Books

CHALLENGES TO DEMOCRACY IN INDIA edited by Rajesh M. Basrur. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2009.

WHEN India became independent in 1947, few observers would have expressed confidence about its future as a sovereign, democratic nation. Yet, against the grain of received wisdom, India has proved her detractors wrong. Despite the fact that many other countries, who too won their freedom from colonial rule around the same time, have fallen by the wayside – wracked by serious internal conflicts, civil wars and continuous interference by armed forces in civilian rule – the Indian democratic experiment has not only survived but, as many now grudgingly admit, deepened and become more inclusive. Nevertheless, the arrangement remains seriously contested. In today’s troubled climes, when each of our neighbours from Myanmar in the East to Afghanistan in the West appear on the edge, if not threaten to unravel, there is little cause to be sanguine about our future. And once we add the current global economic meltdown to the list of problems, the challenges become even more formidable. So, will India make the grade?

The broad assessment provided by a range of eminent thinkers brought together in the volume under consideration, a series of presentations at the Nehru Centre, Mumbai, not unexpectedly, is unlikely to leave the reader much clearer. Not only because the future is inherently uncertain, or even that each contributor focuses on his/her own favoured set of issues that need to be addressed, but equally because these are times of transition in which not only conventional arrangements for governance and the exercise of legitimate power by the state but even the categories of analysis are under question. Even the notion of democracy, agreed upon as a worthwhile goal and arrangement by most, encapsulates widely differing meanings, visions and aspirations. Thus, even if we agree that India’s democracy has come a long way, the future is nowhere near being settled. The book under review seeks to explain why.

Fali Nariman, arguably our wisest legal-constitutional thinker, reminds us of the non-negotiable centrality of ‘the rule of law and the need of fairness in a richly diverse society.’ He argues that the erosion of the rule of law, the overemphasis on rights at the expense of obligations, and declining probity alongside the ‘persistent wall of separation between the governed and those who govern’ is indicative of the decline of idealism in our public life. When each of the central pillars of our republican, constitutional arrangement – the executive, legislature, judiciary and media – suffer an erosion of trust, it is time that our leaders reassess their practices and work at restoring the values and ideals encapsulated in the Constitution.

In a similar vein, Valerian Rodrigues reminds us of our failures in moving from a formal to a substantive democracy, one ensuring an equality of opportunity to all, without which a deeply segmented society cannot gain coherence. Upendra Baxi focuses on ‘governmental lawlessness and official deviance enclosed within a culture of impunity.’ He is particularly critical about our growing reliance upon the judiciary to settle what essentially are social and political disputes, important because the judiciary is not only nonrepresentative but has over time sought to insulate itself from critical scrutiny by all external actors. Interestingly, Rafique Dada, another constitutional expert, offers a more charitable view about the growing interventionism of the judiciary, arguing that it has been forced to assume a larger role by default. But he too is not unmindful of the dangers of judicial over-reach, particularly when sections of the judiciary are perceived as corrupt.

Essays by both Abid Husain on the bureaucracy and Jayaprakash Narayan, bureaucrat turned civil activist and now politician, on corruption, tread familiar ground. Narayan in particular highlights the growing relation between politics and organized crime, helped no doubt by both a lack of transparency and excessive centralization in our political parties. Thus, his fervent plea for democratization of political parties as also creation of a new political culture. But, it is really Pratap Bhanu Mehta who puts his finger on the ‘paradox between public faith in the political process of democracy and the failure of institutions to deliver basic goods and services.’ Is this, as he writes, because of our obsession with process rather than outcome? Or, one might equally add, with form rather than content. Possibly this is why even as the state appears responsive to public concerns, constantly creating new institutional mechanisms and even passing new laws, the actual change on the ground leaves everyone dissatisfied. A system that is representative but not responsive can easily create conditions in which freedom can be sacrificed at the altar of stability and performance – remember the Emergency!

Most of the other contributions struggle to explain the persistent inequality – social and economic – marking the Indian experience. Zoya Hasan points out that democracy by itself does not ensure the human development of all, particularly the marginalized. Dilip Nachane warns us against the glib support to marketization, pointing to the ‘frustration of ordinary citizens with governments that they vote in but do not control and the smug indifference of elites towards governments that they do not vote in but control.’

