Podcast: The Democracy in India

Host = Nicholas CarlieKF = Kathinka Frøystad

Host: Hello, my name is Nicholas Carlie. I'm a former journalist for Norwegian Broadcasting and work as a schoolteacher. In this podcast series, we will explore democracy in several English-speaking countries, to try to get a better understanding of how they work and what, if any, threats they face.Today, I'll be speaking to Kathinka Frøystad, a social anthropologist, professor at UiO, and an expert on India. Kathinka Frøystad, so nice to have you here.

KF: Thank you.

Host: Please begin by telling me, I'm so curious, how you have amassed this amazing amount of knowledge about the subcontinent of India, which is today's subject.

KF: Well, it began with my interest in reading. I read, as a 17-year-old, Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, and was fascinated. And I thought ‘one day in my life I’m going to go to India’ – and I did, and it was fantastic. I met not just a country, but a continent with so hospitable people, so nice people, speaking all sorts of different languages. Teaching me that there are so many different ways in which one can live and think in different manners than what I had grown up with. And I became so fascinated that I spent the rest of my career trying to learn more about this fascinating place, this country, this continent, and this culture. I'm still doing it. There's still a lot of things that I do not understand, even though I've been going at it for, now. 30–35 years.

Host: But it has opened your eyes?

KF: Absolutely.

Host: Wow. Amazing. It has a very famous history, and it's, let's say ‘marriage’ with Great Britain is also something that a lot of movies, and history, and cultural references have been reminding us of for a long time. But what has been going on since the end of this ‘marriage’? That's maybe a little more difficult to put a finger on.

KF: Well, first and foremost, this was an enforced marriage, right? This was not a marriage of free will. India was colonised by a company, the British India Company, who came to India in the 17th century, and they wanted to earn money. Then one thing took the other and at the end you had India, which became part of the British Raj, the British Empire. So, it was by no means, you know, a happy marriage. Gradually after some time, India managed to break free and has since then been an independent, sovereign, democratic country which decides its own future. And that's what we see today.Host: So, they gained their independence, then struggled for a while, it got really ugly, but it was really important for them. Who were the key figures now in moving forward and what kind of system are they trying to replace the British with?

KF: Well, they already had the basis of an electoral democracy. The problem was that there was not a lot of people who could vote, and there was not a lot of room for Indian representatives in the parliament. But they did have, already, political deliberations and so on, and they did have quite a few English-educated Indians, elite Indians, who were educated as lawyers, specifically barristers and so on and so forth, who became the leaders of the Indian Freedom Movement. So, what they envisioned was deeply British, but without the British. They wanted the British systems, but they wanted themselves in the lead role and the Indian population.

Host: So, they like the game, but now they want to change out the players?

KF: In in a way I think you could say that, yes.

Host: And how did that work out for them in the beginning?

KF: Well, the first thing they had to do was to sit down and decide on how the legal system should be, because they had to change that. They had to codify a lot of laws. So, one of the first things that happened after independence was that they put together a committee who could draft a constitution, draft an entire new country's constitution. Which for a country with as many people as India and as deep religious cleavages that occurred at the time of independence, it was a formidable task to do this. But they did that, and that new constitution came into place in 1952.

Host: Did they have to do this incredibly big task? It's a huge, formidable job. Do they do all right?

KF: The constitution of India was very, very forward for its time.

Host: Okay. So, modern?

KF: It's very modern, it's a just constitution. It gives the people of India full religious freedom, equal rights, so on and so forth. Even today in political protests, protests can take the shape of people reading aloud from the constitution in order to make sure that their current politicians do not forget the rights that they are set to uphold. So, the constitution was very forward, very modern, very just. And it was a constitution that did a lot to chalk out a direction in which India should go in the coming decades. Now, of course, India hasn't gone as far as one would have hoped, but the direction I think was a good one.

Host: So, now they have independence, they have a constitution. Are they good at using their system, their democracy?

KF: In many ways, I think they are. Especially compared to China, which has been an autocratic state for a long time. Then India has a flourishing democracy. It has an electoral system that works well. Now, there are some autocratic tendencies that are worrisome, but it's still seriously a democracy that a lot of us have been admiring for a long time, I must say.

Host: You used the word autocracy. Tell me, please.

KF: Okay, so it's when you have a state ruler who wants to decide everything for himself, or herself.

Host: We see in a lot of democratic countries that a lot of elections come down to two choices, pretty much, in a lot of cases. In France, and US, and in England, it's like this. What is the case in India?

KF: In India, it's not like this. India has a multi-party system, which means that there are quite a few political parties competing for political power. Now, in order to understand the number of parties and how they operate, it's useful to know that India is a federal state, almost in the same way as in the United States, which has, you know, California, and Missouri, and so on.

Host: So states have some power for themselves, but also, the greater nation.

KF: That's right. So, at state level, there are some parties that are active, and at the national level, which is the federal level, there's a smaller set of parties that are active. But even at the sort of highest at the national, federal level, there are six or eight parties that compete for power, and which means that they must take up issues that are relevant for the entire population regardless of where they live. They also have to communicate with voters who speak in different languages, who represent different ethnic groups, and so on.

Host: Somebody mentioned before we sat down, it was probably going to come up anyway, that it seems that Indian women are also setting a good example of using the democratic system properly.KF: I would say! You could say India has political discourse in all sorts of ways at the moment, which I think any healthy democracy should have. And what we see is that women are strong participants along all shades of the political spectrum. They are Hindu nationalists, they are Congress sympathisers, they are communists, they are... –I mean, they are really represented everywhere, of course not as strongly, traditionally, as the men. So, there are there are things to catch up, but compared to the neighbouring countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, especially, women are strong in India.

