Source: Ideas and Institutions Issue #31
Analysis
The Possibilities of Indian Electoral Politics
Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
George Orwell, in Second Thoughts on James Burnham.
With the Congress Party’s victory in Karnataka, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) now rules in six states on its own and in nine other states as a member of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). At one point in 2017, the BJP and its allies ruled in as many as twenty-one states. The present count of fifteen states would have been lower had the BJP not formed the government in Madhya Pradesh through Operation Lotus—a phrase used for the wide variety of tactics that the BJP uses to get support from legislators from other parties without running afoul of the anti-defection law.
As the recent verdict from the Supreme Court on the change of government in Maharashtra underlines, the ethics and legality of some of the methods deployed in Operation Lotus can be disputed. What cannot be disputed is that since the BJP achieved dominance in national politics in 2014—a dominance it underscored with a second general election victory in 2019—the BJP has not found it easy to win assembly elections in most states. In many states, when a non-NDA party overcame the steep financial odds to run an effective campaign, it defeated the BJP or came close to doing so. Further, in many states, non-NDA parties have been able to or are about to complete their full five-year terms in office. The effectiveness of Operation Lotus requires intraparty disputes and mismanagement in the party being targeted.
What this shows is that electoral politics at the state level remains quite open and that the BJP and its allies cannot take their victory in state elections for granted. Even though there is an appearance of the BJP’s dominance at the national level, the party’s all-out campaigns in state elections show that it does not take any election for granted (this includes local body elections as well). The simple reason for this is that India is a democracy, which in its most basic definition means that a plurality of citizens must vote for a party to come to power. In authoritarian regimes, the number of people whose support is required to stay in power is much smaller, and therefore the kinds of tactics that work to stay in power in those regimes do not work in a democracy. In a democracy, the electorate must be persuaded to vote for a party. And, if we accept a basic value of modernity, we must presume that people can reason about things they consider important. To the extent that electoral choices are important to them, people are making a reasoned choice.
A key issue here is the conditions under which opposition parties solicit support from voters, during and between elections. For instance, the BJP seems to enjoy a significant financial advantage because its national dominance allows it to raise many more resources than other parties. Purely strategic behavior by donors would predict much higher donations for a dominant party. Beyond campaign resources, the BJP also has more to offer by way of power and position to potential candidates, making it easier for the party to grow and also to launch Operation Lotus. While legal and ethical critiques of the means of politics are important, it is also important to place things in a comparative perspective, especially when one is trying to assess the political possibilities. All comparisons have limitations, of course, but they can help put things in perspective in a way that a purely moral and legal analysis with abstract principles and laws as benchmarks cannot.
The BJP’s dominance at present is very different from the Congress Party’s hegemony, which extended nationally and in most states from the founding of the republic until 1966. Although the party never received more than half of the vote share in a general election, in three consecutive national elections, it won around three-quarters of the seats in the Lok Sabha. Its electoral power in the states can be seen in the fact that between 1952 and 1966 its share of the elected Rajya Sabha seats ranged from 72 to 85 percent, averaging 77 percent. Barring a few years in a few states, the Congress Party ruled in all the states.
The present political situation is more like the 1967–89 period, when the Congress Party was dominant for most of the time at the national level but faced steep competition in many state elections. The year 1967 was one of transition—non-Congress governments came to power in nine states, and the Congress barely achieved a majority of seats in that year’s general elections. In that era, the Congress party’s share of elected Rajya Sabha seats ranged from a mere 28 percent (in 1978–80) to 68 percent (in 1984–86). For a while, even its dominance at the national level was interrupted by the unprecedented opposition unity that took the form of the Janata Party government following the suspension of Emergency Rule (albeit the elections were held while the Emergency Rule was still in force). Thereafter, the Congress secured two successive thumping general election victories in 1980 and 1984. In the mid-1980s, its share in the elected Rajya Sabha seats also reached 68 percent. It seemed like the party was back to its pre-1967 glory.
But then followed a quarter century of the coalition era (1989–2014), in which no party could claim dominance in national politics. In the 1989 and 1991 general elections, the Congress was still the largest party by a considerable margin but it could not secure a majority of seats. From 1996 until 2014, no single party received more than 30 percent of the national vote share.
