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The Nation-state in the Mirror of Political Science:Tracking a Discipline in India

Posted: 08/02/2009 by Nivedita Menon in Democracy, Modernity, Nation-state, Political Science,Politics, Theory Tags: Ashis Nandy, Morris-Jones, Partha Chatterjee, Rajni Kothari

0By Nivedita Menon

(This paper was originally delivered as a public lecture in December 1999 at the National Centre forBiological Sciences, Bangalore as part of a series called State of the Discipline in the Social Sciences

jointly organized by NCBS and Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.)

Why does political science call itself a “science”? The tag of “science” is an aspiration towards the highreaches of verifiability, quantifiability, systematization and applicability to “real life” which are seen ascharacterizing the natural sciences. Standard text-books on political science, for instance the excellentseries produced by IGNOU, make a claim for the label of “science” because political analysis is aboutthe study of “political reality”, while “political philosophy” for example, is partial because it excludes“practical aspects.” Further, behavioural and post-behavioural approaches are characterised as“modern”, as opposed to “traditional” historical and normative methods. It must be recognized thathere, “traditional” means traditional within the discipline – which is itself modern. “You would comeacross the claim,” the student is told, “that approaches which are identified as modern, are consideredmore scientific.” Despite all the critiques of the fact/value dichotomy that was brought into socialanalysis by the behavioural revolution, the presumed (and desired) link between science andtransformation continues to inform the self-styled social sciences. Society is to be studied in scientificways, in order that it can be effectively transformed in accordance with scientific values.

The social sciences are of course, an invention of the 19th century. The natural sciences emerged aroundthe time of the transition in Europe from feudalism to capitalism. The assumption on which they werebased was that natural phenomena behave in predictable or at least analyzable ways and are thereforesubject to intervention and manipulation. The struggle to establish the legitimacy of this perspectiveencountered the resistance of religious authorities who believed that such a view would underminesocial stability. The social sciences make a similar assertion about social phenomena, that these are

predictable and can be manipulated. Immanuel Wallerstein argues that it was the French Revolution,which crystallized the issues involved in this understanding and legitimated the notion of deliberatesocial change. However, the question, “Is political science a science” acquires its full meaning in the

20th century, in the context of the influence of positivism. Positivism holds that science is the mostreliable form of knowledge we have of reality and that is it is possible and desirable to develop a naturalscience of society. The distinction between knowledge and reality is central to the positivist position.

In many ways, the mainstream discipline of Political Science in India continues to reflect a positivistunderstanding of knowledge, although many scholars today with a formal training in political scienceare concerned with areas ranging from cinema, literature and theatre to ecological movements.However rarely would one find their work reflected in school or university syllabi. What is consideredto be Political Science is still constitutional studies, electoral politics, political parties, and other suchissues that relate to the state in particular ways and that can be studied using quantitative methods likecensus data, surveys and objective type questionnaires.

Disciplines are distinguished from one another by the kinds of problems with which they concernthemselves, the kinds of questions they ask about these problems and the frameworks within whichthey ask as well as attempt to answer these questions. Of course, we also know that these are notnatural attributes of disciplines but conventions constituted by the communities of scholars who work

within them. For liberal as well as marxist political scientists till the beginning of the 20th century, thecentral preoccupation was the study of the state. In the 1930s, the view emerged that the study of thestate was too narrow. Power was declared to be the central category of politics by the writers of theChicago School, who defined power as an attribute of individuals which enabled them to achieve theirgoals. The emphasis was on the study of individuals, institutions being conceived of as aggregations ofindividuals, and politics as a market in which political man competes for power. It was also held thatempirically verifiable data was to be derived from the actual behaviour of individuals, and behaviouralscientists tried to evolve a working definition of power which could be used to identify power relationsand measure the relative power of individuals.

This view came under attack from marxist positions which see power not as the attribute of individualsbut as arising from class divisions in society. Power in this understanding, is not only economic (controlor ownership of resources) but political (power of the state apparatus which may be directly controlledby the owners of resources or indirectly via the political elites) and ideological (as exercised by religiousleaders or by the mass media and educational system). David Held defines ideology as “systems ofsignification or meaning which are mobilised to sustain asymmetrical power relations in the interests ofdominant or hegemonic groups.” Thus power is divided between political, economic and socialinstitutions all of which set up multiple pressures to comply with dominant structures and values.

If the object of study of political science then, is power in this broad sense, it should be no surprise todiscover that the preoccupation of the discipline with the state continues. The state in modern society isthe crystallization of power in that society – it is the supreme form of political organization whose lawsoverride all others. No-one, whether individuals or groups, can withdraw or retire from the authority ofthe state, and it is the state which has the monopoly on the use of coercion.

In this paper I work through one particular prism – that of the nation-state – to trace the trajectoryfollowed by the discipline of political science in India. The shifts and transformations that have takenplace in the discipline, not unsurprisingly, reflect shifts in the Indian polity on the understanding of thenation-state and its legitimacy. I must emphasize that my intention in this paper is not to offer a surveyof writings on Indian politics, which would be an impossible task in so short a piece, but to look at theshifts in the ways in which political scientists and later, scholars of other disciplines, have understoodthe state and its relationship to democracy in India.

Political Science in India Mark I: Building the Nation

Immanuel Wallerstein points out that by the mid-20th century, the basic unit of analysis within whichalmost all of social science was written was the state – “…either a sovereign state, or a claimant to statestatus. The ‘society’ of each state was then judged as more or less ‘cohesive’, and more or less‘progressive’. Each society had an ‘economy’ which could be characterised…Each society had a‘culture’, and it had minorities with sub-cultures, and these minorities could be seen as having acceptedor rejected ‘assimilation’”. What Wallerstein is pointing to, is the legitimisation within the socialsciences, of the conceptualization of the nation as the natural and desirable whole, with a distinct andhomogenous character. This desirable homogeneity is resisted internally only by troublesome parts,refusing union with the whole. The nation in addition, is seen as compact and self-subsisting, itseconomy having internal coherence and permitting independent analysis as a unit in a system of othersuch nation-states.

