Post on 30-Jan-2023
Devolution in Indian: Lessons for Sri Lanka
1. Need for Informed Discussion
To clarify the connotations of key terms used in this essay: (a)
‘devolution’ refers to a constitutionally facilitated process of power-
sharing between the central government and institutions of government at
the level of sub-national units of territory – it is also known as
‘territorial power-sharing’; (b) there are other modalities of power-
sharing such as those referred to in Arend Lijphart’s ‘Consociation
Theory’ in the early expositions (1977) of which the accent was on
devices that enhance minority participation at the Centre and cultural
autonomy for the minorities; and (c) usually, strategies of “development
from below” and “community empowerment at the grass-roots” such as those
epitomised by Panchayat Raj are not considered as falling within the ambit
of ‘devolution’ or ‘power-sharing’. (See, the endnote on Panchayat Raj )
Is there a Consensus on Devolution in Sri Lanka’s ‘South’?
Mahinda Rajapaksa, the President of Sri Lanka, has recently
(September 2006) declared a policy commitment to “maximum devolution
within the framework of a united Sri Lanka”. Ranil Wickremasinghe and
some of his party colleagues have over several years been advocating
federalism, in subdued tones when elections approach but with
considerable vehemence at other times. Stalwarts of the ‘Old Left’ have
favoured autonomy to the north-east all along. Certain other political
leaders like the much admired Anandasangaree prescribe a federal
arrangement similar to that of India as the solution to the current
conflict in Sri Lanka. These leadership stances have formidable backing
from an array of opinion makers – scholars, journalists, diplomats,
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visiting pundits from abroad, donors of aid, facilitators of peace
negotiations – casual but so cocksure in their pronouncements that Sri
Lanka should devolve (ideally, go federal) because: (to paraphrase) the
people desire it, or people demand peace which devolution/ federalism
alone will bring about, or devolution will enable the government to reach
out to the Tamils bypassing the LTTE, or it will bestow on Sri Lanka’s
ethnic minorities their due political rights, or it will make the
secessionist campaign redundant, or it will please the ‘international
community’ and thus increase the flow of aid, or (as a prominent
historian once claimed) ancient Sri Lankan kings practiced it, or because
those who express reservations and misgivings on devolution/federalism
are, ipso facto, chauvinists, hegemonists and racial supremacists.
Needless to stress, these rationalisations have hardly ever been
substantiated with hard evidence. Their exponents probably believe that
constant repetition will provide them the aura of unassailable truth.
Some of us, however, are aware that, even in their most refined and
sedate formulations, they represent no more than a mix of well-
intentioned speculation and superficial, short-sighted benevolence. Hence
the fact that in Sri Lanka today there is, at least at the higher levels
of the arena of formal politics, greater receptiveness to the idea of
devolution than there has been ever before, should not deter us from
placing devolution under critical scrutiny against the backdrop of the
Sri Lankan conflict. In this, circumspection is warranted on two counts.
One is that devolution as a modality of conflict resolution, as many
examples from recent history demonstrate, is a ‘ratchet phenomenon’
irreversible in its directions of change, is irremediable in its possible
adverse consequences, and, more important than all else, has seldom been
successful in the fulfilment of expectations of those who demand it. The other is the
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existence of a scatter of evidence pointing to a disconcerting lack of
memory and/or awareness among our political/opinion leaders regarding not
only the LTTE responses to devolution-based peace overtures of the past,
but also on past experiences with ‘macro-territorial devolution’ and
‘empowerment at the grassroots’, both in our own country as well as
elsewhere, especially in the Indian sub-continent. The amnesia/ignorance
is vividly illustrated, for instance, by the persistence of the myth of
an ‘Oslo Accord’ that is said to have signified an LTTE willingness to
pursue a “federal solution”, or the hilarious spectacle of a group of our
leaders attempting to acquire “first-hand knowledge” of Panchayat Raj
through a brief guided tour in a small part of India.
The present essay, brief as it must remain, cannot venture into a
detailed reappraisal of devolution in federal arrangements that could be
of relevance to Sri Lanka. The essay is, in fact, a follow-up on a survey
of selected federal systems from the standpoint of conflict resolution,
published about an year ago (‘The Federal Option for Sri Lanka’, in
Faultlines, Volume 17, Institute of Conflict Management, New Delhi: 1-72,
re-published in The Island, 7-15 September 2005). Instead of revisiting the
same conflict situations, the remainder of this essay proceeds to
introduce the principal features of the Indian federal system, examines
some aspects of its performance germane to an assessment of the extent to
which it can serve as a model for emulation in Sri Lanka, and concludes
with a series of extracts from authoritative writings, punctuated with a
brief commentary on the subject of power-sharing and conflict resolution.
The thematic contention of the essay is that, in the promotion of
devolution/federalism of whatever design as a modality of conflict
resolution in Sri Lankan, it is desirable to abandon the practice of
repeating hackneyed slogans and clichés, and focus specifically and as
objectively as possible on genuinely relevant considerations including
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the related global experiences which have, in fact, been fairly well
documented.
2. Devolution in India
Twenty-nine ‘States’ and six ‘Union Territories’ constitute the
present (2006) sub-national spatial network of devolution in India. All
States and the Union Territory of Pondicheri (former French colony
comprising four non-continuous localities) have their own elected
legislatures (mostly, unicameral), in addition to being represented in
both houses of the federal parliament. Five of the Union Territories –
Chandigarh (city), Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu (two groups of
non-contiguous enclaves), Lakshadweep and Andaman & Nicobar
(archipelagos) – send elected representatives to Lok Sabha, are
administered directly by the central government, have no elected
legislatures of their own, but have their local government institutions.
There is variation among the States of the Indian federation in
respect of the devolved powers they exercise. The most important and
controversial among such variations is the substantially higher level of
autonomy accorded to the State of Jammu & Kashmir through Article 370 of
the Constitution, amendments to its original form (introduced in response
to opposition from certain other States to the exceptional treatment)
notwithstanding.
The Indian Constitution provides for a strong Central Government,
with the Centre having exclusive powers over 99 specifically listed
functions of government, in addition to the powers it shares with the
States in respect of 52 functions – those specified in a “concurrent
list”. At least in theory the State governments have a monopoly over 61
functions specified in the “State List”. All residual powers (those not
listed) are also vested in the Centre. As several critics have pointed
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out, in Centre-State disputes concerning the actual exercise of these
powers it is usually the will of the Centre that has prevailed (subject,
however, to the enhancing or curtailing impact of tug-of-wars of
electoral politics). The Centre’s exclusive powers include those
pertaining to the creation of new States and Union Territories. More
significantly, in situations of serious confrontation, the central
government of India derives overwhelming powers over the States from the
so-called “emergency provisions” of the Constitution (Articles 253 to
260) which enable it to suspend over any part of the country the normal
procedures of law enforcement, to dissolve State governments, and to
establish ‘Presidential Rule’ over any State. According to the review of
India’s federal system by the Sarkaria Commission of 1983, since the
promulgation of the Constitution, “emergency regulations” had been
invoked on more than one-hundred occasions, almost entirely at the
discretion of the Prime Minister.
