Comment: Political Modernization in India. (1993, 20 Marks)
Political modernisation, in Samuel Huntington‘s Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), means the rationalisation of authority, the differentiation of specialised structures and the expansion of participation. Lucian Pye called the same bundle the “development syndrome” of equality, capacity and differentiation; Gabriel Almond added cultural secularisation. The theory expected tradition to retreat as the modern advanced. India modernised its politics through tradition rather than against it, and it did so most visibly in the village.
The modern frame: authority and participation
- Rationalised authority — a written Constitution, a secular state, an impersonal bureaucracy and universal adult franchise granted in 1950, with polling in 1951–52 when fewer than one Indian in five was literate, a choice no theory of development recommended.
- The Congress system — Rajni Kothari (“The Congress ‘System’ in India”, 1964; Politics in India, 1970) described a dominant party that absorbed opposition through internal factions while outside “parties of pressure” worked within a “margin of pressure”, linking Delhi to the village through local notables. Myron Weiner (Party Building in a New Nation, 1967) showed Congress winning by adapting to caste and faction, and spoke of India’s two political cultures: a modern elite idiom and a traditional mass idiom.
Tradition as the vehicle
- Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition (1967), argued that caste associations — the Nadars of the Tamil south are their case — turned ascriptive groups into voluntary, quasi-modern bodies that fought elections, ran schools and claimed welfare.
- Kothari, Caste in Indian Politics (1970), reversed the lament: “casteism in politics” is “no more and no less than politicisation of caste”. Democratic competition secularised caste by making it a bloc of voters rather than a ritual order.
- M. N. Srinivas‘s dominant caste explains who carried the vote to the village; Yogendra Singh‘s Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973) showed heterogenetic (Western) and orthogenetic (indigenous) sources of change interacting selectively rather than one displacing the other.
Reaching the village: democratic deepening
- Panchayati raj after the Balwantrai Mehta Committee (1957) created a rural leadership that later filled state assemblies — though in Maharashtra dominant landed castes captured it, as B. R. Ambedkar had warned of a village that was a “sink of localism”.
- The backward-caste assertion and the Mandal decision (1990) moved power downward. Yogendra Yadav later called this the “second democratic upsurge”: turnout rises as one moves down the social hierarchy, inverting the Western pattern.
- The 73rd Amendment, in force from 24 April 1993, turned this into constitutional rules: reserved seats and chairs for SCs, STs and women. Today about 14.5 lakh women, roughly 46% of some 32 lakh panchayat representatives, hold office — participation reaching the lowest level of the state.
Limits: decay beside development
- Huntington’s gap — participation outran institutions. Atul Kohli (Democracy and Discontent, 1990) wrote of a “crisis of governability”; the Emergency was decay in Huntington’s precise sense.
- Gunnar Myrdal‘s soft state and Fred Riggs‘s formalism persist: panchayats hold elections but lack functions, funds and staff, and proxy “sarpanch-patis” show presence without power.
- Theory’s own bias — India sustained democracy at an income level too low for the modernisation thesis to predict. It fits Shmuel Eisenstadt‘s multiple modernities better than a single Western path.
Conclusion
Political modernisation in India is real but hybrid. Tradition was not abolished. Caste, community and village were drawn into competitive politics, and in the process they became instruments of participation. The unfinished part is institutional capacity. The Rudolphs’ insight holds; Huntington’s warning still applies.