Gail Omvedt and Ramachandra Guha write on the persistence of caste inequalities and tribal marginalization respectively, both threatening the fragile social compact. Similarly, Krishna Kumar’s exploration of the links between education and democracy provides us valuable clues about our insufficiently democratic public culture aided by an insufficiently critical citizenry. And V.R. Raghavan, in exploring the vexed relationship between terrorism, security and democracy, warns us that in failing to move away from a state-centric notion of security to a people-centric one, we undermine the importance of handling sociopolitical concerns as key to tackling terrorism. The final three essays by Dilip Nachane on liberalization, Suhas Palshikar on the ever-present dangers of majoritarianism and Neera Chandoke on the need to deepen social equality – all point to key unfinished tasks in the Indian enterprise.

Despite such a rich and diverse set of offerings, it is intriguing why none of these thinkers thought it worthwhile to address some new challenges, in particular those relating to urbanization, the shifts in our demographic composition, and the implications of new technology for shaping political discourse and choice. After all, if stands to reason that a younger populace, less constrained by the burdens and languages of the past, is more likely to imagine the future, both personal and shared, rather differently from those who still occupy and control the strategic levers of power. Equally, it seems facile to imagine an India unmarked by the changes in both its neighbourhood and the globe. To believe that we can continue to go on in the way we have over the last six decades is the greatest myth that we need to challenge. Fortunately, this collection offers sufficient material for us to imagine the future differently.

Harsh Sethi

 

GANDHI’S CONSCIENCE KEEPER: C. Rajagopalachari and Indian Politics by Vasanthi Srinivasan. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, with The New India Foundation, 2009.

BIOGRAPHY as literary craft remains elusive, especially for Indian social sciences. We have few credible or even enjoyable biographies of our political, literary and cultural figures. We are certainly unable to write the lives of our modern saints. One reason for this is our tendency to place the subjects on a pedestal and once they either become a statue, or a photograph, we cease to contend with them. Reverence is the best mode of indifference. Second, is the question of empathy. Modern social science has shrinking space for religious or spiritual quest. It is, therefore, only the cultural psychologists who ask questions of the divine with empathy and with exciting insights.

Vasanthi Srinivasan had to contend with this obvious disadvantage of an immature biographical tradition while writing a study on C. Rajagopalachari. Rajaji who lived to be 94 (1878-1972) was one of the most significant presences in the political and cultural life of India in the 20th century. He is today remembered chiefly as a masterful storyteller of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. But his role in the national movement, his years as the Premier of Madras Presidency (1937-1939), his contribution as the Governor of Bengal in the most troubled times after independence/partition, the brief stint as Governor General of India (1948-1950) and his curious decision to accept the Chief Ministership of Madras (1952-1954) have become recessive in our memory and scholarship.

Rajaji was, like many others in the national movement, a complex intellectual and statesman. He was devoted to Gandhi and yet was his ‘conscience keeper’, capable of exercising autonomous judgement that often stood at variance from both Gandhi and the Congress. He was devoutly religious but questioned Gandhi’s claim to hear the inner voice. His commitment to the democratic processes and institutions was complete but he was reluctant to seek elected office. He was called progressive and reactionary in the same breath. He was, particularly in more socialistic climes, castigated as a supporter of landlords and free enterprise but his commitment to the poor was never in doubt. His deep personal friendship with E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) notwithstanding, Periyar repeatedly accused him of being Brahmanical in personal and political life.

Vasanthi Srinivasan works through this maze with admirable dexterity and clarity. Her attempt is not to write a biography at all. In fact, the biographical details present a picture of bare life. She also does not concern herself with the variegated roles that Rajaji played during the national movement. Her attempt is to present the political thought of Rajaji in its specific contexts. This she does, not as an exercise in political theory but as a method in the history of ideas. She has the biographer’s empathy and patience to ask Rajaji questions and wait for his answers. She, nevertheless, does not allow her warmth and empathy for the man to cloud her judgement and there is no attempt to mask her disappointments with the man and his ideas. But even when he fails to measure up to her expectations, Srinivasan explains the rationale behind his choices. Her search is not for discontinuities and ruptures but coherence in thought and action.

The idea of ‘theocentric liberalism’ developed by Dante Germino provides a theoretical basis for her reconstruction of Rajaji’s ideas and practices. This notion of theocentric liberalism recognizes ‘alongside freedom and justice, the human quest for transcendence.’ This allows Vasanthi Srinivasan to speak of Rajaji’s devotion to Hinduism, his advocacy of bhakti (in his introduction to Adi Sankaracharya’s Bhaja Govindam, Rajaji spoke eloquently of jnana and bhakti), and yet his aversion towards allowing religion a central space in his politics.

