4 Patrimonial and Programmatic Talking About Democracy in a South Indian Village
4 Patrimonial and Programmatic Talking about Democracy in a South Indian Village PAMELA PRICE AND DUSI SRINIVAS How do people in India participate politically, as citizens, clients and/or subjects?1 This query appears in various forms in ongoing debates concerning the extent and nature of civil society, the pitfalls of patronage democracy, and the role of illegal- ity in political practice, to name a few of the several concerns about political spheres in India. A focus for discussion has been the relationship of civil society institutions (with associated principles of equality and fairness) to political spheres driven mainly by political parties and to what Partha Chatterjee desig- nated as ‘political society’.2 Since 2005, with the publication of the monograph, Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India (Corbridge et al.), there is growing support for the argument that political cultures and practices in India, from place to place and time to time, to greater and lesser degrees, include 1. Thanks to those who commented on earlier drafts of this piece when it was presented at the Department of Political Science at the University of Hyderabad, the South Asia Symposium in Oslo, and at the workshop ‘Practices and Experiences of Democracy in Post-colonial Locali- ties’, part of the conference, ‘Democracy as Idea and Practice’ organized by the University of Oslo. We are grateful to K.C. Suri for suggesting the term ‘programmatic’ in our discussions of the findings here. Thanks to the editors of this volume, David Gilmartin and Sten Widmalm for reading and commenting on this piece.
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