I did not intend to write this piece, because I dislike polemics. But reflection on what could well be a productive debate has been inspired by Salmoli Choudhuri and Moiz Tundawala’s piece ‘Contrary to Yogendra Yadav’s Dim View, Indian Political Thought is Alive and Kicking’ in The Wire. I will not comment on Yadav’s ‘dim view’ of political theory. I am personally fond of Yogen and listen to his sound-bytes with great interest.
No one but he can condense an entire corpus of texts and practices into a few minutes comment on television channels. These short and pithy comments provoke thought. They certainly give him visibility as one of India’s finest political commentators.
What I want to do in this brief essay is to reflect on the history of political theory in India since the 1990s, both to think through my discipline, and to stand up for my colleagues and former students who have great belief in the possibilities of political theory, and who have done remarkable work in the field, even if this work has only dimly seen the light of day. The road to publishing with the ‘right’ publishing house is, after all, strewn with many pitfalls.
It is widely believed that if intellectual revolutions took place in history and English literature in India in the 1980s, a revolution occurred in political theory in the 1990s. This is not to suggest that there was no great work on political theory till then, but as a concerted effort political theory came into its own in India in the decade.
I do not wish to mention names of scholars. This creates an unfair and undesirable divide between those theorists who have come to ‘be known’, and those who miss out. Both events just might be accidents of history, or of an unpredictable fate. I wish to reflect on the corpus of knowledge that dramatically changed in the period after the Emergency. Since then, most work on political theory has addressed the political crisis of its time.
Political developments in the country built up rapidly in the aftermath of the Emergency, and a splurge of social movements, civil society organisations and associations erupted onto the scene in 1977. Given the attack on civil rights by the Indira Gandhi regime, it is not surprising that one of the first associations that came up was the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties and its various avatars.
Though the Dalit movement had been catapulted onto the stage of history in Maharashtra in the early 1970s in the shape of the Dalit Panthers, it was in the late 1970s and 1980s that we were to witness the formation of associations from the women’s movement, the Dalit movement, environmental struggles, the Peoples Science movement, and various associations struggling for their rights.
We witnessed the birth of civil society: the range of social associations that lie between the household, the market and the state. Civil society is a peculiarly modern phenomenon as the great German philosopher Wilhelm Fredrik Hegel had pointed out in 1820. As individuals break the confines of caste, community, region and the countryside, and enter urban anonymous spaces to search for opportunities, they, over time, come to be part of associational life, part of a collective created by people who otherwise might be strangers to each other.
The development of associational life in India was not isolated. In 1971 Solidaritie was invented in Poland. In the rest of the Stalinist world in Eastern Europe citizens came together in webs of associations in the De Tocquevillian mode. Associational life brings camaraderie into people’s lives. They otherwise might remain anonymous, lonely and alienated in urban settings. They suffer from the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ in Shakespeare’s words, without kinship bonds or even families to support them.
Civil society also enables people as ‘a people’ to take on the state as the East Europeans did in 1989 independently of political parties and trade unions. With the Velvet Revolutions, the term civil society came onto the lips of not only citizens, but also governments, journalists, policy makers, corporate houses, and international agencies.
In the 1990s the concept of civil society became a matter of some very tart debates between political theorists: why civil society, why not samaj, or samudhay, or political society? The interesting part is that no one writing on civil society in India could overlook that it bore very distinctive features compared to say De Tocqueville’s theory on the subject meant for the USA and Europe.
Some civil society organisations in India are not marked by ‘voluntary entry and equally voluntary exit’ at all. We have become familiar with caste and jati, linguistic and religious associations. Even the RSS which is a highly ideological and cadre-based organisation prefers to think of itself as a civil society organisation.
This is an organisation that advocates uniformity of ideological thinking and believes in the take-over of political power. Civil society eschews uniformity and does not intend to take over political power, merely to engage with it. The only instance of a civil society movement – India Against Corruption – that transformed itself into a political party and then into a government is Aam Aadmi Party. The jury is still out on the mixed record of AAP.
The second debate that erupted in the 1990s, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, was centred on secularism. Whereas reputed theorists held that secularism is a Western concept, others believed that we should make a distinction between secularisation of society and secularism as a political norm. We went back in history to trace the emergence of the concept during the freedom struggle.
In the many political drafts of the Indian National Congress the belief that the state should be neutral towards political communities was held aloft. Though the concept of secularism was mentioned in debates in the Constituent Assembly, it was never adequately discussed. The Supreme Court had to get into the act to define secularism. It also carried on the colonial project of defining Hinduism.
Despite conceptual disagreement the general agreement among political theorists was that secularism is not a ‘phantom concept’ as a lawyer in the Supreme Court during the Bommai case had termed it. It is a concept that must be respected because it is an intrinsic part of democracy.
It is particularly relevant in India, a plural society with a tortured history of communal conflict. Society is religious. Yes. There is all the more reason that the state has to be secular in the sense of adopting a policy of non-discrimination between religious groups. Anyone who believes in democracy cannot deny this.
