DEMOCRACY a Theory of Indian Politics

At Home with DEMOCRACY A Theory of Indian Politics D.L. Sheth Edited with an Introduction by Peter Ronald deSouza At Home with Democracy D.L. Sheth At Home with Democracy A Theory of Indian Politics Edited with an Introduction by Peter Ronald deSouza Author D.L. Sheth Centre for the Study of Developing Societies New Delhi, India Editor Peter Ronald deSouza Centre for the Study of Developing Societies New Delhi, India ISBN 978-981-10-6411-1 ISBN 978-981-10-6412-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-6412-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950827 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Hemis / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore For Surabhi, friend and companion PREFACE About a year ago when I thought of putting my published articles between covers and making a book, I consulted my friend and colleague Peter about a small dilemma I faced: should I present my work chronologically, as it developed, or thematically, through an analytical perspective. I showed him the list of articles I wanted to include and gave him the text of some of them. Peter was fairly well acquainted with my overall work for we had several occasions to discuss, and even dispute, the issues explored in what has now acquired the shape of a book. This often took place during our daily drive to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and back—what Peter called the ‘seminar on wheels’. Looking at what I had given him, he responded ‘Neither, for I see your work principally as theoretical. The way you problematize democracy as a phenomenon integral to India’s social, cultural and even historical frame and the way you see its working, in a complex civilizational society like India, would require theoretical literature in democracy to recognize and re-work how the major institutional archi- tecture of checks and balances in India evolved through popular protests and movements and not deductively from theory.’ In fact the Indian experience of group identities and rights, which I discuss, has expanded the idea of democratic theory. In India the concern of political freedom is stretched into impossible areas because of the romance of democracy among ordinary people, and thereby blunting the elite features with which it began. The result of my conversations with Peter was to junk my ‘collected work’ project and produce a selection focused on issues concerning the theory of Indian democracy. After some ‘seminar on wheels’ vii viii PREFACE Peter agreed to compile and edit those articles which could be included within this overall logic and to write an Introduction. The net gain for me, and for the reader, is the Introduction which covers and raises distinctive theoretical issues of Indian democracy. I would also like to particularly acknowledge my deep debt to the CSDS which helped me conceive, investigate, and write several of these articles through the collegial process of the regular lunch adda—unique to the CSDS—where every member was eager to introduce ideas and projects that they were considering and to seriously contest viewpoints and approaches they disagreed with. Everything was open—even wild—but never personally motivated. It really began with Rajni Kothari’s Politics in India. The lunch addas particularly helped me to recognize the two languages of social thinking on India: English and the bhashas. When written in English an essay in political sociology would sound scholarly and even social scientific. The same thing when rendered in Gujarati sounded, at the best, common- sensical. It appeared as if the use of English lent the essay an air of being academic and scientific. The same thing in Gujarati cannot be written without bringing the play of agencies involved, and consequences entailed, into the process of depicting that reality. My work has been an attempt to de-academize the idea of social change and to bring back the reality of agents, issues, and implications/consequences involved. The critical culture of the CSDS produced a restlessness within me which led me to see academic pursuit as essentially a dialogic process (rather than adopting a ‘truth out there’ approach which needed to be investigated) involving social agencies. This enabled me to reject the dichotomy between the producers and consumers of social knowledge. It is primarily experiential. This led me to conceive of Lokayan as a different kind of knowledge-producing process from which I have drawn many of my formulations. Such an institutional initiative as Lokayan was only possible because of the culture of CSDS. This is how I conceived and really experienced academic freedom at CSDS. Also crucial to this process are my early Baroda days. It began during my work with I.P. Desai in the sociology department. He talked about social roles by converting the classroom as a social group with many roles, processes, and sanctions and in a concluding lecture told us that ‘now that you have done the course, if you go and stand at a bus stop and do not see things differently from how you saw them before, then you have not learned any sociology’. The other crucial experience was the Renaissance Club led by R.C. Patel (mota), who was iconoclastic towards all authority. Sixty years later I have still not recovered from his response to my presentation on PREFACE ix Talcott Parsons’s theory of social systems. Rajni Kothari systematized in my mind the idea of thinking about issues as a way of thinking India. Having thought about India for sixty years, the conventional dichotomies— such as tradition-modernity, progressive-regressive and class-caste—dissolved into a more generic view of coexisting multiple and multidimensional realities contained in every singularity. As we look at today’s India most of these old classifications collapse. In India today, increasingly, older identities/identifica- tions are blunted. New awareness is now more and more about opportunities through expanding spaces. With increasing democratization the old politics of identities is being dimmed and blunted and now it is more a politics of aspiration, rights, freedoms and opportunities, particularly economic opportu- nity, presaging a new phase of democracy. The organicity of old ties is getting dissolved. This perhaps gives us a glimpse into the new phase of democracy on which India has embarked. New Delhi, India Dhirubhai L. Sheth 14 August 2017 CONTENTS 1 Introduction: A Political Theory of Indian Democracy 1 Peter Ronald deSouza Part I State, Nation, Democracy 21 2 Historicizing India’s Nationhood: History as Contemporary Politics 23 3 State-Nation Building: The Making of Liberal Democracy 35 4 Crisis of Political Authority 49 Part II Parapolitics of Democracy 69 5 Civil Society and Non-party Political Formations 71 6 Transformative Politics of Grass-Roots Movements 87 xi xii CONTENTS 7 Law and the Outcasts of Development 109 Part III Social Power and Democracy 121 8 Secularization of Caste and the Making of a New Middle Class 123 9 The Dalit Question in Four Frames 149 10 The Great Language Debate: Politics of Metropolitan Versus Vernacular India 169 Part IV Representation in Liberal Democracy 197 11 Interests and Identities: The Changing Politics of Representation 199 12 Minority Politics: The Shifting Terms of Policy Discourse 217 13 Growth of Communal Polarization in Gujarat and the Making of a Hindutva Laboratory 227 Part V Emerging Challenges of Democracy 237 14 Revisiting the Reservations Policy 239 CONTENTS xiii 15 Entering the Twenty-First Century: Changes in National Politics and Discourse 255 16 Democratizing Global Governance: A Minimalist Perspective 265 Index 281 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: A Political Theory of Indian Democracy Peter Ronald deSouza CONCEPTS AND CONTEXT Compiling this collection of articles has been a challenging and rewarding exercise, both personally and professionally. What began as a simple practi- cal task of selecting from Dhirubhai L. Sheth (DLS)’s extensive and diverse writings a representative set of papers that could be made available to students and researchers of Indian politics, an apparently straightforward objective, soon developed into a tutorial on his ideas and his political philosophy. As editor, I quickly realized that I had to engage with his arguments and interpretations of events and to reflect on his readings of personalities, processes, institutions and histories. The intellectual universe he inhabited emerged as more complex and layered than I had anticipated and, as a result, I had to make a mid-course correction.

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