Indian democracy began with the unique advantages of an efficient civil service and a well-organized political party yet its record is dismal. What are the causes for such poor performance? (2001)
India began with two assets few new states had: an administrative “steel frame” carried over from the Indian Civil Service, and the Congress, a mass party with a national organisation. The charge of a “dismal” record holds for the quality of governance, not for the survival of democracy. Most of the shortfall came from the decay of those same two assets.
Causes of the shortfall
- Decline of the Congress organisation. Rajni Kothari‘s “Congress system” settled conflict through internal factional bargaining. After 1969, Indira Gandhi replaced elected state units with Delhi’s appointees and plebiscitary appeals. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (In Pursuit of Lakshmi, 1987) called this deinstitutionalisation: the leader won elections while the institutions that absorbed demands decayed.
- A crisis of governability. Atul Kohli, in Democracy and Discontent (1990), argued that mobilisation outran institutions. Personalised leaders weakened parties, and newly assertive groups made demands that weakened institutions could not process. The results were violence, policy drift and ineffective government.
- Politicisation of the bureaucracy. The early-1970s call for a “committed bureaucracy”, punitive transfers and patronage eroded the civil service’s neutrality. The Supreme Court had to step in with Prakash Singh (2006) on police reform and T. S. R. Subramanian (2013) on fixed tenure. Both have been implemented unevenly.
- Criminalisation and money. Lok Sabha MPs with declared criminal cases rose from 23% in 2004 to 46% in 2024. Milan Vaishnav (When Crime Pays, 2017) shows that parties pick such candidates because they bring money and “deliver” where the state does not.
- Unregulated parties. Parties entered the Constitution only in 1985, and then only to punish defection. Internal democracy is absent and finance opaque; the electoral bonds scheme was struck down in 2024 for denying voters information about party funding.
- Structural inheritance. On 25 November 1949 B. R. Ambedkar warned that India was entering “a life of contradictions”: political equality alongside social and economic inequality. Mass poverty and illiteracy made clientelism rational.
Why “dismal” overstates the case
- Survival. Most post-colonial democracies collapsed; India’s has lasted over seven decades. Even the Emergency ended through an election that removed the government. Arend Lijphart called this a “puzzle” for democratic theory.
- Alternation and inclusion. Power has changed hands peacefully at the Centre repeatedly since 1977. Yogendra Yadav‘s “second democratic upsurge” brought OBCs, Dalits and Adivasis into participation, and turnout was 66.1% in 2024.
- Outcomes. There has been no major famine since independence, which Amartya Sen ties to elections and a free press. The World Bank estimates that extreme poverty fell from 27.1% (2011–12) to 5.3% (2022–23).
- The newer worry concerns the quality of democracy: since 2021 V-Dem has classed India an “electoral autocracy”, a verdict that is widely contested.
Conclusion
India’s record is uneven, not dismal. It is strong on legitimacy, participation and integration, and weak on governance, accountability and the rule of law. The causes are chiefly institutional: the two founding assets were allowed to decay. The remedy is therefore to rebuild them through party regulation, an insulated civil service and police reform.