Concepts and Context
Compiling this collection of articles has been a challenging and rewarding exercise, both personally and professionally. What began as a simple practical 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. The pragmatic exercise of ‘just compiling’ was, it now seemed, not possible. I found myself beginning a conversation with the writings, one that spanned many issues starting with his epistemic location within the social sciences community in a developing society to his personal and his own community history, to the role of persistent knowledge asymmetries in India and even to trying to map his multifaceted political disposition. I had to walk back and forth from his understandings to mine in a continuous process of signification. The last had a cubist character to it. To do justice to DLS’s work required me to acknowledge the range of resources from which he drew and with which he interacted. Added to these factors was the influence of the academic institution in which he was based and to whose intellectual life he contributed, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, an institution that had developed a public identity as a community of activist-scholars and intellectual iconoclasts. Locating Dhirubhai, a project in itself, helped me to understand and appreciate his deep commitment to democracy as the maker of a new and egalitarian India.
I mention this in the first paragraph of this collection since I want to draw attention, in the very beginning, to the fact often ignored in India that the intellectual work of a creative scholar must be understood in terms of both the cultural and material world in which he is embedded and the world of ideas in which he is conducting a dialogue. In DLS’s case, this is important because his is the generation that saw the dawn of Indian independence. Those were the years when young people, such as him, were introduced to the twists and turns of the freedom struggle and who picked up their ideas through household and village gossip. The doings and sayings of Gandhi, Patel, Nehru, Ambedkar and Azad, as well as a host of others who participated in the civil disobedience movements, were the topics of their growing years. Theirs was the generation of people who heard stories of the heroics and sacrifices that ordinary people made for a higher cause—the promise of Swaraj—who combined high idealism with pragmatism in campaigns such as the Dandi march, and who had to adapt to the new vocabulary of Swaraj fashioned by the Mahatma. The many elements of this vocabulary resonated with these young people since it drew on the sources of their tradition, which had been reworked for the times and given a futuristic direction. DLS was a participant in that history. As he was just a boy it was mostly the sidelines from which he drew his inspiration. From the stories that he received, both momentous and mundane, he fashioned his world view. DLS has recounted to me episodes in which he, and other village boys who were part of the Seva Dal, teased and taunted other boys from the neighbourhood who went with their big khaki pants to the shakas on the other side of the river, for being backward-looking. In this youthful jousting, a politics was being forged of the distinction between the ‘backward’ and the ‘modern’, the past and the future, which one can see underlies all his subsequent writing. Every essay in this collection carries this politics of the ‘backward’ and the ‘modern’ which has served as the basis of his political judgement. In DLS’s writing, there is no tentativeness about political judgement. The early experience of growing up in Gujarat, in the shadow of the Mahatma and in the din of the national struggle, I believe, set the ethical foundations for his subsequent intellectual life.
The post-independence period also contributed many events, involvements and responsibilities to the making of his analytical frame. Together the two phases of his life produced the key elements of his philosophy such as a deep commitment to democracy as the necessary dynamic for transforming the social structure of India, and an unwavering hostility to authoritarian practices irrespective of the quarter from which they came. He developed a dislike of the family in politics as he also did of ethno-religious organizations, not just because the latter tried to homogenize an internal diversity but also because of their spurious nationalism. DLS’s work shows impatience with the dissimulation practised both by political parties and by social scientists. This is because of his unhappiness with the explanations and concepts used to elucidate the political process in India which, he believes, needs different frames. Running through his writing is a preoccupation with the denial of rights, especially of disadvantaged and subaltern groups. His work in Lokayan and Peoples Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) was based on his valorization of the act of protest against injustice. I was once witness to him challenging the immigration officers at Delhi airport who were casual in processing the passports of the large numbers of tired passengers who had arrived on long international flights. He first reprimanded them for their casualness and then demanded to submit a complaint to their officers who were sitting in a room behind the counters. His dissent soon produced an increasing decibel of protest. And the Indian State actually (seen through this impromptu ethnographic lens) soon improved its delivery of public services. We now move through immigration with greater ease. While most of us are excessively polite before an immigration officer, he was purely professional.
