In India, it cuts both ways

Jawaharlal Nehru’s India — he was prime minister from 1947 to 1964 — can best be described as a one-party democracy. Elections were free and fair, but as the party that liberated India and the only truly national party, the Congress Party dominated at every level, often winning two-thirds majorities in parliament and in state legislatures. This enviable position gave it all kinds of formal and informal advantages, making it impossible to mount a serious challenge to the Congress in many areas…

(But) The Congress Party was committed to building genuine traditions of constitutional governance. Nehru in particular was deeply respectful of liberal institutions and traditions, such as the prerogatives of parliament and the press. He supported an independent judiciary, even when this meant accepting political defeats in court. He was obsessive about secularism and religious tolerance. Despite his immense popularity, he allowed dissenting views to flourish and often win the day…

When I was growing up in India in the late 1960s and 1970s, this tradition was still strong but fraying. The Congress Party had morphed from a vibrant grass roots organisation into a fawning, imperial court, appointed by and adoring of its popular leader, Indira Gandhi. Mrs Gandhi pursued populist policies that were often unconstitutional and certainly illiberal, such as nationalising banks and abolishing the rights of India’s princes. Still, the courts were largely independent, the press free, and religious tolerance sacred. But over time, the Congress Party’s commitment to these institutions and values weakened. More importantly, the party declined as the dominant national institution.

New challengers rose to fill the space, the most prominent of them being the Hindu fundamentalist BJP. The BJP, however, is only one among a host of energetic new parties that draw their appeal from regional, religious, or caste differences. As a result, new voters — almost all from poor, rural, and lower-caste backgrounds — have entered the political system. In the 1950s about 45 percent of the population voted; today that number is over 60 percent. Yogendra Yadav, an Indian political scientist studying this trend, argues that India is going through a ‘‘fundamental though quiet transformation’’ that is opening up its politics to a much broader group of people who were previously marginalised. These parties have made India more democratic, but they have also made it less liberal.

The BJP came to power by denouncing Nehruvian secularism, advocating a quasi-militant Hindu nationalism, and encouraging anti-Muslim and anti-Christian rhetoric and action. It organised a massive national campaign to destroy a mosque in northern India (in the city of Ayodhya) that had been built, some Hindus believed, on the site of the birthplace of Rama. That Rama is a mythological figure, that Hinduism advocates nonviolence and tolerance, and that India has had terrible experiences with religious violence (and did again in the wake of the Ayodhya affair) mattered little to the BJP. The rhetoric of hatred appealed to its core voters.

Recently the BJP formed a governing coalition, and inevitably has had to tone down its anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, and anti-lower-caste rhetoric, lest it alienate the other members of its coalition. But it has still pursued a policy aimed at ‘‘Hinduising’’ India, which has meant rewriting history texts to downplay or remove references to Muslims and other minorities, establishing departments of astrology at major universities, and encouraging the use of Hindu religious symbols in public settings. And whenever it has found itself in political trouble, it has stoked the fires of religious conflict, as it did in Gujarat in 2002…

Religious intolerance is only the first glimpse of the new face of Indian democracy. Massive corruption and a disregard for the rule of law have transformed Indian politics. Consider Uttar Pradesh (UP)… UP is now dominated by the BJP and two lower-caste parties. The political system there can only be described as ‘‘bandit democracy’’. Every year elections are rigged, ballot boxes are stuffed… The tragedy for the millions of new lower-caste voters is that their representatives, for whom they dutifully vote en masse, have looted the public coffers and become immensely rich and powerful while mouthing slogans about the oppression of their people…

Corruption has always existed in India, but until the 1970s it was mostly petty corruption produced by the country’s insane web of economic regulations … Perhaps most important, the judiciary was clean and had high standards. In 1958, Nehru appointed one of India’s most eminent jurists, M.C. Chagla, as ambassador to the United States. The Bombay Bar Council immediately issued a formal denunciation, worried that appointing a judge to high office might compromise the image of the independence of the judiciary. Today, rewarding compliant judges with patronage posts is so common as to be unremarkable …

In retrospect it is clear that Nehru’s Congress Party imposed a quasi-liberal order on India in the 1950s and 1960s that began withering as new, entrepreneurial parties competed for votes using raw appeals to caste, linguistic, and religious solidarity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the change in atmosphere and substance of my hometown. Bombay is a city built by its great minority communities: Parsi industrialists, Gujarati merchants, Muslim restaurateurs, and of course, the British. Unlike Calcutta and New Delhi, it was never capital of the British Raj. It was India’s New York and Los Angeles rolled into one — nouveau riche, crass, but also vibrant, meritocratic, and tolerant…

That Bombay is now a memory. In the last 20 years, the rise of Hindu nationalism and a local variant, Maratha chauvinism, has systematically destroyed the old city. The regional party that has spearheaded this movement, the Shiv Sena … is determined to rid the state of Maharashtra, of which Bombay is the capital, of all ‘‘alien’’ influences. (The Muslims came to India beginning in the 12th century; 800 years is apparently not long enough to be considered a native.)

This is most evident in its campaign to rename cities, towns, roads, and buildings that have anything other than pure Hindu names. It culminated in the renaming of Bombay as Mumbai in 1996, an act that illustrates the invented quality of much of Hindu nationalism. Unlike Beijing (a long-standing city whose name was Anglicised into Peking by Westerners) Mumbai did not really exist as a city before the Portuguese and the British called it Bombay … ‘‘Mumbai’’ is not a return to the past but the validation of a myth.