Management of Diversity through Integrative Strategies
by Swarna Rajagopalan

Most states consist of more than one nation or ethnic group. In larger polities like the major states of South Asia, the former Soviet Union, Canada, Nigeria, and Malaysia, the problems of managing interethnic rivalries and of ensuring allegiance to the state are critical to the survival of the state. In spite of the passage of centuries and the changes in ideas, experience, and technology, the fundamental problems of regime survival or state survival—the problems of legitimacy and obligation—have not changed.

A state, or any polity, is based primarily on the cooperation, consensual or coerced, that it manages to elicit from its members. To the extent that the polity elicits consensual cooperation from the populace, it is legitimate. However, continued legitimacy is determined by the capacity of the regime to create the bases of its continuance.

Strategies of Regime Maintenance
A regime exercises three kinds of power and, accordingly, can employ three different kinds of strategies to maintain itself: destructive, productive, and integrative. In their actual implementation, regimes may or may not intentionally use a particular strategy to achieve a particular end.

Destructive strategies such as the use of force, repressive laws, arbitrary justice, and punishments have historically been used by regimes at three times in their histories. The founding of many a polity is a consequence of conquest, usurpation, regicide, or revolution. Destructive strategies also characterize the period of consolidation when a regime needs to enforce its dictates and to suppress dissent or competition. Finally, destructive strategies often characterize the response of a regime to the weakening of its control and the erosion of its legitimacy.

Productive strategies facilitate the growth of prosperity and interdependence and involve incentives and rewards. Such strategies typify the period after the consolidation of a state, although that is not necessarily the only time they may be used.

Integrative strategies build a community out of a polity. Integrative power is described by Kenneth Boulding as the power of love. Legitimacy, affect, allegiance, loyalty, and identity are all objects of integrative power. Integrative strategies attempt to create the same sentiments through the use of ideology, charisma, and even institutions.

The question addressed here is: What kinds of strategies or policies would have the consequences, intentional or unintended, of integrating a polity? Four may be identified: institution-building, communication, incentives, and ideology.

Akbar and Asoka, third rulers in the Mughal and the Maurya dynasties in India, respectively, are remembered for their tolerant and enlightened, ergo, integrative policies. That the Maurya and the Mughal rulers united much of India under their control, governed areas that are in 1994 sometimes referred to as ungovernable, and also commanded allegiance in their heyday seems nothing short of a miracle to their modern successors. Just what did those leaders do and why was it successful?

The Working of Integrative Strategies
We start by assuming that integrative strategies do make a difference to the survival prospects of polities. The corollary of this is that, to the extent that integrative strategies explain the survival and endurance of these polities, their absence must also offer an explanation for demise. Hence, if the Maurya and the Mughal polities followed integrative strategies, why did they decline? The question is especially pertinent in the case of the Maurya polity, which did not last much more than fifty years after the death of Asoka. What was missing?

When we examine certain integrative features of the Maurya polity—an extensive, efficient administration, an attempt to communicate with the public, and an attempt to create a common ideological base for the polity—for their contribution to the decline of the Mauryas, it becomes evident that these features also bore within themselves the seeds of disintegration.

While the Maurya administration did reach the village level, the basic unit of the state, it was in the final analysis a very centralized government. Every succession in Pataliputra meant new viceroys, new governors, and, basically, new officials all the way down the line. Furthermore, the stress on social order and on Dhamma fostered allegiance to an ideology and not to the state or the king. (Dhamma was a philosophy of life based on a high degree of social ethics and civic responsibility.) In such a system, the king had to be strong enough to rein in the administration. Unfortunately, this was not the case for the successors of Asoka.

The division of the Maurya polity into eastern and western halves further weakened its chances of survival. In the west, a provincial government had suddenly to transform itself into an imperial government. In the east, there were strains at the core areas and, while the center was well connected to the grass-roots level through officials and spies, there was no true representative process. The means of hearing the vox populi was dependent on the accuracy and honesty of the reporters.

Criticisms of the policy of Dhamma have limited truth. Dhamma was not completely successful for two reasons. First, the core of orthodoxy was too strong and the dhamma-mahamattas, whose powers increased over the years of Asoka’s reign, could interfere in every aspect of life. Secondly, the coercive bases of the polity were eroded by Asoka’s pacifist-social welfare emphases. This was inconsequential when the king was a strong and dominating personality, but could not be sustained under lesser persons. Further, Dhamma strengthened the social order at the expense of the state. The more it reinforced the values that inhered in Indian philosophical and religious tradition, the less relevant it became in the consciousness of the people. Add to this the fact that the idea of political unity was never real and that the Mauryas clearly could not impose it, disintegration became inevitable.