The book examines Rajaji’s ideas and his practices around four large questions within the framework of liberal practice informed by a personal spiritual quest. These are his attempts to strengthen democratic politics in post-independence India through first his Congress politics and later the creation of Swatantra Party which provided the most powerful intellectual political challenge to the Nehru-led Congress. His differences with Congress socialism and the plea to free the country from ‘slogan socialism’ form another major concern of the book. The debates around caste and minority politics, including the role of Hindi and the linguistic reorganisation of states, constitutes the third aspect of the study. And finally, his role as a statesman in crafting a distinct foreign policy for India elaborates the fourth large concern of the study.

The other major merit of the study is that the author rescues the category of political wisdom, of prudence, and makes it central to her understanding of virtue in political life. This idea of prudence allows her to work through apparent contradictions in Rajaji’s thought and practice.

This discerning study provides us with a model of scholarship that could possibly allow us to study our cultural and political figures in a new light.

Tridip Suhrud

 

REBELS, WIVES, SAINTS: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times by Tanika Sarkar. Permanent Black, Delhi, 2009.

Rebels, Wives, Saints is a difficult book to review because, as the name suggests, it contains a very large number of characters, both historical and fictional. In fact, books, peoples, gods and ideas, all act as protagonists here, and the book tells us their many stories without seeking to fold them into any one narrative or frame. Indeed, if there is one central argument to the book, it is precisely this: that each self, life or event must be narrativised such that it stands in for the whole – for history, for nation and for country. That, perhaps, is the justice proper to selves, a refusal to let them be subsumed under the meta-narratives of nation and history. Nation and history, the book implies, are immanent categories – produced as well as differentiated through lives and life-stories – rather than reified or transcendental regimes that fully determine and control how the story unfolds.

If Tanika Sarkar has been known till now as a feminist social historian, this book of hers recasts ‘social history’ itself. This it does by reconfiguring the ‘social’ through stories of the crafting of selves. Significantly, Tanika does not use terms such as agent or subject, terms that naturally seem to bring into play unproductive oppositions such as agent versus structure or subject versus object. Instead, by using a term such as the self, Sarkar indicates her preference for a word which gestures towards the other at the very moment of invoking personhood and identity, but which, at the same time, also hints at the production of an interiority, a claim of autonomy, self-possession and resistance, in the face of both colonial and national un-freedoms.

In so doing, Rebels, Wives, Saints argues, implicitly, that one really cannot take the ‘social’ of social history for granted. In fact, what one needs to do is also write a history of the ‘social’ itself. To do a history of the ‘social’ – a historically constituted and contingent formation – one must go beyond merely seeing the social as that which is non-state. One must also go beyond merely admitting to the ‘constructed-ness’ of laws, norms, traditions and customs which are said to make up society, just as one must go beyond thematising relationships and institutions such as caste, kinship, marriage, class, ethnicity etc., all of which are seen to simply add up to make the ‘social’. Tanika Sarkar chooses to rewrite the ‘social’ by simply writing about ‘men, women and children’, as she says in her introduction, rather than carry on writing about reified categories such as caste, class or nation. For such categories actually serve to erase peoples and their selves, and do so, ironically, in the name of the people themselves.

Rebels, Wives, Saints thus seeks to write of ‘the concrete, the palpable, the sensuous.’ Yet I feel a bit uneasy at naming all this ‘lived experience’, as Tanika Sarkar does (p. 7). For ‘experience’ is not such a benign word either. After all, experience was till recently invoked as an unmediated and authentic mode of being, say, of the woman or the dalit as opposed to representational and textual modes of the elite, just as experience was also often invoked negatively through a characterization of modernity as the ‘destruction of experience’ by mass media and mass culture. Tanika herself demonstrates that she is not really working with a notion of ‘experience’ as such. Instead she actually undoes the notion of experience by showing how representations, self-enunciations, texts, performances and politics work at the heart of immediate and intimate articulations of the self. In so doing, she also makes it clear that the ‘social’ is not, despite the claims of sociology and social sciences in general, a domain that is always already self-evident and self-present as ‘object’ of study. Nor is ‘society’ necessarily structural, systemic or simply external in relation to lives and selves. Rewriting the ‘social’ through stories of crafting of selves – but not in the biographical mode – is therefore a significant theoretical move. I wish that the introduction was somewhat longer and more explicit about all this. But perhaps, she thought it best to let the essays speak for themselves.

