Making Federalism Work

James Manor

India Defies the Odds

To understand how India's democracy works, and how it manages demands from social groups for greater power, resources, autonomy, and respect, it is essential to understand Indian federalism. That, in turn, requires us to address two questions. First, why have relations between New Delhi and the various state governments (there are at present 25) usually remained manageable? Second, why have things gone so spectacularly wrong in a few states, with "normal" democratic politics breaking down and violent separatist movements appearing?

Compared to the United States or most other countries with federal systems, India has a highly centralized arrangement. The authorities in New Delhi possess very considerable powers over the day-to-day workings of state government. They can also impose "president's rule" on any state, suspending or dissolving the Westminster-style cabinet government in that state and replacing it with direct rule by New Delhi.

Direct presidential rule is supposed to be invoked only in grave crises, but national-level leaders have sometimes abused it, using it to oust state governments headed by rival parties. When those in charge of the central government have dealt with the states in a spirit of accommodation--as they mostly did from 1947 to 1970 and also have done since the era of hung federal Parliaments began in 1989--relations between the center and the states have tended to be fairly smooth. ¹

By "quarantining" most conflicts within individual regions, federalism helps the political system cope with strife. ² The rough congruence between most state boundaries and those of linguistic regions (and hence distinctive social systems) mightily assists this [End Page 21] process, as does the strong tendency of Indian voters in the 1990s to support parties that are preoccupied with regional concerns. Yet attempts by national leaders to apply commandist or homogenizing approaches to the diverse states can still throw the federal system into crisis. This point is especially worth noting now that the first government led by Hindu nationalists--whom many suspect of commandist and homogenizing inclinations--has come to power in New Delhi. Today, such inclinations are more dangerous than ever. The increasingly regional focus of voters makes them more sensitive to intrusions from New Delhi. And any attempt to reverse the recent dispersals of political power--among various institutions (formal and informal), and from New Delhi to state governments--is likely to provoke fierce reactions in the regions.

Finally, it is worth noting that since 1991 the federal system has often aided the cause of economic reform by enabling New Delhi to "off-load" some of the pain associated with liberalization to state-level arenas, where the resulting tensions are largely quarantined. Many state-level politicians have proven themselves highly adroit at the political management of reform, and some state governments have developed imaginative innovations in economic policy. All of this, combined with the generally cautious and limited nature of the reforms, has helped to make them more politically sustainable.

The Politics of Bargaining

Relations between New Delhi and the states have tended to remain manageable, though not trouble-free, for four main reasons. First, powerful group demands seldom are aimed squarely at New Delhi, but instead usually grow out of conflicts within states. Second, most states contain so much sociocultural complexity and heterogeneity that there is little prospect for the kind of state-wide solidarity that secessionism requires.

Third, Indians can and often do shift their preoccupations rather fluidly among the many identities available to them. Depending upon circumstances, they may fix for a time on any one of three different caste identities; on local, subregional, or national identities; or on class, linguistic, or religious identities. But they seldom seize tenaciously on any one distinct characteristic, as people in Sri Lanka, for example, have done. This is discouraging both to leftists, who advocate a politics based on class affiliations, and to pan-Hindu rightists, who seek to make religious identities preeminent. The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fared well in the 1998 elections because it made alliances with nonsectarian parties and because its rivals behaved self-destructively, not because most voters embraced Hindu identity politics. Amid India's welter of variably salient identities, tensions have a hard time building up along any single fault line. This reduces the duration [End Page 22] and intensity of most conflicts in most states, and undermines the threat of secessionism, which cannot thrive in the absence of sustained regional solidarities.

Finally, federal-state relations remain generally manageable because India's formal and informal political institutions, despite their decay in recent decades, can still make the politics of bargaining work. All political parties have enough people with appropriate skills and attitudes to sustain the bargaining process. A veritable legion of political activists and "fixers" gives India a major resource that is unavailable in most less-developed countries. With their help, the politics of bargaining works well enough to keep sociocultural heterogeneities from sowing political chaos. Accommodations, both within states and between New Delhi and the several states, are maintained.

