Partha Chatterjee’s new book brings together key strands in his lifelong theorising of democracy – capitalism, citizenship, federalism and the rights of minorities. In addition, he directly addresses caste and gender justice perhaps for the first time. The result is an exhilarating ride over the landscape of Indian history and politics, with Chatterjee as a knowledgeable and expansive guide, helping to organise multiple disparate elements into a narrative that is fresh and original, as one would expect of anything Chatterjee writes.

The book does a deep dive into the Constitutional Assembly Debates as well as traversing a vast body of scholarship, in addition to a fine attention to contemporary news, to produce its larger argument. This argument is for a “change of scale to focus on regional and local caste-class formations and their gender component” (348). This means coalition politics as the “normal condition of government at the centre” (350), civil society to insist on the right of public institutions to govern themselves, and a more equal and meaningful federal process which is crucial for both the stability of the nation-state and the continued vitality of the people-nation.

This productive conceptual distinction between the nation-state and the people-nation is outlined in the first chapter. And it structures too, the book itself, with the four following chapters looking at dimensions of the nation-state and the next four at the people-nation.

With the insertion of the category of ‘people’ in the usual dyad of nation-state, we see how the desire of the people for a nation and the entity of nation that the state desires to control, are two very different imaginations. The argument is that a coalitional form of politics was implicit in the original agreement in the Constituent Assembly, which “allowed each constituent part to join the republic while retaining its distinct historical memory and cultural preferences and prohibited any one part from imposing its will on the others” (42). Over the past decade, the attempt of the BJP under Modi to make the trajectory of the state converge with that of the nation, has floundered, in Chatterjee’s opinion.

The next chapter examines the limits of liberal government in India, tracing this through the history of colonial governmentality and then the Indian nation-state, dwelling on the conceptual distinction Chatterjee has developed earlier, that between civil society and political society. The journey made by the Indian nation-state from social democratic tactics to neoliberal governmentality is tracked through this prism, leading to the conclusion – “what neoliberal rationality defines as corrupt is precisely what the rationality of political society regards as just” (65). A thought on this – is it “precisely” the same meaning corruption has in each case?  The corruption of the neoliberal elites lies in looting public banks, for instance, or the the handing over of public assets to specific favoured capitalists, violating environmental laws and so on. The corruption of the poor lies in street vendors with undocumented transactions or jhuggis squatting on public land. I think we need to define corruption more precisely so that the survival strategies of the poor don’t fall under that definition but we definitely need to retain the term for the expropriating strategies of the elite. 

The next chapter examines the limits set to capitalist development by the pressures of democracy and political society. This chapter has the familiar, iconic argument Chatterjee has made regarding primitive accumulation and the passive revolution, with the crucial development that he brings it all the way up to 2019 after which it is “the dominance of capital within Hindu Nationalism”. There is also a substantial discussion on populism here. 

One may have differences of opinion (as I do) on whether the political society Chatterjee conceptualised under a democratic state is still viable after the BJP’s two terms in power and in the ongoing third term, untrammelled as it is by democratic pressures and being in complete control of key institutions. Is the bourgeois transformation even “passive” any longer? It may still not be possible for capital to proceed the way it did in Europe for want of colonies but can the concept of passive revolution continue to be used as if the change is only of degree? Does political society (as distinct from civil society) have the clout it did under developmentalist regimes? Chatterjee hasn’t modified his earlier argument on this, and thus produces an important debate to be had..

The fourth chapter traces the complicated histories and trajectories of citizenship in India. And one learns how complex the legalities are, such that Indians acquire and retain citizenship in variegated ways mediated by specific regions and their histories – as Chatterjee puts it “the original simplicity of the principle of birth on Indian soil has been thoroughly confounded.” For me this was the most exciting chapter in the book, offering the resources it does to challenge the idea of the nation-state itself, and to consider citizenship in less narrow terms, bound by nation-state borders, than it currently is.

