It is hard to find a political language for speaking about the long-term significance of these inventions. Certainly Indian politics bears little resemblance to either textbook accounts of representative democracy or to the Parliament-centred, Nehru-led Congress model of democracy, which after all supposed that citizens’ needs were best championed through elected parliamentary representatives chosen by political parties. The 60-year-old Asian democracy is not just the world’s largest democracy — a convenient cliché — but also its most compound, turbulent and exciting prototype. Defined by various older and newer means of publicly contesting power and representing citizens’ interests, it resembles, in form, the giant, multi-trunk tree with interlinked aerial roots and branches that grows throughout the sub-continent: the famous banyan tree that is still honoured as a symbol of the vibrant unity that comes from complex diversity.

India is moving in the direction of banyan democracy. Especially since the defeat of the Emergency, democratic ideals and mechanisms have begun to extend sideways and downwards, throughout government and into the nooks and crannies of Indian society. With its deep roots, many trunks and tall branches, banyan democracy has global implications. One is that parties and politicians cannot be relied upon fully to address citizens’ needs — and that new channels are necessary for addressing citizens’ needs and grievances, their hopes and dreams. Another implication is that banyan democracy disproves the predictions of those who once believed that democracy required the privatisation of religious faith, or its outright extermination. Of decisive historical importance here is Nehru’s founding vision of secularism. This was not the secularism of the French or American constitutions, but something more innovative, in effect a vision of the equality of all religions, that implied the need for India’s citizens to reject the canker of communalism, to accept that Israeli-style partitioning is not their thing, and a two-nation policy, one for Muslims and one for Hindus, is an offence to the idea of democratic India.

... contd.