Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is a very useful text in comparative government and politics. Its author, Barrington Moore, Jr, takes very serious the question why some modern nation-states---namely the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, China, and India---have become flourishing democracies, or brutal dictatorships. In Chapter 7 of his text, Moore chronicles the history of Indian politics, from as far back as the Mogul occupation through British colonialism to the present day. It is seemingly miraculous, in the author's opinion, that modern India is a functional parliamentary democracy. Moore explained his conviction when he wrote:
"If imperfect, the democracy was no sham. There had been a working parliamentary system since Independence in 1947, an independent judiciary, and the standard liberal freedoms...There is a paradox here...Political democracy may seem strange in both an Asian setting and one without an industrial revolution."
History, in Moore's analysis, should have made Indian democracy unlikely, though it is presently a reality. India was once divided into petty kingdoms in which "a monarch ruled, an army that supported the throne, and peasants supported both." Governance, during both of Mogul and British rule was strictly local, revolving around the village. Local affairs were settled, through custom, tradition, and religious practice, namely the caste system, which in Moore's words, " [provided] a local division of labor and a corresponding distribution of power." Commercial activity was not the life blood of these villages, but agricultural; the reason being that outside of the village there was no meaningful institution or custom, e.g. courts, to resolve mercantile conflicts. The royal treasury was not kept in the black by a cash flow, but a crop flow. The arrangement worked that in practice commoners did not own the land, rather it was leased to them by the monarch. Moore argued that the agrarian order was perpetuated when nobility used economic surplus for opulence, e.g. ornamental elephants, lavish palaces. Wealth was not transmitted down family lines as the monarch would claim a subject's assets when he died. Moore noted, "...that neither capitalism nor parliamentary democracy could have emerged unaided from seventeenth century India."
When the British stepped foot in India, they found a Mogul empire in serious decay to inefficient and ineffective governance. However, this did not seem to bother the India as authority outside the village---in a decentralized agrarian 'state'---seemed to be "superfluous" at best. A democratic order, Moore contended should not have taken hold in India as, "There was no landed aristocracy that had succeed in achieving independence and privilege against the monarch, while retaining political unity." Landed aristocracy often ruled villages outside of the decaying Mogul imperial system. Unlike feudal China, as the author noted, there was not a movement amongst Indians to oust a bad government for a good one.
It was counterproductive to British needs---economic and colonial--- to have a decentralized India. In order to ensure their interests, the British established a system of law and order---e.g. a judiciary and legal profession---which angered those whose power was derived heavily from the traditional caste system, while also further empowering the local elites. Though, the English introduced the rule of law to India, it did not make them benevolent rulers as seen through repeated uprisings---namely the Sepoy Rebellion----up until the nationalist and independence movement led by Gandhi. The British did nothing but export their way of life and culture to another part of the world, displacing traditional Indian society, as seen with the destruction of the local economy, and the impetus for Indian self-rule in the 20th century.
In the third part of Moore's text provided a theoretical framework for what, in the modern era, and into the future could be the catalyst for democratic movements. He believes that democracy can happen in limited circumstances, depending on the past, if not recurring political history and culture. Democracy, Moore believed, arose in Western Europe because of the notion of the rights, and that no one authority or figure can rule absolutely unchecked. Elsewhere in the world different regimes came into existence depending on economics, and again the history of a people.
No comments:
Post a Comment