That era ended with the 2014 general elections, in which the BJP received 31 percent votes but a clear majority of seats. In 2019, it received 37.4 percent of the votes and further increased its seat tally. The BJP can be considered a dominant party at the national level because other parties’ seat and vote shares are much smaller. In the Lok Sabha, the main opposition alliance, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), only has roughly a third of the seat count the BJP boasts.
A democracy governed by a dominant party appears very different from a democracy with no dominant party; in the latter, unelected institutions can more easily claim independence, and the legislature naturally becomes an important place for debate and bargaining to get laws passed and to pressure the government. In much of the contemporary writing on Indian politics, there seems to be a recency bias. Such writing tries to identify the possibilities of contemporary Indian politics by comparing how the polity functions now with how it functioned during the quarter century of coalition politics.
To the extent that comparisons can be made at all, the present era of Indian politics should be compared with the 1967–1989 era. Much of that era was marked by intense political activity. Opposition parties tried everything possible to “oppose, expose, and depose” the Congress party. The party in power in the union government—which was the Congress for most of the years and the Janata Party for three years—freely used the union government’s powers to shore up its chances. For instance, the constitutional powers to suspend a state government and to impose President’s Rule (Article 356) were frequently used, in most cases without a legitimate cause. In all, around twenty-three democratically elected state governments that enjoyed a majority their respective assemblies were suspended during this period. In 1977, the Janata Party came to power and suspended all state governments led by the Congress party. In 1980, when the Congress party came back to power, it again suspended most non-Congress state governments.
Other powers were also misused by the central government. Consider the case of bank nationalization. As I have discussed in a previous piece, during the 1960s, the Ministry of Finance and the Reserve Bank of India had substantially addressed the problems that had been cited by the proponents of bank nationalization. Nonetheless, the Indira Gandhi-led government nationalized the banks. This was likely done for political purposes—it gave the government control over resources it could use for shoring up the Congress Party’s political support.
A democratic political system should improve over time. So, the purpose of such comparisons matters. If the excesses of the past are cited to justify the excesses here and now, they represent an abuse of such knowledge. Still, for the purposes of understanding what is possible, comparisons are useful. Despite the excesses of the pre-coalition era, the Indian polity changed. It gave way to the quarter century of the coalition era, which also delivered considerable improvements in the quality of life of India’s citizens. Hiding within the era of the Congress Party’s dominance was the possibility of a different party system.
As the most well-organized part of India’s vast, diverse, and sprawling freedom struggle, the Congress Party enjoyed a considerable advantage at the time of the founding of the republic. Even the idea of opposing such power must have appeared daunting. And indeed, until 1967, there was little hope, as electoral power even in states was hard to come by. Imagine being in opposition in 1962. In addition to dominating the general elections, the Congress Party won all the state elections held that year, most of them with a thumping majority. Five years later, it lost nine states. This is because many opposition parties persisted against all odds. Similarly, think about being in the opposition in the mid-1980s. In the 1984 general election, the Congress party won more than three-quarters of the seats and secured fourteen times the number of seats won by the second-largest party. It also won many state elections. Yet, by the end of the decade, the coalition era had begun. Such is the nature of politics in Indian democracy. What has not changed through the many transformations of Indian politics is the fact that for any party or coalition to come to power, it needs the support of a plurality of voters.
A key fact to consider when thinking of the possibilities in Indian politics is that most voters are not aligned with any party. In 2019, the National Election Studies (conducted by the Lokniti Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) reported that only 28.7 percent of respondents said that they felt particularly close to any political party. Of them, 41.2 percent said that they felt close to the BJP, and 19.2 percent said the same about the Congress party. It is therefore not reasonable to argue that the dominance in electoral politics in India is now deep-rooted. The voters can easily change their minds and hold anyone accountable.
The common sense of Indian political life understands these facts and nuances. So, when an average person is told that this is the least democratic time in independent India’s history, it does not resonate. To the contrary, most voters probably feel empowered because they see that the party that rules comes to power by receiving support from a plurality of voters and is therefore always vulnerable. Most surveys show that a majority of respondents in India feel satisfied with the state of Indian democracy. Pew Research’s Global Attitudes Survey, held in 2019, found that 70 percent of the respondents from India were satisfied with the way democracy was working in the country. Among the thirty-four countries covered by the survey, only Sweden did better on this metric, with 72 percent of the respondents saying that they were satisfied with their democracy; the median for the thirty-four countries was only 44 percent. Only 26 percent of Indian respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the working of democracy in the country, while the median stood at 52 percent.
