Dispatch #16: Weekend Linkfest
Here is a curated list of a few good articles from the world of policy, politics and development
1) By the Book- Does the Constitution keep its promises?
In this provocative long piece, Achin Vanaik, talks about the inner contradictions of the Indian Constitution and how it has impacted our polity.
Achin writes, “The asymmetries of class power are obscured in the Constitution by propping up a notion of the “people’s will,” one that is expressed through the functioning of electoral democracy. The Constitution is testament to the fact that the members of the original Constituent Assembly, incidentally not elected by universal suffrage, were overwhelmingly members of the Congress party—an organisation that headed an independence movement that sought not so much to overthrow colonial power, but to transfer it from British to Indian hands. It retains, to this day, copious and detailed provisions for protecting the machinery of administration and governance. These were adopted almost intact from the Government of India Act, 1935, the colonial legislative instrument that preceded the Constitution. The senior advocate Rajeev Dhavan, in his book The Constitution of India: Miracle, Surrender, Hope, gives a somewhat cynical, but not inaccurate, portrayal of how the Constitution acquired its shape. “We the People of India,” Dhavan writes, “who had little say in the making” of the document, “have been informed to accept this Constitution ... part of which is a British India clone,” and which “makes unreal promises.” Indians “have no choice but to accept this arrangement ... which our leaders have given to themselves to rule over us.”
From the beginning, the constitution has carried Hindu, dominant-caste, and patriarchal biases. (Not by coincidence—the members of the Constituent Assembly were overwhelmingly Hindu, dominant-caste men.) For instance, in Article 1, the name given to the union is “India, that is Bharat,” invoking a pre-Islamic past of presumed glory—a Bharat Varsha when a legendary Hindu king is said to have ruled. Many of the Constitution’s admirers—including such figures as the jurists Fali Nariman and HM Seervai, and Justice VR Krishna Iyer—do not appear to have drawn serious, let alone repeated, attention to these flaws. Very few have dared to argue that the text exhibits any bias at all. One of those few is the scholar Pritam Singh, and I am indebted to his writings, particularly his paper, “Hindu Bias in India’s ‘Secular’ Constitution: probing flaws in the instruments of governance.” "
2) Louise Tillin on how the Modi era upended conventional thinking about Indian federalism:
Louise Tillin, in this interview, talks about Indian federalism and how it is changing under the current ruling dispensation. She writes, “Since the election of the Narendra Modi-led BJP government in 2014, some of those fundamental assumptions about the nature of India’s political culture have been challenged. I wrote last year about the fragility of Indian federalism and now we see in a number of ways that what had seemed settled compromises have been opened up.
Look at the very profound ways in which political power has been re-centralised, in which the central government, even if it doesn’t directly infringe on the affairs of states, squeezes the space that states have to make autonomous policy decisions, implementing policies at the state level in a way that they can claim credit for and finance policy decisions.
So in all sorts of ways, the autonomy of states that had developed a certain character through the course of the 1990s and 2000s is under pressure.”
3) Narendra Modi threatens to turn India into a one-party state:
Economist’s new piece cautions us that India is now ‘sleepwalking into authoritarianism’. The article uses some very strong words, “It is not only the courts, alas, that seem eager to stay in step with the government. Many cogs in India’s institutional machinery are not merely complacent, but have grown complicit in a project that threatens to turn the country into a one-party state. At least during the Emergency the threat was clear, says Tarunabh Khaitan, vice-dean of law at Oxford University and author of a paper, “Killing a Constitution with a Thousand Cuts”, that details India’s institutional decay. “What we have now is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he says. “There is no full-frontal big-ticket attack on democracy, but there are multiple, simultaneous attacks on all fronts…We are sleepwalking into authoritarianism.”
Of the ostensibly independent institutions that are now compliant, India’s police stand out. Despite individually humane and honest officers, the impression Indians hold of the force is that its main purpose is to protect the powerful and persecute the weak. A case in point is the Delhi police’s management of communal riots that racked parts of India’s capital for three days last winter, leaving 53 dead.”
4) Why India Has Become a Different Country?
Salil Tripathi laments that the India which he knew is now a different country in his Foreign Policy piece. He writes, “If ticking boxes were sufficient to evaluate democracies, then India still gets the right ticks—it holds elections periodically, it has an independent judiciary, a constitution that safeguards minority rights and recognizes individual rights, where privately owned media operates, where opposition parties exist and are in parliament. And yet, the essence of democracy is not the form, but its content; the norms, not the laws; it is not the presence of the structures, but whether those structures function the way they are meant to perform, and whether checks and balances set the system right when things go wrong, that determines democracy. And by those criteria, India—for long described as the world’s largest democracy—has been failing persistently.”
5) Why I’m Losing Hope in India?
If you want to understand how and why India got here, then read this hard hitting piece by Andy Mukherjee. He ends his piece by writing, “Sadly, I don’t see northern India’s economic pessimism — or its caste enmities, religious hatred and deep-seated misogyny — making way for a less toxic, more aspirational politics. I say sadly, because I have always been secretly hopeful about India, even when criticizing its cumbersome red tape, crumbling infrastructure or clumsy policymaking.
