India After Gandhi (115 page)

In June 1990, by an order of the Supreme Court, a Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal was constituted. Three (presumably impartial) judges were its members. On 25 June 1991, the tribunal passed an interim order, directing Karnataka to release 205 million cubic feet of water per year to Tamil Nadu, pending final resolution of the matter. Ten days later the Karnataka assembly passed a unanimous resolution rejecting the tribunal’s order. The Karnataka government then passed its own order, which mandated its officials to ‘protect and preserve’ the waters of the Cauvery for the state’s farmers.

The matter went to the Supreme Court, which held that the Karnataka directive was
ultra vires
of the constitution. The central government now made the tribunal’s interim order official by publishing it in the official gazette. The Karnataka chief minister, S. Bangarappa, responded by declaring a
bandh
(general strike) in the state. All schools and colleges were closed and, with the administration looking on, protesters were allowed to go on the rampage in Tamil localities of the state capital, Bangalore. The violence continued for days, with an estimated 50,000 Tamils being forced to flee the state.

Karnataka’s defiance sparked angry words from the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, J. Jayalalithaa. Her administration, in turn, encouraged the targeting of Kannada homes and businesses in Tamil Nadu. Altogether, property worth more than Rs200 million was destroyed.

While ordering the constitution of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, the chief justice of the Supreme Court noted that ‘disputes of this nature have the potentiality of creating avoidable feelings of bitterness among the peoples of the States concerned. The longer the disputes linger, more the bitterness. The Central Government as the guardian of the interests of the people in all the States must, therefore, on all such occasions take prompt steps to set the Constitutional machinery in motion.’

However, while the central government could set the machinery in motion, it no longer had the powers to compel the states to accept its recommendations. Fifteen years after it was constituted, the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal has yet to come up with a final resolution. When the monsoon is good, Karnataka has no problems releasing 205 million cubic feet to Tamil Nadu. But if the rains fail, panic sets in all round. Tamil film stars lead demonstrations and go on fasts to compel Karnataka to ‘see reason’. In her most recent term as chief minister, Jayalalithaa went on fast herself, surely a less-than-constitutional method of pressing her state’s demands on the centre. Meanwhile, peasant leaders in Karnataka warn their government that if water is released without their consent, the administration will have to face the consequences.

In bad years, between the months of June and September the Cauvery question rarely strays off the front pages of the newspapers in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Protest and counter-protest is followed by the centre ordering Karnataka to release
x
million cubic feet of water to save standing crops in Tamil Nadu. The Tamil Nadu chief minister demands more than
x
; her counterpart in Karnataka says he can release only so much less than
x
. A central team rushes to the Cauvery valley to supervise operations. The precise amount of water eventually released is never made public. One can, however, be certain that it is determined more by the fluid dynamics of inter-party politics than by the logic of science or the letter of the law.
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Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, in July 2004 the Punjab assembly passed a resolution abrogating its agreements on water-sharing with other states. It would, it said, appropriate as much of the Ravi and Beas rivers as it chose before allowing them to flow on to Haryana and Rajasthan. The resolution was clearly at variance with the spirit of Indian federalism. Moreover, it was piloted by a Congress chief minister at a time when the Congress was also in power at the centre.

The act of the Punjab Assembly was possibly unethical, probably illegal and certainly unconstitutional.
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It might yet come to be viewed by other states as an encouraging precedent. For water, more than oil, is the resource most critical to India’s economic development, critical both for agriculture and to sustain the burgeoning population of the cities. With the increasing fragmentation of the polity, and the declining capacities of the central government, more states might be tempted to take such unilateral action.

In 1993 Parliament passed the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the constitution. The 73rd Amendment mandated the creation of local government institutions at the level of the village,
taluk
(county) and district while the 74th did the same for towns and cities. Office-bearers were to be chosen on the basis of universal adult franchise. Everywhere, one-third of the seats were reserved for women, with additional reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

Panchayati Raj
, or village self-governance, had been an abiding concern of Mahatma Gandhi. However, both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were hesitant to devolve power to lower levels, if for different reasons: the former because he felt it would be inimical to economic development, the latter because of a general preference for centralization. In the 1960s Rajasthan and Maharashtra had both experimented with village and district councils. However, the first serious attempts to create village
panchayats
were in West Bengal, after the Left Front came to power therein1977. The process was taken further by the Janata government in Karnataka, which between 1983 and 1987 devolved significant responsibilities to local institutions.

