116, 122; and China, 50, 126; coalition democracy, 128; congress, 56, 113, 115; constitution, 56, 127, 134; corruption, 125; Council of Ministers, 55; coup, 132; demand for democracy, 111; democratic integration, 116; early democracy, 51, 53, 55; economy, 53, 124–137, 226; elections, 116, 121; electoral democracy, 139; elite bargain, 111; ethnic conflicts, 104; Indo-Nepal relations, 117, 129, 132; under Koirala, 55, 57; and Latin America, 111; leftist military movement, 14, 119; map of, 112; monarchy, 24, 52–55, 113, 117, 118, 134; multiparty democracy, 128; national crisis, 114; National Democratic Congress, 116; Panchayat Raj, 52, 57, 127; parliamentary democracy, 127, 138; party politics, 51, 114, 120, 121, 127, 129, 136; population, 137; Royal Council, 55; and South Africa, 115; trade-offs, 111; Treaty of Sagauli, 51; Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 115; urbanization, 53 Nepali Congress (NC), 52, 54, 56, 57, 113, 115, 119 NF. See National Front nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 89 Northeast Council, 166 Northeastern Areas (Reorganization) Bill, 167 North West Frontier Province (NWFP), 25

INDEX

Operation Bluestar, 160

Pakistan, 24–38; under Ayub, 25, 30; Baluch, 8; Bengali, 8, 27; Benazir Bhutto, 33, 107; centralization, 92; and China, 104; coercion, 29; constitution, 25, 36, 68, 82, 88; corruption, 69, 78, 82, 89; Council for Defense and National Security, 88; coup, 91, 106, 107, 216, 225; defense, 28; early democracy, 26–30, 67, 69, 98; economy, 31, 73, 77, 85, 86, 89, 105; elections, 28, 30, 36, 67, 69, 82, 107; elite bargaining, 8; front line state, 200; and Gulf countries, 31, 73; and India, 27, 88; industry, 30, 31; and Islam, 34, 103; judiciary, 80, 83, 88; martial law, 25, 30, 36, 70, 88, 216; Military-Civil relations, 25, 26, 30, 69, 81, 85, 106, 208, 209, 216, 225; Mohajir, 8; National Assembly, 70, 75; National Security Council, 70, 91; nation-state, 99; under Nawaz Sharif, 74, 76, 79, 87, 101–107, 207, 214, 225; nuclear weapons, 32, 77, 89, 200; partition, 24; politics, 29, 67; presidential powers, 69; prime minister’s powers, 80, 178; protests, 71; Punjab domination, 24; secularism, 92; socialism, 32; strategic security, 34; and United States, 29, 73, 104; urbanization, 30; Yahya Kahn, 31; under Zia, 34, 38 Pakistan Democratic Movement Pakistan Human Rights Commission, 99, 122 Pakistan Muslim League (PML), 68 Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), 31–34 Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), 30, 79, 81, 87, 97, 102; and elections, 68; internal tensions, 33; opposition to, 30, 35 Panchayat Raj, 52, 57, 119, 127 Panchayat system, 124 party-less elections, 36, 70 political identity, 98–103; patronage, 96–97; personality, 93–96; popularity, 97–98 postcolonial period, 23

245

PPP. See Pakistan People’s Party Punjab, 156, 158, 164; compromise, 157; democracy, 156; domination of, 24; Grant of Suba, 158; violence, 156 Punjab Accord, 161, 172 Punjab Congress Party, 157

quasi-authoritarian democracy. See democracy, low-quality

Rahman, Mujibur, 33 Rana Regime, 60, 117 Ranbir, Sena, 153 Rao, P. V. Narasimha, 48, 173 Rashtriya Janata Dal, 151 Rashtriya Panchayat, 57, 113, 121 Rashtriya Praja Parishad (RPP), 128, 132 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 39 relative deprivation, 149 religious revivalism, 160 Restoration of Constitutional Order (ROC), 70 Royal Council, 55

SAARC. See South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Sadbhavana Party, 116, 128 Saffron Brotherhood, 183 Savarna Liberation Army, 153 Sayeed, Rubiya, 201 Schedule Castes (SCs), 147, 152; Backward Classes (SC/BC), 152; Schedule Tribes (SC/ST), 148, 175 Sectarian conflicts, 102 secular federal democracy, 157 Shah Bono case, 46 Shah Dynasty, 117 Shari’a, 89 Sharif, Mian Nawaz, 68, 74, 87, 93–96 Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 200 Shekhar, Chandra, 50, 58 Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee (SGPC), 227 Simla Summit, 197 Singh, Fateh, 161 Singh, Maharaja Hari, 28 Singh, Master Tara, 156, 161 Singh, V. P., 48, 126, 151, 171, 178, 183, 202, 212

246

INDEX

single-party dominance, 45 Sixth Schedule, 166, 168, 171 South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), 132, 213 South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement (SAPTA), 214 Soviet Union, 77, 121, 173, 198 spoils system, 16 Sri Lankan Tamil (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, LTTE), 50 strategic choice, 6 structuralism, 7, 9

Tamil Nadu, 41, 50, 151, 227 Telugu Desam Party (TDP), 175 “third wave” of democratization, 19, 113 thule mancho. See Big Man Trade and Transit Treaty (India-Nepal), 55, 113, 125–127, 133

UML. See United Marxist Leninist Party United Front, 48

United Leftist Front (ULF), 113, 115 United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), 171 United Marxist Leninist Party (UML), 115–117, 129 United Nations (UN), 197, 215 United States of America, 46, 69, 77, 83, 85, 89, 124, 150, 176, 198, 205, 206 Uttar Pradesh (UP), 151

Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 90, 178 varna, 146 violence: and democracy, 224, 228; in India, 143, 152, 161, 179, 187, 201; in Nepal, 13, 129; in Pakistan, 13, 105

World Bank, 37, 77, 83, 85, 86, 104, 125, 130, 133, 216

Zardari, Asif Ali, 84 Ziauddin (General), 91

About the Book This original analysis of South Asia’s experience with democracy in the 1990s assumes that, if democratic norms are to be universalized, they must first absorb the interpretations and experiences of non-Western countries. Chadda contends that any discussion of democratization must be founded on mapping its course amid the constraints of state consolidation, national integration, and conflicting notions of individual and group rights. Within that context, she deconstructs four sets of developments: the repeated dismissals of elected governments in Pakistan; the dilemmas produced by the changes in caste politics, separatist confrontations in Punjab and northeast, and the end of the Congress Party’s dominance in India; the political and ideological contest over Kashmir in both India and Pakistan; and the Movement to Restore Democracy leading to a constitutional monarchy in Nepal. She exposes the underlying goals and logic of these political events to identify regime objectives and priorities, capabilities, and responses to various types of challenges. Concerned with identifying the “rules of the political game” against the backdrop of changes in international politics, Chadda addresses two broad questions: Have the political events of the 1990s been a step toward pluralism and democracy as understood in the dominant Western model; or do they demand a new definition of democracy? Ultimately, she argues, whether political development is a step toward or away from democracy can be determined only in relation to the competing demands on the state.

Maya Chadda is professor of political science at William Paterson University of New Jersey. Her publications include Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism in South Asia and Paradox of Power: The United States in Southwest Asia.

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