Political competition has a number of different outlets. Not only are there elections for the national and state legislative assemblies; there are also positions of influence available in three tiers of decentralized, elected councils, and in numerous quasi-official boards, cooperatives, associations, and the like. The existence of so many opportunities to capture at least some power persuades parties and politicians to remain engaged with elections and logrolling, even when they are defeated in some arenas. ³

On those rare occasions when powerful regional interests have contemplated separatism, the coercive power of the Indian state has usually been enough to discourage them. But force has seldom had to be used, both for the reasons set out above and because those interests believed that the politics of bargaining offered them sufficient incentives to make revolt unpalatable.

New Delhi employs a several-pronged "creative-management" approach to relations with individual states, and in particular with disenchanted regional groups that have turned or might turn to separatism and violence. This approach entails a willingness to listen to the discontents of regional groups, and to change policies in response. Policy changes are often accompanied by political enticements, such as promises to include such groups in ruling coalitions if they moderate their demands. Other enticements, such as economic assistance and development packages, are often offered even before negotiations, as a token of good intentions. At the same time, security forces might be fighting members of such disenchanted groups. This can cause problems for attempts at accommodation, but New Delhi has succeeded often enough in such endeavors to make this kind of two-track approach worth trying, as many national leaders understand.

In some cases, "creative management" can involve the imposition of direct rule from New Delhi after a state parliament is suspended or dissolved. This claim will seem controversial to some, since direct rule has often been abused by commandist national leaders. But the [End Page 23] reasoning that led the framers of India's Constitution to arm the central government with this power remains valid. There would be times, they believed, when state governments would prove unable or unwilling to cope with severe and deadly conflict. They thought that in such circumstances, New Delhi might justly conclude that intervention would be needed to quell or contain disorder.

The truth is that such occasions have indeed arisen in the history of postindependence India. This is hardly surprising; the stresses that attend an adventurous experiment with democracy in a society such as India's are bound to overwhelm liberal institutions on occasion (as currently in much of the northeast). The abuse of direct central rule should not blind us to this fact.

An analyst who knows both India and Africa well has rightly noted how much death and destruction the Organization of African Unity (OAU) might have prevented had it possessed such powers. ⁴ In a number of instances over the last four decades, strife within OAU member nations could have been snuffed out before it reached grotesque levels, making it possible to restore minimally civilized standards in relations between warring social groups. The legitimate use of direct rule should not be excluded from the universe of possible approaches to extreme problems.

With these considerations in mind, let us consider the situation in some specific Indian states. The first, Andhra Pradesh, illustrates the predominant tendency: Its relations with New Delhi have been reasonably manageable. We then turn to three strife-torn states or areas where breakdowns in federal-state relations have occurred: Punjab, Kashmir, and the northeast. The first two are places where relations were bound to be difficult, but where creative management by New Delhi could have prevented breakdowns. In the northeast, however, breakdowns were and remain unavoidable. New Delhi's approach there has sometimes left much to be desired, but even if it had been impeccable, it would have been impossible to prevent breakdowns.

A Typical State

The southern state of Andhra Pradesh has been swept by various movements, including regional movements that might be termed "nationalist" or "subnationalist," but it also exemplifies an approximate national "norm." (In India, national-level politics is "abnormal," for caste has far less importance there than it has in the politics of any single state.) India has not one caste system but many. Speaking very roughly, each linguistic region has its own distinctive caste system. And since most state borders conform, roughly, to the boundaries of linguistic regions, politicians in each major state share not only a common language but a common traditional social system that differs from those of other states. [End Page 24]

Thus being a Brahmin in north India, where these groups have considerable numerical strength and economic power, means something very different from being a Brahmin in the south, where Brahmins make up only 3 or 4 percent of the population and are far less prosperous. The other two top strata of the conventional north Indian caste system--Kshatriyas and Vaishyas--are entirely lacking among southern indigenes. So when members drawn from these various strata meet in New Delhi, caste is of little relevance.

