INDIA is the largest democracy in the world but it is also perhaps the most violent. And as democracy in India has deepened, so it appears, has violence. In the last decade alone, at least 23000 citizens were killed in Kashmir according to official estimates, 11,000 in the North East, and close to 8000 in Maoist related violence across states.¹ Hundreds have died in communal violence. Thirty thousand cases of murder have been registered every year adding up to an astounding three hundred thousand in a single decade!² And then there are forms of violence which the state does not even categorize separately – caste massacres, self-immolations, farmer suicides. Violence in India is so frequent, and its scale so large, that we have become desensitized to the numbers.

In this essay, I suggest that there is a link between some portion of this violence and another remarkable feature of India’s democracy – the high degree of fragmentation of our party system – and illustrate the link with the example of Maoist violence in the state of Jharkhand.³

India now has the largest number of political parties in the world. Over 300 distinct parties competed in the 2009 parliamentary elections. Over a thousand parties competed in the state legislative assembly elections between 2004 and 2009.⁴ Many of these parties are small, but in a highly fragmented environment, capable both of winning seats and of participating in government.

 

The great efficacy of small parties in present-day India has dramatically increased the political representation of subaltern groups – backward castes, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes – whose political voice now extends far beyond anything we could have imagined in the era of one-party dominance under the Congress system.⁵ Every year, waves of new young men from these groups seek entry into the political system (women too, but at the state and national level, most new entrants continue to be male). They seek better livelihoods, higher status and greater opportunities than their parents. Our economy, even post liberalization, is too small to absorb these aspirations. And many of those from subaltern groups do not have the capital – the money, the networks, the skills – to be competitive in the private sector. A political following is an alternative form of capital that gives these new entrants a point of access to the state, which remains an attractive source of both earnings and status. Political parties, thus, have historically been an especially attractive channel for the incorporation of these subaltern groups.

But paradoxically, the same party fragmentation that opens the door to a wave of new entrants closes the door to those following behind. The high rewards attached to smallness in a fragmented party system means that new parties, once created, have weak incentives to expand. Why should the leaders of any new party work hard to recruit new members when they can already gain a share in power with the handful of members that they do have? During the era of single party government, when every party thought it needed a majority, or something close, in order to win, we had a small number of parties. But those we did have invested in an effort to enlist large numbers of followers simply as a matter of survival. In a fragmented environment, by contrast, small parties have every incentive to remain small.

 

Consider the hypothetical – but realistic – case of a constituency in which 20 candidates stand for election and 100,000 voters turn out. Here, it is possible for a candidate to win with just over 5000 votes. (To compare this hypothetical case with real numbers, consider the state of Jharkhand, to which I will return later in this essay – Jharkhand had an average of 17 candidates per seat in the 2005 assembly elections, and an average of about 135,000 voters per constituency). In the current coalition environment in India, even a single seat party can be highly sought after to make up the numbers of a coalition government. When such a few thousand votes can carry such large rewards, why should a political party invest the time and effort in enrolling millions of members? Indeed, many of these new parties are small-scale family affairs without any clear mechanisms for continued recruitment. With the increasing fragmentation of India’s party system, the era of large-scale party organizations may well be over. Essentially what we are beginning to see now is a proliferation of small clubs with closed memberships.

The closed door nature of our new parties leaves a wide open field for recruitment of these young men by non-party organizations – including armed organizations. Let me illustrate from some recent research on Maoist violence in Jharkhand. I draw here on a handful of biographical narratives of young men in rural Jharkhand. These narratives cannot claim to be representative. They are a close look at a small number of individuals. But precisely for that reason, they can suggest links that are lost in broader, impersonal accounts.

 

The last decade has seen a proliferation of armed organizations in the state of Jharkhand. Apart from the CPI (Maoist), these include the TPC, the JPC, the Jharkhand Janmukti Parishad, the JSMM, the MCC(I), Pahadi Cheeta, Azad e-Hind, Black Tiger, Lal Tiger, RCC, Sashastra People’s Morcha, TLFI, TPC(I). The CPI (Maoist) remains the principal armed organization in Jharkhand, and the only one with a base in all its districts. Several of the others emerged as splinters of the CPI (Maoist) and exist in only one or two districts.⁶ Quite notably, this proliferation of armed organizations has gone hand in hand with the proliferation of political parties. In its first elections as a separate state, held in 2005 in the midst of increasing violence, Jharkhand had 50 parties competing for elections – more than every other state in India barring Bihar, Delhi, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, despite the fact that it is one of the smaller states.

The recruits and local level leadership of these groups is drawn from across subaltern social groups – not only Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes as is commonly assumed, but also backward castes (Yadavs, Mahtos, Rajwars, Sahus). These groups are the natural pools from which one would expect political parties like the RJD and the JMM to recruit. But the RJD and JMM are conspicuous by their weakness in the areas in which these organizations found recruits.

In the narratives that I have collected, the MCC and the CPI-Party Unity – the precursors of the CPI-Maoist – were often the first and only political organization that recruited from among these groups. Young men from subaltern groups join or sympathize, furthermore, not out of ideological conviction or a desire for the overthrow of the Indian state – or even a desire for violence – but because they are looking for a solution to a local set of problems, often caused by rising aspirations, and political parties, which are the usual channel for such aspirations, have fallen down on the job.