This was the dominant form of the discipline as it had developed by the 1960s in the Americanacademy, when the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa began to become areas of interest.In the Cold War politics of the time, these regions were areas of concern. Were the new states going tobe successful in bringing about development and stability, or were they going to collapse under theexplosion of “traditional” identities – religious, ethnic, racial, regional and caste?

From the point of view of the elites of the new states, development and stability were seen as theprimary tasks. The anti-imperialist struggles were meant to culminate in the modernisation of theirsocieties through economic development. Not only were modernisation and development considered tobe practically synonymous, there seemed in addition to be a self-evident relationship between thenation-state and development. Indeed the claim to legitimacy of the of the state structures set up by theelites of the newly emerging nations of Asia and Africa lay in their promise to deliver economicdevelopment to their populations.

Nation building, then, was the concern of political scientists studying India and the axes along whichthis project was mapped were those of Tradition/Modernity, Development and Stability.

The classic and early work of the British scholar WH Morris-Jones (1964) establishes a continuity of thepost-Independence state in India with the institutions of British rule. What he calls “mediatinginstitutions” – the legislative bodies, the judiciary and the law – were taken over by the nationalistmovement with “respectful care”. Through these institutions, values which were “not native to theIndian soil” took firm root here. There is then, “the presence, the confrontation and…the mixing ofpolitical idioms” which gives the Indian political scene its distinctive tone. There were two such idioms –the modern and the traditional – the language of the mediating institutions and that of the institutions

of caste. But Morris-Jones identifies a third idiom – that of the modern politician at the local level, whois able to exploit the traditional idiom. In his revised edition written seven years later, Morris-Jonesdraws on the work of several American scholars – Paul Brass and Myron Weiner, who identify theCongress as one of the great meeting places of these three languages of politics and Harold Gould, whogives a twist to the Tradition/Modernity divide. The latter, cited by Morris-Jones approvingly, suggeststhat behaviour in political parties is in some ways an extension of behaviour learnt in a world of castegroups. For Gould, “Indian politics manifests a largely unconscious jati model…If caste is seen asretreating in the face of new institutions it must also be seen as having in some measure already shapedits replacements.”

For these scholars, the Indian political system has acquired stability through this unique mode ofaccommodating modernity within tradition. Morris-Jones was optimistic that the forces ofdisintegration were weaker than those which would preserve India’s unity, even if one of the latter wasthe most powerful non-Congress party at that time, the Jan Sangh, for its anti-Muslim Indianizationslogan was strongly unitarist. However by the late 60s, Morris-Jones can see the tendency towardsincreased violence and extra-constitutional action – “the established avenues cannot cope with theissues which seem to press.” The main reason for this as he sees it, is the weakening of what was“virtually the sole integrator”, the Congress as an umbrella, centrist party. The process of developmentas well as the failures of development created a series of social tensions seeking expression.

Writing at the same time, Rajni Kothari took issue with Morris-Jones on his understanding ofdisintegrative possibilities within the system, specifically, his reading of the linguistic reorganization ofstates as a disintegrative move. Rather, he argued that the coming forward of “indigenous elite groups”was healthy for Indian democracy. Kothari was generally in tune with Morris-Jones on the question ofthe stability of the Indian state, but his own understanding of nation-building was sharply critical of thesuspicion towards “parochial tendencies.” Kothari saw this suspicion as arising from the Westernexperience of the establishment of centralized nation-states out of the break-up of feudal structures andempires. But he argued that in the new nations such an approach could in fact, be a recipe fordisintegration. “The task facing the elites of the new nations is to establish a centre, penetrate thesymbols of this centre, involve other centres into its dominant framework through coalition-makingand bargaining, and mobilize the population into this framework”

Politics in India is pre-eminently the politics of integration, for Kothari. The “seeming discrepancy”between centralized bureaucratic planning and a widening electoral base could have been met byincreasing centralization and an authoritative structure of political leadership. Rather India’s eliteschose an alternative path to development which had no previous model to follow. “To attempt asimultaneous achievement of political and economic development while at the same time undertaking areconstruction of a hardened social structure was a unique undertaking.” India chose to giveprecedence to the task of mobilizing intermediate and peripheral structures “through a simultaneouspursuit of both aggregative and participatory goals, rather than simply to re-map its institutions for theprimary purpose of extracting from the people a growing economic surplus for the state.” The lattergoal is to be achieved as part of a total process of social and political mobilisation and not throughauthoritarian manipulation. Indeed, Kothari feels the authoritarian formula may not work in “cultureswhere the central symbols of secular authority have not penetrated into the regions and wheresubnational identities have yet to be woven together into a viable federation.” Authoritarianism in sucha context may lead to disintegration, not integration.

Kothari decries also the “paranoid concern with stability” (reinforced by the foreign policy perceptionsof dominant nations), which leads to a suspicion of political participation in a semi-literate and sociallyfragmented society. “The hold of an amorphous theory of secularism and the concomitant concernwith a movement from “communal” to “associational” organizations [i.e. from “tradition” to“modernity”] colours the analysis of caste and tribal associations.” He argues that the preoccupationwith national identity as an overriding theme of political development leads to a neglect of intermediatemechanisms of containing political demand and the role of differential (including parochial) identitiesin political institutionalization. It is the neglect of these intermediate identities, Kothari argues, thatleads to the notion of “the revolution of rising expectations,” which is meaningless outside the context ofthe demand-oriented polity of the West.

During this process of simultaneous institutionalization and dispersal of political opportunities, thetraditional sectors are mobilized as much as the modern ones. On this question of Tradition/Modernity,he agrees broadly with the Rudolphs, who, in their influential work, The Modernity of Tradition, arguedthat the distinction between tradition and modernity blurs as they “infiltrate and transform eachother.” The caste association representing “the adaptive response of caste to modern social, economicand political changes”, reveals the modernity of tradition. “By creating conditions in which a caste’ssignificance and power is beginning to depend on its numbers rather than its ritual and social status,and by encouraging egalitarian aspirations among its members, the caste association is exerting aliberating influence.” This is the converse of the argument made by Gould, discussed earlier, who saw“traditional” patterns of behaviour in “modern” institutions. Rudolph and Rudolph suggest rather, thattraditional identities were transformed by modern institutions. Kothari saw their model as lessdichotomous than others, which present modernization as a rejection of tradition, or conversely,tradition as resistant to modernization.

