He had been working in the bureaucracy for twenty years. I asked how things had changed. He said these structural problems had always been present, of course, but that it had gotten markedly worse when Indira Gandhi came back to power in 1980. Her son Sanjay built a network of mafia goons who propped Indira up and helped finance her comeback. It grew worse and worse through the 1980s, he said. A few years ago my informant had a moral epiphany, as he described it, and announced upon being transferred to a mine in Haryana that he would not take any money and would properly enforce all of the federal wage and labor laws. His colleagues arranged to have him transferred out within six weeks and concocted paperwork “proving” that he was the only one in the whole system taking money illegally. They said they would ruin his career if he persisted with his quest, he said. So now he collects a monthly salary of eight thousand rupees and does nothing. “We need discipline,” he was saying by the time the coffee arrived. “We need a Stalin. Only that will save us.” He wasn’t smiling.
The nexus of politicians, bureaucrats, industrial barons, petty contractors, union bosses, and indebted laborers that my informant described at the quarries is too often typical of the structure of Indian public enterprise. In Bihar are the coal gangs, in Maharashtra the sugar barons, in Uttar Pradesh the tyrannical carpet bosses, in Assam the tea gangs, and on and on. These structures can be dynamic because there is intense and sometimes violent competition for control of the wealth that flows from the core enterprises. But this competition generally occurs across a relatively narrow social band and has proven too heavily dependent on protection and subsidies from the government to be sustainable in the long run by the heavily indebted state.
The roots of this mess are in the land. The eclectic, exploitive, often caste-based arrangements that have grown up around many of the public-sector enterprises reflect similar arrangements that have evolved in the countryside during the last several centuries. The rural structures of South Asian feudalism are diverse because the history of empire, war, and conquest on the subcontinent produced different results in different areas. Not even the British could impose a uniform system, and they changed their minds several times about what was the best way to hold the indigenous population in check. But they did introduce the idea of private property to India. When the British first arrived in the eighteenth century, there was confusion about who actually owned the land that is today India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This question was not merely academic, since if they wished to control India, the imperialists needed to understand who else claimed to own it and how they might best be paid to keep quiet. Lord Cornwallis, a witness to the recent British calamity in America, devised the “Permanent Settlement” in much of what is now northern India. The settlement recognized the landlords and local rulers as owners and required them to pay a fixed sum annually to the British government; because their taxes were fixed at a flat rate, the landlords could make loads of money if they improved productivity, and many promptly did. Cornwallis thought this might head off the revolutionary violence he had encountered in America by providing an intermediate, indigenous class a stake in the empire. But this didn’t work very well, in part because the landlords merely exploited more vigorously than before the farmers below them. So by the nineteenth century, when the British conquered Maharashtra, the colonialists were experimenting with more utilitarian systems, which recognized small peasant farmers directly as the owners of the land. This helped to create a class of relatively rich small farmers, who then exploited vigorously the landless below them on the caste totem, particularly the untouchables.
The Congress Party was initially the party of wealthy Indian landlords. Later, under the leadership of Gandhi and Nehru, and influenced by such diverse twentieth-century events as the Bolshevik revolution and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, it adopted a radical agrarian line. Within the party and the Muslim League, however, egalitarian ideas were slow to take hold as different classes of landlords battled with each other for influence and control of the prospective spoils of independence. The short version of this long and complex struggle is that while the founders of the Nehruvian state permitted and sometimes encouraged gradual change in the countryside—and in a few regions threw out upper-caste landlords to replace them with middle-caste peasant farmers—by and large they promised much more land reform than they actually delivered. In places like Maharashtra and Gujarat, middle castes prevailed, sometimes on their own and sometimes with help from the state. But in the northern heartland, as the land reform specialist Arvind Das put it to me one afternoon in New Delhi during a helpful tutorial, “a lot of legislation was enacted and very little was implemented.” In part this was because when the government passed reform laws, it provided long waiting periods before the laws took effect. In this interregnum, landlords juggled land records, allocating plots to fictious names, dead relatives, dogs, cats, and actual sharecroppers while retaining firm control themselves.
Das estimates that in a state such as Bihar, albeit an exceptional place where the most vertical forms of feudalism remain intact, there are perhaps two hundred landlords who control more than five thousand acres each—enormous estates in such a fertile, overpopulated region. His assessment is that the richest of these landlords owns about thirty-three thousand acres, all controlled through fictitious records. Most important, such empires can be preserved only by integration with the structures of the Nehruvian state. The Bihar landlord with the estimated thirty-three thousand acres has achieved such influence through a son-in-law who is a senior bureaucrat in the Indian Administrative Service, a daughter who is a Congress Party member of parliament, and three grandchildren who are members of the IAS. “In this system, the person with investments and money puts it into his son’s education toward getting a government job,” Das explained. This preserves and extends the family empire into new areas, such as public-sector businesses. Since the bureaucracy controls the economy, those with resources compete to control the bureaucracy. Extreme cases of landlords who may control thousands of acres are very rare, but the principle holds nonetheless for landlords who hold smaller but relatively sizable tracts of fifty to one hundred acres.
In Bihar, especially, the competition is sometimes expressed in persistent small-scale wars. Upper-caste landlords have formed private armies to defend their land from rivals, including middle-caste peasants and low-caste leftist revolutionaries, known as the Naxalites.
