Fractures in the Indian Union: a book extract

The data for India’s states across the sectors of health, economy and education raises two obvious questions: why has peninsular India done better and how can the divergences between the states ever be addressed in policymaking?

Subnationalism is a frequently cited reason. A greater focus on education in the southern states is attributed to political movements that emphasised self-respect, which in turn resulted in better development for them. Some of these movements were also explicitly anti-caste, which has been attributed to consolidation of the subaltern, yielding a sense of solidarity and common purpose.

Others have attributed the improvements narrowly to specific policies, such as midday meals which helped keep children in school, regardless of whether those were the result of such subnational consolidation. Still others have cited cultural and anthropological reasons and practices, such as marriage among cousins—where a woman who marries into her extended family has slightly more agency than a woman married into a home outside the family network. Economists also like to cite better access to the sea.

The answer is probably all the above, and then some. Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and a genuine inability to distinguish cause from effect make pinpointing the reasons why southern states have done better than their northern counterparts a difficult question to answer.

A crucial aspect of the divergence is that India’s best states were not always the best. Their improvement and outcomes can be explained by policy actions and the politics that enabled those over the last few generations. Present-day Kerala, which is a consistent leader in most development indicators across health and education, for example, was considered a basket case in the late nineteenth century. The situation was so bad that the British were constantly threatening to annex what was then the princely state of Travancore and merge it with the Madras Presidency.

The states of Travancore, Cochin, and what is present-day northern Kerala did not see themselves as a single society. Travancore’s caste system was rigid even by the standards of the nineteenth century, and the majority of the population lived in conditions that the British administrators thought were cruel.

Travancore’s elite Brahmins were not originally from the state, causing further complications and disaffection among the people. There was no concept of a ‘Malayalee’; back then, that term generally meant someone belonging to the Nair caste. In effect, Travancore was a state without a cohesive identity and its people lived in abject poverty with no health or education to speak of.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a fledgling movement called the Aikya Kerala movement started to protest the dominance of Brahmins in the region. What started as a demand for representation in jobs soon morphed into a movement that went well beyond its original cause. It forged an identity for the Malayalee people for the first time.

The real effect of the movement, historians agree, was that it made society seek public services for the entire society as Malayalee people, as opposed to seeking favours for particular caste groups.

This transformed the health and education services in ways that we still see evidence of. The transformation wasn’t overnight, or easy. But the slow struggle to transform society ended in success, partly because the citizens thought of themselves as one linguistic unit.

Neighbouring Tamil Nadu had the non-Brahmin movement, which started a few decades after the Aikya Kerala movement. Later, this morphed into the Justice Party and continues to this day in the form of the offshoots of the Dravidian movement.

Much like the Aikya Kerala movement, the Dravidian movement started as a protest for better representation of the people in jobs before becoming a subnationalist movement about Tamil causes and identity, seeking to unify Tamilians against Brahmins first, and later against New Delhi and Hindi imposition.

The effect of the Dravidian movement, much like that of the Aikya Kerala movement, was one of consolidating the Tamil identity. Public services are now seen as public services for the Tamil people, as a whole. This, again, is credited in literature as one of the driving forces behind improvements in health and education in the state.

Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka have also shown a higher degree of subnationalism than the rest of India. Their welfare policies—particularly in areas of supplemental nutrition, health and education—distinctly belong to southern India.

Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have generous public distribution systems, for example. In the context of the budgetary constraints that India’s states face, the southern states, in general, privilege universal access over targeting, unlike the states in the Indo-Gangetic plains, or the recommendations of the Union government.

A renewed sense of localized kinship amongst an old ‘in-group’ of a given society—which may be ethnic, or linguistic, or any other such axis of identification—has proven to be a common thread amongst societies that made rapid advances in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finland and Japan are frequently cited examples of this.

A feeling of ‘my society’ among people with respect to their ‘in-group’ seems to make them view public goods such as health and education as something beyond a zero-sum game between competing communities or subgroups.

India, with a population of 1.3 billion and multiple internal cleavages, makes that feeling of a strong ‘in-group’ near impossible to achieve for the entire country. What the right size of a group is for such a feeling to be fostered is a difficult question to answer; but if the rest of the world is any guide, it isn’t anywhere near the population of India.

The sense of subnationalism and of common identity is difficult to forge. But once forged, it’s a great force multiplier, as the experience in southern India has shown. People will have to have a sense of belonging for public services to be effective.

It’s in this context that people also feel a positive connection with their society when their tax money is spent for the development of that society. It strengthens their bond with society and creates a virtuous cycle. And locally designed welfare programmes tailored to a society’s needs give its people a sense of participation, improving that sense of belonging even further.

…

Does the Indian Union work?

A simple test of whether a democracy is functional is this: does it allow a self-governing people to proceed on a slow march towards enlightened liberalism? India’s answer to that was never an enthusiastic yes. In the time since Independence, that march towards liberalism has taken several dark detours that even the loudest nationalist won’t deny.

Examining utilitarian outcomes of governance in each state, in the areas of health, education and economic opportunities, is a useful place to start. Whether the political Union allows India’s states the policy space to meet and accommodate the aspirations of their citizens is another crucial question in assessing the health of India’s overall democracy.

Whatever a given state’s achievements, or lack thereof, the system should allow all its citizens to feel they have the right to self-determination, which will allow them to work towards the light at the end of the tunnel.

What India needs is a political structure that allows for states—and other subunits of society—to organise themselves, devise their own policies, and have sufficient resources to fund those policies. More importantly, in doing so, the country must retain the democratic sanctity of the process by which the subunits arrive at those policy decisions. After all, that is the only way to maximise developmental outcomes while minimising possible conflicts.

Arriving at the right policy is quite often an accident. Sustaining and improving that policy is what needs concerted action, knowledge and sacrifice.

The ability to arrive at that policy option, or more importantly, the ability to choose from multiple iterations of a policy to arrive at what works, is why the structure of decision-making is far more important than any single decision itself. The purpose of such a structure, above all, should be one that makes people feel empowered.