Let's formalise the mansabdari system

It is common for economists to ask about an economy: How will it look in 10, 20, 30 or 40 years from now? But to my knowledge, no political scientist ever asks this question about the political structure of a country. I wonder why.

Take India: How will it look politically 10 or 20 years from now? To answer that we have to see how far away it has travelled from what it started out with in 1947. The growth of the regional parties suggests that it has travelled very far.

I have a theory about this, which is that every social and cultural group has a ‘normal’ towards which it gravitates. In India this ‘normal’ is satrapies or mansabdaris or rajwadas over whom the sovereign has complete suzerainty.

It doesn’t matter who the satrap or the mansabdar is. It also doesn’t matter who the sovereign is. What matters is the structure. Here we have to distinguish between legitimacy and power.

The legitimacy of the sovereign derives out of everyone accepting that it has the monopoly of force in the region where it is sovereign. But its power depends on the degree of support it has from the constituent mansabdars or satraps.

Since 1989, it is the regional parties that have become the new mansabdars who, in the old days, derived their power from the number of ghudsawars or horsemen they could muster up for the sovereign. Today the horses and the sawars have been replaced by MPs. 

Loyalty can never be taken for granted. In the old days it depended on the grant of jagirs by the sovereign to the satrap. Today, it depends on central grants-in-aid to the regional leaders. 

By the end of the 17th century, Aurangzeb was moaning “yak anar, saad beemar” (one pomegranate and a hundred sick men). He meant he had very little room for fiscal manoeuvre.

After the last Finance Commission’s award, the Centre is in the same position now. There is very little at its disposal to buy support with. The overall consequence is to greatly enhance the power of the satraps.

A question of legitimacy

In the old days, the legitimacy of the satrap came from two sources: Military prowess to collect revenue and priestly sanction to do so. Today the Constitution bestows the former power and the voter the latter. 

But here is the problem: While the former is fixed, the latter — like priestly sanction, which depends on what the payoff is for the priest — varies with the times. This is called competitive populism now.

The trouble with competitive populism — payoff for the priests — is that if you spread the jam too thin, you lose loyalty. But in India this is what has happened because the number of people in each parish (constituency) has grown massively. 

Whence the key question: How many voters will an MP represent in the future? How many can he represent effectively? I have been asking this question since 2001, when the Vajpayee government froze the number of seats in Parliament for 25 years.

That was an absurd decision, considering that by then India’s population was already over a billion. On average that means each MP represented 1.85 million people. Now it is 2.4 million. There can’t be anything more absurd in the world.

But 2026, when the freeze ends, is a scant seven years and just one general election, away. So given my theory about mansabdars, satraps, regional parties, horsemen and MPs we had better start thinking about it, most particularly the political scientists who should wean themselves from 19th century European political theories on which they have been overdosing. 

A 2-tier system?

My very preliminary solution to the problem is this.

• To make representation more representative we must consider having five regional parliaments, one each for the North, East, South, West and the Central India, which is basically the Hindi belt.
• Each regional parliament will have the same number of MPs, chosen from the assemblies, if necessary with each regional MP having more than one vote because some assemblies are tiny. This will eliminate the population advantage that the Hindi states have.
• Each regional parliament will then send an equal number of MPs to the Central parliament, which can become smaller by some agreed on number.
• The concurrent list of the Constitution will be eliminated for this to be effective. The central list will have to be pruned.

In a way all this is happening informally and by indirection anyway. Why not formalise it round this idea or some variant of it?