Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society

by Ajay Gudavarthy (Editor)

Overview

The volume critically unpacks the concept of ‘political society’, formulated as a response to the idea of civil society in a postcolonial context. It addresses the theoretical issues of political society through a number of detailed case studies from across India: Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Chattisgarh, Delhi and Maharashtra.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857283504
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	03/01/2012
Series:	Anthem South Asian Studies
Edition description:	First
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

Ajay Gudavarthy is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His current areas of interest include human rights, contemporary political movements and the nature of civil society in India.

Read an Excerpt

Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India

Interrogating Political Society

---

By Ajay Gudavarthy

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2012 Ajay Gudavarthy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-946-9

---

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: WHY INTERROGATE POLITICAL SOCIETY?

Ajay Gudavarthy

There would be, perhaps, very little disagreement if one were to argue that over the last decade or so, civil society has emerged as a 'hold-all' concept that has been both an explanatory category as to how some societies are managing their democratic processes as well as a normative category that sets goals in terms of what societies should aspire to be in future in order to claim to be potentially or essentially democratic. However, there would be very substantive disagreement over how civil society as a conceptual tool has fared in terms of explaining 'real-concrete' political processes across societies, beginning from the continental to the Oriental parts of the world. Regardless of whether or not civil society had taken shape in Europe and was then 'exported' to other parts of the world, in the process, it signifies both the 'imperialism of categories' and also thereby seriously mars its potential in explaining the 'specificities' of the societies that are non-European. If civil society has shaped, and in turn taken shape through, the institutional and political processes integral to the way democracy works in a country like India, how should one approach this concept? Should one strive to actualize and emulate it to the best of our efforts in order to recreate it in our societies by mediating it through the project of citizenship (refer to Mahajan and Gupta in Elliot 2004), or reject it altogether since it adds very little to our conceptual understanding (Kumar 1993), or resignify it to fit into processes that are integral to the state–society relation in India, both in order to better represent as well as better transform them in more radical registers.

It is in this context of wide-scale difference over how to approach civil society in the context of post-colonial democracies that Partha Chatterjee has offered his rather fresh and novel concept of 'political society'. This arena is marked by practices which according to him, are essentially political but look uncivil from the point of view of civil society. It is, therefore, a domain that is not only different but separated from civil society, and, in fact, takes shape in the course of struggling to survive while negotiating with the exclusionary practices of both the state and civil society. It is a method of pursuing strategies that rework the modalities of the state and civil society to work in favour of and yield benefits to the bulk of the population groups, which are either left out of or remain mere target groups in the techniques pursued to achieve the large-scale developmental goals of the modern state.

Among the various meanings that the idea of civil society has assumed for itself over a period of time, Partha Chatterjee finds it useful, in the context of democracy in a post-colonial society, to refer to it, as Marx does, as a 'bourgeois society'. Civil society is delimited by modern associational practices such as autonomy, freedom of entry and exit, deliberative procedures of decision making, and recognized individual rights and duties, among other such liberal practices (Chatterjee 1998a, 60). In complete contrast, 'those in political society make their claims on government, and in turn, are governed, not within the framework of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws, but rather through temporary, contextual and unstable arrangements arrived at through direct political negotiations' (Chatterjee 2008a, 57). These negotiations could vary from protecting illegal water and electricity connections and occupying government land to operating the levers of governmental structures and institutions in order to obtain basic and subsistence provisions. In order to even understand how these negotiations work, we need to step out of the frame of comprehending political processes that are confined to the interface between the state and civil society. For instance, these negotiations could occur not through associational activity but with communities – the 'missing link' in Western political theory – as 'some of the active agents of political practice' and therefore, democratization occurs in and through the 'much less well-defined, legally ambiguous, contextually and strategically demarcated terrain of political society' (Chatterjee 1998b, 282); Chatterjee here highlights a core concern of the subaltern studies project – 'the capacity to hear that which one does not already understand' (Chakravarty 2002, 36).

Political society is a contemporary exposition of the project of subaltern studies that began way back in the 1980s. 'The starting point of Subaltern Studies was that any historiography that concentrates on the control of the masses is by definition elitist' (Amin 2002, 11). Instead, historians engaged in subaltern studies have argued that the relevant question would be: 'How do we make the subalterns genuinely the subjects of their history?' (Chakravarty 2002, 33). Subaltern studies emerged as a project that rejected the elitism of the colonial version as entrenched in the works of Cambridge historians, who believed that politics was the result of the introduction of cultural institutions such as the universities and administrative bodies by colonial rule in India (Amin 2002, 11). In the same breath, it also rejected the nationalist historiography, which believed that subalterns pursued the politics introduced to them by the Congress and its leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru. As against both these trends, subaltern historians have argued that in order to recover the subaltern history and its agency, we need to understand that politics itself occurred in two domains – one of the elites, and the other of the subalterns.