The themes of the essays – sati, widowhood, low-caste and tribal movements, public theatre, Bankimchandra’s Anandamath¸ Rabindranath’s novels, verses, essays – are not new. They have already been much written about, often by Tanika Sarkar herself. But it is exactly this that makes the book particularly significant, because the book is actually a self-conscious act of rewriting. Thus, the question of the woman’s selfhood is here displaced from the rhetoric of the women’s question – whether it be the nationalist version of reform and emancipation or the early feminist version of recovery of woman’s voice and experience or even the 1980s-90s version of woman as contestatory site for the articulation of nation and community. The essay on sati discusses how, in early nineteenth-century Bengal, the woman’s death itself became an opening for a discourse about pain and entitlement to life and how the political possibility of a woman’s ‘will and accord’ emerged out of it. The essay on widowhood explores how the widow, as figure of undomesticated desire and as one without a male owner/guardian (and so difficult to even give away in remarriage!), became critical in a rewriting of sexuality and of wifehood itself at this time.

What is marvellous about these essays is a very distinctive kind of intense engagement with textual and archival materials. So Tanika Sarkar explores how the act of immolation itself could be read, from its many contemporary descriptions and narrations, simultaneously as spectacle and as improvised performance of the self but also as ritual, routine and staging of prefabricated narrative, and whether a changing history of the feminine self emerges out of this. She also reads through the intricate scriptural and doctrinal argumentation that marked the exchanges between Vidyasagar and his detractors in the early nineteenth century, to demonstrate the working out of notions of love, sexuality, authority and temporal dystopia through the figure of the widow. Two essays that I particularly liked, in terms of engagement with materials, are the one on caste and the one on Tagore’s ideas of education. The essay on Rabindranath and his writings for children is beautiful and evocative. It shows how the poetic word could become, at one point, the primary site for the relationship of the adult with her/his radical other, namely, the child/infant – producing a pre-aesthetic and pre-ethical moment of recognition. She also shows how the adult-child interface could, as it did for Tagore, gesture towards a linguistic and expressive possibility beyond hardened forms and well-set meaning-systems, where writing, sound, rhyme, painting, hand-crafting could all work as part of the same manner of engaging and handling the world.

The essay on the Balakdashi sect historicises different possibilities of affective community across social hierarchies in pre-colonial Vaishnavism, in early colonial times and in early twentieth century Bengal – through a reading of possible relationships to God and to the poor articulated through the moments of loverly, motherly, fatherly, even friendly ties. She reads the life of Balakdas, a low-caste spiritual leader, too as text, beautifully detailing the differences in the nature of the child in Chaitanya, the child in Balakdas himself, and the child in Balak’s own god, Gopal. What strikes me is that in terms of conventional parameters of the social sciences these are seemingly abstruse, even esoteric details. Such details would routinely be bracketed out as either irrelevant or unusable in earlier histories of sati or widow remarriage or caste mobility. But once admitted and read, such scriptural or spiritual or intimate or even speculative details – hitherto resistant to historical and political reading – seem to enable a kind of fundamental rewriting. That is what Tanika Sarkar’s book successfully demonstrates.

Needless to say, Rebels, Wives, Saints is an implicit critique of existing historiography. The critique is in the form of a counter-demonstration of the historian’s craft and idiom. And yet, if one reads the introduction, which I believe is more important in a collection of essays than in a monograph, one is left with a sense of inadequacy. When Tanika Sarkar asserts that colonial political economy constrained more than did cultural imperialism (p. 7-8) or when she says that the colonised, rather than the coloniser, blinded by privilege, had wider cultural resources to recreate selves out of (p. 11), it remains in the nature of a simple polemic against shadowy antagonists about the autonomy (or otherwise) of the colonial subject. The point is, of course, well-taken. But the essays in themselves seek to do very different and very many more things – especially, create a texture for experiences of freedoms and un-freedoms through which selfhood emerges. This, to my mind, is the task that the book sets for itself, but without admitting it fully – namely, the task of retheorising ‘freedom’ itself beyond the standard nationalist rendering of ‘independence’ and the conventional Marxist rendering of ‘determination’.

Prathama Banerjee