Andhra Pradesh exhibits the kind of sociocultural heterogeneity that prevails in most states, and that helps to prevent tensions from becoming concentrated along any one cleavage. Partly as a result of this, it has also managed to sustain the politics of bargaining. These two elements, heterogeneity and bargaining, constitute the "norm."

This state has witnessed successive political excitements since the 1940s. Before 1952, two potent movements occurred there. One demanded the inclusion of the princely state of Hyderabad in the new, democratic India. A second, more radical movement against an unjust socioeconomic order flowered in the Telengana subregion. In each case, "managerial" interventions from New Delhi determined the outcome. The first movement succeeded, thanks in large measure to the intervention of India's security forces. Federal government coercion and the attractions of political bargaining defeated the second movement.

The early 1950s also saw a passionate campaign for the unification of three Telugu-speaking subregions, which had been separately administered, into the new state of Andhra Pradesh. In 1953, after a "fast unto death" by a leader of this movement, New Delhi acceded. That episode hastened a nationwide revision of state borders along linguistic lines. This modification, which took place in 1956, still stands as the most creative "managerial" decision that New Delhi has ever undertaken in its dealing with the regions. Nehru was hesitant, fearing that the change might breed secessionism. But he soon realized that grouping Telugus, Tamils, or Gujaratis together in a single political entity caused them to focus on all that divided them: caste, class, subregion, urban versus rural residence, and so on. The solidarity essential to secessionism could never flourish under such circumstances. Ever since, heterogeneity within each linguistic region has been the bulwark of national unity.

In the late 1960s, Andhra Pradesh's Telengana subregion saw the rise of another movement, this time urging secession from the state (but not India) because of unjust treatment by the state government. A secessionist party swept Telengana in the 1971 national elections, but the movement fizzled shortly thereafter when the ruling Congress party provided a package of concessions and coopted the leaders by offering them powerful positions. From then until 1980, the voters of Andhra [End Page 25] Pradesh enthusiastically supported Indira Gandhi and identified strongly with the national Congress party that she led. But soon after, bullying interventions in the state's affairs by central Congress leaders alienated voters. In 1983 came the election of the state's first non-Congress government, run by the new Telugu Desam. This party had been founded just the year before, but shot up like a rocket, thanks both to the popularity of its movie-star leader, N.T. Rama Rao (NTR), and to his well-publicized complaints about insults from New Delhi. NTR was no secessionist, but the national Congress blasted him as "antinational" and arranged his ouster by inducing a number of his legislators to defect. This backfired, and NTR rode back into power on a wave of fresh resentment against New Delhi.

His government compiled a poor track record, however, and by the late 1980s Congress was able to beat him in a state election. The next turn of the wheel brought an NTR comeback in 1994, after a period of incompetent Congress rule. Eventually, NTR's own insensitive behavior brought about his ouster by his own party.

Two things about all of this deserve emphasis. The first is the frequency with which voters have shifted their preoccupations from one to another of the political identities available to them. We see here successive enthusiasms for first national, then subregional, then national again, then regional identities and movements. This general pattern, notwithstanding the passion generated at any single moment, prevails in most Indian states. Such fluidity makes the task of "managing" New Delhi's relations with most states comparatively easy. Things can still go wrong when aggressively commandist, manipulative "management" creates problems (witness Andhra Pradesh in the early 1980s), but even then, accommodation can save the day.

Punjab

Let us now examine three regions in which severe conflict with New Delhi has led to breakdowns both in center-state relations and in the democratic process. We will consider in turn Punjab, Kashmir, and India's northeast. There are important differences among these cases. Creative management could probably have avoided disasters in Punjab and Kashmir, but at least occasional breakdowns in relations with most states in the northeast were and remain unavoidable, no matter what approaches New Delhi might have tried.

