A week is a long time in politics. What a tumultuous time it has been in Indian politics. On August 17, Jaswant Singh?s book was launched and the ten days following saw the BJP fall apart at the top. Now the shock is for the Congress; not perhaps about its top echelon but still pretty serious.
The YSR story is one that is not even now well known. He was a Christian and this aspect of YSR has been kept hidden. Yet it also illustrates that things are possible at the state level which are impossible at the national level. No Muslim or Christian is likely to be Prime Minister. A Hindu label is vital (Brahmin even better), Dr Manmohan Singh being a Sikh notwithstanding since Sikhs are honorary Hindus. Even Rajiv hid his Parsee lineage completely.
The Hindu majoritarian compulsion arises for the same reason that the Jinnah controversy is still live. This is the fragility of the Indian nationhood even after 60 years of independence. The fear of balkanisation, the idea that if India is not run as a tight ship from the top down it will fall apart is very strong with the Congress and BJP, which are national parties.
This is in my view not only a fallacy but also that the 60-plus years of independence should have destroyed that theory. In purely economic terms this top down central obsession has cost India a large amount of lost income growth. The Congress pursued the creation of a military industrial complex as its number one priority and called it socialism. It forced India into a slow growth lane while countries like Malaysia and South Korea which were behind India in terms of development in the fifties surpassed India.
But the balkanisation fear is overdone. Though the centralist bias persists, India has strong provinces which show a fascinating variety of growth achievements. Andhra Pradesh was one such example and Tamil Nadu is another. The Centralist approach worried about some regions going ahead of others and taxed the better states and subsidised the poor performers. But the compulsions of politics have now led to the better off states acquiring enough clout to develop at the pace they like. Thus Gujarat, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh Tamil Nadu get ahead while the states of West Bengal and Bihar and UP lag behind. Bihar is recovering from fifty years of stagnation but West Bengal is sliding down fast.
Robert Putnam, who is a distinguished historian, wrote a book ?Making Democracy Work? which analysed the persistent inequality between North and South Italy. He found that the roots go back at least seven hundred years. India has yet to have someone do such research but the centralist bias will never support such research. The diversity of performance is a strength and not a weakness of the economy. It is a consequence of different tenure systems, divergent pace at which modernisation happened faster in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras and slower in the upcountry areas and the quality of the local politics in different regions.
Thus the anti-Brahmin movement in the South which began in the 19th century raised the standards of literacy and social welfare there way above the North. Thus Mandal may cause ructions in the North but in the South there has been positive discrimination for the entire 20th century thanks to the anti-Brahmin movement. In Gujarat, the OBCs especially Patels became prominent in the first half of the 20th century and the Brahmins took a back seat. Maharashtra had also a similar battle between the Marathas and the Brahmins.
In the Bimaru states there never was an anti-Brahmin movement, illiteracy and upper caste oppression. Thus India struggles with the low human development in the most populous areas while the South marches ahead. The remarkable thing is that the Congress, which has effectively been in power through most of the 62 years, contains within it the progressive South and the backward North except that the North almost monopolises prime ministerships. There would never be a Congress leader who would be a non-Brahmin and indeed non-Hindu plus a trained medical doctor in the Bimaru states.
The example of YSR and many other state level leaders tell us that the real strength of India is in the provinces and perhaps even further down. The Centre has all the money so there has to be a fiscal transfer from the Centre to the states. But perhaps there should be much greater devolution of power . The creation of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and other smaller states in the last 20 years has been a help in bringing development to the grassroots. Maybe we should have Bundelkhand and a Vidarbha and a Saurashtra and many more smaller states.
Divide and Prosper is the lesson we should draw from YSR?s life.
The author is a prominent economist and Labour peer