Host: The logistics of an election in India is probably worth a television series. Tell me, how does this work? Like physically, how are we going to get that job done?

KF: Some people have compared Indian elections almost with a carnival. It's like a festival. People are very proud to get out to vote, out of their house. So, they dress in the best clothes sometimes, and they line up from early in the morning because that's before it gets too hot. They vote. And when they vote they get a sort of ink dot across one fingernail.

Host: Okay?

KF: And everybody shows up their fingernail to the camera afterwards because they're so proud they have taken part in this. But then the problem, when you have so many people on the streets going out to vote, is that there will be a lot of crowds moving about. So, it's a security question as well, right? Political elections in India, as many other places, are situations where fights can sometimes erupt. There has to be quite strong police security around the ballots where people come to vote, which means that in a country as large as India, you can't have everybody voting at the same time because there's not enough security personnel to man the ballot boxes.

Host: So, you need the same guards a few times.

KF: Exactly. You need the same guards a few times. So, you have voting shifting from constituency to constituency, which means that carrying out the elections can sometimes take as much as six weeks.

Host: But people are voting?

KF: People are voting.

Host: And they're proud that they're votingKF: People are very proud that they're voting. And the voter turnout in India has been – at least compared to a country such as the United States – higher, considerably higher.

Host: We also have a huge amount of religious belief in India. We also have a caste system that we've heard about for years. How are these two very large parts of Indian culture working together with the modern democracy?

KF: Oh, that's a huge question! I can begin with caste, saying that there are a growing number of political parties trying to represent marginalised castes to fight for equality and to fight for growing representations of people who have formerly been more or less excluded from the political system, for instance. So, they participate, and they participate in the election, now finding out that organisational work or merely getting their rights on paper is not enough. They need a strong political voice. So, that's the first thing. Second thing, though, is that sometimes people who are in power, if they represent the political elites who are normally from the upper castes, would not necessarily want the lower cost people to vote in case their voting is believed to go against their wishes.

Host: Right. So, there are a few people who are of lower castes as well?

KF: Of course, there are quite a few. And in such cases, they can try to push them out of the room in which the ballot is supposed to be dropped and so on, which is where you have these small fights that can erupt. That's why security is absolutely necessary in order to ensure as fair elections as possible.

Host: Some people actually need protection when they're voting?

KF: They do.

Host: What about the religion?

KF: I think one can say that one of the problems that we see rising now, is that if the current Hindu nationalist political party is going to remain at power, which is quite likely actually (because they are hugely popular among a majority of the population), then you will see a further decline in the representation of other religious communities. Especially of India's Muslim minority. They are being squeezed out of the parliament. Nobody wants a Muslim to stand election for their party. There are fewer Muslims in the police now, in the army and so on and so forth. So, the question then is that if the state institutions are politically biased and religiously biased, then how can anyone make sure that these people will actually get the rights that they have on paper? That is the problem now.Host: What about, let's say, a very important Norwegian right – the freedom. The freedom of speech, the freedom to believe what we want, and say what we want, obviously without hurting anyone directly. But we can still allow ourselves extreme views and extreme opinions and we cannot be punished for this. What is the history and also the current climate of freedom of speech in India?

KF: Freedom of speech has always been more restricted in India than it has been here. It's still quite free. India has critical journalists, it has critical newspapers, critical TV channels. Not as big as those that are government friendly, that's true, but people can still say quite a lot against the government without being caught for that. The worry now is that the state surveillance is growing, which means that the government watches you. It watches my Facebook page, it watches the Facebook page of all my colleagues, it watches what we write in academic writings and so on. If we are too critical, if my Indian colleagues are too critical, they will restrict their movements in some way or another. They do that.

Host: So, you are actually publishing opinions, whereas someone like me – I might just be updating my status - but when you're saying something, you might be saying it to a lot more people. Have you felt the pressure of that before?

KF: Oh, absolutely. We are not just publishing opinions, but we are writing facts. But if they disagree with the facts that we report or if they think that those facts are not something that anyone should do research on ... They will let us know. They say: ‘this is our country and who are you to interfere in that?’ and ‘we want our critics to keep distance from what we are doing’, because it's more important at this stage in India's history to ensure that India should be such a country that can protect its vulnerable majority, which is the Hindu majority. It's a majority in Indian terms. But across the world, there are hardly any Hindu countries. So, for them that goal is more important than anything else right now. If that means that they must restrict free speech a little bit, they will do that.

Host: When something becomes something of that size and there's so many moving parts involved, where do you think the hope springs from in a piece like this? I like hearing that marginalised people actually are finding safety in democracy and party politics, to have their voices heard. Is that something that could be, maybe, part of a change towards the future?

KF: I think so, and I'm very glad that you ask this question, because what we see is something that we can perhaps call a double movement. Like on the one hand, there are restrictions against people who raise their voice against injustices and so on. On the other hand, there are still people who raise those voices, and a growing number of people do – simply because of the fact that the amount of education that people have now is much more than people had 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, or 50 years ago. So, you have a lot more people fighting for their rights and standing up for what they think is right. And so India has become a cacophony of a lot of voices going back and forth and a lot of disagreements and a lot of quarrels. But in some way, it's also a healthy debate because at least there's no censorship of the kind you can find in the worst dictatorships in the world. India is not there yet, and I hope it will never get there.

Host: Kathinka Frøystad, we could talk for hours. Our time, however, is up. Thank you so much for your insight into this fascinating subject.

KF: Thank you for inviting me.