In the case of the Mughals, the question of why integrative policies ultimately failed is more complicated because the Mughal polity lasted much longer than did the Maurya. The institutions that the Mughals built are often cited as an instance of strategies that promoted political community. In fact, their impact was mixed. The mansabdari system (army commissions that required maintaining horses and soldiers on behalf of the emperor and producing them in time of war in return for a position at court) initially was based on cash salaries and escheat, but following rebellions in Bihar and Bengal over the strict enforcement of imperial regulations regarding the maintenance of the mansabs and the branding of horses, Akbar compromised on some aspects of the system. One feature that was reintroduced was the award of jagirs (land grants awarded at the emperor’s pleasure). Land grants bought fealty from this class, but in the long run they provided the base for rebellion and successor-states of the Mughals—Hyderabad, Avadh, Bengal, and Bihar.

The strategies that involved incentives also proved problematic at least partly because of the constantly changing inclusionary and exclusionary “religious” policies of the rulers. The jiziya (a special tax on non-Muslims), for instance, was not levied by Akbar, Jahangir, or Shah Jahan. Aurangzeb, however, revived it in 1679, and like the rest of his religious policy, it served to fire the latent nationalisms of a number of groups within the Mughal domain—the Jats, the Satnamis, the Sikhs—and to sharpen that of the Marathas, whose initial assertion of independence was from one of the Deccan Sultanates that was outside the Mughal realm. On the other hand, the abolition of the jiziya antagonized the Muslim elite that had come to regard itself as the ruling class of India. The realities of succession politics in the Mughal polity precluded ignoring the sentiments of this class. Thus after Akbar a thread of inconsistency ran through the religious policies of the Mughals, and the incentives and disincentives that were the manifestation of these policies also changed.

The most striking instance of a strategy that did not realize its potential was the case of Akbar’s syncretist ideology—Din-i-Ilahi, which had three elements: one, a “discipleship” that many courtiers subscribed to and that required complete surrender and loyalty to a king, who was the emanation of sovereignty, a “perfect man” and a spiritual guide in the Sufi sense of the term; second, a syncretist discourse on faith and ritual, manifest in the realm of public policy as the principle of sulh-i-kul or universal tolerance. Universal justice and the abolition of jiziya were two concrete instances of this. The third was Akbar’s own evolving vision of social integration or enlightened despotism, which was not sustainable and depended too much on the ruler’s capacity to cast the polity in his mold. After Akbar, only Aurangzeb would, it seems, have had that capacity, and he had not the will.

Coming back to the original question—To what extent do integrative strategies explain regime maintenance or demise?—and the one that necessitates the present discussion—Why, in spite of the use of integrative strategies, did these two polities fail to survive?—the answer seems to lie in the nature of these strategies in that, while they are integrative, they also have disintegrative or centrifugal tendencies.

Integrative Strategies
This duality is shown in Table 1. When the scheme of integrative strategies is overlaid with the Boulding scheme of destructive, productive, and integrative aspects of power, one sees that integrative strategies are sometimes also destructive and productive. That is, strategies that have the potential to build a political community based on consensual cooperation and consent-based legitimacy also have destructive facets or productive facets or both.

Sometimes, the integration is a by-product of some other function of state strategy, as in the case of the army or the espionage system. Neither of the latter is prima facie integrative, but integration is a by-product of the process of recruiting, training, and using an army—all activities that involve definitions of the “us” and the “them” in a polity. Armies are also used to defend frontiers and the people within them. This closes off a people and says of them: “All of these form one unit, defended by one army.” Espionage, justly regarded with some suspicion when included as an integrative activity, performs the function of communicating the thinking of the common people to a ruler. The ruler may then heed these reports carefully and respond positively or, alternatively, respond through repression. The ruler may also ignore the reports, punish the bearer of bad news, or selectively respond. That does not alter the utility of espionage as a means, albeit by default, of providing information for the ruler. The problem with the army and espionage, like any other institution or process that is fundamentally threat based, is that, although they may be useful, they remain coercive. The people that armies defend are not asked if they want to be defended or if they agree with the reason for this or any other war. Similarly, spies are not used primarily to promote communication, and their overuse creates feelings of alienation and insecurity, which in the long run are not integrative at all.