In the formative stages of the Indian nation-state – i.e. the final
phase of decolonisation in South Asia – British control over the areas
that came to constitute the Republic of India was not uniform. The
‘Provinces’ under direct British rule accounted for no more than about
49% of India at independence. A large part of the remaining territory
consisted of more than six-hundred ‘Princely States’ over most of which
British rule had been nominal, and several coastal colonies of the
Portuguese and the French. There were, in addition, the extensive
Himalayan tribal tracts that had been designated ‘Excluded’ or ‘Partially
Excluded’ (from Delhi’s direct control) under the constitutional
dispensation of the Simon Commission of 1935. Their outer peripheries
remained ill-defined, and, in that sense, they constituted a ‘buffer
zone” between the British Indian Empire and the interior of continental
Asia.
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The task of national consolidation that confronted the leaders of
emergent India thus involved the resolution of territorial disputes with
neighbour countries and the stabilisation of international frontiers, the
strengthening of national security, the absorption into the national
polity of many pre-modern enclaves the rulers of which had exercised
varying degrees of autonomy in earlier times, the appeasement or
suppression of incipient secessionist movements in certain peripheral
areas (notably in Nagaland, Kashmir and Hyderabad) and, above all,
facilitating due representation in the affairs of government of the
diverse groups of people with distinctive identities in respect of
language, religion, caste and tribe that constituted the Indian nation.
The federal system adopted in 1950 after more than two years of intense
deliberation was expected to facilitate this task.
The adoption of federalism as the guiding principle of national
consolidation was accompanied almost throughout the first few post-
independence decades by the importance accorded to linguistic ethno-
nationalism in the demarcation of the constituent spatial units of the
federation. The Indian Constitution of 1950 accorded the status of
‘National Languages’ to Hindi and English but made provision for the use
of fifteen other ‘Indian Languages’ in regional administrative affairs
(this number has since then been increased to 22). In addition,
constitutional guarantees ensured for all children primary education in
their mother-tongue. Hindi being the first language for only 42% of the Indian population,
the constitution facilitated the promotion of literacy in that language
in all areas of the country with the objective of making it, by the mid-
1960s, the sole ‘National Language’ of India. [Note that, as Hart (1988:
18-61) has shown, the constitution in its original form made provision
for making Hindi the sole official language of the Union in January 1965.
As the date approached there were massive protests in Tamil Nadu. Five
Tamil students burned themselves to death. In the course of attempting
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to suppress riots in various parts of the state, over a period of two
weeks, police firings had killed sixty. During Lal Bahadur Shastri’s
tenure as Prime Minister, with a much weaker Congress, the Congress Party
leaders persuaded themselves that holding to the policy of Hindi only
will cost the party the South. It was only after that that the decision
to continue to retain English was made.]
The notion that a single indigenous language of government will
best serve the interests of national consolidation was much in vogue in
India in those less enlightened times as it was in several ex-colonial
Asian nation states during their early existence – Urdu in Pakistan,
Nepali in Nepal, Sinhala in Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh with Bangla (to
this list may be added Malaysia and Indonesia with their own bhāshā in the
roman script).
A process of ‘State Reorganisation’, initially aimed at eliminating
the waywardness of the existing demarcation of administrative units at
the second tier of government, and later, specifically focused on
providing each of the numerically large language groups at least one sub-
national unit of government (‘state’ or ‘union territory’) in which it
would constitute the majority began to be pursued in the early 1950s.
Andhra Pradesh, the earliest product of this principle, brought together
within a single State the areas carved out of former Madras Province,
Hyderabad and Mysore, so that Telugu-speakers would constitute its
majority. This was soon followed by the partition of the former province
of Bombay into Maharashtra and Gujarat – a Marathi-majority State and a
Gujarati-majority State. Parts of the Malabar coast from the former
Madras Province were annexed to the districts in Travancore-Cochin to
constitute the Malayalam-speaking State of Kerala. The State of Karnataka
was created by merging the Kannada-speaking areas of southern Deccan.
Madhya Pradesh, a State in which Hindi speakers would constitute a
slender majority, was created out of a linguistically heterogeneous area
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of which the former ‘Central Provinces’ and ‘Madhya Bharat’ constituted
the core. Meanwhile the committee entrusted the task of ‘State
Reorganisation’ ignored demands that did not appear to command vehement
popular support, sometimes in disregard of the numerical size of the
population on whose behalf the demands were being made (as in the case
of the Maithili of Bihar). It also remained wary of granting statehood
to linguistic regions that correspond spatially to large agglomerations
of people with other ethnic identities such as those of religion or tribe
– the delay, despite intense agitation, in forming the State of Nagaland
until 1962, and of Punjab until 1966, and the rejection of the demand for
a State of ‘Udayachal’ by Bodo tribes of northern Assam and for a State
of ‘Gorkhaland’ by the Nepali-speaking Gurkhas of the Darjeeling area of
West Bengal were due largely to this cautiousness. Creating the Sikh-
majority and predominantly Punjabi-speaking State of Punjab also meant
the carving out of a new, predominantly Hindi-speaking State of Haryana.
Meanwhile, the ‘North-East’ (original State of Assam, the North-East
Frontier Province, and former monarchies such as Manipur, Tripura and
Sikkim) was converted in a series of slow and cautious steps into a
network of States – Nagaland (in 1963), Meghalaya (1971), Manipur (1972),
Tripura (1972), Sikkim (1975), Arunachal Pradesh (1986) and Mizoram
(1987). In most of these, language did not figure prominently in state
demarcation. Thereafter, following a long spell over which the federal
government remained unresponsive to various other demands for autonomy,
three new States – Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh (both in north-eastern Deccan)
and Uttaranchal (in the Himalayan foothills of the north) were created in
2000, and the Union Territory of Delhi City was elevated to statehood in
2004, once again, largely in response to non-linguistic necessities and
demands.
Thus, over a period of slightly more than half a century since its
initiation, ‘State Reorganisation’ resulted in (a) converting the former system
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of placing the constituent units of the Indian Union in several categories
(each with different relations with the centre) into a largely dichotomous
typology of ‘States’ and ‘Union Territories’; (b) increasing the number of
fully fledged states from 10 (those placed in the list of ‘Part A States’ of
the First Schedule of the Constitution in 1950), to 29 at present, and (c)
bringing about a far greater correspondence between the distribution of groups
with linguistic and certain other prominently articulated ethnic identities and
the spatial structure of the Indian federation than there was at the
promulgation of the Constitution. (The changes referred to above are depicted
in the following sketch-maps.)
