Democracy And Violence: In India And Beyond, Economic And Political Weekly
In about a year’s time, the citizens of India will vote in their sixteenth General Elections. The last
such exercise, held in May 2009, showcased a bewildering variety of parties and politicians. Some
700 million adults were eligible to vote; about 400 million actually voted, to choose five hundred and
forty-three members of the national Parliament. The Republic of India also has twenty-eight states,
in which elections are likewise held on a five-year cycle. Altogether, many more Indians have freely
chosen their political representatives than have citizens of Western democracies of far greater
antiquity.
Demographically and otherwise, India dominates South Asia. Of the other nations in the region,
Pakistan, born at the same time as India (in August 1947), and Bangladesh (which seceded from
Pakistan in 1971), have both seen periods of civilian government alternate with military rule. In
Nepal, an autocratic regime with a King at its head gave way to a constitutional monarchy in 1990;
this, in turn, being replaced by a republic in 2008, when, quite remarkably, a party previously
committed to armed revolution on the Maoist model emerged as the largest single force in
Parliament. There has been an equally striking change in neighbouring Bhutan, where a King younger
than Prince Charles, and (by all accounts) more popular among his people, voluntarily abdicated in
favour of his son after overseeing the first multi-
party elections in the nation’s history.
Apart from India, however, it is Sri Lanka that has had the longest experience of electoral democracy
in the region. The country, then known as Ceylon, was granted independence from the British in
1948. It has since regularly held provincial and national elections. As in India, in Sri Lanka too all
adults were immediately granted the vote, regardless of their class or gender. This was in contrast to
the experience of the West, where the franchise was granted in stages: first to men of property,
then to educated men, somewhat later to all men, and later still to women as well.
Outside of the North Atlantic world, the most extensive experiments with the idea of democracy
have taken place in South Asia. Here, as in the West, the forging of democratic institutions has been
intimately connected with the making of nations. Thus, the people of a certain, clearly demarcated,
territory come together under a single flag and single currency, while ridding themselves of rule by
foreigners or rule by kings; at the same time, or soon afterwards, they conceive of electing their
leaders through an exercise of free will. Notably, in South Asia democracy and national
independence arrived at more-or-less the same time. Thus adult franchise was promoted in India
and Sri Lanka even as the majority of voters were poor and illiterate. In the 1950s, when blacks were
largely excluded from the franchise in the American South, erstwhile Untouchables were Members
of Parliament and Cabinet Ministers in India. In the 1960s, a woman was the Prime Minister of