The ghastly crisis that gripped the northwestern state of Punjab for more than a decade from the early 1980s could plainly have been avoided. It would never have occurred if leaders in New Delhi had not insisted on meddling in potentially explosive disputes among the followers of the Sikh religion who make up three-fifths of the state's population, and from exploiting anti-Sikh feelings among Hindus once [End Page 26] the explosion actually detonated. This episode demonstrates what should have been obvious--that social diversity within religious minorities will not suffice to prevent then from reacting heatedly when they think that their faith has been insulted.

In the late 1970s, Indira Gandhi's younger son Sanjay and her senior political lieutenant from Punjab, Zail Singh (himself a Sikh), sought to undermine their main opposition in the state, the overwhelmingly Sikh party known as Akali Dal, by encouraging the rise of the Sikh extremist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. When lethal violence broke out in 1978 between Bhindranwale's group and others, the Congress party's publicity machine backed Bhindranwale. Zail Singh lent financial support to Bhindranwale's newly formed political party even though, as a government White Paper later declared, it was "established with the avowed intention of demanding an independent sovereign Sikh state." ⁵

Bhindranwale campaigned actively for the Congress party in the 1980 election that brought Indira Gandhi back to power. She made Zail Singh her home minister in New Delhi, but sought to check his potential dominance in Punjab by naming his archrival as the state's chief minister. The latter took a hard line against the Sikh extremists in Punjab, while Zail Singh continued to promote and defend Bhindranwale. Mrs. Gandhi oscillated between these approaches, alienating Sikh extremists even as she allowed one section of her party to encourage them. ⁶ A more dangerous strategy would be hard to imagine.

When mounting violence committed by Bhindranwale's group moved the Punjab government to seek his arrest, Zail Singh (whose duties as home minister included oversight of law and order in all of India) arranged for police from a neighboring state to escort Bhindranwale safely to his temple in Punjab. Soon thereafter, the outraged chief minister of Punjab succeeded in securing Bhindranwale's arrest. The retaliatory violence that followed included murders, train derailments, and the hijacking of an airliner. Zail Singh--acting on orders from Indira Gandhi--then had Bhindranwale released, telling Parliament that there was no evidence that he had been behind the crimes for which he was detained.

This decision had appalling results. Bhindranwale, now a hero to Sikh extremists, was free to plot further atrocities. When one of his close allies was killed by a rival Sikh politician, Zail Singh and Rajiv Gandhi attended the memorial service and allowed themselves to be photographed in Bhindranwale's company, despite insulting remarks that the latter made about Zail Singh.

There followed a series of negotiations between Sikh extremists and Indira Gandhi, at first directly, and then through intermediaries. She continued to oscillate between accommodation and obduracy. In mid-1982, [End Page 27] amid continuing violence, Bhindranwale took refuge in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikhs' holiest shrine, from which he never again emerged alive. By late 1983, his forces had escalated their campaign of mayhem, slaughtering Hindus at random. This led to the imposition of direct rule from New Delhi. Yet Zail Singh--whom Mrs. Gandhi had by then made president of India--is reliably alleged to have been in daily contact with Bhindranwale thereafter. Mrs. Gandhi, too, was in contact with the extremist leader through an emissary until less than a month before she ordered the army into the Golden Temple on 5 June 1984. ⁷

Two depressing points about that bloody military action are worth stressing. First, it would never have been needed if New Delhi had, much earlier, let Punjab's own police force do its job. Second, launching the attack on a Sikh holy day ensured that many innocent pilgrims would be killed in the fighting, which cost more than a thousand lives. In addition to this terrible human toll, the attack severely damaged the temple and its compound, deeply offended even moderate Sikhs, and provoked mutinies in several Sikh army units. It touched off years of terrorism by Sikh militants and led, on 31 October 1984, to the murder of Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

The crisis deepened following the assassination. More than 3,000 Sikhs were massacred in its aftermath, many of them falling victim to Congress party mobs, some of which were headed by prominent Congress leaders. To add to the shame, highly placed Congress figures restrained the police from intervening to stop the carnage, and later actively sought to thwart efforts to apprehend the rioters, in one case even pressuring a European diplomat to suppress photographic evidence of attempted arson by a mob including prominent Congress party figures.