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Figures 1 & 2 – Sub-National Units of Government in India on the eve of Independence
and prior to the ‘Reorganisation of States’
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Figure 3 – The Indian Federation in 2000
3. India: A Model for Sri Lanka?
An appraisal of the federal system of India as a ‘model’ for
emulation must, first of all, be placed in the context of the
extraordinary territorial and demographic dimensions of India which
entail, among other things, a degree of “remoteness” of its people from
the institutions of the central government, which one does not find in
small countries with representative forms of government. The size of a
national entity is, of course, not the only determinant of the “distance”
between the government and the governed. Nevertheless, the
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significance of the size factor from present perspectives which has
often tended to be overlooked could be illustrated with reference to the
fact that Sri Lanka (with a population equivalent to about 2% of that of
India), if it was a component of the Indian union, would have been
represented in the 545-member Lok Sabha by only about nine members with,
say, the entire Colombo District or the Central Province constituting
single-member constituencies. It could thus be argued that, given the
enormity of the Indian “scale”, sub-national institutions of government,
sharing power with the central government, are far more vital an
ingredient of democratic governance (in order to provide even a semblance
of popular participation in the direction and control of the daily lives
of the people) in that country than they are in tiny and spatially
compact nation states like Sri Lanka.
Another relevant but frequently overlooked consideration is that the
evolution of the present geographical mosaic and the power-sharing
arrangements of the Indian federation represents a long drawn-out and
tortuous process, the initial impulses of which could be traced back to
the Swaraj Movement. Even more importantly, since independence, this
evolutionary process has been regulated by a powerful government at the
Centre, which, though never entirely unresponsive to the more important
sub-national electoral pressures, has always had both the capacity to
retrace its steps when costly blunders were made as well as the strength
to overwhelm (through recourse to military power when necessary) any
serious resistance to its fiat, with hardly any external challenge
barring the past Chinese links of the Nāga rebels and the allegedly
continuing Pakistani links of the Kashmiri rebels. Unlike in many other
federations India’s federal arrangement has been, in that sense, the
product not only of trial and error but also of compulsion from the
Centre and, at least occasionally, involuntary obedience from the States.
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There is much controversy among researchers on the relative success
of devolution (and, more generally, on the overall complex of
consociational power-sharing arrangements) in India from the viewpoint of
their expected objectives of democratisation and national consolidation.
The best illustrations of this are provided by the mutually
irreconcilable assertions on the related issues found in abundance even
in some of the most authoritative commentaries on India such as those by
Arend Lijphart (1977& 1996), Myron Weiner (1978, 1979, 1996), Donald
Horowitz (1985), Rajni Kothari (1989), Paul Brass (1990, 1991, 1994,
2002), Atul Kohli (1990), Christophe Jaffrelot (1993), Dipanker Gupta
(1997), Dreze & Sen (2002) and Ashutosh Varshney (2004). Most scholars
evaluating India’s record tend to take a stance of qualified
commendation rather than outright condemnation.
Moreover, the hazy consensus one could discern on the positive
contribution of territorial power-sharing towards preserving the nation’s
territorial integrity and towards diffusion of the destabilising effects
of language-based rivalries is not entirely free of discordant nuances.
The following passage is an extract from an article by two reputed
Indian scholars (Ajuha & Varshney, 2005: 242) which could be considered
typical of the “favourable” end of the spectrum of conclusions on the
performance of the Indian system.
“More than anything else, two enduring continuities –
geographical and constitutional – sum up the overall success of
Indian federalism. Since independence, India has not
experienced secession, though it has witnessed a few
secessionist movements here and there; there has been no replay
of the terrible partition of 1947. India’s constitutional
continuity also calls for attention. The federal features of
India’s constitution debated over several years in the
constituent assembly and promulgated in 1950, remain intact.
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The constitution has gone through several amendments, but no
amendment has altered the basic outlines of centre-state
relations permanently in favour of the centre. Indeed, the
current situation is the obverse of a centralizer’s dream. If
anything, the polity is becoming more and more decentralised”.
(emphasis added)
The diversity of views in the scholarly works referred to above
could, of course, be illustrated by quoting other eminent social
scientists who would disagree with Ajuha and Varshney, and would not, in
their own assessments of the India’s achievements, confine themselves to
the criteria of durability of India’s territorial integrity and the
recent trends towards distribution of political power. For instance,
through a more broad-based evaluation, Paul Brass (2002: 3026) has
arrived at the conclusion encapsulated in the following quotation:
“So implicated were political scientists in the
developmentalist goals of elites that they failed to provide an
independent basis for critique that has become increasingly
necessary as it has become more and more obvious that those
goals have failed to transform India into the modern,
industrial state of its elite’s imaginings, have failed at the
same time to provide for the basic minimum needs of its people,
have failed to eliminate the causes for unrest and have instead
drawn the country into the ugly morass of state terrorism in
the north-east, Punjab and Kashmir, and have failed to provide
a basis for accommodation between the Hindu and Muslim
populations of the country”. (emphasis added)
That certain Indian critics of scholarly repute have also been in
agreement with Paul Brass’ verdict is illustrated by the passage cited
below (extracted from Dua, 1994: 20):
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“India seems to be at war with itself. This is driven home
with brutal evidence in Punjab, Kashmir, Assam, and in the
north-eastern states of Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura.
Marked by a variety of militant movements, these states have
become virtually ungovernable. In most other parts of the
country, caste and communal violence, aided and abetted by
mafia leaders, seems to have become the normal way of life. The
politics of Mandal and Mandir, of Yadavs and Thakurs, of Jats
and Rajputs, of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, of Senas (or
military fronts) and Saffrons, of polarising marches (Bharat
Yatras, Ekta Yatras) have drawn the country into the edge of
collapse”.
Nevertheless, there could obviously be no charge of serious
distortion against the sketch by Ajuha and Varshney. One could, for
example, accept the claim that the post-independence secessionist
movements witnessed “here and there” have not been as convulsive as the
partition of 1947 (which was not exactly a secessionist movement – no
matter), in the same way that one could accept the assertion regarding
the absence of changes in the basic outlines of Centre-State relations as
designed in the Indian constitution of 1950. The claimed trend of
increasing decentralisation could also be considered valid especially in
the light of the weakening of the nation-wide grip of the Indian Congress
that existed in the Jawaharlal-Indira era, and the increasing propensity
in the recent decades for coalitions that include State-based parties to
hold the reins of office at the Centre. We can certainly share in the
satisfaction expressed by the authors of the above passage regarding the
fact that the Indian federation “has worked reasonably well”.
Such a verdict, however, does not help in resolving the question of
whether it is devolution that explains the success. What about the sporadic
secessionist movements which the authors have referred to but
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trivialised. And, was it devolution that prevented their culmination in
secession? How effective and how genuine has territorial power-sharing
really been, especially from the viewpoint of both the numerically
largest as well as some of the smallest minority communities of India?
Has devolution or other forms of power-sharing brought about greater
ethnic harmony? These, surely, are the issues that must be pursued from
the perspective of Sri Lanka’s present concerns.
