Christophe Jaffrelot has written a comprehensive account of India's democratic evolution. As he observes, India's democracy has always come with adjectives that have changed over time. In this hefty tome, Jaffrelot argues that an “ethnic democracy” is emerging in India.
Jaffrelot contends that India's democratization only began in the late 1980s when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was defeated by a coalition of parties, which were united largely by their desire to eviscerate the “hegemony exercised by the upper castes, those who stood to gain the most from the conservative democracy” (p. 3). Caste-motivated politics, however, created a political opportunity structure that enabled Hindu chauvinism to emerge. The Janata party (1977–80) and the Janata Dal (1989–91) were more representative of lower castes, especially the other backward castes (OBCs), often referred to as shudras. The Mandal Commission, formed in 1979 to evaluate whether reservations could or should be used to redress caste discrimination using a variety of standards, mobilized OBCs who favored such an approach to redistributive justice. The commission also mobilized high-caste Hindus, whose public service opportunities were threatened by its policies.
This mobilization led OBCs to stop voting for high-caste candidates, compelling the Congress Party to contest elections with OBC candidates. Unable to rely upon previous vote bank politics, Congress had to engage in the electoral interests of OBCs as well as those parties which claim to represent them. When the Congress Party returned to power in 2004, it set a 27 percent quota for OBCs at public universities. This policy discomfited high-caste Hindus, who began to look for political alternatives. Jaffrelot calls this phenomenon the silent revolution of Indian politics that heralded the retrenchment of upper-caste, middle-class voters, as was evident in poor electoral showings from the late 1990s through the early 2000s.
This caste-based politics precipitated a counterrevolution led by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). This revolution was animated by an ideology with origins in the 1920s: Hindutva. The first chapter of this volume recounts this early history. Jaffrelot argues that Hindutva's efficacy was limited until 2014, when the BJP, led by Narendra Modi, won sufficient seats to govern without the need for a coalition. The second chapter recounts the personal and political rise of Modi, whose leadership was crucial to the BJP's success.
In the third chapter, Jaffrelot closely examines the 2014 election, which was markedly different from other phases of Indian democracy. As Jaffrelot argues in chapter 4, this election heralded the rise of a Hindutva-inspired populist politics that relied upon campaign promises that were honored in the breach. Jaffrelot contends that with this turn of events, Indian democracy now requires two additional adjectives: “ethnic democracy” and “electoral democracy.”
In the second part of the book, Jaffrelot lays out this concept of “ethnic democracy,” which he compares to the Jewish state. In chapter 5, he explores how proponents of this style of democracy are motivated to promote a kind of Hinduism that is orthogonal to the secularism enshrined in the 1950 constitution, which guaranteed equidistance between the state and any religion. In chapter 6, he investigates the ways in which vigilantes have enforced these notions of Hindiusm by strategically employing violence against champions of secularism, Christians, and especially Muslims. He devotes the entirety of chapter 7 to examining the rise of these vigilantes as the sword arm that birthed and now defends what has become a de facto majoritarian state based upon Hindu chauvinism.
In the third section of the book, Jaffrelot describes the new authoritarianism that has flourished under Modi. In chapter 8, he describes how the BJP has “de-institutionalized” the Indian state by bending state institutions to service the interests of the regime and its ideology. The consequences of these machinations comprise a form of “electoral authoritarianism,” which has rendered Muslims second-class citizens, a development he details in chapter 9. In chapter 10, Jaffrelot expounds upon this idea, adding a further adjective to India's emerging regime: “authoritarian vigilante state.” He posits that India is transforming from a de facto Hindu state to an authoritarian Hindu state.
In chapter 11, he details a litany of challenges confronting India's Muslims ranging from continued institutional exclusion to judicial obligation. He concludes with a predictably dour view of India's future and the prospects of those who oppose the project of the Hindu ethnic state.
While there is much to appreciate in this capacious and heroic volume, there are a number of flaws that detract from the otherwise positive contributions it makes to the literature. First and foremost, Jaffrelot mixes well-defined political science terms (e.g., “electoral democracy”) with ideological terms such as “Hindu Rashtra,” undermining the coherence of the arguments he offers. This likely restricts the audience who can engage the volume to those with an understanding of these idioms, which are deeply rooted in South Asia. A second challenge is the volume's disjointed and unwieldy organization. The overreliance upon subject headers fails to compensate for the paucity of logical, organic textual organization. At times, at seems as if large tranches of prose were deposited per the demands of a tasking rather than the result of a measured exercise in exposition. (Some of the disjointed language could be attributable to the fact that this volume is a translation from Jaffrelot's native French.) Ironically, the volume may have been more effective with more concision and tighter organization with a more organic analytical narrative.
Despite these significant organizational and logical shortcomings, the book's detailed exploration of how Hindu nationalism writes the epitaph for India's experiment with multiethnic, secular democracy will reward the reader with the stamina to grapple with it and its arguments.