But the 1990s dream has ended, the world has changed, and so have we.
Just typing that previous sentence feels like betrayal. India is where I was born, grew up, started work and got married.
I have left the country for long stretches, and my teenage children don’t have any feel for its culture, cuisine or languages. Yet India and I have never let go of each other. When I write about other places, it’s as a foreign correspondent. The India stories are different. They aren’t all strewn with the first-person pronoun, but they’re all personal. Increasingly, they’re also bitter. Like this essay.
Call it buyers’ remorse. Those of us who thought that muscular leadership would revive India’s dream of mimicking Chinese-style double-digit expansion are not just disappointed. For many of my generation, our long-cherished hope for a better, greater India is all but gone. We wanted to trade some of our democratic chaos for a little bit more growth. We ended up with less of both.”
6) Nakusha- Son preference, ‘unwanted’ girls, and gender gaps in schooling:
In Marathi, Nakusha means unwanted girl. In the Economic Survey of India 2018, there is a chapter on India’s gender crisis. The chapter talks about unwanted girls based on meta-son preference. In this article Ashwini Deshpande and Apoorva Gupta talks about the education levels of these unwanted girls. They write, “We find that the gender gap in the probability of being ever enrolled, currently enrolled, and years of education is fully eliminated between 1985-86 and 2018 – overall, and across all family types. This means that regardless of their motivation, parents do not distinguish between girls and boys in terms of quantity of schooling.
In terms of quality of education, the gender gap in private schooling increased slightly over the period, with the largest increase in families with unwanted girls. The expenditure gap between girls and boys was driven by families with unwanted girls. Also, most of the increase occurred during 1995-2018. We find that an intensification of meta SP has adversely affected the quality of schooling for ‘unwanted’ girls.”
7) How Pandemic Is Pushing Women Out Of Jobs In UP?
“In a state like Uttar Pradesh, which has social and cultural restrictions on women’s mobility, the effects of the current crisis are bound to be even more gender-skewed, experts said. In 2017-18, only 8.2% women were in the state’s labour force in urban areas and 9.7% in rural areas. When compared to the corresponding national average, the LFPRs for women in rural and urban areas were lower by eight and nine percentage points respectively.”
8) Autonomous Reform versus Global Isomorphism: Explaining Iran’s Success in Reducing Fertility:
In this brilliant paper, Lant Pritchett and Masoomeh Khandan, explains how Iran magically reduced its fertility rates. They argue that the policies were autonomous (positive deviance) and not the result of isomorphism where structures, policies and reforms are adopted from different countries where a similar set of issues were resolved by a set of policies.
Pritchett has also termed this as ‘isomorphic mimicry’.
This paper compares Iranian strategy of population control vis-a-vis Indian strategy.
The authors conclude, “This article tries to explain how developing countries can reach the ultimate goals of development practices by themselves. Their efforts to build their state capabilities can be realized without depending on external legitimacy and support. Furthermore, to be able to help developing countries in development paths, development agencies should change their approaches regarding their interventions. The key logic here is that the process of local development should be carried out by local agents in the local context. Such an approach helps developing countries to escape from isomorphic mimicry and capability traps, which otherwise restrict the space for empowering decision-makers and frontline implementers to enhance the state’s capabilities; with the space for novelty closed, they have to follow predetermined best practices. The paper posits that, in the absence of external pressures to comply with global “best practice” for the purposes of securing funding and/or legitimacy, Iran has been able to respond to its understanding of its family planning problems by defining them in politically supportable and practically implementable ways, using the space afforded by its very isolation to pursue reforms compatible with its own social norms and religious sensibilities – reforms that, in less than a decade, achieved history’s fastest recorded decline in fertility. Of course, countries seeking to forge their own path to lower fertility levels would do well not to cast what became (the visible form of) Iran’s strategy itself as a “best practice”, but rather to find and fit their own locally supportable solution to their own understanding of what constitutes their problem.”
9) Does the right to vote affect political behaviour? Historical evidence from India:
There is a huge body of work that talks about the enfranchisement levels in India and its impact on the politics. In this article, the scholars have studied the impact of voting rights extension in India between 1921 and 1957 on the political and policy outcomes. The authors write, “Despite the smaller increases in citizen participation, the increased number of voters does result in statistically significant increases in the extent of political competition faced by candidates. The 1935 reforms resulted in a large decrease in the rate of re-election of members of provincial legislatures (that is, a decline in incumbency advantage). On the other hand, the 1950 move to universal suffrage leads to an increase in the number of candidates contesting each seat, though there is no decline in incumbency advantage with this reform.
We also examined education spending as an important policy outcome. We find that districts that increased enfranchisement by 10 percentage points also obtained 5% higher education spending per capita after the 1935 reform. This is consistent with the cross-country evidence of democracy resulting in better economic growth and education attainment (Acemoglu et al. 2019). Lack of district-level spending data in the post-independence period precludes us from conducting a similar analysis for the 1950 reform.”