Structural changes fuelling turmoil

Historian

India is agitated over a host of measures taken by the Modi government in its second term. The government, in turn, has asserted, many times over, that it is not going to back off. Measures like the modifications to Article 370, the introduction of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Population Register are a part, along with some of its earlier measures like making Aadhaar compulsory for receiving state support and filing income tax returns, push towards digital payments, the introduction of FASTag for vehicles using toll roads etc. All these, the government asserts, are needed even though their introduction caused teething troubles to citizens. The government has made it clear that these measures, mooted in pre-Modi times and needed for citizen-friendly governance, were not implemented by the previous governments because they lacked the political will and that they will be implemented now for the general good.

Going beyond the political carping that is routine in India, one notices that essentially what is happening is that the turmoil is also related to the transformation of the country from a traditional small-scale society based on informal rules and face-to-face interactions to one that is based on formal rules and less arbitrariness. This, is turn, leads to fears about the loss of identity, and nostalgia for an older time when informal interactions were about all that were needed to get along in life.

For ages, India has been a small-scale society where anyone outside the boundaries of the village or small town, was a foreigner. In small communities, everyone knew everyone, so there was little need for paperwork. What we forget is that the tendency towards systematisation and paperwork is part and parcel of an increase in scale that has characterised modernity. It submerges some already existing identities and creates new ones. When these transformations take place rapidly, they create anxieties.

The fact is that diversity in thought, belief, faith and action is as natural to human existence as breathing. Human beings are hard-wired to live in small communities. Ever since the days of hunter-gatherers and the gradual transition to settled agriculture, humans have been used to living in communities smaller than 200 people. Establishing networks with greater reach than this or achieving any kind of commonality of thought and action requires effort. Building networks of trust and collectivities has been one of the main characteristics of the evolution of the civilisation from the small-scale to the large-scale.

The building of collectivities also means that many small identities get subsumed in the larger one. In a study of the languages of the Himalayan region, it was found that nearly 300 languages were threatened. Of these, over 170 languages are spoken in India; most are of the Tibeto-Burman variety and are spoken in regions right down to the India-Myanmar-Bangladesh border. As the social groups that spoke these languages ceased to be isolated, their languages simply merged seamlessly into other languages. Otherwise, in the various censuses of modern times, languages which had as few as ten speakers have been recorded. One does wonder with whom those ten speakers were communicating.

What is true of language is equally true of social practices like caste and religion. Small identities of jati and sect gradually get subsumed into larger ones. Think of the large number of jatis that claim kshatriya status for themselves today even though within living memory, they were said to be of the shudra varna.

Right up to the nineteenth century, Indian rulers had made little effort to interfere with this method of existence where the village was all and anyone beyond the confines of the village was a ‘foreigner’. Indian state systems preferred to negotiate tributary relationships with those who ran all these small-scale communities. The effort to hire officials or set up more permanent systems of administration was never seriously pursued. The one desultory attempt to set up such a system, known to history as the mansabdari system, by the Mughal state, resulted in the creation of one of the most powerful and richest Asiatic states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the Mughals never attempted to pay their officials a salary independently of whichever estate those officials were posted in. The officials were expected to deduct their salary from whatever the income of the estate might be. This conflict of interest was never resolved. It was not till the English East India Company colonised India that Indians were virtually press-ganged into the modern world.

The social processes by which smaller communities get subsumed into larger ones is normally so gradual that it is difficult to notice. In the last ten years, however, the mechanism of the Aadhaar database, the issuance of voter IDs and PAN cards and the shock of demonetisation and digitisation have made that intangible social process tangible. It has also sparked infinite fears, each depending on one’s perceived vulnerabilities.

Much depends on the social location of someone, say in the case of the Aadhaar identity. For those at the bottom of the pyramid, an Aadhaar card or a PAN card are keys to accessing state facilities and also the banking system. A superior social location might lead the owner to feel that these documents allow the state to ‘snoop’ on them, especially because frequently they are able to get their work done through highly personalised networks that exist in their favour.

For the poor in India, Aadhaar becomes the basis for evoking trust and getting the system to trust them. Large-scale societies, we might add, are underpinned by the assumption that there is a base network of institutions and rules that would help all people, irrespective of who they might be. Such systems help to reduce risk. Above all, they help to achieve inclusive growth and provide a cushion to those who have nothing to begin with.

Basically, India is being frogmarched into becoming a large-scale society based on formal rules that are independent of one’s kinship, caste and friendship networks.

Till now, the focus of the government has been on creating new rules for functioning and forcing the people to fall in line. Will the government also show the ability to reach out to the people and co-opt them into supporting this transformation?