Political Science Mark II: The Fragmenting Nation

In a later incarnation, Kothari was to considerably rethink his thesis of the integrative model of Indianpolitics, but by that time, the project of the nation state was itself fraying at the seams. FrancineFrankel, writing in 1978, could not see the “multi-systemic model” of Kothari, but rather, pointed to the“paradox of accommodative politics and radical social change”, processes which to Kothari had seemedcompatible. In the mid-70s, only a small minority of the population had been incorporated into thehigh-productivity, high-wage industrial sector of the economy and 80 percent of the populationcontinued to earn their livelihood directly from agriculture while only small pockets of modernagriculture could be created in the rural sector.

By this time, despite continuing invocations of “the modernity of tradition”, the Tradition/Modernitydichotomy re-established itself in the lexicon of political scientists – Frankel noted that among the poor,“traditional relationships based on religion, caste and family” overrode any sense of an Indian identity.Similarly, Robert L Hardgrave Jr was writing, in his book published just before the Emergency, thatIndia’s diversity – “there are more than 2000 castes, or jati in India” – “has been accompanied bypatterns of social and cultural fragmentation, historically rooted in and sanctioned by…Hindutradition.” Hinduism and the concept of dharma creates “resignation, fatalism and passiveness”. CitingGunnar Myrdal, Hardgrave argued that religion at a “higher level” may not be in conflict with thegoals of modernization, but the “inertia of popular belief” remains a major obstacle to socialtransformation. Here however, it would be fair to note that his position is closer to that of EMS

Namboodiripad, that while caste associations enabled peasants to rise in struggle against feudalism,such associations which foster community separatism must be transcended if the peasant is to beorganized as a class.

Hardgrave also documented the fact that by emphasizing growth per se rather than development,India opted for production without social change – the disparities of the green revolution “underscorethe tension between economic justice and a narrow production orientation.” Identifying the existingclass structure of India as posing a challenge to economic growth with social justice, he quoted theCPI’s statement of 1968 (that the state in India is the instrument of the national bourgeoisie as a whole,in which the big bourgeoisie and landlords hold powerful influence) as “more accurate” than theCPI(M)’s assessment of 1973 that state power in India is shared by the landlords and industrialbourgeoisie, under the leadership of the monopoly capitalists. Fundamentally, he agreed with BaldevRaj Nayar’s opinion that political and state power have rested in the hands of the “middle sectors” – theeducated and professional groups, town merchants and small businessmen in the urban areas, and themiddle peasantry or kulaks in the villages.

Frankel comes to three conclusions which suggest a similar understanding:

a) Without radical agrarian reform the goals of economic, social and political development cannot beaccomplished. b) The dominant land-owning castes that had benefited from commercialised farmingand the wider market economy no longer felt under the obligation to meet the responsibilities of thetraditional patron-client ties of the interdependent subsistence village economy. At the same time thevast numbers of marginal farmers and landless labourers were being pushed into greater dependencyon the landowning castes. Under these circumstances, any attempt to bring about social changethrough panchayat and cooperative institutions in the villages only strengthened the power of thedominant peasant castes. c) Accommodative politics will have to be given up for a polarization of thepolitical process by organizing the peasantry into class-based associations. Frankel argued that evenconservative political elites would have to satisfy new criteria of legitimacy based on the premise ofremoving mass poverty within the foreseeable future, given that large numbers of the illiterate andimpoverished were now active and vocal participants in the political arena.

The Emergency which suspended democracy and concentrated unlimited formal powers in the handsof the central government, was one attempt to deal with the impasse reached by the attempt to bringabout growth without radical agrarian transformation. As Rajni Kothari was to write later – “The realfact is that growing popular expectations cannot be fulfilled except through basic structural changes.But the elite…uses a crude mixture of socialism, developmentalism and statism according to which thefate of the poor rests solely in the hands of the state…”

In the mid-80s, Pranab Bardhan and Sudipta Kaviraj published two important Marxian critiques ofIndia’s political economy. These addressed the impasse reached by the Indian state’s developmentstrategy in terms of the impossibility of bringing about a thoroughgoing bourgeois revolution withoutfirst effecting radical agrarian transformation through land reforms. Kaviraj used the Gramscian notionof “passive revolution” to explain this pattern of development. Both writers assume the relativeautonomy of the Indian state from the ruling classes, for two reasons. One, as with other post-colonialsocieties, the Indian state at independence inherited a vast and well-developed state apparatus, that is, acivil and military bureaucracy, which had served the colonial purpose. Thus the state had the potential

to be more than merely an ‘instrument of the ruling class’, a potential further enhanced by the fact thatcolonial policies had resulted in a comparatively weak and unstable bourgeoisie which is incapable ofcontrolling the state apparatus on its own. It is therefore a coalition of ruling classes which controls thestate, and the contradictions between the interests of fractions of the ruling classes are as crucial indetermining state policy as are the contradictions between the ruling class and the ruled. Neverthelessthe bourgeoisie does exercise a leadership function in this coalition because the non-capitalist sectorsand types of production in the economy have been subsumed, economically and politically, under thelogic of capital. The other components of the ruling class are rich farmers, the bureaucracy and theurban professional middle classes.

Another reason for the relative autonomy of the state is that since the bourgeoisie is weak and capitalresources low, the state was the only agency at independence that could draw together scarce capitalresources and invest these in basic infrastructural areas which need large initial investments and yieldslow profits. Within the constraints posed by the dominant propertied classes therefore, it was possiblefor the state to act autonomously, being an important part of the economic base itself.

This explains the ‘socialistic’ pattern of development adopted by the Indian state in the three decadesafter independence. However, without the implementation of land reforms, which could never beeffected because of the influence of landed interests in the coalition of ruling classes, the entire planningprocess has been a futile exercise in trying to balance short-term poverty alleviation measures withinvestment of resources in growth.