3.1. Secessionist Movements “Here and There”
The sporadic secessionist insurrections referred to by Ajuha and
Varshney were no fireworks displays. Kashmir, for example, has remained
the venue of one of the most complex and destructive conflicts in Asia
ever since the late 1940s. If estimates furnished by Rasul Bakhsh Rais
(1997) are authentic, its death-toll could well exceed 80,000. The
conflict in Kashmir, though often perceived as a territorial dispute
between India and Pakistan, has a pronounced dimension of ethnic
conflict, especially in the political turbulences witnessed in Jammu &
Kashmir (J&K, 39,600 sq. miles) – the part of the former Kingdom of
Kashmir which is a State of the Indian federation. Indeed, as several
scholars have shown, there has always been among the Muslims of J&K an
ardent ethno-nationalist sentiment which seeks to disengage Kashmir from
the Indo-Pakistan conflict and make “Kashmiriat” the basis of an
independent Kashmiri nation-state. From about the late 1980s several
Kashmiri Muslim rebel groups, initially united under an umbrella
organisation named Hurriat (Independence), have been locked in fierce
confrontation with the Indian forces.
Ever since the Maharaja of the kingdom of Kashmir (Figure 4)
signed the Instrument of Accession to the Indian Union in 1947, the
integration of this predominantly Muslim kingdom with India has remained
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one of the cardinal objectives of Delhi’s Kashmir policy. The provision
made through Article 370 of the Constitution of India for the State of
J&K to exercise a substantially greater degree of autonomy than the other
States of the Indian federation, efforts by the Centre to secure the
collaboration of Kashmir’s moderate groups towards democratisation of
the institutions of government at Srinagar, and the substantially higher
per capita levels of central government funding for the development of J&K
compared to other states (Partha Ghosh, 1997), are among the devices that
have been adopted in pursuance of this objective. Yet, it is undeniable
that, in the long-run, Delhi’s rule over J&K has continued to depend
largely on its military capacity to combat the challenge of insurrection
alongside the external security threats.
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Figure 5 – The British Province of Punjab, and Post-Independence Changes in the configurations of the main sub-national units of government in the Punjab Area of India
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Likewise, in Punjab, ethnicity figured prominently in the process
of estrangement of Centre-State relations which culminated in a
secessionist war that raged throughout the 1980s and extended into the
early 1990s, in what was perhaps the most serious challenge ever to
India’s national integrity since independence. According to very
“conservative” official estimates it caused within the State the death of
about 22,000 persons. It also reverberated outside the State in large-
scale mob violence against the Sikhs, and outside India in terrorist
attacks on civilian target.
Secessionism in Punjab, with its goal of creating an independent
Sikh nation-state – Khālistan – was spearheaded by several militant
groups some of which received strong backing from the Sikh diaspora and,
allegedly, from Pakistan as well. The Khālistan ideal found qualified
support from certain factions/leaders of the Akāli Dāl – the political
party of the Sikhs in the democratic mainstreams, the declared policy of
which up to 1984 was “maximum autonomy within the federal structure of
India” (similar to that of our TULF?). However, by the early 1980s, with
the militants establishing their hegemony over Sikh politics (like the
LTTE did here from about the late 1980s?), the insurrection gathered
momentum and became seemingly irreversible in the escalating ferocity of
its violence.
The Khalistan insurrection has been attributed by certain critics
to mismanagement of Centre-State relations. Paul Brass (1991: 210), for
instance, reached the conclusion that “… relentless centralisation and
ruthless, unprincipled intervention by the Centre in State politics have
been the primary cause of the troubles in the Punjab and elsewhere in
India since Mrs Gandhi’s rise to power.” He also noted, however, that the
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“bold and constructive initiatives” adopted by her successors, Rajiv
Gandhi and V. P. Singh also failed to quell the rebellion. From the
viewpoint of the present study what the long-term record of Punjab
politics illustrates as clearly as the consequences of Indira Gandhi’s
unscrupulous manipulation of politics at State-level is that the
concessions offered by the Centre in response to Sikh demands including
the grant of statehood in 1966 (see, Figure 5, above) to an area in which
the Sikhs constituted only 62% of the population only had the effect of
whetting the desire of the Akali Dal leadership for further autonomy.
Thus, some of the demands they incorporated into their ‘Anandpur Sahib
Resolution’ of 1973 (and the later versions of it) included the
restriction of Centre’s intervention in Punjab to Defence, Foreign
Affairs, Currency, Post and Telecommunication, and Railways; annexation
of the city of Chandigarh (where the Sikhs are a minority) to the State
of Punjab; and an excessively large allocation of the Beas-Sutlej water
for exclusive use in Punjab, were not of the type a central
government could have conceded without
placing the entire federation in jeopardy. The tragic story of this
insurrection also makes it abundantly clear that its trail of destruction
and anarchy ended only when it was crushed through an all out military
effort.
A third venue of conflict – the ‘North-East’ – has also ranked
among the most turbulent parts of South Asia. At the promulgation of
India’s constitution in 1950, the ‘North-East’ consisted of (a) the State
of Assam, (b) two territorial entities placed in Part C of the ‘First
Schedule’ of the constitution (Manipur and Tripura), (c) the semi-
independent kingdom of Sikkhim placed in Part D of the ‘First Schedule’,
and (d) several ‘Tribal Areas’ listed in the ‘Fifth Schedule’. The
devolution cum power-sharing measures adopted in this region, usually
though ‘Accords’ between Delhi and the rebel groups since that time have
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involved, inter alia, the recognition of various areas within this region as
fully-fledged ‘States’ of the Indian federation. Thus, at present, the
region consists of the states of Assam, Meghālayā, Tripura, Mizoram,
Manipur, Nāgaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkhim.
Devolution which the process of creating new States represents has
undoubtedly had the effect of making certain insurrectionary movements in
the north-east dormant, if not pacifying them altogether. Yet, intense
political turbulences in the form of both inter-ethnic clashes as well as
anti-Indian acts of destruction and sabotage have persisted (see Figure
6). For example, the All Assam Student Union (AASU – the strongest
Assamese militant outfit since the early the 1980s) has continued to
engage in sporadic but deadly attacks on civilian targets, the most
recent of which was staged in November 2006. In Tripura thousands of
Bengali migrants have perished in attacks led by the guerrilla group
‘Tripura National Volunteer Force’, one of the most gruesome episodes of
which occurred, coincidentally, in July 1983. In Manipur, the ‘People's
Liberation Army’, the Maoist revolutionary group that provides leadership
to an insurgency among the Meitei tribals of the Imphal valley, launched
a campaign against “outsiders” (Assamese and Bengalis) mainly in order
to whip up popular support for their radical cause. The prolonged and
bloody campaign for the creation of a semi-autonomous ‘Bodoland’
embracing an area that stretches along the northern banks of Brahmaputra
river has drawn strength from two sources – the resentment of the
Bodo/Kachari tribes against Assamese domination, and their traditional
animosity towards the so-called “ādivasi” (now outnumbering the
Bodo/Kachari) who are believed to have migrated into this
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Figure 6 – Insurgent Groups in India’s ‘North-East’
area in the 19th century. Finally, there are the frequent outbursts of
violence between the Naga and the Kuki tribal groups in Manipur, each
regarding the other as intruder. The Naga insurgents, meanwhile, have
embarked upon a campaign for the creation of a “Greater Nagaland” that
would extend well beyond the frontiers of the State of Nagaland as
demarcated at present. To sum up, India’s hold over its North-East is
93
certainly much more secure today than it was at independence, or even at
the time of the Sino-Indian War of the early 1960s. Yet there is still a
great deal of spatial variation in the effectiveness of the institutions
of government in this region. Indeed, over some of its localities,
government authority is either non-existent or is confined to what could
be enforced by the armed forces.
