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Public Opinion & Pressure Groups

structure

(1) Opening    —    Public opinion is potent in India.

(2) Body    —    Pressure groups in India.

    —    New Classes.

    —    Consensus and Synthesis.

  —    A remarkable degree of consensus has existed through out Indian history.

    —    Cultural heritage.

(3) Closing    —    New Indian State represents ideals and principles which are the result of an effective, even if imperfect, synthesis between the East and the West.

In spite of the mass illiteracy and relative lack of social communication, public opinion is potent in India, even though the study of it as a political force is still quite undeveloped. In India, as elsewhere, various public may be discerned. The most obvious public are uneducated, many whose role in influencing public policy is largely negative and general and the elite few, who control the effective channels of access and exercise most of the power. Within each of these publics many subdivisions may be found, especially on particular issues. Divisions between the North and South, between regional and linguistic groups, between the literate and illiterate, between villagers and towns people, between communal and caste groups have a profound effect on political life and behaviour.

Pressure groups also are to be found in India, although perhaps to a lesser degree and in different forms from those in western states. “Three main types of pressure groups may be distinguished in the Indian setting: (1) Special interest organizations of fairly recent origin representing modern bases of social and economic association familiar to the western observer, such as trade unions and business groups, special welfare agencies, or youth and women’s organizations; (2) organizations representing traditional social relationships, such as caste and religious groups and (3) organisations representing the Gandhian ideological heritage, “such as the Sarva Seva Sangh, the main agency of the Sarvodaya movement, whose outstanding activity is the Bhoodan Yagna movement of Vinoba Bhave. The exact role of the pressure groups is hard to determine, but they obviously exert considerable influence on particular issues.

In traditional Hindu Society the classes that mattered were the high-caste Hindus, notably the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. In Moghul times a new ruling class of Muslims governed the country, but they made relatively little impact on the masses of the people, who were mostly Hindus. The British became a new ruling aristocracy, and they trained and associated with them a group of Western educated and Western-oriented Indians, who formed a new class in economic and political life if not so obviously in Indian society generally. This Western educated group split up into various classes. Some continued to the end as loyal servants of British rule, while others furnished the top leadership of the nationalist movement.

Gandhi raised up another new class of persons of various castes and backgrounds who were mere clearly identified with the masses of the people and with Indian traditions and outlook. Some of the surviving members of this new class have apparently sloughed off the Gandhian traditions. Some are trying to continue it. A different new class may now be emerging, with deeper roots in local and regional society—a class neither as westernized in education or outlook as the new classes which developed in the days of British rule nor as devoted to India’s past traditions as some of the more conservative followers of Gandhi or some of the many thousands of sadhus and other “holy men” who presumably devote their lives to non-material things. This new class, perhaps one should say this new generation, may be able to achieve a more satisfactory synthesis of the many values, foreign and indigenous, which complete for the loyalties of Indians today and which cause the torment in our minds of which Nehru has spoken. The members of this new class will presumably place greater emphasis on constructive service in building a new India than on the traditional values of renunciation and sacrifice.

An interesting problem for exploration would be the extent to which a genuine political consensus exists in India today. The idea of consensus is deeply ingrained in Indian traditional ways and attitudes such as decision by majority vote. It has been practiced for centuries in village councils and in other groupings at the higher levels of social and political organisation. For all the traditional emphasis on India as a unified nation, Indian society today is, as Professor Morris-Jones has pointed out, “a fragmented society, a society with an absence of a basic consensus”. This “absence of consensus theme” states Professor Morris-Jones, has been central to an understanding of modern Indian politics.

Some students of Indian history and politics would insist that a remarkable degree of consensus has existed throughout Indian history and that this consensus still exists on fundamentals. Historically, it arises out of the unifying forces in Indian social and religious life, notably Hinduism and the caste system. At the present time it is reinforced by the widespread acceptance of the basic decisions which have 

been made regarding the nature of the new state, including the decision to establish a “socialist pattern of society”. It is also reinforced by an almost unparalleled continuity and quality of national leadership. Undoubtedly Nehru himself, the chief political spokesman for India for a generation and dominant figure on the Indian scene generally, since the assassination of Gandhi early in 1948, has been a great unifying influence, and has done much to develop a high degree of political consensus, over in `fragmented society’.

Among the fine traditions of Indian society have been those of assimilation, tolerance and synthesis as illustrated in the two great religions (or religio-philosophical systems) which originated in the Indian subcontinent—Hinduism and Buddhism. These qualities have given a distinctive fervour to Indian life and culture. Out of the blending of any old and the new, the indigenous and the foreign, a distinctively Indian culture has emerged. To be sure, cultures as divergent from the mainstream of Hindu culture as those of the Muslims and the British were not wholly assimilated, but they did merge with the dominant Hindu strain to form that unique synthesis which is the stamp of the culture of Modern India. “The tradition of India”, in the view of a profound student of Indian history, K.M. Panikkar, has always been of synthesis a singular ability to absorb the culture of others and assimilate without losing her own identity. It is the synthesis of Aryan and Dravidian that laid the basis of Hindu civilization. The prolonged contact with Islam had profound significance for very aspect of Indian Life”. India later became the “meeting ground of the East and West”. “Whereas the contact of the West with other countries had only been external, in India the West had so to say entered into the very bone and marrow of the East”. Arnold Toynbee has pointed out that the western impact on India was more intimate than on any other part of Asia, although of all the major Asian civilizations, alien to the civilization of the West.

The inheritance that India has steeped into is only partly Hindu and Indian. The inheritance from the West is of no less importance in many fields. Modern India does not live under the laws of Manu. Her mental background and equipment, though largely influenced by the persistence of Indian tradition, have been moulded into their present shape by over a hundred years of western education, extending practically to every field of mental activity. Its social ideals are not what Hindu society for long cherished, but those assimilated from the west and derived predominantly from the teachings of western social thinkers. In fact it will be no exaggeration to say that the New Indian State represents ideals and principles which are the result of an effective, even if imperfect, synthesis between the East and the West.