Beyond these facts, the main problem with exaggerating the shortcomings and challenges of Indian democracy is that of values—it may breed despair about the possibilities of electoral success in Indian politics. Such despair can then become self-fulfilling.
Note: The author would like to thank Milan Vaishnav for comments.
—By Suyash Rai
Review
How Does Globalization Impact Indian Cities? A Review
Knight Frank’s report on India’s real estate market for July–December 2022 states that demand for residential property is at a nine-year high and that demand for office real estate is also strong. Given that India’s major real estate markets are cities like Mumbai, Delhi NCR, and Bengaluru that service the global economy, it is worth examining the degree to which cities and urban land markets in India are influenced by global economic forces. While the Knight Frank report points out some domestic drivers for the resurgence in demand for real estate, it points to some facts that can also be understood as the influences of globalization:
- Leading Indian metros, which have been understood to be some of the main beneficiaries of globalization, continue to account for a significant percentage of real estate transactions in 2022 as well.
- Bengaluru, an IT services hub, accounted for more than one-fourth of the total area transacted, and overall, the IT sector accounted for more than one-fifth of the total office space area transacted in the second half of 2022.
These facts indicate that, in addition to domestic sources of demand, the demand for land in major Indian cities is also product of India’s participation in the global economy. However, we do not yet have good answers on the degree to which globalization affects demand for land and urbanization in general. In this review, I examine some literature on the effects of globalization on urbanization, the demand for land, and the spatial arrangement of cities.
Broadly defined, globalization is the free movement of capital, goods, and services facilitated by lower capital controls, lower tariffs, and harmonized trade procedures. It also encompasses a regime allowing for the free dissemination of technology and easier human mobility. Gill-Chin Lim states that global economic forces will have all-encompassing spatial impacts on cities—on industrial activities, population, densities, housing, transportation, natural resources, public facilities, and patterns of clustering.
However, globalization also has disparate and unequal impacts on cities. Some cities benefit disproportionately, while many others see marginal benefits. Many cities also see a decline. In other words, cities that already have, or can quickly develop, skills and infrastructure to benefit from the current patterns of globalization succeed, while others fail. Some research is indicating that for the most successful cities, there may be a greater convergence in real estate price movements among them than between their domestic competitor cities.
Global trends have an impact on real estate values because they affect the locational value of a piece of property relative to the value of property in another city that competes in the same kinds of industries—finance, technology, logistics, and so on. This has made real estate, a sector that was traditionally considered local, much more global ( Bardhan and Kroll 2007). As a 2015 review of the relevant literature notes, a growing body of research is confirming that “increasing international economic links resulting from flows of goods, services and money lead to some degree of alignment in the behaviour of international real estate markets.” As per this review, researchers have found the following: (a) a “long-run relationship… [in] office market returns” in London, New York, and Tokyo; and (b) “international [real estate] markets are integrated in the long term despite seemingly low short-term return correlations.”
There is some evidence to show that this group of “ superstar cities” may be “ decoupling”—certain cities are becoming significantly more expensive than others and show a much higher variation in office rents than other cities. However, this research is not yet conclusive, and other research has failed to find clear evidence for strong correlations between major global cities.
Another aspect of the impact of globalization on the spatial dimensions of cities is with respect to population density. At one point, conventional theory posited that advancements in communications and the rapid dissemination of technology would make the need for dense agglomerations less relevant for conducting businesses. Cities would therefore de-densify. The opposite seems to have happened—cities have in fact become more dense in the last three decades.
In her book, Cities in a World Economy (2019), Saskia Sassen points out that “when telecommunications were introduced on a large scale in all advanced industries in the 1980s, we saw the central business districts of the leading cities and international business centers of the world—New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong, and Sydney, among others—reach their highest density of firms ever.”
Why is densification coexisting with globalization? Sassen was one of the first to point out that globalization has in fact increased the need for human interaction, for clustering together, and for higher-density cities. She argued that the abstract representation of a global city misses out on the everyday processes needed to keep the globalized economy ticking:
Missing from this abstract model are the actual material processes, activities, and infrastructures crucial to the implementation of globalization… Increased capital mobility not only brings about changes in the geographic organization of manufacturing production and in the network of financial markets, but it also generates a demand for types of production needed to ensure the management, control, and servicing of this new organization of manufacturing and finance… These types of production have their own locational patterns; they tend toward high levels of agglomeration.