3.2. Continuing Language-Base Discrimination
The Urdu-Hindi language dispute is a persistent language-related
problem in India to which devolution has not found an answer. Urdu, the
language of the Muslim elite in several areas of pre-partition India, and
one to which the British had accorded an official status similar or even
superior to that of Hindi, still remains the preferred language of an
estimated 50-60% of the Muslim segment of India’s population. This makes
it one of the largest minority languages of India. Though Urdu was
granted constitutional recognition as one of India’s official languages,
for many years after independence there remained a strong resistance
among the Hindus to the idea of placing Urdu at par with the other
officially recognised languages of the country.
Linguistic Minorities within the States of the Indian Union, 1971
State
non-speakers of the official language of the State as % of theState population)
State
non-speakers of the official language of the State as % of the State population
Jammu &KashmirAssam Karnataka(Delhi) Tripura
47.839.034.133.331.223.4
Tamil Nadu Andhra PradeshWest Bengal HimachalPradesh Uttar Pradesh
15.514.714.714.311.410.5
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Maharashtra Punjab Bihar MadhyaPradesh Orissa
20.520.416.815.5
Gujarat Haryana Rajasthan Kerala All states
10.08.94.017.1
NOTE: Nagaland, which was a state by 1971, has not been covered in the source.Delhi, though covered, was (in 1971) a Union Territory.
‘State re-organisation’ on the basis of language has also been
criticised on the grounds of its shortfall in achieving the objective of
reducing the numerical size of linguistic minorities at the level of the states.
In this context, critics have presented various sets of data (such as
those tabulated above) to show that in many States there are fairly large
minority groups (many of which are numerically larger than the total population of Sri
Lanka) whose languages are not used in the affairs of government.
Implicit in this is the idea that there persists in India considerable
discrimination against the smaller linguistic minorities. The validity
of this criticism, however, has necessarily to be gauged against the
backdrop of the fact that such un-accommodated linguistic minorities
constitute a lower population ratio than ever before – probably no more
than about 17% of the country’s total.
3.3. The Marginalised Muslim Minority
The Muslims, the largest religious minority of India, constitute
about 12% of the country’s population. Though spread throughout the
country, about 52% of the Indian Muslims live in the ‘Gangetic’ States of
Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. Outside this area, fairly large
Muslim concentrations are found in parts of Gujarat, Maharashtra and
Kerala (western Deccan), Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh (especially in
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areas of the former princely states of Hyderabad and Mysore), Tamil Nadu,
Jammu & Kashmir, and Assam. In many of the larger cities of the north
the Muslim population ratio exceeds 20%. These include Sri Nagar
(91.0%), Hyderabad (38.0%), Lucknow (29.6%), Varanasi (25.9%), Allahabad
(23.9%), and Kanpur (20.2%). In metropolitan Calcutta, Mumbai and Delhi
it approximates 15%.
The impact of the Hindu-Muslim rivalry has continued to pervade
almost all aspects of governance in India. It has tended to condition the
nature of Indo-Pakistan relations and Indo-Bangladesh relations,
perpetuating the intractability of solutions to disputes among them in
respect of their national frontiers, control over peripheral territory,
and the sharing of resources. It has had a profound influence on extra-
regional foreign relations of each of these countries.
In general, economic factors have figured less prominently in the
Hindu-Muslim confrontations witnessed in India during the past 50 years
than they have in most of the other types of internal conflict in the
country. This could be explained with reference to the fact that,
typically, in most parts of India, socio-economic stratifications cut
across the Hindu-Muslim divide in the sense that, in respect of both
wealth and income as well as other criteria that have a bearing on the
physical quality of life, there are no sharp contrasts between the
Muslims, on the one hand, and the less affluent numerical majority (the
lower castes) in the Hindu segment of the population, on the other. The
readily evident economic difference between the Hindus and the Muslims
lies in the fact that in most parts of India, the latter group is under-
represented in the higher strata society.
Nevertheless, there could be no denial of the fact that the Muslims
see themselves as an economically disadvantaged and socially
discriminated minority. The spokesmen of this community often emphasise
its relatively lower level of literacy and educational attainment and its
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under-representation in both public sector employment as well as high-
income professional fields. In this context, it has been pointed out
that, of the 3,062 recruits to the elite Indian Administrative Services
from 1948 to 1982, Muslims have accounted for only 1.7% ( Beg,
1989:121); and, according to
estimates furnished by the Minorities Commission of India, Muslims
constitute only 4.4% of the total central government employees at all
levels throughout the country. Information generated by surveys of more
restricted scope provides further confirmation of the impression that, at
least is some of the main Muslim population concentrations of north
India, the average household incomes of the Muslims are lower than those
of the Hindus, and that the majority of Muslims are confined to low
income occupations. For instance, as Rudolph & Rudolph (1987: 43) have
shown: “[i]n Maharashtra and Gujarat where there are large local
concentrations of mostly poor Muslims, communal violence has become
endemic as a result of struggles between Hindus and Muslims over
reservations, employment, property and business opportunities”. Yet
another facet of economic discrimination is found in the fact that the
poorest among the Muslims have been denied many of the benefits of
‘affirmative action’ (the most widely acclaimed form of consociational
power-sharing in India) made available in the form of “reservations” to
the depressed segments of the Hindu population (‘Other Backward Castes’
and ‘Scheduled Castes’) and to the ‘Scheduled Tribes’.
There have been periodic oscillations in the incidence and
intensity of violence associated with Hindu-Muslim rivalry in India.
Following the great convulsions that accompanied the partition of British
India in 1947, the trend throughout the 1950s was one of steady decline
in the occurrence of these ‘communal’ clashes. In the next decade there
was, first, the sharp spurt of 1964 which coincided with the ‘Hazrat Bal’
incident, followed by a dip, and then another upsurge which lasted from
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1969 until about 1972. Thereafter, the rate remained relatively low
almost up to the end of that decade. In the 1980s, there was, once again,
an increase which accelerated sharply from 1986 until about 1994. It was
at this time (December 1992) that the infamous destruction of the Babri
Mosque at Ayodhya by the exponents of the ‘Ramjanmabhoomi Movement’
occurred. The number killed in communal confrontations of the 1980s,
according to Hasan (1996), was almost four times higher than that of the
1970s. From the mid-1990s, with fundamentalist groups like the ‘Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh’ (RSS) and the ‘Vishwa Hindu Parishad’ (VHP) emerging
at the forefront of Indian politics, and with the spread of the concept
of an all-Indian ‘Hinduthva’ even at its highest levels, there has been
an oscillating but fairly distinct long-term trend towards further
deterioration of Hindu-Muslim relations in areas where there are large
agglomerations of the latter group.