After the BJP government came to power in 2014 and then in 2019 and started work on the Citizenship Amendment Act with intent to exclude groups who do not have the relevant papers, papier citizenship as the Europeans called it, some fine and exciting work has been done on citizenship, and deceptions of current conceptions of what it means to be a citizen. This work contributed greatly to the global debate on the subject, particularly the rights or the non-rights of immigrants and minorities.
Around the second decade of the twenty first century remarkable, work has been done on Indian political thought, ancient as well as modern. The focus is on rediscovering themes and relocating thinkers of the national movement.
My only anxiety is that focus on the upper-caste and spiritualistic public philosophy of the national movement, the uncritical recycling of Sanskritic phrases and metaphors, and elucidation of the overtly Hindu orientation of main thinkers, might once again replace Indian with Brahmanical Hindu thought. I only hope that memories of a shared tradition-our sanjhi virasat, and the gift of tolerance that Mughal rulers gave us, will find place in a rediscovered version of Indian political theory. This is a debate waiting to happen.
The other anxiety is the overt emphasis on the indigenous as opposed to Western theory. Seventy-five years after independence we are still caught in the search for an authentic knowledge system, and a distinctive identity. Colonialism is a part of our intellectual history, we should accept it.
We will do well to remember that discovery of the metaphysical and upper caste Vedantic tradition by the German Romantics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, and Orientalist selection and translations of sacred texts served to legitimise the Vedanta as the public philosophy of the national movement. Western thought, Orientalists and Indologists shaped the way we think about our own tradition.
“The Indian reception of the West not only marks the adoption and assimilation of the European philosophical tradition comprising various concepts, doctrines, and ways of thinking but also, and perhaps more importantly, the reinterpretation of indigenous concepts and ways of thinking in the light of what was so assimilated” writes the philosopher Sharad Deshpande in his introduction to the volume on Philosophy in Colonial India edited by him. Let us hope that the current focus on Indian Political Theory keeps this in mind.
Above all, in the current political situation a number of political theorists have concentrated on right wing populism and autocratisation to explain the political predicament we find ourselves in. Where did our democracy go wrong? What did my generation do to protect the dignity of every Indian? Precious little.
Enough has been written on these subjects in scholarly articles, newspaper columns and the social media to show that political theorists critically engage with their society, and strive to hammer in the distinction between what is and what should be. We need not be what we are – casteist, communal, and prejudiced we can strive towards a better life for all. This is the prescriptive value of political theory.
Finally, Indian political theory has begun to concentrate on Constitutional Assembly Debates and on the Constitution as a set of values and as a guide. Political theorists do not select a basket of good values in abstraction, and expect practice to measure up to those values. We look to the Constitution and its values, which were the outcome of intricate political bargaining during the national movement as well as historical contingencies.
Consider that August 1947 brought with it not only independence, but also the partition of North and Eastern India on religious lines. The worst affected was Punjab. The poet Agyeya sat on benches or piles of luggage on the platforms of railway stations in the region from August to October 1947 scripting the inhumanity of man to man. His poetry bore witness to indescribable scenes of violence as Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, who had lived together for centuries in a degree of amity, went for each other’s throats.
Unable to account for the tsunami of violence that had destroyed the region, Agyeya concluded that the country had been caught up in an epileptic fit. Gandhi who had spent his life advocating substantive freedom or swaraj wrote despondently on 25 July 1947: ‘Have we got swaraj? Did swaraj mean only that the British rule should end? To my mind it was not so. For me Sabarmati is far off Noakhali is near.”
Seeking to lay down principles that could serve as the fulcrum of a democratic political community, the Constituent Assembly institutionalised a set of alternative norms, many of which had been integrated into Constitutional documents of the national movement; freedom, equality, justice, fraternity/solidarity, in the Preamble to the Constitution.
Religious mobilisation had divided people, solidarity had to bring them together on issues that concerned themselves and their fellow citizens. Without solidarity, we will continue to live in Hobbes’s state of nature, isolated and cut off from civic virtues that complete us as human beings.
Solidarity enables us to come together in networks of shared concerns, and establish a dialogical relationship with our fellow citizens. This has to be reinvented by contemporary Indian political theory. Our values are the values of the Constitution.
Finally, what is political theory? The task of the political theorist is to identify political dilemmas and tell us how to resolve them. For dilemmas as the great philosopher Bimal Matilal told us can only be resolved, they can never be solved. The dilemmas of politics can hardly be solved, for politics is chancy, contingent, and unpredictable.
The days when political theorists dreamt that they could craft a perfectly well-ordered society based on principles of justice have long gone. We have to think of how to reverse injustice that many of our fellow citizens suffer day after day. We have to think of realising the promises of the Preamble. We have to think of dignity for all. And Indian political theorists have done this. For us political theory is analytical, critical and prescriptive activity. This our vocation and our passion.
Neera Chandhoke was a professor of political science at Delhi University.