Contradictions may be intrinsic to the nature of the strategy because the use of the strategy depends on inclusion and exclusion. This happens most with incentives and ideologies. Incentives, such as the special privileges that Brahmins enjoyed all through the history of India, are ultimately divisive. The growth of heterodox religions in India had, partly at least, to do with the fact that they folded in those on the periphery of the older tradition. But this inclusion is ultimately an exclusion, and it polarizes the polity sharply. This is the case with the extension of privileges to Brahmins, who, where they felt in any way slighted, were the backbone of a movement to change the regime to one better disposed towards them. If the legends about the origin of the Maurya polity are to be believed, this was as true of the Maurya accession to the Pataliputra throne as it was of their ouster from it. Weighted taxes, special levies, gifts, and endowments are all exclusive, and even matrimonial alliances can lead to resentment and claims of “undue influence.”

Some strategies such as road building also have conflicting consequences. Roads promote trade and travel and at the same time make movement of troops and messengers easy. Recognized routes also provide a focus for certain kinds of communications, like Asoka’s edicts, which were inscribed along arterial routes. Increased contact and interdependence among regions and peoples actively contribute to the integration of the community. The case can be made that although no single polity dominated the subcontinent for very long, the integration of the subcontinent into a distinct identity vis-à-vis Burma, China, and Central, Southwest, and West Asia had a great deal to do with the fact that road building and maintenance were recognized areas of state activity. This strategy may have not particularly served one regime or another, but it did in the long run foster identity formation in the region.

Another strategy having competing consequences is Asoka’s Dhamma. Asoka intended to propound a new ethic that would rely on tolerance, nonviolence, and social welfare to achieve whatever ends the state chose. The emphasis on nonviolence and Dhamma, however, led to the neglect of the state’s military capabilities, and the state was unable to defend itself against external threat.

To sum up, integrative strategies play a role in the survival of the state, but that role is limited by the inherent contradictions in the strategies themselves—either in their natures, in the assumptions that would precede their use, or in their competing outcomes. If potentially integrative strategies also have a disintegrative side to them, then they should be considered carefully. The modern Indian state will be used to furnish examples for three considerations.

Considerations for Policy Makers
First, the integrative strategy should not have an intrinsically destructive side. If it does, it should not be a major strategy, because the capacity of force to foster cooperation is short-lived. The other side to this argument is that integrative strategies are ultimately policies and laws that need enforcement. This “enforcement” may be achieved through the cooperation of citizens, but where the situation is less than ideal, enforcement may mean sanctions of some sort and the capacity to enforce them, literally. That the state should avoid using coercion as its stock response to crisis does not mean that its enforcement mechanisms should be allowed to become inefficacious. An enforcement mechanism is needed to underpin the state’s efforts to achieve consensual cooperation and internal peace. Purely integrative strategies have a limited utility for large multination communities because the need for enforcement is greater there, even when they are highly consensual. Underscored by some enforcement capability, however, the problems of governance are more meaningfully addressed by the use of integrative strategies. The point is to distinguish between having the capacity to implement strategies and using coercive measures against a populace to extract obedience.

Second, the integrative strategy should not be exclusionary. That is, drawing one group into the political community should not mean excluding another. In the context of the modern Indian state, the strategy of “reservations” recalls this dilemma. To redress centuries of discrimination, the state reserves a percentage of educational and employment opportunities for the traditionally dispossessed. Today, however, decades of modernization have created new equations in society, and the traditional definitions of “privileged” and “underprivileged” classes do not capture these changes. Therefore, the announcement of further reservations in 1990 caused great turmoil, and the entire discourse finally hinged on the definition of particular “in-groups” and “out-groups” who were to benefit.

The point is that strategies that involve spelling out identity and incentives and disincentives may potentially divide the community they seek to create—only along different lines. The lesson of history seems to be that definitions should be seen as dynamic and not cast in stone and, when those on the outside demand the right to enter, as accommodation rather than appeasement, and appeasement rather than force—that is, redefinition rather than more incentives, more incentives rather than enforcement of obsolete definitions.

The third consideration is that there are policies whose consequences are almost always integrative. Such policies include a uniform and equitable system of justice, center-region-local relationships based on power sharing, and principles of tolerance and social justice, not unlike those expressed by Asoka’s Dhamma. A state based on these strategies is more likely to elicit cooperation than is one that uses strategies based on force.

The successes and the failures of regimes that have tried to integrate their diverse peoples both add to our stock of available measures and reaffirm the conviction that underlies all attempts to establish political communities—that enduring integration depends on legitimizing, consensual cooperation.

Swarna Rajagopalan is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She received her undergraduate training at Elphinstone College, the University of Bombay, and her master’s degree in international relations from Syracuse University. Her research interests lie in the area of security and state-building.