Marshall M. Bouton - India Briefing, 1988

JAMES MANOR

T.N. SRINIVASAN

THOMAS PERRY THORNTON

RAJU G.C. THOMAS

KRISHNA KUMAR

WILUAM BLANPIED

Before plunging into a discussion of Indias political dilemmas, it is worth mentioning five problems which India did not face in 1987 and is unlikely to encounter soon, as a way of suggesting the scale of its political achievement over the last 40 years. First, India was not threatened by the prospect of a military coup. This owed a little to logistical factors. The size of the country and the structure of the armed forces, which prevents close contact between officers from different services until they reach senior ranks, make a coup difficult to coordinate. More important, the armed forces had enough confidence in civilian elites and in open politics that they were disinclined even to contemplate such action. They had also learned, by observing Pakistan and Bangladesh, the inadequacy of armies as instruments of government in complex societies.

Nor, despite much ill-formed comment to the contrary, was India about to fall apart. In part, the coercive power of the central government is more than sufficient to prevent regions or states within India from breaking away. But the threat of secession has never seriously arisen and is unlikely to do soexcept perhaps in the remote, hilly states of the far northeast which are ethnically and culturally distinct. Elsewhere, in mainstream India, secessionist movements of substance (as opposed to secessionist rhetoric) are unlikely to arise because would-be secessionists cannot generate enough solidarity at the state or regional level to sustain such movements. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Indian society is its extreme heterogeneity, the ubiquity of variegated subgroups within sub-groups. That means, at one level, that the states and regions within India differ markedly from one another, which leads some observers to prophesy balkanization. But they overlook great heterogeneity within each of these varied states. It is for that reason that the current crisis in the Punjab is essentially a problem not of separatism but of bitter alienation between Sikhs and Hindus, and between Sikhs and the current government in New Delhi.