During the campaign leading up the parliamentary balloting of December 1984, Congress, led by Indira's elder son and successor as prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, appealed to fear and hatred of Sikhs. I myself witnessed a rally in Delhi at which Rajiv Gandhi did nothing to stop the crowd from shouting down the Sikh mayor of the city (a Congress member) and then spoke of taking "revenge." Actions such as this only deepened the dangerous gulf between Sikhs and others, even as the country faced its worst crisis since independence, complete with army unrest (Sikhs have a long military tradition and serve in many combat units) that seriously compromised national defense.

The years following the Indira Gandhi assassination saw a campaign of Sikh terrorism that the Indian security forces met with severe counterinsurgency efforts. New Delhi used a time-honored combination of coercive and accommodative measures to maintain minimal order, ease discontent, and persuade moderates to go back to "normal" representative politics. Yet the horrors of 1984 so ruptured relations [End Page 28] between New Delhi and the Sikh majority in Punjab that it took an unprecedentedly long time--roughly a decade--to yield something resembling the preferred outcome. And still to this day, as the political scientist Guharpal Singh has pointed out, Punjabi Sikhs bear terrible psychological scars.

The misguided actions of national leaders in this nightmarish episode were based on a strange but all too common mixture of those seeming opposites, naivete and cynicism. As lasting and deeply damaging as the results were, they yielded one positive result: Many senior figures in New Delhi now realize that it is folly to play politics with religious sentiments, and in particular to encourage extremism among religious minorities. The ongoing upheaval in Kashmir, Punjab's neighbor to the north, has reinforced the lesson. We must hope that the Hindu-nationalist BJP, now heading the government coalition in New Delhi, will take heed of it.

Kashmir

Kashmir (formally known as Jammu and Kashmir), whose borders are a subject of dispute with Pakistan, has a story that differs dramatically from that of all other states. It pains a friend of India to say it, but New Delhi's approach to Kashmir has--by India's own democratic standards--been manipulative and destructive. This was true from independence in 1947 until very recently. Coercion, electoral fraud, and other dubious tactics have marred the center's management of the only state in India in which Muslims form a majority (they are an 11 percent minority nationwide). Although ignorance and ineptitude rather than ill will explain many of New Delhi's misdealings in Kashmir--where, as in Punjab, civil violence has killed tens of thousands of people--an evil conspiracy could scarcely have made things worse. ⁸

A compressed narrative of events would begin in 1953 with Jawaharlal Nehru's decision to revoke an accommodation that he had reached with Sheikh Abdullah, the Muslim leader who headed Kashmir's regional government, over the latter's refusal to give up on the possibility of independence for Kashmir. New Delhi engineered a split in Abdullah's party, he was jailed, and one of his lieutenants took his place as head of the regional government. Widespread protests broke out in the region, but federal security forces quelled them. ⁹

The following year, the Indian government issued a Constitutional Order under which it gave itself unlimited powers to legislate in Kashmir. Basic liberties were severely curtailed. The ruling party in the state proved corrupt during its ten years in power (1953-63), but its willingness to accept these impositions ensured its survival. When the rigged elections of 1957 and 1962 left it with somewhere between [End Page 29] 95 and 97 percent of the seats in the state assembly, Nehru was sufficiently distressed at the lack of subtlety to ask the Kashmiri chief minister if he could keep up appearances by arranging to lose "a few seats" at the next balloting. ¹⁰

In 1963, at New Delhi's behest and against the wishes of a majority of the state legislature, the chief minister was replaced and then arrested. Popular protests, which still centered on democratic demands rather than separatism or a desire to join Pakistan, were again met with force. In 1965, Congress in effect annexed the state's ruling party, the National Conference, which won the dubious state election of 1967. In 1972, followers of the still-imprisoned Sheikh Abdullah announced plans to run in the next state election, which spurred the chief minister to ban them from electoral politics and arrest their leaders. Thus freed from the threat of opposition, Congress won the ensuing vote.

