There has been disagreement over what constitutes the basis of Indian society: caste or class. Both are very significant in our collective social life. However, a large part of our private lives is governed neither by caste nor class, but by factions. Factions are easily visible in the political domain, often forming around influential people in a political party. They are not limited to politics, but can be found in many other areas of our social life. Political scientists have paid attention to factions, but it doesn’t look like hat our sociologists have done significant empirical or theoretical work on them.

When not much data is available about a social process, people look to their own life experiences and common sense to understand the problem. Rural life — of which I have first hand experience — is simpler in terms of its organization. What matters most is personal relationships; rules are not as important. Since the community is small, this works well. People are able to take finer personal distinctions into account when interacting with each other. They turn to their relatives for both work and fun. In return, the family offers security to its members. I’m not saying that family and relatives always help each other, but they feel a strong moral duty to help and a moral right to ask for help.

Life in cities is different in scale and arrangement and is mediated by different kinds of institutions. The British introduced many new institutions into our country in the past, and, in our zeal for modernization, we have added some more since then. Whether we have the experience and ability to manage them or not, we cannot imagine our lives without them. Institutions in urbane India are supposed to work via impersonal rules and procedures. Still, it goes without saying that these rules do not count for much in most of our institutions. This is due to two main reasons: first, we did not have a tradition or “habit of hearts” which prefers “rules” over “people”, and second, the conditions do not exist in our institutions where such a tradition can grow and sustain a life of its own (See also Rule and Person).

If we are to analyze factions, we need to discard two widely held beliefs about them. First, that factions are essentially a by-product of peasant mentality, and their presence in white-collar professions or in the urban middle class is a traditional residue. And they are bound to disappear with more industrialization and modernization. Second, factions appeal to our baser nature and have little or no moral legitimacy whatsoever. If anything, I would argue that the appeal of factions is most intense in urban middle classes, and they are not without a moral legitimacy, whether or not we are willing to admit it in public. Perhaps the reason behind this is that we notice factions among others easily but fail to recognize them among ourselves.

We can learn a little more by looking at how an Indian in a village copes when he is confronted by a modern institute that supposedly runs according to impersonal rule. For a villager, a place where unknown people do work through impersonal rules is a scary place to be. Whenever he has to deal with such places – banks, police, hospital, etc. – the first thing he would inquire is whether he can find a person he can find some factional ties. If such a person does not exist, then the idiom of kinship needs to be extended. If a bank manager, doctor, or revenue officer happens to be from a different caste but from the same or nearby village, then the idiom of kinship is extended according to the village, even though everyone knows that kinship cannot exist between different castes.
On the other hand, if he is from a distant village or town, he will inquire about his caste and extends the idiom of kinship accordingly. It is this fluid nature of the idiom of kinship which enables villagers to find “connections” to get their work done in modern institutions. They must do it since they cannot be certain if their work will get done through written rules and procedures only. Also, factional ties appeal to them because it relieves them from the impersonal world of modern offices and brings them psychological relief by bringing them closer to their kinsmen — a sort of pseudo-family where an Indian feels truly secure.

The attraction of a faction (or a pseudo-kinship) is no less strong in our cities. The idiom of kinship is even more fluid among urban Indians. In colleges and universities, it can be extended to hostels, wings, batches, labs, and even to departments, not to mention academic lineage, if one has one worth mentioning. One can witness some of it during elections in IIT Bombay. Voting takes place on factional lines: wing, hostel, department, batch, etc. One notices many similarities here and voting based on “jati” in villages. In NCBS Bangalore, attendance patterns in journal club meetings depend largely on labs. Many attend the club meeting only when their own lab member is reading a paper. This pattern is often broken by the presence of faculty members, usually perceived to be authoritative figures on Indian university campuses.

The conditions and environment in which our institutions operate are both uncertain and malleable. In the face of uncertainty, people turn to their factions because there is nothing else to rely on. The rules won’t work or won’t work fast enough. The malleable nature of institutions offers vast opportunities to manipulate personal relations in factional ties. Once a pseudo-kinship is formed and acknowledged, one feels free to ask for some patronage or favor. It is remarkable how far people in positions of power in this country are willing to go to fulfill these requests for patronage. There is always some potential for material gain in all this, but one does it for the sheer satisfaction and social prestige it brings. In our society, a man in some position of power who does not offer patronage to his kinsmen is a man of no consequence.

The distribution of patronage among his kinsmen by a person in power has its own moral legitimacy in the traditional order. Nirmal Kumar Bose, the first generation of anthropologists, wrote about factional ties in the city of Calcutta; how city life was riddled with factions or ‘dal.’ These factions tried to outdo each other on public occasions with a lavish display of wealth. The wealth spent on these occasions was mostly private wealth. In recent times, the democratic processes in the country have made it possible, and to some extent even legitimized, to squander public wealth for factional displays of might and status.

The attraction of factions does not appear to be weaker, even in the most efficient sections of our society. It is remarkable that a person who appoints someone often feels that they now have a moral claim on the appointed one’s life-long loyalty. Perhaps the appointed one also feels that such a claim is morally justified, if somewhat uncalled for in the given institutional settings. What may appear to be a faction without any moral legitimacy to an outsider is, in fact, a humane arrangement of interdependence, loyalty, and security for its members.

The inefficiency in our institutions largely, if not solely, depends on the fact that the impersonal rules by which our institutions are mandated to govern themselves are either discounted or simply ignored. Discarding these institutions because they are now withering away in our tropical environment would not yield any gains. We need to rethink and appreciate the role of impersonal rules in modern institutional settings. Many of us with strong factional ties would agree publicly that impersonal rules must count for much in our institutions. However, not many of us are willing to give up the convenience of “cronyism” and “factionalism” that comes with it.

Many Indians seem to have realized the costs that some of our political institutions have to pay for accommodating families into them. However, it does not appear that we are too concerned about factionalism. In fact, many people are trying to paint a more humane face onto them [1]. If we are truly troubled by the sorry states in which we find our institutions today, we have to understand that factions (or pseudo kinships like IITians, Bengalis, Jats, Delhites, IASs etc.) – whatever advantages they bring to individuals – cannot have the same moral claim as real kinship. In the long run, factions are parasitic in nature, and a parasite cannot thrive unless it feeds on its host.

[1] Gurucharan Das and S Gurumurthy can be taken as two examples. One of them recently argued that, ”Instead of morally judging caste, I seek to understand its impact on competitiveness. I have come to believe that being endowed with commercial castes is a source of advantage in the global economy. Bania traders know how to accumulate and manage capital. They have financial resources and more important, financial acumen.”