Partha Chatterjee himself developed this logic of the two domains of politics, which was initially suggested in the writings of Ranajit Guha. Chatterjee had argued that 'the establishment of a sovereign state authority, based on bourgeois legal and constitutional principles, in the pre-capitalist social formation does not immediately imply the real incorporation of all relations of domination within the political processes instituted by that state' (Chatterjee 1984, xxxviii). Thus, politics is split into 'one organized by the legal-political principles laid down by the state, the other lying outside it' (ibid.). However, while the two domains are structured differently, they interpenetrate each other, and can never be completely separated. As Shahid Amin observes, 'The methodological task that Chatterjee set for himself and for others in Subaltern Studies was to study the "evolving process of interpenetrating of the two domains of politics", a process in which one domain seeks to enter into, break down, transform and incorporate the other into its own form of exercise of domination' (Amin 2002, 14–15).

The domains interpenetrate not merely because they are operating in an 'integral material reality', but also or primarily because the colonial categories and institutions that are exclusionary and entail violence also simultaneously and inextricably offer a vision of justice and freedom. The subaltern perspective has 'to seek another relation with European thought; it has to attempt an alternative thinking of equality, democracy, citizenship or human rights. In other words, post-colonial scholarship has to question Enlightenment categories in the very spirit and even name of these categories' (Skaria 2009, 53). In other words, the subaltern perspective does not draw a wedge or dichotomize the two domains of politics but resignifies the so-called universal for the imperatives of the 'specificities' of democracy and radical social transformation in post-colonial societies. Therefore, the post-colonial project is, as Dipesh Chakravarty in his work Provincializing Europe explicitly argues, 'not a project of rejecting or discarding European thought ... European thought is at once indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought – which is now everybody's heritage and which affects us all – may be renewed from and by the margins' (Chakravarthy 2000, 16). In fact, Chatterjee himself argued in his essay, 'Our Modernity' that the lessons of reason that modernity has taught us enable us to 'identify the forms of our own particular modernity'. Thus, 'ours is the modernity of the once-colonized. The same historical process that has taught us the value of modernity has also made us the victims of modernity. Our attitude to modernity, therefore, cannot but deeply be ambiguous' (Chatterjee 1997, 20).

Is this ambiguity now being replaced by a strategy that dichotomizes politics into neatly self-enclosed domains wherein modernity stands against democracy? Has this search for identifying ways of reordering categories at the point of their interpenetration – 'indispensable and inadequate' – given way to the temptation of drawing a series of new binaries such as modernity/ democracy, and civil society/political society in this new formulation on political society by Chatterjee? Does this then signify a break from the earlier methodology of the subaltern and post-colonial school in the new approach enunciated by Chatterjee in his recent formulation? The question which is of critical significance to the collection of essays in this volume is whether or not the idea of political society, following this shift in approach, is thus counterproductive to the goals of democratization in arresting the agency of the subaltern within a self-contained domain.

Political Society and Resistance as Radical Politics

Political society refers to those aspects of subaltern negotiation that are marked by the growing 'governmentalization of the state' that transforms or derecognizes the 'ethical connotation of participation' associated with citizenship into population groups that are mere targets of administrative policies. Chatterjee argues that the dominant moment in subaltern politics today is to negotiate with the administrative bodies of the state in order to compel them under the 'moral rhetoric of community' to yield benefits to the marginalized social groups. As he observes in his response to his critics in this volume, 'India has never been more governed than it is today', thereby resulting in a shift in the modalities of subaltern politics. Chatterjee argues that, 'there was undoubtedly a strong force against governmentality that motivated peasant resistance in an earlier era, even in the middle of the twentieth century; I see very little of it today' (see this volume). If vying for governmental subsistence benefits marks the new political reality, what then is its relation with radical protest politics? Have they been displaced by the emergent 'politics of the possible' or 'politics of everyday life'? Is aiming for micro-politics or 'molecular' change the new reality that has emerged in light of the changes that have been initiated by the flexibilization of both governmental strategies and the economy?

In their essay in this volume, based on a detailed field survey of a new industrial town near the city of Hyderabad, Gudavarthy and Vijay argue that such dependence on subsistence governmental benefits, either from administrative bodies or the market, emerges in the particular context of initiating neo-liberal economic reforms marked by 'uncivil development' that does not account for the social costs of production. Can we account for the nature of the subaltern politics bereft of a critique of the model of development? Do the new institutional changes introduced as governance reforms that aim for a minimalist yet an interventionist state say something about the need for large-scale 'governmentalization of the state'? Is this a new mode of management of increasing structural inequalities? Gudavarthy and Vijay conclude that 'while it is democratic to recognize the strategies for survival, it is struggles that lie beyond survival strategies that are imperative for any meaningful idea of democratization'. Chatterjee, on the other hand, believes that the new emergent micro-politics hold the promise of bringing in structural changes over a period of time. Political society would, in fact, point towards the possibility where, 'the actual transactions over the everyday distribution of rights and entitlements lead over time to substantial redefinitions of property and law within the actually existing modern state' (Chatterjee 2004, 75).