The Nation and its Fragments: The Collapse of Disciplinary Boundaries

Up to this point the characterisation of the post-independence state as an ally in progressivetransformation, economic and social, was an inevitable hangover from the independence struggle. Therhetoric of national integrity therefore, continued to have currency, and social movements too, by andlarge, had an unproblematized relationship with the idea of the “nation”, so recently carved through amass struggle encompassing different currents. By the mid-70s however, the legitimacy of the post-Independence elites had begun to erode with the economic and political crisis precipitated by the failureof development planning. There was a resurgence of militancy in every section of society. Politicalrepression followed, and the imposition of the internal emergency by Indira Gandhi’s government in1975, finally lifted in 1977.

This phase also marks the beginning of rethinking, both among movements and among politicalanalysts, on the legitimacy of the national integrity argument. Critical questions were arising as towhose interests were being protected by this “integrity.” By the mid-80s various regional movementswere challenging, as one observer puts it, “the inherited idea of Indian nationhood…[T]he Assam andPunjab movements had a distinct edge which was ‘anti-India’ (as distinct from the ‘anti-national’ of theofficialese) – in the sense that whether or not they were explicitly secessionist, they sought to renegotiateand redraw its cultural-political boundaries.”

A significant shift was the one evident in the women’s movement’s thinking on the demand for aUniform Civil Code (UCC). A variety of positions were emerging, which basically expressed the need toturn to other agencies and initiatives than those of the state, to bring about gender justice. By the timeof the Shah Bano judgement in 1985 it was becoming increasingly clear that in every way in which thenation was being constituted by dominant discourses, the powerless and the marginal were being

defined out of its boundaries. Along with this, the routine invocation of “the integrity of the nation” byjudicial pronouncements in cases involving Muslim personal law, in order to castigate minoritycommunities as “anti-national”, gradually made it imperative for feminists to delink the nationalintegrity argument from the gender justice argument. Above all, there loomed the growing presence oforganised Hindu communalism in the 80s and the sharpening edge of the Babri Masjid controversy.The appropriation of the demand for UCC by these forces, which characterised the Muslimcommunity’s resistance to the UCC as its inability to integrate into the nation, brought into crisis thehitherto unquestioned relationship of partnership between radical social movements and the nation-state.

Increasingly also, the highly questionable role of state apparatus during “communal riots” was alsobecoming disturbingly clear, whether in innumerable attacks on Muslims or most dramatically andincontrovertibly, during the carnage of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984.

These developments were, naturally, reflected in the discipline too. A shorthand way of characterisingthe shift in the discipline of political science would be to term it “From Rajni Kothari to ParthaChatterjee.” From “Politics in India” to “The Nation and its Fragments.” From nation building tounderstanding the collapse of that project. And at this point there is a Kothari Mark II as well, as wehave mentioned earlier, and whom we will encounter more fully in this section.

Simultaneously there is another trend at work in this period. If the object of political science in India isto grasp the nature of the Indian state and to characterise the processes that circulate around theproduction and deployment of power in contemporary India, then we see that the most significantcontributions to debates on these questions in the late 80s and early 90s do not come from politicalscientists. (Except for two notable exceptions – Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj.) They comefrom historians of the Subaltern School, such as Dipesh Chakravarty, from sociologists like TN Madanand from the maverick psychologist Ashis Nandy. And from economists like Pranab Bardhan and CTKurien.

It is also important to note that the shifts in the understanding of politics in India do not conform to asimple Liberal/Marxist divide. The axis along which the debates fall rather, is that of the conception ofthe nation-state – its role and its legitimacy. Up to the 80s, whether liberal or marxist, political scientiststook for granted the legitimacy of the nation-state’s pre-eminent role in setting the agenda fordevelopment and social transformation/modernization. What we see after the 80s is a dilution of thatcertainty.

Related to this was a particular kind of rethinking on the meaning of “secularism.” Partha Chatterjeeand Ashis Nandy were among the significant contributors of the insight that secularism in the Indiancontext was but one aspect of the modernizing and nation-building project of the postcolonial elite, andcould not be understood simply in terms of the relationship between state and religious community.With the challenges to that project, secularism too would have to be reconceptualised.

Ashis Nandy in “An Anti-secularist manifesto” (1985) and TN Madan in “Secularism in its Place”(1987) both responded to the crisis in this vein. Madan argued that secularism as the privatization ofreligion cannot work in South Asia because here, society “seethes with…vibrant religiosity.” Secularismremains therefore the dream of a minority that cannot shape society, because in a democratic polity thestate will reflect the character of society. Communalism and fundamentalism are produced, he argued,

not by religions, but by the marginalization of religious faith. In other words, it is secularism that isresponsible for these phenomena and what secularism means in effect, is the enhancing of the power ofthe state to make it the arbiter among communities and their protector. Madan essentialises “religion”and “belief” considerably, but his argument is significant for being among the first in the 80s tograpple with the diminished legitimacy of the nation-state to define progressive change and to assumefor itself the responsibility to bring this about.

It was Nandy’s provocatively titled piece that had fired the first salvo. He is “anti-secularist” becausesecularism is the ideology of the modern state, which, having rejected and nearly defeated religion asfalse consciousness, has set up its own “priestly classes like the scientists, the bureaucrats and thedevelopment experts” who expect the same blind obedience that religion once did. It is equipping itselfwith the technological means to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, like God itself. In theNorth, said Nandy, this is called scientific advancement, in the South, development. Nandy arguedthat communalism in India was produced by modern state techniques of governance, whichdeliberately marginalize “religion-as-faith” which is “definitionally non-monolithic and operationallyplural.” The modern state permits space in the public arena only for “religion-as-ideology”, throughwhich “those loyal to the modern idea of the nation-state…try to hitch ethnicity to the state…They tryto create a social basis for secularism by linking it to the reward system of the state.” Communalism inthis understanding, is the instrumental use of religious identity, by elites similarly intolerant of theeclecticism of lived religion, to control state power. By excluding religion from public life, secularismfacilitates its takeover by science, and as we have seen, Nandy is sharply critical of the globallyhegemonizing partnership of science and the state.