Decoding the many levels of his readings required me to travel to his ‘native’—as we say in India—to get a sense of the roots that were the foundation of his framework, the meaning system that coloured it and the ethical resolve that underlined it. The ‘native’ for DLS is not just the village. It is also the region, the community and the nation. Each of these locations, I believe, adds dimensions to his framework of explanation. It is from the village that his understanding of the rules of social and cultural exchange comes, from the region that the encounter with modernity is understood, from the community that his perception of internal and external group dynamics emerges and from the nation that he discovers the relationship between history and politics. In this framework of explanation, we find both assertion and critique, a vocabulary that is shared and yet one that is quite distinct to him.
Mapping all of this soon converted a simple exercise of sorting out his essays into a more complex exercise of understanding. As I write this now that I am in the final stage of completing the preparation of this edited collection, I am back to being practical about the task undertaken but in a different way. From the practicality of an editor-publisher, who has to think about the mechanics of publishing a good book, I have now moved to the practicality of the scholar-editor, who seeks to ensure that the collection of articles does not just represent DLS’s range of insights into Indian politics, but also presents his work as belonging at the ‘appropriate’ conceptual level at which a theory of Indian politics is valid. The ‘appropriate’ level is one which is able to combine the insights of the ethnographer with the insights of the political scientist, of the political economist with that of the constitutionalist. A political theory of India must not be derivative and must not carry the burden of an orientalist framing. It must be sensitive to descriptions of the particular and the local while also being sufficiently removed from the heat and dust of everyday politics to see the societal dynamics that have been set into motion by democracy. It must be able to dialogue with both the nativist and the cosmopolitan, the activist and the intellectual. I believe DLS’s work meets these criteria. That is why I worked hard to persuade him (it was a struggle) to accept the title ‘A theory of Indian Politics’. The compromise we reached was to make it a subtitle.
Theory and Significance
It was important for me to insist on the words ‘theory’ in the title because I believe that his lifetime’s work can best be described as a theory of Indian politics. It has a framework of explanation with a distinct value slope which gives it significance. For example, his statement that ‘the structure of law undermines the legal rights of tribals’ is a sweeping statement and can only be understood if one explores how he sees the ‘structure’ of law in India, from the initial constitutional promise to its translation into a criminal and civil system, and then to the manner in which this elaborate edifice of laws—the procedure and structure—actually works. DLS, having analysed this working, concluded that tribals who are guaranteed equal citizenship, in reality, suffer a deprivation of their rights. In this succinct statement can be found a theory of the legal order and of the interests that it serves, of its partiality in contrast to its professed impartiality and of its inability to protect the vulnerable section of tribals from the actions and policies of the State. He held that this is true even of legislation that has been specially enacted to protect the interests of the tribals. For DLS, there is a fundamental flaw in the structure of the Anglo-Saxon adversarial structure of law in India. Only because he has a theory of Indian politics is DLS able to make a clear and unambiguous statement about the nature of law with respect to groups such as tribals. It is a radical theory of the legal order. He believes that for the tribal the law is unjust.
Take another illustration. His statement on language that ‘modernization became an elite discourse in post-independent India because it was, by and large, carried out in English’ gives a clear sense of one of the instruments of elite domination, language. English is a language that excludes large numbers of citizens and inferiorizes those who do not speak it. Because English is the language of the elite, it serves to establish and maintain their continuing superiority. But more than the political point being made here is an epistemic point. By conducting a discourse in English the elite demonstrate the fact that they have not completely broken free—or perhaps they never really were able to break free—of the conceptual frames of colonialism, using its categories to explain, represent and recommend. DLS’s statement suggests that English is not up to the task at hand. It cannot adequately represent the political process because there are no equivalent English terms for concepts that have a currency in the bhasas such as netagiri, biradari, asmita or bahujan. Even colloquial words such as 420 or lal batti, which convey a great deal, cannot be rendered effectively in English. Native categories from the bhasas would certainly have served modernization better. When the discourse is conducted in English a great deal is lost because Indians thinking in English both miss many of the English concept’s nuances and misrepresent the social reality by relying on it. In addition to exclusion, control and conceptual loss, DLS’s statement is also a critique of the democratic deficit in the system since it limits participation in the modernizing project to those proficient in English. In the statement is a theory not just of language as an instrument of control, but also of an incomplete process of decolonization of the mind.