98
TEXT BOXPatterns of Violence in Hindu-Muslim Confrontations in India*
Hindu-Muslim violence has been more an urban phenomenon than a ruralone, mainly for the reason that it is in urban areas that the two groupslive side-by-side in intense competition with one another for the highlyrestricted range of opportunities in the same economic space. The urbancharacter of these conflicts have increased in the recent past also becauseit is mainly (though not exclusively) in the cities and the towns thatpolitical and/or criminal organisations sponsoring violence operate withincreasing vigour and effectiveness. On the basis of information furnished in several detaileddescriptions of communal clashes it is possible to construct a model whichportrays how economic factors aggravate the rivalry between these religiousgroups. The basic components of this model are that, in all these urbancentres (or, in the case of the larger cities, the suburbs or residentiallocalities) there is, on the one hand, a sizable presence of Muslimsconstituting a part of the “native” segment of the population, engaged inlong-established middle class occupations in various crafts and in retailtrade, and falling into the lower and lower-middle income strata; and, onthe other, a Hindu population in which there is a prominent presence ofrelatively recent migrants, most of whom are in low income occupations ofthe informal sector. It has, indeed, been suggested that some of the mostgruesome communal riots, such as those of Ahmedabad, Meerut, Surat,Aurangabad, Baroda, Aligarh, Varanasi, Bhiwandi, Kanpur and Calcutta haveoccurred in situations where the Muslims have achieved a measure ofeconomic stability and an improvement of their living conditions. Incontrast, the employment prospects of the migrant Hindus in many of thesesituations are, at best, irregular and vulnerable to changes in the short-run. Both these groups live in conditions of extreme squalor, in spatiallysegregated residential neighbourhoods where, typically, crime and vice arealso rampant. Formal law enforcement is perfunctory, and many aspects ofdaily life remain under the control of criminal syndicates with amultiplicity of interests including protection and extortion rackets,smuggling and drug trafficking, land grabbing and other shady transactionsin the real estate market, and the control of trade union activities. The
There are indications that the communal violence that has continued
to be more or less endemic to the cities and town of ‘western India’
(Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Meerut, Surat, Aurangabad, Baroda, Aligarh) has also
99
begun to occur with increasing frequency in some of the main urban
centres of the South and the Gangetic plains, for the same underlying
causes, and in almost identical fashion. At the time of these convulsions
formal law enforcement has often been perfunctory. More significantly,
even in normal times, many aspects of daily ghetto life remain under
the control of criminal syndicates with a multiplicity of interests
including protection and extortion rackets, smuggling and drug
trafficking, land grabbing and other shady transactions in the real
estate market, and the control of trade-union activities. In the larger
cities, in particular, regimentation of daily life through the exercise
of muscle-power is the norm among slum dwellers, as organised mob-
violence is in electoral politics. Indeed, several Indian scholars (not
the types that sermonise to adoring audiences in less enlightened
countries like Sri Lanka) have exposed the links that exist between
politicians, the police and the gangland bosses in the phenomenon
frequently referred to as ‘criminalisation of politics’ in their country.
The aggravating Hindu-Muslim conflict, featured as it is by
intensifying religious fanaticism on both sides of the great divide, is
probably the biggest blot in the record of performance of the Indian
political system. Given the basic elements of the ‘geography’ of
phenomenon, it is obvious that neither devolution (in the case of the
Muslim-majority State of J&K) nor other forms of consociational power-
sharing that could be provided through statutory means have been
effective in safeguarding the rights of the Muslims and reversing the
escalating trend of Hindu-Muslim rivalry.
“Gathering Storm” of Radical Revolt
Rivalries generated by socio-economic causes are often prominently
displayed in the conflicts that are regarded as being based on the caste
100
and tribal diversities in India. It has even been persuasively argued the
‘State Re-organisation’ of the Indian federation, initiated in the mid
1950s, in which the focus throughout has been on facilitating power-
sharing among the main linguistic groups has, while diffusing some of the
language-based tensions of the past, has had the effect of bringing into
the forefront of India’s political affairs conflicts relating to caste
and tribe.
101
In pre-independence times and in the early years of independence,
violent conflict between castes, where it occurred, tended to take the
form of confrontations between the land-owning upper castes and the
landless segments of the peasantry usually belonging to the lower castes
and the tribal groups. Such conflict usually took the form of forcible
occupation of land, organised protest against the collection of land
rent, and pillage of granaries, sometimes spontaneously, and at others,
with a measure of guidance provided by ultra-left political
organisations; and retaliatory action by the law enforcement agencies.
Episodes of this type, involving varying levels of violence and lasting
102
over varying lengths of time, were reported from areas such as Kerala,
Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Assam up to about the early 1970s. They
were, however, few and far between.
In more recent times ‘caste conflict’ in India has shifted towards
the lower levels of the traditional caste structure, taking the form of
confrontations either between the middle castes that command newly
acquired wealth and enhanced social status (following agrarian reform
movements such as ‘Zamindari abolition’ and ‘land ceiling legislation’)
and those whose identities of caste or tribe place them lower down in the
social hierarchy, or between the ‘Scheduled Castes’ and ‘Other Backward
Castes’ (OBCs), or between contending groups representing complex caste
and/or tribal alliances. These new types of confrontation, as reported
from Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, have been
featured by gruesome and large-scale violence perpetrated by one group
upon another, and have involved the participation of both armed
revolutionary militias (for example, the so-called ‘People’s War Groups’,
the ‘Vinodh Mishra Faction’ of the CPI-ML, the ‘Maoist Communist Centre’,
and the ‘Mazdoor Kishan Sangharsh Samiti’) as well as private caste sēnā
(mercenary armies serving one or another of the propertied castes.
Causal connections between widening disparities in wealth and
income, the rapid upsurge of unemployment, discrimination based on caste
and tribe have been highlighted in several recent studies of intra-state
conflicts in India (Government of India, 1988; Chaudhuri, 1991; Gupta,
1992; Misra, 1993; Sen, 1996). One such study (Chandramohan,1998) has
identified the districts listed below as areas which have experienced a
relatively high incidence of such conflict from the early 1980s to the
late ‘90s.
An official investigation on extreme forms of violence generated by
this type of inter-group conflict in Bihar (Government of India, 1988)
103
speculated on what the prevailing trends could portend for the stability
of the India’s federal system in the period ahead in the following terms:
“It should not be surprising if the winds of peasant politics of
the twenty-first century take a south-east direction (from Bihar),
with Kerala providing the legislative wherewithal, and Andhra
Pradesh and West Bengal providing the organisational lessons. The
environment conducive to a massive peasant movement dominated by
the landless labour, small and marginal farmers from backward
classes with greater participation of women ... already exists in
these conflict-prone states. The increasing politicisation of
these movements would bring the extremists into mainstream
politics”.