His project, that of building a more tolerant society, involves defying “the imperialism of categories”which allows the concept of secularism, inextricably linked to the state, to hegemonise the idea oftolerance. As he put it, the condition of the Indian state is such today that to expect the religioustraditions to abide by the values derived from it is ridiculous. Few would believe that any religioustradition has any moral lesson to learn from the Indian state, or expect it to be an impartial arbiterbetween religious communities. The need is to recover the resources within religious practices whichmake it possible to live with “fluid definitions of the self,” an idea inimical to modern state practiceswhich require the straitjacket of the identity of citizen.

The implied claim in Nandy that the pre-colonial communitarian space was more tolerant and that themodern public sphere introduced authoritarian impulses is problematic, as I have argued in an earlierpaper. The “fluid” notions of the self in precolonial South Asian cultures may have provided protectionfrom the alienation and objectification produced by modern rules of governance, but this fluidity didnot extend to the possibility of renegotiating traditionally ascribed, even if multiple, positions withinoverlapping communities. This circumscription ensured the exclusion of lower castes, women and otherstigmatised groups from socially valued cultural and economic resources. However, the point ofNandy’s critique that is valuable is the recognition that the sphere of secular citizenship is notinherently emancipatory either. His critique calls into question the pre-eminent role assumed by themodern nation-state in setting, defining and activating what will be “the national agenda”, and whatwill be acceptable values in the public sphere.

While Madan and Nandy engage with the crisis of the 80s through a critique of modernity, RajniKothari’s rethinking on the project of nation-building is explicitly not anti-modernist. However, he isconcerned that the richness and diversity of our societies is under threat from “the new juggernaut thatis taking place in the name of modernity.” This is a process that is taking away from the people theircapacity to intervene in the political arena – this is “an approach to modernity that will leave no groundfor creative interventions.” It is a kind of development driven by the needs of global capital, which isdestroying the resource base of the country, its sustainability as well as people’s access to it. ForKothari, the crises of “ecocide, ethnocide, and militarization” are inevitable outcomes of processesunleashed by the three dominant projects of the state – Development, Secularism and Security. “Thethree projects are interrelated because the development project based on narrow principles ofeconomism is centralising and homogenising and secularising.”

It seems to Kothari that the modern state has still an alien character in India. It was being indigenizedthrough the national movement and later, the Congress Party, but this process has been disrupted.“Ironically,” Kothari writes, “the main source of this disruption has been the modern westernised andurbanised elite keen on building a strong Indian state.” This elite has a homogenising vision of “not ahumane but a hegemonic state, not relevant but latest technology, not a liberating but a libertarianethic of consumption, culture and communications.” The basic crisis facing India is “institutionalerosion in the face of massive change.” The distinctively Indian model of nation-building, whichKothari Mark I had labelled the Congress System, had been identified as the ability to build a centrethat would integrate the peripheries, building a plurality of centres in the process. This system hadrigidified, he argues, by the late 60s. Distributive justice was not built into the nation-building designand the development model. The state apparatus became increasingly centralised and correspondinglymore indifferent, even hostile to the people. This growing recognition is leading to the rise of a newpolitical process, grassroots movements that aim less at seizing state power and more at “managingthings at manageable levels.” If the state continues to adopt repressive attitudes towards suchinitiatives, Kothari sees no option for them but to move out of the existing democratic politicalframework.

Global capital and the Nation State

From the point of view of the economists, the developments of the 80s have considerably reduced therelevance and scope of operation of the nation-state. CT Kurien establishes that in 1980 the beginning ofthe directional change in domestic industrial policy was made in India. The theory behind the first threedecades of planning had been that redistribution of incomes and property was necessary to create amarket for goods and services. Since 1980 however, the rationale is that development can be achievedon a limited market. A small enclave was to be created, with enhanced purchasing power, and inaddition the international market was to be opened up for Indian industry through incentives forexport promotion.

Bardhan, in the epilogue of 1998 to his 1984 book cited earlier, argues that the lack of seriousopposition to reforms should not be understood as proving a lack of substantive reforms. Rather, hepoints out that over a period there have been large-scale reforms on a piecemeal basis, which has hadthe effect of diffusing resistance. One important trend he identifies in this process is “diffusion ofresistance through regional fragmentation.” That is, as power has shifted more to the regions, (not justto regional parties but through increased autonomy of regional wings of national parties), some

regional governments, backed by regional capital, have permitted the breach or non-implementation ofexisting rules restricting capital vis-à-vis labour. These Bardhan calls “reform by default.” Anothertrend is “reform by stealth”, whereby labour laws protecting job security and automatic promotion arebeing increasingly circumvented by voluntary retirement schemes, use of contract or casual labour andby sub-contracting to backward areas and to the unorganized sector, where existing laws can beignored. The net effect of these processes is the retreat of the state from large areas of the economy.

However, Bardhan points to a “major disjuncture between politics and economics”. That is, while theeconomic sphere is becoming increasingly market-friendly, the developments in the political field overthe last two decades or so have been “essentially anti-market.” With the coming to political power ofthe backward and lower castes and the diminishing hold of elite control, there has been, he argues, “asteady erosion of the institutional insulation of the decision-making process in public administrationand economic management.” The “propagation of group equity and caste rights…amount to adrowning of considerations of efficiency in the name of inter-group equity.” Bardhan offers the“interesting” if “cynical” hypothesis that the retreat of the state is in fact more acceptable to the uppercastes and classes because they are losing their control over state power in any case, and therefore seekgreener pastures in the private sector and abroad.

Nevertheless, despite his recognition of the splintering of the nation-state’s agenda, Bardhan takes issuewith those he terms “anarcho-communitarians” – Partha Chatterjee, Ashis Nandy, the later RajniKothari and Ranajit Guha – who question “the agenda-setting presuppositions and legitimizing mythsof state-directed development led by a ‘rational’, ‘modern’ elite.” Bardhan suggests that on thecontrary, the rising tempo of ethnic and communal conflict could have to do with, not the diminishingof the modernist vision, but rather, the inadequate hold of this vision. The answer, his analysis suggests,lies in refurbishing the modernist project of the nation-state, ensuring that it is better administered. Heurges that we not lose sight of the crucial role that a supra-local authority plays in conflicts betweensubaltern and local communities. Parochial and traditional communities look to the modernizing,Westernized elite as protector and arbiter against other parochial communities, he says, citing “anti-Brahmin cultural solidarities” in the South.