Political society is, therefore, a domain limited to pointing towards the growing negotiations for governmental benefits and is 'explicitly not a concept of revolutionary politics'. However, it would perhaps be not inappropriate to argue that this domain in terms of 'real-concrete' politics would have something to do with radical protest politics that are also visible within the same spatial and temporal dimension. Swagato Sarkar believes that political society can be useful for understanding the modalities through which antagonisms are being 'deflected, deferred or nullified in the post-colonial society' (see Sarkar's essay in this volume). However, he cautions, 'yet, we must be careful to not treat political society as a successful strategic field, structured to overcome the problematic of "dominance without hegemony", i.e., the development of non-coercive and persuasive political condition for capitalist transformation'. In other words, would it be right to conclude that political society is only offering us a descriptive account of the emerging condition in a post-colonial democracy and not a normative evaluation about transformative politics? Or would it be more appropriate to say that political society in fact valorizes the strategy of 'contextual negotiation' as the only mode through which 'popular politics' can be articulated in contemporary post-colonial democracies?

This confusion – normative suspension as valorization – pointed out by a number of essays in this volume seems to be at the heart of the very concept of political society. Part of the reason for this seems to be the fact that Chatterjee has not, or at least not yet, reflected on the interface between the strategies of political society and those of radical protest politics that lie outside it, except that at times, he vaguely encompasses everything including political parties, social movements and non-party political formations as part of political society without ever raising the more fundamental question as to whether or not all these strategies can unproblematically coexist within the same political domain. For instance, can contextual negotiations coexist along with organized political movements? Or do they come in lieu of the former? If so, is there a new context in which mobilizational politics are on a retreat? Is there a generic scepticism with organized party politics and unwillingness on the part of the subaltern to become party to planned strategies by organized political movements? Are we moving beyond, as a range of new writings have suggested, 'politics of events' that have come to signify instrumental reasoning? (refer to Holloway 2002; Laclau 2005).

Political strategies that are being adopted by the marginalized social groups in India, as part of the process of exerting pressure on the state to recognize their rightful demands, have been varied and complex. In addition, they demand a framework that can make sense of currents that sometimes run concurrently, and at other times, in mutually exclusive ways. Subaltern response has varied from patiently building mass protest movements in instances such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) or the movement for the right to information (RTI), to the spread of militant armed struggles from across central India to the south of Vindhyas, that have raised raising issues such as the implementation of minimum wages to the more basic issue of 'land to the tiller'. Amidst these protest forms, one can also observe the trend of a generic decline in the mobilizational capacity of political organizations of all hues, on the one hand, and farmers' suicides, on the other.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India by Ajay Gudavarthy. Copyright © 2012 Ajay Gudavarthy. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Why Interrogate Political Society? – Ajay Gudavarthy; Part I: Political Society and Protest Politics; 2. Political Society in a Capitalist World – Swagato Sarkar; 3. Antinomies of Political Society – Implications of Uncivil Development – Ajay Gudavarthy and G. Vijay; 4. Civil Society and the Urban Poor – Supriya RoyChowdhury; 5. Contentious Politics and Civil Society in Varanasi – Jolie M. F. Wood; 6. The Politics of a Political Society – Ranabir Samaddar; Part II: Political Society, Middlemen and Mobility; 7. The Pyraveekar: The ‘Fixer’ in Rural India – G. Ram Reddy and G. Haragopal; 8. Politics of Middlemen and Political Society – Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and René Véron; 9. Widows’ Organizations in Kerala State, India: Seeking Citizenship amidst the Decline of Political Society – J. Devika and A. K. Rajasree; Part III: Civil Society and/or Political Society; 10. Clubbing Together: Village Clubs, Local NGOs and the Mediations of Political Society – Tom Harrison; 11. Civic Anxieties and Dalit Democratic Culture: Balmikis in Delhi – Omar Kutty; 12. The Habits of the Political Heart: Recovering Politics from Governmentality – Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar; 13. Civil Society in the East and Some Dark Thoughts about the Prospects of Political Society – Sanjeeb Mukherjee; Part IV: Rejoinder; 14. The Debate over Political Society – Partha Chatterjee

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

‘This volume offers rich theoretical and empirical engagement with Partha Chatterjee’s idea of political society, and critically navigates the interface between political society and the dynamics of resistance in India’s emerging social reality, arguing that it is the struggles that lie beyond survival strategies that are imperative for democratisation. By posing questions of democracy and agency, these essays comprise a significant advance in the debate on civil and political society, and move towards presenting alternative interpretations of popular politics in contemporary post-colonial societies.’ —Professor Zoya Hasan, Jawaharlal Nehru University

‘A collection of very important philosophical, theoretical and empirical essays that test the usefulness and limits of the increasingly controversial concept of “political society” in understanding the politics of subordinate groups in India. The contributions rescue “political society” from its rather anodyne and apolitical conceptualisation, and establish it as a site of insurgent, radical and possibly transformational politics. The essays of the volume provide a comprehensive account of where democratic political agency in India is heading.’ —Dr Subir Sinha, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Editorial Reviews

‘[This book] is an informed debate on political society with Partha Chaterjee. […] [It] mark[s] out a territory that needs attention from scholars on Indian politics as it is only upon naming and categorizing varied political practices that one can refine and clarify them.’ —Ankita Pandey, ‘Studies in Indian Politics’

From the Publisher