In 1977, Sheikh Abdullah (freed as an old man after renouncing his belief in self-determination) and his National Conference won hands-down in the first genuinely competitive elections in the history of Kashmir. Congress did not win a single seat in the heavily Muslim Kashmir Valley. Sheikh Abdullah died in 1982, but the next year his son and political successor Farooq Abdullah led the National Conference to another honest victory over Congress, and then joined other anti-Congress parties in a nationwide opposition front. Mrs. Gandhi responded in 1984 by engineering another split in his party. Backed by Congress, National Conference defectors formed a new government. Two years later, what one scholar calls "carefully organized riots" provided the "pretext" for the imposition of "president's rule." ¹¹

The next state election, in 1987, saw a return to fraudulent practice. Farooq Abdullah, who the previous year had entered an alliance with Rajiv Gandhi, faced a popular backlash. Force and fraud were used to ensure his election. This, plus his government's corrupt and repressive ways, eventually provoked widespread protests. These were put down by force, and that triggered the start of serious armed resistance to New Delhi.

After a spell of direct rule from New Delhi, a further state election was held amid severe armed conflict in 1996. Insurgents warned people who voted that they would suffer violent reprisals. The security forces used violent coercion to force many from their houses to the polling stations. Separatist groups put up no candidates, and the National Conference led by Farooq Abdullah won the election and took power. At the national parliamentary election of 1998, results were mixed but the National Conference failed to win a single seat. Since then, Farooq has indicated a willingness to work constructively with the new BJP-led government--mainly, most observers presume, to avoid the further imposition of "president's rule" by New Delhi. The insurgency and aggressive actions by the security forces continue. [End Page 30]

The remarkably long time that it took Kashmiri Muslims to pick up the gun strongly suggests that accommodation at many points before the late 1980s would have worked--and may still hold some promise. Yet New Delhi has spurned one opportunity after another. If present and future Indian leaders want an object lesson in how not to manage relations with sensitive regions, Kashmir provides it.

Many senior figures in New Delhi have recently come to understand this, but this change has come very late. The various central governments since 1991 have sought to apply in Kashmir the elements of the Punjab "solution," meaning the simultaneous use of strong counterinsurgency campaigns by the security forces, concessions to minority religious sentiments and moderate regional parties, and state elections. The results so far have been mixed. More generous concessions to the people of Kashmir may be required before moderate, democratic politics can be reestablished, if indeed that will ever be possible.

The Northeast

The northeastern region, which is almost completely cut off from the rest of India by Bangladesh, is mainly inhabited by tribal peoples of a different racial origin from the people of the Indian plains. It is the one region where relations between New Delhi and the states have been and remain unmanageable much of the time. Dealings with most (though not all) of these eight states are bound to degenerate from time to time into severe conflict. The Indian government's poor management of the region has at times contributed to breakdowns. But even when this has not been the case, the region's many excruciating problems have often (though not always) been enough to overwhelm even the most carefully devised strategies.

This is not to deny Jyotirindra Dasgupta's observations on the need to pay attention to "the positive aspects of community formation, the lineage of communities in wider political institutions as parts of the northeastern administration and representative systems, and the contributions of these processes to the national systems (and to the long history of peace, social collaboration, and political reconciliation, democratic participation, and innovations in institution-building and sustenance)." ¹² All these things are important, but they have not yet succeeded in bringing extreme conflicts in most of the northeast to an end, and it seems unlikely that they will do so soon. Consider the problems that confront efforts to manage the region through accommodation. The British never asserted sovereign control over much of this area, relying instead on a policy of "least interference" that accorded much deference to "traditional institutions." When disturbances occurred, the British resorted to punitive measures that [End Page 31] inspired bitter resentment toward the central authorities and any locals who appeared to be aiding or submitting to British power. The British also left a legacy of confusion about the borders, formal and informal, between areas in which different tribes enjoyed preeminence. This resentment and confusion persisted after independence in 1947, posing huge problems for the fledgling central government in New Delhi.