While agreeing with these critics that decentralised development is in principle a good thing, he pointsout that the highly complex structures of production and exchange require the state inevitably to take acentral role. Local communities are marked by inequality of access to resources and power, and inaddition, are not capable of seeing the larger picture, since they would naturally prioritize their localconcerns. This can have disastrous consequences for the environment. Autonomous local developmentcan in addition lead to regional inequality; a weak centre may work to the advantage of more powerfulregions. And finally, given the powerful interests of multinational capital at work, a strong nation-stateis an absolute necessity for countries of the global South.

In Bardhan’s defence of a strong state, it is interesting to note the possible outcomes, as he outlinesthem, of the retreat of the state. The alert reader would note that the very phenomena that criticsattribute to the success of the logic of the Indian nation-state are those which Bardhan presents as theeventualities that a strong centre can mitigate. In other words, ecologically unsustainable development,regional inequalities, and the growing control of the economy by global capital – these are not trendsthat have emerged despite the nation-building project of Indian elites, but precisely are what “anarcho-communitarians” point to as the result of that project.

“The Indian Communitarians”

Bardhan’s critique of the “communitarians” locates the tension in their work in the positing ofcommunity against state. He also seems to recognize, as is evident from the discussion above, that“community” in their work refers to solidarities that are not necessarily “traditional.”

In this respect, his is probably the only critique that escapes the mould into which other critiques havetended to fall. Broadly, there are two types – those that tend to take “communitarianism” in India to beset against liberal individualism and those that recognize it to be posited against the state. (While theliberal individualist position presupposes the state as the guarantor of individual rights, the secondcritique of communitarianism is directed more specifically at the attack of the communitarians on theagenda-setting legitimacy of the state.) Both understand the alternative being suggested to be some sortof “authentic tradition.” Historian Sumit Sarkar noted in the immediate aftermath of the demolition ofthe Babri Masjid that the valorization of the authentic indigenous by Nandy and others opens upcommon ground between Hindutva and its anti-secular critics. Sarkar labels this as a “traditionalisticcritique, “situated in the past rather than in the present.” A more recent argument is that of SarahJoseph, who uses the term “Indian communitarians” to refer to the work of Nandy, Chatterjee, Kavirajand Madan. Joseph sees their work as mounting a strong critique of what they consider to have beenthe dangerous consequences of “trying to understand Indian society and politics through the lens ofalien and individualist categories…The revival and strengthening of community has been put forwardas a way of coping with the increasing alienation and violence of social life in India, and as a way ofbringing us back into relationship with our cultural traditions.”

I think that the kind of understanding discussed above, of the work that emerged in the 80s as aresponse to the diminishing legitimacy of the project of nation-building, misses two very crucial, inter-related points. First, that the “indigenism” prioritized in this body of work cannot be simply taken tobe traditionalism, and second, that the work is predicated on the problematization of the very processby which the categories of tradition/modernity have been produced. (Although there are importantdifferences in the arguments of Nandy, Chatterjee, Kaviraj and Madan, I will here take them as onebody of work, as do their critics.) In other words, the plea for “community” vis-à-vis the state does notimply going back to some assumed traditions, but rather, must be read as part of a larger body ofscholarship that raises questions about the process of the formation and concretization of communityidentities as we encounter them today.

Dipesh Chakravarty and Sudipta Kaviraj have explored the construction of “community” boundariesthrough the modern practices of the colonial state. The colonial state used techniques of measurement –surveys, censuses –to carry out its task of governing India more effectively. Although pre-moderngovernment too used statistics of produce, land and revenue, Chakravarty argues that it was notsystematic or regularly updated in the way it was with modern government. This systematic, regularprocess of census-taking which the colonial government introduced, led to the hardening of communityboundaries and the fixing of religious and caste identities. The “fuzzy” boundaries of pre-British timesbecame, through enumeration, distinct and discrete. Further, the logic of modern electoral democracy,the fight for numbers, operating at every stage of the nationalist movement, meant that “communities”had a vested interest in enumerating and clarifying their boundaries. The “religious communities”being identified as “traditional”, in other words, were created over a period of less than a hundred

years, over the 19th and 20th centuries.

Some recent historical work could be read in a similar way, as suggesting that the functioning ofcolonial jurisprudence erased ambiguity and multiplicity in existing forms of jurisprudence,transforming indigenous notions of justice and honour, and bringing them in line with therequirements of modern legal discourse. In the process, “custom” was created, codified and protectedas “tradition.” The participation of indigenous elites in this process, of course, was crucial. The colonialstate was the bearer of modernity and modern values, which, while empowering many subalternsections against indigenous elites, was not unambiguously emancipatory for all. Many subalternsections – sansiahs, nayar women, female mill workers in Bombay – as the essays in the collection citedabove show, were drastically marginalised and disciplined by the operation of modern codes of identityand governance. By reading such historical work in this way, I would point to the casting of the presentas the product of certain historical processes, thus enabling the questioning of seemingly fixed andgiven boundaries and opening up the possibility of their renegotiation through political practice.

Thus for Nandy, as we saw in an earlier section, traditional community structures have more effectivecivilisational resources to resolve conflicts and tolerate difference than the modern state, but the“community” he sees is already a construct of modern governmental practices. If there is a “goingback,” it is in order to access those resources, that style, to deal effectively with current dilemmas andconflicts, to evolve ways of living together in the present, not to recreate an assumed past. That past islost.

I suggest that what is understood as “indigenism” in the work of the Indian communitarians is betterunderstood as a recalling to memory of the manner of entry of modernity into our societies. On the onehand there was the despotic colonial state strategically making adjustments at various levels withdifferent sections of the subject population, and on the other, there were the differing investments thesesections had in the modern norms and institutions brought in by colonialism. The fact that thisencounter with modernity occurs through a political system that was at its core, violent, distinguishes“our” modernity (to use Partha Chatterjee’s evocative phrase) from modernity as it emerged in Europe.The dislocation caused by modernity in Europe four centuries ago was equally brutal, but in Asia andAfrica there was a double violence involved – the simultaneous disruption caused by modernity andcolonialism.

