India’s government is loosely modelled on the British Westminster system. It consists of a president as head of state; an executive headed by the prime minister; a legislature consisting of a parliament with an upper and lower house (the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha); and a judiciary with a supreme court at its head. 543 members are elected to the Lok Sabha through a first-past-the-post general election, held every five years. State representatives are indirectly elected to the Rajya Sabha on staggered six–year terms, so every two years around one-third are changed, elected by state legislatures. India’s constitution sets out the country’s political code, federal structure, powers of government and guarantees Indians’ rights, including to equality before the law and freedoms of speech, assembly, movement and others. The system is complicated by India’s caste system, a hierarchical social structure that divides the Hindu majority into groups, with ‘Brahmins’ at the top and ‘Dalits’ at the bottom of society. Last names often indicate to which caste a person belongs. India’s constitution banned caste discrimination and early governments introduced quotas to provide fairer allocation of jobs and education, but caste remains a powerful factor in politics. In some regions political parties still court voters according to castes, who tend to vote as a block. Secularism and democracy in India India’s constitution was adjusted to describe it as a secular state during the 1975 emergency, and a later court ruling found that India has been secular since independence. But India is understood to be a deeply religious country, with diverse religions represented in its population.

Even today, the military in Pakistan remains primus inter pares, or first among equals. When President Asif Ali Zardari visits Washington, D.C., directly behind him is General Ashfaq Kiyani, the chief of staff of the army. This is something that would never happen in India. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits, he does not bring a military entourage with him, because he does not need the military’s consent to govern. The differences between Pakistan and India could not be more striking, and, yet, both of these countries emerged from the same colonial experience. My principal focus here is on how liberal and democratic institutions emerged, specifically, in India. In the mid-nineteenth century, under the growing influence of British colonialism, the British government formally took charge of India. This government displaced the British East India Company, which had steadily expanded its influence and its ability to govern between 1757 and 1857. But in 1857, there was a significant uprising against British rule. British colonial historians have referred to this as the Great Indian Mutiny, and Indian Nationalist historians refer to this as the First War of Independence. I prefer to call this an insurrection or an uprising in a purely descriptive form, without necessarily taking a position on either side. In any case, this uprising was brutally suppressed with, for example, the principal leaders’ bodies being shot out through cannon barrels—an effective way of killing someone—and also pour decourager les autres, to discourage the others. Once you see someone being shot out of a cannon barrel with a significant amount .
In the wake of 1857, the British formally took over the rule of India. Queen Victoria promised not to tamper with local customs, practices and religious beliefs and generally to be a good steward of her Indian subjects. Despite this, by the late nineteenth century, the historical record shows the emergence of Indian nationalism. Undoubtedly the ideas which infused this insipient Indian nationalism were quintessentially drawn from the Western World. There was some Nationalist claptrap that perpetuated the myth of an ancestral village level democracy in India, and these ideas ultimately came to the fore.
However, there is little evidence for that. There might have been this ancestral notion of consensus in a village and the like, but that is not where the origins of modern Indian democracy lie. Rather these origins, contrary to the claims of Indian Nationalists, lie in the traditions of British liberalism. These liberal ideas were quintessentially British and European. However, it is the genius of the Indian Nationalists that they seized upon these ideas and then implanted them in the Indian soil. This was not something that the British bequeathed on India. This nineteenth century emergence of Indian nationalism was very different from that which ultimately brought India independence in 1947. The Indian nationalism of the late nineteenth century, which was given a voice when the Indian National Congress was formed in 1885, was elitist, upper middle class, anglicized, and sought only incremental changes.
The idea that India would be independent of British rule was simply beyond the pale. All they wanted was some notion of representative government. These demands were incremental, evolutionary and limited—reflecting the class, and the much anglicized character of the early Nationalist movement. Wilson’s Call for Self-Determination In the early twentieth century, in part because of Woodrow Wilson’s call for the self-determination of peoples, the Indians received the mistaken impression that Wilson was referring to the subcontinent instead of Central Europe. Indian Nationalists got a considerable boost from this, only to be terribly disappointed by the very incremental, conservative changes that the British made in 1919. Slight forms of representation were allowed, but only very propertied males were allowed to have representation in the various parts of British India. (Even though after 1857 the British basically extended their sway over all of India, some monarchs were allowed to remain as titular heads of their states. They didn’t wield any effective power, and could be dismissed with a wave if the British resident so chose. But there were these 562 monarchs, and some of them ruled over areas slightly larger than a postage stamp. They were allowed to do essentially what they wanted, except that the British controlled three critical areas—defense, foreign affairs and communications. They also recognized the British as what was called the paramount power in India, through the Doctrine of Paramountcy. As it happened, these nominally independent kingdoms would pose an interesting challenge at the time of national independence and partition in 1947. ) In the 1920s and early 1930s, under the Congress party, the Indian National Congress, which had been formed in 1885, came under the tutelage of one of the most remarkable men of the twentieth century: Mohandas K. Gandhi. Most people think of Gandhi as a saintly individual. They also think of his personal quirks. What is relevant, however, is Gandhi’s genius in transforming this elitist, anglicized, upper middle class organization into a mass-based political party. Gandhi recognized that the only way to oust the British was to mobilize all of India’s population. In this, he drew upon Henry David Thoreau and his idea of civil disobedience. Gandhi recognized that if he used civil disobedience, he could paralyze the British, because the British were interested in social control, not in genocide. They did not want to wipe out the Indians, but rather to keep the Indians in their place.