India Is Elsewhere

In his The Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani perceptively observed: ‘The future of Western political theory will be decided outside the West. And in deciding that future, the experience of India will loom large’. At first blush it seems as though Roderick Matthews’ new book pursues this line of argument. ‘Does the future of democracy lie with India?’ asks the subtitle. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that Matthews has little interest in such exalted intellectual inquiry. The title of the book, he tells us, is a play on the mythical Indian rope trick where the rope stays up because the fakir wills it. ‘India’s democracy is much the same… it will stand if Indians want it to, and use their collective will to give it strength.’ The substitution of trite tautology for sturdy insight is a recurrent feature of this book, starting from its title.

The author of popular histories of the British Raj including Jinnah vs Gandhi, Matthews offers a mélange of politics, history and political theory. He begins with a disquisition on the emergence of democracy, right through to the unavoidable Francis Fukuyama. His ideas on the machinery of politics are not any more insightful; the book abounds with observations like: ‘Politicians want to get things done, or sometimes undone, for a variety of personal and abstract reasons.’ Isn’t this true of most people in most vocations for most of the time? Into the bargain, we get such ex cathedra pronouncements as: ‘We as a species are becoming increasingly confident about our ability to make good collective decisions, and this bodes well for democracy.’

Perhaps it is unfair to judge a historian by his grip on such matters. But even on his own turf, Matthews’ footwork is far from nimble. The bulk of the book is devoted to reciting the commonplaces of Subcontinental history, and if anything there are glaring solecisms and errors. ‘India was declared to be a sovereign, federal republic’, the author confidently declares, adding for good measure that ‘All three of these terms were important’. In fact, the Indian Constitution explicitly states that India is a union of states. Its framers pointedly wished to avoid the term ‘federal’ owing to their concerns about the preservation of national unity. More damaging are Matthews’ attempts at comparing India’s democratic experience with those of the Western world. ‘The recent collapse of public finances in Greece,’ he writes, ‘provides a salutary lesson in how state credit can be deployed to satisfy an electorate, but only at the risk of longer-term disaster.’ Evidently, India is not the only country whose political economy is a mystery to Matthews. What’s worse, whenever the author advances an original opinion, it turns out to be thoroughly idiosyncratic. India in the 20th century apparently had only two ‘truly national leaders’: MK Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan. Thankfully, Matthews is unsure if Narendra Modi deserves to join this exclusive pantheon.

Perhaps the most serious problem with this book is the author’s inability to understand the impact of democracy in South Asia. Matthews frequently avers that democracy is a form of conflict mitigation, if not resolution. Violence, he insists, is antithetical to the prospects of democracy. Yet he seldom pauses to consider if the introduction of democracy itself isn’t a trigger for such conflict. The mere use of the language of majority and minority set the stage for protracted conflicts in the region. In theory, democracy presupposes the existence of stable identities. In practice, though, these identities are fashioned through the democratic process and often in contradistinction to the identities of other groups. The results can be seen in the violent turn taken by many democracies in South Asia. Seen from this angle, a key question about democracy in India is: why have levels of violence been so low? Matthews does not ask it.

What he does offer at the end is a homily on ‘What can ordinary Indians do to help democracy stay strong?’: ‘avoid over-expectation’, ‘don’t over-value leadership’, ‘cultivate serenity’, ‘develop patience’, and so on. Fortunately, the ‘ordinary Indian’ doesn’t need to plough through the 350-odd pages of this book to figure this out.

(Srinath Raghavan is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research)

booksRoderick MatthewsThe Great Indian Rope Trick: Does The Future Of Democracy Lie With India?