The next chapter is a theoretical and normative chapter discussing the idea of justice, strongly arguing that substantive justice rather than procedural justice is more “just”. However, he does not suggest that one transcendental principle should replace the other, for the very idea of the norm is contested over time and space. It seems to me that this debate did not deserve an entire chapter. The question “is justice better served by the non-arbitrary procedures of the equal application of law or the contextual and possibly arbitrary judgement that addresses the peculiarity of a particular case” (168) is one that has been exhaustively debated in feminist and Marxist circles and did not need the lengthy treatment this book gives it. In many ways the debate is always inconclusive, and points to the deeper infirmities of the use of law and the language of rights as many including myself, have argued for long.

We then move to the second part of the book (the people-nation), with the four chapters examining the federal principle understood as “a federation of peoples”; the rights of minorities debates; capital and the regional distribution of its power; and the last chapter looks at class, caste and gender justice.

True federalism would mean the acceptance of “a fair degree of asymmetry in federal relations”, such asymmetry not to be used opportunistically but “established on the principled ground of a broad agreement among all the members of the federation” (237). This principle will have to be constantly negotiated and new problems may arise, but it will stop the process of concentration of power at the centre.

The rights of minorities is examined historically as the question evolved and is debated over time, concentrating on the Constitutional Assembly debates and Ambedkar’s views. Chatterjee argues that Ambedkar’s ethical defence of the protection of the rights of Scheduled castes should be extended to the rights of religious minorities, as the grounding principle of justice in both cases is the same.

These two chapters together are the core argument of the book for a more just republic

The next chapter examines the disparity between regions and the roles they play in capitalist development. Chatterjee identifies three such patterns – “core growth regions” of capital – Gujarat and Tamil Nadu; a “region of extraction” – Chhattisgarh; a “labour supply region” – West Bengal. These patterns, he says, do not exhaust the different paths capital accumulation has traversed in different parts of India, but offer a general overview. Nevertheless the regional pattern he has outlined, he argues, is “a necessary feature of the current phase of capital’s passive revolution. That is to say, the structure of capital today requires separate zones of high growth, natural resource extraction and labour supply in order to continue the accumulation process” (304). Setting aside any real possibility that capitalism can be abolished (although the debate must continue) (305), he asks, how to move towards a more just republic under the given conditions The answer is once again, to rejuvenate federal politics, strengthen regional aspirations and the people-nation. 

The final chapter attempts to address the questions of caste, class and gender justice as they play out both in formal and legal domains as well as in the everyday, and especially the intersection of caste and class. The chapter then moves on to discuss mass movements of people in which, it is argued, these identities are manifested and which represent a “longing for non-political politics” (342) (such as India Against Corruption and massive street protests against rape demanding justice for the survivor/victim). Chatterjee characterizes as non-political, the claim to a higher morality made by Anna Hazare, and the demand for a Lokpal  However, it could be argued that what such movements and mass protests embody at their hearts, is a rejection of political parties, not of politics itself. All the popular uprisings globally in the 21st century show this dynamic of distrust towards representative politics through parties that have appropriated and ventriloquized the people, and attempts, however short-lived, to establish more direct and local control over institutions.

The connection between caste/class/gender and mass uprisings is rather idiosyncratically made, I think. More importantly, the complex imbrication of gender and caste/class deserves a much deeper examination of the vast field of contentious and interlinked debates within caste and feminist movements and scholarship. Rather, this chapter separates each discussion into separate sections, and may be the least developed part of the book. 

The book concludes by validating the “shallow version” of history the Constitution makers chose to adopt, and refusing the idea of a “civilisational history” stretching back thousands of years as advocated both by votaries of unity-in-diversity as well as by Hindu nationalists. The author’s final statement on the just republic is worth quoting in full:

“A more just federation of equal parts will shift the deep memories of cultural solidarity and conflict to where they properly belong – the caste-class formations built around India’s linguistic regions” (352).

This book is a striking example of Partha Chatterjee’s inspiring style of building theory through granular histories and elements of contemporary politics. It is characteristically contentious and productive of debate, as we have come to expect of his vast scholarship over the decades. 

Nivedita Menon teaches at JNU, Delhi.

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