Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T03:11:10.979Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Democracy and Political Development: Perspectives from the Indian Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Francine R. Frankel
Get access

Extract

Foreign aid can be “related” to intervention in many ways. Some argue, with Senator J. W. Fulbright, that aid tends to precede intervention and to increase the probability of intervention. Others would say that aid follows intervention, contending, for example, that American aid to Vietnam was evidence of a prior diplomatic commitment. Still others see aid as an alternative to intervention—if we give aid now we are less likely to have to intervene in the future.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , April 1969 , pp. 448 - 468
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1969

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Conceptual ambiguities abound in the Rudolphs' analysis and should be mentioned. Political modernity is assumed to be the same as government “basing itself on participation, consent, and public accountability,” i.e., democracy (p. 4). The single term “modernity” is also used interchangeably for “modern society” and “political development,” even though the meanings of both terms, especially of the second, continue to provoke lively controversy among scholars.

2 There is some basis in social experience for this assumption. Except for the Brahmins at the apex and untouchables at the bottom, ritual rank tends roughly to coincide with economic position in the village community. Thus, when an obvious disparity begins to develop between economic and ritual standing in the middle ranges of the caste structure, the ranking system generally proves flexible enough to incorporate these changes. See Bailey, F. G., Caste and Economic Frontier (New York 1957), 264–275Google Scholar.

3 The district, with a population of two to three million, is the basic unit of local administration in India. It is also the major operating unit of the Congress party. The District Congress Committees (D.C.C.'s) are the communications link between the Pradesh (State) Congress Committees (P.C.C.'s) and the smaller taluka and mandal committees within their jurisdiction. They often raise their own funds for party work and are responsible for organizing elections in constituencies that fall within district boundaries. They also have a strong voice in the selection of candidates for State Assembly and Parliamentary seats, although the Congress Constitution vests final responsibility for decision in the P.C.C. Election Committee and the Central Election Committee.

4 The “functional approach to comparative politics” is most closely associated with the work of Gabriel Almond and his collaborators. Since the new conceptual scheme was specifically designed to compare modern Western political systems with transitional and traditional societies, Almond tells us that particular functional categories “were derived in a very simple way…. We derived our functional categories from the political systems in which structural specialization and functional differentiation have taken place to the greatest extent”; i.e., the Anglo-American democracies. Almond, Gabriel A. and Coleman, James S., eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton 1960), 16Google Scholar. In a later formulation, Almond and Powell suggest a six-fold classification: three universal input functions of interest articulation, interest aggregation, and communication (abstracted from the roles of associational interest groups, political parties, and the mass media); and three universal output functions of legislation, administration, and adjudication (adapted from the separation-of-powers among the three formal branches of government). Together, these functions constitute the conversion processes of the political system, transforming an inflow of demands and supports into an outflow of authoritative policies for the whole society. Almond, Gabriel A. and Powell, G. Bingham Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston 1966), 27–29Google Scholar.

5 One immediate and vital difference, of course, is that the distribution issue is being raised before problems of increasing productivity have been solved. Moreover, the new nations are simultaneously confronted by crises of national identity, political integration, governmental legitimacy, and popular participation, all of which had been more or less resolved in the Anglo-American democracies when the distribution crisis arose.

6 See Monteiro, John B., Corruption (Bombay 1966)Google Scholar.

7 The role of state party leaders in the selection of both Lai Bahadur Sastri and Mrs. Indira Gandhi as successors to Mr. Nehru is described in great detail in Brecher, Michael, Nehru's Mantle: The Politics of Succession in India (New York 1966)Google Scholar.

8 Chandidas, R., Morehouse, Ward, Clark, Leon, Fontera, Richard, eds., India Votes: A Source Book on Indian Elections (New York 1968)Google Scholar. Swatantra Party Manifesto, 1967, p. 11. Similar statements are contained in the manifestos of all major political parties.

8 A comparative analysis of all four general elections has been published by the Indian National Congress, The Fourth General Elections: A Statistical Analysis (New Delhi 1967)Google Scholar. The Indian Institute of Public Opinion, which evaluated the voting data shortly after the Fourth Election, concluded that Congress had lost strength not only among minority communities (Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs) but among the majority Hindu community, particularly “the 21–35 [age] group, the lower literates and again, the lower income groups.” The Statesman, March 9, 1967.

10 The Statesman, June 14, 1968. The most striking example of this was the 1968 alliance between the Shiv Sena and two all-India parties, the Praja Socialist Party and the Swatantra Party in the Bombay municipal elections. The Shiv Sena, a strongly communal organization, seeks to exclude all Tamilian (or southern) workers from Bombay in order to provide more jobs for native Marathi-speaking people. The Shiv Sena, with the help of its allies, won a sweeping victory in the election. The Bharatiya Jan Sangh (Indian People's Party) has also been suspected of stepping up its customary anti-Muslim propaganda; and the number of Hindu-Muslim clashes has actually increased from 133 in 1966 to 209 in 1967. See The Economist, June 22, 1968.

11 The Dravida Munnetra Kazakham (Dravidian Progressive Federation) defeated the Congress party in Madras State in 1966 on a platform pledged to the “protection of the Tamil language” against inroads from Hindi, and efforts to “give first priority to plans meant for uplift of the poor.” R. Chandidas and others, pp. 100–101.

12 India, Finance Ministry, Economic Survey, 1966–67 (New Delhi 1967), 24Google Scholar.

13 The Statesman, December 2, 1967.

14 The Statesman, March 1, 1968.

15 The Planning Commission's “Approach to the Fourth Plan” is summarized in Economic and Political Weekly, 111 (May 18, 1968).

16 According to a report in the New York Times, May 17, 1968, the Home Ministry has calculated that there were 438 defections in the various State Assemblies during the first twelve months after the general elections. In Haryana and Bihar, the same individuals crossed back and forth between parties several times. Of 125 defectors from the Congress party in Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh, 52 were made either Chief Ministers or Ministers in non-Congress governments. Similarly, 64 of the 95 defectors from United Front coalitions in Bihar, Punjab, Rajasthan, and West Bengal became Ministers in new Congress-supported governments. In May 1968, new elections in Haryana returned the Congress party to power with virtually the same margin it had won in 1966. But dissensions within the Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee (which had precipitated the original defections) were so bitter that the party was not able to hold new organizational elections until December, and the defeated group once again organized defections from the Congress Legislature Party that placed the government's majority in doubt.