On the edge of civil society in contemporary India

Contemporary South Asia, 2014

Asian Journal of Social Science, 2014

Jeffrey Witsoe's Democracy against Development brings ethnographic and theoretical attention to the dynamics of postcolonial democracy in India. The book gives voice to a "silent revolution," an upsurge of lower-caste politics in Bihar, India's poorest state (p. 9). Witsoe's ethnography is multi-sited, moving from political rallies to District Magistrate offices to villages to polling booths. While much has been written about how democratic institutions have shaped caste, Witsoe argues that the opposite is also the case. Caste-based mobilizations shape contemporary Indian democracy. In doing so, Witsoe calls into question the utility of liberal democratic theory for analyzing Indian politics.

Partha Chatterjee has argued that the concept of civil society neither adequately describes nor is analytically helpful in understanding the democratic life in a post-colonial society like India. Civil society is the domain of the elites, who can claim full citizenship, and a vast number of people are excluded from such a process. He proposes the concept of political society: the actual domain of policy implementation, where the government engages with the population. On the one hand, various governmental functions and apparatus approach the population as the targets of policies. On the other hand, the people participate in the political process by manoeuvring in this domain. This space for manoeuvring is not available within the liberal space of civil society. According to Chatterjee, this should be seen as a positive aspect rather than a pathological condition, since it provides a scope for realizing the popular demands.

How do subalterns imagine their membership in India's political community? Many scholars argue that they imbibe the egalitarian ideals in India's political–economic sphere. Others suggest that subalterns identify the modernising impulses of the political–economic sphere as a greater threat to their ways of life. Intervening in this debate, recent research enlivens analysts to the perspective that the political–economic sphere of the state cannot be unambiguously mapped onto modernity. Nor, for that matter, can the socio-cultural sphere be regarded as singular realm of uninterrupted tradition. This article is offered as a contribution to this strand of the scholarship. By exploring endogenous egalitarian impulses among subaltern groups in India, I seek to interrogate the widely prevailing notion that ideas associated with modernity are the preserve of and emanate from elites in the political–economic sphere of the Indian state. Subalterns eschew notions of hierarchy and value ideas of equality and social justice without necessarily drawing on statist vocabularies in their assertions.

Critical Sociology

Capitalist development in India, and the politics of those who are its immediate victims, defies the main varieties of postcolonial theory and Marxism that are today in contentious debate, in which postcolonial theory is identified with culture and particularity, and Marxism with political economy and universalism. Rejecting this framing, I draw attention to recently translated works by Marx, debates in agrarian political economy, and writings that emphasize the temporal specificity of contemporary capitalist development in India. I show the "compulsion" of capitalists to compete and workers to sell their labour and is held back by the on-going politics of hegemony: capitalists want state protection and support for accumulation, and democracy and rights provide the poor with limited but sometimes effective political power. As a result, the primitive accumulation process remains indefinitely incomplete, and mature capitalism, defined by some Marxists as "universal", is held in a sustained state of deferral.