A third illustration from a different area, to strengthen my point, is the following statement in his chapter on caste: ‘The rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party [BSP] is not a victory of caste politics but the opposite, a repudiation of caste ideology.’ This seems to go against the prevailing wisdom but if we use the same approach that I have used so far, of going behind the statement to discover the frame that gives it meaning, we find a clear explanation of the dynamics of the BSP which, bowing to the demands of competitive politics, makes (and can make) alliances across castes, even with the Brahmins, that a conventional theory of social stratification would consider inconceivable. Hence, while caste as a descriptor is foregrounded in the analysis, it is not the same category of social stratification where social boundaries are maintained and policed and where social norms are the basis for societal exchanges. According to DLS, in democratic politics in India, and because of it, these boundaries are transgressed. And so the discourse that talks of caste in politics fails to appreciate that the referent here, in this political discussion of caste, is not the social category of vertical stratification but a political category of horizontal division. If in the former usage we are referring to a regressive tendency in society, in the latter usage we are referring to a progressive tendency in politics. Here too we see that it is possible for the statement to be made only because of a political theory of what democracy is doing to the caste system.
There are several such pithy statements in the essays that I have selected for this collection. I cannot, and do not, wish to list them all because I hope each reader will find for himself or herself similar statements and then, through a process of self-reflection, determine why the statement chosen by him or her was deemed significant. When identified and subjected to the kind of analysis that I have just demonstrated, of unearthing the frame that stands behind the statement, thereby giving it significance, we would be able to reconstruct DLS’s theory of Indian politics. If a theory is a framework of explanation, then DLS’s work provides us with an innovative theory of Indian politics. This collection is rich in hypothesis from which the study of democracies, both in India and abroad, can draw.
I have chosen to speak of the ‘appropriate level of abstraction’ because a great deal of reflection went into the choice of the word ‘of’ in the subtitle. ‘For’ was the reflex word, which was also syntactically more elegant, but I soon discarded it because it seemed too patronizing. If the struggle is for a theory of Indian politics that did not carry the three burdens of (a) a colonialization of the mind, (b) a derivative discourse and (c) an imperialism of categories,1 the word had to be ‘of’. While ‘of’ is a bit ambivalent since it does not clearly specify whether it emerges from within the language of representation or whether it comes from outside or does a bit of both, it is better than ‘for’. DLS’s work develops a theory ‘of’ Indian democracy and thereby it is set apart from many of the other studies that are unable to shake off the burden of being derivative. The theory that informs DLS’s work is sometimes stated clearly in his writing and has sometimes to be extracted from it since it frames his analysis but remains in the background. This is what makes his work so exciting and enriching since a reader is invited to reconstruct the theoretical frame from the succinct statements that abound in the work and from the specific analysis of a particular theme. The 15 chapters when added up give a comprehensive theory of Indian politics.
Since DLS’s theory is both manifestly stated and discernibly outlined in his work, reconstruction can be attempted at three levels: (i) inquiring why he has selected a set of issues to write about, i.e., asking the significance question; (ii) examining how he has formulated the details of the issue, i.e., the construction of the argument question; and (iii) positioning his analysis against other frameworks of explanation on the same issue, i.e., the question of critique. DLS’s framework of explanation, although lean, offers itself for deployment in a large range of instances. This is what makes it a theory at the right level of abstraction.