The move from the early theorising of Indian politics to this point is quite sharp. Contesting the readingof modernization theorists, Rajni Kothari in Politics in India was concerned with demonstrating thatIndia was not unique, not different from the West. Discussing a feature peculiar to India – thatdemocracy here preceded industrialization and rapid social change, unlike in Europe, wheredemocratic compulsions did not hinder rapid capitalist transformation – Kothari argues that this is nota problem in any way, as modernisation theorists suggest. Rather, it enhances the true spirit ofdemocracy. Development here was based on reconciling common good with self-interest, through aprocess of drawing new sections of society constantly into the arena of power. He compares India to itsadvantage both to Europe as well as to revolutionary experiments in which political competition wasbarred from the process of development – while in India “politics provides the larger setting withinwhich decision-making in regard to economic development and social change takes place.” Theunderstanding of the Tradition/Modernity split here is that India should not be seen as having notmodernised yet. Rather, we are simply extending the true spirit of modernity.

For later theorists, there is a difference. “Our” modernity is qualitatively different precisely because ofthe mode of its entry into our societies. Sudipta Kaviraj, for instance, sees in the same phenomenon – ofmass democracy preceding industrialisation unlike in the West – the possibility that the simultaneity ofthese processes could mean that “the logic of one could seriously affect, hinder or alter” the logic of theother.

The task of the non-Western political theorist, according to Chatterjee, is “to find an adequateconceptual language to describe the non-Western career of the modern state not as a distortion or lack,which is what inevitably happens in a modernisation narrative, but as the history of differentmodernities shaped by practices and institutions that the universalist claims of Western political theoryhave failed to encompass.” Chatterjee’s “community” is composed of “concrete selves necessarilyacting within multiple networks of collective obligations and solidarities to work out strategies of copingwith, resisting or using to their advantage the vast array of technologies of power deployed by themodern state.” The instance he uses to work out this definition is the study of a group of squatters, poormigrants living close to a railway track in Calcutta, on land belonging to the state-owned railways.Chatterjee here makes a distinction between civil society and political society, which is central tounderstanding the ramifications of “our” modernity. The struggle of the squatters not to be evictedfrom government land is not conducted on the site of a “civil society of citizens” dealing with a state inwhose sovereignty they participate. They are located, rather, in “political society” where they negotiateclaims and benefits with governmental agencies for whom they represent obligations based oncalculations of political efficacy. They have to use strategies that build links outside the community,both with other such groups as well as with more powerful sections with which they engage in socialand economic exchanges (such as employers and middle-class neighbours).

The distinction made above between civil society and political society is key to reconceptualisingdemocratic politics today. “Civil society” according to Chatterjee is constituted by the institutions ofmodern associational life, while “political society” is a domain of mediating institutions between civilsociety and state. The mark of non-western modernity is the hiatus between civil society, composed of asmall section of “citizens”, and political society, composed of “population.” Population groups, unlikecitizens, are not the product of rational contractual association, but rather, are the target of the “policy”of the legal bureaucratic apparatus of the state. The civil society of citizens, shaped by the normativeideals of western modernity, excludes the vast mass of the population, towards which it assumes a“pedagogical mission” of enlightenment.

In order to understand the principles that govern political society, we must begin with the relationshipof the “development state” to population, which it attempts to regulate through the governmental formof “welfare.” Political society – parties, movements, non-party political formations – channelisespopular demands on the state through a form of mobilisation we call democracy. “The point is thatthat the practices that activate the forms and methods of mobilisation and participation in politicalsociety are not always consistent with the principles of association in civil society.” Democraticaspirations in other words, often violate institutional norms of liberal civil society.

In the context of the latest phase of globalisation of capital, a transnational public sphere has emergedwhose moral claims proceed from the assumption of the existence of a universal civil society. Chatterjeeincludes in this domain “many United Nations agencies, non-governmental organizations, peace-keeping missions, human rights groups, women’s organizations.” These act as an external check on the

sovereign powers of the nation-state, “assessing the incomplete modernity of particular nationalpolitical formations.” This framework of global modernity can only structure the world in “a patternthat is profoundly colonial.” The framework of democracy on the other hand, will “pronouncemodernity itself as inappropriate and deeply flawed.” However, the domain of political society cannotbe understood as “traditional” as opposed to the “modernity” of civil society. Rather, the argumenthere consistently is that what we are dealing with is different forms of modernity.

Conclusion

For over a decade now, the boundaries of the discipline have been opening up with the theoreticalchallenges posed to the centrality and legitimacy of the state and nation. On the one hand, practitionersof the discipline have recast their theoretical understanding in the face of political developments overthe 1980s, and on the other, the very shift in focus away from the state is also an attempt to reshape thepolitical terrain. Further, it looks like we can finally start to think seriously about the much used term“multidisciplinary approach”. What are the implications for any discipline if its boundaries arebreached by a serious multidisciplinary intervention? How can we engage with methods and insights

generated by other disciplines without losing the training of our own? And finally, today in the 21st

century, when the exalted status claimed by “science” has been sufficiently challenged for over fivedecades by philosophers of science, isn’t it time we dropped the tag of “science” from the nomenclatureof this discipline?

Endnotes

Introduction to Political Theory and Institutions, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi1989, Block 1, P7.

Op cit P 17

Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World Economy The States, the Movements and theCivilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 1984 (See Ch 17)

Agnes Heller, “The Concept of the Political Revisited” in Political Theory Today ed. David Held Oxford:Blackwell, Polity Press, 1991

See Sarah Joseph, Political theory and Power Second Edition New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2004

David Held Political theory and the Modern State Stanford University Press 1990

Immanuel Wallerstein, op cit

WH Morris-Jones The Government and Politics of India BI Publications, New Delhi 1984. First edition1964, revised (third) edition 1971.

Op cit P 39

op cit P 43

ibid

op cit P 64

op cit P 66

op cit Pp 69- 70

op cit Pp 246-50

Rajni Kothari Politics in India Orient Longman, Delhi 1986 (first published by Little Brown and Co.,1970) P 114 n 20.