As prime minister during 1984–9, Rajiv Gandhi sought to create an all-India system of local self-governance. His interest was in part a nod to the rise of local autonomy movements, which called for a wider sharing of power and authority, but it was also based on political calculation – namely, the fact that while the Congress ruled at the centre, state governments were dominated by parties hostile to it.
Panchayati raj
would allow New Delhi to bypass these parties and deal directly with the people, putting straight into their hands a portion of the funds previously controlled by the state administration.
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The process initiated by Rajiv Gandhi bore fruition after his death, when the Congress regained power at the centre. During the discussions leading up to the amendments, state governments had expressed concern about the undermining of their authority. The legislation as finally passed gave individual states the discretion to specify the functions and powers of the
panchayats
in their territory. The provincial acts varied widely in intent and consequence. Some states gave
panchayats
responsibility over all aspects of development work – irrigation, education, health, road-building etc. – and transferred funds appropriately. Other
states followed a more parsimonious line regarding the functions and finances of their local institutions.
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In the 1980s West Bengal was at the forefront of
panchayati raj
; afterwards, the lead was taken by another state with a strong communist presence, Kerala. When it came to power in 1996 the Left Democratic Front (LDF) decided to allocate 35–40 per cent of plan funds for programmes designed and executed by local institutions. Across the state,
panchayats
were encouraged to hold meetings at which villagers were helped by officials and technical experts to set their own priorities. Hundreds of locality-specific plans were prepared, which tended to highlight the careful management of natural resources such as soil, water and forests.
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In Kerala, as in Bengal, the promotion of
panchayati raj
is based on an unstable mixture of idealism and opportunism. On the one hand, left-wing intellectuals and activists believe that, by devolving power, villagers can spend public money on projects relevant to their needs instead of being subject to directives from above. There is also some evidence that decentralization reduces the leakages in the system, that there is less corruption and thus more money actually spent on development works. On the other hand, in the original Gandhian vision,
panchayati raj
was to be a ‘partyless democracy’, where the most respected (or able) villagers were elected regardless of political affiliation. In practice, the process has been deeply politicized. In Kerala, and even more so in West Bengal, the CPM has seen in
panchayati raj
an instrument to tighten its grip on the countryside. The power of the
panchayat
, and its officials, is used not merely in and for themselves but, crucially, to mobilize votes during assembly and parliamentary elections.
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These caveats notwithstanding, the 73rd Amendment has set in motion a process with possibly profound implications for the future of Indian democracy. A decade after its enactment there were more than 3 million elected representatives in local institutions, a third of them women. They were chosen through a very competitive process, with voter turnout at
panchayat
elections generally exceeding 70 per cent.

One subject of great interest, and greater importance, is the impact that
panchayati raj
will have on relations between castes. In Uttar Pradesh, where the Dalits are vocal and organized, the dominant castes are now forced to share power at the local level with those historically less advantaged. In Orissa, where the Dalits are more submissive, they have been (illegally) excluded from participation in many
panchayats
. In
Tamil Nadu, the formation of village councils has sharpened existing conflicts between the landed Thevars and the Dalits. About one-fifth of
panchayat
presidents have to be Dalits, but these often find their authority eroded by the upper castes. Likewise, while some women presidents act autonomously, others are mere mouthpieces for the male members of their family or caste.

Notably, members of Parliament and of the various state legislatures are often hostile to the
panchayati raj
experiment. So are many members of the Indian Administrative Service, who argue that it will merely lead to the ‘decentralization of corruption’. Supporters of the new system answer that such criticism is motivated, emanating as it does from groups that would be hard hit if administrative and financial authority were to be more widely distributed than is presently the case.
¹⁷

During the 1990s Indian politics became more complex at the
domestic
level, with greater competition between parties and the introduction of a third tier of government. However, when it came to India’s dealings with the rest of the world there was a noticeable convergence of views. Whether led by the BJP or the Congress, the ruling alliance was committed to enhancing the country’s military capabilities, and to a more assertive foreign policy in general.
¹⁸

One manifestation of this new strategy was a growth in the size and power of the military. India was rapidly moving ‘from a defence dependent upon diplomacy to a diplomacy strengthened by a strong defence’.
¹⁹
Military expenditure rose steadily through the decade, from US $7,000 million to $12,000 million between 1991 and 1999. Some of this money went on salaries – there were now more than a million Indians in uniform, members of the army, navy or air force, with another million staffing the various paramilitary outfits.

Some of the money also went to buy state-of-the-art weaponry. And some went to manufacturing instruments of war that the richer Western countries were not prepared to supply. In addition to the Agni and Prithvi missiles developed in the 1980s, India now had an intercontinental ballistic missile, Surya (with a range of up to 12,000 kilometres), and another, Sagarika, that could be launched from sea. Indian scientists had
also developed a range of defensive options, designing shorter-range missiles to be aimed at any the enemy might throw at them.
²⁰

These missiles were designed by the Defence Research and Development Organization, one of two scientific institutions that played a vanguard role in the defence sector. The other was the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which had responsibility for the production of both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. An atomic device had been tested in 1974, but in subsequent years the AEC scientists were able to improve considerably its sophistication and destructive capability. From the early 1990s they pressed the government to allow them to test their improved bombs.

In his history of India’s nuclear programme, George Perkovich tracks the persistent efforts of the scientists. Those who led the missile and nuclear programmes told successive prime ministers that, in the absence of tangible results, talented young scientists would prefer high-paying jobs in the commercial sector to the service of the state. ‘Without full-scale tests’, they argued, ‘morale would fall and the nation would not find replacements for the aging cohort that had produced the first device in 1974.’ In late 1995 Prime Minister Narasimha Rao sanctioned tests, but backed off when American satellites revealed the preparations, provoking a strong warning from the US government. When a United Front government came to power in 1996, the scientists urged the new prime minister, H. D. Deve Gowda, to give them the green signal. Gowda demurred; he didn’t care about American opinion, he said, but his priorities were economic development rather than a show of military strength.
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The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance assumed office in March 1998. The next month Pakistan tested a medium-range missile, provocatively named Ghauri, after a medieval Muslim warrior who had conquered and (according to legend) laid waste to much of northern India. A quick response was called for, if only because ‘the BJP’s historic toughness on national security would have seemed hollow if the government did not respond decisively to the new Pakistani threat’.
²²
The heads of the AEC and the DRDO insisted that a nuclear test would be the most fitting response. Their calls were endorsed by the atomic physicist Raja Ramanna, who carried enormous prestige as the man who had ‘fathered’ the1974 tests. Ramanna met Prime Minister Vajpayee, who assured him that he wanted ‘to see India as a strong country and
not as a soft one’. To this the physicist added a definitive caveat: ‘Also, you can’t keep scientists in suspended animation for twenty-four years. They will simply vanish.’
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