The sequencing of chapters and the clustering into groups have also been the product of considerable deliberation. The five sections—(i) State, Nation, Democracy; (ii) Parapolitics of Democracy; (iii) Social Power and Democracy; (iv) Representation in Liberal Democracy; and (v) Emerging Challenges of Democracy—seek to establish the distinct platform on which the argument will be developed. The first chapter on the relation of history to politics begins by challenging the thesis of ‘fact’ from ‘interest’, undermining the claim that history is objective and governed by evidence alone and not by political considerations. Here DLS makes the provocative claim that such a reading of history has been the source of much of the contemporary communal discord in India. In contrast, he endorses the Gandhian attitude of privileging cultural political consciousness over such historical consciousness. The collection ends with a chapter on global governance. From a philosophical engagement with the historical method in the first chapter, through a discussion of specific themes, the book concludes with a discussion on democratizing the global system. Although the essays were written at different times over the last four decades, they retain their value because of their conceptual insights into the political dynamics of Indian democracy which, although specific to the context, have a relevance beyond the context and address general issues of human societies. While some of the data used may be dated, it must be seen merely as illustrative of the argument being made. The argument is not dependent on these data.
Some chapters are earlier essays that have been edited and included with minor changes. Others have been substantially reworked, combining several essays to form a wide-ranging argument. This is to allow the issues developed in individual small essays, but which are part of a larger concern, e.g., reservations—which he has argued in three separate small essays as reservations in the private sector, reservations for other backward classes (OBCs) and reservations for religious groups—to be combined so that they are available to the reader as a more comprehensive argument. Each chapter is therefore chosen, either in its original or reworked form, to offer the reader a substantial argument of what democracy in doing to India and what India is doing to democracy. The essays collected here are DLS’s responses to these two connected questions. Both contain seeds of a theory since only a theory of democracy will be able to (i) explain the consequences of the political processes that have been set into motion and (ii) accept its inability to explain aspects that have emerged—the inconvenient facts, ambivalences and conundrums of democracy. Because of these inconvenient facts and conundrums, the theory will have to be reworked to accommodate them. For example, DLS in his discussion of the voluntary sector writes that
in our voluntary sector the integrity or otherwise of the form that an organization acquires is linked to the kind of leadership it has. Since the leadership is usually individual-oriented the form remains flexible, but not necessarily diffused. An [o]rganization’s origins, its legal identity, the patterns of its growth and its contemporary role and functions, however, do not always exist as elements of one coherent entity. Yet even an individual centered organization acquires, over time, an institutional form which imparts a certain image and boundary to its functioning. Ironically, such evolution of institutional form is often made possible by a prolonged continuation of one individual in the leadership role. Both the strength and vulnerability of the sector thus lie in what seems to be this uniquely Indian (individual centered) form of voluntary action.
Democracy in India should therefore be seen as producing a politics which goes beyond the simple binaries of full and flawed, mature and young, developed and deficient. It requires new concepts for explanation.
What Is Democracy Doing to India
For DLS ‘democracy may be said to be a model of deliberate imperfection, a model that tolerates various loose ends in the system. … Democracy recognizes … a multiplicity of possible courses open to the system at any given point in time. … [It] presumes a society that allows various legitimation processes to test themselves out on the ground through critical analysis and through real-life conflict, struggles and integrative movements of ideas and actions.’2 Having made the argument, in the first part of this introduction, on why DLS’s work constitutes a political theory of Indian democracy, let me now go, in the second part, to the substantive aspects of this theory. I shall do this by identifying five interesting hypotheses from the 15 chapters in the collection and show how they offer valuable insights into ‘what democracy is doing to India and what India is doing to democracy’. I have chosen five to illustrate the depth of his thinking on democracy.
The first hypothesis comes from Chap. 2, ‘Historicizing India’s Nationhood: History as Contemporary politics’, and states that the ‘historici...