Two Indias.

• Author: Guha, Ramachandra
• Position: Democracy in India

I like to think of India as a "fifty-fifty" democracy. I owe this formulation to a Bollywood film I once saw which featured a great comic actor named Badruddin Jamaluddin Kazi, whose screen name was Johnny Walker (after an alleged fondness for that brand of whiskey). In this particular film he played the sidekick of a mafia don, who used him as a sounding board. Will I be able to successfully raid the bank?, asked the boss of the sidekick. Will this moll of the other gangster come over to me? To every such question Johnny Walker would rub his hands and answer, "Phiphty-phiphty, boss, phiphty-phiphty." Every project or endeavor, felt the sidekick, would have a 50 percent chance of success, 50 percent of failure.

It is much the same with the political experiment conducted by the nation of which Johnny Walker was a citizen. If one looks at the successful conduct of elections, the free movement of people and the vigorously independent press, then India is indeed a democracy. On the other hand, if one looks at the widespread corruption in public institutions, the inequalities of class and status, and the bloody and continuing battles between insurgent groups and the state, then perhaps India is not a democracy.

In 1952, when the Republic of India held its first general elections, they were dubbed the "biggest gamble in history." Evidently, the gamble worked. The country has now successfully held fifteen general elections for the national parliament, as well as countless polls for different state assemblies.

This past, hot spring, more than 400 million Indians voted in the most recent exercise of their democratic franchise. This was an elaborate process, conducted over five weeks and in six different phases.

Before the elections, all believed the verdict would be a hung parliament; that the balance of power would rest with smaller parties based on the identities of region, language or caste; and that neither of the two major parties--the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress--would get anywhere near a majority. Divisions have long existed within Indian society, and tensions among rich and poor, low caste and high caste, Left and Right, Hindus and Muslims mark the social and political landscape of contemporary India. Given these divides, both the BJP and the Congress were predicted to decline further in the polls. In a best-case scenario, either would lead a multiparty coalition over which it had little control. There was even talk of a "third front" government, composed of a dozen smaller parties, perhaps supported from the outside by the Congress or the BJP.

In the event, the voters confounded the pollsters. The Congress emerged as the single largest party, with 206 members of parliament, a good forty or fifty more than even it had hoped for. (1) With the help of its allies, it can now head a coalition government which, with luck, it can direct and effectively lead. Still, it would be a mistake to view this election as heralding an end to the tensions that have characterized the functioning of state and society in India.

Some observers have interpreted the results of these recent elections as a triumph of governance over identity. At least in terms of seats gained, the real winner is indeed the Congress, the one party that sees itself as "national," that (as the historian Mukul Kesavan once observed) attempts to be a Noah's Ark that seeks to keep all species of Indians onboard. If one were to base one's analysis solely on the performance of the Congress in the 2009 elections, one might conclude that unity was in our midst. But this would be a superficial reading of the polls.

The Indian National Congress, as the vanguard of the struggle for freedom from British rule, has been the natural party of governance ever since independence in 1947. For the last sixty-two years, Congress has run the central government in New Delhi for all but eleven. In most general elections held since independence, it has either commanded an outright majority or emerged as the party with the most seats. However, India is a union of twenty-eight states, and while the Congress has been dominant at the Centre, it has steadily ceded ground in the provinces. Thus for long stretches of time, the state of West Bengal has been ruled by left-wing parties, the state of Tamil Nadu by parties evincing regional pride. Other provinces have seen Congress governments alternate with those led by parties based on identities of caste, religion and language.

The recent election was not a referendum. It was not a single national verdict but an aggregation of two-dozen state verdicts. In some states, such as Bihar and Delhi, chief ministers who have focused on governance and social welfare did find their parties gaining a majority of seats. However, in other states the politics of identity ruled the day. In Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, two parties running explicitly on caste lines (one representing the lowest castes, the other the intermediate groups) won more than half the seats to parliament. Meanwhile, the BJP did particularly well in Gujarat and Karnataka, the states in which it has indulged most effectively in minority bashing, with its target being Muslims in the first state and Christians in the second.

That, at the national level, the Congress did considerably better than the BJP is to be explained in part by the fact that it has historically had a significant presence in more states of the union, and in part by the first-past-the-post election system in India. Thus the Congress was helped by the ubiquity of three-cornered and four-cornered contests, with its candidates squeezing through in constituencies they would have lost had there been a united opposition.

It must be said of the Congress, the BJP and all other parties that, whether in the central government or in the states, they have not often governed wisely or well. But then there were, and are, extenuating circumstances. For India is both an unnatural nation as well as an unlikely democracy. Never before has a territory so disparate and diverse been constructed as a single political unit. Never before has universal adult franchise been attempted--or imposed--in a poor, divided and largely illiterate society.

Because of this diversity and inequality, the Indian experiment with democracy and nationhood was written off by many Western observers. Indians were informed, through a series of premature obituaries, that our country was too heterogeneous to be a single nation, and too poor to be run on democratic lines. In every secessionist movement was seen the prospect of balkanization, in every death of a prime minister the imminent threat of military takeover. Undoubtedly, the nation was scarcely stable or secure--it lurched, as it were, from crisis to crisis, from riot to assassination to border conflict to open war. But somehow, India has survived; somehow it has even stayed democratic.

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The skepticism of Western observers about Indias democracy project was falsified by events, but the historian can certainly...