Op cit P 17

op cit p 4

op cit Pp 15-7

op cit P 6

Lloyd I. and Susanne H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, Chicago, Chicago University press,1967, P3. Quoted by Robert L Hardgrave Jr in India. Government and Politics in a Developing Nation

Freeman Book Co., Delhi 1979, P 111

Lloyd I. and Susanne H. Rudolph, “The political role of India’s caste associations” Pacific Affairs Vol33, March 1960 pp 5-6. Quoted by Robert L Hardgrave Jr, op cit P 114

Rajni Kothari, op cit P 86

Francine R Frankel, India’s Political Economy 1947-1977. The Gradual Revolution OUP Delhi 1978 P 3(Emphasis added)

ibid

Francine Frankel op cit P xii

Robert L Hardgrave Jr, India. Government and Politics in a Developing Nation Freeman Book Co., Delhi1979, (First Indian edition ) Pp 6-9

op cit P 115

op cit P 79.

Op cit P 137

Francine Frankel op cit pp 548-50

Rajni Kothari, State Against Democracy. In Search of Humane Governance Ajanta Publications, Delhi1990, p 257.

Pranab Bardhan , The Political Economy of Development in India, OUP Delhi 1985 (First published byBasil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984); Sudipta Kaviraj, “A critique of the Passive Revolution”, EPW 1988Annual number.

Aditya Nigam “Antinomies of secularism” (Review of Secularism and its Critics ed. Rajeev Bhargava,OUP Delhi 1998) Summerhill

See also Pranab Bardhan, who makes a similar argument about the social sciences in “The StateAgainst Society. The Great Divide in Indian Social Science Discourse” in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalaleds., Nationalism, Democracy and Development. State and Politics in India OUP Delhi 1997.

In the 1990s there has emerged a rich body of work on democracy, secularism, development, civilsociety and electoral politics by a number of political scientists. I should clarify here that in this essay Icannot possibly engage with everything written on contemporary India. As I specified at the beginningof the essay I focus on a particular strand of work in order to highlight one particular shift in theunderstanding of the nation-state that I consider to be significant in the study of Indian politics.

Ashis Nandy, “An Anti-secularist manifesto”, Seminar 1985, Vol 314 pp 1-11; TN Madan “Secularismin its Place”, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 46 No. 4 1987 pp 747-59

TN Madan op cit., republished in Secularism and its Critics ed. Rajeev Bhargava, OUP Delhi 1998 pp297-315

See also Rajeev Bhargava’s discussion of Nandy in Secularism and its critics op cit P

Ashis Nandy, op cit. Also see Nandy, “The politics of secularism and the recovery of religioustoleration” in Rajeev Bhargava ed. Secularism and its Critics op cit. Pp 321-344

Nivedita Menon, “State/Gender/Community. Citizenship in Contemporary India” EPW January 311998, P PE-4.

Rajni Kothari, State Against Democracy op cit P 230

ibid

op cit Pp 2-3

op cit P 96

op cit Pp 32-33

op cit P 95

CT Kurien Global Capitalism and the Indian Economy Orient Longman, New Delhi 1994

Pranab Bardhan op cit, Epilogue in 1998 edition, P125.

Op cit P 126

op cit pp 132-4

op cit pp 134-5

Pranab Bardhan, “The State Against Society. The Great Divide in Indian Social Science Discourse” inSugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal eds., Nationalism, Democracy and Development. State and Politics inIndia OUP Delhi 1997 P 184.

Op cit. P 191

Op cit. P 194

Op cit. Pp 192-4.

Term used by Sarah Joseph, Interrogating Culture. Critical Perspective on Contemporary Social theory

Sage, Delhi 1998. P 152

For example, Sarah Joseph op cit. Gurpreet Mahajan too, thinks “community centred perspectives”associate liberalism with individualism, although she argues this is a mistaken understanding ofliberalism. Identities and Rights. Aspects of liberal democracy in India OUP Delhi 1998. P 26

Sumit Sarkar “The Anti-secularist Critique of hindutva: problems of a shared discursive space” ingerminal vol 1 1994.

Op cit. P 102

Op cit. P 104

Sarah Joseph op cit. P 152. Emphasis added.

Dipesh Chakravarty, “Modernity and Ethnicity in India. A History for the present” in EPW December30 1995; Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Imaginary Institution of India” in Subaltern Studies VII ed. ParthaChatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, OUP Delhi 1992.

Kaviraj, op cit.

See essays by Sumit Guha, Radhika Singha, G Arunima, Sandria Freitag and Radha Kumar inChanging Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia ed. Michael Anderson and Sumit Guha , OUPDelhi 1998

From the title of Chapter 11 of A Possible India. Essays in Political Criticism OUP Delhi 1997.

Politics in India op cit. P 9

“Dilemmas of Democratic Development in India” in Democracy and Development ed. Adrian Leftwich,Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996 P 132.

Partha Chatterjee, “Community in the East”, EPW February 7 1998 P 279.

Op cit. P 282

Asok Sen, “Life and Labour in a squatters’ colony”, Occasional paper 138, Centre for Studies in SocialSciences, Calcutta, October 1992. Discussed in Chatterjee op cit. P 281.

The following discussion is based on “Beyond the Nation? Or Within?” EPW January 4-11 1997 Pp 30-34, where Chatterjee initially worked out this distinction more fully.

If we accept this understanding, then it is clear that the struggle to reclaim and produce meaning willhave to be waged in this uncomfortable realm, that of political society. I have explored theconsequences of this understanding for a radical political practice in my book Recovering Subversion:Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (Permanent Black, Delhi and University of Illinois Press, 2004). Inreading “political society” in this way, I unhitch Chatterjee’s notion of “political society” from its link inhis argument to the “welfare” function of government, and relocate it as the realm of struggles toproduce an alternative common sense – alternative that is, to the common sense of civil society. It seemsto me that the kind of political practice with the capacity to challenge the hegemonised will – radicalpolitics in short – can be carried out only in political society understood in this sense, not in civil society,the domain of constitutionalism.

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