An appraisal of the Indian system of devolution from the viewpoint
of its adoptability in Sri Lanka should also take into account the
increasing trend of collapse of formal government in many parts of that
country in the face of a rising tide of insurrection supposedly based on
‘Maoist ideology’. Scholars have attributed this phenomenon to increasing
oppression, deprivation and socio-economic marginalisation of groups of
people living in conditions of dire poverty and want. The present study
cannot venture into a detailed analysis of the causal connections between
poverty and political unrest (of the type attempted in Peiris, 1999).
However, the passage from a recent writing by one of the leading
authorities on insurrectionary politics in rural India (Mehra, 2006: 36)
presented below underscore the fact that devolution, and even other forms
of consociational power-sharing in India, are featured not only by the
achievements highlighted by their exponents, but also by phenomenal
failures.
Table 3 - Areas featured by a high incidence of violent inter-group
104
conflict (since the early 1980s)
State District
Punjab Jullandhur, Ludhiana, Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Hoshiapur
Bihar Patna, Gaya, Aurangabad, Roitas, Bhojpur, Nalanda, Dhanbad, Sirpur, Santal Pargans
West Bengal Bhardwan, Twenty-Four Paraganas, Midnapore
Maharashtra Thane, Ahmadnagar, Nasik, Chandrapur
Madhya Pradesh Batsar
Andhra Pradesh Adilabad, Karimnagar, Warrangal, Medak, Nizamabad, Khamman, Mehnagar,Rangareddy, Srikakulam
Karnataka Dharwar
Tamil Nadu North Arcot, Dharmapuri, Salem, Thanjavir
Kerala Aalepy, Kottayam, Palghat
“The Maoist expansion in the past few years has been impressive –
from 55 districts in nine states in 2003 to 156 districts in 13 states in
2004 to 170 districts in 15 states in 2006. In their strongholds in
about 55 districts in 12 states, they run parallel governments, which is
not surprising given the retreat, if not collapse, of the state in key
social sectors such as education and health in many States and
stranglehold on political power of those who control land and other
economic resources. However, only thing prominently known about their
parallel government so far is the jan adalat, basically kangaroo courts,
and their brutal summary punishments that keep the people in the area
105
adequately terrified. The expansion of their area of influence in 170
out of 604 districts of the country and the ‘parallel’ government they
have been able to establish, give them sustenance in a dubious way, give
them a territory to train on and plan their ‘revolutionary’ foray against
the state and the people” (emphasis added).
4. Devolution and Conflict Resolution
No critique on devolution could afford to ignore the strong
confirmation provided by international experiences of the past few
decades to the generalisation that devolution through constitutional
devices (‘quasi-federal’, ‘federal’, ‘confederal’ or whatever) in nation-
states plagued by ethnic conflict have not restored inter-ethnic harmony
and that, on the contrary, it has had a tendency to imperil democracy,
and could constitute an irreversible step towards national
disintegration. Moreover, as the related evidence also shows, these risks
were averted only in situations where the Centre had the capacity –
usually in terms of military strength – to overcome the challenges to
democratic governance and national integrity.
The following extracts from major writings on the subject conform
closely to the observations made above. In introducing these studies
mention should be made of the fact that they are empirically based on
wide spectra of case studies of conflict situations. They are not aimed
at authenticating one or another conceptual postulate. All of them have
paradigmatic similarities in their commitments to peaceful resolution of
inter-group conflict and in their concern for safeguarding the rights of
minority groups.
106
“Even if power-sharing can avert potential ethnic conflicts or
dampen mild ones, our concern here is whether it can bring peace
under the conditions of intense violence and extreme ethnic
mobilisation that are likely to motivate intervention. The answer
is no. … The core reason why power-sharing cannot resolve ethnic
civil wars is that it is inherently voluntaristic; it requires
conscious decisions by elites to cooperate to avoid ethnic strife.
Under conditions of hypernationalist mobilisation and real
security threats, group leaders are unlikely to be receptive to
compromise, and even if they are, they cannot act without being
discredited and replaced by harder-line rivals”.
KAUFMANN Chaim ,1997: 265-304
“Proposals for devolution abound, but more often than not
devolution agreements are difficult to reach, and once reached,
soon abort. Most such agreements are concluded against a
background of secessionist warfare or terrorist violence. Where
central authority is secure, as in India, the appropriate
decisions can be made and implemented by the centre. But, where
the very question is how far the writ of the centre will run,
devolution is a matter of bilateral agreement, and an enduring
agreement is an elusive thing”.
HOROWITZ Donald L ,1985: 622-3
“(I)n ethnically divided societies after intense conflicts they
(i.e. power-sharing institutions) typically have a set of
unintended but perverse consequences. They empower ethnic elites
from previously warring groups, create incentives for these elites
to press radical demands once peace is in place, and lower the
costs for these elites to escalate conflict in ways that threaten
democracy and peace. These dangers can be avoided when power-
sharing institutions operate under very special conditions such as
107
a political culture of accommodation, economic prosperity and
equality, demographic stability, strong governmental institutions,
stable hierarchical relations within ethnic communities, and a
supportive international environment. Yet those conditions are
unlikely to be present or difficult to sustain after severe
conflicts such as civil wars.”
ROTHCHILD Donald & ROEDER Philip G, 2005: 29
In the entire mass of research literature on this subject one
could find only a few cases of successful resolution of ethnic conflict
through the constitutional device of territorial power-sharing –
surprisingly few, given the fact that, as an approach to negotiated
settlement of inter-group conflict in Third World countries, it has
tended to be prescribed by peace-makers from both within and outside far
more frequently than any other. For example, a recent study (Hoddie &
Hartzell, 2005), presents what purports to be a comprehensive list
containing 38 ‘civil wars’ of the period 1945-1998 that were ended
through negotiation. Of this total, 18 had territorial power-sharing
108
agreements. A careful perusal of the latter category in the list would
show, however, that four were agreements involving successor states of
the former Soviet Union and their respective ethnic minorities, eleven
have failed to achieve durable peace, one culminated in secession, and
that even qualified success could be claimed only in respect of five. It
is also of interest that none of the five successful cases are comparable
to the Sri Lankan conflict in respect of power, ferocity and the global
reach of the insurgents.
During the more recent past (i.e. after the period covered by the
foregoing study) there have been three other peace settlements that
contained ‘regional autonomy’ dimensions – the agreement between Dhaka
and the Chittagong Hill-Tribes of Bangladesh, the Jakarta-Aceh Peace
Accord of Indonesia, and the so-called ‘Belfast Agreement’ Northern
Ireland. The agreements in Bangladesh and Indonesia, it should be noted,
were achieved under exceptional circumstances and in the aftermath of
devastating calamities. In both, the political concessions granted to the
rebel groups in the form of “autonomy over local affairs” and
“representation at the Centre” in return for total disarmament have also
been extremely meagre and are far less substantial than that provided for
under the present constitution of Sri Lanka and its Thirteenth Amendment
(i.e. the Provincial Councils system). And, in both situations,
persistent rumblings of discontent continue forming a gloomy shadow of
doubt on the durability of peace.