 

Consider the example of A.Y. (initials changed), who joined the MCC, and eventually the CPI-Maoist, in his mid-twenties. He was born sometime around 1970 (he does not know the precise year) to a Yadav family in rural Jharkhand (then Bihar). He describes the mid-1980s as a time of conflict with zamindars in the village. A case was registered against the entire village. The police was on the side of the zamindars. At that time, MCC people came recruiting in the village, urging him and others from his village to join. They presented it as a matter of protection. He finally joined around 1994, ten years after the MCC first approached him.

‘…They said when you are caught and beaten, no one will help you…’

And at this time did any other party also come to you to help?

There was Male (ML) in the Pratapgarh side.

But no other political party in your area?

No one, only zamindars had parties…

Did anyone from the RJD come…?

No, we had no contact with RJD… but we used to vote for RJD.

And your father, whom does he or did he vote for?

RJD

And before, in 1970/80, whom did your father vote for?

Congress, before RJD…

 

One of the remarkable features of A.Y.’s story is that there was no competition for his support – or the support of others like him. The two main party organizations in the village were the Congress and BJP. They were known to be associated with the upper castes. The rising conflict between Yadavs and zamindars in the village provides a time honoured point of entry for political parties seeking new bases of support. In the nearby state of Uttar Pradesh, for instance, which is an important counterfactual to Jharkhand, such conflicts would have invited the intervention of new subaltern political parties such as the BSP and the Janata Dal (later the Samajwadi Party) which had begun to be active in the same time period. Here, in this village, A.Y.’s political sympathies – and that of his father and others in his village – lay with the RJD. But the MCC was the only organization that bothered to recruit him. Not only that, it remained the only political organization to contact him in ten years. And the attraction of the MCC in the end was not ideology – that came later – but its ability to provide protection in a local conflict between newly assertive Yadavs and zamindars in which the main political parties and the state were aligned with the other side.

A.Y.’s story does not appear to be unique among the accounts that I have been able to construct so far. It is not the case that armed organizations entered areas in which party organizations were strong and then drove them out. Rather, they were first movers in areas in which political parties were slow to recruit – and once they built support, they were able to keep political parties out, or allow political parties entry on their terms. Indeed, by ceding ground to the Maoists in Jharkhand, political parties have also become dependent on them.⁷ 

In the adivasi areas I have visited, there also appears to be little difference in the stories of young men in villages where the Maoists are believed to have support and those villages in which they do not.⁸ Consider the example now of a young man who did not join: now in his thirties, he is of Adivasi background and comes from a family of basket weavers. He does not have the education or skills that qualify him for a job in the private sector, and private sector jobs are in any case hard to come by.

 

In the last fifteen years, he tried his luck in many professions. He tried to work as tutor, to find a niche in some local NGO, to become a subcontractor for small schemes sanctioned by the government – he tried even the traditional family occupation of basket weaving despite his own aspirations for a better profession. He has responded to the occasional political party or student association that tried to reach out to him. The JMM, remarkably, did not even try. The only factor that distinguishes him from those who joined the CPI(Maoist) and those who did not is an accident of location: he lives in a village close enough to the road so that the CPI(Maoist) does not attempt to recruit there. As he puts it, there is now a berojgaron ki fauj – an army of the unemployed – in Jharkhand. The CPI(Maoist) has capitalized on it. Other political parties have not.

Although the rise of violence in Jharkhand and other areas certainly has something to do with failures of development or governance, it also has a great deal to do with the failure of political parties. In other states, other political parties have pre-emptively mobilized this potential army of the unemployed. The Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh is the obvious example of a political party working in a state and among social groups also affected by poverty and development failures that channelled a movement that could have been violent within constitutional boundaries. In Jharkhand, political parties have not tried very hard. Understanding the success of Naxalism there also requires us to understand the failure of political parties.

I’ve tried to suggest here that this failure of political parties is linked to the changed party environment in India since 1991. The BSP was created in 1984, at a time when political parties believed that they still needed a majority. Its very name – ‘Bahujan’ – was adopted with that goal in mind and the party made painstaking efforts over a number of years to reach out beyond its core social base among Dalits. With the increasing fragmentation of the party system since, such majorities are no longer perceived as necessary. Paradoxically, then, as the number of political parties in India explodes, the space these parties occupy has also begun to shrink, creating new opportunities for organized violence.

 

Footnotes:

1. These figures represent official estimates of security forces, civilians and ‘extremists’ killed between 1998-2007 according to the Home Ministry and as reported in figures compiled by Indiastat (www.indiastat.com).

2. Figures compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau (http://ncrb.nic.in/).

3. This research was conducted in Jharkhand in 2010 as part of a broader project on democracy in South Asia. I am indebted to Shri Harivansh, the editor-in-chief of Prabhat Khabar, Jivesh Ranjan Singh, Prabhat Khabar’s rural affairs editor, and B. Vijay Murty of The Hindustan Times for their unstinting and indispensable help. Some interviews were conducted jointly with Saroj Nagi and Yubaraj Ghimire.

4. Compiled using election reports on national and assembly elections published by the Election Commission of India.

5. Kanchan Chandra, ‘A Rope of Many Strands’, Indian Express, 28 May 2009.

6. The names of these organizations and an assessment of their district level scope is based on the organizations named in newspaper articles on violence in Jharkhand and on interviews with the district correspondents of Prabhat Khabar about the organizations active in each district.

7. See for instance Venkitesh Ramakrishnan, ‘Maoist Connection’, Frontline 24(25), 2008.

8. Kanchan Chandra and Saroj Nagi, ‘Independence Day in Maoist Land’, The Hindustan Times, 17 August 2010.