According to her, in a globalized economy, cities become sites where entirely new kinds of business practices get created. This makes cities centers from where global businesses are managed. They are command centers for global and regional businesses. This actually requires a lot more centralization in some respects. Due to this increasing sophistication, cities also require highly specialized services. Cities then also become key places for the production of services catering to businesses.
These features of globalization therefore make certain cities tend toward higher densities. A new industry providing services in major cities is replacing the manufacturing-related office. Sassen also notes that these phenomena are more true of major or “world” cities rather than all cities. She and many others find that globalization has in fact led to the increasing decline of cities that are unable to take advantage of the current patterns of globalization.
There is inadequate research linking the densification of Indian metropolitan cities to globalization, though research indicates the outsized benefits of globalization in their favor. Early research on the impact of globalization, however, indicates the disparate and unequal benefits of globalization on Indian cities. For example, O.P. Mathur (2005) found that “the direct impacts were geographically concentrated in six larger cities” and that “globalization has not accelerated urban growth.”
His paper found that the effects of globalization focused largely on trade, capital, and technology but did not lead to any changes in sectors such as land and water. He also found unequal impacts of globalization, which predominantly benefitted six large cities (in terms of Foreign Direct Investment or FDI) at the cost of others. He found that while there is an increasing demand for residential and commercial space, globalization has not led to any overall urban growth. Narayana (2010) also finds higher population growth and concentration in select urban areas as a result of globalization.
This literature is largely focused on studying the effects of globalization on large cities and metropolitan areas. While it may be true that these cities may be the biggest beneficiaries of globalization, there is also new knowledge about its effects on small-city India. Small-town urbanization is often ignored as a subject of study, even though a significant percentage of India’s urban population lives in small towns. Partha Mukhopadhyay and other scholars studying small-town urbanization in India provide interesting instances of how entrepreneurs in small towns and cities are able to take advantage of the globalized economy. One example is of Tiruchengode in Tamil Nadu:
The Tiruchengode of today excels in the drilling rig industry. Companies from the city are able to export their low-cost borewell drilling trucks to Africa where their adaptation to local needs is appreciated, especially the ease of repair and maintenance. These manufacturers developed the ability to satisfy markets neglected by large European and American truck makers who produce sophisticated vehicles that are too expensive for certain countries and cannot be customized to local needs.
Yet another example is of Udupi in Karnataka:
[In Udupi], …an assemblage of towns and villages is known as far away as Japan for supplying fishnets, as well as for the quality of their fish products (Benjamin, 2017). These traditional activities have been able to cope with the advent of globalized trading, not least because local private actors have been engaged in development initiatives to grow this strong and open regional economy since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Another scholar notes that “Many small towns in Tamil Nadu that have experienced a rapid and important growth such as Tiruppur, Bhavani, Arani, Tiruchengode.… Their productive units are involved in multi-regional links and eventually they concentrate capabilities to directly trade internationally.”
We therefore have evidence that at least some part of the small-town urbanization in India is based on residents capitalizing on transnational economic opportunities. However, while the dynamics of urbanization in small-town India are now relatively better understood, the different ways in which these dynamics are linked to globalization have to be explored further.
Finance also enables easy remittances, and the Indian diaspora is one of the largest remitters in the world. It would seem that in smaller towns and villages that are centers of out-migration, the remittance economy would be an important causal factor leading to urbanization.
One paper reviewing studies on India’s small-town dynamics (2015) notes that “remittances of international migrants are an important source of finance for small enterprises in small urban settlements. They also affect the spatial morphology and quality of life in towns through increased construction activity and change in consumption practices.”
This impact of remittances on urbanization has been studied in Kerala and Goa, but research on this issue seems scanty.
While this is a preliminary review and therefore not exhaustive, it appears that there are many understudied aspects of globalization in India, from the continuing effects on large metropolises to the remittance economy and the broader urban processes prevalent in small-town India. However, after three decades of globalization in India, it is evident that the study of urbanization in an open economy is to also study the impact of global economic forces on India’s towns and cities.
—By Anirudh Burman