After independence, India's new rulers could not sustain Britain's approach to the region. They faced potentially (and often actively) troublesome neighbors in Burma, China, and East Pakistan. India had to fix and police its international borders and exercise its sovereign authority in the northeast. But the center's relationship with this region was far less institutionalized than were its dealings with more "mainstream" areas of the country, and immense difficulties ensued.

To make matters worse, the partition of the subcontinent had severed traditional trade routes--most crucially, down the valleys and rivers leading to the port of Chittagong (then in East Pakistan)--cutting the northeast off from most of its former markets and making essential imports from the rest of India inordinately expensive. These circumstances clouded the region's prospects for economic development, which might have eased the threat of turbulence. The northeast now lay at the end of poorly developed and insecure lines of communications and transport that funneled through a narrow strip of difficult terrain along the northern edge of hostile East Pakistan.

The lack of clarity and consensus over informal demarcation lines between areas occupied by diverse social groups has continued to bedevil the region, in spite or because of central-government efforts to formalize these lines into territorial boundaries. When a new state is carved out in response to a demand for autonomy, usually from a cluster of tribes that have developed a sense of what might be called (for want of a better term) "common ethnicity," other groups that find themselves included within the new borders raise objections and sometimes resort to outright resistance. Conversely, entire clusters that are granted a state or Union territory often remain unreconciled to the noninclusion of others from their group who stand outside the state or even the national boundary. And they may resent the presence of other social groups within their new bailiwick, or the migration of "strangers" into the area.

Squabbling within and between tribal clusters can often undo political accommodations that were forged in response to what had seemed like a unanimous demand. In this wildly diverse region, divisions can spring from many sources: leadership rivalries (often involving generational and educational differences), local grievances, language, religion, or even ideology. At times, there has been conflict over systems of collective land ownership, to which older leaders cling but which impede access to the institutional financing that is badly needed if development is to go forward. [End Page 32]

The number, frequency, and complexity of such problems in the region are mind-boggling, as B.G. Verghese's bafflingly detailed account makes clear. ¹³ As a result, even New Delhi's most enlightened and sensitive attempts to manage such areas can easily unravel. The northeastern states differ crucially from most others in a way that reminds us of something important about the rest of India. We saw earlier that in most states, internal heterogeneities undermine the state-level solidarity that might otherwise yield secessionist movements. That can be said of the northeast as well, but its heterogeneities tend to go so far that they also undermine the politics of bargaining and with it the prospect for political stability. Accommodations tend not to hold in lands crisscrossed by so many multifarious tensions.

Groups in the region often turn fairly quickly to armed struggle--against New Delhi, against one another, against both New Delhi and one another. The proximity of countries that furnish ready sources of weapons offers a partial explanation, as does the relative ease of raising funds by smuggling teak or narcotics. But the problem's taproot is the sheer difficulty that faces efforts to sustain the politics of bargaining in most of these societies.

Central-government efforts to manage relations with northeastern states have often, especially in recent years, been enlightened and admirable. ¹⁴ Openness to tribal preferences, offers of elections, and a willingness to revise boundaries have all been in evidence. Generous development aid has raised per-capita incomes to higher levels. Yet there have also been mistakes. Early efforts were often fumbling and ad hoc. Jawaharlal Nehru's own posture on northeastern questions sometimes changed unhelpfully, creating resentments. New Delhi's failure to deliver on some promises has been and remains an irritant. The security forces have often been heavy-handed, particularly in the days when they were forcibly herding people into "strategic hamlets" on the British Malayan model, but not only then. And Verghese's long catalogue of initiatives that might yet be tried suggests that more could have been and therefore can be done.

