The dismantling of the haphazard accretion of economic controls – the notorious Licence Raj – has

The dismantling of the haphazard accretion of economic controls – the notorious “Licence Raj” – has released a flood of consumer goods that has transformed the look andfeel of urban India: cities glitter with neon adverts for international brands, streets are choked by thousands of new vehicles. It is a country with high savings rates (but low literacy: it is the combination of high savings and high literacy which some see as the important springboard for the economic leap of the Asian “tigers”); this has, however, provided little opportunity for productive private investment. Power has become free-floating, its moorings to institutional structures – ancestry, caste, party, office – looser than ever before, and more directly a function of personalities. A striking example is the current in cumbent of the office of Election Commissioner: he has made himself the Hector of Indian democracy, accruing considerable political power and deciding – generally to perfectly good effect – when or whether elections can take place in certain states.The Indian economy too is rapidly reshaping itself.

Greater democratisation of the social structure has actually had the effect of further personalising and centralising power, and has spawned populist varieties of power. But this too is changing rapidly, though with unexpected results. The result is, as Mehta terms it, something like a “democratic monarchy”. The Congress Party, which has ruled for 43 of the 48 years since Independence, is in long-term decline, and the state bureau cracy is mired in corruption.For Ved Mehta, part of the elusiveness of India’s politics lies in the conjunction of a democratic political system with a rigid hierarchical social structure in which lineage and ancestry remain close attributes of power.

But this entry of new groups into the political process is occurring at exactly the moment when the organisations supposed to support public demands are buckling. If these local assemblies are given real financial autonomy, this promises to deepen India’s identity as the most exceptional and bristling democracy anywhere. This is pr o bably the single most important initiative aimed at decentralising power in India, at creating structures of local government in what has historically been a hugely centralised system. Seats have been reserved for poorer groups, and a Constitutional amen dment stipulates that a third of all seats must go to women.

These transient couplings can generate enormous political effects, and have undermined the power of the political elite, as well as the security of those who are excluded. The notion of political equality has seeped deep and wide into this profoundly fissured society: more and more are now pressing what they see as their legitimate claims – against one another, and against the state – with greater energy.The rapid entry of ever more people into the political process has recently received further impetus: the weight of the Constitution has been put behind the project of Panchayati Raj, adopted by Nehru and revived in the 1980s by Rajiv Gandhi. In this country of minorities, each subject to its own distinctive inequalities, democracy serves as a language fo r forging new identities, expressly designed to yield fictitious permanent majorities – monster castes (which bring together “Backward Castes” with “Other Backward Castes” and so on, in pythonesque variation), mythic leviathans like a “unified” Hinduism (a nonsense in a religion which has always flourished through a proliferation of observances and practices). In fact, the machinations of New Delhi have become more a symptom than a cause of the much wider changes sweeping the subcontinent The r e are at least three facets to these changes. Democracy in India has struck deep roots, though it is hardly a liberal version of democracy. The studiously cultivated poise of Mehta’s prose, even whe n he recounts absurdities that beggar belief, lends a low comedy to his descriptions of the activities of political leaders, of their relatives and in-laws, and of what he has termed “sundry other collat-erals”. He covers the domestic wranglings between I ndira Gandhi and her daughter-in-law, Maneka Gandhi (wife of Sanjay Gandhi, who was killed in 1980 when the plane he was piloting crashed), and Maneka’s disinheritance from the family profession, the crises in Assam and Punjab, the assassination of MrsG andhi by her Sikh bodyguards, the succession to her office of Rajiv Gandhi and the period of hope which surrounded this, the Bhopal gas disaster, Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by Tamil terrorists, and the rise of Hindu nationalism, resulting in the destru ction of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya.But this sparely rendered narrative is always filtered through the spectacles of New Delhi, and that is a limitation.