During the most intense caste conflicts of 1990, I flew down to Bihar’s capital, Patna, and drove out with a local crime reporter to talk with an upper-caste warlord about his prospects. We rattled over pitted and unrepaired roads and crumbling bridges through eroded land to a small village named Pauna. At sunset, the warlord arrived in a sputtering Ambassador with a band of bodyguards who wore bright red scarves and carried double-barreled shotguns. This self-styled Rajput general, Shivaji Singh, sat on a rope cot as much of the village population gathered to listen. “The situation is rising beyond tolerance. Any time the tension is going to break,” he said. “For the last ten years we’ve been fighting these Naxalites and these backward-caste armies. Eighteen from our village have died, six from my own group. If this tension continues, in the future it will be much worse than ever before.”
“Will there ever be a time when caste is not important in India, when it will not so sharply define people’s lives?” I asked.
“No such time will come,” he said. Then, pointing to the night sky, “It will take as long as it takes you to count all the stars in the sky. The upper castes have been preserving their land and their possessions. The backward castes have been doing the same. Among the backward classes, there are two sections—those with land, and those without. What has happened is that the poor landless laborers still believe that the upper castes are their enemies, not the rich leaders of their own castes.... There is no way out. I know I won’t win because they are greater in number. But I have no choice but to fight, so I will fight.”
A paradox of continuing feudal and caste conflict in South Asia is that where the Nehruvian state is especially weak—such as in Bihar or Pakistan’s southern Sind province—feudal rivals tend to take matters into their own hands, battling with weapons for control of land or criminal mafias. But where the state is strong, the power of those in charge too often institutionalizes caste-derived hierarchies, which encourages losers in the competition to resort to violence against the state. At the same time, the central role of the state—whether it is the bureaucracy in India or the army in Pakistan—convinces many involved that possession and abuse of the state apparatus is the key to ultimate victory.
South Asia’s free market reformers today are attempting to alter the basic terms of this competition by asking the Nehruvian state to dismantle itself, to ease itself out of the center. But the reformers know that in the process, the state must provide peaceful and stable mediation of ongoing emotional, often violent, caste and feudal disputes. If, under the guise of free market ideology, the state merely leaps off the stage and hands the existing political economy to upper-caste brethren in narrow, private transactions, leaving the “backward classes” to find opportunity on their own, the eventual result could be disastrously inequitable. Optimists in India pin their hopes on the strength and caste pluralism of the new urbanized, consumerist middle class. Optimists in Pakistan are a little harder to find.
For reasons that perhaps he alone considers noble, former Indian prime minister V. P. Singh offered an awkward quota-based form of this necessary state mediation in August 1990, when he proposed to implement the affirmative action and government jobs plan known as the Mandal Commission report. It was a minor disaster, and not only because of the riots and self-immolations it provoked. Singh is a peculiar politician. The upper-caste son of a feudal raja, he embraced socialism, toiled in the bowels of the Congress Party, developed a reputation as an enemy of corruption, then broke with Rajiv Gandhi and won the prime ministership at the head of a loose coalition on a platform of clean government. Some of the upper-caste establishment supported his original campaign because they, like the urban middle class, yearned for clean administration and checks on the Congress Party-sponsored public-sector mafias. But they hardly expected Singh, one of their own, to attempt a caste revolution by administrative fiat. Singh who had made no great issue of caste quotas earlier, apparently seized on this idea mainly out of tactical necessity; his coalition was falling apart and he needed somehow to galvanize support from the vote banks of “other backward classes.” Afterward, he made a virtue of political necessity and stuck with his new “principles” through a long and steady political decline.
What seemed most interesting about the caste riots Singh provoked were the attitudes of the university students on the barricades. This was the Indian generation poised to inherit the state, and it seemed utterly at odds with itself—as evidenced not so much by the violent, transitory conflict in the streets as by the students’ divergent views of what the egalitarian ideal meant to the future of South Asia. The upper-caste students demanded unfettered opportunity. The lower-caste students insisted on a chance to exploit the state.
In the midst of the riots I went to Delhi University to talk with lower-caste students about their predicament. I sat with groups of four or five in the damp student hostels and debated for hours. My argument usually was that by concentrating so heavily on access to the government bureaucracy, they were not going to turn society inside out but would only ensure that power and wealth remained in the form of an inverted cone—and the cone would shrink in volume as the state continued to decline. Their quick response was that they and their families had lived outside the state apparatus for centuries in conditions of overwhelming poverty and injustice. Now that they had the chance, they wanted in.
“The whole system works on this fact, the dominance of the civil service,” said Suraj Yadav, eldest son of a lower-caste peasant farming family in Bihar. “When one goes to officialdom, one gets the feeling of what the system really is. These are the lucrative jobs, and naturally one aspires to the best thing. They are the best in terms of the privileges and the prestige one enjoys.... By giving [government job] reservations, the way Indian society functions, the benefits will percolate more quickly. There will be a check and balance.”
I asked what his parents expected of him. He was the first from his family to make it to college.
“I MUST get into the civil services,” he said. “I have felt that this bureaucracy is dominated by the same feudal class, the people who have been ruling Indian society all along. I want to root out the nepotism. There is this perpetuation of economic resources between the bureaucracy, which is upper-caste-dominated, and the politicians, also of the upper classes.”
“But isn’t your plan just a substitution of a lower-caste mafia for an upper-caste mafia, rather than a changing of the system to reward merit and create prosperity?” I asked.
“I didn’t say I would replace the system,” he answered. “I cannot overhaul the system overnight. Suppose I go into the private sector, the question is, who will I be serving? The same feudal class. I won’t be allowed to flourish because of the bureaucracy’s hold over the private sector. Suppose I go into contracting—they simply will not give me the licenses.”