6 - India as a Patronage-Democracy

Summary

The state is everywhere. Life chances are influenced by the state. If you don't have access to the state, life is difficult.

Those who rule have everything. Those who do not rule have nothing.

The state is widely perceived as a ‘grace and favour’ state; state officials tend to be seen, and see themselves, as dispensers of favours. It is widely assumed that if an official wishes to do something for you he can, and the problem is how to make him want to.

In Part I, I argued that the patronage-democracy was a distinct type of democracy, with distinct patterns of voting behaviour and therefore distinct conditions leading to ethnic party success. In this chapter, I propose an interpretation of the Indian political system as a patronage-democracy. This interpretation applies broadly to postcolonial India, from independence in 1947 until the present. The Indian state is currently undergoing two major structural changes: the deregulation of the Indian economy and the decentralization of political power. So far, however, these changes have not been of sufficient magnitude to alter the nature of India's patronagedemocracy.

Virtually every major study of Indian politics and political economy has remarked upon India's dominant state and the extent to which voting behaviour in India is conditioned by expectations of access to the state.4 This chapter builds upon this previous literature in order to advance two further arguments. First, it argues that the essential element influencing voting behaviour in India is not simply the dominance of the state, but the ability of those who control the state to exercise discretion in the implementation of state policy. Second, whereas previous studies have analyzed state dominance and ethnic politics as two parallel processes, this chapter proposes a connection between the two: The individualized distribution of benefits at the disposal of those who control the dominant state, I argue here, produces and sustains ethnic politics in India.

Section I describes the discretionary control of the Indian state over jobs, livelihoods, and living conditions and shows that those who hold state office have considerable opportunity for rent seeking in the implementation of state policy.