The Virtues of Accommodation

The severe troubles of the 1980s, especially in Punjab and Kashmir, have persuaded many (though not all) key figures in New Delhi of the virtues of accommodation as both the oil and the glue of Indian federalism. This approach resonates with broader changes in security policy, meaning responses not only to internal disturbances but to external threats as well. Since the late 1980s, according to one expert, there has been a "greater emphasis on negotiated settlements and in particular a more economistic vision of security policy." ¹⁵

Long experience in coping with a diversity of crises in a wide array [End Page 33] of states has equipped many of India's leaders with skills and attitudes that could help to make the politics of bargaining work, if not perfectly, at least tolerably well. The question today is whether the new Hindu-nationalist-led government will choose to pursue accommodation. That government's May 1998 decision to carry out several nuclear-weapons tests indicates a willingness to revert to a national-security policy that is more assertive and less concerned with things "economistic." Similarly, the government's recent naming of hard-liners as governors in several states (where they will supposedly function as neutral referees), as well as its interest in moving toward a centralized presidential system, leaves room for doubt about its willingness to pursue accommodations with state governments under the current federal system. If those now in power in New Delhi pursue centralization in an effort to homogenize India culturally, the creative achievements of recent years in center-state relations could be undone.

James Manor is a professorial fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. A longer and more detailed version of the present essay will appear in a volume now being edited by Atul Kohli in conjunction with the Liechtenstein Program on Self-Determination at Princeton University.

Notes

1. A 1994 Supreme Court decision requiring New Delhi to provide detailed justifications made it harder to abuse direct rule. See Ajit Mozoomdar, "The Supreme Court and President's Rule," in Balveer Arora and Douglas V. Verney, eds., Multiple Identities in a Single State (Delhi: Konark, 1995), 160-68.

2. Myron Weiner, "The Indian Paradox: Violent Social Conflict and Democratic Politics," in M. Weiner, The Indian Paradox: Essays in Indian Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1989), 36.

3. The best study of this is Robert Jenkins, "Democratic Adjustment: Explaining the Political Sustainability of Economic Reform in India" (D.Phil thesis, University of Sussex, 1997).

4. I am grateful to D.A. Low for this insight.

5. Mark Tully and Satish Jacob, Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi's Last Battle (London, Jonathan Cape, 1985), 60.

6. Ibid., 60-66; and Kuldip Nayar and Khushwant Singh, Tragedy of Punjab: Operation Bluestar and After (New Delhi: Vision, 1984), 36-39.

7. Tully and Jacob, Amritsar, 73-105 and 121; Nayar and Singh, Tragedy of Punjab, ch. 2.

8. Sumantra Bose, The Challenge in Kashmir: Democracy, Self-Determination, and a Just Peace (New Delhi, Sage, 1996), is an influential study on which I draw heavily, but it overstresses malevolent intent. Corrective accounts may be found in Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in the Crossfire (London: Harvill, 1996) and Vernon Hewitt, Reclaiming the Past: The Search for Political and Cultural Unity in Contemporary Jammu and Kashmir (London: Portland, 1995).

9. Ibid., 32.

10. Ibid., 33-34. The source for the anecdote about Nehru's request is M.J. Akbar, India: The Siege Within (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985), 258.

11. Bose, The Challenge in Kashmir, 43.

12. Jyotirindra Dasgupta, "Community, Authenticity, and Autonomy: Insurgence and Institutional Development in India's Northeast," Journal of Asian Studies 56 (May 1997): 345.

13. B.G. Verghese, India's Northeast Resurgent: Ethnicity, Insurgency, Governance, Development (Delhi: Konark, 1996).

14. See especially Dasgupta, "Community, Authenticity," 362-68.

15. Kanti Bajpai, "Redefining India's Security" (paper presented at an International Institute of Strategic Studies seminar, Neemrana, India, September 1997), 1.

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