In Northern Ireland armed confrontations between the ‘Unionists’
(drawn from the predominantly Protestant segment of Northern Ireland’s
population, desiring continuing union with Britain) and the
‘Nationalists’ (comprising almost exclusively Roman Catholics, who desire
merger of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland) had defied many
attempts at negotiated settlement, and had, for long, been associated
with both fierce armed confrontations (between the militant groups on
109
either side of the ethno-political divide, and between the militants and
the law-enforcement agencies) as well as terrorist attacks on civilian
targets by the paramilitary groups. The
‘Belfast Agreement’ of 1998 (a.k.a. ‘Good Friday Agreement’) that marked
the conversion of the existing uneasy truce (declared in 1994) between
the two sides into a peace accord, entailed, among other things, the
initiation of several institutional measures that were intended to
facilitate: (a) various forms of power-sharing among the participants of
the conflict and (b) the decommissioning of arms, large stockpiles of
which were believed to be held by the paramilitary groups. The agreement,
though widely hailed as a major breakthrough towards ending a seemingly
intractable and never-ending conflict, has hitherto fallen short of the
expectations with which it was forged. Thus, the ‘Northern Ireland
Assembly’ which was intended to facilitate the establishment of a
government in Northern Ireland that accommodated all segments of its
population (i.e. all political parties) and, at the same time, maintain
links with the governments of Britain and Ireland, was suspended in 2002
due mainly to the non-compliance of certain paramilitary groups with the
stipulated procedures of disarmament. In September 2005, the
‘Independent Commission’ entrusted the task of monitoring disarmament
reported that, while the decommissioning of arms by the ‘Nationalist’
militant groups has been satisfactorily accomplished, several
pro-‘Unionist’ groups of militants were yet to abide by the related terms
of the agreement of 1998. Meanwhile violent clashes and acts of terrorism
have continued to occur, albeit at a lower level of intensity than in
earlier times. From perspectives of the present study, the feature of
the Belfast Agreement that needs to be highlighted is that its main focus
was on power-sharing through various consociational modalities, and not
on the devolution of power.
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Endnote
On Panchayat Raj
‘Panchayat Samithi’ (village- or clan- level, consensus-based
committees consisting of ‘elders’, often multi-caste in composition, but,
as far as it is known, never accommodating representatives of the so-
called ‘untouchables’) existed in parts of pre-modern India, performing
an important functions in community-level governance Including those
111
pertaining to the enforcement of traditional laws and social mores. The
leaders of India’s freedom movement believed that similar institutions,
if re-established under government sponsorship at the grassroots of
Indian society, will have the potential to perform a catalytic role in
mobilising popular participation in rural development of post-
independence India. This perception drew strength from the remarkable
success achieved in a few experimental development projects based upon
the Panchayat approach in localities such as Comila and Etawar pioneered
in the 1920s and the ‘30s by volunteer workers affiliated to the All-
India National Congress. Mahatma Gandhi took a special interest in
Panchayat Raj. Thus, the ‘Community Development Programme’ (CDP), one of
the main components of India’s First Five-Year Plan (1951-55) envisaged
the setting up of a network of ‘Panchayat Samithi’ throughout India,
administratively regulated by a hierarchically arranged system of
institutions – Zilla Parishads, District Panchayat Committees, Panchayat
ministries/departments at State-level – in which Panchayats are
represented.
Despite the high priority accorded to the CDP and the concept of
‘Panchayat Raj’ in the first three Five-Year Plans, by the early 1960s,
it was becoming increasingly evident that, barring exceptions in States
such as Kerala and West Bengal, the entire programme had failed to fulfil
its expectations and had become a huge and wasteful burden on the
government’s coffers. A Ford Foundation funded variant of the programme
named the ‘Intensive Agricultural Development Program’, confined to a
selected Panchayat Samithi Block from each district, aimed at propagating
newly introduced ‘Green Revolution’ technology, also experienced a high
failure rate. Thus, from about the late 1960s, the entire Panchayat Raj
strategy receded to the background and was eventually abandoned
altogether.
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In the early 1990s, however, the government headed by Narasimha Rao
initiated a concerted effort to revitalize the Panchayat strategy. The
main innovative element of this attempt was that it involved the adoption
of the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution (so-called ‘Panchayat
Raj
Amendments’) which required all State governments to introduce
legislation to revitalize the Panchayat system, make regular elections
of their members mandatory, facilitate the reservation of seats in the
Panchayat Samithi for women and Scheduled Castes, and devolve on the
Panchayats a range of development functions. Large financial allocations
were also set apart for this programme.
There have been many evaluations of the revived Panchayat system of
India. The following extracts from a volume authored by two of the most
distinguished among the writers on India (Dreze & Sen, 2002: 361) is
fairly representative of the available general evaluations and, one
should add, reminiscent of the guarded optimism that featured the
evaluations of the CDP that were published in the heyday of that
programme in the 1950s.
“Indeed, the reforms associated with Panchayat Raj amendments have
followed very different courses in different states. At one
extreme, Bihar has barely reached the stage of organizing
Panchayat elections. Kerala, on the other hand, has gone far
beyond the constitutional requirements and initiated a visionary
campaign of ‘decentralised planning’ through Panchayat Raj
institutions. Even among states that have followed a similar
course in terms of legislative reform, the practical results have
varied a great deal depending on the extent of social preparedness
in terms of educational levels, political mobilization and social
equity. The issue of social preparedness has emerged quite clearly
in states like Madhya Pradesh where the state has been active in
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legislative reforms, yet the practical results have been held back
by the antecedent social inequalities, educational backwardness
and other barriers inherited from the past”.
Dreze & Sen conclude (p. 363):
“In the light of these learning possibilities (i.e. from
experiences since 1993), the first wave of social change
associated with the Panchayat raj amendments warrants cautious
optimism about the potential for local democracy in India. There
are, of course, also the matters of concern. These include the
frequent derailing of local democracy by social inequality, the
limited participation of the public in local governance on a day-
to-day basis, the dormant conditions of ‘gram sabha’ (village
assemblies) in many states, the lack of significant devolution of
powers in many fields, and, last but not least, the widespread
embezzlement of public resources associated with local development
programmes under Panchayat auspices”.
As postscript, it may be recorded that, in Sri Lanka, there have
been several development projects that were conceptually similar to the
Indian Panchayat Raj – for example, the Rural Development Scheme launched
informally in the 1930s and placed on an official footing soon after
independence, the Cultivation Committee system under the Paddy Lands Act,
114
the Divisional Development Councils programme of the early 1970s, and the
Gramodhaya Mandala programme of the Premadasa regime. It is of interest
that Ursula Hick’s seminal work titled ‘Development from Below’ referred
to Sri Lanka’s Rural Development Scheme as a forerunner of India’s CDP.
The Panchayat Raj approach has also been pursued in other South
Asian countries – in Bangladesh under General Mohammad Ershard and in
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